debarred from testifying against a white man. The courts will not hear
him as a witness. By the principles of the common law, if any man
suffers violence at the hands of another, he can prefer his complaint
to magistrates, or to the grand juries of the courts, who are bound
to give him redress. Hence the law is said to hold up its shield
before every man for his protection. It surrounds him in the crowded
street and in the solitary place. It guards his treasures with greater
vigilance than locks or iron safes; and against meditated aggressions
upon himself, his wife, or his children, it fastens his doors every
night more securely than triple bolts of brass. But all these sacred
protections are denied to the slave. While subjected to the law of
force, he is shut out from the law of right. To suffer injury is his,
but never to obtain redress. For personal cruelties, for stripes that
shiver his flesh, and blows that break his bones, for robbery or for
murder, neither he nor his friends can have preventive, remedy, or
recompense. The father, who is a slave, may see son or daughter scored,
mangled, mutilated, or ravished before his eyes, and he must be dumb as
a sheep before its shearers. The wife may be dishonored in the presence
of the husband, and, if he remonstrates or rebels, the miscreant who
could burn with the lust will burn not less fiercely with a vengeance
to be glutted upon his foiler.
Suppose, suddenly, by some disastrous change in the order of nature, an
entire kingdom or community were to be enveloped in total darkness,--to
have no day, no dawn, but midnight evermore! Into what infinite forms
of violence and wrong would the depraved passions of the human heart
spring up, when no longer restrained by the light of day, and the
dangers of exposure! So far as legal rights against his oppressors are
concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness. A hundred of
his fellows may stand around him and witness the wrongs he suffers,
but not one of them can appeal to jury, magistrate, or judge, for
punishment or redress. The wickedest white man, in a company of
slaves, bears a charmed life. There is not one of the fell passions
that rages in his bosom which he cannot indulge with wantonness and to
satiety, and the court has no ears to hear the complaint of the victim.
How dearly does every honorable man prize character! The law denies
the slave a character; for, however traduced, legal vindication is
impossible.
And yet, infinitely flagrant as the anomaly is, the slave is amenable
to the laws of the land for all offences which he may commit against
others, though he is powerless to protect himself by the same law from
offences which others may commit against him. He may suffer all wrong,
and the courts will not hearken to his testimony; but for the first
wrong he does, the same courts inflict their severest punishments
upon him. This is the reciprocity of slave law.--to be forever liable
to be proved guilty, but never able to prove himself innocent; to
be subject to all punishments, but, through his own oath, to no
protection. Hear what is said by the highest judicial tribunal of South
Carolina: “Although slaves are held to be the absolute property of
their owners, yet they have the power of committing crimes.”--_2d Nott
and McCord’s Rep._, p. 179. A negro is so far amenable to the common
law, that he may be one of three to constitute the number necessary to
make a riot.--_1st Bay’s Rep._, 358. By the laws of the same state, a
negro may be himself stolen, and he has no redress; but if he steals
a negro from another, he shall be hung.--_2d Nott and McCord’s Rep._,
179. [_An example of this penalty suffered by a slave._] This is
the way that slave legislatures and slave judicatories construe the
command of Christ, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you,
do ye also the same unto them.” Nay, by the laws of some of the slave
states, where master and slave are engaged in a joint act, the slave is
indictable, while the master is not.
What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and
the parental? No savage nation, however far removed from the frontiers
of civilization, has ever yet been discovered, where these rights
were unknown or unhonored. The beasts of the forest feel and respect
them. It is only in the land of slaves that they are blotted out and
annihilated.
Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the conscience. The word
“conscience” conveys a complex idea. It includes conscientiousness;
that is, the sentiment or instinct of right and wrong; and also
intelligence, which is the guide of this sentiment. _Conscience_, then,
implies both the desire or impulse to do right, and also a knowledge of
what is right. Nature endows us with the sentiment, but the knowledge
we must acquire. Hence we speak of an “enlightened conscience,”
meaning thereby not only the moral sense, but that knowledge of
circumstances, relations, tendencies and results, which is necessary
in order to guide the moral sense to just conclusions. Each of these
elements is equally necessary to enable a man to feel rightly and to
act rightly. Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no
cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and
so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault
in its conclusions. The two were made to coëxist and operate together
by Him who made the human soul. But the impious hand of man divorces
these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge. If one of these
coördinate powers in the mental realm be annulled by the legislature,
it may be called _law_; but it is repugnant to every law and attribute
of God.
But, not satisfied with having invaded the human soul, and annihilated
one of its most sacred attributes, in the persons of three millions of
our fellow-men; not satisfied with having killed the conscience, as
far as it can be killed by human device, and human force, in an entire
race; we are now invoked to multiply that race, to extend it over
regions yet unscathed by its existence, and there to call into being
other millions of men, upon whose souls, and upon the souls of whose
posterity, the same unholy spoliation shall be committed forever.
Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the religious nature of man. The
dearest and most precious of all human rights is the right of private
judgment in matters of religion. I am interested in nothing else so
much as in the attributes of my Creator, and in the relations which
he has established between me and himself, for time and for eternity.
To investigate for myself these relations, and their momentous
consequences; to “search the Scriptures;” to explore the works of
God in the outward and visible universe; to ask counsel of the sages
and divines of the ages gone by,--these are rights which it would be
sacrilege in me to surrender; which it is a worse sacrilege in any
human being or human government to usurp. Yet, by denying education
to the slave, you destroy not merely the _right_, but the _power_, of
personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the
soul’s interests. Who so base as not to reverence the mighty champions
of religious freedom, in days when the dungeon, the rack, and the fagot
were the arguments of a government theology? Who does not reverence,
I say, Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, and the whole army of martyrs whose
blood reddened the axe of English intolerance? Yet it was only for
this right of private judgment, for this independence of another man’s
control in religious concernments, that the godlike champions of
religious liberty perilled themselves and perished. Yet it is this very
religious despotism over millions of men which it is now proposed, not
to destroy, but to create. It is proposed not to break old fetters and
cast them away, but to forge new ones and rivet them on. Sir, on the
continent of Europe, and in the Tower of London, I have seen the axes,
the chains, and other horrid implements of death, by which the great
defenders of freedom for the soul were brought to their final doom,--by
which political and religious liberty was cloven down; but fairer and
lovelier to the view were axe and chain, and all the ghastly implements
of death ever invented by religious bigotry or civil despotism to
wring and torture freedom out of the soul of man;--fairer and lovelier
were they all than the parchment roll of this House on which shall be
inscribed a law for profaning one additional foot of American soil with
the curse of slavery.
After the above speech was delivered, I was referred to a Tract,
written by a Virginian, on the subject of slavery; and, by the
politeness of its author, I have since obtained a copy of it. It is
entitled, “_Address to the People of West Virginia; showing that
Slavery is injurious to the public welfare, and that it may be
gradually abolished, without detriment to the rights and interests of
Slaveholders._ BY A SLAVEHOLDER OF WEST VIRGINIA. Lexington: R. C.
Noel. 1847.” This Address was written by the Rev. Henry Ruffner, D. D.,
president of Lexington College, Lexington, Va. Some of the passages of
this Address are so striking; it is throughout so corroborative of one
of the arguments contained in the speech; and coming, as it does, from
a Virginian, an eye-witness of the effects of slavery, and a holder
of slaves, that I have thought it would be useful to append them. The
extracts, of course, are not, as here, consecutive.
Nowhere, since time began, have the two systems of slave labor and
free labor been subjected to so fair and so decisive a trial of
their effects on public prosperity as in these United States. Here
the two systems have worked side by side for ages, under such equal
circumstances, both political and physical, and with such ample time
and opportunity for each to work out its proper effects, that all must
admit the experiment to be now complete, and the result decisive.
