FACTS AND ARGUMENTS BY THE WAYSIDE.
Finding that we shall have to leave unsaid a great many things which we intended to say, and that we shall have to omit much valuable matter, the product of other pens than our own, but which, having collected at considerable expense, we had hoped to be able to introduce, we have concluded to present, under the above heading, only a few of the more important particulars.
In the first place, we will give an explanation of the reason
WHY THIS WORK WAS NOT PUBLISHED IN BALTIMORE.
A considerable portion of this work was written in Baltimore; and the whole of it would have been written and published there, but for the following odious clause, which we extract from the Statutes of Maryland:—
“Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Maryland, That after the passage of this act, it shall not be lawful for any citizen of this State, knowingly to make, print or engrave, or aid in the making, printing or engraving, within this State, any pictorial representation, or to write or print, or to aid in the writing or printing any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill or other paper of an inflammatory character, and having a tendency to excite discontent or stir up insurrection amongst the people of color of this State, or of either of the other States or Territories of the United States, or knowingly to carry or send, or to aid in the carrying or sending the same for circulation amongst the inhabitants of either of the other States or Territories of the United States, and any person so offending shall be guilty of a felony, and shall on conviction be sentenced to confinement in the penitentiary of this State, for a period not less than ten nor more than twenty years, from the time of sentence pronounced on such person.”—Act passed Dec. 1831. See 2nd Dorsey, page 1218.
Now so long as slaveholders are clothed with the mantle of office, so long will they continue to make laws, like the above, expressly calculated to bring the non-slaveholding whites under a system of vassalage little less onerous and debasing than that to which the negroes themselves are accustomed. What wonder is it that there is no native literature in the South? The South can never have a literature of her own until after slavery shall have been abolished. Slaveholders are too lazy and ignorant to write it, and the non-slaveholders—even the few whose minds are cultivated at all—are not permitted even to make the attempt. Down with the oligarchy! Ineligibility of slaveholders—never another vote to the trafficker in human flesh!
LEGISLATIVE ACTS AGAINST SLAVERY.
In his Compendium of the Seventh Census, Mr. DeBow has compiled the following useful and highly interesting facts:—
“The Continental Congress of 1774 resolved to discontinue the slave trade, in which resolution they were anticipated by the Conventions of Delegates of Virginia and North Carolina. In 1789 the Convention to frame the federal Constitution, looked to the abolition of the traffic in 1808. On the 2nd of March, 1807, Congress passed an act against importations of Africans into the United States after January 1st, 1808. An act in Great Britain in 1807 also made the slave trade unlawful. Denmark forbid the introduction of African slaves into her colonies after 1804. The Congress of Vienna, in 1815, pronounced for the abolition of the trade. France abolished it in 1817, and also Spain, but the acts were to take effect after 1820. Portugal abolished it in 1818.
“In Pennsylvania slavery was abolished in 1780. In New Jersey it was provisionally abolished in 1784; all children born of a slave after 1804 are made free in 1820. In Massachusetts, it was declared after the revolution, that slavery was virtually abolished by their Constitution, (1780). In 1784 and 1797, Connecticut provided for a gradual extinction of slavery. In Rhode Island, after 1784, no person could be born a slave. The Constitutions of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively, abolished slavery. In New York it was provisionally abolished in 1799, twenty-eight years’ ownership being allowed in slaves born after that date, and in 1817 it was enacted that slavery was not to exist after ten years, or 1827. The ordinance of 1787 forbid slavery in the territory northwest of the Ohio.”
Besides the instances enumerated above, slavery has been abolished in more than forty different parts of the world within the last half century, and with good results everywhere, except two or three West India islands, where the negro population was greatly in excess of the whites; and even in these, the evils, if any, that have followed, are not justly attributable to abolition, but to the previous demoralization produced by slavery.
