THE PERIODS OF HISTORY THAT are most interesting are those which have been lighted up by spiritual bonfires. As we read about such epochs we seem to feel the fires rekindling in our bosoms. Through the identity of those historic flames with our own, we become aware of our portion in the past, and of our mission in the present. The names of the actors, to be sure, are changed; the names of the forces at work vary continually. Yet the substance of the story is ever the same; the fable deals with ourselves. And therefore that fable stirs the intimate embers in us. Here, within us, are those smothered and banked furnaces which the stride of History has left behind it-the only now living part, the only real part and absolute remnant of the divine pageant.
There are some periods of great conflagration where a whole epoch is lighted up with one great flame of idea, which takes perhaps a few decades to arise, blaze, and fall; during which time it shows all men in its glare. Willy-nilly they can be and are seen by this light and by no other. Willynilly their chief interest for the future lies in their relation to this idea. In spite of themselves they are thrilling, illustrative figures, seen in lurid and logical distortion, —abstracts and epitomes of human life. Nay, they stand forever as creatures that have been caught and held, cracked open, thrown living upon a screen, burned alive perhaps by a searching and terrible bonfire and recorded in the act as the citizens of Pompeii were recorded by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
It happened that a period of this kind passed over the United States between the years 1830 and 1865. There is nothing to be found in that epoch which does not draw its significance, its interest, its permanent power from the slavery question. There is no man whose life falls within that epoch whose character was not controlled by that question, or whose portrait can be seen by any other light than the light of that fire. Subtract that light and you have darkness; you cannot see the man at all. In the biographies of certain distinguished conservatives of that time you may often observe the softening of the portrait by the omission of unpleasant records, the omission by the biographers of those test judgments and test ordeals with which the times were well supplied. By these omissions the man vanishes from the page of his own book. The page grows suddenly blank. You check yourself and wonder who it was that you were reading about. Now the reason of this disappearance of the leading character from your mind is that the biographer has drawn someone who could not have existed. The man must have answered aye or nay to the question which the times were putting. And, in fact, he did so answer. By this answer he could have been seen. Without it he does not exist.
I confess that I had rather stand out for posterity in a hideous silhouette, as having been wrong on every question of my time, than be erased into a cipher by my biographer. But biographers do not feel in this way toward their heroes. Each one feels that he has undertaken to do his best by his patron. Therefore they stand the man under a north light in a photographer’s attic, suggest his attitude, and thus take the picture;—whereas in real life, the man was standing on the balcony of a burning building which the next moment collapsed, and in it he was crushed beyond the semblance of humanity. The Civil War,—that war with its years of interminable length, its battles of such successive and monstrous carnage, its dragged-out reiterations of horror and agony, and its even worse tortures of hope deferred,—hope all but extinct,that war of which it is impossible to read even a summary without becoming so worn out by distress that you forget everything that went before in the country’s history and emerge, as it were, a new man at the close of your perusal;—that war was no accident. It was involved in every syllable which every inhabitant of America uttered or neglected to utter in regard to the slavery question between 1830 and 1860. The gathering and coming on of that war, its vaporous distillation from the breath of every man, its slow, inevitable formation in the sky, its retreats and apparent dispersals, its renewed visibilities-all of them governed by some inscrutable logic — and its final descent in lightning and deluge;—these matters make the history of the interval between 1830 and 1865. That history is all one galvanic throb, one course of human passion, one Nemesis, one deliverance. And with the assassination of Lincoln in 1865 there falls from on high the great, unifying stroke that leaves the tragedy sublime. No poet ever invented such a scheme of curse, so all-involving, so remotely rising in an obscure past and holding an entire nation in its mysterious bondage — a scheme based on natural law, led forward and unfolded from mood to mood, from climax to climax, and plunging at the close into the depths of a fathomless pity. The action of the drama is upon such a scale that a quarter of the earth has to be devoted to it. Yet the argument is so trite that it will hardly bear statement. Perhaps the true way to view the whole matter is to regard it as the throwing off by healthy morality of a little piece of left-over wickedness — that bad heritage of antiquity, domestic slavery. The logical and awful steps by which the process went forward merely exhibit familiar, moral, and poetic truth. What else could they exhibit?
We are ungrateful to the intellects of the past; or rather, like children we take it for granted that somebody must supply us with our supper and our ideas; and, for the most part, it is difficult to discover the extent of our indebtedness, whether, for example, to Charlemagne or to the scholars who have revealed him. Yet everything we know and live by is due to the mind of someone in the past: its formulation, at any rate, was the act of a man.
