JOURNAL.
Philadelphia, December 1838.
My Dear E——,— I return you Mr. ——’s letter. I do not think it answers
any of the questions debated in our last conversation at all
satisfactorily: the right one man has to enslave another, he has not the
hardihood to assert; but in the reasons he adduces to defend that act of
injustice, the contradictory statements he makes appear to me to refute
each other. He says, that to the continental European protesting against
the abstract iniquity of slavery, his answer would be, ‘the slaves are
infinitely better off than half the continental peasantry.’ To the
Englishman, ‘they are happy compared with the miserable Irish.’ But
supposing that this answered the question of original injustice, which it
does not, it is not a true reply. Though the negroes are fed, clothed, and
housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the
bare name of freeman—the lordship over his own person, the power to
choose and will—are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter;
possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable
than their fullest enjoyment without them. Ask the thousands of ragged
destitutes who yearly land upon these shores to seek the means of
existence—ask the friendless, penniless foreign emigrant, if he will give
up his present misery, his future uncertainty, his doubtful and difficult
struggle for life, at once, for the secure, and as it is called, fortunate
dependance of the slave: the indignation with which he
would spurn the
offer will prove that he possesses one good beyond all others, and that
his birthright as a man is more precious to him yet than the mess of
pottage for which he is told to exchange it because he is starving.
Of course the reverse alternative cannot be offered to the slaves, for
at the very word the riches of those who own them would make themselves
wings and flee away. But I do not admit the comparison between your
slaves and even the lowest class of European free laborers, for the
former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they
enjoy in common with the brutes that perish. The just comparison is
between the slaves and the useful animals to whose level your laws
reduce them; and I will acknowledge that the slaves of a kind owner may
be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful
master; but the latter condition—i.e. that of happiness—must again
depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental
degradation. Mr. ——, in his letter, maintains that they are an
inferior race, and, compared with the whites, ‘animals, incapable of
mental culture and moral improvement:’ to this I can only reply, that if
they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the
necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to
them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity
for progress, where lies the danger which is constantly insisted upon
of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws
forbidding us to teach our dogs and horses as much as they can
comprehend; nobody is fined or imprisoned for reasoning upon knowledge,
and liberty, to the beasts of the field, for they are incapable of such
truths. But these themes are forbidden to slaves, not because they
cannot, but because they can and would seize on them with
avidity—receive them gladly, comprehend them quickly; and the masters’
power over them
would be annihilated at once and for ever. But I have
more frequently heard, not that they were incapable of receiving
instruction, but something much nearer the truth—that knowledge only
makes them miserable: the moment they are in any degree enlightened,
they become unhappy. In the letter I return to you Mr. —— says that
the very slightest amount of education, merely teaching them to read,
‘impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their
contentedness, and since you do not contemplate changing their
condition, it is surely doing them an ill service to destroy their
acquiescence in it;’ but this is a very different ground of argument
from the other. The discontent they evince upon the mere dawn of an
advance in intelligence proves not only that they can acquire but
combine ideas, a process to which it is very difficult to assign a
limit; and there indeed the whole question lies, and there and nowhere
else the shoe really pinches. A slave is ignorant; he eats, drinks,
sleeps, labors, and is happy. He learns to read; he feels, thinks,
reflects, and becomes miserable. He discovers himself to be one of a
debased and degraded race, deprived of the elementary rights which God
has granted to all men alike; every action is controlled, every word
noted; he may not stir beyond his appointed bounds, to the right hand or
to the left, at his own will, but at the will of another he may be sent
miles and miles of weary journeying—tethered, yoked, collared, and
fettered—away from whatever he may know as home, severed from all those
ties of blood and affection which he alone of all human, of all living
creatures on the face of the earth may neither enjoy in peace nor defend
when they are outraged. If he is well treated, if his master be
tolerably humane or even understand his own interest tolerably, this is
probably
all he may have to endure: it is only to the consciousness of
these evils that knowledge and reflection awaken him. But how is it if
his master be severe, harsh, cruel—or even only careless—leaving his
creatures to the delegated dominion of some overseer, or agent, whose
love of power, or other evil dispositions, are checked by no
considerations of personal interest? Imagination shrinks from the
possible result of such a state of things; nor must you, or Mr. ——,
tell me that the horrors thus suggested exist only in imagination. The
Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and
personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that
it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision,
insult, menace—the handcuff, the lash—the tearing away of children
from parents, of husbands from wives—the weary trudging in droves along
the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the
sickness of heart—these are the realities which belong to the system,
and form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slave’s experience.
