University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI.
MR. ONSLOW SPEAKS HIS MIND.

AN opportunity for resuming the conversation did not occur
till long after sundown, and when many of the passengers
were retiring to bed.

“I have heard, Mr. Onslow,” said Vance, “that since your
removal to Texas you have liberated your slaves.”

“You have been rightly informed,” replied Onslow.

“And how did they succeed as freedmen?”

“Two thirds of them poorly, the remaining third well.”

“Does not such a fact rather bear against emancipation, and
in favor of slavery?”

“Quite the contrary. I am aware that the enthusiastic Mr.
Ruskin maintains that slavery is `not a political institution at
all, but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance of a large
portion of the human race.' But as his theory would involve
the enslaving of white men as well as black, I think we may
dismiss it as the sportive extravagance of one better qualified
to dogmatize than argue.”

“But is he not right in the application of his theory to the
black race?”

“Far from it. Look at the white men you and I knew some
twenty-five years ago. How many of them have turned out
sots, gluttons, thieves, incapables! Shall the thrifty and wise,
therefore, enslave the imprudent and foolish? Assuredly not,
whatever such clever men as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thomas
Carlyle may say in extenuation of such a proceeding.”

“Do not escaped or emancipated negroes often voluntarily
return to slavery?”

“Not often, but occasionally; and so occasionally a white
man commits an offence in order that he may be put in the penitentiary.
A poor negro is emancipated or escapes. He goes
to Philadelphia or New York, and has a hard time getting his
grub. In a year or two he drifts back to his old master's plantation,
anxious to be received again by one who can insure to
him his rations of mush; and so he declares there 's no place
like `old Virginny for a nigger.' Then what pæans go up in behalf
of the patriarchal system! What a conclusive argument
this that `niggers will be niggers,' and that slavery is right and
holy! Slave-drivers catch at the instance to stiffen up their
consciences, and to stifle that inner voice that is perpetually
telling them (in spite of the assurances of bishops, clergymen,
and literary dilettanti to the contrary) that slavery is a violation
of justice and of that law of God written on the heart
and formulized by Christ, that we must do unto others as we
would have them do unto us, and that therefore liberty is the
God-given right of every innocent and able-minded man. Instances
like that I have supposed, instead of being a palliation
of slavery, are to my mind new evidences of its utter sinfulness.
A system that can so degrade humanity as to make
a man covet repression or extinction for his manhood must
be devilish indeed.”

“But, Mr. Onslow, do not statistics prove that the blacks
increase and multiply much more in a state of slavery than
in any other? Is not that a proof they are well treated and
happy?”

“That is the most hideous argument yet in favor of the system.
In slavery women are stimulated by the beastly ambition
of contending which shall bear `the most little nigs for massa'!
Among these poor creatures the diseases consequent upon too
frequent child-bearing are dreadfully prevalent. Surely the
welfare of a people must be measured, not by the mere amount
of animal contentment or of rapid breeding with which they
can be credited, but by the sum of manly acting and thinking
they can show. A whole race of human beings is not created
merely to eat mush, hoe in cotton-fields, and procreate slaves.
The example of one such escaped slave as Frederick Douglas
shows that the blacks are capable of as high a civilization as
the whites”

“Do they not seem to you rather feeble in the moral
faculty?”

“No more feeble than any race would be, treated as they
have been. The other day there fell into my hands a volume
of sermons for pious slaveholders to preach to their slaves. It
is from the pen of the excellent Bishop Meade of Virginia.
The Bishop says to poor Cuffee: `Your bodies, you know, are
not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to;
but your precious souls are still your own.' What impious
cajolery is this? The master has an unlimited, irresponsible
power over the slave, from childhood up, — can force him to act
as he wills, however conscience may protest! The slave may
be compelled to commit crimes or to reconcile himself to wrongs,
familiarity with which may render his soul, like his body, the
mere unreasoning, impassive tool of his master. And yet a
bishop is found to try to cozen Cuffee out of the little common
sense slavery may have left him, by telling him he is responsible
for that soul, which may be stunted, soiled, perverted in
any way avarice or power may choose.”

“Well, Mr. Onslow, will you deny that slavery has an ennobling
effect in educating a chivalrous, brave, hospitable aristocracy
of whites, untainted by those meannesses which are
engendered by the greed of gain in trading communities?”

