Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery / As Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States, with the Duties of Masters to Slaves

by William A. Smith

I propose to submit a brief sketch of the present and prospective condition of our country.

We live in a country of vast geographical extent. A large portion of it is uninhabited. It is, however, rapidly filling up. Immigrants from every section of the civilized world are rapidly arriving in our eastern cities, and spreading to remote sections of our republic: men of every conceivable variety of taste, disposition, and opinion, both in politics and in religion. The fertility and abundance of our soil, and the variety of our staple articles of produce, have attracted universal activity and enterprise. To compare the civilized world to one vast city, our republic seems destined to become the great market or business-street of it. Here, all is bustle and activity. Nowhere on the face of the globe is so much energy of character displayed. No attentive observer can fail to perceive the tendency of all this to call off the mind from those moral and intellectual pursuits that so eminently fit men for the sober duties of life and the felicities of heaven. The public mind is already kept in a state of most unnatural excitement, stimulated in the highest degree to the pursuits of wealth and political distinction, to the almost entire neglect of every other interest. This is daily becoming the supreme attraction, to which the popular impulse yields as readily as the unfortunate ship obeys the resistless circles of the maelstrom.

Thus far, it is true, we have succeeded to “lay that broad foundation of modern society which promises the noble superstructure of rational liberty. But regarding the tendencies of this restless people, looking at the growth of our own improvidence, and at the copious additions which overstocked and perishing Europe is daily sending us, in multiplied forms of ignorance and superstition, insomuch that in many respects in our Northern States our republican fabric is fast changing and passing away before our very eyes, who can exult in the certainty of success! Who will not despair, except so far as he may be sanguine that a tone and energy of moral effort is put forth, equal to that which achieved our national liberties! For if this be not done, in a day we may go down into hopeless bondage! The physical battle of our liberties has been fought and won, and we are fast rushing up to unparalleled eminence; but from this dizzy height, if we be not sustained by some conservative power, we shall go down in a moment to the degradation of slavery. For let it be remembered that whilst liberty may be achieved by the sword, it cannot be maintained by the sword. Enlightened principles and moral excellence alone can maintain the liberty that force achieves.”

I say nothing of that large class of foreign population whose education and pecuniary resources enable them to come among us from a choice of our institutions, and the other means of happiness which this great country affords. I bid them all welcome. They add alike to the permanency and strength of our institutions. Nor do I say any thing against that unfortunate multitude which accompanies these, whose ignorance and vice compel them, reluctantly or not, to seek their bread in our fruitful country. So far as we may be able to receive them, I rejoice that we have a home for them. But it is obvious that our safety can be found only in our ability to absorb them into our political body, and impart our character to them; and in those providential arrangements which shall sustain us through the protracted process. Without these, there is no ground to hope for success. For what power is that which (in the language of another) “has been fitly styled the ‘terror of Europe’—the power that has sent earthquake after earthquake, rolling under the deep foundations of governments, till they have rocked to their basis, and tottered to their fall? It is the order, or rather the mass of vicious ignorance and poverty which has there accumulated for ages.” This maniac power must continue to work its extended desolations in Europe, except so far as it may be enervated by expanding on the wilderness of North America. It is fortunate for Europe that this enfeebling process is rapidly going forward; but it is most unfortunate for us that we are destined soon to concentrate a power which Europe is so happily expanding. We are destined, ere long, to become a great manufacturing, as well as commercial and agricultural people. Our condition is soon to condense millions into cities and manufacturing districts, where, as in Europe, from the class of population flowing in upon us, a distinct class of menial poverty will be formed, “imbecile of mind, and inapt but for one employment.”[6]

[6] Some years ago, a pamphlet fell into my hands, written by some one whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. I think it likely that this language, or much of it, is to be credited to that pamphlet.

Nor is this all. It lays no claim to prophetic honor to venture the prediction, that the youth of our country who shall survive the next half century, will witness that which many will not believe, “though a man declare it unto them.” But reasoning from the past, or from well-established principles of political economy, it is morally certain that our present population of twenty-three millions will then have swelled to near one hundred millions. “Agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will have expanded their resources and powers of production to an inconceivable extent. The various portions of our country will be linked together by railroads, canals,” telegraphic wires, and by some other—God knows what!—as yet undiscovered means of connection. Already, the cities of our Atlantic coast converse freely, by means of “lightning post-boys,” with their next-door neighbors—the cities of the great Mississippi valley! “Flourishing cities are now lifting their spires in the hitherto pathless wilds of Iowa, Oregon,” and California, and will soon be in telegraphic connection with those of the East. Who can doubt that in less than ten years the prediction of an eminent son of Virginia, J. E. Heath, Esq., will be verified: “American steamships from the cities of our Western coast shall strike off in the path of the setting sun, and following that burning luminary where he dips his glowing axle in the waters of the Pacific, return in the short space of thirty or forty days, laden with the commerce and population of China, and the isles of the remotest West!”[7]

[7] Literary Messenger.

Can any man doubt the political and commercial changes that will then follow throughout the civilized world? But who can estimate the extent of these changes? Who can tell the result upon the political and moral destiny of this great country? Who can tell the end of that commercial revolution by which a large portion of the tea trade of China, now in the hands of that greatest of all monopolies—the British East India Company, contributing largely to the support of the British government—shall be transferred to American bottoms, and flow into this country through our cities on the Pacific coast! Already the walls of pagan China have bowed to the thunder of British cannon, and the deep foundations of her ancient government are destined at no distant day to yield alike to American enterprise and American liberty. Thousands of her perishing population—indeed, already they come!—shall, ere long, flow in from the West, and meet the vast tide of papal superstition and vice that has been long setting in from Europe on the east. I am free to own that I contemplate this period with profound amazement! I know not the extent of the vision that confounds me. And when I turn my eyes to the canvas of Divine inspiration, and decipher its unerring pencillings, I cannot doubt that the strange elements that even now are so rapidly combining, and that are soon to concentrate the maddened powers of pagan ignorance, and papal superstition and vice, in the heart of this republic, are, ere long, to make my native land the great theatre of those eventful battles—the conflicts of truth and error in both politics and religion—so graphically described in the apocalyptic vision of John. And as I believe in the truth of the prophecy, and confide in the promise of Heaven, I cannot doubt the result. But mark you, “the peril of our condition—the peril of that state of things on which our children may be but just entering!” This conflict is to be the more or less fierce, the more or less disastrous to those who shall immediately sustain its calamities, as they shall be the more or less prepared for it. And what are the great agencies that shall prepare us for a successful conflict? What is it that shall give comparative mildness to this great moral and perhaps physical conflict that awaits our children, or the want of which shall arm it with all the terrors of a barbarous warfare? But one answer can be given to these questions. The general education of the sovereigns of the land, and the conservative influence of our institutions, or perdition, is the alternative.