Letter to the Editor of the “Times.”
Sir,—As it is not to be supposed that you consciously afford the support
of your great influence to misstatements, I request your attention to some
remarks I wish to make on an article on a book called ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin
as it is,’ contained in your paper of the 11th. In treating Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s work as an exaggerated picture of the evils of slavery, I
beg to assure you that you do her serious injustice:—of the merits of her
book as a work of art, I have no desire to speak,—to its power as a most
interesting and pathetic story, all England and America can bear
witness,—but of its truth and moderation as a representation of the
slave system in the United States, I can testify with the experience of
an eye witness, having been a resident in the Southern States, and had
opportunities of observation such as no one who has not lived on a slave
estate can have. It is very true that in reviving the altogether exploded
fashion of making the hero of her novel ‘the perfect monster that the
world ne‘er saw,’ Mrs. Stowe has laid herself open to fair criticism, and
must expect to meet with it from the very opposite taste of the present
day; but the ideal excellence of her principal character is no argument at
all against the general accuracy of her statements with regard to the
evils of slavery;—everything else in her book is not only possible, but
probable, and not only probable, but a very faithful representation of the
existing facts:—faithful, and not, as you accuse it of being,
exaggerated; for, with the exception of the horrible catastrophe, the
flogging to death of poor Tom, she has pourtrayed none of the most
revolting instances of crime produced by the slave system—with which she
might have darkened her picture, without detracting from its perfect
truth. Even with respect to the incident of Tom’s death, it must not be
said
that if such an event is possible, it is hardly probable; for this is
unfortunately not true. It is not true that the value of the slave as
property infallibly protects his life from the passions of his master. It
is no new thing for a man’s passions to blind him to his most obvious and
immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting
ones,—in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various
human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the
partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those
states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions
predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated
machinery of human existence is at once a perpetually renewed cause and
effect of certain legal and moral restraints, which, in the shape of
government and public opinion, protect the congregated lives and interests
of men from the worst outrages of open violence, the natural selfishness
of mankind assumes a different development; and the love of power, of
pleasure, or of pelf, exhibits different phenomena from those elicited
from a savage under the influence of the same passions. The channel in
which the energy and activity of modern society inclines more and more to
pour itself, is the peaceful one of the pursuit of gain. This is
preeminently the case with the two great commercial nations of the earth,
England and America;—and in either England or the Northern States of
America, the prudential and practical views of life prevail so far, that
instances of men sacrificing their money interests at the instigation of
rage, revenge, and hatred, will certainly not abound. But the Southern
slaveholders are a very different race of men from either Manchester
manufacturers or Massachusetts merchants; they are a remnant of barbarism
and feudalism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty and danger by
the side of the latest and most powerful development of commercial
civilisation.
The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New
Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates
in the near neighborhood of their respective cities, are not now the
people I refer to. They are softened and enlightened by many
influences,—the action of city life itself, where human sympathy, and
human respect, stimulated by neighborhood, produce salutary social
restraint, as well as less salutary social cowardice. They travel to the
Northern States, and to Europe; and Europe and the Northern States travel
to them; and in spite of themselves, their peculiar conditions receive
modifications from foreign intercourse. The influence, too, of commercial
enterprise, which, in these latter days, is becoming the agent of
civilisation all over the earth, affects even the uncommercial residents
of the Southern cities, and however cordially they may dislike or despise
the mercantile tendencies of Atlantic Americans, or transatlantic
Englishmen, their frequent contact with them breaks down some of the
barriers of difference between them, and humanizes the slaveholder of the
great cities into some relation with the spirit of his own times and
country. But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the
slaveholding population of the South,—a nation, for as such they should
be spoken of, of men whose organization and temperament is that of the
southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once
enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid
sand and pestilential swamp; entrenched within their own boundaries;
surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will;
delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking,
gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion;
ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society—it is impossible to
conceive a more savage existence within the pale of any modern
civilisation.
