Henry Ward Beecher and a 165-year-old Prediction
What you are about to read is except from a speech that was delivered at a time when the American union of democracy was facing secession of states between the North and the South, as Beecher states in his speech some 165 years ago. His words then resonated the feelings of the North and the South and why we faced a civil war. The speech in its entirety touches deeply on the issue of Slavery and why the South sought secession. It touches on others with strong religious beliefs as to the concerns of the Christian community of the North over the South’s views on Slavery and why slavery was important to the South survival economically, and politically. Wrong or Right the civil war set a tone for future generations of racial unrest that to this day, the speech would not be out of context when you consider today’s racial inequalities. The South may have lost the civil war, but did the ideal that the African American slave was chattel, an inferior race die with it? Given today’s current unrest and racial inequality in 2020, the South of 1855 is ever present. As Beecher’s speech did then, it still resonates in our society today.
Excerpts of speech
DELIVERED IN NEW YORK CITY,
BY HENRY WARD BEECHER, ON THE
“Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories
OF MAN AND SOCIETY,”
January 14, 1855.
The Eighth Lecture of the Course before the Anti-Slavery Society, was delivered, January 14, 1855, at the Tabernacle, New York, by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The subject, at the present time, is one of peculiar interest, as touching the questions of Slavery and Know-Nothingism, and, together with the popularity of the lecturer, drew together a house-full of auditors.
(Full text available Project Gutenberg.com Author: Henry Ward Beecher”)
Henry Ward Beecher speaking…..I am quite aware that the subject of Slavery has been regarded, by many, as sectional; and the agitation of it in the North needless, and injurious to our peace and the country’s welfare. Whatever may have been the evils, the agitation has only come through men, not from them. It is of God. It is the under heaving of Providence. Mariners might as well blame you for the swing and toss of their craft when tides troop in or march out of your harbor, as us, for heaving to that tide which God swells under us. Tides in the ocean and in human affairs are from celestial bodies and celestial beings. The conflict which is going on springs from causes as deep as the foundations of our institutions. It will go on to a crisis; its settlement will be an era in the world’s history, either of advance or of decline….
….Yes, you may speak of Slavery, if you will defend it; you may preach about it, if you shingle its roof with Scripture texts; but you may not talk, nor preach, nor print abolition doctrines, though you believe them with the intensity of inspiration! The reason given is, that it will stir up insurrection. And so, it will. It is said that free speech is inflammatory. So it is. That it would bring every man’s life in the South into jeopardy; that, in self-defense, they most limit and regulate the expression of opinion. But what is that theory of Government, and what is the state of society under it, in which free speech and free discussion are dangerous? It is the boast of the North, not alone that speech and discussion are free, but that we have a society constructed in every part so rarely, wisely, and justly, that they can endure free speech; no file can part,….
….It is very plain that while nominally republican institutions exist in both the North and South, they are animated by a very different spirit, and used for a different purpose. In the North, they aim at the welfare of the whole people; in the South they are the instruments by which a few control the many. In the North, they tend toward Democracy; in the South, toward Oligarchy. It is equally plain that while there may be a union between Northern and Southern States, it is external, or commercial, and not internal and vital, springing from common ideas, common ends, and common sympathies. It is a union of merchants and politicians and not of the people. Had these opposite and discordant systems been left separate to work out each its own results, there would have been but little danger of collision or contest….
….For fifty years the imperious spirit of the South has sought and gained power. It would have been of but little consequence were that power still republican. The seat of empire may be indifferently on the Massachusetts Bay or the Ohio, on the Lakes or on the Gulf; if it be the same empire, acting in good faith for the same democratic ends. But in the South the growth of power has been accompanied by a marked revolution in political faith, until now the theory of Mr. Calhoun, once scouted, is becoming the popular belief. And that theory differs in nothing from outright European Aristocracy, save in the forms and instruments by which it works. The struggle, then, between the North and the South is not one of sections, and of parties, but of Principles — of principles lying at the foundations of governments — of principles that cannot coalesce, nor compromise; that must hate each other, and contend, until the one shall drive out the other….
