This recent Jax. Misc. features George Cheever against Slavery. It
started a thread on one of the American Studies lists that I'm also
forwarding.
Cheever made a name for himself as a temperance reformer before
concentrating on abolition. He was the subject of Hawthorne's temperance
story, "A Rill from the Town Pump," (1835) which was written and published
while Cheever was on trial for libel for his allegory, "Deacon Giles'
Distillery," which was widely reprinted in the temperance papers as an
"ingenious piece of fancy" and a remarkable contribution to the growing
temperance literature.
After he refused to say his "Deacon Giles" was not a thinly-veiled
portrait of a real-life Deacon Stone, the 23-year-old Cheever was beat on
the streets by a working man who identified himself as "one of the demons"
working nights at Deacon Stone's distillery. Newspapers reported how "Mr.
Cheever bore the savage attack in a most meek and Christian manner,
telling the assailant, after he ceased from his blows, that he forgave
him, and hoped God would also forgive him." Temperance people were
surprised the case went to trial, and they were not prepared to learn
there was, in fact, an abundance of incriminating similiarity between
Cheever's fanciful allegory and the facts in the case of the real-life
Deacon Stone. Yes, he was a Deacon distiller; he did sell Bibles out of
the distillery; he did have an alcoholic son; a member of his family was,
indeed, found dead in one of the hot vats of liquor. The distinguished
Whig lawyer, Rufus Choate, defended Cheever, but the Massachusetts
Attorney General won prosecution. Though the trial won converts to
temperance, many supporters were alarmed and disturbed by the extent of
the libel. After he went to jail, his remaining supporters regarded him
as a "modern Luther," but he considered himself someone more like a modern
Bunyan. A literary scholar from his teenage years, Cheever later wrote a
book about the Pilgrim's Progress, after gaining some recognition as an
anthologist of American poetry and prose.
Here's the miscellany. The thread follows.
----------------------
Jon Stephen Miller
Assistant Editor
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
Department of English
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 00:02:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jacksonian Miscellanies <[log in to unmask]>
To: "jm [00170]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: jm#84: Fire and Hammer of God's Word Against Slavery
Jacksonian Miscellanies, #84 June 1, 1999
Fire and Hammer of God's Word Against Slavery
Copyright by the editor, Hal Morris, Hopatcong, NJ 1999. Permission is
granted to copy, but not for sale, nor in multiple copies, except by
permission.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is the first half of:
THE
FIRE AND HAMMER
OF
GOD'S WORD
Against the
SIN OF SLAVERY.
SPEECH OF George B. CHEEVER, D.D., AT THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICAN
ABOLITION SOCIETY, MAY, 1858,
Goodell Anti-Slavery Collection No. 90 PRESENTED TO
OBERLIN COLLEGE BY THE HEIRS OF
WILLIAM GOODELL
The whole work is posted in page images by the Making of America project,
at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moa-idx?notisid=ABJ4913
Bowdoin's Class of 1825 included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, of enduring literary fame, as well as John Stevens Cabot Abbott
(1805-1877), a very prolific writer of popular history, (the brother of
Jacob Abbott, who has appeared several times in these pages).
George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890) was yet another member of this
fascinating cohort. He was a man of impressive literary gifts, a
campaigner for Calvinist orthodoxy and temperance, and later for Abolition
(and also, curiously, very vocally against abolishing capital punishment).
After Bowdoin, he studied to become an orthodox (Calvinist)
Congregationalist minister at the Andover Theological Seminary, and for a
few years in the early 1830s, he preached in Salem, where Hawthorne lived
without interruption from 1825 until the late 1830s.
In Salem, Cheever made quite a splash, denouncing the Unitarians, and most
notably attacking one Unitarian church deacon who owned a distillery;
drawing a fanciful picture of a distillery worked by demonic imps, and
causing the barrells of liquor, when they ended up in a tavern or grocery,
to blazen forth "Weeping, Wailing, and Gnashing of Teeth: Inquire at
Deacon Giles' Distillery". Giles was not the man's true name, but the
piece clearly aimed at a real Deacon, who eventually brought charges for
libel, costing Cheever $1,000 and 30 days in jail. And before that, he
had been cow-hided in the streets of Salem.
He is said to have been the author of some 20 books and 50 pamphlets. Note
that following the copyright page, is the following price list for the
anti-slavery pamphlet made from the speech, which gives some insight into
how such pamplets got diffused among the population (in many cases some
zealous person would buy buy a dozen or a hundred to give away as their
contribution to the cause).
PRICES OF DR. CHEEVER'S SPEECH.
