Compromise
Compromise on the slavery question, which had prevailed in American politics at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and during the resolution of the Missouri crisis of 1818–20, was again at the forefront when Lowell wrote this wryly satiric essay for the National Anti-Slavery Standard in March 1850. Beneath his irony, Lowell discerns real danger for the future of the Union: “Do they think that the Union can be stuck together with mouth-glue, when the eternal forces are rending it asunder?”
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IF THERE were a Saint Compromise, it would be his image that ought to be stamped upon the coins of our Republic. Our very existence as a Nation at all is due, we are told, to a Compromise, and one of a somewhat ignoble sort, not between God and Satan, but between Trade and Slavery. So that Satan and Mammon were represented at the formation of the compact, but not God. Since the sticking together of the Union, this patron Saint Compromise has intervened on several occasions to preserve the work of his clients.
This patching up of expedients is justified by a system of reasoning falsely termed common sense. Everything, they say, is the result of Compromises. Conventionalism is a Compromise between the individual and Society. Respectability is a Compromise between Virtue and Vice. Nay, life itself is a Compromise between Health and Disease. We are taught to believe that half a loaf is not only better than no bread at all, but better than any amount of bread.
Now this is not truly common sense at all, for that is the result of experience and practical sagacity teaching the best means of reaching a desired point, not a makeshift for getting halfway to it. Facts are things to which we must all make up our minds, however distasteful they may be to us. No matter what our own hurry may be, we must consent that Destiny shall not make advances per saltum, but with an almost inappreciable slowness. The most vehement Reformer must endure that his very existence shall depend upon that of his opposite pole, the unyielding Conservative. We must either get out of the way of facts or be run over by them, like the old philosopher who denied the existence of matter.
One of these tough facts is the presence and force of Evil, Unwisdom, Satan, or whatever we choose to call it, in human affairs. We may say what we please, there it is, and we must make the best of it. A great part of valuable human activity is wasted in the futile work of building barriers against the Inevitable. This, then, is the true problem—to find out what the Inevitable is. It is inevitable that when two forces join at an angle, a new direction is generated proportioned to the relative quantities of force. And this is the truth on which is based the fallacy that Compromise is the dictate of common sense. Practical wisdom, it is said, lies in the neutral ground, the balance between opposite poles. In spite of this, nevertheless, all that mankind has ever recognized as uncommon sense has been that which has come bluntly and face to face against whatever was established theory or usage.
The difficulty is that all our Compromises have been no Compromises at all, at least in this sense. They have rather realized the old meaning of the word, which implied a Conspiracy. They have not been modifications springing from a meeting of the two antagonistic principles of Good and Evil, but conspiracies by which Good has been uniformly betrayed. In the great game which began with the birth of the Constitution, Slavery has all along played with loaded dice. She has put on the mask of Destiny, and acted the part so well that our Statesmen have always taken defeat for granted beforehand.
Slavery, being an acknowledged evil, the very permission to exist was at first a concession and a surrender. This was called a Compromise. Then Slavery desired to extend itself, and treachery allowed it. This was called a Compromise. Again the monster felt the pains of hunger, and Texas was thrown to it. This was called a Compromise. Now, affairs have thriven so well, that Freedom sits, an outcast and a beggar, at the gates of her own ancestral dwelling. And this is also called a Compromise. Better strangle at once that “bird of our Country” of which our orators are so fond of talking, than let her go hatching the eggs of all manner of unclean birds.
It is hardly a year since the Northern Whig presses were vieing with each other in their zeal for the Wilmot Proviso. The universal Whig Dough of the Country, fermenting with the yeast of an expected victory, forgot for a moment that it was dough. Nothing was too bad for that sour and heavy Democratic batch which would not rise. Now that aspiring dough is flat and lifeless. Even General Taylor was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso, and Northern Whigs were seduced to vote for him upon that pretence. Let a man cheat his neighbor out of a few hundred dollars and he goes to the State-Prison. But to what Penitentiary of public contempt shall a Party be consigned, which obtains a President under false pretences? When the eye of the People becomes clairvoyant, it will behold, we fancy, certain unconscious gentlemen working in Congressional Committees, clad in symbolic suits of blue and red perpendicularly halved, such as are the uniform in some other public institutions.
The Wilmot Proviso was truly a Compromise. It allowed the South to keep all it had hitherto unjustly gained, but declared that it should steal no more. Our Statesmanship which has brought itself more and more into accordance with that of Europe was desirous of reproducing an American type of that greatest of Old-World humbugs, the Balance of Power. Accordingly we are now told that the beam must be kept exactly even between the Free and the Slave States, in other words, that when we make a great hole for our great cat to go through, we must also make a still greater for the little cat not yet littered.
All history is the record of a struggle, gradually heightening in fierceness, between reason and unreason between right and wrong. Of what good is it that we can put off the evil time a century, which is but a day in the history of the human race? Our statutes are subject to revision in that higher Congress where the laws of Nature are enacted. “Trent shall not wind him with so deep indent,” exclaim our Glendowers.—“He must, he will, you see he doth,” answers the progress of events. This very neutral ground of Compromise is that which is trampled at last by the contending forces of the good and evil principle. Our legislators might as well try to stay Niagara with a dip-net, or pass acts against the laws of gravitation, as endeavor to stunt the growth of avenging Conscience. Do they think that the Union can be stuck together with mouth-glue, when the eternal forces are rending it asunder? There is something better than Expediency, and that is Wisdom; something stronger than Compromise, and that is Justice.
—J. R. L.
(1850)