CHAPTER XXIX.

The Negro in America and the Slavery Conflict.

[=Beginning of the Slave Traffic=]

[=Increase in Numbers=]

When, over two hundred and eighty years ago (it is in doubt whether the correct date is 1619 or 1620) a few wretched negroes, some say fourteen, some say twenty, were bartered for provisions by the crew of a Dutch man-of-war, then lying off the Virginia coast, it would have seemed incredible that in 1900 the negro population of the Southern States alone should reach very nearly eight million souls. African negroes had, indeed, been sold into slavery among many nations for perhaps three thousand years; but in its earlier periods slavery was rather the outcome of war than the deliberate subject of trade, and white captives no less than black were ruthlessly thrown into servitude. It has been estimated that in historical times some forty million Africans have been enslaved. The Spaniards found the Indian an intractable slave, and for the arduous labors of colonization soon began to make use of negro slaves, importing them in great numbers and declaring that one negro was worth, as a human beast of burden, four Indians. Soon the English adventurers took up the traffic. It is to Sir John Hawkins, the ardent discoverer, that the English-speaking peoples owe their participation in the slave trade. He has put it on record, as the result of one of his famous voyages, that he found "that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and might easily be had on the coast of Guinea." For his early adventures of this kind he was roundly taken to task by Queen Elizabeth. But tradition says that he boldly faced her with the argument that the Africans were an inferior race, and ended by convincing the Virgin Queen that the slave trade was not merely a lucrative but a perfectly philanthropic undertaking. Certain it is that she acquiesced in future slave trading, while her successors Charles II. and James II. chartered four slave trading companies and received a share in their profits. It is noteworthy that both Great Britain and the United States recognized the horrors of the slave trade as regards the seizing and transportation from Africa of the unhappy negroes, long before they could bring themselves to deal with the problem of slavery as a domestic institution. Of those horrors nothing can be said in exaggeration.

[=Colonial Laws About Slavery=]

The institution of slavery, introduced as we have seen into Virginia, grew at first very slowly. Twenty-five years after the first slaves were landed the negro population of the colony was only three hundred. But the conditions of agriculture and of climate were such that, once slavery obtained a fair start, it spread with continually increasing rapidity. We find the Colonial Assembly passing one after another a series of laws defining the condition of the negro slave more and more clearly, and more and more pitilessly. Thus, a distinction was soon made between them and Indians held in servitude. It was enacted that "all servants not being Christians imported into this colony by shipping shall be slaves for their lives; but what shall come by land shall serve, if boyes or girles, until thirty years of age; if men or women, twelve years and no longer." And before the end of the century a long series of laws so encompassed the negro with limitations and prohibitions, that he almost ceased to have any criminal or civil rights and became a mere personal chattel.

[=Slavery in Early New York=]

In some of the northern colonies slavery seemed to take root as readily and to flourish as rapidly as in the South. It was only after a considerable time that social and commercial conditions arose which led to its gradual abandonment. In New York a mild type of negro slavery was introduced by the Dutch. The relation of master and slave seems in the period of the Dutch rule to have been free from great severity or cruelty. After the seizure of the government by the English, however, the institution was officially recognized and even encouraged. The slave trade grew in magnitude; and here again we find a series of oppressive laws forbidding meetings of negroes, laying down penalties for concealing slaves, and the like. When the Revolution broke out there were not less than fifteen thousand slaves in New York--a number greatly in excess of that held by any other northern colony.

[=Slavery in Massachusetts=]

Massachusetts, the home in later days of so many of the most eloquent abolition agitators, was from the very first, until after the war with Great Britain was well under way, a stronghold of slavery. The records of 1633 tell of the fright of Indians who saw a "Blackamoor" in a treetop, whom they took for the devil in person, but who turned out to be an escaped slave. A few years later the authorities of the colony officially recognized the institution. To quote Chief Justice Parsons, "Slavery was introduced into Massachusetts soon after its first settlement, and was tolerated until the ratification of the present constitution in 1780." The curious may find in ancient Boston newspapers no lack of such advertisements as that, in 1728, of the sale of "two very likely negro girls," and of "A likely negro woman of about nineteen years and a child about seven months of age, to be sold together or apart." A Tory writer before the outbreak of the Revolution sneers at the Bostonians for their talk about freedom when they possessed two thousand negro slaves. Even Peter Faneuil, who built the famous "Cradle of Liberty," was himself, at that very time, actively engaged in the slave trade. There is some truth in the once common taunt of the pro-slavery orators that the North imported slaves, the South only bought them.

