COEXISTENCE OF THE TWO RACES AFTER EMANCIPATION.
Something more difficult to foresee than the suppression, henceforth
certain, of slavery, is the consequence of this suppression. The problem
of the coexistence of the two races rests at the present hour with a
crushing weight on the thoughts of all; it mingles poignant doubts with
the hopes of some, it exasperates the resistance of others. Is it true
that emancipation would be the signal of a struggle for extermination?
Is there not room upon American soil for free blacks by the side of free
whites? I do not conceal from myself that there is here an accredited
prejudice, an admitted opinion which, perhaps more than any thing else,
trammels the progress of the United States. Let us attempt to estimate
it.
M. de Tocqueville, who has judged America with so sure an eye, has been,
notwithstanding, mistaken upon some points; his warmest admirers must
admit it. Writing at an epoch when the great results of English
emancipation had not yet been produced, he was led to frame that
formidable judgment of which so much advantage has been taken:
"Hitherto, wherever the whites have been the more powerful, they have
held the negroes in degradation and slavery; wherever the negroes have
been the more powerful, they have destroyed the whites. This is the only
account which can ever be opened between the two races."
Another account is opened, thank God, and no one will rejoice at it more
sincerely than M. de Tocqueville--he who is so generous, and whose
abolition sentiments are certainly no mystery to any of his colleagues
of the Chamber. But his opinion remains in his book, and every one
repeats after him, that the blacks and the whites cannot live together
on the same soil, unless the latter be subject to the former.
I repeat, that at the time at which he wrote, he had reason, or at least
known facts gave him reason, to say this; the liberty of the blacks had
then but one name--St. Domingo. To-day, the victories of Christian
emancipation have come, to contrast with the catastrophes provoked by
impenitent despotism.
The English Colonies bear a striking analogy to the Southern States of
the Union. The blacks there are numerous, more numerous even in
proportion to the whites than in the Carolinas or Florida. The climate
is even more scorching, and the cultures demand still more imperiously
the labor of the blacks. As to the prejudices of the masters, I dare
affirm that the planters of the Continent and those of the Antilles have
not long had any thing with which to reproach each other.
Notwithstanding, what has happened in the Antilles? Not only has liberty
been proclaimed--this was the act of the metropolis--but the coexistence
of races has subsisted. It is to this point that I claim attention.
They, the whites and the blacks, alike free, invested with the same
privileges, exercising the same rights, encountering each other in the
ranks of the militia, in the magistracy, and even in the seats of the
colonial assemblies, admirably accept this life in common. And the
whites there, observe, are Anglo-Saxons; that is, they belong to that
race which is declared incapable of enduring free blacks in its
neighborhood.
It is necessary to appeal sometimes from those axioms so boldly laid
down, which serve us to make inflexible laws for that which must be
subject in an infinite measure to the mobility of circumstances and
influences. The influence of the Gospel, especially, is a fact, the
scope of which is never sufficiently measured. It has created in the
Antilles a negro population which maintains its equality face to face
with the whites, yet which does not entirely reject their patronage; a
dependent population which is also a free population, free in the most
absolute sense of the word. The blacks of the Antilles labor on the
plantations, and secure the success of large plantations; but, at the
same time, they themselves become landholders, forming by degrees one of
the happiest and most remarkable classes of peasants that ever existed.
Their little fields, their pretty villages, manifest real prosperity;
and there is something among them that is worth more than prosperity,
there is moral progress, the development of intellect, and the elevation
of souls.
It will be demanded of us if, in the midst of so much progress, the
production of sugar has not suffered. I answer that, on the contrary, it
has increased. It had been predicted that emancipation would be a
death-blow to the British colonies. I suspect that many people are even
yet persuaded of it; now, in spite of the faults committed by the
planters, who have neglected nothing to disgust the negroes with labor
and to drive them from their old mills, they are found to return to
them, contenting themselves with wages that scarcely rise above an
average of a shilling a day. If we compare the two last censuses of
liberty with the two last years of slavery, we shall discover that the
total production of sugar has increased in the colonies in which
emancipation was effected in 1834. And they have not only had to endure
this crisis of emancipation, but also another crisis still more
formidable, that of the sudden introduction of free trade in 1834. The
colonial sugars, exposed to competition with the sugar produced at
Havana and elsewhere by slave labor, experienced a prodigious decline.
