“The rich lands where white labour, even in small numbers, might be profitable, are either in the hands of large planters, or too heavily timbered for a single man. The only thing now preventing any poor white man in the South from gaining a fair competence, and even attaining wealth, is his own laziness, shiftlessness, and ignorance; for the small planters in the counties I have mentioned are deplorably ignorant. * * *
“There is one case I remember, which is to the point; the man lives in Choctaw county, and was born in Georgia. He does not own a negro, but has two boys, one sixteen, the other twelve. With the assistance of these boys, and the most imperfect agricultural implements, he made twenty-two bales of cotton, year before last, plenty of corn, and sufficient small grain for himself and family, although the season was more than ordinarily bad in his neighbourhood, while many of his neighbours, with five or six slaves, did not exceed him, and some made even less. He went on to his place without ten dollars in his pocket, gave his notes for eight hundred dollars, payable in one, two, and three years’ time, with interest at six per cent. per annum, and the ensuing year he purchased another one hundred and sixty acres for seven hundred and fifty dollars, also on time. This man is, however, far more intelligent and progressive in farming than those about him; he does not plant as did his grandfather, because his father did so, but endeavours to improve, and is willing to try an experiment occasionally.
“In my own county, in Alabama, there is a woman whose husband died shortly after the crop was planted, leaving her without a single servant, and no assistance except from a little son of twelve years of age: yet she went into the field, ploughed and picked her cotton, prepared her ground for the coming crop, and raised a second crop thereon.”
My conclusion, from the various evidences to which I have referred, must be a widely different one from Mr. Russell’s, from that which is generally thought to prevail with our leading capitalists, merchants, and manufacturers, and from that which seems to have been accepted by the Cotton Supply Associations of Liverpool and Manchester. It is this: that there is no physical obstacle in the way of our country’s supplying ten bales of cotton where it now does one. All that is necessary for this purpose is to direct to the cotton-producing region an adequate number of labourers, either black or white, or both. No amalgamation, no association on equality, no violent disruption of present relations is necessary. It is not even requisite that both black and white should work in the cotton fields. It is necessary that there should be more objects of industry, more varied enterprises, more general intelligence among the people, and especially that they should become, or should desire to become, richer, more comfortable, than they are.
The simple truth is, that even if we view in the brightest light of Fourth of July patriotism, the character of the whites of the cotton-producing region, and the condition of the slaves, we cannot help seeing that, commercially speaking, they are but in a very small part a civilized people. Undoubtedly a large number of merchants have had, at times, a profitable business in supplying civilized luxuries and conveniences to the South. The same is true of Mexico, of Turkey, of Egypt, and of Russia. Silk, cloth, and calico, shoes, gloves, and gold watches, were sold in some quantity in California, before its golden coffers were forcibly opened ten years ago. The Southern supply to commerce and the Southern demand of commerce is no more what it should be, comparing the resources of the South with those of other lands occupied by an active civilized community, than is that of any half-civilized community, than was that of California. Give the South a people moderately close settled, moderately well-informed, moderately ambitious, and moderately industrious, somewhat approaching that of Ohio, for instance, and what a business it would have! Twenty double-track railroads from the Gulf to the lakes, and twenty lines of ocean steamers, would not sufficiently meet its requirements. Who doubts, let him study the present business of Ohio, and ask upon what, in the natural resources of Ohio, or its position, could, forty years ago, a prediction of its present wealth and business have been made, of its present supply and its present demand have been made, which would compare in value with the commercial resources and advantages of position possessed to-day by any one of the Western cotton States?[54]
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES OF THE SOUTH.
