Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

From that time until the close of the last session of Congress, in every form in which so intrinsically wicked an idea could be set forth without shocking not only all principle, but all decency, this idea was inculcated upon the public mind of the north, especially upon the cities. In unofficial speeches and letters, Mr. Webster urged this seduction more and more pointedly and earnestly, until, on the 17th of July, 1850, in the last speech which he ever made in Congress, he appealed to the senators of the north, and to the people of the north, in language as explicit as he could make it, to adopt the compromise measures, to take even the abhorred Fugitive Slave bill itself, for the sake of the money to be made out of them. Throughout that speech he held out the apple of temptation before their eyes, he jingled the thirty pieces of silver in their ears, to seduce them into the surrender of liberty for pelf.

I appeal to the common knowledge of the citizens of Boston, if, during the last summer, it was not an expression as familiar to their lips as the salutations of the day, that they had Mr. Webster’s authority for saying, that if they would surrender the great questions involved in the compromise, they could have a tariff.

Now, on this state of facts, I have two observations to make,—

1st. That a proposition to barter or to jeopard the liberty of our fellow-beings for any amount of money, however great, was intrinsically inhuman and wicked.

2d. That every new concession we made to the south on the subject of slavery, for the sake of getting protection for our manufactures and other industrial interests, only impaired and postponed our chance of getting that protection.

For the correctness of the first of these propositions, I appeal to every man who has a conscience, or even any elementary ideas of right or wrong, which are not smothered by his interests or his passions. And for the second, I appeal to the case of Texas which defeated the tariff of ’42, and to the fact that, though we did consent to all the detestable provisions of the compromise,—slave territories, slave states, ten millions of dollars for Texas, Fugitive Slave bill, and all,—yet we get no tariff, and have now no rational prospect of one.

That the surrender of all our glorious patrimony of free principles should help to make some northern man President, I can readily understand. That is intelligible. Before the 7th of March speech, it was announced, from high southern sources, that they would take the northern man for the next presidential term who would do the most for slavery; and since that time, the same declaration has been reiterated. [See, among others, Mr. Toombs’s speech before the Georgia Union meeting.] But I state it as a fact within my own personal knowledge, that there was not an intelligent man in Congress who was not implicated, on the one side, in the manufacture of goods, or, on the other, in the manufacture of presidents, who did not then foresee and predict that every forward step we took towards the compromise was a step backwards from protection. And we now have this stubborn fact to show for the soundness of that opinion,—the event has ratified it. They have not obtained the tariff they were promised, though they have given for it the price of blood.

Now I wish to ask the manufacturers and commercial men of the north, whether, if they had seen,—as it was seen by every unbiased man at the seat of government,—that upholding the compromise would put down protection, they would have consented to the compromise? And a further question which I wish to put to all Massachusetts and all New England is, if, during the last year, we had had the tariff of 1842 in full operation, and if the current of prosperity had filled the deepest channels that enterprise and industry had cut for it, whether then Massachusetts citizens would have unsaid and retracted all the noble things they have been saying in favor of liberty for the last ten years; whether then the Massachusetts press, or so large a portion of it, would be found openly advocating doctrines which they have always heretofore professed to hold in utter detestation and abhorrence? No man will pretend it. If we had had the tariff of ’42 last year, the compromise measures never could have passed, and it would have been impossible for any presidential aspirant, or all of them together, to have subdued the northern mind to their acceptance.

The commercial and manufacturing interests of the north, then, have been deceived, grossly deceived and imposed upon. When their real interests were all on the side of freedom, they have been made to believe that it would promote those interests to unsay all they had ever said, and undo all they had ever done adverse to slavery. Their chance for a tariff lay in standing to their principles like men, and not in abandoning them like cowards. President-making has been the agency, and Cotton has been the instrument, of this deception. It has been said that the Press is the fourth estate in the realm; but I say Cotton is the fourth estate, for Cotton subdues the Press. The eyes and ears and nose and mouth of a portion of our people have been so filled with cotton, that they have come to consider cotton not only as their daily bread, but their bread of life.

Gentlemen, whatever convictions or doubts there may be on the subject of Animal Magnetism, I am a firm believer in Cotton Magnetism. The southern planter seems to possess some wizard art, unknown to the demonology of former times, by which he impregnates his bales of cotton with a spirit of inhumanity, with a contempt for all the dearest, tenderest, holiest ties that bind man to man and heart to heart; he fills them with this spirit as an electrician fills a Leyden jar, and then he sends them here; and if the man who comes within the circle of their influence is not himself filled with the strong, counteracting, disinfecting magnetism of duty and truth, of love to God and love to man, he is overcome and subdued by the infernal spell; he is brought into “communication” with the southern sorcerer, and into subjection to his will; and then he seems bereft of reason and conscience, he belies his Pilgrim parentage, talks gibberish about the dissolution of the Union, kneels, lies down, eats dirt, and says to his southern master, as Balaam’s beast said to him, “Am I not thine ass upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine?”