[=Negro Soldiers in the Revolution=]

As with New York and Massachusetts, so with the other colonies. Either slavery was introduced by greedy speculators from abroad or it spread easily from adjoining colonies. In 1776 the slave population of the thirteen colonies was almost exactly half a million, nine-tenths of whom were to be found in the southern states. In the War of the Revolution the question of arming the negroes raised bitter opposition. In the end a comparatively few were enrolled, and it is admitted that they served faithfully and with courage. Rhode Island even formed a regiment of blacks, and at the siege of Newport and afterwards at Point's Bridge, New York, this body of soldiers fought not only without reproach but with positive heroism.

[=Slavery Abolished in the North=]

From the day when the Declaration of Independence asserted "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the peoples of the new, self-governing states could not but have seen that with them lay the responsibility. There is ample evidence that the fixing of the popular mind on liberty as an ideal bore results immediately in arousing anti-slavery sentiment. Such sentiment existed in the South as well as in the North. Even North Carolina in 1786 declared the slave trade of "evil consequences and highly impolitic." All the northern states abolished slavery, beginning with Vermont in 1777, and ending with New Jersey in 1804. It should be added, however, that many of the northern slaves were not freed, but sold to the South. The agricultural and commercial conditions in the North were such as to make slave labor less and less profitable, while in the South the social order of things, agricultural conditions, and climate were gradually making it seemingly indispensable.

When the Constitutional debates began the trend of opinion seemed strongly against slavery. Many delegates thought that the evil would die out of itself. One thought the abolition of slavery already rapidly going on and soon to be completed. Another asserted that "slavery in time will not be a speck in our country." Mr. Jefferson, on the other hand, in view of the retention of slavery, declared roundly that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just. And John Adams urged again and again that "every measure of prudence ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States." The obstinate states in the convention were South Carolina and Georgia. Their delegates declared that their states would absolutely refuse ratification to the Constitution unless slavery were recognized. The compromise sections finally agreed upon, avoided the use of the words slave and slavery, but clearly recognized the institution, and even gave the slave states the advantage of sending representatives to Congress on a basis of population determined by adding to the whole number of free persons "three-fifths of all other persons." The other persons referred to were, it is almost needless to add, negro slaves.

[=Compromises in the Constitution=]

The entire dealing with the question of slavery, at the framing of the Constitution, was a series of compromises. This is seen again in the failure definitely to forbid the slave trade from abroad. Some of the southern states had absolutely declined to listen to any proposition which would restrict their freedom of action in this matter, and they were yielded to so far that Congress was forbidden to make the traffic unlawful before the year 1808. As that time approached, President Jefferson urged Congress to withdraw the country from all "further participation in those violations of human rights which have so long been continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa." Such an act was at once adopted, and by it heavy fines were imposed on all persons fitting out vessels for the slave trade and also upon all actually engaged in the trade, while vessels so employed became absolutely forfeited. Twelve years later another act was passed declaring the importation of slaves to be actual piracy. The latter law, however, was of little practical value, as it was not until 1861 that a conviction was obtained under it. Then, at last, when the whole slave question was about to be settled forever, a ship-master was convicted and hanged for piracy in New York for the crime of being engaged in the slave trade. In despite of all laws, however, the trade in slaves was continued secretly, and the profits were so enormous that the risks did not prevent continual attempts to smuggle slaves into the territory of the United States.

[=The Slave Trade=]

The first quarter of a century of our history, after the adoption of the Constitution, was marked by comparative quietude in regard to the future of slavery. In the North, as we have seen, the institution died a natural death, but there was no disposition evinced in the northern states to interfere with it in the South. The first great battle took place in 1820 over the so-called Missouri compromise. Now, for the first time, the country was divided, sectionally and in a strictly political way, upon issues which involved the future policy of the United States as to the extension or restriction of slave territory. State after state had been admitted into the Union, but there had been an alteration of slave and free states, so that the political balance was not disturbed. Thus Ohio was balanced by Louisiana, Indiana by Mississippi, Illinois by Alabama. Of the twenty-two states admitted before 1820, eleven were slave and eleven free states.