In this connection we may very properly introduce the testimony of a West India planter to the relative advantages of Free over Slave Labor. Listen to Charles Pettyjohn, of Barbadoes, who, addressing himself to a citizen of our own country, says:—
“In 1834, I came in possession of 257 slaves, under the laws of England, which required the owner to feed, clothe, and furnish them with medical attendance. With this number I cultivated my sugar plantation until the Emancipation Act of August 1st, 1838, when they all became free. I now hire a portion of those slaves, the best and cheapest of course, as you hire men in the United States. The average number which I employ is 100, with which I cultivate more land at a cheaper rate, and make more produce than I did with 257 slaves. With my slaves I made from 100 to 180 tons of sugar yearly. With 100 free negroes I think I do badly if I do not annually produce 250 tons.”
If, in the forty and more instances to which we have alluded, the abolition of slavery had proved injurious in a majority of cases, the attempt to abolish it elsewhere might, perhaps, be regarded as an ill-advised effort; but, seeing that its abolition has worked well in at least fourteen-fifteenths of all the cases on record, the fact becomes obvious that it is our duty and our interest to continue to abolish it until the whole world shall be freed, or until we shall begin to see more evil than good result from our acts of emancipation.
THE TRUE FRIENDS OF THE SOUTH.
Freesoilers and abolitionists are the only true friends of the South; slaveholders and slave-breeders are downright enemies of their own section. Anti-slavery men are working for the Union and for the good of the whole world; proslavery men are working for the disunion of the States, and for the good of nothing except themselves. Than such men as Greeley, Seward, Sumner, Clay, and Birney, the South can have no truer friends—nor can slavery have more implacable foes.
For the purpose of showing that Horace Greeley is not, as he is generally represented by the oligarchy, an inveterate hater of the South, we will here introduce an extract from one of his editorial articles in a late number of the New York Tribune—a faithful advocate of freedom, whose circulation, we are happy to say, is greater than the aggregate circulation of more than twenty of the principal proslavery sheets published at the South:—
“Is it in vain that we pile fact upon fact, proof on proof, showing that slavery is a blight and a curse to the States which cherish it? These facts are multitudinous as the leaves of the forest; conclusive as the demonstrations of geometry. Nobody attempts to refute them, but the champions of slavery extension seem determined to persist in ignoring them. Let it be understood, then, once for all, that we do not hate the South, war on the South, nor seek to ruin the South, in resisting the extension of slavery. We most earnestly believe human bondage a curse to the South, and to all whom it affects; but we do not labor for its overthrow otherwise than through the conviction of the South of its injustice and mischief. Its extension into new Territories we determinedly resist, not by any means from ill will to the South, but under the impulse of good will to all mankind. We believe the establishment of slavery in Kansas or any other Western Territory would prolong its existence in Virginia and Maryland, by widening the market and increasing the price of slaves, and thereby increasing the profits of slave-breeding, and the consequent incitement thereto. Those who urge that slavery would not go into Kansas if permitted, wilfully shut their eyes to the fact that it has gone into Missouri, lying in exactly the same latitude, and is now strongest in that north-western angle of said State, which was covertly filched from what is now Kansas, within the last twenty years. Even if the growth of hemp, corn and tobacco were not so profitable in Eastern Kansas, as it evidently must be, the growth of slaves for more Southern consumption would inevitably prove as lucrative there as in Virginia and Maryland, which lie in corresponding latitudes, and whose chief staple export to-day consists of negro bondmen destined for the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, which could be supplied more conveniently and cheaply from Kansas than from their present breeding-places this side of the Alleghanies.
Whenever we draw a parallel between Northern and Southern production, industry, thrift, wealth, the few who seek to parry the facts at all complain that the instances are unfairly selected—that the commercial ascendancy of the North, with the profits and facilities thence accruing, accounts for the striking preponderance of the North. In vain we insist that slavery is the cause of this very commercial ascendancy—that Norfolk and Richmond and Charleston might have been to this country what Boston, New-York and Philadelphia now are, had not slavery spread its pall over and paralyzed the energies of the South.”
