Kitabı oku: «Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863», sayfa 2

We hear a great deal, nowadays, from rebel sources, of the different race which settled Virginia and Carolina from that which peopled New England, and the immeasurable superiority of the former. If the mouthpiece of the confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis, may be believed, the latter and their descendants are not worthy even to be the slaves of the former, and are a degree lower in the scale of creation than the hyenas! Differing in language, manners, customs, ideas, there is no possibility of a peaceable union, say the confederate organs. In fine, language is exhausted of epithets expressive of their scorn, contempt, and hatred of the Yankees, as they are opprobriously nicknamed. But do these men ignore the fact that the original settlers of both New England and Virginia were purely English? They were from the same stock precisely. As to the character of each, I cannot do better than to quote from a work of which Americans may well be both glad and proud, a work that has set us and our institutions in a truer and juster light than any before it. I allude to the work of M. De Tocqueville on 'Democracy in America.' In volume first, chapter fifth, he says:

'The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirits endangered the infant colony, and rendered its progress uncertain. The artisans and agriculturists arrived afterward; and although they were a more moral and orderly race of men, they were in no wise above the level of the inferior classes in England. No lofty conceptions, no intellectual system, directed the foundation of these new settlements.'

He adds, in a note:

'It was not till some time later, that a certain number of rich English capitalists came to fix themselves in the colony.'

It is true that in the course of time some men of high character and position were attracted to the genial climate and virgin resources of the new Southern colonies, and, buying up large tracts of land, fixed themselves permanently, sensibly modifying the condition of affairs. The descendants of such men as these afterward became the most famous leaders of the Revolution which Puritan principles effected. They were men of whom descendants may well be proud, but it is certain that they have had very few descendants; therefore, the great body of the slaveholders, each one of whom would fain believe himself, and try to make others believe him, a scion of this renowned stock, must have had a very different origin.

In striking contrast with the above account, here is what he says of the first settlers of the Northern colonies:

'The settlers who established themselves on the shores of New England all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. Their union on the soil of America at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality; they landed in the desert, accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. Nor did they cross the Atlantic to improve their situation, or to increase their wealth: the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile, their object was the triumph of an idea.'

Let the world judge between the Puritan and the so-called Cavalier!

As the same author remarks – 'The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and the social condition of the Southern States;' so it is no less true, that the influence of an almost unlimited democracy, the product of widespread intelligence and pure religion, united to the English character, explains the peculiar civilization of New England. It is nothing strange, certainly, that, after the wide and continued divergence of two aggressive principles for more than two hundred years, they should at last come to stand in the position of giant antagonisms, and close in a deadly grapple for the ascendency. It is perfectly natural that the ignorance and mental darkness of slave Virginia or Carolina should fear and hate above all things the light of knowledge that streams from New England; it is natural that the unquestioned immorality and laxity of principle engendered by slavery should shrink from the contrast with a state of morals unsurpassed for purity in the world; and that an obsequious church and clergy, which, in the holy name of religion, and 'using the livery of heaven to serve the devil in,' had dared by the thinnest sophistries and most palpable perversions to garble the true teachings of the Bible, and been willing to brave the anathemas denounced against those who add to or subtract from aught written therein, should accede willingly to a separation which could relieve them somewhat from an odious comparison, to say the least. Compare the vigorous, consistent, and sublime theology of New England, the widely spread influence of her cultivated and philanthropic clergy, with that part of the clergy and church of the South which, in sustaining slavery, has lost all hold upon human sympathies, all influence, save in the regions where the highest crime against humanity has become a matter of interest, of sordid speculation. Alas! what sadder spectacle could be seen than the ministers of Christ using their talents to lead their people into wrong, mocking religion, trailing its snowy wings in the mire of the most corrupt political dogmas, doing their utmost to upheave that grand corner stone set by Christ himself in the primal temple of Christianity and humanity: 'All things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.'

