Lecture on Slavery
Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the overthrow of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Emerson, like so many others, felt a renewed antipathy to slavery. On January 25, 1855, he delivered this lecture to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at the Tremont Temple in Boston. Emerson’s fury and frustration are evident: “Who can long continue to feel an interest in condemning homicide, or counterfeiting, or wife-beating?” Having so long proclaimed the intolerable evil of slavery to no avail, the desperate abolitionist “must write with a red hot iron to make any impression.”
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Gentlemen,
I approach the grave and bitter subject of American slavery with diffidence and pain. It has many men of ability and devotion who have consecrated their lives to it. I have not found in myself the right qualifications to serve this any more than other political questions, by my speech, and have therefore usually left it in their honored hands. I have not either the taste or the talent that is needed for the disposition of political questions, and I leave them to those who have. Still there is somewhat exceptional in this question, which seems to require of every citizen at one time or other, to show his hand, and to cast his suffrage in such manner as he uses. And, whilst I confide that heaven too has a hand in these events, and will surely give the last shape to these ends which we hew very roughly, yet I remember that our will and obedience is one of its means.
The subject seems exhausted. An honest man is soon weary of crying ‘Thief!’ Who can long continue to feel an interest in condemning homicide, or counterfeiting, or wife-beating? Tis said, endless negation is a flat affair.
One must write with a red hot iron to make any impression. I thought therefore the policy of those societies which have opened courses of instruction on the aspects of slavery, wise, when they invited southern planters, the patrons and fathers of the system, to come hither and speak for it. Nay, I think it would not have been ill-advised had they asked only such, and put the whole duty of expressing it on the slave-holders. I am sure it would have surprised northern men to see how little was to say on its behalf. But a difficulty arose in inducing them to come. The inviting committee were hospitable and urgent; but, most unfortunately, all the persons invited, with one or two brave exceptions, were absolutely pre-engaged. No solicitations were of any avail. It was left to us to open the subject, each as he could. And it is for us to treat it not as a thing that stands by itself;—that quickly tires and cloys,—but as it stands in our system;—how it can consist with the advantages and superiorities we fondly ascribe to ourselves. A high state of general health cannot coexist with a mortal disease in any part. If any one member suffers, all the members suffer. Then, again, we must find relief from the uniform gloom of the theme, in large considerations of history, whereinto slavery and war enter as necessary shadows in the vast picture of Providence.
We have to consider that, however strongly the tides of public sentiment have set or are setting towards freedom, the code of slavery in this country is at this hour more malignant than ever before. The recent action of Congress has brought it home to New England, and made it impossible to avoid complicity.
The crying facts are these, that, in a Republic professing to base its laws on liberty, and on the doctrines of Christianity, slavery is suffered to subsist: and, when the poor people who are the victims of this crime, disliking the stripping and peeling process, run away into states where this practice is not permitted,—a law has been passed requiring us who sit here to seize these poor people, tell them they have not been plundered enough, and must go back to be stripped and peeled again, and as long as they live.
But this was not yet the present grief. It was shocking to hear of the sufferings of these men: But the district was three hundred, five hundred, and a thousand miles off, and, however leagued with ours, was yet independent. And, for the national law which enacted this complicity, and threw us into conspiracy with the thief, it was an old dead law, which had been made in an hour of weakness and fear, and which we had guarded ourselves from executing,—now revived and made stringent. But there was no fear that it would be valid.
But the destitution was here. We found well-born, well-bred, well-grown men among ourselves, not outcasts, not foreigners, not beggars, not convicts, but baptised, vaccinated, schooled, high-placed, official men, who abetted this law. ‘O by all means, catch the slave, and drag him back.’ And when we went to the courts, the interpreters of God’s right between man and man said, ‘catch the slave, and force him back.’
