Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. Our answer is, do nothing with them mind your business, and let them mind theirs. It assumes that nature has erred that the law of liberty is a mistake that freedom, though a natural want of human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God - less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. This question has been answered, and can be answered in many ways. In view of this frightful, though happily somewhat contradictory picture, the question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? The laboring classes among the whites would come in bitter conflict with them in all the avenues of labor, and regarding them as occupying places and filling propositions which should be occupied and filled by white men a fierce war of races would be the inevitable consequence, and the black race would, of course, (being the weaker,) be exterminate. It is said, what will you do with them? they can’t take care of themselves they would all come to the North they would not work they would become a burden upon the State, and a blot upon society they’d cut their masters’ throats they would cheapen labor, and crowd out the poor white laborers from employment their former masters would not employ them, and they would necessarily become vagrants, paupers and criminals, over-running all our alms houses, jails and prisons. These objections are often urged with a show of sincere solicitude for the welfare of the slaves themselves.

Like all other great transgressions of the law of eternal rectitude, slavery thus produces an element in the popular and depraved moral sentiment favorable to its own existence. Like the one started above, these pro-slavery objections have their power mainly in the slavery-engendered prejudice, which every where pervades the country. It is curious to observe, at this juncture, when the existence of slavery is threatened by an aroused nation, when national necessity is combining with an enlightened sense of justice to put away the huge abomination forever, that the enemies of human liberty are resorting to all the old and ten thousand times refuted objections to emancipation with which they confronted the abolition movement twenty-five years ago.

Million Man March by Michael H. Cottman