We returned from Washington to New York, for much was going on in the
metropolis. The newspapers day by day were full of Douglas and his
difficulties in Chicago. The common council had adopted a resolution
censuring Douglas, calling the Clay Compromises a violation of the laws
of God. The aldermen of Chicago must have been affected by the religious
psychology which was now sweeping the country.
We read that Douglas had heard that a mass-meeting was about to indorse
the resolution of the city council; he had gone to the hall to defend
himself and had been greeted by hisses and catcalls. He had faced his
hecklers, forced them to adjourn until he could address them; then he
had addressed them, carried them by storm and procured the resolutions
to be expunged.
Evidently the city council did not understand the Clay Compromises. Or
had Douglas' oratory swept them off their feet? It may not be a pleasing
sight to see a slave returned to its master, but what are you going to
do with the law? Are you willing to violate the Constitution for the
negro? A heckler asked him: "Are not the provisions of the Constitution
respecting the return of a fugitive slave a violation of the law of
God?" Douglas was quick to reply: "The divine law does not prescribe
the form of government under which we shall live, and the character of
our political and civil institutions. Revelation has not furnished us
with a constitution, a code of international law, and a system of civil
and municipal jurisprudence. If this Constitution is to be repudiated
for the law of God, who is to be the prophet to reveal the will of God
and establish a theocracy for us?"
I began to think of this law of God. Men are always reaching for it.
Sometimes it is only a club for interest or revenge. You have offended
me. God will punish you. If God was opposed to slavery he could have
prevented it in the beginning and He could terminate it now. Perhaps
Douglas thought of this when saying that God had not provided a code of
municipal law. If He had, He could have written freedom into the
Constitution. Douglas was at least sure that he knew as much about the
law of God as Garrison or Seward, or abolitionist lecturers in back
halls.
De Tocqueville had written that "America is the country of the whole
world where the question of religion has asserted the most real power
over the souls of men." The ringing of church bells, church going,
revivals, the calling upon God to note and punish sin, pervaded the
country and the cities. The Bible was a textbook of God's thinking. It
justified slavery in the South; it encouraged abolitionism in the North;
it suggested interference and regimentation; it counseled forgiveness
and vengeance.
At this time in New York one could not turn or pick up the most casual
publication without finding something in the nature of a moral
propagandum. At breakfast I read from the _New York Independent_ that
"Rum, profaneness and Sabbath breaking always go together." The editor
was "sorry to find that the stockholders of the Saratoga railroad still
run their cars upon the Sabbath. It is an odious and monstrous
violation, not only of the laws of God, but of all the decencies of
Christian society. And yet I had noticed ladies traveling in them,
thundering into Saratoga on the Lord's Day. Women traveling in a public
conveyance on the Sabbath. There is something in this peculiarly
degrading and shameful. It ought to be only the lowest of the sex that
would stoop to such debasement." And another paper said: "We are sorry
to learn that the directors have established an accommodation train for
Sunday morning between this city and Poughkeepsie, in addition to the
mail train to Albany. Mr. James Boorman, through whose efficient service
as President the road was mainly built, has resigned his office as
director and has addressed a firm remonstrance to the Board against this
impiety."
This was the time in which Douglas was now working. Every one knew what
the law of God was. Every one appealed to the Bible as God's word. For
much of this Douglas had perfect contempt; and he was quick to sense a
taint of it in Seward, or any one whom it had infected. Such men as
Stephens of the South were insisting now that the real intellect-of the
North cared nothing about slavery, and only used it to masquerade their
centralizing plots. If local self-government could be extinguished for
the purposes of abolition why not for anything, in behalf of which a
moral enthusiasm could be evoked? Why not a constitutional amendment
establishing a state religion? Why not a state religion under the
present constitutional clause which makes provision for the general
welfare?
One day when Dorothy and I were seated at Niblo's at luncheon I felt
some one touch my shoulder. I looked up and saw Aldington, back of him
Abigail, who was laughing at my expression of surprise. We all broke
into exclamations. They had just returned from Europe. They joined us in
the meal; and there was scarcely enough time to tell back and forth all
that was of mutual interest. He saw me with the _Independent_ and began
to rally me. "Did you know," he said, "that the early Puritans in New
England were the progenitors of one third of the whole population of the
United States by 1834? They constitute one half of the population of the
states of Ohio and New York now, and they have gone into the northwest.
