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troubles.
He alleged that the immediate peril did not arise so much from the claims on the part of Congress, or of the Territorial Legislatures, to exclude Slavery from the Territories, or the enactment of Personal Liberty Laws by some of the Northern States, “as from the fact of the incessant and violent agitation of the Slavery question throughout the North, for the last quarter of a century.”
This agitation, he alleged, had “inspired the slaves with vague notions of freedom,” and hence “a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar.”
Then, with substantial repetition of the words of John Randolph on the floor of Congress, fifty years before,1 he said:--“This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrection.
Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before the morning.”
2 This state of things, he intimated, was a sufficient excuse, if continued, for the lifting of a fratricidal hand.
“Should this apprehension of domestic danger,” he said, “whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself, until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature. . . . And no political Union, however fraught with blessings and benefits in all other respects, can long continue, if the necessary consequence be to render the homes and the firesides of nearly half the parties to it habitually and hopelessly ”
1 “I speak from facts,” said Randolph, in 1811, “when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond, that the frightened mother does not hug her infant the more closely to her bosom, not knowing what may have happened. I have myself witnessed some of the alarms in the capital of Virginia.” This was a quarter of a century before there was any “violent agitation of the Slavery question throughout the North.”
2 George Fitzhugh, in the article in De Bow's Review just alluded to, pronounced this statement a “gross and silly libel,” “which could only have proceeded from a nerveless, apprehensive, tremulous old man. Our women,” he continued, “are far in advance of our men in their zeal for disunion. They fear not war, for every one of them feels confident that when their sons or husbands are called to the field, they will have a faithful body-guard in their domestic servants. Slaves are the only body-guard to be relied on. Bonaparte knew it, and kept his Mohammedan slave sleeping at his door.” The same writer added, that it was “they [the women] and the clergy who lead and direct the disunion movement.”
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