From the time they were first introduced into the colonies, about 1620, to the time the system may be considered as permanently established, makes a period of some hundred and fifty years. Among the eminent personages who appeared in Great Britain during this period, and did not fail to impress their genius and moral character upon the age in which they lived, we may mention, James I., Cromwell, and William III., Burnet, Tillotson, Barrow, South, with Bunyan and Milton; and also Newton and Locke.
In the colonies, during this time, there lived Cotton Mather, Brainerd, Eliot, and Roger Williams; Winthrop, Sir H. Vane, and Samuel Adams, with Henry, Washington, and Franklin.
These great men, and some of them eminently good men, stood connected with a numerous class of highly influential men, though inferior in position, and all together may be regarded as embodying and controlling public opinion in their day. Some of them were preëminently distinguished for their patriotic devotion to the rights of humanity. Many others were men of wide views on all subjects, and of broad and expansive feelings of benevolence, and indeed of the soundest piety. Add to all this, many of them are to this day without a peer in intellectual distinctions, if indeed the same may not be said of their attainments in literature and science. The age of Barrow, and of Locke, and Newton, in philosophy, and of Washington and Franklin, in patriotism, public benevolence, common sense, and general learning, still stands on the pages of history without a rival. But these men, and their numerous compeers and co-laborers, were no better than a hoard of mountain robbers! They coolly coincided with each other, without formal concert or convention, but by the common attraction of their natural affinity for power and plunder, to murder, rob, and enslave thousands of their innocent and defenceless fellow-creatures—the helpless victims of public cupidity! Such is the shameless position strangely postulated in regard to these men and their times! We scruple not to affirm that this is more than a stupid gratuity! It is a gross calumny upon humanity itself, of which the authors should be profoundly ashamed!
The advantages enjoyed in this day, by the great success which has attended the art of printing—an art for which we are indebted to the genius of a former age—would no doubt afford us a satisfactory history of the rise and progress of public opinion on such a subject, if it were to occur in this age. The state of the art at that period, the proscription of the press, and especially the new and unsettled condition of the colonies, furnishes good cause for the deficiency. We may not, therefore, account for public opinion as satisfactorily now, as might have been done at that time. Still we have abundant materials for a charitable construction of the conduct of our forefathers—both here and in England. The savage, and indeed the brutal condition of the larger portion of Africa, had long since been a matter of history. All well-informed men were familiar with the facts of African history. They were not only Pagans, but Pagans of the most stupid and enslaved kind—without the knowledge of God, or the rudest forms of civilization. The population was divided into tribes, each governed by an ignorant petty king, who ruled his equally Pagan subjects as absolute slaves. In the place of the knowledge and worship of the true God, which was found to exist among the savages of America, the African worships the devil—the evil spirit, and that by the most humiliating and debasing rites of superstition. His superstitions furnished frequent occasions for wars. These wars were highly sanguinary—often exterminating, as all wars amongst an ignorant and highly superstitious people have always been. To spare the life of an enemy in war, make him a prisoner, guard him as such, or make him labor as a slave for his support, is an advance of civilization. To continue to put the enemy to death to the end of the war, is the necessary condition of a state of war in uncivilized life. Such was the known condition of all the African population south of Egypt and the States of Barbary. Did not their condition appeal, as it still does, to the benevolence of the civilized world? But what could they do? Send Christian missionaries? No. We, in this country, have succeeded, to some extent at least, in civilizing the savage tribes upon our border! But the Indians were not, like the Africans, idolatrous Pagans. Be this as it may, the competency of missionary enterprise to civilize and christianize Pagans, was, as it still is to any very material extent, an untried experiment. The opinion then obtained, and to this hour it is not wholly invalidated, that to reduce Pagans to a state of labor was, among other agencies, a necessary condition of their civilization. What then could Christians do in that age for African civilization? They could not introduce them as laborers in England, or on the continent of Europe. Such a step would have denied bread to the multitudes who already filled the menial offices of society. It was impracticable to do this, and inhuman to attempt it. Thus for long ages had degraded and enslaved Africa “stretched forth” her imploring hands, appealing to the benevolence of the world for relief. But the wisest and best men of the times saw no means of relief, and attempted none. In this state of African history, colonial settlements were ultimately effected on the coast of North America. At an early period an experiment was made