but you ought not, for her sake, to be false to America - and
false you will be, if you fail to rebuke her for her atrocious
system of slavery. The fact that her soil is stained with blood,
that there is no other institution to which she clings with so
much tenacity as to that of slavery, that your welcome depends
upon your silence where even the very stones should cry out, that
the universal sympathy which is expressed for your oppressed
countrymen would instantly be turned to rage, and thus proved
to be spurious this fact alone would make you faithful and
fearless, instead of timid and parasitical, if 'God, the Almighty,'
had selected you 'to represent the cause of humanity' before us.1
"As there is, in reality, only one reason for your turning a
deaf ear to the cry of imbruted humanity among us,—and that
is, an apprehension of exciting popular displeasure,— it is idle
to pretend that you are compelled to take this course, to avoid
being mixed up with a multitude of extraneous matters that
would otherwise be pressed upon your consideration. The
case of millions deprived of personal liberty, and subjected to
all the mutations of property, is too distinct and too awful to
be put into the same category with the question of tariff, or free
trade, or the extension of suffrage, or the distribution of the
public lands,2 or social reorganization, or national independ-
ence, or non-intervention, or any other question relating to
individual advancement or the general welfare.
In every
land, men differ-widely and honestly differ-in their views
respecting the science of political economy and the best form
of government, whether for transient or permanent adoption.
But as to chattelizing those upon whom the Creator has stamped
his own image, 'the same verdict has always been rendered —
"GUILTY!"— the same sentence has always been pronounced

"LET IT BE ACCURSED!"— and human nature, with her million echoes, has rung it round the world in every language under heaven" LET IT BE ACCURSED!" His heart is false to human nature who will not say, 66 AMEN!" There is not a man on earth who does not believe that slavery is a curse. Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to herself. She has uttered her testimony against slavery with a shriek ever since the monster was begotten; and till it perishes

1 Kossuth's first speech, on his reception at Castle Garden by the city authorities of New York, Dec. 6, 1851 (Lib. 21: 201).

2 The Homestead Bill was now looming up as an issue between North and South. Passed by the House of Representatives, it was rejected by the Senate in August, 1852, as an abolition measure (Lib. 22: 141).

CHAP. XII.

1852.

Letter to
Kossuth,

p. 57.

CHAP. XII. amidst the execrations of the universe, she will traverse the world on its track, dealing her bolts upon its head, and dashing 1852. against it her condemning brand. We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him! Clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for him; give him an hour to prepare his wife and children for a life of slavery; bid him make haste, and get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for the cofflechains; then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have nature's testimony against slavery.' ..

Letter to Kossuth, p. 58.

Jan. 19. 1852; Lib. 22: 14.

71, 99, 201.

"As to the tact displayed by you in the management of your cause, it certainly indicates great worldly shrewdness. In England, you could eulogize the Government, advocate free trade, and warmly commend the abolition of West India slavery as 'bound up with much of the glory' of that country; for this was sailing with both wind and tide. In the United States, your admiration is boundless for the Union, the Constitution, the Government, even the Mexican War, unparalleled for its turpitude, because waged expressly for the extension and perpetuity of slavery. All this is congenial with the popular taste. But as for free trade, the anti-slavery enterprise, etc., these are questions of domestic policy' with which you cannot properly meddle, because they have not yet become victorious! You will find, sir, in the end, that 'honesty is the best policy,' and that no amount of skilful diplomacy can be advantageously substituted for manly rectitude. Strive as you may to propitiate the slave power, by which this Government is moulded and directed, it will be only to your own degradation, and without attaining the end you desire."

The Hungarian refugee had hardly turned his back upon the national capital when the House, by a narrow vote, just failed of resolving that South Carolina (like the seaboard slave States generally) was justified in imLib. 22:25, prisoning the black sailors of a British ship driven into port by stress of weather-treatment worse than that which the Japanese expedition was ostensibly ordered to redress. He passed into Maryland and Pennsylvania, and was received by the Legislatures and Governors while a bill was pending in each State to prevent the entrance of free negroes. Traversing Ohio, which disfranchised its black citizens, he essayed his pro-slavery

Griffis's M.

C. Perry, pp. 276-279.

Lib. 22:11,

15.

Lib. 22:14,

33.

