A First Word
By Moncure D. Conway

A First Word
By Moncure D. Conway

Article

Preface for the newspaper

Moncure D. Conway, editor

The Commonwealth (Boston), vol. 1, no. 1, p. 1

James M. Stone, publisher
Moncure D. Conway, editor

Sept. 6, 1862

"'The Union as it Was, and the Constitution as it is'." New York Times Oct. 18, 1864, p. 4.
"The Liberator." Accessible Archives.

Pdf scan of UMI microfilm

English

Text

A First Word

 In giving to the public the first number of our journal, we invoke the sympathy and help of all true and earnest men and women for a work which is undertaken, not for any private interest, clique or party, but for Liberty, Justice ,and the Commonwealth of the United States,--which may the God of Humanity bless and preserve forever!
  In thus invoking the sympathy and help of the people we are ready to announce what they will naturally wish to know, our object in establishing a new Journal and the spirit in which it is undertaken.
  I. This is not the revival of any organ which has preceded it here or elsewhere; nor is it to be the organ of any party or person, however liberal. Brought forth in the pangs of a new era, it can live only by recognizing the new forms of duty and methods of strength emerging with new occasions. Whatever persons or party shall rise or fall, we pledge you, countrymen, that our devotion to the cause of Humanity, now involved with the cause of this nation, shall be inviolable.
  II. The people shall find our every column warm with the pulses of their loyalty. But we remember that loyalty does not mean to encourage fatuity and wrong in the government we would preserve. If that were loyalty Jeff. Davis is doubtless a loyal man, for there is little doubt that he has ardently approved the measures which our government has adopted in the prosecution of this war. Whilst we will earnestly support the government at all times, and the administration when it is faithful to the government, whenever we see weakness of purpose of imbecility we shall spare not to tell the truth. For the Commonwealth proposes to speak the truth.
  III. The Commonwealth is for the Constitution, as it is. 
  That which is intolerable to Slavery, must be dear to the friend of Freedom. Now are our fathers justified; for that which was a dry root in the hard soil of compromise, is proved now to have possessed an immortal germ; to-day the effort of slavery to trample it underfoot attests that the constitution is its death warrant. We regard the constitution as not securing Slavery by one single word, but as securing Liberty in every word; even what are called ‘the compromises of the constitution with slavery,” by gaining from that institution a committal of itself to the destiny of Republican government, bound it fast to the chariot of Freedom behind which it must soon be dragged, a dead Hector. The most uncompromising foe of slavery can not find it a covenant with death, whilst the South is trying to tear it to pieces as a covenant with life.
  IV. We are in favor of the Union as it wasn’t, but as it was meant to be, and shall be.
  We have no found memories of the days when the union,--Tylerized, Filmoreized, Pierceized,--was dragged into every corruption; nor is our retrospect of “the Union as it was” in the days of James Buchanan, romantic, as of

       “A goodly place, a goodly time,
       As ere was in the golden prime,
                Of good Haroun Alraschid.”

We shall not devote much space in advocating the payment of a million of men and a billion of money for the return of the torch to the free-State settler’s home, of the bludgeons to the Senate, or traitors to plot in the cabinet and the Halls of Congress. We are not anxious to regain the agitation whose climax has proved to be civil war, and by the re-establishment of causes to reproduce consequences.
  To reconstruct that condition of things now traitorously masking itself in certain quarters with the name of “Union” would be to surrender the capitol of the capitol. It was precisely because the American people declared by their peaceful ballot that the corruption blasphemously called the “Union as it was” should end as a thing intolerable, and the Union as our fathers meant it to be should be restored, that the rebels are in arms to-day. Had they been sure that the Union could still be maintained as the cage of unclear birds,--as it was”—they would never have assaulted it.
  That organized Atheism—that Nationality of crime, has been stricken before our eyes by the thunderbolts of Eternal Justice; and though for a while, like the ancient tree stricken on our Common which fond hands have hooped and riveted together as well as they could, we may seek by iron and steel to retain that so-called “Union as it was,” yet as the rains and snows visit the stricken elm no longer to bring life but daily death, we should live to see all the forces and elements of the world gradually destroying it. The real Union is to be saved only by seizing the green branch—the living seed—of the old and planting it in an honest soil, to rear therefrom the true Liberty Tree, under whose shade our land shall rejoice, and whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.
  V. Whilst not opposing the administration in a spirit of opposition we intend to unite our voice with those which demand that it shall sustain the government and work for the Republic with a genuineness, fidelity and spirit which it has at no time manifested. In order to ensure loyalty in the masses the administration itself should be above suspicion. It stands before the world in the attitude of a government enforcing its laws upon rebels against its authority; we shall demand that ti [sic] shall enforce the laws upon those, who, against laws signed by its own hand return fugitive colored freemen or shoot them down under the very shadow of the American flag. We shall protest against laws given to the executive to be enforced, being heard of after their passage only in flagrant and cruel violations of them in the very departments where the people meant they should produce practical and instant changes of policy.
  We shall protest also against the government discouraging enlistments while it is punishing individuals for the same offence. We shall protect against their chilling the enthusiasm of the nation, and exciting panic fears in every wife’s and mother’s breast by calling upon them to send forth their dearest ones to be led by Generals who have again and again been proved incompetent—who have shown strategic ingenuity only in not hurting the enemy, and energy only in burying their own soldiers in swamps and trenches before Richmond and Corinth. This we affirm is a discouragement of enlistments, and this it is which makes drafting necessary throughout this country.
  VI. We need scarcely add that the Commonwealth will maintain that a black patriot is better than a white traitor. We shall advocate a treatment of slavery according to the laws of war, and one adequate to the tremendous exigencies of the hour, in opposition to the present policy of dealing with this arch foe as if he were a peaceful subject to whom constitutional forms are a protection. We believe in giving this devil his due,--which is to speak moderately, instant death. We object, that this is a political defense on our side against a savage war on the part of the South. No one doubts that if we were invading England we should try to get the help of Ireland; or if at war with France we should call for the Bourbon and other factions to rise. It is evident from Mr. Seward’s late letter to the English government that Emancipation as an effective and certain military weapon was distinctly appreciated by the government in May last. Why has it not been used? Answer, Chicago Platform, Republican party,--political considerations generally.
  Who does not know that if in last May the government had acted toward slavery according to the laws of war, which the President has declared, authorize him to free every slave to save the Union, instead of according to political considerations, the war would now have been over, and a hundred thousand men alive who now lie dead?
  We shall advocate mercy to the misguided South,--chiefly the mercy which will relieve them forever from that which has maddened them, whilst it has corrupted thousands of hearts in the North,--American Slavery, the real name of which for every moment of its further existence will be National Disaster.

Prefaces were common fare in first issues. Some, like William Lloyd Garrison's prospectus for The Liberator, were circulated prior to the paper's first number. Their purpose was to articulate the goals of the paper and the beliefs, including editorial practices and political ideologies, to which it would adhere. "A First Word" performs that function for The Commonwealth. 

  The paper is defined in the preface by what it is not: it is not the organ of any particular person or political party, and it is not a "revival" of any defunct periodical (including Samuel Howe's 1850s Free State paper The Boston Commonwealth). Nor does it subscribe to William Lloyd Garrison's "no union with slaveholders," the outlook that suggested the U.S. Constitution was a slaveholding document anathema to freedom. In the section "The Commonwealth is for the Constitution, as it is," the preface explicitly rejects Garrisonian abolitionism, saying that not "one single word" of the Constitution establishes slavery and, furthermore, that the Constitution cannot be regarded simultaneously as a "covenant with death" (borrowing Garrison's phraseology) by those who are anti-slavery and as a "covenant with life" by pro-slavery southerners. 

  Though it rejects Garrisonian ideas about the Constitution, The Commonwealth is decidedly anti-slavery. It rejects calls for peaceful compromise with slavery, both in the form of "Union as it was," a Democratic platform that would end the war but allow slavery to continue, and in the form of mass payments to slaveholders. Of "Union as it was," Conway argues elsewhere that pro-slavery forces had polluted the Constitution's guarantees of freedom for decades and here criticizes rosy nostalgia for the days "when the union...was dragged into every corruption." Additionally, The Commonwealth opposes returning self-emancipated slaves who arrive into Union territory back to slavery and demands that the Lincoln administration enforce its own policies guaranteeing the safety of arriving self-emancipated slaves. 

  Finally, the preface affirms the practical value of immediate emancipation of slaves to the war effort, suggesting that emancipation is an appropriate response to the South's "savage war" and declaring that "a black patriot is better than a white traitor."