Two letters selected from the voluminous correspondence of that time, one to a friend who approved, and the other to one who condemned, his course, are given, that the spirit which he cherished may be more thoroughly understood:

Also we give extracts from a third:

We find no word from Mr. Beecher concerning the election of this year, but an article immediately following shows that he kept his eye upon the main issue, and that none of its humorous any more than its sorrowful features escaped him. It was entitled “Degraded into Liberty”:

“A Southern gentleman en route for Texas brought to New York eight slaves, to be shipped hence by one of our ocean-going steamers. The birds of the air informed the Abolitionists of the facts, and it was not long before a writ was served upon the whole chattel-gang, and they were hauled up before Judge Paine to show cause why they should not be doomed to freedom. The cruel inhospitality of New York was never more manifest. These innocent fellow-beings, blessed by being born slaves, and not painfully educated for it, as Northern Southerners are; having had all the manifold mercies which make a Virginia slave so much better off than a free factory-girl in Massachusetts; having grown up in the indulgence of those hilarious dances and in the practice of those songs which make plantation life perfectly paradisaical, they were on their way to that land waving with sugar-cane and cotton-plants, where, hoe in hand, they were to while away the brilliant hours with gentle dalliances with loam and clay—when lo! they were suddenly arrested.

“From these bright anticipations they have been ruthlessly snatched, and plunged into freedom utterly unprepared! Are there no tears in Castle Garden? Ought not the Union Committee to spend something for a trifle of crape? Eight innocent fellow-chattels changed into fellow-beings! No kind master have they now. The tender relation is sundered. Our bereaved master and mistress must depart slaveless and alone. Having been worked for so long, and tended and taken care of, it is doubtful whether they will be able to take care of themselves now. Much as we sympathize with them, we do not consider their affliction at all comparable to that of the late happy slaves. These poor creatures are free, and we are assured in the highest quarter that no greater evil than that can well befall the slave population. They have degraded themselves. They have refused to be ‘content rather.’ In all the world they cannot find a man who owns them. They are now to sneak through life, like white men, owning themselves! They must have had some awful moments of compunction when the conviction first flashed upon them that they owned their own hands, trod upon their own feet, put their clothes upon their own shoulders, and felt that thing throbbing under their ribs to be their own heart. Some natural feelings must have shot through the maternal heart as she pressed her own babe to her own breast, and dropped her own tears upon its dusky cheek....

“Only one woman can be found faithful in this emergency. Their former mistress alone has appealed to their conscience and adjured them to return to her! Where were the teachers, the chaplains, the casuists, the lawyers, that a little time ago choked the press with beatitudes of slavery? ‘His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs; they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.’

“In reply to Mrs. Lemmon’s appeal the deluded slave-woman drew herself up, and, pressing her child to her breast, said, ‘I had rather be free!’ What! not value the radiant mercies of slavery more than that? The creature is crazy! Slaves in their senses are always contented. They are mere pets. The Uncle Toms of Virginia do nothing but look after the children, or sit in sunny nooks and smoke their stubbed pipes. The Aunt Phillises are always fat, rollicking cooks, bursting with laughter. Nobody is happy but slaves. The poor masters have all the care and burden, slaves all the glee and leisure....

“It is a dreadful state of things here in New York, where we feed upon Cotton, and have our very living in the smiles and favor of the South, to be hurting their feelings by talking so much about liberty and all that. A few more slaves set free, and the South will get angry again; and then New York will be in a world of trouble, and another call will call together another Castle Garden full of anxious merchants, all full of love to the South; and we shall have more sermons and more newspaper articles; and nobody can tell what will happen the next time.

“In part, the South is at fault. It has sent North the wrong kind of negroes. Those who have run away, or been judicially sentenced to freedom, or been bought—all these have loved liberty. Now, won’t the South send us some of another sort—some of those model slaves that love bondage and wouldn’t take liberty if they could get it? With a few specimen copies of such, we believe that we could do Southern institutions great good in the North.      *”

Fifty-three follows in much the same line as that of the two years immediately preceding. Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in November last, takes the oath of office on the 4th of March. His inaugural gives expression to what was undoubtedly the general feeling of the country—a determination that the Compromise measures shall be enforced, and a fervent trust that the question of slavery has been settled; and in his annual message, upon the assembling of Congress in that year, promises that the peace which now so happily existed through the land should not be disturbed during his term of office, if he could prevent it. A large majority of the people, both North and South, were undoubtedly in perfect accord with this desire, greatly pleased with this assurance, and tried to share his confidence.

