Chapter XVI (2)

“In the beginning of this great struggle the question among loyal men was, _How_ shall we save this nation? One year of fighting and the question is, WHETHER we can save it? That is the question of to-day....

“The South has simplicity and unity of purpose. The North is uncertain which she wishes most—to subdue the rebellion, to leave slavery unharmed, or to have the right President at the next election!

“The South adjourns every question and postpones every interest in favor of arms. The North is busy with conflicting schemes and interests—and is also mildly carrying on war.

“Does anybody doubt the result of such a course? It is so certain that it is not worth our while to waste another man or another dollar! Either the Administration policy should instantly change or the war cease! It is not more vigor so much as a different _internal idea_. If the Administration cannot be disenchanted of the traditional policy that has grown up during the heartless, timid, compromising era of the last half-century, and adopt the simple and straightforward policy that becomes a people striving for liberty and free institutions upon the American continent, then we are doomed! It is war that we are making—war first, war second, war wholly! It is not politics. It is not Constitution-making. It is not the decision of legal niceties. These are not the business of government, as toward the South. It is war, absolute, terrible, and immeasurable war!

“The South has organized on the fact of slavery, and fights on that issue, pure and simple. The North must organize on the doctrine of liberty, and fight right through on that issue, pure and simple.

“The South sacrifices everything that conflicts with her central idea. The North must do the same. The South is not ashamed of slavery. The North must not be ashamed of liberty!

”... The government cannot any longer avoid choosing the issue that has been made up and thrust upon it—_freedom or slavery_. The time has come. So long as there was a chance of solving this question _as a civil question_ it was wise to leave it, as far as possible, to the States concerned, and to employ the moral influences which change men’s minds. _But slavery has become a military question._ One year has changed all things. A remiss and vacillating policy of the Administration; the committing of the armies of the United States for a whole year to a man who thought he was at West Point giving a four years’ course of instruction to five hundred thousand men infinitely at leisure, has changed the relations and possibilities of things. It has taken slavery out of the realm of discussion and placed it in the arena of war. It must be settled by force....

“Nothing will unite this people like a bold annunciation of a moral principle. Let the American flag be lifted up by Mr. Lincoln, as was the brazen serpent, and let it be known that every man who looks upon it on this continent shall be free, and a tide of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away every obstacle. Let Mr. Lincoln decree it. The nation will do it!

“Such a policy would carry the conscience of the North; would kindle the enthusiasm for liberty, which is always the most potent of influences; would bring all the historic traditions of the old American struggle to enkindle the ardor of the young, who are to form our armies. It would brush away at one stroke a thousand hindrances, give simplicity and unity to our plans, and distinctness to our policy. It would end all threat of foreign intervention. Above all, it would give to the American armies that pillar of smoke by day and fire by night by which God the Emancipator led forth His people from bondage into liberty!”

In the next issue, July 31, he writes a two-column editorial upon “The Root of the Matter”:

“It is not enough that we increase our men and means. We shall never succeed until we accept the _idea_ latent in this conflict. Slavery must be crushed. Liberty must have absolute and unquestioned dominion on this continent. We will not have oppression under the symbol of a sceptre or of a whip—neither exported from abroad nor sprouting from our own soil! This continent is dedicated to Liberty. It is the mission of this generation of men to establish free institutions from ocean to ocean. We sought to do it in peace. Since war has come, we will seek to take from its repulsiveness and horror by making it serve the noblest ends of human liberty. If it is for liberty upon a whole continent that we fight, then every son or brother that falls is a sacrificial victim. By his blood we ransom generations of men!

“The way to make the Administration see this truth is to see it ourselves. There is a kind of political mesmerism. Our rulers will partake of our sensations. What the people see the President will see. What the people taste will repeat itself on the President’s tongue.

“Let the sentence be spoken. Let all hindrances and hesitations end. Lift up the banner! And as the winds of war roll out its folds, let those letters shine out as if God had written them with heavenly light, ‘UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.’”

The next editorial, August 7, is upon “A Leader for the People.” These were the days of Pope and the disasters of the army, and the uncertainty and terror at Washington. Two columns of argument and appeal for more genuine enthusiasm for the great doctrines on which this government was founded close with a prayer, the only relief of a heart bursting with a mighty passion of sorrow and impatience:

“Great God, what a people hast Thou brought forth upon this continent! What love of liberty; what heroic love of law and institution; what courage, and constancy, and self-sacrifice hast Thou given them! And no man is found to lead this so great a nation! Be Thou Leader! Lord God of Hosts, hast Thou forgotten how to lead a people? There are no ages on Thy head! Years make Thee neither old nor weary! Behind Thy unwrinkled brow no care dwells! Teach this people to need no other leader but Thyself! Then, led by Thee, teach them to be all-sufficient for every deed of justice, and omnipotent for liberty!”

