dices from them by a momentary effort of mind, viewing them abstractly and as if for the first time in your life, the scales might drop from your eyes. Take, then, one phenomenon by itself, and, as you view it all around, steadfastly bear in mind what is the character Southern gentlemen assume to be their marked and peculiar glory. Look at a scene that occurs often enough, God knows, and say, What think you of gallant, chivalric men whipping women to make them work and support those lazy men in idleness? Viewed abstractly and apart from your own concern in it, would you not say immediately, under all the impulses of Southern gentlemen, that there could be no more ineffable meanness than this under the cope of heaven? Here is every element of the gallant cavalier violated. We unchivalric roundheads and rustics of the Puritan North could not sink to a less heroic achievement. You do not think, you do not know, what you are doing. How many more horrid features there may be in your institution, which you might see, if you tried hard to break the spell of custom and self-partiality! "Suppose there were no cruelty in slavery, save as injustice is always cruelty; suppose there were no scourges, no stocks, no iron-collars, no guns and bloodhounds, not even fox-hounds turned into man-hounds, no public as well as private whipping-houses, termed often, in unfeeling mockery, 'sugar-houses,' passers by which can attest, that, at all hours, 'Hinc exaudiri gemitus, et sæva sonare Verbera: tum stridor ferri, tractæque catenæ'; yet can you, men of the nicest sense of honor as you are, who feel a stain like a wound, and would rather die, and put your dearest friend to death, than have your probity impeached, can you live long lives in peace of mind with injustice your constant stigma, with dishonesty staining every cent you receive or spend? Is it not unjust to make a good man another's chattel? Then is it not unjust to keep him so? Do not an innocent man's limbs belong to himself? Then how is it not dishonesty to take away from him the labor of his limbs; and common, ungenteel, vulgar dishonesty as any, the moment we look through the thin surface of a most shallow prejudice? Your slaves say they wish to be free. We never heard one say otherwise out of his master's hearing, in twenty years' intercourse with them. That is their strange preference; and that should be enough to decide you how to act. It may be a foolish choice in them. 1848.] Our Connection with Slavery. 67 They may be perverse, having had experience in the matter, in not believing the rhapsodies uttered on the advantages of being a crushed and brutified chattel by your well-paid fictionmongers, who seem to think that slavery, as Diderot says of that other enrapturing theme, woman, should be written upon, 'dipping our pen in the hues of the rainbow, and using for dust the down of the butterfly's wing.' But their sufficient answer is, We don't like it." And be assured, O Southern gentlemen, you would not like it either. With your tastes and indolence, you would be the last people on earth to like toiling in that burning sun of the reeking rice-swamp, under the cart-whip. Therefore you might feel for the congenial indolence and slumberous propensities of the children of Africa. By the constitution nature has given them, they hate work worse than any white man does. "Southern friends, what will you lose by freedom? Not wealth; for slavery keeps you all in debt to the non-slaveholding North. Not polish and elegance, not generosity and magnanimity, not the graces and enjoyments that spring from the ascendency of the powerful over the weak; for you would still be a landed aristocracy, and would live under the same physical influences as now. All the chivalry and honor and frankness and fearless adventurousness and exuberance of spirits would remain. Would you be less agreeably situated as gentlemen, if you approached more nearly to what you now boast has a partial resemblance in your social arrangements, namely, the condition of the European landed aristocracy, living surrounded by your tenants, looking up to you with a gratitude for freedom, and a deference for multiform superiority, such as are not felt by farmers abroad toward their landlords ? - "Friends, this is no insidious proposal. There is not a man of you but we love. Some of us have been identified with you, and can feel for you as for our own flesh and blood. We who write this have sympathized with you in modes not always agreeable now to reflect upon, as we remember that fifty human beings were hung in a line for the winding up of a servile insurrection among you, which we were obliged to assist in suppressing. Yes; we rode patrol for you, night after night, through your streets and forests, striking no blow, we are thankful, but running down and incarcerating poor fugitives, whom we pitied from the bottom of our hearts. God forgive us, if we did wrong! but the terror of your women and children was an appeal not be resisted. Never shall we forget the scenes we witnessed at the ringing of your alarmbells. Therefore we can feel for you and appreciate all the difficulties of your position; but, in view of them all, we decide that justice is the path of safety. That insurrection was plotted in '22, or rather, it was discovered then; the plot commenced years before. This was before the abolition agitation. It is since then, and since the last considerable insurrection that has occurred, that of Nat Turner, in Southampton, Virginia, that we have begun to talk much of antislavery. Therefore the antislavery discussion here did not occasion those insurrections; but, if it has had any effect, has prevented such outbreaks, for there have been none of late years. And this is what might be expected from the peaceful principles it breathes, and the hope it gives the slave that it will not be necessary for him to strike with the arm of flesh, since others are taking thought for him with bloodless and more effective weapons. Why should you be afraid, then, to talk of doing justice? Why fear that justice will provoke the slave to massacre, instead of exciting his gratitude, when lifelong injustice has so seldom