In a long 1777 letter to the Committee of Secret Correspondence Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, American Commissioners in Paris, wrote the following optimistic assessment of Europe’s regard for America and its rebel cause:
Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our case is esteemed the cause of all mankind. Slaves naturally become base as well as wretched. We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by providence to this post of honor.[1]
Those words seem very ironic 238 years later; especially after we just re-witnessed almost four and a half years of disunion and the agony of the American Civil War. I’m pretty sure no one was fighting the American Revolution for the real slaves held in bondage in the Colonies. 150 years ago this week a Northern editorial acknowledged that the cause of furthering American liberty would require a change in racial attitudes and predicted a period of “social persecution.” “To undertake to exalt the Southern blacks by dragging down the Southern whites would only strengthen the animosities of the two races, and fit them for internecine war.”
From The New-York Times July 22, 1865:
The Magnitude and Importance of the Revolution at the South.
The revolution in the South involves a prodigious change, and it will require, at the very least, a generation to complete it. We never expect to see the South entirely clear of the old theories of the subordination of the races, and of the doctrines of State sovereignty, until those who are now upon the stage give place to those born in the new era. Meantime there will be, as in every transitional period, a great deal of irregularity. The new relations of the white and black races of the South will not adjust themselves without much rough collision, and not a little hardship to the weaker race. We may lament this. We may and should do our utmost to avert and to check it. Yet to some extent it will be inevitable, and altogether beyond our control. It will come from impulses of human nature which it is quite beyond the power of any government perfectly to restrain or regulate. We ought to regard it as the price we must pay for the new promises of the future, and like wise, practical men, make the best of it.
The qualities that we shall have most need to cultivate are docility and patience. The experiences we have had in the last four years show the folly of undertaking to fix developments according to a predetermined plan. No man four years ago had any conception of such results as now confront us. The unforeseen had far more to do in guiding us through the war than the foreseen. We are bound to suppose that this baffling of antecedent theories and calculations will continue, to a greater or less extent, in the reorganization of the South. We must content ourselves to be still taught in no small measure, by events, to get our best ideas of the real needs and remedies by an observance of actual developments. It is true of all human affairs on a large scale that the springs which control them are too manifold, too complex, and too variable to make it possible for the human intellect, even in its best estate, surely to determine in advance their combined operation. More than ever is this true after such civil and social shocks as the South has lately experienced. The great success of President LINCOLN’s administration came from his willingness and his aptitude to draw instruction and guidance from facts rather than theories. It is this disposition and habit in President JOHNSON that gives the best promise that he will, in like manner, be successful.
But we may have even greater need of patience than ever during the war — at least may have to exercise it for a longer period, though not perhaps under such bitter trials. For many years yet Southern patriotism will fall short of the Northern standard, and this will show itself in a thousand vexatious and harassing ways. The treatment of the freedmen too will not be in accordance with our own highest ideas of justice and equity, in spite of any national laws or regulations. Even the grant of the suffrage would furnish little or no security against social persecution, as is proved distinctly enough by the experience of the black race in the North. These things may greatly grieve us, but they will never be remedied by contumelious words or individual acts. To inveigh against the South can only deepen its sectional bitterness, and alienate it all the more from the government. To undertake to exalt the Southern blacks by dragging down the Southern whites would only strengthen the animosities of the two races, and fit them for internecine war. To yield to impatience would be to defeat our own ends, and run the hazard of most fearful consequences.
If we will but take wise counsel of developments as they arise, and shape our practical policy accordingly, always keeping sound principles and right ends in view, and if we will steadily exercise forbearance and kindness, we shall sooner or later see the South as instinct with the national life as any part of the Union. We shall see its vital forces reviving under their new conditions, and playing with a healthfulness and freedom never before known. We shall see new duties recognized, new standards adopted, a new character formed. Every material interest, every industrial law, every moral influence, will work together to effect this change now that the iron barriers of slavery are leveled forever — if we patiently give them time, and allow them their own just scope. We have but to take good heed to our own ways to insure, in due time, a complete restoration of the South, body and spirit, to the Union.
- [1]Schiff, Stacy. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005. Print. page 64 and note on page 426.↩
