In these days of strange and startling events, of rapid and fundamental changes, of curious and unexpected developments; these days, tremulous with the vibrations of the political atmosphere, and quaking with the fierce earthquake of national war; these days, that are filling up a web of history with more fearful rapidity, more complete, important, and decisive results than any previous epoch in the world's annals,—a history which, if ever truly and worthily penned, will demand a deeper search into moral causes and effects, a closer scrutiny of the philosophy of mind, and a more careful balancing of political judgments, than any drama ever before played on the great world's stage,—in such days as these, I say, it is curious and profitable to subject each new moral phase that presents itself to a rigid analysis, and trace every effect, moral, political, governmental, or popular, to the cause or causes that may, after a fair showing, appear to have produced it. A fair and dispassionate application of true and just principles is as essential to a right political judgment as to a correct moral decision, and he who allows himself to be led by passion, selfishness, prejudice, or a blind adoration of party, instead of the calm convictions of educated reason and conscience, thereby dishonors himself, and abdicates the right he possesses of acting for the best interests of himself and all. Especially is this true under a democratic form of government—where every citizen is a legislator, virtually,—where opinion leads to political action, and is consequently responsible for the course that action may take, and where each one helps to swell the numbers of those great parties that in their plannings and counterplannings make or mar the general good fortune. If this is true of individual citizens, how much more is it true of those mighty engines of the press and of party, that sweep such grand circles of influence, and install, in grandeur or in gloom, such important national conditions. That these are fruitful of evil as well as of good, every great national struggle, every crisis in the affairs of nations and of humanity, bears witness. Every national contest has seen the rise and the fall of an anti-war party, and felt the influence of a press wielded in the interest of that party. These have not, necessarily, always been in the wrong. The contrary has been often true, though their fall, and What is the spectacle that our astonished eyes behold? The Genius of Liberty, standing on the threshold of her besieged temple, pale, fettered, betrayed in the house of her very friends, but resolute and dauntless as ever, her eye calm and steadfast, her hand firmly grasping the Magna Charta of our birthright, and the birthright of all the race. While a raging and vindictive foe bays her in front, and the leal and true are pressing in countless hosts around her at her call, a false and craven crew are basely creeping in at undefended passages, and, with lies and slanders and deceitful tongues, endeavoring to undermine the foundations of her strength. Base sappers and miners! Thank God ye are few! And the number of the people ye are trying to hoodwink and seduce from their allegiance is hourly growing less, as your cunningly devised schemes explode. Do ye not know that the people of the Free States are loyal to the core? That great principles are invincible as fate, say rather, Providence? and that those who will not move in their onward course must be overwhelmed beneath the wheels of their triumphal chariot? Do ye not fear the award of posterity? Let the partisan press of to-day, and those who inspirit and sustain it here at the North, who are vainly and impotently trying to turn back the tide of human progress by aiding and abetting the vilest rebellion against a good government that has been seen since Satan, that arch rebel, chose 'rather to reign in hell than serve in heaven,' shudder at the report the unerring tongue of history will give them, even if they care nought for the good of humanity as bound up in the well being of this land. I have called these men few, for it cannot be that the great and time-honored organization of which I hope these men are but the calumniators, boasting the grand old names of Jefferson and Jackson as founders, and enrolling in its ranks so many thousands of the substantial yeomanry and solid men of the country, will really prove false to its name and trust, and be willing to descend into history in the robe of horror and infamy which, like the fabled shirt of Nessus, would cling to it forever as the country's betrayer, if it shall not shake itself free from these vile contaminators. No party could survive the weight of the foul imputation of putting barriers in the way of this war, which, we firmly believe, though terrible and bloody while it lasts, is to end by giving a fresh and vigorous impulse to the cause of human redemption and advancement—an impulse that nothing thereafter shall be able to check materially. Although one only comprehensive principle lies at the bottom of the anomalous condition of things which preceded, and at last culminated in, the tremendous civil contest through which the country is now passing—a fierce baptism of fire and blood necessary to purge and reinstate her in pristine purity and grandeur, whose end is certainly not yet—still it is constantly assuming new