Yes, let it pass. There was music in that laughter, doubtless, but it
cost us too dear. I think we Virginians[1] are agreed as to that,—more
than agreed,—yet we cannot bring ourselves to look as others do, upon
the state of things which rendered it possible. As one man, we rejoice
that slavery is dead; but even the victors in the late struggle—the
magnanimous among them, at least—will hardly find fault with us if we
drop a sentimental tear, as it were, upon its tomb. A reasonable man is
glad that an aching tooth is well out of his mouth; but to the
autocratic dentist who should pull it out by force, his gratitude would
not be boisterous; and then, after all, it leaves a void. But cheer up,
brother Virginians, listen to your Bushwhackerish bard while he chaunts
you a lay. He would have his say; but he will be good and kind. He would
not willingly bore you; and hence, ever thoughtful and considerate, he
serves up his rhetoric in a separate course. Skip this chapter, then, if
you will. You will find the story continued in the next.
Yes, it is all true enough, I admit. It was but the other day, so to
speak, that the first shipload of negroes was landed on the shores of a
continent peopled by a race which, after all has been said, remain the
most interesting of savages, and who, if not heroes, have easily become
heroic under the magicians’ wands of Cooper and of Longfellow. That
shipload and its successors have become millions; while the genius of a
Barnum scarce suffices to bring together enough Redskins to make a
Knickerbocker holiday. The descendant of the naked black, whose tribe,
on the Gold Coast, still trembles before a Fetish, rustles, beneath
fretted ceilings, in the robes of a bishop; while some chief of the
kindred, perhaps, of Tecumseh, shivers on the wind-swept plains, under
the fluttering rags of a contract blanket. His half-naked squaw hugs her
pappoose to her bosom, and flees before the sabres of our cavalry; but
her more deeply-tinted sister struts, beflounced, the spouse of a
senator. In one word, the race which the Anglo-Saxons found on this
continent remained free, and perished; the people they imported and
enslaved, multiplied and flourished. I do not feel myself the Œdipus to
solve this riddle of modern morals; but, with my people, I fail to see
the consistency of Victor Hugo[2] for example, who could whine over the
fate of John Brown,—hanged for an attempt to achieve the liberty of the
negro through murder,—but who, when Captain Jack stood at the foot of
the gallows, made no sign. Captain Jack, he too, through murder, sought
to maintain his ancestral right to independence—nay, existence—and a
few acres of wretched lava-beds. The distempered fancy of the first saw,
as he gazed upon the corpses of the fellow-citizens of Washington, of
Jefferson, and of Henry, countless dusky legions rushing to his
rescue,—the clear eye of the other showed him forty millions pouring
down upon his less than a hundred braves, to avenge the death of Canby;
and yet he slew him. John Brown is a hero, his name is a legend, his
tomb a shrine; but where are thy wretched bones slung away, poor Jack?
Hadst thou been fair, and dwelt in Lacedæmon, in Xerxes’ days, the name
of Leonidas shone not now in solitary glory adown the ages; wert thou
living now, and of sable hue, thou mightest be sitting at the desk of
Calhoun. Alas! alas! that thou shouldst have been of neutral shade; for
how couldst thou be a man and a brother, being only copper-colored?
But leaving these knotty points of ethical casuistry to the
philanthropists, I reiterate that I think that the picture I have drawn
of certain aspects of slavery, as it existed in Virginia, reveals its
fatal weakness. That weakness consisted in the fact that it realized the
ideal set forth in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” That eloquent work of
the erratic French dreamer is one long and passionate protest against
the sorrows and sufferings of the poor. In those sorrows and sufferings
he finds the source of all the crimes that dishonor humanity. How, as
things existed with us, poverty sufficiently grinding to produce crime
was actually unknown; so that our little world was just the world that
he sighs for.
Victor Hugo plumes himself, I believe, upon never having learned the
gibberish that the English call their language. Therefore, as I do not
design having this work translated into the various modern languages
(why should I, forsooth, since by the time your day rolls round the
aforesaid gibberish will be the only tongue spoken by mankind?) he will
never have the pain of seeing himself ranked among the upholders of
slavery. Whatever he might say, however, it is very clear that no state
of things heretofore existing has so well fulfilled the conditions of
his ideal of society. It is no fault of mine if his ideal be absurd.[3]
For I fear me much this is no ideal world we live in.
But ah, what a lotus-dream we were a-dreaming, when from out our blue
sky the bolt of war fell upon us! We lived in a land in which no one was
hungry, none naked, none a-cold; where no man begged, and no man was a
criminal, no woman fell—from necessity; where no one asked for bread,
and all, even the slaves, could give it; where Charity was unknown, and
in her stead stood Hospitality, with open doors. What tidings we had,
meanwhile, of the things of the outer world, made us cherish all the
more fondly the quietude of our Sleepy Hollow. The nations, had they not
filled the air for a century past with the murmur of their unrest?
Revolutions, rebellions, barricades, bread-riots,—agrarianism,
communism, the frowning hosts of capital and labor—the rumor of these
grisly facts and grislier phantoms reached us, but from afar, and as an
echo merely; and lulled, by our exemption from these ills, into a fatal
security, we failed to perceive the breakers upon which we were slowly
but surely drifting. The lee-shore upon which our ship was so
somnolently rocking was nothing less than bankruptcy. Spendthrifts, we
dreamed that our inheritance was too vast ever to be dissipated; nay, we
fondly imagined that we were adding to our substance. Did not our
statesmen, our Able Editors, unceasingly assure us that we were the
richest people on the globe, and growing daily richer? And what had been
that inheritance? A noble, virgin land, unsurpassed, all things
considered, anywhere,—a land that cost us nothing beyond the beads of
Captain Smith and the bullets of his successors,—a land which no
mortgages smothered, no tax-gatherer devoured. But smothered and
devoured it was, and by our slaves.