nerved him to revenge ? "Southrons, you are not apt to be afraid. You love the excitement of danger. You are pouring, with tumultuous. delight, into the battle-fields of Mexico. One half of those who go there die, yet you shrink not. And will you be afraid of a few imaginary difficulties and dangers, all of which, put together and converted from shadows into realities, would not equal the fatigues and perils of one Buena Vista day? Festina lente in the matter, if you think that best, but begin to make some movement. Be willing to think, at least, when justice, and honor, and common honesty, and chivalric intrepidity call for it. "We appeal to every consideration that should affect good and noble men, or wise and self-loving men. You are ruining the land you love; you are impoverishing its resources; you are putting a prohibition on enterprise, and thrift, and the dignity of labor; and, what is worse, on the purest conscientiousness and the peculiar virtues of the Christian, where they transcend the virtues of the worldly cavalier. How many good men you have driven out from you, by making conscientiousness in one duty a crime ! They are afraid to stay, if they would be honest with themselves, and rise above 1848.] Political Action. 69 prejudice and interest. This class will increase now every year. There is no Edict of Nantz for them. If they would be faithful to conscience, they must become expatriated men. Was the revocation of that edict a wise measure for France, when it stripped her of so many valuable subjects, the élite of the Huguenot fearers of God, and drove them to settle on your shores? We plead for these exiles from the land of their birth. The banished child pines to return to his mother's breast. His fathers' sepulchres are among you. Those fathers bled to serve you and make you a free people. His mother sleeps under the sod of your valleys. She taught him, among her first lessons, to love his native land and make it a land of Christian righteousness. Let him come back to you with a clear conscience, that he may practise that lesson. Some of us who ventured to you from the North to preach Christ's Gospel you have driven away with indignity and outrage and a price upon our head, in violation of our civil rights, as well as the authority of God. We forgive all that; but we cannot so easily forgive your unfaithfulness to yourselves." We do not see how we can refuse to say something like this, when we have the ear of our Southern friends favorable to us, and escape the charge of proslavery in both of the senses we have attributed to the word. We justified the sentiment so far as it meant pro-slaveholder, that is, love and kindness to him, as to all other men. But politeness is carried too far, if Chesterfield is set above Christ, and our being pro-slaveholder makes us anti-slave. We must never forget the slave, when conversing with his master. He is our perpetual client, and we should ever be watching for a chance to forward his cause prudently. A word dropped wisely in the mollia tempora fandi may be the seed of his freedom. We hold that we are bound, too, to vote and legislate against this giant evil, to the utmost limit of our constitutional rights; and among those, we suppose, is even the right of changing the Constitution, if we find it desirable, and do it through constitutional forms. The stipulations of the national compact do not muzzle speech on any subject, nor prohibit self-defence, when the ever-growing encroachments of the slave power threaten our Northern rights and portend a slavocracy as the government of the Federal Union. A stiffer resistance than we have made would win respect, even at the South. But, if we are allowed to do little by antislavery action, so much the more strenuously ought we to do all we can, by scorning to exert the smallest proslavery influence unnecessarily. It is unquestionably constitutional to keep the lips closed; and silence sometimes may be almost omnipotent. We read in the book of Revelation, that "there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour"; and a half-hour's silence on earth at the fitting season would do something to bring it nearer to heaven. In this matter we are grievously faulty. Who, while travelling in the South, has not often witnessed an eagerness in New-Englanders to speak favorably of an institution about which they supposed their opinion would be considered doubtful or adverse? They volunteer their approbation. In coaches, and cars, and steamboats, if you see a man in ecstacy, be sure it is a Jonathan, delighted with his discovery that slavery is not the monster abolitionists have represented it. This is one of the mischiefs of their exaggerations. To hear some of their lecturers, one would receive the impression, that nothing was heard but lamentation, mourning, and woe over the wide savannas and cotton-fields of the South. On the contrary, the New-Englander finds it the land of gayety, compared with which his own has a sombre aspect. He sees slaves dancing in the streets to the music of the troops maintained expressly to keep them in subjection and march them to execution when uneasy. There are no such Momuses as the mindless children of Gallah and the Gold Coast. The moment punishment is over, their elastic spirits throw off the load of sadness, and they rise to joke about their stripes, perhaps while they wash out the brine that has been rubbed into their wounds to exacerbate the smart. Hearing this sonorous and incessant cachinnation, — not admitted into the privacies where discipline is administered, — feasted and flattered by the courtly masters, the New-England man thinks he has been imposed upon by the enemies of slavery. He does not allow for the peculiarity of the African temperament nor for the genial Southern clime, the very heat of which seems to exhilarate the black as much as it oppresses the white man. Then he hears that the slave is not required to accomplish as much labor as he himself exacts of his hired laborers at home, and he thinks they must have an easy life; not considering the difference of the stimulus that incites them, and that free hope will do with pleasure ten times the work |