As to the words which you quote from the declaration of independence, Jefferson, the draftsman, doubtless, meant them to include the African; but the majority of the congress making it, and the American people actually ratifying it, almost unanimously held that the African was not enough of man to come within the words.
A Roman law parallel aptly illustrates. In the Institutes it is said that slavery is contrary to the law of nature, for under this every one is born free;[19] and again, that slavery was established by the jus gentium under which a man is made subject to the dominion of another contra naturam, that is, against nature, against jus naturale, or the law of nature.[20] And in the Pandects this is weakly echoed.[21] But the actual enactment of the corpus juris civilis fortifies slavery as it had been established all over the world by the jus gentium with these plain words: “The master has power of life and death over his slave; and whatever property the slave acquires, he acquires for the master.”[22]
Our forefathers making the declaration of independence, and the Romans of Justinian’s time, sentimentalized in the same words over the natural right to equality and liberty of all human beings, and also resolutely held on to their slaves. The solemn assertion that all men are created equal and of inalienable liberty made by American slaveholders was but a repetition of what Roman slaveholders had already said; and it is curious that the fact has not attracted due attention.
I fancy that my objector now shoots his last bolt. He exclaims that southerners were incredibly dull and obtuse not to discern that resistlessly puissant economical, political, moral, and intellectual forces, not of America only but of the entire world, were leaguing together against slavery, and therefore they ought to have fled in time from the coming wrath and evil day.
A satisfactory reply need not postulate any other than ordinary intelligence and alertness for the south. Note how people dwell near overflowing rivers, or a sea of tidal waves, or live volcanoes, or in earthquake districts, or near a tribe of scalping redskins, where they, their wives and children, keep merry as the day is long until calamity comes. The warning of the abolitionists was too late. Suppose we had given the inhabitants of Herculaneum or Pompeii or St. Pierre timely counsel to abandon their homes and settle beyond the reach of eruption. How many would have done it? I knew hundreds of people, and among all of them there was but one who showed by his actions that he foresaw the early fall of slavery. That was Mr. Frank L. Upson of Lexington, Georgia, a highly accomplished and well-informed man. In 1856, I think it was, he sold all of his slaves, declaring as his reason that he believed if he kept them he would see them freed without compensation. He was so serious that he declared this even to his purchasers. They merely laughed, and everybody else laughed too, to think how green he was to give them the good bargain that he did. But after the war he enjoyed comfort from the money those slaves had brought him, when all his neighbors had been plunged into hard times by emancipation. There may have been others that did like him. There could not have been many such, for I have never been able to hear of a single one.
We did like the rest of mankind do or would have done. We stuck to our homes and business until the tidal wave washed them away. Yet there are wise ones who are positive that had we not been far more dull and unforeseeing than the average we would have understood many years before the final convulsion that the forces arrayed against slavery were irresistible, and surrendered it in time to get compensated emancipation. Look at the monopolists now preying upon the public in every corner of the land. They are confident that their holdings are impregnable against democracy coming invincibly against them. Look at the great mass of our population, shutting the fresh air out of their houses in order to be comfortably warm, and thereby rearing parents—especially mothers—who unawares are incessantly developing tuberculosis to destroy themselves and their children. Some years hence when resumption by government of its functions now granted to private persons has dispossessed all the monopolists, and when every dwelling-house is kept perfectly ventilated and free from infected air, there will be other wise ones to believe that hindsight is just the same as foresight, and to inveigh against the monopolists and parents just mentioned for their unwonted stupidity and improvidence.
CHAPTER III
UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS