* * * * *

Yet more: aggressive war is a sin; a corruption of the public morals. It

is a practical denial of Christianity; a violation of God's eternal law

of love. This is so plain that I shall say little upon it to-day. Your

savagest and most vulgar captain would confess he does not fight as a

Christian--but as a soldier; your magistrate calls for volunteers--not

as a man loving Christianity, and loyal to God; only as Governor, under

oath to keep the Constitution, the tradition of the elders; not under

oath to keep the commandment of God! In war the laws are suspended,

violence and cunning rule everywhere. The battle of Yorktown was gained

by a lie, though a Washington told it. As a soldier it was his duty. Men

"emulate the tiger;" the hand is bloody, and the heart hard. Robbery and

murder are the rule, the glory of men. "Good men look sad, but ruffians

dance and leap." Men are systematically trained to burn towns, to murder

fathers and sons; taught to consider it "glory" to do so. The Government

collects ruffians and cut-throats. It compels better men to serve with

these and become cut-throats. It appoints chaplains to blaspheme

Christianity; teaching the ruffians how to pray for the destruction of

the enemy, the burning of his towns; to do this in the name of Christ

and God. I do not censure all the men who serve: some of them know no

better; they have heard that a man would "perish everlastingly" if he

did not believe the Athanasian creed; that if he questioned the story of

Jonah, or the miraculous birth of Jesus, he was in danger of hell-fire,

and if he doubted damnation was sure to be damned. They never heard

that such a war was a sin; that to create a war was treason, and to

fight in it wrong. They never thought of thinking for themselves; their

thinking was to read a newspaper, or sleep through a sermon. They

counted it their duty to obey the Government without thinking if that

Government be right or wrong. I deny not the noble, manly character of

many a soldier, his heroism, self-denial and personal sacrifice.

Still, after all proper allowance is made for a few individuals, the

whole system of war is unchristian and sinful. It lives only by evil

passions. It can be defended only by what is low, selfish, and animal.

It absorbs the scum of the cities, pirates, robbers, murderers. It makes

them worse, and better men like them. To take one man's life is murder;

what is it to practise killing as an art, a trade; to do it by

thousands? Yet I think better of the hands that do the butchering than

of the ambitious heads, the cold, remorseless hearts, which plunge the

nation into war.

In war the State teaches men to lie, to steal, to kill. It calls for

privateers, who are commonly pirates with a national charter, and

pirates are privateers with only a personal charter. Every camp is a

school of profanity, violence, licentiousness, and crimes too foul to

name. It is so without sixty-five thousand gallons of whiskey. This is

unavoidable. It was so with Washington's army, with Cornwallis's, with

that of Gustavus Adolphus, perhaps the most moral army the world ever

saw. The soldier's life generally unfits a man for the citizen's! When

he returns from a camp, from a war, back to his native village, he

becomes a curse to society and a shame to the mother that bore him. Even

the soldiers of the Revolution, who survived the war, were mostly ruined

for life, debauched, intemperate, vicious and vile. What loathsome

creatures so many of them were! They bore our burden, for such were the

real martyrs of that war, not the men who fell under the shot! How many

men of the rank and file in the late war have since become respectable

citizens?

To show how incompatible are War and Christianity, suppose that he who

is deemed the most Christian of Christ's disciples, the well-beloved

John, were made a navy-chaplain, and some morning, when a battle is

daily looked for, should stand on the gun-deck, amid lockers of shot,

his Bible resting on a cannon, and expound Christianity to men with

cutlasses by their side! Let him read for the morning lesson the Sermon

on the Mount, and for text take words from his own Epistle, so sweet, so

beautiful, so true: "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth

God, for God is love." Suppose he tells his strange audience that all

men are brothers; that God is their common father; that Christ loved us

all, showing us how to live the life of love; and then, when he had

melted all those savage hearts by words so winsome and so true, let him

conclude, "Blessed are the men-slayers! Seek first the glory which

cometh of battle. Be fierce as tigers. Mar God's image in which your

brothers are made. Be not like Christ, but Cain who slew his brother!