These same illuminations of history that we have been speaking of were due to the enlightenment of individual minds. Our Revolution of 1776 was made interesting by its state papers, and to-day our knowledge of that time is a knowledge of the minds of Washington, Franklin, and the other patriots. Now the light by which we to-day see the Anti-slavery period was first shed on it by one man-William Lloyd Garrison. That slavery was wrong, everyone knew in his heart. The point seen by Garrison was the practical point that the slavery issue was the only thing worth thinking about, and that all else must be postponed till slavery was abolished. He saw this by a God-given act of vision in 1829; and it was true. The history of the spread of this idea of Garrison’s is the history of the United States during the thirty years after it loomed in his mind. From the day Garrison established the Liberator he was the strongest man in America. He was affected in his thought by no one. What he was thinking, all men were destined to think. How had he found that clew and skeleton-key to his age, which put him in possession of such terrible power? What he hurled in the air went everywhere and smote all men. Tide and tempest served him. His power of arousing uncontrollable disgust was a gift, like magic; and he seems to sail upon it as a demon upon the wind. Not Andrew Jackson, nor John Quincy Adams, nor Webster, nor Clay, nor Benton, nor Calhoun,—who dance like shadows about his machine,—but William Lloyd Garrison becomes the central figure in American life.
If one could see a mystical presentation of the epoch, one would see Garrison as a Titan, turning a giant grindstone or electrical power-wheel, from which radiated vibrations in larger and in ever larger, more communicative circles and spheres of agitation, till there was not a man, woman, or child in America who was not a-tremble.
We know, of course, that the source of these radiations was not in Garrison. They came from the infinite and passed out into the infinite. Had there been no Garrison they would somehow have arrived and at some time would have prevailed. But historically speaking they did actually pass through Garrison: he vitalized and permanently changed this nation as much as one man ever did the same for any nation in the history of the world.
LET US CONSIDER THE FIRST fifty years of our national history. There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of the cotton gin, more than half awake at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; and slavery was continued in the Louisiana Territory by the terms of the treaty. Thereafter slavery was always in everyone’s mind, though not always on his tongue. A slave state and a free state were, as a matter of practice, always admitted in pairs. Thus, Vermont and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi and Illinois, had each been offset against the other. This was to preserve the balance of power. The whole country, however, was in a state of unstable equilibrium and the era of good feeling oscillated upon the top of a craggy peak.
At last, in 1818-20, came two years of fierce, open struggle over slavery in the admission of Missouri, which state was formed from part of the Louisiana Purchase. Southern threats of disunion clashed with Northern taunts of defiance in the House of Representatives. In the outcome, the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri with slavery; and prohibited slavery in that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay north of the latitude of 36° 30′, except in the portion included in Missouri. This compromise became, in the public mind, as sacred as the Constitution itself; so that when, in 1854, the Compromise was repealed, the whole North felt that the bottom had dropped out of their government. The North believed itself to be betrayed. The savage feeling which led up to war developed rapidly at the North after this time. The war came as the final outcome of a great malady. But we must return to 1820.
During the decade that followed the Missouri Compromise everyone in America fell sick. It was not a sickness that kept men in bed. They went about their businessthe lawyer to court, the lady to pay calls, the merchant to his wharf. The amusements, and the religious, literary, and educational occupations of mankind went forward as usual. But they all went forward under the gradually descending fringe of a mist, an unwholesome-feeling cloud of oppression. No one could say why it was that his food did not nourish him quite as it used to do, nor his unspoken philosophy of life any longer cover the needs of his nature. This was especially strange, because everybody ought to have been perfectly happy. Had not the country emerged from the War of the Revolution in the shape of a new and glorious Birth of Time — a sample to all mankind? Had it not survived the dangers of the second war with Great Britain? And what then remained for us except to go forward victoriously and become a splendid, successful, vigorous, and benevolent people? Everything was settled that concerned the stability of our form of government. The future could surely contain nothing except joyous progress.
The Americans of 1820-30 expounded the glorious nature of their own destiny. They challenged the casual visitor to deny it; and became quite noted for their insistence upon this claim, and for their determination to secure the acknowledgement of it by all men.
At the bottom of this nervous concern there was not, as is generally supposed, merely the bumptious pride and ignorance of a new nation. There was something more complex and more honorable; there was an inner knowledge that none of these things were true. This knowledge was forced upon our fathers by their familiarity with their own political literature and with the Declaration of Independence in particular. There was a chasm between the agreeable statement that all men are created free and equal, and the horrible fact of human slavery. The thought of this incongruity troubled every American. No recondite or difficult reasoning was required to produce the mental anguish that now began to oppress America. The only thing necessary was leisure for anguish, and this leisure first became possible at the close of the second war with Great Britain. The operation of the thought was almost entirely unconscious, and its issue in pain almost entirely unexpressed.
