or mother owned slaves, they were considered the joint property of the
family. I think, if you include the grown and the young, there are
about three millions interested in slave property.
Mr. MANN resumed. My data lead me to believe that the number does
not now exceed two millions; but, at the time of the adoption of the
constitution, the number directly connected with slaveholding must
have been less than one million. Yet this one million have already
managed to acquire the broad States of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Florida, and Texas, beyond the limits of the treaty of 1783; when,
at the time the “compromises of the constitution” were entered into,
not one of the parties supposed that we should ever acquire territory
beyond those limits. And this has been done for the benefit, (if it be
a benefit,) of that one million of slaveholders, against what is now
a free population of fifteen millions. And, in addition to this, it
is to be considered that the non-slaveholding population of the slave
states have as direct and deep an interest as any part of the country,
adverse to the extension of slavery. If all our new territory be doomed
to slavery, where can the non-slaveholders of the slaveholding states
emigrate to? Are they not to be considered? Has one half the population
of the slaveholding states rights, which are paramount, not only to
the rights of the other half, but to the rights of all the free states
besides? for such is the claim. No, sir. I say that, if slavery were no
moral or political evil, yet, according to all principles of justice
and equity, the slaveholders have already obtained their full share of
territory, though all the residue of this continent were to be annexed
to the Union, and we were to become, in the insane language of the day,
“an ocean-bound republic.”
I now proceed to consider the nature and effects of slavery, as a
reason why new-born communities should be exempted from it. First, let
me treat of its economical or financial, and, secondly, of its moral
aspects.
Though slaves are said to be property, they are the preventers, the
wasters, the antagonists of property. So far from facilitating the
increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both. It
blasts worldly prosperity. Other things being equal, a free people
will thrive and prosper, in a mere worldly sense, more than a people
divided into masters and slaves. Were we so constituted as to care for
nothing, to aspire to nothing, beyond mere temporal well being, this
well being would counsel us to abolish slavery wherever it exists, and
to repel its approach wherever it threatens.
Enslave a man, and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his
capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering
one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery
snaps this spring. The slave does not participate in the value of the
wealth he creates. All he earns another seizes. A free man labors,
not only to improve his own condition, but to better the condition
of his children. The mighty impulse of parental affection repays for
diligence, and makes exertion sweet. The slave’s heart never beats with
this high emotion. However industrious and frugal he may be, he has
nothing to bequeath to his children,--or nothing save the sad bonds
he himself has worn. Fear may make him work, but hope--never. When he
moves his tardy limbs, it is because of the suffering that goads him
from behind, and not from the bright prospects that beckon him forward
in the race.
What would a slave owner at the south think, should he come to
Massachusetts, and there see a farmer seize upon his hired man, call in
a surgeon, and cut off all the flexor muscles of his arms and legs? I
do not ask what he would think of his humanity, but what would he think
of his sanity? Yet the planter does more than this when he makes a man
a slave. He cuts deeper than the muscles; he destroys the spirit that
moves the muscles.
In all ages of the world, among all nations, wherever the earnings of
the laborer have been stolen from him, his energies have gone with
his earnings. Under the villeinage system of England, the villeins
were a low, idle, spiritless race; dead to responsibility; grovelling
in their desires; resistant of labor; without enterprise; without
foresight. This principle is now exemplified in the landlord and
tenant system of Ireland. If a tenant is to be no better off for the
improvements he makes on an estate, he will not make the improvements.
Look at the seigniories of New York,--the anti-rent districts as they
are now called;--every man acquainted with the subject knows that
both people and husbandry are half a century behind the condition of
contiguous fee-simple proprietorships. All history illustrates the
principle, that when property is insecure, it will not be earned.
If a despot can seize and confiscate the property of his subject at
pleasure, the subject will not acquire property, and thereby give to
himself the conspicuousness that invites the plunder. And if this be
so when property is merely insecure, what must be the effect when a
man has no property whatever in his earnings? Who does not know that a
slave, who can rationally hope to purchase his freedom, will do all the
work he ever did before, and earn his freedom-money besides? Slavery,
therefore, though claiming to be a kind of property, is the bane of
property; and the more slaves there are found in the inventory of a
nation’s wealth, the less in value will the aggregate of that inventory
be.
This is _one_ of the reasons why slave labor is so much less efficient
than free labor. The former can never compete with the latter; and
while the greater service is performed with cheerfulness, the smaller
is extorted by fear. Just as certain as that the locomotive can outrun
the horse, and the lightning outspeed the locomotive, just so certain
is it that he who is animated by the hopes and the rewards of freedom
will outstrip the disheartened and fear-driven slave.
