NOTE 7.-EFFECTS OF SLAVERY ON THE NEGRO. I have already remarked, in the introduction, that the simple test of the right or wrong of the continuance of slavery, in any given case, is, its effect upon both parties. It becomes important, therefore, to inquire what has been, thus far, its effect, here in the United States, upon the negro. I have already alluded to the subject, (Note 2,) but something more than an allusion is needed, especially as the matter is very generally misapprehended. Mrs. Stowe charges slavery with having "barbarized” the negro: "To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises." (Vol. ii. p. 318.) And again: "On the shores of our free States are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families, men and women, escaped, by miraculous providences, from the surges of slavery,-feeble in knowledge, and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality." (p. 317.) And the London Examiner, in a review of her work, chimes in with her: "We are for our own parts disposed to regard as the chief evil the fact which is sometimes adduced in extenuation of the whole crime against human rightsthat under the slave system the negroes have been plunged into such depths of ignorance and brutishness, that they have acquired not only the brute's vices, but in a great measure even the brute's habit of unquestioning content with his position. Not more than two negroes in five thousand yearly have the spirit to attempt to escape. They go to their cabins as the oxen to their stalls. And that by deliberate denial of education, by a long course of * * * debasing treatment, human beings should have been reduced to this-is in our opinion a more horrible result of slavery than even the tearing of the child from the slave parent, or the selling of a husband by auction out of his wife's arms. And again: "The complete acceptance of the slave's position indicated by Aunt Chloe in this last extract, the contempt of their own skin which negroes acquire from the habitual tone adopted by their white oppressors, that element of degradation upon which we have already dwelt, is happily touched in many portions of the book." (See Littell's Living Age, No. 439, pp. 102 and 105.) The charge here is, that American Slavery has caused the negro to degenerate. In refutation of this charge, I appeal from Philip drunk, to Philip sober," from Mrs. Stowe the Advocate, seeking to bolster up a bad cause with worse argument, to Mrs. Stowe the Judge, giving, in the person of George Harris, an obiter (and, therefore, unprejudiced) dictum: "The desire and yearning of my soul is for an African nationality. I want a people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own; and where am I to look for it? Not in Hayti; for in Hayti they had nothing to start with. A stream cannot rise above its fountain. The race that formed the character of the Haytiens was a worn-out, effeminate one; and, of course, the subject race will be centuries in rising to anything. "Where, then, shall I look? On the shores of Africa I see a republic, a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery." (Vol. ii. p. 300.) Now the meaning of all this is very plain; it means that as the feeble character of the Haytiens was formed in slavery to a "worn-out, effeminate race," so the energetic character of the " picked men" on the shores of Liberia was formed in slavery to a race composed of "stern, inflexible, energetic elements," to which had "been entrusted the destinies of the world, during its pioneer period of struggle and conflict." (p. 302.) And this is undoubtedly true. Yet it is a truth entirely lost sight of by the opponents of slavery, if, indeed, they were ever aware of it. They speak of the poor African as "Forced from home and all its pleasures," just as if he ever had a home, or even the idea of one. They seem to look on Africa as a paradise, with the golden age of pastoral innocence and simplicity still lingering among its inhabitants, though long since gone from the rest of the earth. If the reader has heretofore indulged in such a dream, let him turn to Appendix, B., and he will there find what will dissipate it forever. Hobbes, in his Leviathan, (Pt. i. ch. 18,) thus describes the condition of Europe in the Middle Ages:-"No arts, no letters, no society,--and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." And it must be owned that there is too much truth in the description. Europe in the Middle Ages was paradise, compared with Western Africa in all ages that we have any knowledge of her, the present included. She is the darkest of those "dark places of the earth" which, the Psalmist tells us, are full of the habitations of cruelty." Yet I have spoken of the slave traffic as an accursed traffic, (Note 3,) but it is because of the cruelty with which it is carried on. To stow human beings "in a sitting posture, wedged in between each others' legs, in a space between decks only three feet and a quarter high, with no air but what is admitted through the grated hatchways, through which their food is passed to them," and to keep them thus cramped up for weeks, and even months, together, is a deed that one would suppose none but a devil would be guilty of; and they who do it, deserve the same treatment in return: hanging is too good for them. Why! even the Guinea pigs are not thus stowed away; if they were, they would die on the voyage. But if the slave traffic were carried on without cruelty,if the negroes were as comfortably accommodated on board the slave ships, as the Irish and the Germans are in our emigrant vessels, then the slave traffic, so far from being accursed, would be a positive blessing to them.* The slave, thus brought-under the control of a Christian master, would. be as much better off than he was under his savage master in Africa, as the German or Irish peasant in this country is better off than he was in his native land. Nay, taking into consideration his own improvement and that of his posterity,—their gradual civilization and Christianization,—and he would be far the greater gainer of the two. As to the slave trade severing family ties, it is all, to use St. Clare's expression, "humbug:" there are no family ties, among the Western Africans, that are at all regarded by themselves. Parents sell their own children, and husbands their wives, without compunction. (See Appendix, B.) Indeed, properly speaking, there are no husbands and wives; the marriage relation, as we understand it, is unknown among them: its place is supplied by a temporary concubinage; the man can put away the woman at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. As to the slave trade reducing free men to slavery, ordinarily, it is not true; most of the natives of Africa are born * Or rather, it would be a blessing to them, but for the fact that where there is a fresh supply from Africa at a low rate, the owner can afford to work up his hands, and, in some cases, does actually work them up. in slavery;* and even where they are free, their freedom is a curse to them, and not a blessing. Those slaves at the South who belong to the hardest masters, and are most rigorously treated, are far better off than the freest native inhabitants of Western Africa; and the average condition of the Southern slaves is infinitely preferable to the average condition of the West-African negro, bond or free. All this, no doubt, will sound very strange to Northern ears: it would have sounded so to mine twenty years ago. It is not the teaching of New England school-books. The children there grow up under the impression that the slaves at the South go regularly to their work under the lash, with every nerve of endurance strained to its utmost tension. They have read the words of Cowper,-what schoolboy has not read them?—those glowing words : "Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys; and they have taken them for gospel, and thought them literally applicable to the southern slaveholder. True, they have learned better as they have grown up, but their early impression still clings to them and exercises a powerful influence over them. It is with them very much as it was with a class-mate of mine whom I recollect to have met in Virginia, the year after we graduated. "Why," said he, "when I was at Cambridge, I always felt as though the Unitarians were the majority, not only there, but everywhere. True, when I reflected, I knew it was not so, but, then, I did not realize it. And now, I have come here in * Of the fifty millions that inhabit that continent, forty millions are slaves to the other ten. |