The articulate classes had not talked much about slavery since the days of the constitutional compromises, and it is the aged Jefferson who writes from Monticello apropos of the Missouri Compromise—“This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union.”
Now there never was a moment in the history of the country when this fire-bell was quite silent. The educational policy of the articulate classes of society during the first fifty years of the Nation’s life had been to hush the bell.
Ever since the Southern members in the Constitutional Convention had showed their teeth, and threatened to withdraw if slavery were disturbed, a policy of silence had been adopted. The questions covered by the Constitution were to be regarded as conclusively settled. The bandages must never be taken off them. Any person who reviews the history of the American Revolution can sympathize with this timidity; for it seems like a miracle that the Colonies should ever have come together-so antagonistic were their interests, and their ideals. The Colonists feared some new breach, and there ensued a non-intellectual determination that certain questions should not be re-examined: this determination gradually grew into our great stupefying dogma which says to the private citizen, “This is our way of doing things: youbedamned: intellect has nothing to do with the matter: it is American.” This dogma, which arose out of the needs of our early days, has become the most widespread form of metaphysical faith among us. No doubt all nations harbor similar prejudices as to their own institutions; but the nations of Europe have been jostled into liberalism by their contiguity one with another; and the jostling is now being extended to us. During our early history, however, we were isolated, and our intellectual classes took their American history a little too seriously. The state of mind of our statesmen and scholars in that epoch is well summed up in Webster’s reply to Hayne. That speech closes an epoch. It is the great paving-stone of conclusive demonstration, placed upon the mouth of a natural spring.
All this while something had been left out in all the nation’s political and social philosophy — something which policy forbade men to search for, and this something was beginning to move in the pit of the stomach of Americans, and to make them feel exceedingly and vaguely ill. In order to bind the Colonies into a more lasting union, a certain suppression of truth, a certain trampling upon instinct had been resorted to in the Constitution. All the parties to that instrument thoroughly understood the iniquity of slavery and deplored it. All the parties were ashamed of slavery and yet felt obliged to perpetuate it. They wrapped up a twenty years protection of the African slave trade in a colorless phrase.
“The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importations, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.”
Now the slave trade meant the purchase upon African coasts of negroes and negresses, their branding, herding, manacling, and transportation between decks across tropical seas. The African slave trade is probably the most brutal organized crime in history. Our fathers did not dare to name it. So of the fugitive-slave law;—the Constitution deals with it in the cruel, quiet way in which monstrous tyranny deals with the fictions of administrative law. “No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
In an age in which the Inquisition is absolutely dominant, its officials are almost kind. The leaden touch of hypocrisy was thus in the heart of our Constitution. Coldheartedness radiated from the Ark of our Covenant. We condone this because we know that many of these fathers really did believe that slavery was probably going to diminish and die out in the country. Even while protecting it they hoped for the best, and knew not what they did. But as slavery became more important instead of less important, and as the cruelty of it became more visible, the bond of the document pressed upon the conscience of the people. We had undertaken more than we could perform. The suppression of truth, the trampling upon instinct, which we had accepted as a duty, was stifling us. For the first fifty years of our national life no reaction was visible. And then there ensued a fermentation, a tumult in the heart which nothing could quell. This tumult began long before it showed itself. Its dialectic and logic were developed and ready for use, like the wings of the locust in the shell. The natures of men were beginning to heave and to swell — and at last, when Garrison speaks out, behold, he is in electrical communication with an age over-charged with passion. His thought is understood immediately. Every implication, every consequence, every remote contingency has been anticipated in the public consciousness, and there ensues explosion after explosion: crash generates crash: storm-routes of continuous passion plow the heavens across the continent from sea to sea. In truth our whole civilization, our social life, our religious feelings, our political ideas, had all become accommodated to cruelty, representative of tyranny. The gigantic backbone of business-interest was a slavery backbone. We were a slave republic. For a generation, nay, for two hundred years, we had tolerated slavery; and for a generation it had been a sacred thing — a man must suppress his feelings in speaking of it.
Now there is nothing more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of generous emotion. It means death:—sickness to the individual, blight to the race. Compassion shining through the heart wears the very name and face of Divine Life. It makes the limbs strong and the mind capable; it strengthens the stomach and supports the intestines. Cramp this emotion, and you will have a half-dead man, whose children will be less well-nourished than himself.
