Statement of the Question—Slave Trade increased by the efforts made to suppress it—Title to Slaves, to Lands—Abstract Ideas—Is Slavery Sin?—Argument from the Old Testament—Argument from the New Testament—The "Higher Law"—Political Influence of Slavery—Free Labor Police—In war, Slavery is Strength—Code of Honor—Mercantile Credit—Religion and Education—Licentiousness and Purity—Economy of Slave Labor, and of Free Labor—Responsibility of Power—Kindness and Cruelty—Curtailment of Privileges—Punishment of Slaves, children and soldiers—Police of Slavery—Condition of Slaves—Condition of Free Laborers in England—Slavery a necessary condition of human Society—Moral Suasion of the Abolitionists—Coolie Labor—Results of Emancipation in the West Indies—Revival of the Slave Trade by Emancipationists—Results of Emancipation in the United States—Radicalism of the present Age.
Silver Bluff, (So. Ca.,) January 28, 1845.
Sir: I received, a short time ago, a letter from the Rev. Willoughby M. Dickinson, dated at your residence, "Playford Hall, near Ipswich, 26th November, 1844," in which was inclosed a copy of your Circular Letter, addressed to professing Christians in our Northern States, having no concern with slavery, and to others there. I presume that Mr. Dickinson's letter was written with your knowledge, and the document inclosed with your consent and approbation. I therefore feel that there is no impropriety in my addressing my reply directly to yourself, especially as there is nothing in Mr. Dickinson's communication requiring serious notice. Having abundant leisure, it will be a recreation to devote a portion of it to an examination and free discussion of the question of slavery as it exists in our Southern States: and since you have thrown down the gauntlet to me, I do not hesitate to take it up.
Familiar as you have been with the discussions of this subject in all its aspects, and under all the excitements it has occasioned for sixty years past, I may not be able to present much that will be new to you. Nor ought I to indulge the hope of materially affecting the opinions you have so long cherished, and so zealously promulgated. Still, time and experience have developed facts, constantly furnishing fresh tests to opinions formed sixty years since, and continually placing this great question in points of view, which could scarcely occur to the most consummate intellect even a quarter of a century ago: and which may not have occurred yet to those whose previous convictions, prejudices, and habits of thought, have thoroughly and permanently biased them to one fixed way of looking at the matter: while there are peculiarities in the operation of every social system, and special local as well as moral causes materially affecting it, which no one, placed at the distance you are from us, can fully comprehend or properly appreciate. Besides, it may be possibly, a novelty to you to encounter one who conscientiously believes the domestic slavery of these States to be not only an inexorable necessity for the present, but a moral and humane institution, productive of the greatest political and social advantages, and who is disposed, as I am, to defend it on these grounds.
I do not propose, however, to defend the African slave trade. That is no longer a question. Doubtless great evils arise from it as it has been, and is now conducted: unnecessary wars and cruel kidnapping in Africa: the most shocking barbarities in the middle passage: and perhaps a less humane system of slavery in countries continually supplied with fresh laborers at a cheap rate. The evils of it, however, it may be fairly presumed, are greatly exaggerated. And if I might judge of the truth of transactions stated as occurring in this trade, by that of those reported as transpiring among us, I should not hesitate to say, that a large proportion of the stories in circulation are unfounded, and most of the remainder highly colored.
