inhabitants, has never been at all desirous of the emancipation of the
slaves. The Democratic party which has ruled the United States for many
years past has always been friendly to the slaveholders, who have, with
few exceptions, been all members of it (for by a strange perversion both
of words and ideas, some of the most Democratic States in the Union are
Southern slave States, and in the part of Georgia where the slave
population is denser than in any other part of the South, a county exists
bearing the satirical title of _Liberty County_). And the support of the
South has been given to the Northern Democratic politicians, upon the
distinct understanding that their 'domestic institution' was to be
guaranteed to them.
The condition of the free blacks in the Northern States has of course been
affected most unfavourably by the slavery of their race throughout the
other half of the Union, and indeed it would have been a difficult matter
for Northern citizens to maintain towards the blacks an attitude of social
and political equality as far as the borders of Delaware, while
immediately beyond they were pledged to consider them as the 'chattels' of
their owners, animals no more noble or human than the cattle in their
masters' fields.
How could peace have been maintained if the Southern slaveholders had been
compelled to endure the sight of negroes rising to wealth and eminence in
the Northern cities, or entering as fellow-members with themselves the
halls of that legislature to which all free-born citizens are eligible?
they would very certainly have declined with fierce scorn, not the
fellowship of the blacks alone, but of those white men who admitted the
despised race of their serfs to a footing of such impartial equality. It
therefore was the instinctive, and became the deliberate policy of the
Northern people, once pledged to maintain slavery in the South, to make
their task easy by degrading the blacks in the Northern States to a
condition contrasting as little as possible with that of the Southern
slaves. The Northern politicians struck hands with the Southern
slaveholders, and the great majority of the most enlightened citizens of
the Northern States, absorbed in the pursuit of wealth and the extension
and consolidation of their admirable and wonderful national prosperity,
abandoned the government of their noble country and the preservation of
its nobler institutions to the slaveholding aristocracy of the South--to a
mob of politicians by trade, the vilest and most venal class of men that
ever disgraced and endangered a country--to foreign emigrants, whose
brutish ignorance did not prevent the Democratic party from seizing upon
them as voters, and bestowing on the Irish and German boors just landed on
their shores the same political privileges as those possessed and
intelligently exercised by the farmers and mechanics of New England, the
most enlightened men of their class to be found in the world.
The gradual encroachment of the Southern politicians upon the liberties of
the North, by their unrelaxing influence in Congress and over successive
cabinets and presidents, was not without its effect in stimulating some
resistance on the part of Northern statesmen of sufficient intelligence to
perceive the inevitable results towards which this preponderance in the
national counsels was steadily tending; and I need not remind you of the
rapidity and force with which General Jackson quelled an incipient
rebellion in South Carolina, when Mr. Calhoun made the tariff question the
pretext for a threatened secession in 1832, of the life-long opposition to
Southern pretensions by John Quincy Adams, of the endeavour of Mr. Clay to
stem the growing evil by the conditions of the Missouri compromise, and
all the occasional attempts of individuals of more conscientious
convictions than their fellow-citizens on the subject of the sin of
slavery, from Dr. Channing's eloquent protest on the annexation of Texas,
to Mr. Charles Sumner's philippic against Mr. Brooks of South Carolina.
The disorganisation of the Democratic party, after a cohesion of so many
years, at length changed the aspect of affairs; and the North appeared to
be about to arouse itself from its apathetic consent to Southern
domination. The Republican party, headed by Colonel Fremont, who was known
to be an anti-slavery man, nearly carried the presidential election six
years ago, and then every preparation had been made in the South for the
process of secession, which was only averted by the election of Mr.
Buchanan, a pro-slavery Southern sympathiser, though born in Pennsylvania.
Under his presidency, the Southern statesmen, resuming their attitude of
apparent friendliness with the North, kept in abeyance, maturing and
perfecting by every treasonable practice, for which their preponderating
share in the cabinet afforded them fatal facilities, the plan of the
violent disruption of the Union, upon which they had determined whenever
the Republican party should have acquired sufficient strength, to elect a
president with Northern views. Before, however, this event occurred, the
war in Kansas rang a prophetic peal of warning through the land; and the
struggle there begun between New England emigrants bent on founding a free
state, and Missouri border ruffians determined to make the new territory a
slaveholding addition to the South, might have roused the whole North and
West to the imminence of the peril, by which the safety of the Union was
threatened.
