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DISCOURSE
UPON
CAUSES FOR THANKSGIVING:
PREACHED AT
WATERTOWN, NOV. 30, 1862.
By JOHN WEISS.
BOSTON:
WRIGHT & POTTER, PRINTERS, 4 SPRING LANE.
1 8 6 2.
�J
�DISCOURSE.
Make: iv: 28.
FIRST THE BLADE, THEN THE EAR, AFTER THAT- THE FULL CORN IN THE EAR.
The content and thankfulness of New England are committed
every spring to her soil by fee hand! oft farmers, who find it
again spreading the color of California gold over their autumn
fields. And what an alchemist is a former, to get that color out
of land so poor and climate so harshgwhefe, what with the
prices of labor, the expense of implements;,;' of draining, manur
ing, keeping of stock and buildings,; and a comfortable life
through a tedious winter not a great deal of feat color finds its
way into his pockety however much he may store in his bins
or send to market. And W;herever.,a ploughmans, from the
Kennebec to the Mississippi, turniiig^fat or meagre soils to the
sun of a temperate summer^ there springs the beautiful thanks
giving harvest of New England# and of the North. Manufac
tures, shoe and leather dealing, all. the trades and inventions,
eat the pumpkins and the corn of fee farmer. And the pursuits
which are closely allied to^agideulture,such as, the breeding
of cattle and the growing of wool, foelp the farmer to create
and feed a North. Lawrence# and Lowell can consume all the
cotton they get, when the farmer of the East and West dumps
his potatoes at the ^factory door. ■ When the great arm of the
engine vibrates, and a million spindles and the hearts of those
who tend them sing, see how fee sJendentferead goes up from
the ball, carrying all the. crops of the year wife it to spin them
into Wamsutta or Merrimac, or other famous brands. The morn
ing tattoo which the Lynn shoemakers beat on their lap-stones
is the echo of flails in a thousand barns. Genesis says, that the
Lord God took a little earth to make the first man ; now man
�4
breathes his own breath of life into the earth again, and it
makes him and sustains him every day.
There is not much land, even among the rich river-bottoms
and prairies of the West, so genial that man has “ only to tickle
it with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest.” What would
our farmers think of that great tract of black earth in the
empire of Russia, “ lying between the fifty-first and fifty-seventh
parallels of latitude, comprising about 247,000,000 acres, so rich
that if manured the first years of culture, the crops often prove
abortive from excessive vegetation. The thickness of this deposit
varies from three to six feet, and in many places it runs to an
unknown depth.”* But how hard it is to evoke civilization and
knowledge out of that depth, because neither of them cultivate
it. Yet it is in that great temperate plateau of Russia, called
“ The Industrial Region,” that freedom and religion when
planted may be expected to subdue the rankness of the soil.
Here freedom and religion coax and flatter sterility till it fairly
forgets itself and smiles.
In a still autumn morning, when the brown roads have
drift-heaps of red and yellow leaves, and the air seems to be
nothing but a mingling of shine and warmth, what a ride
it is to take up and down the valleys here, through the north
part of Watertown, where the first farmers of New England
sowed their English grass, and across Beaver brook through
the uplands of Waltham, and behind Prospect-hill, where
the farms and wood-lots stretch pleasantly away. Perhaps you
turn off towards Lexington, and cross the famous turnpike
down which the farmers “fired the first shot heard round
the world,” when, as minute-men, they top-dressed their
fields with English blood, and were not chary of their own.
Religion and liberty have grown well ever since. You ride past
their manifest tokens; you pause at their memorial when you
hitch your horse at a farmer’s door, and ask the price of his
potatoes and pumpkins which lie there, great heaps of plenty,
before barns bursting with corn-shucks and upland grass, the
sinews of war and of peace. No sharp-shooting behind the stone
fences now, nor irregular firing up and down the road. The
cricket chirps from the door-step a tranquil song, whose burden
Patent Office Report, 1861. Agricultural.
�5
’seems to be that Nature is laying in sunshine, with good hus
bandry, for another spring. The children break out of the little
primary school-house, where New England planting is carried
on too,—boys and girls trained to grow straight and sturdy, to
handle some day the plough, the loom, or the musket, as the
country needs. Now they are the finest of all the crops on the
slopes which they shall one day inherit. What a ride you can
take through the country lanes, bordered with nothing finer
than the pendent barberry and the purpling sumach, unless you
have an eye for the comfort, and thanksgiving, and popular
Liberty, whose stateliness lines all the road, and stretches far
away between the hills.
When a people own the land, wd own themselves, and conse
quently do not depend upon oiid product and one employment
for their means of intelligence and happiness, they are superior
to bad luck, and know little of the discomforts of a crisis. In
this respect what a different sight meets the traveller who is
passing to-day through the cotton districts of Lancashire,
England, where a population offl nearly three millions have
their welfare entangled in the will-machinery, and cease to
hope as the factory ©fiimnies Q,ease to smoke. They are as
piuch the slaves of thll cotton-plant as the negroes who hoe it
and gin its blossoms. They belong to a style of civilization
*
which thinks little of man, but a great deal of trade ; which
dooms a man all his life, and his? children after him, to make
the head of a pin, to pick under grouffl. at a stratum of coal, to
pull and ripple flaxjfe1 tend a machine in a mill. Take away
his pin-head, his pick-axe, or fail to. feed his machine with
cotton, and he is a p^w^ef| he,,comes upon the parish for his
daily support, or has a^frowl of soup ladled out to him at the
door of some charity. In Manchester, which has a population
of 357,604, the pauperism is-Bow 10f per cent., and out-door
relief is distributed to 16,334 persons at the rate of Is. 4d. per
head per week—about two shillings of ©Mr money. Out of
eighty-four cotton mills, twenty-two
are
**
stopped, and thirty are
working short time. But Manchester is comparatively well off.
