Slave revolt

“ Not we, for we have introduced no question of territorial slavery into congress — not we, who are denounced as agitators and factionists. No, sir: the quietists and the finalists have become agitators; they who told us that all agitation was quieted, and that the resolutions of the political conventions put a final period to the discussion of slavery. This will not escape the observation of the country. It is slavery that renews the strife. It is slavery that again wants room. It is slavery with its insatiate demand for more slave territory and more slave states. ”

“ The struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part of the South, was ended, and fate had decided against them. With this arbitrament of war fell also the institution which had been its cause. Slavery was abolished—by proclamation, by national enactment, by constitutional amendment—ay, by the sterner logic which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man could claim his service or restrain his volition. ”

“ Slavery is abolished. The cause of antagonism is removed; and you must see that it is altogether illogical—‘putting new wine into old bottles, mending new garments with old clothes’—to legislate from slave-holding and slave-driving premises for a people whom you have repeatedly declared your purpose to maintain in freedom. ”

“ We cannot alter our course one hair's breadth, nor accept a compromise of our principles for the hearty adoption of our principles. I am for meddling with slavery everywhere—attacking it by night and by day, in season and out of season (no, it can never be out of season) —in order to effect its overthrow. (Loud applause.) Higher yet will be my cry. Upward and onward! No union with slave-holders! Down with this slave-holding government! ”

“ Upon whose floor the spangling sands were strown,
And rarest sea-shells, which the eternal flood,
Slave to the mother of the months, had thrown
Within the walls of that gray tower, which stood
A changeling of man's art nursed amid Nature's brood. ”

“ The revolting scenes of the inter-State slave trade, the abominations of slave breeding, the barbarities of the cotton field and rice swamps, the ferocities of the slave hunt with blood-hounds in the South, and with more savage men in the free States, the imprisonments and lynchings of Northern men found in the slave States and suspected of holding abolition sentiments, the many collisions between slavery and freedom, which have in some instances proceeded to bloodshed and death, have caused much irritation and deep indignation throughout the country. ”

“ I knew that through the whole of the south of the United States the idea of a revolt of the slaves is one of those fearful phantoms of the imagination which is present to the minds of all men, although, in the affairs of business, or the excitement of pleasure, they may, from custom, forget it, and take no notice of the shadow of Nemesis which is cast upon the festal board--the sword suspended by a hair, which hangs over the head even of the lord of the feast. ”

“ And now let us briefly inquire into the influence of slavery on the white man's character; for in this evil there is a mighty re-action. "Such is the constitution of things, that we cannot inflict an injury without suffering from it ourselves: he who blesses another, benefits himself; but he who sins against his fellow-creature, does his own soul a grievous wrong." The effect produced upon slave-captains is absolutely frightful. ”

“ Some of our men seemed to have taken it for granted that all the tales they had read of the horrors of slavery were the general rule, and that the great aim and object of every master's life was to abuse and maltreat the slave in every possible way. ”

“ Slavery has gained victories large and numerous; but never as against this movement—against a temporizing policy, and against northern timidity, the slave power has been victorious; but against the spread and prevalence in the country, of a spirit of resistance to its aggression, and of sentiments favorable to its entire overthrow, it has yet accomplished nothing. Every measure, yet devised and executed, having for its object the suppression [369] of anti-slavery, has been as idle and fruitless as pouring oil to extinguish fire. ”

“ Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception of some recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yet felt, in a great degree, the baneful and deteriorating influence of slave labor—we hear, at this moment, the cry of suffering. ”

“ First, there are the five millions of mean, non-slaveholding whites. These the system has reduced to a condition below that of the slave himself, in many cases. Slavery becomes at once their curse and their infatuation. It fascinates while it crushes them ”

“ The infusion of Anglo-Saxon with African blood has created an insurrectionary feeling among the slaves of America hitherto unknown. Aware of their blood connection with their owners, these mulattoes labour under the sense of their personal and social injuries; and tolerate, if they do not encourage in themselves, low and vindictive passions. On the other hand, the slave owners are aware of their critical position, and are ever watchful, always fearing an outbreak among the slaves. ”

“ When will our slaveholding brethren learn that the advocates of immediate emancipation are the only true friends of both slaveholders and slaves, and that the only path of safety is the path of duty, which demands the immediate repentance of all sin, and especially that "sum of all villanies," slavery?
In the year 1800, the city of Richmond, Va., and indeed the whole slaveholding country were thrown into a state of intense excitement, consternation and alarm, by the discovery of an intended insurrection among the slaves. ”

“ The assertions that the great contest between free and slave labor has no foundation in fact, that the origin of the slavery controversy is to be found in the fanaticism of a few Northern abolitionists, and that those who speak of an “irrepressible conflict” are to be made responsible for its existence—these form the argumentative staple of those who possess either not sagacity enough to discern or not courage enough to state facts as they are. ”

“ The men who vote for the Fugitive Slave Bill on a week day, and avow themselves ready to carry out its requirements, are the same men who sit down at the Lord’s table on Sunday.
To abolish Slavery, under such circumstances, is tantamount to a revolution. True, the Abolitionists pray and labor that it may be a bloodless one; but just so far as their weapons are spiritual, just in proportion as their warfare lies in the realm of ideas, will be the amount of the evil with which our foreign friends find fault, and which we are called upon to correct. ”