This may be regarded as a fair expression of the sentiments of a great majority of the people north of Mason and Dixon’s line. Our Northern cousins “do not hate the South, war on the South, nor seek to ruin the South;” on the contrary, they love our particular part of the nation, and, like dutiful, sensible, upright men, they would promote its interests by facilitating the abolition of slavery. Success to their efforts!
SLAVERY THOUGHTFUL—SIGNS OF CONTRITION.
The real condition of the South is most graphically described in the following doleful admissions from the Charleston Standard:—
“In its every aspect our present condition is provincial. We have within our limits no solitary metropolis of interest or ideas—no marts of exchange—no radiating centres of opinion. Whatever we have of genius and productive energy, goes freely in to swell the importance of the North. Possessing the material which constitutes two-thirds of the commerce of the whole country, it might have been supposed that we could have influence upon the councils of foreign States; but we are never taken into contemplation. It might have been supposed that England, bound to us by the cords upon which depend the existence of four millions of her subjects, would be considerate of our feelings; but receiving her cotton from the North, it is for them she has concern, and it is her interest and her pleasure to reproach us. It might have been supposed, that, producing the material which is sent abroad, to us would come the articles that are taken in exchange for it; but to the North they go for distribution, and to us are parcelled out the fabrics that are suited to so remote a section.
Instead, therefore, of New-York being tributary to Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah or New Orleans, these cities are tributary to New-York. Instead of the merchants of New-York standing cap in hand to the merchants of Charleston, the merchants of Charleston stand cap in hand to the merchants of New-York.—Instead of receiving foreign ships in Southern waters, and calling up the merchants of the country to a distribution of the cargo, the merchants of the South are hurried off to make a distribution elsewhere. In virtue of our relations to a greater system, we have little development of internal interests; receiving supplies from the great centre, we have made little effort to supply ourselves. We support the makers of boots, shoes, hats, coats, shirts, flannels, blankets, carpets, chairs, tables, mantels, mats, carriages, jewelry, cradles, couches, coffins, by the thousand and hundreds of thousands; but they scorn to live amongst us. They must have the gaieties and splendors of a great metropolis, and are not content to vegetate upon the dim verge of this remote frontier.
As it is in material interests, so it is in arts and letters—our pictures are painted at the North, our books are published at the North, our periodicals and papers are printed at the North. We are even fed on police reports and villany from the North. The papers published at the South which ignore the questions at issue between the sections are generally well sustained; the books which expose the evils of our institution are even read with avidity beyond our limits, but the ideas that are turned to the condition of the South are intensely provincial. If, as things now are, a man should rise with all the genius of Shakspeare, or Dickens, or Fielding, or of all the three combined, and speak from the South, he would not receive enough to pay the costs of publication. If published at the South, his book would never be seen or heard of, and published at the North it would not be read.—So perfect is our provincialism, therefore, that enterprise is forced to the North for a sphere—talent for a market—genius for the ideas upon which to work—indolence for ease, and the tourist for attractions.”
This extract exhibits in bold relief, and in small space, a large number of the present evils of past errors. It is charmingly frank and truthful. DeQuincey’s Confessions of an opium eater are nothing to it. A distinguished writer on medical jurisprudence informs us that “the knowledge of the disease is half the cure;” and if it be true, as perhaps it is, we think the Standard is in a fair way to be reclaimed from the enormous vices of proslavery statism.
PROGRESS OF FREEDOM IN THE SOUTH.
“Now, by St. Paul, the work goes bravely on.”
As well might the oligarchy attempt to stay the flux and reflux of the tides, as to attempt to stay the progress of Freedom in the South. Approved of God, the edict of the genius of Universal Emancipation has been proclaimed to the world, and nothing, save Deity himself, can possibly reverse it. To connive at the perpetuation of slavery is to disobey the commands of Heaven. Not to be an abolitionist is to be a wilful and diabolical instrument of the devil. The South needs to be free, the South wants to be free, the South shall be free!
