Shadow and Light. Gibbs Mifflin Wistar

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СКАЧАТЬ growing stronger and bolder in its assumption of power and permeating every artery of society. The cotton gin was invented and the demand for cotton vaulted into the van of the commerce of the country. Men, lured by the gains of slavery and corrupted by its contact, sought by infamous reasoning and vicious legislation to avert the criticism of men and the judgment of God. In the words of our immortal Douglass, "To bolster up and make tolerable what was intolerable; to make human what was inhuman; to make divine what was infernal." To make this giant wrong acceptable to the moral sense it was averred and enacted that slavery was right; that God himself had so predetermined in His wisdom; that the slave could be branded and sold on the auction block; that the babe could be ruthlessly taken from its mother and given away; that a family could be scattered by sale, to meet no more; that to teach a slave to read was punishable with death to the teacher. But why rehearse this dead past – this terrible night of suffering and gloom? Why not let its remembrance be effaced and forgotten in the glorious light of a happier day? I answer, Why?

      All measure of value, all estimates of greatness, of joy or sorrow, of health or suffering, are relative; we judge by comparison, and if in recalling these former depths we temper unreasonable criticism of waning friendships, accelerate effort as we pass the mile-stones of achievement, and stimulate appreciation of liberty in the younger generation, the mention will not be fruitless.

      But to the resume of this rapid statement of momentous events: Meanwhile, the slave, patient in his longings, prayed for deliverance. Truly has it been said by Elihu Burrit that "you may take a man and yoke him to your labor as you yoke the ox that worketh to live, and liveth to work; you may surround him with ignorance and cloud him over with artificial night. You may do this and all else that will degrade him as a man, without injuring his value as a slave; yet the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. 'Tis allied to his hope of immortality – the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach. 'Tis the torch lit up in his soul by the omnipotent hand of Deity Himself." The true and tried hosts of freedom, represented and led by Garrison, Douglass, Lovejoy, Phillips, Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances Ellen Harper, and others – few compared to the indifferent and avowed defenders of slavery, welcoming outrage and ostracism, by pen and on forum, from hilltop and valley, proclaimed emancipation as the right of the slave and the duty of the master. The many heroic efforts of the anti-slavery phalanx were not without effect, and determined resistance was made to the admission of more slave territory which was in accordance with the "Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the Northwest. Slavery controlled the Government from its commencement, hence its supporters looked with alarm upon an increasing determination to stay its progress.

      California had been admitted as a free State, after a struggle the most severe. Its admission John C. Calhoun, the very able leader of the slave power, regarded as the death-knell of slavery, if the institution remained within the union and counseled secession. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, in despair at the growth of slavery; Calhoun at that of freedom. But how could this march of moral progress and national greatness be arrested? Congress had, in 1787, enacted that all the territory not then States should forever be reserved to freedom. The slave power saw the "handwriting on the wall" surround it with a cordon of free States; increase their representatives in Congress advocating freedom, and slavery is doomed. The line cherished by the founders, the Gibraltar against which slavery had dashed its angry billows, must be blotted out, and over every rod of virgin soil it was to be admitted without let or hindrance.

      Then came the dark days of compromise, the era of Northern fear of secession, and, finally, opinion crystallizing into legislation non-committal, viz: That States applying for admission should be admitted as free or slave States, as a majority of their inhabitants might determine. Then came the struggle for Kansas. Emigration societies were fitted out in the New England and Northern States to send free State men to locate who would vote to bring in Kansas as a free State. Similar organizations existed in the slave States for the opposite purpose.

      It is not pleasant to dwell nor fitly portray the terrible ordeal through which the friends of freedom passed. In 1859 they succeeded; right and justice were triumphant, the beneficial results of which will reach remotest time. It was in this conflict that the heroism of John Brown developed. It was there he saw his kindred and his friends murdered, and there registered his vow to avenge their blood in the disenthralment of the slave. The compeers of this "grand old man" or people of the nation could have scarcely supposed that this man, hitherto obscure, was to be the instrument of retributive justice, to inaugurate a rebellion which was to culminate in the freedom of 4,000,000 slaves. John Brown, at the head of a few devoted men, at Harper's Ferry, struck the blow that echoed and re-echoed in booming gun and flashing sabre until, dying away in whispered cadence, was hushed in the joyousness of a free nation. John Brown was great because he was good, and good because he was great, with the bravery of a warrior and the tenderness of a child, loving liberty as a mother her first born, he scorned to compromise with slavery. Virginia demanded his blood and he gave it, making the spot on which he fell sacred for all time, upon which posterity will see a monument in commemoration of an effort, grand in its magnanimity, to which the devotees of liberty from every clime can repair to breathe anew an inspiration from its shrine —

      "For whether on the gallows high

      Or in the battle's van,

      The noblest place for man to die

      Is where he dies for man."

      The slave power, defeated in Kansas, fearful of the result of the vote in other territories to determine their future status, found aid and comfort from Judge Taney, a Supreme Judge of the United States. Bancroft, the historian, has said: "In a great Republic an attempt to overthrow a State owes its strength to and from some branch of the Government." 'Tis said that this Chief Justice, without necessity or occasion, volunteered to come to the rescue of slavery, and, being the highest court known to the law, the edict was final, and no appeal could lie, save to the bar of humanity and history. Against the memory of the nation, against decisions and enactments, he announced that, slaves being property, owners could claim constitutional protection in the territories; that the Constitution upheld slavery against any act of a State Legislature, and even against Congress. Slavery, previous to 1850, was regulated by municipal law; the slave was held by virtue of the laws of the State of his location or of kindred slave States. When he escaped that jurisdiction he was free. By the decision of Judge Taney, instead of slavery being local, it was national and freedom outlawed; the slave could not only be reclaimed in any State, but slavery could be established wherever it sought habitation.

      Black laws had been passed in Northern States and United States Commissioners appointed in these States searched for fugitives, where they had, in fancied security, resided for years, built homes, and reared families, seizing and remanding them back into slavery, causing an era of terror, family dismemberment, and flight, only to be remembered with sadness and horror. For had not the heartless dictum come from a Chief Justice of the United States – the "Jeffry of American jurisprudence," that it had been ruled that black men had no rights a white man was bound to respect?

      The slave power, fortified with this declaration, resolved that if at the approaching election they did not succeed they would secede. Lincoln was elected, and the South, true to its resolve, prepared for the secession of its States. Pennsylvania is credited with having then made the last and meanest gift to the Presidency in the person of James Buchanan. History tells of a Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. The valedictory of this public functionary breathing aid and comfort to secession, was immediately followed by South Carolina firing on Fort Sumter, and Southern Senators advised their constituents to seize the arsenals and ports of the nation. Rebellion was a fact.

      CHAPTER VII

      Abraham Lincoln, the President-elect, was the legitimate outgrowth of American institutions; in him was presented choice fruit, the product of republican government. Born in a log cabin, of poor, uneducated parents, his only aids untiring industry, determination, and lofty purpose. Hewing out his steps on the rugged rocks of poverty, climbing the mountains of difficulty, and attaining the highest honor within the gift of the СКАЧАТЬ