I sorrow for these present housekeepers of the south. They all know by heart and often retell to their children the tales of their mothers and grandmothers,--how, early in the morning, the affectionate and faithful nurses stole the children out of the room, without waking papa and mamma; how the cook and the waiters, not superintended, had the best of breakfasts ready at the right time; how at this meal there was happy reunion of the family beginning a new day, the children bathed and in their clean clothes, each one pretty as a picture and sweet as a pink; and how all the affairs of the household under the magic touch of angel servants were fitly despatched without trouble or worry to mamma, until the day ended by the nurses" bathing the little tots again, putting them to bed, and mammy"s getting them to sleep by telling "The Tar Baby" or some other adventure of Brer Rabbit over and over as often as sleepily called for, or by singing sweet lullabies. With this vision of a real fairyland in which their ancestors lived not so very long ago, how can any one of these mothers of the new south contentedly make herself the only nurse, cook, and house servant of her family? For many a year yet, to do every day the drudgery of all three will be the extreme of discomfort and sore trial to her. We must give her loving words and sympathy without ceasing, and trust her to the slow but sure healing of inevitable necessity.
This lamentable condition of our southern woman is due, as plainly appears, to the miseducation given their ancestors by slavery. Slavery went forty years ago; but it left the negro, and the dependence of these women upon her as their only servant. It is indispensable that they cut loose completely from this dependence. Their resolve should be firm and unwavering that they will learn to minister to themselves and their dear ones, and teach the blessed art to their children; as their northern sisters have always done. I would have them here receptively contemplate, as a part of the new lesson which they must learn, this true and enchanting picture of a New England home:
"There are no servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap, with the spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing had ever been done, or were to be done,--she and her girls, in some long-forgotten forepart of the day _did up the work_, and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them, it is _done up_. The old kitchen floor never seems stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking utensils never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes four meals a day are got there, though the family washing and ironing is there performed, and though pounds of b.u.t.ter and cheese are in some silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence."[140]
Of course it is not to be demanded that the southern woman exactly reproduce the New England system of fifty years ago just described by Mrs.
Stowe. But she must learn to be entirely independent of servants in the era of co-operation, electric dish-washers, and other helping machines, about to begin.
Let us see how it has been with the fathers and boys. The planting of the old south required proportionally less cash outlay annually than any common business that I now call to mind. The owner of 750 acres of land--an ordinary plantation--worth $6,000, thirty slaves worth $18,000, and mules and live-stock worth $1,000, had usually but five considerable items of expense: the overseer with his family was "found"--to use the then current vogue--and paid not more than $150 yearly wages; a few sacks of salt to save the pork--a little to be given the live animals occasionally; a few bars of iron for the plantation blacksmith shop--the latter being furnished with bellows, anvil, tongs, screwplate, vise, and a few other tools, all hardly amounting to $100 investment; sometimes coa.r.s.e cotton and woollen cloth for the clothes of the negroes, made by the slave-women tailors (even in my day this cloth was, on many plantations, spun and wove at home from the cotton and wool grown by the owner); and the fifth item was a moderate bill of the family physician for attendance upon the sick slaves. The whole would seldom amount to $350; and remember the income yielding capital was $25,000. This planter paid no wages for his labor; he bred his slaves, and all animals serving for work, food, or pleasure;--in short, the establishment was self-supporting. The good manager sold every year more than enough of meat, grain, and other produce to pay the expense itemed a moment ago, and so the $1,200 from the sale of his crop of thirty bales of cotton was often net income.
The natural increase of slaves which I have explained above operated in many cases to encourage wastefulness and idleness. But even in the majority of these cases the estates more than held their own.
