Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ELECTION.

AUBURN, NOVEMBER 5, 1860.

THE question, looking through this election to-morrow, and forward through many elections, presses home upon us,-whatever may be the result, auspicious as I am almost sure it will be,-shall freedom, justice and humanity ultimately and in the end prevail; are these republican institutions of ours safe and permanent? I have sought and entered the hall of prophecy. I may not tell you just where it stands, but this much I can say, that its entrance is through native forest shades, from the water's edge of a deep and flowing river. I entered it, not irreverently, not unconscious of the presumption of attempting to explore the will of the God whose rule, however men may deny or profess, is higher law. The two gigantic figures, Time and Destiny, which guarded the approach to the altar, seemed to relax their grim features as I passed, and the one dropped his scythe, and the other balanced for a moment the hour glass which he held in his hand. I learned from the oracle that the powers above favor the perpetuation of these institutions, and that they are never to fall by the hand of any foreign enemy; that they are to be saved or to be lost by the action of the American people; that a great danger, a danger that has been long gathering, is at this very moment being passed, and that this danger once passed, there is assurance of long life, aye, of immortality to the institutions of American freedom. I asked for a sign, but the oracle replied to me, "why do this generation look for a sign? I say unto you that no sign shall be given to this generation, but a rule shall be given to them adequate to every emergency, and that rule is, let the American people rule their own spirit."

This people are human, and because they are human, they have accidental and temporary interests and passions and prejudices to mislead them; but also, because they are human, they have reason to conduct them through all temptations and all perils, in the way

of wisdom. A mysterious Providence has permitted, does always permit, error to exist everywhere, cotemporaneously with truth, wrong with right, freedom with slavery; and between these different powers there is always an irrepressible conflict. That conflict is the trial of human virtue; a triumph of the good over the bad constitutes the perfection of human nature. Slavery was probably essential to the success of the institutions of republicanism. That continually provoking conflict, as continually stimulated virtue, and the love of freedom. The fathers, rejecting the sinister counsels of interest and suppressing passions and prejudice, surveyed the continent when they established our government, and they adopted the policy which alone was possible. They could not extirpate slavery at a blow. Probably it had been unwise if they had attempted it; but they had adopted a policy marked equally by sagacity and by benevolence, which is told in a very few words. Its effect was to be the abridgment of the power and duration of slavery by practicable, peaceful means, and the invigoration and ultimate establishment of universal freedom. How this was to be done, requires as few words to tell. The African slave trade, which was then exercised in bringing slaves to do the cultivation of the whole continent and if it had continued, would have covered the land with savage Africans stolen from their native land—was to be abolished after twenty years, during which time the American people might, as they could, procure supplies of free labor from oppressed and groaning Europe, to supply its place. The states were encouraged and stimulated to provide, by acts of gradual emancipation, for the removal of slavery altogether. The whole of the public domain, then unoccupied, lying northwest of the Ohio river, was set apart exclusively for freedom, and for the erection of new and future free states. Free emigration. from all the nations of Europe, of whatever faith or language, was invited by the permission given to the emigrant to pledge his labor for a term of years, so that he might pay the cost of his passage. And to all these was added that boon of boons, that offer, the richest that any nation ever had to give, an equal citizenship by naturalization to the immigrant of whatever race or name, or lineage, with the native born.

You see how simple this system was. you in a few words how effective it was.

Mark, now, while I tell
Within twenty years the

African slave trade ceased, and never until one year ago did the soil

of America again bear the tread of a native African bondman. Seven of the states rapidly removed slavery by prospective laws, which, while they deprived no man of what he called his property, but left his slave to be his slave for life, still, in a period of twentyfive years, there remained on the soil of those states not one native born or imported African slave. And whereas, in this state of New York of ours, on the day when it became independent, every seventeenth inhabitant was a slave, in the year 1825, not one slave was found upon its soil. And the redemption came under the invitation of that liberal law, from Germany, France, Holland, England, Scotland and Ireland, and they became naturalized without question as to their former allegiance, or their religious faith, and they are now our brethren, and by ties of kindred are mixed and mingled with the American people. There is scarcely one man or woman who can trace to a parentage of one nation of Europe an undivided lineage. The blood of the Dane and Hungarian-the Irishman and the German-the Frenchman and Englishman -are intermingled until we have become the descendants and representatives of enlightened Christian nations throughout the whole continent of Europe.

