Chapter III

SLAVERY AND SECESSION. ROCHDALE, FEBRUARY 3, 1863.

[This speech was delivered at a public meeting held in the Public Hall, Rochdale, for the purpose of passing a resolution of thanks to the merchants of New York, for their generous contributions to the relief of the suffering population of the cotton districts.]

I feel as if we were in our places to-night, for we are met for the purpose of considering, and, I doubt not, of agreeing to a resolution expressive of our sense of the generosity of the merchants of New York, and other citizens of the United States, who have, in the midst of so many troubles and such great sacrifices, contributed to the relief of that appalling distress which has prevailed, and does still prevail, in this county.

I regard this transmission of assistance from the United States as a proof that the world moves onward in the direction of a better time. It is an evidence that, whatever may be the faults of ambitious men, and sometimes, may I not say, the crimes of Governments, the peoples are drawing together, and beginning to learn that it never was intended that they should be hostile to each other, but that every nation should take a brotherly interest in every other nation in the world. There has been, as we all know, not a little jealousy between some portions of the people of this country and some portions of the people of the United States. Perhaps the jealousy has existed more on this side. I think it has found more expression here, probably through the means of the public press, than has been the case with them. I am not alluding now to the last two years, but as long as most of us have been readers of newspapers and observers of what has passed around us.

The establishment of independence, eighty years ago; the war of 1812; it may be, occasionally, the presumptuousness and the arrogance of a growing and prosperous nation on the other side of the Atlantic--these things have stimulated ill feeling and jealousy here, which have often found expression in language which has not been of the very kindest character. But why should there be this jealousy between these two nations? Mr. Ashworth has said, and said very truly, 'Are they not our own people?' I should think, as an Englishman, that to see that people so numerous, so powerful, so great in so many ways, should be to us a cause, not of envy or of fear, but rather of glory and rejoicing.

I have never visited the United States, but I can understand the pleasure with which an Englishman lands in a country three thousand miles off, and finds that every man he meets speaks his own language. I recollect some years ago reading a most amusing speech delivered by a Suffolk country gentleman, at a Suffolk agricultural dinner, I think it was, though I do not believe the speeches of Suffolk country gentlemen at Suffolk agricultural meetings are generally very amusing. But this was a very amusing speech. This gentleman had travelled; he had been in the United States, and being intelligent enough to admire much that he saw there, he gave to his audience a description of some things that he had seen; but that which seemed to delight him most was this, that when he stepped from the steamer on to the quay at New York, he found that 'everybody spoke Suffolk.' Now, if anybody from this neighbourhood should visit New York, I am afraid that he will not find everybody speaking Lancashire. Our dialect, as you know, is vanishing into the past. It will be preserved to future times, partly in the works of Tim Bobbin, but in a very much better and more instructive form in the admirable writings of one of my oldest and most valued friends, who is now upon this platform. But if we should not find the people of New York speaking Lancashire, we should find them speaking English. And if we followed a little further, and asked them what they read, we should find that they read all the books that we read that are worth reading, and a good many of their own, some of which have not yet reached us; that there are probably more readers in the United States of Milton, and Shakespeare, and Dryden, and Pope, and Byron, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, than are to be found in this country; because, I think, it will probably be admitted by everybody who understands the facts of both countries, that out of the twenty millions of population in the Free States of America, there are more persons who can read well than there are in the thirty millions of population of Great Britain and Ireland.

And if we leave their literature and turn to their laws, we shall find that their laws have the same basis as ours, and that many of the great and memorable judgments of our greatest judges and lawyers are of high authority with them. If we come to that priceless possession which we have perhaps more clearly established than any other people in Europe, that of personal freedom, we shall find that in the Free States of America personal freedom is as much known, as well established, as fully appreciated, and as completely enjoyed as it is now in this country. And if we come to the form of their government, we shall find that it is in its principle, in its essence, not very dissimilar from that which our Constitution professes in this kingdom. The difference is this, that our Constitution has never yet been fully enjoyed by the people; the House in which forty-eight hours hence I may be sitting, is not as full and fair and free a representation of the people as is the House of Representatives that assembles at Washington. But, if there be differences, are there not great points of agreement, and are there any of these differences that justify us or them in regarding either nation as foreign or hostile?