The town of Stockport, about six miles from Manchester, has,
out of a population of 54,681, 18,000 engaged in the factories,
in good times; but now there are only 4,000 working on full
�6
time, 7,283 are wholly unemployed, and 7,000 are working on
short time. Then 1,000 people belonging to other trades
depend upon the staple trade, thrown out of work. 30,000
people in Stockport receive relief. But what an amount of
misery do those figures represent. The more able-bodied men
go tramping over the country to seek work, but spinners and
weavers are not able-bodied, and a day’s march often lays them
up. Some of them who can sing form a little company, and
go singing glees, “ with nobody minding,” and few farthings for
their half-starved music. The women also try to win a’bitter
meal with the sweetness of their voice. A spectator describes
a scene of this kind : “ One young woman, about thirty years of
age, with a child in her arms, was standing in a by-street,
singing in a sweet, plaintive voice, a Lancashire song. It was
her first song in public ; and the tremulous voice and downcast
look, as she hugged with nervous grasp her little one, was very
touching. When the song was over, the poor creature looked
round with a timid air to the bystanders ; but she had miscalcu
lated her strength—the occasion was beyond her power of
endurance—and she burst into a passionate flood of tears.”*
I see m that womaU, the patient England held in slavery by a
selfish Toryism, which would be. glad to-morrow to recognize
another slavery in order to keep its own fed and quiet. A
relieving officer in Stockport, says : “ I have gone into the
rooms of the English operatives when they have not had a
mouthful of bread under the roof, and perhaps not had what
you may call a meal the whole $ay, and nothing but shavings to
sleep on through the night, yet they talked as cheerfully and
resignedly as if there was every prospect of employment on the
morrow.” These are subjects of a government which has
trained their bodies and souls to do only one thing, to mind the
brutifying monotony of one machine, and is now exulting over
what it calls the failure of a Democracy, as it lets arms and
steamers for a Southern aristocracy slip through one hand, and
a little soup for its starving poor through the other. This,
then, is the largess of a constitutional monarchy,—piratical
cannon and comfort for slave-drivers abroad, and the great
institution of Soup for slaves at home I
* A Visit to the Cotton Districts, 1862, p. 4.
�7
Even this latter is grudgingly bestowed. Many of the richest
mill-owners have not yet subscribed a farthing to the relief
funds, so that it is a difficult matter to secure a shilling a head
per week to the poor applicants. Yet who subscribed to the
“Alabama?” Whose money fits out steamer after steamer with
munitions to keep the life in Southern slavery ? What capital
is it that buys Confederate bonds at eighty-four cents, and that
is willing to take the risks of sea and a blockade to help in
undermining the great Republic whose manifold prosperity it
dreads ? Thank God, the elements of an American Thanks
giving, material and spiritual, are, and forever will be, beyond
the reach of open levy dr secret m^lfe'e of itsjiearty haters.
In Ashton-under-eLyne, whose population is 36,791, there are
10,933 hands employed tdfi^^MH^^^iting a population of
nearly 22,000. The existing means Of relief reach only 9,000
of these; that is, there are moi^thanb 10,000 dependent on
private charity, or their own eesoffm^ The 9,000 cost <£480
per week. The mill-owners in this place have been disposed to
help the operativestfff'Someof thdm have allowed their unem
ployed hands as much as two^and^shipen'c’e a week, some lend
them money, others maintain a daily distribution of food.
In Preston the progress of the distress is shown by the fol
lowing figures : in August of this year fehe number of poor
relieved by the rates was fe,2'0l| and by' the Public Relief
Committee, 21,616 ; but in September the number had swelled
to 14,289 relieved by the rates, and 23,932 by the Committee.
“ During the week ending September 13, the Relief Committee
distributed 16,832 loaves, weighing;, 601:6 lbs.; 11,301 quarts
of soup, and 4,820 qaaafts' of coffee.” There are seventy-one
firms owning mills imPr^stbff ^ ofthese,. forty-eight contributed
the pitiful sum of :£l,9f8
a re^ifwd of £12,000. Yet
there are 27,600 factory operatives; whose actual financial loss
per week amounts to mop® than £11,00'0. This happens every
week, and one in every seveii and a half of the entire popula
*
tion of Preston become entirely pauperized. To counterbalance
this, forty-eight rich mill-owners contributed less than £2,000,
not per week, but their definitive subscription for the year !
See how these poor men were obliged to take their money
out of the savings banks. In the single town of Blackburn
�8
the annual deposits, from 1855 to 1861, “ had risen from
£18,118 to £49,943, or more than £30,000.” But what was
that sum to the working classes who had lost since August,
1861, at least £350,000 in wages, “ and that amount is now
being increased at the rate of £12,000 per week.” During six
months, down to last May, the withdrawals from the banks were
£10,000 in excess of the usual amount. These savings have
been all swallowed up by this time. “ A lass, thinly clad, but
bearing evidence of better days, saw a dog with a bone. She
tried to take it away. The dog snarled—would not give it up ;
and she stood foiled, in hungry attitude. A tradesman seeing
her said, £ What did you want with that bone ? ’ c I could have
swapped it for salt,’ she replied, £ and the salt I might have
swapped for a bit of bread.’ As she said this she burst into
tears.”
In the midst of this distress, the painful and touching
instances of which need not be repeated, the Boards of Guard
ians in many places have established what is called the ££ Labor
Test,” to protect the parish funds from the poaching of profes
sional paupers and vagabonds. They commence an excavation,
or provide work in stone-yards and on the roads, where every
unemployed man must do his choice in order to draw his relief.
