Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments Part 35

Dr. Channing has told us, we are aware, of the "indomitable love of liberty," which had been infused into the breast of "fierce barbarians"

by their native wildernesses.[197] But we are no great admirers of a liberty which knows no law except its own will, and seeks no end except the gratification of pa.s.sion.[198] Hence, we have no very great respect for the liberty of fierce barbarians. It would make a h.e.l.l on earth. "My maxim," exclaims Dr. Channing, "is anything but slavery!" Even slavery, we cry, before a freedom such as his!

This kind of freedom, it should be remembered, was born in France and cradled in the revolution. May it never be forgotten that the "Friends of the Blacks" at Boston had their exact prototypes in "_les Amis des Noirs_" of Paris. Of this last society Robespierre was the ruling spirit, and Brissot the orator. By the dark machinations of the one,[199] and the fiery eloquence of the other, the French people--_la grande nation_--were induced, in 1791, to proclaim the principle of equality to and for the free blacks of St. Domingo. This beautiful island, then the brightest and most precious jewel in the crown of France, thus became the first of the West Indies in which the dreadful experiment of a forced equality was tried. The authors of that experiment were solemnly warned of the horrors into which it would inevitably plunge both the whites and the blacks of the island. Yet, firm and immovable as death, Robespierre sternly replied, then "Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles!"[200] The magnificent colony of St. Domingo did not quite perish, it is true; but yet, as every one, except the philanthropic "Ami des Noirs" of the present day, still remembers with a thrill of horror, the entire white population soon melted, like successive flakes of snow, in the furnace of that freedom which a Robespierre had kindled.

The atrocities of this awful ma.s.sacre have had, as the historian has said,[201] no parallel in the annals of human crime. "The negroes," says Alison, "marched with spiked infants on their spears instead of colors; they sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females on the dead bodies of their husbands." The work of death, thus completed with such outbursts of unutterable brutality, const.i.tuted and closed the first act in the grand drama of Haytien freedom.

But equality was not yet established. The colored men, or mulattoes, beheld, with an eye burning with jealousy, the superior power and ascendency of the blacks. Hence arose the horrors of a civil war.

Equality had been proclaimed, and anarchy produced. In this frightful chaos, the ambitious mulattoes, whose insatiable desire of equality had first disturbed the peace of the island, perished miserably beneath the vengeance of the very slaves whom they had themselves roused from subjection and elevated into irresistible power. Thus ended the second act of the horrible drama.

This b.l.o.o.d.y discord, this wild chaos of disgusting brutalities, of course terminated not in freedom, but in a military despotism. With the subsequent wars and fearful destruction of human life our present inquiry has nothing to do. We must confine our attention to the point before us, namely, the kind of freedom achieved by the blacks of St.

Domingo. We have witnessed the two great manifestations of that freedom; we shall now look at its closing scene. This we shall, for obvious reasons, present in the language of an English author.

"An independent negro state," says he, "was thus established in Hayti; but the people have not derived all the benefits which they sanguinely expected. Released from their compulsory toil, they have not yet learned to subject themselves to the restraints of regular industry. The first absolute rulers made the most extraordinary efforts to overcome the indolence which soon began to display itself. The _Code Rural_ directed that the laborer should fix himself on a certain estate, which he was never afterward to quit without a pa.s.sport from the government. His hours of labor and rest were fixed by statute. The whip, at first permitted, was ultimately prohibited; but as every military officer was allowed to chastise with a thick cane, and almost every proprietor held a commission, the laborer was not much relieved. By these means Mr.

Mackenzie supposes that the produce of 1806 was raised to about a third of that of 1789. But such violent regulations could not continue to be enforced amid the succeeding agitations, and under a republican _regime_. Almost all traces of laborious culture were soon obliterated; large tracts, which had been one entire sugar garden, presented now only a few scattered plantations."[202]

Thus the lands were divided out among the officers of the army, while the privates were compelled to cultivate the soil under their former military commanders, clothed with more than "a little brief authority."

