Talent and virtuous merit at that period was the passport to public confidence. Had it continued to be, we should never have known the present deplorable condition of the country, with the Government sinking into ruin ere it has reached the ten o'clock of national life.
His Shibboleth was, that the disgrace of the State must be wiped out by the repeal of the Yazoo Act; and repeal rang from every mouth, from Savannah to the mountains. Jackson resigned his seat in Congress, and was elected a member of the Legislature. Immediately upon the assembling of this body, a bill was introduced repealing the odious Act, and ordering the records containing it to be burned. This was carried out to the letter. Jackson, heading the Legislature and the indignant public, proceeded in procession to the public square in Louisville, Jefferson County, where the law and the fagots were piled; when, addressing the assembled multitude, he denounced the men who had voted for the law as bribed villains—those who had bribed them, and the Governor who had signed it; and declared that fire from heaven only could sanctify the indignation of God and man in consuming the condemned record of accursed crime. Then, with a Promethean or convex glass condensing the sun's rays, he kindled the flame which consumed the records containing the hated Yazoo Act.
Jackson was a man of ordinary height, slender, very erect in his carriage, with red hair and intensely blue eyes. His manners were courteous, affable, and remarkable for a natural dignity which added greatly to his influence with the people. He was the model from which was grown that chivalry and nobility of soul and high bearing so characteristic of the people of Southern Georgia. In truth, the essence of his character seemed subtilly to pervade the entire circle in which he moved, inspiring a purity of character, a loftiness of honor, which rebuked with its presence alone everything that was low, little, or dishonest. Subsequently he was elected Governor of the State, bringing all the qualities of his nature into the administration of the office; he gave it a dignity and respectability never subsequently degraded, until an unworthy son of South Carolina, the pus and corruption of unscrupulous party, was foisted into the position. Strength of will, a ripe judgment, and purity of intention, were the great characteristics distinguishing him in public life, and these have endeared his name to the people of Georgia, where now remain many of his descendants, some of whom have filled high positions in the State and United States, and not one has ever soiled the honor or tarnished the name with an act unworthy a gentleman.
The Revolutionary struggle called out all the nobler qualities nature has bestowed on man, in those who conceived the desire and executed the determination to be free. The heroic was most prominent: woman seemed to forget her feebleness and timidity, and boldly to dare, and with increased fortitude to bear every danger, every misfortune, with a heroism scarcely compatible with the delicacy of her nature. To this, or some other inexplicable cause, nature seemed to resort in preparation for coming events. In every State there came up men, born during the war or immediately thereafter, of giant minds—men seemingly destined to form and give direction to a new Government suited to the genius of the people and to the physical peculiarities of the country where it was to control the destinies of hundreds of millions of human beings yet unborn, and where the soil was virgin and unturned, which nature had prepared for their coming. This required a new order of men. These millions were to be free in the fullest sense of the word; they were only to be controlled by laws; and the making of these laws was to be their own work, and nature was responding to the exigencies of man.
The early probation of independent government taught the necessity of national concentration as to the great features of government, at the same time demonstrating the importance of keeping the minor powers of government confined to the authority of the States. In the assembling of a convention for this purpose, which grew out of the free action of the people of each State, uninfluenced by law or precedent, we see congregated a body of men combining more talent, more wisdom, and more individuality of character than perhaps was ever aggregated in any other public body ever assembled. From this convention of sages emanated the Constitution of the United States; and most of those constituting this body reassembled in the first Congress, which sat as the supreme power in the United States. It was these men and their coadjutors who inaugurated and gave direction to the new Government. Under its operations, the human mind and human soul seemed to expand and to compass a grasp it had scarcely known before. There were universal content and universal harmony. The laws were everywhere respected, and everywhere enforced. The freedom of thought, and the liberty of action unrestrained, stimulated an ambition in every man to discharge his duties faithfully to the Government, and honestly in all social relations. There was universal security to person and property, because every law-breaker was deemed a public enemy, and not only received the law's condemnation, but the public scorn. Under such a Government the rapid accumulation of wealth and population was a natural consequence. The history of the world furnishes no example comparable with the progress of the United States to national greatness. The civilized world appeared to feel the influence of her example and to start anew in the rivalry of greatness. Her soil's surplus products created the means of a widely extended commerce, and Americans can proudly refer to the eighty years of her existence as a period showing greater progress in wealth, refinement, the arts and sciences, and human liberty, than was ever experienced in any two centuries of time within the historical period of man's existence. My theme expands, and I am departing from the purposes of this work; yet I cannot forbear the expression of opinion as to the causes of this result. I know I shall incur the deepest censure from the professors of a mawkish philanthropy, and a hypocritical religion which is cursing with its cant the very sources of this unparalleled progress, this unexampled prosperity.