The South Carolinian gentry have been fond of styling themselves the
chivalry of the South, and perhaps might not badly represent, in their
relations with their dependents, the nobility of France before the
purifying hurricane of the Revolution swept the rights of the suzerain and
the wrongs of the serf together into one bloody abyss. The planters of the
interior of the Southern and Southwestern States, with their furious
feuds and slaughterous combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their
gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the
chivalry of France before the horrors of the Jacquerie admonished them
that there was a limit even to the endurance of slaves. With such men as
these, human life, even when it can be bought or sold in the market for so
many dollars, is but little protected by considerations of interest from
the effects of any violent passion. There is yet, however, another aspect
of the question, which is, that it is sometimes clearly not the interest
of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior
or superannuated laborers, or the very notorious instance in which some
of the owners of sugar plantations stated that they found it better worth
their while to work off (i.e. kill with labor) a certain proportion, of
their force, and replace them by new hands every seven years, than work
them less severely and maintain them in diminished efficiency for an
indefinite length of time. Here you will observe a precise estimate of the
planter’s material interest led to a result which you argue passion itself
can never be so blind as to adopt. This was a deliberate economical
calculation, openly avowed some years ago by a number of sugar planters in
Louisiana. If, instead of accusing Mrs. Stowe of exaggeration, you had
brought the same charge against the author of the ‘White Slave,’ I should
not have been surprised; for his book presents some of the most revolting
instances of atrocity and crime that the miserable
abuse of irresponsible
power is capable of producing, and it is by no means written in the spirit
of universal humanity which pervades Mrs. Stowe’s volumes: but it is not
liable to the charge of exaggeration, any more than her less disgusting
delineation. The scenes described in the ‘White Slave’
do occur in the
slave States of North America; and in two of the most appalling incidents
of the book—the burning alive of the captured runaway, and the hanging
without trial of the Vicksburg gamblers—the author of the ‘White Slave’
has very simply related positive facts of notorious occurrence. To which
he might have added, had he seen fit to do so, the instance of a slave who
perished in the sea swamps, where he was left bound and naked, a prey to
the torture inflicted upon him by the venomous mosquito swarms. My
purpose, however, in addressing you was not to enter into a disquisition
on either of these publications; but I am not sorry to take this
opportunity of bearing witness to the truth of Mrs. Stowe’s admirable
book, and I have seen what few Englishmen can see—the working of the
system in the midst of it.
In reply to your ‘Dispassionate Observer,’ who went to the South
professedly with the purpose of seeing and judging of the state of things
for himself, let me tell you that, little as he may be disposed to believe
it, his testimony is worth less than nothing; for it is morally impossible
for any Englishman going into the Southern States, except as a resident,
to know anything whatever of the real condition of the slave population.
This was the case some years ago, as I experienced, and it is now likely
to be more the case than ever; for the institution is not yet approved
divine to the perceptions of Englishmen, and the Southerners are as
anxious to hide its uglier features from any note-making observer from
this side the water, as to present to his admiration and approval such as
can by any possibility be made to wear the most distant approach to
comeliness.
The gentry of the Southern States are preeminent in their own country
for that species of manner which, contrasted with the breeding of the
Northerners, would be emphatically pronounced ‘good’ by Englishmen. Born
to inhabit landed property, they are not inevitably made clerks and
counting-house men of, but inherit with their estates some of the
invariable characteristics of an aristocracy. The shop is not their
element; and the eager spirit of speculation and the sordid spirit of
gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their very demeanor
and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large proportion of
the inhabitants of the Northern States. Good manners have an undue value
for Englishmen, generally speaking; and whatever departs from their
peculiar standard of breeding is apt to prejudice them, as whatever
approaches it prepossesses them, far more than is reasonable. The
Southerners are infinitely better bred men, according to English
notions, than the men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives
them a certain self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease.