Now this was disheartening. Slavery is an evil, as cholera or typhus is, that will be purged out by the health of the system. Being unnatural and violent, I know that it will yield at last, and go with cannibalism, tattooing, inquisition, duelling, burking; and as we cannot refuse to ride in the same planet with the New Zealander, so we must be content to go with the southern planter, and say, you are you, and I am I, and God send you an early conversion.
But to find it here in our sunlight, here in the heart of Puritan traditions in an intellectual country, in the land of schools, of sabbaths and sermons, under the shadow of the White Hills, of Katahdin, and Hoosac; under the eye of the most ingenious, industrious, and self-helping men in the world,—staggers our faith in progress.
It is an accident of a larger calamity. It rests on skepticism, which is not local, but universal. The tone of society and of the press on slavery is only an index of the moral pulse. And I call slavery and the tolerance it finds, worst in this,—the stupendous frivolity it betrays in the heart and head of a society without faith, without aims, dying of inanition. An impoverishing skepticism scatters poverty, disease, and cunning through our opinions, then through practice. The Dark Ages did not know that they were dark; and what if it should turn out, that our material civilization has no sun, but only ghastly gas-lights?
I find this skepticism widely spread. Young men want object, want foundation. They would gladly have somewhat to do, adequate to the powers they feel, somewhat that calls them with trumpet note to be heroes, some foeman worthy of their steel, some love that would make them greater than they are; which not finding, they take up some second-best ground, finding no first-best—they slip into some niche or crevice of the state, some counting-room or rail-road, or whatever creditable employment,—not the least of whose uses is the covert it affords. They are not supported by any sense of greatness, and this reputable office screens them from criticism.
We are led to cast shrewd glances into our society. Among intellectual men, you will find a waiting for, an impatient quest for more satisfying knowledge. It is believed that ordinarily the mind grows with the body, that the moment of thought comes with the power of action, and, that, in nations, it is in the time of great external power, that their best minds have appeared. But, in America, a great imaginative soul, a broad cosmopolitan mind, has not accompanied the immense industrial energy. Among men of thought and education, the unbelief is found as it is in the laymen. A dreary superficiality,—critics instead of thinkers, punsters instead of poets. They think the age of poetry is past. They think the Imagination belongs to the savage era. Yes and serious men are found who think our Christianity and religion itself effete;—forms and sentiments that belonged to the infancy of mankind. I say intellectual men; but are there such—if we see to what uses the Intellect is applied? I think the atheism as much shown in the absence of intellectual action, as in the absence of profound morals.
Go into the festooned and tempered brilliancy of the drawing rooms, and see the fortunate youth of both sexes, the flower of our society, for whom every favor, every accomplishment, every facility has been secured. Will you find genius and courage expanding those fair and manly forms? Or is their beauty only a mask for an aged cunning? Have they already grown worldly-wise? No illusions for them. A few cherished their early dream, and resisted to contumacy the soft appliances of fashion. But they tired of resistance and ridicule: they fell into file, and great is the congratulation of the refined companions that these self-willed protestants had settled down into sensible opinions and practices. Time was when a heroic soul conversing with eternity disdained the trifles of hard or easy lot, enamoured of honor and right.
The same career invites us. The method of nature is ever the same. God instructs men through the Imagination. But the opera-glasses of our young men do not reach to ideas and realities.
The ebb of thought drains the law, the religion, the education of the land. We send our boys to the universities. But do those institutions inspire the hope and gratitude, which, at great moments, have filled them with enthusiastic crowds? men eager to impart the light which has kindled them, and to set the whole land on flame? The boy looks at the professor and the textbook, with frightful penetration, and says, ‘Has not the professor read his own books? I do not see that he is better or stronger for it all.’ He looks into the stable at the horses, and, after a few trials, concludes that the horses can teach him the most. They give him health, courage, and address, with no false pretences. The horse is what he stands for: perhaps he will break the rider’s neck, but he never prated of ethics or of humanity, whilst the presidents and professors of the colleges were in this very rabble that voted down the moral sentiments of mankind.
