CHAPTER XIII.

Beginning of the Great Battle—Five Great Eras—Compromise Measures of

1850—“Shall We Compromise”—The Fugitive Slave Law Denounced—Right of

Free Speech Defended—Commercial Liberty—Fighting Caste—Liberty of

the Pulpit Defended—Quickness of Retort—Sentiment of the

Times—Reaction—Visit of Kossuth—Election of 1852—The Parker

Controversy—Degraded into Liberty—John Mitchel—Garrison—Close of

this Era.

Other things than opening the church building contributed to make 1850

an eventful year to Henry Ward Beecher.

In that year slavery came to the place of supreme interest in our

national affairs which it never afterwards lost until it was swept away

in the battle-storm of 1861-65.

The very month that Plymouth Church took possession of its new house,

the first month of the last half of the nineteenth century, Henry Clay

submitted a series of resolutions in the Senate of the United States

as “compromise measures for a final and complete adjustment of the

slavery question.” In the debate, passage, and enforcement of these

measures, the utterly antagonistic nature of the two contending

elements, liberty and slavery, which had been brought together under

our Constitution, became so evident; slavery, from the very necessity

of self-preservation, became so aggressive, advanced claims so

comprehensive and so forced the fighting, that the very measures

intended to compromise the whole difficulty made it clear that there

could be _no_ compromise. There could be no amicable adjustment of

interests so diametrically opposed; one or the other, liberty or

slavery, must take undivided and undisputed possession of the

government. From debate of words the conflict passed rapidly to the

argument of arms, first on the plains of Kansas and eventually over

the whole southern half of our country, developing into the greatest

civil war ever known in the world’s history—a war in comparison with

which, in the numbers engaged on either side, in the breadth of the

battle-field, in the agents of destruction employed and the important

interests at stake, England’s Wars of the Roses, and even the strife

of the rival claimants for the imperial purple of Rome, were

insignificant and secondary contests.

The part of this great slavery conflict in which Mr. Beecher was

actively engaged had five distinct eras, clearly marked by well-defined

boundaries, each presenting peculiar difficulties of its own to be

overcome, and each bringing forward peculiar and important questions for

solution. The first began with the agitation of the Compromise measures

of 1850, and ended in the passage of those measures and their

enforcement, more or less complete, during the uneasy years of 1850 and

1853.

The second began with the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise

measures and continued through what was known as “The Kansas Struggle,”

until April 1, 1858, when the first substantial victory ever won by the

free States was gained in Congress in the permission to give the actual

residents of Kansas a fair vote upon the question of the acceptance or

rejection of the infamous Lecompton Constitution.

The third began with the abandonment by the slave-power of its

dependence upon legislative enactments, which its defeat in Kansas had

proved to be futile, and the inauguration of an era of secession and

violence, and ended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, which took

effect January 1, 1863, and which legally destroyed slavery in all the

States in rebellion, and substantially within the whole domain of the

United States.

The fourth era began with the issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation;

extended through two years and more of battle by which the proclamation

was carried into effect, and slavery was destroyed _de facto_ as it had

already been _de jure_, and foreign intervention was prevented; and

ended with raising the flag over Sumter, the sign of the restoration of

our national authority over a free and undivided national domain.

The fifth includes the period of reconstruction, in which the difficult

task of bringing the States, once in rebellion but now submissive, back

into the Union was successfully accomplished. It covers the ground from

the close of the war to the present time, or, more properly, from the

death of President Lincoln, when the South lay prostrate at the feet of

the victorious North, to the election of President Cleveland, when, as

Mr. Beecher hoped and believed, sectional lines were obliterated and the

South once more saw the candidate she favored raised to be the chief

magistrate of our common country.

The Compromise measures of 1850 were conceived for the purpose of

removing the serious and dangerous complications that had arisen,

between the North and the South, in the attempt to organize the

territory recently acquired from Mexico, and in admitting California as

a free State with a constitution for ever prohibiting slavery within her

borders. The South felt that such an addition to the free States would

so disturb the balance of power between the sections that something must

be given her as a compensation. Hence these Compromise measures, which

provided for the admission of California as a free State, but gave the

South, as an offset, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law and paid Texas

ten millions of dollars for the adjustment of her State boundaries.

Honestly intended, no doubt, and urged by the mover, Henry Clay, and

accepted by many who disliked it, from patriotic motives, this

Compromise was, nevertheless, wrong in principle and proved only

mischievous in results. It rested on the false theory that the

development of both liberty and slavery was equally the duty of the

Republic, and that whatever gain was made by the former must be

equalized to the latter by some new concession, and led to constantly

increasing disturbance in both sections. While failing to satisfy the

more radical men of the South, it was utterly abhorrent to a much larger

body at the North. It seemed to the latter to be but another great step

taken by the slave-power in its attempt to gain possession of the whole

land. The first had been the Missouri Compromise, in which slavery,

surrendering what it never owned—viz., the territory north of 36° 30′,

called Mason and Dixon’s line—gained Missouri and a _quasi_ right to all

territory south of that line. In this second great step now proposed

they did not fail to note that the provision to prohibit slavery in the

newly-acquired territories, called the “Wilmot Proviso,” had been

defeated in Congress, nor fail to see that in these Compromise measures,

should they be carried, the slave-power would secure the right to hunt

and capture its fugitives in every city, town, and home of the free

States, and to compel every Northern citizen to aid in the work, thus

making, so far as fugitives were concerned, slave territory of the whole

North. They saw in this measure a great advance towards nationalizing

this institution and securing for it the right, aimed at by its

advocates from the first, to go unquestioned and protected wherever the

authority of the Constitution of the United States was recognized. If

this were passed they felt it to be not at all improbable that the

threat of Senator Toombs, of Georgia, to call the roll of his slaves

from the steps of Bunker Hill Monument, would be executed, and they

opposed it with an energy born both of conviction and abhorrence. In

this opposition none were more strenuous than Mr. Beecher. Speaking of

this period, he says:

“In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay’s Omnibus Bill,

including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly roused, and in the

pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the utmost earnestness the

infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then that I wrote that article,

‘Shall we Compromise?’ It was read to John C. Calhoun on his sick-bed by

his clerk, and he raised himself up and said: ‘Read that article again.’

The article was read. ‘The man who says that is right. There is no

alternative. It is liberty or slavery.’ And then, when Webster made his

fatal apostasy on March 7, 1850, I joined with all Northern men of any

freedom-loving spirit in denouncing it and in denouncing him. Forthwith,

after a paralysis of a few weeks, his friends determined to save him by

getting all the old clergymen—such men as Dr. Spring, Dr. Lord of

Dartmouth, and the Andover professors—to take his part. The effort was

to get every great and influential man in the North to stand up for

Webster; and then it was that I flamed. They failed utterly. Professor

Woolsey of New Haven, Dr. Bacon, Dr. Hopkins, President of Williams

College in Massachusetts, and various other most influential men,

absolutely refused to sustain Webster.”

In the issue of the _Independent_ of February 21, 1850, filling three

columns, we have the famous article referred to above. We quote only

enough to indicate its spirit and line of argument:[5]

-----

Footnote 5:

This article entire can be found in Mr. Beecher’s “Patriotic

Addresses,” published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, New York City.

-----

“SHALL WE COMPROMISE?

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise has been violently resisted by the South and but

coldly looked upon by the North.

“It is not that both sides are infatuated and refuse a reasonable

settlement; but the skill of Mr. Clay has evidently not touched the seat

of the disease. He either has not perceived or else has not thought it

expedient to meet the real issue now before the people of the United

States. The struggle now going on is a struggle whose depths lie in the

organization of society in the North and South respectively; whose

causes are planted in the Constitution. There are two incompatible and

mutually destructive principles wrought together in the government of

this land.... These elements are slavery and liberty.... One or the

other must die.

”... The South now demands room and right for extension. She asks the

North to be a partner. For every free State she demands one State for

slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail

in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall

sing for joy.

“... It is time for good men and true to gird up their loins and stand

forth for God and humanity. No compromises can help us which dodge the

question, certainly none which settle it for slavery....

“There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her duty

openly, firmly, and for ever to refuse to slavery another inch of

territory, and to see to it that it never gets it by fraud. It is her

duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where it now exists.

It is her duty to declare that she will under no consideration be a

party to any farther inhumanity and injustice....

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise resolutions demand better provision for the

recovery of fugitive slaves, and a bill is now pending in the United

States Senate for that purpose. On this matter our feelings are so

strong that we confess a liability to intemperance of expression.