There was cause to believe that the production was about to be
destroyed; it has risen again, notwithstanding, and the English
Antilles, with their free negroes and their unprotected sugar, forced to
face entire liberty in all its forms, import to-day into the metropolis
nearly a million more hogsheads than at the moment when the crisis of
free trade broke forth.
Liberty works miracles. We always distrust her, and she replies to our
suspicions by benefits. The English Antilles, which, during the last
thirty years, have had to surmount, besides the two crises of
emancipation and free trade, the earthquake of 1840 and six consecutive
years of drought; the English Antilles, which have had to liquidate
their old debts, and to repair the ruin accruing from the failure of the
bank of Jamaica, are now in an attitude which proves that they have no
fears for the future and scarcely regret the past.
Under slavery, the Antilles were hastening to their ruin; with liberty,
they have become one of the richest channels of exportation which
England possesses; under slavery, they could not have supported the
shock of free trade; with liberty, they have gained this new battle:
such are the net proceeds of experience. If we still have doubts, let us
compare Dutch Guiana, which holds slaves, to English Guiana, which has
emancipated them. The resources of these two countries are almost equal;
English Guiana is progressing, while the cultures of Surinam are
forsaken; three-fourths of its plantations are already abandoned, and
the rest will follow.
But the question of profits and losses is not the only one here, I
think, and after having computed the proceeds of sugar, after having
shown that in this respect English emancipation is in rule, it is
allowable to mention also another kind of result. Look at these pretty
cottages, this neat and almost elegant furniture, these gardens, this
general air of comfort and civilization; question these blacks, whose
physical appearance has become modified already under the influence of
liberty, these blacks, who decreased rapidly in numbers during the epoch
of slavery, and who have begun to increase, on the contrary, since their
affranchisement; they will tell us that they are happy. Some have become
landowners, and labor on their own account, (this is not a crime, I
imagine;) others unite to strengthen large plantations, or perhaps to
carry to the works of rich planters the canes gathered by them on their
own grounds; some are merchants, many hire themselves out as farmers.
Whatever may be the faults of some individuals, the ensemble of free
negroes has merited the testimony rendered in 1857 by the Governor of
Tobago: "I deny that our blacks of the country are of indolent habits.
So industrious a class of inhabitants does not exist in the world."
An admirable spectacle, and one which the history of mankind presents to
us too rarely, is that of a degraded population elevating itself more
and more, and placing itself on a level with those who before despised
it. Concubinage, so general in times of servitude as to give rise to
the famous axiom, "Negroes abhor marriage," is now replaced by regular
unions. In becoming free, the negroes have learned to respect
themselves: the unanimous reports of the governors mark the progress of
their habits of sobriety. Crimes have greatly diminished among them.
They are polite and well brought up, falling even into the excess of
exaggerated courtesy. They respect the aged: if an old man passes
through the streets, the children rise and cease their play.
These children are assiduously sent to schools, the support of which
depends, in a great part, upon the voluntary gifts of the negroes.
Grateful to the Gospel which has set them free, the former slaves have
become passionately attached to their pastors; their first resources are
consecrated to churches, to schools, and sometimes, also, to distant
missions, to the evangelization of that Africa which they remember to do
it good. We should be at once surprised and humiliated, were we to
compare the much-vaunted gifts of our charity with those of these poor
people, these freed men of yesterday, whom we think that we may
rightfully treat with disdain.
Thanks to the Gospel, and it is to this that I return, the problem of
the coexistence of races is resolved in the most pacific manner in the
Antilles. Among freemen, however little these freemen may be
Christianized, specific inequalities become speedily effaced, and the
prejudice of skin is not found to be ultimately as insurmountable as we
have been told. In these English colonies, which are true republics,
governing themselves, and which also remind us, through this feature, of
the Southern States, the blacks have come to be accepted as
fellow-citizens. They practise the liberal professions; they are
electors and often elected, for they form of themselves alone one-fifth
of the Colonial Assembly at Jamaica; they are officers of the police and
the militia, and their authority never fails to be recognized by all. I
named Jamaica just now. Some may seek to bring it as an argument against
me. The fact is, that this great island has seemed to form an exception
to the general prosperity; considerable fortunes have been sunk there,
and the transformation has been slower and more painful there than
elsewhere. But, when they arm themselves with these circumstances, they
forget two things: first, that the causes of the malady were anterior to
emancipation; next, that the cure has come from emancipation itself.
