cannot have general education without Common Schools. Common Schools
cannot exist where the population is sparse. Where slaves till the
soil, or do the principal part of whatever work is done, the free
population must be sparse. Slavery, then, by an inexorable law, denies
general education to the whites. The providence of God is just and
retributive. Create a serf caste, and debar them from education, and
you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from
education also. It is impossible, in the present state of things,
or in any state of things which can be foreseen, to have free and
universal education in a slave state. The difficulty is insurmountable.
For a well-organized system of Common Schools, there should be two
hundred children, at least, living in such proximity to each other that
the oldest of them can come together to a central school. It is not
enough to gather from within a circle of half a dozen miles’ diameter
fifty or sixty children for a single school. This brings all ages and
all studies into the same room. A good system requires a separation of
school children into four, or at least into three, classes, according
to ages and attainments. Without this gradation, a school is bereft
of more than half its efficiency. Now, this can never be done in an
agricultural community where there are two classes of men--one to do
all the work, and the other to seize all the profits. With New England
habits of industry, and with that diversified labor which would be sure
to spring from intelligence, the State of Virginia, which skirts us
here on the south, would support all the population of the New England
states, and fill them with abundance.
Mr. BAYLY. We have as great a population as New England now.
Mr. MANN. As great a population as New England!!
Mr. BAYLY. We send fifteen representatives.
[A voice. And how many of them represent slaves?]
Mr. MANN. Massachusetts alone sends ten representatives.
[A voice. And the rest of New England twenty-one more.]
Mr. MANN. I say, sir, the single State of Virginia could support
in abundance the whole population of New England. With such a free
population, the school children would be so numerous that public
schools might be opened within three or four miles of each other all
over its territory,--the light of each of which, blending with its
neighboring lights, would illumine the whole land. They would be
schools, too, in point of cheapness, within every man’s means. The
degrading idea of pauper schools would be discarded forever. But what
is the condition of Virginia now? One quarter part of all its adult
free white population are unable to read or write, and were proclaimed
to be so by a late governor, in his annual message, without producing
any reform. Their remedy is to choose a governor who will not proclaim
such a fact. When has Virginia, in any state or national election,
given a majority equal to the number of its voters unable to read
or write? A _republican_ government supported by the two pillars of
Slavery and Ignorance!
In South Carolina there is also a fund for the support of pauper
schools; but this had become so useless, and was so disdained by its
objects, that a late governor of the state, in his annual message,
recommended that it should be withdrawn from them altogether.
Yet in many of the slave states there are beautiful paper systems
of Common Schools,--dead laws in the statute books,--and the census
tells us how profitless they have been. In 1840, in the fifteen slave
states and territories, there were only 201,085 scholars at the primary
schools. In the same class of schools in the free states, there were
1,626,028,--eight times as many. New York alone had 502,367, or two
and a half times as many. The scholars in the primary schools of
Ohio alone, outnumbered all those in the fifteen slave states and
territories by more than 17,000. In the slave states, almost one tenth
part of the free white population over twenty years of age are unable
to read and write. In the free states, less than one in one hundred and
fifty; and at least four fifths of these are foreigners, who ought not
to be included in the computation. Many of the slave states, too, have
munificent school funds. Kentucky has one of more than a million of
dollars; Tennessee, of two millions; yet, in 1837, Governor Clarke, of
Kentucky, declared, in his message to the legislature, that “one third
of the adult population were unable to write their names;” and in the
State of Tennessee, according to the last census, there were 58,531 of
the same description of persons. Surely it would take more than five
of these to make three freemen; for the more a state has of them, the
less of intelligent freedom will there be in it. And if the schools
in the slave states are compared with the schools in the free states,
the deficiency in quality will be found as great as the deficiency in
number.