Their temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have
the grace and spirit which seldom belong to the deportment of a Northern
people; but upon more familiar acquaintance, the vices of the social
system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with
their own peculiar taint; and haughty overbearing irritability,
effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy
and cruelty, which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power
over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits which
acquaintance developes in a Southern character. In spite of all this,
there is no manner of doubt that the ‘candid English observer’ will, for
the season of his sojourning among them, greatly prefer
their
intercourse to that of their Northern brethren. Moreover, without in the
least suspecting it, he will be bribed insidiously and incessantly by
the extreme desire and endeavor to please and prepossess him which the
whole white population of the slave States will exhibit—as long as he
goes only as a ‘candid observer,’ with a mind not
yet made up upon the
subject of slavery, and open to conviction as to its virtues. Every
conciliating demonstration of courtesy and hospitable kindness will be
extended to him, and, as I said before, if his observation is permitted
(and it may even appear to be courted), it will be to a fairly bound
purified edition of the black book of slavery, in which, though the
inherent viciousness of the whole story cannot be suppressed, the
coarser and more offensive passages will be carefully expunged. And now,
permit me to observe, that the remarks of your traveler must derive
much of their value from the scene of his enquiry. In Maryland,
Kentucky, and Virginia, the outward aspect of slavery has ceased to wear
its most deplorable features. The remaining vitality of the system no
longer resides in the interests, but in the pride and prejudices of the
planters. Their soil and climate are alike favorable to the labors of
a white peasantry: the slave cultivation has had time to prove itself
there the destructive pest which, in time, it will prove itself wherever
it prevails. The vast estates and large fortunes that once maintained,
and were maintained by, the serfdom of hundreds of negroes, have
dwindled in size and sunk in value, till the slaves have become so heavy
a burden on the resources of the exhausted soil and impoverished owners
of it, that they are made themselves objects of traffic in order to ward
off the ruin that their increase would otherwise entail. Thus, the
plantations of the Northern slave States now present to the traveler
very few of the darker and more oppressive peculiarities of the system;
and, provided he does not stray
too near the precincts where the negroes
are sold, or come across gangs of them on their way to Georgia,
Louisiana, or Alabama, he may, if he is a very superficial observer,
conclude that the most prosperous slavery is not much worse than the
most miserable freedom.
But of what value will be such conclusions applied to those numerous
plantations where no white man ever sets foot without the express
permission of the owner? not estates lying close to Baltimore and
Charleston, or even Lexington or Savannah, but remote and savage
wildernesses like Legree’s estate in ‘Uncle Tom,’ like all the plantations
in the interior of Tennessee and Alabama, like the cotton-fields and
rice-swamps of the great muddy rivers of Louisiana and Georgia, like the
dreary pine barrens and endless woody wastes of north Carolina. These,
especially the islands, are like so many fortresses, approachable for
‘observers’ only at the owners’ will. On most of the rice plantations in
these pestilential regions, no white man can pass the night at certain
seasons of the year without running the risk of his life; and during the
day, the master and overseer are as much alone and irresponsible in their
dominion over their black cattle, as Robinson Crusoe was over his small
family of animals on his desert habitation. Who, on such estates as these,
shall witness to any act of tyranny or barbarity, however atrocious? No
black man’s testimony is allowed against a white, and who on the dismal
swampy rice-grounds of the Savannah, or the sugar-brakes of the
Mississippi and its tributaries, or the up country cotton lands of the
Ocamulgee, shall go to perform the task of candid observation and
benevolent enquiry?
I passed some time on two such estates—plantations where the negroes
esteemed themselves well off, and, compared with the slaves on several of
the neighboring properties, might very well consider themselves so; and
I will,
with your permission, contrast some of the items of my observation
with those of the traveler whose report you find so satisfactory on the
subject of the ‘consolations’ of slavery.
And first, for the attachment which he affirms to subsist between the
slave and master. I do not deny that certain manifestations on the part of
the slave may suggest the idea of such a feeling; but whether upon better
examination it will be found to deserve the name, I very much doubt. In
the first place, on some of the great Southern estates, the owners are
habitual absentees, utterly unknown to their serfs, and enjoying the
proceeds of their labor in residences as remote as possible from the
sands and swamps where their rice and cotton grow, and their slaves bow
themselves under the eye of the white overseer, and the lash of the black
driver. Some of these Sybarites prefer living in Paris, that paradise of
American republicans, some in the capitals of the middle states of the
union, Philadelphia or New York.
