Freedom and war. Discourses on topics suggested by the times

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I. The Nation's Duty to Slavery .... 1

II. Against a Compromise of Principle . . 28

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" Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein. Also I set watchmen over you, saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet. But they said, We will not hearken. Therefore hear, ye nations, and know, 0 congregation, what is among them. Hear, 0 earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it." — Jer. vi. 16-19.

HIS is a terrible message. It was God's word of old by the mouth of his prophet, Jeremiah. The occasion of it was a sudden irruption upon Judah of victorious enemies. God sent the prophet to reveal the cause of this disaster. The prophet declared that God was punishing his people because they were selfish and unjust and

* Preached October 30, 1859, while John Brown was in prison awaiting trial for his doings at Harper's Ferry. John Brown's raid took place while the country was just organizing for the campaign which resulted in the election of Mr. Lincoln. It was at once attempted to turn the occurrence against the cause of liberty, by representing it as a symptom and premature development of what was intended by the Eepublican party against the rights of the South. It was necessary that the friends of liberty should be vindicated, without at the same time taking part, or seeming to take part, against those in bonds.

I A covetous, and because the whole Church, with its ministry, was whelmed in the same sins. These mischiefs had been glossed over and excused and palliated and hidden, and not healed. There had been a spirit that demanded union and quiet rather than purity and safety. God, therefore, threatens further afflictions, because of the hardness of their hearts ; and then, — for such always is the Divine lenity, — as it were, giving them another opportunity and alternative, he commands them to seek after God ; to look for A better way; to search for the old way, the right way, and to walk in it.

I need not stop to point out the remarkable pertinence which these things have, in many respects, to our nation in the past and to our times in the present. After a long silence upon this subject, I avail myself of the state of the public mind to make some observations on the present state of our land.

The surprise of a whole nation at a recent event is itself the best evidence of the isolation of that event. A burning fragment struck the earth near Harper's Ferry. If the fragment of an exploding aerolite had fallen down out of the air, while the meteor swept on, it would not have been more sudden or less apparently connected either with a cause or an effect !

Seventeen men, white men, without a military base, without supplies, without artillery, without organization more than as a squad of militia, attacked a State, and undertook to release and lead away an enslaved race ! They do not appear to have been called by the sufferers, nor to have been welcomed by them. They volunteered a grace, and sought to enforce its acceptance. Seventeen white men held two thousand in

THE NATION'S DUTY TO SLAVEKY. 3

duress. They barricaded themselves, and waited until the troops of two States, the employes of a great railway, and a portion of the forces of the Federal government could, travelling briskly night and day, reach them. Then, at one dash, they were snuffed out !

I do not wonder that Virginians feel a great deal of mortification ! Everybody is sympathetically ashamed for them ! It is quite natural that every effort should be made to enlarge the proportions of this escapade, that they may hide their weakness and incompetency behind a smartly upblown horror! No one doubts the bravery of Yirginians ! It needs no praising. But even brave men have panics. Courage is sometimes caught at unawares. Certainly it strikes us, at a distance, as a remarkable thing, that prisoners three to one more than their captors, and two thousand citizens, should have remained days and nights under the fear and control of seventeen white men. Northern courage has been at a discount in the South hitherto. It ought hereafter to rise in value, at least in Yirginia !

The diligence which is now shown on the part of many public presses to inflame the public mind and infect it with fear is quite foolish. The inoculation will not take. The North may not be courageous, but it certainly is not silly. There is an element of the ludicrous in this transaction which I think will effectually stop all panic.

Seventeen men terrified two thousand brave Yirginians into two days' submission, — that cannot be got over ! The common sense of common people will not fail to see through all attempts to hide a natural shame by a bungling make-believe that the danger was really greater than it was ! The danger was nothing, and the fear very great, and the courage none at all. And nothing can now change the facts ! All the newspapers on earth will not make this case appear any better. Do what you please, — muster a crowd of supposed confederates, call the roll of conspirators, include the noblest men of these States, and exhibit this imaginary army before the people, and, in the end, it will appear that seventeen white men overawed a town of two thousand brave Virginians, and held them captives until the sun had gone laughing twice around the globe !