Those were days in which a great deal of sympathy was felt in this country for the Irish, and by many, too, who were stanch opposers of liberty for the negro. Mr. Beecher had no patience with men, on either side of the Atlantic, whose sympathy was limited by the bounds of race or color; and when John Mitchel, who had posed as the “Great Irish Patriot” of that day, having escaped from an English penal colony and been received here with great enthusiasm, took occasion to state in an editorial in the Citizen, “We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion; we only wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama,” he (Mr. Beecher) enters into public correspondence with him, in which he denies the claims of the refugee to be an “apostle of liberty,” sorrows over his downfall, and dismisses him to the test of history in these words:

“Once you stood like some great oak whose wide circumference was lifted up above all the pastures, the glory of all beholders, and a covert for a thousand timid singing-birds! Now you lie at full length along the ground, with mighty ruptured roots ragged and upturned to heaven, with broken boughs and despoiled leaves! Never again shall husbandman predict spring from your swelling buds! Never again shall God’s singing-birds of liberty come down through all the heavenly air to rest themselves on your waving top! Fallen! Uprooted! Doomed to the axe and the hearth!

“But there is a future beyond this, even on earth! There is a time promised, and already dawning, in which the human family shall be one great brotherhood, and Love shall be the law of man! In that golden age there shall be research made for all the names that, since the world began, have wrought and suffered for the good of their kind. There will be a memorable resurrection of forgotten names. From the obscurity into which despotism has flung all who dared to defy it, from the shades and darkness of oblivion by which oppressors would cover down the memory of all who proclaimed human right and human liberty, they will come forth shining like the sun, and none be forgotten that labored to bring to pass the world’s freedom! In that day, when ten thousand names shall be heard, in all their number not one shall utter that gone and forgotten name—John Mitchel!”

We do not wish it to be inferred from our words that Mr. Beecher was the only anti-slavery leader who was doing good service in those days. There were many others, and some, perhaps, were doing as effective work in a single line as he. But we believe that, when the whole sphere of his activity was considered, he went far beyond any man of his time.

In any one of the three channels of largest influence, of that or of any time—the pulpit, the press, and the platform—he was the peer, if not the superior, of any leader; and while the most of his co-laborers used but one, or at the most two, of these instrumentalities, he was constantly employing the three, and each with unequalled efficiency.

His beliefs, as his labors, were broader than the most who were at that day prominently identified with the anti-slavery cause. He believed in the Constitution of the United States, and claimed that, if the government should be administered according to the original intent of this document, slavery must speedily cease. In this he differed from Garrison and his school, who held that “the (Federal) Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” He believed in the ballot-box, and in using its power to the utmost. In this he differed from Wendell Phillips and others of his school, who had disfranchised themselves for years, lest by voting they should seem to countenance an institution that was being used for the perpetuity of so great an injustice. He believed in the Church and the moral forces which she could bring to the work. He believed in love rather than hate, and most of all, with a triumphant, joyful faith, he believed in the person, presence, and leadership of the Redeemer and Reformer of the world. In all this he separated from the great body, individuals here and there excepted, of the Garrison and Pillsbury school of Abolitionists.

His judgment of the spirit of the leaders in this great movement may be inferred from the following extracts:

“Events made Garrison a leader. We never thought, and we do not now think, that Garrison deserved the one-half of the bitter reproaches that have been heaped upon him. His worst faults have been the reaction, in him, of the opposite faults of men favoring slavery or indifferent to it. But we regard him as one of the most unfortunate of all leaders for the best development of anti-slavery feeling. He is a man of no mean ability, of indefatigable industry, of the most unbounded enterprise and eagerness, of perseverance which pushes him like a law of nature, and of courage which amounts to recklessness. These are the qualifications which make a man powerful for stimulation. Had he possessed, as a balance to these, conciliation, good-natured benevolence, or even a certain popular mirthfulness; had he possessed the moderation and urbanity of Clarkson, or the deep piety of Wilberforce, he had been the one man of our age. These all he lacked. Had the disease of America needed only counter-irritation, no better blister could have been applied.

“Garrison did not create the anti-slavery spirit of the North. He was the offspring of it. It existed before he was born. But he at one time more powerfully developed and organized it than any other one mind; and developed it in modes and spirit, as we think, most unfortunate. Anti-slavery under his influence was all teeth and claw. It fought. It never conciliated. It gained not one step by kindness. It won not a single fort by surrender. It bombarded everything it met, and stormed every place which it won. We do not deny that Garrison and his early followers did a great work. Another generation will divide praise and blame, as no one is fitted to do in the heats of the present day. But when bare justice shall be done we believe that it will be found that a noble soul, deeply and truly benevolent, who sought the truest interests of his age, yet sought them with such a fierceness and such a hard and relentless courage as constantly roused up in his path the worst feelings of man, and heaped obstacles before him to such a degree that at length, in combating them, his sympathies for good seemed swallowed up in a bitter hatred of evil. The result of the agitation, inspired largely with this feeling, was that almost every interest in the nation rose up against the movement with which he was identified. Churches dreaded abolitionism, parties hated abolitionism, commerce abhorred abolitionism. Mobs rioted around the meetings, and threatened the dwellings, the stores, and the very persons of Abolitionists.

