II
Two principles may be laid down to which, perhaps, all will assent. First, it is absolutely essential that a correct understanding of the question should be had; and, secondly, the only proper settlement of it is one that shall be founded on justice and wisdom—a justice which shall embrace all concerned.
It is important that, at the very outset, we should start with proper bearings. Therefore, though it would hardly appear necessary to advert to the historical side of the question, yet so much ignorance is displayed about it in the discussion that goes on, that, perhaps, the statement of a few simple historical facts will serve to throw light on the subject and start us aright.
Until a recent period, slavery existed as an institution almost all over the world. Christianity, while it modified its status, recognized it, and, up to the time of the abolition of the institution, those who defended it drew their strongest arguments from the sacred writings. Pious Puritans sent their ships to ply along the middle passage, and deemed that they were doing God and man a service to transport benighted savages to serve an enlightened and Christian people. Pious and philanthropic churchmen bought these slaves as they might have bought any other chattels.
The abolition of slavery came about gradually, and was due rather to economic than to moral reasons. When, in 1790, slavery was abolished, by a more or less gradual system, in the Northern States, it was chiefly because of economic conditions. There were at that time less than 42,000 slaves in all the Northern States, and the system was not profitable there; whereas there were over 700,000 slaves in the Southern States, and it appeared that the system there was profitable. But the balance had not then been struck.
Though a respectable party of the representatives of the Southern States advocated its abolition at that time, it was retained because of economic conditions. From these facts, which are elementary, one cannot avoid the conclusion that whatever difference existed in the relation of the races in various sections was due to economic causes rather than to moral or religious feeling. In fact, during the Colonial period, so far from slavery having any moral aspect to the great body of the people, it was generally regarded as a beneficent institution. The Quakers, a sect who, having known oppression themselves, knew how to feel for the oppressed, and a small proportion of the most far-seeing in both sections, were exceptions. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was as strong an advocate of emancipation as James Otis and a much stronger advocate than John Adams.[3]
When the principle that all men are created equal was enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, a great majority of those who signed it had no idea of embracing within its category the enslaved Africans. To have done so would have been to stultify themselves. And whether or not Thomas Jefferson at heart felt the far-reaching scope of his enunciation, he gave no evidence of it at the time.
The Negro was discussed and legislated about as a chattel by the very men who issued that great charter. The whites had conquered this country from the savage and the wild, and they had no misgivings about their rights.
The inclusion of three-fifths of the Negroes in the representation of the several States was stated by Jefferson to have grown out of the claim made by Adams and certain other Northern representatives that they should be taxed just as the whites were taxed, every slave being counted for this purpose just as every white laborer was counted. This view the Southerners opposed and the matter was adjusted by a compromise which reckoned only three out of every five slaves.[4] Representation naturally followed.
It was, however, impossible that the spirit of liberty should be so all-pervading and not in time be felt to extend to all men—even to the slaves; but the growth of the idea was slow, and it was so inextricably bound up with party questions that it was difficult to consider it on its own merits. To show this, it is only necessary to recall that, in 1832, Virginia, through her Legislature, came within one vote of abolishing slavery within her borders, and that, in 1835, William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob—an outrage which he says was planned and executed, not by the rabble or workingmen, but “by gentlemen of property and standing from all parts of the city.”[5]
Fugitive-slave laws found their first examples in the colonial treaties of Massachusetts; yet in time fugitive-slave laws and the attempt to enforce them against the sentiment of communities where slavery had passed away played their part in fostering a sentiment of championship of the Negro race.
Then came “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was the nail that, in the hands of a woman, fastened Sisera to the ground. It presented only one side of the question and did more, perhaps, than any one thing that ever occurred to precipitate the war. It aroused and crystallized feeling against the South throughout the world. For the first time, the world had the imaginable horrors of slavery presented in a manner that appealed alike to old and young, the learned and the ignorant, the high-born and the lowly. It blackened the fame of the Southern people in the eyes of the North and fixed in the mind of the North a concept not only of the institution of slavery, but of the Southern people, which lasted for more than a generation, and has only begun of late, in the light of a fuller knowledge, to be dislodged.[6]