“If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which

violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. Not even the Constitution

shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires confederated in my behalf

that I should maintain that instrument, so I will to the utmost bound of

right. But who, with power which even God denies to Himself, shall by

compact fore-ordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice? I

disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I have breath

will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of recapturing a

fellow-man for bondage; and may my foot palsy and my right hand forget

her cunning if I ever become so untrue to mercy and to religion as not

by all the means in my power to give aid and succor to every man whose

courageous flight tells me he is worthy of liberty!

”... From those compromises, like Mr. Clay’s, which seek for peace

rather than for humanity—from such compromises, guileless though they

seem, and gilded till they shine like heaven, evermore may we be

delivered.”

This battle in Congress resulted, like every battle since the adoption

of the Constitution, in a victory for the slave party. In September of

this year, 1850, the Compromise measures, which had passed both Houses

of Congress, were signed by President Fillmore and became by a very

decided majority the law of the land. Many things had contributed to

this result. On the one hand, there was a strong party in the South,

representing largely the sentiment of that whole section, who felt

themselves aggrieved and deprived of their rights under the

Constitution, since they could not carry their property with them into

the common territory of the Union, and who saw in these Compromise

measures a step in the direction of nationalizing their peculiar

institution; on the other the commercial and manufacturing interests of

the North demanded a cessation of strife, that they might enter into the

prosperity opened to them by the discovery of the gold upon our Western

coast; again, the fear of disruption, if the bitter discussion in

Congress should continue, reconciled many to such measures as promised

peace; also, the habit of compromise, which had been early formed, and

stood apparently justified by years of prosperity and growth, made it

easier to again adopt this course; and, perhaps more influential than

any other, the leaders most beloved and trusted at the North were in

favor of the measure. Henry Clay was its originator, and Daniel Webster,

the great expounder of the Constitution, in his fatal speech of March 7,

1850, had justified the Compromise measures, spoke not a word in

condemnation of the legal or moral crudities and enormities of the

Fugitive Slave Law, and had reserved the lightning of his sarcasm and

the thunder of his condemnation for the Abolitionists:

“Nothing can be plainer than that all parties in the state were drifting

in the dark, without any comprehension of the elemental causes at work.

Without prescience or sagacity, like ignorant physicians, they

prescribed at random; they sewed on patches, new compromises on old

garments, sought to conceal the real depth of the danger of the

gathering torrent by crying peace! peace! to each other. In short, they

were seeking to medicate volcanoes and stop earthquakes by administering

political quinine. The wise statesmen were bewildered and politicians

were juggling fools.”

If the anti-slavery men of the North hated the Compromise, and

especially the Fugitive Slave clause in it, while it was being debated

in Congress, their abhorrence was increased a thousand-fold now that all

it had cost and all it threatened was in a measure comprehended. Looking

at it calmly, they saw that safe-guards which from time immemorial had

gathered around the individual to protect him in person and liberty had,

for a very large class in the community, been suddenly destroyed.

Trial by jury was denied. Opportunity for the accused to summon

witnesses in his own defence was not given, and “in no trial or hearing

under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitives be admitted

to evidence.” He had no hearing before any competent judge, but before a

commissioner appointed to take depositions, who, whatever his ability or

lack of ability, was clothed by this infamous act with plenary power in

the premises.

On the simple certificate of this man the unhappy victim was hurried off

at once into slavery, and no stay of proceedings or liberty of appeal

was granted. Dumb, undefended, his destiny at the mercy of any accuser,

and of a commissioner possibly ignorant and possibly vicious, the

accused was consigned to a state worse to many than death.

Aimed at a particular class, its injustice was seen to be indiscriminate

enough to make an attack possible upon individuals of any class; and its

provisions for the deprivation of a single right made necessary such a

stringency in the exercise of other rights as could not be tolerated in

a free community.

Atrocious in itself, it became still more offensive and dangerous by

reason of the ease with which its provisions could be employed by

villains for kidnapping negroes, or even white men, who had never been

slaves. It was stated and believed that along the whole line between the

slave and free States arresting fugitives at once became a regular

business, with very little care in many instances as to the previous

liberty or slavery of those arrested. Instances were continually being

recorded of colored boys and girls being unexpectedly spirited away and

hurried off into bondage. Great activity in this work of securing

fugitives who had lived in the North for years prevailed, and fear and

apprehension took possession of the whole negro population of that

section, and a corresponding indignation grew hot in the hearts of

multitudes of freemen.

Scenes and incidents were continually transpiring and published in the

newspapers that stirred the one party to greater hatred of the

institution of slavery, and the other party to greater hatred to the

means, regular or irregular, that were employed to prevent the carrying

out of its purpose.

As may well be supposed, Mr. Beecher speaks with no greater affection

for this measure, now that it has become a law, than when it was being

debated in Congress.

In a Star paper that appeared October 3, upon “The Fugitive Slave Bill

at its Work,” he meets it with undisguised and open defiance. “With such

solemn convictions no law impious to God and humanity shall have respect

or observance at our hands. If in God’s providence fugitives ask bread

or shelter, raiment or conveyance, from us, my own children shall lack

bread before they; my own flesh shall sting with cold ere they shall

lack raiment; I will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their

flight, and while under my shelter or my convoy they shall be to me as

my own flesh and blood; and whatsoever defence I would put forth for my

own children, that shall these poor, despised, and persecuted creatures

have in my house or upon the road.”

He follows with another very thoughtful and able article upon “Law and

Conscience” in defence of his position, and for the instruction of those

who were in doubt what course to take in the conflicting claims of the

law of the land on one side and their feelings of humanity upon the

other.

In the first place, he makes the duty of obedience to law very strong:

“Nothing could be more mischievous than the prevalence of the doctrine

that a citizen may disobey an unjust or burdensome law. Should that

liberty be granted, the bad, the selfish, the cruel and grasping, might

disregard wholesome laws as easily as just men unjust laws. It would

constitute every man a court in his own case; and a court, too, in which

selfishness would preside. Society could not exist for a day.

“It is a question seriously asked by thousands: How can we as good

citizens subscribe to such wholesome doctrine and yet openly resist the

Fugitive Slave Law? Many reasons make it important that this question

should be thoroughly answered. There are thousands who _say_ that this

law must be obeyed, and who, with the next breath, bravely and

generously declare that nevertheless, should a distressed fugitive ask

succor, shelter, and guidance at their hand, he should have them. But

this is breaking the law. To keep this law you must not shelter a slave

mother fleeing to her free husband in the North, nor a slave girl whose

foot bounds at the sound of a pursuer, as if it were the knell of

virtue. You must not give direction to a fugitive, though his head be

white and his old limbs reveal half a century of unrequited toil; though

a man say to you, in the awful agony of his soul, ‘Kill me, but for the

love of God do not betray me!’ the law enjoins you to go with the

officer, if he summon you, and help in his arrest! The minister of the

Gospel, the humane philanthropist, peacefully walking to the

Sabbath-sounding bell, must turn aside and help some scoundrel hireling

to run down his slave, if the marshal command him, or break the law!”

He then lays down this general principle:

“Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his person,

estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed; but no citizen is

bound to obey a law which commands _him_ to _inflict_ injury upon

another. We must _endure_ but never _commit_ wrong. We must be patient

when sinned against, but must never sin against others. The law may heap

injustice upon me, but no law can authorize me to pour injustice upon

another. When the law commanded Daniel not to pray he disobeyed it; when

it commanded him to be cast into the lions’ den he submitted.

“A law which enjoins upon a citizen the commission of a crime, and still

more of an open, disgraceful, and flagitious crime, has violated the

confidence of the citizen, and is dissolved in the court of God the

moment it is enacted.

“Let no man stand uncommitted, dodging between daylight and dark, on

this vital principle. Let every man firmly and openly take sides. This

vibrating between humanity for the fugitive and conscience for the law,

this clandestine humanity in spite of law, to which the lips only give a

sullen and pouting obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and

open-hearted integrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom

conscience is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand

forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian’s creed:

_Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me: disobedience to

every law that commands me to sin._”

His conviction of the origin of this whole trouble, his policy

concerning it, and his confidence in the working out of natural causes

are well set forth in an article at this period upon “The Cause and Cure

of Agitation”:

“It ought primarily to be understood that our Constitution has _invited_

this whole conflict which has raged about it. Had the framers been

gifted with prescience they would, we cannot but think, have regarded

the inevitable future mischief of that compromise by which slavery had

its rights embedded in a constitution of liberty, as too great to be

risked. They acted with the light which they had. They swaddled and laid

in one cradle two infant forms. These were rocked together and grew up

together; but one was a wolf’s cub and the other a lamb. Both were alike

peaceful at birth—for a lion’s whelp when first dropped is as gentle as

a doe. Growth brought forth separate natures. Then appeared hostility.