They will make trouble for your Douglas. I admit that they have blighted
art and hobbled literature. They have expurgated Shakespeare, they have
fought the theater, they are always ready for the moral battle. They
know what God wants better than anybody. In a sense they are hounds in
pursuit of a lot of things in the great hunt of life. They are a
stubborn lot. It will be hard to take away from them anything that is
their own, and also to keep them from destroying anything that they
don't want."
"Well, now don't you see," I asked, "that Douglas is against all these
people and that he has all these influences to fight? For example, these
Puritans cannot rule if popular sovereignty is adopted everywhere. They
are numerically too inferior. How, for example, can you stop the
railroads on Sunday if you let communities, states, control the matter?
But if these fanatics get into control of the Federal government, they
can do it. Don't you see the point? This is what Douglas is thinking
about. He knows that you can have freedom about life only where every
man has a say."
Then we began to talk of the religious revival. Periodicals were noting
the great turn of the public mind to religion. "Fruits of the spirit"
were extolled. Great and glorious works of divine grace were wrought in
Maine. A village in Massachusetts had enjoyed "a heavenly refreshing
from the presence of the Lord." In Cincinnati there was "an outpouring
of the spirit." In the woods of Michigan men rode into a village to
obtain mercy, having heard that the Lord was there. In New York City
noon prayer meetings were held. A conductor found salvation suddenly
while operating his horse car in Sixth Avenue. A sailor saw Christ at
the wheel. Christ was met in parlors, in places of worldly gayety. An
actor had been rescued from his wicked calling. Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote: "We trust since prayer has once entered the counting rooms it
will never leave it; and that the ledger, sandbox, the blotting book and
the pen and ink will all be consecrated by heavenly presence." Her
brother, the pastor of Plymouth church, had converted one hundred and
ninety souls. A theater was used for a place of worship. Actors were
called upon to repent: You who have portrayed human nature before the
footlights, fall on your knees and acknowledge God! Rum had been driven
from a saloon near this theater. "Thank God," said Beecher, "let us pray
silently for the space of two minutes. What a history has been here. A
place of fictitious joys but of real sorrows has been reformed. It is
open for God's people to sing and pray in. God be thanked that Heaven's
gates have been opened in this place of hell."
Garrison saw the point. Of the revival he wrote that it had "spread like
an epidemic in all directions, over a wide extent of country. Prayer
meetings, morning, noon and night; prayer meetings in town, village, and
hamlet, North and South. The whole thing is an emotional contagion
without principle. This revival, judging from the past, will promote
meanness, not manliness; delusion, not intelligence; the growth of
bigotry, not of humanity; a spurious religion, not genuine piety."
Theodore Parker denounced the mania too, and was attacked for it by
Methodists and others. He sew that the North had its rain gods, its
prosperity gods, its bread and butter gods, its rituals and devotions
for these gods; and that the South had the same number of gods.
What then of the law of God? Douglas was at one with Garrison and Parker
in this criticism of the religious mania.
Thus we talked along together. The principal thing about Abigail was
that she despised the South, but for the reason that there was nothing
there but the political mind and that it was concerned almost entirely
with the negro. It had no literature. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier,
Lowell were producing works of merit; and the South was doing nothing.
Poe was born in Boston, had lived South, but had written out of nowhere.
He had died about a year before, discouraged and broken.
The most silent voice at the table was Dorothy's. She did not really
enter into these discussions. Her softer, altogether feminine nature was
disturbed by these things. Abigail began to laugh. "Why," she asked,
"does every one say here 'how's your health' instead of 'good morning'
as they say in England? People look careworn to me in America; they are
spare and pallid. Not many ruddy complexions. Why all these sharp-faced,
lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people? Why this depression of
spirits? Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all. Why
all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God?
This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air. After all, I do
not understand it."
"All due to the habits of life," said Aldington. "Look at the fast
eating--look at them here. Too much hot bread and sweets--too much pie
for breakfast. Too much pork. Too much living at hotels and boarding
houses. Too much drinking before meals; not enough wine and beer with
meals. Too much tobacco chewing. No exercise. Only the farmer, the
laborer works. They go too far. But where do you see outdoor sports? No
cricket, no rowing. Nothing but trotting around in buggies. Recreation
consists of lounging around on sofas at Saratoga. All the public men
ill. I hear that Toombs is indisposed. Sumner is in poor health.
