CHAPTER III.

LIBERTIES. OF THE WHITE PEOPLE OF THE NON

SLAVEHOLDING STATES.

The Rights of the White People of the Non-slaveholding States are directly and indirectly invaded by the Slave Code of the Slave States. Their Liberties, to a great extent, have already fallen a sacrifice, and can never be secure while Slaveholding continues.

WE open, here, upon a wider field than our limits will permit us to explore as its importance demands. The entire political history of the country, which might occupy volumes, demands attention under this head. But we must pass it by, only asking of the reader that he examine it at his leisure.*

The topics of the last preceding chapter might, for the most part, be introduced here again. The white people of the North and of the South suffer, in common, many of the heavy inflictions of the slave master's lash. If the stroke fall less heavily upon the citizens of the free States, it nevertheless falls, and none the less really because, from stupidity induced by long-standing habit, a callous insensibility

* Some sketches and outlines of this history may be found in the Author's "Slavery and Anti-Slavery, a History," &c.

indicates that it is scarcely felt or perceived. In no other way did ever a people, once free, submit to part with their freedom. "A people," says Montesquieu, "may lose their liberties in a day, and not miss them for a century." Thus it was with the Romans, who, under the reign of the tyrant Nero, had not ceased boasting of their liberties!

So closely connected are the people of the free and of the slave States, that whatever affects the latter can scarcely fail to affect the former.

If the spectacle of human beings bereft of selfownership and the rights of property is found to undermine the foundations of personal security and the rights of property at the South, they cannot remain perfectly stable at the North.

If brutal inflictions on the slaves beget brutal assaults and encounters between Southern gentlemen, the contamination of the bad example cannot but have its effect at the North.

If slave labor at the South makes manual labor a badge of degradation there, such labor will become less respectable in the free States.

If the whites of the South submit to the tyranny that forbids them to hold " commerce, trade, or barter" with one half of their neighbors, the moneymaking traffickers of the North will scarcely think of the indignity or the immense losses they suffer, in being shut out by the Slave Code from their natural and political right of commerce with millions of their fellow-countrymen.

If the people of the South become debased and

servile, by submitting to the loss of freedom of speech and of the press, those inestimable rights will become less prized at the North, and the natural attempts of slaveholders to extend this feature of their sway over the North will not lack for auxiliaries among editors, politicians, statesmen, lawyers, judges, and ministers of religion, in close affinity with those slaveholders at the North.

If the whites of the South submit to enactments which forbid them to relieve the suffering, to feed the hungry, to shelter the outcasts, to perform the common offices of humanity to those most in need of them, the same ignoble and unmanly servility will be likely to manifest itself at the North, until the despots of the South become emboldened to enact statutes for extending this feature of their sway over the entire country.

If churches, church members and ministers of religion at the South (either as persecutors or as persecuted) submit to arrangements by which the rights of free social worship, religious instruction, and missionary labor (including the distribution of Bibles and the teaching of the people to read) are forbidden and suppressed, the churches, church members and ministers of the North connected with them, will be exposed to similar indignities, temptations, and derelictions. And by this process it may come to pass that, while compassing sea and land to convert the heathen abroad, and give to every family on the earth a Bible, and teach them to read it in Sabbathschools, admonishing their missionaries not to heed

the prohibitory decrees of civil governments, they may, nevertheless, be among the first to cry out against the application of their own doctrine to the heathen of America, made such by the slave codes of the South.

And, finally, if the non-slaveholding whites of the South submit to be shorn of their political power, and despoiled of their civil liberties and political rights, the non-slaveholding whites of the North, equally contemned by the same oligarchy of slaveholders, will be likely to imbibe the same spirit of pusillanimous submission, to sink into the same degradation, and share the same fate.

The intelligent reader need not be told that such, indeed, are the facts of the case, as already developed and incorporated into the history of the country. We need not and cannot enter here into the details; nor is it necessary to cite authorities in proof. Whoever has been on the stage of action in this country, and a reader of the public journals for the last twenty years, will be at no loss for the particulars to which we refer.

What has been now witnessed was matter of intelligent anticipation and prediction before it took place. Though the climax of disgrace and ruin has not yet been reached, and may yet be averted by prompt efforts, yet we have come sufficiently near the precipice to recognize the truthfulness of the picture drawn, long since, of the gulf below, by one of our most eminent statesmen. In the House of Delegates of Maryland, in 1789, WILLIAM PINCK

NEY (a member of the Convention that had just drafted the Federal Constitution) held the following remarkable language:

"I have no hope that the stream of general liberty will flow for ever unpolluted through the mire of partial bondage, or that those who have been habituated to lord it over others will not, in time, become base enough to let others lord it over them. If they resist, it will be the struggle of pride and selfishness, not of principle.”

If the relation of slave owner and slave is to be continued, all this may be expected to follow, as the natural if not necessary result. By reverting again to the facts presented in the latter part of our chapter on the "origin of the relation and its subjects," it will be seen that the process of enslaving white people has already commenced, and is making steady and rapid progress, with the prospect (according to Henry Clay) of becoming prevalent a few generations hence, when the slavery and the existence of the black race shall have ceased.

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