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

[362] therefore happy. Its nobleness will be, that, laughing at prophets, and scorning chances, it has taken the prop from the slave system, and in one night the whole fabric will tumble to pieces. Disunion is abolition! That is all the value disunion has for me. I care little for forms of government or extent of territory; whether ten States or thirty make up the Union. No foreign state dare touch us, united or disunited. It matters not to me whether Massachusetts is worth one thousand millions, as now, or two thousand millions, as she might be, if she had no Carolina to feed, protect, and carry the mails for. The music of disunion to me is, that at its touch the slave breaks into voice, shouting his jubilee.

What supports slavery? Northern bayonets, calming the masters' fears. Mr. Seward's words, which I have just quoted, tell you what he thinks the sole use of our army and navy. Disunion leaves God's natural laws to work their good results. God gives every animal means of self-protection. Under God's law, insurrection is the tyrant's check. Let us stand out of the path, and allow the Divine law to have free course.

Next, Northern opinion is the opiate of Southern conscience. Disunion changes that. Public opinion forms governments, and again governments react to mould opinion. Here is a government just as much permeated by slavery as China or Japan is with idolatry.

The Republican party take possession of this government. How are they to undermine the Slave Power? That power is composed, 1st, of the inevitable influence of wealth, $2,000,000,000,--the worth of the slaves in the Union,--so much capital drawing to it the sympathy of all other capital; 2d, of the artificial aristocracy created by the three-fifths slave basis of the Constitution; 3d, by the potent and baleful prejudice of color.

The aristocracy of the Constitution! Where have you