This presumption is greatly strengthened by the fact that they who claim political freedom for the Africans now in the country, have signally failed to secure it for those upon whom they have professed to confer it. Essential freedom is inseparably interlaced with social equality. Without the latter, the former cannot possibly exist. The Northern States have long since conferred the forms of civil freedom upon the African portion of their population, but to the present hour they have denied them social equality. Herein, they extinguish all the lights and comforts of essential freedom. They settle upon them a suffocative anhelation, which is truly the most oppressive form of slavery. The social inequality of the races, it is well known, exists in a much more modified form at the South than at the North. That those who have made, as we allow, an honest effort to confer essential freedom upon them, have signally failed, greatly strengthens the presumption that we are right in believing that the end they proposed was impracticable, and that we need not be so unwise as to imitate their folly.
But this presumption is still further strengthened by the fact that the basis argument upon which the abolitionists usually rest the claims of the African, is entirely sophistical. It is this: Slave property was originally acquired by robbery and violence, and therefore can never become lawful property. Hence we should confer upon them political freedom, regardless of whatever consequences may follow; seeing that an act of robbery can never extinguish the original right of the person robbed, or confer original title upon the robber.
The doctrine assumed in this argument is, that possessions unjustly acquired originally, can never become legal possessions; or that a state of things originally resulting from wrong, can never, by lapse of time, or the force of any circumstances, become right. The fact assumed as the basis of this doctrine in its application to the African is, that they were stolen while in a state of freedom, and reduced to a state of slavery. But we deny both the doctrine and the hypothetical assumption on which it is based.
1. If the doctrine be true, it will follow that all wrong is without any remedy, except in the few cases in which things may be restored to their original state. This would be a deplorable state of things indeed. It would work special disaster to our Northern brethren. For, first, if this doctrine be true, they own scarcely one foot of honest land; nor is there any in the whole country, save the original purchase of William Penn, and a few other unappreciable portions of territory. The Indians were the original and rightful owners of this whole country, according to the theory of rights which forms the basis of this doctrine. From the most of their possessions they were forcibly ejected at the peril of life as well as liberty; and from the remainder they were driven by a policy which in civilized life would be held and treated as knavery. These lands, according to this doctrine, should in all honesty be restored to their rightful owners, or to those who inherit them under their title, or the present holders are robbers. Second. The Africans, it is said, were stolen! If so, those who received them in this country can only be regarded as the receivers of stolen property—no better, if not worse, than the original thieves. But on this hypothesis, Who stole them? and who received this stolen property, knowing it to be so stolen? These questions admit of but one answer: The forefathers of the present generation of New England population! From their ports, vessels were fitted out, and employed in this system of “man-stealing.” They became the receivers of this stolen property. Those who were not demanded by their own agricultural pursuits, were sold in Southern markets. As the climate and soil of the South were better suited to such labor, the larger portion of all this stolen property was accumulated in the South. The product of the lands of New England, and the product of these sales of stolen Africans, have been, from time to time, invested in commercial and manufacturing pursuits. These constitute the chief sources of the great wealth of the New England States, to the present day; and these, it is well known, are mainly supported by the products of slave labor at the South. This being so, the great wealth of the Northern States can be regarded only as so much dishonest gain! Really, it is time they were looking to the duty of restitution! But the disaster of this doctrine does not exhaust itself with our Northern brethren. The Norman Conquest of Great Britain is that by which all the land-titles of England are held to the present day. All these titles are held under the rights acquired by this conquest. Now it is well known that the Norman Conquest was the most lawless piece of injustice and butchery, the record of which ever disgraced the pages of human history! Upon the basis of the doctrine in question, it is equally certain that there is scarcely an honest shilling in all England! Nor is this all: the present titles of all Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, are traceable, more or less remotely, to a source equally cruel and unjust! Thus there is an end pretty much to all honesty, as to the possessions of the civilized world! Surely, the absurdity of this conclusion is sufficient to invalidate the soundness of the doctrine from which it arises.
Now we are far from affirming that wrong—which is the negative of right—can ever become, by circumstances or any thing else, otherwise than it is, that is, wrong, namely, not right. But the state or thing which, under one set of circumstances, is wrong, may, under other circumstances, become right. It is not the wrong in itself which, in such a case, changes to right; but, by a change of circumstances, the wrong no longer inheres, but the right inheres in that which formerly involved the wrong; and therefore the state or thing which was before wrong, now becomes right. Hence, although it be admitted that the land-titles of the civilized world were originally founded in wrong, and therefore were unjust titles, it may not follow that those who now hold them, do so by an unjust title, because the original title was unjust. The facts may be thus stated in regard to the most of them. The titles were originally acquired by wrong; in many instances, cruel wrong! The authors of these wrongs were usually the heads of government, who, in their circumstances, were beyond control. They did the wrong. The ultimate results of their doings, by the lapse of time with its perpetual changes, upset all the existing relations of society, merged the descendants of the actors and sufferers in these wrongs into the mass of society, beyond the power of just discrimination, and introduced an altogether new state of things. Under these circumstances, the original wrong was ultimately placed beyond all remedy. The restoration of the lands to the original and lawful owners became an impossibility. To attempt such a work could only be followed by the grossest injustice to all the parties concerned. In this state of things, the question of title—Who shall own these lands? becomes an original question. And in this state of the case, the simple fact of present possession—there being no one to claim antecedent possession—according to the fundamental belief of all mankind, confers moral title, and should therefore be made legal. Hence the title is just, because the idea of the right in itself—that which is good—now inheres in the man who holds property under such circumstances. The argument authorizes this prescriptive principle in political science: That when the original wrong cannot be remedied, without inflicting greater injury, on all the parties concerned, than to permit the existing state of things to remain, in this state of the case, the existing state of things is in itself right, and should be permitted to remain.
