CHAPTER XXVIII.

Yes, let it pass. There was music in that laughter, doubtless, but it cost us too dear. I think we Virginians[[1]] are agreed as to that,—more than agreed,—yet we cannot bring ourselves to look as others do, upon the state of things which rendered it possible. As one man, we rejoice that slavery is dead; but even the victors in the late struggle—the magnanimous among them, at least—will hardly find fault with us if we drop a sentimental tear, as it were, upon its tomb. A reasonable man is glad that an aching tooth is well out of his mouth; but to the autocratic dentist who should pull it out by force, his gratitude would not be boisterous; and then, after all, it leaves a void. But cheer up, brother Virginians, listen to your Bushwhackerish bard while he chaunts you a lay. He would have his say; but he will be good and kind. He would not willingly bore you; and hence, ever thoughtful and considerate, he serves up his rhetoric in a separate course. Skip this chapter, then, if you will. You will find the story continued in the next.

Yes, it is all true enough, I admit. It was but the other day, so to speak, that the first shipload of negroes was landed on the shores of a continent peopled by a race which, after all has been said, remain the most interesting of savages, and who, if not heroes, have easily become heroic under the magicians’ wands of Cooper and of Longfellow. That shipload and its successors have become millions; while the genius of a Barnum scarce suffices to bring together enough Redskins to make a Knickerbocker holiday. The descendant of the naked black, whose tribe, on the Gold Coast, still trembles before a Fetish, rustles, beneath fretted ceilings, in the robes of a bishop; while some chief of the kindred, perhaps, of Tecumseh, shivers on the wind-swept plains, under the fluttering rags of a contract blanket. His half-naked squaw hugs her pappoose to her bosom, and flees before the sabres of our cavalry; but her more deeply-tinted sister struts, beflounced, the spouse of a senator. In one word, the race which the Anglo-Saxons found on this continent remained free, and perished; the people they imported and enslaved, multiplied and flourished. I do not feel myself the Œdipus to solve this riddle of modern morals; but, with my people, I fail to see the consistency of Victor Hugo[[2]] for example, who could whine over the fate of John Brown,—hanged for an attempt to achieve the liberty of the negro through murder,—but who, when Captain Jack stood at the foot of the gallows, made no sign. Captain Jack, he too, through murder, sought to maintain his ancestral right to independence—nay, existence—and a few acres of wretched lava-beds. The distempered fancy of the first saw, as he gazed upon the corpses of the fellow-citizens of Washington, of Jefferson, and of Henry, countless dusky legions rushing to his rescue,—the clear eye of the other showed him forty millions pouring down upon his less than a hundred braves, to avenge the death of Canby; and yet he slew him. John Brown is a hero, his name is a legend, his tomb a shrine; but where are thy wretched bones slung away, poor Jack? Hadst thou been fair, and dwelt in Lacedæmon, in Xerxes’ days, the name of Leonidas shone not now in solitary glory adown the ages; wert thou living now, and of sable hue, thou mightest be sitting at the desk of Calhoun. Alas! alas! that thou shouldst have been of neutral shade; for how couldst thou be a man and a brother, being only copper-colored?

But leaving these knotty points of ethical casuistry to the philanthropists, I reiterate that I think that the picture I have drawn of certain aspects of slavery, as it existed in Virginia, reveals its fatal weakness. That weakness consisted in the fact that it realized the ideal set forth in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” That eloquent work of the erratic French dreamer is one long and passionate protest against the sorrows and sufferings of the poor. In those sorrows and sufferings he finds the source of all the crimes that dishonor humanity. How, as things existed with us, poverty sufficiently grinding to produce crime was actually unknown; so that our little world was just the world that he sighs for.

Victor Hugo plumes himself, I believe, upon never having learned the gibberish that the English call their language. Therefore, as I do not design having this work translated into the various modern languages (why should I, forsooth, since by the time your day rolls round the aforesaid gibberish will be the only tongue spoken by mankind?) he will never have the pain of seeing himself ranked among the upholders of slavery. Whatever he might say, however, it is very clear that no state of things heretofore existing has so well fulfilled the conditions of his ideal of society. It is no fault of mine if his ideal be absurd.[[3]]

For I fear me much this is no ideal world we live in.

But ah, what a lotus-dream we were a-dreaming, when from out our blue sky the bolt of war fell upon us! We lived in a land in which no one was hungry, none naked, none a-cold; where no man begged, and no man was a criminal, no woman fell—from necessity; where no one asked for bread, and all, even the slaves, could give it; where Charity was unknown, and in her stead stood Hospitality, with open doors. What tidings we had, meanwhile, of the things of the outer world, made us cherish all the more fondly the quietude of our Sleepy Hollow. The nations, had they not filled the air for a century past with the murmur of their unrest? Revolutions, rebellions, barricades, bread-riots,—agrarianism, communism, the frowning hosts of capital and labor—the rumor of these grisly facts and grislier phantoms reached us, but from afar, and as an echo merely; and lulled, by our exemption from these ills, into a fatal security, we failed to perceive the breakers upon which we were slowly but surely drifting. The lee-shore upon which our ship was so somnolently rocking was nothing less than bankruptcy. Spendthrifts, we dreamed that our inheritance was too vast ever to be dissipated; nay, we fondly imagined that we were adding to our substance. Did not our statesmen, our Able Editors, unceasingly assure us that we were the richest people on the globe, and growing daily richer? And what had been that inheritance? A noble, virgin land, unsurpassed, all things considered, anywhere,—a land that cost us nothing beyond the beads of Captain Smith and the bullets of his successors,—a land which no mortgages smothered, no tax-gatherer devoured. But smothered and devoured it was, and by our slaves.

