Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
accounts clipped from different southern papers, of the assaults, frays
and murders daily perpetrated by white men on each other in a land
where violence was ever above law. There were, too, the advertisements
of slave auctions and runaway negroes; of blood-hounds kept for human
hunting; while in a weekly corner called the "Refuge of Oppression,"
all the violent doctrines of the most rabid slave holders found every
week a faithful reproduction in their own language. For an exact
picture of the image and body of the most extreme form of southern
slave holding and its results on society, the _Liberator_ was as
perfect a moral daguerreotype as could be produced.
A solemn instance of the terrible sequence of Divine retribution has
been presented to this generation which will not soon be forgotten.
All this disgusting, harrowing, dreadful record of cruelty, crime and
oppression which the _Liberator_ went on, year after year, in vain
holding up to the inspection of the North, as being perpetrated within
the bounds of slaveholding society, was shrunk from as too dreadful and
disgusting to be contemplated.
"We do not wish to have our feelings harrowed; we do not wish to be
appalled and disgusted with records of cruelty and crime," was the
almost universal voice of good society at the North, as they went
steadily on, compromising with and yielding to the exactions of a
barbarous oligarchy. God so ordered it in return, that the cup of
trembling which had so long been drunk by the slave alone, should be
put into the hands of thousands of the sons and daughters of the free
North. Thousands of them were starved, tortured, insulted, hunted by
dogs, separated from home and friends, and left to linger out a cruel
death in life, through the barbarity of those very slaveholders, with
whose sins we had connived, with whose cruelties practiced on the
helpless negroes we had refused to interfere. So awful a lesson of the
justice of a living God we trust will never be forgotten. If every
northern man and woman had from the very first been as careful in
regarding the rights of the slave, as determined to hold no fellowship
with evil as Garrison, the solution of our great national question
might have been a far more peaceful one.
In the days of the great conflict, Mr. Garrison was accused of being in
a bad spirit, of the utterance of violent, angry and abusive language.
A very mistaken idea of his personal character, in fact, went abroad in
the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account