The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858

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[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion, as
if he did not see exactly where he was to come out, if he computed
his arc too nicely. I think it possible it might cut off a few
corners of his present belief, as it has cut off martyr-burning and
witch-hanging;--but time will show,--time will show, as the old
gentleman opposite says.]

----Oh,--here is that copy of verses I told you about.

SPRING HAS COME.
_Intra Muros_.

The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays;
For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip's horn of dusky green,
The peony's dark unfolding ball.

The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.

The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.

--See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour,--
Behold it withering,--then look up,--
How meek the forest-monarch's flower!--

When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
"Bud, little roses! Spring is here!"

The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink; as Aurora's finger-tips.

Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty's changed corolla-shades,--
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.

The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.

Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot,--
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.

--Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!

I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.

Oh for one spot of living green,--
One little spot where leaves can grow,--
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!

* * * * *

THE PRESIDENT'S PROPHECY OF PEACE.

There was joy in the national palace on the eve of May-day. The
heart of the Chief of Thirty Millions was full of gladness. It was a
high holiday at the capital of the nation. Jubilant processions
crowded the streets. The boom of cannon told to the heavens that some
great event, full of glory and of blessing, was just happily born
into the history of the world. Strains of triumphant music at once
expressed and stirred afresh the rapture which the new fruition of a
deferred and doubting hope had kindled in myriad breasts. Rejoicing
multitudes swarmed before the palace gate, and with congratulatory
shouts compelled the presence of the Nation's Head. He stood before
them proud and happy, and answered to the transports of their joy
with a responsive sympathy. He rejoiced in the prospect of the peace
and prosperity with which the occasion of this jubilee was to cheer
and bless the land in all its borders. His chosen friends and
counsellors surrounded him and echoed his prophecies of good. A
kindred homage was next paid to the virtuous artificers of the
new-wrought blessing, without whose shaping hands it would have
perished before the sight, or taken some dreadful form of mischief
and of horror. Their words of cheer and exultation, too, swelled the
surging tide of patriotic emotion till it overflowed again. Thus with
the thunder of artillery, with the animating sound of drum and
trumpet, with the more persuasive music of impassioned words, with
shoutings and with revelry, these jocund compeers, from the highest
to the lowest, mingled into one by the alchemy of a common joy,
chased the hours of that memorable night and gave strange welcome to
the morn of May.

What great happiness had just befallen, which should thus transport
with joy the chief magistrate of a mighty nation, and send an
answering pulse of rapture through all the veins of his capital? The
armies of the Republic had surely just returned in triumph from some
dubious battle joined with a barbarian invader who threatened to
trample all her cherished rights, and the institutions which are
their safeguard, under his iron heel. Perhaps the Angel of Mercy had
at length set again the seals upon some wide-wasting pestilence
which had long been walking in darkness, with Terror going before
her and Death following after. Or was it the desolating course of
Famine that had been stayed, as it swept, gaunt and hungry, over the
land, and consumed its inhabitants from off its face? Peradventure,
the prayers of holy men had prevailed, and the heavens which had
been as brass were melted, and the earth which had been but ashes
revived again, a living altar, crowned afresh with flowers, and
prophetic of the thank-offerings of harvests. Or it might be that a
great discoverer had added a new world to the domain of human
happiness, by some invention which should lighten the toils and
multiply the innocent satisfactions of mankind. Or had virtue and
intelligence won some signal victory over barbarism and ignorance,
and blessed with liberty and knowledge regions long abandoned to
despotism and to darkness? These had been, indeed, occasions on
which the chief ruler of a great people might fitly lead the anthem
of a nation's thanksgiving.

