Oldalképek
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]

mere might of moral power, but directly due to his influence. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON from first to last disclaimed the idea of being a politician. In one of those short grand sayings which stood him in stead of any elaborate eloquence, he declared-"I am determined to know nothing as a public man save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and in this country I see Him crucified again in the person of the slave." But he did more to "convert" his age than all its politicians together. His career is the most salient instance in biography of what can be done by perfect courage, unrelenting determination, and absolute singleness of aim. His early manifestoes were received, in lieu of argument, by frantic threats of murder from the Southern press, then, it would appear, mostly edited by ruffians. To these he paid no attention, save occasionally reprinting them in the Liberator. Nearer home he ran greater danger. In 1835, the feeling was so strong against him that he was, by a mob of well-dressed and well-to-do gentlemen, dragged through the streets of Boston with a halter round his neck, and was only saved by being thrown into jail. The moment he was out, he went on printing, with the declaration, "I will not recede an inch, and I shall be heard." Such a voice could not be stifled. He was heard. During fifteen years his papers and pamphlets were spread or smuggled all over the land; he had gathered to his circle most of the choicest spirits of New England-Channing, Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, Follen, Parker, Sumner, Chase, etc.; he had won the waverers, held up the arms of the faint, rebuked and shamed or silenced the arrogant, and led the tide of Northern revolt, till searchers for fugitives in Boston had to be guarded by the military, and Massachusetts in her turn threatening to secede, the law of 1850 became a dead letter. A decade passed, and the old man-whose non-resistance principles had been sorely tried in the liberating war, in which his son served as an officer-marched up the streets of

[ocr errors]

Charleston, where thirty years before a price had been set
upon his head, among a throng of freedmen,
throng of freedmen, "rending the
air with their shouts " to see the flag" re-hoisted on Fort
Sumter. In 1879 he departed in peace, and entered into his
inheritance. "No shadow of suspicion," writes Whittier,
"rests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of
which should be the Alpine flower that symbolises noble
purity."

As Garrison was the apostle of Abolitionism, so its orator was WENDELL PHILLIPS, a man of the highest birth and culture of New England, who with equal devotion surrendered his brilliant prospects at the bar and Senate to the advocacy of the cause to which from youth upwards he gave his splendid energies and eloquence. Of the latter we can only give a single instance-earliest in date, but characteristic of his manner and attitude throughout. In 1837, at a crowded meeting, convened by Dr. Channing in Faneuil Hall, to express indignation at the murder of Lovejoy, Mr. Austin, the Attorney-General of the State, moved an amendment, in the course of which he justified the atrocity, and compared the mob of miscreants who had perpetrated it to that which had destroyed the tea in Boston harbour. Whereupon Phillips rose and said—

"Mr. Chairman-When I heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips (pointing to the portraits in the hall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, the gentleman said that he should sink into insignificance if he dared not gainsay the principles of the resolution before this meeting. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

Phillips has always been the leader of the extreme "gauche " of the party, and his fervour frequently led him beyond the limits prescribed by the substantial good sense of Garrison;

[ocr errors]

PHILLIPS AND SUMNER.

141

but in distinct genius for speech he was their Coryphæus. Their politician, and nearly one of their martyrs, CHARLES SUMNER, had the same claims of scholarship and descent, with a native power little inferior. His earlier eloquence is best illustrated by some of his denunciations of war (v. especially his description of a sea-fight). Most of his life was spent in battle, its closing years in triumph, when, in high office, most honourably attained, he helped to weld together the Union under new conditions. This extensive learning and retentive memory enabled him to make a mass of facts converge on the conclusion of an argument, at once impassioned and apparently judicial. No better testimony can be given to the trenchant force of his eloquence than the dastardly assault made upon him (1856) in the Senate by Preston Brooks. The approval of this outrage in the South, with the contemporary events of the free fight for Kansas, made it plain that while constitutional disputes may be adjusted by civilised discussion, the only answer to organised rowdyism is at the cannon's mouth. We shall recur to the last phase of the struggle, in connection with the poetry it called forth. Pierce paved the way for the treachery of Buchanan, and that for the open revolt of the Mississippi repudiator. The North, with its twenty1 States and twenty millions, taken at a disadvantage, had to fight against the eleven States of the South, with six million 2 freemen, threeand-a-half million slaves, for three years before the Union was virtually saved at Gettysburg. The crisis passed, the question of the end was merely one of time, and the event. gave rise to the few paragraphs of consummate natural

1 Kentucky and Maryland being set down as neutral, and Missouri as loyal.

2 These are roughly the numbers, allowing for the average increase on the census of 1860.

3 Gettysburg was the Metaurus of the war; though hope of foreign aid, and Lee's generalship, for two years more prolonged the desperate fight.

eloquence, in which the rail-splitter of Illinois, raised on the surge of a great moral and patriotic tide, recalled the address of Pericles over his Athenian dead, in terms with which we may close our record of the oratory of the West" It is for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people-by the people and for the people-shall not perish from the earth."

HISTORIANS.

143

CHAPTER V.

HISTORIANS-ROMANCE AND CRITICISM, 1800-1850.

If the literary fame of the orator and statesman is transient, he has the compensation of having more or less permanently affected the destinies of the nation in which his personality is merged. He makes history: he is, equally with the soldier or philanthropist, a cause of the struggles, victories, and defeats of which others have to preserve the memory. Mere narrative is often almost contemporaneous with the event, and biographies are apt to follow too swiftly on the lives of great men. But these are mere preliminaries to a true History, which, as the result of the comprehensive reflection of an organising genius, makes as great a claim on the finest faculties and strongest energies of the mind as an epic poem does. It demands a knowledge of details rarely combined with the power to grasp a whole : it involves a perfect idea of the proportion of parts, keen analysis of character, broad synthesis of national movements on or beneath the surface, the impartial verdicts of a judge and the skill of an artist, the zeal of the moralist tempered by the sense of the politician, the sympathies of the antiquary with the past, almost the insight of the prophet into the future. Such histories are necessarily few. Greece, Rome, and England have each contributed but one that meets all the conditions— the works respectively of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon.

« ElőzőTovább »