“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of Slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, THE MOST UNREMITTING DESPOTISM on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.… The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part and the amor patriæ of the other!… With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed.”[56]
Next comes the Philosophic Authority. Here, while the language which I quote may be less familiar, it is hardly less commanding. Among names of such weight I shall not discriminate, but simply follow the order of time. First is John Locke, the great author of the English system of Intellectual Philosophy, who, though once unhappily indulgent to American Slavery, in another place describes it, in words which every Slave-Master should know, as—
“The state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” “So directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that ’tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, MUCH LESS A GENTLEMAN, should plead for ’t.”[57]
Then comes Adam Smith, the founder of the science of Political Economy, who, in his work on Morals, thus utters himself:—
“There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”[58]
This judgment, pronounced just a century ago, was repelled by the Slave-Masters of Virginia in a feeble publication, which attests at least their own consciousness that they were the criminals arraigned by the distinguished philosopher. This was soon followed by the testimony of the great English moralist, Dr. Johnson, who, in a letter to a friend, thus shows his opinion of Slave-Masters:—
“To omit for a year, or for a day, the most efficacious method of advancing Christianity, in compliance with any purposes that terminate on this side of the grave, is a crime of which I know not that the world has yet had an example, except in the practice of the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.”[59]
These are British voices. There are French also of equal character, whose is the same implacable judgment. First I name Condorcet, who did so much to develop the idea of Human Progress. Constantly he testifies against Slavery. His brand of it as Barbarism is sententiously expressed in a letter to Voltaire, describing a successful Slave-Master:—
“L’Éprémesnil is a little American, who, by dint of plying his negroes with the lash, has succeeded in getting enough sugar and indigo to buy an office of King’s Councillor in the revenue service.”[60]