Milwaukee (WI) Free Democrat, June 16, 1858

  FRANCIS P. BLAIR, from his retirement at Silver Springs Maryland, writes a letter to ELIHU BURRITT, in favor of compensated emancipation. Preliminary, to that, however, there must be some place to which these blacks must be sent as they are emancipated, for the laws of the Slave States will not permit them to remain within the borders of such States, and the laborers of the north will not permit them to fill the northern States, to enter into competition with them. A portion of the vast uncultivated regions of the South, (meaning Central America of South Mexico,) should be obtained for this purpose, which, argues Mr. Blair, the government has as much right to obtain for that as it has to obtain lands on which to plant its expatriated or exiled Indians. Such removal of the free blacks would be fraught with the most beneficial consequences, not only to them, but the nation at large. Indeed, on this point, Mr. Blair has the most rosy anticipations. There are already, he says, half a million freed men ready to embark, which number, the slaveholders would rapidly increase by voluntary emancipation as soon as they were convinced the objects of their benevolence would not become an meubus on society. In short, if this territory were obtained, all the influences of the land would unite in promoting emancipation, and the time would not be distant when a complete separation of the blacks from the whites could be achieved, the former occupying with the most beneficial results to themselves and to the world, this Southern Mexico or Central America territory. To accomplish this result, the compensation project he thinks is necessary. The great body of slaveholders will not free their slaves without compensation. When a way is opened for disposing of the slaves, compensation will be readily voted by the people of the north. Of the Compensation Emancipating Society, he says, "It is only necessary you should get the place to stand on to move the world," and the place to stand on is this aforesaid southern territory, which the first efforts of the society should be directed to securing. 

   We are by no means as sanguine as Mr. Blair in the matter. Expatriation and involuntary emigration will accomplish less for the territory which it is proposed shall be occupied by these blacks than slavery itself, for it would make a discontented imprisoned population, without the incentives to labor which the southern masters supply. And voluntary emigration could not be had to a great extent. It would be difficult get a colony of Yankees to occupy the country in question, and how then this universal stampede of the blacks upon the loosing of their fetters can be calculated on with confidence, we are at a loss to imagine. 

   The slavery question is not to be solved in that way. It is a moral relation involving moral questions which cannot be settled by lines of latitude or longitude or by emigration either voluntary or involuntary. The enlightenment of the popular mind to understand the true relation of the superior to the inferior, the fortunate to the unfortunate, or the strong to the weak, and the quickening of the popular conscience to reduce this right understanding to practice is what is wanted, and what is necessary to the settlement of this question. Thus done, the African will cease to be an object of special solicitude or special attention. He will come and go without question and use and room will be found for him wherever his footsteps voluntarily tend, and this with much less danger of those natural distinctions between the races being infringed on, than in the present wrong relations and conditions which exist.