ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD.
Ran away from the subscriber, a bright mulatto man-slave, named Sam. Light, sandy hair, blue eyes, ruddy complexion — is so white as very easily to pass for a free white man.
Mobile, April 22, 1837. EDWIN PECK.
RAN AWAY, On the 15th of May, from me, a negro woman, named Fanny. Said woman is 20 years old; is rather tall; can read and write, and so forge passes for herself. Carried away with her a pair of ear-rings — a Bible with a red cover; is very pious. She prays a great deal, and was, as supposed, contented and happy. She is as white as most white women, with straight light hair, and blue eyes, and can pass herself for a white woman. I will give 500 dollars for her apprehension and delivery to me. She is very intelligent.
Tuscaloosa, May 29, 1845. JOHN BALCH.
From the Newbern (N. C.) Spectator: —
FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD
Will be given for the apprehension and delivery to me of the following slaves: — Samuel, and Judy his wife, with their four children, belonging to my estate of Sacker Dubberly, deceased.
I will give 10 dollars for the apprehension of William Dubberly, a slave belonging to the estate. William is about 19 years old, quite white, and would not readily be taken for a slave.
JOHN J. LANE.
March 13, 1837.
The next two advertisements we cut from the New Orleans Picayune of Sept. 2, 1846: —
TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS REWARD.
Ran away from the plantation of Madame Fergus Duplantier, on or about the 27th of June, 1846, a bright mulatto, named Ned, very stout built, about 5 feet 11 inches high, speaks English and French, about 35 years old, waddles in his walk. He may try to pass himself for a white man, as he is of a very clear colour, and has sandy hair. The above reward will be paid to whoever will bring him to Madame Duplantier’s plantation, Manchac, or lodge him in some jail where he can be conveniently obtained.
TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD.
Ran away from the subscriber, last November, a white negro man, about 35 years old, height about 5 feet 8 or 10 inches, blue eyes, has a yellow woolly head, very fair skin.
These are the characteristics of three races. The copper-coloured complexion shows the Indian blood. The others are the mixed races of negroes and whites. It is known that the poor remains of Indian races have been in many cases forced into slavery. It is no less certain that white children have sometimes been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Rev. George Bourne, of Virginia, Presbyterian minister, who wrote against slavery there as early as 1816, gives an account of a boy who was stolen from his parents at seven years of age, immersed in a tan-vat to change his complexion, tattooed and sold, and, after a captivity of fourteen years, succeeded in escaping. The tanning process is not necessary now, as a fair skin is no presumption against slavery. There is reason to think that the grandmother of poor Emily Russell was a white child, stolen by kidnappers. That kidnappers may steal and sell white children at the South now, is evident from these advertisements.
The writer, within a week, has seen a fugitive quadroon mother, who had with her two children — a boy of ten months, and a girl of three years. Both were surpassingly fair, and uncommonly beautiful. The girl had blue eyes and golden hair. The mother and those children were about to be sold for the division of an estate, which was the reason why she fled. When the mind once becomes familiarized with the process of slavery — of enslaving first black, then Indian, then mulatto, then quadroon, and when blue eyes and golden hair are advertised as properties of negroes — what protection will there be for poor white people, especially as under the present fugitive law they can be carried away without a jury trial?
A Governor of South Carolina openly declared, in 1835, that the labouring population of any country, bleached or unbleached, were a dangerous element, unless reduced to slavery. Will not this be the result, then?
CHAPTER X.
“POOR WHITE TRASH.”
WHEN the public sentiment of Europe speaks in tones of indignation of the system of American slavery, the common reply has been, “Look at your own lower classes.” The apologists of slavery have pointed England to her own poor. They have spoken of the heathenish ignorance, the vice, the darkness, of her crowded cities — nay, even of her agricultural districts.
Now, in the first place, a country where the population is not crowded, where the resources of the soil are more than sufficient for the inhabitants — a country of recent origin, not burdened with the worn-out institutions and clumsy lumber of past ages, ought not to be satisfied to do only as well as countries which have to struggle against all these evils.
It is a poor defence for America to say to older countries, “We are no worse than you are.” She ought to be infinitely better.
But it will appear that the institution of slavery has produced not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable. The institution of slavery has accomplished the double feat, in America, not only of degrading and brutalising her black working classes, but of producing, notwithstanding a fertile soil, and abundant room, a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.
The way that it is done can be made apparent in a few words. 1. The distribution of the land into large plantations, and the consequent sparseness of settlement, make any system of common school education impracticable. 2. The same cause operates with regard to the preaching of the Gospel. 3. The degradation of the idea of labour, which results inevitably from enslaving the working class, operates to a great extent in preventing respectable working men of the middling classes from settling or remaining in slave States. Where carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons, are advertised every week with their own tools, or in company with horses, hogs, and other cattle, there is necessarily such an estimate of the labouring class that intelligent, self-respecting mechanics, such as abound in the free States, must find much that is annoying and disagreeable. They may endure it for a time, but with much uneasiness; and they are glad of the first opportunity of emigration.