“tact” first in Kentucky at Covington. "The spirit of
the South is warm," he exclaimed; "and wherever warmth
is, there is life! .. It is now for the first time that
I breathe the air of a Southern State." But even as he
spoke, the Rev. Calvin Fairbank was being doomed to the
Kentucky penitentiary under a sentence of fifteen years'
hard labor, for having assisted in the
of slaves-
escape
his second expiation in the same State for the same
Christian act. At Jackson, Miss., Kossuth paid his re-
spects to "Hangman" Foote, then Governor of the State,
to whom, indeed, he owed the Congressional action which
ended in his release from Turkey and transportation to
the United States. At Montgomery, Ala., the cradle of
the future Confederacy, he repeated his Covington argu-
ment in favor of national interference on behalf of Hun-
gary because the South held to the doctrine of State rights,
identically his own!

Feb. 24;

Lib. 22:45.

Feb. 21.

Lib. 22:47, 63, 66. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, p.

719. Mar. 25;

Lib. 22:59. Pulszky's White, Red, and Black, 287, 90-92.

Lib. 22:65.
Lib. 22:45.

Pulszky's White, Red,

2: 108. Lib. 22:73:

The Southern grand tour was curtailed in order to reach Massachusetts before the adjournment of the Legislature. and Black, On April 29, Kossuth made his first speech in Faneuil Hall; and here at length his tongue was free to pronounce the name of slavery, while nevertheless confirming his refusal to heed the poet Channing's exhortation:

"But, flying slave, take the slave's part!"

With incredible self-satirization he exclaimed :

"Cradle of American Liberty!'—it is a great name; but there is something in it which saddens my heart. You should not say, 'American Liberty.' You should say, 'Liberty in America.' Liberty should not be either American or European, it should be just 'Liberty.' God is God. He is neither America's God nor Europe's God; he is God. So should liberty be. American Liberty' has much the sound as if you would say, 'American privilege.' And there is the rub. Look to history, and, when your heart saddens at the fact that liberty never yet was lasting in any corner of the world, and in any age, you will find the key of it in the gloomy truth, that all who yet were free regarded liberty as their privilege, instead of regarding it as a principle. The nature of every privilege is exclu

Kossuth in land, p. 82.

New Eng

W. E.
Channing.
Lib. 21:
[203].

Kossuth in New England, p. 87; Lib. 22:73.

CHAP. XII. siveness; that of a principle is communicative. Liberty is a 1852. principle, its community is its security, exclusiveness is its doom."

Pulszky's White, Red,

and Black, 2:171, 172,

174-177.

Kossuth in

New Eng

land, p. 91.

Ibid., p. 92.

Kossuth in
New Eng-

Ergo-not white liberty, but liberty for all races of men; not the white man's God, but the God of humanity; not national patriotism, but "My Country is the World, My Countrymen are All Mankind." Ergo-"No Union with Slaveholders!" Ergo, Kossuth not the guest in Boston of the Webster Whigs, the apologists of the Fugitive Slave Law, but the companion of Garrison, Phillips, and Quincy. But no, after a lament that he had come to America in the midst of a Presidential campaign, Kossuth continued:

"The second difficulty I have to contend with is rather curious. Many a man has told me that, if I had only not fallen into the hands of the abolitionists and Free Soilers, he would have supported me; and had I landed somewhere in the South, instead of New York, I would have met quite different things from that quarter; but, being supported by the Free Soilers, of course I must be opposed by the South. On the other side, I received a letter from which I beg leave to quote a few lines:

"You are silent on the subject of slavery. Surrounded as you have been by slaveholders ever since you put your foot on English soil, if not during your whole voyage from Constantinople,- and ever since you have been in this country surrounded by them, whose threats, promises, and flattery make the stoutest hearts succumb,-your position has put me in mind of a scene described by the apostle of Jesus Christ, when the devil took him up into a high mountain,' etc., etc.

"Now, gentlemen, thus being charged from one side with being in the hands of abolitionists, and from the other side with being in the hands of the slaveholders, I indeed am at a loss what course to take, if these very contradictory charges were not giving me the satisfaction to feel that I stand just where it is my duty to stand, on a truly American ground."

So this is what the beautiful tirade against "American liberty" comes to. But Kossuth has not yet done with his "neutrality."

"I must beg leave to say a few words in that respect; the land, p. 93. more, because I could not escape vehement attacks for not com