It is doubtful whether slavery was ever, at any stage of the world’s history, wise, from an economical point of view, though it was, of course, in one aspect, in the interest of humanity, when, at some prehistoric period, men began to enslave rather than butcher their prisoners of war. But it seems very clear, that if the conditions of any society were ever such that its greatest productive force could only be realized through the restraints and constraints of slavery, then that slavery must needs have been absolute and pitiless. No half-and-half system will suffice. Severe and continuous labor is endured by no man who can avoid it. But labor, continuous and severe, is the price paid by the great mass of mankind for the mere privilege of being counted in the census; so terrible is that struggle for existence, of the Darwinian dispensation, which, whether we be Darwinians or not, we must needs live under. This, in our dreamland, we quietly ignored. The political economists are all agreed that from the sharpest toil little more can be hoped for than the barest support of the toilers; and we were not ignorant of political economy. But is there not an exception to every rule? And were we not that exception? In our favored nook, at least, the cold dicta of science should not hold sway. And so our toilers did half work,—and got double rations. In one word, we spent more than we made. And although we could not be brought to see this, it became very plain when the war came and settled our accounts for us; for I venture to assert that in April, 1865, the State of Virginia was worth intrinsically less than when, in 1607, Captain John Smith and his young gentlemen landed at Jamestown. In other words, there had been going on for two hundred and fifty years a process the reverse of accumulation. For that length of time we had been living on our principal,—the native wealth of the soil. While, in other parts of the country, the struggle for existence had caused barrenness to bloom, the very rocks to grow fat, in ours the struggle for ease had converted a garden into something very like a wilderness. The forests we found had fallen; the rich soil of many wide districts was washed into the sea, leaving nothing to represent them; and when the smoke of battle cleared away, we saw a naked land. It could not have been otherwise. Thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the nineteenth century, as well as the principles of the Jeffersonian Democracy, we were entangled in a system of things not compatible, profitably at least, with either. We could not forget that our slaves were human. There were ties that we felt in a hundred ways. We loved this old nurse. We humored that old butler. We indulged, here a real, there a sham invalid, until, in one word, the thing began to cost more than it came to, and it was time we shook off the incubus.

And there was a time when many Virginians, now living, began to see this; and had they been let alone, not many years would have passed before we should have freed ourselves from the weight that oppressed us. But in an evil hour there arose a handful of men with a mission,—a mission to keep other people’s consciences,—often—as certain national moral phenomena subsequently showed—to the neglect of that charity which begins at home. From that day all rational discussion of the question became impossible in Virginia; and a consummation for which many of the wisest heads were quietly laboring became odious even to hint at, under dictation from outsiders; and on the day when the first abolition society was formed, the fates registered a decree that slavery should go down; not in peace, but by war; not quietly and gradually extinguished, with the consent of all concerned, but with convulsive violence,—drowned in the blood of a million men, and the tears of more than a million women.

Well, they were only white men and women,—so let that pass, too.

[1] Obviously, as often elsewhere, Mr. Whacker here says Virginians, instead of Southerners, to avoid all semblance of sectional feeling.
[2] Written, doubtless, before the death of “The Master.”—Ed.
[3] In my capacity of Bushwhacker, I make it a matter of business to laugh whenever I feel like it. I felt like it when, on reading the above, this parallelism occurred to me: the hero of the “Miserables”—Jean Valjean—is a thief. Now, holds our author, whenever a man is so unfortunate as to be a thief, no blame should be attached to him,—and he puts it about thus: “A thief is not a thief. Nor a crime. He is a product. A fact. A titanic fact. A thief is a man who hears the cry of a child. It is his child. It is a cry for bread. Society gives him a stone. Effacement of his rectitude. He appropriates society’s wallet. And serves society right; for ’tis society has made him a thief.” Leaving to some coming man the task and the credit of removing from society all stain, by discovering who or what made society a thief-maker, ’tis this that moved my Bushwhackerish soul to smile: this Jean Valjean, whom society is so wicked in producing, turns out to be a better man than any other man ever was, is, or shall be. So we, under our very sinful system, would seem to have prepared for the elective franchise a whole people lately buried in heathenism, without, as it were, half trying. Nor does this claim rest merely upon that braggartism so peculiarly Southern. The very best people on the other side—nay, the people who, by their own admission, embrace all the culture and virtue of the country—have been the first to give us this meed of praise,—yet it is notorious that very few white men are yet, with all their Bacons, and Sydneys, and Hampdens, and Jeffersons to enlighten them, qualified for that august function. Nay, even in France herself, though she is, as Victor Hugo says,—and he should know,—the mother and the father, and the uncle and the aunt, and the brother and the sister of civilization, I believe there are Frenchmen not yet fitted to wield the ballot,—among whom, I doubt not, some profane persons would make so bold as to class the illustrious rhapsodist himself.