That men and women, taught from infancy to look upon slavery as a moral and political as well as a material good; whose ideas, manners, habits have become interwoven with its existence in their midst, and who, no matter how falsely, as those may think who look upon it from a comparatively disinterested standpoint, conceive that it lies at the base of their social prosperity and happiness; who have been accustomed from forum, hustings, pulpit, and press, to hear an institution that appeals to so many selfish instincts and principles in the human heart, lauded and defended, and made to be the Ultima Thule of Southern hope, pride, and ambition; that they should view with displeasure and anger such an influence as the institutions of New England must always wield, is not so surprising. But that men can be found here in the free North, yea, more, in New England itself, to sympathize with them, to echo their degraded sentiments, and to wish to see the slave power supreme in the land, is what surpasses wonder, and almost belief. Yet a portion of a large, old, and venerated party have come to be their miserable allies and claqueurs. The truth is, we may say and believe that slavery is a dire wrong, a foul injustice, done to a whole race, and therefore ought to die, but that does not tell one half of the damning story: the worst is this, that it gradually kills out the virtue, the manliness, the moral vitality of the nation that allows it; that it has done so in our own nation to an alarming extent is the great, the fear-impelling cause why it should be rooted out, abolished, as an influence in the Government.

'Ah, but,' says the Northern traitor, 'that very abolition has done the whole mischief. If there had been no Abolitionists, there would have been no war. The Abolitionists are responsible for it all.' Softly, poor, weak-minded man! Does not any man's common sense tell him that wherever a wrong exists, it is in the nature of things that somebody should oppose it – that a desire should arise to get rid of it? It is the chief mercy of God to the world, next to His providing salvation for it, that this conscience is left to it, this sense of wrong, and the will and struggle to abolish the wrong. For such remonstrance the Abolitionists are indeed responsible!

There are certain words that have come to be used in an indefinite, canting sort of way, so that they have no meaning at all, or, at least, a meaning very deceptive. These words represent bugbears to unthinking people, and unscrupulous men do not fail to pervert this fact to their own or party ends. Such are some of the terms which have been applied to New England, both South and North. She is called radical, and a most absurd and mischievous idea of New England radicalism is rife, especially in the South. Said a Southern gentleman to me on one occasion (he was a physician, was one of the most intelligent slaveholders I ever met, and was an occasional contributor to De Bow's Review):

'You New Englanders do not believe anything; you are all freethinkers – is it not so?'

Par parenthese, that word freethinker is another of the terms conventionally abused. This gentleman had just been speaking of this very thing, New England radicalism, and in his query showed an evident idea that it involved that species of unbelief, that discarding of all creeds or standards of belief, popularly known as freethinking. It also includes, in the minds of many of the Southern people, the exercise of a kind of personal license, an abandoning of the good old established landmarks of thought and action, and a strong-minded striking out into new paths of experiment, regardless of form or law. A Northern woman going to the South is assumed to be strong-minded, especially, till she has proved herself feminine. There is nothing so absurd as this idea, when one considers that there is no people on earth as free, independent, and original, intellectually, as they are, who possess so deep and abiding a respect and veneration for those same laws and institutions. New England is the prolific hive whence swarm all the isms that infest the country, say they. They do not understand that in a state of society where education is universal, where mind is constantly meeting mind, and thought clashing with thought, the restless and heaving mass must be always throwing up something to the surface, it may be froth, it may be tangled weeds, rough stones, or plain shells, or it may be curious and valuable gems fit to glitter in a coronet, or shells of dazzling colors and manifold convolutions fit to shine in rare cabinets. The waveless and stagnant calm of the mass of the Southern mind can have no conception of the intellectual movement that is ever going on in such a community as New England.

But this radicalism especially bears on its 'horrid front' that bugbear of all conservatism, the world over —abolition. There is no word so abused as that. The thing itself is as old and inevitable as the relation of cause and effect, as the existence of sin and righteousness, as the contest between God and Satan. Just as if there could help being an abolition sentiment where there existed the aggressive, hateful principle of slavery!

