Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

Mr. Gayle. Ten times as many.

Mr. Mann. Ten times as many! Ten times 300,000 is 3,000,000; and allowing six persons to each family, this would give a population of 18,000,000 directly connected with slaveholding; while the whole free population of the south, in 1840, was considerably less than five millions!

Mr. Meade, of Virginia, here interposed and said, that where the father or mother owned slaves, they were considered the joint property of the family. I think, if you include the grown and the young, there are about three millions interested in slave property.

Mr. Mann resumed. My data lead me to believe that the number does not now exceed two millions; but, at the time of the adoption of the constitution, the number directly connected with slaveholding must have been less than one million. Yet this one million have already managed to acquire the broad States of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, beyond the limits of the treaty of 1783; when, at the time the “compromises of the constitution” were entered into, not one of the parties supposed that we should ever acquire territory beyond those limits. And this has been done for the benefit, (if it be a benefit,) of that one million of slaveholders, against what is now a free population of fifteen millions. And, in addition to this, it is to be considered that the non-slaveholding population of the slave states have as direct and deep an interest as any part of the country, adverse to the extension of slavery. If all our new territory be doomed to slavery, where can the non-slaveholders of the slaveholding states emigrate to? Are they not to be considered? Has one half the population of the slaveholding states rights, which are paramount, not only to the rights of the other half, but to the rights of all the free states besides? for such is the claim. No, sir. I say that, if slavery were no moral or political evil, yet, according to all principles of justice and equity, the slaveholders have already obtained their full share of territory, though all the residue of this continent were to be annexed to the Union, and we were to become, in the insane language of the day, “an ocean-bound republic.”

I now proceed to consider the nature and effects of slavery, as a reason why new-born communities should be exempted from it. First, let me treat of its economical or financial, and, secondly, of its moral aspects.

Though slaves are said to be property, they are the preventers, the wasters, the antagonists of property. So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both. It blasts worldly prosperity. Other things being equal, a free people will thrive and prosper, in a mere worldly sense, more than a people divided into masters and slaves. Were we so constituted as to care for nothing, to aspire to nothing, beyond mere temporal well being, this well being would counsel us to abolish slavery wherever it exists, and to repel its approach wherever it threatens.

Enslave a man, and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. The slave does not participate in the value of the wealth he creates. All he earns another seizes. A free man labors, not only to improve his own condition, but to better the condition of his children. The mighty impulse of parental affection repays for diligence, and makes exertion sweet. The slave’s heart never beats with this high emotion. However industrious and frugal he may be, he has nothing to bequeath to his children,—or nothing save the sad bonds he himself has worn. Fear may make him work, but hope—never. When he moves his tardy limbs, it is because of the suffering that goads him from behind, and not from the bright prospects that beckon him forward in the race.

What would a slave owner at the south think, should he come to Massachusetts, and there see a farmer seize upon his hired man, call in a surgeon, and cut off all the flexor muscles of his arms and legs? I do not ask what he would think of his humanity, but what would he think of his sanity? Yet the planter does more than this when he makes a man a slave. He cuts deeper than the muscles; he destroys the spirit that moves the muscles.

In all ages of the world, among all nations, wherever the earnings of the laborer have been stolen from him, his energies have gone with his earnings. Under the villeinage system of England, the villeins were a low, idle, spiritless race; dead to responsibility; grovelling in their desires; resistant of labor; without enterprise; without foresight. This principle is now exemplified in the landlord and tenant system of Ireland. If a tenant is to be no better off for the improvements he makes on an estate, he will not make the improvements. Look at the seigniories of New York,—the anti-rent districts as they are now called;—every man acquainted with the subject knows that both people and husbandry are half a century behind the condition of contiguous fee-simple proprietorships. All history illustrates the principle, that when property is insecure, it will not be earned. If a despot can seize and confiscate the property of his subject at pleasure, the subject will not acquire property, and thereby give to himself the conspicuousness that invites the plunder. And if this be so when property is merely insecure, what must be the effect when a man has no property whatever in his earnings? Who does not know that a slave, who can rationally hope to purchase his freedom, will do all the work he ever did before, and earn his freedom-money besides? Slavery, therefore, though claiming to be a kind of property, is the bane of property; and the more slaves there are found in the inventory of a nation’s wealth, the less in value will the aggregate of that inventory be.

This is one of the reasons why slave labor is so much less efficient than free labor. The former can never compete with the latter; and while the greater service is performed with cheerfulness, the smaller is extorted by fear. Just as certain as that the locomotive can outrun the horse, and the lightning outspeed the locomotive, just so certain is it that he who is animated by the hopes and the rewards of freedom will outstrip the disheartened and fear-driven slave.