The American Union Speaker Part 54

Citizens of Carlyle, I have endeavored to present to your view a faithful picture of the religion and politics, the objects and the aims, of the rebel confederate States of America; of those States that at this moment, through their commissioned emissaries on this side the Atlantic, are seeking admission into the Commonwealth of Christian nations! One of these accredited representatives is, while I am speaking, upon our sh.o.r.es; and on the behalf of the object of these men some of our leading journals are daily writing laborious articles; for them our shipbuilders are constructing warlike vessels, not to meet an equal foe in fair fight, but to plunder and destroy defenseless merchantmen, engaged in the lawful and laudable trade of carrying the legitimate products of one country to the markets of another; for these men our capitalists are raising money, that, if possible, they may render successful a rebel slaveholders' revolt--a revolt which for wickedness and infamy has no parallel save in the impious rebellion of Lucifer and his compeers.

Yonder, across the wide waste of waters, four millions of helpless slaves--the victims of the cruelty and l.u.s.t of Southern men-stealers--raise their fettered hands and imploringly inquire what part you will take in the conflict which involves their fate and that of their posterity; whether you will give aid and comfort to their oppressors, or whether you will send them words of sympathy and hope, and give encouragement and support to the friends of freedom in the North, who are n.o.bly sacrificing property and life for their redemption. What answer will you return to this appeal? What think you is the duty of England in this life-or-death contest between the North and the South? Of England, whose heart was with the cause of the heroic black population of Hayti, when, under the leadership of the immortal Toussaint l'Ouverture, they were resisting unto blood, in the cause of liberty, the mercenary hordes of Napoleon? Of England who, with disinterested ardor, fought the battle of the Greeks against the Turks? Of England, who has so often raised her voice on behalf of bleeding, crusaded, denationalized Poland? Who has welcomed in her cities, and cherished in her homes, the ill.u.s.trious patriot Louis Kossuth? Whose best wishes and earnest prayers have ever attended the efforts in the cause of freedom of Mazzini and Garibaldi?

In what do the struggles in which England has heretofore sympathized, differ from that which is now convulsing America? Is it not a contest between a vile slaveholding oligarchy on the one hand, and the upholders of free democratic inst.i.tutions and the friends of emanc.i.p.ation on the other?

The only difference, if difference there be, is this, that the conspirators against human rights in the South are fighting for objects immeasurably more base and more deeply stained with guilt than any which were ever sought by the crowned kings and despots of the Old World. The confederate banditti of the South are fighting for what their Vice-president avows is a new idea--a government based upon the perpetual enslavement of the laboring cla.s.s. In a conflict between liberty and slavery between a free democratic government and the foulest despotism which the enemies of mankind ever conspired together to establish, where should England stand? On the side of two hundred and fifty thousand traitors and tyrants, or on the side of four millions of slaves? England with her past history and glorious traditions, England that extinguished the accursed slave trade, and abolished colonial slavery, whose cathedrals and council chamfers and market places are adorned with the statues of Howard and Wilberforce, and Clarkson, and Buxton, and Sturge?

It may be granted that, when the Government of the North first armed for the defence of the national life, it did not at once decree the universal abolition of slavery; and I have given, as I think, good and sufficient reasons why it did not and could not. The action of the President at the beginning was restricted to const.i.tutional objects. Those objects were--the enforcement of the laws; the suppression of a local insurrection; the reintegration of the disputed territory; the protection of the Capitol and its archives from the spoliating hands of traitors. But the seat of government saved; the President seated firmly in the chair; the Congress duly a.s.sembled; and the machinery of the Const.i.tution set to work; and then commenced, and were carried out, a series of measures such as were never before accomplished in the same s.p.a.ce of time by any government in the world. First we saw the National District purged from the pollution and shame of slavery; then, the prohibition of slavery forever in the vast Territories of the Northwest; then, the enforcement of the laws against the slave trade, and the execution of Gordon the slave trader; then, an offer of compensation to such slave States as would adopt measures of emanc.i.p.ation; then, the recognition of the independence of the black republics of Hayti and Liberia; and finally, a proclamation of freedom to all the slaves within the rebel States.

It was said of Napoleon that he would go down to posterity with the code which bears his name, in his hand. It may be said of Abraham Lincoln, that he will descend to future time, holding in his hand the Great Charter of the Negro's rights his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation of January, 1863. With such a President, at the head of such a people, engaged in such a cause, need I answer the questions I have so often put to you, on which side should England be found in the great American struggle?

