The Negro and the Nation Part 1

The Negro and the Nation.

by George S. Merriam.

CHAPTER I

HOW SLAVERY GREW IN AMERICA

An English traveler, riding along the banks of the Potomac in mid-July, 1798, saw ahead of him on the road an old-fas.h.i.+oned chaise, its driver urging forward his slow horse with the whip, until a sharp cut made the beast swerve, and the chaise toppled over the bank, throwing out the driver and the young lady who was with him. The traveler--it was John Bernard, an actor and a man of culture and accomplishments, spurred forward to the rescue. As he did so he saw another horseman put his horse from a trot to a gallop, and together they reached the scene of action, extricated the woman and revived her from her swoon with water from a brook; then righted the horse and chaise, helped to restore the half-ton of baggage to its place; learned the story of the couple--a New Englander returning home with his Southern bride--and saw them safely started again. Then the two rescuers, after their half-hour of perspiring toil in a broiling sun, addressed themselves courteously to each other; the Virginian dusted the coat of the Englishman, and as Mr.

Bernard returned the favor he noticed him well,--"a tall, erect, well-made man, evidently advanced in years, but who appeared to have retained all the vigor and elasticity resulting from a life of temperance and exercise. His dress was a blue coat, b.u.t.toned to the chin, and buckskin breeches." The two men eyed each other, half recognizing, half perplexed, till with a smile the Virginian exclaimed, "Mr. Bernard, I believe?" and, claiming acquaintance from having seen him on the stage and heard of him from friends, invited him to come and rest at his house near by, to which he pointed. That familiar front, the now wholly familiar face and form,--"Mount Vernon! Have I the honor of addressing General Was.h.i.+ngton?" With a charming smile Was.h.i.+ngton offered his hand, replying, "An odd sort of introduction, Mr. Bernard; but I am pleased to find you can play so active a part in private and without a prompter." There followed a long and leisurely call at Mount Vernon, and Bernard, in his volume of travels which did not see the light for nearly a century, has given a most graphic and winning picture of Was.h.i.+ngton in his every-day aspect and familiar conversation. To the actor's keen eye, acquainted with the best society of his time, the near approach showed no derogation from the greatness which the story of his deeds conveyed.

"Whether you surveyed his face, open yet well defined, dignified but not arrogant, thoughtful but benign; his frame, towering and muscular, but alert from its good proportions--every feature suggested a resemblance to the spirit it encased, and showed simplicity in alliance with the sublime. The impression, therefore, was that of a most perfect whole."

The talk ran a various course. Was.h.i.+ngton incidentally praised the New Englanders, "the stamina of the Union and its greatest benefactors." The Englishman acknowledged a tribute to his own country, but Was.h.i.+ngton with great good humor responded, "Yes, yes, Mr. Bernard, but I consider your country the cradle of free principles, not their arm-chair." He had proceeded a little way in a eulogy of American liberty, when a black servant entered the room with a jug of spring water. Bernard smiled, and Was.h.i.+ngton quickly caught his look and answered it: "This may seem a contradiction, but I think you must perceive that it is neither a crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom, and not confound a man's with a brute's, the gift would insure its abuse. We might as well be asked to pull down our old warehouses before trade has increased to demand enlarged new ones. Both houses and slaves were bequeathed to us by Europeans, and time alone can change them; an event which, you may believe me, no man desires more heartily than I do. Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our Union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle."

These words of Was.h.i.+ngton, with the incident that supplies their background, are an epitome of the view and att.i.tude of that great man toward slavery. Before measuring their full significance, and the general situation in which this was an element, we may glance at the preliminary questions; how came slaves in Virginia and America; whence came slavery; what was it?