Each acted to its nature.

“Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are

warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery

alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to

abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every

root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask

to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by Congressional

enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution.

We only ask that a line be drawn about it; that an insuperable bank be

cast up; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must find no

new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must abide in its

place, subject to all the legitimate changes which will be brought upon

it by the spirit of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught

by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually into every profession

thousands bred to justice and hating its reverse, by churches preaching

a gospel that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which

always thrive best when the masses are free and refined and therefore

have their wants multiplied, by free agriculture and free commerce.

“When slavery begins, under such a treatment, to flag, we demand that

she be denied political favoritism to regain her loss; we demand that no

laws be enacted to give health to her paralysis and strength to her

relaxing grasp. She boldly and honestly demanded a right to equality

with the North, and prophetically spoke by Calhoun, that the North would

preponderate and crush her. It is true. Time is her enemy. Liberty will,

if let alone, always be a match for oppression. Now, it is because

statesmen propose stepping in between slavery and the appointed bourne

to which she goes, scourged by God and nature, that we resent these

statesmen and refuse to follow them. If her wounds can be stanched, if

she may have adventitious aid in new privileges, slavery will renew her

strength and stave off the final day. But if it be forbidden one

additional favor and be obliged to stand up by the side of free labor,

free schools, free churches, free institutions; if it be obliged to live

in a land of free books, free papers, and free Bibles, it will either

die or else it _ought_ to live.”

He ridicules those measures that had been adopted North and South to

enforce the peace, and compares those who keep agitating against

agitation to poor old “crazy Dinah” who used to sit on the pulpit stairs

in Litchfield. “Once she began talking, but, startled at her want of

manners, she said out loud: ‘Why I’m talking! I’m talking in meetin’!

There, I spoke again. I ought not to speak. There, I spoke once more.

Tut, tut! why, I _keep_ a-speaking.’”

While advocating at this time, as ever afterwards, the utmost liberty of

discussion, he stated his creed in these words: “There is nothing so

safe in a free country as _free discussion_, nothing so dangerous as the

suppression of it; _peace_ and _liberty of speech_, _violence_ and

_intolerance_, respectively go together.”

He argued and advised in a lengthy paper against “the usual unfortunate

concomitants of controversy, bitterness, railing, unfairness, and

exaggerated prejudices.

“We have not the least objection to the most unbounded ardor of

expression, to the most enthusiastic convictions, expressed in the most

positive manner, so long as they relate to _truths_ or _principles_. But

when the propagandist comes to regard those who do not receive his views

as devoid of all principle and necessarily dishonest, and becomes

offensively personal, then controversy is morbid and mischievous. And as

nothing gives such vigor to like or dislike as conscience, so they who

profess to be conscientious are often conscientiously bitter. There is

no revulsion against men or measures so violent as that of pure and

honorable men. A man consciously right should watch against severe

judgments of others. It is sad and curious to observe the progress of

exaggerated impressions of personal character. Those who do not follow

our conscience on the slavery question are often, nevertheless, on the

whole, more conscientious men than we. Those whose reasonings we

pronounce cold and inhuman are not cold or inhuman men. Those whose

commercial interests reduce them, as it seems to us, to a policy on this

particular question which outrages justice and rectitude, are in their

private character most estimable for truth, and even for tender

sympathy. Indeed, this is often shown in strange contrast; for the very

men who give their counsel and zeal and money against the unseen slave

_of the South_ irresistibly pity the particular fugitive whom they may

_see_ running through the North. They give the Union Committee money to

catch the slave, and give the slave money to escape from the Committee.”

All who were acquainted with Mr. Beecher know that the course he advised

for others he persistently and conscientiously pursued himself. We doubt

if any man ever lived who was engaged in so many severe battles and

carried into them or brought from them so little bitterness.

Such a vigorous treatment of large and vital questions commanded a

following; and it was not long before this young minister from the West

was recognized as one of the great anti-slavery leaders and had a

national reputation. Men at the South began to hate him; men at the

North, conservatives whose business interests were wrapped up in the

present state of things, whose goods and principles were equally for

sale in Southern markets, were horrified and alarmed at his unwise

sayings, his blasphemous use of the pulpit for political ends, and his

fiery denunciations of the nation’s pet institution. But over against

these there was another class, daily growing larger, whose consciences

were set free by his clear discrimination of a citizen’s and a

Christian’s duty, whose intelligence was broadened and enlarged by his

lofty views, and whose hearts were set on fire by his mighty enthusiasm

and abounding love. This body daily increased in numbers and came more

and more to share the spirit of their leader. Whatever he wrote they

read. Whenever he spoke the size of church or hall alone decided the

number of hearers. Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a

simple, earnest desire to do his work as God revealed it to him,

unrasped by hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and

high as there was in the land. With cheek still ruddy with youth, with

eyes from which the laughter never died out except when the tears of

sympathy filled them or the deep things of God veiled them, with a heart

that was in sympathy with all nature round him, and which nature and He

who is above nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that

could interpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the

body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a complete

instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come from his

sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he strikes.

In the progress of this discussion upon the Compromise measures, which

had its centre in Congress, but in which every hamlet, almost every

household, in the North had a share, other questions came to the front

as parts of the great controversy.

Among the earliest of these was the right of free speech—a right utterly

unknown where slavery was in power, and always bitterly attacked where

it had influence. As may well be expected, it found in Mr. Beecher one

of its most strenuous champions. Early in his career he urged all the

claims of friendship, risked the safety of his new church building, and

defied the New York and Brooklyn mob, then under the control of the

notorious Captain Rynders, in its defence.

In a sermon preached in 1884 upon the death of Wendell Phillips he gives

an account of his experience in this matter:

“It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth

here that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway

Tabernacle before it was moved up-town, William A. Hall, now dead—a

fervent friend and Abolitionist—had secured the Graham Institute, on

Washington Street, in Brooklyn, wherein to hold a meeting where Mr.

Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the

meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place I

was visited by the committee of that Institute (excellent gentlemen,

whose feelings will not be hurt, because they are all now ashamed of it:

they are in heaven), who said that, in consequence of the great peril

that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty

to use it and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say

that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their

supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing. If there is anything on

earth that I am sensitive to it is the withdrawing of the liberty of

speech and thought. Henry C. Bowen said to me: ‘You can have Plymouth

Church, if you want it.’ ‘How?’ ‘It is a rule of the church trustees

that the church may be let by a majority vote when we are convened; but

if we are not convened, then every trustee must give his consent in

writing. If you choose to make it a personal matter and go to every

trustee, you can have it.’ He meanwhile undertook, with Mr. Hall, to put

new placards over the old ones, notifying men quietly that the meeting

was to be held here, and distributing thousands and tens of thousands of

hand-bills at the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the

trustees man by man. The majority of them very cheerfully accorded the

permission. One or two of them were disposed to decline and withhold it.

I made it a matter of personal friendship: ‘You and I will break if you

don’t give me this permission,’ and they signed. So the meeting glided

from Graham Institute to this house. A great audience assembled. We had

detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle the subject

in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to molest us.”

Neither at this nor any other time was an attack actually made upon

Plymouth Church, although many times in its history have angry men

gathered in the immediate neighborhood, evidently bent on mischief, but

were restrained from violence by the bold bearing of many in the

audience who were known not to be Quakers, and by the presence of the

police, who were kept well informed of their intentions.

Another of the secondary battles that were fought early in this year was

one for commercial liberty.

The South, by the help, and perhaps by the instigation, of Northern

co-operators, attempted nothing less than to boycott every commercial or

manufacturing company that was opposed to them upon the great political

questions of the day. A great “Union Saving Committee” was formed in New

York, and met in Castle Garden and made out a black-list of the

merchants that were anti-slavery, from whom the South were to withdraw

their patronage. Mr. Beecher not only preached against the outrage, but

visited from store to store to uphold the courage of the merchants.

He says: “Mr. Bowen was, of course, included in that blacklist, and

threatened with the loss of all his Southern custom. He came to me and

asked me if I would not write a card for him, and I undertook to do it;

but, my head not running very clear, the only thing I got at, after

making three or four attempts, was, ‘My goods are for sale, but not my

principles,’ but I could not lick it into shape, and I gave the paper to

him and said, ‘You must fix it yourself.’ He took it to Hiram Barney,

and he drew up the card in the shape in which it appeared, including

that sentence, which was the snap of the whole thing.”

