No one, except perhaps the political economist here or there, or some fond soul of the olden time who has been asleep ever since, will attempt to defend slavery; yet it is also difficult to understand the philosopher, North or South, White or Negro who attaches nothing but obloquy to it, and sees nothing that is good resulting from it. Doctor Murphy’s opening chapter of The Basis of Ascendency begins with this true assertion: “It is so frequently assumed that the most significant factor in the history of our negro population is the factor of its exploitation, that a word of contradiction is never quite out of place. Within its actual environment, whether North or South, this population has suffered much, but it has received more.” And emphasizing the inevitable co-partnership of the two races in the task of progress which the White alone has been responsible for forming, he adds: “It (the negro population) has become involved so inextricably in the fate of a far more efficient social group, that the conditions of progress within this stronger group have become the conditions which must surround and advance the life and fortunes of the weaker.”
Dr. Booker T. Washington is never an apologist for negro slavery, but he recognizes a large fact when he sees, side by side with “the great curse (of slavery) to both races,” this evident shaping of its ends. “God, for two hundred and fifty years, in my opinion, prepared the way for the redemption of the Negro through industrial development.” It is the story of this redemption that must now occupy our interest.
Our first chapter sought to draw the picture of the Negro in Africa. We then saw him as he has developed under conditions of more or less segregation and self-government. Now we are to trace his development under American conditions, described by visiting students of slavery as the most kindly and humane ever experienced in such relations. Thus the Englishman, Welby, wrote in 1820: “After traveling through three Slave States, I am obliged to go back to the theory to raise any abhorrence of it. Not once during the journey did I witness an instance of cruel treatment, nor could I discover anything to excite commiseration in the faces or gait of the people of color. They walk, talk, and appear, at least, as independent as their masters; in animal spirits they have greatly the advantage.”
Again, Basil Hall wrote, in 1828: “I have no wish, God knows! to defend slavery in the abstract; ... but ... nothing during my recent journey gave me more satisfaction than the conclusion to which I was gradually brought that the planters of the Southern States of America, generally speaking, have a sincere desire to manage their estates with the least possible severity. I do not say that undue severity is nowhere exercised; but the discipline taken upon the average, as far as I could learn, is not more strict than is necessary for the maintenance of a proper degree of authority, without which the whole framework of society in that quarter would be blown to atoms.”
Human nature is much the same the world over, and this display of kindly humanitarianism, so noticeable to the traveling students, was probably but the outgrowth of the early conditions of colonial life. The settlers in a new land were beset with the problem of labor to develop the new homesteads. English freemen would rarely engage themselves for such wages as employers could afford to pay. What more natural than that the laborers in England, willing and often anxious to emigrate to the new land, should sell themselves for a period of labor sufficient to pay passage, including a meagre wage while the servitude lasted. Thus indentured servitude for the Colonies took the place of the old system of apprenticeship so long in use in the Old Country.
When negro slaves came in increasing numbers, the former relation with indentured servants must certainly have entered, more or less, into the interpretation of the relations of permanent servitude. Add to this that all alike were surrounded with the possible, and often aroused enmity of the Red Men, and with a constant peril of life, we have factors which must greatly have strengthened and softened the bond between White and Negro. In these and in many other conditions of the earlier days of the settlements, one sees the conditions out of which kindliness and affection were well-nigh certain to grow, and the well-recognized mutual partnership of interests to develop.
And this is just what actually happened for the most part. The growing sense of the mutual interest and dependence, and responsibility constantly tended to develop a relationship similar to that of the old patriarchate. The constant battle with the primeval forest and undeveloped new lands—a battle to be waged successfully only by the importation of laborers, untaught and undisciplined—constantly tended also to develop the relation of the teacher and the taught in the larger School of Nature. So the system grew into the Family and the Trade School.
Let us dismiss, with one paragraph, that other unsightly, often cruel, always condemnable side of slavery—the unfeeling, ruthlessly selfish and contemptible business of the slave-trader, who sought only to fill his purse with gold through the sale of “human cattle”—that unspeakably loathsome estimate of the Negro as an animal whose relationships were ignored, whose love was ridiculed, whose sensibilities were despised and whose rights (for the rights were there, even though the rights of a slave) were denied. Slavery did, in some instances, present that aspect; but no one can read the story without knowing that that side was the horrid incident, and not the characteristic of the old feudal and patriarchal life. It was that feature which often hindered the development, upon the best lines, of the rude Negroes brought from Africa. It could not, however, stop it. Our purpose being to trace this development, we are led into pleasanter fields; for it is in the inner life of the White-Black family and school, that the story of the culture of the wild graft is written.
Professor Phillips, in his American Negro Slavery, tells us that during the first half century after the introduction of slaves there were comparatively few Negroes in the colony—Virginia—which received the first importations. “They had,” he writes, “by far the best opportunity which any of their race had been given in America, to learn the white man’s ways and to adjust the lines of their bondage into as pleasant places as might be. Their importation was, for the time, on but an experimental scale, and even their legal status was, during the early decades, indefinite.”
There was, as yet, neither law nor custom establishing slavery as an institution. In fact it was custom that established the status of permanent servitude, while the laws only recognized it in defining the difference between the white indentured servant and the negro purchased slave. This did not become a subject of legal enactment until 1662. Prior to that time, Negroes were described as servants: “A few as servants for terms of years; some were conceded, property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution of slavery as elaborated in later times. Some of the blacks were liberated by the courts, as having served the terms fixed by their indentures or by the custom of the country.” How much of trouble and distress would have been saved had the forefathers developed their slave problems after this precedent, rather than after that of their Spanish and English neighbors of the South Atlantic Islands!