The air of New England has a keen edge of liberty, which suits few
Southern constitutions; and unkindly as abolition has found its native
soil and native skies, that is its birthplace, and there it flourishes, in
spite of all attempts to root it out and trample it down, and within any
atmosphere poisoned by its influence no slaveholder can willingly draw
breath. Some travel in Europe, and few, whose means permit the contrary,
ever pass the entire year on their plantations. Great intervals of many
years pass, and no master ever visits some of these properties: what
species of attachment do you think the slave entertains for him? In other
cases, the visits made will be of a few days in one of the winter months;
the estate and its cultivators remaining for the rest of the year under
the absolute control of the overseer, who, provided he contrives to get a
good crop of rice or cotton into the market
for his employers, is left to
the arbitrary exercise of a will seldom uninfluenced for evil, by the
combined effects of the grossest ignorance and habitual intemperance. The
temptation to the latter vice is almost irresistible to a white man in
such a climate, and leading an existence of brutal isolation, among a
parcel of human beings as like brutes as they can be made. But the owner
who at these distant intervals of months or years revisits his estates, is
looked upon as a returning providence by the poor negroes. They have no
experience of his character to destroy their hopes in his goodness, and
all possible and impossible ameliorations of their condition are
anticipated from his advent, less work, more food, fewer stripes, and some
of that consideration which the slave hopes may spring from his positive
money value to his owner,—a fallacious dependence, as I have already
attempted to show, but one which, if it has not always predominating
weight with the master, never can have any with the overseer, who has not
even the feeling of regard for his own property to mitigate his
absolutism over the slaves of another man.
There is a very powerful cause which makes the prosperity and well-being
(as far as life is concerned) of most masters a subject of solicitude with
their slaves. The only stability of their condition, such as it is, hangs
upon it. If the owner of a plantation dies, his estates may fall into the
market, and his slaves be sold at public auction the next day; and whether
this promises a better, or threatens a worse condition, the slaves cannot
know, and no human being cares. One thing it inevitably brings, the
uprooting of all old associations; the disruption of all the ties of
fellowship in misery; the tearing asunder of all relations of blood and
affection; the sale into separate and far distant districts of fathers,
mothers, husbands, wives, and children. If the estate does not lie in the
extreme
south, there is the vague dread of being driven thither from
Virginia to Georgia, from Carolina to Alabama, or Louisiana, a change
which, for reasons I have shown above, implies the passing from a higher
into a lower circle of the infernal pit of slavery.
I once heard a slave on the plantation of an absentee express the most
lively distress at hearing that his master was ill. Before, however, I had
recovered from my surprise at this warm ‘attachment’ to a distant and all
but unknown proprietor, the man added, ‘massa die, what become of all him
people?’
On my arrival on the plantation where I resided, I was hailed with the
most extravagant demonstrations of delight, and all but lifted off my feet
in the arms of people who had never seen me before; but who, knowing me to
be connected with their owners, expected from me some of the multitudinous
benefits which they always hope to derive from masters. These, until they
come to reside among them, are always believed to be sources of
beneficence and fountains of redress by the poor people, who have known no
rule but the delegated tyranny of the overseer. In these expectations,
however, they very soon find themselves cruelly mistaken. Of course, if
the absentee planter has received a satisfactory income from his estate,
he is inclined to be satisfied with the manager of it, and as
subordination to the only white man among hundreds of blacks must be
maintained at any and every cost, the overseer is justified and upheld in
his whole administration. If the wretched slave ever dared to prefer a
complaint of ill-usage the most atrocious, the law which refuses the
testimony of a black against a white is not only the law of the land, but
of every man’s private dealings; and lying being one of the natural
results of slavery, and a tendency to shirk compelled and unrequited
labor another, the overseer stands on excellent vantage-ground
when he
refers to these undoubted characteristics of the system, if called upon to
rebut any charge of cruelty or injustice. But pray consider for a moment
the probability of any such charge being preferred by a poor creature,
who has been for years left to the absolute disposal of this man, and who
knows very well that in a few days, or months at furthest, the master will
again depart, leaving him again for months, perhaps for years, utterly at
the mercy of the man against whom he has dared to prefer a complaint. On
the estates which I visited, the owners had been habitually absent, and
the ‘attachment’ of slaves to such masters as these, you will allow, can
hardly come under the denomination of a strong personal feeling.
