State Slavery - Imprisonment of A. Bronson Alcott - Dawn of Liberty
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Letter I January 16, 1843
SIR: Another stone in the old castle of human wrongs has this day been
loosened, of which you and your readers will be interested in learning
the particulars, if, in the unavoidable excitement of the occasion,
they can be reported. Thousands feel the inequity of the incorporated
state system as keenly as the millions have felt the incompatibility
and baseness of the incorporated church system. A forced church, a
tyrannous love, has long been felt to be no church and no love
whatever; and not a few persons in this country, as well as in all
other parts of the world, are fully prepared to suffer violence,
persecution and death, rather than commit any act to support such false
and forced Christianity. But of the numbers who feel that the State,
when it calls upon us by its club law, its mere brigand right of a
strong arm, to support guns and bayonets, murderous armies and navies,
legislators, judges, jailers, executioners, teachers, &c. &c.
no one has yet, it seems ventured to act upon the conviction, and
passively endure the consequences, whatever they might be, of a
faithful adherence to principle. It is often said, that in a condition
of society where one is obliged to let pass so much that is immoral, it
is not worthwhile to undergo so much inconvenience as close
imprisonment on account of State prosecution.
Very different to this, however, has been the feeling of A.
Bronson Alcott, of Concord; and being convinced that the payment of the
town tax involved principles and practices most degrading and injurious
to man, he had long determined not to be a voluntary party to its
continuance. Last year, by the leniency of the collector in prepaying
the 1.50 dollar, the question was not brought to issue, and only the
humblest instrument of the State was subdued, in so far as he declared
the law was too base for him to execute. This year, a step further has
been gained.
By the system of putting up the collector's office to public
auction, and accepting the man who will do the dirty work for the
lowest per centage, the town is pretty sure to secure the services of
the most suitable instrument of its tyranny. When the citizens
generally shall take the trouble to look into the law and the
circumstances of this affair, they will shudder at the slavery to which
they subject themselves; and the sooner they do so, the better; for
greater oppressions than any they have thrown off, have grown from
smaller beginnings.
This year, a collector was appointed, who could
execute the law; and although no doubt it wen hard with him to snatch a
man away from his home, from his wife, from the provision and education
of his little children, in which latter he found Mr. Alcott serenly
engaged, he nevertheless did it. He witnessed, with his own eyes, the
little hasty preparations to attend him to the jail, the packing up of
a few personal conveniences to ward off the inclemencies of the season,
and yet, with no higher authority than the general warrant in his
pocket, which, without particular investigation, trial, or inquiry,
hands over the liberty of every townsman to his discretion, he took a
fellow-citizen, an unoffending man, to a long confinement.
To the county jail, therefore, Mr. Alcott went, or rather was
forced by the benignant State and its delicate instrument. Probably the
authorities anticipated that if they showed a rigid determination to
enforce this old monstrous system, a weakness would be discovered
somewhere; that domestic attractions would be too potent; that wive or
friend would interfere, and pay the money. But they were mistaken. A
virtuous man is not often surrounded by friends who would persuade him
to desert his conscience, and turn his back upon moral principles, just
at the trying moment. In this case, at all events, no one was unwise
enough so to act.
Having worked up to this point, it appears the enemy's courage
failed. The constable collector having brought his victim to the jail,
the next step was to find the jailer, who appeared to be not at home. A
considerable delay ensued, during which the prisoner, of course, waited
patiently; and after nearly two hours had thus been passed, the
constable announced that he no longer had a right to detain his
caption. - On inquiring how that happened, he said that both the tax
and costs had been paid. To the question, by whom the payment had been
made, he replied by naming a gentleman who may be regarded, and who
would willingly be regarded, as the very personification of the State.
In these facts, humble as the individual and the circumstances may
appear, we have a wide and deep subject for reflection, which I trust
you will not permit to pass in a barren manner. This act of
non-resistance, you will perceive, does not rest on the plea of
poverty. For Mr. Alcott has always supplied some poor neighbor with
food and clothing to a much higher amount than his tax. Neither is it
wholly based on thee iniquitous purposes to which the money when
collected is applied. For part of it is devoted to
education, and
education has not a heartier friend in the world than Bronson Alcott.
