supper-eating men riot, our soldiers drill (soldiering is our presiding
genius), and our mob-politicians waste their spleen against the North.
Unlike Boston, towering all bright and vigorous in the atmosphere of
freedom, we have no galleries of statuary; no conservatories of
paintings; no massive edifices of marble, dedicated to art and science;
no princely school-houses, radiating their light of learning over a
peace and justice-loving community; no majestic exchange, of granite
and polished marble, so emblematic of a thrifty commerce;—we have no
regal “State House” on the lofty hill, no glittering colleges
everywhere striking the eye. The god of slavery-the god we worship, has
no use for such temples; public libraries are his prison; his
civilization is like a dull dead march; he is the enemy of his own
heart, vitiating and making drear whatever he touches. He wages war on
art, science, civilization! he trembles at the sight of temples reared
for the enlightening of the masses. Tyranny is his law, a cotton-bag
his judgment-seat. But we pride ourselves that we are a respectable
people-what more would you have us?
The night is chilly without, in the fire-place of the antiquary’s back
parlor there burns a scanty wood fire. Tor has eaten his supper and
retired to a little closet-like room overhead, where, in bed, he muses
over what fell from Maria’s lips, in their interview. Did she really
cherish a passion for him? had her solicitude in years past something
more than friendship in it? what did she mean? He was not one of those
whose place in a woman’s heart could never be supplied. How would an
alliance with Maria affect his mother’s dignity? All these things Tom
evolves over and over in his mind. In point of position, a mechanic’s
daughter was not far removed from the slave; a mechanic’s daughter was
viewed only as a good object of seduction for some nice young
gentleman. Antiquarians might get a few bows of planter’s sons, the
legal gentry, and cotton brokers (these make up our aristocracy), but
practically no one would think of admitting them into decent society.
They, of right, belong to that vulgar herd that live by labor at which
the slave can be employed. To be anything in the eyes of good society,
you must only live upon the earnings of slaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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