SLAVERY AS IT WAS
And now, in the year 1852, there befell an event perhaps as momentous in
American history as any between the establishment of the Constitution
and the Civil War. A frail little woman, the wife of an obscure
theological professor in a Maine village, wrote a story, and that story
captured the heart of the world. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say
that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ converted the North to the cause of the slave.
The typical Union volunteer of 1861 carried the book in his memory. It
brought home to the heart of the North, and of the world, that the slave
was a man,--one with mankind by that deepest tie, of human love and
aspiration and anguish,--but denied the rights of a man.
The book was a birth of genius and love. It is absolutely
sweet-spirited. Its intense and irresistible plea is not against a class
or a section, but against a system. It portrays among the Southern
slave-holders characters noble and attractive,--Mrs Shelby, the faithful
mistress, and the fascinating St. Clare. The worst villain in the story
is a renegade Northerner. Its typical Yankee, Miss Ophelia, provokes
kindly laughter. The book mixes humor with its tragedy; the sorrows of
Uncle Tom and the dark story of Cassy are relieved by the pranks of
Black Sam and the antics of Topsy. With all its woes, the story somehow
does not leave a depressing effect; it abounds in courage and action;
the fugitives win their way to freedom; the final impulse is to hopeful
effort against the wrong. Its basal motive was the same as that of the
Abolitionists, but its spirit and method were so different from
Garrison's that it won response and sympathy where he had roused
antagonism. Against pharisaical religion it uses effective
satire,--which was intensified in its successor, _Dred_,--but the
Christianity of faith and life is its animating spirit. No book is
richer in the gospel of love to man and trust in God. Its rank is high
in the new literature which has stimulated and led the great modern
movement for the uplifting of the poor and oppressed. Its place is with
Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_ and Tolstoi's _War and Peace_.
The motive of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an appeal to the heart of the
American people. There was no reference to political action, far less
any suggestion of servile insurrection, and there was no discussion of
methods of emancipation. The book set forth an organized, monstrous
wrong, which it was in the power of the American nation, and above all,
of the Southern people, to remove. The effect at the North was
immeasurably to widen and deepen the conviction of the wrong of slavery,
and the desire to remove it. But the way to practical action did not
open; and strangely enough there was at first no visible effect on
politics. The political logic of the situation led straight, as a first
step, to the support of the Free Soil party. But though _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ appeared (as a book) in April, 1852, and its popularity was
instant, the Presidential election seven months later showed a Free Soil
vote less by 100,000 than four years before. The political effect of the
book was to appear only when public events two years later gave a sudden
spur to the hesitating North.
The South turned a deaf ear to the appeal. It shut the book out from its
borders as far as it could, and one who inquired for it in a Southern
bookstore would probably be offered _Aunt Phillis's Cabin_ or some
other mild literary anti-toxin. The South protested that the book's
picture of slavery was untrue and unjust. It was monstrous, so they
said, that their labor system should be shown as having its natural
result in the whipping to death of a saintly negro for his virtuous
conduct. Another reply was: "If the book is true, it is really a eulogy
of slavery, for it depicts slavery as producing in Uncle Tom a perfect
character."
To the objections to the fidelity of her portraiture Mrs. Stowe replied
with _A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_,--a formidable array of proved facts,
as to the laws of the slave States, and specific incidents which
paralleled or exceeded all she had told. As now judged, the novel has
some serious imperfections as a picture of slavery. Probably the most
important of these was expressed by Judge Tourgee, para-phrasing the
proverb about the Russian and the Tartar: "Scratch one of Mrs. Stowe's
negroes, and you will find a white man." She failed adequately to
differentiate the two races, and described the negro too much from such
specimens as Uncle Tom and George and Eliza Harris. She had never lived
in the South, and her knowledge was obtained from observation in the
border town of Cincinnati, from acquaintance with fugitives, and from
the reports of Northern travelers--all interpreted with the insight of
genius and the impulse of philanthropy. Her avowed purpose was not to
make a literal or merely artistic picture, but to show the actual wrongs
and legalized possibilities of wrong which called for redress. It did
not lessen the justice of her plea, that the mass of negroes were more
degraded than she knew, or that their average treatment was kinder than
her portrayal showed.
But a true historical judgment of slavery must rest on a comparison of
documents. The story told from the master's standpoint should be heard.
Among the faithful and graphic narrations of this sort may be named Mrs.
