The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the rights of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are limited by international law, or the rights of universal society--the truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked.The grand error of Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God.It therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real world.Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all Christendom.
The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual; and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to be free.Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding the black or colored race as slaves.Liberty, said they, is the right only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it.Let the negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him be my servant, which is best for him and for me.
Why ask me to free him? I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude.Why appeal to me! Am I my brother's keeper?
Nay, is he my brother? Is this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the same race with myself? Ibelieve it not.But in some instances, at least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter.The tendency of the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore all true civil society.
At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite tendency--a tendency to exaggerate the social element, to overlook the territorial basis of the state, and to disregard the rights of individuals.This tendency has been and is strong in the people called abolitionists.The American abolitionist is so engrossed with the unity that he loses the solidarity of the race, which supposes unity of race and multiplicity of individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial circumscriptions.Back of these, back of individuals, he sees humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law." The principle on which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers.Were his socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in which might makes right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much out of the order of civilization, and as much in that of barbarism, as is the slaveholder himself.Wendell Phillips is as far removed from true Christian civilization as was John C.
Calhoun, and William Lloyd Garrison is as much of a barbarian and despot in principle and tendency as Jefferson Davis.Hence the great body of the people in the non-slaveholding States, wedded to American democracy as they were and are could never, as much as they detested slavery, be induced to make common cause with the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the late civil war was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the time the social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same enemy.The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt that pure socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as pure individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that slavery has been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic reasons but really for reasons of state, in order to save the territorial democracy.The territorial democracy would not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds.