When you meet the enemy, fire into their bosoms; kill them in the dear

name of Christ; butcher them in the spirit of God. Give them no quarter,

for we ought not to lay down our lives for the brethren; only the

murderer hath eternal life!"

* * * * *

Yet great as are these three-fold evils, there are times when the

soberest men and the best men have welcomed war, coolly and in their

better moments. Sometimes a people, long oppressed, has "petitioned,

remonstrated, cast itself at the feet of the throne," with only insult

for answer to its prayer. Sometimes there is a contest between a

falsehood and a great truth; a self-protecting war for freedom of mind,

heart and soul; yes, a war for a man's body, his wife's and children's

body, for what is dearer to men than life itself, for the unalienable

rights of man, for the idea that all are born free and equal. It was so

in the American Revolution; in the English, in the French Revolution. In

such cases men say, "Let it come." They take down the firelock in

sorrow; with a prayer they go forth to battle, asking that the Right

may triumph. Much as I hate war I cannot but honor such men. Were they

better, yet more heroic, even war of that character might be avoided.

Still it is a colder heart than mine which does not honor such men,

though it believes them mistaken. Especially do we honor them, when it

is the few, the scattered, the feeble, contending with the many and the

mighty; the noble fighting for a great idea, and against the base and

tyrannical. Then most men think the gain, the triumph of a great idea,

is worth the price it costs, the price of blood.

I will not stop to touch that question, If man may ever shed the blood

of man. But it is plain that an aggressive war like this is wholly

unchristian, and a reproach to the nation and the age.

* * * * *

Now, to make the evils of war still clearer, and to bring them home to

your door, let us suppose there was war between the counties of Suffolk,

on the one side, and Middlesex on the other--this army at Boston, that

at Cambridge. Suppose the subject in dispute was the boundary line

between the two, Boston claiming a pitiful acre of flat land, which the

ocean at low tide disdained to cover. To make sure of this, Boston

seizes whole miles of flats, unquestionably not its own. The rulers on

one side are fools, and traitors on the other. The two commanders have

issued their proclamations; the money is borrowed; the whiskey

provided; the soldiers--Americans, Negroes, Irishmen, all the

able-bodied men--are enlisted. Prayers are offered in all the churches,

and sermons preached, showing that God is a man of war, and Cain his

first saint, an early Christian, a Christian before Christ. The

Bostonians wish to seize Cambridge, burn the houses, churches,

college-halls, and plunder the library. The men of Cambridge wish to

seize Boston, burn its houses and ships, plundering its wares and its

goods. Martial law is proclaimed on both sides. The men of Cambridge cut

asunder the bridges, and make a huge breach in the mill-dam, planting

cannon to enfilade all those avenues. Forts crown the hilltops, else so

green. Men, madder than lunatics, are crowded into the Asylum. The

Bostonians rebuild the old fortifications on the Neck; replace the forts

on Beacon-hill, Fort-hill, Copps-hill, levelling houses to make room for

redoubts and bastions. The batteries are planted, the mortars got ready;

the furnaces and magazines are all prepared. The three hills are grim

with war. From Copps-hill men look anxious to that memorable height the

other side of the water. Provisions are cut off in Boston; no man may

pass the lines; the aqueduct refuses its genial supply; children cry for

their expected food. The soldiers parade, looking somewhat tremulous and

pale; all the able-bodied have come, the vilest most willingly; some are

brought by force of drink, some by force of arms. Some are in brilliant

dresses, some in their working frocks. The banners are consecrated by

solemn words.[6] Your church-towers are military posts of observation.

There are Old Testament prayers to the "God of Hosts" in all the

churches of Boston; prayers that God would curse the men of Cambridge,

make their wives widows, their children fatherless, their houses a ruin,

the men corpses, meat for the beast of the field and the bird of the

air. Last night the Bostonians made a feint of attacking Charlestown,

raining bombs and red-hot cannon-balls from Copps-hill, till they have

burnt a thousand houses, where the British burnt not half so many. Women

and children fled screaming from the blazing rafters of their homes. The

men of Middlesex crowd into Charlestown.