Let us ill.u.s.trate the change wrought by emanc.i.p.ation by having you to contemplate a small middle Georgia farmer of to-day. If he employ but four hands to his two plows, he will, in wages, fertilizers that have come into general use since the war, purchase of meat, corn, and other supplies that the slaves used to produce, necessarily lay out annually more than did the planter making thirty bales as we mentioned above. If this small farmer makes twenty bales--which is far above the average--worth, if the price be, say, eight cents, $800--more than half of it will be needed to cover his outlay. It is to be emphasized that as a general rule this farmer and his boys have not yet been trained to work as steadily and diligently as their circ.u.mstances demand of them. As the women slight in the house what they regard as fit employment only of negroes, so the men do the same in the farm. The whites of both s.e.xes cling to the negro instead of making good workers of themselves.
In the old south money grew of itself. Now constant alertness is needed to see that every dollar laid out comes back, if not with addition, at least without loss. To keep from falling behind, the farmer must have a very much higher degree of mercantile capacity than he could ever acquire under the old system. And he and his boys ought to supplant much of the negro labor he now employs by their own systematic and steady work. All these necessary lessons are very hard to learn, because to do that we must first unlearn widely different ones.
This examination shows that the men of the new south are almost as inadequate to the demands of the day as we found the women to be.
I do not mean to say that our women and men have not improved at all in their respective spheres in the last forty years. I believe that when due allowance is made for the unavoidable effect upon them of the system into which they were all born it must be conceded that the little improvement which they have made is greater than what could have been reasonably expected. But I see clearly that the habits of thought and the modes of house and farm economy, bred first from our contact with the negro slave and then with the negro freedman, are yet an oppressively heavy load upon our section.
I have now to do with a still greater evil as part of the curse of slavery to the southern whites; which is, that it prevented the normal rise in the section of a white labor cla.s.s. If one but look steadily at developments, either now in progress or surely impending, in Germany, France, England, the English colonies, and the United States he sees that the workers most of all are influencing the other cla.s.ses to pursue the best policy in all departments of government. The truth is that in every stage of society there is the leading energy of some particular cla.s.s. Let me make you reflect over a few well-known examples. In their unremitted struggle with the patricians, the plebeians of Rome gradually climbed out of their low estate into complete political, civil, and social equality with the former who had long been the const.i.tuency of the so-called republic. Some centuries later a tacit combination of those belonging to each division of the middle cla.s.s dried all the fountains of civil disorder and made domestic peace sure and permanent by establishing the Roman empire. Much later employers of the free labor which had displaced slavery made European towns democratic, and set them in such strong array against the feudal barons that the latter were at last restrained from plundering the new industry. The American revolution and the French revolution were each mainly middle-cla.s.s movements. By them the middle cla.s.s cleared out of its way, as far as it could, distinctions of birth, t.i.tle, rank, and all other special personal privileges. But, unawares, it put in the place of the old hereditary lords and monopolists, known as such by everybody, a n.o.bility in disguise. The members of this n.o.bility make no claim to our labor or substance by reason of their having had such and such fathers or having received such and such grants or patents to themselves as natural persons.
They pose as government agents in such functions as the transportation and monetary, of which efficient, cheap, and impartial performance is vital to the general welfare. Clandestinely they have had the law of the land made or interpreted and the practice of government shaped each as they want it; and sitting in their masks wherever these sovereign powers must be invoked by producer or worker, it is these usurpers and not the legitimate public authorities who must be applied to and given, not the just cost of the service, but the supreme extortion possible. These masked rulers toll our wages, profits, and property as insidiously and deeply as does indirect compared with direct taxation. In fact they are government licensees, levying upon us for their own benefit all the indirect taxation that we can bear. Some--I may say, a large number--of middle-cla.s.s property owners and producers are heart and soul in strong and strengthening resistance now forming against the tyrants they have unwittingly set up. But the initiative and most effective elements of this benign uprising do not come from the middle cla.s.s. It was the workers who excited and kept at its height the righteous indignation of the country that shamed the coal-trust into decency. It is the workers who are the most influential of all that strive to arm us with those plutocracy-destroying weapons, direct nomination and direct legislation; and of all who demand that the railroads pay just taxes; of all who would lay the axe at the root of public corruption by having government resume its powers and do every one of its duties without favor or prejudice to a single human being. It is clear that the laborers are gathering all the anti-monopoly interests and cla.s.ses of society to their banner, and that from the steady and increasing impulsion of these laborers, in unions and political campaigns, industrial democracy will at last come in, to open the millennium by keeping every man, woman, and child, except the wilfully idle and criminal, permanently supplied with necessaries and comforts.
