by Noel Rae
Then he got to work. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fiction. It is a fiction not for the sake of more effectually communicating the truth, but for the purpose of more effectually disseminating a slander … Every fact is distorted, every incident discolored, in order to awaken rancorous hatred and malignant jealousies between the citizens of the same republic, the fellow countrymen whose interests and happiness are linked with the perpetuity of a common union, and with the prosperity of a common government.”
Yes, of course abuses occurred under the slave system, but had there ever been a form of society without them? “In all periods of history…instances of misery and barbarity equal to any depicted in this atrocious fiction have been of constant recurrence, and whatever changes may hereafter take place, unless the nature of man be also changed, they must continually recur until the very end of time.”
Another error in these “dangerous and dirty little volumes” was to ignore the fact that “what might be grievous misery to the white man, is none to the differently tempered black … The joys and sorrows of the slave are in harmony with his position, and are entirely dissimilar from what would make the happiness or misery of another class.” In fact, the effect of slavery was not to increase but “to diminish the amount of individual misery in the servile classes; to mitigate and alleviate all the ordinary sorrows of life; to protect the slaves against want as well as against material and mental suffering; to prevent the separation and dispersion of families.” Also, “the communities where it prevails exhibit the only existing instance of a modern civilized society in which the interests of the laborer and the employer of labor are absolutely identical.” In conclusion, “the average condition of the slave at the South is infinitely superior, morally and materially, in all respects, to that of the laboring class under any other circumstances in any other part of the world.”
Another high-minded lady who rallied to the cause was Fanny Wright. The nineteenth century was the great age of utopian communities and Fanny was just the right person to lead one, having a strong character, a magnetic presence, firmly-held progressive opinions (atheism, free love, birth control, racial equality), and plenty of money. She was also tall, handsome, a self-confident member of the Anglo-Scottish gentry, and a close friend—and reputed lover—of the Marquis de Lafayette, whom she accompanied on his triumphant return visit to this country in 1824. While here she also delivered lectures on her advanced ideas to packed theaters, holding the audiences spellbound (except for a few heckling rowdies up in the galleries, who had to be forcibly ejected).
While still a young girl living in Scotland, Fanny had convinced herself that America was “a country dedicated to freedom,” that slavery—“the most atrocious of all the sins”—had been forced upon it by English traders, and that most slaveholders wanted to free their slaves but did not know where to begin. Hence A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States, Without Danger or Loss to the Citizens of the South, published while touring the country with Lafayette. At the heart of the plan was an educational, self-supporting commune where, under the supervision of qualified whites, some fifty to a hundred slaves and their families would learn how to cope with the challenges of being free. During this “apprenticeship,” which would last five years, the exslaves would continue to work, part of the money being used to compensate their former owners, part to support the commune. There would be no overseers or drivers, since the inmates would know that “their labor was for their personal redemption, the relief of the race, and the practical education of their children.” To accelerate the improvement of the children, they would be separated from their parents and brought up by experts. There would be no religious services; instead there would be evening lectures by Fanny and her sister, Camilla. Interracial sex was authorized, provided it was consensual. Management would be in the hands of ten trustees, all of them white. Once this prototype had proved its success, thousands of others would spring up everywhere, and before long slavery would be no more.
The first step was to set up the commune, called Nashoba, which Fanny did in October, 1825, buying with her own money over a thousand acres of swampy woodland on the Wolf River, in Tennessee—a site recommended to her by Andrew Jackson who, a few years earlier, had driven out the Chickasaw Indians. (Nashoba is Chickasaw for wolf.) Next, since no one offered to donate his slaves, she had to buy ten of them, and their families, at an auction in Nashville, paying between $400 and $500 each. Clearing the land went slowly since the “apprentices,” skeptical of their new owner’s intentions, worked at the sluggish pace typical of slave labor everywhere. Raising buildings also went slowly, and the swampy surroundings proved to be so unhealthy that after living there for a few months Fanny fell sick. Though her enthusiasm remained high, it was decided that for the sake of her health she should spend some time in Italy. Her sister, Camilla, and another trustee called James Richardson, a Scotsman, would remain in charge.
On July 28, 1827, the day after Fanny landed at Le Havre, Benjamin Lundy’s abolitionist paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published what the editor, in his innocence, must have thought would be a puff piece about Nashoba. It was written by James Richardson, and included several entries from the log book he had been keeping. For example:
“May 6. Agreed that if any of the slaves neglect their duty, and thus retard the object of the plan, we will exclude such slaves from the benefit of the plan, and will treat them according to the slave system, until it shall appear that their habits are changed for the better.
“May 20. Camilla Wright informed [the slaves] that to-morrow the children Delila, Lucy, Julia and Alfred, will be taken altogether from under the management of their parents, and will be placed, until our school is organized, under the management of Mamselle Lolotte [a free black]; that all communication between the parents and children shall in future be prevented, except such as may take place by permission, and in the presence of the manager of the children.
