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

[528] where it found it. But the North has never been a unit. With the North as a unit, democratic, intelligent, resolved, in earnest, the South never would have risked the struggle. But she knew that the North was divided into three great parties. One was routine, West Point, too lazy to think. [Great applause.] I resolve hunkerism into indolence and cowardice, too lazy to think,--and too timid to think. The man of the past is the man who got his ideas before he was twenty, and had rather think as his father thought than take the labor of thinking himself: he is a hunker, and he will probably die such. [Laughter.] And the North had a second element, negrophobia, the Saxon contempt for a black skin, disgust with the question of the negro, hatred of him as another race, contempt for him as a slave, and weariness of the question. Outside of that was the democrat of the North, in the good sense of the term,--the man who believes in the manhood of his brother the world over, and is willing he should have his rights. Against such a North the South rebelled,--one of our hands tied up by negro hatred, and the other by constitutional scruples, and West Point on our shoulders. Against such a North the South rebelled. You remember it well,--the North that never dared to apply the line and the plummet to the ethics of its civilization,--that never dared to have a logic which would know no black, no white, when it studied its duties,--the North that, both in pulpit and in civil life, believed and obeyed the old proverb: “When the monkey reigns, let every man dance before him.” [Laughter.] As long as a wicked, contemptible institution had honors and wealth and fashion to bestow, so long the pregnant knee was crooked before it. That North the South met in battle, and she mistook, as we Abolitionists did, (that is, the issue will show whether we did mistake, we hope it is so,) how far the canker had gone, how great hold this routine of hunkerism