“I will not deny,” replied Onslow, “that the habit of irresponsible
command may develop certain qualities, sometimes
good, sometimes bad, in the slave-driver; and so the exercise of
the lash by the overseer may develop the extensor muscles of
the arm; but the evils to the whites from slavery far, far out-balance
the benefits. First, there are the five millions of mean,
non-slaveholding whites. These the system has reduced to a
condition below that of the slave himself, in many cases.
Slavery becomes at once their curse and their infatuation. It
fascinates while it crushes them; it drugs and stupefies while
it robs and degrades.”

“But may we not claim advantages from the system for the
few, — for the upper three hundred thousand?”

“That depends on what you may esteem advantages. Can
an injustice be an advantage to the perpetrator? The man
who betrays a moneyed trust, and removes to Europe with his

family, may in one sense derive an advantage from the operation.
He may procure the means of educating and amusing
himself and his children. So the slaveholder, by depriving
other men of their inherent rights, may get the means of benefiting
himself and those he cares for. But if he is content with
such advantages, it must be because of a torpid, uneducated, or
perverted conscience. Patrick Henry was right when he said,
`Slavery is inconsistent with the religion of Christ.' O'Connell
was right when he declared, `No constitutional law can create
or sanction slavery.' I have often thought that Mississippians
would never have been reconciled to that stupendous public
swindle, politely called repudiation, if slavery had not first prepared
their minds for it by the robbery of labor. And yet we
have men like Jefferson Davis,[1] who not only palliate, but approve
the cheat. O the atrocity! O the shame! With what
face can a repudiating community punish thieves?”

“Shall we not,” asked Vance, “at least grant the slaveholder
the one quality he so anxiously claims, — that which he expresses
in the word chivalry?”

Mr. Onslow shrugged his shoulders, and replied: “Put before
the chivalrous slaveholder a poor fanatic of an Abolitionist,
caught in the act of tampering with slaves, and then ask this
representative of the chivalry to be magnanimous. No! the
mean instincts of what he deems self-interest will make him a
fiend in cruelty. He looks upon the Abolitionist very much as
a gunpowder manufacturer would look upon the wandering
Celt who should approach his establishment with a lighted pipe
in his mouth; and he cheerfully sees the culprit handed over to
the tender mercies of a mob of ignorant white barbarians.”

“Do you, then, deny that slavery develops any high qualities
in the master?”

“And if it did, what right have I to develop my high qualities
at another's expense? Yes! Jefferson is right when he
says: `The whole commerce between master and slave is a
perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting
despotism on the one part and degrading submissions

on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and his morals undepraved by such circumstances.'”

Mr. Onslow paced the deck for a moment, and then, returning,
exclaimed: “O the unspeakable crimes, barbarities, and
deviltries to which the system has educated men here at the
South during the last thirty years! Educated not merely the
poor and ignorant, but the rich and refined! The North knows
hardly a tithe of the actual horrors. Worse than the wildest
religious fanaticism, slavery sees men tortured, hung, mutilated,
subjected to every conceivable indignity, cruelty, agony,
simply because the victim is unsound, or suspected to be unsound,
on the one supreme question. I myself have been often
threatened, and sometimes the presentiment is strong upon me
that my end will be a bloody one. I should not long be safe,
were it not that in our region there are brave men who, like
me, begin to question the divinity of the obscene old hag.”

Mr. Onslow again walked away, and then, coming close up
to Vance, said in low tones: “But retribution must come, — as
sure as God lives, retribution must come, and that speedily!
Slavery must die, in order that Freedom and Civilization may
live. I see it in all the signs of the times, in all the straws
that drift by me on the current of events. Retribution must
come, — come with bloodshed, anguish, and desolation to both
North and South, — to Slavery, with spasms of diabolical
cruelty, violence, and unholy wrath, and to Freedom with
trials long and doubtful, but awaking the persistent energy
which a righteous cause will inspire, and leading ultimately to
permanent triumph and to the annihilation on this continent of
the foul power which has ruled us so long, and which shall
dare to close in deadly combat with the young genius of universal
Liberty.”

Vance grasped Onslow by the hand, but seemed too excited
to speak. Then, as if half ashamed of his emotion, he said,
“Will there be men at the South, think you, to array themselves
on the side of freedom, in the event of a collision?”

“There will be such men, but, until the slave-power shall be
annihilated forever, they will be a helpless minority. A few
rich leaders control the masses which Slavery has herself first
imbruted. Crush out slavery, and there will be regenerators

of the land who will spring up by thousands to welcome their
brethren of the North, whose interests, like theirs, lie in universal
freedom and justice.”

“You do not, then, believe those who tell us there is an eternal
incompatibility between the people of the slaveholding and
non-slaveholding States?”

