Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States / The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12

by Archibald Henry Grimké

In the growing exigency of the slave industrial system, under these circumstances, the reparation of this blunder was deemed urgent, and so, in casting about to find some solution of its problem, the attempted abrogation of the compromise law itself not being considered wise by Calhoun, the slave power fell upon Texas, struggling for independence. An agitation was consequently started to correct the error of the Missouri compromise by the annexation of a region of country described in the graphic language of Webster to be so vast that “a bird could not fly over it in a week.” What the South had lost by the blunder of the slave wall of 36° 30′ was then expected, barring accidents of course, to be restored to it in the new slave States, and in the large augmentation of slave representation in the general government, which would eventually ensue from the act of annexation. But the accident of the Mexican war wrecked completely the deep scheme of the Texan plotters, and neutralized the political advantage which had accrued to the slave power in the admission of Texas into the Union by the acquisition of California and New Mexico at the close of that war. It was a checkmate by destiny. Chance had at a critical moment aligned itself definitely on the side of modern industrialism in the American republic and given a decisive turn to the long contest with its slave rival.

With the admission of California as a free State the political balance between our two opposing systems of labor was irreparably destroyed. For, while the South possessed Texas, and an expectation of acquiring new slave States therefrom, this expectation amounted practically to a bare possibility. For it was found, owing to the inferior colonizing resources of the slave system, far easier to annex this immense domain than to people it, or to organize out of it States for emergent needs. On the other hand, the superior colonizing ability of free labor, taken in conjunction with all that vast, unoccupied territory belonging to it and inviting settlement, promised, in the ordinary course of events, to increase and confirm this preponderance of political power, and so to seal the fate of slavery. Nor do I forget in this connection that the bill, which organized into territories Utah and New Mexico, was, in deference to Southern demand, purged of the Wilmot proviso. But this concession on the part of Northern politicians had no real value to the South, for, as Webster pointed out at the time, slave labor was effectually interdicted from competing with free labor for the possession of this land by a power higher than the Wilmot proviso, viz., by a law of nature. The failure, however, to re-enact this decree of nature in 1850 prepared the way for the demolition of the slave wall four years later, and thus operated to hasten the grand catastrophe.

The repeal of the Missouri compromise did for the more or less fluid state of anti-slavery sentiment at the North what Goethe says a blow will do for a vessel of water on the verge of freezing—the water is thereby converted instantly into solid ice. So did the agitation produced by the abrogation of that act convert the gradually congealing sentiment of the free States on the subject of slavery into settled opposition to its farther extension to the national territories and into a fixed purpose to confine it within its then existing limits. But to put immovable bounds to the territorial expansion of the slave industrial system was virtually, under the circumstance, to provide for its decline and ultimate extinction, for the beginning of a period of actual and inhibited non-extension of slavery as a rival system of labor in the Union would mark the termination of its period of growth and the commencement of its industrial decay. The peril of the slave system was certainly extreme, and the dread of the slave power was not less so.

The national situation was full of gloom and menace to the industrial rivals. For the passions of the slave power were taking on an ominously violent and reckless energy of expression, which, unless all signs fail, would take on presently a no less violent and reckless energy of action. The crisis was intensified, first, by the repeal on the part of certain free States of their slave-sojournment laws; second, by the extraordinary activity of the underground railroad; third, by increasing opposition in the North to the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, all of which, acting together, seriously impaired the value and security of slave property in the Union; fourth, by that fierce, obstinate, but futile, struggle of the South to obtain possession of Kansas, and the exposure thereby of its marked inferiority as a colonizer in competition with modern industrialism; fifth, by the growing influence of the abolition movement, and, sixth, by those nameless terrors of slave insurrections, which were evoked by the apparition of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. This acute situation was finally rendered intolerable to the slave power upon the election of Abraham Lincoln on a sectional platform, pledged to a policy of uncompromising resistance to the farther extension of slavery to the territories. Worsted within the Union, it was natural that the South should refuse to yield at this point of the conflict, and that it should make an attempt, as a dernier resort, to secede from it with its peculiar institution for the purpose of continuing the battle for its existence outside of a political system in which it had been overborne and hemmed in upon itself by modern industrialism and so doomed by that inexorable force to slow but absolutely certain extinction.

But the Union, which had developed such deadly industrial peril to the South, had created for the North its immense industrial prosperity, was, in sooth, the origin and mainspring of its powerful and progressive civilization. And so, while the preservation of the peculiar institution and civilization of the former necessitated a rupture of the old Union and the formation of a new one, founded on Negro slavery, every interest and attachment of the latter cried out for the maintenance of the old and the destruction of the new government. The long conflict of the two rival systems of labor culminated in the war to save the old Union on the part of the North and to establish a new one on the part of the South, whose Constitution rested directly upon the doctrine of social unity. Social duality was the great fact in the Constitution of the old Union; social uniformity was to be the great fact in the new. A State divided socially against itself cannot stand. The South learned this supreme lesson in political philosophy well, much more quickly and thoroughly than had the North, whose comprehension of it was painfully slow. And even that part of the grand truth which it did come to apprehend after prolonged wrestlings with bitter experience it reduced to practice in every emergency with moral fears and tremblings.

