A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY
As a distinguished southerner, familiar with the subject, says, slavery in
the United States was "a stupendous anachronism."[11] It is almost
incredible to the average northerner of to-day that the enlightened people
of the south sank backwards in social development a thousand years or
more, and hugged to their bosoms for several generations such a monstrous
evil and peril.
The co-operation of two facts fully explains the wonder just noted. Now
let us try to understand this.
The first fact is the part played by tobacco and cotton before the
anti-slavery sentiment became influential. At a time when there was
practically no industry but agriculture these two staples became the most
lucrative of all common American crops. Tobacco found its true soil in
Virginia, and cotton farther south. It developed in time that both could
be made far more profitably with African slaves than by free white labor,
the only other labor to be had. Of course you are to remember that slave
cultivation of tobacco did not become general in Virginia until near the
end of the seventeenth century, and that it was the invention of the gin
soon after the adoption of the federal constitution in 1789 that started
cotton production on a large scale. What you are especially to grasp here
is the economic conditions which naturally spread slavery from its
beginning at Jamestown, first over Virginia, and then throughout the
entire south, either settled in large measure from Virginia, or looking
thither for example. The Virginian who could not replace his exhausted
fields with virgin soil at home went with his slaves either west or south,
and hacked down enough of the primeval forest to give his working force
its quantum of arable land. We need not stop here to tell of rice and
cane, nor of other crops and industries which for a while engaged slave
labor in northern regions of the south where the soil did not suit
tobacco. The foregoing suggests adequately for this place how slavery
became general in the south.
The second fact is that the prevalent opinion of that time was far
different from that of to-day, for certain reasons, to which I would now
have you attend.
Long before the discovery of America personal slavery had fallen under the
ban of the christian church and become in Europe a thing of the past. The
Divine Comedy catalogues in detail the religious, political, moral, and
social events of its age. It is utterly silent throughout as to slavery.
Dante died in 1321, soon after he had finished the Divine Comedy. That was
nearly three hundred years before the appearance of African slavery in
Virginia.
Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon
afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America.
It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and
Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost
every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last
quarter of the fourteenth century--some fifty years after Dante had
died--that the classics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe,
they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers,
poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the fifteenth
century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty
Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619 until slavery had
become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and
Latin ancient writers were in our mother country almost the sole subjects
of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that
read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic
worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and
inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was
dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery
being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists
afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the
state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science,
jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every
enlightened land. Naturally the educated classes, now that it had been
several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten
or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not
see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all
practised. The classics did not stop with giving slavery the negative
support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca,
and the later jurists--all of the discredited silver, and not of the
glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages--do express, theatrically and
academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in
the balance when weighed against the commendations of the institution to
be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, who had now
become the great idols of intellectual society.[12]
The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been
suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as
the African was a heathen barbarian it was God's mercy to kidnap him for a
christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his
soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants
of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah's curse are to be the
servants of servants to the end of time--that is what Holy Church taught
by precept and example.
"Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first
English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552."[13] His venture
proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his
mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was far better for the
African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the
rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so
convincing that "in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless
man-stealer, she was a partner and protector."[14] Until the end of the
seventeenth century the masses regarded the negro as being rather wild
beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge
of him than later generations did in lassoing wild horses and working them
under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who
recognized that the negro belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15]
and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New
Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed
as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best
characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they
said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their
own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the
scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and
heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We
eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which
is the slavery of those destined for it by God and nature. Slave-catcher,
slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed.
You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating
slavery in America the protection it got in the constitution under which
the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says:
"The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the
constitution, were among the essential conditions upon which the
federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not
been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been
conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the
apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been
agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners,
the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 'to form a more
perfect union.'"[18]
Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery
which this countenance of it by the American bible of bibles naturally
created in the north and south.
The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their
co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of
vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no
sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation
that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which
having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years
after the adoption of the constitution. This agitation was only against
the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to
Congress of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty
aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date the
beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become
respectable with the great mass of northern people until the application
of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened
the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest
eye, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which came out in 1852, stirred the north to
its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a
century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of
the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or
economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of
Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples
and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,--all these had, with
oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting,
nurturing, and on into extending slavery over her territory. Thus when
abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very
economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the
combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would
subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern
States now living in content and comfort.
I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all
that slavery ran the career just described.
