Description
Where Are Your Tears? - - For the last 2 years, the Copperhead press has resounded with groans over the sufferings and miseries of the poor, afflicted slaves whom “the Abolitionists” have seduced from the paternal guardianship and nurture of their masters, to the fancied delights of freedom, and the sad reality of dying by famine and disease in the rear of the Union armies.
And, as though this almost necessary incident of a desolating civil war were to be accepted as the natural result of Emancipation, the public has been called to weep over the approaching and inevitable destruction of the entire negro population of our country, doomed to perish for the lack of masters.
A dispatch says “over 40,000 negroes have been concentrated in the various towns in the interior of Texas, hundreds of whom are now dying of disease and starvation.” These, be it noted, are neither freemen or freedmen but slaves - negroes abundantly supplied with masters, but lacking everything else.
They have been removed by their owners from the older slave States to Texas to escape conscription, to construct rebel batteries, and to keep them out of the way of Yankee liberators; and here they are “dying of disease and starvation.”
What Copperhead can be induced to drop a tear for them? What pro-slavery journal can be impelled to sympathize with their woes? – New York Tribune.
(Researcher’s note: Several news articles in this collection dating between 1858 to 1861 indicate that Platte County enslavers were taking their slaves to Texas to avoid emancipation, present their escape or advancing Union troops. Enslavers named in those new articles include James Randolph Duncan, Edward P. Duncan, Ann and Oscar Holland, David Ellington, Pleasant Ellington, Polly Hunn, Solomon Langdon Leonard, Mike Allgaires / Allgair, James T. Darnall, and James Robinson.)Date(s) of Creation
2/26/1864