Primitive man killed his enemy and ate him. Later, the sequel of battle was the slaying of all the vanquished and the appropriation of their goods, including women and other live stock. Then it was found more profitable to spare the conquered warrior's life and set him to do the victor's disagreeable work; more profitable, and incidentally more merciful. Civilization advanced; wars became less general; but in the established social order that grew up there was a definite place for a great cla.s.s of slaves. It was part of Nature's early law, the strong raising themselves upon the weak. Morality and religion by degrees established certain limited rights for the slave. But the general state of slavery was defended by philosophers like Aristotle; was recognized by the legislation of Judea, Greece, and Rome; was accepted as part of the established order by Jesus and the early church. It is beyond our limits here to measure either its service, as the foundation on which rested ancient society; or the mischief that came from the supplanting of a free peasantry, as in Italy. We can but glance at the influence of Christianity, first in ameliorating its rigor, by teaching the master that the slave was his brother in Christ, and then by working together with economic forces for its abolition. By complex and partly obscure causes, personal slavery--the outright owners.h.i.+p of man--was abolished throughout Christendom. Less inhuman in theory, less heartless in practice, though inhuman and harsh enough, was the serfdom which succeeded slavery and rested on Europe for a thousand years; till by slow evolution, by occasional b.l.o.o.d.y revolt, by steady advance in the intelligence and power of the laborer, compelling for him a higher status, the serf became a hired laborer and thence a citizen throughout Europe.

The recrudescence of slavery came when the expanding energies of European society, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dashed against the weak barbarians of Africa and America. The old story was retold,--the stronger man, half-savage still under the veneer of civilization and Christianity, trampled the weaker man under foot. In Europe there was little need or room for slaves--the labor supply was sufficient, but on the new continent, in the words of Weeden (_Economic and Social History of New England_): "The seventeenth century organized the new western countries, and created an immense opportunity for labor. The eighteenth coolly and deliberately set Europe at the task of depopulating whole districts of western Africa, and of transporting the captives, by a necessarily brutal, vicious and horrible traffic, to the new civilization of America." The European was impartial between African and Indian; he was equally ready to enslave either; but the Indian was not made for captivity,--he rebelled or ran away or died; the more docile negro was the chief victim. The stream of slavery moved mainly according to economic conditions. Soil and climate in the Northern States made the labor of the indolent and unthrifty slave unprofitable, but in the warm and fertile South, developing plantations of tobacco, rice, and indigo, the negro toiler supplied the needed element for great profits. The church's part in the business was mainly to find excuse; through slavery the heathen were being made Christians. But when they had become Christians the church forgot to bid that they be made brothers and freemen. Some real mitigation of their lot no doubt there was, through teaching of religion and from other conditions. Professor Du Bois says that slavery brought the African three advantages: it taught him to labor, gave him the English language and--after a sort--the Christian religion. But it ruined such family life as had existed under a kind of regulated polygamy. Again we must decline to measure the good and the evil of the system. Probably the negro was in better condition in America than he had been in Africa, as he certainly was in far worse condition than he was ent.i.tled to be--and was in future to be.

The traffic was maintained chiefly by trading companies in England,--at first a great monopoly headed by the Duke of York, then rival companies.

The colonists made some attempts to check the traffic,--growing alarmed at the great infusion of a servile and barbaric population. Virginia long tried to discourage it by putting a heavy import tax on slaves, which was constantly overruled by the English government under the influence of the trading companies. At a later day every one tried to put the responsibility of slavery on some one else,--the North on the South, the South on England. But in truth the responsibility was on all.

The colonists did not hesitate to refuse to receive tea which England taxed; equally well they could have refused to buy slaves imported by trading companies if they had not wanted them; but they did want them.

The commercial demand overrode humanity. The social conscience was not awake,--strange as its slumber now seems. Stranger still, as we shall see, after it had once been thoroughly roused, it was deliberately drugged to sleep. But this belongs to a later chapter.

New England had little use for slaves at home, but for slave s.h.i.+ps she had abundant use. With a sterile soil, and with the sea at her doors swarming with edible fish and beckoning to her sails, her hardy industry found its best field on the ocean. The fisheries were the foundation of her commerce. The thrifty Yankee sold the best of his catch in Europe (here again we follow Weeden); the medium quality he ate himself; and the worst he sent to the West Indies to be sold as food for slaves. With the proceeds the skipper bought mola.s.ses and carried it home, where it was turned into rum; the rum went to Africa and was exchanged for slaves, and the slaves were carried to the West Indies, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Rum and slaves, two chief staples of New England trade and sources of its wealth; slave labor the foundation on which was planted the aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas,--alas for our great-grandfathers! But what may our great-grandchildren find to say of us?

