Looking at the question abstractly, these two elemental forces are nothing but Slavery and Liberty. It is superfluous to add that these are natural enemies, and cannot exist together. Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be. To uphold Slavery, there must be uncompromising denial of Liberty; to uphold Liberty, there must be uncompromising denial of Slavery. Each, in self-defence, must stifle the other. Therefore between the two is constant hostility and undying hate. This eternal warfare is not peculiar to our country. It belongs to the nature of universal man. If it fails to show itself anywhere, it is because Slavery has won its most detestable triumph, and blotted out the Heaven-born sentiment of Freedom. Circumstances among us, going back to our earliest history, have given unprecedented activity to these two incompatible principles, and have at last brought them into bloody battle, face to face. But it is only part of the universal conflict which must endure so long as a single slave shall wear a chain. Slavery itself is a state of war, ready to burst forth in blood, whenever the slave reclaims that liberty which is his right, or whenever mankind refuses to sanction its inhuman pretensions.
Go back to the earliest days of Colonial history, and you will find the conflict already preparing. It was in 1620 that twenty slaves were landed at Jamestown, in Virginia,—the first that ever pressed the soil of our country. In that same year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Those two cargoes contained the hostile germs which have ripened in our time. They fitly symbolize our gigantic strife. On one side is the slave-ship, and on the other is the Mayflower. Early events derive importance as we learn to recognize their undoubted consequences, and these two ships will be regarded with additional interest when it is seen that in them were the beginnings of the present war.
Perhaps, in all the romantic legends of the sea, there is nothing more striking than the contrast of these two vessels. Each had ventured upon an untried and perilous ocean to find an unknown and distant coast. In this they were alike; but in all else how unlike! One was freighted with human beings forcibly torn from their own country, and hurried away in chains to be sold as slaves: the other was filled with good men, who had voluntarily turned their backs upon their own country, to seek other homes, where at least they might be free. One was heavy with curses and with sorrow: the other was lifted with anthem and with prayer. And thus, at the same time, beneath the same sun, over the same waves, each found its solitary way. By no effort of imagination do we see on one Slavery and on the other Liberty, traversing the ocean to continue here, on this broad continent, their perpetual, immitigable war.
I am not alone in homage to the Mayflower. Others have delighted to picture her, and none with more of that consummate art which makes us see the petty craft transfigured by the divine cargo than an illustrious contemporary.
“Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven! poor, common-looking ship, hired by common charter-party for coined dollars; calked with mere oakum and tar; provisioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon: yet what ship Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-Gods, was other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison? Golden fleeces, or the like, these sailed for, with or without effect: thou, little Mayflower, hadst in thee a veritable Promethean spark, the life-spark of the largest nation on our earth,—so we may already name the Transatlantic Saxon Nation.”[374]
There is no record of what passed on board the slave-ship, before the landing of the slaves. The wail of Slavery, the clank of chains, and the voice of the master counting his cargo, there must have been. But the cabin of the Mayflower witnessed another scene, of which there is authentic record, as the whole company, by solemn compact, deliberately constituted themselves a body politic, and set the grand example of a Christian Commonwealth,[375]—thus indicating the character which they had claimed for themselves, as “knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other’s good, and of the whole by every one, and so mutually.”[376] And so these two voyages closed; but the two cargoes have endured, surviving successive generations.
The early social life of the two warring sections attests the prevailing influence. Virginia continued to be supplied with slaves, so that Slavery became part of herself. On the other hand, New England always set her face against Slavery. To her great honor, in an age when Slavery was less condemned than now, the Legislature of Massachusetts censured a ship-master who had “fraudulently and injuriously taken and brought a negro from Guinea,” and by solemn vote resolved that the negro should be “sent back without delay”;[377] and not long after enacted the law of Exodus, “If any man stealeth a man or man-kind, he shall surely be put to death.”[378] Thus at that early day stood Virginia and New England: for such, at that time, was the designation of the two provinces which divided British America by a line of demarcation very nearly coïncident with the recent slave-line of our Republic.
The contrast appears equally in the opposite character of their respective settlers. Like seeks like, and the Pilgrims of the Mayflower were followed by others of similar virtues, whose first labors on landing were to build churches and schools. Many of them had the best education of England; some were men of substance, and there was no poverty among them that could cause a blush; while all were most exact and exemplary in conduct. They were a branch from that grand Puritan stock, to which, according to the reluctant confession of Hume, “the English owe the whole freedom of their Constitution.”[379] We are told by Burke that there is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments, and that, where this is not happily supplied by time, it must be found in a discreet silence. But no veil is needed for the Puritan settlers of New England. It is very different with the early settlers of Virginia, recruited from the castaways and shirks of Old England, and mostly needy men, of desperate fortunes and dissolute lives, who cared nothing for churches or schools. Such naturally became slave-lords. I should not lift the veil which charity would kindly draw, if a just knowledge of their character had not become important in illustrating the origin of our troubles.