George Spring Merriam

“ Stowe, Lincoln, Armstrong, Booker Washington—do we not all claim a share in them? Just as all Englishmen feel themselves heirs alike of the Puritan Hampden and the Royalist Falkland, so we Americans all pay our love and reverence to the heroes of our war,—Grant and Lee, Jackson and Sheridan, Johnston and Thomas, and all their peers.
And we are one by the common tasks that confront us. This problem of the races,—it is a challenge to do our best. "Impossible? What are we put into the world for, but to do the impossible in the strength of God?" ”

“ At Tuskegee the black man is doing for himself what at Hampton the white man is doing for him. Booker Washington is the pupil and successor of Armstrong, but he has his own distinct individuality, his own word and work. His constant precept and practice has been that the black man should make himself so serviceable and valuable to the community that every door will open as fast as he is fit to enter it. It is the gospel of wisdom and of peace. Toward all the opportunities denied to the race, its attitude is one of patience but of untiring persistence. ”

“ In those whose hearts were in the strife, at home or in the field, there was a great glow and elation. The intensity of the time communicated itself to industry and trade. There was an almost feverish activity; with heavy taxation and a fluctuating currency—gold was long at a premium of 250—mills and markets and stores were in full tide of operation. The North matched the South in personal courage and generalship; and greatly outweighed it in numbers, material, and in the productivity engendered in a free, urban, industrial society. The passion of the war touched everything. ”

“ Two master passions strove for leadership in the mind and heart of America. One was love of the united nation and ardor to maintain its union. The other was the aspiration to purify the nation, by removing the wrong of slavery. Unionist and Abolitionist stood face to face. After many years they were to stand shoulder to shoulder, in a common cause. In a larger sense than he gave the words, Webster's utterance became the final watchword: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."
In the retrospect of history, our attention naturally fastens on the conspicuous and heroic figures. ”

“ The advantage of the Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in variety, intensity, and productiveness [Pg 70] of social life; in immigration; in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped the slave States by leaps and bounds. And, again, in the conscience of humanity,—in mankind's sense of right and wrong, which grows ever a more potent factor in the world's affairs,—the tide was setting steadily and swiftly against slavery. ”

“ But the North inclined strongly to the ways of peace. That is the natural temper of an industrial democracy. It is the note of a civilization advanced beyond slavery and feudalism. And of the moral leaders of the North, some of the foremost had been strong champions of peace. Channing had pleaded for it as eloquently as he pleaded for freedom. Intemperance, slavery, and war had been the trinity of evil assailed by earnest reformers. Sumner had gone to the length of proclaiming the most unjust peace better than the justest war,—an extreme from which he was destined to be converted. ”

“ You deny our right to carry a part of our property,—our unquestioned property under the Constitution,—into the territories which belong equally to the whole nation, and which have been acquired by our treasure and our blood not less than by yours. You prevent slave-holders from participating in the colonization of this domain, and thus determine in advance that its future States shall exclude our institutions. You thus unfairly build up a political preponderance, which you use for the discouragement and injury of our industrial system. ”

“ On one side it was urged that slavery was a wrong and an evil, and that Congress had full power to exclude it from a State as a condition of admittance to the Union. On the other side slavery was defended not only as an industrial advantage, but as morally right and a benefit to both blacks and whites. It was strenuously declared that the people of each incoming State had a right to determine their own institutions; and it was also urged that to keep the balance of power between the two sections, it was necessary that slave States should be admitted equally with free. ”

“ Slavery was a crime, a sin, an abomination,—that to him was the first, the last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the process of evolution by which humanity slowly grows from one stage into another ”

“ The more deeply we study human life, the more do we realize that as to individual responsibility "to understand is to forgive." Half a century after the event, we may well have forgiveness—not of charity, but of justice—for John Brown, and for the Governor who signed his death-warrant; we can sympathize with those who honored and wept for him, and with those who shuddered at his deed. But, for the truth of history and for the guidance of the future, we must consider not only the intentions of men, but the intrinsic character of their deeds; not only John Brown himself, but John Brown's acts. ”

