WHAT ENGLISH ABOLITIONISTS WANT.
THERE is one assumption which influences all argument 1 and distorts all opinion upon the results of this Ame- rican struggle, and that is the impossibility of enfranchising the slaves without risking a servile war. Voluntary enfran- chisement, i.e. emancipation with the full consent of owners, is admitted on all hands to be impossible. The smallest conceivable compensation, the full 1)&6, that is ftst adults only, would cost four hundred millions, and though forty millions a year for ten years is not a sum absolutely beyond American competence to raise, it is quite beyond any taxation to which a democracy is likely to submit. If; therefore, say the concealed friends of the South, with a keen Comprehension of British feeling, voluntary action is impos- sible, the abolitionists are driven back on force, and force can be applied only in one way. The North can, they admit, call on the slaves to rise, but the summons would be followed by horrors such as even the Indian Mutiny did not present. In every corner of the South, there are isolated estates, gar- risoned by a few white men, but tenanted by many white women and children, whose protectors are serving in the ranks. Slaves once broke loose have no idea of modera- tion, and the land would be covered with crime, before which humanity would recoil, or in a blaze of righteous wrath consent to the reimposition of the chain. Short of this horrible risk there is no alternative, and therefore, say the friends of the South, whatever be the result of the war, it cannot be enfranchisement. That hope must be abandoned, and with it the sympathy which still links the hearts of freemen to the bombastic and arrogant North.
Now, we start at once with the admission that if this be the only alternative, if the choice lies between continuing the misery of the slaves and ending that misery by steeping them in crime, we submit silently to the necessity which at least does not stain the soul with new or irremediable canoe. We prefer to trust the slaves to the mercy of God, than to free them by the breach of His dearest laws. The right of the slave to regain his freedom, even if the effort involve slaughter, is as clear as any other application of the right of self-defence. But our right to tempt him to slaughter, to avenge one crime by risking the commission of another, is one on which no man should stand, unless more certain of his own convictions than we can profess to be. But admitting that servile insurrection is a crime, even a crime so great that its instigators can have no justification, we utterly deny that it is one risked in the unspoken thought of English abolitionists, or of necessity involved in forcible enfranchisement. Loss there must be, and destruction, and perhaps terrible suffering for the lives of a generation. Great crimes always entail some retribution, and even the lavishness of England could not save the reckless planters of the West Indies from the ruin their cruelty had deserved. But of blood not one drop need be shed, at least by servile hands. The unspoken hope of the English abolitionists—we do not speak of the Americans, who have become ulcerated by the close contemplation of unutterable and long-continued wrong—is, we take it, some- thing in this wise. The reunion of the States, the absolute integrity of the American nation, is a necessity no political compromises can affect. The States, if they are not to exist on the footing of petty jarring republics, as contemptible as those of South America, must form one unbroken whole, and form it, too, with the consent of such a section of the people as shall render civil war no danger to be provided for. As the war drifts on endlessly, and compromise after compromise breaks down, and expenditure becomes ruinous, and misery unendurable, the American mind, which, once raised to a white heat, has a tendency to harden, will grow iron in the conviction that the cause of all this must end. The root and origin of all this strife must be plucked away, and the States so reorganized, that the willing cohesion at least of the next generation shall once more be possible. The instant that con- viction is fairly entertained, the instant the North is determined that whatever the pecuniary loss all slavery shall cease, the path to that end will become practicable and clear. There is no need of laws, or proclamations, or appeals, such as are sure to stir to madness a race who will add to the revenge nurtured by suffering, the savage energy which the hope of Utopia even in Europe inspires. The less the slaves know of their coining freedom the better for them, and for their benefactors. As each State in succession was occupied by the troops forced labour would absolutely cease. The easiest way to enfranchise the bond would be to confiscate them to the Union, and settle all who did not take free service on wild lands, held on condition of a high rent to their former owners. They would, it may be said, still rise. Against what, or whom ? the masters they are free from, or the new and invisible master, who demands nothing but strict obedience to the ordinary laws of human society ? The slaves of the West Indies—and some at least of our readers, have not forgotten the sworn testimony as to their sufferings— never raised a hand in vengeance, though far more nearly masters than the slaves of a State in military occupation are likely to be. If, despite all experience the negroes should commit crime, they would be as liable to punishment as they are now. With the status of freemen they must accept its responsibilities, the liability to be hung amongst the rest. There would, however, we verily believe, be no crime ; the sense of relief from an ever present terror, would swallow up all other emotions, and leave behind it for the moment the single and pleasant vice of outrageous idleness. The picture may be far too bright, the American mind may never rise to the greatness of such a sacrifice of prejudice, the slaves may be more evil than we take them to be ; but this is, we believe, the hope of the English abolitionist, a forcible enfranchisement it is true, but one affected without the de- struction of human life.