Your authority next states that the infirm and superannuated slaves no
longer capable of ministering to their masters’ luxuries, on the estate
that he visited, were ending their lives among all the comforts of home,
with kindred and friends around them, in a condition which he contrasts,
at least by implication, very favorably with the workhouse, the last
refuge provided by the social humanity of England—for the pauper laborer
when he has reached that term when ‘unregarded age is in corners thrown.’
On the plantation where I lived the infirmary was a large room, the walls
of which were simply mud and lathes—the floor, the soil itself, damp with
perpetual drippings from the holes in the roof, and the open space which
served for a window was protected only by a broken shutter, which, in
order to exclude the cold, was drawn so near as almost to exclude the
light at the same time. Upon this earthen floor, with nothing but its
hard damp surface beneath him, no covering but a tattered shirt and
trowsers, and a few sticks under his head for a pillow, lay an old man of
upwards of seventy, dying. When I first looked at him I thought by the
glazed stare of his eyes, and the flies that had gathered round his half
open mouth,
that he was dead: but on stooping nearer, I perceived that the
last faint struggle of life was still going on, but even while I bent over
him it ceased; and so, like a worn-out hound, with no creature to comfort
or relieve his last agony, with neither Christian solace or human succor
near him, with neither wife, nor child, nor even friendly fellow being to
lift his head from the knotty sticks on which he had rested it, or drive
away the insects that buzzed round his lips and nostrils like those of a
fallen beast, died this poor old slave, whose life had been exhausted in
unrequited labor, the fruits of which had gone to pamper the pride and
feed the luxury of those who knew and cared neither for his life or death,
and to whom, if they had heard of the latter, it would have been a matter
of absolute though small gain, the saving of a daily pittance of meal,
which served to prolong a life no longer available to them.
I proceed to the next item in your observer’s record. All children below
the age of twelve were unemployed, he says, on the estate he visited: this
is perhaps a questionable benefit, when, no process of mental cultivation
being permitted, the only employment for the leisure thus allowed is that
of rolling, like dogs or cats, in the sand and the sun. On all the
plantations I visited, and on those where I resided, the infants in arms
were committed to the care of these juvenile slaves, who were denominated
nurses, and whose sole employment was what they call to ‘mind baby.’ The
poor little negro sucklings were cared for (I leave to your own judgment
how efficiently or how tenderly) by these half-savage slips of
slavery—carried by them to the fields where their mothers were working
under the lash, to receive their needful nourishment, and then carried
back again to the ‘settlement,’ or collection of negro huts, where they
wallowed unheeded in utter filth and neglect until the time again returned
for their
being carried to their mother’s breast. Such was the employment
of the children of eight or nine years old, and the only supervision
exercised over either babies or ‘baby minders’ was that of the old woman
left in charge of the infirmary, where she made her abode all day long and
bestowed such samples of her care and skill upon its inmates as I shall
have occasion to mention presently. The practice of thus driving the
mothers a-field, even while their infants were still dependent upon them
for their daily nourishment, is one of which the evil as well as the
cruelty is abundantly apparent without comment. The next note of
admiration elicited from your ‘impartial observer’ is bestowed upon the
fact that the domestic servants (i.e. house slaves) on the plantation he
visited were
allowed to live away from the owner’s residence, and to
marry. But I never was on a southern plantation, and I never heard of one,
where any of the slaves were allowed to sleep under the same roof with
their owner. With the exception of the women to whose care the children of
the planter, if he had any, might be confided, and perhaps a little boy or
girl slave, kept as a sort of pet animal and allowed to pass the night on
the floor of the sleeping apartment of some member of the family, the
residence of
any slaves belonging to a plantation night and day in their
master’s house, like Northern or European servants, is a thing I believe
unknown throughout the Southern States. Of course I except the cities, and
speak only of the estates, where the house servants are neither better
housed or accommodated than the field-hands. Their intolerably dirty
habits and offensive persons would indeed render it a severe trial to any
family accustomed to habits of decent cleanliness; and, moreover,
considerations of safety, and that cautious vigilance which is a hard
necessity of the planter’s existence, in spite of the supposed attachment
of his slaves, would never permit the near
proximity, during the
unprotected hours of the night, of those whose intimacy with the daily
habits and knowledge of the nightly securities resorted to might prove
