The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863

All this is matter of history. And there would be as much propriety in denying the connection between the sun and the light of day, as that between Slavery and the Rebellion.

There is a question upon which men differ: namely, whether emancipation is the most prudent or the most effectual means to enforce violated law and suppress the insurrectionary movement.

It is my opinion that a majority of the people of the loyal States believe, at this moment, that emancipation is the necessary and proper means to effect the above objects. But whether this opinion be well founded or not is immaterial to the present question. According to Chief-Justice Marshall's decision, when it is the right and duty of the Government to perform an act, (as here to enforce law and suppress insurrection,) it "must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means." If Congress believes, that, in order to enforce law and suppress insurrection, it is necessary and proper to take and cancel all claims to life-long service or labor held in the Slave States, and if claims to service or labor, whether for years or for life, held by one inhabitant of the United States against another, be a species of property not specially exempted by the Constitution from seizure for public use, then an Act of Emancipation is strictly constitutional.

Congress is to be allowed to select the means; Congress is to be the judge of the necessity and propriety of these means: Congress, not the Supreme Court; not even the People in their primary meetings; but the People constitutionally represented in their National Legislature; the People, speaking by the voice of those whom their votes have elected to that Legislature, there to act for them.

If Congress believes that Emancipation is no longer a question of sectional interference, but of national preservation, it has the right to judge, and the constitutional right to act upon that judgment. And if Congress can properly allege, as motive for taking and cancelling a multitude of life-long claims to service, the preservation of the national existence, can a consideration of greater magnitude be imagined for any legislative act?

In proceeding, however, to consummate such a measure, it is evidently most fitting and proper, that, in the preamble to an Act of Emancipation, there should be set forth, lucidly and succinctly, the causes and considerations which impelled to so solemn and momentous an act.

As to the just compensation provided by the Constitution to be paid, when private property is taken for public use, it is here to be remarked,—

1. If, when a minor is drafted, a father or an apprentice-master has no claim against the Government for service lost, it may be argued with some plausibility, that, under similar circumstances of public exigency, a slave-owner has no claim when his slave is freed. But the argument fairly applies only in cases in which a slave is drafted for military service, and returned to slavery when that service terminates. In case of wholesale taking and cancelling of life-long claims to service, a fair construction of the Constitution may be held to require, as a general rule, that just compensation should be made to the claimants.

2. But to Congress, by the Constitution, is expressly given the power to declare the punishment of treason, without any limitation as to the confiscation of personal property, including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released from such service.

3. If, because of the present insurrection, set on foot by claimants of service or labor, such claims, from precariousness of tenure or otherwise, have diminished in market-value, that diminution may be properly taken into account in estimating just compensation.

These various considerations converge to this,—that a Preamble and Act of Emancipation, somewhat in the terms following, may be constitutionally enacted.

A Bill to emancipate Persons of African Descent held to Service or Labor in certain of the United States.

Whereas there is now flagrant, in certain of the United States, an insurrection of proportions so gigantic that there has been required, to hold it in check, an increase of the army and navy of the United States to an extent seldom paralleled in the history of the world;

And whereas, because of the said insurrection, the execution of the laws for collecting taxes, and of various other laws of the United States, heretofore enacted by the Congress in the just exercise of their constitutional powers, has been, for more than two years past, and still is, obstructed and defeated throughout the insurrectionary States;

And whereas it is the right and duty of the Congress to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the said constitutional powers;

And whereas the said insurrectionary portions of the Union consist exclusively of States wherein persons of African descent are held in large numbers to involuntary service or labor,—the white inhabitants thereof basing their insurrectionary acts upon the assumption that the security and perpetuation of such involuntary servitude require the disruption of the national unity, and the establishment, on a portion of the domain of the United States, of a separate and independent government;

And whereas a large portion of the said persons of African descent, so held in servitude, contribute greatly, so long as such involuntary services are thus exacted from them, to the aid and comfort of the said insurrectionists, laboring for their behoof on their fortifications, and for the supply of their commissariat, and otherwise giving strength and support to various insurrectionary acts;

