THE CURSE OF SLAVERY TO THE WHITE, AND ITS BLESSING TO THE NEGRO
The master got the curse and the negro the blessing of slavery.
We set out by mentioning how certain ants have been injured by becoming
masters. Before this they were doubtless the equals of any
non-slaveholding tribe in self-maintenance. Now they "are waited upon and
fed by their slaves, and when the slaves are taken away the masters perish
miserably."[139] It did not become so bad as this with human slaveholders;
but the consequent disadvantage was very great, as we shall now exemplify
with some detail. We shall throughout keep to the average and typical man
and woman. And for brevity's sake, we shall not look beyond the domestic
and agricultural spheres, because when the reader has learned what slavery
did in these, he can of himself easily add the little required to make
complete statement of its entire effect.
In non-slave communities baby is tended only by mother and near relatives.
Though petted and indulged, it is steadily constrained into more obedience
to those who tend it. In due time the child is taking care of itself in
many things, and is also doing light chores. Until the parental roof has
been left he or she has every day something to do. What we may call the
open-air home-work is done by the boys, and the inside by the girls. But
in the old south baby commenced its life as a slaveholder with a nurse
that it learned to command by inarticulate cries and signs before it could
talk. And to the end, as grandfather or grandmother, self-service in many
common things, as is usual with all other people, was never learned, but
great expertness in getting these things done by slaves was learned
instead.
I was only fifteen years old in 1851, when I entered the sophomore class
in Princeton College, never having been out of the south before. Of course
much of my time at first was consumed in observing and thinking over many
sights very novel and strange to me. I came in August. Soon afterwards I
saw them saving their Indian corn. In the south we "pulled" the fodder,
and some weeks later we "pulled" the corn, leaving the stripped stalks
standing. But the New Jersey farmers, without removing the blades or the
ears, cut the stalks down, put them up in stacks, and after a while hauled
them to the barn. This was such a wonder that I described it minutely in a
letter to my mother. The next great surprise that I had was to note the
lady of the family and her daughters doing everything in and about the
house, which I used to see at home only the negroes do. They were
marvellously more expert and neat in despatch than the negroes. Their easy
and, as it seemed, effortless way of getting through their daily
employment grew upon me steadily. What I intently observed in those times
and reflected over much subsequently, I have had a recent experience to
refresh and enforce. In the summer of 1902 two ladies from Pennsylvania
took a house in Atlanta next to mine. They had never before been in the
south. I found out these lonely strangers at once, and was soon seeing
much of them. They kept no servant. The two did all the household tasks.
The younger washed the clothes. This is something which but few city
southern ladies, except those whose ancestors were not slaveholders, have
ever consented to do. The laundry of even the poorest families in our
towns is nearly always the care of a negro washerwoman. Although their
work was every day punctually done by my two new-found friends, and their
house always the tidiest, like the New Jersey ladies of my boyhood at
Princeton, they were never flustered nor worried, but were always pleasant
and agreeable.
Plainly they lived in far more ease and comfort than the native
housekeepers. There are two classes of the latter. In one is the woman who
is greatly plagued by the waste, dishonesty, and eye-service of her negro
cook and housemaid, and always in craven fear that she will wake up some
morning to know that they have taken French leave. In the other class is
the woman who often must, with the help only of her children, do
everything at home. What a laborious, fatiguing botch they make of it!
Their day-dream all the year round is to find that needle in a haystack, a
servant who will take no more than the established holidays and always
come in time to get breakfast.
I sorrow for these present housekeepers of the south. They all know by
heart and often retell to their children the tales of their mothers and
grandmothers,--how, early in the morning, the affectionate and faithful
nurses stole the children out of the room, without waking papa and mamma;
how the cook and the waiters, not superintended, had the best of
breakfasts ready at the right time; how at this meal there was happy
reunion of the family beginning a new day, the children bathed and in
their clean clothes, each one pretty as a picture and sweet as a pink; and
how all the affairs of the household under the magic touch of angel
servants were fitly despatched without trouble or worry to mamma, until
the day ended by the nurses' bathing the little tots again, putting them
to bed, and mammy's getting them to sleep by telling "The Tar Baby" or
some other adventure of Brer Rabbit over and over as often as sleepily
called for, or by singing sweet lullabies. With this vision of a real
fairyland in which their ancestors lived not so very long ago, how can any
one of these mothers of the new south contentedly make herself the only
nurse, cook, and house servant of her family? For many a year yet, to do
every day the drudgery of all three will be the extreme of discomfort and
sore trial to her. We must give her loving words and sympathy without
ceasing, and trust her to the slow but sure healing of inevitable
necessity.
