The Right of American Slavery

Part 1

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THE

RIGHT

AMERICAN SLAVERY.

T. W. HOIT,

OF THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION.

SOUTHERN AND WESTERN EDITION.

FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS, 500,000 COPIES.

FOR SALE BY THE PRINCIPAL PUBLISHERS THROUGHOUT THE UNION.

ST. LOUIS, MO.: PUBLISHED BY L. BUSHNELL. 1860.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860,

By T. W. HOIT,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States in and for the District of Missouri.

BAKER & GODWIN, PRINTERS, Printing-House Square, opposite City Hall, NEW YORK.

PREFACE.

TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

My Fellow Countrymen:--Upon what manner of times have we fallen? Is our supposed experiment of self-government about to prove a failure? Are we so blind as not to see the abyss into which we are about to plunge? Section hostile against section; States arrayed against the Constitution; Churches sundered; the springs of intelligence poisoned at their source; treason stalking at noonday; insurrection rife; the equality of States and citizens denied, and derided; justice rebuked; treachery applauded; traitors canonized; anarchy inaugurated; monarchy calculating the end of republicanism; and the wheels of government clogged by the minions of despotism! All this, my Countrymen, and you passive, silent, sightless; reckless of your own and your children's doom? And while all this is true, you go about your usual avocations, as though the eyes of the civilized world were not upon you; as though the great, the good, the magnanimous of all lands were not breathless, and spell-bound, and appalled at the spectacle; as though the prophetic admonitions of the Father of our Country were forgotten, and nature, with an ominous silence, conspired to lull you into forgetfulness, the more to astound you with the wonders and the woes of an approaching catastrophe!

What fatal error is there in our Republican principle? What virus sickens our body politic? What fascination lures us from the shrine of freedom? What infatuation hath seized the American people, that they should put to hazard this priceless inheritance,--the home, and refuge, and hope, of the down-trodden nations?

I aver there is a fatal fallacy adopted by a large number of the American people, which, if not rejected, will lead us down to national oblivion. That fallacy is exposed in the following pages, by showing what is right, and what is wrong, and explaining the fundamental error by which our public opinion is divided, and the way of a reunion pointed out. No one can desire to remain in error. It is the desire to do right which animates the great mass of the American people. It was, perhaps, the desire to do right, that made John Brown a rebel and a traitor, and which consigned him to a traitor's doom. There is no safety, then, in desiring to do right; but to KNOW what is right, and to DO it. The time has now arrived when the American people must do right, or suffer the penalty of doing wrong.

Good intentions will not do. Good DEEDS are demanded,--actions founded upon truth and justice, and in accordance with nature's irrevocable laws. We boast of our greatness, and power, and intelligence. Of what avail are all these, if they will not save us from national ruin? What boots it that a slumbering giant dreams of his strength while he is falling upon the bosom of a burning lake? The mightiest empires have sunk to oblivion. Are we soon to follow them?

Our material greatness and vigor seem to forbid the idea of premature decay; but let us not be blind to the delusive dream of an immortality springing from mental imbecility, nor the chimera of a political finality in governmental system which establishes and tolerates INJUSTICE, nor the permanence of a State in the midst of preponderating elements of fluctuating popular delusion.

Either the institutions under which we live are founded in truth, or they are founded in error. Our constitution is the work of wisdom, or of folly. It is founded in justice, or injustice; in RIGHT, or wrong. Shall we honor the astuteness of its founders, and perpetuate these institutions to remotest ages? or shall we prove recreant to this trust, unworthy of these manifold blessings, and in our mental blindness and moral imbecility invoke the scorn of future ages, and the just execrations of all mankind?

The material elements of greatness of the Great American Republic, must be vivified and enlivened by a corresponding degree of INTELLECT; they must be permeated by an adequate element of illuminating soul, or they will fall, a lifeless mass, into chaotic ruin. Let us remember

"That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labored mote away; Whilst self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky."

THE RIGHT OF SLAVERY.

INTRODUCTION.

