32 PRESENT ASPECT OF THE QUESTION. of a rebel oligarchy. But do grounds for that supposition still exist? Before the war broke out, it is well known that something like a reign of terror prevailed in the South for all who fell short of the most extreme standard of pro-slavery opinion. The rigour of that reign will hardly have been relaxed since the war commenced, and must no doubt have produced a very considerable emigration of loyal citizens. The infectious enthusiasm of the war will probably have operated to make many converts; and, under the influences of both these causes, the South, or at least that portion of the South which has led the way in this movement, has probably by this time been brought to a substantial unanimity of opinion, a conclusion which is strongly confirmed by the absence of any sign of disaffection to the Confederation among its population.* Under these circumstances what is the policy to which Europe, in the interests of civilization, should give its moral support? This country has long made up its mind as to the impossibility of forcibly reconstructing the Union; perhaps it has also satisfied itself of the undesirableness of this result. Of neither of these opinions is the writer prepared to contest the soundness. But this being conceded, an all-important question remains for decision. On what conditions is the independence of the South to be established? For the solution of this question in the interests of civilization, a knowledge of the character and designs of the power which represents the South is requisite, and it is this which it is the aim of the present work to furnish. Meanwhile, however, it may be said that the definitive severance of the Union is perfectly compatible with either the accomplishment of the original design of the seceders-the extension of slavery, or the utter defeat of that design, according to the terms on which the separation takes place; and that therefore the severance of the Union by no means implies the defeat of the North or the triumph of the South. The Southern leaders may be assumed to know their own objects, and to be the best judges of the means which are necessary to their accomplishment; and we may be certain that no arrangement which involves the frustration of these objects will be acquiesced in until after a complete prostration of their strength. If this be so, it is important to ascertain what the objects of the South For if these objects be inconsistent with the interests of civilization and the happiness of the human race (and I shall are. * Since the above passage was written some unionist demonstrations in the Border states following on the success of the Northern armies, have shewn that the unanimity is not as complete as the writer imagined: still he does not conceive that what has occurred is at all calculated to affect the general scope of his reasoning. THE ACTUAL POSITION OF SLAVERY. 33 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 politica!' 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 original 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 inlet its place in the industrial system became constantly more prominent, until 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 31 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 personal 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 ic the Southern States, there are fewer inducements to abolish slavery." * Progress of Slavery, pp. 160, 161. |