Who are the laborers that are both to spur and lead us forward in this great course? Why, the white laborers, whose interests and whose qualifications to share in governments are the same as those of the rest of us; who are really part and parcel of the body politic and whose sons and daughters can be married by our sons and daughters without social degradation to themselves or degeneration of the proud Caucasian stock in their children. The negroes cannot do the great work we are contemplating.
They are strangers in blood. They are as yet far too low in development.
It is idle to think of making these aliens, whose highest interests are irreconcilably antagonistic to ours and our children"s, allies of the white laborers--a point which will be treated at large in later chapters.
To bring out the situation more clearly, suppose that instead of the eight millions of negroes now in the south we had eight millions of native white workers and no negroes at all. Would it not be far better for us of the section? Would it not be far better for the anti-monopoly cause in the north? Ought there not to be a real labor party in the south instead of what we now see? The so-called labor party of the south has a large percentage of leaders whose chief activity is to win positions in the unions, in agitation, in the city and State government wherein they can serve themselves by delivering the labor vote to corporate interests, or doing the latter legislative or official favor--a sure symptom that the movement is as yet merely incipient. In no northern State have the railroads and allied corporations such complete command of nominative, appointive, and legislative machinery as in Georgia; and it seems to me that Georgia is but fairly representative of all the south except South Carolina, which has advanced further in direct nomination than any other one of the United States. In many places the people of the north are successfully rising against the corporation oligarchs. In New York and Michigan the latter have been made to pay some of the taxes which they had always been dodging. In a recent Boston referendum the street railroad, which for years had ridden roughshod over the public at will, was snowed under, although it had the machine, all the five daily papers but one, and the outside of that, fighting for it with might and main. Los Angeles, followed by three or four other towns, has just made a beginning with the _Recall_. Oregon has direct legislation. Illinois has pushed ahead with both direct nomination and direct legislation. Cities here and there, in very grateful contrast with the apathy prevalent in this section, have awakened to the importance of rightly guarding the common property in public-service franchises. I could cite many other examples which show that the anti-plutocratic tide gathers force all over the north. Why is it that there is this blessed insurgence against corporation misrule there, and hardly a trace of it here? Simply because the north has and the south has not the motor of insurgence--a real labor cla.s.s, growing steadily in zeal and organization, and rapidly increasing in numbers.
That a southern State has no real labor cla.s.s with potent influence upon the public, puts it as far behind the most enlightened communities in political and governmental condition, as it was with its slaves behind them in productive condition. Such a State lacks a most essential organ of the highest types of democracy.[141]
To sum up: Slavery disqualified the white men and women of the south for the domestic and business management proper to this era; and ever since emanc.i.p.ation the presence of a large number of negroes available for labor in house and on the farm, and preventing the coming in of any other labor, has powerfully helped both races in their efforts naturally made to retain the familiar ways of the old system. Thus the south has been sadly r.e.t.a.r.ded in her due economical rehabilitation. In the second place, it has kept the political influence of labor at the minimum, and consequently sent her backwards in true democracy, while England, the English colonies, and the northern States, are slowly but surely going forward.
These are the main things. Let me in briefest mention suggest some of their results, which, at first blush, seem to be independent.
Slavery engendered among the whites a disrespect for labor, which, although now at last dying out, is still of hurtful influence.
As negroes were always and everywhere in number sufficient to do every task of labor, there was but little demand for labor-saving machines and methods--a fact which prevented the southern whites from developing the inventive faculty equally with their northern brothers. We all are beginning to see that, except in much of agriculture and other activities in which the process is that of nature and not of art, the future of industry belongs more and more to the constantly improving machine.
Think of such things as these in the brood of evils brought forth by slavery;--agriculture primitive or superannuated in many particulars; our entire structure of investment, production, and occupation bottomed upon slaves, property in which could be, and was, totally destroyed by a stroke of the pen; immigration both from Europe and the north repelled; slowness in exploiting our water power and mines; inferior common schools, and lack of town-meeting government due to the spa.r.s.eness of the population and their roving habits which were incident to the plantation system. I have given some consideration to these in the "Old and New South," and I refer you to that.[142]
Of course had there never been any negro slavery in America we should have escaped the brothers" war, its spilling of blood, its waste of wealth, and the long sickness of the section unto death which has ensued. And to-day in solid prosperity, inst.i.tutions, government, and progressiveness in everything good, the section would be abreast of the other. Nay, her better climate, her agricultural products--especially her cotton, which she would have learned to make with white labor--these and other resources would, I fully believe, have by this time pushed her far into the lead. As it actually is, she is far, far behind. She has been sorely scourged, not for any moral guilt.
"Some innocents "scape not the thunderbolt."
It was because she did that which the wisest and best had done--the Greeks who gave the world culture and democracy, the Jews who gave it religion, the Romans who gave it law and civil inst.i.tutions. She really did far better than they did. She did not enslave the free. She merely took some of the only inveterate slaves upon earth out of lawless slavery, in which they would have otherwise remained indefinitely without recognition of the dearest human rights, and placed them in a far other slavery which was for them an unparalleled rise in liberty and well-being; which was, as becomes more and more probable with time, the only opportunity by which any considerable portion of the negro race can ever evolve upward into the capability of enlightened self-government. In doing this she unconsciously antagonized the purposes of the iron-hearted powers guarding the American union, and when the critical moment of that union came, they dashed her to pieces.
It will be many a year before the pathos of southern history can be fully told. I must satisfy myself here by saying only that the curse of African slavery to her has been of magnitude and weight incredible, and that one cannot yet be sure when it will end.
The t.i.tle of the chapter demands that I now tell you of the blessing of African slavery in the United States to the negro. Of course there are many who have been born into the unequalified condemnation of every form of slavery, which was resolutely preached for years all over the north by conscientious men and women of great ability and influence. Such will exclaim against me, and perhaps some of them will not even read the rest of the chapter. But it is my note, which becomes surer and more confident every year, that the great body of men and women shrink from every over-positively urged dogma. I have already mentioned those who are trying to curb the evils of drink. All the while an increasing majority of them recognize that to a.s.sert that any use of liquor, wine, or beer is a moral wrong, as do a noisy few in season and out of season, is too extreme to be true or even politic. The ultra democrat will zealously justify the a.s.sa.s.sination of Julius Caesar, while the wisest friends of the people become more firmly convinced every century that the empire which Caesar founded was, by reason of the circ.u.mstances, the best possible government for the Romans of that and the succeeding times;--the surest guaranty that the main benefits of ancient civilization should be preserved for the human race. And as there has now and then been something of substantial