by Noel Rae
Another Episcopalian, Bishop William Meade of Virginia, also delivered a sermon addressed to slaves. After reviewing the duties they owed to their masters, he urged them to
“take care that you do not fret or murmur, grumble or repine at your condition; for this will not only make your life uneasy, but will greatly offend Almighty God. Consider that it is not yourselves, it is not the people that you belong to, it is not the men that have brought you to it, but it is the will of God who hath, by His providence, made you servants, because, no doubt, He knew that condition would be best for you in this world, and help you the better towards heaven, if you would but do your duty in it.”
Even apparent abuses, when looked at in the right light, worked out for the best. Suppose, for example, that you have been punished for something you did not do, “is it not possible you may have done some other bad thing which was never discovered and that Almighty God, who saw you doing it, would not let you escape without punishment one time or another? And ought you not in such a case to give glory to Him, and be thankful that He would rather punish you in this life for your wickedness than destroy your souls for it in the next life? But suppose that even this was not the case—a case hardly to be imagined—and that you have by no means, known or unknown, deserved the correction you suffered; there is this great comfort in it, that if you bear it patiently, and leave your cause in the hands of God, He will reward you for it in heaven, and the punishment you suffer unjustly here shall turn to your exceeding great glory hereafter.”
Bishop Stephen Elliott, of Georgia, also knew how to look on the bright side. Critics of slavery should “consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”
Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity …”
Later in life, Harriet Beecher Stowe explained why she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw; because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity; because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath.” The book sold over 300,000 copies in its first year, quite a few of which were publicly burned in the South, where several “anti-Tom” novels soon appeared, e.g. Little Eva: The Flower of the South. To rebut criticism that her book was mere fiction, Mrs. Stowe also published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded.
CHAPTER 8
WHITE TESTIMONY
PERHAPS BECAUSE THE UNITED STATES HAD NOT YET BECOME THE DOMINANT power in the world, Americans of the nineteenth century cared a good deal more than they do now about what people from European countries thought of them. As Wendell Phillips, the Boston brahmin turned abolitionist, put it, “the heart of every man is constantly asking the question, ‘What do they say of us in England?’ Europe is the great tribunal for whose decision American sensitiveness always stands waiting in awe.”
This interest was reciprocated. Even before the Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815, visitors were arriving armed with notebooks and sketch-pads, confident of a welcome on their arrival and a publishing contract on their return home. Most were sympathetic but critical. Topics were obvious—the abundance, the opportunities, the mobility, the vulgarity, the equality, the democracy and, of course, the slavery. For example, the English merchant and Quaker, Robert Sutcliff, wrote in Travels in North America 1804-1806:
“There is a very striking contrast between the appearance of the horses or teams in Pennsylvania and those in the Southern States, where slaves are kept. In Pennsylvania we meet with a great number of wagons, drawn by four or more fine fat horses, the carriages firm and well-made, and covered with stout good linen, bleached almost white; and it is not uncommon to see ten or fifteen together, traveling cheerfully along the road, the driver riding on one of his horses. Many of these come more than three hundred miles to Philadelphia, from the Ohio, Pittsburgh, and other places.
“The appearance of things in the slave States is quite the reverse of this. We sometimes meet a ragged black boy or girl driving a team consisting of a lean cow or a mule, sometimes a lean bull, or an ox and a mule; and I have seen a mule, a bull, and a cow, each miserable in its appearance, composing one team, with a half-naked black slave or two, riding or driving, as occasion suited. The carriage or wagon, if it may be called such, appeared in as wretched a condition as the team and its driver.”
Thirty years later, and far to the west, Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar comment in the notebook he kept when researching Democracy in America: “Ohio offers a striking example of the effects slavery and freedom have on society. The state of Ohio is separated from Kentucky only by a river; on either side the soil is fertile and conditions favorable, but the difference is great. On one side the people are feverishly active, doing whatever they can to make money; they may not appear to be prosperous, for they work with their hands, but that work is making them wealthy. On the other side of the river the people are lethargic and unenterprising. On one side work is honored and rewarded, on the other work is despised as being the mark of servitude. The population of Kentucky, which has been settled for nearly a century, grows slowly. Ohio, which joined the Union only thirty years ago, already has a million inhabitants. These differences have only one cause: slavery. It degrades the black people and enervates the white. Its harmful effects are acknowledged but nothing is done about it and it will last for a long time to come. It is deeply embedded in the white Kentuckian’s habits, customs and prejudices and threatens not only his own future but that of the entire country. “The comparison between these two states clearly demonstrates that prosperity depends more on the institutions of society and the will of the people than on external conditions. Man is not made for slavery—a fact proved as much by its effect on the master as on the slave.”
