This was the system under which America rose and flourished, and through which she commanded the respect and admiration of the world. But as the Genius of evil wandered up and down, his eyes fell upon “my servant Job,” and—permitted to torture—he belched forth, in deep, grinding hatred, his mighty volumes of dark and malignant spite. He first planted his batteries at a great distance, and masked them in artful disguise. He commenced in an English pulpit, in the name of philanthropy, and from thence spread his fire through kings and nobles, and by degrees to commoners, until finally reaching the tory mind of America, he let forth the full volumes of his hate and his crushing powers, until he saw the blood of the nation gushing from a million of streams, and liberty weltering and struggling beneath the grinding weight of an insurmountable national debt. Thus has America fallen and her enemies triumphed through deception and design.
Experiments were numerous abroad, but had not the circle of darkness crowded up to the very tips of your noses, you would see that the experiment which you are trying, or at least pretending to try, had already been tried, and its vanity proved within the reach of your own hands, and at the very stoops of your own doors. The Eastern and Middle States, of the Union, in a spirit of mistaken philanthropy, about the close of the revolutionary war, emancipated, or rather turned their negroes loose without masters to direct them in life. Such was the action. What, then, has been the result? It is simply this: that not one of those emancipated people is now alive upon the world; nor have they—if the sphere of our own observations be an index of the whole—left a progeny equal to one tenth of their own numbers. They have died out under a mistaken liberty, while the slaves of the South have greatly outrun the multiplication of their white masters. Is this the millennium with which your experiment is to bless the negro?
You can answer the question yourselves by simply citing us to the wants of your Freedmen’s Bureau—to the mortality among the negroes—and to such scenes as that of Memphis in the winter of 1863, when four hundred out of forty thousand contrabands were daily consigned to “hospitable graves.”
Malpractice may be covered by a shroud, and the remains of African experiments overgrown with brambles; but such stupendous monuments of folly or of spite, or ulterior design, are not easily overlooked by men not interested in keeping them from public view. The negro you have started on a rapid down-hill march to the grave, and will so find his movement written in every succeeding census that will hereafter be taken in the United States. But let us turn from your follies to your sum of excuses.
You have done all, if your own words may be taken as expressive of your intentions, for the sake of that beau ideal of the world called civil or political liberty. But have you ever stopped in your career long enough to ask yourselves what such liberty is?
The German radical sees it only in equality, the toper in his drams, the brigand in his plunder, and even Mr. Wendell Phillips, whom you have followed as the sheep with the bell, has displayed but little, if any, more wisdom in his definitions. It is, he tells us, “The reservation of all natural rights with civil liberty to defend them.”
Could inconsistency be more complete? If all natural rights be retained, from whence come the civil ones? Of what materials are they made? If my natural rights be undisturbed, by what authority am I crowded from the fields of my neighbor? Did nature give him more dominion over them than she gave to me? Or, if the proposition be not as empty as the air on which it floated, by what authority did the United States government wage that war against the Southern States, for the support of which Mr. Phillips was even then, while making the utterance, haranguing the people? Did not the government assume that the Southern people had surrendered certain natural rights, which they could not, at pleasure, resume?
Sir William Blackstone, whose views have stood the abrasion of time with as much durability as any other of his fellow contributors, discusses the subject with as much clearness and precision as is, we apprehend, in any other place to be found. He divides the subject into three heads, and to each gives particular bounds—into absolute liberty, natural liberty, and that division which is called civil or political liberty.
The first—absolute liberty—he tells us is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit.”
The second—natural liberty—is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature,” and the third and last—civil liberty—is “Natural liberty so far restrained, and no farther than is essential for the public good.”