January 2011

Destiny and Fate are not, historically speaking, respectable concepts. Yet throughout the war with Mexico, Zachary Taylor’s luck was so uniformly bright that in retrospect it almost seems that some conscious providence, having determined to make him President of the United States, would thereafter let nothing operate to his harm. Laggard communications that left him ignorant of the intentions of the War Department in Washington, the intrigues of his jealous Commander in Chief, President James Knox Polk, even Taylor’s own blunders and his calculated disobedience of orders—all these redounded to his gain as fully as did the mistakes of his principal military opponent, General Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico. And all helped lift him, a hero by accident, into the highest office his countrymen could offer.

Before the year 1830, when Theodore Weld began preaching the gospel of abolitionism—a crusade in which the Grimké sisters would soon join him—hardly a single noted American advocated the prompt abolition of slavery within the United States. It was not that the slave system had many ardent defenders, but that it had few ardent enemies. Conscientious men expected it to die out naturally, while the majority of Americans hardly thought about it at all. The South’s “peculiar institution,” it was felt, was no one’s concern but the South’s.

A few years later, a quarter of a million Americans, organized in two thousand chapters of the American Anti-Slavery Society, had come to believe that slavery was a sin, a crime, an abomination so loathsome that nothing but its immediate extirpation could save the nation’s soul. This was the achievement of the abolitionists, a small, fervent band of men and women incredibly brave, righteous to a fault, and disliked by most of their countrymen.

“Of course it is true that there are exasperations, and extenuations, and anger that conquers the will and the conscience, and strikes in an almost unconscious fury. But ought it to do so? Ought a man to be negatively praised for losing his moral control? Do we justify an engineer for not bridging precisely the worst abyss of all? The moral sense of every man is given him… for the trials that tear at his heart-roots. That sense may be overborne, and the man commit a crime as black as the one that exasperates him; but he is then not a man to be pitied as if he were a victim—he is to be pitied as a criminal. He may have more excuse than the se- ducer. But because the seduction of a woman is a crime, the willful murder of the seducer does not cease to be a crime also.

“And … remember … the real victim of the tragedy… a wayward girl fascinated to her ruin. If you hasten to pardon crime to him who sins through hate —will you deny forgiveness to her who falls through love: Tenderly, tenderly, pious soulsl