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SEPTEMBER, 1861.     DOUGLASS" MONTHLY.  523

WENDELL PHILLIPS ON THE WAR.

We take the following extract from the able and eloquent speech delivered by WENDELL PHILLIPS at Abington, Mass., on the 1st of August.  His remarks were quite lengthy, and we have space only for the peroration, which is very nearly a summary of the points he had elaborated:

Let the Government of the United States say, through its Lieut. General Scott, or thro' its Secretary of War, to the various Generals of divisions: 'What we shall do in the future with slavery, we know not; the future will shape itself; but every man, black or white, that enters your lines, hang him or arm him.'  When they have said it, there is no longer slavery in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The moment they have said it, ours is an army advancing into a country where one-half of the population is on our side, men, women and children.  That is one-half the victory.  The moment we have said it, the South knows the vigor of the North has touched the point of efficiency.  I ask that of the Government, leaving Congress to shape its future.

Then I ask this further, they shall clear all the public offices of secession spies.  I said just now, and I hold it, that the battle of Bull Run was butchery, and the Government were largely responsible for it, while they keep the public offices full of men with Southern principles.  There is sitting at this moment—mark you!  Charlestown still exists, with its sky almost yet bearing the shadow of that gibbet whereon hung a man for breaking his allegiance to the Government of the United States—there is sitting at this moment, within one hundred miles of it, in the city of Washington, a Committee of the House of Representatives, to find out the number of men in the public offices who have refused to take the oath of allegiance.  'The number!'  Why, there ought not to be one there.  Instead of a Committee to find out the number of traitors, that House of Representatives should have memorialized the President to remove any Secretary who had in his employ one man who had refused to take the oath of allegiance.  [Loud applause.]  If I were brother, or son, or father of any man murdered at Bull Run, I should think that the Secretary who kept traitors in his employment, run the risk of every life that left Washington in that army.  If you and I had marched out of that Capital, knowing that by the criminal weakness of the Government, we left behind us in public offices, with peculiar facilities, therefore, for gaining knowledge of public plans, hosts of men who often avowed their wish for our defeat, we should hardly feel that such a Government deserved our blood shed in its defence. 

I believe, therefore, that the Government should announce what I said in regard to the blacks:  Every man that enters the lines, arm him or punish him.  And in regard to the public offices, empty Washington of every man, woman and child who will not take the oath of allegiance—every one probably disloyal.  [Cheers.]  Until that is done, this war is a bloody farce.  The Government is not fighting; they are only playing with bloody counters—with the lives of 200,000 men.— Maps just finished in Washington found in the tents of the rebels!  The plan of the campaign known to be in possession of the staff of the opposite army!  Out of such a nest no army should be sent.  We have a right to ask this of the Government.  War is horrible.  No Government, no mere form, is worth a single human life.  If we enter it, we enter it for the gravest and most solemn of all purposes; and after that, every step should be taken to make it as efficient as possible.  You and I are to create that efficiency.  You and I are to save years of bloody war.  I would not take one step, nor refrain from it, out of regard to England or France.  [Applause]  In one sense, I do not care for their sympathy.  If nineteen millions of men are not able to hold their Government up, may it tumble down.  [Loud applause.]  If we need England and France to decree government and justice on this continent, we had better be under a King.  [Applause, and cries of 'Hear, hear']  I would not, therefore, take a step, nor forbear it, out of any regard to England.  With a fair purpose and proper exercise of will, we are able to decide this question.— Gen. Scott might have burned over Virginia months ago, and left no woods to conceal the masked batteries of Manassas.  Why did he let his hundred thousand men linger in Washington?  Better there than to be sent out to be butchered.  Such was not Wellington's conduct when for months he created an army behind ramparts in Portugal.  Occasional employment helped formal drill, while it kept up the spirit of the soldier.  But what we may rightfully ask of this Government is to put on its banner something worth fighting for, and then to put behind it an army not already betrayed by its own servants. 

I know that this may seem like disloyal criticisms of the Administration, but this matter is your concern and mine as much as the Administration's.  We are to be beggared, our neighbors are to be shot, our national honor is at stake.  Whoever seals his lips, I shall not seal mine.  [Prolongued applause.]  I believe that Gen. Scott is honest; I know that he is able.  I have no criticisms to make of the secrets or details of military science.  But every man who has his eyes open, knows that war is a serious and earnest game.  The South spares nothing.  She goes back to the days of barbarism for her methods.  She is in deadly earnest, and we are at play.  We pardon traitors at home; we almost smile on them on the other side; and in Washington they are spoken of as 'our friends at the South,' and exchange of courtesies take place.  If we have a war worthy of the blood of New England men, it is to be an earnest war, and it is to be made now, if the great purpose of the war is to be saved from the complications which another Spring, and the difficulties and embarrassments which another six months cannot fail to bring.  If you have any influence, therefore, on members of Congress, on editors, on the creators of public opinion, on your neighbors, on the rank and file of your army, teach them that with Massachusetts bayonets it is better to be insubordinate and shoot a Colonel, than it is, unasked, unauthorized, and Heaven damned, to turn them selves into hunters of slaves.  [Loud and prolonged cheers.]  Help the Government to dare to give free rein to the ardor of the people.  The sight of the Stars and Stripes bowing to the Palmetto at Charleston, that flight at Bull Run, will rankle in the history of the Republic for centuries.  The only opiate for this ache of the Nation's heart is the Government bidding the world take note of the cause of this fell disease, avowing her purpose with mortal surgery to cut it out, and then, gathering four millions of the oppressed under her flag, plant it, in serene strength, amid shouts of jubilee, on the shores of the Gulf.  [Loud applause.]

