THE CONTINGENCY OF SERVILE INSURRECTION.
TT is often said that courage in facing the evils that may I happen to others is a common and an easy virtue, but we doubt whether it is really as common, however easy it may be, as courage in facing evils that threaten ourselves. The whole tone of the mind in facing responsibilities of our own is, and ought to be, more firmly strung than when we are contemplating contingencies which we have never looked at in this steady practical light. We have a remarkable illustration of this in the tone taken by the English press with regard to the danger of servile insurrection. Nation- ally we are not responsible for the great crimes on which that terrible event would be time judgment ; and we avert our eyes, therefore, with something like terror from the contem- plation of it, and cry, God forbid ! We should be exceedingly sorry to make light of such a feeling, for, looking exclu- sively to some of the supposed and too probable conse- quences, we share it with the fullest sympathy. But the drift of events in the United States forces it absolutely upon our consideration, and we do most earnestly believe that, fearful as it might prove, there are many other alter- natives far more fearful which we ought to deprecate with yet more passionate remonstrances. Many points are overlooked which tend to prove that a servile insurrection in this instance would be, not more, but much less horrible than those servile insurrections at which history has taught us to shiver. And, again, while exaggerating ninny of the horrors of this alternative, we doubt if most people seriously consider the terrors of that other alternative for which they ap- parently wish, namely, a strong and consolidated slave power in the South. A word or two on both branches of the subject. 1. We hear it constantly said that if slave insurrections were so horrible as they in fact were where meters and slaves were of the same colour, or even the same race, and in more or less degree of a similar range of intelli- gence, it is scarcely possible to imagine its horrors where the insurgent race would be of the ignorant, degraded, brutal type, to which slavery has reduced the Africans in the Southern States. Now we believe this to be erroneous in many important respects. There is considerable evidence that the vindictive feelings of slaves who are not really inferior in physical and moral calibre to their masters, are far deeper and more ferocious than those of the genuine African. Intelligence, capacity, moral sensitiveness, all give a deeper, more poignant sting to the status of servi- tude; and the revenge of the slave, when once the fetters are struck off, is passionate pretty much in direct propor- tion to the depth of his resentment. It is quite a mistake to suppose that revenge is mainly an animal feeling ; it is proportionate to the sense of injury, and the most rank- ling injuries are those which are partly moral and intel- lectual. A beaten dog, or even a wounded lion, resents nothing when once the momentary instinct of self-defence is past. And a slave who has seen his family sold before his eyes, and bears about him the scars of his master's whip, will hate deeply only where he has had the organization to feel profoundly. Nay, more than this : the African temper, though exceedingly sensual, is also exceptionally placable. It is impossible to detect in the minds of our own emanci- pated slaves any vindictive feeling even towards those masters who had treated them with the most savage cruelty. For example, the act of refined and fiendish cruelty that we are about to relate, and for which we can vouch in detail, and give, if needful, the date and names of the parties concerned, —it happened in Jamaica before the emancipation,—had ap- parently left no vindictive feeling in the mind of the sufferer, who is now living and gaining an honourable living as a surveyor. He was house-slave to a planter, who had been giving a long course of entertainments, and the man bad not been in bed for a couple of nights. On the third night, after laying the supper table, he lay down on the floor of the room in a position which he believed would ensure his hearing his master's voice, or any sound indicating that he was wanted. But, exhausted as lie was, he fell into a heavy sleep. This master—an Englishman—not receiving any answer to his calls, and finding him asleep on the floor, deliberately lifted up one eyelid and dropped melting wax from the candle upon his eye, and would have repeated the act with the other eye, had not the violent struggles of the man rendered it impossible. Of course, the sight of this eye was irrecoverably lost. This man, though intelligent and capable, and now making, as we said, a good livelihood as a surveyor, speaks with horror, but without any apparent vindictiveness, of this fiendish treatment ; and it is the same in almost all our West India islands. The emancipated slaves will narrate the most fearful stories of their sufferings with obvious shrinking and fear, but with little or no re- sentment and revenge. And we believe this too great placability, this mode of looking at their sufferings rather as dreadful events than as wicked inflictions, is very deeply characteristic of this race. We should expect from a social in- surrection in the South to see exceedingly little of the demo- niac, and much of the degraded thievish,element let looseupon society. There would be sensuality probably, but little vio- lence; robbing, but little murder ; and the result would very possibly often be that the slaves would paralyze the friends under whom they arrayed themselves, quite as much as the masters against whom they had revolted. Let us remember, too, that a servile insurrection, properly so called, is a very dif- ferent thing from a war in which the slaves could at once find protection and guidance. Left to their own feeble devices, they might be guilty of needles; violence from mere confusion of purpose. But if there was a clear haven of refuge in the Federal army, they would probably seek its protection and guidance at once, rather than wait to face their masters. No doubt several millions of slaves would be a fearful population to provide for, but the evil and the disorganization would probably rage its worst among the friends with whom they might take shelter, rather than among the enemy. 2. But rate servile war at its worst—and however much its terrors may be overrated, it is terrible enough in its mildest form—we firmly believe that it is a less fearful con- tingency than the consolidation of the slave power in the South. Sufferers are always inclined to magnifythe existing, as compared with the alternative, evil ; but the non-sufferers fall into just the opposite error. We are used to slavery. We know that the world gets on in spite of it. We think that a few Legrees are, perhaps no worse than a few Palmers. But the class of terrors which a servile war would involve impress the imagination far more because they are crowded into so short a space of time. No doubt a year of servile war might be worse than ten years of slavery, as a year of the Committee of Public Safety in France was cer- tainly worse than ten years of Louis XV. But concentrated evil, though it impresses us more, is not really so bad as a larger amount spread over a longer time. A short and fierce spasm of pain may be a happy exchange for a long debilitating illness. The pangs of a servile insurrection must be weighed not against the same period of slavery, but against the indefinite extension of it involved in a firmly consolidated slave power at the South. Now let any honest man contemplate this. Let him consider what it means : the terrible searing of the masters' minds till men of no extraordinary evil-heartedness become capable of such fiendish cruelties as we have narrated—the prolonged degradation of the servile race implied in their scarcely ever resenting such injuries—the infection which extends far and wide from such centres to all who have dealings with them—and then let them honestly decide whether for our own country, for England, we should not prefer the sharp purification of violent and spasmodic suffering to the corruption and decay involved in a new lease, and probably iniiew extensions, of servile institutions. To us the case news so clear, that we can scarcely understand the recoil Alich most men seem to feel from such an alternative. There appears to be no constitutional remedy for slavery in the United States, and, should the Secessionists succeed, no constitutional guarantee against its rapid extension. How can a healthy imagination conceive the hushing up of the present conflict and the confirmation of all the old misery with anything like satisfaction For our- selves, we rejoice, with trembling, to see the escape from this constitutional tangle so near, even though it be an escape as by fire. A mightier force than that of states- men—the force of the evil passions of the Southerners them- selves—has made a practicable breach in the elaborate legal fortifications of Slavery, and we shall hold the North little worthy of its task if it does not avail itself of the opening. Hitherto Americans have had but too morbid a respect for their own tainted Constitution, none more so than Mr. Lin- coln, who is perhaps doomed, like Balaam, to prophesy, with reluctant voice and averted eyes, that triumph of an uncon- stitutional freedom which his legal and constitutional in- stincts had rendered him most anxious to 'prevent. It is fortunate for America that Providence does not appear to share that profound respect for the forms rather than the spirit of Constitutions, to which the President evidently in- clines. He hugs the manacles from which a higher Power is rapidly setting him free.
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