Читать книгу Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition - John H. van Evrie - Страница 4

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“American slavery,” though having no existence in fact, is a phrase which, for the last forty years, has been oftener heard than American democracy; yet the latter is one of the great powers of the earth, and destined, in the course of time, to revolutionize the world. But in this prominence of an abstraction, and indifference, or apparent indifference, to the grandest fact of modern times, is witnessed the wide-spread and almost despotic influence of the European over the American mind. What is here termed “American slavery,” is the status of the negro in American society—the social relation of the negro to the white man—which, being in accord with the natural relations of the races, springs spontaneously from the necessities of human society. The white citizen is superior, the negro inferior; and, therefore, whenever or wherever they happen to be in juxtaposition, the human law should accord, as it does accord in the South, with these relations thus inherent in their organizations, and thus fixed forever by the hand of God. And were America isolated from Europe—did that sea of fire, which Mr. Jefferson once wished for, really divide the Old World and the New, and thus separate us from the mental obliquities and moral perversities of the former—then any other relation than that now common to the South, would be an impossible conception to the American mind.

The words “slave” and “slavery” were scarcely heard a hundred years ago, as indeed they will be unheard a hundred years hence; and prior to the Revolution of 1776, the people of America were quite unconscious of that mighty “evil,” now so oppressive to many otherwise sensible minds, though this imaginary slavery then spread over the whole continent. All new communities are distinguished by a certain advance in civilization over the elder ones, however rude the former may appear in some respects, or whatever may be the over-refinement, or seeming refinement, of the latter. Truth lives forever—“the eternal years of God are hers;” and all real knowledge, all true progress made by the race, is treasured up, and carried with it in all its wanderings, whether from the Nile to the Tiber, or from the Thames to the Hudson; while the errors, the foolish traditions and vicious habits, mental and moral, that gather about it, and weaken, and sometimes so overlie and conceal the truth as to render it useless, are left behind. We see this even in our own energetic and progressive society. The younger States are the most enlightened States; and the West, whatever may be its wants, or supposed wants among a certain class, is really more civilized than the East. That community which is the most prosperous—where there is the greatest amount of happiness—where there is relatively the greatest number of independent citizens—is per se and of necessity the most civilized; for the end of existence, the object of the All-wise and beneficent Creator—happiness for His creatures—is here most fully accomplished.

And when we contemplate the history of this continent, and compare the character of the early colonists, their history, and their influence over the present condition of things, it will be found that they remained stationary in exact proportion as they clung to the ideas and habitudes of the Old World; or advanced towards a better and higher condition just as they cast off these influences, and lived in natural accord with the circumstances that surrounded them. The Spanish conquerors were often the pets and favorites of the court, and always the faithful sons of the Church, and brought with them the pomps and vanities of the former, and the rigid ecclesiastical observances of the latter. When Cortez and Pizzaro took possession of a province, they pompously paraded the titles and dignities of the emperor before the wondering savages, and added vast multitudes of “Christian converts” to “Holy Church” with a zeal and fervor that the Beechers and Cheevers of our times might envy, but surely could not equal. The English colonists, on the contrary, were almost all disaffected, or at all events, were charged with disaffection to the mother country. This, it is true, was masked under religious beliefs and scruples of conscience, but was none the less hostile to the political order under which they had been persecuted and suffered so long. As soon, therefore, as they found themselves in a New World, and relieved from the tyranny of the Old, they abandoned, to a great extent, the forms, as they already had abandoned many of the ideas, of the latter. They recognized the nominal sovereignty of the mother country, or rather of the Crown; but from the landing at Jamestown, as well as at Plymouth, all the British colonists really governed themselves, made their own laws, provided for their own safety, and, except the governor, and occasionally some subordinate officials, elected their own rulers. The result was a corresponding prosperity; for not only did the discipline of self-reliance strengthen the character, and call out a higher phase of citizenship among the English colonists, but in casting off the habitudes of the old societies, and adopting those that were suited to the circumstances surrounding them, they soon exhibited a striking contrast to those of Spain and of other European powers, who clung to the ideas and habits of Europe.

But this drawback on American progress—this clinging to the habitudes of the Old World, which kept the Spanish and French colonies in abject submission to the mother country, and which England, at a later period, sought to force on her colonies—was not the sole embarrassment in the progress of the colonists. They were confronted by wild and ferocious savages, who disputed every step of the white European; and though, previous to the independence of the colonies, the mother country united with the latter against the former, from the breaking out of hostilities in 1776 to the close of the War of 1812 the interests of monarchy and savagism may be said to have been inseparable, and to have formed a common barrier against the march of republicanism. Indeed, it is a truth, attested by the whole history of the past, and equally so by the circumstances of the present, that the subordinate races of this continent—the Indian, Negro, Mongrel, etc.—constitute the material, the very stock in trade, of European monarchists, to embarrass the progress of American institutions; and in every instance where we have been engaged in Indian wars, that portion of our people who, in their ignorance and blindness, have condemned the course of their own government, have been the unconscious instruments of the enemies of their country, and in their sickly sentimentality and folly, they have sought to obstruct the progress of American civilization. Monarchy consists in artificial distinctions of kings, nobles, peasants, etc., or it may be defined as the rule of classes of the same race, and, from the inherent necessities of its organization, it is forced to make war on the natural distinction of races. Prior to the breaking out of the American Revolution, there was no necessity for calling in the aid of the Negro or the Indian to crush out the liberty of the white man. The colonists, as has been observed, were practical republicans, and substantially governed themselves; but they had not questioned the European system or theory of monarchism. When they did this, however, in that grand Declaration of Mr. Jefferson, that all men (meaning, of course, his own race) were created free and equal, the British monarchists instinctively and, indeed necessarily, resorted to the means at hand—to the subordinate races of America—to demoralize and break down this immortal truth. An English judge, anticipating the coming rebellion of the Americans, had already ruled that “slavery,” or social subordination of the negro to the white man, was a result of municipal law—a creature of the lex loci; and though this was in language that led vast numbers of people into error, its technical as well as absolute falsehood is apparent, when we remember that no such “law” has ever existed, either now or at any other time, in American history, from the Canadian Lakes to Cape Horn. But it served as a foundation and stand-point for that wide-spread imposture and world-wide delusion which has since so overshadowed the land, and, with the best intentions on their part, so deluded Americans themselves into a blind warfare against the progress, prosperity, and indeed the civilization, of their country and continent. In the seven years’ war waged to crush out the rebellion of the Colonies, England subsidized the savage Indian tribes wherever it was possible to do so; and in the subsequent War of 1812, her agents partially succeeded in combining all the savages on our western border, under Tecumseh, with the design of shutting us out forever from the country west of the Mississippi. The result of this monstrous alliance of European monarchists and American savages to beat back the advancing civilization of the New World, to hold in check, and, if possible, to defeat and overthrow republicanism, has ended in the destruction and almost utter annihilation of the North American Indians. General Jackson’s campaigns in Florida, as well as those of Harrison in the West, and, to a certain extent, even the later Seminole War, all had their origin in the same causes, the open or secret intrigues of British agents, stimulating the savages to resist the onward march of American civilization. Nor was it anything like the former contests of the agents of England and France to enlist the aid of the savages against each other; for, repulsive and iniquitous as it may be for men of the same race to employ subordinate races against their own blood, they were struggling for possession of a continent, and all means, doubtless, seemed legitimate that should give them victory. But in this case it was a war against Americanism—against a new order of political society—against a system based on a principle of utter antagonism to monarchism, and which if permitted to develop its legitimate results, to grow into a new and grander order of civilized society than the world had ever yet witnessed, the rotten and worn-out systems of Europe were doomed to certain and perhaps early overthrow. It is true, the agents employed did not know this—indeed, their European masters were ignorant, perhaps, of the principles involved; but the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct inherent in hostile systems impelled them forward, while the ends to be reached, or the consequences of success, were always too apparent to be mistaken. But their savage instruments were destroyed in the conflict, in the uses to which they were applied by their European allies; and whatever may be the future fate of the Aborigines in Spanish America, the North American Indian is virtually annihilated. A few wild tribes of the West and South-west, whose means for preserving existence are every day growing less, still remain, and some remnants of semi-civilized tribes, which are perishing even more rapidly than the former, are to be found on our Western frontier; but the time is not distant, perhaps, when they will be wholly and absolutely extinct.