The social conscience was not developed along this line; men were unconscious of the essential wrong of slavery, or, uneasily conscious of something wrong, saw not what could be done, and kept still. Here and there a voice was raised in protest. There was fine old Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of Ma.s.sachusetts; sincere, faithful man; dry and narrow, because in a dry and narrow place and time; but with the capacity for growth which distinguishes the live root from the dead. He presided over the court that adjudged witches to death; then, when the community had recovered from its frenzy, he took on himself deepest blame; he stood up in his pew, a public penitent, while the minister read aloud his humble confession, and on a stated day in each year he shut himself up in solitude to mourn and expiate the wrong he had unwittingly done, and, almost alone among his people, he spoke out clear and strong against human slavery.

A little later, in the generation before the Revolution, came the Quaker, John Woolman,--a gentle and lovely soul, known among his people as a kind of lay evangelist, traveling among their communities to utter sweet persuasive words of holiness and uplifting; known in our day by his _Journal_, a book of saintly meditations. Sensitive and shrinking, he yet had the moral insight to see and the courage to speak against the wrong of slavery. The Quakers, rich in the virtues of peace and kindliness, were by no means unpractical in the ways of worldly gain, or inaccessible to its temptations; they had held slaves like their neighbors, though we should probably have preferred a Quaker master. But the seed Woolman sowed fell on good ground; slavery came into disfavor among the Quakers, and when sentiment against it began to grow they lent strength to the leaders.h.i.+p of the public conscience.

CHAPTER II

THE ACTS OF THE FATHERS

The revolt of the colonists from British rule was not inspired originally by abstract enthusiasm for the rights of man. It was rather a demand for the chartered rights of British subjects, according to the liberal principles set forth by Locke and Chatham and Burke and Fox; a demand pushed on by the self-a.s.serting strength of communities become too vigorous to endure control from a remote seat of empire, especially when that control was exercised in a harsh and arbitrary spirit. The revolutionary tide was swelled from various sources: by the mob eager to worry a red-coated sentry or to join in a raid under Indian disguise; by men who embodied the common sense and rough energy of the plain people, like Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine; by men of practical statesmans.h.i.+p, like Franklin and Was.h.i.+ngton, who saw that the time had come when the colonists could best manage their own affairs; and by generous enthusiasts for humanity, like Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

With the minds of thoughtful men thoroughly wakened on the subject of human rights, it was impossible not to reflect on the wrongs of the slaves, incomparably worse than those against which their masters had taken up arms. As the political inst.i.tutions of the young Federation were remolded, so grave a matter as slavery could not be ignored.

Virginia in 1772 voted an address to the King remonstrating against the continuance of the African slave trade. The address was ignored, and Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration alleged this as one of the wrongs suffered at the hands of the British government, but his colleagues suppressed the clause. In 1778 Virginia forbade the importation of slaves into her ports. The next year Jefferson proposed to the Legislature an elaborate plan for gradual emanc.i.p.ation, but it failed of consideration. Maryland followed Virginia in forbidding the importation of slaves from Africa. Virginia in 1782 pa.s.sed a law by which manumission of slaves, which before had required special legislative permission, might be given at the will of the master. For the next ten years manumission went on at the rate of 8000 a year.

