Gentlemen, it is too late for Virginia, with all her lofty intellect and

nobility of feeling, to defend and advocate the principle of slavery.

The death-like silence which for nearly two centuries brooded over her

execrable system has been broken; light is pouring in upon the minds of

her citizens; truth is abroad, "searching out and overturning the lies of

the age." A moral reformation has been already awakened, and it cannot

now be drugged to sleep by the sophistries of detected sin. A thousand

intelligences are at work in her land; a thousand of her noblest hearts

are glowing with the redeeming spirit of that true philanthropy, which is

moving all the world. No, gentlemen; light is spreading from the hills

of Western Virginia to the extremest East. You cannot arrest its

progress. It is searching the consciences; it is exercising the reason;

it is appealing to the noblest characteristics of intelligent Virginians.

It is no foreign influence. From every abandoned plantation where the

profitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery;

from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the fox

may look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass is

creeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not imbruted

by avarice, indolence, and the lust of power.

Abolitionist as I am, the intellectual character of Virginia has no

warmer admirer than myself. Her great names, her moral trophies, the

glories of her early day, the still proud and living testimonials of her

mental power, I freely acknowledge and strongly appreciate. And, believe

me, it is with no other feelings than those of regret and heartfelt

sorrow that I speak plainly of her great error, her giant crime, a crime

which is visibly calling down upon her the curse of an offended Deity.

But I cannot forget that upon some of the most influential and highly

favored of her sons rests the responsibility at the present time of

sustaining this fearful iniquity. Blind to the signs of the times,

careless of the wishes of thousands of their white fellow-citizens and of

the manifold wrongs of the black man, they have dared to excuse, defend,

nay, eulogize, the black abominations of slavery.

Against the tottering ark of the idol these strong men have placed their

shoulders. That ark must fall; that idol must be cast down; what, then,

will be the fate of their supporters?

When the Convention of 1829 had gathered in its splendid galaxy of

talents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turned

their eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it would

adopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character of

its members and of the age in which they lived. I need not say how deep

and bitter was our disappointment. Western Virginia indeed spoke on that

occasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity.

But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned away

to listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph,

as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that system

of oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial of

the citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave-

holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before the

convention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrust

aside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved.

"In a political point of view," says the memorial, "we esteem slavery an

evil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us,

and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden of

removing it. We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as our

proposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with that

of the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and the

general depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and is

producing?"

I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper. The

memorialists state their belief

"That the labor of slaves is vastly less productive than that of freemen;

that it therefore requires a larger space to furnish subsistence for a

given number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of the

former necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence our

population, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and would

under other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty to

a square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a source

of endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on the

farm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt of

steady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt induces

idleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; that

the waste of the products of the land, nay, of the land itself, is

bringing poverty on all its inhabitants; that this poverty and the

sparseness of population either prevent the institution of schools

throughout the country, or keep them in a most languid and inefficient

condition; and that the same causes most obviously paralyze all our

schemes and efforts for the useful improvement of the country."

Gentlemen, you have only to look around you to know that this picture has

been drawn with the pencil of truth. What has made desolate and sterile

one of the loveliest regions of the whole earth? What mean the signs of

wasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finished

mansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed-

grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled and

naked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern? Is all this

in the ordinary course of nature? Has man husbanded well the good gifts

of God, and are they nevertheless passing from him, by a process of

deterioration over which he has no control? No, gentlemen. For more

than two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded its

annual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun of

our brief summer. The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor has

changed a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosa

into one of pastoral beauty,--the abode of independence and happiness.

Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, rich

with Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all her

territory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry! What a

change would have been manifest in your whole character! Freemen in the

place of slaves, industry, reputable economy, a virtue, dissipation

despised, emigration unnecessary!

(A late Virginia member of Congress described the Virginia slave-

holder as follows: "He is an Eastern Virginian whose good fortune it

has been to have been born wealthy, and to have become a profound

politician at twenty-one without study or labor. This individual,

from birth and habit, is above all labor and exertion. He never

moves a finger for any useful purpose; he lives on the labor of his

slaves, and even this labor he is too proud and indolent to direct

in person. While he is at his ease, a mercenary with a whip in his

hand drives his slaves in the field. Their dinner, consisting of a

few scraps and lean bones, is eaten in the burning sun. They have

no time to go to a shade and be refreshed such easement is reserved

for the horses"!--Speech of Hon. P. P. Doddridge in House of

Delegates, 1829.)

All this, you will say, comes too late; the curse is upon you, the evil

in the vitals of your state, the desolation widening day by day. No, it

is not too late. There are elements in the Virginian character capable

of meeting the danger, extreme as it is, and turning it aside. Could you

but forget for a time partisan contest and unprofitable political

speculations, you might successfully meet the dangerous exigencies of

your state with those efficient remedies which the spirit of the age

suggests; you might, and that too without pecuniary loss, relinquish your

claims to human beings as slaves, and employ them as free laborers, under

such restraint and supervision as their present degraded condition may

render necessary. In the language of one of your own citizens, "it is

useless for you to attempt to linger on the skirts of the age which is

departed. The action of existing causes and principles is steady and

progressive. It cannot be retarded, unless you would blow out all the

moral lights around you; and if you refuse to keep up with it, you will

be towed in the wake, whether you will or not."--(Speech in Virginia

legislature, 1832.)

The late noble example of the eloquent statesman of Roanoke, the

manumission of his slaves, speaks volumes to his political friends. In

the last hour of existence, when his soul was struggling from his broken

tenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act of

a former period. Light rest the turf upon him beneath his own

patrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made happy by his

benevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it.

Gentlemen, in concluding these letters, let me once more assure you that

I entertain towards you and your political friends none other than kindly

feelings. If I have spoken at all with apparent harshness, it has been

of principles rather than of men. But I deprecate no censure. Conscious

of the honest and patriotic motives which have prompted their avowal, I

cheerfully leave my sentiments to their fate. Despised and contemned as

they may be, I believe they cannot be gainsaid. Sustained by the truth

as it exists in Nature and Revelation, sanctioned by the prevailing

spirit of the age, they are yet destined to work out the political and

moral regeneration of our country. The opposition which they meet with

does not dishearten me. In the lofty confidence of John Milton, I

believe that "though all the winds of doctrine be let loose upon the

earth, so Truth be among them, we need not fear. Let her and Falsehood

grapple; whoever knew her to be put to the worst in a free and open

encounter?"

HAVERHILL, MASS., 29th of 7th Mo., 1833.

LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL.

HAVERHILL, 10th of 1st Mo., 1834.

SAMUEL E. SEWALL, ESQ.,

Secretary New England A. S. Society

DEAR FRIEND,--I regret that circumstances beyond my control will not

allow of my attendance at the annual meeting of the New England Anti-

Slavery Society.

I need not say to the members of that society that I am with them, heart

and soul, in the cause of abolition; the abolition not of physical

slavery alone, abhorrent and monstrous as it is, but of that intellectual

slavery, the bondage of corrupt and mistaken opinion, which has fettered

as with iron the moral energies and intellectual strength of New England.

For what is slavery, after all, but fear,--fear, forcing mind and body

into unnatural action? And it matters little whether it be the terror of

the slave-whip on the body, or of the scourge of popular opinion upon the

inner man.

We all know how often the representatives of the Southern division of the

country have amused themselves in Congress by applying the opprobrious

name of "slave" to the free Northern laborer. And how familiar have the

significant epithets of "white slave" and "dough-face" become!

I fear these epithets have not been wholly misapplied. Have we not been

told here, gravely and authoritatively, by some of our learned judges,

divines, and politicians, that we, the free people of New England, have

no right to discuss the subject of slavery? Freemen, and no right to

suggest the duty or the policy of a practical adherence to the doctrines

of that immortal declaration upon which our liberties are founded!

Christians, enjoying perfect liberty of conscience, yet possessing no

right to breathe one whisper against a system of adultery and blood,

which is filling the whole land with abomination and blasphemy! And this

craven sentiment is echoed by the very men whose industry is taxed to

defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of property, vested in

beings fashioned in the awful image of their Maker; by men whose hard

earnings aid in supporting a standing army mainly for the protection of

slaveholding indolence; by men who are liable at any moment to be called

from the field and workshop to put down by force the ever upward

tendencies of oppressed humanity, to aid the negro-breeder and the negro-

trader in the prosecution of a traffic most horrible in the eye of God,

to wall round with their bayonets two millions of colored Americans,

children of a common Father and heirs of a common eternity, while the

broken chain is riveted anew and the thrown-off fetter replaced.

I am for the abolition of this kind of slavery. It must be accomplished

before we can hope to abolish the negro slavery of the country. The

people of the free states, with a perfect understanding of their own

rights and a sacred respect for the rights of others, must put their

strong shoulders to the work of moral reform, and our statesmen, orators,

and politicians will follow, floating as they must with the tendency of

the current, the mere indices of popular sentiment. They cannot be

expected to lead in this matter. They are but instruments in the hands

of the people for good or evil:--

"A breath can make them, as a breath has made."

Be it our task to give tone and direction to these instruments; to turn

the tide of popular feeling into the pure channels of justice; to break

up the sinful silence of the nation; to bring the vaunted Christianity of

our age and country to the test of truth; to try the strength and purity

of our republicanism. If the Christianity we profess has not power to

pull down the strongholds of prejudice, and overcome hate, and melt the

heart of oppression, it is not of God. If our republicanism is based on

other foundation than justice and humanity, let it fall forever.

No better evidence is needed of the suicidal policy of this nation than

the death-like silence on the subject of slavery which pervades its

public documents. Who that peruses the annual messages of the national

executive would, from their perusal alone, conjecture that such an evil

as slavery had existence among us? Have the people reflected upon the

cause of this silence? The evil has grown to be too monstrous to be

questioned. Its very magnitude has sealed the lips of the rulers.

Uneasily, and troubled with its dream of guilt, the nation sleeps on.

The volcano is beneath. God is above us.

At every step of our peaceful and legal agitation of this subject we are

met with one grave objection. We are told that the system which we are

conscientiously opposing is recognized and protected by the Constitution.

For all the benefits of our fathers' patriotism--and they are neither few

nor trifling--let us be grateful to God and to their memories. But it

should not be forgotten that the same constitutional compact which now

sanctions slavery guaranteed protection for twenty years to the foreign

slave-trade. It threw the shield of its "sanctity" around the now

universally branded pirate. It legalized the most abhorrent system of

robbery which ever cursed the family of man.

During those years of sinful compromise the crime of man-robbery less

atrocious than at present? Because the Constitution permitted, in that

single crime, the violation of all the commandments of God, was that

violation less terrible to earth or offensive to heaven?

No one now defends that "constitutional" slavetrade. Loaded with the

curse of God and man, it stands amidst minor iniquities, like Satan in

Pandemonium, preeminent and monstrous in crime.

