cluster of States, that may attempt to coerce or bully a legal and
constitutional majority by the threat of secession, shall be met with the
answer: "You don't go out of this Union unless you are strong enough to
fight your way out." I want to have the armed heel of the country crush the
serpent head of secession, now and forever, so that it shall never again
glare with its baleful eyes, or brandish its venomous tongue. Let not the
fate and fortunes of this glorious country be committed to the keeping of a
clumsy, misshapen raft, compacted of twenty-four or thirty-four logs, good
enough to float down a river, but sure to go to pieces when it gets into
deep water; Let let them be embarked on board a goodly ship, well found,
well fastened, well manned--in which every timber and plank has been so
fashioned as to contribute to the beauty and strength of the whole fabric,
with a good seaman at the helm, the Constitution in the binnacle, and the
stars and stripes at the masthead. When the time of my departure shall
come, let me feel, let me know, that I leave those whom I love under the
protection of a government good enough to secure the affection of its
subjects, and strong enough to enforce their obedience. Remember that if a
strong government be sometimes bad, a weak government is never good.
G. S. Hillard.
CCLXXIX.
THE MILITARY CAPACITY OF THE PEOPLE.
We have cause for gratitude in the military capacity which our people have
developed. We had no great standing armies. We had but a single thoroughly
furnished military school. There was no military profession proper,
inviting young men on the threshold of life to choose the trade of arms. A
soldier's garb was a rare spectacle, and every child ran to the window to
gaze at the passing glitter. Whence should come our fighting men if the
bugle should blow? You must have men before you have soldiers. Our
institutions raised men. Proverbially the Yankee can turn his hand to
anything. He likes to do well what he undertakes. He has a pride in showing
himself equal to his position. Above all, he has force of personal
character. When a Northern regiment makes a charge, it is not merely the
weight of so much physical humanity; there goes weight of character with
it. Why, there is an accomplished schoolmaster there, and the best
blacksmith of the village, and a solid merchant, and a dexterous lawyer,
and the handiest coachman of the stable, and a well known stage-driver on a
prominent public route, and a butcher with an unerring cleaver, and a jolly
tar whose vessel never missed stays with his hand at the wheel; do you
suppose that these men are going to charge like so many nameless Hessians?
Why, it is a personal matter with every one of them. They go in under
orders, to be sure, but they have not lost the sense of individual
responsibility. The thing is to be well done because they are there. I know
it, my friends, the personal character of our recruits lends weight and
irresistibleness to them as soldiers.
There have been no braver men, no stouter soldiers, in all war's red
annals, than these armed clerks, farmers, college boys, and their comrades
of every peaceful calling. Each community keeps the name of some young
hero, nobler than Spartan mothers ever welcomed on his shield. Redder blood
never stained the earth, than those full libations our new mustered ranks
have poured out for union, law, and liberty. There has been no fighting in
the bloody past of human story, where muzzle to muzzle and steel to steel,
bold hearts have more truly played the man, than in those battles of two
years past in which our citizen armies have saved our nationality. Never
have the hardships of the camp, the march, the field, and the trenches, and
the merciless privations of imprisonment been more heroically endured. It
was not needed--and our President said it well--to consecrate the sacred
acres of Gettysburg; that was already done by the deep baptism that had
laved those hills, and not that field only, but all the sands and sods and
waves our boys' brave blood have crimsoned. No land beneath the blue
heavens was ever kept by stouter living bulwarks; no mourners ever had a
nobler heritage than those that mourn our soldier-dead.
A. L. Stone.
CCLXXX.
LIMIT TO HUMAN DOMINION.
God has given the land to man, but the sea He has reserved to Himself. "The
sea is His, and He made it." He has given man "no inheritance in it; no,
not so much as to set his foot on." If he enters its domain, he enters it
as a pilgrim and a stranger. He may pass over it, but he can have no
abiding place upon it. He cannot build his house, nor so much as pitch his
tent within it. He cannot mark it with his lines, nor subdue it to his
uses, nor rear his monuments upon it. It steadfastly refuses to own him as
its lord and master. Its depths do not tremble at his coming. Its waters do
not flee when he appeareth. All the strength of all his generations is to
it as a feather before the whirlwind; and all the noise of his commerce,
and all the thunder of his navies, it can hush in a moment within the
silence of its impenetrable abysses. Whole armies have gone down into that
unfathomable darkness, and not a floating bubble marks the place of their
disappearing. If all the populations of the world, from the beginning of
time, were cast into its depths the smooth surface of its oblivion would
close over them in an hour; and if all the cities of the earth, and all the
structures and monuments ever reared by man were heaped together over that
grave for a tombstone, it would not break the surface of the deep or lift
back their memory to the light of the sun and the breath of the upper air.