UNCOVERED-2 cents per single copy.
20 cents per dozen.
$1.50 per hundred.
IN TRACT FORM-Same prices.
COVERED-3 cents per single copy.
30 cents per dozen.
$2.25 per hundred.
POSTAGE-for either kind, 1 cent each.
SPEECH.
MR. PRESIDENT: We are driven this day to God. Apart from his word, and his
grace to make his word effectual, and to keep it even in the hearts of his
children from perversion, there is no hope in the heart of any political
party, nor any Christian party, for the poor slave. We have seen, that men
of professed piety, men of age, gray hairs, experience, eloquence, can
plead the very authority of the word of God for concealing and denying that
word; can call upon Christ to bear witness that their first Christian duty
is to take down his light from the candlestick and to put it under a
bushel; can deliberately in the name of God, so pervert the salt of
Christian truth, as to make it nothing but an additional corrupting element
on the dunghill of the world's corruptions. We have seen an eloquent
Bishop, with silver locks, pleading for silence on the sin of Slavery, and
justifying the Executive Committee of the Tract Society, as possessing an
indestructible negative against the instructions of their constituents, and
in opposition to the will and word of God, by virtue of being the managers
of a great Circumlocution Office, the perfection of whose sagacity and
strength is in the art, how not to do it. We can not but remember the
answer of God, "To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it
is sin;" and the judgment of the Lord Jesus: "Inasmuch as ye did it not to
one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me."
We have also seen venerable and Christian men not shrinking to denounce the
declaration that American Slavery is sin, as ultra and inexpedient, and
exposing the cause of righteousness to defeat and ruin. Paul rejoiced, in
his day, that he had not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God. The
professed followers of Paul in our day, do not shun to rebuke such
declaration as fanatical and rash. Before such developments, were it not
that our trust is in God and not man, we should have no more any strength,
or life, or courage left in us. There is no hope, apart from God's word,
and from the full and faithful application of it. There is wanting the
element of conscientious, stubborn, heart-felt, eternal hostility against
Slavery as sin, as reprobated and forbidden of God in the same catalogue
with lying, perjury, murder, whoremongering, piracy, man-stealing, and
guilt, that, by the law not of God only, but man, is worthy of death. Where
shall such an element be found? How shall it be created, quickened,
trained? Not in the school of political self-seeking and expediency; not
under obedience to fugitive-slave laws; not under proclamations and
assertions of allegiance to Dred Scott decisions; not in the school of
unrighteous and oppressive statutes; not under the law of silence on the
word of God--silence in the pulpit-silence in the Tract House; but under
the law of fire and thunder in the manifestation of the truth to every
man's conscience in the sight of God--by revealing the wrath of God from
heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men, and against this
stupendous iniquity as foremost and most germinating in enormity and
malignity, most sweeping and accumulating in the habits and materials of
sin and misery, the elements and securities of national ruin. Our only hope
is in the revived, living, faithful religion of a free, out-spoken,
consistent Church, and a fearless, unmuzzled, faithful ministry. Our only
hope is in a conscience fastened to the word of God, and a heart flaming
with its sacred fire; a popular Church and ministry, holding forth the word
of life, and giving themselves up to its supremacy, in such an unrestricted
abandonment of all things to its sovereignty, (not the popular sovereignty,
but God's sovereignty,) that it may have free course, and be glorified.
The intensity of the plague with us, the exasperation and strength of the
iniquity and the evil, are in the provisions for its perpetuity and the
insurances of its increase. Not content with enduring it ourselves, for one
generation, we have by law entailed it upon others; and the generations to
come, as God distributes the consequences, must inevitably rise up and call
each preceding generation accursed. If this sin had a possible death, like
that of intemperance in the grave of the present drunkard, and were not
propagated by a legal fatalism forbidding it to die out, or to be
renounced, or the will to be broken--a legal fatalism and missionary zeal
united, providing future victims for it in the fastest ratio of increase in
human population-then would the evil be comparatively trifling, and the sin
would speedily come to an end. But there is no such limit, no such natural
consumption or wearing out, no such release by death; the evil and the sin
are carefully secured against death, and injected, as the heart's blood,
into the veins of the next generation, and any attempt to stop the process,
throws the whole system into convulsions.