But neither the struggle in Kansas, nor the strange and piteous episode
which grew out of it, of John Brown's attempt to excite an insurrection in
Virginia, and his execution by the government of that State, did more than
startle the North with a nine days' wonder out of its apathetic
indifference. The Republican party, it is true, gained adherents, and
acquired strength by degrees; and Mr. Buchanan's term of office
approaching its expiration, it became apparent that the Democratic party
was about to lose its supremacy, and the slaveholders their dominion; and
no sooner was this evident than the latter threw off the mask, and
renounced their allegiance to the Union. In a day--in an hour
almost--those stood face to face as mortal enemies who were citizens of
the same country, subjects of the same government, children of the same
soil; and the North, incredulous and amazed, found itself suddenly
summoned to retrieve its lost power and influence, and assert the dignity
of the insulted Union against the rebellious attempt of the South to
overthrow it.
But it was late for them to take that task in hand. For years the conduct
of the government of the United States had been becoming a more desperate
and degraded _jobbery_, one from which day by day the Northern gentlemen
of intelligence, influence, and education withdrew themselves in greater
disgust, devoting their energies to schemes of mere personal advantage,
and leaving the commonweal with selfish and contemptuous indifference to
the guidance of any hands less nice and less busy than their own.
Nor would the Southern planters--a prouder and more aristocratic race than
the Northern merchants--have relished the companionship of their
fellow-politicians more than the latter, but _their_ personal interests
were at stake, and immediately concerned in their maintaining their
predominant influence over the government; and while the Boston men wrote
and talked transcendentalism, and became the most accomplished of
_aestetische_ cotton spinners and railroad speculators, and made the shoes
and cow-hides of the Southerners, the latter made their laws; (I believe
New Jersey is really the great cow-hide factory); and the New York men,
owners of the fastest horses and finest houses in the land, having made a
sort of Brummagem Paris of their city, were the bankers and brokers of the
Southerners, while the latter were their legislators.
The grip the slaveholders had fastened on the helm of the State had been
tightening for nearly half a century, till the government of the nation
had become literally theirs, and the idea of their relinquishing it was
one which the North did not contemplate, and they would not tolerate.
If I have said nothing of the grievances which the South has alleged
against the North--its tariff, made chiefly in the interest of the
north-eastern manufacturing States, or its inconsiderable but enthusiastic
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Abolition party--it is because I do not
believe these causes of complaint would have had the same effect upon any
but a community of slaveholders, men made impatient (by the life-long
habit of despotism), not only of all control, but of any opposition.
Thirty years ago Andrew Jackson--a man of keen sagacity as well as
determined energy--wrote of them that they were bent upon destroying the
Union, and that, whatever was the pretext of their discontent, that was
their aim and purpose. 'To-day,' he wrote, 'it is the tariff, by and by it
will be slavery.' The event has proved how true a prophet he was. My own
conviction is that the national character produced and fostered by
slaveholding is incompatible with free institutions, and that the
Southern aristocracy, thanks to the pernicious influences by which they
are surrounded, are unfit to be members of a Christian republic. It is
slavery that has made the Southerners rebels to their government, traitors
to their country, and the originators of the bloodiest civil war that ever
disgraced humanity and civilisation. It is for their sinful complicity in
slavery, and their shameful abandonment of all their duties as citizens,
that the Northerners are paying in the blood of their men, the tears of
their women, and the treasure which they have till now held more precious
than their birthright. They must now not merely impose a wise restriction
upon slavery, they must be prepared to extinguish it. They neglected and
despised the task of moderating its conditions and checking its growth;
they must now suddenly, in the midst of unparalleled difficulties and
dangers, be ready to deal summarily with its entire existence. They have
loved the pursuit of personal prosperity and pleasure more than their
country; and now they must spend life and living to reconquer their great
inheritance, and win back at the sword's point what Heaven had forbidden
them to lose. Nor are we, here in England, without part in this tremendous
sin and sorrow; we have persisted in feeding our looms, and the huge
wealth they coin, with the produce of slavery. In vain our vast Indian
territory has solicited the advantage of becoming our free cotton
plantation; neither our manufacturers nor our government would venture,
would wait, would spend or lose, for that purpose; the slave-grown harvest
was ready, was abundant, was cheap--and now the thousand arms of our great
national industry are folded in deplorable inactivity; the countless hands
that wrought from morn till night the wealth that was a world's wonder are
stretched unwillingly to beg their bread; and England has never seen a
sadder sight than the enforced idleness of her poor operatives, or a
nobler one than their patient and heroic endurance.
