Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

"Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If't be so,
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind,
For them the gracious Duncan have I murthered,
Put rancors in the vessel of my peace.
... To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!
Rather than so, come fate into the list,
And champion me to the utterance."

When Napoleon the First was master of nearly all Europe, he could not be satisfied while England resisted his power, and Russia had not submitted to it. So he also said,—

"Rather than so, come fate into the list,
And champion me to the utterance."

He also threw away all his immense power because he could not arrest his own course or limit his own demands on fate. Such ambitions cannot stop, so long as there is anything unconquered or unpossessed. "All this avails me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." The madness which seizes those greedy of power is like the passion of the gamester, who is unable to limit his desire of gain. By this law of insatiable ambition Providence equalizes destinies, and power is prevented from being consolidated in a few hands.

The motive which actuates these ambitions, and makes them think that nothing is gained so long as anything remains to be gained, seems to be a secret fear that they are in danger of losing all unless they can obtain more.

This inward dread appears to have possessed the hearts of the Southern slaveholders. Since slavery has been abolished, many of them admit that they have more content in their present poverty than they formerly had in their large possessions. They were then sensitive to every suggestion which touched their institution. Hence their persecution of Abolitionists, hence their cruelty to the slaves themselves,—for cruelty is often the child of fear. Hence the atrocity of the slave laws. Hence the desire to secure more and larger guaranties from the United States for their institution. Every rumor in the air troubled them. The fact that antislavery opinion existed at the North, that it was continually increasing, that a great political party was growing up which was opposed to their system, that such men as Garrison and Wendell Phillips existed in Boston, that Seward and Sumner were in the Senate,—all this was intolerable. The only way of accounting for Southern irritability, for Southern aggressions, for its perpetual demand for more power, is to be found in this latent terror. They doubted whether the foundations of their whole system were not rotten; they feared that it rested on falsehood and lies; they secretly felt that it was contrary to the will of God; an instinct in their souls told them that it was opposed to the spirit of the age and the laws of progress; and this fear made them frantic.

When men's minds are in this state, they are like the glass toy called a Rupert's bubble. A single scratch on the surface causes it to fly in pieces. The scratch on the surface of the slave system which caused it to rush into secession and civil war was the attempt of John Brown on Harper's Ferry. It seemed a trifle, but it indicated a great deal. It was the first drop of a coming storm. When one man was able to lay down his life, in a conflict with their system, with such courage and nobleness, in a cause not his own, a shudder ran through the whole South. To what might this grow? And so they said, "Let us cut ourselves wholly off from these dreadful fanaticisms, from these terrible dangers. Let us make a community of our own, and shut out from it entirely all antislavery opinion, and live only with those who think as we do." And so came the end.

In reviewing Mr. Wilson's work, we have thus seen how it describes the gradual and simultaneous growth in the United States of two hostile powers,—one political, the other moral. The one continued to accumulate the outward forces which belong to the organization; the other, the inward forces which are associated with enthusiasm. The one added continually to its external strength by the passage of new laws, the addition of new territory, the more absolute control of parties, government, courts, the press, and the street. The other increased its power by accumulating an intenser conviction, a clearer knowledge, a firmer faith, and a more devoted consecration to its cause. The weapons of the one were force, adroitness, and worldly interest; those of the other, faith in God, in man, and in truth.

Great truths draw to their side noble auxiliaries. So it was with the antislavery movement. The heroism, the romance, the eloquence, the best literature, the grandest forms of religion, the most generous and purest characters,—all were brought to it by a sure affinity. As Wordsworth said to Toussaint l'Ouverture, so it might be declared here:—