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Page 48
I claim this, that the cause, in its recent aspect, has put on nothing
but timidity. It has taken to itself no new weapons of recent years; it
has become more compromising,--that is all! It has become neither more
persuasive, more earnest, more Christian, more charitable, nor more
effective than for the twenty years pre-ceding. Mr. Hale, the head of
the Free Soil movement, after a career in the Senate that would do honor
to any man,--after a six years' course which entitles him to the respect
and confidence of the antislavery public, can put his name, within
the last month, to an appeal from the city of Washington, signed by a
Houston and a Cass, for a monument to be raised to Henry Clay! If that
be the test of charity and courtesy, we cannot give it to the world.
Some of the leaders of the Free Soil party of Massachusetts, after
exhausting the whole capacity of our language to paint the treachery of
Daniel Webster to the cause of liberty, and the evil they thought he was
able and seeking to do,--after that, could feel it in their hearts to
parade themselves in the funeral procession got up to do him honor! In
this we allow we cannot follow them. The deference which every gentleman
owes to the proprieties of social life, that self-respect and regard to
consistency which is every man's duty,--these, if no deeper feelings,
will ever prevent us from giving such proofs of this newly invented
Christian courtesy. We do not play politics, antislavery is no half-jest
with us; it is a terrible earnest, with life or death, worse than life
or death, on the issue. It is no lawsuit, where it matters not to the
good feeling of opposing counsel which way the verdict goes, and where
advocates can shake hands after the decision as pleasantly as before.
When we think of such a man as Henry Clay, his long life, his mighty
influence cast always into the scale against the slave, of that
irresistible fascination with which he moulded every one to his will;
when we remember that, his conscience acknowledging the justice of our
cause, and his heart open on every other side to the gentlest impulses,
he could sacrifice so remorselessly his convictions and the welfare of
millions to his low ambition; when we think how the slave trembled at
the sound of his voice, and that, from a multitude of breaking hearts
there went up nothing but gratitude to God when it pleased him to call
that great sinner from this world, we cannot find it in our hearts, we
could not shape our lips to ask any man to do him honor. No amount of
eloquence, no sheen of official position, no loud grief of partisan
friends, would ever lead us to ask monuments or walk in fine processions
for pirates; and the sectarian zeal or selfish ambition which gives up,
deliberately and in full knowledge of the facts, three million of human
beings to hopeless ignorance, daily robbery, systematic prostitution,
and murder, which the law is neither able nor undertakes to prevent
or avenge, is more monstrous, in our eyes, than the love of gold which
takes a score of lives with merciful quickness on the high seas. Haynau
on the Danube is no more hateful to us than Haynau on the Potomac. Why
give mobs to one and monuments to the other?
If these things be necessary to courtesy, I cannot claim that we are
courteous. We seek only to be honest men, and speak the same of the dead
as of the living. If the grave that hides their bodies could swallow
also the evil they have done and the example they leave, we might enjoy
at least the luxury of forgetting them. But the evil that men do lives
after them, and example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from
the grave. History, also, is to be written. How shall a feeble minority,
without weight or influence in the country, with no jury of millions to
appeal to--denounced, vilified, and contemned,--how shall we make way
against the overwhelming weight of some colossal reputation, if we do
not turn from the idolatrous present, and appeal to the human race?
saying to your idols of to-day: "Here we are defeated; but we will write
our judgment with the iron pen of a century to come, and it shall never
be forgotten, if we can help it, that you were false in your generation
to the claims of the slave!" * * *
We are weak here,--out-talked, out-voted. You load our names with
infamy, and shout us down. But our words bide their time. We warn the
living that we have terrible memories, and their sins are never to be
forgotten. We will gibbet the name of every apostate so black and high
that his children's children shall blush to bear it. Yet we bear no
malice,--cherish no resentment. We thank God that the love of fame,
"that last infirmity of noble minds," is shared by the ignoble. In our
necessity, we seize this weapon in the slave's behalf, and teach caution
to the living by meting out relentless justice to the dead. * * *
"These, Mr. Chairman, are the reasons why, we take care that 'the memory
of the wicked shall rot.'"
I have claimed that the antislavery cause has, from the first, been ably
and dispassionately argued, every objection candidly examined, and every
difficulty or doubt anywhere honestly entertained treated with respect.
Let me glance at the literature of the cause, and try not so much, in
a brief hour, to prove this assertion, as to point out the sources from
which any one may satisfy himself of its truth.
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