Afterward the law was made more restrictive. Ma.s.sachusetts adopted in 1780 a const.i.tution and bill of rights, a.s.serting, as the Declaration had done, that all men are born free and have an equal and inalienable right to defend their lives and liberties, to acquire property and to seek and obtain freedom and happiness. A test case was made up to decide the status of a slave, and the Supreme Court ruled that under this clause slavery no longer existed in Ma.s.sachusetts. Its 6000 negroes were now ent.i.tled to the suffrage on the same terms as the whites. The same held good of the free blacks in four other States. In all the States but Ma.s.sachusetts slavery retained a legal existence, the number ranging in 1790 from 158 in New Hamps.h.i.+re to nearly 4000 in Pennsylvania, over 21,000 in New York, 100,000 in each of the Carolinas, and about 300,000 in Virginia. s.h.i.+ps of Ma.s.sachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Middle States were still busy in bringing negroes from Africa to the South, though there were brave men like Dr. Hopkins at Newport who denounced the traffic in its strongholds.

Jefferson planned n.o.bly for the exclusion of slavery from the whole as yet unorganized domain of the nation, a measure which would have belted the slave States with free territory, and so worked toward universal freedom. The sentiment of the time gave success to half his plan. His proposal in the ordinance of 1784 missed success in the Continental Congress by the vote of a single State. The principle was embodied in the ordinance of 1787 (when Jefferson was abroad as Minister to France), but with its operations limited to the Northwestern territory, the country south of the Ohio being left under the influence of the slave States from which it had been settled.

The young nation crystalized into form in the const.i.tutional convention of 1787, and the ratification of its act by the people. It was indeed, as John Fiske's admirable book names it, "the critical period of American history." To human eyes it was the parting of the ways between disintegration toward anarchy, and the birth of a nation with fairer opportunities and higher ideals than any that had gone before. The work of those forty men in half a year has hardly a parallel. Individually they were the pick and flower of their communities. The circ.u.mstances compelled them to keep in such touch with the people of those communities that their action would be ratified. They included men of the broadest theoretical statesmans.h.i.+p, like Madison and Hamilton; men of great practical sense and magnanimity, like Was.h.i.+ngton and Franklin; and they also included and needed to include the representatives of various local and national interests. They had been schooled by the training of many momentous years, and the emergency brought out the strongest traits of the men and of the people behind them.

A prime necessity was willingness to make mutual concessions, together with good judgment as to where those concessions must stop. Large States against small States, seaport against farm, North against South and East against West, slave society against free society--each must be willing to give as well as to take, or the common cause was lost. The theorists, too, must make their sacrifices; the believers in centralization, the believers in diffusion of power; Madisonians, Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians--all must concede something, or there could be no nation.

And between principles of moral right and wrong,--here, too, can there be compromise? Easy to give a sweeping No; but when honest men's ideas of right and wrong fundamentally differ, when personal ideals and social utilities are in seeming contradiction, the answer may be no easy one.

The great difficulty at the outset, as to the relative power in Congress of the large and small States, was settled at last by the happy compromise of making the Senate representative of the States in equality, and the House representative of the whole people alike. But then came the question, Should the representation be based on numbers or on wealth? The decision to count men and not dollars was a momentous one; it told for democracy even more than the framers knew. But now again, Shall this count of men include slaves? Slaves, who have no voice in the government, and are as much the property of their owners as horses and oxen? Yes, the slaves should be counted as men, in the distribution of political power,--so said South Carolina and Georgia. In that demand there disclosed itself what proved to be the most determined and aggressive interest in the convention,--the slavery interest in the two most southern States. Virginia, inspired and led by Was.h.i.+ngton, Madison, and Mason, was unfriendly to the strengthening of the slave power, and the border and central as well as the eastern States were inclined the same way. But South Carolina and Georgia, united and determined, had this powerful leverage; from the first dispute, their representatives habitually declared that unless their demands were granted their States would not join the Union. Now it had been agreed that the Const.i.tution should only become operative on the a.s.sent by popular vote of nine of the thirteen States, and it was plain that at the best there would be great difficulty in getting that number. With two lost in advance the case looked almost hopeless. South Carolina and Georgia saw their advantage, and pushed it with equal resolution and dexterity. The question of representation was settled by a singular compromise: To the free population was to be added in the count three-fifths of the slave population. The slave was, for political purposes, three-fifths a man and two-fifths a chattel. Illogical to grotesqueness, this arrangement--in effect a concession to the most objectionable species of property of a political advantage denied to all other property--yet seemed to the wisest leaders of the convention not too heavy a price for the establishment of the Union. The provision that fugitive slaves should be returned had already been made, apparently with little opposition.