Look at our politics. The great parties coeval with the origin of the government,—do they inspire us with any exalted hope? Does the Democracy stand really for the good of the many? of the poor? for the elevation of entire humanity? Have they ever addressed themselves to the enterprize of relieving this country of the pest of slavery?
The Party of Property, of education, has resisted every progressive step. Did Free Trade come from them? Have they urged the abolition of Capital Punishment? Have they urged any of the prophetic action of the time? No. They would nail the stars to the sky. With their eyes over their shoulders, they adore their ancestors, the framers of the Constitution. Nolumus mutari. We do not wish to touch the Constitution. They wish their age should be absolutely like the last. There is no confession of destitution like this fierce conservatism. Can any thing proclaim so loudly the absence of all aim or principle? What means this desperate grasp on the past, if not that they find no principle, no hope, no future in their own mind? Some foundation we must have, and, if we can see nothing, we cling desperately to those whom we believe can see.
Our politics have run very low, and men of character will not willingly touch them. This is fast becoming, if it has not already become, discreditable work. Those who have gone to Congress were honest well-meaning men. I heard congratulations from good men, their friends, in relation to certain recent members, that “these were honest and thoroughly trustworthy, obstinately honest.” Yet they voted on the late criminal measures with the basest of the populace. They ate dirt, and saw not the sneer of the bullies who duped them with an alleged state-necessity: and all because they had no burning splendor of law in their own minds. Well, what refuge for them? They had honor enough left to feel degraded: they could have a place in which they could not preserve appearances. They become apathized and indifferentists. We leave them in their retreats. They represented the property of their constituency. Our merchants do not believe in anything but their trade. They loll in republican chairs, they eat and drink in republican Astor, Tremont, and Girard Houses. They roll in easy and swift trains, telegraphing their wishes before them. And the power of money is so obtrusive as to exclude the view of the larger powers that control it.
I am sorry to say, that, even our political reforms show the same desperation. What shall we think of the new movement? We are clear that the old parties could not lead us. They were plainly bankrupt, their machineries and politicians discredited. We will have none of them. Yes, but shall we therefore abdicate our common sense? I employed false guides and they misled me; shall I therefore put my head in a bag?
The late revolution in Massachusetts no man will wonder at who sees how far our politics had departed from the path of simple right. The reigning parties had forfeited the awe and reverence which always attaches to a wise and honest government. And as they inspired no respect, they were turned out by an immense frolic. But to persist in a joke;—I don’t like joking with edge-tools, and there is no knife so sharp as legislation.
An Indian Rajah, Yokasindra, had a poor porter in his gate who resembled him in person. He put his royal robes on him, and seated him on his throne: then he put on his own head the porter’s cap, and stood in the gate, and laughed to see his ministers deceived, bowing down before the porter. But Datto the porter said, “Who is that fellow there on the threshold, laughing in my face? Off with his head.” They obeyed him, and decapitated the Rajah, and Datto the porter reigned in his stead.
What happens after periods of extraordinary prosperity, happened now. They could not see beyond their eye-lids, they dwell in the senses;—cause being out of sight is out of mind:—They see meat and wine, steam and machinery, and the career of wealth. I should find the same ebb of thought from all the wells alike. I should find it in science. I should find it in the philosophy of France, of England, and everywhere alike, a want of faith in laws, a worship of success. Everywhere dreary superficiality, ignorance and disbelief in principles, a civilization magnifying trifles.
I saw a man in a calico-printing-mill, who fancied there was no reason why this pattern should please, and that pattern should not. They were all jumbles of color, of which one had the luck to take, and the other had the luck not to take, and that was all. I asked him, if he had that blue jelly he called his eye, by chance?
