Another stage begins in 1830 with the reply to Hayne. What Webster says therein, recommending brotherly love between the sections, and commending the union, he reproduced with grateful variation in many memorable passages of later speeches. The original and reproductions are the most precious gems of our literature, ranking in excellence even above Poe’s poetry, America’s best.
The speech of 1833 against Calhoun’s nullification resolutions, that which won for Webster the cognomen, The Expounder of the Constitution, belongs to the next succeeding stage, wherein he rose from supreme panegyric to invincible defence of the union. As we have already given in a former chapter this performance its due praise, we need not say more of it.
This chapter would not be complete if we failed to glance at the essentials of Webster’s greatness as an orator, and to point out the means used by the powers to give him his extraordinary excellence. He did not stale himself by discussing trivial matters. When he rose, people knew that he had an important message,and they ought to attend. In harmony with this was his uniform seriousness, gravity, and becoming dignity of manner; and even in his merry-making humor, as instanced in describing Hayne leading the South Carolina militia, he never stooped. He spoke to the sound common sense and the regnant conscience of the masses. His propositions, his illustrations, his argument went home without effort to every one who thought at all and who cared for moral virtue. The entire country has heard with great acceptance that Davy Crockett said to him, “Mr. Webster, you are not the great orator people say you are; for I heard your speech, and I understood every word of it.” Whether this be an invention or not, it well characterizes his easy intelligibility. Herbert Spencer could have exampled the main proposition of his able essay on style by Webster’s best efforts, and every part and parcel of them—statement of proposition, necessary explanation and narrative, distinctions, illustrations, reasoning, invocation of feeling—appeal to the sense of justice. I often feel that he is not more majestic in any particular than the always manifest meaning of what he says. In this he reminds of Bacon.
He chose only the most important subjects; he befittingly addressed always the higher nature of his hearers; and he always spoke with a transparent clearness. But all this does not indicate more than the mere beginning of true eloquence. The greatest teachers—those who win and keep the admiration of the world—have, as their worshippers teach us, gifts of expression commensurate with the desert of their communications. Remember Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Vergil, Cicero, Dante, Bacon, Goethe, and above all Shakspeare. As the reader hangs over them he becomes more and more unconscious of what we call, rather vaguely, their style. Their diction, in unhackneyed use of hackneyed words, inmetaphors that flash like electric sparks, in appropriateness of varied rhythm, and all appertaining jewels, becomes to him but a belonging of the much more precious sense. As it must impart that without impediment it is unconsciously made as like it as the protecting coloring of animals is made like that of the objects amidst which they lurk. There has been but one other which admits of comparison in world-wide secular importance with Webster’s theme—that which inspired
“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.”
We have learned how the Æneid was prized above all other poetry, not only by the Romans themselves, but, long after they had become a mere name and memory, by the different nations of Europe. Plainly it was because Vergil, in that “stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” had fitly celebrated the greatest factor delivering from barbarism, and spreading civilization abroad, that had yet appeared in history,—the Roman empire. The American union, immeasurably exceeding that empire in immediate good to millions at home, and in fair promise to all the earth, was Webster’s subject. It got from him an appropriate style. The variety of ornament in his language reaches all the way from the modest violets of the Anglo-Saxon common to Bunyan and King James’s version, up to the most gorgeous trappings which are part and parcel of the sense in the best passages of Paradise Lost. There is also a variety of idiom. He uses that of the field or street, or of the gentleman or of the scholar, as best suits. He affected short sentences, and also pure English words. He told Davis to weed the Latin words out of his speech on Adams and Jefferson. But when occasion calls he can revel in that latinity of our tongue which, as De Quincey has noted, becomes intense with Shakspeare,when he is soaring his strongest. If you are inclined to dispute this, look over the last two sentences of the reply to Hayne. How you would lower this sublime peroration into the dust, if you replaced the Latin with native derivatives, or changed the long for short sentences in what is now above all example in English or American oratory, and can be paralleled in structure, “ocean-roll of rhythm,” and exquisite words only by the most famous paragraphs of Cicero and Livy. As our last word here, Webster always imparts the wisest counsel as to the American union in phrase all-golden, and his eloquence is entitled to praise beyond all other, because it is always what his high subject demands.
As I have to do mainly with the permanent and lasting in Webster, I can merely allude to his physical endowments, described with such rapture by March, Choate, and many others of his time, and well summarized by Mr. Lodge. I must remind the reader how it accorded with the purpose of the powers to bestow upon their favorite majesty of form, mien, and look, a voice that suggested the music of the spheres, action that would have been a model to Demosthenes; in short, a physique for the orator superior to any on record. These things helped him mightily in his day.
Apparently I finished with Webster’s education some pages back of this. But the more important part of it has not as yet been touched upon; and it is incumbent upon me to tell it, because of the lesson we ought to learn from it.
The largest and most characterizing part of our education—perhaps it would more accurately express my meaning to say our culture—each one of us gets from his associations, from his contact with the people of all sorts around him in his infancy, boyhood, and manhood often as far on as middle age, if not sometimes farther.We get it by imitation, unconscious and conscious, and by absorption from what we see, hear, and read, etc., which absorption is often most active when we are least aware of it. Now let us consider the community of which Webster was the product.
In the Plymouth oration, as we have already suggested, he exhibits the exceptional progress and acquisitions of New England. What other community ever showed greater courage against danger or greater energy against obstacles, and such wise building-up of a new country in a strange land? The Pilgrim Fathers could not have liberty and their own religion at home, and for these they went into the wilderness. There they kept the savage at bay. With soil and climate both unfavorable they wrought out general plenty and comfort. They prospered in industry. They equalized as far as they could all in property rights. And these liberty-lovers gave the regulation of local affairs to the town meeting, of which Webster says: “Nothing can exceed the utility of these little bodies. They are so many councils or parliaments, in which common interests are discussed, and useful knowledge acquired and communicated.”
Jefferson, the great apostle of popular self-government, most earnestly longed to see all America outside of New England divided into such townships as hers.
But to return to the Pilgrims. They established schools and churches everywhere. Free education was maintained by taxation of all property.
Let us sum up. Here was a country in which everybody had been well trained in the available ways of self-support and also of saving and accumulating,—the very first essential to make good citizens. Such citizens were required to administer their public affairs themselves; and thus they received the very best political educationand training in a school of genuine democracy,—which is the next essential. The children of each generation were schooled better than those of the former, the colleges and universities constantly did better with the students, and libraries open to the public both multiplied and enlarged,—the third essential. And education and business were rationally mixed, until in Webster’s time it might be said with truth that the average New Englander worked with a will, and wisely, every day to maintain himself and family, and also found leisure to add something of value to his store of knowledge. Here is another essential. The moral and religious atmosphere became purer and purer, and more and more on all sides good intention was conspicuous in the light, and evil intention hid itself deep in the dark. This is the last essential.
