Border and Bastille

by George A. Lawrence

First, take the North great battle or, rather, stalking-horse—Abolition.

Let no reader be here unnecessarily alarmed. On that terrible slave question, over which wiser brains have puzzled, till they became lost in a labyrinth of self-contradiction, I purpose to speak only a few cursory words. It is beyond dispute that a vast extent of the richest land in the South can only be kept in cultivation by the Africans, who can thrive and fatten where the white man withers helplessly. No one that has realized the present state of our own West Indian colonies, will believe that the enfranchised negro can be depended upon as a daily laborer for hire. The listless indolence inherent in all tropical races will assert itself, as soon as free agency begins or is restored. With a bright sun overhead, and a sufficiency of sustenance for the day before him, money will not tempt Sambo to toil among cotton or canes, should the spirit move him to lie under his own vine or fig-tree; and he is unfortunately peculiarly liable to these lazy fits just when his services are most vitally important to the interests of his employer. From so much ground having been thrown out of cultivation in the West Indies, the supply of free negro labor is perhaps now nearly equal to the ordinary demand; but we all know how, in the early times of emancipation, the fortunes of our planters fared. There has been, in all ages, certain cases of apparent political necessity, hardly to be justified—sometimes hardly to be defended—on purely moral grounds. Whether the existence and maintenance of a slave population in the South be one of these huge dilemmas or paradoxes is a question that any English or Northern abolitionist is about as capable of determining, as he would be of legislating for Mangolian Tartary.

The two blackest points in all the dark system—for dark it is, looking at it how you will—are first, the complication of sin and shame arising from the mixture of the races; and, secondly, the separation of husband and wife from each other, and from their infant families, by sale. I do firmly believe that the recurrence of the former evil becomes rarer every day, for advance of civilization only seems to strengthen the natural repugnance—with which moral sentiment has nothing to do—existing between the Anglo-Saxon and African blood.

The subject is not a pleasant one to dilate upon, but that such a repugnance does exist, few that have been brought into actual contact with the "colored" element en masse, will be inclined to deny. I think some of those scientific philosophers who write volumes to prove that there is no physical difference between the races, would feel their theories strangely modified after such a practical trial. If this be an immutable fact, it may work in the South for the prevention of evil as well as of good; in the North it can only work for bitter harm. In Delaware, where the free negroes are found in unusually large proportions to the whites, they are notoriously more hardly treated than in any other State of the original Union; and fanaticism must be blind and deaf indeed if recent events in New York have not taught it to doubt whether the tender mercies of the Abolitionists are so gentle, after all. While things are so (and there is scant hope of their changing within many generations) the position of the black freedman in the North will never be much higher than that of the Chinese in California, where a scintilla of civil rights is the utmost that the unhappy aliens can claim. In the South, I do greatly fear, there is no alternative between suppression and subjugation.

There is no reason why the second great evil—the separation of families (under a certain age) should not be entirely removed by proper legislation; and I believe measures to this effect have already been mooted in more than one of the slaveholding States. Putting these two points aside, I believe that the condition of the slave—especially where the "patriarchal" system prevails—is infinitely better than that of the coolies: the unutterable horrors and waste of life in the Chincha Islands have never been matched in Kentucky or Louisiana. I believe that the whole roll of authenticated cruelties exercised on the negroes in any one year would be outnumbered and outdone by the brutalities practiced within the same time upon the apprentices in our own coast trade, and upon seamen—white and colored—in the American merchant-service. With all this it should be remembered that the ordinary slave-rations far exceed, both in quantity and quality, the Sunday meal of an English west-country laborer; and that the comforts of all the aged and infirm, whom the master is, of course, obliged to maintain, are infinitely superior to those enjoyed by the like inmates of our most lenient work-houses.

I think it is a mistake to suppose that the negroes, as a race, pine for freedom; though, when it is suggested to them, they may grasp at it with eagerness, much as they would at any other novelty. Many, no doubt, can appreciate liberty, and use it as wisely and well as any freeborn white: gradual emancipation would be one of the grandest schemes that could be propounded to human benevolence: it is rife with difficulty, but surely not impracticable. The indiscriminate and abrupt manumission of the negro would, I am convinced, turn a quaint, simple, childish creature—prone to mirth, and not easily discontented if his indolence be not taxed too hardly, susceptible, too, of strong affection and fidelity to his master, as many recent events have shown—into a sullen, slothful, insolent savage, never remembering the past, except as a sort of vague excuse for the present indulgence of his brutal instincts, conscious that every man's hand is against him, without the meek patience of a pariah; but only venturing to retaliate by occasional outbursts of ruffianism or rapine. Where a body of these men is subjected at once to military discipline, and overawed by the presence of white soldiers in overwhelming numbers, the same danger cannot exist; yet I doubt gravely as to the ultimate success, in any point of view, of those negro levies. It seems hard to say, but I do think it is better for us—even for the sake of Christian charity—to leave that Great Anomaly to be dealt with by God in His own time.

Were the cause stronger than it is, it would be damaged, with many moderate thinkers, by the absurdities and violence of its moat zealous advocates. Ward Beecher, the great Abolition apostle, fairly outdoes the earlier eccentricities of Spurgeon; every trick of stage effect—such as the sudden display of a white slave-child—is freely employed in the pulpit of Plymouth Church, and each successful "point" is rewarded by audible murmurs of applause. One fact stamps the man very sufficiently. In the latter part of last May, he was starting for a four-months' absence in Europe; it was purely a pleasure trip, the expenses to be paid by "his affectionate congregation;" and the whole arrangements were thoroughly comfortable, not to say luxurious. The text of his last sermon was taken from Acts, chapter xx. 18-27—words that even an Apostle never spoke till, standing in the shadow of bonds and death, he said farewell to saints who should never look upon his face any more.

Theodore Tilton, another shining light, much distinguished himself by announcing that there was no doubt that "the negroes were destined to be The Church of Christ:" he founded his discovery not so much upon the strong religious feeling prevalent among "colored" persons, as on that verse in the Songs of Solomon, where the Bride professes herself "black but comely."

It would be well if such absurdities were all one had to record: some ebullitions of abolitionist zeal will hardly bear writing down. Take one instance. At a large Union meeting at Philadelphia, the Reverend A. H. Gilbert, speaking of the Proclamation, and its probable effects in the South, did not deny that it might entail a repetition of the San Domingo horrors on a vaster scale. "But," said he—"speaking calmly and as a Christian minister—I affirm that it would be better that every woman and child in the South should perish, than that the principles of Confederate Statesmen should prevail."

In all that huge assembly, there was not one man found who—for the love of wife, or sister, or daughter, or mother—would rise to smite the brutal blasphemer on the mouth; nay, the Quaker brood cheered him to the echo.