The intelligent freeman can afford to live well, dress decently, and
occupy a comfortable tenement. A scanty subsistence, a squalid garb, a
mean and dilapidated hovel, proclaim the degradation of the slave. The
slave states gain millions of dollars every year from the privations,
the mean food, clothing, and shelter to which the slaves are subjected;
and yet they grow rich less rapidly than states where millions of
dollars are annually expended for the comforts and conveniences of the
laborer. More is lost in production than is gained by privation.
A universal concomitant of slavery is, that it makes white labor
disreputable. Being disreputable, it is shunned. The pecuniary loss
resulting from this is incalculable. Dry up the myriad headsprings of
the Mississippi, and where would be the mighty volume of waters which
now bear navies on their bosom, and lift the ocean itself above its
level, by their outpouring flood? Abolish those sources of wealth,
which consist in the personal industry of every man, and of each member
of every man’s family, and that wide-spread thrift, and competence, and
elegance, which are both the reward and the stimulus of labor, will be
abolished with them. Forego the means, and you forfeit the end. You
must use the instrument if you would have the product. Nothing but the
feeling of independence, the conscious security of working for one’s
self and one’s family, will, in the present state of the world, make
labor profitable.
I know it has been recently said in this capital, and by high
authority, that, with the exception of menial services, it is not
disreputable at the south for a white man to labor. There are two ways,
each independent of the other, to disprove this assertion. One of them
consists in the testimony of a host of intelligent witnesses acquainted
with the condition of things at the south. I might quote page after
page from various sources; but, as the assertion comes from a gentleman
belonging to South Carolina, [Mr. CALHOUN, of the Senate,] I will meet
it with the statement of another gentleman belonging to the same
state. I refer to Mr. William Gregg, of Charleston, a gentleman who is
extensively acquainted with the social condition of men, both north and
south.
In that state, according to the last census, there were about 150,000
free whites _over twelve years of age_. “Of this class,” says Mr.
Gregg, “fifty thousand are non-producers.”[3] I suppose South Carolina
to be as thrifty a slave state as there is, perhaps excepting Georgia;
yet here is one third part of the population, old enough to work and
able to work, who are idle, and of course vicious,--non-producers, but
the worst kind of consumers.
Another answer to the above assertion is, that if white labor were
reputable at the south, and white men were industrious, the whole
country would be a garden,--a terrestrial paradise,--so far as
neatness, abundance, and beauty are concerned. _Where are the_ RESULTS
_of this respected and honored white labor_? In a country where few
expenses are necessary to ward off the rigors of winter; where the
richest staples of the world are produced; where cattle and flocks need
but little shelter, and sometimes none; if man superadded his industry
to the bounties of nature, want would be wholly unknown, competence
would give place to opulence, and the highest decorations of art would
mingle with the glowing beauties of nature.
But hear Mr. Gregg:--
“My recent visit to the northern states has fully satisfied me that
the true secret of our difficulties lies in the want of energy on
the part of our capitalists, and ignorance and laziness on the part
of those who ought to labor. We need never look for thrift while we
permit our immense timber forests, granite quarries, and mines to lie
idle, and supply ourselves with hewn granite, pine boards, laths,
shingles, &c., furnished by the _lazy_ dogs of the north. Ah! worse
than this; we see our back-country farmers, many of whom are too lazy
to mend a broken gate, or repair the fences to protect their crops
from the neighboring stock, actually supplied with their axe, hoe, and
broom handles, pitchforks, rakes, &c., by the _indolent_ mountaineers
of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The time was, when every old woman
had her gourd, from which the country gardens were supplied with seed.
We now find it more convenient to permit this duty to devolve on our
careful friends, the Yankees. Even our boat oars, and handspikes for
rolling logs, are furnished, ready-made, to our hand,” &c. “Need I
add, to further exemplify our excessive indolence, that the Charleston
market is supplied with fish and wild game by northern men, who come
out here as regularly as the winter comes, for this purpose, and from
our own waters and forests often realize, in the course of one winter,
a sufficiency to purchase a small farm in New England.”--_Essays_,
page 8.
Again:--
“It is only necessary to travel over the sterile mountains of
Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, to learn the
true secret of our difficulties,”--“to learn the difference between
indolence and industry, extravagance and economy. We there see
the scenery which would take the place of our unpainted mansions,
dilapidated cabins, with mud chimneys, and no windows, broken-down
rail fences, fields overgrown with weeds, and thrown away half
exhausted, to be taken up by pine thickets; beef cattle unprotected
from the inclemency of winter, and so poor as barely to preserve
life.”--_Essays_, page 7.