No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt
for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and
prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave
labor. In the first settlement of a country, when labor is scarce and
dear, slavery may give a temporary impulse to improvement; but even
this is not the case, except in warm climates, and where free men are
scarce and either sickly or lazy; and when we have said this, we have
said all that experience in the United States warrants us to say, in
favor of the policy of employing slave labor.
It is the common remark of all who have travelled through the United
States, that the free states and the slave states exhibit a striking
contrast in their appearance. In the older free states are seen all
the tokens of prosperity;--a dense and increasing population; thriving
villages, towns, and cities; a neat and productive agriculture,
growing manufactures, and active commerce.
In the older parts of the slave states,--with a few local
exceptions,--are seen, on the contrary, too evident signs of
stagnation, or of positive decay;--a sparse population, a slovenly
cultivation spread over vast fields that are wearing out, among
others already worn out and desolate; villages and towns, “few and
far between,” rarely growing, often decaying, sometimes mere remnants
of what they were, sometimes deserted ruins, haunted only by owls;
generally no manufactures, nor even trades, except the indispensable
few; commerce and navigation abandoned, as far as possible, to the
people of the free states; and generally, instead of the stir and
bustle of industry, a dull and dreamy stillness, broken, if broke at
all, only by the wordy brawl of politics.
New England and the middle states of New York, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania contained, in 1790, 1,968,000 inhabitants, and in 1840,
6,760,000; having gained, in this period, 243 per cent.
The four old slave states had, in 1790, a population of 1,473,000,
and in 1840, of 3,279,000; having gained, in the same period, 122 per
cent., just about half as much, in proportion, as the free states.
They ought to have gained about twice as much; for they had at first
only seven inhabitants to the square mile, when the free states
not only had upwards of twelve, but, on the whole, much inferior
advantages of soil and climate. Even cold, barren New England, though
more than twice as thickly peopled, grew in population at a faster
rate than these old slave states.
About half the territory of these old slave states is new country,
and has comparatively few slaves. On this part the increase of
population has chiefly taken place. On the old slave-labored lowlands,
a singular phenomena has appeared; there, within the bounds of these
rapidly growing United States,--yes, there, population has been long
at a stand; yes, over wide regions,--especially in Virginia,--it has
declined, and a new wilderness is gaining upon the cultivated land!
What has done this work of desolation? Not war, nor pestilence; not
oppression of rulers, civil or ecclesiastical; but _slavery_, a curse
more destructive in its effects than any of them. It were hard to
find, in old king-ridden, priest-ridden, overtaxed Europe, so large a
country, where, within twenty years past, such a growing poverty and
desolation have appeared.
It is in the last period of ten years, from 1830 to 1840, that this
consuming plague of slavery has shown its worst effects in the old
Southern States. Including the increase in their newly-settled and
western counties, they gained in population only 7¹⁄₂ per cent.; while
cold, barren, thickly peopled New England gained 15, and the old
Middle States 26 per cent. East Virginia actually fell off 26,000 in
population; and, with the exception of Richmond and one or two other
towns, her population continues to decline. Old Virginia was the first
to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap
the full harvest of destruction. Her lowland neighbors of Maryland and
the Carolinas were not far behind at the _seeding_; nor are they far
behind at the ingathering of desolation.
Let us take the rich and beautiful State of Kentucky, compared with
her free neighbor Ohio. The slaves of Kentucky have composed less
than a fourth part of her population. But mark their effect upon the
comparative growth of the state. In the year 1800, Kentucky contained
221,000 inhabitants, and Ohio, 45,000. In forty years, the population
of Kentucky had risen to 780,000; that of Ohio to 1,519,000. This
wonderful difference could not be owing to any natural superiority of
the Ohio country. Kentucky is nearly as large, nearly as fertile, and
quite equal, in other gifts of nature. She had greatly the advantage,
too, in the outset of this forty years’ race of population. She
started with 5¹⁄₂ inhabitants to the square mile, and came out with
20: Ohio started with one inhabitant to the square mile, and came
out with 38. Kentucky had full possession of her territory at the
beginning. Much of Ohio was then, and for a long time afterwards, in
possession of the Indians. Ohio is by this time considerably more
than twice as thickly peopled as Kentucky; yet she still gains, both
by natural increase and by the influx of emigrants; while Kentucky has
for twenty years been receiving much fewer emigrants than Ohio, and
multitudes of her citizens have been yearly moving off to newer and
yet newer countries.