But geometry survives, though we have forgotten it. Everything rests on foundations, alike the globe of the world, the human mind, and the calico print. The calico print pleases, because the arrangement of colors and forms agrees with the imperative requirements of the human eye. Is the reputation of the Parthenon, of the Elgin marbles, the Apollo, and the Torso, a caprice? Greek architecture was made by men of correcter eyes than others, who obeyed the necessities of their work, namely, the use of the building, the necessary support, the best aspect, entrance, light, etc., and, having satisfied these conditions, pared away all that could be spared for strength,—and behold beauty.
Is the arch of the rainbow, the beauty of stars and sunshine, the joy of love, a caprice and an opinion? Or does any man suppose the reputation of Jesus accidental: the saint whom in different forms and opinions, but with unanimity of veneration as to character, the whole race of man worships? Or is the reputation of Socrates, of the Stoics, of Alfred, of Luther, of Washington whimsical and unfounded?
There are periods of occulation when the light of mind seems to be partially withdrawn from nations as well as from individuals. This devastation reached its crisis in the acquiescence in slavery in this country,—in the political servitude of Europe, during the same age. And there are moments of greatest darkness, and of total eclipse. In the French Revolution, there was a day when the Parisians took a strumpet from the street, seated her in a chariot, and led her in procession, saying, “This is the Goddess of Reason.” And, in 1850, the American Congress passed a statute which ordained that justice and mercy should be subject to fine and imprisonment, and that there existed no higher law in the universe than the Constitution and this paper statute which uprooted the foundations of rectitude and denied the existence of God.
Thus in society, in education, in political parties, in trade, and in labor, in expenditure, or the direction of surplus capital, you may see the credence of men; how deeply they live, how much water the ship draws. In all these, it is the thought of men, what they think, which is the helm that turns them all about. When thus explored, instead of rich belief, of minds great and wise sounding the secrets of nature, announcing the laws of science, and glowing with zeal to act and serve, and life too short to read the revelations inscribed on earth and heaven, I fear you will find non-credence, which produces nothing, but leaves sterility and littleness.
This skepticism assails a vital part when it climbs into the Courts, which are the brain of the state. The idea of abstract right exists in the human mind, and lays itself out in the equilibrium of nature, in the equalities and periods of our system, in the level of seas, in the action and reaction of forces, that nothing is allowed to exceed or absorb the rest; if it do, it is disease, and is quickly destroyed.
Among men, this limitation of my liberty by yours,—allowing the largest liberty to each compatible with the liberty of all,—protection in seeking my benefit, as long as it does not interfere with your benefit,—is justice,—which satisfies everybody.
It was an early discovery of the human mind—this benificent rule. This law is: Render to each his own. As thou doest, shall it be done to thee. As thou sowest, thou shall reap. Smite and thou shalt smart; serve, and thou shalt be served. If you love and serve men, you cannot by any dodge or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the Divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar:—settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote and star and sun must range with it, or be pulverized by the recoil. Any attempt to violate it, is punished, and recoils on you. If you treat a man nobly, though he be of a mean habit, he will make an exception in your behalf, and will aim to do you justice. You cannot use a man as an instrument, without being used by him as an instrument. If you take advantage and steal from him, he watches his opportunity to make accounts square with you. If he is not strong enough to resist, then he will be cunning and cheat you. Lord Coke said, “Any departure from the established principles of law, although at the time wearing the specious appearance of advantage, never fails to bring along with it such train of unforeseen inconveniences, as to demonstrate their excellence, and the necessity of return to them.”
Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself at last of every crime. An Eastern poet, in describing the Golden Age, said, that God had made justice so dear to the heart of Nature, that, if any injustice lurked anywhere under the sky, the blue vault would shrivel to a snake-skin and cast it out by spasms.
