“Americans! Your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three million of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad ... and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill.... You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators.... Your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence.... You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America!”
The people went out along the streets of Pittsburgh repeating his words. The convention delegates scattered to their states.
And out in Illinois a homely state legislator named Abraham Lincoln was saying that it is “the sacred right of the people ... to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.... It is the quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.”
Part III
THE STORM
When the measure of their tears shall be full—when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness—doubtless a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by his exterminating thunder manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.
—Thomas Jefferson
Chapter Eleven
The storm came up in the West and birds flew North
There never had been such a time for cotton. All over the South the cotton foamed in great white flakes under the sun. Black workers staggered beneath its weight. Up and down the roads straining mules pulled wagons loaded with bubbling masses of whiteness. The gins spat flames and smoke; the presses creaked and groaned, as closer and closer they packed the quivering mass until, dead and still, it lay in hard, square bundles on river wharves, beside steel rails and on rotting piers. Shiploads were on their way to the hungry looms of England and the crawling harbors of China. Prosperity lay like a fragrant mist upon the Southland in 1854.