Part 12

“The state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” “So directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that _’tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman_, MUCH LESS A GENTLEMAN, _should plead for ’t_.”[57]

Then comes Adam Smith, the founder of the science of Political Economy, who, in his work on Morals, thus utters himself:--

“There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from nor of those which they go to, _and whose levity, brutality, and baseness so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished_.”[58]

This judgment, pronounced just a century ago, was repelled by the Slave-Masters of Virginia in a feeble publication, which attests at least their own consciousness that they were the criminals arraigned by the distinguished philosopher. This was soon followed by the testimony of the great English moralist, Dr. Johnson, who, in a letter to a friend, thus shows his opinion of Slave-Masters:--

“To omit for a year, or for a day, the most efficacious method of advancing Christianity, in compliance with any purposes that terminate on this side of the grave, is a crime of which I know not that the world has yet had an example, except in the practice of _the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble_.”[59]

These are British voices. There are French also of equal character, whose is the same implacable judgment. First I name Condorcet, who did so much to develop the idea of Human Progress. Constantly he testifies against Slavery. His brand of it as Barbarism is sententiously expressed in a letter to Voltaire, describing a successful Slave-Master:--

“L’Éprémesnil is a little American, who, by dint of plying his negroes with the lash, has succeeded in getting enough sugar and indigo to buy an office of King’s Councillor in the revenue service.”[60]

Voltaire adds to this expression other words kindred in scorn:--

“The American savage of whom you speak does not astonish me; but he frightens me, for I know beyond doubt that he is of the horde of other French savages who have sworn immortal hate to reason.”[61]

In harmony with these is that famous irony of Montesquieu, where, speaking of the Africans, he says:--

“It is impossible that we should suppose these people men; because, if we supposed them men, the world would begin to think that we ourselves were not Christians.”[62]

Other countries might testify; but this is enough.

With such authorities, Personal and Philosophic, American and Foreign, I need not hesitate in this ungracious task; but Truth, which is mightier than Mason and Jefferson, than John Locke, Adam Smith, and Samuel Johnson, than Condorcet, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, marshals the evidence in unbroken succession.

Proceeding with the argument, broadening as we advance, we shall see Slave-Masters (1) in the Law of Slavery, (2) in relations with Slaves, (3) in relations with each other and with Society, and (4) in that unconsciousness which renders them insensible to their true character.

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(1.) As in considering the Character of Slavery, so in considering the Character of Slave-Masters, we must begin with the _Law of Slavery_, which, as their work, testifies against them. In the face of this unutterable abomination, where impiety, cruelty, brutality, and robbery all strive for mastery, it is vain to assert humanity or refinement in its authors. Full well I know that the conscience, which speaks so powerfully to the solitary soul, is often silent in the corporate body, and that, in all ages and countries, numbers, when gathered in communities and States, have sanctioned acts from which the individual revolts. And yet I know no surer way of judging a people than by its laws, especially where those laws have been long continued and openly maintained.

Whatever may be the eminence of individual virtue,--and I would not so far disparage humanity as to suppose that offences so general where Slavery exists are universal,--it is not reasonable or logical to infer that the body of Slave-Masters are better than the Law of Slavery. And since the Law itself degrades the slave to be a chattel, and submits him to irresponsible control,--with power to bind and to scourge, to usurp the fruits of another’s labor, to pollute the body, and to outrage all ties of family, making marriage impossible,--we must conclude that such enormities are sanctioned by Slave-Masters; while the refusal of testimony, and the denial of instruction, by supplementary law, complete the evidence of complicity. And this conclusion must stand unquestioned, just so long as the Law of Slavery exists unrepealed. So mild and philosophical a judge as Tocqueville says, in his authoritative work: “The legislation of the Southern States with regard to slaves at the present day exhibits such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated.”[63] All of which is too true. Cease, then, to blazon the humanity of Slave-Masters. Tell me not of the lenity with which this cruel Code is tempered to its unhappy subjects. Tell me not of the sympathy which overflows from the mansion of the master to the cabin of the slave. In vain you assert such “happy accidents.” In vain you show individuals who do not exert the wickedness of the law. The Barbarism still endures, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very SLAVE CODE, and proclaiming constantly the character of its authors. And this is the first article in the evidence against Slave-Masters.

