Having been requested to edit and introduce an American edition of this English book, I have thought I could best serve a public purpose by examining and setting forth its value and purport as evidence and intelligent European commentary upon the present exciting questions of our politics.

Mr. Gladstone, a kinsman of the distinguished ex-chancellor of the Exchequer of England, visited Kansas, at a moment of interest in its history, and in the history of our country. His opportunities of obtaining trustworthy information were good, and he appears to have used them calmly and diligently. As a foreigner, with claims of friendship, or even acquaintance, upon no one in the territory, except Colonel Sumner, who, as the military representative of the federal authority, was respected by both parties, he occupied a neutral position in their warfare.

Going back of these circumstances, I find that Mr. Gladstone arrived in New York near the beginning of the year 1856, with the ordinary motives of an English traveler of his class. From all I can learn of those who knew him here, his testimony on any subject should be received with particular respect. He is thought to observe closely and accurately, to study carefully, and to be slow in expressing the conclusions of his judgment. He is not known to have had, at this time, more knowledge of, or interest in, American politics, than is common among English conservative gentlemen—about as much, that is to say, as is common among us with regard to the affairs of Sweden or Brazil.

He proceeded, very soon after his arrival, to Washington, and thence further south, and, during the winter, enjoyed the hospitality of South Carolina and Mississippi. In the spring he continued his journey through Missouri, and so, finally, to Kansas, arriving at Leavenworth city on the 21st of May.

[406]

Our whole country was then hotly engaged in the presidential canvass. So great was the tumult in Kansas, and such was the temptation upon our editors and newsmongers to disallow or exaggerate the conflicting reports of its condition, according as their influence was likely to be favorable, or otherwise, to the success of one or another candidate, that it became, and has continued to be, very difficult for a cautious mind, not possessing private means of information, to form a confident judgment, first, as to the reality or extent of the alleged calamity of Kansas, and second, as to the absolute or relative culpability of either of the contending parties.

Readers, who have been accustomed to hear the “disturbances” in Kansas spoken of only as such as are “incidental to all new settlements, “will, perhaps, be inclined to set down this calmly observant traveler as an impostor, or a romancer, when they find him describing the condition of the territory, upon his arrival, as “a holiday of anarchy and bloodshed. “Readers at the South, [407] who have been accustomed to rely for contemporary history on Southern newspapers, or on those of the North in which information is given in a form adapted to the Southern market, may question if he were in his right mind when they find him testifying that: “among all the scenes of violence I witnessed, the offending parties were invariably on the pro-slavery side.” Those who have seen nothing inconsistent with the official assurances of our late president, in the rapid humiliation of his three successively appointed governors, will hardly believe that the sympathies of an impartial, dispassionate, but justice-loving Englishman, could have been so immediately engaged, on his arrival in the territory, for the Free-state party, as is implied by this narrative, unless his mind had been previously prejudiced against their opponents.

He had been in intercourse, almost from the moment of his landing in America, chiefly with Southern minds. He came to Kansas fresh charged from Southern social influence. And yet, before he had met a single avowed free-soiler in the territory, he evidently had a most painful impression of the injustice, tyranny, and persecution to which the majority of the actual settlers were subjected, and was well convinced that the pro-slavery party, and the influence of the South, acting through the federal government, was wholly to blame for this.

“But, surely,” some indignant “democrat” will ask, “he would not have us suppose that the truth about Kansas has been monopolized all along by one party; that the black republican newspapers have been all right, and the rest all wrong?” This may have been the case without any advantage in veracity of character to those who told the truth. It may have happened that nothing could have served their purpose better than the truth. Certainly, if that purpose was to be served by proving a desperate determination on the part of the administration to establish slavery in Kansas, if necessary, at any cost of justice and humanity, and of our reputation with the world as a civilized people, nothing could have answered it better than what Mr. Gladstone, carefully studying the facts upon the ground, was led to consider the truth. He attributes the most honorable conduct, in all respects, as good citizens, to the Free-state party in the territory, while it would be difficult to describe a people more unfit to exercise the rightful privileges of citizenship than those whom he represents to be engaged, under the patronage of the federal authorities, in persecuting that party.