Upon the basis of this principle—without which, we have no scruple to say, society could nowhere harmonize for a single hour—we have no difficulty in vindicating the honesty of the descendants of the Puritans, or the land-titles of the civilized world, or the thousand other titles which are equally involved by the absurd doctrine under consideration. Nor do we find any difficulty in allowing them a just title to all the proceeds of the African traffic, even though it should be conceded that their forefathers were, as they characterize them, a set of mere men-stealers!
Having invalidated this doctrine as a piece of gross sophistry, we remark:
2. That we also deny the hypothesis upon the basis of which this false doctrine has been made to apply to the Africans of this country; that is, we deny that African slavery in this country had its origin or was founded in cruelty and robbery.
There is no reason to doubt the statements of history, that many slave-ships originally (as perhaps is still the case to some extent) acquired their cargoes, some by robbery and violence, and some by purchase. The sufferings of what is called the “middle passage” are, no doubt, correctly stated in history. We have no motive to controvert these statements, nor indeed to inquire into their authenticity. We are not even the apologists of any of the actors in these scenes, much less their defenders. There may have been cruel wrongs, and under circumstances of even greater aggravation than those recorded in history. Be it so! The actors have long since gone to their account, and we may safely leave them to Him who judgeth righteously. The conduct of these agents, whether cruel or kind, is not an element in this discussion. Our inquiry goes to the foundation of this matter—the true producing cause for the introduction of the African into this country, and his position as a slave. What was this? It will not be maintained that these agents, whether humane or not, can in any proper sense be said to be the cause or foundation of African slavery in this country. With much greater propriety it may be said that the artisans of Boston were the founders and builders of the city. They were necessary agents. They might have done their part well. They might have done it dishonestly, cruelly. Neither hypothesis will entitle them to rank as the true and proper founders and builders of the city. So neither are the men in question to be regarded as the founders and builders of African slavery in America. Whether they did their part as they should have done, or should not have done; or whether they did the work at all, or not, is the mere logical accident of a cause, which lay back of all they did, and of all they might have done, whether good or bad. This cause is evolved by the inquiry, Why did they bring them into the country at all? If some potent cause had not been at work, would they or any others have brought them into the country? Certainly not. This cause, then, whatever it was, is without doubt the true foundation, the immediate cause, of African slavery in America. What, then, was this cause? But one answer can be given to this inquiry. On it there can be no division of opinion. It was the state of public opinion in Great Britain, and the state of public opinion in her colonies in this country at the time. This state of public opinion demanded their introduction and employment as slaves, and hence they were introduced and so employed. Whatever demerit or merit, then, was in the origin and maturity of this state of things, is traceable directly to public opinion, and attaches directly as a virtue or a crime, as the case may be, to those who controlled public opinion, through the long period of its inception, formation, and maturity, and to them alone. This being the true origin and foundation of the system, if it had its foundation in robbery and violence, it was because public opinion, through that long period, was so eminently corrupt as to set itself, deliberately and of full purpose, to work to perpetrate robbery and violence, without any redeeming virtue; for such crimes admit of none. Was this so? Can we be prepared to believe it? In default of all history at this point to detail the origin and progress of public opinion on this subject, we are left to form our judgment from our knowledge of the men whom we know to have participated more largely than any others in directing public opinion in their day, and to the history of the times in which they lived.
In the seventeenth century, African slaves were first introduced into this country, and the practice was continued, under the sanction of law, until the years 1778 and 1808, inclusive. At an early period, public opinion was matured on this subject both in England and in the colonies, and we see that for a long period it sustained the practice of introducing slaves directly from Africa into this country. Now, we affirm that the position postulated in regard to this case is among the most palpable absurdities that can be conceived. The character of the men who controlled public opinion in that day, and the patriotic and Christian age in which they lived, utterly disprove the gross assumption that they yielded themselves up to falsify the truth and the conscience that was in them, and become a mere corporation of landpirates and freebooters! If our ignorance of the history of those times should disqualify us to account for the existence of this state of public opinion on any strictly rational grounds, common sense would forbid that we assign for it so unreasonable a cause as this; whilst the least that charity could suggest would be, that we place it among those things for which we were unable to account.