This lamentable condition of our southern woman is due, as plainly
appears, to the miseducation given their ancestors by slavery. Slavery
went forty years ago; but it left the negro, and the dependence of these
women upon her as their only servant. It is indispensable that they cut
loose completely from this dependence. Their resolve should be firm and
unwavering that they will learn to minister to themselves and their dear
ones, and teach the blessed art to their children; as their northern
sisters have always done. I would have them here receptively contemplate,
as a part of the new lesson which they must learn, this true and
enchanting picture of a New England home:
"There are no servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap,
with the spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her
daughters, as if nothing had ever been done, or were to be done,--she
and her girls, in some long-forgotten forepart of the day _did up the
work_, and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you
would see them, it is _done up_. The old kitchen floor never seems
stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking
utensils never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes
four meals a day are got there, though the family washing and ironing
is there performed, and though pounds of butter and cheese are in some
silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence."[140]
Of course it is not to be demanded that the southern woman exactly
reproduce the New England system of fifty years ago just described by Mrs.
Stowe. But she must learn to be entirely independent of servants in the
era of co-operation, electric dish-washers, and other helping machines,
about to begin.
Let us see how it has been with the fathers and boys. The planting of the
old south required proportionally less cash outlay annually than any
common business that I now call to mind. The owner of 750 acres of
land--an ordinary plantation--worth $6,000, thirty slaves worth $18,000,
and mules and live-stock worth $1,000, had usually but five considerable
items of expense: the overseer with his family was "found"--to use the
then current vogue--and paid not more than $150 yearly wages; a few sacks
of salt to save the pork--a little to be given the live animals
occasionally; a few bars of iron for the plantation blacksmith shop--the
latter being furnished with bellows, anvil, tongs, screwplate, vise, and a
few other tools, all hardly amounting to $100 investment; sometimes coarse
cotton and woollen cloth for the clothes of the negroes, made by the
slave-women tailors (even in my day this cloth was, on many plantations,
spun and wove at home from the cotton and wool grown by the owner); and
the fifth item was a moderate bill of the family physician for attendance
upon the sick slaves. The whole would seldom amount to $350; and remember
the income yielding capital was $25,000. This planter paid no wages for
his labor; he bred his slaves, and all animals serving for work, food, or
pleasure;--in short, the establishment was self-supporting. The good
manager sold every year more than enough of meat, grain, and other produce
to pay the expense itemed a moment ago, and so the $1,200 from the sale of
his crop of thirty bales of cotton was often net income.
The natural increase of slaves which I have explained above operated in
many cases to encourage wastefulness and idleness. But even in the
majority of these cases the estates more than held their own.
Let us illustrate the change wrought by emancipation by having you to
contemplate a small middle Georgia farmer of to-day. If he employ but four
hands to his two plows, he will, in wages, fertilizers that have come into
general use since the war, purchase of meat, corn, and other supplies that
the slaves used to produce, necessarily lay out annually more than did the
planter making thirty bales as we mentioned above. If this small farmer
makes twenty bales--which is far above the average--worth, if the price
be, say, eight cents, $800--more than half of it will be needed to cover
his outlay. It is to be emphasized that as a general rule this farmer and
his boys have not yet been trained to work as steadily and diligently as
their circumstances demand of them. As the women slight in the house what
they regard as fit employment only of negroes, so the men do the same in
the farm. The whites of both sexes cling to the negro instead of making
good workers of themselves.
In the old south money grew of itself. Now constant alertness is needed to
see that every dollar laid out comes back, if not with addition, at least
without loss. To keep from falling behind, the farmer must have a very
much higher degree of mercantile capacity than he could ever acquire under
the old system. And he and his boys ought to supplant much of the negro
labor he now employs by their own systematic and steady work. All these
necessary lessons are very hard to learn, because to do that we must first
unlearn widely different ones.
