Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, with Illustrations and Speeches

by Unknown

Even if it be admitted that, as early as the year 1836, the strongest elements in New England were united against the South, it is by no means true that they were then unanimous in selecting slavery as the most advantageous ground of battle. A cry of distress arose from Great Britain at the way some of the distributors of her secret service money were being treated; a paragraph from an English newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, read on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. King, of Georgia, in corroboration of what Mr. Hill had said, will serve as an illustration: "Letters of the most distressing nature have been received from Mr. George Thompson, the zealous and devoted missionary of slave emancipation, who has gone from this country to the United States, and who writes from Boston. He says that 'the North (that is, New England, where slavery does not exist) has universally sympathized with the South in opposition to the abolitionists; that the North has let fall the mask; that the merchants and mechanics, priests and politicians have alike stood forth the defenders of Southern despots and the furious denouncers of Northern philanthropy'; that all parties of politics, especially the supporters of the two rival candidates for the Presidential office (Van Buren and Webster) vie with each other in denouncing the abolitionists; and that even religious men shun them, except when the abolitionists can fairly gain a hearing from them. With regard to himself he speaks as follows: 'Rewards are offered for my abduction and assassination; and, in every direction, I meet with those who believe they would be doing God and their country service by depriving me of life. I have appeared in public, and some of my escapes from the hands of my foes have been truly providential. On Friday last I narrowly escaped losing my life in Concord, New Hampshire.' 'Boston, September 11.—This morning a short gallows was found standing opposite the door of my house, 23 Bay street, in this city, now occupied by Garrison. Two halters hung from the beam, with the words above them: By Order of Judge Lynch!'"

Responding to this, the New Hampshire Representative (Hill) said: "The present agitation in the North is kept up by the application of money; it is a state of things altogether forced. Agents are hired, disguised in the character of ministers of the gospel, to preach abolition of slavery where slavery does not exist; and presses are kept in constant employment to scatter abolition publications through the country."

Yes, and this constant "application" of money finally overcame the Yankee. The love of it has been the root of much evil with him. Then, too, eventually, his politicians and manufacturers found that the best use they could make of the negro was to hold him betwixt them and the fire of Southern indignation, kindled by their cupidity.

To show the dangerous reciprocity of feeling between old and New England long before it was intensified as it now is by the community of interest in untold millions of investments, the words uttered by John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, fall with the weight of state's evidence: "That their object (i. e. that of the New England States) was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a separate confederation, he knew from unequivocal evidence, although not provable in a court of law; and that in case of a civil war the aid of Great Britain to effect that purpose would as assuredly be resorted to as it would be indispensably necessary to their design."—Adams' letter in reply to Harrison Gray Otis and others, December 28, 1828, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his Memoirs of Service Afloat, p. 43. This attachment to British interests was so pronounced in 1812 that the New England States refused to furnish their quota of troops to help conduct our defense; and, while the nation was locked in deadly conflict with the ruthless invader, these States actually held a convention at Hartford looking to secession. The Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast day for deploring a war against a nation which had long been "the bulwark of the religion we profess"; its Supreme Court decided that neither the President nor Congress could control its State troops in time of war, and the Legislature declared the war to be unholy, and urged its people to do what they could to thwart it. These States forced a treaty of peace in which Great Britain was not even required to cease the outrages on account of which the war was undertaken—outrages which might have been begun again but for Jackson's victory with the Southern soldiers at New Orleans. Jefferson, in a letter to Lafayette, says: "During that war four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men."

That will be the saddest chapter of American history which faithfully compares the treasonable obstruction of these States to this war with their Cain-like swiftness to shed their brothers' blood because of an alleged difference of opinion on a question of constitutional law. It will be remembered, in this connection, that these States had their troops mobilized and waiting for the President's call before Fort Sumter was fired on. In four days after the call the troops of Massachusetts (the most protected State save one) had invaded the State of Maryland and were shooting down the astonished and outraged citizens of Baltimore.

The next saddest chapter of our national history will show that the section which has been greediest to gain power from the States and revenues from the people has been the readiest to use these powers and revenues against those from whom they were stolen, and the most reluctant to use them to defend the nation against foreign aggressions. "It is a principle of human nature," remarks Tacitus, "to hate those we have injured more than those who have injured us."

And who, now, but the beneficiaries of implied powers (which they fought a civil war to preserve and maintain in all their latitude), under real or affected dread of a foreign war, are zealous for the late proposed bondholders' treaty with England? As though that nation could afford to kill or even injure the goose which lays the golden egg in the shape of four hundred million dollars annual interest on British investments in this country! The sole purpose of this treaty is that this egg shall be golden and not bimetallic; and instead of preventing, it may be the cause of war, as soon as the people resume control of their government and feel the effects of an arbitration judgment on the financial question. I pause to remark, in this connection, that many well-meaning people who petitioned the Senate for the confirmation of this treaty had not read it with sufficient care to observe that it delegated to a commission, composed partly of foreigners and to a majority of the Senate, powers which have heretofore been only exercised by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution provides. And this apparently slight though subtle change in the conduct of our government was sought to be inaugurated in the name of peace!

What a Southern statesman exclaimed, arguing against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, in 1787, may be appositely repeated here: "But the character of the partners (meaning the Northern States) causes me more alarm than the terms of the partnership." England's partnership with Australia, South Africa, and India has spread such a pall of universal indebtedness over the fairest portions of the globe that we may well hesitate before we make more permanent the stipulations in the "bond" of her blighting friendship.

Undoubtedly the seeds of the War of 1812 were sown by the treaty of 1794, negotiated by John Jay, who took "a mild and conciliatory part in the Revolutionary war," and by Lord Grenville, the son of the author of the Stamp Act. The "Jay treaty," as it was called, provided for the shameful curtailment of the American ocean-carrying trade, and for the free navigation of the Mississippi for Great Britain. And if the proposed arbitration treaty is not finally rejected by the Senate, the prominence given to the present British Minister at McKinley's inauguration, accidental though it may have been, will serve as a fine prototype of British influence in the administration of our government.

"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples—compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder.