But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
True, permanent peace can never be restored, until slavery, the occasion of the war, has ceased.
Slavery, first and foremost, was an energy institution. Shackling human muscle was about getting work done.
Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.
Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.
Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.
Nor was it only from the millions of slaves that chains had been removed; the whole nation had been in bondage; free speech had been suppressed.
Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.
We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time. But if we fail to do this, then unless we intend hereafter to violate the Constitution, we shall have a fugitive slave law in operation whenever the war is over.
I saw that the war could not be prevented. The time had passed.
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection.