Part 13

In dealing with these men, and their relation to slavery, we pass from the domain of conjecture into the realm of fact.

Robert E. Lee never owned a slave, except the few he inherited from his mother—all of whom he emancipated many years prior to the war.[220]

"Stonewall" Jackson never owned but two slaves, a man and a woman, both of whom he purchased at their own solicitation. He immediately accorded to them the privilege of earning their freedom, by devoting the wages received for their services to reimburse him for the purchase money. This offer was accepted by the man, who, in due time, earned his freedom. The woman declined the offer, preferring to remain a servant in General Jackson's family.[221]

Joseph E. Johnston never owned a slave and, like General Lee, regarded the institution with great disfavor.[222]

A. P. Hill never owned a slave, and regarded slavery as an evil, much to be deplored.[223]

J. E. B. Stuart inherited one slave from his father's estate; and, while stationed as a lieutenant in the United States Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, purchased another. Both of these he disposed of some years prior to the war—the first, because of her cruelty to one of his children, and the second, to a purchaser who undertook to return the slave to his former home in Kentucky.[224]

Fitzhugh Lee never owned a slave.[225]

Matthew F. Maury never owned but one slave, a woman who remained a servant and member of his family until her death, some years after the war.[226] As we have seen, he characterized the institution as "a curse."[227]

Footnote 216:

_Slavery and Abolition_, Hart, p. 67.

Footnote 217:

_Idem_, p. 68.

Footnote 218:

_Four Years Under Marse Robert_, Stiles, p. 49.

Footnote 219:

_The Confederate Cause and Conduct, in the War Between the States_, McGuire and Christian, p. 22.

Footnote 220:

See letter from his eldest son, General G. W. Custis Lee, to the Author, dated February 4, 1907, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 221:

_The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States_, McGuire and Christian, p. 22.

Footnote 222:

See letter from his nephew, Dr. George Ben Johnston, of Richmond, Va., dated April 17, 1907, to the Author, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 223:

See letter from his son-in-law, James Macgill, dated April 20, 1908, to the Author, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 224:

See letter from his widow, Mrs. Flora Stuart, to the Author, dated March 25, 1908, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 225:

See letter from his brother, Daniel M. Lee, to the Author, dated May 28, 1908, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 226:

See letter from his son, Colonel Richard L. Maury, to the Author, dated June 1, 1907, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 227:

See _Life of Matthew F. Maury_, Corbin, p. 131.

XXIII

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF EMANCIPATION

The problems and difficulties which beset emancipation in Virginia may be summarized as follows:

First: The legal rights of the slaveholders and their creditors;

Second: The moral and physical well-being of the slaves; and

Third: The political and social interests of the state.

To these inherent difficulties should be superadded the lack of free discussion and the growth of bitterness and reactionary sentiments occasioned largely by partisan and ofttimes criminal instigations coming from beyond the state.

LEGAL RIGHTS OF SLAVEHOLDERS

It will not be questioned that of all men, except the slaves themselves, the slaveholders were most deeply interested in the subject of emancipation. They possessed a direct pecuniary interest in the slaves and were usually the owners of large tracts of land dependent, it was believed, for cultivation, upon their labor. Thus it was thought that emancipation without compensation involved not only the loss of their slaves, but a great depreciation in the value of their lands. In addition to these direct losses would come the burden of caring for the poor, the afflicted, and the criminal classes of the ex-slaves, not to mention the cost of educating the rising generation—the major part of all of which would fall upon the communities where the ex-slaves lived, and thus upon the remnant of property left to their former owners.

To the foregoing embarrassments must be added the rights of creditors. A great majority of the slaves in Virginia descended to their owners by the laws of inheritance, just as the plantations of which they were virtually part. With the slaves and the lands, came the debts of the ancestors, or, in the progress of time, new debts were incurred. In all such instances the debts of creditors must be provided for before any change could be made in the status of slaves bound for their payment. All these considerations convinced fair-minded men that some substantial measure of compensation must be made the slaveholders before they could be expected to absolve their slaves from service. But from what source was this great fund to be gathered? Despite the widespread sentiment favorable to emancipation, neither state nor nation gave sign of willingness to assume the burden.

