HL Deb 03 July 1865 vol 180 cc1025-6
LORD BROUGHAM

craved permission, on what might be regarded as a personal matter, but what really was something more, to set himself right after some great misapprehension of what had passed on the subject of slavery in the United States; because he was assured by persons of note from that country that the charge made against him of taking part with the slave-mongers of the South was certain to lessen the influence, such as it was, of his earnest entreaty to the Government of the North, that they would use their great victory with moderation and mercy. He show a leaning towards the slavemongers of the South !—he, who was well known to have abandoned a kind gift of a Barbadoes plantation, and an estate in Durham, because he would not abandon the cause of slave emancipation and slave trade abolition, and his friends and fellow labourers in that great cause ! The notion was beyond measure absurd; but he could imagine how it arose. He differed from many respected friends on two points. Highly as he praised the noble conduct of the North in granting the right of search which was directed against the Cuba slave trade, and greatly as he approved the proclamation against slavery, he had always maintained that it was not issued on behalf of the slaves, but as a measure of hostility against the South, and had for its object the restoration of the Union, not the good of the negro. So he differed with the same friends on the conduct of the South, which they contended was wholly actuated by the desire to maintain slavery, while he contended that this was only in part the cause of the secession, which was in great part for obtaining their independence. He had in that very address at the Social Science Congress of York, which was referred to as an authority for these misrepresentations, called slavery the detested institution of the South, but these words were suppressed. In praising the North for their conduct, he had felt called upon to express his horror of the treatment to which the unhappy negroes were subjected, when driven in multitudes to slaughter during the war fortunately now ended. Exaggeration and perversion are the very life of party, and he who casts himself loose from its trammels, and is resolved to see facts in their proper colour and just dimensions, will stand aloof from siding with either party, and is pretty certain to be misrepresented by both.

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