utures" and
"corners." As an illustration, take the State of Virginia. The people
of that State contracted large debts to aid and abet the cause of the
so-called Confederate Government, a thing which crystallized around
the question: "Have the Sovereign States absolute, undivided authority
to regulate their own internal concerns, slave and other, or is this
authority vested in the Federal or National Government?" When the
people of Virginia contracted those large debts, drawing upon her
future resources, and placing burdens upon men yet unborn, to
propagate theories at variance with sound doctrines of government, and
to perpetuate an institution too vile to be mentioned with respect, in
1860, and immediately subsequent thereto, when the State of Virginia
contracted the debts in question for the perpetuation of slavery, she
had a population of 1,047,299; 65.6 per cent of which was white
(free), and 34.4 per cent was colored (slave). Virginia, therefore, in
contracting debts in 1860, did not calculate that twenty-two years
thereafter the obligations would be repudiated, and the credit of the
State depreciated, by the assistance of the very class of persons to
bind whom to a cruel and barbarous servitude those debts were
contracted. It is one of the most striking instances of retributive
justice that I ever knew. Nothing was more natural, when the question
came up for final settlement a few years ago, than that the black
voters of Virginia should take sides with those who opposed the full
settlement of the indebtedness. It is too much to expect of sensible
men that they will assent, in a state of sovereign citizenship, to
cancel debts contracted when they had no voice in the matter, and
when, as a matter of fact, the debts were contracted to rivet upon
them the chains of death. And yet for the part the black men of
Virginia took upon the settlement of her infamous debt, they have been
abused and maligned from one end of the country to the other. Because
they refused to vote to tax themselves to pay money borrowed without
their consent, and applied to purposes of death and slaughter, no man
has been found to commend them or to accept as sufficiently
extenuating, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the question.
Shylock must have his pound of flesh, though the unlucky victim bleed
his life away. But there are laws "higher" than any framed in the
interest of tyrannical capital. In my opinion, the man who
deliberately inves