"Could any Beatrice seeA lover in such anchorite!"
But in the mean time a reciprocal feeling was gaining strength in the heart of Margaret. To her grateful appreciation of the condescension of a great and good man—grave, learned, and renowned—to her youth and weakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers, devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enough the tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of his lonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies and kindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life. Did she not owe to him, under God, the salvation of body and mind? Was he not her truest and most faithful friend, entering with lively interest into all her joys and sorrows? Had she not seen the cloud of his habitual sadness broken by gleams of sunny warmth and cheerfulness, as they conversed together? Could she do better than devote herself to the pleasing task of making his life happier, of comforting him in seasons of pain and weariness, encouraging him in his vast labors, and throwing over the cold and hard austerities of his nature the warmth and light of domestic affection? Pity, reverence, gratitude, and womanly tenderness, her fervid imagination and the sympathies of a deeply religious nature, combined to influence her decision. Disparity of age and condition rendered it improbable that Baxter would ever venture to address her in any other capacity than that of a friend and teacher; and it was left to herself to give the first intimation of the possibility of a more intimate relation.
It is easy to imagine with what mixed feelings of joy, surprise, and perplexity Baxter must have received the delicate avowal. There was much in the circumstances of the case to justify doubt, misgiving, and close searchings of heart. He must have felt the painful contrast which that fair girl in the bloom of her youth presented to the worn man of middle years, whose very breath was suffering, and over whom death seemed always impending. Keenly conscious of his infirmities of temper, he must have feared for the happiness of a loving, gentle being, daily exposed to their manifestations. From his well-known habit of consulting what he regarded as the divine will in every important step of his life, there can be no doubt that his decision was the result quite as much of a prayerful and patient consideration of duty as of the promptings of his heart. Richard Baxter was no impassioned Abelard; his pupil in the school of his severe and self-denying piety was no Heloise; but what their union lacked in romantic interest was compensated by its purity and disinterestedness, and its sanction by all that can hallow human passion, and harmonize the love of the created with the love and service of the Creator.
Although summoned by a power which it would have been folly to resist, the tough theologian did not surrender at discretion. "From the first thoughts yet many changes and stoppages intervened, and long delays," he tells us. The terms upon which he finally capitulated are perfectly in keeping with his character. "She consented," he says, "to three conditions of our marriage. 1st. That I should have nothing that before our marriage was hers; that I, who wanted no earthly supplies, might not seem to marry her from selfishness. 2d. That she would so alter her affairs that I might be entangled in no lawsuits. 3d. That she should expect none of my time which my ministerial work should require."
As was natural, the wits of the Court had their jokes upon this singular marriage; and many of his best friends regretted it, when they called to mind what he had written in favor of ministerial celibacy, at a time when, as he says, "he thought to live and die a bachelor." But Baxter had no reason to regret the inconsistency of his precept and example. How much of the happiness of the next twenty years of his life resulted from his union with a kind and affectionate woman he has himself testified, in his simple and touching Breviate of the Life of the late Mrs. Baxter. Her affections were so ardent that her husband confesses his fear that he was unable to make an adequate return, and that she must have been disappointed in him in consequence. He extols her pleasant conversation, her active benevolence, her disposition to aid him in all his labors, and her noble forgetfulness of self, in ministering to his comfort, in sickness and imprisonment. "She was the meetest helper I could have had in the world," is his language. "If I spoke harshly or sharply, it offended her. If I carried it (as I am apt) with too much negligence of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestly tell me of it. If my looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend them (which my weak, pained state of body indisposed me to do)." He admits she had her failings, but, taken as a whole, the Breviate is an exalted eulogy.
His history from this time is marked by few incidents of a public character. During that most disgraceful period in the annals of England, the reign of the second Charles, his peculiar position exposed him to the persecutions of prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries, standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderate Episcopacy. He was between the upper millstone of High Church and the nether one of Dissent. To use his own simile, he was like one who seeks to fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close upon him with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of complaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity of purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had already done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack of judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. His utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and his writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution for not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he advocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power, and the right of that power to enforce conformity. He wrote against conformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yet held stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster, and declined the bishopric of Hereford. His writings were many of them directly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he was invariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, and quarrelled with his own converts to Dissent. The High Churchmen of Oxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; while Harrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned it for its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience to kings. He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterly complained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained the necessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerant doctrines of Penn and Milton. Never did a great and good man so entangle himself with contradictions and inconsistencies. The witty and wicked Sir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of his works a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter. The Antinomians found him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertook to show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns a Quaker and a Papist!
Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, upon matters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, he possessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt and misgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforce his settled opinions and cherished doctrines. His credulity at times seems boundless. Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all manner of evil of them, he readily came to the conclusion that their leaders were disguised Papists. He maintained that Lauderdale was a good and pious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to a place with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamous Dangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert from popish errors. To prove the existence of devils and spirits, he collected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiers scared from their posts at night by headless bears, of a young witch pulling the hooks out of Mr. Emlen's breeches and swallowing them, of Mr. Beacham's locomotive tobacco-pipe, and the Rev. Mr. Munn's jumping Bible, and of a drunken man punished for his intemperance by being lifted off his legs by an invisible hand! Cotton Mather's marvellous account of his witch experiments in New England delighted him. He had it republished, declaring that "he must be an obstinate Sadducee who doubted it."
The married life of Baxter, as might be inferred from the state of the times, was an unsettled one. He first took a house at Moorfields, then removed to Acton, where he enjoyed the conversation of his neighbor, Sir Matthew Hale; from thence he found refuge in Rickmansworth, and after that in divers other places. "The women have most of this trouble," he remarks, "but my wife easily bore it all." When unable to preach, his rapid pen was always busy. Huge folios of controversial and doctrinal lore followed each other in quick succession. He assailed Popery and the Establishment, Anabaptists, ultra Calvinists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchy men, and Quakers. His hatred of the latter was only modified by his contempt. He railed rather than argued against the "miserable creatures," as he styled them. They in turn answered him in like manner. "The Quakers," he says, "in their shops, when I go along London streets, say, 'Alas' poor man, thou art yet in darkness.' They have oft come to the congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's Gospel, and cried out against me as a deceiver of the people. They have followed me home, crying out in the streets, 'The day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt perish as a deceiver.' They have stood in the market-place, and under my window, year after year, crying to the people, 'Take heed of your priests, they deceive your souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neat clothing, they cried out to me, 'These are the fruits of your ministry.'"
At Rickmansworth, he found himself a neighbor of William Penn, whom he calls "the captain of the Quakers." Ever ready for battle, Baxter encountered him in a public discussion, with such fierceness and bitterness as to force from that mild and amiable civilian the remark, that he would rather be Socrates at the final judgment than Richard Baxter. Both lived to know each other better, and to entertain sentiments of mutual esteem. Baxter himself admits that the Quakers, by their perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance of penal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which would otherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes special mention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder's Court in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and the rights of the Great Charter.
The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against him whenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscription of himself and his friends. "They gathered," he complains, "out of mine and other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery and Quakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it as against the toleration of ourselves." It was in vain that he explained that he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderate enforcement of conformity. His plan for dealing with sentries reminds one of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impale the frog on the hook as gently as if they loved him.
While at Acton, he was complained of by Dr. Ryves, the rector, one of the King's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in his family with more than five strangers present. He was cast into Clerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him. On his discharge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wrote and published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made the ground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys.
On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure the greatest affliction of his life. His wife died on that day, after a brief illness. She who had been his faithful friend, companion, and nurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of his greatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling on her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door in some passion indeed of love and grief." In the preface to his poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so passion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reasons, which the world is not concerned to know; so my grief for her removal, and the revival of the sense of former things, have prevailed upon me to be passionate in the sight of all."
The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, are too well known to justify their detail in this sketch. He was sentenced to pay a fine of five hundred marks. Seventy years of age, and reduced to poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Bench prison. Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering. When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restored to freedom, he was already a dying man. But he came forth from prison as he entered it, unsubdued in spirit.
Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II., his soul put on the athletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act of toleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papists and sentries. Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, he retired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friend Sylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance. His death was quiet and peaceful. "I have pain," he said to his friend Mather; "there is no arguing against sense; but I have peace. I have peace." On being asked how he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"
He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and her mother had been placed. An immense concourse attended his funeral, of all ranks and parties. Conformist and Non-conformist forgot the bitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues and the piety of the man. Looking back on his life of self-denial and faithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him while living wept over his grave. During the last few years of his life, the severity of his controversial tone had been greatly softened; he lamented his former lack of charity, the circle of his sympathies widened, his social affections grew stronger with age, and love for his fellow-men universally, and irrespective of religious differences, increased within him. In his Narrative, written in the long, cool shadows of the evening of life, he acknowledges with extraordinary candor this change in his views and feelings. He confesses his imperfections as a writer and public teacher.
"I wish," he says, "all over-sharp passages were expunged from my writings, and I ask forgiveness of God and man." He tells us that mankind appear more equal to him; the good are not so good as he once thought, nor the bad so evil; and that in all there is more for grace to make advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than he once believed. "I less admire," he continues, "gifts of utterance, and the bare profession of religion, than I once did, and have now much more charity for those who, by want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession."
He laments the effects of his constitutional irritability and impatience upon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that his bodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tenderness and love of his heart. Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolable regret which dictated the following paragraph?
"When God forgiveth me, I cannot forgive myself, especially for my rash words and deeds by which I have seemed injurious and less tender and kind than I should have been to my near and dear relations, whose love abundantly obliged me. When such are dead, though we never differed in point of interest or any other matter, every sour or cross or provoking word which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcilable to myself, and tells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they had wronged to forgive them, in the hurry of their passion."
His pride as a logician and skilful disputant abated in the latter and better portion of his life he had more deference to the judgment of others, and more distrust of his own. "You admire," said he to a correspondent who had lauded his character, "one you do not know; knowledge will cure your error." In his Narrative he writes: "I am much more sensible than heretofore of the breadth and length and depth of the radical, universal, odious sin of selfishness, and therefore have written so much against it; and of the excellency and necessity of self-denial and of a public mind, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves." Against many difficulties and discouragements, both within himself and in his outward circumstances, he strove to make his life and conversation an expression of that Christian love whose root, as he has said with equal truth and beauty, "is set
In humble self-denial, undertrod,While flower and fruit are growing up to God."
Of the great mass of his writings, more voluminous than those of any author of his time, it would ill become us to speak with confidence. We are familiar only with some of the best of his practical works, and our estimate of the vast and appalling series of his doctrinal, metaphysical and controversial publications would be entitled to small weight, as the result of very cursory examination. Many of them relate to obsolete questions and issues, monumental of controversies long dead, and of disputatious doctors otherwise forgotten. Yet, in respect to even these, we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capable of appreciating the character of Baxter as a writer. "What works of Mr. Baxter shall I read?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them," was the answer, "for they are all good." He has left upon all the impress of his genius. Many of them contain sentiments which happily find favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychological disquisitions, which look oddly enough in the light of the intellectual progress of nearly two centuries; dissertations upon evil spirits, ghosts, and witches, which provoke smiles at the good man's credulity; but everywhere we find unmistakable evidences of his sincerity and earnest love of truth. He wrote under a solemn impression of duty, allowing neither pain, nor weakness, nor the claims of friendship, nor the social enjoyments of domestic affection, to interfere with his sleepless intensity of purpose. He stipulated with his wife, before marriage, that she should not expect him to relax, even for her society, the severity of his labors. He could ill brook interruption, and disliked the importunity of visitors. "We are afraid, sir, we break in upon your time," said some of his callers to him upon one occasion. "To be sure you do," was his answer. His seriousness seldom forsook him; there is scarce a gleam of gayety in all his one hundred and sixty-eight volumes. He seems to have relished, however, the wit of others, especially when directed against what he looked upon as error. Marvell's inimitable reply to the High-Church pretensions of Parker fairly overcame his habitual gravity, and he several times alludes to it with marked satisfaction; but, for himself, he had no heart for pleasentry. His writings, like his sermons, were the earnest expostulations of a dying man with dying men. He tells us of no other amusement or relaxation than the singing of psalms. "Harmony and melody," said he, "are the pleasure and elevation of my soul. It was not the least comfort that I had in the converse of my late dear wife, that our first act in the morning and last in bed at night was a psalm of praise."
