Part 16

Alexander I. desired to emancipate the serfs throughout the whole empire, but only succeeded, and that very partially, in the so-called German or Baltic provinces--where, moreover, the German nobles and landowners succeed in impoverishing the peasants even more after emancipation than they could before. Alexander I. also prohibited the sale of single peasants, either male or female, separate from their families; he forbade their sale in the markets; and no one could purchase or own serfs unless he had at the same time twenty acres of land for each family. But all these tutelary laws were more or less evaded during his reign. He permitted the nobles freely to emancipate their serfs; but very few of them followed the example set by Prince Alexander Galitzine and a few others, and not more than three hundred thousand families were thus set free. Nicholas I. also spoke favorably of emancipation, and even attempted it, but unsuccessfully.

During all this period, military service was a great engine of emancipation. Enlisted serfs were forever free, together with their wives and children. But military service lasted for twenty-five or thirty years, and was often more oppressive than serfdom in the village.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peasantry now and then avenged their wrongs by isolated murders of the more oppressive masters and their families. Partial insurrections even took place, the most celebrated of which is that of Pugatschoff under Catharine II., which swept over the bodies of slain nobles and officials, from the mountains of Orembourg to the very gates of Moscow.

But the day of justice now dawns upon Russia. The whole Christian world glorifies the efforts of Alexander II., supported by a considerable portion of the nobles, to restore freedom and homesteads to the twenty millions of serfs. The success of the great emancipation movement is beyond doubt, beyond even the possibility of being stopped, although the carrying out of such a colossal revolution requires time and meets with many impediments.

At the example of Russia the tributary nomads of Asiatic Tartary have emancipated their slaves and abjured further enslavement; and Turkey, likewise, has inscribed her name upon the grand roll of emancipating empires.

Thus the whole ancient world shakes off slavery, and attempts to wash away its ancient and bloody stain; while the New World, or at least a part of it, still glories in the barbarous abomination.

No special law in Poland decreed the serfdom of the rural population, nor in Russia their transformation into chattels. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history of man has the conception of justice and law been so degraded as to legislate freemen, or those partially free, out of their sacred and inherent rights, beforehand. The most bloody records of humanity have not preserved any such act of legislation, and even the name of a Nero or a Heliogabalus are free from such a stain. It was left to the modern worshippers of the blood-reeking slave-demon to enact such laws; it was left to the highest judicial tribunal of the United States to brand into the brow of justice, there to remain for eternities, the infernal Dred Scott decision.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: The name of _slave_ in the Slavi language, is derived either from _slava_, "renown," or from _slowo_, "the verb." It is supposed that the Slavi called themselves thus as having the gift of speech, of _the verb_, in contradistinction to those speaking an unintelligible language, whom they called _niemy_, "mute," wherefrom _nemets_, "a German."]

XXI.

These pages do not touch on slavery among the Spaniards. Under the Roman republic and empire, Spain shared the lot of the other provinces, as Gaul, etc.; and what has been said in relation to slavery in the Roman world applies to her also. The results of the German invasions, and the establishment of the Goths in Spain, were similar in their bearings to what we have already seen as taking place in Gaul and Italy. Scarcely had the two races begun to fuse on the soil of Spain, and the relations between the conqueror and the conquered to be modified and softened, when the invasions by the Moors (whose domination lasted for nearly seven centuries), threw the Spaniards into internal wars. Their protracted efforts to expel the invaders fostered the preponderance of the men of the sword; and there is every likelihood that the unavoidable sequellæ of war contributed to preserve longer in Spain than in any of the other nationalities that arose out of the ruins of the Roman empire, certain of the features of domestic slavery, of bondage, and the feudal tenure. The final expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula was almost immediately followed by the discovery of the continent of America, and by the formation here of a great Spanish empire, and the introduction thereinto of Africans as domestic slaves. To master the various relations of property and villeinage, of bondage and chattelhood in Spain and in the Spanish Main, requires special studies, for which, indeed, we have as yet no sufficient material. At least I had none such within my reach--none that was, to my mind, conclusive and satisfactory. The Spanish republics nobly satisfied the hopes of humanity by abolishing all kinds of bondage and all distinctions of race. The Peruvian republic paid to the owners three hundred dollars per head for each slave, of every age and both sexes, and then liberated them. It may be emphatically asserted, that the protracted political confusion prevailing in the Spanish American States, has its sources not in the act of emancipatory justice, but that it is the result of altogether different causes. These, however, do not come within the compass of the present investigation.

