LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO presented to the LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY donor E IGH LETTERS AMERICAN REPUBLIC, OB, COMMON FALLACIES AND MONSTROUS ERRORS REFUTED AND EXPOSED. KEY. JOSHUA R BALME. Author of the "Lever of the Gospel," "Mirror of the Gospel," "Magnet of tha Gospel," "Telescope of the Gospel," "Telegraph of the Gospel," "American States, Churches, and Slavery," and the " American War Crusade." FOURTH EDITION. LONDON : HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO. THE AUTHOR, WILSDEN, NEAR BINGLEY, YORKSHIRE. 1865. CONTEN TS, AMERICAN PRIVILEGE, ... .1 THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA AND ITS GLORIES, - 8 AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES, 16 AMERICAN SUBSTRATUMS OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PRIN- CIPLES EXAMINED, - 26 EXPLOSIVE ELEMENTS AND PYRAMIDAL SCENES IN AMERI- CAN SOCIETY, 37 ON THE AMERICAN UNION, 42 THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUARRELS, 54 THE BLACK PARTNERSHIP CONCERN, 65 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT ; OR GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING, - 73 THE LORD MAYOR'S BANQUET IN LONDON, 88 THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, - - 100 ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIVINES, - 134 NEW CAMBRIA, THE NEW WELSH COLONY IN NORTHERN MISSOURI, - - - 135 AMERICAN DIVINES, - 136 A MARTIN LUTHER WANTED, - 140 TRUE POLICY DEFINED, - - 147 MOCK PHILANTHROPY ; OR CANTERISM, - - 158 NON COMEATIBDS, - - 179 FREEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION, - - 187 THE FREEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION AND ITS ENGLISH AUXILIARIES, 192 FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY AND ITS REPRESENTATIVES AND SUPPORTERS, - - 196 MEMBERS OF THE PEACE SOCIETY AND THE AMERICAN WAR, - 209 PEACE BACKSLIDERS, - 215 THE AMERICAN WAR CRUSADE, - - 225 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, AND PRESIDENT OF THE WESLEYAN CONFERENCE, - 263 THE EXPIATOKS, OR SAVIOURS OF THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE OF AMERICA, - - 283 CONCLUSION, - ... 301 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO AMEKICAN PEIVILEGE. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCDRT. GENTLEMEN, The words of John Bright must ever sound strangely in the ears of enlightened and upright men, and produce immense mischief in stirring up animosity and strife both in the Old and New World. " Privilege came forth every morning, and with blatant voice cursed the American republic. Privilege had beheld thirty millions happy and prosperous, without an emperor or a king, or a state bishop or priest." By the word "privilege," I suppose Mr Bright means the aristocracy with its vested rights, and its use in the above relationship presents him to the view of mankind as the opponent of monarchy and a paid ministry, denouncing them as "kingcraft and priest- craft." But as monarchy and the noble ordination of the ministry will not lack noble intellects, hearts and arms to defend them in this country, should the oc- casion demand it, let us lift up and make to pass in review before us " squatter sovereignty," another A 2 AMERICAN PRIVILEGE. name for aristocracy, or privilege, in America. Our " squatter sovereigns " are divided into two classes. The first is an aristocracy of men-stealers, or slave- holders. These look on slavery as the normal con- dition of the negro ; consider property in him as inviolable as any other in the country; cherish a decided preference for that species of property so called ; consider any interference with it by others as presumptuous, intrusive, and diabolical ; avow that the emancipation of the slave would be dangerous to society and a curse to himself ; certify that slavery is a great blessing, a kind of alkali which neutralises the antagonism of whites and blacks for the mutual interest of both ; contend that slavery is invested with the sanction of religion and guaranteed by the constitution ; affirm that they view ifc with thankful- ness and gratitude as a providential arrangement ordained by the Almighty, and declare that all who call in question or entertain a doubt concerning the humanity and divinity of slavery display " bottomless ignorance," unteachable fanaticism, and blasphemously intrude between the negro and his God. W T hat fearful vested rights are disclosed in the above form of our so-called " privilege " in America, Into what bright forms the hideous features of slavery are transformed to woo and charm the unsuspecting and ignorant. With what presumptuous daring and matchless effrontery is it associated with the sacred- ness of religion. And with what subtlety and cunning do these " squatter sovereigns," or aristocrats, seek to AMERICAN PRIVILEGE. 3 hide from the view of men the bloody slave-whip which is ever doing its cruel work, the red-hot brand- ing iron which is ever hissing in the flesh of the wretched victims of its cruelty and the anguish and sorrow which dwell in the hearts of multitudes of the oppressed ! O for a million tongues To thunder freedom's name, To utter a cry which should pierce the sky The indignant cry of shame ! Our eagle's talons are red With the reeking blood of the slave, And he proudly flings his protecting wings O'er the sight of freedom's grave. Awake in Thy mercy and might, And hasten the day which shall open the way Of truth, and justice, and right. But whoever may speak against negro slavery, say our "squatter sovereigns," England must be silent, for if it be sinful and cruel to hold men in bondage, she has a heavy load of guilt to bear, since she first gave slavery to us in America. If true, England gave other things to us besides slavery, and we would not have them. She gave us Stamp Acts, but these created Eiot Acts ; she put threepenny taxes on our tea, and we threw it into the waters of Boston Harbour ; and she imposed taxation without repre- sentation, and we resisted it with the rattling musketry of Bunker Hill and the roar of cannon from Nev* Orleans to Saratoga. Each and all these we repudiated 4 AMERICAN PRIVILEGE. because we did not like them, but we kept slavery because we liked it ! How fearful, therefore, to delude ourselves and to seek to deceive others by casting off an awful responsibility which it becomes us to feel and meet with manly courage. And this we call privilege in America, There is, however, another class of aristocrats in America whose " privileges" associate them with the " aristocracy of skin," which is the vilest thing the world ever knew or saw. These look upon the negro as a " superior animal" or " domesticated brute," and consider him as belonging to an inferior race to them- selves. They say, " as the crocodile is to the negro, so is the negro to the white man ; and as the white man may treat a negro, so the negro may treat a crocodile." " Pre- judices," say they, " which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education can subdue, mark the people of colour, bond and free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable ; subject them to every ima- ginable insult in their expulsion from the railway car, steamboat saloon, social circle, sanctuary, the states of Illinois and New Jersey ; and with beseechings made soft with tenderness, cause the President to entreat them to leave the country, whilst he solemnly and .earnestly reminds them that America can never be the black man's home, and that his country cannot continue to be polluted with their footprints. "Be- sides," say our Northern aristocrats, "God has pio- vided for the negro a Canaan in Liberia ; and when it shall be great and prosperous it will then doubt- AMERICAN PRIVILEGE. 5 lessly be seen (say they) that a wise Providence suffered the negro race to pass through a long season of oppression in order that they might be elevated and purified, and demonstrate that God had been long elaborating in the depths of his unfathomable counsel, just as he elaborates the diamond in the mine, a gem of Christian civilisation, to blaze on the sable brow of Africa ; so that what Christianity could not do for them in America, it could, would, and should do for them in Africa ; and this is what we sincerely believe to be no fault of the coloured or white man, but an ordination of Providence, and no more to be changed than the laws of nature." Influenced by such considerations and governed by such principles and motives, need we wonder that our Northern class of aristocrats should spurn the negro, as the bigot of old did the Jew, or as the Turk did the Christian ; reveal a fixedness of purpose never to allow the coloured man equal social, political or re- ligious privileges with themselves ; avow that in America the negroes "must be for ever debased, use- less, and a nuisance from which it were a blessing for society to be rid ;" and pass decrees of a most oppres- sive character which are to stand against them in all their rigour, and which they say were enacted to work out their " ultimate and unbounded good" in order to relieve us of " their unwelcome presence where they are not wanted, and to induce them to emigrate en masse to Liberia, where they could repeat with the highest gratification to each other and feel the captiv- 6 AMERICAN PRIVILEGE. ating spell of the sentiment contained in those lines which the far-famed comedian Garriek proposed as the commencement of an address for the opening of a theatre at Botany Bay "True patriots we, for be it understood We left our country for our country's good." What distinguished magi we have got in America. Is it not wonderful to contemplate such so-called far- reaching sagacity and benevolence ? It is no less amusing to observe these aristocrats seeking to penetrate into the " mysteries of infinity," and to hear them talk with impious familiarity of the " designs of an all-wise Providence" to silence their fears in connexion with their own over-shadowing iniquities, and smother conviction arising from obli- gations which bring pressing claims to love mercy, do justly towards all men, and walk humbly with their God. What phantoms of evil imaginrtions, which vanish into " airy nothings" when looked at with cool and undistorted vision ! And how absurd to suppose that a people dwelling in so wide and rich a land as ours is, should be constantly saying to the millions of Europe, spiced with an invitation to the "cotton lords" to bring their mills and machinery with them to our "poor man's paradise," exclaiming "there is room enough for all,"and yet feel alarmed lest the coloured man should make his home amongst them to pollute or frighten them with the touch or colour of his skin. AMEKICAN PRIVILEGE. 7 How basely wicked is the thought ! Oh, the deceit- fulness of unrighteousness ! Verily the " tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." And as these two forms of " privilege" cover our whole land, one per- vading the South, 'and the other the North, it will be perceived that obnoxious as John Bright makes out " privilege" to be here ; and sneeringly as he may refer to it, there are a few in the New World, and the writer amongst them, who have never been possessed or obsessed in favour of " privilege" there ; and when "privilege" here and "privilege"there are brought into contrast would exclaim in regard to the former " O give us the freedom and home of the brave, With soil never trod by the foot of the slave ; Where tyrants and dungeons and chains are unknown, And liberty's smile is the stay of the throne." Should the above be deemed worthy of a place in your columns, and the opportunity present itself in connexion with other urgent claims, I hope you will allow me the privilege and gratification of calling at- tention to some other monstrous fallacies which are propounded with all earnestness and gravity and sought to be industriously circulated in this country in regard to America. Meanwhile, allow me to sub- scribe myself Yours, for truth as well as liberty. J. E. BALME. An American Baptist Clergyman, 32 Sun -street, Brownlow-hill. THE EEPUBLIC OF AMEEICA AND ITS GLOEIES. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MEUCUBT. GENTLEMEN, It is quite easy to fascinate men with the beauteous imagery which is employed by those who have embraced the Federal cause and policy in this country, and to excite their admiration and heroic appreciation of America by representing it as a "model country," "a thing for angels to dream of," for men are naturally fond of what is marvellous ; but as the superb grandeur which invested the dignified order of our " squatter sovereigns " in America, and the bright halo of glory which surrounded their virtues, disap- peared like the mist before the rising sun, on lifting up the mask in our last letter ; even so, by pushing our inquiries into the real condition and true character of our country, we shall find that its bright colours will rapidly fade before us, and its towering glories speedily vanish at every step, and from every stand- point where we can have a glimpse of it. If we look at America in the light of our great charters of freedom, such as the constitution and de- claration of independence, and also our written laws, we shall find our honour as a people trampled in the dust, and our name made a reproach and byword THE EEPUBLTC OP AMERICA AND ITS GLOEIES. 9 amongst the nations. The constitution provides for all, without limitation, restriction, and distinction of colour, the act of habeas corpus, trial by jury, civil and religious liberty, the right of petition, and protection to person and property ; and yet to the negro these grand clauses in the constitution have been as " in- operative as a bull against a comet " from the first hour of our independence until now ; whilst through the perversion and misapplication of it the victims of slavery have increased from 647,000 to 4,000,000. What a black heritage of guilt has this tremendous feat of jugglery entailed on our land ! How wonder- ful that an instrument which was associated with the bright angel of liberty, and was made to carry the eagles of freedom, should by some mysterious process have been made to carry " a devil " with it instead of an angel. Our declaration of independence avows that " all men are equal, and are born to life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness ;" and yet, although it has been the motto of a thousand speeches, and the text of a thousand sermons, it is gravely alleged by the president and governors from their chairs of state, the senator in the senate chamber, legislator in the house of legislature, the judge from the bench of judicature, and the divine from the pulpit, that the negro is not a man, and that his equality with them is simply neither more nor less than the equality of the ox ; for as the law of Moses commanded that the mouth of the ox was not to be muzzled, that treadeth out the corn, even so, to use the language of President Lincoln, who denies the 10 THE EEPUBLIO OF AMEEICA AND ITS GLORIES. right of negroes to vote, sit on juries, and intermarry with white people, yet this same negro has one right reserved by the President, and this right claimed by him and the magi who think with him, is simply and solely deemed to be the right of (the ox) to eat the bread which his own hand earns. We have not only great charters of freedom in the documents referred to, but we have written laws. It has been truly said that no people are better than their laws. If so, in what a mean, low, and debased condition must our slave laws our " black laws " so called in the Free States and our congressional fugitive slave law, put us as a people. Our slave laws reduce the negro to a " chattel personal ;" make every child born of a slave, the property of his master or owner so called ; subject the slaves to the lash for learning to read, and the white man to fines and penalties for teaching them. Our black laws in two of our Free States, so called, decree that no black man or mulatto shall enter, and in all but two exclude them from voting, and in one of these require a property qualification, whilst in all the Free States they are made the badge of an ignoble distinction, which excludes them from social rights and sanctuary privileges, and marks them out as the victims of a cruel prejudice. And then there is the Fugitive Slave Law, which strikes down in the most cruel and summary manner the natural right of the slave to be free, tramples under feet two of the most sacred guarantees of the constitution the Habeas THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA AND ITS GLORIES. 11 Corpus Act and trial by jury creates a tribunal un- known to the constitution in the persons of com- missioners, offers a bribe to send men into slavery, and requires all citizens, under the heaviest penalties, to doff their manhood, don the bloodhound, and go yelping on the track of the weary, wayworn fugitive, in order to secure his arrest, although they may feel that the above law is opposed to every noble impulse of humanity, the express command of Jehovah, and that the code of Draco, which was written in blood, was white-robed innocence when compared with it. What a glimpse our written constitution and laws give of our highly eulogised country. Our free re- presentative government so called, gives us a further and deeper insight into the " wonders and glories of our republic." And first of all, there is our elective franchise, to which all citizens are entitled, and can therefore vote for the election of president, governors of States, mayors and members of city corporations ; and those who are not citizens can be made so to subserve party purposes, whilst Indians sometimes are made to help to turn the tide of electioneering in favour of favour- ite partizans ; and if these manoeuvres are not suffi- cient to accomplish party purposes, men who have no regard to an oath, are induced by bribery to perjure themselves ; " plug uglies " are also called in to block up every avenue to the ballot box to keep out oppos- ing parties ; and, recently, for the first time in the history of the world, whole regiments have had 12 THE EEPTJBLIC OF AMEKICA AND ITS GLOEIES furloughs granted them to leave the battlefield that they might vote in the interests of their military dictators. Need we wonder, therefore, that by the use of such means, and from the force of contending parties who make a virtue of necessity, we should have had a succession of presidents who have violated the great charters of freedom, which they were sworn to uphold ? so that if they had been dealt with as the law of the case demanded, many, if not all of them, would have had to expiate their crimes on the gallows ! And such has been the corruption, peculation, and fraud which have filled every department of the Govern- ment and States, that our representative form of government, with its "unbalanced "democracy which ought to be called " mobocracy '' has been brought into almost universal disrepute. Instead of winning favour, it has created dark withering frowns and shrugged-up shoulders amongst men ! In the place of hosannas, it is bringing down upon itself a world's thundering anathemas ! Instead of being a blessing, it has become the pesthouse of fraud, the lazar house of corruption a great world nuisance ! The provision made for the education of the people gives us another manifestation of our republic. This provision is plentiful, for no country in the world has more schools, colleges, or churches ; but the education is corrupt in quantity, and defective in quality. This is obvious from the fact, that if the simplest elements of justice, feeblest deductions of reason, or the first and THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA AND ITS GLORIES. 13 easiest lessons of Christianity, had been taught, a succession of ever-increasing victims could not have passed through the fires to the Moloch of slavery the free negroes would not have so long continued underthe ban of proscription, Northern schools, colleges, and churches would not have been filled with pro-slavery teachers, professors, and divines ; the sons and daughters of slaveowners who have received their education almost exclusively in the North, would not have been so far inducted into the so-called humanity and divinity of slavery, as to have their moral sense extinguished shown in their attempt to found a new republic based on slavery ; all liberty sentiments would not have been expunged from tracts, pamphlets, and books written by authors in this country, before they have been put into circulation by our tract committees and publishers ; men who have had the taint or smell of abolition about them would not have been isolated, ostracised, caricatured, abhorred, mal- treated, or endangered in their position, prospects, or property ; our best friend and ally, England, would not have been regarded and treated as our greatest foe ; the fires of the volcano which is now sending forth its burning lava to ruin and devastate our land, would not have been so long concealed from the view of men, or allowed to gather its forces to produce such vast and extended mischief both in America and Europe ; those who profess to hold in trust the enlightened principles of Christianity, which lie at the basis of a sound education, and to have a providential mission 14) THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA AND ITS GLORIES. to supply the antidote to those boundless elements of mischief, in the persons of Cheever, Beecher, Sloane, Conway, Mrs Stowe, and others, would not have abandoned moral for military issues, and have been running to and fro in our land with the Eobespierre cry of liberty, fraternity, and equality on their lips to rouse the war passions and to let out deluges of blood. Captains and chaplains would not have been selected and appointed to go on a crusade to this country armed with "sacks of flour" and "butteries" to possess and obsess you in favour of our imaginary liberties, by making speeches and reading homilies on civil and religious liberty, and gravely reading Psalms in public which commence, " Not unto us, O Lord not unto us, Lord, but unto Thy name be all the glory," in homage of the greatness and glory of our republic now in ruins, and of our illustrious race of philanthropists, patriots, and Christians, who have accelerated its destruction. An all-pervading press and the wonderful powers of the telegraph would not have been controlled by military despotism, covered ignominous defeats with imaginary glorious victories, to enlist new recruits, to make more food for powder, or contract new loans, to prop up our doomed republic, or ambassadors sent to the Old World to astonish the nations by the assumption of extraordinary powers in connection with " tickets of leave." And yet, forsooth, we have philosophers, poets, statesmen, and divines, who point to the glory that dwells in our land, and strangely misguided pro-Federal advocates here THE EEPUBLIC OF AMERICA AND ITS GLORIES. 1 5 who reciprocate the sentiment of John Bright in his avowal that "there would be a wild shriek of freedom to startle all the world if our republic in America was overthrown," and that Privilege here would shudder at what would happen. I have still a few more points of interest to comment upon. Yours respectfully, for truth as well as liberty, J. R BALME, American Baptist Clergyman Sun-street, Liverpool. AMEEICAN MELODEAMATIC SCENES. TO TUB EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCURY. GENTLEMEN, It is quite amusing to read the state- ments of poets, senators, orators, and divines in America, and the pro-Federals in this country, who claim for America the highest place amongst nations. In a grandiloquent speech made by Secretary Seward in the senate chamber of the United States in the autumn of 1860, we find the following startling announcement, that the '' worst slave state is in ad- vance of England ;" and in a lecture recently delivered by the celebrated novelist Thomas Hughes in the Collegiate Institute, the following paragraph was jot- ted down by the reporters, and published in the newspapers of this town " He declared, from all his reading and his conversation with Americans and with Englishmen who had travelled in that country (America), that there was no country in the world where men are so free, so well educated, so noble in all respects in all essential respects in which free- men ought to be noble as the citizens of the States of the North, especially the New England States. (Cheers.) No nation had done so much to enlighten and elevate its people ; and its people were worthy of the sympathy of those who had done well in the great ends for which nations were established." AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. 17 If, therefore, we are to give credence to the utter- ances of the persons referred to, your illustrious char- acters, such as Brougham, Gladstone, Livingstone, Spurgeon, Florence Nightingale, and Queen Victoria, must vanish behind the scenes, whilst the aristocracy of slaveholders or menstealers in the Southern States make their appearance in the persons of Jeff. Davis, Howell Cobb, Mason, Slidell, Floyd, Wise, Pryor, Barkdale, accompanied by a large retinue of lady major domos, surrounded by bright and beautiful land- scapes, where the skies cleave asunder to pour down righteousness in the way of retributive justice ; where the incense laden gales of miasma from the dismal swamps of slavery fill every breeze ; where the soft sweet lullaby dies away, and then swells into a grand hallelujah chorus amid the din and clatter of blud- geons, thumbscrews, pincers, cowhides, cat-o'-nine-tails, bowie knives, revolvers, and bloodhounds, as these aristocrats trip it with fantastic toe, making heaven to weep and hell to rejoice, while the lash plays and t!ie blood flows ; while women are whipped and child- ren are sold ; while the paternal tie is rudely torn, and the marriage annulled ; while honest gains are filched and robbed, the souls of men are shut down in all the darkness of ignorance, and God himself is defied in the pretension taut man can hold property in his fellow-man ; while all around the great big serpent slavery draws its long slow length along, over every sunny bank, under every shady tree, by the side of every meandering stream, coiling its snaky 1 8 AMERICAN MELODfiAMATIC SCENES. folds or darting its sting and breathing its hiss under the shadow of their " patriarchal domes," filling the land with its unclean presence and spirit, impregnating the atmosphere with its stench, and turning the bloom- ing paradise of the South into an Aceldama. And yet, forsooth, with this monster that binds so many hands, cords so many feet, blinds so many eyes, blasts so many intellects, crushes so many hearts, and opens so wide the jaws of destruction, and makes such a smooth path to it yes, with this monster, slavery, we are to be fascinated ; with its patriarchal scenes, so called in the " sunny South," we are to be entranced ; and with such sounds we are to be filled with joys divine and rhapsodies celestial, if we are to bow to the dogma of the Hon. "VVm. H. Seward. And if we are to receive the teachings of Thomas Hughes, your distinguished celebrities must still hide their diminished heads whilst the genii, so called in the North, whom Beecher designates the "picklock of society and the pickpocket of the world," and whose daughters, especially in the New England States, according to the testimony of the same divine, are to regenerate the South without the aid of the first syllable oh yes, your illustrious personages must still go down into the shade whilst the above wonderful genii crowd upon the stage. And here the scene opens with the crowding of the shores of the New World with emigrants, whom Dr Guthrie calls the " scum of Europe ; " and as they enter upon the business activities of life, down goes the value of slave labour, and up goes the feverish AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. 1 9 anxiety of their Northern fleshmongering owners to realise their full market value. Hence, when they could find no market around them, they sent them into the Southern market, that they might exemplify their "thrift to fawning." It must be some consolation therefore, to those who have constituted the so-called " scum of Europe," to be of some service to the com- monwealths of America in the North. The next scene brings before us a large procession of dis- tinguished citizens, with clergymen robed in their canonicals leading the way to church, where they offer their devout gratitude to Almighty God for the passing of the fugitive slave law, and condole each other and the people that the Union was saved, the storms which threatened the Eepublic were turned into a calm, and that they would have peace in their time. Again the curtain rises, and we hear the bells tolling, as they announce the " glory departed " of Northern free cities in the rendition of fugitive slaves amidst the military tramp of armed men who are conveying them to the ship or railway station to be consigned to the hell of the Carolinas. The next scene brings before us the fitting up of the slave ships and their departure from New York, Boston, and New Bedford, for Africa, to empty that country in order to humanise, civilise, and christianise them through the benign influences of the patriarchal institution of slavery. Another scene opens to our view, and we see a par- son salesman in a Baptist Convention in Philadelphia, 20 AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. surrounded by great official dignitaries, such as Drs. Wayland, Cone, and others, and hear his voice as he proceeds, amidst the profound silence of the assembly, and without rebuke, to offer for sale his pious slave, whom he had brought with him from the South. We hear his voice exclaiming, " See, here is my Christian slave, who has a desire to go to preach the gospel in Africa. I will take 200 dollars for him. Oh, what a chance for you who are anxious for the slave, to try your liberality." Then comes the Baptist missionary, Bushyhead, the agent of the Triennial Convention, which had its head-quarters in Boston. Bushyhead is surrounded with a beautiful plantation, well stocked with slaves, and is deeply solicitous about the Indians, and very assiduous in inducting them into the mysteries and blessings of the patriarchal institution, slavery, where this mystery of iniquity is now at work, showing its baleful influences among the red men of the forest. Then comes before us the examination of the slave- breeding pens of Virginia and the border States by the representatives of the Bible, Tract, and Missionary Societies, appointed by committees in New York to see which slaves are ready for the market, and whether they can bespeak any of the proceeds of their sale for the printing of the Holy Bible, and to send mission- aries to Turkey and India by getting their owners to become life members, or directors in the payment of the usual fee. In the next scene the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher AMEKICAN MELODKAMATIC SCENES. 21 leads the way in connection with a crowd of official dignitaries, and solicits attention whilst he reads a homily to prove that there is no nialum in se in slavery. An electric flash goes through the crowd, and the editors of the New York Observer, Express, and Christian Intelligencer, frantic with delight, shout, " This our brother was dead, and is alive again ; was lost, and is found." The Eev. Dr. Lord, of Dartmouth College, follows with another homily on the subject, to show that slavery is in accordance with natural and revealed religion, and the law of love. Professors Hoge of Princeton, and Stuart of Andover, thunder out the announcement that master and slave is a relationship of rightful authority, and that, after all the spouting on the subject, the Bible, which estab- lishes that relationship, remains the same. The Kev. Van Dyke, of New York, with deepest and broadest emphasis avows that he finds slavery in nature and Providence. Dr. Nehemiah Adams declares that it is adapted to the beneficent workings of society, and regrets that he cannot introduce it into Boston. Dr. Blagden opens out his Bible and turns down chapter and verse in its defence. Dr. Baron Stowe finds that his Bible does not allow him to deny any courtesy to a man because he is a " Christian slave- holder." The Eev. Henry T. Cheever says a man may be a slaveholder and yet a Christian there is no doubt of it. Dr. Gardiner Spring says if one prayer would free every slave he would not be the man to offer that prayer. And Mrs. Stowe brings up the 22 AMERICAN MELODEAMATIC SCENES. rear in this crowd of worthies with a brand-new mantle of piety for her dear " lady pious slaveholder," Mrs. Shelby, large enough to cover both the mistress and her stolen property the slave ; and whilst she looks with defiant scorn, and carries a whirlwind in her track against the pirate who has stolen a chest of goods, because he covets a mantle of piety to cover up himself and his stolen goods, thinking, doubtlessly, that if stolen men were no bar to the enjoyment of such a privilege, stolen goods ought not. But, poor soul, he is mistaken. He has not been inducted into the mysteries of our special justificatory circumstances in America, and the granting of special indulgences to absolution which exempt these great transgressors from the ban of condemnation. Next comes a Kepublican convention, that makes America a place of torture for the black man, holds out to him Liberia as a Paradise, decrees no more slave territory, and yet elects a man to the presidency who declares that "if any territory desires slavery, and seeks admission into the Union, although he would be sorry to do it, yet he would admit it." The next scene gives us a view of the successive plagues of America, the softening of the president's heart in view of all circumstances, and the cornu- copias which rain down flowers upon him for his grand achievements as a rail splitter, tavern keeper, navigator of a flat boat, farmer catching coons, lawyer learning the " specious arts " to deceive, political de- bater in which he adapted himself to men of all AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. . 23 political creeds and shades of opinions, making Abo- litionists believe that he hated slavery as much as any of them, Republicans feel that he had no love to the negro as a man, was quite inflexible in their belief that America was the country for the white man, and the white man only ; and Democrats quiescent under the assurance that if he could save the Union and slavery as well, he would do it ; or save the Union and slavery in part, he would do that ; but if he could not save the Union without destroying slavery he would do it ; and as President of the United States he has been honoured with the achieve- ments of a Moses, although he has not acquired the power of a Pharaoh to let the slaves go. In the next scene, Secretary Chase makes his appearance with his financial goose under his arm, and goes through the operation of putting gold into its mouth, and receiving a hurricane of greenbacks at its tail to show the sudden increase of wealth in our glorious republic, and assures the astonished crowds that if he can only monopolise the trade, he can pre- vent the republic from coming to grief or tottering to its fall. Arid to close these melo-dramatic scenes, the Mar- plots gather in great force ; and amongst them we recognise the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher, armed with his knuckledusters, and bending his fists in the face of England amidst the wildest demonstrations of ap- plause. There are also Cheever, Goodell, and Sloane, surrounded by torches of Greek fire, horns of powder, 24 AMEEICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. percussive biscuits, and starvation shells, which, like so many Titans, they aspire to take up in the sling of mortal hate to hurl into the heart of the South, to start the slave population in revolt against their masters. Doolittle and Wadsworth claim that the thunderbolts of heaven will so avenge their cause that the South is sure to he turned into swamps for croco- diles if the southerners persist in their rebellion. Jim Lane, of Kansas notoriety, is so furious in the letting out of blood that he advocates the destruction of the Copperheads, or Democrats so called in the North, and certifies to a commencement of such a reign of terror in the state to which he belongs. Fred Douglas gives a significant look towards this country, ad- ministering at the same time a particular caution or warning that, if you interfere, Uncle Sam, though re- duced to a skeleton with the scab, cancer, and bare- bones of slavery, will gather up the remnants of his Titanic power and " strike down the mailed hand of England." And Mrs. Stowe certifies that, on the bright roll of their war crusade, Garrisonians, and democrats, and republicans are all registered, and stand shoulder to shoulder, and with voice answering voice, and heart to heart, utter words of good cheer as they cry Draw your good sabres bright, Gather your reins up tight, Buglemen blow : Now for the crimson fight, Charge on the foe. AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC SCENES. 25 Man to man, horse to horse, Hand to hand, force to force ; Oh, but they fiercely fight : Give them your sabres bright, Pistol them too. And these deluges of blood are let out in the name of justice, equality, and liberty. How deluded and misguided, to allow a love of country to override their love of justice! And yet, according to Thomas Hughes, these men are the world's greatest noble- men ! What a satire upon the human race ! This is what we call in America " beating the devil at long chalks." In my next I shall notice " American Substratums." Yours, for truth as well as liberty, J. E. BALME, An American Baptist Clergyman. 32 Sun Street, May 4, 1863. THE AMERICAN SUBSTRATUMS OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLE EXAMINED. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCURY. GENTLEMEN, No nation any more than an individual can depart from the laws of God without being subject to His retributive justice. This is fearfully illustrated in the cataract outpourings of blood, and wide-spread scenes of suffering and woe which we now behold in the present unhappy condition of America. No country recorded in the annals of history has evermore persistently departed from first principles, or wickedly violated the just and righteous laws of God a fact which no " mysterious cypher " or " hieroglyph " can cover up or hide from the view of men, who are acquainted with our condition or history as a people. If, therefore, the punishment bears any proportion to our crimes or guilt, God's thunderbolts must flame with uncommon wrath to blast our country's greatness, and make desolate our land. These great and terrible judgments had long been predicted by distinguished citizens and statesmen, who pointed to the coming whirlwind of Divine vengeance and raised the warning voice as if they had been almost inspired ; but our nation rushed madly on in its career of guilt and shame, until God shook down AMEKICAN SUBSTKATUMS OF MOEAL, &C. 27 upon it the "bolted fires" of His wrath as a just penalty for its sins. Long, long ago Jefferson ex- claimed, " I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. One day of American slavery is worse than a thousand years of that which we rose in arms to oppose. The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest. And His justice will not sleep for ever." What words could have been more prophetic or appropriate ? Scarcely any, however, expected that the destruc- tion of our " grand Eepublic," so called, was so near at hand or would be so suddenly affected ; and fewer still anticipated that our Northern people would be the blind Samsun in connexion with the terrible scenes now being enacted in the great drama of God's retri- butive providences in America, to pull down the pillars of our American commonwealth on themselves, and bury themselves in one common ruin with the Southern Lords or Philistines. Such, however, was the prediction of Longfellow when he dedicated his poem to the Senate of the United States, which con- tained the following stanza : There is a poor blind Samson in the land, Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel, Who may in some grim revel raise his hand And strike the pillars of the commonwealth, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies ! When, however, the Unionists or pro-Federals cannot cover up the plague-spots of our country which 28 AMERICAN SUBSTKATUMS OF MORAL the crashing thunders and forked lightnings in the terrific displays of God's justice are now finding out, and disclosing to the view of men in their shifting policy, they acknowledge their severity, and recognise their appropriateness so far as the South is concerned, but claim exemption for the North, as if it had had no share in the bonds of wickedness to be unloosed, but had dwelt in the paradise of abiding peace established on the foundation of righteousness, than which nothing can be more fallacious or delusive. Ah, but, says Dr. Guthrie, one of the vice-presidents of the Manchester Union Emancipation Society, " There is no country in the world, our own excepted, where there is such a deep substratum of moral and religious principle as is to be found in those portions of the American republic which have not been cursed with slavery, and considering so much scum from the old world has been poured into it by the tides of emigration, we have cause to wonder that the good bears such a proportion to the evil !" Lincoln, Seward, and Co. are ever and anon in- troduced to our favourable notice by the pro-Federals as bright ornaments to the cause of humanity, liberty, morality and religion. These men have a more exalted opinion of the worth of European emigrants at the present time than Dr. Guthrie, or they would not have appropriated three millions of dollars to open the floodgates of emigration, that a flood of the above-mentioned " scum " might flow into our so- called " Poor Man's Paradise !" In an address which AND EELIGIOUS PEINCIPLE EXAMINED. 29 that great and good man Dr. Guthrie gave in the Philharmonic Hall of this town, he truly remarked that "the genius of Christianity was love, and that her highest worship lay in such works as sprang from loving God with all the heart, and loving their neighbours as themselves ;" but does Dr. Guthrie or his pro-Federal coadjutors admire the love or appre- ciate the work of the above Christian statesmen, so called, who are now turning so lovingly, and beckon- ing so kindly to the able-bodied men of this country through their consuls and crimps, whilst they repeat the old ditty of the nursery rhyme : " Come into my parlour," Said the spider to the fly, " Tis the prettiest little parlour That ever you did spy." Now, if, to use the language of Guthrie, " faith with- out works is a lie, a monstrous lie, a devil's lie, and one of the blackest that ever came out of hell," what must faith with the w^orks of those Christian men- spiders be, in connection with the black and bloody work of enticing men away from home, friends, and country, to be dumped by Northern Christian scavengers into the " grand army of the North " to fill up the gaps of the dead and dying on the battle fields of the South, or amidst its pestilential swamps? What kind Christian solicitude ! How deep or broad is the substratum of moral or religious principle that underlies such a work as that ! Moral and religious principle is a thing of great SO AMEBICAN SUBSTEATUMS OF MOEAL value, and is everywhere very much required, but nowhere in God's creation is it more wanted than in our Free States, so called, in America The scarcity of the thing there enhances the value of it very much. If we look to the science of political economy for it, we discover no trace of it in that department ; for however minute or diligent we may be in our re- searches, we can find nothing but compromise, corrup- tion, and fraud. In taking a survey of the whole field of political science in America and its different strata, we can confidently affirm that there is not a wicked or cruel act of the Federal Government on behalf of slavery, which has not been subscribed to, ratified, and endorsed by Northern senators and people, and for which they are alone responsible, as they could not have been enacted or put in force without their votes and consent. If we turn our attention to our religious theories and practises, as popularly taught and illus- trated, we are again doomed to be disappointed in our researches for this deep, broad substratum of moral and religious principle, for there is no depart- ment in America that has been more perverted or corrupted than the science of religion, in theory or practice. Not only have the blasphemous doctrines that man may hold property in man, and that one man is inferior to the other, been chiefly taught and inculcated by our Northern professors and divines, but acted upon by our Northern people in their brokerage system with the Southern people, and, what is worse still, shown in their contempt of the negro race, and AND EELIGIOUS PEINCIPLE EXAMINED. 31 usurpation of their sanctuary rights and privileges, where the negroes are met with the same biting sarcasms and blasting irony and scorn, as the Jews met the Gentiles when they drove them from their places in the temple and filled them with ordinary traffic, so that our Saviour in going into the temple had to pass through herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and busy crowds who were selling turtle doves and ex- changing money ; indignant at the profanation of the sacredness of his house, he took a whip and drove them out of the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers. And were our Saviour now on earth, would he not be indignant with the proud Yankees who drive men of a different colour from themselves from their places in the sanctuary, and show his displeasure by rebuking them, exclaiming, " My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people, but ye have made it a den of thieves," abrother- hood of thieves. Can we succeed any better in find- ing this deep, broad substratum of principle in our survey of the enlightened sentiments or opinions of the people ? Had the people been touched with the fine issues that proceed from moral and religious principles, the overwhelming masses thereof would not have acquiesced in the death of that noble hero and martyr, John Brown, or demanded his execution for doing what he would have had every slave do to him under similar circumstances, and what the grand old Puritans covenanted to do in the cabin of the Mayflower at all costs and risks. Where, then, shall 32 AMERICAN SUBSTKATUMS OF MORAL we find this deep, broad substratum of moral and religious principle ? Shall we find it in the fearful struggle now going on between the North and South ? Is the fierce war spirit that is now cherished by the religious war crusaders, so called, evidence of its existence ? If so, Robespierre and his coadjutors in the French revolution were great saints ; and liberties lost, wrongs endured, hopes blasted, and sufferings undergone must be regarded as the work of a genuine philanthropy, putting darkness for light, and evil for good. And yet this terrible issue, which is sweep- ing all the mounds of authority, and ornaments of civilisation and safeguards of virtue before it, as with a whirlwind, is the only issue before the country. If this be the deep, broad substratum of moral and religious principle referred to by Dr Guthrie and his coadjutors the pro-Federals, what a terrible liberty- loving element it must be ; and how it illustrates those scenes of unutterable horror which marked the era of the French revolution ! In the report of the committee adopted at the 46th anniversary meeting of the Liverpool auxiliary of the Wesleyan Mission- ary Society, recently held in Brunswick Chapel, Liverpool, there occurs the following extraordinary passage : "We have no educated barbarian who tests the quality of his revolver and practises his own sports- manship upon the bodies of the poor heathen whose souls he is sent to save. Nor can we find any one so afflicted with a mathematical monomania as to be driven by its delusions to leave his poor sheep in the AND KELIGIOUS PRINCIPLE EXAMINED. 33 wilderness of heathenism, and return to England to bewilder those who are already in the fold, to tread down their pasturage and foul the waters of life. Happily, such is the prompt efficaciousness of our discipline, that, should such a prodigy appear, the very next mail would carry out his sentence " His Bishopric let another take!'" Have our Wesleyan brethren had no M'Clintock and Bishop Simpson in their midst to bewilder those who are in the fold, &c., by their misrepresentations of the condition of the Northern Branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church ? and as those same divines are in full fellowship with those extraordinary "soldiers of Christ in America," described under the following heading in the Liverpool Mercury, May 20th. SOLDIEES OF CHEIST IN AMEEICA. At a recent meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in New York, several of the reverend speakers denounced the rebellion of the South, and the con- duct of the Confederates in extraordinary language. The Eev. Dr. Osborne, of White Plains, said he "had to contend against a great deal in his district, for the infamous Copperheads, sympathisers with the South, were as thick as blackberries, and he often felt as if he would like thrashing a man to be a Christian virtue, that he might have the privilege of digging into such fellows." Here there was a loud laughter from the reverend auditory, as well as a fluttering of 34 AMERICAN SUBSTEATTJMS OF MORAL fans in the galleries. Encouraged by this, Dr. Osborne went on to say " that if he were President Lincoln, instead of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, he would suspend the Copperheads." A Eev. Mr Foster said that " the South hated the Yankees, despised, scorned, and held them in ridicule, and he for one hoped that the war would go on until such hellish, devilish ideas were whipped out of the people of the Southern States. To accomplish that object he did not care if the war went on for one, two, or ten years." A second Mr Foster, recently from New Orleans, where he had acted as chaplain to a regi- ment, complained of the ladies of that city, who in- sulted every Yankee they met in the streets, some- times crossing on the other side to show their contempt. The common cry among them was, a Take care of your pockets, here's a Yankee coming." " He wanted that feeling whipped out of the Southern people by shot and shell." The Eev. J. R T\ T akely informed the Conference that "the proper way to treat a Copperhead was to stamp your heels on him.'' As the same divines are in full fellowship with these soldiers, has any mail taken out the sentence to the above, " Your fellowship let others take ?" How sad to contemplate such a degeneracy in our race in America ! Mr Newdegate condescends to inform us that we need not be surprised at our condition, or with the troubles which have come upon our land "You have got no established religion ! Your President is not the vicegerent of Christ ! You have AND RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLE EXAMINED. 35 no bench of bishops, or fat livings for Churchmen ! Consequently you are a nation accursed of God !" His Excellency, Charles Francis Adams, ambassador to this country from America, says that they are to be traced to the "consequences of royal piety, in his Majesty King James the Second making his religion his politics, and his politics his religion." " I may not forget," to quote, " a resolution which his Majesty made, and had a little before entered upon it at the council board at Windsor or Whitehall, that the negroes in the plantations should all be baptised, exceedingly declaiming against that impiety of their masters prohibiting it, out of a mistaken opinion that they would be ipso facto free." " Had James, therefore," says Adams, " seen the true connexion between the maxims of Jesus Christ, and the relation of master and slave in the plantations, Christianity would in time have gained the mastery over slavery in America, as it did in Europe. He mistook it, and the conse- quence has been that slavery has gained the mastery over Christianity in one half of the Union. Religion, therefore, is the handmaid of oppression, and liberty is wounded in the house of her friends." And Secretary Seward, in his address to the Parliamentary Reform Association at Paisley, traces the continuance of our troubles to the power of European opinion : "If all Europe could not only think but speak as you do, there would soon be no civil war or insurrection here." What a trio of distinguished sages ! If the assurances of Mr Paterson, therefore, "that the people of England 36 KELIGIOUS PEINCIPLES EXAMINED are in favour of the war for the Union," should carry with them in America any weight of influence, accord- ing to Seward he will soon want no more citizen soldiers from the North, or alien soldiers from Europe, nor a Miss Dickinson, with her inspirations as the goddess of liberty. Eeserving a few more points, yours, for truth as well as liberty, J. R BALME, American Baptist Clergyman. 82 Rim-street Liverpool, May 13, 1863. EXPLOSIVE ELEMENTS AND PYEAMIDAL SCENES IN AMEEICAN SOCIETY. