VIII.: The Future.

I find that my letters from Kanzas seem incomplete without a final appendix, in regard to the immediate future of that region. Perhaps the observation of a visitor to the Territory may have seen some things in a different light from that of its residents, or from that of those who have never been there.

Moreover, I have observed for many years that the more thorough an Abolitionist any man is, the more correct are his prophecies as to American affairs; and in this respect, at least, the present writer is pretty well qualified. I will therefore give the reasons which lead me to think, contrary to the opinions of many at the East, that the present comparative quiet of Kanzas is only the prelude to a severer struggle than any she has yet seen; that this struggle will occur soon after the Presidential election; and that it will be almost equally certain to occur, whether Fremont or Buchanan be elected.

The foundation for these opinions can be made very intelligible.

1. The real question at issue is, not the invasions of Missourians, nor the blockading of the river, but the enforcing of the bogus laws. The laws still exist, the Courts are still controlled by Missouri, and this is the real root of the difficulty, over which neither Governor Geary nor any one else (except Congress) has any legitimate control. The essential trouble, therefore, must either remain unsettled till Congress meets again, or be settled by force.

2. There is not the slightest increase of harmony between the parties, but the contrary. Both sides expect to see the contest renewed. I did not hear of a single man, on either side, except Governor Geary and his satellites, who thought otherwise.

3. Both sides are making actual preparations for a renewal. The settlers are collecting arms, ammunition, and fresh men. The Missourians are doing the same. True, men from both sides are leaving the country; but they are going, either with the design to return soon after the election, or else from personal dissatisfaction—not because they expect permanent peace.

4. Neither party desires peace, under the present auspices. The Missourians do not desire it, until they see that it involves the speedy introduction of Slavery. And the settlers do not desire it, when it means submission to the laws which a foreign State imposed upon them, and the daily arrest of their own men while Pro-Slavery men go free.

5. War always educates men to itself, disciplines them, teaches them to bear its fatigue, anxiety, and danger, and actually to enjoy them. I saw abundant instances of this on the Free State side; and I believe it to be so with the Missourians. Everybody testified that the army of two thousand eight hundred, which last besieged Lawrence, was better armed and better drilled than any previous invading force; and all agreed that at the battle of Hickory Point the Missourians showed more courage than ever before.

6. The whole tendency of Governor Geary’s policy is to exasperate both sides, and, indeed, actually to strengthen both. Take a single instance: What can be more preposterous than his plan of organizing the two parties, “man for man,” (as he expressed it to me,) into military companies? Imagine an Irish mob, and the Governor stopping them to say, “Hold on my hearties! lay down your shillelahs, while I give you Sharp’s rifles, teach you the art of war, and pick out your bravest men to lead you properly!” Yet this is precisely what Geary has done. He has organized two companies of Free State men, and two of Pro-Slavery men; he arms them, pays them, and officers them with the very leaders who have been foremost in the fray. At Lawrence, Captain Walker, who led the attack on Titus’s fort, now heads one company under the Governor’s system, while Titus heads another. Lieutenant Harvey, of the new Lawrence company, is the Colonel Harvey of Hickory Point notoriety. His men lie in prison, while he is put in office: but there is no change in him, only in the Governor. And in Topeka, with the other Free State company, the same folly is played over. The Governor may fancy this a peace measure, if he will; I call it a war measure, and confidently expect to see the conflict recommence among his own troops.

7. The reason why the strife is postponed, by tacit agreement, is easily told. The Missourians are waiting, in stronger and stronger hopes that Geary will do their work. The Free State men submit to his aggressions, only because the election is coming. That, and that only, gives them patience; precisely as the hope of flight to Canada keeps slaves from insurrection. They cling to the hope, not of escaping the contest, but of placing it on a more favorable footing. Take away the dream of Fremont, and no power could make these injured men endure a week longer the combined oppression of the Administration and of Missouri. Besides, every letter that comes to them from the East, exhorts them to “endure till November, and all will be well.” Is it strange, then, if they seem almost too submissive, with such a prospect?