These honest and unfortunate operatives are reduced to labor
at these aimless tasks by the side of vagrants, ragamuffins, gam
blers, “ and corrupt old hucksters,” to get a miserable dole of
parish bread. Whiat a poisoned mess is this which the proud old
monarchy tosses jealously to her plain, straightforward children,
who have woven, spun, carded,, drawn and pieced her million
bales of goods, which stock the markets of the world !
The resort to Indian cotton, which is carelessly gathered and
imperfectly cleaned, appears only to have aggravated the pre
vailing wretchedness. Overseers and ££ managers report the
most harrowing scenes in the factories,
o
*wing
to the exhaustion
of the patience of the men and the women who £ cannot go on
with their work, owing to constant breakages.’ The machines
which they tend stand idle, whilst innumerable threads break
rom sheer rottenness, and almost before the wheels are again
in motion the work is again required to be suspended, from a
cause which had but the moment before been remedied. The
�9
worry of such work is exhausting; it depresses the physical
energies and wears the heart. Some give up in despair, and
leave the factory to beg or work on the moor or in the stone
yard ; others grow haggard or pale under the trial; the strong
men grow weak,—the weak, ill. The men curse, and the
women sit down and cry bitterly. A manufacturer resident in
Manchester, who is by no means a tender-hearted gentleman,
said, that instances of the kind were of daily occurrence in his
factory, and that he had ceased to go into most of the rooms,
4 for the women were all crying over their work.’ ”*
The London 44 Times” informs jks, tl«from the first of Sep
tember to the twenty-fifth of October, the number of persons
receiving parochial relief in all the cotton districts had increased
by 68,456, and that there <ere in ^11
^
*08,621.
In addition to
this, there are 143,870 persons who receive their aid from local
committees. Total, 352,491. jfTJie weekly loss of wages is
estimated at ^136,094,- and th^amou^at^to <^7,000,000 a year.
44 Nor does this prodigious sunu| says the 44 Times,” 44 represent
the whole loss incurred by, these districts, for the ordinary
*
receipts of a manufacturer mutst be such as to cover not only
wages, but the expense of machine^, and the interest of capital
sunk in buildings and land, besides a^handsome^ofit.” It is the
loss of this handsome, profit wshich, more than all the suffering of
the men and women who used to egtrn it, inspires the 44Times”
to unroll its columns of appalling figures in the interest of inter
vention and Southern slavery. The l$ss5..of this profit, and the
discomfort of having- 40.0.,000 gjesh (paupers added in one year
to its list of vagabonds, isthe on® .d^w^ack to English satisfac
tion at seeing the great Republic ,shrivelling from loss of blood,
and sinking from the menace of^its, former estate to insignifi
cance beneath debt, dismembermenti. ^nd national disgrace.
But it reminds me of. .the. principaL.cause for thanksgiving
which we have to-day. J>i;^rea.dmgt;.b,efQye you a few facts in
relation to the distress o%ihe^ng^jwofci^n, my object was
not only to contrast it with the suhgtap^al comfort which the
institutions of a Democracy sustain, at the same time that it
can wage war at the rate of $2,000,000 a day, and deaths and
* Visit to the Cotton Districts, p. 75.
2
�10
wounds incomputable, but to bring that rebellious aristocracy,
to whose bad cause this distress is incidental, before the tribunal
of our grateful thoughts.
Men of New England never had such a reason for returning
thanks as to-day, when they can perceive so clearly that the
whole history of their country has inevitably led to this death
struggle between two ideas as incompatible in the same civil
society as deceit and sincerity in the same heart; an Aristocracy
founded upon depriving men of natural rights, and a Democracy
founded upon securing them to men. We are thankful that
the issue is honestly and squarely made at last, and lurks no
longer behind politics and compromises, and that every measure
of the past which expected to stifle it has distinctly led, by the
logic of a God who cannot bear iniquity, to a great historical
situation, which tears the mask from the evil tendency, and bids
a good tendency assume its grand proportions. The first Revo
lution of ’76 was only a graft upon the rugged American stock,
which blossomed in these latter years, and is now maturing
its fruit. It will be the task of some future pen to show how
the divine thought has picked its way through the political
confusion and disgraces of a generation, to finish its work of
founding a Republic.
How premature were all our notions that we were citizens
of an America. We have been in our minority all the time
—a lusty, passionate and unsettled one, out of which we are
stepping now, to the rights and privileges of an honest demo
cratic manhood. To show how we grew to this, will one
day be the task of some man who will devote to it the flower
and prudence of his life. He will have to divide it into three
epochs—the first comprising the establishment of the Constitu
tion, and the subsequent years to the abolition of the slavetrade. This was the epoch when the rights of man were the
accepted theory of the country, slavery was supposed to be a
self-limited disease, and the Revolution slumbered after resisting
one aristocracy, till it was awakened by another. The second
epoch will tell the great material and political story of the
growth of slavery, in a generation which forgot the feeling of
the fathers from interest and ambition. It will show how
adroitly the new aristocratic ideas helped themselves to power
�11
witir the country’s great watchword—Democracy—by relating
the successive encroachments of an unconstitutional tendency
1 in the name of the Constitution, in each of which free-labor
voted to extend and protect slave-labor, and our mother, with
the Revolution’s blood yet hallowing her starry garments, was
scorned and almost turned out of her own children’s house.