It has been fashionable to speak of Baxter as a champion of civil and religious freedom. He has little claim to such a reputation. He was the stanch advocate of monarchy, and of the right and duty of the State to enforce conformity to what he regarded as the essentials of religious belief and practice. No one regards the prelates who went to the Tower, under James II., on the ground of conscientious scruples against reading the King's declaration of toleration to Dissenters, as martyrs in the cause of universal religious freedom. Nor can Baxter, although he wrote much against the coercion and silencing of godly ministers, and suffered imprisonment himself for the sake of a good conscience, be looked upon in the light of an intelligent and consistent confessor of liberty. He did not deny the abstract right of ecclesiastical coercion, but complained of its exercise upon himself and his friends as unwarranted and unjust.
One of the warmest admirers and ablest commentators of Baxter designates the leading and peculiar trait of his character as unearthliness. In our view, this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly, for a full and healthful development of his nature as a man, or of the graces, charities, and loves of the Christian. He undervalued the common blessings and joys of life, and closed his eyes and ears against the beauty and harmony of outward nature. Humanity, in itself considered, seemed of small moment to him; "passing away" was written alike on its wrongs and its rights, its pleasures and its pains; death would soon level all distinctions; and the sorrows or the joys, the poverty or the riches, the slavery or the liberty, of the brief day of its probation seemed of too little consequence to engage his attention and sympathies. Hence, while he was always ready to minister to temporal suffering wherever it came to his notice, he made no efforts to remove its political or social causes. In this respect he differed widely from some of his illustrious contemporaries. Penn, while preaching up and down the land, and writing theological folios and pamphlets, could yet urge the political rights of Englishmen, mount the hustings for Algernon Sydney, and plead for unlimited religious liberty; and Vane, while dreaming of a coming millennium and reign of the saints, and busily occupied in defending his Antinomian doctrines, could at the same time vindicate, with tongue and pen, the cause of civil and religious freedom. But Baxter overlooked the evils and oppressions which were around him, and forgot the necessities and duties of the world of time and sense in his earnest aspirations towards the world of spirits. It is by no means an uninstructive fact, that with the lapse of years his zeal for proselytism, doctrinal disputations, and the preaching of threats and terrors visibly declined, while love for his fellow-men and catholic charity greatly increased, and he was blessed with a clearer perception of the truth that God is best served through His suffering children, and that love and reverence for visible humanity is an indispensable condition of the appropriate worship of the Unseen God.
But, in taking leave of Richard Baxter, our last words must not be those of censure. Admiration and reverence become us rather. He was an honest man. So far as we can judge, his motives were the highest and best which can influence human action. He had faults and weaknesses, and committed grave errors, but we are constrained to believe that the prayer with which he closes his Saints' Rest and which we have chosen as the fitting termination of our article, was the earnest aspiration of his life:—
"O merciful Father of Spirits! suffer not the soul of thy unworthy servant to be a stranger to the joys which he describes to others, but keep me while I remain on earth in daily breathing after thee, and in a believing affectionate walking with thee! Let those who shall read these pages not merely read the fruits of my studies, but the breathing of my active hope and love; that if my heart were open to their view, they might there read thy love most deeply engraven upon it with a beam from the face of the Son of God; and not find vanity or lust or pride within where the words of life appear without, that so these lines may not witness against me, but, proceeding from the heart of the writer, be effectual through thy grace upon the heart of the reader, and so be the savor of life to both."
"O Freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,And wavy tresses, gushing from the capWith which the Roman master crowned his slave,When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed handGrasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarredWith tokens of old wars; thy massive limbsAre strong with struggling. Power at thee has launchedHis bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;They could not quench the life thou hast from Heaven."BRYANT.
WHEN the noblest woman in all France stood on the scaffold, just before her execution, she is said to have turned towards the statue of Liberty, —which, strangely enough, had been placed near the guillotine, as its patron saint,—with the exclamation, "O Liberty! what crimes have been committed in thy name!" It is with a feeling akin to that which prompted this memorable exclamation of Madame Roland that the sincere lover of human freedom and progress is often compelled to regard American democracy.