And if the slave-trade has become thus odious, what must be the fate,

erelong, of its parent, slavery? If the mere consequence be thus

blackening under the execration of all the world, who shall measure the

dreadful amount of infamy which must finally settle on the cause itself?

The titled ecclesiastic and the ambitious statesman should have their

warning on this point. They should know that public opinion is steadily

turning to the light of truth. The fountains are breaking up around us,

and the great deep will soon be in motion. A stern, uncompromising, and

solemn spirit of inquiry is abroad. It cannot be arrested, and its

result may be easily foreseen. It will not long be popular to talk of

the legality of soul-murder, the constitutionality of man-robbery.

One word in relation to our duty to our Southern brethren. If we detest

their system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite with

our lips. Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings as

to suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views of

justice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices and

established prejudices by miserable stratagem. Let us not first do

violence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property in

man, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them out

of it. They have a right to complain of such treatment. It is mean, and

wicked, and dishonorable. Let us rather treat our Southern friends as

intelligent and high-minded men, who, whatever may be their faults,

despise unmanly artifice, and loathe cant, and abhor hypocrisy.

Connected with them, not by political ties alone, but by common

sacrifices and mutual benefits, let us seek to expostulate with them

earnestly and openly, to gain at least their confidence in our sincerity,

to appeal to their consciences, reason, and interests; and, using no

other weapons than those of moral truth, contend fearlessly with the evil

system they are cherishing. And if, in an immediate compliance with the

strict demands of justice, they should need our aid and sympathy, let us

open to them our hearts and our purses. But in the name of sincerity,

and for the love of peace and the harmony of the Union, let there be no

more mining and countermining, no more blending of apology with

denunciation, no more Janus-like systems of reform, with one face for the

South and another for the North.

If we steadily adhere to the principles upon which we have heretofore

acted, if we present our naked hearts to the view of all, if we meet the

threats and violence of our misguided enemies with the bare bosom and

weaponless hand of innocence, may we not trust that the arm of our

Heavenly Father will be under us, to strengthen and support us? And

although we may not be able to save our country from the awful judgment

she is provoking, though the pillars of the Union fall and all the

elements of her greatness perish, still let it be our part to rally

around the standard of truth and justice, to wash our hands of evil, to

keep our own souls unspotted, and, bearing our testimony and lifting our

warning voices to the last, leave the event in the hands of a righteous

God.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

In 1837 Isaac Knapp printed Letters from John Quincy Adams to his

Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District in Massachusetts,

to which is added his Speech in Congress, delivered February 9,

1837, and the following stood as an introduction to the pamphlet.

THE following letters have been published, within a few weeks, in the

Quincy (Mass.) 'Patriot'. Notwithstanding the great importance of the

subjects which they discuss, the intense interest which they are

calculated to awaken throughout this commonwealth and the whole country,

and the exalted reputation of their author as a profound statesman and

powerful writer, they are as yet hardly known beyond the limits of the

constituency to whom they are particularly addressed. The reason of this

is sufficiently obvious. John Quincy Adams belongs to neither of the

prominent political parties, fights no partisan battles, and cannot be

prevailed upon to sacrifice truth and principle upon the altar of party

expediency and interest. Hence neither party is interested in defending

his course, or in giving him an opportunity to defend himself. But

however systematic may be the efforts of mere partisan presses to

suppress and hold back from the public eye the powerful and triumphant

vindication of the Right of Petition, the graphic delineation of the

slavery spirit in Congress, and the humbling disclosure of Northern

cowardice and treachery, contained in these letters, they are destined to

exert a powerful influence upon the public mind. They will constitute

one of the most striking pages in the history of our times. They will be

read with avidity in the North and in the South, and throughout Europe.

Apart from the interest excited by the subjects under discussion, and

viewed only as literary productions, they may be ranked among the highest

intellectual efforts of their author. Their sarcasm is Junius-like,--

cold, keen, unsparing. In boldness, directness, and eloquent appeal,

they will bear comparison with O'Connell's celebrated 'Letters to the

Reformers of Great Britain'. They are the offspring of an intellect

unshorn of its primal strength, and combining the ardor of youth with the

experience of age.

The disclosure made in these letters of the slavery influence exerted in

Congress over the representatives of the free states, of the manner in

which the rights of freemen have been bartered for Southern votes, or

basely yielded to the threats of men educated in despotism, and stamped

by the free indulgence of unrestrained tyranny with the "odious

peculiarities" of slavery, is painful and humiliating in the extreme. It

will be seen that, in the great struggle for and against the Right of

Petition, an account of which is given in the following pages, their

author stood, in a great measure, alone and unsupported by his Northern

colleagues. On his "gray, discrowned head" the entire fury of slave-

holding arrogance and wrath was expended. He stood alone, beating back,

with his aged and single arm, the tide which would have borne down and

overwhelmed a less sturdy and determined spirit.

We need not solicit for these letters, and the speech which accompanies

them, a thorough perusal. They deserve, and we trust will receive, a

circulation throughout the entire country. They will meet a cordial

welcome from every lover of human liberty, from every friend of justice

and the rights of man, irrespective of color or condition. The

principles which they defend, the sentiments which they express, are

those of Massachusetts, as recently asserted, almost unanimously, by her

legislature. In both branches of that body, during the discussion of the

subject of slavery and the right of petition, the course of the ex-

President was warmly and eloquently commended. Massachusetts will

sustain her tried and faithful representative; and the time is not far

distant when the best and worthiest citizens of the entire North will

proffer him their thanks for his noble defence of their rights as

freemen, and of the rights of the slave as a man.

THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY.

From a review of a pro-slavery pamphlet by "Evangelicus" in the

Boston Emancipator in 1843.

THE second part of the essay is occupied in proving that the slavery in

the Roman world, at the time of our Saviour, was similar in all essential

features to American slavery at the present day; and the third and

concluding part is devoted to an examination of the apostolical

directions to slaves and masters, as applicable to the same classes in

the United States. He thinks the command to give to servants that which

is just and equal means simply that the masters should treat their slaves

with equity, and that while the servant is to be profitable to the

master, the latter is bound in "a fair and equitable manner to provide

for the slave's subsistence and happiness." Although he professes to

believe that a faithful adherence to Scriptural injunctions on this point

would eventually terminate in the emancipation of the slaves, he thinks

it not necessary to inquire whether the New Testament does or does not

"tolerate slavery as a permanent institution"!

From the foregoing synopsis it will be seen at once that whatever may

have been the motives of the writer, the effect of his publication, so

far as it is at all felt, will be to strengthen the oppressor in his

guilt, and hold him back from the performance of his immediate duty in

respect to his slaves, and to shield his conscience from the reproofs of

that class who, according to "Evangelicus," have "no personal

acquaintance with the actual domestic state or the social and political

connections of their Southern fellow-citizens." We look upon it only as

another vain attempt to strike a balance between Christian duty and

criminal policy, to reconcile Christ and Belial, the holy philanthropy of

Him who went about doing good with the most abhorrent manifestation of

human selfishness, lust, and hatred which ever provoked the divine

displeasure. There is a grave-stone coldness about it. The author

manifests as little feeling as if he were solving a question in algebra.

No sigh of sympathy breathes through its frozen pages for the dumb,

chained millions, no evidence of a feeling akin to that of Him who at the

grave of Lazarus

"Wept, and forgot His power to save;"

no outburst of that indignant reproof with which the Divine Master

rebuked the devourers of widows' houses and the oppressors of the poor is

called forth by the writer's stoical contemplation of the tyranny of his

"Christian brethren" at the South.

"It is not necessary," says Evangelicus, "to inquire whether the New

Testament does not tolerate slavery as a permanent institution." And

this is said when the entire slave-holding church has sheltered its

abominations under the pretended sanction of the gospel; when slavery,

including within itself a violation of every command uttered amidst the

thunders of Sinai, a system which has filled the whole South with the

oppression of Egypt and the pollutions of Sodom, is declared to be an

institution of the Most High. With all due deference to the author, we

tell him, and we tell the church, North and South, that this question

must be met. Once more we repeat the solemn inquiry which has been

already made in our columns, "Is the Bible to enslave the world?" Has it

been but a vain dream of ours that the mission of the Author of the

gospel was to undo the heavy burdens, to open the prison doors, and to

break the yoke of the captive? Let Andover and Princeton answer. If the

gospel does sanction the vilest wrong which man can inflict upon his

fellow-man, if it does rivet the chains which humanity, left to itself,

would otherwise cast off, then, in humanity's name, let it perish forever

from the face of the earth. Let the Bible societies dissolve; let not

another sheet issue from their presses. Scatter not its leaves abroad

over the dark places of the earth; they are not for the healing of the

nations. Leave rather to the Persian his Zendavesta, to the Mussulman

his Koran. We repeat it, this question must be met. Already we have

heard infidelity exulting over the astute discoveries of bespectacled

theological professors, that the great Head of the Christian Church

tolerated the horrible atrocities of Roman slavery, and that His most

favored apostle combined slave-catching with his missionary labors. And

why should it not exult? Fouler blasphemy than this was never uttered.

A more monstrous libel upon the Divine Author of Christianity was never

propagated by Paine or Voltaire, Kneeland or Owen; and we are constrained

to regard the professor of theology or the doctor of divinity who tasks

his sophistry and learning in an attempt to show that the Divine Mind

looks with complacency upon chattel slavery as the most dangerous enemy

with which Christianity has to contend. The friends of pure and

undefiled religion must awake to this danger. The Northern church must

shake itself clean from its present connection with blasphemers and

slave-holders, or perish with them.

WHAT IS SLAVERY

Addressed to the Liberty Party Convention at New Bedford in

September, 1843.

I HAVE just received your kind invitation to attend the meeting of the

Liberty Party in New Bedford on the 2d of next month. Believe me, it is

with no ordinary feelings of regret that I find myself under the

necessity of foregoing the pleasure of meeting with you on that occasion.

But I need not say to you, and through you to the convention, that you

have my hearty sympathy.

I am with the Liberty Party because it is the only party in the country

which is striving openly and honestly to reduce to practice the great

truths which lie at the foundation of our republic: all men created

equal, endowed with rights inalienable; the security of these rights the

only just object of government; the right of the people to alter or

modify government until this great object is attained. Precious and

glorious truths! Sacred in the sight of their Divine Author, grateful

and beneficent to suffering humanity, essential elements of that ultimate

and universal government of which God is laying the strong and wide

foundations, turning and overturning, until He whose right it is shall

rule. The voice which calls upon us to sustain them is the voice of God.