And now you ask me what plan, what scheme, what project the government of
the United States has formed for the safe and successful emancipation of
four millions of slaves, in the midst of a country distracted with all the
horrors of war, and the male population of which is engaged in military
service at a distance from their homes? Most assuredly none. Precipitated
headlong from a state of apparent profound security and prosperity into a
series of calamitous events which have brought the country to the verge of
ruin, neither the nation or its governors have had leisure to prepare
themselves for any of the disastrous circumstances they have had to
encounter, least of all for the momentous change which the President's
proclamation announces as imminent: a measure of supreme importance, not
deliberately adopted as the result of philanthropic conviction or
far-sighted policy, but (if not a mere feint of party politics) the last
effort of the incensed spirit of endurance in the North--a punishment
threatened against rebels, whom they cannot otherwise subdue, and which a
year ago half the Northern population would have condemned upon principle,
and more than half revolted from on instinct.
The country being in a state of war necessarily complicates everything,
and renders the most plausible suggestions for the settlement of the
question of emancipation futile: because from first to last now it will be
one tremendous chapter of accidents, instead of a carefully considered and
wisely prepared measure of government. But supposing the war to have
ceased, either by the success of the Northern arms or by the consent of
both belligerents, the question of manumission in the Southern States when
reduced to the condition of territories or restored to the sway of their
own elected governors and legislatures, though difficult, is by no means
one of insuperable difficulty; and I do not believe that a great nation of
Englishmen, having once the will to rid itself of a danger and a disgrace,
will fail to find a way. The thing, therefore, most to be desired now is,
that Americans may unanimously embrace the purpose of emancipation, and,
though they have been reluctantly driven by the irresistible force of
circumstances to contemplate the measure, may henceforward never avert
their eyes from it till it is accomplished.
When I was in the South many years ago I conversed frequently with two
highly intelligent men, both of whom agreed in saying that the immense
value of the slaves as property was the only real obstacle to their
manumission, and that whenever the Southerners became convinced that it
was their interest to free them they would very soon find the means to do
it. In some respects the conditions are more favourable than those we had
to encounter in freeing our West India slaves. Though the soil and climate
of the Southern States are fertile and favourable, they are not tropical,
and there is no profuse natural growth of fruits or vegetables to render
subsistence possible without labour; the winter temperature is like that
of the Roman States; and even as far south as Georgia and the borders of
Florida, frosts severe enough to kill the orange trees are sometimes
experienced. The inhabitants of the Southern States, throughout by far the
largest portion of their extent, must labour to live, and will undoubtedly
obey the beneficent law of necessity whenever they are made to feel that
their existence depends upon their own exertions. The plan of a gradual
emancipation, preceded by a limited apprenticeship of the negroes to white
masters, is of course often suggested as less dangerous than their entire
and immediate enfranchisement. But when years ago I lived on a Southern
plantation, and had opportunities of observing the miserable results of
the system on everything connected with it--the souls, minds, bodies, and
estates of both races of men, and the very soil on which they existed
together--I came to the conclusion that immediate and entire emancipation
was not only an act of imperative right, but would be the safest and most
profitable course for the interests of both parties. The gradual and
inevitable process of ruin which exhibits itself in the long run on every
property involving slavery, naturally suggests some element of decay
inherent in the system; the reckless habits of extravagance and
prodigality in the masters, the ruinous wastefulness and ignorant
incapacity of the slaves, the deterioration of the land under the
exhausting and thriftless cultivation to which it is subjected, made it
evident to me that there were but two means of maintaining a prosperous
ownership in Southern plantations: either the possession of considerable
capital wherewith to recruit the gradual waste of the energies of the
soil, and supply by all the improved and costly methods of modern
agriculture the means of profitable cultivation (a process demanding, as
English farmers know, an enormous and incessant outlay of both money and
skill), or an unlimited command of fresh soil, to which the slaves might
be transferred as soon as that already under culture exhibited signs of
exhaustion. Now the Southerners are for the most part men whose only
wealth is in their land and labourers--a large force of slaves is their
most profitable investment. The great capitalists and monied men of the
country are Northern men; the planters are men of large estates but
restricted means--many of them are deeply involved in debt, and there are
very few who do not depend from year to year for their subsistence on the
harvest of their fields and the chances of the cotton and rice crops of
each season.