And again:--
“Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded
white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in
comparative nakedness and starvation? Many a one is reared in _proud_
South Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in
which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a
mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily
supplied with bread, and much more scantily with meat, and if they be
clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty
allowances of food. These may be startling statements, but they are
nevertheless true; and if not believed in Charleston, the members
of our legislature, who have traversed the state in electioneering
campaigns, can attest their truth.”--_Essays_, page 22.
After such statements as these; after the testimony of hundreds and
hundreds of eye-witnesses; after the proofs furnished by the aggregates
of products, published in our Patent Office Reports, it is drawing a
little too heavily on our credulity to say that the white man at the
south is industrious. Industry manifests itself by its results, as the
sun manifests itself by shining.
But slavery is hostile to the pecuniary advancement of the community
in another way. The slave must be kept in ignorance. He must not be
educated, lest with education should come a knowledge of his natural
rights, and the means of escape or the power of vengeance. To secure
the abolition of his freedom, the growth of his mind must be abolished.
His education, therefore, is prohibited by statute under terrible
penalties.
Now, a man is weak in his muscles; he is strong only in his faculties.
In physical strength how much superior is an ox or a horse to a man; in
fleetness, the dromedary or the eagle. It is through mental strength
only that man becomes the superior and governor of all animals.
It was not the design of Providence that the work of the world
should be performed by muscular strength. God has filled the earth
and imbued the elements with energies of greater power than that of
all the inhabitants of a thousand planets like ours. Whence come our
necessaries and our luxuries?--those comforts and appliances that
make the difference between a houseless, wandering tribe of Indians
in the far west, and a New England village. They do not come wholly
or principally from the original, unassisted strength of the human
arm, but from the employment, through intelligence and skill, of those
great natural forces with which the bountiful Creator has filled every
part of the material universe. Caloric, gravitation, expansibility,
compressibility, electricity, chemical affinities and repulsions,
spontaneous velocities,--these are the mighty agents which the
intellect of man harnesses to the car of improvement. The application
of water, and wind, and steam, to the propulsion of machinery, and to
the transportation of men and merchandise from place to place, has
added ten thousand fold to the actual products of human industry. How
small the wheel which the stoutest laborer can turn, and how soon will
he be weary! Compare this with a wheel driving a thousand spindles or
looms, which a stream of water can turn, and never tire. A locomotive
will take five hundred men, and bear them on their journey hundreds
of miles in a day. Look at these same five hundred men, starting
from the same point, and attempting the same distance, with all the
pedestrian’s or the equestrian’s toil and tardiness. The cotton mills
of Massachusetts will turn out more cloth, in one day, than could have
been manufactured by all the inhabitants of the eastern continent
during the tenth century. On an element which, in ancient times,
was supposed to be exclusively within the control of the gods, and
where it was deemed impious for human power to intrude, even there
the gigantic forces of nature, which human science and skill have
enlisted in their service, confront and overcome the raging of the
elements,--breasting tempests and tides, escaping reefs and lee shores,
and careering triumphant around the globe. The velocity of winds, the
weight of waters, and the rage of steam, are powers, each one of which
is infinitely stronger than all the strength of all the nations and
races of mankind, were it all gathered into a single arm. And all these
energies are given us on one condition,--the condition of intelligence,
that is, of education.
Had God intended that the work of the world should be done by human
bones and sinews, he would have given us an arm as solid and strong
as the shaft of a steam engine; and enabled us to stand, day and
night, and turn the crank of a steamship while sailing to Liverpool
or Calcutta. Had God designed the human muscles to do the work of the
world, then, instead of the ingredients of gunpowder or gun cotton,
and the expansive force of heat, he would have given us hands which
could take a granite quarry and break its solid acres into suitable and
symmetrical blocks, as easily as we now open an orange. Had he intended
us for bearing burdens, he would have given us Atlantean shoulders,
by which we could carry the vast freights of rail-car and steamship,
as a porter carries his pack. He would have given us lungs by which
we could blow fleets before us, and wings to sweep over ocean wastes.
But, instead of iron arms, and Atlantean shoulders, and the lungs
of Boreas, he has given us a mind, a soul, a capacity of acquiring
knowledge, and thus of appropriating all these energies of nature to
our own use. Instead of a telescopic and microscopic eye, he has given
us power to invent the telescope and the microscope. Instead of ten
thousand fingers, he has given us genius inventive of the power loom
and the printing press. Without a cultivated intellect, man is among
the weakest of all the dynamical forces of nature; with a cultivated
intellect, he commands them all.
