"O Freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,
A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,
And wavy tresses, gushing from the cap
With which the Roman master crowned his slave,
When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,
Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand
Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,
Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred
With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs
Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched
His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;
They could not quench the life thou hast from Heaven."
BRYANT.
WHEN the noblest woman in all France stood on the scaffold, just before
her execution, she is said to have turned towards the statue of Liberty,
--which, strangely enough, had been placed near the guillotine, as its
patron saint,--with the exclamation, "O Liberty! what crimes have been
committed in thy name!" It is with a feeling akin to that which prompted
this memorable exclamation of Madame Roland that the sincere lover of
human freedom and progress is often compelled to regard American
democracy.
For democracy, pure and impartial,--the self-government of the whole;
equal rights and privileges, irrespective of birth or complexion; the
morality of the Gospel of Christ applied to legislation; Christianity
reduced to practice, and showering the blessings of its impartial love
and equal protection upon all, like the rain and dews of heaven,--we have
the sincerest love and reverence. So far as our own government
approaches this standard--and, with all its faults, we believe it does so
more nearly than any other--it has our hearty and steadfast allegiance.
We complain of and protest against it only where, in its original
framework or actual administration, it departs from the democratic
principle. Holding, with Novalis, that the Christian religion is the
root of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man, we
regard the New Testament as the true political text-book; and believe
that, just in proportion as mankind receive its doctrines and precepts,
not merely as matters of faith and relating to another state of being,
but as practical rules, designed for the regulation of the present life
as well as the future, their institutions, social arrangements, and forms
of government will approximate to the democratic model. We believe in
the ultimate complete accomplishment of the mission of Him who came "to
preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to
them that are bound." We look forward to the universal dominion of His
benign humanity; and, turning from the strife and blood, the slavery, and
social and political wrongs of the past and present, anticipate the
realization in the distant future of that state when the song of the
angels at His advent shall be no longer a prophecy, but the jubilant
expression of a glorious reality,--"Glory to God in the highest! Peace
on earth, and good will to man!"
For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, as
a party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very little
respect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize the
advantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation. But if
it has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree of
oppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself to
be made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it. It has allowed
itself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally of
slavery." It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf of
freedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures. Nominally
the advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the colored
citizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyed
under a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush. Perhaps the most
shameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Island
struggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven and
earth to witness its readiness to encounter all the horrors of civil war,
in defence of the holy principle of equal and universal suffrage,
deliberately excluded colored Rhode Islanders from the privilege of
voting. In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the same
party declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rule
in the case of the colored inhabitants. Its course on the question of
excluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read of
all.
After such exhibitions of its practice, its professions have lost their
power. The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living down
its principles is, to an earnest mind, well nigh insufferable. Pertinent
were the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, "Shall a man utter vain
knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Shall he reason with
unprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?" Enough
of wearisome talk we have had about "progress," the rights of "the
masses," the "dignity of labor," and "extending the area of freedom"!
"Clear your mind of cant, sir," said Johnson to Boswell; and no better
advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Work
out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your
sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of
your duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, your
hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings?
A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of
human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives
its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on
which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it
disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in
heaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this
subject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against
humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own
shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cutting
severity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, in
justification of her indignant rebuke of her wicked mother:--
"'Tis you that say it, not I
You do the unholy deeds which find rue words."
Yet in that party calling itself democratic we rejoice to recognize true,
generous, and thoroughly sincere men,--lovers of the word of democracy,
and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who
are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy
will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to
prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in
deceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democratic
voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate
slavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of the
matter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by
political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be
useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and
strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already
to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices
from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free
principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining.
To them, at least, democracy means something more than collectorships,
consulates, and governmental contracts. For the sake of securing a
monopoly of these to a few selfish and heartless party managers, they are
not prepared to give up the distinctive principles of democracy, and
substitute in their place the doctrines of the Satanic school of
politics. They will not much longer consent to stand before the world as
the slavery party of the United States, especially when policy and
expediency, as well as principle, unite in recommending a position more
congenial to the purposes of their organization, the principles of the
fathers of their political faith, the spirit of the age, and the
obligations of Christianity.