The following extracts from Southern journals will show that the glorious light of a better era has already begun to penetrate and dispel the portentous clouds of slavery. The Wellsburg (Va.) Herald, an independent paper, referring to the vote of thirteen Democrats from that section, refusing, in the Virginia Legislature, in 1856, “to appropriate money from the general treasury for the recapture of runaway slaves,” says:—
“We presume these delegates in some degree represent their constituents, and we are thereby encouraged and built up in the confidence that there are other interests in Virginia to be seen to besides those pertaining to slavery.”
A non-slaveholding Southron, in the course of a communication in a more recent number of the same journal, says:—
“We are taxed to support slavery. The clean cash goes out of our own pockets into the pockets of the slaveholder, and this in many ways. I will now allude to but two. If a slave, for crime, is put to death or transported, the owner is paid for him out of the public treasury, and under this law thousands are paid out every year. Again, a standing army is kept up in the city of Richmond for no other purpose than to be ready to quell insurrection among the slaves; this is paid for out of the public treasury annually. This standing army is called the public guard, but it is no less a standing army always kept up. We will quote from the acts of 1856 the expense of these two items to the State, on the 23d and 24th pages of the acts:—‘To pay for slaves executed and transported, $22,000;’ ‘to the public guard at Richmond, $24,000.’ This, be it noticed, is only for one year, making near $50,000 for those two objects in one year; but it can be shown by the present unequal plan of taxation between slave property and other property, that this is but a small item of our cash pocketed by the slaveholders; and yet some will say we have no reason to complain.”
The editor of the Wheeling Gazette publishes the following as his platform on the slavery question:—
“Allying ourself to neither North nor South, on our own hook we adopt the following platform as our platform on this question, from which we never have and never will recede. We may FALL on it, but WILL NEVER LEAVE IT.
The severance of the General Government from slavery.
The REPEAL of the fugitive slave law.
The REPEAL of the Nebraska Kansas Bill.
No more slave territories.
The purchase and manumission of slaves in the District of Columbia, or the removal of the seat of government to free territory.”
Says the Baltimore Clipper:—
“The South is contending for, and the North against, the extension of slavery into the territories; but we do not think that either side would consent to dissolve the Union about the negro population—a population which we look upon as a curse to the nation, and should rejoice to see removed to their native clime of Africa.”
The National Era, one of the best papers in the country, published in Washington City, D. C., says:—
“The tendency of slavery to diffuse itself, and to crowd out free labor, was early observed by American patriots, North and South; and Mr. Jefferson, the great apostle of Republicanism, made an effort, in 1784, to cut short the encroaching tide of barbaric despotism, by prohibiting slavery in all the territories of the Union, down to thirty-one degrees of latitude, which was then our Southern boundary. His beneficent purpose failed, not for want of a decisive majority of votes present in the Congress of the Confederation, but in consequence of the absence of the delegates from one or two States, which were necessary to the constitutional majority. When the subject again came up, in 1787, Mr. Jefferson was Minister to France, and the famous ordinance of that year was adopted, prohibiting slavery North and West of the Ohio river. Between 1784 and 1787, the strides of slavery westward, into Tennessee and Kentucky, had become too considerable to admit of the policy of exclusion; and besides those regions were then integral parts of Virginia and North Carolina, and of course they could not be touched without the consent of those States. In 1820, another effort was made to arrest the progress of slavery, which threatened to monopolize the whole territory west of the Mississippi. In the meantime the South had apostatized from the faith of Jefferson. It had ceased to love universal liberty, and the growing importance of the cotton culture had caused the people to look with indifference upon the moral deformity of slavery; and, as a matter of course, the politicians became its apologists and defenders. After a severe struggle a compromise was agreed upon, by which Missouri was to be admitted with slavery, which was the immediate point in controversy; and slavery was to be excluded from all the territory North and West of that State.
“We have shown, from the most incontestable evidence, that there is in slave society a much greater tendency to diffuse itself into new regions, than belongs to freedom, for the reason that it has no internal vitality. It cannot live if circumscribed, and must, like a consumptive, be continually roving for a change of air to recuperate its wasting energies.”