Burton Harrison's _Flower de Hundred_,--a volume of personal
reminiscences of Virginia before the war. It is a charming story,
without motive other than the pleasure of recalling happy memories, and
it describes a society of various and vivid charm. The mention of the
slaves is occasional and incidental; but the description of the
plantation hands, and especially the household servants, trusted and
beloved, gives a sunny and doubtless a real side of slavery. Another
book is fuller and more impressive in its treatment. It might be said
that every American ought to read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as a part of his
education, and to follow it with two other books of real life. One of
these is _A Southern Planter_,--a biography of Thomas Dabney, of
Virginia and later of Mississippi, written by his daughter. It is a
story amply worth reading for its human interest, and for its
presentation of a man of noble and beautiful character. One is enriched
by the acquaintance, even through a book, of a man like Thomas Dabney.
And it is most desirable for the Northerner to vivify his impression of
the South by the knowledge of men like him. We are misled by general and
geographical terms: "an Englishman" is a vague and perhaps unattractive
term to an American until he knows, in books or in flesh and blood, a
few Britons of the right stamp. And so South and North need mutual
interpretation not alone through their historic heroes, but through the
best of their everyday people. And of those best, surely Thomas Dabney
was one,--a strong, tender, noble man, fulfilling each relation in
family and society with loyal conscience and sympathetic heart.
From the book we can give but a few instances of plantation life as such
a man made it. When he was to move from Virginia to Mississippi he
called together all his slaves,--some hundreds--and told them he wanted
to take none of them against their will, and especially he would not
break up any families. If any of them had wives or husbands on other
plantations, he would sell or buy, just as they wished, so that every
family should stay or go together. Every one of them elected to go with
their old master. Settled in Mississippi, his cotton plantation became
the admiration and envy of the neighbors, for the size of the crops as
well as the condition of the workers. Their comfort was amply secured.
The general rule was three hours' rest at midday and a Saturday
half-holiday. At the height of the season hours were longer, but there
was a system of prizes, for four or five months in the year, from $1 a
week to a picayune; with an extra prize of a $5 gold piece for anyone
picking 600 pounds a day; and these prizes roused such interest and
excitement that some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave
the field at night, wishing to sleep at the end of their row. The
inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be
alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden
from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good
masters and mistresses at the South,--"and I have known very few who
were not good," adds the writer. The plantation trained and kept its own
mechanics; two each of carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, with five
seamstresses in the house. In the house, under the mistress's eye, were
cut and made the clothes of all the negroes, two woolen and two cotton
suits a year, with a gay calico Sunday dress for each woman. The women
were taught sewing in the house. When their babies were born a nurse was
provided, and all the mother's work done for her for a month, and for a
year she was allowed ample leisure for the care of the baby. The sons of
the family taught reading to those who wished to learn. Some of the
house servants were very fine characters; the sketch of "Mammy Maria"
one would gladly reproduce. When secession came on, Thomas Dabney
altogether disapproved, and foresaw the ruin of the South. He proposed
to his wife that they close up their affairs, and go to live in England.
Her reply was: "What will you do with Abby? and with Maria and Harriet,
and their husbands and children, and the rest of our people?" That was
unanswerable. So he stayed, and with his family shared the
fighting,--for, the war begun, Dabney gave his hearty support to the
Southern cause, and his sons went to the field,--shared the hardships of
a devastated country, the social chaos that followed, and the slow
reconstruction,--a more intrepid and lovable figure in adversity than
before.
His daughter writes: "In the family of Thomas Dabney the first feeling
when the war ended was of joy that one dreadful responsibility at least
was removed. Gradual emancipation had been a hope and a dream not to be
realized." "A hope and a dream,"--it does not appear that it had ever
been seriously considered as a purpose or a duty. "Not an intelligent
white man or woman in the South," says the writer, "would now wish
slavery restored." But why,--it is impossible not to return to the
question,--why had the South done nothing to rid itself of the evil? Why
had it centered its political energies in maintaining and extending it?
Why had it revolted from the Union and invited war and ruin, for a
system which when once removed it recognized as a burden and a curse? No
right minded man can ponder that question without taking a step further,
and asking whether the evils in our present industrial system shall be
allowed to go on till they bring down the temple on our heads, or be met
with deliberate and resolute cure. And the good and conscientious man
who does his best under the existing system--as Thomas Dabney did under
slavery--is yet derelict unless he gives his thought and effort to such
radical amendment as the system may need.
There is yet another book in illustration of slavery which ought to be
read by every American. It is Fanny Kemble Butler's _A Residence on a
Georgia Plantation_. She was a woman of unusual genius, character, and
sensibility; the inheritor of a great dramatic talent, and a brilliant
actress until she married Mr. Butler of Georgia, and left the stage to
live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After
no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her
confidence as to her domestic affairs, but returning to the stage as a
dramatic reader, and passing into honored private life. After the
outbreak of the Civil War she published, with some reserves and some
additions, the journal she had kept during her life on the plantation.