But the price was by no means all paid. When the powers of Congress came to be defined, the extreme South demanded that it be not allowed to forbid the importation of African slaves. With the example of Virginia and Maryland in view, it was clear that the tide was running so strongly against the traffic that Congress was sure to prohibit it unless restrained from doing so. Against such restraint there was strong protest from Virginia and the middle States. "The traffic is infernal,"

said Mason of Virginia. "To permit it is against every principle of honor and safety," said d.i.c.kinson of Delaware. But the two Pinckneys and their colleague said, "Leave us the traffic, or South Carolina and Georgia will not join your Union." The leading members from the northern and New England States actually favored the provision, to conciliate the extreme South. The matter went to a committee of one from each State. There it was discussed along with another question: It had been proposed to restrict Congress from legislating on navigation and kindred subjects except by a two-thirds vote of each House. This went sorely against the commercial North, which was eager to wield the whole power of the government in favor of its s.h.i.+pping interests. Of this power the South was afraid, and how well grounded was the importance each section attached to it was made plain when a generation later the North used its dearly-bought privilege to fas.h.i.+on such tariff laws as drove South Carolina to the verge of revolt. Now in the committee a bargain was struck: The slave trade should be extended till 1800, and in compensation Congress should be allowed to legislate on navigation as on other subjects. The report coming into the convention, South Carolina was still unsatisfied. "Eight more years for the African trade, until 1808," said Pinckney, and Gorham of Ma.s.sachusetts supported him. Vainly did Madison protest, and Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey vote against the whole scheme. The alliance of New England commerce and Carolina slavery triumphed, and the African slave trade was sanctioned for twenty years.

For the compromise on representation it might be pleaded, that by it no license was given to wrong; there was only a concession of disproportionate power to one section, fairly outweighed in the scale of the public good by the establishment of a great political order. But the action on the slave trade was the deliberate sanction for twenty years of man-stealing of the most flagitious sort. It was aimed at the strengthening and perpetuation of an inst.i.tution which even its champions at that time only defended as a necessary evil. And this action was taken, not after all other means to secure the Union had been exhausted, but as the price which New England was willing to pay for an advantage to her commercial interests.

At a later day, there were those who made it a reproach to the convention, and a condemnation of their whole work, that they imposed no prohibition on slavery as it existed in the States. But if such prohibition was to be attempted, the convention might as well never have met. The whole theory of the occasion was that the States, as individual communities, were to be left substantially as they were; self-governing, except as they intrusted certain definite functions to the general government. When only a single State, and that almost without cost, had abolished slavery within itself, it was out of the question that all of the States should through their common agents decree an act of social virtue wholly beyond what they had individually achieved. Any human State exists only by tolerating in its individual citizens a wide freedom of action, even in matters of ethical quality; and a federated nation must allow its local communities largely to fix their own standard of social conduct. At the point which the American people had reached, the next imperative step of evolution was that they unite themselves in a social organism, such as must allow free play to many divergencies. For the convention to take direct action for the abolition of slavery was beyond the possibilities of the case. It was in making provision for the extension of the evil that it was untrue to its ideal, sacrificed its possibilities, and opened the door for the long domination of a mischievous element.

But the main work of the convention was well and wisely done. Not less fine was the self-control and sagacity with which the people and their leaders debated and finally adopted the new order. Advocates of a stronger government, like Hamilton, and champions of a more popular system, like Samuel Adams and Jefferson, sank their preferences and successfully urged their const.i.tuents to accept this as the best available settlement. Slavery played very little part in the popular discussions, and only a few keen observers like Madison read the portents in that quarter. The young nation was swept at once into difficulties and struggles in other directions.

