Reconstruction: A Letter to President Johnson

47 ry—the exclusion of the negro race in the South—will suffice to reconstruct all this. We are nothing but abolitionists, it is said, and we think of nothing but the negroes. God is iny witness that the safety of the whites, their prosperity and their honor, inspire me with the liveliest anxiety. I love that great people which has just broken with so much valor the shameful yoke under which it had been bowed. I love it, and I counsel it to that which is in conformity with its glorious vocation here on earth. If this vocation consisted only in possessing a vast territory, in gaining great wealth, in giving the world the spectacle of a precocious civilization, a formidable brute force, a liberty coupled with oppression, an unregulated and unscrupulous democracy, you would be right in not listening to me ; you might attain this ideal for a few days at least, while crushing a race, while trampling under foot humanity and principle. This prosperity, founded on injustice, doubtless would not long endure, and these high fortunes would be akin to ruin ; nevertheless, lasting or not, they might be realized for a moment. But if your vocation consists in governing by justice, in showing the world the omnipotence of justice, in serving all noble causes by your example, the Gospel, liberty, the independence of the human conscience, the equality of the races, the entire equality in the highest sense of the word, then listen to those who are jealous for your good name, those who have lofty ambition for you. These, believe it, serve the honor, and the good fortune of the whites into the bargain, when they advise them to finish the deliverance of the negroes. These negroes are very weak, yet they are very strong. They may be crushed, yet they cannot be crushed without rousing the indignation of public opinion throughout the world, without causing the soil of America to tremble, without renewing the civil war. By the side of these four millions of unarmed men stands a champion that will never be utterly overthrown, and that will constantly rise again after a defeat—the Right.

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