B24

LIFE OF GOBDEN - [oma

1868. emancipation. It is indeed doubtful whether another army
=- xa, of Northern whites could be raised. If the Federal Congress
bolt the black dose, and resolve to employ black regiments,
it will be the beginning of the end of slavery. Is it no
apparently tending to this? I would have rather seen the
work done in almost any other way. But the Devil of
battles will not, I hope, have it all his own way. God will, I
hope, snatch something from the carnage to compensate U8
for this terrible work. And spite of the Times and the devil
I hope the slave will get his freedom yet.”
“ Midhurst, Jan. 18,1868. ( ,, )—.... I join with
you in all your horror of this vulgar and unscientific and
endless butchery in America, Before the first shot W8S
fired I wrote to Sumner to say that if I were a New Englander
 I would vote with both hands for a peaceful separabion.
 But since the fighting began I have regarded the
matter as beyond the control of reason or moral suasion, and
I have endeavoured to keep my mind as free as I could from
an all-absorbing interest in the struggle—-simply on this
utilitarian principle—that I can do no.good there, and
I want my faculties and energies to try and do something
here.
“My only absorbing care in connexion with the civil
war is to endeavour to prevent this country from interfering
 withit. To this end I think the anti-slavery direction
in which the war is drifting will be favourable. I am not
much afraid of any widespread acts of violence on the part
of the negroes. They are generally under religious impressions,
 and are not naturally ferocious. They will grow
unsettled, and some of them unmanageable, and there will
be great confusion and swaying to and fro. But though I
don’t expect them to rise and commit desperate crimes, it 18
quite evident that Jefferson Davis feels all the force of the
emancipation measure as a strategical act. He has allowed