Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[547] national action. Confiscate those lands. Colonize them. Sell them with the guaranty of the government to the loyal Massachusetts man or New Yorker. Say to him, “There is a deed as good as the Union. Carry there your ploughshares, seeds, schools, sewing-machines.” Carry free labor to that soil, and you carry New York to Virginia, and slavery cannot go back. I want to supply the vacancy which this war must leave in every Slave State it subdues. The Slave States, to my mind, are men and territory, and nothing else. The rebellion has crushed out all civil forms. New government is to go there. It seems to me the idlest national work, childish work, for the President, in bo-peep secrecy, to hide himself in the White House and launch a proclamation at us on a first day of January. The nation should have known it sixty days before, and should have provided fit machinery for the reception of three million bondmen into the civil state. If we launch a ship, we build straight well-oiled ways upon which it may glide with facility into its native element. So when a nation is to be born, the usual aid of government should have been extended to prepare a pathway through which to step upon the platform of civil equality. It is nonsense without. We cannot expect in hours to cover the place of centuries. It is a great problem before us. We must take up the South and organize it anew. It is not the men we have to fight,--it is the state of society that produces them. He would be a fool who, having a fever, scraped his tongue and took no medicine. Killing Davis is only scraping the tongue; killing slavery is taking a wet-sheet pack, destroying the very disease. But when we have done it, there remains behind the still greater and more momentous problem, whether we have the strength, the balance, the virtue, the civilization, to absorb six millions of ignorant, embittered, bedeviled Southerners, and transmute them into