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCURY. GENTLEMEN, As no transcendent opening of gran- deur, beauty, or inestimable worth could be found in connection with our explorations into the substratum of American society, in our last communication, we shall briefly call attention to the explosive elements of human passion, frenzy, and madness which are everywhere manifest in our degraded country, causing tremendous eruptions of the burning lava of malice and vengeful scorn to flow forth sometimes from South to North, at other times from North to South, and then again from both North and South alternately and conjointly towards England. These fiery erup- tions in connection with the Northern substratum of society are abundantly made manifest in the depart- ments of the science of our political economy, religion as popularly taught amongst us, our enlightened public sentiment so-called, and the philanthropy which the Eev. Newman Hall says lies at the bottom of the struggle going on in America. And apropos to our figure, we have an illustration which will help to fix in our memories, and to move 38 EXPLOSIVE ELEMENTS us to the profoundest depths of our hearts in horror of the terrible wreck of virtue, morality, liberty, and religion which such explosive elements produce. The illustration is as follows : During the drilling of an oil well recently, at a place called Tudione, in Penn- sylvania, a sudden rush of oil in its crude state took place, forming a pillar which rose to the height of 4* 1 feet above the surface of the ground, and also a circle of 100 feet in diameter. Above this jet or pillar the gas or benzine rose in a cloud, which kept extend- ing itself until it came in contact with a fire in the O neighbourhood, when a terrific explosion took place, instantly turning the jet of oil into a column of livid flame, and also the oil shower around it into a shower of fire, which fell like water from a fountain, and ignited the ground as each drop of oil came down in the shape of a blazing globe of fire, whilst the blaz- ing gas or benzine above this pyramid of fire went dashing towards the heavens like lightning flashes until it licked the clouds with its furious tongues of heat ; and as the fiery pillar was fed at the rate of 100 barrels per hour, the scene of combustion was tremendous, and, being continuous, it made a noise like the rushing of a hurricane or tornado through the forest. The heat of the fire became so intense that no persons could approach within 150 feet without scorching their skin or burning their garments, and the scenes of horror which took place were frightful to contemplate. Scores of men were thrown hither and thither by the force of the explo- AND PYRAMIDAL SCENES. 39 sion, and, being exposed to the shower of fire, were horribly burnt as they rushed blazing from the scene of their misfortune, shrieking and screaming in their anguish. Within the blazing circle could be seen the skeletons of those who had fallen a prey to the scorch- ing and devouring flames. Some who escaped from the blazing circle of destruction and ruin after- wards died from the injuries which they received. Others who survived were so seriously injured by the scorching heat of the flames as to become great sufferers from pain ; and all who were present at the opening of the well sustained more or less injury by the explosion which took place. The above is a feeble but fitting emblem of the scenes of suffering and trial which have been the sad experience of multitudes who have come within the vaster circle of the scorching flames of persecution that have been ignited with the fires of freedom in connection with the borings or drillings into what Dr Guthrie calls the deep, broad substratum of moral and religious principles in America. Not only in the degraded South, but in our "moral and religious North," so called, no drilling or boring could be made into any of the departments already referred to with- out discovering an abundance of fiery elements which the smallest spark of freedom or atom of moral and religious principle would cause to explode, or kindle into a grand pyrotechnic display of human passion, from which the uncompromising abolitionist would feel glad to escape, and the approach to which would 40 EXPLOSIVE ELEMENTS. fill him with apprehension and alarm. Hence the almost universal precaution taken to warn the public against the abolitionist in churches, synods, and con- ventions, lest there should be an explosion and the peace of the churches or states be destroyed. Up to the period of the disruption, abolitionism was always considered the greatest crime in our Nothern calendar, and the Christian abolitionist in particular had to be subject to the fiery ordeal of persecution, and to en- dure privation and hardship, inconvenience and loss. Not only were there hidden stores of danger in society beneath him, but around him in church and state there were active agencies, which sometimes resembled the scene given in the following picture, " A pyramid of serpents." The following is from the Morning Chronicle, and, although passing strange, the scene described may be true. A traveller in South America writes : " In the savannahs of Isacubo, in Guiana, I saw the most terrible spectacle that can be seen, and, although it is not uncommon to the inhabitants, no traveller has ever mentioned it. We were ten men on horseback, two of whom took the lead in order to sound the passage, while I preferred to skirt the great forest One of the blacks who formed the vanguard returned at full gallop and called to me, ' Here, sir, come and see the serpents in a pile.' He pointed out to me something elevated in the middle of the savannah or swamp which looked like a bundle of arms. One of my company then said, ' This certainly is one of the assemblages of serpents, which heap AND PYEAMIDAL SCENES. 41 themselves on each other after a violent tempest. I have heard of these, but have never seen any before. Let us proceed cautiously, and not go too near.' "We were within 20 paces of it. The terror of our horses prevented our nearer approach, to which none of us were inclined. On a sudden the pyramid mass became agitated ; horrible hissings issued from it ; thousands of serpents rolled spirally on each other, shot forth out of their circle their hideous heads, and presented their venomous darts and fiery eyes at us." However uncommon such scenes as the above may have been to travellers in South America, scarcely a church in our principal denominations, conventional gatherings, or political assemblies, in our Northern States, but has presented the same hideous aspect to abolitionists. We have had some agitated masses in the church and senate chamber; and let any good man and true rebuke the present unholy, fratricidal war, and no parties in Church or state more than some who claim to be " famous anti-slavery agitators " will fling their envenomed darts or turn up their fiery, malignant eyes ! This is no uncommon thing in America, since no person or party is allowed to hold an opinion different to that of their own, without being subject to open rancorous malignity ; or feeling Joab's vengeful stab. Yours, for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA E. BALME, American Baptist Clergyman. 32 Sun Street. ON THE AMERICAN UNION. TO THK EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCTIBT. GENTLEMEN, Our Union, so called, in America, is so drunk with sorcery and witchcraft, so corrupted and perverted with falsehood and fraud, and so wrinkled, withered, and bowed down with crime, that it is a matter of surprise how any sincere and upright man can look upon her haggard features, or her double- dyed garments of dishonour and shame with any other feelings than those of utter detestation and ab- horrence ; and yet we find Federals and pro-Federals who profess to have the " honour clear," and " soul sincere," ever and anon introducing her to the favour- able notice of mankind as if she was the grand polar star of attraction which was to draw all nations to worship at her feet the mighty enchantress of the world, that could not only stir the air, but also the ears and hearts of men with harmony, and charm them wisely and well ! The Hon. Edward Everett is amongst the first and foremost of our country's ad- mirers to call our attention to the Union, and to ex- patiate on the spell of her enchantments, and the witchery of her charms ; whilst with deepest and broadest emphasis he puts the crown on her beauty. ON THE AMERICAN UNION. 43 pronouncing her to be "the nicest adjustment of human wisdom." When referring to the robes of splendour and be'auty which she is said to wear, Peter Sinclair, Esq., the agent of the Union and Emancipa- tion Society in this country, solemnly avows, in one of a series of letters to the Edinburgh Review, that she is covered with "the fairest fabric of human liberty the world possesses." And if we are to believe John Bright, M.P., or the Hon. A. H. Stephens, the Vice-president of the Confederate States, we must pass through " Glory's morning gate and walk in Paradise to obtain a glimpse of her heritage," since Stephens, in a speech which he made in the Hall of Representatives, Georgia, November, 1860, described her domain to be the " Eden of the world, the Para- dise of the universe" a sentiment in which John Bright coincides, as shown in his affirmation that " America is a land of which angels might dream." According to the above, it must be delightful to dwell in such a land to gaze on landscapes painted with such rich beauties and suffused with such heavenly light where still waters glide through such meadows of enchantment and fields of paradisaical beauty where flowers bloom along every pathway, incense floats on every gale, and where warbling songsters fill every forest and grove, and sweep the mystic chords of every heart with their enchanting Tiofl, tiofi, tiofi, tioft. Spe, tiou, squa. 4* ON THE AMERICAN UNION. Tid, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tix. Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio. Squo, squo, squo, squo. Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi. Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui. Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading ! Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis, Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi. Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatn, tzatu, dzi. Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo. Quio, tr rrrrrrrr itz. Ln, In, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, ly, lie, lie, lie, lie. Quio, didl, li lulylie. Hagurr, gurr, guipio. Coui, coui, coui, coui, qui, qui, qui, qui, gai, gui gui. Goll goll goll goll guia hadadoi. Couigui, horr, he diadia dill si ! Hezezezezezezezezezezezezezezezeze couar ho dze hoi. Quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, ti. Ki, ki, ki, 10, lo, 10, ioioioio ki. Lu ly li le lai la leu lo, didl lo quia. Kigaigaigaigaigaigaigaiguiagaigaigai couior dzio dzio pi. "Before creating such a land," says the celebrated Charles O'Connor of New York : " God, in the be- nignity and far-seeing wisdom of his power, permitted the great family of mankind to live on, advance, im- prove step by step, 5000 years and upwards, until the earth was deemed mature for laying the foundation of our truly free, truly happy, and truly independent empire." " Then," says O'Connor, " God raised up a set of men whose like had never existed upon the face of the earth men unequalled in their percep- tions of justice, in their comprehensive benevolence, and in their capacity to lay safely, justly, soundly, ON THE AMEEICAN UNION. 45 and with all the qualities which should ensure per- manency, the foundations of the above empire the first assembly of rational men who ever proclaimed in clear and undeniable form the immutable prin- ciples of justice, and consecrated to a]l time, in the face of tyrants, and in opposition to their power, the rights of nations and the rights of men." Senator Doolittle has proclaimed it to be his religious belief that our American republic was the " political power foretold by the prophets for which good men in all ages looked and prayed and to whose duration and success Heaven, with all its omnipotence, was pledged." The poet Longfellow has recently put the capstone of glory on the above column of testimony in honour of the Union in his ode to its greatness, in which he makes the Union to be the great keystone in the centre arch of Society and the world, and boldly declares that " Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes of future years, Hangs breathless on its fate ! " Such being the case in their estimation, it is no won- der that the Federals, or pro-Federals, sucji as John Bright, should dread disunion, or that the Hon. Secretary Seward should bring up the rear, and assure mankind that our great and glorious Union, so-called, has been ingratiated into the " world's affections," and that the different nations of mankind are "prepossessed in its favour to an extent that no other nation enjoys 46 ON THE AMERICAN UNION. or ever possessed before ! " It remains for us, there- fore, to examine this wonderful thing called the Union, which has so delightfully sprung into being, and is said to rise before the nations the marvel of beauty, wreathed with unfading honour and glory. And if we take into account its unnatural combinations, we shall perceive that its bright colours fade with the touch, and that an enormous fraud has been practised on mankind a fraud as cruel and heartless as the hoax palmed off on the credulity of 700 ministers in France, and 4000 ministers of religion in this country namely, that our Northern clergy and churches have diffused a gospel based on the sacred and in- alienable rights of human freedom, concerning which we have had something to say in our book, " Ameri- can States and Churches." It has been said that the Union is the emblem of nationality; if so, our flag gives a correct but humiliating repre- sentation of its character and condition. The late Daniel O'Connell was quick to perceive this, and prompt to expose it, whilst with terrible sarcasm he rung the sentiment in the ear of the world " United States, your banner wears Two emblems one of fame ; Alas ! the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. The white man's liberty in types Stands blazoned on your stars, But what's the meaning of those stripes? They mean the negro's scars ! " But can those stars be real when they are made to ON THE AMERICAN UNION. 47 coalesce with unnatural stripes ? If they had not been mock stars, would they or could they have formed a combination with real stripes, or have re- mained in such a preposterous coalition for so long a time ? It is incompatible with the principles of free- dom to be in alliance with the stripes or scars of slavery. A peaceful, permanent, and happy Union on such a basis, was in the nature of things impos- sible. " When the republic was first born," says John Bright, " it contained the seeds of great peril." At first slavery was connived at, then tolerated as a necessary evil, and then enthroned in church and state as a cardinal virtue, where it acquired a colossal power to control parties and sects, the judgments of courts both civil and sacred, and the freedom of speech and the press ! With such a combustible element at the basis of our republic, how could an ex- plosion be well avoided by the mixing up of such in- congruous elements ? In such a case it needed but the spark of true freedom to explode the mine. Whilst Jefferson, one of the founders of the Union, deprecated the existence of slavery, he also predicted that " it would be the rock upon which the Union would split." And so it has been, for it was impos- sible to impair the law of contract that existed be- tween the slave and the free States without endanger- ing the existence of the entire country. This was so patent to William Lloyd Garrison and party, that they uniformly and persistently demanded that the Union should be allowed to slide up to the time of 48 ON THE AMERICAN FNION. the disruption, and proclaimed the stars and stripes to be a " flaunting lie." On January 31, 1861, the leading representatives of the above party met in Association-hall, Albany, New York, and resolved as follows : " That the American slave system is the sum of all villanies, a compound of all cruelties and crimes robbery, adultery, piracy, and murder, and whatever is impure, unholy, and accursed. Eesolved, that slaveholders, as such, have no rights which any human being is bound to respect ; that their slaveholding States are organised bands of thieves and robbers, living by plunder and piracy on the avails of unpaid and un- pitied toil ; that our governmental union with such States and men was an atheistic rebellion against every principle of reason and revelation, every law of nature and of God, which no possible circumstances could have warranted in its formation, or justify in its longer continuance ; and that to call such a state of things a union is to outrage, beyond possible en- durance, the common sense of creation ; and the only relief in enduring such an unholy alliance, at once so devilish and disgraceful, is the hope that God, or some other power, will ere long dash it in pieces like a potter's vessel." The Union was first formed to protect themselves from common danger. In order to meet England they had to be united. " Union was strength," said they ; " United we stand, divided we fall" But whilst we have been secure from outward dangers, ON THE AMEKICAN UNION. 49 we have fallen a prey to ruin from the greater danger^ which have threatened ' us from within. Slavery has always been an element of disunion a jarring note of discord a bone of contention ; but the South had nothing to fear from any abolition power in the North, for the good men and true who clung to the sacred principles of freedom on the basis of no compromise and no surrender, like the Spartans in olden times, were few and far between, scattered and peeled, driven hither and thither, and were sub- ject to almost universal indignity and scorn when the war broke out. At that period there were only some three or four in Congress, such as Sumner, Lovejoy, and/Giddings, who had stemmed the tide of opposi- tion to their principles ; and my friend, Wendel Phillips was uttering a loud lament that the cause of abolitionism had made no progress for twenty-five years previously. And in that lament he was joined by that eloquent but misguided man, Frederick Douglas, as shown in his "Monthly" for June, 1860. Should the pro- Federals point us to an advance of public opinion in favour of abolitionism in the election of Lincoln, we have overwhelming proof to the contrary in Lincoln's own statements, given in his campaign book, and letter to the Hon. Horace Greeley. At page 202 of the above book he says " I should like to know if taking this old declaration of independence, which declares that all men are equal on principle, and making ex- ceptions to it ; where will it stop ? If one man says D 50 ON THE AMEKICAN UNION. it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man ? If that declara- tion is not the truth, let us get this statute book in which we find it, and tear it out." At page 193 of the same book he says " I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ; and I will say in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which will for ever forbid .the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior. I am as much as any other man in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race." But the above is not all In page 18 of the book we have referred to, he says " I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist." And in his letter to the Hon. Horace Greeley, dated Washington, August 22, 1862, he says " I woiild save the Union ; I would save it the shortest way under the constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My ON THE AMEEICAN UNION. 51 paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." And yet, forsooth, according to Peter Sinclair and the pro-Federals, the sentiments of Lincoln are worthy of a place beside the noblest utterances of Granville Sharpe, Clarkson, Wilberforce, Brougham, or any of your British philanthropists ! Can deception, fraud, or hypocrisy be exceeded in the above ? The moral world must be moving the wrong way on its axis when such beggarly shams and gigantic swindles as the one referred to above, can be palmed off at public meetings as abolitionist, receive congratulatory addresses as such, and receive their plaudits! By the duplicity, cunning, and fraud which Lincoln practised, he obtained a few abolition votes ; but what contributed most of all to his success was the division which had taken place in the Democratic party. This gave him a large majority. But although Lincoln was elected, a larger number of Democratic or pro- slavery senators and legislators were sent by the people of Congress at the general election of 1860 than obtained in the Senate, or the Hall of Legislature at Washington, under the presidency of Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor! The Hon. A. *H. Stephens, when referring to this fact in an eloquent speeeh which he delivered in the Hall of Eepresentatives, 52 ON THE AMEEICAN UNION. Georgia, November 14, 1860, says, "The President of the United States, is no emperor, no dictator. He is clothed with no absolute power. He can do nothing unless he is backed by power in Congress." The House of representatives is largely in the majority against him. In the very face of the heavy majority which he has obtained in the Northern States, there have been large gains in the House of Representatives to the conservative constitutional party of the country, which here I will call the national Democratic party, because that is the cognomen it has at the North. There are twelve of this party elected from New York to the next Congress, I believe. In the present house there are but four, I think. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Indiana, there have been gains. In the present Congress there were 113 Eepublicans, when it takes 117 to make a majority. The gains in the Democratic party in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Indiana, and other States, not- withstanding its distractions, have been enough to make a majority of nearly 30 in the next House of Eepresentatives against Lincoln. Even in Boston, Mr Burlingame, one of the noted leaders of the fanatics of that section, has been defeated, and a conservative man returned in his stead. Is this the time, then, to apprehend that Mr. Lincoln, with this large majority in the house against him, can carry out any of his unconstitutional principles in that body? In the Senate he will also be powerless. There will be a majority of four against him this ON THE AMEKICAN UNION. 53 after the loss of Bigler, Fitch, and others, by the un- fortunate dissensions of the National Democratic party in their States. Mr Lincoln cannot appoint an officer without the consent of the Senate he cannot form a cabinet without the same consent. He will be in the condition of George III., the embodiment of Toryism, who had to ask the Whigs to appoint his ministers, and was compelled to receive a cabinet utterly opposed to his views ; and so Mr Lincoln will be compelled to ask the Senate to choose for him a cabinet, if the Democracy of that body chose to put him on such terms. He will be compelled to do this or let the Government stop, if the Democratic men in the Senate should so determine. Then how can Mr. Lincoln obtain a cabinet which would aid him or allow him to violate the constitution ? So far, there- fore, from there being an advance wave of public opinion in favour of liberty in the last general election of America, the result was a clear gain in favour of what is called the conservative or pro-slavery element, and Lincoln owed his election not to the Eepublican party, but to the dissensions and divisions which obtained amongst the Democrats. Why, then, it may be asked, did Southern senators and representatives retire from their places in Congress, and form them- selves into a new government ? This will form the subject of my next communication. Meanwhile, allow me to subscribe myself, yours for truth as well as liberty, J. E. BALME, American Baptist Clergyman. THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUAERELS. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCUKT. GENTLEMEN, In the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, London, there used to be a man who ex- hibited a cage containing birds, reptiles, insects, and animals, said to be living in quiet grace and harmony, bearing the title of " The Happy Family." But when any of them showed their irreconcilable natures, the exhibitor gave them a gentle tap on the head with a lath which he kept for that purpose. Our " Happy Union Family" in America, so called, bears a strong resemblance to the above, and with its antagonistic natures has required to be kept under restraint with the laths of presidential authority. The Abolitionist member, however, was the most difficult to manage, and had to endure not only gentle but sometimes very severe treatment in order to preserve its false harmony and peace from being interrupted, and its " nice and subtle happiness " from being destroyed, by the touch of his magical enchanter's wand. And not only is its happiness demonstrated to be of an imaginative and uncertain character, but also insecure, for on the elec- tion of President Lincoln to assume the functions of supreme power with his lath, there fras a n outburst THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QT7AEEELS. 55 of enmity which has produced alienation and strife ever since ; and the more President Lincoln has tried to reunite the different members of our once so-called " Happy Family," the more deadly have their resent- ment and hostility become. And although he has called to his councils and aid the Hon. W. H. Seward, who claims to be invested with extraordinary powers, shown in a despatch of Lord Lyons to Earl Eussell, Nov. 14, 1861, which contains the following words, said to have been addressed to him by Seward " My lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio ; I can touch another bell, and order the imprisonment of a citizen of New York, and no power on earth, except that of the Presi- dent, can release them. Can the Queen of England do so much?" Although President Lincoln has the aid of such a wonderful man, with his spiritual mediums to boot, to all human appearance he will come to grief with the members of the Northern division in our Union family, and have his difficulties and trials the same as in the Southern one, over which he has lost all control, and for the subjugation of whom he uses all his powers and resources in vain. " Is it, man, with such discordant noises, With such accursed instruments as these, Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices, And j arrest the celestial harmonies ? Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts. 56 Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts : The warrior's name would be a name abhorred; And every nation that should lift again Its hand against a brother, on its forehead Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain ! " With the above unhappy, unnatural, disastrous state of affairs, men acquainted with the condition of our so-called " Happy family " have felt no surprise. With them the wonder has been that the quarrels have not brought on the Union crash sooner, and that every atom or fragment of its existence has not been long ago numbered with the things that were, illustrative of the scriptural sentiment, that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." From the commence- ment of its existence, its fate has been sealed, and its knell rung, although in the articles of its original compact our Union representatives resolved that it should be "perpetual" But whilst man proposes, God disposes ; and we now see amidst the hurricane sweep of his retributive providences what a fearful and terrible disposition He is making of our so-called "great, and wonderful, and glorious Union." The astounding fact also is revealed that the destruction of the "Old Union" was necessary to promote the interests of liberty, commerce, and Christianity. No truth is more clearly substantiated than tin's, that the old Union has been a nursery for the growth of slavery. Over one half of its domain its plantations THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QTJAEEELS. .57 have been stocked with the choicest breeds of slaves, whilst the other half has always been turned into hunting ground for the fugitive, and the official hounds of the Union, with administrative collars round their necks, have never been harmless in their barks, nor innocent in their bites, nor indolent with their capacious mouths and ponderous jaws when they have got upon his track, and he would not capitulate as " lawful prey," except when he has been successful in placing himself under the protection of what our American people call the " Queen-craft of monarchy ?" But we are now gravely informed that our Union has undergone a change, and that our men- hunters, from President Lincoln down to the meanest official, have lost their tiger instinct, leap, and claws. And wonderful it is when it has only turned from the slave to shew their terrible claws and bare their teeth in savage blood-thirstiness to his master. This is a change that may serve as a bait to catch what the Honourable Edward Everett designates "easy con- sciences of weak-minded men and silly fools " a fit- ing representation of the class to which he belongs but it is a base trap, from which the common sense of the multitude will lead them to turn away and reject with contempt and disdain. If we look at the culminating glory of our wonder- ful union in connection with our last tariff, we shall see under what terrible restrictions the commerce of the world is placed. In this tariff, dated July, 1862, the cotton goods of Lancashire are subject to duties 58 THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUAEBELS. ranging from 25 to 40 per cent; woollen manufactures, 30 ; and worsted, 35. Sheffield cutlery is made to pay 35 per cent, duty, and English railway iron from 4< to o per ton. No Wilton carpet can pass the Northern customs without a tax of 45 cents per square yard. Birmingham buttons must pay 35, and Coventry ribbons 40 per cent. ! Such is the Northern Morrell Tariff. And yet, forsooth, these are the men for whom you are to erect your triumphal arches, peal your merry bells, and create a world's jubilee ! And when we contemplate the association of our American Union with Christianity, we may well take up the language of Jehovah, where he appealed to the Jews, exclaiming, "Will a man rob God?" And couple with it the response which he gave to the question in its application to them. " Ye have' robbed me, even this whole nation I" Thus has it been with our American people ; and no man can demonstrate that they can present the free-will offering of their hearts, flaming with supreme love to God, on His altar, when they turn away from their fellow-men be- cause they possess a different colour on their skin to themselves ; or if when turning to them, it is to sub- ordinate them to their use in their persons, services, and lives, as " chattels personal !" Our Union, there- fore, in America, in the above respects had become a world nuisance ; and its existence and continuance on the old basis were not compatible with the govern- ment of God. We are quite aware that structures of reasoning, chains of argument, and link added to link THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUARRELS. 59 in those chains, enamelled with the flowers and beauties of rhetoric, have been constructed and thrown out in its interest and favour, but no efforts of its ad- mirers or friends can brace up its weakness or hide its deformities. President Lincoln, the Hon. William H. Seward, and others, backed by overwhelming masses in the North, have tried both by the pen of the ready writer, the tongue of the eloquent, and the sword of the warrior, but have miserably failed. And now that huge imposture, called the Union, stands fully revealed, this greatest sham of the ages now stands unmasked with all its horrors disclosed to the view of the world, whilst a voice comes thundering down the roll of ages Take away "the accursed thing." In a letter addressed to the governors of the different States of the Union in 1 783, General Wash- ington said : " There are four things which I humbly conceive are essential to the well-being, I may even venture to say to the existence, of the United States as an independent power. First, an indissoluble union of the States under one federal head ; second, a sacred regard to public justice ; third, the adoption of a proper peace establishment ; and, fourth, the preva- lence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States which will induce them to forget their local politics and prejudices." The above extraordinary letter of Washington , dis- closes his deep anxiety for the fate of the " beloved Union," records the conviction that the law of com- 60 THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUAEEELS. pact which bound the slave and free States was not sufficient of itself to secure the perpetuity of the Union. Hence the necessity of the above extraordi- nary pre-requisities, which it was utterly impossible to call into being with such incongruous elements as composed the different classes of the Union. A know- ledge of the compact, therefore, between the different States of the Union, is of paramount importance to those who feel an interest in America, and essentially necessary in order to obtain a proper understanding of the character and causes of those thrilling and appalling events which are now taking place in the New and filling the Old World with wonder, and, so far as they are comprehended, with intensest abhor- rence and disgust! The compact designates the Union which it contemplated " The United States of America?" Its articles of agreement were to be its basis, although the Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence have never been called into requisition and acted upon from the day of their adoption as articles of the National Creed to the period when civil war broke out amongst us. The lofty principles inculcated in them, and the imperial heritage of blessing which they were designed to secure to all, without limitation as to sex, age, or colour, have neither been desired nor coveted by the overwhelming masses of people who have composed those States, except for the white man. Amongst other things, those articles which constitute the law of compact made provision for the sacredness and THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUARRELS. 61 supremacy of each separate State. The Hon. Secretary Seward, " whose bright and patriotic plans and pur- poses," says Peter Sinclair, Esq., " qualify him to fill a high office of trust, and administer it so as to become in many respects, along with Abraham Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, models for the study of the world." Seward, when commenting on this clause in his place in the Senate Chamber, in 1860, addressed himself to the represen- tatives and people of the slave States as follows : " In your capital States you are sovereigns on the subject of slavery within your own borders, as we are on the same subject within our borders. It is well and wisely arranged. Use your authority to main- tain what system you please. We are not distrustful of the result. If our authority shall be assailed from within or without by any enemy, or for any cause, and we shall have need, we shall expect you to de- fend us. If you shall be so assailed, in the emergency, no matter what the cause or the pretext, or who the foe, we shall defend your authority as the equivalent of our own !" " You are sovereigns," said Seward, " within your own borders on the subject of slavery!" Where there is sovereignty there is the exercise of absolute power in accordance with vested rights acquired or otherwise. But how fearful are the vested rights of slavery ! And how terrible is the sovereignty that makes merchandise of the bodies and souls of men, and traffics in human flesh ! And yet, said Seward, " it is well and wisely arranged ! " Well 62 THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUAEEELS. and wisely arranged that four .millions should be reduced from persons to things articles of merchan- dise commodities to be bought and sold ! Well and wisely arranged that slaves should have no relation- ships which they can call their own, but, like cattle, be separated at the will of their owners husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters, and friends from bosom friends ! Well and wisely arranged that they should be robbed of the fruits of their industry, and stripped of all mental, moral, social, and religious culture ! Well and wisely arranged that they should be subject to a robbery and tyranny ' unequalled in the world ! Now, the Hon. W. H. Seward, when he uttered the above language, was well acquainted with the character of that system which these slaveholders sought to maintain. He knew full well the injuries which it inflicted, and the untold agonies which it produced, and yet Seward said, " Use your authority in maintaining the above sovereignty." As if he had said, " Go on and multiply the wrongs of the negro slave in connection with this terribly ferocious system of inhuman bondage. Do it in every form in which their humanity may be assailed, and by every character of agency and appliance you may please to use. According to your taste, convenience, or caprice, make your exactions, enforce obedience with the utmost rigour, and make your will supreme ; " we are not distrustful of you," says Seward, " or of the result." Their victims may weep, groan, or struggle in the agonies of death, but THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QUAEEELS. 63 it is no concern of ours, said the above "philanthropic man" so called, the "astute philosopher, meta- physician, and model statesman of America." " You are sovereigns within your own borders," and, there- fore, we repudiate all responsibility in the States where those victims of your cruelty and tyranny reside. Such was the Honourable William H. Seward in 1860, when he made a bid for the Presidency. What a wonderful model for the study of the world. Another clause in the law of compact made pro- vision for equal rights and privileges to all the separate states of the Union, both in regard to the protection of each State sovereignty and the general sovereignty of all the States from common danger, and also to a share in the common territory. The rights common to each were common to all. Our Union, therefore, was nothing more nor less than a partnership concern. And to all the articles of our political creed embodied in our law of compact, each State has given its " unfeigned assent and consent." And these possess a binding power on each and all which they are not at liberty to set aside or reject without endangering the existence of the whole. In the history of our country we have had repeated in- fractions of the law of compact by the Northern or Free States so called in the adoption of the Missouri Compromise, which dispossessed the slave States of their equal rights in the national territory ; as well as the personal liberty bill, which brought five of the 64 THE HAPPY FAMILY AND ITS QTJAEKELS. Free States into conflict with the United States ; in the Congressional Fugitive Slave Law ; and also in the threats made by the Northern people against the Southerners in regard to the tarriff, and to cherish a war of sections. Against these infractions the Southern States protested, but in vain. And in vain also did they point to the law of compact which had been infringed. Hence their determination to secede. And as there is a brotherhood as well as honour among thieves, it was the duty, and ought to have been the privilege, of Northern States to allow them to secede, and amicably to have wound up the affairs of the ' Old Union Concern " the " existence of which no possible circumstances could justify," said Win. Lloyd Garrison, or "ought to continue ;" and " to preserve which," said General Washington, it required " the prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States which would induce them to forget their local politics and pre- judices !" As we shall return to this subject, allow me to subscribe myself as usual, Yours for truth as well as liberty, 32 Sun Street JOSHUA R BALME, American Baptist Clergyman. THE BLACK PARTNERSHIP CONCERN. TO THE EDITORS OF XHE LIVERPOOL MERCUBT. GENTLEMEN, Nothing can be more preposterous or absurd than to suppose that the above concern called the Union in America, possesses a basis founded on an enlarged philanthropy, or enlightened forecast; and if it had not been placed on record, it is scarcely possible to believe that any ruler or statesman should have fallen into so gross a delusion, as to avow, that it could continue amidst the dangers that would imperil its existence, since an impartial administra- tion of justice, or the sinking down of a shaft to the rock called principle, would at any period have sprung a mine to destroy it with its false peace, at once and for ever ! In its brief history those dangers have been frequent, from jealousy between the Northern and Southern partners in the acquisition of new states and territory from the Tariff which led South Carolina to threaten to withdraw from the Union from the war of 1812 which brought it to the verge of disruption from the opposition of New England States to that war under the leadership of Massachusets from " Bleeding Kansas " and John Brown's raid, which led the Richmond Whig to 66 THE BLACK PARTNERSHIP CONCERN. announce that "their connexion with the North was a standing insurrection in the South ! But the greatest danger which ever threatened the Union, was the election of Lincoln, who, like the Hon. Win. H. Seward in his " Bloody Eochester Speech," so called, had made himself particularly obnoxious and offensive in an address which he delivered at Spring- field, Illinois, June 12th, 1858. In this address Lincoln said, "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this country cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents will arrest the farther spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or, its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South" This speech was interpreted by the Southerners to mean, " a war of THE BLACK PAETNEESHIP CONCEEN. 67 sections." Mr Lincoln being a representative man, and claiming to be the standard bearer of the Ee- publican party, lead them to accept it as a standing menace, and to adopt for their motto, "no submission to abolition rule." Lincoln took the alarm, for when charged by the late Judge Douglas, August 21, 1858, at Ottawa, Illinois, with the utterance of the senti- ments contained in the above speech, he replied, as recorded on page 77 of his Campaign Book, "When I made my speech at Springfield, of which the Judge complains, and from which he quotes, I really was not thinking of the things he ascribes to me at all, I had no thought in the world that I was doing anything to bring about a war between the free and slave states. I had no thought in the world that I was doing any- thing to bring about a political and social equality of the black and white races. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything, or favouring anything, to reduce to a dead uniformity all the local institutions of the various states. But I must say in all fairness to him, if he thinks I am doing something which leads to these bad results, it is none the better I did not mean it. It is just as fatal to the country, if I have any influence in producing it, whether I intend it or not ! The States also which had passed personal Liberty Bills, took alarm, and with dreadful haste, in which Ehode Island led the way, erased the "obnoxious statutes," so called, from the statute book in con- nexion with the State legislatures ! In the general consternation and alarm which prevailed for the 68 THE BLACK PARTNERSHIP CONCERN. safety of the Union, the churches, city corporations, and chambers of commerce, united to send their delegates to a Peace Congress which was called at Washington, where Wm. E. Dodge, Esq. of New York, (a naming revivalist), with other delegates, by joint resolution, decreed to offer the slave states all territory south of 36 30' for new slave states, if they, would come back into the Union, bury the war hatchet, and smoke the pipe of peace ? And to bring up the rear of the panic-stricken, the government took the alarm, sent for the late Judge Douglas to seek his interposi- tion and advice, whilst at the same time the Secretary of State, the Hon. Wm. H. Seward, telegraphed to the Boards of Trade in Chicago and Milwaukie, convey- ing the startling announcement, " That heretofore the cry of Union has been raised when there was no danger. The question of slavery will not now be taken into account. We are to save the Union, and then save all that is worth saving." Our Northern people had often performed their antics before the Southerns, and prostrated themselves to pick up the nuts they threw down, in the shape of commercial tariffs but at this fearful and rugged crisis of our history they performed their antics without the nuts, the Southerns, having withdrawn from the Union menagerie, left them to find their own nuts to crack ! All the energies of what are called mighty spirits amongst Northern Democrats, and the resources of their "great intellects were brought to bear on Southern representatives, but in vain. The South THE BLACK PAETNEESHIP CONCEEN. 69 had taken its stand for weal or for woe, and in the bloody contest which has followed, it has displayed an energy and skill which has won for its generals and armies the admiration of the world, and since there is more hope of the emancipation of the slave in the separation of the South from the North, than in their re-union and also of the amelioration of his condition, who that is not blind to the signs of the times, can desire success to the Federal arms ? The truth is self-evident, that if the Union had not given slavery a new lease of its life, in the barricades which it interposed for its preservation in the Fugitive Slave Law, Slavery would have been well nigh extinguished without the shedding of blood, or the interruption of commerce, for the same law which operated to send the slaves from the Northern States into Canada, when slave States, and caused their masters to make what they could out of their nimble "chattels personal," would have had the same effect in the South, but for the vile subserviency of our Northern people, who placed themselves under the Union yoke to obey the powers that be, to hunt up the fugitive, and stand between him and his deliverance thus making them a proverb and a reproach a taunt and a curse to society and the world! And as it was never in the power of the South to preserve slavery, or extend it of itself, how imbecile and foolish it is to make slavery a stalking horse for the subjugation of the South ? Even John Bright has confessed " that but for the secession of the South nothing but a 70 THE BLACK PARTNEESHIP CONCEEN. miracle could have hastened the destruction of slavery." If, therefore, our Northern people, or the Pro-Federals in this country, had any regard for freedom, they would have said, "wayward sisters, depart in peace." And there was nothing to have prevented such an arrangement in our Partnership Concern, since, to use the language of the Eev. Dr Guthrie, "there is no Union or partnership which may not be dissolved without crime, but marriage." Such a course would have saved rivers of blood, and prevented an awful waste of property, which, will yield a heavy crop of heart-burnings ; and, also, an accumulation of debt which will ere long send us with a thundering crash into the gulph of financial ruin. Besides, if there had been a particle of that sacred thing called honour, amongst the Northern partners of the Union, they would have withdrawn, or have dissolved partnership ; but, alas, honour, which is said to be known and practised amongst thieves, was not to be found amongst our so-called enlightened statesmen and sagacious wise men ! How much to be deprecated is the course which our Northern people and government have adopted. In their hands what a terrible scourge war has become both to themselves and the South, and to Europe. Who shall bridge the yawning chasm which their resentment has created, or heal the wounds which their war passions have produced! " Sic transit gloria mundi." Amongst the current news of the day there is a THE BLACK PARTNERSHIP CONCERN. 71 paragraph in circulation that a machine has been in- vented to be driven by the force of circumstances. Our union in America has often been praised as a machine which has turned every thing into gold, and wrapt men with visions of enchantment and beauty. How strange that it should now turn everything into blood and heaps of blackened ruin. And how desperate the force of circumstances which impel it in such a course as this ! How fearful is the love of country when it leads men to seek to merge all in common ruin, rather than put the curb on the spirit of aggrandisement and conquest. And how rancorous their malignity when, if they cannot continue to get the lion's share of profit out of the wicked compact with the South, the cry goes forth in the spirit of burning revenge, make the habitations of men desolate, lay waste their fruitful fields, burn their populous towns and peaceful villages, and turn their country into a wilderness to be the haunts of wild beasts and crocodiles ! And yet, in a lecture recently delivered in Hull, we have been gravely informed by the Eev. Newman Hall, that such a war, with all its vast extremes of guilt and cruelty, and unparallelled in the misery which it is producing in both hemi- spheres, " is legitimate," because it is a war for empire, is invested with the sanction and gathers force from the " practices of European governments," and has "philanthropy at the bottom of it!"' horror of horrors, to contemplate such frightfnl butcheries of men such diabolical outrages as have been committed in this war ! Surely, if we could get 72 THE BLACK PAETNEESHIP CONCEEN. the above divine, with his coadjutors, John Bright, Peter Sinclair, and other misguided men, who are the advocates of this war if we could get them to look down into the gulph of ruin into which the nation has been plunged by reckless men that they might get a glimpse of the sepulchral shades of repudiation which lies at the bottom of the dark abyss the fragmentary glories of our grand republic and the skeletons of the men who " In blood Stept in so far, that should they wade no more, Returning was as tedious as go o'er," but never did get o'er, as they perished in the mad attempt Oh, yes ! if we could get the above men to take such a glance, and in such a case they did not ex- claim, Citizen soldiers, put up your swords into their scabbards, we would join with the Hon. Edward Everett in the pathetic exclamation, " Throw open your doors, just Bedlam, and send your abused philosophers, princes, and statesmen to their homes ! " Cease your dull prate, ye teachers of morals ! There is no crime, there is no barbarism, there is madness." Yours for truth as well as liberty, J. R BALME, An American Baptist Clergyman. 32 Sun Street THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT ; OK, GENTLE- MANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LIVERPOOL MERCURY. GENTLEMEN, Thus far our expositions of monstrous falsehoods have referred to others ; in our present communication we propose to examine the delusion into which you have fallen in the use which you have made of the words " Gentlemen of Honour and Stand- ing" in your Editorial of June 26, 1863, where you say, "But we must consider it amongst the worst evils of the present civil war that it compels gentle- men of honour and standing, like Mr. Adams and Mr. Dudley, to keep such very indifferent company, as that of some of the persons with whom they have re- cently been associating ! " Some there are who write and speak as if they were influenced by the belief that gentlemanly honour and standing in society, or the world, was only to be found in connection with prelacies and popedoms deacon- ships and bishopricks mitres and crowns ! Will such worldly rank and title operate with greater force on the imagination and affections than the charms df moral goodness ? And since the former are not al- ways associated with the latter, there are many lowly 74 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OE cottagers who dwell in the shades of their greatness, endowed with noble qualities of intellect and heart which make them happy and useful, invest them with a dignity, and shed around them a halo of glory which will hand down their names to posterity al- though their virtues and deeds may be passed over in silence by the nobles and grandees of this world, find no place on historic page, or in the niche of the temple of fame ! Such have a moral superiority which no mere worldly rank or title can secure or confer on their possessors ! Theirs also is a happi- ness which is associated with, the perennial spring of contentment, the overflowing consolations of peace, the enheartening visitations of hope, and the joyous prospects of a blessed immortality, where faith ends in sight, and hope terminates in the fulness of fruition ! But whose pen shall describe, or heart conceive, those magnificently glorious results which have flowed from their meek and quiet spirits the uniform consistency of their lives their acts of self-denial and unrequited toil and the triumphs of their faith ! How sublime is such a spectacle ! what a point of communication such a scene opens up to the view of men between heaven and earth ! And how attractive, since here is to be witnessed " the actions of the just, which smell sweet and blossom in the dust !" Others still speak to us of a " gentlemanly honour and standing" that is exclusively worldly. This is based on integrity, civility, and generosity. But for the highest style of " gentlemanly honour and stand- GENTLEMANLY HONOUE AND STANDING. 