July
“O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.”
—Emerson.
Independence Day
Sunday, 4.
And the republic now begins to look sweet and beautiful again, as if men and patriotic citizens might walk upright without shame or apologies of any sort. Having managed for a century or more to keep the black man under foot, provoked a war to this end, and, in our straits, availed of his life to spare ours, let us cherish the faith that we are bent honestly now on securing him the rights which his courage and loyalty have won for him and his while the republic stands. Was this slaughter of men and expenditure of treasure, with the possible woes to come, necessary to make us just? And shall we not be careful hereafter that political parties play not false as before the war; the cry for union and reconstruction but a specious phrase for reinstating the old issues under new names? Admitted into the Union, the once rebellious States may break out into new atrocities for recovering their fallen fortunes. It behooves the friends of freedom and human rights to know their friends, and trust those, and only those, who have proved themselves faithful in the dire struggle,—
“Who faithful in insane sedition keep,
With silver and with ruddy gold may vie.”
In democratic times like ours, when Power is stealing the world over from the few to the many, and with an impetus unprecedented in the world’s history, the rightful depositories of Power, the People, should make sure that their representatives are fitted alike and disposed to administer affairs honorably; the rule being that of the Best by the Best,—an aristocracy in essence as in name; since no calamity can befall a people like the want of good heads to give it stability and self-respect in its own, or consideration in the eyes of foreign beholders. Ideas are the royal Presidents; States and peoples intelligent and prosperous as they are loyal to these Potentates. Liberty is the highest of trusts committed to man by his Creator, and in the enjoyment of which man becomes himself a creator,—a trust at once the most sacred and most difficult to hold inviolate. “Power is a fillet that presses so hard the temples that few can take it up safely.” Right is the royal ruler alone, and he who rules with least restraint comes nearest to empire.
And one of the most hopeful aspects of our national affairs is the coming into importance and power of plain, sensible men, like Grant and Boutwell,—men owing their places to their honesty and useful services,—the one in the field, the other in the state. Our village, also, is honored by the elevation of one of its distinguished citizens for his eminent legal attainments and personal integrity. This change for the better in our politics, it seems, came in with President Lincoln, himself the plainest of the plain, one of the most American of American men; is (after his successor’s lamentable career) now reinstated in our present chief magistrate, whose popularity is scarcely secondary to any of his predecessors in the Presidential Chair. Our national politics have obviously improved in these respects upon later administrations, and we may reasonably hope for the prevalence of peace and prosperity, such as the country has not enjoyed since the times of Washington and Franklin. The reign of principle appears to have returned into the administration of affairs, honorable men taking the lead, softening, in large measure, the asperities and feuds of parties. Great questions affecting the welfare of the community, and for the solution of which the ablest heads are requisite, are coming into discussion, and are to be settled for the benefit, we trust, of all concerned. Reform in capital and labor, temperance, woman’s social and political condition, popular education, powers of corporations, international communication,—these and the new issues which their settlement will effect, must interest and occupy the active forces of the country to plant the republic, upon stable foundations.
“An early, good education,” says Gray, in his notes on Plato’s Republic, “is the best means of turning the eyes of the mind from the darkness and uncertainty of popular opinion, to the clear light of truth. It is the interest of the public neither to suffer unlettered and unphilosophical minds to meddle with government, nor to allow men of knowledge to give themselves up for the whole of life to contemplation; as the first will lack principle to guide them, and others want practice and inclination to business.” One might also commend to senators and representatives this sentence from Tacitus: “I speak,” he says, “of popular eloquence, the genuine offspring of that licentiousness to which fools and designing men have given the name of liberty. I speak of that bold and turbulent oratory, that inflamer of the people, and constant companion of sedition, that fierce incendiary that knows no compliance, and scorns to temporize,—busy, rash, and arrogant, but, in quiet and well-regulated governments, utterly unknown.” Yet I cannot say that I should have written, with my present notion of political or religious obligation, what follows: “Upon the whole, since no man can enjoy a state of calm tranquillity, and, at the same time, raise a great and splendid reputation; to be content with the benefits of the age in which we live, without detracting from our ancestors, is the virtue that best becomes us.” The sentiment has a patriotic sound, but conceals the cardinal truth, dear to a patriot, certainly in our times and republic, that a calm tranquillity is hardly compatible with a life of heroic action, and that true progress, so far from detracting from the glory of our ancestors, carries forward that for which they battled and bled, to clothe them and their descendants with a fresher and more enduring fame. Not in imitation of such inflamers of the people, but in the spirit of liberty and loyalty, have Sumner and Phillips won great and splendid reputations, if not silenced the fools and designing men whose bold and turbulent oratory, the genuine offspring of licentiousness, once sounded in our national halls, and came near the separation of our Union.
