Slavery Ordained of God | Page 4

the charity of emancipating the slave. You have left us, unaided, to give millions. Will you now come to our help? Will you give dollar for dollar to equalize our loss? [Here many voices cried out, "Yes, yes, we will."]
Yes, yes? Then pour out your millions. Good. I may thank you personally. My own emancipated slaves would to-day be worth greatly more than $20,000. Will you give me back $10,000? Good. I need it now.
I recommend to you, sirs, to find out your advocates of _murder_,--your owners of stock in under-ground railroads,--your Sabbath-breakers for money. I particularly urge you to find Legree, who whipped Uncle Tom to death. He is a Northern _gentleman_, although having a somewhat Southern name. Now, sir, you know the Assembly was embarrassed all yesterday by the inquiry how the Northern churches may find their absent members, and what to do with them. Here then, sir, is a chance for you. Send a committee up Red River. You may find Legree to be a Garrison, Phillips, Smith, or runaway husband from some Abby Kelly. [Here Rev. Mr. Smith protested against Legree being proved to be a Smith. Great laughter. [Footnote: This gentleman was soon after made a D.D., and I think in part for that witticism.]] I move that you bring him back to lecture on the cuteness there is in leaving a Northern church, going South, changing his name, buying slaves, and calculating, without _guessing_, what the profit is of killing a negro with inhuman labor above the gain of treating him with kindness.
I have little to say of spirit-rappers, women's-rights conventionists, Bloomers, cruel husbands, or hen-pecked. But, if we may believe your own serious as well as caricature writers, you have things up here of which we down South know very little indeed. Sir, we have no young Bloomers, with hat to one side, cigar in mouth, and cane tapping the boot, striding up to a mincing young gentleman with long curls, attenuated waist, and soft velvet face,--the boy-lady to say, "May I see you home, sir?" and the lady-boy to reply, "I thank ye--no; pa will send the carriage." Sir, we of the South don't understand your women's-rights conventions. Women have their wrongs. "The Song of the Shirt,"--Charlotte Elizabeth,--many, many laws,--tell her wrongs. But your convention ladies despise the Bible. Yes, sir; and we of the South are afraid _of them_, and for you. When women despise the Bible, what next? _Paris,--then the City of the Great Salt Lake,--then Sodom, before_ and after the Dead Sea. Oh, sir, if slavery tends in any way to give the honour of chivalry to Southern young gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy and heavenly integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious blessing with its curse.
Sir, your inquisitorial committee, and the North so far as represented by them, (a small fraction, I know,) have, I take it, caught a Tartar this time. Boys say with us, and everywhere, I _reckon_, "You worry my dog, and I'll worry your cat." Sir, it is just simply a _fixed fact: the South will not submit to these questions_. No, not for an instant. We will not permit you to approach us at all. If we are morbidly sensitive, you have made us so. But you are directly and grossly violating the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church. The book forbids you to put such questions; the book forbids _you to begin discipline_; the book forbids your sending this committee to help common fame bear testimony against us; the book guards the honour of our humblest member, minister, church, presbytery, against all this impertinently-inquisitorial action. Have you a _prosecutor_, with his definite charge and witnesses? Have you _Common Fame_, with her specified charges and witnesses? Have you a request from the South that you send a committee to inquire into slanders? No. Then hands off. As gentlemen you may ask us these questions,--we will answer you. But, ecclesiastically, you cannot speak in this matter. You have no power to move as you propose.
I beg leave to say, just here, that Tennessee [Footnote: At that time I resided in Tennessee.] will be more calm under this movement than any other slave-region. Tennessee has been ever high above the storm, North and South,--especially we of the mountains. Tennessee!--"there she is,--look at her,"--binding this Union together like a great, long, broad, deep stone,--more splendid than all in the temple of Baalbec or Solomon. Tennessee!--there she is, in her calm valour. I will not lower her by calling her unconquerable, for she has never been assailed; but I call her ever-victorious. King's Mountain,--her pioneer battles:--Talladega, Emucfau, Horse-shoe, New Orleans, San Jacinto, Monterey, the Valley of Mexico. Jackson represented her well in his chivalry from South Carolina,--his fiery courage from