INTRODUCTION.
Among the stock fallacies which belong to public writers and thinkers,
and which exercise a kind of conventional influence as often as they are
paraded, there is none greater than this,--that History always repeats
herself, because Human Nature never changes. The Tories of all ages and
countries content themselves and alarm their neighbors by an adroit
interpolation of this formula in their speech. They create the alarm
because they are contented and intend to remain so. Successive audiences
yield, as to the circus-jokes of the clown, who hits his traditional
laugh in the same place so often that it is a wonder the place is not
worn through. But people of a finer wit are not so easily surprised. If
they bore a fair numerical proportion to the listeners of _doctrinaires_
and alarmists, the repetition would be eventually resisted, with an
indignation equal to the amount of literary and political damage which
it had effected.
If people mean, when they say that Human Nature is always the same, that
a few primitive impulses appear through the disguise of all ages and
races, which can be modified, but never extinguished, which work and
are worked upon, are capable of doing good or harm according to
circumstances, but are at all events the conditions of life and motion,
it is fortunately true. That is to say, it is very fortunate that men
and women inhabit the earth. Their great, simple features uplift and
keep all landscapes in their places, and prevent life from falling
through into the molten and chaotic forces underneath. These rugged
water-sheds inclose, configure, temper, fertilize, and also perturb,
the great scenes and stretches of history. They hold the moisture, the
metal, the gem, the seeds of alternating forests and the patient routine
of countless harvests. Superficially it is a great way round from
the lichen to the vine, but not so far by way of the centre. The
many-colored and astonishing life conceals a few simple motives.
Certainly it is a grand and lucky thing that there are so many people
grouped along the lines of divine consistency.
Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be
gathered in the palm or reached by digging. If they succeed in making a
cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a
story on its side. They are not disposed to become food for animals,
or to remain unprotected from the climate. They like to have the
opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist
any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer. They propagate
their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage.
When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize,
to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their
primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms
of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and
size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found
together in the rites and constructions of religion. They like to make
the whole tribe or generation conform; and it is dangerous to oppose
this tendency to preserve the shape of society from within and to
protect it against assaults from without. These are motives originally
independent of circumstances, and which made the first circumstances by
coming in contact with the elements of the physical world.
But these circumstances are not always and everywhere as invariable
as the primitive wants which first set them in motion. Enlargement of
knowledge, of political and human relations, of the tenure of the earth,
increases the number and variety of circumstances, and combines them
so unexpectedly that it is a science to discover their laws, and the
conditions of action and reaction between men and things that happen. We
can depend upon Human Nature, but the problem always remains, What shall
be expected of Human Nature under this or that modification of its
external environment? Great laws from without act as well as great
laws from within. If we knew all the laws, we should know what average
consequences to expect. But in the mean time we shall commit the error
of supposing that History does nothing but repeat itself, fretfully
crooning into the "dull ear" of age a twice-told tale, if we do not
allow for the modifications amid which the primitive impulses find
themselves at work.
And besides, there is a difference in individuals; one set of people
alone is too poor to furnish us with an idea of human nature. It is
natural for Themistocles, Pausanias, or Benedict Arnold, under suspicion
or ill-treatment, to desert to the enemy, and propose crushing his
country for a balm to apply to wounded feelings. But General Fremont,
in similar circumstances, will derive comfort from his loyal heart, and
wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with
which to trust him against the foe. These are very simple variations;
they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess.
A self-seeking man will turn villain under the encroachment of other
people's egotism. The sight of too many trophies will convert a friend
into a covert enemy, who, without being treacherous, will nevertheless
betray a great cause by his jealousy of its great supporter. But the
latter will not always become a traitor to suit the expectations of an
envious friendship. And your own judgment of men and prophecy of events,
if based entirely upon selfish calculation, will entirely fail.
Nations differ also, in spite of the similar things that they do in
analogous circumstances. Both Rome and England will not have too
ambitious neighbors. They hate a preponderating power, and find out
some way to get rid of the threat to their national egotism. The Romans
exterminate the Veians and Carthaginians; they want no colonizing or
commercial rivals. If England rules the sea, and uses its advantage to
create markets where it can buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest
rates, we can understand its inexpensive sympathy for the people who can
manufacture little and therefore have to import a great deal, who are
thus the natural, disinterested lovers of free trade. It is very easy to
see why England turns red in the Crimea with the effort to lift up that
bag of rags called Turkey, to set it on the overland route to India; one
decayed nation makes a very good buffer to break the shock of natural
competition in the using up of another. It was the constant policy of
Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to
respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from
the peculator. She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her
own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and
half-effete races. On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives
of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her
best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and
outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they
cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes. Is this difference
merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the
trousers? But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread
into _papilloe_ over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely
blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial
advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived. Should we expect this
from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet
before Copenhagen in 1801, without even the formality of a declaration
of war, on the suspicion that the Dane preferred to sympathize with
France? What moral clamor could have made the selfish exigency of that
act appear more damaging than a coalition of all the fleets of Europe?
