[295] Gurney, Views and Practices of the Society of Friends, p. 390. ‘Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833,’ quoted by Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, p. 398. Birney, Second Letter, p. 1.
[296] Parker, op. cit. v. 56.
[297] von Holst, op. cit. ii. 230.
Nobody would suppose that this attitude towards slavery was due to religious zeal. It was one of those cases, only too frequent in the history of morals, in which religion is called in to lend its sanction to a social institution agreeable to the leaders of religious opinion. Many clergymen and missionaries were themselves slave-holders,[298] the chapel funds largely rested on slave property,[299] and the ministers naturally desired to be on friendly terms with the more important members of their respective congregations, who were commonly owners of slaves. Adam Smith observes that the resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their slaves, was due to the fact that the principal produce there was corn, the raising of which cannot afford the expense of slave cultivation; had the slaves “made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to.”[300]
[298] Barnes, op. cit. p. 13. Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, pp. 151, 186 sq.
[299] Newman, op. cit. p. 53.
[300] Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 172.
To explain the establishment of colonial slavery, the difficulties in the way of its abolition, and the laws relating to it, it is necessary to consider not only economic conditions and the motive of self-interest, but, as a factor of equal importance, the want of sympathy for, or positive antipathy to, the coloured race. The negro was looked upon almost as an animal, according to some he was a being without a soul.[301] Even when free he was a pariah, subject to special laws and regulations. In the Code of Louisiana it is said:—“Free people of colour ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to the whites; but, on the contrary, they ought to yield to them on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect, under the penalty of imprisonment, according to the nature of the offence.”[302] The Code Noir prohibited white men and women from marrying negroes, “à peine de punition et d’amende arbitraire”;[303] and in the Revised Statutes of North Carolina we read:—“If any white man or woman, being free, shall intermarry with an Indian, negro, mustee or mulatto man or woman, or any person of mixed blood to the third generation, bond or free, he shall, by judgment of the county court, forfeit and pay the sum of one hundred dollars to the use of the county.”[304] In Mississippi a free negro or mulatto was legally punished with thirty-nine lashes if he exercised the functions of a minister of the Gospel.[305] Coloured men in the North were excluded from colleges and high schools, from theological seminaries and from respectable churches, as also from the town hall, the ballot, and the cemetery where white people were interred.[306] The Anglo-Saxon aversion to the black race is thus expressed by an English writer:—“We hate slavery, but we hate the negroes still more.”[307] Among the Spaniards and Portuguese racial antipathies were not so strong, and their slaves were consequently better treated.[308]
[301] von Holst, op. cit. i. 279. Malloch, ‘How the Church dealt with Slavery,’ in The Month, xxvii. 454.
[302] Quoted by Stroud, op. cit. p. 157.