But the crowning refutation of this slander against Southern morals, is presented by the great war lately concluded—a refutation whose glory repays us for long years of reproach. Dispassionate spectators abroad have passed their verdict of disgust upon the combination of feebleness in the field, boasting and falsehood at home, venality and peculation towards their own treasury and the property of private citizens, with ruthless violation of all the laws of humanity. Dispassionate spectators! No; there were none such: but from ignorant and prejudiced minds stuffed with misconceptions by our interested assailants, the splendid disclosure of civic and military genius, bravery, fortitude under incredible hardships, magnanimity under unspeakable provocations, and dignity under defeat, which appeared at the South, drew a general acclaim of admiration from the whole civilized world. This war, among its many evils, has done us this good, that it has settled for this century the charge of the "barbarism of Southern slavery."
But it may not be amiss to reveal those vices which are peculiarly opposed to the Yankees' own boasts, as the inhabitants of "the land of steady habits." Our soldiers who have been prisoners of war among them, all report that their camps were Pandemoniums, for their resounding blasphemies and profanities. Nothing was more common than the capture from them of prisoners of war, too drunk to walk steadily. The mass of the letters found upon their slain, and about their captured camps, disclosed a shocking prevalence of prurient and licentious thought, both in their armies and at home. And our unfortunate servants seduced away by their armies, usually found, to their bitter cost, that lust for the African women was a far more prevalent motive, than their pretended humanity, for their liberating zeal. Such was the monstrous abuse to which these poor creatures were subjected, that decent slave fathers often hid their daughters in the woods, from their pretended liberators, as from beasts of prey.
We freely avow that the line of argument which occupies this section is not to our taste; nor, as was intimated in the introduction, do we regard it as the safest means of ascertaining the moral influences of the two systems. But it has not been by our choice that it has been introduced. The slanders of our accusers have thrust it upon us. We now gladly dismiss it with this general concluding remark; that the comparative general virtue of Southern masters, and the purity of Southern Christianity, are a strong evidence that we were not living in a criminal relation, as to the African race. For sins are always gregarious. One sin, permanently established in the heart and life, always introduces its foul kindred. Sin is contagious. An unsound spot in the character ultimately taints the whole. The misguided gentleman who first yields to the passion of gaming, solely for its amusement and excitement, cannot continue a habitual gamester and a gentleman. The ingenuous youth who harbours the habit of intoxication, in due time ceases to be even ingenuous. These unhallowed passions, once established, introduce fraud, selfishness, meanness, falsehood. So, we argue, if slaveholding were a sin, its practice would surely tell upon the honour and integrity of those who continue in it. But Southern character exhibits no such general effect.
§ 8. Slavery and the African Slave Trade.
It is a plausible ground of opposition to slavery, to charge it with the guilt of the slave trade. It is argued that unless we are willing to justify the capture of free and innocent men, on their own soil, and their reduction from freedom to slavery, with all the enormous injustice and cruelty of the African slave trade, we must acknowledge that the title of the Southern master to his slave at this day is unrighteous; that a system which had its origin in wrong cannot become right by the lapse of time; that, if the title of the piratical slave catcher on the coast of Africa was unrighteous, he cannot sell to the purchaser any better title than he has; and that an unsound title cannot become sound by the passage of time. It need hardly be said that we abhor the injustice, cruelty, and guilt of the African slave trade. It is justly condemned by the public law of Christendom—a law which not Wilberforce, nor the British Parliament, nor British, nor Yankee Abolitionists, have the honour of originating, but the slaveholding Commonwealth of Virginia. It is condemned by the law of God. Moses placed this among the judicial statutes of the Jews: "And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." We fully admit, then, that the title of the original slave catcher to the captured African was most unrighteous. But few can be ignorant of the principle, that a title, originally bad, may be replaced by a good one, by transmission from hand to hand, and by lapse of time. When the property has been acquired, by the latest holder, fairly and honestly; when, in the later transfers, a fair equivalent was paid for it, and the last possessor is innocent of fraud in intention and in the actual mode of his acquisition of it, more wrong would be effected by destroying his title, than by leaving the original wrong unredressed. Common sense says, that whatever may have been the original title, a new and valid one has arisen out of the circumstances of the case. If this principle be denied, half the property of the civilized world will be divorced from its present owners. All now agree that the pretext which gave ground for the conquest of William of Normandy was wicked; and however just it might have been, by the laws of nations, the conquest of the government of a country ought not to disturb the rights of individuals in private property. The Norman Conquest resulted in a complete transfer of almost all the land in England to the hands of new proprietors; and nearly all the land titles of England, at the present day, are the legal progeny of that iniquitous robbery, which transferred the territory of the kingdom from the Saxon to the Norman barons. If lapse of time, and change of hands, cannot make a bad title good, then few of the present landlords of England have any right to their estates. Upon the same principles, the tenants leasing from them have no right to their leases, and consequently they have no right to the productions of the farms they hold. If they have no right to those productions, then they cannot communicate any right to those who purchase from them; so that no man eating a loaf of English bread, or wearing a coat of English wool, could be certain that he was not consuming what was not his own. Thus extravagant and absurd are the results of such a principle. Let us apply to the abolitionists their own argument, and we shall unseat the most of them from the snug homes whence they hurl denunciations at us. It is well known that their forefathers obtained the most of that territory from the poor Indians, either by fraud or violence. If lapse of time and subsequent transfers cannot make a sound title in place of an unsound one, then few of the people of the North have any right to the lands they hold; and, as honest men, they are bound to vacate them. To this even as great a man as Dr. Wayland, the philosopher of abolitionism, has attempted an answer, by saying that this right, arising from possession, only holds so long as the true, original owner, or the inheritor of his right, does not appear; and that, when he appears, the right of possession perishes at once. But he argues, the original and true claimant to the ownership of the slave is always present, in the person of the slave himself; so that the right originating in possession cannot exist for a moment. Without staying to inquire whether the presence of the inheritor of the original right necessarily puts an end to this right of possession—a proposition worse than questionable—I would simply remark, that, to represent the slave himself as the possessor of the original right, is a complete begging of the question. It assumes the very point in dispute, whether the right of the master is sound or not. And we would add, what would the courts of New England, what would Dr. Wayland say, should the feeble remnants of the New England Indians, who are yet lingering in those States, claim all the fair domains of their tribe? And what would be said in England, if the people of Saxon descent should rise upon all those noble houses who boast a Norman origin, and claim their princely estates?