And this system exists here in this country of yours, which boasts
itself the asylum of the oppressed, the home of freedom, the one place
in all the world where all men may find enfranchisement from all
thraldoms of mind, soul, or body—the land elect of liberty.
Mr. —— lays great stress, as a proof of the natural inferiority of the
blacks, on the little comparative progress they have made in those States
where they enjoy their freedom, and the fact that, whatever quickness of
parts they may exhibit while very young, on attaining maturity they
invariably sink again into inferiority, or at least mediocrity, and
indolence. But surely there are other causes to account for this besides
natural deficiency, which must, I think, be obvious to any unprejudiced
person observing the condition of the free blacks in your Northern
communities. If, in the early portion of their life, they escape the
contempt and derision of their white associates—if the blessed
unconsciousness and ignorance of childhood
keeps them for a few years
unaware of the conventional proscription under which their whole race is
placed (and it is difficult to walk your streets, and mark the tone of
insolent superiority assumed by even the gutter-urchins over their dusky
cotemporaries, and imagine this possible)—as soon as they acquire the
first rudiments of knowledge, as soon as they begin to grow up and pass
from infancy to youth, as soon as they cast the first observing glance
upon the world by which they are surrounded, and the society of which,
they are members, they must become conscious that they are marked as the
Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like those unfortunates,
without the gates of every human and social sympathy. From their own sable
color, a pall falls over the whole of God’s universe to them, and they
find themselves stamped with a badge of infamy of Nature’s own devising,
at sight of which all natural kindliness of man to man seems to recoil
from them. They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from
all fellowship save with their own despised race—scorned by the lowest
white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated as companions even by the
foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are
also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs
of your society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task
and unpaid toil of slavery; but they are not the less under a ban. Their
kinship with slaves for ever bars them from a full share of the freeman’s
inheritance of equal rights, and equal consideration and respect. All
hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky
skin, all tongues—the most vulgar, as well as the self-styled most
refined—have learnt to turn the very name of their race into an insult
and a reproach. How, in the name of all that is natural, probable,
possible, should the spirit and energy of any human creature support
itself under such
an accumulation of injustice and obloquy? Where shall
any mass of men be found with power of character and mind sufficient to
bear up against such a weight of prejudice? Why, if one individual rarely
gifted by heaven were to raise himself out of such a slough of despond, he
would be a miracle; and what would be his reward? Would he be admitted to
an equal share in your political rights?—would he ever be allowed to
cross the threshold of your doors?—would any of you give your daughter to
his son, or your son to his daughter?—would you, in any one particular,
admit him to the footing of equality which any man with a white skin would
claim, whose ability and worth had so raised him from the lower degrees of
the social scale. You would turn from such propositions with abhorrence,
and the servants in your kitchen and stable—the ignorant and boorish
refuse of foreign populations, in whose countries no such prejudice
exists, imbibing it with the very air they breathe here—would shrink from
eating at the same table with such a man, or holding out the hand of
common fellowship to him. Under the species of social proscription in
which the blacks in your Northern cities exist, if they preserved energy
of mind, enterprise of spirit, or any of the best attributes and powers of
free men, they would prove themselves, instead of the lowest and least of
human races, the highest and first, not only of all that do exist, but of
all that ever have existed; for they alone would seek and cultivate
knowledge, goodness, truth, science, art, refinement, and all improvement,
purely for the sake of their own excellence, and without one of those
incentives of honor, power, and fortune, which are found to be the chief,
too often the only, inducements which lead white men to the pursuit of the
same objects.