Before emancipation, Jamaica was insolvent, her plantations were
mortgaged beyond their value, and its planting was threatened in other
ways far more than now. Do you know what has since happened?
Difficulties which appeared insoluble have been resolved; to-day, the
cape is doubled, and men navigate in peace. At the present time, Jamaica
comprises two or three hundred villages, inhabited by free negroes; the
latter are willing to work; for, according to the latest information,
(February, 1861,) the price of daily labor decreases instead of rising.
Among these free negroes, there are not less than ten thousand
landholders, and three-eighths of the cultivated soil is in their hands.
They have established sugar-mills everywhere, imperfect, rude, yet
working in a passable manner; and mills of this sort are numbered by
thousands. The middle class of color thus grows richer day by day; the
families that compose it all own a horse or a mule; they have their
bank-books and their accounts with the savings banks. Lastly, which is
of more value than all else, the free negroes of Jamaica have built more
than two hundred chapels, and as many schools. At the very moment when I
write these lines, an enthusiastic religious movement is prevailing
among them; the rum-shops are abandoned, the most degraded classes
enter in their turn the path of reformation.
I should have been glad to cite our own colonies instead of confining
myself to the English islands. I have been prevented from this, not only
by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the
state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above
all, by the circumstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been
too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor
has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the
parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that,
moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than of the Coolies
and others employed, which has secured the success of our experiment;
whence it follows that this success is far from being as conclusive as
that which has been obtained elsewhere under the system of full liberty.
Nevertheless, our success, which is no less real, signifies something
also. If we have not yet those little free villages, that class of small
negro landholders of which I just spoke, we have, like the English, free
negroes in our militia and in our marine; like them, we have had our
elections, and all classes of the population have taken part in them;
like them, and perhaps in a greater degree, we have increased our sugar
production since emancipation. It is true that the crisis of free trade
has not yet passed among us, and that we cannot know how this would be
supported by our colonial sugars. But it will not be long before we
shall be informed on this point: by an act which we cannot but applaud,
and which continues the work it has undertaken, the French government
has just suppressed the protection continued hitherto to our planters.
If, ere long, as it is justifiable to hope, they are delivered from the
charges of the colonial system, whose advantages they have lost, we
shall see them struggle, and successfully, I am convinced, against the
Spanish sugars produced by slave labor.
It will be, perhaps, maintained, that the antipathy of race is stronger
in the United States than elsewhere, and that the Americans, in this
respect, are inferior to the English. I am as conscious as any one else
of those infamous proceedings towards free negroes which are the crime
of the North, a crime no less odious than that of the South. What
conscience is not aroused at the thought of those prejudices of skin
which do not permit blacks to sit by the side of whites, in schools,
churches, or public vehicles? Only the other day, nothing less than a
denunciation in open parliament was needed to begin the destruction, by
a public rebuke, of the classification which is being made on the
English steamers themselves between Liverpool and New York. There are
some new States which purely and simply exclude free negroes from their
Territory; those which do not exclude them from the Territory, repulse
them from the ballot-box. The injustice, in fine, is as gross, as
crying, as it is possible to imagine.
Must we conclude from this that the coexistence of races, possible
elsewhere, is impossible in the United States? I distrust those sweeping
assertions which resolve problems at one stroke; I refuse, above all, to
admit so easily that iniquity must be maintained for the sole reason
that it exists, and that it suffices to say: "I am thus made; what would
you have? I cannot change myself," to abstract one's self from the
accomplishment of the most elementary duty. To endure negroes at one's
side, to respect their independence, to abstain from wrongs towards
them, to consent to the full exercise of their rights, is an elementary
duty; Christian duty, I need not say, demands something better.
Does this mean that we are to set ourselves up as judges, and brand as
wretches all those who thus mistake the laws of charity and justice? I
fear much that, in their place, we would do precisely as they. Living in
the South, we would have slaves, and would defend slavery to the last;
living in the North, we would tread under foot the free colored class.
