Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

So the preamble to their constitution must run in this wise: “We, the people of the ‘United States South,’ in order to form a more perfect conspiracy against the rights of the African race, establish injustice, insure domestic slavery, provide for holding three millions of our fellow-beings, with all the countless millions of their posterity, in bondage, and to secure to ourselves and our posterity the enjoyment of power, and luxury, and sloth, do ordain and establish this constitution for the ‘United States South.’”

Sir, should a civil war ensue between the north and the south, (which may God in his mercy avert,) in consequence of an attempt to dissolve this Union, and the certain resistance which would be made to such an attempt, it would be difficult to exaggerate the immediate evils which would befall the interests of New England and some other parts of the north. Our manufactures and our commerce would suffer at least a temporary derangement. But we have boundless resources in our enterprise and our intelligence. Knowledge and industry are recuperative energies that can never long be balked in their quest of prosperity. The people that bore the embargo of 1807, and the war of 1812, when all their capital was embarked in commerce, can survive any change that does not stop the revolution of the seasons or suspend the great laws of nature. And, when the day of peace again returns, business will again return to its old channels. The south, notwithstanding any personal hostility, will be as ready to take northern gold as though it had come from the English mint; and they will employ those first, who will do their manufacturing or their commercial labor cheapest and best. Gold is a great pacificator between nations; and, in this money-loving age, mutual interests will, in the end, subdue mutual hostilities. Our share, therefore, of the calamities of a civil war, will be mainly of a pecuniary nature. They will not be intolerable. They will invade none of the securities of home; they will not associate poison with our daily food, nor murder and conflagration with our nightly repose; nor black violation with the sanctities of our daughters and our wives.

Even in a pecuniary point of view, a dissolution of our political ties would cause less immediate and intense suffering at the north than at the south. Our laws and institutions are all framed so as to encourage the poor man, and, by education, to elevate his children above the condition of their parents; but their laws and institutions all tend to aggrandize the rich, and to perpetuate power in their hands. Were it not for the visions of horror and of bloodshed which southern threats have so intimately associated with this controversy, one remarkable feature, which has hitherto been eclipsed, would have been most conspicuous.

With every philanthropic northern man, a collateral motive for keeping the new territories free is, that they may be a land of hope and of promise to the poor man, to whichever of all our states he may belong; where he may go and find a home and a homestead and abundance. But the south, in attempting to open these territories to the slaveholders, would give them to the rich alone,—would give them to less than three hundred thousand persons out of a population of six millions. The interests of the poorer classes at the south all demand free territory, where they can go and rise at once to an equality with their fellow-citizens, which they never can do at home. They are natural abolitionists, and unless blinded by ignorance, or overawed by their social superiors, they will so declare themselves. Every intelligent and virtue-loving wife or mother, at the south, when she thinks of her husband and her sons, is forced to be an abolitionist. The attempt, therefore, to subject the new territories to the law of slavery is not made in the name of one half of the people of the United States; it is not made for the six millions, more or less, who inhabit the slave states; but it is made for less than three hundred thousand slaveholders among more than twenty millions of people.