“My goods are for sale, but not my principles” became a war-cry for the

independent business men of the day, and had immense influence upon

commercial action.

He fought the petty ostracism of the North, and apparently with success:

“I never preached on that subject. I never said to the people in this

congregation, from the beginning to this day, ‘You ought to let colored

folks sit in your pew.’ I preached the dignity of man as a child of God,

and lifted up the sanctity of human life and nature before the people.

They made the application, and they made it wisely and well.

“When I came here there was no place for colored men and women in the

theatre except the negro pen; no place in the opera; no place in the

church except the negro pew; no place in any lecture-hall; no place in

the first-class car on the railways. The white omnibus of Fulton Ferry

would not allow colored persons to ride in it. They were never allowed

to sit even in the gentlemen’s cabin on the boats.

“I invited Fred Douglass, one day in those times, to come to church

here. ‘I should be glad to, sir,’ said he; ‘but it would be so offensive

to your congregation.’ ‘Mr. Douglass, will you come? And if any man

objects to it, come up and sit on my platform by me. You will always be

welcome there.”

“At the Fulton Ferry there are two lines of omnibuses, one white and the

other blue. I had been accustomed to go in them indifferently; but one

day I saw a little paper stuck upon one of them, saying: ‘Colored people

not allowed to ride in this omnibus.’ I instantly got out. There are men

who stand at the door of these omnibus lines, urging passengers into one

or the other. I am very well known to all of them; and the next day,

when I came to the place, the gentleman serving asked: ‘Won’t you ride,

sir?’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I am too much of a negro to ride in that omnibus.’

I called the attention of every one I met to that fact, and said to

them: ‘Don’t ride in that omnibus, which violates your principles, and

my principles, and common decency at the same time.’ I do not know

whether this had any influence, but I do know that after a fortnight’s

time I had occasion to look in and the placard was gone.”

But perhaps the most important, at all events the hardest-fought, battle

of this era was in behalf of the liberty of ministers of the Gospel to

preach in their pulpits for the slave and against the atrocities of

slavery.

It sprang from the publication, by an influential New York daily paper,

of an article in which it was threatened that clergymen who spoke in

their pulpits upon slavery “would have their coats rolled in the dirt.”

Mr. Beecher at once took up the glove in his own defence and that of his

brethren who thought it their duty to preach on this subject. He entered

into an examination of the whole status of the slave with great

thoroughness, and gathered his materials for defence and attack from

Southern sources. A report made to the Synod of South Carolina and

Georgia in 1833 says: “They have no Bible to read by their own

firesides; they have no family altars; and when in affliction, sickness,

or death, they have no minister to address to them the consolations of

the Gospel.

“They are destitute of the privileges of the Gospel, and ever will be,

under the present state of things. They may justly be considered the

heathen of this country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any

country in the world.”

“Says Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, in a case brought against

defendant for shooting and wounding a _woman_ who endeavored to run away

from a whipping: ‘With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the

profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is

one doomed in his own person and in his posterity to live without

knowledge, and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil

that others may reap the fruits.’”

Aroused by such testimony from reports of religious bodies and the

decisions of the courts, he exclaims, with hot indignation:

“Yet the pulpit, whose echoes roll over the heathenism of the globe,

must be dumb!

“It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are

church-members; does that save women from the lust of their owners?

does it save their children from being sold? does it save parents from

separation? In the shameless processions every week made from the

Atlantic to the Gulf are to be found slaves ordained to preach the

Gospel, members of churches, baptized children, Sunday-school scholars

carefully catechised, full of Gospel texts, fat and plump for market.

What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from

despair when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on

Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him

God-speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the

cotton-plantations of Alabama?

“What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction

worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved,

just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if

he were without God and without hope? What motive is there to the slave

to strive for Christian graces, when, if they make him a real man, they

are threshed out of him; or, if they make him a more obedient and

faithful man, raise his market price and only make him a more

merchantable disciple of Christ? It is the religious phase of slave-life

that reveals the darkest features of that all-perverting system.”

Ridiculing the idea that it takes _distance_ to make a topic fit for the

pulpit, and upbraiding the ministry, who are engaged in snatching here

and there a child from the Ganges, and have no words for those children

that, here at home, every year are snatched from the parents’ bosom and

sold everywhither, he says:

“It requires _distance_, it seems, to make a topic right for the pulpit.

Send it to Greenland or to Nootka Sound, and you may then practise at

the far-away target. And the reason of such discrimination seems to be

that preaching against foreign sins does not hurt the feelings nor

disturb the quiet of your congregation; whereas, if the identical evils

at home which we deplore upon the Indus or along the Burampootra are

preached about, the _Journal_ says that it will risk the minister’s

place and bread and butter; and it plainly tells all Northern ministers

that if they meddle with such politics they will have their coats rolled

in the dirt. Will the _Journal_ tell us how many leagues off a sin must

be before it is prudent and safe for courageous ministers to preach

against it?

“Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate virtue, and tens

of thousands robbed of what they have never been taught to prize, and

the _Journal_ stands poised to cast its javelin at that meddlesome

pulpit that dares speak of such boundless licentiousness, and send it to

its more appropriate work of evangelizing the courtesans of Paris or the

loose virtue of Italy! And it assures us that multitudes of clergymen

are thanking it for such a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know.

The platforms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices,

urging Christianity to go abroad, stimulating the Church not to leave a

corner of the globe unsearched nor an evil unredressed. But when the

speech is ended they steal in behind the _Journal_ to give it thanks for

its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to say a word about

home-heathen—about their horrible ignorance, bottomless licentiousness,

and about the mercenary inhumanity which every week is selling their own

Christian brethren, baptized as much as they, often preachers of the

Gospel like themselves, eating from the same table of the Lord, praying

to the same Saviour, listening to snatches of that same Bible (whose

letters they have never been permitted to learn), out of which these

reverend endorsers of the _Journal_ preach!”

He shows that the slavery of New England never was the slavery of the

South: “The slavery of the South in our day adopts the Roman civil law

as the basis of its code.... Now, New England never held a slave on the

basis of the Roman civil law, but under a law which was expressly

enacted for the benefit of the slave and for the ultimate destruction of

slavery—viz., the _Hebrew law of slavery_. No system of slavery, in this

land, can be profitable which does not put the slave under a regimen

which denies him the rights of manhood. The North, on the basis of the

Hebrew slavery law, found it out; she refused to go further and

sacrifice her religious scruples. The South, on the basis of the Roman

civil law, imbibed its inhuman spirit, put on the screws, and forced the

system into its present legal attitude, with a written code more

infamous than the unwritten law of any pirate’s deck.”

He proves that the North never sold out her slaves, with a profit, to

“her partners in the South, and so closed up the business,” by showing

that in most of the Northern States the slaves were set free by the

decisions of the courts upon the adoption of the State constitutions,

and that in the meantime their masters were forbidden, under heavy

penalties, to sell them South.

In New York gradual emancipation was enacted, and not only was the sale

of slaves out of the borders forbidden, but masters travelling with

their slaves in the South were required to give heavy bonds for the safe

return of the same.

These words reveal his own spirit in the discussion:

“In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the shapes and

motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual struggle how to calm

the natural expressions of an honest soul into that measured phrase that

may best suit the sated public ear. If one overhang this abyss until his

spirit do drink in its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and

his words glance like fire. Neither are these feelings the foul

engenderings of fanaticism. They are the true feelings of a heart taught

to hate injustice and degrading wrong, by that nature which God gave it;

by the Bible which educated it; by the law under which it was made, and

by the public sentiment in which it has been bred. It is with a sense of

shame that we see strong words for oppression granted an unapologized

liberty to walk up and down as they will; while he who speaks for

freedom must rake up his ardor under the ashes of a tame propriety, and

stand to answer for want of a Gospel spirit if indignation at double and

treble wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt! Nevertheless, we hope; we

trust; we pray; and hoping, trusting, and praying, we soothe ourselves

in such thoughts as these: ‘From this shame, too, thou shalt go forth, O

world! God, who, unwearied sitting on the circle of the earth, hath

beheld and heard the groanings and travailings of pain until now, and

caused Time to destroy them one by one, shall ere long destroy thee,

thou abhorred and thrice damnable oppression cancerously eating the

breasts of liberty.’”