This examination shows that the men of the new south are almost as
inadequate to the demands of the day as we found the women to be.
I do not mean to say that our women and men have not improved at all in
their respective spheres in the last forty years. I believe that when due
allowance is made for the unavoidable effect upon them of the system into
which they were all born it must be conceded that the little improvement
which they have made is greater than what could have been reasonably
expected. But I see clearly that the habits of thought and the modes of
house and farm economy, bred first from our contact with the negro slave
and then with the negro freedman, are yet an oppressively heavy load upon
our section.
I have now to do with a still greater evil as part of the curse of slavery
to the southern whites; which is, that it prevented the normal rise in the
section of a white labor class. If one but look steadily at developments,
either now in progress or surely impending, in Germany, France, England,
the English colonies, and the United States he sees that the workers most
of all are influencing the other classes to pursue the best policy in all
departments of government. The truth is that in every stage of society
there is the leading energy of some particular class. Let me make you
reflect over a few well-known examples. In their unremitted struggle with
the patricians, the plebeians of Rome gradually climbed out of their low
estate into complete political, civil, and social equality with the former
who had long been the constituency of the so-called republic. Some
centuries later a tacit combination of those belonging to each division of
the middle class dried all the fountains of civil disorder and made
domestic peace sure and permanent by establishing the Roman empire. Much
later employers of the free labor which had displaced slavery made
European towns democratic, and set them in such strong array against the
feudal barons that the latter were at last restrained from plundering the
new industry. The American revolution and the French revolution were each
mainly middle-class movements. By them the middle class cleared out of its
way, as far as it could, distinctions of birth, title, rank, and all other
special personal privileges. But, unawares, it put in the place of the old
hereditary lords and monopolists, known as such by everybody, a nobility
in disguise. The members of this nobility make no claim to our labor or
substance by reason of their having had such and such fathers or having
received such and such grants or patents to themselves as natural persons.
They pose as government agents in such functions as the transportation and
monetary, of which efficient, cheap, and impartial performance is vital to
the general welfare. Clandestinely they have had the law of the land made
or interpreted and the practice of government shaped each as they want it;
and sitting in their masks wherever these sovereign powers must be invoked
by producer or worker, it is these usurpers and not the legitimate public
authorities who must be applied to and given, not the just cost of the
service, but the supreme extortion possible. These masked rulers toll our
wages, profits, and property as insidiously and deeply as does indirect
compared with direct taxation. In fact they are government licensees,
levying upon us for their own benefit all the indirect taxation that we
can bear. Some--I may say, a large number--of middle-class property owners
and producers are heart and soul in strong and strengthening resistance
now forming against the tyrants they have unwittingly set up. But the
initiative and most effective elements of this benign uprising do not come
from the middle class. It was the workers who excited and kept at its
height the righteous indignation of the country that shamed the coal-trust
into decency. It is the workers who are the most influential of all that
strive to arm us with those plutocracy-destroying weapons, direct
nomination and direct legislation; and of all who demand that the
railroads pay just taxes; of all who would lay the axe at the root of
public corruption by having government resume its powers and do every one
of its duties without favor or prejudice to a single human being. It is
clear that the laborers are gathering all the anti-monopoly interests and
classes of society to their banner, and that from the steady and
increasing impulsion of these laborers, in unions and political campaigns,
industrial democracy will at last come in, to open the millennium by
keeping every man, woman, and child, except the wilfully idle and
criminal, permanently supplied with necessaries and comforts.
Who are the laborers that are both to spur and lead us forward in this
great course? Why, the white laborers, whose interests and whose
qualifications to share in governments are the same as those of the rest
of us; who are really part and parcel of the body politic and whose sons
and daughters can be married by our sons and daughters without social
degradation to themselves or degeneration of the proud Caucasian stock in
their children. The negroes cannot do the great work we are contemplating.
They are strangers in blood. They are as yet far too low in development.
It is idle to think of making these aliens, whose highest interests are
irreconcilably antagonistic to ours and our children's, allies of the
white laborers--a point which will be treated at large in later chapters.
