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Show 24 ness and hatred. The bonds of our political union may remain indeed undivorced ; but we have prepared for ourselves a condition of connubial wretchedness, to which their actual dissolution would be infinitely preferable. CHAPTER IV. Public sentiment in the slave-holding S tates cannot be altered. This arises from a very melancholy consideration, but one which it is necessary should be deeply considered. Domestic Slavery is, in the United States, so intimately connected with civil soc iety, that it can never be removed but by one of those tremendous convulsions in which nations perish. I speak not merely of the destruction of popular government, of the overturn of our democracy and the substitution of another. I say nothing of the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of several feeble and independent States. I speak not of civil war and its concomitants of butchery, massacre, and blood. Far less do I limit the statement to the waste of property, the desolation and ruin, the wretchedness and poverty of houseless and helpless fugitives from their own comfortable homes. I speak not of the deluge of crime that would sweep like another flood over all the moral monuments of the country ; but of CHAOS come ag a,in, in the utter annihilation of all the elements of which our social, civil, religious and political institutions are created. I speak to sensible men who see this danger, and to conscientious men who tremble at it. I speak to firm men, who will not think it a mark of courage to brave its horrors, or of intrepidity to conceal them. I speak to practical, experienced business men, who know, by actual contact, the force of human motives and the rage of human passion, and not to the 1 I 25 theoretical and secluded scholar, who would give lessons in his study for the measure of a whirl wind. I speak to the bold and venturous navigator on the great ocean of life, wl10 has heard the roar of the elements and felt the strain of the cordage ; and not to the li ttle pilot of a pleasure-boat, who never ventures beyond the ripple of a summer's breeze. I utter the declaration with grief ; but the pain of the writer does not diminish the truth of the fact. I speak it to men whose generous and noble spirits would shrink from no sacrifice that would alter the fact, whose blood would be poured out like water if it could wash this record from existence, but who know and feel that it is the record of immutable truth, over which no human power can prevail ; and I give utterance to it now, because eve ry efi'ort to remove the condition of domestic S lavery in the U nited States tends to produce a catastrophy, first to be written in the blood of purity and innocence, and then effaced by the ashes of everything valuable in the land. Why this should be so cannot be explained. P ossibly as a balance in the operations of Heaven, for the the unparalleled blessings of our extensive and prosperous republic ; possibly as a trial for those virtues, which need calamity as well as happiness ; possibly as the mode by which om nation, like the mouldering empires of the elder world, shall come to its termination ; possibly foo· some mysterious reasons y et to be developed in the wisdom of Providence ; possibly for some cause, like the minor evils of life, never to be made manifest to human reason. We are concerned with the fact more than with its cause. Is it true then that Domestic S lavery is the perpetual and immoveable condition of our national existence ? Let us examine very summarily actual facts . It is now firmly established in fourteen S tales and T erritories of the U nion and in the District of Columbia, the centre and common property of the whole. This slave District is the fairest and most fertile portion of the United States. It is the most progressive in population- the most extensive in terri· 4 |
