The American Union Speaker Part 52

What is the contest in Virginia now? Between the men who want to make their slaves mechanics, for the increased wages it will secure, and the men who oppose, for fear of the influence it will have on the general security of slave property and white throats. Just that dispute will go on, wherever the Union is dissolved. Slavery comes to an end by the laws of trade. Hang up your Sharpe's rifle, my valorous friend! The slave does not ask the help of your musket. He only says, like old Diogenes to Alexander, "Stand out of my light!" Just take your awkward proportions, you Yankee Democrat and Republican, out of the light and heat of G.o.d's laws of political economy, and they will melt the slaves' chains away!

W. Phillips.

CCLx.x.xIII.

THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.

No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea,--wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a revolution. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. The child feels; he grows into a man, and thinks; another, perhaps, speaks, and the world acts out the thought. And this is the history of modern society. Men undervalue the Anti-slavery movement, because they imagine you can always put your finger on some ill.u.s.trious moment in history, and say, here commenced the great change which has come over the nation. Not so. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of a mighty republic, fills the Gulf, and divides a continent.

I remember a story of Napoleon which ill.u.s.trates my meaning. We are apt to trace his control of France to some noted victory, to the time when he camped in the Tuileries, or when he dissolved the a.s.sembly by the stamp of his foot. He reigned in fact when his hand was first felt on the helm of the vessel of state, and that was far back of the time when he had conquered in Italy, or his name had been echoed over two continents. It was on the day when five hundred irresolute men were met in that a.s.sembly which called itself, and pretended to be, the government of France. They heard that the mob of Paris was coming the next morning, thirty thousand strong, to turn them, as was usual in those days, out of doors. And where did this seemingly great power go for its support and refuge? They sent Tallien to seek out a boy-lieutenant,--the shadow of an officer,--so thin and pallid that, when he was placed on the stand before them, the President of the a.s.sembly, fearful, if the fate of France rested on the shrunken form, the ashy cheek before him, that all hope was gone, asked, "Young man, can you protect the a.s.sembly?" And the stern lips of the Corsican boy parted only to reply, "I always do what I undertake!" Then and there Napoleon ascended his throne; and the next day, from the steps of St. Roche, thundered forth the cannon which taught the mob of Paris, for the first time, that it had a master. That was the commencement of the Empire. So the Anti-slavery movement commenced unheeded in that "obscure hole" which Mayor Otis could not find, occupied by a printer and a black boy.

W. Phillips.

CCLx.x.xIV.

"TOUCH NOT SLAVERY"

What! you the descendants of those men of iron who preferred a life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the end less prairie with human habitations; you, this race of bold reformers who blended together the most incongruous elements of birth and creed, who built up a government which you called a model republic, and undertook to show mankind how to be free; you, the mighty nation of the West, that presumes to defy the world in arms, and to subject a hemisphere to its sovereign dictation; you, who boast of recoiling from no enterprise ever so great, and no problem ever so fearful--the spectral monster of Slavery stares you in the face, and now your blood runs cold, and all your courage fails you? For half a century it has disturbed the peace of this Republic; it has arrogated to itself your national domain; it has attempted to establish its absolute rule, and to absorb even your future development; it has disgraced you in the eyes of mankind, and now it endeavors to ruin you if it cannot rule you; it raises its murderous hand against the inst.i.tutions most dear to you; it attempts to draw the power of foreign nations upon your heads; it swallows up the treasures you have earned by long years of labor; it drinks the blood of your sons and the tears of your wives and now, every day it is whispered in your ears, "Whatever Slavery may have done to you, whatever you may suffer, touch it not! No matter how many thousand millions of your wealths it may cost, no matter how much blood you may have to shed in order to disarm its murderous hand, touch it not! No matter how many years of peace and prosperity you may have to sacrifice in order to prolong its existence, touch it not! And if it should cost you your honor, touch it not!"

Listen to this story: On the Lower Potomac, as the papers tell us, a negro comes within our lines, and tells the valiant defenders of the Union that his master conspires with the rebels, and has a quant.i.ty of arms concealed in a swamp; our soldiers go and find the arms; the master reclaims the slave; the slave is given up; the master ties him to his horse, drags him along eleven miles to his house, lashes him to a tree, and, with the a.s.sistance of his overseer, whips him three hours--three mortal hours; then the negro dies. That black man served the Union; Slavery attempts to destroy the Union; the Union surrenders the black man to Slavery, and he is whipped to death--touch it not! Let an imperishable blush of shame cover every cheek in this boasted land of freedom--but be careful not to touch Slavery! Ah, what a dark divinity is this, that we must sacrifice to it our peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac imagination; and yet--have I been unjust in what I have said?

Carl Schurz.

CCLx.x.xV.

OHIO.

Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to the beneficent reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years than he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence but in the emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population as that of all England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon, and Shakespeare, and began its continuous attempts at colonizing America. Each one of her inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his own toil. She possesses wealth that must be computed by thousands of millions; and her frugal, industrious and benevolent people, at once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of their faculties, restless in enterprise, do not squander the acc.u.mulations of their industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for mechanical purposes the unwitting forces of nature; keeping exemplary good faith with their public creditors; building in half a century more.

churches than all England has raised since this continent was discovered; endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries of learning.

Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as the best of fortresses, Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her school-teachers, of whom she pays more than twenty thousand; she provides a library for every school-district; she counts among her citizens more than three hundred thousand men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that number of children registered as students in her public schools. Here the purity of domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity of woman. In the heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of corn, of wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance of 1787, already the young mother of other commonwealths that bid fair to vie with her in beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory, crowned with cities, and challenges the admiration of the world. Hither should come the political skeptic, who, in his despair, is ready to strand the ship of state; for here he may learn how to guide it safely on the waters. Should some modern Telemachus, heir to an island empire, touch these sh.o.r.es, here he may observe the vitality and strength of the principle of popular power; take from the book of experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle, and learn to rebuke ill-advised counsellors who p.r.o.nounce the most momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a failure.

G. Bancroft.

CCLx.x.xVI.

THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH.

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through pa.s.sion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. The question is, What will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly--done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State const.i.tutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us: "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone--have never disturbed them--so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, an any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and const.i.tutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we can not justly object to its nationality--its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension--its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces either of destruction to the government or of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

A. Lincoln.

CCLx.x.xVII.

THE PRETEXT OF REBELLION.

If war must come--if the bayonet must be used to maintain the Const.i.tution--I can say, before G.o.d, my conscience is clear. I have struggled long for a peaceful solution of the difficulty. I have not only tendered those States what was theirs of right, but I have gone to the very extreme off magnanimity, The return we receive is war, armies marched upon our Capital obstructions and danger to our navigation, letters of marque to invite pirates to prey upon our commerce, a concerted movement to blot out the United States of America from the map of the globe. The question is, Are we to be stricken down by those who, when they can no longer govern, threaten to destroy? What cause, what excuse do disunionists give us for breaking up the best government on which the sun of heaven ever shed its rays? They are dissatisfied with the result of a Presidential election. Did they never get beaten before? Are we to resort to the sword when we get defeated at the ballot-box? I understand that the voice of the people expressed in the mode appointed by the Const.i.tution must command the obedience of every citizen. They a.s.sume, on the election of a particular candidate, that their rights are not safe in the Union. What evidence do they present of this? I defy any man to show any act on which it is based.

What act has been omitted or been done? I appeal to these a.s.sembled thousands, that so far as the const.i.tutional rights of the Southern States--I will say the const.i.tutional rights of slaveholders--are concerned, nothing has been done, and nothing omitted, of which they can complain.

There has never been a time, from the day that Washington was inaugurated first President of these United States, when the rights of the Southern States stood firmer under the laws of the land than they do now; there never was a time when they had not as good a cause for disunion as they have to-day. What good cause have they now that has not existed under every administration? If they say the Territorial question--now, for the first time, there is no act of Congress prohibiting slavery anywhere. If it be the non-enforcement of the laws, the only complaints that I have heard have been of the too vigorous and faithful fulfillment of the Fugitive Slave Law. Then what reason have they? The slavery question is a mere excuse. The election of Lincoln is a mere pretext. The present secession movement is the result of an enormous conspiracy formed more than a year since--foraged by leaders in the Southern Confederacy more than twelve months ago. They use the slavery question as a means to aid the accomplishment of their ends. They desired the election of a Northern candidate, by a sectional vote, in order to show that the two sections cannot live together. When the history of the two years from the Lecompton charter down to the Presidential election shall be written, it will be shown that the scheme was deliberately made to break up this Union. They desired a Northern Republican to be elected by a purely Northern vote, and now a.s.sign this fact as a reason why the sections may not longer live together. If the disunion candidate in the late Presidential contest had carried the united South, their scheme was, the Northern candidate successful, to seize the Capital last spring, and, by a united South and divided North, hold it.

That scheme was defeated in the defeat of the disunion candidate in several of the Southern states. The conspiracy is now known. Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or traitors.

S. A. Dougla.s.s.

CCLx.x.xVIII.

NO NEUTRALS; ONLY PATRIOTS OR TRAITORS.

But this is no time for a detail of causes. The conspiracy is now known.

Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or tractors. We cannot close our eyes to the sad and solemn fact that war does exist. The government must be maintained, its enemies overthrown; and the more stupendous our preparations the less the bloodshed, and the shorter the struggle will be. But we must remember certain restraints on our action even in time of war. We are a Christian people, and the war must be prosecuted in a manner recognized by Christian nations. We must not invade const.i.tutional rights. The innocent must not suffer, nor women or children be the victims. Savages must not be let loose. But while I sanction no war on the rights of others, I will implore my countrymen not to lay down their arms until our own rights are recognized. The Const.i.tution and its guarantees are our birth right, and I am ready to enforce that inalienable right to the last extent. We cannot recognize secession. Recognize it once, and you have not only dissolved government, but you have destroyed social order, and upturned the foundations of society You have inaugurated anarchy in its worst form, and will shortly experience all the horrors of the French Revolution.