terrible auxiliaries to any attack from without. The city guards, patrols,
and night-watches, together with their stringent rules about negroes
being abroad after night, and their well fortified lock-up houses for all
detected without a pass, afford some security against these attached
dependents; but on remote plantations, where the owner and his family and
perhaps a white overseer are alone, surrounded by slaves and separated
from all succor against them, they do not sleep under the white man’s
roof, and, for politic reasons, pass the night away from their master’s
abode. The house servants have no other or better allowance of food than
the field laborers, but have the advantage of eking it out by what is
left from the master’s table,—if possible, with even less comfort in one
respect, inasmuch as no time whatever is set apart for their meals, which
they snatch at any hour and in any way that they can—generally, however,
standing or squatting on their hams round the kitchen fire; the kitchen
being a mere outhouse or barn with a fire in it. On the estate where I
lived, as I have mentioned, they had no sleeping-rooms in the house; but
when their work was over, they retired like the rest to their hovels, the
discomfort of which had to them all the additional disadvantage of
comparison with their owner’s mode of living. In all establishments
whatever, of course some disparity exists between the accommodation of the
drawing-rooms and best bed-rooms and the servants’ kitchen and attics; but
on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree. The young women who
performed the offices of waiting and housemaids, and the lads who
attended upon the service of their master’s table where I lived, had
neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down upon themselves; the ‘boys’
lay
all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire, and the women upon the
usual slave’s bed—a frame of rough boards, strewed with a little moss off
the trees, with the addition perhaps of a tattered and filthy blanket. As
for the so-called privilege of marrying—surely it is gross mockery to
apply such a word to a bond which may be holy in God’s sight, but which
did not prevent the owner of a plantation where my observations were made
from selling and buying men and their so-called wives and children into
divided bondage, nor the white overseer from compelling the wife of one of
the most excellent and exemplary of his master’s slaves to live with
him—nor the white wife of another overseer, in her husband’s temporary
absence from the estate, from barbarously flogging three
married slaves
within a month of their confinement, their condition being the result of
the profligacy of the said overseer, and probably compelled by the very
same lash by which it was punished. This is a very disgusting picture of
married life on slave estates: but I have undertaken to reply to the
statements of your informant, and I regret to be obliged to record the
facts by which alone I can do so. ‘Work,’ continues your authority, ‘began
at six in the morning, at nine an hour’s rest was allowed for breakfast,
and by two or three o’clock the day’s work was done.’ Certainly this was a
pattern plantation, and I can only lament that my experience lay amid such
far less favorable circumstances. The negroes among whom I lived went to
the fields at daybreak, carrying with them their allowance of food, which
toward noon, and not till then, they ate, cooking it over a fire which
they kindled as best they could where they were working; their
second
meal in the day was at night after their labor was over, having worked at
the
very least six hours without rest or refreshment, since their
noon-day meal—properly so called, indeed, for it was meal and nothing
else, or a
preparation something thicker than porridge, which they call
hominy. Perhaps the candid observer, whose report of the estate he visited
appeared to you so consolatory, would think that this diet contrasted
favorably with that of potato and butter-milk fed Irish laborers. But a
more just comparison surely would be with the mode of living of the
laboring population of the United States, the peasantry of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, or indeed with the condition of those
very potato and butter-milk fed Irishmen when they have exchanged their
native soil for the fields of the Northern and North-Western States, and
when, as one of them once was heard to say, it was no use writing home
that he got meat three times a-day, for nobody in Ireland would believe
it. The next item in the list of commendation is the hospital, which your
informant also visited, and of which he gives the following account—‘It
consisted of three separate wards, all clean and well ventilated: one was
for lying-in women, who were invariably allowed a month’s rest after their
confinement.’ Permit me to place beside this picture that of a Southern
infirmary, such as I saw it, and taken on the spot. In the first room that
I entered I found only half of the windows, of which there were six,
glazed; these were almost as much obscured with dirt as the other
windowless ones were darkened by the dingy shutters which the shivering
inmates had closed in order to protect themselves from the cold. In the
