"They say 'Sunny South' is the name of my home;
'Tis here that your robins and blue-birds are come,
While snows cover nests up, and angry winds rave;
They may rest here,—not I; I'm a poor little slave.
"Here beautiful mothers, 'mid splendors untold.
Their fairy-like babes to their fond bosoms fold;
My mammy's worked out, and lies here in the grave;
There's none to kiss me,—I'm a poor little slave.
"I've heard mistress telling her sweet little son,
What Jesus, the loving, for children has done;
Perhaps little black ones he also will save;
I ask him to take me, a poor little slave!"
No wonder, Gustavus, that you write such letters as your last, fed and nourished as you are on such things as this. I took it with me that evening to a missionary party at the house of Judge ——. I read the lines. The ladies said nothing for a time, till at last one said to me, "Such things have helped us in seceding." The Judge took the lines, looked them over, and, smiling, handed them back to me, saying, "Madam, is Massachusetts a dark place?" "Yes," said a young gentleman, "and the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." "Oh," said I, "how prejudiced you all are!" Whereupon they all laughed. "Now," said I, "you think, no doubt, that the author of such a piece is malign. I know nothing of its origin, but I venture to say it was written by one whose heart overflows with love to everybody, but who is 'laboring under a delusion.'" I did not tell them of the "delusion" which you were "under," in the Senior's room, but I said, "I have a nephew in a New England college who has the Northern evil very badly. But he is so very kind. Set him to write poetry about the South and he would produce just such lamentable stanzas." Nothing will cure these fancies, about oranges and magnolias not blooming for the little negroes, so well as to bring these good people where they can see them pelting one another with oranges, such as these poets never dreamed of, and making money by selling magnolias to passengers at the railway stations.
"Here beautiful mothers, 'mid splendors untold," etc. I went with the wife of a planter to her "Maternal Association" of slave-mothers. She gathers the fifteen mothers among her servants once a fortnight, and spends an afternoon talking to them about the education of their children, and reading to them; and when she knelt with them and prayed, I cried so all the time that I hardly heard anything. Oh what a tale of love was that Maternal Association! "Here beautiful mothers 'mid splendors untold," etc.;—those words kept themselves in my thoughts. Now tell this to some great "friend of the slave," in Massachusetts, and what will he say?—"All very good, I dare say; hope she will go a little further, and give those fifteen their liberty." I sometimes say, "Must I go back to the North, and hear and read such things?"
Yes, it is such things as these, simple and inconsiderable as you may deem them, which are dividing us irreconcilably, and breaking up the Union. It is not Messrs. ——, nor their frenzy, but it is Christian brethren who allow their Sabbath-school children, for example, to say and sing, "I've heard mistress telling her sweet little son, what Jesus, the loving, for children has done," making the impression that such a Christian mother leaves a colored child in her house, without instruction, to draw the inference, if it will, that Jesus, perhaps, will love a "poor little slave!" There are no words to depict the feeling of injustice and cruelty which this conveys to the hearts of our Christian friends at the South. "Let us go out of the Union!" they cry, in their blind grief; but where will they go? for while our Northern people write and publish and sing and teach their children to sing such things, we can have nothing but mutual hatred, and perhaps exterminating wars. We must change. If our Northern people would discriminate, and, while retaining all their natural feelings against oppression and man-stealing, would admit that "ownership in man" is not necessarily oppression nor man-stealing, they would do themselves justice and contribute to the peace of the country. "But O!" they say, "look at the iniquitous system. If separating families, and destroying marriage, and liberty to chastise at pleasure, and to kill, are not sin, what is sin?" So they impute the system, and everything in it, to the people who live under it. How a system can be a sin, it would puzzle some of them, who say that all sin consists in action, to explain. And when they came to look into the system itself, they would find, that if slavery is to exist, some laws regulating it are, of necessity, self-protective, and must be coercive. Even in Illinois, it is enacted that a black man shall not be a witness against a white man. But if the slaves could swear in court, every one sees that the whites must be at the mercy of their servants. The testimony of the honest among them is procured, though indirectly, and it has weight with juries; but it is a wise provision to exclude them as sworn witnesses. So of other things, which theoretically are oppressive, but practically right; while many things in the system which are rigorous are as little used as the equipments in an arsenal in times of peace.
When you quote John Wesley's words and apply them to the South: "Slavery is the sum of all villanies," you unconsciously utter a fearful slander. Whatever may have been true of British slavery, in foreign plantations, in Wesley's day, the good man never would utter such words about our Southern people could he see and enjoy that which gladdens every Christian heart. If slavery be, necessarily, "the sum of all villanies," as you and many use the expression, the relation cannot exist without making each slave-holder a villain, in all the degrees of villany. You will do well to look into the cant phrases of "freedom," before you indulge in the use of them. The bishops and clergy of the noble army of Methodists in the South would not sustain their great chief in applying the phrase in question to the actual state of things in the Southern country. Wesley used those words concerning slavery in foreign colonies; he had not seen it mixed up with society in England, as it is in the South.
Taking the blacks as they are, and comparing them also with what they would be in Africa, or if set free, to remain in connection with the whites, slavery is not a curse. To be free is, of course, in itself a blessing. But it depends on many things whether, under existing circumstances, being a slave here is practically a curse. Our people generally insist that it must be, and therefore that it is. Here they are mistaken, as I now view the subject. The British people and the French, looking at the blacks in a colony, settle the question of emancipation in their own minds without much difficulty. But it would be found to be a different thing to emancipate the colored race, to live side by side with the English people in the mother-country. In that case, a contest between the two races for the possession of power, and innumerable offences and practical difficulties, would, in time, lead to the extermination, or expatriation, of one of the two races, or to their intermarriage, if the universal history of such conjunction of races is any guide.
I do not wonder that the good lady with the "marsh-mallow" exclaimed so at your groundless commiseration of the sick among the slaves. You have no more idea of the practical relation between the whites and the blacks, the owners and the slaves, than most of the English people, who have never been here, have of our Federal and State relations.
I will tell you an incident which I know to be literally true.