But it is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being
to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive
principles of power and might over peace and love.
Suppose this tax were levied by the town in its caprice, and the full
value of the amount were to be returned the next day to each payer in
bread. Would it not be a sacred duty in every man, in the virtuous
integrity of his nature, to deny such a proceeding? Doubtless it would.
All but the meanest souls would thereby be raised to dis-annex
themselves from the false and tyrannous assumption, that the human will
is to be subject to the brute force which the majority may set up. It
is only tolerated by public opinion because the fact is not yet
perceived that all the true purposes of the corporate state may as
easily be carried out on the revolutionary principle, as all the true
purposes of the collective church. Every one can see that the Church is
wrong when it comes to men with the Bible in one hand and the sword in
the other. And is it not equally diabolical for the State to do so? The
name is of small importance. When Church and State are divorced by
public opinion, they still may carry on an adulterous intercourse.
Then, look at the peculiar law in this case. When a debtor is
imprisoned by an ordinary creditor, he can be bailed out, and have
considerable liberty to employ himself, preserve his health, and the
like. But the impersonal town is an inexorable monster, and permits not
his debtor to quit the prison walls. He is treated as a convicted
felon. No trial, no jury is permitted him.
Many are the points worthy of consideration involved in this
uncouth, barbaric, unchristian state of the law; and I earnestly trust
you will not allow the occasion to escape your enlightened and
benevolent pen, nor fail to inform the public at large of the facts.
Yours sincerely,
C.L.
Concord, Mass.
January 28, 1843
SIR: A typographical error in my communication inserted last week,
impels me again to take up the pen upon the comprehensive subject of a
voluntary government. In the fifth line from the bottom of the first
column, the word 'revolutionary' is printed, instead of 'voluntary'
principle. As the word revolutionary is rather alarming to some
friends' nerves, it is of importance that the reader's mind should be
disabused of any imagination, that violent proceedings are recommended
or contemplated. In as much as the principle of universal charity is
quite opposed to the principle of brute force, the proposed new basis
for social action may be said to involve a revolution; that is to say,
a something on the other side of the moral wheel. But nothing can be
more clear, than that if the new plan is to be brought into the actual
world, it must be only by kind, orderly, and moral means.
I am not unaware that it may require some time to render this
thought familiar to the public mind; but I see very plainly, that the
more the practicability of immediate abolition of colored slavery is
considered, the sooner all will be brought to see that really there is
little hope for its success, until we entertain this question of the
larger evil, of which colored slavery is, in fact, but a consequence.
Let us suppose that success should attend the present abolition
efforts, and all the colored population are liberated, or are at least
what we call set free; still, this master evil, this monster tyrant
will remain. Whereas, if we could but penetrate, at once, to this
deeper, this more radical vice, the shallower crime would at the same
time be dried up.
Let us imagine the colored man turned from a forced workman to a
hired laborer, what will be his condition? Will he not, by reason of
his present notions, and our false state of society, fall into that
degraded position, in which the Irish laborer is found? Slavery, we
know, is the Ireland of the United States. It is the machinery by which
one portion of the race has, in almost every age, oppressed another
portion; and the transference of the colored man to hireling servitude
would leave him a bondman still. Why then should we aim alone at the
mere modification, when with as much ease we might carry the whole
question? Nay, not alone with as much ease, but with more. Thorough
virtue is more easily sustained than any compromise, if we have but the
valor to set about it. In this case, a new class of persons will become
interested in abolition. The circle will be widened, the numbers
augmented, the feeling deepened. In comprehending white freedom as well
as black, the white man as well as the black will be heartily engaged
in the great cause of human freedom. Coadjutors, who feel deeply
because the question comes vitally home to them, will be actively
enlisted.
