The agitation and outside pressure which they were chiefly instrumental
in furthering to its rightful issues, were the most powerful
auxiliaries, if not the power itself, which emancipated the mind of
the country from its subserviency to the slave dominion. They were
the creators of the sentiment that freed the negro at last from his
bonds and cleared the way for a true Republican State. Some power
superior to the Constitution was required to revise it, and free
the whole people from this Arachne's coil that had bound them so
long; was especially needed to extricate the rulers themselves from
its meshes, and to rescue the rights thus imperilled by unscrupulous
placemen who shrunk from the task. These could not help them, caught
in the same snare that bound the nation. "Neither the law, nor the
Constitution, nor the whole system of American institutions," they
were told, "ever had contemplated a case as likely to arise under our
system in which a resort would be necessary to provide outside of the
law and Constitution for amending the Constitution." The case arose,
nevertheless, and was provided for by these powerful agitators, and by
the progress of events. The late civil outbreak compelled the necessary
amendments, sweeping the compromises, the slave Congress and territory
from the statute books and the country itself.
"Principles like fountains flow round forever,
Being in a state of perpetual agitation."
"To all new truths, all renovations of old truths," says
Coleridge, "it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the
about-to-be-renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the
dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath."
GREELEY.
Of political editors, next to Garrison, perhaps Horace Greeley was the
most efficient in furthering this national result; and by his eminent
services in various departments of activity comes nearest to being
the people's man, the best representative of character indigenous to
New England, or more properly America--like Beecher and Phillips. His
power appears to lie in his strong understanding, abundant information,
plain statement of his facts, freed from all rhetorical embellishment.
A rustic Franklin in his direct way of putting his things before his
auditor, he makes plain his meaning in spite of his utter want of all
graces of person, or of oratory, handling his subject as a rude farmer
his axe and crowbar. There is about him a homely charm of good-nature,
a child-like candor, that have all the effect of eloquence, elevating
him for the time into the subject he treats. In the statistics of
things, practical and political, he is a kind of living encyclopedia
of information, and as his chief distinction has made the newspaper a
power it had not been before.
May we not credit New England with giving the country these new
Instrumentalities for Progress, viz.:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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