What might have been, it is useless to conjecture; but the notion of a certain class of sentimentalists among us, that we have done the Indian great wrong, and that, had we treated him with kindness and justice, he might have become civilized, and a part of our permanent population, of course, is absurd; for it is founded on that foolish dogma of a single race, which Europe has fastened on the American mind, and which supposes the Indian, as the Negro, etc., to have the same nature as themselves. Nor is the notion of others, that the Indian is incapable of civilization, and therefore destined to give way before the advance of the white man, worthy of any consideration; for this involves the paradox of being created without a purpose, a supposition not to be entertained a moment; for the most insignificant beings in the lowest forms of organic life have their uses, and the human creature, surely, was not created in vain. The simple truth is, that we need to know what the Indian is in fact, his true nature and true relations to our own race, and then, as we have done in the case of the Negro, adapt the social and governmental machinery to the wants of both races. But this employment and consequent destruction of the Indians of America by the monarchists of Europe, though often inflicting great temporary evil on our border settlements, did not retard our progress in the least, nor did England, to any appreciable extent, succeed in her objects. The theory or dogma of a single race, which her writers and publicists had set up about the time of the Revolution, produced, however, immense practical results both in Europe and America. The doctrines of the American Revolution, as was foreseen by British statesmen, soon became universally accepted in France, and threatened to overturn monarchy all over the Continent, and indeed in England itself. Dr. Johnson, Wilberforce, Pitt, and all the great writers and leaders of England, naturally enough adopted the notion that Indians, Negroes, etc., were men like themselves, except in color, cultivation, etc.; but they were impelled, by the necessities of their system and the preservation of monarchical institutions, to practicalize this theory to the utmost extent in their power, and thus divert the attention of their own oppressed white people from their wrongs, by holding up before them continually the imaginary wrongs of “American slaves.” They said, “It is true, you laborers of Yorkshire and operatives of Birmingham have a hard life, a life of constant toil and privation; but you are free-born Englishmen, and your own masters, and in all England there is not a single slave; while in America, in that so-called land of freedom, where there is no king, or noble, or law of primogeniture, and where, in theory, it is declared that all men are created free and equal, one sixth of the population are slaves, so abject and miserable that they are sold in the public markets, like horses and oxen. What, then, are your oppressions or your wrongs in comparison with those of American slaves? or what are the evils or the injustice of monarchy when contrasted with those dark and damning crimes of American democracy, that thus, in these enlightened times, dooms one sixth of the population to open and undisguised slavery?” Such was the argument of the British writers, and it was unanswerable if it had rested on fact—if the foundation were true, then the inference, of course, was unavoidable. If the so-called American slave was created free and equal with his master, then all that the British writers charged would have been true enough, and American slavery, in comparison with British liberty—or what passed for such in Yorkshire and Birmingham—would have been a wrong, so deep, damning, and fathomless, that no words in our language would be able to express its enormity. How was the poor, ignorant, and helpless laborer, or even his defenders, Fox, Sheridan, and other liberal leaders of the day, to answer this argument? They did not attempt it. They admitted that “American slavery” was all that it was charged to be—that it was a wrong and evil immeasurably greater and more atrocious than any of those which the people of France had risen against, or that the masses in England suffered under; but they hoped that the great principle of the American Revolution was strong enough to overcome this wrong, and in the process of time, to “abolish slavery,” and that liberty would become universal among Americans. Indeed, some of those who had been the most devoted believers in the great American doctrine, both in England and France, were so painfully impressed by the seeming wrong done the negro, that they lost their interest, to a great extent, in the real wrongs of the white man, and devoted all their efforts to the former. Societies were formed in London and Paris, funds contributed, books published, tracts distributed, and extensive arrangements entered into, with the sole purpose of relieving the “American slave” from the fancied wrongs that were heaped on him; and their societies, these “Amis des Noirs,” patronized by Robespierre and other leaders of the