Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society Part 2

It is a perpetual education of the people, and a safeguard to the State. There is the utmost lat.i.tude of speech and discussion among our citizens. The attempt to abridge it would be so infatuated that the most dignified Court that ever sat in Boston would become an object of universal merriment and ridicule, that should presume to arrest and cause to be indicted any man for free speaking in old Faneuil Hall.

Merriment, I say, for who would not laugh at a philosopher who would set snares for the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and regulate their indiscreet shining. Darkness and silence are excellent for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant to a fool.

But should any power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society.

There would be no time for a revolution--there would be an _eruption_, and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward athwart the sky, like stones and b.a.l.l.s of flame driven from the vomiting crater of a furious volcano! No. This is a right like the right of breathing. This is a liberty that broods upon us like the atmosphere. The grand American doctrine that men may speak what they think, and may print what they speak--that all public measures shall have free public discussion--cannot be shaken; and any party must be intensely American that can afford to destroy the very foundation of American principle that public questions shall be publicly discussed, and public procedure be publicly agreed upon. Right always gains in the light, and Wrong in the dark. An owl can whip an eagle in the night!

The South, holding a heathen theory of man--an aristocratic theory of society,--is bound to hold, and does hold, a radically opposite practice in respect to rights of speech and freedom of the press.

There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.

Men may there talk of a thousand things--of all religious doctrines, of literature, of art, of public political measures--but no man has liberty to talk as he pleases about the structure of southern society, and apply to the real facts of southern life and southern internal questions that searching investigation and public exposure which, in the North, brings every possible question to the bar of public opinion, and makes society boil like a pot!

Yes, you may speak of Slavery, if you will defend it; you may preach about it, if you shingle its roof with Scripture texts; but you may not talk, nor preach, nor print abolition doctrines, though you believe them with the intensity of inspiration!

The reason given is, that it will stir up insurrection. And so it will. It is said that free speech is inflammatory. So it is. That it would bring every man's life in the South into jeopardy; that, in self-defence, they most limit and regulate the expression of opinion.

But what is that theory of Government, and what is the state of society under it, in which free speech and free discussion are dangerous? It is the boast of the North, not alone that speech and discussion are free, but that we have a society constructed in every part so rarely, wisely, and justly, that they can _endure_ free speech; no file can part, but only polish. We turn out any law, and say, _Discuss_ it! that it may be the stronger! We challenge scrutiny for our industry, for our commerce, for our social customs, for our munic.i.p.al affairs, for our State questions, for all that we believe, and all that we do, and everything that we build. We are not in haste to be born in respect to any feature of life. We say--probe it, question it, put fire to it. We ask the _experience of the past_ to sit and try it. We ask the ripest _wisdom of the present_ to test and a.n.a.lyze it. We ask enemies to plead all they know against it. We challenge the whole world of ideas, and the great deep of human interests to come up upon anything that belongs, or is _to_ belong, to public affairs. And then, when a truth, a policy, or a procedure comes to birth, from out of the womb of such discussion, we know that it will stand. And when our whole public interests are rounded out and built up, we are glad to see men going around and about, marking well our towers, and counting our bulwarks. May it do them good to see such architecture and engineering! And it is just this difference that distinguishes the North and the South. We have inst.i.tutions that will stand public and private discussion--they have not. We will not _have_ a law, or custom, or economy, which cannot be defended against the freest inquiry. Such a rule would cut them level as a mowed meadow!

They live in a crater, forever dreading the signs of activity. They live in a powder magazine. No wonder they fear light and fire. It is the plea of Wrong since the world began. Discussion would unseat the Czar; a free press would dethrone the ign.o.ble Napoleon; free speech would revolutionize Rome. Freedom of thought and freedom of expression! they are mighty champions, that go with unsheathed swords the world over, to redress the weak, to right the wronged, to pull down evil and build up good. And a State that will be damaged by free speech ought to be damaged. A King that cannot keep his seat before free speech ought to be unseated. An order or an inst.i.tution that dreads freedom of the press has _reason_ to dread it. If the South would be revolutionized by free discussion, how intensely does that fact show her dying need of revolution! She is a dungeon, full of damps and death-air. She needs light and ventilation. And the only objection is, that if there were light and air let in, it would no longer be a dungeon.

IV. There is a noticeable contrast between Northern and Southern ideas of Religion.

We believe G.o.d's revealed word to contain the influence appointed for the regeneration and full development of every human being, and that it is to be employed as G.o.d's universal stimulant to the human soul, as air and light are the universal stimulants of vegetation.