“May 26. Agreed that the slaves shall not be allowed to receive money, clothing, food, or indeed any thing whatever from any person … Agreed that the slaves shall not be permitted to eat elsewhere than at the public meals.
“June 1. Isabel had laid a complaint against Redrick for coming during the night to her bedroom, uninvited, and endeavoring, without her consent, to take liberties with her person. Our views of the sexual relationship had been repeatedly given to the slaves; Camilla Wright again stated it, and informed the slaves that, as the conduct of Redrick, which he did not deny, was a gross infringement of that view, a repetition of such conduct ought to be punished by flogging.
“June 17. James Richardson informed that last night Mamselle Josephine [daughter of Mamselle Lolotte] and he began to live together; and he took this occasion of repeating to them our views on color, and on the sexual relation.” (“All colors are equal in rank,” and sex was to be based on “the unconstrained and unrestrained choice of both parties.”)
Although he did not include two other entries for the month of May—“Reprimanded Dilly for having given bread and meat to one of her own children,” and “Two women slaves tied up and flogged by James Richardson in presence of Camilla and the slaves. Two dozen and one dozen on the bare back with a cowskin”—Richardson could hardly have done more damage to Nashoba had he deliberately set out to sabotage it. As one outraged subscriber wrote to the editor of the Genius, such “indecent” and “libidinous” activities were “repugnant to the safe and honest maxims of Christian life … Who can read without disgust that an accomplished young English woman apparently concurs in giving a sanction to the formation of illicit sexual connections without the obligations of marriage?” Nashoba was nothing but “one great brothel, disgraceful to its institutors, and most reprehensible.” (As tactless as ever, when rebutting this charge, Richardson wrote to the editor that “I have seen a brothel, and I never knew a place so unlike it as Nashoba …”)
On her return from Italy, Fanny tried to re-establish her inte
rracial utopia, but as an instrument for ending slavery it was finished. To find a home for the former slaves she personally escorted them to Haiti, where President Boyer, probably as dazzled by her as had been Lafayette and Andrew Jackson, promised to take good care of them. On her return to this country she resumed her career as a public speaker, adored by some—“a brilliant woman,” wrote Walt Whitman, “who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good”; but to Catharine Beecher (Harriet Stowe’s sister), “intolerably offensive and disgusting.” And to others “the petticoated politician” or “the Red Harlot of Infidelity.”
A powerful but often muted argument against slavery was the sexual exploitation of black women by their white masters. Though this was often talked about quite freely in private, social conventions demanded that public discussion be rare and unspecific. However, in 1852, Julia Tyler of Virginia, wife of President John Tyler, published a defense of slavery in which she asserted, among other things, that slaves were “sold only under very peculiar circumstances.” In response, Harriet Jacobs, who before escaping to freedom had spent many years in Edenton, N. C., as a slave in the household of Dr. Norcom, wrote this letter giving an example of what “very peculiar circumstances” really meant: “My mother was held as property by a maiden lady. When she married, my younger sister was in her fourteenth year … as gentle as she was beautiful … innocent and guileless … the light of our desolate hearth! But oh, my heart bleeds to tell you of the misery and degradation she was forced to suffer in slavery. The monster who owned her had no humanity in his soul and every stratagem was used to seduce my sister. Mortified and tormented beyond endurance, this child came and threw herself on her mother’s bosom … with bitter tears she told her troubles, and entreated her mother to save her. And oh, Christian mothers! you that have daughters of your own, can you think of your sable sisters without offering a prayer to that God who created all in their behalf? My poor mother … sought her master, entreating him to spare her child. Nothing could exceed his rage at this, what he called impertinence. My mother was dragged to jail,” where she was put up for sale and “my sister was told that she must yield, or never expect to see her mother again. There were three younger children; on no other condition could she be restored to them … That child gave herself up to her master’s bidding, to save one that was dearer to her than life itself. Can you, Christian, find it in your heart to despise her?”
And there was more: “At fifteen, my sister held to her bosom an innocent offspring of her guilt and misery. In this way she dragged a miserable existence of two years, between the fires of her mistress’s jealousy and her master’s brutal passion. At seventeen she gave birth to another helpless infant …” At twenty-one “sorrow and suffering had made its ravages upon her—she was less the object to be desired by the fiend who had crushed her to the earth.” Also, “as her children grew, they bore too strong a resemblance to him who desired to give them no other inheritance save Chains and Handcuffs.” And so, “in the dead hour of the night, when this young, deserted mother lay with her little ones clinging around her,” they were seized and carried off, “and when the sun rose on God’s beautiful earth, that heart-broken mother was far on her way to the capital of Virginia,” there to be sold. “And where she now is God only knows.”
