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Riverside Edition
THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND POETRY
VOLUME V
Political Essays
by
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
[Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in 1881_]
London
MacMillan and Co.
1898
CONTENTS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 17
E PLURIBUS UNUM 45
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 75
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177
RECONSTRUCTION 210
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62.
ENGRAVED ON STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX _Frontispiece_
MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56
GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178
ANDREW JOHNSON 264
WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302
POLITICAL ESSAYS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the
hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of
the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch
whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of
his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions
whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the
political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of
all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his
hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as
would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become
king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told
that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications,
lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the
African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent
for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs
could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
Bartholomew,--that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee
dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save
the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could
not read, on the depravity of the double shuffle,--that they would
consent to be fellow members in the Tract Society with him who sold
their fellow members in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed with
them in condemning Transubstantiation (and it would not be difficult
for a gentleman who ignored the real presence of God in his brother man
to deny it in the sacramental wafer),--if those excellent men had been
told this, they would have shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, "Are thy
servants dogs, that they should do these things?"
Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.
There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.
The first is by an appeal to the Society's Constitution, and by
claiming to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law
as applied to contracts, whether between individuals or States. The
second is by denying that Slavery is opposed to the genius of
Christianity, and that any moral wrongs are the necessary results of
it. We will not be so unjust to the Society as to suppose that any of
its members would rely on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine
ourselves to a brief consideration of the other.
In order that the same rules of interpretation should be considered
applicable to the Constitution of the Society and to that of the United
States, we must attribute to the former a solemnity and importance
which involve a palpable absurdity. To claim for it the verbal accuracy
and the legal wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with common
sense and the facts of the case; and even were it not so, the party to
a bond who should attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal
quibble of construction would be put in coventry by all honest men. In
point of fact, the Constitution was simply the minutes of an agreement
among certain gentlemen, to define the limits within which they would
accept trust funds, and the objects for which they should expend them.
But if we accept the alternative offered by the advocates of strict
construction, we shall not find that their case is strengthened.
Claiming that where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful, it should
be interpreted according to the contemporary understanding of its
framers, they argue that it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen
from the Southern States would have united to form a society that
included in its objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from
the institution of Slavery. Admitting the first part of their
proposition, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from it. They are
guilty of a glaring anachronism in assuming the same opinions and
prejudices to have existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in
1858. The Anti-slavery agitation did not begin until 1831, and the
debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years
after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that
State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been
tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all
during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such
distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the
conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing
either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded
them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and
slave less demoralizing to the one and less imbruting to the other.
Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only
on topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is
involved. But what are the facts about matters other than Slavery?
Tracts have been issued and circulated in which Dancing is condemned as
sinful; are all Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On the
Temperance question, against Catholicism,--have these topics never
entered into our politics? The simple truth is that Slavery is the only
subject about which the Publishing Committee have felt Constitutional
scruples. Till this question arose, they were like men in perfect
health, never suspecting that they had any constitution at all; but
now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in every pore, at the least
breath from the eastward.
If a strict construction of the words "all Evangelical Christians" be
insisted on, we are at a loss to see where the committee could draw the
dividing line between what might be offensive and what allowable. The
Society publish tracts in which the study of the Scriptures is enforced
and their denial to the laity by Romanists assailed. But throughout the
South it is criminal to teach a slave to read; throughout the South no
book could be distributed among the servile population more incendiary
than the Bible, if they could only read it. Will not our Southern
brethren take alarm? The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either
denying that the African has a soul to be saved, or of consenting to
the terrible mockery of assuring him that the way of life is to be
found only by searching a book which he is forbidden to open.
If we carry out this doctrine of strict construction to its legitimate
results, we shall find that it involves a logical absurdity. What is
the number of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the
suppression of a tract? Is the _taboo_ of a thousand valid? Of a
hundred? Of ten? Or are tracts to be distributed only to those who will
find their doctrine agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to be
instructed that a Temperance essay is the proper thing for a
total-abstinent infidel, and a sermon on the Atonement for a distilling
deacon? If the aim of the Society be only to convert men from sins they
have no mind to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no
temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade
schoolmasters that two and two make four, or geometricians that there
cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of
the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that
they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of
sleeping in church.
But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral
evils and vices which it is known to promote and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly
do fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be
discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly
that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in the world of
ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only line which
Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great
horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which is the boundary between
light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have done in
1858) to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the South
(objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs
were "forced to flee") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the
southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the
Episcopal Church did to the artist when without public protest they
allowed Ary Scheffer's _Christus Consolator_, with the figure of the
slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.
