Spilling Blood for the Remission of the Sin of Spilling Blood

…we have the saddening spectacle of men courageously dedicated to a worthy cause letting their nobility grow so distempered by impatience that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish love of liberty from lust for blood. Ad we find by their charismatic arithmetic that ‘if all the slaves in the United States–men, women and helpless babes–were to fall on the field or become the victims of vengeance…if only one man survived to enjoy the freedom they had won, the liberty of that solitary negro…would be cheaply purchased by the universal slaughter of his people and their oppressors.’

James Redpath, the author of the above calculation, was not alone. The Reverend George B. Cheever preached that it would be ‘infinitely better that three hundred thousand slaveholders were abolished, struck out of existence,’ than that slavery should continue. The Reverend Theodore Parker welcomed the prospect of ‘the White Man’s blood.’ And William Lloyd Garrison, in his characteristic style… proclaimed that the career of the typical Southern planter ‘from the cradle to the grave is one of unbridled lust, of filthy amalgamation, of swaggering braggadocio, of haughty domination, of cowardly ruffianism, of boundless dissipation, of matchless insolence, of infinite self-conceit, of unequalled oppression, of more than savage cruelty.’ More succinctly, he declared that ‘every slaveholder has forfeited his right to live.’ John Brown, of course, summed it all up when, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet pronouncing on the Canaanite the blood-bath of the cherim, he would mutter his favorite text: ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’

…The cause for which the Abolitionists labored was just. Who can deny that, or deny that often they labored nobly? But who can fail to be disturbed and chastened by the picture of the joyful mustering of the darker forces of our nature in that just cause?

Robert Penn Warren. The Legacy of the Civil War. 20-23. 1961.

– Mind the men with blood in their teeth, no matter which cause they champion.