The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
If they consent to be erected into a Slave State by accepting the
bribe, they will come into the Union by a puff of Presidential breath,
though having only forty thousand inhabitants, with two Senators and
a Representative, and all the advantages incident to Federal
connection and patronage. Should they reject it, they will be left,
it may be, to years of Territorial annoyance, and the annoyance of a
Slave Territory, too, till Government officials shall discover their
numbers to amount to near a hundred thousand, and possibly to much
more, after the next census has newly apportioned the House. With
Slavery, they have proffered to them broad lands to help cover their
wide expanse with an iron reticulation of railways, developing their
resources and multiplying their material prosperity, at the slight
cost of their consistency and their honor. Without it, they may have
to stand shivering at the gate of the Union, blasted by the
"cold shade" of our American aristocracy, and far removed from the
genial sunshine of national favor and bounty. Truly did Senator
Wilson say that Congress approached Kansas at once with a bribe and
a threat. Never was the devilish cunning of Slaveholding politics
more strikingly illustrated than by the insidious vileness of this
proposition. It had been bad enough, surely, had we been called upon
to rejoice, as over a great triumph of the right, at the concession
to Kansas of the sovereignty of settling her own institutions in her
own way, had such been granted. Nothing could be more simple and
natural, in a case of conflicting assertions and opposite beliefs as
to the state of opinion there, than to remit the decision of the
doubt to a fresh vote. Had any other interest than that in human
beings been involved, such a disposition of the whole matter would
have excited neither remark nor opposition. Nothing, perhaps, could
exemplify the control Slavery has obtained over the affairs of the
country more strongly than the power it has had to hinder this
simple remedy of an alleged wrong or error,--and this, by procuring
the defection of sordid Northern Representatives from what they
confessed to be the right, to this corrupt evasion,--an evasion
designed to fit the people of Kansas for servitude by tempting them
to sacrifice their self-respect and their honor. Let these
miscreants make haste to seize the price of their perfidy before
popular contempt and loathing shall sweep them forever out of sight
into the abyss of infamy and forgetfulness which is appointed for
the traitors to Liberty. If the question of the real will of the
people of Kansas had been referred back to them for settlement, it
would have been humiliating enough to have had to exult over it as a
victory of Freedom. With what depth of shame, then, should we
contemplate the compassing of their end by the Slavocrats, through
the venal surrender of the rights so long and so manfully asserted,
for so paltry a temptation!
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