In the mean time the Bostonians hastily repair a bridge or two; some

pass that way, some over the Neck; all stealthily by night, and while

the foe expect them at Bunker's, amid the blazing town, they have stolen

a march and rush upon Cambridge itself. The Cambridge men turn back. The

battle is fiercely joined. You hear the cannon, the sharp report of

musketry. You crowd the hills, the house-tops; you line the Common, you

cover the shore, yet you see but little in the sulphurous cloud. Now

the Bostonians yield a little, a reinforcement goes over. All the men

are gone; even the gray-headed who can shoulder a firelock. They plunge

into battle mad with rage, madder with rum. The chaplains loiter behind.

"Pious men, whom duty brought,

To dubious verge of battle fought,

To shrive the dying, bless the dead!"

The battle hangs long in even scale. At length it turns. The Cambridge

men retreat, they run, they fly. The houses burn. You see the churches

and the colleges go up, a stream of fire. That library--founded amid

want and war and sad sectarian strife, slowly gathered by the saving of

two centuries, the hope of the poor scholar, the boast of the rich

one--is scattered to the winds and burnt with fire, for the solid

granite is blasted by powder, and the turrets fall. Victory is ours. Ten

thousand men of Cambridge lie dead; eight thousand of Boston. There

writhe the wounded; men who but few hours before were poured over the

battle-field a lava flood of fiery valor--fathers, brothers, husbands,

sons. There they lie, torn and mangled; black with powder; red with

blood; parched with thirst; cursing the load of life they now must bear

with bruised frames and mutilated limbs. Gather them into hasty

hospitals--let this man's daughter come to-morrow and sit by him,

fanning away the flies; he shall linger out a life of wretched anguish

unspoken and unspeakable, and when he dies his wife religiously will

keep the shot which tore his limbs. There is the battle-field! Here the

horse charged; there the howitzers scattered their shells, pregnant with

death; here the murderous canister and grape mowed down the crowded

ranks; there the huge artillery, teeming with murder, was dragged o'er

heaps of men--wounded friends who just now held its ropes, men yet

curling with anguish, like worms in the fire. Hostile and friendly, head

and trunk are crushed beneath those dreadful wheels. Here the infantry

showered their murdering shot. That ghastly face was beautiful the day

before--a sabre hewed its half away.

"The earth is covered thick with other clay,

Which her own clay must cover, heaped and pent,

Rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blent."

Again it is night. Oh, what a night, and after what a day! Yet the pure

tide of woman's love, which never ebbs since earth began, flows on in

spite of war and battle. Stealthily, by the pale moonlight, a mother of

Boston treads the weary miles to reach that bloody spot; a widow

she--seeking among the slain her only son. The arm of power drove him

forth reluctant to the fight. A friendly soldier guides her way. Now

she turns over this face, whose mouth is full of purple dust, bit out of

the ground in his extremest agony, the last sacrament offered him by

Earth herself; now she raises that form, cold, stiff, stony and ghastly

as a dream of hell. But, lo! another comes, she too a woman, younger and

fairer, yet not less bold, a maiden from the hostile town to seek her

lover. They meet, two women among the corpses; two angels come to

Golgotha, seeking to raise a man. There he lies before them; they look.

Yes it is he you seek; the same dress, form, features too; it is he, the

son, the lover. Maid and mother could tell that face in any light. The

grass is wet with his blood. The ground is muddy with the life of men.

The mother's innocent robe is drabbled in the blood her bosom bore.

Their kisses, groans, and tears, recall the wounded man. He knows the

mother's voice; that voice yet more beloved. His lips move only, for

they cannot speak. He dies! The waxing moon moves high in heaven,

walking in beauty amid the clouds, and murmurs soft her cradle song unto

the slumbering earth. The broken sword reflects her placid beams. A star

looks down and is imaged back in a pool of blood. The cool night wind

plays in the branches of the trees shivered with shot. Nature is

beautiful--that lovely grass underneath their feet; those pendulous

branches of the leafy elm; the stars and that romantic moon lining the

clouds with silver light! A groan of agony, hopeless and prolonged,

wails out from that bloody ground. But in yonder farm the whippoorwill

sings to her lover all night long; the rising tide ripples melodious

against the shores. So wears the night away,--Nature, all sinless, round

that field of woe.