The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-slavery doctrines, but
simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him
in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his
bondmen. But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at
present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all
appeals, that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that
then, and not till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something
in the premises. But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity
with such exemplary patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to
decline any attempt at converting the sinner till after God has
converted him, will there be any special necessity for a tract society
at all? Will it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superfluous,
to undertake the doing over again of what He has already done? We fear
that the studies of Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus
have entered in order to fit themselves for the legal and
constitutional argument of the question, have confused their minds, and
that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a tract and an
action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other, cannot be
employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.
The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual meeting
of 1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire to make
whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all
attempts to reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express
confidence in the Publishing Committee, and at the same time impliedly
condemn them by recommending them to do precisely what they had all
along scrupulously avoided doing. The result was just what might have
been expected. Both parties among the Northern members of the Society,
those who approved the former action of the Publishing Committee and
those who approved the new policy recommended in the resolutions, those
who favored silence and those who favored speech on the subject of
Slavery, claimed the victory, while the Southern brethren, as usual,
refused to be satisfied with anything short of unconditional
submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slavery is concerned, has
always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the South have been
like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of a bankrupt
bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts upon his wife,
and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to accept all her
personal and a life estate in all her real property. The South is
willing that the Tract Society should expend its money to convince the
slave that he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his
master, but not to persuade the master that he has a soul to undergo a
very different process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.
We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many
quack cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it
will not stand hot water,--and as the question of slavery is sure to
plunge all who approach it, even with the best intentions, into that
fatal element, the patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was
warranted to be better than new, falls once more into a heap of
incoherent fragments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Redintegrator by the Special Committee of the Tract Society has ended
like all the rest, and as all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate
must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle and pluck are
better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it finds at last that
he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a contemptuous
toleration, that leaves him at war with his own self-respect and the
invincible forces of his higher nature.
But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience
and self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their
lost Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which
severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that
bind the soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from
family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which
hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him,
not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the
will. Christianity has never been concession, never peace; it is
continual aggression; one province of wrong conquered, its pioneers are
already in the heart of another. The mile-stones of its onward march
down the ages have not been monuments of material power, but the
blackened stakes of martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to
conviction. For it is the only religion which is superior to all
endowment, to all authority,--which has a bishopric and a cathedral
wherever a single human soul has surrendered itself to God. That very
spirit of doubt, inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment, with
which Romanists reproach Protestantism, is its stamp and token of
authenticity,--the seal of Christ, and not of the Fisherman.
We do not wonder at the division which has taken place in the Tract
Society, nor do we regret it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible
to very few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach to it in those
who associate together to disseminate the doctrines which they believe
to be its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies
of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct
and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the
wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the
hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a
Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of
families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling
Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a
system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the
minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it
condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was
there ever a simony like this,--that does not sell, but withholds, the
gift of God for a price?
The world naturally holds the Society to a stricter accountability than
it would insist upon in ordinary cases. Were they only a club of
gentlemen associated for their own amusement, it would be very natural
and proper that they should exclude all questions which would introduce
controversy, and that, however individually interested in certain
reforms, they should not force them upon others who would consider them
a bore. But a society of professing Christians, united for the express
purpose of carrying both the theory and the practice of the New
Testament into every household in the land, has voluntarily subjected
itself to a graver responsibility, and renounced all title to fall back
upon any reserved right of personal comfort or convenience.
We say, then, that we are glad to see this division in the Tract
Society; not glad because of the division, but because it has sprung
from an earnest effort to relieve the Society of a reproach which was
not only impairing its usefulness, but doing an injury to the cause of
truth and sincerity everywhere. We have no desire to impugn the motives
of those who consider themselves conservative members of the Society;
we believe them to be honest in their convictions, or their want of
them; but we think they have mistaken notions as to what conservatism
is, and that they are wrong in supposing it to consist in refusing to
wipe away the film on their spectacle-glasses which prevents their
seeing the handwriting on the wall, or in conserving reverently the
barnacles on their ship's bottom and the dry-rot in its knees. We yield
to none of them in reverence for the Past; it is there only that the
imagination can find repose and seclusion; there dwells that silent
majority whose experience guides our action and whose wisdom shapes our
thought in spite of ourselves;--but it is not length of days that can
make evil reverend, nor persistence in inconsistency that can give it
the power or the claim of orderly precedent. Wrong, though its
title-deeds go back to the days of Sodom, is by nature a thing of
yesterday,--while the right, of which we became conscious but an hour
ago, is more ancient than the stars, and of the essence of Heaven. If
it were proposed to establish Slavery to-morrow, should we have more
patience with its patriarchal argument than with the parallel claim of
Mormonism? That Slavery is old is but its greater condemnation; that we
have tolerated it so long, the strongest plea for our doing so no
longer. There is one institution to which we owe our first allegiance,
one that is more sacred and venerable than any other,--the soul and
conscience of Man.