He concludes by giving his views upon the position of the pulpit, and

utters this solemn protest:

“Therefore, against every line of the Coward’s Ethics of the _Journal_

we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its pattern fitter

to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt to preach to old-world

mummies than to be a living man of God among living men, loving them but

never fearing them! God be thanked that in every age hitherto pulpits

have been found, the allies of suffering virtue, the champions of the

oppressed! And if in this day, after the notable examples of heroic men

in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for fidelity, the pulpit is

to be mined and sapped by insincere friends and insidious enemies, and

learn to mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonorous and

thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found

conspiring with this league of iniquity; that so, when in that august

day of retribution God shall deal punishment in flaming measures to all

hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under

double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom or thrice-polluted

Gomorrah!”

Some idea of his mode of address and quickness in retort at that day

will appear from extracts from his speech at the annual meeting of the

American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and two incidents that

occurred at this meeting. Mr. Beecher answered the Scriptural argument

for the return of fugitives, based on the return of Onesimus, in this

manner: “There are two ways of sending fugitives back into slavery. One

is the way Paul sent back the slave Onesimus. Now, if people will adopt

that way I will not object. In the first place, he instructed him in

Christianity and led him to become a Christian; then he wrote a letter

and sent it by Onesimus himself. Now, I should like to see Marshal ———

or Marshal somebody else, of this city, send back a slave in this way.

In the first place, the marshal would take him and teach him the

catechism, and pray with him, and convert him, and then write a letter

to his master telling him to receive him as a brother beloved; and then

the slave goes of his own free will to his master, and walks into the

house, and, with his broad, black, beaming face, says: ‘How d’ye do, my

brother? and how d’ye do, my sister?’” The broad, beaming face which he

himself wore as he described this scene and personated this character

was irresistibly comical, and nothing more was heard in that quarter of

Paul’s return of fugitives.

It was in this speech that, in describing the situation of the slave, he

says:

“They are married and separated in the South until perhaps they have

twenty wives.” [A voice: “There are men in New York City who have twenty

wives.”] “I am sorry for them,” he answered at once. “I go for their

immediate emancipation!”

He read extracts from the law as laid down by some of the able members

of the Southern bench in South Carolina and Louisiana, to show that

slaves are mere goods and chattels.

“The slave,” he exclaimed, “is made just good enough to be a good slave

and no more. It is a penitentiary offence to teach him more.”

Here a person among a group in one corner of the gallery exclaimed:

“It’s a lie!”

“Well, whether it’s a penitentiary offence or not, I shall not argue

with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been there and

ought to know.”

Such was the voice that began to attract attention throughout the whole

land. It was as truthful and earnest as that of the old Abolitionists,

but took in a broader range of subjects and was inspired by a higher

spirit than theirs; it was as politic in its utterances as that of the

prince of politicians, Martin Van Buren, but it was the policy of right

and justice; it had in it the strength of Webster’s, but argued from

truer premises than he; it was as popular as Henry Clay’s, but its

sympathy was broader than his; it was the voice of Henry Ward Beecher as

he stood in the early maturity of his powers, aflame with Christian love

and patriotism, preaching the Gospel of the Son of God, the Deliverer

and Saviour for slave and master, for North and South, for commerce and

manufactures, for our whole land from shame and thraldom.

The need of such a voice will appear if we consider the state of things

at this time, as he himself described it:

“‘An Abolitionist’ was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man

that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age it was

punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a

man from church communion if he insisted on praying in the

prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. I am speaking the words

of truth and soberness. The Church was dumb in the North, but not in the

West. A marked distinction exists between the history of the New School

of Presbyterian churches in the West and the Congregational churches,

the Episcopal churches, the Methodist and Baptist churches in the North

and East. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the

contributions of the churches were absolutely dumb. Great controversies

raged round about the doors of the Bible Society, of the Tract Society,

and of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The

managers of these societies resorted to every shift except that of

sending the Gospel to the slaves. They would not send the Bible to the

South; for, they said, ‘it is a punishable offence in most of the

Southern States to teach a slave to read; and are we to go in the face

of this State legislation and send the Bible South?’ The Tract Society

said: ‘We are set up to preach the Gospel, not to meddle with political

and industrial institutions.’ And so they went on printing tracts

against tobacco and its uses, tracts against dancing and its abuses, and

refusing to print a tract that had a shadow of criticism on slavery!

“One of the most disgraceful things took place under the jurisdiction of

Bishop Doane, of New Jersey—I take it for granted, without his

knowledge. I have the book. It was an edition of the Episcopal

prayer-book. They had put into the front of it a steel engraving of Ary

Scheffer’s ‘Christus Consolator’—Christ the Consoler. There was a

semi-circle around about the beneficent and aerial figure of our

Saviour—the poor, the old, the sick, the mother with her dead babe,

bowed in grief; every known form of human sorrow belonged to the

original design and picture, and among others a fettered slave, with his

hands lifted to heaven, praying for liberty. But this was too much; and

so they cut out the slave, and left the rest of the picture, and bound

it into the Episcopal prayer-book of New Jersey. I have a copy of it,

which I mean to leave to the Historical Society of Brooklyn when I am

done using it.

“These things are important as showing the incredible condition of

public sentiment at that time. If a man came to be known as an

anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy in business.”

After the intense excitement, within and without Congress, upon the

discussion and the passage of the Compromise measures of 1850, a

reaction followed, and the year 1851 is, in many respects, a marked

contrast to that immediately preceding. The people, in the main, tired

of the discussion and the consequent turmoil, thankful for their escape,

as they thought, from the threatened danger of the dissolution of the

Union, were determined to preserve the peace that had been won, and

frowned upon everything that endangered its continuance. Public meetings

and conventions, held for the expression of free-State sentiments, were

regarded with great disfavor and often broken up by mob violence.

Four millions of people in a Christian land were denied every right

belonging to them, not only on the ground of Christianity but of

humanity, and yet they must be dumb. The pulpit, which represented Him

who came to set the captive free and preach the Gospel to the poor, on

this great matter must utter no voice. Statesmanship must see

consummated an utter perversion of the fundamental principles and policy

of the nation, and yet offer no protest. A common humanity, outraged by

the atrocities committed against a fellow human being, must be silent or

join in the hue and cry for the capture of the unhappy victim.

This was the programme that conservatism, through the press, in the

pulpit, by the ballot-box, through business patronage, social frowns or

favors, and not unfrequently through mob violence, attempted to execute.

It was as vain as to try to still the voice of Niagara or the noise of

the breakers upon the coast.

One thing more powerful than any other contributed to prevent a complete

reaction and consequent stagnation upon this subject—the activity of the

South in availing itself of the advantages offered by the Fugitive Slave

Bill for obtaining possession of the property that had escaped and was

living on Northern soil. The year 1851 was emphatically a year of

slave-hunting. And since these refugees from labor had, many of them,

lived for years at the North, had become respectable citizens and reared

families, their violent capture invariably occasioned, if not forceful

resistance, at least deep and bitter indignation.

The quiet of 1851 was not perfect and it could not be made permanent. It

was only the lull which weariness compels in every hard-fought battle.

In December of this year Kossuth visited this country at the invitation

of the Senate, coming in a government steamer sent to Asia especially

for his conveyance. Many things contributed to awaken immense enthusiasm

for him. He had represented Hungary in the Austrian Diet; had championed

the liberty of free press and free speech so fearlessly as to gain the

honor of an Austrian dungeon; had been elected governor of Hungary, and

for two years had waged successful war with Austria. Overcome by the

immense military power of that great empire in alliance with Russia, he

had been forced into exile with a price set upon his head. He

represented, in that year of European revolutions, the struggles of the

common people for liberty. These experiences, united with his personal

appearance and marvellous eloquence, combined to secure for him a most

enthusiastic reception by the people of this country. The Senate, on the

other hand, were far more chary of their welcome. The Hungarian exile

stood for universal liberty, and that was just what at that time the

Senate of the United States were most interested in suppressing.

However, though granted no reception, a banquet was given in his honor,

at which most of our public men were present, and Daniel Webster,

Secretary of State, delivered the principal address.

Quick to perceive the dilemma in which Congress found itself, and eager

that the nation at large should appreciate it, Mr. Beecher writes a Star

Paper in which, in his usual happy and effective style, he describes the

incongruity in the action of our government in welcoming this fugitive

from the oppression of the Old World while we are engaged in remanding

to their oppressors fugitives in the New.

Invited by Mr. Beecher, Kossuth delivered an address in Plymouth Church

in behalf of the cause of Hungarian liberty. So great was the eagerness

of the people to hear him that some ten thousand dollars were realized

from the sale of tickets.

