few words. I do not know how much it was the administration of General
Taylor, or how far it was that of his Cabinet. I do not know who made
the Cabinet. The messages, in his official term, were as good as usual;
but who made the messages? One thing is clear: he promised to be the
President of the country, not of a party; to remove no man from office
except for reasons not political. Neither promise was kept. It was plain
that other elements interfered and counteracted the honest intentions of
that honest man. General Jackson rewarded his "friends" and punished his
"enemies," men who voted against him. Mr. Jefferson had done the same.
But I doubt if the administration of either of these men was so
completely a party administration as that of General Taylor. Men were
continually removed from office purely for political reasons. The
general character of his appointments to office, you can judge of better
than I. It seems to me the removal of subordinate officers from their
station on account of their vote is one great evil in the management of
our institutions. Of what consequence is it whether the postmaster at
Eastham or West-Newton, the keeper of the lighthouse at Cape Anne, or
the Clay Pounds of Truro, or the district attorney in Boston, or the
tide-waiters at Nantucket are "good whigs," or not good whigs?
* * * * *
What shall I say of the character of the man who has left this high
office; of him on the whole? Some men can be as eloquent on a ribbon as
on a Raphael. They find no difficulty in calling General Taylor "The
second Washington." I like the first Washington too much to call any
one by that name lightly. General Harrison was the "Second Washington"
ten years ago. General Jackson ten years before that. I think there is
another "Second Washington" getting ready, and before the century ends
we shall perhaps have five or six of this family. But the world does not
breed great men every day. I must confess it, I have not seen any thing
very great in General Taylor, though I have diligently put my eye to the
magnifying glasses of his political partisans; neither have I seen any
thing uncommonly mean and little in him, though I have also looked
through the minifying glasses of his foes. To be a frontier soldier for
forty years, to attain the rank of Colonel at the age of forty-eight,
after twenty-four years of service, to become a Brigadier-General at
fifty-four, is no great thing. To defend a log-house, to capture Black
Hawk, to use bloodhounds in war, and to extirpate the Seminole Indians
from the everglades of Florida, to conquer the Mexicans at Churubusco
and Monterey, does not require very high qualities of mind and heart.
But in all the offices he ever held, he appears to have done his
official duty openly and honestly. He was a good officer, a plain,
blunt, frank, open, modest man. No doubt he was "rough and ready;" his
courage was never questioned. His integrity is above suspicion. All this
is well known. But is all this enough to make a great man in the middle
of this century; a great man in America, and for such an office? Judge
for yourselves.
I sincerely believe that he was more of a man than his political
supporters thought him; that he had more natural sagacity, more common
sense, more firmness of purpose, and very much more honesty than they
expected or desired. Rumors reach me that he was not found quite so
manageable as his "friends" and admirers had hoped; that he had some
conscience and a will of his own. It seems to me that he honestly
intended to be an honest and impartial ruler, the President of his
country; that he took Washington for his general model; that he never
sought the office, and at first did not desire it, but when he came to
it endeavored to deserve well of his country and do well by mankind. But
with the best intentions, what could such a man do, especially with such
foes, and more especially with such friends.
It is said he was a religious man: sometimes that means that a man loves
God and loves men; sometimes that he is superstitious, formal,
hypocritical, that he does not love men, and is afraid of God, or of a
devil. I do not know in which sense the word is used in reference to
him. But it appears to me that he was a man of veracity, honest,
upright, and downright too; a good father, a good husband, a good
friend, faithful to his idea of duty; very plain, very unpretending,
mild and yet firm, good-natured, free and easy. There were many that
loved him; a rare circumstance among politicians. He was a temperate
man, also, remarkably temperate, and such temperance as his is not a
very common virtue in high political and social stations in America, as
we all know too well.
These are all the good qualities I can make out his title to. I suppose
there are some ten thousand men in Massachusetts that are his equals in
all these qualities, as honest, as able, and as patriotic as he. It is
hardly worth while to worship those qualities in a President which are
not rare in farmers, and traders, and butchers and mechanics.
There are two things which seem to me decidedly wrong in his public
career. His partisans at the North claimed that he was hostile to
slavery. I never could find any reason for that opinion: at the South
his friends insisted that he was the decided friend of slavery. When his
opinion was asked on this matter, he remained steadily and
pertinaciously silent. To me this does not seem honest or manly.
