“that He reigns,
Who alone is Lord and God!”
The poet misunderstood the “broken chains” as greatly as he did the “burial hour.” Chains were broken, but their breaking was no blessing to the negro. Golden chains of domestic ties, drawing him gently, kindly, surely up to higher morality and complete manhood—these were broken; and far other were forged for him, with which fear he has been made fast to destruction. His only friends able to help alienated; what a clog! Given back to African improgressiveness; what a fetter! How he is held to the body of death by unbreakable chains of want, misery, vice, disease, and utter helplessness! and how his shackles gall him and his convict chains clank in every corner of the land which was once an earthly paradise to him!
Let us not sully with Whittier the glory of the federal arms by ascribing to them as their chief triumph the gift of illusory freedom to a few negroes. Rather let us inform ourselves with the spirit of Webster, and give praise and thanks without end for the actual blessings and the richer promise of the restored union to myriads of that race whose mission it is to spread an inexpressibly fair socialism over all the earth.
And let me say at the last, the people of the north should learn that all the tragic evils which Professor Wendell and others outside of the south have in mind belong only to the slave-ships, and by a strange psychological metastasis—no stranger, however, than that by which the fourth commandment, in popular conception, has been abrogated as to the seventh day, and applied to the first day of the week—they have firmly attached themselves to the reputation of southern slavery. For long years we of the south, our mothers and our mothers’ mothers, our fathers and our fathers’ fathers, have been charged with cruelties and outrages purely fancied. These fabrications are the stock comparisons with which almost every invective against the wrongs of any lower class is sharpened. The writer or speaker whenever he is taken short says something of the dreadful condition of the southern slave under the sway of an entirely absolute master. Variety of the misdeeds invoked as illustration is limited only by the promptness with which the utterer can think of what he has read in abolition literature or its sequel. It is all mere parrot gabble. To hear so much of it as we do is “a little wearing,” as Reginald Wilfer said. Surely if our brothers and sisters of the north but think, they will acknowledge that these so-called horrors of slavery were all nothing but the inventions of the angry passions provoked by the powers in the unseen after they had decided that slavery must be sacrificed in the interests of the union. And these dear brothers and sisters will no longer persist in asserting that southern slavery was but robbery and oppression of and cruelty to the slave; that the system was evil to him of itself. They will talk no more of the pro-slavery infamy, of the unscrupulousness and perfidy of the slave power, and all such false twaddle, that can now serve no purpose whatever except to offend good men and women and their children without cause.
CHAPTER X
SLAVERY AT LAST IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE
Until the crisis of 1850, slavery had never changed from purely defensive tactics. This year made it seem that the north had fully resolved that slavery should never be allowed another inch of new territory; and also was very near, and was rapidly coming nearer to, the point of practically preventing the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. We have explained how slave property could not live unless it found new virgin soil in the Territories; and we have also explained what a deadly blow it would receive, in the refusal to restore fugitives. This refusal would be really indirect abolition. Read the masterly sketch by Calhoun, in his speech March 4, 1850, of the conquering advance of the anti-slavery party, until now—to use his language—“the equilibrium between the two sections ... had been destroyed;” and he demonstrates that the actual exercise of the entire national political power must soon be in the hands of the free-labor section. The south instinctively felt that the time for her old tactics was over, and that she must do more than merely fend off the blows of abolition. And, as we will tell in the next chapter, she found her new leader in Toombs. Nullification as advocated by Calhoun was the extreme energy of the pure defensive of the south. His proposed dual executive amendment was merely that nullification be made a right granted to the federal government instead of remaining one reserved to the States. Toombs had grown up in the school of William H. Crawford. George R. Gilmer, a follower of Crawford, tells of the latter: “He was violently opposed to the nullification movement, considering it but an ebullition excited by Mr. Calhoun’s overleaping, ambition.”[96]
Toombs scouted nullification. Under his lead his State, in 1850, adopted the Georgia Platform quoted above. This platform was considerate and resolute preparation for the southern offensive.