III. INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE.
In a community so unenlightened as yours, it is a matter of course, that the arts and sciences must languish, and the industry and enterprise of the country be oppressed by a general torpor. Hence multitudes will be without regular and profitable employment, and be condemned to poverty and numberless privations. The very advertisements in your newspapers show that, for a vast proportion of the comforts and conveniences of life, you are dependent on Northern manufacturers and mechanics. You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged. The great staple of the South is cotton; and we have no desire to undervalue its importance. It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing. Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders. Yet on account of this article, we hear frequent vaunts of the agricultural riches of the South. With the exception of cotton, it is difficult to distinguish your agricultural products arising from slaves, and from free labor. But admitting, what we know is not the fact, that all the other productions of the soil are raised exclusively by free labor, we learn from the census, that the agricultural products of the North exceed those of the South, cotton excepted, $226,219,714. Here then we have an appalling proof of the paralyzing influence of slavery on the industry of the whites.
In every community a large portion of the inhabitants are debarred from drawing their maintenance directly from the cultivation of the earth. Other and lucrative employments are reserved for them. If the slaveholders chiefly engross the soil, let us see how you are compensated by the encouragement afforded to mechanical skill and industry.
| In 1839 the Secretary of the Treasury reported to Congress, that the tonnage of vessels built in the United States was | 120,988 |
| Built in the slave States and Territories | 23,600 |
Or less than one-fifth of the whole! But the difference is still more striking, when we take into consideration the comparative value of the shipping built in the two regions:
| In the free States the value is | $6,311,805 |
| In the slave do. | 704,291 [6] |
[ [6] See American Almanac for 1843, page 153.
It would be tedious and unprofitable to compare the results of the different branches of manufacture carried on at the North and the South. It is sufficient to state that, according to the census, the value of the manufactures
| In the free States are | $334,139,690 |
| In the slave State | 83,935,742 |
Having already compared Ohio and Kentucky in reference to population and education, we will pursue the comparison as to agricultural and mechanical industry. On account of contiguity, and similarity of extent, soil and climate, no two States can perhaps be so aptly contrasted for the purpose of illustrating the influence of slavery. It should also be borne in mind that Kentucky can scarcely be called a cotton State, having in 1840 raised only 607,456 lbs. of that article. Hence the deficiency of agriculture and other products in Kentucky arises, not from a peculiar species of cultivation, but solely from the withering effects of slavery.
| Ohio. | Kentucky. | |
| Wool, | 3,685,315 lbs. | 1,786,842 |
| Wheat, | 16,571,661 bushels | 4,803,152 |
| Hay, | 1,022,037 tons | 88,306 |
| Fulling mills, | 205 | 5 |
| Printing-offices, | 159 | 34 |
| Tanneries, | 862 | 387 |
| Commercial houses in foreign trade, | 53 | 5 |
| Value of machinery manufactured, | $875,731 | $46,074 |
In one species of manufacture the South apparently excels the North, but unfortunately it is in appearance only. Of 9657 distilleries in the United States, no less than 7665 were found in the slave States and Territories; but for want of skill and capital these yield 1992 gallons less than the other.
Where there is so much ignorance and idleness, we may well suppose that the inventive faculties will be but little exercised; and accordingly we find that of the 545 patents granted for new inventions in 1846, only 80 were received by the citizens of the slave States. We have thus, fellow-citizens, offered you the testimony of figures, as to the different state of society under freedom and slavery; suffer us now to present you pictures of the two regions, drawn not by abolitionists, but by Southern artists, in unguarded hours. Mr. Clowney, of South Carolina, thus portrayed his native State, in the ardor of debate on the floor of Congress:
"Look at South Carolina now, with her houses deserted and falling to decay; her once fruitful fields worn out and abandoned for want of timely improvement or skilful cultivation; and her thousands of acres of inexhaustible lands, still promising an abundant harvest to the industrious husbandman, lying idle and neglected. In the interior of the State where I was born, and where I now live, although a country possessing all the advantages of soil, climate and health, abounding in arable land, unreclaimed from the first rude state of nature, there can now be found many neighborhoods where the population is too sparse to support a common elementary school for children. Such is the deplorable condition of one of the oldest members of this Union, that dates back its settlement more than a century and a half, while other States, born as it were but yesterday, already surpass what Carolina is or ever has been, in the happiest and proudest day of her prosperity."
This gentleman chose to attribute the decline of South Carolina to the tariff; rather than to the obvious cause, that one-half of the people of South Carolina are poor, ignorant, degraded slaves, and the other half suffering in all their faculties and energies, from a moral pestilence which they insanely regard as a blessing and not a curse. Surely it is not owing to the tariff, that this ancient member of the Union has 20,615 white citizens over twenty years of age who do not know their letters; while Maine, with double her population, has only 3,241.