Now, the people of Europe owe much more than they are often aware of to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the existence of that great Republic. The United States have been in point of fact an ark of refuge to the people of Europe, when fleeing from the storms and the revolutions of the old continent. They have been, as far as the artisans and labouring population of this country are concerned, a life- boat to them; and they have saved hundreds of thousands of men and of families from disastrous shipwreck. The existence of that free country and that free government has had a prodigious influence upon freedom in Europe and in England. If you could have before you a chart of the condition of Europe when the United States became a nation, and another chart of the condition of Europe now, you would see the difference, the enormous stride which has been made in Europe; and you may rely upon it that not a little of it has been occasioned by the influence of the great example of that country, free in its political institutions beyond all other countries, and yet maintaining its course in peace, preserving order, and conferring upon all its people a degree of prosperity which in these old countries is as yet unknown.

I should like now to speak specially to the working men who are here, who have no capital but their skill and their industry and their bodily strength. In fifteen years from 1845 to 1860--and this is a fact which I stated in this room more than a year ago, when speaking on the question of America, but it is a fact which every working man ought to have in his mind always when he is considering what America is--in fifteen years there have emigrated to the United States from Great Britain and Ireland not less than two million four hundred thousand persons. Millions are easily spoken, not easily counted, with great difficulty comprehended; but the twenty-four hundred thousand persons that I have described means a population equal to not less than sixty towns, every one of them of the size and population of Rochdale. And every one of these men who have emigrated, as he crossed the Atlantic--if he went by steam, in a fortnight, and if he went by sails, in a month or five weeks--found himself in a country where to his senses a vast revolution had taken place, comprehending all that men anticipate from any kind of revolution that shall advance political and social equality in their own land--a revolution which commenced in the War of Independence, which has been going on, and which has been confirmed by all that has transpired in subsequent years.

He does not find that he belongs to what are called the 'lower classes;' he is not shut out from any of the rights of citizenship; he is admitted to the full enjoyment of all political privileges, as far as they are extended to any portion of the population; and he has there advantages which the people of this country have not yet gained, because we are but gradually making our way out of the darkness and the errors and the tyrannies of past ages. But in America he finds the land not cursed with feudalism; it is free to every man to buy and sell, and possess and transmit. He finds in the town in which he lives that the noblest buildings are the school-houses to which his children are freely admitted. And among those twenty millions--for I am now confining my observations to the Free States--the son of every man has easy admission to school, has fair opportunity for improvement; and, if God has gifted him with power of head and of heart; there is nothing of usefulness, nothing of greatness, nothing of success in that country to which he may not fairly aspire.

And, Sir, this makes a difference between that country and this, on which I must say another word. One of the most painful things to my mind to be seen in England is this, that amongst the great body of those classes which earn their living by their daily labour--it is particularly observable in the agricultural districts, and it is too much to be observed even in our own districts--there is an absence of that hope which every man ought to have in his soul that there is for him, if he be industrious and frugal, a comfortable independence as he advances in life. In the United States that hope prevails everywhere, because everywhere there is an open career; there is no privileged class; there is complete education extended to all, and every man feels that he was not born to be in penury and in suffering, but that there is no point in the social ladder to which he may not fairly hope to raise himself by his honest efforts.

Well, looking at all this--and I have but touched on some very prominent facts--I should say that it offers to us every motive, not for fear, not for jealousy, not for hatred, but rather for admiration, gratitude, and friendship. I am persuaded of this as much as I am of anything that I know or believe, that the more perfect the friendship that is established between the people of England and the free people of America, the more you will find your path of progress here made easy for you, and the more will social and political liberty advance amongst us.

