by Noel Rae
“There seems to be something in this subject that blunts the perceptions, and darkens the understanding and moral feelings of men. Tell them that, of necessity, in every civilized society there must be an infinite variety of conditions and employments, from the most eminent and intellectual to the most servile and laborious; that the Negro race, from their temperament and capacity, are peculiarly suited to the situation which they occupy, and not less happy in it than any corresponding class to be found in the world; prove incontestably that no scheme of emancipation could be carried into effect without the most intolerable mischiefs and calamities to both master and slave—and you have done nothing … They repeat, as the fundamental maxim of our civil policy, that all men are born free and equal, and quote from our Declaration of Independence ‘that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
“It is not the first time that I have had occasion to observe that men may repeat with the utmost confidence some maxim or sentimental phrase as a self-evident or admitted truth which is either palpably false, or to which, upon examination, it will be found they attach no definite idea.” We should respect the Declaration, but not those parts which are “false, sophistical or unmeaning. All men are born free and equal. Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal?” And not just at birth, but throughout life “wealth and poverty, fame or obscurity, strength or weakness, knowledge or ignorance, ease or labor, power or subjection, mark the endless diversity in the condition of men.
“What is the foundation of the bold dogma so confidently announced? Females are human and rational beings. They may be found of better faculties, and better qualified to exercise political privileges, and to attain the distinctions of society, than many men; yet who complains of the order of society by which they are excluded from them?” To give women political rights would be to “desecrate them; do violence to the nature which their Creator has impressed upon them; drag them from the position which they necessarily occupy for the existence of civilized society, and in which they constitute its blessing and ornament—the only position which they have ever occupied in any human society—to place them in a situation in which they would be alike miserable and degraded.” Enough then of this “well-sounding but unmeaning verbiage of natural equality and inalienable rights.” It is the law of nature that “the strong and the wise should control the weak and the ignorant.”
Harper also posed the question, “Is it not better that the character and intellect of the individual should be suited to the station which he is to occupy? If there are sordid, servile and laborious offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile and laborious beings to perform them?”
This question was taken up by another leading politician, James Henry Hammond, twice governor of South Carolina, twice a Congressman, and twice a U.S. Senator. A hard-liner who agreed with Harper in repudiating as “ridiculously absurd that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal,’” Hammond delivered his notorious Mudsill speech in March, 1858, in the Senate during a debate on the admission of Kansas as a free state. While boasting that “Cotton is King,” Hammond nevertheless claimed that the greatest strength of the South came not from its wealth but from “the harmony of her political and social institutions.” The key to this harmony was recognition of the fact that “in all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. [The term refers to the lowest foundation of a building.] Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.” But although inferior, “the status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”
Hammond also took pains to refute the assertion made by the English abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson, “that licentiousness in intercourse between the sexes is a prominent trait of our social system.” This absurd charge had become “a favorite theme of abolitionists,” especially “learned old maids” who dwelt on the subject with “insatiable relish.” Surely “such rage without betrays the fires within.” Still, he would set the record straight.
It was true that “some intercourse of the sort does take place. Its character and extent, however, are grossly and atrociously exaggerated.” Also, nearly all such “irregularities” took place in the cities, many of whose white inhabitants were “natives of the North, or foreigners.” Among the southern gentry such conduct was “highly disreputable. If carried on habitually, it seriously affects a man’s standing, so far as it is known; and he who takes a colored mistress—with rare and extraordinary exceptions—loses caste at once.” The fact was that “a people whose men are proverbially brave, intellectual and hospitable, and whose women are unaffectedly chaste, devoted to domestic life, and happy in it, can neither be degraded nor demoralized.”
