Beyond the Lines; Or, A Yankee Prisoner Loose in Dixie

by John James Geer

Antigua and St. Christopher’s are within gunshot of each other, and both are sugar-growing colonies. In the latter island, the proportion of blacks is smaller than in the former, yet St. Christopher’s has had some difficulty with the gradual system, while the quiet of Antigua has not been disturbed for one hour by immediate manumission. Such facts are worth more than volumes of sophistry.

If, however, the humane view be not allowed, let us look at the question in a pecuniary one. The results in this direction, of the British Emancipation Bill, are truly wonderful. To the astonishment of even the most sanguine friends of abolition, the plantations of the colonies are more productive, more easily managed, and accepted as security for higher sums or mortgages, than they ever were under the slave system. It appears from an official statement, that in the first quarter of the present year, there is an increase over the average of the first quarter of the three years preceding emancipation in the great staples of West Indian produce exported, as follows:

From Georgetown, Demarara, twenty per cent. increase. From Berbice, fifty per cent. increase. Coffee increased about one hundred per cent.

The hundred million indemnity thus appears to have been a compensation for having been made richer.

Now, with all this weight of testimony, it is impossible for the candid reader to cleave any longer to the idea that emancipation is the cause of all this misery.

“If,” says a distinguished logician, “you have a right to make another man a slave, he has a right to make you a slave.” “And if we have no right,” says Ramsey, “to sell him, no one has a right to purchase him. If ever negroes, bursting their chains, should come (which Heaven forbid!) on the European coast, to drag whites of both sexes from their families, to chain them, and conduct them to Africa, and mark them with a hot iron; if whites stolen, sold, purchased by criminals, and placed under the guidance of merciless inspectors, were immediately compelled, by the stroke of the whip, to work in a climate injurious to their health, when at the close of each day they could have no other consolation than that of advancing another step to the tomb, no other perspective than to suffer and to die in all the anguish of despair; if devoted to misery and ignominy, they were excluded from all the privileges of society, and declared legally incapable of judicial action, their testimony not admitted against the black class; if, driven from the sidewalks, they were compelled to mingle with the animals in the middle of the street; if a conscription were made to have them lashed in a mass, and their backs, to prevent gangrene, covered with pepper and salt; if the forfeit for killing them were but a trifling sum; if a reward were offered for apprehending those who escaped from slavery; if those who escaped were hunted by a pack of hounds, trained to carnage; if, blaspheming the Divinity, the blacks pretended that by their origin they had permission of heaven to preach passive obedience and resignation to the whites; if greedy, hireling writers published that, for this reason, just reprisals might be exercised against rebellious whites, and that white slaves were happy, more happy than the peasants in the bosom of Africa; in a word, if all the arts of cunning calumny, all the strength and fury of avarice, all the invention of ferocity, were directed against you by a coalition of merchants, priests, kings, soldiers and colonists, what a cry of horror would resound through these countries! To express it, new epithets would be sought. A crowd of writers, and particularly poets, would exhaust their eloquent lamentations, provided, that having nothing to fear, there was something to gain.

“Europeans, reverse this hypothesis, and see what you are. Yes, I repeat it, there is not a vice, not a species of wickedness, of which Europe is not guilty towards negroes, of which she has not shown them the example. Avenging God! suspend thy thunder, exhaust thy compassion in giving her time and courage to repair, if possible, these horrors and atrocities!”

Now, these things are all perfectly reasonable. Though written a long time ago, they are now not the less true; and those of us who may live to see the end of this war will know well the cause of it; and I trust that the rising generation may profit by the history of their fathers. May they learn from their earliest years to denounce the name that offers an apology for the dark curse of slavery!

It was of this evil that Jefferson spoke in the original Declaration of Independence, drafted by himself, but suppressed by Southern influence. The language is:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him; capturing them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his prerogative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”