The many analogies between domestic slavery as practised by various nations and races of the past, and as it now exists in our Slave States, have been often enough pointed out. These analogies prove beyond doubt that slavery always corrupts the slave-holder and the whole community--be the ethnic peculiarities of the enslaved race what they may.

History shows slavery to have been always most luxuriant in those nations where society was most disorganized, just as noxious animals and plants multiply in putrefaction and rottenness. Facts reveal to us how far the disorder has already penetrated Southern life; and it would progress even more rapidly were it not for the purifying and healing influences (feeble though they now be) coming from the North.

The civilized Christian world follows with ever-increasing interest the stages of the political struggle in the American Union--sympathizing deeply with those who, though they cannot hope to effect an immediate cure, yet seek to arrest the growth of the fatal disorder.[21]

Slavery is as fatal to society as are the Southern and tropical swamps to human life. And as material culture drains the marshes, clears the forests, and renders the soil productive and the air healthy: so in like manner, will moral and social culture yet make the institutions of this republic rich and refulgent--unblighted by the presence of a slave!

The source of many, if not of all, the political and administrative disorders in these States, is to be found in the struggles occasioned by the arrogant and everlasting encroachments on liberty and on the Union, by the militant worshippers of slavery. To cure these disorders, the _growth_ of the disease--its expansion over yet uninfected territories--_must be stopped_: such must be the first step in a sanitary direction; and the paramount duty of self-preservation now commands its adoption. This whole question of Slavery, too, must be forced back to where it was left by the immortal expounders of Southern instinct and intuition on slavery, those noble patriots--Henry, Laurens, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Randolph, and a host of other great names--now forsworn by their political descendants. To conceal the vulture that is devouring their vitals, the fanatical upholders of slavery pervert and degrade all that humanity, morality, civilization and history have recognized as sacred.

The slave-orators and so-called statesmen avouch "that no one in the South believes in popular sovereignty." This unbelief is natural enough; for popular sovereignty can only exist in intelligent, orderly and laborious communities. It exists in the Free States, and here freemen practically believe in and uphold it. But an ignorant and degraded population of oligarchs, oppressors and slave-breeders never were capable of exercising popular sovereignty, and consequently nowhere could they ever have faith in it: barbarians generally mistrust civilization. Universal suffrage is _not_ a failure in the villages and townships of the Free States, though it does fail on slave plantations, or among a so-called free population drilled and led by oligarchs.

Human institutions experience ups and downs--they have their luminous and their gloomy epochs. Ignorant and debased masses throw a shadow over universal suffrage and self-government; and only genuine freedom goes hand in hand with reason, knowledge and morality. These, too, mutually reproduce each other. It is, therefore, easy to be understood how freedom disappears from the Slave South, and is no more cherished or believed in.

Many consider the American institution of self-government as a new experiment; and European serviles and American slave oligarchs utter fearful forebodings that the experiment is already a failure. But the prophecy only expresses their desires. For this so-called experiment is but the natural, progressive development of man, and for this reason proves itself every day more and more successful in the Free States. The kingdoms and nations of the old world are now diligently studying this experiment of freedom, and trying to appropriate its beneficent results. Agents of European governments uninterruptedly investigate the system of free communal schools, the manufactures, the inventions, the multifarious industrial and agricultural progress of the Free States. But no government sends its messengers to study out the condition of slave plantations, slave huts, or slave pens; for they know well that by the action of self-government and universal suffrage, qualitative and quantitative knowledge is more generally spread, and has reached a far higher grade in the American Free States than among all the militant oligarchs and knight-errants of slavery the world over.

An experiment generally proves successful if made with properly adapted and unadulterated materials. A structure raised on a treacherous foundation and built with rotten materials must fall. It is an experiment altogether new to the human race to construct a society and government with chattelhood as an integral element. It is an experiment to attempt to bring down horrified humanity on its knees to the worship of chattelhood and the devilish slave traffic. Such an experiment is now being tried by the apostles of slavery; and that too, though morality, civilization and history have unanimously and forever pronounced the sentence of condemnation against holding property in man. The civilized and Christian world of both hemispheres and every race unanimously awarded to John Brown the crown of a martyr, who fell in the cause of human liberty.