And whereas, in an emergency so urgent as that which is now patent to the world, it is the duty of the Congress to place at the disposal of the Executive branch of the Government, for the common defence, the utmost power, civil and military, of the country, and to employ every means not forbidden by the usages of civilized warfare, and not in violation of the Constitution, that is placed within their reach, in order to repress and to bring to a speedy termination the present protracted and desolating insurrection;

And whereas it appears from the above recitals, that the existence, throughout certain of the United States, of a labor-system which recognizes the claims of one race of men to the involuntary services of another race (always a moral wrong) has now shown itself to be destructive of the supremacy of the laws, and a constant menace to the Government, and that the continuance of such labor-system imminently jeopardizes the integrity of the Union, and has become incompatible with the domestic tranquillity of the country;

And whereas it has thus become evident that claims to the involuntary service or labor of persons of African descent ought not to be possessed by any inhabitant of the United States, but should, in the just exercise of the power which inheres in every independent government to protect itself from destruction by seizing and destroying any private property of its citizens or subjects which imperils its own existence, be taken, as for public use, from their present possessors, and abrogated and annulled,—just compensation being made to so many of the said possessors of such claims as may demand it, and as may by their loyalty be entitled thereto, for the claims so abrogated and annulled; therefore,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, that from and after the – day of – next all claims to the services or labor of persons of African descent, who shall then be held to involuntary service or labor in any of the States of the Union under the laws thereof, be and the same are hereby taken by the Government of the United States. And the said claims are hereby abrogated and annulled. And all persons of African descent within the United States, who shall, on the said – day of – next, be held to involuntary service or labor, except for crime of which the party shall have been legally convicted, shall be released and emancipated from such claims in as full and complete a manner as if the same had never existed; the said release and emancipation to take effect from and after the said – day of –, thenceforth and forevermore.

And be it further enacted, that the faith of the United States be and the same is hereby pledged for the payment of just compensation to all persons who shall, on the said – day of –, hold such claims to service or labor; provided, that such persons shall make application for such compensation in the form and manner hereinafter prescribed, and provided further, that said persons shall have been, throughout the present insurrection, and shall continue to the close of the same, true and loyal to the Government of the United States, and shall not, directly or indirectly, have incited to insurrectionary acts, or given aid or comfort to any persons engaged in the insurrection aforesaid.

[Here should follow provisions in regard to the manner of application, the mode and rate of compensation, etc.]

It will probably be found that the number of slaves for the remuneration of whose lost services applications will be made by loyal claimants, under such an act, will scarcely reach the number emancipated in 1834 by Great Britain, which was about seven hundred and seventy thousand; and that the sum paid by England to colonial slave-owners, namely about a hundred millions of dollars, (the probable cost of eight weeks war,) will suffice as just compensation for all the services due to loyal claimants thus taken and cancelled.10

An act couched in the terms here proposed could not be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, without a shameless encroachment on legislative ground, nor without a reckless reversal of principles as well established, and of as high authority, as any which form the basis of constitutional law.

Those who demur to the passage of an act which meets the great difficulty before us broadly, effectually, honestly, and in accordance with the dictates of Christianity and civilization, would do well to consider whether, in the progress of this insurrectionary upheaval, we have not reached a point at which there is no prudent alternative left. By the President's Proclamation some three millions of slaves have been already declared free. Sundry laws of Congress have emancipated several hundred thousands more. There remain legally enslaved probably less than three quarters of a million,—chiefly scattered along a narrow border-strip that is coterminous, North and South, with Freedom or Emancipation,—partly dotted in isolated parishes or counties, surrounded by enfranchised slaves. Can we maintain in perpetuity so anomalous a condition of things? Clearly not. At every step embarrassments innumerable obstruct our progress. No industry, no human sagacity, would suffice to determine the ten thousand conflicting questions that must arise out of such a chaos. Must the history of each negro be followed back, so as to determine his status, whether slave or free? If negroes emancipated in insurrectionary States are sold as slaves into Border States, or into excepted parishes or counties, can we expect to trace the transaction? If slaves owned in Border States, or in excepted parishes or counties, are sold to loyal men in insurrectionary States, are they still slaves? or do they become free? Are we to admit, or to deny, the constitutionality of Border-State laws, which arrest, and imprison as vagrants, and sell into slavery to pay expenses of arrest and imprisonment, free negro emigrants from insurrectionary States?11 But why multiply instances? The longer this twilight of groping transition lasts, it will be only confusion the worse confounded.

