Part 6

Toryism exists in all lands. In some, there is a good deal of excuse to be made for it. I can understand the Toryism of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and of such men. If a man has been born to great wealth and power, derived from ancestors for many centuries held in admiration and in awe; if he has been bred to account himself a superior being, and to be treated accordingly, I can easily understand the Toryism of such a man, and find some excuse for it. I can understand the Tory literature of other nations. The Toryism of the "London Quarterly," of "Blackwood," is easily accounted for, and forgiven. It is, besides, sometimes adorned with wit, and often set off by much learning. It is respectable Toryism. But the Toryism of men who only know they had a grandfather by inference, not by positive testimony; who inherited nothing but their bare limbs; who began their career as tradesmen or mechanics,--mechanics in divinity or law as well as in trade,--and get their bread by any of the useful and honorable callings of life--that such men, getting rich, or lifting their heads out of the obscurity they were once in, should become Tories, in a land, too, where institutions are founded on the idea of freedom and equity and natural justice--that is another thing. The Toryism of American journals, with little scholarship, with no wit, and wisdom in homoeopathic doses; the Toryism of a man who started from nothing, the architect of his own fortune; the Toryism of a Republican, of a Yankee, the Toryism of a Snob,--it is Toryism reduced to its lowest denomination, made vulgar and contemptible; it is the little end of the tail of Toryism. Let us loathe the unclean thing in the depth of our soul, but let us pity the poor Tory; for he, also, in common with the negro slave, is "A man and a brother."

Then the Spirit of Trade is often against us. Mr. Mann, in his letter, speaks of the opposition made to Wilberforce by the "Guinea merchants" of Liverpool, in his attempts to put an end to the slave-trade. The Corporation of Liverpool spent over ten thousand pounds in defence of a traffic, "the worst the sun ever shone upon." This would seem to be a reflection upon some of the merchants of Boston. It seems, from a statement in the Atlas, that Mr. Mann did not intend his remarks to apply to Boston, but to New York and Philadelphia, where mass meetings of merchants had been held, to sustain Mr. Clay's compromise resolutions. Although Mr. Mann did not apply his remarks to Boston, I fear they will apply here as well as to our sister cities. I have yet to learn that the letter of Mr. Webster's retainers was any less well adapted to continue and extend slavery, than the resolutions passed at New York and Philadelphia. I wish the insinuations of Mr. Mann did not apply here.

One of the signers of the letter to Mr. Webster incautiously betrayed, I think, the open secret of the retainers when he said--"I don't care a damn how many slave States they annex!" This is a secret, because not avowed; open, because generally known, or at least believed, to be the sentiment of a strong party in Massachusetts. I am glad to have it also expressed; now the issue is joined, and we do not fight in the dark.

It has long been suspected that some inhabitants of Boston were engaged in the slave-trade. Not long since, the brig "Lucy Anne," of Boston, was captured on the coast of Africa, with five hundred and forty-seven slaves on board. This vessel was built at Thomaston in 1839; repaired at Boston in 1848, and now hails from this port. She was commanded by one "Captain Otis," and is owned by one "Salem Charles." This, I suppose, is a fictitious name, for certainly it would not be respectable in Boston to extend slavery in this way. Even Mr. Winthrop is opposed to that, and thinks "a million swords would leap from their scabbards to oppose it." But it may be that there are men in Boston who do not think it any worse to steal men who were born free, and have grown up free in Africa, and make slaves of them, than to steal such as are born free in America, before they are grown up. If we have the Old Testament decidedly sustaining slavery, and the New Testament never forbidding it; if, as we are often told, neither Jesus nor his early followers ever said a word against slavery; if scarcely a Christian minister in Boston ever preaches against this national sin; if the Representative from Boston has no religious scruples against returning a fugitive slave, or extending slavery over a "hundred or a hundred thousand square miles" of new territory; if the great Senator from Massachusetts refuses to vote for the Wilmot Proviso, or reaffirm an ordinance of nature, and reenact the will of God; if he calls on us to return fugitive slaves "with alacrity," and demands of Massachusetts that she shall conquer her prejudices; if nine hundred and eighty-seven men in this vicinity, of lawful age,[9] are thankful to him for enlightening them as to their duty, and a professor of theology comes forward to sanction American slavery in the name of religion--why, I think Mr. "Salem Charles," with his "Captain Otis," may not be the worst man in the world, after all! Let us pity him also, as "A man and a brother."

