Mr. Cushing affects to see in the history of the Slavery Agitation nothing but a series of injuries inflicted by the North on the South. He charges "some of the Northern States" with acts of aggression upon the South "which would have been just cause of war as between foreign governments." He prudently forbears to name any. Does he mean, that persons have been found in some of those States unnational enough, un-Original-Democratic enough, to give a cup of water to a hunted Christian woman, or to harbor an outcast Christian man, without first submitting their hair to a microscopic examination? Does he mean, that we have said hard things of our Southern brethren? Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" is open to them as well as to us, and the Richmond "South" is surely not in the habit of sprinkling the Northern subjects of its animadversion with rose-water. No,—what Mr. Cushing means is this,—that there are men at the North who will not surrender the principles they have inherited from three revolutions because they are threatened with a fourth that will never come,—who do not consider it an adequate success in our experiment of self-government that we can produce such types of nationality as reckon the value of their country by the amount of salary she pays,—who will not believe that there is no higher kind of patriotism than complicity in every violent measure of an administration which redeems only its pledges to a faction of Southern disunionists,—who will not admit that slave-holding is the only important branch of national industry, because the profession of that dogma enables unscrupulous men to enter the public service poor and to leave it rich. Has any citizen of a Southern State ever failed to obtain justice (that is to say, in the language of Original Democracy, his nigger) in a Northern court? Has Massachusetts ever mobbed an envoy or brutally assaulted a Senator of South Carolina? Has any Northern State ever nullified an article of the Federal Constitution, as every seaboard Slave-State has always done in respect to the colored citizens of the North? When a man's allowing himself to be kicked comes to be reckoned an outrage on the kicker, then Mr. Cushing's notion of what constitutes a "just cause of war" will deserve as much consideration as Mr. G.T. Curtis's theory that hustling a deputy-marshal is "levying" it. We can remember when the confirmation of an ambassador to England (where the eminent fitness of the nomination was universally conceded) was opposed by several Southern Senators on the ground that he had expressed an interest in the success of West India emancipation. If Original Democrats have their way, it will not be long before it is made constructive treason to have read that chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which relates the misguided philanthropy of Philip in endeavoring to convert an Ethiopian into anything but a chattel.
We are inclined to think that a too amiable willingness to be kicked has been generally considered "just cause of war as between foreign governments,"—especially on the part of the stronger of the two. History seems to show this,—and also, that the sooner a nation gets over its eccentric partiality for this kind of appeal to its reasoning faculty, the more likely it is to avoid the risks of war. At any rate, the forbearance of the South has been such, that, in spite of the great temptation, she has hitherto refrained from sending her fleets and armies northward, and we are glad to find that Mr. Cushing is inclined to take a cheerful view of the permanency of our institutions. He tells us, it is true, in one place, that the success of the Republican Party would be "the de facto dissolution of the Union"; but in a moment of calmer reflection he assures us that there are thirty million Americans who stand ready "to devour and swallow up" the "handful of negrophilist Union-haters." We have great faith in the capacity of the American people, yet we somewhat doubt whether any one of them could swallow up what he had already devoured, unless, indeed, he performed that feat which has hitherto been the opprobrium of Jack-puddings, and jumped down his own throat afterwards. However, a man of Mr. Cushing's warmth of nature might well find himself carried beyond the regions of ordinary rhetoric in contemplating so beautiful and affecting a vision, and it is enough that we have the consolation of knowing that he either spoke with a disregard of the census, which we cannot believe possible in one so remarkable for accuracy of statement, or that he acquits every man, woman, and child in the country of any hostility to the Union. It is cheering to have this matter set finally at rest by so eminent an authority, and we are particularly glad that the necessity for so painful an experiment in swallowing is a great way off; for, though a "handful" would not go far among so many, yet, if its components be as unpleasant as Mr. Cushing represents them, it would certainly give a colic to every patriot who got a bite. After so generous an exculpation of the American people from any desire to pull their own house about their ears, we are left to conclude that the only real danger to be apprehended, in case of a Republican success, is a de facto and de jure dissolution of that union between certain placemen and their places which has lasted so long that they have come to look on it as something Constitutional. When that day is likely to arrive, we shall see such samples of consistency, and such instances of stable conviction, in finding out on which side of their bread the butter lies, as cannot fail to gratify even Mr. Cushing himself.
But we must not congratulate ourselves too soon. In the interval between the fifth of July, when his oration was delivered, and the seventh of August, which is the date of the Craytonville letter, Mr. Cushing seems to have reviewed his opinion on the state of the Union. There is more cause for alarm than appeared on the surface; but this time it is not because we have fallen out of love with the South, but that we have become desperately enamored of negroes. Nurses will have to scare their refractory charges with another bugaboo; for the majority of Massachusetts infants would jump at the chance of being carried off by the once terrible Ugly Black Man. Our great danger is from Negrophilism; though Mr. Cushing seems consoled by the fact, that it is a danger to Massachusetts, and not to South Carolina. We think Mr. Cushing may calm his disinterested apprehensions. We believe the disease is not so deep-seated as he imagines; and as we see no reason to fear the immediate catastrophe of the Millennium from any excess of benevolence on the part of Mr. Cushing and his party toward white men, (whose cause he professes to espouse,) we are inclined to look forward with composure to any results that are likely to follow from sporadic cases of sympathy with black ones. There is no reason for turning alarmist. In spite of these highly-colored forebodings, it will be a great while before our colored fellow-citizens, or fellow-denizens, (or whatever the Dred Scott decision has turned them into,) will leave mourning-cards in Beacon Street, or rear mulatto-hued houses on that avenue which it is proposed to build from the Public Garden into the sunset.
It is adroit in Mr. Cushing thus to shift the front of his defence, but it is dreadfully illogical. It is very convenient to make it appear that this is a quarrel of races; for, in such a case, a scruple of prejudice will go farther than a hundredweight of argument. In assuming to be the champion of the downtrodden whites against the domineering blacks, Mr. Cushing enlists on his side the sympathy and admiration which are sure to follow the advocate of the weak and the defenceless. He comes home to New England, finds his own color proscribed, and at once takes the part of amicus curiæ for the weak against the strong in the forum of Humanity. We do not wonder, that a gentleman, who has devoted so much ingenuity, so much time and talent, to making black appear white, should at last deaden the nicety of his sense for the distinction between the two, and thus reverse the relation of the two colors; but we do wonder, that, in choosing Race as a convenient catchword, he should not see that he is yielding a dangerous vantage-ground to the Native American Party, whose principles he seems so pointedly to condemn. We say seems, —for he is carefully indefinite in his specifications, and hedges his opinions with a thicket of ambiguous phrases, which renders it hard to get at them, and leaves opportunity for future evasion. If a war of race be justifiable in White against Black, why not in so-called Anglo-Saxons against Kelts? The one is as foolish and as wicked as the other, and the only just method of solution is the honest old fair field and no favor, under which every race and every individual man will assume the place destined to him in the order of Providence. We have a great distrust of ethnological assumptions; for there is, as yet, no sufficient basis of observed fact for legitimate induction, and the blood in the theorist's own veins is almost sure to press upon the brain and disturb accurate vision, or his preconceptions to render it impossible. Gervinus reads the whole history of Europe in the two words, Teutonic and Romanic; Wordsworth believed that only his family could see a mountain; Dr. Prichard, led astray by a mistaken philanthropy, believed color to be a matter of climate; and Dr. Nott considers that the outline shown by a single African hair on transverse section is reason enough for the oppression of a race. If the black man be radically inferior to the white, or radically different from him, the folly of white-washing him will soon appear. But, on the other hand, if his natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades know their place.
It will be a blessed day for the world when men are as willing to help each other as they are to assist Providence. The "London Cotton-Plant," a journal established to sustain the interests of Slavery in the Old World, is almost overpowered with acute distress for the Order of Creation, and offers its sustaining shoulder to the System of the Universe. "Fear nothing," it seems to say, "glorious structure of the Divine Architect! Giddings shall not touch you, nor shall Seward lay his sacrilegious hand on you!" "Who are ye?" murmurs the Voice, "that would reedit the works of the Almighty?" "Sublime, but misguided object of our compassion, we prefer to remain in the modest seclusion of namelessness, but we are published at Red-Lion Court, Fleet Street, and are sold for one shilling!" To judge from Mr. Cushing's letter, he has studied this organ of the sympathizers with the Pre-established Harmonies,—certainly there is a singular coincidence in the sentiments of both, so far as we can make them out. Both call themselves conservative, both are anti-philanthropists, both claim that public opinion is tending in the direction of their views, both affirm that their cause is that of the white man, and both appear to mean by white man the same thing,—the owner of a slave.