As to her personal relations, except as touching the slaves, the book is
entirely reticent, but it is plain that slavery as she saw it made life
under those conditions literally intolerable. Below all special
cruelties, she writes, she felt the ever-present, vivid wrong of living
on the unpaid labor of servants. The special wrongs were constant. Thus
she describes the parting of a family of slaves, and the husband's awful
distress. She tells of the head-driver, Frank, an every way superior
man, left at some seasons in sole charge of the plantation; but his wife
was taken from him and made the mistress of the overseer. There was
Engineer Ned, intelligent and capable, and himself not badly treated,
but with a wife broken down by being driven to field work too soon after
the birth of a child. Half the women on the plantation were diseased
from the same cause. One woman brought to her mistress a pitiful tale of
such suffering. A little later the mistress learned that the woman, on
the ground that this visit had caused her day's labor to come short,
had received a flogging. She appealed to her husband, but he refused to
interfere. "To Mr. ----'s assertion of the justice of poor Theresa's
punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced
labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a
woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to
maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I
said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and
corporal chastizement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any
manly or humane man. Mr. ---- said he thought it was disagreeable, and
left me to my reflections with that concession." Presently he refused to
listen to any more such petitions from her. She writes: "A wild wish
rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in
their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours."
The principal physical hardships, she writes, fell to the women. The
children and the old people are idle and neglected; the middle-aged men
do not seem over-worked, and lead a mere animal existence, in itself not
peculiarly cruel or distressing, but with a constant element of fear and
uncertainty, "and the trifling evils of unrequited labor, ignorance the
most profound (to which they are condemned by law), and the unutterable
injustice which precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits
of voluntary exertion, and the progress that results from it."
Her eye notes closely the faces about her. When she gathers the slaves
to read prayers to them, she observes "their sable faces, so many of
them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions, and yet all of them
so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression of patient
suffering and religious fervor." She says: "Just in proportion as I have
found the slaves on this plantation intelligent and advanced, I have
observed this pathetic expression of countenance in them, a mixture of
sadness and fear." The plantation, she writes, was well reputed, and its
management was considered above the average.
Her analysis of the master class in the South is keen and striking. "The
shop is not their element, and the eager spirit of speculation and the
sordid spirit of gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their
very demeanor and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large
proportion of the inhabitants of the Northern States. The Southerners
are infinitely better bred men, according to English notions, than the
men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives them a certain
self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease. Their
temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have the
grace and spirit which seldom belong to the development of a Northern
people; but upon more familiar acquaintance the vices of the social
system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with
their own peculiar taint; and haughty, over-bearing irritability,
effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy
and cruelty which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power
over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits."
She gives another and darker picture of the planter class. It goes
without saying that it is only a part of the class to which it fairly
applies: "A nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose
organization and temperament is that of the southern European, living
under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting,
scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential
swamp, intrenched within their own boundaries, surrounded by creatures
absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard
necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and
debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of
all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to conceive a
more savage existence within the border of any modern civilization." The
picture of the poor whites is graphic and somber, but space must limit
these quotations.
She gives credit for the habits of courage and command, which are bred
in the upper class, as when she tells of a heroic rescue from a
shipwreck: "The devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of
peremptory command over their fellowmen, and under the constant
apprehension of danger and awful necessity of immediate readiness to
meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of
supreme peril."
She touches repeatedly on the social restrictions on free speech; thus,
speaking of two gentlemen, one a clergyman: "They seem good and kind and
amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of
slave holders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful
atmosphere, the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled
sound which one must hear to be able to conceive." She observes that
whenever she discusses slavery with people she meets, they waive the
abstract right or wrong of the system. Now and then she gets a bit of
entire frankness, as when a very distinguished South Carolinian says to
her, "I'll tell you why abolition is impossible; because every healthy
negro can fetch $1000 in Charleston market at this moment."
She generalizes as to the effects of emancipation in a way which later
events completely justified. Unlike the West Indies, she says, the South
is not tropical, and will not yield food without labor, and necessity
would compel the liberated blacks to work. That they would not work, and
the ground would lie idle, was, as we know, the bogy which was held up
to scare away from emancipation--just as in our own day the danger of
race mixture is made a bogy to scare away from social justice. But the
event proved that Fanny Kemble was right in her predictions, in which
indeed she was at one with other candid observers at the time. As to
gradual emancipation, she believed it unwise--the system, she writes, is
too absolutely bad for slow measures. Had she owned her husband's
plantation, she would at once have freed the slaves, and hired them, if
only as a means of financial salvation.
She pronounces _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ to be no exaggeration. Her own story
of facts gives a darker impression than Mrs. Stowe's novel. It may be
asked, why, at this distance, revive the tragic tale? The answer is,
that the truth of history is precious, and our present problems cannot
be understood if we shut our eyes to their antecedents. Just now there
is a fashion, among many Southern writers on the negro question, of
beginning their story with the wrongs and sufferings of the
reconstruction period. Now, it was indeed deplorable, and a thing not to
be forgotten, that ignorant negroes sat in the Senate chambers of South
Carolina and Mississippi, that taxes were excessive, and the public
business mismanaged. But, in the broad view, it is well to remember that
a few years earlier very much worse things than these were happening,
and that a system which made cattle of men and women might be expected
to avenge itself.
