The Evolution of Slave Status in American Democracy
II
The story of the evolution of the status of the Negro in the North during the first part of the nineteenth century can be easily told as it was the result of forces the existence of which we have already suggested. By far the most important among these were economic and industrial. Lecky has said somewhere that the masses of men are influenced far more by the practical implications of daily life in the pursuit of their callings than they are by abstract ideas and this finds abundant illustration in the attitude taken by the northern mind upon the Negro. In Pennsylvania, where slavery existed in its mildest form and where the moral sentiment of the community was best prepared for its eradication, thanks to the persistent and effective campaign of education begun by the Quakers as early as 1688 and prosecuted under the leadership of such men as the saintly John Woolman and Benezet, economic interests still played a more important part than ethical.[291] Slavery flourished only where the plantation system was profitable and this was not the case in Pennsylvania. The industrial development of the State was in the direction of small farming, manufacturing and commerce, all of which were uncongenial to slavery. In the absence of paramount economic needs, slavery was unable to hold its own against the moral idealism of the Quaker and the racial antipathies of the German and the Scotch Irish.
Even in respect to New England the evidence is abundant that it was economic rather than moral or religious influences that paved the way to freedom for the slave. At the beginning it was the imperative demand for labor that led to the enslavement of the Indian and Negro, which the Puritan justified by an appeal to his high Calvinism. When this demand ceased because of the increase of white labor and when the diminished supply rendered it more difficult to get profitable slaves, the same economic laws tended to encourage the freedom of the slave.[292] "Fortunately for the moral development of our beloved colonies," says Weeden, "the climate was too harsh, the social system too simple, to engender a good economic employment of black labor. The simple industrial methods of each New England homestead, described in so many ways through these pages, make a natural barrier against an alien social system including either black or copper-colored dependents. The blacks soon dwindled in numbers, or dropped out from a life too severe for any but the hardiest and firmest fibered races."[293] When we see how during the constitutional convention of 1787 selfish economic interests led Massachusetts to enter into the unholy alliance with the pro-slavery States of the far South to fix upon another section of the country the nefarious slave-trade for twenty years longer, we may perhaps conclude that it was after all fortunate for the integrity of the Puritan conscience that slavery was unprofitable as a domestic institution. The slave-trade ended in 1808 and during the years 1806, 1807 six hundred New England slavers arrived at the port of Charleston alone.[294]
There seems to have been, on the whole, comparatively little express legislation in the way of constitutional changes and few express acts abolishing slavery in the North during this period.[295] The process was a gradual one, proceeding by acts of manumission or gradual abolition, the act of Pennsylvania in 1780 being typical. Slavery does not appear to have ever been made illegal in Pennsylvania by express law but died out in the natural course of events. Hence slaves were found in this State well on toward the middle of the nineteenth century.[296] This goes to show that the abolition of slavery and the admission of the Negro to complete citizenship were the result of a slow evolution of public sentiment. Moore even contends that slavery was never formally abolished in Massachusetts until 1866 when it was agreed on all hands that it was "considered as abolished."[297] Thus the social mind, by a natural and normal development of democratic ideals, arrived unconsciously at the point where it was impossible to harmonize the status of the slave with the prevailing sentiments of the community. The social mind was for this reason often far in advance of the legal status of the Negro as determined by the laws which represented earlier stages of opinion. A case in point is the Massachusetts act of 1788, of which Moore says: "We doubt if anything in human legislation can be found which comes nearer branding color as a crime," and yet this law remained upon the statute books of the State long after it had ceased to be in accord with the feelings and practices of the community and was only repealed in 1834.[298] The hesitancy of the legislators of the different free States to pass express acts of abolition and thus formally to pronounce slavery illegal may have been due in part to the fact that slavery was sanctioned to a certain extent by the constitution and was the "peculiar institution" around which centered the social and economic life of a large number of sister States.
The great industrial expansion of the North and West toward the end of the second decade of the century and the increase of population through immigration in time reduced the Negro in the North in point of number to an almost negligible factor. He was swept along with the rising tide of the growing industrial democracy and shared in the general benefits of citizenship accorded to all. But it would give a very superficial idea of the real status of the Negro in the North during this time if we were to base our judgments upon the statistics of slave and free, the various acts for manumission or the vigorous anti-slavery agitation from 1830 on. A closer acquaintance with the actual conditions of the time shows that there was a striking contrast between the theoretical rights and privileges which the Negro was supposed to enjoy by virtue of the constitution and bills of rights and those he really did enjoy.
