The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

“The monuments of the ancient Egyptians carry him back to the morning of time—older than the pyramids; they furnish the evidence both of his national identity and his social degradation before history began. We first behold him a slave in foreign lands; we then find the great body of his race slaves in their native land; and after thirty centuries, illuminated by both ancient and modern civilization, have passed over him, we still find him a slave of savage masters, as incapable as himself of even attempting a single step in civilization—we find him there still, without government or laws of protection, without letters or arts of industry, without religion, or even the aspirations which would raise him to the rank of an idolater; and in his lowest type, his almost only mark of humanity is, that he walks erect in the image of the Creator. Annihilate his race to-day, and you will find no trace of his existence within half a score of years; and he would not leave behind him a single discovery, invention, or thought worthy of remembrance by the human family.”[85]

If my reader deems Toombs’s picture overdrawn let him consult those parts of the recent work of a most diligent and conscientious investigator describing the negroes of West Africa, and note what is there told of heathen practices still surviving,—slavery of women to their polygamic husbands, pitiless destruction of useless members of the family, robbery, murder, cannibalism, the utter want of chastity.[86] We quote this as to slavery, which is especially important here:

“Slavery, having existed from time immemorial, is bound up with the whole social and economic organization of West African society. There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of slaves: those captured in war, those purchased from outside the tribe,—usually from the interior,—and the native-born slaves. All alike are mere chattels, and by law are absolutely subject to the master’s will without redress. But in practice a difference is made, for obvious reasons, between native-born slaves and captives taken from hostile tribes. The latter are numerous, and the severest forms of labor fall to their lot. They are treated with constant neglect, and cruelly punished on the slightest provocation. Their lives are at no time secure; they serve as victims for the sacrifice; when sick they are driven into the jungle; in times of scarcity they starve.”[87]

The master has the power of life and death over all slaves.[88]

The same author adds: “The pawning of persons for debt is exceedingly common. If the debt is never paid in full, the pawn and his descendants become slaves in perpetuity.”[89]

Surely the reader who has attended to these details which I have given from Mr. Tillinghast will admit that the southern master transferred the African into a condition far better than any he could find at home. In the south two agencies gave him beneficent favor to which he and his fathers had always been strangers. The law of the land protected his life and shielded him from cruelty; and his high market value made it the interest of his American master not to overwork or under- feed and clothe him. And he was introduced into the first stage of monogamic life, which he developed steadily and rapidly until he was freed. In this he was travelling the only true road up from barbarism. If he could have but stayed in it until, after some generations—perhaps centuries—chaste wives and mothers had been evolved, he would have stood firmly on the threshold of permanent civilization and improvement.

Whatever evil of southern slavery to the negro my readers, prompted by the root-and-branch abolitionists, may suggest, they will find on reflection that it would have been far greater to him and more frequent had he remained in Africa. Separation of members of the family has been repeatedly emphasized as a most horrible evil of slavery in the south. Such separation was incalculably more cruel and frequent in West Africa than it ever was among the negro slaves in America. And how have the root-and-branch abolitionists mended matters? What do we see in the new south, now that slavery, the great rupturer of family circles, is no more, and a master no longer can part parent and child, or husband and wife? Before the end of the brothers’ war there had not been a single separation of a family among my father’s slaves. At much expense and inconvenience he had bought the husband of one and the wife of another in order to keep each one of these two pairs united. In 1866, Bob, a boy of sixteen, who, because of his obedience and merry-making gifts, had always been a greatly indulged pet, signalized his new-found freedom by stealing from the house of one of our neighbors some articles of considerable value. He fled from justice, and, never seeing his parents or his brothers and sisters again, died among strangers. In 1868, Lewis abandoned his wife Esther and their young child, and went to a distant town. Some ten years afterwards, Bill, a brother of Bob, and several years younger, convicted of an unmentionable crime, received a ten years’ chain-gang sentence. Not long before this the body of one of his two wives who was at the time out of his favor was found in a well. Reputable whites living near were convinced that he had murdered her. If that be true, it should count as a separation. While he was serving out his sentence his remaining wife married again, and this should be set down also as a separation. Bob, Lewis, Esther, and Bill were slaves of my father. He did not own twenty in all. This example shows how, as to the same negroes, southern slavery operated to prevent separation of families, and how freedom has operated to encourage and stimulate it. It is not an exceptional example. My maternal grandfather and a maternal aunt owned each many more slaves than my father did. Some of my father’s near neighbors had slaves in considerable number. In all of these slaves, while I knew them, there never was a separation of a family except by death or the voluntary act of parties to a marriage? But when they were freed in 1865 separation at once became rife, and it has always been active. What I have just told is fairly representative of the new south throughout the cotton States.

There were now and then sales made of slaves which sundered man and wife, and parent and child; but such were extremely few, and their proportion was steadily decreasing under two potent influences. Restraint of them by the law had commenced and was growing. But the stronger influence was custom and public opinion. Before approaching sales at public outcry by sheriffs or representatives of a deceased, and also before private sales, the slaves to be sold were given opportunity to find their new masters. There was generally a neighbor who owned husband, wife, parents, or children, or wanted a cook, washerwoman, seamstress, boy to make a carpenter, striker, or blacksmith of, somebody careful with stock, etc., and the upshot would be that the man selected by the slave had got him. The seller had natural feelings. His wife and all of his children would do their utmost to get such new masters as the negroes preferred. I shall always cherish in memory the affectionate regard which the mother of the household and all the family habitually showed to their slaves. As I write, a sweet reminiscence comes of how the children would always clamor and mutiny against the most merited punishment of their nurse by father or overseer. There is no doubt that the slave steadily won larger place in the domestic affections, and that his treatment by each generation of masters was more kind and humane. And as a part of this amelioration the percentage of forced separation of slave families was all the while becoming less.

Let us devote a moment to the negro trader, as he was called, and his slave-pens, which were the subjects of much and heated invective. The first suggestion in order here is that there were such in West Africa, far more frequent and far exceeding in cruelty any ever known in the south. To take the African away from the latter and turn him over to the former was great kindness to him. I remind my readers, in the next place, that the factors constantly minimizing separation of slaves from other members of the family—law, public opinion becoming more sensitive, custom becoming more merciful, and the sway of the domestic affections stronger—were pari passu humanizing every incident of the commerce in slaves as property. Lastly, the negro trader and the pen, by reason of the small number of the slaves to whom they caused real suffering, were mercy and prosperous condition itself beside the convict gangs and pens which emancipation has put in their place, as will come out more clearly in a short while.

His use of the lash was a dire accusation of the master. The reader thinks at once of the relevant words in a famous passage so often quoted from one of President Lincoln’s messages: “If this struggle is to be prolonged till ... every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” This was said March 4, 1865, a month and five days only before General Lee’s surrender, and when all the great battles of the brothers’ war had been fought,—a war by far the most sanguinary in the world’s history. Blood did sometimes follow the blow of the lash, but not often. The overseer who could not correct without breaking the skin always lost his place. When the statement of Mr. Lincoln just commented on is compared with the actual fact, it appears to be one of the most extravagant hyperboles ever uttered.