This, Sir, is the little wicket gate, by which we must enter the
straight and narrow way which leads to universal liberty. As soon as we
see this, we shall vigorously and successfully struggle out of the
slough of despond.
Every abolitionist must perceive, by this time, that the great
obstruction to colored freedom consists in this very fact of
government, not of charity, but of force. The State and its intrigues,
its place-hunting, its office-seeking, is at this moment the only
serious obstacle to that freedom, in favor of which public opinion is
even now strong enough, if this hard, compacted hindrance did not stand
in the way. Moral feeling, I declare, Sir, is at this hour clear
enough, potent enough, to carry this small step, this triffling section
of personal freedom, were but our brute force government superseded by
a voluntary government.
The State, not being a person, can be carried to any tyrannic
action without any remorse. There is none to blush for it. It imprisons
without inquiry. It punishes without trial, either by jury or solitary
judge. It converts and perverts an anti-slavery constitution into
pro-slavery conduct. It does things daily without shame, which no
individual in it could do without soul-stirring contrition. It involves
a system which absolutely shuts out the best men from public life, and
selects only the mediocre, such as are capable of being used as tools
and instruments. It pretends to defend person and property, and is the
first to invade them, and that also in a more brutal manner than it
allows to any of its individual members.
Let the people recollect that it is themselves who have made and who
sustain this dragon, which respects or disrespects, holds up or
tramples down written constitutions, just as slaveholders shall
suggest. Away, then, with such a delusion! There is no safety for a
person or property, while a government by force exists. Let us
supersede it by one of charity. Let us have a voluntary State, as well
as a voluntary Church, and we may possibly then have some claim to the
appellation of free men. Till then, at least, we are slaves.
Yours, dear friend,
C.L.
Concord, Mass.
February 21, 1843
SIR: The idea that the business of a nation could be carried on if
it were left to the free judgment in every individual to support it or
not as to him seemed best, must no doubt appear at first sight to the
ordinary politician as most chimerical. But this is the fortune of all
new ideas; and happily we are now-a-days too much accustomed to new and
progressive thoughts, to be stopped in our efforts to carry them out by
any such vaporish charge. I have no doubt if we can succeed in
attracting due attention to the subject we shall soon have the
charitable feelings and sound thoughts of the country on our side. If
it were not that we are so accustomed to the present mode of life as to
overlook its incongruities, disharmony, and injustice, we should be
impulsed at once to demand "Why should we have all this complicated and
costly machinery of government?"
The purposes and pretences for which the representative system of
government has credit, it wholly fails to secure. Nay, in many
instances, it is the foremost actor in breaking the principles it
declares it exists to maintain. It professes to be a defence for person
and property. Whenever, the propriety of maintaining the government is
questioned, the first prompt remark is that neither person nor property
would then be secure. But how does it preserve person? Whose person is
more secure under political government than it would be without it?
Whom does it guard? From whom does it ward off the consequences of
anger, hatred, jealousy, revenge, or the many other passions which
occasionally boil up in the human heart and impel the hand to strike?
Not even the very first executive officer, the royal or presidential
head of government itself, is exempted from personal assaults of this
kind by any governmental power. No guards, guns, gendarmerie, police,
nor any such contrivance, can protect a Louis Phillippe, or a Victoria,
from an enemy's or maniac's hand. Still less can it accomplish
preventively for the person of any private citizen. The notion of
actual prevention is, then, quite ridiculous.
But when the advocate for coercive government is brought to this point,
he admits that by actual temperate and kindly prevention the political
government is altogether powerless; and that it is only by terror, by
the force of example in the imposition of pain on previous offenders,
that it can be of any effect whatever. Now, let any rational man answer
the question whether this is any personal protection. The head of the
decapitated murderer will not fit the shoulders of any murdered
brother. A man is not much benefitted by the knowledge in his dying
moment that his assassin, if caught, will be hanged by the neck until
he is dead.
No man strikes or kills another without a motive. Individual
persons so not murder for amusement, though governments and nations do.