What claim has Slavery to immunity from discussion? We are told that
discussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what? Truth invites it, courts
the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more
clearly the grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The
advocates of Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate
sophism, and affirm that their institution is of Divine ordination,
that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of
God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the
universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? Did
the circulation of the firmament stop in terror because Newton laid his
daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle to discuss a proposition so
monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for a crime against humanity,
and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns of the altar bring it
to vengeance, and not to safety.
Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to
be, and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing,
would not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of
Christian men to protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out?
Would our courts feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a
daughter from a parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or
a wife from a husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental
authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice
discharge a drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or
would he not rather give him another month in the House of Correction
for his impudence?
The Anti-slavery question is not one which the Tract Society can
exclude by triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his
Testament; the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his
heart, finds it lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of
his ship; the lawyer, who has declared that it is no concern of his,
finds it thrust upon him in the brief of the slave-hunter; the
historian, who had cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at Bunker
Hill. And why? Because it is not political, but moral,--because it is
not local, but national,--because it is not a test of party, but of
individual honesty and honor. The wrong which we allow our nation to
perpetrate we cannot localize, if we would; we cannot hem it within the
limits of Washington or Kansas; sooner or later, it will force itself
into the conscience and sit by the hearthstone of every citizen.
It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this
matter of Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of
Christianity, which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the
moral consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed
after creed and institution after institution have measured their
strength and been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to
crystallize in any sect or form, but persists, a Divinely commissioned
radical and reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new
dilemma between ease and interest on the one hand, and duty on the
other. Shall it be said that its kingdom is not of this world? In one
sense, and that the highest, it certainly is not; but just as certainly
Christ never intended those words to be used as a subterfuge by which
to escape our responsibilities in the life of business and politics.
Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer, whether the world, that
then was, so understood its first preachers and apostles. Caesar and
Flamen both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed at riches or
power, but because it strove to conquer that other world in the moral
nature of mankind, where it could establish a throne against which
wealth and force would be weak and contemptible. No human device has
ever prevailed against it, no array of majorities or respectabilities;
but neither Caesar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so cunningly
adapted to neutralize its power as that graceful compromise which
accepts it with the lip and denies it in the life, which marries it at
the altar and divorces it at the church-door.
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER
1860
While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became
a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil
that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be
tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far
characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the
duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness
of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular
election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general
persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone
conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and
therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For though during
its term of office the government be practically as independent of the
popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are
called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility; then for the first time he becomes capable of
that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the
narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each
other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory, a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government
itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club,
with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are
commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed,
without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas) our
politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled,
unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our Congress debates and
our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of
national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable
Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half
a dozen years ago. If that personage, outraged in all the finer
sensibilities of our common nature, by failing to get the contract for
supplying the District Court-House at Skreemeropolisville City with
revolvers, was led to disparage the union of these States, it is seized
on as proof conclusive that the party to which he belongs are so many
Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is unanimous only in misspelling the name of
that oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms
always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief
Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection,
and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an
unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the
White House lures our public men away from present duties and
obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a
Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet,
whenever a President goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch
every member of the Committee. We are kept normally in that most
unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians
measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship,
to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and
to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for
patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was a necessary
evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave; then that it
was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it was a system
divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned under the New.
With a representation, three fifths of it based on the assumption that
negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists on our
acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her Northern
allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the preamble to the
Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the way of enslaving
men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through the Supreme Court
of the United States, that negroes are not men in the ordinary meaning
of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to find that we have eaten
more than was necessary may chance to give us an indigestion. The
slaveholding interest has gone on step by step, forcing concession
after concession, till it needs but little to secure it forever in the
political supremacy of the country. Yield to its latest demand,--let it
mould the evil destiny of the Territories,--and the thing is done past
recall. The next Presidential Election is to say _Yes_ or _No_.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing
moral degradation on the part of the Non-slaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry,--for
it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right;
and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest
achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed the
accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that history
is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns through the
folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite true that
there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all questions of
right and wrong in the balance of trade; but we cannot bring ourselves
to believe that it is a wise political economy which makes cotton by
unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an immediate
money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared public sentiment. We
think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in proclaiming the new
Pretender. The election of November may prove a Culloden. Whatever its
result, it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether
the American idea is to govern this continent, whether the Occidental
or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future, whether we
are to recede from principles which eighteen Christian centuries have
been slowly establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the
stake and so many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in
favor of some fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of
Abraham, of which all that can be said with certainty is that they did
not add to his domestic happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody
knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The
supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform
the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may
be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal
question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a
question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the
other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the
Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to
that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all
the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged
faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all
take refuge in the Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any
logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the
Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were t' other dear charmer
away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the
unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made
against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is _too_ Constitutional.
