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APRIL, 1862 DOUGLASS MONTHLY. 627 [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] message comes at the call of no desperation.——The time selected for sending it to Congress and the nation must be read with the document itself in order to appreciate its true significance. Right upon the heels of the message comes the appointment of John C. Fremont, a man whose name thrills the young heart of America with every sentiment of honor, patriotism, and bravery. John C. Fremont carries his department in his name. He goes to free the mountains of rebels and traitors and the good wishes of all but traitors will go with him. Here is a new chapter of the war: Fremont's proclamation, was revised and modified by the President; Fremont was removed from his post when in the act of striking the foe. Calumny did its worst upon Fremont. But he was brave and calm, with Jessie by his side he could not well be otherwise, and though strong himself without that pride of American women to support him, he must have fallen. I saw them as they passed eastward, after the chief had fallen.——One glance at the young General and his noble wife told me that Fremont would rise again. He has risen. The rebels will hear it. His war horse is already pawing on all their mountains! But what shall be the conditions of peace? How shall the Union be reconstructed? To my mind complete Emancipation is the only basis of permanent peace. Any other basis will place us just at the point from which we started. To leave slavery standing in the rebel States, is to leave the eggs of treason in the nest from when we shall have to meet a larger brood of traitors, and rebels at another time; it is to transmit to posterity the question that ought to be settled to day. Leave slavery where it is, and you leave the same generator of hate towards the north which has already cost us rivers of blood and millions of treasure. Leave slavery in the south and it will be as dangerous for a Northern man to travel in the south, as for a man to enter a powder magazine with fire. Despots are suspicious, and every slaveholder is an unmitigated despot, a natural foe to every form of freedom. Leave slavery in the south, and you will fill the north with a full fledged breed of servile panderers to slavery, baser than all their predecessors. Leave slavery where it is and you will hereafter, as heretofore, see in politics a divided, fettered, north, and an united south. You will see the statesmen of the country facing both ways, speaking two languages, assenting to the principles of freedom in the north, and bowing to the malign spirit and practices of slavery at the South. You will see all the pro-slavery elements of the country attracted to the south, giving that section ascendancy again in the counsels of the nation and making them masters of the destinies of the Republic. Restore slavery to its old status in the Union and the same elements of demoralization which have plunged this country into this tremendous war will begin again to dig the grave of free Institutions. It is the boast of the South that her Institutions are peculiar and homogeneous, and so they are. Her statesmen have had the wit to see that contact with the free North must either make the North like herself, or that she herself must become like the North.——They are right. The South must put off the yoke of slavery or the North must prepare [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] her neck for that yoke, provide the union is restored. There is a middle path——We have pursued that middle path. It is compromise and by it we have reached the point of civil war with all its horrid consequences. The question is shall we start anew in the same old path? Who wants a repetition of the same event thro' which we are passing? Who wants to see the nation taxed to keep a standing army in the South to maintain respect for the Federal Government and protect the rights of citizens of the United States? To such a man I say, leave slavery still dominant at the South and you shall have all your wants supplied. On the other hand abolish slavery and the now disjointed nation like kindred drops would speedily mingle into one. Abolish slavery and the last hinderance to a solid nationality is abolished. Abolish slavery and you give conscience a chance to grow, and you will win the respect and admiration of mankind. Abolish slavery and you put an end to all sectional politics founded upon conflicting sectional interests, and imparting strife and bitterness to all our general elections, and to the debates on the floor of Congress. Abolish slavery and the citizens of state each will be regarded and treated as equal citizens of the United States, and may travel unchallenged and unmolested in all the states of the Union. Abolish slavery and you put an end to sectional religion and morals, and establish free speech and liberty of conscience throughout your common country. Abolish slavery and rational law abiding Liberty will fill the whole land with peace, joy, and permanent safety now and forever. [[line]] THE DYING THROES OF THE MONSTER. [[short line]] Slavery is not yet dead in the North. The