22 greater victories over the embarrassments and trials which must still dispute its path to the highest glory. When peace returns, it will prove to be a heavy assessor of our common sense and patience. The problem of self-government will include the governing and rearing of four millions of people, richly endowed with affection, veneration and docility, but ignorant and awkward, superstitious, full of childish tricks, and unconscious of the duties of a freeman. Their feeble ambition has been hitherto one of the advantages of the slaveholder in perpetuating their servile state. • But it is also fostered by the tone of religious instruction among their own preachers, who represent and confirm the gentle tendencies of the African. Mr. Pierce describes, in his first report to Secretary Chase, a sermon which he heard at Port Royal, from the text, “ Blessed are the meek.” The slaveholder may well tremble for his acres when he recalls the promise of that text. It was characteristic of the American slave that the preacher urged upon his hearers not to try to be “ stout-minded.” How congenial this advice is to the average negro is shown by the infrequency and feebleness of all insurrectionary movements. It was not possible for the slave to organize a formidable insurrection while the South was in full strength, nor will he ever be disposed to hazard the attempt, except, perhaps, in case the Proclamation of Emancipation is recalled, dr hampered with gradualism, or local efforts are made to reestablish or continue the status of slavery. Then their scattered condition and the geography of the country would be less unfavorable to a successful rising than the slave’s inborn predisposition for bloodless and pacific ways. Not that the negro dreads death: his mobile and fluttering imagination becomes fixed in the presence of a real danger. He is impassive or frenzied, and will charge up to the very mouths of cannon and coil about them. He is singularly cool to meet what he cannot avoid, but night-fears and fancied terrors make a child of him. The threat of a novel mode of torture is too much for him. It is imagination only that makes a coward of a negro. If the Proclamation wins, we shall find among the slaves a general deference to the plans of Government for confirming their freedom, to make it useful to themselves and to the country.
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