Henry Ward Beecher

“ Northern ideas must become American, or Southern ideas must become American, before there will be peace. If the North gives to the Nation her radical principles of human rights and democratic Governments, there will be the peace of an immeasurable prosperity. If the South shall give to the country a policy derived from her heathen notions of men, there will be such a peace as men have overdrugged with opium, that deep lethargy just before the mortal convulsions and death! ”

“ There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.
Men may there talk of a thousand things—of all religious doctrines, of literature, of art, of public political measures—but no man has liberty to talk as he pleases about the structure of southern society, and apply to the real facts of southern life and southern internal questions that searching investigation and public exposure which, in the North, brings every possible question to the bar of public opinion, and makes society boil like a pot! ”

“ There will be inequality enough as soon as men get into life. Some shoot ahead; some, like dull sailors in a fleet, are dropped behind, and men are scattered all along the ocean. But the Common School gathers up their children and brings them all back again to take a new start together. Thus our schools are not mere whetstones to the intellect; they are institutions for evening up society; they resist the tendency to separation into classes, which grows with the prosperity of a community; they bind together, in cordial sympathy, all classes of citizens. ”

“ And then, when a truth, a policy, or a procedure comes to birth, from out of the womb of such discussion, we know that it will stand. And when our whole public interests are rounded out and built up, we are glad to see men going around and about, marking well our towers, and counting our bulwarks. May it do them good to see such architecture and engineering! And it is just this difference that distinguishes the North and the South. We have institutions that will stand public and private discussion—they have not. ”

“ The North believe that personal and political liberty are not only rights of man, but their necessity, that man cannot thrive nor develop, with the true proportions of manhood, without liberty. It is the northern sentiment that a man must be prepared for liberty, and that the act of birth is that preparation; that no creature lives which is the better for oppression, and who will not be the better for freedom, which is the natural air appointed for the soul's breathing. ”

“ In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions. Then comes the township, which presents the only spectacle of an absolute political democracy. For, here only, do citizens assemble in mass and vote, directly and not by representation. Next comes Society at large, or the mass of citizens grouped into States. And in Society, in the North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous forces. ”

“ In the North, men are educated to be something—in the South to seem something. The North tends to doing—the South to appearing. And both tendencies spring from the root of opposite theories of men and notions of society.
And it is this innate, hereditary indisposition to work that, after all, is the greatest obstacle to emancipation. Laziness in the South and money in the North, are the bulwarks of Slavery! To take away a planter's slaves is to cut off his hands. There is where he keeps his work. ”

“ A net spread for those guilty of such wrongs against man, would catch States, and Legislatures, Citizens, Courts, and Constitutions.
In the North the most useless pauper that burdens the Alms-House—the most uncombed foreigner that delves in a ditch—the most abject creature that begs a morsel from door to door, is yet a man; and there is, not in theory only, but in the public sentiment, a sacredness of rights, which no man, except by stealth, can violate with impunity. There is no other law for the Governor of New-York or of Massachusetts, than for the beggar in your streets. ”

“ But in the South the law refuses to look at any degree of cruelty in chastisements upon the universal laborer, short of maiming or death, and public sentiment is but little better than the law.
The laborer in the North answers to a tribunal; in the South, to a master, incensed, passionate, vindictive in justice executed upon all symptoms of resisting manhood!
In the North, nothing is more sacred than a man's family and his children. It would not be possible for a man to do public violence to a family circle without vindictive penalty. ”

“ I do not believe that there is a doctrine of individual rights nor of civil liberty that can stand outside of Christianity. They are to be seen revealed in nature, but there is none to interrupt them with authority. Christ is the World's Emancipator, for he hath declared that men belong to Him; and an oppressor thus becomes a felon, a robber, and a wronger of God, in the person of every poor and wretched victim!
A Christianity that tells man what his origin is—of God; his destiny, to God again ”

“ We preach it to arouse the whole soul; we preach it to fire the intellect, and give it wings [pg 13] by which to compass knowledge; we preach it to touch every feeling with refinement, to soften rudeness and enrich affections; we build the family with it; we sanctify love, and purge out lust; we polish every relation of life; we inspire a cheerful industry and whet the edge of enterprise, and then limit them by the bonds of justice and by the moderation of a faith which looks into the future and the eternal. We teach each man that he is a child of God ”

“ These two radical theories of man—man, a physical creature to be judged by effects produced in Time; or man, a spiritual creature, to be judged by the development to which he is destined, are at the root of all the antagonisms between the spirit of northern and southern institutions: northern policy and southern policy. In the North, it is the public sentiment of the people, that all men are born free and equal; that every man has an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, forfeited only by crime. ”

“ They hold that liberty is an attribute of power; that it is a blossom which belongs to races, and not to mankind; that a part were born to rule, and a part were ordained to serve; that liberty is dangerous to the many; that servitude, the most rigorous, is a blessing; that it accords with the creative intent of God, and with his revealed institutions; that a nation cannot be homogeneous, and should not aim at it; that there is a law and scale of gradation, on which the top is privilege and authority, the bottom labor and obedience. ”

