SLAVERY--CUBAN SLAVE LAWS, INSTITUTIONS, ETC.
It is not with pleasure that we approach this question, sacred to the
pugilism of debate. Nor is it worth while to add one word to the past
infinity of talk about it, unless that word could have the weight of a
new wisdom. We Americans, caught by the revolutionary spirit of the
French, make them too much our models, and run too much to grandiloquent
speech, and fine moral attitudinizing. The attitudes do not move the
world,--the words do not change the intrinsic bearings of things. They
whom we attack, the fight being over, sit down and wipe the dust from
their faces,--we sit and wipe the sweat from ours,--something stronger
than their will or ours passes between us,--it is the great moral
necessity which expresses the will of God. We and they are two forces,
pulling in opposite ways to preserve the equilibrium of a third point,
which we do not see. We must keep to our pulling, they cannot relinquish
theirs. The point of solution that shall reconcile and supersede the
differences is not in sight, nor has the wisest of us known how to
indicate it. Meanwhile, the calm satisfaction with which some of us
divide our national moral inheritance, giving them all the vices, and
ourselves all the virtues, is at once mournful and ridiculous. Why are
we New Englanders so _naïve_ as not to see this? When the representative
of a handful of men rises to speak, and, alluding to the progress which
a great question has made in twenty years, says: "This is all our
doing,--behold our work and admire it!" we cannot, but pause and wonder
if merely that irruption of bitter words can have produced so sweet a
fruit. In this view, what becomes of the moral evolution of the ages, of
the slow, sure help of Time, showing new aspects, presenting new
possibilities? What becomes of human modesty, which is nearly related
to human justice?
I preface with these remarks, because, looking down from where I sit, I
cannot curse the pleasant Southern land, nor those who dwell in it. Nor
would I do so if I thought tenfold more ill of its corruptions. Were
half my body gangrened, I would not smite nor reproach it, but seek with
patience an available remedy. This is the half of our body, and the
moral blood which brings the evil runs as much in our veins as in
theirs.
Looking at realities and their indications, we see a future for the
African race, educated by the enslavement which must gradually
ameliorate, and slowly die out. We see that in countries where the black
men are many, and the white few, the white will one day disappear, and
the black govern. In South Carolina, for example, the tide of emigration
has carried westward the flower of the white population. In Charleston,
all the aristocratic families have their mulatto representatives, who
bear their names. There are Pinckneys, Pringles, Middletons, and so on,
of various shades of admixture, living in freedom, and forming a
community by themselves. There are even mulatto representatives of
extinct families, who alone keep from oblivion names which were once
thought honorable. These things are indications of changes which will
work themselves slowly. Noble efforts have hemmed the evil in, and the
great soul of the World watches, we believe, at the borders, and will
not suffer the sad contagion to creep over them into the virgin
territories. But where the Institution sits at home, with its roots
undergrowing the foundations of society, we may be sad, but we must be
patient. The enfranchisement of a race, where it is lasting, is always
accomplished by the slow and solid progress of the race itself. The
stronger people rarely gives Freedom to the weaker as a boon,--when they
are able, they rise up and take it with their own hands. It is an
earning, not a gift, nor can the attributes which make liberty virtual
and valuable be commanded, save under certain moral conditions. A man is
not noble because he is free, but noble men constituting a nation
become free. Let the wounds of Africa first be stopped,--let her
lifeblood stay to enrich her own veins. The enslaved population of Cuba
and our own South must, under ordinary circumstances, attain in time a
condition in which Slavery shall be impossible.
But our business is with what actually exists. We will leave what shall
and should be to the Theorists who invent it, and to God who executes
it, often strangely unmindful of their suggestions.
The black and white races are, by all accounts, more mingled in Cuba,
than in any part of our own country. People who have long been resident
there assure us that some of the wealthiest and most important families
are of mixed blood. Animadvert upon this as you will, it is nevertheless
certain that it weaves close bonds of affinity between them, and ties of
Nature which, though ignored, cannot be unfelt. I have not seen in Cuba
anything that corresponds to our ideal separation of the two sets of
human beings, living in distinctness one from the other, hating and
wronging each other with the fierceness of enemies in the death-grapple.
