The Question of the War
By Moncure D. Conway

  So the dear grand old Republic of our fathers, the e pluribus unum of liberty, is in danger! The Union thereof is not in quite so bad a plight as the liberty, for even secesh has not yet decided that if successful it will leave out any thing, except perhaps rocky little New England and the corner of New York where John Brown’s body lies. But hate blazes and blood flows. There is in the heart of the land a war of too full grown giants.—One of them is the beast that was nursed to its ferocious maturity under the ass’s skin of the Pierce and Buchanan administrations.—The other is the constitutional government of the people’s choice, representing the sum total of the liberty and justice which the other creature had left us. If the brute carries the day then the government of this land of our fathers is hereafter to rest on the principle that it does NOT take two to make a bargain, provided one part is sufficiently stronger or handsomer than the other. Then any fast man with a taste for spotless linen, will have his choice either to pay his washer-woman so much per dozen as she asks for doing up his shirts, or as many dozen lashes as he pleases for not doing them up. Or he may sell her baby, or her, or both, and put the price in his pocket, if he prefers that. On the other hand, if the constitutional government of the people’s choice carries the day, then—then what? Then will it everywhere under that government take two to make a bargain? Will the most unequal man then be equal before the law? Will the poor man’s life and liberty be as sacred then in every state as the rich man’s? This is the Question of the War. In other words, is the constitutional government of the people’s choice fighting against the beast as an enemy, and a rebel at that, or as a rival? If as a mere rival, where is the use? What great odds is it whether you rob your washer-woman constitutionally or unconstitutionally? If you don’t have trouble from her, you will from the fast man, in due time.

  Who are these rebels, who excite the sympathy of special friends of privilege and despotism all over the world, and only theirs? They are the thousands of men who hold four millions as property, despots in the primary natural sense of the word, the men who monopolize or control nearly all the wealth and intelligence of half the country, whose arbitrary will, united by a common interest, gives, and always has given, law to the states they infest, as much as if the rest of the whites as well as the black were their chattles. Every man of them feels popular ignorance and debasement to be the prime condition of his prosperity. Every man of them feels the very foundations of his home endangered by the prosperity of free labor. The moment the census showed beyond all contradiction or cavil that genuine democracy led to wealth and happiness all over the free states, and even in rocky New England, and that chattelism and caste led to destitution and poverty, every man of there was ready to lay hold of the pillars of the Union and level the fabric in ruins. Every man of them who dared did make the attempt. If slaveholders have proved unionists any where, it has been either by the force of circumstances or a belief that they would lose individually more than they could gain by rebellion. The heart of every willing slaveholder has gone with the rebellion and against the government of the people.

  Do we owe these rebels anything? Do we owe their victims nothing? Let us scan these questions faithfully, for justice to all is now even a necessity. If the enslavement of the people of Africa and their descendants in America had been a religious duty, the government of the United States up to the year 1863, could not more faithfully have abstained from all interference against it, or more carefully have guarded it from all hostile interference whether from states or individuals. It has even defiled its statute book with the most revolting and inhuman legislation to repress the exercise of inalienable rights in order to protect a species of property utterly unknown to the language of the constitution and inconsistent with its plainest provisions. Every national party, even including that which elected the present Executive, though the constitution of the United States knows no distinction of races, knows nothing of servitude except as a matter of debt, the result of a free bargain, has consented that slavery in certain states should be considered constitutional and invulnerable, in other words, that state wrongs should be held as sacred as State rights. The constitution was made to secure the liberty of the people of the United States; it expressly provides as a fortification of liberty, that no man shall be deprived of it without due process of law, that the people shall have the right to keep and bear arms without restriction or exception. Yet to please the slaveholders that part of the laboring population of the South which they profess to own, was by a private understanding, not alluded to in the Constitution, left out in the cold! The meanest, foulest injustice ever perpetrated by any nation on this planet!