In the eloquent language of the lamented Myron Holley, the man who first

lifted up the standard of the Liberty Party: "He calls upon us to sustain

these truths in the recorded voice of the holy of ancient times. He

calls us to sustain them in the sound as of many waters and mighty

thunderings rising from the fields of Europe, converted into one vast

Aceldama by the exertions of despots to suppress them; in the persuasive

history of the best thoughts and boldest deeds of all our brave, self-

sacrificing ancestors; in the tender, heart-reaching whispers of our

children, preparing to suffer or enjoy the future, as we leave it for

them; in the broken and disordered but moving accents of half our race

yet groping in darkness and galled by the chains of bondage. He calls

upon us to sustain them by the solemn and considerate use of all the

powers with which He has invested us." In a time of almost universal

political scepticism, in the midst of a pervading and growing unbelief in

the great principles enunciated in the revolutionary declaration, the

Liberty Party has dared to avow its belief in these truths, and to carry

them into action as far as it has the power. It is a protest against the

political infidelity of the day, a recurrence to first principles, a

summons once more to that deserted altar upon which our fathers laid

their offerings.

It may be asked why it is that a party resting upon such broad principles

is directing its exclusive exertions against slavery. "Are there not

other great interests?" ask all manner of Whig and Democrat editors and

politicians. "Consider, for instance," say the Democrats, "the mighty

question which is agitating us, whether a 'Northern man with Southern

principles' or a Southern man with the principles of a Nero or Caligula

shall be President." "Or look at us," say the Whigs, "deprived of our

inalienable right to office by this Tyler-Calhoun administration. And

bethink you, gentlemen, how could your Liberty Party do better than to

vote with us for a man who, if he does hold some threescore of slaves,

and maintain that 'two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned and

sanctified negro slavery,' is, at the same time, the champion of Greek

liberty, and Polish liberty, and South American liberty, and, in short,

of all sorts of liberties, save liberty at home."

Yes, friends, we have considered all this, and more, namely, that one

sixth part of our entire population are slaves, and that you, with your

subtreasuries and national banks, propose no relief for them. Nay,

farther, it is because both of you, when in power, have used your

authority to rivet closer the chains of unhappy millions, that we have

been compelled to abandon you, and form a liberty party having for its

first object the breaking of these chains.

What is slavery? For upon the answer to this question must the Liberty

Party depend for its justification.

The slave laws of the South tell us that it is the conversion of men into

articles of property; the transformation of sentient immortal beings into

"chattels personal." The principle of a reciprocity of benefits, which

to some extent characterizes all other relations, does not exist in that

of master and slave. The master holds the plough which turns the soil of

his plantation, the horse which draws it, and the slave who guides it by

one and the same tenure. The profit of the master is the great end of

the slave's existence. For this end he is fed, clothed, and prescribed

for in sickness. He learns nothing, acquires nothing, for himself. He

cannot use his own body for his own benefit. His very personality is

destroyed. He is a mere instrument, a means in the hands of another for

the accomplishment of an end in which his own interests are not regarded,

a machine moved not by his own will, but by another's. In him the awful

distinction between a person and a thing is annihilated: he is thrust

down from the place which God and Nature assigned him, from the equal

companionship of rational intelligence's,--a man herded with beasts, an

immortal nature classed with the wares of the merchant!

The relations of parent and child, master and apprentice, government and

subject, are based upon the principle of benevolence, reciprocal

benefits, and the wants of human society; relations which sacredly

respect the rights and legacies which God has given to all His rational

creatures. But slavery exists only by annihilating or monopolizing these

rights and legacies. In every other modification of society, man's

personal ownership remains secure. He may be oppressed, deprived of

privileges, loaded with burdens, hemmed about with legal disabilities,

his liberties restrained. But, through all, the right to his own body

and soul remains inviolate. He retains his inherent, original possession

of himself. Even crime cannot forfeit it, for that law which destroys

his personality makes void its own claims upon him as a moral agent; and

the power to punish ceases with the accountability of the criminal. He

may suffer and die under the penalties of the law, but he suffers as a

man, he perishes as a man, and not as a thing. To the last moments of

his existence the rights of a moral agent are his; they go with him to

the grave; they constitute the ground of his accountability at the bar of

infinite justice,--rights fixed, eternal, inseparable; attributes of all

rational intelligence in time and eternity; the same in essence, and

differing in degree only, with those of the highest moral being, of God

himself.

Slavery alone lays its grasp upon the right of personal ownership, that

foundation right, the removal of which uncreates the man; a right which

God himself could not take away without absolving the being thus deprived

of all moral accountability; and so far as that being is concerned,

making sin and holiness, crime and virtue, words without significance,

and the promises and sanctions of revelation, dreams. Hence, the

crowning horror of slavery, that which lifts it above all other

iniquities, is not that it usurps the prerogatives of Deity, but that it

attempts that which even He who has said, "All souls are mine," cannot

do, without breaking up the foundations of His moral government. Slavery

is, in fact, a struggle with the Almighty for dominion over His rational

creatures. It is leagued with the powers of darkness, in wresting man

from his Maker. It is blasphemy lifting brazen brow and violent hand to

heaven, attempting a reversal of God's laws. Man claiming the right to

uncreate his brother; to undo that last and most glorious work, which God

himself pronounced good, amidst the rejoicing hosts of heaven! Man

arrogating to himself the right to change, for his own selfish purposes,

the beautiful order of created existences; to pluck the crown of an

immortal nature, scarce lower than that of angels, from the brow of his

brother; to erase the God-like image and superscription stamped upon him

by the hand of his Creator, and to write on the despoiled and desecrated

tablet, "A chattel personal!"

This, then, is slavery. Nature, with her thousand voices, cries out

against it. Against it, divine revelation launches its thunders. The

voice of God condemns it in the deep places of the human heart. The woes

and wrongs unutterable which attend this dreadful violation of natural

justice, the stripes, the tortures, the sunderings of kindred, the

desolation of human affections, the unchastity and lust, the toil

uncompensated, the abrogated marriage, the legalized heathenism, the

burial of the mind, are but the mere incidentals of the first grand

outrage, that seizure of the entire man, nerve, sinew, and spirit, which

robs him of his body, and God of his soul. These are but the natural

results and outward demonstrations of slavery, the crystallizations from

the chattel principle.

It is against this system, in its active operation upon three millions of

our countrymen, that the Liberty Party is, for the present, directing all

its efforts. With such an object well may we be "men of one idea." Nor

do we neglect "other great interests," for all are colored and controlled

by slavery, and the removal of this disastrous influence would most

effectually benefit them.

Political action is the result and immediate object of moral suasion on

this subject. Action, action, is the spirit's means of progress, its

sole test of rectitude, its only source of happiness. And should not

decided action follow our deep convictions of the wrong of slavery?

Shall we denounce the slave-holders of the states, while we retain our

slavery in the District of Columbia? Shall we pray that the God of the

oppressed will turn the hearts of "the rulers" in South Carolina, while

we, the rulers of the District, refuse to open the prisons and break up

the slave-markets on its ten miles square? God keep us from such

hypocrisy! Everybody now professes to be opposed to slavery. The

leaders of the two great political parties are grievously concerned lest

the purity of the antislavery enterprise will suffer in its connection

with politics. In the midst of grossest pro-slavery action, they are

full of anti-slavery sentiment. They love the cause, but, on the whole,

think it too good for this world. They would keep it sublimated, aloft,

out of vulgar reach or use altogether, intangible as Magellan's clouds.

Everybody will join us in denouncing slavery, in the abstract; not a

faithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, and

forsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie down

with the lamb, while slavery in practice clanks, in derision, its three

millions of unbroken chains. Our opponents have no fear of the harmless

spectre of an abstract idea. They dread it only when it puts on the

flesh and sinews of a practical reality, and lifts its right arm in the

strength which God giveth to do as well as theorize.

As honest men, then, we must needs act; let us do so as becomes men

engaged in a great and solemn cause. Not by processions and idle parades

and spasmodic enthusiasms, by shallow tricks and shows and artifices, can

a cause like ours be carried onward. Leave these to parties contending

for office, as the "spoils of victory." We need no disguises, nor false

pretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow-

countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and native

beauty. Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with hearty

confidence that truth and right are destined to triumph. Let us blot out

the word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary. Let the

enemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppression

despair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the name

of God and in the power of His truth, take courage. Slavery must die.

The Lord hath spoken it. The vials of His hot displeasure, like those

which chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking even

now, above its "habitations of cruelty." It can no longer be borne with

by Heaven. Universal humanity cries out against it. Let us work, then,

to hasten its downfall, doing whatsoever our hands find to do, "with all

our might."

October, 1843.

DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. (1843.)

THE great leader of American Democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was an

ultra-abolitionist in theory, while from youth to age a slave-holder in

practice. With a zeal which never abated, with a warmth which the frost

of years could not chill, he urged the great truths, that each man should

be the guardian of his own weal; that one man should never have absolute

control over another. He maintained the entire equality of the race, the

inherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fair

participation in the enactment of the laws by which they are governed.

He saw clearly that slavery, as it existed in the South and on his own

plantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine. His early efforts for

emancipation in Virginia failed of success; but he next turned his

attention to the vast northwestern territory, and laid the foundation of

that ordinance of 1787, which, like the flaming sword of the angel at the

gates of Paradise, has effectually guarded that territory against the

entrance of slavery. Nor did he stop here. He was the friend and

admirer of the ultra-abolitionists of revolutionary France; he warmly

urged his British friend, Dr. Price, to send his anti-slavery pamphlets

into Virginia; he omitted no opportunity to protest against slavery as

anti-democratic, unjust, and dangerous to the common welfare; and in his

letter to the territorial governor of Illinois, written in old age, he

bequeathed, in earnest and affecting language, the cause of negro

emancipation to the rising generation. "This enterprise," said he, "is

for the young, for those who can carry it forward to its consummation.

It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old

man."

Such was Thomas Jefferson, the great founder of American Democracy, the

advocate of the equality of human rights, irrespective of any conditions

of birth, or climate, or color. His political doctrines, it is strange

to say, found their earliest recipients and most zealous admirers in the

slave states of the Union. The privileged class of slaveholders, whose

rank and station "supersede the necessity of an order of nobility,"

became earnest advocates of equality among themselves--the democracy of

aristocracy. With the misery and degradation of servitude always before

them, in the condition of their own slaves, an intense love of personal

independence, and a haughty impatience of any control over their actions,

prepared them to adopt the democratic idea, so far as it might be applied

to their own order. Of that enlarged and generous democracy, the love,

not of individual freedom alone, but of the rights and liberties of all

men, the unselfish desire to give to others the privileges which all men

value for themselves, we are constrained to believe the great body of

Thomas Jefferson's slave-holding admirers had no adequate conception.

They were just such democrats as the patricians of Rome and the

aristocracy of Venice; lords over their own plantations, a sort of "holy

alliance" of planters, admitting and defending each other's divine right

of mastership.