The death-blow of slavery in this country will be given by the very power
upon which it has hitherto relied with so much confidence. Abused and
insulted Democracy will, erelong, shake off the loathsome burden under
which it is now staggering. In the language of the late Theodore
Sedgwiek, of Massachusetts, a consistent democrat of the old school:
"Slavery, in all its forms, is anti-democratic,--an old poison left in
the veins, fostering the worst principles of aristocracy, pride, and
aversion to labor; the natural enemy of the poor man, the laboring man,
the oppressed man. The question is, whether absolute dominion over any
creature in the image of man be a wholesome power in a free country;
whether this is a school in which to train the young republican mind;
whether slave blood and free blood can course healthily together in the
same body politic. Whatever may be present appearances, and by whatever
name party may choose to call things, this question must finally be
settled by the democracy of the country."
This prediction was made eight years ago, at a time when all the facts in
the case seemed against the probability of its truth, and when only here
and there the voice of an indignant freeman protested against the
exulting claims of the slave power upon the democracy as its "natural
ally." The signs of the times now warrant the hope of its fulfilment.
Over the hills of the East, and over the broad territory of the Empire
State, a new spirit is moving. Democracy, like Balaam upon Zophim, has
felt the divine _afflatus_, and is blessing that which it was summoned to
curse.
The present hopeful state of things is owing, in no slight degree, to the
self-sacrificing exertions of a few faithful and clear-sighted men,
foremost among whom was the late William Leggett; than whom no one has
labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring
the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions.
William Leggett! Let our right hand forget its cunning, when that name
shall fail to awaken generous emotions and aspirations for a higher and
worthier manhood! True man and true democrat; faithful always to
Liberty, following wherever she led, whether the storm beat in his face
or on his back; unhesitatingly counting her enemies his own, whether in
the guise of Whig monopoly and selfish expediency, or democratic
servility north of Mason and Dixon's line towards democratic slaveholding
south of it; poor, yet incorruptible; dependent upon party favor, as a
party editor, yet risking all in condemnation of that party, when in the
wrong; a man of the people, yet never stooping to flatter the people's
prejudices,--he is the politician, of all others, whom we would hold up
to the admiration and imitation of the young men of our country. What
Fletcher of Saltoun is to Scotland, and the brave spirits of the old
Commonwealth time--
"Hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none
The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington,
Young Vane, and others, who called Milton friend--"
are to England, should Leggett be to America. His character was formed
on these sturdy democratic models. Had he lived in their day, he would
have scraped with old Andrew Marvell the bare blade-bone of poverty, or
even laid his head on the block with Vane, rather than forego his
independent thought and speech.
Of the early life of William Leggett we have no very definite knowledge.
Born in moderate circumstances; at first a woodsman in the Western
wilderness, then a midshipman in the navy, then a denizen of New York;
exposed to sore hardships and perilous temptations, he worked his way by
the force of his genius to the honorable position of associate editor of
the Evening Post, the leading democratic journal of our great commercial
metropolis. Here he became early distinguished for his ultraism in
democracy. His whole soul revolted against oppression. He was for
liberty everywhere and in all things, in thought, in speech, in vote, in
religion, in government, and in trade; he was for throwing off all
restraints upon the right of suffrage; regarding all men as brethren, he
looked with disapprobation upon attempts to exclude foreigners from the
rights of citizenship; he was for entire freedom of commerce; he
denounced a national bank; he took the lead in opposition to the monopoly
of incorporated banks; he argued in favor of direct taxation, and
advocated a free post-office, or a system by which letters should be
transported, as goods and passengers now are, by private enterprise. In
all this he was thoroughly in earnest. That he often erred through
passion and prejudice cannot be doubted; but in no instance was he found
turning aside from the path which he believed to be the true one, from
merely selfish considerations. He was honest alike to himself and the
public. Every question which was thrown up before him by the waves of
political or moral agitation he measured by his standard of right and
truth, and condemned or advocated it in utter disregard of prevailing
opinions, of its effect upon his pecuniary interest, or of his standing
with his party. The vehemence of his passions sometimes betrayed him
into violence of language and injustice to his opponents; but he had that
rare and manly trait which enables its possessor, whenever he becomes
convinced of error, to make a prompt acknowledgment of the conviction.