75 ing " we must look to the Christian, since piety is the crowning link which is essential to form a genuine specimen of " gentlemanly honour and stand- ing." There are some worldly good men who set a noble example to many who profess to be truly Christian men. But where there is true piety, associated with intel- ligence, economy, punctuality, civility, integrity, and generosity, there must be the highest order of " gentle- manly honour and standing." The ties of consan- guinity, the caprices of fortune, and the genius and skill of men in connection with plodding perseverance, may secure to men, in a worldly sense, " gentlemanly honour and standing." It, however, requires three things to make men of true honour, and the highest order of standing. These are a right principle, a right rule, and a right end. The right principle is the love of God. The right rule is the word of God. And the right end is the glory of God. These alone secure the honour which comes from God invest men with the order of a rank which throws all others into the shade, and makes dim their lustre ; and also confers on them an heirship, and prepares them to enjoy the blissful inheritance of heaven. Let us, then, unfurl the roll of American history in search of this "gentlemanly honour and standing," and see if we can find this precious commodity, whether in the worldly or Christian sense, amongst the Fathers and Founders of our country and govern- ment. And here are the men, the deed, and the day, 76 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OE on which great stress is laid. The men, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. The deed, which was said to have made them immortal, the adoption of a basis of constitutional freedom, and the declaration of inde- pendence. And the day, which was to he celebrated by -bonfires, and fireworks, triumphal arches, the peal of merry bells, and the roar of cannon processions and music orations, and huzzas, henceforth and for ever. If we examine the nature and charac- ter of those documents subscribed to, endorsed, and ratified by the men already referred to documents which embodied the deed which they performed to the execution of which they pledged their lives, for- tunes, and sacred honour ; and if we consider that these documents guarantee and secure to all men un- restricted freedom, irrespective of colour, sex, or age, we may triumphantly ask where is the " tip of the last joint " of that thing which is called " gentlemanly honour and standing ?" When they signed those in- struments did they free their slaves ? Or, did they put the negro on an equality with the white man ? What does impartial history say ? With a voice like thunder it says, No ! Many, therefore, plead that, as they did not do these things, they did not understand these instruments as including the negro, or, as conscientious men, they would have freed their slaves, and restored the negro to an equality with the white man ; be this as it may, these documents place it beyond a doubt or a peradventure that all were included, without restriction as to race, or dis- GENTLEMANLY HONOUK AND STANDING. 77 tinction as to colour ; and therefore it is a monstrous fraud to cover up their delinquencies in the avowal that they proceeded on the basis of making the white people the governing race, and others their inferiors. If we cast our eyes on the successive pages of our history in connection with our government from the days of Washington to Lincoln, we find the same betrayal of trust, forfeiture of all claim to respect in the abominable fraud which has been perpetrated on the black man ; and in no one has this been more manifested than in the person of " Honest Abe Lincoln," so called, who disputed the " exclusive right " and " monopoly " of the late Judge Douglas of being on all sides of all questions in a speech which he delivered at Alton, Illinois, Oct. 15, 1858. And that he shared in the supposed blessings of what he called this " High Privilege " is abundantly made manifest in his published speeches, of which we have already given some remarkable specimens, and could give many more, but we will make one or two suffice. In a speech which Lincoln made at Galesburgh, Illinois, Oct. 7, 1858, he said, " I believe that the right of property in a slave is not distinctly affirmed in the Constitution." In another which he delivered at Cincinnati, Ohio, September, 1 859, he said, address- ing himself to slaveholders, "When we do, as we say, beat you, you perhaps want to know what we will do with you. I will tell you," said he, " we mean to treat you as near as we possibly can as Washington, 78 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OE Jefferson, and Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institution (slavery) to abide by all and every com- promise of the constitution." What he meant by this phrase, " all and every compromise of the Con- stitution," we learn in his Inaugural Address on the 4th of March, 1861, when he said, "There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitive slaves from service or labour. The rendition clause is as plainly written as any other of its provisions. No person, held to service or labour in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in con- sequence of any law or regulation therein be dis- charged from such service or labour, but shall be de- livered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due." "It is scarcely questioned," said Lincoln, " that this provision was intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves, and the intention of the lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution, "and to. this provision as much as any other. To the proposition, therefore, whose cases come within the terms of this clause, ' shall be delivered up,' their oaths are unani- mous. Now, if they would make an effort in good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanimity, frame and pass a law by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath." The Constitution, therefore, according to Lincoln, GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. 79 does not include property in man, and it does include it! When solicited by a convention in Chicago to pro- claim emancipation to the slaves on the basis of a military necessity, he replied that "it would be as inoperative as a bull against a comet." About three weeks from that time he issued the proclamation referred to ! In an address which he delivered at Ottawa, Illinois, Aug. 21, 1 858, Lincoln said, " I think I would not hold one (a slave) in slavery at any rate ; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next ? Free them, and make them, politically and socially, our equals ? My own feelings will not admit of this !" Again, when addressing the people at Chicago, July 10, 1858, he said, " I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist." Where is the tip of the last joint, of gentlemanly honour and standing in the above ? Has it not disappeared and gone out of sight ? We shall find the same results if we trace the history of the abolitionists. We have seen already in the convention held by them at Albany the ring of metal which they gave in connection with the Union, proclaiming it to be an outrage on civilization, and a curse to be removed. In the letter of Mrs Stowe to Lord Shaftesbury we are informed that all classes of emancipationists stand shoulder to shoulder in the war for the Union, although there has been no change 80 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OR amongst the administrators of the government or the people towards the negro as a man ; and at a large meeting recently held in the Church of the Puritans, one of the principal advocates has avowed that Pre- sident Lincoln is the first slave that ought to be emancipated ! Here, again, the " tip of the last joint " of " gentlemanly honour and standing " has gone out of sight. In our religious war crusaders we witness the same lamentable results. One moment they cry mightily to God as the author of peace and lover of concord, and the next, use their prayers as a whetstone on which their people may sharpen their war hatchets still to let out deluges of blood ! In such a war as that, we behold no gentlemanly honour or standing no, not even the "tip of the last joint." The blasts of the war trumpet by thePtev. Henry Ward Beecher are terrific ! How sadly he has mistaken his vocation. And when the writer penned his glowing tribute to the Eev. M. D. Conway in his book, "American States, Churches, and Slavery," he closed his remarks as follows : " Neither have we seen from Conway any appeals to the material sword. But amidst the general defections that have obtained in the above respect, it is difficult to say who amongst the little band of Christian emancipationists have stood true to their mission of peace and good-will. Since then, Conway has mounted the war horse, blown with all his soul the war trumpet, and urged on the carnival of death ; and is now, as well as Beecher, in GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. 81 this country to bespeak your sympathies and co-oper- ation in favour of war to the knife and the knife to the handle. From the editor of the Manchester Examiner and Times, who claims to be more Ameri- can than Americans, we learn that Conway has been making himself less American than himself and Pro-Federal coadjutors, who he claims to be more American than Americans, in the offer which he made in the name of American abolitionists to Mr. Mason to use their influence to discontinue the war on condition of the Southerns adopting gradual emancipation for which offer Conway now declares himself to be very penitent and sad, but consoles himself with the thought that no one will be injured by his misguided zeal but himself, although in his letter to Mason he avowed his authority to make his offer in the name of the abolitionists ! ! what " gentlemen of honour and standing." And the " last tip of the last joint " of this sacred thing called honour is beginning to disappear amongst the Pro-Federals, not only in claiming the black heritage of guilt in being more American than Americans theoretically, but practically. This is shown in a letter addressed to the Edinburgh Re- view, written by Peter Sinclair, Esq., agent to the Union and Emancipation Society in this country. In this letter Mr. Sinclair boldly demands, "What is the issue on the American question ?" And replying to his own question, he has con- fidently asserted that the issue in the present terrible conflict between the North and the South "is freedom 82 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OB or slavery liberty or despotism remunerated labour, or unrequited toil free school, or no school a bible for all, or no bible for millions !" To sustain the above position, he lays mighty emphasis on the following charges, made by John C. Breckenridge, Esq., recently Vice-President of the United States, against the present party in power, whom he designates a " Black Eepublican Party." Breckenridge says, " I charge that the present and ulterior purposes of the Eepublican party are : "1st. To introduce the doctrine of negro equality into American politics, and to make it the ground of positive legislation, hostile to the Southern States. " 2nd. To exclude the slave property of the South from the territory of the Union, or which may be hereafter acquired. " 3rd. To prevent the admission in any latitude of another slaveholding state. "4th. To repeal the Fugitive Slave Law, and practically refuse to obey the constitution on that subject. "5th. To refuse to prevent, or punish by state action the spoliation of slave property ; but, on the contrary, to make it a criminal offence in their citizens to obey the laws of the Union, in so far as they protect property in African slaves. " 6th. To abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. " 7th, To abolish it in the forts, arsenals, dockyards, GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. 83 and other places in the South, where Congress has exclusive jurisdiction. " 8th. To limit, harass, and frown upon the institu- tion in every mode of political action, and by every form of public opinion, " 9th. And, finally, by the executive, by Congress, by the Postal service, by the Press, and in all other accessible modes, to agitate without ceasing, until the Southern States, without sympathy or brotherhood in the Union, worn down by the unequal struggle, shall be compelled to surrender ignominously and emancipate their slaves." " Upon the above indictment," says Mr Sinclair, "the slavery party submitted their case to the people, and the people said we want men holding these views to be our governors. By an overwhelming majority the candidate who brought thece charges against the Republican party was rejected, and a man holding principles including all that was contained in these charges, elected" Here is a statement made by Mr Sinclair, that the political creed of President Lincoln included all that was contained in Breckenriclge's charges ! Let us therefore put President Lincoln on the stand. Lincoln, what do you say to the charge of negro equality? "Not guilty" is the response! This is corroborated in a speech delivered by him at Quincy. Illinois, Oct. 13, 1858, when Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any 84 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OB way the social and political equality of the white and black races!" Is it true that you would prevent new slave states from being admitted into the Union? "Not guilty." This is shewn in his speech made at Freeport, Illinois, August 27, 1858, when Lincoln said, I should be glad to know there would never be another slave state admitted into the Union but I must add, that if slavery shall be kept out of the territories during the territorial existence of any one 'given territory, and then the people shall, having a fair chance, and a clear field when they come to adopt the Constitution, do such an extraordinary thing as to adopt a slave Constitution, uninfluenced by the actual presence of the institution among them, I see no alternative, if we own the country, but to admit them into the Union ! Is it true that you would repeal the Fugitive Slave Law ? " Not guilty," says Lincoln ! In a speech which he made at Freeport, Illinois, Aug. 27, 1858, Lincoln said, " I have never hesitated to say, and do not now hesitate to say, that I think, under the Con- stitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law !'' Is it true that you would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia ? " Not guilty," says Lincoln! In a speech reported in the "Courier" in May 1860, he said, "he had not studied the subject had no distinctive ideas about it he never thought it worth while to consider it much GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. 85 but so far as he had considered it, he should be perhaps in favour of gradual abolition, when the slaveholders of the District "asked for it." And although he has signed a Bill which has been passed in Congress for its abolition since the Disruption yet, at the period of his election, Lincoln could not be held responsible for entertaining such a sentiment and was therefore " not guilty !" As to the charge of anti-slavery agitation, Lin- coln again pleads "not guilty." Such an agitation he says in a speech already referred to, "would be fatal to the country " and be " productive of bad results !" Thus we see, that instead of including all that was contained in Breckenridge's charges, it in- cluded at that period none of the sentiments contained in those charges ! What a position of " honour and standing " for an agent of an emancipation society ! "Who is most to be pitied or prayed for the agent who propagates such statements or the society which employs him ? Be this as it may, there cannot be the tip of the last joint of gentlemanly honour or standing in such work ! It is most strange that ambassador Adams and Consul Dudley can be "gentlemen of honour and standing," and keep, as the above mentioned editors say, " very indifferent company." We had thought, Mr. Editors, that a man was known by the company which he keeps. And that as he who would be wise must walk with wise men, what must be the charac- 86 THE TIP OF THE LAST JOINT, OE ter of those who associate with crimps ? If we stretch out our charitable indulgence to its utmost limits, we cannot say that such connections, when pronounced to be " very indifferent," comport with gentlemanly honour and standing. In such a case, we are sceptical about the existence of the " tip of the last joint !" But methinks I hear those editors whispering to each other the sentiment that those " who live in glass houses must not throw stones." And then comes the startling announcement, that " systems of evil are by no means likely to be uprooted by personal attacks, and we can only attribute the violence of his censure upon the Cheevers, Beechers, and Stowes to the fervour of his zeal in advocating the cause which he has espoused ! " This is certainly very charitable, but whilst the writer disclaims all personal animosity he would claim the right of entertaining what opinions he chooses ; and of expressing them when and where he likes and of calling a spade a spade without ask- ing any pardons, or making any apologies ; and as the writer has been wantonly and wickedly assaulted by Federals and pro-federals, on both sides of the water, and false statements put to his account, is it matter of surprise that his virtuous indignation should be aroused and brought into full play, or that he should try to make the sword give a terrible rebound? God forbid that he, or any other man, should lie motionless under the heels of misguided and reckless men until all life is trodden out of them. An open field, and fair play, is all that the writer asks, and GENTLEMANLY HONOUR AND STANDING. 87 falling back on his motto nil desperandum auspice deo, onward he is prepared to go forwards, though floods and flames oppose. Yours respectfully, for truth as well as liberty. JOSHUA E. BALME. THE LOED MAYOK'S BANQUET, LONDON. TO THE EDITOB3 OF THE BELFAST NEWS-LETTER. SiK, A terrible indignation has been shewn by those who have blindly embraced the cause of the Federals in this country, against the Lord Mayor of London for extending to Mr. Mason, a Confederate Com- missioner, the rights of hospitality. " The above act," say these men, " has disgraced the metropolis and country," because Mason is a " slave- holder," the author of the " Fugitive Slave Law," and represents a " Government based on slavery." These sins are vile and infamous, and the writer has no cloak to cover them up, or inclination to extenuate them, or connive at them ; but where is the difference in point of principle in the Lord Mayor of London receiving as his guest Mr. Mason and the public re- ceptions which these same men have accorded to his Excellency Mr. Adams, Ambassador from our Federal Government, and the representative of a party which has always upheld the Fugitive Slave Law. " Hang Mason, who devised the above infamous law," say these men. On the same rule, they would have to hang up and quarter Ambassador Adams, President Lincoln, ninety-nine hundreds of our clergy, and the THE LORD MAYOR'S BANQUET. 89 vast multitudes of our "meaner whites, or whiter trash," in the North, who have ratified and endorsed, sanctified and blest, this horrible law, and executed it in our so- called Free States in the North. On page 88 of Lincoln's " Campaign Book," the President says, " I have never hesitated to say, and I do not now hesitate to say, that I think, under the Constitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law." If so, what sin was there in Mason supplying the text of it ? The above claim was sustained by Lincoln's perversion of the original draft of the Constitution, to apply it to the Fugitive Slave Law in his inaugural address to the Presidency, and has since been executed under the worst exasperations on the steps of our National Capitol, in full view of his Presidential mansion. However sinful or criminal it may be to devise such a law, it is ten thousand times more so to execute it; and this guilt attaches to our Northern people in America. The above law would have been a dead letter but for them. It still hangs over the people ; and as its enforcement has alone preserved slavery, slave propagandists would have been powerless to preserve or extend the dire and manifold evils of slavery, but for it. The same query with which we commenced may be extended to the different representatives of America, in its application to the Confederate and Federal Governments. The Confederates openly and 90 THE LORD MAYOE'S BANQUET. boldly seek to build up their Government on slavery. Our Federals represent our Government to be the freest in the world : and yet, from its foundation to the present, the victims of slavery have increased from 647,000 to 4,000,000. One stands out un- blushingly like the libertine ; the other comes up under the garb of a sneaking hypocrite, and has never yet sought to wash its hands of its guilt, de- nouncing slavery as a sin, to be taken by the tail and dashed against the wall And yet, forsooth, the meek reprovers of the Lord Mayor would reject the repre- sentatives of the Confederate Government, whilst they fawn upon and natter, caress and cherish, the repre- sentatives of the latter. In the above respects both representatives are on a par ; but these men are not received by civil rulers and magistrates, or the au- thorities of city corporations, or their representatives, on the ground of their moral character, or the charac ter of the government or people whom they represent ; but on the basis of their representative character touching the comity of nations in their relationships to each other. If any other rule was observed but this, in the present condition of society and the world, how restricted would be the intercourse of nations and men ; but whilst these men have cherished resent- ment to the Lord Mayor, and poured on him. their reproaches and contempt for making Mr. Mason his guest at one of his banquets, they have subjected themselves to a tenfold greater reproach in the wel- come which they have given, tributes paid, and gifts THE LOED MAYOE'S BANQUET. 91 bestowed to such persons as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, who have come to this country not as the representatives of civil governments, but of the moral character of society, and the sacred prin- ciples of freedom. In such a case there must be called into requisition that grand element moral principle, as illustrated in their own experience and example, and in the parties whom they represent, or the cause which both parties profess to cherish and honour, suffers at their hands. Thus immense injury is done, or great good derived. Now what moral principle did Mrs. Beecher Stowe ever repre- sent in the cause of freedom, in the mantle of piety which she provides in her Key to Uncle Tom for "lady pious slaveholders," or in the class of men whom she introduces to our notice in the same Key as "Christian slave-traders ;" and yet on one occasion a select circle met in an elegant mansion in the neighbourhood of Heading-ley, Leeds, where, three or four circle deep, Mrs. Stowe became the cynosure of all eyes, whilst one of those vehement denunciators of the Lord Mayor of London, in the name of the fluttering fashionables of beauty, put a beautiful purse, containing two hundred guineas, into her hands ? There has been the same forgetfulness of principle by these men in their reception of American missionaries and endorsement of the American Board of Missions a society supported by its twin sister, the Turkish Aid Missions, since the latter is only a blind to get aid for the former society a society 92 THE LOED MAYOR'S BANQUET. which has never rejected those charming specimens ofhumanity, called Christian slaveholders and slave- breeders, as directors and life members never re- fused to take unhallowed gains, extracted by the lash of the whip and thumb- screw, from the slave, to send the Gospel to the far-off heathen, etc., etc. ; still the same meek reprovers of the Lord Mayor of London are the chief apologists and warmest defenders of the above Board and their missionaries. They put on " dark spectacles " when those terrible delinquencies are spread before their vision, and stuff their ears with the " cotton " of a false charity whilst Christ's name is blasphemed through their monstrous evil practices, and shout " mad dog," fanatic, fool, madman, to the man who lays them bare ; but when they dwell on the " good they do," they brush away their " specs," and, inspired with the nectar of honeyed delight, point to new translations of the Bible, Arabs con- verted, &c., &c. Eecently, pulpit, platform, and press, have justly thundered their anathemas against Bishop Colenso for subverting the authority of Jehovah, in connex- ion with the historical records of the Bible a man who has laid himself open to the severest censure but scarcely a whisper has been heard concerning the corrupters and defilers of God's heritage, who have come into your midst, transformed like Satan into angels of light, to tell of the wonderful works they have done in the name of Christ and yet hide the black deeds of shame, in the robbery of Christ's little THE LORD MAYOR'S BANQUET. 93 ones which has been constantly perpetrated in America, to make up their own salaries, and to furnish them with the machinery of missionary evan- gelization! Where is the thunder, lightning and earthquake in the latter case and yet, is it not as dangerous and mischievous to pervert the fellowships of God's family, as it is to destroy the authority of God in his inspired book? Eecently there has been a tremendous philippic made by the Eev. Dr Candlish against the advisers of the Queen, for causing to be inscribed a quotation from the Apocrypha on a Highland "Cairn," in honour of the late Prince Albert ; this by the Dr. is considered to be a great insult to " Bible loving Scot- land," but it is no insult in the Eev. Dr. and his coadjutors to introduce men who represent Boards of Missions in America, which are a hissing and bye- word, and reproach to civilization, Christianity, and to the age in which we live ! The same dishonour is done to the cause of Christ in the introduction of books written by authors who have been the chief instruments of turning our American churches into " synagogues of Satan," by expurgating from the gospel and the churches that supreme love of liberty which in itself constitutes their greatest excellence and glory. In another place we have given an illustration of the above, in the case of the Eev. Dr. Candlish, and "Good, Better, and Best," a book written by the Eev. J. W. Alexander of New York ! 94 THE LORD MAYOK'S BANQUET. This is also shown in the introduction given "by Professor Smeaton of the New College, Edinburgh, to the " Closer Walk ; or Believer's Sanctification," written by the Rev. Henry Darling, D.D. of Phila- delphia ; a book which discourses sweetly and eloquently on fellowship with Christ, but contains not a syllable about fellowship with Christ's " black little ones" speaks fluently of the saints' "meet- ness" for heaven but not a word on the "pious slaveholders" of America, and our "pious negro- haters " so called, being made meet to declare deliver- ance to their slaves, or to lift up the negro to an equality with themselves ! And yet, in his prefatory note, Mr. Smeaton asks for Darling's book a kind reception amongst the Christians of this country ! The same grievous and lamentable blunder has been made by the Eev. Charles H. Spurgeon, in giving an introduction to a " History of the Transla- tion of the Bible" by Mrs H. Conant, a History which records the doings and sayings of the " Bible Union," New York a society which has done more than all other societies in its brief history, to propa- gate a slave-holding and negro-hating Christianity a society which contains the blackest list of slave- holders and pro-slavery divines of any society in America, and amongst its " Black Constellation " of worthies, so called, we find that the Eev. C. H. Spurgeon's name figures conspicuously as a Vice- President ! Moreover, in the above introduction referred to, Mr. Spurgeon ha classified the Eev. R THE LOED MAYOK'S BANQUET. 95 Fuller of Baltimore, one of the greatest defilers and corrupters of God's heritage in America with his pro-slavery theories and practices, with such men as the Eevs. Daniel Waterland, D.D., Eobert Lowth, D.D., and other great biblical celebrities ! Could they arise from the dead, most assuredly they would protest against the unhallowed association ! As Mr Spurgeon has frankly avowed in his review of a book written by Mr. Mitchell, a coloured preacher, " that he would fling his most vehement testimony into the hypocritical faces of men-owning professors of Christianity," by turning to the "Bible Union Quarterly" for November 1859, and February 1860, he will find urgent claims on him for the above kind of work amongst his brother Bible Union Vice- Presidents ! But the most ludicrous mistake made by the divines of this country is to be found in the introduction given by the Eev. Thomas Binney, to a book called the "Eifle, Axe, and Saddle Bag," written by a blind preacher, named Milburne! This is abundantly made manifest in the following story, which the editor of the Eclectic, in the last number of the old series, takes out of the blind preacher's "Saddle Bags" for the benefit of his readers ! The Eev. James Axley, familiarly known as " Old Jimmy," a renowned and redoubtable preacher, of East Tenessee, delivered a discourse one Sabbath Day at a place called Jones- borough. Another preacher was with him, and a double service was held. In the discourse which Mr 96 THE LORD MAYOB'S BANQUET. Axley delivered, lie observed, "It may be a very painful duty, but it is a very solemn one, for a minister of the gospel, to reprove vice, misconduct, and sin, whenever and wherever he sees it that is a duty I am now about to attend to. And now, continued the speaker, pointing with his long finger in the direction indicated, that man sitting out yonder behind the door, who got up and went out while the brother was preaching, stayed out as long as he wanted to, got his boots full of mud, came back, and stamped the mud off at the door, making all the noise he could, on purpose to disturb the attention of the congrega- tion, and then took his seat, that man thinks I mean him. No wonder he does it does not look as if he had been raised in the white settlements, does it, to behave that way at meeting? Now, my friend, I advise you to learn better manners before you come to church next time: but I don't mean him. And now, again pointing at his mark, that little girl sitting there, about half way in the house, I should judge her to be about sixteen years old that is her with the artificial flowers outside of her bonnet she has a breastpin on too she that was giggling and laughing all the time the brother was preaching, so that the old sisters in the neighbourhood could not hear what he was saying, though they tried to. She thinks I mean her. I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for any parents that have raised a girl to her time of day, and yet have not taught her to behave when she comes to church. Little girl, you have THE LORD MAYOR'S BANQUET. 97 disgraced you* parents as well as yourself. Behave better next time, won't you ? But I don't mean her. Directing his finger to another aim, he said, that man sitting there, that looks as bright and pert as if he was never asleep in his life, and never expected to be but that, just as soon as the brother took his text, laid his head down on the back of the seat in front of him went sound asleep slept the whole time, and snored that man thinks I mean him. My friend, don't you know that the church ain't the place to sleep. If you need rest, why don't you stay at home, take off your clothes, and go to bed that is the place to sleep, and not the church. The next time you have a chance to hear a sermon, I advise you to keep awake. But I don't mean him. Thus did he proceed, pointing out every man, woman, and child, who had in the slightest deviated from a befitting line of conduct, characterising the misdemeanour, and read- ing sharp lessons of rebuke. A judge, named White, was sitting all this time at the end of the front seat, just under the speaker, enjoying the old gentleman's disquisition to the last degree, twisting his neck around to notice if the audience relished the " down- comings" as much as he did, rubbing his hands, smiling, chuckling inwardly. Between his teeth and cheek was a monstrous quid of tobacco, which, the better he was pleased, the more he chawed and the more he spat ; and, behold, the floor bare witness to the results. At length the old gentleman straighten- ing himself up to his full height, continued with G 98 THE LORD MAYOR'S BANQUET. great gravity, and now I reckon you want to know who I do mean ? I mean that dirty, nasty, filthy tobacco-chewer sitting at the end of that front seat his finger meanwhile pointing true as the needle to the pole see what he has been about look at these puddles on the floor a frog would not get into them. Think of the tails of the sisters' dresses being dragged through that muck !" The above preacher reproved sin, whenever and wherever he saw it, marked the slightest deviations, and yet the people he was adress- ing were slaveholders, but the great sin of which they were guilty, in making merchandise of the bodies and souls of their fellow-men the sum of all villanies, which hung like a millstone around their necks, was not discernible to his quick and penetrating eye! And why ? Because in his estimation it had been transformed into a virtuous, domestic, and patriarchal institution ; so that, whilst he strained at the above gnats, he could swallow a crime as large as a camel ! How strange that a book which recites the above with great gusto and delight, and lifts such a man up as a model of fidelity amongst preachers, is thus introduced to the enlightened and considerate regard of the people of this country ! Such a course discovers an enormous amount of ignorance, or else a terrible connivance at sin ! Some writers have won the sobriquet of being crazy men, for calling attention to the many wide- spread and fearful delinquencies that obtain ; but then, nobody ever tried to do his duty without fear or favour, without becoming crazy. If it be a sign THE LOED MAYOR'S BANQUET. 1)9 that they have got a "slate off their roof," as some of their " kind friends " have declared, here is the intelligible and unmistakeable evidence of it in the clear, ringing and thrilling shout, that with such a Union, such a theology in America, and such a mistaken policy as the above, it is a wonder that any decent man retains the shadow of respect towards Christian institutions ! Sad mistakes have been made on this subject. Men have gone to the lives of professors, and seen so much of erroneous practice there, that it has warped their judgments and soured their spirits against Christianity itself. This is however wrong. And " crazy " as we may appear to be in the eyes of bigoted partizans, we must not allow our religious belief to be split up and dashed to pieces on such a rock Yours for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA E. BALME, 82 Sun-street. FACTS TO BE BORNE IN MIND BY ALL TEUE LOVEES OF FEEEDOM IN EEGAED TO THE KEY. HENEY WAED BEECHEE. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, According to the united testimony of the reporters for the New York newspapers, Mr Beecher (January 25, 1860, in Plymouth Church) advanced the follow- ing propositions : 1. That a man might hold a slave and not do wrong. 2. That immediate emancipation is impos- sible. 3. That a slaveholder may he a good Christiaa 4. That the influence of slavery is not always evil 5. That some actual slaveholders are doing more for the cause of freedom than some violent jeformers. 6. That anti-slavery bigotry is like that of the Papacy. The above need no comments, although some strangely amusing comments were made on the above proposi- tions in the New York papers and journals at the time, which would be interesting to produce at the present time, more especially as Mr. Beecher desires your co-operation and practical sympathy to supply the means to put the knife to the throats of his " old friends his Christian slaveholders." At the time Mr. Beecher propounded the above maxims he made an elaborate defence of the American Board of Missions, that has been sustained by a fund THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 101 created by a long list of life members who are slave- holders and negro-haters, and which board, at that very time, according to the testimony of the Liberator, July 6, 1860, had for one of its " corporate members" the Eev. Dr. Plummer, a Presbyterian clergyman, who made a proposal to "burn alive such aboli- tionists as could be caught in Eichmond, Virginia." Mr. Beecher, in his "Harper's Ferry Sermon," avows that " the South has a Christian conscience ;" that the slaves held by men who possess this Christian conscience " cannot be and will not be free for ages ;" that " we are to leave no pains untaken through the Christian conscience of the South to give to the slave himself a higher moral status ;" that " the time is rapidly coming when the Southern Christian will feel a new inspiration ;" that " we are not far removed from the doctrines of Christian manhood and the divine right of men;" that "when this Pentecost comes the slaves will be stirred by their own masters ;" that " we must make the master discontented with slavery, and he will speedily take care of the rest ;" that " our Christian public sentiment " in America, "owned and cherished by the masters of the slaves," and we who are to " work upon the master ; " that such a Christian public sentiment "is a pendulum swinging between owning or exporting the poor in our midst ;" that those men who stand outside the great "cordon of darkness" in the South, with its " Christian conscience, have no right, to carry into the system of slavery exterior discontent ; " that " it is 102 THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. not good for the slaves themselves ;" that our Union, with such a " pendulum," and the atmosphere of such a public sentiment around it, "hath health in it;" and that John Brown was " insane" in disturbing the pendulum of the Union in his attempt to create such discontent " by inciting slaves to run away." As we have got such strange quartz from the dig- gings of Beecher's "Harper's Ferry Sermon," let us turn to one of his Thanksgiving Sermons, reported in the " New York Tribune," Nov. 28, 1861. On this memor- able dayBeecher said " Our country has long lain in the ever-tightening serpent folds of slavery. The per- plexing questions of race, caste, condition, and climate cast into the nation by the African bondman, which the wisest and strongest knew not how to deal with, were likely to be solved by the war. A direct political emancipation was impossible. He wished Adam had not sinned, and his posterity had not been affected, but that did not help the matter. He wished our fathers had stood out against the com- promises of the constitution, for a serpent just hatched was not half so dangerous as a full-grown serpent. "We had declared our fealty to the constitution, and we could not now break the pact The war had not driven us into revolution. The constitution was not superior to right, conscience, or liberty. We must keep by our plighted faith, and when we could not abide by our promise we had better stand apart as two separate peoples. Were we then shut up by this reasoning? No. What the pen of the legislator THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 103 could not do the sword of the warrior would do." Mr Beecher, in his Manchester speech at the Free Trade Hall, said " Let me say one word here about the constitution of America. It recognises slaver} 7 as a fact, but it does not recognise the doctrine of slavery whatever." In this paragraph Mr. Beecher puts the constitution of our dis-United States in the same relationship to slavery as the Bible stands to sin. It recognises sin as a fact, but not as a doctrine otherwise than to be shunned, contemned, despised, abhorred. But Mr. Beecher in the paragraph extracted from his Thanksgiving Sermon speaks of the " corn- promises of the constitution." What does he mean by them ? Surely not the recognition of slavery as a fact, but a doctrine to be believed in, embraced, and practised. He wished it had been otherwise, as in the case of Adam's transgression, but that did'nt help the matter." Quite true, Mr. Beecher ; but you say that it made "political emancipation impossible.'' This is a most strange, delusive, and dangerous doctrine to be taught by any man, but especially by an avowed minister and disciple of Christ. But why was political emancipation impossible ? Let Mr. Beecher answer " We had sworn fealty to the constitution" (with its compromises), which at Manchester he said contained no compromises ; " we had made a promise," and if we could not keep " our plighted faith, and abide by our promise, we had better stand apart as two peoples." But have the Northern partners in our black partnership concern 104 THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHES. kept their promise, or maintained their plighted faith to a constitution which, according to Beecher, the administrators of the government, with the consent of the people, had made a covenant with death and an agreement with hell ? No. " But what the pen of the legislator could not do the sword of the warrior would," said Beecher. Instead of sensibly standing apart as two peoples, the more inhuman, irrational, and terrible arbitrament of the sword is resorted to. The above pretexts of Mr. Beecher are not only hollow, but horrible ; and it would be quite in harmony with Mr. Beecher's theory to throw off his prophet's mantle, or to lay aside his shepherd's crook in his lecture, in the Philharmonic Hall, next Friday evening, and to appear in his " Pantomime covered with the war paint, and holding the " war hatchet" in his hands. Mr. Beecher, in his speech at Manchester, spoke of a class of men " who licked the feet of slaveholding men." In the facts, however, that we have given we leave our readers to judge who has been the greatest " lickspittle." Thus, Mr. Beecher has gone for saving the union by keeping his plighted faith with the constitution and "its compromises," but now a spirit has come over his dreams, and he throws " his compromises " overboard to urge men to get not at what he calls the " Christian conscience of the South," but at the necks and throats of his " Christian slaveholders," THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHER. 105 to preserve his blind devotion to and superstitious veneration of the Union. Mr. Beecher, in his recent speech at Glasgow, avowed that the Northerns would give "their last child and last dollar to restore the Union ; but the conscription, associated with its dreadful tragedies, and his own avowal " that God and the negro are to save the Eepublic" do not harmonise, nor does also the belief which he avowed at Manchester that in the present fratricidal war the Northerns " are giving their best blood for principle." The seed corn of the old English martyrs was not associated with the doctrine of compromising truth with falsehood, or of uprooting error with the sword. Mr. Beecher said " Under God, the South has done more to bring on this work of emancipation than the North itself." First, they began after the the days of Calhoun to declare that they accepted slavery no more as a misfortune, but as a Divine blessing. The above is quite true, but it is not the whole truth, since the cause of this dreadful apostacy in the South originated in the teachings of the Northern pulpits, colleges, missionaries, and tract society boards, who for commercial causes introduced the "obscene goddess" of slavery, and proclaimed its humanity and divinity until, as Wendel Phillips, Esq., in 1860, declared orthodoxy was a " sea of rottenness." So that, base and infamous as " the hierarchs of infidelity" may be in the South who declare that the foundation of the Southern republic 106 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHEE. is slavery, it emanates from Northern tuition ; and vile and degrading as the sentiments are which have been addressed by the Southern clergy and churches to the Christians of this country, viler, blacker, and more atrocious sentiments still, if possible, may be culled from the writings, sermons, and speeches of Drs. Nehemiah Adams, Lord, Stuart, and Hoge, and the Eev. Vandyke, of New York, and the Eight Eev. Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont, &c., &c. Mr. Beecher said "No offence had been com- mitted, none threatened by the North against the South, but the arrogation was that the election of a man (Lincoln) known to be pledged against the exten- sion of slavery was not compatible with the safety of slavery in the South." Mr. Beecher must be strangely ignorant of the speech made by President Lincoln at Springfield, June 12, 1858, when he said " I believe this country cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," &c., &c. ; also of the interpretation which the Southerns put upon it as " a war of sec- tions ;" and also of Lincoln's recantation of the above speech at Ottawa, Illinois, Aug. 21, 1858 ; and also of the declaration made by Lincoln at Freeport, Illinois, Aug. -27, 1858, " that if any territory adopted a slave constitution uninfluenced by the actual pre- sence of the institution amongst its members, that he saw no other alternative, if we held the union, but to admit them." Mr. Beecher' s statement in regard to the spread of abolitionism on the basis of no compromise is not in THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHEE. 107 accordance with the history of the case. In Fred. Douglas's Monthly, for August, 1860, reference is made by him to Wendel Phillips, declaring that " the efforts of abolitionists for twenty years in the cause of freedom had been bootless ;" and Douglas himself said at the same period " Little progress had been made in twenty-five years of anti-slavery effort. There have been many mistakes to be corrected, and there has been much force used up by needless faction between contending factions." The testimony of the above men is complete, and as Mr. Beecher claims it a privilege to " unloose their shoes," he will hardly dispute their, authority. But if the above should be deemed insufficient out of many facts which we could give of the " pro-slavery proclivities " of our Northern people, take the follow- ing. It is the case of the Eev. Dr. Plummer, who, instead of losing caste for the expression we have quoted and the unchristian spirit which he manifested was promoted to honour after the above " diabolical utterances " referred to ; chosen professor of didactic and pastoral theology in the Western Theological Seminary at Alleghany City, Pennsylvania : "And," according to the testimony of Wni. Loyd Garrison, " so far from the American board rebuking him in this wickedness, he has virtually rebuked the board by resigning his membership at the last annual meeting (October, 1859), probably because the board had sneaked out of the support of slavery in the Choctaw mission, instead of continuing to uphold it, as they 108 THE EEV. HENRI WARD BEECHER still do in the Cherokee mission. But, since the American Tract Society has never made even so small a concession as this to the demands of anti-slavery, Dr. Plummer remains one of its ' directors ' (as he has "been ever since 1836), and made a speech at its last annual meeting, May 9, 1860, in support of the following resolution, presented by another pro-slavery divine, Eev. Dr. Eichard Fuller of Baltimore, as follows : ' Eesolved : That the national and catholic spirit of the American Tract Society, and its influence upon the literature of the land, ought to make it dear to every Christian and patriot.'" At the Tahernacle meeting in London the other day, Mr. Beecher said " Language failed him to express his admiration of this country." In the Independent, of which he is editor and proprietor, January 30, 1862, Mr. Beecher said " Except in the madness of our Southern rebels it would be difficult to find a parallel for the malice which the whole English nation, government, newspapers, priests, and people (a few individuals excepted) have exhibited towards the American Union and its loyal citizens in the crisis of their greatest trial and danger. How can he reconcile the above statements ? In the Independent, Dec. 6, 1861, there is also the following record from the pen of Mr. Beecher : " Should the President yield to the present necessity (in the Trent affair) as the less of two evils, and bide our time with England, there will be a sense of wrong, of national humiliation so profound, and a horror of the THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHEfc 109 unfeeling selfishness of the English Government in this great emergency of our affairs, such as will inevit- ably break out by and by in flames that will be extin- guished only by a deluge of blood. We are not living the whole of our life to-day. There is a future to the United States in which the nation will right any in- justice of the present hour." " Allusion having been made to the above by the Eevs. Messrs Graham & Kennedy at the Tabernacle meeting held in London, Mr. Beecher ignored the threat which he connected with the words wronged, humbled, unfeeling selfishness that must be punished, the volcano of indignation that will leap up in resent- ment the deluge of blood that will follow the near- ness of those sanguinary scenes as the above deluge of blood is to be poured out in our life. All this is ignored by Mr. Beecher, and in their place he said, at the London meeting referred to, ' Then we will show England how we can forgive an injury, and heap coals of -fire on the heads of those from whom it comes.' In the future sense of the above language used by Mr. Beecher, is there any sense or forgive- ness- made manifest, or ' squelching' of the flames that will break out by and by with any overflow of charity? How can such an explanation harmonise with his original statement, published in his own favourite newspaper the Independent ? And so far from there being any forgiving spirit or truly proper Christian spirit shown by Mr. Beecher; if your numerous readers could only get access to the 110 THE EEV. HENRY WARD BEECHER' columns of his newspaper, they would find that the only fire which Mr. Beecher and his coadjutors advocated is Greek fire. This is their ten command- ments sermon on the Mount gospel. In proof of which see an editorial article in the London Patriot a week or two ago, in which the editor lodges a grave complaint about the use of their ' Greek fire.' " Surely the present is an age of wonders, when Mr. Beecher can receive " deafening plaudits" in the pre- sence of such " revelations," and have addresses and memorials superbly printed and embellished for "consistent advocacy" as an abolitionist. The lion's skin cannot cover up his long ears. Yours, for truth as well as liberty. JOSHUA R BALME, an American Clergyman. 56, Islington, Liverpool, Oct. 13, 1863. THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHER To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, In a sermon preached by Mr. Beecher, October 30, 1859, and published in the " Echoes of Harper's Ferry," when speaking of brute force, he says " It would be the most cruel, hopeless, and desperate of all conceivable follies to seek emancipa- tion by the sword and by blood." (P. 268.) Again, he says, " So far as human instrumentation is concerned, with all the conscience of a man, with all the faith of a Christian, and with 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 neighbours to them bad for the whole land bad from beginning to end ! An evil so unminded and malignant that its origin can scarcely be doubted." (P. 269.) Eeferring to the sovereign rights of the people, he says " I believe in the right of a people to assert and achieve their liberty. 