CHAPTER XLIII
We returned from Washington to New York, for much was going on in the metropolis. The newspapers day by day were full of Douglas and his difficulties in Chicago. The common council had adopted a resolution censuring Douglas, calling the Clay Compromises a violation of the laws of God. The aldermen of Chicago must have been affected by the religious psychology which was now sweeping the country.
We read that Douglas had heard that a mass-meeting was about to indorse the resolution of the city council; he had gone to the hall to defend himself and had been greeted by hisses and catcalls. He had faced his hecklers, forced them to adjourn until he could address them; then he had addressed them, carried them by storm and procured the resolutions to be expunged.
Evidently the city council did not understand the Clay Compromises. Or had Douglas' oratory swept them off their feet? It may not be a pleasing sight to see a slave returned to its master, but what are you going to do with the law? Are you willing to violate the Constitution for the negro? A heckler asked him: "Are not the provisions of the Constitution respecting the return of a fugitive slave a violation of the law of God?" Douglas was quick to reply: "The divine law does not prescribe the form of government under which we shall live, and the character of our political and civil institutions. Revelation has not furnished us with a constitution, a code of international law, and a system of civil and municipal jurisprudence. If this Constitution is to be repudiated for the law of God, who is to be the prophet to reveal the will of God and establish a theocracy for us?"
I began to think of this law of God. Men are always reaching for it. Sometimes it is only a club for interest or revenge. You have offended me. God will punish you. If God was opposed to slavery he could have prevented it in the beginning and He could terminate it now. Perhaps Douglas thought of this when saying that God had not provided a code of municipal law. If He had, He could have written freedom into the Constitution. Douglas was at least sure that he knew as much about the law of God as Garrison or Seward, or abolitionist lecturers in back halls.
De Tocqueville had written that "America is the country of the whole world where the question of religion has asserted the most real power over the souls of men." The ringing of church bells, church going, revivals, the calling upon God to note and punish sin, pervaded the country and the cities. The Bible was a textbook of God's thinking. It justified slavery in the South; it encouraged abolitionism in the North; it suggested interference and regimentation; it counseled forgiveness and vengeance.
At this time in New York one could not turn or pick up the most casual publication without finding something in the nature of a moral propagandum. At breakfast I read from the New York Independent that "Rum, profaneness and Sabbath breaking always go together." The editor was "sorry to find that the stockholders of the Saratoga railroad still run their cars upon the Sabbath. It is an odious and monstrous violation, not only of the laws of God, but of all the decencies of Christian society. And yet I had noticed ladies traveling in them, thundering into Saratoga on the Lord's Day. Women traveling in a public conveyance on the Sabbath. There is something in this peculiarly degrading and shameful. It ought to be only the lowest of the sex that would stoop to such debasement." And another paper said: "We are sorry to learn that the directors have established an accommodation train for Sunday morning between this city and Poughkeepsie, in addition to the mail train to Albany. Mr. James Boorman, through whose efficient service as President the road was mainly built, has resigned his office as director and has addressed a firm remonstrance to the Board against this impiety."
This was the time in which Douglas was now working. Every one knew what the law of God was. Every one appealed to the Bible as God's word. For much of this Douglas had perfect contempt; and he was quick to sense a taint of it in Seward, or any one whom it had infected. Such men as Stephens of the South were insisting now that the real intellect-of the North cared nothing about slavery, and only used it to masquerade their centralizing plots. If local self-government could be extinguished for the purposes of abolition why not for anything, in behalf of which a moral enthusiasm could be evoked? Why not a constitutional amendment establishing a state religion? Why not a state religion under the present constitutional clause which makes provision for the general welfare?
One day when Dorothy and I were seated at Niblo's at luncheon I felt some one touch my shoulder. I looked up and saw Aldington, back of him Abigail, who was laughing at my expression of surprise. We all broke into exclamations. They had just returned from Europe. They joined us in the meal; and there was scarcely enough time to tell back and forth all that was of mutual interest. He saw me with the Independent and began to rally me. "Did you know," he said, "that the early Puritans in New England were the progenitors of one third of the whole population of the United States by 1834? They constitute one half of the population of the states of Ohio and New York now, and they have gone into the northwest. They will make trouble for your Douglas. I admit that they have blighted art and hobbled literature. They have expurgated Shakespeare, they have fought the theater, they are always ready for the moral battle. They know what God wants better than anybody. In a sense they are hounds in pursuit of a lot of things in the great hunt of life. They are a stubborn lot. It will be hard to take away from them anything that is their own, and also to keep them from destroying anything that they don't want."