The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions just summarized.[79]Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of Story, a mostdiligently attending judge and one of the best; also finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be surpassed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom we may call the founder of the post classical school of literature in our country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an illustrious line,—let him suggest also the famous historians, such as Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,—Channing, who raised religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy; what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,—the teacher to us all of fit aspiration, right thinking, noble expression, the highest virtue and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told, the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession, purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,—how his consummate achievement rebukes the sixty years’ dilatoriness of Goethe over his unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes,—the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,—and there are others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the land whose names I must omit.
In this enumeration I have intentionally looked somewhat forward; for what is in one particular generation you cannot find out until its effects are plain in the next. I want to accentuate it that Webster belonged to a society which had made some of the extraordinary figures whose names are given, and was making the rest of them. When the view just suggested has been taken, and if in comparing New England with any other community—even with Athens, Florence, England, or Germany, in their best eras—periods of time be equalized and differences of population be properly allowed for, it will appear that the conditions moulding Webster were more energetic in productivity than can be found elsewhere. And if, in this comparison, the relative general condition of the masses in each community be duly taken into the account, the result will be far more favorable to New England; for a high level of the masses is a much better proof of a fecund culture than merely many striking individual instances.
Thus we bring out the point that Webster was born, grew up, and lived in a nursery prolific in men and women of extraordinary powers and virtues. How insignificant is the muster-roll of any other part of our country! I compare that of the south because I am familiar with it, and one can with better manners disparage his own section than another. The ante-bellum southern treasures of art and literature except speeches, political and forensic, can be counted on the fingers of one hand without taking them all. The poetry of Poe, a few essays of Legaré, especially that on Demosthenes, Calhoun’s Dissertation on Government, and Toombs’s Tremont Temple lecture, are all that are pre-eminent; and some of the historians of our literature insist that Poe was southern only in his prejudices, and not in his making. To turn away from authors, howfew can be found to compare in education, polish, and literary or scientific accomplishments with average New Englanders of their several professions or occupations. Toombs, in the diamond-like brilliance of his extempore effusion in talks or speeches, is as solitary in the south as Catullus, the greatest of the spontaneous poets of his nation, was in the Rome of his day.
Webster absorbed and absorbed, assimilated and assimilated, all the better elements of this marvellous New England culture, which I am painfully conscious of having most insufficiently described above, until at last he mounted its eminences in his profession, in the politics of democracy, æsthetic taste, and especially statesmanly eloquence. So assured was his stand upon these eminences that all the wisest and most refined of the section spontaneously and involuntarily did him obeisance, recognizing in him their ideal of wisdom and counsel befittingly expressed. We can stop to give only two examples. Edward Everett is the one American master of grand rhetoric. He heard the reply to Hayne, and, as he says, he could not but be reminded throughout of Demosthenes’ making the unrivalled crown oration. Choate, profoundly versed in the law, the incomparable forensic advocate and popular speaker, daily flying higher with inspiration drawn from Demosthenes and Cicero—he poured out his admiration in many utterances that have already become classic. Webster was made in and by New England, and not for herself alone. The toast, “Daniel Webster,—the gift of New England to his country, his whole country, and nothing but his country,” to which he responded December 22, 1843, tells but the truth. No American other than a New Englander ever had what one may term such a greatness breeding environment as he. And passing in review all the famous children of those famous six States, whetherthey spent their lives at home as Choate, or developed elsewhere as Henry Ward Beecher, it is my decided opinion that Daniel Webster as fruit and example of her culture is New England’s greatest glory.
There remain now but a few prominences of Webster for me to touch upon.
His speech of March 7, 1850, was fiercely denounced by the root-and-branch abolitionists. Horace Mann called him a fallen Lucifer. Sumner charged him with apostasy. Giddings said he had struck “a blow against freedom and the constitutional rights of the free States which no southern arm could have given.” Theodore Parker could think of no comparable deed of any other New Englander except the treachery of Benedict Arnold. Wittier condemned him to everlasting obloquy in a lofty lyric, which from its very title of one word throughout was reprobation more stinging than the world-known lampoon of Catullus against Julius Cæsar. The effect of this tempest has not yet all died out; and in many quarters of the north Webster is still regarded as a renegade. His defenders, however, multiply and become more earnest and strong. Let us consider this speech with the serenity and riper judgment which should mark the historical writer of to-day.
First and foremost let us grasp the wide difference of the situation from that at the beginning of 1833. Then, the question was only remotely a pro-slavery or southern one. A southern president, the most popular American, of great firmness of purpose and extraordinary courage, had taken a decided stand against the movement of one southern State hostile to the general government,—a stand the more decided because he cordially hated Calhoun, who was leading the movement. The southern leaders outside of that State did not approve of nullification; most of them believing it was an absurdityfor a State to contend she could stay in the union and at the same time rightfully refuse to perform a condition of that union. It seemed that no southern State except Virginia would stand by South Carolina in the event of a collision between her and the United States. We can well understand that Webster could then see no danger to the cause he loved above all others, that is, the union, in uncompromisingly demanding that the revenue be collected, and with force if necessary.
Nullification was palpably unjustifiable, even under the doctrine prevalent in the south. We have explained how Calhoun’s extreme desire for peaceable remedies only, led him to champion this illogical measure. The theory of State sovereignty demanded that, instead of the nullification ordinance, South Carolina pass an ordinance of secession, conditioned to commence its operation at a stated time if the objectionable duties had not been repealed. The situation in 1833 was that all the north and nearly all of the south were arrayed under a southern leader against only one southern State, making a demand which was plainly untenable in either one of the two differing schools of constitutional construction.