Then, again, the filling up of all branches of mechanics and agriculture with slave-labour necessarily depresses free labour. Suppose, now, a family of poor whites in Carolina or Virginia, and the same family in Vermont or Maine; how different the influences that come over them! In Vermont or Maine, the children have the means of education at hand in public schools, and they have all around them in society avenues of success that require only industry to make them available. The boys have their choice among all the different trades, for which the organisation of free society makes a steady demand. The girls, animated by the spirit of the land in which they are born, think useful labour no disgrace, and find, with true female ingenuity, a hundred ways of adding to the family stock. If there be one member of a family in whom diviner gifts and higher longings seem to call for a more finished course of education, then cheerfully the whole family unites its productive industry to give that one the wider education which his wider genius demands; and thus have been given to the world such men as Roger Sherman and Daniel Webster.
But take this same family and plant them in South Carolina or Virginia — how different the result! No common school opens its doors to their children; the only church, perhaps, is fifteen miles off, over a bad road. The whole atmosphere of the country in which they are born associates degradation and slavery with useful labour; and the only standard of gentility is ability to live without work. What branch of useful labour opens a way to its sons? Would he be a blacksmith? — The planters around him prefer to buy their blacksmiths in Virginia. Would he be a carpenter? — Each planter in his neighbourhood owns one or two now. And so coopers and masons. Would he be a shoemaker? — The plantation-shoes are made in Lynn and Natick, towns of New England. In fact, between the free labour of the North and the slave labour of the South, there is nothing for a poor white to do. Without schools or churches,
these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighbourhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of “poor white trash,” says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said. From this class spring a tribe of keepers of small groggeries, and dealers, by a kind of contraband trade, with the negroes, in the stolen produce of plantations. Thriving and promising sons may perhaps hope to grow up into negro-traders, and thence be exalted into overseers of plantations. The utmost stretch of ambition is to compass money enough, by any of a variety of nondescript measures, to “buy a nigger or two,” and begin to appear like other folks. Woe betide the unfortunate negro man or woman, carefully raised in some good religious family, when an execution or the death of their proprietors throws them into the market, and they are bought by a master and mistress of this class! Oftentimes the slave is infinitely the superior, in every respect — in person, manners, education, and morals; but, for all that, the law guards the despotic authority of the owner quite as jealously.
From all that would appear, in the case of Souther, which we have recorded, he must have been one of this class. We have certain indications in the evidence that the two white witnesses, who spent the whole day in gaping, unresisting survey of his diabolical proceedings, were men of this order. It appears that the crime alleged against the poor victim was that of getting drunk and trading with these two very men, and that they were sent for probably by way of showing them “what a nigger would get by trading with them.” This circumstance at once marks them out as belonging to that band of half-contraband traders who spring up among the mean whites, and occasion owners of slaves so much inconvenience by dealing with their hands. Can any words so forcibly show what sort of white men these are, as the idea of their standing in stupid, brutal curiosity, a whole day, as witnesses in such a hellish scene?
Conceive the misery of the slave who falls into the hands of such masters! A clergyman, now dead, communicated to the writer the following anecdote: — In travelling in one of the Southern States, he put up for the night in a miserable log shanty, kept by a man of this class. All was dirt, discomfort, and utter barbarism. The man, his wife, and their stock of wild, neglected children, drank whiskey, loafed, and predominated over the miserable man and woman who did all the work and bore all the caprices of the whole establishment. He — the gentleman — was not long in discovering that these slaves were in person, language, and in every respect, superior to their owners; and all that he could get of comfort in this miserable abode was owing to their ministrations. Before he went away, they contrived to have a private interview, and begged him to buy them. They told him that they had been decently brought up in a respectable and refined family, and that their bondage was therefore the more inexpressibly galling. The poor creatures had waited on him with most assiduous care, tending his horse, brushing his boots, and anticipating all his wants, in the hope of inducing him to buy them. The clergyman said that he never so wished for money as when he saw the dejected visages with which they listened to his assurances that he was too poor to comply with their desires.
This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.
Singular as it may appear, though slavery is the cause of the misery and degradation of this class, yet they are the most vehement and ferocious advocates of slavery.
The reason is this: They feel the scorn of the upper classes, and their only means of consolation is in having a class below them, whom they may scorn in turn. To set the negro at liberty would deprive them of this last comfort; and accordingly no class of men advocate slavery with such frantic and unreasoning violence, or hate abolitionists with such demoniac hatred. Let the reader conceive of a mob of men as brutal and callous as the two white witnesses of the Souther tragedy, led on by men like Souther himself, and he will have some idea of the materials which occur in the worst kind of Southern mobs.
