Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

Having shown how the “redress” of disunion will operate upon one of the grievances alleged as its motive and excuse, let us look at another of those “hazards,” whose list, of indefinite length, the south is so willing to brave. In case of rebellion or secession, to whom will the territories belong? It is the rule of political as well as of municipal law, that whoever retires from a community, leaves its common property behind him. I have a direct interest and proprietorship in the church in my parish, in the schoolhouse in my town, and in the state-house and other public property belonging to my state. But if I expatriate myself, I leave all that interest and proprietorship behind me. If the county of Brooke, in Virginia, should secede from the State of Virginia, and should annex itself to Ohio or Pennsylvania, no one doubts that it would forfeit all its rights to whatever public property the State of Virginia possesses. In like manner, if the “United States South”—as the new confederacy has already been named by the “Richmond Enquirer,”—should secede, they would, by the very act of secession, surrender and abandon all right, title, and interest in the new territories. By such secession, all their citizens become foreigners. They have no rights under the treaty with Mexico. The new Spanish citizen, whose allegiance was transferred by the treaty with Mexico, and whose citizenship is not yet two years old, would have a right to expel them. The “United States South,” it is true, may declare war, and attempt the conquest of the territories by force; but in such a contest, the army and navy and military stores of the government, which, also, they have lost by secession, will be turned against them. But, I venture to prophesy, that if the slave states shall pass through one war, single-handed, they will afterwards be the most peaceable nation the world ever saw. To every frontier country and to every naval power, they have given three millions of hostages for their good behavior.

Let us look at a third grievance they mean to redress, and a third “hazard” they are ready to encounter. They complain of northern agitation on the subject of slavery, and northern instigation of the slaves themselves. On the subject of “agitation,” I deny that the north has ever overstepped the limits of their constitutional rights. They have never agitated the question of slavery in the states. It has been only in regard to slavery in this District, or the annexation of Texas, or the acquisition of territory for the extension of slavery, or the imprisonment of her own citizens in southern ports, or a denial of the inviolable right of petition;—it has been only on such subjects that the north has lifted up the voice of expostulation and remonstrance. Even these constitutional rights she has used forbearingly. She has never exerted force, nor threatened force, either to maintain the right of petition or to liberate her own citizens imprisoned in southern jails.

In regard to instigating slaves to escape, I acknowledge there have been some instances of it; but they have been few. The perpetrators have been tried and severely punished, and the north has acquiesced; for they acknowledge that, if a man will go into a slave state and violate its laws, he must be judged by them. But I have never known of a single case,—I believe there is no well-authenticated case on record,—where a northern man has instigated the slaves to rise in rebellion, and to retaliate upon their masters for the wrongs which they and their race have suffered. As I dread indiscriminate massacre and conflagration, I should abhor the perpetrator of such a crime. But will separation bring relief or security? No, sir; it will enhance the danger a myriad fold. Thousands will start up, who will think it as much a duty and an honor to assist the slaves in any contest with their masters, as to assist Greeks, or Poles, or Hungarians, in resisting their tyrants. Two things exist at the north which the south does not duly appreciate,—the depth and intensity of our abhorrence of slavery, and that reverence for the law which keeps it in check. The latter counterpoises the former. We are a law-abiding people. But release us from our obligations, tear off from the bond with your own hands the signatures which bind our consciences and repress our feelings, destroy those compensations which the world and which posterity would derive from a continuance of this Union, and well may you tremble for the result. I have seen fugitive slaves at the north, and heard from their own lips the dreadful recital of their wrongs: and if I am any judge of the natural language of men; if I can divine from the outward expression what passions are burning within, each one of them had a hundred conflagrations and a hundred massacres in his bosom. They felt as you and I should feel if we had been subjected to Algerine bondage. And do you doubt, sir, does any southern gentleman on this floor doubt, for one moment, that if he were seized by a Barbary corsair and sold into Algerine bondage, and carried a hundred miles into the interior, that he would improve the first opportunity to escape, though at every step in his flight he should crush out a human life, and should leave an ever-widening expanse of conflagration behind him? If agitation and instigation are evils now, woe to those who would seek to mitigate or to repress them by the remedies of disunion and civil war. Let men who live in a powder-mill beware how they madden pyrotechnists.

