Secession and the Fugitive Slave Law

Secession and the Fugitive Slave Law.

We have received a communication, which will appear next week, on the secession of the Southern States, and which requires some notice at our hands. It is not our intention to admit any thing, editorial or otherwise, into our columns, which might give our paper a political caste. But we do not regard this question as political one. The spirit that would overthrow our Constitution and convert our Union into a tremendous machine of oppression and injustice, would, if allowed its full sweep, soon degrade religion into an odious fanaticism. It is in vain to pretend that the tendencies of Abolition are not towards irreligion and infidelity; its very spirit is setting up of individual notions of justice and humanity, against the morality of the Bible, and if permitted to swell and gather head, it will soon sweep away all the ancient bulwarks, and let in a flood of brackish waters to destroy every thing green or fruitful. That fanatical wisdom which exalts itself above revelation and arrays the Bible against itself, must soon despise that sort of justice that removed the Canaanites from the promised land, to make room for the favored seed of Abraham; it must end in holding in contempt the doctrine that lays the guilt of the sinner upon the head of the immaculate son of God. What avails it to the heated imagination of the disciple of equality that all the past bears its testimony to the fact that the African race attains its highest elevation and greatest happiness under the control and direction of the whites? He will soon learn to question the justice that has so decreed, and to deny to the Supreme the right to subject a sinful world as he chooses. If there ever was a time and place since the fall of man where servitude was not known, where the dream of equality had an actual practical existence, there might be some excuse for this madness. But with the concurrent testimony of sacred and profane history in their hands, nothing but madness can be pleaded in extenuation of such folly. It is worse than blindness then, to shut our eyes to the matter. The progress of Abolition must be stopped, or our freedom or conscience will soon be but a name and the next generation even may see the Bible condemned, because man, in his wisdom, pronounces slavery a foul sin. We say that freedom of conscience may soon be denied us, it is even so now. Persecution consists not alone in the torture of the body or the imprisonment of the person. Insult and scorn, in words and acts, deny to the mind freedom of thought, and he who is condemned to insult  for his opinions, may endure persecution  even greater than he whose body is tortured.

How then is this evil to be removed? How are we to stop the mouths or palsy the hands of those who persecute us? We know no cure for religious madness, the world has never discovered a remedy for fanaticism. But we can withdraw ourselves from its influence. If we cannot stop the mouths of our revilers, we can stop our ears, and leave them to listen to their own ravings. We can do politically what we Baptists have already done as a religious body, that is, agree to separate. It is plain that our common government is the medium through which we are now assailed, for the shaft can reach us in no other way. We can exclude their books from our schools, their slanderous papers from our tables, but the acts of our common government which brand slavery as a curse, and slave holders as tyrants, remain to bring the blush of shame to our cheeks. The repeated attacks upon slavery in the District of Columbia, the passage of the Wilmot Passage of the Wilmot Proviso in the admission of California, the approaching repeal of the Fugitive Slave Bill are small matters in themselves. But when we consider that they are but means to an end, that by them wreckless politicians pander to the appetites of the agitators, they are full of evil omen. The storm is assuredly approaching and we shall be wise if we take shelter by ourselves. We cannot now doubt that the North is in earnest, that the agitators are in power there, and there is no safety for them or for us but in our leaving to them the field of contest. Even the safety of the North requires this course of us, for perchance when its connection with slavery shall cease and the North be to us as England is, a foreign nation, the strife may cease, and reason resume her throne. We deceive ourselves if we suppose that anything short of secession will give us peace or put a stop to the progress of abolition. We have been brought to this conclusion not by excitement, for we were never more calm, but by a cool and careful review of the commencement and progress of the slavery agitation; and our firm belief is, that it has taken so deep a hold upon the mass of the free States, that it must last while they have any connection with slavery, through union, with the slave States. This being our conviction, and knowing that slavery is an institution that the South will never surrender, we see before us no hope of peace in the future, whilst the Union lasts. With opinions and feelings so diverse, the North and South must seek peace in an agreement to separate, and the longer the separation is delayed, the more do we hazard the risk of a fierce and bloody war. For this separation we believe our denomination is ready. Their independent system of Church government naturally leads to a reliance upon the home political government, and having for the sake of peace, severed our religious connection with the non-slaveholding States, we are not prepared to hold our political beliefs as dearer than those of the Church. Freedom of conscience is the birth right of the Baptist. We have never persecuted others, and will submit to persecution from none.

The late so called Compromise, so far from allaying, has increased the slavery agitation. The leaders in the North are shouting loudly over their victories, and grumbling fiercely at their fugitive slave law, and this they vow to repeal. Everywhere does the North condemn it. Our exchange papers prophesy its repeal with the assurance of certainty. An informal meeting among the Delegates of the New York Baptist State Convention pronounces for its repeal. We hope it will be repealed, and that right speedily. It always was a pretence and could never be enforced. Its repeal will unite the South and rouse her to a sense of her danger. Mr. Seward is is not alone in holding to the doctrine of a law higher than the Constitution. There are thousands at the North who believe in "the expansion of the human mind," who hold their notions of humanity as superior to the Constitution-aye, or the Bible itself." Of this opinion also are the Independent and other Northern papers, and thousands of other readers. These show too plainly that the issue has come. It was obliged to come. That issue is secession or degredation, and with our degradation and the destruction of our institutions, fanaticism triumphs, and revelation yields to a higher rule of morality.