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(2.) I am next brought to _Slave-Masters in their relations with Slaves_; and here the argument is founded on facts, and on presumptions irresistible as facts. Only lately has inquiry burst into that gloomy world of bondage, and disclosed its secrets. But enough is already known to arouse the indignant condemnation of mankind. For instance, here is a simple advertisement--one of thousands--from the _Georgia Messenger_:--

“RUN AWAY.--My man Fountain; has holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead; has been shot in the hind parts of his legs; is marked on his back with the whip. Apply to Robert Beasley, Macon, Ga.”

Holes in the ears; scar on the forehead; shot in the legs; and marks of the lash on the back! Such are tokens by which the Slave-Master identifies his slave.

Here is another advertisement, revealing Slave-Masters in a different light. It is from the _National Intelligencer_, published at the capital; and I confess the pain with which I cite such an indecency in a journal of much respectability. Of course it appeared without the knowledge of the editors; but it is none the less an illustrative example.

“FOR SALE.--An accomplished and handsome lady’s-maid. She is just sixteen years of age; was raised in a genteel family in Maryland; and is now proposed to be sold, not for any fault, but simply because the owner has no further use for her. A note directed to C. D., Gadsby’s Hotel, will receive prompt attention.”

A sated libertine, in a land where vice is legalized, could not expose his victim with apter words.

These two instances illustrate a class.

In the recent work of Mr. Olmsted, a close observer and traveller in the Slave States, which abounds in pictures of Slavery, drawn with caution and evident regard to truth, is another, where a Slave-Master thus frankly confesses his experience:--

“‘I can tell you how you can break a nigger of running away, certain,’ said the Slave-Master. ‘There was an old fellow I used to know in Georgia, that always cured his so. If a nigger ran away, when he caught him, he would bind his knee over a log, and fasten him so he couldn’t stir; then he’d take a pair of pincers, and pull one of his toe-nails out by the roots, and tell him, that, if he ever run away again, he would pull out two of them, and if he run away again after that, he told him he’d pull out four of them, and so on, doubling each time. He never had to do it more than twice; it always cured them.’”[64]

Like this story, from the lips of a Slave-Master, is another, where the master, angry because his slave sought to regain his God-given liberty, deliberately cut the tendons of his heel, thus horribly maiming him for life.

In vain these instances are denied. Their accumulating number, authenticated in every possible manner, by the press, by a cloud of witnesses, and by the confession of Slave-Masters, stares us constantly in the face.

Here we are brought again to the Slave Code, under the shelter of which these things, and worse, are done with complete impunity. Listen to the remarkable words of Mr. Justice Ruffin, of North Carolina, who, in a solemn decision, thus portrays, affirms, and deplores this terrible latitude. The obedience of the slave, he says,--

“is the consequence only of _uncontrolled authority over the body.… The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect._ I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And, as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. _This discipline belongs to the state of Slavery.…_ It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.”[65]

This same license is thus expounded in a recent judicial decision of Virginia:--

“It is the policy of the law in respect to the relation of master and slave, and for the sake of securing proper subordination and obedience on the part of the slave, _to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel, and excessive_.”[66]

Can Barbarism further go? Here is irresponsible power, rendered more irresponsible still by the seclusion of the plantation, and absolutely fortified by supplementary law excluding the testimony of slaves. That under its shelter enormities should occur, stranger than fiction, too terrible for imagination, and surpassing any attested experience, is simply according to the course of Nature and the course of history. Antiquity has illustrations which are most painful. From Ovid we learn how the porter was chained at his master’s gate;[67] by Plautus we are introduced to the various instruments of punishment, in fearful catalogue;[68] and in the pages of the philosopher Seneca we are saddened by the cruelties of which the slave was victim.[69] A later writer, the great teacher of medicine, Galen, describes men knocking out the teeth of slaves with the fist, falling upon them not only with fist, but with the heels, and gouging the eyes with a pen, if at hand, as did the Emperor Adrian on one occasion;[70] while Tacitus shows how four hundred slaves in the house of an assassinated master were handed over to vindictive death.[71] St. Chrysostom portrays a mistress dragging a slave-girl by the hair, and herself applying the whip, until the cries of her bruised victim filled the whole house and penetrated the street.[72]