In the Missouri Legislature, in January, 1857, Mr. Brown, of St. Louis, proved himself a hero, a patriot, and a statesman, in the following words:—
“I am a Free-Soiler and I don’t deny it. No word or vote of mine shall ever inure to the benefit of such a monstrous doctrine as the extension of Slavery over the patrimony of the free white laborers of the country. I am for the greatest good of the greatest number, and against the system which monopolizes the free and fertile territory of our country for a few slaveholders, to the exclusion of thousands upon thousands of the sinewy sons of toil. The time will come, and perhaps very soon, when the people will rule for their own benefit and not for that of a class which, numerically speaking, is insignificant. I stand here in the midst of the assembled Legislature of Missouri to avow myself a Free-Soiler. Let those who are scared at names shrink from the position if they will. I shall take my stand in favor of the white man. Here in Missouri I shall support the rights, the dignity and the welfare of the 800,000 non-slaveholders in preference to upholding and perpetuating the dominancy of the 30,000 slaveholders who inhabit our State.”
The St. Louis Democrat, in an editorial article, under date of January 28, 1857, entitled itself to the favorable regard of every true lover of liberty, by talking thus boldly on the subject of the “Emancipation of Slavery in Missouri”:—
“Viewing the question as a subject of State policy, we will venture to say that it is the grandest ever propounded to the people. If it were affirmed in a constitutional convention, and thoroughly carried out without any violation of vested rights, Missouri, in a few years subsequent to its consummation, would be the foremost State on the American continent. Population would flow in from all sides were the barrier of negro slavery once removed, and in place of 80,000 slaves, we should have 800,000 white men, which, in addition to the population we would have at that time, would give us at once an aggregate of two millions.
Is Missouri ambitious of political power?—a power which is slipping away from the South. The mode of acquiring it is found. We are not rash enough to attempt a description of our condition if the element of free labor were introduced. The earth would give up its hidden treasures at its bidding as the sea will give up its dead; and the soil would bloom more luxuriantly than if it drank the dews of Hermon nightly; ten thousand keels would vex our rivers, towns along their banks would grow into cities, and St. Louis would soon unite in itself the attributes of the greatest commercial manufacturing and literary metropolis in the world. Let it be remembered that we have every inanimate element of wealth and power within our limits, and that we require only labor—free labor—for we need not say that servile labor is inadequate. * * *
There need be no pernicious agitation, and even if there should, it is the penalty which we cannot avoid paying at some time; and it is easier to pay it now, than in the future. Who that watches passing events and indications, is not sensible of the fact that great internal convulsions await the slave States? Better to grapple with the danger in time, if danger there be, and avert it, than wait until it becomes formidable. One thing is certain, or history is no guide: that is, that slavery cannot be perpetuated anywhere. An agitation now would be the effort of the social system to throw off a disease which had not touched its vitals; hereafter it would be the struggle for life with a mortal sickness. But we do not apprehend any agitation more violent than has been forced upon us for years by the pro-slavery politicians. Agitating the slavery question, has been their constant business, and nothing worse has resulted from it than their elevation to office—no very trifling evil, by the way—and the temporary subjugation of Kansas.
Besides, we know that all the free States emancipated their slaves, and England and France theirs suddenly; and we have yet to learn that a dangerous agitation arose in any instance.”
In addition to all this, it is well known, and we thank Heaven for the fact and for the indication, that, at the election held for Mayor of St. Louis, in April, 1857, the Abolition candidate, himself a native of Virginia, was triumphantly elevated to the chief magistracy of the city. Three cheers for St. Louis! nine for Missouri! thirteen for the South.
In reference to the late election in St. Louis, in which the Emancipation party triumphed, the Wheeling (Va.) Intelligencer says:—
“These elections do demonstrate this fact, beyond a cavil, that the sentiment of the great majority of the people of this Union is irrevocably opposed to the extension of slavery; that they are determined, if overwhelming public sentiment can avail anything, another slave State shall not be admitted into the confederacy. And why are they so determined? Because they believe, and not only believe, but see and know, that slavery is an unmitigated curse to the soil that sustains it. They know this, because they see every free State outstripping every slave State in all the elements that make a people powerful and prosperous; because they see the people in the one educated and thrifty, and in the other ignorant and thriftless; because they have before their eyes a State like our own, once the very Union itself almost in importance, to-day taking her rank as a fifth rate power.”