“ As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. ”

“ That small number of slaveholders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and secessionists, and we may cover the South with armies, and keep a file of soldiers upon every plantation, and not smother this insurrection unless we break down the power of that class. Their wealth gives them their power, and their wealth is in their slaves. Free their negroes by an act of Emancipation, or Confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day. ”

“ The sudden emancipation of the slaves, the precipitate transition from slave-labor to free-labor society, naturally called out the violent opposition of the popular habits and prejudices which had been identified with the abolished system, and the passions of the war, still burning after defeat, threatened to inflame this new contest. ”

“ We have got our wives, our daughters, our sons, our property, all at their mercy—a quantity of papers and pamphlets are circulated among them, in which the slave-holder is portrayed as a monster of hell—a picture or plate of some act of cruelty generally heads the production—individual acts of cruelty and oppression are selected, and so related as if similar deeds were daily committed by every slave-holder in the South! What must the poor man of colour think upon reading, or seeing, this? ”

“ Drunk with power and dazzled with prosperity, monopolizing cotton, and raising it to the influence of a veritable fetich, the authors of the rebellion did not admit a doubt of the success of their attack on the Federal Government. They dreamed of perpetuating slavery, though all history shows the decline of the system as industry, commerce, and knowledge advance. The slaveholders proposed nothing less than to reverse the currents of humanity, and to make barbarism flourish in the bosom of civilization. ”

“ How the consequences of abolishing slavery would be dreadful and horrible, neither history nor experience informs us. Let us, then, see what they tell us of the consequences of holding men in bondage. In every instance which has fallen under my notice, insurrections have always been projected and carried on by slaves, and never (with the exception of Denmark Vesey in 1822, in Charleston, S. C.) by the free blacks. ”

“ By these changes, we mean the manumission of the slave-class, the consequent formation of proletarianism, and, in course of time, the universal substitution of indirect or disguised for direct or personal slavery—an order of things which has ever since prevailed, and which, at the moment we write, imposes upon the vast majority of every “civilized” country a bondage more galling and intolerable than was the personal servitude of man to man under the ancient system. ”

“ But the fact of freedom to many thousands of slaves by reason of this war, and the inevitable speedy breaking down of the institution of slavery as one of the consequences to slaveholders of their mad folly, are beyond dispute, and assure us of the wise Providence of Him who maketh even the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain. ”

“ Have not the providential developments of the rebellion revealed a new goal in our national progress? Instead of being a dire calamity, may we not rather consider the present civil war as a means, in the hand of Divine Providence, for the solution of a great moral problem—the overthrow of slavery? ”

“ The faithful slave, who, in this reciprocal destruction, came to claim the protection of his master against those who on either side sought his life, was in many instances put to death by that very master himself. This blind severity served no purpose but to swell the ranks of the rebels, for the peaceable negro could find no security for his life but by assuming arms in the ranks of his countrymen. ”

“ If we say no, it is no! Slavery is a curse to the North. It impoverishes the South, and demoralizes both. It is the parent of treason, the seedling of tyranny, and the fountain-source of all the ills that have infected our life as a people, being the central cause of all our conflicts of the past and the war of to-day. ”

“ Slaves were prohibited to carry anus, offensive or defensive, or to go off the plantations of their masters without a written pass, or to lift hand against a Christian even in self-defense. Runaways who refused to be apprehended might be lawfully killed. The condition of slavery was imposed upon all servants, whether negroes, Moors, mulattoes, or Indians, brought into the colony by sea or land, whether converted to Christianity or not, provided they were not of Christian parentage or country, or Turks or Moors in amity with his majesty. ”

“ The spirit of slavery, stimulated to madness by the indignation of the civilized world, in its frenzy bids defiance to God and man, and is determined to make itself respected by enlisting into its service the entire wealth, and power, and political influence of this great nation. Its encroachments are becoming so enormous, and its progress so rapid, that it is now a conflict for the freedom of the citizens rather than for the emancipation of the slaves. ”

“ Now, at last, slavery has risen in arms against our nationality. It has defied us, for our own salvation, to destroy it. Slavery itself, with its defiance, has put the weapon into our hands, and in obedience to the command of events the Government of the Republic has at last struck the blow. ”

“ But it is still here, it still works and one of the most magnificent anomalies in modern human history is the labor and fighting of a half-million black men and two million whites for the freedom of four million slaves and these same slaves, dumbly but faithfully and not wholly unconsciously, protecting the mothers, wives and children of the very white men who fought to make their slavery perpetual. ”

“ Is it possible to form an idea of a slavery more compleat, more miserable, more disgraceful, than that of a people, where justice is administered, government exercised, and a standing army maintained, at the expence of the people, and yet without the least dependence upon them? ”

“ Slavery was nationalized, and freedom limited and circumscribed with the evident intent soon to strangle it in all the States, and spread forced labor over the continent, from the North to Cape Horn. Failing in the election, slavery then assailed the vital principle of the republic, the rule of the majority, and inaugurated the rebellion. ”

“ We have been accustomed to say, "slavery is sectional, and freedom national," let those who elect slavery take the results of slavery to themselves; let them suffer, if their choice brings suffering; but as for us, we wash our hands in innocency, and hold ourselves guiltless of blood." And so we have been going on ever since the outbreak of slavery in the form of armed rebellion. "They are the guilty parties, let them suffer." ”