"The morn is up again, the dewy morn,

With breath all incense and with cheek all bloom,

Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

And living as if earth contained no tomb,

And glowing into day."

What a scene that morning looks upon! I will not turn again. Let the

dead bury their dead. But their blood cries out of the ground against

the rulers who shed it,--"Cain! where are thy brothers?" What shall the

fool answer; what the traitor say?

Then comes thanksgiving in all the churches of Boston. The consecrated

banners, stiff with blood and "glory," are hung over the altar. The

minister preaches and the singer sings: "The Lord hath been on our side.

He treadeth the people under me. He teacheth my hands to war, my fingers

to fight. Yea, He giveth me the necks of mine enemies; for the Lord is

his name;" and "It was a famous victory!" Boston seizes miles square of

land; but her houses are empty; her wives widows; her children

fatherless. Rachel weeps for the murder of her innocents, yet dares not

rebuke the rod.

I know there is no fighting across Charles River, as in this poor

fiction; but there was once, and instead of Charles say Rio Grande; for

Cambridge read Metamoras, and it is what your President recommended;

what your Congress enacted; what your Governor issued his proclamation

for; what your volunteers go to accomplish: yes, what they fired cannon

for on Boston Common the other day. I wish that were a fiction of mine!

* * * * *

We are waging a most iniquitous war--so it seems to me. I know I may be

wrong, but I am no partisan, and if I err, it is not wilfully, not

rashly. I know the Mexicans are a wretched people; wretched in their

origin, history, and character. I know but two good things of them as a

people--they abolished negro slavery, not long ago; they do not covet

the lands of their neighbors. True, they have not paid all their debts,

but it is scarcely decent in a nation, with any repudiating States, to

throw the first stone at Mexico for that!

I know the Mexicans cannot stand before this terrible Anglo-Saxon race,

the most formidable and powerful the world ever saw; a race which has

never turned back; which, though it number less than forty millions, yet

holds the Indies, almost the whole of North America; which rules the

commerce of the world; clutches at New Holland, China, New Zealand,

Borneo, and seizes island after island in the furthest seas; the race

which invented steam as its awful type. The poor, wretched Mexicans can

never stand before us. How they perished in battle! They must melt away

as the Indians before the white man. Considering how we acquired

Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, I cannot forbear thinking that this people

will possess the whole of the continent before many years; perhaps

before the century ends. But this may be had fairly; with no injustice

to any one; by the steady advance of a superior race, with superior

ideas and a better civilization; by commerce, trade, arts, by being

better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly. Is it not

better to acquire it by the schoolmaster than the cannon; by peddling

cloth, tin, any thing rather than bullets? It may not all belong to this

Government, and yet to this race. It would be a gain to mankind if we

could spread over that country the Idea of America--that all men are

born free and equal in rights, and establish there political, social,

and individual freedom. But to do that, we must first make real these

ideas at home.

In the general issue between this race and that, we are in the right.

But in this special issue, and this particular war, it seems to me that

we are wholly in the wrong; that our invasion of Mexico is as bad as the

partition of Poland in the last century and in this. If I understand the

matter, the whole movement, the settlement of Texas, the Texan

revolution, the annexation of Texas, the invasion of Mexico, has been a

movement hostile to the American idea, a movement to extend slavery. I

do not say such was the design on the part of the people, but on the

part of the politicians who pulled the strings. I think the papers of

the Government and the debates of Congress prove that. The annexation

has been declared unconstitutional in its mode, a virtual dissolution of

the Union, and that by very high and well-known authority. It was

expressly brought about for the purpose of extending slavery. An attempt

is now made to throw the shame of this on the democrats. I think the

democrats deserve the shame; but I could never see that the whigs, on

the whole, deserved it any less; only they were not quite so open.