And the attempt to hide the fear of these surrounded men by awaking a larger fear will never do. It is too literal a fulfilment, not exactly of prophecy, but of fable ; not of Isaiah, but of ^Esop.

A fox having been caught in a trap, escaped with the loss of his tail. He immediately went to his brother foxes to persuade them that they would all look better if they too would cut off their tails. They declined. And our two thousand friends, who lost their courage in the presence of seventeen men, are now making an appeal to this nation to lose its courage too, that the cowardice of the few may be hidden in the cowardice of the whole community ! It is impossible. We choose to wear our courage for some time longer!

As I shall not recur to this epic in Virginia history again to-night, I must say a word in respect to the head and heart of it. For it all stood in the courage of one man.

An old man, kind at heart, industrious, peaceful, went forth, with a large family of children, to seek a new home in Kansas. That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble as liberty ever inspired or religion enriched. A great scowling Slave State, its nearest neighbor, sought to tread down this liberty-loving colony, and to dragoon slavery into it by force of arms. The armed citizens of a hostile State crossed the State lines, destroyed the freedom of the ballot-box, prevented a fair expression of public sentiment, corruptly usurped law-making power, and ordained by fraud laws as infamous as the sun ever saw ; assaulted its infant settlements with armed hordes, ravaged the fields, destroyed harvests and herds, and carried death to a multitude of cabins. The United States government had no marines for this occasion ! No Federal troops posted by the cars by night and day for the poor, the weak, the grossly wronged men of Kansas. There was an army there that unfurled the banner of the Union, but it was on the side of the wrong-doers, not on the side of the injured.

It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A tender father, whose life was in his son's life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten like a dog by the officer in charge, and long lying at death's door ! Another noble boy, without warning, without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead ! No justice sought out the murderers ; no United States attorney was despatched in hot haste ; no marines or soldiers aided the wronged and weak !

The shot that struck the child's heart crazed the father's brain. Revolving his wrongs, and nursing his hatred of that deadly system that breeds such contempt of justice and humanity, at length his phantoms assume a slender reality, and organize such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief had bereft of good judgment. He goes to the heart of a Slave State. One man, — and with sixteen followers ! he seizes two thousand brave Virginians, and holds them in duress !

When a great State attacked a handful of weak colonists, the government and nation were torpid, but when seventeen men attacked a sovereign State, then Maryland arms, and "Virginia arms, and the United States government arms, and they three rush against seventeen men.

Travellers tell us that the Geysers of Iceland — those singular boiling springs of the North — may be transported with fury by plucking up a handful of grass or turf and throwing it into the springs. The hot springs of Virginia are of the same kind ! A handful of men was thrown into them, and what a boiling there has been!

But, meanwhile, no one can fail to see that this poor, child-bereft old man is the manliest of them all. Bold, unflinching, honest, without deceit or evasion, refusing to take technical advantages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, glorying in. them in danger and death, as much as when in security, — that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The Governor, the officers of the State, and all the attorneys are pygmies compared with him.

I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble schemes. I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and I shrink likewise from all the anticipations of that judicial bloodshed which doubtless erelong will follow, — for when was cowardice ever magnanimous ? If they kill the man, it will not be so much for treason as for the disclosure of their cowardice !

Let no man pray that Brown be spared. Let Virginia make him a martyr. Now, he has only blundered. His soul was noble ; his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that, and round up Brown's failure with a heroic success.

One word more, and that is as to the insecurity of those States that carry powder as their chief cargo. Do you suppose that if tidings had come to New York that the United States armory in Springfield had been seized by seventeen men, New Haven, and Hartford, and Stamford, and Worcester, and New York, and Boston, and Albany would have been thrown into a fever and panic in consequence of the event ? We scarcely should have read the papers to see what became of it. We should have thought that it was a matter which the Springfield people could manage. The thought of danger would not have entered into our heads. There would not have been any danger. But in a State where there is such inflammable stuff as slavery, there is danger, and the people of the South know it; and they cannot help it. I do not blame them so much for being afraid : there is cause for fear where they have such a population as they have down at the bottom of society. But what must be the nature of State and domestic institutions which keep brave men at the point of fear all their life long ?