And now, what does the slave maker do? He abolishes this mighty power
of the intellect, and uses only the weak, degraded, and half-animated
forces of the human limbs. A thousand slaves may stand by a river, and
to them it is only an object of fear or of superstition. An educated
man surpasses the ancient idea of a river god; he stands by the
Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Merrimack, or the Connecticut; he commands
each of them to do more work than could be performed by a hundred
thousand men,--to saw timber, to make cloth, to grind corn,--and they
obey. Ignorant slaves stand upon a coal mine, and to them it is only
a worthless part of the inanimate earth. An educated man uses the
same mine to print a million of books. Slaves will seek to obtain the
same crop from the same field, year after year, though the _pabulum_
of that crop is exhausted; the educated man, with his chemist’s eye,
sees not only the minutest atoms of earth, but the imponderable gases
that permeate it, and he is rewarded with an unbroken succession of
luxuriant harvests.
Nor are these advantages confined to those departments of nature where
her mightiest forces are brought into requisition. In accomplishing
whatever requires delicacy and precision, nature is as much more
perfect than man as she is more powerful in whatever requires strength.
Whether in great or in small operations, all the improvements in the
mechanical and the useful arts come as directly from intelligence as
a bird comes out of a shell, or the beautiful colors of a flower out
of sunshine. The slave worker is forever prying at the short end of
Nature’s lever, and using the back instead of the edge of her finest
instruments.
Sir, the most abundant proof exists, derived from all departments of
human industry, that uneducated labor is comparatively unprofitable
labor. I have before me the statements of a number of the most
intelligent gentlemen of Massachusetts, affirming this fact as the
result of an experience extending over many years. In Massachusetts
we have no native-born child wholly without school instruction; but
the degrees of attainment, of mental development, are various. Half a
dozen years ago, the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
obtained statements from large numbers of our master manufacturers,
authenticated from the books of their respective establishments, and
covering a series of years, the result of which was, that increased
wages were found in connection with increased intelligence, just as
certainly as increased heat raises the mercury in the thermometer.
Foreigners, and those coming from other states, who made their marks
when they receipted their bills, earned the least; those who had a
moderate or limited education occupied a middle ground on the pay-roll;
while the intelligent young women who worked in the mills in winter,
and taught schools in summer, crowned the list. The larger capital, in
the form of intelligence, yielded the larger interest in the form of
wages. This inquiry was not confined to manufactures, but was extended
to other departments of business, where the results of labor could be
made the subject of exact measurement.
This is universally so. The mechanic sees it, when he compares the work
of a stupid with that of an awakened mind. The traveller sees it, when
he passes from an educated into an uneducated nation. Sir, I have seen
countries in Europe, lying side by side, where, without compass or
chart, without bound or landmark, I could run the line of demarcation
between the two, by the broad, legible characters which ignorance has
written on roads, fields, houses, and the persons of men, women, and
children, on one side, and which knowledge has inscribed on the other.
This difference is most striking in the mechanic arts, but it is
clearly visible also in husbandry. Not the most fertile soil, not mines
of silver and gold, can make a nation rich, without intelligence. Who
ever had a more fertile soil than the Egyptians? Who have handled more
silver and gold than the Spaniards? The universal cultivation of the
mind and heart is the only true source of opulence;--the cultivation
of the mind, by which to lay hold on the treasures of nature;
the cultivation of the heart, by which to devote those treasures
to beneficent uses. Where this cultivation exists, no matter how
barren the soil or ungenial the clime, there comfort and competence
will abound; for it is the intellectual and moral condition of the
cultivator that impoverishes the soil or makes it teem with abundance.
He who disobeys the law of God in regard to the culture of the
intellectual and spiritual nature, may live in the valley of the Nile,
but he can rear only the “lean kine” of Pharaoh; but he who obeys the
highest law may dwell in the cold and inhospitable regions of Scotland
or of New England, and “well-formed and fat-fleshed kine” shall feed on
all his meadows. If Pharaoh will be a taskmaster, and will not let the
bondmen go free, the corn in his field shall be the “seven thin ears
blasted by the east wind;” but if he will obey the commandments of the
Lord, then behold there shall be “seven ears of corn upon one stalk,
all rank and good.” Sir, the sweat of a slave poisons the soil upon
which it falls; his breath is mildew to every green thing; his tear
withers the verdure it drops upon.