Now, the very head and front, the bone and marrow of Southern politics for more than three decades, has been—slavery, and plans for its aggrandizement and perpetuation. That has been the ulterior object of all the past vociferations about State rights and Southern rights. Slavery is country, practically, with them, and as it lay at the root of their society, and its check or its extinction would, in their false view, overturn society itself, it was easy for the scheming, cunning leaders of the slave faction to adroitly transfer this enthusiasm, and to raise the watchword, which never yet among any people has been raised in vain, Your homes and firesides! When ever did women hear that cry unmoved?
When country, that grand idea and object of human hope, pride, and affection, had degenerated into a section; and when a false and miserable institution, from its very nature terribly intimate with the life of society, became the most substantial feature of that section; what wonder if the war has at last, whatever it might have been at first, come to the complexion of a contest for home and fireside with the masses of the people, with the majority of the Southern women?
The magnificent dreams and projects, too, of a great slave empire, that should swallow up territory after territory, and astonish the world with its wealth, power, and splendor, which were fused into life in the brains of the great apostles of slavery and secession, had their influence on minds which, like the minds of the Southern women, have a natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern women so much. I pity them infinitely. Just think what they have been educated to believe, and then say if there is not something sadly splendid in the very spirit of endurance, of defiance, of sacrifice, however wrong and mistaken, they have shown. I pity them profoundly, for they are drinking to the lees the cup of suffering, of deprivation, of humiliation, of bitter loss, and stern retribution. And the end is not yet. Deeper chagrin and humiliation must be theirs; more loss, more devastation, more death, and ruin, before their proud hopes and visions are utterly crushed out of life. Oh, are they not being educated, too, as well as we of the North?
When I think of all the grace, loveliness, and generosity of the many Southern women I have known and loved; when I recall the admirable qualities which distinguished them, the grace of manner, the social tact and address, the intellectual sprightliness, the openness and hospitality of soul, the kindliness and sympathy of heart, the Christian gentleness and charity; I can but say to my Northern sisters, These deluded women of the South would, in themselves, be worthy of your esteem and love, could the demon of secession and slavery once be exorcised. And I believe that when it is, and the poor, rent South sits clothed and in her right mind, subdued through sheer exhaustion of strength, and so made fit for the healthy recuperation that is one day to begin, the cause of our beloved country, and of humanity through this country, will have no more generous or loving supporters, ay, none so enthusiastic and devoted as they. I glory in the anticipation of the time when the ardent, impulsive, demonstrative South shall even lead the colder North in the manifestation of a genuine patriotism, worthy of the land and nation that calls it forth. We shall then have gained a country, indeed, instead of being, as heretofore, several sections of a country.
The consistent moulding of society in the spirit of our political ideas is essential to securing us the respect of the world, and to vindicating the principles, themselves, on which having built, they are our sole claim to such honor and respect. As long as we fail so to do, we may be the wonder, and we are likely to be the jest of the onlooking world, but we never can be what we ought to be, its admired and beloved model. It seems to me there is less danger now than formerly of our failure in this important respect. The dangers, the expenses, the burdens, and losses of this fearful civil war will surely create in the hearts of the people everywhere, North and South, a revivified if not a new-born love for, and appreciation of, republican principles, and will teach them where the most insidious danger to them lies; not from open foes, foreign or domestic; not from anything inherent in those free principles; but from a cause exceedingly paradoxical: a democratic people leaving to a party, to a section, the Government which should be their very own; the virtue and intelligence of the nation absenting themselves from the national councils, thus making way for corruption and fraud to enter in an overwhelming flood; one half of the nation rocking its conscience to sleep with the false lullaby of commercial greatness and material prosperity, and the other, left to do the governing, with seemingly no conscience at all, going to work with satanic directness and acuteness, to undermine the principles thus left without a guardian, and to inject the black blood of slavery into the veins of the body politic, till the name democracy became a misnomer the most wretched, a sarcasm the most touching. I do not imagine we shall ever again go back to that. It must be that, in future, the American people will grow into the habit of demanding that an enlightened, patriotic statesmanship shall rule, instead of an unprincipled demagoguism. Also, that they will attend to it that better men are sent to Washington; men chosen because they represent most nearly the great national ideas and interests, which the people will require shall absorb legislation rather than any sectional institution whatever; and not because, primarily, they are the subservient idols of this or that party. It must be that, hereafter, party will be less and the nation more. Of course, parties will exist, necessarily; but if this great American people, having carried on to perfect success this war against a stupendous rebellion, and having gone through the school of knowledge and experience it has been to them, can again settle down into the mere political jobbery into which governmental affairs had deteriorated before the earthquake of war stirred up the dregs of things, it would be an instance of fruitless expenditure of means and life, and of self-stultification, too pitiful for words—such an instance as the world has not yet seen, thanks to the ordained progression of the world.