Slavery was introduced into the Colonies by English merchants about two centuries since: this was to supply a necessity—labor—for the purpose of developing the resources of this immense and fertile country. The African was designed by the Creator to subserve this purpose. His centre of creation was within the tropics, and his physical organization fitted him, and him alone, for field labor in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the earth. He endures the sun's heat without pain or exhaustion in this labor, and yet he has not nor can he acquire the capacity to direct profitably this labor. It was then the design of the Creator that this labor should be controlled and directed by a superior intelligence. In the absence of mental capacity, we find him possessed of equal physical powers with any other race, with an amiability of temper which submits without resistance to this control. We find him, too, without moral, social, or political aspirations, contented and happy in the condition of servility to this superior intelligence, and rising in the scale of humanity to a condition which under any other circumstances his race had never attained. I may be answered that this labor can be had from the black as a freeman as well as in the condition of a slave. To this I will simply say, experience has proved this to be an error. Such is the indolence and unambitious character of the negro that he will not labor, unless compelled by the apprehension of immediate punishment, to anything approaching his capacity for labor. His wants are few, they are easily supplied, and when they are, there is no temptation which will induce him to work. He cares nothing for social position, and will steal to supply his necessities, and feel no abasement in the legal punishment which follows his conviction; nor is his social status among his race damaged thereby. As a slave to the white man, he becomes and has proved an eminently useful being to his kind—in every other condition, equally conspicuous as a useless one. The fertility of the soil and the productions of the tropical regions of the earth demonstrate to the thinking mind that these were to be cultivated and made to produce for the uses and prosperity of the human family. The great staples of human necessity and human luxury are produced here in the greatest abundance, and the great majority of these nowhere else. The white man, from his physical organization, cannot perform in these regions the labor necessary to their production. His centre of creation is in the temperate zones, and only there can he profitably labor in the earth's cultivation. But his mental endowments enable him to appropriate all which nature has supplied for the necessities of life and the progress of his race. He sees and comprehends in nature the designs of her Creator: these designs he develops, and the consequence is a constant and enlightened progress of his race, and the subjection of the physical world to this end.
He finds the soil, the climate, the production, and the labor united, and he applies his intelligence to develop the design of this combination; and the consequence has been the wonderful progress of the last two centuries. I hold it as a great truth that nature points to her uses and ends; that to observe these and follow them is to promote the greatest happiness to the human family; and that wherever these aims are diverted or misdirected, retrogression and human misery are the consequence. In all matters, experience is a better test than speculation; and to surrender a great practical utility to a mere theory is great folly. But it has been done, and we abide the consequences.
In all nations, a spurious, pretentious religion has been the avant-coureur of their destruction. In their inception and early progress this curse exercises but slight influence, and their growth is consequently healthy and vigorous. All nations have concealed this cancerous ulcer, sooner or later to develop for their destruction. These wear out with those they destroy, and a new or reformed religion is almost always accompanied with new and vigorous developments in a new and progressive Government. The shackles which have paralyzed the mind, forbidding its development, are broken; the unnatural superstition ceases to circumscribe and influence its operations; and thus emancipated, it recovers its elasticity and springs forward toward the perfection of the Creator. Rescued from these baleful influences, the new organization is vigorous and rapid in its growth, yielding the beneficent blessings natural to the healthful and unabused energies of the mind. But with maturity and age the webs of superstition begin to fasten on the mind; priests become prominent, and as is their wont, the moment they shackle the mind, they reach out for power, and the chained disciple of their superstition willingly yields, under the vain delusion that he shares and participates in this power as a holy office for the propagation of his creed—and retrogression commences.
The effects of African slavery in the United States, upon the condition of both races, was eminently beneficial to both. In no condition, and under no other circumstances, had the African made such advances toward civilization: indeed, I doubt if he has not attained in this particular to the highest point susceptible to his nature. He has increased more rapidly, and his aspirations have become more elevated, and his happiness more augmented. With his labor directed by the intelligence of the white race, the prosperity of the world has increased in a ratio superior to any antecedent period. The production of those staples which form the principal bases of commerce has increased in a quadruple ratio. Cotton alone increased so rapidly as to render its price so far below every other article which can be fashioned into cloth, that the clothing and sheeting of the civilized world was principally fabricated from it. The rapidity of its increased production was only equalled by the increase of wealth and comfort throughout the world. It regulates the exchanges almost universally. It gave, in its growth, transportation, and manufacture, employment to millions, feeding and clothing half of Europe—increasing beyond example commercial tonnage, and stimulating the invention of labor-saving machinery—giving a healthy impulse to labor and enterprise in every avocation, and intertwining itself with every interest, throughout the broad expanse of civilization over the earth. To cotton, more than to any other one thing, is due the railroad, steamboat, and steamship, the increase of commerce, the rapid accumulation of fortunes, and consequently the diffusion of intelligence, learning, and civilization.
Sugar, too, from the same cause, ceased to be a luxury, and became a necessity in the economy of living: coffee, too, became a stimulating beverage at every meal, instead of a luxury only to be indulged on rare occasions. How much the increased production of these three articles added to the commerce and wealth of the world during the last two centuries, and especially the last, is beyond computation. How much of human comfort and human happiness is now dependent upon their continued production, and in such abundance as to make them accessible to the means of all, may well employ the earnest attention of those who feel for the interest and happiness of their kind most. If these results have followed the institution of African slavery, can it be inhuman and sinful? Is it not rather an evidence that the Creator so designed?