The leaders of the community, those men who play on other men with as little care for them as a harper plays on a harp, keep this blind furious monster of the MOB, very much as an overseer keeps plantation-dogs, as creatures to be set on to any man or thing whom they may choose to have put down.
These leading men have used the cry of “abolitionism “ over the mob, much as a huntsman uses the “set on” to his dogs. Whenever they have a purpose to carry, a man to put down, they have only to raise this cry, and the monster is wide awake, ready to spring wherever they shall send him.
Does a minister raise his voice in favour of the slave? — Immediately, with a whoop and hurra, some editor starts the mob on him, as an abolitionist. Is there a man teaching his negroes to read? — The mob is started upon him — he must promise to give it up or leave the State. Does a man at a public hotel-table express his approbation of some anti-slavery work? — Up come the police, and arrest him for seditious language;* and on the heels of the police, thronging round the justice’s office, come the ever-ready mob — men with clubs and bowie-knives, swearing that they will have his heart’s blood. The more respectable citizens in vain try to compose them; it is quite as hopeful to reason with a pack of hounds, and the only way is to smuggle the suspected person out of the State as quickly as possible. All these are scenes of common occurrence at the South. Every Southern man knows them to be so, and they know, too, the reason why they are so; but, so much do they fear the monster, that they dare not say what they know.
This brute monster sometimes gets beyond the power of his masters, and then results ensue most mortifying to the patriotism of honourable Southern men, but which they are powerless to prevent. Such was the case when the Honourable Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, with his daughter, visited the city of Charleston. The senator was appointed by the sovereign State of Massachusetts to inquire into the condition of her free coloured citizens detained in South Carolina prisons. We cannot suppose that men of honour and education, in South Carolina, can contemplate without chagrin the fact that this honourable gentleman, the representative of a sister State, and accompanied by his daughter, was obliged to flee from South Carolina, because they were told that the constituted authorities would not be powerful enough to protect them from the ferocities of a mob. This is not the only case in which this mob power has escaped from the hands of its guiders, and produced mortifying results. The scenes of Vicksburg, and the succession of popular whirlwinds which at that time flew over the South-western States, have been forcibly painted by the author of “The White Slave.”
They who find these popular outbreaks useful when they serve their own turns are sometimes forcibly reminded of the consequences —
Of letting rapine loose, and murder,
To go just so far, and no further;
And setting all the land on fire,
To burn just so high, and no higher.
The statements made above can be substantiated by various documents — mostly by the testimony of residents in slave States, and by extracts from their newspapers.
Concerning the class of poor whites, Mr. William Gregg, of Charleston, South Carolina, in a pamphlet called “Essays on Domestic Industry, or an Inquiry into the expediency of establishing Cotton Manufactories in South Carolina, 1845,” says, : —
Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation? Many a one is reared in proud South Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily provided with bread, and much more scantily with meat; and, if they be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowa
nces of food. These may be startling statements, but they are nevertheless true; and if not believed in Charleston, the members of our legislature who have traversed the State in electioneering campaigns can attest the truth.
The Rev. Henry Duffner, D.D., President of Lexington College, Va., himself a slaveholder, published in 1847 an address to the people of Virginia, showing that slavery is injurious to public welfare, in which he shows the influence of slavery in producing a decrease of the white population. He says: —
It appears that in ten years, from 1830 to 1840, Virginia lost by emigration no fewer than 375,000 of her people; of whom East Virginia lost 304,000, and West Virginia 71,000. At this rate, Virginia supplies the West, every ten years, with a population equal in number to the population of the State of Mississippi in 1840. * * * She has sent — or, we should rather say, she has driven — from her soil at least one-third of all the emigrants who have gone from the old States to the new. More than another third have gone from the other old slave States. Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave States, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of the West. These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them. It is a truth, a certain truth, that slavery drives free labourers — farmers, mechanics and all, and some of the best of them too — out of the country, and fills their places with negroes. * * * Even the common mechanical trades do not flourish in a slave State. Some mechanical operations must, indeed, be performed in every civilised country; but the general rule in the South is to import from abroad every fabricated thing that can be carried in ships, such as household furniture, boats, boards, laths, carts, ploughs, axes, and axe-helves; besides innumerable other things, which free communities are accustomed to make for themselves. What is most wonderful is, that the forests and iron mines of the South supply, in great part, the materials out of which these things are made. The Northern freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and pig-iron, work them up, supply their own wants with a part, and then sell the rest at a good profit in the Southern markets. Now, although mechanics, by setting up their shops in the South, could save all these freights and profits, yet, so it is, that Northern mechanics will not settle in the South; and the Southern mechanics are undersold by their Northern competitors.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 708