The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet ItHelper, Hinton Rowan
History
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
Helper, Hinton Rowan
Slavery -- United States
An army of brave and worthy successors--champions of Freedom now living,
have the illustrious forefathers of the North, in the persons of Garrison,
Greeley, Giddings, Goodell, Grow, and Gerrit Smith; in Seward, Sumner,
Stowe, Raymond, Parker, and Phillips; in Beecher, Banks, Burlingame,
Bryant, Hale, and Hildreth; in Emerson, Dayton, Thompson, Tappan, King and
Cheever; in Whittier, Wilson, Wade, Wayland, Weed, and Burleigh. These are
the men whom, in connection with their learned and eloquent compatriots,
the Everetts, the Bancrofts, the Prescotts, the Chapins, the Longfellows,
and the Danas, future historians, if faithful to their calling, will place
on record as America's true statesmen, literati, preachers, philosophers,
and philanthropists, of the present age.
In this connection, however, it may not be amiss to remark that the
Homers, the Platos, the Bacons, the Newtons, the Shakspeares, the Miltons,
the Blackstones, the Cuviers, the Humboldts, and the Macaulays of America,
have not yet been produced; nor, in our humble judgment, will they be,
until slavery shall have been overthrown and freedom established in the
States of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Upon the soil of those
States, when free, or on other free soil crossed by about the same degrees
of latitude, and not distant from the Appalachian chain of mountains,
will, we believe, be nurtured into manhood, in the course of one or two
centuries, perhaps, as great men as those mentioned above--greater,
possibly, than any that have ever yet lived. Whence their ancestors may
come, whether from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, from Oceanica, from
North or South America, or from the islands of the sea, or whatever
honorable vocation they may now be engaged in, matters nothing at all. For
ought we know, their great-grandfathers are now humble artisans in Maine,
or moneyed merchants in Massachusetts; illiterate poor whites in
Mississippi, or slave-driving lordlings in South Carolina; frugal farmers
in Michigan, or millionaires in Illinois; daring hunters in the Rocky
Mountains, or metal-diggers in California; peasants in France, or princes
in Germany--no matter where, or what, the scope of country above-mentioned
is, in our opinion, destined to be the birth-place of their illustrious
offspring--the great savans of the New World, concerning whom we should
console ourselves with the hope that they are not buried deeply in the
matrix of the future.
CHAPTER V.
TESTIMONY OF THE NATIONS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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