Is there then neither the true, nor the false, nor justice, nor
injustice? God forbid! The just and the true remain; iniquity should be
condemned without pity; but we are bound to be more indulgent towards
men than, towards things. We are bound to remember that the influence of
surroundings is enormous, and that, if crimes are always without excuse,
there are many excusable criminals. When we examine men by the prejudice
of skin, such as prevails in the United States, we are not long in
discovering that it rests in great part on a misunderstanding: men
mistake coexistence for amalgamation. I do not fear to affirm that the
second would be as undesirable as the first would be desirable. Why
dream of blending or of assimilating the two races? Why pursue as an
ideal frequent marriages between them, and the formation of a third
race: that of mulattoes? America does right to resist such ideas, and to
inscribe her testimony against such a future, evidently very little in
conformity with the designs of God.
But coexistence by no means draws amalgamation in its train. On this
point, also, experience has spoken. In the English colonies, the liberty
of the blacks is entire, the legal equality of the two races is not
contested, public manners have shaped themselves to that mutual
consideration without which they could not live together; yet neither
amalgamation nor assimilation is in question, and the aristocracy of
skin remains what it should be, a lasting distinction, accepted on both
sides, between races which are not designed to mingle together. I do not
know that many marriages are contracted between the whites and the
negresses of Jamaica, and I believe that the class of mulattoes
increases much more rapidly under slavery than with liberty. Look in
this respect at what takes place even now in the United States: as
quadroons sell better than blacks, mixtures, of white or almost white
slaves abound there, and the unhappy women who refuse to lend themselves
to certain combinations are often whipped in punishment.
With liberty, each race can at least remain by itself; with it, there
can be coexistence without amalgamation; both mingling and hostility can
be prevented. This is the more easy, inasmuch as the negroes, with the
gentleness of their race, willingly accept the second place, and by no
means demand what we insist on refusing them. Let their liberty be
complete, let legal equality and friendly relations be maintained, and
they will ask no more.
But they will ask no less, and they are right. I do not understand, in
truth, why so harmless a co-existence should be so long repulsed by the
enlightened people of the United States. There are negroes in Spanish
America who have reached the highest grades of the army, and who show as
much intelligence, decorum, and dignity in command as white men could
do. I myself have seen at Paris, a clergyman of ebony blackness, who was
really the most distinguished, unexceptionable man that it was possible
to meet; he was a remarkable scholar, and had received the title of
doctor from several European universities.
In fact, the negroes are our fellows and our equals much more than we
imagine; they adapt themselves better than the Indians to our
civilization. They seek to be instructed, and not only do the free
blacks of the English islands hasten, as we have seen, to provide
themselves with teachers, but even those of the United States, crushed
as they are by contemptuous treatment, neglect no means of introducing
their children into the schools, where is found one-ninth of their
total number. In Liberia, they have shown themselves hitherto very
capable of ruling. In Hayti, since their deliverance from the ridiculous
and odious yoke of Soulouque, they have advanced rapidly, it is
affirmed, in the way of true progress; legal marriages increase, popular
instruction is becoming established, religious liberty is respected.
Lastly, in the negro colony of Buxton, in Canada, the fugitive slaves
have become industrious landholders, and are respected by all.
Let us not say that prejudice of skin is indestructible; the suppression
of slavery may modify it profoundly. What degrades the free negro
to-day, is the existence of the negro slave. To be respectable, we all
need to be respected. The poor, free negro is ashamed of himself; he
dares not aspire to any thing noble and great; he preserves, besides, as
the legacy of slavery, the idea that labor is dishonoring, that idleness
is a sign of independence. This is enough to make him remain a stranger
to honorable occupations, and confine himself to the practice of vile
trades. When slavery shall have disappeared, the situation of the free
blacks will become quite different: they will be numerous; they will
have an appreciable share in the regulation of national affairs; their
vote will count, and, thenceforth, we may be tranquil, no one will be
afraid to treat them with respect, and perhaps to pay court to them.
The law of New York, as well as the Supreme Court of that State, has
already admitted that color exercises no influence over the rights of
citizens. The time draws near when the North will no longer contest the
intervention of free negroes at the ballot-box. This will be a great
step in advance. Let us remark, moreover, that, after general
emancipation, the black population, while exercising its share of
influence, will never be able, through the number of suffrages at its
disposal, to alarm the jealous susceptibility of the whites; the latter,
in fact, will be continually recruited by European immigration, and the
day will come when the few negroes of the United States will be scarcely
perceptible in the heart of a gigantic nation.