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 a right to change their rulers, their government, their whole political cond : 112 THE REV. HENBT WAED BEECHER. tion. This right is not either granted or limited in the New Testament. It is left as is air, water, and exis- tence itself, as things not requiring command or legis- lation." (P. 269.) Eegarding the treatment of coloured people, Mr. Beecher says " No one can fail to see the inconsis- tency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professions of sympathy for the Southern slaves. How are the free coloured people treated at the North ? They are almost without education, with but little sympathy for igno- rance. They are refused the common rights of citizen- ship which the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in the cars of our city railroads. They are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in New York ? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave at once, or cause him to leave ! Can the black man be a carpenter ? There is scarcely a carpenter's shop in New York in which a journey- man would continue to work if a black man was em- ployed in it. Can the black man engage in the common industries of life ? There is scarcely one in which he can engage. He is crowded down, down, down through the most menial callings to the bottom of society. We tax them, and then refuse to allow their children to go to our public schools. We tax them, and then refuse to sit by them in God's house. We heap upon them moral obloquy more Atrocious THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHEE. 113 than that which the master heaps upon the slave. And, notwithstanding all this, we lift ourselves up to talk about the rights and liberties of the human soul, and especially the African soul ! It is true that slavery is cruel, but it is not at all certain that there is not more love to the race in the South than in the North. They love their property. We do not own them, so we do not love them at all. The prejudice of the whites against colour is so strong, that they cannot endure to ride or sit with a black man, so long as they do not own him. As a neigh- bour they are not to be tolerated ; but as property "they are most tolerated in the house, the church, the carriage, the couch. The African owned may dwell in America ; but unowned he must be expatriated emancipation must be jackal to colonisation. The choice given to the African is plantation or colonisation. Our Chris- tian public sentiment is a pendulum, swinging be- tween owning or exporting the poor in our midst." (Pp. 271, 272.) And when speaking of the impotency of the public sentiment of the North for good, he inquires " What can the North do for the South unless her own heart is purified and ennobled ! When the love of liberty is at so low an ebb that churches dread the sound, min- isters shrink from the topic; when book-publishers dare not publish or republish a word on the subject of slavery, cut out every living word from school books, expurgate life passages from Humbolt, Spurgeon, and all foreign authors or teachers ; and when great reli- H THE REV. HENEY WAED BEECHEE. gious publication societies, endowed for the very pur- pose of fearlessly speaking the truths which interest would let perish, pervert their trust and are dumb first and chiefly and articulate only in things that thousands of others could publish as well as they, what chance is there that public sentiment in such a community will have any power with the South?" (P. 274) Can any one harmonise these utterances of Beecher with his orations in England, or Beecher himself? To unite the above would cause a tremendous explo- sion, and all that would be left of him would be a magnificent hoax played off on the credulity of the British people, with fragmentary photographs, and pieces of embellished vellum in the ruins, which would serve as a deposit in the British Museum, as proof positive that we have entered upon the age of shams. Yours, for truth as well as liberty. J. R BALME. 56, Islington, Oct. 29, 1863- THE EEV. HENKY WAKD BEECHER To the Editor of the Examiner and Times. SIR, Will you oblige" me by the insertion of the following remarks, contained in a letter to me, written by the Kev. Henry Ward Beecher, relative to several letters which have appeared on certain sayings of Mr. Beecher ? The observations are as follows : " As to the reported expressions of mine I need not deny them to any right-minded man ; and to any other it would be useless to do it. But if anybody wants to know either my opinions or my feelings respecting England, he has only to ask me and he shall be answered plainly. Let it be done in open meeting. I I am not going to be led into an irrelevant quarrel about distorted reports of remarks of mine years ago, taken out of their connective and qualifying circum- stances. Here I am in England to give every honest man that wishes to know my honest opinions a chance to learn them. When I have made my speech, if any one desires to ask me any questions I shall receive his requests courteously, and answer them frankly." I trust that the preceding remarks will be sufficient to guide the conduct of any inquirer after information, and also correctly indicate the time for, and the man- ner of, making the inquiry. Yours respectfully, JOHN H. ESTCOUKT. Manchester, October 7, 1863. 116 THE EEV. EENKY WARD BEECHER Having in a previous letter shewn Mr Beecher's discrepancy between his published sentiments in Ame- rica, and his explanation given at the Tabernacle meeting, London, we shall now call attention to what he calls " distorted reports of remarks of mine years ago, taken out of their connective and qualifying cir- cumstances." The occasion of his remarks was the following resolution, submitted at the annual meeting of his church in January 1860. "Eesolved, that this church contribute no more money to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions." The above resolution was not only submitted but sought to be maintained by a small band of aboli- tionists in Mr Beecher's church, from the following considerations 1. From the beginning they have allowed slave- holders in their Cherokee and Choctaw churches. 2. They expressly admit that they " have given no in- structions to the missionaries in relation to slavery." 3. By a unanimous vote, they rejected a resolution offered by one of their members, "that slaveholding is a practice which is not to be allowed in ^ae Christian Church." 4. After having allowed slavery in the Choc- taw mission from its very commencement, they dis- continued the mission in 1859, to get rid of " embar- rassments " and " perplexities." 5. They continue to support the equally slaveholding Cherokee mission, without rebuke to its slaveholding church members, wr to its pro-slavery missionaries. THE EEV. HENRY WAED BEECHEE. 117 Mr. Beecher, however, felt a stronger love to the American Board of Missions than to freedom, whilst in the face of the above great historical facts, he de- fended the American Board in an address of two hours' duration, when he maintained that " it was the pro- per depositary for the contributions of Plymouth Church," that to " an unparalleled degree it had kept pace with public sentiment on the subject of slavery," and " was clean, clear, and pure, in its record," refer- ring to doctrine, discipline, and action. In this address he gave utterance to the strange pro- positions referred to in a preyious letter, and which he now calls " distorted, and taken from their connective and qualifying circumstances." There is, however, the same unvarying testimony in the columns of the press, both secular and religious, against Beecher. The anti-slavery " Standard " remarked, " The speech has not been reported in full, but we give what we sup- pose to be a fair sketch, partly from ' The Tribune/ and partly from ' The Express.' ME. BEECHEE'S SPEECH. He intended to maintain to-night, first, that the American Board was the proper depositary of the con- tributions of this church of those funds by which it is desired to preach the gospel in foreign lands ; secondly, that, while he was entirely and perfectly willing that the American Missionary Association should have a collection, he could not do it at the expense of the American Board ; thirdly, that the American Board 118 THE EEV. HENRY WAED BEECHER had to an unparalleled degree keptp ace with public sentiment on the subject of slavery, and now held anti-slavery doctrines, and had faithfully and consist- ently applied these doctrines to missionary work, and that it was clean, clear and pure on this subject. This society was to be preferred because it had a position in nearly every quarter of the globe. The American Missionary Association gave you no chance to preach the gospel in Western or Northern Asia or China, where they have not a missionary, nor a native helper. True, the Missionary Association might say, " Give us the money %nd we will establish mis- sionaries in all these places." This would be like a small firm saying to buyers, Don't go to the large houses, to Claflin and Mellen, or Bowen and M'Namee, or Stewart's ; come to us, and if we haven't got the stock you want, when we are rich enough, we'll keep on hand all that you want. He preferred the American Board, also, because it was old, and was hallowed by association. It was objected to the American Board that it was a close corporation. He compared its action with that of the American Tract Society, an open corporation, much to the disadvantage of the latter. On the question of slavery, he proceeded to defend the Board. These Indian Missions went back to the time when there was no agitation against slavery. And the churches then established were in- dependent ; their independence, like that of all other churches under the American Board being carefully guarded. THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER 119 Mr. Beecher read from the report of 1854 of the American Board taking the ground that it was not necessary to exclude the slave-holders from commun- ion. They denounced slavery, but would consider the circumstances of those who, without their own action, had been made slaveholders. One of the mis- sionaries, vie wing slavery in all its bearings, denounced its baleful effects upon both masters and slaves. This was the feeling in 1845, and they had not yet learned the doctrine of discrimination between the selfish and unselfish slaveholder. He held that a man might hold a slave and not do wrong. This must be the case until time is annihilated. There might be for- malities, and whether they took seconds, days, or weeks, time must be consumed. Such a thing as im- mediate emancipation was impossible. He did not believe that slaveholding was necessarily sinful. There was no such thing as a thing being bad per se, or good per se. That was a scholastic subtlety. Nothing was bad per se, and nothing was good per se. A thing that was bad in its results was bad, and a thing good in its results wasgood. The question with regard to slavery was, whether it was baneful in its in- fluence or not. The American Board has taken this ground: That selfish slaveholding was reprehensible ; but if a man were put in circumstances where he could not help it, he was permitted to do so. If a man could not emancipate his slave, he fellowshipped him, and would sit down to table with him, and so would Christ. He would go through fire and water to stand by that 120 THE KEY. HENY WAED BEECHES. man. The Board had done all that they could to en- force these doctrines. But it was not reasonable to ask that the churches among the Choctaws should be- come anti-slavery before Dr Spring's or the Mercer Street Church became so, or half the churches in Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher reviewed the course of the American Board in regard to slavery among the Choc- taw churches. He thought the books of Corinthians the best adaptation of Christian principle to the actual state of things. And next to them he placed Mr. Treat's report on the American Board and Slavery in the Cherokee and Choctaw Churches. Mr. Beecher presented the history of the Board's action in regard to slavery, and read at length from Mr. Wood's report, accepted by the missionary churches as their guide in matters pertaining to slavery. If by their vote they withdrew their sympathy from the American Board, they might just as well withdraw it from their pastor, and vote that they would not hear him preach any longer, for he held just such views. , Because the missionaries said that they could not bring the Choc- taw churches up to this agreement, the American Board had cut off these churches. When we looked at the course of the churches contributing to the American Board, in regard to slavery, we were sur- prised that the American Board had taken such ground as it had. If there was one form of slavery which he utterly abhorred, it was bigotry for liberty. In the advanced anti-slavery movements of this country, there was a bigotry which equalled any papal intolerance (applause and hisses) THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHES. 121 Such is the character of the report given, let us turn to some of the comments made by editors on the speech reported. The Christian Intelligencer, the organ of the Dutch Church, said of Beecher's speech : ME. BEECHEE'S CONSEEVATISM. " When good men forsake their evil ways, the cause of truth is invigorated, righteousness achieves fresh triumphs, and the wicked are put to shame. It has been our painful and melancholy duty, as faithful journalists, to chronicle, in past times, some aberra- tions of Mr. Beecher from the good old paths the fathers trod ; but latterly, we have been disposed to call for the 'fatted calf,' because this our brother was lost, but is found again!' Ever since the Harper's Ferry foray, the minister of Plymouth Church seems to have had his eyes wide open, to see what abolitionism is coming to. What Mr. Beecher may have meant for eloquent fun others took up in prac- tical and bloody earnest, and carried war to the gates. As an honest and sagacious man, Mr. Beecher seems to have discovered the necessity which was laid upon him to revise his opinions, and overhaul his previous course of anti-slavery agitation. The result has been every way satisfactory. We find him now opposing Lewis Tappan, aud the peripatetic editor of the The Independent (Mr. Leavif), and the legal acumen of Mr. Benedict, and the fiery phalanx of fanatics in his own Church on the subject of slavery. 122 THE EEV. HENEY WAKD BEECHER So confident were we of Mr. Beecher's sincere con- version from the ultraist to the conservative side that we ventured our prediction, last week, that he would, on Monday evening last, put the Abolitionists h ors du combat on the missionary question. Saving a few inconsiderate utterances, his speech was throughout an excellent declaration of conservative principles. We quote a brace of paragraphs, which are so clear and so well pronounced, that, when transferred to our columns, they will be seen to be of the same manner and spirit of opinion which this paper has stifly and persistently advocated for years. Read Mr. Beecher : [We need not repeat the extract, as it is embodied in the foregoing report of Mr. Beecher's speech. Ed. Standard.] That is the sound and wholesome doctrine which our friend, Rev. Harvey D. Ganse, so ably presented years ago in a widely circulated and greatly admired pamphlet, and which the Christian Intelligencer endorsed ex animo et ab corde. Mr. Beecher, having sown his wild oats, is now getting on to the platform of Dutch conservatism, where he can afford to stand " 'Till rolling years shall cease to move." Truth is mighty, and will prevail. Modesty forbids us to claim that Mr. Beecher's frequent readings of the Intelligencer have done him good, like a medicine ; but we have our feelings of encouragement and satis- faction in this case, which will cheer us in our endea- THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHEE. 123 vours to aid Brother Cheever, and others like him, who dont know what to do with genteel negroes, when they chance to enter their churches ; or with slaveholding ladies, who receive their ministrations under special exceptions. Mr. Beecher, in his speech of last Monday evening, went further than to denounce the malum in se men. He let fly a terrible accusation against the " anti-slavery bigots," which must have sounded like a crack of a Sharp's rifle among the abolition convicts whom the speaker arraigned on Monday evening last. Consider attentively his words. ****** The bold, manly, conservative and Christian posi- tion which Mr. Beecher has recejtitly taken with reference to the existing anti-slavery agitation has brought down upon him the adverse criticisms of certain ultra journals, whose political override their ethical principles. We heartily rejoice that Mr. Beecher has, in these exciting times, avowed his hostility to intermeddling Abolitionists and anti- slavery bigots. For as there is an uncounted multi- tude of people in the land who borrow their brains, their thoughts, their principles and their utterances from the eloquent and popular minister of Plymouth Church, we can easily see that his example will be studied and imitated by many influential leaders of opinion, both clerical and political. We do not care to recal now what Mr. Beecher may have said or 124 THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHER. done in former times, in the abolition interest. It is enough for us to know that, in his riper age, and with his maturer judgment, and fuller observation, he has deliberately asserted : 1. That a man might hold a slave and not do wrong. 2. That immediate emancipation is impossible. 3. That a slaveholder may be a good Christian. 4. That the influence of slavery is not always evil. 5. That some actual slaveholders are doing more for the cause of freedom than some violent reformers. 6. That anti-slavery bigotry is like that of the Papacy. These maxims have been enunciated from an honest heart more devoted to truth than to partisan- ship, and have secured for him this regard, the admiration of all men who can appreciate the nobility and magnanimity of character which will show them- selves on great occasions, superior to the mousing meanness of little bigots and partisans. The New York Tribune said, " Mr Beecher made some very extraordinary declarations in his speech on Monday evening. For example, he then declared that nothing was good or bad in itself, and thus that slavery was not a universal wrong. Without embarking upon any metaphysical disquisition, we may at least ask if African slavery, as we know it in the United States and elsewhere, is not a wrong, an infernal wrong, and an accursed nuisance as well ? And as this is the prac- tical point in the whole discussion, Mr. Beecher's de- THE KEV. HENEY WARD BEECHER. 125 claration, which is of very questionable character in connection with it, and which bears against the great truth itself, seems to us to savour of unusual eccen- tricities." The Express, one of the veiy worst of the political pro-slavery journals, thus vented its exultation: "The pith of the matter is the improving position of Mr. Beecher himself upon the subject of slave- agitation and slavery; for he, like most men, as he grows older, seems to be becoming more conservative, and thus not to have lived in vain. * * * Who shall say, after this, that the Union meetings are not converting even the heathen to moderation and better sense? Anon, under such advancing preaching as this [allu- ding to Mr Beecher's speech] the broken bond of the Churches of our country (alas the fatally broken bond) which has clone more to dissever this Republic than all the politicians combined may be restored; and eight millions of Christians in the. South may once more be restored to the communion table with the Christians of the North. What tlie Saviour and the Apostles could do, the Abolitionists of the North have not yet been able to do that is, receive as brethren in the Church slaveholders as wett as non-slaveholders; but, if the Beechers thus begin to pioneer the way, the flood old time may be re-coming, when once more we shall be a united people. Christianity, and Christianity alone the Christianity of the North, acting in comity and concert with the Christianity of the South may and can reform everything wrong in slaveholding 126 THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. communities, and, in the end, perhaps, make the slave be fit for that freedom which it would then be unjust to deprive him of, but this holier than thou Christi- anity of our modern Pharisees is a curse to the .country, the slave, the master, and to all society. The remarks of the pastor of the Plymouth Church show how the current of abolitionism is setting in a better way." The Irish News observed : " Our best and strongest minds won't go the whole abolition hog. In quiet times they will be light and loose-tongued ; but, in the crisis, they come out like bricks for the Union and the welfare of this wonderful family of republics. They stop shrieking and sing Yankee Doodle. Pulpits or journals, it is all the same : good sensible men take their place on the right side and austerely bid their fanatical neigh- bours shut up. As for Mr. Beecher, we are glad the sight of that deadly weapon gave him remorse, re- ferring to a Sharp's rifle exhibited by Mr. Tilton. The feeling was a salutary *one. But we think well of him and hope good things of him good things, indeed, of all kinds. We are sorry Mr. Mitchel is not here. He would rejoice exceedingly to see his old ad- versary coming round. He would extend the warm hand of reconciliation, representing his emotion. It would, in fact, be Dorax and Sebastian over again. " They call Beecher a trimmer. Well, perhaps he is. Let him accept the term. Saville Lord Halifax, once upon a time, did the same, and, with a wit as brilliant and happy as Beecher's own, showed that it was a THE EEV. HENBY WAED BEECHER 127 name suitable to a man of the finest sense and judg- ment, as well in the management of state affairs as in the general conduct of sublunary matters. In sailing over the ocean of life, in fact, the best man trims his ship best. The man who cannot trim, blunders on rocks, falls to pieces, bursts up, goes to Davy Jones's , locker. We hope Mr. Beecher's runagates will take heart and grace and come back. If they don't, he may take Dogberry's consolation and be thankful he has got rid of them." The Anti-slavery Standard commented as fol- lows : " PLYMOUTH CHUECH AND ITS PASTOR. " Henry Ward Beecher has generally been regarded, by friends and foes alike, as a thorough-going anti- slavery minister, and the Church of which he is pastor has been generally supposed to be a thorough- going anti-slavery Church. Both indeed have been accounted by slaveholders and their apologists as quite "fanatical" upon the question of the negro's rights, while many honest friends of the slave have supposed that their reputation in this respect was well deserved. Many of Mr. Beecher's sayings and doings, bearing the stamp of noble impulses and " good intentions," have been calculated to create and foster this impression ; but Abolitionists, who have closely watched his course and that of his Church, and understood the relations of both to pro- slavery men and pro-slavery ecclesiastical and mis- 128 THE EEV. HEXEY WARD BEECHEE. sionary institutions, have long been painfully cogni- zant of short- comings on their part, which tended to nullify their influence against slavery. Their anti- slavery has been exhibited more in words than in deeds. Often denouncing slavery from the pulpit as a sin, Mr. Beecher has always been, as he is now, in ecclesiastical fellowship with pro slavery men, and he does not appear to have been even aware that he was required, either on the score of principle or consistency, to keep himself and his Church free from complicity with the champions and apologists of chattelism. Every year, since its organization, the Church, with the approbation of its pastor, has made a contribution to the American Board, never once protesting against its pro-slavery course : and until a recent period it did the same thing for the American Tract Society. But for no organization representing the great anti-slavery movement of the country has it ever made a collec- tion ! On several occasions it has indeed assisted in purchasing the freedom of slaves an act so far from being distinctively anti-slavery, that it is often per- formed by many of the bitterest pro-slavery men ; and once or twice, perhaps oftener, it has assisted in some educational movement for the benefit of coloured peo- ple. But the anti-slavery cause, as such, has never, like the Bible, the Missionary and the Tract causes, been deemed worthy of its benefactions. He talks of the American Board as if he were utterly oblivious of its history for the last thirty years as if he were un- conscious that it has exerted its whole influence to THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 29 " crush out" the anti-slavery movement, and to prevent discussion of the subject in its meetings, and as if igno- rant of its Jesuitism in putting forth anti-slavery sen- timents only as a means of gaining immunity for pro- slavery action. In behalf of the Board, in spite of its shameless disregard of the claims of the slaves, and its efforts to smother their cries for relief, his mouth is full of excuses, his heart overflowing with charity ; and he is ready to overlook all differences between it and himself, and fold it in one long and loving embrace. But toward the Abolitionists, who have stood by the cause of the slave through sorest trials, and in opposi- tion to a corrupt State and an apostate Church, his feelings are of quite another sort. Instead of wishing to draw nearer to them, and to overlook differences of sentiment in the love of a common cause, he averts his face, and vents his feelings in unfriendly criticism. Mr. Beecher complains of the " doctrinal spirit" among Abolitionists, which he says is " as high, as ex- clusive and as foolish as ever there was in the religious world;" and he tells us that, as he has always con- tended against this fanaticism of doctrine in religious matters," so he " consistently abhors the bigotry of it in great questions of philanthropy." This sounds courageous, but what is the evidence of a " high doc- trinal spirit" among Abolitionists? The only points he mentions are, the doctrines first, that slavery is a malum in se, and secondly, that the slaves ought to be immediately emancipated. The American Baptist condemned in Beecher what 130 THE EEV. HENKY WARD BSECHEB. its editors have often practised themselves. Its editors said : " To many it is a source of surprise and mortification that Henry Ward Beecher, who has often heen so loud in his denunciation of slavery, should now be found endeavouring to hold back his church from becoming a real, active, anti - slavery body, by sending their missionary funds through a Society which makes slaveholding a bar to fellowship. But the case is one which ought not to excite surprise. Henry Ward Beecher, eloquent for freedom as he sometimes is, has never committed himself to the doctrine of practical separation from the wrong-doer. We know Dr. Cheever has been severely censured for intimating that among the New York ministers of his own order he stood alone, when in point of fact Mr. Beecher and Dr. Thompson were as thoroughly anti-slavery as he. But the statement of Dr. Cheever was strictly true ; in his mode of opposing slavery, he stands alone ; his abolitionism is totally different from that of Mr. Beecher, as the event has now shewn. We become more and more persuaded that the only true test by which to judge the soundness of any man's anti-slavery position is to meet him with the question : Do you believe slavery to be, in itself, a sin? And, as such, a bar to admission to the Lord's table ? Any Church or Society which evades this issue ought not to be reckoned among the anti-slavery ranks ; any mini- ster or church-member who professes opposition to slavery as an evil, but does not regard it as a sin worthy of church discipline, is not to be depended THE EEV. HENRY WAED BEECHER. 131 upon; in the very hour when his help is needed, he will be found on the wrong side; his influence will be given for Hie suppression of any efficient anti-slavery action. Such, it ought to have been expected, would be the course of Mr. Beecher, when the question was brought up in the Plymouth Church, whether their funds should be given to the American Board or the American Missionary Association." And the abolitionists in council assembled took action as follows : " Eesolved, That we have seen without astonishment that slaveholders and their accomplices, in defending the accursed slave system, are driven to deny and ignore all the self-evident truths pertaining to human rights that even their gifted and ever-zealous ally, the late Eufus Choate, in their behalf, blasphemed the Declaration of Indepen- dence into a sounding tirade of 'GLITTERING GENEEAL- ITIES ! ' But when an eminent teacher of religion, like Henry Ward Beecher, for the same unhallowed purpose, boldly inculcates that sin also is but another ' glittering generality,' that there is no sin in itself; that 'nothing is bad, per se; and nothing is good, per se;' and that 'these are only scholastic subtleties ;' and that the great American Board of Missions is a true exponent of Christianity, and not only worthy of support, but is pre-eminently the chosen instru- mentality for the world's salvation, notwithstanding that its religion includes slaveholding and slave- trading, even to the separation of parents and children; we are constrained to believe, from such 132 THE EEV. HENEY WAED BEECHEK. revelations, that the age of wonders has not ceased and that slavery has done its most fearful, fatal work on the Northern Pulpit though we cannot but rejoice that the infidelity of Beecher is now revealed ; and tb at not even his brilliant eloquence and shining talents can longer mislead the people, perverting and poisoning the public conscience and character." How complete is the case against Mr. Beecher, both in regard to " distortion " and the remarks of his "being taken from their connective and qualifying circumstances !" But Mr. Beecher says also that they are " irrelevant." In what respects ? In regard to himself and the object of his mission to this country. As for ourselves we most profoundly pity the man who could in America avow that there was no malum in se in slavery, and in England denounce it as a " cancer, nuisance, dragon, devil," and pray that " it may go to hell with its attendant horrors." The man who could make the slaveholder " a good Christian," and then exultingly avow that he would give his last dollar and child to butcher him the man who put actual slaveholders before William Loyd Garrison, Wendel Philips, and Arthur Tappan. whom he called " violent reformers ;" and then discards the slaveholders and welcomes to his embrace the " violent reformers" so called, avowing that "he is not worthy to unloose their shoes !" Such a man ought to be pitied and prayed for ; and so ought to be the men who, in the face of these immense deficiencies, introduce him intu their THE BEV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 133. pulpits to plead the cause of freedom, turn up their faces beaming with delight to receive him at public meetings, bespeak the attention of mankind in the columns of the press on his behalf, as an " uncom- promising advocate " the " Jupiter Tonans of the New World," etc., and give farewell banquets in his honour and favour! J. E. BALME, 56 Islington, January 27, 1864. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIVINES. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, In to-day's Mercury I observe a letter on the " American Question," from the pen of one who signs himself "Joseph Parker." Now, as this signature is apt to mislead, I would suggest to your readers that this " great gun " in favour of the South must not be confounded with the Eev. Dr. Joseph Parker, the able and eloquent preacher of Cavendish Chapel, of this city. My reason for making this suggestion is simply because Dr. Parker being a member of the Union and Emancipation Society, it might seem strange that he should write such an effusion that smells so strongly of the " Southern Independence Association," alias " The Southern Club." I may remark en passant that " Joseph Parker's " logic respecting Southern independence is merely a threadbare repetition of what one may hear any night when strangers are permitted to hear the mysterious speeches of the mystic few. Having been a thorough abolitionist long before the Union and Emancipation Society unfurled its flag, I take a special interest in such matters. In addition to this, I have a particular ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIVINES. 135 liking to hear the truth the whole truth, and nothing but the truth spoken on such a grave subject as slavery and its abolition. I confess, then, that I felt rather indignant when I read such a gross suppressio veri as " Joseph Parker's " letter. Truth needs no lengthened defence no webs of sophistry to surround it. Truth is simple, and with- out guile. No one in his senses will deny that the South sanctions and upholds the wicked institutions of slavery. There can be no true freedom where there is slavery; therefore, there can be no real liberty in the South till slavery is completely abolished. This is truth and logic. Yours, &c., J. A Manchester, Nov. 9, 1863. The following letter, says the Liverpool Mercury, is from one of the most eminent divines in America, the Eev. William R Williams, D.D., of New York, whose own father, also a minister of the Gospel, emi- grated from Wales : New York, Oct. 22, 1863. Few regions of the United States probably present a finer field for the emigrant than the great State of Missouri. Settled by colonists of intelligence, principle and energy, it is likely to exercise a pivotal influence in the great conflict now going on between freedom 136 DBS. PAEKEK AND WILLIAMS, and slavery. I have been much pleased to hear of the project of a colony from Wales to be settled on the line of the Hannibal and St Joseph Railroad, in that State. From the names of the American pro- prietors, who invite the settlement, and from the credentials of the gentlemen in this city (Messrs J. M. and W. B. Jones, of No. 37 Nassau Street), who have the warm endorsement of men every way reli- able, I have sanguine hopes that the enterprise may prove, under the blessing of God, a common and a rich benefit to the country from which the emigrants are to be drawn, and to that also which receives and welcomes them, as well as to the colonists themselves, if exercising but the virtues of energy, thrift, prudence, and patient industry which have distinguished the men of the Principality. Some hardships and incon- veniences must, of course, attend the first steps of those leading such an enterprise ; but with ordinary resolution, and with the wonted blessings of God's good providence, it may be safely anticipated that the new colony will prove a signal success, and a long- enduring blessing. WILLIAM R WILLIAMS, Pastor of Amity Street Baptist Church, New York City. AMERICAN DIVINES. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, In Saturday's Mercury there is a AND THE REV. STOWELL BROWN. 137 letter signed "Wm. E Williams, Pastor of Amity Street Baptist Church, New York City," who is intro- duced as "one of the most eminent divines in America," designed to attach importance to his communication on the " New Welsh Colony in Northern Missouri," and to bespeak the favourable notice of the public to the same. Now, when it is known that the Eev. W. R Williams, D.D., has been for a quarter of a century one of the revisers of publications for the Old Tract Society, New York, and that his mission was to ex- punge every sentiment of liberty from works written by celebrated European authors, in order to prepare them for circulation in America a work which he faithfully discharged up to the period of the disrup- tion between the North and South when this is known and duly considered, the public will attach little importance to his communication, deem his references to liberty as a mockery, delusion, snare, and regard his descent from a minister of the gospel who emigrated from Wales as being no more an honour to the principality than the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher having for his "great-great-grandmother a full-blooded Welshwoman." Our American war brings out many revelations and revolutions ; but of things revealed in American history, no fact is more capable of demonstration than this that the Eevs. Dr. Williams and Henry Ward Beecher, holding as they do liberty subordinate to the Union, just as they have held it in the one case subordinate to the Old Tract Society, and in the other to the American 138 DES. PARKER AND WILLIAMS, Board of Missions, neither could have acquired any moral power to overturn American slavery until they had repented of their sins, and abandoned their evil courses. One would naturally have supposed that the admirers of the principality of Wales would not seek to give it such a prominence in connection with such a wayward progeny, any more than the avowed friends of the Eev. Hugh Stowell Brown who covet for him a niche in the temple of immortality by call- ing him the "Beecher of Liverpool" an honour which Mr. Brown has estimated at its proper value, if the report be true that is in circulation that he put his emphatic " No, never " to the application which was made for his so-called prototype to preach in his chapel during his recent visit to Liverpool. No lustre is shed on the principality of Wales by such men as Williams and Beecher, or on Stowell Brown by call- ing him the " Beecher of Liverpool," as shown in one of the Dissenting journals published in London recently. One of your Manchester correspondents, I see, is very fearful lest one " Joseph Parker," an able writer in your columns, should be confounded with the Eev. Dr. Joseph Parker. I should have thought that plain " Joseph Parker " was deep and broad enough in its distinction from "Dr. Joseph Parker;" but if he thinks that plain Joseph Parker has got less sense because he is not a " war Christian," or member of the " Union and Emancipation Society," and that Dr. Joseph Parker has got more sense because he is both, it is quite evident that he is no more a proper judge AND THE REV. STOWELL BEOWN. 139 of the relative value of that precious commodity any more than he is capable of dealing with the suppressio veri of the North in its relationships to slavery which he charges upon plain Joseph Parker falsely in regard to the south. Yours, for truth as well as liberty, J. E. BALMB. 66 Islington, Nov. 7, 1863. A MARTIN LUTHEE WANTED. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, Nothing can be more apparent than the above, both in regard to the usurpation of despotic power in America, and also the relationships which civil governments bear to that country, and the duties arising therefrom. Let us look at the facts of the case before us. In consequence of taxation without representation your American colonies threw off their allegiance to this country, and formed themselves into independent states, with governors, senators, legislators, judges, militia, and all the apparatus and authority necessary for their governance and guidance as independent nations. From motives of prudence and economy the people and government of these states entered into a league, or federation of States, to protect each other from com- mon danger, obviate the necessity of keeping up a standing army and navy in, or sending ambassadors from each separate state to foreign courts. When this league or federation was entered into, provision was made for the appointment of a president or manager of our federal concern, in whom executive power was to be vested ; and also for the creation of a Congress, A MARTIN LUTHEK WANTED. . 141 with a Senate and House of Kepresentatives, in which all legislative powers granted by the States were like- wise to be vested. These powers were defined as given above and put on record in the constitution of the United States ; and as every president has interpreted the constitution as a slave document, by usage and custom, it has put slaves in the same category with all other common property belonging to the United States, and given us a black heritage of shame and guilt that could never be covered up or concealed from the view of men with our high-sounding titles, such as our " great and wonderful Union " our " freest Govern- ment of the world." And whilst the separate States who formed our federation of States reserved intact as sacred and supreme their sovereignties, they made provision that " nothing in the constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular State " a provision which was ignored both in the Missouri Compromise, the Personal Liberty Bills adopted by five of the Free States, and also in the tariffs created to protect some States at the expense of others the manufacturing against the agricultural. And moreover, the President or Congress of the United States thus created and appointed by the separate States had no power given them to interfere with any of the sovereign States in the Federal Union in any case of domestic violence, except on application of the legislature, or of the exe- cutive, or governor in the State where such violence takes place. 142 A MARTIN LUTHER WANTED. Taking into account, therefore, the equality of rights when each State joined the Union, and the arrange- ment that the burden of taxation should fall on all the States equally and not partially, any State or States denied their just rights had not only a ground for complaint, but a right to withdraw, when their law of compact was violated. And when President Lincoln called into requisition the army and navy of the United States to invade the Southern States, he ought to have been impeached at the bar of the Senate for levying war against the sovereign States of the South. And seeing that commissioners were sent by the seceding States to Washington to treat with the Federal Govern- ment, and to make a proper adjustment of all claims and questions arising therefrom, Lincoln was stripped of every constitutional plea to justify himself in his rash, mad, infamous policy of coercing the Southern States into the Union, or of seeking to promote their subjugation or extermination. And, strange to say, this view is ratified and confirmed by Lincoln in the following declaration which he made in his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, when he assumed the office of President : " I declare that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclina- tion to do so. Those who nominated and elected me did so with the full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never revoked them. And more than this : they placed on the plat- A MAETIN LUTHER WANTED, 143 form for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read : ' Eesolved that the maintenance invio- late of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric de- pend ; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.'" Self-convicted and self-condemned, therefore, our so- called wise, just, and conscientious magistrate stands before the world guilty of trampling under his feet the " rights " of the Southern States in their withdrawal from the Union, and invading their sovereignties un- der the pretext of protecting Fort Sumter, thus com- mitting on his own showing the " gravest of crimes." 1 Such being the terrible condition of things in Ame- rica, let us look at the facts of the case in connection with the relationships which other nations sustain to- wards America, and the duties arising therefrom. In these relationships, whence does the President or Con- gress derive the powers which enable them to make treaties with other nations ? Is it not from the repre- sentatives of the different States of the Union ? When, therefore, the representatives of the Southern Status withdrew from Congress, and the several States to which they belonged announced their separation from the United States, there was not a treaty made by the 144 A MAETIN LUTHEE WAITED. United States previously with any Government on earth but was invalidated by that act, or impaired, just the same as a contract in any firm, when any partners withdraw from it. Now, if a contractor would not feel justified in going to sleep with his contract in his pocket when his interests are jeopardised, can those nations which have treaty contracts with America be excused for allowing their treaty rights to slumber, and going to sleep with their treaty rights in their possession ? When the Southern States withdrew from the Federal Union, the treaties of the United States with other nations from that hour ceased to be binding on the Southern States, and all nations that had treaties with America, and if they had no complaints to make they ought to have had, since the blockade of the Southern ports and coasts is just as much illegal and iniquitous as Lincoln committing any overt act of de- spotic power on land that interfered with their rights or invalidated their supremacy as sovereign States. Why, then, this interruption of commerce and confis- cation of property in the shipping trade ? And who is to blame for the open doors amongst the nations through which the wolf has come in to prey on them- selves? There is either tremendous ignorance or a terrible connivance at the assumption of such arbitrary and despotic powers at Washington. But if safety lies in the pathway of duty, where is the wisdom, justice, or sound policy of being in such a position as that which the nations now present to the world that have treaties A MARTIN LUTHER WANTED. 145 with America ? As John Bull was recently represented in your Exchange Newsroom, stretched on a " rack," with the governor of the Bank of England at his head, and a veiled figure, the " Times," at his feet, lever in hand, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer and others looked on with deep solicitude, as Lord Palmer- ston felt John's pulse to see how much he could endure under the tender mercies of his torturers even so all nations may be fitly represented as being in a stupor towards America, for we cannot conceive that any of them, more especially the " great powers" amongst them, know their rights, and knowing dare not main- tain them. Oh for some Luther to take the above facts and send them thundering down the sides both of the Old and New World, to reveal the handwriting on the walls at Washington, put a stop to all presidential jokes, as Lincoln makes himself merry over, his hand being in the "cranberry jam" of the States, and rouse the governments and peoples of the world to a sense of their duty. Could Luther arise from the dead, how- ever, to perform such an essential service, he would have to break through all conventional forms and usages, and have to consent to be isolated, ostracised, have his name cast out as evil, and to wear titles much longer than those which form appendages to the names of our conventional wire-pullers in the new world ; and not quite so graceful withal, as they would read " im- potures, scoundrel, monster in human shape," &c., &c. The world would then have its ears regaled with another song wWch would go down the ages with its K 146 A MARTIN LUTHER WANTED. magic spell of enchantments, like the former, when he sung, " Give to the winds thy fears, And undismayed go on." But to get on he would have to unmask the villanies of many, unbind the delusions of others ; and if he had to confront the religious war fanatics, or the " Union emancipationists," he would have to bend his fists in the face of their unbounded arrogance and in- solence, and where they have got consciences, to strike them in those tender parts as fast as he came at them. Hurrah for a Martin Luther. Yours, &c. JOSHUA R BALMH 56 Islington, January 4, 1864 TEUE POLICY DEFINED. AT the beginning of the present war there were two courses for our Northern people to pursue, rather than have appealed to the arbitrement of the sword ; the first was to have made proposals of compensation for the liberation of the slave ; the second was a dissolu- tion of partnership. The Kev. Henry Ward Beecher, who is now trying to go down the centuries with his Janus-face, and like some great wizard, to ingratiate himself into the affections of mankind, and win their admiration and applause ; when referring, in his Harper's Ferry Sermon, to such a liberty, he called it a " regulated liberty," and expatiating on the same, he said, " 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 prin- ciples which make us wise and happy such a liberty would be a great blessing to them." And if such proposals had been rejected, with advantage to themselves and posterity, they could have said, in the adoption of the latter course, the law of compact which bound us together is now re- pealed the covenant of death and agreement with hell in the Union is broken " wayward sisters go in 148 TRUE POLICY DEFINED. peace." This would have given us a moral power amongst the nations that would have been felt for ages to come won for us the title of peace-makers, and not that of peace-breakers chained the bless- ings of a glorious prosperity to our multitudinous wants and averted the dreadful calamities that have befallen us in the present terrible war. All this was made very plain to us by "VYm. Loyd Garrison and Wendel Philips, Esqs., men "whose shoes," Mr Beecher said, " he was not worthy to un- loose." In a lecture which George Thompson delivered in Glasgow, January 27th, I860, after shewing that the republican party had no wish to abolish slavery, he observed, "Besides this political party there is a non- political party, of which Mr Garrison is the founder and head. By this party the constitution is denounced as an unholy and iniquitous compact, which must be dissolved, as the first effectual step towards the aboli- tion of slavery. Hence they are avowedly disunionists, and inscribe upon their flag, " no union with slave- holders, no compromise with slavery." In accordance with their settled views of what is right and necessary, they seek the separation of the free from the slave states. With this party it has been my privilege to co-operate for five and twenty years, and with ever increasing admiration of their disinterestedness and fidelity." When, therefore, the South seceded from the North these advocates with their sympathisers and admirers TKUE POLICY DEFINED. 1-49 ought to have hailed the separation with the most thrilling emotions of joy. " This was their settled view of what was right and necessary." Listen to this, Revs. Baptist Noel and Newman Hall, Professors Newman, Cairns, and all ye misguided zealots who put your fingers on certain clauses of an obsolete constitution, and pronounce them with a whisper, and then with the deepest and broadest emphasis peal them in the ears of your auditors. "This secession, also, would be the first effectual step towards liberty." How ? Mr Thompson in the same lecture said, " but for the guarantee of slavery in the constitution of the United States, the slave- holders of the South would be unable to hold their slaves. Were it not for the protection afforded by it, the slaves would run away ! The Southern States admit their inability to hold their slaves, except through the protection afforded them by the Northern States." The men, therefore, who held the above views were doubly bound to demand the dissolution of the Union ; but alas, for the men referred to above, who instead of hailing the disruption as a means of attaining the consummation of their wishes in the dissolution of the Union, have made it the means of increasing the mad outbursts of passion which is producing such scenes of violence and blood ; and George Thompson, who recently pointed his admirers to a rare phenomenon amongst his bumps, the great philanthropic development of his conscien- 150 TRUE POLICY DEFINED. tiousness, at a farewell "banquet at tlie Adelphi, Liver- pool ; as illustrated in his anti-corn law league ex- periences this man has undergone a sad change in connexion with the organ of combativeness, which is being stimulated to such a wonderful expansion and growth in the way of destructiveness, so that he can scarcely think, speak, or dream of anything but stand- ing amidst the myriad slain of the battle-field, where the air is filled with the moans of widows and orphans, and the soil soddened with the gore of the dying and the dead ; not, however, to take his place in the ranks of those who have fallen, but to desecrate the spot where John Brown fell a hero and a martyr, and pollute his fair fame by associating his glorious name with the present revolutionary scenes of massacre and blood, than which no one more than John Brown would have condemned and abhorred since no man was more reluctant to shed human blood, or more careful to avoid the policies of men who bartered truth for falsehood, virtue for ambition, or had no shield or protection but refuges of lies. Should Mr. Thompson's wish be gratified, by "standing on the spot where stood the scaffold on which John Brown perished, with gathered thousands of emancipated slaves before him ;" and could John Brown rise from the dead, and make his appearance before him, in their presence, what a withering rebuke he would give George Thompson if he dared to. utter the mean and contemptible falsehoods to which he gave utterance in his speech at the Adelphi. TRUE POLICY DEFINED. 