disguises, and has been aptly likened to a virulent and incurable cancer in the body politic, which, driven in in one place, instantly breaks out with redoubled fierceness in another. Its latest and favorite form is that of hatred to New England. I have called it Southern hatred of New England. By this I do not mean to denote any geographical limit or boundary. This war is not a war of sections, but a war of ideas; and the terms Southern and Northern are to be limited to this ideal meaning. The two sections, as such, are not arrayed against each other, but the two antagonistic principles represented by these sections are, in sad truth, at deadly warfare. We see Union men at the South, and secessionists at the North; but there is this difference in the position of those who oppose the Government North, and those who favor it South. The former are would-be leaders, who assume to act for the outraged people; the latter are merely the people, or a portion of them, lacking organization and leadership, and consequently obliged to submit to the tyranny that has laid its iron hand upon them. I do not believe, and never have believed, in the asserted unanimity of the Southern people. Recalling my eight years' residence among, and acquaintance with, the people of the South, of two of the cotton States principally, I cannot think that they have, almost to a man, lost their respect and love for the national banner and authority, and, rather than submit to it again, would prefer to be 'English Colonists,' 'French vassals,' or 'Russian serfs!' No; their leaders first grossly cajole and deceive them, and then basely slander them. That there is an apparent oneness, I admit; but I think the time is not far off when, if the Federal Government but does its duty, and uses its authority and strength wisely, crippling the rebel faction in every possible way, thousands of liberated arms will spring forth to seize the sword in its defence, and as many liberated voices swell the All hail! that will burst out for its welcome. For, so long tutored to the repression of any independent ideas, any sentiments that do not tally with the doctrines to full belief in which these leaders have aimed to educate the men of the last generation, viz., the divine origin and purpose of slavery, and the other mischievous and absurd dogma of State sovereignty, which, but for slavery and its imperative demands, would never have seen the light, but have perished stillborn—they have no idea of the freedom of opinion and expression permitted among us, and their minds and consciences have become nerveless and supine to an astonishing degree; or, if thinking and feeling, as very many do, they suffer in silence, not daring to resist the oppressive faction that has ruled them so long. Moral force and courage is not the fruit of subserviency to the principles and ideas that have gradually filled the Southern mind. No wonder that the Union sentiment that showed itself so plainly at the outbreak of the rebellion became, ere long, like one of those streams that, starting impetuously from its mountain source, flows on awhile clearly and rapidly, and then begins to wander and slacken its pace, till finally it is lost in the dreariness and desolation of some marshy wilderness, and so never reaches its destination, the open sea. There is no people in the world so abused and defrauded as the bulk of the Southern whites. If you pity the oppressed of another race, then pity still more those of your own blood who are suffering a worse slavery, and who yet do not know it, but hug fondly the chains of their But with all this as an offset, still there is an undeniably strong and unscrupulous faction there, composed of the leading minds of the South, acute, imperious, sophistical, used to political and social rule, and backed by a small but cunning minority here at the North, so vile and contemptible that, in comparison with its adherents, they, these slave oligarchs, are 'Hyperion to a satyr.' These, with the thousands both North and South, misled and befooled by them, form the formidable opposition with which the Government is even now closing in a life-or-death encounter. These represent one of the two grand ideas at last met in a decisive struggle on this North American Continent, after the numberless petty skirmishes, reconnoissances, and lesser conflicts which have stained the battle fields of the world with the best blood of humanity during so many thousand years. No child's play now—no diplomatic dissembling—no sword thrusts intended to be parried, no machiavelian hits nor disguises. The fight is close, desperate, deadly; it is yard arm to yard arm; it is heart seeking for naked heart, flashing eye to eye, visor down, and hot breath mingling with hot breath, as the foes close in the last grapple. The other idea is embodied in the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and is represented by the Federal authority. The South, then, is taken to mean the one, and the North, its opposite. On one side barbarism, slavery, injustice, ignorance, despotism, the woes and maledictions of oppressed races, the carnival of fiends; on the other, civilization, freedom, justice, education, republicanism, the gladness and gratitude of redeemed humanity, the jubilee of joy among angels. On the side of disunion, endless bickerings, intestine wars, standing armies, crushing debts, languishing