But beyond the financial difficulties mentioned was the attitude of that class of slaveholders who cherished no desire for emancipation and resented every such suggestion as a wanton invasion of their safety and their rights. They were satisfied with the status quo; they neither desired change nor discussion of its supposed advantages. They met every proposal with a resolute insistence upon their legal rights under the constitutions, State and Federal, and manifested an intolerance of thought and speech with respect to the institution which filled the friends of moderation and progress with mournful appreciation of the hindrances which beset their path.

THE WELL-BEING OF THE SLAVES

How far a conscientious regard for the moral and physical well-being of the slaves entered into the considerations of the time as a deterrent cause against their emancipation, cannot be determined. Undoubtedly such sentiments existed among many earnest men favorable thereto.

From the mass of facts and medley of voices certain conclusions can be drawn.

Thus it may be affirmed that the slaves in Virginia were better off as a result of their training and experience in servitude than they would have been had their ancestors never set foot upon her soil. It is equally true that theirs was but a partial development and that freedom was necessary to the complete man. As the time comes in the life of a child when the privileges and dangers of self-expression and self-control must supplant the restraints of the home and the school-room, so in the life of these children of larger growth, freedom with its awesome dangers and soul-inspiring possibilities was essential to any well-rounded and continuous advance.

Again, freedom was a help in the development of those who had made a certain measure of progress in their moral, intellectual and physical being; yet for those who were not thus prepared, its untimely coming might prove the dawn of a darker day, unless accompanied by wise nurture and sympathetic guidance of the feet, trained only for the paths of dependence.

Mr. Jefferson doubtless expressed the sentiments of a large class of thinkers when he said: "As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather to abandon, persons whose habits have been formed in slavery, is like abandoning children."[228]

Experience with respect to emancipations made prior to the Civil War strongly tended to confirm these views. The conditions, moral, intellectual and physical, of the free negroes of Virginia contrasted, as a rule, most unfavorably with that of their brethren still in bonds.

CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES, 1830-1860

The results of emancipation where the slaves had been carried to free states, were, on the whole, not much more encouraging.

Professor MacMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the condition of the free negroes in those states at the time of the Missouri Compromise, writes: "In spite of their freedom they were a despised, proscribed, and poverty-stricken class."[229]

Mr. Clay, speaking December 17, 1829, said:

"Of all the descriptions of our population and of either portion of the African race, the free people of color are by far, as a class, the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned. There are many honourable exceptions among them, and I take pleasure in bearing testimony to some I know. It is not so much their fault as the consequence of their anomalous condition."[230]

Dr. Leonard Bacon, in a sermon before his congregation in New Haven, Conn., July 4, 1830, said:

"Who are the free people of color in the United States, and what are they? In this city there are from eight hundred to one thousand. Of these, a few families are honest, sober, industrious, pious and in many points of view, respectable. But what are the remainder? Every one knows their condition to be a condition of deep and dreadful degradation, but few have formed any conception of the reality. The fact is, that as a class, they are branded with ignominy.... There are in this country three hundred thousand freedmen, who are free men only in name, degraded to the dust and forming hardly anything else than a mass of pauperism and crime."[231]

The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison have recorded that at the North, prior to the Civil War:

"The free colored people were looked upon as an inferior caste to whom their liberty was a curse, and their lot worse than that of the slaves, with this difference, that while the latter were to be kept in bondage 'for their own good' it would have been very wicked to enslave the former for their good."[232]

OUTLAY NECESSARY TO EMANCIPATION

We need not pause to consider the causes which reduced the free negroes of the Northern States to the conditions here described. That the free negroes of Virginia should have made little or no progress is easily accounted for by the abnormal conditions amid which they lived. There was confessedly scant chance for free negroes in communities densely populated with negro slaves. Many of the friends of emancipation, however, observing this same phenomenon in both slave and free states, came to the conclusion that freedom under existing conditions was hurtful rather than helpful. Others concluded that it was not freedom, but the lack of freedom with all its normal privileges, which had fettered the feet of these newly manumitted slaves. Let the state pay the owners and emancipate the whole body of slaves; let education and training for freedom go hand in hand with opportunity for achieving, and then emancipation would be justified of her children. For this immense outlay Virginia was confessedly not ready, and so the earnest believer in emancipation looked to colonization as the only door through which the slave might enter upon liberty with a man's chance for progress and self-respecting independence.

