Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

Sir, it was all glowing and fervid with sentiments like these, that, a few weeks ago, I entered this House,—sentiments transfused into my soul from without, even if I had no vital spark of nobleness to kindle them within. Imagine, then, my strong revulsion of feeling, when the first set, elaborate speech which I heard, was that of the gentleman from Virginia, proposing to extend ignorance to the uttermost bounds of this republic,—to legalize it, to enforce it, to necessitate it, and make it eternal. Since him, many others have advocated the same abhorrent doctrine. Not satisfied with dooming a whole race of our fellow-beings to mental darkness, impervious and everlasting,—not satisfied with drawing this black curtain of ignorance between man and nature, between the human soul and its God, from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande, across half the continent,—they desire to increase this race ten, twenty millions more, and to unfold and spread out this black curtain across the other half of the continent. When, sir, in the halls of legislation, men advocate measures like this, it is no figure of speech to say that their words are the clankings of multitudinous fetters; each gesture of their arms tears human flesh with ten thousand whips; each exhalation of their breath spreads clouds of moral darkness from horizon to horizon.

Twenty years ago, a sharp sensation ran through the nerves of the civilized world, at the story of a young man named Caspar Hauser, found in the city of Nuremberg, in Bavaria. Though sixteen or seventeen years of age, he could not walk nor talk. He heard without understanding; he saw without perceiving; he moved without definite purpose. It was the soul of an infant in the body of an adult. After he had learned to speak, he related that, from his earliest recollection, he had always been kept in a hole so small, that he could not stretch out his limbs, where he saw no light, heard no sound, nor even witnessed the face of the attendant who brought him his scanty food. For many years conjecture was rife concerning his history, and all Germany was searched to discover his origin. After a long period of fruitless inquiry and speculation, public opinion settled down into the belief that he was the victim of some great unnatural crime; that he was the heir to some throne, and had been sequestered by ambition; or the inheritor of vast wealth, and had been hidden away by cupidity; or the offspring of criminal indulgence, and had been buried alive to avoid exposure and shame. A German, Von Feuerbach, published an account of Caspar, entitled “The Example of a Crime on the Life of the Soul.” But why go to Europe to be thrilled with the pathos of a human being shrouded from the light of nature, and cut off from a knowledge of duty and of God? To-day, in this boasted land of light and liberty, there are three million Caspar Hausers; and, as if this were not enough, it is proposed to multiply their number tenfold, and to fill up all the western world with these proofs of human avarice and guilt. It is proposed that we ourselves should create and should publish to the world, not one, but untold millions of “Examples of a Crime on the Life of the Soul.” It is proposed that the self-styled freemen, the self-styled Christians, of fifteen great states in this American Union, shall engage in the work of procreating, rearing, and selling Caspar Hausers, often from their own loins; and if any further development of soul or of body is allowed to the American victims than was permitted to the Bavarian child, it is only because such development will increase their market value at the barracoons. It is not from any difference of motive, but only the better to insure that motive’s indulgence. The slave child must be allowed to use his limbs, or how could he drudge out his life in the service of his master? The slave infant must be taught to walk, or how, under the shadow of this thrice-glorious Capitol, could he join a coffle for New Orleans?

I know, sir, that it has been said, within a short time past, that Caspar Hauser was an impostor, and his story a fiction. Would to God that this could ever be said of his fellow-victims in America!

For another reason slavery is an unspeakable wrong. The slave is debarred from testifying against a white man. The courts will not hear him as a witness. By the principles of the common law, if any man suffers violence at the hands of another, he can prefer his complaint to magistrates, or to the grand juries of the courts, who are bound to give him redress. Hence the law is said to hold up its shield before every man for his protection. It surrounds him in the crowded street and in the solitary place. It guards his treasures with greater vigilance than locks or iron safes; and against meditated aggressions upon himself, his wife, or his children, it fastens his doors every night more securely than triple bolts of brass. But all these sacred protections are denied to the slave. While subjected to the law of force, he is shut out from the law of right. To suffer injury is his, but never to obtain redress. For personal cruelties, for stripes that shiver his flesh, and blows that break his bones, for robbery or for murder, neither he nor his friends can have preventive, remedy, or recompense. The father, who is a slave, may see son or daughter scored, mangled, mutilated, or ravished before his eyes, and he must be dumb as a sheep before its shearers. The wife may be dishonored in the presence of the husband, and, if he remonstrates or rebels, the miscreant who could burn with the lust will burn not less fiercely with a vengeance to be glutted upon his foiler.

