F. A. Ross

“ Ay, sir, mother-England, old fogy as she is, begins to open her eyes. What, then, is our gain? Sir, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many of its conceptions, could not have been written twenty-five years ago. That book of genius,--over which I and hundreds in the world have freely wept,--true in all its facts, false in all its impressions,--yea, as false in the prejudice it creates to Southern social life as if Webster, the murderer of Parkman, may be believed to be a personification of the elite of honor in Cambridge, Boston, and New England. ”

“ Africa, with here and there an exception, has never produced men to compare with the men of Asia. For six thousand years, save the unintelligible stones of Egypt, she has had no history. Asia has had her great men and her name. But Europe has ever shown, and now, her nobler men and higher destiny. Japheth has now come to North America, to give us his past greatness and his transcendent glory. (Applause.) And, sir, I thank God our mountains stand where they stand; and that our rivers run where they run. Thank God they run not across longitudes, but across latitudes, from north to south. ”

“ You get only groans and mutterings. You claim these voices, I know, as testimony against slavery. But you cannot torture in secret as in olden times. When putting the question, you have to let men be present,--who tell us that Moses and Paul won't speak for you,--that they are silent, like Christ before Pilate's scourging-men; or, in groans and mutterings,--the voices of their sorrow and the tones of their indignation,--they rebuke your pre-judgment of the Almighty when you say if the Bible sanctions slavery, "it neither ought to be nor could be received by mankind as a divine revelation." ”

“ On the one hand, some anti-slavery men have left the light of the Bible, and wandered into the darkness until they have reached the blackness of the darkness of infidelity. Other some are following hard after, and are throwing the Bible into the furnace,--are melting it into iron, and forging it, and welding it, and twisting it, and grooving it into the shape and significance and goodness and gospel of Sharpe's rifles. Sir, are you not afraid that some of your once best men will soon have no better Bible than that? ”

“ I speak not only of the RIGHT simply to govern, but the mode of the government, and the extent of the power. Government can do ALL which God would do,--just THAT,--no more, no less. And it is bound to do just THAT,--no more, no less. Government is responsible to God, if it fails to do just THAT which He himself would do. It is under responsibility, then, to rule in righteousness. It must not oppress. It must give to every individual "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," in harmony with the good of the family,--the state,--as God himself would give it,--just THAT, no more, no less. ”

“ God has permitted the anti-slavery men in the North, in England, in France, and everywhere, so to blind themselves in hypocrisy as to give the Southern slave-holder his last perfect triumph over them; for God tells the planter to say to the North, to England, to France, to all who buy cotton, "Ye men of Boston, New York, London, Paris,--ye hypocrites,--ye brand me as a pirate, a kidnapper, a murderer, a demon, fit only for hell, and yet ye buy my blood-stained cotton. ”

“ And every man in this house, capable of understanding the force of that question, felt it had shivered the whole anti-slavery argument, on those resolutions, to atoms. Why, sir, if a man can hold three slaves, with a right heart and the approbation of God, he may hold thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand. It is a mere question of heart, and capacity to govern. The Emperor of Russia holds sixty millions of slaves: and is there a man in this house so much of a fool as to say that God regards the Emperor of Russia a sinner because he is the master of sixty millions of slaves? ”

“ Why, sir, the wife everywhere, except where Christianity has given her elevation, is the slave. And, sir, I say, without fear of saying too strongly, that for every sigh, every groan, every tear, every agony of stripe or death, which has gone up to God from the relation of master and slave, there have been more sighs, more groans, more tears, and more agony in the rule of the husband over the wife. ”

“ These two theories of Right and Wrong,--these two ideas of human liberty,--the right, in the nature of things, or the right as made by God,--the liberty of the individual man, of Atheism, of Red Republicanism, of the devil,--or the liberty of man, in the family, in the State, the liberty from God,--these two theories now make the conflict of the world. This anti-slavery battle is only part of the great struggle: God will be victorious,--and we, in his might. ”

“ Sir, that Emperor has certainly a high and awful responsibility upon him. But, if he is good as he is great, he is a god of benevolence on earth. And so is every Southern master. His obligation is high, and great, and glorious. It is the same obligation, in kind, he is under to his wife and children, and in some respects immensely higher, by reason of the number and the tremendous interests involved for time and eternity in connection with this great country, Africa, and the world. ”

“ I agree with you that some men have been, are, and will be, made infidels by hearing that God has ordained slavery as one form of his government over depraved mankind. But how does this fact prove that the Bible does not sanction slavery? Why, sir, you have been all your life teaching that some men are made infidels by hearing any truth of the Bible;--that some men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement, Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. ”

“ You are bound to obey him in all things. Your service is very, very, very often involuntary from the first, and, if voluntary at first, becomes hopeless necessity afterwards. I know God has laid upon the husband to love you as Christ loved the church, and in that sublime obligation has placed you in the light and under the shadow of a love infinitely higher, and purer, and holier than all talked about in the romances of chivalry. But the husband may not so love you. He may rule you with the rod of iron. What can you do? Be divorced? God forbids it, save for crime. ”

“ Had Ham killed Shem, Noah would have commanded Japheth to slay him. So much for the origin of the power over life: now for the power over liberty.
The right to take life included the right over liberty. But God intended the rule of the superior over the inferior, in relations of service, should exemplify human depravity, his curse and his overruling blessing.
The rule and the subordination which is essential to the existence of the family, God made commensurate with mankind; for mankind is only the congeries of families. ”

“ Men have been afraid to say all this for years, just as they have been timid to assert that God has placed master and slave in the same relation as husband and wife. Public sentiment, which you once had and have lost, suppressed this utterance as the other. But now, men speak out; and I, for one, will tell you what the Bible reveals as to that part of the Declaration of Independence, as fearlessly as I tell you what it says of the system of slavery. ”

