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PART I.

SLAVERY.

"THERE is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amidst the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved: it was wafted, like some accursed germ, upon a portion of the soil; but it afterwards nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread naturally with the society to which it belonged. This calamity is Slavery. Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century re-established it; as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind."-DE TOCQUEVILLE.

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PART I.

SLAVER Y.

CHAPTER I.

AS A LABOR SYSTEM.

THE greatest social and political problems of the world connect themselves, more or less intimately, with the subject of labor. A people who regard work as degradation, though arts and letters flourish among them, are but emerging from barbarism. It has been. sometimes said, with much truth, that the grade of civilization in a nation may be measured by the position which it accords to woman: a stricter test is the degree of estimation in which labor is held there.

Our race, in its gradual advance from ignorance and evil to comparative knowledge and good, has not yet, even in countries the most favored, outlived an error fatal to true progress. Sometimes avowedly, more often practically, a certain stigma still attaches to human labor; to that labor from which, in one shape or other, the world receives every thing of good, of useful, of beautiful, that charms the senses or ministers to the wants of man; to which we owe life, and every thing that makes life desirable.

According to the structure of society in each country, this error is modified in form. In certain nations of

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DEGRADATION OF LABOR.

continental Europe the great line of social demarcation is drawn between the titled classes, whether noble by birth or ennobled by royal creation, constituting the privileged; and ali other persons, including merchants, though wealthy, and lawyers, though eminent, and authors, though popular, constituting the unprivileged. More liberal England begins to admit within the pale the distinguished and successful among the professional classes, and from the mercantile and literary ranks. We ourselves, professing to honor industry and talking occasionally of the nobility of labor, have opened somewhat wider, but only throughout a portion of our Republic, the door which admits within the precincts of respectability.

Only throughout a portion of our Republic. In fifteen of these United States the opinions, the feelings, the practice of the inhabitants, as regards laborers and labor itself, have been more perverted, have been less civilized, than in the most despotic countries of Europe.

In these States the class of working husbandmen has been degraded, both as regards civil rights and social position, below the Pariahs of India. This cannot happen in any nation without producing results fatal alike to its prosperity and to the moral worth and essential dignity of its population. The only doubt as to these results is, whether their influence has been more pernicious on the enslavers or on the enslaved.

INCEPTION OF WESTERN SLAVERY.

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CHAPTER II.

ENSLAVEMENT OF INDIANS.

THE introduction into our hemisphere of this terrible element of social demoralization was almost coeval with its discovery by Europeans. It was in October of the year 1492 that Columbus first landed; and it was just eight years afterwards, in the month of October, 1500, that Francis de Bovadilla was guilty of two outrages:-one, the sending home, in chains, of the Great Discoverer; the other, the reducing to bondage of the gentle islanders whose fair land he discovered. Bovadilla "granted liberal donations of Indians to all who applied for them."*

The first year of the sixteenth century saw introduced into America that baneful system, abhorrent to Christian civilization, which was to spread and gather numbers and strength and influence, until, after more than three centuries and a half of evil growth, it was to bring a million of combatants into the field, to sacrifice on the field of battle hundreds of thousands of lives and thousands of millions of treasure.

There is scarcely a page in history so replete with horrors as that which records the inception of Slavery in this hemisphere. That terrible abuse caused, in an incredibly short period, the extinction of a race, a race whom all the historians of that day concur in representing as the most kind and inoffensive and hospitable

*Robertson's History of America, London, 1792, vol. i. book 2, p. 222. Herrera, General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America (Stevens's translation), London, 1725, vol. i. p. 244.

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