Still, in Virginia, Maryland, and in other sections of the slave states,

truer exponents and exemplifiers of the idea of democracy, as it existed

in the mind of Jefferson, were not wanting. In the debate on the

memorials presented to the first Congress of the United States, praying

for the abolition of slavery, the voice of the Virginia delegation in

that body was unanimous in deprecation of slavery as an evil, social,

moral, and political. In the Virginia constitutional convention--of 1829

there were men who had the wisdom to perceive and the firmness to declare

that slavery was not only incompatible with the honor and prosperity of

the state, but wholly indefensible on any grounds which could be

consistently taken by a republican people. In the debate on the same

subject in the legislature in 1832, universal and impartial democracy

found utterance from eloquent lips. We might say as much of Kentucky,

the child of Virginia. But it remains true that these were exceptions to

the general rule. With the language of universal liberty on their lips,

and moved by the most zealous spirit of democratic propagandism, the

greater number of the slave-holders of the Union seem never to have

understood the true meaning, or to have measured the length and breadth

of that doctrine which they were the first to adopt, and of which they

have claimed all along to be the peculiar and chosen advocates.

The Northern States were slow to adopt the Democratic creed. The

oligarchy of New England, and the rich proprietors and landholders of the

Middle States, turned with alarm and horror from the levelling doctrines

urged upon them by the "liberty and equality" propagandists of the South.

The doctrines of Virginia were quite as unpalatable to Massachusetts at

the beginning of the present century as those of Massachusetts now are to

the Old Dominion. Democracy interfered with old usages and time-honored

institutions, and threatened to plough up the very foundations of the

social fabric. It was zealously opposed by the representatives of New

England in Congress and in the home legislatures; and in many pulpits

hands were lifted to God in humble entreaty that the curse and bane of

democracy, an offshoot of the rabid Jacobinism of revolutionary France,

might not be permitted to take root and overshadow the goodly heritage of

Puritanism. The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures of

the evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrines

in their midst, have drawn nothing more fearful than the visions of such

"Prophets of war and harbingers of ill"

as Fisher Ames in the forum and Parish in the desk, when contemplating

the inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, and

property of the North.

But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, the

mechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter.

The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel. It

was in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinent

inconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in the

free states. Come the doctrine from whom it might, the people felt it to

be true. State after state revolted from the ranks of federalism, and

enrolled itself on the side of democracy. The old order of things was

broken up; equality before the law was established, religious tests and

restrictions of the right of suffrage were abrogated. Take

Massachusetts, for example. There the resistance to democratic

principles was the most strenuous and longest continued. Yet, at this

time, there is no state in the Union more thorough in its practical

adoption of them. No property qualifications or religious tests prevail;

all distinctions of sect, birth, or color, are repudiated, and suffrage

is universal. The democracy, which in the South has only been held in a

state of gaseous abstraction, hardened into concrete reality in the cold

air of the North. The ideal became practical, for it had found lodgment

among men who were accustomed to act out their convictions and test all

their theories by actual experience.

While thus making a practical application of the new doctrine, the people

of the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracy

and slavery.

Selleck Osborn, who narrowly escaped the honor of a Democratic martyr in

Connecticut, denounced slave-holding, in common with other forms of

oppression. Barlow, fresh from communion with Gregoire, Brissot, and

Robespierre, devoted to negro slavery some of the most vigorous and

truthful lines of his great poem. Eaton, returning from his romantic

achievements in Tunis for the deliverance of white slaves, improved the

occasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency and

guilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819-

20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, took

issue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten years

later, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated,

beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words of

Jefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic men called the

attention of the community to the moral wrong and political reproach of

slavery. In the name and spirit of democracy, the moral and political

powers of the people were invoked to limit, discountenance, and put an

end to a system so manifestly subversive of its foundation principles.

It was a revival of the language of Jefferson and Page and Randolph, an

echo of the voice of him who penned the Declaration of Independence and

originated the ordinance of 1787.

Meanwhile the South had wellnigh forgotten the actual significance of the

teachings of its early political prophets, and their renewal in the shape

of abolitionism was, as might have been expected, strange and unwelcome.

Pleasant enough it had been to hold up occasionally these democratic

abstractions for the purpose of challenging the world's admiration and

cheaply acquiring the character of lovers of liberty and equality.

Frederick of Prussia, apostrophizing the shades of Cato and Brutus,

"Vous de la liberte heros que je revere,"

while in the full exercise of his despotic power, was quite as consistent

as these democratic slaveowners, whose admiration of liberty increased in

exact ratio with its distance from their own plantations. They had not

calculated upon seeing their doctrine clothed with life and power, a

practical reality, pressing for application to their slaves as well as to

themselves. They had not taken into account the beautiful ordination of

Providence, that no man can vindicate his own rights, without directly or

impliedly including in that vindication the rights of all other men. The

haughty and oppressive barons who wrung from their reluctant monarch the

Great Charter at Runnymede, acting only for themselves and their class,

little dreamed of the universal application which has since been made of

their guaranty of rights and liberties. As little did the nobles of the

parliament of Paris, when strengthening themselves by limiting the kingly

prerogative, dream of the emancipation of their own serfs, by a

revolution to which they were blindly giving the first impulse. God's

truth is universal; it cannot be monopolized by selfishness.

THE TWO PROCESSIONS. (1844.)

"Look upon this picture, and on this." HAMLET.

CONSIDERING that we have a slave population of nearly three millions, and

that in one half of the states of the Republic it is more hazardous to

act upon the presumption that "all men are created free and equal" than

it would be in Austria or Russia, the lavish expression of sympathy and

extravagant jubilation with which, as a people, we are accustomed to

greet movements in favor of freedom abroad are not a little remarkable.

We almost went into ecstasies over the first French revolution; we filled

our papers with the speeches of orator Hunt and the English radicals; we

fraternized with the United Irishmen; we hailed as brothers in the cause

of freedom the very Mexicans whom we have since wasted with fire and

sword; our orators, North and South, grew eloquent and classic over the

Greek and Polish revolutions. In short, long ere this, if the walls of

kingcraft and despotism had been, like those of Jericho, destined to be

overthrown by sound, our Fourth of July cannon-shootings and bell-

ringings, together with our fierce, grandiloquent speech-makings in and

out of Congress, on the occasions referred to, would have left no stone

upon another.

It is true that an exception must be made in the case of Hayti. We fired

no guns, drank no toasts, made no speeches in favor of the establishment

of that new republic in our neighborhood. The very mention of the

possibility that Haytien delegates might ask admittance to the congress

of the free republics of the New World at Panama "frightened from their

propriety" the eager propagandists of republicanism in the Senate, and

gave a death-blow to their philanthropic projects. But as Hayti is a

republic of blacks who, having revolted from their masters as well as

from the mother country, have placed themselves entirely without the pale

of Anglo-Saxon sympathy by their impertinent interference with the

monopoly of white liberty, this exception by no means disproves the

general fact, that in the matter of powder-burning, bell-jangling,

speech-making, toast-drinking admiration of freedom afar off and in the

abstract we have no rivals. The caricature of our "general sympathizers"

in Martin Chuzzlewit is by no means a fancy sketch.

The news of the revolution of the three days in Paris, and the triumph of

the French people over Charles X. and his ministers, as a matter of

course acted with great effect upon our national susceptibility. We all

threw up our hats in excessive joy at the spectacle of a king dashed down

headlong from his throne and chased out of his kingdom by his long-

suffering and oppressed subjects. We took half the credit of the

performance to ourselves, inasmuch as Lafayette was a principal actor in

it. Our editors, from Passamaquoddy to the Sabine, indited paragraphs

for a thousand and one newspapers, congratulating the Parisian patriots,

and prophesying all manner of evil to holy alliances, kings, and

aristocracies. The National Intelligencer for September 27, 1830,

contains a full account of the public rejoicings of the good people of

Washington on the occasion. Bells were rung in all the steeples, guns

were fired, and a grand procession was formed, including the President of

the United States, the heads of departments, and other public

functionaries. Decorated with tricolored ribbons, and with tricolored

flags mingling with the stripes and stars over their heads, and gazed

down upon by bright eyes from window and balcony, the "general

sympathizers" moved slowly and majestically through the broad avenue

towards the Capitol to celebrate the revival of French liberty in a

manner becoming the chosen rulers of a free people.

What a spectacle was this for the representatives of European kingcraft

at our seat of government! How the titled agents of Metternich and

Nicholas must have trembled, in view of this imposing demonstration, for

the safety of their "peculiar institutions!"

Unluckily, however, the moral effect of this grand spectacle was marred

somewhat by the appearance of another procession, moving in a contrary

direction. It was a gang of slaves! Handcuffed in pairs, with the

sullen sadness of despair in their faces, they marched wearily onward to

the music of the driver's whip and the clanking iron on their limbs.

Think of it! Shouts of triumph, rejoicing bells, gay banners, and

glittering cavalcades, in honor of Liberty, in immediate contrast with

men and women chained and driven like cattle to market! The editor of

the American Spectator, a paper published at Washington at that time,

speaking of this black procession of slavery, describes it as "driven

along by what had the appearance of a man on horseback." The miserable

wretches who composed it were doubtless consigned to a slave-jail to

await their purchase and transportation to the South or Southwest; and

perhaps formed a part of that drove of human beings which the same editor

states that he saw on the Saturday following, "males and females chained

in couples, starting from Robey's tavern, on foot, for Alexandria, to

embark on board a slave-ship."

At a Virginia camp-meeting, many years ago, one of the brethren,

attempting an exhortation, stammered, faltered, and finally came to a

dead stand. "Sit down, brother," said old Father Kyle, the one-eyed

abolition preacher; "it's no use to try; you can't preach with twenty

negroes sticking in your throat!" It strikes us that our country is very

much in the condition of the poor confused preacher at the camp-meeting.

Slavery sticks in its throat, and spoils its finest performances,

political and ecclesiastical; confuses the tongues of its evangelical

alliances; makes a farce of its Fourth of July celebrations; and, as in

the case of the grand Washington procession of 1830, sadly mars the

effect of its rejoicings in view of the progress of liberty abroad.

There is a stammer in all our exhortations; our moral and political

homilies are sure to run into confusions and contradictions; and the

response which comes to us from the nations is not unlike that of Father

Kyle to the planter's attempt at sermonizing: "It's no use, brother

Jonathan; you can't preach liberty with three millions of slaves in your

throat!"

A CHAPTER OF HISTORY. (1844.)

THE theory which a grave and learned Northern senator has recently

announced in Congress, that slavery, like the cotton-plant, is confined

by natural laws to certain parallels of latitude, beyond which it can by

no possibility exist, however it may have satisfied its author and its

auditors, has unfortunately no verification in the facts of the case.