But this country which I have been in part describing is now the scene of one of the greatest calamities that can afflict mankind. After seventy years of almost uninterrupted peace, it has become the scene of a civil war, more gigantic, perhaps, than any that we have any record of with regard to any other nation or any other people; for the scene of this warfare is so extended as to embrace a region almost equal in size to the whole of Europe. At this very moment military operations are being undertaken at points as distant from each other as Madrid is distant from Moscow. But this great strife cannot have arisen amongst an educated and intelligent people without some great and overruling cause. Let us for a moment examine that cause, and let us ask ourselves whether it is possible at such a time to stand neutral in regard to the contending parties, and to refuse our sympathy to one or the other of them. I find men sometimes who profess a strict neutrality; they wish neither the one thing nor the other. This arises either from the fact that they are profoundly ignorant with regard to this matter, or else that they sympathise with the South, but are rather ashamed to admit it.

There are two questions concerned in this struggle. Hitherto, generally, one only has been discussed. There is the question whether negro slavery shall continue to be upheld amongst Christian nations, or whether it shall be entirely abolished. Because, bear in mind that if the result of the struggle that is now proceeding in America should abolish slavery within the territories of the United States, then soon after slavery in Brazil, and slavery in Cuba, will also fall. I was speaking the other day to a gentleman well acquainted with Cuban affairs; he is often in the habit of seeing persons who come from Cuba to this country on business; and I asked him what his Cuban friends said of what was going on in America. He said, 'They speak of it with the greatest apprehension; all the property of Cuba,' he said, 'is based on slavery; and they say that if slavery comes to an end in America, as they believe it will, through this war, slavery will have a very short life in Cuba.' Therefore, the question which is being now tried is, not merely whether four millions of slaves in America shall be free, but whether the vast number of slaves (I know not the number) in Cuba and Brazil shall also be liberated.

But there is another question besides that of the negro, and which to you whom I am now addressing is scarcely less important. I say that the question of freedom to men of all races is deeply involved in this great strife in the United States. I said I wanted the working men of this audience to listen to my statement, because it is to them that I particularly wish to address myself. I say, that not only is the question of negro slavery concerned in this struggle, but, if we are to take the opinion of leading writers and men in the Southern States of America, the freedom of white men is not safe in their hands. Now, I will not trouble you with pages of extracts which would confirm all that I am about to say, but I shall read you two or three short ones which will explain exactly what I mean.

The city of Richmond, as you know, is the capital of what is called the Southern Confederacy. In that city a newspaper is published, called the _Richmond Examiner_, which is one of the most able, and perhaps about the most influential, paper published in the Slave States. Listen to what the _Richmond Examiner_ says:--

The experiment of universal liberty has failed. The evils of free
society are insufferable. Free society in the long run is
impracticable; it is everywhere starving, demoralizing, and
insurrectionary. Policy and humanity alike forbid the extension
of its evils to new peoples and to coming generations; and
therefore free society must fall and give way to a slave society--
a social system old as the world, universal as man.'

Well, on another occasion, the same paper treats the subject in this way. The writer says:--

'Hitherto the defence of slavery has encountered great
difficulties, because its apologists stopped half way. They
confined the defence of slavery to negro slavery alone,
abandoning the principle of slavery, and admitting that every
other form of slavery was wrong. Now the line of defence is
changed. The South maintains that slavery is just, natural, and
necessary, and that it does not depend on the difference of
complexions.'

But following up this is an extract from a speech by a Mr. Cobb, who is an eminent man in Southern politics and in Southern opinion. He says:--

'There is, perhaps, no solution of the great problem of
reconciling the interests of labour and capital, so as to protect
each from the encroachments and oppressions of the other, so
simple and effective as negro slavery. By making the labourer
himself capital, the conflict ceases, and the interests become
identical.'

