The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 42, April, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 42, April, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
all the anti-republican affinities already strongly developed. It makes
deeper the chasm dividing the rich and the poor; it increases vastly the
ranks of the uneducated; and, finally, while most unnaturally forcing
the increase of the already threatening African infusion, it also tends
to make the servile condition more unendurable, and its burdens heavier.
The modern Southern politician is the least far-seeing of all our
short-sighted classes of American statesmen. In the existence of a
nation, a generation should be considered but as a year in the life of
man, and a century but as a generation of citizens. Soon or late, in the
lives of this generation or of their descendants, in the Union or out
of the Union, the servile members of this Confederacy must, under the
results of the prolonged dynasty of Cotton, make their election either
to purchase their security, like Cuba, by dependence on the strong arm
of external force, or they must meet national exigencies, pass through
revolutions, and destroy and reconstruct governments, making every
movement on the surface of a seething, heaving volcano. All movements of
the present, looking only to the forms of government of the master, must
be carried on before the face of the slave, and the question of class
will ever be complicated by that of caste. What the result of the
ever-increasing tendencies of the Cotton dynasty will be it is therefore
impossible to more than dream. But is it fair to presume that the
immense servile population should thus see upturnings and revolutions,
dynasties rising and falling before their eyes, and ever remain quiet
and contented? "Nothing," said Jefferson, "is more surely written in the
Book of Fate than that this people must be free." Fit for freedom at
present they are not, and, under the existing policy of the Cotton
dynasty, never can be. "Whether under any circumstances they could
become so is not here a subject of discussion; but, surely, the day will
come when the white caste will wish the experiment had been tried. The
argument of the Cotton King against the alleviation of the condition of
the African is, that his nature does not admit of his enjoyment of true
freedom consistently with the security of the community, and therefore
he must have none. But certainly his school has been of the worst. Would
not, perhaps, the reflections applied to the case of the French peasants
of a century ago apply also to them?" It is not under oppression that
we learn how to use freedom. The ordinary sophism by which misrule is
defended is, when truly stilted, this: The people must continue in
slavery, because slavery has generated in them all the vices of slaves;
because they are ignorant, they must remain under a power which has made
and which keeps them ignorant; because they have been made ferocious by
misgovernment, they must be misgoverned forever. If the system under
which they live were so mild and liberal that under its operation they
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