There is one other “hazard,” sir, which the south invokes and defies, which to her high-minded and honor-loving sons, should be more formidable than all the rest. She is defying the Spirit of the Age. She is not only defying the judgment of contemporaries, but invoking upon herself the execrations of posterity. Mark the progress in the public sentiment of Christendom, within the last few centuries, on the subject of slavery and the rights of man. After the discovery of this continent by Columbus, the ecclesiastics of Spain held councils to discuss the question, whether the aborigines of this country had or had not souls to be saved. They left this question undecided; but they said, as it was possible that the nations of the new world might have an immortal spirit, they would send them the gospel, so as to be on the safe side; and the mission of Las Casas was the result. In the time of Lord Coke, only a little more than two centuries ago, the doctrine was openly avowed and held, in Westminster Hall, that the heathen had no rights; and therefore that it was lawful for Christians to drive them out of their inheritance, and to despoil them, as the Jews despoiled the Egyptians and drove out the Canaanites. During the seventeenth century, all the commercial nations of Europe engaged in the African slave trade, without compunction or reproach. In the last, or eighteenth century, the horrors of that trade were aggravated and blackened by such demoniacal atrocities, as, were it not for some redeeming attributes among men, would have made the human race immortally hateful. Even when our own constitution was formed, in 1787, this dreadful traffic was not only sanctioned, but a solemn compact was entered into, by which all prohibition of it was prohibited for twenty years. Yet, in the year 1820, after the lapse of only thirty-three years, this very trade was declared to be piracy,—the highest offence known to the law,—and the felon’s death was denounced against all principals and abettors. We are often reminded by gentlemen of the south, that, at the time of the adoption of that constitution, slavery existed in almost every state in the Union; and that some northern merchants, by a devilish alchemy, transmuted gold from its tears and blood. But can they read no lesson as to the progress of the age from the fact that all those states have since abjured slavery of their own free will; and that, at the present day, it would be more tolerable for any northern merchant, rather than to be reasonably suspected of the guilt of this traffic, to be cast into the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, seven times heated? In Europe, the tide of liberty, though meeting with obstructions from firm-seated dynasties and time-strengthened prerogative, still rises, and sweeps onward with unebbing flow. In France, revolutions follow each other in quicker and quicker succession. These revolutions are only gigantic struggles of the popular will to escape from oppression; and, at each struggle, the giant snaps a chain.

Great Britain, which in former times sent more vessels to the coast of Africa to kidnap and to transport its natives, than all the other nations of the earth together, now maintains a fleet upon the same coast to suppress the trade she so lately encouraged. Three times, during the present century, has that government escaped civil commotion by making large concessions to popular rights. Since the year 1814, written constitutions have been extorted by the people from more than three fourths of all the sovereigns of Europe. What a tempest now beats upon Austria, from all points of the compass, because, during the last season, she attempted only to half enslave the Hungarians,—because she attempted to do what, during the last century, she might have done without a remonstrance! The rights of individuals, not less than the rights of communities, have emerged from oblivion into recognition, and have become law. Penal codes have been ameliorated, and barbarous customs abolished. There are now but two places on the globe where a woman can be publicly whipped,—in Hungary and in the Southern States! And the universal scorn and hissing with which the rulers of the former country have been visited for their women-whipping, and their execution of those whose sole crime was their love of freedom, only foretoken that fiercer scorn and louder hissing with which, from all sides of the civilized world, the latter will soon be visited. Let the high-toned and chivalrous sons of the south,—those “who feel a stain upon their honor like a wound,”—think of all this, as one in the long catalogue of “hazards” upon which they are rushing.

Sir, the leading minds in a community are mainly responsible for the fortunes of that community. Under God, the men of education, of talent, and of attainment, turn the tides of human affairs. Where great social distinctions exist, the intelligence and the wealth of a few stimulate or suppress the volition of the masses. They are the sensorium of the body politic, and their social inferiors are the mighty limbs, which, for good or for evil, they wield. Such is the relation in which the three hundred thousand, or less than three hundred thousand slave owners of the south, hold to their fellow-citizens. They can light the torch of civil war, or they can quench it. But if civil war once blazes forth, it is not given to mortal wisdom to extinguish or control it. It comes under other and mightier laws, under other and mightier agencies. Human passions feed the combustion; and the flame which the breath of man has kindled, the passions of the multitude,—stronger than the breath of the hurricane,—will spread. Among these passions, one of the strongest and boldest is the love of liberty, which dwells in every bosom. In the educated and civilized, this love of liberty is a regulated but paramount desire; in the ignorant and debased, it is a wild, vehement instinct. It is an indestructible part of the nature of man. Weakened it may be, but it cannot be destroyed. It is a thread of asbestos in the web of the soul, which all the fires of oppression cannot consume.