Footnote 228:

_Writings of Jefferson_, Ford, Vol. X, p. 66.

Footnote 229:

_History of the United States_, McMaster, Vol. III, p. 558.

Footnote 230:

_The African Repository and Colonial Journal_, Vol. VI, No. 1, p. 12.

Footnote 231:

_Liberia Bulletin_, No. 15, p. 7.

Footnote 232:

_William Lloyd Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, pp. 253-254.

XXIV

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF EMANCIPATION (Continued)

Beyond all the difficulties mentioned, there loomed the more portentous problem of the effect upon the state's political and social well-being of the introduction into her free population of a great company of negroes, whether as citizens or suffragists, or mere tenants at the will of their white brethren. What should be the outcome of such an unparalleled experiment as universal emancipation under the conditions existing in Virginia? The results of emancipation in the free states furnished no assurance because there the number of negroes was so small as to constitute a negligible quantity. What were the voices of history which came from over-sea? In Spain, after centuries of conflict, the whites had finally driven the remnant of the Moors literally into the Mediterranean. In San Domingo, after the carnival of blood had spent its force, the blacks had expelled all the surviving whites from the island.

"It is futile," said Mr. Jefferson, "to hope to retain and incorporate the blacks into the state. Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of the blacks, of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction Nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."[233]

STATUS OF THE FREE NEGRO IN THE STATE

But casting aside these tragic warnings, the question of what would be the result of the great experiment, stood unanswered. What place in the life of the commonwealth were these people to fill? Should they be trained for the obligations of freedom and then denied its privileges? Should they be accorded the right of suffrage? If not, how would its denial comport with the genius of our institutions and the aspirations of our people? If entrusted with the suffrage how was the well-being of communities to be assured where, having the majority, they would become political masters? Had negroes ever, in the world's history, ruled in peace and order a community largely populated by whites? Was the race to be kept in a state of quasi-dependence—beholden for their social and economic privileges to the very people with whom they must come in competition? What provision for the pauperism, the vagrancy, the lunacy and the crime which would certainly follow the removal of the restraints of slavery? What measure and character of education for the young and by whom provided? These and many more like them were the questions, which, from the close of the Revolution, had confronted the people of Virginia. What should be the relations, political and social, of the two races after emancipation? Speaking in September, 1850, in Congress, on the Wilmot Proviso, Gov. James McDowell, of Virginia, said:

"Physical amalgamation? ... ruinous, if it were possible.... Political and civil amalgamation just as impossible.... Emancipation with rights of residence and property, but exclusion from social, civil and political equality, would conduce, sooner or later, to a war of colors."[234]

VIEWS OF RIVES AND DE TOCQUEVILLE

Speaking ten years later in the Peace Conference, at Washington, Ex-Senator William C. Rives, of Virginia, said: "It has occupied the attention of the wisest men of our time.... In fact, it is not a question of slavery at all. It is a question of race."[235]

These two great Virginians were strong anti-slavery men, yet they stood appalled before the problems of immediate emancipation without deportation or colonization. That their views were not the product of their environment, will appear from expressions of eminent men not so situated.