We practise the iniquity upon children, innocent children, the natives of
our own land, unbought, unsold, unpaid for, without consultation or consent
of father or mother, or the shadow of a permission from the Almighty; and
they, the new-born babes of this system, are the compound interest year by
year added to the sin and its capital, which thus doubles upon us in the
next generation, and must treble in another. We make use of the most sacred
domestic affections, of maternal, filial, and, I was going to say,
connubial love-but the system forbids, and I have to say contubernal-for
such rapid and accumulating production of the iniquity, as shall be in some
measure adequate to the demand. The whole family relation, the whole
domestic state, is prostituted, poisoned, turned into a misery-making
machine for the agent of all evil. What God meant should be the source and
inspiration of happiness, becomes the fountain of sin and woe. The sacred
names of husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, babe, become the
exponents of various forces and values in the slave-breeding institute. And
the whole perfection, completeness, and concentration of this creative
power in this manufacturing interest, descends like a triphammer on the
children, beating them from the birth into marketable articles, and
stamping and sealing them as chattels, foredoomed and fatalized to run till
they wear out, as living spindles, wheels, activities of labor and
productiveness in the same horrible system.
And each generation of immortal marketable stuff is as exactly fashioned in
these grooves, moulds, channels, wefted, netted, and drawn through, to come
out the invariable product, as the yards of carpeting are cut from the loom
to be trodden on, or as the coins drop from the die for the circulation of
society. This is the peculiarity of the sin of Slavery in the foremost
Christian country on the face of the earth. In this branch of native
industry and manufacture we are self-reliant. Disavowing a protective
policy in almost every thing else, we are proudly patriotic for the
security, superiority, and abundance of this most sacred native product of
domestic manufacture, and for neither the raw material nor the bleaching of
it, will we depend on any other country in the world.
This is the manner, these are the principles, on which we obey the precepts
and fulfill the glories of the 72d Psalm. Instead of obeying God in
delivering the children of the needy from deceit and violence, we foredoom
them to all the oppression endured by their fathers; instead of judging the
poor with righteousness, and the children of the oppressed with equity, we
deliberately and solemnly give them over to oppression, as incapable of
brotherhood and citizenship, and having no rights that white men are bound
to respect. Instead of removing every yoke, we predestinate them for the
yoke, and perpetuate the yoke for them, as a fixture prepared from the
birth-the controlling, governing, supreme domestic law-the guiding
institution and policy of the house, the State, the nation.
By thus laying our grasp on an unborn race; by saying beforehand to
immortal beings, the work of the Creator, You can not come into God's world
but as infant slaves, articles of property and merchandise, but with a
curse of our national justice and equity branding you for the slave-pen,
and separating you firom the manhood of all mankind; by this robbery from
God and man we become a nation of men-stealers a community of baptized
Thugs for the kidnapping of the children of four millions of people, and
the assassination of their personality.
If this were done now, for the first time, to a nation by themselves; if we
made a descent upon Africa, China, India, or elsewhere, and carried off
into hopeless slavery the children of four millions, the universe would
utter a roar of terror and indignation at such a crime. But organize it
into a system--make this robbery and moral assassination a fixture of law
and policy from generation to generation, and set up its support as the
watchword of a powerful political party, the test of faithfulness and
patriotism, and the security of an unlimited command of the whole patronage
of the United States Government, and forthwith the sanction and sustaining
of it become the shining virtue of compromise and expediency, and he is the
dangerous man and the mad-man in the community who undertakes to disturb
this arrangement, or to agitate the conscience in regard to it. Forthwith,
it is no longer the sin which is regarded with astonishment and horror, but
the denunciation of it as sin! It is no longer the perpetrators of such a
crime, and its supporters, who are to be the objects of reproach and
condemnation, but those who cause the truth to burn against the crime
-those who call it by the name with which God has branded it, and visit it
with the reprobation that God has laid upon it.
And especially the political world and the Pharisees of political Churches
stand in horror of the very bad spirit, the unchristian spirit, of those
who denounce this wickedness with the direct application of the word of
God. It is a subject which must be excluded from the pulpit, because it is
a sin enthroned in state, a political sin, to be treated only by political
quacks, with political drenches, platforms, cataplasms, and compromises,
which the only duty of the Church and the ministry is quietly to indorse
and sanction, for the sake of peace.
The system of Slavery is now at length asserted to be the chosen missionary
institute of the Lord Almighty. And, admitting it to be such, we are
certainly foremost of all the nations in carrying forward the great
missionary work. If the appointed work to be done for the children of the
needy is that of branding and training them as chattels and brute beasts
for the market, we have no rivals in this honor. This is, in fact, the
greatest, vastest, most persevering missionary work that we perform. Our
instrumentality in binding down in hopeless bondage the children of four
millions of immortal beings, guilty of a skin not colored like our own, is
our largest instrumentality, thus far, in the glories of the millenium.