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Such is the crisis in our affairs; such the special issue in the general question between freedom and slavery; such the position of parties and of great men in relation to this question; such the foes to freedom in America.

On our side, there are great and powerful allies. The American idea is with us; the spirit of the majority of men in the North, when they are not blindfolded and muzzled by the demagogues of State and Church. The religion of the land, also, is on our side; the irreligion, the idolatry, the infidelity thereof, all of that is opposed to us. Religion is love of God and love of man: surely, all of that, under any form, Catholic or Quaker, is in favor of the unalienable rights of man. We know that we are right; we are sure to prevail. But in times present and future, as in times past, we need heroism, self-denial, a continual watchfulness, and an industry which never tires.

Let us not be deceived about the real question at issue. It is not merely whether we shall return fugitive slaves without trial by jury. We will not return them with trial by jury! neither "with alacrity," nor "with the solemnity of judicial proceedings!" It is not merely whether slavery shall be extended or not. By and by there will be a political party with a wider basis than the free soil party, who will declare that the nation itself must put an end to slavery in the nation; and if the Constitution of the United States will not allow it, there is another Constitution that will. Then the title, Defender and expounder of the Constitution of the United States, will give way to this,--"Defender and expounder of the Constitution of the Universe," and we shall reaffirm the ordinance of nature, and reenact the will of God. You may not live to see it, Mr. President, nor I live to see it; but it is written on the iron leaf that it must come; come, too, before long. Then the speech of Mr. Webster, and the defence thereof by Mr. Stuart, the letter of the retainers and the letters of the retained, will be a curiosity; the conduct of the whigs and democrats an amazement, and the peculiar institution a proverb amongst all the nations of the earth. In the turmoil of party politics, and of personal controversy, let us not forget continually to move the previous question, whether Freedom or Slavery is to prevail in America. There is no attribute of God which is not on our side; because, in this matter, we are on the side of God.

Mr. President: I began by congratulating you on the favorable signs of the times. One of the most favorable is the determination of the South to use the powers of government to extend slavery. At this day, we exhibit a fact worse than Christendom has elsewhere to disclose; the fact that one sixth part of our population are mere property; not men, but things. England has a proletary population, the lowest in Europe; we have three million of proletaries lower than the "pauper laborers" of England, which the whig protectionists hold up to us in terror. The South wishes to increase the number of slaves, to spread this blot, this blight and baneful scourge of civilization over new territory. Hot-headed men of the South declare that, unless it is done, they will divide the Union; famous men of the North "cave in," and verify their own statements about "dough-faces" and "dough-souls." All this is preaching anti-slavery to the thinking men of the North; to the sober men of all parties, who prefer Conscience to cotton. The present session of Congress has done much to overturn slavery. "Whom the gods destroy they first make mad."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Mr. Silgestroem.

[5] Annal. Lib. XIV. cap. 42, _et seq._

[6] Executive Documents: House of Representatives, No. 17, p. 3.

[7] Since the delivery of the above, Mr. Webster has introduced his bill, providing a trial by jury for fugitive slaves. If I understand it, Mr. Webster does not offer it as a substitute for the Judiciary Bill on the subject, does not introduce it as an amendment to that or to any thing else. Nay, he does not formally introduce it--only lays it before the Senate, with the desire that it may be printed! The effect it is designed to produce, it is very easy to see. The retainers can now say--See! Mr. Webster himself wishes to provide a trial by jury for fugitives! Some of the provisions of the bill are remarkable, but they need not be dwelt on here.

[8] While this is passing through the press, I learn that several wealthy citizens of Boston are at this moment owners of several hundreds of slaves. I think they would lose reputation among their fellows if they should set them free.

[9] It has since appeared that several of those persons were at the time, and still are, holders of slaves. Their conduct need excite no surprise.

III.

A DISCOURSE OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF THE LATE PRESIDENT TAYLOR.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, JULY 14, 1850.

Last Sunday, on a day near the national anniversary, something was said of the relation which the American citizen bears to the State, and of the duties and rights which belong to that relation. Since then an event has occurred which suggests another topic of a public nature, and so I invite your attention to a discourse of the general position and duties of an American ruler, and in special of the late President Taylor. It is no pleasant task to rise to speak so often on such themes as this, but let us see what warning or guidance we can gather from this occasion.

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In order that a man should be competent to become a complete political ruler and head of the American people, he ought to be distinguished above other men in three particulars.

