Paederasty

“ Have I not annihilated the confederation itself, cut to pieces the assembled tribes—rescued the prisoners, razed to the ground the fortifications at the falls, and made prisoners of the brave remnant of those misguided nations who erected it? If this be treason, then indeed am I a traitor!
"Why is it that this great and glorious country, opened to the oppressed and crowded nations of the old world by a kind and beneficent Providence, must so often become the theatre of struggles for personal aggrandizement and power? ”

“ The wilful, treacherous defects in the former constitution have been brought to light; the continual alarm of treason and conspiracy aroused the nation, and produced eventually a second revolution. The people have beat down royalty, never, never to rise again; they have brought Louis Capet to the bar, and demonstrated in the face of the whole world, the intrigues, the cabals, the falsehood, corruption, and rooted depravity, the inevitable effects of monarchical government. ”

“ But they found in the peasant a sleepless suspicion, a silent energy and cunning, which thwarted all their efforts, and which, if they persisted, would often turn to violence, maintaining the rights of the people by the horrors of a Jacquerie. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed more than one peasants’ revolt. And if some plot of the reactionaries should one day place again upon the throne of France a son of the House of Orleans, or a Bonaparte Pretender, be sure the croquants of the South, the Jacques of the North, would defend their liberties again as violently to-morrow. ”

“ A great iniquity was perpetrated, far worse in its nature than a common trick of wire-pulling. Colored agitators were sent all over the State, from town to town, from settlement to settlement, to enlist the newly enfranchised colored people in the crusade against the enfranchising amendment and the support of the candidates representing that hostility, and all the artifices of demagogism, every possible appeal to passion, prejudice and fear, were freely employed. ”

“ Such an aggression is more than sufficient to justify, among an outraged people, the recourse to any and all the means to preserve the last one of the insulted privileges, the right to have our complaints be heard. But thanks to the blindness of our aggressors, the wickedness of this measure will find by the care of the providence its antidote in its very folly. The regiments that one proposes to distribute among us are composed of men who come out and were educated in the middle of their country's democracy. ”

“ It was recommended in the first centuries of our era by the abject misery in which men and women lived. The cities and provinces burdened with debt; the nobles suspected at court, and tracked by informers; the peasantry mostly slaves at the mercy of their lord and of every government official; barbarians rushing in to destroy, or pestilence ravaging; it seemed as if the very perfection of mechanism in the central government made it all the more an inexorable fatality, crushing out hope and self-respect. ”

“ The government, therefore, though in form a republic, was in truth a despotism, moderated only by the wisdom, the sobriety, and the magnanimity of the despot. The country was divided into military districts. Those districts were placed under the command of Major Generals. Every insurrectionary movement was promptly put down and punished. The fear inspired by the power of the sword, in so strong, steady, and expert a hand, quelled the spirit both of Cavaliers and Levellers. ”

“ But when a Mob of Chairmen or Servants, or a Gang of Thieves and Sharpers, are almost too big for the Civil Authority to suppress, what must be the Case in a seditious Tumult, or general Riot of the People? ”

“ U.S. GRANT.
PROCLAMATION TO THE CITIZENS OF PADUCAH!
I have come among you, not as an enemy, but as your friend and fellow-citizen, not to injure or annoy you, but to respect the rights, and to defend and enforce the rights of all loyal citizens. An enemy, in rebellion against our common Government, has taken possession of, and planted its guns upon the soil of Kentucky and fired upon our flag. Hickman and Columbus are in his hands. He is moving upon your city. ”

“ Three times a day these peasant warriors knelt at their prayers, in the churches if they were near them, if not, in the open field, and seldom have ever been equaled the piety, the humility, the self-devotion alike of chiefs and of followers. The frightful cruelties committed by the enemy were returned by mercy; though such of them as fell into the hands of the Republicans were shot without pity, yet their prisoners were instantly set at liberty after being made to promise not to serve against them again, and having their hair shaved off in order that they might be recognized. ”

“ The feudal system had rim to seed in unbridled license, and in every species of infuriating wrong. Ignorant and outraged, the people, once broke loose, placed no limits to their cruelties and revenge. They despised the nobles, who, while they had oppressed there, had, in base cowardice, deserted their sovereign at Poietiers. Formerly crushed down into slaves, they were now terrible masters. They burnt and laid waste the country everywhere, plundered the villages, and cut off the supplies of the terrified towns. ”

“ Such an institution could only prevail at a time when ordinary means of justice were excluded by the hand of power, and when, in order to bring the guilty to punishment, it required all the influence and authority of such a confederacy. In no other country than one exposed to every species of feudal tyranny, and deprived of every ordinary mode of obtaining justice or redress, could such a system have taken root and flourished. ”

“ To this point tend the words of President Pierce addressed to the soldiers of 1812 on the 8th of January 1855, in which he speaks of such as "disseminate political heresies," that is, the Idea of Freedom; "revile the government,"—expose its hostility against the unalienable Rights of man; "deride our institutions,"—to wit, the patriarchal institution of Slavery; "sow political dissensions,"—advise men not to vote for corrupt tools of the government; "set at defiance the laws of the land,"—meaning the fugitive slave bill which commands kidnapping. ”

