Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Will you tell me Democracy, Republicanism, consecrated by
Christianity, is the remedy for all these ills? Let us look,
then, at the best example. Our own nation is not yet a hundred
years old, but it had behind it in the beginning, the chronicles
of forty or sixty centuries, written mostly in tears and blood.
At the end of an eight years' revolutionary war, our new
governmental columns were reared, not, like some pagan temples,
on human skulls, but on the imbruted bodies and extinguished
souls of five hundred thousand chattel slaves. We had our
Declaration of Independence, our war of Revolution, and a new
Constitution and code of laws. We had a Washington for our first
President, a John Jay for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and
a constellation of senators, statesmen, and sages who challenged
the respect and admiration of mankind. We closed that
dispensation with James Buchanan as Chief Magistrate, and Roger
B. Taney as Chief-Justice, with his diabolical Dred Scott
Decision, and with a war of Treason and Rebellion which deluged
the land in the blood of more than half a million of men. We had
multiplied our slaves to four millions, with new cruelties and
horrors added to the system, and at least ten generations of them
were lost in unknown graves. The new Republican President pledged
his official word and honor to the rebels already in arms, that,
would they but return to their allegiance, he would favor
amendments to the Constitution that should not only render slave
property more secure than ever before, but also make all its old
guarantees and safeguards, _Fugitive Slave law and all_, forever
"_irrevocable_" by any act or decree of Congress! So were we
endeavoring to bulwark and balustrade our slave-system about, in
the name of a Christian Republicanism, when it was struck by the
lightnings of a righteous retribution, and the world is rid of it
forever. And our old nationality went down in the ruin. Now we
are divided, distracted, deranged in currency, commerce,
diplomacy, with State and Federal liabilities resting on the
people, amounting to not less than six thousand millions of
dollars, not to speak of current expenditures which are also
appalling; with a President whose weakness finds no parallel but
in his wickedness, with a Secretary of State who has become his
full counterpart in both, and a Senate too cowardly, or too
corrupt, to impeach the one or to seek the removal of the other!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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