Now, I do not know whether there is any working man here who does not fully or partly realize the meaning of those extracts. They mean this, that if a man in this neighbourhood (for they pity us very much in our benighted condition as regards capital and labour, and they have an admirable way, from their view, of putting an end to strikes)--they say that, if a man in this neighbourhood had ten thousand pounds sterling in a cotton or woollen factory, and he employed a hundred men, women, and children, that instead of paying them whatever wages had been agreed upon, allowing them to go to the other side of the town, and work where they liked, or to move to another county, or to emigrate to America, or to have any kind of will or wish whatever with regard to their own disposal, that they should be to him capital, just the same as the horses are in his stable; that he should sell the husband South,-- 'South' in America means something very dreadful to the negro,--that they should sell the wife if they liked, that they should sell the children, that, in point of fact, they should do whatsoever they liked with them, and that, if any one of them resisted any punishment which the master chose to inflict, the master should be held justified if he beat his slave to death; and that not one of those men should have the power to give evidence in any court of justice, in any case, against a white man, however much he might have suffered from that white man.

You will observe that this most important paper in the South writes for that principle, and this eminent Southern politician indorses it, and thinks it a cure for all the evils which exist in the Old World and in the Northern and Free States; and there is not a paper in the South, nor is there a man as eminent or more eminent than Mr. Cobb, who has dared to write or speak in condemnation of the atrocity of that language. I believe this great strife to have had its origin in an infamous conspiracy against the rights of human nature. Those principles, which they distinctly avow and proclaim, are not to be found, as far as I know, in the pages of any heathen writer of old times, nor are they to be discovered in the teachings or the practice of savage nations in our times. It is the doctrine of devils, and not of men; and all mankind should shudder at the enormity of the guilt which the leaders of this conspiracy have brought upon that country.

Now, let us look at two or three facts, which seem to me very remarkable, on the surface of the case, but which there are men in this country, and I am told they may be found even in this town, who altogether ignore and deny. The war was not commenced by those to whom your resolution refers; it was commenced by the South; they rebelled against the majority. It was not a rebellion against a monarchy, or an aristocracy, or some other form of government which has its hold upon people, sometimes by services, but often from tradition; but it was against a Government of their own, and a compact of their own, that they violently rebelled, and for the expressed and avowed purpose of maintaining the institution of slavery, and for the purpose, not disavowed, of re-opening the slave trade, and, as these extracts show, if their principles should be fully carried out, of making bondage universal among all classes of labourers and artisans. When I say that their object was to re-open the slave trade, do not for a moment imagine that I am overstating the case against them. They argue, with a perfect logic, that, if slavery was right, the slave trade could not be wrong; if the slave trade be wrong, slavery cannot be right; and that if it be lawful and moral to go to the State of Virginia and buy a slave for two thousand dollars, and take him to Louisiana, it cannot be wrong to go to Africa, and buy a slave for fifty dollars, and take him to Louisiana. That was their argument; it is an argument to this day, and is an argument that in my opinion no man can controvert; and the lawful existence of slavery is as a matter of course to be followed, and would be followed, wherever there was the power, by the re-opening of the traffic in negroes from Africa.

That is not all these people have done. Reference has been made, in the resolution and in the speeches, to the distress which prevails in this district, and you are told, and have been told over and over again, that all this distress has arisen from the blockade of the ports of the Southern States. There is at least one great port from which in past times two millions of bales of cotton a-year have found their way to Europe--the port of New Orleans--which is blockaded; and the United States Government has proclaimed that any cotton that is sent from the interior to New Orleans for shipment, although it belongs to persons in arms against the Government, shall yet be permitted to go to Europe, and they shall receive unmolested the proceeds of the sale of that cotton. But still the cotton does not come. The reason why it does not come is, not because it would do harm to the United States Government for it to come, or that it would in any way assist the United States Government in carrying on the war. The reason that it does not come is, because its being kept back is supposed to be a way of influencing public opinion in England and the course of the English Government in reference to the American war. They burn the cotton that they may injure us, and they injure us because they think that we cannot live even for a year without their cotton; and that to get it we should send ships of war, break the blockade, make war upon the North, and assist the slave-owners to maintain, or to obtain, their independence.

Now, with regard to the question of American cotton, one or two extracts will be sufficient; but I could give you a whole pamphlet of them, if it were necessary. Mr. Mann, an eminent person in the State of Georgia, says:--

'With the failure of the cotton, England fails. Stop her supply
of Southern slave-grown cotton, and her factories stop, her
commerce stops, the healthful normal circulation of her life-
blood stops.'