enormous chimney glimmered the powerless embers of a few chips of wood,
round which as many of the sick women as had strength to approach were
cowering, some on wooden settles (there was not such a thing as a chair
with a back in the whole establishment), most of them on the ground,
excluding those who were too ill to rise—and these poor wretches lay
prostrate on the earth, without bedstead, bed, mattress, or pillow, with
no
covering but the clothes they had on and some filthy rags of blanket in
which they endeavored to wrap themselves as they lay literally strewing
the floor, so that there was hardly room to pass between them. Here in
their hour of sickness and suffering lay those whose health and strength
had given way under unrequited labor—some of them, no later than the
previous day, had been urged with the lash to their accustomed tasks—and
their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were even at that hour
sweating over the earth whose increase was to procure for others all the
luxuries which health can enjoy, all the comforts which can alleviate
sickness. Here lay women expecting every hour the terror and agonies of
child-birth, others who had just brought their doomed offspring into the
world, others who were groaning over the anguish and bitter disappointment
of miscarriages—here lay some burning with fever, others chilled with
cold and aching with rheumatism, upon the hard cold ground, the draughts
and damp of the atmosphere increasing their sufferings, and dirt, noise,
stench, and every aggravation of which sickness is capable combined in
their condition. There had been among them one or two cases of prolonged
and terribly hard labor; and the method adopted by the ignorant old
negress, who was the sole matron, midwife, nurse, physician, surgeon, and
servant of the infirmary, to assist them in their extremity, was to tie a
cloth tight round the throats of the agonized women, and by drawing it
till she almost suffocated them she produced violent and spasmodic
struggles, which she assured me she thought materially assisted the
progress of the labor. This was one of the Southern infirmaries with
which I was acquainted; and I beg to conclude this chapter of contrasts to
your informant’s consolatory views of slavery, by assuring you once more
very emphatically that they have been one and all drawn from estates
where the slaves esteemed themselves well treated,
were reputed generally
to be so, and undoubtedly, as far as my observation went, were so,
compared with those on several of the adjoining plantations.
With regard to the statement respecting the sums of money earned by
industrious negroes, there is no doubt that it is perfectly correct. I
knew of some slaves on a plantation in the extreme South who had received,
at various times, large sums of money from a shopkeeper in the small town
near their estate, for the gray moss or lichen collected from the
evergreen oaks of Carolina and Georgia, upon which it hangs in vast
masses, and after some cleaning process becomes an excellent substitute
for horse-hair, for bed, chair, and sofa-stuffing. On another estate, some
of the slaves were expert boat makers, and had been allowed by their
masters to retain the price (no inconsiderable one) for some that they had
found time to manufacture after their day’s labor was accomplished. These
were undoubtedly privileges, but I confess it appears to me that the
juster view of the matter would be this—if these men were industrious
enough out of their scanty leisure to earn these sums of money, which a
mere exercise of arbitrary will on the part of the master allowed them to
keep, how much more of remuneration, of comfort, of improvement, physical
and mental, might they not have achieved, had the due price of their daily
labor merely been paid to them? It seems to me that this is the mode of
putting the case to Englishmen, and all who have not agreed to consider
uncertain favor an equivalent for common justice in the dealings of man
with man. As the slaves are well known to toil for years sometimes to
amass the means of rescuing themselves from bondage, the fact of their
being able and sometimes allowed to earn considerable sums of money is
notorious. But now that I have answered one by one the instances you have
produced, with others—I am sure as accurate and I believe as common—
of
an entirely opposite description, permit me to ask you what this sort of
testimony amounts to. I allow you full credit for yours, allow me full
credit for mine, and the result is very simply a nullification of the one
by the other statement, and a proof that there is as much good as evil in
the details of slavery; but now, be pleased to throw into the scale this
consideration, that the principle of the whole is unmitigated abominable
evil, as by your own acknowledgement you hold it to be, and add, moreover,
that the principle being invariably bad beyond the power of the best man
acting under it to alter its execrable injustice, the goodness of the
detail is a matter absolutely dependent upon the will of each individual
slaveholder, so that though the best cannot make the system in the
smallest particular better, the bad can make every practical detail of it
as atrocious as the principle itself; and then tell me upon what ground
