ITS AGGRESSIVE CHARACTER.

93

CHAPTER VI.

EXTERNAL POLICY OF SLAVE SOCIETIES.

In the foregoing chapters an attempt has been made to analyze the system of society presented in the Slave States, and to ascertain the direction in which, under ordinary circumstances, and in the absence of intervention from without, the development of such a system proceeds; and the result of an examination, as well of the several elements of which the whole society is composed as of their joint action, has been to show that it is essentially retrograde in its character, containing within it no germs from which improvement can grow, and no forces competent to counteract those which press it downwards. In the remaining portion of this essay I shall endeavour to exhibit the working of this system in the politics of the Union; and as, in relation to the people who compose it, the social system of the Slave States has been seen to be retrograde, so, in relation to other societies with which it may come into contact, it will be found to be aggressive-to be constantly urged by exigencies, which it cannot control, to extend its territory, and by an ambition not less inevitable to augment its power.

The aggressive character of a social system deriving its strength from slavery-that is to say of a Slave Power-proceeds primarily from the well-known economic fact, already more than once adverted to—the necessary limitation of slaveculture to soils of more than average richness, combined with its tendency to exhaust them. It results from this that societies based upon slavery cannot, like those founded upon free industrial institutions, take root, grow, and flourish upon a limited area. To secure their vigour, their roots must be always spreading. A constant supply of fresh soils of high fertility becomes, therefore, an indispensable requisite for the permanent industrial success of such societies. This is a fundamental principle in their political economy, and one which, we shall find, exercises a powerful influence on the course of their general history. As the principle will hereafter be frequently referred to, it is important to observe that it is one about which no controversy can be said to exist, being as fully recognized by the upholders as by the opponents of slavery. "There is not a slaveholder," says Judge Warner of Georgia, "in this

94.

SLAVERY MIGRATORY.

house or out of it, but who knows perfectly well that, whenever slavery is confined within certain specified limits, its future existence is doomed; it is only a question of time as to its final destruction. You may take any single slaveholding county, in the Southern States, in which the great staples of cotton and sugar are cultivated to any extent, and confine the present slave population within the limits of that county. Such is the rapid natural increase of the slaves, and the rapid exhaustion of the soil in the cultivation of those crops (which add so much to the commercial wealth of the country), that in a few years it would be impossible to support them within the limits of such county. Both master and slave would be starved out; and what would be the practical effect in any one county, the same result would happen to all the slaveholding States. Slavery cannot be confined within certain specified limits without producing the destruction of both master and slave; it requires fresh lands, plenty of wood and water, not only for the comfort and happiness of the slave, but for the benefit of the owner."*

It is further important to observe that the internal organization of slave societies adapts them in a peculiar manner for a career of constant expansion. "In free communities property becomes fixed in edifices, in machinery, and in improvements of the soil. In slave communities there is scarcely any property except slaves, and they are easily movable. The freeman embellishes his home; the slaveholder finds nothing to bind him to soils which he has exhausted. Freedom is enterprising, but not migratory as slavery is. It is not in the nature of slavery to become attached to place. It is nomadic. The slaveholder leaves his impoverished fields with as little reluctance as the ancient Scythian abandoned cropped pastures for fresh ones, and slaves are moved as readily as flocks and herds."+

Slavery thus requires for its success a constantly expanding field. It is also to be noted that within this field it is exclusive of all other industrial systems. It is true, indeed, that there exists in certain districts through the Slave States a considerable free population engaged in regular industry; but this forms no real exception to the essential exclusiveness of slave societies. These settlements of free farmers occur only where, from some cause, slavery has disappeared from tracts of country large enough to form the abode of distinct societies; as in Western Virginia, where the exhaustion of the soil, under a long continued cultivation by slaves, compelled at one time an

*Progress of Slavery, p. 227.

+ Ibid., p. 8.

THE RACE OF COLONIZATION.

95

extensive emigration of planters; or along the slopes of the Alleghanies, where the land is better suited to cereal crops than to cotton or tobacco; or, again, in Texas, where the available slave force has not been sufficient to enable planters to appropriate the vast regions suddenly placed at their disposal. In these cases, no doubt, colonies of free peasants are to be found in the midst of the Slave States; but there is here no real intermixture of the two forms of society. The free settlements remain in the Slave States as distinct communities*-oases of freedom in the vast desert of slavery-without bond of interest or sympathy to connect them with the surrounding population. Slave society is thus essentially exclusive of all other forms of social life. Now this characteristic of it is as well understood by the free population of the Northern States, as is the necessity to their system of a constantly expanding area by the planters of the South; and hence it has happened that, whenever free and slave societies have come into contact on the same field, a mutual antagonism has sprung up between them. Each has endeavoured to outstrip the other in the career of colonization, and, by first occupying the ground, to keep the field open for its future expansion against the encroachments of its rival. "It has thus," says Mr. Weston, "become a race whether the negro from Texas and Arkansas, or the white labourer from Kansas and the free West, shall first reach New Mexico and the Gulf of California."