These are followed, August 14, by a three-column editorial upon “The Time has Come”:

“We have been made irresolute, indecisive, and weak by the President’s attempt to unite impossibilities; to make war and keep the peace; to strike hard and not hurt; to invade sovereign States and not meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion without touching its cause; to bring an infuriated people into enforced union with their enemies, and to leave all their causes of quarrels unsettled and vigorous, and yet hope for future concord.

“Thus far the conservative North has been striving to conduct this war so as not to meddle with the so-called Southern right of slavery. But, in spite of every scruple, events have crowded men to the necessity of confiscation and emancipation. There is one more step. It is the last sublime step toward national safety and national Christian glory. It is _immediate and universal emancipation_!”

In the next issue, August 21, is another article, upon “The Only Ground,” of the same temper, urging the same plea:

“The President has the right and power to destroy slavery. Let him account to the civilized world for not doing it.”

And another August 28, upon “Reconstruction”:

“Since, then, the old Union is _de facto_ ceased, and all the local rights lapsed by rebellion to the hands of the government, and it is to reconstruct the Union, would it be a stretch of authority in the government so to reconstruct it as to insure its perpetuity by purging out all possible cause of future discord? The President has the authority. He is exercising it every day. All that we ask is that he will look _forward_ and not _backward_; that he will consider the nation of the future, and not mere precedents in the past.... To put down rebellion first, and attend to slavery afterwards, is letting two serpents uncoil that may as well be stricken through with one blow.”

The preacher’s pulpit is in perfect accord with the editor’s chair. In a sermon of July 27, 1862, he says: “God has been pleased to bring this nation at this time into great trials that are to test the faith of all true men. I think that we have not by a long way touched bottom yet. I think that the wind has not yet blown its fiercest. There are blacker clouds than those that have yet expended their fury. I cast no confidence away. I do not know that we are to succeed to-day or to-morrow; but we are going to succeed. I do not know that we are going to succeed in Virginia for the present, but we are a-going to succeed in America.

“When I die there will be a great many things that, if I have time to think of them, I may be sorry for. After I die there may be a great many inconsistencies, a great many sins, a great many unperformed duties that, when I behold them in retrospect, I shall regret. But I tell you that, whether in the passage of death, or at the gate of heaven, or before God’s eternal throne, I never expect to be sorry that I have preached so often and so strongly in behalf of those that were in bonds; that I have spoken, as I have had opportunity, for those that could not speak for themselves; that I have roused up, according to the measure of my influence, the whole community to vindicate the cause of God toward His oppressed ones. I shall not be sorry for that. I shall be sorry that I have not done more; but I never shall be sorry that I have done so much.

“And my faith in this cause was never so strong as it is now. I do not throw it away. I feel certain that if the will of God is done in this matter, though we may have to wait, we shall have great recompense of reward in waiting.

“May God inspire the hearts of our rulers by the right things! May God unite the hearts of this great people in right counsels and in right feelings! May God accept the offerings that we make of our children, of our brothers, of our neighbors, of everything that we have! Let us put them all on the altar of patriotism, knowing that in this case the altar of patriotism is the altar of God. He will accept the offering, and in His own time, by tokens infallible, He will reward our faith and bring us forth purged, purified, strengthened by the things which we have suffered.”

With all his earnestness he must have his laugh at a contemporary, “A Queer Pulpit”:

“We knew that the _Journal of Commerce_ was famous upon statistics and prided itself upon its good literary taste. But we had no idea before of the powers of its rhetoric. We extract a figure from its issue of August 27 that should be commended to the directors of the New York Hospital:

“‘It is the voice of a glorious past which speaks to him, in the tones of the fathers whose graves are with us. It is the voice of the living nation, millions on millions of whom utter the same words we utter to-day. It is the _voice of posterity, speaking from the womb of time, that calls on him to save the Constitution_, which was made, not for the duration of a human life, but to be the blessing of all men and all nations until the end of thrones and earthly powers. That he will be faithful we do not for one instant doubt.’

“This is taking part in politics rather early. Constitutional studies must be pursued under difficulties in this case. But if posterity are so greatly stirred in their minds, there is nothing for it but for the President to write them a letter. He answered Horace Greeley. Surely he will heed the sufferings of posterity in such uncomfortable quarters.

“For ourselves, we cannot be too thankful that we are already born. We prefer open-air speaking. If the President don’t save the Constitution now, it is a hopeless case!”

In an editorial, September 11, upon “The Contrast,” he sums up the difference in sentences like these:

“Richmond determines, Washington reasons; Richmond is inflexible, Washington vacillates; Richmond knows what it wants to do, Washington wishes that it knew; Richmond loves slavery and hates liberty, Washington is somewhat partial to liberty and rather dislikes slavery; Rebellion is wise and sinful, Government is foolish.”

