Shadow and Light / An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century

by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

In passing through the States in 1859 an unrest was everywhere observable. The pulse-beat of the great national heart quickened at impending danger. The Supreme Court had made public the Dred Scott decision; John Brown had organized an insurrection; Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln at the time were in exciting debate; William H. Seward was proclaiming the "irrepressible conflict." With other signs portentous, culminating in secession and events re-enacting history—for that the causes and events of which history is the record are being continuously re-enacted from a moral standpoint is of easy observation. History, as the narration of the actions of men, with attendant results, is but a repetition. Different minds and other hands may be the instruments, but the effects from any given course involving fundamental principles are the same. This was taught by philosophers 2,000 years ago, some insisting that not only was this repetition observable in the moral world, but that the physical world was repeated in detail—that every person, every blade of grass, all nature, animate and inanimate, reappeared upon the earth, engaged in the same pursuits, and fulfilling the same ends formerly accomplished.

However skeptical we may be as to this theory of the ancients, the student of modern history has accomplished little if he fails to be impressed with the important truth standing out on every page in letters of living light—that this great world of ours is governed by a system of moral and physical laws that are as unerring in the bestowal of rewards as certain in the infliction of penalties. The history of our own country is one that will ever be an exemplification of this pre-eminent truth. The protests of the victims of oppression in the old world resulted in a moral upheaval and the establishment by force of arms of a Republic in America. The Revolutionary Congress, of which, in adopting the Federal Constitution, closed with this solemn injunction: "Let it be remembered that it has been the pride and boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature." And it was reserved for the founders of this nation to establish in the words of an illustrious benefactor, "a Government of the people, for the people, and by the people"—a Government deriving all its powers from the consent of the governed, where freedom of opinion, whether relating to Church or State, was to have the widest scope and fullest expression consistent with private rights and public good—-where the largest individuality could be developed and the patrician and plebeian meet on a common level and aspire to the highest honor within the gift of the people.

This was its character, this its mission. How it has sustained the character, how fulfilled the mission upon which it entered, the impartial historian has indited, every page of which is redolent with precept and example that point a moral.

With the inauguration of republican government in America the angel of freedom and the demon of slavery wrestled for the mastery. Tallyrand has beautifully and forcibly said: "The Lily and Thistle may grow together in harmonious proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in the separation." The pronounced policy of the best minds at the adoption of the Federal Constitution was to repress it as an institution inhuman in its character and fraught with mischief. Foretelling with accuracy of divine inspiration, Jefferson "trembled for his country" when he remembered that God was just and that "His justice would not sleep forever." Patrick Henry said "that a serious view of this subject gives a gloomy prospect to future times." So Mason and other patriots wrote and felt, fully impressed that the high, solid ground of right and justice had been left for the bogs and mire of expediency.

They died, leaving this heritage growing stronger and bolder in its assumption of power and permeating every artery of society. The cotton gin was invented and the demand for cotton vaulted into the van of the commerce of the country. Men, lured by the gains of slavery and corrupted by its contact, sought by infamous reasoning and vicious legislation to avert the criticism of men and the judgment of God. In the words of our immortal Douglass, "To bolster up and make tolerable what was intolerable; to make human what was inhuman; to make divine what was infernal." To make this giant wrong acceptable to the moral sense it was averred and enacted that slavery was right; that God himself had so predetermined in His wisdom; that the slave could be branded and sold on the auction block; that the babe could be ruthlessly taken from its mother and given away; that a family could be scattered by sale, to meet no more; that to teach a slave to read was punishable with death to the teacher. But why rehearse this dead past—this terrible night of suffering and gloom? Why not let its remembrance be effaced and forgotten in the glorious light of a happier day? I answer, Why?

All measure of value, all estimates of greatness, of joy or sorrow, of health or suffering, are relative; we judge by comparison, and if in recalling these former depths we temper unreasonable criticism of waning friendships, accelerate effort as we pass the mile-stones of achievement, and stimulate appreciation of liberty in the younger generation, the mention will not be fruitless.

But to the resume of this rapid statement of momentous events: Meanwhile, the slave, patient in his longings, prayed for deliverance. Truly has it been said by Elihu Burrit that "you may take a man and yoke him to your labor as you yoke the ox that worketh to live, and liveth to work; you may surround him with ignorance and cloud him over with artificial night. You may do this and all else that will degrade him as a man, without injuring his value as a slave; yet the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. 'Tis allied to his hope of immortality—the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach. 'Tis the torch lit up in his soul by the omnipotent hand of Deity Himself." The true and tried hosts of freedom, represented and led by Garrison, Douglass, Lovejoy, Phillips, Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances Ellen Harper, and others—few compared to the indifferent and avowed defenders of slavery, welcoming outrage and ostracism, by pen and on forum, from hilltop and valley, proclaimed emancipation as the right of the slave and the duty of the master. The many heroic efforts of the anti-slavery phalanx were not without effect, and determined resistance was made to the admission of more slave territory which was in accordance with the "Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the Northwest. Slavery controlled the Government from its commencement, hence its supporters looked with alarm upon an increasing determination to stay its progress.

California had been admitted as a free State, after a struggle the most severe. Its admission John C. Calhoun, the very able leader of the slave power, regarded as the death-knell of slavery, if the institution remained within the union and counseled secession. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, in despair at the growth of slavery; Calhoun at that of freedom. But how could this march of moral progress and national greatness be arrested? Congress had, in 1787, enacted that all the territory not then States should forever be reserved to freedom. The slave power saw the "handwriting on the wall" surround it with a cordon of free States; increase their representatives in Congress advocating freedom, and slavery is doomed. The line cherished by the founders, the Gibraltar against which slavery had dashed its angry billows, must be blotted out, and over every rod of virgin soil it was to be admitted without let or hindrance.

Then came the dark days of compromise, the era of Northern fear of secession, and, finally, opinion crystallizing into legislation non-committal, viz: That States applying for admission should be admitted as free or slave States, as a majority of their inhabitants might determine. Then came the struggle for Kansas. Emigration societies were fitted out in the New England and Northern States to send free State men to locate who would vote to bring in Kansas as a free State. Similar organizations existed in the slave States for the opposite purpose.