good in even absolute government, there has also been good to the slave in his slavery. Surely it was an improvement of the captor and a bettering of the condition of the prisoner of war, not to barbecue the latter, as was the custom for ages, but to have him work for a master. Perhaps the fabulist aesop had been a slave. Terence, a great Roman dramatist, surely had been. Horace"s father had been one. It may well be true that it was slavery that gave each one of these three immortals his opportunity. The more familiar you become with ancient history the larger you estimate the number of those to have been who as slaves got many of the benefits of Greek and Roman civilization, which benefits they afterwards transmitted to free descendants. I need not repeat what I have already told--how the negroes in the ma.s.s were advantaged by transfer from slavery in Africa to slavery in America. But do let me inquire, would Professor DuBois have ever outstripped all the white children in a New England school, graduated creditably from two American universities, studied at the university of Berlin, acquired the degree of Master of Arts and then that of Doctor of Philosophy, been made in sociology fellow of Harvard and a.s.sistant of the university of Pennsylvania, become president of the American Negro Academy, got the professorship of economics and history in Atlanta University, and pushed forward as an author into prominent and most respectable place; all before he was thirty-six years old--would Professor DuBois have surpa.s.sed this brilliant career, if an "evil, Dutch trader"
had not seized his "grandfather"s grandmother--two centuries ago"?[143] If the transfer just mentioned had not been made what would now be Fred Dougla.s.s, Booker Washington, Richard R. Wright, Professor DuBois, Bishop Turner, and other great negroes, their good works and glory? Would Hayti have arranged for some of its young men to be trained in farming at Tuskegee? more especially do I ask, would negroes educated at Tuskegee be now teaching the missionaries how to christianize the Africans of Togoland? Who would now be arousing people north and south in behalf of the race? and where could nine millions of blacks be found--or even half a million--as far above the African level of to-day as ours?
My conclusion is that the whites and the negroes of the south ought to learn wisdom and interchange their holidays and great annual rejoicings.
The former ought to keep the anniversary of the emanc.i.p.ation proclamation as the southern 4th of July, and the blacks ought to observe that day by wearing mourning and eating bitter herbs. Further, the negroes of America ought to celebrate the day when the Dutch ship landed the first Africans at Jamestown as the dawn of their hopes as a people.
CHAPTER XV
THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND MORALLY RIGHT--BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION, AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY
The proposition of the heading has really been demonstrated in the foregoing chapters. I feel that the demonstration should have impressive enforcement. It will surely be for the great good of our country if the brothers of each section be truly convinced that those of the other were morally right in the slavery struggle from beginning to end.
Let us begin by noting the ambiguity of the word "right." Something may be right in expediency, policy, or reason, and yet wrong ethically. Likewise something may be a mistake and wrong in policy while it is right in morals. General Sherman was a conspicuous example of the almost universal p.r.o.neness to confound right in the sense first mentioned above with it in the other. The two are widely different--not merely in degree, but in kind. That which is right or wrong in expediency is decided by the understanding--by the head; that which is right or wrong ethically is decided for every human being by his own conscience--by his heart. To try with all my might to do a particular thing may be my highest moral duty; to try with all your might to keep me from doing it may be yours. The brothers who set up the southern confederacy and defended it, the brothers who warred upon it and overturned it--they were on each side sublimely conscientious; for every one--to use the high word of Lincoln--was doing the right as G.o.d gave him to see it. No people ever waged a war with deeper and more solemn conviction of duty than did our northern brothers.