Sir, during the last ten years I have had a most extensive
correspondence with the intelligent friends of education in the slave
states. They yearn for progress, but they cannot obtain it. They
procure laws to be passed, but there is no one to execute them. They
set forth the benefits and the blessings of education; but they speak
in a vacuum, and no one hears the appeal. If a parent wishes to educate
his children, he must send them from home, and thus suffer a sort
of bereavement, even while they live; or he must employ a tutor or
governess in his family, which few are able to do. The rich may do it,
but what becomes of the children of the poor? In cities the obstacles
are less; but the number of persons resident in cities is relatively
small. All this is the inevitable consequence of slavery; and it is
as impossible for free, thorough, universal education to coëxist with
slavery as for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time.
Slavery would abolish education, if it should invade a free state;
education would abolish slavery, if it _could_ invade a slave state.
Destroying common education, slavery destroys the fruits of common
education,--the inventive mind, practical talent, the power of adapting
means to ends in the business of life. Whence have come all those
mechanical and scientific improvements and inventions which have
enriched the world with so many comforts, and adorned it with so many
beauties; which to-day give enjoyments and luxuries to a common family
in a New England village, that neither Queen Elizabeth of England nor
any of her proud court ever dreamed of, but a little more than two
centuries ago? Among whom have these improvements originated? All
history and experience affirm that they have come, and must come, from
people among whom education is most generous and unconfined. Increase
the _constituency_, if I may so speak, of developed intellect, and you
increase in an equal ratio the chances of inventive, creative genius.
From what part of our own country has come the application of steam
to the propulsion of boats for commercial purposes, or of wheels for
manufacturing purposes? Where have the various and almost infinite
improvements been made which have resulted in the present perfection
of cotton and woollen machinery? Whence came the invention of the
cotton-gin, and the great improvements in railroads? Where was born the
mighty genius who invented the first lightning rod, which sends the
electric fluid harmless into the earth; or that other genius, not less
beneficent, who invented the second lightning rod, which sends the same
fluid from city to city on messages of business or of affection? Sir,
these are results which you can no more have without common education,
without imbuing the public mind with the elements of knowledge, than
you can have corn without planting, or harvests without sunshine.
Look into the Patent Office reports, and see in what sections of
country mechanical improvements and the application of science to the
useful arts have originated. Out of _five hundred and seventy-two_
patents issued in 1847, only _sixty-six_ went to the slave states. The
patents annually issued, it is true, are a mingled heap of chaff and
wheat, but some of it is wheat worthy of Olympus. I think the Patent
Office reports show that at least six or eight times as many patents
have been taken out for the north as for the south. What improvements
will a slave ever make in agricultural implements; in the manufacture
of metals; in preparing wool, cotton, silk, fur, or paper; in chemical
processes; in the application of steam; in philosophical, nautical,
or optical instruments; in civil engineering, architecture, the
construction of roads, canals, wharves, bridges, docks, piers, &c.;
in hydraulics or pneumatics; in the application of the mechanical
powers; in household furniture, or wearing apparel; in printing,
binding, engraving, &c., &c.? This question, when put in reference to
slaves, appears ridiculous; and yet it is no more absurd, when asked
in reference to an ignorant slave, than when asked in reference to an
uneducated white man. The fact that the latter is a voter makes no
difference, notwithstanding the common opinion, in certain latitudes,
that it does. All such improvements come from minds which have had an
early awakening, and been put on scientific trains of thought in their
childhood and youth,--a thing utterly impossible for the people at
large, without Common Schools.
These are causes; now look at effects. In the New England states, the
iron manufacture is twenty times as much, according to the population,
as it is in Virginia; and yet Virginia has far more of the ore than
they. In cotton, we can hardly find a fraction low enough to express
the difference. The ship-building in Maine and Massachusetts is
thirty-five times as much as in Virginia. The north comes to the south,
cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings
it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those
who would see it rot before their eyes.
Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New
York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people?