commerce, all improvement at a stand still, tyranny settling darkly down over the liberties of the people and of individuals, and national influence gone forever. On the side of Union, honorable peace, legitimate expansion, social order and improvement, increasing commerce, the education and elevation of the masses, the path of success open to all, the freedom and rights of all, even the least and poorest secured, and the nation occupying a front rank among nations, her flag loved no less than feared, her government the model one of the world, and the great experiment of self-government safe beyond the peradventure of failure. Who doubts the issue of such a struggle—who would cheat himself of being one with God and good men in the glory of a triumph so possible and certain? But why is it that the hate of all rebels, North and South, is so malignantly directed toward New England especially? What has she done more than New York or Illinois? Again I reply, it is not geographical New England that is so feared and hated, but the ideas she represents. I have called these, already, the Northern idea. But if the nature of our political philosophy be closely scanned, if we exactly analyze the genius of our institutions in their proper and unbiased action, we shall be forced to acknowledge that it was the Puritan idea which predominated; that it is, in fact, the saving clause in the gospel of our national salvation. And New England was the first home of the Puritans—the focus from which have radiated the myriad beams of the light of which they were the repositories to the remotest corners of the land. Let no one be alarmed at the mention of the word Puritan. There are some people who have no other notion of a Puritan than that of a close-cropped, saturnine personage, having a nasal twang, who is forevermore indulging an Nor would I be understood to mean a wholesale and indiscriminate adoration of the Puritans as a sect. The appellation, which was bestowed upon them in opprobrium, and which they certainly wore in no meek manner, but evidently gloried in as a word of highest praise and honor, I use as a convenient one to characterize the idea I would represent. These men were but the chosen instruments in the hands of Him who no doubt has ever ordered the course of affairs in the world, to open up a new epoch in its history. The time was ripe—the men had been moulded—and through them the free principles which had been culminating through the ages, which had stirred the souls, animated the imaginations, and quickened the desires of the best and noblest of the race from its birth till now, were at last to find a resistless voice, a limitless scope, an unrepressed expansion, on a new and magnificent theatre. For freedom is of no time, nor clime, nor color, nor sect, nor nationality. She is the primal gift of God to his intelligent creatures, and is the kingly dower of every human soul. She was not born with the Puritans, nor did she die with them. In no age or land, among no sect or people, has she been without her priesthood, her altar, her ritual, her heart worship. Nor is she to blame for the wrongs and atrocities committed in her name. The ideas and principles the Puritans were ordained to carry out and embody in a great political structure were of the noblest, rarest, most enduring and beneficent; the faults that marred the beauty and consistency of their own character, were the exaggerations of their virtues, and arose from the frailty and instability of the human heart, even when most governed and inspired by the highest motives. The principles remain steadfast, immovable, immortal; the defects we can but grieve over and forgive for the sake of the grandeur they only marred but could not destroy. Through the weakness of our nature, through the deceitfulness of the heart, the zeal which, in its proper exercise, is admirable, as inciting us to a grand enthusiasm in a cause believed to be true and holy, ofttimes degenerates into a blind and bitter bigotry, as unreasoning as reprehensible; the faith which pierces the unseen and eternal, and fixes its calm eye on One who sits changeless amid infinite series of changes, all-wise amid infinite follies and wickednesses of His creatures, all-merciful and all-loving amid the hate and opposition of weak, finite hearts, becomes a gloomy asceticism, or a fierce inquisitorial despotism, perverting Him—this glorious and loving God—into a cold, selfish, unreasonable Being, as far removed from our sympathies and love as He is from caring for us, and only existing to receive the hateful homage of fearful and enslaved souls; and what was a high, disinterested, fearless devotion to truth and duty becomes a narrow, selfish, insane thirst for the ascendency of sect or party, or the propagation of some pet dogmas, which, so far from touching practically the happiness, duty, or destiny of the soul, are mere stumbling stones, strewing the dark mountains of vain, egotistic, arrogant human speculation. As there is no power so relentless as a theological or spiritual despot It is not as a sect that I admire the Puritans. Away with all party lines, all sectional prejudices, all barriers of creed or sect at such a time as this, when all nations and creeds and colors are forming in serried ranks, a close and impervious breakwater, to resist the threatening tide of rebellion and ruin whose sullen