American Dangers and Duties

by A. D. Mayo

The idea of society founded on civil and religious liberty for all men has laid the foundation of eighteen American states, containing, in 1860, 18,000,000 of people; the best commonwealths that were ever created in a time so brief. It has also, in less degree, influenced the rising confederacy of the Canadas, and is slowly preparing that vast region for self-government. It has diverted a large emigration from the Southern States, of men attracted by the hopes and opportunities of free society. Its possessions stretch from the northeastern coast of the Atlantic with southwesterly inclination to the southern shores of the Pacific, nearing the lower extremity of North America.

Although by no means of equal development, society in these eighteen free states is founded on the immutable principles of the natural rights of man. The laborer is a free man and a citizen. Social life is a democracy in which service to the community is the chief claim to preeminence. Education is the boon of every child, and the press and speech are free. The ballot in several Northern States is absolutely free to all men, and the current is setting in that direction in the remainder. In all these states the free worship of God is secured by fundamental law. The radical tendency among these 18,000,000 of people is towards the complete establishment of a Christian democracy. Already the superiority of this portion of the Republic in all the elements of civilization is undisputed. Its commercial and industrial enterprise is the controlling force of the country’s material prosperity. Its agriculture leads in the majority of crops that can be tilled on northern soil; and it has three crops, either of which can buy up the whole special productions of the southern states. It is the seat of popular education. Its literature and art, and general refinement of life, represent the Union to the world. The present census brings it into its great inheritance of overwhelming political power. Its religion is nearer the Sermon on the Mount than ever was reached by 18,000,000 of people before. It is headed towards the kingdom of God more decisively than any nation of ancient or modern times.

But the north is by no means yet in the kingdom. Each of its radical ideas of free society is violated and perverted by a considerable portion of every commonwealth; some of its principles by entire states. Out of the competitions of free labor has sprung a fierce and selfish love of money which scorns honesty and tramples down man in its accursed lust for gold. Whole classes of men are cursed by this venal insanity which, culminating in the marble streets of the commercial metropolis, distills its venom to the remotest log cabin in the wilderness. Out of the opportunities of free social life has sprung a mushroom growth of vulgar social ambition, luxury and sensuality; which struggles to become the fashion on the pavement of the Atlantic city and in the “percussion” village of the west. The sacred freedom of printing and speech has been perverted to a satanic press and the open advocacy of every vagary of despotism and sin. Political freedom has been demoralized to the freedom of unlimited office seeking, the betrayal of human rights for individual success and fearful corruption in public affairs. And out of the noblest feature of our church, its liberty of worship, comes that pernicious strife for sectarian supremacy and worldly success which endangers the most liberal religious organizations.

These abuses of northern society marshal a host in New England. They rage through the great cities of the Middle States. They demoralize multitudes on the prairies, and on the Pacific struggle with fearful intensity for the possession of society. The point to which this tendency gravitates is popular servility. So we have, in the North, a great crowd of men and women debauched by the abuse of the opportunities of free society, to the point of yielding to the blandishments and menaces of any despotism that promises to pay its way.

Let us distinctly understand that in this direction lies the sin and peril of northern civilization. It is not our free institutions and their faithful disciples which are endangering the peace of the country, as is slanderously asserted by every tyrant and tyrant’s jackall in America; but the chief peril of the Union is from this margin of servility in northern civilization, which is always in the market, ready to tamper with any abomination from abroad, within or without its own borders, as its wretched selfishness may be stimulated thereby. Perhaps its present direction is least dangerous to the national welfare. It now succumbs to the slave power of our Southern States, as the nearest, most powerful, and remunerative purchaser of its influence. Were there no slave power, it would be in league with foreign civil and religious despotism, or fasten upon some Northern institution as the representative of the aristocratic idea. But now it has turned its shameless face away from Northern civilization, which is growing up behind its back into an adamantine wall overtopping its base hopes and impotent threats. While its preachers, and politicians, and journals and saloons are facing towards despotism, and calling free society anarchy, the majority of the North is calmly marching onward to the victory for the right which is only a question of a few decades, unswayed by the promises, undaunted by the croakings of its margin of servility. The idea of free society, of which New England is the foremost representative, is gradually subduing every region of these eighteen states to itself.