It is hard to imagine the falsetto condition of life in the Northern States in 1829; —the lack of spontaneity and naturalness about everybody, so far as externals went, and the presence of extreme solicitude in the bottom of everybody’s heart. Emerson speaks in his journal (1834) of the fine manners of the young Southerners, brought up amidst slavery, and of the deference which Northerners, both old and young, habitually paid to the people of the South. It seems to have been regarded as a social duty at the North to shield the feelings of Southerners, and, as it were, to apologize for not owning slaves. The feelings of the Northern philanthropist, however, were never regarded with delicacy. On the contrary it was thought to be his duty to suppress his feelings. Any exhibition of humane sentiment where slavery was concerned — and it was always concerned — was punished immediately. The most natural impulses, the most simple acts of human piety could be indulged in only through an initiation of fierce pain, generally followed by social ostracism. The right to draw one’s breath involved a struggle with Apollyon.
“ Only a few days before one of our meetings,” writes Henry I. Bowditch, one of Garrison’s early recruits from the social world of Boston, “a young lady had hoped that I ‘would never become an Abolitionist,’ and about the same time Frederick Douglass appeared as a runaway slave. He was at the meeting in Marlboroa Chapel. Of course I was introduced to him, and, as I would have invited a white friend, I asked him home to dine with me in my small abode in Bedford Street. It is useless to deny that I did not like the thought of walking with him in open midday up Washington Street. I hoped I would not meet any of my acquaintances. I had, however, hardly turned into the street before I met the young lady who had expressed her wish as above stated. I am glad now to say that I did not skulk. I looked at her straight and bowed in ‘my most gracious manner’ as if I were ‘all right,’ while I saw by her look of regret that he thought me ‘all wrong.’ It was, however, something like a cold sponge-bath,that Washington Street walk by the side of a black man,—rather terrible at the outset, but wonderfully warming and refreshing afterwards! I had literally jumped ‘in medias res.’ But I did not hear until years afterwards, and a long time after Douglass had held office in Washington under Federal Government, and the slavery of his own race had been washed out in blood, what I was doing for him at the moment that as a friend I asked him to walk home with me to dinner. How little do we appreciate acts that seem trivial or something worse to us, but which to others, affected by such acts, are of indispensable importance! Beautiful to me seems now the act, inasmuch as it helped to raise a poor, down-trodden soul into a proper self-appreciation. And how much I thank God that He led me by giving me a love of freedom, and something like a conscience to act as I did then.” 1
The strain of that walk upon Bowditch is felt forty years later in his account of it. The profound political instinct which led him to take the walk is as noticeable as the religious nature of his impulse. It is wonderful to reflect how little the significance of the act could have been understood by any casual observer of the scene. Here is a man who turns down one street rather than another, upon meeting an acquaintance. He looks like a gentleman doing an act of politeness; while he is, in fact, a saint going through the fire for his faith, and a hero saving the republic. So banal are externals, so deep is reality. But our present interest in the incident lies in this — that it measures the separation of Massachusetts from the ordinary standards of Europe. Frederick Douglass was almost a man of genius and he looked like a man of genius. His photograph at the time of his escape from slavery might be the photograph of a musician or a painter. He was the kind of man who, in a Paris or London salon, would excite anyone’s passing notice, as perhaps a South American diplomat or artist.
An intelligent foreign observer might have told Bowditch that the sufferings which both Bowditch and Douglass were enduring betrayed the fact that a social revolution was under way. They were the sign of an approaching homogeneity. This universal disturbance, this universal throe is the first thing that all the people of the United States ever experienced together. Their former unions had been political and external: this was spiritual and internal.
We are familiar with the Northern form of the uneasiness, because the Northerner could speak. He cried out; and through his utterance came the cure. But of the pain of the Southerner, to whom all expression of feeling was denied, we know nothing. With the rise of Abolition, perished every vestige of free speech at the South. Events now converged to crush the manhood out of the slave-holding classes. A Southerner could not be gentle, unselfish, quick to speak his thought, or genuinely interested in anything. His opinions were prepared for him before he was born; and they were lightkilling illusions — the precursors of mania. The enactment of very stringent and inhuman slave codes, and the prohibition of all education to the slaves followed in the wake of the Abolition outbreaks. The maturing of a sort of philosophy of slavery, according to which slavery was seen as the cornerstone of religion and progress, was the work of the following decade, and the task of Calhoun. The corollaries to this philosophy which involved an abandonment of popular education, and the cutting-off of the South from every intellectual contact with the civilization of Europe, were duly worked out during the next thirty years. By the time the war came there existed a sort of Religion of Slavedom. The Pro-slavery Northern Democrats of Buchanan’s time held opinions which would have shocked the most pronounced slaveholders of 1820. During all this time Virginia and the Carolinas — which constituted the Holy Land of the Slave Dispensation — endured a silent exodus and migration on the part of the more liberal spirits. Men even went to New Orleans to escape the tyranny of slave opinion at Charleston. Thus were the souls of Americans squeezed and their tempers made acid. A slightly too ready responsiveness to stimulus of any kind came to be the mark of the American, whether at the North or at the South; the difference being that the too ready response at the South was apt to be an insult, at the North an apology. This hair-trigger nervousness on the part of everybody was the result of poison in the system. What could the manly Southern youth do? Leave all and follow Abolition? He knew of Abolition only that it was a villainous attack on his father’s character and property. He was in the grip of a relentless, moving hurricane of distorted views, false feelings, erroneous philosophy; and he knew nothing clearly, understood nothing clearly, until he perished upon the battlefields of the Civil War, fighting like a hero.