No better could have been expected except by fools or fanatics. The blacks might preach equality, it is true, but yet, like the more enlightened ruffians of Paris, they would of course take good care not to practice what they had preached. Hence, by all the horrors of their b.l.o.o.d.y resolution, they only effected a change of masters. The white man had disappeared, and the black man, one of their own race and color, had a.s.sumed his place and his authority. And of all masters, it is well known, the naturally servile are the most cruel. "The earth," says Solomon, "cannot bear a servant when he reigneth."[203]

"The sensual and the dark rebel in vain: Slaves by their own compulsion, in mad game They burst their manacles, to wear the _name_ Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain."

COLERIDGE.

Thus "the world of good" they sought was found, most literally, in "the word;" for the word, the name of freedom, was all they had achieved--at least of good. Poverty, want, disease, and crime, were the substantial fruits of their boasted freedom.

In 1789, the sugar exported was 672,000,000 pounds; in 1806, it was 47,516,531 pounds; in 1825, it was 2020 pounds; in 1832, it was 0 pounds. If history had not spoken, we might have safely inferred, from this astounding decline of industry, that the morals of the people had suffered a fearful deterioration. But we are not left to inference. We are informed, by the best authorities,[204] that their "morals are exceedingly bad;" and that under the reign of liberty, as it is called, their condition has, in all respects, become far worse than it was before. "There appears every reason to apprehend," says James Franklin, "that it will recede into irrecoverable insignificance, poverty, and disorder."[205]

Mr. T. Babington Macaulay has, we are aware, put forth certain notions on the subject of liberty, which are exactly in accordance with the views and the spirit of the abolitionists, as well as with the cut-throat philosophy of the Parisian philanthropists of the revolution.

As these notions are found in one of his juvenile productions, and ill.u.s.trated by "a pretty story" out of Ariosto, we should not deem it worth while to notice them, if they had not been retained in the latest edition of his Miscellanies. But for this circ.u.mstance, we should pa.s.s them by as the rhetorical flourish of a young man who, in his most mature productions, is often more brillant than profound.

"Ariosto," says he, "tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the period of her disguise were forever excluded from partic.i.p.ation in the blessings which she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied and protected her, she afterward revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love, and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But wo to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her glory."

For aught we know, all this may be very fine poetry, and may deserve the place which it has found in some of our books on rhetoric. But yet this beautiful pa.s.sage will--like the fairy whose charms it celebrates--be so surely transformed into a hateful snake or venomous toad, that it should not be swallowed without an antidote. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Barriere, and the black Dessalines, took this hateful, hissing, stinging, maddening reptile to their bosoms, and they are welcome to its rewards. But they mistook the thing: it was not liberty transformed; it was tyranny unbound, the very scourge of h.e.l.l, and Satan's chief instrument of torture to a guilty world. It was neither more nor less than Sin, despising G.o.d, and warring against his image on the earth.

We do not doubt--nay, we firmly believe--that in the veritable history of the universe, _a.n.a.logous_ changes have taken place. But then these awful changes were not mere fairy tales. They are recorded in the word of G.o.d. When Lucifer, the great bearer of light, himself was _free_, he sought equality with G.o.d, and thence became a hateful, hissing serpent in the dust. But he was not fully cursed, until "by devilish art" he reached "the organs of man's fancy," and with them forged the grand illusion that equality alone is freedom.

For even sinless, happy Eve was made to feel herself oppressed, until, with keen desire of equality with G.o.ds, "forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate:"--

"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of wo, That all was lost."

How much easier, then, to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned G.o.d's Paradise itself into a blighted world.

If Mr. Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license, than which no two things in the universe are more diametrically opposed to each other, his pa.s.sion for fine rhetoric would not have betrayed him into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom.

Liberty is--as we have seen--the bright emanation of reason in the form of law; license is the triumph of blind pa.s.sion over all law and order.

Hence, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human pa.s.sion must be restrained. For this purpose, as Mr. Burke has said, there must be power somewhere; and if there be not moral power within, there must be physical power without. Otherwise, the restraints will be too weak; the safeguards of liberty will give way, and the pa.s.sions of men will burst into anarchy, the most frightful of all the forms of tyranny. Shall we call this liberty? Shall we seek the secure enjoyment of natural rights in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seek the pure light of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more diabolical ma.s.sacres of St. Domingo. If such were freedom, it would, in sober truth, be more fitly symbolized by ten thousand hissing serpents than by a single poisonous snake; and by all on earth, as in heaven, it should be abhorred. Hence, those pretended friends and advocates of freedom, who would thus fain trans.m.u.te her form divine into such horribly distorted shapes, are with her enemies confederate in dark, misguided league.

