A. D. Mayo

“ Their wisest and most patriotic men must, like Washington, and Jefferson, and Clay and Benton, clasp the hands of the real North; the North that is faced towards liberty; and demand of it all consideration and support consistent with true civilization. Let them no longer parley with the political, social and commercial traitors who promise what they never can perform—a reversal of Northern ideas of society. Let them convince us that they have at heart the freedom of the Republic, and their counsels for moderation and fraternal action will have the weight they deserve. ”

“ Perhaps the margin of servility in the North will gain a temporary victory, and in concert with a united slave power, enact some infamous concession over our heads. Then we must only close up and move on, as in the past; for freedom repudiates all surrender to tyranny now and forever, and there must be a final victory for the right.
Perchance the nobler civilization of the South will arise in its might, and, in concert with the real North, adopt some wise and conciliatory policy for the whole country which will sacrifice no right of the people and impair no hope of the Republic ”

“ But the north is by no means yet in the kingdom. Each of its radical ideas of free society is violated and perverted by a considerable portion of every commonwealth; some of its principles by entire states. Out of the competitions of free labor has sprung a fierce and selfish love of money which scorns honesty and tramples down man in its accursed lust for gold. Whole classes of men are cursed by this venal insanity which, culminating in the marble streets of the commercial metropolis, distills its venom to the remotest log cabin in the wilderness. ”

“ The pulpits of the North are not yet rid of the servants of this Sadducism. It is not strange that this whole margin of servility is stirred to its nauseous depth in favor of unlimited concession to the slave power. It would be monstrous if this great North cast down her noblest and wisest advisers and followed the lead of this motley crew. It may or may not be necessary that certain men should be rich, famous, or in office; but that eighteen states who represent the loftiest civilization on the earth should commit social suicide to further such trivial objects is too much to contemplate. ”

“ Only by this zealous upholding of freedom in eighteen states can the North educate herself to her secondary obligation to preserve the Union by defending the people of the South against the slave power. Whatever may be the capacity of liberty in the free states to sustain a disruption of the Union; it is morally certain that the only rational hope of liberty in fifteen southern states is in their continuance of the partnership in a national government administered in the interests of human rights. ”

“ The paramount duty of the eighteen Northern States is to preserve and perpetuate the Christian civilization already inaugurated within their borders, and permit the sacred cause of liberty to suffer no eclipse.
Second. The North has now become the natural protector of the Southern people against the tyranny of the slave power, and must do its uttermost to prevent the conquest of fifteen states by this remorseless tyranny.
The North has one obligation more sacred than all others; to preserve the sacred rights of man and carry forward the work of a Christian civilization on this continent. ”

“ She knows, as Virginia and Maryland do not, that there can be no more reliable extension of the slave power in the Union, as now constituted, and as it will inevitably be administered in the future. She is sick at heart, and understands that all her physicians are quacks, who propose only palliatives, in helpless inability to cure her disease. What cares she for a new fugitive slave law when the old one cannot be enforced, and every Negro carried back to bondage leaves a town full of new-made abolitionists behind? ”

“ Will it help her to declare that all the territories shall choose freedom or slavery for themselves, when Yankee Jonathan, German Hans and Irish Patrick are swarming on the borders of every territory where a civilized man can live? The offer of new slave states in the southwestern deserts does not console her, for she remembers that of the four slave states admitted into the Union within the last thirty years, two are insignificant, and Texas and Missouri are already in a state of siege by freedom, while free states stand, rank behind rank, awaiting an open door. ”

“ Let us keep the conscience of the North sound, its spirit high, its determination unchangeable for a true civilization. We must abate none of our great agencies of freedom. The free school, the free press, free speech, free society, a free ballot, a free church must be sustained at all hazards, and purified of grossness and license by the gradual education and refining of the people. Our political state policy must be maintained, and only changed in the direction of purging the cause of freedom from all base alloy, and opening into wider vistas of Christian liberty. ”

“ We behold in the firm attitude of a few Southern patriots of the Washington and Jefferson school, the only hope for the salvation of the country. They know that the majority of the North never did and will not propose to abolish slavery in the Slave States by the General Government against their own desire. They know that any administration inaugurated by this majority will protect the Southern people against all danger of war, intestine conflict, invasion or insurrection. ”

“ Let our servants remember we forgive all things to devotion to our common humanity; we pardon any policy, that finally keeps us in the current of the nineteenth century; but we forgive no man who, through fear, or flattery, or ignorance, or any motive, puts in peril the cause of human rights. ”

“ Freedom has eighteen states, with double their white population, and holds the two strategical points, California and Kansas, which cover every territory, and make it almost impossible that new slave states should be permanently sustained therein. And now the North has united to confine the peculiar institution within its present limits. In the Union, the battle is fought and won. Slavery, nominally the victor, has been really defeated in every contest since the Revolution. She has violated every compromise, and thus morally put it out of her power to demand concession from liberty. ”

