That a southern State has no real labor class with potent influence upon the public, puts it as far behind the most enlightened communities in political and governmental condition, as it was with its slaves behind them in productive condition. Such a State lacks a most essential organ of the highest types of democracy.[141]
To sum up: Slavery disqualified the white men and women of the south for the domestic and business management proper to this era; and ever since emancipation the presence of a large number of negroes available for labor in house and on the farm, and preventing the coming in of any other labor, has powerfully helped both races in their efforts naturally made to retain the familiar ways of the old system. Thus the south has been sadly retarded in her due economical rehabilitation. In the second place, it has kept the political influence of labor at the minimum, and consequently sent her backwards in true democracy, while England, the English colonies, and the northern States, are slowly but surely going forward.
These are the main things. Let me in briefest mention suggest some of their results, which, at first blush, seem to be independent.
Slavery engendered among the whites a disrespect for labor, which, although now at last dying out, is still of hurtful influence.
As negroes were always and everywhere in number sufficient to do every task of labor, there was but little demand for labor-saving machines and methods—a fact which prevented the southern whites from developing the inventive faculty equally with their northern brothers. We all are beginning to see that, except in much of agriculture and other activities in which the process is that of nature and not of art, the future of industry belongs more and more to the constantly improving machine.
Think of such things as these in the brood of evils brought forth by slavery;—agriculture primitive or superannuated in many particulars; our entire structure of investment, production, and occupation bottomed upon slaves, property in which could be, and was, totally destroyed by a stroke of the pen; immigration both from Europe and the north repelled; slowness in exploiting our water power and mines; inferior common schools, and lack of town-meeting government due to the sparseness of the population and their roving habits which were incident to the plantation system. I have given some consideration to these in the “Old and New South,” and I refer you to that.[142]
Of course had there never been any negro slavery in America we should have escaped the brothers’ war, its spilling of blood, its waste of wealth, and the long sickness of the section unto death which has ensued. And to-day in solid prosperity, institutions, government, and progressiveness in everything good, the section would be abreast of the other. Nay, her better climate, her agricultural products—especially her cotton, which she would have learned to make with white labor—these and other resources would, I fully believe, have by this time pushed her far into the lead. As it actually is, she is far, far behind. She has been sorely scourged, not for any moral guilt.
“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.”
It was because she did that which the wisest and best had done—the Greeks who gave the world culture and democracy, the Jews who gave it religion, the Romans who gave it law and civil institutions. She really did far better than they did. She did not enslave the free. She merely took some of the only inveterate slaves upon earth out of lawless slavery, in which they would have otherwise remained indefinitely without recognition of the dearest human rights, and placed them in a far other slavery which was for them an unparalleled rise in liberty and well-being; which was, as becomes more and more probable with time, the only opportunity by which any considerable portion of the negro race can ever evolve upward into the capability of enlightened self-government. In doing this she unconsciously antagonized the purposes of the iron-hearted powers guarding the American union, and when the critical moment of that union came, they dashed her to pieces.
It will be many a year before the pathos of southern history can be fully told. I must satisfy myself here by saying only that the curse of African slavery to her has been of magnitude and weight incredible, and that one cannot yet be sure when it will end.