MR. ONSLOW SPEAKS HIS MIND.
“How faint through din of merchandise
And count of gain
Has seemed to us the captive’s cries!
How far away the tears and sighs
Of souls in pain!”
_Whittier._
An opportunity for resuming the conversation did not occur till long
after sundown, and when many of the passengers were retiring to bed.
“I have heard, Mr. Onslow,” said Vance, “that since your removal to
Texas you have liberated your slaves.”
“You have been rightly informed,” replied Onslow.
“And how did they succeed as freedmen?”
“Two thirds of them poorly, the remaining third well.”
“Does not such a fact rather bear against emancipation, and in favor of
slavery?”
“Quite the contrary. I am aware that the enthusiastic Mr. Ruskin
maintains that slavery is ‘not a political institution at all, but an
inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance of a large portion of the
human race.’ But as his theory would involve the enslaving of white men
as well as black, I think we may dismiss it as the sportive extravagance
of one better qualified to dogmatize than argue.”
“But is he not right in the application of his theory to the black
race?”
“Far from it. Look at the white men you and I knew some twenty-five
years ago. How many of them have turned out sots, gluttons, thieves,
incapables! Shall the thrifty and wise, therefore, enslave the imprudent
and foolish? Assuredly not, whatever such clever men as Mr. Ruskin and
Mr. Thomas Carlyle may say in extenuation of such a proceeding.”
“Do not escaped or emancipated negroes often voluntarily return to
slavery?”
“Not often, but occasionally; and so occasionally a white man commits an
offence in order that he may be put in the penitentiary. A poor negro is
emancipated or escapes. He goes to Philadelphia or New York, and has a
hard time getting his grub. In a year or two he drifts back to his old
master’s plantation, anxious to be received again by one who can insure
to him his rations of mush; and so he declares there’s no place like
‘old Virginny for a nigger.’ Then what pæans go up in behalf of the
patriarchal system! What a conclusive argument this that ‘niggers will
be niggers,’ and that slavery is right and holy! Slave-drivers catch at
the instance to stiffen up their consciences, and to stifle that inner
voice that is perpetually telling them (in spite of the assurances of
bishops, clergymen, and literary _dilettanti_ to the contrary) that
slavery is a violation of justice and of that law of God written on the
heart and formulized by Christ, that we must do unto others as we would
have them do unto us, and that therefore liberty is the God-given right
of every innocent and able-minded man. Instances like that I have
supposed, instead of being a palliation of slavery, are to my mind new
evidences of its utter sinfulness. A system that can so degrade humanity
as to make a man covet repression or extinction for his manhood must be
devilish indeed.”
“But, Mr. Onslow, do not statistics prove that the blacks increase and
multiply much more in a state of slavery than in any other? Is not that
a proof they are well treated and happy?”
“That is the most hideous argument yet in favor of the system. In
slavery women are stimulated by the beastly ambition of contending which
shall bear ‘the most little nigs for massa’! Among these poor creatures
the diseases consequent upon too frequent child-bearing are dreadfully
prevalent. Surely the welfare of a people must be measured, not by the
mere amount of animal contentment or of rapid breeding with which they
can be credited, but by the sum of manly acting and thinking they can
show. A whole race of human beings is not created merely to eat mush,
hoe in cotton-fields, and procreate slaves. The example of one such
escaped slave as Frederick Douglas shows that the blacks are capable of
as high a civilization as the whites.”
“Do they not seem to you rather feeble in the moral faculty?”
“No more feeble than any race would be, treated as they have been. The
other day there fell into my hands a volume of sermons for pious
slaveholders to preach to their slaves. It is from the pen of the
excellent Bishop Meade of Virginia. The Bishop says to poor Cuffee:
‘Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of
those you belong to; _but your precious souls are still your own_.’ What
impious cajolery is this? The master has an unlimited, irresponsible
power over the slave, from childhood up,—can force him to act as he
wills, however conscience may protest! The slave may be compelled to
commit crimes or to reconcile himself to wrongs, familiarity with which
may render his soul, like his body, the mere unreasoning, impassive tool
of his master. And yet a bishop is found to try to cozen Cuffee out of
the little common sense slavery may have left him, by telling him he is
responsible for that soul, which may be stunted, soiled, perverted in
any way avarice or power may choose.”
“Well, Mr. Onslow, will you deny that slavery has an ennobling effect in
educating a chivalrous, brave, hospitable aristocracy of whites,
untainted by those meannesses which are engendered by the greed of gain
in trading communities?”
“I will not deny,” replied Onslow, “that the habit of irresponsible
command may develop certain qualities, sometimes good, sometimes bad, in
the slave-driver; and so the exercise of the lash by the overseer may
develop the extensor muscles of the arm; but the evils to the whites
from slavery far, far outbalance the benefits. First, there are the five
millions of mean, non-slaveholding whites. These the system has reduced
to a condition below that of the slave himself, in many cases. Slavery
becomes at once their curse and their infatuation. It fascinates while
it crushes them; it drugs and stupefies while it robs and degrades.”
“But may we not claim advantages from the system for the few,—for the
upper three hundred thousand?”
“That depends on what you may esteem advantages. Can an injustice be an
advantage to the perpetrator? The man who betrays a moneyed trust, and
removes to Europe with his family, may in one sense derive an advantage
from the operation. He may procure the means of educating and amusing
himself and his children. So the slaveholder, by depriving other men of
their inherent rights, may get the means of benefiting himself and those
he cares for. But if he is content with such advantages, it must be
because of a torpid, uneducated, or perverted conscience. Patrick Henry
was right when he said, ‘Slavery is inconsistent with the religion of
Christ.’ O’Connell was right when he declared, ‘No constitutional law
can create or sanction slavery.’ I have often thought that
Mississippians would never have been reconciled to that stupendous
public swindle, politely called repudiation, if slavery had not first
prepared their minds for it by the robbery of labor. And yet we have men
like Jefferson Davis,[16] who not only palliate, but approve the cheat.
O the atrocity! O the shame! With what face can a repudiating community
punish thieves?”
“Shall we not,” asked Vance, “at least grant the slaveholder the one
quality he so anxiously claims,—that which he expresses in the word
_chivalry_?”
Mr. Onslow shrugged his shoulders, and replied: “Put before the
chivalrous slaveholder a poor fanatic of an Abolitionist, caught in the
act of tampering with slaves, and then ask this representative of the
chivalry to be magnanimous. No! the mean instincts of what he deems
self-interest will make him a fiend in cruelty. He looks upon the
Abolitionist very much as a gunpowder manufacturer would look upon the
wandering Celt who should approach his establishment with a lighted pipe
in his mouth; and he cheerfully sees the culprit handed over to the
tender mercies of a mob of ignorant white barbarians.”
“Do you, then, deny that slavery develops any high qualities in the
master?”
“And if it did, what right have I to develop my high qualities at
another’s expense? Yes! Jefferson is right when he says: ‘The whole
commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most
boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part and
degrading submissions on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can
retain his manners and his morals undepraved by such circumstances.’”
Mr. Onslow paced the deck for a moment, and then, returning, exclaimed:
“O the unspeakable crimes, barbarities, and deviltries to which the
system has educated men here at the South during the last thirty years!
Educated not merely the poor and ignorant, but the rich and refined! The
North knows hardly a tithe of the actual horrors. Worse than the wildest
religious fanaticism, slavery sees men tortured, hung, mutilated,
subjected to every conceivable indignity, cruelty, agony, simply because
the victim is unsound, or suspected to be unsound, on the one supreme
question. I myself have been often threatened, and sometimes the
presentiment is strong upon me that my end will be a bloody one. I
should not long be safe, were it not that in our region there are brave
men who, like me, begin to question the divinity of the obscene old
hag.”
Mr. Onslow again walked away, and then, coming close up to Vance, said
in low tones: “But retribution must come,—as sure as God lives,
retribution must come, and that speedily! Slavery must die, in order
that Freedom and Civilization may live. I see it in all the signs of the
times, in all the straws that drift by me on the current of events.
Retribution must come,—come with bloodshed, anguish, and desolation to
both North and South,—to Slavery, with spasms of diabolical cruelty,
violence, and unholy wrath, and to Freedom with trials long and
doubtful, but awaking the persistent energy which a righteous cause will
inspire, and leading ultimately to permanent triumph and to the
annihilation on this continent of the foul power which has ruled us so
long, and which shall dare to close in deadly combat with the young
genius of universal Liberty.”
Vance grasped Onslow by the hand, but seemed too excited to speak. Then,
as if half ashamed of his emotion, he said, “Will there be men at the
South, think you, to array themselves on the side of freedom, in the
event of a collision?”
“There will be such men, but, until the slave-power shall be annihilated
forever, they will be a helpless minority. A few rich leaders control
the masses which Slavery has herself first imbruted. Crush out slavery,
and there will be regenerators of the land who will spring up by
thousands to welcome their brethren of the North, whose interests, like
theirs, lie in universal freedom and justice.”
