Christianity & the Civil War Issue 33 | 1992

ARTICLE TOOLS

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The following words were part of a sermon delivered by Henry Ward Beecher on Thanskgiving Day 1860.

The southern states … have organized society around a rotten core,—slavery: the North has organized society about a vital heart,—liberty.… They stand in proper contrast. God holds them up to ages and to nations, that men may see the difference. Now that there is a conflict, I ask which is to yield? …

The truth that men cannot hush and that God will not have covered up, is the irreconcilable difference between liberty and slavery! Which will you advocate and defend? …

The secret intentions of those men who are the chief fomenters of troubles in the South cannot in anywise be met by compromise.… What do those men that are really at the bottom of this conspiracy mean? Nothing more or less than this: Southern empire for slavery, and the reopening of the slave-trade as a means by which it shall be fed.… Their secret purpose is to sweep westward like night, and involve in the cloud of their darkness all Central America, and then make Africa empty into Central America, thus changing the moral geography of the globe. And do you suppose any compromise will settle that design, or turn it aside, when they have made you go down on your knees, and they stand laughing while you cry with fear because you have been cozened and juggled into a blind helping of their monstrous wickedness?

They mean slavey. They mean an Empire of Slavery. They don’t any longer talk of the evil of slavery. It is a virtue, a religion! … You cannot compromise with them except by giving up your own belief, your own principles, and your own honor. Moral apostasy is the only basis on which you can build a compromise that will satisfy the South!

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