To Mrs. David Lane.
BOSTON, Dec. 1860.
DEAREST FRIEND (for I think friends draw closer to one another in
troublous times),--Indeed I am sad and troubled, under the most
favorable view that can be taken of our affairs; for though all this
should blow over, as I prevailingly believe and hope it will, yet the
crisis has brought out such a feeling at the South as we shall not
easily forget or forgive. To be sure, as the irritation of an arraigned
conscience, we may partly overlook it, as we do the irritation of a
blamed child,--as an arraigned, and, I add, not quite easy conscience;
for surely conscious virtue is calmer than the South is, today. I
know that other things are mixed up with this feeling of the South;
but if it felt that its moral position was high and honorable and
unimpeachable before the world, it would not fly out into this
outrageous passion. If the ground it stood upon in former days were
held now, it might be calm, as it was then; but ever since the day when
it changed its mind,--ever since it has assumed that the slave system
is right and good and admirable [255] and ought to be perpetual,--it
has been growing more and more passionate. Well, we must be patient
with them. For my part, I am frightened at the condition to which their
folly is bringing them. It is terrible to think that the distrust and
fear of their slaves is spreading itself all over the South country. To
be sure, they, in their unreasonableness, blame us for it. They might
as well accuse England; they might as well accuse all the civilized
world. For the conviction that slavery is wrong, that it ought not to
be advocated, but to be condemned, and ultimately removed from the
world,-this conviction is one of the inevitable developments of modern
Christian thought and sentiment. It is not we that are responsible for
the rise and spread of this sentiment; it is the civilized world; it is
humanity itself.
And now what is it that the South asks of us as the condition of union
with it? Why, that we shall say and vote that we so much approve of
the slave-system, that we are willing, not merely that it should exist
untouched by us,--that is not the question,--but that it should be
taken to our bosom as a cherished national institution.
I hope we shall firmly but mildly refuse to say it. It is the only
honorable or dignified or conscientious position for us of the
North. But, do you see the result of these municipal elections
in Massachusetts? That does not look like firmness. There may be
flinching. But so it is, under the great Providence, that the world
wears around questions which it cannot sharply meet.
These matters take precedence of all others now-adays, or else my first
word would have been to say how glad we were to hear that C. is well
again.
Yours as ever,