Missouri Awake to the Idea of Emancipation

image 1image 2image 3image 4cropped image 1

Missouri Awake to the Idea of Emancipation.

The day is not far remote when the agitation of African emancipation in the State of New York was deemed premature, and yet public sentiment not only urged on the agitation, but unriveted the fetters and set the African free. At the commencement of the present century, the land- holders, especially in the valley of the Hudson, did not entertain the idea that the labor of their farms, or their kitchens, could be done without depending chiefly on their slaves; but many things seen at a distance and deemed impossible, on a nearer approach are found to be entirely practicable. The old Knickerbocker,¹ smoking his pipe and waiting for Jack to do his errands, blacken his boots, harness his horses and drive them after they were harnessed, had no idea of any other way of having these things and a thousand others done; but when Jack was no longer a slave, the old gentleman found that his Sam could do the same things in one-fifth the time, and that he could smoke his pipe and hold the plough at the same time just as well, as to stand idle and look at Jack as he reined up the bays and stretched the lazy furrows. At the end of the year “the good Dutchman” found he had more old corn and wheat in the granary, more pork in the cellar and more money in his pocket, than when he had an “African concert” every night in his kitchen, and was compelled to lock up his cellar all the time to keep the darkies from getting drunk on his cider.

The same, or a similar scene, will be enacted in Missouri; they begin already to observe that the free citizens of Kansas can do more without slaves than themselves with all their hordes of dronish blacks. The past two years have taught them a lesson, which they never learned before, that one northern freeman is a match for three southern “chattels” for any sort of business; and that hiring southern bullies to “whip out” free principles on the great prairies of the west is an investment which will yield a poor interest. The whole South have found that sound sleep, with the possibility of having their brains dashed out in the presence of their families, is not to be relied on; and they have come to the conclusion that what they call chattels hear and remember, and tell others too, all about “the great campaign,” “the wicked abolitionists,” and “the under- ground railroad” to Canada. They are finding to their cost that, without a system of general education, the blacks are acquiring knowledge of which it is impossible to deprive them, and that their imagined wealth (in human sinews) is liable at any time to annihilation, by the hangman, by flight, or by an excited populace. For all this they have only themselves to thank. If the southern people had been contented with what Douglas said other northern demagogues so sagaciously carved out for them,² squatter sovereignty—the Republican movement never would have been made, and they might have embraced and enjoyed their precious delusion of property in human flesh till they were tired of it; but the ball is in motion, and unless the people of the South make provision for gradual emancipation, the eruption of the volcano or the yawning of the earthquake come not more suddenly, than will extermination of their hopes and the end of their fancied security.

---