Such a contrast between the character of the emigrants from the Slave States and of those from the Free—both, being, not many generations back, of the same origin and blood—would, indeed, be incredible, if there were not anterior reason to expect in the former a special proneness to violence, and a distrust, or habitual forgetfulness of law and civilized customs under exciting circumstances.

Such a dangerous quality—gravely dangerous, wherever this policy of so-called squatter sovereignty, involving, as it does, squatter warfare, shall be tried; and ten-fold grave to us of the North, since the recent decision of the Supreme Court,—such a dangerous quality is inbred and with every generation [408] growing more established in the character of the citizens of the South. It is so from the inexorable force of circumstances—thus:

The title to property in slaves is derived at no remote period, from certain vindictive and lawless barbarians, who, having overpowered an enemy, considered his life as forfeited, and if they spared it, did so from no regard to the abstract right or sacredness of life, or any motive of humanity, but simply for the purpose of enjoying the profits of his labor. His labor and abject submission to all their demands Upon him was the price of his life, and with this understanding he was transferred to America. At first the only persons so held were “Black-a-moors,” and all Black-a-moors in the country were so held and considered, and only by terror of death, legalized and insured by legislation and military force, continued to be held in the requisite habit of subordination for profitable labor, by their purchasers and inheritors. Hence, exceptional laws, exceptional customs, and hence, irresistibly, a defection from the usual sentiment of the sacredness of human life, as far as the negro was concerned. But as the negro is, after all, really a human being, whatever affects him, inevitably affects all human beings associated with him. Thus arises a peculiar influence which must produce and reproduce peculiar qualities among people nurtured in a slaveholding community.

Hence, however our Southern fellow-citizens may continue to talk, and sentimentalize, and clothe themselves under ordinary circumstances in accordance with the customs, literature, laws and religious maxims of the rest of the civilized world, it is an inevitable effect of their peculiar institution to diminish in them that constitutional and instinctive regard for the sanctity of human life, the growth of which distinguishes every other really advancing people just in proportion to their progress in the scale of Christian civilization. Mr. Gladstone is not the first traveler whose studies among them have taught us this; nor is it necessary to assume the truth of his testimony to prove that there is this essential difference between the people of the Free and the Slave states. In what community, uninfluenced by slavery, could such a record be made, of recklessness unrestrained in regard to the life of its citizens, as the following, which is taken from the Louisville Journal (June, 1854), and was suggested by the “Mat Ward case,” in which case, again, the alleged murderer was presently allowed to go free.

There have been scores of notorious cases of murder and acquittal in this city. There was the case of Kunz who killed Schaffer. Kunz, hearing that Schaffer had spoken lightly of a member of his family, went to his coffee-house and cursed him. Schaffer picked up a small stick and went around the counter as if to strike Kunz, whereupon the latter thrust a deadly weapon into his breast and killed him. He was tried and discharged without punishment. There was the case of Delph who killed his uncle, Reuben Liter. Delph armed himself deliberately, and went to the upper market-house to meet Liter. He met him, sought a quarrel with him, and shot him dead on the spot. The quarrel was about a prostitute. Delph was tried and acquitted by a jury. There was the case of Croxton who killed Hawthorn. [409] Hawthorn was in a coffee-house, sitting in a chair, drunk and asleep. Croxton struck him on the head in that condition with a brick-bat, and killed him. He was acquitted by a jury. There was the case of Peters who killed Baker. In Natchez, a long time before, Baker, in a fight, had wounded Peters, and made him a cripple. Peters being thus disabled, Baker supported him. The latter, after about a year, became very poor, and discontinued his bounty. Thereupon, Peters pursued’ him to this city, rode in the night in a hack to his house, sent the hackman to inform him that a gentleman and friend wished to see him on business, and when Baker came out and stood at the window of the hack, shot him dead instantly. Peters was acquitted by the jury and lived here for some years afterwards—long enough indeed to murder or try to murder a prostitute, upon whose bounty he subsisted. There was the case of the Pendegrasts, who killed Buchanan, a schoolmaster. The elder Pendegrast, with two of his sons and a negro, went to Buchanan’s school-house with loaded guns and killed him, without giving him a chance for his life. The jury gave a verdict of acquittal. There was the case of Shelby who killed Horine in Lexington. The two dined at the same public table, and, upon Horine’s going into the street, Shelby demanded of him why he had looked at him in such a manner at the table. Horine answered that he was not aware of having looked at him in any unusual manner. Shelby said—“You did, and if you eve r do it again, I will blow your brains out. I don’t know who you are.” Horine responded—“I know you, and suppose a man may look at you, if your name is Shelby.” At that, Shelby struck him with his fist, and without any return of the blow, and without any display of a weapon by Horine, for he was unarmed, Shelby shot him dead. Shelby was indicted, but the jury found no verdict against him. There was the case of Harry Daniel, of Mount Sterling, who killed Clifton Thompson. Daniel and Thompson were lawyers, and brothers-in-law. Thompson made some imputation upon Daniel in open court. Daniel drew a pistol and shot him dead in the presence of judge and jury. Thompson had a pistol in his pocket but did not draw it. Daniel was acquitted by a jury.