But the joy which thus overflowed the hearts of President and people
at the metropolis of our politics, and which has sprinkled with its
cordial drops kindred spirits scattered far and wide over the land,
welled up from no wholesome sources such as these. It was no
deliverance from barbarous enemies, from pestilential disease, from
meagre famine, that moved those raptures,--no joy at ignorance
dissipated, barbarism dispelled, or tyranny put down. The "peace"
and the "prosperity," the prophecy of which was so sweet to the
souls that took sweet counsel together on that night, were of a kind
which only souls tuned to such unison and so subtly trained could
fully comprehend and rightly estimate. This gentle peace, thus
joyfully presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate
State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to
institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity,
forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of
the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil,
their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this
blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over the stormy waves and
tells of the calm at hand, is a bribe so cunningly devised that its
contrivers firmly believe it will buy up the souls of these
much-injured men, and reconcile them to the shame and infamy of
trading away their lights and their honor as the boot of a dirty
bargain in the land-market. And the "prosperity" which is to wait
upon this happy "peace" glows with a like golden promise. It is a
prosperity that shall bless Kansas into a Virginia or a North
Carolina by virtue of the same means which has crowned the
Slave-country with the wealth, the civilization, and the
intelligence it has to brag of. It is such a prosperity as ever
follows after the footsteps of Slavery,--a prosperity which is to
blight the soil, degrade the minds, debauch the morals, impoverish
the substance, and subvert the independence of a loathing population,
if the joy of the President and his directors is to be made full.
Such is the message of peace and good-will which thrilled with
prophetic raptures the hearts which flowed together on that happy
night, and such the blessed prospects which made the air of
Washington vocal with the ecstasies of triumph.

The history of the world is full enough of illustrations of
"the Art of making a Great Kingdom a Small One." The art of
degrading the imperial idea of a true republic from its just
preeminence among the polities of mankind, of quenching the
principles of eternal right which are the star-points of its divine
crown, of trailing the shining whiteness of its robes in the dust,
and making it an object of contempt rather than of adoration, has
never been taught more emphatically than in the examples furnished
by our own later annals. If Mr. Buchanan and his predecessor had set
themselves to work, of good set purpose, to bring republican
institutions into derision, and to prove that the American
experiment was a dead failure, they could not have proceeded more
cunningly with their task. Their aim has been, as it has seemed, to
give the lie to all the principles on which it has been assumed that
these institutions rest, and to show that their real object is to
subject the many to the government of the few, as the manner is of
the nations round about. The thin veil of decent falsehood, under
which the caution of earlier time had decorously hid this fact, has
been torn aside by the rude intrepidity of assurance which
long-continued success had fostered. The problem to be solved being
to prove the chief axiom of our political science, that the people
have a right to self-government and to the choice of their own
institutions, to be a lie, it is worked out in the presence of an
admiring world, after this fashion.

The old Ordinance--which set limits to Slavery, and which, as it
preceded the Constitution, should in honor and equity be taken as a
condition precedent to it, and the later pledge of the South, that
this contract should be sacredly kept on the other side of a certain
parallel of latitude, having both been infamously violated for the
sake of extending the domain of Slavery into regions solemnly
dedicated to Liberty, the entire energies of the General Government
and of the political party it represented were put forth to
crystallize this double lie into the institutions of Kansas, and
thus take it out of the category of theory and reduce it into that
of fact. The reluctance of the inhabitants of the young Territory
went for nothing, and provision was soon effectually made to
overcome their resistance. Every form of terrorism, to which tyrants
all alike instinctively resort to disarm resistance to their will,
was launched at the property, the lives, and the happiness of the
defenceless settlers. Hordes of barbarians, as we have said before,
from every part of the Southern hive, but especially from the savage
tribes of the bordering Missouri, poured themselves over the devoted
land. Murder, arson, robbery, every outrage that could be offered to
man or woman, waited on their footsteps and stalked abroad with them
in their forays against Freedom. When the first steps were to be
taken towards the organization of a government, they precipitated
themselves upon the Territory in fiercer numbers. They made
themselves masters of the polling-places; they drove away by
violence and threats the peaceable inhabitants and lawful voters,
and by open force and unblushing fraud elected themselves or their
creatures the lawgivers of the commonwealth about to be created. So
outrageous were the crimes of these miscreants at this and
subsequent periods, that even the very creatures of Pierce and
Buchanan, chosen especially for their supposed fitness to assist in
these villanies, turned away, one after another, sickened at the
sight of them, and forfeited forever the favor of their masters by
shrinking from an unqualified and unhesitating obedience.