I do not propose, at this time, to express my opinion upon the general subject of slavery. I have else-

8 FEEEDOM AND WAE.

where, and often, deliberately uttered my testimony. Reflection and experience only confirm my judgment of its immeasurable evils. It is double-edged evil, that cuts both ways, wounding master and slave ; a pest to good morals ; a consumption of the industrial virtues ; a burden upon society in its commercial and economic arrangements ; a political anomaly ; and a cause of inevitable degradation in religious ideas, feelings, and institutions. All other causes of trouble derived from the weakness or the wickedness of men put together are not half so mischievous to our land as is this gigantic evil.

But it exists in our land, and with a wide-spread and a long-established hold. The extent of our duties toward the slave and toward the master is another and separate question. Our views upon the nature of slavery may be right, and our views of duty toward it may be wrong. At this time it is peculiarly necessary that all good men should be divinely led to act with prudence and efficient wisdom.

Because it is a great sin, because it is a national curse, it does not follow that we have a right to say anything or do anything about it that may happen to please us. We certainly have no right to attack it in any manner that may gratify men's fancies or passions. It is computed that there are four million colored slaves in our nation. These dwell in fifteen different Southern States, with a population of ten million whites. These sovereign States are united to us not merely by federal ligaments, but by vital interests, by a common national life. And the question of duty is not simply what is duty toward the blacks, not what is duty toward the whites, but what is duty to each and to both united. I am bound by the great law of love to consider my duties toward the slave, and I am bound by the great law of love also to consider my duties toward the white man, who is his master ! Both are to be treated with Christian wisdom and forbearance. We must seek to benefit the slave as much as the white man, and the white man as really as the slave. We must keep in mind the interest of every part, — of the slaves themselves, of the white population, and of the whole brotherhood of States federated into national life. And while the principles of liberty and justice are one and the same, always and everywhere, the wisest method of conferring upon men the benefit of liberty and justice demands great consideration, according to circumstances.

How to apply an acknowledged principle in practical life is a task more difficult than the defence of the principle. It is harder to define what would be just in certain emergencies than to establish the duty, claims, and authority of justice.

Can any light be thrown upon this difficult path ? Some light may be shed ; but the difficulties of duty can never be removed except by the performance of duty. But some things may be known beforehand, and guide to practical solutions.

I shall proceed to show the wrong way and the right way.

1. First, we have no right to treat the citizens of

the South with acrimony and bitterness, because they

are involved in a system of wrong-doing. Wrong is

to be exposed. But the spirit of rebuke may be as

wicked before God as the spirit of the evil rebuked. . i#

Simplicity and firmness in truth are more powerful than any vehement bitterness. Speaking the truth in love is the Apostle's prescription. Some men so love that they will not speak painful truth, and some men utter truth so bitterly as to destroy love ; and both are evil-doers. A malignant speech about slavery will not do any good ; and. most of all, it will not do those any good who most excite our sympathy, — the children of bondage. If we hope to ameliorate the condition of the slave, the first step must not be taken by setting the master against him. We may be sure that God will not employ mere wrath for wisdom ; and that he will raise up and send forth, when his day comes, fearless men, who shall speak the truth for justice, in the spirit of love. Therefore it is a matter not merely of political and secular wisdom, but of Christian conscience, that those that have at heart the welfare of the enslaved should maintain a Christian spirit. This can be done without giving up one word of truth or one principle of righteousness. A man may be fearless and plain-spoken, and yet give evidence of being sympathetic and kind-hearted and loving.

2. The breeding of discontent among the bondmen of our land is not the way to help them. Whatever gloomy thoughts the slave's own mind may brood, we are not to carry disquiet to him from without.