But is not Mr. Cushing's anxiety misdirected, and wilfully so, in seeking the material for its forebodings of danger to the Union in the Free States? The only avowed disunionists of the North are the radical Abolitionists, whose position is the logical result of their admitting that under the Constitution it is impossible to touch Slavery where it exists, and who, therefore, seek in a dissolution of the federal compact an escape from complicity with what they believe an evil and a wrong,—with what, till within the last twenty years, was conceded to be such by the South itself. If Mr. Cushing be so great an admirer of stability in conviction, he might have found in these men the subject of something other than vituperation. There are men among them who might have won the foremost places of political advancement, could they have sacrificed their principles to their ambition, could they believe that public honors would heal as well as hide the wounds of self-respect. It is the South that advocates disunion, from sectional motives, and adds the spice of treason. The "London Cotton-Plant" says,—
"If she [the South] is denied 'equality' within the Union, she can have 'independence' out of it. Already in European cabinets the possibility of this contingency is contemplated. We but perform a public duty when we tell Mr. Douglas that there is in Europe more than one power able and willing and prepared to take the Cotton States of America, and with them the other 'Slave'-States, so-called by free-negroists, under their protection, as valuable and desirable allies … And more, he can say by authority that she [the South] has active and successful agents in every part of Europe preparing the way for equal existence, commercially as well as politically, so long as the Union exists, or the active support of powerful allies, if driven as a last resort to appeal to the civilized world against tyranny and oppression."31
But what does the "Cotton-Plant" understand by "equality"? Nothing less than the reopening of the slave-trade. Speaking of the chance that the captured slaves of the "Echo" would be sent back to Africa, and resenting such a procedure as "a brand upon our section and upon our social condition," it affirms that:
"This labor-question of the South does not depend upon such miserable clap-trap as Kansas or the Fugitive Slave Law. It rests upon a full, open, and deliberate recognition of the rights of the Southern people; and the Senator from Illinois, by moving the abrogation of the so-called slave-trade treaty with England, allowing the South to supply herself with labor as she may see fit, would give, indeed, unquestioned assurance of his disposition and courage to follow the principle of the white-basis to its logical and constitutional consequence."
It declares that the sending home of the Africans would be "a practical reversal of the Dred Scott decision," and adds,—"We have no fear that our people will long remain passive under such an accumulating weight of inequality."32
Is not this explicit enough? and does not the "white-basis" sufficiently explain what is meant by the systematic depreciation of the colored race in Mr. Cushing's letter?
The Democratic Party is the party of "Progress." What is the direction of that progress likely to be? What is the lesson of the past? Hitherto this party has been the ally and the tool, not of the moderate, but of the extreme propagandas of the South. The Carolinians with their Scotch blood received also a strong infusion of Scotch logic. They felt that their system was inconsistent with the immortal assertion of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and with the principles of the Revolution,—that its extension was a direct reversal of the creed and the policy of the men by whom our frame of government was established. They accepted the alternative, and assumed the aggressive. The principles of the Revolution must be crushed out, the traditions of the Fathers of the Republic repudiated,—and that, too, by means of the party calling itself Democratic, through which alone the South could control the policy of the government.
Accordingly, a reaction was put in motion and steadily pressed, precisely similar in kind to that organized by Louis Napoleon against the principles of the French Revolution, and supported by precisely the same warnings of the danger of civil commotion, and by appeals to the timidity of Property and the cupidity of Trade. The party which had so long vaunted the derivation of its fundamental truth from the Law of Nature was compelled to make it a part of its creed that there was nothing higher than an ordinance of man. The party of State-Rights was forced to proclaim that a decision of the Supreme Court was sovereign over all the rights of the States. The party whose leading dogma it is, that all power proceeds from and resides in the people, that all government rests on the consent of the governed, was driven into refusing to submit a constitution to the people whose destiny was to be decided by it. And all this has been done, not for the security of Slavery where it exists, but to serve the truculent purposes of its indefinite extension. To acquiesce in the honesty and justice of such a course of policy as the last few years have shown, to assist in inaugurating a future that shall accord with it, is nationality and conservatism! No wonder Mr. Cushing is charmed with the consistency of his new allies. Do they propose to steal Cuba?—they are the party who would extend the area of Freedom. Do they make Slavery a matter of federal concern by means of the Supreme Court?—they are the party who maintain that it is an affair of local law. Do they disfranchise a race?—they are the party of equal rights. And the whole wretched imbroglio of creed which is the condemnation of their action, and of action, which is the death of their creed, is dubbed Nationality. If sectionalism be the reverse of all this, we confess that we prefer sectionalism. It is a nationality which has no Northern half, a conservatism which abolishes all our heroic traditions.
