Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/6

4 this venerable plantation, so sacred to us all, has been our home from that day to this. No stranger has ever been able to buy from us one foot of the soil. It has been ours, wholly ours, from the time we first received the grant up to the present moment. The bones of our ancestors (some of whom fought bravely in our triumphant war of independence) have rested there for four, five, or six generations; and surely every refined feeling of our hearts must of necessity cling with love and veneration to this consecrated ground. You may form then some idea of my solicitude, when I, who have been compelled to live at the North for several years, learned through the papers that Beaufort District was one of the principal starting-points of the secession movement, and that you yourself was much inflamed in your feelings in favor of it. My brother, you will not suspect me of treachery, when I assure you that South Carolina is utterly mistaken in imagining that the respectable and dignified men of the North are abolitionists. Look at the self-sacrificing, the almost godlike patriotism of Webster's attitude, when he stood up firmly against his own Northern prejudices and the seeming threats of his own constituents, and boldly argued in the defence of our rights under the Constitution as slaveholders. His enemies fondly hoped that even his own State would expatriate him from her affections, and refuse to send him back to the Senate. Many of them asserted that politically he was now dead; yes, they were foolish enough to believe that his noble, patriotic, Christian efforts to make peace among all the contending members of that great family of brothers that constitutes these United States, would blast his influence at the North.

I should, indeed, have blushed for the Yankees, if this, Webster's crowning moral act as a peace-maker, had remained unappreciated. But you remember how many communications he immediately received, approving of his course. I was very near him in the Senate, when he delivered his truly national speech, and not very far off sat our own physically emaciated, but still majestic Calhoun. My eyes were riveted in veneration and hope, first on one, and then on the other of these two blazing lights of genius; and I was delighted afterwards to learn that Mr. Calhoun, just before he died, remarked, "that although Webster had been his political opponent all his life, he had always been forced to approve in him, one striking moral peculiarity, namely, that he could not speak with power on any subject, if that subject did not command the entire consent of his intellectual judgment that it was right and true." Would to God