Similar cases might be cited by the volume in which public sentiment, finding its expression in the action of a jury, is proved to be constantly triumphant over all laws and ecclesiastical formulas in justifying homicide when it results from the quick and vehement anger of an undisciplined intellect. This is the natural consequence of the lurking danger everywhere present at the South, by which its citizens are compelled to hold themselves always in readiness to chastise, to strike down, to slay, upon what they shall individually judge to be sufficient provocation or exhibition of insubordination.

Southerners themselves may, perhaps, affirm that they are unconscious of this sense of insecurity, and this habit of preparation. But every habit breeds unconsciousness of its existence in the mind of the man whom it controls, and this is more true of habits which involve our safety than of any others. The weary sailor aloft, on the lookout, may fall asleep; not the less, in the lurch of the ship, will his hands clench the swaying cordage, but only the more firmly that they act in the method of instinct. A hard-hunted fugitive may nod in his saddle, but his knees will not unloose their hold upon his horse. Men who live in powder-mills are said to lose all conscious feeling of habitual insecurity; [410] but visitors perceive that they have acquired softness of manner and of voice.

If a laborer on a plantation should contradict his master, it may often appear to be no more than a reasonable precaution for his master to kill him on the spot; for, when a slave has acquired such boldness, it may be evident that not merely is his value as property seriously diminished, but the attempt to make further use of him at all, as property, involves in danger the whole white community. “If I let this man live, and permit him the necessary degree of freedom, to be further useful to me, he will infect, with his audacity, all my negro property, which will be correspondingly more difficult to control, and correspondingly reduced in value. If he treats me with so little respect now, what have I to anticipate when he has found other equally independent spirits among the slaves? They will not alone make themselves free, but will avenge upon me, and my wife, and my daughters, and upon all our community, the injustice which they will think has been done them, and their women, and children.” Thus would he reason, and shudder to think what might follow if he yielded to an impulse of mercy.

To suppose, however, that the master will pause while he thus weighs the danger exactly, and then deliberately act as, upon reflection, he considers the necessities of the case demand, is absurd. The mere circumstance of his doing so would nourish a hopeful spirit in the slave, and stimulate him to consider how he could best avoid all punishment.

But how is it in a similar case at the North? I have seen it. “I am sorry, “says the farmer; “I am sorry you have such a bad temper, John. I can’t afford to have you live with me, if you have not more respect for yourself and for me, than to play the blackguard. I will pay you what owe you, and then we will part—part friends, if you please, for I bear no malice.” And John goes, ashamed of himself, and with a sensible resolution to acquire a better self-government. The man who would knock John down, under these circumstances, especially if John were the weaker man, or taken at disadvantage, from behind, or with a weapon, would live without the respect, the confidence, or the affection of his neighbors. He would be called a vindictive, irritable, miserable old fool.

Mark the difference at the South. The same man would be called, and, perhaps, rightly, a brave, generous, high-toned, and chivalric gentleman. And, perhaps rightly, I say, for the impulses which would lead him, in the instant, and without reflection, to act decisively, that is, perhaps, to kill, and, at all events, to very cruelly hurt his fellow-being, and that without the smallest regard to fairness, it is not impossible might have been based on a generous sense of his duty to the public, and a superiority to merely selfish considerations. Thus slavery educates gentlemen in habits which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.

