America Before the Global Tribunal: an Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on June 30, 1861
AMERICA BEFORE THE GLOBAL TRIBUNAL: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, ON 30 JUNE 1861
Douglass' Monthly, 4: 500-02 (August 1861). Another text in Foner, Life and Writings, 3: 136-42.
On 30 June 1861 Douglass again spoke at Rochester’s Spring Street A.M.E. Zion Church. Since many of those present had regularly attended previous lectures in the series, Douglass avoided repetition in his remarks by reviewing recent events of the war.
My friends have insisted upon my coming again before you, to speak upon the lessons and events of the hour. The present difficulties of our country have brought into notice, far more vividly than ever before, the fact that no nation is absolutely independent of all others. We are not only ruled by national laws, and international laws, but upon all great questions we have to appeal to the great law of the world’s public opinion, or the world’s judgment. Both the North and the South have been anxious to secure a favorable judgment for themselves in the present contest. We have watched eagerly to see what the London Times had to say—what Lord JOHN RUSSELL had to say—and what LOUIS NAPOLEON had to say. No civilized nation can be totally indifferent to the opinion of the rest of mankind. It is an attribute of man’s nature to wish to stand approved in the eyes of his fellows; and as of individual men, so of nations. It is impossible to over estimate the self-executing power ofthis unwritten, but all-pervading law. The settled judgment of mankind, in respect to the right or wrong
of any given case, almost shuts the door to argument and doubt. The mightiest monarchs and the greatest generals have trembled before the verdict of the world. The printing press and the lightning are the most potent rulers of our times. Regiments, battalions, and vast accumulations of munitions of war, are often rendered powerless in the face of the silent moral influence of the world’s public opinion.
No people on the globe have ever appealed more emphatically to this tribunal, than have the American people; and yet few people could do so with less success in attaining a desirable verdict. How do we stand now before the bar of the world’s opinion? It certainly is a very remarkable fact, and suggestive of the very small influence exerted by particular forms of government, that while Russia, an autocratic Govemment, is emancipating its serfs,1Russian serfdom was abolished on 3 March 1861 by decree of Czar Alexander II. the United States, a democratic Government, is the scene of a bloody civil war for the extension of slavery. The haughty pride of our American civilization may well hang its head and blush at the contrast. It would be a relief to our national self-complacency if the war now going on were really a war between liberty and slavery—if it were abolition on the one hand, and preservation on the other. Such a contest, waged with spirit and determination by the Govemment against the slaveholding traitors and rebels, would instantly command the respect and sympathy of the civilized world; but, unfortunately, up to the present hour we are entangled with relatives. The South only is positive and absolute. The North is comparative, and, therefore, it is firm in nothing.
Our newspapers and public men express surprise and indignation that European governments have manifested so little sympathy with the Government in suppressing the slaveholding rebels. They have little cause, in my opinion, for this surprise and this indignation. We have ourselves to thank for the chilling blasts that come to us upon every breeze from the Eastern world. We are lukewarm, cursed with halfness, neither hot nor cold. Let but the Government of the U.S. plant itself upon the immutable truth proclaimed in its own Declaration of Independence, that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and unsheathe the sword to make this truth the law of the land to all its inhabitants, and it will then deserve, and will receive the cordial and earnest sympathy of the lovers of liberty throughout the world.
It is difficult for a people distant from the scene of action to form an intelligent judgment, except upon very plain and well-defined issues. They
have not time to deal with shadows and to draw nice inferences in respect to relatives and comparatives. They want plain, blunt, decided and point-blank forces. Of these they can judge; but where colors are neither black nor white, but are blended and mixed, they very naturally fail, while viewing them from a distance, to trace out the lines of difference and
division. We who are here on the ground, very easily see that our Government is in some sort engaged in a war against slavery, for we can see that the Slave Power once conquered and humbled, will to that extent part with its prestige and sink into weakness. We can see that though slavery shall not be destroyed, and may yet have an existence, its power, if once conquered, will be broken, if not ruined. But these nice shadings are for us, who are on the ground, and may easily escape the observation and reflection of the world at a distance. I say again, therefore, that we have no right to be surprised, and no right to complain of the world’s judgment upon the present conflict with the slaveholding States. We have ourselves to condemn. A lukewarm cause deserves only a lukewarm sympathy. When we deserve more, we shall receive more.
I have little admiration for slaveholders in any circumstances; and yet I must accord to them the merit of entire frankness and consistency. They have plunged the country into all the horrors, desolations and abominations of civil war. But they are consistent. They had declared their purpose; they have written piracy and robbery upon every fold of the Confederate flag, and displayed the death head and crossbones in ghastly horror from the
mast heads oftheir pirate ships. No one is at a loss to know what they mean. They hate liberty, and say so. They are for slavery, and for all its kindred abominations. Their cause is openly espoused and shamelessly avowed. Ten thousand times over, give me such an enemy, rather than a half- hearted, luke-warm and halting friend!