The fathers, in July 1787, consented to adopt population as the basis of representation, and to count only three-fifths of the slaves, and to concede the reclamation of fugitive slaves;—for the consideration, that there should be no slavery in the Northwest Territory. They agreed to this false basis of representation and to this criminal complicity of restoring fugitives: and the splendor of the bribe, namely, the magnificent prosperity of America from 1787, is their excuse for the crime. It was a fatal blunder. They should have refused it at the risk of making no Union. Many ways could have been taken. If the southern section had made a separate alliance with England, or gone back into colonies, the slaves would have been emancipated with the West Indians, and then the colonies could have been annexed to us. The bribe, if they foresaw the prosperity we have seen, was one to dazzle common men, and I do not wonder that common men excuse and applaud it. But always so much crime brings so much ruin. A little crime, a minor penalty; a great crime, a great disaster.
If the south country thinks itself enriched by slavery, read the census, read the valuation tables, or weigh the men. I think it impoverished. Young men are born in that country, I suppose, of as much ability as elsewhere, and yet some blight is on their education: in the present generation is there one living son to make good the reputation of the Past? If the north think it a benefit, I find the north saddled with a load which has all the effect of a partnership in a crime, on a virtuous and prosperous youth. It stops his mouth, ties his hands, forces him to submit to every sort of humiliation, and now it is a fountain of poison which is felt in every transaction and every conversation in this country.
Well, certain men were glad perceivers of this Right, with more clearness and steadiness than others, and labored to establish the application of it to human affairs. They were Lawgivers or Judges. And all men hailed the Laws of Menu, the Laws of Lycurgus, laws of Moses, laws of Confucius, laws of Jesus, the laws of Alfred, and of men of less fame, who in their place, believing in an ideal right, strove to make it practical,—the Code of Justinian, the famous jurists, Grotius, Vattel, Daguesseau, Blackstone, and Mansfield. These were original judges, perceivers that this is no child’s play, no egotistic opinion, but stands on the original law of the world. And the reputation of all the judges on earth stands on the real perception of these few natural or God-anointed judges. All these men held that law was not an opinion, not an egotism of any king or the will of any mob, but a transcript of natural right. The judge was there as its organ and expounder, and his first duty was to read the law in accordance with equity. And, if it jarred with equity, to disown the law. All the great lawgivers and jurists of the world have agreed in this, that an immoral law is void. So held Cicero, Selden, Hooker; and Coke, Hobart, Holt, and Mansfield, chief justices of England. Even the Canon law says, “Neither allegiance nor oath can bind to obey that which is unlawful.” Grotius, Vattel, Daguesseau, and Blackstone teach the same. Of course they do. What else could they? You cannot enact a falsehood to be true, nor a wrong act to be right.
And I name their names, not of course to add authority to a self-evident proposition, but only to show that black-letter lawyers supposed to be more than others tied to precedent and statute, saw the exquisite absurdity of enacting a crime.
And yet in America justice was poisoned at its fountain. In our northern states, no judge appeared of sufficient character and intellect to ask not whether it was constitutional, but whether it was right.
This outrage of giving back a stolen and plundered man to his thieves was ordained and under circumstances the most painful. There was enough law of the State of Massachusetts to resist the dishonor and the crime, but no judge had the heart to invoke, no governor was found to execute it. The judges feared collision of the State and the Federal Courts. The Governor was a most estimable man—we all knew his sterling virtues, but he fell in an era when governors do not govern, when judges do not judge, when Presidents do not preside, and when representatives do not represent.
The judges were skeptics too and shared the sickness of the time. The open secret of the world was hid from their eyes, the art of subliming a private soul with inspirations from the great and public and divine soul from which we live. A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself. A judge who gives voice as a judge should, to the rules of love and justice, is godlike; his word is current in all countries. But a man sitting on the Bench servile to precedent, or a windy politician, or a dangler trying to give authority to the notions of his superiors or of his set, pipes and squeaks and cheeps ridiculously. Judges are rare, and must be born such. King James said, “O, ay, I can mak him a lord, but I canna mak him a gentleman.” And governors and presidents can give a commission to sit on the Bench, but only wisdom can make a judge.