This makes it of vital importance to them to command an unrestricted
extent of territory. The man who can move a 'gang' of able-bodied negroes
to a tract of virgin soil is sure of an immense return of wealth; as sure
as that he who is circumscribed in this respect, and limited to the
cultivation of certain lands with cotton or tobacco by slaves, will in the
course of a few years see his estate gradually exhausted and unproductive,
refusing its increase, while its black population propagating and
multiplying will compel him eventually, under penalty of starvation, to
make _them_ his crop, and substitute, as the Virginians have been
constrained to do, a traffic in human cattle for the cultivation of
vegetable harvests.
The steady decrease of the value of the cotton crop, even on the famous
sea island plantations of Georgia, often suggested to me the inevitable
ruin of the owners within a certain calculable space of time, as the land
became worn out, and the negroes continued to increase in number; and had
the estate on which I lived been mine, and the laws of Georgia not made
such an experiment impossible, I would have emancipated the slaves on it
immediately, and turned them into a free tenantry, as the first means of
saving my property from impending destruction. I would have paid them
wages, and they should have paid me rent. I would have relinquished the
charge of feeding and clothing them, and the burthen of their old, young,
and infirm; in short, I would have put them at once upon the footing of
free hired labourers. Of course such a process would have involved
temporary loss, and for a year or two the income of the estate would, I
dare say, have suffered considerably; but, in all such diversions of
labour or capital from old into new channels and modes of operation, there
must be an immediate sacrifice of present to future profit, and I do not
doubt that the estate would have recovered from the momentary necessary
interruption of its productiveness, to resume it with an upward instead of
a downward tendency, and a vigorous impulse towards progress and
improvement substituted for the present slow but sure drifting to
stagnation and decay.
As I have told you, the land affords no spontaneous produce which will
sustain life without labour. The negroes therefore must work to eat; they
are used to the soil and climate, and accustomed to the agriculture, and
there is no reason at all to apprehend--as has been suggested--that a race
of people singularly attached to the place of their birth and residence
would abandon in any large numbers their own country, just as the
conditions of their existence in it were made more favourable, to try the
unknown and (to absolute ignorance) forbidding risks of emigration to the
sterner climate and harder soil of the Northern States.
Of course, in freeing the slaves, it would be necessary to contemplate the
possibility of their becoming eventual proprietors of the soil to some
extent themselves. There is as little doubt that many of them would soon
acquire the means of doing so (men who amass, during hours of daily extra
labour, through years of unpaid toil, the means of buying themselves from
their masters, would soon justify their freedom by the intelligent
improvement of their condition), as that many of the present landholders
would be ready and glad to alienate their impoverished estates by parcels,
and sell the land which has become comparatively unprofitable to them, to
its enfranchised cultivators. This, the future ownership of land by
negroes, as well as their admission to those rights of citizenship which
everywhere in America such ownership involves, would necessarily be future
subjects of legislation; and either or both privileges might be withheld
temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently, as might seem expedient, and
the progress in civilisation which might justify such an extension of
rights. These, and any other modifications of the state of the black
population in the South, would require great wisdom to deal with, but
their immediate transformation from bondsmen to free might, I think, be
accomplished with little danger or difficulty, and with certain increase
of prosperity to the Southern States.
On the other hand, it is not impossible that, left to the unimpeded action
of the natural laws that govern the existence of various races, the black
population, no longer directly preserved and propagated for the purposes
of slavery, might gradually decrease and dwindle, as it does at the
North--where, besides the unfavourable influence of a cold climate on a
race originally African, it suffers from its admixture with the whites,
and the amalgamation of the two races, as far as it goes, tends evidently
to the destruction of the weaker. The Northern mulattoes are an unhealthy
feeble population, and it might yet appear that even under the more
favourable influence of a Southern climate, whenever the direct stimulus
afforded by slavery to the increase of the negroes was removed, their
gradual extinction or absorption by the predominant white race would
follow in the course of time.