Jamestown was settled before Plymouth, and had _natural_ advantages
superior to it. Plymouth now has a population of between seven and
eight thousand, is worth two millions of dollars, and taxed itself last
year, for schools and schoolhouses, more than seven thousand dollars. I
ought rather to say, that it invested more than seven thousand dollars
in a kind of stock that yields a hundred per cent. income. How many
bats there may be in the ruins of Jamestown, the last census does not
inform us.
The books printed at the south I suppose not to be equal to _one
fiftieth_ part of the number printed at the north. In maps, charts,
engravings, and so forth, the elements of comparison exist only on one
side.
Out of universal education come genius, skill, and enterprise, and the
desire of bettering one’s condition. Industry and frugality are their
concomitants. Diversified labor secures a home market. Diligence earns
much, but the absence of the vices of indolence saves more. Hence
comforts abound, while capital accumulates. After the home consumption
is supplied, there is a surplus for export. The balance of trade is
favorable. All the higher institutions of learning and religion can be
liberally supported. These institutions impart an elevated and moral
tone to society. Hence efforts for all kinds of social ameliorations.
Temperance societies spring up. Societies for preventing crime; for
saving from pauperism; for the reform of prisons and the reformation
of prisoners; for peace; for sending missionaries to the heathen; for
diffusing the gospel,--all these, where a sound education is given,
grow up, in the order of Providence, as an oak grows out of an acorn.
In one thing the south has excelled,--in training statesmen. The
primary and the ultimate effects of slavery upon this fact are so well
set forth in a late sermon by Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford, Connecticut,
that I will read a passage from it:--
“And here, since this institution of slavery, entering into the
fortunes of our history, complicates in so many ways the disorders
we suffer, I must pause a few moments to sketch its characteristics.
Slavery, it is not to be denied, is an essentially barbarous
institution. It gives us, too, that sign which is the perpetual
distinction of barbarism, that it has no law of progress. The highest
level it reaches is the level at which it begins. Indeed, we need not
scruple to allow that it has yielded us one considerable advantage,
in virtue of the fact that it produces its best condition first.
For while the northern people were generally delving in labor, for
many generations, to create a condition of comfort, slavery set the
masters at once on a footing of ease, gave them leisure for elegant
intercourse, for unprofessional studies, and seasoned their character
thus with that kind of cultivation which distinguishes men of society.
A class of statesmen were thus raised up, who were prepared to figure
as leaders in scenes of public life, where so much depends on manners
and social address. But now the scale is changing. Free labor is
rising, at length, into a state of wealth and comfort, to take the
lead of American society. Meanwhile, the foster-sons of slavery,--the
high families, the statesmen,--gradually receding in character, as
they must under this vicious institution, are receding also in power
and influence, and have been ever since the revolution. Slavery is
a condition against nature; the curse of nature, therefore, is on
it, and it bows to its doom by a law as irresistible as gravity. It
produces a condition of ease which is not the reward of labor, and a
state of degradation which is not the curse of idleness. Therefore,
the ease it enjoys cannot but end in a curse, and the degradation
it suffers cannot rise into a blessing. It nourishes imperious and
violent passions. It makes the masters solitary sheiks on their
estates, forbidding thus the possibility of public schools, and
preventing also that condensed form of society which is necessary to
the vigorous maintenance of churches. Education and religion thus
displaced, the dinner table only remains, and on this hangs, in great
part, the keeping of the social state. But however highly we may
estimate the humanizing power of hospitality, it cannot be regarded
as any sufficient spring of character. It is neither a school nor a
gospel. And when it comes of self-indulgence, or only seeks relief
for the tedium of an idle life, scarcely does it bring with it the
blessings of a virtue. The accomplishments it yields are of a mock
quality, rather than of a real, having about the same relation to a
substantial and finished culture that honor has to character. This
kind of currency will pass no longer; for, it is not expense without
comfort, or splendor set in disorder, as diamonds in pewter; it is not
air in place of elegance, or assurance substituted for ease; neither
is it to be master of a fluent speech, or to garnish the same with
stale quotations from the classics; much less is it to live in the
Don Juan vein, accepting barbarism by poetic inspiration,--the same
by which a late noble poet, drawing out of Turks and pirates, became
the chosen laureate of slavery,--not any or all of these can make up
such a style of man, or of life, as we in this age demand. We have
come up now to a point where we look for true intellectual refinement,
and a ripe state of personal culture. But how clearly is it seen to
be a violation of its own laws, for slavery to produce a genuine
scholar, or a man who, in any department of excellence, unless it be
in politics, is not a full century behind his time? And if we ask for
what is dearer and better still, for a pure Christian morality, the
youth of slavery are trained in no such habits as are most congenial
to virtue. The point of honor is the only principle many of them know.