So did the pastor of this church link himself with the cause of freedom

all over the earth.

Fifty-two, being “election year,” saw efforts more persistent, if

possible, than ever before to regard the Compromise measures as a

finality and discourage all agitation of the subject of slavery. A

public pledge was signed by more than fifty senators, among them the

most influential from both the great parties, including Henry Clay,

agreeing that they would thereafter support no candidate who did not

approve and promise to abide by the provisions of that compact. Both the

great parties of the day—the Whig and Democratic—put into their

platforms resolutions declaring that the above Compromise was accepted

as a final settlement of the questions at issue, and agreed to resist

all attempts at renewing the agitation of the slavery question under any

pretext whatsoever. In the election Franklin Pierce, who had but two

qualifications for the office of chief magistrate—he was a gentleman and

a radical pro-slavery man—was chosen by an overwhelming majority for

President, for the reason that his party affiliations gave the best

assurance that the pledges which all had alike made would in his case be

fulfilled.

General Scott and the Whig party made just as profound an obeisance to

the slave-power, and offered just as heavy a bid for its favors; but

there was not the same confidence in their ability to perform the

service demanded as in that of their Democratic rivals, and they were in

consequence disastrously defeated. So did the popular vote upon its

first opportunity endorse the action of Congress and declare that

discussion on this great matter was closed. Yet, in spite of the verdict

of the ballot-box, in spite of resolutions, compacts, and threats,

agitation still went on. Mr. Beecher explains the phenomenon:

“Politicians inquire whence is the tenacity of life of the anti-slavery

movement. It is not fanaticism that animates or controls it, it is the

religious principle that is the secret of the strength of this cause; it

is because Jesus Christ is alive, and there are Jesus Christ men who

count this cause dearer than their lives.”

In the summer and autumn of 1852 Mr. Beecher was engaged in what was

called “The Parker Controversy.”

We have no desire to open anew the bitterness of those old matters which

have passed so long ago into history, and almost into forgetfulness, but

no biography of the man would be complete without a reference to this

trial, the severest which he had thus far endured, and which prepared

him for other and greater ones to come. In our study of the character

and disposition of Henry Ward Beecher we find him, as we believe, to

have been pre-eminently a man of peace. In his history we see him almost

continuously engaged in war. This anomaly is easily explained. It was

not from desire or disposition, but a necessary consequence of the

progress which he was making and the position which he occupied. The age

was moving forward: wrongs must be overcome, new positions of advantage

must be gained. By the habit of his mind, the intuitions of his genius,

and the earnestness and simplicity of his purpose he found himself a

leader in this progress.

While others stopped to discover the truth by laborious study in their

libraries, he found it among the results of former researches, derived

it intuitively from well-admitted principles, or gathered it from the

people with whom he associated by the way. While others were carefully

weighing the consequences of their actions, he, trusting in God, in the

righteousness of his cause, in the forces of nature and in himself,

stepped forward to the front. While others were laboriously forging

their speeches his sprang like the fabled Minerva from the brain of

Jupiter, alive, armed, and beautiful. He came into battle for the same

reason that the head of a column advancing to seize a favorable position

within the enemy’s lines is early brought under fire, or that a heavy

field-battery, which is sending its shot with deadly effect into the

ranks of the enemy, is attacked.

In his discussion with a New York daily, of which we have already

spoken, he had come in conflict with the commercial spirit of the day

which held its principles and its goods both for sale, and against it

had defended the right of the pulpit to discuss the live topics of the

hour. This had drawn fire. Men who had been scored as he scored them in

a Star Paper of January 24, 1850, entitled “A Man in the Market”— “...

They hang themselves up in the shambles of every Southern market; they

trust the pliant good nature of the North, and are only fearful lest

they should fail to be mean enough to please the South”—and who deserved

the scoring, would not be likely to forget it soon or forgive it

readily. The conflict in which he now became engaged was more painful

than the former, for it was waged with Christian brethren. Beginning as

a skirmish, it became a general battle, in which the conservatism of the

Church, which had expurgated its religious tracts, curbed the religious

press, and toned down the utterances of the pulpit, so as not to hurt

the feelings of slave-holders, was engaged and brought to judgment.

It came about in this way: In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Mrs. Stowe had

described the sale of a child taken from the arms of the mother, and of

Tom’s feeling on the subject. “To him it looked like something

unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he

had not learned to generalize and take in large views. If he had only

been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity he might have

thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful

trade—a trade which is the vital support of an institution which some

American divines tell us has no evils but such as are inseparable from

any other relations in social and domestic life.”

In a note she refers to Dr. Joel Parker by name as the man who had given

utterance to these sentiments, and as representing the class which

entertained them. The words, “No evils but such as are inseparable from

any other relations in social and domestic life,” had been printed as

his in a discussion which he had held in Philadelphia, had gone the

rounds of the papers as his and had been printed and commented upon in

England, and he had never denied that they rightfully belonged to him.

But the quickened moral feeling which followed the publication of “Uncle

Tom’s Cabin” made the authorship of such sentiments less pleasant than

formerly, and Dr. Parker suddenly discovered that he had been wronged in

having these words ascribed to him, and threatened Mrs. Stowe with a

suit for libel. A friend of his lawyer visited her brother Henry, and

suggested that this matter could be arranged without a law-suit. With a

confidence that was born of sincerity and inexperience, the brother

attempts that most difficult rôle—that of peace-maker. He visits Dr.

Parker, becomes satisfied that his language is capable of a less violent

construction than had been put upon it, confers with Mrs. Stowe and

finds her ready to take the most favorable view of the case possible,

bears a letter from her to the doctor, writes and discusses with him the

answer which he shall make, forwards Mrs. Stowe’s letter, which had been

somewhat changed in the discussion, to her for approval—which being

gained, he publishes both letters over the united signatures of the two

parties, and goes off to Indiana on a lecturing trip, with the happy

consciousness that he has done a good thing. Never was a man waked from

a sweeter dream to a more bitter disappointment. Instead of making peace

between them, he found, as a result of his labors, their differences

increased and embittered, and himself charged with forgery both of

letter and signature. Offended professional pride, newspaper rivalry,

the hatred of men who had been lashed by his tongue and pen, the fears

of conservatives and the bitter hatred of pro-slavery men, suddenly

united their forces for his destruction. This young radical had left

himself open to attack, and they all rushed to the onset or stood back

and cheered others on, and were already beginning to rejoice in his

downfall. The lead in the attack soon passed out of the doctor’s hands

into those of more able and less scrupulous men, and aimed at nothing

less than his annihilation. “The arrow was well shot,” he said; “had I

been unshielded it would have done its work, for the point was

poisoned.” But he was not unshielded! the overthrow was not

accomplished, and he stood, at the end, fully vindicated from all the

aspersions of his enemies.

In a long, carefully written article over his own name he gives the

whole beginning, continuance, and end of this unhappy matter:

“For myself I profess that no event of my life, not the loss of my own

children nor bereavements of friends most dear, have ever filled me with

so deep a sorrow as that which I have in being made a party to a public

dispute when three of the parties concerned are ministers of the Gospel,

and when the fourth is a woman and the wife of a clergyman. At the very

best it is a shame and a disgrace. To avert it I labored most honestly

and with all my might.”

He closes with these words:

“I commit this narrative to the sober judgment of all good men, and

myself I commit to the charge of Almighty God.”

“HENRY WARD BEECHER.”

Two letters selected from the voluminous correspondence of that time,

one to a friend who approved, and the other to one who condemned, his

course, are given, that the spirit which he cherished may be more

thoroughly understood:

“BROOKLYN, Oct. 12, 1852.

”BARNABAS BATES, ESQ.:

“DEAR SIR: Your kind letter gave me much pleasure, not as adding

anything to that quiet which belongs to a conscience void of offence,

but as showing that I have been able to manifest to others that which

was undoubted truth to me. It is very painful to be placed before the

public as I have been, even when the verdict is ultimately favorable;

for there is something repugnant to one’s feelings even to feel it

possible that a suspicion of his honor could be for a moment

entertained.

“But I am sure that I should be the most ungrateful of men if I failed

to recognize the presence and abundant blessing of my God in all the

passages of this painful experience.

“Not a promise made to me has been left unfulfilled, and I know that it

has been a better sermon to me than was ever preached by human lips.