On the passage of the Act of Parliament prohibiting this trade to British subjects rests, what you esteem, the glory of your life. It required twenty years of arduous agitation, and the intervening extraordinary political events, to convince your countrymen, and among the rest your pious king, of the expediency of the measure: and it is but just to say, that no one individual rendered more esessential service to the cause than you did. In reflecting on the subject, you can not but often ask yourself: What, after all, has been accomplished; how much human suffering has been averted; how many human beings have been rescued from transatlantic slavery? And on the answers you can give these questions, must in a great measure, I presume, depend the happiness of your life. In framing them, how frequently must you be reminded of the remark of Mr. Grosvenor, in one of the early debates upon the subject, which I believe you have yourself recorded, "that he had twenty objections to the abolition of the slave trade: the first was, that it was impossible—the rest he need not give." Can you say to yourself, or to the world, that this first objection of Mr. Grosvenor has been yet confuted? It was estimated at the commencement of your agitation in 1787, that forty-five thousand Africans were annually transported to America and the West Indies. And the mortality of the middle passage, computed by some at five, is now admitted not to have exceeded nine per cent. Notwithstanding your Act of Parliament, the previous abolition by the United States, and that all the powers in the world have subsequently prohibited this trade—some of the greatest of them declaring it piracy, and covering the African seas with armed vessels to prevent it—Sir Thomas Fowel Buxton, a coadjutor of yours, declared in 1840, that the number of Africans now annually sold into slavery beyond the sea, amounts, at the very least, to one hundred and fifty thousand souls; while the mortality of the middle passage has increased, in consequence of the measures taken to suppress the trade, to twenty-five or thirty per cent. And of the one hundred and fifty thousand slaves who have been captured and liberated by British men-of-war, since the passage of your Act, Judge Jay, an American abolitionist, asserts that one hundred thousand, or two-thirds, have perished between their capture and liberation. Does it not really seem that Mr. Grosvenor was a prophet? That though nearly all the "impossibilities" of 1787 have vanished, and become as familiar facts as our household customs, under the magic influence of steam, cotton, and universal peace, yet this wonderful prophecy still stands, defying time and the energy and genius of mankind. Thousands of valuable lives, and fifty millions of pounds sterling, have been thrown away by your government in fruitless attempts to overturn it. I hope you have not lived too long for your own happiness, though you have been spared to see that in spite of all your toils and those of your fellow laborers, and the accomplishment of all that human agency could do, the African slave trade has increased three-fold under your own eyes—more rapidly, perhaps, than any other ancient branch of commerce—and that your efforts to suppress it, have affected nothing more than a three-fold increase of its horrors. There is a God who rules this world—all-powerful—far-seeing: He does not permit his creatures to foil his designs. It is he who, for his all-wise, though to us often inscrutable purposes, throws "impossibilities" in the way of our fondest hopes and most strenuous exertions. Can you doubt this?
Experience having settled the point, that this trade can not be abolished by the use of force, and that blockading squadrons serve only to make it more profitable and more cruel, I am surprised that the attempt is persisted in, unless it serves as a cloak to other purposes. It would be far better than it now is, for the African, if the trade was free from all restrictions, and left to the mitigation and decay which time and competition would surely bring about. If kidnapping, both secretly, and by war made for the purpose, could be by any means prevented in Africa, the next greatest blessing you could bestow upon that country would be to transport its actual slaves in comfortable vessels across the Atlantic. Though they might be perpetual bondsmen, still they would emerge from darkness into light—from barbarism into civilization—from idolatry to Christianity—in short from death to life.
But let us leave the African slave trade, which has so signally defeated the philanthropy of the world, and turn to American slavery, to which you have now directed your attention, and against which a crusade has been preached as enthusiastic and ferocious as that of Peter the Hermit—destined, I believe, to be about as successful. And here let me say, there is a vast difference between the two, though you may not acknowledge it. The wisdom of ages has concurred in the justice and expediency of establishing rights by prescriptive use, however tortuous in their origin they may have been. You would deem a man insane, whose keen sense of equity would lead him to denounce your right to the lands you hold, and which perhaps you inherited from a long line of ancestry, because your title was derived from a Saxon or Norman conqueror, and your lands were originally wrested by violence from the vanquished Britons. And so would the New England abolitionists regard any one who would insist that he should restore his farm to the descendants of the slaughtered red men, to whom God had as clearly given it as he gave life and freedom to the kidnapped African. That time does not consecrate wrong, is a fallacy which all history exposes; and which the best and wisest men of all ages and professions of religious faith have practically denied. The means, therefore, whatever they may have been, by which the African race now in this country have been reduced to slavery, cannot affect us, since they are our property, as your land is yours, by inheritance or purchase and prescriptive right. You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is, that he can and actually does hold property in his fellow all the world over, in a variety of forms, and has always done so. I will show presently his authority for doing it.