[=The Missouri Compromise=]

Immediately after the admission of Alabama, of course as a slave-holding state, Maine and Missouri applied for admission. The admission of Maine alone would have given a preponderance to the free states, and for this reason it was strongly contended by southern members that Missouri should be admitted as a slave state. But the sentiment of opposition to the extension of slavery was growing rapidly in the North, and many members from that section opposed this proposition. They had believed that the ordinance of 1787, adopted simultaneously with the Constitution, and which forbade slavery to be established in the territory northwest of the Ohio, had settled this question definitely; but this ordinance did not apply to territory west of the Mississippi, so that the question really remained open. A fierce debate was waged through two sessions of Congress, and in the end it was agreed to permit the introduction of slavery into Missouri, but to prohibit it forever in all future states lying north of the parallel of 36 degrees 30 minutes, the southern boundary of Missouri. This was a compromise, satisfactory only because it seemed to dispose of the question of slavery in the territories once and forever. It was carried mainly by the great personal influence of Henry Clay. It did, indeed, dispose of slavery as a matter of national legislative discussion for thirty years.

[=The Anti-slavery Sentiment=]

But this interval was distinctively a period of popular agitation. Anti-slavery sentiment of a mild type had long existed. The Quakers had, since revolutionary times, held anti-slavery doctrines, had released their own servants from bondage, and had disfellowshipped members who refused to concur in the sacrifice. The very last public act of Benjamin Franklin was the framing of a memorial to Congress in which he deprecated the existence of slavery in a free country. In New York the Manumission society had been founded in 1785, with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, in turn, as its presidents. But this early writing and speaking were directed against slavery in a general way, and with no tone of aggression. Gradual emancipation and colonization were the only remedies suggested. It was with the founding of the _Liberator_ by William Lloyd Garrison, in 1831, that the era of aggressive abolitionism began. Garrison and his society maintained that slavery was a sin against God and man; that immediate emancipation was a duty; that slave owners had no claim to compensation; that all laws upholding slavery were, before God, null and void. Garrison exclaimed: "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard." His paper bore conspicuously the motto "No union with slaveholders."

[=Leading Opponents of Slavery=]

The Abolitionists were, in numbers, a feeble band; as a party they never acquired strength, nor were their tenets adopted strictly by any political party; but they served the purpose of arousing the conscience of the nation. They were abused, vilified, mobbed, all but killed. Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck--through those very streets which, in 1854, had their shops closed and hung in black, with flags Union down and a huge coffin suspended in mid-air, on the day when the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, was marched through them on his way back to his master, under a guard of nearly two thousand men. Mr. Garrison's society soon took the stand that the union of states with slavery retained was "an agreement with hell and a covenant with death," and openly advocated secession of the non-slaveholding states. On this issue the Abolitionists split into two branches, and those who threw off Garrison's lead maintained that there was power enough under the Constitution to do away with slavery. To the fierce invective and constant agitation of Garrison were, in time, added the splendid oratory of Wendell Phillips, the economic arguments of Horace Greeley, the wise statesmanship of Charles Sumner, the fervid writings of Channing and Emerson, and the noble poetry of Whittier. All these and others, in varied ways and from different points of view, joined in bringing the public opinion of the North to the view that the permanent existence of slavery was incompatible with that of a free republic.

[=Southern Hatred of Abolitionists=]

In the South, meanwhile, the institution was intrenching itself more and more firmly. The invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the reign of cotton as king made the great plantation system a seeming commercial necessity. From the deprecatory and half apologetic utterances of early southern statesmen, we come to Mr. Calhoun's declaration that slavery "now preserves in quiet and security more than six and a half million human beings, and that it could not be destroyed without destroying the peace and prosperity of nearly half the states in the Union." The Abolitionists were regarded in the South with the bitterest hatred. Attempts were even made to compel the northern states to silence the anti-slavery orators, to prohibit the circulation through the mail of anti-slavery speeches, and to refuse a hearing in Congress to anti-slavery petitions. The influence of the South was still dominant in the North. Though the feeling against slavery spread, there co-existed with it the belief that an open quarrel with the South meant commercial ruin; and the anti-slavery sentiment was also neutralized by the nobler feeling that the Union must be preserved at all hazards, and that there was no constitutional mode of interfering with the slave system. The annexation of Texas was a distinct gain to the slave power, and the Mexican war was undertaken, said John Quincy Adams, in order that "the slave-holding power in the government shall be secured and riveted."

[=The Literature of Slavery=]

The actual condition of the negro over whom such a strife was being waged differed materially in different parts of the South, and, under masters of different character, in the same locality. It had its side of cruelty, oppression and atrocity; it had also its side of kindness on the part of master and of devotion on the part of slave. Its dark side has been made familiar to readers by such books as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Dickens' "American Notes," and Edmund Kirk's "Among the Pines;" its brighter side has been charmingly depicted in the stories of Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Harry Edwards. On the great cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama the slave was often overtaxed and harshly treated; in the domestic life of Virginia, on the other hand, he was as a rule most kindly used, and often a relation of deep affection sprang up between him and his master.