This epoch, with its three sub-divisions of nullification, the
territorial questions, and the reaction of Republicanism, will
extend to the election of Abraham Lincoln. The third epoch
will open with secession, and tell the story of the reappearance
of the rights of man in the reawakening of the Revolution, *
1
when the Democrat and the Aristocrat see each other clearly at
last, only a bayonet’s length
as they did at Bunker’s
Hill and Yorktown. And as-it 4s •jushjis impossible to write
history without idea® as it iatqinake nations and epochs without
them, so the idea of thist, history will be to show how provi
dential and inevitable was the -rise of thisparistocracy and the
resistance of this democracy, with all the triumphs, disgraces,
defeats and miseries qf their irrepressible conflict, with all the
accidents, treasons, indecisions and weaknesses of the people’s
war ; and that these things were for the sake of having a People
at last to illustrate, uphold, and organize.the rights of mankind,
first for America, but no less for th©wo$id^ It will be a history
of two necessities born^of ,£ws> incompatible tendencies: the
necessity of aristocracy, born of slavery, and the necessity of
democracy born of freqdqm. Those, two necessities not only
account for all that ha$ happened, but show how nothing could
*
have happened otherwise^ not eyen military disappointments,
delays and imbecilities;, how, in short, slavery would never
have been destroyed by freedom in any other way, or upon other
terms, or at any other period.
We never believed thi®, and yet we see that it comes true,
and every fresh bulletin ‘^nfirms it; for if, out of all the
crowd of events which makes the history of a country, a few
of them happened by chance alone, the whole series of events
would be vitiated, and the divine intentions, if there are any
such, would be spoiled. If even one event occurred by chance,
that is, illogically, shoved in, on slovenly, like the dropping
of a stitch, the splendid web which we call history would
.1
�12
be shoddy. All the great forces of the world make all their
slightest movements in obedience to law. The only mistake
which slavery makes is in being slavery; that will destroy it,
but in the meantime it is consistent and fatal as consumption.
And God means that it shall be, for consistency’s sake, to
show the necessity of health and freedom. Therefore, we
shall find that there was never a moment previous to the war
when slavery could have been overcome by freedom, and never
a moment during the war. We return thanks for the presence
of God in every disappointment of our history.
Let us look at this point a little closer. When the Constitu
tion became the charter of a Federal Union, slavery had just
strength enough to prevent freedom from destroying it, and not
strength enough to pique freedom in making the attempt. The
two tendencies were neutral, but it was because one tendency
was felt to be evil and unrepublican, and short-lived. In 1790,
’91 and ’92, only 733,044 pounds of cotton were exported from
the United States, a great deal of which was foreign cotton which
had been previously imported.
*
The total value of this export
was only $137,737 ; an amount that would not keep an aristoc
racy in tobacco. But the development of the cotton-crop has
been unchecked and regular ever since, excepting in the year
of the embargo, 1808, and the three years of war, 1812, ’13 and
’14. In 1805, the value of the export was $32,004,005; in
1821, it was $64,638,062; and in 1850, it was $118,393,952.
The “ cotton zone ” extended from the Atlantic to the Rio del
Norte, including the States and portions of States lying between
the 27th and 35th parallels of latitude, “and all of the State
of Texas between the Gulf of Mexico, and the 34th parallel of
* Before the Revolution, hemp and silk competed with cotton for preponder
ance. In a copy of Nathaniel Ames’s Almanac for 1765, I find the following
item : “March 14; above 20,000 cwt. of|iemp has been exported from South
Carolina since Nov. 1. Several stalks measured 17 feet long and 2 inches
diameter at the base.” Thus hemp was exported while foreign cotton was
imported, and more pounds of hemp were raised than of cotton. In a copy of
the Almanac for 1766, is another item: “June 30. Last Triday voted by ye
House of Commons of ye Province (S. Carolina) £1,000 towards establishing a
Silk Filature in this town under the direction of Rev’d Mr. Gilbert. Mrs.
Pinckney of Belmont Plantation, within four miles of Charleston, has made
near 50 bushels of Cocoons this season, which are esteemed of the best kind.”
�13
North latitude.” In this vast area of upwards of 450,000 square
miles, nearly a third is adapted to the growing of cotton.
*
Here,
if any where, was the development of a geographical party with
sectional politics. But at the same period, in 1850, the value
of the crop of Indian corn was $456,091,491; of wheat, $156,786,068 ; and of hay, $254,334,316.f Cotton was smaller than
each of these great staples, being only one hundred and eighteen
millions. Why did no aristocracy spring from those enormous
figures, whose growth is maifilylNorthern ? Because the men
who owned the crops raised them^ and therein lies the difference
between a sectional party and tw national life.
At what period during tliS’ great development of the cotton
staple would yoUr-haw expected ’slavery to come to an end by
the operation of natural laws ?' Wei
®
* sbd
to hear a good deal
about letting slavery alone Mhat it might die out. Why, the
operation of natural laws-was faWrafole ‘to slavery—to the
protection both of slaves and cotton. We might have expected
to see Northern agriculture die out as soon.
The abolition of the slave-trade, in 1808, which the South
regarded at the timAas' a hostile mewurwhas proved immensely
favorable to slavery. It was indeed the first act of positive
legislation with a tendency to ncMrish and protect that institu
tion. For when artohial cargoes of half-barbarous Africans are
introduced into a eoiaAffy, local ' disturbances occur more
frequently, the- mortalitynin'ong' the sWbi W greater, and their
increase comparativelyTeebl'S. t The abolition of the trade gave
•t «
* Andrews’ Report on Colonial, and Lake Trade... 1852.
f These figures, taken from the Agricultural Report, 1861, vary from those
which had been previously given in the Census for 1850. Of wheat alone, the
two States of Pennsylvania! and New York, raised of course more bushels than
the aggregate of all the Southern and Middle Slave States.
t In 1714, the number of slaves; was 55,850; and 30,000 of these had been
brought from Africa,
Between 1715 and 1750 there were imported 90,000 slaves.
cc
6t
■ CC
1751
1760 CC
35,000 11
Cl
Ct
1761 “ 1770 CC
74,000 “
CC
CC
CC 1
1771 “ 1790 CC
34,000 “
CC
CC
1790 “ 1808 CC
70,000 “
These amount to 303,000; but the total number of native and imported slaves
in 1808, was only 1,100,000, showing a feeble increase for a century. But from
1808 to 1850 the number leaped to 3,204,373. The slave-ships always landed
more men than women.
