Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

Some men sit sad and trembling for the future, because the knell of this Union has sounded. But the heavens are almost all bright; and if some sable clouds linger on the horizon, they have turned their silver linings almost wholly to our sight. Every man who possesses his soul in patience sees that disunion is gain, disunion is peace, disunion is virtue.

Thomas Jefferson said: “It is unfortunate that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been deprived should be accompanied with violence, with errors, and even with crime. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end.”

We may see our future in the glass of our past history. The whole connection of Massachusetts Colony with England was as much disgrace as honor to both sides. On the part of England, it was an attempt to stretch principles which were common sense and justice applied to an island, but absurd and tyrannical applied across the ocean. It was power without right, masked in form. On the side of the Colony, it was petty shifts, quibbles, equivocations, cunning dodges, white lies, ever the resource of weakness. While England was bulldog, Massachusetts was fox. Whoever cannot take his right openly by force, steals what he can by fraud. The Greek slave was a liar, as all slaves are. Tocqueville says, “Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power, nor debased by submission; but by the exercise of power they think illegal, and submission to a rule they consider oppressive.” That sentence is a key to our whole colonial history. When we grew strong enough to dare to be frank, we broke with England. Timid men wept; but now we see how such disunion was gain, peace, and virtue. Indeed, seeming disunion was real union. We were then two snarling hounds, leashed together; we are now one in a true marriage, one in blood, trade, thought, religion, history, in mutual love and