But the situation, in 1850, was a south solidly united, not upon such an obvious heresy as nullification, but aroused as one man to protect the very underpinning of its social structure. It was standing confidently upon the doctrine of State sovereignty, which, as the historical records all showed, was the creed of the generation, both north and south, that made the constitution. As we have already told, Calhoun in 1833 probably convinced Webster that the States were sovereign. That did not mean that the force-bill was wrong; it meant only that if South Carolina chose, she could rightfully secede. And we may say that this great argument ofCalhoun, demolishing as it does the premises of Webster, was really irrelevant, for it did not support his own proposition. Now in 1850, as Webster saw it, the south was justified by the constitution, however foolish might be her policy, and he was too conscientious to oppose what he believed right and just. In addition to this claim by the south of State sovereignty as abstractly right, his conscience told him that some of her practical demands were just. It had been provided not only that all of Texas south of 36° 30′ be admitted with slavery, but further that four other States be made out of the same territory. Although Webster was a free-soiler from first to last, his conscience told him peremptorily that the only honest course of congress as to the provision mentioned, which was really a solemn contract with Texas, was to perform the contract in good faith. This advice, of course, aroused the ire of the abolitionists, who had united upon the position that no other slave State should ever be admitted into the union. And he boldly said that the south was right in her complaint that there was disinclination both among individuals and public authorities at the north to execute the fugitive slave law. Meditate these serious words:
“I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the north, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their constitutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound minds at the north as a question of morals and a question of conscience, What right have they, in their legislative capacity or any other capacity, to endeavor to get round this constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before the face of the constitution, are they, in my opinion, justified in such an attempt.”
I must believe that as time rolls on the outcry against this position of Webster’s, so unshakably founded in conscience and reason as the position is, must not only cease, but turn to words of praise and commendation. The northern fanatics who tried to abolish slavery by repudiating such solemn contracts as the resolution of March 1, 1845, respecting the admission of Texas, and the fugitive slave restoration clause of the federal constitution,while purposing to stay in the union, were just as morally wrong as were the southern fanatics who proposed to stay in the union and enjoy its benefits and not pay the taxes necessary for its maintenance.
One other passage of this speech has been strongly attacked. Webster opposed applying the Wilmot proviso to California and New Mexico, where, as he said, “the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth ... settles forever with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist.” To apply the proviso would be, as he added, to “take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature,” and “to re-enact the will of God;” and its insertion in a Territorial government bill would be “for the mere purpose of a taunt or reproach.” Mr. Lodge, reprehending most severely, confidently asserts that though these Territories were not suited to slave agriculture, yet that their many and rich mines could have been profitably worked by slaves.[80]He stresses the fact that certain slave owners declared that they would, if they could, so work these mines. This distinguished author is to be reminded of how cheaply Seius could replace any one of his slaves that he worked to death in Ilva’s mines. Let him re-read the Captivi of Plautus,—not to mention many other ancient records just as instructive,—and realize that in that time it wasnot only one race that furnished slaves, but that every free human being was in lifelong danger of falling to a master. The prisoners taken in the incessant wars kept the slave markets glutted. A few months’ work of one of his slaves would bring the master enough to pay the purchase money and leave a considerable sum to his credit with the banker. The Spaniards worked their mines with Indians to be had for the catching in near-by places. And Mr. Lodge mentions mining with the labor of criminals and serfs. In all the instances that he has in mind the worker can be had for his keep or a little more than that. But to have mined with the slaves of the south,—that was widely different. There was no way to get such a slave except to rear or hire or buy him in a protected market. Does Mr. Lodge really believe that Seius would have permitted his eight hundred slaves to sicken in the mines of Ilva if each one had been worth at least $1,000 in the market? Really the leading industry of the south was slave rearing. The profit was in keeping the slaves healthy and rapidly multiplying. This could be done at little expense in agriculture, where even the light workers were made to support themselves. But had a planter gone into a mining section, where he could get no land, for corn to feed his slaves and stock, and for cotton to bring him money, he would have found no margin of profit whatever in mining. I was reared in the gold-bearing district of Georgia. I can remember old Mr. John Wynne, a wealthy cotton planter living in Oglethorpe county, some six or seven miles from my father’s, who, when—to use plantation parlance—he had laid by his crop at the middle or end of July, would work his gold mine until cotton-picking became brisk about the middle of September. He made money out of his gold mine, without injuring his other far more valuable mine, that is, thenatural increase of his negroes. And I heard of other such mine workers. But you could not have tempted one of these shrewd business men to settle with his slaves outside of a cotton-making district in order to mine. Had either Mr. Clingman or Mr. Mason—mentioned by Mr. Lodge—made the trial, he would have soon returned to his old neighborhood a sadder and wiser man.
The negro’s work as a slave in the coal and iron mines of the south never commenced until after the thirteenth amendment freed him. Since then he has done much cruelly hard work asservus poenae—a slave of punishment—in these mines, for convict lessees, having no other interest in him than to get all the labor possible during his term.
So it is clear that Webster, in contending that the conditions in these Territories were prohibitive of slavery was as statesmanly and perspicacious as he was generally in other matters.
His detractors charged that the entire speech was a bid for the support of the south in his eager struggle for the presidency. That he passionately longed for the chair was manifest. But his was not the sordid ambition of the professional place-hunter. He had a heaven-reaching aspiration to show America what a president should be in those angry times. He must have been conscious that he was the only man of gifts to do the great deed. What an appropriate climax that would have been for the invincible defender of the union, who, when replying to Hayne twenty years before, had outsoared Pindar in eulogizing South Carolina leading the south, and Massachusetts leading the north, in the same breath; and who, neither from prepossession in favor of his native community or resentment because of attack upon it by those of the other section, had everbeen removed out of brotherly love for all his countrymen alike. If you can do an all-important thing for your fellows which you believe no one else can do, and are without ambition for opportunity, are you not a poor grovelling creature? Webster, knowing that secession could not be peaceable, and seeing it become more and more probable, racked with fears for the union, and aghast at the menace of fraternal bloodshed, like Calhoun, he cheated himself with a futile remedy. We have told you of Calhoun’s proposal to disarm the combatants. In his amiability Webster believed with his whole soul that he could as president make his countrymen love one another as he himself loved them, and that he could pour upon the waters now beginning to rage oil enough to safe the ship of union through the tempest soon to be at its height. It was an aspiration high and holy, deserving of eternal honor from all America. You cannot read this great speech of March 7 aright if you do not discern that Webster was seriously alarmed. When you see that a dear one’s malady is fatal, you will not confess it to others,—not even to yourself. His excited exclamations, “No, sir! no, sir! There will be no secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession,” cannot deceive a reader whose wont it has been to look into his own heart. Webster did not see the future with the superhuman prevision of Calhoun; but he had observed the course of things in that stormy session. Is it to be believed that he had overlooked the tremendous significance of Toombs’s speech of December 13, and of the wild plaudits it brought from the southern members? And try to conceive what must have been the effect upon him of that most solemn and the saddest great speech in all oratory of Calhoun just three days before. Read the 7th of March speech by its circumstances and it isrevealed to you, as by a flashlight, that Webster had peeped behind the curtain which he had prayed should never rise in his lifetime. Horror-struck as he was, he would not despair of his country,—he would not believe that the brothers’ union was about to turn into a brothers’ war. Oh, let nobody dishonor his better self by seeing in this glorious speech, which our best and most lovable have placed in their hearts beside Washington’s farewell address, the bid of a turncoat. Rather let us learn to understand its supreme statesmanly reach; its impartiality towards and just rebuke of the orator’s own section and its merited castigation of the other courageously given, while affection for both is kept uppermost; its grand dignity, moral height, and pre-eminent patriotism. Let us also learn properly to estimate the disfavor with which he regarded ever afterwards during the rest of his life the active anti-slavery men of the north, whom he could not understand to be other than bringers of the unspeakable calamity he would avert. And let us give him his due commiseration for missing the nomination, and realizing that the hopes of saving his country which he had cherished so fondly were all, all shattered. When we do our full duty to him we will, northerners and southerners alike, agree that Whittier’s palinode ought to have gone full circle before it paused.