First, he ought to have just political ideas in advance of the people, ideas not yet organized into institutions in the State. Then he will be a leader in ideas.

Next, he ought to have a superior power of organizing those ideas, of putting them into institutions in the State. Then he will be a leader in the matter of organizing ideas.

Then he ought to have a superior power of administering the institutions after they are made. Then he will be a leader in the matter of administering institutions.

An eminent degree of these three qualities constitutes genius for statesmanship, genius, too, of a very high order. A man who really and efficiently leads in politics must possess some or all of these qualities; without them, or any of them, he can only seem to lead. He and the people both may think he is the leader, and call him so; but he that shall lead others aright, must himself be on the right road and in advance of them. To perform the functions of a leader of men, the man must be eminently just also, true to the Everlasting Right, the Law of God; otherwise he can never possess in the highest degree, or in a competent degree, the power of ideas, of organization, of administration. A man eminently just, and possessing these three qualities is a leader by nature; if he is also put into the conventional position of leader, then he bears the same relation to the people, which the captain of a ship, skilful and competent, would bear to the ship's company who were joint owners with him, and had elected him to his office, expecting that he would serve them as captain while he held the office of captain.

The complete and perfect leader must be able to originate just political ideas, to organize them justly, to administer the organization with justice. But these three powers are seldom united in the same man; so, practically, the business of leading, and therefore of ruling, is commonly distributed amongst many persons; not concentrated in one man's hands. I think we have as yet had no statesman in America who has enjoyed each and all of these three talents in an eminent degree. No man is so rich as mankind. Any one of them is a great gift, entitling the man to distinction; but the talent for administration is not very rare. It is not difficult to find a man of good administrative ability with no power to invent, none to organize the inventions of other men. How many men can work all day with oxen yoked to a plough; how few could invent a plough or tame wild cattle. It is not hard to find men capable of managing political machinery, of holding the national plough and conducting the national team, when both are in the field, and there is the old furrow to serve as guide. That is all we commonly look for in an American politician. He is to follow the old constitutional furrow, and hold the old plough, and scatter a little democratic or whig seed, furnished by his party, not forgetting to give them the handsel of the crop. That is all we commonly look for in an American politician, leaving it for some bright but obscure man in the mass of the people to discover a new idea, and to devise the mode of its organization. Then the politician, perched aloft on his high place and conspicuous, holds the string of the kite which some unknown men have thought out, made up, and hoisted with great labor; he appears to be the great man because he sits and holds the string, administering the kite, and men look up and say, "See there, what a great man he is! Is not this the foremost man of the age?"

In this way the business of ruling the nation is made a matter of mere routine, not of invention or construction. The ruler is to tend the public mill; not to make it, or to mend it; not to devise new and better mills, not even to improve the old one. We may be thankful if he does not abuse and leave it worse than he found it. He is not to gather the dam, only to shut the gate at the right time, and at the right time open it; to take sufficient toll of all comers, and now and then make a report of the grinding, or of what he sees fit to communicate to the owners of the mill. As it is a part of the written Constitution of the land that all money bills shall originate with the House of Representatives, so it is a part of the unwritten custom that political ideas in advance of the people shall not originate with the nominal rulers of the nation, but elsewhere. One good thing results from this: we are not much governed, but much let alone. The American form of government has some great merits; this I esteem the greatest; that it lets the people alone so much. In forming ourselves into a State, we agreed with one another not to meddle and make politically with individuals so much as other nations had done.

It is a long time since we have had a man of large genius for politics at the head of affairs in America. I think we could not mention more than one who had any genius for just political ideas in advance of the people. Skilful administrators we have had in great abundance in politics as in other matters. Nature herself seems democratic in her action here, and all our great movements appear to be brought about by natural power diffused amongst many men of talent, not by natural power condensed into a single man of genius. So long as this is the case, the present method of letting alone is the best one. The American nation has marched on without much pioneering on the part of its official rulers, no one of them for a long time being much in advance of the million; and while it is so it is certainly best that the million are very much left to themselves. But if we could have a man as much in advance of the people in all these three qualities, and especially in the chief quality--as the skilful projector of a cotton mill is in advance of the girls who tend the looms, in all that relates to the projection of a cotton mill,--then we should know what it was to have a real leader, a ruler who could be the schoolmaster of the nation, not ruling over our bodies by fear, but in the spirit of love, setting us lessons which we could not have devised, nor even understand without his help; one who preserves all the good of the old, and adds thereto much new good not seen before, and so instructs and helps forward the people. But as the good God has not sent such a man, and he is not to be made by men, only found, nor in the least helped in any of those three qualities by all the praise we can pour on him; so it comes to pass that an ordinary ruler is a person of no very great consequence. His importance is official and not personal, and as only the person dies, not the office, the death of such an one is not commonly an affair of much significance. Suppose after Mr. Tyler or Mr. Polk had taken the oath of office, he had appointed a common clerk, a man of routine and experience, as his factotum, with power to affix the presidential name to necessary documents, and then had quietly and in silence departed from this life, how much would the nation have lost? A new and just political idea; an organization thereof? No such thing. If the public press had kept the secret, we should not have found out their death till this time. The obscure clerk could tend the mill as well as his famous master who would not be missed.