A word, before we follow the history, as to the sentiments of the great leaders in this period. Broadly, they all viewed slavery as a wrong and evil; they looked hopefully for its early extinction; they recognized great difficulties in adapting the negro to conditions of freedom; and they were in general too much absorbed in other and pressing problems to direct much practical effort toward emanc.i.p.ation. Was.h.i.+ngton's view is nowhere better given than in the casual talk so graphically reported by Bernard. He desired universal liberty, but believed it would only come when the negroes were fit for it; at present they were as unqualified to live without a master's control as children or idiots. Was.h.i.+ngton's way was to look at facts and to deal with a situation as he found it, and not to try to order the world by general and abstract ideals. He was intensely practical, responsive to each present call of duty, and in his conception of duty taking wider and wider views as he was trained by years and experience. The incident which brought him and Bernard together was characteristic; if any chaise was upset in his neighborhood, trust Was.h.i.+ngton to have a hand in righting it! The natural reply to his talk about the negroes might have been: "Since you desire their freedom, but think them not fit for it, why not make a business--you and the country--of making them fit?" And the answer fairly might have been: "The country and I have as yet had too much else to do." Besides his public services, he was a planter on the largest scale; thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves had come to him by inheritance and by marriage. He was most thorough and successful in his private affairs; through all his cares in the Revolution, scarcely ever visiting his home, he kept in close touch with his steward and regulated the plantation's management by constant correspondence. He had the reputation of a just but strict master. His slaves were well fed and clothed; they were supported in infancy and old age; they were trained in work according to their capacity, and taught something of morals and religion; in point of physical comfort and security, and of industrial and moral development, they were by no means at the bottom of the scale of humanity. The slave-holder's position, however unjust by an absolute standard, and with great possibilities of abuse, was, in the case of the rightly-disposed man--and such were common--a position which had its grave duties and often onerous burdens to be conscientiously borne.

Hardly was the war ended when the country's needs summoned Was.h.i.+ngton again to long and arduous service. Retired from the Presidency, his successor called him, not in vain, to head the army which the threatened French war would call into action. Who can blame him that he did not undertake in addition a complete reorganization of the labor system of his own farms and of Virginia? Inconsistent perhaps it was,--a very human inconsistency,--that his slaves, who, he told Bernard, were unfit for freedom, were given their freedom by his will, though not until his wife's death. That we may take as an imperfect essay of conscience to deal with a situation so complicated that no ideal solution was apparent. But we may fairly read as his unspoken legacy to his countrymen of the next generation: "My a.s.sociates and I have won national independence, social order, and equal rights for our own race; deal you as courageously and strongly with the problems which remain."

Jefferson was an enthusiast for moral ideals, and a warm believer in the merit and trustworthiness of average humanity. He enn.o.bled the struggle of the colonies against England by writing on the flag the universal and undying ideas that the authority of governments rests solely on their justice and public utility, and that every man has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson did not flinch, as did many of his a.s.sociates, from giving that right a full and general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that G.o.d is just." He described what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous pa.s.sions,--the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal.... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of pa.s.sions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities."

But Jefferson shared a common belief of his time, that it was futile to hope to "retain and incorporate the blacks into the State." He wrote: "Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of blacks of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction Nature has made, and many other circ.u.mstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race." So he looked for a remedy to emanc.i.p.ation followed by deportation. But he hesitated to affirm any essential inferiority in the negro race. He wrote: "The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination must be hazarded with great diffidence." Later he wrote that "they were gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward their re-establishment on an equal footing with other colors of the human family."

Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was skillful to persuade men, and to organize and lead a party. His general tendency was "along the line of least resistance,"--the summoning of men to free themselves from oppressive restraint; and he was highly successful until he called on them for severe self-sacrifice, when his supporters were apt suddenly to fail him. Virginia gladly followed his lead in abolis.h.i.+ng primogeniture and entail, and overthrowing the Established Church. She even consented, in 1778, to abolish the African slave-trade, being then in little need of more slaves than she possessed. In 1779 he planned a far more radical and costly project--a general emanc.i.p.ation. All slaves born after the pa.s.sage of the act were to be free; they were to dwell with their parents till a certain age, then to be educated at the public expense in "tillage, arts, or sciences," until the males were twenty-one years old and the females eighteen; then they were to be colonized in some suitable region, furnished with arms, implements, seeds and cattle; declared a free and independent people, under American protection until strong enough to stand alone; and meanwhile their place as laborers was to be filled by whites sent for by vessels to other parts of the world.

