It is known that Slavery once existed in Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
New York, and the New England States. It has been abolished in those
States, while it continues to exist in Maryland, and in the States
south of the Potomac and the Ohio.
The disappearance of Slavery from certain States, and its continuance
in others, constitute a notable point of observation. Why has it
happened that Pennsylvania discarded an institution which South
Carolina cherishes? Is the question one of morality or of political
economy?
If slave labor had proved, upon the whole, profitable in Pennsylvania,
is it likely that Slavery would have been abolished in that State? Let
the same question be asked of New Jersey, New York, and New England.
There was a _beginning_ of the system in Maryland, Virginia,
the Carolinas, and Georgia. How happened it that the germ of an
institution, planted about the same time in all the colonies, took
root and increased in some of them only, while in others it did not
grow? It could not have been from the superior morality of the northern
people--because at that time there was no question about the morality
of the thing at all. Scruples against the right to hold slaves were not
entertained then; nor was the slave trade regarded as an unrighteous
traffic.
The operation of causes similar to those which produced emancipation at
the north, will bring about the abolition of Slavery in Maryland. Let
us now consider this point.
If Slavery be regarded as a matter of political economy, it will be
found, as when viewed in the light of a social relation, to require
conditions and circumstances, in order to its vindication. It is only
when the soil is uncommonly prolific, and calls for no great degree of
skill in the cultivation; or when the productions are so valuable as to
allow of large deductions for waste and bad management, that Slavery
can be said to pay for its own subsistence.
In the long run, Slavery is always unprofitable. It can be applied
only to one sort of labor--agriculture; and to that in its simplest
forms. Its tendency is to exhaust the soil without providing for its
resuscitation; because wherever Slavery is, there labor is regarded as
drudgery, and the intelligence of the community, which resides with the
masters, is not directed towards labor. Hence there are no improvements
in the modes of labor; no well regulated system of economy; no
foresight. The masters want to enjoy at once the proceeds of their
plantations, for their business is mainly to enjoy; they live for the
present; they leave all concerns of industry to their overseers, who
are not likely to carry out systematic plans for the improvement of
lands, when the owners of the estates are regardless of such things,
and would not be disposed to forego immediate profits for the future
benefit of such improvements. A thoughtful industry will wait some
years for the fruition of its hopes, stinting itself in the meantime.
It will vest in the soil the profits of the year, looking to be repaid
abundantly hereafter. But with a system of Slavery these things can
not be expected.
As a general remark, then, it may be observed that whenever from
circumstances of soil, climate, and production, there is need of
economy, skill, and careful industry in the cultivation of the ground;
wherever nature, not yielding her fruits to indolent hands, has to
be overcome by sturdy efforts, by labor directed by intelligence and
aided at every turn by the appliances of art which inventive genius has
discovered and adapted to use--there Slavery can not permanently exist,
because it is incompatible with such conditions.
In this view it may be seen how it has happened that Slavery, once
adopted in the northern States, failed to flourish there--how it was
cast out as an uncongenial element. In this same view it may be seen
also that Slavery must, by and by, cease to exist in Maryland. It
has brought sterility already upon whole districts; it rests like a
paralysing spell upon the enterprise and the active energies of the
commonwealth. Of this, more as we proceed.
In the sugar and cotton growing States the products of the soil are
so rich and abundant, that Slavery can exist in spite of the slovenly
and wasteful manner in which its agency is employed. Yet even under
these circumstances its profits are for the most part fallacious.
No portion of the United States suffered so severely under the
commercial revulsion of 1837 as the cotton and sugar growing region.
The statistics of bankruptcies in Jamaica, as exhibited in reports to
Parliament from time to time, show the same fact.
Again, the use of slave labor is deemed essential in hot climates. The
productiveness of the British West India Islands certainly was impaired
by the abolition of Slavery; nor can it be disguised that the British
government is now attempting to substitute another species of Slavery,
or Slavery under another name, in place of that which was abolished.