“You do not, then, believe those who tell us there is an eternal
incompatibility between the people of the slaveholding and
non-slaveholding States?”
“Bah! These exaggerations, the rhetoric of feeble spirits, and the logic
of false, are stuff and rubbish to any true student of human nature.
There is no incompatibility between North and South, except what slavery
engenders and strives to intensify. Strike away slavery, and the people
gravitate to each other by laws higher than the bad passions of your
Rhetts, Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble
writers of the South, who are eternally raving about the mean, low-born
Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation and prejudice, are merely the
tools of a few plotting oligarchs who hope to be the chiefs of a
Southern Confederacy.”
“And must civil war necessarily follow from a separation?”
“As surely as thunder follows from the lightning-rent! Yes, Webster is
undoubtedly right: there can be no such thing as peaceable secession,
and I rejoice that there cannot be.”
“But would not a civil war render inevitable that alienation which these
Richmond scribblers are trying to antedate?”
“No. Enmity would be kept up long enough for the slave-power to be
scotched and killed, and then the people of both sections would see that
there was nothing to keep them apart, that their interests are
identical. The true people of the South would soon realize that the
three hundred thousand slaveholders are even more _their_ enemies than
enemies of the North. A reaction against our upstart aristocracy (an
aristocracy resting on tobacco-casks and cotton-bales) would ensue, and
the South would be republicanized,—a consummation which slavery has thus
far prevented. South Carolina was Tory in the Revolution, just as she is
now. Abolish slavery, and we should be United States in fact as well as
in name. Abolish slavery, and you abolish sectionalism with it. Abolish
slavery, and you let the masses North and South see that their welfare
lies in the preservation of the republic, one and indivisible.”
“And do you anticipate civil war?”
“Yes, such a civil war as the world has never witnessed.[17] The devil
of slavery must go out of us, and as it is the worst of all the devils
that ever afflicted mankind, it can go out only through unprecedented
convulsions and tearings and agonies. The North must suffer as well as
the South, for the North shares in the guilt of slavery, and there are
thousands of men there who shut their eyes to its enormities. Believe
me, their are high spiritual laws underlying national offences; and the
Nemesis that must punish ours is near at hand. Slavery must be
destroyed, and war is the only instrumentality that I can conceive of
energetic enough to do it. Through war, then, must slavery be
destroyed.”
“And I care not how soon!” said Vance. Then, lowering his tone, he
remarked: “Have you not been imprudent in confiding your views to a
stranger, who could have you lynched at the next landing-place by
reporting them?”
“Perhaps. But I bide the risk; you have not been so shrewd an actor,
sir, that I have not seen behind the mask.”
Vance started at the word _actor_, then said, looking up at the stars:
“What a beautiful night! Does not the Champion seem to be gaining on
us?”
“I have been thinking so for some minutes,” replied Onslow. “Good night,
Mr.——. Excuse me. I haven’t the pleasure of knowing your name.”
“And yet we have met before, Mr. Onslow, and under circumstances that
ought to make me remembered.”
“To what do you allude?”
“I was once brought before you for horse-stealing, and, what is more,
you found me guilty of the charge, and rightly.”
“Then my recollection was not at fault, after all!” exclaimed Onslow,
astonished. “But were you indeed guilty?”
“I certainly took a horse, but it was a case of necessity. A friend of
mine, a colored man, in defence of his liberty, had wounded his master,
so called, and was flying for life. To save him I robbed the
robber,—took his horse and gave it to his victim, enabling the latter to
get off safely. The fact of my taking the horse was clearly proved, but
my motive was not discovered. If it had been, Judge Lynch would surely
have relieved you of the care of me. You, as justice of the peace,
remanded me to prison for trial. That night I escaped. In an outer room
of the jail I found a knife and half of a slaughtered calf. The knife I
put in my pocket. The carcass I threw over my shoulder, and ran. In the
morning I found five valuable bloodhounds on my track. I climbed a tree,
and when they came under it, I fed them till they were all tame, and
allowed me to descend; and then I cut their throats, lest they should be
used to hunt down fugitives from slavery. Two days afterwards I was safe
on board a steamboat, on my way North.”
“Who, then, _are_ you, sir?” asked Onslow.
Vance whispered a word in reply.
Mr. Onslow seemed agitated for a moment, and then exclaimed, “But I
thought he was dead!”
“The report originated with those who took the reward offered for his
head. Mr. Onslow, I have repaid your frankness with a similar frankness
of my own. To-morrow morning, at ten o’clock, meet me here, and you
shall hear more of my story. Good night.”
The gentlemen parted, each retiring to his state-room for repose.