“Toward the parties of this wrong much must be allowed to wounded

vanity, much to partisanship, something perhaps to forgetfulness. After

all this, however, the rest will be a burden to their conscience

whenever they shall hereafter look back upon it. And while I do most

heartily forgive them, and could with earnest good-will do either of

them a kindness, I cannot refrain from thanksgiving that I was the

accused, not the accuser. Your kindness I have felt the more because

personally (although not otherwise) a stranger to me, and because,

coming among the first letters of sympathy, it has been the harbinger of

great kindnesses, similar in kind, from many.

“I am, with sincere esteem,

“Gratefully yours,

“H. W. BEECHER.“

”BROOKLYN, Oct. 12, 1852.

“RICHARD HALE, ESQ.:

”DEAR SIR: I was for a moment pained by the reading of your note this

morning, and but for a moment; for it has pleased God to grant Himself

to me in such measure that neither the wrath of enemies, nor the strife

of tongues, nor the unadvised blows of friends have power to do me harm

or unsettle my peace. Had I ever doubted the promises of God I should

now find every shadow swept away; and I surely count the little

annoyance which this perversion of honor and truth in these unprincipled

men has caused me not worthy to be mentioned in the joy which I have had

in being folded into the very bosom of my Saviour.

“All that I can ask in your behalf is that when the day of trouble shall

come to you (with as little fault on your part as this on mine) God may

sustain you by that certainty of integrity and that consciousness of

honor which have given me unspeakable comfort, and _would_ were I this

day standing before God’s judgment-seat.

“I do not blame you; I believe that you meant me no unkindness; but it

is manifest that with your present views it would be as painful for you

to associate with me as it would be impossible for me to permit it.

“Whenever the evil impressions which have tempted you into misjudgments

shall have passed away (and they assuredly _will_), and when my

righteousness shall shine forth as the light (and God _will_ bring it

forth), then you will find me unchanged in my affections for you; nor

shall I then remember anything but that you were once my friend.

“I am, with God’s unwavering support, and with the patience and peace

which Christ only can give,

“Truly your brother,

“HENRY WARD BEECHER.“

Also we give extracts from a third:

”BROOKLYN, October 12, 1852.

“R. W. LANDIS:

”DEAR SIR: Your welcome letter I received this morning. It gave me great

pleasure, though I did not need it for my happiness. For it has pleased

God so graciously to stand by me in this fiercest attack of my life that

if every friend in the world had abandoned me I should not have been

alone. I need not tell you, who have both known and taught to others,

that Christ has a peace which, surpassing all other experience of

earthly joy, requires for its possession an unusual earthly trial. In

that peace I have rested as in God’s pavilion....

“I never expected to stand up in the publicity which God has been

pleased to draw me into, and faithfully to declare His truth against the

interests of commercial and political circles, and not be visited with

this wrath.

“But they shall neither destroy me nor daunt me nor silence me, for my

God is greater than their devil. I will work yet harder and speak more

plainly for every blow they deal. May God repay your kindness to me a

thousand-fold!

”H. W. BEECHER.”

We find no word from Mr. Beecher concerning the election of this year,

but an article immediately following shows that he kept his eye upon the

main issue, and that none of its humorous any more than its sorrowful

features escaped him. It was entitled “Degraded into Liberty”:

“A Southern gentleman _en route_ for Texas brought to New York eight

slaves, to be shipped hence by one of our ocean-going steamers. The

birds of the air informed the Abolitionists of the facts, and it was not

long before a writ was served upon the whole chattel-gang, and they were

hauled up before Judge Paine to show cause why they should not be doomed

to freedom. The cruel inhospitality of New York was never more manifest.

These innocent fellow-beings, blessed by being born slaves, and not

painfully educated for it, as Northern Southerners are; having had all

the manifold mercies which make a Virginia slave so much better off than

a free factory-girl in Massachusetts; having grown up in the indulgence

of those hilarious dances and in the practice of those songs which make

plantation life perfectly paradisaical, they were on their way to that

land waving with sugar-cane and cotton-plants, where, hoe in hand, they

were to while away the brilliant hours with gentle dalliances with loam

and clay—when lo! they were suddenly arrested.

“From these bright anticipations they have been ruthlessly snatched, and

plunged into freedom utterly unprepared! Are there no tears in Castle

Garden? Ought not the Union Committee to spend something for a trifle of

crape? Eight innocent fellow-chattels changed into fellow-_beings_! No

kind master have they now. The tender relation is sundered. Our bereaved

master and mistress must depart slaveless and alone. Having been worked

for so long, and tended and taken care of, it is doubtful whether they

will be able to take care of themselves now. Much as we sympathize with

them, we do not consider their affliction at all comparable to that of

the late happy slaves. These poor creatures are free, and we are assured

in the highest quarter that no greater evil than that can well befall

the slave population. They have degraded themselves. They have refused

to be ‘_content_ rather.’ In all the world they cannot find a man who

_owns_ them. They are now to sneak through life, like white men, owning

themselves! They must have had some awful moments of compunction when

the conviction first flashed upon them that they owned their own hands,

trod upon their own feet, put their clothes upon their own shoulders,

and felt that thing throbbing under their ribs to be their own heart.

Some natural feelings must have shot through the maternal heart as she

pressed her own babe to her own breast, and dropped her own tears upon

its dusky cheek....

“Only one woman can be found faithful in this emergency. Their former

mistress alone has appealed to their conscience and adjured them to

return to her! Where were the teachers, the chaplains, the casuists, the

lawyers, that a little time ago choked the press with beatitudes of

slavery? ‘His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all

dumb dogs; they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.’

“In reply to Mrs. Lemmon’s appeal the deluded slave-woman drew herself

up, and, pressing her child to her breast, said, ‘_I had rather be

free!_’ What! not value the radiant mercies of slavery more than that?

The creature is crazy! Slaves in their senses are always contented. They

are mere pets. The Uncle Toms of Virginia do nothing but look after the

children, or sit in sunny nooks and smoke their stubbed pipes. The Aunt

Phillises are always fat, rollicking cooks, bursting with laughter.

Nobody is happy but slaves. The poor masters have all the care and

burden, slaves all the glee and leisure....

“It is a dreadful state of things here in New York, where we feed upon

Cotton, and have our very living in the smiles and favor of the South,

to be hurting their feelings by talking so much about liberty and all

that. A few more slaves set free, and the South will get angry again;

and then New York will be in a world of trouble, and another call will

call together another Castle Garden full of anxious merchants, all full

of love to the South; and we shall have more sermons and more newspaper

articles; and nobody can tell what will happen the next time.

“In part, the South is at fault. It has sent North the wrong kind of

negroes. Those who have run away, or been judicially sentenced to

freedom, or been bought—all these have _loved liberty_. Now, won’t the

South send us some of another sort—some of those model slaves that love

bondage and wouldn’t take liberty if they could get it? With a few

specimen copies of such, we believe that we could do Southern

institutions great good in the North. *”

Fifty-three follows in much the same line as that of the two years

immediately preceding. Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in November

last, takes the oath of office on the 4th of March. His inaugural gives

expression to what was undoubtedly the general feeling of the country—a

determination that the Compromise measures shall be enforced, and a

fervent trust that the question of slavery has been settled; and in his

annual message, upon the assembling of Congress in that year, promises

that the peace which now so happily existed through the land should not

be disturbed during his term of office, if he could prevent it. A large

majority of the people, both North and South, were undoubtedly in

perfect accord with this desire, greatly pleased with this assurance,

and tried to share his confidence.

Those were days in which a great deal of sympathy was felt in this

country for the Irish, and by many, too, who were stanch opposers of

liberty for the negro. Mr. Beecher had no patience with men, on either

side of the Atlantic, whose sympathy was limited by the bounds of race

or color; and when John Mitchel, who had posed as the “Great Irish

Patriot” of that day, having escaped from an English penal colony and

been received here with great enthusiasm, took occasion to state in an

editorial in the _Citizen_, “We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or

even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to

keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion; we only

wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in

Alabama,” he (Mr. Beecher) enters into public correspondence with him,

in which he denies the claims of the refugee to be an “apostle of

liberty,” sorrows over his downfall, and dismisses him to the test of

history in these words:

“Once you stood like some great oak whose wide circumference was lifted

up above all the pastures, the glory of all beholders, and a covert for

a thousand timid singing-birds! Now you lie at full length along the

ground, with mighty ruptured roots ragged and upturned to heaven, with

broken boughs and despoiled leaves! Never again shall husbandman predict

spring from your swelling buds! Never again shall God’s singing-birds of

liberty come down through all the heavenly air to rest themselves on

your waving top! Fallen! Uprooted! Doomed to the axe and the hearth!