We cannot stand still. Shall we recede? We break faith solemnly plighted; we submit, before the world, to base humiliation; we bow down to a system which the voice of all Christendom condemns; we abandon the struggle for nationality, and consent, for ages, perhaps, to a dismembered country. Shall we advance? There is but one path—the plain, truth-lighted, onward path—to victory and to peace.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and Religion in their Relation to Life. An Essay on the Physics of Creation. By HENRY JAMES. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

Any one tolerably conversant with either the religion or the philosophy of the last twenty-five years, as displayed in the current literature, must have been convinced that both had left their ancient moorings, never again to find them, and were floating about perilously in quest of a new anchorage. We read the "Essays and Reviews" and "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically Examined," and the replications long-drawn-out from High Church and Low, with a decided impression that the combatants are skirmishing on an immense ice-field, which is drifting them all together into other and unknown seas. What cares any man profoundly conscious of the wants both of the intellect and the heart whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not, and if so, whether he was as accomplished a geologist as Professors Buckland and Lyell? Admit that the whole letter of Scripture comes from God, even to the vowel-points, by what laws and methods shall we expound it so as to put an end to the internecine war between Faith and Reason, between Religion and Philosophy?

We say without reserve, that this book of Mr. James's, if we except a small and unpretending treatise by the same author, published a few years since, on the "Nature of Evil," is the first we have met with, in the range of modern religious controversy, which goes to the heart and marrow of the subject.

To see into what straits we had been brought, call to mind the essentials of the Kantian and Scotch philosophies, which have dominated the German and English mind, and partially the French mind, for the last quarter of a century. Kant resolves all our knowledge into the science of phenomena. Our faculties give us nothing but the phenomena of consciousness; and the phenomena of consciousness are not noumenal existence, or existence in se. Nor have we any right to reason from phenomena to noumena, or to say that the former authenticate the latter. We know only the Ego. The Non-Ego lies on the other side of a yawning chasm,—if, indeed, there is anything on the other side, which is doubtful. The Ego becomes the centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct. Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism, or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute. He and his disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, and that to attempt such a philosophy leads us into inextricable confusion and self-contradiction.

In thus degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only to deal with the Finite,—in other words, making her the lackey of mere Science,—they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation. Very well,—we are ready to say,—having scourged Philosophy out of the temple, will you please, Gentlemen, to conduct us yourselves towards its hallowed shrine? If Philosophy cannot yield us a knowledge of the Infinite, we take it that Revelation, as you apprehend it, can. We, poor prodigals, have been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a little nourishing food.—The answer we get is, that Revelation does not propose to give us any such fare. Not any more than Philosophy does Revelation disclose to us the Infinite. It only gives us finite conceptions and formulas about the Infinite. The gulf between us and God yawns wide as ever, and is eternal. We must worship still an unknown God, as the heathen did. But we have this consolation,—that we have creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they mean, and under what these philosophers call a "regulative" religion repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

"These be thy gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever can beat.

Mr. James's whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch philosophies, is profound and masterly. He uses two sets of weapons, both of them with admirable skill. One set is awfully destructive. He clears off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy. But, on the whole, Mr. James is right here. If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright, unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,—or if men pretending to hold the keys of knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive. He shows not only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,—science deals with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre for the circumference. This is the glaring fault both of the German and the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and hence they grovel in the Finite, and muddle everything they touch even there. Revelation, on the other hand, does unfold to us a true philosophy of the Infinite. It shows how the Infinite is contained in the Finite, the Absolute in the Relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. Mr. James demonstrates the supreme absurdity of the notion of noumenal existence, or of any created existence which has life in se. God alone has life in Himself. All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance. The notion of Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards in se, and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions." It is the mother-fallacy," says Mr. James, "which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding." Those familiar with Dr. Mansel's argument will see that he has not the remotest conception of Creation, except as an exploit of God in time and space, or of the Infinite, except as an unbounded aggregation of finites. That God reposed alone through all the past eternities, but roused some day and sent forth a shout, or six successive shouts, and spoke things out of nothing into "noumenal" existence, were absurd enough, to use Mr. James's nervous English, "to nourish a standing army of Tom Paines into annual fatness." The utter childishness of the theological quarrels over the first chapter of Genesis is obvious enough, so long as both parties swamp the spirit in the letter, or deny that the Finite can reveal the Infinite.