When the city is on fire, you will make but a feeble spray with your engine whilst you draw from your buckets. But once get your pipe screwed on to a hose which is dipped in the river, or in the harbor, and you can pump as long as the Atlantic Ocean holds out.
This was the hiding of the light. But the light shone, if it was intercepted from us. Truth exists, though all men should deny it. There is a sound healthy universe whatever fires or plagues or desolation transpire in diseased corners. The sky has not lost its azure because your eyes are inflamed. Seas and waters, lime and oxygen, magnesia and iron, salts and metals, are not wasted, their virtues are safe, if an individual or a species sicken. And there’s a healthy interior universe as well, and men are great and powerful as they conform to, or become recipient of, the great equal general laws.
Now what is the effect of this evil government? To discredit government. When the public fails in its duty, private men take its place. When the British ministry is weak, the Times’ editor governs the realm. When the American government and courts are false to their trust, men disobey the government, put it in the wrong; the government is forced into all manner of false and ridiculous attitudes. Men hear reason and truth from private men who have brave hearts and great minds. This is the compensation of bad governments,—the field it affords for illustrious men. And we have a great debt to the brave and faithful men who in the very hour and place of the evil act, made their protest for themselves and their countrymen by word and deed. They are justified, and the law is condemned.
It is not to societies that the secrets of nature are revealed, but to private persons, to each man in his organization, in his thoughts. A serious man who has used his opportunities will early discover that he only works and thinks securely when he is acting on his own experience. All forcible men will agree that books and learned societies could not supply what their own good sense taught them.
It is common to say that the invention of gunpowder has equalized the strong and the weak. Never believe it. It has not made any deep difference, and Lord Wellington’s weighing the soldiers proves it. Audacity and good sense have their old superiority, whatever weapons they wield. My political economy is very short, a man’s capital must be in him.
’Tis a maxim in our politics that a man cannot be formidable in Congress, unless he is strong at home. I am glad to hear that confession, but I say more,—that he must have his own support. ’Tis only what strength he carries with him everywhere, that can serve him anywhere. Paper money is good only as far as it represents real labor. A member who “walks into the chamber attended only by his own insignificance, cannot get any strength by the distant shouts of electors.” All the British batteries can not give comfort to the coward. If he knows there is weakness in his heart, tear off his epaulettes, break his sword, boot him out of the camp.
But whilst I insist on the doctrine of the independence and the inspiration of the individual, I do not cripple but exalt the social action. Patriotism, public opinion, have a real meaning, though there is so much counterfeit rag money abroad under it, that the name is apt to disgust. A wise man delights in the powers of many people. Charles Fourier noting that each man had a different talent, computed that you must collect 1800 or 2000 souls to make one complete man. We shall need to call them all out.
Certainly the social state, patriotism, law, government, all did cover ideas, though the words have wandered from the things. The King or head of the state was godlike in the eyes of the people, whilst he was the foremost man of all the tribe, exponent of the laws, the genius, and the future of the tribe. It was so once in this country when Washington, Adams, Jefferson, really embodied the ideas of Americans. But now we put obscure persons into the chairs, without character or representative force of any kind, and get a figure awful to office hunters.
And as the state is a reality, so it is certain that societies of men, a race, a people, have a public function, a part to play in the history of humanity. Thus, the theory of our government is Liberty. The thought and experience of Europe had got thus far, a century ago, to believe, that, as soon as favorable circumstances permitted, the experiment of self-government should be made. America afforded the circumstances, and the new order began. All the mind in America was possessed by that idea. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the States, the Parties; the newspapers, the songs, star-spangled banner, land of the brave and home of the free, the very manners of the Americans, all showed them as the receivers and propagandists of this lesson to the world. For this cause were they born and for this cause came they into the world. Liberty; to each man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man. It was not a sect, it was not a private opinion, but a gradual and irresistible growth of the human mind. That is the meaning of our national pride. It is a noble office. For liberty is a very serious thing. It is the severest test by which a government can be tried. All history goes to show, that it is the measure of all national success. Religion, arts, science, material production are as is the degree of liberty. Montesquieu said, “Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their population, but in proportion to their freedom.”
