American Dangers and Duties

by A. D. Mayo

This is a sufficient answer to the demands of that margin of servility in the North which asks us to surrender anything and everything to the cause of the Union. This wretched school of advisers counsel nothing less than unconditional submission to the extreme demands of an insolent oligarchy, whose turbulent and dishonest despotism has already brought the country to the brink of ruin. To satisfy Mr. Charles O’Conor, the Rev. Mr. Van Dyke, and their disciples, we must change our whole type of society; forswear all that gives us power at home and fame abroad; place ourselves under a general espionage more hateful than the rule of an emperor; and conspire to crush a whole race of men in the dust forever. This cannot be done. Northern civilization is looking towards the golden rule of Christ. Its social, civil, industrial, educational, religious associations are all slowly adjusting themselves to the Christian idea of the equal rights of all men. Should our people now be persuaded or forced to repudiate these ideas; turn their backs on the spirit of the age; hold every principle on sale; make their pavements and fields too servile for the tread of freemen, it would be a calamity in comparison with which the sinking of every despotic state in the depths of the sea would be a blessing. Our great commercial cities are full of adventurers from every part of the world, who, caring nothing for republican institutions, only look to their own aggrandizement in wealth and personal position. Every county holds a politician base enough to flatter this class of men to gain an office. The pulpits of the North are not yet rid of the servants of this Sadducism. It is not strange that this whole margin of servility is stirred to its nauseous depth in favor of unlimited concession to the slave power. It would be monstrous if this great North cast down her noblest and wisest advisers and followed the lead of this motley crew. It may or may not be necessary that certain men should be rich, famous, or in office; but that eighteen states who represent the loftiest civilization on the earth should commit social suicide to further such trivial objects is too much to contemplate.

But there is a better class of advisers who counsel the North to compromise and conciliation, with the hope of weathering the present gale, and ultimately keeping the ship on the track of a Christian democracy. They sincerely believe the American Union is the best hope of freedom on this continent; that united, these States must finally reach the promised land; dissevered, they will drift into hopeless anarchy. We appreciate the motives and understand the apprehensions of this large body of the Northern people. We wish they took less counsel of their fears, and saw more clearly the danger of experimenting on a thing so sensitive as human rights. We think they are too much concerned to learn what will appease our despotism, forgetting that it is unappeasable; while they also forget that there is a sentiment of freedom that will not submit beyond a fixed point, and that point of endurance is already near. We know that successful statesmanship must be a series of approaches to abstract right, and no great idea of liberty can be organized at once. We do not presume to explain the details of our public policy in a region where the political landscape changes every morning; and it is absurd to ask our advanced statesmen to sacrifice the permanent interest of liberty to a verbal consistency. No party can always be guided by its own platform; especially can no great national policy be run upon the straight track of a fore-ordained programme.

Therefore, we believe in all methods of conciliation and forbearance that do not vitiate the spirit of liberty in the people or imperil the final triumph of freedom in the country. Let us keep the conscience of the North sound, its spirit high, its determination unchangeable for a true civilization. We must abate none of our great agencies of freedom. The free school, the free press, free speech, free society, a free ballot, a free church must be sustained at all hazards, and purified of grossness and license by the gradual education and refining of the people. Our political state policy must be maintained, and only changed in the direction of purging the cause of freedom from all base alloy, and opening into wider vistas of Christian liberty. Then we must choose men for our servants in national offices whose fidelity to God and man are undoubted; instruct them to see that the cause of humanity receives no harm, and trust much to their wisdom in the details of public policy. It is daily becoming a more difficult task to guide our national affairs. Only the highest order of ability, experience and unflinching principle can suffice for the mighty toil. The Northern people will sacrifice every man, however lofty, who turns his back against the present age. They will resent any measure whose effect is to undermine Northern ideas, however imperceptibly. But they will give a generous margin for that policy of wise conciliation, which will preserve the Union to freedom forever.

Let our servants remember we forgive all things to devotion to our common humanity; we pardon any policy, that finally keeps us in the current of the nineteenth century; but we forgive no man who, through fear, or flattery, or ignorance, or any motive, puts in peril the cause of human rights. For such there is everlasting political punishment. Our rulers must not open the African slave trade; or make our northern cities the depots of the infamous traffic in men; or permit further acquisition of territory for slavery; or change the Republic into a machine to assist and protect property in man wherever our flag is planted. The national policy must aim at a final limitation of slavery in the nation, and a transferal of the whole controversy to the slave states. Whoever can best accomplish this shall be approved.

Only by this zealous upholding of freedom in eighteen states can the North educate herself to her secondary obligation to preserve the Union by defending the people of the South against the slave power. Whatever may be the capacity of liberty in the free states to sustain a disruption of the Union; it is morally certain that the only rational hope of liberty in fifteen southern states is in their continuance of the partnership in a national government administered in the interests of human rights. Were these fifteen states to-day severed from our connection and united in a slave empire, they would be ever haunted by three specters, either more formidable than any present danger. Their intestine conflicts would compare with our present agitation like the spouting of a volcano to the sputtering of a coal fire. A thousand ambitious and unscrupulous characters stand waiting that event to run the wild race for power whose goal is anarchy. There could be no permanent union between South Carolina and Maryland; Mississippi and Kentucky; for revolutions do not go backward, and the forces that would sweep fifteen states out of the Union would fatally drift any new government they should create towards a military despotism. They would be in constant danger from servile insurrection; and the rapid increase of slave population would necessitate a reign of terror through all their borders. They would perpetually be urged into wars with every civilized power; for nobody supposes the nations of the world will permit a black empire to open the slave trade and steal unlimited territory. On whatever side we look, the only hope of free institutions in the south is adherence to a Union working towards the freedom of man.