The honor of the North is at stake; it belongs to it to give an example
at this time, and to show, by the reform of its own habits, that it has
the right to combat the crime of the South. It must set to work
seriously, resolutely, to resolve the problem of the coexistence of
races, while the South resolves, willing or unwilling, the problem of
emancipation. Liberty in the South, equality in the North; the one is
no less necessary than the other; it may even be said that one great
obstacle to the idea of emancipation is this other idea that blacks and
whites cannot live together, but that one must some day exterminate the
other.
Why suffer the establishment of this lying axiom which checks all
progress? Why not cast our eyes on the neighboring colonies where the
prejudice of color reigned supremely before emancipation, and where it
has since become rapidly effaced. The United States have a lofty end to
attain; let them beware how they take too low an aim! They will not have
more than they need, with the efforts of all, the charity of all, the
sacrifices of all, the earnest endeavors by which all can elevate
themselves above vulgar prejudices, to accomplish a task at once the
most difficult and most glorious that has ever been proposed to a great
people.
The North, I repeat, is bound to give a noble example by obtaining a
shining victory over itself. Let it say to itself that coexistence is
not amalgamation; the question is not to marry negroes, but to treat
them with justice. The fear of amalgamation once vanished, many things
will change in appearance. Why, in fact, is the prejudice of race
stronger in the free States than in the slave States? Because the latter
know that slavery is a sufficient line of demarcation, and because they
have not to dread amalgamation. Now, this is and will be nowhere to be
dreaded; the instinct of both races will prevent such mingling, and the
blacks are as anxious to remain separate from the whites as the whites
are to avoid alliance with the blacks. As I have said, nothing but
slavery, and the perverse habits that it engenders, could have succeeded
in some sort in breaking down this barrier. If the class of mullattoes
thus formed rule in some republics of South America, it proceeds from
the absence of a numerous and powerful white race, like that which is
covering the United States with its continually increasing population.
Decidedly, fears of amalgamation are puerile in such a country; and
decidedly also, any other solution than the coexistence of races would
be wrong. Doubtless, a natural concentration of the emancipated negroes
will be some day effected; they will flock to those States where their
relative number will ensure to them the most influence. Perhaps we may
even obtain a glimpse of the time when, by the result of a providential
compensation, the countries which have been the witnesses of their
sufferings, and which they have watered with their tears, these
countries where they, better than any others, can devote themselves to
labor, will belong to them in great part. Are the Antilles and the
regions of the Gulf of Mexico destined to become the refuge and almost
the empire of Africans torn from their own continent? It is possible,
but not certain. In any case, this geographical repartition of the races
would be wrought peaceably; the effort to effect it by violent measures
would justly arouse the conscience of the human race. So long as we talk
of transporting the blacks to Africa, to St. Domingo, or elsewhere, so
long as the peaceable coexistence of the races be not accepted, the
barbarous proceedings which dishonor America will not cease, the
Northern States will maltreat their free negroes, and the South will
cling to slavery as to the only means of preventing a struggle for
extermination.
At the North as well as the South, men need to accustom themselves in
fine to the idea of coexistence. Yes, there will be whites and free
blacks in various parts of the Union; yes, it is certain that in some
parts, the black population will be possessed of influence; it may even
happen that, in one or two points of the extreme South, it will come to
rule. If this hypothesis, improbable in my opinion, should ever be
realized, it would not be a cause of shame, but of glory, to the Union.
It is said that the great Indian tribes of the Southwest think of
forming a State, which will demand admission into the Union, and which
has a chance to obtain it. Why should there not be, at need, a negro
State by the side of an Indian State? This reparation would be fully due
to the oppressed race, and America would be honored in treading her
repugnance under foot, and in showing to the whole world that her so
much vaunted liberty is not a vain word.
She would show, at the same time, that her Christian faith is not a vain
formality. If the desire of avoiding amalgamation has legitimate
grounds, the antipathy of race is simply abominable. Words cannot be
found severe enough to censure the conduct of those _Christians_ who,
pursuing with their indignation the slavery of the South, refuse to
fulfil the simplest duties of kindness, or even of common equity,
towards the free negroes of the North.