Upon a report that a member of the Cabinet had said “that nations often lose their institutions, their liberties, and yet preserve their national life, and that in our case we must aim to preserve the national life,” he writes an editorial (September 18, 1862) which he properly entitled “The Trumpet”:

“... Let other people imagine as they may a national life, like a disembodied spirit, wandering over the continent seeking rest and finding none. We propose no such issue to this struggle. The nation must emerge from war shorn of no attribute and mutilated in none of its members. We claim this continent for liberty. We demand the execution of slavery for treason. We arraign this arch-conspirator, arrested with a dagger in its hand aimed at the life of this government and the liberties of the people, and in the name of mankind and before Almighty God we demand that its life be forfeited. Let the trumpet sound!”

These are but samples of the editorials that were sent out from his pen through the columns of the _Independent_. Week after week they continued, pleading for vigor, denouncing inaction, urging that liberty be recognized as the great issue at stake, and demanding immediate emancipation of the slave.

At last, after this long, weary, heart-breaking delay, he publishes, September 25, “The Proclamation” of the President announcing “that on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward and for ever free.” Mr. Beecher says of it:

“We send forth to-day the most important paper ever published in the _Independent_, the most extraordinary document ever proceeding from this government....

“No more guises and veils. No more side-issues. No more deceitful compromises. The government has taken ground, and every man in the nation must take ground. You are for or against this government, and this government is declared to mean liberty to the slave! There is no neutral ground for traitors to hide in, playing wolf at night and sheep by day. The President’s proclamation will sift the North, give unity to its people, simplicity to its policy, liberty to its army! That whole army is no longer a mongrel something between a police force and a political caucus. It is an _army_ organized to strike where blows will be most felt.

“The Proclamation emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. But it emancipates the government and the army to-day. The nation is freer than it was on the 21st. We have a policy. The people will base it upon a principle. It is the policy of liberty upon the principle of justice. The future is before us! Through what dark days we must pass we know not. What battles and what reverses are in store we do not inquire. At last we have a right to believe that God is leading us. He who carried His people from bondage through the wilderness, and established them in the promised land, can surely guide us!

“Let sorrows fall fast; there is joy before us! We behold upon the troubled sea a Christ coming to us, walking on the waves! In His hand are winds and storms. Every hour now moves toward the great day of Emancipation. At length the dawn shall bring that day most eminent in our national calendar. Amid all the festivities that usher in the year, there shall be a great joy, deeper, purer, holier than ever came to us with the New Year—the joy of a nation that, after long sorrow and shame, shall cast off from itself the guilt of slavery, and stand erect before the world a consistent witness for liberty!”

He looks upon it as the beginning of the end, and is satisfied if it be God’s will that his work should now cease. On the evening of the last day of slavery in America—Wednesday evening, December 31—he says in his lecture-room talk:

“As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me, and bark me, and strip me of my leaves, and do as He chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough; I have had a good time. You cannot take back the blows I have given the devil right in the face. I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die. Through my instrumentality, aided by God’s providence, many souls have been converted and gone singing home to their eternal abode. I think I have a larger church in heaven than I have on earth, and I think they love me and want me there. I have no reason to ask for longer life. If my work is done, and God does not want me here, and this is my last night of labor on earth, ought I to be sorry? Ought I not to be the most grateful man that ever lived that I have had such health, that I have had such an open field, that I have had the privilege of speaking the truth right straight along for fifteen years, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear, and that I have been borne up, in doing this, by so large a church, composed of such an enthusiastic body of God’s people?

“And to-night the shadows of the past come over me. I remember when I first stood, in about this place, in the old church. I remember the sermon that I preached to you on the first Sunday night after I came among you, as if it were but an hour ago. I then declared to the inchoate congregation gathered here that it was my purpose to preach the Gospel in its applications to slavery, and peace, and war, and moral purity, and every Christian reform, and that I would do it whether you heard it or not, and whether you stood by me or forsook me. I recollect those times perfectly well.

“Fifteen years have passed since then, and here we are talking about the President of the United States emancipating four million slaves. Here we are in the midst of a war whose inevitable outcome from this time must be to make war on slavery. Mightier than Congress now is the arm for emancipation—mightier than all things! In the providence of God what wonderful revolutions and changes have taken place in fifteen years! I am willing to live fifteen years more, if God wishes it, if I may renew my youth and work on. I should dread to find now that there were no more locks to get up, and that I must henceforth travel on a dead level. I would try and pull with my freight-boat on a level, if God wished me to, though I would like here and there to rise. It would be a pleasure to live, if it were God’s will, till the day-star dawned, for I know it will dawn, but I am willing to lay down my burden at any time, if it please God. If He will accept the thanks that I give Him for all that He has permitted me to do, to say, and experience in days past, then, as to the future, let His will be done. I ask neither to live nor to die.”

This closes the third era of his work in the great anti-slavery contest. We now turn back to glance over the same period and note some of the more important events aside from this struggle, public, domestic, and private, that marked the years from 1850 to January, 1863.