The New York Times prints the entire speech of Mr. PHILLIPS, and editorially comments as follows:  

There are thousands and tens of thousands throughout the country, who sympathize thoroughly with this view of the subject, and who insist that the Government ought immediately to raise the standard of liberation.  It seems to us quite sufficient to say that we cannot possibly do this, without contradicting the facts of current history, and discarding the Constitution, which it is the object of the war to vindicate and defend.  This war has thus far nothing historically to do with slavery.  Its object is simply to defend the Government of the Union from the destruction with which it is threatened.  President Lincoln, moreover, speaking the voice of the whole country, has over and over again declared tht the Government has no intention to interfere with slavery, or with any of the institutions, laws or rights of the several States.  So long as the Government proceeds upon the theory that secession is a nullity, and that the seceded States are still de jure and de facto members of the Union, it must continue, in acts as in words, to hold this ground. 

But while we consider this to be of necessity the position of the Government for the present, we do not mean to intimate that it may not be changed.  War is a terrible stimulant to the development of national passions, and it often works in days or weeks, changes in the current of events which, under ordinary circumstances, it would take years to bring about.  A repetition of such defeats as that at Bull Run—a succession of disasters of any sort to the National arms, might convince the people that we have mistaken the issue—that we are fighting the battle on a false basis—that it is not, in reality, a defensive war for the mere salvation of a written Constitution, but that it has its roots deeper down in the social and civil life of the nation, and that it must be waged with a broader view, a loftier purpose, and a more terrible energy than have yet entered into its conduct.  When our people once see—as we hope they may not—that we cannot protect ourselves behind the ramparts of the Constitution—that we must go forth and fight to the death against the monster that really assails us, or else crouch in abject and perpetual subserviency to his will, there can be little doubt of the choice they will make.

The Times is considered one of the most conservative of the leading Northern journals.  In another issue of that paper we find the following, which shows plainly that it is coming to the conclusion that the only way to put a stop to this uncalled for rebellion, is for the President to proclaim freedom to every slave in the land.  It says:

The most natural way to put an end to a controversy, is to remove the cause of it, and since the war has resulted from the refusal of the slavery propagandists to submit to the laws, the obvious and certain cure for the political malady is the abolition of slavery.  The Government will be slow in adopting this radical mode of treatment, but the public mind is rapidly coming to the conclusion that no other will prove effectual.  If undertaken at all, it should be done with a strong hand.

Slavery is a doomed institution.  Its upholders and propagandists have waged unholy war upon the General Government, for no other reason than that they have been turned out of power, by the result of a fair election, and now they must take the consequences of their crimes.


WHY WAS JOHN BROWN HUNG?— We have looked over the trial again, and we find that John Brown was hung because he was in arms against the United States—because the Courts and the Government pronounced him a traitor.

The whole North was denounced for the act of Brown and his squad of twenty men.  The Senate investigated it.  Prominent Republicans from Massachusetts to Kansas were hauled up before the patriot, Senator Mason, and an attempt was made to implicate them in the treason.  Men of decided anti-slavery principles were publicly mobbed and privately jeered at as aiders and abettors of treason.— These things happened a short time ago.  The Government called out its soldiers to capture John Brown; they guarded the Court House during the trial; they protected the execution field on the day of the hanging.  For what was John Brown hung?  For treason.

Gen. McClellan has recently captured a thousand prisoners, ten of whom are officers. Government has ordered him to release them on their taking the oath.  Why was not John Brown allowed to take the oath?

Suppose Massachusetts had seceded instead of South Carolina, and Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips had been the leaders of the rebellion.  Everybody knows that nothing would have been said about taking the oath in such a case.  The captured Abolitionists would have been hung instanter.

Moral — Fighting for slavery is justifiable; fighting for freedom is treason. - Atchison Conservative.









































































































  

Transcription Notes:
Reviewed - removed unnecessary descriptions of format - see Instructions... & fixed a couple of typos (x2)