But I hope that the Gospel, accustomed to work miracles, will also work
this. Let us be just; we have already seen the pious ladies of
Philadelphia lavishing their cares on black and white without
distinction at the time of the cholera invasion. They washed and
dressed with their own hands, in the hospital which they had founded,
the children rendered orphans by the scourge, without taking account of
the differences of color. This is a sign of progress, and I could cite
several others; I could name cities, Chicago, for instance, where the
schools are opened by law to the blacks as well as the whites. There is
a power in the United States which will overthrow the obstacle of the
North as well as that of the South, which will abolish both slavery and
prejudice of skin.
This power has shown in the Antilles what it can do. There, pastors and
missionaries, schools, works of charity pursued in common, have placed
on a level the blacks and the whites, devoted to the same cause, and
ransomed by the same Saviour. In the United States; likewise, the
Christian faith will raise up the one, and will teach the others to
humble themselves; it will destroy the vices of the negro, and will
break the detestable pride of the Anglo-Saxon. The real influence of
faith on both--this is the true solution, this is the true bond of the
races. Through this, will be established relations of mutual love and
respect. What a mission is reserved for the churches of the United
States! Checked hitherto by enormous difficulties, which it would be
unjust not to take into account, they have not acted the part in the
recent struggle against slavery which reverted to them of right. They
have done a great deal, whatever may be said; they are disposed to do
still more, and their attitude has improved visibly within a year. But
this cannot suffice; there are two problems to resolve instead of one;
the question is now, to approach both face to face. True equality is
founded, under the eye of God, through the community of hopes and of
repentance, through close association in worship, in prayer, in action;
and this equality has nothing in common with the jealous spirit of
levelling which suffers old grievances to subsist, and continually
invents new; it is peaceable, forgetful of evil, confiding, truly
fraternal. I do not dream, of course, of the universal conversion of the
population of the United States, both black and white; I know only that
the Gospel, though it deeply penetrates comparatively few hearts,
extends its influence much further, and acts on those that it has not
won. Let the Christians of America set to work, let them reject, for it
is time, the scandals still presented here and there by their apologists
for slavery, let them forbear to spare that which is culpable, to call
good evil, or evil good, and they will render to their country a
service which they alone can render it, and to which nothing on earth
can be compared.
The United States do not know how great will be the transformation of
their internal condition, and the increase of their good renown abroad,
when their churches, their schools, their public vehicles, their
ballot-boxes, shall be widely accessible to persons of color, when
equality and liberty shall have become realities on their soil; they do
not know how great will be their peace and their prosperity. Let the two
inseparable problems of slavery and the coexistence of races be resolved
among them under the ruling influence of the Gospel, and they will
witness the birth of a future far better than the past. No more fears,
no more rivalries, no more separations in perspective, their conquests
will become accomplished of themselves; and, no longer destined to swell
the domain of servitude, they will win the applause of the entire world.
And all this will not be purchased, as men seem to believe, by the
sacrifice of the cotton culture. At the present time, this culture
incurs but one serious risk: the momentary triumph of a party that
dreams of a slavery propaganda; it will be saved alone by the progress
of liberty. On the day when emancipation shall be achieved, if wrought
by the action of moral agents and social necessities, instead of by that
of civil wars and insurrections, the cultivation of cotton in the
Southern States will receive the impetus to a magnificent development.
The emancipated negroes make large quantities of sugar in the Antilles;
why should they not make cotton on firm ground? If affranchisement
produced the destruction of planting in St. Domingo, we know now the
reason. It is a proved fact that negroes who do not owe their liberty to
insurrection, remain disposed to devote themselves to labor in the
fields.
With slavery, observe, disappear, one after the other, the obstacles in
the way of agricultural progress. The capital which no one dares risk
to-day in the Southern States, will flow into them emulously as soon as
slavery shall be abolished; I say more: as soon as its progressive
abolition shall be no longer doubtful in the sight of all. European
immigration, the current of which turns aside with so much
circumspection, avoiding a territory accursed and given over to
calamities, will flock towards those countries more beautiful, more
fertile, and broader than those of the Far West. Machinery will come, to
more than fill up the void caused by the passing diminution of the
number of laborers. The slaves can be intrusted with none but the
simplest implements: every one knows that the plough, introduced
originally into our French colonies, disappeared to make room for the
hoe as soon as Colbert had authorized the slave trade. Ploughs have
reappeared there since emancipation. Their agricultural and industrial
progress date from the same epoch: to-day, our colonists understand the
use of manures, and make improvements in manufacture. A new era is
dawning, in fine; what will it be in the United States, among that
people which seems destined to surpass all others in the application of
mechanics to agriculture?