If the Democratic Party has been urged to such extreme measures and such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by success, and its lieutenants are eager for more plunder at the easy price of more perfidy? Already, as we have seen, the reopening of the slave-trade is demanded; already fresh enactments are called for, expressly to render it in future impossible for the people of a Territory to loosen the grip of Slavery, as those of Kansas have done. And to prepare the way for this, we are forced to hear continual homilies on the supremacy of law, on what are called "legal conscience" and "legal morality,"—phrases which sound well, but cover nothing more than the absurd fallacy, that everything is legal which can by any hocus-pocus be got enacted. The doctrine, that there is no higher law than the written statute, is but one of the symptoms of the steady drift of our leading politicians toward materialism, toward a faith which makes the products of man's industry of more value than man himself, and finds the god of this lower world in the law of demand and supply. "Cotton is King!" say such reasoners as Mr. Cushing;—"Conscience is King!" said such actors as the Puritans. To have a moral sense may be very unwise, very visionary, very unphilosophic; but most men are foolish enough to have one, and the enforcing of any law which wounds it is sure to arouse a resistance thoroughly pervading their whole being and lasting as life itself. The carrying away of a single fugitive33 gave the Republicans a tenure of power in Massachusetts, as firm, and likely to be as enduring, as that of the Whigs was once. The propagandists of Slavery overreached themselves when they compelled the people of the North to be their accomplices. The higher law is not a thing men argue about, but act upon. People who admit the right of property a thousand miles off go back to first principles when the property comes to their door in the upright form of man and appeals for sympathy with a human voice.
Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of isms, so many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious hobbies been a desideratum so long, and has such a benefactor of his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing? He tells us, however, that the delusion of Negrophilism, that is, Republicanism, is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction. The very extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us evidence of the contrary. They prove the depth to which the religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon the question of Slavery. Such extravagancies have accompanied every great moral movement of mankind. The Reformation, the great Puritan Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms. A profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding. Thinking men will ask themselves whether the isms Mr. Cushing enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,—and whether it be wise, under the names of "Nationality" and "Conservatism," to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the extension of a system which makes the mass of the population an element of danger and weakness in the body politic, as its advocates admit by their scheme for a foreign protectorate of their proposed independent organization,—a system which renders public education impossible, exhausts the soil, necessitates sparseness of population, and demoralizes the governing classes.34
The ethical aspects of Slavery are not and cannot be the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under the Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined to the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion of abstract principles, but of practical measures. The question, even in its political aspect, is one which goes to the very foundation of our theories and our institutions. It is simply, —Shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or of democracy? Shall our Territories be occupied by lord and serf, or by intelligent freemen?—by laborers who are owned, or by men who own themselves? The Republican Party has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion. In this case, there is a meaning in the phrase, Manifest Destiny. America is to be the land of the workers, the country where, of all others, the intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic, and the patient labor of those who till their own fields, are to stand them in greatest stead. We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put the living value of industry above the dead value of capital. Our republic was not born under Cancer, to go backward. Perhaps we do not like the prospect? Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with which novelists and poets have invested the old feudal order of things? That is not the question. This New World of ours is to be the world of great workers and small estates. The freemen whose capital is their two hands must inevitably become hostile to a system clumsy and barbarous like that of Slavery, which only carries to its last result the pitiless logic of selfishness, sure at last to subject the toil of the many to the irresponsible power of the few.
It may temporarily avail the Party of Slavery-Extension to announce itself as the party of the white man, of the sacredness of property, and the obligation of law; it may draw to their ranks a few well-meaning persons, whose easy circumstances make them uneasy,—a few leaders of defunct parties, with a general capacity for misdirection and nobody to misdirect; but it will avail the Republican Party more to claim and to prove that it is the party of Man, no matter what his color or creed or race,—of the sacredness of that property which every human being has in himself,—and of the obligation of that law which outlives legislatures and statute-books, and is the only real security of all law. The cry of "Conservatism" may be efficacious for a season; but time will make plainer and plainer the distinction between the false conservatism which for its own benefit would keep things as they are, which smooths imminent ruin delusively over, as Niagara is smoothest on the edge of the abyss, and that true conservatism which works upon things as they are, to prepare them for what they must be,—recognizes the necessity of change, to forestall revolution with healthy development,—and believes that there is no real antagonism between Old and New, but only a factitious one, the result of man's obstinacy or self-seeking.