He seems also to have anticipated that flagrant sophism, which, under the guise of Popular Sovereignty, insists that men shall be at liberty—“perfectly free” is the phrase of the Nebraska Bill—to buy and sell fellow-men.
“If you will adopt the principles of Liberty, adopt them altogether. Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims might be employed, with far greater justice, in favor of the emancipation of your bondsmen. When that event shall have taken place, your demand will deserve consideration. At present, what you require under the name of Freedom is nothing but unlimited power to oppress. It is the freedom of Nero.”[10]
The threats of disunion, coming from slave-drivers, are also foreshown, and treated with the scorn they merit.
“Who can refrain from thinking of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who, while raised sixty feet from the ground on the hand of the King of Brobdignag, claps his hand on his sword and tells his Majesty that he knows how to defend himself? You will rebel!… But this is mere trifling. Are you, in point of fact, at this moment able to protect yourselves against your slaves without our assistance? If you can still rise up and lie down in security,—if you can still eat the bread of the fatherless and grind the faces of the poor,—if you can still hold your petty Parliaments, and say your little speeches, and move your little motions,—if you can still outrage and insult the Parliament and people of England,—to what do you owe it?”[11]
The sensitiveness of slave property—the same in our Slave States as in the British West Indies—is aptly described in the remark, that a pamphlet of Mr. Stephen or a speech of Mr. Brougham is sufficient to excite all the slaves in the colonies to rebel. And it is shown that in a servile war the master must be loser; for his enemies are his chattels. Whether the slave conquer or fall, he is alike lost to the owner. In the mean time, the soil lies uncultivated, the machinery is destroyed. And when the possessions of the planter are restored to him, they have been changed into a desert.[12]
Here also is an exhibition of the incompatibility between Slavery and Christianity, which ought to be read in every Southern pulpit:—
“The immorality and irreligion of the slaves are the necessary consequences of their political and personal degradation. They are not considered by the law as human beings.… They must become men before they can become Christians.… Can a preacher prevail on his hearers strictly to fulfil their conjugal duties in a country where no protection is given to their conjugal rights,—in a country where the husband and wife may, at the pleasure of the master or by process of law, be in an instant separated forever?… The great body of the colonists have resolutely opposed religious instruction; and they are in the right. They know, though their misinformed friends in England do not know, that Christianity and Slavery cannot long exist together.”[13]
Such is the philippic against Slavery by the first writer of the English language in our day, and one of the first in all times. As testimony to a sacred cause, it is priceless; as a contribution to literature, it cannot be forgotten. Why it was suppressed by American publishers, who gave us the earliest collection of Macaulay’s Essays ever printed in England or America, I know not. Unhappily, this suppression was too much in harmony with the received American system from that day to this, whether in publishing Humboldt’s work on Cuba, the Bishop of Oxford’s work on the American Church, or the engraving of Ary Scheffer’s “Christus Consolator,” from all of which the slave is shut out. That this blame may not fall upon the author himself, it is important to know that the American collection was made without any list supplied by him. In the modesty of his nature, he regarded his contributions to Reviews as fugitive pieces, which he abandoned to the world, without caring to gather them together. It will be for posterity to rejudge this judgment.
In this statement, I rely upon personal recollection of conversations with him. More than twenty years ago—as also more recently—I was in the habit of meeting the great writer in the society of London; and I remember well how, on one of these occasions, when told that an American bookseller proposed to publish a collection of his articles, he very positively protested against it, and refused to furnish a list. Nor is it out of place to add here, that, while his wonderful conversation left on the mind an ineffaceable impression of eloquence and fulness, perhaps without parallel, it also showed a character of singular integrity.
This article is not alone in attesting his sympathy with the Antislavery cause. The first public appearance of Macaulay, while yet a very young man, was at an Antislavery meeting; and one of his most stinging speeches, at the maturity of his powers, in the House of Commons, bore testimony to the depth and constancy of this sentiment.[14] This was natural; for he was son of Zachary Macaulay, one of the devoted Abolitionists who helped to carry, first, the abolition of the slave-trade, and then, at a later day, the abolition of Slavery itself, in the British dominions.