He is the man who converted the pulpit into a political rostrum, and from it, in the name of religion, preached politics and sectarian and sectional spite.
He is the man who is always humble in defeat, but who, when successful, never gets done kicking a fallen foe.
He changes nature (in his own estimation) by changing names; but is here no way punctilious in regard to proprieties. He says “Colored People”—can’t say Negro, for that would be paying too much respect to nature’s divisions; therefore, he adopts, and clings to the prefix colored, though his philosophy of light tells him that black is not a color, but the absorption of all colors and the reflection of none. If he were honest he would here pause; but the deception is the very thing which alone sweetens the morsel to his tongue: for, by saying “colored people,” he may so work on the imagination of some fool, as to make him believe, that all that divides the negro from the Caucasian is merely the exterior shade or color of his skin.
He is deceptious and often pretentiously pious; but, in addition to both, is excessively malignant, and hates from the very bottom of his soul, wherein is generated the deepest spite, which, in its struggle for vent from its dark-vaulted, heaving and burning interior, bursts forth with such fulminations as “Copperhead” and “Locofoco.” They are the effusions of his own soul—display his own character, and, by their escape, give him relief.
He was for the Union when the Southern States wished to get out of it; and against the Union when they wished to be counted in. Thus is he a good Christian—by being all things to all men.
He is sufficiently variable to be counted among the progressive species; for, like his brother, the dandy, he changes his clothing with every change of fashion. At one time he is a federal, at another a national republican, at another a whig, at another a republican without a prefix, and at another, par excellence, a Union man. Thus does he change, in his exterior, with times and fashions. But follow him back to his nakedness, and you will always find him a centralizationists, and an admirer of English polity, or an English church, or an English crown. He will be somewhere lurking under the curtain, and, although the way be dark and mysterious, wherever you hear the spiteful utterances of “Copperhead” or “Locofoco,” or kindred fulminations, or the soft and plaintive whispers of “Colored People,” you may know that you are in the right course to that dark nucleus of many exteriors known to our revolutionary dialect as the American tory.
This explains what we mean by a term which otherwise might be regarded as improper or inappropriate in these connections. But let us return from so long a digression.
Our bird of liberty has already flown to the mountains, and left us, not independent, as we are wont to be, but dependent—dependent for American labor on European hands, and through that dependence and other kindred relations—the result of kindred policies—subject to the European mind in our affairs of State. This is all the result of unwise legislation. But it began long anterior to present time; still to you has been reserved the infliction of the most fatal of all inflicted blows. You have, as already noticed, converted four millions of laborers into four millions of vagabonds—have transformed or inverted them from a natural to an unnatural condition, and there left them to pay the penalty of your own crimes, by a rapid decline and ultimate extinction. You have forced our American youth to unequal competition in the field of labor, and not contented with holding our delicate-muscled American women—the most beautiful, I have not a doubt, beneath the sun, and designed by nature for ladies to command—to an unequal conflict with the heavy armed laboring woman of the old world; but you have forced them to a still more unequal and degraded conflict with the gross and insensitive negroes, yet wavering between imposed civilization and native barbarism.
You have destroyed our own kindred that you may give their lands away to immigrants from abroad—to a people of another continent, who even now darken the seas with their numbers, on their ways to receive and appropriate to themselves homes made desolate by your destruction of American men, women, and children. You will not deny the impeachment, but will interpose your plea of loyalty—the plea of the tory over three quarters of a century ago—but can you hide the fact that, had there been no abolitionists there would have been no secessionists or secession?
But the battle is over, and we may now count the loss, and in the sequel see how effectually your blows have rebounded to the injury of all sections, both North and South. You have destroyed a million of our most valuable men, and imposed upon us a debt of three thousand millions of dollars—the heaviest burden, computing its interest at but six percent, while England’s draws but three, that now bears on any people in the known world. But even this, though great beyond indurance, for neither principal nor interest ever can be paid, is not the greatest of the afflictions which you have imposed upon us: you have destroyed the unity of sections, and killed our own goose that laid our golden eggs. This a few figures will effectually explain.