If the emancipated slaves had shown a willingness to work; if they had
been sufficiently advanced to appreciate freedom so far as to know
that in their own industry lay the real elements of independence--the
result of the Emancipation Act of the British Parliament would have
been different from what it has thus far appeared to be. There would
have been laborers enough; but laborers of such a sort that the white
proprietors, a handful in the general population, would have been
supplanted--and that ere now. The energy which would have impelled the
Jamaica negroes to work of their own accord; the spirit which would
have sustained them; if that energy and spirit had existed; would have
made them masters of the island.
But in the West Indies the blacks, for the most part, are scarcely
one grade beyond the natives in Africa. They are not so transfused
throughout a white population as our negroes are; they live in gangs or
communities to themselves, where they speak a gibberish dialect, and
retain their native superstitions. They are a far inferior race to the
colored people of the United States. Of course they would not work when
compulsion ceased; their highest ideas of freedom included nothing more
precious than the privilege of being idle. And it is very well for the
existing generation of whites in those islands, that the emancipated
mass preferred torpid repose to activity.
At present the planters of Jamaica are obtaining laborers from Africa,
under the name of emigrants, who, by a pleasant fiction, are entered
as volunteers in the fields. The British cruisers, when they capture
a slaver at sea, send the cargo to the West Indies, and thus benefit
the plantations, at the expense of the slave captain and owners--the
latter suffering confiscation, and the former running the risk of
being hanged. So, certain of the eagle tribe, disdaining to fish,
sit on a high tree or rock and watch the fishing hawk; and when the
latter secures his prey in his talons and is rising with it, the eagle
darts forth from his eminence and pounces upon the spoil, which he
appropriates without further ceremony to the use of his own nest.
Nevertheless, it is not my purpose to dwell on this point of the
adaptation of slave labor to hot climates. We may safely leave it
to time and to the progress of the age to determine that matter
as it ought to be determined. It is Slavery in Maryland which we
are considering; and in Maryland the heat of the climate can not
be taken into the account at all, as disqualifying free labor. The
States farther south have their own responsibilities on the subject
of Slavery. They will know of themselves when the system becomes
productive of evil to such an extent as to call for its removal. It is
not for us to judge for them, to judge them. Let each State act for
itself and act only when its judgment and sense of duty dictate.
For years past our cotton growing States have been exporting their
soil; and with that improvidence which Slavery generates, that love
of present indulgence, careless of what may follow, the south has
received in return the means of enjoyment only--nothing wherewith to
renovate the outraged ground. Such a process long continued must, in
the end, ruin the finest lands in the world. Its effects are apparent
in the Atlantic States of the south, which are losing their population,
the attraction of the new and rich lands in the south-west operating
irresistibly to draw the planters of Carolina and Georgia from their
worn out fields.
The same general observations will apply to our slaveholding sections
in Maryland, and to many parts of eastern Virginia too, if it were
necessary to pursue the investigation there. Emigration to the west
has kept pace with the impoverishment of our lands. Large tracts have
come into the hands of a few proprietors--too large to be improved,
and too much exhausted to be productive. But this is not the worst.
The traveller, as he journeys through these districts, smitten with
premature barrenness as with a curse, beholds fields, once enclosed
and subject to tillage, now abandoned and waste, and covered with
straggling pines or scrubby thickets, which are fast overgrowing the
waning vestiges of former cultivation. From swamps and undrained
morasses, malaria exhales, and like a pestilence infects the country.
The inhabitants become a sallow race; the current of life stagnates;
energy fails; the spirits droop. Over the whole region a melancholy
aspect broods. There are every where signs of dilapidation, from
the mansion of the planter with its windows half-glazed, its doors
half-hinged, its lawn trampled by domestic animals that have ingress
and egress through the broken enclosures, to the ragged roadside
house where thriftless poverty finds its abode. No neat cottages with
gardens and flowers giving life to the landscape; no beautiful villages
where cultivated taste blends with rustic simplicity, enriching
and beautifying; no flourishing towns, alive with the bustle of
industry--none of those are seen; no, nor any diversified succession of
well cultivated farms with their substantial homesteads and capacious
barns; no well-constructed bridges, no well-conditioned roads.