You know very well dear E——, that in speaking of the free blacks of the
North I here state nothing but what is true, and of daily experience. Only
last week I heard,
in this very town of Philadelphia, of a family of
strict probity and honor, highly principled, intelligent, well-educated,
and accomplished, and (to speak the world’s language) respectable in every
way—i.e.
rich. Upon an English lady’s stating it to be her intention to
visit these persons when she came to Philadelphia, she was told that if
she did nobody else would visit
her; and she probably would excite a
malevolent feeling, which might find vent in some violent demonstration
against this family. All that I have now said of course bears only upon
the condition of the free colored population of the North, with which I
am familiar enough to speak confidently of it. As for the slaves, and
their capacity for progress, I can say nothing, for I have never been
among them to judge what faculties their unhappy social position leaves to
them unimpaired. But it seems to me, that no experiment on a sufficiently
large scale can have been tried for a sufficient length of time to
determine the question of their incurable inferiority. Physiologists say
that three successive generations appear to be necessary to produce an
effectual change of constitution (bodily and mental), be it for health or
disease. There are positive physical defects which produce positive mental
ones; the diseases of the muscular and nervous systems descend from father
to son. Upon the agency of one corporal power how much that is not
corporal depends; from generation to generation internal disease and
external deformity, vices, virtues, talents, and deficiencies are
transmitted, and by the action of the same law it must be long indeed
before the offspring of slaves—creatures begotten of a race debased and
degraded to the lowest degree, themselves born in slavery, and whose
progenitors have eaten the bread and drawn the breath of slavery for
years—can be measured, with any show of justice, by even the least
favored descendants of European nations, whose qualities have been for
centuries devel-
oping themselves under the beneficent influence of freedom,
and the progress it inspires.
I am rather surprised at the outbreak of violent disgust which Mr. ——
indulges in on the subject of amalgamation; as that formed no part of
our discussion, and seems to me a curious subject for abstract argument. I
should think the intermarrying between blacks and whites a matter to be as
little insisted upon if repugnant, as prevented if agreeable to the
majority of the two races. At the same time, I cannot help being
astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to
the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest
it; because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large
proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and colored
women. In New Orleans, a class of unhappy females exists whose mingled
blood does not prevent their being remarkable for their beauty, and with
whom no man, no gentleman, in that city shrinks from associating; and
while the slaveowners of the Southern States insist vehemently upon the
mental and physical inferiority of the blacks, they are benevolently doing
their best, in one way at least, to raise and improve the degraded race,
and the bastard population which forms so ominous an element in the social
safety of their cities certainly exhibit in their forms and features the
benefit they derive from their white progenitors. It is hard to conceive
that some mental improvement does not accompany this physical change.
Already the finer forms of the European races are cast in these dusky
moulds: the outward configuration can hardly thus improve without
corresponding progress in the inward capacities. The white man’s blood and
bones have begotten this bronze race, and bequeathed to it in some degree
qualities, tendencies, capabilities, such as are the inheritance of the
highest order of human animals. Mr. ——
(and many others) speaks as if
there were a natural repugnance in all whites to any alliance with the
black race; and yet it is notorious, that almost every Southern planter
has a family more or less numerous of illegitimate colored children. Most
certainly, few people would like to assert that such connections are
formed because it is the
interest of these planters to increase the
number of their human property, and that they add to their revenue by the
closest intimacy with creatures that they loathe, in order to reckon
among their wealth the children of their body. Surely that is a monstrous
and unnatural supposition, and utterly unworthy of belief. That such
connections exist commonly, is a sufficient proof that they are not
abhorrent to nature; but it seems, indeed, as if marriage (and not
concubinage) was the horrible enormity which cannot be tolerated, and
against which, moreover, it has been deemed expedient to enact laws. Now
it appears very evident that there is no law in the white man’s nature
which prevents him from making a colored woman the mother of his
children, but there
is a law on his statute books forbidding him to make
her his wife; and if we are to admit the theory that the mixing of the
races is a monstrosity, it seems almost as curious that laws should be
enacted to prevent men marrying women towards whom they have an invincible
natural repugnance, as that education should by law be prohibited to
creatures incapable of receiving it. As for the exhortation with which
Mr. —— closes his letter, that I will not ‘go down to my husband’s
plantation prejudiced against what I am to find there,’ I know not well
how to answer it. Assuredly I
am going prejudiced against slavery, for I
am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be
disgraceful. Nevertheless, I go prepared to find many mitigations in the
practice to the general injustice and cruelty of the system—much kindness
on the part of the masters, much content
on that of the slaves; and I feel
very sure that you may rely upon the carefulness of my observation, and
the accuracy of my report, of every detail of the working of the thing
that comes under my notice; and certainly, on the plantation to which I am
going, it will be more likely that I should some things extenuate, than
set down aught in malice.
Yours ever faithfully.