February 5, 1861 (Tuesday)

Compromises as Old Wineskins.....

(In response to yesterday's post which shared an article against abolition, here is an article favoring abolition by Frederick Douglass entitled The Union and How To Save It, Douglass' Monthly, February, 1861, University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project.)  --hat tip to Seven Score and Ten.

"Was ever a people so terribly frightened as are we of the North at this moment?  We have been singing and shouting free speech!  free speech! on every Northern stump during the last ten years, and yet one rebellious frown of South Carolina has muzzled the mouths of all our large cities and filled the air with whines for compromise. 

...Shame upon this cowardly, guilty, and fantastical method of dealing with the stupendous crime and curse, which our statesmen are either too blind to see, or too dishonest to confess to be the real cause of our national troubles.  They beat the bush, but dare not enter; they talk of 'passion,' 'sectional feeling,' 'misrepresentation of object,' the 'South deceived,' as the causes of the treason and rebellion which , thirsting for blood, are about to plunge the nation into all the horrors of civil war, and all the dark and dreadful possibilities of anarchy.

Now, what disturbs, divides and threatens to bring on civil war, and to break up and ruin this country, but slavery.  Who but one morally blind can fail to see it; and who but a moral coward can hesitate to declare it.  Fifteen states are bent upon the ascendancy, and endless perpetuation of this system of immeasurable wickedness and numberless crimes, and are determined either to make it the law of the whole county, or destroy the Government.

Here is the cause of the trouble.  It is slavery, the sum of all villainies, on the one hand, and all the silent but mighty forces of nature on the other.  Here is and must ever remain the irrepressible conflict, until slavery is abolished or human nature, with all its divine attributes, is changed and made to reflect the image of hell instead of heaven.  Slavery is the disease, and its abolition in every part of the land is essential to the future quiet and security of the country.  Any union which can possibly be patched up while slavery exists, must either completely demoralize the whole nation, or remain a heartless form, disguising, under the smiles of friendship, a vital, active and ever-increasing hate, sure to explode in violence.  It is a matter of life and death.  Slavery must be all in the Union, or it can be nothing.  This is fully understood by the slaveholders of the cotton States and hence they can accept no compromise, no concession, no settlement that does not exalt slavery above every other interest in the country.

Instead of looking around for means of reconciling freedom and slavery, how immeasurably better would it be if...a wise statesman would propose a plan for complete abolition of slavery.  Whether this is done or not, herein, and herein alone is the basis of solid peace, and the country must remain a spectacle of anarchy, and be a byword and a hissing to a mocking earth, till this basis of eternal justice and liberty shall be the foundation of our Union.

All Compromises now are but a new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments.  The 'irrepressible conflict' still proceeds, and must continue till the merciful spirit of Christianity and civilization shall be extinguished and cease to have a single heart and voice to plead her cause, or slavery dies.  If there is not wisdom and virtue enough in the land to rid the country of slavery, then the next best thing is to let the South go to her own place, and be made to drink the wine cup of wrath and fire, which her long career of cruelty, barbarism and blood shall call down upon her guilty head."