The first natural instinct of the slave, black or white, towards his master is, to cheat and baffle that armed embodiment of wrong, who stands to him in the relation of a thief and a tyrant. Thus, from his earliest years, lying and fraud become legitimate and praiseworthy in the slave’s eyes; for slavery, except under rare conditions, crushes out the moral life in the victim.
Any conscience he may have, being subordinate to the conscience of his master, is kept stunted or perverted. The slave may wish to be true to his wife; but his master may compel him to repudiate her and take another. He may object to being the agent of an injustice; but the snap of the whip or the revolver may be the reply to any conscientious scruples he may offer against obedience.
In the first stage of his slave-life, Peculiar probably gave little thought to the moral bearings of his lot; although old Alva, his instructor, who was something of a casuist, had offered him not a few hard nuts to crack in the way of knotty questions. But Peculiar did precisely what you or I would have done under similar circumstances: he taxed his ingenuity to find how he could most safely shirk the tasks that were put upon him. Knowing that his taskmasters had no right to his labor, that they were, in fact, robbing him of what was his own, he did what he could to fool and circumvent them. Thus he grew to be, by a necessity of his condition, the most consummate of hypocrites and the most intrepid and successful of liars. At eighteen he was a match for Talleyrand in using speech to conceal his thoughts.
He saw that, if slaves were well treated, it was because the prudent master believed that good treatment would pay. Humanity was gauged by considerations of cotton. Thus the very kindnesses of a master had the taint of an intense selfishness; and Peculiar, while readily availing himself of all indulgences, correctly appreciated the spirit in which they were granted.
The devotional element seems to be especially active in the negro; but it has little chance for rational development, dwarfed and kept from the light as the intellect is. The uneducated slave, like the Italian brigand,—indeed, like many worthy people who go to church,—thinks it an impertinence to mix up morality with religion. He agrees fully with the distinguished American divine, who the other Sunday began his sermon with these words, “Brethren, I am not here to teach you morality, but to save your souls.” As if a saving faith could exist allied to a corrupt morality!
Peculiar could not come in contact with a sham, however solemn and pretentious, without applying to it the puncture of his skeptical analysis. He saw his master, Herbert, go to church on a Sunday and kneel in prayer, and on a Monday shoot down Big Sam for attaching himself to the wrong woman. He saw the Rev. Mr. Bloom take the murderer by the hand, as if nothing had happened more tragical than the shooting of a raccoon.
And then Peculiar cogitated, wondering what religion could be, if its professors made such slight account of robbery and murder. Was it the observance of certain forms for the propitiation of an arbitrary, capricious, and unamiable Power, who smiled on injustice and barbarity? The more he thought of it, the more inexplicable grew the puzzle. Herbert evidently regarded himself as one of the elect; and Mr. Bloom encouraged him in his security. If heaven was to be won by such kind of service as theirs, Peculiar concluded that he would prefer taking his chances in hell; and so he became a scoffer.
His residence in New Orleans, in enlarging the sphere of his experiences, did not bring him the light that could quicken the devotional part of his nature. Dwelling most of the time in a hotel which frequently contained three or four hundred inmates, he was thrown among white men of all grades, intellectual and moral. He instinctively felt his superiority both ways to not a few of these. It was therefore a swindling lie to say that the blacks were born to be the thrall of the whites, that slavery was the proper status of the black in this or any country. If it were true that stupid blacks ought to be slaves, so must it be true of the same order of whites.
He heard preachers stand up in their pulpits, and, like the Rev. Dr. Palmer, blaspheme God by calling slavery a Divine institution. “Would it have been tolerated so long, if it were not?” they asked, with the confidence of a conjurer when he means to hocus you. To which Peek might have answered, “Would theft and murder have been tolerated so long, if they were not equally Divine?” The Northern clergymen he encountered held usually South-side views of the subject, and so his prejudices against the cloth grew to be somewhat too sweeping and indiscriminate. Judged of by its relations to slavery, religion seemed to him an audacious system of impositions, raised to fortify a lie and a wrong by claiming a Divine sanction for merely human creeds and inventions.
This persuasion was deepened when he found there were intelligent white men utterly incredulous as to a future state, and that the people who went to church were many of them practically, and many of them speculatively, infidels. The remaining fraction might be, for all he knew, not only devout, but good and just. Indeed, he had met some such, but they could be almost counted on his ten fingers.