G. Thompson.

CCXCIX.

PATRIOTISM.

Right and wrong, justice and crime, exist independently of our country. A public wrong is not a private right for any citizen. The citizen is a man bound to know and do the right, and the nation is but an aggregation of citizens. If a man should shout, in the delirium of his dinner, "My country, by whatever means extended and bounded: my country, right or wrong;" he merely repeats the words of the thief who steals in the streets or of the trader who swears falsely at the Custom-House, both of them chuckling "My fortune, however acquired." Thus, gentlemen, we see that a man's country is not a certain area of land--of mountains, rivers, and woods--but it is principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely a.s.sociated with the soil and symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.

So, with pa.s.sionate heroism, of which tradition is never weary of tenderly telling, Arnold Von Winkelreid gathers into his bosom the sheaf of foreign spears, that his death may give life to his country. So Nathan Hale, disdaining no service that his country demands, perishes untimely, with no other friend than G.o.d and the satisfied sense of duty. So George Washington, at once comprehending the scope of the destiny to which his country was devoted, with one hand put aside the crown, and with the other sets his slaves free. So, through all history from the beginning, a n.o.ble army of martyrs has fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history to the end, as long as men believe in G.o.d, that army must still march and fight and fall--recruited only from the flower of mankind--cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in their confidence in their cause.

G. W. Curtis.

CCC.

POLITICAL MORALITY.

Have we no interest that the controlling force in this country shall be a moral force?--that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our inst.i.tutions is our pride.

But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. It is shameful that it is universally conceded that the best men, the men of intelligence and probity, generally avoid politics, and that the word itself has come to mean something not to be touched without defilement.

Consequently, what good men will not touch, bad men will. It is understood that bribery carries the election; and the Presidency is the result of an adroit process of financial engineering. I have myself been shown a handful of bank-notes publicly displayed in the ante-room of a Legislature, and sagaciously told: "That is the logic for legislators." Men think they cannot afford to go to Congress, and send other men to do their duties to the State--forgetting that we can have nothing without paying for it, and that if we hope to enjoy the best government in the world we must give time and labor, each one of us, and not suppose that the country will govern itself nor bad men govern it well.

Remember that the greatness of our country is not in its achievement, but in its promise--a promise which cannot be fulfilled without that sovereign moral sense--without a sensitive national conscience. If it were a question of the mere daily pleasure of living, the gratification of taste, opportunity of access to the great intellectual and aesthetic results of human genius, and whatever embellishes human life, no man could hesitate for a moment between the fulness of foreign lands in these respects, and the conspicuous poverty of our own. What have we done? We have subdued and settled a vast domain. We have made every inland river turn a mill, and wherever, on the dim rim of the globe, there is a harbor, we have lighted it with an American sail. We have bound the Atlantic to the Mississippi, so that we drift from the sea to the prairie upon a cloud of vapor; and we are stretching one hand across the continent to fulfil the hope of Columbus in a shorter way to Cathay, and with the other we are grasping under the sea to clasp there the hand of the old continent, that so the throbbing of the ocean may not toss us further apart, but be as the beating of one common pulse of the world.

Yet these are the results common to all national enterprise, and different with us only in degree, not in kind. These are but the tools with which to shape a destiny. Commercial prosperity is only a curse, if it be not subservient to moral and intellectual progress; and our prosperity will conquer us, if we do not conquer our prosperity.

G. W. Curtis.

CCCI.

IDEAS THE LIFE OF A PEOPLE.