The sea would roll its billows in derision, a thousand fathoms deep, above
the topmost stone of that mighty sepulchre. The patient earth submits to
the rule of man, and the mountains bow their rocky heads before the hammer
of his power and the blast of his terrible enginery. The sea cares not for
him; not so much as a single hair's breadth can its level be lowered or
lifted by all the art, and all the effort, and all the enginery of all the
generations of time. He comes and goes upon it, and a moment after it is as
if he had never been there. He may engrave his titles upon the mountain
top, and quarry his signature into the foundations of the globe, but he
cannot write his name on the sea. And thus, by its material uses and its
spiritual voices, does the sea ever speak to us, to tell up that its
builder and maker is God. He hewed its channels in the deep, and drew its
barriers upon the stand, and cast its belted waters around the world. He
fitted it to the earth and the sky, and poised them skilfully, the one
against the other, when He "measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,
and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth
in a measure, and weighted the mountains in scales, and the hills in a
balance." He gave the sea its wonderful laws, and armed it with its
wonderful powers, and set it upon its wonderful work.
"O'er all its breadth His wisdom walks,
On all its waves His goodness shines."
L. Swain.
CCLXXXI.
THE BATTLE OF CIVILIZATIONS.
Our war is only an appeal from the nineteenth century of freedom and
ballots to the system of the sixteenth century. The old conflict,--a new
weapon, that is all. The South thought because once, twice, thrice, the
spaniel North had gotten down on her knees, that this time, also, poisoned
by cotton-dust, she would kiss her feet. But instead of that, for the first
time in our history, the North has flung the insult back, and said: "By the
Almighty, the Mississippi is mine, and I will have it." Now, when shall
come peace? Out of this warlike conflict, when shall come peace? Just as it
came in the conflict of parties and discussion. Whenever one civilization
gets the uppermost positively, then there will be peace, and never till
then.
There is no new thing under the sun. The light shed upon our future is the
light of experience. Seventy years have not left us ignorant of what the
aristocracy of the South means and plans. The South needs to rule, or she
goes by the board. She is a wise power. I respect her for it. She knows
that she needs to rule. What does Mr. Jefferson Davis plan? Do you suppose
he plans for an imaginary line to divide South Carolina from New York and
Massachusetts? What good would that do? An imaginary line would not shut
out ideas. But she must bar out those ideas. That is the programme in the
South. He imagines he can broaden his base by allying himself to a weaker
race. He says: "I will join marriage with the weak races of Mexico and the
Southwest, and then, perhaps, I can draw to my side the Northwest, with its
interests as an agricultural population, naturally allied to me, and not to
the Northeast, with its tariff set of States." And he thinks thus, a
strong, quiet, slaveholding empire, he will bar New England and New York
out in the cold, and will have comparative peace.
But if he bar New England out in the cold, what then? She is still there.
And give it only the fulcrum of Plymouth Rock an idea will upheave the
continent. Now, Davis knows that better than we do,--a great deal better.
His plan, therefore is to mould an empire so strong, so broad, that it can
control New England and New York. He is not only to found a slaveholding
despotism, but he is to make it so strong that, by traitors among us, and
hemming us in by power, he is to cripple, confine, break down, the free
discussion of these Northern States. Unless he does that, he is not safe.
He knows it. Now I do not say he will succeed, but I tell you what I think
is the plan of a statesmanlike leader of this effort. To make slavery safe,
he must mould Massachusetts, not into being a slaveholding Commonwealth,
but into being a silent, unprotesting Commonwealth; that Maryland and
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Arkansas, may be quiet, peaceable populations.
He is a wise man. He knows what he wants, and he wants it with a will, like
Julius Cæsar of old. He has gathered every dollar and every missile south
of Mason and Dixon's line to hurl a thunderbolt that shall serve his
purpose. And if he does achieve a separate confederacy, and shall be able
to bribe the West into neutrality, much less alliance, a dangerous time,
and a terrible battle, will these Eastern States have. For they will never
make peace. The Yankee who comes out of Cromwell's bosom will fight his
Naseby a hundred years, if it last so long, but he will conquer. In other
words, Davis will try to rule. If he conquers, he is to bring, in his
phrase, Carolina to Massachusetts. And if we conquer, what is our policy?