“ But such is the public opinion in favor of personal independence springing from industry, that a native-born American citizen had rather die than go to an Alms-House. Foreigners are our staple paupers. Our charity feeds the poor wretches whom foreign slavery has crippled and cast upon us. But the whole South is a vast work-house for the slave while young, and a vast alms-house for him when old, and neither young or old, is he permitted to feel the responsibility for labor. ”

“ It is the only basis on which the poor, the ignorant, the weak, the laboring masses can entrench against oppression.
What, then, is that theory of man which Christianity gives forth?
It regards man not as a perfect thing, put into life to blossom and die, as a perfect flower doth. Man is a seed, and birth is planting. He is in life for cultivation, not exhibition; he is here chiefly to be acted on, not to be characteristically an agent. For, though man is also an actor, he is yet more a recipient. Though he produces effects, he receives a thousand fold more than he produces. ”

“ It has been honorable because our people have been taught that each man is set to make the most of himself. The crown for every victory gained in a struggle of skill or industry over matter is placed upon the soul; and thus among a free people industry becomes education.
It is the peculiarity of Northern labor, that it thinks. It is intelligence working out through the hands. There is more real thought in a Yankee's hand than in a Southerner's head. This is not true of a class, or of single individuals, or of single States. It pervades the air. It is Northern public sentiment. ”

“ Who shall trifle with such a creature, full bound upon such an errand through life, and swelling forth to such a destiny? Clear the place where he stands?—give him room and help, but no hinderance, as he equips for eternity!—loosen the bonds of man, for God girds him!—take off all impediments, for it is his life and death and struggle for immortality! ”

“ Not only is there this contrast in dignity of work, but even more—in rights of industry. Work, in the North, has responsibilities that are prodigious educators. We ordain that a man shall have the fullest chance, and then he shall have the results of his activity. He shall take all he can make, or he shall take the whole result of indolence. It is a double education. It inspires labor by hope of fruition, and intensifies it by the fear of non-fruition. The South have their whole body of laborers at work without either responsibility. ”

“ When credulous ministers assure us that slaves have the means of grace, do they mean that they have such teaching as we have? Or that there is any such ideal in preaching? The power of religion with us is employed to set men on their feet; to make them fertile, self-sustaining, noble, virtuous, strong, and to build up society of men, each one of whom is large, strong, capacious of room, and filled with versatile powers. ”

“ Whatever may have been the evils, the agitation has only come through men, not from them. It is of God. It is the underheaving of Providence. Mariners might as well blame you for the swing and toss of their craft when tides troop in or march out of your harbor, as us, for heaving to that tide which God swells under us. Tides in the ocean and in human affairs are from celestial bodies and celestial beings. The conflict which is going on springs from causes as deep as the foundations of our institutions. ”

“ Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men. They carry it so far that the theory of Slave law regards the slave not as an inferior man, governed, for his own good as well as for the benefit of the society at large, but it pronounces him, in reiterated forms, not a man at all, but a chattel. ”

“ In the South it is a part of the civil rights of men to do these things whenever they please. And though public sentiment is better than law, yet as no public sentiment on earth is a match for legalized lust, or avarice, or the grip of misfortune, these things are continually done, and remorselessly. Cruelty, chastity, virtue, do not mean the same things in the South as in the North. A man is not blemished by deeds and indulgencies, upon a plantation, among slaves, which in the North, would strike him through with infamy and house him in the penitentiary. ”

“ But with all this industry, you shall find nowhere on earth so little drudging work as in the North. It is not the servitude of the hands to material nature. It is the glorious exercise of mind upon nature. They vex nature with incessant importunities. They are always prying, and thinking, and trying.
In California, gold is found in quartz formations. But in New England, and the free inventive North, in the geology of industry, gold is found everywhere—in rye straw and bonnets, in leather and stone, in wool, felts and cloths ”

“ It is this apparent care for the helplessness of slaves, that has won the favor of many northern men, and of some who ought to have known better the effect of taking off from men the responsibility of labor, in both ways, its fruition and its penalty. Once declare in New York that Government would take care of poverty and old age, so as to make it honorable, and it would be a premium upon improvidence. With us, it is expected that every man will work, will earn, will lay up, will deliver his family from public charity. ”

“ Do not think that all the danger lies in that bolted cloud which flashes in the Southern horizon. There is decay, and change, here in the North. Old New-England, that suckled American liberty, is now suckling wolves to devour it. ”

“ Authority would go with productive greatness, as gravity goes with mass in matter. The whole chance of Right, and the whole theory of Liberty, springs from that part of man that lies beyond this life. ”

“ By all the love that I bear to the cause of God, and the glory of his Church, by the yearnings which I have for the welfare of the human kind, by all the prophetic expectations which I have of the destiny of this land, God's Almoner of Liberty to the World, I desire to see Old Representative New-England, and the affiliated North, rouse up and do their first works. ”

“ The South has no common people. There can be States, there, but never Commonwealths. There is no common ground, where the theory of society grades men upon a perpendicular scale. It is a society of classes, and a society of classes can never be a community. When the whole labor of a State is performed by a degraded class, that are not included in the State as citizens or social beings, it is impossible but that the class next above them should feel the force of those theories and ideas which have produced such a state of things. ”