A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR.

[Sidenote: 1832—The slave trade]

The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so great a triumph that most men assumed them to be capable of any triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in establishing one principle which, up to that time, had never been recognized, the principle that a constitutional sovereign in these countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to listen to reason, and probably not even they knew at the time the full importance of the constitutional principle which they had thus established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really constitutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of statesmanship. When the passing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very justly, regarded this assertion of the right of a representative Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The natural feeling therefore was to assume that the men who had done these great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our constitutional and our social system.

The time was one especially favorable for such hopes and for such achievements. A new era had opened on the civilized world. New ideas were coming up regarding the value and the validity of many of our constitutional and social arrangements which had formerly been considered as inspired and sanctified forever by that mysterious influence, the wisdom of our ancestors. If education had not yet made much way among the masses of the people, at least the belief in popular education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons. The first great work to which the reformed Parliament applied itself, after the conditions of Lord Grey's Act had been allowed to take effect in remoulding the constituencies, was the abolition of negro slavery in the colonies of Great Britain. Domestic slavery and the slave trade had already been abolished, but in the minds of a great number of well-meaning, well-informed, and by no means hard-hearted men slavery in our colonies was a very different sort of institution from slavery in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions at all, had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free constitution of the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from African sea-shores in order to sell them into slavery was an offence against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did not see that there was anything like the same {190} reason for interfering with the system of slave labor as we had found it established, for instance, in our West Indian colonies. "We did not introduce the system there," it was argued; "we found it established there; we inherited it; and its continuance is declared, by all those who know, to be absolutely essential to the production of the sugar which is the source of profit and the means of living to the islands themselves, and an indispensable comfort, a harmless and healthful luxury, to millions of civilized beings who never stood under a tropical sky." The mind of the average Englishman, however, had been, for some time, much disturbed by the arguments, the pleadings, and the agitation of a small number of enlightened Reformers, at first much in advance of their time, who were making a pertinacious crusade against the whole system of colonial slavery. Some of these men have won names which will always be honored in our history. Zachary Macaulay was one of these. He was the father of the Macaulay whom we have just heard of as seated side by side with Charles Greville at Lord Holland's dinner-table. Zachary Macaulay had been the manager of a great West Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery, and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by men who professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work, and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his own living property.

[Sidenote: 1832—The horrors of the slave trade]

Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads, were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation, and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving her identity if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his reach. Numbers of advertisements were produced in which the owners, seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were branded on both breasts, and that thus there could be no difficulty about their identification. We need not go further into the details of the subject, but it may be as well to mention that we have not touched at all upon the most revolting evidences of the horrors which seemed to {192} be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system. Brougham was one of the first among leading Englishmen who threw his heart and soul into the agitation against colonial slavery. Long before that agitation approached to anything like success he had brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, directing attention to the evils and the horrors of the system, and calling for its abolition. For a time, successive Governments did not see their way to go any further than to endeavor to bring about or to enforce better regulations for the use of slave labor on the colonial plantations. Even these modest measures of reform had many difficulties to encounter. Some of the colonies were under the direct dominion of the Crown, were governed, in fact, as Crown colonies, but others had legislative chambers of their own, and refused to submit to the dictation of the authorities at home. These legislative chambers in most cases resented the interference of the home Government when it attempted to introduce new rules for the treatment of negro slaves, and the whole plantation interest rallied in support of the great principle that every owner of slaves had an absolute right to deal with them according to his own will and pleasure.

[Sidenote: 1832—Anti-slavery agitation]

It was loudly asserted by the planters and by the friends of the planters—and of course the planters had friends everywhere in England—that the sugar-growing business could not be carried on with any profit except by means of slave labor, and that the slaves could not be got to work except by the occasional use of flogging or other such needful stimulant. The negroes, it was loudly declared, would rise in rebellion if once it became known to them that the English Parliament was encouraging them to consider themselves as slaves no longer, and their mode of rising in rebellion would simply be a simultaneous massacre of all the planters and their wives and children. "See what you are doing!" many a voice cried out to the anti-slavery agitators; "you are preaching a crusade which will not merely end in the utter bankruptcy of the West Indian Islands, but in the massacre of all the planters, their wives, and their children." The agitators, however, were neither {193} dismayed nor disheartened. It would have taken a good deal of sophistry to confuse the conscience of Zachary Macaulay or Wilberforce. It would have taken a good deal of bellowing to frighten Brougham. The agitation went on with increasing force, and Brougham continued to denounce "the wild and guilty phantasy" that man has property in man.

In Jamaica the colonial legislature, pressed hard by the Government at home, passed an Act with the avowed purpose of mitigating the severity of the punishments inflicted on slave laborers. The Act, however, was, even on the face of it, absurdly inadequate for any humane purpose. The home Government had demanded, among other reforms, the entire discontinuance of the flogging of women. The colonial Act allowed the flogging of women to go on just as it had done before. The Jamaica planters were indignant at the course taken by the home authorities, and raved as if they were on the verge of rebellion against the Crown, and the well-meant interference of the Government at home seemed in fact to have done more harm than good. In Demerara, which was the Crown colony, some of the more intelligent among the negro slaves had heard scraps of talk which led them to believe that the King of England and his Government were about to confer freedom upon the colored race, and these reports spread and magnified throughout certain plantations, and the slaves on one estate refused to work. Their refusal was regarded as an insurrection and was treated accordingly. The most savage measures were employed to crush the so-called insurrection, just as in more recent, and what ought to have been more enlightened, days some local disturbances in Jamaica were magnified into a general rising of the blacks against the whites, and the horrors perpetrated in the name of repression startled the whole civilized world. In Demerara an English dissenting missionary, the Rev. John Smith, who had been known as a most kindly friend of the negroes, was formally charged with having encouraged and assisted the slaves to rise in revolt against their masters. He was flung into prison, was treated with barbarous {194} rigors such as might have seemed in keeping with some story of Siberia; he was put through the hurried process of a sham trial in which the very forms of law were disregarded, and he was sentenced to death. Even at Demerara and at such a time the court-martial which had condemned the missionary as guilty of the offence with which he was charged had accompanied its verdict with a recommendation to mercy on account of the prisoner's previous good character. But before it could be decided whether or not the recommendation was to have any effect, the unfortunate man died of the treatment he had received.

[Sidenote: 1830—Parliamentary action against slavery]