The Negro cannot be so hated, so despised,--it is not in the nature of
things. His _bonhommie_, his gentle and attachable nature do not allow
it. Nor can he, in return, so hate. There is a great familiarity between
the children of the two races. They play, and run about, and are petted
together. We made a visit at a Creole house, where the youngest child, a
feeble infant of six months, was suckled by a black nurse. "You must see
the nurse's Baby," they all said, and the little daughter of the house
ran to fetch her, and soon returned, bringing her by one arm, the way in
which their own mothers carry them. She was an uncommonly handsome
infant, scarcely older than her white foster-brother, but greatly in
advance of him in her powers of locomotion. She was, according to
custom, entirely naked, but her shining black skin seemed to clothe her,
and her fine back and perfect limbs showed that she throve in nudity.
She ran about on all fours like some strange creature, so swift and
strong was she, and meeting with a chair, pulled herself up by it, and
stood dancing on one foot, holding out the other. The family all
gathered round her, admiring her color and her shape, and the little
girl finally carried her off in triumph, as she had brought her.
The slave children wear oftenest no clothing until five or six years
old. They look well-fed and healthy, only the prevalence of umbilical
Hernia shows a neglect of proper bandaging at birth,--the same trouble
from the same cause is very observable in the south of Italy. The
increase of the slaves is, of course, an important test of their
treatment,--it is small throughout the Island, and amounts to little
save on the best plantations. There is now a slow improvement in this
respect. The repression of the slave-trade has caused such a rise in the
price of negroes, that it is become better economy to preserve and
transmit their lives than to work them off in eight or ten years,
leaving no posterity to supply their place. Vile as these motives seem,
they are too near akin to the general springs of human action for us to
contemn them. Is it otherwise with operatives in England, or with
laborers in Ireland? Emigration lessens their numbers, and raises their
value,--it becomes important to society that they shall be fed and
sustained. One wrong does not excuse another, but where a class of
wrongs is universal, it shows a want of moral power in the race, at
which the individual cannot justly carp.
Even the race of Coolies, hired at small wages for eight years, and
exploitered for that time with murderous severity, have found a suicidal
remedy that nearly touches their selfish masters. So many of them
emancipated themselves from hard service by voluntary death, that it
became matter of necessity to lighten the weight about their necks, and
to leave them that minimum of well-being which is necessary to keep up
the love of life. The instinct itself is shown to be feeble in the race,
whereas the Negro clings to life under whatever pains and torment. The
Coolies are valued for their superior skill and intelligence, but as men
will treat a hired horse worse than a horse of their own, so they were,
until they happily bethought them of killing themselves, more hardly
used than the Negroes. Would that horses in the North had the same
resource. If the wretched beast, harnessed, loaded, and beaten over the
face and head by some greater brute in human shape, could only "his
quietus make" by himself, and be found hanging in his stall, what a
revolution would there be in the ideas of Omnibus-drivers and Carmen!
Self-assassination is, surely, the most available alleviation of
despotism. When Death is no longer terrible to the Enslaved, then let
the Enslaver look to it.
True, we have heard of horrible places in the interior of the Island,
where the crack of the whip pauses only during four hours in the
twenty-four, where, so to speak, the sugar smells of the blood of the
slaves. We have heard of plantations whereon there are no women, where
the wretched laborers have not the privileges of beasts, but are only
human machines, worked and watched. There, not even the mutilated
semblance of family ties and domestic surroundings alleviates the sore
strain upon life and limb. How can human creatures endure, how inflict
this? Let God remember them, as we do in our hearts, with tears and
supplication.
We have seen too, here and there, fiendish faces which looked as if
cruelty and hardness might be familiar to them. The past history of
Spain shows to what a point that nation can carry insensibility to the
torment of others. Yet the Creoles seem generally an amiable set of
people, enduring from the Spanish government much more than they in turn
inflict on those beneath them. Nor can we believe that even the Spaniard
can be a more dreaded tyrant than the Yankee, where the strong nature of
the latter has been left coarse and uncultured, or brutalized by
indulgence in vice. The nervous energy of his race makes him a worse
demon than the other, while the peaceable and pious traditions of his
youth, turned against him, urge him yet further from the sphere of all
that is Christian.
The slave laws of Cuba are far more humane than our own. It is only to
be doubted whether the magistrates in general are trustworthy in
carrying them out. Still, it is the policy of the Government to favor
the Negroes, and allow them definite existence as a third class, which
would be likely to range with the Government in case of civil war. It is
affirmed and believed by the Cubans that the colonial President has in
his hands orders to loose the slaves throughout the Island, at the first
symptoms of rebellion, that they may turn all their old rancors against
their late masters. The humane clauses of which we speak are the
following:--
In the first place, every slave is allowed by law to purchase his own
freedom, when he has amassed a sum sufficient for the purchase. He can
moreover compel his master to receive a small sum in part payment, and
then, hiring himself out, can pay the residue from his wages. The law
intervenes also, if desired, to fix the price of the slave, which it
will reduce to the minimum value. Every slave has the right to purchase
his child before birth for the sum of thirty dollars, a fortnight after,
for fifty, and so on, the value of course rising rapidly with the age
of the child. Again, a slave who complains of ill-treatment on the part
of his master may demand to be sold to another, and a limited space of
time is allowed, during which he can exert himself to find a purchaser.
