Whittier sang: The evil days have come,—the poor Are made a prey; Bar up the hospitable door, Put out the firelights, point no more For Pity now is crime; the chain Is melted at her hearth in twain, Is rusted by her tears' soft rain: Mr. Beecher was, of course, in rebellion against the atrocious law which denied trial by jury, opportunity on the part of the accused to summon witnesses in his own defense, or a hearing before a competent judge. "Dumb, undefended, his destiny at the mercy of any accuser, and of a commissioner possibly ignorant and possibly vicious, the accused was consigned to a state worse than death."1 An underground railroad, designed to facilitate the escape of fugitives from bondage, was actively manned the whole distance from Mason and Dixon's line to the Canadian border. On the other hand, colored people at the North who were free were often kidnapped and hurried into Southern slavery. Those were days of hot feeling. Mr. Beecher, in a Star paper that was published in October, 1850, said: "If in God's providence fugitives ask bread or shelter, raiment or conveyance from us, my own children shall lack bread before they; my own flesh 144 Biography," p. 239. will sting with cold ere they shall lack raiment; I will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their flight, and while they are under my shelter or my convoy they shall be to me as my own flesh and blood." The principle of his action is thus described: "Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his person, estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed; but no citizen is bound to obey the law which commands him to inflict injury upon another. We must endure, but never commit wrong." "Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by congressional enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution; we only ask that a line be drawn about it; that an insuperable bank be cast up; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must find no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must abide in its place, subject to all legitimate changes which will be brought upon it by the spirit of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually into every profession thousands bred to justice and hating its reverse, by Churches preaching a Gospel that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which always thrive best when the masses are free and refined, and, therefore, have their wants multiplied by free agriculture and free commerce." Mr. Beecher's policy, thus outlined, while coming far short of the absolute justice demanded by the Abolitionists, was substantially the policy which the Republican party was destined to inaugurate and pursue. The difficulty with this policy, however, was that it could not possibly be executed without arousing the South to fiercer hostilities. By its very nature slavery must expand or die. Liberty might, as Mr. Beecher well said, if left alone, be always a match for oppression, but under the circumstances in America the South, believing in slavery and taught by Calhoun to believe also in secession, was steadily making ready, with the continued growth of this anti-slavery movement in the North, for the great Civil War. CHAPTER XVIII. A LIGHT IN AMERICA'S DARK AGE. WITHOUT any personal bitterness, Mr. Beecher continued his fearless agitation. One result of it was this, that personal abuse was showered upon him without stint. As the years went by, the pro-slavery feeling became so bitter in the North that Mr. Beecher "naturally received the largest share of abuse from pro-slavery journals, and incurred the lion's part of mercantile, commercial, and social displeasure."' His name became a hated name; he aroused all sorts of opposition, and it penetrated all grades of society, from the highest to the lowest. It was evident that if hatred could ever find a weak point in his armor, if ever personal scandal should attach itself to his reputation, there would be wide and eager credulity on the part of great masses of his own countrymen. There were ecclesiastical circles, large and influential, where, for many years, his name was mentioned only to be abused. He was lampooned in Harper's Weekly, which printed a full-page cartoon of him declining to administer communion to Washington because the Father of his Country owned slaves. In the time of the struggle for freedom in Kansas, Howard's "Life of Henry Ward Beecher," p. 243. Plymouth Church and its pastor were the objects of intense malignity on the part of the roughs in New York and Brooklyn; and one Sunday evening, in 1856, a company of "lewd fellows of the baser sort" entered Plymouth Church for the purpose of cleaning out the accursed Abolition nest. A large police force, however, were present, and fifty gentlemen, including some of the trustees of the Church, armed themselves with revolvers, and the hostile demonstration was confined to the muttering of curses and threats against all negro-worshipers as the would-be mob passed into the street again. A fearless and powerful speaker, with a great Church behind him sympathetic with his utterances, dealing vigorous blows at every form of iniquity, prejudice, and sluggish conservatism, Mr. Beecher became more hated than any other of the antislavery leaders. Garrison and Phillips would have excited perhaps intenser malignity, but they were deemed by many such extremists and fanatics, and their following was so much smaller and their connection with the Church so slender, that they escaped some of the bitter contumely which smote the popular pastor of Plymouth Church. "Whenever he spoke, the size of the church or hall alone decided the number of hearers. Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest desire to do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and high as there was in the land." In daily augmenting numbers the friends of freedom gathered 1" Biography," p. 245. |