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364 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. November, 1860. [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] now, whoever might be the candidate, nor unless that candidate took higher ground than Birney then did. We have 'outgrown' our former position, and cannot go back into it, to please any one. The [[italics]] inferences [[/italics]], therefore, that you draw from the [[italics]] fact [[/italics]] that I formerly voted for you, are not legitimate. They are not logical.--They do not warrant you in setting aside my 'Reasons number one, two, three, four, and five,' as not being, to the extent I had alleged, the [[italics]] true, bona fide [[/italics]] reaons for my declining to vote for you, now. But what if it were otherwise? Suppose I am inconsistent in not [[italics]] now [[/italics]] voting for you, because I [[italics]] formerly [[/italics]] voted for you. Am I bound to bring my present self into harmony with my former self, though I do so, at the expense of my present convictions? It would be strange if this should be required of me, by Gerrit Smith, who has said--'Change, not Consistency, I my motto.' Suppose, which I fear is, to some extent, the fact, that I was not rigidly self-consistent, in voting for you, while I disagreed with you, in several points of such great importance. I hold, (and hope you do,) that men ought to cultivate self-consistency, for the time being, consistency with their own present selves, their present principles, though not the spurious consistency that continues in the wrong, through the pride of consistency with their former selves. If your argument against the validity of my alleged 'Reasons number one, two,' &c., had any weight, that weight was derived from my supposed [[italics]] consistency [[/italics]] in having voted for you, when I did. For if I was [[italics]] in [[/italics]] consistent, I ought, certainly, to get out of the inconsistency in some way, either by changing my views, and adopting your measures, or else by ceasing to vote for you. If unable to do the former, (as I certainly am,) I am shut up, of course, to the latter. No man sees all his inconsistencies. Few, if any of us detect any of them, till time and experience compel the discovery. Let me tell you how, in this instance, I was compelled to detect mine. Daring the Fremont furor in 1856, the Editor of the '[[italics]] Free Presbyterian, [[/italics]]' excused voting for Fremont, by denying that a vote for Fremont was a vote for the sentiments of his Letter of acceptance, or for the platform of the Republican party. In my 'Radical Abolitionist,' I undertook to answer him. I asked him whether he did not think that a vote for Buchanan, was a vote for the published sentiments and measures of Buchanan, and of the Democratic Cincinnati Platform? The Editor replied by asking me whether in voting for Gerrit Smith, I intended to vote for the annexation of Cuba and Mexico. the question was a poser. How could I answer it? I forget how I did, or whether I attempted it, at all. But I found my strength shorn by my position. the Editor of the [[italics]] Free Presbyterian [[/italics]] was not the only man that made the discovery of my weak spot, and pressed me on that point. In the whole course of my editorial navigation, so to speak, for one third of a century, I have no remembrance of every having been so closely pushed, upon a lee shore, either before or since.--I resolved so take care how I got caught in that latitude and longitude again. When the Convention that nominated you for Governor, was held at Syracuse, in 1858, the question came up, in my mind, whether I would go for it. I persuaded myself--so desirous was I, of still voting for you--that you would do much better, for Governor of the State of New York, than for President of the United States. In the Chair of State, at Albany, you could do nothing toward the annexation of Cuba or Mexico. I still think there was something in the distinction then I made. At Albany, you could not offer compensation to the slaveholders. At Albany, you would have seen human blood flow like water, (so you said, in your speeches,) before you would have given up the first 'black baby,' to the slave-catcher. At Washington, as we now learn, you would, to avoid blood-shed, allow two or three hundred thousand kidnappers to run away with four [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] millions of your equal fellow citizens, entitled, under the Constitution, and by your oath of Office, to your protection from kidnappers--husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, babes and all, at wholesale. This, of course, I did not foresee, while advocating your nomination at Syracuse, in 1858, nor while using my pen, afterward, to get votes for you. Did I thereby obligate myself to vote for you, for President, in 1860, to go to Washington City, with your proclamation of amnesty preceding you--advertising the slaveholders, in effect--though not in intention--beforehand, and when you come to be President, they would need only to threaten civil war, and make Congress, and the nation, and the President believe them in earnest, in order to secure the Presidential consent to their unmolested abduction from the nation, and from under its protection, of one seventh part of its citizens? If I [[italics]] did [[/italics]] thus obligate myself, by my vote for you to be Governor of New York, in 1858, and if I may not now object to your views of a contingent tolerance of Southern Succession, as a valid reason against voting for you for President, without subjecting myself to the suspicion of having adduced a fictitious reason, and without being now told by you, in the face of my published declaration to the contrary, that my 'Reason number four,' as you designate it, [[italics]] is not [[/italics]] a Reason that costs you the loss of my vote, then, in that case, I shall being to think that voting for you is a more hazardous thing than I had ever supposed it to be; and that I ought to be doubly careful how I now follow you into the track that, to me, seems marked out by your Letter to the Syracuse Convention. I should be sorry to be told, four years hence, that any objection I might then make, to such an employment of 'presses and lecturers,' as I might then find in operation by the party to teach the people 'the simple religion of