What is Webster’s highest and best fame? In answer we think at once of the reply to Hayne, its loftiness throughout, its eagle ascensions here and there, and most of all the organ melodies at the grand close, beside which the famous apostrophe of Longfellow is harsh overstrain. The next moment we feel he is higher in his profound love for his whole country than in his unequalled eloquence. He and Lincoln were the supereminent Americans who could never, never forget that the people of the other section were their ownfull-blood brothers and sisters. They are the supreme exponents of that American brotherhood, more deeply founded and more lasting than either one of the nationalizations which we have explained, out of which a continental is first, and then a world-union to come. To save our union was also to do the better deed of saving that brotherhood. For this each strove in his own way. I believe that the people of the world-union will pair them in Walhalla, and set them above all other heroes, crowning Webster as the monarch of speech which prepared millions with faith and fortitude for the crisis, and crowning Lincoln the monarch of counsels and acts in the crisis. It will be understood that neither was called away before his mission was finished. The greatest work of each was example of the love with which we should all love one another; and that was complete.
“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN”
Themisrepresentations in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of the character of the negro and his usual treatment in southern slavery have been taken as true by the best-informed and most unprejudiced everywhere outside of the south. The quotations which I make above from Prof. Barrett Wendell’sbahnbrechendwork on American literature[81]show a rare and exemplary freedom from sectional bias. But he is a most convincing witness to the statement with which I begin this chapter, as I shall now show by two other excerpts from the same book, making it appear that even Professor Wendell has accepted without question the misrepresentations mentioned. In these excerpts I italicize the important statements, and I follow each with a contradictory one of my own. I invite close attention to what Professor Wendell says on one side and I on the other, for they make up issues of fact that must be rightly settled before the historical merit of the work which is the subject of this chapter can be accurately judged.
This is the first excerpt:
“Written carelessly, and full of crudities, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ even after forty-eight years, remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The truth is that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling; but her characters, even though little studied in detail, have a pervasive vitality which no study can achieve;you unhesitatingly accept them asreal. Her descriptive power, meanwhile, was such as to make equally convincing the backgrounds in which her action and her characters move. What is more, these backgrounds, most of which she knew from personal experience, are probably so faithful to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them may generally be accepted as true.”[82]
I say as to the characters in the novel that the negroes are monstrous distortions, being drawn in the main with the leading peculiarities of whites and without those of negroes; and that as to her most representative southern whites Mrs. Stowe is utterly untrue to fact by making them all anti-slavery. I say as to the “backgrounds,” that she knew as little of them as she did of the negroes. I expect to demonstrate that the “personal experience” claimed for her by Professor Wendell was scanty and inadequate in the extreme.
I now give the second and last excerpt: “She [Mrs. Stowe] differed from most abolitionistsin having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery.”[83]
I do not dispute that her opportunity of learning southern slavery, small as it was, was very far superior to that of the other prominent abolitionists except Seward, who had taught school in the black belt of Georgia.[84]I maintain that she knew but little of southern slavery, and they less; that what both they and she conscientiously and most confidently believed to be their knowledge of this slavery, the slave, and of the slaveholder, was but a prodigious mass of delusion and prejudice.
I shall show, I think, that, instead of observing, she merely fancied and imagined, and that, to say the least, itis very misleading to allege that this fancying and imagining of hers was done “on the spot.”
By the words, “all the tragic evils of slavery,” Professor Wendell evidently means that the evils of southern slavery to the slave were both very many and very great. I shall show, I believe, that the condition of the average negro in southern slavery was far better than it was in Africa whence he came, and far better than it is now since he has been freed. There are occasionally incident to every human condition—even to the relation of parent and child—some tragic evils of its own. In the native home of the negro in West Africa all the women and nearly all the men are slaves of brutally cruel savages, without any protection of law whatever. The social organism is in the very lowest stage; and there is complete inability to evolve into a better one as the stationariness of ages proves. In the new south, certain causes which I have described at length in the last two chapters of this book have, ever since emancipation, been steadily and with acceleration depressing the average negro; and the rise of the few who have managed to acquire some property, or to get a good industrial education, only brings out more conspicuously the misery and wretchedness of the mass. It is correct to say that there was a vast multitude of tragic evils to the negroes in West Africa; and it is also correct to say that there is now the same to them in the south; but it is not correct to say that the tragic evils of southern slavery to the slave were frequent or general. The truth as to southern slavery ought to be known everywhere, which is, that it raised the negro very greatly in condition, and, now that he has been taken out of it, his progress has been arrested, and he is relapsing.