“Bah! These exaggerations, the rhetoric of feeble spirits,
and the logic of false, are stuff and rubbish to any true student
of human nature. There is no incompatibility between North
and South, except what slavery engenders and strives to intensify.
Strike away slavery, and the people gravitate to each
other by laws higher than the bad passions of your Rhetts,
Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble
writers of the South, who are eternally raving about
the mean, low-born Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation
and prejudice, are merely the tools of a few plotting oligarchs
who hope to be the chiefs of a Southern Confederacy.”

“And must civil war necessarily follow from a separation?”

“As surely as thunder follows from the lightning-rent!
Yes, Webster is undoubtedly right: there can be no such thing
as peaceable secession, and I rejoice that there cannot be.”

“But would not a civil war render inevitable that alienation
which these Richmond scribblers are trying to antedate?”

“No. Enmity would be kept up long enough for the slave-power
to be scotched and killed, and then the people of both
sections would see that there was nothing to keep them apart,
that their interests are identical. The true people of the
South would soon realize that the three hundred thousand
slaveholders are even more their enemies than enemies of the
North. A reaction against our upstart aristocracy (an aristocracy
resting on tobacco-casks and cotton-bales) would ensue,
and the South would be republicanized, — a consummation
which slavery has thus far prevented. South Carolina was
Tory in the Revolution, just as she is now. Abolish slavery, and
we should be United States in fact as well as in name. Abolish
slavery, and you abolish sectionalism with it. Abolish
slavery, and you let the masses North and South see that their
welfare lies in the preservation of the republic, one and indivisible.”

“And do you anticipate civil war?”

“Yes, such a civil war as the world has never witnessed.[2]
The devil of slavery must go out of us, and as it is the worst
of all the devils that ever afflicted mankind, it can go out only
through unprecedented convulsions and tearings and agonies.
The North must suffer as well as the South, for the North
shares in the guilt of slavery, and there are thousands of men
there who shut their eyes to its enormities. Believe me, their
are high spiritual laws underlying national offences; and the
Nemesis that must punish ours is near at hand. Slavery must
be destroyed, and war is the only instrumentality that I can
conceive of energetic enough to do it. Through war, then,
must slavery be destroyed.”

“And I care not how soon!” said Vance. Then, lowering
his tone, he remarked: “Have you not been imprudent in confiding
your views to a stranger, who could have you lynched at
the next landing-place by reporting them?”

“Perhaps. But I bide the risk; you have not been so
shrewd an actor, sir, that I have not seen behind the mask.”

Vance started at the word actor, then said, looking up at the
stars: “What a beautiful night! Does not the Champion seem
to be gaining on us?”

“I have been thinking so for some minutes,” replied Onslow.
“Good night, Mr. — Excuse me. I have n't the pleasure
of knowing your name.”

“And yet we have met before, Mr. Onslow, and under circumstances
that ought to make me remembered.”

“To what do you allude?”

“I was once brought before you for horse-stealing, and, what
is more, you found me guilty of the charge, and rightly.”

“Then my recollection was not at fault, after all!” exclaimed
Onslow, astonished. “But were you indeed guilty?”

“I certainly took a horse, but it was a case of necessity.
A friend of mine, a colored man, in defence of his liberty, had
wounded his master, so called, and was flying for life. To
save him I robbed the robber, — took his horse and gave it to
his victim, enabling the latter to get off safely. The fact of

my taking the horse was clearly proved, but my motive was not
discovered. If it had been, Judge Lynch would surely have
relieved you of the care of me. You, as justice of the peace,
remanded me to prison for trial. That night I escaped. In
an outer room of the jail I found a knife and half of a slaughtered
calf. The knife I put in my pocket. The carcass I
threw over my shoulder, and ran. In the morning I found five
valuable bloodhounds on my track. I climbed a tree, and when
they came under it, I fed them till they were all tame, and
allowed me to descend; and then I cut their throats, lest they
should be used to hunt down fugitives from slavery. Two days
afterwards I was safe on board a steamboat, on my way North.”

“Who, then, are you, sir?” asked Onslow.

Vance whispered a word in reply.

Mr. Onslow seemed agitated for a moment, and then exclaimed,
“But I thought he was dead!”

“The report originated with those who took the reward
offered for his head. Mr. Onslow, I have repaid your frankness
with a similar frankness of my own. To-morrow morning,
at ten o'clock, meet me here, and you shall hear more of my
story. Good night.”

The gentlemen parted, each retiring to his state-room for
repose.