All must admit that the bill of my colleague is excellent in purpose. It proposes nothing less than to establish Equality before the Law, at least so far as civil rights are concerned, in the Rebel States. This is done simply to carry out and maintain the Proclamation of Emancipation, by which the Republic is solemnly pledged to “maintain” the emancipated slave in freedom. Here is our pledge: “The Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and _maintain the freedom of said persons_.” The pledge is without limitation in space or time. It is as extended and as immortal as the Republic itself. Does anybody call it vain words? I trust not. To that pledge we are solemnly bound. Wherever our flag floats, as long as time endures, we must see that it is sacredly observed.
The performance of this pledge cannot be intrusted to another; least of all can it be intrusted to ancient slave-masters, embittered against the slave. It must be performed by the National Government. The power that gave freedom must see that freedom is maintained. This is according to reason. It is also according to examples of history. In the British West Indies we find this teaching. Three of England’s greatest orators and statesmen, Burke, Canning, and Brougham, at successive periods united in declaring, from experience in the British West Indies, that whatever the slave-masters undertook to do for their slaves was always “arrant trifling,” and that, whatever might be its plausible form, it always wanted “an executory principle.”[21] More recently the Emperor of Russia, when ordering Emancipation, declared that all efforts of his predecessors in this direction had failed, because left to “the spontaneous initiative of the proprietors.” I might say much more on this head, but this is enough. I assume that no such blunder will be made by us,--that we shall not leave to the old proprietors the maintenance of that freedom to which we are pledged, and thus break our own promises and sacrifice a race.
Elsewhere I have alluded to Emancipation in Russia.[22] But the example is worthy our deepest study, unless we purposely reject history. All know that in 1861 the Emperor by solemn proclamation gave freedom to upward of twenty-three million serfs; but it is not generally known by what supplementary provisions this freedom was assured.