Another visitor was James Silk Buckingham, an outspoken English journalist who had already traveled much of the world, especially India and the Middle East, and was now to be found with his wife in a horse-drawn coach lumbering through the night over bad roads on their way to Columbia, S. C. A few years earlier, Buckingham, a Liberal Member of Parliament, had promoted the 1833 law which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, a fact which did not make him popular with his Southern fellow-passengers, one of whom claimed that the British had only done this “for the sake of encouraging a Negro revolt in the southern states, and thus revenging yourselves on America.” This
was just the kind of remark Buckingham was sure to note, as he took particular interest in the stultifying effect of slavery on the minds of its supporters. And he would find other examples as their coach rolled on.
“At the earliest dawn of day, soon after four o’clock, we met many of the field-Negroes going to their work. All of them were wretchedly clad, in tattered and ragged fragments of garments hanging in shreds around their bodies; and when, at the sight of their miserable condition, Mrs. Buckingham involuntarily sighed, and said in a scarcely audible whisper, ‘Poor creatures!’ three or four voices immediately and impatiently exclaimed, ‘Ah! Madam, they are among the happiest of human beings; for when their work is over, they have no cares, as everything they need is provided for them.’ It has been often remarked that the constant representation of a falsehood ultimately occasions even its utterers to believe it to be true. This often-repeated falsehood of ‘the Negroes having everything they need provided for them,’ must be of this class.” (Perhaps rather tactlessly, Buckingham pointed out that if to have one’s basic needs taken care of was the key to happiness, then who so fortunate as “the inmates of State prisons and penitentiaries?”) “Persons brought up in slave countries, and accustomed from their cradles to regard the institution of slavery as one of mercy instead of injustice, and to repeat every day of their lives that ‘slaves are the happiest of human beings,’ are impervious to reason on this subject … Throughout the South, slavery is a topic upon which no man and, above all, a foreigner, can open his lips without imminent personal danger, unless it is to defend and uphold the system. Then, indeed, he may speak as freely as he pleases.”
This was also true of southern publications. “There is not one that ever ventures to speak of slavery as an institution to be condemned, or even regretted. They are all either indulgent towards, or openly advocates of, this state of bondage.” Such conformism inevitably led to mediocrity. Consider, for example, a recent issue of The Southern Literary Journal, one of the best of its kind. This contained a “puerile” anti-abolition letter; an editorial rejecting out of hand the “ruinous and degrading” idea of compensated emancipation”; an article by a college president that began “I do not know a more bold, a more impudent, a more unprincipled, unblushing falsehood than to say that slavery is inconsistent with the laws of God …”; a round-up of several recent pro-slavery publications, and an excerpt from Judge Harper’s address to the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning. This, too, was about the “cherished institution” and why it was bound to endure: “‘Our proudest feelings—our most essential interests—our humanity and consideration for the slaves themselves—nay, almost physical impossibility, forbid that this [abolition] should be done by our own act; and, thank God! we, the slave-holding communities of the South, are too strong, and on this subject too united, to admit the thought that it can be effected by external force.’”
Summing up, Buckingham wrote: “When such influential persons as editors of quarterly journals and daily newspapers, presidents of colleges, and judges on the bench, maintain and propagate such views as these, it is certainly not to be wondered at that the youths of Carolina, educated at home, and hearing scarcely any other view of slavery expressed but such as I have quoted, should grow up in the belief that they are just and sound, and receive them as the maxims of wisdom from the lips and pens which are guided by age and experience.”
While traveling by boat along the Ashley River, he had a conversation with some southerners and “could not help observing that the testimonies of the same persons differed very much according to the turn which the conversation took. When they spoke of the coercion employed towards the Negroes, and endeavored to justify the necessity of it, they were represented as ‘an indolent, worthless and ungrateful race, wholly incompetent to arouse themselves to voluntary labor.’” But when Buckingham suggested that their condition might be improved, “it was replied that ‘they were already as happy as persons could be, that they were perfectly contented with their condition, and … were now faithful, kind-hearted and attached to their masters, whereas education would destroy all their natural virtues.’ Such were the contradictory statements which I heard, not from different persons, but from the same individuals.”
