Those who did this are to be forgiven. They had been made to believe that the negroes of the south were as well qualified for full citizenship as the whites, and it was but meet retributive punishment of the great crime of slavery and waging war to hold on to it, that the masters be put under their former slaves. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had made them believe it.
The only parallel of mass of pernicious error engendered by a book, so far as I know, is “Burke’s Reflections.” Constitutional England ought to have followed Charles Fox as one man, and given countenance to the rise in France for liberty. But Burke’s piece of magnificent rhetoric effectually turned the nation out of her course, and had her in league with absolutists to put back the clock of European democracy a hundred years or more. Even yet intelligent Englishmen magnify that most unEnglish achievement. The bad effects of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” have not been so lasting in our country. We Americans get out of ruts much more easily than the English. The north is now rapidly learning the real truth as to the utter incapacity of the mass of southern negroes to vote intelligently, and complacently acquiesces in their practical disfranchisement by the only class which can give good government.
We must utterly reject and discard everything that Mrs. Stowe and those whom I distinguish as the root-and-branch abolitionists have taught, in their unutterable ideology, as to the nature and character of the negro, and in its place we must learn to know him as he really is—to tolerate him, nay, to love him as such. This is the only way in which we can prepare ourselves for giving the negroes their due from us.
Further, we owe it to our proud American history, now that the brothers’ war is forty years past, to ascertain the real cause of that mighty struggle, maintained most laudably and gloriously by each side. Those whom I am here criticising made many believe that the real stake was whether the slave should remain the property of his master or not. Note the emphasized adjuration in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic:”
“As he [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
A most beautiful sentiment, fitly expressed; but how it humiliates the grand issue, which was whether federal government should live or perish! And that greatest of American odes, Whittier’s “Laus Deo,” how wide of the true mark is its sublime rejoicing! Celebrating the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment, the occasion demanded that he extol the really benign achievement. That achievement was that all cause of diverse nationalization in the States had been forever removed, and thus it was assured that brotherhood of the nations was to grow without check. But the rapt bard was blinded, as his utterances show, by what now almost appears to have been a fit of delusional insanity. He says:
“Ring! O bells!
Every stroke exulting tells
Of the burial hour of crime.”
What does he mean is the crime? Why, the delivering of certain Africans and their descendants from lowest human degradation and misery, and blessing them with opportunity and help to rise far upward? Had he seen, as we do now, forty years later, instead of pouring out this wild and mad delight, he would have dropped scalding tears over the “burial hour” of all that promised anything of welfare to those for whom he had labored so long and faithfully. And in the last stanza his command that
“With a sound of broken chains”
the nations be told