Compare this natural increase with the census returns, and it appears
that, in the ten years from 1830 to 1840, Virginia lost by emigration
no fewer than 375,000 of her people, of whom East Virginia lost
304,000, and West Virginia 71,000. At this rate Virginia supplies
the west every ten years with a population equal in number to the
population of the State of Mississippi in 1840!
Some Virginia politicians, proudly,--yes, _proudly_,
fellow-citizens,--call our old commonwealth _The Mother of States_!
These _enlightened_ patriots might pay her a still higher compliment,
by calling her _The Grandmother_ of States. For our part, we are
grieved and mortified to think of the lean and haggard condition of
our venerable mother. Her black children have sucked her so dry, that
now, for a long time past, she has not milk enough for her offspring,
either black or white.
She has sent,--or we should rather say, she has driven,--from her
soil at least one third of all the emigrants who have gone from the
old states to the new. More than another third have gone from the
other old slave states. Many of these multitudes, who have left the
slave states, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in
the free countries of the west. These were generally industrious and
enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country
of slaves was not the country for them. It is a truth, a certain
truth, that _slavery drives free laborers,--farmers, mechanics, and
all, and some of the best of them too,--out of the country, and fills
their places with negroes_.
It is admitted on all hands, that slave labor is better adapted to
agriculture than to any other branch of industry; and that, if not
good for agriculture, it is really good for nothing.
Therefore, since in agriculture slave labor is proved to be far less
productive than free labor, _slavery is demonstrated to be not only
unprofitable, but deeply injurious to the public prosperity_.
We do not mean that slave labor can never earn any thing for him that
employs it. The question is between free labor and slave labor. He
that chooses to employ a sort of labor that yields only half as much
to the hand as another sort would yield, makes a choice that is not
only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to his interest.
Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by
two epithets, _extensive_, _exhaustive_,--which in all agricultural
countries forebode two things, _impoverishment_, _depopulation_. The
general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and
places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much
land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays
the golden egg. They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by
compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole
interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as
possible.
This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its
effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire
was at the height of its grandeur.
Pliny, a writer of that age, in his Natural History, (Book 18, c.
1-7,) tells us, that while the small farms of former times were
cultivated by freemen, and even great commanders did not disdain to
labor with their own hands, agriculture flourished, and provisions
were abundant; but that afterwards, when the lands were engrossed by a
few great proprietors, and cultivated by fettered and branded slaves,
the country was ruined, and corn had to be imported. The same system
was spreading ruin over the provinces, and thus the prosperity of
the empire was undermined. Pliny denounces, as the worst of all, the
system of having large estates in the country cultivated by slaves,
or indeed, says he, “_to have any thing done by men who labor without
hope of reward_.”
So Livy, the great Roman historian, observed, some years before
Pliny, (Book 6, c. 12,) that “innumerable multitudes of men formerly
inhabited those parts of Italy, where, in his time, none but slaves
redeemed the country from desertion;”--that is, a dense population of
free laborers had been succeeded by a sparse population of slaves.
Even the common mechanical trades do not flourish in a slave state.
Some mechanical operations must, indeed, be performed in every
civilized country; but the general rule in the south is, to import
from abroad every fabricated thing that can be carried in ships,
such as household furniture, boats, boards, laths, carts, ploughs,
axes, and axehelves, besides innumerable other things, which free
communities are accustomed to make for themselves. What is most
wonderful is, that the forests and iron mines of the south supply,
in great part, the materials out of which these things are made. The
northern freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and
pig iron, work them up, supply their own wants with a part, and then
sell the rest at a good profit in the southern markets. Now, although
mechanics, by setting up their shops in the south, could save all
these freights and profits, yet so it is, that northern mechanics will
not settle in the south, and the southern mechanics are undersold by
their northern competitors.