Still, I have made one concession too much in admitting the diminution
of the number of laborers. Supposing that a few negroes quit the field,
many whites will come to take their place. White labor is fully possible
in the majority of the slave States, and immigrants from Europe will not
hesitate to engage in it. Wherever slavery reigns, it is that, and not
the climate, that must be arraigned if the whites fold their hands;
labor has become there a servile act--it is blighted, as it were, in its
essence. A competent writer said the other day: "If Algeria had been
subjected to the sway of slavery, cultivation there would have been
reputed impracticable for the French, and examples of mortality would
not have been wanting." The whites have labored in the Antilles; the
whites can labor, not only in all the slave States of the intermediate
region, but in Louisiana. Cotton is already produced in Texas, thanks to
its German settlers. The question is only, to go on in this way. Slavery
once abolished, the small proprietors, who at present carry all the
criminal extravagancies of the South further than any others, will be
compelled to set their hands to work. This will be an advantage both to
the country and themselves. Who will not pray for the coming of the time
when so considerable a part of the population will cease to possess
slaves which it is incapable of feeding, when it will be transformed
into the middle class, and thus escape the real servitude which
embitters it?
Moreover, let us not forget new cultures, that of the vine among others,
which are fitted to become introduced into these new countries, or to
develop there, and which lack nothing but liberty in order to flourish.
The arts and manufactures also have their place; independently of the
tillers of the soil, properly called, the Southern States will have need
of workmen in manufactories, and of managers of agricultural machines;
large plantations will often, become divided, as has happened in the
Antilles, and we shall witness the appearance of the small estate, that
essential basis of social order. There will be employment for all, and
the rich Southern cultures will be less neglected than before.
Whoever has descended the Ohio has involuntarily compared its two banks:
here, the State of Ohio, whose prosperity advances with rapid strides;
there, the State of Kentucky, no less favored by Nature, yet which
languishes as if abandoned. Why? Because slavery blights all that it
touches. Could not the whites of Kentucky and Virginia labor as well as
those of Ohio? The comparative poverty of these slave States reminds me
of the destitution of our colonies and those of England before
emancipation: mortgaged estates, plantations burdened with expenses, the
complete destruction of credit--such was their position. We must read
American statistics to form an idea of the truly unheard-of extent of
this fact--impoverishment by slavery. With a larger extent and much
richer lands, the slave States possess neither agricultural growth, nor
industrial growth, nor advance of population, which can be compared far
or near with that which is found in the free States. A book by Mr.
Hinton Rowan Helper, _The Impending Crisis of the South_, expresses
these differences in figures so significant that it is impossible to
contest them.
The Southern States, therefore, are certain to increase their cultures,
and to found their lasting prosperity by entering the path that leads to
emancipation. But if they take the contrary road, they will hasten to
their destruction, and with strange rapidity. Already, their violent
acts of secession, and the monstrous plans which are necessarily
attached to them, have had the first effect, easily foreseen, of dealing
a most dangerous blow to American cotton. In a few weeks, they have done
themselves more harm than the North, supposing its hostility as great as
it is little, could have done them in twenty years. The meeting of
Manchester has replied to the manifestoes of Charleston; England has
said to herself, that, from men so determined to destroy themselves, she
should count on nothing; and, having taken her resolution, she will
proceed with it speedily; let the Southern States take care. English
India can produce as much cotton as America; before long, if the
Carolinians persist, they will have obtained the glorious result of
despoiling their country of its chief resource; they will have killed
the hen that laid the golden eggs. The matter is serious; I ask them to
reflect on it. As England, under pain of falling into want and riots,
cannot dispense with cotton for a single day, she will act
energetically. Cotton grows marvellously in many countries; in the
Antilles, where it has been produced already; in Algeria, where the
plantations are about to be increased; on the whole continent of Africa,
in fine, where it enters perhaps into the plans of God thus to make a
breach in indigenous slavery by the faults committed by slaveholders in
America.