Suppose, suddenly, by some disastrous change in the order of nature, an entire kingdom or community were to be enveloped in total darkness,—to have no day, no dawn, but midnight evermore! Into what infinite forms of violence and wrong would the depraved passions of the human heart spring up, when no longer restrained by the light of day, and the dangers of exposure! So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness. A hundred of his fellows may stand around him and witness the wrongs he suffers, but not one of them can appeal to jury, magistrate, or judge, for punishment or redress. The wickedest white man, in a company of slaves, bears a charmed life. There is not one of the fell passions that rages in his bosom which he cannot indulge with wantonness and to satiety, and the court has no ears to hear the complaint of the victim. How dearly does every honorable man prize character! The law denies the slave a character; for, however traduced, legal vindication is impossible.

And yet, infinitely flagrant as the anomaly is, the slave is amenable to the laws of the land for all offences which he may commit against others, though he is powerless to protect himself by the same law from offences which others may commit against him. He may suffer all wrong, and the courts will not hearken to his testimony; but for the first wrong he does, the same courts inflict their severest punishments upon him. This is the reciprocity of slave law.—to be forever liable to be proved guilty, but never able to prove himself innocent; to be subject to all punishments, but, through his own oath, to no protection. Hear what is said by the highest judicial tribunal of South Carolina: “Although slaves are held to be the absolute property of their owners, yet they have the power of committing crimes.”—2d Nott and McCord’s Rep., p. 179. A negro is so far amenable to the common law, that he may be one of three to constitute the number necessary to make a riot.—1st Bay’s Rep., 358. By the laws of the same state, a negro may be himself stolen, and he has no redress; but if he steals a negro from another, he shall be hung.—2d Nott and McCord’s Rep., 179. [An example of this penalty suffered by a slave.] This is the way that slave legislatures and slave judicatories construe the command of Christ, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also the same unto them.” Nay, by the laws of some of the slave states, where master and slave are engaged in a joint act, the slave is indictable, while the master is not.

What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and the parental? No savage nation, however far removed from the frontiers of civilization, has ever yet been discovered, where these rights were unknown or unhonored. The beasts of the forest feel and respect them. It is only in the land of slaves that they are blotted out and annihilated.

Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the conscience. The word “conscience” conveys a complex idea. It includes conscientiousness; that is, the sentiment or instinct of right and wrong; and also intelligence, which is the guide of this sentiment. Conscience, then, implies both the desire or impulse to do right, and also a knowledge of what is right. Nature endows us with the sentiment, but the knowledge we must acquire. Hence we speak of an “enlightened conscience,” meaning thereby not only the moral sense, but that knowledge of circumstances, relations, tendencies and results, which is necessary in order to guide the moral sense to just conclusions. Each of these elements is equally necessary to enable a man to feel rightly and to act rightly. Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions. The two were made to coëxist and operate together by Him who made the human soul. But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge. If one of these coördinate powers in the mental realm be annulled by the legislature, it may be called law; but it is repugnant to every law and attribute of God.

But, not satisfied with having invaded the human soul, and annihilated one of its most sacred attributes, in the persons of three millions of our fellow-men; not satisfied with having killed the conscience, as far as it can be killed by human device, and human force, in an entire race; we are now invoked to multiply that race, to extend it over regions yet unscathed by its existence, and there to call into being other millions of men, upon whose souls, and upon the souls of whose posterity, the same unholy spoliation shall be committed forever.

Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the religious nature of man. The dearest and most precious of all human rights is the right of private judgment in matters of religion. I am interested in nothing else so much as in the attributes of my Creator, and in the relations which he has established between me and himself, for time and for eternity. To investigate for myself these relations, and their momentous consequences; to “search the Scriptures;” to explore the works of God in the outward and visible universe; to ask counsel of the sages and divines of the ages gone by,—these are rights which it would be sacrilege in me to surrender; which it is a worse sacrilege in any human being or human government to usurp. Yet, by denying education to the slave, you destroy not merely the right, but the power, of personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the soul’s interests. Who so base as not to reverence the mighty champions of religious freedom, in days when the dungeon, the rack, and the fagot were the arguments of a government theology? Who does not reverence, I say, Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, and the whole army of martyrs whose blood reddened the axe of English intolerance? Yet it was only for this right of private judgment, for this independence of another man’s control in religious concernments, that the godlike champions of religious liberty perilled themselves and perished. Yet it is this very religious despotism over millions of men which it is now proposed, not to destroy, but to create. It is proposed not to break old fetters and cast them away, but to forge new ones and rivet them on. Sir, on the continent of Europe, and in the Tower of London, I have seen the axes, the chains, and other horrid implements of death, by which the great defenders of freedom for the soul were brought to their final doom,—by which political and religious liberty was cloven down; but fairer and lovelier to the view were axe and chain, and all the ghastly implements of death ever invented by religious bigotry or civil despotism to wring and torture freedom out of the soul of man;—fairer and lovelier were they all than the parchment roll of this House on which shall be inscribed a law for profaning one additional foot of American soil with the curse of slavery.