Since the growth of the cotton demand has doubled the value of slave labour, and with it the pecuniary inducement to prevent negroes from taking care of themselves, hypotheses and easy methods for justifying the everlasting perpetuation of slavery have been multiplied. I have not often conversed with a planter about the condition of the slaves, that he did not soon make it evident, that a number of these were on service in his own mind, naïvely falling back from one to another, if a few inquiries about matters of fact were addressed him without obvious argumentative purpose. The beneficence of slavery is commonly urged by an exposition not only of the diet, and the dwellings, and the jollity, and the devotional eloquence of the negroes, but also by demonstrations of the high mental attainments to which individuals are already found to be arriving. Thus, there is always at hand, some negro mathematician, who is not merely held to be far in advance of the native Africans, but who beats most white men in his quickness and accuracy in calculation, and who is at the same time considered to be so thoroughly trustworthy, that he is constantly employed by his master as an accountant and collecting agent; or some negro whose reputation for ingenuity and skill in the management and repair of engines, sugar-mills, cotton-presses, or other machinery, is so well established that his services are more highly valued, throughout a considerable district, than any white man’s; or some negro who really manages his owner’s plantation, his agricultural judgment being deferred to, as superior to that of any overseer or planter in the county. Scarcely a plantation did I visit on which some such representative black man was not acknowledged and made a matter of boasting by the owner, who, calling attention perhaps to the expression of intelligence and mien of self-confidence which distinguished his premium specimen, would cheerfully give me a history of the known special circumstances, practically constituting a special mental feeding, by which the phenomenon was to be explained. Yet it might happen that the same planter would presently ask, pointing to the brute-like countenance of a moping field-hand, what good would freedom be to such a creature? And this would be one who had been provided from childhood with food, and shelter, and clothing, with as little consideration of his own therefor as for the air he breathed; who had not been allowed to determine for himself with whom he should associate; with what tools and to what purpose he should labour; who had had no care on account of his children; who had no need to provide for old age; who had never had need to count five-and-twenty; the highest demand upon whose faculties had been to discriminate between cotton and crop-grass, and to strike one with a hoe without hitting the other; to whose intelligence, though living in a civilized land, the pen and the press, the mail and the telegraph, had contributed nothing; who had no schooling as a boy; no higher duty as a man than to pick a given quantity of cotton between dawn and dark; and of whom, under this training and these confinements, it might well be wondered that he was found able to understand and to speak the language of human intelligence any more than a horse.
Again, one would assure me that he had witnessed in his own time an obvious advance in the quality of the slaves generally; they were more active, less stupid, employed a larger and more exact vocabulary, and were less superstitious, obstinate, and perverse in their habits of mind than when he was himself a boy; but I had only to presume that, with this rapid improvement, the negroes would soon be safely allowed to take some step toward freedom, to be assured with much more apparent confidence than before, that in the special quality which originally made the negro a slave, there had been no gain; that indeed it was constantly becoming more evident that he was naturally too deficient in forecasting capacity to be able to learn how to take civilized care of himself.
As a rule, when the beneficence of slavery is argued by Southerners, an advancing intellectual as well as moral condition of the mass of negroes is assumed, and the high attainments of individuals are pointed to as evidence of what is to be expected of the mass, if the system is not disturbed. Suggest that any modification of the system would enlarge its beneficence, however, and an exception to the general rule, as regards the single quality of providence, is at once alleged, and in such a manner, that one cannot but get the impression that, in this quality, the negro is believed to be retrograding as surely as he is advancing in everything else; and this is one method by which the unconditional perpetuation of the system, as it is, is justified. Such a justification must of course involve the supposition that in the tenth generation of an unremitted training, discipline, education, and custom in abject dependence upon a voluntary provision by others, for every wish of which the gratification is permitted, white men would be able, as a rule, to gain in the quality of providence and capacity for independent self-support.
As to the real state of the case, I find, in my own observation, no reason for doubting, what must be expected of those interested, that the general improvement of the slave is usually somewhat overrated, and his forecasting ability underrated. Measures intended to prevent a man from following his natural inclinations often have the effect of stimulating those inclinations; and I believe that the system which is designed not merely to relieve the negro from having any care for himself, but, as far as practicable, to forcibly prevent him from taking care of himself, in many particulars to which he has more or less instinctive inclination, instead of gradually suppressing this inclination, to some extent stimulates it, so that the Southern negro of to-day, however depraved in his desires, and however badly instructed, is really a man of more cunning, shrewdness, reticence, and persistence, in what he does undertake for himself, than his father was. The healthful use of these qualities (which would constitute providence) is, however, in general, successfully opposed by slavery, and, as far as the slave is concerned, nothing worse than this can be said of the system.