It is hardly strange that the Legislature did not even take the measure into consideration, and it does not appear that Jefferson ever returned to it. Practical legislation was not his forte. But his influence told n.o.bly, as has been related, in barring slavery from the Northwestern territory, and, had just a little more support been found in 1784, would have saved the Southwest also to freedom, with almost certain promise of result in early freeing of the whole country. Just two or three votes in the Continental Congress,--on such small hinges does the destiny of nations seem to turn.

The inertia which holds men even exceptionally high-minded from breaking strong ties of custom and convenience is shown by a letter of Patrick Henry to a Quaker in 1773, in which he declared slavery "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty. Every thinking, honest man rejects it as speculation, but how few in practice from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them."

There is no need to dwell further on the anti-slavery sentiments of the group of great leaders who were the glory of the nation. It is to be noted that Franklin took a characteristically active part in aiding to establish an anti-slavery society in Philadelphia in 1782. Shrewd as he was high-minded and benevolent, Franklin was always a special master in organizing men in societies for effective and progressive action. His tact won France to the American alliance, and decisively turned the scale in the Revolutionary war; and his conciliatory yet resolute spirit was a main factor in the const.i.tutional convention. This Pennsylvania anti-slavery society led the way to the early adoption by the State of gradual emanc.i.p.ation. Franklin, an optimist by temperament and by his large faith in mankind, looked confidently for the early end of slavery; as fast as men ripened into honesty and sense, he thought, they would recognize the folly and wrong of it.

Looking from the leaders to the ma.s.s of the community, in this early period, we see these broad facts. Slavery was regarded by all as an evil, and by most as a wrong. Even its champions in the convention claimed no more for it than that it was a necessary evil; one of the Pinckneys expressed the hope of its extinction at an early day, and the other Pinckney dissented only in thinking this too sanguine. Further, there was a distinct wave of anti-slavery sentiment, sympathetic with the lofty temper of the Revolution and the genesis of a free nation.

That wave was strong enough to wipe out slavery where its economic hold was slight; it was plainly destined to sweep at least through all the Northern and Middle States, and hope was high that it might go farther.

But this moral enthusiasm broke helpless against the inst.i.tution wherever a strong property interest was involved with it. Manumission in the South went no further than a few individuals. Virginia and Maryland, needing no more slaves, ceased importing them; but South Carolina and Georgia bargained successfully for a twenty years' supply.

Ma.s.sachusetts, having almost inadvertently freed her few slaves, was willing that the stream of misery should still flow on from Africa to the South. In a word, so far as the negroes were concerned, the supposed material interest of the whites remained the dominating factor throughout the country.