These statutes do not seem to contemplate the perpetuity of slavery as
do our own institutions. What a thrill of joy would run through our
Southern and South-Western states, if every slave father and mother had
the power to purchase their own offspring for a sum not altogether
beyond their reach. How would they toil and starve to accumulate that
sum, and how many charitable friends would invest the price of a dress
or shawl in such black jewels, which would be the glory of so many black
mothers. On the other hand, it is to be feared that the ignorance and
poverty of the slaves may, in many places, make the benevolent intention
of these statutes null and void. Official corruption, too, may impede
their operation. In many parts of our own South, superior enlightenment
and a more humane state of public feeling may do something to
counterbalance the inferiority of legislation. Still, Americans should
feel a pang in acknowledging that even in the dark article of slave laws
they are surpassed by a nation which they contemn. Slaves are not sold
by public auction, in Cuba, but by private sale. Nor are they subject to
such rudeness and insult as they often receive from the lower whites of
our own Southern cities. The question now rises, whether in case of a
possible future possession of the Island by Americans, the condition of
the blacks would be improved. There is little reason to think so, in any
case, as our own unmitigated despotism would be enforced; but if their
new masters were of the Filibuster type, they might indeed sing with
sorrow the dirge of the Creole occupation, and betake themselves to the
Coolie expedient of obtaining freedom at small cost.
Not in such familiarity live the Creoles and Spaniards. Here, the
attitudes are sharply defined. Oppression on the one hand and endurance
on the other appear in a tangible form, and the oppression is
conscious, and the endurance compulsory. The Spanish race is in the
saddle, and rides the Creole, its derivative, with hands reeking with
plunder. Not content with taxes, customs, and prohibitions, all of which
pass the bounds of robbery, the Home Government looses on the Colony a
set of Officials, who are expected to live by peculation, their salaries
being almost nominal, their perquisites, whatever they can get. All
State-offices are filled by Spaniards, and even Judgeships and
Professorates are generally reserved to them. A man receives an
appointment of which the salary may be a thousand dollars per annum. He
hires at once an expensive house, sets up a _volante_, dresses his wife
and daughters without economy, lives in short at the rate of ten times
that sum, and retires after some years, with a handsome competency. What
is the secret of all this? Plunder,--twofold plunder, of the
inhabitants, and of the Home Government. And this, from the lowest to
the highest, is the universal rule. We spoke of customs and
prohibitions. Among the first, that on flour seems the most monstrous
imposition. No bread-stuffs being raised on the Island, the importation
of them becomes almost a condition of life, yet every barrel of wheaten
flour from the States pays a duty of eight dollars, so that it becomes
cheaper to ship the flour to Spain, and re-ship it thence to Cuba, than
to send it direct from here. Of prohibitions, the most striking is that
laid upon the vine, which flourishes throughout the Island. It may be
cultivated for fruit, but wine must on no account be made from the
grape, lest it should spoil the market for the Spanish wines. Among
taxes, none will astonish Americans more than the stamp-tax, which
requires all merchants, dealers, and bankers to have every page of their
books stamped, at high cost. Of course, no business contracts are valid,
recorded on any other than stamped paper. To these grievances are added
monopolies. All the fish caught on the Island is held at the disposition
of Señor Marti, the _Empresario_ of the Tacon theatre. This man was once
a pirate of formidable character,--after some negotiation with the
Tacon Government, he gave up his comrades to justice, receiving in
return his own safety, and the monopoly of the fish-market. The price of
this article of food is therefore kept at twenty-five cents a pound.