Whom did the people trust?
Not those, the false confederates of State,
Who laid their country’s fortunes desolate;
Plucked her fair ensigns down to seal the black man’s fate;
Not these secured their trust.
But they, the generous and the just,
Who, nobly free and truly great,
Served steadfast still the servant race
As masters in the menial’s place;
By their dark brothers strove to stand
Till owners these of mind and hand,
And freedom’s banners waved o’er an enfranchised land.
These were the nation’s trust,
—
The patriots brave and just.
Phillips
“Some men such rare parts have that they can swim
If favor nor occasion help not them.”
Phillips stands conspicuous above most of his time, as the advocate of human rights, the defender of the oppressed. By happy fortune, he enjoys the privilege denied to senators, of speaking unencumbered by convention or caucus. His speeches have the highest qualities of an orator. In range of thought, clearness of statement, keen satire, brilliant wit, personal anecdote, wholesome moral sentiment, the Puritan spirit, they are unmatched by any of the great orators of his time. They have, besides, the rare merit, and one in which our public men have been painfully deficient, of straightforwardness and truth to the hour. They are addressed to the conscience of the country, are spoken in the interest of humanity. Many a soldier in the field during the late war, many a citizen owes his loyalty to hearing his eloquent words.
Above party, unless it be the honorable and ancient party of mankind, they embody the temper and drift of the times. How many public men are here to survive in the pillory of his indignant invectives! The history of the last thirty years cannot be accurately written without his facts and anecdotes. There is no great interest of philanthropy in which he has not been, and still is, active. His words are to be taken as those of an earnest mind intent on furthering the ends of justice, interpreted not by their rhetoric, but strict adherence to principle. Certainly the country has at times hung in the balance of his argument; cabinets and councils hesitating to do or undo without some regard to his words, well knowing the better constituency which he better represents and speaks for,—the people, namely, whose breath can unmake as it has made.
An earnest, truthful man, he has not shared with other statesmen of his time in their indifferency nor their despair; and if by some esteemed a demagogue and disorganizer, such is not his estimate of the part taken by him in the great issues of the past, political and social. The friend of progress, he early threw himself into the conflict, addressed himself to the issues as they rose, rose with them and rode the wave bravely; sometimes hastening, oftentimes provoking the crisis. What States would not adventure upon as policy, he espoused as policy and humanity both. Addressing himself from the first to the great middle class, whose principles are less corrupted by party politics, in whom the free destiny of peoples is lodged, he is gathering the elements of power and authority which, becoming formidable in ability if not in numbers, must secure the country’s confidence, and in due time have political dictation and rule.