[=The Fugitive Slave Law and Underground Railroad=]

With this state of public feeling North and South, it was with increased bitterness and developed sectionalism that the subject of slavery in new states was again debated in the Congress of 1850. The Liberty party, which held that slavery might be abolished under the Constitution, had been merged in the Free Soil party, whose cardinal principle was, "To secure free soil to a free people," and, while not interfering with slavery in existing states, to insist on its exclusion from territory so far free. The proposed admission of California was not affected by the Missouri Compromise. Its status as a future free or slave state was the turning point of the famous debates in the Senate of 1850, in which Webster, Calhoun, Douglas and Seward won fame--debates which have never been equaled in our history for eloquence and acerbity. It was in the course of these debates that Mr. Seward, while denying that the Constitution recognized property in man, struck out his famous dictum, "There is a higher law than the Constitution." The end reached was a compromise which allowed California to settle for itself the question of slavery, forbade the slave trade in the District of Columbia, but enacted a strict fugitive slave law. To the Abolitionists this fugitive slave law, sustained in its most extreme measures by the courts in the famous--or as they called it, infamous--Dred Scott case, was as fuel to fire. They defied it in every possible way. The "Underground Railway" was the outcome of this defiance. By it a chain of secret stations was established, from one to the other of which the slave was guided at night until at last he reached the Canada border. The most used of these routes in the East was from Baltimore to New York, thence north through New England; that most employed in the West was from Cincinnati to Detroit. It has been estimated that not fewer than thirty thousand slaves were thus assisted to freedom.

[=The Outbreak an Kansas=]

Soon the struggle was changed to another part of the western territory, which was now growing so rapidly as to demand the formation of new states. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill introduced by Douglas was in effect the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, in that it left the question as to whether slavery should be carried into the new territories to the decision of the settlers themselves. As a consequence immigration was directed by both the anti-slavery and the pro-slavery parties to Kansas, each determined on obtaining a majority enabling it to control the proposed State Constitution. Then began a series of acts of violence which almost amounted to civil war. "Bleeding Kansas" became a phrase in almost every one's mouth. Border ruffians swaggered at the polls and attempted to drive out the assisted emigrants sent to Kansas by the Abolition societies. The result of the election of the Legislature on its face made Kansas a slave state, but a great part of the people refused to accept this result; and a convention was held at Topeka which resolved that Kansas should be free even if the laws formed by the Legislature should have to be "resisted to a bloody issue."

[=John Brown at Harper's Ferry=]

Prominent among the armed supporters of free state ideas in Kansas was Captain John Brown, a man whose watchword was at all times action. "Talk," he said, "is a national institution; but it does no good for the slave." He believed that slavery could only be coped with by armed force. His theory was that the way to make free men of slaves was for the slaves themselves to resist any attempt to coerce them by their masters. He was undoubtedly a fanatic in that he did not stop to measure probabilities or to take account of the written law. His attempt at Harper's Ferry was without reasonable hope, and as the intended beginning of a great military movement was a ridiculous fiasco. To attempt to make war upon the United States with twenty men was utter madness, and if the hoped for rising of the slaves had taken place might have yielded horrible results. The execution of John Brown, that followed, was the logical consequence of his hopeless effort.

But there was that about the man which none could call ridiculous. Rash and unreasoning as his action seemed, he was still, even by his enemies, recognized as a man of unswerving conscience, of high ideals, of deep belief in the brotherhood of mankind. His offense against law and peace was cheerfully paid fur by his death and that of others near and dear to him. Almost no one at that day could be found to applaud his plot, but the incident had an effect on the minds of the people altogether out of proportion to its intrinsic character. More and more as time went on he became recognized as a martyr in the cause of human liberty.