people, which were formed in almost every town in France and England, popularized the movement, and so identified the imaginary cause of the negro with that of the European masses, that to this day they doubtless seem inseparable. And even in our own times, we have witnessed the sorry spectacle of English laborers contributing of their wretched pittance to glorify some abolition hero or heroine of the “Uncle Tom” pattern, under the deplorable misconception, of course, that these blind tools of the enemies of liberty were faithful defenders of a common cause, when, in truth, they were vastly more dangerous to that cause than the open and avowed friends of despotism. But this very natural mistake of the friends of freedom in Europe, this ignorance and misconception of the negro nature and relations to the white man, which led Fox in England, and Robespierre in France, to confound the cause of the oppressed multitudes of their own race with the imaginary interests of negrodom, extended and unfortunate as it was and still is, was surpassed by a still more insidious and more extended influence. Wilberforce, who, more than any other man, gave form and direction to the great “anti-slavery” delusion of modern times, was eminently pious—as piety is accepted by a large portion of the religious world. He was an Episcopalian in form, but preeminently a Puritan in practice; and, while doubtless sincere in his belief, and perfectly correct in his religious habits, he was one of the most complete bigots, religious, political, and social, the world ever saw. Belonging to the ruling class, and possessed of a considerable fortune, he believed that his own status was the stand-point, and himself the model, for the government of society, and therefore was as doggedly and bitterly opposed to any change in England, or to any reform in English society, as he was earnest in his efforts to relieve the “sufferings of the slave” in America. In a public career of some forty years, as a member of Parliament, he never failed to record his vote against any increase of popular freedom, or any change that tended to ameliorate the condition of the white masses, and just as steadily and uniformly labored to “elevate” the negro to the status of the English laborer, or, at all events, to favor that final “abolition of slavery,” which he himself was not, however, destined to witness in the British American possessions. But throughout he regarded the question rather as a religious than a political one, and at an early period, in this respect, impressed his own character on it. Identified with the Church, all his notions those of the High Church party—substantially the notions that Archbishop Laud entertained two centuries before—by birth and association connected with the landed aristocracy, and yet distinguished for practical piety, for a zeal and devotion to his religious duties that the most zealous among the Dissenters and Evangelicals might imitate but could not surpass, this was just the man to impress a great movement with his own characteristics, and the “anti-slavery cause” became the cause of religion as well as of liberty with the religious world. Nor was it confined to the “American slave;” it embraced the whole world of heathendom; and a religious crusade sprang up, that finally became more extended, and, in some respects, more permanent, than the great political movement inaugurated by Jefferson a few years before. And if the Father of Lies, Lucifer himself, had plotted a plan or scheme for concealing a great truth, and embarrassing a great cause, he could have accomplished nothing more effective than the movement that Wilberforce inaugurated for the professed benefit of the negro and other subordinate races of mankind, which, masked under the form of religious duty, and appealing to the conscience, the love of proselytism, the enthusiasm, and even the bigotries of the religious world, has, for more than half a century, held in thrall the conscience as well as the reason of Christendom. Robespierre, and other patrons of the Amis des Noirs, could only present a common cause, that “universal liberty” which they declared to be the birthright of all men, and which it were better that every conceivable calamity should happen rather than this “great principle” should perish; but when it became the duty of every Christian man and woman, every follower of Christ and professor of religion, to work and pray for “the deliverance of the slave,” then a power was aroused that nothing could resist, for it became an immediate and sacred duty to labor in this cause. Missionary societies were organized, money contributed by millions both in Europe and America, enthusiastic men and women offered their services, even children were taught to give their pocket-money for a cause so holy as that of redeeming the “slave,” while all this time innumerable multitudes of their own race, their own blood, those whom God had created their equals, and endowed with like capacities, instincts, and wants, and therefore designed for the same happiness as themselves, were left to grovel in midnight darkness and abject misery.