Douglas, the little giant, is losing strength. What a curious people,
aged and young, corrupt and idealistic, candid and hypocritical,
religious and materialistic, hoarders and spenders, self-righteous,
licentious, Puritanical." "Like all others," I interjected.
"Like no other," Aldington rejoined. "Go back to your native England and
see. You have forgotten some things. There is such a thing as a definite
stock. And if you call the English bulldogs, for example, your America
is a mixture of the wolf, spaniel, lapdog, shepherd, and about all
breeds; and according to the occasion any one of them, with quick
changes. Abigail and I have been here for a number of days and we have
been entertained by some of her splendacious friends, to use Thackeray's
adjective for American fashion; and the impression it all makes on me is
beyond description. I want to see a better thing made of Chicago. I
really hate it here, all this striving for money--but of course no place
can beat Chicago for that--but also the idlers here, the worship of
Mammon, the dullness and the gloom of elegant people, the extravagant
dressing, the liveried servants, all this imitation. And all this talk
here of America being the only religious, free, and enlightened people
in the world. Why, they are not free at all. The mind must be free
before the man is free, and the mind cannot be free in a despotism. The
slavery of the North is just as bad as the slavery of the South. For
look at these people; slaves to fear, slaves to stupid customs, slaves
to superstition, slaves to foreign ideas of dress, fashion, wealth;
slaves to all the vices by which money is made, and all the tricks and
hypocrisies by which it is piled up and invested with rulership; slaves
to absurd ideas; slaves to every foolish reform. Why, sometimes as I
think of it, I see the negro in the South as the freest man in America.
He is only a slave as to his labor. Every one must work. Instead of
receiving money he gets clothes and a hut. He can't go away from the
plantation, but why go away? One must be somewhere. And as to these
other things, he is not a slave at all."
"Yes, and that's not all," I said. "A money power is fast growing up in
this country which will rule the country so thoroughly that the small
dictation of the cotton industry of the South will not be a comparison.
Slavocracy is only one of the scales on the tail of the dragon of
plutocracy. Gold and silver, tariffs, subsidies, colonies, banks of
issue--these are the claws and teeth of the big slavery."
"So says Adam Smith," Aldington interjected.
"Exactly so, and it's all true. Every one of the old timers knew these
things, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton. I am beginning to think that
Franklin, Payne, and Jefferson were the truest thinkers and greatest
planners for a republic that America has had. And what do you think of
Douglas now? He is a Nationalist with Jackson, and a Republican with
Jefferson; a let-alone philosopher all the time."
"Oh, yes, but Douglas is not educated. He is not really sound. He is not
deep enough. He is not--I hate the word spirituality--but he hasn't the
right heat, the right light. I may not be able to put my finger on the
exact fault--it is not exactly demagogy--but I see him using blocks of
people, who are bound together by a common emotion or idea, as a man
might use a block of stone for his house. He picks them up and puts them
in the place that suits his own ambition. There is one thing, however,
with which I am inclined to sympathize with Douglas. His appeal is
really more intellectual than emotional. You see an ocean-bound republic
requires imagination to get the thrill out of it, but you can catch
anybody in America with a military uniform. And while Douglas may be a
war man, so to speak, he is really too honest to play that game. I'll
grant him that much. I think that the Whigs are outplaying him. And it
looks to me that the emotions of America--what some people might call
the conscience of America--are being drawn away from Douglas by this
slavery matter. Just now territory and railroads are not so strong, or
will not be so strong pretty soon as the cry for emancipation." "I am
glad to hear you say these things," I said. "Douglas is only
thirty-seven; he will not fully mature his powers for ten years yet. I
have talked with him many times and have known him intimately and I
think I understand the man. He is distrusted in the South simply because
he will not bend all law making to the slave interests. He has just been
written down in Chicago on the law of God doctrine. And yet he stands
his ground against both the North and the South without flinching. He
defies his enemies. He has the very sanity that you have extolled here
at this table. I think he has the only rational solution for this
slavery question. He is a very great man in my opinion."
"What do you think of Barnum?" asked Aldington. Abigail looked up and
said: "Yes, I would like to hear a little about Barnum and less about
Douglas. I hear that Jenny Lind is coming to town." "It's to-day," said
Dorothy. "And don't we want to see her arrive? I do, let's go."
And we all hurried forth to witness the greetings given to the Swedish
nightingale.