151 1st. That Abraham Lincoln, the camelion debater with the late Judge Douglas, had "thoroughly imbibed the principles of the declaration of independence, had always cherished the ' desire ' that they should be carried out impartially without respect to colour, and that every man born on the soil of America, and under its institutions, should enjoy the benefit secured by civilization." 2nd. That Abraham Lincoln, who, when he took the oath to the constitution, swore to uphold and maintain it as a slave document, and threatened with all the terrors of his official displeasure all who would not so regard it the man who wrote to Hon. Horace Greely, to the effect that " if he could save the Union with slavery, he would do it, or slavery in part, he would do that, but if he could not save the Union without, he would destroy slavery." That this man " had shaped out for himself an anti-slavery policy, and carried with him into the presidential chair, a strong determination to administer his government in the spirit of freedom, and that future ages, when they should look back on the list of great names, would remember with equal gratitude, George Washington, the father of American independence, and Abraham Lincoln, the liberator of the slaves." 3rd. That the Union and Emancipationists in England, leagued with the Religious War Crusaders and Republicans in America, are the true friends of the slave." John Brown, who was quick to detect artifice, and 152 TEUE POLICY DEFINED. who loathed in his inmost soul all treachery and falsehood, would instantly have protested, and hurled his defiance with seven-fold indignation against such abominable frauds and diabolical wickednesses per- petrated and sanctioned in the name of liberty, justice, humanity, Christianity, and God. True friends of freedom, look at the hecatombs of the slain gaze upon the bruised and mangled limbs of the wounded and dying, visit the homes made desolate by the war, and see how their woe- cups are filled to the brim think of the mirth and hilarity of the administrators of the government as they crack their jokes in the midst of such scenes of suffering and woe ; bear in mind that a country which claims to have the holiest government, and to be the freest nation in the world is filled with spies, informers, conscripts, and dungeons ; consider also, how, in consequence of the judicial blindness of our so-called great men in church and state, the whole country is bounding along with accelerated force into the gulph of ruin ; and then, ponder over the records put on file by Mr. James Yeatman, the Presi- dent of the Western Sanitary Commission, and you will see from another stand point what is the charac- ter of the men who claim to be the liberators of the slave and the nature of that freedom, which the Unionists and Emancipationists say, is rapidly coming upon four millions of slaves, in connexion with the philanthropic work of the brute force abolitionists. The "Liverpool Courier" Jan. 29, 1864, says: TEUE POLICY DEFINED. 153 Our authority for what we are about to state is de- rived from unimpeachable Northern sources. In the month of December last, one year after the celebrated emancipation proclamation, Mr. James E. Yeatman, president of the Western Sanitary Commission, visited the camps of the " Freedmen " from Cairo to Natchez, along the Mississippi. He was commissioned to as- certain the number of those freed negroes who were unemployed, to ascertain their wants, and to make what suggestions he thought fit for their advantage and improvement. He visited twenty-one camps, and we will give in his own words a concise view of what he saw : "About Memphis there are 3000 freedmen and women. Those employed by Government receive but 10 dollars a-month (that is, allowing for depreciation of currency, 1 monthly), out of which they must feed, clothe, and lodge themselves. The negroes could earn from 30 to 45 dollars monthly, but they are compelled to work for 10. A negro harness-maker, who could earn 45 dollars, was forced to work for 10, though white men were paid 45 dollars per month for the same work. The negroes on steamboats, who re- ceive 35 dollars monthly, are afraid to land lest they should be picked up and forced into government em- ployment at one-fourth their existing wages; thou- sands, moreover, have been employed for weeks and months who have never received anything but pro- mises to pay !" The liberated negroes gathered round Mr. Yeatman 15-t TEUE POLICY DEFINED. and said, " They were told they were free, but they could not believe it. Negroes are seized in the street and ordered to go and help to unload a steamboat, or to work in the trenches, or to chop wood ; he labours for months, and at last is only paid with promises, unless it be with kicks, cuffs, and curses." They say " tliat they sigh to return to their former masters and homes ; their masters at least fed, clothed, and sheltered them." The enterprising citizens of Massachusetts have readily found a profitable mode of employing slaves. They are very severe abolitionists, the men of Massa- chusetts, and lest wages should seem to be a badge of slavery or coercion they never pay the negroes any- thing, but they make them work hard, for idleness is sinful These men of the North lease four or five abandoned plantations, and put all the negroes to work. These intelligent contrabands " may get corn wherever they can find it on abandoned plantations ; the masters give them none. Four pounds of meat per week is all that is allowed them ; they have to pay for their flour." Some have worked from April to December without receiving any pay or clothing whatever. The negroes say " that they are taken out and hired to men who treat them, as far as providing for them is con- cerned, far worse than their Secesh masters did." They who do receive pay receive it not by the month, but by the number of days' work they put in, at the rate of 27 cents daily ; and thus when the planter only furnishes ten days' labour in the month, the TRUE POLICY DEFINED. 155 slave receives but 2 dollars 70 cents for his month's service. Mr. YEATMAN says, "The parties leasing planta- tions and employing negroes do so from no motives either of loyalty or humanity ; the desire of gain alone prompts them. The majority of the lessees are ad- venturers, camp followers, and land sharks. These parties are endeavouring to form a combination by which a few men would monopolise many plantations. If the nSgroes succeed in obtaining wages they are plundered by wholesale. Their considerate Northern masters sell to them shoes at 2 dollars 50 cents, which were sold at S. Louis for 1 dollar, and calicoes at 75 cents, which are sold at the same place for 20." There has been a vast amount of " tall talk " in the North respecting the herculean efforts made to edu- cate the negro. Mr. Yeatman visited several schools along the Mississippi In one he found the master bedridden, but teaching " while himself lying in bed." In another he found sixty-three scholars, " using books of all kinds, scarcely any two alike, and some had nothing but scraps of paper. One had a volume of Tennyson's poems, stolen out of a Southern lady's boudoir, out of which he was learning his letters ! The teacher of another had but one arm to keep order amidst a crowd of negro children." But we cannot go through the whole of this re- markable report ; we must confine ourselves to a few salient points. At Milliken's Bend Mr. Yeatman found 1500 freedmen " in a destitute condition." A' 156 TRUE POLICY DEFINED. Young's Point there were 2100 in miserable tents, huts, and hovels. The sickness and death were most frightful During the summer from thirty to fifty died in a day, and on some days as many as seventy- five. At De Soto, so well known from its position opposite to Vicksburg, there were 275 old men and women to whom the government undertook to furnish rations, but " none had been received for more than two weeks preceding Mr. Yeatman's visit." At Natchez there was a camp of 2100 freedmen huttect without light or ventilation; seventy-five died in one day. Numbers returned to their masters on account of suf- fering. The first question asked by the negroes of Mr. Yeatman was always, " Are you a doctor ?" One camp, which numbered 4000 at the time of his visit, was reduced to 2100. "A sad tale to tell," he writes ; " but whoever will ride along the levee from Millikin's Bend to De Soto, as I did, and see the numerous graves along the way, for the distance of twenty-five miles, cannot doubt it." Even Mr. Yeatman, a North- ern partisan from the Western States, and chief of an abolition society, is compelled to say that the negroes "are in a state of involuntary servitude worse than that from which they have escaped." " Such are the results Mr. Bright exults in ; such, he hopes, will be rapidly extended. Old men and women left to starve ; the ablebodied worked hard by pitiless taskmasters for little or no pay. No cloth- ing ; no medical comforts ; instruction intrusted to the decrepid and the helpless ; and honest Bostonians TRUE POLICY DEFINED. 157 amassing fortunes by the compulsory labour of liber- ated negroes ! As democracy has become the most extreme tyranny in the States, so the " liberty" of the negro has assumed the form of the most heartless and most merciless slavery. We desire the freedom of every slave throughout the world, but not such a free- dom as this." MOCK PHILANTHROPY ; OE CANTEEISM. INSTEAD of adopting the use of the means referred to in the preceding communication, nothing would satisfy our religious war crusaders, such as Cheever, Beecher, Sloane, Tyng, Conway, Mrs Stowe, and Miss Dickenson, but an appeal to the arbitement of the sword. Blood, blood, blood, is their hoarse and melan- choly cry spoliation, confiscation, extermination, rather than the Union should be dismembered ! And although Win. Loyd Garrison, Esq., the founder and head of the Abolition party in America, at one period contemplated with horror the termination of slavery by insurrection, or a servile war, and solemnly pledged himself to reject the use of all carnal weapons in seeking to promote the emancipation of the slave, whilst with the deepest and broadest emphasis he ex- claimed : " Not by the sword shall your deliverance be, Not by the shedding of your master's blood, Not by rebellion, nor foul treachery, Upspringing suddenly like swelling flood, Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good." Although such were the expressed feelings and sen- MOCK PHILANTHEOPY 159 timents of Mr Garrison, now a change has come over the spirit of his dreams his doctrines of non-resist- ance have been exchanged for the shout of the war- rior, and garments rolled in blood ; and the " revenge and rapine which ne'er did bring forth good," are to produce the most astounding miracles of mercy and love the hurricane of blood and ruin which is now sweeping across our land is to be succeeded by an imperial heritage of privilege and blessing, which is to make America the envy of the world! Nor do the above class of men lack sympathisers or supporters in this country, in their ruinous and detestable policy. Mr George Thomson, to whom we have already re- ferred, in a lecture which he delivered in the City Hall, Glasgow, April 3d, 1860, when commenting on on the plea used by Frederick Douglas, " That to dis- solve the Union would be to do just what the slave- holders would like to have done," observed, " On this subject the testimony of slaveholders themselves will be regarded as the best that can be given ; and I will bring before you three passages out of many that might be selected, and leave you to draw your own conclusion on which side the weight of authority lies, and who are doing most to advance the overthrow of slavery those who support the constitution which is the bulwark of slavery, and who would draw the cords of the Union closer ; or those who would with- draw from the constitution would annul it as a com- pact in oppression, and would dissolve the Union be- tween the slave-holding States." Then follow his 160 MOCK PHILANTHROPY authorities. " The editor of the Marysville (Tenessee) Intelligencer, in an article on the character and con- dition of the slave population, says : " We of the South are emphatically surrounded by a dangerous class of beings degraded, stupid savages, who if they would but entertain the idea that immediate and un- conditional death would not be their portion, would re-enact the St Domingo tragedy. But the conscious- ness with all their stupidity, that a tenfold force, superior in discipline, if not in barbarity, would gather from the four corners of the United States and slaughter them, keeps them in subjection. But to the non-slaveholding States particularly, we are indebted for a permanent safeguard against insurrection. With- out their assistance the white population of the South would be too weak to quiet that innate desire of liberty which is ever ready to act itself out with every rational creature." "In the debate in Congress on the resolution to censure John Quincy Adams for presenting a peti- tion for the dissolution of the Union, Mr Underwood of Kentucky said : " They, the South, being the weaker portion, were in a minority. The North could do what they pleased with them ; they could adopt their own measures. One thing he knew well, that the State which he in part represented had, perhaps, a deeper interest in this subject than any other, except Maryland, and a small part of Virginia. And why ? Because he knew that to dissolve the Union, and sepa- rate the different States composing this confederacy, MOCK PHILANTHROPY 161 making the Ohio river, and Mason and Dixon's line, the boundary line, he knew as soon as that was done, slavery was done in Kentucky, Maryland, and a large portion of Virginia, and it would extend to all the States south of this line. The dissolution of the Union was the dissolution of slavery. It had been the common practice for Southern men to get up on this floor and say, 'Touch this subject, and we will dissolve this Union as a remedy.' Their remedy was the destruction of the thing they wished to save, and any sensible man could see it. If the Union were dis- solved into two parts, the slave would cross the line, and turn round and curse his master from the other shore." " This declaration of Mr Underwood as to the de- pendence of the slave-masters on the citizens of the free states, to guard their plantations and secure them against desertion, is substantially confirmed by Thomas D. Arnold of Tenessee, who in a speech on the same subject, assures us that the people of the South were dependent on the North for personal pro- tection against their slaves. In assigning his reasons for adhering to the Union, Mr Arnold made use of the following language ; "The Free States had a majority 'of forty-four in that house. Under the new census they would have fifty-three. The cause of the slaveholding states was getting weaker and weaker, and what were they do ? He would ask his Southern friends what the South had to rely on if the Union were dissolved? Suppose L 162 MOCK PH1LANTHEOPY the dissolution could be peaceably effected (if it did not involve a contradiction in terms) what had the South to depend upon ? All the crowned heads were against her. A million of slaves were ready to rise and strike for freedom at the first tap of the drum. If they were cut loose from their friends at the North, (friends that ought to be, and without them the South had no friends) whither were they to look for protec- tion? How were they to sustain an assault from England or France with that cancer at their vitals ? The more the South reflected, the more clearly must she see that she has a deep and vital interest in maintaining the Union." Mr Thompson commenting on the above remarks said : " These unimpeachable testimonies may be ac- cepted, I think, as a sufficient answer to the unsup- ported assertion of Mr Douglas, that the dissolution of the Union would be just what the slaveholders would like," and they may be also accepted as a stand- ing reproach to himself and others who are now con- stantly making the avowals of President Davis, vice- President Stephens, Dr Palmer, Dr Thorn well, Sena- tor Brown, and the Hon. Robert Toombs, a stalking- horse, " to draw tighter the cords of the Union." What was impracticable on the part of slave- holders, according to the testimonies produced by Mr Thompson in 1860, must be so now. If the Southerns are fighting to preserve Slavery, what madness it must be on their part to fight for what they cannot retain, or preserve without the aid of the North, and MOCK PHILANTHROPY 163 the Northerns must be equally foolish in shedding such rivers of blood, and producing such wide-spread misery and woe to attain an object which was already within their power to realise without the firing of a single shot, or the destruction of a single life ! Next comes Henry Vincent, Esq., with his lofty assumption that the present conflict between the North and South in America is a " Great Rebellion." Hear what the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in his Harper's Ferry Sermon says : " These sovereign States are united to us not by any federal ligaments, but by vital interests, by a common national life. And the question of duty is not simply what is duty towards the blacks, not what is duty towards 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 towards the slave, and I am bound by the great law of love also, to consider my duties towards 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." Mr Vincent will hardly dispute the above authority, since he has espoused the cause of Mr. Beecher's partisans ; we entreat the reader therefore, to mark the stress which Mr Beecher lays on the sovereignty of the different States on vital interests MOCK PHILANTHEOPY as "being the bond of Union, and not federal ligaments on the different States as constituting a brother- hood ; that these vital interests have federated the whole brotherhood of States into national life ; that this federation and brotherhood bring obligations to seek the mutual benefit of the slave and the white man his master ; and that the recognition of those obligations are to be associated with Christian wisdom and forbearance. Now if these vital interests are to be the forge to produce the links in the chain that is to bind the States together in the federation or brotherhood of the Union, may not vital interests also be a forge to produce a sledge hammer to dissever the links in this chain of federation, and destroy the brotherhood of the Union ? And who are to be the judge but the administrators and people of what Mr. Beecher calls " These sovereign States." But should Mr. Vincent repudiate these "vital interests," and fall back on federal ligaments as the bond of Union, which Mr. Beecher says do not exist, and deny the right of any of the States to secede, we would remind him of the broad emphasis Mr. Beecher has laid on these sovereign States. If the powers vested in sovereignty are sacred and supreme, so it is with the States, or they could not with any degree of propriety be called "sovereign States." And should Mr. Vincent repudiate not only vitality of interest as the bond of Union, but the sovereignty ul the States, and fall back on the parchments or MOCK PHILANTHEOPY 165 written bonds, we would remind him that these are worthless where there is no vitality of interest, and also very insecure when their binding power is de- pendent on sovereigns, as shewn in the German and Danish war. And there is not a clause in the written bond of the constitution, which our whole brother- hood of States have not trampled under their black hoofs at every period of our history as a people ; and Mr. Vincent would hardly allege that law-breakers can put in a plea in favour of constitutional law and order. But should Mr. Vincent fall back still on the vox populi, we would remind him that the people who live in the slave States, whom Professor Newman calls "Thugs," have the same right as the Poles. Hungarians, Italians, or any other people, to "change their rulers, government, their whole political condi- tion." "This," says the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, " belongs to all men on the face of the globe, with- out regard to complexion. This right is not either granted or limited in the New Testament. It is left as is air, water, and existence, itself, as things not requiring command or legislation." How foolish to call the American war a rebellion. We can conceive how the whole brotherhood of States have rebelled against God, and are justly suffering the penalty due to their terrible crimes. In this sense it may be called a " great rebellion." But we cannot see how it can be called a rebellion towards man, when our written parchments, such as the constitution and 166 MOCK PHILANTHROPY declaration of independence, like our liberty, poles of contradiction in our cities, towns, and villages, are a swift witness against our whole people for treachery and folly ! We have now done with yon Mr. Vincent, and you can take your Bolton placards or bill-posters and your " Great Eebellion " with you. Mr. Mason Jones according to the Manchester Ex~ aminer and Times, Feb. 24, 1864, in a lecture delivered at Halifax, is reported to have said that " he denounced the blasphemous utterances of the Eev. Dr. Palmer, who maintained that slavery was a divine insti- tution, remarking that though he had never met him in a dark lane, yet he did not hesitate to say that if he could lay his hands on the Dr. he would string him up as high as heaven, (Loud cheers.) Many have felt it inconvenient to be surrounded with the broad light of heaven, and be subject to the public gaze in the performance of atrocious deeds and therefore have waited with feverish anxiety for the evening shade to cover them when they have sneaked their way into "dark lanes" where they have laid "snares privily," and carried out their diabolical schemes, ex- claiming "who shall see them? " And we are sorry that Mr. Jones, in aspiring to Calcraft's situation, should seek to stand out in his new character associated with "dark lanes." But if Mr. Jones was to commence his work nearer home, and to hang all clergymen or ministers who maintain that slavery is a divine institution in this country, or in the Northern States of America first, Dr. Palmer would have a long lease MOCK PHILANTHROPY 167 of his life before his turn came round. If Mr. Jones is ignorant of this fact, he ought to know that there are many, very many Bible defenders of slavery in this country amongst the avowed ministers of Christ, The writer met with one in Edinburgh, who turned down the chapter and verse in the Epistles of Saint Paul. From another in Manchester he received a tremendous castigation, because he could not see and. feel as his reverence saw and felt in regard to slavery on Bible grounds. By another of these Bible defenders of slavery the writer was denounced and ostracised for twenty years before he left this country for America for the unpardonable sin and crime of calling in question his ipse dixit, in the assumption of arbi- trary power, and exercising the right of private judg- ment, and honouring his convictions in accordance with Noncomformist theory and acknowledged polity. But whilst Mason Jones would find plenty of work in his new occupation in this grand old country, so consecrated with hallowed spots, so precious with the memories of the good and great, and so ennobled with the priceless gem of liberty, in the Northern States of America he would find quite a " heap " more of such work to do, than he would find here. He would find in accordance with his theory, a fitting subject on whom to try his hand in the Kev. H. J. Vandyke of New York, who, unrebuked by his co- presbyters, boldly asserted " that the idea of property in man is an enormity and a crime, blasphemes the name of God and his doctrine," so that if bias- 168 MOCK PHILANTHROPY phemers are to be hung at once, a struggle for dear life would commence in the " dark lane," amidst fierce recriminations, as each one would charge upon the other that he was the proper person to he hung ; but should Jones succeed in despatching his victim, and take up a work called " Sable Cloud," written by Dr. Nehemiah Adams of Boston, he would find that Adams wore the brand of criminality on his forehead, since he maintains that God ordains the subjection of one race to another, and makes bondage one of his ordinances as well as war!" After putting Dr. Adams on the drop, he would have little trouble on deciding on the merits of the Right Rev. Bishop Hopkins, as on reading over the roll of Bible defences which were lately published from his pen, in the Morning Herald and Standard, he would soon put him under the beam. Mr. Jones would probably discover some emo- tion in the case of the Rev. Dr. Gardiner Spring, since he and Dr. Murray have got one redeeming quality in the eyes of Jones' friend, Mr. Beeeher, namely, that of wadding the cannon to shoot down the Britishers in the war of 1812, with the contents of Bibles and Hymn Books ; but ah, that awful avowal, when Dr. Spring said, " if by offering one prayer I could liberate every slave, I would not be the man to offer that prayer," dries up his compassion, and nerves his arm to put the rope round his neck. And has it come to this my friend Beeeher, that I must hang you, says the hangsman Jones ? Have you been uttering blasphemous sentiments on the MOCK PHILANTHKOFY 169 slavery question ? Holding the circiilar of the Church Anti-slavery Society for 1860 in his hands, the rever- end criminal says, the executive of the above society have laid to my charge the crime, that " in order to save an assumed principle in ethics, I avowed there was no malum in se in slavery, and to prevent the moral obloquy of mankind, and of the churches from settling down upon slaveholding and the slaveholder, I reduced to the last shift of maintaining that the term slaveholding cannot be held as an invariable equivalent for holding human beings as property, so that slaveholding is not inherently sinful, although the holding of beings as property I admit to be an im- morality, the renunciation of which ought to be made a condition of membership in the Christian Church ! " I am very sorry for you, and pity you," says the hangman to Mr Beecher, " but if I don't hang you, I shall lose my ' shiners,' " and so on goes the rope and down falls the drop ! But in the " Flowery Land," of the Northern States, there are so many ecclesiastical criminals, that Jones, in order to make progress in his work, is required to bring them on to the scaffold in larger numbers, and the more the merrier for the hangsman, as he is anxious to prosper in his calling like other people. In the circular already re- ferred to, the executive of the Church Anti-Slavery Society say, " we have seen an association formed by prominent evangelicals of the North, called the Ame- rican Society for Promoting National Unity in the Preparation and Diffusion of Tracts Intended to Prove 1 70 MOCK PHILANTHROPY the ' Justice and Beneficence of African Slavery,' " so that if Jones does all the work required of him in the Northern States, the Rev. Dr Palmer would have a long respite. J. E. Cairiies, AM., in a Tract called, " Who are the Canters," says the Northern people have never thought nor said that slavery was a sin, that as such it was to be renounced by all means, abolished at any cost this is the creed of abolitionism. The Northerners as a people have never accepted this doctrine. Until re- cently they were content to tolerate slavery, and have freely said so. Now, indeed, they are opposed to slavery, they have changed their view, (and the change embodies the whole significance of Mr Lincoln's elec- tion) but even now they are opposed to it, not be- cause it is a sin, but because it is a nuisance. Some men scent carrion in every breeze, but it does not re- quire any strong olfactory nerves to scent wherein the carrion is, when J. E. Cairnes, M. A., a person who has entered the lists for the North and freedom, and sought to carry off the palm of victory in the race for the championship against all competitors, only con- tends for a people who " embody the whole signifi- cance of Mr Lincoln's election," which significance, from the key given by Mr. Cairnes in his quotation of Lincoln's letter to the Hon. Horace Greeley. proves him to be in his claim to be styled an abolitionist, one of the most gigantic swindles and abominable frauds of the ages. When, therefore, J. E. Cairnes, M.A., takes into his embrace President Lincoln, and lifts MOCK PHILANTHROPY 171 him up as the type of an honest man in the cause of freedom, in the exhibited and exhibitor, you have a specimen of what Mr Cairnes calls the Canters ! And if they will turn to the following articles in the extra- ordinary ukase of General Banks, issued on February 3d 1864, he Mall find what is the creed of the Canters, and the character of the men who are presented by them as fitting subjects of your admiration and esteem ! "XII. Labourers shall render to their employer, between daylight and dark, ten hours in summer and nine hours in winter of respectful, honest, faithful labour, and receive therefor, in addition to just treat- ment, healthly rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children. Wages per month as follow, payment of one-half of which, at least, shall be reserved until the end of the year : For first-class hands, $8 per month ; for second-class hands, $6 per month ; for third-class ' IT J- ' hands, $5 per month ; for fourth-class hands, $3 per month. " XIII. Labourers will be permitted to choose their employers, but when the agreement is made, they will be held to their engagement for the year under the protection of the government. In cases of attempted imposition, by feigning sickness or stubborn refusal of duty, they will be turned over to the provost-mar- shal of the parish for labour upon the public works without pay. " XXIV. It is, therefore, a solemn duty resting 172 MOCK PHILANTHROPY upon all persons to assist in the earliest possible res- toration of civil government. Let them participate in the measure suggested for this purpose. Opinion is free and candidates are numerous. Open hostility cannot be permitted. Indifference will be treated as crime, and faction as treason. Men who refuse to de- fend their country with the ballot-box or cartridge-box have no just claim to the benefits of liberty regulated by law. All people not exempt by the law of nations, who seek the protection of the government, are called upon to take oath of allegiance in such form as may be prescribed, sacrificing to the public good and the restoration of public peace, whatever scruples may be suggested by incidental considerations. The oath of allegiance, administered and received in good faith, is the test of unconditional fealty to the government and all its measures, and cannot be materially strengthened or impaired by the language in which it is clothed. " XXV. The amnesty offered for the past is condi- tioned upon an unreserved loyalty for the future, and this condition will be enforced with an iron hand. Whoever is indifferent or hostile must choose between the liberty which foreign lands afford the poverty of the rebel states, and the innumerable and inappreci- able blessings which our government confers upon its people." The Editor of the Manchester Courier, March 3, 1864, comments on the above as follows : " Since the day when Boris, to maintain an usurped authority by his mere autocratic fiat, established serf- MOCK PHILANTHROPY 173 dom in Russia, no more wantonly and shamelessly despotic act lias been done than the proclamation for the re-enslavement of the negroes just issued by Gene- ral Banks with which the civilised world by this time rings. Les extremes se touchent, in this case, with a vengeance ; and the Czar Boris and the Repub- lican Banks, so worthily matched in identity of crime against humanity, may pass to posterity together as signal examples that in no climes nor under any form of institutions does triumphant Might pay respect to Right. By the side of this Banks, Butler really ap- pears an Augel of Light. Butler's ordinances at New Orleans embodied the sneaking, cowardly passions of the low-minded tyrant, worked out with the sophistical cunning of a pettifogging lawyer ; but those who chose to keep quiet, the fairer sex especially, could avoid his annoying and degrading proscriptions. This ukase of Banks is a really important Act of State, which es- tablishes a new landmark in American history. The tyranny that has enslaved whole races has usually crept slowly and stealthily towards its end, unless when effected by wholesale conquest ; but General Banks, who came to Louisiana as a deliverer, has set the first example in history of an entire population, high and low, rich and poor, being in one hour, in a country professedly the most free on earth, consigned to degrees of subjection and slavery from which even the organised despotism of Russia now shrinks with shame. " What makes this act extraordinary in a purely 174 MOCK PHILANTHROPY political point of view, independently of the outrage offered to humanity, is that it is an open and direct contravention, not only of the fundamental laws of America and of the abstract rights of man, but also of the specific proclamation of Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery, on which alone rests any justification the Northerners can offer for persisting in their efforts to conquer the South. It is always thus in revolutions. When we see passing before the mind's eye, in the bloody phantasmagoria of '89, the phantoms of the Dantans and the Robespierres with their atrocious decrees, the philanthropist of yester- day, the tyrant and murderer of to-day, and each dis- torting the logic of the public duty of civilians till the very principles of freedom became new fetters for mankind, we are not so much surprised as filled with horror, because those men whirled along in a seething pandemonium, scarcely were masters of their own volition. No such excuse can be made for the chiefs of the Northern States of America. They have ample room and verge enough, both as regards time and space. Abraham Lincoln was no more under the necessity to emancipate the negroes than General Banks was to re-enslave them. Each is to be regarded as a deliberate, cold-blooded act of State. It would be an insult to the reader's understanding to detain him with proofs that the condition of things set up bj~ this proclamation of Banks is nothing more nor less than the re-establishment of slavery, minus, indeed, the actual property in the negro, but creating MOCK PHILANTHROPY 175 a property in the negroe's labour, and forcing him to work, whether he will or no, at rates of wages on which he has no control, while depriving him of that hold on the sympathy of his master, which existed when he feared to lose the value of his living healthy body. With a singular ingenuity, this pro-Consul of Yankeedom copies and legalises under new names all the most odious features of the old system of slavery. At the same time, he leaves to the newly- made negro serf absolutely no protection against their abuse by masters who have already had their friend- liness turned to exasperation against their slaves flaunting themselves under their very noses as free men. Take their jegulations item by item, and it will be seen that they not only re-establish all the worst evils of slavery, but deprive the slave of the only protection they left him. " So much for the Black Serfs created by this docu- ment. Now, as to the White Serfs, worse than the atrocious iniquity of the act is its blundering stupidity. All sensible Yankees, who were not compelled to do homage to abolitionism, had long condemned Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, not on the grounds of humanity, but on being mis-timed, and therefore in that sense a political blunder. It certainly was not the way to win back the Southerners, but rather to nerve them to fight to the last. Had General Banks, then, by this Edict for the Establishment of Serfdom, offered a grand bribe to the discontented Southerners in giving them at least the interest of the 176 MOCK PHILANTHKOPY capital value of their slaves in the shape of forced labour, one might have shuddered at the cynical contempt for human rights and morality such a step would have manifested, but one must have admitted that it was an able and daring act of -State craft. General Banks deprives us even of this excuse for his astounding " orders." The same proclamation that makes the negroes serfs in the sense of forcing their labour from them under severest penalties, actually converts the whole white population into Political Serfs, depriving them of all volition and independence, and refusing them the protection of the law except on the condition of abject submission to the Govern- ment. Here again Banks has transcended his Eussian prototypes. Not Nicholas, nor Alexander, even dared such extremities against the Poles, as this Eepublican American has proclaimed his determina- tion to practise against his own free fellow-citizens. Let the reader digest, among others, article 24- of this manifesto of tyranny. Its brutal logic has never been attempted before, even in the most fearful cases of triumphant mid-day despotism. Its pretence to lay a basis of political ethics in defence of stark, staring tyranny, renders it a greater insult to humanity than if this man had simply and boldly asserted the Eight of Might. And what a splenid device to lure the Southerners back to the Union. Equality with their own slaves would almost be preferable. "If this act of General Banks is impolitic as regards the Southerners, what shall we say of its probable MOCK PHILANTHROPY 17? effect on public opinion all over the rest of the world ? What estimate can henceforth be formed of the dignity and power of the government of the Northern States of America, if the deliberate act of the Chief Magis- trate can thus be contravened by a subordinate officer of the State ? And what will Europe now say to the prolongation of the quarrel. Of those who hold out for non-interference, even in the most friendly spirit, a large proportion, perhaps the majority, are influenced by the belief that after all the cause of the South, in so far as it is the maintenance of slavery, is an unholy one. But these thinkers will no longer have the strong moral and religious motives they now have to range themselves against the South. They will not be so blinded by fanaticisims not to see that General Banks's serfdom is nothing less in fact, and very little less in name, than the slavery so pompously abolished by Abraham Lincoln. European philanthropy, then, will no longer feel itself enlisted on one side only. The stakes are even. The North is fighting quite as much for the enslavement of the negro as did the Southerner when he commenced the struggle, only that the Northerner is now fighting at least in Louisiana not only to conquer and enslave his white brother, but also to re-enslave his black-quondam protege. General Banks, by this atrocious act of compounded criminality and fatuity, has served the South as well as many battles gained would do. The tide of pubilc sentiment only wanted some such freshener. \VhennexttheFrenchEmperor directly or vicariously ] 78 MOCK PHILANTHEOPY talks about attempts to put an end to the civil war, English opinion European opinion will not be so slow, as heretofore, to follow his lead. Even Russia, with her serfs emancipated, must feel ashamed of her anomalous political association with these re-enslavers of a liberated race these cheats of the blacks and tyrants over the whites." " Are you republicans ! away ! "Tis blasphemy the word to say. You talk of freedom ? Out, for shame I Your lips contaminate the name. How dare you prate of public good, Your hands besmeared with human blood? How dare you lift those hands to heaven, And ask, or hope to be forgiven ? How dare you breathe the wounded air, That wafts to heaven the negro's prayer ? How dare you tread the conscious earth, That gave mankind an equal birth ? And while you thus inflict the rod, How dare you say there is a God That will, in justice, from the skies, Hear and avenge His creature's cries ? " J. E. BALME. NON COMEATIBUS. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, A fight once occurred in Kentucky, when a State warrant was obtained against one of the combatants ; on seeing the constable he fled through a corn field and over a creek into a swamp, where he climbed into a stump and drew his bowie knife in readiness for defence. When the officer came up to the stump the defendant exclaimed, " Now, Mr. Con- stable, you want to take me, and I give you fair warning, that if you attempt to, climb this stump I'll take you. The constable, who had been about the courthouse long enough to learn some of the technical terms used in returning writs, went back to the squire's (or magistrate's) office, and endorsed upon the warrant, "Non est inventus, through fieldibus, across creekum, up stumpum, non comeatibus." When the present terrible war broke out in America, all parties, whether ecclesiastical or political, had abandoned the use of the right means for the attainment of the right end, so far as slavery and colourphobia were concerned, whilst the overwhelming masses of the 180 NON COMEATIBTJS. people, both in the churches and states, were in com- plicity with these monstrous evils and crimes. In the Liberator a speech is published, delivered by Wendel Phillips, Esq., at the New England Anti- Slavery Convention, May 30, 1860, in which he said, "There is no political anti-slavery existing at this moment. There is no movement in the political arena that calls itself anti-slavery. Of course you know there is none in the church. You know very well that, unfortunately, the ballot-box is a great deal ahead of the communion table in its knowledge of ethics ; and as we find no anti-slavery at the ballot- box, we cannot expect to find any at the communion table." The Rev. M. D. Conway, in a sermon delivered at the First Congregational Church, Cincin- nati, October 23, 1859, said "An immortal child of God, a brother of Christ, may pause at my door, the demon of hunger may be gnawing at his vitals, his naked back, yet quivering with cruel marks, may call for oil for the wound and shelter from the blast, and the General Government says, Close your hands, tighten your purse strings, slam your door in his face ; the crueller you are the more virtuous I will hold you ; the more pitiless, the more patriotic. Nay, it has gone further, and declared the most helpless, already still m'ore helpless those already unprotected to have no rights which men are bound to respect. And yet there was a deeper pit in the national Inferno to which it could descend, and thither it went, covering the principle that slavery could be extended and free- NON COMEATIBUS. 181 dom put down by the national arms in the arsenal at Harper's Ferry ; the President declaring that the con- stitution carries slavery wherever it goes, thus rightly interpreting the Supreme Court. Thus has this Union- by making itself the tool of oppression, by outraging human instincts, by mocking every cry of humanity, plunged its fangs into its own vitals. It has made treason heroic." The traitorous element in this movement will excite a smile wherever it is mentioned nobody will feel an indignant throb at the wrong done the Union, so far has our land been prostituted to base purposes. The deeper heart of the people will say, " No, the Government has made its bed, now let it lie thereon." And when speaking of the " so-called Christian church," Conway in the same sermon said, "The blood of their slain brother cries out against it from the earth this day. The church it is to which was entrusted the oppressed and wronged man through all time. In the Christian temple Jesus himself had hung up the living pictures of the Samaritan bending over the wounded Jew of the stranger, hungry, naked, and sick, who was there at the door with the halo of a Christ about his head ; all ministry to him being ministry to Christ. And when we see through all this fearful struggle, the miserable cowardice, the essential infi- delity of the church ministers crouching before prejudice and ignorance, haggling about the slavery under Moses, or the word ' doulos,' when God's im- mortal children lie mangled under their .very altars 182 KON COMEATIBUS. see this in men to whom the sceptre of God over man is given when they have courage to wield it, who can smother in his heart the ancient cry, ' God, the heathen are come into thy inheritance ; thy holy temple have they defiled ; they have laid Jerusalem in heaps. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth.' And William Lloyd Garrison, in a lecture called ' the Infidelity of Abolitionism,' has declared that ' Christian and Infidel, Calvinist and Universalist, Trinitarian and Unitarian, Episcopalian and Methodist, Baptist and Swedenborgian, Old School and New School Presby- terian, Orthodox and Hicksite Quaker, all are infected by the complexional caste called ' negrophobia,' and equally ready to make an innocent natural distinc- tion the badge of eternal infamy and a warrant for the most cruel proscription." In view of the facts stated above, what nation ever presented a picture of guilt more debasing, more ready for destruction, or that demanded the avenging justice of the Almighty? Amidst such apostacy, what could a few despised, persecuted, ostracised, and calumniated abolitionists do in grappling with those great distinctive sins and crimes to which we have referred in America? Slavery and negro or colourphobia, with their oligar- chies enthroned on the rotten stumps of the churches and states, hurled us from their presence with con- temptuous disdain, and brandished over us their terrible instruments of torture and death a thing NON COMEATIBUS. 183 which would have been utterly impossible had the grand liberty clauses in the Declaration of Independ- ence, and constitution, been recognised or applied by political men ; or the word of God, in reliance upon the Almighty for His blessing, had been taken by our five millions of avowed disciples and made known in their primary elements regarding the inalienable rights of our fellow-men morally, socially, politically, and religiously ; and those monstrous evils and crimes which have had inscribed on their bronzed faces the words " non comeatibus" would not have required the more terrible agencies of God's retributive providences to effect their destruction, so that the calamities which have befallen us are the fault of our government, churches, and people. Again, seeing that reigning sins and crimes in America have been " non comeati- bus," by divinely appointed agencies and instrumen- talities, in consequence of a fearful abuse of trust can Northern men who have been the chief instru- ments in perverting the consciences of our fellow- men, corrupting their moral s, and destroying the mounds of all authority, whether human or divine, by a systema- tic course of cunning and fraud, and from a love of the "almighty dollar " so called, of conquest, and a blind or superstitious veneration of the Union ; can such men be instrumental in subduing the South, or in keeping them in subjection when conquered? For four years there has been a furious antagonism between the Federals and Confederates ; every injury has been inflicted that human ingenuity could devise, with the 18-t NON COMEATIBUS. most improved means of deadly warfare in their pursuit of each other through fieldibus, across creeknms, in s wampums, and up stumpums, and yet to-day the Confederates still hurl defiance at their Federal foes, whilst their subjugation seems more distant than ever. How humiliating it must be for our Northern people to contemplate, that more bones whiten the soil of the battle fields in the South, made red with blood from the boasted " Israelitish army of the North," than the so-called " Egyptian army of the South ! " And how mortifying it must be for one Federal force after another to have to return from the battle fields of the South without their boasted prey, to proclaim in the ears of political demagogues and blood-thirsty war crusaders in the churches the unwelcome message, " non comeatibus " in the path- way of victory or success. But supposing that with the increased facilities of our Northern people in obtaining men and means to carry on their bloody strife, in consequence of your one-sided neutrality in this country, they should succeed in subjugating the South, they could never make them pull together politically with the bayonet ; but it is urged that liberty would be planted with the bayonet, and the golden rule enthroned by blood ; consequently, say they, these things will counterbalance the fearful loss of life and treasure, and the increased taxation and burdens under which future generations will groan as the result thereof ; and, therefore, fire and sword, suffering and slaughter, death and destruction, must NON COMEATIBUS. 185 not be allowed for a moment to weigh against their mad schemes of ambition, rapine, revenge, and wholesale murder ! Where, oh, where are the prin- ciples that the old martyrs developed and proved to be more powerful than all the battering rams or engines of military science ever invented by man, to be found amid such fanaticism as the above ? Are they brought to the world's surface full of life, love, faith, or beauty on the basis of the new-fangled theory, so recently discovered or put forth, that " war is the expression of moral force?" And can we point to men such as Lincoln, Sumner, Beecher, or any of their co-patriots who subscribe their oaths to con- stitutional documents under the avowed expression of belief that they endorse slavery ; proclaim to the world that they are governed by no fixed principles, but by indispensable military necessity ; and confess before the universe, like President Lincoln in his letter, dated Executive Mansion, Washington, April 4, 1864, " that events control them ? " Can we look to such men, or to those who aid or abet them, for "unselfish- ness, moral grandeur, strong sense, indisputable probity, or a lovely modesty almost amounting to bashfulness ? " What, then, has become of the old- fashioned principles so dear to the martyrs? Are they dead and buried beneath the conventionalities of society, or do we find them illustrated in the hero- worship of the age in which we live ? If so, would the omnipotence of abstract principle or the might and power of moral force be abandoned for brute 186 NON COMEATIBUS. force the reign of bullets ; or should we find men claiming to "be " thorough peace men " covered with dovelike wings stretching out their villture claws, and opening their savage bills to glut their voracious appetites, in order to run riot in such a carnival of death as our American war? Is such the way and are such the means to promote the " liberties of the world or mankind ? " Is there no Elihu to be found amidst the slumbering churches or tribes of men, to point to the grand march of the seasons, and of events, and send forth an electric appeal to the judgments and hearts of men, in rebuke of such monstrosities demanding that "days should speak, and multitudes of years teach men wisdom ?" Once for all, allow me to say that I never fight with men who in anonymous communications put them- selves in the same category with footpads and assassins. Yours for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA EHODES BALME, An American Clergyman. 92 Hughes Street, West Derby-road, May 12. loo*. FftEED MEN'S AID COMMISSION. To the Editor of the Daily Gazette. SIE On reading the account given of the meeting held at Mrs. Joseph Sturge's, in your columns of the 1st inst, under the designation of " Aid for Escaped Slaves," I was deeply impressed with the immense deficiencies of Mr. Levi Coffin, in the statement of his case, as the agent or representative of the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, as well as the introduc- tions referred to by the chairman, Mr. Edward Gem, and this is all the more remarkable as Mr. Coffin was introduced to Mrs. Sturge's guests as "a gentleman who had been during the whole of his life interested in the great question of the emancipation of slaves." Surely an old veteran in the cause of freedom ought to have been able to have produced some names long and favourably known in the cause of freedom in America ; but be this as it may, Secretary Chase's and Judge Storer's names are very unfortunate, both for himself and the object of his mission, since both have always been borne onwards and downwards on the "drift- wood" of rotten policies and expediences towards the dead sea of putrefaction. 