Then, of the new instrumentalities for agitation and reform, the free Platform derives largely its popularity and efficiency from his genius. Consider the freedom of speech it invites and maintains, free as the freest can make it, a stand whereon every one who will gains a hearing; every opinion its widest scope of entertainment,—the widest hospitality consistent with the decorum of debate. Hither comes any one breathing a sentiment of progress, any daring to dissent against dissent, against progress itself. Here the sexes meet on fair terms. Here, as not elsewhere, is intimated, if not spoken fittingly, the popular spirit and tendency. Here come the most effective speakers by preference to address a free constituency, a constituency to be theirs, if not already, their words leaping into type from their lips, to be spread forthwith to the four winds by the reporting press. ’Tis a school of debate, for oratory, for thought, for practice; has the remarkable merit of freshness, originality; questions affecting the public welfare being here anticipated, first deliberated upon by the people themselves; systems of agitation organized and set on foot for creating a wholesome popular sentiment; in short, for giving inspiration, a culture, to the country, which the universities cannot; training the reason and moral sense by direct dealing with principles and persons as occasion requires; a school from whence have graduated not a few of our popular speakers,—the Orator himself, whose speeches furnish passages for collegiate declamation, from which politicians plume their rhetoric to win a borrowed fame. Cato said, “An orator was a good man skilled in the art of speaking.”
More than any lecturer, unless it be Emerson, he has made the lecture a New-England, if not an American institution; is always heard with profit and pleasure by the unprejudiced auditor,—any course in the cities and towns being thought incomplete without his. Nor is it easy to estimate the debt of the free States to his speeches before associations, conventions, in pulpits, the humblest places where his words could be secured. He has already taken his place beside Garrison, has linked his name with the Liberator’s, to be on men’s lips while the word slave has significance.
If there be any one to whom the country is more largely indebted than another for eminent services in his day, it must be Garrison; unless a doubt may arise in the minds of some, if the hero of Harper’s Ferry be not entitled to like honors, since to these illustrious men must be attributed the merit of having struck the most effective blows for the overthrow of slavery, the one inaugurating the era of emancipation, and the other consummating it.
“The just man’s like a rock, that turns the wroth
Of all the raging waters into a froth.”
The agitation and outside pressure which they were chiefly instrumental in furthering to its rightful issues, were the most powerful auxiliaries, if not the power itself, which emancipated the mind of the country from its subserviency to the slave dominion. They were the creators of the sentiment that freed the negro at last from his bonds and cleared the way for a true Republican State. Some power superior to the Constitution was required to revise it, and free the whole people from this Arachne’s coil that had bound them so long; was especially needed to extricate the rulers themselves from its meshes, and to rescue the rights thus imperilled by unscrupulous placemen who shrunk from the task. These could not help them, caught in the same snare that bound the nation. “Neither the law, nor the Constitution, nor the whole system of American institutions,” they were told, “ever had contemplated a case as likely to arise under our system in which a resort would be necessary to provide outside of the law and Constitution for amending the Constitution.” The case arose, nevertheless, and was provided for by these powerful agitators, and by the progress of events. The late civil outbreak compelled the necessary amendments, sweeping the compromises, the slave Congress and territory from the statute books and the country itself.
“Principles like fountains flow round forever,
Being in a state of perpetual agitation.”
“To all new truths, all renovations of old truths,” says Coleridge, “it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be-renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.”
Greeley
Of political editors, next to Garrison, perhaps Horace Greeley was the most efficient in furthering this national result; and by his eminent services in various departments of activity comes nearest to being the people’s man, the best representative of character indigenous to New England, or more properly America—like Beecher and Phillips. His power appears to lie in his strong understanding, abundant information, plain statement of his facts, freed from all rhetorical embellishment. A rustic Franklin in his direct way of putting his things before his auditor, he makes plain his meaning in spite of his utter want of all graces of person, or of oratory, handling his subject as a rude farmer his axe and crowbar. There is about him a homely charm of good-nature, a child-like candor, that have all the effect of eloquence, elevating him for the time into the subject he treats. In the statistics of things, practical and political, he is a kind of living encyclopedia of information, and as his chief distinction has made the newspaper a power it had not been before.
May we not credit New England with giving the country these new Instrumentalities for Progress, viz.:—
Greeley, the Newspaper;
Garrison, a free Platform;
Phillips, a free Convention;
Beecher, a free Pulpit;
Emerson, the Lecture?
The Conversation awaits being added to the list.