When peace returns to the land once more; when the fierce fever of blood and strife is quelled; when the vague fears and uncertainties of this period of transition are over, and the keen pangs and bloody sweat of the nation's new birth are all past—what will be the position of this American people? I tremble to contemplate it. It will be much like what I imagine the condition of a freed, redeemed soul to be, just escaped the thraldom, perplexity, and sin of this lower life, and entered on a purer, higher, freer plane of existence. Then comes reconstruction, reorganization, a getting acquainted with the new order of things, and the new duties and experiences to which it will give rise; then will be discoveries of new truths, and new applications of old; old errors and superstitions have been renounced, and facts and principles which have long lain in abeyance, smothered under a weight of neglect and unappreciation, will start into fresh magnitude. And, withal, will come a sense of the reality and security there is in this great change, and of infinite relief and blessedness therein, such as I suppose attends every change from a lower to a higher condition, from darkness to light, from cloud, mystery, and trouble, to the white air of peace and the clear shining of the sun of knowledge.
Then, think of the career that lies ahead of this regenerated nation. This war, fearful and costly as it is, was needed, to rouse men and women to the conviction that there is something more in a people's life than can be counted in dollars and cents; and that their strength consists not alone in commercial superiority or material development, but, principally, in virtue, justice, righteousness. It was needed, to give the lie to that impious and infidel assumption of the South that Cotton is king, and to prove that the God of this heaven-protected land is a true and jealous God, who will not give his glory to Baal. It was needed, to arrest the nation in the fearful mechanical tendency it was assuming, whereby it was near denying the most holy and vital principles of its being; and it was needed, to warm and quicken the almost dead patriotism of the masses, and to educate them anew in the high and pure sentiments they had suffered to be forgotten, and, in forgetting which, many another ration has gone to irretrievable decay and ruin.
I trust in God that this people have not suffered many things in vain, and that the time is dawning when we shall be a nation indeed, a Christian nation, built upon those eternal ideas of truth, justice, right, charity, holiness, which would make us the ideal nation of the earth, dwelling securely under the very smile and benediction of Jehovah.
In this time of which I speak, the people will see that to be a nation we must not be merely servile imitators of Old World ideas, but must develop our own American ideas in every department of government and society; thus, eventually, building up a national structure which shall, which need, yield to none, but may take precedence of all.
We are too young, as yet, to have become such a nation, with its distinctive and separate features, each clearly marked and self-illustrating; but not too young to understand the necessity of working out our own special plan of civilization. As the American nation did not follow the course of all others, by mounting from almost impalpable beginnings up through successive stages to an assured position of national influence and greatness; so need we not imitate them in waiting for gray hairs to see ourselves possessed of a distinct national character. As we did not have to go through the slow, age-long process of originating, of developing ideas, principles, but took them ready made, a legacy from the experience of all the foregoing ages; and as our business is to apply these ideas to the problem we are set to solve, not for ourselves alone, but for the world's peoples, for aggregate humanity, so should we be neither laggard nor lukewarm in fulfilling this high trust, this 'manifest destiny.' In the developing of our special American ideas we have a great work before us—a work but begun, as yet. There is an American art—an American literature—an American society, as well as an American Government, to be shaped out of the abundant material we possess, and compacted into the enduring edifice of national renown. For what is national character, but ideas crystallized in institutions? Until we have done this—given permanency to our special ideas in our institutions—we are a nation in embryo; our manhood exists only in prophecy.