In your
civil but very diplomatic reply to my
letter, you inform me that I have a constitutional right to visit Virginia,
for peaceful purposes, in common with every citizen of the United States. I was
perfectly well aware that such was the theory of constitutional
obligation in the Slave States; but I was also aware of what you omit to
mention, viz.: that the
Constitution has, in reality, been completely and systematically nullified
whenever it suited the convenience or the policy of the Slave Power. Your
constitutional obligation, for which you profess so much respect, has never
proved any protection to citizens of the Free States, who happened to have a
black, brown, or yellow complexion; nor to any white citizen whom you even
suspected of entertaining opinions opposite to your own, on a question of vast
importance to the temporal welfare and moral example of our common country.
This total disregard of constitutional obligation has been manifested not
merely by the Lynch Law of mobs in the Slave States, but by the deliberate
action of magistrates and legislators. What regard was paid to constitutional
obligation in South Carolina, when Massachusetts sent the Hon. Mr. Hoar there
as an envoy, on a purely legal errand? Mr. Hedrick, Professor of Political
Economy in the University of North Carolina, had a constitutional right to
reside in that State. What regard was paid to that right, when he was driven
from his home, merely for declaring that he considered Slavery an impolitic
system, injurious to the prosperity of States? What respect for constitutional
rights was manifested by Alabama, when a bookseller in Mobile was compelled to
flee for his life, because he had, at the special request of some of the
citizens, imported a few copies of a novel that everybody was curious to road?
Your own citizen, Mr. Underwood, had a constitutional right to live in
Virginia, and vote for whomsoever he pleased. What regard was paid to his
rights, when he was driven from your State for declaring himself in favor of
the election of Fremont? With these, and a multitude of other examples before
your eyes, it would seem as if the less that was said about respect for
constitutional obligations at the South, the better. Slavery is, in fact, an
infringement of all law, and adheres to no law, save for its own purposes of
oppression.
You accuse Captain John Brown of “whetting knives of
butchery for the mothers, sisters, daughters and babes” of Virginia; and you
inform me of the well-known fact that he is “arraigned for the crimes of
murder, robbery and treason.” I will not here stop to explain why I believe
that old hero to be no criminal, but a martyr to righteous principles which he
sought to advance by methods sanctioned by his own religious views, though not
by mine. Allowing that Capt. Brown did attempt a scheme in which murder robbery
and treason were, to his own consciousness, involved, I do not see how Gov.
Wise can consistently arraign him for crimes he has himself commended. You have
threatened to trample on the Constitution, and break the Union, if a majority
of the legal voters in these Confederated States dared to elect a President
unfavorable to the extension of Slavery. Is not such a declaration proof of
premeditated treason? In the Spring of 1842, you made a speech in Congress, from
which I copy the following: —
“Once set before the people of the
Great Valley the conquest of the rich Mexican Provinces, and you might as well
attempt to stop the wind. This Government might end its troops, but they would
run over them like a herd of buffalo. Let the work once begin, and I do not
know that this House would hold me very long. Give me five millions of dollars,
and I would undertake to do it myself. Although I do not know how to set a single
squadron in the field, I could find men to do it. Slavery should pour itself
abroad, without restraint, and find no limit but the Southern Ocean. The
Camanches should no longer hold the richest mines of Mexico. Every golden image
which had received the profanation of a false worship, should soon be melted
down into good American eagles. I would cause as much gold to cross the Rio del
Norte as the mules of Mexico could carry; aye, and I would make better use of
it, too, than any lazy, bigoted priesthood under heaven.”
When you thus boasted that you and your “booted loafers”
would overrun the troops of the United States “like a herd of buffalo,” if the
Government sent them to arrest your invasion of a neighboring nation, at peace
with the United States, did you not pledge yourself to commit treason? Was it
not by robbery, even of churches, that you proposed to load the mules of Mexico
with gold for the United States? Was it not by the murder of unoffending
Mexicans that you expected to advance those schemes of avarice and ambition?