But, “planters sleep unguarded, and with their bedroom doors open.” So, as it was boasted, did the Emperor at Biarritz, last summer, and with [411] greater bravery, because the assassin of Napoleon would be more sure, in dispatching him, that there would be no one left with a vital interest to secure punishment for such a deed; and because, if he failed, Napoleon dare never employ such exemplary punishment for his enemies as would the planters for theirs. The emperors of the South are the whole free society of the South, and it is a society of mutual insurance. Against a slave who has the disposition to become an assassin, you find his emperor has a body-guard, which, for general effectiveness, is to the Cent garde as your right hand is to your right hand’s glove.

It is but a few months since, in Georgia, or Alabama, a man treated another precisely as Mr. Brooks treated Mr. Sumner—coming up behind, with the fury of a madman, and felling him with a bludgeon; killing him by the first blow, however, and then discharging vengeance by repeated strokes upon his senseless body. The man thus pitifully abused had been the master of the other, a remarkably confiding and merciful master, it was said—too much so; “it never does to be too slack with niggers.” By such indiscretion he brought his death upon him. But did his assassin escape? He was roasted, at a slow fire, on the spot of the murder, in the presence of many thousand slaves, driven to the ground from all the adjoining counties, and when, at length, his life went out, the fire was intensified until his body was in ashes, which were scattered to the winds and trampled under foot. Then “magistrates and clergymen” addressed appropriate warnings to the assembled subjects. It was no indiscretion to leave doors open again, that night.

Will any traveler say that he has seen no signs of discontent, or insecurity, or apprehension, or precaution; that the South has appeared quieter and less excited, even on the subject of slavery, than the North; that the negroes seem happy and contented. and the citizens more tranquilly engaged in the pursuit of their business and pleasure? Has that traveler been in Naples? Precisely the same remarks apply to the appearances of things there at this moment. The massacre of Hayti opened in a ball-room. Mr. Cobden judged there was not the smallest reason in the French king’s surrounding himself with soldiers the day before the hidden virus of insubordination broke out and cast him forth from his kingdom. The moment of greatest apparent security to tyrants is always the moment of their greatest peril. It is true, however, that the tranquillity of the South is the tranquillity of Hungary and of Poland; the tranquillity of hopelessness on the part of the subject race. But, in the most favored regions, this broken spirit of despair is as carefully preserved by the citizens, and with as confident and unhesitating an application of force, when necessary to teach humility, as it is by the army of the Czar, or the omnipresent police of the Kaiser. In Richmond, and Charleston, and New Orleans, the citizens are as careless and gay as in Boston or London, and their servants a thousand times as childlike and cordial, to all appearance, in their relations with them, as our servants are with us. But go to the bottom of this security and dependence, and you come to police machinery, such as you never find in towns [412] under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings of the subjects for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston, than at Naples in a week; and I found that more than half the inhabitants of this town were subject to arrest, imprisonment, and barbarous punishment, if found in the streets without a passport after the evening “gun-fire.” Similar precautions and similar customs may be discovered in every large town in the South.

Nor is it so much better, as is generally imagined, in the rural districts. Ordinarily there is no show of government any more than at the North: the slaves go about with as much apparent freedom as convicts in a dockyard. There is, however, nearly everywhere, always prepared to act, if not always in service, an armed force, with a military organization, which is invested with more arbitrary and cruel power than any police in Europe. Yet the security of the whites is in a much less degree contingent on the action of the patrols than upon the constant habitual and instinctive surveillance and authority of all white people over all black. I have seen a gentleman, with no commission or special authority, oblige negroes to show their passports, simply because he did not recognize them as belonging to any of his neighbors. I have seen a girl, twelve years old, in a district where, in ten miles, the slave population was fifty to one of the free, stop an old man on the public road, demand to know where he was going, and by what authority, order him to face about and return to his plantation; and enforce her command with turbulent anger, when he hesitated, by threatening that she would have him well whipped if he did not instantly obey. The man quailed like a spaniel, and she instantly resumed the manner of a lovely child with me, no more apprehending that she had acted unbecomingly than that her character had been influenced by the slave’s submission to her caprice of supremacy; no more conscious that she had increased the security of her life by strengthening the habit of the slave [of subservience] to the master race, than is the sleeping seaman that he tightens his clutch of the rigging as the ship meets each new billow.