Another work may be merely mentioned as illuminating the facts of
slavery. It is Frederic Law Olmsted's three volumes of travels in the
slave States. He studied them with the eyes of a farmer and a practical
man; a well-equipped, fair, and keen observer. His testimony, already
touched on in these chapters, is very strong as to the economic mischief
of the system, its frequent cruelties, its demoralization of both
master and slave, and the absolute need of its ultimate extinction. From
his pages we can borrow but one or two passages. The contrasts of
slavery are epitomized in two plantations he found side by side in
Mississippi. On one the slaves had good food and clothes, were not
driven hard, were given three stops in the day for meals, and had the
time from Friday night till Monday morning for themselves. In this time
the men cultivated gardens and the women washed and sewed. They were
smartly dressed, and seemed very contented; many could read and write;
on Sundays there was a church service and a Sabbath school taught by
their mistress, both of which they could attend or not as they pleased.
On the other plantation, owned by a religious woman, the working hours
were from 3.30 A. M. to 9 P. M. The slaves had only Sunday free from
labor, and on that day there were three services which they had to
attend under penalty of a whipping. They were never allowed off the
plantation, and were whipped if they talked with slaves from other
plantations. Said a neighbor, "They can all repeat the catechism, but
they are the dullest, laziest, and most sorrowful negroes I ever saw."
As to the possibilities of gradual emancipation, which he favored,
Olmsted wrote that in Cuba every slave has the right of buying his own
freedom, at a price which does not depend on the selfish exaction of his
master, but is either a fixed price or is determined in each case by
disinterested appraisers. "The consequence is that emancipations are
continually going on, and the free people of color are becoming
enlightened, cultivated, and wealthy. In no part of the United States do
they occupy the high position which they enjoy in Cuba." So much for the
despised Spanish-American.
From a still different standpoint--that of the non-slaveholding
Southern white--the system was reviewed and scathingly judged in
Helper's _The Impending Crisis_. But that, like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, was
not merely a book, but an event, and as such is to be mentioned in its
place among events. The general survey of the slave system in itself
need not here be carried further. As to its essential character and
basal principle, no truer word was ever spoken than that which Mrs.
Stowe puts in the mouth of the slaveholder St. Clare:
"The short of the matter is, cousin, on this abstract question of
slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters,
who have money to make by it,--clergymen, who have planters to
please,--politicians, who want to rule by it,--may warp and bend
language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their
ingenuity; they can press Nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what
else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world
believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the
short of it,--and to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what
he can do in his own line. You seem to wonder; but if you will get me
fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business,
accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run
it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why,
because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and
strong,--because I know how, and can do it,--therefore I may steal all
he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy.
Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set
Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because
the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the
money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that
I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the
days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at
last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is."
St. Clare goes on to say that "for pity's sake, for shame's sake,
because we are men born of women and not savage beasts, many of us do
not and dare not--we would scorn to--use the full power which our savage
laws put into our hands." In truth, a compilation of the slave laws was
one of the most convincing arguments against the whole system.
This book is characterized by Charles G. Ames,--whose long life of noble
service to humanity included earnest work among the anti-slavery
pioneers: "To my mind, the heaviest blow, though probably not the most
telling one, ever struck against our slave system as a system was the
compilation and publication of Stroud's _Slave Laws_--a codification
from the statute-books of the Southern States of their own barbarous
methods of legislation, made necessary for the protection of the
peculiar institution. All the recent sentimental defenses of it, as
gentle, humane, and patriarchal, seem utterly to ignore the rugged
facts, which Lawyer Stroud's book made as plain as the stratification of
the rocks to the eye of the geologist."
In its actual administration, the system was in a measure softened and
humanized. It was more humane in the border than in the cotton and sugar
States, and it was generally better when a plantation was managed by its
owner than when left to an overseer,--as the plantation of Fanny
Kemble's husband had been left. But in one respect its disastrous effect
was everywhere felt. By associating manual labor with the stigma of
servitude, it bred, in free men, a strong disrelish for work,--a most
demoralizing and ruinous influence. Inefficiency and degradation were
the marks of the non-slaveholding whites. The master class missed the
wholesome regimen of toil. Nature is never more beneficent than when
she lays on man the imperative command "Thou shalt work." Of all ways of
evading it the worst is to shift the burden to another man. In being
driven to do other men's work as well as his own the negro found some
compensation, but his enslaver paid a constant and heavy penalty.