What humanity had you for Mexican “mothers and babes,” whom you proposed to
make childless and fatherless‘? And for what purpose was this wholesale
massacre to take place? Not to right the wrongs of any oppressed class; not to
sustain any great principles of justice, or of freedom; but merely to enable
“Slavery to pour itself forth without restraint.” Even if Captain Brown were as
bad as you paint him, I should suppose he must naturally remind you of the
words of Macbeth:
“We but teach,
Bloody instructions, which, being
taught, return
To plague the inventor: This
even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our
poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”
If Captain Brown intended, as you say, to commit treason,
robbery and murder, I think I have shown that he could find ample authority for
such proceedings in the public declarations of Gov. Wise. And if, as he himself
declares, he merely intended to free the oppressed, where could he read a more
forcible lesson than is furnished by the State Seal of Virginia? I looked at it
thoughtfully before I opened your letter; and though it had always appeared to
me very suggestive, it never seemed to me so much so as it now did in
connection with Captain John Brown. A liberty-loving hero stands with his foot
upon a prostrate despot; under his strong arm, manacles and chains lie broken;
and the motto is, “Sic Semper Tyrannis;” “Thus be it ever done to Tyrants.” And
this is the blazon of a State whose most profitable business is the Internal
Slave-Trade! — in whose highways coffles of human chattles, chained and
manacled, are frequently seen! And the Seal and the Coffles are both looked
upon by other chattels, constantly exposed to the same fate! What if some Vezey,
or Nat Turner, should be growing up among those apparently quiet spectators? It
is in no spirit of taunt or of exultation that I ask this question. I never
think of it but with anxiety, sadness, and sympathy. I know that a slaveholding
community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder; and, in this age, sparks
of free thought are flying in every direction. You cannot quench the fires of
free thought and human sympathy by any process of cunning or force; but there is
a method by which you can effectually wet the gunpowder. England has already
tried it, with safety and success. Would that you could be persuaded to set
aside the prejudices of education, and candidly examine the actual working of
that experiment! Virginia is so richly endowed by nature that Free Institutions
alone are wanting to render her the most prosperous and powerful of the States.
In your letter, you suggest that such a scheme as Captain
Brown’s is the natural result of the opinions with which I sympathize. Even if
I thought this to be a correct statement, though I should deeply regret it, I
could not draw the conclusion that humanity ought to be stifled, and truth
struck dumb, for fear that long-successful despotism might be endangered by
their utterance. But the fact is, you mistake the source of that strange
outbreak. No abolition arguments or denunciations, however earnestly, loudly,
or harshly proclaimed, would have produced that result. It was the legitimate
consequence of the continual and constantly-increasing aggressions of the Slave
Power. The Slave States, in their desperate efforts to sustain a bad and
dangerous institution, have encroached more and more upon the liberties of the
Free States. Our inherent love of law and order, and our superstitious
attachment to the Union, you have mistaken for cowardice; and rarely have you
let slip any opportunity to add insult to aggression.
The manifested opposition to Slavery began with the lectures
and pamphlets of a few disinterested men and women, who based their movements
upon purely moral and religious grounds; but their expostulations were met with
a storm of rage, with tar and feathers, brickbats, demolished houses, and other
applications of Lynch Law. When the dust of the conflict began to subside a
little, their numbers were found to be greatly increased by the efforts to
exterminate them. They had become an influence in the State too important to be
overlooked by shrewd calculators. Political economists began to look at the
subject from a lower point of view. They used their abilities to demonstrate
that slavery was a wasteful system, and that the Free States were taxed, to an
enormous extent, to sustain an institution which, at heart, two-thirds of them
abhorred. The forty millions, or more, of dollars, expended in hunting Fugitive
Slaves in Florida, under the name of the Seminole War, were adduced, as one
item in proof, to which many more were added. At last, politicians were
compelled to take some action on the subject. It soon became known to all the
people that the Slave States had always managed to hold in their hands the
political power of the Union, and that while they constituted only one-third of
the white population of these States, they hold more than two-thirds of all the
lucrative, and once honorable offices; an indignity to which none but a
subjugated people had ever before submitted. The knowledge also became
generally diffused, that while the Southern States owned their Democracy at home, and voted for them, they also
systematically bribed the nominally Democratic party, at the North, with the
offices adroitly kept at their disposal.
Through these, and other instrumentalities, the sentiments
of the original Garrisonian Abolitionists became very widely extended, in forms
more or less diluted. But by far the most efficient co-laborers we have ever
had have been the Slave States themselves. By denying us the sacred Right of
Petition, they roused the free spirit of the North, as it never could have been
roused by the loud trumpet of Garrison, or the soul-animating bugle of
Phillips. They bought the great slave, Daniel, and, according to their
established usage, paid him no wages for his labor. By his cooperation, they
forced the Fugitive Slave Law upon us, in violation of all our humane instincts
and all our principles of justice. And what did they procure for the
Abolitionists by that despotic process? A deeper and wider detestation of
Slavery throughout the Free States, and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
an eloquent outburst of moral indignation, whose echoes wakened the world to
look upon their shame.