Non-slaveholders of the South! fail not to support the papers—the Southern papers—that support your interests. Chief amongst those papers are the St. Louis (Mo.) Democrat, the National Era, published in Washington City, D. C., the Baltimore Clipper, the Wheeling (Va.) Intelligencer, and the Wellsburg (Va.) Herald.
A RIGHT FEELING IN THE RIGHT QUARTER.
There is but one way for the oligarchy to perpetuate slavery in the Southern States, and that is by perpetuating absolute ignorance among the non-slaveholding whites. This it is quite impossible for them to do. God has scattered the seeds of knowledge throughout every portion of the South, and they are, as might have been expected, beginning to take root in her fertile soil. The following extracts from letters which have been received since we commenced writing this work, will show how powerfully the spirit of freedom is operating upon the minds of intelligent, thinking men in the slave States.
A Baltimorean, writing to us awhile previous to the last Presidential election, says:—
“I see that the Trustees of the University of North Carolina have dismissed Prof. Hedrick for writing a letter in favor of Republican principles. Oh, what an inglorious source of reflection for an American citizen! To think, to know that our boasted liberty of speech is a myth, an abstraction. To see a poor professor crushed under the feet of the tyrannical magnates of slavery, for daring to speak the honest sentiments of his heart. Where is fanaticism now, North or South? Oh, my country, my country, whither art thou tending? Truly we have fallen upon degenerate days. God grant that they may not be like those of ancient Greece and Rome, the forerunners of our country’s ruin.”
In a letter under date of November 1, 1856, a friend who resides in the eastern part of North Carolina, says:—
“In the papers which reached me last week I notice that our own State has been disgraced by a junto of pro-slavery hot-spurs, who had the audacity to meet in Raleigh for the express purpose of concocting measures for a dissolution of the Union. It appears that the three leading spirits of this cabal were the present governors of three neighboring States—three treasonable disturbers of the public peace, who, under the circumstances, should, in my opinion, have been shot dead upon the spot! I have each of their names noted down in my memorandum, and I shall certainly die unsatisfied, if I do not live to hear of their being thoroughly tarred and feathered, and ridden on a rail, by the non-slaveholding whites, against whose welfare their machinations have been chiefly leveled. Rely upon it, that, if they do not soon sneak away into their graves, a day of retributive justice will most assuredly overtake them.”
A native and resident of one of the towns in western North Carolina, under date of March 19, 1857, writes to us as follows:—
“While patrolling a few nights ago I was forcibly struck with the truthfulness of the remarks contained in your last letter.—Here I am, a poor but sober and industrious man, with a family dependent on me for support, and after I have finished my day’s labor, I am compelled to walk the streets from nine in the evening till three in the morning, to restrain the roving propensities of other people’s ‘property’—niggers. Why should I thus be deprived of sleep that the slaveholder may slumber? I frankly acknowledge my indebtedness to you for opening my eyes upon this subject. The more I think and see of slavery the more I detest it. * * * I am becoming restless, and have been debating within my own mind whether I had not better emigrate to a free State. * * * If I live, I am determined to oppose slavery somewhere—here or elsewhere. It will be impossible for me to keep my lips sealed much longer. Indeed, I sometimes feel that I have been remiss in my duty in not having opened them ere now. But for the unfathomable ignorance that pervades the mass of the poor, deluded, slavery-saddled whites around me, I would not suppress my sentiments another hour.”
Again, under date of April 7, 1857, he says:—
“I thank God that slavery will, in my opinion, soon be abolished. I wish to Heaven I had the ability to raise my voice successfully in favor of a just system to abolish it. I would indeed be rejoiced to have an opportunity to do something to relieve the South of the awful curse. Fear not that you will meet with no sympathizers in the South. You will have hosts of friends on every side—even in this town, if I am not greatly mistaken, a large majority of the citizens will add an enthusiastic Amen! to your work.”