188 FREEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION. ' * But let us come to Mr. Coffin's missioa He appears as the agent or representative of the Western Freed- men's Aid Commission. But from his statement what information do we glean of the character of the men who control its Board of Management ? or of the re- lationships which it sustains to the Government or churches of America ? On these points Mr. Coffin is silent. The one harp of a thousand strings which absorbs his attention, and concentrates his energies, is that of aid to escaped slaves ; neither does he say whether the society which he represents is confined exclusively in its operations or restricted in its benevolence to them. President Lincoln, however, conies to our aid and gives us the requisite information. In a speech which he made in Philadelphia, at the Sanitary Fair, on the 16th of last month, recorded in the London Daily Telegraph of the 1st inst, there occurs the following remarkable para- graph : When speaking of the war the President says, " It has had accompaniments not before known in the history of the world." What accompaniments ? De- luges of blood ! Avalanches of debt ! Heaps of blackened ruin ! Widows' wails and orphans' moans ! Spies, informers, conscripts, and dungeons ! Deceit, cunning, infamy, and fraud ! Yes, we have had all these on a scale never before known to such an extent in so short a space of time in the history of the world ! Aye, and we have had more accompaniments or auxiliaries to our Northern armies. As President Lincoln does not mean the above, what then does FKEEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION. 189 he mean ? Hear him. " I mean," says the President " I mean the Sanitary and Christian Commissions !" Sanitary and Christian Commissions accompani- ments or auxiliaries to the Federal armies ! And one of these Christian Commissions the oae represented by Mr. Levi Coffin ! Is it not enough to make the bones of Joseph Sturge rattle in his grave, and spring to life to rebuke the withering imposture if it was necessary ? According to Mr. Coffin, Federal agents take all the able-bodied negroes out of the camps when they come into the Federal lines, and leave the women and children, the aged, decrepit, and infirm, to the ac- companiments or auxiliaries to be cared for! Well and wisely planned to make the Federal armies more powerful for carnage and slaughter ; and well and wisely planned to make the pleas put forth " as irre- sistible as they are pathetic " by the agents and advo- cates of the Federals in England, to raise their piles of money by reminding the ptiblic " Inasmuch as ye do it unto these ye do it unto me." And all in the name of freedom ! How wide the phylacteries of their garments ! But what claim have these Federal advo- cates and agents on the benevolence of mankind to relieve these helpless objects of misery ? Being accompaniments or auxiliaries to the Federal armies, is it not plainly and evidently the legitimate duty of the Federal Government to provide for them when they take from them their natural helpers the able- bodied fathers, brothers, and friends to whom the young and aged of necessity look for help, as in the 190 FEEEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION. case of white men. If Mr. Sturge's ghost could have appeared in the corridors of his late mansion when the above meeting was held, bearing the inscription, " Sanitary and Western Freeman's Aid Commission, accompaniments or auxiliaries to men of violence and blood, and represented by a member of the Society of Friends," what consternation there would have been ! How their knees would have smote together in their paroxysms of fear ! And how they would have shrunk from his presence abashed, ashamed, and confounded! But is there no mistake in regard to these accompaniments or auxiliaries ? Hear what the President says, "Their labours are for the relief of the soldiers, and the Volunteer refreshment saloons understood better by those who hear me than by himself." The relief of soldiers we can understand that, but the relief of volunteer refreshment saloons is a tre- mendous smooth down, and gloss over of the Presi- dent's natural anti-slavery feelings when officially he has to use a catch-word to throw the fugitive slaves into the shade, as a bait in the base trap of cunning by which to reach the easy consciences and votes of weak-minded men and silly fools at the forthcoming election. In concluding this letter, allow me to sup- ply a test by which to prove the spirits as well as doctrines of men, who claim your sympathies, prayers, or pecuniary aid in the cause of freedom in America or on its behalf. It is a test that sends to shivers Beecher and Mrs. Stowe, the Revs. Charles H. Eoe, FEEEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION. 191 D. M. Graham, Professor Grosvenor, &c., and also the Eevs. Newman Hall, and Baptist Noel, E. Matthews, and Oncken ; Professor Newman ; Goddard and Stoddard, Mason Jones, and Henry Vincent, on American questions. This test is two-fold. On moral and religious grounds it is no compromise of truth with falsehood, and no pressing of the sword to uproot human crime. And on civil grounds the test is the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. On the above basis the little stripling writer can make short, sharp, and decisive work with the above classes of advocates and writers, as it would be quite easy to take them by the beard and smite them under the fifth rib of their con- sciences. I must not forget to state that I think President Lincoln is entitled to a vote of thanks for the nail to fasten down the lid in the coffin of the above questionable, if not false and spurious philan- thropy. Yours for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA E. BALME, An American Baptist Clergyman and Uncompromising Abolitionist. London House, Hill Street, Birmingham, July 4, 1864. THE FREEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION AND ITS ENGLISH AUXILIARIES. To the Editor of the Daily Gazette. SIR, With the deepest and broadest emphasis our attention is called to the urgent necessities of " poor coloured freedmen " by the agents and advocates of the above society and auxiliaries. When in a state of ignoble bondage, these oppressed and down-trodden people not only fed and clothed themselves, but their owners, so called, and provided them with many of the luxuries of life, as well as secured a provision for the helpless from infancy even to old age. Now is it unreasonable to suppose that they cannot maintain themselves in freedom, and also their dependents, when they did so much in slavery ? Why then this accumulated misery amongst these unfortunates ? How are we to account for their distress, shown in the harrowing details given in the public prints of their condition ? One cause is the wantonness of cruelty and reckless savageism and barbarity with which the present war is carried on by our Federal armies, shown in the use AND ITS ENGLISH AUXILIARIES. 193 of stone fleets and torches sealing up ports of com- merce, reducing prosperous towns and villages to ashes, and changing plantations which almost re- flected the hues of paradise into a wilderness of desolation, ruin and woe, making it more difficult for * the people of the South to obtain suitable food and clothing. Hence the utterly destitute and famished condition of the negroes when they reach the Federal lines, as their escape to freedom is from homesteads where the woe-cup has been filled to the brim by war and their pathway to it through " plantations deso- lated by its ravages." Another cause is the unnatural and cruel proscrip- tion of the negroes in the efforts made to detain them by the Federal Government, in what is called the " volunteer refreshment saloons." First, because they are not wanted in the North, where their presence and colour is considered a pollution and a nuisance, although our Northern people are sending the cry across the Atlantic, by every breeze, to emigrants to make their homes in our country, enchanting them with the delusion that it is an "asylum for the oppressed of all nationalities," and deluding them with the prospect that they will find it the " Paradise of the Universe." Secondly, because these volunteer refreshment saloons would be a convenient trap where they could seize the able-bodied to form them into " black regiments," on the same principle and accord- ing to the same model of our " black churches ; " and also to use them as teamsters and body-servants to o 194 THE FEEEDMEN'S AID COMMISSION the different grades of officers and agents in the Federal armies. Hence the orders issued by the administrators of the Federal Government to prevent any negroes coming North when they reach the Federal lines ; and hence, also, the misery of the helpless who are handed over to the cold pittance of charity and the tender mercies of the agents and officers of the commissariat a class of men not over liberal, or veiy tender or considerate in their regard for the well-being of those unfortunate creatures, as shown in the reports of Sanitary Commissioners. Such being the inexorable logic of facts, can you, will you, ought you to give your sympathies, or to sustain with your practical benevolence the imbecile admini- strators of our Federal Government, or to co-operate with men masked under the names of high sounding titles, such as "Sanitary Fairs," and "Freedmen's Aid Christian Missions," engaged in sustaining such a philanthropy as the above ? If the British Government were to take able- bodied men to help to fight your battles, and place their associates a'nd dependents in a state of helpless- ness and misery where they would have nothing to fall back upon but the cold pittance of charity, and where they could not by any possibility help them- selves, would it not deserve the bitterest reproaches and the severest censures and reprobation of man- kind ? and would the Britishers in such a case be satisfied if the British Government called into being "accompaniments," or auxiliaries, under masked names AND ITS ENGLISH AUXILIARIES. 1 95 and high-sounding titles, to do for it what was the bounden duty of the Government to do itself, in order that it might be more free for the work of massacre and blood, what would you think of such a govern- ment, or such auxiliaries, or their advocates or sup- porters ? What, then, are we to think of the Federal Govern- ment and people in such a case? Where is their sense of decency and shame, leaving out regard for principle and honour ? In view of the above facts, it is quite easy to plant our feet in the breach, scale the ramparts of the Mid- land Freedmen's Aid Association, which, it appears, swarm with men who are bound with strong and chosen delusions ; and, after dislodging them from their false positions, run up our flagstaffs, whilst with matchless grace and undaunted courage we hurl back in their faces their false imputations and menacing insults, tearing to shreds before their eyes their " spurious designations " and lions' skins which show the long ears cropping out a truly pitiable and humiliating spectacle. It is a matter of little moment to be unknown or disowned by certain classes of religionists or philanthropists, and the writer has no dread of father confessors or inquisitorial racks. Yours, for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA E. BALME, An American Baptist Clergyman. FKEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY AND ITS EEPEE- SENTATIVES AND SUPPOETEES. To the Editor of the Gazette. SIR, In Covington, Kentucky, a small town across the river Cincinnati, there lives a slave whom we will call Levi Coffin ; and in Cincinnati a gentleman, bearing the name of Joseph Sturge, distinguished for his practical benevolence and supreme regard for the rights of men. Joseph hears that Levi is hard worked, has scanty fare, and is sometimes roughly used. He is moved with compassion towards Levi, tries to make his acquaintance, and discovering that Levi would prefer to have his liberty with his wife and family, and enjoy the fruit of his hard earned toils, Mr. Sturge says to him, Levi, arise, and bring thy wife and children, and follow me ; and as there has been hitherto no security for the fugitive slave in our Free States, so called, away they go towads Canada, and on reaching the Queen's dominions, Levi with his wife and family embrace their benefactor, thank him for his gracious interposition, and then send up their incense of praise towards God for sending them FBEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. 197 such a bright angel of mercy as Joseph Sturge, who has delivered them from a bondage full of unutterable woe and terror ; but if Joseph Sturge was the slave, and Levi Coffin was to be the benefactor and deliverer although he " has always taken it for granted that every body had a right to liberty who had not for- feited it by crime ; yet it was no part of his business to interfere with what was law in the Slave States, or to incite or assist any slaves to make their escape ;" therefore the slave Joseph Sturge with his wife and family would have all their hopes coffined and con- signed to the tomb, so far as Levi Coffin is concerned, except they made their way of their own accord in disguise over the ferry, or piloted their course in some boat over the river, and gave a loud thundering knock at Coffin's door. In such a case Coffin would receive and entertain Joseph Sturge with his wife and family and give them a helping hand. Hear him. In his statement made at the meeting held at Mrs. Sturge's,he said, "he often told slaveholders that it was no part of his business to interfere with slaves on their estates ; but that if a slave had run away, and he found him needing assistance, he would help him," and " on the same principle," continued Levi, " he would feed the slave- holders if they came to him hungry ; but that he would not help in the capture of escaped slaves." A number of slaves find their way to Coffin's house, obtain relief, and set out on their perilous journey to the land of freedom. As soon as they have gone, the marshal and a number of slaveholders come to his 198 FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. door, and ask to see Mr. Coffin ; on presenting him- self, they tell him that they have been making an exciting chase after a number of fugitive slaves, who have eluded their grasp, and baffled them in their efforts to arrest them, and then avow that they are fatigued and very hungry. In such a case are we to understand from Mr. Coffin that he would say to them come in, make yourselves welcome at my table, and take refreshing repose under my roof ?" Mark Mr. Coffin's words, " on the same principle he would feed the slaveholders if they came to him hungry," or " needing assistance." Many slaveholders would be glad of his bread and cheese to satisfy their hunger, renew their strength, that they might make more strenuous efforts to capture fleeing bond- men. By relieving them in such a case, would he not be helping them to capture slaves, although he was personally to refuse to go forth with the man-hunters to aid them in their wicked calling? If so, what is there distinctively anti-slavery in his aid given to escaped slaves, adapted to call forth our admiration or esteem, or to place him before us as a model for imita- tion? In regard to the institution represented by Mr. Coffin, great care has been, taken to assure us that "tools of every description as well as donations will be doubly welcome and very thankfully received;" and " there can be no doubt " say its agents and sup- porters, "that the articles contributed will have the duties remitted by government." Why not? Surely FEEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. 199 there can be no misgiving in such a case when the eagles of the Federal government, such as Chase and C. F. Adams appear on the scene with open bills, spreading wings, and outstretched talons. Oh! no, there will be no Custom House obstruction to such a work of benevolence as the above. Directions have also been given that "care should be taken that the goods are specially adapted for the use of negroes, or for sale." The use of negroes. Where? On the plantations of Louisiana, under the new code of laws, adopted and enforced by General Banks and his subordinates ? If the response comes " no, not for men in serfdom." Then are they for the negroes col- lected in the camps formed on the banks of the Mississippi ? Of what earthly use can implements of industry be there, when the able-bodied are taken for service in the army? Or for sale. This is very sig- nificant, and will not escape notice, for our American people are fond of having a little ready cash, which will be very acceptable just now that we are so un- comfortably nearing the rapids which are to float us into the depths of bankruptcy ; therefore, throw in your rings and brooches, necklaces and ear-rings, anything which is convertible into gold. Motives are also suggested, "as millions have gained their liberty," shouts one of the Committee ; " but four thousand have already perished from actual want of food, shelter, and raiment." Millions are immense numbers. Now, if all the able-bodied are taken out of those millions of freed slaves and put into our 200 FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. Federal armies, there can be no lack of fighting men on the part of the North ; and it must be very stupid of General Grant to stand still, or to be blocked fast with his " swamp angels " before Petersburgh ; or for the administration journals to insist that Grant must be heavily reinforced before he again ventures to ad- vance ? Surely the telegram brought by the North American, July 1st, must be untrue ; or else there must be a screw loose in the member of the committee referred to ; but, however we may doubt the realiza- tion of the former part of the paragraph under con- sideration, we need not wonder that four thousand of these unfortunate people should die from actual want of food, shelter, and raiment in connection with such an arrangement or provision as that which is made for them by our Federal government. In the one case, such an arrangement might create a great many " war boys " for General Lee to kill ; and, in the other, for famine and pestilence to destroy. "The most valued and benevolent fellow-townsman" referred to by Edward Gem, Esq., says, " to my mind, this exodus from slavery is an event so awful in itself, and, I trust, I may not be presumptuous to say, so grand an evidence of the hand of God in bringing good out of evil, that I am impressed with humble thankfulness in being able and privileged to give some small help." It is an old adage, that " when rogues fall out, honest men get their own ;" but what enlightened man can give his sympathies or practical aid to FEEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. 201 rogues ? and yet, God in His all-wise providence may overrule their quarrel to bring to light the dishonest gains which they have filched, make them disgorge their plunder, secure their appropriation to persons to whom they belong, and subject the criminals to the punishment justly due to their crimes. When our terrible war commenced in America, our government, churches, and overwhelming masses amongst the people, had given themselves up to a wilful perver- sion of the truths of Christianity, a false commercial policy, and an overshadowing attachment to, and superstitious veneration for the Union ; consequently, they had trampled down under their black hoofs all those sacred principles which hold in their everlasting embrace the supreme rights of men, irrespective of kith or kin, caste or colour, country or clime, so amply and brightly developed in the New Testament, Declaration of Independence ; and even in the Consti- tution of the disunited states ; thus robbing both God and man. But why this stretch of despotic power ? God had made the negro with a darker hue on his countenance ; and as negro slavery was first connived at, and afterwards openly avowed to be the corner- stone of the Federal Eepublic, in order to maintain the union one and inseparable, the Bible was made to rob the negro of his manhood the eagles of freedom were smuggled out of the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence was resolved into a glittering generality for the exclusive use and benefit of the white or superior race, so-called ; this vast and 202 FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. foul conspiracy, therefore, was not something new, or novel, or startling with us. It commenced with our revolutionary fathers, Jefferson, Madison, and Wash- ington, and culminated in the reign of terror in- augurated by our lilliputian race of political men, represented by President Lincoln, and Senator Sum- ner, who subscribed their oaths to the Constitution as a slave document, and then tried to palm them- selves off for hero philanthropists ; and also by our clerical agitators, such as " Parson Brownlow," the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher, Drs. Cheever, Eddy, Tyng, Dowling, etc., etc., who have confederated to prove their principles orthodox by sending bomb shells and bullets, " swamp angels " and bayonets into the South, for its conversion, and the restoration of the union. When, therefore, we begun to live, we begun to die to all sense of decency and shame ; and as we com- menced, even BO we have come to grief in consequence of our national jugglery and fraud. The immediate cause of our present troubles was a quarrel for the division of the spoils, both in regard to the "Cranberry Jam" of the government, and the territory taken from the Indians. The unfolding scenes connected with it have revealed the character of our infamy and guilt as a people. The Eev. Henry Ward Beecher says, that " God is the great tax-gatherer who is abroad making the people disgorge their plunder ;" but be this as it may, defeat, disunion, loss of personal liberty, and the terrible destruction of life and property, demonstrate beyond cavil that the FREEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. 203 Almighty is " abroad " with the great whip of retri- bution to fetch up arrears on the tender skins of our Northern people as well as the Southerns, for their double-dyed garments of shame, dishonour, and guilt ; neither can we doubt that the negro will come out from under the avalanche of wickedness which both North and South have helped to create, claiming the lawful use of the two hands which God has given him, and maintaining that it is not insurrection to take his own limbs into his own keeping, or to walk off with them ; neither will the free negro be so generally proscribed or ostracised in connexionjwith the common industries of life, the pathway of social intercourse, the halls of science and literature ; common councils, legislature, congress, or the church of the living God. Thus God will bring good out of evil; and if any man inquires why could not we have had this good without the famine, sword, and pestilence? It is because, as the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher in his Harper's Ferry Sermon has said, " there was a remarkable pertinence which these things have, described in Jeremiah vi. 12-19 ; in many respects to our nation in the past, and to our times in the present." ! ponder over these words of terrible import. " For I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land saith the Lord ; for from the least of them even unto the greatest of them, every one is given to covetousness, and from the prophet even unto the priest, every one dealeth falsely. They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying peace, peace, when there is no peace. 204 FBEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomi- nation ? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush ; therefore they shall fall among them that fall ; " at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord. 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, congregation, what is among them. Hear, earth, behold I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened to my words, nor to my law, but rejected it." These words are now being fearfully illustrated and realized by our American people as a nation, in the way of God's terrible judgments ; and whilst God inflicts the punishment He has no co- partners in this work, not even " most valued and benevolent fellow-townsmen, although they may claim with humble thankfulness, in being able and privi- leged to give some help." And there can be no "atonement or consolation," as Mr. Cobden avows there is, in his recent letter to Simeon Whiteley ; " for the horrors with which our American war has been accompanied," not even when it can be shewn that as the result of this war four millions of human beings have been " elevated from the condition of chattels to the rank of free men," since the " good ends of Provi- AND ITS REPEESENTATIVES AND SUPPORTERS. 205 dence " in their deliverance have always been within the compass, range, or mighty sweep of our Northern people, without the use of violence and blood. " It may seem strange for me to say," Ward Beecher de- clares in the sermon already referred to, " that the lever with which to lift the load off Georgia is in New York, but it is so." Why has not the proper lever been applied ? Has not the primary cause of our awful calamities been revealed? Did not good old Timothy Dwight thunder in the ears of our people repentance for national sins ? Did not Dr. Hopkins cry, " Hearken to the sound of the trumpet ;" but the people said, " we will not hearken." Others reiterated the same cry, and were driven from their pulpits, all conventional relationships, and from their property and homes into exile. " Where lying lips do torture, Their mercy into crime, And the slanderer does flourish As the bay tree for a time." At length two special messengers appeared to warn the people of their sins, in the persons of Elijah Love- joy and John Brown, who gathered up their strength and lives, and threw them against the wickedness of the land ; but our people had become so hardened in crime, under the instructions received from teachers who covered up malum in se with their theology and technicalities : hence the cry forthwith arose that these men are insane, let us kill them ; and, accord- 206 FKEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY ingly, they were put to death. At length the time drew near when, to use the language of Dr. Cheever in one of his lucid intervals, " victory over our reign- ing and remorseless sins, in that way in which it is only worth gaining, the victory by conscience, the victory by divine truth, the victory by the claims and power of the gospel, the victory by benevolence and love, the victory by God's grace, to God's everlasting glory " the time drew near when these means must give place to more terrible things in righteousness ; and " when God lets loose the avalanche of judg- ment," says Cheever, "it will no more be in the power of an appalled and trembling church, by an untimely repentance, wrung out of selfishness and terror, to stay or prevent the ruin, than it would be possible for a regiment of conservative saints to hold back an alpine cataract ; or a ridge on the icy forehead of the Jungfrau mountain, already loosened by the tempest, and thundering into the valley below." The untimely repentance, wrung out of selfishness and terror, has come. A full description of it is given in the Anti-slavery Eeporter, July 1st ; and amongst the sundry resolutions recorded from the pens of these penitent backsliders, we beg to call attention to the following : " ' That while we deplore the evil of war that has filled our land with mourning, we rejoice in the sub- lime manifestations of benevolence it has developed, as seen in the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, and in the Associations formed to aid the vast multi- AND ITS REPRESENTATIVES AND SUPPORTERS. 207 tudes who have recently become freemen, and that we pledge to these institutions our hearty co-operation and support.' "In view of the past course of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the adoption, with but two or three dissenting voices, of the following preamble and resolution, by the Convention of that Church, sitting in Pittsburg last week, is still more remarkable. ""Whereas, There exists in this country an or- ganized and armed rebellion, whose purpose is the destruction of our National Union, and the perpetua- tion of Negro Slavery, " And whereas, This rebellion has more and more assumed a character of barbarous fanaticism, and murderous ferocity on the part of the enemies of the nation ; therefore, in view of the causes and character of this struggle, " Eesolved, That we hereby declare our unfaltering allegiance to the Government of the United States, and that we pledge it our willing devotion and ser- vice, and that as a body of Christians we will ever pray that in God's own time and way this rebellion may be put down ; that oppression and Slavery, in all its forms, may be done away ; that freedom of body and mind, political and religious, may every- where prevail ; that the emancipated negroes, whom God in his providence is committing to our care, may be the objects of our liberal and Christian regard and instruction ; that war may soon cease throughout all our borders ; and that our now lacerated country may 208 FEEEDMEN'S AID SOCIETY. again be so united, that from the lakes on the North, to the gulf on the South, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there shall be one Union, one Government, one Flag, one Constitution, the whole culminating in the higher glory, which shall make this nation Emanuel's land a mountain of holiness, and a fit dwelling-place of righteousness." Had the above re- pentance come before the war commenced it would have been seasonable ; but despite the " sublime manifestations of Christian benevolence it has de- veloped in the Sanitary and Christian Commissions " and the earnest prayers of these backsliders, we cannot sympathize with Mr. Cobden, or those like minded with him, when he or they say " our sym- pathies follow your commanders and soldiers in the Federal armies to the field, with all the interest in their terrible efforts which we had felt in the labours of Mr. Sumner, and the other champions of freedom, when their struggle was confined to the domain of peaceful arguments." Yours for truth and liberty, JOSHUA R BALME. Wilsden, near Bingley, Yorkshire. July 16, 1864 MEMBEES OF THE PEACE SOCIETY AND THE AMEKICAN WAE. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. Gentlemen, We can scarcely go into a Christian sanctuary, without being reminded that in the " out- side world" there is steel clashing against steel, venom spitting against venom, evil smashing, crash- ing, and dashing against evil ; but in the Christian world there is, say our theologians, " the good over- coming the evil." Now, if it be the work of Christian men to overcome the evil with the good, what must we think of those avowedly Christian men who abandon spiritual weapons for carnal, adopt the venom and steel for their cardinal virtues and creed, make the sword their peace-maker, rifled guns and minnie balls their true conciliators, feel that no storms are so pleasant as those of violence and blood, no sounds so sweet as those which are associated with the echoing thunders of battle, and vow on God's altar to hew their way through what they call " rebel armies " and " over the heads of rebel leaders," in order to sub jugate the South. p 210 MEMBERS OF THE PEACE SOCIETY Has the right kind of seed been dropped into the centre of the above men's hearts ? If so, their superior natures must be terribly im- bruted by their inferior ones the spiritual must be woefully in subjection to the animal And yet, forsooth, this class of men have their abettors and promoters in this country as well as in America. They try to win their way into the depths of the popular heart by boundless assumption and solemn asseveration, and maintain that the end which they have in view, justifies the use of the fire, faggot, and sword, the means which they employ. Hence they call that most execrable of all wars the world has ever yet seen or known, " Our American war." " The Holy war." Amongst those who share with them in these delusions are to be found members of the Peace Society, non-resistants, men who plead for the inviolability of human life, and yet give their unbounded sympathies and aid to those who are associated with rash and bloody hands, the maddest outbursts of violence and blood. In the report of the Liverpool Peace Society recently pub- lished in the Mercury, some of these men say, " We rely upon nothing to render war impossible but the prevalence of Christian principles and dispositions in the hearts of men." Even so say our religious war crusaders, whose gospel is made up of brimstone and bayonets ; and the Christian Advocate and Journal, published in New York on February ] 1, 18t>4, copies an extract approvingly from the Christian Intelligencer, AND THE AMEEICAN WAR. 21 1 which says " The more of these employed by us, the sooner shall we come to the close of this horrible strife." But should these non-resistants disavow a reliance on such a manifestation of Christian principles and dispositions as the above, how are we to account for their appreciation of the American war the co-opera- tion and sympathy given by them to some of its princi- pal instigators and promoters and the feeling of satis- faction which they connect with it ? The best illustra- tion of the character and conduct of these men is given us by the Editor of the journal referred to above, in a review of a book written by Whittier, the Quaker poet, called "In War Time." Take the following extract as a specimen: "' In War Time,'" says the Advocate and Journal, "is a strange book for a Quaker. It shows how one whose heart is large, easily fits a gospel creed to his divine duties. Whittier advised separation in some admirable lines, written in the opening winter of the rebellion. But he erred, not knowing the mind of God. Those lines have a selfish ring about them as if glad to be free of the accursed thing : Draw we not even now a freer breath, As from our shoulders falls the load of death. He forgot the slave at that moment. God had not. He knew His only chance for liberty was in filling us with a fury for the Union, and the Divine madness rushed upon us. Whittier sympathises with it, and sees its efficacy, sees that is the sole remedy ; yet still clings to his creed, saying 212 MEMBEES OF THE PEACE SOCIETY 41 The levelled gun, the battle brand, We may not take." What a mockery for such men to point us to the old- fashioned doctrines of Christianity, as taught by our blessed Lord and Saviour and glorious apostles and illustrated in the noble examples of the martyrs, who repudiated rapine and revenge, violence and murder, that they might bear a faithful witness to the truth and make a good confession before many witnesses ? And if the Quakers of America to whom the avowed friends of the slave in Liverpool are entrusting their subscriptions, cherish the same spirit as Whit-tier, or as Alice Hambleton, Dinah Mendenhall, and Eliza Agnew the Quakeresses who waited upon President Lincoln a short time ago to urge upon him not to give up the struggle, although it has been fierce and terribly bloody if such persons as the above are to have the control over or management of your funds, why not send them direct to Parson Brownlow, Henry Ward Beecher, or Miss Dicken- son, who unblushingly and openly make their teach- ings harmonise with their instincts, wishes, and desires in the sanction and encouragement which they give to the present horrible and ferocious war in America. Not wishing to dwell upon the new revelation or prediction of the Committee concerning the preval- ence of Christian principles and dispositions, which they say are to come "gradually and by very small degrees," let us turn to one more paragraph, which AND THE AMEKICAN WAK. 213 reads as follows : " Not even the abolition of slavery can justify the violation of human life, much less the maintenance of the political union. And yet, so long as slavery exists, there can be little hope of perma- nent pacification. The agents and advocates of the Confederacy in England now constantly profess an anti-slavery policy, but no evidence appears of progress in this direction in the Confederacy itself." If the Southerns had adopted an anti-slavery policy, the world would have been delirious with joy; but seeing that by their own unaided efforts they could not retain slavery in their embrace, much less extend it, why should we trouble ourselves about any abortive attempts which they might make to strengthen, con- solidate, or preserve such a nefarious system, when it was utterly beyond their power without the help of our Northern people to do such a wicked thing ? In such a case a separation between the North and South would have brought deliverance to the slave without calamity and bloodshed, and there would have been a greater probability of a reunion afterwards on a more secure and permanent basis ; but now, alas, we have got to sing the " Song of Greenbacks," which ends with the " Union is gone to smash !" How foolish and unwise, therefore, are those who advocate the Northern war of invasion in the South, or extenuate the guilt or cover up the horrors of it, from the plea that the independence of the South would or could have secured the continued existence of slavery, or that there would have been "little hope of permanent 214 MEMBERS OF THE PEACE SOCIETY. pacification " in such a case ! Alas for " peacemen," so called, to be mixed up with the above class of men, and to take sides with them, avowing that " not even the abolition of slavery can justify the violation of human life, much less the maintenance of the political union!" What a mockery, delusion and snare! Yours for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA RHODES BALME, An American Clergyman. 82, Hughee-street, West Derby-road. PEACE BACKSLIDEES. To the Editor of the Gazette. SIR : In the Herald of Peace for June 1st, 1864, there is a remarkable paragraph, which points the finger with unerring precision to some backsliding sinners who have lost their first love to peace princi- ples. It reads as follows : Surely, the present con- dition of things in America, and still more the dreadful prospect which the future presents, for there is n6 rational probability of the war coming to a speedy end by the military predominance of either side, ought to awaken reflection in the minds of those good people in this country, who, misled by sympathies that were true and generous, have been tempted to encourage one of the parties in this conflict, because they hoped that out of the evil good might come. Surely, they also must begin to suspect that rapine and slaughter and devastation cannot be the right means, or the means which God will bless, for promoting the ends of Christian philanthropy. In America we can point to many of these men. There are a few of them amongst the evangelicals who pledged themselves to make the word of God their charter for freedom and armoury against slavery. 21 6 PEACE BACKSLIDEES These, however, were the first and foremost to aban- don the cross for the corselet, love for hatred, the peace cry for the war cry ; and in their mad haste to invoke the war spirit, call forth the angry defiance, demand the challenge of battle, and light up the flames of civil discord, which have broken out in deluges of blood, these men called their church mem- bers together on Fast days and Feast days, and resolved that henceforth their gospel, creed, and ten commandments be made up of Greek fire, violence, and blood. At a church meeting presided over by the Rev. Henry T. Cheever on the last Fast day, called by the late President Buchannan, the following resolutions were adopted and endorsed : " Eesolved that it was held to be manifestly and imperatively the duty of the President of the United States promptly to enforce the laws, and to put down rebellion and treason, now upheld and perpetuated in South Carolina, by all the disposable force of the army and navy of the United States. " Eesolved, that we declare our deliberate opinion, that all the Christian people of the country should } and that an overwhelming majority of them will, sustain the President in such a decisive suppression of the rankest treason and rebellion. " Resolved, that if he should not do this as being due both to the safety and dignity of such a people, that he be further impeached at the bar of the Senate of the United States." "What a function for a church ! And what an ob- PEACE BACKSLIDERS. 217 servance of a Fast day ! How the arch adversary must have smiled, and his infernal imps have been filled with joy with such a presage of the approaching carnival of death ! Not only were Fast days turned to account by these backsliding sinners, but, also, Thanksgiving or Feast days ! Hence we find the Rev. George B. Cheever before he sits down to feast on turkey, preaches a sermon on Thanksgiving day, Nov. 24, 1859, in which he avowed, " If you or I possessed the power by tossing a horn of powder, a torch of Greek fire, a percussion cap, an explosive biscuit into the heart of the South to set the whole slave population into a sudden revolt for the assertion of their own freedom, would it not be beyond question, your duty and mine ? " Whatever satisfaction he and his people felt in eating their thanksgiving turkey after the enunciation of this policy, to be pursued in such a mad outburst of fiery enthusiasm and zeal in the Church of the Puritans, there can be little doubt of its being succeeded by a jubilee in Pandemonium. The above, however, was only the key-note of what was to follow amongst our evangelicals ! Meanwhile, no first shot had as yet been fired at Fort Sumpter ? If such be the philanthropic evangelicals in the New World, what are the non-evangelicals ? In a letter signed William White, in the Gazette of July 7th, Frederick Douglas is ushered into our notice with a flourish of trumpets " as a man whose intelligence, attainments, oratorio and literary ability, and moral worth, constituted him the foremost advocate of the 218 PEACE BACKSLIDEES. race from which he derives the darker hues of his countenance, while they enable him in their cause, to face undauntedly, the white people with whom he is equally in blood relationship." The reader will per- ceive that we place Douglas under the head of non- evangelicals. How is that, inquires one ? Did he not break bread and sing psalms with the evangelicals on his last visit in this country ? Yes, and also fling his Theodore Parkerite heresies in their faces in America, and brandished them like daggers over their heads ! Being acquainted with his sad history, we tried to elicit the necessary information, expecting to be filled with thrilling emotions of joy in the recital of the particular incidents detailing the recovery of this lost sheep to the evangelical fold from which he had ' strayed, but was rewarded for my trouble with a daub from the tar and brushes of Douglas and Mrs. Julia Croft, and also designated " as a man who had a slate off his roof!" Not deeming the above proof posi- tive that Douglas was an evangelical, we must have farther revelations before we make a new classification. This non-evangelical Douglas, used to be a disciple of Garrison's peace school of abolition ; but, being a re- fractory pupil, he soon quarrelled with his teacher ; and, also, with that great master of elocution, Wendel Phillips Esq., until at length he became unmanage- able, when strong words passed between them. After throwing off all restraint, Douglas soon became a champion in his advocacy of brute force, but now and then received some terribly hard knocks. One PEACE BACKSLIDERS 219 these was given him by an aged coloured female. On stretching out his strong brawny arms at a public meeting, with the fire of indignation flashing in her eyes, she looked him defiantly in the face, while with the deepest earnestness she demanded, " is God dead, Fred?" Such a terrific thump from so unexpected a quarter, brought down the house in thunders of ap- plause, and entwined the laurels of victory around her brow. After being thrashed by this old woman, he received a withering exposure for his cowardice in the Harper's Ferry affair which made terrible work of his chivalry. On that eventful Monday, when the honoured and illustrious John Brown was taken pri- soner, he was to have arrived at the school house with a large reinforcement of his friends on the morn- ing of that day, but Cook, one of Brown's party, said, " I conveyed the arms to the school house for him, and waited until nearly night, but the coward did'nt come." Now, if he could not undauntedly face the aged female whose features wore a darker hue on her countenance than his own ; we do not wonder that he should have " skedaddled " when sterner work was re- quired of him in the presence of the white people, " his blood relation equals ! " Such being the " fore- most" advocate of the negro race in America, let us turn to the founder of the school of abolitionism in that country, namely, William Loyd Garrison, who also is a non-evangelical, although he has often been whitewashed by others, and by some who ought to have known better. On glancing down the brief his- 220 PEACE BACKSLIDERS. tory of abolitionism, we find Garrison commenced his work of emancipation on the following basis, or declaration of principles, which he submitted for the approval of emancipationists to be subscribed to as a solemn bond and covenant to shew to the world that they were pledged and sealed for the work before them. In this bond and covenant they solemnly engaged " to reject themselves, and entreat the op- pressed to reject the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage," admitted the "sovereignty of the States over the subject of slavery within their limits," and avowed that they were " under high moral obligations to use for the promotion of their cause, moral, and political action as prescribed in the Constitution of the United States." Such was the basis on which Garrison planted his feet thirty years ago, in the presence of assembled delegates, convened in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. But where does he stand now ? And what has been the charac- ter of his labours during the last thirty years ? If it is right and proper for Mr Garrison now to use forceable means on behalf of the slaves it was right and proper then. Alas for Mr. Garrison when he has to grope his way through broken bonds and covenants to the councils of men of violence and blood ; and to unite with them in seeking to re-elect our modern Pharaoh Lincoln for the Presidency, who has thrown the whole country into a state of the wildest anarchy, and the most frightful despotism, compared with which the horrors of the French revolution sink into insignificance, PEACE BACKSLIDERS. 221 and in which the Jacobins were saints compared with such persons as Brownlow, Beecher, Cheever, Eddy, Tyng Sloane, the Hon. Lewis Barker, and Miss Dicken- son in their enormous thirst for blood. There is yet another who demands a passing notice before we dismiss our new world philanthropists. His name is J. G-. Whittier, the Quaker poet, and for convenience sake we will put him in that new divi- sion of mankind which the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher claims to occupy, which is that neither of saint nor sinner, but Beecher ! Whittier on coming into the presence of saints and sinners, hushes them into silence, and commands their profoundest attention whilst he points them to the rising mountains in the distance called the blue ridge in Virginia, and as they look with steadfast gaze he breathes the prayer " O ! never may yon blue ridged hills The Northern rifle hear, Nor see the light of blazing homes Flash on the negro's spear. But let the free-winged angel truth Their guarded passes scale, To teach that right is more than might, And justice more than mail!" Surely now we have found a good man and true. Ah ! no, there has not been a vote which this peace quaker has ever given to uphold the Constitution of Massachusets, or of the Federal government, that does not pledge him to uphold the war system army, navy, militia, and all their accompaniments. More- 222 PEACE BACKSLIDERS. over, during the present war our Northern "War Christians have gravely charged him with " answering his own non-resistant doctrines with his divinest instincts the innermost life," which, say they, "clearly as the trumpets of the revelator's angels, proclaims the absolute and most perfect justice of this war." The writer is not quite so sure about that ; but when Whittier, in sight of the blue hills referred to in his former poem, now assumes martial airs, and with soldier-like instinct and chivalry points us to the Stars and Stripes, whilst General Lee enters Freder- ick city, and with enthusiastic ardour shouts, " Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their golden Tsars Flapped in the morning wind," what are we to think in such a case ? Think ! we cannot otherwise think than that he flapped back again his peace principles in his own face. And this is no less evident in the stanza which he composed in honour of Barbara Fretchie, who, bowed with her threescore years and ten, thrust the Stars and Stripes out of her attic window. Full of military ardour, the Quaker poet again shouts, " Up the street came the rehel tread, Stonewell Jackson riding ahead ; Under his slouched hat left and right He glanced ; the old flag met his sight. Halt ! The dust brown ranks stood fast. Fire ! Out blazed the rifle blast." PEACE BACKSLIDERS. 223 What a change has come over the dreams of this renowned champion in the peace cause ! A rich story is in circulation, that Mr. Cobden once avowed that if Mr. Bright had not been a Quaker, he would have been a "prize fighter." Now, as the instincts of Whittier, like Mr. Bright's, are now gravitating to- wards combativeness in the American war, might not these men be of some service in sponging the head of a " swamp angel," or directing a battery of Greek fire ? But be this as it may, we cannot help but think how different to their former selves. What a strange freak is manifest in their phrenological developments ! Bumps of benevolence associated with the "grizzly fighter's hair!' Love torches con- nected with raids of midnight terror ! Souls over- flowing with goodness, lifting up out of their goodness rash and bloody hands ; and all bound fast or knit together -by strong and powerful sympathies, as shown in the illustrations given from Whittier's poem, called In War Time, and demonstrated in Mr. Bright's letter to the New York Chamber of Com- merce, in which he says : " I wish you success in this great conflict." liberty, what deeds of infamy are done in thy name ! Can such men be the true friends of either whites or blacks ? or those who abet them in their suicidal madness and folly ? O, perish with them the folly That seeks through evil good Long live the generous purpose, Unstained with human blood " 224 PEACE BACKSLIDERS. Such men cannot be worthy of our confidence or esteem. Neither is it right to give them any countenance or support until they have repented of their sins, and returned from their evil ways. We are glad that the editor of the Herald of Peace has taken the birch into his hand to chastise the English peace backsliders. Success to him in trying to awaken reflection in their minds. We shall be very sorry if his voice of gentle warning should be unheeded by them. ! think of the rapine, and slaughter, and devastation in the conflict which Mr. Bright desires to be successful, and so vividly portrayed by the poet, where he says, " And the wail of the lone and desolate one Arose in the midnight air ; And the smoke of the combat dimmed the sun, And the wolf fed fat in his lair : And rapine, and murder, and nameless crimes, Strode forth in the blessed sun ; And the devil he owned that such glorious times Had'nt been since the world begun." As we think of the above being present to the editor's mind, let us hope that his efforts will not be love's labour lost in convincing these awful backsliders that they' are not the right means, and that the men to whom we have referred are not the right agents, or the means or agents which God will bless for promoting the ends of Christian philanthropy. Yours, for truth as well as liberty, JOSHUA ERODES BALME. THE AMEKICAN WAE CRUSADE Two sins rise before us in America, which are of fearful and appalling magnitude, and involve us, as a people, in a criminality the most offensive to God and injurious to man. These sins are slavery, and one man's inferiority to another, one of which prevails in the South, the other in the North, shutting us out, as a people, from the court of morality and justice, and placing us beyond the pale of sympathy and aid amongst enlightened and upright men. These sins have gone on increasing from the era of American Independence to the present time, in consequence of the perverted maxims of philoso- phers and statesmen, and the corrupted teachings of professors and divines, until they have attracted the thunderbolts of Jehovah, and the lurid flashes of His vengeance in righteous retribution ; and this punishment is meted out, not only on the people of 226 PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. the South, but on the more guilty inhabitants of the North, who have sinned against clearer light and stronger convictions, and, even now, there is no evidence of a change of mind towards sin as such, or deep humility before God on account of it. Although the country was settled with the Puri- tans, and, according to Mrs. Stowe, in her " Key to Uncle Tom," claims a pre-eminence in regard to the "more powerful influence of the clergy, and a greater religious ascendancy amongst the nations," those supposed clergy, not excepting her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and the multitudes of avowed disciples referred to by her, have no visible hand in shaping our destiny in the present awful and rugged crisis, by the Word and Spirit of God, means which are alone owned, sanctified, and blest by Him. The diabolical barbarities and cold blooded atro- cities, butcheries, and miseries flowing out of the fratricidal war are utterly revolting and frightful to contemplate, and ought to call forth the earnest and most dignified remonstrances of Christian men everywhere against its continuance ; and, also, against the religious war crusaders, such as Cheever, Beecher, Sloan, Tyng, Dowling, Conway, and Mrs. Stowe, whose gospel of emancipation is not one of peace, but of "iron globes, torches of Greek fire, explosive biscuits," famine, pestilence, slaughter, and blood. How mournful and humiliating to reflect, thai PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 227 in the abandonment of moral for military issues, our avowedly Christian men, with their mottos, " fight or die," were the first to lead the way, com- mercial men the next to follow, then the idolaters of the Union, whilst " Progressive Friends," or Quakers, so called, and the Garrisonians or Parker- ites, who had been peace men at any price, and proclaimed the Federal Union to be a covenant with death and agreement with hell, brought up the rear. What a fall, when these men can now point to nothing but bullets, as the staple com- modity for their creed, ten commandments, and sermon on the mount ! Fallen and misguided- as they are, one would have supposed, that as Peter the Hermit had the magnanimity to march at the head of his followers in his crusade, so they, or some of them, would have shown their genius, valour, and skill on the battle-field with the sword, but as yet this has been confined to their tongues and pens, showing that their cowardice is as great as their guilt, whilst the pleas which they put forth to sustain their position are inexcusable and un- justifiable, whether they may be religious, commer- cial, or national Religiously they are placed in a terrible position, when, like Dr. Cheever, May 6, 1862, in Cooper's Institute, New York, they have to interpolate Christ's words of peace and goodwill with the brutal and bloody words of strife, and make Him say, " Go to Decapolis and preach as well as fight, 228 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. (announce) deliverance to the captives, as well as submission to the rebels;" or, like Dr. Tyng, whom Dr. Mackay, the correspondent of the Times, says, " Makes it the duty of the civil Magistrate to uproot crime with the sword urged into dictation by the priest." Their commercial pleas are equally unsatisfac- tory, when the Rev. Henry Ward Beech er confesses, in his Harper's Ferry sermon, that "our standard of morals has been commercial, and from a com- mercial stand-point we have taken our observa- tions." And how low and debasing that stand- point has been is shown in the same sermon, when Beecher says, " There can be no disputing the fact, that, for commercial causes, an element of slavery which had temporary refuge with us, granted by the unsuspecting fathers, has swollen to an unex- pected and unforeseen power, and, for the last fifty years, has held the administrative power of the country in its hands, has controlled patronage, and distributed appointments." But national pleas are equally untenable and delusive as the others. Stress is laid on the freedom power of the Con- stitution, one clause of which would have swept slavery with its concomitant evils away for ever. This was the Habeas Corpus Act, which provides that " no person be deprived of liberty without due process of law," and yet, in defiance of this clause, every slave has been stript of liberty without such PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. 