“Shall we not,” asked Vance, “at least grant the slaveholder the one quality he so anxiously claims,—that which he expresses in the word chivalry?”
Mr. Onslow shrugged his shoulders, and replied: “Put before the chivalrous slaveholder a poor fanatic of an Abolitionist, caught in the act of tampering with slaves, and then ask this representative of the chivalry to be magnanimous. No! the mean instincts of what he deems self-interest will make him a fiend in cruelty. He looks upon the Abolitionist very much as a gunpowder manufacturer would look upon the wandering Celt who should approach his establishment with a lighted pipe in his mouth; and he cheerfully sees the culprit handed over to the tender mercies of a mob of ignorant white barbarians.”
“Do you, then, deny that slavery develops any high qualities in the master?”
“And if it did, what right have I to develop my high qualities at another’s expense? Yes! Jefferson is right when he says: ‘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. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and his morals undepraved by such circumstances.’”
Mr. Onslow paced the deck for a moment, and then, returning, exclaimed: “O the unspeakable crimes, barbarities, and deviltries to which the system has educated men here at the South during the last thirty years! Educated not merely the poor and ignorant, but the rich and refined! The North knows hardly a tithe of the actual horrors. Worse than the wildest religious fanaticism, slavery sees men tortured, hung, mutilated, subjected to every conceivable indignity, cruelty, agony, simply because the victim is unsound, or suspected to be unsound, on the one supreme question. I myself have been often threatened, and sometimes the presentiment is strong upon me that my end will be a bloody one. I should not long be safe, were it not that in our region there are brave men who, like me, begin to question the divinity of the obscene old hag.”
Mr. Onslow again walked away, and then, coming close up to Vance, said in low tones: “But retribution must come,—as sure as God lives, retribution must come, and that speedily! Slavery must die, in order that Freedom and Civilization may live. I see it in all the signs of the times, in all the straws that drift by me on the current of events. Retribution must come,—come with bloodshed, anguish, and desolation to both North and South,—to Slavery, with spasms of diabolical cruelty, violence, and unholy wrath, and to Freedom with trials long and doubtful, but awaking the persistent energy which a righteous cause will inspire, and leading ultimately to permanent triumph and to the annihilation on this continent of the foul power which has ruled us so long, and which shall dare to close in deadly combat with the young genius of universal Liberty.”
Vance grasped Onslow by the hand, but seemed too excited to speak. Then, as if half ashamed of his emotion, he said, “Will there be men at the South, think you, to array themselves on the side of freedom, in the event of a collision?”
“There will be such men, but, until the slave-power shall be annihilated forever, they will be a helpless minority. A few rich leaders control the masses which Slavery has herself first imbruted. Crush out slavery, and there will be regenerators of the land who will spring up by thousands to welcome their brethren of the North, whose interests, like theirs, lie in universal freedom and justice.”
“You do not, then, believe those who tell us there is an eternal incompatibility between the people of the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States?”
“Bah! These exaggerations, the rhetoric of feeble spirits, and the logic of false, are stuff and rubbish to any true student of human nature. There is no incompatibility between North and South, except what slavery engenders and strives to intensify. Strike away slavery, and the people gravitate to each other by laws higher than the bad passions of your Rhetts, Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble writers of the South, who are eternally raving about the mean, low-born Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation and prejudice, are merely the tools of a few plotting oligarchs who hope to be the chiefs of a Southern Confederacy.”