Look at it candidly, and you cannot deny that it must produce an effect. It is idle to say that its influence will be bounded by our jurisdiction. When the mill-gates are lifted, all the water above, in its most distant sources, starts on its way; and so will the slaves. Remote kingdoms trembled at the Pope’s excommunication and interdict, and an elegant historian has described the thunders of the Vatican intermingling with the thunders of war. Christendom shook when Luther nailed his theses on the church-door of Wittenberg. An appeal to our slaves will be hardly less prevailing. Do you ask how it would be known? The fall of Troy, long before our telegraph, was flashed by beacon-fires from Mount Ida to Argos. The slave telegraph is not as active as ours, but it is hardly less sure. It takes eight days for a despatch from Fortress Monroe to the Gulf of Mexico. The glad tidings of Freedom will travel with the wind, with the air, with the light, quickening and inspiring the whole mass. Secret societies of slaves, already formed, will be among the operators. That I do not speak without authority, please listen to the words of John Adams, taken from his Diary, under date of 24th September, 1775.
“These gentlemen [Georgia delegates] give a melancholy account of the state of Georgia and South Carolina. They say, that, if one thousand regular troops should land in Georgia, and their commander be provided with arms and clothes enough, and proclaim freedom to all the negroes who would join his camp, twenty thousand negroes would join it from the two provinces in a fortnight. The negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves: it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight.”[127]
This is testimony. The destructive avalanche of the Alps is sometimes started by the winding of a horn, and a structure so irrational as Slavery will tremble at a sound.
From such appeal two things must ensue. First, the slaves will be encouraged in loyalty; and, secondly, the masters will be discouraged in disloyalty. Slave labor, which is the mainspring and nursery of Rebel supplies, without which the Rebellion must starve, will be disorganized, while a panic spreads among slave-masters absent from their homes. The most audacious Rebels will lose their audacity, and, instead of hurrying forward to deal parricidal blows at their country, will hurry backward to defend their own firesides. The Rebellion will lose its power. It will be hamstrung.
That such a panic would ensue is attested by the confession of the South Carolina delegation in the old Continental Congress, as appears by its Secret Journal, under date of 29th March, 1779, that this State was “unable to make any effectual efforts with militia, by reason of the great proportion of citizens necessary to remain at home to prevent insurrections among the negroes, and to prevent the desertion of them to the enemy.”[128] It is attested, also, by the concurring testimony of Southern men in other days, especially in those remarkable words of John Randolph: “The night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the frightened mother does not hug her infant the more closely to her bosom, not knowing what may have happened.”[129] It is attested also by the actual condition of things when John Brown entered Virginia, as pictured in familiar words:—
“He captured Harper’s Ferry
With his nineteen men so few,
And he frightened Old Virginny