IV
CHARLES SUMNER: THE APPEAL TO EDUCATED MEN
In every country and time, the era of national peril has been the creative era for the intellect. The eloquence of Greece was at its best when Philip attacked Athens and Demosthenes defended its liberties. Dante's poems were born of the collision between the despots who sought to enslave Florence, and the patriots who dreamed of democracy. Milton's songs were written during the English Revolution, when the Puritan, seeking to diffuse the good things of life, and the Cavalier, who wished to monopolize the earth's treasure, came into a deadly collision.
In accordance with that principle it seems natural to expect that the scholars of the Republic should do their best work during the era of agitation, when the national intellect was white hot, and public excitement burned by day and night. The anti-slavery epoch, therefore, was the Augustan Era of American literature, when the historians, poets and philosophers lent distinction to American literature. At that time Motley was writing his "History of the Netherlands"; Prescott, his "History of Mexico and Spain"; Whittier, his songs of slavery and freedom; Lowell was the satirist of the debate, and was writing his "Biglow Papers," and Emerson, the philosopher, was undermining the foundations and shaking the principles of slavery, even as Samson pulled down the temple of the olden time.
Emerson, the philosopher, did the thinking, and furnished the intellectual implements to the abolitionists. Beginning his career as a preacher, he resigned his position, moved to Concord, and dwelt apart from men, but "as he mused, the fire burned." Easily our first man of American letters, he is among the first essayists of all ages and climes. Essentially, however, he was a man of intellect, an American Plato, "a Greek head screwed upon Yankee shoulders," to use Holmes' expression. His essay upon "The American Scholar," and his book on "Nature," brought him fame in England, and invitations to lecture before their colleges. Early in his career he won the friendship of Arnold of Rugby, of Matthew Arnold the son, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and of Thomas Carlyle. He returned from his honours in England to find himself the centre of the intellectual movement of New England. A number of younger men gathered around him, until Emerson's group at Concord became like unto Goethe's group at Weimar, and Coleridge's in London. During the late forties American educators, orators and statesmen began to quote the striking sentences from Emerson. Little by little it came about that the fighters went to Emerson as to an arsenal for their intellectual weapons. His first notable contribution to abolitionism was his "Story of the West India Emancipation." Then came his "Essay on the Fugitive Slave Law," his speech on the Assault on Mr. Sumner, his writings on Kansas, and on John Brown. Few men have had such power to condense a statement of philosophy into a single epigram. Grant once said of his soldiers that while each man took aim for himself, Winchester slew all the thousands. Not otherwise, hundreds of orators and reformers went up and down the land attacking slavery, but while the voices were many, the argument was one, and Emerson for a time did the speaking for the abolitionists.
What Emerson stated in pure white light, Whittier made popular through his poems of Slavery and Freedom. By way of preëminence he was the poet of the abolition movement, and the Sir Galahad among our singers. Reared among the Friends, he had the simplicity of the Quaker, but the solidity and massiveness of the fighting Puritan. Strange as it may seem, he was at once the poet of peace, insisting upon the crime of war, and the poet of freedom, insisting upon the destruction of slavery. The fire and glow, the moral earnestness, the spiritual passion of Whittier, are best illustrated in his "Lost Occasion," and "Ichabod." At length the newspapers of the North took up his work. For some years before the war broke out, scarcely a month passed by without a new poem of liberty by Whittier. Soon these poems that were published in the newspapers were recited in the schools by the children, quoted in the pulpits by the preachers, and used by the orators as feathers for their arrows. Once Wendell Phillips concluded an impassioned oration by reciting one of Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of peace,—John Greenleaf Whittier." If Emerson's philosophy was like the diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army, Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that blasted forever all compromise and expediency.
Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in England, in developing an anti-slavery sentiment there, was, if possible, more influential than in the home country. The great English editor, William Stead, tells us that he owes to Lowell's message the influences that made him an editor and a reformer. In the critical moments of his life he found in Lowell the inspiration and support that he found in no other books, save in Carlyle's "Cromwell" and the Bible. "In Russia, in Ireland, in Rome, and in prison, Lowell's poems have been my constant companions." The poet used the story of Moses emancipating the Hebrew slaves as an illustration of the abolitionist as the unknown leader whom God would raise up to lead the three million black men out of Southern slavery. "What God did for the Egyptian bondsmen, he believed God would do; because what God was, God is. He goes on:—
"From what a Bible can a man choose his text to-day! A Bible which needs no translation; and which no priestcraft can close from the laity,—the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine and destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title that Homer bestows upon princes. He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find his tables of the new law here among factories and cities in this wilderness of sin, called the progress of civilization, and be the captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order."
Certain stanzas of Lowell, also, were quoted even more widely, and were ever upon the lips of college students. Many a soldier boy who went to battle from the forest and factory, the fields and the mines, scarcely knew that his inspiration—like Phillip's oratory—was embodied in Lowell's poem, "The Present Crisis":—