“ Our rulers must not open the African slave trade; or make our northern cities the depots of the infamous traffic in men; or permit further acquisition of territory for slavery; or change the Republic into a machine to assist and protect property in man wherever our flag is planted. The national policy must aim at a final limitation of slavery in the nation, and a transferal of the whole controversy to the slave states. ”

“ South Carolina counsels it to prolong its life by flying beyond jurisdiction of the court. But if the slave power flies from the Union, it is only rushing from the house of a regenerating friend into an open country peopled by its foes. The civilization of the age is against it. The South must, first or last, regenerate her false order of society, or walk towards final destruction. ”

“ But now it has turned its shameless face away from Northern civilization, which is growing up behind its back into an adamantine wall overtopping its base hopes and impotent threats. While its preachers, and politicians, and journals and saloons are facing towards despotism, and calling free society anarchy, the majority of the North is calmly marching onward to the victory for the right which is only a question of a few decades, unswayed by the promises, undaunted by the croakings of its margin of servility. ”

“ New Mexico has 62,000 square miles, and has about one slave to 1,000 square miles, and this is her most hopeful scion at present; very like protecting a dead horse against a general muster of crows. What of the abstract right to carry slaves through states that daily hate slavery more bitterly? Are compromises offered in any of these directions? The spectre of one great compromise, murdered in the Capitol, rises like Banquo’s ghost, and shrieks, “thou sent compromise to the grave; who calls up my unquiet shadow to haunt the day?” A compromise is henceforth only a law ”

“ No wall of separation can be raised so high that the growing civilization of the North will not overlook it, and, like the sun in mid-heaven, shine down with beneficent rays on the just and unjust, protecting the good, succoring the fallen, regenerating the evil. ”

“ O! that God would give our brothers of the South the clearness and calmness to see that Northern civilization contemplates harm to no man; is beneficent like God’s love; in truth is, in its ideal, the Love of God applied to the life of a new world.
The future is not clear, and he is a bold man who can prophecy a month ahead. It may be that we are at the end; that the slave power has conquered fifteen states and is about to lead them out into the desert of a barbaric experiment in despotic society. ”

“ Eighty-four years ago, thirteen American colonies revolted from the British Empire. All acknowledged the right of property in one race of men. But only in six colonies was this idea inwrought into the texture of society; in seven northern provinces it was already a condemned barbarism. These seven northern colonies were inclined to believe in the natural right of every man to freedom sufficient to develop his own nature without hindrance to other men; a right to be forever asserted and secured by a government of the whole people. ”

“ For the South has only gained thereby an additional slave population of 60,000 in Texas; a vast, region whose western border is already in the hands of free men; a fugitive slave law, whose imperfect enforcement has greatly served to alienate the Northern mind, and reduce the escape of slaves to a science; and a barren promise of several new States in Texas, New Mexico, and Utah, if she can get them. The North secured the State of California, which has shut off the Pacific from slavery, and planted a mighty free State like a circular battery, covering all the newly acquired Mexican Territory. ”

“ If any man has made himself specially obnoxious to the people of New England, New York or the Great West, by treason to their higher convictions, we have seen him lifted into some exalted position by the voice of those whose only hope of salvation is the confidence of the Northern heart. The moderate men of the South have counseled too often with this irresponsible section of the free states, and, of course, are now left to drift.
If this Union is to be saved, the border slave states must change their policy. ”

“ The idea of free society, of which New England is the foremost representative, is gradually subduing every region of these eighteen states to itself.
And just as the New England idea, organized in the great Middle States and the Northwest, is approaching its day of conquest in the North, is the idea of South Carolina subduing the fifteen Southern States. South Carolina is now the most completely aristocratic State in the Confederacy. Fifty-eight per cent of her entire population are slaves. Her basis of representation in her Legislature is equally slave property and white population ”

“ They would perpetually be urged into wars with every civilized power; for nobody supposes the nations of the world will permit a black empire to open the slave trade and steal unlimited territory. On whatever side we look, the only hope of free institutions in the south is adherence to a Union working towards the freedom of man.
This preservation of the Union for liberty can only be accomplished by a co-operation of the moderate men and class of the South with the party of freedom in the North. ”

“ With the most determined effort to keep its hands off the slave power, the spirit of American liberty will be compelled to deal with it more vitally every year. The age is forcing it towards this policy. Every school house and meeting house, free home, free journal, and country lyceum in the United States is a protest against this barbarism. ”

“ Van Dyke, and their disciples, we must change our whole type of society; forswear all that gives us power at home and fame abroad; place ourselves under a general espionage more hateful than the rule of an emperor; and conspire to crush a whole race of men in the dust forever. This cannot be done. Northern civilization is looking towards the golden rule of Christ. Its social, civil, industrial, educational, religious associations are all slowly adjusting themselves to the Christian idea of the equal rights of all men. ”

“ Should our people now be persuaded or forced to repudiate these ideas; turn their backs on the spirit of the age; hold every principle on sale; make their pavements and fields too servile for the tread of freemen, it would be a calamity in comparison with which the sinking of every despotic state in the depths of the sea would be a blessing. ”