To bring out the situation more clearly, suppose that instead of the eight
millions of negroes now in the south we had eight millions of native white
workers and no negroes at all. Would it not be far better for us of the
section? Would it not be far better for the anti-monopoly cause in the
north? Ought there not to be a real labor party in the south instead of
what we now see? The so-called labor party of the south has a large
percentage of leaders whose chief activity is to win positions in the
unions, in agitation, in the city and State government wherein they can
serve themselves by delivering the labor vote to corporate interests, or
doing the latter legislative or official favor--a sure symptom that the
movement is as yet merely incipient. In no northern State have the
railroads and allied corporations such complete command of nominative,
appointive, and legislative machinery as in Georgia; and it seems to me
that Georgia is but fairly representative of all the south except South
Carolina, which has advanced further in direct nomination than any other
one of the United States. In many places the people of the north are
successfully rising against the corporation oligarchs. In New York and
Michigan the latter have been made to pay some of the taxes which they had
always been dodging. In a recent Boston referendum the street railroad,
which for years had ridden roughshod over the public at will, was snowed
under, although it had the machine, all the five daily papers but one, and
the outside of that, fighting for it with might and main. Los Angeles,
followed by three or four other towns, has just made a beginning with the
_Recall_. Oregon has direct legislation. Illinois has pushed ahead with
both direct nomination and direct legislation. Cities here and there, in
very grateful contrast with the apathy prevalent in this section, have
awakened to the importance of rightly guarding the common property in
public-service franchises. I could cite many other examples which show
that the anti-plutocratic tide gathers force all over the north. Why is it
that there is this blessed insurgence against corporation misrule there,
and hardly a trace of it here? Simply because the north has and the south
has not the motor of insurgence--a real labor class, growing steadily in
zeal and organization, and rapidly increasing in numbers.
That a southern State has no real labor class with potent influence upon
the public, puts it as far behind the most enlightened communities in
political and governmental condition, as it was with its slaves behind
them in productive condition. Such a State lacks a most essential organ of
the highest types of democracy.[141]
To sum up: Slavery disqualified the white men and women of the south for
the domestic and business management proper to this era; and ever since
emancipation the presence of a large number of negroes available for labor
in house and on the farm, and preventing the coming in of any other labor,
has powerfully helped both races in their efforts naturally made to retain
the familiar ways of the old system. Thus the south has been sadly
retarded in her due economical rehabilitation. In the second place, it has
kept the political influence of labor at the minimum, and consequently
sent her backwards in true democracy, while England, the English
colonies, and the northern States, are slowly but surely going forward.
These are the main things. Let me in briefest mention suggest some of
their results, which, at first blush, seem to be independent.
Slavery engendered among the whites a disrespect for labor, which,
although now at last dying out, is still of hurtful influence.
As negroes were always and everywhere in number sufficient to do every
task of labor, there was but little demand for labor-saving machines and
methods--a fact which prevented the southern whites from developing the
inventive faculty equally with their northern brothers. We all are
beginning to see that, except in much of agriculture and other activities
in which the process is that of nature and not of art, the future of
industry belongs more and more to the constantly improving machine.
Think of such things as these in the brood of evils brought forth by
slavery;--agriculture primitive or superannuated in many particulars; our
entire structure of investment, production, and occupation bottomed upon
slaves, property in which could be, and was, totally destroyed by a stroke
of the pen; immigration both from Europe and the north repelled; slowness
in exploiting our water power and mines; inferior common schools, and lack
of town-meeting government due to the sparseness of the population and
their roving habits which were incident to the plantation system. I have
given some consideration to these in the "Old and New South," and I refer
you to that.[142]
Of course had there never been any negro slavery in America we should have
escaped the brothers' war, its spilling of blood, its waste of wealth, and
the long sickness of the section unto death which has ensued. And to-day
in solid prosperity, institutions, government, and progressiveness in
everything good, the section would be abreast of the other. Nay, her
better climate, her agricultural products--especially her cotton, which
she would have learned to make with white labor--these and other resources
would, I fully believe, have by this time pushed her far into the lead. As
it actually is, she is far, far behind. She has been sorely scourged, not
for any moral guilt.
"Some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt."