The anti-slavery cause has, from the beginning, suffered more from the compromising and temporising spirit of the politicians who have undertaken to serve it, than from the assaults of its open and undisguised enemies. It has often been more injured by the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of politicians, than by the brickbats and unsalable eggs of the pro-slavery mob.
We have now had this war with slaveholders on our hands nearly six months. As yet, no great battle has been fought, and no great victory has been won on either side. Much damage, to be sure, and destruction has taken place. Business has been destroyed, the glory of the country tarnished, doubt and anxiety spread over the land. The forces of the two contending powers have been face to face for weeks and months. Annoy-
ing and menacing movements, marches and counter-marches, a battery occasionally attacked, a railway train fired into, a picket shot down by an assassin, a bridge blown up, a house burnt down, a few rebels quickly arrested and as quickly released, thus far make up the incidents of the war. And yet, in this unfinished and almost unbegun state of the conflict of arms, while earnest men in every land are looking for a decision which shall be one thing or the other, and set at rest forever the question whether we, the American people, have a Government or not—whether a State has a right to secede—whether a part is more than the whole—whether liberty or slavery shall give law to the Republic, to the shame and confusion of all beholders—the mixed and ill-assorted head, part iron and part clay, of Compromise looms above the sea of our National troubles. Where, under the whole heavens, among what people but the American people could there be, in such a state of facts, even a possibility of compromise? How shall we account for it, even among ourselves? I will tell you. American society, American religion, American government, and every department of American life since the formation of the present Government, with freedom in one section, and slavery in the other, have naturally parted with their native vigor and purity, and degenerated into a compromise, so that an American wherever met with is simply a bundle of contradictions, incongruities and absurdities. For every truth he utters, he has a qualification, and for every principle he lays down, he has an exception. All his doctrines are accompanied with ‘ifs' and ‘buts.’ The attempt to reconcile slavery with freedom has dethroned our logic and converted our statesmanship into stultified imbecility. It has given three tongues to all our politicians, a tongue for the North and a tongue for the South, and a double tongue for the nation.
You are never sure of the meaning of one of these statesmen until you have heard him in the three distinct characters which he is required to assume. Take Mr. WM. H. SEWARD for example. Standing in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, speaking with a Northern tongue, he is plain, direct and to the purpose. He there proclaims the irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom, and assures us that wherever these powers are brought into a State or Territory, that one must inevitably fall before the other. But this is in Rochester, on the borders of Lake Ontario, five hundred miles from the Capital. Listen to the same man in the Senate of the United States, and you will learn from his lips that the irrepressible conflict is quite a repressible one—that there need be no trouble between the labor States and
the capital States, if slavery were not pressed into politics.2 Douglass contrasts William H. Seward's “lrrepressible Conflict" speech, delivered in Rochester in October 1858, with the senator's advocacy of compromise during the secession crisis. In a Senate address on 12 January 1861, Seward endorsed the repeal of all personal liberty laws, a constitutional amendment prohibiting congressional interference with slavery in the southem states, and other measures intended to placate slaveholders. Although Seward refrained from conceding the Republicans' key tenet of opposition to slavery's expansion, his remarks were widely interpreted as a retreat from the antislavery militancy of his earlier speech. Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2d sess., 314-44; New York Times, 14 January 1861; New York Daily Tribune, 14 January 1861; Seward, Irrepressible Conflict; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 193-94, 244-47. Mr. SEWARD is a fair sample of the political honesty which eighty years of the educating influences of American slavery, and of the attempt to reconcile what from the nature of the case is irreconcilable. As I said of the late Mr. DOUGLAS a few Sundays ago,3 Stephen A. Douglas died on 3 June 1861. Douglass most likely commented on his death and career at the weekly antislavery meeting of 9 June 1861 at Rochester's Spring Street A.M.E. Zion Church. Douglass published an editorial on the senator in the July issue of his journal. DM, 4:468-69, 483 (June, July 1861); Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 872. Mr. SEWARD simply represents the nation, or rather the Northern people, whose sensibilities have been blunted and paralyzed by the poisoned atmosphere in which we all live, and move, and have our being.
