Slavery in Maryland briefly considered

by John L. Carey

If it is evident, from the foregoing, that the state of servitude has been well adapted to the condition of the negroes who were brought to this country; if it appears beyond all doubt that they have improved in that state; it is no less clear that the condition of Slavery is not adapted to their continued improvement—that it is in fact incompatible with their improvement beyond a certain point.

The uses of Slavery are those of tutelage; in other words, Slavery is beneficial and proper only in so far as it is a species of tutelage. But a state of tutelage must have an end; the child in due time grows beyond it. So of a race in servitude—for it is as a race that we are considering the negro and his position.

The law of progress is an inherent principle in every form of social organization; it is the mark of its vitality and the main element thereof. Efforts indeed have been made, and long persevered in, to defeat this tendency to development. Hence the organism of castes in Hindostan; hence the Chinese policy of prohibiting changes in the most trivial as well as the most important things. In both instances the mind is dwarfed, and unnatural exhibitions are produced from which civilization turns away with disgust. Society can not be petrified in fixed forms; stereotyped in one immovable aspect, like metal fused and cast in a mould. It has a vital principle; it is a living organization; it has powers of growth and expansion which must go on to their development, or the vital force, suppressed, will generate disorder in the system and manifest itself in the shapes of maladies and eruptions.

But what need is there of argument or illustration on so plain a point? Is it not palpable to the perception of every one that the idea of Slavery is utterly repugnant to the attainment by man, of his due stature and proportions in the world, of moral and civil action? The ascendency which superior intelligence gives may be used to control the less enlightened, if it is found that control is necessary to the latter, from the circumstances of their position and their inability to govern themselves. But the ascendency of superior intelligence should be itself controlled by superior benevolence and justice; it should not be made the mere instrument of selfish ends. Slavery, let it be repeated, when right and proper, is a species of guardianship; a form of tutelage. In this view a good thing, it becomes, like other good things, when perverted, a pernicious evil.

I am aware that some distinguished gentlemen at the south maintain the doctrine that Slavery, as a permanent institution, is no evil; and they contend that, as a mode of organizing labor, it is better than the English system which makes the operatives by the mass the slaves of a social organization, which, cutting them off from the domestic sympathies of their employers, leaves them to a cold isolation and to the slender resources of a pittance, in the shape of scanty wages, and to the poor rates, contributed by a calculating cupidity, and reduced to the lowest minimum on this side of starvation.

It would not be to the purpose to enter into a comparison of these two systems. It is enough to know that neither can be permanent; because both are incompatible with the progress of mankind. There is this, however, to be noted. The aristocracy of Great Britain hold in servitude men of their own blood, race, and complexion; elements of Anglo-Saxon hardihood; bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; millions worthy of a better state, and capable of appreciating better things. In this republic the servile class are of a race and complexion different from ours; just entering upon the borders of civilization, adapted from their characteristic disposition to service, and rapidly improving in the service of their superiors; incapable of holding any other relation, because incapable of being harmoniously blended with the general mass of society—a class whose condition, if liberated from the control and protection of individual masters yet remaining in the community, would be one of exposure to a thousand ills from which they are now shielded. Gurth, the born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, found shelter under his master’s roof; in sickness a master’s care; in old age, sustenance from a master’s hand. He was one of a household sharing in the life thereof, in its loves and fears, its attachments and feuds, its domestic endearments, its homefelt enjoyments. The English operative of this day has no such associations as these. There are superiors around him; but he finds a protector in none of them. Hence his feelings towards the wealthy and noble are apt to be characterized by sullen dislike, or by a mean servility. As for sympathy, he may look for that to the spinning jenny and the cotton bale, and let his affections grow to them if they can.

The world will behold in due time the disruption of that vast organization of labor by which the ruling class in Great Britain have concentrated the energies of the empire, and directed the same for so many years to the extension of British power and dominion, which was but a generalized mode of aggrandizing themselves. That system has answered great purposes, has accomplished great results. But it has generated in its progress a mass of social and political evil which now clogs its working, and is gradually impairing its inmost springs of action. Civilization is expanding beyond the narrow basis of a class government. Humanity cries aloud in the name of her millions. Men are something more than machines. The object of human existence is not merely to gain, by incessant toil, the means of subsistence, that the ability to toil on may be maintained. The mass of mankind were never designed to be the drudges of a few, and to rest in that position, as the highest attainment for them. The progress of freedom is but the progress of individual development; its results are the results of individual activity, extended more and more to the integers of society. Men have found that power, in whatever depository lodged, has been used by rulers in forgetfulness of its true uses, in forgetfulness of the general good, in a blind persuasion that it was theirs by an inherent right, to be employed for their aggrandizement or pleasure. Thus the Priesthood first, as the agents of heaven, and holding intercourse with the celestial powers; then the monarch, as the personal representative of Deity; next the highest order of men in the State, ὁι αριστοι, as possessing the combined wisdom of the wisest; all these have held the supreme power in succession, in the progress of freedom, and all have perverted the functions of government. Instead of shepherds, guarding well the flock, they have been as hirelings, fleecing the flock. The assumption of sovereign power by the general body of the people, is the result of continued disappointments—of continued failures to find a depository where sovereignty might be safely deposited and righteously and wisely administered.

It will not do for the rulers of nations nor for the masters of slaves to regard themselves as the holders of power for their own purposes merely—but as the holders of a trust which they are to discharge with fidelity, and which they are to give up, when their agency as the administrators of authority is no longer productive of good.

V. Of Slavery in Maryland.

It is known that Slavery once existed in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the New England States. It has been abolished in those States, while it continues to exist in Maryland, and in the States south of the Potomac and the Ohio.