It is not intended to sneer at or to indulge in unkind criticism on missionary efforts. On the contrary, it is frankly admitted that they sprang from the sincerest conviction, and were generally pursued with an utter disregard of selfish and mercenary considerations; but in not understanding the diversity of races, these efforts were more likely to do harm than good. A man’s first duties are to his own household; and no amount or extent of benefits conferred on strangers, can excuse him for neglecting the former; and even if the “heathen”—the Negro, Indian, and Sandwich Islander—had been benefited by the efforts of Wilberforce and his followers, the neglect of the ignorant, darkened, and miserable millions of their own race, was a wrong that scarcely has a parallel in history. But they did not benefit the subordinate races, but, on the contrary, assuming them to be beings like themselves, when they were widely different beings, they necessarily injured them; and when it is reflected that they not only neglected the ignorant and degraded multitudes of their own race, but got up a false issue, in order to distract the attention and conceal the wrongs of their own people, then an unequalled crime was committed.

The government of England, which is simply an embodiment of the class to which Wilberforce belonged, acted in concert with these religious efforts; and thus we see the leaders of the popular cause in the Old World, Fox and Robespierre, the Church and Aristocracy, all acting together in a common cause, and laboring, in fact, to retard the progress and the liberation of millions upon millions of their own race, under the pretence, and doubtless with many, in the belief, that they were laboring for the benefit of the negro and other subordinate races. The government expended about a thousand millions to crush out American liberty in 1776; but it is quite likely that an almost equal sum, expended for the professed benefit of the negro, has accomplished vastly more than all other things together to protract the liberation of her own masses. It has been estimated that six hundred millions have been expended nominally to put down the slave trade, but in reality to pervert the natural relations of races, and force the subordinate negro to the status of the British laborer. The interest on this enormous sum is annually drawn from the sweat and toil of the English masses; and every hut and cottage in the British Islands is forced to surrender a portion of its daily food, or of the daily earnings of its owner, to pay the interest on money squandered on the negro in America! The amount thus paid, properly expended, would be amply sufficient to give a good English education to the entire laboring class; but that would be an overwhelming calamity to the governing class, who could not retain their power for a single day after the masses were thus enlightened.

A few years since, famine and pestilence swept over Ireland, carrying off some three millions of the Irish people, all of whom might have been saved if the annual amount wasted on negroes in America had been applied to this beneficent and legitimate purpose. Indeed, it is quite possible that if the money wrung from the sweat and toil of Irishmen alone, for the pretended benefit of the negro, had been appropriated to the relief of the suffering multitudes of that unhappy people, few would really have perished. The mortgage on the bodies and souls of future generations of British laborers, for the avowed purpose of “doing good” to the negro, enormous as the amount may be—and it has been estimated as high as one thousand million dollars—is only a portion of the vast waste and wholesale destruction of property involved in the British Free Negro policy, or so-called schemes of philanthropy. Farms and plantations in Jamaica and other islands, valued at fifty thousand pounds prior to the “emancipation,” were afterward sold with difficulty at ten and even five thousand pounds; and indeed extensive districts were abandoned by their unfortunate owners. An infamous system of fraud and inhumanity, practiced of late years on the ignorant and simple Chinese and other Asiatics, has enabled some planters to recover and restore their wasted and plundered estates; and the vile hypocrites who filled the world with their doleful lamentations over the sorrows of Africa, not only wink at this infinitely greater wrong practiced on Asiatics, but resort to the effects attending it, as a proof that emancipation has not ruined these beautiful islands! Could audacity and hypocrisy surpass, or did they ever surpass, this shameless fraud? But this new and vastly more atrocious system of “man-stealing,” is transitional and temporary. The Mongol or Asiatic is rapidly worked up and destroyed in the West Indies; and, as no females are introduced, they can never become an essential or permanent element of the population.

The negro, forced from his normal condition, and into unnatural relation to the white man, must relapse into his African habits, just as fast as the white element disappears; and as the latter is relatively feeble, the time must soon come, unless we take possession and restore the natural order, when civilization itself will utterly perish, and the great heart of the continent be surrendered to African savagism! The eternal and immovable laws fixed forever in the heart and organism of things, can not be changed or modified by human folly, fraud, or power; and therefore the climate, the soil, the products, and the means that the Almighty has ordained shall be used to make them tributary to human welfare, have their fixed and everlasting relations since time began. The brain of the white man and the muscles of the negro, the mind of the superior and the body of the inferior race, in natural relation to each other, are the vital principles of tropical civilization, without which it is as impossible that civilization should exist in the great centre of the continent, as that vegetation should spring from granite, or animals exist without atmospheric air; and, therefore, thrusting the negro from his natural sphere into unnatural relations with the white man, necessarily destroys the latter, and drives the other into his inherent and original Africanism.