One deviation from a sound social principle is speedily followed by another; violence ever begets violence; and this is the fatal genesis of all oppressions and tyrannies. The oligarchic despotism in the Slave States runs rapidly through all the stages with which individual despotism has filled the dark records of history. It has already succeeded in the suppression of free speech and even free thought, violation of seal, censorship of the press, and the centring of political control in the hands of officials and lacqueys. If individual tyrants dispatch their victims by special executioners, lynch law and mob law--although often executed by misguided "poor whites"--are as lawless as the murders of the tyrant, and bear a striking analogy to the executions perpetrated by agents or court-martials. Despotism drills the masses in all kinds of degradation: thus a part of the population of the Slave States is drilled in ignorance by the slaveholders, and blindly perpetrate their murderous biddings. To these deluded men who execute the bloody behests of the tyrant, the words of the Christ on Calvary apply: "Forgive them; _for they know not what they do_."

A society based on a violation of cardinal human rights can never be considered free. Freemen are never governed by violent passions. Injustice and tyranny cannot recede; they divorce themselves from mercy, and are guilty of the most remorseless actions: thus fatally, of late, the gallows was once more ennobled. Executions and burning at the stake, amid the applaudings of the ignorant and the infuriated, are nothing new in history; and neither is the transmission of the names of the murderers to the maledictions of eternity.

Human society will perhaps always be subject, in one shape or another, to wrongs and disorders: but humanity specially revolts at the hideous wrongs which now exist, such as the claim of property in man, and the traffic in man. As long as this claim is found on the legal record, as long as slavery exists as a common fact, futile will be all efforts to stifle the voice of freedom, to crush into oblivion the question of slavery, or to expel it from the chambers of legislation or the tribunals of the people. It will and must ever reappear on the surface:--as in bodily disorders, when the virus has eaten its way into the innermost organism, external eruptions may be locally, healed or closed up, but again they reappear on another spot, or attack another organ, until a radical cure relieves the body from the poison. Until utterly destroyed, slavery will always be paramount to all other political questions, to all political complications, and it will forever force its way into them all. To a greater or less degree, diseases assume the characteristics of a prevailing epidemic. When several diseases are complicated together, the physician first attempts to cure the most virulent and dangerous. This question of slavery must have a solution; and it is in vain that the weak-minded deny the existence of the devouring disorder, or attempt to conjure it with paltry expedients.

Humanity would gratefully applaud even an intermediate step from absolute chattelhood toward emancipation, or any public measure foreshadowing an intention on the part of the slaveholding States to become humane. First of all, let them recognize in the bondman the sacred, imprescriptible, natural rights of man and of family; then let them abandon the slave traffic, and thus avoid separation of man and wife, of parent and child. Even the transformation of the slaves into serfs, into _adscripti glebæ_, would be an alleviation, and a cheering sign of progress. Certainly, there are economic impediments which stand in the way of immediate and absolute emancipation. The emancipated might be interested in labor, in the soil, and in freedom, by the possession of homesteads, even if they remained under the control of their masters. The noble examples set by Prussia and Russia in Europe, and by England in her West Indian possessions, might be modified and adapted to circumstances and to special conditions. But the present extollers of human bondage never will listen to the imploring voice of humanity, or to the admonishing warnings of history; they deliberately prepare volcanic eruptions for coming generations.

Pro-slavery orators sometimes grow florid, sentimental, and idyllic in their praises and glorification of slavery. But gaseous speeches emanate not from vigorous or healthy minds. Gas generally arises from substances in process of decomposition. Posterity venerates only the names of the orators who stand up for a sacred cause or a grand idea, who act under generous impulses, who defend human rights and liberties, and who brand with infamy every kind of oppression.

Every day freedom gets a firmer and more enduring foothold in Europe. Every nation of the old continent enjoys greater liberty to-day than it did on the birthday of the American Republic. The disorders which are the accumulation of almost countless centuries, slowly, but nevertheless uninterruptedly, melt away before the breath of the ever-vigorous spirit of humanity. After a protracted experience of sufferings, old Europe, centuries ago, got rid of domestic slavery.

But what civilization and humanity assert to be their greatest afflictions are upheld as blessings in this New World by the Young Republic. Sadness and even despair fill the mind when witnessing the loftiest and best social structure ever erected by man sapped to its foundations by the sacrilegious champions of human bondage!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: What in common politics is called a "party," "an expedient," never had even the slightest influence upon my convictions or action--events having furnished me more than one occasion to sacrifice to principle some leaves of my existence. I now use my right of American citizenship in voting the "Republican" ticket, the tendencies and actions of that organization satisfying my convictions. But excepting some few personal friends, the leaders of the party, whether in this city, the State, or the Union, are scarcely known to me even by name.]

THE END.