This was a subject of frequent remark by foreigners travelling in America. Captain Marryat, writing of conditions in Philadelphia in 1838, says, "Singular is the degree of contempt and dislike in which the free blacks are held in all the free states of America. They are deprived of their rights as citizens; and the white pauper who holds out his hand for charity ... will turn away from a negro or colored man with disdain."[299] DeTocqueville, in a remarkable characterization of the relations between the races based upon his observations in the early thirties, says that as the legal barriers fall away in the free States those of race prejudice are drawn all the sharper. Wherever the freemen have increased the gap has widened between them and the whites. "The prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country. Though having the franchise the Negro may not exercise the right for fear of his life;[300] his rights before the law are pronounced upon by white judges only; his children may not attend the same school with the white's and gold can not buy a ticket for him in the same theater; he lies apart in the hospital, worships at a different altar and must bury his dead in a different cemetery."[301]
Harriet Martineau, writing in 1834-35 and commenting upon the statement of a Boston gentleman that the Negroes were perfectly well treated in New England in the matter of education, the franchise, and otherwise, states that while they are nominally citizens, "yet their houses and schools are pulled down,[302] and they can obtain no remedy at law. They are thrust out of offices, and excluded from the most honorable employments, and stripped of all the best benefits of society by fellow-citizens who, once a year, solemnly lay their hands on their hearts, and declare that all men are born free and equal, and that rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."[303] Fanny Kemble, the English actress, writes in 1838-39 of the treatment of the free blacks at the North, "They are marked as the Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like these unfortunates, without the gates of every human and social sympathy. From their own sable color, a pall falls over the whole of God's universe to them, and they find themselves stamped with a badge of infamy of Nature's own devising, at sight of which all natural kindness of man to man seems to recoil from them. They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from all fellowship save with their own despised race—scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated as companions by the foreign menials in your kitchens. They are free certainly but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task and unpaid toils of slavery; but they are not the less under a ban."[304]
There was in fact throughout this entire period a remarkable paradox in the social mind of the North with regard to the Negro, for we find everywhere the strongest antipathy to the Negro personally and general discriminations against him socially and politically, united with the greatest enthusiasm for his rights in the abstract. Even the best spirits of the time did not escape it. Fanny Kemble relates of John Quincy Adams, who became the very head and front of the anti-slavery element in Congress,[305] that while discussing with her at a Boston dinner-party the Shaksperean heroine Desdemona, he asserted "with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a 'nigger.'"[306] About the time when Garrisonian abolition was at its high tide, when Wendell Phillips was placing Toussaint l'Ouverture above Caesar and Napoleon on the roll of fame, when Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell were lending their talents to the cause of unalterable and inalienable rights of mankind, Jesse Chickering published a "Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts from 1765 to 1840," at the end of which he appended some very interesting facts and conclusions as to the colored population of this State. He stated that, owing partly to their race traits and partly to fixed and immovable prejudices of the whites against them, the blacks are deprived of sympathy and social enjoyments and reduced to a servile and degraded condition of poverty and dependence (p. 137). Because of this widespread prejudice against their color, "they cannot obtain employment on equal terms with the whites, and wherever they go a sneer is passed upon them, as if this sportive inhumanity were an act of merit.... Thus, though their legal rights are the same as those of the whites, their condition is one of degradation and dependence." In spite of the vigorous agitation for the rights of the Negro which stirred New England and the entire nation at this time, the writer says "the prejudices which are now felt in this Commonwealth against the people of color and the disadvantages under which they labor ... we can hardly expect will soon be removed," though he is persuaded that "this want of true sympathy, and this sense of degradation, must operate on their sensibility and unfavorably affect their physical, moral, and social condition, and shorten to them the duration of life" (pp. 156, 157).
The anti-slavery movement in Pennsylvania never went to the rhapsodical extremes we find in Massachusetts. It was from beginning to end sane and reasonable and yet vigorous and unremittent. Nevertheless, we find the same enthusiasm for the rights of the Negro in the abstract combined with racial antipathy, social and political discriminations, and even on more than one occasion mob violence in the actual treatment of the Negro population of the State.[307] Pennsylvania's interest in slavery, because of her position just to the north of slaveholding States, was never allowed to lag even after she had set all her slaves free. Her Negro population was constantly being replenished from the South and largely by fugitive slaves. This brought about much friction with Maryland, owing to the unwillingness of Pennsylvanians to surrender the runaways. In spite of Federal law the spirit of freedom made it unsafe for owners to hunt for their escaped slaves in Pennsylvania, as the famous Christiana riot of 1851 shows, and brought the State to the verge of nullification,[308] to such extremes were a peaceful and yet liberty-loving people ready to go in their championship of the abstract rights of the oppressed slave.