If I could have my way, every man on the globe should be a freeman, and at once ! But as they cannot be, will not be, for ages, is it best that bitter discontent should be inspired in them, or Christian quietness and patient waiting ? If restlessness would bring freedom, they should never rest. But I firmly believe that moral goodness in the slave is the harbinger of liberty ! The influence of national freedom will gradually reach the enslaved, it will surely inspire that restlessness which precedes development. Germination is the most silent, but most disturbing, of all natural processes. Slaves cannot but feel the universal summer of civilization. In this way they must come to restless yearnings. We cannot help that, and would not if we could. It is God's sign that spring has come to them. The soul is coming up. There must be room for it to grow. But this is a very different thing from surly discontent, stirred up from without, and left to rankle in their unenlightened natures. The time is rapidly coming when the Southern Christian will feel a new inspiration. "We are not far removed from a revival of the doctrines of Christian manhood and the divine rights of men. When this pentecost comes, the slaves will be stirred by their own masters. We must work upon the master. Make him discontented with slavery, and he will speedily take care of the rest. Before this time comes, any attempt to excite discontent among the slaves will work mischief to them, and not good. And my experience — and I have had some experience in this matter — is, that men who tamper with slaves and incite them to discontent are not themselves to be trusted. They are not honest men, unless they are fanatical. If they have their reason, they usually have lost their conscience. I do not know why it is so, but my experience has taught me that men who do such things are crafty, and untrustworthy. Conspirators, the world over, are bad men. And if I were in the South, I should, not from fear of the mas-

12 FKEEDOM AND WAE.

ter, but from the most deliberate sense of the injurious effects of it to the slave, never by word nor act do anything to excite discontent among those who are in slavery. The condition of the slave must be changed, but the change cannot go on in one part of the community alone. There must be change in the law, change in the Church, change in the upper classes, change in the middle and in all classes. Emancipation, when it comes, will come either by revolution or by a change of public opinion in the whole community. No influences, then, are adequate to the relief of the slave, which are not of a proportion and power sufficient to modify the thought and the feeling of the whole community. The evil is not partial. It cannot be cured by partial remedies. Our plans must include a universal change in policy, feeling, purpose, theory, and practice in the whole nation. The application of simple remedies to single spots in this great body of disease will serve to produce a useless irritation : it will merely fester the hand, but not cure the whole body.

3. No relief will be afforded to the slaves of the South, as a body, by any individual ; or by any organized plan to carry them off, or to incite them to abscond.

The more enlightened and liberty-loving among the Southern slaves bear too much of their masters' blood not to avail themselves of any opening to escape. It is their right ; it will be their practice. Free locomotion is an incident of slave property, which the master must put up with. Nimble legs are of much use in tempering the severity of slavery. If, therefore, an enslaved man, acting from the yearnings of his own heart, desires to run away, who shall forbid him ? In all the earth, wherever a human being is held in bondage, he has a right to slough his burden and break his yoke if he can. If he wishes liberty, and is willing to dare and suffer for it, let him ! If by his manly courage he achieves it, he ought to have it. I honor such a man !

Nay, if he has escaped and comes to me, I owe him shelter, succor, defence, and God-speed to a final safety. If there were as many laws as there are lines in the Fugitive Slave Law, and as many officers as there were beasts in Daniel's lions'-den, I would disregard every law but God's, and help the fugitive ! A man whose own heart has inspired a courage sufficient to achieve what he desired, shall never come to my door, and not be made as welcome as my own child. I will adopt him for God's sake, and for the sake of the Christ who broods over the weak and. perishing. Nor am I singular in such feelings and purposes. Ten thousand men, even in the South, would feel and do the same. A man who would not help a fellow-creature flying for his liberty must be either a villain or a politician.

I stand on the outside of this great cordon of darkness, and every man that escapes from it, running for his life, shall have some help from me, if he comes forth of his own free accord ; yet I would never incite slaves to run away, or send any other man to do it. We have no right to carry into the midst of slavery exterior discontent ; and for this reason : that it is not good for the slaves themselves. It is short-sighted humanity, at best, and poor policy for both the blacks and the whites. And I say again,

I would not trust a man that should do it. It would injure the blacks chiefly and especially. How it would injure them will appear when I come to speak positively of what is the right way to promote the liberty of the 'enslaved. I may say here, however, that the higher a man is raised in the scale of being, the harder it will be to hold him in bondage and to sell him ; while the more he is like an animal, the easier it will be to hold him in thrall and harness. The more you make slaveholders feel that when they oppress and sell a man they are oppressing and selling God's image, the harder it will be for them to continue to enslave and traffic in human beings. Therefore, whatever you do to inspire in the slave high and noble and godlike feelings tends to loosen his chains, and whatever shall inspire in him base, low, and cruel feelings tightens them.

