The Liberator (newspaper)/September 18, 1857/Speech of Hon. Henry Wilson

Speech of Hon. Henry Wilson,

At the Banks’s Ratification Meeting at Worcester, September 8th, 1857.

Mr. President, and Young Men of Massachusetts:

On the first Tuesday of November last, one hundred and eight thousand intelligent, patriotic, liberty-loving Massachusetts men, Republicans and Americans, recognizing the paramount issues growing out of the system of human slavery in America, rallied around the banner of equal, universal and impartial liberty, borne by John C. Fremont. (Loud applause.) On that day, Massachusetts placed herself, where Massachusetts has a right to be, in the van of free Commonwealths. On that day, by fifty thousand majority, Massachusetts placed herself front to front with the Slave Power of the Republic. The same standard that then waved in victory over Massachusetts, the same flag on which were written, in characters of living light, the glorious mottoes of Liberty, has now been entrusted to the hands of Nathaniel P. Banks. (Loud applause.)

Why not, then, men of Massachusetts, rally around him, as you rallied in 1856 around the same old banner in the hands of a brave, true, and gallant loader? Will you listen to the seductive voice of personal ambition? (Voices—‘No,’ ‘no.’) Will you turn your backs upon your old flag—upon its chosen leader? Will you break from the ranks of freedom, and retreat, affiliate, fraternize and associate with those who last autumn scoffed at your principles, maligned your candidate, and shouted with joy when the black flag of slavery waved victorious in the beams of that November sun? (Voices—‘No,’ ‘no.’)

We are now told, Mr. President, that the living issues which last year summoned more than one hundred thousand sons of Massachusetts to the standard of Fremont, are among the issues of the past. The living issues of 1856 among the issues of the past! Does not slavery in America now loom up a hideous and appalling spectre? Does it not stand revealed in the light of the nineteenth century to the gaze of mankind, in all its odious and revolting aspects? What an aggregation of immolated rights, nameless outrages, and ‘sumless agonies’! Millions of beings created in the image of God, sunk from the lofty level of a common humanity down to the abject submission of unreasoning beasts of burden,—manacles, chains and whips,—pens, prisons and auction-blocks, bludgeons, revolvers and blood-hounds,—scourgings, lynchings and burnings,—laws to torture the body, shrivel the mind, and debase the soul,—labor dishonored and laborers despised,—towns wasting away, and fields smitten with sterility,—non-slaveholders impoverished and degraded, and slaveholders, in defiance of the lessons of history, the deductions of philosophy, the rights of humanity, and the teachings of Christianity, proudly vaunting their shame before the nations, make up this deformed monstrosity of organized barbarism, which now stands in shameless defiance of the civilization, humanity and Christianity of America. We of the North may avert our faces from this hateful spectacle;—to the accusing voices of mankind we may reply in faltering accepts—‘We are not responsible!’ ‘This crime is not ours!’ ‘This guilt is not on our souls!’ but we, as American citizens, jealous of the renown of our country, cannot but feel the deepest mortification and shame, as we see the sneer of scorn on the lips of mankind.

By a long series of assumptions and aggressive acts, by concessions and compromises, we of Massachusetts have been associated with and made responsible for this crime of human slavery in America.—When the illustrious framers of the Constitution assembled in 1787, our history as a nation was radiant with deeds for the rights and liberties of mankind. Seventy years have just closed, and that history is blurred and blotted, stained by deeds for human slavery which bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of the patriot who loves his country, who feels the stain upon her fame as a blot of personal dishonor. Now a privileged class, bound together by two thousand millions of dollars, represented by the souls and bodies of more than four millions of bondsmen, rules with resistless power fifteen sovereign States. This aristocracy, based upon the immolated rights of humanity, now controls the executive, legislative and judicial departments of the national government. In the pride and arrogance of usurped power, this slaveholding aristocracy bids the Supreme Court utter the inhuman sentiment that four millions of men in Republican America ‘have no rights that white men are bound to respect,’ and the President of the Republic to declare that slavery exists in the national territories by the authority of the Constitution of the United States. And shall we, the men of Massachusetts, oppose only a temporary, faint and heartless resistance to these ignominious avowals, which bring dishonor and shame upon the American name?

————Shall we calmly rest,
The Christian’s scorn, the Heathen’s mirth,
Content to live the lingering jest
And by-word of a mocking earth?

