"The Pilgrim spirit is not dead, But walks in noon's broad light."
We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. The fathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthrops and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle through which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked back to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their memory be green forever!
GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.
I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regret it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such, regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed. He honestly thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth, responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to save his people from perilous heresy.
The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly exaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of conscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates, must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high tempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his, Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did from the magisterial whip.
Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.
WEST OSSIPEE, N. H., 14th 9th Month, 1878.
JOHN WINTHROP.
On the anniversary of his landing at Salem.
I see by the call of the Essex Institute that some probability is suggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting at The Willows on the 22d. I would be glad to make the implied probability a fact, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts into metrical form, and there will be little need of it, as I understand a lady of Essex County, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the best spirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to the occasion.
It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meeting of the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and good governor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that its choice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, and eloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy. As I look over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, I find no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the early colonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop. Like Vane and Milton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured and enlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian. It was not under his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry and intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quite reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could "hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity and forbearance far in advance of his generation.
I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest. I hope you will not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits the best qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar, and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop.
DANVERS, 6th Month, 19, 1880.
VOLUME VII. THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY, plus POLITICS AND REFORM, THE INNER LIFE and CRITICISM
CONTENTS:
THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY THE ABOLITIONISTS; THEIR SENTIMENTS AND OBJECTS LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL JOHN QUINCY ADAMS THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY WHAT IS SLAVERY DEMOCRAT AND SLAVERY THE TWO PROCESSIONS A CHAPTER OF HISTORY THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE QUESTION FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872 THE CENSURE OF SUMNER THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833 KANSAS WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY RESPONSE TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY
REFORM AND POLITICS.
UTOPIAN SCHEMES AND POLITICAL THEORISTS PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES WOMAN SUFFRAGE ITALIAN UNITY INDIAN CIVILIZATION READING FOR THE BLIND THE INDIAN QUESTION THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OUR DUMB RELATIONS INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN
THE INNER LIFE.
THE AGENCY OF EVIL HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES SWEDENBORG THE BETTER LAND DORA GREENWELL THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS JOHN WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL THE OLD WAY HAVERFORD COLLEGE
CRITICISM.
EVANGELINE MIRTH AND MEDICINE FAME AND GLORY FANATICISM THE POETRY OF THE NORTH
THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY
JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY
OR, SLAVERY CONSIDERED WITH A VIEW TO ITS RIGHTFUL AND EFFECTUAL REMEDY, ABOLITION.
(1833.)
"There is a law above all the enactments of human codes, the same throughout the world, the same in all time,--such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of wealth and power and knowledge, to another all unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man."
--LORD BROUGHAM.
IT may be inquired of me why I seek to agitate the subject of Slavery in New England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil. Because such an acknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than the slave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found," says James Monroe, in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that this evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed." All the states in their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made a similar statement. And what has been the consequence of this general belief in the evil of human servitude? Has it sapped the foundations of the infamous system? No. Has it decreased the number of its victims?
Quite the contrary. Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has been in a moral point of view worthless, a thing without vitality, sightless, soulless, dead.
But it may be said that the miserable victims of the system have our sympathies. Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering.
Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing of those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lash from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul are becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It is white-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. It is scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festering grave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and all uncleanness," the pollution and loathsomeness below.
No! let the truth on this subject, undisguised, naked, terrible as it is, stand out before us. Let us no longer seek to cover it; let us no longer strive to forget it; let us no more dare to palliate it. It is better to meet it here with repentance than at the bar of God. The cry of the oppressed, of the millions who have perished among us as the brute perisheth, shut out from the glad tidings of salvation, has gone there before us, to Him who as a father pitieth all His children. Their blood is upon us as a nation; woe unto us, if we repent not, as a nation, in dust and ashes. Woe unto us if we say in our hearts, "The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He who formed the eye, shall He not see?"
But it may be urged that New England has no participation in slavery, and is not responsible for its wickedness.
Why are we thus willing to believe a lie? New England not responsible!
Bound by the United States constitution to protect the slave-holder in his sins, and yet not responsible! Joining hands with crime, covenanting with oppression, leaguing with pollution, and yet not responsible!
Palliating the evil, hiding the evil, voting for the evil, do we not participate in it?
(Messrs. Harvey of New Hampshire, Mallary of Vermont, and Ripley of Maine, voted in the Congress of 1829 against the consideration of a Resolution for inquiring into the expediency of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.)
Members of one confederacy, children of one family, the curse and the shame, the sin against our brother, and the sin against our God, all the iniquity of slavery which is revealed to man, and all which crieth in the ear, or is manifested to the eye of Jehovah, will assuredly be visited upon all our people. Why, then, should we stretch out our hands towards our Southern brethren, and like the Pharisee thank God we are not like them? For so long as we practically recognize the infernal principle that "man can hold property in man," God will not hold us guiltless. So long as we take counsel of the world's policy instead of the justice of heaven, so long as we follow a mistaken political expediency in opposition to the express commands of God, so long will the wrongs of the slaves rise like a cloud of witnesses against us at the inevitable bar.
Slavery is protected by the constitutional compact, by the standing army, by the militia of the free states.
(J. Q. Adams is the only member of Congress who has ventured to speak plainly of this protection. See also his very able Report from the minority of the Committee on Manufactures. In his speech during the last session, upon the bill of the Committee of Ways and Means, after discussing the constitutional protection of slavery, he says: "But that same interest is further protected by the Laws of the United States. It was protected by the existence of a standing army. If the States of this Union were all free republican States, and none of them possessed any of the machinery of which he had spoken, and if another portion of the Union were not exposed to another danger, from their vicinity to the tribes of Indian savages, he believed it would be difficult to prove to the House any such thing as the necessity of a standing army. What in fact was the occupation of the army? It had been protecting this very same interest. It had been doing so ever since the army existed. Of what use to the district of Plymouth (which he there represented) was the standing army of the United States? Of not one dollar's use, and never had been.")
Let us not forget that should the slaves, goaded by wrongs unendurable, rise in desperation, and pour the torrent of their brutal revenge over the beautiful Carolinas, or the consecrated soil of Virginia, New England would be called upon to arrest the progress of rebellion,--to tread out with the armed heel of her soldiery that spirit of freedom, which knows no distinction of cast or color; which has been kindled in the heart of the black as well as in that of the white.
And what is this system which we are thus protecting and upholding? A system which holds two millions of God's creatures in bondage, which leaves one million females without any protection save their own feeble strength, and which makes even the exercise of that strength in resistance to outrage punishable with death! which considers rational, immortal beings as articles of traffic, vendible commodities, merchantable property,--which recognizes no social obligations, no natural relations,--which tears without scruple the infant from the mother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child. In the strong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition or comparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputed possession of its detestable preeminence."
So fearful an evil should have its remedies. The following are among the many which have been from time to time proposed:--