Chesterton historia USA

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everywhere admitted to be theoretically desirable. At any rate, there is not the suspicion of any attempt to
suppress them; indeed, the very year before the first number of the Liberator was published in Boston, a great
Conference of Anti-Slavery Societies, comprising delegates from every part of the South, met at Baltimore,
the capital city of the Slave State of Maryland.
Northern Abolitionism was, however, quite a different thing. It owed its inception to William Lloyd Garrison,
one of those enthusiasts who profoundly affect history solely by the tenacity with which they hold to and
continually enforce a burning personal conviction. But for that tenacity and the unquestionable influence
which his conviction exerted upon men, he would be a rather ridiculous figure, for he was almost every sort of
crank--certainly a non-resister, and, I think, a vegetarian and teetotaller as well. But his burning conviction
was the immorality of Slavery; and by this he meant something quite other than was meant by Jefferson or
later by Lincoln. When these great men spoke of Slavery as a wrong, they regarded it as a social and political
wrong, an evil and unjust system which the community as a community ought as soon as possible to abolish
and replace by a better. But by Garrison slave-holding was accounted a personal sin like murder or adultery.
The owner of slaves, unless he at once emancipated them at whatever cost to his own fortunes, was by that
fact a wicked man, and if he professed a desire for ultimate extinction of the institution, that only made him a
hypocrite as well. This, of course, was absurd; fully as absurd as the suggestion sometimes made in regard to
wealthy Socialists, that if they were consistent they would give up all their property to the community. A man
living under an economic system reposing on Slavery can no more help availing himself of its fruits than in a
capitalist society he can help availing himself of capitalist organization. Obviously, unless he is a
multi-millionaire, he cannot buy up all the slaves in the State and set them free, while, if he buys some and
treats them with justice and humanity, he is clearly making things better for them than if he left them in the
hands of masters possibly less scrupulous. But, absurd as the thesis was, Garrison pushed it to its wildest
CHAPTER VIII 71
logical conclusions. No Christian Church ought, he maintained, to admit a slave-owner to communion. No
honest man ought to count a slave-owner among his friends. No political connection with slave-owners was
tolerable. The Union, since it involved such a connection, was "a Covenant with Death and an Agreement
with Hell." Garrison publicly burnt the Constitution of the United States in the streets of Boston.
Abolitionist propaganda of this kind was naturally possible only in the North. Apart from all questions of
self-interest, no Southerner, no reasonable person who knew anything about the South, though the knowledge
might be as superficial and the indignation against Slavery as intense as was Mrs. Beecher Stowe's, could
possibly believe the proposition that all Southern slave-owners were cruel and unjust men. But that was not
all. Garrison's movement killed Southern Abolitionism. It may, perhaps, be owned that the Southern
movement was not bearing much visible fruit. There was just a grain of truth, it may be, in Garrison's bitter
and exaggerated taunt that the Southerners were ready enough to be Abolitionists if they were allowed "to
assign the guilt of Slavery to a past generation, and the duty of emancipation to a future generation."
Nevertheless, that movement was on the right lines. It was on Southern ground that the battle for the peaceful
extinction of Slavery ought to have been fought. The intervention of the North would probably in any case
have been resented; accompanied by a solemn accusation of specific personal immorality it was maddeningly
provocative, for it could not but recall to the South the history of the issue as it stood between the sections.
For the North had been the original slave-traders. The African Slave Trade had been their particular industry.
Boston itself, when the new ethical denunciation came, had risen to prosperity on the profits of that
abominable traffic. Further, even in the act of clearing its own borders of Slavery, the North had dumped its
negroes on the South. "What," asked the Southerners, "could exceed the effrontery of men who reproach us
with grave personal sin in owning property which they themselves have sold us and the price of which is at
this moment in their pockets?"
On a South thus angered and smarting under what is felt to be undeserved reproach, yet withal somewhat
uneasy in its conscience, for its public opinion in the main still thought Slavery wrong, fell the powerful voice
of a great Southerner proclaiming it "a positive good." Calhoun's defence of the institution on its merits
probably did much to encourage the South to adopt a more defiant tone in place of the old apologies for delay
in dealing with a difficult problem--apologies which sounded over-tame and almost humiliating in face of the
bold invectives now hurled at the slave-owners by Northern writers and speakers. I cannot, indeed, find that
Calhoun's specific arguments, forcible as they were--and they are certainly the most cogent that can be used in
defence of such a thesis--were particularly popular, or, in fact, were ever used by any but himself. Perhaps
there was a well-founded feeling that they proved too much. For Calhoun's case was as strong for white
servitude as for black: it was a defence, not especially of Negro Slavery, but of what Mr. Belloc has called
"the Servile State." More general, in the later Southern defences, was the appeal to religious sanctions, which
in a nation Protestant and mainly Puritan in its traditions naturally became an appeal to Bible texts. St. Paul
was claimed as a supporter of the fugitive slave law on the strength of his dealings of Onesimus. But the
favourite text was that which condemns Ham (assumed to be the ancestor of the Negro race) to be "a servant
of servants." The Abolitionist text-slingers were not a whit more intelligent; indeed, I think it must be
admitted that on the whole the pro-Slavery men had the best of this absurd form of controversy. Apart from [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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