Neglect, the harbinger of decay, has stamped her impress every where.
Slavery, bringing with it from its African home its characteristic
accompaniments, seems to have breathed over its resting places here the
same desolating breath which made Sahara a desert.
No one who has passed from a region of free labor to a slaveholding
district can have failed to notice the contrast presented by the change.
I have been here speaking of those portions of the country where
slavery has existed for a long time, and where it has formed the
prominent feature. In some sections the natural fertility of the soil
withstands for many years the deteriorating influence of slave culture;
in other quarters, the number of slaves being small, the effects of
slavery do not become prominently characteristic.
Grain growing districts, countries where a scientific agriculture
prevails, where the mind of man as well as the hands of labor, finds
employment in the culture of the ground, the rearing of trees, the
improvement of breeds of cattle, horses, and swine, the refining of the
texture of wool, the care of the dairy--those rural districts, where
Nature, repaying the manifold appliances of judicious care, tasks her
powers of production and puts on her loveliest forms of beauty, as
though grateful to man for his attention, and seeking communion with
his better spirit--_there_ Slavery can not dwell. It is not congenial
with such scenes.
Nor, again, can Slavery find a congenial abode in those beautiful
undulating regions of green hills and swiftly flowing streams which
afford such conveniences for the arts. In those regions nature invites
the co-operation of intelligent man; she offers her powers to turn the
wheels of his complicated machinery. The rude hands of servile labor
are not adapted to take advantage of such proffers.
What are all the arts of civilized life, but so many results of
man’s conquests over material things? The active mind, the inventive
intellect, in alliance with its minister, the fashioning hand, never
ceases in its efforts, as it comes in contact with the things of
nature, to turn them to its purposes. The laws of nature are studied
that man may act in unison with them, and through them gain the
mastery. But where Slavery forms the hand of the community, the working
instrument, how is it possible that intelligence should animate it to
give it dexterity, delicacy of touch, variety of powers? No, it is not
possible. The informing principle, the vital force of a perceptive
mind, quickened by its own impulses, can not descend into the form of
Slavery to animate and direct it. There may be great intelligence in a
slaveholding community; but it is not in the working members thereof.
Thus the mind of the South, devoted to political affairs, is shrewd,
active, and powerful, and maintains an ascendency in the republic,
far beyond the physical weight and resources of that section of the
union. The south has given to the United States seven out of the ten
Presidents who have sat at the head of our public affairs. But the mind
of the south can not approach nature to deal with it, to overcome it.
It has not the appliances, the practical instrumentality. Its head is
clear; but its hand is paralytic. If its working agency were endowed
with an inherent intelligence and a self-directing will, the necessary
accompaniments of an inventive genius, it would be servile no longer.
The south, then, must be content, so long as it retains Slavery, with
the simplest modes of labor; it must expect to have every thing done
in a clumsy, slovenly manner. It may grow cotton and sugar, while
fertility remains to its soil; but it will be dependent on the north
for the most ordinary implements of husbandry, from a cotton gin to
a hoe, a spade, or sugar ladle. Let us here quote the language of a
southern man:
“My recent visit to the northern states has fully satisfied me that
the true secret of our difficulties lies in the want of energy on
the part of our capitalists, and ignorance and laziness on the part
of those who _ought_ to labor. We need never look for thrift while
we permit our immense timber forests, granite quarries and mines, to
lie idle, and supply ourselves with hewn granite, pine boards, laths,
and shingles, &c., furnished by the lazy dogs at the north--ah, worse
than this, we see our back country farmers, many of whom are too lazy
to mend a broken gate, or repair the fences, to protect their crops
from the neighboring stock, actually supplied with their axe, hoe, and
broom handles, pitchforks, rakes, &c., by the _indolent_ mountaineers
of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The time was when every old woman
in the country had her gourd, from which the country gardens were
supplied with seeds. We now find it more convenient to permit this duty
to devolve on our careful friends, the Yankees. Even our boat-oars,
and handspikes for rolling logs, are furnished, ready made, to our
hands, and what jimcrack can possibly be invented of which we are
not the purchasers? These are the drains which are impoverishing the
south--these are the true sources of all our difficulties. Need I add,
further to exemplify our excessive indolence, that the Charleston
market is supplied with fish and wild game by northern men, who come
out here as regularly as the winter comes for this purpose, and, from
our own waters and forests, often realize, in the course of one winter,
a sufficiency to purchase a small farm in New England?”
