But it is not so where the institution of white master and negro slave exists, for there the same law of self-interest works to a different end. Wealth existing in slaves, the owner selects that order of life in which his property may be best protected and yield him the best return; consequently he eschews the city, and settles down on a plantation where both he and his negroes are alike protected against the contaminating influences of congregated luxury, poverty, and vice. For these reasons have penitentiaries been few, and poorhouses scarcely known in the Southern States, while both have been numerous and crowded from their cellars to their garrets in the North.
Why, then, have you destroyed negro slavery? and I particularly use the word negro, for no white blood should ever be held in such bondage. Are you madmen, or knaves sacrificing your country for party ends, or have you dropped from the high mentalities of your fathers down to a generation of fools?
Spite is a fierce motive power in the human mind, and when it breaks forth from a long pent up fountain, it comes forth with terrific power. So, we fear, has it been in our time. The tory, who fell with Lord North in 1776, rose again with Abraham Lincoln in 1860; and writhing under the stings of long defeat, found no bounds to his vengeance. He therefore, in the consummation of his “irrepressible conflict,” wanted “a little blood.”
But let us not be misunderstood or inappropriate in the application of names to conditions.
The tory has a character by which he may be known under all disguises, as effectually as the ass was known by his bray when clothed in the skin of the lion. He is generally a worshiper of money, and to get it and hold it to himself and his children forever, to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor, or, in his own language, to steady the ship of state, he seeks a centralization of power in a congress or in a crown.
He is the man who sees all national perfections abroad, and all imperfections at home; the man who tells you that “England did so and so”—that England abolished slavery—that England has a great national debt—that England has a subjugated Ireland, and that we, of necessity, to be great must be just like England. These points alone mark the tory. He is a centralizationist and British in his proclivities. But he has other stripes, ear-marks, and croppings by which he may be known. He is the man who governs by fraud or force, who sees wisdom in deception, and honesty as a twin sister of ignorance, and vulgar life—he is often artfully pious; but runs the nation wildly into debt, converts its property into national bonds, then steals them or divides them with his friends without the least compunction of conscience, but is shockingly horrified if some one happens to say repudiation, or, no more high tariffs, stamp duties, or excise taxes. He is often exceedingly reverential, but very forgetful when new desires conflict with old obligations. He goes into a Know-nothing lodge, swears immortal hatred to all foreigners, and particularly to that division of our species whom he has politely styled “the d—d Dutch,” and also in the same obligation swears unchanging fidelity to his native brother, but, on the next day, joins in a crusade with these very identical “d—d Dutch” to murder and destroy those very men whom, on the day preceding, he as arduously swore ever to defend and never to desert.
He is the man who steals the goods, and then diverts attention by crying “stop thief!”—the man who has revolutionized our government, without incurring the responsibility of a rebellion.
His views vary exceedingly under the influence of the stand-point which he occupies as a member of the ins or of the outs. Under one condition, he sees the bonds of our federal Union as “a league with hell and a covenant with death,” and, in some individualities, “struggles for sixteen years to get fifteen States out of it.” But under the other, he becomes more Union than Union itself—runs forth, with his mouth wide open, shouting his devotions with all the power of his lungs, and with a rope in his hand to hang all persons whose roaring capacities are not equal to his own.
He also, under one condition, sees our “star-spangled banner” as “a flaunting lie,” and a “hated rag.” But under the other, lashes himself into a blazing fury, and breathes forth blood, and murder, and annihilation against his own countrymen—but not against foreigners—who dare to insult that time-honored emblem of a great nation’s pride, liberty and honor.
He is the man who divided our country into two party sections, because he had power in the one and not in the other; then held his Convention at Chicago, and, as a war challenge to the other section, nominated his candidates in a wigwam, with a bowie-knife eight feet long, hanging over his speaker’s chair.