Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by
mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible
relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world,
but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal
blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and
made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the
outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but
it is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things,
the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will
hardly light the hovel of a single slave!
The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed.
There was perhaps at the middle of the eighteenth century not a
single non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe! All were alike
brutalized by the influences and traditions of the ancient system. All
were familiar with it--aye, they were nursed by it; for it has been
one of the strange aspects of human life that the children of the free
have been nursed by the mothers of the enslaved. All races, we repeat,
were alike poisoned with the venom of the serpent. Thus poisoned were
France and Germany. Thus poisoned was England; and thus also our
colonies. Time was, even down to the dawn of the Revolution, when
every American colony was slave-holding. Time was when the system was
taught in the schools and preached in the pulpits of all the civilized
world.
It was about the Revolutionary epoch, that is, the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, when the conscience of men began to be active on
the subject of human bondage. We think that the disposition to
recognize the wickedness and impolity of slavery was a part of the
general movement which came on in civilization, tending to
revolutionize not only the political but the social and ethical
condition of mankind. We know well that in our own country, when our
political institutions were in process of formation slavery was
courageously challenged. It was not challenged more audaciously in
the Northern than in the Southern colonies. Some of the latter, as,
for example, Georgia, had at the first excluded slavery as a thing
intolerable to freedom and righteousness. The leading men of the old
Southern States at the close of the last century nearly all repudiated
slavery in principle. They admitted it only in practice and because it
was a part of their inheritance. The patriots, both North and South,
were averse not only to the extension of the area of bondage, but to
the existence of it as a fact.
Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man. He wished in his heavy
but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men
might enjoy the blessings of freedom. Jefferson was almost radical on
the question. Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling
Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive
system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered. He
said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God is
just.
Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had
co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentiment
against slavery in that part of the Union. So, although the
institution was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees
thrown around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental
law. One may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous
question. Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had
appeared. There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and
philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave _trade_
should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive
genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton,
sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in
favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon
our country.
The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century
American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever
before. Neither the outcry of the Northern abolitionists nor the
appeals of Southern patriots such as Henry Clay, availed to check the
pro-slavery disposition in fully one-half the Union, or to abate the
covert favor with which the institution was regarded in nearly all the
other half.
Meanwhile, however, slavery was suffering and expiring in nearly all
parts of Europe. England began her battle against it even before the
beginning of the century. The work of the philanthropists, begun as
far back as 1786-87, when the Quakers, under the leadership of
Clarkson and Sharpe, began to cry out against the atrocity of human
bondage, now reached the public authorities, and ministers found it
necessary to take heed of what the people were saying and doing. Both
Pitt and Fox became abolitionists before the close of the eighteenth
century. The first attack was against the slave _trade_. Bills for the
abolition of this trade were passed in 1793-94 by the House of
Commons, but were rejected by the Peers. In 1804 another act was
passed; but this also was rejected by the Lords. So too, the bill of
1805! The agitation continued during 1806; and in 1807, just after the
death of Fox, the slave trade _was_ abolished in Great Britain.
The abolitionists went straight ahead, however, to attack slavery
itself. The Anti-slavery Society was founded. Clarkson and Wilberforce
and Buxton became the evangels of a new order that was seen far off.
It was not, however, until the great reform agitation of 1832 that the
government really took up the question of the abolition of slavery.
The bill for this purpose was introduced in the House of Commons on
the twenty-third of April, 1833. The process of abolition was to be
_gradual_. The masters were to be _compensated_. There were to be
periods of apprenticeship, after which freedom should supervene.
Twenty million pounds were to be appropriated from the national
treasury to pay the expenses of the abolition process.
It was on the seventh of August, 1833, that this bill was adopted by
the House of Commons. Two weeks afterward the House of Lords assented,
and on the twenty-eighth of August the royal assent was given. The
emancipation, however, was set for the first of August, 1834; and this
is the date from which the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and
her dependencies may be said to have occurred. In some parts, however,
the actual process of extinguishing slavery lagged. It was not until
1843 that the 12,000,000 of slaves under British control in the empire
were emancipated.
The virtual extinction of human slavery in the present century,
presents a peculiar ethnical study. Among the Latin races, the French
were the first to move for emancipation. It appears that the infusion
of Gallic blood, as well as the large influence of the Frankish
nations in the production of the modern French, has given to that
people a bias in favor of liberty. All the other Latin races have
lagged behind; but, France foreran even Great Britain in the work of
abolition. Scarcely had the great Revolution of 1789 got under way,
until an act of abolition conceding freedom to all men without regard
to race or color was adopted by the National Assembly.
It was on the fifteenth of May, 1791, that this great act was passed.
One of the darkest aspects of the character of Napoleon I. was the
favor which he showed to the project of restoring slavery in the
French colonies. But that project was in vain. The blow of freedom
once struck produced its everlasting results. Though slavery lingered
for nearly a half century in some of the French colonies, it survived
there only because of the revolutions in the home government which
prevented its final extinction. Acts were passed for the utter
extirpation of the system during the reign of Louis Philippe, and
again in the time of the Second Republic.
Meanwhile, the northern nations proceeded with the work of abolition.
In Sweden slavery ceased in 1847. In the following year Denmark passed
an Act of Emancipation. But the Netherlands did not follow in the good
work until the year 1860. The Spaniards and Portuguese have been among
the last to cling to the system of human servitude. In the outlying
possessions of Spain, in Spanish America and elsewhere, the
institution still maintains a precarious existence. In Brazil it was
not abolished until 1871. In the Mohammedan countries it still exists,
and may even be said to flourish. In Russia serfdom was abolished in
1863. He who at that date looked abroad over the world, might see the
pillars of human bondage shaken, and falling in every part of the
habitable globe which had been reclaimed by civilization.
In the meantime, Great Britain, in her usual aggressive way, had
established an anti-slavery propaganda, from which strong influences
extended in every direction. Her Anti-slavery Society re-established
itself in the United States. Abolition candidates for the presidency
began to be heard of and to be voted for at every quadrennial
election. Such was Birney in 1844. Such (strange to say) was Martin
Van Buren in 1848. Such four years afterward was John P. Hale, of New
Hampshire, and such in 1856, as the storm came on, was John C.
Fremont.
The political history of the United States shows at this epoch an
astounding growth of anti-slavery sentiment; and this expanding force
culminated in the election of Lincoln. Great, indeed, was the change
which had already swept over the landscape of American thought and
purpose since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few
thousand votes in the whole United States. Now the Rail-splitter had
come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its
flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the
bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm.
American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third
quarter of the century saw such a condition established in both the
New World and the Old, as made the restoration of human bondage
forever impossible.
Not until the present order of civilization shall be destroyed will
man be permitted again to hold his fellow-man in servitude. The chain
that was said "to follow the mother," making all her offspring to be
slaves; the manacles and fetters with which the weak were bound and
committed to the mercies of heartless traders; all of the insignia and
apparatus of the old atrocious system of bondage, have been heaped
together and cast out with the rubbish and offal of the civilized life
into the valley of Gehenna. There the whole shall be burned with
unquenchable fire! Then the smoke, arising for a season, shall be
swept away, and nothing but a green earth and a blue sky shall remain
for the emancipated race of man.