The newspapers tell us from time to time of the establishment of
manufacturing works in the south. In the western portions of North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, where the country is hilly
and water power abundant, cotton factories are beginning to spring
up. Men of enterprise from the north go thither and embark in these
undertakings, which are said, for the most part, to promise well.
In many places in Virginia, manufactures have taken root firmly. In
proportion as this movement goes on and prospers, in such proportion
will Slavery recede; in such proportion will its hold at the south be
loosened.
For let it be remembered that the blending of the mind of the
community, with the labor of the community, implies necessarily
_freedom_, to the extent of such combination.
Look at the diversified forms in which the mind of the north finds
development: behold its manifold workings. What exhibitions of
ingenuity! What variety of invention! What astonishing results!
Lowell and Patterson and Pittsburg, each a living trophy of the
achievements of man over the powers of nature, or rather of his
achievements in alliance with the powers of nature. Yet what are these
three illustrations? The number of such is innumerable. Look at the
whole state of Ohio, the growing, gigantic embodiment of practical,
intellectual energy applied to the arts of industry.
Nor can any limits be assigned to this progression, nor any
restrictions be put upon the variety of its developments. The whole
world of material things lies subject to the controlling hand of man,
when his inquiring mind has discovered the laws of nature; and what can
hold back the free spirit from its incessant investigations?
But in a slaveholding community there is no such progression, no
such variety. The mind of the community is directed to other things
than labor; nay, labor falls into contempt and is looked upon as
derogatory; for it is _servile_ to labor. How can society, under such
circumstances, advance in the practical arts? Its industry is confined
to one pursuit, and in that there can be no excellence attained,
because slave labor is not imbued with intelligence. Evidently, such a
social state can not be fitted for permanence; it is not in harmony
with the laws of social existence and progress. Things can not be in a
wholesome condition where it is discreditable to work, since with labor
is conjoined every valuable attainment, including soundness of mind and
body.
It must doubtless, sooner or later, come to pass that the soil of the
Atlantic cotton growing States, worn out by servile culture, will be
unable to sustain Slavery by the side of the competition of the rich
alluvial lands of the south western portions of the Mississippi valley.
Georgia and the Carolinas, not to mention Virginia, where Slavery must
cease at an earlier date than in the more southern States, will find it
necessary to fall upon some other occupation besides cotton growing.
They must cultivate the vine, breed silk worms, rear the olive, turn
to account their manufacturing facilities--these, or other such
things, the inhabitants there must do if they would save the land from
depopulation.
There is but one element in the agriculture of Maryland to which
Slavery is attached with any affinity; and that is the Tobacco culture.
Nor is this affinity of a very binding nature. Tobacco can be grown
very successfully by free labor, as the statistics of Ohio demonstrate.
One result of the abolition of Slavery in this particular, would be the
subdivision of large plantations into small farms.
The system of cultivation would improve under this arrangement, and
the product would be increased. I presume it would be no exaggerated
calculation to estimate that the tobacco crop of Prince George’s
county, under a system of small farms and free labor, would be of twice
its present annual value ten years hence. The enhanced value of the
land would be in about the same proportion.
If the foregoing considerations afford any illustration of the reasons
why Slavery did not continue to exist in the States north of Maryland,
a brief examination of statistics, to say nothing of other things, will
show that the system can not continue much longer to exist in Maryland.
I ask attention to the remarkable facts exhibited by the census
records of our State since 1790.[2]
In nine counties in Maryland the white population has diminished
since 1790. These are the counties: Montgomery, Prince George, St.
Mary’s, Calvert, Charles, Kent, Caroline, Talbot and Queen Anne’s.
