[ [7]We are well aware that Mr. Preston has denied, what no one asserted, that he had said an abolitionist, if he came into South Carolina, would be executed by Lynch law. He used the words we have quoted. (See "New York Journal of Commerce," Jan. 6th, 1838).
IV. FEELINGS OF THE SLAVEHOLDERS TOWARDS
THE LABORING CLASSES.
Whenever the great mass of the laboring population of a country are reduced to beasts of burden, and toil under the lash, "bodily labor," as Chancellor Harper expresses it, must be disreputable, from the mere influence of association. Hence you know white laborers at the South are styled "mean whites." At the North, on the contrary, labor is regarded as the proper and commendable means of acquiring wealth; and our most influential men would in no degree suffer in public estimation, for holding the plough, or even repairing the highways. Hence no poor man is deterred from seeking a livelihood by honest labor from a dread of personal degradation. The different light in which labor is viewed at the North and the South is one cause of the depression of industry in the latter.
Another cause is the ever-wakeful jealousy of your aristocracy. They fear the people; they are alarmed at the very idea of power and influence being possessed by any portion of the community not directly interested in slave property. Visions of emancipation, of agrarianism, and of popular resistance to their authority, are ever floating in their distempered and excited imaginations. They know their own weakness, and are afraid you should know it also. Hence it is their policy to keep down the "mean whites." Hence their philippics against the lower classes. Hence their constant comparison of the laborers of the North, with their own slaves; and hence, in no small degree, the absence among you of those institutions which confer upon the poor that knowledge which is power. Do you deem these assertions uncharitable? Listen to their own declarations:
"We believe the servitude which prevails in the South far preferable to that of the North, or in Europe. Slavery will exist in all communities. There is a class which may be nominally free, but they will be virtually Slaves."—Mississippian, July 6th, 1838.
"Those who depend on their daily labor for their daily subsistence can never enter into political affairs: they never do, never will, never can."—B. W. Leigh in Virginia Convention, 1829.
"All society settles down into a classification of capitalists and laborers. The former will own the latter, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy. If laborers ever obtain the political power of a country, it is in fact in a state of revolution. The capitalists north of Mason and Dixon's line, have precisely the same interest in the labor of the country, that the capitalists of England have in their labor. Hence it is that they must have a strong federal government (!) to control the labor of the nation. But it is precisely the reverse with us. We have already not only a right to the proceeds of our laborers, but we own a class of laborers themselves. But let me say to gentlemen who represent the great class of capitalists in the North—beware that you do not drive us into a separate system; for if you do, as certain as the decrees of heaven, you will be compelled to appeal to the sword to maintain yourselves at home. It may not come in your day; but your children's children will be covered with the blood of domestic factions, and will see a plundering mob contending for power and conquest."—Mr. Pickens, of South Carolina, in Congress, 21st Jan., 1836.
So the way to prevent plundering mobs, is to enslave the poor! We shall see presently, how far this expedient has been successful in preventing murdering mobs.
"In the very nature of things there must be classes of persons to discharge all the different offices of society, from the highest to the lowest. Some of these offices are regarded as degrading, although they must and will be performed. Hence those manifest forms of dependent servitude which produce a sense of superiority in the masters or employers, and of inferiority on the part of the servants. Where these offices are performed by members of the political community, a dangerous element is obviously introduced into the body politic. Hence the alarming tendency to violate the rights of property by agrarian legislation, which is beginning to be manifest in the older States, where universal suffrage prevails without domestic slavery.
"In a word, the institution of domestic slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility, and all the other appendages of a hereditary system of government."—Governor M'Duffie's Message to the South Carolina Legislature, 1836.
"We regard slavery as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us, that the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions do not exist. Every plantation is a little community with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative."—(Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, in the U. S. Senate, Jan. 10th, 1840.)
"We of the South have cause now, and shall soon have greater, to congratulate ourselves on the existence of a population among us, which excludes the Populace which in effect rules some of our Northern neighbors, and is rapidly gaining strength wherever slavery does not exist—a populace made up of the dregs of Europe, and the most worthless portion of the native population."—(Richmond Whig, 1837.)
"Would you do a benefit to the horse or the ox by giving him a cultivated understanding, a fine feeling? So far as the mere laborer has the pride, the knowledge, or the aspiration of a freeman, he is unfitted for his situation. If there are sordid, servile, laborious offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile, laborious beings to perform them?
"Odium has been cast upon our legislation, on account of its forbidding the elements of education being communicated to slaves. But in truth what injury is done them by this? He who works during the day with his hands, does not read in the intervals of leisure for his amusement, or the improvement of his mind, or the exception is so very rare as scarcely to need the being provided for."—(Chancellor Harper of South Carolina.—Southern Literary Messenger.)
This same gentleman delivered an oration on the 4th of July, 1840, reviewing the principles of the two great political parties, and although he supported Mr. Van Buren's administration, in consideration of its devotion to the slave interest, he frankly inquires:—
"Is there anything in the principles and opinions of the great democratic rabble, as it has been justly called, which should induce us to identify ourselves with that? Here you may find every possible grade and hue of opinion which has ever existed in the country. Here you may find loafer, and loco foco, and agrarian, and all the rabble of the city of New York, the most corrupt and depraved of rabbles, and which controls, in a great degree, the city itself, and through that, as being the commercial metropolis, exercises much influence over the State at large.
"What are the essential principles of democracy as distinguished from republicanism? The first consists in the dogma, so portentous to us, of the natural equality and unalienable right to liberty of every human being. Our allies (!) no doubt, are willing at present to modify the doctrine in our favor. But the spirit of democracy at large makes no such exceptions, nor will these (our allies, the Northern democrats) continue to make it, longer than necessity or interest may require. The second consists in the doctrine of the divine right of majorities; a doctrine not less false, and slavish, and absurd, than the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings."
Mr. Robert Wickliffe, of Kentucky, in a speech published in the Louisville Advertiser, in opposition to those who were adverse to the importation of slaves from the States, thus discourseth: