The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 10

The fact that such a man as Horace Greeley was taking comfort because that outrage would "drive the slave power to new outrages"[67] throws a strong side-light on the tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They were following Garrison. Garrison, the father of the Abolitionists, had begun his campaign against slave-holders by "exhausting upon them the vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his antagonists."[68] The new party--his successor and beneficiary, was now felicitating itself that ultimate good would come, even from the John Brown raid. It would further their policy of "_driving the slave power to new outrages_."

[67] Channing.

[68] Hart.

People at the North, conservatives and all, held their breath for a time after Harper's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in the press, on the rostrum, and from the pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No a.s.sertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From the noted "Brownlow and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia (_Lippincott_), we take the following as a specimen of the abuse a portion of the Northern press was then heaping on the Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the _New York Independent_ of November, 1856:

"The ma.s.s of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain.... Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina!... Progeny of the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and sheep-stealers, and pick-pockets of Old England!"

The South was not to be outdone, and here was a retort from _De Bow's Review_, July, 1858:

"The basis, framework, and controlling influence of Northern sentiment is Puritanism--the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of England, which ... has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees ... the worst bigots on earth and the meanest of tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."[69]

[69] Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery," p. 303.

And the non-slave-holder of the South did not escape from the pitiless pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the slave-holder, and this was not only an offence but a puzzle.

It became quite common in the North for anti-slavery writers to cla.s.sify the non-slave-holding agricultural cla.s.ses of the South as "poor whites," thus distinguishing them from the slave-holders; and the idea is current even now in that section that as a cla.s.s the lordly slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average non-slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the Southern slave-holder, his neighbor and political ally, could despise.

Educated and uneducated, these people were independent voters and honest jurors, the very backbone of Southern State governments that always will be notable in history for efficiency, purity, and economy.

This cla.s.s of voters, however, came in for much abuse in the literature of the crusade. They were all lumped together as "poor whites,"

sometimes as "poor white trash," and the belief was inculcated that their imperious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. "Poor white trash," on its face, is "n.i.g.g.e.r talk," caught up, doubtless, from Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, and used by writers who, from information thus derived, pictured Southern society.

This is a sample of the numerous errors that crept into the literature of one section of our Union about social conditions in the other during that memorable sectional controversy. It is on a par with the idea that prevailed, in some quarters in the South, that the Yankee cared for nothing but money, and would not fight even for that.

Southerners were practically all of the old British stock. h.o.m.ogeneity, common memories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, and with Mexico, and Fourth of July celebrations, all tended to bind together strongly the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder.

There were, of course, many cla.s.ses of non-slave-holders--the thrifty farmer, the unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for hire, but more frequently for "shares of the crop." Then there were others--the inhabitants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain regions. These people were, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, etc., that the Union armies gathered many recruits. This was not, as is often stated, because mountaineers love liberty better than others, but because these mountaineers never came into contact with either master or slave. The crusade against slavery, therefore, did not threaten to affect their personal status.

There were very few public schools in the South, but in the cities and towns there were academies and high-schools, and the country was dotted with "old field schools," most of them not good, but sufficient to train those who became efficient leaders in social, religious, and political circles.

The wonderful progress made by the Southern white man during the last thirty-five years is by no means all due to the abolition of slavery.

Labor, it is true, is held in higher esteem. This is a great gain, but still more is due to improved transportation, to better prices for timber and cotton, to commercial fertilizers, and an awakening interest in education. The South is also developing its mineral resources and is now rapidly forging to the front. The white man is making more cotton than the negro.

But the very strongest bond that bound together the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every white man was a freeman; he belonged to the superior, the dominant race.

Edmund Burke, England's philosopher-statesman, in his speech on "Conciliation with America" at the beginning of our Revolution, complimented in high terms the spirit of liberty among the dissenting protestants of New England. Then, alluding to the hopes indulged in by some gentlemen, that the Southern colonies would be loyal to Great Britain because the Church of England had there a large establishment, he said: "It is certainly true. There is, however, a circ.u.mstance attending these colonies which in my opinion fully counter-balances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the Northward. It is, that in Virginia and Carolina they have a vast mult.i.tude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any part of the world, _those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom_. Freedom with them is not only an enjoyment, but a kind of _rank and privilege_."

The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a bond that tied all Southern whites together, and it was infinitely strengthened by a crusade that seemed, from a Southern stand-point, to have for its purpose the levelling of all distinctions between the white man and the slave hard by.

Socially, there were cla.s.ses in the South as there are everywhere. The controlling cla.s.s consisted of professional men, lawyers, physicians, teachers, and high-cla.s.s merchants (though the merchant prince was unknown), and slave-holders. Slave-holders were, of course, divided into cla.s.ses, chiefly two: those who had acquired culture and breeding from slave-holding ancestors, and those who had little culture or breeding, princ.i.p.ally the newly rich. It was the former cla.s.s that gave tone to Southern society. The performance of duty always enn.o.bles, and this is especially true of duty done by superiors to inferiors. The master and mistress of a slave establishment were responsible for the moral and material welfare of their dependents. When they appreciated and fulfilled their responsibilities, as the best families usually did, there was found what was called the Southern aristocracy. The habit of command, a.s.sured position, and high ideals, coming down, as these often did, with family traditions, gave these favored people ease and grace, and they were social favorites, both in the North and Europe. At home they dispensed a hospitality that made the South famous. They were exemplars, giving tone to society, and it was notable that breeding and culture, and not wealth, gave tone to Southern society. There was perhaps in Virginia and South Carolina an aristocracy that was somewhat more exclusive than elsewhere.

Slavery was at its worst when masters were not equal to their responsibilities, for want of either culture or Christian feeling, or both, as also when, as was now and then the case, a brutal overseer was in charge of a plantation far away from the eye of the owner.

The influence of the slave-holder and his lavish hospitality did not make for thrift among his less fortunate brethren; it made perhaps for prodigality, but it also made for a high sense of honor among slave-holders and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave-holders and non-slave-holders were extremely punctilious. Money did not count where honor was concerned, and Southerners do well to be proud of the record in this respect that has been made by their statesmen.

Among the more cultured cla.s.ses in the period here treated of, the duel prevailed, a practice now very properly condemned. But it made for a high sense of honor. Demagogues were not common when a false statement on "the stump" was apt to result in a mortal combat.

Among the less cultured cla.s.ses insult was answered with a blow of the fist. Fisticuffs, too, were quite common to ascertain who was the "best man" in a community or county. The rules were not according to the Marquis of Queensbury, but they always secured "fair play."[70]

[70] For the humorous side of life in the South in the old day, see "Simon Suggs," J. J. Hooper; "Georgia Scenes," Judge Longstreet; and "Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi," by Baldwin.

This combative spirit of Southerners was undoubtedly a result of the spirit of caste that came from slavery. Sometimes it was unduly exhibited in Congress during the controversy over slavery and State's rights, and excited Southerners occasionally subjected themselves to the charge of arrogance.

One of the great evils of slavery was that, as a rule, neither the slave-holder nor the non-slave-holder properly appreciated the dignity of labor. A witty student at a Southern university said that his chief objection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn his lessons for him. The slave-holder quite generally disdained manual labor, and the non-slave-holder was also inclined to deprecate the necessity that compelled him to work.

The sudden abolition of slavery was the ruin of thousands of innocent families--a loss for which there was no recompense. But for the South at large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing that all cla.s.ses have come to see, that to labor and to be useful is not only a duty, but a privilege.

Political conditions, North and South, differed widely. The North was the majority section. Its majority could protect its rights; recourse to the limitations of the Federal Const.i.tution was seldom necessary. The South, a minority section, with a devotion that never failed, held high the "Const.i.tution of the fathers, the palladium" of its rights. To one section the Const.i.tution was the bond of a Federal Union that was the security for interstate commerce and national prosperity; to the other it was a guaranty of peace abroad and local self-government at home. In the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was usually some business or moral question, while in the South the political arena was a great school in which the ma.s.ses were not only educated in the history of the formation of the Const.i.tution, but taught an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered "gift from the fathers" and the only safeguard of American liberty. Joint political discussions, which were common between the ablest men of opposing parties, were always numerously attended, and the Federal Const.i.tution was an unfailing topic. The result was, an amount of political information in the average Confederate soldier that the average Union soldier in his business training had never acquired, and a devotion of the Southerner to the Const.i.tution of his country which even the ablest historians of to-day have failed to comprehend.

It is often stated, as if it were an important fact in the consideration of the great anti-slavery crusade, that not many of the Abolitionists were as radical as Garrison, and that of the anti-slavery voters very few favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Abolitionists advocating mixed schools and favoring laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw them practising social equality; saw the general trend in that direction; and so from its very beginning the Republican party, which had absorbed the Abolitionists, was dubbed, North and South, the "Black Republican" party.

The whites of the South believed that the triumph of the "Black Republican" party, as they called it, would be ultimately the triumph of its most radical elements. Judge Reagan, of Texas, United States congressman in 1860-61, Confederate Postmaster-General, later United States senator, and always until 1860 an avowed friend of the Union, in his farewell speech to the Congress of the United States in January, 1861, gave expression to this idea when he said:

"And now you tender to us the inhuman alternative of unconditional submission to _Republican rule on abolition principles, and ultimately to free negro equality, and a government of mongrels_, or a war of races on the one hand, and on the other, secession and a b.l.o.o.d.y and desolating civil war."[71]

[71] "Memoirs of John H. Reagan," p. 261.

Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress the opinion that animated the Confederate soldier in the war that was to follow secession, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of Reconstruction had been reached, and the ballot had been given to every negro, while the leading whites were disfranchised.

In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, wrote a notable book to show that slavery was a curse to the South, and especially to the non-slave-holders. It was an appeal to the latter to become Abolitionists. His arguments availed nothing; back of his book was the Republican party, now planting itself, as Garrison had planted himself, on an extract from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence covered negroes as well as whites,[72] and Southern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the suggestion that the signers, every one of whom, save possibly those from Ma.s.sachusetts, represented slave-holding const.i.tuents, intended to say that the negroes then in the colonies were the equals of the whites. If so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, and why were they not immediately given the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be educated, and to intermarry with the whites?

[72] Mr. Lincoln took that position in his great speech at Chicago, in 1858, when beginning his campaign for the senatorship.

All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, did many Northerners also, was to be the logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, that negroes and whites were equals. It is pa.s.sing strange that modern historians so often have failed to note that this thought was in the minds of all the opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth--North and South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his debate with Lincoln, gave it that name and stood by it. In his speech at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges the Republicans with advocating "negro citizenship and negro equality, putting the white man and the negro on the same basis under the law."[73]

[73] Lincoln, "Complete Works," vol. IV, p. 9.

John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the Southern people in 1849, signed by many other congressmen, had said that Northern fanaticism would not stop at emanc.i.p.ation. "Another step would be taken to raise them [the negroes] to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public office under the Federal Government.... But when raised to an equality they would become the fast political a.s.sociates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this perfect union between them holding the South in complete subjection. _The blacks and the profligate whites that might unite with them_ would become the princ.i.p.al recipients of Federal patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the social and political scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them, _a degradation greater than has as yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people_."[74]

[74] "Calhoun's Works," vol. VI, p. 311.

In the light of Reconstruction, this was prophecy.

These words, once heard by a Southern white man, of course sank into his heart. They could never have been forgotten. The argument of Helper fell on deaf ears. If Helper had come with the promise (and an a.s.surance of its fulfilment) that the negroes, when emanc.i.p.ated, would be sent to Liberia, or elsewhere _out of the country_, the South would have become Republicanized at once. Even if the slave-holder had been unwilling, the Southern non-slave-holder, with his three, and often five, to one majority, would have seen to it.

And it is not too much to say that if the negro had been, as the Abolitionists and ultimately many Republicans contended he was, the equal of the white man, Liberia would have been a success. What a glorious consummation of the dreams of statesmen and philanthropists that would have been! Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their scheme, and the American negro, profiting by the civilization here received from contact with the white man, building by his own energy happy homes for himself and his kinsmen, and enjoying the blessings of a great government of his own, in his own great continent!

Africa with its vast resources is a prize that all Europe is now contending for. It is believed to be adapted even to white men. Most a.s.suredly, for the negro Liberia offered far better opportunities than did the rocky coast of New England to the white men who settled it.

Liberia had been carefully selected as a desirable part of Africa. It was an unequalled group of statesmen and philanthropists that had planted the colony; they provided for it and set it on its feet. But it failed; failed just for the same reason that prevented the aboriginal African from catching on to the civilization that began to develop thousands of years ago, close by his side on the borders of the Mediterranean; failed for the same reason that Hayti, now free for a century, has failed. The failure of the plan of the American Colonization Society to repatriate the American negro in Africa was due _primarily to the incapacity of the negro_.

A very complete and convincing story will be found in an article ent.i.tled "Liberia, an Example of Negro Self-Government,"[75] by Miss Agnes P. Mahony, for five years a missionary in that country. The author of the article was a sympathizing friend. She says: "In 1847 the colony was considered healthy enough to stand alone.... So our flag was lowered on the African continent, and the protectors of the colony retired, leaving the people to govern the country in their own way." Then she recites that in order to test their capacity for self-government their const.i.tution (1847) provided that no white man should hold property in the country; and to this Miss Mahony traces the failure that followed.

When she wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine years under the protectorship of the United States, had been troubled by no foreign enemy; yet their failure was complete--not a foot of railroad, no cable communication with foreign countries, no telegraphic communication with the interior, etc. Still the devoted missionary thinks that Liberia might prosper, if it could but have "_the encouraging example of and contact with the right kind of white men_."

[75] _Independent_, 1906.