For democracy, pure and impartial,—the self-government of the whole; equal rights and privileges, irrespective of birth or complexion; the morality of the Gospel of Christ applied to legislation; Christianity reduced to practice, and showering the blessings of its impartial love and equal protection upon all, like the rain and dews of heaven,—we have the sincerest love and reverence. So far as our own government approaches this standard—and, with all its faults, we believe it does so more nearly than any other—it has our hearty and steadfast allegiance. We complain of and protest against it only where, in its original framework or actual administration, it departs from the democratic principle. Holding, with Novalis, that the Christian religion is the root of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man, we regard the New Testament as the true political text-book; and believe that, just in proportion as mankind receive its doctrines and precepts, not merely as matters of faith and relating to another state of being, but as practical rules, designed for the regulation of the present life as well as the future, their institutions, social arrangements, and forms of government will approximate to the democratic model. We believe in the ultimate complete accomplishment of the mission of Him who came "to preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them that are bound." We look forward to the universal dominion of His benign humanity; and, turning from the strife and blood, the slavery, and social and political wrongs of the past and present, anticipate the realization in the distant future of that state when the song of the angels at His advent shall be no longer a prophecy, but the jubilant expression of a glorious reality,—"Glory to God in the highest! Peace on earth, and good will to man!"
For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, as a party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very little respect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize the advantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation. But if it has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree of oppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself to be made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it. It has allowed itself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally of slavery." It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf of freedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures. Nominally the advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the colored citizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyed under a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush. Perhaps the most shameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Island struggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven and earth to witness its readiness to encounter all the horrors of civil war, in defence of the holy principle of equal and universal suffrage, deliberately excluded colored Rhode Islanders from the privilege of voting. In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the same party declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rule in the case of the colored inhabitants. Its course on the question of excluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read of all.
After such exhibitions of its practice, its professions have lost their power. The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living down its principles is, to an earnest mind, well nigh insufferable. Pertinent were the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, "Shall a man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Shall he reason with unprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?" Enough of wearisome talk we have had about "progress," the rights of "the masses," the "dignity of labor," and "extending the area of freedom"! "Clear your mind of cant, sir," said Johnson to Boswell; and no better advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Work out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of your duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, your hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings? A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in heaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this subject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cutting severity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, in justification of her indignant rebuke of her wicked mother:—
"'Tis you that say it, not IYou do the unholy deeds which find rue words."
Yet in that party calling itself democratic we rejoice to recognize true, generous, and thoroughly sincere men,—lovers of the word of democracy, and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in deceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democratic voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate slavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of the matter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining. To them, at least, democracy means something more than collectorships, consulates, and governmental contracts. For the sake of securing a monopoly of these to a few selfish and heartless party managers, they are not prepared to give up the distinctive principles of democracy, and substitute in their place the doctrines of the Satanic school of politics. They will not much longer consent to stand before the world as the slavery party of the United States, especially when policy and expediency, as well as principle, unite in recommending a position more congenial to the purposes of their organization, the principles of the fathers of their political faith, the spirit of the age, and the obligations of Christianity.
The death-blow of slavery in this country will be given by the very power upon which it has hitherto relied with so much confidence. Abused and insulted Democracy will, erelong, shake off the loathsome burden under which it is now staggering. In the language of the late Theodore Sedgwiek, of Massachusetts, a consistent democrat of the old school: "Slavery, in all its forms, is anti-democratic,—an old poison left in the veins, fostering the worst principles of aristocracy, pride, and aversion to labor; the natural enemy of the poor man, the laboring man, the oppressed man. The question is, whether absolute dominion over any creature in the image of man be a wholesome power in a free country; whether this is a school in which to train the young republican mind; whether slave blood and free blood can course healthily together in the same body politic. Whatever may be present appearances, and by whatever name party may choose to call things, this question must finally be settled by the democracy of the country."