Again he says:--

'In one year from the stoppage of England's supply of Southern
slave-grown cotton, the Chartists would be in all her streets and
fields, revolution would be rampant throughout the island, and
nothing that is would exist.'

He also says, addressing an audience:--

'Why, Sirs, British lords hold their lands, British bishops hold
their revenues, Victoria holds her sceptre, by the grace of
cotton, as surely as by the grace of God.'

Senator Wigfall says:--

'If we stop the supply of cotton for one week, England would be
starving. Queen Victoria's crown would not stand on her head one
week, if the supply of cotton was stopped; nor would her head
stand on her shoulders.'

Mr. Stephens, who is the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, says:--

'There will be revolution in Europe, there will be starvation
there; our cotton is the element that will do it.'

Now, I am not stating the mere result of any discovery of my own, but it would be impossible to read the papers of the South, or the speeches made in the South, before, and at the time of, and after the secession, without seeing that the universal opinion there was, that the stoppage of the supply of cotton would be our instantaneous ruin, and that if they could only lay hold of it, keep it back in the country, or burn it, so that it never could be used, that then the people of Lancashire, merchants, manufacturers, and operatives in mills--everybody dependent upon this vast industry--would immediately arise and protest against the English Government abstaining for one moment from the recognition of the South, from war with the North, and from a resolution to do the utmost that we could to create a slave-holding independent republic in the South.

And these very men who have been wishing to drag us into a war that would have covered us with everlasting infamy, have sent their envoys to this country, Mr. Yancey, Mr. Mann (I do not know whether or not the same Mr. Mann to whom I have been referring), and Mr. Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law. These men have been in this country,--one of them I believe is here now,--envoys sent to offer friendship to the Queen of England, to be received at her Court, and to make friends with the great men in London. They come,--I have seen them under the gallery of the House of Commons; I have seen Members of the House shaking hands with them and congratulating them, if there has been some military success on their side, and receiving them as if they were here from the most honourable Government, and with the most honourable mission. Why, the thing which they have broken off from the United States to maintain, is felony by your law. They are not only slave owners, slave buyers and sellers, but that which out of Pandemonium itself was never before conceived,--they are slave breeders for the slave market; and these men have come to your country, and are to be met with at elegant tables in London, and are in fast friendship with some of your public men, and are constantly found in some of your newspaper offices; and they are here to ask Englishmen--Englishmen with a history of freedom--to join hands with their atrocious conspiracy.

I regret more than I have words to express this painful fact, that of all the countries in Europe this country is the only one which has men in it who are willing to take active steps in favour of this intended slave government. We supply the ships; we supply the arms, the munitions of war; we give aid and comfort to this foulest of all crimes. Englishmen only do it. I believe you have not seen a single statement in the newspapers that any French, or Belgian, or Dutch, or Russian ship has been engaged in, or seized whilst attempting to violate the blockade and to carry arms to the South. They are English Liberal newspapers only which support this stupendous iniquity. They are English statesmen only, who profess to be liberal, who have said a word to favour the authors of this now--enacting revolution in America.

The other day, not a week since, a member of the present Government,--he is not a statesman--he is the son of a great statesman, and occupies the position of Secretary for Ireland,--he dared to say to an English audience that he wished the Republic to be divided, and that the South should become an independent State. If that island which--I suppose in punishment for some of its offences--has been committed to his care,--if that island were to attempt to secede, not to set up a slave kingdom, but a kingdom more free than it has ever yet been, the Government of which he is a member would sack its cities and drench its soil with blood before they would allow such a kingdom to be established.

But the working men of England, and I will say it too for the great body of the middle classes of England, have not been wrong upon this great question. As for you,--men labouring from morn till night that you may honourably and honestly maintain your families, and the independence of your households,--you are too slowly emerging from a condition of things far from independent--far from free--for you to have sympathy with this fearful crime which I have been describing. You come, as it were, from bonds yourselves, and you can sympathize with them who are still in bondage.

