THE POSITION OF THE NEGRO DT THE UNITED STATES.
[FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. j New York, February 13, 1864. THE military event of the past week is an attempt on the part of General Butler to make a dash into Richmond and rescue our suffering prisoners there. It failed so utterly that it would hardly be worth notice, did it not illustrate the impossibility of preserving military secrets under which the Government labours in conduct- ing this war. General Meade was to cross the Rapidan and press Lee so heavily as to cause him to summon every man within reach. Meade did so most effectively. Meantime Butler was to dash (by proxy) into Richmond with a column of cavalry and light infantry, surprise the place, and bring off the prisoners. The plot was an excellent one, and would have succeeded perfectly, except for treachery. Butler's cavalry got to within twelve miles of Rich- mond ; but there found that the roads were so blockaded with newly felled trees that (the country off the road being imprac- ticable) to go farther was hopeless, and the attempt was abandoned. We learn from the rebels that they received timely information of the movement from " a Yankee de- serter," as they call him ; but we know well enough that he was one of those thousands and tens of thousands of rebels who swarm within our lines, and who may be found in the very ranks of our armies, where they have gone to be ready for just the sort of service which on this occasion disappointed such fond and well-founded hopes. In fact, had it not been for this treachery the movement might have had much more important results than were looked for. Meade's advance caused the city to be almost stripped of troops, and the approach of our column from the south-west filled the place with consternation. Again that sad phrase is on our lips, " It might have been."
In a former letter I mentioned two books recently published in London which contained notable errors about us ; but I was obliged to pass by one of them for the time unnoticed. I revert to this one now with a purpose somewhat different from that I first had in regard to it. The book is Mr. Charles Reade's " Very Hard Cash," in which there is a Yankee character called Fullalove. Now I am becomingly grateful to Mr. Reade that he, being a Briton, presented to his fellow Britons what he meant for a type of my countrymen without making him a mean- spirited, cowardly scoundrel. Besides, this shows a degree of moral courage on his part, as he lives by his books, which, to a certain extent at least, wins my respect. But I must say to him that his Yankee, in all that is peculiar to him, is simply no Yankee at all, but an absurd nondescript assemblage of incongruities. For instance, Fullalove called upon to give evidence in " Hardie v. Hardie," thus speaks, in chapter lv., to one who makes signs to him :—" Well, what is it, old hoes? What are you making mugs at me for? Don't you know it's clean against law to telegraph a citizen in the witness-box ?" Again, on the same occasion, he says, " Do you hyar now what his lordship says ? If you know anything more, come up hyar, and swear it like an enlightened citizen ; do you think I'm going to swear for tew ?" Now, if a man were to talk thus in court here, even in the remotest rural districts, the whole room, audience, jury, counsel, and bench, would go off into a fit of laughter.
A Yankee is fully aware of his advantages in being " a citizen " of this Republic, the strength of which he knows lies in its unpre- cedented proportion of " enlightened citizens ;" but any use of the word citizen of which Fullalove's is even a caricature would set down the speaker as mildly mad or very foolish. Fullalove's language, too, is a jargon in which the word " tew " (eat, however, don't represent the rustic pronunciation of oo) is the only Yankee element ; in which a piece of purely British slang—" mug," for mouth—appears ; and which in other respects is more (though not much) like the talk of a rude resident of a south-western Slave State than it is like any other speech ever spoken. The use, for instance, of " hyar " for " here," which seems to be regarded by British writers as the distinctive trait of Yankee speech (next to a nasal twang, which is as offensive to us as an exasperated " h " is to you, and, according to Dean Alford's evidence, not so common) —this " hyar " is, as I have before remarked, a negroism, and is never heard except from people born and bred in the Slave States, and from the negroes in the Free States. It and various other like words and phrases, which you use when you wish to be funny at the expense of us Yankees (all right enough so long as you are good-natured), and which are all of negro origin, illustrate that great difference which exists between the people of the Free and those of the Slave States in regard to the negro. I have heard a man, University bred and the descendant of two or three gene- rations of wealthy planters, speak negro (not jocosely) in every sentence he uttered, and attract no attention from his fellow South- erners around him, because they were all more or leas infected with the same taint, and the ears of all were accustomed to this dialect ; which would offend, and in our eyes disgrace, the rudest and least cultured of us Yankees (I use, and always use, the word in its largest sense, as meaning the people of all the old States north of the Potomac), although we hear it constantly from the negroes around us. But we hear it only to laugh at and avoid it. We do not work the negro like a beast, and sell, and beat, and brand him like a beast, we (I do not include Irish rioters) treat him more than justly, kindly—but we shun and separate ourselves from him except as a servant, and few of us like him even in that relation. What is the reason of this difference between people of the same race and of equal pride of race ? Why does the arrogant, domineering planter mix with his negroes, and become infected even with their ridiculous and distinctive traits of lan- guage, while the very Yankee artisan and farm labourer avoid him, and keeps his English at least pure from that contamination? Simply because in the former case the negro has a fixed and un- mistakeable position as a slave, a chattel, a thing, and not a man ; while in the latter, though ridiculous and repulsive, he is a man. A Southern woman, so squeamish that she would not say "leg " in the presence of a white man, will admit a male negro to her toilet, almost from its very initial step ; his sex enters into her mind under any circumstances hardly