To carry Massachusetts to Carolina. In other words, carry Northern
civilization all over the South. It is a contest between civilizations.
Which ever conquers supersedes the other.
W. Phillips.
CCLXXXII.
SECESSION THE DEATH OF SLAVERY.
Severed from us, South Carolina must have a government. You see now a reign
of terror,--threats to raise means. That can only last a day. Some system
must give a support to a government. It is an expensive luxury. You must
lay taxes to support it. Where will you levy your taxes? They must rest on
productions. Productions are the result of skilled labor. You must educate
your laborer, if you would have the means for carrying on a government.
Despotisms are cheap; free governments are a dear luxury,--the machinery is
complicated and expensive. If the South wants a theoretical republic, she
must pay for it, she must have a basis for taxation. How will she pay for
it? Why, Massachusetts, with a million workmen,--men, women, and
children,--the little feet that can just toddle bringing chips from the
wood-pile.--Massachusetts only pays her own board and lodging, and lays by
about four per cent a year. And South Carolina, with one half idlers, and
the other half slaves, a slave doing only half the work of a freeman,--only
one quarter of the population actually at work, how much do you suppose she
lays up? Lays up a loss! By all the laws of political economy, she lays up
bankruptcy; of course she does! Put her out, and let her see how sheltered
she has been from the laws of trade by the Union! The free labor of the
North pays her plantation patrol; we pay for her government, we pay for her
postage, and for everything else. Launch her out, and let her see if she
can make the year's ends meet! And when she tries, she must educate her
labor in order to get the basis for taxation. Educate slaves! Make a
locomotive with its furnaces of open wirework, fill them with anthracite
coal, and when you have raised it to a white heat, mount and drive it
through a powder magazine, and you are safe, compared with a slaveholding
community educating its slaves. But South Carolina must do it, in order to
get the basis for taxation to support an independent government. The moment
she does it, she removes the safeguard of slavery.
What is the contest in Virginia now? Between the men who want to make their
slaves mechanics, for the increased wages it will secure, and the men who
oppose, for fear of the influence it will have on the general security of
slave property and white throats. Just that dispute will go on, wherever
the Union is dissolved. Slavery comes to an end by the laws of trade. Hang
up your Sharpe's rifle, my valorous friend! The slave does not ask the help
of your musket. He only says, like old Diogenes to Alexander, "Stand out of
my light!" Just take your awkward proportions, you Yankee Democrat and
Republican, out of the light and heat of God's laws of political economy,
and they will melt the slaves' chains away!
W. Phillips.
CCLXXXIII.
THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.
No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new
idea,--wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a
revolution. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural
a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far
back. The child feels; he grows into a man, and thinks; another, perhaps,
speaks, and the world acts out the thought. And this is the history of
modern society. Men undervalue the Anti-slavery movement, because they
imagine you can always put your finger on some illustrious moment in
history, and say, here commenced the great change which has come over the
nation. Not so. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the
Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But
soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of
a mighty republic, fills the Gulf, and divides a continent.
I remember a story of Napoleon which illustrates my meaning. We are apt to
trace his control of France to some noted victory, to the time when he
camped in the Tuileries, or when he dissolved the Assembly by the stamp of
his foot. He reigned in fact when his hand was first felt on the helm of
the vessel of state, and that was far back of the time when he had
conquered in Italy, or his name had been echoed over two continents. It was
on the day when five hundred irresolute men were met in that Assembly which
called itself, and pretended to be, the government of France. They heard
that the mob of Paris was coming the next morning, thirty thousand strong,
to turn them, as was usual in those days, out of doors. And where did this
seemingly great power go for its support and refuge? They sent Tallien to
seek out a boy-lieutenant,--the shadow of an officer,--so thin and pallid
that, when he was placed on the stand before them, the President of the
Assembly, fearful, if the fate of France rested on the shrunken form, the
ashy cheek before him, that all hope was gone, asked, "Young man, can you
protect the Assembly?" And the stern lips of the Corsican boy parted only
to reply, "I always do what I undertake!" Then and there Napoleon ascended
his throne; and the next day, from the steps of St. Roche, thundered forth
the cannon which taught the mob of Paris, for the first time, that it had a
master. That was the commencement of the Empire. So the Anti-slavery
movement commenced unheeded in that "obscure hole" which Mayor Otis could
not find, occupied by a printer and a black boy.
W. Phillips.
CCLXXXIV.
