Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

Slavery is as fatal to society as are the Southern and tropical swamps to human life. And as material culture drains the marshes, clears the forests, and renders the soil productive and the air healthy: so in like manner, will moral and social culture yet make the institutions of this republic rich and refulgent—unblighted by the presence of a slave!

The source of many, if not of all, the political and administrative disorders in these States, is to be found in the struggles occasioned by the arrogant and everlasting encroachments on liberty and on the Union, by the militant worshippers of slavery. To cure these disorders, the growth of the disease—its expansion over yet uninfected territories—must be stopped: such must be the first step in a sanitary direction; and the paramount duty of self-preservation now commands its adoption. This whole question of Slavery, too, must be forced back to where it was left by the immortal expounders of Southern instinct and intuition on slavery, those noble patriots—Henry, Laurens, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Randolph, and a host of other great names—now forsworn by their political descendants. To conceal the vulture that is devouring their vitals, the fanatical upholders of slavery pervert and degrade all that humanity, morality, civilization and history have recognized as sacred.

The slave-orators and so-called statesmen avouch "that no one in the South believes in popular sovereignty." This unbelief is natural enough; for popular sovereignty can only exist in intelligent, orderly and laborious communities. It exists in the Free States, and here freemen practically believe in and uphold it. But an ignorant and degraded population of oligarchs, oppressors and slave-breeders never were capable of exercising popular sovereignty, and consequently nowhere could they ever have faith in it: barbarians generally mistrust civilization. Universal suffrage is not a failure in the villages and townships of the Free States, though it does fail on slave plantations, or among a so-called free population drilled and led by oligarchs.

Human institutions experience ups and downs—they have their luminous and their gloomy epochs. Ignorant and debased masses throw a shadow over universal suffrage and self-government; and only genuine freedom goes hand in hand with reason, knowledge and morality. These, too, mutually reproduce each other. It is, therefore, easy to be understood how freedom disappears from the Slave South, and is no more cherished or believed in.

Many consider the American institution of self-government as a new experiment; and European serviles and American slave oligarchs utter fearful forebodings that the experiment is already a failure. But the prophecy only expresses their desires. For this so-called experiment is but the natural, progressive development of man, and for this reason proves itself every day more and more successful in the Free States. The kingdoms and nations of the old world are now diligently studying this experiment of freedom, and trying to appropriate its beneficent results. Agents of European governments uninterruptedly investigate the system of free communal schools, the manufactures, the inventions, the multifarious industrial and agricultural progress of the Free States. But no government sends its messengers to study out the condition of slave plantations, slave huts, or slave pens; for they know well that by the action of self-government and universal suffrage, qualitative and quantitative knowledge is more generally spread, and has reached a far higher grade in the American Free States than among all the militant oligarchs and knight-errants of slavery the world over.

An experiment generally proves successful if made with properly adapted and unadulterated materials. A structure raised on a treacherous foundation and built with rotten materials must fall. It is an experiment altogether new to the human race to construct a society and government with chattelhood as an integral element. It is an experiment to attempt to bring down horrified humanity on its knees to the worship of chattelhood and the devilish slave traffic. Such an experiment is now being tried by the apostles of slavery; and that too, though morality, civilization and history have unanimously and forever pronounced the sentence of condemnation against holding property in man. The civilized and Christian world of both hemispheres and every race unanimously awarded to John Brown the crown of a martyr, who fell in the cause of human liberty.

One deviation from a sound social principle is speedily followed by another; violence ever begets violence; and this is the fatal genesis of all oppressions and tyrannies. The oligarchic despotism in the Slave States runs rapidly through all the stages with which individual despotism has filled the dark records of history. It has already succeeded in the suppression of free speech and even free thought, violation of seal, censorship of the press, and the centring of political control in the hands of officials and lacqueys. If individual tyrants dispatch their victims by special executioners, lynch law and mob law—although often executed by misguided "poor whites"—are as lawless as the murders of the tyrant, and bear a striking analogy to the executions perpetrated by agents or court-martials. Despotism drills the masses in all kinds of degradation: thus a part of the population of the Slave States is drilled in ignorance by the slaveholders, and blindly perpetrate their murderous biddings. To these deluded men who execute the bloody behests of the tyrant, the words of the Christ on Calvary apply: "Forgive them; for they know not what they do."

A society based on a violation of cardinal human rights can never be considered free. Freemen are never governed by violent passions. Injustice and tyranny cannot recede; they divorce themselves from mercy, and are guilty of the most remorseless actions: thus fatally, of late, the gallows was once more ennobled. Executions and burning at the stake, amid the applaudings of the ignorant and the infuriated, are nothing new in history; and neither is the transmission of the names of the murderers to the maledictions of eternity.

Human society will perhaps always be subject, in one shape or another, to wrongs and disorders: but humanity specially revolts at the hideous wrongs which now exist, such as the claim of property in man, and the traffic in man. As long as this claim is found on the legal record, as long as slavery exists as a common fact, futile will be all efforts to stifle the voice of freedom, to crush into oblivion the question of slavery, or to expel it from the chambers of legislation or the tribunals of the people. It will and must ever reappear on the surface:—as in bodily disorders, when the virus has eaten its way into the innermost organism, external eruptions may be locally, healed or closed up, but again they reappear on another spot, or attack another organ, until a radical cure relieves the body from the poison. Until utterly destroyed, slavery will always be paramount to all other political questions, to all political complications, and it will forever force its way into them all. To a greater or less degree, diseases assume the characteristics of a prevailing epidemic. When several diseases are complicated together, the physician first attempts to cure the most virulent and dangerous. This question of slavery must have a solution; and it is in vain that the weak-minded deny the existence of the devouring disorder, or attempt to conjure it with paltry expedients.