THEY WOULD STAY AT HOME.
The crafty and unscrupulous slave-holders have imbued into the minds of many Northern people, an immense lie,––one that terrifies and chills the imagination, and converts men who abstractly hate slavery, into jailors and patrolmen for slave-holders. This lie consists in the assertion, that if the slaves were emancipated, they would stampede to the North by millions. It has so incessantly been reiterated by the slave-holders, and echoed by their tools in the Free States, that it is very difficult to disabuse the public mind. However much people abhor the system of slavery, they still more dread the consequences to themselves, of an avalanche of freed slaves among them. Laboring men imagine themselves elbowed out of employment. Servant girls are told that wenches will exclude them from the kitchen and chambers. Business men apprehend that the jails and poor-houses would be filled with colored vagrants, and the streets swarm with black beggars....
[Editor's Note: The majority of this article has been omitted from our transcription except for the portions directly mentioning the term "slave stampedes" or some variant.]
"They Would Stay At Home," Chicago (IL) Daily Tribune, August 14, 1861, p. 3.