“ I am not placing such an insult upon you, my daughter ... but after all, the rebellion of that female vassal is as novel as it is monstrous. Oh, the spirit of revolt among the populace, although partly broken to-day, has spread into our domains and has infested our peasants also; and that is taken by the crown for a pretext to add to our troubles by encroaching upon our rights, claiming that they must be first sanctioned by the jurists. ”

“ Possibly, here and there an extremist might be found to object, that, thus openly to set up, as he did, his own prejudices and those of his family, in the place of law, justice and humanity, as his rule of official conduct, to the manifest injury of twenty-seven thousands of innocent people, was a most shameless abuse of power and perversion of authority. ”

“ It is the dregs of the population habilitated in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them the rule of ignorance and corruption.... It is barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force. It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet. And, though it is done without malice and without vengeance, it is nevertheless none the less completely and absolutely done.... We will enter the House of Representatives. ”

“ Wherever men and women lived, there they embodied a living submission to slaveholders. Resistance, or insurrection against them, in any relation, in thought, feeling, word or deed, was counted a felony against the peace of society, against the Union, and its sovereign power. ”

“ Without the repeal of a single statute favourable to the peasants, it became a fundamental principle of the constitution, that 'Henceforth no temporal court in existence can grant the peasant redress against his lord, though property, honour, or life be at stake.' The peasant was thus handed over to an arbitrary power, which had no limit, except that which the excess of an evil imposes on the evil itself. ”

“ Not more strongly did the tide of public opinion run against the old monarchy and aristocracy, at the time of the taking of the Bastile, than it now ran against the tyranny of the Mountain. From every dungeon the prisoners came forth, as they had gone in, by hundreds. The decree which forbade the soldiers of the republic to give quarter to the English was repealed by an unanimous vote, amidst loud acclamations; nor, passed as it was, disobeyed as it was, and rescinded as it was, can it be with justice considered as a blemish on the fame of the French nation. The Jacobin Club was refractory. ”

“ The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the head of an insurrection. The absence of the masters, the apathy of the provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents, the corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies, indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion, misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all proceeds from the same cause and terminates in the same effect. ”

“ The government of your chief city has been usurped by armed strangers; your Legislature has been dissolved by the unlawful arrest of its members; freedom of the press and of speech has been suppressed; words have been declared offenses by an arbitrary decree of the Federal Executive; and citizens ordered to be tried by military commissions for what they may dare to speak. ”

“ Surely if the United States Government does not confiscate the property of those who are called rebels, the M. E. Church, in her highest legislative assembly, will hardly set a precedent by claiming the property of their Southern brethren.
“But it may, perhaps, be said that we have been sinners, rebels, traitors, touching our civil and political relations to the Government. ”

“ The sons of these men, eighty years later, showed at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, that when Law and Peace become but grotesque masks, under which are hidden the faces of legalized injustice and tyranny, then the time has come for armed revolt and organized resistance. ”

“ The fact is, it is vain to attempt, AS THE CONSTITUTION IS NOW, to keep the question of slavery out of the halls of Congress,—until, by some decisive action, WE COMPEL SILENCE, or alter the constitution, agitation and insult is our eternal fate in the confederacy. ”

“ You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. ”

“ But, dangerous as the great peasant insurrection appeared for many weeks, and manifold as were the characters and passions which blazed forth in it, the peasants themselves were little more than an undulating mass; the greater part of their demagogues and leaders belonged to another class; on the whole, it appears to us that the intelligence and capacity of the leaders, whether peasants or others, was but small, and equally small the warlike capacity of the masses. ”

“ Throughout the struggle we shall find the forces well defined—aristocracy against democracy, and sometimes we shall see it illustrated with theatrical exaggeration, as when the Philadelphia aristocrats of the army that marched against the Whiskey Boys, on prancing horses and in broadcloth uniforms, paraded their ragged, weather-beaten prisoners of the frontier through the fashionable streets for the delectation of the ladies at the windows. ”

“ Like the fierce old barons, at the head of their vassals, they are ever ready to resist and nullify the central power of the State, whenever it interferes with their individual interests, or even approaches the strong holds of their prejudices. All history shows, that men possessing hereditary, despotic power, cannot easily be brought to acknowledge a superior, either in the administrators of the laws, or in the law itself. ”

“ The future historian will record, that the present rebellion, notwithstanding its protracted origin, the multitudes it enlisted, and its extensive sweep, was at last precipitated by fewer than twenty men,—Mr. Everett says by as few as eight or ten. [226] It is certain that thus far it has been the triumph of a minority,—but of a minority moved, inspired, combined, and aggrandized by Slavery.
And now this traitorous minority, putting aside the sneaking, slimy devices of conspiracy, steps forth in full panoply of war. ”

“ A series of unprovoked and unparalleled outrages have been inflicted upon the peace and dignity of this Commonwealth and upon the rights and liberties of its people, by wicked and unprincipled men, professing to act under the authority of the Government of the United States; solemn enactments of your Legislature have been nullified; your volunteer soldiers have been taken prisoners; your commerce with your sister States has been suspended; your trade with your own fellow-citizens has been and is subjected to the harassing control of an armed soldiery ”