“ New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, all went against the administration. Its majority in Congress was greatly reduced.
But the emancipation proclamation had struck deep to the hidden springs of power. For the exigencies of a prolonged and desperate struggle, it had evoked the full power of a great sentiment. It had roused the passion of freedom which nerves men to suffer and die. It was an unselfish passion,—it was for the freedom of other men that the North now fought. ”

“ The South should be restored at the earliest possible moment to a share in the general government. Idle to ask them to repent of secession; enough if they recognize that it is forever disallowed. The best guarantee for the future is the utter destruction of slavery. Let there be no further humbling: "I think it to be the great need of this nation to save the self-respect of the South." What then are the necessary conditions of reconstruction? ”

“ The resulting Federal Union was a combination of strength and freedom such as the world had never seen. With this for its organic form, with its spiritual lineage drawn from the Puritan, the Quaker and the Cavalier, with Anglo-Saxon stock for its core, yet with open doors and assimilating power for all races, and with a continent for its field of expansion,—the American people became the leader and the hope of humanity. ”

“ The South had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the idea that labor is a curse and is to be shirked on to somebody else. Overthrow and impoverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one, and slowly it was revealed as a blessing.
When General Lee, stately in figure and bearing and splendid in dress, met in surrender the sturdy Grant, in worn and homely service uniform, it was emblematic of the yielding of the aristocratic order to the industrial democracy. ”

“ The growth of a slave, or a slave's child, into a free man or woman,—the birth and development of true family life,—could we see this in its millions of instances, or even distinctly in one typical instance, with all its phases of struggle, mistake, disappointment, success, the growth of character, the blossoming of manhood and womanhood,—it would be a more moving spectacle than any that Shakespeare has given. ”

“ In the early stages, slavery had on its side the advantage of an established place under the law, the support of its local communities becoming more and more determined, the long-time indifference and inertia of the free States, custom, conservatism, timidity, race prejudice. But against all this were operating steadily two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as much as the freeman is superior to the slave. ”

“ It is felt that the old-time book-education, and even its modern revision—all as yet come vastly short of rightly fitting the child for manhood or womanhood. We have advanced, but we have still far to go. To rightly educate "the hand, head and heart," (the watchword of Tuskegee) —to develop strong, symmetrical character and intelligence, the sound mind in the sound body,—to train the bread-winner and the citizen, as well as to open the gates of intellectual freedom and spiritual power,—this is what we have not quite learned. ”

“ Whatever the case required,—of preparation, compensation, new industrial arrangement,—the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands, to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few for instant and unconditional emancipation, there never was a day when the vast mass of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only they kept it at home. ”

“ This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country, fellow-countrymen, our own dear and native land, is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. ”

“ Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the storm came and the wind blew. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the white race—is his natural and normal condition. ”

“ The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions. Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in words that the common man could understand. ”

“ The North in turn looked with something like suspicion, if not scorn, on a Christianity which used the Bible as an arsenal to fortify slavery. The Northern brood of reforms and isms,—wise, unwise, or fantastic,—moved the South to a hostility which made little discrimination between the idealism of Emerson, the iconoclasm of Parker, and the vagaries of "free love." The group of literary lights,—Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and their compeers,—won Southern dislike by their hostility to slavery. ”

“ It was their labor that made it possible for the whole white population to take the field. It was their fidelity and kindliness that kept the social structure sound, even though pierced and plowed by the sword. Their conduct was a practical refutation of the belief that they were in general sufferers from inhuman treatment. It was a proof that slavery had included better influences than its opponents had recognized. But it suggested, too, that a people capable of such things under slavery were fully ready for an upward step, and might be trusted with freedom. ”

“ For the education of the people's children, everywhere the most pressing of common concerns, and the most perplexing in the transition from old to new ideas and methods—bears with especial weight and importunity upon the South. Its thinly-spread population, its still limited resources of finance, the presence of the two races with their separate and common needs,—all set a gigantic task to the South, and one that calls for sympathy and aid from the nation at large. ”