In the summer of 1834, a series of mobs, directed against the
Abolitionists, who had organized a national society, with the city of New
York as its central point, followed each other in rapid succession. The
houses of the leading men in the society were sacked and pillaged;
meeting-houses broken into and defaced; and the unoffending colored
inhabitants of the city treated with the grossest indignity, and
subjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage. It was
emphatically a "Reign of Terror." The press of both political parties
and of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion,
and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of the
Abolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demons
possessed the misguided populace. To advocate emancipation, or defend
those who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preaching
democracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eve
of St. Bartholomew. Law was prostrated in the dust; to be suspected of
abolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insult
and indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in those
nights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayer
of the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up against
me; save me from bloody men."
At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly in
condemnation of the mob. William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist;
he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruel
misrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith,
he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery. The
infection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips of
multitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with its
victims, never reached him. Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that the
mob should be put down at once by the civil authorities. He declared the
Abolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them,
fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens. He
sternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting with
contempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory of
their principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminate
them. Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists in
the rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle which
they had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this,
however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relation
to the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them? Where is
the man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do less
in relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed?
Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubs
of ruffians, or hold his conscience at the dictation of a mob?"
In the summer of 1835, a mob of excited citizens broke open the post-
office at Charleston, South Carolina, and burnt in the street such papers
and pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such as
advocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition of
the slaves of the South. These papers were addressed, not to the slave,
but to the master. They contained nothing which had not been said and
written by Southern men themselves, the Pinkneys, Jeffersons, Henrys, and
Martins, of Maryland and Virginia. The example set at Charleston did not
lack imitators. Every petty postmaster south of Mason and Dixon's line
became ex officio a censor of the press. The Postmaster-General, writing
to his subordinate at Charleston, after stating that the post-office
department had "no legal right to exclude newspapers from the mail, or
prohibit their carriage or delivery, on account of their character or
tendency, real or supposed," declared that he would, nevertheless, give
no aid, directly or indirectly, in circulating publications of an
incendiary or inflammatory character; and assured the perjured
functionary, who had violated his oath of office, that, while he could
not sanction, he would not condemn his conduct. Against this virtual
encouragement of a flagrant infringement of a constitutional right, this
licensing of thousands of petty government officials to sit in their mail
offices--to use the figure of Milton--cross-legged, like so many envious
Junos, in judgment upon the daily offspring of the press, taking counsel
of passion, prejudice, and popular excitement as to what was "incendiary"
or "inflammatory," the Evening Post spoke in tones of manly protest.
While almost all the editors of his party throughout the country either
openly approved of the conduct of the Postmaster-General or silently
acquiesced in it, William Leggett, who, in the absence of his colleague,
was at that time sole editor of the Post, and who had everything to lose,
in a worldly point of view, by assailing a leading functionary of the
government, who was a favorite of the President and a sharer of his
popularity, did not hesitate as to the course which consistency and duty
required at his hands. He took his stand for unpopular truth, at a time
when a different course on his part could not have failed to secure him
the favor and patronage of his party. In the great struggle with the
Bank of the United States, his services had not been unappreciated by the
President and his friends. Without directly approving the course of the
administration on the question of the rights of the Abolitionists, by
remaining silent in respect to it, he might have avoided all suspicion of
mental and moral independence incompatible with party allegiance. The
impracticable honesty of Leggett, never bending from the erectness of
truth for the sake of that "thrift which follows fawning," dictated a
most severe and scorching review of the letter of the Postmaster-General.
"More monstrous, more detestable doctrines we have never heard
promulgated," he exclaimed in one of his leading editorials. "With what
face, after this, can the Postmaster-General punish a postmaster for any
exercise of the fearfully dangerous power of stopping and destroying any
portion of the mails?" "The Abolitionists do not deserve to be placed on
the same footing with a foreign enemy, nor their publications as the
secret despatches of a spy. They are American citizens, in the exercise
of their undoubted right of citizenship; and however erroneous their
views, however fanatic their conduct, while they act within the limits of
the law, what official functionary, be he merely a subordinate or the
head of the post-office department, shall dare to abridge them of their
rights as citizens, and deny them those facilities of intercourse which
were instituted for the equal accommodation of all? If the American
people will submit to this, let us expunge all written codes, and resolve
society into its original elements, where the might of the strong is
better than the right of the weak."