And the fact is, that terror of punishment ceases to have any effect
just when it is most needed, that is to say, when the passions are
unduly excited. Indeed it has no such result as prevention at any time
that personal safety is jeopardized. Men are not restrained from murder
by the fear of external punishment, but by the internal governor. Just
to that degree in which a consciousness of the divine government is
developed in the individual is he restrained from destruction,
violence, or wrong to his neighbors. There is no other preventive of
crime. We may go on, as nations have gone on, to add capital offence to
capital offence, making so many crimes punishable by death that the
whole code is wet with human blood, and one would think the hangman
enacted the laws; but in the way of prevention all this is vain.
Nations have done this, they have built up systems which by their
spirit we might suppose had been dictated by Jack Ketch and his
associates. And what has been the consequence? Surely not an increased
protection to person and property. No; but such an utter repugnance to
have any participation in so sanguinary a scheme that innocent victims
have rather been content to remain at the mercy of the depraved than
prosecute them unto death. Coercive governments have bid high in blood
for popular support; but the very excess of their offers has disgusted
the people. It is to be hoped that this disgust will be increased by
the growth of moral power and perception in the nations; that it may
not only be applied to capital punishment, but be extended also to
ordinary punishments. Revenge or retaliation is a principle which
cannot prevent crime, but must rather increase it. Retaliation is
itself a crime. And a grosser crime than original attack.
The nations, that is to say the moral people in them, have
discovered the tendency of governmental force with respect to the
prevention of personal offences. They have discovered that an increase
of force so far from affording an increased protection has led to a
diminution of it; and that the protection of the murdered, and the
reclamation of the murderer are alike futile by the hanging of the
latter. A little more consideration will lead to the just conclusion
that pain inflicted after the committal of crime is altogether a
failure in the prevention of offences. What is true of the extremely
heavy is also applicable to the middling and lighter crimes.
This argument need scarcely be here followed out to its further
ramifications. Although at first sight it may appear to be quite
fanciful to assert that a force government does not and cannot protect
the subjects of its pretended solicitude, yet a moderate extent of
thoughtful investigation soon opens the mind to the undeniable fact.
Nay, we may go a step further, and from the recent case of Mr.
Alcott, as reported in your paper, assert that on some occasions the
government itself is foremost in attacking the sacred right of personal
liberty. Because this citizen as a man, as a christian, has
conscientious scruples in doing aught in support of a government which
spends people's money on prison, gunpowder, halters, and the like
civilized gear, that very government lays violent hands upon him and
imprisons him for a term only shortened by its good will and pleasure.
Why, sir, the supposed wild and lawless red man, whom
we
have exiled from his native forests, could do nothing worse in
principle than this. He left the result of personal assaults unavenged,
even when it amounted to murder. -
So too perhaps would the
untaught Irishman, and the Scotch Highlander. But nothing so bad as to
attack in a body the most meek, inoffensive, and well-disposed of the
community ever entered the minds of these "great untaught."
But the iron-hearted system does not limit its depressing
despotism to the case of a total denial of its right divine. This is a
sort of high treason which might be expected to arouse its ire. But it
also takes into its vengeance any partial denial of its purity; and, on
smaller occasions, thunders forth its unrelenting anger. When a young
man, happily conscious of the wickedness of learning to shoot his
fellow-creatures, refuses to be drilled, and to bear deadly arms
against the innocent, the guns of the willing are pointed at his head,
and long imprisonment, as the lightest expiation, follows. Such a mode
of protecting the persons of its citizens, of respecting their native
feelings, their purest sentiments, seems abundantly curious, and
difficult of reconciliation with our intuitive moral precepts.
Many years have not elapsed since we were in a like predicament
regarding the church. It is still thought in some countries that a
legislative enactment, a procedure of collective man, is necessary to
the due upholding of Divine laws. Some people still think, or pretend
to think, that communities and nations can be made religious by act of
parliament. We have, however, beneficially escaped from this unworthy
predicament, and it is not a very profound foresight to prophecy that
we shall soon be rid of the one in question. We prefer a voluntary
church as the only true church. We shall shortly devise a voluntary political organization as the only true State.