It was because she did that which the wisest and best had done--the Greeks
who gave the world culture and democracy, the Jews who gave it religion,
the Romans who gave it law and civil institutions. She really did far
better than they did. She did not enslave the free. She merely took some
of the only inveterate slaves upon earth out of lawless slavery, in which
they would have otherwise remained indefinitely without recognition of the
dearest human rights, and placed them in a far other slavery which was for
them an unparalleled rise in liberty and well-being; which was, as becomes
more and more probable with time, the only opportunity by which any
considerable portion of the negro race can ever evolve upward into the
capability of enlightened self-government. In doing this she unconsciously
antagonized the purposes of the iron-hearted powers guarding the American
union, and when the critical moment of that union came, they dashed her to
pieces.
It will be many a year before the pathos of southern history can be fully
told. I must satisfy myself here by saying only that the curse of African
slavery to her has been of magnitude and weight incredible, and that one
cannot yet be sure when it will end.
The title of the chapter demands that I now tell you of the blessing of
African slavery in the United States to the negro. Of course there are
many who have been born into the unequalified condemnation of every form
of slavery, which was resolutely preached for years all over the north by
conscientious men and women of great ability and influence. Such will
exclaim against me, and perhaps some of them will not even read the rest
of the chapter. But it is my note, which becomes surer and more confident
every year, that the great body of men and women shrink from every
over-positively urged dogma. I have already mentioned those who are trying
to curb the evils of drink. All the while an increasing majority of them
recognize that to assert that any use of liquor, wine, or beer is a moral
wrong, as do a noisy few in season and out of season, is too extreme to be
true or even politic. The ultra democrat will zealously justify the
assassination of Julius Caesar, while the wisest friends of the people
become more firmly convinced every century that the empire which Caesar
founded was, by reason of the circumstances, the best possible government
for the Romans of that and the succeeding times;--the surest guaranty that
the main benefits of ancient civilization should be preserved for the
human race. And as there has now and then been something of substantial
good in even absolute government, there has also been good to the slave in
his slavery. Surely it was an improvement of the captor and a bettering of
the condition of the prisoner of war, not to barbecue the latter, as was
the custom for ages, but to have him work for a master. Perhaps the
fabulist AEsop had been a slave. Terence, a great Roman dramatist, surely
had been. Horace's father had been one. It may well be true that it was
slavery that gave each one of these three immortals his opportunity. The
more familiar you become with ancient history the larger you estimate the
number of those to have been who as slaves got many of the benefits of
Greek and Roman civilization, which benefits they afterwards transmitted
to free descendants. I need not repeat what I have already told--how the
negroes in the mass were advantaged by transfer from slavery in Africa to
slavery in America. But do let me inquire, would Professor DuBois have
ever outstripped all the white children in a New England school, graduated
creditably from two American universities, studied at the university of
Berlin, acquired the degree of Master of Arts and then that of Doctor of
Philosophy, been made in sociology fellow of Harvard and assistant of the
university of Pennsylvania, become president of the American Negro
Academy, got the professorship of economics and history in Atlanta
University, and pushed forward as an author into prominent and most
respectable place; all before he was thirty-six years old--would Professor
DuBois have surpassed this brilliant career, if an "evil, Dutch trader"
had not seized his "grandfather's grandmother--two centuries ago"?[143] If
the transfer just mentioned had not been made what would now be Fred
Douglass, Booker Washington, Richard R. Wright, Professor DuBois, Bishop
Turner, and other great negroes, their good works and glory? Would Hayti
have arranged for some of its young men to be trained in farming at
Tuskegee? more especially do I ask, would negroes educated at Tuskegee be
now teaching the missionaries how to christianize the Africans of
Togoland? Who would now be arousing people north and south in behalf of
the race? and where could nine millions of blacks be found--or even half a
million--as far above the African level of to-day as ours?
My conclusion is that the whites and the negroes of the south ought to
learn wisdom and interchange their holidays and great annual rejoicings.
The former ought to keep the anniversary of the emancipation proclamation
as the southern 4th of July, and the blacks ought to observe that day by
wearing mourning and eating bitter herbs. Further, the negroes of America
ought to celebrate the day when the Dutch ship landed the first Africans
at Jamestown as the dawn of their hopes as a people.