Louis XIV. said, "The State! That is I." He was the State. So when the ruler dies, the State is in peril. If the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Russia or Austria, or the Pope of Rome were to die, there would be a revolution, and nobody knows what would come of it; for there the ruler is master of the people, who are subjects, not citizens, and the old master dying, it is not easy to yoke the people to the chariot of a new one. Here the people are the State; and though the power of General Taylor was practically greater than that of any monarch in Europe, save Nicholas, William, and Ferdinand, yet at his death all the power passes into the hands of his successor, with no noise, no tumult, not even the appearance of a street constable. I think that was a sublime sight--the rule over twenty millions of people, jealous of their rights, silently, by due course of law, passes into the hands of another man at dead of night, and the next morning the nation is just as safe, just as quiet and secure as before, no fear of change perplexing them. That was a sublime sight--one of the fair things which comes of a democracy. Here the ruler is servant, and the people master; so the death of a President, like Mr. Van Buren, or any of his successors, Harrison or Tyler or Polk, would really have been a very unimportant event; not so momentous as the death of one of the ablest doctors in Boston, for should the physician die, your chance of life is diminished by that fact. If Dr. Channing had died at the age of forty, before he wrote his best works, his death would have been a greater calamity than that of any or all of the four Presidents just named, as soon as their inaugural address was delivered; for Dr. Channing had some truths to tell, which there was nobody else to deliver at that time. No President since Jefferson, I think, has done the nation so much good as the opening of the Erie Canal in New York, or the chief railroads in Massachusetts, or the building up of any one of the half dozen large manufacturing towns in New England. Mr. Cunard, in establishing his line of Atlantic steamers, did more for America than any President for five-and-twenty years. The discovery of the properties of sulphuric ether, the devising of the magnetic telegraph, was of more advantage to this nation, than the service of any President for a long time. I think I could mention a few men in Boston, any one of whom has been of more service than four or five Presidents; and, accordingly, the death of any one of those would be a greater calamity than the demise of all those Presidents the day after election. With us the President is only one spoke in the wheel, and if that is broken we always have a spare spoke on hand, and the wheel is so made that without stopping the mill, the new spoke drops into the place of the old one and no one knows the change till told thereof. If Mr. Polk had really been the ablest man in the land, a creator and an organizer, his death would have been a public calamity, and the whole nation would have felt it, as Boston or New York would feel the loss of one of its ablest manufacturers or merchants, lawyers or doctors. That would deprive us of the services of a man which could not be supplied. We have always spare men of routine, but not spare men of genius. Dr. Channing has been missed ever since his death, and the churches of Boston, poor enough before, are the poorer for his absence. So has John Quincy Adams, old as he was, been missed in the House of Representatives. The enemy of freedom may well rejoice that his voice is still. But who misses General Harrison or Mr. Polk? What interest languishes in consequence of their departure? What idea, what right, lost thereby a defender? If Sir Robert Peel were to die, the British nation would feel the loss.

We attach a false importance to the death of a President. Great calamities were apprehended at the death of General Harrison. But what came? Whigs went out of office and democrats went into office. Had Jefferson died before the Declaration of Independence, or Washington any time after it, or before the termination of his official service, or John Adams before the end of the war, that would have been a great calamity; for I know not where we should have found another Jefferson, to see so distinctly, and write down so plain the great American idea, or another Washington to command an army without money, without provisions, without hats and shoes, as that man did. The death of Samuel Adams, in 1760, would have been a terrible misfortune to America. But the death of General Harrison only made a change in the Cabinet, not in the country; it affected the politicians more than the people.