Rome, rising unvanquished from every great victory of Hannibal, much as she has been most justly lauded by foremost historians, fell behind them in supreme effort--in undaunted perseverance in spite of disaster after disaster until the difficulty insuperable was overcome. We of the south should be proud of this unparalleled achievement of our brothers. Most of all should we be proud of the complete self-abnegation and unwavering obedience to conscience with which they waded a sea of blood, for the welfare of future generations rather than their own. I am glad to observe that many who most affectionately remember the lost cause have come at last to concede without qualification that the restoration of the union by force of arms was morally right. But I note that as yet only a few at the north--men like Dr. Lyman Abbott, Mr. Charles F. Adams, and Professor Wendell--have learned that the south, in all that she did in "The Great War,"[144] was likewise morally right. To show that the confederates were exemplary champions of a legitimate government, I need not repeat what I have said above when I told how southern nationalization had given them a country of their own as dear to them and as much mistress of their consciences as the union was to the northern people. If there are those who cannot bring themselves to allow the all-potent coercion of the nationalization mentioned as justification, and who still think of us as traitors and rebels, I beg them to give due consideration to the feelings with which the southerner now looks back upon his life in the confederate army. I call a most convincing witness to testify. I do not know a man who ever followed what his conscience p.r.o.nounced right more faithfully, who was truer to the better traditions of the old south, and who was a more devoted soldier in the brothers" war, nor do I know another who now draws from every cla.s.s in his community more respect for real manhood and honesty. All who know him will believe his word against an oracle or an angel. Here is what he said thirty-seven years after the close of the war:
"That period of my life is the one with which I am the most nearly satisfied. A persistent, steady effort to do my duty--an effort persevered in in the midst of privation, hardship, and danger. If ever I was unselfish, it was then. If ever I was capable of self-denial, it was then. If ever I was able to trample on self-indulgence, it was then. If ever I was strong to make sacrifices, even unto death, it was in those days; and if I were called upon to say on the peril of my soul, when it lived its highest life, when it was least faithless to true manhood, when it was most loyal to the best part of man"s nature, I would answer, "It was when I followed a battle-torn flag through its shifting fortune of victory and defeat."
My comrades, how easy it is to name the word that characterizes and strikes the keynote of that time and should explain our pride to all the world--self sacrifice--that spirit and that conduct which raise poor mortals nearest to divinity. Oh, G.o.d in heaven, what sacrifices did we not make! How our very heart strings were torn as we turned from our home, our parents, our children!... How poor we were! How ragged! How hungry! When I recall the light-heartedness, the courage, the cheerfulness, the fidelity to duty which lived and flourished under such circ.u.mstances, from the bottom of my heart I thank G.o.d that for four long years I wore, if not brilliantly, at least faithfully and steadfastly, in camp and bivouac, in advance and retreat, on the march and on the battlefield, the uniform of a confederate soldier."[145]
The pa.s.sage just quoted most truly expresses the feelings with which the southern people stood by their cause and now look back upon the support which they gave it. In this matter their word will be taken by everybody.
Their actions before, during, and ever since the war speak louder than their word. There can be no doubt that in founding the Confederate States and waging the resulting war everything they did was counselled by the most tender and enlightened conscience. Bear in mind how they clung to Davis and how they still remember him, winning the precious eulogy
"--he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i" the story."
Bear in mind how truly they keep Memorial Day. The love which the south gives Davis and her dead soldiers protests to all the earth and heaven the righteousness of her lost cause. Calmly, serenely, confidently she awaits future judgment upon her love. It needs that all the north appreciate this fealty as the height of heaven-climbing virtue.
The real soldiers of each section--those who--to use a confederate saying--were "in the bullet department," and fighting every day, learned great regard for their foes; and when the war ended they became at once advocates of speedy reconciliation. And the non-combatants on each side felt far less resentment towards the actual fighters of the other than they did towards its political leaders. It is a common error to overrate the accomplishment of potent and ambitious men in tumultuous times. As the world long ascribed meteorological phenomena to the mutations of the moon, conspicuous above all things else as the apparent cause, so most people now believe that revolutions are caused by the men who appear to be leading. We have explained above that the only effective leaders--even of revolutions--are those who are the most completely led by the people. To lead, the leader must keep on the tide and let it lead him. If he makes serious effort to balk it, he is at once stranded as a piece of drift thrown out of the current. All of us--both those north and those south of Mason and Dixon"s line--ought to learn this truth thoroughly. The former should correct their false judgments as to Calhoun, Toombs, Yancey, and Davis; the latter as to Sumner, Garrison, and Phillips. It was but to be expected that these false judgments would be cherished all through what we may call the era of civil fury. That begins with the excitement over the admission of California and extends to the time after the war when the project of giving a negro const.i.tuency the balance of political power in each southern State was abandoned. But now as the brothers can look back upon those evil days with at least the beginning of dispa.s.sionate calmness, the task of convincing the whole people of each section that the more prominent figures of the other in the era mentioned were all true men and patriots, should be pushed forward with his whole might by every one who loves his country. It is not demanded that we claim too much for them.