Now connect with these wonderful facts another fact, and the mystery
is solved. The number of mechanics, in different parts of the south,
is in the inverse ratio of the number of slaves; or in other words,
where the slaves form the largest proportion of the inhabitants,
there the mechanics and manufacturers form the least. In those parts
only where the slaves are comparatively few, are many mechanics and
artificers to be found; but even in these parts they do not flourish
as the same useful class of men flourish in the free states. Even in
our Valley of Virginia, remote from the sea, many of our mechanics can
hardly stand against northern competition. This can be attributed only
to slavery, which paralyzes our energies, disperses our population,
and keeps us few and poor, in spite of the bountiful gifts of nature
with which a benign Providence has endowed our country.
Of all the states in this Union, not one has on the whole such various
and abundant resources for manufacturing as our own Virginia, both
East and West. Only think of her vast forests of timber, her mountains
of iron, her regions of stone coal, her valleys of limestone and
marble, her fountains of salt, her immense sheep-walks for wool, her
vicinity to the cotton fields, her innumerable waterfalls, her bays,
harbors, and rivers for circulating products on every side;--in short,
every material and every convenience necessary for manufacturing
industry.
Above all, think of Richmond, nature’s chosen site for the greatest
manufacturing city in America,--her beds of coal and iron, just
at hand, her incomparable water power, her tide-water navigation,
conducting sea vessels from the foot of her falls, and above them
her fine canal to the mountains, through which lie the shortest
routes from the eastern tides to the great rivers of the west and
the south-west. Think, also, that this Richmond, in old Virginia,
“the mother of states,” has enjoyed these unparalleled advantages
ever since the United States became a nation;--and then think again,
that this same Richmond, the metropolis of all Virginia, has fewer
manufactures than a third-rate New England town;--fewer,--not than
the new city of Lowell, which is beyond all comparison,--but fewer
than the obscure place called Fall River, among the barren hills of
Massachusetts;--and then, fellow-citizens, what will you think,--what
_must_ you think,--of the cause of this strange phenomenon? Or, to
enlarge the scope of the question: What must you think has caused
Virginians in general to neglect their superlative advantages for
manufacturing industry?--to disregard the evident suggestions of
nature, pointing out to them this fruitful source of population,
wealth, and comfort?
Say not that this state of things is chargeable to the _apathy_ of
Virginians. That is nothing to the purpose, for it does not go to the
bottom of the subject. What causes the apathy? That is the question.
The last census gave also the cost of constructing new buildings in
each state, exclusive of the value of the materials. The amount of
this is a good test of the increase of wealth in a country. To compare
different states in this particular, we must divide the total cost of
building by the number of inhabitants, and see what the average will
be for each inhabitant. We find that it is in Massachusetts, $3·60;
in Connecticut, $3·50; in New York, $3·00; in New Jersey, $2·70; in
Pennsylvania, $3·10; in Maryland, $2·30; and in Virginia, $1·10.
No state has greater conveniences for ship navigation and ship
building than Virginia. Yet on all her fine tide waters she has little
shipping; and what she has is composed almost wholly of small bay
craft and a few coasting schooners.
We do not blame our southern people for abstaining from all
employments of this kind. What could they do? Set their negroes
to building ships? Who ever imagined such an absurdity? But could
they not hire white men to do such things? No; for, in the first
place, southern white men have no skill in such matters; and, in the
second place, northern workmen cannot be hired in the south, without
receiving a heavy premium for working in a slave state.
The boast of our West Virginia is the good city of Wheeling. Would
that she was six times as large, that she might equal Pittsburg, and
that she grew five times as fast, that she might keep up with her!