But it is less in the economic, than in the moral and social, attributes of slave societies that we must look for the motive principle of their aggressive ambition. That which the necessity for fresh soils is to the political economy of such communities, a lust of power is to their morality. The slaveholder lives from infancy in an atmosphere of despotism. He sees around him none but abject creatures, who, under fearful penalties to be inflicted by himself, are bound to do his slightest, his most unreasonable, bidding. "The commerce between master and slave," says a slaveowner, "is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions-the most unremitting despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. The parent

*See Olmsted's account of the German settlement in Texas.-A Journey through Texas, pp. 143-146, 176-178.

This is not only instinctively felt by the Southerns, but maintained in theory. The following passage from the Richmond Inquirer is sufficiently explicit: "Two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, co-exist and endure. The one must give way and cease to exist; the other become universal. If free society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to slave society, a social system old as the world, universal as man.".

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TENDENCY TO FOSTER AMBITION.

storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped with its odious peculiarities."* The first notion," says De Tocque ville, "which the citizen of the Southern States acquires in life, is that he is born to command, and the first habit which he contracts is that of being obeyed without resistance." The despot mood is thus early impressed on the heart of the slaveholder; and it bears fruit in his manners and life. "The existence of a dominant class necessarily leads to violence. Trained up from youth to the unrestrained exercise of will, the superior race or class naturally becomes despotic, overbearing, and impatient. In their intercourse with their inferiors this leads to unresisted oppression; but with their equals, armed with similar power and fired by the same passions, it breaks out into fierce strife. In this country the relation of master and slave produces the same effect on the character of the dominant class as was formerly produced in Europe by that of lord and serf. There is the same imperious will, the same impatience of restraint, the same proneness to anger and ferocious strife. The passions which are developed in the intercourse with inferiors show themselves, though in a different form, in the intercourse with equals. Thus, by an inevitable retribution, wrong is made self-chastising, and the hand of the violent man is turned against himself.

"Duelling is not the only form of this national proneness to acts of violence; rather, it is the modified form which it assumes among fair and honourable men, who, even in their anger, disdain to take advantage of an adversary, and who have at least sufficient self-command to give a semblance of reason to their passion. There are others, whose hasty impulses disdain even this slight self-restraint, who carry with them habitually the means of deadly injury, and use them on the slightest provocation." "The custom of carrying arms is at once a proof of proneness to violence, and a provocation to it. This habit, I am informed, prevails very extensively in the South. When coming down the Mississippi, a Colonel B- -, to whom I had been introduced, pointing to a crowd of men of all ranks clustered round the cabin stove, said: 'Now, there is probably not a man in all that crowd who is not armed; I myself have a pistol in my state-room." "+ Such are the private influences by which the slaveholder is

* Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, p. 39.

Stirling's Letters from the Slave States, pp. 270, 272.

SLAYERY ITS SOLE RESOURCE.

07

moulded to an intense craving for power. And what scope do the institutions of the South provide for the satisfaction, on a large theatre, of the passion which they generate? In free societies the paths to eminence are various. Successful trade, the professions, science and literature, social reform, philanthropy, furnish employment for the redundant activity of the people, and open so many avenues to distinction. But for slaveholders these means of advancement do not exist. Commerce and manufactures are excluded by the necessities of the case. The professions, which are the result of much subdivision. of employment where population is rich and dense, can have no place in a poor and thinly peopled country. Science and literature are left without the principal inducements for their cultivation, where there is no field for their most important practical applications. Social reform and philanthropy would be out of place in a country where human chattels are the principal property. Practically, but one career lies open to the Southerner desirous of advancement-agriculture carried on by slaves. To this, therefore, he turns. In the In the management of his plantation, in the breeding, buying, and selling of slaves, his life is passed. Amid the moral atmosphere which this mode of life engenders his ideas and tastes are formed. He has no notion of ease, independence, happiness, where slavery is not found. Is it strange, then, that his ambition should connect itself with the institution around which are entwined his domestic associations, which is identified with all his plans in life, and which offers him the sole chance of emerging from obscurity?

But the aspirations of the slaveholder are not confined within the limits of his own community. He is also a citizen of the United States. In the former he naturally and easily takes the leading place; but, as a member of the larger society in which he is called upon to act in combination with men who have been brought up under free institutions, the position which he is destined to fill is not so clearly indicated. It is plain, however, that he cannot become blended in the general mass of the population of the Union. His character, habits, and aims are not those of the Northern people, nor are theirs his. The Northerner is a merchant, a manufacturer, a lawyer, a literary man, an artisan, a shopkeeper, a schoolmaster, a peasant farmer; he is engaged in commercial speculation, or in promoting social or political reform; perhaps he is a philanthropist, and includes slavery-abolition in his programme. Between such men and the slaveholder of the South there is no common basis for political action. There are no objects in promoting which he