Read Ebook: Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society Great Speech Delivered in New York City by Beecher Henry Ward

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 92 lines and 14636 words, and 2 pages

Out of such original and radical differences, there must flow a perpetual contrast and opposition of policies and procedures, in the operation of society and of business. We will select but a few, of many, subjects of contrast, Work, Education, Freedom of Speech and of the Press, and Religion.

In the South, the very reverse is true, as a general proposition.

But this is not the whole reason, nor the chiefest and more potent reason of the difference between public feeling about WORK, North and South.

And it is this innate, hereditary indisposition to work that, after all, is the greatest obstacle to emancipation. Laziness in the South and money in the North, are the bulwarks of Slavery! To take away a planter's slaves is to cut off his hands. There is where he keeps his work. There is none of it in himself. And it is this, too, which leads to the contempt which southern people feel for northern men. They are working men, and work is flavored to the Southerner with ideas of ignominy, of meanness, of vulgar lowness. Neither can they understand how a man who works all his life long can be high-minded and generous, intelligent and refined.

The theory of the North is, that every man has the right, on every subject, to the freest expression of his opinions, and the fullest right to urge them upon the convictions of others. It is not a permission of law; it is the inherent right of the individual. Law is only to protect the citizen in the use of that right.

It is the theory of the North that society is as much a gainer by this freedom of discussion as is the individual.

It is a perpetual education of the people, and a safeguard to the State. There is the utmost latitude of speech and discussion among our citizens. The attempt to abridge it would be so infatuated that the most dignified Court that ever sat in Boston would become an object of universal merriment and ridicule, that should presume to arrest and cause to be indicted any man for free speaking in old Faneuil Hall. Merriment, I say, for who would not laugh at a philosopher who would set snares for the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and regulate their indiscreet shining. Darkness and silence are excellent for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant to a fool.

The South, holding a heathen theory of man--an aristocratic theory of society,--is bound to hold, and does hold, a radically opposite practice in respect to rights of speech and freedom of the press.

There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.

Men may there talk of a thousand things--of all religious doctrines, of literature, of art, of public political measures--but no man has liberty to talk as he pleases about the structure of southern society, and apply to the real facts of southern life and southern internal questions that searching investigation and public exposure which, in the North, brings every possible question to the bar of public opinion, and makes society boil like a pot!

Yes, you may speak of Slavery, if you will defend it; you may preach about it, if you shingle its roof with Scripture texts; but you may not talk, nor preach, nor print abolition doctrines, though you believe them with the intensity of inspiration!

We believe God's revealed word to contain the influence appointed for the regeneration and full development of every human being, and that it is to be employed as God's universal stimulant to the human soul, as air and light are the universal stimulants of vegetation.

We preach it to arouse the whole soul; we preach it to fire the intellect, and give it wings by which to compass knowledge; we preach it to touch every feeling with refinement, to soften rudeness and enrich affections; we build the family with it; we sanctify love, and purge out lust; we polish every relation of life; we inspire a cheerful industry and whet the edge of enterprise, and then limit them by the bonds of justice and by the moderation of a faith which looks into the future and the eternal. We teach each man that he is a child of God; that he is personally one for whom the Savior died; we teach him that he is known and spoken of in heaven, his name called; that angels are sent out upon his path to guard and to educate him; we swell within him to the uttermost every aspiration, catching the first flame of youth and feeding it, until the whole heart glows like an altar, and the soul is a temple bright within, and sweet, by the incense-smoke and aspiring flame of perpetual offerings and divine sacrifices. We have never done with him. We lead him from the cradle to boyhood; we take him then into manhood, and guide him through all its passes; we console him in age, and then stand, as he dies, to prophesy the coming heaven, until the fading eye flashes again, and the unhearing ear is full again; for from the other side ministers of grace are coming, and he beholds them, and sounds on earth and sights are not so much lost as swallowed up in the glory and the melody of the heavenly joy!

Now tell me whether there is any preaching of the Gospel to the slave, or whether there can be, and he yet remain a slave? We preach the Gospel to arouse men, they to subdue them; we to awaken, they to soothe; we to inspire self-reliance, they submission; we to drive them forward in growth, they to repress and prune down growth; we to convert them into men, they to make them content to be beasts of burden!

Religion with them does no such thing. It doth the reverse.

With them it is Herod casting men into prison. With us it is the angel, appearing to lead them out of prison and set them free! In short religion with us is emancipation and liberty; with them it is bondage and contentment.

It is very plain that while nominally republican institutions exist in both the North and South, they are animated by a very different spirit, and used for a different purpose. In the North, they aim at the welfare of the whole people; in the South they are the instruments by which a few control the many. In the North, they tend toward Democracy; in the South, toward Oligarchy.

It is equally plain that while there may be a union between Northern and Southern States, it is external, or commercial, and not internal and vital, springing from common ideas, common ends, and common sympathies. It is a union of merchants and politicians and not of the people.

Had these opposite and discordant systems been left separate to work out each its own results, there would have been but little danger of collision or contest.

But they are politically united. They come together into one Congress. There these antagonistic principles, which creep with subtle influence through the very veins of their respective States, break out into open collision upon every question of national policy. And, since the world began, a republican spirit is unfit to secure power. It degenerates it in the many. But an aristocratic spirit always has aptitude and impulse toward power. It seeks and grasps it as naturally as a hungry lion prowls and grasps its prey.

For fifty years the imperious spirit of the South has sought and gained power. It would have been of but little consequence were that power still republican. The seat of empire may be indifferently on the Massachusetts Bay or the Ohio, on the Lakes or on the Gulf; if it be the same empire, acting in good faith for the same democratic ends.