But it is said that if dissolution occurs, the “United States South” can form an alliance with Great Britain. And are there no instigators and abolitionists in England? Yes, sir, ten in England where there is one at the north. Frederick Douglass has just returned from England, where he has enjoyed the honors of an ovation. William Wells Brown, another fugitive slave, is now travelling in England. His journeys from place to place are like the “progresses” of one of the magnates of that land,—passing wherever he will with free tickets, and enjoying the hospitalities of the most refined and educated men. The very last steamer brought out an account of his public reception at Newcastle. An entertainment was given him which was attended by four hundred ladies and gentlemen. Men of high distinction and character adorned it by their presence. The ladies made up a purse of twenty sovereigns, which they gave him. It was presented in a beautiful purse that one of their number,—the successful competitor for the honor,—had wrought with her own hands. All their generosity and kindness they considered as repaid by hearing from his own lips the pathetic story of his captivity and the heroism of his escape. Sir, every man who has travelled in England knows that there are large, wealthy, and refined circles there, no member of which would allow a slaveholder to sit at his table or enter his doors. Not only churches, but moral and religious men, the world over, have begun to read slaveholders out of their communion and companionship. If the south expects to rid itself of agitation and abolitionism by rupturing its bonds with the north and substituting an alliance with Great Britain for our present constitution, they may envy the wisdom of the geese who invited the fox to stand sentinel over them while they slept. Northern interference will increase a hundred fold; and the whole power and wealth of British abolitionism, not only founded on moral principle but nursed by national pride, will be brought to bear directly upon them.

I said that the slave does not know much of geography; but he understands enough of it to know where lies the free frontier. The slave does not know much of astronomy; but there is one star in the firmament which is dearer to him than all the heavenly host were to the Chaldeans. He worships the north star with more than Persian idolatry. But let the south form commercial alliances with Great Britain; let the carrying trade be carried on in British vessels; and the slave will find a star in the east as beautiful to his eye, and as inspiring to his hopes, as the star in the north.

Is the case of the Amistad forgotten, where a few ignorant, degraded wretches, fresh from the jungles of benighted Africa herself, seized upon the vessel in which they were transported, and compelled the master, under peril of his life, to steer for the north star,—that light which God kindled in the heavens, and which he will as soon extinguish as he will extinguish the love of liberty which he has kindled in every human breast?

And will a slave, escaping to Great Britain, or to any of her colonial possessions, be reclaimable? Examine Somerset’s case for an answer. No, sir. Neither the third clause of the second section of the fourth article of the constitution, nor the law of 1793, will ever be extended over the Three Kingdoms or their dependencies.

It surely is not beneath the dignity of the place or the occasion to look at another of those “hazards” which the south are invoking. They are proud of their past history, and I doubt not their reflecting and patriotic men are at least reasonably solicitous of their future fame. When they meet in august council to inaugurate the great event of establishing an independent confederacy of slave states, and of dissolving the political bands which now unite them with us, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” will “require them to declare the causes which had impelled them to the separation.” And will they find a model for their manifesto in that glorious Declaration of American Independence which their own immortal Jefferson prepared, and to which many of the greatest of all their historic names are subscribed? Alas, they will have to read that Declaration, as the devil reads Scripture, backwards! I know not what may be the rhetorical terms and phrases of the new Declaration, but I do know that its historic form and substance cannot be widely different from this:—

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that men are not created equal; that they are not endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that white men, of the Anglo-Saxon race, were born to rob, and tyrannize, and enjoy, and black men, of the African race, to labor, and suffer, and obey; that a man, with a drop of African blood in his veins, has no political rights, and therefore shall never vote; that he has no pecuniary rights, and therefore whatever he may earn or receive, belongs to his master; that he has no judicial rights, and therefore he shall never be heard as a witness to redress wrong, or violence, or robbery, committed by white men upon him; that he has no parental rights, and therefore his children may be torn from his bosom, at the pleasure or caprice of his owner; that he has no marital rights, and therefore his wife may be lawfully sold away into distant bondage, or violated before his eyes; that he has no rights of mind or of conscience, and therefore he shall never be allowed to read or to think, and all his aspirations for improvement shall be extinguished; that he has no religious rights, and therefore he shall never read the Bible; that he has no heaven-descended, God-given rights of freedom, and therefore he and his posterity shall be slaves forever. We hold that governments were instituted among men to secure and fortify this ascendency of one race over another; that this ascendency has its foundation in force ratified by law, and in ignorance and debasement inflicted by intelligence and superiority; and when any people, with whom we are politically associated, would debar us from propagating our doctrines or extending our domination into new realms and over free territories, it becomes our duty to separate from them, and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind,—friends when they make slaves, enemies when they make freemen.”

I say, sir, of whatever words and phrases the southern “Magna Charta” may consist, this, or something like this, must be its substance and reality.