The Constitution, contrived by the wretches thus nefariously clothed
in the stolen sovereignty of the true inhabitants of Kansas, of
course made Slavery an integral part of the institutions of the State.
A code of laws was enacted absolutely without parallel in the history
of the world for insolent trampling down of rights and for bloody
cruelty of penalties,--laws so abominable as even to call down upon
them, from his place in the Senate, the emphatic condemnation of so
veteran a soldier in the service of Slavery as General Cass, now
Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of State. These Territorial laws, thus
infamously vile, thus made in defiance of the well-known will of the
great majority of the people of Kansas, Mr. Pierce hastened to
recognize as the authentic expression of the mind of the people there,
and exerted all the moral and all the physical force of the
government to maintain them in their authority. Since that magistrate
was kicked aside as no longer available for the uses of Slavery,
because of the very infamy he had won in its service, Mr. Buchanan,
unlessoned by his fate, has adopted his views and carried out his
policy.

We do not propose to follow this march of shameful events step by
step, nor to speak of them in their exact chronological order, nor
yet to specify to which of these magistrates the credit of any one
of them belongs, inasmuch as the philosophy and method of the policy
of the one and the other are absolutely identical. We have space
only to glance at unquestionable facts, and to trace them to their
necessary motives. To maintain the supremacy of this usurpation, and
the Draconic laws made under it, Mr. Pierce poured in the squadrons
of the Republic, to dragoon the rebellious freemen into obedience to
what their souls abhorred, and what their reason told them was of no
more just binding force upon them than an edict of the Emperor of
China. When the actual inhabitants of the Territory had met in
Convention and framed a Constitution excluding Slavery, and had
adopted it, and the legislature authorized by it met, its members
were dispersed by national soldiers, detailed to compel submission
to the behests of the Slavemastery of the Government and of the
nation. These troops have been kept on foot ever since, to intimidate
the people, to assist as special police in the arrest and detention
of political prisoners charged with crimes against the Usurpation,
and to sustain the Federal governors and judges in carrying out
their instructions for the Subjugation of the majority by legal
chicane or by military violence.

Such was the genesis of the Lecompton Constitution, and such the
nursing it had received at the hands of the paternal government at
Washington. In due course of time it was presented to Congress as
the charter under which the people of Kansas asked to receive the
concession of their right of State government; and the scene of war
was forthwith transferred from those distant fields to the chambers
of national legislation, under the immediate eye of the chief of the
state. This high officer soon dispelled any delusive doubts which,
for the purpose of securing his election, he had permitted to be
ventilated during the late Presidential campaign, that he would at
least see fair play in the struggle between Slavery and Freedom in
Kansas. With indecent zeal and unscrupulous partisanship, he
concentrated all the energies of his administration, and employed
the whole force of the influence and the patronage of the nation, to
obtain the indorsement by Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, and
thus to compel the people of Kansas to pass under the yoke of their
Slaveholding invaders. The true origin and character of that vile
fabrication had been made plain to every eye that was willing to see,
and the abhorrence in which it was held by nearly the entire
population of the Territory put beyond question by more than one
trial vote. Yet it was embraced as the test measure of the
Administration to prove the unbroken fealty of the President to the
Power which is mightier than he. Victory was reckoned upon in advance,
as certain and easy. A servile, or rather a commanding majority in
the Senate,--nearly half of that body being of the class that rules
the rulers,--was ready to do whatever dirty and detestable work was
demanded of them. A majority of more than thirty in the House,
elected as supporters of the Administration, seemed to make success
there also an inevitable necessity. But by reason of the vastly
larger proportion of members from the Free States in that body, and
their greater nearness to their constituents, these reasonable
expectations were disappointed. Men who had taken service in the
Democratic ranks, and had been faithful unto that day, refused to
obey the word of command when it took this tone and was informed
with this purpose. And for a season the plague was stayed, and
sanguine hearts trusted that it was stayed forever.