Yet plantation fanaticism did not prevent the great act from which we
augured English hatred of a slaveholders' rebellion. Probably the lining
membrane of a pocket may have intermitted accesses of induration:
we must consult circumstances, if we would know what to expect. An
extraordinary vintage or a great fruit year will follow a long series of
scant or average crops; but we can count upon the average.
But unless circumstances are constant, it matters little how constant
tempers and tendencies may be; and the expectations which we found upon
the general action of avarice, credulity, bigotry, self-seeking, or
any of the debased forms of legitimate human impulses, will often
be disappointed by results. Prepare the favorite climate, moisture,
exposure of a foreign plant, imitate its latitude and air and soil: it
will not necessarily grow at all, or, growing, it will only surprise you
by some alteration of its native features. Results are better chemists
than we, and their delicate root-fibres test the ground more accurately;
we shall find them languishing for some favorite elements, or colored
and persuaded by novel ones. History must remember the constants of
Man and of Nature, but be always expecting their variables, lest her
prophetic gift fall into ill-repute.
Thus, give unlimited power to the Catholic, and he cannot anywhere set
up his old-fashioned absolutism, unless you can manage at the same time
to furnish him with Roman and Spanish people, and the fifteenth century.
Yet we, too, have trembled at the imaginary horrors of Popery. All the
power you can thrust and pile upon the Catholic in America will become
an instrument to further the country's tendency towards light, as it
drags the human impulses away from the despotic past. All the Jesuits,
and prize bulls by every steamer, relays of papal agents, and
Corpus-Christi processions in the streets of Boston, will hardly lift
the shoulders of the great protesting country, as it turns to stare from
its tilling, steaming, pioneering, emancipating task.
It is not difficult to see why the revolts of peasants in the Middle
Ages were marked by horrible excesses,--why diplomatic Catholicism
prepared a St. Bartholomew's Eve for Paris,--why Dutch and Scotch
Protestants defaced and trampled under foot ecclesiastical Art,--why
German princes proclaimed a crusade against budding Protestantism and
Pan-slavism under Ziska and Procopius in Bohemia,--why the fagots were
fired at Constance, Prague, and Smithfield, and Pequod wigwams in New
England. All dreadful scenes, by simply taking place, show that they
have reason for it. But will they take place again? A Black Douglas did
undoubtedly live, and he was the nursery-threat for fractious Scotch
children during several generations; the Douglas never caught one of
them, but the threat did. So we are plied with stock-phrases, such as
"the Reign of Terror" and "the Horrors of San Domingo," and History is
abjectly conjured not to repeat herself, as she certainly will do, if
she goes on in the old way. Of course she will. But does she propose to
furnish a fac-simile of any critical epoch which haunts the imaginations
of mankind? That depends upon circumstances. The same barrel will play a
fresh tune by a hair's-breadth shifting of a spring. Two epochs may seem
to be exactly alike, and the men who only remember may seek to terrify
the men who hope by exposing the resemblance. But unless they can show
that all the circumstances are identical, they have no right to infect
the morning with their twilight fears. History insensibly modifies her
plan to secure the maximum of progress with the minimum of catastrophes,
and she repels the flippant insinuation that her children win all their
fresh advantages at the expense of the old crimes.
The story of Hayti is worth telling, apart from its bearing upon
questions connected with the emancipation of slaves. It is a striking
record of the degradation of fine races and the elevation of inferior
ones, and shows with what ease Nature can transfer her good points from
her gifted children and unexpectedly endow with them her neglected
ones,--thus affording us a hint of something that is more permanent and
irreversible than ethnological distinctions, by repeating within our own
time her humane way with her old barbarians whose hair was long. From
them sprang the races which never could have dominated by cunning and
force alone, and which have to lay down their dominion when they have
exhausted everything but force and cunning. It is a story of the
desolation in which the avarice and wrath of man must always travel:
colonial prosperity was nothing but a howling war-path blazed directly
across stately and beautiful human nature. It shows the blood which the
fine hands of luxury never could wash off; the terrible secret at last
betrayed itself. In telling this story, the horrors of San Domingo are
accounted for, and whatever was exceptional in the circumstances is
at the same time marked, to prevent them from being applied without
discrimination to the present condition of America. But the story must
be told from the beginning, for its own sake; otherwise it will be a
bad story, without a moral. If the main features of it are carefully
preserved, it will make its own application.