  They are not allowed to be people of the United States. Their liberty is withheld without pretence of legal process. They may not keep or bear arms lest it should become unsafe to sell them at auction. To please their masters we have been educated to regard their race with the most insane hatred and contempt. Thus we have coaxed, caressed and petted the tyrants for three quarters of a century, standing always ready to violate our consciences by putting down with an “iron hand” any attempt of the slaves to put in practice the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, and yet it is the tyrants who have risen in insurrection. What is the remedy for this rebellion? Justice. Nothing but justice. If we had the command of seven thunders, we would condense them into one clap, to drive this truth into the ears of the President and cabinet. Force without justice is force wasted. The constitution, if it is not an agreement with hell, (and this writer having been carefully instructed in English grammar, never believed it was, but just the contrary), belongs as much to the four millions of black people at the South as to any other there or here. They have the same constitutional right to bear arms for the common defence as any other people. Their abstinence from revenge for the cruelest of wrongs, and most dastardly of insults, has given us peace which we ill deserved. Their patient toil has contributed to the wealth of the whole country. We have not governed them, but outlawed them, and heaped on them all possible provocation to resist civil authority. Yet, in the highest style of christian conservatism they have governed themselves, till the presumptuous rebels count them a safe foundation for their own rebellion. And if they remain submissive to their rebel master—as their own good sense requires them to, till we make a thorough, unconditional, cordial offer of liberty and the common constitutional aegis of United States citizenship—there is no reason to believe the eight million rebels, with a country half jungle, will be more than a match for twenty millions of busy business men, however loyal and patriotic. These patient people are the vitality as well as the cause of the rebellion. Governing themselves as they do, can they possibly endanger a self-governing republic, by being received into it? We have localities in free states wherein the black population even exceeds the white. Are they particularly dangerous spots, more so than any other known to the police?—Don’t let us be too big fools at such a time as this. Catnip tea could’nt (sic) be a safer remedy. Full negro liberty can do us, so far as the negro himself is concerned, no possible hurt if it does us no good. Every body knows this who knows any thing. It may madden secesh. It may raise an insurrection among the Vallandingham democrats. But secesh is mad enough already to do its worst. And the Vallandingham democrats will do for their old masters the slaveholders, all they dare any how.

  O let us not be fools! The physical force that year after year filled the coffers of King Cotton, till he cast loose his northern body guard against insurrection and snapped his fingers in the face of the world, though mild and manageable, is not to be despised. It can and will save the Republic beyond a peradventure, if we let it. Its heart stands ready to meet our heart—nothing else. But good God! Is it in the glorious free America of our fathers, that justice, the tardiest, scantiest justice, has to be urged as a nauseous dose—this or death! No! Young, undebauched America, let us thank God for the opportunity, and swear by our dear old sincere but too charitable fathers, by the purity of our own souls that the meanness and hypocrisy of seventy-five years, always increasing and always failing of its object, shall stop here; that not only the dear, grand old republic of our fathers shall be saved, but that it shall be saved most especially that it may do the justice which it ought from the first to have done, for dear justice’s sake.

  This essay works together with “Stand by the Government!”, which appears beside and below it in the Commonwealth’s second issue, to describe the stakes of the Civil War. Not unexpectedly in an immediate-emancipation paper, editor Conway argues that the fate of slavery, and whether the Union should decide to end it or allow it to continue in the south, as the destiny of the republic. The question of the war, for Conway, is whether a party “sufficiently stronger or handsomer than the other” can bend constitutional guarantees of freedom to suit his greedy purpose and, therefore, whether the people of the US shall all be free or some of them remain more equal than others. Conway argues that this question does not just affect people of color or those enslaved but everyone, suggesting that those who would oppress a slave would do, and have done, the same to whites and portraying slaveholders as privileged despots. He demands that the Union distinguish itself from the Confederacy and prove whether it is an “enemy…or a rival” to the Confederate, whether it would secure liberty for all or preserve slavery for some. In keeping with his argument elsewhere that the Constitution abhors slavery, Conway holds that slaveholders have denied rights to the enslaved by congressional arrangement, not constitutional agreement, noting that the US has done little to oppose and has, in fact, passed legislation to support slavery.

  In the last half of the essay, incensed that slaveholders rebel despite the government’s efforts to support the oppression of the enslaved, Conway turns to the question of rights of black people, holding not only that the Constitution guarantees rights to black people, but also that the Union should work to restore “full liberty” to the enslaved, including citizenship, the right to bear arms, and all other constitutional guarantees. Arguing against those who wanted to free the enslaved and end emancipation there, Conway says that there is no danger in enforcing constitutional protections for black people, rights they are already guaranteed, and particularly foolishness in not doing so. Finally, he calls for an end to the “meanness and hypocrisy of seventy-five years, always increasing and always failing of its object” by bettering the rights of white men while oppressing blacks, a point he expands upon in the following “Stand by the Government!”.