Then he was a slaveholder, not by compulsion, as some pretend they hold
men in bondage, not by inheritance. He was a slaveholder from choice,
and only three years ago bought one hundred and fourteen human beings
and kept them as his slaves. This fact must be considered in estimating
the character and value of the man. I know that Money is the popular god
of America; that slaveholding is one of the canonical forms of
worshipping that god, sanctioned by the Constitution and the laws and
the legislature of the land, by its literature and by its churches. I
know men in Boston, who would have no more scruple in buying and selling
a black man as a slave, or a white man if they could catch and keep him,
than they would have of buying a cow at Brighton. There are men in
Massachusetts that have grown rich by the slave-trade. It does not hurt
their reputation; it is no impeachment of their religious character. Now
I do not expect a frontier colonel, busy in fighting Indians half his
life, dogging them with Cuban bloodhounds, to be more enlightened on
such a matter than merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, ministers and
professors of theology in New England. It may be that he had the same
opinion as Professor Stuart, that slavery was allowed in the New
Testament and sanctioned in the Old Testament; such a good thing that
Paul and James said never a word against it. We should not judge such a
man as you would judge a Unitarian Minister in Boston or Doctors of
Divinity at Andover. Born as he was, bred as he had been, living in a
camp, sustained by the public opinion of the Press, the State and the
Church, it would not be surprising if it had never occurred to him that
it was wrong to steal men. But the fact is to be taken into the account
in determining the elevation of his character.
It is now plain that he found the office of President a heavy burden;
that it cost him his life. It seems to me the conduct of some of our
public men towards him was ungenerous, not to say unjust and shameful.
An honest man, he looked for honest foes and honest friends; but his
hardest battles were fought after he had ceased to be a soldier.
Well, he has gone to his rest and his recompense. To his family the
affliction is sudden, painful and terrible. What vicissitudes in their
life--from the obscurity of their former home to the glaring publicity
of that high station; then in so brief a time the honored and
well-beloved head is silent and cold forever! The nation may well drop
its tears of sympathy for those whom its election has robbed of a father
and a husband; the ghastly honors of the office are poor recompense for
the desolation it has brought into a quiet and once happy home.
He has gone to his reward. He leaves the government in the hands of an
obscure man, whom the nation knows very little of, whom no one would
ever have thought of making President; a man selected certainly for no
eminence of faculty, intellectual or moral. There is some cause to fear,
perhaps some little for hope.[10] Two very important questions are now
before the nation: Shall we extend over the territory conquered from
Mexico the awful blight which now mildews the material welfare of the
South, and curses with a threefold ban the intellect, the conscience and
the religion of the land? Shall Congress pass that infamous fugitive
slave measure, known as Mr. Mason's bill, with Mr. Webster's indorsement
on it? I know not how his death will affect these things. Who knows the
intentions of the late President? or those of his successor? He has
power to bless, he may use it only to curse the land. Let us wait and
see. The fact that the "Great Compromiser" now represents the
Administration in the Senate, the rumor of the appointment of the
Senator of Boston to the highest place in the Cabinet, are things of ill
omen for freedom, and bid us fear the worst. However, it may be that
this event will affect the politicians more than the people.
Last Tuesday night General Taylor ceased to be mortal. His soul went
home to God. He that fought against the Mexican and the Indian has gone
to meet the God of the red man as well as the white. He who claimed to
own the body and the soul of more than a hundred of his fellow
creatures, enriched by the unrequited toil, which they unwillingly gave
him when stung by the lash of his hireling overseers, has gone home to
the Father of negro slaves, who is no respecter of persons; gone where
the servant is free from his master. Black and white, conqueror and
vanquished, the bond and the free, alike come up before the Infinite
Father, whose perfect justice is perfect love; and there the question
is, "What hast thou done with the talent committed unto thee?" The same
question is asked of the President; the same of the slave; yea, it will
one day be asked of you and me!
"An old man, wearied with the storms of State," now only asks a little
earth for charity. Costly heathen pageants there will be in these
streets to his memory, and politicians will, I suppose, hold their
drunken and profane debauch over his grave, as over the tomb of that
far-famed friend of freedom who died two years ago. But he has ceased to
be mortal. The memory of his battle-fields faded from before his dying
sight. Power rests no longer in his hands; victory perches on another
banner. His ear is still, and his heart is cold. How hollow sounds the
voice of former flattery! His riches go to other men; his slaves will be
called by his name no more; the scourge that goads them to unpaid toil
is now owned by another man. His fame goes back to such as gave; the
accident of an accident succeeds him in the presidential chair; only the
man, not the officer, goes home to God, with what of goodness and piety
he had won. His manhood is all that he can carry out of the world;
elected or rejected, a conqueror or conquered, it is now the same to
him; and it may be the humblest female slave who only earned the bread
which her master only ate, and got an enforced concubinage for pay,
takes rank in heaven far before the man whom the nation honored with its
highest trust, and for whom the official Senate and low-browed Church
send out their hollow groans.
"The glories of our birth and State
Are shadows, not substantial things.
There is no armor against fate:
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made,
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
"Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill;
But their strong arms at last must yield,
They tame but one another still.
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
"The garlands wither on his brow:
Then boast no more his mighty deeds,
Upon death's purple altar now,
See where the victor victim bleeds.