These compromises are by no means uncommon. The public Executioner of
Havana is a Negro whose life, once forfeit to the State, was redeemed
only by his consenting to perform this function for life. He is allowed
only the liberty of the Prison. One of our party, visiting that
Institution, found this man apparently on the most amicable terms with
all the inmates. The _Garrote_ being shown, he was asked if it was he
who garroted Lopez, and replied in the affirmative, with a grin. Our
friend inquired of him how many he had garroted: "How can one tell?" he
said, shrugging his shoulders, "so many, so many!" The prisoners chatted
and smoked with him, patting him on the back,--making thus that
discrimination between the man and his office which is at the bottom of
all human institutions. Of the great sums of money received by the
Government through direct and indirect taxation, little or nothing
revisits the people in the shape of improvements. The Government does
not make roads, nor establish schools, nor reform criminals, nor stretch
out its strong arm to prevent the offences of ignorant and depraved
youth. The roads, consequently, are few and dangerous,--a great part of
the Island being traversable only on horseback. There is little or no
instruction provided for the children of the poorer classes, and the
prisons are abominable with filth, nakedness, and disorder of every
kind. There is the same espionage, the same power of arbitrary
imprisonment as in Austria, Rome, and Naples, only they have America
near them, and in that neighborhood is fear to some, and hope to others.
The administration of justice would seem to be one of the worst of all
the social plagues that abide in the Island. Nowhere in the world have
people a more wholesome terror of going to law. The Government pays for
no forms of legal procedure, and a man once engaged in a civil or
criminal suit, is at the mercy of Judges and Lawyers who plunder him at
will, and without redress. If a man is robbed, the Police come to him at
once with offers of assistance and detection. It is often the case that
he denies and persists in denying the robbery, rather than be involved
in the torment of a suit. Much of what we narrate was common to all the
civilized world, an hundred years ago, but the Cubans do not deserve to
be held under the weight of these ancient abuses. They are not an effete
people, but have something of the spring of the present time in them,
and would gladly march to the measure of the nineteenth century, were it
not for the decrepit Government whose hand has stiffened with their
chains in it. The portrait of the vulgar Queen hangs in nearly every
place of note,--she is generally painted at full length, in a blue
dress. So coarse and weak is her face that one would think those
interested would keep it out of sight, that the abstract idea of royalty
might not be lowered by so unqueenly a representation. But this is
unjust, for what crowned head of the present day is there that has
anything intrinsically august in its aspect?
The Cubans, considered in comparison with the Spaniards, form quite as
distinct a people as the Americans, compared with the English. Climate
and the habits of insular life have partly brought about this
difference, but it has also a moral cause,--a separate interest makes a
separate people. The mother-countries that would keep their colonies
unweaned must be good nurses. The intermingling of the black element in
the Creole race is, as I have said, strongly insisted upon by competent
judges,--it is evidently not purely Caucasian, and there seems to be
little reason for supposing that it perpetuates any aboriginal descent.
The complexion, and in some degree the tastes of these people give some
color to the hypothesis of their indebtedness to the African race. The
prevailing color of the Creole is not the clear olive of the Spaniard,
nor the white of the Saxon,--it is an indescribable, clouded hue,
neither fair nor brown. We have seen children at a school who were
decidedly dark, and would have been taken for mulattoes in the
North,--they had straight hair, vivacious eyes, and coffee-colored
skins,--those whom we interrogated called them "_Criollos_" as if the
word had a distinct meaning. We could not ascertain that they were
considered to be of black descent, though the fact seemed patent. In
this school, which we saw at recess only, some of the mischievous boys
amused themselves with dragging their comrades up to us, and saying:
"Señora, this boy is a mulatto." The accused laughed, kicked, and
disclaimed.
The taste of the Cubans, if judged by the European standard, is bad
taste. They love noisy music,--their architecture consults only the
exigencies of the climate, and does not deserve the name of an art. Of
painting they must have little knowledge, if one may judge by the vile
daubs which deface their walls, and which would hardly pass current in
the poorest New England village. As to dress; although I have whispered
for your good, my lady friends, that the most beautiful summer-dresses
in the world may be bought in Havana, yet the Creole ladies themselves
have in general but glaring and barbaric ideas of adornment, and their
_volante_-toilette would give a Parisienne the ague.
The Creoles then, as a race, do not incline to plastic art, nor to the
energetic elegancies of life. Theirs is not the nature to grapple with
marble or bronze, or with the more intellectual obstacles of Painting.
One art remains to them, common to all early civilizations, first in
history, first too in rank,--they are Poets. Not only is a facility for
versification common amongst them, but they have some names which the
real halo adorns. Of these, Heredia, Placido, and Milanés are best
known.
