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The Rejected Stone: Or, Insurrection Vs. Resurrection in America
The Rejected Stone Or Insurrection Vs Resurrection in America Author:Moncure Daniel Conway Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sacred hands we have nailed and the side we have pierced. Henceforth, brother, if we must be devils, at least we can be honest devils ; and if any craven prie... more »st or tricky politician tells us that we have nothing to do with the crimes of the Union against man, more than with the widow-burning of Hindoos, or the cannibalism of Fiji- ans, shall we not at least tell him — in a devovit and Christian-like way — that he lies ? BETWEEN US BE TRUTH! Without doubt, the rule of Slavery in the United States, which began its wane as the century passed its noon, was one legitimate and structural phase of the country. It was the result of certain compromises made by its builders ; and freemen had either to endure it as best they could, or, as some of the bravest did, take sides with the stone which the builders rejected against the whole fabric. But can any man in his senses imagine that men fresh from a revolution for Freedom would have stooped to that narrow gate and straitened way, unless they had seen, or thought they saw, the spacious halls of Liberty in the distance ?Would they then and there have forever sealed the doom of their new-born nation's independence ? Nailing up a Republican in a barrel and rolling him into the river would then be only a symbol of what our fathers did for a whole nation of Republicans. Had the Union been the mere petrifaction of its most rudi- mental and unripe condition, a contract for the everlasting retention of its tottering infancy, a compact generating no power of self-conservation amid the emergencies of the future, then the nation would have kicked it off as a Chinese shoe, or limped with premature decrepitude to pay, ere its minority had passed, the debt of Nature,— dissolution. Everywhere the limit of growth is the inauguration of death. But t...« less