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
It will be a blessed day for the world when men are as willing to
help each other as they are to assist Providence. The "London
Cotton-Plant," a journal established to sustain the interests of
Slavery in the Old World, is almost overpowered with acute distress
for the Order of Creation, and offers its sustaining shoulder to the
System of the Universe. "Fear nothing," it seems to say, "glorious
structure of the Divine Architect! Giddings shall not touch you, nor
shall Seward lay his sacrilegious hand on you!" "Who are ye?"
murmurs the Voice, "that would reedit the works of the Almighty?"
"Sublime, but misguided object of our compassion, we prefer to
remain in the modest seclusion of namelessness, but we are published
at Red-Lion Court, Fleet Street, and are sold for one shilling!" To
judge from Mr. Cushing's letter, he has studied this organ of the
sympathizers with the Pre-established Harmonies,--certainly there is
a singular coincidence in the sentiments of both, so far as we can
make them out. Both call themselves conservative, both are
anti-philanthropists, both claim that public opinion is tending in
the direction of their views, both affirm that their cause is that
of the white man, and both appear to mean by white man the same
thing,--the owner of a slave.
But is not Mr. Cushing's anxiety misdirected, and wilfully so, in
seeking the material for its forebodings of danger to the Union in
the Free States? The only avowed disunionists of the North are the
radical Abolitionists, whose position is the logical result of their
admitting that under the Constitution it is impossible to touch
Slavery where it exists, and who, therefore, seek in a dissolution
of the federal compact an escape from complicity with what they
believe an evil and a wrong,--with what, till within the last twenty
years, was conceded to be such by the South itself. If Mr. Cushing
be so great an admirer of stability in conviction, he might have
found in these men the subject of something other than vituperation.
There are men among them who might have won the foremost places of
political advancement, could they have sacrificed their principles
to their ambition, could they believe that public honors would heal
as well as hide the wounds of self-respect. It is the South that
advocates disunion, from sectional motives, and adds the spice of
treason. The "London Cotton-Plant" says,--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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