All this is ancient Barbarism, according to the evidence; but the analogies of life show that such things must be, where Slavery prevails. The visitation of the abbeys in England disclosed vice and disorder in startling forms, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of monastic life. A similar visitation of plantations would disclose more fearful results, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of Slavery. Every Slave-Master on his plantation is a Bashaw, with all the prerogatives of a Turk. According to Hobbes, he is a “petty king.” This is true; and every plantation is of itself a petty kingdom, with more than the immunities of an abbey. Six thousand skulls of infants are reported to have been taken from a single fish-pond near a nunnery, to the dismay of Pope Gregory.[73] Under the Law of Slavery, infants, the offspring of masters “who dream of Freedom in a slave’s embrace,” are not thrown into a fish-pond, but something worse is done. They are sold. This is a single glimpse only. Slavery, in its recesses, is another Bastile, whose horrors will never be known until it shall be razed to the ground; it is the dismal castle of Giant Despair, which, when captured by the Pilgrims, excited their wonder, as they saw “the dead bodies that lay here and there in the castle-yard, and how full of dead men’s bones the dungeon was.” The recorded horrors of Slavery are infinite, and each day, by the escape of its victims, they are still further attested, while the door of the vast prison-house is left ajar. But, alas! unless examples of history and lessons of political wisdom are alike delusive, its unrecorded horrors must assume a form of more fearful dimensions. Baffling all attempts at description, they sink into that chapter of Sir Thomas Browne entitled “Of some Relations whose Truth we fear,” and among kindred things whereof, according to this eloquent philosopher, “there remains no register but that of Hell.”

* * * * *

If this picture of the relations of Slave-Masters with their slaves could receive any darker coloring, it would be by introducing figures of the congenial agents through which the Barbarism is maintained,--_the Slave-Overseer, the Slave-Breeder, and the Slave-Hunter_, each without a peer except in the brothers, and the whole constituting a triumvirate of Slavery, in whom its essential brutality, vulgarity, and crime are all embodied. There is the Slave-Overseer, with bloody lash,--fitly described, in his Life of Patrick Henry, by Mr. Wirt, who, born in a Slave State, knew the class, as “last and lowest, most abject, degraded, unprincipled,”[74]--and his hands wield at will the irresponsible power, being proper successor to “the devil,” described by the English dramatist, who appeared

“_in Virginia_, and commanded With many stripes; for that’s his cruel custom.”[75]

There is next the Slave-Breeder, who assumes a higher character, even entering legislative halls, where, in unconscious insensibility, he shocks civilization by denying, like Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, any alleged distinction between the “female slave” and the “brood mare,” by openly asserting the necessary respite from work during the gestation of the female slave as the ground of property in her offspring, and by proclaiming that in this “vigintial” crop of human flesh consists much of the wealth of his State,--while another Virginian, not yet hardened to this debasing trade, whose annual sacrifice reaches twenty-five thousand human souls, confesses the indignation and shame with which he beholds his State “converted into _one grand menagerie_, where men are reared for the market, like oxen for the shambles.” Verily the question may be asked, Have we a Guinea among us? And, lastly, there is the Slave-Hunter, with the bloodhound as his brutal symbol, who pursues slaves as the hunter pursues game, and does not hesitate in the public prints to advertise his Barbarism thus:--

“BLOODHOUNDS.--I have TWO of the FINEST DOGS for CATCHING NEGROES in the Southwest. They can take the trail TWELVE HOURS after the NEGRO HAS PASSED, and catch him with ease. I live four miles southwest of Bolivar, on the road leading from Bolivar to Whitesville. I am ready at all times to catch runaway negroes.

“DAVID TURNER.

“March 2, 1853.”[76]

The bloodhound was known in early Scottish history; it was once vindictively put upon the trail of Robert Bruce, and in barbarous days, by cruel license of war, was directed against the marauders of the Scottish border. Walter Scott makes one of his heroes “cheer the dark blood-hound on his way”; but more than a century has passed since the last survivor of the race was seen in Ettrick Forest.[77] The bloodhound was employed by Spain against the natives of this continent, and the eloquence of Chatham never touched a truer chord than when, gathering force from the condemnation of this brutality, he poured his thunder upon the kindred brutality of the scalping-knife, adopted as an instrument of war by a nation professing civilization. Tardily introduced into this Republic some time after the Missouri Compromise, when Slavery became a political passion and Slave-Masters began to throw aside all disguise, the bloodhound has become the representative of our Barbarism, when engaged in the pursuit of a fellow-man asserting his inborn title to himself; and this brute becomes typical of the whole brutal leash of Slave-Hunters, who, whether at home on Slave Soil, under the name of Slave-Catchers and Kidnappers, or at a distance, under politer names, insult Human Nature by the enforcement of this Barbarism.