The whole South is, in fact, a people divided against itself, of which one faction has conquered, and has to maintain its supremacy. The “state of siege” is permanent. Any symptoms of rebellion on one side, or of treachery on the other, cannot safely be left to the slow process of civil law; every white man is expected to deal summarily with them, and in such a manner as to pervade with terror, cowardice, and hopelessness all the possibly disaffected; and in many districts, where the contagion of a bold or hot brain would be most dangerous, the life of the whole white population is that of a “vigilance committee,” every man and woman grim-faced for a possible ferocious duty.

There is no part of the South in which the people are more free from the direct action of slavery upon the character, or where they have less to apprehend from rebellion, than Eastern Tennessee. Yet, after the burning of a negro near Knoxville, a few years ago, the deed was justified as necessary for [413] the maintenance of order among the slaves, by the editor of a newspaper (the Register), which, owing to its peculiarly conservative character, I have heard stigmatized as “an abolition print.” “It was, “he observed, “a means of absolute, necessary self-defense, which could not be secured by an ordinary resort to the laws. Two executions on the gallows have occurred in this county within a year or two past, and the example has been unavailing. Four executions by hanging have taken place, heretofore in Jefferson, of slaves guilty of similar offenses, and it has produced no radical terror or example for the others designing the same crimes, and hence any example less horrible and terrifying would have availed nothing here.”

The other local paper (the Whig), upon the same occasion, used the following language:

“We have to say, in defense of the act, that it was not perpetrated by an excited multitude, but by one thousand citizens—good citizens at that—who were cool, calm, and deliberate.”

And the editor, who is not ashamed to call himself “a minister of Christ,” presently adds, after explaining the enormity of the offense with which the victim was charged—“We unhesitatingly affirm that the punishment was unequal to the crime. Had we been there we should have taken a part, and even suggested the pinching of pieces out of him with red-hot pincers—the cutting off of a limb at a time, and then burning them all in a heap. The possibility of his escaping from jail forbids the idea of awaiting the tardy movements of the law.”

How much more horrible than the deed are these apologies for it. They make it manifest that it was not accidental in its character, but a phenomenon of general and fundamental significance. They explain the paralytic effect upon the popular conscience of the great calamity of the South. They indicate that it is a necessity of these people to return in their habits of thought to the dark ages of mankind. For who, from the outside, can fail to see that the real reason why men, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the centre of the United States, are publicly burned at the stake, is one much less heathenish, less disgraceful to the citizens than that given by the more zealous and extemporaneous of their journalistic exponents—the desire to torture the sinner proportionately to the measure of his sin. Doubtless, this reverend gentleman expresses the uppermost feeling of the ruling mind of his community. But would a similar provocation have developed a similar and equally tumultuous, avenging spirit in any other nominally Christian or civilized people? Certainly not. All over Europe, in every free-state-California, for significant reasons, temporarily excepted—in similar cases, justice deliberately takes its course; the accused is systematically assisted in defending or excusing himself. If the law demands his life, the infliction of unnecessary suffering, and the education of the people in violence and feelings of revenge, is studiously avoided. Go back to the foundation of the custom which thus neutralizes Christianity, among the people of the South, which carries them backward blindly against the tide of [414] civilization, and what do we find it to be? The editor, who still retains moral health enough to be suspected, as men more enlightened than their neighbors usually are, of heterodoxy, answers for us. To follow the usual customs of civilization elsewhere would not be safe. To indulge in feelings of humanity would not be safe. To be faithful to the precepts of Christ would not be safe. To act in a spirit of cruel, inconsiderate, illegal, violent, and pitiless vengeance, must be permitted, must be countenanced, must be defended by the most conservative, as a “means of absolute, necessary self-defense.” To educate the people practically otherwise would be suicidal. Hence no free press, no free pulpit, nor free politics, can be permitted in the South, nor in Kansas, while the South reigns. Hence every white stripling in the South may carry a dirk-knife in his pocket, and play with a revolver before he has learned to swim. “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

I happened to pass through Eastern Tennessee shortly after this tragedy, and conversed with a man who was engaged in it—a mild, common-sense native of the country. He told me that there was no evidence against the negro but his own confession. I suggested that he might have been crazy. “What if he was?” he asked, with a sudden asperity.

