Right and wrong in Massachusetts

by Maria Weston Chapman

At the beginning, they were “as much Anti-Slavery as any one, but hated Mr. Garrison.” What are they now? Even “more Anti-Slavery than any one, but hate Mr. Garrison.” Through all their various phases of Colonizationists, American Unionists, Clerical Appellants, new organizationists, their moving spirit is the same;—hatred of the freedom that defies their control. Even while professing to be laboring for emancipation, they have always been careful to express their hatred of the free spirit in which abolitionists carry on the enterprize. It must needs be so. There is eternal enmity between the spirit which prompts a man to strive for the mastery, and the spirit which calls no man master. It is an eternal truth, that he who wishes to rule, is unfit to serve.

From this point of observation, we may notice not only the timidity and treachery of some, but the touching fidelity of others. A single individual was once exalted by our opponents into a symbol of faithfulness to liberty and humanity. Now, the whole associated host of a State are assailed with slander and contempt for a like fidelity.

In this symbolic sense, an association is endowed by the enemies of truth and freedom with a notoriety and importance not its own. In every such case, we have a finger of Providence, pointing out to us the course we should pursue with respect to it. Identifying ourselves with it, we listen for the voices that have been wont to cheer the onset. The soul that is now silent is self-condemned.

Let us enlarge our horizon by ascending still higher, so that we can at a glance command the present and the past; for so come many instructive lessons to the mind. We behold far back in the distance, days like those of Wat Tyler, of Wycliffe, of Knox, and Luther and Washington. On closely observing any such era of accelerated progress, we perceive great bodies of men, unaccountably to us, giving back at a critical instant—thrown into confusion by circumstances which we, at this distance of time, discern to have been of but the smallest moment; and, seeing how the speedy and triumphant success of the right is thereby prevented, we suffer a sort of pain that we are unable to cast upon their path the light of our knowledge. “Had they but known what we so readily discern,” we exclaim, “how different would have been their course!” and we marvel that they were unable to break the spell that bound them, and which one added glance of foresight or of faith would have shivered.

We forget that, besides the natural obscurity of the hour unilluminated by the future, there is ever a shrinking terror on men’s minds, which forbids them boldly to face the phantoms of their own times:—a spurious charity for wrong, which, prompted by a vision of oneself in a similar condemnation, is not forgiveness, but treachery to Right. We overlook the obvious consideration that those transition periods were, like our own, infested with the treacherous and the selfish, whose fancied interest it was to suppress facts, circulate falsehoods, make up false issues, apologise for wrong, palliate crime, veil baseness under “decent pretexts,” exalt profession into performance, and by any and every means delay impending change.

This reflection should remind us that such light as we are fain to cast upon past times in our impatience of their blindness, is the same as duty binds us to communicate to our own. When we observe the importance of small things in the world’s history; it should point us to the cheerful discharge of so lowly a duty as to record those in which we have been engaged. Let us not deem any of them so unimportant as to refuse to draw from them lessons of wisdom, nor strive to persuade ourselves that aught can be trifling, which is wrought into the great page of the past. “To serve the nineteenth century we must know the nineteenth century:” therefore, nothing is without consequence which helps to illustrate our times. Facts, warnings, rebuke, encouragement, consolation, advice, labor,—whatever the times demand, let us give as we have power and opportunity, and we shall soon be made to know what it was that kept so great a distance between the words of lonely warning that have risen prophet-like upon the past; and why, at some periods, there could be no “open vision” or corresponding energy, but only the feebleness and incertitude of ignorance and fear. Custom is never, by her nature, the handmaid of freedom; and therefore in a struggle for the extinction of slavery, if we speak only according to custom, we shall lose the unhesitating distinctness which the occasions of the cause demand. The occasion now demands, in an especial manner, the plain directness of the very palace of truth.

Let us, however, avoid the mistake of supposing that we can find in the past, the exact parallel of the present, in any other than a spiritual sense. Truth—Love—Freedom—are ever the same; but the outward signs of their presence, and the manner of their workings upon society, will, at different times, be far unlike. The problems they present, may be wrought out by different processes, though the results are the same. This reflection will enlighten us as to the causes of the convulsive terror now manifested by the body of the ministry and their dupes—the clerical politicians. We shall learn how it came to pass that the latter were desirous of disjoining themselves from the abolition host, while they yet claimed the name of abolitionists. We shall see on what temptations they have

“fallen away

Like water from us, never found again,

But where they mean to sink us.”