The leaders of our Revolution were men of whom the simple truth is the ugliest praise. Of every condition in life, they were singularly sagacious, sober and thoughtful. Lord Chatham spoke only the truth when he said to Franklin, of the men who composed the first colonial Congress: "The Congress is the most honorable a.s.sembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times." Given to grave reflection, they were neither dreamers nor missionaries, and they were much too earnest to be rhetoricians. It is a curious fact, that they were generally men of so calm a temper that they lived to extreme age. With the exception of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, they were most of them profound scholars, and studied the history of mankind that they might know men. They were so familiar with the lives and thoughts of the wisest and best minds of the past that a cla.s.sic aroma hangs about their writings and their speech; and they were profoundly convinced of what statesmen always know, and the adroitest mere politicians never perceive--that ideas are the life of a people--that the conscience, not the pocket, is the real citadel of a nation, and that when you have debauched and demoralized that conscience by teaching that there are no natural rights, and that therefore there is no moral right or wrong in political action, you have poisoned the wells and rotted the crops in the ground. The three greatest living statesmen of England knew this also--Edmund Burke knew it, and Charles James Fox, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. But they did not speak for the King or parliament, or the English nation. Lord Gower spoke for them when he said in Parliament: "Let the Americans talk about their natural and divine rights! their rights as men and citizens! their rights from G.o.d and nature! I am for enforcing these measures!" My lord was contemptuous, and the King hired the Hessians, but the truth remained true. The Fathers saw the scarlet soldiers swarming over the sea, but more steadily they saw that national progress had been secure only in the degree that the political system had conformed to natural Justice. They knew the coming wreck of property and trade, but they knew more surely that Rome was never so rich as when she was dying, and, on the other hand, the Netherlands, never so powerful as when they were poorest. Farther away, they read the names of a.s.syria, Greece, Egypt. They had art, opulence, splendor. Corn enough grew in the valley of the Nile. The Syrian sword was as sharp as any. They were merchant princes, and the clouds in the sky were rivalled by their sails upon the sea. They were soldiers, and their frown frightened the world.

"Soul, take thine ease." those Empires said, languid with excess of luxury and life. Yes: but you remember the King who had built his grandest palace, and was to occupy it upon the morrow, but when the morrow came the palace was a pile of ruins. "Woe is me!" cried the King, "who is guilty of this crime?" "There is no crime," replied the sage at his side; "but the mortar was made of sand and water only, and the builders forgot to put in the lime." So fell the old empires, because the governors forgot to put justice into their governments.

G. W. Curtis.

CCCII.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

These things our fathers saw and pondered. I do not mean that when the Writs of a.s.sistance were issued, or the Stamp Act proposed, or Port Bill pa.s.sed, they did not oppose them upon technical and legal grounds.

Undoubtedly they did. But their character, and habits, and studies, were such that, as the tyranny encroached, they rose naturally into the sphere of fundamental truths, as into a purer and native air. In great crises, men always revert to first principles, as in sailing out of sight of land the mariner consults celestial laws. So the Fathers began at the beginning, with G.o.d and human nature, and derived their government from truths which they disdained to prove, a.s.serting them to be self-evident. Thus the Revolution was not the struggle of a cla.s.s only, but of a people. It was not merely the rebellion of subjects whose pockets were threatened, it was the protest of men whose instincts had been outraged. As Mr. Webster was fond of saying, it was fought on a preamble. A two-penny tax on tea or paper was not the cause, it was only the occasion, of the Revolution. The spirit which fought the desperate and disastrous battle on Long Island yonder was not a spirit which could be quieted by the promise of sugar gratis. The chance of success was slight--the penalty of failure was sure.

But they believed in G.o.d, they kissed wife and child, left them in His hand, and kept their powder dry. Then to Valley Forge, the valley of the shadow of death--with feet bleeding upon the sharp ground--with hunger, thirst, and cold d.o.g.g.i.ng their steps--with ghastly death waiting for them in the snow, they bore that faith in ideas which brought their fathers over a pitiless sea to a pitiless sh.o.r.e.

Ideas were their food; ideas were their coats and camp-fires. They knew that their ranks were thin and raw, and the enemy trained and many. But they knew, also, that the only difficulty with the proverb that G.o.d fights upon the side of the strongest battalions is that it is not true. If you load muskets with bullets only, the result is simply a question of numbers.

But one gun loaded with an idea is more fatal than the muskets of a whole regiment. A bullet kills a tyrant, but an idea kills tyranny, What chance have a thousand men fighting for a sixpence a day against a hundred fighting for life and liberty, for home and native land? In such hands, the weapons themselves feel and think. And so the family firelocks and rusty swords, the horse-pistol and old scythes of our fathers thought terribly at Lexington and Monmouth, at Saratoga and Eutaw Springs. The old Continental muskets thought out the whole Revolution. The English and Hessian arms were better and brighter than ours; but they were charged only with saltpetre.

Our guns were loaded and rammed home with ideas.

G. W. Curtis.

CCCIII.

EMANc.i.p.aTION THE WAR POLICY OF THE PRESIDENT.

At length the skies are cleared, and the oracles have spoken. The ultimate achievement is already determined in the irreversible purpose of the loyal States; and that purpose is, a restored republic from the Gulf to the Lakes,--and a Republic of Freemen.