229 process. In deference to the wishes of the slave- holders and commercial men of the North, this freedom power of the Constitution was sacrificed by those whom Beecher calls the "unsuspecting fathers," and the reason assigned was, " They found slavery, and they left it among them because of the difficulty, the absolute impossibility of its removal." And this freedom power in the Constitution, so far as the black man is concerned, has slumbered ever since, and " been inoperative as a bull against a comet." And when Alice Hambleton, Dinah Mendenhall, Oliver Johnson, and sundry other Quakers, waited on President Lincoln, and pressed on his attention this freedom power in the Consti- tution, and reminded him of its binding power, he assented to its truth, but " it cannot be enforced at present in the South," said the President. " True," said the Quakers, " but you do not for all that give up the struggle." Oh, no ! The struggle has been rather bloody since at Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Murfreesboro, and other places, and Lincoln and his government give no signs of weariness in the bloody work. Have the great charters of freedom been allowed to slumber in this country ? Can they not be enforced ? "But the 'Union' is, to loyal Americans, what the British throne and constitution are to British- ers," say our religious war crusaders. Suppose, for example, say they, that "Scotland, Ireland, or Wales were, by conspiracy, to present a demand to 230 PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. separate from the British throne and government, and jeopardise the throne, and the glorious consti- tutional liberties secured to this nation, under the laws of Providence, by the toil and blood of noble sires, would they parley with the traitors ? " No. But, if the "glorious constitutional liberties" had lain a dead letter, unheeded and unneeded, like the Constitution in America ; or, what is worse still, the administrative power had perverted and mis- applied these constitutional liberties, so as to make their great charters of freedom an engine of despot- ism to subject millions to the grinding power of tyranny and oppression : What then ? Would not the British say, the sooner such a throne was sub- verted the better, and the government broken up, if they had no constitutional means of redress ? In such a case thousands and millions of voices would respond in the affirmative. But how does the matter stand in America? Not only have the great charters of freedom been inoperative, but a direct breach has been made through them by the wedge of compromise, so as to turn those great charters into instruments of injustice and cruelty, depriving millions of all constitutional means of redress, and subjecting them to a bondage, "one hour of which," said Jefferson, "exceeds ages of that we rose in rebellion to oppose;" and the whole nation, with a few exceptions, have looked silently on, whilst the administrators of the govern- ment are powerless and unable to meet the exigen- PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 231 cies of the case, except by revolution, which is now throwing the whole country into the gulf of ruin. To show the inefficiency and weakness of the Federal Government, Dr. Cheever, in his anti- British organ, the Principia, May 22, 1860, says : " The States are supreme for wickedness, but the United States is impotent for protection and justice. The government of the individual State may compel the government of the United States to respect slavery, but the United States cannot compel the individual State to respect freedom. The government of the individual State may pre- vent the United States from making a slave of one of its citizens, but the United States cannot pro- tect one of its citizens from being made a slave by the States." And it is thus the case now stands between the Federal Government and the loyal slaveholding States of Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware ; whilst, what is the worst of all, the slaves in those States have no access to the seat of power, or constitutional means of redress, and if they should attempt to run away, the loyal slave- holder could follow them to the steps of the national capitol, or into the White House, the Pre- sident's mansion, at Washington, and claim and seize his "chattels personal," and drag them back into bondage. What a country to claim analogy with Great Britain ! But it is added by the Federalists, in the lan- guage of Mrs. Stowe, "step after step has been 232 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. taken for liberty, chain after chain has fallen, till the march of our armies is choked and clogged by the glad flocking of emancipated slaves ; the day of final emancipation is set ; the border States begin to move in a voluntary consent ; universal freedom for all dawns like the sun in the distant horizon, and still no voice from England'' No voice of sympathy and encouragement ! No. The people of England don't believe in the gospel of emancipation by the sword. As one of her noble sons has recently said, "Ours is not a gospel of blood and lust, to be enforced by the torches of Butler's negro brigade, and the bayonets of Siegel's German mercenaries." Besides, the Rev. Newman Hall, a votary of the Federalists, frankly avows, " We must be blind if we do not see how, by the operation of natural causes, God is punishing chiefly the South as the perpetrator of the wickedness, but also the North, for long and guilty connivance. There has been wicked compromise. To uphold a constitution of man's devising, God's laws have been set at nought. Slavery has been sanctioned and guaranteed in order to preserve the Union, and now, by that very slavery, the Union is broken up." There has been wicked compromise. No one has been more guilty of compromise than Mrs. Stowe, shewn in her description of Mrs. Shelby, whom in her key she makes a " Lady pious slave- holder ;" and also in her appeal, in the same Key, PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 233 to a class of men, whom she calls " Christian slave- traders." Newman Hall says, "We cannot have sympathy with impenitent slavers. We cannot admit them to our holy sacraments, for they are violating every law of humanity, and trampling on the Gospel they have the audacity to profess. We dare not bid them, God speed. We cannot sit at the same table with them. We shrink from re- ceiving them into our houses. Our hand is pol- luted by grasping theirs. We loathe them as the representatives of the concentration of all villanies. They know it. Can there ever be alliance between us ? Mrs. Stowe says, Yes. Do you ask how ? By throwing over them a mantle of piety, and calling them Christians. And in view of which Mrs. Stowe may suppress her resentment and with- hold her sarcasms at the noble-minded women of Great Britain, who have no wish to be inducted into her creed, or to shout, " Bressed be de Lord," with " Christian slave traders or slaveholders " so called. The women of England, although they have a common origin with Mrs. Stowe, have no common faith with her in " lady pious slavehold- ing," and no common cause in enforcing emancipa- tion by the cartridge or bayonet. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher has generally been a strenuous and ardent supporter of compro- mises. In a comic sermon which he preached on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, ]861, he said, "A direct political emancipation was impossible. We 234 PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. were bound to conduct the war in accordance with the constitution, or else acknowledge the failure of our republican institutions. He wished he could declare political emancipation. He wished Adam had not sinned and his posterity been affected. But that did not help the matter. He wished our fathers had stood out against the compromises of the constitution ; for a serpent just hatched was not half so dangerous as a full-grown serpent. We had declared our fealty to the constitution, and we could not now break the pact. The war had not driven us into revolution. The constitution was not superior to right, conscience, or liberty ; but we must keep our plighted faith, and when we could not abide by our promise, we had better stand apart as two peoples." And in referring to the present terrible war, Dr. Cheever, in a Memorial adopted by him and others in the Church of the Puritans, New York, Dec. 22, 1862, says, "We believe the whole cause of our disasters to be in our continued complicity with that crime of human slavery, which is the founda- tion and inspiring demon of the rebellion itself. Had we withdrawn ourselves from that complicity, by obeying the command of God at the outset, the justice and mercy of Heaven were pledged for our protection and success, the Divine frown would have been upon our enemies, we would have secured the blessing of God, and commanded the sympathy and respect of all nations. PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 235 " But the moment we ourselves re-entered into complicity with the very wickedness which waa the foundation of the rebellion, we threw away the immense superiority of our moral position, de- scended to a level with that of the rebels, deprived ourselves of the possibility of appealing, as our fathers did in the war of the Revolution, to the Judge of all the earth for the justice of our cause and the rectitude of our intentions; and went so far as to inform foreign nations that no moral prin- ciple was involve.d in our quarrel, and that the position of every state and all persons should be the same as before. This annoucement was suffi- cient to set both God and man against us. " We chose war without emancipation, and God gave us our request with disaster and defeat as the consequence. We have ourselves deliberately built up and prolonged the confederate treason, by the determination to avoid striking at its cause. We have provoked the indignation and challenged the avenging justice of the Almighty, by resolving that we would not decree the deliverance of the enslaved till this measure should become a necessity indis- pensable to the existence of our own government. And even now, when calamity and defeat have pressed us to this movement, we have taken all the dignity and virtue from it, by declaring it to be adopted as a mere military necessity, and by com- bining with it the offer of continued slavery to aa many rebel states as will return to practise that 236 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. wickedness under the government and guarantee of our own union. " Still the guiding star of our policy seems to be to crush the rebellion with as little injury to slavery, and as little depreciation of slave property, as possible." In the presence of the above avowals, conces- sions, complaints, and remonstrances, how could the Broughams, Buxtons, Gladstones, Russells, Palmer- stons, or the noble sons and daughters of old Eng- land, give their sympathy and aid to the Federalists of America? But who are the men who presume to approach the President with "the cry of freedom against slavery, and not freedom entering into a new com- pact with slavery, or making use of slavery as a bribe for the purchase of slavery " men who are shouting "freedom or nothing. No more compro- mise with slavery. Give us freedom to fight for against slavery." The Rev. Dr. Cheever and Dr. Nathan Brown, two of the men who signed the above document, have not been very remarkable for their embodi- ment of the " no compromise theory " in their own history and experience. We have fearful illustration of this in the case of Dr. Nathan Brown, who in 1860 was a director of the Bible Union, a society which contains a long list of Christian slaveholders so-called, and not only a director but a member of a committee in connec- PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 28 T tion with the same, which voted slaveholding monies, and Bibles wrung out of the blood of the slave and whipt out of their muscles for the " Free Mission Society's missions. And the Rev. Dr. Cheever is in the same anomalous position, as Hon. Member of the Corporate Board of American Mis- sions, a society which has always, like the Bible Union, compromised with pious slaveholders and negro-hatei^s so called. It is reported that in a remarkable prayer recently uttered by Dr. Cheever. at Cooper's Institute, New York, in the presence of a mixed assembly of black and white men, that he called up the soul of John Brown from the vast depths of eternity, and prayed that in accordance with the popular hymn, " the soul of John Brown might march on," at the head of the northern armies, to lead them to victory, might animate the councils of the president, declaring at the same time, "that the soul in question was big enough for any twenty of the Federal generals." If John Brown was now alive he would not be found marching with negro-haters to make the sword leap at the the throats of negro-traders', or abetting them. Neither would he allow his name to be on the books of pro-slavery missions or Bible union boards, like Dr. Cheever or Dr. Brown. How- ever big his soul might be, in connection with the little souls of the twenty generals referred to, or that of President Lincoln, his soul would have loathed the contamination and pollution of those old corrupt 238 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. delinquent boards as much as he did that of the pro-slavery clergymen who went to pray and con- dole with him in his prison cell before his execu- tion, but whom he summarily dismissed until they had got their slaveholding or pro-slavery guilt washed from their consciences. " I have no objections to pray for you," said Mr. Brown, " but you shall not pray for me." With such compromises, inconsistencies, detest- able policies, and departures from great principles, would it not have been better, as Henry Ward Beecher suggested in one of his sermons referred to, that "the two peoples should stand apart." In the history of the past, whenever the sword has been drawn in the cause of freedom, "it has," says the editor, of the A thenceum, in an able review of war crusades and freedom : " It has found the cause invariably put back. It knows of many a servile war, but of none in which the ultimate fact was favourable to the insurgent slave." But the Rev. William Taylor, author of the " Model Preacher," in one of his Model Treatises, designated " Cause and Pr6bable Results of the Civil War in America," says, " the institution (slavery) cannot be removed by moral appliances, as in the glorious example of the British government in her West India Colonies. Here," he says, " the friends of freedom had direct access to the seat of power, the throne, and parlia ment. * * * But had Wilberforce or his co- adjutors gone into the slave states of America and PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 239 raised their voices in favour of freedom, they would have been hung most likely. It could not be reached by the United States Congress, because" says the reverend gentleman, "the question belonged to the State legislation. It can only be reached, therefore, by some direct providential interposition, such as a military necessity so palpable as to com- bine the great loyal masses in one united purpose to overthrow it." Britishers have direct access to the seat of power, but in America we have wheels within wheels, and the great fly wheel of Congress cannot control the little State wheels which profess to be subordinate to the Federal wheel. Subordi- nate. No. Slavery has caused a break down and a smash up of the machinery; " Had Wilberforce and his coadjutors gone into the slave States of America, and raised their voices in favour of freedom," he says, "they would most likely have been hung." Very probable. But why should their services have been necessary? Has the Northern Methodist Episcopalian Church, of which Taylor is a member, no conferences, churches, or members in the slave States ? And if so, why should the above men have been hung, had they gone into Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, or Texas?' Surely the seven slaveholding conferences of the above church, and their multitudes of churches and mem- bers, would have afforded them an asylum of liberty, and stood between them and danger, more especially 240 PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. as Mr. Taylor says, "all the religious bodies of the North, whose organizations, extended into the South, have fought a series of ecclesiastical battles on the question, as a matter of principle and con- science, resulting in their separation on that ground alone," whilst the Methodist Episcopal Church was rent nearly by the halves on that ground." It could not be that the members and clergymen of the above seven Conferences that are connected with the Northern half of the Methodist Episcopalian Church, fought very hard for freedom, were very conscientious in the matter, felt much of principle or conscience, or were intensely anti-slavery or dis- tinguished foreigners, such as Wilberforce needed not to have dreaded being in jeopardy in their lives or limbs had they visited those parts of the South. Mr. Taylor says, "if the Northern Conferences could have accepted a slave-holding bishop and consented to complicity with slavery, they would have avoided an incalculable amount of trouble and expense, and saved to their organization nearly half-a-million of members who went off South." Numerically and pecuniarily the Northern conferences sustained an immense loss. They were, from the first, constitu- tionally an anti-slavery church, believing with Wesley, their founder, that " slavery was the sum of all villainies," they could not conscientiously, and hence would not, sacrifice their anti-slavery princi- ples. The above Mr. Taylor presents as facts in the PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 241 book already referred to. But, if such be facts, we may truly ask, what are falsehoods ? In the authentic history of the case it is affirmed that Bishop Andrews became a slaveholder. "The Book of Discipline, as it now stands," says the Northern Independent, April 1857, a Methodist newspaper, published at Auburn, New York, the editor of the above says, " As the Discipline now stands, slaveholding in the ministry is the rule, non-slave- holding the exception. We let all preachers hold slaves if they will consent to be local and unor- dained. We will consent to ordain them, and let them travel, slaveholders though they be, if wicked slaveholders are disposed to make a law forbidding emancipation." Acquainted with the above ridi- culous discrimination, Bishop Andrews doubtless reasoned within himself, if it be right for my brother local preacher to hold a slave, it is right for me, and, consequently, he bought slaves, was suspended, and went off with half-a-ndllion of members in the South. But what anti-slavery principle was there in this? There was no more anti-slavery in the matter than there was honesty to be found in the discrimination between clerical and lay theft ! This was the sole cause of division, and, therefore, no question of principle could divide the Methodist Episcopal Church of the North from that of the South. Moreover, if the Northern one was anti-slavery, it would not receive slaveholders into its communion and membership. B 242 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. But the editor of the Richmond Christian Ad- vocate says, " It is known to you and to me, and to many, many others," addressing himself to Northern Methodists, in answer to Bishop Simpson and Dr. M'Clintock, delegates to the Wesleyan Methodists in England, who maintained that the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church was anti- slavery the above editor says, " It is known to you and me, and many, many others, that thou- sands and thousands of slaves are owned and worked from sun to sun by members and ministers in the Church in which Bishop Simpson and Dr. M'Clintock are ministers." And not only does that Church contain slaveholders, but slave-breeders, as members, if not ministers. The Rev. H. Mattison, a travelling preacher in the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church, in a letter addressed to the Leeds Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society, and pub- lished in their report for 1860, says : " For myself, I am fully satisfied from figures that ' will not lie,' and from enquiries and corre- spondence upon the subject for years, that we can- not have to-day less than 10,090 slaveholders and 100,000 slaves in our Northern Methodist Episco- pal Church ; and the number is rapidly increasing every year. And, still worse, our people raise, buy, and sell slaves, as others do, without rebuke or hindrance. The territory covered by our Church in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Mis- souri, and Arkansas, contains one million of slaves PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 243 one quarter of all the slaves in the Union. This belt of States constitute the great breeding ground of slavery for the citron, sugar, and 'rice regions of the farther South. About 50,000 slaves go hence annually towards the Gulf States. The annual sale from Virginia alone is 20,000, amounting to thir- teen millions of dollars. Missouri sold some 12,000 last year to go ' down the river' to Mississippi and Texas ; and yet her late census shows her to have more slaves to-day than she had five years ago. Now, the slaves of Methodists in all this region increase as fast as do the slaves of others. What then becomes of them? Do they free them? Seldom or never. Are their slave families expand- ing twice as fast as those of others ? Not at all. They are sold, as other breeders sell their slaves, and there is no denying it. I write it with shame and sorrow, but it is true ; and the Christian world ought to know it before we are utterly debauched and ruined." And in the effort made to change the charter on statute law in the above Church in their last con- ference, held at Buffalo, in 1860, we see what was the character of their legislation against slavery on that occasion : The Chapter as it stands, reads, The Chapter as proposed by the Committee and adopted by the " Quest. What shall be done Conference, reads, for the extirpation of the evil of slavery ? " Quest. What shall be dona "Ans. 1. We declare that we for the extirpation of slavery ? 244 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. " Ans. We declare that we are as much as ever convinced of the evil of slavery. We be- lieve that buying, selling, or holding of human beings as chattels, is inconsistent with the Golden Rule, and with that rule in our Discipline which requires 'all who wish to remain among us to do no harm and to avoid evil of every kind.' We, therefore, affectionately admon- ish all our preachers and people to keep themselves pure from this great evil, and to seek its extirpation by all lawful and Christian means." are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery ; therefore, no slaveholder shall be eligible to any official station in our Church hereafter, where the laws of the State in which he lives will admit of emanci- pation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy his freedom. "2. When any travelling preacher becomes an owner of a slave or slaves, by any means, he shall forfeit his ministerial character in our Church, unless he execute, if it be practicable, a legal emancipation of such slaves, conformably to the laws of the State in which he lives. " 3. All our preachers shall prudently enforce upon our members the necessity of teach- ing their slaves to read the Word of God; and to allow them time to attend upon the public worship of God on our regular days of divine service." Mr. Mattison says, "Reasoning from these sub- stantial premises, not a few in the General Confer- ence desired something like this to follow the above declaration of principles : " 'Therefore no slaveholder shall hereafter be eligr ible to admission into the Methodist Episcopal Church ; and those now in the Church are required either to emancipate their slaves or voluntarily retire ; and, in case they neglect or refuse to do PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. ' 245 either, they are to be dealt with as in other cases of immorality.' " Nothing short of this would at all correspond with the declaration of principles. But was any- thing of the kind adopted ? " Instead of prohibiting what is declared to be ' contrary to the laws of God and nature/ and inconsistent with our general rules, the new chap- ter suddenly tapers down to the following honied admonition : " ' We therefore affectionately admonish all our preachers and people to keep themselves pure from this great evil, and seek its extirpation by all law- ful and Christian means.' " ' What a fall was this, my countrymen ! ' "And this is the whole of the new legislation against slavery, except that a law prohibiting the ordination of slaveholders to the ministry was stricken from the discipline. The new chapter was declared not to be mandatory, or, in other words, to be without executive force or meaning ; and there we now stand. We have lost all prohibition of slaveholding, both in the laity and ministry, and have gained a tolerable, though rather feeble, declaration of principles, oiled over with an affec- tionate admonition ! The administration on the Border were not only whitewashed but approved, with all its toleration of official and ministerial slaveholding ; and, on the whole, so far as practical slaveholding is concerned, the prospects of the 246 ' PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. Border was never more bright. Not a slaveholder will retire, or give up his slaveholding ; and minis- ters as well as private members can go into slave- holding, without even violating an obsolete discip- linary prohibition. There will, therefore, be far more, instead of less, slaveholding in our Church for the four years to come." And the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church is the history of all the principal religious bodies in America whose organizations extended into the South. With such a history in our principal denomina- tions, how could the seat of power be reached in the slave States, or the great fly-wheel of Federal Congress be repaired, so as to replace the broken cogs in order to make the little State fly-wheels move in subordination ? Here was a noble and glorious work to be done by Christian men, anti- slavery from principle, not only to purge slavery out of the Churches, and secure to the free negro his rights, but to repair the broken-down machin- ery of the government. Moral appliances were at their command which, if made available, would, under God's blessing, have met and removed every conceivable difficulty. But this work was too slow and tedious for our avowedly Christian anti-slavery men, hence their dreadful haste to let out deluges of blood in their war crusade, and to merge the country in one common ruin. And, as the war progressed, no portion of our people in America PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 24? have been more intoxicated with the fumes of war than our religious war crusaders. Bulletins have been issued in the New York Independent, headed, "Peace Items for General M'GLellan," which com- menced, "The way to increase our army to a million of men fight ; the way to gain the respect of England and France fight" . . . Military Re- vival Recruiting Prayer Meetings have been held in Northern Churches to fill up the army. Regi- ments of Federal soldiers have marched through Northern cities, on their way to the battle-field-, singing : " John Brown's body is mouldering in the grave, His soul is marching on." Bloody battles have been fought at Bulis Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Murfreesboro, Vicks- burgh, and numerous other places, alternating with victory on one side and then on the other. Con- scripts and drafts have been resorted to, to fill up the places of the wounded and the dead. Prisons and forts have been filled up with "suspects" Enormous piles of treasury notes have been put into circulation, containing promises to pay, without the means to make them valid. Immense loans have been raised, and a tremendous war-tax created. On the 15th January 1863, gold was 48 per cent, premium, and exchange 163. And the coun- try is advancing with such accelerated speed into the whirlpool of destruction, that some of our war fanatics are beginning to tremble for their fate. 248 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. The following, from the New York Independent, shews what kind of a "heart beat" they have got: "A nation bankrupt, is a nation ruined. It may still have a name and a place on the maps, but it is practically extinct, dead. It may have a large population, and that inherent strength which numbers give, but, like the strength of a caged lion, a manacled giant, or an imprisoned warrior, it is useless. It may have fruitful valleys and fertile hills, thriving manufactories and temporary indivi- dual prosperity, numerous railroads and far-reach- ing canals, mines of mineral wealth and all the riches of institutional greatness and magnificence, an immense army and a powerful navy, a good gov- ernment, honest, God-fearing, man-loving rulers, but if it be tied, fettered, and anchored in bank- ruptcy, what is it good for ? It were better that it should perish, and its name be blotted out for ever. A bankrupt nation, like an individual in such a dilemma, should go into liquidation. It should wind up its political affairs, dispose of its assets of name, place, and power, and honestly, be- fore God and the people, yield up its executive life, and ask funeral rites and ceremonies a decent burial from the sight of man. If we, as a nation, have Bible wisdom, we shall foresee the great evils of bankruptcy, now threatening us, and hide from them. We shall use, without a moment's delay, our strength and power to crush the monster now PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 249 gnawing at our vitals. "We shall, with the martial tramp of irresistible forces, overwhelm our enemies and end for ever the great conflict between free- dom and slavery. " We are endangering more than liberty by longer halting between two opinions. We are im- perilling our very existence our national life. We shall soon be bound with chains which can never be broken. We are blindly and rapidly floating into the depths of bankruptcy. We must now fight or we must die. The nation may will rightly, our armies may cover every hill top, and our rulers be honest, patriotic, and pure ; but nevertheless we must now fight, or, as a nation, we must die this is inevitable. " The voice from our national treasury is, fight, or we die. " The voice from the tribune of our political power is, fight, or we die. " The voice from every workshop and every manufacturing village in the Union is, fight, or we die. " The voice of a burdened nation of tax-payers is, fight, or we die. " The voice of every ship's crew, sailing in peril of pirates is, fight, or we die. " The voice of all the great moneyed institutions of the nation is, fight, or we die. " The voice of merchants, bankers, and of all busi- ness men is, fight, or we die. 250 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. "The voice, trumpet-tongued, from our currency troubles is, fight, or we die. "The voice from every half-frightened, gold- hoarding miser is, fight, or we die. " The voice of widows and the fatherless, and of thousands who are now mourning the loss of in- come is, fight, or we die. " The voice of soldiers, sick, wounded, and dy- ing by thousands in hospitals and Southern prisons is, fight, or we die. "The voice of every true general, either from West Point or West anyivhere, is, fight, or we die. "The voice from New York, and every other commercial city of the Union is, fight, or we die. " The voice of every despairing, homeless, tyrant- hating exile, the world over, is, fight, or we die. " The voice of the millions of slaves, bleeding and manacled, is, fight, or we die. " The voice of LIBERTY, from the Poles to the Equator ; the voice of the round WORLD, groaning in sin and hoping in God ; the voice of high Heaven, as plainly as ever thundered from Mount Sinai, is urging us now to duty. " Will you hear that voice, President Lincoln, for whom thousands are now praying on every shore, in every land of every Christian nation ? " Will you hear it, Secretary Seward, war horse of liberty whose ear has never yet failed to hear the cry of the poor and oppressed ? " Will you hear it, Secretary Chase, overwhelmed PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 251 and almost bowed down with unparalleled burdens and cares, - nobly, heroically, and successfully battl- ing with a nation's financial troubles ? " Will you hear it, Secretary Stanton, while a million loyal men stand ready to pour out their heart's blood to save us ? "Will you hear it, Secretary Welles, and spread every canvass, man every gun, and use every effort to gain for yourself and our matchless navy fresh glory and honour ? " Will you hear it, Secretary Bates, and boldly and speedily act in behalf of thousands of Union men in peril of life and property all through the South, and especially in your own liberty-seeking, rebel- hating state ? " Will you hear it, Secretary Blair, from whom we have a right to expect an open ear when so much is threatened and may be lost for ever? " Will you hear it, Secretary Smith, from whose home on the priaries thrice ten thousand hearts are now crying for a nation's salvation ? "Will you, Generals-in-Chief, hear it, and stop fault-finding ? Will you admit, as an experiment, that there are several other places in the country beside West Point ? Will you go anywhere as directed? Will you fight in front, and not ten miles in the rear of your army ? Don't, for once, be afraid of hurting the rebels, who have already cost us a quarter of a million of precious lives. Leave your dignity and your importance for some 252 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. more appropriate place than the battle-field, and be quite willing, we pray you, that one or two other generals should do a little of something for our country as well as yourselves. " Will the army hear it ? Yes, we know they will, for they are already ahead of the Government, ahead of their generals, and would be ahead of the rebels, if they were permitted the opportunity. The great heart of the nation cries out, Put down the rebellion ! Crush the enemy. Stop the wasting of lives. Save us from bankruptcy." The war, therefore, which was considered a mili- tary necessity, by the religious war crusaders, to subjugate the South in order to destroy slavery, by commercial men in the North to keep the trade of the South in their own hands, and to promote their own agrandizement, and by the Unionists from a false pride and love of country to support their tottering idol, which the Kev. Newman Hall says, "slavery has broken up," this insane and bloody war is now " necessary," says Beecher in the above, " war manifestoes," or " they will rapidly float into the depths of bankruptcy." At the commencement of the " War Crisis," our religious war enthusiasts turned to our Negro-hating Moses, in the person of President Lincoln, and in " strange rhythmical chant" sung the Psalms of what was to be the new " modern exodus," combining the " barbaric fire of the Marsellaise with the religious fervour of the old Hebrew prophet" fire which was PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 253 to nerve Lincoln, our modern Moses, for the duties of his mission, and turn him into a grand heroic personage, but to send terror into the heart of the slave-holding Pharaoh, Jeff. Davis. Hence they sung "Oh, go down Moses, Way down into Egypt's land ! Tell king Pharaoh To let my people go ! Stand away dere, Stand away dere, And let my people go ! " Oh, Pharaoh, said he, would go 'cross ! Let my people go ! Oh ! Pharaoh and his hosts were lost ! Let my people go ! You may hinder me here, But me can't go up dere, Let my people go. "Oh, Moses, stretch your hand across 1 Let my people go ! And don't get lost in the wilderness Let my people go. He sits in de heavens, And answers prayers, Let my people go ! " What a ridiculous farce to compare such a man as Lincoln to Moses ! During the progress of the war our modern Moses Lincoln, so called, has not dared to go down into (Egypt) the South, but what has been more con- 254 PLAIN FACTS FOE EARNEST MEN. genial to himself, he has sent his multitudinous hosts, not in the way of merciful interposition to the slave, but with ineradicable hate and implacable vengeance to annihilate (Pharaoh) Jeff Davis and his minions. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was so elated with the advance of our modern Moses Lincoln's " Israelitish army," that he predicted Pharaoh and his hosts, in the persons of Jeff Davis and his armies, on their advance to meet it, "would be chucked into the Red Sea by God." But as the miracle was withheld that was to annihilate them, vast numbers of the Northern Israelitish army so called, got chucked into the Red Sea at Bull's Run, on the banks of the Chicahominy, at Fredericks- burg, Vicksburg, and other places. But as the above disasters were traced to the mutable counsels of cunning men, weaving politi- cians and fault-finding generals, who fought ten miles in the rear of the army, a great and immut- able principle was to be struck, which would bring up every general, officer, and private to the post of duty amongst the Northern Israelites, armed with the triple armour of a just cause, and lead them with feelings of unbounded transport and joy to annihilate their enemies, repair the mis- chiefs of slavery, and introduce the reign of univer- sal liberty. On the 22d of September 1862 an in- timation was given by our " modern Moses " Lin- coln, that this great immutable principle was to be PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 255 announced; and that on the 1st January 1863, he would be the porter to open the way to it the instrument to lift the silver trumpet of liberty, whose blast, said Beecher, " would roll through the forest, sweep along the mountain side, spread wide over the priaries, be heard on the hither and thither ocean, causing the waves of the Pacific and the Atlantic to lift themselves up and sound to- gether their notes of gladness." In a word, it was to sweep across the Atlantic, be hailed with acclama- tion in this liberty-loving country, cause triumphal arches to be erected in honour of the event, pro- duce the merry peals of bells, light up bonfires on every hilltop, and bring together monster crowds in every town and village to celebrate with gladness such a boon to humanity. The 1st of January 1863 has come, and insteaa of a world's jubilee there is a world's scorn ; for in- stead of striking the rock of great and immutable principles with his pronunciamento, he has only opened up a new and more powerful explosion of the war passion, inaugurated a new era of disaster and strife, split up his own minions into factions, and helped to accelerate his own doom with that of the country he so miserably represents. what a mockery in our " modern Moses " to confer freedom where he has no power, and confirm slavery where he has power; to say to the loyal slaveholder, your slaves shall be preserved as a re- ward of your loyalty, whilst to the disloyal slave- 256 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. holder he says, your disloyalty shall be punished with the loss of your slaves. Whatever heart-beat there may be to such inhumanity from the people of the New World, there can be none in the Old World amongst judicious and sensible men. Here the cry is measures and not men principles and not dollars. Such is the immeasurable calamity which has befallen us in America, in the war policy which has obtained and brought with it such frightful calamities, and fearful and widespread horrors. It is consolitary, however, to know that the issue was not in the hands of our " modern Moses " Lincoln, our religious war crusaders, Cheever, Beecher, Mrs Stowe, and Co., our commercial men, who are now trembling for their Morrell Tariffs and en- trepots of trade or our idolaters of the Union, who speak, and think, and write as if the world would not move on should the American Republic break up. No, God has taken the issue out of all their hands ; and as John Bright truly said in a recent speech in Birmingham, " He was bringing about a great transaction in history," a transac- tion which will level with the dust his ''Model Republic," and demonstrate beyond controversy that America, no more than Rome or Babylon, can harden itself against God and prosper. Dark, therefore, as the scenes are which we now behold in America, no truth is more palpable than this, that God has come out of His place to make PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 257 inquisition for the blood of the slave, and the oppressions of multitudes who wear a different skin to their fellowmen ; and, whilst the guilt, of slavery has caused Him to open the magazines of His ven- geance to punish the slaveholder, in His righteous retribution He will not allow the man who treats the Negro as belonging to an inferior race, and subjects him to every imaginable insult, to escape the just desert of his sins. In the sight of God both sins are of the deepest dye, involving each in the deepest, basest, and most atrocious rebellion against Him. One says to the Negro, if you exist in America, it must be as a slave; the other, says, if you exist, it must not be in America, but in Liberia, or Abbeo- kuta. One avows that God made him to be a "chattel-personal;" the other swears vengeance against him, and declares that he must be colonised a thing not easily to be accomplished, if the Negro were willing to go. Need we wonder, therefore, that God's judgments should be a great deep in our guilty land. Our wonder is, that He should have so long borne with our impious treachery, fraud, and blood-guiltiness, as a nation. It is no less manifest, that a gross and terrible delusion prevails among the avowed disciples in America, in their appeals to the material sword in- stead of the sword of God's Spirit, the word of God. Dark was the hour in our country's history when the Rev. Henry T. Cheever called his church together 258 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. in the autumn of 1859, and adopted the following resolutions : " Resolved that it was held to be manifestly and imperatively the duty of the President of the United States promptly to enforce the laws, and to put down rebellion and treason, now upheld and perpetuated in South Carolina, by all the disposable force of the army and navy of the United States. " Resolved, that we declare our deliberate opinion, that all the Christian people of the country should, and that an overwhelming majority of them will, sustain the President in such a decisive suppression of the rankest treason and rebellion. " Resolved, that if he should not do this as being due both to the safety and dignity of such a people, that he be further impeached at the bar of the Senate of the United States," The above was the first war-spark that has pro- duced such a tremendous conflagration in our land the first war-cloud that has now made the heavens black with darkness, emitting fiery flashes to bias L, what is lovely, beautiful, and fair, and reduce our country to a heap of ruin. No sooner was the above spark lighted in the Congregational Church, Jewett City, Connecticut, than Dr. Cheever added fuel to the flame, as in a thanksgiving sermon in the church of the Puritans, New York, Nov. 24, 1859, he appealed to his people, exclaiming, " was it in your power, it is beyond question your duty and my duty to take horns of powder, torches of Greek fire, per- PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 259 cussive caps, and explosive biscuits, and hurl them into the heart of the South, to set the whole slave population into a sudden revolt for the assertion of their own freedom." Then the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, in a terrible tilt against slavery, to get at the Seceders, it is said by the reporter of the New York Times, Dec. 15, 1860, appeared six inches taller than usual, with his eyes flashing fire on JefF. Davis and the Southerns, whom he designated as Pharaoh and his hosts, gave the charge to the Northerns in scriptural language, "Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward, Exod. xiv. 15. " Right before us rolled the sea," cried Beecher, "red, indeed, for there is blood in it. The word of God is, go on. Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, that I may retain my faith in liberty." These sentiments, said the reporter, " caused the uprising of many hundreds of people, accompanied with waving of hats and handkerchiefs, cheers, hurrahs, and shouts, which made the building ring ; producing one of the most remarkable and impressive scenes ever witnessed in that church." After then the war spirit spread with amazing rapidity in the churches of the Free States so called. " Twenty churches on a night," writes Manhattan, " hold prayer meetings to get recruits for the army." And what is the language of the clergy on these occasions? Here is an instance. The Rev. J. W. Sloane, pastor of the third Reformed Presbyterian 260 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. Church, New York, was reported in the newspapers to have said, in a speech abounding with similar atrocities, " That it was better that the six millions of white men, women, and children of the South should be slaughtered, than that slavery should not be extinguished." And being censured by an editor for expressing such atrocity, Mr. Sloane replied, that "What he really said was only as follows : But supposing that emancipation should lead to insurrection. Let this, which I by no means admit, be for the time granted, then, I affirm, that it is better, far better, that every man, woman, and child in every rebel State should perish in one widespread, bloody, and indiscriminate slaughter; better that the land should be a Sahara be, as when God destroyed the Canaanites, or overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah than that this rebellion should be successful." And, "Mark our words," says Mrs. Stowe, in her reply to the women of England, " if we succeed, the children of these very men who are now fighting us will rise up to call us blessed." Blessed ! For what ? For lay- ing waste their lands, pillaging their houses, burn- ing their cities, treating ladies as women of the town, ravishing young females, massacreing inno- cent men in cold blood at the instigation of General M'Neil, imprisoning their clergy because they would not pray for President Lincoln, placing their lives and property in the hands of military governors, who urge, as in the case of Brigadier General Dowe, PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. 