reason.' as set forth in your 'Three Discourses' on that subject, must be fictitious and unreal, because I had found no fault with your proposal to the Syracuse Convention of 1860, and had supported you, as a Presidential Candidate on the programme of that Letter. You will see, still further, the force of this, when I assure you, truthfully, that I was not aware of your views of compensation, until you assisted in organizing a compensation Emancipation Society, in company with Enihu Burritt and others, the greater part o them never known among us, as abolitionists--nor was I aware of your willingness to allow a Southern secession from the Union, until I learned it from the manuscript you sent me, of the Letter you afterward addressed to Frederick Douglass, but originally addressed to me, for publication in the [[italics]] Principia [[/italics]]. Of this latter fact I apprized you sufficiently, I think, when I wrote you my objections to the sentiments of the manuscript, asking you to reconsider the subject, before publishing, and saying that, though I should regret its publication by you, I would not decline publishing it in the [[italics]] Principia [[/italics]], but notifying you that if I did, it would necessarily occasion an earnest debate between us, respecting it, which, I thought, it would be better for both of us with our other labors, and present condition of health, to avoid. You must certainly have seen, in this, that I was seeking no bone of contention with you and was not conjuring up any fictitious grounds for withholding my vote from you, while the true cause was only my 'impatience with what I regarded as your religion!'--Yet you now include this very subject in your category of my fictitious reasons, which you insist, had no weight with me, though I had told the public otherwise. I must claim to know, for myself, what my reasons are, and if I am to be regarded a truthful man, I must claim credence for my public statements of them, at least until some plausible grounds for discrediting them, shall be furnished. Your letter, as a whole, bears ample testimony to your belief in my integrity. To Gerrit Smith, then, I appeal to bear me witness, that Gerrit Smith's entire course of argument against the [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] reality of my 'Reasons, NO one, two, three, four, and five' is fallacious and sophistical from beginning to end, without power to convince even himself of their soundness, when he shall have deliberately re-examined it. What occasion can you have had for your unreasonable suspicion that mere theological 'impatience' with you, on my part, was the basis of all my ostensible objections against you, as a candidate, and that those ostensible objections were not real ones? Did no one but myself, or those who hold my Theological views, in opposition to your's, object as strongly as I have done, to some of your measures and views embraced in 'Reasons No one, two, three and four' as you call them? Take your favorite measure of 'COMPENSATION' for example. You admit that 'the mass of abolitionists have held you to be wrong' in your proposal of compensation. Is it strange that I should happen to be one of them? Do you include 'the mass of abolitionists' in the same implied imputation that your reasonings cast upon me? Or is it only in the case of 'orthodox' abolitionists that suspicion should be indulged? 'Here and there,' you say, 'a prominent abolitionist has, on account of it (the proposal of compensation) called down the public contempt upon me.'--Was William Goodell one of them? What 'orthodox' abolitionist was of the number? Yet William Goodell and other 'orthodox' abolitionists, were, at least, as strongly opposed, on principle, to the policy of paying a compensation for the relinquishment of crime, as were any of the so called 'liberal' creeds. If Abram Pryne too sharply reproved you at your compensation convention at Cleveland--if Mr. Garrison in his [[italics]] Liberator [[/italics]] accused you, on that occasion, of having 'thrown another somerset'--if the Anti-Slavery [[italics]] Standard [[/italics]] and the Anti-Slavery [[italics]] Bugle [[/italics]] chimed in, laughing at the Radical Political Abolitionists about their candidate, if Parker Pillsbury or Theodore Parker pounced upon you, with their ponderous armor, without mercy, if Henry C. Wright, if Stephen S. Foster and Abby Kelly Foster, looked sorrowfully upon you, as upon a fallen brother (I cannot tell, precisely, whether each and all of these are to be included among the 'prominent abolitionists' to whom your statement might be truthfully applied,) I should like to know whether you think that in their case, their strong condemnation of your proposals was merely ostensible and not real, and only resorted to, as a cover, for their theological prejudices against you, and because they had 'lost all patience with what they regarded your religion?' In the case of either or all of these, had their denunciations been as sharp as Pryne's, or their sarcasms as severe as Garrison's, you never would have thought them owing to 'impatience with what they regarded your religion'--for their theology was above the suspicion of any taint of 'orthodox' exclusiveness and bigotry. But when Williams Goodell concludes to decline voting for a Presidential candidate on that platform, his contrary views on the subject having been on distinct public record, ever since 1833, if not earlier, how shall so strange a phenomenon be accounted for? In no way assuredly, says Gerrit Smith, but by the supposition that he has 'lost all patience with what he regards my religion!'--Is it not possible, my dear friend, that some of the theological prejudice and impatience may have been on the other side? Have you always expressed yourself in terms of patience, with the theology which you opposed, in your Three Discourses on the 'RELIGION OF REASON?' Examine its pages, which candor, and see. You think me 'uncharitable.' You claim to have a very charitable religion. Can you not charitably believe me to be conscientious in declining to vote on the compensation platform, even for the pleasure of voting for my old friend Gerrit Smith, whom I have so often voted for? Can you not charitable believe me to be truthful, when I assign this, as among my real reasons? It may seem strange to you--I presume it does--that I was not, all along aware of your [[/column 3]]
