The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

to the

gradual emancipation of the negro. Upon this question Virginia

appears to have been divided. But Georgia and the Carolinas at

once declared that they would not have the slave-trade

abolished: they wanted more slaves; and unless this species of

property were guaranteed, they would not enter the Union at

all. They demanded that slavery should be recognised and

protected by the Constitution. The Northerners at once gave in;

they only requested that the words “slave” and “slavery” might not

appear. To this the Southerners agreed, and the contract was

delicately worded; but it was none the less stringent all the

same. It was made a clause of the Constitution that the slave-trade should not be suppressed before the year 18O8. It might

then be made the subject of debate and legislation — not

before. It was made a clause of the Constitution that, if the

slaves of any state rebelled, the national troops should be

employed against them. It was made a clause of the Constitution

that, if a slave escaped to a free state, the authorities of

that state should be obliged to give him up. And lastly, slave-owners were allowed to have votes in proportion to the number

of their slaves. Such was the price which the Northerners paid

for nationality — a price which their descendants found a hard

and heavy one to pay. The fathers of the country ate sour

grapes, and the children’s teeth were set on edge.

 

But the Southerners had not finished yet. The colonies

possessed, according to their charters, certain regions in the

wilderness out west, and these they delivered to the nation. A

special proviso was made, however, by South Carolina and by

Georgia, that at no future time should slavery be forbidden in

the territories which they gave up of their own free will and

these territories in time became slave states. It is therefore

evident that the South intended from the first to preserve, and

also to extend slavery. It must be confessed that their policy

was candid and consistent, and of a piece throughout. They

refused to enter the Union unless their property was

guaranteed; they threatened to withdraw from the Union whenever

they thought that the guarantee was about to be evaded or

withdrawn. The clauses contained in the Constitution were

binding on the nation; but they might be revoked by means of a

constitutional amendment, which could be passed by the consent

of three-fourths of the states. Emigrants continually poured

into the north; and these again streamed out towards the west.

It was evident that in time new states would be formed, and

that the original slave states would be left in a minority.

These states were purely agricultural; they had no commerce;

they had no manufactures. Indigo, rice, and tobacco were the

products on which they lived; and the markets for these were in

an ugly state. The East Indies had begun to compete with them

in rice and indigo; the demand for tobacco did not increase.

There was a general languor in the South; the young men did not

know what to do. Slavery is a wasteful and costly institution,

and requires large profits to keep it alive; it seemed on the

point of dying in the South, when there came a voice across the

Atlantic crying for cotton in loud and hungry tones; and the

fortune of the South was made.

 

In the seventeenth century the town of Manchester was already

known to fame. It was a seat of the woollen manufacture, which

was first introduced from Flanders into England in the reign of

Edward the Third. It bought yarn from the Irish, and sent it

back to them as linen. It imported cotton from Cyprus and

Smyrna, and worked it into fustians, vermilions, and dimities.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the cotton industry had

become important. In thousands of cottages surrounding

Manchester might be heard the rattle of the loom and the

humming of the one-thread wheel, which is now to he seen only

in the opera of Marta. Invention, as usual, arose from

necessity; the weavers could not get sufficient thread, and

were entirely at the mercy of the spinners. Spinning machines

were accordingly invented: the water frame, the spinning jenny,

and the mule. And now the weavers had more thread than they

could use, and the power loom was invented to preserve the

equilibrium of supply and demand. Then steam was applied to

machinery; the factory system was established; hundred-handed

engines worked all the day: and yet more labourers were

employed than had ever been employed before; the soft white

wool was carded, spun, and woven in a trice; the cargoes from

the East were speedily devoured; and now raw material was

chiefly in demand. The American cotton was the best in the

market; but the quantity received had hitherto been small. The

picking out of the small black seeds was a long and tedious

operation. A single person could not clean more than a pound a

day. Here, then, was an opening for Yankee ingenuity; and

Whitney invented his famous saw-gin, which tore out the seeds

as quick as lightning with its iron teeth. Land and slaves

abounded in the South; the demand from Manchester became more

and more hungry —it has never yet been completely satisfied —

and, under King Cotton, the South entered upon a new era of

wealth, vigour, and prosperity as a slave plantation. The small

holdings were unable to compete with the large estates on which

the slaves were marshalled and drilled like convicts to their

work; society in the South soon became composed of the

planters, the slaves, and the mean whites who were too proud to

work like niggers, and who led a kind of gipsy life.