Then we have a solemn duty,--to maintain the government. The greater our unanimity, the speedier the day of peace. We have prejudices to overcome from a fierce party contest waged a few short months since. Yet these must be allayed. Let us lay aside all criminations and recriminations as to the origin of these difficulties. When we shall have again a country, with the United States flag floating over it, and respected on every inch of American soil, it will then be time enough to ask who and what brought all this upon us. I have said more than I intended to say. It is a sad task to discuss questions so fearful as civil war; but sad as it is, b.l.o.o.d.y and disastrous as I expect the war will be, I express it as my conviction, before G.o.d, that it is the duty of every American citizen to rally round the flag of his country.

S. A. Dougla.s.s.

CCLx.x.xIX.

ON THE ORDINANCE OF SECESSION IN THE GEORGIA CONVENTION.

This step, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that follow will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when your green fields of waving harvests shall be trodden down by the murderous soldiery and the very car of war sweeping over our land; our temples of justice laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us, who but this convention will be held responsible for it? and who but him who shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held to strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and probably cursed and execrated by posterity for all coming time, for the wide and desolating ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now propose to perpetrate?

Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can give that will ever satisfy yourselves in calmer moments,--what reasons you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring upon us?

What reason can you give the nations of the earth to justify it? They will be the calm and deliberate judges in the case, and to what cause, or one overt act can you point, on which to rest the plea of justification? What right has the North a.s.sailed? What interest of the South has been invaded?

What justice has been denied? and what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? can either of you to-day name one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by the government at Washington of which the South has a right to complain? I challenge the answer! While, on the other hand, let me show the facts (and believe me, gentlemen, I am not here the advocate of the North, but am here the firm friend and lover of the South and her inst.i.tutions, and for this reason I speak thus plainly and faithfully for yours, mine, and every other man's interest, the words of truth and soberness,) let me show the facts, I say, of which I wish you to judge, and I will only state facts which are clear and undeniable, and which now stand as records authentic in the history of our country.

When we of the South demanded the slave-trade, or the importation of Africans for the cultivation of our lands, did they not yield the right for twenty years? When we asked a three-fifths representation in Congress for our slaves, was it not granted? When we asked and demanded the return of any fugitive from justice, or the recovery of those persons owing labor or allegiance, was it not incorporated in the const.i.tution? and again ratified and strengthened in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850? Do you reply that in many instances they have violated this compact, and have not been faithful to their engagements? As individuals and local communities they may have done so; but not by the sanction of government; for that has always been true to Southern interests.

Leaving out of the view, for the present, the countless millions of dollars you must expend in a war with the North, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of your sons and brothers slain in battle, and opened up as sacrifices upon the altar of ambition,--and for what, we ask again? It is for the overthrow of the American government, established by our common ancestry cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on the broad principles of Right, Justice, and Humanity? And, as such, I must declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest of statesman and patriots in this and other lands, that it is the best and freest government,--the most equal in its rights,--the most just in its decisions--the most lenient in its measures: and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of men, that the sun in heaven ever shone upon.

Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for more than three quarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety while the elements of peril are round us with peace and tranquility accompanied with unbounded prosperity and rights una.s.sailed--is the height of madness, folly and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote.

A. H. Stephens.

CCXC.

"THE HIRELING LABORERS" OF THE NORTH.

The Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Hammond] exclaims: "The man who lives by daily labor, your whole hireling cla.s.s of manual laborers, are essentially slaves; and they feel galled by their degradation." What a sentiment is this to hear uttered in the councils of this democratic republic! This language of scorn and contempt is addressed to senators who were not nursed by a slave; whose lot it was to toil with their own hands,--to eat bread, earned, not by the sweat of another's brow, but by their own.

Sir, should the Senator and his agitators and lecturers come to Ma.s.sachusetts, on a mission to teach our "hireling cla.s.s of manual laborers," our "slaves," the "tremendous secret of the ballot-box," and to help "combine and lead them," these stigmatized "hirelings" would reply to the Senator and his a.s.sociates: "we are freemen; we are the peers of the gifted and the wealthy; we know 'the tremendous secret of the ballot-box;'

and we mould and fashion these inst.i.tutions that bless and adorn our free Commonwealth! These public schools are ours, for the education of our children; these libraries, with their acc.u.mulated treasures, are ours; these mult.i.tudinous and varied pursuits of life, where intelligence and skill find their reward, are ours. Labor is here honored and respected, and great examples incite us to action.