To begin ill.u.s.trating: Toombs"s Tremont Temple lecture on slavery is such an able and powerful defence of the south that its reputation must forever increase. Yet as we consider it now we see that what he believed with all his heart to be the perpetual pillar and weal of his community was in fact its woe and ruin. We see, as to Calhoun, that if he had but given the resources of southern slavery against the implacable oppugnancy of free labor, roused for decisive combat, the sure and marvellous vision with which he searched the innermost nature of money, he would have had to acknowledge that the proud structure of southern society was wholly builded upon sands. The rains descended and the floods beat, and we saw the great fall. Of course we must admit that had our leaders been endowed with unerring prescience they ought to have warned us, and striven heart and soul for compensated emanc.i.p.ation. I need merely allude to State sovereignty, treated fully above. We of the south now see that though in advocating it we showed that the fathers were with us, and thus got the better of the argument, yet that the north was right in historical fact, and right also as to the true interest and welfare of America. Thus I have indicated some important acknowledgments which we of the south must make to our brothers of the north. Now I must state some that they must make to us.
The root-and-branch abolitionists and many following their lead interpreted the statement in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and with inalienable liberty as both intentional and actual condemnation of the slavery then existing in our country. They shut their eyes to the significant fact that the same doc.u.ment published to the world, as one of the causes justifying the solemn act therein proclaimed, that the king had "excited domestic insurrections amongst us"; which means he had instigated the slaves to rise against their masters. Many of the signers owned slaves then and to the end of their lives afterwards.
Palpably the declaration did not mean to say that the negroes in America were unjustly held in slavery, but did mean to say that inciting them--as John Brown with the approval of Phillips, Garrison, and such, afterwards sought to do--to gain their liberty by insurrection was inhuman and atrocious. These root-and-branch abolitionists confidently alleged that slavery in America was proscribed by the christian religion. Yet Jesus, the founder, who definitely reprehended every particular sin, never once denounced slavery. Paul, or some one else, whom the canon accepts as speaking with the authority of Jesus, says: "All who are in the position of slaves should regard their masters as deserving of the greatest respect, so that the name of G.o.d, and our teaching may not be maligned.
Those who have christian masters should not think less of them because they are brothers, but on the contrary they should serve them all the better, because those who are to benefit by their good work are dear to them as their fellow-christians. Those are the things to insist upon in your teaching. Any one who teaches otherwise, and refuses his a.s.sent to sound instruction--_the instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ_--and to the teaching of religion, is puffed up with conceit, not really knowing anything, but having a morbid craving for discussions and arguments."[146]
The pa.s.sage last quoted--to which several others from the new testament, almost as strong, can be added--demonstrates that christianity did not disapprove of slavery. Further, as I have already suggested, the slavery not rebuked by Jesus and his apostles was mainly that of kin in blood and race, of those who had been in a measure free themselves or descendants of the free. The slaves of the south were far remote in blood, and their native condition so bad that American slavery was for them elevation and great improvement.
The new testament, the declaration of independence, and the federal const.i.tution--surely three very respectable authorities, in America at least--stand together in solid phalanx. They clearly demonstrate that the charge that southern slavery was heinously wrong in itself, and that the masters were wicked man-stealers and kidnappers, made for a long while in every corner of the north, was mere opprobrium and abuse. Both sections ought to learn that there was nothing in negro slavery to shock the moral sense, but that on the contrary it was in its general effect of the utmost beneficence to the slave. Both ought to learn also that the white-hot zeal with which the inst.i.tution was fought was due mainly to these things:
1. Free labor had long been in an uncompromising hand-to-hand struggle with slave labor. Years before this commenced the employing cla.s.s had subconsciously divined it was far more profitable to hire the laborer only when his work was needed, and then let him go until he was needed again.
