American Eloquence, Volume 2: Studies In American Political History (1896)
History
American Eloquence, Volume 2: Studies In American Political History (1896)
Speeches, addresses, etc., American; United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government
deliberately and in full knowledge of the facts, three million of human
beings to hopeless ignorance, daily robbery, systematic prostitution,
and murder, which the law is neither able nor undertakes to prevent
or avenge, is more monstrous, in our eyes, than the love of gold which
takes a score of lives with merciful quickness on the high seas. Haynau
on the Danube is no more hateful to us than Haynau on the Potomac. Why
give mobs to one and monuments to the other?
If these things be necessary to courtesy, I cannot claim that we are
courteous. We seek only to be honest men, and speak the same of the dead
as of the living. If the grave that hides their bodies could swallow
also the evil they have done and the example they leave, we might enjoy
at least the luxury of forgetting them. But the evil that men do lives
after them, and example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from
the grave. History, also, is to be written. How shall a feeble minority,
without weight or influence in the country, with no jury of millions to
appeal to--denounced, vilified, and contemned,--how shall we make way
against the overwhelming weight of some colossal reputation, if we do
not turn from the idolatrous present, and appeal to the human race?
saying to your idols of to-day: "Here we are defeated; but we will write
our judgment with the iron pen of a century to come, and it shall never
be forgotten, if we can help it, that you were false in your generation
to the claims of the slave!" * * *
We are weak here,--out-talked, out-voted. You load our names with
infamy, and shout us down. But our words bide their time. We warn the
living that we have terrible memories, and their sins are never to be
forgotten. We will gibbet the name of every apostate so black and high
that his children's children shall blush to bear it. Yet we bear no
malice,--cherish no resentment. We thank God that the love of fame,
"that last infirmity of noble minds," is shared by the ignoble. In our
necessity, we seize this weapon in the slave's behalf, and teach caution
to the living by meting out relentless justice to the dead. * * *
"These, Mr. Chairman, are the reasons why, we take care that 'the memory
of the wicked shall rot.'"
I have claimed that the antislavery cause has, from the first, been ably
and dispassionately argued, every objection candidly examined, and every
difficulty or doubt anywhere honestly entertained treated with respect.
Let me glance at the literature of the cause, and try not so much, in
a brief hour, to prove this assertion, as to point out the sources from
which any one may satisfy himself of its truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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