This prediction was made eight years ago, at a time when all the facts in the case seemed against the probability of its truth, and when only here and there the voice of an indignant freeman protested against the exulting claims of the slave power upon the democracy as its "natural ally." The signs of the times now warrant the hope of its fulfilment. Over the hills of the East, and over the broad territory of the Empire State, a new spirit is moving. Democracy, like Balaam upon Zophim, has felt the divineafflatus, and is blessing that which it was summoned to curse.
The present hopeful state of things is owing, in no slight degree, to the self-sacrificing exertions of a few faithful and clear-sighted men, foremost among whom was the late William Leggett; than whom no one has labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions.
William Leggett! Let our right hand forget its cunning, when that name shall fail to awaken generous emotions and aspirations for a higher and worthier manhood! True man and true democrat; faithful always to Liberty, following wherever she led, whether the storm beat in his face or on his back; unhesitatingly counting her enemies his own, whether in the guise of Whig monopoly and selfish expediency, or democratic servility north of Mason and Dixon's line towards democratic slaveholding south of it; poor, yet incorruptible; dependent upon party favor, as a party editor, yet risking all in condemnation of that party, when in the wrong; a man of the people, yet never stooping to flatter the people's prejudices,—he is the politician, of all others, whom we would hold up to the admiration and imitation of the young men of our country. What Fletcher of Saltoun is to Scotland, and the brave spirits of the old Commonwealth time—
"Hands that pennedAnd tongues that uttered wisdom, better noneThe later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington,Young Vane, and others, who called Milton friend—"
are to England, should Leggett be to America. His character was formed on these sturdy democratic models. Had he lived in their day, he would have scraped with old Andrew Marvell the bare blade-bone of poverty, or even laid his head on the block with Vane, rather than forego his independent thought and speech.
Of the early life of William Leggett we have no very definite knowledge. Born in moderate circumstances; at first a woodsman in the Western wilderness, then a midshipman in the navy, then a denizen of New York; exposed to sore hardships and perilous temptations, he worked his way by the force of his genius to the honorable position of associate editor of the Evening Post, the leading democratic journal of our great commercial metropolis. Here he became early distinguished for his ultraism in democracy. His whole soul revolted against oppression. He was for liberty everywhere and in all things, in thought, in speech, in vote, in religion, in government, and in trade; he was for throwing off all restraints upon the right of suffrage; regarding all men as brethren, he looked with disapprobation upon attempts to exclude foreigners from the rights of citizenship; he was for entire freedom of commerce; he denounced a national bank; he took the lead in opposition to the monopoly of incorporated banks; he argued in favor of direct taxation, and advocated a free post-office, or a system by which letters should be transported, as goods and passengers now are, by private enterprise. In all this he was thoroughly in earnest. That he often erred through passion and prejudice cannot be doubted; but in no instance was he found turning aside from the path which he believed to be the true one, from merely selfish considerations. He was honest alike to himself and the public. Every question which was thrown up before him by the waves of political or moral agitation he measured by his standard of right and truth, and condemned or advocated it in utter disregard of prevailing opinions, of its effect upon his pecuniary interest, or of his standing with his party. The vehemence of his passions sometimes betrayed him into violence of language and injustice to his opponents; but he had that rare and manly trait which enables its possessor, whenever he becomes convinced of error, to make a prompt acknowledgment of the conviction.
In the summer of 1834, a series of mobs, directed against the Abolitionists, who had organized a national society, with the city of New York as its central point, followed each other in rapid succession. The houses of the leading men in the society were sacked and pillaged; meeting-houses broken into and defaced; and the unoffending colored inhabitants of the city treated with the grossest indignity, and subjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage. It was emphatically a "Reign of Terror." The press of both political parties and of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion, and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of the Abolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demons possessed the misguided populace. To advocate emancipation, or defend those who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preaching democracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eve of St. Bartholomew. Law was prostrated in the dust; to be suspected of abolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insult and indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in those nights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayer of the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up against me; save me from bloody men."
At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly in condemnation of the mob. William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist; he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruel misrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith, he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery. The infection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips of multitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with its victims, never reached him. Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that the mob should be put down at once by the civil authorities. He declared the Abolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them, fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens. He sternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting with contempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory of their principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminate them. Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists in the rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle which they had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this, however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relation to the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them? Where is the man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do less in relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed? Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubs of ruffians, or hold his conscience at the dictation of a mob?"