Slavery is singularly cosmopolitan in its habits. The offspring of

pride, and lust, and avarice, it is indigenous to the world. Rooted in

the human heart, it defies the rigors of winter in the steppes of Tartary

and the fierce sun of the tropics. It has the universal acclimation of

sin.

The first account we have of negro slaves in New England is from the pen

of John Josselyn. Nineteen years after the landing at Plymouth, this

interesting traveller was for some time the guest of Samuel Maverick, who

then dwelt, like a feudal baron, in his fortalice on Noddle's Island,

surrounded by retainers and servants, bidding defiance to his Indian

neighbors behind his strong walls, with "four great guns" mounted

thereon, and "giving entertainment to all new-comers gratis."

"On the 2d of October, 1639, about nine o'clock in the morning, Mr.

Maverick's negro woman," says Josselyn, "came to my chamber, and in her

own country language and tune sang very loud and shrill. Going out to

her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and would willingly

have expressed her grief in English had she been able to speak the

language; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment.

Whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him the cause, and resolved

to entreat him in her behalf; for I had understood that she was a queen

in her own country, and observed a very dutiful and humble garb used

towards her by another negro, who was her maid. Mr. Maverick was

desirous to have a breed of negroes; and therefore, seeing she would not

yield by persuasions to company with a negro young man he had in his

house, he commanded him, willed she, nilled she, to go to her bed, which

was no sooner done than she thrust him out again. This she took in high

disdain beyond her slavery; and this was the cause of her grief."

That the peculiar domestic arrangements and unfastidious economy of this

slave-breeding settler were not countenanced by the Puritans of that

early time we have sufficient evidence. It is but fair to suppose, from

the silence of all other writers of the time with respect to negroes and

slaves, that this case was a marked exception to the general habits and

usage of the Colonists. At an early period a traffic was commenced

between the New England Colonies and that of Barbadoes; and it is not

improbable that slaves were brought to Boston from that island. The

laws, however, discouraged their introduction and purchase, giving

freedom to all held to service at the close of seven years.

In 1641, two years after Josselyn's adventure on Noddle's Island, the

code of laws known by the name of the Body of Liberties was adopted by

the Colony. It was drawn up by Nathaniel Ward, the learned and ingenious

author of the 'Simple Cobbler of Agawarn', the earliest poetical satire

of New England. One of its provisions was as follows:--

"There shall be never any bond slaverie, villainage, or captivitie

amongst us, unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres and such

strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And these

shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God

established in Israel doth morally require."

In 1646, Captain Smith, a Boston church-member, in connection with one

Keeser, brought home two negroes whom he obtained by the surprise and

burning of a negro village in Africa and the massacre of many of its

inhabitants. Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the assistants, presented a

petition to the General Court, stating the outrage thereby committed as

threefold in its nature, namely murder, man-stealing, and Sabbath-

breaking; inasmuch as the offence of "chasing the negers, as aforesayde,

upon the Sabbath day (being a servile work, and such as cannot be

considered under any other head) is expressly capital by the law of God;"

for which reason he prays that the offenders may be brought to justice,

"soe that the sin they have committed may be upon their own heads and not

upon ourselves."

Upon this petition the General Court passed the following order,

eminently worthy of men professing to rule in the fear and according to

the law of God,--a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that do

well:--

"The General Court, conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunity

to bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing, as

also to prescribe such timely redress for what has passed, and such a law

for the future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us to

have to do in such vile and odious courses, justly abhorred of all good

and just men, do order that the negro interpreter, and others unlawfully

taken, be by the first opportunity, at the charge of the country for the

present, sent to his native country, Guinea, and a letter with him of the

indignation of the Court thereabout, and justice thereof, desiring our

honored Governor would please put this order in execution."

There is, so far as we know, no historical record of the actual return of

these stolen men to their home. A letter is extant, however, addressed

in behalf of the General Court to a Mr. Williams on the Piscataqua, by

whom one of the negroes had been purchased, requesting him to send the

man forthwith to Boston, that he may be sent home, "which this Court do

resolve to send back without delay."

Three years after, in 1649, the following law was placed upon the

statute-book of the Massachusetts Colony:--

"If any man stealeth a man, or mankind, he shall surely be put to death."

It will thus be seen that these early attempts to introduce slavery into

New England were opposed by severe laws and by that strong popular

sentiment in favor of human liberty which characterized the Christian

radicals who laid the foundations of the Colonies. It was not the rigor

of her Northern winter, nor the unkindly soil of Massachusetts, which

discouraged the introduction of slavery in the first half-century of her

existence as a colony. It was the Puritan's recognition of the

brotherhood of man in sin, suffering, and redemption, his estimate of the

awful responsibilities and eternal destinies of humanity, his hatred of

wrong and tyranny, and his stern sense of justice, which led him to

impose upon the African slave-trader the terrible penalty of the Mosaic

code.

But that brave old generation passed away. The civil contentions in the

mother country drove across the seas multitudes of restless adventurers

and speculators. The Indian wars unsettled and demoralized the people.

Habits of luxury and the greed of gain took the place of the severe self-

denial and rigid virtues of the fathers. Hence we are not surprised to

find that Josselyn, in his second visit to New England, some twenty-five

years after his first, speaks of the great increase of servants and

negroes. In 1680 Governor Bradstreet, in answer to the inquiries of his

Majesty's Privy Council, states that two years before a vessel from

Madagasca "brought into the Colony betwixt forty and fifty negroes,

mostly women and children, who were sold at a loss to the owner of the

vessel." "Now and then," he continues, "two or three negroes are brought

from Barbadoes and other of his Majesty's plantations and sold for twenty

pounds apiece; so that there may be within the government about one

hundred or one hundred and twenty, and it may be as many Scots, brought

hither and sold for servants in the time of the war with Scotland, and

about half as many Irish."

The owning of a black or white slave, or servant, at this period was

regarded as an evidence of dignity and respectability; and hence

magistrates and clergymen winked at the violation of the law by the

mercenary traders, and supplied themselves without scruple. Indian

slaves were common, and are named in old wills, deeds, and inventories,

with horses, cows, and household furniture. As early as the year 1649 we

find William Hilton, of Newbury, sells to George Carr, "for one quarter

part of a vessel, James, my Indian, with all the interest I have in him,

to be his servant forever." Some were taken in the Narragansett war and

other Indian wars; others were brought from South Carolina and the

Spanish Main. It is an instructive fact, as illustrating the retributive

dealings of Providence, that the direst affliction of the Massachusetts

Colony--the witchcraft terror of 1692--originated with the Indian Tituba,

a slave in the family of the minister of Danvers.

In the year 1690 the inhabitants of Newbury were greatly excited by the

arrest of a Jerseyman who had been engaged in enticing Indians and

negroes to leave their masters. He was charged before the court with

saying that "the English should be cut off and the negroes set free."

James, a negro slave, and Joseph, an Indian, were arrested with him.

Their design was reported to be, to seize a vessel in the port and escape

to Canada and join the French, and return and lay waste and plunder their

masters. They were to come back with five hundred Indians and three

hundred Canadians; and the place of crossing the Merrimac River, and of

the first encampment on the other side, were even said to be fixed upon.

When we consider that there could not have been more than a score of

slaves in the settlement, the excitement into which the inhabitants were

thrown by this absurd rumor of conspiracy seems not very unlike that of a

convocation of small planters in a backwoods settlement in South Carolina

on finding an anti-slavery newspaper in their weekly mail bag.

In 1709 Colonel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, had several negroes, and among

them a high-spirited girl, who, for some alleged misdemeanor, was

severely chastised. The slave resolved upon revenge for her injury, and

soon found the means of obtaining it. The Colonel had on hand, for

service in the Indian war then raging, a considerable store of gunpowder.

This she placed under the room in which her master and mistress slept,

laid a long train, and dropped a coal on it. She had barely time to

escape to the farm-house before the explosion took place, shattering the

stately mansion into fragments. Saltonstall and his wife were carried on

their bed a considerable distance, happily escaping serious injury. Some

soldiers stationed in the house were scattered in all directions; but no

lives were lost. The Colonel, on recovering from the effects of his

sudden overturn, hastened to the farm-house and found his servants all up

save the author of the mischief, who was snug in bed and apparently in a

quiet sleep.

In 1701 an attempt was made in the General Court of Massachusetts to

prevent the increase of slaves. Judge Sewall soon after published a

pamphlet against slavery, but it seems with little effect. Boston

merchants and ship-owners became, to a considerable extent, involved in

the slave-trade. Distilleries, established in that place and in Rhode

Island, furnished rum for the African market. The slaves were usually

taken to the West Indies, although occasionally part of a cargo found its

way to New England, where the wholesome old laws against man-stealing had

become a dead letter on the statute-book.

In 1767 a bill was brought before the Legislature of Massachusetts to

prevent "the unwarrantable and unnatural custom of enslaving mankind."

The Council of Governor Bernard sent it back to the House greatly changed

and curtailed, and it was lost by the disagreement of the two branches.

Governor Bernard threw his influence on the side of slavery. In 1774 a

bill prohibiting the traffic in slaves passed both Houses; but Governor

Hutchinson withheld his assent and dismissed the Legislature. The

colored men sent a deputation of their own to the Governor to solicit his

consent to the bill; but he told them his instructions forbade him. A

similar committee waiting upon General Gage received the same answer.

In the year 1770 a servant of Richard Lechmere, of Cambridge, stimulated

by the general discussion of the slavery question and by the advice of

some of the zealous advocates of emancipation, brought an action against

his master for detaining him in bondage. The suit was decided in his

favor two years before the similar decision in the case of Somerset in

England. The funds necessary for carrying on this suit were raised among

the blacks themselves. Other suits followed in various parts of the

Province; and the result was, in every instance, the freedom of the

plaintiff. In 1773 Caesar Hendrick sued his master, one Greenleaf, of

Newburyport, for damages, laid at fifty pounds, for holding him as a

slave. The jury awarded him his freedom and eighteen pounds.

According to Dr. Belknap, whose answers to the queries on the subject,

propounded by Judge Tucker, of Virginia, have furnished us with many of

the facts above stated, the principal grounds upon which the counsel of

the masters depended were, that the negroes were purchased in open

market, and included in the bills of sale like other property; that

slavery was sanctioned by usage; and, finally, that the laws of the

Province recognized its existence by making masters liable for the

maintenance of their slaves, or servants.

On the part of the blacks, the law and usage of the mother country,

confirmed by the Great Charter, that no man can be deprived of his

liberty but by the judgment of his peers, were effectually pleaded. The

early laws of the Province prohibited slavery, and no subsequent

legislation had sanctioned it; for, although the laws did recognize its

existence, they did so only to mitigate and modify an admitted evil.