Human beings, we are now convinced, can not be rendered more fit for
heaven by human coercion; neither can they by such a contrivance, be
better qualified for a true life on earth. In fact, the goodness and
qualification for one are the same as for the other. They both spring
from one sentiment, from one state of being. They both originate in the
religious nature in the human soul. This nature above all others, is
out of the reach of external power. Government may only lay hold of
men's bodies, their carcasses they may imprison, and even their minds
they may, by education, do something towards impressing with particular
doctrines, and, through public opinion, some influence is occasionally
produced on the sympathies and moral sentiment. But, for the latter,
the contrivances must be very delicate and their appliance very quiet
and subtle, or they will fail for their end. And for a man's religious
being, for the inmost nature, the deepest good within, coercive
government ever has and ever must fail. The sensitive plant coils up
not more quickly at the human touch than does the religious element on
the application of the smallest particle of violence. Not only
political government, but social force, the power of a sect, shall in
vain assault the sacredness of soul. No: not even a parent's care over
his child may by force extend to this sphere. It is holy ground, an on
one may stand thereon with rough shod feet.
If it were safe to abandon force with respect to the maintenance
of religious belief, surely it is no less salutary to give it up in
reference to religious
conduct.
All conduct is either religious, or should be so. If it be not it
happens because force has profaned it. If, in respect to the church, we
can leave it to men's free will to support it by word or money as they
deem proper, most certainly we shall be right as men are now
constituted, in leaving political and social economy to their good
sense. Worldly minded as men are now admitted to be, it cannot be
probable that they would fail in supporting a system which they thought
protected their worldly goods. Religious opinion is a thing which by no
external means men and women are compelled to declare; yet, so strong
is the spontaneity in this direction, that upon most occasions a public
feeling is manifested which includes every one. If it be said that many
are compelled by force of public opinion to subscribe in money and
submit in behaviour, we can prove on the other hand, that many are
carried, by a pure zeal, much beyond the point which the public voice
demands; and it is in fact that perpetually fresh zeal which is ever
creating and keeping alive the public opinion which is said to draw in
the luke warm.
May we not then boldly ask whether it is probable that men who
are so ready to maintain the things which are unseen, would spontaneate
less on behalf of the things which are visible? If the love of peace,
of our fellow citizens' good opinion, compels men to pay so handsomely
for churches and spiritual protectors, why should such motives fail for
a similar result when their persons and worldly property, which are
open to all men's eyes, are concerned? It is not possible that men of
property would neglect an institution which protected their property,
any more than they now neglect to insure against loss by fire without
an external force to compel them. It is clear that this argument
entirely fails. No one believes in its validity. At all events if the
government itself had any faith in this imaginary axiom that it (the
government) is necessary for the protection of person and property, its
members would at once give up all coercion employed for its
maintenance, and rely on the self-interest of persons and of property
holders for support. - This low motive of self-interest would singly be
sufficient to bring in all needful supplies, if there were any veracity
in it. But there is not. And however axiomatical, or self-evidently
true this sentiment may once have been, it is now worn out, and should
be discarded. It has now no more a legitimate place amongst us than our
great grandfathers' three cornered hats and tye wigs which kept their
heads so warm.
Much more may be said, and I apprehend from the deep seated position of this delusion
must
be said, in order to awaken mankind to a due sense of their degradation
and loss; but possibly for this occasion I have said enough. If I shall
succeed in calling the attention of thinkers to the subject, some of
them will perhaps find leisure either to confirm or disprove the
position I am endeavoring to establish.
In the meantime I remain sir,
Yours, very respectfully,
C.L.
Concord, Mass.
[ Intro ] -
[ I ] -
[ II ] -
[ III ] -
[ IV ] -
[ V ] -
[ VI ] -
[ VII ]