Most unhappily, this universally accepted duty and feeling has been antagonized by the calamity of southern slavery. And that institution in its perpetual encroachment has had through the stronger personality, shall I say, of the southern people, and through their systematic devotion to politics, the art so to league itself with the government, as to check and pervert the natural sentiment of the people by their respect for law and statute.
And this country exhibits an abject regard to the forms, whilst we are swindled out of the liberty.
Lord Nelson was a man of sterling English sense, and knowing himself to mean rightly, and being a rough plain man being much annoyed by the pedantic rules of the service, he went back to first principles, and once for all made up his mind. “To obey orders,” he said, “is thought to be all perfection but the great order of all is to serve your country, and down with the French; and, whenever any statute militates with that, I go back,” he said, “to the great order of all, and of which the little orders spring.” And he was careful to explain to his officers, that, in case of no signals, or, in case of not understanding signals, no captain could go wrong who brought his ship close alongside an enemy’s ship.
So every wise American will say, “in the collision of statutes, or in the doubtful interpretation, liberty is the great order which all lesser orders are to promote.” That is the right meaning of the statute, which extirpates crime, and obtains to every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man. No citizen will go wrong who on every question leans to the side of general liberty. And whilst thus the society is no fiction, but has real rank, (he who represents the ideas of the society being the head,) it has a real function. That of our race is to liberty. So it has public actions which it performs with electric energy.
Men inspire each other. The affections are Muses. Hope is a muse. Love is, Despair is not, and selfishness drives away the angels. It is so delicious to act with great masses to great aims. For instance the summary or gradual abolition of slavery. Why in the name of common sense and the peace of mankind is not this made the subject of instant negotiation and settlement? Why do not the men of administrative ability in whose brain the prosperity of Philadelphia is rooted;—the multitude of able men who lead each enterprize in the City of New York; in Boston, in Baltimore; why not the strong courageous leaders of the south; join their heads and hearts to form some basis of negotiation to settle this dangerous dispute on some ground of fair compensation, on one side, and of satisfaction, on the other, to the conscience of the Free States. Is it impossible to speak of it with reason and good nature? Why? Because it is property? Why, then it has a price. Because it is political? Well then, it ultimately concerns us, threatens us, and there will never be a better time than the present time. It is really the great task fit for this country to accomplish, to buy that property of the planters, as the British nation bought the West Indian slaves. I say buy,—never conceding the right of the planter to own, but that we may acknowledge the calamity of his position, and bear a countryman’s share in relieving him, and because it is the only practicable course, and is innocent.
Well, here is a right social or public function which one man cannot do, which all men must do. We shall one day bring the states shoulder to shoulder, and the citizens man to man, to exterminate slavery. It is said, it will cost two thousand millions of dollars. Was there ever any contribution levied that was so enthusiastically paid as this will be? The United States shall give every inch of the public lands. The states shall give their surplus revenues, their unsold lands. The citizen his private contribution. We will have a chimney-tax. We will give up our coaches, and wine, and watches. The churches will melt their plate. The Father of his country shall wait well-pleased a little longer for his monument: Franklin for his; the Pilgrim Fathers for theirs. We will call on those rich benefactors who found Asylums, Hospitals, Athenaeums, Lowell Institutes, Peabody Institutes, Bates and Astor City Libraries. On wealthy bachelors and wealthy maidens to make the State their heir as they were wont in Rome. The merchant will give his best voyage. The mechanic will give his fabric. The needlewomen will give. Children will have cent societies. If really the matter could come to negotiation and a price were named, I do not think any price founded on an estimate that figures could tell would be quite unmanageable. Every man in the land would give a week’s work to dig away this accursed mountain of sorrow once and forever out of the world.
(January 25, 1855)