A few days after the publication of this manly rebuke, he wrote an
indignantly sarcastic article upon the mobs which were at this time
everywhere summoned to "put down the Abolitionists." The next day, the
4th of the ninth month, 1835, he received a copy of the Address of the
American Anti-Slavery Society to the public, containing a full and
explicit avowal of all the principles and designs of the association. He
gave it a candid perusal, weighed its arguments, compared its doctrines
with those at the foundation of his own political faith, and rose up from
its examination an Abolitionist. He saw that he himself, misled by the
popular clamor, had done injustice to benevolent and self-sacrificing
men; and he took the earliest occasion, in an article of great power and
eloquence, to make the amplest atonement. He declared his entire
concurrence with the views of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the
single exception of a doubt which rested, on his mind as to the abolition
of slavery in the District of Columbia. We quote from the concluding
paragraph of this article:--
"We assert without hesitation, that, if we possessed the right, we should
not scruple to exercise it for the speedy annihilation of servitude and
chains. The impression made in boyhood by the glorious exclamation of
Cato,
"'A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity of bondage!'
has been worn deeper, not effaced, by time; and we eagerly and ardently
trust that the day will yet arrive when the clank of the bondman's
fetters will form no part of the multitudinous sounds which our country
sends up to Heaven, mingling, as it were, into a song of praise for our
national prosperity. We yearn with strong desire for the day when
freedom shall no longer wave
"Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.'"
A few days after, in reply to the assaults made upon him from all
quarters, he calmly and firmly reiterated his determination to maintain
the right of free discussion of the subject of slavery.
"The course we are pursuing," said he, "is one which we entered upon after
mature deliberation, and we are not to be turned from it by a species of
opposition, the inefficacy of which we have seen displayed in so many
former instances. It is Philip Van Artevelde who says:--
"'All my life long,
I have beheld with most respect the man
Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him;
And from among them chose considerately,
With a clear foresight, not a blindfold courage;
And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind.
Pursued his purpose.'
"This is the sort of character we emulate. If to believe slavery a
deplorable evil and curse, in whatever light it is viewed; if to yearn
for the day which shall break the fetters of three millions of human
beings, and restore to them their birthright of equal freedom; if to be
willing, in season and out of season, to do all in our power to promote
so desirable a result, by all means not inconsistent with higher duty: if
these sentiments constitute us Abolitionists, then are we such, and glory
in the name."
"The senseless cry of 'Abolitionist' shall never deter us, nor the more
senseless attempt of puny prints to read us out of the democratic party.
The often-quoted and beautiful saying of the Latin historian, Homo sum:
humani nihil a me alienum puto, we apply to the poor slave as well as his
master, and shall endeavor to fulfil towards both the obligations of an
equal humanity."
The generation which, since the period of which we are speaking, have
risen into active life can have but a faint conception of the boldness of
this movement on the part of William Leggett. To be an Abolitionist then
was to abandon all hope of political preferment or party favor; to be
marked and branded as a social outlaw, under good society's interdict of
food and fire; to hold property, liberty, and life itself at the mercy of
lawless mobs. All this William Leggett clearly saw. He knew how rugged
and thorny was the path upon which, impelled by his love of truth and the
obligations of humanity, he was entering. From hunted and proscribed
Abolitionists and oppressed and spirit-broken colored men, the Pariahs of
American democracy, he could alone expect sympathy. The Whig journals,
with a few honorable exceptions, exulted over what they regarded as the
fall of a formidable opponent; and after painting his abolitionism in the
most hideous colors, held him up to their Southern allies as a specimen
of the radical disorganizers and democratic levellers of the North. His
own party, in consequence, made haste to proscribe him. Government
advertising was promptly withdrawn from his paper. The official journals
of Washington and Albany read him out of the pale of democracy. Father
Ritchie scolded and threatened. The democratic committee issued its bull
against him from Tammany Hall. The resolutions of that committee were
laid before him when he was sinking under a severe illness. Rallying his
energies, he dictated from his sick-bed an answer marked by all his
accustomed vigor and boldness. Its tone was calm, manly, self-relying;
the language of one who, having planted his feet hard down on the rock of
principle, stood there like Luther at Worms, because he "could not
otherwise." Exhausted nature sunk under the effort. A weary sickness of
nearly a year's duration followed. In this sore affliction, deserted as
he was by most of his old political friends, we have reason to know that
he was cheered by the gratitude of those in whose behalf he had well-nigh
made a martyr's sacrifice; and that from the humble hearths of his poor
colored fellow-citizens fervent prayers went up for his restoration.
