Abolition a Sedition, by a Northern ManColton, Calvin
History
Abolition a Sedition, by a Northern Man
Colton, Calvin
Abolitionists -- United States; Slavery -- United States
So long as the American Anti-slavery Society is permitted to exist,
and to carry on its operations under its present form, it is not the
reason of their cause that prevails, but the power of their machinery
in its action on the public mind. All opposing influences, so long as
the Government is inactive, are like the scattering, random, and
over-shoulder shot of a routed and retreating host that is flying in
the field before the well-formed, steady, and disciplined march of a
triumphant army--triumphant, because there is no corresponding agency
to oppose them, not because they have the right. Such, precisely, is
the effect of all the newspaper squibs that are fired off on the
Abolitionists, and such the effect of the unorganized remonstrances of
the public. The Abolitionists are in the field with a disciplined
army, officered, paid, with a full staff, and an adequate
Commissariat. In other words, they are a regularly organized and
permanent political body, acting under a complete State machinery in
all that their exigences require, adding to it at pleasure, with ever
active and industrious agents, with money at command and the power of
the press, and as independent of the Government of this country as the
throne of the Sultan at Constantinople--and yet doing the business
of the country!
There are most obvious reasons, why such a power, once recognized as
suitable and proper, will carry all before it, till it shall have
dissolved the Government of this country. The Abolitionists have all
the native and long cherished feeling of the North on their side, as
being opposed to slavery in principle; they have all the advantage of
the sympathies of our nature, when we consider the _manner_ in which
they represent the case; they have the common and prevailing popular
ignorance of the nature of our political fabric to aid them--for it is
not to be supposed, that the people generally will have clear and
uniform views on a question upon which Statesmen differ; and to the
effect of all these natural and social auxiliaries, they superadd the
power of their immense, combined, and variously ramified machinery,
which steals every where upon the public, catching every man, woman,
and child, whose benevolent sympathies are naturally open to their
appeals, and when once they are indoctrinated after the manner and in
the school of the Abolitionists, and become possessed of their spirit,
there is little chance for the sway of those principles on which our
political society is based. It is not the fair argument of the cause,
but the power of this political combination, that bears such sway.
There is no chance for a candid hearing before the public, and for the
due influence of all the considerations which appertain to this
momentous and complicated question, because the constitutional
balance of power, designed for such exigences, has been prostrated by
an usurpation, and every thing is made to give way to isolated and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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