The worker with the advance of democracy had become more and more hostile to a system coercing his labor and denying him all political and civil rights. The co-operation of employer and laborer had expelled slavery of white men from Europe. The feeling towards slavery had become one of decided opposition.
2. In America the opposition to slavery was powerfully re-enforced, first, by the new cause the latter gave in competing with free labor for the unsettled public domain, and then in its operation to nationalize the south into a separate federation. With this combined the growing conception among the northern people of the negro as a man who had reached the stage of development characterizing the typical white. This huge mistake, hugged to their bosoms and championed with unflagging zeal by the ablest and most influential root-and-branch abolitionists, had a prodigious propagandic effect. It identified the cause of the negro slave, whom evolution had not yet made ready for liberty, with that of the oppressed European who had been long ready for it; and consequently that cause was continuously advocated with the pa.s.sion which the French revolution had started against human inequality. The root-and-branch abolitionists at last excited a pseudo-moral paroxysm among thousands at the north and kept it increasing for a long while.
Facts which cannot now be gainsaid plainly justify me in denying that conscientious conviction was the real primary motive. The northern and southern churches split, all the wisest and best of the former standing against, all those of the latter for slavery. You must see that their moral convictions were secondary, not primary motives; that some superior power had given to one side to regard slavery as wrong and to the other to regard it as right; that it really had given the two sides differing consciences. If you but invoke the universal history of mankind this fact now under consideration will cease to appear marvellous. You will find it to be the rule that the struggle for existence develops in every community an instinct which resistlessly prompts to the maintenance of its great economic interest. This instinct is the special preserver of the family, of the neighborhood, of the country. It is not strange that that which gives sustenance and comfort to one"s family, and what he sees all the best of his neighbors using as he does, will seem unquestionably right to him. It is not strange that, in such a serious conflict of interest as the intersectional one of dividing a vast empire between such fell compet.i.tors as free labor and slave labor, each side will differ diametrically in conscience as to right and wrong. Also it is not strange that they should lose temper, shower abuse upon their opponents, and fill the land with mutual accusations of heinous moral offences.
It is just as far wrong to regard the controversy between anti- and pro-slavery men--which was at bottom but a quarrel between north and south at first over the division of the Territories between the free labor system and the slave labor system, and later over the other question whether a slave republic should divide the continent with the United States--as a contest over a moral question, as it would be to make either the American or the French revolution such a contest. All three--the intersectional struggle as to slavery and the two revolutions--were mainly impelled by a desire of each side in every one to better or hold on to its material resources--that is, the leading impulsion was economic. Of course the combatants on each side claimed that they themselves were right and their adversaries wrong in morals. The rencounter between free labor and slave labor was very much like that now on between capitalists and labor organizations. Note how each side denounces the conduct of the other, alleging it to be against moral justice. The most superficial observer discerns that the real cause of difference between them is not one of conscience, but one of interest. We ought to understand that the crimination of the root-and-branch abolitionist and the recrimination of the fire-eater were each but stage thunder. The southern master must be wholly exonerated from the charge that in working his slave he committed moral offence against the dearest American rights; the claim for the African, who was in a far lower circle of development, of equal civil and political privileges with the white must be disallowed; and it be fully conceded that the southern people, leaders and all, were but doing their conscience-commanded duty throughout. Also we of the south must learn that the root-and-branch abolitionist, even in his wildest moments--Sumner refusing in the United States senate to show respect to Butler"s gray hairs, Wendell Phillips degrading Washington below Toussaint, Garrison denouncing the slavery-protecting const.i.tution as a covenant with death and an agreement with h.e.l.l, John Brown"s raid into Virginia--was just as conscientious as Robert Lee was when he was defending the soil of his native State. They were each irresistibly constrained by the powers working to save the union to think his particular action right and the highest patriotism.