“How bad was the treatment of the Negro in the Southeastern States of the Union, between, let us say, 1790 and 1860”—he says—“This story should be written over again, lest we forget.”[310]
Evidently there is no need to take into consideration any “of the difficulties of the situation” in the Southeastern States of the Union. Sir Harry Johnston has been called upon to curse the Southeastern States of the Union, and being a firmer type of man than Balaam, he does it thoroughly. But incidentally he exclaims impatiently:
“Haiti’ I have tried to show is not as black as she has been painted.”
To which he adds the following rich, dark, daub:
“For very shame she should cease to make the Negro race a laughing stock.”[311]
The author has not proceeded a page in his chapter, “Slavery in the United States” before he begins to inveigh against South Carolina and Charleston. He tells his readers:
“In South Carolina the condition of the slaves was often one of great hardship, and the slave laws were very cruel.”
He writes of slave insurrections in South Carolina in 1710, 1720, and 1740, and states that in 1760 there was a slave population of 400,000 in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia; but he fails to mention that during this period these people were all under British control. He actually makes it a complaint of South Carolina that: “these were the people so admired by Gladstone, Kingsley, Huxley and Carlyle.”[312]
The more he writes the angrier he gets with South Carolina:
“The election of Abraham Lincoln was the last episode which decided South Carolina—protagonist of the Slave Powers and rightly so called, for it has been from first to last the wickedest of the Slave States—to secede from the Union.”[313]