By our laws providing that the slave and its increase shall be deemed and
doomed our personal chattels forever, we constitute for them a millennium
of sin and misery. We convert them into a community, in which it is
impossible that the fundamental laws of Christianity should be recognized
and obeyed, or the most commonly acknowledged and most sacred institutions
of the Christian state be regarded. The laws of God for husbands, wives,
fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, children, can not be applied, can not be
obeyed, in such a community. "Husbands, love your wives," is a divine
injunction. But for those most miserable outcasts of humanity, the American
slaves, there can be no such law, but an admonition against it. God's
claims, so expressed, interfere with man's property in man. Husbands,
beware of imagining that you have any rights, any authority, in regard to
the chattels you are permitted to live with; beware of ever so loving them
as to be unwilling to sacrifice them at a moment's warning to the avarice,
the need, or the passions of your owners. Ye are not permitted to love, but
only in subjection to the price of the market, the necessities of your
master, and the grand rule of your domestic institution, the slave and its
increase.
Wives, be obedient to your husbands. What? Obedience from a chattel to a
chattel? Wives ye are none, and this divine law belongs not to you, but for
the profit of your masters. Your obedience and your increase belong to
them, and to none else.
Children, obey your parents. But slaves have no children, and their
children have no parents, except only as the bales of cotton have a parent
in the gin and the factory, where they were shaped and bonded for the
market. These commands and precepts are all and only for the masters, not
the slaves. Slaves have no ties, no affections, no duties, no obligations,
no belongings, but for their owners, whose property they are, and for whom
and at their bidding, every faculty, capacity, emotion, must be devoted,
occupied, tasked, improved, sold at the highest premium to the highest
bidder whenever, however, and wherever the owner's interest requires it.
And it is not isolated beings that we devote thus, for a mere lifetime, to
such degradation and cruelty, but we create a perpetual, unfailing, and
self-renewing spring of this wickedness. It is not a transitory shower of
blistering drops that we cause to pass over the land, but an Artesian well
that we sink, of domestic shame and misery for future generations. In the
word of God it is said, referring to the glory and blessedness of the
establishment of righteousness and freedom as the fundamental fixtures of
society: "If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, thou shalt
raise up the foundations of many generations." But we, by foredooming
unborn children to the yoke, and preparing it for them, are securing a
succession of curses and crimes, crimes and curses, as the heritage of the
social state. We have no more right to enact by law that the offspring of
slaves shall be slaves, than we have to make a law that the offspring of
the free whites shall be slaves. If such a law were passed in the State of
New York, a law that the children of those engaged in manual labor should
from the birth be taken and held as chattels, to be bought and sold as the
property of those capitalists for whom their parents have been laboring,
could such a law sanction such a crime? Could it make it any other thing
than man-stealing? Could it be pleaded that it is not man-stealing, because
it is children-stealing? What is it when these children grow up?
And if they have children, does the fact that their parents were stolen
before them give the stealers of the parents any claim upon the next
generation? Does the fact that their parents were stolen before them take
away their rights as human beings, and turn the stealing of them into a
natural and just claim of property? Nothing can transmit the right of
theft; no law can sanction it; even if we had a right to steal the parents
from themselves, this could give no right to steal the children from the
parents and from God. This is the deep damnation of our guilt. The offense
cries up to heaven. By stealing children from the birth, we are A NATION OF
MEN-STEALERS, and we renew, perpetuate and increase the guilt from
generation to generation. We perpetuate the sin and the cruelty upon five
times the number that our ancestors did, and insure its being perpetrated
by five times more, and then thank God for the success of this providential
missionary institution.
The guilt is increasing, but all the while the conscience in regard to it
is diminishing and being seared. The sin, by being enlarged in surface and
in quantity, seems lessened in intensity. We are more guilty than our
fathers in the practice of it, and yet we contrive to make ourselves
imagine that we are less guilty and more pious than they. The iniquity is a
moral cancer that is eating at the vitals of our piety, while the only
treatment we tolerate is increased doses of chloroform, till the whole
system is stupefied under its influence. When a new outrage is committed,
we just send to the apothecaries for more laudanum, or swallow, through our
representatives, a Lecompton drench and sweat, or suffer Congress to
administer an English swindle. Never was a sick and groaning victim more
completely at the mercy of unprincipled quacks. Every six months some new
experiment of fraud, despotism, bribery, unprincipled and ignorant
political surgery, and we are hauled and tossed about, and cut and skinned
as if we were a dead body in the dissecting-room, and Congress nothing but
a class of raw, headstrong, roaring medical students with their knives in
their hands and Dunglison's Anatomy in their pockets. The body does not
wince, does not kick, does not even protest; and so they keep cutting and
carving, no outrage as yet attempted being so monstrous as to have gone
beyond the people's tame endurance.