roar is in our ears, and when 'heaps of brothers slain' look into the sad face of heaven from fields where they fell, battling heroically to preserve the common heritage. No! a better day is dawning—a day of fairer promise, of more tranquil beauty, of more enduring blessedness, than ever before gladdened the hearts of men. To see that day come, all the good and true and loyal are waiting and working, no matter of what faith, or tongue, or nationality. I do not regard the sins of the Puritans as resulting from the principles by which they professed to be governed, but rather as something extraneous and antagonistic to them. Their ideas and principles resulted in the broadest constitutional liberty, while the free thought, free speech, free inquiry, the wide individual freedom, which, as a church, under the influence of a stern theological despotism they sought to stifle, under those very institutions they founded are to-day the pride, the life, the glory of free and progressive New England. It is only in this broad sense, then, that I use the term Puritan, to denote the agency whereby Providence saw fit to inaugurate the ideas which were to form the foundation of our national polity. The Puritan idea, then, predominated in the principles embodied in the Declaration of Rights and in the Constitution. But says one, Washington was no Puritan, nor Jefferson, nor the majority of the first framers of our Government. Granted that they were not born on Puritan soil, par excellence, but were they not of the spirit and understanding of the Puritans? (In fact, I suspect that Washington was a Puritan of the Puritans.) A Virginia Puritan, a cavalier Puritan even, was not then the strange phenomenon, the lusus naturÆ, it would be nowadays. Besides, let it be remembered that the Constitution was not the production of any man or set of men. It was the outgrowth of the political ideas and necessities of the age and country. These men, trained in the spirit of the time, gave direction to their development, assisted to inaugurate the reign of those ideas, and to give them a specific embodiment, no more. Great and good men they were—the fit productions of the renowned epoch of the birth of a great people. It is a noble thing, a thing for fame and just pride, if men live at such a time who can share the inspiration, and cause it to live in great deeds, to say nothing of creating it. What, then, are the distinguishing characteristics of this Puritan idea or influence? Since the country had a history at all, New England has been reputed the centre, the abiding home of a pure morality. This needs no elaborate argument to sustain it. The records of her criminal and civil courts attest it; so do the general good order of her small communities and larger cities, as well as the high character of the numerous men and women who, emigrating to the various portions of the country, carry with them, wherever they choose a Again, it is no doubt true, and may be stated as a characteristic correlated to the one above mentioned, that nowhere else is a purer gospel preached than in New England. The piety of the New England heart is deep and strong, if not demonstrative and fervent. It is not like the sweep of the winds, nor the rush of the torrents; its faith may be burning, but it is the steady burning of the hidden fire, a vestal flame, not the glare of the conflagration. It rather reminds me, in its depth and strength and purity, of the ocean, calm, uniform, and monotonous outwardly, but concealing under its surface many a swift current and strong countercurrent, many a fair expanse, many a lovely secret of life, beauty, and glory. The religious faith of New England fully and devoutly receives those sublime doctrines of Christianity which were given as good news, indeed, to the race; not to a favored few, but to the individual man and woman of the race. It credits in a real and literal sense the declaration of Paul that 'God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth;' and the opening sentence of the Declaration of Rights is something more to them than a 'glittering generality.' A deep, intelligent religious faith may be said to underlie all the institutions of New England, political and social. For what is that genius of Christianity that has ever found its truest exponent in the teachings of the New England theology, and in the lives and practice of her people? Is it not the liberty of every person, without respect to color or condition, but simply in consideration of his humanity, to learn and to obey every law of his being, physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious? To be untrammelled in following out the best light conscience and revelation may afford him as to the constitution and laws of his being, his duty to himself, his fellow man, and his Creator, and his destiny, which he himself is to determine? The Christian religion may be comprehensively defined as the golden circlet which includes all the complex duties, interests, and affections of the most complex being, man, and lifts him up, and binds him back, with all his capacities, hopes, and sympathies, to the throne of the Infinite, from which, in his low, fettered, and sinful estate, he is an alien; and all this through the love and mercy of the Infinite One Himself. This I conceive to be the true intent and glorious result of Christianity, when allowed