But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial
champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they
forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that
all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
This has already been answered. The slaveholding republics of Greece and
Rome had advanced in democracy so far beyond anything to be found in
Europe at the revival of learning, that from that time on for many years
the political doctrine in the recovered classics was the very greatest of
all the intellectual influences that made for mere democracy. The
celebrated passage in which Burke eulogizes the stubborn maintenance of
their freedom by free slaveholders has been the text of speakers from
Pinkney, addressing the United States senate on the Missouri question, to
Toombs, lecturing in Tremont Temple, Boston, and it has never been
confuted. History shows no instance where such men ever reproached
themselves for slaveholding, and while it was profitable put it aside
because it is undemocratic.
As to the words which you quote from the declaration of independence,
Jefferson, the draftsman, doubtless, meant them to include the African;
but the majority of the congress making it, and the American people
actually ratifying it, almost unanimously held that the African was not
enough of man to come within the words.
A Roman law parallel aptly illustrates. In the Institutes it is said that
slavery is contrary to the law of nature, for under this every one is born
free;[19] and again, that slavery was established by the _jus gentium_
under which a man is made subject to the dominion of another _contra
naturam_, that is, against nature, against _jus naturale_, or the law of
nature.[20] And in the Pandects this is weakly echoed.[21] But the actual
enactment of the _corpus juris civilis_ fortifies slavery as it had been
established all over the world by the _jus gentium_ with these plain
words: "The master has power of life and death over his slave; and
whatever property the slave acquires, he acquires for the master."[22]
Our forefathers making the declaration of independence, and the Romans of
Justinian's time, sentimentalized in the same words over the natural right
to equality and liberty of all human beings, and also resolutely held on
to their slaves. The solemn assertion that all men are created equal and
of inalienable liberty made by American slaveholders was but a repetition
of what Roman slaveholders had already said; and it is curious that the
fact has not attracted due attention.
I fancy that my objector now shoots his last bolt. He exclaims that
southerners were incredibly dull and obtuse not to discern that
resistlessly puissant economical, political, moral, and intellectual
forces, not of America only but of the entire world, were leaguing
together against slavery, and therefore they ought to have fled in time
from the coming wrath and evil day.
A satisfactory reply need not postulate any other than ordinary
intelligence and alertness for the south. Note how people dwell near
overflowing rivers, or a sea of tidal waves, or live volcanoes, or in
earthquake districts, or near a tribe of scalping redskins, where they,
their wives and children, keep merry as the day is long until calamity
comes. The warning of the abolitionists was too late. Suppose we had given
the inhabitants of Herculaneum or Pompeii or St. Pierre timely counsel to
abandon their homes and settle beyond the reach of eruption. How many
would have done it? I knew hundreds of people, and among all of them there
was but one who showed by his actions that he foresaw the early fall of
slavery. That was Mr. Frank L. Upson of Lexington, Georgia, a highly
accomplished and well-informed man. In 1856, I think it was, he sold all
of his slaves, declaring as his reason that he believed if he kept them he
would see them freed without compensation. He was so serious that he
declared this even to his purchasers. They merely laughed, and everybody
else laughed too, to think how green he was to give them the good bargain
that he did. But after the war he enjoyed comfort from the money those
slaves had brought him, when all his neighbors had been plunged into hard
times by emancipation. There may have been others that did like him. There
could not have been many such, for I have never been able to hear of a
single one.
We did like the rest of mankind do or would have done. We stuck to our
homes and business until the tidal wave washed them away. Yet there are
wise ones who are positive that had we not been far more dull and
unforeseeing than the average we would have understood many years before
the final convulsion that the forces arrayed against slavery were
irresistible, and surrendered it in time to get compensated emancipation.
Look at the monopolists now preying upon the public in every corner of the
land. They are confident that their holdings are impregnable against
democracy coming invincibly against them. Look at the great mass of our
population, shutting the fresh air out of their houses in order to be
comfortably warm, and thereby rearing parents--especially mothers--who
unawares are incessantly developing tuberculosis to destroy themselves and
their children. Some years hence when resumption by government of its
functions now granted to private persons has dispossessed all the
monopolists, and when every dwelling-house is kept perfectly ventilated
and free from infected air, there will be other wise ones to believe that
hindsight is just the same as foresight, and to inveigh against the
monopolists and parents just mentioned for their unwonted stupidity and
improvidence.