But in the South the growth of power has been accompanied by a marked revolution in political faith, until now the theory of Mr. Calhoun, once scouted, is becoming the popular belief. And that theory differs in nothing from outright European Aristocracy, save in the forms and instruments by which it works.

Oh! how little do men dream of the things that are transpiring about them! In Luther's days, how little they knew the magnitude of the results pending that controversy of fractious monk and haughty pope! How little did the frivolous courtier know the vastness of that struggle in which Hampden, Milton and Cromwell acted! We are in just such another era. Dates will begin from the period in which we live!

Do not think that all the danger lies in that bolted cloud which flashes in the Southern horizon. There is decay, and change, here in the North. Old New-England, that suckled American liberty, is now suckling wolves to devour it.

What shall we think when a President of old Dartmouth College goes over to Slavery, and publishes to the world his religious conviction of the rightfulness of it, as a part of God's disciplinary government of the world--wholesome to man, as a punishment of sins which he never committed, and to liquidate the long arrearages of Ham's everlasting debt! and avowing that, under favorable circumstances, he would buy and own slaves! A Southern volcano in New-Hampshire, pouring forth the lava of despotism in that incorrupt, and noble old fortress of liberty! What a College to educate our future legislators!

What are we to think, when old Massachusetts, the mother of the Revolution, every league of whose soil swells with the tomb of some heroic patriot, shall make pilgrimages through the South, and, after surveying the lot of slaves under a system that turns them out of manhood, pronounces them chattles, denies them marriage, makes their education a penal and penitentiary offence, makes no provision for their religious culture, leaving it to the stealth of good men, or the interest of those who regard religion as a currycomb, useful in making sleek and nimble beasts--a system which strikes through the fundamental instincts of humanity, and wounds nature in the core of the human heart, by taking from parents all right in their children, and leaving the family, like a bale of goods, to be unpacked, and parceled out and sold in pieces, without any other protection than the general good nature of easy citizens; what shall be thought of the condition of the public mind in Boston, when one of her most revered, and personally, deservedly beloved pastors, has come up so profoundly ignorant of what we thought every child knew, that he comes home from this pilgrimage, to teach old New-England to check her repugnance to Slavery, to dry up her tears of sympathy, and to take comfort in the assurance that Slavery, on the whole, is as good or better for three millions of laboring men as liberty. He has instituted a formal comparison between the state of society and the condition of a laboring population in a slave system and those in a free State, and left the impression on every page that Liberty works no better results than servitude, and that it has mischiefs and inconveniences which Slavery altogether avoids.

Read that book in Faneuil Hall, and a thousand aroused and indignant ghosts would come flocking there, as if they heard the old roll-call of Bunker Hill. Yea, read those doctrines on Bunker Hill--and would it flame or quake? No. It would stand in silent majesty, pointing its granite finger up to Heaven and to God--an everlasting witness against all Slavery, and all its abettors or defenders.

It is not the question whether a Northern party should be a party of philanthropy, or of propagandism, or of abolition. It is simply a question whether, for fear of these things, they will ignore and rub out of their creed every principle of human rights!

I am not afraid of foreigners among us. Nevertheless, our politicians have so abused us through them, that I am glad that a movement is on foot to regulate the conduct of new-comers among us, and oblige them to pass through a longer probation before they become citizens. In so far as I understand the practical measures proposed and set forth in the Message of the Governor of Massachusetts, I approve them.

If then, a party is American, ought it not to be because it represents those principles which are fundamental to American Institutions and to American policy? principles which stand in contrast with European Institutions and policy!

That which declares the right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--or that which declares the right of strength and intelligence to subordinate weakness and ignorance?

That which ordains popular education, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, public discussion--or that which makes these a prerogative, yielded to a class but denied to masses?

That which organizes Society as a Democracy and Government, and Republic--or that which organizes Society as an Aristocracy, and Government as an Oligarchy?

Which shall it be--that of organized New England townships, schools, and churches--that resisted taxation without representation--that covered Boston harbor with tea, as if all China had shook down her leaves there--which spake from Faneuil Hall, and echoed from Bunker Hill; or that policy which landed slaves on the Chesapeake--that has changed Old Virginia from a land of heroes into a breeding-ground of slaves--that has broken down boundaries, and carried war over our lines, not for liberty, but for more territory for slaves to work, that the owners might multiply, and the Aristocracy of America stand on the shores of two oceans, an unbroken bound all between?

An American National party--Liberty left out!

An American party--Human Rights left out!

Gentlemen, such a party will stink with dissolution before you can get it finished. No Masonry can make it solid--no art can secure it. No anchor that was ever forged in infernal stythy can go deep enough into political mud to hold it!

We will take that for our life's enterprise. Dying, we will leave it a legacy to our children, and they shall will it to theirs, until the work is done, our fathers' prayers are answered, and this whole land stands clothed and in its right mind--a symbol of what the earthly fruits of the Gospel are!

If a National party is now to be formed, what shall it be, and what shall its office be?

It shall be a peacemaker, say sly politicians. Yes, peace by war. But an American party, seeking peace with the imperious Aristocracy by yielding everything down to the root--one would think no party need be formed to do that. Judas did as much without company. Arnold did that without companions.

The latter portion of the lecture was frequently interrupted by boisterous applause.

After Mr. Beecher had taken his seat, there were loud calls for Mr. GIDDINGS, whereupon that gentleman came forward and said that he had not come to make a speech, but, like a good Methodist brother, he would add his exhortation to the excellent sermon of his clerical friend. In conclusion, Mr. Giddings besought all to enter heartily into the contest for Freedom--to trust in God and keep their powder dry!

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet