THE ACTUAL POSITION OF SLAVERY.

33333

endeavour to show that this is the case), then no settlement of the American dispute which is not preceded by a thorough humbling of the slave party should be satisfactory to those who have human interests at heart. This is the cardinal point of the whole question. The designs of the seceders are either legitimate and consistent with human interests, or the contrary. If they are legitimate, let this be shown, and let us in this case wish them God speed: if they are not, and if the Southern leaders may be taken to know what is essential to their own ends, then we may be sure that nothing short of the effectual defeat of the South in the present war will secure a settlement which shall be consistent with what the best interests of mankind require.

CHAPTER II.

THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF SLAVERY.

BEFORE proceeding to an examination of the social and political system which has been reared upon the basis of slavery in North America, it will be desirable to devote some consideration to the institution itself in its industrial aspects. The political tendencies of the Slave Power, as will hereafter be seen, are determined in a principal degree by the economic necessities under which it is placed by its fundamental institution; and in order, therefore, to appreciate the nature of those tendencies, a determination of the conditions requisite for the success of slavery, as an industrial system, becomes indispensable.

The form in which it will be most convenient to discuss this question will be in connexion with the actual position of slavery in the American continent. As is well known, the system. formed originally a common feature in all the Anglo-Saxon settlements in that part of the world, existing in the northern no less than the southern colonies, in New England no less than in Virginia. But before much time had elapsed from their origi nal foundation, it became evident that it was destined to occupy very different positions among these rising communities. In the colonies north of Delaware Bay slavery rapidly fell into a subordinate place, and gradually died out; while in those south of that inìet its place in the industrial system became constantly more prominent, unt 1 ultimately it has risen to a position of paramount importance in that region, overpowering every rival influence, and moulding all the phenomena of the social

24

THEORY OF DIVERSE ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDERS.

state into conformity with its requirements. The problem, then, which I propose to consider is the cause of this difference in the fortunes of slavery in these different portions of American soil.

Several theories have been advanced in explanation of the phenomenon. One of these attributes it to diversity of character in the original founders of the communities in question ;* for, though proceeding from the same country and belonging to the same race, the Anglo-Saxon emigrations to North America, according as they were directed to the north or south of that continent, were in the main drawn from different classes of the mother nation. Massachusetts and the other New England States were colonized principally from the élite of the middle and lower classes-by people who, being accustomed to labour with their own hands, would feel less the need of slaves; and who, moreover, owing to their political views, having little to hope for in the way of assistance from the country they had quitted, would have little choice but to trust to their personal exertions. On the other hand, the early emigration to Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas was for the most part composed of the sons of the gentry, whose ideas and habits but ill fitted them for a struggle with nature in the wilderness. Such emigrants had little disposition to engage personally in the work of clearance and production: nor were they under the same necessity for this as their brethren in the North; for, being composed in great part of cavaliers and loyalists, they were, for many years after the first establishment of the settlements, sustained and petted by the home government; being furnished not merely with capital in the shape of constant supplies of provisions and clothing, but with labourers in the shape of convicts, indented servants, and slaves. In this way the colonists of the Virginian group were relieved from the necessity of per sonal toil, and in this way, it is said, slavery, which found little footing in the North, and never took firm root there, became established in the Southern States.

This explanation, however, carries us but a short way towards the point we have in view. It explains the more rapid extension of slavery in early times in the colonies which were in their origin most patronized by the home government, but it does not explain why slavery, which had, though not extensively, been introduced into the Northern colonies, should not have subsequently increased; much less does it afford any explana

* See Stirling's Letters from the Slave States, p. 64, where greater importance is attributed to this circumstance than it appears to me to deserve; and compare Olmsted's Seaboard States, pp. 181-183, 220, 221.

THEORY OF CLIMATE AND RACE.

35

tion of its ultimate extinction in the North. It is certain the New Englanders were not withheld from employing slaves by moral scruples, and, if the system had been found suitable to the requirements of the country, it is to be presumed that they would have gradually extended its basis, and that, like their neighbours, especially since the treaty of Utrecht had secured for English enterprise the African slave-trade, they would have availed themselves of this means of recruiting their labour market.

Another and more generally accepted solution refers the phenomenon in question to the influence of climate and the character of the negro race. The European constitution, we are told, cannot endure a climate in which the negro can toil, thrive, and multiply, and the indolence of the negro is such that he will only work under compulsion. If it were not, therefore, for negro slavery, the world must have gone without those commodities which are the peculiar product of tropical climes. Mankind, in effect, says this theory, has had to choose between maintaining slavery and abandoning the use of cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and the instincts of humanity have succumbed before the more powerful inducements of substantial gain.

It would, perhaps, be too much to say that this view of the causes which have maintained slavery in the Southern districts of North America is absolutely destitute of foundation, but there can be no hesitation in saying that, as a theory, it utterly fails to account for the facts which it is sought to explain. The climate of the oldest of the Slave States-Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina-is remarkably genial and perfectly suited to the industry of Europeans;* and, though the same is not true in the same degree of the Gulf States, yet it is a fact that these regions also afford examples of free European communities increasing in numbers under a semi-tropical climate, and rising to opulence through the labour of their own hands. In Texas a flourishing colony of free Germans, among whom no slave is to be found, engage in all the occupations of the country, and are only prevented by their distance from the great navigable rivers, and the want of other means of communication, from applying themselves extensively to that very cultivation-the growing of cotton-which the complacent reasoners whose theory we are considering choose to regard as the ordained function of the negro race.†

* Olmsted's Slave States, pp. 131, 462-3.

+ "The Southern parts of the Union," says De Tocqueville, "are not hotter than the south of Italy and of Spain; and it may be asked why the European cannot

36

ALLEGED INDOLENCE OF THE NEGRO.

"If we look," says Mr. Weston, "to the origin of the European races which inhabit this country, Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee are more like their mother countries than New England is. The Irishman and Englishman and German find in Missouri and Texas a climate less dissimilar to that at home, than they do in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The heats of summer are longer and steadier at the South, but not more excessive than at the North. Labour in the fields is performed by whites, and without any ill consequences in the extreme South. Nearly all the heavy out door work in the city of New Orleans is performed by whites. . . . . The practical experience of mankind is a sufficient answer to fanciful rules, which, applied on the other side of the Atlantic, would surrender to the African, Spain, France, and Italy, and drive back their present inhabitants to the shores of the Baltic. The three thousand years of recorded civilization in the regions which environ the Mediterranean on all its sides, prove that no part of the continental borders of the Gulf of Mexico, and none of the islands which separate it from the ocean, need be abandoned to the barbarism of negro slavery. The European stock is found everywhere, from Texas to Patagonia, and in every part of that whole extent is more vigorous and prolific than any other race, indigenous or imported. Isothermal lines are not uniform with parallels of latitude; vertical suns are qualified by ocean breezes and mountain heights; and America, even at the equator, offers to man salubrious abodes."*

But still more fatally does the theory halt upon the other limb of the argument-the incorrigible indolence of the negro. Whatever plausibility there may have been in this oft repeated assertion in times when the negro was only known as a slave or as a pariah in a land where his existence was scarcely tolerated, it is perfectly futile to advance such statements now in the face of the facts which recent observations have revealed to us. "We, in the United States," says Mr. Sewell, "have heard of abandoned properties in the West Indies, and, without much investigation, have listened to the planters' excusethe indolence of the negro, who refuses to work except under

work as well there as in the two latter countries. If slavery has been abolished in Italy and in Spain without causing the destruction of the masters, why should not the same thing take place in the Union? I cannot believe that Nature has prohibited the Europeans in Georgia and the Floridas, under pain of death, from raising the means of subsistence from the soil; but their labour would unquestionably be more irksome and less productive to them than that of the inhabitants of New England. As the free workman thus loses a portion of his superiority over the slave ir the Southern States, there are fewer inducements to abolish slavery."

* Progress of Slavery, pp. 160, 161.

GROUNDLESSNESS OF THE CHARGE.

37

compulsion. But I shall be able to show that, in those colonies where estates have been abandoned, the labouring classes, instead of passing from servitude to indolence and idleness, have set up for themselves, and that small proprietors since emancipation have increased a hundred fold." "It is a

fact which speaks volumes that, within the last fifteen years, in spite of the extraordinary price of land and the low rate of wages, the small proprietors of Barbadoes holding less than five acres have increased from 1100 to 3537. A great majority of these proprietors were formerly slaves, subsequently free labourers, and finally landholders. This is certainly an evidence of industrious habits, and a remarkable contradiction to the prevailing idea that the negro will work only under compulsion. That idea was formed and fostered from the habits of the negro as a slave; his habits as a freeman, developed under a wholesome stimulus and settled by time, are in striking contrast to his habits as a slave. I am simply stating a truth in regard to the Barbadian creole, which here, at least, will not be denied. I have conversed on the subject with all classes and conditions of people, and none are more ready to admit than the planters themselves, that the free labourer in Barbadoes is a better, more cheerful, and more industrious workman than the slave ever was under a system of compulsion." And, again, of an island very differently circumstanced from Barbadoes the same author writes:-" I have taken some pains to trace the creole labourers of Trinidad from the time. of emancipation, after they left the estates and dispersed, to the present day; and the great majority of them can, I think, be followed, step by step, not downward in the path of idleness and poverty, but upward in the scale of civilization to positions of greater independence."* This testimony of a perfectly unimpassioned witness, coming after ten years' further experience in corroboration of the evidence given by Mr. Bigelow in 1850, ought to set this question at rest. There is not a tittle of evidence to show that the aversion of the negro to labour is naturally stronger than that of any other branch of the human family. So long as he is compelled to work for the exclusive benefit of a master, he will be inclined to evade his task by every means in his power, as the white man would do under similar circumstances; but emancipate him, and subject him to the same motives which act upon the free white labourer,

* Sewell's Ordeal of Free Labour in the West Indies, pp. 34–35, 39–40. And for evidence to the same effect respecting the Jamaican negroes, see post, pp. 198, 202, &c.