Now look upon a very different picture. Mr. Preston, of South Carolina, not long since delivered a speech at Columbia in reference to a proposed rail-road. In this speech, in order to stimulate the efforts of the friends of the road, he indulged in the following strain:
"No Southern man can journey (as he had lately done) through the Northern States, and witness the prosperity, the industry, the public spirit which they exhibit—the sedulous cultivation of all those arts by which life is rendered comfortable and respectable—without feelings of deep sadness and shame as he remembers his own neglected and desolate home. There, no dwelling is to be seen abandoned—not a farm uncultivated. Every person and every thing performs a part towards the grand result; and the whole land is covered with fertile fields, with manufactories, and canals, and rail-roads, and edifices, and towns, and cities. We of the South are mistaken in the character of these people, when we think of them only as pedlars in horn flints and bark nutmegs. Their energy and enterprise are directed to all objects great and small within their reach. The number of rail-roads and other modes of expeditious intercommunication knit the whole country into a closely compacted mass, through which the productions of commerce and of the press, the comforts of life, and the means of knowledge, are universally diffused; while the close intercourse of travel and of business makes all neighbors, and promotes a common interest and a common sympathy. How different the condition of these things in the South! Here the face of the country wears the aspect of premature old age and decay. No improvement is seen going on, nothing is done for posterity. No man thinks of anything beyond the present moment."
Yet this same Mr. Preston, thus sensitively alive to the superior happiness and prosperity of the free States, declared in the United States Senate, "Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina, if we can catch him we will try him, and notwithstanding all the interference of all the governments of the earth, including the Federal Government, we will hang him." [7] In other words, the slaveholders, rather than part with their slaves, are ready to murder, with all the formalities of law, the very men who are laboring to confer on them the envied blessings of the North.
[ [7]We are well aware that Mr. Preston has denied, what no one asserted, that he had said an abolitionist, if he came into South Carolina, would be executed by Lynch law. He used the words we have quoted. (See "New York Journal of Commerce," Jan. 6th, 1838).
IV. FEELINGS OF THE SLAVEHOLDERS TOWARDS
THE LABORING CLASSES.
Whenever the great mass of the laboring population of a country are reduced to beasts of burden, and toil under the lash, "bodily labor," as Chancellor Harper expresses it, must be disreputable, from the mere influence of association. Hence you know white laborers at the South are styled "mean whites." At the North, on the contrary, labor is regarded as the proper and commendable means of acquiring wealth; and our most influential men would in no degree suffer in public estimation, for holding the plough, or even repairing the highways. Hence no poor man is deterred from seeking a livelihood by honest labor from a dread of personal degradation. The different light in which labor is viewed at the North and the South is one cause of the depression of industry in the latter.
Another cause is the ever-wakeful jealousy of your aristocracy. They fear the people; they are alarmed at the very idea of power and influence being possessed by any portion of the community not directly interested in slave property. Visions of emancipation, of agrarianism, and of popular resistance to their authority, are ever floating in their distempered and excited imaginations. They know their own weakness, and are afraid you should know it also. Hence it is their policy to keep down the "mean whites." Hence their philippics against the lower classes. Hence their constant comparison of the laborers of the North, with their own slaves; and hence, in no small degree, the absence among you of those institutions which confer upon the poor that knowledge which is power. Do you deem these assertions uncharitable? Listen to their own declarations:
"We believe the servitude which prevails in the South far preferable to that of the North, or in Europe. Slavery will exist in all communities. There is a class which may be nominally free, but they will be virtually Slaves."—Mississippian, July 6th, 1838.
"Those who depend on their daily labor for their daily subsistence can never enter into political affairs: they never do, never will, never can."—B. W. Leigh in Virginia Convention, 1829.
"All society settles down into a classification of capitalists and laborers. The former will own the latter, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy. If laborers ever obtain the political power of a country, it is in fact in a state of revolution. The capitalists north of Mason and Dixon's line, have precisely the same interest in the labor of the country, that the capitalists of England have in their labor. Hence it is that they must have a strong federal government (!) to control the labor of the nation. But it is precisely the reverse with us. We have already not only a right to the proceeds of our laborers, but we own a class of laborers themselves. But let me say to gentlemen who represent the great class of capitalists in the North—beware that you do not drive us into a separate system; for if you do, as certain as the decrees of heaven, you will be compelled to appeal to the sword to maintain yourselves at home. It may not come in your day; but your children's children will be covered with the blood of domestic factions, and will see a plundering mob contending for power and conquest."—Mr. Pickens, of South Carolina, in Congress, 21st Jan., 1836.
So the way to prevent plundering mobs, is to enslave the poor! We shall see presently, how far this expedient has been successful in preventing murdering mobs.
