Yes, as Mr. Lowell sings, "All honor and praise to the women and men Who spoke out for the dumb and the downtrodden then. I see history preparing the statue and niche. They were harsh; but shall you be so shocked at hard words Who stabbed with sharp words for the freedom of others-- Who, for sake of the many, dared stand with the few." This defence, which he who was to become one of their most powerful voices here finds himself driven to make for the harshness of the abolitionists, was never needed for Channing; and it is for this reason that I have referred to him as perhaps the most noteworthy of them all. For in all the excitement of a controversy which he felt to be for the life itself, and to be going down to the roots of things; when the religious and respectable world shrank from the side of the teacher they had pretended to love and honor for thirty years, when the finger of hatred and scorn was pointed at him in the most influential journals as the fomenter of revolution and the associate of felons and fanatics-no word ever fell from his lips or pen which was not weighted with consideration for and sympathy with his enemies, and generous allowance for the difficulties of the Southern slave-owner. In his first great anti-slavery manifesto-his letter to H. Clay on the annexation of Texas-he speaks of his own early residence in the South, and his life-long attachment to them in these words: " There is something singu larly captivating in the unbounded hospitality, the impulsive generosity, the carelessness for the future, the frank, open manners, the buoyant spirit and courage, which marks the people ;" and from this attitude he never swerved in later years, when the contest had become most envenomed. Hitherto the Christian world has made very little progress in the divine art of assailing and overcoming evil," was one of his sayings; and it was with scrupulous care that he strove to set some example of the divine method in the great controversy of his own time. Let me now, as briefly as possible, recall the position of the question in 1830. The struggle in England was drawing to an end. Those of us who are old enough will recollect those dayshow children were brought up to use no sugar, and to give every penny they could call their own for the cause of the slave; when grown men and women were spending themselves freely for the same cause; how the time was one of bright hope and enthusiastic work for the goal was full in view. On the 1st of August, 1834, the act passed, and emancipation was a fact, In the United States it was far otherwise. There year by year the prospect was growing darker, and the clouds were gathering. The Southern tone had changed under the strain of the immense development of the cotton trade. Instead of lamenting slavery as an evil inheritance from their fathers, which was to be curtailed by every prudent method, and finally extinguished, Calhoun and the other Southern leaders were now openly proclaiming it to be the true condition of the laborer, and the mainstay of Christian society. They were looking round eagerly for new slave States to balance the steady increase of free States in the North, and by savage word and savage act were challenging and trying to stamp out every attempt to interfere with their domestic institution. Their challenge had been at last formally accepted, and the gage of battle taken up in deadly earnest. It was in this winter of 1830-1 that Garrison, the immortal journeyman printer, by extraordinary self-denial and energy, got out the first number of the Liberator, declaring slavery to be a league with death and cove nant with hell," and pledging himself and his friends to war with it to the bitter end. Their watchword was, uncompromising, immediate emancipation. It was in this same winter that Channing went to spend some months at St. Croix. He had not been in a slave State since his boyhood, and he returned with all his old impressions confirmed and strengthened. Slavery he felt to be even a greater curse to the world than he had always proclaimed it, and so he preached on his return to New England. At the same time, without joining them openly he showed much interest in the work of Garrison and the uncompromising party, pleading for them that" deeply moved souls will speak strongly, and ought to speak, so as to move and shake nations." No wonder that they turned eagerly to him in the hope that he would come forward and lead their attack. But for the moment this could not be. The temper of the combatants, waxing fiercer day by day, was a barrier which he could not cross us yet, and no doubt the social ostracism-so formidable to one who for a generation had stood foremost among those whom his countrymen delighted to honor-weighed somewhat with him. He could defend the abolitionists as men moved by a passionate devotion to truth and freedom." which led them to speak " with an indignant energy which ought not to be measured by the standard of ordinary times" but join them at once he could not. And they in their disappointment were almost ready to denounce him as one of those New England recreants who are addressed in the first stirring appeal of Hosea Biglow to his Massachusetts fel low-citizens: "Wall, go 'long to help 'em stealin', , Help the men that's ollers dealin' The question whether Channing would have done well to join the abolitionists in these early days will always remain fairly debatable, and will be settled by each of us according to the strength of his own fighting instinct. Those who blame him for delaying can at any rate call himself as a witness on their side. For when at the end of 1834 the Rev. Samuel May, general agent of the Boston Anti Slavery Society, in answer to Channing's expostulations as to the harshness and violence of their language. and the heat and one-sidedness of the abolitionist meetings, turned upon him with, Why then have you left the movement in young and inexperienced hands? Why, sir, have you not moved why have you not spoken before?" Channing, after a pause, replied in his kindest tones, "Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof. I have been silent too long.' Looking, however, at the man's age and character, I cannot join pin casting blame on Channing. Other men might have deserved reproach for not emphasizing their convictions in this way; but not he. At school he had gained the name of the Peacemaker. He had been true to that character for half a century. While a gleam of hope remained that the South might even yet move in the direction of abolition, a gentle firmness in remonstrance was the only weapon he could conscientiously sanction. And in 1830 there was still such a gleam of hope in the lurid clouds. As late as 1832 the question of abolition was discussed in the Virginian Legislature. Some few