American Dangers and Duties

by A. D. Mayo

The next great battle was in 1844, when slavery grasped Texas, and plunged the country into a war to extend her territory. The end of that was a nominal defeat of liberty, but the real defeat of slavery. For the South has only gained thereby an additional slave population of 60,000 in Texas; a vast, region whose western border is already in the hands of free men; a fugitive slave law, whose imperfect enforcement has greatly served to alienate the Northern mind, and reduce the escape of slaves to a science; and a barren promise of several new States in Texas, New Mexico, and Utah, if she can get them. The North secured the State of California, which has shut off the Pacific from slavery, and planted a mighty free State like a circular battery, covering all the newly acquired Mexican Territory. The regions west of Texas will finally be peopled from free California. They are now sparsely populated, because unfit for settlement. But if gold or silver mines or profitable agricultural districts should be discovered in this vast wilderness, there would be a hegira that way which would “re-enact the will of God” beyond hope of repeal.

Then came the battle of 1854, when the South abolished the Missouri Compromise, to steal Kansas, and lost this territory and wounded slavery to death in Missouri, thus planting two great States over against Western Texas and the Indian Possessions, which must be settled therefrom.

Then, in desperation, the slave power sentenced all the territories of the United States to slavery; and the North has declared, unanimously, by a popular vote of 3,250,000 against 200,000, that she will not permit this subversion of the Constitution.

Thus stand the forces on the field. Slavery has fifteen states; three of which are turning one ear to freedom. Freedom has eighteen states, with double their white population, and holds the two strategical points, California and Kansas, which cover every territory, and make it almost impossible that new slave states should be permanently sustained therein. And now the North has united to confine the peculiar institution within its present limits. In the Union, the battle is fought and won. Slavery, nominally the victor, has been really defeated in every contest since the Revolution. She has violated every compromise, and thus morally put it out of her power to demand concession from liberty. The slave power to-day stands beaten, surrounded, and dependent for its very existence on the will of the Free States.

Is it strange that South Carolina raises the Palmetto flag, and sends the order down the whole line to march out of the Union? She has fewer entangling alliances with freedom than any of her followers; and, with an eye sharpened by long observation of the conditions of aristocratic society, sees that its doom is sealed. She knows, as Virginia and Maryland do not, that there can be no more reliable extension of the slave power in the Union, as now constituted, and as it will inevitably be administered in the future. She is sick at heart, and understands that all her physicians are quacks, who propose only palliatives, in helpless inability to cure her disease. What cares she for a new fugitive slave law when the old one cannot be enforced, and every Negro carried back to bondage leaves a town full of new-made abolitionists behind? Will it help her to declare that all the territories shall choose freedom or slavery for themselves, when Yankee Jonathan, German Hans and Irish Patrick are swarming on the borders of every territory where a civilized man can live? The offer of new slave states in the southwestern deserts does not console her, for she remembers that of the four slave states admitted into the Union within the last thirty years, two are insignificant, and Texas and Missouri are already in a state of siege by freedom, while free states stand, rank behind rank, awaiting an open door. Do her comforters offer protection in the territories? New Mexico has 62,000 square miles, and has about one slave to 1,000 square miles, and this is her most hopeful scion at present; very like protecting a dead horse against a general muster of crows. What of the abstract right to carry slaves through states that daily hate slavery more bitterly? Are compromises offered in any of these directions? The spectre of one great compromise, murdered in the Capitol, rises like Banquo’s ghost, and shrieks, “thou sent compromise to the grave; who calls up my unquiet shadow to haunt the day?” A compromise is henceforth only a law; so has slavery willed; freedom responds: “so let it be forevermore.” Lay upon freedom whatever compromises you will, she henceforth walks through and beyond them like a living man through a churchyard full of wavering shadows. What can the Supreme Court do for her case? She has shown us that court can be made to yield to the reigning spirit of the day, and gained all she asked for slavery. Another day will dawn, and the court will look to that rising sun. Will she change the Constitution? But no act of to-day can bind posterity. A perpetual provision for slavery there is setting up a king over the Constitution. The North to-day will set up no king; if it does the North of to-morrow will dethrone him.

The slave power, as represented by South Carolina, wants primarily but one thing—a complete reversal of Northern moral convictions and social ideas. That change of civilization would permit her to open the slave trade and acquire new territory for slave States. All these things are impossible in the Union as headed now. Therefore, South Carolina turns her back on it, and gives the command: forward, the whole line towards—we’ll see when we get out. We must confess there is no link wanting in this logic of the slave power. If it stays in the Union, it must be girdled, year by year, more irresistibly by freedom; as a great snow bank feels the April sun, day by day, enclosing it in glittering lines, and already dissolves in thought of June mornings ahead. With the most determined effort to keep its hands off the slave power, the spirit of American liberty will be compelled to deal with it more vitally every year. The age is forcing it towards this policy. Every school house and meeting house, free home, free journal, and country lyceum in the United States is a protest against this barbarism. It may be as well said at once that what the slave power calls abolitionism, is simply the spirit of the nineteenth century applied to American Society. Every man who lives in that spirit is to it an abolitionist, with his own will, or spite of his will, must help abolish human slavery. I doubt not the political fidelity of the North to all constitutional obligations; but if the fifteen slave states remain in the Union they must finally become free states. Freedom is aggressive. Virtue, truth, humanity, God are aggressive. The fathers intended that slavery should die a peaceful death in the Union, and the sons will not forget the tradition. The slave power now hears her sentence read and sees the executioner on the way. South Carolina counsels it to prolong its life by flying beyond jurisdiction of the court. But if the slave power flies from the Union, it is only rushing from the house of a regenerating friend into an open country peopled by its foes. The civilization of the age is against it. The South must, first or last, regenerate her false order of society, or walk towards final destruction.

What is the duty of the North in this perilous condition of affairs?

First. The paramount duty of the eighteen Northern States is to preserve and perpetuate the Christian civilization already inaugurated within their borders, and permit the sacred cause of liberty to suffer no eclipse.

Second. The North has now become the natural protector of the Southern people against the tyranny of the slave power, and must do its uttermost to prevent the conquest of fifteen states by this remorseless tyranny.

The North has one obligation more sacred than all others; to preserve the sacred rights of man and carry forward the work of a Christian civilization on this continent. These eighteen states now occupy the foremost position in the world, and cannot abandon it without such danger and disgrace as no good man can calmly contemplate. Whatever they do, Humanity, Christianity, God command them to surrender nothing of that which they hold in trust as the agent for mankind and posterity.