The Liberator (newspaper)/September 18, 1857/Messrs. Wilson and Banks
Messrs. Wilson and Banks.
In preceding columns, we have given the speeches of Hon. Henry Wilson and Hon. N. P. Banks, made at the State Ratification meeting at Worcester, on the 8th inst. We believe but a small portion of Mr. Wilson’s speech was actually delivered, for want of time; so that we cannot tell with what favor would have been received by the Convention. It reads very much like an old-fashioned anti-slavery speech, and we do not doubt expresses the real feelings and desires of Mr. Wilson, though it breathes a very different spirit, and speaks in a very different tone from some of his utterances at Washington, and his letter to the Disunion Convention at Worcester last winter. What relevancy it had to the occasion, we are unable to perceive. The Republican party has for its motto, ‘Freedom national, Slavery sectional.’ Mr. W. exclaims with us, ‘Freedom everywhere, Slavery nowhere.’ He is no longer a Republican, but an aboiltionist; and admonishes all who listen to him to apprehend the grandeur of the struggle and the solemnity of their obligations,—especially the young men of Massachusetts. But all this glowing rhetoric ends in a hearty recognition of Mr. Banks as the man for the crisis, the champion of freedom,—which is very much like ending in smoke. For Mr. Banks, instead of encouraging any agitation, or feeling that there is any necessity for it, says ‘it is not indispensable that the sentiment of our people upon the subject of slaver should be made broader or deeper,’ and declares that ‘we suffer as much from our zeal as from indifference’!
We can explain such glaring incongruities only in this way:—Votes are wanted for Mr. Banks, in all directions, to make him Governor of Massachusetts. Mr. B’s speech is designed for the public at large, and seeks to propitiate conservatism rather than to incite to philanthropy. Mr. W’s speech (or, rather, that portion of it which we lay before our readers) was evidently prepared for the more radical portion of the anti-slavery rank and file in the Commonwealth. It is not a rare thing to witness jugglery in politics, and this looks very much like it. Mr. Wilson is full of anti-slavery zeal and devotion; Mr. Banks is not only cool, but stoical, and as the ‘iron’ candidate, may be excused for being destitute of flesh. Mr. W. is for increasing the flame of abolitionism until it melt every fetter in all the land; Mr. B. is for throwing a wet blanket upon it. Mr. W. is concerned for the wretched fate of black laborers, actually chattelized; Mr. B. is interested in the case of white laborers, who have the power to make their own laws and to protect themselves. Mr. W. proposes many fine things to be done to bring slavery to an end—such as repealing the Fugitive Slave Law, rescinding the Died Scott decision, making the District of Columbia and the Territories free, abolishing the domestic slave trade, and putting the control of the General Government wholly into the hands of the North—(all moonshine); Mr. B. is silent upon all these points, and does not seem to be aware that any thing is to be done in particular excepting on his part to ‘religiously support the Union of the States,’ and to concede to the South all the slaveholding guaranties in the Constitution! Yet Mr. Banks is the standard-bearer for Mr. Wilson!
Mr. Banks is a profound politician, and an adept in the school of non-committalism and abstract generalization. To use the language of the Courier, in a very different spirit, and for a very different purpose—
‘The whole speech is one of the most cloudy, misty, hazy compositions we ever undertook to read. It is full of abstract propositions on government and politics, some of which are true, and some of which are false, but all commonplace. It is like Hamlet’s cloud, which was either a weasel or a whale, at the pleasure of the spectator’s eye. The gods in Homer, when they get into a scrape, disappear in a convenient mist: so Mr. Banks disappears from impertinent investigation in a fog of generalities. He is commended to the support of the people of Massachusetts as a self-made man: a mechanic, a farmer, a working-man. From such persons we expect plainness of speech and directness of statement. But Mr. Banks’s speech is worthy of the oldest functionary in the Circumlocution office. Had it been spoken by a graduate of a college, it might have been used as an argument to show the unpractical character of scholars, and the unfitness of learned pursuits to train men for the duties of life. Indeed, the elaborate indistinctness of many paragraphs of the speech is so unlike what might have been expected of a gentleman reared and trained in the rough school of labor and struggle, as Mr. Banks has been, that we cannot but surmise that he has had the assistance of some of the ‘eminent hands’ of his party in the preparation of it.’