Following out his favorite postulate, that God alone has life in Himself, and all things else are only phenomena of life, Mr. James evolves the doctrine of Creation, of Man and Nature, and of Redemption, steering clear alike of the shoals of Atheism and the devouring jaws of Pantheism. In his constructive argument he draws upon the vast wealth of Swedenborg, and herein, as we conceive, he has done a rare service to our literature. Both the popular and ecclesiastical conception of Swedenborg would be ludicrously, if they were not shamefully inadequate. He has been known but little, except as a ghost-seer, or as a Samson grinding painfully in sectarian mills. Mr. James has done something like justice to his broad humanity, and his incomparably profound and exhaustive philosophy. It was Kant who first called him a ghost-seer; but while Kant was doing his best to turn all realities into the ghastliest of spectres, and remove all the underpinning of faith, till the heavens themselves should tumble through, Swedenborg was laying the foundation of all knowledge on the solid floors of Nature, subordinating sense to science, science to philosophy, philosophy to revelation, each serving as the impregnable support of its superior, and all filled and quickened with the life of God, and lighted up with those divine illuminations in whose illustrious morning the first and faintest cock-crowing would scare the ghosts of the Kantian philosophy out of the universe.

We have regarded Mr. James for some time as among the first of American essayists. There are few writers whose thought is more worthy to be spoken, or whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and nobler proportions. The present volume is his crowning work, and he has coined his life-blood into it. But as honest critics we have some grounds of quarrel with him. A man has no right to be obscure who can make words so flexible and luminous as he can. In the present volume, his readers who here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply because he alters the fundamental nomenclature of religion and chiefly Ritualism, and we find only by the most wide-awake searching that he means anything else. Morality means the Selfhood, not social justice, not that which binds the individual in his relations to society and to humanity. Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all divine charities flowing through them. So Swedenborg uses the word morality. See his noble chapter on Charity in the "True Christian Religion." And for ourselves, we have not the least idea of abandoning these honored words either to superstitious formalists or handsome scoundrels.

We have no such respect for the Devil as Mr. James has expressed for him, even when transformed into the gentleman and utilized for beneficent purposes. Nor do we see how the gap in Mr. James's argument is to be closed up, while he avows his belief in the eternity of the hells, and yet holds that we are ab intra the unqualified creations of God. Again, we should take exception to his favorite position, or, rather, the batteries he opens from it, that saints and scoundrels are not different in the sight of God, allowing the sense which alone, of course, he intends, different in se.

But the merits of the book, as one of the noblest and profoundest contributions to philosophy which have been produced, are undeniable. Mr. James possesses two qualities in very rare combination, the power of subtile metaphysical analysis and the power of picturesque representation, so that, while he tasks the thinking faculty of his readers to the utmost, he chains their attention by the fascination of his rhetoric. His sturdy honesty is everywhere apparent, and his success the most complete which we have yet witnessed in rescuing Philosophy from her degrading bondage to Sense, and restoring her to the divine service of Revelation.

The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. By SIR CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S., Author of "The Principles of Geology," "Elements of Geology," etc., etc. Illustrated by Wood-Cuts. 8vo. Philadelphia: George W. Childs.

Human bones from time to time have been discovered associated with those of extinct hyenas and cavern-bears, and specimens of them were in the Museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris as long ago as 1829; but there was then a doubt among geologists as to the human bones being coeval with the bones with which they were associated, it being supposed that they might have been washed into crevices of the rocks in which the bone-breccias are found, and there, being incrusted with carbonate of lime, had the false appearance of being as ancient as the fossil bones of extinct animals.