The delusion, the folly, or the fraud of Wilberforce and his associates, in presenting a false issue to their own wronged and oppressed millions, and thus diverting their attention from their own oppressions to the imaginary sufferings of negroes and other subordinate races, is so transcendent, its magnitude so enormous, that we have no terms in our language that can express it; but great and indeed awful as may be this wrong on the white man, it is in some respects really surpassed by the evils, if not the wrongs, inflicted on the negro. More than one million of negroes are believed to have perished, through the means resorted to to suppress the slave trade; and now it is admitted that those attempts have not prevented the importation of one single negro! The world needed the products of the tropics; the labor of a certain number of negroes was needed to furnish these products; and therefore, when fifty thousand were required in Cuba, eighty thousand were shipped on the African coast, thus leaving a margin of thirty thousand to be destroyed by interference with the laws of demand and supply. Who can contemplate these frightful results without awe, and sorrow, and pity, not alone for the victims, but for the authors of such wide-spread and boundless calamity. The crusades of the middle ages are now recognized as utterly baseless—simple human delusions, in which millions of lives were sacrificed, not to an idea, but to a false assumption—an assumption that the Holy Sepulchre could be recovered at Jerusalem. That crusade of “humanity,” in behalf of the subordinate races, set up by Wilberforce and his associates in modern times, is also a simple delusion, based on a false assumption, the assumption that negroes are black-white men, or men like ourselves, and though not so fatal to human life as the former, its effects or influences on human welfare are vastly and immeasurably more deplorable.

Such is the great “anti-slavery” delusion of our times. It is wholly European and monarchical in its origin; and leaving out of view all other considerations, its mere existence among us, or that any considerable number of Americans could be so deluded and mentally so degraded, as to embrace it, will astonish posterity to the latest generations. We are in contact with the negro—we see he is a negro—a different being from ourselves. We will not—even the most deluded Abolitionist will not, in his own case or family, act on the assumption that he is a being like himself, indeed, would rather see his child carried to the grave than intermarried with a negro, however rich, cultivated, and pious; and rather than thus live out his own professed belief, he would prefer the death of his whole household. The European, on the contrary, naturally enough supposes the negro to differ only in color; and the monarchist—the enemy of Democracy—the man opposed to the great principle of equality underlying our system—just as naturally demands that we shall be consistent and apply it to negroes. But instead of enlightening this European ignorance, and indignantly rejecting this monarchical impudence, which proposes that we shall degrade our blood and destroy our institutions, by including a subordinate race in our political system, we have foolishly, wickedly, and abjectly assented to the European assumption, and millions of Americans have based their reasonings, and to a certain extent their actions, on this palpable, fundamental, and monstrous falsehood. Those portions of the country most directly under the mental dictation of the Old World, are those, of course, most given up to the delusion, but nearly the whole northern mind has adopted it as a mental habit. The time, however, has come when it must be exploded, and the reason of the people restored, or it will drag after it consequences and calamities that one shudders to contemplate. Eighty years ago it was an abstraction, universally assented to, and just as universally rejected in practice; for all the States save one then recognized the legal subordination of the negro as a social necessity, whatever the speculative notions were on this subject. They generally believed that, in some indefinite or mysterious manner, it would—or rather that the negro would—become extinct; and as the industrial powers of this element of the general population was not specifically adapted to our then territory, all perhaps were willing to hope that it should some day disappear. But the vast acquisition of Southern territory, the discovery and opening up of new channels of industry, and the extensive cultivation of those great staples so essential to human welfare, which are only to be attained on this continent by the labor of the negro when directed by the white man; and, moreover, the rapid increase of this population, and the certainty that it must remain forever an element of our population, demand that this mighty delusion shall be exposed, as it is in fact the vilest and most infamous fraud on the freedom, dignity, and welfare of the white millions ever witnessed since the world began.