The aggregate white population of those counties in 1790 was 73,352;
in 1840 it was 54,408. Here is a falling off of nearly 20,000; if the
account were carried to the present year the falling off would be more
than 20,000.
These nine counties include the chief slaveholding sections of the
State. In five of them taken together, viz., Montgomery, Prince George,
St. Mary’s, Calvert, and Charles, the number of slaves exceeds that of
the white population. These are chiefly the tobacco growing counties,
together with the county of Frederick.
The counties of Allegany, Washington, Frederick and Baltimore and
Baltimore City are the portions of the State in which Slavery has
existed but partially. That is to say, Allegany, with an aggregate
population of 15,704, has but 811 slaves; Washington, in a population
of 28,862, has 2,505 slaves; Frederick has 6,370 slaves to a population
of 36,703; Baltimore county, 6,533 slaves in an aggregate population of
80,256; and Baltimore city includes but 3,212 slaves in its population
of 102,513.
Now taking these four counties and Baltimore city out of the account,
it will be found that the aggregate white population of the rest of the
State has diminished since 1790. In other words the increase of our
population, which is about one hundred and fifty thousand since the
first census, has been mainly in those counties where Slavery has been
least prominent. In those portions of the State where Slavery prevails
most prominently the white population, during the last fifty years, has
diminished.
Another remarkable result exhibited by the census statistics of
Maryland since 1790, is the increase of the free colored population,
in contrast with the diminution of slaves. The slave population of
our State amounted in 1790 to 103,036; in 1810 it reached 111,502,
its maximum. Since 1810 it has fallen to 89,619. The free colored
population on the other hand, which in 1790 was only 8,043, has
increased to 61,093. In a few years it must exceed the slave
population, for the one is increasing while the other decreases--a
double process which must soon annihilate the difference of some
twenty-five thousand.
The number of manumissions reported to the commissioners of the State
Colonization Fund from 1831 to 1845, under the act of the former
year, was 2,988. This shows an average of some two hundred and more
annually. I am not sure that this number exhibits all the manumissions.
It is enough, however, to show the tendency of things. With all the
restrictions which legislation has imposed upon manumissions they still
go on. It may be taken for certain that they will go on; that nothing
can stop them. Year after year the scruples of slaveholders in some
parts of the State prompt to manumission. The death beds of many afford
the occasions for giving these scruples force. It is useless to reason
about a thing of this sort. Emancipation in Maryland must go on. In my
humble judgment it is going on too fast--and for the simple reason that
we are not making adequate preparation for the new condition of things
which must ensue.
The contrast presented by the progress of the free States, within fifty
years, and by that of the slaveholding States for the same period,
is so familiar that it would be useless to burden these pages with
statistics to illustrate it. It may be sufficient to state, in respect
to the increase of population, that in 1790 the free States, including
Massachusetts and Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
Vermont, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, had a population of
1,971,455; while the slaveholding States, Delaware, Maryland, with
the District, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia,
contained 1,852,494 inhabitants. In 1840 the same free States numbered
a population of 6,761,082, and the same slaveholding States had an
entire population of 3,827,110. The former increased in a ratio more
than double as compared with the latter.
In our own State, however, where we do not grow cotton, sugar, or rice,
and where there are no new lands to present a fresh soil to the plough,
and to invite settlers from a distance, the increase of population in
our chief slaveholding counties has been nothing at all. There has
been a decrease, and a very marked one. How has this decrease happened
but by a process similar to that which rendered desolate three hundred
thousand acres in the champagne of Naples, in the days of Slavery among
the Romans--which made Italy itself almost one wilderness, reinhabited
by wild boars and other animals, before a single barbarian had crossed
the Alps!
Let us not conceal the truth from ourselves. Slavery in Maryland is
no longer compatible with progress; it is a dead weight and worse; it
has become a wasting disease, weakening the vital powers--a leprous
distilment into the life blood of the commonwealth. Yet we will have no
quacks to prescribe for our malady. It is only necessary that we should
become aware of our true condition; there are restorative energies in
abundance, rightly directed, to retrieve the State from every disorder
to which she is subject.