There was yet another reason why that mother and her children were sold. This was “to make room for another sister, who was now the age of that mother when she entered the family”—i.e. fourteen. “And such are the ‘peculiar circumstances’ of American Slavery—of all the evils in God’s sight, the most to be abhorred.”
Thanks to Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution, which dealt with the apportionment of taxes and representatives, what was then called an enumeration but is now known as a census has been held—with a few exceptions—every ten years, starting in 1790. As with many another government program, once started it did not stop growing, and by 1850 the scope of inquiry had expanded from a simple head count to an elaborate compilation of statistics about such matters as property values, manufacturing, agriculture, crime, pauperism and mortality rates. Once published, the results were seized upon by opposing polemicists to prove their arguments conclusively, Thornton Stringfellow bringing out Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery (mentioned in the previous chapter) in 1856, and Hinton Rowan Helper The Impending Crisis of the South in 1857.
Helper began by making it clear that he was not one of those Northern fanatics but “as proud as any Southerner—the South being my birthplace and my home, and my ancestry having resided there for more than a century.” Nor was it “part of my purpose to cast unmerited opprobrium on slaveholders, or to display any special friendliness or sympathy for the blacks. I have considered my subject more particularly with reference to its economic aspects as regards the whites—not with reference, except in a very slight degree, to its humanitarian or religious aspects.” Northern writers, including “Yankee wives,” [e.g. Mrs. Stowe], had written about these aspects of slavery, often “in the form of novels … Against this I have nothing to say; it is all well enough for women to give the fictions of slavery; men should give the facts.” Using information from past censuses, he would “take a survey of the relative position and importance of the several states, and when, of two sections of the country starting under the same auspices, and with equal natural advantages, we find the one rising to a degree of almost unexampled power and eminence, and the other sinking into a state of comparative imbecility and obscurity, it is our determination to trace out the causes which have led to the elevation of the former, and the depression of the latter.” The results, he forewarned, could not but be painful to “a true-hearted Southerner.”
Getting down to facts and figures: “In 1790, when the first census was taken, New York contained 340,120 inhabitants; at the same time the population of Virginia was 748,308, being more than twice the number of New York. Just sixty years afterward, as we learn from the census of 1850, New York had a population of 3,097,394; while that of Virginia was only 1,421,661, being less than half the number of New York! In 1791 the exports of New York amounted to $2,505,465; the exports of Virginia amounted to $3,130,865. In 1852 the exports of New York amounted to $87,484,456; the exports of Virginia during the same year amounted to only $2,724,657.”
Next he compared Massachusetts and North Carolina, and here the story was much the same: “In 1790, Massachusetts contained 378,717 inhabitants; in the same year North Carolina contained 393,751; in 1850 the population of Massachusetts was 994,514, all freemen; while that of North Carolina was only 869,039, of whom 288,548 were slaves.
“In 1850, the products of manufacture, mining and the mechanic arts in Massachusetts amounted to $151,137,145; those of North Carolina to only $9,111,245. In 1850, the cash value of all the farms, farming implements and machinery in Massachusetts was $112,285,931; the value of the same in North Carolina was only $71,823,298.”
A comparison between Pennsylvania and South Carolina produced much the same results. “In Pennsylvania, in 1850, the annual income of public schools amounted to $1,348,249; the same in South Carolina, in the same year, amounted to only $200,600; in the former state there were 393 libraries other than private, in the latter only 26; in Pennsylvania 310 newspapers and periodicals were published, circulating 84,898,672 copies annually; in South Carolina only 46 newspapers and periodicals were published, circulating but 7,145,930 copies per annum.”
As a result of these disparities “we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utility and adornment, from matches, shoepegs and paintings up to cotton mills, steamships and statuary … We want Bibles, brooms, buckets and books, and we go to the North; we want pens, ink, paper, wafers and envelopes, and we go to the North; we want shoes, hats, handkerchiefs, umbrellas and pocket knives, and we go to the North; we want toys, primers, school books, fashionable apparel, machinery, medicines, tombstones, and a thousand other things, and we go to the North for them all. Inste
ad of keeping our money in circulation at home, by patronizing our own mechanics, manufacturers and laborers, we send it all away to the North, and there it remains; it never falls into our hands again.”
And what caused this “unmanly dependence,” this “contemptible insignificance,” this “galling poverty and ignorance?” The answer lay in one word, “the most hateful and horrible word that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economy—Slavery!”
Although he did mention “the sin and shame” of slavery, calling it “a great moral evil,” Helper’s main objection was “that slavery, and nothing but slavery, has retarded the progress and prosperity of our portion of the Union; made us tributary to the North, and reduced us to the humiliating condition of mere provincial subjects in fact, though not in name. We believe, moreover, that every patriotic Southerner thus convinced will feel it a duty he owes to himself, to his country, and to his God, to become a thorough, inflexible, practical abolitionist.”