With the creation of every human being, God creates this love of liberty anew. The slave shares it with his master, and it has descended into his bosom from the same high source. Whether dormant or wakeful, it only awaits an opportunity to become the mastering impulse of the soul. Civil war is that opportunity. Under oppression it bides its time. Civil war is the fulness of time. It is literal truth that the south fosters within its homes three millions of latent rebellions. Imbedded in a material spontaneously combustible, it laughs at fire. Has it any barriers to keep the spirit of liberty, which has electrified the Old World, from crossing its own borders, and quickening its bondmen into mutinous life?—not all of them, but one in ten thousand, one in a hundred thousand of them. If there is no Spartacus among them, with his lofty heroism and his masterly skill for attack and defence, is the race of Nat Turners extinct, who, in their religious musings, and their dumb melancholy, take the impulses of their own passions for the inspiration of God, and, after prayer and the eucharist, proceed to massacre and conflagration? In ignorant and imbruted minds, a thousand motives work which we cannot divine. A thousand excitements madden them, which we cannot control. It may be a text of Scripture, it may be the contents of a wine vault; but the result will be the same,—havoc wherever there is wealth, murder wherever there is life, violation wherever there is chastity. Let this wildfire of a servile insurrection break out in but one place in a state; nay, in but ten places, or in five places in all the fifteen states; and then, in all their length and breadth, there will be no more quiet sleep. Not Macbeth, but the angel of retribution, will “murder sleep.” The mother will clasp her infant to her breast, and, while she clasps it, die a double death. But, where will the slaves find arms? “Furor arma ministrat.” Rage will supply their weapons. Read the history of those slaves who have escaped from bondage; mark their endurance and their contrivance, and let incredulity cease forever. They have hid themselves under coverts; dug holes and burrowed in the earth for concealment; sunk themselves in ponds, and sustained life by breathing through a reed, until their pursuers had passed by; wandered in “Dismal Swamps,” far away from the habitations of men; almost fasting for forty days and forty nights, like Christ in the wilderness; crushed themselves into boxes, but of half a coffin’s dimensions, to be nailed up and transported hundreds of miles, as merchandise; and, in this horrible condition, have endured hunger and thirst, and, standing upon the head, without a groan or a sigh;—and, will men, who devise such things, and endure such things, be balked in their purposes of hope and of revenge, when the angel of destruction, in the form of the angel of liberty, descends into their breasts?

The state of slavery is always a state of war. In its deepest tranquillity, it is but a truce. Active hostilities are liable at any hour to be resumed. Civil war between the north and the south,—any thing that brings the quickening idea of freedom home to the mind of the slave; that supplies him with facilities of escape, or immunities for revenge,—will unleash the bloodhounds of insurrection. Can you muster armies in secret, and march them in secret, so that the slave shall not know that they are mustered and marched to perpetuate his bondage, and to extend the bondage of his race? Was not Major Dade’s whole command supposed to be massacred through the treachery of a slave? A foray within your borders places you in such a relation to the slave that you are helpless without him, and in danger of assassination with him. He that defends slavery by war, wars against the eternal laws of God, and rushes upon the thick bosses of Jehovah’s buckler. Such are some of the “hazards” which the leaders of public opinion at the south, the legislators and guides of men in this dark and perilous hour, are invoking upon themselves and their fellows; not for the interests of the whole, but for the fancied interests of the slaveholders alone, and against the real interest of a vast majority of the people. May God give that wisdom to the followers which he seems not yet to have imparted to the leaders.

Sir, in these remarks, I have studiously abstained from every thing that seemed to me like retaliation or unkindness. I certainly have suffered no purposed word of crimination to pass my lips. If I have uttered severe truths, I have not sought for severe language in which to clothe them. What I have said, I have said as to a brother sleeping on the brink of a precipice, where one motion of his troubled sleeping, or of his bewildered awaking, might plunge him into remediless ruin.