AFRICAN SLAVERY is, at present, the subject of all-absorbing interest to the American mind; for, our people, almost intoxicated with their own freedom, seem unsatisfied with those manifold blessings acquired by the labors of their sires; and while they are conscious of not excelling them in wisdom, virtue, or valor, they are becoming ideal, and seem willing to sacrifice the practical, safe rules of republican action, for mere idealisms, born in the dizzy sphere of their own over-wrought imaginations. They tremble at the name of Washington, whose purity and moral power shed lustre upon the name of man, and they worship him as a god; but while the REAL WASHINGTON commands the homage of mankind, and stands the intermediate between the race of men and the Infinite, we find the imaginations of men ignoring reason, and embarked upon a voyage aerial, amid the clouds. There they revel high above the mountain tops of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, where the atmosphere is pure, where the light is clear, and where the lightnings play; but, alas for human weakness and frailty! they are there only in imagination, though the splendid illusion is to them a reality, and the pleasing dream of ideal beauty, which, by the magic power of transmutation, annihilates or obliterates the reason and memory, destroys those distinctions of great and little, right and wrong, weakness and power, which nature has arbitrarily made, and the experience of mankind recognized as fundamental; upon which all law is based, and all order and civilization sustained and advanced, for the security and elevation of nations and of men.

THE IDEAL AND THE REAL

Part 2

This ideal element so predominates, in consequence of over or false culture; by the reading of a spurious literature, which dwells in the regions of fiction and romance, to the proportionate neglect of the stirring incidents of our time, which actually go to make up true history--which seem marvellous enough of themselves, without the necessity of invention, or the aid of artificial novelties, except for mere embellishment.

It would seem that the rise and progress of this Republic; the spread of our ocean commerce; the building of a thousand cities; the rush of the world to our shores; the peopling of our boundless plains; the rapid birth of new States into our Union; the triumph of our arms; our repeated accessions of territory; our maritime and commercial superiority; our foreign discoveries; our inventions in mechanism; our discoveries in science; the use of steam, and electricity; our statesmanship, and foreign diplomacy; a thousand miraculous incidents of individual enterprise and success; the discovery of gold, of silver, and iron; our internal improvements and meliorations; our national prestige; and finally, our greatness and glory as a nation,--ought to suffice for any reasonable conception of the marvellous, as they outstrip the more ignoble creations of fancy, and absolutely invade the former domain of fiction and romance. Hence the seeming puerility of fiction when contrasted with these more wondrous phenomena of fact. The substitution of fiction for fact is, therefore, unnecessary and absurd, as it defeats the very purpose intended, by its own inferiority. Its chief effect, then, is but to mislead the mind.

Let us, then, control the imagination; discard the ideal in practical affairs, hold it in its sphere, and adopt the REAL, in order that by the exercise of right reason we may be enabled to consider the present subject as it is, and not as it would be when weighed in the scale of the ideal; for in this way, and this alone, can we come to just conclusions, and our labors result in practical benefit to those most concerned in the premises. In the spirit of truth, of candor, of sober reality, let us, therefore, approach the subject of American Slavery.

THE NEGRO EVER A SLAVE.

The Negro has been a slave from time immemorial. This is shown from the earliest Egyptian monuments, paintings, and traditions. Herodotus, the father of Grecian History, tells us of negro slavery in Ancient Greece. It existed in Rome also. During the tenth century of the Christian era, the Moors, from Barbary, established an extensive traffic in the cities of Nigritia, where they bought large numbers of slaves; and the merchants of Seville brought slaves from the western coast of Africa, and established slavery in that city, and in Andalusia, long before the time of Columbus. It is also a curious fact in history, that Hanno, the great Carthagenian commander and discoverer, having explored Africa from the Straits of Gibraltar to the bounds of Arabia, brought back to Carthage a cargo of ourang-outangs, which he supposed to be Negro men and women; showing more historically his estimate of African character, than his familiarity with Natural History. The Negro has ever been a slave; and it is to be considered whether his quick and sudden transition from slavery to freedom, by emancipation, is probable or possible, or is sanctioned by the history of human development and progress.

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