�14
to Southern slavery all those peculiarities which the masters
are pleased to call patriarchal. Plantation life has reared two
generations of American slaves, in a climate comparatively
temperate, where they have preserved and propagated all
their native excellencies undisturbed by the annual relays
of native vices which the slave-ship brought. A good many
savage habits have dropped away from them. Fetichism
and serpent-worship lingers only in a few places in Mississippi,
and perhaps in Louisiana, where the slave-trade lasted longer.
The natural religiousness of the negro is more healthily devel
oped by Methodism aiid the Baptist sects, as in Jamaica, than
by Catholicism, as in Hayti, or by the half-savage rites of
Africa. When the “ Wanderer,” in 1858, landed a cargo of
native negroes on the coast of 'Georgia, the better portion of the
Southern press and people were alarmed and indignant; many
disliked the violation of law; the rest felt that it was an infrac
tion of law which brought harm instead of benefit to the insti
tution. A few papers were clamorous with approbation, but the
more influential recorded their disgust at the sight of the sickly
and savage cargo.
*
In 1850 it was calculated that not more
than eight or ten thousand of originally imported Africans were
yet alive.
It was not long before the polities of the South represented
its controlling interest, in the doctrine of State rights, the
interpretation of the Constitution, the jealous safeguards thrown
around the property in man, the absolute necessity to encroach
and domineer, to invent new compromises, to abolish old ones,
to thrust the fatal tendency into the courts and every depart
ment of government. The South never did a single act that
was not strictly in harmony with the exigencies of its position.
It had recovered from the amiable expectation of the fathers,
that slavery would disappear. Figures, which are said to never
lie, began to prove slavery a divine institution. It was the
cotton crop which sent Southerners to the Old Testament after
a divine sanction for slavery, and to the New, to applaud Paul
for remanding Onesimus to his master. Washington, Jefferson,
Lee, and Lowndes and Mason never cared to build a hedge of
* See Charleston and Savannah papers of that date.
�15
texts around the institution. If they thought there was no
attribute of God that could take the part of the slaveholder, they
would not dare to search their Bibles for slaveholding texts.
But their sons of the next generation saw an undoubted law of
God whitening all their fields with the cotton-bloom. Then the
Bible texts became pods that burst with the doctrines of Cal
houn and his descendants ; for men search the Scriptures to
justify their interest as often as to control their passions *
There was an anti-slavery party in Virginia as late as 1832.
Worn out tobacco-fields helped it to chew the cud of bitter
fancy, as it revolved the sentiments of Jefferson and Mason. An
act of emancipation narrowly escaped passing the legislature of
that State. Why did it not pass,
the prosecution of slave
labor was hostile to the interest of Virginia? We have heard
that the efforts of anti-slavery men in that State were paralyzed
by the commencement, of an anti-slavery agitation at the North.
Slavery was just on the point of dying out, when the publica
tion of the “Liberator,” infused a new and antagonistic life into
its decrepit frame. How farmen have to go for nothing, when
their prejudices, drive! That publication heralded a great
awakening of the republican. tendency, but the Southern
tendency was already pledge^ to its own laws and obedient to
their direction; a “ Liberator < in ^verytown and village of the
North could have neither accelerated nor retarded the march of
natural laws. Just look at ..the facts. In 1832, while the legis
lature of Virginia was discussing, laws relative to emancipation,
the slaves rose immensely ^.pripe- They should have fallen.
The discussion itself was in conseqpence ,of their being worth so
little. Why did they rise ? Did slaveholders give three or four
times as much for able-bodied negroes,- against their own
interest, and to spite the “ Liberatoy
It was the increasing
demand for slaves, the growing activity of the internal slavetrade, the imperious necessity of slave labor, the prospect of new
territory and an expansion of the cottorf zone, that caused the
* Descourtilz, a French. Naturalist, was in Charleston in 1798, and heard a
Quaker declaiming in the square, to quite a gathering of people, against the
enormity of separating and selling some slaves who were exposed there on a
platform. The sale went on, and so did the Quaker. But the snake had a full
equipment of rattles by the time of Mr. Hoar’s mission.
�16
price to rise and emancipation to be shelved as a Virginia
abstraction. It was found to be against nature, and against the
dreadful fatality of Southern wants. An act of emancipation
would have been as much waste paper in Virginia, as if it had
been passed in Massachusetts. The “ corner-stone ” would have
fallen upon it and ground it to powder. It was not the aboli
tionist alone who was antagonistic to slavery, but the spirit of
the age itself.
*
The savage instinct of slavery divined this
enmity which pervaded the air; steadily but resolutely, because
pushed on by the necessity of self-defence, and the necessity of
working out its bitter problem, it sought for guarantees and
for expansion, and stuck at nothing to attain its end. Only
revolution can bleed and pacify such passion ; its logic will not
come to the ground until i bipod does. The whole long story of
*
Southern aggression is a story of Southern self-defence, from the
expulsion of Mr. Hoar, through the annexation of Texas, Fugitive
Slave bills, Kansas-Nebraska, bills, border and senatorial ruffian
ism, Ostend conferences, Illlibusterfsm, to the secret treason
which armed and comforted" secessabSa.