And then five new states rose upon that public domain, and all of them free states; and this process still being continued that five added to the other seven which had emancipated, making twelve, has already been increased, until whereas twelve of the original thirteen states were slave states, now eighteen of the states are free states, and only fifteen are slave states. As it had been ordered wisely, so all was going on prosperously; and at the expiration of the present century slavery would either have ceased to exist, or have been languishing or dying in the midst of what would have been practically universal liberty, but for one of those singular accidents, one of those strange events which, occurring in the course of human affairs, produces a reäction, and for a time the cause which was suppressed, goes forward, and the cause which was expected to triumph, recedes. That accident was nothing more than that an ingenious countryman of ours, and a lover of freedom as much as you or I, invented a machine by which he could, with greater ease, extract the seeds from the fibers in cotton balls, and thus, giving a cheaper value to cotton, and increasing the demand for it, for fabrics of human wear, cotton became the production of slave labor in six slave states, or in a portion of them, and became king in those states, commanded

emancipation to cease, shut foreigners out from their ports, demanded a rescinding of all the laws which forbid slavery to spread over the American soil, demanded room for new slave territories and new slave states, and began the dreadful work of preparation for the restoration of the African slave trade.

You know too well to need that I should repeat it, the rapidity and violence of that reäction. You know how it bought up parties, and statesmen and capitalists through all of the free states, and moulded them as the image-maker moulds the moistened plaster, to its demands. You know how that under the very first earnest, vehement, violent demand of slavery, Missouri and Arkansas were, admitted into the Union, slave states, by a people under the influence of terror, who had, only twenty years before, abolished the African slave trade, and denied slavery another acre of American soil. You know how Texas, a free country in Mexico, was overrun, first by slaveholders with slaves, and then brought into the American Union, with the consent of yourselves, that five slave states might be made out of its soil. You know how California and Mexico and Utah, free lands, free soil, inhabited by men of free speech and free thought, were conquered and brought into the Union, with the expectationonly baffled by the perseverance of a few men in despair, of whom I was one-of establishing slavery upon the Pacific coast. And you know, finally, how presidents and cabinets, ministers and foreign ministers, and at last the judges, came to confess a faith, alien from the constitution, and alien from the spirit of all our institutions, that the normal condition of every territory under the flag of the United States is not freedom but slavery, and that no power existing on the soil, no power existing in other states, no power existing in the congress of the United States, or in any department of the federal government, can challenge it, and say, "How came you or what do you here?"

This was the reäction, and it culminated only six years ago. Never, never was a nation more thoroughly demoralized. The whig party, that had affected sympathy for freedom, faltered and failed in the hour of trial, and went down. The democratic party, bolder than ever, became the unblushing advocate of slavery, ceased to be longer, or to pretend to be, a party of human freedom, but became a party of human bonds. There was no party for freedom. Jalousies were engendered between American free born freemen, VOL. IV.

54

and the voluntary citizens, and at the time when both should have been engaged in rescuing the constitution, which secured the soil for them and their children, and their children's children, as a patrimony for freedom, they were engaged in internecine hostilities, the only effect of which could be to let slavery go roaming over the whole territories.

Such, my friends, was the real condition of things when I addressed you in the park on South street, only four years ago. You were a thoughtless, an excited, a bewildered people. I saw a party forming for freedom, but it was unorganized and discordant, and filled with mutual jealousies. It was the only hope for freedom, but it failed, and it seemed as if it must fail, though it "charmed never so wisely," to win the American people. It seemed to me then that I saw the good angel of my country rising up and bidding her a last farewell.

But now all is changed. The elements of freedom which that republican party took in at that day are so invigorating, so renewing that they have within four years made it a mighty, yes, an unconquerable host. They have taken the reins of the state government in almost every one of the free states, and they lay close siege to what are left in the hands of slavery. They appear strong and vigorous, and have already achieved free speech, free thought and free debate in three slave states, Delaware, Maryland and Missouri, and the battle recedes immediately after this contest, from the free states into the slave states; and the slaveholders, instead of boasting that they are national, and we republicans, are sectional, are already beginning to feel what it is to be attempting to extend and fortify an institution which is purely sectional, into territories that belong to the nation, against the will of the nation.

It has been long that this reäction has been working, and its history will bring out into a new light controversies that to all around us seemed to be already buried in the past. You, laboring men, and especially you of foreign birth, naturalized citizens, can you tell me why it is that you are here among these men in this community, and in the employment of men whom you accuse so often with sympathy with the negro to your prejudice? Why is it that you are here in a land that you call a land of abolitionists? Why are you not in Virginia and in North Carolina and in South Carolina and in Louisiana, among the slave drivers whom you ap

1

« PreviousContinue »