See that meeting that was held in Manchester a month ago, in the Free Trade Hall, of five or six thousand men. See the address which they there carried unanimously to the President of the United States. See that meeting held the other night in Exeter Hall, in London; that vast room, the greatest room, I suppose, in the Metropolis, filled so much that its overflowings filled another large room in the same building, and when that was full, the further overflowings filled the street; and in both rooms, and in the street, speeches were made on this great question. But what is said by the writers in this infamous Southern press in this country with regard to that meeting? Who was there? 'A gentleman who had written a novel, and two or three Dissenting ministers,' I shall not attempt any defence of those gentlemen. What they do, they do openly, in the face of day; and if they utter sentiments on this question, it is from a public platform, with thousands of their countrymen gazing into their faces. These men who slander them write behind a mask,--and, what is more, they dare not tell in the open day that which they write in the columns of their journal. But if it be true that there is nothing in the writer of a successful novel, or in two or three pious and noble-minded Dissenting ministers, to collect a great audience, what does it prove if there was a great audience? It only proves that they were not collected by the reputation of any orator who was expected to address them, but by their cordial and ardent sympathy for the great cause which was pleaded before them.

Everybody now that I meet says to me, 'Public opinion seems to have undergone a considerable change.' The fact is, people do not know very much about America. They are learning more every day. They have been greatly misled by what are called 'the best public instructors.' Jefferson, who was one of the greatest men that the United States have produced, said that newspapers should be divided into four compartments: in one of them they should print the true; in the next, the probable; in the third, the possible; and in the fourth, the lies. With regard to some of these newspapers, I incline to think, as far as their leading columns go, that an equal division of space would be found very inconvenient, and that the last-named compartment, when dealing with American questions, would have to be at least four times as large as the first.

Coming back to the question of this war; I admit, of course--everybody must admit--that we are not responsible for it, for its commencement, or for the manner in which it is conducted; nor can we be responsible for its result. But there is one thing which we are responsible for, and that is for our sympathies, for the manner in which we regard it, and for the tone in which we discuss it. What shall we say, then, with regard to it? On which side shall we stand? I do not believe it is possible to be strictly, coldly neutral. The question at issue is too great, the contest is too grand in the eye of the world. It is impossible for any man, who can have an opinion worth anything on any question, not to have some kind of an opinion on the question of this war. I am not ashamed of my opinion, or of the sympathy which I feel, and have over and over again expressed, on the side of the free North. I cannot understand how any man witnessing what is enacting on the American continent can indulge in small cavils against the free people of the North, and close his eye entirely to the enormity of the purposes of the South. I cannot understand how any Englishman, who in past years has been accustomed to say that 'there was one foul blot upon the fair fame of the American Republic,' can now express any sympathy for those who would perpetuate and extend that blot. And, more, if we profess to be, though it be with imperfect and faltering steps, the followers of Him who declared it to be His Divine mission 'to heal the broken- hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,' must we not reject with indignation and scorn the proffered alliance and friendship with a power based on human bondage, and which contemplates the overthrow and the extinction of the dearest rights of the most helpless of mankind?

If we are the friends of freedom, personal and political,--and we all profess to be so, and most of us, more or less, are striving after it more completely for our own country,--how can we withhold our sympathy from a Government and a people amongst whom white men have always been free, and who are now offering an equal freedom to the black? I advise you not to believe in the 'destruction' of the American nation. If facts should happen by any chance to force you to believe it, do not commit the crime of wishing it. I do not blame men who draw different conclusions from mine from the facts, and who believe that the restoration of the Union is impossible. As the facts lie before our senses, so must we form a judgment on them. But I blame those men that wish for such a catastrophe. For myself, I have never despaired, and I will not despair. In the language of one of our old poets, who wrote, I think, more than three hundred years ago, I will not despair,--

'For I have seen a ship in haven fall,
After the storm had broke both mast and shroud.'

From the very outburst of this great convulsion, I have had but one hope and one faith, and it is this--that the result of this stupendous strife may be to make freedom the heritage for ever of a whole continent, and that the grandeur and the prosperity of the American Union may never be impaired.

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AMERICA.