“Put that question,” replied Kenrick, “to nine tenths of the slaveholders,—men in favor of lynching, torturing, murdering, those opposed to the institution. Put it to Mr. Carson, who, the other day, in his own house, shot down an unarmed and unsuspecting visitor, because he had freely expressed views opposed to slavery. Abolitionists don’t hang men for not believing with them,—do they? But the whole code and temper of the South reply to you, that men may not differ, and shall not differ, on the subject of slavery. Onslow, give me but one thing,—and that a thing guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, though never tolerated in the Slave States,—give me liberty of the press in those States, and I, as a friend of the Union, would say to the government at Washington, ‘Put by the sword. Wait! I will put down this rebellion. I have the pen and the press! Therefore is slavery doomed, and its days are numbered.’”
“Why is it,” asked Onslow, “if slavery is wrong, that you find all the intelligence, all the culture, at the South, and even in the Border States, on its side?”
“Ah! there,” replied Kenrick, “there’s the sunken rock on which you and many other young men have made wreck of your very souls. Your æsthetic has superseded your moral natures. To work is in such shocking bad taste, when one can make others work for one!”
“Nine tenths of the men at the South of any social position,” said Onslow, “are in favor of secession.”
“I know it,” returned Kenrick, “and the sadder for human nature that it should be so! In Missouri, in Kentucky, in Virginia, in Baltimore, all the young men who would be considered fashionable, all who thoughtlessly or heartlessly prize more their social status than they do justice and right, follow the lead of the pro-slavery aristocracy. I know from experience how hard it is to break loose from those social and family ties. But I thank God I’ve succeeded. ’T was like emerging from mephitic vapors into the sweet oxygen of a clear, sun-bright atmosphere, that hour I resolved to take my lot with freedom and the right against slavery and the wrong!”
“How was your conversion effected?” asked Onslow. “Did you fall in love with some Yankee schoolmistress? I wasn’t aware you’d been living at the North.”
“I’ve never set foot in a Free State,” replied Kenrick. “My life has been passed here in Louisiana on my father’s plantation. I was bred a slaveholder, and lived one after the most straitest sect of our religion until about six months ago. See at the trunkmaker’s my learned papers in De Bow’s Review. They’re entitled ‘Slave Labor versus Free.’ Unfortunately for my admirers and disciples, there was in my father’s library a little stray volume of Channing’s writings on slavery. I read it at first contemptuously, then attentively, then respectfully, and at last lovingly and prayerfully. The truth, almost insufferably radiant, poured in upon me. Convictions were heaved up in my mind like volcanic islands out of the sea. I was spiritually magnetized and possessed.”
“What said your father?”
“My father and I had always lived more as companions than as sire and son. There is only a difference of twenty-two years in our ages. My own mother, a very beautiful woman who died when I was five years old, was six years older than my father. From her I derived my intellectual peculiarities. Of course my father has cast me off,—disowned, disinherited me. He is sincere in his pro-slavery fanaticism. I wish I could say as much of all who fall in with the popular current.”
“But what do you mean to do, Charles? ’T is unsafe for you to stay here in New Orleans, holding such sentiments.”