Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

For this noble sentiment of liberty our later fathers encountered the perils and deaths of a seven years’ war, and amid poverty and destitution, amid hunger and cold and nakedness, without any of the protections and defences of battle which the wealth of their foe could command, they bared their noble breasts to the shock of the mailed legions of the British crown. And when the struggle was ended and the triumph won, they achieved labors of peace not less magnanimous and wonderful than their labors of war.

They were the pattern men of the world;—not aggressive, not submissive; not hostile, not servile; doing right, demanding right; they were the men who would never wield the oppressor’s rod, and would go mad at the touch of his heel.

Now, there is not one of all those glorious deeds, from the embarkation at Delfthaven to the signing of the peace of 1783, or the inauguration of the federal government in 1789, which was not begotten by the love of liberty, or would have been performed without its creative energy. And yet, the arch-apostate, standing in the city of Boston, the home of old Samuel Adams and John Hancock, within a stone’s throw of the spot where Benjamin Franklin was born, in sight of Bunker Hill, and with Lexington and Concord, as it were, just hiding themselves behind the hills for shame, calls all this a “prejudice,” and commands us to cast it from us as an unclean thing. Was it not enough to make the stones in the streets, and every block in that eternal shaft which marks the spot where Warren fell, cry out “with most miraculous organ” to rebuke him?

We have another, and it is a kindred “prejudice.” We have a “prejudice” of sixty years’ standing in favor of the principle of the ordinance of 1787. That ordinance has been cherished in our memories, it has been taught to our children, and we have displayed it before the world both as the pledge and the promise of our devotion to liberty. Five states, now numbering five millions of men, were the battalions whom that ordinance wheeled from the ranks of Belial to the Lord’s side. Hundreds of times have the Whig party and the Democratic party resolved that the principle of that ordinance should be maintained inviolate. Mr. Webster claimed the application of it to the new territories, as his thunder, and swaggered as he rattled it. Now he calls the great achievement of Thomas Jefferson and Nathan Dane a “prejudice,” and dishonors their graves by his scoffs. He abandons the vast regions of Utah and New Mexico to the slaveholder; he gives more than fifty thousand square miles of free territory to Texas; he gives ten millions of dollars in money, (more than, with all our devotion and self-sacrifice, we have been able to appropriate to public education in Massachusetts for the last ten years;) and worse than this, he gives permission that she may carve out of her territory a slave state additional to what had been unconstitutionally contracted for when she came into the Union.

And for what does he flout us, by stigmatizing all these sacred convictions and sentiments and instincts as “prejudices”? Only to feed the famine of his ambition. He began to see, what every body else has so long seen, that his vices were bringing upon him the retribution of premature old age and decrepitude; and that, unless he could enter the White House the next term, he must wait, at least until the great Julian period should bring the world round again. He parleyed with southern tempters, and fell.

Nor did he outrage our feelings only. He sacrificed our pecuniary interests, our very means of subsistence. Massachusetts would be prospering under an improved system of protection for our domestic industry to-day, but for Mr. Webster’s apostasy, which stripped us of all our power and of all our unity, and inflamed the spirit of southern aggrandizement to demand every thing and yield nothing. Could the issue be now formed, and the case tried, whether Daniel Webster’s course in 1850 did not deprive the working-men of the country of a tariff for the protection of their labor, not an intelligent and impartial jury could be found that would not bring him in guilty. This result every unbiased man at Washington saw, last summer; while he was cajoling the men of the north with the delusion that, if they would surrender liberty, they should have their reward in a tariff. I speak of this with confidence, because there are hundreds of my constituents and acquaintances who will bear me witness that, in personal interviews, and by correspondence, they were warned, that if they followed Mr. Webster in his recreancy to principles, he would leave them without relief in the matter of property.

Fellow-citizens, I will trespass upon your attention but for a moment longer. I wish to advance one idea for the consideration of all sober, moral, and religious men; and when this idea is duly considered, I trust to its working a revolution in public sentiment. In selecting men to be our political leaders, we have sometimes committed the gravest moral error. We have assumed the falsity of a distinction between a man’s public and his private life. We have supposed that the same individual might be a bad man and a good citizen; might be a patriot and an inebriate, a faithful officer and a debauchee, at the same time; might serve his country during “office hours,” and the powers of darkness the rest of the twenty-four. But I say, as of old, no man can serve God and mammon.

We have been too prone to judge of men by their professions and by their connections. We seem to have forgotten that the tree is to be known by its fruit, and a man by his life. If we are to take the Pharisee’s rule, and determine a man’s piety by his creed, and by the number and length of his prayers, then piety will be the cheapest thing in the market, and as worthless as it is cheap.

In choosing teachers to be the guides and exemplars of our children, we demand high moral worth; and we would as soon thrust our youth into the centre of pestilence, as amid the contagion of vicious and profligate men.

In selecting our religious guides, we feel almost justified in being captiously and morbidly critical; we hardly admit that we can be strict to a fault; and the man who fails to carry personal purity and exemplariness into the pastoral life, is driven from it with indignation and contempt.