We are willing to believe that the bulk of the Democrats in both
Houses of Congress, who had the virtue to defy the threats and
cajolements of their party-leaders, when this great public crime was
demanded at their hands, were sincere in the resistance they opposed
to this subversion of all the principles in which they had been bred,
and of which their party had always professed to be the special
defence and guard. But the mantle of our charity is not wide enough
to cover up the base treachery of those men who, acknowledging and
demonstrating the right, devised or consented to the villany which
was to crush or to cripple it. That the final shape which the
Lecompton juggle took was an invention of the enemy, cunningly
contrived to win by indirection what was too dangerous to be
attempted by open violence, is a conclusion from which no candid
mind can escape, after a full consideration of the case. The
defection of so large a body of Northern Democrats from the side of
the Slaveholding Directory was doubtless a significant and startling
fact, suggestive of dangerous insubordination on the part of allies
who had ever been found sure and steadfast in every jeopardy of
Slavery. And it made a resort to guile necessary to carry the point
which it was not prudent to press to the extremity of force. The
Slaveholders are not fastidious as to the means by which they reach
their end. Though they might have preferred to hew their way to their
design with a high hand, and to put down all opposition by bought or
bullied majorities, backed by the strong arm of the nation, yet they
never refuse to compromise and palter when the path to success lies
through stratagems or frauds. The skill in this instance, as in all
others, by which they propose to win everything under the show of
yielding somewhat, is worthy of Machiavel or of Lucifer, and is far
above the capacity of the paltry Northern tool who is permitted to
enjoy the infamy of the invention which he was employed to utter.
The Slaveholders, like other despots, do their dirty work by proxy,
and scorn the wretched instruments they use, and then fling from
them in disgust.

The Lecompton cheat having been defeated in the House after it had
received the indorsement of the Senate, the two coordinates were at
issue, and it seemed for a brief time to have met with the fate it
merited. But cunning and treachery combined to put it into the hands
of a Committee of Conference to be manipulated afresh, and, if
possible, moulded into a shape that might give Democratic recusants
an excuse for treason to the North and submission to the Power that
demanded it. And the invention was worthy of the diabolical sagacity
and ingenuity which have always marked the politics of Slavery. The
maxim, that every man has his price, was assumed to apply as well to
men when collected into bodies corporate as to individuals; and the
hook, with which the souls of the men of Kansas are to be fished for,
was baited with a bribe the most tempting to their hungry needs. And
to make their capture the more sure, an answering menace threatens
them on the other hand, to force them to swallow the barbed treachery.
They are offered no opportunity of expressing their assent or
dissent as to the Constitution held over their heads. Their enemies
know too well what its fate would be, if offered, pure and simple,
to their acceptance or refusal. They are only to say whether or not
they will accept five million acres of land that Congress
munificently offers them for the construction of their railways. If
they say, "Yes, thank you," to this simple question, the Chief
Conjurer of the nation, the great Medicine Man of our tribe, the
Head Magician of our Egypt, will only have to say, "Presto pass,"
and they will find themselves a Slave State in the glorious Union,
under a solemn contract, struck by this same act, to endure Slavery
for six years to come. If they say, "No, we won't," the door of the
Union is shut in their faces, and they are told to wait without in
all the bleakness of Territorial dependency, subject to the laws now
afflicting them, with a satrap sent down from Washington to rule over
them, and with Lecomptes and Catos to decree justice for them, until
swindling tools of the Administration shall be instructed to allow
the presence of a sufficient population to entitle a State to a
Representative.