We preach it to arouse the whole soul; we preach it to fire the intellect, and give it wings by which to compa.s.s knowledge; we preach it to touch every feeling with refinement, to soften rudeness and enrich affections; we build the family with it; we sanctify love, and purge out l.u.s.t; we polish every relation of life; we inspire a cheerful industry and whet the edge of enterprise, and then limit them by the bonds of justice and by the moderation of a faith which looks into the future and the eternal. We teach each man that he is a child of G.o.d; that he is personally one for whom the Savior died; we teach him that he is known and spoken of in heaven, his name called; that angels are sent out upon his path to guard and to educate him; we swell within him to the uttermost every aspiration, catching the first flame of youth and feeding it, until the whole heart glows like an altar, and the soul is a temple bright within, and sweet, by the incense-smoke and aspiring flame of perpetual offerings and divine sacrifices. We have never done with him. We lead him from the cradle to boyhood; we take him then into manhood, and guide him through all its pa.s.ses; we console him in age, and then stand, as he dies, to prophesy the coming heaven, until the fading eye flashes again, and the unhearing ear is full again; for from the other side ministers of grace are coming, and he beholds them, and sounds on earth and sights are not so much lost as swallowed up in the glory and the melody of the heavenly joy!

Now tell me whether there is any preaching of the Gospel to the slave, or whether there can be, and he yet remain a slave? We preach the Gospel to arouse men, they to subdue them; we to awaken, they to soothe; we to inspire self-reliance, they submission; we to drive them forward in growth, they to repress and prune down growth; we to convert them into men, they to make them content to be beasts of burden!

Is this _all_ that the Gospel has? When credulous ministers a.s.sure us that slaves have the means of grace, do they mean that they have such teaching as _we_ have? Or that there is any such _ideal_ in preaching?

The power of religion with us is employed to set men on their feet; to make them fertile, self-sustaining, n.o.ble, virtuous, strong, and to build up society of men, each one of whom is large, strong, capacious of room, and filled with versatile powers.

Religion with them does no such thing. It doth the reverse.

With them it is Herod casting men into prison. With us it is the angel, appearing to lead them out of prison and set them free! In short religion with us is emanc.i.p.ation and liberty; with them it is bondage and contentment.

It is very plain that while nominally republican inst.i.tutions exist in both the North and South, they are animated by a very different spirit, and used for a different purpose. In the North, they aim at the welfare of the whole people; in the South they are the instruments by which a few control the many. In the North, they tend toward Democracy; in the South, toward Oligarchy.

It is equally plain that while there may be a union between Northern and Southern States, it is external, or commercial, and not internal and vital, springing from common ideas, common ends, and common sympathies. It is a union of merchants and politicians and not of the people.

Had these opposite and discordant systems been left separate to work out each its own results, there would have been but little danger of collision or contest.

But they are politically united. They come together into one Congress.

There these antagonistic principles, which creep with subtle influence through the very veins of their respective States, break out into open collision upon every question of national policy. And, since the world began, a republican spirit is unfit to secure power. It degenerates it in the many. But an aristocratic spirit always has apt.i.tude and impulse toward power. It seeks and grasps it as naturally as a hungry lion prowls and grasps its prey.

For fifty years the imperious spirit of the South has sought and gained power. It would have been of but little consequence were that power still republican. The seat of empire may be indifferently on the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay or the Ohio, on the Lakes or on the Gulf; if it be the same empire, acting in good faith for the same democratic ends.

But in the South the growth of power has been accompanied by a marked revolution in political faith, until now the theory of Mr. Calhoun, once scouted, is becoming the popular belief. And that theory differs in nothing from outright European Aristocracy, save in the forms and instruments by which it works.

The struggle, then, between the North and the South is not one of sections, and of parties, but of _Principles_--of principles lying at the foundations of governments--of principles that cannot coalesce, nor compromise; that must hate each other, and contend, until the one shall drive out the other.

Oh! how little do men dream of the things that are transpiring about them! In Luther's days, how little they knew the magnitude of the results pending that controversy of fractious monk and haughty pope!

How little did the frivolous courtier know the vastness of that struggle in which Hampden, Milton and Cromwell acted! We are in just such another era. Dates will begin from the period in which we live!

Do not think that all the danger lies in that bolted cloud which flashes in the Southern horizon. There is decay, and change, here in the North. Old New-England, that suckled American liberty, is now suckling wolves to devour it.

What shall we think when a President of old Dartmouth College goes over to Slavery, and publishes to the world his religious conviction of the rightfulness of it, as a part of G.o.d's disciplinary government of the world--wholesome to man, as a punishment of sins which he never committed, and to liquidate the long arrearages of Ham's everlasting debt! and avowing that, under favorable circ.u.mstances, he would buy and own slaves! A Southern volcano in New-Hampshire, pouring forth the lava of despotism in that incorrupt, and n.o.ble old fortress of liberty! What a College to educate our future legislators!

