Record Data
“The First Want,” National Era 11, no. 522, Washington D.C., 1 January 1857, p.2.
Transcription
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and other typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
THE FIRST WANT
THE GREAT SOUTHERN CONVENTION finds no favor at the hands of the Southern press. The Richmond (Va.) Examiner dissects the proceedings of one Convention as a sample of all the rest, and exclaims—
"Here we have a set of brave resolutions, valorous words, high resolves, up to the ‘do or die’ or ‘last extremity’ point, and what have they profited the South? Who has attempted to carry them out, or who has thought of them since the clever and patriotic gentlemen who wrote them quitted Charleston? The energy of the Convention died with it, and no Governor of a Southern State, no Legislature, no Council of the Cherokees, no Board of Trade, no Railroad Company, has ever bestowed one though upon any one of these resolutions. Southern trade, Southern commerce, Southern education, colleges, and free schools, the Pacific Railroad, the ‘uniform coinage,’ the geological surveys, are precisely as they were before the Convention met.
"From Dan to Beersheba all is barren; the groups of resolutions foliaged with words are barren fig-trees, producing nothing, and the fine speeches by which they were supported were nothing more than words—words—words."
Well, what does the Examiner expect? Can the Convention manufacture Capital, and Enterprise, and Intelligence? Can if build ships, make sailors, get up steam lines to Europe, write Peter Parley Histories, establish the Common School system? It sees the wants of the South, resolves that they ought to be supplied, and then—it stops, blindly, stupidly ignoring the great primal want—the want of free labor. Had the South free labor, Capital and Enterprise would spring up there as elsewhere, and take care of themselves, without annual gatherings of demagogues, visionaries, and speculators, to say what ought to be done.
It is because Slave Society is a failure, that we have these Southern Conventions, and that all such Conventions fail. In Free States, when a steam line is to be got up, they do not call a Northern Convention to talk about it, but a company of private individuals organize, and the work is done. We claim no pre-eminent merit for the Northern People—the question is one between institutions—between Free Society and Slave Society—and the fact that the latter is a failure, shows that even Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American energy is not equal to all things.