ADDRESS OF HON. JAMES M. ASHLEY BEFORE THE "OHIO SOCIETY OF NEW YORK," AT ITS FIFTH ANNUAL BANQUET, WEDNESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 19, 1890. NEW YORK, February 20, 1890. MY DEAR GOVERNOR ASHLEY: At the banquet of the Ohio Society of New York last evening, the President of the Society was, by unanimous vote, directed to ask you to furnish to the Society for publication a copy of your admirable paper on the passage through the House of Representatives of the United States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In performance of this duty, I beg leave to present to you their request. Let me add, personally, that this formal expression was supplemented individually by every one of those present with whom it was my fortune to converse. I am sure that I speak for all present in expressing my individual appreciation of the greatness and historic value of that action of which you were so largely the inspiration, and in which you were the foremost actor. Yours, very truly, Hon. J. M. ASHLEY. WAGER SWAYNE. GEN. WAGER SWAYNE, NEW YORK, February 21, 1890. President Ohio Society of New York MY DEAR SIR: Herewith please find copy of my address as delivered before your Society, at the fifth annual banquet, on the 19th inst. It gives me pleasure to comply with a request in which is conveyed so complimentary an approval by the Society and yourself of the address. I only regret that I did not have time to speak more in detail of the personality of the immortal twenty-four who voted with us, and thus made possible the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Truly yours, J. M. ASHLEY. MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE OHIO SOCIETY OF NEW YORK: The official acts of the great actors in the conflict of civilization with the barbarism of slavery, are faithfully recorded in the nation's archives, and open to the inspection and compilation of the coming historian. You will not expect me to-night to do more than briefly notice some few of these men, with whom it was my good fortune to be associated during the time Congress had under consideration the propositions to abolish slavery at the national capital and the Thirteenth Amendment. When the story of our great anti-slavery conflict shall have been written, it will make one of the most ideal chapters in our matchless history. That chapter will tell the coming generations of men the story of the immortal victory achieved by the American people for democratic government and an undivided Union; a victory whose far-reaching consequences no man can even now foresee. In the fullness of time, to every nation and people great leaders are born, and some one or more of these earnest leaders, by the utterance of a simple moral truth in a brief couplet or in a single epigrammatic sentence, have often in the world's history changed the opinions of thousands. Especially true was this of the written appeals and public addresses of the great anti-slavery leaders in this country for more than a quarter of a century before the rebellion. He was indeed a dull and insensible man who during our anti-slavery crusade did not grow eloquent and become aggressive when writing or speaking of slavery as the great crime of his age and country. To me, as a boy, the men who made up this vanguard of anti-slavery leaders always appeared to be exceptionally great men, men who walked the earth with unfaltering faith and a firm tread, with heads erect, so that their prophetic eyes caught the dawn of Freedom's coming morn. They were brave, strong, self-reliant men, whose words and acts all testified that their great hearts "burned to break the fetters of the world." These men had no thought of witnessing during their lifetime the triumph of the cause which they had so unselfishly espoused; they were tireless and invincible, workers. The alluring promise of success nowhere held out to them hope of political reward. To an unpopular cause they gave all they had of time, money and brains, not doubting that those who should come after them would be able to command and so to direct the moral forces of the nation as ultimately to enact justice into law by "proclaiming liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof." Under this banner they went forth, conquering and to conquer, and in all their impassioned appeals they sounded forth the bugle that never called retreat." To have voluntarily enlisted and fought with this liberating army until our starry banner was planted in triumph on the last citadel of American slavery, is an honor of which the humblest citizen and his children may justly be proud, an honor which will grow brighter in all the coming years of the republic. I was so young when I enlisted in this liberating army that I cannot fix the date. At the home of a neighbor, a Virginian by birth, and until the close of his manly life a resident of Kentucky, I heard, with wondering emotions, the first song in which a slave was represented as appealing to his captors for his freedom. I was but nine years old, but that song with its story touched my heart, and, though I never saw it in print, I never forgot it. The verse of this song that arrested my attention, and remained fixed in my memory, is as clear to me TO-NIGHT as it was more than half a century ago. It was the plaintive appeal of an escaped slave, in simple rhyme, such as slaves often sang to tunes with which all are familiar who have heard the old-fashioned plantation melodies. In that appeal to his captors "He showed the stripes his master gave, I did not know until then that the slave master had the right to whip, brand and maim his slave. It was at the home of this venerable anti-slavery man (who made the world better for his having lived in it), that I first learned this fact, and it was at his house that I first heard repeated many of the fiery utterances of Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky. After showing an appreciation of these anti-slavery sentiments, I was frequently lifted on a chair or table by our old anti-slavery neighbor and taught to declaim from the speeches of Cassius M. Clay and others. I was so fascinated by a paragraph from a speech made by Governor McDowell, of Virginia, that it always gave me pleasure to speak it, as I often did, with such earnestness as to secure me as honest applause in that quiet anti-slavery household as any I ever commanded on the platform in after years. I never forgot that appeal of Governor McDowell, and often used it after I grew to manhood, and quoted it in one of my early speeches in Congress, as I again quote it here: "You may place the slave where you please, you may dry up to your uttermost the fountain of his feelings, the springs of his thought, you may close upon his mind every avenue to knowledge, and cloud it over with artificial night, you may yoke him to labor as an ox-which liveth only to work, and worketh only to live; you may put him under any process which without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being-you may do all this; and yet, the idea that he was born free will survive it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality-it is the eternal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach. It is a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of Deity, and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man." I speak of these seemingly unimportant incidents of my boyhood to confirm what I said in opening, touching the influence which one brave, truthful man can exercise over thousands, and to illustrate the tremendous power a single thought may often have over the acts and lives of reader and hearer. From my ninth to my thirteenth year my father was preaching on a circuit in the border counties of Kentucky and West Virginia, and afterwards in Southeastern Ohio. During our residence in Kentucky and West Virginia I did not know a single abolitionist except the family which I have described, and not until I was in my seventeenth year did I meet and become acquainted with Cassius M. Clay and John G. Fee. Some time afterwards I met James G. Burney, who became the abolition candidate for President in 1844. The leaders of the church to which my father belonged, and, indeed, the leaders in all Southern churches in those days, publicly affirmed "that slavery PER SE could exist without sin," a doctrine which I regarded then, as I do now, as a perversion of the teachings of Christ. It has always been a source of satisfaction to me that my mother, who was a conservative woman, never gave in her adhesion to this rascally defense of "the sum of villainies." At that time, in all the border counties of Kentucky, slavery existed in a milder form than in any other part of the Southwest, and the slave owners whom I knew were much better men than one would in this day believe possible under any slave system. And yet the system in its practical working was so monstrous that before I had grown to manhood I had publicly pronounced against it, and, as many before me know, I |