“There was odium and influence enough arrayed against the anti-slavery movement, under the form of early abolitionism, to have sunk ten enterprises which depended on men for existence. But there was a spirit in this cause, there was a secret strength, which nerved it, and it lived right on, and grew, and trampled down opposition, and came forth victorious! There was an irresistibility in it which made it superior to the faults of its friends and the deadly hatred of its enemies.”

It will be seen from the above how thoroughly he differed from what may be called the right wing of the Abolition party.

This difference is emphasized and the spirit which impelled him is indicated in an address which he delivered before the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and in a letter which he wrote to the New York Tribune in answer to a criticism that appeared in that paper:

“I believe there is to be found Christianity enough in the world, in the Church and out of it, in the Bible and out of it, i.e., in the record and in the living heart, and, I had almost said, breathed through the very air, as a Divine Providence, inspiring the great organic laws of society, controlling the moral sense of the Church, yea, beating in the veins of political economy, subtly guiding the common generosities of men into a public sentiment which, in God’s own time, in spite of recreant clergymen, apostate statesmen, venal politicians, and trafficking shopmen, shall fall upon this vast and unmitigated abomination and utterly crush it. But my earnest desire is that slavery may be destroyed by the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given me to choose whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commercial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the spirit and trophy of Christ, I had rather let it linger twenty-five years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the destruction of it. So do I hate it that I should rejoice in its extinction, even did the devil tread it out, as he first kindled it; but how much rather would I see God Almighty come down to shake the earth with His tread, to tread all tyrannies and oppressions small as the dust of the highway, and to take unto Himself the glory!”

This having been severely criticised, especially his willingness to have slavery linger, if by so doing its destruction could become a trophy to the prevailing power of Christ, he replies in a letter addressed to the same journal:

“Our highest and strongest reason for seeking justice among men is not the benefit to men themselves, exceedingly strong as that motive is and ought to be. We do not join the movement party of our times simply because we are inspired by an inward and constitutional benevolence. We are conscious of both these motives and of many other collateral ones; but we are earnestly conscious of another feeling stronger than either, that lives unimpaired when these faint, yea, that gives vigor and persistence to these feelings when they are discouraged; and that is a strong personal, enthusiastic love for Christ Jesus. I regard the movement of the world toward justice and rectitude to be of His inspirations. I believe my own aspirations, having a base in my natural faculties, to be influenced and directed by Christ’s Spirit. The mingled affection and adoration which I feel for Him is the strongest feeling that I know. Whether I will or not, whether it be a phantasy or a sober sentiment, the fact is the same nevertheless, that that which will give pleasure to Christ’s heart and bring to my consciousness a smile of gladness on His face in behalf of my endeavor, is incalculably more to me than any other motive. I would work for the slave for his own sake, but I am sure that I would work ten times as earnestly for the slave for Christ’s sake.

“I am not ashamed to own that I bear about with me an ineffaceable consciousness that I am what I am from Christ’s influence upon me. I accept the power to do good as His inspiration. Life is sacred to me only by my belief that I am walking in the scenes of a personal Divine Providence. When I drop from these beliefs life becomes void, the events of human society mere bubbles, and strifes of hope and fear, of good and bad, are useless as the turmoil of the rapids above Niagara. Nay, there is more than this: there is a heart-swell which no words can express; there is a sense of the sweet freedom of love, a sense of gracious pity, of patient condescension, of entire and transcendent excellence in Christ, which makes me feel how utterly true was the impassionate language of David: ‘Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee. My heart and my flesh cry out for God!’...

“This sentiment does not spring from any indifference to the slave, but from a yet greater sympathy with Christ Jesus—the slave’s only hope, my only hope, the Saviour of the world!”

With this letter we close our consideration of Mr. Beecher’s work in this era of slavery agitation. Great as were his labors—and we think they were unsurpassed and unequalled by those of any other man—we still believe that his best contribution to the great cause was the spirit which he manifested and the motives that influenced him. It was like the walking of the Hebrew youths in the fiery furnace and coming forth unscathed from the flames.