Violence and dissipation bring down every succeeding generation to
a state continually lower; so that now, after a hundred and fifty
years are passed, the slaveholding territory may be described as a
vast missionary ground, and one so uncomfortable to the faithful
ministry of Christ, by reason of its jealous tempers, and the known
repugnance it has to many of the first maxims of the gospel, that
scarcely a missionary can be found to enter it. Connected with this
moral decay, the resources of nature also are exhausted, and her
fertile territories changed to a desert, by the uncreating power of a
spendthrift institution. And then, having made a waste where God had
made a garden, slavery gathers up the relics of bankruptcy, and the
baser relics still of virtue and all manly enterprise, and goes forth
to renew, on a virgin soil, its dismal and forlorn history. Thus, at
length, has been produced what may be called the bowie-knife style
of civilization, and the new west of the south is overrun by it,--a
spirit of blood which defies all laws of God and man;--honorable, but
not honest; prompt to resent an injury, slack to discharge a debt;
educated to ease, and readier, of course, when the means of living
fail, to find them at the gambling table or the race-ground, than in
any work of industry,--probably squandering the means of living there,
to relieve the tedium of ease itself.”
The free schools of the north lead to the common diffusion of
knowledge, and the equalization of society. The private schools of
the south divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the
latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself. In the public schools
of New York there are libraries now amounting to more than a million
of volumes. In the schools of Massachusetts the number of volumes
is relatively less; but the quality is greatly superior. In each of
these states, within half an hour’s walk of the poorest farm-house or
mechanic’s shop, there is a library, free and open to every child,
containing works of history, biography, travels, ethics, natural
science, &c., &c., which will supply him with the noblest capital of
intelligence, wherewith to commence the business of making himself a
useful and intelligent citizen. With the exception of New Orleans,
(whose free schools were commenced and have been presided over by a
Massachusetts man,) and three or four other cities, all the libraries
in the public schools of the slave states could be carried in a
schoolboy’s satchel. The libraries of all the universities and colleges
of the south contain 223,416 volumes; those of the north, 593,897
volumes. The libraries of southern theological schools, 22,800; those
of northern, 102,080.
Look into Silliman’s Journal, or the volumes of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, and inquire whence the communications came. Where
live the historians of the country, Sparks, Prescott, Bancroft; the
poets, Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell; the jurists, Story, Kent,
Wheaton; the classic models of writing, Charming, Everett, Irving;
the female writers, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Sigourney, and Mrs. Child?
All this proceeds from no superiority of natural endowment on the one
side, or inferiority on the other. The Southern States are all within
what may be called “the latitudes of genius;” for there is a small
belt around the globe, comprising but a few degrees of latitude, which
has produced all the distinguished men who have ever lived. I say this
difference results from no difference in natural endowment. The mental
endowments at the south are equal to those in any part of the world.
But it comes because, in one quarter, the common atmosphere is vivified
with knowledge, electric with ideas, while slavery gathers its Bœotian
fogs over the other. What West Point has been to our armies in Mexico,
that, and more than that, good schools would be to the intelligence and
industrial prosperity of our country.