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(3.) From this dreary picture of Slave-Masters with their slaves and their triumvirate of vulgar instruments, I pass to another more dreary still, and more completely exposing the influence of Slavery: I mean the _relations of Slave-Masters with each other_, also _with Society_ and _Government_,--or, in other words, the Character of Slave-Masters, as displayed in the general relations of life. Here again I need your indulgence. Not in triumph or in taunt do I approach this branch of the subject. Yielding only to the irresistible exigency of the discussion, and in direct reply to the assumptions on this floor, especially by the Senator from Virginia [Mr. MASON], I proceed. If I touch Slavery to the quick, and make Slave-Masters see themselves as others see them, I shall do nothing beyond the strictest line of duty in this debate.

One of the choicest passages of the master Italian poet, Dante, is where we are permitted to behold a passage of transcendent virtue sculptured in “visible speech” on the long gallery leading to the Heavenly Gate. The poet felt the inspiration of the scene, and placed it on the wayside, where it could charm and encourage. This was natural. Nobody can look upon virtue and justice, if only in images and pictures, without feeling a kindred sentiment. Nobody can be surrounded by vice and wrong, by violence and brutality, if only in images and pictures, without coming under their degrading influence. Nobody can live with the one without advantage; nobody can live with the other without loss. Who could pass life in the secret chamber where are gathered the impure relics of Pompeii, without becoming indifferent to loathsome things? But if these loathsome things are not merely sculptured and painted,--if they exist in living reality,--if they enact their hideous, open indecencies, as in the criminal pretensions of Slavery,--while the lash plays and the blood spurts,--while women are whipped and children are sold,--while marriage is polluted and annulled,--while the parental tie is rudely torn,--while honest gains are filched or robbed,--while the soul itself is shut down in all the darkness of ignorance, and God himself is defied in the pretension that man can have property in his fellow-man,--if all these things are “visible,” not merely in images and pictures, but in reality, the influence on character must be incalculably deplorable.

According to irresistible law men are fashioned by what is about them, whether climate, scenery, life, or institutions. Like produces like, and this ancient proverb is verified always. Look at the miner, delving low down in darkness, and the mountaineer, ranging on airy heights, and you will see a contrast in character, and even in personal form. The difference between a coward and a hero may be traced in the atmosphere which each has breathed,--and how much more in the institutions under which each is reared! If institutions generous and just ripen souls also generous and just, then other institutions must exhibit their influence also. Violence, brutality, injustice, barbarism, must be reproduced in the lives of all living within their fatal sphere. The meat eaten by man enters into and becomes part of his body; the madder eaten by the dog changes his bones to red; and the Slavery on which men live, in all its fivefold foulness, must become part of themselves, discoloring the very soul, blotting the character, and breaking forth in moral leprosy. This language is strong, but the evidence is even stronger. Some there may be of happy natures--like honorable Senators--who can thus feed and not be harmed. Mithridates fed on poison, and lived. It may be that there is a moral Mithridates, who can swallow without bane the poison of Slavery.

Instead of “ennobling” the master, nothing is clearer than that the slave drags his master down; and this process, beginning in childhood, is continued through life. Living much in association with his slave, the master finds nothing to remind him of his own deficiencies, to prompt his ambition or excite his shame. He is only a little better than his predecessor in ancient Germany, as described by Tacitus, who was distinguishable from his slave by none of the charms of education, while the two burrowed among the same flocks and in the same ground.[78] Without provocation to virtue, or elevating example, he naturally shares the Barbarism of the society he keeps. Thus the very inferiority which the Slave-Master attributes to the African explains the melancholy condition of the communities in which his degradation is declared by law.

A single false principle or vicious thought may debase a character otherwise blameless; and this is practically true of the Slave-Master. Accustomed to regard men as property, the sensibilities are blunted and the moral sense is obscured. He consents to acts from which Civilization recoils. The early Church sacrificed its property, and even its sacred vessels, for the redemption of captives. On a memorable occasion this was done by St. Ambrose,[79] and successive canons confirmed the example. But in the Slave States all is reversed. Slaves there are hawked as property of the Church[80]; and an instance is related of a slave sold in South Carolina to buy plate for the communion-table. Who can estimate the effect of such an example?