If they consent to be erected into a Slave State by accepting the
bribe, they will come into the Union by a puff of Presidential breath,
though having only forty thousand inhabitants, with two Senators and
a Representative, and all the advantages incident to Federal
connection and patronage. Should they reject it, they will be left,
it may be, to years of Territorial annoyance, and the annoyance of a
Slave Territory, too, till Government officials shall discover their
numbers to amount to near a hundred thousand, and possibly to much
more, after the next census has newly apportioned the House. With
Slavery, they have proffered to them broad lands to help cover their
wide expanse with an iron reticulation of railways, developing their
resources and multiplying their material prosperity, at the slight
cost of their consistency and their honor. Without it, they may have
to stand shivering at the gate of the Union, blasted by the
"cold shade" of our American aristocracy, and far removed from the
genial sunshine of national favor and bounty. Truly did Senator
Wilson say that Congress approached Kansas at once with a bribe and
a threat. Never was the devilish cunning of Slaveholding politics
more strikingly illustrated than by the insidious vileness of this
proposition. It had been bad enough, surely, had we been called upon
to rejoice, as over a great triumph of the right, at the concession
to Kansas of the sovereignty of settling her own institutions in her
own way, had such been granted. Nothing could be more simple and
natural, in a case of conflicting assertions and opposite beliefs as
to the state of opinion there, than to remit the decision of the
doubt to a fresh vote. Had any other interest than that in human
beings been involved, such a disposition of the whole matter would
have excited neither remark nor opposition. Nothing, perhaps, could
exemplify the control Slavery has obtained over the affairs of the
country more strongly than the power it has had to hinder this
simple remedy of an alleged wrong or error,--and this, by procuring
the defection of sordid Northern Representatives from what they
confessed to be the right, to this corrupt evasion,--an evasion
designed to fit the people of Kansas for servitude by tempting them
to sacrifice their self-respect and their honor. Let these
miscreants make haste to seize the price of their perfidy before
popular contempt and loathing shall sweep them forever out of sight
into the abyss of infamy and forgetfulness which is appointed for
the traitors to Liberty. If the question of the real will of the
people of Kansas had been referred back to them for settlement, it
would have been humiliating enough to have had to exult over it as a
victory of Freedom. With what depth of shame, then, should we
contemplate the compassing of their end by the Slavocrats, through
the venal surrender of the rights so long and so manfully asserted,
for so paltry a temptation!

But we do not apprehend a consummation so devoutly to be deprecated.
We believe that the people of Kansas will spurn the bribe and refuse
to eat the dirt that is set before them for a banquet. They will
reject the insulting proffer with contempt, and fall back upon their
reserved right of resistance, passive or active, as their
circumstances may advise. They will not be so base as to desert the
post of honor they have sought in the great fight for freedom and
maintained so long and so well, disappointing and throwing into
confusion the distant allies who have stood behind them in their most
evil hours, for all the lands that President and Congress have to
give. It is, indeed, a momentous crisis for them, and we have faith
to believe that they will not be wanting to its demands. The eyes of
the lovers of liberty everywhere are earnestly watching to see how
they will come out from the ordeal by fire and by gold to which they
are subjected. What Boston was in 1775, and Paris in 1789, is Kansas
now,--the field on which a great battle for the right is to be fought.
Honor or infamy attends the issue of her action in the dilemma in
which the crafty malice of her enemies has placed her. If she agree
to take the dirty acres which are proffered to her as the price of
her integrity, she consents to take the yoke of Slavery upon her
neck and not even to attempt to shake herself free from it for six
years to come. We know that shuffling Democrats, and even
temporizing Republicans, represent that the people, after accepting
the Lecompton Constitution, can forthwith summon a Convention and
substitute another scheme of government in its stead. But this could
be initiated only by a breach of the promise they would have just
pledged, and could be carried through only by a revolution. Such a
course would be a direct violation of the philosophy of
Constitutional Government, which assumes as its fundamental axiom,
that Constitutions can be altered only in the way and according to
the conditions prescribed in themselves. Such a proceeding would be
a _coup d'etat_, not as flagitious certainly as that of Bonaparte,
but to the full as revolutionary and illegal. And we may be sure
that the arm of the United States Government would not be shortened
so that it should not interpose and hinder such a defiance of itself
and the Power whose instrument it is. With servile and corrupt
judges at its beck and a majority in Congress within its purchase,
the occasion and means of such an interference would be readily
devised and supplied.

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