But is there really any danger that our Government is again to be debauched by a new compromise with slavery? My answer is, that straws show the way of the wind. What has been done, may be done again. We live in an atmosphere of compromise. Very much can be said against the probability of such a termination of the present war. About the strongest consideration which can be urged against the probability of such compromise, is the fact that neither party, the North nor the South, could, at this stage of the war, agree to any terms of accommodation or peace which would not cover them with the derision and scorn of mankind. Were the South to-morrow to lay down their arms on condition that such an act on their part would place them, in respect to constitutional rights, precisely where they were before, the Government of the United States could not, without degradation and without deep injustice to the whole people, accept the overture. Nothing can be plainer than the obligation resting on the Government to demand the fullest indemnity and restitution. A failure on its part to make an example of traitors and rebels would leave to the future historian a catalogue of calamities. For it would open the door to a repetition of all the horrors which have attended, and may further attend our present National troubles. It would leave behind it the same root of sec-
tional bitterness, the same sectional pride, the same sectional contempt for Northern manhood and valor upon which Southern insolence has been able to foment the present rebellion. Other DAVISES, TOOMBSES, MASONS and WISES4Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, James Murray Mason, and Henry Wise. would arise and re-enact the deeds of their prototypes. Nevertheless, we are in danger ofa compromise. Telegrams from Washington, though often false, are sometimes true, and among the latest rumors of the lightning is that the Confederate Provisional Government has its ardent friends now at Washington in the garb of devoted Union men, openly suggesting terms of compromise between the Government and the rebels. I know something of the fluctuations of public sentiment, and to what extremes masses of men may be carried in one direction to-day, and in another to-morrow. The experience of the last few months demonstrates the oscillating character of popular feeling. The clamor for war against the rebels reached our ears almost before the clamor for compromise had died away on the breeze.
Another reason for apprehending a new attempt at compromise, is the fact that we at the North are essentially a peaceable people. War is not our vocation. It is looked upon and dreaded as among the worst calamities. When, therefore, there shall come, as there doubtless will come, one or two great battles, bringing great suffering and slaughter upon our side, as well as that ofthe South, we may look out for eloquent denunciations of the horrors of war and earnest appeals in favor of the adoption of some new arrangement which shall arrest the effusion of blood.
Herein lies our chief danger—a danger involving the loss of all for which the war was undertaken. To be forewarned, however, is to be forearmed, and the country is now indebted perhaps to the New York Tribune, more than to any other source, for keeping it alive to this possible danger.5Editorials in Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune during May and June 1861 warned against the “Impending Compromise." Greeley declared that such Democrats as Benjamin Wood of New York. Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, and James A. Bayard of Delaware were attempting to resurrect the compromise proposals circulated before the firing on Fort Sumter. The Daily Tribune attacked the motivation of these “peace men," noting that “in fact every one wants peace; we only differ as to the terms. Some want it with the union, some without—a serious divergence." New York Daily Tribune , 22, 23 May, 14, 25, 26 June 1861.
But the question arises as to what kind of a compromise the people of the North can be made willing to assent. I answer, judging the future by the past: they may be brought to assent to anything short of a dissolution of the
Union. Thus far our Government has done nothing against the alleged compromises of the Constitution of the United States, the old bond of Union. It has taken up no hostile attitude against slavery itself, and thus has left the door of compromise wide open. This fact, and the additional fact that there are political schemers who still look southward for political support in high and influential positions, increases my apprehension of danger. Until slavery is openly attacked, this danger will continue imminent.
The great and grand mistake of the conduct of the war thus far, is the attitude of our army and Government towards slavery. That attitude deprives us ofthe moral support of the world. It degrades the war into a war of sections, and robs it ofthe dignity of being a mighty effort of a great people to vanquish and destroy a huge system of cruelty and barbarism. It gives to the contest the appearance of a struggle for power, rather than a struggle for the advancement and disenthrallment of a nation. It cools the ardor of our troops, and disappoints the hopes of the friends of humanity.
Now, evade and equivocate as we may, slavery is not only the cause of the beginning ofthis war, but slavery is the sole support ofthe rebel cause. It is, so to speak, the very stomach of this rebellion.
The war is called a sectional war; but there is nothing in the sections, in the difference of climate or soil to produce conflicts between the two sections. It is not a quarrel between cotton and com—between live oak and live stock. The two sections are inhabited by the same people. They speak the same language, and are naturally united. There is nothing existing between them to prevent national concord and enjoyment of the profoundest peace, but the existence of slavery. That is the fly in our pot of ointment—the disturbing force in our social system. Every body knows this, every body feels this, and yet the great mass of the people refuse to confess it, and the Government refuses to recognise it. We talk [of] the irrepressible conflict, and practically give the lie to our talk. We wage war against slaveholding rebels, and yet protect and augment the motive which has moved the slaveholders to rebellion. We strike at the effect, and leave the cause unharmed. Fire will not burn it out of us—water cannot wash it out of us, that this war with the slaveholders can never be brought to a desirable termination until slavery, the guilty cause of all our national troubles, has been totally and forever abolished.