"TOUCH NOT SLAVERY"
What! you the descendants of those men of iron who preferred a
life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New
England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of
those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and
difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the
forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the end
less prairie with human habitations; you, this race of bold reformers who
blended together the most incongruous elements of birth and creed, who
built up a government which you called a model republic, and undertook to
show mankind how to be free; you, the mighty nation of the West, that
presumes to defy the world in arms, and to subject a hemisphere to its
sovereign dictation; you, who boast of recoiling from no enterprise ever so
great, and no problem ever so fearful--the spectral monster of Slavery
stares you in the face, and now your blood runs cold, and all your courage
fails you? For half a century it has disturbed the peace of this Republic;
it has arrogated to itself your national domain; it has attempted to
establish its absolute rule, and to absorb even your future development; it
has disgraced you in the eyes of mankind, and now it endeavors to ruin you
if it cannot rule you; it raises its murderous hand against the
institutions most dear to you; it attempts to draw the power of foreign
nations upon your heads; it swallows up the treasures you have earned by
long years of labor; it drinks the blood of your sons and the tears of your
wives and now, every day it is whispered in your ears, "Whatever Slavery
may have done to you, whatever you may suffer, touch it not! No matter how
many thousand millions of your wealths it may cost, no matter how much
blood you may have to shed in order to disarm its murderous hand, touch it
not! No matter how many years of peace and prosperity you may have to
sacrifice in order to prolong its existence, touch it not! And if it should
cost you your honor, touch it not!"
Listen to this story: On the Lower Potomac, as the papers tell us, a negro
comes within our lines, and tells the valiant defenders of the Union that
his master conspires with the rebels, and has a quantity of arms concealed
in a swamp; our soldiers go and find the arms; the master reclaims the
slave; the slave is given up; the master ties him to his horse, drags him
along eleven miles to his house, lashes him to a tree, and, with the
assistance of his overseer, whips him three hours--three mortal hours; then
the negro dies. That black man served the Union; Slavery attempts to
destroy the Union; the Union surrenders the black man to Slavery, and he is
whipped to death--touch it not! Let an imperishable blush of shame cover
every cheek in this boasted land of freedom--but be careful not to touch
Slavery! Ah, what a dark divinity is this, that we must sacrifice to it our
peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable
vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon
me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac
imagination; and yet--have I been unjust in what I have said?
Carl Schurz.
CCLXXXV.
OHIO.
Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to the beneficent
reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years than
he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence but in the
emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population as that of all
England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon, and Shakespeare, and
began its continuous attempts at colonizing America. Each one of her
inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his own toil. She possesses wealth
that must be computed by thousands of millions; and her frugal, industrious
and benevolent people, at once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of
their faculties, restless in enterprise, do not squander the accumulations
of their industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more
productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for
mechanical purposes the unwitting forces of nature; keeping exemplary good
faith with their public creditors; building in half a century more.
churches than all England has raised since this continent was discovered;
endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries of learning.
Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as the best of fortresses,
Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her school-teachers, of whom she
pays more than twenty thousand; she provides a library for every
school-district; she counts among her citizens more than three hundred
thousand men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that number of
children registered as students in her public schools. Here the purity of
domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity of woman. In the
heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of corn, of
wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance of 1787, already
the young mother of other commonwealths that bid fair to vie with her in
beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory, crowned with cities, and
challenges the admiration of the world. Hither should come the political
skeptic, who, in his despair, is ready to strand the ship of state; for
here he may learn how to guide it safely on the waters. Should some modern
Telemachus, heir to an island empire, touch these shores, here he may
observe the vitality and strength of the principle of popular power; take
from the book of experience the lesson that in public affairs great and
happy results follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that
principle, and learn to rebuke ill-advised counsellors who pronounce the
most momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a
failure.
G. Bancroft.
CCLXXXVI.
THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH.
It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall
be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us do our part to have
it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill
temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us,
let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our
deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. The question is, What will
satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must,
somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by
experience, is no easy task. We have been trying to convince them from the
very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our
platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them
alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. What will convince
them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in
calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly--done in acts as well as
in words. Silence will not be tolerated we must place ourselves avowedly
with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits or in private. We must arrest and return
their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free
State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all
taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all
their troubles proceed from us.
I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most
of them would probably say to us: "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say
what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone--have never
disturbed them--so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies
them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.
Nor can we justifiably withhold this, an any ground save our conviction
that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and
constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and
swept away. If it is right, we can not justly object to its
nationality--its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist
upon its extension--its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant,
if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if
they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong,
is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it
right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition,
as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can
we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our
moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?