That, however, is fatal to any attempt to infect minds with the Haytian
bug-bear, now that political discussion threatens to ravage the country
which our arms are saving. It has been used before, when it was
necessary to save the Union and to render anti-slavery sentiment odious.
The weak and designing, and all who wait for the war to achieve a
constitutional recurrence of our national malady, will use it again to
defeat the great act of justice and the people's great necessity.
Slavery is a continual conspiracy. Its life depends upon intrigue,
aggression, adroit combinations with other forms of human selfishness.
The people at the North who at this moment hate to hear the word
Emancipation mentioned, and who insist that the war shall merely restore
things to their original position, are the people who always hated the
phrase "Anti-Slavery," who will be ready to form a fresh coalition with
Slavery for the sake of recovering or creating political advantages,
and whom the South will know how to use again, by reviving ancient
prejudices, and making its very wounds a cause for sympathy. Slavery
will be the nucleus of political combinations so long as it can preserve
its constitutional and commercial advantages,--while it can sell its
cotton and recover its fugitives. Is the precious blood already
spilled in this war to become, as it congeals, nothing but cement to
fugitive-slave bills, and the basis of three-fifths, and the internal
slave-trade? For this we spend three millions a day, and lives whose
value cannot be expressed in dollars,--for this anguish will sit for
years at thousands of desolate hearths, and be the only legacy of
fatherless children. For what glory will they inherit whose fathers fell
to save still a chance or two for Slavery? It is for this we are willing
to incur the moral and financial hazards of a great struggle,--to
furnish an Anti-Republican party of reconstructionists with a bridge
for Slavery to reach a Northern platform, to frown at us again from the
chair of State. The Federal picket who perchance fell last night upon
some obscure outpost of our great line of Freedom has gone up to Heaven
protesting against such cruel expectations, wherever they exist; and
they exist wherever apathy exists, and old hatred lingers, and wherever
minds are cowed and demoralized by the difficulties of this question. In
his body is a bullet run by Slavery, and sent by its unerring purpose;
his comrades will raise over him a little hillock upon which Slavery
will creep to look out for future chances,--ruthlessly scanning the
political horizon from the graves of our unnamed heroes. This, and eight
dollars a month, will his wife inherit; and if she ever sees his grave,
she will see a redoubt which the breast of her husband raises for some
future defence of Slavery. The People, who are waging this war, and
who are actually getting at the foe through the bristling ranks of
politicians and contractors, must have such a moral opinion upon this
question as to defeat these dreadful possibilities. Let us be patient,
because we see some difficulties; but let us give up the war itself
sooner than our resolution, that, either by this war, or after it,
Slavery shall be stripped of its insignia, and turned out to cold and
irretrievable disgrace, weaponless, fangless, and with no object in the
world worthy of its cunning. We can be patient, but we must also be
instant and unanimous in insisting that the whole of Slavery shall pay
the whole of Freedom's bill. Then the dear names whose sound summons
imperatively our tears shall be proudly handed in by us to History, as
we bid her go with us from grave to grave to see how the faith of a
people watched them against the great American Body Snatcher, and kept
them inviolate to be her memorials. We feel our hearts reinforced by the
precious blood which trickled from Ball's Bluff into the Potomac, and
was carried thence into the great sea of our conscience, tumultuous with
pride, anger, and resolve. The drops feed the country's future, wherever
they are caught first by our free convictions ere they sink into the
beloved soil. Let us be instant, be incisive with our resolution, that
peace may not be the mother of another war, and our own victory rout
ourselves.
Blow, North-wind, blow! Keep that bearded field of bayonets levelled
southward! Rustle, robes of Liberty, who art walking terribly over the
land, with sombre countenance, and garments rolled in blood! See, she
advances with one hand armed with Justice, while the other points to
that exquisite symmetry half revealed, as if beckoning thitherward her
children back again to the pure founts of life! "Be not afraid," she
cries, "of the noise of my garments and their blood-stains; for this is
the blood of a new covenant of Freedom, shed to redeem and perpetuate a
chosen land."