Dissident

“ Wherefore the citizen must so prepare himself as to be always armed against those things which trouble the constitution of a state. And that dissension of the citizens, when one party separates from and attacks another, is called sedition. And in truth in civil dissensions, as the good are of more importance than the many, I think that we should regard the weight of the citizens, and not their number. ”

“ Whether in the field or the council—whether at home, a freeman among the mountains of Vermont, or loaded with the manacles of despotism, in a foreign country, his spirit never quailed beneath the sneer of the tory, or the harsh threats of insolent authority. A stranger to fear, his opinions were ever given without disguise or hesitation: and, an enemy to oppression, he sought every opportunity to redress the wrongs of the oppressed. ”

“ Under the severe pressure of despotism the people rise in their fury, and snap their chains asunder. A republic follows; degenerating first into a rude and wild democracy; and thence into a cruel and more turbulent anarchy. ”

“ Let them deliver up to the fury of an infatuated people the man who, for these twenty years, has been the adversary of oppression; who talked to the French of liberty, of Constitution, of resistance, when his base calumniators were at nurse in the court of despotism and suckled with the milk of overbearing prejudices. ”

“ Citizens, name within the hour a pitiless dictator, who, with the same blow, will sever the heads of the ministers, of their subalterns, of Lafayette, of all the scoundrels of his staff, of all the counter-revolutionists, of all the traitors in the National Assembly. ”

“ When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. ”

“ The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which, in different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. ”

“ Remember this, that the bloody, and treasonable, and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a Government. * * * When men accept despotism, they may have a choice as to who the despot shall be! ”

“ It gives me a serious concern to see such a spirit of dissension in the country; not only as it destroys virtue and common sense, and renders us in a manner barbarians towards one another, but as it perpetuates our animosities, widens our breaches, and transmits our present passions and prejudices to our posterity. ”

“ While but a few years ago a man who refused to obey the behests of his party was not only ostracized as a traitor, but laughed at as a fool uselessly sacrificing himself in a windmill fight, we behold to-day all over the country countless thousands asserting their independence from party dictation, doing their own thinking for themselves, and following only their convictions of duty. ”

“ Such is the eternal doom of disordered states. The mediator between rank and rank,—the kindly noble—the dispassionate patriot—the first to act—the most hailed in action—darkly vanishes from the scene. Fiercer and more unscrupulous spirits alone stalk the field; and no neutral and harmonizing link remains between hate and hate,—until exhaustion, sick with horrors, succeeds to frenzy, and despotism is welcomed as repose!
Chapter 5.IV. The Hollowness of the Base.
The rapid and busy march of state events has led us long away from the sister of the Tribune and the betrothed of Adrian. ”

“ It should be remembered that the severity shown to the Dissenters at the Restoration119 came largely from their close association with the civil war and the government of the Commonwealth. The cloak of religion had been made to cover the overthrow of the liberties of Parliament, the killing of the king, and the rule of Cromwell; and it is not unnatural, though most regrettable, that the victorious cavaliers should have failed to make the proper distinction between dissent and rebellion. ”

“ But since we cannot in our hearts find one single spot of rebellion or treason, or that we have in any manner aimed at subverting the settled government or attempting of the person of any either magistrate or private man, notwithstanding the several reproaches and threats of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us and censured our innocent and honest designs, and since all people in all places where we have yet been can attest our civil, quiet, peaceable behaviour, far different from that of rebellion [rebellious?] ”

“ Our revolution is justified by this fact alone. You ask me to do the thing that caused us to revolt. To brush aside the laws which our people have ordained and set up a Dictatorship with the power of life and death over every man, woman and child. For three years we have poured out our blood in a sacred cause. We are fighting for our liberties under law, or we are traitors, not revolutionists. We are fighting for order, justice, principles, or we are fighting for nothing—"
A courier dashed to the door of the tent and handed Lee a message which he read with a frown. ”

“ Of course every dissenting movement has been hampered and prejudiced, and its ideals muddied by the adhesion to it of temperamental rebels, and the type of crank which gathers around any standard of revolt, just as the opposition to dissent has been degraded by its readiness to accept the help of “lewd fellows of the baser sort.” ”

“ If such are the men with whom bitter quarrels are waged, and upon whom unstinted contumely and contempt are poured out, shall we not all, upon every side, pause and reflect that to blow mere party fires to fury, and to trample personal character in the mire of angry political dispute, is to disgrace ourselves and the cause that we would serve, and the country whose good name depends upon us? ”

“ It should seem, to my way of conceiving such matters, that there is a very wide difference in reason and policy between the mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of bands of men, who disturb order within the State, and the civil dissensions which may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities which compose a great empire. ”

“ The favourite Subject of its Clamours will be the Misconduct of Those who govern. And in a Country where Liberty is justly ranked among the greatest national Blessings, the most plausible Pretence of Faction will be, "to load the executive Power with the Charge of Despotism." ”

“ In order that I may give different things different names, I call him who usurps the royal authority a tyrant, and him who usurps the sovereign power a despot. The tyrant is he who thrusts himself in contrary to the laws to govern in accordance with the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above the laws themselves. ”

“ When any officer or general—or indeed any person in this disturbed country—thinks he has induced a faction of the people to act under him in opposition to the existing government, he issues a declaration of dissent and grievances addressed to his followers and to the country at large ”

