The Alternative: A Separate Nationality or The Africanization of the South

by William H. Holcombe

African slavery is therefore a certain relation of capital and labor, in which capital owns its labor and is bound to maintain and protect it. It is only thus that an inferior race can exist in contact with a superior one. In the Sandwich Islands, in Australia, in New Zealand, the aborigines are passing away before the encroachments of English power and at the mere presence of English civilization. The free negroes of the North are dying out beneath the cold climate and the colder charities of that region. Freedom and competition with the white man would ultimately annihilate the negro race in the South. The only hope of the African is in his just subordination to the superior type.

Certain physical and spiritual peculiarities of the negro necessitate his subjection to the white man. It is for his own good that he is subjected. As long as this was doubtful or not clearly seen, the South itself was opposed to slavery. It remonstrated with England for imposing the institution upon it, and with Massachusetts for insisting upon a continuance of the slave-trade for twenty years after the adoption of the federal compact. The South is now fully convinced of the benefits and blessings it is conferring upon the negro race. It is beginning to catch a glimpse of the true nature and extent of its mission in relation to this vast and growing institution. The government of the South is to protect it; the Church of the South is to christianize it; the people of the South are to love it, and improve it and perfect it. God has lightened our task and secured its execution by making our interests happily coincide with our duty.

We anticipate no terminus to the institution of slavery. It is the means whereby the white man is to subdue the tropics all around the globe to order and beauty, and to the wants and interests of an ever-expanding civilization. What may happen afar off in the periods of a millenial Christianity we cannot foresee. No doubt the Almighty in his wisdom and mercy has blessings in store for the poor negro, so that he will no longer envy the earlier and more imposing development and fortunes of his brethren. Some shining Utopia will beckon him also with beautiful illusion into the shadowy future. But with those remote possibilities we need not trouble ourselves. His present duty is evidently “to labor and to wait.”

The Southern view of the matter, destined to revolutionize opinion throughout the civilized world, is briefly this: African slavery is no retrograde movement, no discord in the harmony of nature, no violation of elemental justice, no infraction of immutable laws, human or divine—but an integral link in the grand progressive evolution of human society as an indissoluble whole.

The doctrine that there exists an “irrepressible conflict” between free labor and slave labor is as false as it is mischievous. Their true relation is one of beautiful interchange and eternal harmony. When each is restricted to the sphere for which God and nature designed it, they both contribute their full quotas to the physical happiness, material interests, and social and spiritual progress of the race. They will prove to be not antagonistic but complementary to each other in the great work of human civilization. From this time forth, the subjugation of tropical nature to man; the elevation and christianization of the dark races, the feeding and clothing of the world, the diminution of toil and the amelioration of all the asperities of life, the industrial prosperity and the peace of nations, and the further glorious evolutions of Art, Science, Literature and Religion, will depend upon the amicable adjustment, the co-ordination, the indissoluble compact between these two social systems, now apparently rearing their hostile fronts in the Northern and Southern sections of this country.

The only “irrepressible conflict” is between pro-slavery and anti-slavery opinion: Here indeed collision may be inconceivably disastrous, and fanaticism may thrust her sickle into the harvest of death. The pro-slavery sentiment is unconquerable. It will be more and more suspicious of encroachment and jealous of its rights. It will submit to no restriction, and scouts the possibility of any “ultimate extinction.” Nothing will satisfy us but a radical change of opinion, or at least of political action on the subject of slavery throughout the Northern States. The relation of master and slave must be recognized as right and just, as national and perpetual. The Constitution must be construed in the spirit of its founders, as an instrument to protect the minority from the domination of an insolent majority. The slavery question must be eliminated forever from the political issues of the day. No party which contemplates the restriction of our system and its ultimate extinction can be tolerated for a moment. In assuming this bold attitude we simply assert our obvious rights and discharge our inevitable duty.

Now the Northern mind is equally determined and defiant. It has literally gone mad in its hostility to our institutions. The most conservative of the Republican party look forward complacently to the restriction and ultimate extinction of slavery, in other words, to the Africanization of the South and our national destruction. We will see to it that they precipitate no such calamity upon us, and we warn them to look carefully to their own fate. When a Northern Confederacy can no longer like a vampire suck the blood of the sleeping and compliant South; when agrarianism and atheism and fanaticism and socialism do their perfect work in a crowded and crowding population, will not the dark enigmas of free-labor civilization press heavily upon it, and the dread images evoked by the prophetic wisdom of Macauley arise indeed—taxation, monopoly, oppression, misery of the masses, revolution, standing armies, despotism, &c.? It may yet deserve the strange epitaph written for this nation by Elwood Fisher:

“Here lies a people, who, in attempting to liberate the negro, lost their own freedom.”

Have we rightly comprehended the fearful import of those words, the Africanization of the South? According to the present rate of increase, in fifty years the negroes of these States will amount to twenty millions. Suppose them to be restricted to their present arena. Suppose them in addition to be free. Imagine the misery, the crime, the poverty, the barbarism, the desolation of the country! The grass would grow in the streets of our cities, our ships would rot in their harbors, our plantations would become a wilderness of cane-brakes. The re-subjugation of the negro, or the extermination of one race or the other would be inevitable, and in any event our children would be beggared with an inheritance of woe. Let us swear upon the altar of God, that as Christians and citizens we will resist to the death the first step which might lead us towards this awful abyss!

If the Republican party is permitted to get into power, the Africanization of the South may be gradual, but it will be sure. Their leaders already boast to applauding multitudes that the heel of the North is at last on our necks. When the power, the patronage, the prestige of the federal government are wielded against slavery; when Southern men take office under it, and first apologize and then approve; when a free-soil sentiment gradually percolates through the South itself; when the brightness of Southern honor is tarnished, and the integrity of Southern opinion destroyed, what will be, what must be the inevitable result? Nothing hasty or violent will be attempted. The iniquity will be accomplished under the forms of the present Constitution. Remember that the coins of Nero bore the image of the Goddess of Liberty, and that a perverted Constitution is the choicest instrument of tyranny. Lulled by pleasant narcotics, we will pass from dreams of security, into the sleep of death. Or if we rouse ourselves at last, and reach out for our fallen thunderbolts, we will be found, like Sampson, blind and helpless, and they will make sport of our misery. The silken cords with which they bind us now, will change to iron fetters in our moment of revolt.