The present state constitution was established in 1780. The first

article of the Bill of Rights prohibited slavery by affirming the

foundation truth of our republic, that "all men are born free and equal."

The Supreme Court decided in 1783 that no man could hold another as

property without a direct violation of that article.

In 1788 three free black citizens of Boston were kidnapped and sold into

slavery in one of the French islands. An intense excitement followed.

Governor Hancock took efficient measures for reclaiming the unfortunate

men. The clergy of Boston petitioned the Legislature for a total

prohibition of the foreign slave-trade. The Society of Friends, and the

blacks generally, presented similar petitions; and the same year an act

was passed prohibiting the slave-trade and granting relief to persons

kidnapped or decoyed out of the Commonwealth. The fear of a burden to

the state from the influx of negroes from abroad led the Legislature, in

connection with this law, to prevent those who were not citizens of the

state or of other states from gaining a residence.

The first case of the arrest of a fugitive slave in Massachusetts under

the law of 1793 took place in Boston soon after the passage of the law.

It is the case to which President Quincy alludes in his late letter

against the fugitive slave law. The populace at the trial aided the

slave to escape, and nothing further was done about it.

The arrest of George Latimer as a slave, in Boston, and his illegal

confinement in jail, in 1842, led to the passage of the law of 1843 for

the "protection of personal liberty," prohibiting state officers from

arresting or detaining persons claimed as slaves, and the use of the

jails of the Commonwealth for their confinement. This law was strictly

in accordance with the decision of the supreme judiciary, in the case of

Prigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania, that the reclaiming of fugitives was

a matter exclusively belonging to the general government; yet that the

state officials might, if they saw fit, carry into effect the law of

Congress on the subject, "unless prohibited by state legislation."

It will be seen by the facts we have adduced that slavery in

Massachusetts never had a legal existence. The ermine of the judiciary

of the Puritan state has never been sullied by the admission of its

detestable claims. It crept into the Commonwealth like other evils and

vices, but never succeeded in clothing itself with the sanction and

authority of law. It stood only upon its own execrable foundation of

robbery and wrong.

With a history like this to look back upon, is it strange that the people

of Massachusetts at the present day are unwilling to see their time-

honored defences of personal freedom, the good old safeguards of Saxon

liberty, overridden and swept away after the summary fashion of "the

Fugitive Slave Bill;" that they should loathe and scorn the task which

that bill imposes upon them of aiding professional slave-hunters in

seizing, fettering, and consigning to bondage men and women accused only

of that which commends them to esteem and sympathy, love of liberty and

hatred of slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to

"constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reserved

for trained bloodhounds? Surely, in view of what Massachusetts has been,

and her strong bias in favor of human freedom, derived from her great-

hearted founders, it is to be hoped that the Executive and Cabinet at

Washington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning,

some opportunity for conquering her prejudices, before letting loose the

dogs of war upon her. Let them give her time, and treat with forbearance

her hesitation, qualms of conscience, and wounded pride. Her people,

indeed, are awkward in the work of slave-catching, and, it would seem,

rendered but indifferent service in a late hunt in Boston. Whether they

would do better under the surveillance of the army and navy of the United

States is a question which we leave with the President and his Secretary

of State. General Putnam once undertook to drill a company of Quakers,

and instruct them, by force of arms, in the art and mystery of fighting;

but not a single pair of drab-colored breeches moved at his "forward

march;" not a broad beaver wheeled at his word of command; no hand

unclosed to receive a proffered musket. Patriotic appeal, hard swearing,

and prick of bayonet had no effect upon these impracticable raw recruits;

and the stout general gave them up in despair. We are inclined to

believe that any attempt on the part of the Commander-in-chief of our

army and navy to convert the good people of Massachusetts into expert

slave-catchers, under the discipline of West Point and Norfolk, would

prove as idle an experiment as that of General Putnam upon the Quakers.

THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE-QUESTION. (1846.)

A LATE number of Fraser's Magazine contains an article bearing the

unmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle,

entitled, 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question', which would be

interesting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency so

unspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling of

amazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemous

irreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil of

Faust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts of

Christianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spices

from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation,--and that the

negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without

wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the

latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to

them, can afford to give,--the author considers himself justified in

denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was

specially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confned himself to

simple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christian

abolitionists of England--"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of Exeter

Hall"--there would have been small occasion for noticing his splenetic

and discreditable production. Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy

--the alloy of human frailty and folly--in the most righteous reforms,

which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater of

shows and falsities. Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics,

morals, or religion, comes very properly within the scope of his mockery,

and we bid him Godspeed in plying his satirical lash upon it. Impostures

and frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection and

exposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the

image of Bell and the Dragon.

But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply

his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to

humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the

amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred

rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his

Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the

poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a

Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on

the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and

auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good

taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults

his readers.

He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the

Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse

to facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West India

Islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that

God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the

white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their

masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that,

if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed

to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest

slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly

philosopher,--"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the

spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little

less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other

methods avail not, will be compelled to work."

It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such

offensive language with anything like respect. Common sense and

unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrine

they inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of man

towards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth and

travaileth unto this day." It is as old as sin; the perpetual argument

of strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greek

philosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born to

be slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, being

by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce

him to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine of

what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school of

philosophy,--the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer

of caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities and

unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the

East India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal.

Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He has

before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his

philosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia of

Paraguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction

and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his 'Letters

and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage and

almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the

age, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms," and squeamishness which shudders at

the sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for a

justification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he has

intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of

settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible

transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the

colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and

social evils of England. In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see this

devilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with the

strong. Might has a divine right to rule,--blessed are the crafty of

brain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennus

said when he threw his sword into the scale,--Woe to the conquered! The

negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has

no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and,

if need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the

oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh

and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is

squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism,"

maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to

scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and

"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substance

of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic

husbandry,--the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding

unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of

Transcendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for the

Sermon on the Mount.

He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the West

Indies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use and

behoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, these

islands would have been productive only of "jungle, savagery, and swamp

malaria." The negro alone could never have improved the islands or

civilized himself; and therefore their and his "born lord," the white

man, has a right to the benefits of his own betterments of land and "two-

legged cattle!" "Black Quashee" has no right to dispose of himself and

his labor because he owes his partial civilization to others! And pray

how has it been with the white race, for whom our philosopher claims the

divine prerogative of enslaving? Some twenty and odd centuries ago, a

pair of half-naked savages, daubed with paint, might have been seen

roaming among the hills and woods of the northern part of the British

island, subsisting on acorns and the flesh of wild animals, with an

occasional relish of the smoked hams and pickled fingers of some

unfortunate stranger caught on the wrong side of the Tweed. This

interesting couple reared, as they best could, a family of children, who,

in turn, became the heads of families; and some time about the beginning

of the present century one of their descendants in the borough of

Ecclefechan rejoiced over the birth of a man child now somewhat famous as

"Thomas Carlyle, a maker of books." Does it become such a one to rave

against the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaided

by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been,

at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of

Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his

Piet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvement

and spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on the

part of any nation or people? From people to people the original God-

given impulse towards civilization and perfection has been transmitted,

as from Egypt to Greece, and thence to the Roman world.

But the blacks, we are told, are indolent and insensible to the duty of

raising sugar and coffee and spice for the whites, being mainly careful

to provide for their own household and till their own gardens for

domestic comforts and necessaries. The exports have fallen off somewhat.

And what does this prove? Only that the negro is now a consumer of

products, of which, under the rule of the whip, he was a producer merely.

As to indolence, under the proper stimulus of fair wages we have reason

to believe that the charge is not sustained. If unthrifty habits and

lack of prudence on the part of the owners of estates, combined with the

repeal of duties on foreign sugars by the British government, have placed

it out of their power to pay just and reasonable wages for labor, who can

blame the blacks if they prefer to cultivate their own garden plots

rather than raise sugar and spice for their late masters upon terms

little better than those of their old condition, the "beneficent whip"

always excepted? The despatches of the colonial governors agree in

admitting that the blacks have had great cause for complaint and

dissatisfaction, owing to the delay or non-payment of their wages. Sir

C. E. Gray, writing from Jamaica, says, that "in a good many instances

the payment of the wages they have earned has been either very

irregularly made, or not at all, probably on account of the inability of

the employers." He says, moreover:--

"The negroes appear to me to be generally as free from rebellious

tendencies or turbulent feelings and malicious thoughts as any race of

laborers I ever saw or heard of. My impression is, indeed, that under a

system of perfectly fair dealing and of real justice they will come to be

an admirable peasantry and yeomanry; able-bodied, industrious, and hard-

working, frank, and well-disposed."

It must, indeed, be admitted that, judging by their diminished exports

and the growing complaints of the owners of estates, the condition of the

islands, in a financial point of view, is by no means favorable. An

immediate cause of this, however, must be found in the unfortunate Sugar

Act of 1846. The more remote, but for the most part powerful, cause of

the present depression is to be traced to the vicious and unnatural

system of slavery, which has been gradually but surely preparing the way

for ruin, bankruptcy, and demoralization. Never yet, by a community or

an individual, have the righteous laws of God been violated with

impunity. Sooner or later comes the penalty which the infinite justice

has affixed to sin. Partial and temporary evils and inconveniences have

undoubtedly resulted from the emancipation of the laborers; and many

years must elapse before the relations of the two heretofore antagonistic

classes can be perfectly adjusted and their interests brought into entire

harmony. But that freedom is not to be held mainly accountable for the

depression of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that Dutch

Surinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor,

is in an equally depressed condition. The 'Paramaribo Neuws en

Advertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date of

January 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints. People seek

and find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of the

place in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country. Of

a large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now be

called such. So deteriorated has property become within the last few

years, that many of these estates have not been able to defray their

weekly expenses. The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, into

which it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system is

speedily adopted. It is impossible that our agriculture can any longer

proceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and the

social position they held must undergo a revolution."

The paper from which we have quoted, the official journal of the colony,

thinks the condition of the emancipated British colonies decidedly

preferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continued

in force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the example

of Great Britain. The actual condition of the British colonies since

emancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them,

Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whatever

evils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be well

understood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towards

emancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils of

their own system.

This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyle

and others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has been

produced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838.

We have no fears whatever of the effect of this literary monstrosity,

which we have been considering upon the British colonies. Quashee, black

and ignorant as he may be, will not "get himself made a slave again."

The mission of the "beneficent whip" is there pretty well over; and it

may now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities,

with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days.