Running away is all fair for single cases. It is God's remedy for all cases of special hardship. It is the natural right of any slave who has manhood enough to resent even tolerant bondage. We are not speaking of the remedy for individuals, — but the remedy for the whole system. Four million men cannot run away, until God sends ten Egyptian plagues to help them. And those who go among the slaves to stir up discontent will help the hundreds at the expense of the millions. Those left behind will be demoralized, and, becoming less trustworthy, will grow sullen under increased severity and vigilance.

4. Still less would we tolerate anything like insurrection and servile war. It would be the most cruel, hopeless, and desperate of all conceivable follies, to seek emancipation by the sword and by blood. And though I love liberty as my own life, though I long for it in every human being, though if God, by unequivocal providences, should ordain that it should come again as of old, through terrible plagues on the first-born, and by other terrors of ill, 'I should submit to the Divine behest ; yet, so far as human instrumentality is concerned, by all the conscience of a man, by all the faith of a Christian, and by all the zeal and warmth of a philanthropist, I protest against any counsels that lead to insurrection, servile war, and bloodshed. It is bad for the master, bad for the slave, bad for all that are neighbors to them, bad for the whole land, — bad from beginning to end !

The right of a race or nation to seize their freedom is not to be disputed. It belongs to all men on the face of the globe, without regard to complexion. A people have the right to change their rulers, their government, their whole political condition. This right is neither granted nor limited in the New Testament. It is left, as are the functions of life, and even existence itself, as a thing not requiring commands or legislation. But, according to God's Word, so long as a man remains a servant, he must obey his master. The right of the slave to throw off the control of his master is not abrogated. The right of the subject to do this is neither defined nor limited. But the use of this right must conform to reason, and not to mere impulse. The leaders of a people have no right to whelm their helpless followers in terrible disaster by inciting them to rebel, under circumstances that afford not the slightest hope that their rebellion will rise to the dignity of a successful revolution. The nations of Italy are showing great wisdom and fitness in their leaders for their work, in that they are quelling fretful and irregular outbreak, and holding the people steadfast till success shall surely crown uprising revolution. This has been the eminent wisdom of that Hungarian exile, Kossuth. In spite of all that is written and said against this noble man, I stand to my first full faith in him. The uncrowned hero is the noblest man, after all, in Europe ! And his statesmanship has been shown in this : that his burning sense of the right of his people to be free has not led him to incite them to premature, partial, and easily overmatched revolt. A man may give his own life rather than abide in servitude, but he has no right to lead a whole people to slaughter, without the strongest probabilities of success.

If nations were all armed men, it would be different. Soldiers can die. But a nation is made up of other materials than armed men ; it includes women and children and youth. These are to be considered, and not merely men of muscle and knuckle and bone.

Now, if the Africans in our land were intelligent, if they understood themselves, if they had self-governing power, if they were able first to throw off the yoke of adverse laws and institutions, and afterwards to defend and build themselves up in a civil state, then they would have just the same right to assume their independence that any nation has.

But does any man believe that this is the case ? Does any. man believe that this vast horde of undisciplined Africans, if set free, would have cohesive power enough to organize themselves into a government, and maintain their independence ? If there be men who believe this, I am not among them. I certainly think that even slaves would be made immeasurably better by liberty ; but I do not believe they would be made better by liberty gained by insurrection or rebellion in the peculiar circumstances which surround them at the South. A regulated liberty ; a liberty possessed with the consent of their masters ; a liberty under the laws and institutions of the country ; a liberty which should make them common beneficiaries of those institutions and principles which make us wise and happy, — such a liberty would be a great blessing to them. Freedom, with law and government, is an unspeakable good, but without them it is a mischief. And anything that tends to incite among men a vague insurrectionary spirit is a great and cruel wrong to them.

If, in view of the wrongs of slavery, you say that you do not care for the master, but only for the slave, I reply, that you should care for both master and slave ! Though you do not care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man, I do ! But even though your sympathy were only for the slave, then for his sake you ought to set your face against anything like an insurrectionary spirit.