Slavery gradually dying out! Slavery was a system which
decreed its own expansion. It was mightier than 350,000 slave
holders. Do we suppose1 it is that insignificant body of men
which has controlled the politics of this country for fifty years,
and is now dashing its arahed' columns against the bosses of the
shield of Liberty ? It ds a naturafl»8brce hidden in slave-labor,
and enslaving the slaveholder. It ensnared him through his
lust, his pride, his political ambition, his tocal prejudices, and
his pocket. It invigorates his arm, and employs all his gifts to
enforce the extremity of its passion against the vigor of liberty.
The moment when slavery can Jbe artestecl is the moment when
it bleeds to death, and not before.
*How clearly this is shown 'by the scorn and contempt with which for
twenty years the prominent men and journals of the South met the most con
servative advice which its own Northern friends ventured to offer. The vitriol
dashed into the face of the abolitionist was not diluted before being used to
asperse the genteelest remonstrants. The Southern exigency was long ago
betrayed by the passionate tone of able editors. For specimens of rhetoric
hitherto unequalled at the North, see the Richmond “Examiner,” 1853, “The
Paramount Question; ” March 7 and 31, 1854; May 19, “ Every Northern Man
a Swindler;” July 4, 1854; October 16, 1855, etc.
�What moment of the past would you select now, upon delibe
rate afterthought, when, if things had turned out differently,
you can imagine that the Southern tendency would have been
checked ? When great natural elements are at their work of
making history, things happen naturally, and could never
happen differently ; they express with mathematical accuracy
the state of the elements. To suppose a change in the circum
stances you must previously suppose a change in the forces that
are at work, including the mental and spiritual condition of the
people. Sometimes men speculate that if the events of a period
had been different the results would have been different.”*
There is but little virtu© in that “ If,” for an event, by occur
ring, shows that it could not have been different. Events are
always the products of all the forces at the period of their occur
rence. While one force checks, and another force propels, still
another must lie dormant? and others do little but appear upon
the field. And masses of men are butw®§ embodiments of the
forces, which they help at every moment to create, and which
illustrate their period. It is as absurd to wonder what would
have happened if William the Conqueror had not invaded
England, or Washington had not organized the spirit of ’76, or if
Daniel Webster had made a different speech on the 7th of March,
1850, or if Fremont had been elected'President six years ago, or if
Buchanan had garrisoned the Southern forts, as to wonder what
*
the movements of the solar system would have been if the
planets had no moons, or if the sun were half its present bulk.
The good and ill of history combine to repeat the wondrous tale
of the divine necessities. England was invaded, Washington
arose, Webster fell back before advancing slavery, Fremont
lacked three hundred thousand votes, and Buchanan loaded the
first gun and trained it on Fort Sumter, from combinations and
foregoing influences and momentary moods that expressed
themselves thus, in scorn of all ifs and buts, and leaving the
future to explain them. Even the disgraceful things which men
do at critical moments are nice expressions of an evil tendency,
show how far it is disposed to go at every point where a good
tendency does not yet suflice, and are the unconscious menials
* See, for instance, Niebuhr’s Lectures, ii. 59.
�18
of goodness. The vices of men finish up a great deal of
scavenger-work in the housekeeping of God.
Examine any political moment of the past thirty years, when,
if there had been a united and indignant North, you think that
the career of slavery would have been checked, and you will
find nothing out of which to make your supposition. Such a
North was an impossibility. Examine the same period of time
for the moment when the natural decay of slavery might have
commenced, and you will find that the natural growth of slavery
forbade that supposition also. When the Republican party
triumphed in 1860, its leaders thought that slavery was hemmed
in. by a permanent change in Northern sentiment, expressed by
a majority of votes, and that the time had at last arrived when
we should see slavery commencing its decline. This shallow
expectation was soon corrected, because it underrated the logical
necessities of slavery, and overrated the vitality of republicanism.
The triumph of the latter was a moment most dangerous for
real democracy, because the North proposed to be content with
the election of a president. The danger was that republicanism
would have burnt itself out in four years with making a Cabinet
pot to boil. Any Secretary of State might keep that fire well
fed with old speeches that were once plump with generous
abstractions, but served at last only for a crackling of thorns.
After the pot had boiled itself dry, and republicanism had
shrivelled all up inside and scorched sadly to the bottom, it
would have been lifted off the political crane, and a new demo
cratic pot hung in its place, with the South to blow up a fresh
fire of cotton-waste and bagasse, and the North to watch and
stir the new pottage of compromise for the the homely Esau of
liberty. It was a dangerous and almost fatal moment, not only
because the North was disposed to be content, but because a
large portion of the South was disposed to wait for the reaction
in its favor which would have certainly taken place. But
slavery is stronger than the -South, just as liberty is stronger
than the North. And there is always one place where a tendency
comes to its focus of white heat which shrivels up reserve, pru
dential consideration, and all respect: a moment and a place
where a domineering passion breaks through every restraint to
ravish its object. The focus of slavery was in South Carolina.