What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders of

slave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter of

encouragement, and that our anti-christian prejudices against the colored

man might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation and

sarcasm. On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of an

eloquent writer in the London Enquirer:--

"We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American people

than his (Carlyle's) last composition. Every cruel practice of social

exclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom. The slave-holder,

of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, but

enthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of European

celebrity. But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle's

hand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and the

denial of light to his mind. The free black will feel him, too, in the

more contemptuous and abhorrent scowl of his brother man, who will easily

derive from this unfortunate essay the belief that his inhuman feelings

are of divine ordination. It is a true work of the Devil, the fostering

of a tyrannical prejudice. Far and wide over space, and long into the

future, the winged words of evil counsel will go. In the market-place,

in the house, in the theatre, and in the church,--by land and by sea, in

all the haunts of men,--their influence will be felt in a perennial

growth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment. Amongst the

sufferers will be many to whom education has given every refined

susceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter. Men and women,

faithful and diligent, loving and worthy to be loved, and bearing, it may

be, no more than an almost imperceptible trace of African descent, will

continue yet longer to be banished from the social meal of the white man,

and to be spurned from his presence in the house of God, because a writer

of genius has lent the weight of his authority and his fame, if not of

his power, to the perpetuation of a prejudice which Christianity was

undermining."

A more recent production, 'Latter Day Pamphlets', in which man's

capability of self-government is more than doubted, democracy somewhat

contemptuously sneered at, and the "model republic" itself stigmatized as

a "nation of bores," may have a salutary effect in restraining our

admiration and in lessening our respect for the defender and eulogist of

slavery. The sweeping impartiality with which in this latter production

he applies the principle of our "peculiar institution" to the laboring

poor man, irrespective of color, recognizing as his only inalienable

right "the right of being set to labor" for his "born lords," will, we

imagine, go far to neutralize the mischief of his Discourse upon Negro

Slavery. It is a sad thing to find so much intellectual power as Carlyle

really possesses so little under the control of the moral sentiments. In

some of his earlier writings--as, for instance, his beautiful tribute to

the Corn Law Rhymer--we thought we saw evidence of a warm and generous

sympathy with the poor and the wronged, a desire to ameliorate human

suffering, which would have done credit to the "philanthropisms of Exeter

Hall" and the "Abolition of Pain Society." Latterly, however, like

Moliere's quack, he has "changed all that;" his heart has got upon the

wrong side; or rather, he seems to us very much in the condition of the

coal-burner in the German tale, who had swapped his heart of flesh for a

cobblestone.

FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY.

A letter to William Lloyd Garrison, President of the Society.

AMESBURY, 24th 11th mo., 1863.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I have received thy kind letter, with the accompanying

circular, inviting me to attend the commemoration of the thirtieth

anniversary of the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at

Philadelphia. It is with the deepest regret that I am compelled, by the

feeble state of my health, to give up all hope of meeting thee and my

other old and dear friends on an occasion of so much interest. How much

it costs me to acquiesce in the hard necessity thy own feelings will tell

thee better than any words of mine.

I look back over thirty years, and call to mind all the circumstances of

my journey to Philadelphia, in company with thyself and the excellent Dr.

Thurston of Maine, even then, as we thought, an old man, but still

living, and true as ever to the good cause. I recall the early gray

morning when, with Samuel J. May, our colleague on the committee to

prepare a Declaration of Sentiments for the convention, I climbed to the

small "upper chamber" of a colored friend to hear thee read the first

draft of a paper which will live as long as our national history. I see

the members of the convention, solemnized by the responsibility, rise one

by one, and solemnly affix their names to that stern pledge of fidelity

to freedom. Of the signers, many have passed away from earth, a few have

faltered and turned back, but I believe the majority still live to

rejoice over the great triumph of truth and justice, and to devote what

remains of time and strength to the cause to which they consecrated their

youth and manhood thirty years ago.

For while we may well thank God and congratulate one another on the

prospect of the speedy emancipation of the slaves of the United States,

we must not for a moment forget that, from this hour, new and mighty

responsibilities devolve upon us to aid, direct, and educate these

millions, left free, indeed, but bewildered, ignorant, naked, and

foodless in the wild chaos of civil war. We have to undo the accumulated

wrongs of two centuries; to remake the manhood which slavery has well-

nigh unmade; to see to it that the long-oppressed colored man has a fair

field for development and improvement; and to tread under our feet the

last vestige of that hateful prejudice which has been the strongest

external support of Southern slavery. We must lift ourselves at once to

the true Christian altitude where all distinctions of black and white are

overlooked in the heartfelt recognition of the brotherhood of man.

I must not close this letter without confessing that I cannot be

sufficiently thankful to the Divine Providence which, in a great measure

through thy instrumentality, turned me away so early from what Roger

Williams calls "the world's great trinity, pleasure, profit, and honor,"

to take side with the poor and oppressed. I am not insensible to

literary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will

of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to the

Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.

Looking over a life marked by many errors and shortcomings, I rejoice

that I have been able to maintain the pledge of that signature, and that,

in the long intervening years,

"My voice, though not the loudest, has been heard Wherever Freedom

raised her cry of pain."

Let me, through thee, extend a warm greeting to the friends, whether of

our own or the new generation, who may assemble on the occasion of

commemoration. There is work yet to be done which will task the best

efforts of us all. For thyself, I need not say that the love and esteem

of early boyhood have lost nothing by the test of time; and

I am, very cordially, thy friend,

JOHN G. WHITTIER

THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY.

From the Amesbury Villager.

(1865.)

IN the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the unspeakably brutal

assault upon Secretary Seward slavery has made another revelation of

itself. Perhaps it was needed. In the magnanimity of assured victory we

were perhaps disposed to overlook, not so much the guilty leaders and

misguided masses of the great rebellion as the unutterable horror and sin

of slavery which prompted it.

How slowly we of the North have learned the true character of this mighty

mischief! How our politicians bowed their strong shoulders under its

burthens! How our churches reverenced it! How our clergy contrasted the

heresy-tolerating North with the purely orthodox and Scriptural type of

slave-holding Christianity! How all classes hunted down, not merely the

fugitive slave, but the few who ventured to give him food and shelter and

a Godspeed in his flight from bondage! How utterly ignored was the

negro's claim of common humanity! How readily was the decision of the

slave-holding chief justice acquiesced in, that "the black man had no

rights which the white man is bound to respect"!

We saw a senator of the United States, world-known and honored for his

learning, talents, and stainless integrity, beaten down and all but

murdered at his official desk by a South Carolina slave-holder, for the

crime of speaking against the extension of slavery; and we heard the

dastardly deed applauded throughout the South, while its brutal

perpetrator was rewarded with orations and gifts and smiles of beauty as

a chivalrous gentleman. We saw slavery enter Kansas, with bowieknife in

hand and curses on its lips; we saw the life of the Union struck at by

secession and rebellion; we heard of the bones of sons and brothers,

fallen in defence of freedom and law, dug up and wrought into ornaments

for the wrists and bosoms of slave-holding women; we looked into the open

hell of Andersonville, upon the deliberate, systematic starvation of

helpless prisoners; we heard of Libby Prison underlaid with gunpowder,

for the purpose of destroying thousands of Union prisoners in case of the

occupation of Richmond by our army; we saw hundreds of prisoners

massacred in cold blood at Fort Pillow, and the midnight sack of Lawrence

and the murder of its principal citizens. The flames of our merchant

vessels, seized by pirates, lighted every sea; we heard of officers of

the rebel army and navy stealing into our cities, firing hotels filled

with sleeping occupants, and laying obstructions on the track of rail

cars, for the purpose of killing and mangling their passengers. Yet in

spite of these revelations of the utterly barbarous character of slavery

and its direful effect upon all connected with it, we were on the very

point of trusting to its most criminal defenders the task of

reestablishing the state governments of the South, leaving the real Union

men, white as well as black, at the mercy of those who have made hatred a

religion and murder a sacrament. The nation needed one more terrible

lesson. It has it in the murder of its beloved chief magistrate and the

attempted assassination of its honored prime minister, the two men of all

others prepared to go farthest to smooth the way of defeated rebellion

back to allegiance.

Even now the lesson of these terrible events seems but half learned. In

the public utterances I hear much of punishing and hanging leading

traitors, fierce demands for vengeance, and threats of the summary

chastisement of domestic sympathizers with treason, but comparatively

little is said of the accursed cause, the prolific mother of

abominations, slavery. The government is exhorted to remember that it

does not bear the sword in vain, the Old Testament is ransacked for texts

of Oriental hatred and examples of the revenges of a semi-barbarous

nation; but, as respects the four millions of unmistakably loyal people

of the South, the patient, the long-suffering, kind-hearted victims of

oppressions, only here and there a voice pleads for their endowment with

the same rights of citizenship which are to be accorded to the rank and

file of disbanded rebels. The golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount is

not applied to them. Much is said of executing justice upon rebels;

little of justice to loyal black men. Hanging a few ringleaders of

treason, it seems to be supposed, is all that is needed to restore and

reestablish the revolted states. The negro is to be left powerless in

the hands of the "white trash," who hate him with a bitter hatred,

exceeding that of the large slave-holders. In short, four years of

terrible chastisement, of God's unmistakable judgments, have not taught

us, as a people, their lesson, which could scarcely be plainer if it had

been written in letters of fire on the sky. Why is it that we are so

slow to learn, so unwilling to confess that slavery is the accursed thing

which whets the knife of murder, and transforms men, with the exterior of

gentlemen and Christians, into fiends? How pitiful is our exultation

over the capture of the wretched Booth and his associates! The great

criminal, of whom he and they were but paltry instruments, still stalks

abroad in the pine woods of Jersey, where the state has thrown around him

her legislative sanction and protection. He is in Pennsylvania,

thrusting the black man from public conveyances. Wherever God's children

are despised, insulted, and abused on account of their color, there is

the real assassin of the President still at large. I do not wonder at

the indignation which has been awakened by the late outrage, for I have

painfully shared it. But let us see to it that it is rightly directed.

The hanging of a score of Southern traitors will not restore Abraham

Lincoln nor atone for the mighty loss. In wreaking revenge upon these

miserable men, we must see to it that we do not degrade ourselves and do

dishonor to the sacred memory of the dead. We do well to be angry; and,

if need be, let our wrath wax seven times hotter, until that which "was a

murderer from the beginning" is consumed from the face of the earth. As

the people stand by the grave of Lincoln, let them lift their right hands

to heaven and take a solemn vow upon their souls to give no sleep to

their eyes nor slumber to their eyelids until slavery is hunted from its

last shelter, and every man, black and white, stands equal before the

law.

In dealing with the guilty leaders and instigators of the rebellion we

should beware how we take counsel of passion. Hatred has no place beside

the calm and awful dignity of justice. Human life is still a very sacred

thing; Christian forbearance and patience are still virtues. For my own

part, I should be satisfied to see the chiefs of the great treason go out

from among us homeless, exiled, with the mark of Cain on their foreheads,

carrying with them, wherever they go, the avenging Nemesis of conscience.