The great proposition of Mrs. Stowe and of the root-and-branch abolitionists was that slavery in the southwas such a flagrant and atrocious wrong to the negro, that every human being was commanded by conscience to do everything possible to help him if he should try to escape from his master. Combating this proposition, without any concession whatever, I think it well that we try at the outset to ascertain how southern slavery affected the negro, whether cruelly or beneficially. To do this, his condition in his native land, his condition while a slave in America, and, lastly, his condition after his emancipation, must be compared. I beg my reader to follow me attentively as I now review and contrast these three conditions. First, as to his condition in Africa. Here is what Toombs said of him to a Boston audience, January 24, 1856:
“The monuments of the ancient Egyptians carry him back to the morning of time—older than the pyramids; they furnish the evidence both of his national identity and his social degradation before history began. We first behold him a slave in foreign lands; we then find the great body of his race slaves in their native land; and after thirty centuries, illuminated by both ancient and modern civilization, have passed over him, we still find him a slave of savage masters, as incapable as himself of even attempting a single step in civilization—we find him there still, without government or laws of protection, without letters or arts of industry, without religion, or even the aspirations which would raise him to the rank of an idolater; and in his lowest type, his almost only mark of humanity is, that he walks erect in the image of the Creator. Annihilate his race to-day, and you will find no trace of his existence within half a score of years; and he would not leave behind him a single discovery, invention, or thought worthy of remembrance by the human family.”[85]
If my reader deems Toombs’s picture overdrawn let him consult those parts of the recent work of a mostdiligent and conscientious investigator describing the negroes of West Africa, and note what is there told of heathen practices still surviving,—slavery of women to their polygamic husbands, pitiless destruction of useless members of the family, robbery, murder, cannibalism, the utter want of chastity.[86]We quote this as to slavery, which is especially important here:
“Slavery, having existed from time immemorial, is bound up with the whole social and economic organization of West African society. There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of slaves: those captured in war, those purchased from outside the tribe,—usually from the interior,—and the native-born slaves.All alikeare mere chattels, andby law are absolutely subject to the master’s will without redress. But in practice a difference is made, for obvious reasons, between native-born slaves and captives taken from hostile tribes.The latter are numerous, and the severest forms of labor fall to their lot. They are treated with constant neglect, and cruelly punished on the slightest provocation. Their lives are at no time secure; they serve as victims for the sacrifice; when sick they are driven into the jungle; in times of scarcity they starve.”[87]
The master has the power of life and death over all slaves.[88]
The same author adds: “The pawning of persons for debt is exceedingly common. If the debt is never paid infull, the pawnand his descendants become slaves in perpetuity.”[89]
Surely the reader who has attended to these details which I have given from Mr. Tillinghast will admit that the southern master transferred the African into a condition far better than any he could find at home. In the south two agencies gave him beneficent favor to which he and his fathers had always been strangers. The law of the land protected his life and shielded him from cruelty; and his high market value made it the interest of his American master not to overwork or under- feed and clothe him. And he was introduced into the first stage of monogamic life, which he developed steadily and rapidly until he was freed. In this he was travelling the only true road up from barbarism. If he could have but stayed in it until, after some generations—perhaps centuries—chaste wives and mothers had been evolved, he would have stood firmly on the threshold of permanent civilization and improvement.
Whatever evil of southern slavery to the negro my readers, prompted by the root-and-branch abolitionists, may suggest, they will find on reflection that it would have been far greater to him and more frequent had he remained in Africa. Separation of members of the family has been repeatedly emphasized as a most horrible evil of slavery in the south. Such separation was incalculably more cruel and frequent in West Africa than it ever was among the negro slaves in America. And how have the root-and-branch abolitionists mended matters? What do we see in the new south, now that slavery, the great rupturer of family circles, is no more, and a master no longer can part parent and child, or husband and wife? Before the end of the brothers’ warthere had not been a single separation of a family among my father’s slaves. At much expense and inconvenience he had bought the husband of one and the wife of another in order to keep each one of these two pairs united. In 1866, Bob, a boy of sixteen, who, because of his obedience and merry-making gifts, had always been a greatly indulged pet, signalized his new-found freedom by stealing from the house of one of our neighbors some articles of considerable value. He fled from justice, and, never seeing his parents or his brothers and sisters again, died among strangers. In 1868, Lewis abandoned his wife Esther and their young child, and went to a distant town. Some ten years afterwards, Bill, a brother of Bob, and several years younger, convicted of an unmentionable crime, received a ten years’ chain-gang sentence. Not long before this the body of one of his two wives who was at the time out of his favor was found in a well. Reputable whites living near were convinced that he had murdered her. If that be true, it should count as a separation. While he was serving out his sentence his remaining wife married again, and this should be set down also as a separation. Bob, Lewis, Esther, and Bill were slaves of my father. He did not own twenty in all. This example shows how, as to the same negroes, southern slavery operated to prevent separation of families, and how freedom has operated to encourage and stimulate it. It is not an exceptional example. My maternal grandfather and a maternal aunt owned each many more slaves than my father did. Some of my father’s near neighbors had slaves in considerable number. In all of these slaves, while I knew them, there never was a separation of a family except by death or the voluntary act of parties to a marriage? But when they were freed in 1865 separation at once became rife, and it has always been active. What I have just told isfairly representative of the new south throughout the cotton States.
There were now and then sales made of slaves which sundered man and wife, and parent and child; but such were extremely few, and their proportion was steadily decreasing under two potent influences. Restraint of them by the law had commenced and was growing. But the stronger influence was custom and public opinion. Before approaching sales at public outcry by sheriffs or representatives of a deceased, and also before private sales, the slaves to be sold were given opportunity to find their new masters. There was generally a neighbor who owned husband, wife, parents, or children, or wanted a cook, washerwoman, seamstress, boy to make a carpenter, striker, or blacksmith of, somebody careful with stock, etc., and the upshot would be that the man selected by the slave had got him. The seller had natural feelings. His wife and all of his children would do their utmost to get such new masters as the negroes preferred. I shall always cherish in memory the affectionate regard which the mother of the household and all the family habitually showed to their slaves. As I write, a sweet reminiscence comes of how the children would always clamor and mutiny against the most merited punishment of their nurse by father or overseer. There is no doubt that the slave steadily won larger place in the domestic affections, and that his treatment by each generation of masters was more kind and humane. And as a part of this amelioration the percentage of forced separation of slave families was all the while becoming less.
Let us devote a moment to the negro trader, as he was called, and his slave-pens, which were the subjects of much and heated invective. The first suggestion in order here is that there were such in West Africa, far more frequent and far exceeding in cruelty any everknown in the south. To take the African away from the latter and turn him over to the former was great kindness to him. I remind my readers, in the next place, that the factors constantly minimizing separation of slaves from other members of the family—law, public opinion becoming more sensitive, custom becoming more merciful, and the sway of the domestic affections stronger—werepari passuhumanizing every incident of the commerce in slaves as property. Lastly, the negro trader and the pen, by reason of the small number of the slaves to whom they caused real suffering, were mercy and prosperous condition itself beside the convict gangs and pens which emancipation has put in their place, as will come out more clearly in a short while.