What if he was? To be sure; what if he was? In fact, he was not burned because he deserved it; nor, if we consider, because he was believed by his rulers to have committed the offenses charged upon him. It was not a question of evidence, of morality, but of expediency—simply, of self-preservation. His life depended not upon a conviction of his guilt, in the minds of his judges, but upon the opinion which the subject people of the county were likely to have about it, the same necessity requiring this jury of his peers to be degraded, cunning, and suspicious. To make them sure that their rulers are a strong and hard-hearted race, quick, sure, and terrible in their vengeance, was the object. It was a question no more of justice than of mercy, to the victim used in accomplishing the object.

Is it incredible that men, nurtured in communities whose most conservative and respectable classes, whose very professional teachers feel themselves justified in taking part in such barbarity, upon such grounds, should have been found, by Mr. Gladstone, guilty of purely barbarous conduct towards a people whose patient and self-controlling habits were so new to them that they could only ascribe them to a slave-like cowardice? Evidently, to the invaders of Kansas, it must have seemed a merciful treatment of those they had been taught to consider their enemies, when they fell into their hands, merely to hang, or shoot, and scalp them, without torture.

“No people,” it has been said, “are ever found to be better than their laws, though many have been known to be worse.” If, in the following advertisement, which was recently published in North Carolina, the proper-names and technical phrases were suitably changed, and it were presented to us by a traveler as coming from the Sandwich Islands, would it not strike us that it had [415] been rather premature to class the natives of those islands among the Christian nations of the world?

State of North Carolina, Jones County.—Whereas, complaint upon oath hath this day been made to us, Adonijah McDaniel and John N. Hyman, two of the Justices of the Peace of said county, by Franklin B. Harrison, of said county, planter, that a certain male slave belonging to him, named Sam, hath absented himself from his master’s services, and is lurking about said county, committing acts of felony and other misdeeds. These are, therefore, in the name of State, to command the said slave forthwith to surrender himself and return home to his master; and we do hereby require the Sheriff of said County of Jones to make diligent search and pursuit after the said slave, and him having found, to apprehend and secure, so that he may be conveyed to his said master, or otherwise discharged as the law directs; and the said Sheriff is hereby authorized and empowered to raise and take with him such power of his county as he shall think fit for apprehending the said slave; and we do hereby, by virtue of the Act of Assembly, in such case provided, intimate and declare that if the said slave, named Sam, doth not surrender himself and return home immediately after the publication of these presents, that any person may kill and destroy the said slave, by such means as he or they may think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime or offense for so doing, and without incurring any penalty and forfeiture thereby.

Given under our hands and seals the 29th day of September, a. d., 1856.

A. McDANIEL, J. P.

J. N. HYMAN, J. P.

May not the most conservative of us soon be obliged to consider less what we can do and suffer to retain the fellowship, than what we can do to guard against the sinister influences upon our own politics and society, of contiguous States, under the laws of which there is still the liability of such an exposition of constitutional barbarism? What is to be expected of such seed but such bitter fruit as that of Kansas, under the heat of Squatter Sovereignty?

The supreme judicial authority of the same State has declared that it would be preposterous, while the intention of holding the slaves in their present subjection was maintained, to consider it a crime for a white man to shoot a woman attempting to escape from the ordinary chastisement of indocility. It was decided (in the case of the State vs. Mann), by Justice Ruffin, “essential to the value of slaves, as property, to the security of the master, and to the public [416] tranquillity,” that such recklessness with human life should be unrestrained by the law.

Let the reader who thinks there must be “two sides” to this story of Kansas, and that Mr. Gladstone has chosen to give his countrymen but one of them, remember that the necessity which has made the South thus exceptional among civilized States, in its law, must have made the people of the South much more exceptional among civilized mankind in their habits and character. Mr. Gladstone demonstrates but one consequence—that one which, being defended and apologized for by the President of the United States, has most injured the reputation of democratic institutions throughout the world. The world should recognize the fact that the disgraceful condition of Kansas, the atrocious system, which the federal government of the United States has been forced to countenance in Kansas, is the legitimate fruit of despotism, not of free government.

