The West India emancipation experiments have demonstrated the truth of a few principles that the world should fully understand. It must now be admitted that mere personal liberty, even connected with the stimulus of wages, is insufficient to secure the industry of an ignorant population. It is intelligence, alone, that can be acted upon by such motives. Intelligence, then, must precede voluntary industry. And, hereafter, that man, or nation, may find it difficult to command respect, or succeed in being esteemed wise, who will not, along with exertions to extend personal freedom to man, intimately blend with their efforts adequate means for intellectual and moral improvement. The results of West India emancipation, it must be further noticed, fully confirm the opinions of Franklin, that freedom, to unenlightened slaves, must be accompanied with the means of intellectual and moral elevation, otherwise it may be productive of serious evils to themselves and to society. It also sustains the views entertained by Southern slaveholders, that emancipation, unaccompanied by the colonization of the slaves, could be of little value to the blacks, while it would entail a ruinous burden upon the whites. These facts must not be overlooked in the projection of plans for emancipation, as none can receive the sanction of Southern men, which does not embrace in it the removal of the colored people. With the example of West India emancipation before them, and the results of which have been closely watched by them, it can not be expected that Southern statesmen will ever risk the liberation of their slaves, except on these conditions.
CHAPTER XV.
Moral condition of the free colored people in United States—What have they gained by refusing to accept Colonization?—Abolition testimony on the subject—Gerrit Smith—New York Tribune—Their moral condition as indicated by proportions in Penitentiaries—Census Reports—Native whites, foreign born, and free colored, in Penitentiaries—But little improvement in Massachusetts in seventy years—Contrasts of Ohio with New England—Antagonism of Abolitionism to free negroes.
In turning to the condition of our own free colored people, who rejected homes in Liberia, we approach a most important subject. They have been under the guardianship of their abolition friends, ever since that period, and have cherished feelings of determined hostility to colonization. What have they gained by this hostility? What has been accomplished for them by their abolition friends, or what have they done for themselves? Those who took refuge in Liberia have built up a Republic of their own; and with the view of encouraging them to laudable effort, have been recognized as an independent nation, by five of the great governments of the earth. But what has been the progress of those who remained behind, in the vain hope of rising to an equality with the whites, and of assisting in abolishing American slavery?
We offer no opinion, here, of our own, as to the present social and moral condition of the free colored people in the North. What it was at the time of the founding of Liberia, has already been shown. On this subject we might quote largely from the proceedings of the Conventions of the colored people, and the writings of their editors, so as to produce a dark picture indeed; but this would be cruel, as their voices are but the wailings of sensitive and benevolent hearts, while weeping over the moral desolations that, for ages, have overwhelmed their people. Nor shall we multiply testimony on the subject; but in this, as in the case of Canada and the West Indies, allow the abolitionists to speak of their own schemes. The Hon. Gerrit Smith, in his letter to Governor Hunt, of New York, in 1852, while speaking of his ineffectual efforts, for fifteen years past, to prevail upon the free colored people to betake themselves to mechanical and agricultural pursuits, says:
"Suppose, moreover, that during all these fifteen years, they had been quitting the cities, where the mass of them rot, both physically and morally, and had gone into the country to become farmers and mechanics—suppose, I say, all this—and who would have the hardihood to affirm that the Colonization Society lives upon the malignity of the whites—but it is true that it lives upon the voluntary degradation of the blacks. I do not say that the colored people are more debased than the white people would be if persecuted, oppressed and outraged as are the colored people. But I do say that they are debased, deeply debased; and that to recover themselves they must become heroes, self-denying heroes, capable of achieving a great moral victory—a two-fold victory—a victory over themselves and a victory over their enemies."
The New York Tribune, September 22, 1855, in noticing the movements of the colored people of New York, to secure to themselves equal suffrage, thus gives utterance to its views of their moral condition:
"Most earnestly desiring the enfranchisement of the Afric-American race, we would gladly wean them, at the cost of some additional ill-will, from the sterile path of political agitation. They can help win their rights if they will, but not by jawing for them. One negro on a farm which he has cleared or bought patiently hewing out a modest, toilsome independence, is worth more to the cause of equal suffrage than three in an Ethiopian (or any other) convention, clamoring against white oppression with all the fire of a Spartacus. It is not logical conviction of the justice of their claims that is needed, but a prevalent belief that they would form a wholesome and desirable element of the body politic. Their color exposes them to much unjust and damaging prejudice; but if their degradation were but skin-deep, they might easily overcome it. . . . . Of course, we understand that the evil we contemplate is complex and retroactive—that the political degradation of the blacks is a cause as well as a consequence of their moral debasement. Had they never been enslaved, they would not now be so abject in soul; had they not been so abject, they could not have been enslaved. Our aborigines might have been crushed into slavery by overwhelming force; but they could never have been made to live in it. The black man who feels insulted in that he is called a 'nigger,' therein attests the degradation of his race more forcibly than does the blackguard at whom he takes offense; for negro is no further a term of opprobrium than the character of the blacks has made it so. . . . . If the blacks of to-day were all or mainly such men as Samuel R. Ward or Frederick Douglass, nobody would consider 'negro' an invidious or reproachful designation.
"The blacks of our State ought to enjoy the common rights of man; but they stand greatly in need of the spirit in which those rights have been won by other races. They will never win them as white men's barbers, waiters, ostlers and boot blacks; that is to say, the tardy and ungracious concession of the right of suffrage, which they may ultimately wrench from a reluctant community, will leave them still the political as well as social inferiors of the whites—excluded from all honorable office, and admitted to white men's tables only as waiters and plate-washers—unless they shall meantime have wrought out, through toil, privation and suffering, an intellectual and essential enfranchisement. At present, white men dread to be known as friendly to the black, because of the never-ending, still-beginning importunities to help this or that negro object of charity or philanthrophy to which such a reputation inevitably subjects them. Nine-tenths of the free blacks have no idea of setting themselves to work except as the hirelings and servitors of white men; no idea of building a church, or accomplishing any other serious enterprise, except through beggary of the whites. As a class, the blacks are indolent, improvident, servile and licentious; and their inveterate habit of appealing to white benevolence or compassion whenever they realize a want or encounter a difficulty, is eminently baneful and enervating. If they could never more obtain a dollar until they shall have earned it, many of them would suffer, and some perhaps starve; but, on the whole, they would do better and improve faster than may now be reasonably expected."