His use of the lash was a dire accusation of the master. The reader thinks at once of the relevant words in a famous passage so often quoted from one of President Lincoln’s messages: “If this struggle is to be prolonged till ... every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” This was said March 4, 1865, a month and five days only before General Lee’s surrender, and when all the great battles of the brothers’ war had been fought,—a war by far the most sanguinary in the world’s history. Blood did sometimes follow the blow of the lash, but not often. The overseer who could not correct without breaking the skin always lost his place. When the statement of Mr. Lincoln just commented on is compared with the actual fact, it appears to be one of the most extravagant hyperboles ever uttered.
Before I have my readers to look at the actual facts I want to say a preliminary word. The parent was enjoined by Solomon not to spare the rod. The rod was permitted to the master of the apprentice, the school-teacher, the drill officer, and others. It was often usedwith great severity. As we see from the Decameron husbands were wont to correct their wives by beating them with sticks. Whipping on the bare back was a common execution of the judgment of a criminal court. Our insubordinate convicts are strapped. The usual punishment of a slave’s disobedience was to whip him. A switch was not generally used, because by reason of his thick and tough skin and lower nervous development—to use a common expression—it would not hurt him. It was a familiar thing to me in my childhood to hear some negro tell of the use of a switch on him by women or feeble men, how the blows could scarcely be felt, and yet with what outcry and clamor he pretended that each one gave him great pain. The cowhide, but far more frequently the whip, took the place of the switch. The former was more and more discredited, because it could seldom be laid on hard enough without cutting the skin. The whip had a flat lash at the end, with which, as the strap or paddle now used on our convicts, a stinging blow could be hit that would not draw blood.
An ordinary correction of a negro did not cause him as much pain as your child, with his far superior sensitiveness, receives when you give him the rod. Large and heavy as the overseer’s whip looked, the negro, with his high degree of insensibility to physical pain inherited from his African ancestors, who for a hundred generations or more had bestowed upon one another all kinds of corporal torture, cared far less for it than the abolitionist who insisted on making him merely a black white man, could ever understand. How little of both mental and corporal suffering the lash causes the average negro is strikingly shown by the fact that ever since his emancipation, when he is detected in a serious offence, he is prone to propose that he be whipped instead of beingcarried to court. If his offer is accepted he strips off his clothes with alacrity, exclaims the conventional “O, Lordy!” under every fall of the whip; and when the contract number of lashes has been given he goes away with the look and air of one who has just learned that he has drawn a lottery prize of thousands; and his nearest and dearest, his wife and children, all his sweethearts, congratulate him cordially, and the entire negro community rate him as rarely fortunate. This is enough here of the lash; but a word or two more will be appropriate when we give the chain-gang attention.
“Run, nigger, run, patroller get you.”
The riotous merriment of this air can be fully appreciated only by one who has heard Cuffee sing it at the quarters while picking his banjo. It completely confutes the charge often made that the patrol law was a cruel one. To the negro, the execution of that law was more of fun and frolic than punishment. Let this air, and all the others to which the slaves used to dance, be meditated by those, if there are such, who incline to believe that Professor DuBois has really detected, as he seriously contends, in the negro melodies of the old south deep sorrow over slavery. If miserable conditions give character to musical expression, the songs, if any, that now come forth spontaneously from the mass of southern negroes—that is, from those of the lower class, which class will be described later herein—ought to be sadder than the tears of Simonides.
My reader who has his memory stored with the raw-head and bloody bones fiction of abolitionists who had never set foot on an inch of slave territory, probably thinks of bloodhounds, and wonders if I will be frank enough to mention them. He has been made to believe that runaway slaves often had the flesh torn from theirbones by these dogs. I witnessed several chases of runaways, and in every one, when the negro was overtaken by the dogs, he was in a tree far above their reach. Think about it, and bring it home to yourself. Put yourself in the runaway’s place, you would surely understand as well as a common house cat does how to avoid pursuing dogs. Negro dogs, as they were called, were bred to be far more slow than fox dogs. The tricks of the runaway would put the latter at fault so often that they could hardly ever catch him. Further, the packs of negro dogs were usually too small to overpower a stout negro. He was often armed with a scythe-blade for use if overtaken where he could not find a tree. When he could keep ahead no longer he preferred taking refuge to fighting with the dogs. He knew he could kill or disable only the few that would rush in recklessly, and that the others would stay too far from him to be hurt and yet keep him at bay. He was now going to be caught, and he would think it better not to provoke the ire of the owners by killing or injuring their dogs.
The negro hunted the ’possum and ’coon by night and the hare—the rabbit, as everybody called it—on Sundays, half-holidays, and Christmas, either with his young master or without him, and always with the dogs; which he thus learned to control. A negro woman cooked the corn-bread and pot-liquor, with which they were fed by her or some other slave. They were always waiting near when the slaves ate by day in the fields or at all hours of night in their cabins, and many a bit was thrown to them. Usually there was the greatest friendship between the dogs on the plantation, those intended for chasing runaways included, and the negroes. It was great entertainment for a negro, at the command of his master, to give the young negro dogs a race, as it wascalled. These races were frequent, and they were the entire training of the dogs for their business. A hunting dog when lost will track his master. And many a runaway was caught by dogs which he was in the habit of feeding and hunting with. The average negro of those days, prowling so much at night as he did, necessarily became a most expert dog-tamer. How often I have been diverted with this sight! A strange negro, coming on some errand, intrepidly opens the front gate and enters the yard of a dwelling. A savage dog dashes forward. Just as the dog couches near for his spring, the negro, by a very quick movement, takes off his hat and extends it to the dog. The latter turns his eyes away from the negro, looks at the old, soiled wool hat, smells it, and then retires, nonplussed.
As a general rule a negro was safe from the bite of dogs. Running away was not frequent. The almost insuperable difficulty of final escape from the dogs prevented it. And it was in practice a most mild means of prevention. I suppose that I knew and heard of the catching of some twenty odd slaves in the contiguous parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, which constituted the locality with which I was familiar, and in not a single case was one injured by the bloodhounds. The dogs that are now turned loose after our convicts are of far more savage temper than were the negro dogs of the old south; and consequently the human game, when come up with, is more prompt to go up a tree than was the old slave.
There was much less lack of food and raiment among the slaves than among the class known as the white trash. It was considered a business blunder not to keep them supplied always with more food than they wanted. They were in better physical condition than the average white laborer now shows.
And they were not worked hard. Even in the longest days of the year, when the battle with the grass was fiercest, at night the quarters were resonant with mirth, song, and dancing as soon as the mules had been watered, stabled, and fed.
The foregoing is a report, from my observation on the spot, of “all the tragic evils of slavery” to the negro in the south. I have been at pains to make it as true as can be. I purpose to follow it now with a like report of all the gladsome blessings to him of his freedom.