Our iniquitous and cruel career against the African race came to its climax
in the Dred Scott decision; for when iniquity takes the place of national
law, and is enthroned in the tribunal of justice, it can not well go
higher; and now that decision, unresisted, uncorrected, is producing its
fruits. It is like the star wormwood cast upon all fountains of waters, and
men drink and die. Our public officials of justice and of policy, from the
highest to the lowest, every time they are about to enact a new violence
against the oppressed, only have to refer to the Dred Scott decision, and
the basest, meanest, most detestable acts of fraud and cruelty are
converted into righteousness.
>From the Secretary of State down through files of marshals, judges,
bailiffs, lawyers, to the conductor of the street rail-car, the word
passes, and the policy is established, and it is officially announced, and
the judicial dictum is reverberated and applauded and applied, that black
men have no rights that white men are bound to respect. This dictum is fast
being welded into chains, into political precedents sealed and made sure,
and snare after snare in the iron net is woven on by lies, by perversions
of the Constitution and of history, by new measures of usurpation
unresisted, by presumptuous, unauthorized interpretations of law, till the
very breath of the black man is almost beaten out of his body, and he is
refused the privilege of expanding his lungs in a Republican atmosphere.
Our judges, Cabinet ministers, attorneys, general and local, and
Secretaries of State are hunting up examples of old injustice, for
precedents of new villainy. They thus set immorality and cruelty in the
fountains of justice, infecting all its elements with death, just as vile
assassins poison the wells of their neighbors by throwing dead dogs into
them, or the carcases of cats and skunks.
As God declared in a case fearfully similar, they have turned judgment into
gall and wormwood, and the fruit of righteousness into hemlock. They hunt
every man his brother with a net. That they may do evil with both hands
earnestly, the prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; and the
great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire, and so they wrap it up. The
best of them is as a briar; the most upright is sharper than a thorn-hedge;
they trust in vanity and speak lies; they conceive mischief and bring forth
iniquity; they hatch cockatrice's eggs and weave the spider's web; he that
eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a
viper. There is no judgment in their goings; they have made them crooked
paths, speaking oppression, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of
falsehood, so that judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth
afar off. They are never so happy as when they conceive absolute mischief,
the dregs of profound social ignorance, prejudice, and depravity, framing
mischief by a law which thence forward they impose as the supreme political
and moral state god. They set up the sin of Slavery as law, enforce it by
the Constitution under judicial opinions, to which they swear allegiance,
and if they can not discover precedents, they make them.
The Secretary of State dares publicly to affirm that no black man ever
received a passport, and can not, as a citizen, receive one, and shall not.
The Dred Scott decision has prepared this lid for the black man's living
sepulchre, and Secretary Cass acts the undertaker for the body, and screws
down the coffin with an incontrovertible falsehood. Then the Secretary of
the Treasury declares that a free negro can not receive a register for his
own'vessel, nor be master of his ewn vessel, nor, as such, have any title
to his own property by United States marine papers: for by the Dred Scott
decision he is no citizen, and can be none, and to be the rightful owner
and master of his own maritime property, a man must be a citizen. As he has
none of the rights of a citizen, any seafaring man may own him, but he can
not himself be the owner of so much as a plank or a nail in his own vessel.
Then comes, on the heels of this outrage, the United States Land
Commissioner, and from the General Land Office, with the same despotic
authority under the same infernal act, declares that persons of color have
no right of purchase and ownership in the public lands, that privilege also
being restricted by positive law to citizens of the United States, or those
that intend to become such; and by the, Dred Scott decision a man with a
colored skin neither is, nor can become, nor can without treason intend to
become, a citizen. So, by this decision, and these magisterial
interpretations and enforcements of it, the human being with a skin not
colored like our own, is alienated and expelled from land and sea--is an
exile every where, and even on the great highway of nations no better than
a log, or a snag, or a shred of drifting sea-weed, over which the keel of a
Christian civilization plunges, with all on board grinning approbation of
the cruelty. And certainly, if God's word be not thundered against such
crimes, the Church and the ministry do, by their silence, set the seal of a
Christian approbation to all this. Our revivals of religion become
accessory to it, if a fawning, clinging, whining piety, trembling in the
fear of man, refuses, to bear testimony against such wickedness.
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