Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1867-02-27
MONTPELIER, VT:
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY q, 1867
Lamentations.

pleasure and solace (misery liking company
in a private letter written by DIR. Lord, late
president Of Dartmouth College, to one Of
his former pupils, Gin South Carolina. We
presume,) and shares its joy with its readers
by printing the following extracts from this
letter:
Il do not justify, in point of Christian
principle or common prudence, the methods
by which you sought redress of the wrongs
you have, for more than a generation, receiv-
ed from the North. But 1 more blame our
selves, first, for our denunciatiOn of slavery
itself, in distinction from its abuses, and then
for our " irrepressible conflict " with it, I'M
dertaken upon false moral and political
grounds, and carried on. hatcfully as it has
been, after Mohammedan fashion Were
the Institution a NAHUM IN Sc, and not some
times a conservative necessity for all the
parties, our method of overcoming 1T has been,
from first to last, unworthy of Christian
people. We have done the work. We have
given you dreadful punishment. But, as we
have done it in unrighteousness, our retribu-
ton, some time, some how, will come, per-
haps to general dissolution.
. Yet dare not speculate about the flu
ture- l fold my hands, and wait
upon the providence of God But in the
general and in the long run | see good be-
fore us Judgment will come
. think thus the rather because | seem
to see an approaching catastrophe of ali the
nations The world has grown old in trans
gression- From East to West the experiment
of reforming and saving it has been tried in
vain We are the westernmost and last ;
and now the Christianized, Anglo-Saxon, re-
publican wisdom has failed instead of calling
on God for help, we are calling on the negro.
We look to a brutifed, shiftless and lcen-
tious people to aid us in the work of self-gov-
eminent, which has been impossible to our
selves, and which now believe is impossible
on earth
The demonstration seems now almost
complete that man can neither govern or be
governed, nor govern himself, and that the
last failure will somehow prove the greatest
of all. The volcanic throes of the nations to
Overturn arbitrary power will be ultimately
successful. Then :. liberty, equality, frater-
nifty ~ will have it's short day; and when its
Babel seems to be completed the dream of
earth will vanish
Here all such prophesying is vain
find myself almost alone. l sometimes i'm
agine that could do more among your peo-
pie, and even among the outcast, suffering
and perishing negroes, than among philan-
thropists who have given them q boon which
they know not how to use, and which these
boosters never would have given them but to
make them subservient to their fanatical en-
terprlsee or their lust of power. But my
day is past. What can one at three-score
and fifteen do but to repose and pirate and la
ment ~
That DR.. Lord should find himself :. al
most alone he resides at Hanover, n H.
in the sympathies which have inspired
such prophetic forebodings of national ca
lanity as appear in this letter, may be evil
dence that the race of prophets is dying out
in New Hampshire; but, on the other hand,
it gives pleasing assurance that the patriot
ism of the Granite State remains confident
and steadfast. 1t is, of course, not impossi-
bic that the writer may have clearer revela-
lions of the future than are vouchsafed to
the great and good men of this generation,
who have expressed their joy at the overthrow
of slavery and who have thought they saw
the work of God, in this grand jubilee of the
republic, unloosing the heavy burdens and
letting the oppressed 60 free; but he ought
not to complain that men who believe in
publican government and the inalienable
rights of man, should leave him alone in his
mourning over the death of an institution
which made its victims g brutifed, shiftless
and licentious - by shutting from them every
avenue or invitation to better life
But is mt it possible, after all, that Dr.
Lord may be wrong? Is he infallible? Is
he quite sure that his inspiration is genuine,
and that of the thousands of religious teach
ers who read Gods providences in more
hopeful way, is counterfeit? May he not have
mistaken the morning for the evening twi-
light, and be shedding tears the depart
ing, when he should rejoice at the rising day
May there not be at least some hopeful ground
for believing that God has been at work in
this nation in the overthrow of slavery? If
slavery instead of freedom had triumphed,
would not DIR. Lord have found in that result
proof that slavery was divine institution,
and may we not be excused for seeing in
its destruction evidence that it was not a
divinely approved form of oppression? We
suspect Pharaoh thought that Egypt and the
world generally would go to the everlasting
bow-wows if he permitted the abolition of
slavery in his realm, but Moses proceeded
nevertheless. We have no doubt that many
a poor Jew thought the world was all going
wrong when the new gospel of Christian
charity, kindnes sand love, flashed the blaze of
the Sun of Glory into the temple of an old
and sacred Judaism The prophets of that
old dispensation lifted up their voices and
bewailed the fanaticism and radicalism and
blasphemy of the gospel of Christian - lib
erty, equa lily and fraternity which made
no distinction between the g brutifed. shift
less and licentious y Gcntiles, and the Gull
tivated, refined, thrifty and chosen people TO
whom the law had been given by Moses.
Even to-day, it is possible to find the prophets
of the Jewish people sitting, metaphorically, t
by the waters of Babylon. hanging their
harps on the willows, singing the sad song of
and looking back with the sad /
dest regret to the days when the money
changers ruled in the temple, and the Phari- 1
But these men are but the prophets of the
dead past standing in tears around the
sepulchre of the decayed and departed civil
cations, which have fulfilled
their allotted work, and given way to the new
order which God has ushered in in the mighty
march of his Providence along the centuries
With their faces toward the setting sun, they
refuse to see the light bursting in its morn
ing glory all along the eastern mountains,
and .s repose and pirate and lament because