His true and fast friends, the abolitionists, equalized himper saltumto his master as a voter and office-holder. This single measure was sure to make deadly enemies of white and black in the south, and to bring a war of races in which the superior one was bound to conquer and become absolute. This war did come, and was fought out. Profound peace has reigned for some years, and the negroes now contentedly stay away from the polls, and manifest no aspiration whatever for office and place.
His same friends gave the ex-slave equality with his old master under the criminal law. He had this in slavery only when charged with a capital offence; and if he was charged with a graver one of the non-capital offences, such as breaking and entering a dwelling, stealing something of considerable value, he was brought before a statutory court of justices of the peace, and if upon his summary trial he was convicted, his punishment was usually a short term in jail, the sheriff to give him so many lashes each day until he had received the full number adjudged in his sentence. I never heard of one that was seriously injured by this kind of punishment. It never gave him any permanent mental anguish. His conscience approved whipping as the most fit punishment for every offence. The crimes ofnegroes mentioned above in this paragraph were very infrequent. Their many peccadillos were in practice wholly ignored by the law, and given over to private and domestic jurisdiction. Cuffee would sometimes indulge a sudden craving for fresh meat by appropriating a shoat or grown lamb, or he would gratify a watering mouth by stealthy invasion of melon patches or sweet potato patches and banks. And he was prone to other small larcenies. If caught,—which was very far from always happening,—he was whipped; and that was the last of it. Now he must replace the bounty of his master which sheltered, clothed, and fed him comfortably all his life by living from hand to mouth. His forecast utterly undeveloped, and more and more losing the work habit, there is often but one way for him to avoid starving or freezing, and that is to get the necessaries of life by various acts which are crimes in the law. It is but a scanty supply that he thus manages to get. His year is nearly always, from beginning to end, but an alternation of short feasts upon the cheapest fare, and prolonged fasts. Yet in the eye of the stern and severe law how many gross offences does he commit by doing only the things which, if he did not do, he could not keep soul and body together. And so he is brought before every court of any criminal jurisdiction, and when convicted, as he generally is, for he is nearly always guilty,—not in conscience, but guilty under the law which his emancipators have put him under,—often he cannot find a friend to pay his fine, and he must work it out in the chain-gang. The city has its chain-gang, the county has its chain-gang, and the State works or farms out its convicts. The percentage of whites among these convicts is very small. Often when you encounter a gang at work you cannot find a single white person in it. These negro convicts are many, many.As fast as one’s time expires his place is filled by another. Disease, decay of energy from irregular food supply, growing habits of idleness, and other things in the train, bring forth tramps more plentifully, and from these the chain-gangs are more and more largely recruited. These slaves of punishment work under the eyes of guards furnished with the best of small-arms loaded to kill. The most of them work in shackles. If they do not work as their superintendents think they ought, they are strapped. I have seen them working in the rain, as I never saw required of slaves. At night they are put to sleep in a crowded log-pen, all of them chained together, the chain being made fast to each bunk. The guards are practised marksmen, known to be men who will promptly and resolutely “do their duty.” This hell-like life constantly keeps each convict watching for opportunity to make a dash for liberty. If the guards have anything like fair shots when he starts, one more unmarked and soon forgotten grave is dug and filled in the paupers’ burial ground, and that is the earthly end of this poor derelict of the human race. Suppose he gets safely away from the guard. In a few minutes the unleashed dogs are yelping on his track. In the old days even the negro dogs were fed and tended by slaves, and almost every dog in the land seemed to love negroes. But these bloodhounds in the convict camps have been bred into a deadly hatred of every negro. Escaping Cuffee is usually caught. Then more of the paddle, heavier shackles, chains at night stronger and more taut, and the bosses harder to satisfy as he works under greater hindrances—these make his lot more hell-like than it was before.
It is a melancholy proof of the insufficient dietary and bad hygiene of the common negroes that these convicts fatten in spite of their cruel hardships.
The long-term convicts, farmed out to coal and other mine owners and various manufacturers, and private employers, I know but little of from observation. But what I hear makes me believe that their condition is worse than that of those just described. This is to be expected, for two reasons. First, they are worked for profit by persons whose only interest is to get the largest possible product out of their labor. The labor exacted by the owner, bear in mind, would not be severe enough either to impair the market value or check vigorous reproduction of his slaves. Second, the places where these convicts are worked are more or less retired, and thus the employer escapes scrutiny nearly all the year. Think of a negro who, receiving a twenty years’ sentence for burglariously stealing a ham when he was hungry, is put to work in the coal mine! Who ever hears of him afterwards? He is soon forgotten by his wife, who takes another husband, and by his children either skulking here and there to shun the officer, or toiling in a chain-gang. Here is indeed a bitter slavery—bitterer by far than any West Africa ever knew. There the slave does not labor underground and out of the sun so dear to him. His manumission comes mercifully in many ways, long before the expiration of twenty years—the sacrifice may need a victim; he may starve; he may fall sick and be cast out in the bush. But the mine slave—the mine boss will not whip him hard enough to give him even short rest from his work, work, work; he shall always have enough of raiment, food, and sleep to keep him able to work, work, work; when he gets very sick the mine doctor will patch him up and send him back to his work, work, work; he will work, work, work out his twenty years in this hell hole. Miss Landon in her immortal invective against child labor exclaims:
“Good God! to think upon a childThat has no childish days,No careless play, no frolics wild,No words of prayer and praise!”
This factory child that never knew any of the proper joys of a child is without either sweet memory or unavailing wish. But the mine slave, the most of whose former life was passed in the open air, how he pines for the splendor of his loved sun by day; how in his bunk he recalls his rounds by night when the Seven Stars, the Ell and Yard and Job’s Coffin were his clock and the North Star his compass. Each part of the revolving year whispers to him when he is at work or dreaming. Christmas suggests the jug with the corn-cob stopper, the ’possum cooked brown, the yams exuding their sugary juice, the banjo picker and his song, the fiddle playing a dancing tune, and the floor shaking under the thumping footfalls; the cold weather following suggests the ’possum and ’coon hunt; the early spring brings what he used to call the corn-planting birds and their lively calls; and on and on his thoughts go over mocking-bird, woodpecker, early peaches and apples, full orchards spared by frost, the watermelon, solitary and incomparable among all things for a negro to eat, his Sunday fishings and rabbit hunts, his church and society meetings, this and that dusky love who fooled him into believing that he was dearer to her than husband or any other man, especially some yellow girl, his nonesuch, exceeding all other women as the watermelon excels all other produce of tree or vine,—on and on his thoughts go over what he can never have again. I need not say a word for the white victims of child labor, for their race is rousing for their rescue, and I know its power to achieve. But I do feel that it is my duty to put that friendless, forgotten, long-term negro convict inthe minds of my southern readers. If he must be a convict, do not farm him out to mine operators or where he will be worked behind any screen. Put all our convicts, both felony and misdemeanor, upon the public roads until they need only a little working now and then, say I. There the convicts will not be worked for profit, nor in secret.
