The Death of Slavery

William Cullen Bryant, the longtime editor of the New York Evening Post and the first American poet to attain international prominence, was a staunch abolitionist. “Wherever our flag floats,” he wrote after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, “it is the flag of slavery.” He was also an influential Lincoln supporter. (Bryant, in fact, introduced Lincoln to New Yorkers at his famous Cooper Union speech.) After the war, Bryant hailed the demise of slavery’s “cruel reign” in this poem.

—Sage Stossel

O THOU great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years,
   Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wield
   The scourge that drove the laborer to the field,
And look with stony eye on human tears,
          Thy cruel reign is o'er;
          Thy bondmen crouch no more
In terror at the menace of thine eye;
   For He who marks the bounds of guilty power,
Long-suffering, hath heard the captive's cry,
   And touched his shackles at the appointed hour,
And lo! they fall, and he whose limbs they galled
Stands in his native manhood, disenthralled.

A shout of joy from the redeemed is sent;
   Ten thousand hamlets swell the hymn of thanks;
   Our rivers roll exulting, and their banks
Send up hosannas to the firmament.
          Fields, where the bondman's toil
          No more shall trench the soil,
Seem now to bask in a serener day;
   The meadow-birds sing sweeter, and the airs
Of heaven with more caressing softness play,
   Welcoming man to liberty like theirs.
A glory clothes the land from sea to sea,
For the great land and all its coasts are free.

Within that land wert thou enthroned of late,
   And they by whom the nation's laws were made,
   And they who filled its judgment-seats, obeyed
Thy mandate, rigid as the will of fate.
          Fierce men at thy right hand,
          With gesture of command,
Gave forth the word that none might dare gainsay;
   And grave and reverend ones, who loved thee not,
Shrank from thy presence, and, in blank dismay,
   Choked down, unuttered, the rebellious thought;
While meaner cowards, mingling with thy train,
Proved, from the book of God, thy right to reign.

Great as thou wert, and feared from shore to shore,
   The wrath of God o'ertook thee in thy pride;
   Thou sitt'st a ghastly shadow; by thy side
Thy once strong arms hang nerveless evermore.
          And they who quailed but now
          Before thy lowering brow
Devote thy memory to scorn and shame,
   And scoff at the pale, powerless thing thou art.
And they who ruled in thine imperial name,
   Subdued, and standing sullenly apart,
Scowl at the hands that overthrew thy reign,
And shattered at a blow the prisoner's chain.

Well was thy doom deserved; thou didst not spare
   Life's tenderest ties, but cruelly didst part
   Husband and wife, and from the mother's heart
Didst wrest her children, deaf to shriek and prayer;
          Thy inner lair became
          The haunt of guilty shame;
Thy lash dropped blood; the murderer, at thy side,
   Showed his red hands, nor feared the vengeance due.
Thou didst sow earth with crimes, and, far and wide,
   A harvest of uncounted miseries grew,
Until the measure of thy sins at last
Was full, and then the avenging bolt was cast.

Go then, accursed of God, and take thy place
   With baleful memories of the elder time,
   With many a wasting pest, and nameless crime,
And bloody war that thinned the human race;
          With the Black Death, whose way
          Through wailing cities lay,
Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that built
   The Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taught
To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt,—
   Death at the stake to those that held them not.
Lo, the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom
Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room.

I see the better years that hasten by
   Carry thee back into that shadowy past,
   Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast,
The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie.
          The slave-pen, through whose door
          Thy victims pass no more,
Is there, and there shall the grim block remain
   At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet
Scourges and engines of restraint and pain
   Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat.
There, 'mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes,
Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times.

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During residency, I worked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.