And just as the New England idea, organized in the great Middle States and the Northwest, is approaching its day of conquest in the North, is the idea of South Carolina subduing the fifteen Southern States. South Carolina is now the most completely aristocratic State in the Confederacy. Fifty-eight per cent of her entire population are slaves. Her basis of representation in her Legislature is equally slave property and white population; one sixty-second of white people and one sixty-second of property having the same political weight. Her 25,000 slaveholders rule the little State with a rod of iron, and this phalanx is wheeled about by a smaller number of men than governs any State of the Union. In the Revolution the great men of Maryland and Virginia clasped the hands of the North, and thus governed the Carolinas, wrested them from utter subjugation, and organized the Constitution over their heads. But South Carolina, Georgia and their children along the Gulf of Mexico have been gaining in power every day in the last half century.

South Carolina is now captain of eight States, with a white population of more than 2,000,000, owning a slave population of 1,800,000; 42 per cent of the whole people; with a monopoly of the cotton, rice and sugar crops; and a rapidly consolidating unanimity of sentiment. The seven more northern Slave States have a white population of 5,000,000, with 27 per cent of slavery. But they have no peculiar staple of production, excepting young negroes, and are wavering in social ideas and political policy. Freedom has planted a line of batteries along their borders in the form of nine growing cities containing a million and a half of people, in all of which free discussion is practically vindicated; several being already in the hands of the Northern idea. Thus wavering between extremes, these seven States are now being fought over as the body of Moses was by the angel and the Dragon. South Carolina, foremost of the host of despotism, has them by the throat, haling them towards the precipice of disunion. She has conquered them in every battle since they shrank from Northern fellowship; she brought in three slave States from the Louisiana Purchase; she drove the country into the Mexican war and secured Texas; she repealed the Missouri Compromise; she has procured the Dred Scott decision; and now, on the refusal of the North to ratify it, threatens to dissolve the Union, and commands the Central Slave States to come on.

Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Jackson, Benton; the great men of this region who withstood her claims are all dead, and who are their successors? All things look fearfully like a surrender of the seven northern Slave States to the idea of South Carolina and her seven confederates, just as the entire North has been wheeled into line by New England and her children of the North.

There is nothing strange in this. There was always plenty of railing against New England and her ideas in the Middle and Western States, which has ended in their conversion. Every great Preacher, Statesman, Thinker, in twelve States beyond the Hudson, has his heel on Plymouth Rock. New England and her children believe wholly in the natural rights of man; therefore she conquers twelve States that do not exactly know whether man has or has not natural rights. South Carolina and her children disbelieve wholly in the natural rights of man. Therefore they subdue seven great States of wavering faith. The man, the State that believes with its whole heart, always in the end subdues the man or State that only half believes.

In every great national collision between the two civilizations, freedom has been nominally beaten, but actually victorious. The Revolution made nine States free. If the North was compelled to hide away slavery in the Constitution; she saved the Declaration of Independence; kept the word “slave” out of the charter of our liberties; abolished the slave trade; and secured the Northwest territory, five States, for liberty. The South cut up her remaining territories into four additional slave states; obtained Florida, from Spain; Louisiana and Arkansas from France, and then gave battle for Missouri. She gained the nominal victory of forcing 80,000 slaves into this State, and lost the remaining territory north of 36 deg. and 30 min., sufficient for half a dozen free commonwealths, which secured two States in the future beyond the Rocky Mountains. Thus, out of the Louisiana Purchase, slavery has gained but two States, and kept back Missouri fifty years from her natural condition of freedom; while the North has gained already three free States; and has, beside Kansas, half a dozen territories in reserve, ready to come in.