-- V. _The consequences of abolition to the South._

"We have had experience enough in our own colonies," says the _Prospective Review_, for November, 1852, "not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale." Now this, though it comes to us from across the Atlantic, really sounds like the voice of genuine philanthropy. Nor do we wish to see the experiment, which has brought down such wide-spread ruin on all the great interests of St. Domingo and the British colonies, tried in this prosperous and now beautiful land of ours. It requires no prophet to foresee the awful consequences of such an experiment on the lives, the liberties, the fortunes, and the morals, of the people of the Southern States. Let us briefly notice some of these consequences.

Consider, in the first place, the vast amount of property which would be destroyed by the madness of such an experiment. According to the estimate of Mr. Clay, "the total value of the slave property in the United States is twelve hundred millions of dollars," all of which the people of the South are expected to sacrifice on the altar of abolitionism. It only moves the indignation of the abolitionist that we should for one moment hesitate. "I see," he exclaims, "in the immenseness of the value of the slaves, the enormous amount of the robbery committed on them. I see 'twelve hundred millions of dollars'

seized, extorted by unrighteous force."[206] But, unfortunately, his pa.s.sions are so furious, that his mind no sooner comes into contact with any branch of the subject of slavery, than instantly, as if by a flash of lightning, his opinion is formed, and he begins to declaim and denounce as if reason should have nothing to do with the question. He does not even allow himself time for a single moment's serious reflection. Nay, resenting the opinion of the most sagacious of our statesmen as an insult to his understanding, he deems it beneath his dignity even to make an attempt to look beneath the surface of the great problem on which he condescends to pour the illuminations of his genius.

Ere we accept his oracles as inspired, we beg leave to think a little, and consider their intrinsic value.

Twelve hundred millions of dollars extorted by unrighteous force! What enormous robbery! Now, let it be borne in mind, that this is the language of a man who, as we have seen, has--in one of his lucid intervals--admitted that _it is right to apply force_ to compel those to work who will not labor from rational motives. Such is precisely the application of the force which now moves his righteous indignation!

This force, so justly applied, has created this enormous value of twelve hundred millions of dollars. It has neither seized, nor extorted this vast amount from others; it has simply created it out of that which, but for such force, would have been utterly valueless. And if experience teaches any thing, then, no sooner shall this force be withdrawn, than the great value in question will disappear. It will not be restored; it will be annihilated. The slaves--now worth so many hundred millions of dollars--would become worthless to themselves, and nuisances to society. No free State in the Union would be willing to receive them--or a considerable portion of them--into her dominions. They would be regarded as pests, and, if possible, everywhere expelled from the empires of freemen.

Our lands, like those of the British West Indies, would become almost valueless for the want of laborers to cultivate them. The most beautiful garden-spots of the sunny South would, in the course of a few years, be turned into a jungle, with only here and there a forlorn plantation.

Poverty and distress, bankruptcy and ruin, would everywhere be seen. In one word, the condition of the Southern States would, in all material respects, be like that of the once flourishing British colonies in which the fatal experiment of emanc.i.p.ation has been tried.

Such are some of the fearful consequences of emanc.i.p.ation. But these are not all. The ties that would be severed, and the sympathies crushed, by emanc.i.p.ation, are not at all understood by abolitionists. They are, indeed, utter strangers to the moral power which these ties and sympathies now exert for the good of the inferior race. "Our patriarchal scheme of domestic servitude," says Governor Hammond, "is indeed well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature. It is not wanting in its enthusiasm and its poetry. The relations of the most beloved and honored chiefs, and the most faithful and admiring subjects, which, from the time of Homer, have been the theme of song, are frigid and unfelt, compared with those existing between the master and his slaves; who served his father, and rocked his cradle, or have been born in his household, and look forward to serve his children; who have been through life the props of his fortune, and the objects of his care; who have partaken of his griefs, and looked to him for comfort in their own; whose sickness he has so frequently watched over and relieved; whose holidays he has so often made joyous by his bounties and his presence; for whose welfare, when absent, his anxious solicitude never ceases, and whose hearty and affectionate greetings never fail to welcome him home.

