Boston and New York Pine and Palm, May 18, 1861

This journal will be devoted to the interests of freedom, and of the colored races in America.

It will seek to array against Slavery, and the prejudices it has engendered, not the moral powers exclusively, but the physical forces of the age.

It will advocate action, rather than the promulgation of ideas.

It will expound a programme of associated action, having for its chief object the complete and abiding triumph of the Democratic Idea on this Continent, and its Islands; and, with it, the elevation of the colored races inhabiting America, to a position of perfect social, political and National Equality and Power with the whites.

This programme will embrace:

I. The immediate eradication of slavery from the soil of the United States, by the authority of the Federal Government; or, failing in that, by John Brown expeditions, and simultaneous and extended Negro Insurrections.

II. The calling of a National Convention for the revision of the Federal Constitution, to place it unmistakeably and forever on the side of freedom; to erase from it its lingering remnants of royalist ideas; to enable the North to share the taxation and new duties, (as they have shared the guilt and the folly of Slavery,) which must necessarily result from a forced emancipation; and, finally, believing that the people of the Cotton States east of the Mississippi are, in every essential respect, a different and hostile nation to us, to take measures for their temporary secession from the Union, after the abolition of Slavery in their Territory; that is to say, if by a fair vote, their inhabitants shall decide, as we believe they would decide, in favor of an independent Government.

III. A Union with the British North American Provinces.

IV. The establishment of two Tropical Confederacies—the first to be organized by a union of the West India Islands; the second, by the colonization of Central America by the whites of the North, and the blacks of the country.

V. The promotion of the material unity of the North, by an enlightened and continental system of internal improvement.

VI. The destruction of political corruption by the withdrawal of the other than protectoral powers of the Federal Government; by the establishment of absolute free trade, and the substitution of direct taxation; and by the abolition of all manner of exclusive privileges, by which, under the fallacious hope of relieving labor, a monied aristocracy is rising in America, threatening the purity of its democracy, and extinguishing the aspirations to which free institutions give birth.

—As a preliminary series of measures aiming at these results, THE PINE AND PALM will advocate—

The building up of Hayti, by an enlightened and organized emigration, into the rank of a great American Power. We hold this measure to be now essential for the dignity of the African race and its descendants wherever they exist. The foundation of respect is power. As long as the negro is everywhere a subordinate, he will nowhere be treated as the equal of races which are "lords of human kind." Right or wrong, this is the fact; and practical minds must act in view of it. What, then, is to be done? We must create a great Negro Nation. Where? Hayti alone affords us a foundation near enough to influence Slavery and its brood of prejudices here, broad enough to establish a nationality of the necessary importance and durability there.

Let us not be misunderstood. We do not believe in a distinctive Nationality, founded on the preservation of any race, as a finality. We believe in Humanity, not in Black men or White men; for the fusion of the human races is the destiny of the future. We stand by man as man; not by the Saxon because we are Saxon; nor by the Negro because we are an Abolitionist. What we assert, as our belief, is this only—that, at this stage of the world's progress, the fact of a powerful Negro Nation is a lesson imperatively needed in order that the African race, wherever it exists, may be respected as the natural equal of other families of man. We do not believe that the inculcation of the doctrine of fraternity alone will accomplish this result; for without a physical basis, this class of truths require centuries for their universal acceptance.

The rapid physical development of our tropical regions, (which includes the West Indies and Central America) is necessary for another reason: because there alone can American free labor be brought into competition with the slave system of our Southern States. As long as the Cotton States supply England, Old and New, with their great manufacturing staples, just so long will they hold a mortgage on the votes, the pulpits, the presses and the consciences of Englishmen and Yankees. Thus the shadow of the whipping post of Charleston is often seen in the streets of London—oftener still in the factories of Manchester and the counting rooms of Liverpool. In our North, alas! it forms everywhere the sable cloud which obscures from our souls the rays of the sun of fraternal truth.

The recognition of the Confederate States might partly, but it would never wholly, drive this cloud away. We must create other Southern Confederacies to save us from the cotton-growing and conscience-eating conspiracy of our bottomless-Gulf States. Let us colonize the fair West India Islands and the rich regions of Central America, and make Cotton, not a tyrannical King, but a democratic Priest; let us call up, from their exhaustless fertility, cotton enough to clothe all the world in the robes of freedom, and sugar enough to sweeten the other products of the earth, without clarifying it in the blood of the Negro, or drying it with the sighs of the broken-hearted bond-mother.

This policy, of course, involves the expulsion of the Spaniards from America. They have long enough corrupted and blood-be-smeared our soil—sacred soil set apart by the Divine Father for Democracy and Fraternity. At any cost of blood and treasure, this pitiless people should be banished.

—To carry out this programme, we elect Fraternity as our Representative Idea. Henceforth, as equals, in harmonious union, the white and black races must work together, remembering their origin only to provoke emulation in effort, and in willing self-abnegation.

Yet we will not forget that, while the creation of a great Negro Commonwealth in the Antilles is necessary for the elevation of the African race here, and while the formation, also, of free tropical Confederacies is indispensable for the arraying of the physical forces of freedom against physical slavery, there is a higher possibility for humanity still—to which the world is tending, which America must inaugurate—THE COSMOPOLITAN GOVERNMENT OF THE FUTURE, which, superceding Nationalities and rendering war unnecessary, shall establish and secure forever, the "reign of peace on earth and good will to men."

—Our policy, therefore, is Continental in its scope—it embraces both the North and the South—the Arctic regions and the Torrid Zone—the land of THE PINE AND PALM.

JAMES REDPATH