Slavery in Maryland briefly considered

by John L. Carey

But in the West Indies the blacks, for the most part, are scarcely one grade beyond the natives in Africa. They are not so transfused throughout a white population as our negroes are; they live in gangs or communities to themselves, where they speak a gibberish dialect, and retain their native superstitions. They are a far inferior race to the colored people of the United States. Of course they would not work when compulsion ceased; their highest ideas of freedom included nothing more precious than the privilege of being idle. And it is very well for the existing generation of whites in those islands, that the emancipated mass preferred torpid repose to activity.

At present the planters of Jamaica are obtaining laborers from Africa, under the name of emigrants, who, by a pleasant fiction, are entered as volunteers in the fields. The British cruisers, when they capture a slaver at sea, send the cargo to the West Indies, and thus benefit the plantations, at the expense of the slave captain and owners—the latter suffering confiscation, and the former running the risk of being hanged. So, certain of the eagle tribe, disdaining to fish, sit on a high tree or rock and watch the fishing hawk; and when the latter secures his prey in his talons and is rising with it, the eagle darts forth from his eminence and pounces upon the spoil, which he appropriates without further ceremony to the use of his own nest.

Nevertheless, it is not my purpose to dwell on this point of the adaptation of slave labor to hot climates. We may safely leave it to time and to the progress of the age to determine that matter as it ought to be determined. It is Slavery in Maryland which we are considering; and in Maryland the heat of the climate can not be taken into the account at all, as disqualifying free labor. The States farther south have their own responsibilities on the subject of Slavery. They will know of themselves when the system becomes productive of evil to such an extent as to call for its removal. It is not for us to judge for them, to judge them. Let each State act for itself and act only when its judgment and sense of duty dictate.

For years past our cotton growing States have been exporting their soil; and with that improvidence which Slavery generates, that love of present indulgence, careless of what may follow, the south has received in return the means of enjoyment only—nothing wherewith to renovate the outraged ground. Such a process long continued must, in the end, ruin the finest lands in the world. Its effects are apparent in the Atlantic States of the south, which are losing their population, the attraction of the new and rich lands in the south-west operating irresistibly to draw the planters of Carolina and Georgia from their worn out fields.

The same general observations will apply to our slaveholding sections in Maryland, and to many parts of eastern Virginia too, if it were necessary to pursue the investigation there. Emigration to the west has kept pace with the impoverishment of our lands. Large tracts have come into the hands of a few proprietors—too large to be improved, and too much exhausted to be productive. But this is not the worst. The traveller, as he journeys through these districts, smitten with premature barrenness as with a curse, beholds fields, once enclosed and subject to tillage, now abandoned and waste, and covered with straggling pines or scrubby thickets, which are fast overgrowing the waning vestiges of former cultivation. From swamps and undrained morasses, malaria exhales, and like a pestilence infects the country. The inhabitants become a sallow race; the current of life stagnates; energy fails; the spirits droop. Over the whole region a melancholy aspect broods. There are every where signs of dilapidation, from the mansion of the planter with its windows half-glazed, its doors half-hinged, its lawn trampled by domestic animals that have ingress and egress through the broken enclosures, to the ragged roadside house where thriftless poverty finds its abode. No neat cottages with gardens and flowers giving life to the landscape; no beautiful villages where cultivated taste blends with rustic simplicity, enriching and beautifying; no flourishing towns, alive with the bustle of industry—none of those are seen; no, nor any diversified succession of well cultivated farms with their substantial homesteads and capacious barns; no well-constructed bridges, no well-conditioned roads. Neglect, the harbinger of decay, has stamped her impress every where. Slavery, bringing with it from its African home its characteristic accompaniments, seems to have breathed over its resting places here the same desolating breath which made Sahara a desert.

No one who has passed from a region of free labor to a slaveholding district can have failed to notice the contrast presented by the change.

I have been here speaking of those portions of the country where slavery has existed for a long time, and where it has formed the prominent feature. In some sections the natural fertility of the soil withstands for many years the deteriorating influence of slave culture; in other quarters, the number of slaves being small, the effects of slavery do not become prominently characteristic.

Grain growing districts, countries where a scientific agriculture prevails, where the mind of man as well as the hands of labor, finds employment in the culture of the ground, the rearing of trees, the improvement of breeds of cattle, horses, and swine, the refining of the texture of wool, the care of the dairy—those rural districts, where Nature, repaying the manifold appliances of judicious care, tasks her powers of production and puts on her loveliest forms of beauty, as though grateful to man for his attention, and seeking communion with his better spirit—there Slavery can not dwell. It is not congenial with such scenes.

Nor, again, can Slavery find a congenial abode in those beautiful undulating regions of green hills and swiftly flowing streams which afford such conveniences for the arts. In those regions nature invites the co-operation of intelligent man; she offers her powers to turn the wheels of his complicated machinery. The rude hands of servile labor are not adapted to take advantage of such proffers.

What are all the arts of civilized life, but so many results of man’s conquests over material things? The active mind, the inventive intellect, in alliance with its minister, the fashioning hand, never ceases in its efforts, as it comes in contact with the things of nature, to turn them to its purposes. The laws of nature are studied that man may act in unison with them, and through them gain the mastery. But where Slavery forms the hand of the community, the working instrument, how is it possible that intelligence should animate it to give it dexterity, delicacy of touch, variety of powers? No, it is not possible. The informing principle, the vital force of a perceptive mind, quickened by its own impulses, can not descend into the form of Slavery to animate and direct it. There may be great intelligence in a slaveholding community; but it is not in the working members thereof. Thus the mind of the South, devoted to political affairs, is shrewd, active, and powerful, and maintains an ascendency in the republic, far beyond the physical weight and resources of that section of the union. The south has given to the United States seven out of the ten Presidents who have sat at the head of our public affairs. But the mind of the south can not approach nature to deal with it, to overcome it. It has not the appliances, the practical instrumentality. Its head is clear; but its hand is paralytic. If its working agency were endowed with an inherent intelligence and a self-directing will, the necessary accompaniments of an inventive genius, it would be servile no longer.