In this cold, calculating, ambitious world of ours, there are few ties more heart-felt, or of more benignant influence, than those which mutually bind the master and the slave, under our ancient system, handed down from the father of Israel."

Let the slaves be emanc.i.p.ated then, and, in one or two generations, the white people of the South would care as little for the freed blacks among us, as the same cla.s.s of persons are now cared for by the white people of the North. The prejudice of race would be restored with unmitigated violence. The blacks are contented in servitude, so long as they find themselves excluded from none of the privileges of the condition to which they belong; but let them be delivered from the authority of their masters, and they will feel their rigid exclusion from the society of the whites and all partic.i.p.ation in their government. They would become clamorous for "their inalienable rights."

Three millions of freed blacks, thus circ.u.mstanced, would furnish the elements of the most horrible civil war the world has ever witnessed.

These elements would soon burst in fury on the land. There was no civil war in Jamaica, it is true, after the slaves were emanc.i.p.ated; but this was because the power of Great Britain was over the two parties, and held them in subjection. It would be far otherwise here. For here there would be no power to check--while there would be infernal agencies at work to promote--civil discord and strife. As Robespierre caused it to be proclaimed to the free blacks of St. Domingo that they were naturally ent.i.tled to all the rights and privileges of citizens; as Mr. Seward proclaimed the same doctrine to the free blacks of New York; so there would be kind benefactors enough to propagate the same sentiments among our colored population. They would be instigated, in every possible way, to claim their natural equality with the whites; and, by every diabolical art, their bad pa.s.sions would be inflamed. If the object of such agitators were merely to stir up scenes of strife and blood, it might be easily attained; but if it were to force the blacks into a social and political equality with the whites, it would most certainly and forever fail. For the government of these Southern States was, by our fathers, founded on the VIRTUE and the INTELLIGENCE of the people, and there we intend it shall stand. The African has neither part nor lot in the matter.

We cannot suppose, for a moment, that abolitionists would be in the slightest degree moved by the awful consequences of emanc.i.p.ation.

Poverty, ruin, death, are very small items with these sublime philanthropists. They scarcely enter into their calculations. The dangers of a civil war--though the most fearful the world has ever seen--lie quite beneath the range of their humanity.

Indeed, we should expect our argument from the consequences of emanc.i.p.ation to be met by a thorough-going abolitionist with the words,--"Perish the Southern States rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles!" We ask them not to sacrifice their principles to us; nor do we intend that they shall sacrifice us to their principles. For if perish we must, it shall be as a sacrifice to our own principles, and not to theirs.

NOTE.--It has not fallen within the scope of our design to consider the effects of emanc.i.p.ation, and of the consequent destruction of so large an amount of property, on the condition and prosperity of the world. Otherwise it might easily have been shown that every civilized portion of the globe would feel the shock. This point has been very happily, though briefly, ill.u.s.trated by Governor Hammond, in his "Letters on Slavery."

Nor has it formed any part of our purpose, in the following section, to discuss the influence of American slavery on the future destiny and civilization of Africa. This subject has been ably discussed by various writers; and especially by an accomplished divine, the Rev. William N.

Pendleton, in a discourse published in the "Virginian Colonizationist," for September, 1854.

-- VI. _Elevation of the Blacks by Southern slavery._

The abolitionists, with the most singular unanimity, perseveringly a.s.sert that Southern slavery degrades its subjects "into brutes." This a.s.sertion fills us with amazement. If it were possible, we would suppose, in a judgment of charity, that its authors knew nothing of the history of Africa or of the condition of our slaves. But such ignorance is not possible. On the other hand, we find it equally impossible to believe that so many men and women--the very lights of abolitionism--could knowingly utter so palpable a falsehood. Thus we are forced to the conclusion, that the authors of this charge are so completely carried away by a blind hatred of slavery, that they do not care to keep their words within the sacred bounds of eternal truth. This seems to be the simple, melancholy fact. The great question with them seems to be, not what is true or what is false, but what will most speedily effect the destruction of Southern slavery. Any thing that seems to answer this purpose is blindly and furiously wielded by them.

