II • William J. Grayson
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
To each fanatical delusion prone,
He damns all creeds and parties but his own,
Brawls, with hot zeal, for every fool and knave,
The foreign felon and the skulking slave; ...
And faction’s fiercest rabble always find
A kindred nature in the Tribune’s mind;
Ready each furious impulse to obey,
He raves and ravens like a beast of prey....
There Seward smiles the sweet perennial smile,
Skilled in the tricks of subtlety and guile;
The slyest schemer that the world e’er saw;
Peddler of sentiment and patent law;
Ready for fee or faction to display
His skill in either, if the practice pay....
(Ibid., pp. 38–40.)
As he contemplates Mrs. Stowe his full wrath is stirred. He does not spare her sex. Southern chivalry serves the pure and good in lovely woman, not the malignant and selfish. An unsexed woman is hateful to it, and after extolling the true womanliness of Florence Nightingale, angel of mercy, Grayson pays his compliments to the Yankee propagandist thus:
Not such with Stowe, the wish or power to please,
She finds no joy in gentle deeds like these;
A moral scavenger, with greedy eye,
In social ills her coarser labors lie;
On fields where vice eludes the light of day,
She hunts up crimes as beagles hunt their prey;
Gleans every dirty nook—the felon’s jail,
And hangman’s mem’ry, for detraction’s tale,
Snuffs up pollution with a pious air,
Collects a rumor here, a slander there;
With hatred’s ardor gathers Newgate spoils,
And trades for gold the garbage of her toils.
In sink and sewer thus, with searching eye,
Through mud and slime unhappy wretches pry;
In fetid puddles dabble with delight,
Search every filthy gathering of the night;
Fish from its depths, and to the spacious bag
Convey with care the black, polluted rag;
With reeking waifs secure the nightly bed,
And turn their noisome stores to daily bread.
(Ibid., pp. 42–43.)
The Hireling and the Slave, is vigorous propaganda, carefully documented and pointed with modern instances, the work of an intelligent and humane writer who might be blind to certain evils in slavery but whose eyes were open to the social ills that grew rankly in the muck of industrialism. Outside of the South few in America had as yet come to understand so much—a handful of New England idealists, Parker and William Henry Channing and Emerson and Wendell Phillips, and Orestes Brownson, and a handful of Utopians, Albert Brisbane and George Ripley and Horace Greeley. The inadequacy of southern thought was identical with that of northern: blinded by sectional economic interests, they saw only half the truth. They beheld the mote in a brother’s eye, but considered not the beam that was in their own.
Source notes
Footnotes
[1] The same argument was made use of by northern supporters of slavery. Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, for example, “printed a description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the English laborer, ‘the slave lived like a prince.’ He had his cabin, neat, clean, and weather-proof: he had his own garden patch, over which he was lord paramount; he was well fed, well lodged, well clothed, and rarely over-worked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays with gusto, he lived to a great age” (quoted in Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism, p. 271).