Or shall we not rather awake to the full realization of our responsibilities—to the full comprehension of our duties? Responsibilities rest upon us—duties press upon us. Responsibility and duty go hand in hand. Our path of duty, young men of Massachusetts, is radiant with light—as luminous as the pathway of the sun across the heavens on this bright autumnal day.

The earnest young men of Massachusetts—of the North—should cultivate a profound reverence for humanity, for its sacred and inalienable rights; hate, loathe and abhor slavery in every form; resolve that whenever, wherever and however they may be summoned to act, their voices shall be for Freedom everywhere—for Slavery nowhere; that, in their own States, every man, no matter to what race he may claim kindred—no matter what blood may course through his veins,—shall stand before the laws the equal and the peer of the most favored sons of men; that over him—poor, ignorant and friendless though he may he—shall be thrown the panoply of just, equal and humane laws. Then they should, by legal and constitutional action, take possession of the National Government, place every Department, Executive, Legislative and Judicial, in the hands of such men, and such men only, as will see to it that the nation, within its own exclusive jurisdiction, rejects ‘the wild and guilty phantasy that man may hold property in man.’

Having prostrated in the dust the slaveholding oligarchy, shivered its power over the nation to atoms, they should pronounce the doom of human slavery everywhere under the exclusive authority of the National Government:—

By prohibiting it in each and all the Territories of the United States;

By abolishing it, in the District of Columbia, abrogating all oppressive laws now in force there, and placing the whole people under the protection of just and humane legislation;

By repealing the law of 1807 and all other laws giving the sanction of the nation to the domestic slave-trade;

By repealing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and all other acts for the reclamation of persons held to service or labor, thereby leaving to each State, under its own sense of Constitutional obligation and duty, the execution of that provision of the Constitution concerning persons held to service or labor in one State escaping into another;

By reversing the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the citizenship of persons of color;

By avowing the settled policy of the nation to be, that all Territory hereafter acquired,—on the North or on the South—free or slave—shall be forever consecrated to freedom and free institutions for all;

By proclaiming to their countrymen of the South, in mild but firm language, that, while they concede slavery in the States to be, in the words of the Supreme Court, ‘a mere municipal regulation, founded upon and limited to the verge of State law;’—while they do not claim to possess Constitutional power to abolish slavery in the States, and do not mean to usurp power—they do mean to put the National Government in open and active sympathy with Freedom everywhere—they do mean to use the legitimate influence and patronage of the nation in favor of the proscribed men of the South, who believe as Jefferson believed, that ‘the abolition of Slavery is the first object desired’—who are resolved, as was Washington, that their ‘suffrage shall not be wanting’ to abolish it by ‘Legislative authority’—they do mean, by the example and daily beauty of free institutions, and by ‘all means sanctioned by law, humanity and religion,’ to appeal to the heart, the conscience, the reason and the interest of the men of the South—slaveholders and non-slaveholders—until they shall

——Bid the bondmen cast the chain
From fettered limb and soul aside,

and walk forth in the majesty of freedom, ‘redeemed,’ in the language of Curran, ‘regenerated, disenthralled by the irresistible Genius of Universal Emancipation.’

How grand, comprehensive and glorious is the work assigned to the young men of this age in America. They are summoned to rescue the Republic from the iron rule of the slaveholding aristocracy,—from the degrading thraldom of a privileged class which hates equal and impartial Liberty with inextinguishable hatred, which contemptuously scoffs at the idea of the equality and brotherhood of the race, which sneers at all efforts to emancipate the bondmen or elevate the lowly. They are summoned to secure the ultimate emancipation of millions of overawed and submissive bondmen;—to vindicate the rights and dignity of free labor and free laboring men;—to purify the nation from the stains and pollutions of slavery, and so put the national government in harmony with the sublime ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence. They are summoned to this mighty task by that generous and expansive Patriotism, which embraces the whole country and the people of the whole country,—by that Philanthropy, which cares for the sons and daughters of toil and misfortune,—by that Religion, which teaches us that all the races of men are of one blood, the children of a common Father—and that the humblest slave that trembles and cowers under the frown or the lash of a master, or overseer, or taskmaster, in the recess of the far South, is a being whom God created, and for whom his Son mounted the cross. Seldom, in human history, has it been permitted by the Providence of God to young men of any country, or of any age, to engage in a work so vast in its conception, so comprehensive in its character, so sanctified by patriotism and humanity, so sure now to win the sympathies of mankind, the applause of the coming generations, the approval of conscience, and the blessings of Almighty God!