of the best Southern public men still held the old doctrine, and were ready to work for gradual emancipation. They were even doing so by a colonization society and other stop-gaps, the hollowness and worthlessness of which had not yet been proved. The Peacemaker therefore might still hope to prevail. But now the time had indeed come when further hesitation would have left a stain on his armor. I have said that the South were on the lookout for new territories into which to carry their slaves, and the devil rarely fails to find what they are in search of for men on such a quest as that. In 1827 the Spanish American colonies had gained their independence. Mexico, the chief of them, and the nearest neighbor to the United States, had from the first looked up to the great republic with hope and admiration. But from her elder sister no response came. Her good-will was coldly put aside, for she had declared freedom to all slaves in her borders, and these borders, unhappily for her, comprised a magnificent ter ritory called Texas, as large as any four States of the Union, and eminently fitted for cotton-growing, and therefore for slave labor. The temptation of this Naboth's vineyard soon proved too strong for the slaveholders, and an immigration of planters and slaves set in. The Mexican government remonstrated, and high words ended in a declaration of independence by the new settlers, and fighting, which must soon have resulted in their defeat, for they scarcely amounted to 20,000 in all, but for the constant replenishment of their ranks by bands of filibusters from the other side of the Mississippi. By this means Texas maintained a precarious kind of independence, which she was bent on couverting into annexation to the Union. For some time every American statesman scouted so shameless a proposal, but by degrees the value of the country began to impress the slave States more and more. Talk of manifest destiny" began to be heard, not only in the New Or leans Picayune and in the border ruffian country, but within the walls of Congress, till in 1835-6 it became clear that the question of annexation, involving almost certain war with Mexico, was about to be submitted to the great council of the nation. Here then was a new departure, involving on the part of the nation a sanction of slavery such as had never yet been tolerated. Already Channing had begun to redeem his pledge. He had published a volume on slavery, taking firm ground against the furious madness of the Southerners, who were calling for the suppres sion of anti-slavery publications, and setting prices on the heads of leading abolitionists; and against the more odious respectable Northern mobs, which even in Boston had broken up meetings, and in New York had dragged Garrison through the streets with a halter round his neck, intent on hanging him. Channing had also opened his pulpit to May, the general agent of the anti-slavery societies. Now he stepped forward as a leader, and stood frankly side by side with the abolitionists. Selecting for his correspondent Henry Clay of Kentucky,the best and most moderate of Southern politicians, he addressed to him the most famous of his political writings, the letter on the annexation of Texas. I have already quoted from this work one of many passages which show his friendly temper toward the South ern slaveholders, but the most thoroughgoing abolitionist could také no exception to the firmness of the position taken, or the power with which it was held. Space will only allow me to give the briefest outline of this masterly paper. Congress," Channing said, is about to be called on to decide whether Texas shall be annexed to the Union. Public questions have not been those on which my work has been spent; but no one speaks, the danger presses, and I cannot be silent. There are crimes which in their magnitude have a touch of the sublime, and ་་ this will be one of them. The current excuses only make it more odious. The annexationists talk of their zeal for freedom! what they really mean is their passion for unrighteous spoil-of manifest destiny! away with such vile sophistry; there can be no necessity for crime. Mexico came to us seven years ago, a sister republic just escaped from the yoke of a European tyranny, looking to us hopefully for good-will and sympathy. Instead of these, in our unholy greed, we have sent them land speculators and ruffians who are waging war upon a nation to which we owed protection against such assaults. Is the time never to come when the neighborhood of a more powerful and civilized people will prove a blessing and not a curse to an inferior community? "But the crime is aggravated by the real cause of it, which is the extension and perpetuation of the slave trade. What will other nations, what especially will England, say to it? We hope to prop up slavery by this filibustering, but the fall of slavery is as sure as the fall of your own Ohio to the sea. A nation provoking war by cupidity, by encroachment, and, above all, by efforts to spread slavery, is alike false to itself, to God, and to the human race. You are entering on a new and fatal path. Let the spread and perpetuation of slavery be once systematically proposed as a Southern policy, and a new feeling will burst forth in the North. Let Texas be once annexed, and there can be no more peace for us. We may not see the catastrophe of the tragedy, the first scene of which we seem so ready to enact; we who are enlarging the borders of slavery when all over Christendom there are signs of a growing elevation of the poor in every other country. We are sinking below the civilization of our day; we are inviting the scorn, indignation, and abhorrence of the world. In short, this proposed measure will exert a disastrous influence on the moral sentiments and principles of this country, by sanctioning plunder, by inflam ing cupidity, by encouraging lawless speculation, by bringing into the Confederacy a community whose whole history and circumstances are adverse to moral order and wholesome restraint, by violating national faith, by proposing immoral and inhuman ends, by placing us as a people in opposition to the efforts of philan thropy and the advancing movements of the civilized world. Freedom is fighting her battle in the world with long enough odds against her already. Let us not give new chances to her foes." It is difficult in our space to give even a faint notion of the power of argument and beauty of style of this splendid protest, but I trust I may have induced some readers to go to the original. Texas was not annexed till after Channing's death, six years later, and there can be no doubt that the influence his letter to Mr. Clay exerted and the encouragement it brought to the minority in Congress helped materially to postpone the evil day. |