Meanwhile, the only point in which voters are interested is, What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others; nay, over
man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it,
means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has no
rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher law
than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not merely the
narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish
ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to
be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing or another,
or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency may seem to
require; but since both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we
have little difficulty in divining what their course would be after the
fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected. We know too well
what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces which each
shows by turns under the same hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's
story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the _royal_ Bengal
tiger under the new character of _national_, as more in harmony with
the changed order of things. Could the animal have lived till 1848,
he would probably have found himself offered to the discriminating
public as the _democratic_ and _social_ ornament of the jungle. The
Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor under even
more frequent and incongruous _aliases_: it is now _national_, now
_conservative_, now _constitutional_; here it represents
Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the
Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged,
and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive.
Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with sufficient precision in the
platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make of
Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct
parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them?
or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Pere la Chaise, who,
with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's
gravestone to advertise that they still carry on business at the old
stand? Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us
only a string of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and
Mr. Bell preserves a silence singularly at variance with his
patronymic. The only public demonstration of principle that we have
seen is an emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a
man to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as
it moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession
equally emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in
the unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of
the party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the
House of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate should
win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading name on
the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the hollowness
of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's
election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise having once or
twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people found out what it
really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended to convey, we find
in it a similitude that is not without significance as regards the
professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who operates upon
it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular motion that
befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative bells. He does
his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with every jolt on
the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the sonorous
pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed that the
Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very much doubt
whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the Constitution would
practically be nothing else than his interpretation of it) would keep
the same measured tones that are so easy on the smooth path of
candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State over some of the
rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and some of those
passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new countries, are
rather _corduroy_ in character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that its
prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican candidate.
To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here
with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very
Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption,
and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong
denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is perfectly plain that we have
only two parties in the field: those who favor the extension of
slavery, and those who oppose it,--in other words, a Destructive and a
Conservative party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact
is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign
critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to
compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are
promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the _rights_ of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is Privilege,
and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change. The
conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on the man
with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor with a
million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars
who had funded their gains were among the stanchest reactionaries, and
left Rome with the nobility. No question of the abstract right of
property has ever entered directly into our politics, or ever
will,--the point at issue being, whether a certain exceptional kind of
property, already privileged beyond all others, shall be entitled to
still further privileges at the expense of every other kind. The
extension of slavery over new territory means just this,--that this one
kind of property, not recognized as such by the Constitution, or it
would never have been allowed to enter into the basis of
representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy of the
Republic.
A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but
has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he
buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a horse
or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind of
property is--how shall we say it so as not to violate our Constitutional
obligations?--that it is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a
thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man, speaks human
language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we all
acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left behind,--in
short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a Christian hath, and
is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a
simpler and more earnest faith. There are people at the North who
believe that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is also such a thing as
_suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their
feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older
and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has
rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our
Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it harder to recover a
fugitive chattel; but the existence of human nature in a man here and
there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as
often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-disease; and the man who
chooses to put his money into these images of his Maker cut in ebony
should be content to take the incident risks along with the advantages.
We should be very sorry to deem this risk capable of diminution; for we
think that the claims of a common manhood upon us should be at least as
strong as those of Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man
turns away should find in the larger charity of the law of God and
Nature a readier welcome and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to
think the negro a man, and on Southern evidence, too, so long as he is
counted in the population represented on the floor of Congress,--for
three fifths of perfect manhood would be a high average even among
white men; so long as he is hanged or worse, as an example and terror
to others,--for we do not punish one animal for the moral improvement
of the rest; so long as he is considered capable of religious
instruction,--for we fancy the gorillas would make short work with a
missionary; so long as there are fears of insurrection,--for we never
heard of a combined effort at revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do
not see how the particular right of whose infringement we hear so much
is to be made safer by the election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or
Mr. Douglas,--there being quite as little chance that any of them would
abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The
same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the
sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others
to take part with the rescued man.
But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high time
that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of
the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to be
respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety
of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is
soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him
a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice,
freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the
current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing
the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?
To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of free
institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when the
encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power
shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche
to be dreaded,--are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of
ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility of animals and the
passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or
from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding
population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material
impoverishment and political inferiority? From one or the other source
its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not the Union
that will be imperilled, but the privileged Order who on every occasion
of a thwarted whim have menaced its disruption, and who will then find
in it their only safety.