It is doubtful whether slavery was ever, at any stage of the world’s
history, wise, from an economical point of view, though it was, of
course, in one aspect, in the interest of humanity, when, at some
prehistoric period, men began to enslave rather than butcher their
prisoners of war. But it seems very clear, that if the conditions of any
society were ever such that its greatest productive force could only be
realized through the restraints and constraints of slavery, then that
slavery must needs have been absolute and pitiless. No half-and-half
system will suffice. Severe and continuous labor is endured by no man
who can avoid it. But labor, continuous and severe, is the price paid by
the great mass of mankind for the mere privilege of being counted in the
census; so terrible is that struggle for existence, of the Darwinian
dispensation, which, whether we be Darwinians or not, we must needs live
under. This, in our dreamland, we quietly ignored. The political
economists are all agreed that from the sharpest toil little more can be
hoped for than the barest support of the toilers; and we were not
ignorant of political economy. But is there not an exception to every
rule? And were we not that exception? In _our_ favored nook, at least,
the cold dicta of science should not hold sway. And so our toilers did
half work,—and got double rations. In one word, we spent more than we
made. And although we could not be brought to see this, it became very
plain when the war came and settled our accounts for us; for I venture
to assert that in April, 1865, the State of Virginia was worth
intrinsically less than when, in 1607, Captain John Smith and his young
gentlemen landed at Jamestown. In other words, there had been going on
for two hundred and fifty years a process the reverse of accumulation.
For that length of time we had been living on our principal,—the native
wealth of the soil. While, in other parts of the country, the struggle
for existence had caused barrenness to bloom, the very rocks to grow
fat, in ours the struggle for ease had converted a garden into something
very like a wilderness. The forests we found had fallen; the rich soil
of many wide districts was washed into the sea, leaving nothing to
represent them; and when the smoke of battle cleared away, we saw a
naked land. It could not have been otherwise. Thoroughly imbued with the
spirit of the nineteenth century, as well as the principles of the
Jeffersonian Democracy, we were entangled in a system of things not
compatible, profitably at least, with either. We could not forget that
our slaves were human. There were ties that we felt in a hundred ways.
We loved this old nurse. We humored that old butler. We indulged, here a
real, there a sham invalid, until, in one word, the thing began to cost
more than it came to, and it was time we shook off the incubus.
And there was a time when many Virginians, now living, began to see
this; and had they been let alone, not many years would have passed
before we should have freed ourselves from the weight that oppressed us.
But in an evil hour there arose a handful of men with a mission,—a
mission to keep other people’s consciences,—often—as certain national
moral phenomena subsequently showed—to the neglect of that charity
which begins at home. From that day all rational discussion of the
question became impossible in Virginia; and a consummation for which
many of the wisest heads were quietly laboring became odious even to
hint at, under dictation from outsiders; and on the day when the first
abolition society was formed, the fates registered a decree that slavery
should go down; not in peace, but by war; not quietly and gradually
extinguished, with the consent of all concerned, but with convulsive
violence,—drowned in the blood of a million men, and the tears of more
than a million women.
Well, they were only white men and women,—so let that pass, too.
-----
[1] Obviously, as often elsewhere, Mr. Whacker here says _Virginians_,
instead of _Southerners_, to avoid all semblance of sectional feeling.
[2] Written, doubtless, before the death of “The Master.”—_Ed._
[3] In my capacity of Bushwhacker, I make it a matter of business to
laugh whenever I feel like it. I felt like it when, on reading the
above, this parallelism occurred to me: the hero of the
“Miserables”—Jean Valjean—is a thief. Now, holds our author, whenever
a man is so unfortunate as to be a thief, no blame should be attached to
him,—and he puts it about thus: “A thief is not a thief. Nor a crime.
He is a product. A fact. A titanic fact. A thief is a man who hears the
cry of a child. It is his child. It is a cry for bread. Society gives
him a stone. Effacement of his rectitude. He appropriates society’s
wallet. And serves society right; for ’tis society has made him a
thief.”
Leaving to some coming man the task and the credit of removing from
society all stain, by discovering who or what made society a
thief-maker, ’tis this that moved my Bushwhackerish soul to smile: this
Jean Valjean, whom society is so wicked in producing, turns out to be a
better man than any other man ever was, is, or shall be. So we, under
our very sinful system, would seem to have prepared for the elective
franchise a whole people lately buried in heathenism, without, as it
were, half trying. Nor does this claim rest merely upon that braggartism
so peculiarly Southern. The very best people on the other side—nay, the
people who, by their own admission, embrace all the culture and virtue
of the country—have been the first to give us this meed of praise,—yet
it is notorious that very few white men are yet, with all their Bacons,
and Sydneys, and Hampdens, and Jeffersons to enlighten them, qualified
for that august function. Nay, even in France herself, though she is, as
Victor Hugo says,—and he should know,—the mother and the father, and
the uncle and the aunt, and the brother and the sister of civilization,
I believe there are Frenchmen not yet fitted to wield the ballot,—among
whom, I doubt not, some profane persons would make so bold as to class
the illustrious rhapsodist himself.