This preservation of the Union for liberty can only be accomplished by a co-operation of the moderate men and class of the South with the party of freedom in the North. This class has too long made the fatal mistake of choosing its Northern allies from those who misrepresented the Northern conscience and society. They have read the journals that live by maligning our civilization, and kept in power a set of politicians who could not be chosen to preside over a town meeting at home. If any man has made himself specially obnoxious to the people of New England, New York or the Great West, by treason to their higher convictions, we have seen him lifted into some exalted position by the voice of those whose only hope of salvation is the confidence of the Northern heart. The moderate men of the South have counseled too often with this irresponsible section of the free states, and, of course, are now left to drift.

If this Union is to be saved, the border slave states must change their policy. Their wisest and most patriotic men must, like Washington, and Jefferson, and Clay and Benton, clasp the hands of the real North; the North that is faced towards liberty; and demand of it all consideration and support consistent with true civilization. Let them no longer parley with the political, social and commercial traitors who promise what they never can perform—a reversal of Northern ideas of society. Let them convince us that they have at heart the freedom of the Republic, and their counsels for moderation and fraternal action will have the weight they deserve. The real danger now is that the freemen of the North have come to distrust this better class of the South. When they see venerable statesmen like Bell yielding to the uttermost demands of the slave power in his adoption of the heresy of universal protection for slavery by the General Government, and uniting in the vulgar slander that the majority of our people has embarked in an unconstitutional and fanatical crusade against Southern rights; or a man like Crittenden proposing to surrender to the secessionists the privilege of making a dozen Alabamas below the parallel of 36 degrees 30 minutes; to convert the metropolis of the Union into the great slave market of the world; and put into the Constitution a perpetual guaranty for slavery, when every provision for liberty is subject to amendment; or when Mr. Stephens tells us our only hope is in complete surrender to the platform of the extreme South, what are we to think? Are the entire slave states so debauched by their institutions that what their representative men call “compromise,” is only the yielding every point in issue between the two civilizations? Are the New York Herald and Caleb Cushing to be perpetual representatives of northern society: and is the Union to be sacrificed because the whole people of the South believe their infamous slanders about us? Then, indeed, is hope for Southern freedom lost; unless freedom, in fire-eating parlance, means liberty to enslave mankind till the end of time.

We behold in the firm attitude of a few Southern patriots of the Washington and Jefferson school, the only hope for the salvation of the country. They know that the majority of the North never did and will not propose to abolish slavery in the Slave States by the General Government against their own desire. They know that any administration inaugurated by this majority will protect the Southern people against all danger of war, intestine conflict, invasion or insurrection. They know that we propose to limit slavery to its present possessions only for the safety of the Union, and the defence of the Southern people from the most insolent oligarchy that ever ruled on earth. If they can unite with us to keep the Union as it is; to defeat the extreme demands of Davis and Yancy, and O’Conor; to gradually localize the slavery controversy in fifteen States, which, under the paternal protection of the nation, may work out this painful problem by the increasing lights of our age, we can be their friends, and finally deliver them all from harm. We will do and suffer everything for ourselves to this glorious result; but we have no right to sacrifice the cause of human rights on a whole continent to please 350,000 slaveholders. We know that, in any event, the united North must protect the Southern people against the slave power. If they tear away from us now, we shall be called before twenty years to defend them against foreign invasions, servile war, and intestine anarchy. If they stay with us, we can protect them with less peril to human life, and more security in the issue.

For, come what will, the North will never desert the people of the South. It will desert the slave power that now rages against our Union and Humanity, tie it up, and leave it to be dealt with by those who know it best. But the millions of white people, our friends and neighbors, our brothers, fathers, lovers and children, inhabiting these vast areas, cannot be torn out of our hearts, or spirited by any demoniac influence beyond our guardian care. The millions of bondmen, who now till those fields, cannot be sacrificed forever to please any clique of tyrants or make the corner stone to any temple of eternal Pagan barbarism. We shall care for both, and shall do our utmost to save the whole Southern people from the dreadful perils of the present and the more fearful danger of the future. No wall of separation can be raised so high that the growing civilization of the North will not overlook it, and, like the sun in mid-heaven, shine down with beneficent rays on the just and unjust, protecting the good, succoring the fallen, regenerating the evil. O! that God would give our brothers of the South the clearness and calmness to see that Northern civilization contemplates harm to no man; is beneficent like God’s love; in truth is, in its ideal, the Love of God applied to the life of a new world.

The future is not clear, and he is a bold man who can prophecy a month ahead. It may be that we are at the end; that the slave power has conquered fifteen states and is about to lead them out into the desert of a barbaric experiment in despotic society. If so, let us not deluge our land with fraternal blood, but let them all go in peace; clinging together at home and girding ourselves up to the mighty task of finally saving them from the anarchy that surely lies across their path. Perhaps the margin of servility in the North will gain a temporary victory, and in concert with a united slave power, enact some infamous concession over our heads. Then we must only close up and move on, as in the past; for freedom repudiates all surrender to tyranny now and forever, and there must be a final victory for the right.