Then there was the “question of the false economy of employing slave-labor in the cultivation of the land. Everything I heard and saw confirmed me in the opinion that it was most injurious to the interests of the planters; and that none would benefit more by a system of free labor than the very landowners themselves. At present, if a planter wishes to purchase an estate for cultivation, he can get 1,000 acres of land for $10,000; and if he could obtain free labor to till the land, hiring it by the day, and paying for such labor as he required and no more, $5,000 would be ample for a reserved capital by which to procure his seed, labor, and stock. But as he must, according to the present system, buy his slaves as well as his land, it will require at last $500 for each working Negro that he may need; and supposing only one hundred Negroes to be purchased, this would require $50,000 to be laid out in the purchase of prospective labor, paying for it before he receives the slightest benefit, and under all the risks of sickness, desertion, and death. In this manner, according to the statement of Mr. Clay in his Anti-abolition speech in Congress, there is locked up, of dead capital, in the purchase and cost of the Negro slaves in the United States, the enormous sum of $1,200,000,000! Now, if slavery had never been permitted to exist here, and labor could have been hired by the day, or week, or year, as in other free countries, this enormous amount of capital would have been available to devote to other purposes; and the whole country would have been advanced at least a century beyond its present condition.”
When Buckingham asked why owners did not therefore free their slaves, he was answered that “up to a very recent period the feeling was almost universal in Kentucky that it would be better to do so, especially as the neighboring State of Ohio, without slaves, was making so much more rapid strides in prosperity than Kentucky with them; and that probably in a few years their emancipation would have been agreed upon; but that the proceedings of the Abolitionists in the North wounded their pride, and they determined that they would not submit to interference or dictation in the regulation of their ‘domestic institution.’”
Buckingham let this pass without comment.
Another English witness to the mentally and morally warping effect of slavery on owners was the acerbic Mrs. Trollope, whose 1832 book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, was a lengthy catalog of this country’s failings.
“Among the poorer classes of landholders, who are often as profoundly ignorant as the Negroes they own, the effect of this plenary power over males and females is most demoralizing [i.e. lowering moral standards]; and the kind of coarse, not to say brutal, authority which is exercised, furnishes the most disgusting moral spectacle I ever witnessed. In all ranks, however, it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralyzed by the relative positions of slave and owner. The characters, the hearts, of children, are irretrievably injured by it.
“In Virginia we boarded for some time in a family consisting of a widow and her four daughters, and I there witnessed a scene strongly indicative of the effect I have mentioned. A young female slave, about eight years of age, had found on the shelf of a cupboard a biscuit, temptingly buttered, of which she had eaten a considerable portion before she was observed. The butter had been copiously sprinkled with arsenic for the destruction of rats, and had been thus most incautiously placed by one of the young ladies of the family. As soon as the circumstance was known, the lady of the house came to consult me as to what had best be done for the poor child; I immediately mixed a large cup of mustard and water (the most rapid of all emetics) and got the little girl to swallow it. The desired effect was instantly produced, but the poor child, partly from nausea, and partly from the terror of hearing her death proclaimed by half a dozen voices round her, trembled so violently that I thought
she would fall. I sat down in the court where we were standing and, as a matter of course, took the little sufferer in my lap. I observed a general titter among the white members of the family … The youngest of the family, a little girl about the age of the young slave, after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed, ‘My! If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her in her lap, and wiped her nasty mouth! Why, I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars!’
“The little slave was laid on a bed, and I returned to my own apartments; some time afterwards I sent to enquire for her, and learnt that she was in great pain. I immediately went myself to enquire farther, when another young lady of the family, the one by whose imprudence the accident had occurred, met my anxious enquiries with ill-suppressed mirth—told me they had sent for the doctor—and then burst into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of really sympathizing in the sufferings of a slave appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered by the butcher. The daughters of my hostess were as lovely as features and complexion could make them; but the neutralizing effect of this total want of feeling upon youth and beauty must be witnessed to be conceived.”
However, there really were good masters—probably not all that many, and even the best of them necessarily despotic. Of these benevolent patriarchs an outstanding example was Colonel Thomas Dabney, whose life and good deeds were fondly recalled by his daughter, Susan Dabney Smedes, in Memorials of a Southern Planter, published toward the end of the nineteenth century. It begins with a description of life on an estate called Elmington, in Gloucester County, “often called the garden-spot of Virginia.”