North America — Volume 2

by Anthony Trollope

*President Lincoln has proposed a plan for the emancipation of slaves in the border States, and for compensation to the owners. His doing so proves that he regards present emancipation in the Gulf States as quite out of the question. It also proves that he looks forward to the recovery of the border States for the North, but that he does not look forward to the recovery of the Gulf States. [back]

Abolition, in truth, is a political cry. It is the banner of defiance opposed to secession. As the differences between the North and South have grown with years, and have swelled to the proportions of national antipathy, southern nullification has amplified itself into secession, and northern free-soil principles have burst into this growth of abolition. Men have not calculated the results. Charming pictures are drawn for you of the negro in a state of Utopian bliss, owning his own hoe and eating his own hog; in a paradise, where everything is bought and sold, except his wife, his little ones, and himself. But the enfranchised negro has always thrown away his hoe, has eaten any man's hog but his own,—and has too often sold his daughter for a dollar when any such market has been open to him.

I confess that this cry of abolition has been made peculiarly displeasing to me by the fact that the northern abolitionist is by no means willing to give even to the negro who is already free that position in the world which alone might tend to raise him in the scale of human beings,—if anything can so raise him and make him fit for freedom. The abolitionists hold that the negro is the white man's equal. I do not. I see, or think that I see, that the negro is the white man's inferior through laws of nature. That he is not mentally fit to cope with white men,—I speak of the full-blooded negro,—and that he must fill a position simply servile. But the abolitionist declares him to be the white man's equal. But yet, when he has him at his elbow, he treats him with a scorn which even the negro can hardly endure. I will give him political equality, but not social equality, says the abolitionist. But even in this he is untrue. A black man may vote in New York, but he cannot vote under the same circumstances as a white man. He is subjected to qualifications which in truth debar him from the poll. A white man votes by manhood suffrage, providing he has been for one year an inhabitant of his State; but a man of colour must have been for three years a citizen of the State, and must own a property qualification of £50 free of debt. But political equality is not what such men want, nor indeed is it social equality. It is social tolerance and social sympathy; and these are denied to the negro. An American abolitionist would not sit at table with a negro. He might do so in England at the house of an English duchess; but in his own country the proposal of such a companion would be an insult to him. He will not sit with him in a public carriage if he can avoid it. In New York I have seen special street-cars for coloured people. The abolitionist is struck with horror when he thinks that a man and a brother should be a slave; but when the man and the brother has been made free, he is regarded with loathing and contempt. All this I cannot see with equanimity. There is falsehood in it from the beginning to the end. The slave as a rule is well treated,—gets all he wants and almost all he desires. The free negro as a rule is ill treated, and does not get that consideration which alone might put him in the worldly position for which his advocate declares him to be fit. It is false throughout,—this preaching. The negro is not the white man's equal by nature. But to the free negro in the northern States this inequality is increased by the white man's hardness to him.

In a former book which I wrote some few years since, I expressed an opinion as to the probable destiny of this race in the West Indies. I will not now go over that question again. I then divided the inhabitants of those islands into three classes,—the white, the black, and the coloured, taking a nomenclature which I found there prevailing. By coloured men I alluded to mulattoes, and all those of mixed European and African blood. The word "coloured," in the States, seems to apply to the whole negro race, whether full-blooded or half-blooded. I allude to this now because I wish to explain that, in speaking of what I conceive to be the intellectual inferiority of the negro race, I allude to those of pure negro descent,—or of descent so nearly pure as to make the negro element manifestly predominant. In the West Indies, where I had more opportunity of studying the subject, I always believed myself able to tell a negro from a coloured man. Indeed the classes are to a great degree distinct there, the greater portion of the retail trade of the country being in the hands of the coloured people. But in the States I have been able to make no such distinction. One sees generally neither the rich yellow of the West Indian mulatto, nor the deep oily black of the West Indian negro. The prevailing hue is a dry, dingy brown,—almost dusty in its dryness. I have observed but little difference made between the negro and the half-caste,—and no difference in the actual treatment. I have never met in American society any man or woman in whose veins there can have been presumed to be any taint of African blood. In Jamaica they are daily to be found in society.

Every Englishman probably looks forward to the accomplishment of abolition of slavery at some future day. I feel as sure of it as I do of the final judgment. When or how it shall come I will not attempt to foretell. The mode which seems to promise the surest success and the least present or future inconvenience, would be an edict enfranchising all female children born after a certain date, and all their children. Under such an arrangement the negro population would probably die out slowly,—very slowly. What might then be the fate of the cotton-fields of the Gulf States, who shall dare to say? It may be that coolies from India and from China will then have taken the place of the negro there, as they probably will have done also in Guiana and the West Indies.

CHAPTER IV.

WASHINGTON TO ST. LOUIS.

Though I had felt Washington to be disagreeable as a city, yet I was almost sorry to leave it when the day of my departure came. I had allowed myself a month for my sojourn in the capital, and I had stayed a month to the day. Then came the trouble of packing up, the necessity of calling on a long list of acquaintances one after another, the feeling that bad as Washington might be, I might be going to places that were worse, a conviction that I should get beyond the reach of my letters, and a sort of affection which I had acquired for my rooms. My landlord, being a coloured man, told me that he was sorry I was going. Would I not remain? Would I come back to him? Had I been comfortable? Only for so and so or so and so, he would have done better for me. No white American citizen, occupying the position of landlord, would have condescended to such comfortable words. I knew the man did not in truth want me to stay, as a lady and gentleman were waiting to go in the moment I went out; but I did not the less value the assurance. One hungers and thirsts after such civil words among American citizens of this class. The clerks and managers at hotels, the officials at railway stations, the cashiers at banks, the women in the shops;—ah! they are the worst of all. An American woman who is bound by her position to serve you,—who is paid in some shape to supply your wants, whether to sell you a bit of soap or bring you a towel in your bedroom at an hotel,—is, I think, of all human creatures, the most insolent. I certainly had a feeling of regret at parting with my coloured friend,—and some regret also as regards a few that were white.

As I drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, through the slush and mud, and saw, perhaps for the last time, those wretchedly dirty horse sentries who had refused to allow me to trot through the streets, I almost wished that I could see more of them. How absurd they looked, with a whole kit of rattletraps strapped on their horses' backs behind them,—blankets, coats, canteens, coils of rope, and, always at the top of everything else, a tin pot! No doubt these things are all necessary to a mounted sentry, or they would not have been there; but it always seemed as though the horse had been loaded gipsy-fashion, in a manner that I may perhaps best describe as higgledy-piggledy, and that there was a want of military precision in the packing. The man would have looked more graceful, and the soldier more warlike, had the pannikin been made to assume some rigidly fixed position instead of dangling among the ropes. The drawn sabre, too, never consorted well with the dirty outside woollen wrapper which generally hung loose from the man's neck. Heaven knows, I did not begrudge him his comforter in that cold weather, or even his long, uncombed shock of hair; but I think he might have been made more spruce, and I am sure that he could not have looked more uncomfortable. As I went, however, I felt for him a sort of affection, and wished in my heart of hearts that he might soon be enabled to return to some more congenial employment.