But leaving these knotty points of ethical casuistry to the philanthropists, I reiterate that I think that the picture I have drawn of certain aspects of slavery, as it existed in Virginia, reveals its fatal weakness. That weakness consisted in the fact that it realized the ideal set forth in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” That eloquent work of the erratic French dreamer is one long and passionate protest against the sorrows and sufferings of the poor. In those sorrows and sufferings he finds the source of all the crimes that dishonor humanity. How, as things existed with us, poverty sufficiently grinding to produce crime was actually unknown; so that our little world was just the world that he sighs for.
Victor Hugo plumes himself, I believe, upon never having learned the gibberish that the English call their language. Therefore, as I do not design having this work translated into the various modern languages (why should I, forsooth, since by the time your day rolls round the aforesaid gibberish will be the only tongue spoken by mankind?) he will never have the pain of seeing himself ranked among the upholders of slavery. Whatever he might say, however, it is very clear that no state of things heretofore existing has so well fulfilled the conditions of his ideal of society. It is no fault of mine if his ideal be absurd.[[3]]
For I fear me much this is no ideal world we live in.
But ah, what a lotus-dream we were a-dreaming, when from out our blue sky the bolt of war fell upon us! We lived in a land in which no one was hungry, none naked, none a-cold; where no man begged, and no man was a criminal, no woman fell—from necessity; where no one asked for bread, and all, even the slaves, could give it; where Charity was unknown, and in her stead stood Hospitality, with open doors. What tidings we had, meanwhile, of the things of the outer world, made us cherish all the more fondly the quietude of our Sleepy Hollow. The nations, had they not filled the air for a century past with the murmur of their unrest? Revolutions, rebellions, barricades, bread-riots,—agrarianism, communism, the frowning hosts of capital and labor—the rumor of these grisly facts and grislier phantoms reached us, but from afar, and as an echo merely; and lulled, by our exemption from these ills, into a fatal security, we failed to perceive the breakers upon which we were slowly but surely drifting. The lee-shore upon which our ship was so somnolently rocking was nothing less than bankruptcy. Spendthrifts, we dreamed that our inheritance was too vast ever to be dissipated; nay, we fondly imagined that we were adding to our substance. Did not our statesmen, our Able Editors, unceasingly assure us that we were the richest people on the globe, and growing daily richer? And what had been that inheritance? A noble, virgin land, unsurpassed, all things considered, anywhere,—a land that cost us nothing beyond the beads of Captain Smith and the bullets of his successors,—a land which no mortgages smothered, no tax-gatherer devoured. But smothered and devoured it was, and by our slaves.
It is doubtful whether slavery was ever, at any stage of the world’s history, wise, from an economical point of view, though it was, of course, in one aspect, in the interest of humanity, when, at some prehistoric period, men began to enslave rather than butcher their prisoners of war. But it seems very clear, that if the conditions of any society were ever such that its greatest productive force could only be realized through the restraints and constraints of slavery, then that slavery must needs have been absolute and pitiless. No half-and-half system will suffice. Severe and continuous labor is endured by no man who can avoid it. But labor, continuous and severe, is the price paid by the great mass of mankind for the mere privilege of being counted in the census; so terrible is that struggle for existence, of the Darwinian dispensation, which, whether we be Darwinians or not, we must needs live under. This, in our dreamland, we quietly ignored. The political economists are all agreed that from the sharpest toil little more can be hoped for than the barest support of the toilers; and we were not ignorant of political economy. But is there not an exception to every rule? And were we not that exception? In our favored nook, at least, the cold dicta of science should not hold sway. And so our toilers did half work,—and got double rations. In one word, we spent more than we made. And although we could not be brought to see this, it became very plain when the war came and settled our accounts for us; for I venture to assert that in April, 1865, the State of Virginia was worth intrinsically less than when, in 1607, Captain John Smith and his young gentlemen landed at Jamestown. In other words, there had been going on for two hundred and fifty years a process the reverse of accumulation. For that length of time we had been living on our principal,—the native wealth of the soil. While, in other parts of the country, the struggle for existence had caused barrenness to bloom, the very rocks to grow fat, in ours the struggle for ease had converted a garden into something very like a wilderness. The forests we found had fallen; the rich soil of many wide districts was washed into the sea, leaving nothing to represent them; and when the smoke of battle cleared away, we saw a naked land. It could not have been otherwise. Thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the nineteenth century, as well as the principles of the Jeffersonian Democracy, we were entangled in a system of things not compatible, profitably at least, with either. We could not forget that our slaves were human. There were ties that we felt in a hundred ways. We loved this old nurse. We humored that old butler. We indulged, here a real, there a sham invalid, until, in one word, the thing began to cost more than it came to, and it was time we shook off the incubus.
And there was a time when many Virginians, now living, began to see this; and had they been let alone, not many years would have passed before we should have freed ourselves from the weight that oppressed us. But in an evil hour there arose a handful of men with a mission,—a mission to keep other people’s consciences,—often—as certain national moral phenomena subsequently showed—to the neglect of that charity which begins at home. From that day all rational discussion of the question became impossible in Virginia; and a consummation for which many of the wisest heads were quietly laboring became odious even to hint at, under dictation from outsiders; and on the day when the first abolition society was formed, the fates registered a decree that slavery should go down; not in peace, but by war; not quietly and gradually extinguished, with the consent of all concerned, but with convulsive violence,—drowned in the blood of a million men, and the tears of more than a million women.
Well, they were only white men and women,—so let that pass, too.
| [1] | Obviously, as often elsewhere, Mr. Whacker here says Virginians, instead of Southerners, to avoid all semblance of sectional feeling. |
| [2] | Written, doubtless, before the death of “The Master.”—Ed. |