When the war first broke out, the free States became at once united for the safety of the capital and for vengeance upon those who had dishonored the common flag. Time pa.s.sed on; the capital was supposed to be secure; changing fortune visited our arms; the people of the North became divided; some insisted upon an instant order of emanc.i.p.ation; others insisted upon no emanc.i.p.ation at all. One there was, as it has seemed to me, who abided the time of Providence and possessed his soul in patience; he was the President. He waited, counselled, struggled for a restored Union, before which and in comparison with which all other things should be subordinated.

Within seventeen months after the first gun--so short are the historic stages in our time--he issued his proclamation of freedom with three months of notice. It saved the heart of the North and of a portion of Europe.

In the mean time the loyal arms had rescued several States from the clutch of revolt, and the inquiry everywhere arose, when, and how, and in what manner, the policy of emanc.i.p.ation should be applied. Then again it was, in the fulness of time, that the second Presidential proclamation came forth for the restoration of the States upon the basis of the equality of all men before G.o.d. Upon that he will stand, and upon that we shall stand, with no faltering or retracing step, until from the waters of the Gulf to the woods of the North, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific sea, this broad beat of empire shall possess an invincible people with no clanking manacle to fetter the creatures of G.o.d.

Accepting this, then, as the fixed policy of the States which are to subjugate the rebellion, we may felicitate ourselves upon the part we are permitted to bear in human events--that a measure, which in other countries and in more peaceful ages would have required a quarter or a half a century for its accomplishment, has become the announced edict of the loyal people of the United States, within the s.p.a.ce of thirty-four months. The abolishment of the slave trade by the British Government, initiated by Wilberforce, supported by Pitt and Fox, and Burke and Granville, was accomplished only after seventeen years of parliamentary agitation.

When Mr. Fox, in 1806 submitted this, which proved to be the last motion he ever made in Parliament, and lived to witness its success, n.o.bly did he declare: "That if, during the forty years he had sat in Parliament, he had been so fortunate as to accomplish that object, and that only, he should think he had done enough." If Mr. Fox might take to his heart that gratulation over the first sanction extorted from the Legislature of Great Britain for the abolition of the slave trade, may I not reclaim it with redoubled force for the American Magistrate under whose decree four millions of men will burst the bondage of ages, and mount enriched and enn.o.bled to the enfranchis.e.m.e.nts of immortality.

The literature of England is rich with the eloquence of eulogium upon the statesman whose star was in the ascendant when freedom became the policy of the Empire; but I choose to appropriate it to him upon this side of the ocean, who has achieved the highest honor of mortal lot; who has won a triumph which leaves every other triumph of humanity and justice out of sight behind it, and for which, to the end of time, mankind will revere his name and bless his memory.

A. H. Bullock.

CCCIV.

THE DUTY OF THE HOUR.

As to duty, that is clear from what I have already told you. We owe allegiance to the Government of the Union, and its history to the breaking out of the present foul rebellion, the memory of the men who gave it to us, the untold blessings it has conferred upon us, the support it has given to const.i.tutional liberty everywhere, the grat.i.tude we owe to Washington, whom Providence, it has been said, left childless, that his country might call him father, will all unite in making that allegiance a pleasure as well as a duty. To be false to such a Government, to palter even with the treason that seeks its downfall, to a.s.sociate with the wicked men or the madmen who are in arms against it, would be as vile a dishonor and as base a crime as fallen man ever perpetrated.

Peace, in such a crisis--the cry of our opponents--how is it to be attained? How, upon their plan, but by a gross violation of our clearest obligations--or total disregard of an allegiance to which we are bound, not only by the Const.i.tution, but by the pledge our ancestors gave for us? The force the Government is raising is not, as is falsely alleged by the conspirators, to subjugate States or citizens. It is but to vindicate the Const.i.tution and the laws, and maintain the existence of the government. It is but to suppress the "insurrection," force the citizen to return to his duty, and restore him to the unequalled benefits of the Union. And when this is done, as done it will be if there is justice in Heaven, the authors of the present calamity will be consigned to the execrations of the civilized world, and punished, perhaps, if that is possible, more severely by the people whom, by arts and subterfuges, they have so deluded and deceived.

R. Johnson.

CCCV.

THE FIRST GUN FIRED AT SUMTER.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient pa.s.sion, the torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the Southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

O. W. Holmes.