His work was not yet done. Purified by trial, he was to stand forth once
more in vindication of the truths of freedom. As soon as his health was
sufficiently reestablished, he commenced the publication of an
independent political and literary journal, under the expressive title of
The Plaindealer. In his first number he stated, that, claiming the right
of absolute freedom of discussion, he should exercise it with no other
limitations than those of his own judgment. A poor man, he admitted that
he established the paper in the expectation of deriving from it a
livelihood, but that even for that object he could not trim its sails to
suit the varying breeze of popular prejudice. "If," said he, "a paper
which makes the Right, and not the Expedient, its cardinal object, will
not yield its conductor a support, there are honest vocations that will,
and better the humblest of them than to be seated at the head of an
influential press, if its influence is not exerted to promote the cause
of truth." He was true to his promise. The free soul of a free, strong
man spoke out in his paper. How refreshing was it, after listening to
the inanities, the dull, witless vulgarity, the wearisome commonplace of
journalists, who had no higher aim than to echo, with parrot-like
exactness, current prejudices and falsehoods, to turn to the great and
generous thoughts, the chaste and vigorous diction, of the Plaindealer!
No man ever had a clearer idea of the duties and responsibilities of a
conductor of the public press than William Leggett, and few have ever
combined so many of the qualifications for their perfect discharge: a
nice sense of justice, a warm benevolence, inflexible truth, honesty
defying temptation, a mind stored with learning, and having at command
the treasures of the best thoughts of the best authors. As was said of
Fletcher of Saltoun, he was "a gentleman steady in his principles; of
nice honor, abundance of learning; bold as a lion; a sure friend; a man
who would lose his life to serve his country, and would not do a base
thing to save it."
He had his faults: his positive convictions sometimes took the shape
of a proud and obstinate dogmatism; he who could so well appeal to the
judgment and the reason of his readers too often only roused their
passions by invective and vehement declamation. Moderate men were
startled and pained by the fierce energy of his language; and he not
unfrequently made implacable enemies of opponents whom he might have
conciliated and won over by mild expostulation and patient explanation.
It must be urged in extenuation, that, as the champion of unpopular
truths, he was assailed unfairly on all sides, and indecently
misrepresented and calumniated to a degree, as his friend Sedgwick justly
remarks, unprecedented even in the annals of the American press; and that
his errors in this respect were, in the main, errors of retaliation.
In the Plaindealer, in common with the leading moral and political
subjects of the day, that of slavery was freely discussed in all its
bearings. It is difficult, in a single extract, to convey an adequate
idea of the character of the editorial columns of a paper, where terse
and concentrated irony and sarcasm alternate with eloquent appeal and
diffuse commentary and labored argument. We can only offer at random the
following passages from a long review of a speech of John C. Calhoun, in
which that extraordinary man, whose giant intellect has been shut out of
its appropriate field of exercise by the very slavery of which he is the
champion, undertook to maintain, in reply to a Virginia senator, that
chattel slavery was not an evil, but "a great good."
"We have Mr. Calhoun's own warrant for attacking his position with all
the fervor which a high sense of duty can give, for we do hold, from the
bottom of our soul, that slavery is an evil,--a deep, detestable,
damnable evil; evil in all its aspects to the blacks, and a greater evil
to the whites; an evil moral, social, and political; an evil which shows
itself in the languishing condition of agriculture where it exists, in
paralyzed commerce, and in the prostration of the mechanic arts; an evil
which stares you in the face from uncultivated fields, and howls in your
ears through tangled swamps and morasses. Slavery is such an evil that
it withers what it touches. Where it is once securely established the
land becomes desolate, as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawk
chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the
tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its
refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable
sterility.
"If any one desires an illustration of the opposite influences of slavery
and freedom, let him look at the two sister States of Kentucky and Ohio.
Alike in soil and climate, and divided only by a river, whose translucent
waters reveal, through nearly the whole breadth, the sandy bottom over
which they sparkle, how different are they in all the respects over which
man has control! On the one hand the air is vocal with the mingled
tumult of a vast and prosperous population. Every hillside smiles with
an abundant harvest, every valley shelters a thriving village, the click
of a busy mill drowns the prattle of every rivulet, and all the
multitudinous sounds of business denote happy activity in every branch
of social occupation.