In the tremendous trial of strength between the sections which followed the rebel shot on Sumter the South was at the end of four years completely overmatched by the North, and by sheer weight of numbers and material resources was borne down at all points and forced back into the old Union, less its system of slave labor. For the destruction of the Southern Confederacy had involved, as a military necessity, the destruction of Negro slavery, which was its chief cornerstone. With the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution the ancient cause of sectional difference and strife, viz., duality of labor systems, was supposed, quite generally at the North, to have been removed, and that a new era of unity in this respect had thereupon straightway begun. It seems to have been little understood by the North at the time, and since, for that matter, that Negro slavery in the South would die hard, and that it has a fatal gift of metamorphosis (ability to change its form without changing its nature), and that while it had under the well-directed stroke of the national arm disappeared as chattel slavery, it would reappear, unless hindered, as African serfdom throughout the Southern States, and that they would return to the Union much stronger politically than when they seceded, and much better equipped for a renewal of the unquenched strife for industrial existence in 1865 than they were in 1860.

The immediate work of reconstructing civil society in the old slave States to meet the new condition of freedom was now by an egregious executive blunder left wholly to the master class, with the startling result at its close that, whereas Negro slavery had been abolished, Negro serfdom reappeared in every instance as the industrial basis of the reconstructed States, and that a serf power was about to take the place of the slave power in the newly restored Union more dangerous than the old slave power to free industrialism than five is greater than three in federal numbers. For, while according to the old rule of slave representation in the lower house of Congress it took five slaves to nullify the votes of three freemen, under a new rule of apportionment which would probably obtain five serfs would be equivalent politically to five freemen. At this all the ancient hatred and dread of its Protean rival blazed hotly in the heart of the North, and with its passionate fear emerged a no less passionate desire to secure forever the domination of its industrial democracy over the newborn nation.

Actuated by this motive to dominate the republic, the freedmen whom the old master class had by prompt legislation reduced to a condition of serfdom were thereupon raised by the North through Constitutional amendment to the plane of citizenship. And when this act proved inadequate to arrest the threatened Southern revival in the national government, the ballot was next placed in their hands to avert the impending danger. It was under such circumstances that the work of Southern reconstruction was entered upon by Congress, i. e., in reality by the North, the South having had its chance and failed to reconstruct itself upon a basis satisfactory to its victorious rival, and in consonance with its sense of industrial and political security and progress.

I know that it is now the universal vogue to criticize and condemn this stupendous work of Congress as wholly wanting in knowledge of human nature and as woefully deficient in wise statesmanship. I know also that hindsight is at all times attended with less embarrassment to him who uses it than is foresight; and I know, besides, that those historic actors who had not attained unto a position of futurity in respect to their task, but whose task sustained to them that relative place instead, were obliged to do the best they could with whatever quantum of the latter faculty they might have possessed and toward the manful achievement of their duty. And this is what Congress did at this juncture. In view of the long, bitter and disastrous strife between the two sets of industrial ideas and interests in the republic, of the complex and earthquake circumstances and conditions in which they were thrown in relation to each other at the close of the rebellion, together with the imperious urgency for immediate and decisive action on the part of the North, I confess that it is extremely difficult to see even with the aid of hindsight what other practicable course was then open to that section to pursue than the one selected by Congress in the emergency as the best and wisest. And all things considered, it was the best and wisest, which, when the present generation of criticism and reaction has passed, will, I think, be so adjudged by impartial truth.

Congress might at this juncture have led the country by another way out of the perils which threatened afresh its peace and security, by a way dreadful and inhuman, it is true, but which offered nevertheless a radical and permanent cure for the evils which flow naturally from the union under one general government of two mutually invasive and destructive industrial systems, viz., by the forcible deportation of the entire black population of the South, and the introduction into their stead of an equal number of white immigrants. Such a course would have certainly achieved the unification of the sections by the extinguishment and elimination of the weaker of our two rival systems of labor. It was, however, a solution of its Southern problem, which the nation was in morals, economics and humanity precluded absolutely from adopting, for three simple and sufficient reasons: First, for the sake of the South, which, wasted and bewildered, lay sullen and prostrate amidst the wreck and chaos of civil strife and at its lowest ebb of productive energy and wealth, its sole recuperative chance depending on the labor of its former slaves. To deport this labor, under the circumstances, would have been cruelly to deprive that section of its last vital resource, and to sink it to a state of industrial collapse and misery, by the side of which its condition at the close of the war might have seemed prosperity and paradise. Second, the nation itself could ill sustain the shock incident to such a huge amputation from the body of its productive labor, and which must have, for long and bitter years, affected disastrously its solvency, greatness and progress. Besides, the presence in the lately rebellious States of a mass of loyal people, like the blacks, constituted an immensely important element of strength and security to the newly restored Union. And, third, the blacks themselves had by two centuries of unpaid toil bought the right to remain in a country which had enslaved them, yet for whose defense and preservation against foreign and domestic foes and through three wars they had bared their brave arms and generous breasts and poured out royally and without measure their devotion, their blood and their life.