M. de Tocqueville, whose work, _Democracy in America_, is the subject of the widest appreciation, has given to the world in his notable book, published in 1838, his conclusions with respect to this subject. "The most formidable of all the ills," he writes, "which threaten the future existence of the Union, arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory."[236]

Again he writes: "I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere."[237]

In conclusion, he says:

"When I contemplate the condition of the South I can only discover the alternative which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those states, namely, either to emancipate the negroes and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races."[238]

VIEWS OF DOUGLAS AND SHERMAN

Stephen A. Douglas, speaking at Ottawa, Ill., August 21st, 1858, said:

"For one I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever; and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men,—men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other inferior races."[239]

General William T. Sherman, writing in July, 1860, said:

"All the Congresses on earth can't make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony, save as master and slave. Mexico shows the result of general equality and amalgamation, and the Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of negroes if they are released from the control of the whites."[240]

William H. Seward, speaking at Detroit, Michigan, September 4th, 1860, said:

"The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element, like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, ... and that it is a pitiful exotic, unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard."[241]

VIEWS OF LINCOLN

Let us turn to the more hopeful and yet halting conclusions of Abraham Lincoln. In his speech at Quincy, Illinois, October 15th, 1858, in the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, he said:

"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, would probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position."[242]

In the same debate at Charleston, Ill., September 18th, 1858, he had said:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."[243]

How unsatisfactory would be the status of the two races in a state where such conditions obtained, Mr. Lincoln must have appreciated, and so, as we have seen, he turned to the colonization of the negroes as the real solution of the problem.

CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES AT THE NORTH

Throughout the North as well as in Virginia there were thoughtful men who knew that here was the difficulty. Slavery might be abolished, but the presence of two non-assimilable races, separated by centuries in their stages of development, endeavoring to live in peace under a Republican form of government—these conditions presented the problem which would tax to the utmost their resourcefulness and patience.

How strong was the sense of danger among the people of the free states, which would result from such conditions, may be read in the provisions of their constitutions and laws.

Probably in New England the laws were more favorable to free negroes than in any other part of the North; but, even there, conditions were far from normal, and certainly not such as to encourage the immigration of the free blacks from Maryland and Virginia—where they were most numerous.

LAWS AGAINST FREE NEGROES

In 1833, the Legislature of Connecticut, endeavoring to prevent the establishment of schools in that state for non-resident negroes, enacted a law prohibiting such schools, except with the consent "of a majority of the civil authority and also of the selectmen of the town in which such school, &c.,"[244] is to be located. The preamble of this act justifies its passage by declaring that the establishment of such schools "would tend to the great increase of the colored population of the state, and thereby to the injury of the people, &c." The negro populations of Vermont and New Hampshire had actually decreased in the half century between 1810 and 1860, while that of Massachusetts had increased less than three thousand.

The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison record the fact that there existed a—

"Spirit which everywhere at the North, either by statute or custom, denied to a dark skin, civil, social and educational equality,—which in Boston forbade any merchant or respectable mechanic to take a colored apprentice; kept the colored people out of most public conveyances; and permitted any common carrier by land or sea, on the objections of a white passenger, to violate his contract with 'a nigger' however cultivated or refined."[245]

The states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had by statutes deprived free negroes of many of the privileges enjoyed in the period immediately succeeding the Revolution. Thus, New Jersey in 1807, and Pennsylvania in 1838, deprived them of the right of suffrage, and New York in 1821 required of them as a prerequisite to voting a much higher property qualification than was required of the white citizens.[246] Professor A. B. Hart declares: "These exclusions branded the negroes as of a different caste, even in the North, and it was backed up by other unfriendly legislation."[247]

But it was chiefly in those free states on the same lines of latitude as Virginia and Maryland, and in which the free negroes would therefore be most liable to settle, that the laws obstructing or forbidding their immigration were most pronounced.

EXCLUDED FROM VARIOUS STATES

Early in the century Ohio enacted laws inhibiting negroes from settling in that state, unless they produced certificates of their freedom, from a Court of Record, and executed bonds, with approved security, not to become charges upon the counties in which they settled. They were not permitted to give evidence in court in any cause where a white man was party to the controversy or prosecution, nor could they send their children to the public schools. About the middle of the century many of these laws were repealed, but, by the constitution adopted as late as 1851, they were denied the right to vote, and were excluded from the militia.[248]