….What are we to think, when old Massachusetts, the mother of the Revolution, every league of whose soil swells with the tomb of some heroic patriot, shall make pilgrimages through the South, and, after surveying the lot of slaves under a system that turns them out of manhood, pronounces them chattel’s, denies them marriage, makes their education a penal and penitentiary offence, makes no provision for their religious culture, leaving it to the stealth of good men, or the interest of those who regard religion as a currycomb, useful in making sleek and nimble beasts — a system which strikes through the fundamental instincts of humanity, and wounds nature in the core of the human heart, by taking from parents all right in their children, and leaving the family, like a bale of goods, to be unpacked, and parceled out and sold in pieces, without any other protection than the general good nature of easy citizens; what shall be thought of the condition of the public mind in Boston, when one of her most revered, and personally, deservedly beloved pastors, has come up so profoundly ignorant of what we thought every child knew, that he comes home from this pilgrimage, to teach old New-England to check her repugnance to Slavery, to dry up her tears of sympathy, and to take comfort in the assurance that Slavery, on the whole, is as good or better for three millions of laboring men as liberty. He has instituted a formal comparison between the state of society and the condition of a laboring population in a slave system and those in a free State, and left the impression on every page that Liberty works no better results than servitude, and that it has mischiefs and inconveniences which Slavery altogether avoids….
….Which of these two theories is the American? The North has one theory, the South another; which of them is to be called the American idea? Which is American — Northern ideas or Southern ideas? That which declares all men free &c., or that which declares the superior races free, and the inferior, Slaves? That which declares the right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — or that which declares the right of strength and intelligence to subordinate weakness and ignorance? That which ordains popular education, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, public discussion — or that which makes these a prerogative, yielded to a class but denied to masses? That which organizes Society as a Democracy and Government, and Republic — or that which organizes Society as an Aristocracy, and Government as an Oligarchy? Which shall it be — that of organized New England townships, schools, and churches — that resisted taxation without representation — that covered Boston harbor with tea, as if all China had shook down her leaves there — which spake from Faneuil Hall, and echoed from Bunker Hill; or that policy which landed slaves on the Chesapeake — that has changed Old Virginia from a land of heroes into a breeding-ground of slaves — that has broken down boundaries, and carried war over our lines, not for liberty, but for more territory for slaves to work, that the owners might multiply, and the Aristocracy of America stand on the shores of two oceans, an unbroken bound all between?….
….If a National American party is ever formed, by leaving out the whole question of Human Rights, it will be what a man would be — his soul left out! An American National party — Liberty left out! An American party — Human Rights left out! Gentlemen, such a party will stink with dissolution before you can get it finished. No Masonry can make it solid — no art can secure it. No anchor that was ever forged in infernal stythy can go deep enough into political mud to hold it! If you rear up an empty name; if you take that revered name American, all the world over radiant and revered, as the symbol of human rights and human happiness — if you sequester and stuff that name with the effete doctrines of despotism, do you believe you can supplicate from any gods the boon of immortality for such an unbaptized monster? No. It may live to ravage our heritage for a few days, but there is a spirit of liberty that lives among us, and that shall live. And aroused by that spirit, there shall spring up the yet unaroused hosts of men that have not bowed the knee to Baal — and we will war it to the knife, and knife to the hilt.
For, it shall be; America shall be free! We will take that for our life’s enterprise. Dying, we will leave it a legacy to our children, and they shall will it to theirs, until the work is done, our fathers’ prayers are answered, and this whole land stands clothed and in its right mind — a symbol of what the earthly fruits of the Gospel are! If a National party is now to be formed, what shall it be, and what shall its office be? It shall be a peacemaker, say sly politicians. Yes, peace by war. But an American party, seeking peace with the imperious Aristocracy by yielding everything down to the root — one would think no party need be formed to do that. Judas did as much without company. Arnold did that without companions. An American National party must either be a piebald and patched-up party, carrying in its entrails the mortal poison of two belligerent schemes, former legendary disputes, and agitation, and furious conflict; or, to be a real national party, it must first be a Northern party and become national. We must walk again over the course of history. Here in the North Liberty began. Its roots are with us yet. All its associations and all its potent institutions are with us. Having once given forth this spirit of liberty, now fading out of our Southern States, the North should again come forth and refill the poisoned veins that have been drinking the hemlock of Despotism with the new blood of Liberty! Let us give sap to the tree of Liberty, that it may not wither and die!…. (End of Excepts in context original order).
Are we in 2020 facing a “National Party” a seed growing in the GOP and our current leadership in the White House? Beecher clearly believed in his time that if change did not come, not just a partial change or a temporary change. Democracy would die.
Robert D. Vergeson