[=Slaves "Contraband of War"=]

Events of vast importance to the future of the negro in America now hurried fast upon each other's footsteps: the final settlement of the Kansas dispute by its becoming a free state; the formation and rapid growth of the Republican party; the division of the Democratic party into northern and southern factions; the election of Abraham Lincoln; the secession of South Carolina, and, finally, the greatest civil war the world has known. Though that war would never have been waged were it not for the negro, and though his fate was inevitably involved in its result, it must be remembered that it was not undertaken on his account. Before the struggle began Mr. Lincoln said: "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to destroy or to save slavery." And the northern press emphasized over and over again the fact that this was "a white man's war." But the logic of events is inexorable. It seems amazing now that Union generals should have been puzzled as to the question whether they ought in duty to return runaway slaves to their masters. General Butler settled the controversy by one happy phrase when he called the fugitives "contraband of war." Soon it was deemed right to use these contrabands, to employ the new-coined word, as the South was using the negroes still in bondage, to aid in the non-fighting work of the army--on fortification, team-driving, cooking, and so on. From this it was but a step, though a step not taken without much perturbation, to employ them as soldiers. At Vicksburg, at Fort Pillow, and in many another battle, the negro showed beyond dispute that he could fight for his liberty. No fiercer or braver charge was made in the war than that upon the parapet of Fort Wagner by Colonel Shaw's gallant colored regiment, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.

[=Behavior of Slaves During the Civil War=]

In a thousand ways the negro figures in the history of the war. In its literature he everywhere stands out picturesquely. He sought the flag with the greatest avidity for freedom; flocking in crowds, old men and young, women and children, sometimes with quaint odds and ends of personal belongings, often empty-handed, always enthusiastic and hopeful, almost always densely ignorant of the meaning of freedom and of self-support. But while the negro showed this avidity for liberty, his conduct toward his old masters was often generous, and almost never did he seize the opportunity to inflict vengeance for his past wrongs. The eloquent southern orator and writer, Henry W. Grady, said: "History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety and the unprotected homes rested in peace.... A thousand torches would have disbanded every southern army, but not one was lighted."

[=The Emancipation Proclamation=]

It was with conditions, and only after great hesitation, that the final step of emancipating the slaves was taken by President Lincoln in September, 1862. The proclamation was distinctly a war measure, but its reception by the North and by the foreign powers and its immediate effect upon the contest were such that its expediency was at once recognized. Thereafter there was possible no question as to the personal freedom of the negro in the United States of America. With the Confederacy, slavery went down once and forever. In the so-called reconstruction period which followed, the negro suffered almost as much from the over-zeal of his political friends as from the prejudice of his old masters. A negro writer, who is a historian of his race, has declared that the government gave the negro the statute book when he should have had the spelling book; that it placed him in the legislature when he ought to have been in the school house, and that, so to speak, "the heels were put where the brains ought to have been."

A quarter of a century and more has passed since that turbulent period began, and if the negro has become less prominent as a political factor, all the more for that reason has he been advancing steadily though slowly in the requisites of citizenship. He has learned that he must, by force of circumstances, turn his attention, for the time at least, rather to educational, industrial and material progress than to political ambition. And the record of his advance on these lines is promising and hopeful. In Mississippi alone, for instance, the negroes own one-fifth of the entire property in the state. In all, the negroes of the South to-day possess two hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of property. Everywhere throughout the South white men and negroes may be found working together.

[=Progress of the Negroes of the South=]

[=Educational Development of the Negro Race=]

The promise of the negro race to-day is not so much in the development of men of exceptional talent, such as Frederick Douglas or Senator Bruce, as in the general spread of intelligence and knowledge. The southern states have very generally given the negro equal educational opportunities with the whites, while the eagerness of the race to learn is shown in the recently ascertained fact that while the colored population has increased only twenty-seven per cent. the enrollment in the colored schools has increased one hundred and thirty-seven per cent. Fifty industrial schools are crowded by the colored youth of the South. Institutions of higher education, like the Atlanta University, the Hampton Institute of Virginia, and Tuskegee College are doing admirable work in turning out hundreds of negroes fitted to educate their own race. Honors and scholarships have been taken by colored young men at Harvard, at Cornell, at Phillips Academy and at other northern schools and colleges of the highest rank. The fact that a young negro, Mr. Morgan, was, in 1890, elected by his classmates at Harvard as the class orator has a special significance. Yet there is greater significance, as a negro newspaper writes, in the fact that the equatorial telescope now used by the Lawrence University of Wisconsin was made entirely by colored pupils in the School of Mechanical Arts of Nashville, Tenn. In other words, the Afro-American is finding his place as an intelligent worker, a property owner, and an independent citizen, rather than as an agitator, a politician or a race advocate. In religion, superstition and effusive sentiment are giving way to stricter morality. In educational matters, ambition for the high-sounding and the abstract is giving place to practical and industrial acquirements. It will be many years before the character of the negro, for centuries dwarfed and distorted by oppression and ignorance, reaches its normal growth, but that the race is at last upon the right path, and is being guided by the true principles cannot be doubted.