"In the very nature of things there must be classes of persons to discharge all the different offices of society, from the highest to the lowest. Some of these offices are regarded as degrading, although they must and will be performed. Hence those manifest forms of dependent servitude which produce a sense of superiority in the masters or employers, and of inferiority on the part of the servants. Where these offices are performed by members of the political community, a dangerous element is obviously introduced into the body politic. Hence the alarming tendency to violate the rights of property by agrarian legislation, which is beginning to be manifest in the older States, where universal suffrage prevails without domestic slavery.
"In a word, the institution of domestic slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility, and all the other appendages of a hereditary system of government."—Governor M'Duffie's Message to the South Carolina Legislature, 1836.
"We regard slavery as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us, that the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions do not exist. Every plantation is a little community with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative."—(Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, in the U. S. Senate, Jan. 10th, 1840.)
"We of the South have cause now, and shall soon have greater, to congratulate ourselves on the existence of a population among us, which excludes the Populace which in effect rules some of our Northern neighbors, and is rapidly gaining strength wherever slavery does not exist—a populace made up of the dregs of Europe, and the most worthless portion of the native population."—(Richmond Whig, 1837.)
"Would you do a benefit to the horse or the ox by giving him a cultivated understanding, a fine feeling? So far as the mere laborer has the pride, the knowledge, or the aspiration of a freeman, he is unfitted for his situation. If there are sordid, servile, laborious offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile, laborious beings to perform them?
"Odium has been cast upon our legislation, on account of its forbidding the elements of education being communicated to slaves. But in truth what injury is done them by this? He who works during the day with his hands, does not read in the intervals of leisure for his amusement, or the improvement of his mind, or the exception is so very rare as scarcely to need the being provided for."—(Chancellor Harper of South Carolina.—Southern Literary Messenger.)
This same gentleman delivered an oration on the 4th of July, 1840, reviewing the principles of the two great political parties, and although he supported Mr. Van Buren's administration, in consideration of its devotion to the slave interest, he frankly inquires:—
"Is there anything in the principles and opinions of the great democratic rabble, as it has been justly called, which should induce us to identify ourselves with that? Here you may find every possible grade and hue of opinion which has ever existed in the country. Here you may find loafer, and loco foco, and agrarian, and all the rabble of the city of New York, the most corrupt and depraved of rabbles, and which controls, in a great degree, the city itself, and through that, as being the commercial metropolis, exercises much influence over the State at large.
"What are the essential principles of democracy as distinguished from republicanism? The first consists in the dogma, so portentous to us, of the natural equality and unalienable right to liberty of every human being. Our allies (!) no doubt, are willing at present to modify the doctrine in our favor. But the spirit of democracy at large makes no such exceptions, nor will these (our allies, the Northern democrats) continue to make it, longer than necessity or interest may require. The second consists in the doctrine of the divine right of majorities; a doctrine not less false, and slavish, and absurd, than the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings."
Mr. Robert Wickliffe, of Kentucky, in a speech published in the Louisville Advertiser, in opposition to those who were adverse to the importation of slaves from the States, thus discourseth:
"Gentlemen wanted to drive out the black population, that they may obtain white negroes in their place. White negroes have this advantage over black negroes, they can be converted into voters; and the men who live upon the sweat of their brow, and pay them but a dependent and scanty subsistence, can, if able to keep ten thousand of them in employment, come up to the polls and change the destiny of the country.
"How improved will be our condition when we have such white negroes as perform the servile labors of Europe, of Old England, and he would add now of New England; when our body servants and our cart drivers and our street sweepers are white negroes instead of black. Where will be the independence, the proud spirit, and the chivalry of Kentuckians then?"
Had the gentleman looked across the river, he might have found an answer to his question, in the wealth, power, intelligence and happiness of Ohio.
In reading the foregoing extracts, it is amusing to observe how adroitly the slaveholders avoid all recognition of any other classes among them than masters and slaves. Who would suspect from their language, that they were themselves a small minority of the white inhabitants, and that their own "white negroes" could, if united and so disposed, outvote them at the polls? It is worthy of remark that in their denunciations of the populace, the rabble, those who work with their hands, they refer not to complexion, but to condition; not to slaves, but to the poor and laborious of their own color. It is these haughty aristocrats who find in Northern democrats "allies," who in Congress and out of it are zealous in obeying their mandates, and who may justly be termed their "white negroes."
Slavery, although considered by Mr. Calhoun "the most stable basis of free institutions in the world," has, as we shall presently show you, in fact, led to grosser outrages in the social compact, to more alarming violations of constitutional liberty, to more bold and reckless assaults upon "free institutions," than have ever been even attempted by the much-dreaded agrarianism of the North.