Nor do we quite understand Mrs. Chapman's giving to Miss Martineau the credit of being the cause of the petition for the pardon of Abner Kneeland; as his conviction, and the consequent petition, did not take place until she had been nearly two years out of the country. And why does Mrs. Chapman select for special contempt, as unfaithful to their duty to mankind, the Unitarian ministers? Why does she speak of "the cowardly ranks of American Unitarians" with such peculiar emphasis? It is not our business here to defend this denomination; but we cannot but recall the "Protest against American Slavery" prepared and signed in 1845 by one hundred and seventy-three Unitarian ministers, out of a body containing not more than two hundred and fifty in all. And it was this body which furnished to the cause some of its most honored members. Of those who have belonged to the Unitarian body, we now recall the names of such persons as Samuel J. May, Samuel May, Josiah Quincy, John Quincy Adams, John Pierpont, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, John G. Palfrey, John P. Hale, Dr. and Mrs. Follen, Theodore Parker, John Parkman, John T. Sargent, James Russell Lowell, Wm. H. Furness, Charles Sumner, Caleb Stetson, John A. Andrew, Lydia Maria Child, Dr. S. G. Howe, Horace Mann, T. W. Higginson. So much for the "cowardly ranks of American Unitarians."
The last years of Miss Martineau were happy and peaceful. She had a pleasant home at Ambleside, on Lake Windermere. She had many friends, was conscious of having done a good work, and if she had no hopes in the hereafter, neither had she any fears concerning it. She was a strong, upright, true-hearted woman; one of those who have helped to vindicate "the right of women to learn the alphabet."
[THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SLAVE POWER IN AMERICA][48]
On the first day of January, 1832, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in the office of Samuel E. Sewall in Boston, the abolition of slavery through any such agency seemed impossible. Almost all the great interests of the country were combined to defend and sustain the system. The capital invested in slaves amounted to at least one thousand millions of dollars. This vast pecuniary interest was rapidly increasing by the growing demand for the cotton crop of the Southern States—a demand which continually overlapped the supply. The whole political power of the thirteen slave States was in the hands of the slaveholders. No white man in the South, unless he was a slaveholder, was ever elected to Congress, or to any important political position at home. The two great parties, Whig and Democrat, were pledged to the support of slavery in all its constitutional rights, and vied with each other in giving to these the largest interpretation. By a constitutional provision, which could not be altered, the slave States had in Congress, in 1840, twenty-five more Representatives in proportion to their number of voters than the free States. By the cohesion of this great political and pecuniary interest the slaveholders, though comparatively few in number, were able to govern the nation. The Presidents, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, the two great political parties, the press of the country, the mercantile interest, and that mysterious force which we call society, were virtually in the hands of the slaveholders. Whenever their privileges were attacked, all these powers rallied to their defense. Public opinion, in the highest circles of society and in the lowest, was perfectly agreed on this one question. The saloons of the Fifth Avenue and the mob of the Five Points were equally loyal to the sacred cause of slavery. Thus all the great powers which control free states were combined for its defense; and the attempt to assail this institution might justly be regarded as madness. In fact, all danger seemed so remote, that even so late as 1840 it was common for slaveholders to admit that property in man was an absurdity and an injustice. The system itself was so secure, that they could afford to concede its principle to their opponents. Just as men formerly fought duels as a matter of course, while frankly admitting that it was wrong to do so,—just as at the present time we concede that war is absurd and unchristian, but yet go to war continually, because we know no other way of settling international disputes,—so the slaveholders used to say, "Slavery is wrong; we know that: but how is it to be abolished? What can we do about it?"
Such was the state of things in the United States less than half a century ago. On one side was an enormous pecuniary interest, vast political power, the weight of the press, an almost unanimous public opinion, the necessities of commerce, the authority of fashion, the teachings of nearly every denomination in the Christian church, and the moral obligations attributed to the sacred covenants of the fathers of the Republic. On the other side there were only a few voices crying in the wilderness, "It is unjust to claim property in man." The object of the work before us is to show how, after the slave power had reached this summit of influence, it lost it all in a single generation; how, less by the zeal of its opponents than by the madness of its defenders, this enormous fabric of oppression was undermined and overthrown; and how, in a few years, the insignificant handful of antislavery people brought to their side the great majority of the nation.
Certainly a work which should do justice to such a history would be one of the most interesting books ever written. For in this series of events everything was involved which touches most nearly the mind, the conscience, the imagination, and the heart of man. How many radical problems in statesmanship, in political economy, in ethics, in philosophy, in theology, in history, in science, came up for discussion during this long controversy! What pathetic stories of suffering, what separation of families, what tales of torture, what cruelty grown into a custom, what awful depths of misery, came continually to light, as though the judgment-day were beginning to dawn on the dark places of the earth! What romances of adventure, what stories of courage and endurance, of ingenuity in contrivance, of determination of soul, were listened to by breathless audiences as related by the humble lips of the fugitives from bondage! How trite and meagre became all the commonplaces of oratory before the flaming eloquence of these terrible facts! How tame grew all the conventional rhetoric of pulpit and platform, by the side of speech vitalized by the immediate presence of this majestic argument! The book which should reproduce the antislavery history of those thirty years would possess an unimagined charm.
We cannot say that Mr. Wilson's volumes do all this, nor had we any right to expect it. He proposes to himself nothing of the sort. What he gives us is, however, of very great value. It is a very carefully collected, clearly arranged, and accurate account of the rise and progress, decline and catastrophe, of slavery in the United States. Mr. Wilson does not attempt to be philosophical like Bancroft and Draper; nor are his pages as picturesque as are those of Motley and Carlyle. He tells us a plain unvarnished tale, the interest of which is to be found in the statement of the facts exactly as they occurred. Considering that it is a story of events all of which he saw and a large part of which he was, there is a singular absence of prejudice. He is no man's enemy. He has passed through the fire, and there is no smell of smoke on his garments. An intelligent indignation against the crimes committed in defense of the system he describes pervades his narrative. His impartiality is not indifference, but an absence of personal rancor. Individuals and their conduct are criticised only so far as is necessary to make clear the course of events and the condition of public feeling. The defenders of slavery at the North and South are regarded not as bad men, but as the outcome of a bad system.
Mr. Wilson's book is a treasury of facts, and will never be superseded so far as this peculiar value is concerned. In this respect it somewhat resembles Hildreth's "History of the United States." Taking little space for speculation, comment, or picturesque coloring, there is all the more room left for the steady flow of the narrative.