Unfortunately for his future reputation, Hammond kept a plantation journal in which he recorded his January, 1839, purchase for $900 of Sally Johnson, aged eighteen, and her daughter, Louisa, aged one. Though he set them up in a separate establishment, the situation was so blatant that his downtrodden wife—whom he had married for her fortune—left him. Over the years Sally produced a number of mulatto children, and when Louisa reached the age of twelve she too became Hammond’s mistress and the mother of several children. (Hammond also kept a diary in which he recorded his “wanton toying” with his four “lovely and luscious” teenage nieces. But it wasn’t his fault—the girls had thrown themselves at him “rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine …”)
Although his father had been a New England laborer, Hammond warmly endorsed the idea that masters were like the patriarchs of the Old Testament, a status “well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature.” Here was the master, “beloved and honored,” and here were the “faithful and admiring” slaves who had “served his father, and rocked his cradle—who have been through life the props of his fortune and the objects of his care—who have partaken of his griefs, and looked to him for comfort in their own—whose sickness he has so frequently watched over and relieved—whose holidays he has so often made joyous by his bounties and his presence—whose hearty and affectionate greetings never fail to welcome him home. In this cold, calculating, ambitious world of ours, there are few ties more heartfelt, or of more benignant influence, than those which mutually bind the master and the slave, under our ancient system, handed down from the Father of Israel.”
How the South liked to see itself: a top-hatted patriarch and his lady look on with benevolent eye as members of his “family” cut loose in a “plantation frolic.”
There were many other expressions of this kindly patriarch/faithful slave myth. “The Southern Gentleman entertains more real love for his ‘human chattels’ than all the hare-brained abolitionists the world ever saw,” wrote Daniel Hundley in Social Relations in our Southern States. “The proof of their well-fed condition is strikingly observable in their sle
ek skins, full cheeks and general plumpness … They are nearly always jovial and smiling, indulging all the time in snatches of song, and giving vent to the most stunning peals of laughter.”
And there was this anecdote told by the journalist Edward Pollard in Black Diamonds Gathered in Darkey Homes of the South: “On the morning following my return home after years of absence, I was told that Uncle George, who was too decrepit from age to come up to the house, wanted me to come to the negro quarter to see him … I found the old fellow very comfortably situated. He had grown old gently; he had never seen any hard service; and now in his old age was he not only not required to do any work, but, with that regard commonly exhibited toward the slave when stricken with age, he had every attention paid him in the evening of his life. His meals were sent out to him from our own table. There was one little consideration that touched me. His passion for gardening, which had been the whole occupation of his life, had been gratified by giving him a little patch of ground in front of his cabin, where he might amuse himself at his own option.
“I found Uncle George in his miniature garden. The old fellow staggered up to see me, and, suddenly dropping, clasped me around the knees. This poor old man was ‘a slave,’ and yet he had a place in my heart, and I was not ashamed to meet him with tears in my eyes. Miserable abolitionists! You prate of brotherly love and humanity. If you or any man had dared to hurt a hair of this slave, I would have trampled you into the dust!”
Pollard was also the author of The Lost Cause, published just after the Civil War. In it he explained that the “sectional animosity” between North and South was not really about slavery; rather it was a conflict that “went deeper to the very elements of the civilization of each,” between “the Puritan exiles who established themselves upon the cold and rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climes of the South.” The first were characterized by “intolerance … painful thrift … external forms of piety … jaundiced legislation … convenient morals … and their unremitting hunt after selfish aggrandizement.” By contrast, “the colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were from the first distinguished by their polite manners, their fine sentiments, their attachment to a sort of feudal life, their landed gentry, their love of field sports and dangerous adventure.” They lived in “baronial halls” and were famous for “their constant rounds of hospitality and gaiety.” The Northerner might have more money, but he was “coarse and inferior in comparison with the aristocracy and chivalry of the South.” In sum, “Slavery established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization. It was not without attendant vices; but the virtues which followed in its train were numerous … It afforded opportunity for extraordinary culture, elevated the standards of scholarship in the South, enlarged and emancipated social intercourse, and established schools of individual refinement.” (Pollard seems to have felt that these assertions were so obviously true that there was no need to provide substantiating examples.)
Was slavery a sin—“a great sin, nay the greatest of sins that exist in the nation?” If yes, then “it behooves all Christians who are involved in the sin to repent in dust and ashes, and wash their hands of it.” But how can we know if something is a sin? Because God tells us, “either by preceptive prohibition [‘Thou shalt not …’]; by principles of moral fitness; or examples of inspired men contained in the Sacred Volume.” But if the way to discover the truth is so clear, why do the North and South differ so profoundly? The answer was that while men of the South were “cleaving to the Bible, and taking all our decisions about this matter from its inspired pages,” men of the North displayed “a palpable ignorance of the Divine Will in reference to the institution of slavery. I have seen but few who made the Bible their study.”
