UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL
COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS
Now a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor.
The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are
resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather,
in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering
of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun
to sun. But this is not all of his load. The year round he must subsist
the numerous non-workers in the families of his laborers, whether young,
superannuated, or afflicted. Suppose another farmer to be on adjoining
land who can employ laborers just as he wants them, and discharge them as
soon as he has no further use for them. Do you not perceive that this
free-labor farmer can produce far more cheaply than the slave farmer? And
do you not also perceive that if there is a supply of free labor to be had
in a slave country, and it can be got by every farmer _ad libitum_, slaves
must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor
was kept out of the south by the repugnance of the white laborer to the
negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable
their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their
property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real
reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the extension of the African
slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States' constitution
refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not
finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it
could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor.
The latter under favorable conditions commenced the competition in which
it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north.
We especially desire to emphasize the attitude towards extension of
slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected
slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at
once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together.[23] Think of the
free worker's suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be
induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking
the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound
disrespect for his class; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing
numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great
accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the
plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power
was rising against slavery.
This has brought us to the place where we can properly treat the
contention for the Territories. Consider their vast area. Remember that
our people have settled thereon in such numbers that thirty-two new States
have been added to the old thirteen, and others still are to be added.
Here for some generations was land for the landless; the full meaning of
which Henry George has made us plainly see. The adventurous and
enterprising of the old States of each section set their faces
thitherward in a constantly swelling stream. Attend to the only material
difference for us between the northerner and the southerner going west.
Each settler wanted a community like his native one. The northerner had
not been trained to manage slave labor and property; he did not like it;
he thought it out of date and vastly inferior to free labor; and he could
not endure to have himself and family live among negroes, repulsive to him
because of unfamiliarity. He had learned from its history in the south
that wherever slavery established itself it superseded all other labor.
Therefore he would none of it in his new home; and he settled in a
non-slave community. Of course the southerner, knowing nothing of free
labor and bred into a love of the slave system, settled among
slaveholders. And so for a generation or two free and slave States were
steadily added to the union in pairs.
But the unsettled lands were diminishing in area. Its population
multiplying so marvellously, the north felt urgent need for the whole of
these lands. The great majority of settlers going thence into the
Territories were farmers. Note some of the more influential classes left
behind them. The parents, relatives, and friends who wanted them suited in
the west--this was the largest class of all, and it was of prodigious
intellectual, political, and moral potency. Then the manufacturers of
agricultural implements, and of many articles, all of which the
southerners either had their mechanic slaves to make by hand, and of
oldtime fashion, or did without; the millers, and many sorts of wholesale
merchants who had found slave owners poor and the employers of free labor
good customers; and these manufacturers and merchants were greedy for the
new markets which they could get only in free States.
These are but the merest hints, but they serve somewhat to suggest the
all-powerful motives which at last united the great majority of northern
people, east and west, in intelligent and inveterate opposition to the
further spread of slavery.
Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves
were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property.
And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but
it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, Dick, and Harry
ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's
plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred
of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of
her great-granddaughter."[24]
Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also
things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do
at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to
understand this one of its phases by supposing that he has orchards
abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees
plant and tend themselves, gather and store the fruit, set out other
orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and
keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and
prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a
difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the
slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only
ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other
occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and
really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in
their automatic production and accumulation, but they would be much
inferior as marketable property in many particulars.
Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest
profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day
long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes
were far more to him than his land. His planting was the furthest removed
of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new
cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for other virgin soil to wear out. The
number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in
the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the
golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the
cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area
of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a
considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus
of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market
value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the
instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.
We hope that we now have helped you to an understanding of the active
principles each of free labor and of slave labor; how by reason of them
the interests of north and south in dividing the public domain were in
irreconcilable conflict; and how it was natural that the free States
should band together against, and the slave States band together for,
slavery. Thus the country split into two geographical though not political
sections, the political division which ripened later being as yet only
imminent and inchoate. That these sections had been made by deadly war
between free labor and slave labor is all that we have to say here. The
development went further, as we shall explain in the next chapter--all of
it under the propulsion of the two active principles. They were always the
ultimate and supreme motors. Often they are not to be seen at all. Still
more often what they did was disguised. To read the facts of that time
aright you must always and everywhere look for their work. Do that
patiently, and you will detect every one of the many controversies over
matters affecting an interest of either section as such--whether questions
apparently of national politics, of morals, or religion, in newspapers,
pamphlets, reviews, books, and all the vast contemporary literature, in
the pulpit, on the platform, and in every place and corner of the entire
land where policy and impolicy or right and wrong were mooted--to be but a
part of one or the other of two great complexes of machinery, each geared
to its particular motor and kept going by its mighty push.