more than that of her lap-dog. A Yankee woman would have just the same feeling as to the impos- sibility and the horror of any sexual relation between her and a male negro ; but still she would not be unconscious of or indifferent to his sex. Then, too, the absolute power of the Anglo-Saxon over the negro at the South creates a feeling of toleration and a freedom of intercourse impossible at the North. It was but an evening or two ago that a lady born and bred in Virginia of a planter family, but now a thorough abolitionist and the wife of one of our Generals, said to me, " Why, it's all very well to 'talk about our freedom of intercourse with the negroes ; but what does it mean? We may throw our arms round the neck of an old black nurse; but we know all the time that we have the power of life and death over her ; she has no will but ours, she exists but by our sufferance ; it is for us to decide whether we will caress her or flog her till the blood streams, whether we shall keep her comfortable with us or sell her to a south-western trader." This lady touched the point. Set the negro free at the South, and his position beComes to all intents and purposes. what it is at the North—that of a fellow creature, who, whether we will or no, excites our ridicule, our pity, and our aversion, and to whom we are, nevertheless, endeavouring to be just, and to make as comfortable as he can be made in contact with us. I say he excites ridicule; and this is not dependent upon his ignorance or his poverty. On the con- trary, the better educated, thebetter bred (and negroes are often well mannered), and the better dressed he is, the more he excites our laughter, the more ridiculous the incongruity between his physical traits and our idea of manhood. This I venture to say represents the feeling of the great mass of those very Yankees who brought on this war by their determination—not to set free those individual slaves at the South; for that they would not have perilleda thousand lives, nor would it have been right or wisely benevolent for them to do so— but to put a stop, as far as they could, to the enslavement of this race, to free this nation, if they could, from the sin and the curse of slavery. Henry Ward Beecher was asked at one of the meetings in London at which he spoke, "Do you admit negroes to seats in your church ?" and the question was evidently made a point of. But it was a most unfair one. For a church here is as much a private affair as a club, or as a private house. In countries where there is any sort of connection between Church and State such a question would be pertinent ; but we might as well ask you, with a censorious air, if you admitted Hodge, the ploughboy, to the privileges of the Reform or the Oxford and Cambridge Club— much better, for he is of your own race. All our churches are built by people who like to worship together, and though no one is excluded from them, nqt even negroes, only people of approxi- mately similar social, positions are likely to be found in the same congregations. So as our pews are as much our own ape our parlours, we don't have the negro in the one any more than we do in the other. But because we don't like the negro, and do laugh at him, we do not, therefore, think it right to oppress and enslave him, or to allow him to be enslaved under the protection of our flag, if we can help it. Because he is poor shall we make him poorer ? because he is weak shall we strike him down ? because he is our inferior shall we, therefore, grind him to powder ? Such is not our view of the privileges secured to us by the dominant position of
our race, and here is the difference between us and the people of the South. They, or most of them, by the teachings of designing politicians operating upon the worst passions of our nature, had been brought to believe that superiority gave the right of oppression. But some of them are beginning to unlearn that lesson.
The contradiction in my last letter of the monstrous misstate- ment in "The Gentle Life" (which I find to be chiefly made up of essays which have had the circulation and authority of the Saturday Review) that we of this country " introduced the slave trade," as the " sovereign Republic increased" and " the want of labourers was felt," and that " the guilt is not and was not yours," was not made with that particularity and authority which I usually endeavour to give to the subject-matter of this correspondence. The facts and dates which will enable any one to decide this question are these:— Queen Anne, by an Order in Council in relation to the Colony of New York, directed, among other things, "that the Royal African Company should be encouraged, and that the colony should have a constant and sufficient supply of merchantable negroes at moderate rates." In 1774, two years before we attempted to sever ourselves from the Government of the mother country, our provisional Con- gress passed resolutions against the slave trade. In 1789, the first year of our national existence, Congress passed an Act prohibiting the external slave trade; at this time slavery itself was prohibited by the constitution, of most of the states north of the Potomac. It was not until 1792 that the gradual abolition of the trade by British subjects was provided for by Act of Parliament. In 1794 Congress passed an Act prohibiting the fitting out of vessels for the slave trade ; in 1800, an Act forbidding any citizen of the United States from holding property in foreign slavers,and authorizing United States vesselstoseizethem. In 1807 the British Parliament abolished the trade, and in the same year Congress forbade under heavy penalties the introduction of slaves within the United States after the expiration of that year. In 1820 Congress passed an Act declaring the slave trade piracy punishable with death. In 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British Possessions after the 1st of August, 1834, as it had been for a generation back in the most enlightened, and Christianized, and most populous States of the American Republic. As to the trade itself, and who conducted it, the returns of the Charleston Custom House in the rolls of congress show that of 39,075 negroes imported into South Carolina from Africa between the years 1804 and 1808 more than one-half —19,649—were imported by British subjects ; that 25,834, or nearly two-thirds of the whole number, were imported by foreigners, while traders, nominally residents of the maritime Free States, imported only 8,838. Between us and our accusers judge.
A YANKEE.
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