by a Dutch Manhattan, to introduce African labor into the colonies. Here a wide field was open for their labor. It was greatly demanded. To labor here denied bread to no other laboring poor, as would have been the case in England. The idea was caught at in both hemispheres, as a “God-send” for the African—for the colonies, and a common civilization. No one dreamed of robbery, injustice, or wrong to any one! All considered it a wide door which a kind Providence had opened, and which piety itself bade them enter! No man who was worthy of the age authorized any one to fit out a ship, from the port of Boston or elsewhere, go to the coast of Africa, steal a cargo of natives, murder all who stood in the way of his schemes, tumble them into the hold of their ship, without regard to health or comfort, and make their way with their piratical cargo to Boston and other markets, and turn them into money! Those who did this—as many no doubt did—acted on their own responsibility, and have long since given their dreadful account to God! But the men who were worthy of the age, and who would be worthy of any age, did authorize, by a common public opinion, the practice of going to Africa, and negotiating a purchase with those who had long held and treated them as slaves, and especially those who by the usages of barbarous war were condemned to death. They considered that thus to arrest the practice of putting prisoners to death was humane, and worthy of a Christian people; that to introduce them into civilized society, teach them the habits of civilized life, the principles and experience of Christianity, and ultimately perhaps to send them back to regenerate their fatherland, was an achievement worthy of the highest attainments of piety! Hence they had no scruple to purchase them when brought to the country. The most eminently patriotic and benevolent of the colonists purchased them. The most pious members of churches, and distinguished Christian ministers, did the same. The immortal Whitefield did not scruple to sustain his pious foundation in Georgia by a large income, for the times, from slave property. Were they correct in these views? We appeal to facts. Multitudes were brought to the country who had otherwise perished in barbarous warfare, or been murdered as captives, and the others would have remained in a state of Pagan ignorance, superstition, and slavery. By coming into the country, they have been greatly improved in their mental, moral, and physical condition. I do not stay to trouble you with statistical details. But my investigations warrant a statement, which you can test at your leisure; it is this: the number of Africans who have died in the communion of the Methodist and Baptist churches of America to the present time—and who, therefore, we may assume, were christianized by their residence in this country—exceeds the whole number of all the heathen who have been christianized by the labors of all the Protestant denominations of Christendom since the days of Luther. Hence, we conclude, that whatever were the cruelties of individuals engaged in the original slave trade, (for which they were responsible,) and whatever may have been the abuses of the system since, by individual slave owners, the system itself was originally founded in a profound view of the principles of political science, so far as regards this country, and of political economy, and the claims of Christian benevolence, so far as it regards the Africans themselves. The resources of this vast country have been rapidly developed. It is already the asylum of the oppressed, and the home of the poor, of all lands. Slave labor has had no small share in all this. The regeneration of the continent of Africa has already commenced, and the ultimate result is looked to with increasing confidence.
Thus we have invalidated the doctrine, and also the hypothesis, which form the basis on which the abolitionists rest their argument against the justice and policy of the South. That their position is not tenable is no direct proof that ours is right; but it does afford a presumption that we are right. This presumption we claim, for the several reasons given. The direct argument in vindication of the system of domestic slavery, upon its own merits, is reserved for the next lecture.
[LECTURE VIII.]
DOMESTIC SLAVERY, AS A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT FOR THE AFRICANS IN AMERICA, EXAMINED AND DEFENDED ON THE GROUND OF ITS ADAPTATION TO THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE RACE.
There should be a separate and subordinate government for our African population—Objection answered—Africans are not competent to that measure of self-government which entitles a man to political sovereignty—They were not prepared for freedom when first brought into the country, hence they were placed under the domestic form of government—The humanity of this policy—In the opinion of Southern people they are still unprepared—The fanaticism and rashness of some, and the inexcusable wickedness of others, who oppose the South.
It having been proved that both the doctrine and the assumption of fact by Northern fanatics, in regard to the claim of the African to a republican form of government, are false, and that the presumption is in favor of the position of the South, that domestic slavery is the appropriate form of government for them, we are now left free to pursue our inquiry, without offset from these vagaries, into the merits of this system, and its appropriateness to the African race in this country.