In the summer of 1835, a mob of excited citizens broke open the post- office at Charleston, South Carolina, and burnt in the street such papers and pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such as advocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition of the slaves of the South. These papers were addressed, not to the slave, but to the master. They contained nothing which had not been said and written by Southern men themselves, the Pinkneys, Jeffersons, Henrys, and Martins, of Maryland and Virginia. The example set at Charleston did not lack imitators. Every petty postmaster south of Mason and Dixon's line became ex officio a censor of the press. The Postmaster-General, writing to his subordinate at Charleston, after stating that the post-office department had "no legal right to exclude newspapers from the mail, or prohibit their carriage or delivery, on account of their character or tendency, real or supposed," declared that he would, nevertheless, give no aid, directly or indirectly, in circulating publications of an incendiary or inflammatory character; and assured the perjured functionary, who had violated his oath of office, that, while he could not sanction, he would not condemn his conduct. Against this virtual encouragement of a flagrant infringement of a constitutional right, this licensing of thousands of petty government officials to sit in their mail offices—to use the figure of Milton—cross-legged, like so many envious Junos, in judgment upon the daily offspring of the press, taking counsel of passion, prejudice, and popular excitement as to what was "incendiary" or "inflammatory," the Evening Post spoke in tones of manly protest.
While almost all the editors of his party throughout the country either openly approved of the conduct of the Postmaster-General or silently acquiesced in it, William Leggett, who, in the absence of his colleague, was at that time sole editor of the Post, and who had everything to lose, in a worldly point of view, by assailing a leading functionary of the government, who was a favorite of the President and a sharer of his popularity, did not hesitate as to the course which consistency and duty required at his hands. He took his stand for unpopular truth, at a time when a different course on his part could not have failed to secure him the favor and patronage of his party. In the great struggle with the Bank of the United States, his services had not been unappreciated by the President and his friends. Without directly approving the course of the administration on the question of the rights of the Abolitionists, by remaining silent in respect to it, he might have avoided all suspicion of mental and moral independence incompatible with party allegiance. The impracticable honesty of Leggett, never bending from the erectness of truth for the sake of that "thrift which follows fawning," dictated a most severe and scorching review of the letter of the Postmaster-General. "More monstrous, more detestable doctrines we have never heard promulgated," he exclaimed in one of his leading editorials. "With what face, after this, can the Postmaster-General punish a postmaster for any exercise of the fearfully dangerous power of stopping and destroying any portion of the mails?" "The Abolitionists do not deserve to be placed on the same footing with a foreign enemy, nor their publications as the secret despatches of a spy. They are American citizens, in the exercise of their undoubted right of citizenship; and however erroneous their views, however fanatic their conduct, while they act within the limits of the law, what official functionary, be he merely a subordinate or the head of the post-office department, shall dare to abridge them of their rights as citizens, and deny them those facilities of intercourse which were instituted for the equal accommodation of all? If the American people will submit to this, let us expunge all written codes, and resolve society into its original elements, where the might of the strong is better than the right of the weak."
A few days after the publication of this manly rebuke, he wrote an indignantly sarcastic article upon the mobs which were at this time everywhere summoned to "put down the Abolitionists." The next day, the 4th of the ninth month, 1835, he received a copy of the Address of the American Anti-Slavery Society to the public, containing a full and explicit avowal of all the principles and designs of the association. He gave it a candid perusal, weighed its arguments, compared its doctrines with those at the foundation of his own political faith, and rose up from its examination an Abolitionist. He saw that he himself, misled by the popular clamor, had done injustice to benevolent and self-sacrificing men; and he took the earliest occasion, in an article of great power and eloquence, to make the amplest atonement. He declared his entire concurrence with the views of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the single exception of a doubt which rested, on his mind as to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. We quote from the concluding paragraph of this article:—
"We assert without hesitation, that, if we possessed the right, we should not scruple to exercise it for the speedy annihilation of servitude and chains. The impression made in boyhood by the glorious exclamation of Cato,