Then that peculiar and valuable trait of Yankee character, which the French so aptly call savoir faire, and which they themselves term faculty, the power of accomplishing, the knowing how to do, the understanding how to suit means to ends, which makes a Yankee so useful and versatile, and consequently a valuable acquisition to society – has received its full share of Southern abuse and ridicule. 'They palm off upon us their inventions, half of which are worthless,' say they. 'They cheat us with their wares, their manufactures, their patents, and nostrums. They grow rich on our necessities, and take the world's trade from our harbors, so superior to theirs, and they are always busy, and intermeddling in everybody's affairs; and we hate them – ah, how we do hate them!' In short, a certain leading class at the South, that which moulds and leads the hollow, shrinking, scared thing they called public opinion, have come to hate and detest everything distinctively New English, and finally to make the wicked, traitorous attempt to overturn the Government, which they know received its highest and controlling impulse from the Puritan ideas of that portion of the country. In the material world, nothing is plainer than the fact embodied in the old adage, 'Straws show which way the wind blows.' In the realm of moral and social law, however, the indications, just as palpable, of the direction in which the current of public sentiment is setting, are usually ignored or pass unobserved at the time being; and not till great events have called attention to the causes that produced them, do these indications take all the prominence due to them. These minor symptoms I have noticed, of the dislike of New England in the Southern mind, have been plainly to be seen in all the doings and sayings of their public men of this generation at least, to go no further back, and in the utterances of the press throughout the South. Flings, innuendoes, sarcasms, condescensions, insults, have been heaped upon the Yankees, by the representatives of the slave power, in the National Congress, in the State Legislatures, in their public speeches, and by the minions of the press, until it would seem as if they must have fallen on dead ears, so little fever they have stirred in the blood of the North. Still, if anyone supposes that the ostensible causes of dislike are the real ones, he is mistaken. Does any man of them all, of these leaders, I mean, suppose for one instant that the Yankee negro-trader, overseer, peddler, lucre-loving tradesman, slaver, slave catcher, subservient politician, or mouthing, dirt-swallowing pulpit huckster, is a true representative of the influence and ideas of New England? Or that the present Copperhead Democracy of that section is the real exponent of the genuine spirit of the Puritan Democracy? Certainly not. They are shrewd men, of great discernment, and in their way brave and chivalrous, and I verily do not wonder if they would not have these renegade Yankees even as slaves. No! the actual cause of their hatred is the silent, all-pervading influence of the free institutions of New England, which derive their power and efficacy from the universal means of education there enjoyed. Shut up the schoolhouses, and burn the schoolbooks in New England, to-day, and let these free institutions become a dead letter thereby, and the Yankees would be as good as anybody in their eyes, because the sword which their intelligence keeps ever suspended over the head of slavery would be effectually laid to rust in its scabbard. Is it not a pitiful, a disgusting sight, that men are found, Northern men, New-England Yankees even, to kneel before the slaveocrats still, after the load of scorn and contumely already heaped upon them, and humbly cry, 'More – give us more contempt – our backs are made to bear the burden!'

God pity such creatures!

And these are the men who advocate a confederation of States with New England left out to shift for herself! New England left out? Fools! to think it possible. Knaves! to deem it desirable, if it were possible. As well banish the Creator from the universe He has made – the sun from the system he warms and enlightens! Not until you have destroyed the essence, the inner spirit of the Government which of all the governments in the world secures 'the greatest good to the greatest number;' not until Freedom is dead and laid in her final grave; not until the temple of knowledge is barred and double barred; not until all your common schools are closed, your free presses manacled, your free Bible suppressed, your right of free speech and free inquiry smothered to death; not until your ships have gone down in the waters, and the hammer rests in your shipyards, and your railroads cease to open a way in the wilderness made straight for the entrance of the most advanced civilization; not until the race of Yankee capitalists is extinct, and enterprise, thrift, industry, nerve, moral courage, the intellectual conquest of the material world become traditional, will that be possible. No! I thank God, that the record of New England is so sure and indelible that nothing can root her out of this land, not even if her whole geographical area were forever submerged by the waters of the ocean that girts her round in barren majesty. Ideas, principles, can never die or be effaced. They shall survive the wreck of matter, and the final catastrophe of the universe. And her empire is that of ideas. Small as she is, she wields the power of the very foremost ideas of the highest civilization of the world. These ideas have at last held at bay the so long encroaching slave principles which were so strangely left to grow alongside with them by the early framers of the Government, and who doubts which is to conquer? The struggle may be a long one, a costly one, and freedom may at last barely escape with her life. But so sure as humanity sweeps onward; so sure as the average progress of the race is never retrograde; so sure as right bears in its bosom the seeds of eternal life, and wrong the seeds of eternal death; so sure as God sits on His throne and the heavens do rule,' the free ideas of New England will yet bear sway over this continent, and, in their moral force at least, mould and remodel the governments of the world. If not preserved intact by the men of this generation, then by others will this ultimate result be reached. God is not confined in His agencies. He sets up one, and puts down another, and the generation that is found worthy to build the temple for Him to dwell in, to preserve and perfect the beautiful heritage He has provided for His freedmen, His redeemed and enfranchised people out of all the nations in which they have been held in mental and political bondage, shall have the honor and privilege, be sure. And think not, O ye men to whom is committed this high trust, that it will be a small thing to leave this birthright unto others; for as no people were ever before so distinguished in having this holiest ark of the covenant of freedom in their midst, so the grave of infamy into which ye shall be cast, if the Philistines dispossess you of it, shall be bottomless. There is no resurrection for the people who should betray such a cause, freighted as it is with the hopes and future destiny of the struggling races of the earth.