"This is the State which, but a few years ago, slept in the unbroken
solitude of nature. The forest spread an interminable canopy of shade
over the dark soil on which the fat and useless vegetation rotted at
ease, and through the dusky vistas of the wood only savage beasts and
more savage men prowled in quest of prey. The whole land now blossoms
like a garden. The tall and interlacing trees have unlocked their hold,
and bowed before the woodman's axe. The soil is disencumbered of the
mossy trunks which had reposed upon it for ages. The rivers flash in the
sunlight, and the fields smile with waving harvests. This is Ohio, and
this is what freedom has done for it.
"Now, let us turn to Kentucky, and note the opposite influences of
slavery. A narrow and unfrequented path through the close and sultry
canebrake conducts us to a wretched hovel. It stands in the midst of an
unweeded field, whose dilapidated enclosure scarcely protects it from the
lowing and hungry kine. Children half clad and squalid, and destitute of
the buoyancy natural to their age, lounge in the sunshine, while their
parent saunters apart, to watch his languid slaves drive the ill-
appointed team afield. This is not a fancy picture. It is a true copy
of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of
every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its
noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body
politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly
drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by
necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his
fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up its
noxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already too
much enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of the
material miasm."
The Plaindealer was uniformly conducted with eminent ability; but its
editor was too far in advance of his contemporaries to find general
acceptance, or even toleration. In addition to pecuniary embarrassments,
his health once more failed, and in the autumn of 1837 he was compelled
to suspend the publication of his paper. One of the last articles which
he wrote for it shows the extent to which he was sometimes carried by the
intensity and depth of his abhorrence of oppression, and the fervency of
his adoration of liberty. Speaking of the liability of being called upon
to aid the master in the subjection of revolted slaves, and in replacing
their cast-off fetters, he thus expresses himself: "Would we comply with
such a requisition? No! Rather would we see our right arm lopped from
our body, and the mutilated trunk itself gored with mortal wounds, than
raise a finger in opposition to men struggling in the holy cause of
freedom. The obligations of citizenship are strong, but those of
justice, humanity, and religion, stronger. We earnestly trust that the
great contest of opinion which is now going on in this country may
terminate in the enfranchisement of the slaves, without recourse to the
strife of blood; but should the oppressed bondmen, impatient of the tardy
progress of truth, urged only in discussion, attempt to burst their
chains by a more violent and shorter process, they should never encounter
our arm nor hear our voice in the ranks of their opponents. We should
stand a sad spectator of the conflict; and, whatever commiseration we
might feel for the discomfiture of the oppressors, we should pray that
the battle might end in giving freedom to the oppressed."
With the Plain dealer, his connection with the public, in a great
measure, ceased. His steady and intimate friend, personal as well as
political, Theodore Sedgwick, Jun., a gentleman who has, on many
occasions, proved himself worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus
speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of
fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a
disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same
manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same
dignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint,
escaped him." At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spirited
democrat was not wholly forgotten. A strenuous effort, which was well-
nigh successful, was made to secure his nomination as a candidate for
Congress. It was at this juncture that he wrote to a friend in the city,
from his residence at New Rochelle, one of the noblest letters ever
penned by a candidate for popular favor. The following extracts will
show how a true man can meet the temptations of political life:--
"What I am most afraid of is, that some of my friends, in their too
earnest zeal, will place me in a false position on the subject of
slavery. I am an Abolitionist. I hate slavery in all its forms,
degrees, and influences; and I deem myself bound, by the highest moral
and political obligations, not to let that sentiment of hate lie dormant
and smouldering in my own breast, but to give it free vent, and let it
blaze forth, that it may kindle equal ardor through the whole sphere of
my influence. I would not have this fact disguised or mystified for any
office the people have it in their power to give. Rather, a thousand
times rather, would I again meet the denunciations of Tammany Hall, and
be stigmatized with all the foul epithets with which the anti-abolition
vocabulary abounds, than recall or deny one tittle of my creed.
Abolition is, in my sense, a necessary and a glorious part of democracy;
and I hold the right and duty to discuss the subject of slavery, and to
expose its hideous evils in all their bearings,--moral, social, and
political,--as of infinitely higher importance than to carry fifty sub-
treasury bills. That I should discharge this duty temperately; that I
should not let it come in collision with other duties; that I should not
let my hatred of slavery transcend the express obligations of the
Constitution, or violate its clear spirit, I hope and trust you think
sufficiently well of me to believe. But what I fear is, (not from you,
however,) that some of my advocates and champions will seek to recommend
me to popular support by representing me as not an Abolitionist, which is
false. All that I have written gives the lie to it. All I shall write
will give the lie to it.