261 "that they must not think it hard if they saffer wrongfully ? " No, there is no blessedness in the above, or in the soddening of the battle-fields with rivers of blood, already made memorable with horrid but- cheries ; and, as those historical and tragical scenes flit before them, they will no more make the children of the Southerners revere the people of the North, or pay homage to their genius or chivalry, than tRe scenes at Yorktown, Lexington, Concord, or Bunker Hill, lead Americans to revere the Britishers. When we look at the bitter struggle as it now moves along in its bloody and devastat- ing course, the words of Milton sound strangely in our ears: "For never can true reconcilement grow, Where words of deadly hate have pierced so deep." And should the war crusaders succeed, with their gospel of torches, faggots, fire, and sword, in conquer- ing and devastating the South, the slaves whom they had freed from the galling tyranny of their masters would not feel themselves, amidst Northern treatment, to be "a heap much more men," when sold on the auction block in Northern cities as paupers recently illustrated in the case of a number of fugitive slaves in Illinois neither would they lift up their hands in blessing and shout, "Bressed be de Lord dat brought us to see dis first happy day of our lives," if shipped out of the country by the chivalrous white man on their 262 PLAIN FACTS FOR EARNEST MEN. landing in Africa. The thought is madness. Such a state of things may be in accordance with strong delusion, judicial blindness, and hardness of heart, but certainly not with the doctrines of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the teachings of His most holy Word, or the merciful spirit of Chris- tianity ; and yet these wilful and chosen delusions are spreading in this country as well as in America, shown in the vigorous attempts now being made to manufacture a public opinion in honour o? these war crusaders in America, who charge the British with " a decline of anti-slavery fire." It is to be hoped that the people of this country will not be blinded by the subterfuges resorted to in dwelling upon the black picture of the South, in order to heighten the virtues of the North, when, by its double dealing, it has excited the pity and deserves the execrations of mankind, or be favourably im- pressed with the means employed to promote the progress of human liberty. May it ever be the exalted privilege and happiness of this highly favoured nation to endorse a gospel of emancipation founded on reason and argument, and not one of physical force associated with rash and bloody hands the folly that seeks, through evil, good. GLASGOW, February 1st, 1863. COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, AND PRESI- DENT OF THE WESLEYAN CONFERENCE. WHEN President Lincoln was a farmer, he called to- gether his friends and neighbours for consultation in regard to a number of coons which were very destruc- tive in his corn fields. A plan was resolved on to catch some of them ; and when caught, farther action was to be taken. It was not long before their labours were crowned with success ; but when Lincoln and his friends met to deliberate on what they should do to them, they were unanimously agreed in their opinions that if they killed them, the stench would be so loathsome and intolerable, that they concluded, in view of all the circumstances of the case, " it would be best to let them go." If Lincoln and his advisers had taken a leaf or chapter out of their experience concerning the above unpleasant and disagreeable animals, and applied it to the Southern people, they would soon have got rid of slavery, as we have already shown in a previous letter, and have pre- vented the fearful stench arising from the red field of battle, which is now filling the world. And how sad to think that no parties have added more to the loathsomeness of the present war in America than the false shepherds in Israel, whose maddening cry 264 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. has virtually demanded " war to the knife, and the knife to the handle," associating our country with rivers of flowing blood, charnel houses full of fester- ing corpses, commercial ruin, disaster, and woe, the widow's wail and orphan's moan. When referring to one of these false shepherds, the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, July 22d, says : There was a public meeting some few days since in New York, called for a very admirable and phil- anthropic purpose the formation of an association to give permanent aid to sick and wounded soldiers. The attendance was large and influential ; the array of orators on the platform imposing. In the course of the evening, Parson Brownlow made a speech. Let me cull a few, a very few, flowers of rhetoric from his harangue : ' If I had the power, sir,' said the reverend Brownlow, ' I would arm and uniform in Federal habiliments eveiy wolf, and panther, and tiger, and catamount, and bear in the mountains of America ; every crocodile in the swamps of Florida and South Carolina ; every negro in the Southern Confederacy ; and every devil in Hell and Pande- monium. . . . This war, I say to you, must be pursued with a vim and a vengeance, until the rebel- lion is put down, if it exterminates from God's green earth every man, woman, and child south of Mason and Dixon's line. . . . And we will crowd the rebels, and crowd and crowd them, till I trust in God we will rush them into the Gulf of Mexico, and drive the entire race, as the devil did the hogs into the Sea COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. 265 of Galilee.' He wound up by saying, ' We can whip the Southern Confederacy ; we can take in England and France ; and I want to carry it on till we whip out all creation/ Every point in this discourse told immensely, and it would be difficult to determine whether the loudest cheers were elicited by the allu- sion to the hogs in the Sea of Galilee, or the aspira- tion of ' whipping out all creation.' " Most of the above class have generally been found far away in the rear of the army. There are some, however, who have moved to the forefront on the tented field, whose voices have been heard to exclaim amidst the confused noise of the warrior, and gar- ments rolled in blood " Let us at least kill and maim each other like Christian gentlemen." One of these is the Eev. Colonel Jacques, a Methodist clergy- man, who has the command of a Federal regiment, officered with reverend clergymen from the same branch of the Church, under him to do the church militant on the battle-field ! And according to the statement of the Eev. W. L. Thornton, President of the Wesleyan Conference, as given in the Leeds Mer- cury, August 4th, " more than one hundred thousand Methodists have actually been in the war ; and reckoning the slain, and the wounded, and the cap- tives, more than half are gone ! " Here is war Christianity with a vengeance ! Eight reverend Fathers in God, and Brothers in Christ, showing their love to their fellowmen, and cutting each other's throats at the same time ! And what is 266 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. the most wonderful of all, there is no protest, or dignified remonstrance, or sorrowful lament, coupled with the above allusion by the dignitary aforesaid with the outrage on civilization and prostitution of Christianity perpetrated by the above-named class of men ! A high eulogium is given by President Thornton on the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church men who, for a quarter of a century, had squelched out the fires of abolitionism in the above denomina- tion of Christians, and acted as pointsmen to shunt off from the track of the General Conferences all questions that came with the velocity of an express on that subject! We are now gravely informed, however, by the President referred to, "that the report of the bishops was remarkable as declaring that the time had come to draw the anti-slavery line, and exclude from the Church all who would not liberate their slaves ! " Here is an extraordinary concession ! It has not always been the time for the Methodist Episcopal Church to draw the anti-slavery line, and exclude from the Church all who would not liberate their slaves ! This is the Church which the editor of the Methodist Recorder, April 25th, 1861, says, " Has ever held high principled views on the subject of slavery;" which the Eev. G. B. Macdonald, in a letter to the London Star, Dec. 1860, called "a protesting anti-slavery church ;" and which Bishop Simpson COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. 267 and Dr. M'Clintock, on a visit to England a few- years ago, maintained was "anti-slavery!" Anti-slavery when it had got to draw the line in the Philadelphia Conference of 1864 for freedom, and resolve to exclude from the Church all who would not liberate their slaves ! But now the set time has come, the grand era has dawned upon our world, the great epoch of time has arrived when the pious slaveholders, so-called, are to be lifted over the stile of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and excluded from its " pastures green," and bounds fixed, over which they are prohibited from coming : but not a word is said about the exclusion or prohibition of the dense multitudes of Methodists who have thrust out from their communion and fel- lowship as members and ministers persons who wear a colour not their own ! We are quite aware that a deputation of five coloured ministers were introduced from what President Thornton calls "African Metho- dist Churches ! " African, to distinguish them from American churches, although not a single member in those churches was probably born in Africa ! But the name in America serves to build the wall of caste between the black and white churches, the same as in the case of black and white regiments on the battle-field to keep alive the stubborn and cruel prejudices of the more favoured classes against the outcasts and down-trodden, and to make the former look big with an inflation of vanity, as they give a tremendous flourish with their trumpets when they go 268 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. out from the portals of the white churches on errands of mercy to their sable brethren, penned up in the folds of so-called "African Churches,'' or when they allow coloured deputations to visit them, on their Annual or General Conferences ! Then their virtues, graces, and worth are sometimes discovered ; and, although the images of Christ are encased in the darkest ebony, they are pronounced " as eloquent as Punshon !" At the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church recently held in Philadelphia, President Thornton says, "It was his responsible duty to address the Conference, and in the name of British Methodism he endeavoured to make his address Wesleyan, Christian, pacific, and anti-slavery." All who are acquainted with the sad history of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, must honestly confess that there was a needs be for Chris- tian, pacific and anti-slavery addresses in the Confer- ence referred to ; and we are glad to perceive that for once a British delegate has felt his responsibility, and made it his duty to call attention to the " sum of all villanies," like the venerable founder of Methodism, John Wesley, on the platform of a New World Con- ference ; as it is a great improvement on the policy adopted by previous delegates from Wesleyan Metho- dism to America, who have been so peaceful on anti- slavery questions, as to resemble dumb dogs that could not bark ! But if the " few words, guarded, Christian, and unpolitical," which the correspondent COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. 269 of the Mercury says, "he addressed to President Lincoln," be a type of the pacific words which he uttered in the presence of the assembled delegates in Philadelphia, coupling as they do the bursting of the fetters of the slave with the hostilities of the Federal armies, and the providence of God, otherwise than . overruling the designs, plots, schemes, and intrigues of wicked men ; and making them subservient to accomplish his gracious purposes ; in such a case we may determine the character of his peace principles, and peace words ; and may safely class him with the Methodist American peace editors, ministers, and people who maintain the " absolute and most perfect justice of the present war," although associated with the most diabolical barbarities and cruelties, com- menced and maintained for the restoration of the Union, which had filled up the measure of its iniqui- ties to the brim, and called down the avenging justice of the Almighty in punishment for its sins. Mark his doubly guarded language, " Sir, there are many thoughtful and praying men in England who are praying daily for the cessation of hostilities, for the bursting of the fetters of the slave, and who hope and believe these two results will, in the providence of God occur together." Together, as if the deliver- ance of the slave could not have been accomplished without the present war ; as if our Northern people were the friends of the negro, and had taken up the sword to burst the fetters of the slave ; as if Chris- tian men could promote the attainment of a righteous 270 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. end by the use of diabolical means ; and as if the providence of God favoured or sanctioned our Federal government, churches, and people in their present course of blood-thirstiness and blood-guiltiness. The thought is abhorrent to every feeling of humanity, repugnant to every principle of reason, and op- posed to every precept of Christianity ; and should. President Thornton and the men who are uttering his prayer think or believe to the contrary, all we can say is that they are blinded and bound fast with the most terrible delusions, clearly manifest in their with- holding of all censure and reproof from their brethren who are crying blood and thunder, and their absence of all condemnation of our horrid demoniacal war. Since writing the above, we have met with the fol- lowing resolution which was unanimously agreed upon by the members and delegates of the Wesleyaii Conference, of which Mr. Thornton is honorary Pre- sident. It is dated Bradford, Aug. 13th : "Our brethren in the United States have been comforted by the expression of our sympathy in their sorrows and difficulties ; and our old and unalterable testimony against slavery has been repeated in cir- cumstances which encourage the hope of a speedy termination of that which our venerable founder has justly designated as 'the execrable sum of all vil- lanies.' " Comforted by the expression of our sympathy in their sorrows and difficulties ! Comfort for men who are full of unreasoning hate towards each other COONS, FALSE SHEPHEKDS, ETC. 271 fanning the lurid flames of war by day and night demanding the extermination of their fellowmen and running riot over our present carnival of death in America ! O ! horror of horrors ! And the words, "repeat our old and unalterable testimony in circumstances which encourage the hope of the speedy termination of slavery," are as mis- placed and delusive as the bottles of comfort are mischievous when viewed in connection with the Methodist Episcopal, or any other branch of the Church of Christ in America, since all have aban- doned the moral for^the military, and have been smitten with judicial blindness and hardness of heart. And to spring a mine of feeling in favour of the Federals amongst the people of this country, President Thornton says, "there is a hearty veneration for Great Britain in EepTiblican America." In vain, however, do we look for this in the silent contempt with which the memorials of your religious bodies have been treated when addressed to their fellow Christians in America ; one of which, even without the formality of being read, was thrown under the table of the Methodist conference, held in Buffalo, 1860, by the magnates of that body ; and that one addressed to them by a no less respectable body of Christians than the Wesleyans in England. According to the testi- mony of Earl Grey, in a speech which he made in the British House of Commons on the eve of the present war breaking out in America, we find that he makes severe complaints against the insulting de- 272 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. meanour of the administrators of the Federal govern- ment, towards England ; consequently we find no "hearty veneration" there. Our researches will be fruitless if we look into our American school books, histories, books of travel written by American authors, or religious literature. In the vast bulk of the above, we shall find any thing and everything but the above. And we beg to remind President Thorn- ton and those who hold similar views with him, that such is not our own conviction, and we claim to have some right to have our say on this subject, both from long and painful experience, fcnd extended observa- tion. In confirmation of the above the reader will find ample proof in our letter addressed to the Leeds Mercury, from St. Paul, Minnesota, July 4th, 1855, contained in the preface to our book, American States and Churches, with the comments thereon of Edward Baines Esq., M.P., and in a letter written on our behalf by Edward Gilbert, Esq. of New York, and endorsectby Dr. Cheever, published at the close of our first edition of the above work, he says, " I know of no reason for the proscription which has been meted out to Mr. Balme, socially and ecclesiastically, except that he is an abolitionist and by birth an Englishman." And the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Augustus M. De Sala, in a letter written from New York, July 4, 1 864, says : " You are all at home, of course, aware that when this hurly-burly in the States is over, we English people, we perfidious, base, and brutal Britishers, are to be ' whipped.' Yes, sir, that COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. 273 is the word, ' Whipped.' John Bull had better bare his shoulders, and adjust his wrists to the triangles at once. The lictors are binding their rods, the drummers are combing their cats, the birch is in pickle, and the blood knots are tying. This time it is not Parson Brownlow, but millions, who utter the threat. So soon as the Confederates have been ' whipped,' our turn is to come. Maximillian and the French Pro- tectorate in Mexico may even be let alone for a time, but there is to be no respite for John Bull. That wicked old man is to suffer, come what may. The piracies of the Alabama are to be. brought home to him. Those rams which Messrs. Laird built for the French mer- chants, likewise for the Pasha of Egypt, also for the Sheikh of the Soudan, perhaps for the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, peradventure for the Prophet Mahomet, but always for the Confederate Government those most flagitious rams are to lie heavy on his soul. The Federal commerce having suffered from the depreda- tions of Captains Semmes, Maffitt, and Maury prin- cipally because the Federal navy has been locked up in trying to maintain an impossible blockade, and the Federal Monitors won't float, and the Federal ocean ironclads can't go to sea, and Mr. Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Federal Navy, won't do anything but sleep, and concede questionable con- tracts, and sit for a portrait of the Prophet Jeremiah in a spun-glass beard and the American commercial flag having come to grief on the high seas, compensa- tion and apology will be demanded from the British T 274 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. Government. In case of refusal, we are to have war. War to the bitter end war to the red-hot stump ! Vermont and Maine will seize upon Canada Myers of Rouse's Point, leading the van of invaders per- chance. Admirals Farragut and Dupont will gobble up the West Indies ; the Fenian Brotherhood will take care of Ireland and British shipping will be swept from the seas by Yankee privateers out of New York and Boston. In a word, our atrocious, viola- tions of neutrality are to meet at last retribution and vengeance." And as we find no veneration of the whites born in old England ; even so we find no veneration of the blacks who are British subjects. Out of many cases that may be given to illustrate the above, we will con- fine ourselves to the following, given in the Daily Telegraph, July 22, " The Eev. W. S. Kinnaird has the misfortune to wear a dark hue on his skin. He was born in the State of Delaware, a slave, but his owner set him free. He went to Canada, became a British subject, and this summer was accredited as a delegate to the Methodist Episcopal Church, then holding its quadrennial session in Philadelphia. The envoy from the British provinces was very cordially received by his brethren in the City of Brotherly Love, and, as was natural, thought he would take a trip to his native Delaware before he went home again. Now, the State of Delaware is the smallest in the American Union. It has enjoyed considerable notor- iety as the last State to retain the brutal practice of COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. 275 flogging women, and not many years since scandalised the entire Union by sentencing a white female to receive ' thirty-nine lashes well laid on.' Little Dela- ware is very loyal, but has not yet abolished slavery within its confines in fact, it is, in many respects as far behind the age as the State of New Jersey, which the New Yorkers contemptuously declare not to be in the Union at all, and where the Dutch and Swed- ish farmers are said, when a presidential election comes round, invariably to vote for Andrew Jackson, ignoring all other candidates whatsoever. In little Delaware there is a law forbidding any negro to so- journ in the State under a penalty of fifty dollars. Very soon after his arrival at Gamden, in Delaware, the Rev. Mr. Kinnaird was arrested, proved to have contravened the law by being born black, and fined fifty dollars and costs. He had not the money by him to pay this mulct, whereupon the hospitable Dela- wariaus sold this clergyman and British subject at public auction. Fortunately for himself he was bought by the brother of the person who had formerly eman- cipated him. This good Samaritan gave a bond to the authorities for his leaving the State within three days, and took Mr. Kinnaird's bill for the payment of the expenses he had incurred on his behalf a bill which the Episcopal Methodists of Canada will doubt- less be delighted to honour. Mr. Kinnaird has very properly laid his case before Lord Lyons, who has, of course, complained to Mr. Seaward, and that delight- ful minister will doubtless confer great benefit on the 276 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. purveyors of goosequills and foolscap to the Govern- ment stationary office, by writing lengthy and cheer- ful letters to Lord Lyons on the subject. Only, if Mr. Seward have any notion of equal justice, or of what is sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander, he ought certainly to remember that he justified the kidnapping of Don Jose Arguelles by the specious plea that no person accused of trading in human flesh could expect protection from the United States Govern- ment ; also that America has an extradition treaty with England ; and ttien, having recalled those facts, he should forthwith deliver up the State authorities of Delaware to the British Government, in order that they might be tried at the Old Bailey for man-steal- ing, which is felony. At all events, whether Mr. Kinnaird obtains any redress or not, it would be as well to lay this little story up in lavender, ready for the compensation controversy. If any noble lords or honourable gentlemen in the British parliament want any more instances of British subjects having been dragged, kidnapped, decoyed, and forced, not into negro slavery, but . into the scarcely less intolerable servitude of the Federal army and navy, I dare say that her Majesty's consuls at the ports of New York, Boston, and Portland will be enabled to supply them with dozens, cut and dried." Here is a case not only for Lord Lyons and the Episcopal Methodists of Canada, but for the Presi- dent of the Wesleyan Conference, and as Mr. Thorn- ton has already favoured Mr. Kinuaird and hi 3 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETC. 277 brother black delegates with such an eloquent tribute to their talents, we may fairly calculate on the elo- quence of the above dignitary, if not of " Punshon's " in denouncing this American outrage on a British subject, and obtaining for him redress. Before we conclude this letter, we must introduce to your notice one of the eulogised bishops, already referred to, that you may see what kind of an anti- slavery line is now sought to be drawn, and the char- acter of the men who draw the blood line. Comment- ing on the above, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Nov. 25, 1864, says : " Bishop Simpson, of Pennsylvania, is the minister of God who has lately added his voice to swell the chorus of fraticidal hate, and he was listened to the other day by an enthusiastic audience at New York. But that words like his must ring in the ears of men who are swift to shed their brother's blood, they would be only another item of that mixture of blasphemy and bombast which so often characterizes American oratory, and which would sometimes be amusing if it were not painfully profane. For instance, the Bishop hazarded a truly Yankee doctrine ' with reverence. God could not do without America.' On the peculiar character of the bishop's ' reverence ' we need not en- large ; but the thought itself that the New World was wanting to complete the resources of Almighty power, discloses a state of mind rather difficult to realize. With every wish to look at the question from his point of view, we find it impossible to agree with our 278 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEKDS, ETC. episcopal friend. Of course we are prejudiced ; but it seems to us that if the Yankee never existed God's great designs in this world could have been worked out. If nobility of bearing, pure self-denial, chival- rous self-sacrifice, readiness to face death for a good cause, some worship for a grand past, some veneration for God's altars, deep love for homes made holy through human affections if these be things which God loves to see on earth, it seems to us that this Old "World, in its varied story of man's trials and man's victories over his baser self, has given to his- tory and to the unwritten page of sweet human memories much that may seem good in the Creator's eyes. We never thought, until Bishop Simpson taught us, that the Yankee was wanting to complete the full idea of man noble in God's sight. We should not have supposed that the worship oi the almighty dollar was needed as a new religion upon earth. We should not have fancied that God's glory or man's moral education lacked the sublime lesson of ' repudia- tion ' that peculiar political economy which, as Mr. Lowell sings, 'sacrifices private ends, your enemy's too, to duty.' We should have thought that on this old continent there had been enough of rulers and soldiers who had sung Te Deums when they had cut their neighbours' throats, or removed their neighbours' landmarks, though we may have had no very tall Yankee in a long-tailed coat to decree, with an up- country story too broad for print, the murder of thousands of his fellow-men. In the olden time, COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. 279 American demagogues, hardly caricatured by the writer of the ' Biglow Papers,' set aside the Gospel as unfinished because ' they didn't know everything down in Judee.' Certainly they did not know that a whole nation ought to choose for itself the mission of Cain, and then to call the work a fulfilment of the Divine will. The poet ol New England could satirise the men who warred on Mexico, putting into their mouths the plea that, because the States surpassed Mexico in extent, ' their rights were bigger,' ' an' that it's all to make 'ern free that we air pulling trigger.' Now the honest satirist of the old day is as warlike as the rest ; he too is carried away by the frenzy of the time ; he too is in favour of the bigger rights of the bigger nation ; he holds up for present Yankee imitation the man who would 'smash the Tables of the Law in time of need to load his guns ;' the man who can see but one side ' If his, 'tis God's, and that is plenty.' Here is the crowning result of national insanity. That the demagogue should rave ; that the preacher living on pew rents should out-rant the rest ; that journalists should prostitute the press all this we might have feared ; but we did hope that the poet ' dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love ' would have kept the whiteness of his soul, would have rebuked the fury of the time, or at least would have preserved a golden silence amid the brazen bellowings of the crowd. "Bishop Simpson, however, is not content with thinking that the chorus of praise which goes up 280 COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. from the temple of God's green earth would be sadly deficient unless the Yankee accent were distinctly heard in it ; that the multiform beauty of angels given to us by the painters of all ages would be incomplete without the novel and crowning grace of a Yankee visage surmounting the usual wings. He also thinks that Providence watches the destiny of the North, and specially helps it at its greatest need. We know how Alison's History was described as ' a work in ten vol- umes, proving that upon the whole Heaven was on the side of the Tories during the late war.' "\Ve also remember how it was publicly stated from an Eng- lish pulpit, that the Irish potato rot was a judgment drawn down by the increased grant to Maynooth. We may not, therefore, laugh too loudly at this portion of the transatlantic trash. In all ages it has been the accursed custom of ribald priests and their inflamed dupes to represent the inscrutable and beneficent Power, 'whose sun shines on the just and the unjust/ as their peculiar partizan as a Moloch who delights in the blood shed by their hands. Bishop Simpson thinks that Providence uncovered the mines of Cali- fornia that America might pay for the Mexican war, and that now He has pointed out the newly-opened fields of gold in Nevada to help the Cabinet of Wash- ington in redeeming its greenbacks and paying its way. What a pity it is that none of these discover- ies was timely enough to enable Pennsylvania to satisfy its bondholders ; for in that case a people COONS, FALSE SHEPHERDS, ETC. 281 might have saved its character without sacrificing its own cash, and some foreign creditors might not have had cause to groan. It would seem, however, that the American Providence the idol invented by the ministers of the Yankee Gospel does not lay much stress on common honesty. As depicted by his priests, that spurious deity will aid the nation to des- poil Mexico, or to carry fire and sword into the South, but he never thinks of helping them to pay their ordinary debts. We suppose each people to some ex tent gives the national colours to the white light of religion ; but while other nations have hierarchies more or less elevated above the vulgar world, the American priests and preachers are the creatures of the society they live in, the creatures of faction, the agents of the market-place. Politics, social questions, personal disputes, get inextricably mixed up with every church and creed ; conferences and convoca- tions, called for purely religious purposes, have again and again been split up on topics of the day ; and the rival sections have sought separate altars, and separ- ate priests, so that the Abolitionist and the Democrat may not overhear each other's prayers to the distinct and peculiardeities they each worship. It has even been said that in the old Union days the Scripture Lessons printed for the South were changed to suit Southern views ; and doubtless, in time to come, we may have an American Bible. But further Yankeefication is, perhaps, hardly needed, if American pulpit oratory is fairly represented by the preacher who, enlarging on 282 COONS, FALSE SHEPHEEDS, ETU. Noah's ' faith ' in building the ark, pointed out that the patriarch, hy giving up his flocks and herds, had 'sacrificed property to a considerable amount in dollars.'" J. R BALME. 3 St. Luke Street, Hull, Feb 7, 1865. THE EXPIATOES OE SAVIOUES OF THE SOUTHEEN PEOPLE OF AMEEICA. To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury. GENTLEMEN, Who could have expected in the year of grace 186-t a class of persons would have made their appearance as advocates of the blasphem- ous doctrine that the sufferings and deaths of Federal soldiers who have fallen on the battle-field, in our present horrible war in America, are vicarious ? How- ever astounding or humiliating it may be to contem- plates such a state of things, yet, alas, it is true. Tn the Address to the Women of England by Mrs- Harriet Beecher Stowe, there is the following remark- able passage : " Our sons die to redeem the very brothers that slay them ; they give their blood in expiation of this great sin (slavery), begun by you in England, and perpetuated by us in America," &c. In a recent letter addressed by Eichard Cobden, M.P., to Simeon Whitely, Esq., President of the Den- ver Council of the Union League of America, he says " If it can be shown that, as the result of this war, four millions of human beings have been elevated from the condition of mere chattels to the rank of free 284- THE EXPIATORS AND SAVIOUKS OF THE men, it will be an atonement and consolation for the horrors with which it has been accompanied, such as have never yet been afforded in the annals of human warfare." The American Missionaries, also, in Turkey, in a letter addressed to Federal soldiers in America, from Constantinople, and signed " Cyrus Hamlin, Geo. A. Perkins, and H. A. Schauffler," have put on record the following sentiment : " Our land was plunged into fearful guilt before God, and without the shed- ding of blood there could be no remission of its sin. And it is patriot blood alone that can purify the land. It is not the blood of rebels slain, but the blood of our fathers, brothers, and sons, of the best and noblest hearts of the land, the shedding of which God will bless and sanctify to our redemption from the mani- fold curses and degrading influences of slavery." Such being the doctrine advocated, let us look at the character of the men who go forth to bear the guilt of the Southern people, and to lay down their lives as an expiation for their sins. Are they without sin in general, or the particular sins of the Southern- ers ? They will not attempt to claim exemption from the former ; and as to the latter it is quite true that, for the profit which waits on crime, they have mort- gaged the slave plantations of the South ; taken slaves and sold them on the -auction blocks for bad debts ; fitted out slave-ships under the name of missionary- ships, in order to give the African races an opportu- nity of sharing in the blessings of our so-called SOUTHEKN PEOPLE OF AMEEICA. 285 " patriarchal institution," so often and extensively lauded by our American people ; put up slave-boards at noon day prayer-meetings in connection with our great and wonderful revivals of religion ; systemati- cally taught the humanity and divinity of slavery in all our principal colleges and seminaries ; issued pic- torial representations from book-rooms, as in the case of the New York Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1860, to show that Abolitionists were destructives, and that a separation of slavery from Methodism would be its destruction ; filled the churches with bitterness, un- charitableness, and a violent spirit of persecution to- wards Abolitionists ; called into being religious insti- tutions whose committees and agents gladly welcomed slaveholders, slavebreeders, and negro-haters, as life members and directors, that they might create a fund in order to make "pastures new" in Turkey, where the missionaries referred to might roam with fond delight, and to provide them with bibles, translations, and tracts, iffi order to convert the Arabs, &c. ; turned church deacons and members into grand inquisitors, as in the case of the Gordons at Boston, Massachu- setts ; and also ministers or clergymen into recruiting officers, to fill up the grand army of the Union and to take the command of regiments, like the Eev. Colonel Jacques, to prove their principles orthodox by " apos- tolic blows ;" sent forth crimps into all parts of the world, to augment the number of the citizen soldiers who are now marching into the South with the torch and dagger, to kill and destroy ; commissioned Quakers 286 THE EXPIATORS AND SAVIOURS OF THE to go out as representatives of Christian Commissions, designated by President Lincoln "accompaniments" (or auxiliaries) " of our Federal armies, for the relief of soldiers and volunteer refreshment saloons," and armed with an instruction from Secretary Chase not te give " Old Mother England a lug of her hair," as Chase pronounced to be her just desert ; not to do this act of wanton barbarity and cruelty, but to caress and flatter .her, and put his hand deep into her purse, that these expiators and saviours of the South may be more at liberty to increase and perpetuate their horrible carnage and slaughter. Great God ! is such the char- acter of the men who claim to be expiators and saviours of the South ? How unlike the character of our Saviour, who went about doing good, and only good. And as they enter what the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher has wickedly called the " Gethsemane" of the Southern battle-field, how different are the means which they employ to those which the world's Re- deemer and Saviour made use of, as they, with the returning light of each succeeding day, make "new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike on the face of heaven ;" or, to use an American phrase, " pile up the agonies." Next to the attainment of a righteous end, which His creatures are commanded to seek, righteous means are to be used. But in our " Holy War," so called, what chicanery and craft are used what lying in wait to deceive what treachery and fraud what unnatural pretences and supernatural powers are claimed as they associate themselves with SOUTHERN PEOPLE OF AMEEICA. 287 pains, penalties, and prison-houses, and arm them- selves with steel and faggots, Greek fire and demonia- cal fire, that they may meet their foes in savage blood- thirstiness in the work of human carnage, slaughter, and blood. How fearful to contemplate that such men are so wrapt with the delusion that they can sanctify the means which they are using, or the Lord God in their hearts ! And yet, forsooth, this war, with all its attendant horrors and infernal agencies and instru- mentalities, is god-fathered by W. E. Forster, M.P., as recently shown in his speech at Bradford, whilst the editors of the Leeds Mercury, in an editorial designated " Cost and Consequences of War with America, 7 ' claim our American religious war fanatics as " strict allies and competitors in the work of evangelising the world." And oh, how sad to relate that memorials from ministers and clergymen have been sent from this country to fraternise with these men of blood, whilst religious associations have received men under the garb of philanthropists, given them their god- speed, and pledged their co-operation to sustain the auxiliaries or accompaniments of our Federal armies, under the name of "Christian Commissions," or "Freedmen's Aid Societies." We would not forget, however, to pay our tribute to the Congregational Union in their refusing to receive Levi Coffin and to read his message. But whilst no thunderbolts have been let fall, or fires of a terrible indignation have flashed forth from the religious organisations of the land to smite down Beecher, Cheever, Sloane, Brown- 288 THE EXPIATORS AND SAVIOURS OF THE low, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Dickenson, and others, for their unceasing clamour for blood, noble peers of the realm, and commercial editors, have unmuzzled their thunders against the atrocities of our unrighteous war, put a restraint on religious fanaticism in your churches, and to some extent rescued our fatherland from dis- grace. All honour to these men. And whilst I am thus writing, new sensations rise to gladden the spirit with the news borne on the pinions of the telegraph that the Southerns have entered into the project and are laying their plans to arm the able-bodied slaves and make soldiers of them under a guarantee of free- dom. This is a move in the right direction, as it will add a new element of strength to the cause of the South, create a gulf stream of sympathy on behalf of Southerns, and give them an impelling power to drive through every difficulty with acclamation in establish- ing their rights or claims to Southern independence, whether on the basis of their acknowledged sovereign- ties as States or the Declaration of Independence, which associates Americans with the men, the deed, and the day when they were freed from the " flat- footed despotism and grinding tyranny," so-called, of the mother country. Believing, as I do, that the separation of the North from the South will be the first effectual step to freedom, crumple up the oppres- sive tariff of the North, and liberate our churches from their serfdom to the States, and cause them to emerge from their defilements, like Zion in her ancient grandeur and beauty, the success of the South will SOUTHERN PEOPLE OP AMERICA. 289 make the writer bound along through the valleys of gladness, leap up on the mountains of joy, plant his feet on the loftiest peaks of the raptures of delight, plunge deep into a sea of earthly bliss, and, as he comes upon the rising wave, cause him to drop music from his fingers and flash ecstacy from his emotions, whilst with exultant voice he extends the invitation to men of every tribe and clime to celebrate the event in one grand hallelujah chorus of praise to the triune Jehovah, who makes the wrath of Jeff. Davis to praise Him and overwhelms Lincoln and his chariots in what the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher calls the " red sea of agitation." Yours, for truth and liberty, JOSHUA R BALME, An Uncompromising Abolitionist. HALIFAX, 20 Clarence-street, Nov. 6, 1864. U AMEEICA AND ROME. To the Editor of the Eastern Counties Herald. SIR, There are many points of resemblance be- tween the two countries above referred to. Allow me to notice a few. Like Eome, there is no nation claims to be in possession of more exalted virtues, to be the embodiment of subliiuer principles, or to be a more perfect model in her institutions to the world ; and yet, with all her preposterous claims, Eome never ex- ceeded America, the country described by John Bright " as the land of which angels might dream." Eome never surpassed her in the extent or complete- ness of her misery arising from her inward corrup- tions, which have made her fall an easy prey to super- stition, pride, avarice, vain-glory, daring impiety, low buffoonery, ribaldry and scorn ; so that there is no country on the one hand produces a more prodigious growth of error and falsehood, or on the other more monstrous crimes against God and man. At the general convention of the Episcopal Church, held a short time ago in New York, Bishop M'Cros- key, of Michigan, asserted " that in the United States AMEEICA AND ROME. 291 there was less religion, with more pretence, than in any other country in the world professedly Christian." The Eev. Dr. Cheever, in a letter dated New York, April 4th, 1862, and published in an Edinburgh newspaper, avowed " it is not our piety, our sense of duty, our humanity, or our desire to obey God, that influences us, but only expediency and necessity ; so that, if slavery be abolished in this slaveholding em- pire, it will be God's providence, God's mercy and power, in spite of our religion, and the opposition of a great part of the professed religionists of the country." The above inference is applicable to all other gross evils that effect America. The Eev. Henry Ward Beecher, in October, 1859, when preaching from that terrible message of Jehovah by the mouth of his prophet Jeremiah, recorded Jer. vi. 12 19, com- menced his discourse as follows : " 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." It is no less remarkable that America has fallen from her pride of place amongst the nations, and be- come a hissing and a bye-word, a proverb and taunt, from the same cause as that which led to the down- fall of Borne, namely priestcraft. No two countries have been more opposed to the circulation of the Bible. We had a powerful illustration of this in the case of the imprisonment of the Madaii a few years ago ; but where one has been placed under the ban of proscription or maltreated from diffusing a knowledge 292 AMERICA AND ROME. of God, through His written word in Italy, hundreds have been banished or tortured under the more op- pressive slave-laws of America ; and when the monks and priests of Eome could not stop the circulation of the Bible, they sought to prevent and corrupt w T hat they could not destroy : even so, our Protestant clergy in America have been priests "writ large" in the above respect. The former put the cross behind the crucifix, the Bible behind tradition, and salvation be- hind the priest the latter restricting the texts and doctrines of God's word to distinction of colour, so that if a quadroon or an octaroon (so called in America amongst the coloured people) comes under the power of Christianity, and is brought to experience its saving benefits, their white blood, according to American theory, can only be taken into heaven at death, whilst their black blood will be cast out and doomed with the inferior creatures to perish. This perversion of the word of God, and its unwarrantable translation for the exclusive use and benefit of the white man, has been so general that every branch of the Church has robbed the word of God of its value, circumscribed its influence, and impaired its lustre by those monstrous theories, that man may hold property in man, and that one man is inferior to another be- cause he wears a different complexion on his counte- nance. Putting their fingers on Leviticus, xxv. 45, and on the doulos in the New Testament, these corrupters and defilers of the word of God have shouted, " We must have a new revelation from Heaven before AMEKICA AND EOME. 293 slavery can be disproved from the Bible," creating a ground swell of complacency and deligbt in the churches, from the frozen regions of the North to the naming belt of the equator. Commencing with the 1st chapter of Genesis, and 24th verse, which they say was not translated, or the words " naphesh chayah " in the original would dis- prove the unity of the human race, they have tra- versed the Scriptures until they have come to the text in Corinthians, which avows that " all flesh is not the same flesh," as proof positive that negroes were further down in the scale of being than white persons, so that our Churches have not only produced " meii- stealers for ministers, women-whippers for mission- aries, and cradle plunderers for church members,'' but men who have excluded coloured people from the blessings and privileges of Christianity, and turned them over to the uncovenanted mercies of God in the Black Churches, where they could engage in acts of devotion as outer court worshippers, thus contraven- ing the arrangement of Jehovah where he says, "My house is a house of prayer for all people ;" and amongst those corrupters and defilers we find not only a Vandyke of New York, a Nehemiah Adams, of Boston ; Professor Hodge, of Princeton College ; Lord, of Dartmouth College ; Stuart, of Andover, but also Drs. Channing and Way land who admitted that ''The Apostles did not preach a religion proclaiming freedom to the slaves, 1 ' &c. ; whilst Mrs. Stowe, like Tetzel, stood forth to the view of the world with her 294 AMERICA AND EOME. "indulgences" to "Lady pious slave-holders" and " Christian slave-traders," as shown in her " Key to Uncle Tom," not, indeed, for any stipulated sum, like her prototype ; but where he got his hundreds of pounds in the brisk trade which he drove in support of his preposterous claims, Mrs. Stowe obtained her thousands by covering up the bad with the good with her " brand new mantle of piety " for the classes re- ferred to ; so that by trading on the ignorance of man- kind she enthroned herself in the affections of millions, which caused gifts to flow in upon her in a most sur- prising manner, and to an extraordinary extent. When the temporal interests of the monks and priests at Eome were jeopardised, as shown in the Ger- man Reformation, in a spirit of the utmost vindictive- ness, and with feelings of the most rancorous malignity and deadly hate, they issued their bulls, proclaimed their anathemas, and threatened with pains and penalties, bonds and imprisonments, the faggot and the sword, all who called in question the infallibility of the Pope, rejected the worship of saints and images, and opposed auricular confession and mass, &c. Even so, when the cry arose in America that the Union was in danger, and Acts of nullification and secession were passed by the Southern States on the two-fold basis of their sovereignty and declaration of independence, which gave them a special and also a general right to do so, our Northern Protestant priests who made the Union a part of their religion, and twined around it their superstitious veneration, were the first to raise AMEKICA AND ROME. 295 the cry of blood, rouse the war passions, and kindle them into a flame. Unceasingly they took the war trumpet and sounded it loud and long, until the whole land was filled with the notes of the preparations of war hostile legions marshalled in battle array hecatombs of the slain piled up amidst the shrieks of the dying, and the land was made to mourn with the torch as well as the dagger ; nor has the cry of these *' war Christians " become less fierce or clamorous, noi their enormous thirst for blood or plunder less eager, since recently their plaintive voices have been heard through the columns of the Boston Recorder, as re- corded in the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 21, 1864, ' deplor- ing the danger to which the loyal North is exposed from selfish desires for peace, and from being too ready to take the divine prerogative of forgiveness into our own hands, as if we were more merciful than God, and pardon those dreadful offenders whom the Lord in mercy to posterity has delivered to us, to punish and destroy ; " and in support of this comfort- able theory of religious duty, the correspondent of the Telegraph says, the Recorder cites as a lesson which American Christians should not forget, at such a crisis as this, the example of Saul, when commanded by the Lord, through Samuel the prophet, to go and smite the Amalekites and utterly destroy all that they had, and spare them not, but slay both men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses 1 Sam. xv. 30. But as Saul took Agag, the King of the Amalekites alive, instead of killing him, 296 AMERICA AND ROME. and allowed the soldiers of the Jewish army to spare the best of the sheep and oxen, under pretence of re- serving them for sacrifice, instead of destroying them utterly, according to the literal terms of the commis- sion he had received from the Almighty, he was re- jected from being King over Israel Even so the Recorder dreads the fiercest wrath of the Almighty from the leniency of our modern Pharaoh, Lincoln, who has already let out deluges of blood ; and also of his soldiers, who have looked with such covetous eyes on the gold and silver, and oxen and sheep of the Southerns. ' Is this the land our fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win.** The thought ought to make us glow with indignation and scorn against such bloodthirsty miscreants, as well as their abettors and promoters, and to lead us to en- deavour to create an influence which will go iorth like an electric shock to send the cold stream of horror down their backs, and destroy every vestige of their evil influence in society and the world When Luther was requested to take the sword to promote the German Reformation, he flung the light- ning flashes of his indignation into the faces of the men of violence, whilst with dignified remonstrance he entered his protest against their abandonment of the moral for the military, manfully avowing that it was " by the word of God alone error must be dis- lodged, overthrown, and done away." " If I resort to AMEEICA AND ROME. 297 force," said Luther, " what shall I gain ? " Replying to his own question he answered, "grimace, fair ap- pearances, apings, cramped uniformity, and hypocrisy ; but there will be no hearty sincerity, no faith, no love : when these are wanting all is wanting, and I would not give a straw for such a victory." How these sen- timents ought to make the ears of our religious fiery war spirits and their sympathisers and supporters to tingle, and their cheeks to crimson with shame : for God never designed that aggression on error or crime should ever be made, except by means purely and solely moral "What then must we think of the new theory put forth by our " religious war crusaders, that war is the expression of moral force?" How strange that men, who have hitherto made the domain of peaceful arguments and conquests the boundary line of their sympathies, efforts, and influences, saying here shall you go and no further, have taken leave of their modesty, allowed their judgments to become impaired, and their passions to ride rough-shod over them, whilst, Jehu-like, they became vehement in their support of what they had been most earnestly and eloquently wont to condemn! And, strange to say, many of the Quakers who were formerly members of the Peace Society, if not now, have smoked out their pipes of peace, entwined their sympathies around the war whoop, and are now feasting their eyes with de- light on scenes of devastation and of blood, such as the world has never seen or known before, and the like of which we pray may never be seen or beheld 298 AMERICA AXD ROME. again. Armed with the word of God, and taking hold of God's strength by prayer, Luther boldly defied the Papists, sophists, and the gates of hell, and was more than a match for all the powers that were combined against him. Nothing could withstand him, "poor monk though he was." A current of magnetic power went forth from him that flowed from heart to heart, until the cry was raised in one place after another, in quick succession, "Down with superstition, down with idolatrous worship to saints and images, down with the Pope." It is quite true that he was ex- communicated, but he excommunicated them. He was called " foul-mouthed and foul-lived," but, like the moon, he held on the even tenor of his way, although the monks and Jesuits, like dogs, barked and gnashed on him with their teeth. Is not the word of God sufficient for America ? Does it not meet the exigencies of nations as well as men ? Why has it not been applied? Are there not five millions of avowed disciples of Christ in that country ? If the word of God had been diffused by them in its original simplicity and purity, would it not have created an atmosphere where neither slavery, negro-hating, high tariffs, or war could have lived or existed? Were there difficulties, the greater would have been their triumphs ? Did lions and beasts of savage name howl and roar about their pathway ? Judah's Lion would have roared in their defence. Some of them who sometimes came into your midst with letters of introduction from their canny bishops, AMEKICA AND EOMB. 299 who have recently been drawing their anti-slavery line in blood, audaciously declared, like Beecher in his sermon called " Summer in the Soul," " War is impossible in America," " Our extraordinay Revivals of Religion are a Preservative against War;" and as they visited spots sacred to the memory of Luther, they cried in the language of the poet, where he says