If you were to ask me whether I am an advocate of slavery in the abstract, I should probably answer, that I am not, according to my understanding of the question. I do not like to deal in abstractions. It seldom leads to any useful ends. There are few universal truths. I do not now remember any single moral truth universally acknowledged. We have no assurance that it is given to our finite understanding to comprehend abstract moral truth. Apart from revelation and the inspired writings, what ideas should we have even of God, salvation, and immortality? Let the heathen answer. Justice itself is impalpable as an abstraction, and abstract liberty the merest phantasy that ever amused the imagination. This world was made for man, and man for the world as it is. We ourselves, our relations with one another and with all matter, are real, not ideal. I might say that I am no more in favor of slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy, or any other inequality in the condition of the human family; that I love perfection, and think I should enjoy a millennium such as God has promised. But what would it amount to? A pledge that I would join you to set about eradicating those apparently inevitable evils of our nature, in equalizing the condition of all mankind, consummating the perfection of our race, and introducing the millennium? By no means. To effect these things, belongs exclusively to a higher power. And it would be well for us to leave the Almighty to perfect his own works and fulfill his own covenants. Especially, as the history of the past shows how entirely futile all human efforts have proved, when made for the purpose of aiding him in carrying out even his revealed designs, and how invariably he has accomplished them by unconscious instruments, and in the face of human expectation. Nay more, that every attempt which has been made by fallible man to extort from the world obedience to his "abstract" notions of right and wrong, has been invariably attended with calamities dire, and extended just in proportion to the breadth and vigor of the movement. On slavery in the abstract, then, it would not be amiss to have as little as possible to say. Let us contemplate it as it is. And thus contemplating it, the first question we have to ask ourselves is, whether it is contrary to the will of God, as revealed to us in his Holy Scriptures—the only certain means given us to ascertain his will. If it is, then slavery is a sin. And I admit at once that every man is bound to set his face against it, and to emancipate his slaves, should he hold any.
Let us open these Holy Scriptures. In the twentieth chapter of Exodus, seventeenth verse, I find the following words: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's"—which is the tenth of those commandments that declare the essential principles of the great moral law delivered to Moses by God himself. Now, discarding all technical and verbal quibbling as wholly unworthy to be used in interpreting the word of God, what is the plain meaning, undoubted intent, and true spirit of this commandment? Does it not emphatically and explicitly forbid you to disturb your neighbor in the enjoyment of his property; and more especially of that which is here specifically mentioned as being lawfully, and by this commandment made sacredly his? Prominent in the catalogue stands his "man-servant and his maid-servant," who are thus distinctly consecrated as his property, and guaranteed to him for his exclusive benefit, in the most solemn manner. You attempt to avert the otherwise irresistible conclusion, that slavery was thus ordained by God, by declaring that the word "slave" is not used here, and is not to be found in the Bible, And I have seen many learned dissertations on this point from abolition pens. It is well known that both the Hebrew and Greek words translated "servant" in the Scriptures, means also, and most usually, "slave." The use of the one word, instead of the other, was a mere matter of taste with the translators of the Bible, as it has been with all the commentators and religions writers, the latter of whom have, I believe, for the most part, adopted the term "slave," or used both terms indiscriminately. If, then, these Hebrew and Greek words include the idea of both systems of servitude, the conditional and unconditional, they should, as the major includes the minor proposition, be always translated "slaves," unless the sense of the whole text forbids it. The real question, then is, what idea is intended to be conveyed by the words used in the commandment quoted? And it is clear to my mind, that as no limitation is affixed to them, and the express intention was to secure to mankind the peaceful enjoyment of every species of property, that the terms "men-servants and maid-servants" include all classes of servants, and establish a lawful, exclusive, and indefeasible interest equally in the "Hebrew brother who shall go out in the seventh year," and "the yearly hired servant," and "those purchased from the heathen round about," who were to be "bond-men forever," as the property of their fellow-man.