Certainly, their leaders did not take ground against it, never as

against a modification of the tariff! When we annexed Texas we of course

took her for better or worse, debts and all, and annexed her war along

with her. I take it everybody knew that; though now some seem to pretend

a decent astonishment at the result. Now one party is ready to fight for

it as the other! The North did not oppose the annexation of Texas. Why

not? They knew they could make money by it. The eyes of the North are

full of cotton; they see nothing else, for a web is before them; their

ears are full of cotton, and they hear nothing but the buzz of their

mills; their mouth is full of cotton, and they can speak audibly but

two words--Tariff, Tariff, Dividends, Dividends. The talent of the North

is blinded, deafened, gagged with its own cotton. The North clamored

loudly when the nation's treasure was removed from the United States

Bank; it is almost silent at the annexation of a slave territory big as

the kingdom of France, encumbered with debts, loaded with the entailment

of war! Northern Governors call for soldiers; our men volunteer to fight

in a most infamous war for the extension of slavery! Tell it not in

Boston, whisper it not in Faneuil Hall, lest you weaken the slumbers of

your fathers, and they curse you as cowards and traitors unto men! Not

satisfied with annexing Texas and a war, we next invaded a territory

which did not belong to Texas, and built a fort on the Rio Grande,

where, I take it, we had no more right than the British, in 1841, had on

the Penobscot or the Saco. Now the Government and its Congress would

throw the blame on the innocent, and say war exists "by the act of

Mexico!" If a lie was ever told, I think this is one. Then the "dear

people" must be called on for money and men, for "the soil of this free

republic is invaded," and the Governor of Massachusetts, one of the men

who declared the annexation of Texas unconstitutional, recommends the

war he just now told us to pray against, and appeals to our

"patriotism," and "humanity," as arguments for butchering the Mexicans,

when they are in the right and we in the wrong! The maxim is held up,

"Our country, right or wrong;" "Our country, howsoever bounded;" and it

might as well be, "Our country, howsoever governed." It seems popularly

and politically forgotten that there is such a thing as Right. The

nation's neck invites a tyrant. I am not at all astonished that northern

representatives voted for all this work of crime. They are no better

than southern representatives; scarcely less in favor of slavery, and

not half so open. They say: Let the North make money, and you may do

what you please with the nation; and we will choose governors that dare

not oppose you, for, though we are descended from the Puritans we have

but one article in our creed we never flinch from following, and that

is--to make money; honestly, if we can; if not, as we can!

Look through the action of your Government, and your Congress. You see

that no reference has been had in this affair to Christian ideas; none

to justice and the eternal right. Nay, none at all! In the churches, and

among the people, how feeble has been the protest against this great

wrong. How tamely the people yield their necks--and say: "Take our sons

for the war--we care not, right or wrong." England butchers the Sikhs in

India--her generals are elevated to the peerage, and the head of her

church writes a form of thanksgiving for the victory, to be read in all

the churches of that Christian land.[7] To make it still more

abominable, the blasphemy is enacted on Easter Sunday, the great holiday

of men who serve the Prince of Peace. We have not had prayers in the

churches, for we have no political Archbishop. But we fired cannon in

joy that we had butchered a few wretched men--half starved, and forced

into the ranks by fear of death! Your peace societies, and your

churches, what can they do? What dare they? Verily, we are a faithless

and perverse generation. God be merciful to us, sinners as we are!

* * * * *

But why talk for ever? What shall we do? In regard to this present war,

we can refuse to take any part in it; we can encourage others to do the

same; we can aid men, if need be, who suffer because they refuse. Men

will call us traitors: what then? That hurt nobody in '76! We are a

rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted

before we were born; our creeds are infidelity to the mother-church; our

Constitution treason to our father-land. What of that? Though all the

governors in the world bid us commit treason against man, and set the

example, let us never submit. Let God only be a master to control our

conscience!

We can hold public meetings in favor of peace, in which what is wrong

shall be exposed and condemned. It is proof of our cowardice that this

has not been done before now. We can show in what the infamy of a nation

consists; in what its real glory. One of your own men, the last summer,

startled the churches out of their sleep,[8] by his manly trumpet,

talking with us, and telling that the true grandeur of a nation was

justice, not glory; peace, not war.