“But there is a future beyond this, even on earth! There is a time

promised, and already dawning, in which the human family shall be one

great brotherhood, and Love shall be the law of man! In that golden age

there shall be research made for all the names that, since the world

began, have wrought and suffered for the good of their kind. There will

be a memorable resurrection of forgotten names. From the obscurity into

which despotism has flung all who dared to defy it, from the shades and

darkness of oblivion by which oppressors would cover down the memory of

all who proclaimed human right and human liberty, they will come forth

shining like the sun, and none be forgotten that labored to bring to

pass the world’s freedom! In that day, when ten thousand names shall be

heard, in all their number not one shall utter that gone and forgotten

name—John Mitchel!”

We do not wish it to be inferred from our words that Mr. Beecher was the

only anti-slavery leader who was doing good service in those days. There

were many others, and some, perhaps, were doing as effective work in a

single line as he. But we believe that, when the whole sphere of his

activity was considered, he went far beyond any man of his time.

In any one of the three channels of largest influence, of that or of any

time—the pulpit, the press, and the platform—he was the peer, if not the

superior, of any leader; and while the most of his co-laborers used but

one, or at the most two, of these instrumentalities, he was constantly

employing the three, and each with unequalled efficiency.

His beliefs, as his labors, were broader than the most who were at that

day prominently identified with the anti-slavery cause. He believed in

the Constitution of the United States, and claimed that, if the

government should be administered according to the original intent of

this document, slavery must speedily cease. In this he differed from

Garrison and his school, who held that “the (Federal) Constitution is a

covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” He believed in the

ballot-box, and in using its power to the utmost. In this he differed

from Wendell Phillips and others of his school, who had disfranchised

themselves for years, lest by voting they should seem to countenance an

institution that was being used for the perpetuity of so great an

injustice. He believed in the Church and the moral forces which she

could bring to the work. He believed in love rather than hate, and most

of all, with a triumphant, joyful faith, he believed in the person,

presence, and leadership of the Redeemer and Reformer of the world. In

all this he separated from the great body, individuals here and there

excepted, of the Garrison and Pillsbury school of Abolitionists.

His judgment of the spirit of the leaders in this great movement may be

inferred from the following extracts:

“Events made Garrison a leader. We never thought, and we do not now

think, that Garrison deserved the one-half of the bitter reproaches that

have been heaped upon him. His worst faults have been the reaction, in

him, of the opposite faults of men favoring slavery or indifferent to

it. But we regard him as one of the most unfortunate of all leaders for

the best development of anti-slavery feeling. He is a man of no mean

ability, of indefatigable industry, of the most unbounded enterprise and

eagerness, of perseverance which pushes him like a law of nature, and of

courage which amounts to recklessness. These are the qualifications

which make a man powerful for stimulation. Had he possessed, as a

balance to these, conciliation, good-natured benevolence, or even a

certain popular mirthfulness; had he possessed the moderation and

urbanity of Clarkson, or the deep piety of Wilberforce, he had been the

one man of our age. These all he lacked. Had the disease of America

needed only counter-irritation, no better blister could have been

applied.

“Garrison did not _create_ the anti-slavery spirit of the North. He was

the offspring of it. It existed before he was born. But he at one time

more powerfully developed and organized it than any other one mind; and

developed it in modes and spirit, as we think, most unfortunate.

Anti-slavery under his influence was all teeth and claw. It fought. It

never conciliated. It gained not one step by kindness. It won not a

single fort by surrender. It bombarded everything it met, and stormed

every place which it won. We do not deny that Garrison and his early

followers did a great work. Another generation will divide praise and

blame, as no one is fitted to do in the heats of the present day. But

when bare justice shall be done we believe that it will be found that a

noble soul, deeply and truly benevolent, who sought the truest interests

of his age, yet sought them with such a fierceness and such a hard and

relentless courage as constantly roused up in his path the worst

feelings of man, and heaped obstacles before him to such a degree that

at length, in combating them, his sympathies for good seemed swallowed

up in a bitter hatred of evil. The result of the agitation, inspired

largely with this feeling, was that almost every interest in the nation

rose up against the movement with which he was identified. Churches

dreaded abolitionism, parties hated abolitionism, commerce abhorred

abolitionism. Mobs rioted around the meetings, and threatened the

dwellings, the stores, and the very persons of Abolitionists.

“There was odium and influence enough arrayed against the anti-slavery

movement, under the form of early abolitionism, to have sunk ten

enterprises which depended on men for existence. But there was a spirit

in this cause, there was a secret strength, which nerved it, and it

lived right on, and grew, and trampled down opposition, and came forth

victorious! There was an irresistibility in it which made it superior to

the faults of its friends and the deadly hatred of its enemies.”

It will be seen from the above how thoroughly he differed from what may

be called the right wing of the Abolition party.

This difference is emphasized and the spirit which impelled him is

indicated in an address which he delivered before the annual meeting of

the Anti-Slavery Society, and in a letter which he wrote to the New York

_Tribune_ in answer to a criticism that appeared in that paper:

“I believe there is to be found Christianity enough in the world, in the

Church and out of it, in the Bible and out of it, _i.e._, in the record

and in the living heart, and, I had almost said, breathed through the

very air, as a Divine Providence, inspiring the great organic laws of

society, controlling the moral sense of the Church, yea, beating in the

veins of political economy, subtly guiding the common generosities of

men into a public sentiment which, in God’s own time, in spite of

recreant clergymen, apostate statesmen, venal politicians, and

trafficking shopmen, shall fall upon this vast and unmitigated

abomination and utterly crush it. But my earnest desire is that slavery

may be destroyed by the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given

me to choose whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish

commercial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the

spirit and trophy of Christ, I had rather let it linger twenty-five

years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the destruction

of it. So do I hate it that I should rejoice in its extinction, even did

the devil tread it out, as he first kindled it; but how much rather

would I see God Almighty come down to shake the earth with His tread, to

tread all tyrannies and oppressions small as the dust of the highway,

and to take unto Himself the glory!”

This having been severely criticised, especially his willingness to have

slavery linger, if by so doing its destruction could become a trophy to

the prevailing power of Christ, he replies in a letter addressed to the

same journal:

“Our highest and strongest reason for seeking justice among men is _not_

the benefit to men themselves, exceedingly strong as that motive is and

ought to be. We do not join the movement party of our times simply

because we are inspired by an inward and constitutional benevolence. We

are conscious of both these motives and of many other collateral ones;

but we are earnestly conscious of another feeling stronger than either,

that lives unimpaired when these faint, yea, that gives vigor and

persistence to these feelings when they are discouraged; and that is a

strong personal, enthusiastic love for Christ Jesus. I regard the

movement of the world toward justice and rectitude to be of His

inspirations. I believe my own aspirations, having a base in my natural

faculties, to be influenced and directed by Christ’s Spirit. The mingled

affection and adoration which I feel for Him is the strongest feeling

that I know. Whether I will or not, whether it be a phantasy or a sober

sentiment, the fact is the same nevertheless, that that which will give

pleasure to Christ’s heart and bring to my consciousness a smile of

gladness on His face in behalf of my endeavor, is incalculably more to

me than any other motive. I would work for the slave for his own sake,

but I am sure that I would work ten times as earnestly for the slave for

Christ’s sake.

“I am not ashamed to own that I bear about with me an ineffaceable

consciousness that I am what I am from Christ’s influence upon me. I

accept the power to do good as His inspiration. Life is sacred to me

only by my belief that I am walking in the scenes of a personal Divine

Providence. When I drop from these beliefs life becomes void, the events

of human society mere bubbles, and strifes of hope and fear, of good and

bad, are useless as the turmoil of the rapids above Niagara. Nay, there

is more than this: there is a heart-swell which no words can express;

there is a sense of the sweet freedom of love, a sense of gracious pity,

of patient condescension, of entire and transcendent excellence in

Christ, which makes me feel how utterly true was the impassionate

language of David: ‘Whom have I in heaven _but Thee_? and there is _none

upon earth that I desire besides Thee_. My heart and my flesh cry out

for God!’...

“This sentiment does not spring from any indifference to the slave, but

from a yet greater sympathy with Christ Jesus—the slave’s only hope, my

only hope, the Saviour of the world!”

With this letter we close our consideration of Mr. Beecher’s work in

this era of slavery agitation. Great as were his labors—and we think

they were unsurpassed and unequalled by those of any other man—we still

believe that his best contribution to the great cause was the spirit

which he manifested and the motives that influenced him. It was like the

walking of the Hebrew youths in the fiery furnace and coming forth

unscathed from the flames.