you palliate a monstrous iniquity, which is the rule, because of the
accidental exceptions which go to prove it. Moreover, if, as you have
asserted, good preponderates over evil in the practice, though not in the
theory of slavery, or it would not maintain its existence, why do you
uphold to us, with so much complacency, the hope that it is surely if not
rapidly approaching its abolishment? Why is the preponderating good, which
has, as you say, proved sufficient to uphold the institution hitherto, to
become (in spite of the spread of civilisation and national progress, and
the gradual improvement of the slaves themselves) inadequate to its
perpetuation henceforward? Or why, if good really has prevailed in it, do
you rejoice that it is speedily to pass away? You say the emancipation of
the slaves is inevitable, and that through progressive culture the negro
of the Southern States daily approaches more nearly to the recovery of the
rights of which he has been robbed. But whence do you draw this happy
augury, except from
the hope, which all Christian souls must cherish, that
God will not permit much longer so great a wickedness to darken the face
of the earth? Surely the increased stringency of the Southern slave-laws,
the more than ever vigilant precautions against all attempts to enlighten
or educate the negroes, the severer restrictions on manumission, the
thrusting forth out of certain States of all free persons of color, the
atrocious Fugitive Slave Bill, one of the latest achievements of
Congress, and the piratical attempts upon Cuba, avowedly on the part of
all Southerners, abetting or justifying it because it will add
slave-territory and 600,000 slaves to their possessions;—surely these do
not seem indications of the better state of things you anticipate, except,
indeed, as the straining of the chain beyond all endurable tightness
significantly suggests the probability of its giving way.
I do not believe the planters have any disposition to put an end to
slavery, nor is it perhaps much to be wondered at that they have not. To
do so is, in the opinion of the majority of them, to run the risk of
losing their property, perhaps their lives, for a benefit which they
profess to think doubtful to the slaves themselves. How far they are right
in anticipating ruin from the manumission of their slaves I think
questionable, but that they do so is certain, and self-impoverishment for
the sake of abstract principle is not a thing to be reasonably expected
from any large mass of men. But, besides the natural fact that the
slaveholders wish to retain their property, emancipation is, in their view
of it, not only a risk of enormous pecuniary loss, and of their entire
social status, but involves elements of personal danger, and above all,
disgust to inveterate prejudices, which they will assuredly never
encounter. The question is not alone one of foregoing great wealth, or the
mere means of subsistence (in either case almost equally hard); it is not
alone the unbinding the
hands of those who have many a bloody debt of
hatred and revenge to settle; it is not alone the consenting suddenly to
see by their side, upon a footing of free social equality, creatures
towards whom their predominant feeling is one of mingled terror and
abhorrence, and who, during the whole of their national existence, have
been, as the earth, trampled beneath their feet, yet ever threatening to
gape and swallow them alive. It is not all this alone which makes it
unlikely that the Southern planter should desire to free his slaves:
freedom in America is not merely a personal right, it involves a political
privilege. Freemen there are legislators. The rulers of the land are the
majority of the people, and in many parts of the Southern States the black
free citizens would become, if not at once, yet in process of time,
inevitably voters, landholders, delegates to state legislatures, members
of assembly—who knows?—senators, judges, aspirants to the presidency of
the United States. You must be an American, or have lived long among them,
to conceive the shout of derisive execration with which such an idea would
be hailed from one end of the land to the other.
That the emancipation of the negroes need not necessarily put them in
possession of the franchise is of course obvious, but as a general
consequence the one would follow from the other; and at present certainly
the slaveholders are no more ready to grant the political privilege than
the natural right of freedom. Under these circumstances, though the utmost
commiseration is naturally excited by the slaves, I agree with you that
some forbearance is due to the masters. It is difficult to conceive a more
awful position than theirs: fettered by laws which impede every movement
towards right and justice, and utterly without the desire to repeal
them—dogged by the apprehension of nameless retributions—bound beneath a
burden of responsibility for which, whether they acknowledge
it or not,
they are held accountable by God and men—goaded by the keen consciousness
of the growing reprobation of all civilized Christian communities, their
existence presents the miserable moral counterpart of the physical
condition of their slaves; and it is one compared with which that of the
wretchedest slave is, in my judgment, worthy of envy.