gilded head of the serpent is bruised at the South, but there is still life and venom in his less comely parts at the North. A genuine old fashioned pro-slavery mob, (its best sign of life,) worthy to take its place with the worst of its predecessors, has just greeted WENDELL PHILLIPS in Cincinnati. There was not a single qualtiy [sic] of a slaveholding mob missing from this one in Cincinnati. It covered the whole circle of mobocratic virtues, from meanness down to murder. Like all our pro-slavery mobs, it was base, brainless, barefaced, turbulent and demoniacal. It howled, and hissed and boiled, in a perfect storm of agony and wrath. To reason with it was as idle as to reason with a maddened bull. Its beastly and ferocious roaring caused strong men to shudder and feeble women to shriek and faint from terror. The voice of the speaker was drowned by unearthly yells, the life of the speaker was endangered by heavy bolders, flung with murderous aim and energy. The person of the speaker was bespattered with rotten eggs and the spacious theatre filled with their intolerable stench fit incense to the slave god at whose bloody shrine it was frantically offered. Altogether, we think, in view of the circumstances this Cincinnati slaveholding mob deserves to be ranked as the most disgraceful and scandalous that ever disgraced any American City. Had its power equaled its murderous disposition the noble blood of Phillips would have been poured out by the slaveholding assassins. Fortunately, and not more so for Mr. P. than for Cincinnati and for the country, this brutal mob was cheated [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] of its victim. Mr. Phillips passing out by a door unknown to the murderous crowd. No doubt that the object of the mob was to humble Wendell Phillips, and at the same time to cheer the rebels with the hope that they still have friends and allies at the North. Neither object is accomplished. The proud slaveholder feels only contempt for such exhibitions of servility on the part of northern mobs.——As to humbling Wendell Phillips or shutting him out of the popular heart that cannot be done. He shines all the brighter for every assault made upon him and will be welcomed by the people of the North and East with a more glorious enthusiasm for this new manifestation of violence towards him. Wendell Phillips looked grand at the capital with the eyes of the nation upon him, but grand as he looked at that moment, he was incomparably grander when he stood calm and serene in Cincinnati amid the tempest and storm of a howling pro-slavery mob thirsting for his noble blood. We observe that it has been basely asserted that Mr. Phillips was mobbed for uttering treasonable and disunion sentiments. The Satanic press know better. When the union was perverted and polluted by slavery, when it was an engine for extinguishing the freedom of the north, and perpetuating the slavery of the black man at the south, Mr. Phillips repudiated the union and did all he co'd by moral means to induce his fellow citizens to follow his example, but no man has spoken with more energy, and eloquence, in behalf of the union as warred upon by the slaveholding traitors, than has Mr. Phillips. All this is patent to the press which lyingly chooses to misrepresent him. That such a mob occurs at such a time and in such a place may however well be made matter of thought. Here is the slave system plunging its bayonets into the warm heart's blood of the whole north, yet northern men are found to apoligize for a beastly mob against one of the ablest and purest patriots in the land for no other crime than his opposition to this same slave system. The slave system is moving all that it can of the powers of earth and Hell to break up this Government and yet here is a bloodthirsty mob, gotton up for the purpose of sustaining slavery, and yet the Democratic papers over the country show their sympathy with the mob by cunning and malignant misrepresentations of Wendell Phillips. The fact is instructive, and warns us that abolitionists have yet to pass through fire and water before his country is freed from slavery. Here ye no warnings in the air? Feel ye no Earthquakes underneath? Up, why will ye slumber where The sleeper only wakes in death. This mob is a trumpet call to every friend of freedom in the land to see to it that while we are contending on the battle field with the armed rebels of the South that the assasins of liberty here do not succeed in their murderous designs upon freedom of speech and the press at the north. [[line]] ANTI-SLAVERY LECTURES IN ROCHESTER.—— The fourth and last lecture of this course, will be delivered in Corinthian Hall, on Thursday Evening April the tenth, by THEODORE TILTON. This lecture will doubtless be one of the ablest ever delivered in this city. If, in looking over the whole field of rising young men in this country and the field is large, we should be asked to point out the man, destined [[/column 3]]
Transcription Notes:
Not sure how "sage" works - ("sage" is the end of hyphenated "message." The previous page was already finalized with "mes-" at the end, so I changed the first word on this page to "message" for clarity.