�19
FEvery channel in her body sent the black blood rushing to her
brain, and congested it with fatal suggestions. How plain it is
now that the temporizing policy, which was always the trait of
half-living republicanism, was the instrument in the hands of
Mr. Buchanan to conjure liberty out of republicanism, decision
out of uncertainty, and draw the bolt out of the gates of the
great North-wind. History will return thanks that the Southern
forts were left without their garrisons, seeing that God meant to
garrison them with liberty. At first it seems clear that there
was a moment when the whole Revolution was in the power of a
few hundred men to be judiciously posted where slavery under
stood itself the best, and was thwbbing with evil purposes. No,
we do wrong to say there was iSBCh a moment. If such a
moment had been essential or possible, it would have become
actual. But the strength of slavery appeared just as much in
the weakness of Mr. Buchanan as in the determination of
Jefferson Davis; it was , against the divine logic that a few
hundred men should tear a glorious page of history.
Seeds are not ready to germinate in April, but after the first
thunder how they swell and burst their flinty husks and send
up shoots like sword-blades over all -the . soil I Liberty was
waiting for the thunder. The awful-looking cloud that blotted
out half her sky and the stars whieh ought to shine there,
gathered and gloomed continually, rolling in upon itself as if
to concentrate and fiercely hearten,
till!
*
the passion that red
dened its great edges could not, bide there another moment, and
forth it sprung. The lightning, Was. neither premature nor
disastrous. It sub^yed the needs/.of liberty, which had lain
frost-bound through a long northern winter, waiting for a genial
hour.
But green shoots do not make a.harvest. There is never a
moment in the summer when the corn might stop growing, with
the delusion that it was ready to furnish food for man. What
moment would you select to break off your corn-tops, expecting
to leave full ears upon the stumps.to ripen in the sun,—when the
joints send forth their ribands, or when the mealy tassels come,
or when the first silk is spun out of the future husk ? Sum
mer’s sun is a growing sun, fierce and almost intolerable.
Autumn points with long shadows to the ripening hours.
�20
Was the corn ripe in the early July sun of the first Manassas;
was it ripe at New Orleans, or ready to be picked at Shiloh ?
Was it mildewed at Ball’s Bluff, or blasted on the Peninsula, or
did the husbandry of God come to nought in the sunless and
chilly days of the second Manassas ?
You cannot mention a single moment in this thunderous
war-summer when liberty could have found her crop. If the
war had closed with early successes, the cause of the war would
have been preserved. Every mistake that we have made,
especially the mistake of underrating the power of slavery,
every lukewarm general who has been commissioned for the
field, every traitor in the cabinet or the camp, every check
experienced by our arms, every example of mediocrity holding
critical command, has precisely represented our immature and
growing condition, and was its logical necessity.
Beauregard hammering at Sumter nailed a flag to the mast
in every village of the North. But though a Republic ran up
all its bunting and had none to spare, it was not till summer
and winter had weather-stained those brave flags and almost
fretted them from the poles, that they began to signalize the
rights of man to every portion of the country, and to stream
like a torn aurora with true American influence from the lakes
to the gulf. Death and sorrow pry up the lids of the heaviest
sleepers; we are all awake now; but when General Banks said
to the North, “ Rais® fl©0,000 men and hold the South as a
conquered province till she is regenerated,” we were astonished
at his exaggeration. And when, still later, General Fremont
said, “ The strength of slavery is in slave-labor, and the sinews
of war are concealed beneath black skins,” the North shuddered
at the bold invasion of property in man, and was not prepared
to see the country itself th© sole owner of its men and women.
So that if a Wellington had gained a complete and subjugating
victory at any of the points where we fondly expected one, he
would have subjugated liberty, and clapped the North again into
the harness of compromises and adjustments. The dreariest
moments have seemed to me the lightest, because I heard the
corn filling with milk under the shadow of the cloud. The
bloodiest days have yielded the finest growing weather to
liberty.
�21
“ Then,” you say to me, “ you do not care for the loss of men
and the anguish of women ? Your liberty is a hyena which
snatches a loathsome feast from lost fields of battle ? ” No
more than she was when Washington seized her hand as he
retreated, and nourished her in his winter-tent upon the gloom
and foreboding of America. No—I am so little careless about
the bloQd which has been shed, that I want to see for what use •
it has gone forever out of the dear hearts of Northern homes.
It is not enough for me that you repeat the hackneyed senti
ment that it is beautiful to die for one’s country. There must
be use as well as beauty, or there is no such thing as a country
to die for. Things that are useful lay the corner-stones of a
great Commonwealth, and build the shafts around which beauties
cluster. If you wish to see thernen who care nothing for the
blood of your kindred, look at those who shout how beautiful it
is to die to keep the cause of death alive, the men who could
stretch a hand to slavery across; three hundred thousand graves,
with a welcome back into a country full of the widows and
orphans she has made. We thank God that His thoughts are
not as such thoughts. A balance in His hand has held a scale
weighted with the glorious truths of this Republic; into it He
has thrown free-labor, knowledge, art and beauty, the common
school, the pulpit and. the plough^ all of these moulded into
liberty in the shape of a winged victory. Into the other scale
the lacerated days of two campaigns! have dripped with blood ;
every precious drop has been marked by that unslumbering
eye to be heavy with New England and Western homes, and
rich with privileges dearly bought y the scale sinks slowly—they
are almost even—the winged victory rises to its equivalent of
blood.
And what thought of the most.ardent worshipper of the liberty
that costs so much can embrace the future which waits at the
outposts of this emancipating "war! After every field-battery
has rolled away into the distance of peace, and the bayonet
hides a strange blush within its sheath, and the last tent is
folded, that future shall step from grave to grave, bringing new
life, new duties, great trials and appropriate joys into the heart
of America. Nations who have been astonished to see how a
free people can organize war by sea and land, will admire its
�22
greater victories over the embarrassments and trials which must
still dispute its path to the highest glory.