There are, however, many other characteristics of the people of the South which have had their origin in this necessity, which we of the North—since the absence of slavery is likely hereafter to depend on a local ordinance, since slavery is officially intimated to be national, and all opposition to slavery declared to be “sectional”—cannot afford to overlook. Would to God we had “nothing to do with it.” But, as a Southern-born man said to me, lately, “It is a white man’s question.” Shall we hereafter exercise our rights as citizens of the United States, which are simply our natural rights ’as men, only by favor of Sharps rifles and in entrenched villages?

It is, for instance, the foundation of that peculiar political cooperativeness and efficiency which we see in the people of the South. Nothing is safe if the slaves rise. Towards any party or measures, therefore, which, however indirectly, militate in the least against the everlasting subordination of the slave race, they act, as they do towards the slaves themselves, with the self-preserving instinct of a community always prepared for the attacks of a savage enemy. Hence, the intensity and completeness with which they give themselves up to any political purpose in which an increase of wealth, and, consequently, of stability in power, is involved for the slaveholding body. They engage in it as in war, and hold ordinary rules of morality and social comity to be suspended till they have gained their ends.

Their orators are wont to boast that they belong to a military people. What are termed the military qualities of the South are, again, the natural effects of this inherited watchfulness and readiness to meet, instantly and decisively, with cruelty and bloodshed, the first symptoms of insubordinate disposition on the part of their slaves. These military qualities are, in fact, not such as are most valued for modern armies—individual staunchness, patience, and endurance of character, contributing to combined concentrativeness, precision, and mobility—but rather those of the feudal ages, or of savage warriors, the chief being mere belligerent excitability, readiness of resort to arms, an idolatrous estimate of the virtue of physical courage, and an insane propensity [417] of that kind which leads Indian braves to amuse or disgust their visitors, as the case may be, by “scalp-dances” and monotonous recitative of their glorious achievements, past and prospective. A government of force is ordinarily a government of threats and gasconading ostentation. The subject must continually know that the master is confident in his strength.

We are well instructed by Humboldt, that the only worthy purpose of the student of history is to learn the influence which different circumstances have had on the development of character in mankind. Doubtless, slavery has not wholly failed of good effects upon the character of our fellow-citizens of the South. I do not now inquire what those effects are, because such an inquiry is not pertinent to the subject of this book. In the conduct of those who represent the influence of slavery in Kansas, only the worst qualities which it is possible for men to acquire have hitherto been displayed. Even the measurable success with which they have, to this moment, maintained their conquest, is due to no good judgment, energy, or bravery of their own, but is evidently entirely dependent on what, to such observers as Mr. Gladstone, must be the most incredible and inexplicable circumstance in the whole sad business—the encouragement they receive in their villainy from the democratic party of the Free-states, and the constant countenance, supplies, reinforcements, and patronage of the federal administration. Withdraw this; let the oppressed citizens generally feel that it would be right, and proper, and lawful to deal with their present rulers as they have been dealt with by them, and the savages would disappear from the land as the more manly Indians have before them, and then the present scandal of Kansas would be lost in the natural peace, order, and prosperity of a society, no member of which need have aught to fear but from his own folly, nor aught to hope but from his own industry. as surely as the fire-blackness of its winter prairies is submerged in the green flood of its spring.

Is it unpatriotic to thus show the incompatibility of slavery with good citizenship?

The people of the South are “my people. “I am attached to them equally as to those of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. My blood and my fortune are equally at their service. I desire their prosperity as I do that of no other people in the world. I look upon slavery as an entailed misfortune which, with the best disposition, it might require centuries to wholly dispose of. I would have extreme charity for the political expedients to which it tempts a resort.

But it seems to me now, that such inexcusable scoundrelism in our common matters, as has been shown in Kansas, should make us consider if charity has not been carried too far; if the forbearing, and apologetic, and patronizing disposition towards everything in the South, or of the South, or for the South, is not as much calculated to bring us into difficulty as the reckless and denunciatory spirit attributed to the abolitionists. Have not thousands of our Northern people so habituated themselves to defend the South that they have become as blind to the essential evils and dangers of despotism as if they were themselves directly subject to its influence?