“ I will now read my own demands, acting under my own convictions, and the universal judgment of my countrymen. They are considered the demands of an extremist. To hold to a constitutional right now makes one considered as an extremist—I believe that is the appellation these traitors and villains, North and South, employ. I accept their reproach rather than their principles. Accepting their designation of treason and rebellion, there stands before them as good a traitor, and as good a rebel as ever descended from revolutionary loins. ”

“ The government feared a popular insurrection from an excitement so sudden, and a persecution so dreadful, and therefore issued express prohibition to all the ecclesiastical authorities to prevent any allusion to the event from the pulpit. All classes were required to maintain absolute silence, and any controversy, or criticism, or remark was regarded as high treason. Such is despotism. Such is religious persecution, when fear, as well as hatred, prompts to injustice and cruelty. ”

“ This century, which has seen all the sovereigns leading revolutionary movements, is the strangest of all. We despots, who forced enlightenment and freedom on the peoples—we were the demagogues and they rewarded us with ingratitude. ”

“ A man’s state, in fact, under the operation of these majority doctrines to which I have adverted, holds hostages for his fidelity to the majority, not only in such land or fortune as he may possess within her bounds, but in his family, his relatives and kin, and if the state revolts, the officer who remains faithful to the flag of the United States is considered by the authorities of the revolting state a traitor, and, what is worse, he is treated in the persons of those he leaves behind him as the worst kind of political renegade. ”

“ If, however, the times were disturbed, if the parties were divided by acute discord and men’s minds inflamed by the memories of a terrible civil war, the sense of justice was, nevertheless, not yet so much blunted by party passions as to allow the dominant party to abuse their own power beyond a certain point. ”

“ Every one fears that his confederate may prove a traitor, and if [Pg 243] one is heard openly cursing the Government as oppressive and intolerable in a café or other public resort, though the sentiment is heartily responded to, the utterer is suspected and avoided as a Police stool-pigeon and spy. ”

“ When his high political courage, in consenting to a bill very obnoxious to the opposition, forced them into violence, he kept his temper and his head, and the opposition leaders learned, not from punishment, but from quiet contempt, to express dissent in modes other than those of arson and sticks and stones. ”

“ And this in general ought to be known, that whosoever has been the occasion of a state being powerful, whether private persons, or magistrates, a certain tribe, or any particular part of the citizens, or the multitude, be they who they will, will be the cause of disputes in the state. For either some persons, who envy them the honours they have acquired, will begin to be seditious, or they, on account of the dignity they have acquired, will not be content with their former equality. ”

“ Those who in theory were the national party, and who sheltered themselves under the institutions of the country against the oligarchy, had, both by a misconception and a neglect of their duties, become, and justly become, odious ”

“ Well aware that any attempt to remove or soften the inveterate prejudices of these men would be met, if not by open hostility and insult, most surely by secret treachery, he resolved to throw himself into the arms of the popular faction, whose principles he detested in his heart, and to rivet their favour by casting into the scale of their idol the weight of his own influence with the middle classes, his proper and peculiar party. ”

“ Will the oppressor let go the oppressed? Was there ever an instance? Can the annals of mankind exhibit one single example where rulers overcharged with power willingly let go the oppressed, though solicited and requested most earnestly? ”

“ In my opinion, Sir, a magistrate, whenever he goes to put any restraint upon religious freedom, can only do it upon this ground,—that the person dissenting does not dissent from the scruples of ill-informed conscience, but from a party ground of dissension, in order to raise a faction in the state. ”

“ In the years 1831 and 1832 it had become an inquiry, a subject of disquisition in my State, and the late Judge Gaston, in an address delivered in 1832 before the Literary Societies of the University, thus treats of the subject:
"Threats of resistance, secession, separation, have become common as household words in the wicked and silly violence of public declaimers. The public ear is familiarized with, and the public mind will soon become accustomed to, the detestable suggestion of disunion. ”

“ On one side is the standard of Government, the States and Law, which denounces the rebel, and especially the Nationalist rebel, as the worst of sinners; on the other side we have the standard of the individual, the soul and liberty, which loves a rebel, especially a Nationalist rebel, and denies that he is a sinner at all. ”

“ It is perfectly obvious, likewise, that when, in those days, men spoke thus of a dictatorship, and of dictatorial power, they attached no suggestion of political guilt either to the persons who bestowed such power, or to the persons who severally accepted it,—the tacit understanding being that, in every instance, the public danger required and justified some grant of extraordinary power ”

“ From war results that other great evil, seen in the administration of the internal concerns of each country; the government being of necessity entrusted, [Pg 85] for the defence of the people, with the power of the sword, the people are governed by the sword of power. Hostile prejudices, the strife of interests ill understood, false judgments, and the jargon of languages mutually unintelligible, fears, suspicions, and precautions perpetuate the evil of disunion when the work of havoc and desolation is suspended. ”

“ All violent oppressors, all those that valued themselves as leaders of parties, saw, with an indignation which they durst not suffer to appear, that they were now at last dwindled into absolute insignificance. ”

“ We can well understand and appreciate how, in a country ruled by a despot, whose heel of oppression and tyranny is ever on the necks of the down-trodden people, the masses, desiring some measure of free action and equality, would revolt against these conditions, and seek a reorganization of society. ”