"And here, let me add, (apart from any consideration already adverted
to,) that, as a matter of mere policy, I would not, if I could, have my
name disjoined from abolitionism. To be an Abolitionist now is to be an
incendiary; as, three years ago, to be an anti-monopolist was to be a
leveller and a Jack Cade. See what three short years have done in
effecting the anti-monopoly reform; and depend upon it that the next
three years, or, if not three, say three times three, if you please, will
work a greater revolution on the slavery question. The stream of public
opinion now sets against us; but it is about to turn, and the
regurgitation will be tremendous. Proud in that day may well be the man
who can float in triumph on the first refluent wave, swept onward by the
deluge which he himself, in advance of his fellows, has largely shared in
occasioning. Such be my fate; and, living or dead, it will, in some
measure, be mine! I have written my name in ineffaceable letters on the
abolition record; and whether the reward ultimately come in the shape of
honors to the living man, or a tribute to the memory of a departed one, I
would not forfeit my right to it for as many offices as has in his gift,
if each of them was greater than his own."
After mentioning that he had understood that some of his friends had
endeavored to propitiate popular prejudice by representing him as no
Abolitionist, he says:--
"Keep them, for God's sake, from committing any such fooleries for the
sake of getting me into Congress. Let others twist themselves into what
shapes they please, to gratify the present taste of the people; as for
me, I am not formed of such pliant materials, and choose to retain,
undisturbed, the image of my God! I do not wish to cheat the people of
their votes. I would not get their support, any more than their money,
under false pretences. I am what I am; and if that does not suit them,
I am content to stay at home."
God be praised for affording us, even in these latter days, the sight of
an honest man! Amidst the heartlessness, the double-dealing, the
evasions, the prevarications, the shameful treachery and falsehood, of
political men of both parties, in respect to the question of slavery, how
refreshing is it to listen to words like these! They renew our failing
faith in human nature. They reprove our weak misgivings. We rise up
from their perusal stronger and healthier. With something of the spirit
which dictated them, we renew our vows to freedom, and, with manlier
energy, gird up our souls for the stern struggle before us.
As might have been expected, and as he himself predicted, the efforts of
his friends to procure his nomination failed; but the same generous
appreciators of his rare worth were soon after more successful in their
exertions in his behalf. He received from President Van Buren the
appointment of the mission to Guatemala,--an appointment which, in
addition to honorable employment in the service of his country, promised
him the advantages of a sea voyage and a change of climate, for the
restoration of his health. The course of Martin Van Buren on the subject
of slavery in the District of Columbia forms, in the estimation of many
of his best friends, by no means the most creditable portion of his
political history; but it certainly argues well for his magnanimity and
freedom from merely personal resentment that he gave this appointment to
the man who had animadverted upon that course with the greatest freedom,
and whose rebuke of the veto pledge, severe in its truth and justice,
formed the only discord in the paean of partisan flattery which greeted
his inaugural. But, however well intended, it came too late. In the
midst of the congratulations of his friends on the brightening prospect
before him, the still hopeful and vigorous spirit of William Leggett was
summoned away by death. Universal regret was awakened. Admiration of
his intellectual power, and that generous and full appreciation of his
high moral worth which had been in too many instances withheld from the
living man by party policy and prejudice, were now freely accorded to the
dead. The presses of both political parties vied with each other in
expressions of sorrow at the loss of a great and true man. The
Democracy, through all its organs, hastened to canonize him as one of the
saints of its calendar. The general committee, in New York, expunged
their resolutions of censure. The Democratic Review, at that period the
most respectable mouthpiece of the democratic party, made him the subject
of exalted eulogy. His early friend and co-editor, William Cullen
Bryant, laid upon his grave the following tribute, alike beautiful and
true:--
"The earth may ring, from shore to shore,
With echoes of a glorious name,
But he whose loss our tears deplore
Has left behind him more than fame.
"For when the death-frost came to lie
On Leggett's warm and mighty heart,
And quenched his bold and friendly eye,
His spirit did not all depart.
"The words of fire that from his pen
He flung upon the lucid page
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age.
"His love of Truth, too warm, too strong,
For Hope or Fear to chain or chill,
His hate of tyranny and wrong,
Burn in the breasts they kindled still."