All heads must come
To the cold tomb,
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."
If he could speak to us from his present position, methinks he would
say: Countrymen and friends! You see how little it availed you to
agitate the land and put a little man in a great place. It is not the
hurrah of parties that will "save the Union," it is not "great men." It
is only Justice. Remember that Atheism is not the first principle of a
Republic; remember there is a law of God, the higher law of the
universe, the Everlasting Right; I thought so once, and now I know it.
Remember that you are accountable to God for all things; that you owe
justice to all men, the black not less than the white; that God will
demand it of you, proud, wicked nation, careful only of your gold,
forgetful of God's high law! Before long each of you shall also come up
before the Eternal. Then and there it will not avail you to have
compromised truth, justice, love, but to have kept them. Righteousness
only is the salvation of a State; that only of a man.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The above was written in July, 1851. Since then the ground of hope
has wholly vanished; the ground for fear remains alone. The following
statement may suggest a thought the other side of the ocean, if no shame
on this side among politicians and their priests:
Elisha Brazealle, a planter of Jefferson county in the State of
Mississippi, was taken sick, and as he lay oppressed with a loathsome
disease, a slave of his, a bright mulatto or quadroon, nursed him, and,
as was believed, through her nursing, saved him from death. He was a man
of feeling and did not forget her kindness, but took her to Ohio and
there educated her. She made rapid progress, and soon became his wife.
He made or caused to be made a legal and sound deed of emancipation, and
had it legally and formally recorded in Ohio and Mississippi. Lawyers,
in both States, said she was free, safe, and that no power in the South,
or elsewhere, could legally deprive her or her children of freedom.
Mr. Brazealle returned to Mississippi with his wife; they had a son, and
named him John Munroe Brazealle. After some years Mr. Brazealle sickened
and died, leaving a will in which he recited the deed of emancipation,
declared his intention to ratify it, and devised all his property to his
son, acknowledging him in the will to be such.
Some poor and distant relations of his in North Carolina, whom he did
not know, and for whom he did not care, hearing of his death, went on to
Mississippi and claimed the property devised by Mr. Brazealle to his
son. They instituted a suit for the recovery of the property. The case
came before William L. Sharkey, "Chief Justice of the High Court of
Errors and Appeals" for that State. It is reported in Howard's
Mississippi Reports, Vol. II. p. 837, _et seq._ Judge Sharkey declared
the act of emancipation "An offence against morality, pernicious and
detestable as an example," set aside the will, gave to those distant
relations the property which Mr. Brazealle had devised to his son, and
in addition declared that son and his mother to be slaves. Here is his
own language:--
"The state of the case shows conclusively that the contract had its
origin in an offence against morality, pernicious and detestable as an
example."... "The consequence [of the decision] is, that the negroes
John Munroe and his mother, are still slaves, and a part of the estate
of Elisha Brazealle." "John Munroe being a slave cannot take the
property as devised; and I apprehend it is equally clear that it cannot
be held in trust for him."
While these volumes are in the press, I learn that Mr. Fillmore has
appointed Judge Sharkey to the honorable and lucrative post of Consul to
Havana.
IV.
THE FUNCTION AND PLACE OF CONSCIENCE, IN RELATION TO THE LAWS OF MEN: A
SERMON FOR THE TIMES.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER
22, 1850.
ACTS 24: 16.
"Herein do I exercise myself to have always a conscience void of offence
toward God and toward men."
There are some things which are true, independent of all human opinions.
Such things we call facts. Thus it is true that one and one are equal to
two, that the earth moves round the sun, that all men have certain
natural unalienable rights, rights which a man can alienate only for
himself, and not for another. No man made these things true; no man can
make them false. If all the men in Jerusalem and ever so many more, if
all the men in the world, were to pass a unanimous vote that one and one
were not equal to two, that the earth did not move round the sun, that
all men had not natural and unalienable rights, the opinion would not
alter the fact, nor make truth false and falsehood true.
So there are likewise some things which are right, independent of all
human opinions. Thus it is right to love a man and not to hate him, to
do him justice and not injustice, to allow him the natural rights which
he has not alienated. No man made these things right; no man can make
them wrong. If all the men in Jerusalem and ever so many more, if all
the men in the world, were to pass a unanimous vote that it was right to
hate a man and not love him, right to do him injustice and not justice,
right to deprive him of his natural rights not alienated by himself, the
opinion would not alter the fact, nor make right wrong and wrong right.