The Edinburgh Review, in a high-wrought eulogy on an American auth.o.r.ess, says that she a.s.sails slavery with arrows "poisoned by truth." Her words, it is true, are dipped in flaming poison; but _that_ poison is not truth. The truth is never poison.

The native African could not be degraded. Of the fifty millions of inhabitants of the continent of Africa, it is estimated that forty millions were slaves. The master had the power of life and death over the slave; and, in fact, his slaves were often fed, and killed, and eaten, just as we do with oxen and sheep in this country. Nay, the hind and fore-quarters of men, women, and children, might there be seen hung on the shambles and exposed for sale! Their women were beasts of burden; and, when young, they were regarded as a great delicacy by the palate of their pampered masters. A warrior would sometimes take a score of young females along with him, in order to enrich his feasts and regale his appet.i.te. He delighted in such delicacies. As to his religion, it was even worse than his morals; or rather, his religion was a ma.s.s of the most disgusting immoralities. His notion of a G.o.d, and the obscene acts by which that notion was worshiped, are too shocking to be mentioned.

The vilest slave that ever breathed the air of a Christian land could not begin to conceive the horrid iniquities of such a life. And yet, in the face of all this, we are told--yea, we are perseveringly and eternally told--that "the African has been degraded into a brute" by American slavery! Indeed, if such creatures ever reach the level of simple brutality at all, is it not evident they must be elevated, and not degraded, to it?

The very persons who make the above charge know better. Their own writings furnish the most incontestable proof that they know better. A writer in the Edinburgh Review,[207] for example, has not only a.s.serted that "slavery degrades its subjects into brutes," but he has the audacity to declare, in regard to slavery in the United States, that "we do not believe that such oppression is to be found in any other part of the world, civilized or uncivilized. We do not believe that such oppression ever existed before." Yet even this unprincipled writer has, in the very article containing this declaration, shown that he knows better. He has shown that he knows that the African has been elevated and improved by his servitude in the United States. We shall proceed to convict him out of his own mouth.

"The African slave-trade was frightful," says he; "but its prey were savages, accustomed to suffering and misery, and to endure them with patience almost amounting to apathy. The victims of the American slave-trade have been bred in a highly-cultivated community. Their dispositions have been softened, their intellects sharpened, and their sensibilities excited, by society, by Christianity, and by all the ameliorating but enervating influences of civilization. The savage submits to be enslaved himself, or have his wife or his child carried off by his enemies, as merely a calamity. His misery is not embittered by indignation. He suffers only what--if he could--he would inflict. He cannot imagine a state of society in which there shall not be masters and slaves, kidnapping and man-selling, coffles and slave-traders, or in which any cla.s.s shall be exempt from misfortunes which appear to him to be incidental to humanity."

Thus, according to this very sagacious, honest, consistent writer, it matters little what you do with the native African: he has no moral sense; he feels no wrong; he suffers only what he would inflict. But when you come to deal with the American slave, or, as this writer calls him, "the civilized Virginian," it is quite another thing! His dispositions have been softened, his intellect sharpened, and his sensibilities roused to a new life, by society and by Christianity! And yet, according to this very writer, this highly civilized Virginian is the man who, by American slavery, has been degraded from the native African into a brute! We dismiss his lawless savage, and his equally lawless pen, from our further consideration.

We proceed, in like manner, to condemn Dr. Channing out of his own mouth. He has repeatedly a.s.serted that slavery among us degrades its subjects into brutes. Now hear him on the other side of this question.

"The European race," says he, "have manifested more courage, enterprise, invention; but in the dispositions which Christianity particularly honors, how inferior are they to the African? When I cast my eyes over our Southern region,--the land of bowie-knives, lynch-law, and duels, of 'chivalry,' 'honor,' and revenge; and when I consider that Christianity is declared to be a spirit of charity, 'which seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and endureth all things,' and is also declared to be 'the wisdom from above,' which is 'first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits;' can I hesitate in deciding to which of the races in that land Christianity is most adapted, and in which its n.o.blest disciples are most likely to be reared?"[208]