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In the South itself, there has been for many years a school of fanatics, who maintain that slavery is essential to a high form of civilization; who, in their selfish anxiety to maintain it, have trained themselves to think that its influence is wholly ennobling and refining, christianizing and civilizing. These views are so flattering to the predominant bad propensities developed by slavery that they are propagated with a zeal and a success like that of the immediate followers of Mahomet. The characteristic vices of the middle ages are unearthed and enshrined under the name of chivalry, and the youth of our country is taught to reverence a reckless, blundering, and blood-thirsty buccaneer as a “second Washington,” and a silly, romantic, swaggering poltroon, who can talk wickedly of women and wear a graceful feather, as “the Marion of Kansas.”

Against this gospel no one dare contend with a spirit and boldness at all comparable to that of its apostles. Books, periodicals, and newspapers, are interdicted, if they maintain the faith which was universal among its friends in the South when our Union was formed. However calm and respectful their manner, they are denied the service of the United States mails; those who receive them are denounced as abolition traitors; gentlemen who acknowledge themselves to privately hold similar opinions, and who are on terms of friendship with their authors, feel obliged to “discountenance” them. “If I should express my real opinions,” said one, himself a large slaveholder, “it is not unlikely I should be mobbed and my life placed in jeopardy by men who never have owned and never will own a single negro.”

Nay, have we not recently seen that, for a mere act of customary politeness to a political opponent, and of respect to a high official of our national government, Mr. Aiken, of South Carolina, the wealthiest citizen and the largest slave-owner of that state, has been denounced and insulted, as guilty of a “gross wrong” to his constituents? There is no “democratic paper” in all the South, believes the editor of the South Carolina Times, that has not condemned the act; no paper which has approved of it. In all the South, not one editor still lives to sympathize with the instincts of a gentleman of the old school. So complete is the success of the new gospel of slavery in its own country.

At the North, we have not only “public documents” sent us by the ton, but many self-styled democratic newspapers, which follow, as near as can be thought discreet for propagandists, in the same course—denying the evils of slavery, apologizing for them, or, with astounding impudence, in the case of these Kansas barbarisms, charging them upon the persecuted and long-suffering victims, whom, also, they hold up to scorn, as “traitors” and “abolitionists.” The most successful journal in the service of the administration here in New York, is not satisfied thus negatively to serve the purposes of the slavery fanatics, but takes the aggressive against freedom, daily arguing “the universal failure of free society,” earnestly combating “the Wide-spread delusion that Southern institutions are an evil, and their extension dangerous,” and [419] diligently advocating the claims to universal adoption of a system, living under the influence of which Jefferson declared the citizen “must be a prodigy who retained his morals and manners undepraved;” which Patrick Henry testified to be “at variance with the purity of our religion;” which Mason held “to produce the most pernicious effects on manners,” and calculated to draw “the judgment of heaven upon a country;” which Franklin termed “an atrocious debasement of our nature,” and “a plan for the abolition” of which Washington declared to be “among his first wishes.”

When the Supreme Court finds slavery to have been considered a national institution by these statesmen in the construction of our constitution; when this opinion, at variance with every impression we have received from our fathers, is welcomed with cheers and congratulations in the North, as by the State Democratic Convention of Connecticut; when nearly all the newspapers of the South, and one quarter of those at the North, express nothing but satisfaction with the criminality of the late administration in Kansas; nothing but charity or admiration for the savages nurtured by slavery to fight its battles; nothing but sneers and maledictions for the grand results of free government manifested in the patient, orderly, and industrious character of their victims; when with the ruling, though minor party, of our citizens, freedom and the “Rights of man” are subjects only of ridicule—slavery only of apology or laudation; when foreigners find border-warfare the most interesting subject of observation on our continent; when the subjects of every crowned head in Europe are pointed to Kansas for a caution against dreams of self-government; when our army is used as a reserve force for bands of robbers, while they murder the sons, and ravish the daughters, and devastate the property of our dearest friends and neighbors, and all in the service of slavery, is it not reasonable to believe that there is greater danger of our forgetting the evils which the people of the South suffer from slavery than of our overlooking the advantages which they claim to enjoy from it?