THE DETROIT PERSECUTION AND ITS MORAL.
'THE jealous attitude of the popular mind of the North to- wards people of colour is one of the favourii e topics of the political friends of the Confederates. And certainly that at- titude is, in many places, at least as bad, and probably decidedly snore tinged with cruelty, than that of the corresponding class in the South. If the immediate extirpation of the inhuman hatreds within the hearts of the people were the most im- portant object of political institutions, we are by no means sure that an exchange between the mere temper of the mobs North and South towards coloured people only, would result in any benefit to either party. We have no wish at all to idisguise this fact; nay, in the true interests of freedom, we wish it to be clearly understood. If it were a mere question between the disposition to cruelty in the North, and the dis- position to cruelty in the South, towards coloured people, we should take no political interest in the matter. Indeed, the South would probably come out the best,—for exactly the same reason for which we see a great deal less cruelty to -animals among country-people, who are accustomed to live amongst them, than amongst towns-people, who are half afraid of them. It is because we find a far greater principle at issue than this,—one which in time will curb the most cruel spirit in the one case, — one which in time would undermine, -and in fact has undermined far and wide, the most humane spirit in the other,—that we do take a deep interest in the question.
The riot at Detroit (Michigan), on the borders of Canada, on the 6th March, was one of those events which ex- press the true spirit of a mob, and shows that there at least the social feeling towards the blacks is just as bitter and cruel as the feeling towards the Jews was in Eng- land a few centuries ago, and of just the same sort— half loathing, half fear. Faulkner, a negro, had done vio- lence to a little orphan white girl in Detroit. The crime was very grave, and the violent prejudice of colour was aggravated by natural compassion for the unprotected child. Faulkner was arrested and tried ; but the mob was not satisfied with the slow process of law, and while the prisoner was being re- moved to prison, made an effort to seize him from the hands of the soldiers, which was resisted with only too much vio- lence. The soldiers fired at random, and killed one or two inoffensive spectators, among whom was a German of high respectability, who had taken no part in the 4meute. This irritated the mob to fury : a citizen of high standing, they said, had been sacrificed to save a creature who deserved tor- ture as well as death ; and immediately a general onslaught on all the coloured people of Detroit was carried out, their houses set on fire, they themselves besieged in the burning buildings, and made the mark for stones, brickbats, and even revolvers, directly they appeared at the windows or doors. Even women and infants, emerging with prayers on their lips, were driven back into the burning buildings with fury ; and far into the night the mobs were engaged at different points of Detroit in burning out the negroes, and doing what they could to injure or kill the coloured people—till a suffi- cient force of soldiers at length restored order. The next day numbers of negroes, it is said, fled to the woods, and others across the river to a safer asylum in Canada.
Such is a fair specimen of the worst popular spirit which has ever yet manifested itself towards the free coloured population in the Northern States. One can discern at once that striking feature in it which always accompanies race-hatreds, — the unconquerable disposition, we mean, to impute an individual crime to the hated race at large, while any good quality of an individual on the other hand would be passed over with contempt, as in no way redounding to the credit of the community. That was the principle on which Englishmen at one time always treated Jews ; that is the principle on which the Northern mob is but too often disposed to treat Africans. It may, we freely admit, involve more guilt than the ordinary frame of mind in the South towards slaves,—as the crimes of men towards those who are partially their equals usually involve more excitement of the whole nature, more full consciousness, more personal evil, than acts of oppression to creatures immeasurably beneath them. The passion that the Southerner would have wreaked by simply burning or flogging the offenders to death, without needing to break the law at all, and therefore without any of that impetus which launches men into limit- less excesses beyond the law, the Northerner was restrained from expressing, and the fury of the people once beyond bounds did what a tide usually does when the sea wall is broken down.
What, then, is the true moral of the occurrence? Is it that the negroes are no better off in the North than in the South, and that no one interested in human freedom can care about aiding the transition to that very unenviable degree of freedom. which they enjoy in the Northern States ? On the con- trary, we hold that the analysis of the very iniquity of which Detroit has been guilty is, in itself, suffi- cient to establish the indefinitely higher moral position which the coloured people there enjoy. We do not merely mean that this would-be massacre was partly restrained and blunted by the power of the law, that the law was feared by the hesitating mob, and that its breach would never have been attempted but for some of those mischances which fan so quickly the passions of a crowd ; we do not merely mean that the injured race were free to shake the dust off their feet and go into a new and more hospitable land. But even the very sense that they had suffered by a gigantic crime, and not by an exercise of legal rights,—that they had a human law as well as a divine on their side, and against their persecutors,— that they could take the tone of men who knew not only that they were innocent, but that their adversaries would be bitterly condemned, and would have to flee from the pursuit of jus- tice,—all this though it does nothing to exculpate, nay, much, perhaps, to deepen the guilt of the population of Detroit, does much also to make us feel that not even at such a time would any free man doubt for a moment whether he would rather have been one of the persecuted free Africans of Michigan, or one of the most tenderly reared of the slaves in the most patriarchal of Southern families.
The truth evidently is that caste-ideas spring naturally in America from the exceedingly heterogeneous masses of popu- lation which are forced to mingle on that great continent,— but, of course, as colour gives both a natural and visible clothing to caste-ideas, and also happens to mark out by far the least civi- lized population of the American continent, these ideas, though also applying to a considerable extent even to the lower Irish, press with by far their greatest force on the coloured people. But when caste-ideas, thus originated, come into close combi- nation with the favourite political idea of equality, a con- tradiction and consequent effervescence ensues, in which either principle or taste must conquer and destroy the other. Instead of being surprised to find the caste ideas rallying very strongly just now in the North, we ought to expect that it would be so. Whatever stimulates the principles of freedom into activity will stimulate the sense of caste into extreme sensitiveness. The crime of Faulkner was one which seemed to show that the inviolability of the higher race was endangered, if not gone, and the resentment felt was not, therefore, simply against the individual criminal, but against the race which appeared to have passed one of the parallels by which it was hedged in. That the manner of the revenge shows us how passionately cruel is the pride and fear of race, we admit. That we ought to speak of the popular wicked- ness with horror and condemnation it is needless to say. But that it shows a hopeless career for the slaves in the North we altogether deny. It shows exactly the reverse ;—that the guardians of the race-barriers are trembling with selfish fear at the signs of the times,—that the people are making a last effort to substantiate to their own satisfaction privileges of race, and that they are fully conscious that the choice lies between a principle which they have already undermined, and which only the Southerners retain, and such an inter- pretation of the American law as will oblige them for the future to regard the negro who breaks it as an individual criminal, and not as the representative of a servile order that must be socially kept down. When fermentation commences, principles are beginning to operate, and even though at first they only give a new strength to opposing principles, the process is one that is an inevitable condition of further pro- gress.
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