“ And he tells you that the earth south of the Equator makes the inferior man. That the oceanic climate makes the inferior man in the Pacific Islands. That South America makes the inferior man. That the solid, unindented Southern Africa makes the inferior man. That the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent Asia makes the huge, heavy, massive, magnificent man. That Europe, indented by the sea on every side, with its varied scenery, and climate, and Northern influences, makes the varied intellect, the versatile power and life and action, of the master-man of the world. ”

“ He, thou seest, welcomes us to liberty and equality. We expect and desire to be members of Congress, Governors of States, to marry among the great, and one of us to be President. Giddings, and all abolitionists, tell us that these honors belong to us equally as to white people, and will be given under the Golden Rule." And the angel of the Lord says to them, "Ye slaves, return unto your masters, and submit yourselves under their hands. I sent your fathers, and I send you, into bondage. I mean it unto good, and I will bring it to pass to save much people alive." ”

“ Verily, sir, you, in the spirit of Korah, now proclaim and say, "Ye masters, and ye white men who are not masters, North and South, ye take too much upon you, seeing the negro is created your equal, and, by unalienable right, is as free as you, and entitled to all your political and social life. ”

“ In this connection, I wish to say, for the South to the North, and to the world, that we have no fears from our slave-population. There might be a momentary insurrection and bloodshed; but destruction to the black man would be inevitable. The Greeks and Romans controlled immense masses of white slaves,--many of them as intelligent as their lords. Schoolmasters, fabulists, and poets were slaves. Athens, with her thirty thousand freemen, governed half a million of bondmen. ”

“ And you know that in New England, in New York, and in the Northwest, many testify against us as a pro-slavery body. You lament that so many members of the church, ministers of the gospel, and editors of religious papers, defend the system; you lament that so large a part of the religious literature of the land, though having its seat North and sustained chiefly by Northern funds, shows a perpetual deference to the slave-holder; you lament that, after fifty years, nothing has been done to arrest slavery ”

“ Does God require him to send the negro back to his heathen home from whence he was stolen? That home no longer exists. But, if it did remain, does God command the master to send his Christianized slave into the horrors of his former African heathenism? No. God has placed the master under law entirely different from his command to the slave-trader. God said to the trader, Let the negro alone. But he says to the present master, Do unto the negro all the good you can; make him a civilized man; make him a Christian man ”

“ God has put it into the hearts of abolitionists to prevent half a million of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more the utter folly of emancipation in the United States. ”

“ For God has intrusted to them to train millions of the most degraded in form and intellect, but, at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and religious love, of all the races of mankind,--to train them, and to give them civilization, and the light and the life of the gospel of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Adam, in his right, from God, to rule over his wife and his children, had all the authority afterwards expanded in the patriarch and the king. This simple, beautiful fact, there, on the first leaf of the Bible, solves the problem, whence and how has man right to rule over man. In that great fact God gives his denial to the idea that government over man is the result of a social compact, in which each individual man living in a state of natural liberty, yielded some of that liberty to secure the greater good of government. ”

“ The relations in which such service obtains are very many. Some of them are these:--husband and wife; parent and child; teacher and scholar; commander and soldier,--sailor; master and apprentice; master and hireling; master and slave. Now, sir, all these relations are ordained of God. They are all directly commanded, or they are the irresistible law of his providence, in conditions which must come up in the progress of depraved nature. The relations themselves are all good in certain conditions. And there may be no more of evil in the lowest than in the highest. ”

“ God, in his providence, ordains the Russian form of government,--i.e. He places the sovereignty in one man, because He sees that such government can secure, for a time, more good to that degraded people than any other form. Now, I ask, Has the emperor right, from God, to change at once, in his mere "consent," the form of his government to that of the United States? No. God forbids him. Why? Because he would thereby destroy the good, and bring immense evil in his empire. ”

“ Sir, when you thus explain the Golden Rule, then your argument against slave-holding, so far as founded on this rule, is at once arrested; it is stopped short, in full career; it has to wait for reinforcement of FACT, which may never come up. For, suppose the FACT to be, that the relation of master and slave is one mode of the government ordained of God. ”

“ Government was ordained and established before the first child was born:--"HE SHALL RULE OVER THEE." Cain and Abel were born in a state as perfect as the empire of Britain or the rule of these United States. All that Blackstone, and Paley, and Hobbs, or anybody else, says about the social compact, is flatly and fully denied and upset by the Bible, history, and common sense. Let any New York lawyer--or even a Philadelphia lawyer--deny this if he dares. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness never were the inalienable right of the individual man. ”

“ Half a million emigrate to our shores, from Ireland, and all Europe, every year. And you gravely talk of difficulties in the negro's way to Africa! Verily, God will unfold their destiny as fast, and as fully, as he sees best for the highest good of the slave, the highest good of the master, and the glory of Christ in Africa.
And, sir, there are forty thousand Chinese in California. And in Cuba, this day, American gentlemen are cultivating sugar, with Chinese hired labor, more profitably than the Spaniards and their slaves. ”

“ This, sir, looks like a new view of the subject. The crime forbidden in the Bible was stealing and selling a man; i.e. seizing and forcibly carrying away, from country or State, a human being--man, woman, or child--contrary to law, and selling or holding the same. But the abolitionist gives us to understand this crime rests on the slave-holder in another sense:--namely, that he steals from the negro a metaphysical attribute,--his unalienable right to liberty! ”

“ Nay, I have made men unequal as the leaves of the trees, the sands of the sea, the stars of heaven. I have made them so, in harmony with the infinite variety and inequality in every thing in my creation. And I have made them unequal in my mercy. Had I made all men equal in attributes of body and mind, then unfallen man would never have realized the varied glories of his destiny. ”