The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Mr. Cushing affects to see in the history of the Slavery Agitation
nothing but a series of injuries inflicted by the North on the South.
He charges "some of the Northern States" with acts of aggression
upon the South "which would have been just cause of war as between
foreign governments." He prudently forbears to name any. Does he mean,
that persons have been found in some of those States unnational
enough, un-Original-Democratic enough, to give a cup of water to a
hunted Christian woman, or to harbor an outcast Christian man,
without first submitting their hair to a microscopic examination?
Does he mean, that we have said hard things of our Southern brethren?
Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" is open to them
as well as to us, and the Richmond "South" is surely not in the
habit of sprinkling the Northern subjects of its animadversion with
rose-water. No,--what Mr. Cushing means is this,--that there are men
at the North who will not surrender the principles they have
inherited from three revolutions because they are threatened with a
fourth that will never come,--who do not consider it an adequate
success in our experiment of self-government that we can produce
such types of nationality as reckon the value of their country by
the amount of salary she pays,--who will not believe that there is
no higher kind of patriotism than complicity in every violent
measure of an administration which redeems only its pledges to a
faction of Southern disunionists,--who will not admit that
slave-holding is the only important branch of national industry,
because the profession of that dogma enables unscrupulous men to
enter the public service poor and to leave it rich. Has any citizen
of a Southern State ever failed to obtain justice (that is to say,
in the language of Original Democracy, his _nigger_) in a Northern
court? Has Massachusetts ever mobbed an envoy or brutally assaulted
a Senator of South Carolina? Has any Northern State ever nullified
an article of the Federal Constitution, as every seaboard
Slave-State has always done in respect to the colored citizens of
the North? When a man's allowing himself to be kicked comes to be
reckoned an outrage on the kicker, then Mr. Cushing's notion of what
constitutes a "just cause of war" will deserve as much consideration
as Mr. G.T. Curtis's theory that hustling a deputy-marshal is
"levying" it. We can remember when the confirmation of an ambassador
to England (where the eminent fitness of the nomination was
universally conceded) was opposed by several Southern Senators on
the ground that he had expressed an interest in the success of West
India emancipation. If Original Democrats have their way, it will
not be long before it is made constructive treason to have read that
chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which relates the misguided
philanthropy of Philip in endeavoring to convert an Ethiopian into
anything but a chattel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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