But we must not congratulate ourselves too soon. In the interval between the fifth of July, when his oration was delivered, and the seventh of August, which is the date of the Craytonville letter, Mr. Cushing seems to have reviewed his opinion on the state of the Union. There is more cause for alarm than appeared on the surface; but this time it is not because we have fallen out of love with the South, but that we have become desperately enamored of negroes. Nurses will have to scare their refractory charges with another bugaboo; for the majority of Massachusetts infants would jump at the chance of being carried off by the once terrible Ugly Black Man. Our great danger is from Negrophilism; though Mr. Cushing seems consoled by the fact, that it is a danger to Massachusetts, and not to South Carolina. We think Mr. Cushing may calm his disinterested apprehensions. We believe the disease is not so deep-seated as he imagines; and as we see no reason to fear the immediate catastrophe of the Millennium from any excess of benevolence on the part of Mr. Cushing and his party toward white men, (whose cause he professes to espouse,) we are inclined to look forward with composure to any results that are likely to follow from sporadic cases of sympathy with black ones. There is no reason for turning alarmist. In spite of these highly-colored forebodings, it will be a great while before our colored fellow-citizens, or fellow-denizens, (or whatever the Dred Scott decision has turned them into,) will leave mourning-cards in Beacon Street, or rear mulatto-hued houses on that avenue which it is proposed to build from the Public Garden into the sunset.
It is adroit in Mr. Cushing thus to shift the front of his defence, but it is dreadfully illogical. It is very convenient to make it appear that this is a quarrel of races; for, in such a case, a scruple of prejudice will go farther than a hundredweight of argument. In assuming to be the champion of the downtrodden whites against the domineering blacks, Mr. Cushing enlists on his side the sympathy and admiration which are sure to follow the advocate of the weak and the defenceless. He comes home to New England, finds his own color proscribed, and at once takes the part of amicus curiæ for the weak against the strong in the forum of Humanity. We do not wonder, that a gentleman, who has devoted so much ingenuity, so much time and talent, to making black appear white, should at last deaden the nicety of his sense for the distinction between the two, and thus reverse the relation of the two colors; but we do wonder, that, in choosing Race as a convenient catchword, he should not see that he is yielding a dangerous vantage-ground to the Native American Party, whose principles he seems so pointedly to condemn. We say seems, —for he is carefully indefinite in his specifications, and hedges his opinions with a thicket of ambiguous phrases, which renders it hard to get at them, and leaves opportunity for future evasion. If a war of race be justifiable in White against Black, why not in so-called Anglo-Saxons against Kelts? The one is as foolish and as wicked as the other, and the only just method of solution is the honest old fair field and no favor, under which every race and every individual man will assume the place destined to him in the order of Providence. We have a great distrust of ethnological assumptions; for there is, as yet, no sufficient basis of observed fact for legitimate induction, and the blood in the theorist's own veins is almost sure to press upon the brain and disturb accurate vision, or his preconceptions to render it impossible. Gervinus reads the whole history of Europe in the two words, Teutonic and Romanic; Wordsworth believed that only his family could see a mountain; Dr. Prichard, led astray by a mistaken philanthropy, believed color to be a matter of climate; and Dr. Nott considers that the outline shown by a single African hair on transverse section is reason enough for the oppression of a race. If the black man be radically inferior to the white, or radically different from him, the folly of white-washing him will soon appear. But, on the other hand, if his natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades know their place.
It will be a blessed day for the world when men are as willing to help each other as they are to assist Providence. The "London Cotton-Plant," a journal established to sustain the interests of Slavery in the Old World, is almost overpowered with acute distress for the Order of Creation, and offers its sustaining shoulder to the System of the Universe. "Fear nothing," it seems to say, "glorious structure of the Divine Architect! Giddings shall not touch you, nor shall Seward lay his sacrilegious hand on you!" "Who are ye?" murmurs the Voice, "that would reedit the works of the Almighty?" "Sublime, but misguided object of our compassion, we prefer to remain in the modest seclusion of namelessness, but we are published at Red-Lion Court, Fleet Street, and are sold for one shilling!" To judge from Mr. Cushing's letter, he has studied this organ of the sympathizers with the Pre-established Harmonies,—certainly there is a singular coincidence in the sentiments of both, so far as we can make them out. Both call themselves conservative, both are anti-philanthropists, both claim that public opinion is tending in the direction of their views, both affirm that their cause is that of the white man, and both appear to mean by white man the same thing,—the owner of a slave.
But is not Mr. Cushing's anxiety misdirected, and wilfully so, in seeking the material for its forebodings of danger to the Union in the Free States? The only avowed disunionists of the North are the radical Abolitionists, whose position is the logical result of their admitting that under the Constitution it is impossible to touch Slavery where it exists, and who, therefore, seek in a dissolution of the federal compact an escape from complicity with what they believe an evil and a wrong,—with what, till within the last twenty years, was conceded to be such by the South itself. If Mr. Cushing be so great an admirer of stability in conviction, he might have found in these men the subject of something other than vituperation. There are men among them who might have won the foremost places of political advancement, could they have sacrificed their principles to their ambition, could they believe that public honors would heal as well as hide the wounds of self-respect. It is the South that advocates disunion, from sectional motives, and adds the spice of treason. The "London Cotton-Plant" says,—
"If she [the South] is denied 'equality' within the Union, she can have 'independence' out of it. Already in European cabinets the possibility of this contingency is contemplated. We but perform a public duty when we tell Mr. Douglas that there is in Europe more than one power able and willing and prepared to take the Cotton States of America, and with them the other 'Slave'-States, so-called by free-negroists, under their protection, as valuable and desirable allies … And more, he can say by authority that she [the South] has active and successful agents in every part of Europe preparing the way for equal existence, commercially as well as politically, so long as the Union exists, or the active support of powerful allies, if driven as a last resort to appeal to the civilized world against tyranny and oppression." [1]
But what does the "Cotton-Plant" understand by "equality"? Nothing less than the reopening of the slave-trade. Speaking of the chance that the captured slaves of the "Echo" would be sent back to Africa, and resenting such a procedure as "a brand upon our section and upon our social condition," it affirms that:
"This labor-question of the South does not depend upon such miserable clap-trap as Kansas or the Fugitive Slave Law. It rests upon a full, open, and deliberate recognition of the rights of the Southern people; and the Senator from Illinois, by moving the abrogation of the so-called slave-trade treaty with England, allowing the South to supply herself with labor as she may see fit, would give, indeed, unquestioned assurance of his disposition and courage to follow the principle of the white-basis to its logical and constitutional consequence."
It declares that the sending home of the Africans would be "a practical reversal of the Dred Scott decision," and adds,—"We have no fear that our people will long remain passive under such an accumulating weight of inequality." [2]
Is not this explicit enough? and does not the "white-basis" sufficiently explain what is meant by the systematic depreciation of the colored race in Mr. Cushing's letter?
The Democratic Party is the party of "Progress." What is the direction of that progress likely to be? What is the lesson of the past? Hitherto this party has been the ally and the tool, not of the moderate, but of the extreme propagandas of the South. The Carolinians with their Scotch blood received also a strong infusion of Scotch logic. They felt that their system was inconsistent with the immortal assertion of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and with the principles of the Revolution,—that its extension was a direct reversal of the creed and the policy of the men by whom our frame of government was established. They accepted the alternative, and assumed the aggressive. The principles of the Revolution must be crushed out, the traditions of the Fathers of the Republic repudiated,—and that, too, by means of the party calling itself Democratic, through which alone the South could control the policy of the government.