CHAPTER III

CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE

For thirty years after the Const.i.tution was established, slavery falls into the background of the national history. Other and absorbing interests were to the front. First, the strife of Federalist and Democrat: Should the central government be strengthened, or should the common people be more fully trusted? Twelve years of conservative ascendency under Was.h.i.+ngton and Adams; then a complete and lasting triumph for the popular party led by Jefferson. Mixed with and succeeding this came an exasperating and perplexing struggle for commercial rights, invaded equally by England and France in their gigantic grapple; an ineffectual defense by Jefferson, who in executive office proved an unskillful pilot; a half-hearted war under Madison, a closet statesman out of place in the Presidential chair; a temporary alienation of New England, exasperated by the loss of her commerce and suspicious of the Jeffersonian influence; a partic.i.p.ation in the general peace which followed 1815, and a revival of industry. Under this surface tide of events went on a steady, quiet advance of the democratic movement. With Jefferson's administration disappeared the Federal party and the old distrust of the common people. State after State gave up the property qualification--almost universal in the first period--and adopted manhood suffrage. Slavery disappeared from the North; in New Hamps.h.i.+re it was abolished by judicial decision, as in Ma.s.sachusetts; Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania pa.s.sed gradual emanc.i.p.ation laws, and a little later New York and New Jersey did the same. In Kentucky, settled by hardy pioneers from Virginia, there had been a vigorous campaign to establish a free State; the Baptist preachers, strong leaders in morals and religion, had championed the cause of freedom; the victory seemed decisively won, by three to one it was said, in the election of May, 1798; but a torrent of excitement over the alien and sedition laws submerged other issues, and the convention sanctioned slavery as it existed. The African slave trade was made piracy by act of Congress in 1808, though the extreme penalty was not inflicted for sixty years, and a considerable traffic still went on. In furtherance of emanc.i.p.ation, a colonization society was started in Pennsylvania, and in a few years it had transported 20,000 freed negroes to Africa, and established the feeble colony of Liberia. Meanwhile the first French republic had freed half a million slaves in the West Indies; and Chili, Buenos Ayres, Columbia, and Mexico, as they gained their independence from Spain, had abolished slavery. The European reaction against the French republic and empire had largely spent itself; the English tradition of const.i.tutional freedom had survived and promised to spread; the Spanish colonies in America had won their independence.

The stiller and deeper current of industrial progress had moved on apace in the United States. A new New England was being swiftly built in the Northwest. The Southwest, too, was growing fast. The acquisition of the Louisiana territory,--through an exigency of Napoleon's politics, and the wise inconsistency of Jefferson--had opened another vast domain. At the North, commerce, set free again, spread rapidly, and a new era of manufactures was opening. The South--more diffusely settled, with less social activity, with a debased labor cla.s.s--caught less of the spirit of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin, for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the front of the scene. The crop rose in value in twenty years from $6,000,000 to $20,000,000. The value of slaves was trebled, and the border States began to do a thriving trade in exporting them to the cotton States--it was said a little later the yearly export reached 50,000.

As new States were organized and admitted, those from the Northwest came in without slavery, which had been kept out by the ordinance of 1787, and those from the Southwest, where slaves had been carried by the emigrants from the seaboard, were allowed without question to retain the inst.i.tution. Of the old thirteen, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York New Jersey, Pennsylvania (spite of a few slaves lingering in the last three) were counted as free States--seven in all; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the two Carolinas, Georgia, were claimed as slave States--six. Speedily were added Vermont to the one column, and Kentucky and Tennessee to the other, making the numbers equal. The following acquisitions were free and slave States alternately: Ohio and Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and Alabama, a total, so far, of eleven free and eleven slave. Of the new Southwestern domain, Arkansas had been organized as a territory, early in 1819, and a motion that slavery be excluded had been defeated in the House by the casting vote of the speaker, Henry Clay.

But in all these thirty years the subject of slavery had little prominence in public discussion. Now it suddenly came to the front. A bill was brought into Congress to permit Missouri to organize as a State. It was part of the Louisiana purchase, of which the Southern portion had inherited and retained slavery; but Missouri was geographically an extension of the region of the Ohio States, in which free labor had made an established and congenial home. It was moved in Congress that slavery should be excluded from the new State, and on this instantly sprang up a fiery debate. On one side it was urged that slavery was a wrong and an evil, and that Congress had full power to exclude it from a State as a condition of admittance to the Union. On the other side slavery was defended not only as an industrial advantage, but as morally right and a benefit to both blacks and whites. It was strenuously declared that the people of each incoming State had a right to determine their own inst.i.tutions; and it was also urged that to keep the balance of power between the two sections, it was necessary that slave States should be admitted equally with free. It was disclosed with startling suddenness that two systems of labor and society stood face to face, with different ideals, different interests, and in a mutual opposition to which no limits could be foreseen. It was plain that with the increase of profit from slavery all idea of its abolition had been quietly dropping from the minds of the great ma.s.s of the Southern community. It was equally plain that the sentiment against slavery in the North had increased greatly in distinctness and intensity. There was apparent, too, a divergence of material interests, and a keen rivalry of political interests. The South had been losing ground in comparison.