This seems a very natural manifestation in their case. Held in check by
the despotism of the tropical sun, and excluded from social and
political action by the more barbarous despotism of Spain, their minds
are turned inward, and their energies flow in the channel of
contemplation. For Poetry is the freedom of the oppressed,--it is one
voice leaping up where a thousand arms are chained, but the thousand
hear it, and take courage. In the dreamy tropical life, the beautiful
surroundings must bear some fruit. Those glorious growths of tree and
flower, those prickly hedges with the sudden glare of a red sword among
them, those inconceivable sunsets and nights without parallel,--these
things must all write themselves upon the sensitive Southern nature, and
the language in which they write themselves is poetry. How far a wider
sphere of action may develop in them more hardy and varied powers is a
question not to be solved in the existing state of things.
It does not seem likely that the Cubans will ever by their own act
abolish slavery. The indolence and mechanical ineptitude which enter
into their characters will make them always a people to be waited on.
Perhaps no nation, living below a certain parallel, would be capable of
such a deed. The far-off English, in their cool island, could emancipate
the slaves in their own Indies, but the English dwelling among them
would never have relinquished the welcome service; nor is it likely that
the men of our own far South will ever conceive as possible another
social _status_ than the present relations between master and slave.
From the North the impulse must come, and however clogged and sanded
with unutterable nonsense of self-gratulation and vituperation of the
brother man, we must welcome it. The enslaved race too, gradually
conquering the finer arts of its masters, will rise up to meet the hand
of deliverance, having in due course of time reached that spiritual
level at which enslavement becomes impossible.
Sismondi, in the second volume of his Essays, has some sensible remarks
on the farming system as pursued in Tuscany, where the farmer is
employed on long leases, receiving one half the profits of the farm
worked by him. Sismondi sufficiently sets forth the advantages of this
over all other systems of leasing and underletting, as it allows the
husbandman a well-being in direct proportion to the thoroughness and
persistency of his labors. After speaking of the apparent failure of
English emancipation, he ascribes the idleness of the freed blacks to
their entire want of interest in the landed property about them, and
proposes associating them in this way to the interests of their
would-be employers. For the world can hardly afford that these people
should merely feed and grovel in the sun, when all the tillage of the
tropics lies fitted to their hand. Nor will it much longer afford, let
us hope, that the human tool shall work without the advantage that
individual will and interest alone can give him. They who thus consent
to use the man without his crowning faculties are like those who would
purchase the watch without the main-spring.
How all this is to end, doth not yet appear. The abstract principles of
right and wrong we know, but not the processes, nor the duration of
their working out in history. All the white handkerchiefs in Exeter Hall
will not force the general Congress of Nations to decide questions
otherwise than by the laws of convenience and advantage. England as a
power has never lifted a finger nor a breath against Russian serfdom or
Austrian oppression; and the Spanish government she is determined to
uphold in Cuba is reeking with abominations of which she cannot afford
to be cognizant.
I know that God has in His power swift miracles of redemption. He can
command the sudden Exodus of a wronged people, and can raise bloody
waves of wrath over the heads of their oppressors. But we cannot call
down these wonders, nor foretell their appointed time. Meantime, the
ram's horn Fantasias which our modern Prophets have so long been
performing against the walls of the southern Jericho do not seem to have
had the Divine commission to overthrow them.
I feel that any one in the North who gives a mild, perhaps palliative
view of slavery, will be subject to bitter and severe censure. But this
should surely make no difference to us in the sincere and simple
statement of our impressions. Intellectual justice revolts from the
rhetorical strainings, exaggerations, and denaturalizations of facts
which the Partisan continually employs, but which the Philosopher and
Historian must alike reject. Moral justice dissents from the habitual
sneer, denunciation, and malediction, which have become consecrated
forms of piety in speaking of the South. Believe me, in so far as we
allow personal temper, spite, or uncharity, place in our treatment of a
holy cause, in so far we do it wrong. Believe me, too, that the actual
alleviations which often temper the greatest social evils should not be
left out of sight, lest an atheistic despair should settle on the minds
of men. The overruling mercy of God is everywhere,--in the North and in
the South it has its work of consolation and of compensation. It
absolves us from no possible reform, from no labor for the amelioration
of the condition of our fellow-men. But as it limits alike the
infliction and endurance of wrong, and sets bounds which the boldest and
wickedest dare not pass, we must not paint the picture of what is,
without it.
So, with thoughts reverting to the slow and mighty operations in the
World of Nature, which seem to have their counterpart in the World of
Life and Fate,--trusting in the wisdom of the gray-haired centuries,
even when the half-grown ones call them Fool, I finish my Chapter of
philosophizing, somewhat, no doubt, to the relief of my Reader, but very
much more to my own.