The total of the negroes suffering in southern slavery from all causes falls in amount far below that alone which has come upon him because he was stupidly subjected to the white man’s criminal law, and not given reformatories and other belongings of the system which we are perfecting for juvenile offenders. The suffering in slavery was occasional only, and soon over. The present suffering of the negroes under the criminal law is constant, and is to be found rife in every locality. The aggregate of the felony and misdemeanor convicts of Georgia now at hard labor is about 4,500. The convicts sentenced by city and town police courts for short terms of days I cannot give with any approximate accuracy. I think it probable that the number of those convicted each year in the municipal courts is somewhat larger than that of those convicted in the State courts. By reason of a late wholesale reduction of felonies the number of long-term convicts does not increase,—it is at a standstill,—but the number of the misdemeanor and municipal convicts steadily increases. More than nine-tenths of those in each one of the three classes are negroes. The stench, filth, and discomfort of their nights and the hardship of their days, who can describe? How it moves my pity to see, as I often do, the convict toiling incessantly for long hours, impeded and tortured by his iron shackles, the paddle at hand, and a double-barrel or Winchester frowning over him, each to be used on occasion by somebody who cares nothing forand has no interest in him. Weary as the worker may be, a word from the boss gives new impetus to his pick or shovel. Here is the only place I have ever known on American soil where one can find “poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa.” How different it was with the slave offender! It mattered not what was the charge against him, he had persons related to him both in interest and affection who would intercede powerfully at his call. Wherever he might be,—in the sheriff’s hands, or locked up by the overseer in the gin-house,—a messenger-service as secret and more sure than wireless telegraphy even if not as quick, was at his command; and some child, white or colored, or favorite servant would carry his entreaties to the Big House. And the justices, or ole master or the overseer, would be influenced by a word from ole miss, or the tears of young miss, or the importunity of young master. In the end Cuffee’s punishment would be made tolerable; and after it was over he would the next night at the cabin brag joyfully of the many friends he had and what great things they had done for him—the children of his master present and showing more gladness than himself.
Which of the two was the more humane and christian punitive system for the negro? Which of the two was the better for him? That of slavery, or that produced by the conditions which his professed friends put in place of slavery?
I assert it most solemnly that I never saw a negro slave worked in shackles and under a loaded firearm, neither by his master nor an overseer, nor by their command, nor by an officer of the law; and, further, that I never had information or report that such had been done.
When their emancipators led the negroes out of their cabins into their new life it was something like throwingour domestic animals into the forest and desert, where they, without formed habits of self-maintenance and without knowledge of the new environment, must live, if they can live, only in competition with their wild brothers and sisters knowing the environment and who are self-maintaining experts therein. That comparison serves somewhat. But this comes nearer: Suppose children between the ages of eight and twelve, who have never been taught to do anything for themselves, to be taken away from their parents, and settled among a people lately made bitterly hostile to the children, as the whites were made to the negroes by the effort of the emancipators to give political equality—nay, supremacy—to the latter. Those emancipated children must subsist themselves. How little they could earn by begging or work. They would have to steal to live. Those that did not steal, and for whom no companion would steal, would perish. The philanthropists who founded this infantile colony would have outdone but by a very little those who thrust the reluctant negroes into freedom.
I ask my reader to add here mentally the full description which in my last two chapters I have given of the lower class of the negroes in the south—this description showing them to be ninety-five per cent of the whole, far below their average condition in American slavery, and steadily becoming worse.
I believe that in due time the people of the north will make these admissions:
1. Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental, and not a necessary incident of the system, just as the occasional evils of marriage to the parties are not necessarily incidental to that institution.
2. As this slavery had improved and was still improving the negroes so prodigiously in every particular, and as their condition during the forty years followingemancipation has been going uninterruptedly from bad to worse, until now the extinction of the great body is frightfully probable, as I shall show in my last two chapters, the sudden and sweeping abolition of 1865 was an unutterable misfortune to these dependent creatures. Emancipation ought to have been gradual. Especially ought there to have been established something like the Roman patronate, under which the freedman would have been sure of wise advice, beneficial overlooking, and efficient protection from his former master.
3. The grant at once of right to vote and hold place and office to the southern negroes indiscriminately exceeds all blunders of democracy in madness and stupidity.
4. Southern slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave. The federal constitution was simply obeying the commands of good conscience in recognizing the slave as the property of his owner, and protecting that property. Therefore, when the federal government emancipated the slaves it ought to have given the masters just compensation.
So much for what American slavery was to the negro, and what its abolition has done for him in the south. This can be told now. But for years the powers watching over our union kept the subject in the dark. It did not suit their purpose that the people of the union-preserving section should see and understand. They had decreed that northern resistance to slavery, as the solitary root of disunion, should go beyond refusing it extension into the Territories. They chose to add another provocation of the secession which they had planned as the means of abolishing slavery. This new provocation was that the north be induced to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter. To drive the south into early secession, perhaps it would not be enough merelyto deny her new territory. But unite the north against the law mentioned, and encourage both running away and the underground railroad by an active public opinion, then soon all along the southern border slavery will lose its hold, some of the slaves escaping and the rest going south. This zone will, after a while, be settled by the friends and employers of free labor, who from year to year will push the southern non-slave district further in. The menace of this hostile occupation will steadily become greater to the slaveholders, and finally it will convince them that they cannot protect slavery in the union.
Many northerners who declared it was wrong to interfere with slavery in the States, at the same time sympathized with the public opposition to restoring the fugitive to his master. It is clear that they did not regard this opposition to be what it really was; that is, actual war upon slavery where it existed. To oppose execution of the law was both to invite and help runaways. And if such invitation and help was persisted in, from one end of Mason and Dixon’s line to the other, the risk of escape of slaves and their consequent depreciation in market value would both steadily increase. The refusal to enforce the fugitive slave law was therefore a deadly attack upon slavery in the States; and this was so plain that the union-loving people of Georgia declared in the famous Georgia Platform of 1850 that the union could not be preserved if that law was not faithfully executed.