But, we shall be told, even if life is preserved, think of the awful destruction of property such an enfranchisement will occasion. Blacks, once free, will not labour, and who is to plant the grain which is to keep the population alive, o r pick the cotton which will keep the mills of Great Britain in full work. The owners of property will be reduced to beg- gary, the land will sink out of cultivation, and the entire South, a whole nation of people, and a territory as large as ten Englands, be utterly and irretrievably ruined. We blankly deny the fact, and the possibility of the fact. That the 850,000 individuals who now own slaves will be more or less injured for a time, we are not concerned to question. Even their tremendous fall will be broken by judicious ad- vances of capital, by the quit rental, and by the high value their great estates will acquire through the rise which inevitably follows the introduction of free labour. They will suffer still, but pecuniary suffering no more gives them a right to compensation than the abolition of a duty gives a similar right to smugglers. They are de- prived of nothing which is their own. Slavery, altogether apart from its attendant evils, the cruelty necessarily be- gotten of terrorism, the license to which the enslavement of women will always give rise, comprehends, as its very essence, one permanent crime. Slavery is theft, though slaveowners are not thieves, the constant theft from the slave of the wages of his labour, and freedom means simply the termination of the right to continue that form of wrong. Personally, the owners, bred in an evil system which many of them abhor, are entitled to every consideration, to every effort society can make to alleviate the bitterness of the blow. There are plenty of St. Claire in the South despite Mr. Olmsted. But as a class the owners simply lose that to which they have no right, and must accept the temporary poverty the ending of so mighty a wrong inevitably entails. But for the South as a whole, we utterly deny that enfranchisement means ruin. On the con- trary, it means the gradual but swift enriching of the white population now steeped to the lips in poverty and wretched- ness. The black race for one generation, at all events, very probably will not work except for themselves. We suspect, some evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that like all the dark races except the Chinese,like the natives of India, and the Italian peasantry, they are extremely industrious when working for themselves, and grossly negligent when working for hire. Half- civilized races usually are, the want with them being one not of industry but of principle. We have no fer- vent belief in Uncle Toms, who, unless slavery is an elevating institution must be very exceptional individuals, and we look for aid to classes other than liberated slaves. The instant slavery ceases the mean white becomes a highly paid labourer, and one at least as efficient as his rival. In Virginia he grows tobacco, in Texas he picks cotton in a style with which no negro can compete. Work for wages is the want of the mean white, and once labour has ceased to be disgraceful he will have work to profusion. At first, in the temporary annihilation of capital, he must be paid out of the crop, in- stead of in cash, but that system, known in Europe as the Inetayer, is quite endurable for a time, and is the very system which slavery compels the planters to adopt. The white is acclimatized, and can labour anywhere except in the worst swamps, which must be left to the negro on a produce rent, or finally abandoned. To say that he cannot work, is to deny the fact that be does, as a German free settler, sow, hoe, and pick cotton, the very best cotton which reaches the English market, so valuable indeed as to make up the whole difference between the value of slave and the value of free labour. His cultivation, moreover, does not exhaust the soil, a fact in itself worth millions to the South, while he is capable under the hope of gain of efforts the whip has at all times failed to produce. In three years we firmly believe the produce of the South so far from decreasing will be doubled, while if the profit on that produce should be more equally divided than before, if the planter should be poorer and the labourer richer than of old, surely that is not a result at which humanity should groan. And the slaves ? We are not of those who contend for outraging race prejudices, or for an equality which circum- stances refuse. Freedom must be given from above, but the race must earn citizenship for itself. We ask neither po- litical privileges, nor enforced maintenance, nor settlement on the soil, nor liberation from a taxation which shall compel toil, nor any other of the fifty claims men with ulcerated hearts have put forward to the injury of their cause. Let the negro be settled on the soil the white man cannot use, till he can earn by purchase the privilege of choice, or enter into domestic service as a free man, or, in short, take his place as a proletaire, till industry and thrift win him a higher position. There is no more reason to give him the suffrage than to give it to English paupers, no more necessity to let political power pass beyond the whites of the South than to degrade it below the educated class in Italy, no more obligation not to tax him till he must work than to abstain from taxing Indian ryots. All that is wanted is freedom; freedom for the slave to work without blows; freedom for the white to earn wages without the burning sense of a degrading rivalry in toil ; that freedom we firmly believe may be conceded without bloodshed, without unen- durable suffering, and without even a suspension of the pros- perity of the South.
Previous page