What are we to think, when old Ma.s.sachusetts, the mother of the Revolution, every league of whose soil swells with the tomb of some heroic patriot, shall make pilgrimages through the South, and, after surveying the lot of slaves under a system that turns them out of manhood, p.r.o.nounces them chattles, denies them marriage, makes their education a penal and penitentiary offence, makes no provision for their religious culture, leaving it to the stealth of good men, or the interest of those who regard religion as a currycomb, useful in making sleek and nimble beasts--a system which strikes through the fundamental instincts of humanity, and wounds nature in the core of the human heart, by taking from parents all right in their children, and leaving the family, like a bale of goods, to be unpacked, and parceled out and sold in pieces, without any other protection than the general good nature of easy citizens; what shall be thought of the condition of the public mind in Boston, when one of her most revered, and personally, deservedly beloved pastors, has come up so profoundly ignorant of what we thought every child knew, that he comes home from this pilgrimage, to teach old New-England to check her repugnance to Slavery, to dry up her tears of sympathy, and to take comfort in the a.s.surance that Slavery, on the whole, is as good or better for three millions of laboring men as liberty. He has inst.i.tuted a formal comparison between the state of society and the condition of a laboring population in a slave system and those in a free State, and left the impression on every page that Liberty works no better results than servitude, and that it has mischiefs and inconveniences which Slavery altogether avoids.

Read that book in Faneuil Hall, and a thousand aroused and indignant ghosts would come flocking there, as if they heard the old roll-call of Bunker Hill. Yea, read those doctrines on Bunker Hill--and would it flame or quake? No. It would stand in silent majesty, pointing its granite finger up to Heaven and to G.o.d--an everlasting witness against all Slavery, and all its abettors or defenders.

At this moment, the former parties that have stood in counterpoise have fallen to pieces. And we are on the eve, and in the very act, of reconstructing our parties. One movement there is that calls itself American. Oh, that it were or or would be! Never was an opening so auspicious for a true American party that, embracing the _principles_ of American inst.i.tutions, should enter our Temple of Liberty and drive out thence not merely the interloping Gentiles, but the money-changers, and those, also, who sell oxen, and cattle and slaves therein.

It is not the question whether a Northern party should be a party of philanthropy, or of propagandism, or of abolition. It is simply a question whether, for fear of these things, they will ignore and rub out of their creed every principle of human rights!

I am not afraid of foreigners among us. Nevertheless, our politicians have so abused us through them, that I am glad that a movement is on foot to regulate the conduct of new-comers among us, and oblige them to pa.s.s through a longer probation before they become citizens. In so far as I understand the practical measures proposed and set forth in the Message of the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, I approve them.

But I ask you, fellow-citizens, whether the simple accident of birth is a basis broad enough for a permanent National party? Is it a _principle_, even? It is a mere fact.

Ought we not to look a little at what a man is _after_ he is born, as well as at the place where? Especially, when we remember that Arnold was born in Connecticut and La Fayette in France.

If then, a party is American, ought it not to be because it represents those principles which are fundamental to American Inst.i.tutions and to American policy? principles which stand in contrast with European Inst.i.tutions and policy!

Which of these two theories is the American? The North has one theory, the South another; which of them is to be called _the American_ idea?

Which is American--Northern ideas or Southern ideas? That which declares all men free &c., or that which declares the superior races free, and the inferior, Slaves?

That which declares the right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--or that which declares the right of strength and intelligence to subordinate weakness and ignorance?

That which ordains popular education, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, public discussion--or that which makes these a prerogative, yielded to a cla.s.s but denied to ma.s.ses?

That which organizes Society as a Democracy and Government, and Republic--or that which organizes Society as an Aristocracy, and Government as an Oligarchy?

Which shall it be--that of organized New England townships, schools, and churches--that resisted taxation without representation--that covered Boston harbor with tea, as if all China had shook down her leaves there--which spake from Faneuil Hall, and echoed from Bunker Hill; or that policy which landed slaves on the Chesapeake--that has changed Old Virginia from a land of heroes into a breeding-ground of slaves--that has broken down boundaries, and carried war over our lines, not for liberty, but for more territory for slaves to work, that the owners might multiply, and the Aristocracy of America stand on the sh.o.r.es of two oceans, an unbroken bound all between?

If _a National_ American party is ever formed, by leaving out the whole question of Human Rights, it will be what a man would be--his soul left out!

An American National party--Liberty left out!

An American party--Human Rights left out!

Gentlemen, such a party will stink with dissolution before you can get it finished. No Masonry can make it solid--no art can secure it. No anchor that was ever forged in infernal stythy can go deep enough into political mud to hold it!

If you rear up an empty name; if you take that revered name American, all the world over radiant and revered, as the symbol of human rights and human happiness--if you sequester and stuff that name with the effete doctrines of despotism, do you believe you can supplicate from any G.o.ds the boon of immortality for such an unbaptized monster? No.

It may live to ravage our heritage for a few days, but there _is_ a spirit of liberty that lives among us, and that shall live. And aroused by that spirit, there shall spring up the yet unaroused hosts of men that have not bowed the knee to Baal--and we will war it to the knife, and knife to the hilt.

For, IT SHALL be; America _shall be free_!

We will take that for our life's enterprise. Dying, we will leave it a legacy to our children, and they shall will it to theirs, until the work is done, our fathers' prayers are answered, and this whole land stands clothed and in its right mind--a symbol of what the earthly fruits of the Gospel are!

If a National party is now to be formed, what shall it be, and what shall its office be?