The Inauguration

This is the day of the innauguration in Washington. We know not what the winds and sky promise there; here it is cold and cheerlessーcold as the heart of the slaveholder towards his slaveーcheerless as the desolate hut of the slave-mother whose children are all "sold and gone," and she alone with her heart-rending agony.

But in the Federal City all will go "merry as a marriage bell." The rich, the great, the beautiful, from the ice-bound shores of New England, the busy cities and villages of the Empire State, the growing towns on the shores of the broad lakes and beautiful rivers of the great West, and the sons and daughters of the South, the planters from the banks of the Mississippi, the rich plains of Alabama, and the rice-fields of the Carolinas, will be there, all eager to show their enthusiastic attachment to the hoary-headed warrior and slaveholder, who will to-day take his seat in the Presidential Chair of this Christian and Republican nation. Christian and Republican! What's in a name? Talleyrand once said the chief use of words was, to conceal thoughts. May not the chief use of names be, to keep unseemly realities from sight?

The cotton lord of New England will be thereーhe who loves the busy hum of machinery in his huge mills on the banks of the Merrimac, as dearly as his pilgrim ancestors loved to hear

"The sounding aisles of the dim woods ring
To the anthems of the free."

The doctor of divinity whose home is where the Puritans dwelt in olden times, and who is wont to preach with philosophical acumen of the exceeding sinfulness of slavery in the abstract, will stand on that slave-cursed land, with a bosom quiet as the stagnant pool, so deep down in some gloomy recess that the free, pure air of heaven never stirs its stagnant waters, and a bland smile will play over his sanctified features, as he holds sweet converse with his beloved brother in the Lord from the land of bondage, on the welfare of souls and the increase of the church. The Northern politician, who at home talks earnestly, at judicious times, of the evils of slavery, and the influence of his party against it will not fail to be present—yes, and, ready too, if necessary, to yield every principle he professed,

"And crook the pliant hinges of the knee,
That thrift may follow fawningly."

And there will be present poor honest, deluded men, who have been so simple as to believe they were working for their country's good, for the good of humanity, while they have labored in their Northern homes to put power and honor in the hands of a slaveholder. The lordly planter from his home where may be heard "the crack of the whip and the footsteps of few," will be there. This is a proud day for him. He will walk with a firmer step, and his eye flash with a prouder glance, as he thinks how the servile North has again yielded, and the man who has "three hundred pledges" on the banks of the Mississippi of his devotion to the peculiar institution, been chosen to execute the will of this Republic. But there will be no joy in the slave-prisons of the capitol; the sounds of applause and joy from without will strike on the ear of the captives within like the jeering laughter of demons. The love of liberty for all, he who feels and knows that they who would be truly free, must give freedom to the bondman, will be sick at heart to see men.

"Play such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep."

G. B. S.Stebbins, Giles Badger

Giles Badger Stebbins (1817–1900), an abolitionist and author, first toured on the lecture circuit in 1845 in the company of Abby Kelley and Stephen S. Foster. Stebbins’s writings focused on such diverse subjects as transcendentalism, abolition, temperance, industrial and agricultural development, and later Spiritualism and “psychic science.” His views on abolition found him firmly in Garrison’s camp, but he retained a cordial relationship with politically minded abolitionists, including Douglass and Gerrit Smith. In 1853 Stebbins published a book outlining the opinions of prominent blacks in opposition to colonization. Giles B. Stebbins, Upward Steps of Seventy Years (New York, 1890), 86–90, 102–05; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 118.

Rochester, March 5th, 1849.