Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15.djvu/631

It is said that Lord Eldon, the typical conservative of his day, shed tears of sincere regret on the abolition of the death-penalty for five-shilling thefts. The unfortunate Lord Eldons of our own day must be weeping in rivers. Slavery is dead, and the freedmen are its bequest. Through a Red Sea which no one would have dared to contemplate, we have attained to the Promised Land. By the sublimest revenge which history has placed on record, we have returned good for evil, and have punished those who wronged us by requiring them to cease from doing wrong. The grand poetic justice by which Maryland, the first State to shed her brothers' blood, has been the first to be transformed into a condition of happy liberty, only symbolizes a like severity of kindness in store for all. Five years of devastating war will have only rounded the sublime cycle of retribution predicted so tersely by Whittier long ago:

The time has come to put in practice that fine suggestion of the wise foreign traveller, Von Raumer, which some of us may remember to have read with almost hopeless incredulity twenty years ago. "The European abolition of the dependent relations between men of one and the same race was an easy matter, compared with the task which Americans have to perform. But if, on the one part, this task carries with it many cares, pains, and sufferings, on the other hand, the necessary instruction and guardianship of the blacks, and their final reconciliation with the whites, offer an employment so noble, influential, and sublime, that the Americans should testify with awe and humility their gratitude to Providence for intrusting them with this duty also, in addition to many others of the greatest importance to the progress of the race. Were its performance really impossible, it would not have been imposed."

In important periods, words are events; and history may be read in the successive editions of a dictionary. The transition from the word "serf" to the word "citizen" marked no European epoch more momentous than that revealed by the changes in our American vocabulary since the war began. In the newspapers, the speeches, the general orders, one finds, up to a certain time, a certain class recognized only as "slaves." Suddenly the slaves vanish from the page, and a race of "contrabands" takes their place. After another interval, these, too, gradually disappear, and the liberated beings are called "freedmen." The revolution is then virtually accomplished; and nothing remains but to rectify the details, and drop the d. When the freedmen are lost in the mass of freemen, then the work will be absolutely complete; and the retrospect of its successive stages will be matter for the antiquary alone.

Corresponding with these verbal milestones, one may notice successive stages of public sentiment as to the class thus variously designated. It was usually considered that the "slaves" were a vast and almost hopeless mass of imbruted humanity. It was generally feared that the "contrabands" would prove a race of helpless paupers, whose support would bankrupt the nation. It is almost universally admitted that the "freedmen" are industrious, intelligent, self-supporting, soldierly, eager for knowledge, and far more easily managed than an equal number of white refugees.

There is no doubt that these last developments were in some degree a surprise to Abolitionists, as well as to pro-slavery prophets. They compelled the admission, either that slavery was less demoralizing than had been supposed, or else that this particular type of human nature was less easy to demoralize. It is but a few years since