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338 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

"This then, is the high vantage ground of the negro; he has labor; the
South wants it, and must have it or perish. Since he is free he can now give
it or withhold it, use it where he is, or take it elsewhere as he pleases. His
labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable,
and independent. It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes, or
bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its pocket. This power
served him well years ago, when in the bitterest extremity of destitution. But
for it, he would have perished when he dropped out of slavery. It saved him
then, and it will save him again. Emancipation came to him, surrounded by
extremely unfriendly circumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the
people among whom he lived, but against their will, and a death struggle on
their part to prevent it. His chains were broken in the tempest and whirlwind
of civil war. Without food, without shelter, without land, without money, and
without friends, he with his children, his sick, his aged and helpless ones,
were turned loose and naked to the open sky. The announcement of his free-
dom was instantly followed by an order from his master to quit his old quarters,
and to seek bread thereafter from the hands of those who had given him
his freedom. A desperate extremity was thus forced upon him at the outset of
his freedom, and the world watched with humane anxiety, to see what would
become of him. His peril was imminent. Starvation and death stared him in
the face and marked him for their victim.

"It will not soon be forgotten that at the close of a five hours' speech by
the late Senator Sumner, in which he advocated with unequaled learning and
eloquence the enfranchisement of the freedmen, the best argument with
which he was met in the Senate, was that legislation at that point would be
utterly superfluous; that the negro was rapidly dying out, and must inevitably
and speedily disappear and become extinct.

"Inhuman and shocking as was this consignment of millions of human
beings to extinction, the extremity of the negro, at that date, did not contradict,
but favored, the prophecy. The policy of the old master-class dictated
by passion, pride, and revenge, was then to make the freedom of the negro,
a greater calamity to him, if possible, than had been his slavery. But happily,
both for the old master-class, and for the recently emancipated, there came
then, as there will come now, the sober second thought. The old master-class
then found it had made a great mistake. It had driven away the means of its
own support. It had destroyed the hands, and left the mouths. It had starved
the negro, and starved itself. Not even to gratify its own anger and resentment
could it afford to allow its fields to go uncultivated, and its tables
unsupplied with food. Hence the freedman, less from humanity than cupidity