By fillibustering and fraud, they dismembered Mexico, and
having thus obtained the soil of Texas, they tried to introduce it as a Slave
State into the Union. Failing to effect their purpose by constitutional means,
they accomplished it by a most open and palpable violation of the Constitution,
and by obtaining the votes of Senators on false pretences.*
Soon afterward, a Southern Slave Administration ceded to the
powerful monarchy of Great Britain several hundred thousands of square miles,
that must have been made into Free States, to which that same Administration
had declared that the United States had “an unquestionable right;” and then
they turned upon the weak Republic of Mexico, and, in order to make more Slave
States, .wrested from her twice as many hundred thousands of square miles, to
which we had not a shadow of right.
Notwithstanding all these extra efforts, they saw symptoms
that the political power so long held with a firm grasp was in danger of
slipping from their hands, by reason of the extension of Abolition sentiments,
and the greater prosperity of Free States. Emboldened by continual success in
aggression, they made use of the pretence of “Squatter Sovereignty” to break
the league into which they had formerly cajoled the servile representatives of
our blinded people, by which all the territory of the United States south of
36° 30’ was guaranteed to Slavery, and all north of it to Freedom. Thus Kansas
became the battle-ground of the antagonistic elements in our Government.
Ruflians hired by the Slave Power were sent thither temporarily, to do the
voting, and drive from the polls the legal voters, who were often murdered in
the process. Names, copied from the directories of cities in other States, were
returned by thousands as legal voters in Kansas, in order to establish a
Constitution abhorred by the people. This was their exemplification of Squatter
Sovereignty. A Massachusetts Senator, distinguished for candor, courtesy, and
stainless integrity, was half murdered by slaveholders, merely for having the
manliness to state these facts to the assembled Congress of the nation.
Peaceful emigrants from the North, who went to Kansas for no other purpose than
to till the soil, erect mills, and establish manufactories, schools, and
churches, were robbed, outraged, and murdered. For many months, a war more
ferocious than the warfare of wild Indians was carried on against a people
almost unresisting, because they relied upon the Central Government for aid.
And all this while, the power of the United States, wielded by the Slave
Oligarchy, was on the side of the aggressors. They literally tied the stones, and
let loose the mad dogs. This was the state of things when the hero of Osawatomie
and his brave sons went to the rescue. It was he who first turned the tide of
Border-Ruffian triumph, by showing them that blows were to be taken as well as
given.
You may believe it or not, Gov. Wise, but it is certainly
the truth that, because slaveholders so recklessly sowed the wind in Kansas,
they reaped a whirlwind at Harper’s Ferry.
The people of the North had a very strong attachment to the
Union; but, by your desperate measures, you have weakened it beyond all power
of restoration. They are not your enemies, as you suppose, but they cannot
consent to be your tools for any ignoble task you may choose to propose. You
must not judge of us by the crawling sinuosities of an Everett; or by our
magnificent hound, whom you trained to hunt your poor cripples, and then sent
him sneaking into a corner to die — not with shame for the base purposes to
which his strength had been applied, but with vexation because you withheld
from him the promised bone. Not by such as these must you judge the free,
enlightened yeomanry of New England. A majority of them would rejoice to have
the Slave States fulfil their oft-repeated threat of withdrawal from the Union.
It has ceased to be a bugbear, for we begin to despair of being able, by any
other process, to give the world the example of a real republic. The moral
sense of these States is outraged by being accomplices in sustaining an
institution vicious in all its aspects; and it is now generally understood that
we purchase our disgrace at great pecuniary expense. If you would only make the
offer of a separation in serious earnest, you would hear the hearty response of
millions, “Go, gentlemen, and
‘Stand not upon the order of your
going,
But go at once!’”
Yours, with all due
respect,
L. MARIA CHILD.
_______________
* The following Senators, Mr. Niles, of Connecticut, Mr.
Dix, of New York, and Mr. Tappan, of Ohio, published statements that their
votes had been obtained by false representations; and they declared that the
case was the same with Mr. Heywood, of North Carolina.
SOURCE: The American Anti-Slavery Society, Correspondence
between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia, p.
6-12