After this preamble to his popular booklet The Bible Argument, or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation, the Rev. Thornton Stringfellow continued, “I propose therefore to examine the Sacred Volume briefly, and, if I am not greatly mistaken, I shall be able to make it appear that the institution of slavery has received:
“First. The sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal Age,” (i.e. “that portion of time stretching from Noah until the Law was given to Abraham’s posterity at Mount Sinai.”)
“Second. That it was incorporated into the only National Constitution which ever emanated from God.
“Third. That its legality was recognized, and its relative duties regulated, by Jesus Christ in his kingdom.”
After explaining that the word “servant” as used by translators of the Bible really meant “slave,” Stringfellow launches into an extensive history, beginning with Genesis and the famous “Cursed be Canaan … a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren”; then dilating upon Abraham, “a man that is held up as a model to all,” who not only owned hundreds of slaves but used one of them, Hagar, as “a secondary wife.” And when Hagar ran away, hoping to get back to Egypt, did not God send an angel in pursuit who ordered the fugitive “Return unto thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands”? (Gen. xvi: 9.)
“The next notice we have of servants as property is from God himself, when clothed with all the visible tokens of his presence and glory, on the top of Sinai, he proclaimed his law to the millions that surrounded the base: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” (Ex. xx. 17.) “Here,” as Stringfellow points out, “is a patriarchal catalog of property having God for its author.”
As to “the only National Constitution which ever emanated from God,” this referred to the various laws which regulated the conduct of the Jewish people; and here again there is ample proof that God approved slavery. For example, here is Leviticus xxv. 44, 45, 46: “‘Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your possession … they shall be your bond-men forever.’ I ask any candid man if the words of this institution could be more explicit? It is from God himself.”
Now all that remained was “to show that Jesus Christ recognized this institution as one that was lawful among men.” This was easy enough. First, and most significant, “he has not abolished slavery by a prohibitory commandment.” Second, “he has introduced no new moral principles which can work its destruction.” Also, “in all the Roman provinces where churches were planted by the Apostles, hereditary slavery existed, as it did among the Jews, and as it does now among us; and in instructing such churches the Holy Ghost, by the Apostles, has recognized the institution as one legally existing among them.” And remember what St. Paul said: “Servants, obey in all things your masters, according to the flesh; not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart fearing God …” This applies even if “a Christian slave have an unbelieving master, who acknowledges no allegiance to Christ.”
“But, say the abolitionists, he has introduced new moral principles which will extinguish it as an unavoidable consequence without a direct prohibitory command. What are they? ‘Do to others as you would they should do to you.’” But these moral principles were not new at all; they were no different from “these words of Moses, (Levit. xix: 18.) ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’” In other words, “Jesus has added no new moral principles above those in the law of Moses to prohibit slavery.”
Some of the confusion concerning the legitimacy of slavery arose from the little-known fact that even in the Early Church “there were abolition teachers among them,” perverters of the truth “who taught that godliness abolished slavery.” Then and now, such men were, in the words of the Apostle Timothy, bringers of “envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings … men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth.
From such withdraw thyself.” (1 Tim. vi: 4, 5.) “Such were the bitter fruits which abolition sentiments produced in the Apostolic day, and such precisely are the fruits they produce now.”
As a polemicist, Stringfellow was unusual in that he appealed not only to the Bible but also to that other great—though more recent—authority: statistics. These were in abundant supply, particularly following the census of 1850, which had been a good deal more extensive than its predecessors. In the introduction to his paper, Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, Stringfellow explained that he was addressing those “who admit the legality of slavery in the sight of God,” but question its “expediency.” Hitherto, “the non-slaveholding States affirmed, and the slaveholding States tacitly admitted, that by this test the slaveholding States must suffer in comparison.” But was this really the case? Did “unquestionable facts and experience warrant the conclusion that while slavery is lawful, yet its continuance or expansion among us is inexpedient?” Thanks to the 1850 census “the facts which belong to the subject are now before the world.”
He began by comparing the six states of New England and the five old slave states, from Maryland to Georgia. “I select these States not because they are the richest (for they are not,) but because they all lie on the Atlantic side of the Union—because they were settled at or near the same time—because they have (within a fraction) an equal free population—and because it has been constantly affirmed, and almost universally admitted, that the advantages of freedom and the disadvantages of slavery, have been more perfectly developed in these two sections than they have been anywhere else in the United States.