We cannot take lessons, at this late day, in their school of barbarism;

we cannot starve and torture them as they have starved and tortured our

soldiers. Let them live. Perhaps that is, after all, the most terrible

penalty. For wherever they hide themselves the story of their acts will

pursue them; they can have no rest nor peace save in that deep repentance

which, through the mercy of God, is possible for all.

I have no disposition to stand between these men and justice. If

arrested, they can have no claim to exemption from the liabilities of

criminals. But it is not simply a question of deserts that is to be

considered; we are to take into account our own reputation as a Christian

people, the wishes of our best friends abroad, and the humane instincts

of the age, which forbid all unnecessary severity. Happily we are not

called upon to take counsel of our fears. Rabbinical writers tell us

that evil spirits who are once baffled in a contest with human beings

lose from thenceforth all power of further mischief. The defeated rebels

are in the precise condition of these Jewish demons. Deprived of

slavery, they are like wasps that have lost their stings.

As respects the misguided masses of the South, the shattered and crippled

remnants of the armies of treason, the desolate wives, mothers, and

children mourning for dear ones who have fallen in a vain and hopeless

struggle, it seems to me our duty is very plain. We must forgive their

past treason, and welcome and encourage their returning loyalty. None

but cowards will insult and taunt the defeated and defenceless. We must

feed and clothe the destitute, instruct the ignorant, and, bearing

patiently with the bitterness and prejudice which will doubtless for a

time thwart our efforts and misinterpret our motives, aid them in

rebuilding their states on the foundation of freedom. Our sole enemy was

slavery, and slavery is dead. We have now no quarrel with the people of

the South, who have really more reason than we have to rejoice over the

downfall of a system which impeded their material progress, perverted

their religion, shut them out from the sympathies of the world, and

ridged their land with the graves of its victims.

We are victors, the cause of all this evil and suffering is removed

forever, and we can well afford to be magnanimous. How better can we

evince our gratitude to God for His great mercy than in doing good to

those who hated us, and in having compassion on those who have

despitefully used us? The hour is hastening for us all when our sole

ground of dependence will be the mercy and forgiveness of God. Let us

endeavor so to feel and act in our relations to the people of the South

that we can repeat in sincerity the prayer of our Lord: "Forgive us our

trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," reverently

acknowledging that He has indeed "led captivity captive and received

gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might

dwell among them."

CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE-DEPARTMENT. (1868.)

THE wise reticence of the President elect in the matter of his cabinet

has left free course to speculation and conjecture as to its composition.

That he fully comprehends the importance of the subject, and that he will

carefully weigh the claims of the possible candidates on the score of

patriotic services, ability, and fitness for specific duties, no one who

has studied his character, and witnessed his discretion, clear insight,

and wise adaptation of means to ends, under the mighty responsibilities

of his past career, can reasonably doubt.

It is not probable that the distinguished statesman now at the head of

the State Department will, under the circumstances, look for a

continuance in office. History will do justice to his eminent services

in the Senate and in the cabinet during the first years of the rebellion,

but the fact that he has to some extent shared the unpopularity of the

present chief magistrate seems to preclude the idea of his retention in

the new cabinet. In looking over the list of our public men in search of

a successor, General Grant is not likely to be embarrassed by the number

of individuals fitted by nature, culture, and experience for such an

important post. The newspaper press, in its wide license of conjecture

and suggestion, has, as far as I have seen, mentioned but three or four

names in this connection. Allusions have been made to Senator Fessenden

of Maine, ex-Minister Motley, General Dix, ex-Secretary Stanton, and

Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

Without disparaging in any degree his assumed competitors, the last-named

gentleman is unquestionably preeminently fitted for the place. He has

had a lifelong education for it. The entire cast of his mind, the bent

of his studies, the habit and experience of his public life, his profound

knowledge of international law and the diplomatic history of his own and

other countries, his well-earned reputation as a statesman and

constitutional lawyer, not only at home, but wherever our country has

relations of amity and commerce, the honorable distinction which he

enjoys of having held a foremost place in the great conflict between

freedom and slavery, union and rebellion, all mark him as the man for the

occasion. There seems, indeed, a certain propriety in assigning to the

man who struck the heaviest blows at secession and slavery in the

national Senate the first place under him who, in the field, made them

henceforth impossible. The great captain and the great senator united in

war should not be dissevered in peace.

I am not unaware that there are some, even in the Republican party, who

have failed to recognize in Senator Sumner the really wise and practical

statesmanship which a careful review of his public labors cannot but make

manifest. It is only necessary to point such to the open record of his

senatorial career. Few men have had the honor of introducing and

defending with exhaustive ability and thoroughness so many measures of

acknowledged practical importance to his immediate constituents, the

country at large, and the wider interests of humanity and civilization.

In what exigency has he been found wanting? What legislative act of

public utility for the last eighteen years has lacked his encouragement?

At the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, his clearness of vision,

firmness, moderation, and ready comprehension of the duties of his time

and place must be admitted by all parties. It was shrewdly said by Burke

that "men are wise with little reflection and good with little self-

denial, in business of all times except their own." But Charles Sumner,

the scholar, loving the "still air of delightful studies," has shown

himself as capable of thoroughly comprehending and digesting the events

transpiring before his eyes as of pronouncing judgment upon those

recorded in history. Far in advance of most of his contemporaries, he

saw and enunciated the true doctrine of reconstruction, the early

adoption of which would have been of incalculable service to the country.

One of the ablest statesmen and jurists of the Democratic party has had

the rare magnanimity to acknowledge that in this matter the Republican

senator was right, and himself and his party wrong.

The Republicans of Massachusetts will make no fractious or importunate

demand upon the new President. They are content to leave to his unbiased

and impartial judgment the selection of his cabinet. But if, looking to

the best interests of the country, he shall see fit to give their

distinguished fellow-citizen the first place in it, they will feel no

solicitude as to the manner in which the duties of the office will be

discharged. They will feel that "the tools are with him who can use

them." Nothing more directly affects the reputation of a country than

the character of its diplomatic correspondence and its foreign

representatives. We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagement

abroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hang

their heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over the

consular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be no

question that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, the

interest, honor, and dignity of the nation will be safe.

In a few weeks Charles Summer will be returned for his fourth term in the

United States Senate by the well-nigh unanimous vote of both branches of

the legislature of Massachusetts. Not a syllable of opposition to his

reelection is heard from any quarter. There is not a Republican in the

legislature who could have been elected unless he had been virtually

pledged to his support. No stronger evidence of the popular estimate of

his ability and integrity than this could be offered. As a matter of

course, the marked individuality of his intense convictions, earnestness,

persistence, and confident reliance upon the justice of his conclusions,

naturally growing out of the consciousness of having brought to his

honest search after truth all the lights of his learning and experience,

may, at times, have brought him into unpleasant relations with some of

his colleagues; but no one, friend or foe, has questioned his ability and

patriotism, or doubted his fidelity to principle. He has lent himself to

no schemes of greed. While so many others have taken advantage of the

facilities of their official stations to fill, directly or indirectly,

their own pockets or those of their relatives and retainers, it is to the

honor of Massachusetts that her representatives in the Senate have not

only "shaken their hands from the holding of bribes," but have so borne

themselves that no shadow of suspicion has ever rested on them.

In this connection it may be proper to state that, in the event of a

change in the War Department, the claims of General Wilson, to whose

services in the committee on military affairs the country is deeply

indebted, may be brought under consideration. In that case Massachusetts

would not, if it were in her power, discriminate between her senators.

Both have deserved well of her and of the country. In expressing thus

briefly my opinion, I do not forget that after all the choice and

responsibility rest with General Grant alone. There I am content to

leave them. I am very far from urging any sectional claim. Let the

country but have peace after its long discord, let its good faith and

financial credit be sustained, and all classes of its citizens everywhere

protected in person and estate, and it matters very little to me whether

Massachusetts is represented at the Executive Council board, or not.

Personally, Charles Sumner would gain nothing by a transfer from the

Senate Chamber to the State Department. He does not need a place in the

American cabinet any more than John Bright does in the British. The

highest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, from

which, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified in

using Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "I

am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct,

or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave, but, by the grace

of God, I have kept my life unsullied."

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872.

The following letter was written on receiving a request from a

committee of colored voters for advice as to their action at the

presidential election of 1872.

AMESBURY, 9th mo. 3d, 1872.

DEAR FRIENDS,--I have just received your letter of the 29th ult. asking

my opinion of your present duty as colored voters in the choice between

General Grant and Horace Greeley for the presidency. You state that you

have been confused by the contradictory advice given you by such friends

of your people as Charles Sumner on one hand, and William L. Garrison and

Wendell Phillips on the other; and you ask me, as one whom you are

pleased to think "free from all bias," to add my counsel to theirs.

I thank you for the very kind expression of your confidence and your

generous reference to my endeavors to serve the cause of freedom; but I

must own that I would fain have been spared the necessity of adding to

the already too long list of political epistles. I have felt it my duty

in times past to take an active part--often very distasteful to me--in

political matters, having for my first object the deliverance of my

country from the crime and curse of slavery. That great question being

now settled forever, I have been more than willing to leave to younger

and stronger hands the toils and the honors of partisan service. Pained

and saddened by the bitter and unchristian personalities of the canvass

now in progress, I have hitherto held myself aloof from it as far as

possible, unwilling to sanction in the slightest degree the criminations

and recriminations of personal friends whom I have every reason to love

and respect, and in whose integrity I have unshaken confidence. In the

present condition of affairs I have not been able to see that any special

action as an abolitionist was required at my hands. Both of the great

parties, heretofore widely separated, have put themselves on

substantially the same platform. The Republican party, originally

pledged only to the non-extension of slavery, and whose most illustrious

representative, President Lincoln, avowed his willingness to save the

Union without abolishing slavery, has been, under Providence, mainly

instrumental in the total overthrow of the detestable system; while the

Democratic party, composed largely of slave-holders, and, even at the

North, scarcely willing to save the Union at the expense of the slave

interest upon which its success depended, shattered and crippled by the

civil war and its results, has at last yielded to the inexorable logic of

events, abandoned a position no longer tenable, and taken its "new

departure" with an abolitionist as its candidate. As a friend of the

long-oppressed colored man, and for the sake of the peace and prosperity

of the country, I rejoice at this action of the Democratic party. The

underlying motives of this radical change are doubtless somewhat mixed

and contradictory, honest conviction on the part of some, and party

expediency and desire of office on the part of others; but the change

itself is real and irrevocable; the penalty of receding would be swift

and irretrievable ruin. In any point of view the new order of things is

desirable; and nothing more fully illustrates "the ways that are dark and

the tricks that are vain" of party politics than the attempt of professed

friends of the Union and equal rights for all to counteract it by giving

aid and comfort to a revival of the worst characteristics of the old

party in the shape of a straight-out Democratic convention.