to have The third great characteristic of the Puritan idea is a pure republicanism. In the largest sense, I hold this also to be the effect of the one just mentioned; for, if tested, the whole spirit and tone of Christianity are republican. On New England soil, from the hour when the little band of pilgrim heroes first set foot on an inhospitable shore, by their footprints upon it making a barren rock a holy shrine for the world's love and veneration, has ever been a sure refuge, a very palladium of republican institutions, of human liberties. It was not alone its religious tendencies that excited the persecution and detestation of Puritanism in the Old World which gave impulse to the resolution to transplant themselves to a land where freedom, if nothing else, was to be found. It was equally as much its republican and democratic theories. Souls made free by the spirit of the Lord, as the souls of those grand old Puritans were, could no more brook the tyranny of the Charleses and Georges of Britain, and so, through blood and fire and sword and chains, was the germ of liberty borne across the watery waste, to be sown anew, as they thought and proposed, in the genial soil of the region bordering on the Hudson, but, as God willed it, in the perverse and barren soil of rockbound, sea-washed New England. Truly this was a novel spectacle. Never in the history of peoples before was it seen that a bare idea was strong enough to lay the foundations of a great state, through persecution, exile, and death, and untold privations worse than death. O you who would bring discredit on the memory and name of the Puritans, recall this noblest era of time; rise for one hour, if your souls have any wings, to the height of this grandeur, and bid calumny and defamation be dumb! This germ of republican freedom took deep root, and acquired an ineradicable hold of their civil polity, and the whole machinery of their civil government; and, spreading from New England to the adjoining colonies, and from these to others, soon permeated the whole confederation, at length forming the basis of a national government, a national condition which has heretofore represented the highest civilization of the world. Is it not plain, then, why they do so, who oppose and hate the influence and ideas of New England? If anything could measure the utter vileness of slavery and its degrading effect on the mind, it would be the consideration of the unblushing assurance with which its lovers defend it, and at the same time assail those sacred principles which lie at the root of our national life, and without which we are dead and cumbering the ground. Our nation holds in trust certain principles, for the successful carrying out of which the nations of the earth wait in hushed and anguished expectancy, and in the failure of which we should be no better than any of the effete, defunct peoples of buried ages; or, rather, in the failure to bring them to a triumphant vindication, we had far better be as Sodom and Gomorrah. These principles are now the stake for which the loyal men of the land are gladly offering up life, treasure, children, all, so they but win. We hear a great deal, nowadays, from rebel sources, of the different race which settled Virginia and Carolina from that which peopled New England, and the immeasurable superiority of the former. If the mouthpiece of the confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis, may be believed, the latter and their descendants are not worthy even to be the slaves of the former, and are a degree lower in the scale of creation than the hyenas! Differing in language, manners, customs, ideas, there is no possibility of a peaceable union, say the confederate organs. In fine, language is exhausted of epithets expressive of their scorn, contempt, and hatred of the Yankees, as they are opprobriously nicknamed. But do these men ignore the fact that the original settlers of both New England and Virginia were purely English? They were from the same stock precisely. As to the character of each, I cannot do better than to quote from a work of which Americans may well be both glad and proud, a work that has set us and our institutions in a truer and juster light than any before it. I allude to the work of M. De Tocqueville on 'Democracy in America.' In volume first, chapter fifth, he says: 'The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirits endangered the infant colony, and rendered its progress uncertain. The artisans and agriculturists arrived afterward; and although they were a more moral and orderly race of men, they were in no wise above the level of the inferior classes in England. No lofty conceptions, no intellectual system, directed the foundation of these new settlements.' He adds, in a note: 'It was not till some time later, that a certain number of rich English capitalists came to fix themselves in the colony.' It is true that in the course of time some men of high character and position were attracted to the genial climate and virgin resources of the new Southern colonies, and, buying up large tracts of land, fixed themselves permanently, sensibly modifying the condition of affairs. The descendants of such men as these afterward became the most famous leaders of the Revolution which Puritan principles effected. They were men of whom descendants may well be proud, but it is certain that they have