It may seem a little out of place, but I cannot forbear here adverting
to one point, which, as a lover of children and as a parent, touches
me more deeply than any other. To whom are intrusted, at the south,
the early care and nurture of children? It has been thought by many
educators and metaphysicians, that children learn as much before the
age of seven years as ever afterwards. Who, at the south, administers
this early knowledge,--these ideas, these views, that have such
sovereign efficacy in the formation of adult character? Who has the
custody of children during this ductile, forming, receptive period of
life,--a period when the mind absorbs whatever is brought into contact
with it? Sir, the children of the south, more or less, and generally
_more_, are tended and nurtured by slaves. Ignorance, superstition,
vulgarity, passion, and perhaps impurity, are the breasts at which
they nurse. Whatever afflictions God may see fit to bring upon me,
whatever other mercies He may withhold, may He give me none but persons
of intelligence, of refinement, and of moral excellence, to walk with
my children during the imitative years of their existence, and to lead
them in the paths of knowledge, and breathe into their hearts the
breath of a moral and religious life.
Before considering the moral character of slavery, I wish to advert
for a moment to the position which we occupy as one of the nations
of the earth, in this advancing period of the world’s civilization.
Nations, like individuals, have a character. The date of the latter is
counted by years; that of the former, by centuries. No man can have any
self-respect, who is not solicitous about his posthumous reputation.
No man can be a patriot who feels neither joy nor shame at the idea
of the honor or the infamy which his age and his country shall leave
behind them. Nations, like individuals, have characteristic objects of
ambition. Greece coveted the arts; Rome gloried in war; but liberty
has been the goddess of our idolatry. Amid the storms of freedom were
we cradled; in the struggles of freedom have our joints been knit;
on the rich aliment of freedom have we grown to our present stature.
With a somewhat too boastful spirit, perhaps, have we challenged the
admiration of the world for our devotion to liberty; but an enthusiasm
for the rights of man is so holy a passion, that even its excesses
are not devoid of the beautiful. We have not only won freedom for
ourselves, but we have taught its sacred lessons to others. The shout
of “Death to tyrants, and freedom for man!” which pealed through this
country seventy years ago, has at length reached across the Atlantic;
and whoever has given an attentive ear to the sounds which have come
back to us, within the last few months, from the European world, cannot
have failed to perceive that they were only the far-travelled echoes
of the American Declaration of Independence. But in the divine face of
our liberty there has been one foul, demoniac feature. Whenever her
votaries would approach her to worship, they have been fain to draw a
veil over one part of her visage, to conceal its hideousness. Whence
came this deformity on her otherwise fair and celestial countenance?
Sad is the story, but it must be told. Her mother was a vampire. As
the daughter lay helpless in her arms, the beldam tore open her living
flesh, and feasted upon her lifeblood. Hence this unsightly wound, that
affrights whoever beholds it. But, sir, I must leave dallying with
these ambiguous metaphors. One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue
to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils. Great Britain was the
mother. Her American colonies were the daughter. The mother lusted for
gold. To get it, she made partnership with robbery and death. Shackles,
chains, and weapons for human butchery, were her outfit in trade. She
made Africa her hunting-ground. She made its people her prey, and
the unwilling colonies her market-place. She broke into the Ethiop’s
home, as a wolf into a sheepfold at midnight. She set the continent
a-flame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran
shrieking from their blazing hamlets. The aged and the infant she left
for the vultures; but the strong men and the strong women she drove,
scourged and bleeding, to the shore. Packed and stowed like merchandise
between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could
not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun. Once
a day the hatches were opened, to receive food and to disgorge the
dead. Thousands and thousands of corpses, which she plunged into the
ocean from the decks of her slave ships, she counted only as the tare
of commerce. The blue monsters of the deep became familiar with her
pathway, and, not more remorseless than she, they shared her plunder.
At length the accursed vessel reached the foreign shore. And there,
monsters of the land, fiercer and feller than any that roam the watery
plains, rewarded the robber by purchasing his spoils.