But we carry this just argumentum ad hominem nearer home. If the Virginian slaveholder derived from the New England or British slave-trader, no valid title to the African, then the trader had no valid title to the planter's money. What can be clearer than this? And if continued possession, with lapse of time, and transmission from hand to hand, cannot convert an unsound title into a sound one, all the wealth acquired by the African slave trade, together with all its increase, is wrongfully held by the heirs of those slave dealers: it belongs to the heirs of the planters from whom it was unjustly taken. Now it is well known that the New England States, and especially the little State of Dr. Wayland, Rhode Island, drew immense sums from the slave trade; and it was said of the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol, that the very bricks of their houses were cemented with the blood of the slave. Who can tell how much of the wealth which now freights the ships, and drives the looms of these anti-slavery marts, is the fruit of slave profits? Let the pretended owners disgorge their spoils, and restore them to the Virginian planters, to indemnify them for the worthless and fictitious title to the slaves whom they have been called upon to emancipate; in order that means may be provided to make their new liberty a real blessing to them. Thus we should have a scheme for emancipation, or colonization, which would be just in both its aspects. But will abolitionism assent to this? About as soon as death will surrender its prey. Let them cease, then, for shame's sake, to urge this sophism.
If this principle of a right originated by possession can be sound anywhere, it is sound in its application to our slaves. The title by which the original slave catchers held them may have been iniquitous. But these slave catchers were not citizens of the Southern colonies; these slaves were not brought to our shores by our ships. They were presented by the inhuman captors, dragged in chains from the filthy holds of the slave ships; and the alternative before the planter was, either to purchase them from him who possibly had no right to sell them, or re-consign them to fetters, disease, and death. The slaves themselves hailed the conclusion of a sale with joy, and begged the planters to become their masters, as a means of rescue from their floating prison. The planters, so far as they were concerned, paid a fair commercial equivalent for the labour of the slaves; and the right so acquired passed legally through generations from father to son, or seller to purchaser. The relation, so iniquitously begun in those cases where the persons imported were not slaves already in Africa, has been fairly and justly transferred to subsequent owners, and has resulted in blessings to the slaves. Its dissolution is more mischievous to them than to the masters. Must it not be admitted that the injustice in which the relation originated no longer attaches to it? The difference between the title of the original slave catcher, and that of the late Virginian slave owner, is as great as between the ruffian Norman freebooter, who conquered his fief at Hastings, and his law-abiding descendant, the Christian gentleman of England.
§ 9. The Morality of Slavery Vindicated by its Results.
To deny the mischievous effects of emancipation upon the Africans themselves, requires an amount of impudence which even abolitionists seldom possess. The experience of Britain has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of all her practical statesmen, that freedom among the whites is ruinous to the blacks. They tell us of the vast decline in the productiveness of their finest colonies, of the lapsing of fruitful plantations into the bush, of the return of the slaves, lately an industrious and useful peasantry, to savage life, and of the imperative necessity for Asiatic labour, to rescue their lands from a return to the wilderness. A comparison between the slaves of the South, and the freed negroes of the North, gives the same results. While the former were cheerful, healthy, progressive, industrious, and multiplying rapidly in numbers, the latter are declared by their white neighbours to be a social nuisance, depressed by indolence and poverty, decimated by hereditary diseases, and tending rapidly to extinction.
We argue hereupon, that it cannot be a moral duty to bestow upon the slave that which is nothing but an injury. It cannot be a sin to do to him that which uniformly and generally is found essential to his well-being in his present condition. We certainly are not required by a benevolent God to ruin him in order to do him justice! No sober and practical mind can hold such an absurdity. Hence we may know, even in advance of examination, that the ethical premises, the theory of human rights, which lead to such preposterous conclusions, must be false. To illustrate this argument, the humane effects of slavery upon the slave should be more fully exhibited. This we propose to attempt in another chapter.