had very few descendants; therefore, the great body of the slaveholders, each one of whom would fain believe himself, and try to make others believe him, a scion of this renowned stock, must have had a very different origin. In striking contrast with the above account, here is what he says of the first settlers of the Northern colonies: 'The settlers who established themselves on the shores of New England all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. Their union on the soil of America at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality; they landed in the desert, accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. Nor did they cross the Atlantic to improve their situation, or to increase their wealth: the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile, their object was the triumph of an idea.' Let the world judge between the Puritan and the so-called Cavalier! As the same author remarks—'The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and the social condition of the Southern States;' so it is no less true, that the influence of an almost unlimited democracy, the product of widespread intelligence and pure religion, united to the English character, explains the peculiar civilization of New England. It is nothing strange, certainly, that, after the wide and continued divergence of two aggressive principles for more than two hundred years, they should at last come to stand in the position of giant antagonisms, and close in a deadly grapple for the ascendency. It is perfectly natural that the ignorance and mental darkness of slave Virginia or Carolina should fear and hate above all things the light of knowledge that streams from New England; it is natural that the unquestioned immorality and laxity of principle engendered by slavery should shrink from the contrast with a state of morals unsurpassed for purity in the world; and that an obsequious church and clergy, which, in the holy name of religion, and 'using the livery of heaven to serve the devil in,' had dared by the thinnest sophistries and most palpable perversions to garble the true teachings of the Bible, and been willing to brave the anathemas denounced against those who add to or subtract from aught written therein, should accede willingly to a separation which could relieve them somewhat from an odious comparison, to say the least. Compare the vigorous, consistent, and sublime theology of New England, the widely spread influence of her cultivated and philanthropic clergy, with that part of the clergy and church of the South which, in sustaining slavery, has lost all hold upon human sympathies, all influence, save in the regions where the highest crime against humanity has become a matter of interest, of sordid speculation. Alas! what sadder spectacle could be seen than the ministers of Christ using their talents to lead their people into wrong, mocking religion, trailing its snowy wings in the mire of the most corrupt political dogmas, doing their utmost to upheave that grand corner stone set by Christ himself in the primal temple of Christianity and humanity: 'All things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.' That men and women, taught from infancy to look upon slavery as a moral and political as well as a material good; whose ideas, manners, habits have become interwoven with its existence in their midst, and who, no matter how falsely, as those may think who look upon it from a comparatively disinterested standpoint, conceive that it lies at the base of their social prosperity and happiness; who have been accustomed from forum, hustings, pulpit, and press, to hear an institution that appeals to so many selfish instincts and principles in the human heart, lauded and defended, and made to be the Ultima Thule of Southern hope, pride, and ambition; that they should view with displeasure and anger such an influence as the institutions of New England must always wield, is not so surprising. But that men can be found here in the free North, yea, more, in New England itself, to sympathize with them, to echo their degraded sentiments, and to wish to see the slave power supreme in the land, is what surpasses wonder, and almost belief. Yet a portion of a large, old, and venerated party have come to be their miserable allies and claqueurs. The truth is, we may say and believe that slavery is a dire wrong, a foul injustice, done to a whole race, and therefore ought to die, but that does not tell one half of the damning story: the worst is this, that it gradually kills out the virtue, the manliness, the moral vitality of the nation that allows it; that it has done so in our own nation to an alarming extent is the great, the fear-impelling cause 'Ah, but,' says the Northern traitor, 'that very abolition has done the whole mischief. If there had been no Abolitionists, there would have been no war. The Abolitionists are responsible for it all.' Softly, poor, weak-minded man! Does not any man's common sense tell him that wherever a wrong exists, it is in the nature of things that somebody should oppose it—that a desire should arise to get rid of it? It is the chief mercy of God to the world, next to His providing salvation for it, that this conscience is left to it, this sense of wrong, and the will and struggle to abolish the wrong. For such remonstrance the Abolitionists are indeed responsible! There are