8. The trial of the Lecompton prisoners will furnish fuel to the flames, and perhaps the final explosion. Most of them will, no doubt, be acquitted. But the Pro-Slavery men will not submit to the liberation of all, nor the Anti-Slavery men to the execution of any.

9. Look out, therefore, for trouble in Kanzas, in November. Elect Fremont, and there will be a last desperate effort of Missouri to obtain possession of Kanzas. In this they will rely on the aid of the United States Courts and troops, and will have it, whatever Gov. Geary says. The policy of the Administration will be unchanged. It is absurd to suppose that Pierce, Cushing, and Douglass will not still bid for Southern favor, after the election of Fremont. They will have nothing else left to do. They will look out for a Pro-Slavery reaction four years afterward, (and it will come then, if not sooner,) and steer for that wave. Still, the Kanzas men will have a great advantage, for the United States troops will not in that case act against them with a will, and they have nothing else to fear.

In case of Buchanan’s election, the whole power of Missouri, backed by the whole power of the Administration, will be directed upon Kanzas. The two forces will be identified. They will be brought to bear as one; and, thank God, resisted as one. The defenders of Freedom will fight, at last, as they never yet have fought. Heretofore, they have submitted to injuries from the weakest United States official, which they would never have borne from whole armies of Missourians. They will not make this nice distinction much longer. Oppression is oppression, wherever it comes from, they will say. “If that is treason, make the most of it.”

We must have a new dictionary, and the definition of this much abused word must be: “Treason, the rope by which the real traitors seek to hang those who resist them.”

Such treason as this is fast ripening in Kanzas. Call it revolution if you please.

If the United States Government and Border-Ruffianism are to mean the same thing, the sooner the people of Kanzas have revolution the better. So they will say, and who shall gainsay it? They have borne to the utmost. Another ounce of weight, and they will bear it no longer; and a less thing than the dispersion of their Legislature, or the destruction of their hotel, will be the signal.

Before I went to Kanzas I feared that her children would gradually scatter and flee, rather than meet a final, desperate struggle. I stand corrected. They will stay and meet it. They will meet it, if need be, unaided.

Will they be unaided? Ask Governor Grimes and the thousands of freemen of Iowa. Ask every man who has a heart left in his bosom.

Kanzas may be crushed, but not without a final struggle more fearful than that of Hungary; a struggle which will convulse a continent before it is ended, and separate forever those two nations of North and South, which neither Union nor Constitution has yet welded into one.

Published, for gratuitous distribution, at the Office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, No. 138 Nassau St., New York. Also, to be had at the Anti-Slavery Offices, No. 21 Cornhill, Boston, and 31 North Fifth St., Philadelphia, and at the Anti-Slavery Depository, Salem, Columbiana Co., Ohio.

One half the net proceeds of sale goes to the State Colonization Society!

In Baltimore and Annapolis it is only necessary that the meeting should be held “with the written permission of a white licensed ordained preacher.”

Extracts from a letter to the writer from a gentleman in Washington:—

“Williams & Co., of this city, sold a woman and two children to a slave-dealing house in Alexandria. While they were imprisoned, she murdered the children, and the purchaser sued the vender for selling him a vicious slave.”

“Williams & Co., (I think—perhaps their predecessors) of this city, bought a mother and two children near Rockville, Maryland, brought them here, and put them in their own prison on Seventh Street and Maryland Avenue. The mother murdered her two children, and then took her own life. My authority was a dark intimation in the National Intelligencer that a horrid deed had occurred in the city; and this was explained to me by the people here as referring to this murder and suicide. No one here ever doubted the facts, so far as I have information, though I had no other proof than that stated.”

“Another was that of a young woman who threw herself from the long bridge. The story has been poetically told by Grace Greenwood. Another was the case of a young man employed in a restaurant in one of the lower rooms of the Capitol. He learned that his master had sold him; he fled, was overtaken, and while his captors were preparing the irons, he took a knife from his pocket and cut his throat. This occurred some two years since.”

The Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D. D., in his “South Side View,” page 128, says, “There is a law of the land, a Constitution, to which we must submit, or employ suitable means to change it. While it remains, all our appeals to a ‘higher law’ are fanaticism.”

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by John P. Jewett & Co., in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

For the local offices, see bottom of page 12.

See also Mr. Webster’s Letter to the Citizens of Newburyport, dated May 15th, 1850, wherein he urges the same point, with great pains of argument.

The Slaveholders of Kentucky begin forming associations for mutual protection against loss of runaway slaves. The preamble of the plan of association, proposed at a meeting at Minerva, Kentucky, held in the winter of 1852-53, is as follows:—“Whereas it has become absolutely necessary for the slave-owners of Kentucky to take such steps as will secure their property, we, the citizens of Mason and Bracken counties, do recommend,” &c.

A correspondent of the New York Evening Post, writing from Columbus, Ohio, September 1, 1853, states that a very large number of fugitive slaves are continually passing through that State; that they are generally armed; and that they find increasing sympathy among the people on the road, and the boatmen on the lakes.

The case of Solomon Northup, though not under the Fugitive Law, is so striking an illustration of the power which created that law, and of the constant danger which impends over every colored citizen of the Northern States, fast threatening to include white citizens also, that it must not be passed over without mention. He was kidnapped in 1841, from the State of New York, and kept in slavery twelve years. Two men, named Merrill and Russell, were arrested and tried as his kidnappers, and the fact fully proven. But the case was got into the United States Courts, and the criminals went unpunished.

This may be illustrated by the position of the Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher. Probably no clergyman has been a more thorough representative of the system called “Evangelical,” or “Orthodox,” for the last thirty years, than he. He was at the zenith of his reputation when the Anti-Slavery movement commenced. But not only had he never commenced it, not only had he never been moved by his religion to say one word against the slaveholders with whom he was then, as now, in ecclesiastical connection, nor one word for the relief of the slaves, whom he knew to be unjustly held in bondage by his orthodox “brethren;” he declined acting in that direction at all, even incidentally, even so much as he has acted against intemperance, when such action was formally proposed to him. Twenty years ago, before Anti-Slavery had become complicated with the calumnious accusations that are now poured upon its advocates, when Mr. Garrison, then believing in the honesty and purity of the clergy, was appealing to them to aid in exposing the abominations of slavery, and in rousing at least the church to free herself from the disgrace of sustaining it, and when, seeing that the great champion of orthodoxy did not spontaneously recognize the claims of two millions of slaves upon the church under whose shadow they were oppressed, Mr. Garrison made it a special business to seek him, spread before him the facts, and urge him to do something in opposition to slavery; he declined, on the ground that he was occupied with other things of more consequence; and in the quarter of a century which has since elapsed, during which he has been actively fraternizing with slaveholders, and building up the form of religion which authenticates them as Christians, he seems to have advanced no farther in opposition to slavery than the discovery that it is undesirable for Kansas and Nebraska. I quote Dr. Beecher as a fair specimen of the influence of the popular religion upon a popular sin like slavery.

On the other hand, I wish distinctly to testify that a few clergymen (most of whom bear the stigma of heterodoxy as well as of anti-slavery) have stood, and still stand, prominent among the boldest, truest, firmest, and most self-sacrificing friends of the slave.

Dr. Edward Beecher enumerates eighteen clergymen (taking in New York and New Jersey with New England) who have published sermons or other addresses to this effect. Doubtless there were more, and a larger number not published. But what are these among so many of the opposite character? The exceptions prove the rule.

The Prudential Committee of Park Street Church notify you not to occupy any pew on the lower floor of Park Street Meeting House on any Sabbath, or on any other day during the time of divine worship, after this date; and if you go there with such intent, you hazard the consequences. The pews in the upper galleries are at your service.

“Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. We cannot but speak.”

“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

Matt. vii. 12, and xxii. 37 to 40.