To understand any of the outstanding men of history one must also
understand something of their background. The Roman Emperor Marcus
Aurelius persecuted and burned the primitive Christians; yet he is
accounted one of the most religious and humane of historical figures,
and his Meditations are commonly considered a book of the gentlest and
wisest counsel toward the good life.
You cannot understand this paradox unless you know the history of the
Roman state. And you cannot understand John Brown unless you understand
the history of his times.
John Brown, until the age of fifty, had lived the peaceful, laborious
life of a Yankee farmer with a large family. He hated war, and was
almost a Quaker; had never handled fire-arms, and was a man of deep
and silent affections. He was deeply religious, read the Bible daily;
Christianity imbued all the acts of his daily existence.
This man, nearing his sixtieth year, assembled a group of young men
with rifles and took the field to wage guerrilla war on slavery. He
became a warrior, an outlaw. What drove him to this desperate stand?
I think the answer is: Respectability. There is nothing more maddening
to a man of deep moral feeling than to find that slavery has become
respectable, while freedom is considered the mad dream of a fanatic.
The slavery of black men had become the most respectable institution in
America in John Brown’s time. It had had a dark and bloody history of a
hundred years in which to become firmly rooted into American life.
There had been slavery in Europe for centuries before the discovery of
America--but it was white slavery. Each feudal baron owned hordes of
serfs--white farmers--who were as much a part of his land-holdings as
his castles, horses and ploughs.
With the invention of printing, gunpowder and machine production the
system of feudalism declined. The French Revolution helped deal it
a death blow. The last country where this ancient slavery of white
men was not dead was in Russia; but African slavery, the slavery of
Negroes, who were heathens, and therefore could morally be bought and
sold by Christians, had been reintroduced on the northern coast of the
Mediterranean by Moorish traders. In the year 990 these Moors from the
Barbary Coast first reached the cities of Nigrita, and established
an uninterrupted exchange of Saracen and European luxuries for black
slaves.
Columbus tried to introduce Indian slavery into Europe but the church
forbade it, for Indians were accounted Christians when converted.
The unhappy Negroes were not considered convertible; their slavery
was sanctified by the church. And for the next few centuries the
African slave-trade was the most lucrative traffic pursued by mankind.
Black slaves were to be found in the whole vast area of Spanish and
Portuguese America, also in Dutch and French Guinea and the West
Indies. It was black men who cleared the jungles, tilled the fields,
built the cities and roads and laid down, in their sweat and blood,
the foundations of civilization in the New World. Great jealous and
prosperous monopolies were formed in this traffic of slaves; and its
profits were greedily shared by philosophers, statesmen and kings.
In 1776, the American colonies were inhabited by two and a half million
white persons, who owned half a million slaves. Many of the most
rational and humane leaders of the Revolution saw the inconsistency of
slave-holders making a revolution in the name of freedom. There was
some early agitation against slavery, but the humanitarians were in a
minority. Even then slavery had become respectable and profitable. It
would have been easy and cheap to have freed the slaves then. It would
have been the most practicable thing the young nation could have done.
Not a life would have been lost; and the development of the country
might have been even more rapid. But it was not done; such acts need
more far-sightedness than the average man possesses.
Slavery grew by leaps and bounds, as the country was growing.
The slave trader, shrewd, intelligent and rich, kidnapped young men
and women in Africa and did a huge business. His markets became the
feature of every Southern town. The planters lolled at their ease, and
devised ways and means of forcing their slaves to breed more rapidly.
The slaves were treated as impersonally as animals. Mothers were sold
away from their children, and husbands from their wives. Generations
of black men died in bondage, and left their children only the sad
inheritance of slavery.
The South developed an aristocrat class of indolent white men and women
who looked down on all work as ignominious, and who used their minds,
not in the arts or sciences, but to find new moral justifications for
slavery.
Slavery was respectable. “It is an act of philanthropy to keep the
Negro here, as we keep our children in subjection for their own
good,” said a Southern statesman. Slavery was moral. Even most of
the respectability of the North enlisted in its defense. In 1826,
Edward Everett, the great Massachusetts statesman, said in Congress
that slavery was sanctioned by religion and by the United States
Constitution.
The churches of almost every denomination were solidly behind slavery.
The Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional. A pro-slavery
President occupied the White House, and Senator Sumner, a lonely
abolitionist, was beaten down with a loaded cane on the senate floor
because he dared say a brave word against the nation’s crime.
In 1838 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, first of the
abolitionist journals. He said that “the constitution is a covenant
with death, and an agreement with hell,” and he fought slavery with
all his power. “Our country is the world, our countrymen all mankind,”
was the slogan of his journal. Garrison was beaten by a mob in a
northern city for his courage; and other abolitionists were tarred
and feathered, lynched, and attacked by mobs of respectable northern
merchants and church-goers, much as pacifists were beaten by mobs
during the late war.
Slavery was respectable. Negro field hands sold for $1,000 each, and
innocent black babies were worth $100 each to the white master as they
suckled at a Negro mother’s breast.
To attack slavery was to attack the constitution, the church, the
government, and the institution of private property. To attack
respectability has always been the crime of the saviours, and
respectability is the cross on which they are forever hung.