When peace returns, it will prove to be a heavy assessor of
our common sense and patience. The problem of self-govern
ment will include the governing and rearing of four millions of
people, richly endowed with affection, veneration and docility,
• but ignorant and awkward, superstitious, full of childish tricks,
and unconscious of the duties of a freeman. Their feeble
ambition has been hitherto one of the advantages of the slave
holder in perpetuating their servile state. But it is also
fostered by the tone of religious instruction among their own
preachers, who represent and confirm the gentle tendencies of
the African. Mr. Pierce describes, in his first report to Secre
tary Chase, a sermon which he hea^d at Port Royal, from the
text, “ Blessed are the meek.” The slaveholder may well
tremble for his acres when he recalls the promise of that text.
It was characteristic of the American slave that the preacher
urged upon his hearers not to try to be “ stout-minded.” How
congenial this advice is to the average negro is shown by the
infrequency and feebleness of all insurrectionary movements. It
was not possible for the slave to organize a formidable insurrection
while the South was in full strength, nor will he ever be disposed
to hazard the attempt, except, perhaps, in case the Proclama
tion of Emancipation is recalled, or hampered with gradualism,
or local efforts are made to reestablish or continue the status
of slavery. Then their scattered condition and the geography
of the country would be less unfavorable to a successful rising
than the slave’s inborn predisposition for bloodless and pacific
ways. Not that the negro dreads death: his mobile and flutter
ing imagination becomes fixed in the presence of a real danger.
He is impassive or frenzied^ and will charge up to the very
mouths of cannon and coil about them. He is singularly cool
to meet what he cannot avoid, but night-fears and fancied
terrors make a child of him. The threat of a novel mode of
torture is too much for him. It is imagination only that makes
a coward of a negro.
If the Proclamation wins, we shall find among the slaves a
general deference to the plans of Government for confirming
their freedom, to make it useful to themselves and to the
country.
�23
And mixed with these four millions of children are the poor
whites, a great horde of immature and stupid boys instead
of men, who never sat at the forms of liberty nor worked out
one of her sums. The North must call its master-builders
together, and those whose business it is to raise and trans
port habitations, for the primary school-house must be shifted
South, and in the little wake which it creates the people’s
chapels must follow, till along that highway of our God, the
court and the jury, the ballot-box and printing-press can safely
pass to disinfect all half-civilized neighborhoods. And wherever
a plough can run, the power-wheel shall follow, and its band
shall turn new wants and enterprises, and hum worthy ambi
tions into ears that have been tuned only to slavery’s lash. And
the great turbine shall go down to put to perpetual labor the
streams that have carried so much of our blood into the sea.
Everywhere the North shall take its revenge, deep, thorough, to
the uttermost farthingJby imposing all the firm and gentle arts
of liberty, with the uplifted ferule of the school-master, at the
edges of reaping-blades, and beneath the weight of every
material and mental instrument that can crush clods, pulverize
a soil, And scatter seed.
There will be a new meaning for. the phrase “ a geographical
party,” for the new Union will circulate by all the great chan
nels of internal navigation, arteries which God opened for
distributing the red blood of an undivided heart. Geography
itself, with mountains, streams, lakes, prairies and defiles, shall
write a people’s creed; and all platforms, whether made at
Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore or Charleston, shall be supplanted
by the square miles of the national domain. And it seems as if
nature, foreseeing that not cotton but man would be king of this
domain, had sealed up craters, cleared out earthquakes, warned
off the hurricane, and spread a firm soil for every product, from
kitchen comforts to sovereign luxuries—a zone for the orange
and the fig, a zone for cotton, rice and sugar, for flax, for wool,
for wheat, for cattle ; districts for grapes, for the silk-worm and
the cochineal, so that the democrat can dress for dinner and
dine in his own house, if he will; and when he wants to ship his
surplus to feed and clothe the English pauper, every spar that
the wind can stretch without breaking grows, from the live oak
�24
to the mountain pine. Florida and Georgia will lay the ribs
and knees, North Carolina will careen and caulk the democrat’s
vessel, Lake Superior mines will bolt and sheathe it, Maine will
send its suit of spars, and Kentucky strain them with her hemp.
Pennsylvania shall build the boiler and feed the fires beneath it,
and the Great West shall victual New England sailors as they
go floating round the world with a cargo of Rights, Intelligence
and Freedom, samples of the failure of a Democracy.
What a house this is to build, furnish and stock with com
forts, to set wide open to starving spinners and weavers, colliers,
peat-burners, all the landless and the hopeless, where they can
come to hear our mother’s daily lessors of thrift, usefulness and
the true dignity of man, as she goes in and out of all her rooms,
cleanly, cheerily, helpfully, with fends whose touch is order,
with a shape whose noble lines are full of grace, with a counte
nance that can leap from serenity to power, and unchain pure
lightnings at those eyes. She is the mother of us all, Thanks
giving America, divorced from hideous wedlock with slavery, all
her beauty coming back to her, all her gifts enhanced, and with
a deeper meaning in her I-ace than ever when she bids all her
children again to the glittering board which she spreads between
the Atlantic and Pacific seas..
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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A discourse upon causes for Thanksgiving: preached at Watertown, Nov. 30, 1862
Creator
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Weiss, John [1832-1907.]
Description
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Place of publication: Boston
Collation: 24 p. ; 24 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Includes bibliographical references. Sermon taken from the Bible. Mark, IV,28
Publisher
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Wright & Potter, printers
Date
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1862
Identifier
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G5352
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A discourse upon causes for Thanksgiving: preached at Watertown, Nov. 30, 1862), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Subject
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Sermons
Slavery
USA
Conway Tracts
Sermons
Slavery-United States
Thanksgiving Day
United States-History