We might furnish similar extracts from other letters, but these, we think, are quite sufficient to show that the millennium of freedom is rapidly dawning throughout the benighted regions of slavery. Coveted events are happening in charming succession. All we have to do is to wait and work a little longer.
THE ILLITERATE POOR WHITES OF THE SOUTH.
Had we the power to sketch a true picture of life among the non-slaveholding whites of the South, every intelligent man who has a spark of philanthropy in his breast, and who should happen to gaze upon the picture, would burn with unquenchable indignation at that system of African slavery which entails unutterable miseries on the superior race. It is quite impossible, however, to describe accurately the deplorable ignorance and squalid poverty of the class to which we refer. The serfs of Russia have reason to congratulate themselves that they are neither the negroes nor the non-slaveholding whites of the South. Than the latter there can be no people in Christendom more unhappily situated. Below will be found a few extracts which will throw some light on the subject now under consideration.
Says William Gregg, in an address delivered before the South Carolina Institute, in 1851:—
“From the best estimates that I have been able to make, I put down the white people who ought to work, and who do not, or who are so employed as to be wholly unproductive to the State, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Any man who is an observer of things could hardly pass through our country, without being struck with the fact that all the capital, enterprise, and intelligence, is employed in directing slave labor; and the consequence is, that a large portion of our poor white people are wholly neglected, and are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest. It is an evil of vast magnitude, and nothing but a change in public sentiment will effect its cure. These people must be brought into daily contact with the rich and intelligent—they must be stimulated to mental action, and taught to appreciate education and the comforts of civilized life; and this, we believe, may be effected only by the introduction of manufactures. My experience at Graniteville has satisfied me that unless our poor people can be brought together in villages, and some means of employment afforded them, it will be an utterly hopeless effort to undertake to educate them. We have collected at that place about eight hundred people, and as likely looking a set of country girls as may be found—industrious and orderly people, but deplorably ignorant, three-fourths of the adults not being able to read or to write their own names.
“It is only necessary to build a manufacturing village of shanties, in a healthy location, in any part of the State, to have crowds of these people around you, seeking employment at half the compensation given to operatives at the North. It is indeed painful to be brought in contact with such ignorance and degradation.”
Again he asks:—
“Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation? Many a one is reared in proud South Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily provided with bread, and much more scantily with meat; and, if they be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowances of food. These may be startling statements, but they are nevertheless true; and if not believed in Charleston, the members of our legislature who have traversed the State in electioneering campaigns can attest the truth.”
In an article on “Manufactures in South Carolina,” published some time ago in DeBow’s Review, J. H. Taylor, of Charleston (S. C.) says:—
“There is in some quarters, a natural jealousy of the slightest innovation upon established habits, and because an effort has been made to collect the poor and unemployed white population into our new factories, fears have arisen that some evil would grow out of the introduction of such establishments among us. * * * The poor man has a vote as well as the rich man, and in our State the number of the former will largely overbalance the latter. So long as these poor but industrious people can see no mode of living except by a degrading operation of work with the negro upon the plantation, they will be content to endure life in its most discouraging forms, satisfied that they are above the slave, though faring often worse than he.”
Speaking in favor of manufactures, the Hon. J. H. Lumpkin, of Georgia, said in 1852:—
“It is objected that these manufacturing establishments will become the hotbeds of crime. But I am by no means ready to concede that our poor, degraded, half-fed, half-clothed, and ignorant population—without Sabbath Schools, or any other kind of instruction, mental or moral, or without any just appreciation of character—will be injured by giving them employment, which will bring them under the oversight of employers, who will inspire them with self-respect by taking an interest in their welfare.”
In a paper on the “Extension of Cotton and Wool Factories at the South,” Mr. Steadman, of Tennessee, says:—
“In Lowell, labor is paid the fair compensation of 80 cents a day for men, and $2 a week for women, beside board, while in Tennessee the average compensation for labor does not exceed 50 cents per day for men, and $1,25 per week for women.”