certain words that have come to be used in an indefinite, canting sort of way, so that they have no meaning at all, or, at least, a meaning very deceptive. These words represent bugbears to unthinking people, and unscrupulous men do not fail to pervert this fact to their own or party ends. Such are some of the terms which have been applied to New England, both South and North. She is called radical, and a most absurd and mischievous idea of New England radicalism is rife, especially in the South. Said a Southern gentleman to me on one occasion (he was a physician, was one of the most intelligent slaveholders I ever met, and was an occasional contributor to De Bow's Review): 'You New Englanders do not believe anything; you are all freethinkers—is it not so?' Par parenthese, that word freethinker is another of the terms conventionally abused. This gentleman had just been speaking of this very thing, New England radicalism, and in his query showed an evident idea that it involved that species of unbelief, that discarding of all creeds or standards of belief, popularly known as freethinking. It also includes, in the minds of many of the Southern people, the exercise of a kind of personal license, an abandoning of the good old established landmarks of thought and action, and a strong-minded striking out into new paths of experiment, regardless of form or law. A Northern woman going to the South is assumed to be strong-minded, especially, till she has proved herself feminine. There is nothing so absurd as this idea, when one considers that there is no people on earth as free, independent, and original, intellectually, as they are, who possess so deep and abiding a respect and veneration for those same laws and institutions. New England is the prolific hive whence swarm all the isms that infest the country, say they. They do not understand that in a state of society where education is universal, where mind is constantly meeting mind, and thought clashing with thought, the restless and heaving mass must be always throwing up something to the surface, it may be froth, it may be tangled weeds, rough stones, or plain shells, or it may be curious and valuable gems fit to glitter in a coronet, or shells of dazzling colors and manifold convolutions fit to shine in rare cabinets. The waveless and stagnant calm of the mass of the Southern mind can have no conception of the intellectual movement that is ever going on in such a community as New England. But this radicalism especially bears on its 'horrid front' that bugbear of all conservatism, the world over—abolition. There is no word so abused as that. The thing itself is as old and inevitable as the relation of cause and effect, as the existence of sin and righteousness, as the contest between God and Satan. Just as if there could help being an abolition sentiment where there existed the aggressive, hateful principle of slavery! Then that peculiar and valuable trait of Yankee character, which the French so aptly call savoir faire, and which they themselves term faculty, the power God pity such creatures! And these are the men who advocate a confederation of States with New England left out to shift for herself! New England left out? Fools! to And O ye other men (would ye were men!) who are in league with traitors, ay, who are even worse than they, to do this accursed thing, know that this pit is yawning for you. Down—down—deeper—deeper—pressed to perdition by the curses of those who are to come after you, whom you wronged so In that terrific vision of hell, seen by the poet Dante, those who had betrayed country, freedom, were visited by the most awful sufferings, pursued by the most vengeful fiends, and pushed to the most dire extremity of woe. Oh, could I speak with the convincing tones of a prophet or an angel, instead of the weak voice of a woman, I would make myself heard throughout the length and breadth of the land by every man, of whatever caste or color, whatever birth or tongue, whatever nationality or political creed, North, East, West, South, and especially this great West, of which I am so proud and confident, and would say to them: 'Rise! quit you like men—be strong! Upon you the ends of the world have come. If you have manhood, assert it now! If you are worthy the name of American, make it now to be honored among the nations. If there is any incentive in the glory of the career that would open to the accelerated progress of a Union at last free and redeemed, without a tyrant or a slave, let it nerve your hearts and inspire your exertions now. If you do not desire the self-gratulations of the crowned despots of the world, and the despair and lamentation of their subject millions, see to it that this great experiment of self-government fail not now. If you would gladden the hearts of our friends in other lands, the Brights and Cobdens, the Gasparins and Laboulayes, liberal men, who love truth, justice, right, freedom, who are 'one with their kind,' be ambitious of coÖperating with them in the work of human elevation and amelioration.' Those who seize upon great opportunities are the men whom History rescues from oblivion, and sets in the memory of mankind forever, whether with blessings or cursings, with glory or shame, as the benefactors or the enemies of their kind. A rare opportunity is passing before this nation. Who will seize upon it, and how? We shall see. |