And O ye other men (would ye were men!) who are in league with traitors, ay, who are even worse than they, to do this accursed thing, know that this pit is yawning for you. Down – down – deeper – deeper – pressed to perdition by the curses of those who are to come after you, whom you wronged so remorselessly.

In that terrific vision of hell, seen by the poet Dante, those who had betrayed country, freedom, were visited by the most awful sufferings, pursued by the most vengeful fiends, and pushed to the most dire extremity of woe. Among the pale, haunted, shrieking shades flitting through that limbo of horrors, they were conspicuous in punishment. And if remorse is in reality the undying worm, the quenchless fire of that future state which recompenses for the deeds of this, surely the traitor to this good, free Government will be made to experience its unmeasured horrors. The salvation of our country, then, and its position and influence as one of the family of nations, depend on its return to, and its enforcing of, those fundamental principles of freedom, moral right, and justice which underlie our system, and for the most part form our superstructure. Ours is the moral lever that is to move the world, if we will have it so. If we lose our moral prestige we are nothing. We have the best Government in the world, but it has, since the time of the fathers, for the most part, been the worst administered. Instead of being made to work in the interest of freedom, the opposite has been the fact, and the whole influence and patronage of the Government for years have been in favor of the slave element. Prior to the incoming of the present Administration, this gradual deterioration in the animus of the Federal Government had culminated in a condition so disgraceful and shameful, that it is enough to dye the cheek of any honest man with red, only to think of it. It was time, if ever, for the climax to be put upon it all, and now it will be a thing to give endless thanks for, if enough virtue and manliness and true patriotism are left in the loyal States to bring the nation, under God, safely through the troubles and disasters into which its supineness, its temporizing and subserviency to wrong have led it.

Oh, could I speak with the convincing tones of a prophet or an angel, instead of the weak voice of a woman, I would make myself heard throughout the length and breadth of the land by every man, of whatever caste or color, whatever birth or tongue, whatever nationality or political creed, North, East, West, South, and especially this great West, of which I am so proud and confident, and would say to them:

'Rise! quit you like men – be strong! Upon you the ends of the world have come. If you have manhood, assert it now! If you are worthy the name of American, make it now to be honored among the nations. If there is any incentive in the glory of the career that would open to the accelerated progress of a Union at last free and redeemed, without a tyrant or a slave, let it nerve your hearts and inspire your exertions now. If you do not desire the self-gratulations of the crowned despots of the world, and the despair and lamentation of their subject millions, see to it that this great experiment of self-government fail not now. If you would gladden the hearts of our friends in other lands, the Brights and Cobdens, the Gasparins and Laboulayes, liberal men, who love truth, justice, right, freedom, who are 'one with their kind,' be ambitious of coöperating with them in the work of human elevation and amelioration.'

Those who seize upon great opportunities are the men whom History rescues from oblivion, and sets in the memory of mankind forever, whether with blessings or cursings, with glory or shame, as the benefactors or the enemies of their kind. A rare opportunity is passing before this nation. Who will seize upon it, and how? We shall see.