In the course of a speech which he delivered in Congress several years ago, Mr. T. L. Clingman, of North Carolina, said:—
“Our manufacturing establishments can obtain the raw material (cotton) at nearly two cents on the pound cheaper than the New-England establishments. Labor is likewise one hundred per cent. cheaper. In the upper parts of the State, the labor of either a free man or a slave, including board, clothing, &c., can be obtained for from $110 to $120 per annum. It will cost at least twice that sum in New-England. The difference in the cost of female labor, whether free or slave, is even greater.”
The Richmond (Va.) Dispatch says:—
“We will only suppose that the ready-made shoes imported into this city from the North, and sold here, were manufactured in Richmond. What a great addition it would be to the means of employment! How many boys and females would find the means of earning their bread, who are now suffering for a regular supply of the necessaries of life.”
A citizen of New-Orleans, writing in DeBow’s Review, says:—
“At present the sources of employment open to females (save in menial offices) are very limited; and an inability to procure suitable occupation is an evil much to be deplored, as tending in its consequences to produce demoralization. The superior grades of female labor may be considered such as imply a necessity for education on the part of the employee, while the menial class is generally regarded as of the lowest; and in a slave State, this standard is ‘in the lowest depths, a lower deep,’ from the fact that, by association, it is a reduction of the white servant to the level of their colored fellow-menials.”
Black slave labor, though far less valuable, is almost invariably better paid than free white labor. The reason is this: The fiat of the oligarchy has made it fashionable to “have negroes around,” and there are, we are grieved to say, many non-slaveholding-whites, (lickspittles,) who, in order to retain on their premises a hired slave whom they falsely imagine secures to them not only the appearance of wealth, but also a position of high social standing in the community, keep themselves in a perpetual strait.
Last Spring we made it our special business to ascertain the ruling rates of wages paid for labor, free and slave, in North Carolina. We found sober, energetic white men, between twenty and forty years of age, engaged in agricultural pursuits at a salary of $84 per annum—including board only; negro men, slaves, who performed little more than half the amount of labor, and who were exceedingly sluggish, awkward, and careless in all their movements, were hired out on adjoining farms at an average of about $115 per annum, including board, clothing, and medical attendance. Free white men and slaves were in the employ of the North Carolina Railroad Company; the former, whose services, in our opinion, were at least twice as valuable as the services of the latter, received only $12 per month each; the masters of the latter received $16 per month for every slave so employed. Industrious, tidy white girls, from sixteen to twenty years of age, had much difficulty in hiring themselves out as domestics in private families for $40 per annum—board only included; negro wenches, slaves, of corresponding ages, so ungraceful, stupid and filthy that no decent man would ever permit one of them to cross the threshold of his dwelling, were in brisk demand at from $65 to $70 per annum, including victuals, clothes, and medical attendance. These are facts, and in considering them, the students of political and social economy will not fail to arrive at conclusions of their own.
Notwithstanding the greater density of population in the free States, labor of every kind is, on an average, about one hundred per cent. higher there than it is in the slave States. This is another important fact, and one that every non-slaveholding white should keep registered in his mind.
Poverty, ignorance, and superstition, are the three leading characteristics of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. Many of them grow up to the age of maturity, and pass through life without ever owning as much as five dollars at any one time. Thousands of them die at an advanced age, as ignorant of the common alphabet as if it had never been invented. All are more or less impressed with a belief in witches, ghosts, and supernatural signs. Few are exempt from habits of sensuality and intemperance. None have anything like adequate ideas of the duties which they owe either to their God, to themselves, or to their fellow-men. Pitiable, indeed, in the fullest sense of the term, is their condition.
It is the almost utter lack of an education that has reduced them to their present unenviable situation. In the whole South there is scarcely a publication of any kind devoted to their interests. They are now completely under the domination of the oligarchy, and it is madness to suppose that they will ever be able to rise to a position of true manhood, until after the slave power shall have been utterly overthrown.