The anti-slavery movement in America is advancing through agitations and conflicts to assured triumph. Already it has laid its grasp upon the reason, the heart, and the conscience of the country, and millions are moved by the mighty impulse. In spite of the passionate and implacable hatred of the slaveholding class,—the barbarizing prejudices of race—the misconceptions of ignorance,—the misrepresentations of great interests,—the timidity, servility, or hostility of political organizations,—the selfishness or apostacy of public men, and the imperfections, weakness and errors of friends, who too often pause in face of the advancing hosts of slavery, to criticise, chide or rebuke comrades, or who turn aside in the hour of battle, when the foe is undermining or storming an out-post of freedom, entrenching or defending a fortress of slavery, to engage in impracticable or secondary issues,—the anti-slavery cause is moving on in the strength, pride, and majesty of conscious power, to the realization of its sublime ideas, to the consummation of its beneficent policy. Everything on earth which has the element of permanency in it, is instinct with vital powers, which impel on the great cause, against all and over all opposing forces, to the final accomplishment of its high mission,—to the complete fulfilment of its ‘manifest destiny.’ The slaveholding class may rejoice in these days of its power,—it may revel and riot over past victories, and gloat over anticipated future acquisitions in Cuba, Mexico and Central America,—it may bid its pliant tools on the Judicial bench to pervert truth, justice, history, law and the Constitution for the disfranchisement of freemen, and to allow slavery, in the passionate language of Henry A. Wise, to ‘pour itself out without restraint, and find no limit but the Southern ocean.’ But let it remember in these hours of revelry, that for these crimes the sense of justice, the love of liberty, the humane and Christian civilization of America, will bring it into judgment. Let the slaveholding class realize that these days of fancied security are days of waning power, that its hold upon the Northern mind is breaking, and will soon be broken forever. Now—

The Northern hills are blazing,
The Northern skies are bright,
And the fair young West is turning
Her forehead to the light!

Now the banners of emancipation are beneath Southern skies. Cassius M. Clay ‘calls the battle roll anew’ on ‘the dark and bloody ground’ of his native Kentucky. St. Louis pronounces for emancipation, and sends her chivalrous Blair to represent the interests of her laboring men in the national councils, and her gallant Brown to summon Missouri in her Halls of Legislation, to join the sisterhood of free Commonwealths.

The cause of equal, universal and impartial liberty in America is indissolubly blended with the cause of human liberty and human progress everywhere. Its triumph will be hailed and applauded by mankind everywhere, and through all coming time. The events of this great struggle for the overthrow of the privileged class and the ultimate emancipation of a race, will pass into the enduring history of the country. The eye will glisten and the heart throb over the bright and glowing pages of that history, which shall record the acts in the great work, which the Providence of God has assigned to the young men of this generation. Let, then, the men of the North; aye, and the few but faithful men of the South, to whom has been entrusted the radiant and glorious banner of anti-slavery in America, fully comprehend the magnitude, grandeur and dignity of the work assigned them. Let them realize that the eye of God is upon them,—that future generations will scrutinize their motives and pronounce judgment upon their acts, when the passions, prejudices and interests of this age are hushed forever. Let them realize, also, that the ultimate triumph of the great cause can be hastened or retarded—perhaps for years—by the advocacy of friends as well as by the resistance of enemies. Let them, then, while they cherish a profound reverence for humanity—an inextinguishable love for the rights of man, and ever act with unswerving fidelity to these hallowed convictions—cultivate a general and expansive patriotism that knows no lines of latitude, or of longitude, or points of the compass,—adopt a prudent, wise and practicable public policy that shall demonstrate to the American people their capacity to take care of the varied, multifarious and vast material interests of the nation, and so administer the government as to protect and defend the interests, rights and honor of the country in peace and in war. Let them so act that the historic pen which shall trace the acts in this great drama, shall record for the study and admiration of all after times, that the young men of this age, in Massachusetts, in America, were animated by lofty motives, aims and purposes, and governed by wise, comprehensive and patriotic councils,—that, living and dying, their hearts ever throbbed with an intense and vehement passion for the liberty, the renown, the unity and eternity of the republic!