It is impossible in describing the course of the Slave Power between 1832-65 to avoid harsh language. If ever wickedness came upward in the counsels of men, it did so here. Yet there are elements in all these matters which elude our analysis. The virtues glimmer and seem to go out; but they are never really extinguished. How much idealism, how much latent heroism must have existed in the South during all these years before the war, was seen when the war came. Villains do not choose for themselves Commanders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is lost, that old society, and it died almost speechless-died justly and inevitably. Yet we do well to remember with what a flame of sacrifice it perished, to remember with what force, what devotion, what heroism, Humanity showed herself to be still adorned in that hour of an all-devouring atonement.
The great fever came to an end with Appomattox. The delirium stopped: the plague had been expelled. The nation was not dead: the nation was at the beginning of a long convalescence. It is, however, about the earlier symptoms of the disorder that I would speak here, about the presentiments of headache and nausea, and about that dreadfullest moment in all sickness (as it seems to me), the moment when we admit that something serious is coming on.
The struggle between the North and the South began over free speech about the negro, and especially about the right of benevolent people at the North to extend their benevolence to the negro, as, for instance, in their schools, Sunday-schools, hospitals, etc. Now the South sincerely believed that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had morally bound the North not to talk about slavery in private conversation, and not to treat the negro as a human being. The South had succeeded in imposing this conviction upon the whole North.
“ The patriotism of all classes,” wrote Edward Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, in a message to his Legislature, “the patriotism of all classes must be invoked to abstain from discussion, which by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave.”
This paralysis of dumbness and of fear touched everyone. It was not exactly fear, either, but a sort of subtle freemasonry, a secret belief that nothing must be disturbed. The Southerners lived in sincere terror of slave uprisings-and they managed to convey a mysterious tremor to the North upon the subject.
Dr. Channing was that age’s figure-head. He was the most eminent man in the country; the moral sciences were his province. He was, therefore, constantly appealed to by all persons and parties upon the slavery question. His responses and his conduct upon such occasions give the best key to that age which we have; and his character will be discussed as long as posterity takes an interest in the epoch. This must be my excuse for recurring to Dr. Channing from time to time and for using him, at this point, to illustrate the flatness and tameness of good men in that age; yes, to illustrate the spiritual domination of evil at the time when Garrison began his crusade. The drawingrooms of our grandfathers’ times contained automata; ghosts clustered about the dinner tables. The people had forgotten what the sound of a man’s voice was like. That is why they were so startled by Garrison.
Even Channing, who was a true saint, and, when time was given him, a courageous man, is an injured being-like a beautiful plant which has grown to maturity in a dungeon. Under the pressure of his own conscience and of certain hammering Abolitionists who were his friends, he wrote an analysis of slavery, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Abolitionists on the question of free speech. It is to his everlasting honor that he did this: for he sincerely deplored the methods of the Abolitionists and was incapable of understanding their mission. By his writings on slavery and by his act in standing by the Abolitionists on the question of free speech, Channing became a broken idol to all of the South and to half of his Boston admirers. We must never confound him, as the Abolitionists were prone to do, with the contemporary flock of time-serving parsons. Channing was a man who could, and did, go through the fire for principle. But he was a man lacking in instinct, a sad man, too reasonable to understand this crisis or know how to meet it. He was trampled upon by his congregation, and knew not how to save himself.
Dr. Channing’s coldness toward Abolition might be shown by his words to Daniel Webster in 1828, deprecating any agitation of the slavery question; by his studied avoidance of Garrison in social life; by his inability, even in the Essay on Slavery, to see the importance of the Abolition movement;—or in a hundred other ways. On the other hand, Dr. Channing’s services to the Antislavery cause could be illustrated by this same essay, and by the esteem and love which many leading Anti-slavery people always bore him. Let us, however, go to the bottom of the whole matter.