So lived and died William Leggett. What a rebuke of party perfidy, of
political meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues,
comes up from his grave! How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons
at the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollow
pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands
to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in
chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,
and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,
shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his
character! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man
who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his
friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of
poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,
"A fame by scandal untouched,
To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."
The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are
their own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave is
written over with the record of their hypocrisy.
We have written rather for the living than the dead. As one of that
proscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravely
defended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinary
gratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at the
present time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of which
we have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in the
hearts of the young democracy of our country. Democracy such as William
Leggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-
comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faith
of this republic. Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name,
and offered the strange incense of human tears and blood on its profaned
altars, shall we, therefore, abandon the only political faith which
coincides with the Gospel of Jesus, and meets the aspirations and wants
of humanity? No. The duty of the present generation in the United
States is to reduce this faith to practice, to make the beautiful ideal a
fact.
"Every American," says Leggett, "who in any way countenances slavery is
derelict to his duty, as a Christian, a patriot, a man; and every one
does countenance and authorize it who suffers any opportunity of
expressing his deep abhorrence of its manifold abominations to pass
unimproved." The whole world has an interest in this matter. The
influence of our democratic despotism is exerted against the liberties of
Europe. Political reformers in the Old World, who have testified to
their love of freedom by serious sacrifices, hold but one language on
this point. They tell us that American slavery furnishes kings and
aristocracies with their most potent arguments; that it is a perpetual
drag on the wheel of political progress.
We have before us, at this time, a letter from Seidensticker, one of the
leaders of the patriotic movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831.
It was written from the prison of Celle, where he had been confined for
eight years. The writer expresses his indignant astonishment at the
speeches of John C. Calhoun, and others in Congress, on the slavery
question, and deplores the disastrous influence of our great
inconsistency upon the cause of freedom throughout the world,--an
influence which paralyzes the hands of the patriotic reformer, while it
strengthens those of his oppressor, and deepens around the living martyrs
and confessors of European democracy the cold shadow of their prisons.
Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the President of the British Free Suffrage
Union, and whose philanthropy and democracy have been vouched for by the
Democratic Review in this country, has the following passage in an
address to the citizens of the United States: "Although an admirer of the
institutions of your country, and deeply lamenting the evils of my own
government, I find it difficult to reply to those who are opposed to any
extension of the political rights of Englishmen, when they point to
America, and say that where all have a control over the legislation but
those who are guilty of a dark skin, slavery and the slave trade remain,
not only unmitigated, but continue to extend; and that while there is an
onward movement in favor of its extinction, not only in England and
France, but in Cuba and Brazil, American legislators cling to this
enormous evil, without attempting to relax or mitigate its horrors."
How long shall such appeals, from such sources, be wasted upon us? Shall
our baleful example enslave the world? Shall the tree of democracy,
which our fathers intended for "the healing of the nations," be to them
like the fabled upas, blighting all around it?
The men of the North, the pioneers of the free West, and the non-
slaveholders of the South must answer these questions. It is for them to
say whether the present wellnigh intolerable evil shall continue to
increase its boundaries, and strengthen its hold upon the government, the
political parties, and the religious sects of our country. Interest and
honor, present possession and future hope, the memory of fathers, the
prospects of children, gratitude, affection, the still call of the dead,
the cry of oppressed nations looking hitherward for the result of all
their hopes, the voice of God in the soul, in revelation, and in His
providence, all appeal to them for a speedy and righteous decision. At
this moment, on the floor of Congress, Democracy and Slavery have met in
a death-grapple. The South stands firm; it allows no party division on
the slave question. One of its members has declared that "the slave
States have no traitors." Can the same be said of the free? Now, as in
the time of the fatal Missouri Compromise, there are, it is to be feared,
political peddlers among our representatives, whose souls are in the
market, and whose consciences are vendible commodities. Through their
means, the slave power may gain a temporary triumph; but may not the very
baseness of the treachery arouse the Northern heart? By driving the free
States to the wall, may it not compel them to turn and take an aggressive
attitude, clasp hands over the altar of their common freedom, and swear
eternal hostility to slavery?
Be the issue of the present contest what it may, those who are faithful
to freedom should allow no temporary reverse to shake their confidence in
the ultimate triumph of the right. The slave will be free. Democracy in
America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the topstone of that
temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought
forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping-
Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will be he who can say,
with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her
welfare, I too have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my
heirs."