There are certain constant and general facts which occur in the material
world, the world of external perception, which represent what are called
the laws of matter, in virtue of which things take place so and not
otherwise. These laws are the same everywhere and always; they never
change. They are not made by men, but only discovered by men, are
inherent in the constitution of matter, and seem designed to secure the
welfare of the material world. These natural laws of matter, inherent in
its constitution, are never violated, nor can be, for material nature is
passive, or at least contains no element or will that is adverse to the
will of God, the ultimate Cause of these laws as of matter itself. The
observance of these laws is a constant fact of the universe; "the most
ancient heavens thereby are fresh and strong." These laws represent the
infinity of God in the world of matter, His infinite power, wisdom,
justice, love and holiness.
So there are likewise certain constant and general facts which occur in
what may be called the spiritual world, the world of internal
consciousness. They represent the laws of spirit--that is of the human
spirit--in virtue of which things are designed to take place so and not
otherwise. These laws are the same everywhere and always; they never
change. They are not made by men, but only discovered by men. They are
inherent in the constitution of man, and as you cannot conceive of a
particle of matter without extension, impenetrability, figure and so on,
no more can you conceive of man without these laws inhering in him. They
seem designed to secure the welfare of the spiritual world. They
represent the infinity of God in the world of man, His infinite power,
wisdom, justice, love and holiness. But while matter is stationary,
bound by necessity, and man is progressive and partially free, to the
extent of a certain tether, so it is plain that there may be a will in
the world of man adverse to the will of God, and thus the laws of man's
spirit may be violated to a certain extent. The laws of matter depend
for their execution only on the infinite will of God, and so cannot be
violated. The laws of man depend for their execution also on the finite
will of man, and so may be broken.[11]
Let us select a portion of these laws of the human spirit; such as
relate to a man's conduct in dealing with his fellow men, a portion of
what are commonly called moral laws, and examine them. They partake of
the general characteristics mentioned above; they are universal and
unchangeable, are only discovered and not made by man, are inherent in
man, designed to secure his welfare, and represent the infinity of God.
These laws are absolutely right; to obey them is to be and do absolutely
right. So being and doing, a man answers the moral purpose of his
existence, and attains moral manhood. If I and all men keep all the laws
of man's spirit, I have peace in my own heart, peace with my brother,
peace with my God; I have my delight in myself, in my brother, in my
God, they theirs and God His in me.
What is absolutely right is commonly called justice. It is the point in
morals common to me and all mankind, common to me and God, to mankind
and God; the point where all duties unite--to myself, my brethren, and
my God; the point where all interests meet and balance--my interests,
those of mankind, and the interests of God. When justice is done, all is
harmony and peaceful progress in the world of man; but when justice is
not done, the reverse follows, discord and confusion; for injustice is
not the point where all duties and all interests meet and balance, not
the point of morals common to mankind and me, or to us and God.
We may observe and study the constant facts of the material world, thus
learn the laws they represent, and so get at a theory of the world which
is founded on the facts thereof. Such a theory is true; it represents
the thought of God, the infinity of God. Then for every point of theory
we have a point of fact. Instead of pursuing this course we may neglect
these constant facts, with the laws they represent, and forge a theory
which shall not rest on these facts. Such a theory will be false and
will represent the imperfection of men, and not the facts of the
universe and the infinity of God.
In like manner we may study the constant facts of the spiritual world,
and, in special, of man's moral nature, and thereby obtain a rule to
regulate our conduct. If this rule is founded on the constant facts of
man's moral nature, then it will be absolutely right, and represent
Justice, the thought of God, the infinity of God, and for every point of
moral theory we shall have a moral fact. Instead of pursuing that
course, we may forge a rule for our conduct, and so get a theory which
shall not rest on those facts. Such a rule will be wrong, representing
only the imperfection of men.
In striving to learn the laws of the universe, the wisest men often go
astray, propound theories which do not rest upon facts, and lay down
human rules for the conduct of the universe, which do not agree with its
nature. But the universe is not responsible for that; material nature
takes no notice thereof. The opinion of an astronomer, of the American
academy, does not alter a law of the material universe, or a fact
therein. The philosophers once thought that the sun went round the
earth, and framed laws on that assumption; but that did not make it a
fact; the sun did not go out of his way to verify the theory, but kept
to the law of God, and swung the earth round him once a year, say the
philosophers what they might say, leaving them to learn the fact and
thereby correct their theory.
In the same way, before men attain a knowledge of the absolute right,
they often make theories which do not rest upon the facts of man's moral
nature, and enact human rules for the conduct of men which do not agree
with the moral nature of man. These are rules which men make and do not
find made. They are not a part of man's moral nature, writ therein, and
so obligatory thereon, no more than the false rules for the conduct of
matter are writ therein, and so obligatory thereon. You and I are no
more morally bound to keep such rules of conduct, because King Pharaoh
or King People say we shall, than the sun is materially bound to go
round the earth every day, because Hipparchus and Ptolemy say it does.
The opinion or command of a king, or a people, can no more change a fact
and alter a law of man's nature, than the opinion of a philosopher can
do this in material nature.