 

While the intellect of the North was inventing machinery,

opening new lands, and laying the foundations of a literature, the

Southerners were devoted entirely to politics; and by means of

their superior ability they ruled at Washington for many

years, and almost monopolised the offices of state. When

America commenced its national career there were two great

sects of politicians; those who were in favour of the central

power, and those who were in favour of state rights. In the

course of time the national sentiment increased, and with it

the authority of the President and Congress; but this

centralising movement was resisted by a certain party of the

North whose patriotism could not pass beyond the state house

and the city hall. The Southerners were invariably provincial

in their feelings; they did not consider themselves as

belonging to a nation, but a league; they inherited the

sentiments of aversion and distrust with which their fathers

had entered the Union; threats and provisos were always on

their lips. The executive, it was true, was in their hands, but

the House of Representatives belonged to the North. In the

Senate the states had equal powers, irrespective of size and

population. In the Lower House the states were merely sections

of the country; population was the standard of the voting

power. The South had a smaller population than the North; the

Southerners were therefore a natural minority, and only

preserved their influence by allying themselves with the

states’ rights party in the North. The free states were

divided: the slave states voted as one man.

 

In the North politics was a question of sentiment, and sentiments

naturally differ. In the South politics was a matter of life and death;

their bread depended on cotton; their cotton depended on

slaves; their slaves depended on the balance of power. The

history of the South within the Union is that of a people

struggling for existence by means of political devices against

the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the age. By

annexation, purchase, and extension they kept pace with the

North in its rush towards the West. Free states and slave

states ran neck and neck towards the shores of the Pacific. The

North obtained Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Maine,

Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and California. The South obtained

Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri,

Arkansas, Florida, and Texas. Whenever a territory became a

state, the nation possessed the power of rejecting and

therefore of modifying its constitution. The Northern

politicians made an effort to prohibit slavery in all new

states; the South as usual threatened to secede, and the Union

which had been manufactured by a compromise was preserved by a

compromise. It was agreed that a line should be drawn to the

Pacific along the parallel 36° 3O’; that all the states which

should afterwards be made below the line should be slaveholding; and all that were made above it should be free. But

this compromise was not, like the compromise of the

constitution, binding on the nation, and only to be set aside

by a constitutional amendment. It was simply a parliamentary

measure, and as such could be repealed at any future session.

However, it satisfied the South; the North had many things to

think of; and all remained quiet for a time. But only for a

time.

 

The mysterious principle which constitutes the law of

progress produces similar phenomena in various countries at the

same time, and it was such an active period of the human mind

which produced about forty years ago a Parisian Revolution, the

great Reform Bill, and the American agitation against slavery.

There was a man in a Boston garret. He possessed some paper,

pens and ink, and little else besides; and even these he could

only use in a fashion of his own. He had not what is called a

style; nor had he that rude power which can cast a glow on

jagged sentences and uncouth words. This poor garretteer, a

printer in his working hours, relied chiefly on his type for

light and shade, and had much recourse to capital letters,

italics and notes of exclamation, to sharpen his wit, and to

strengthen his tirades. But he had a cause, and his heart was

in that cause. When W. L. Garrison commenced his Liberator the

government of Georgia set a price upon his head, he was mobbed

in his native city, and slavery was defended in Faneuil Hall

itself, sacred to the memory of men who cared not to live

unless they could be free. The truth was, that the Northerners

disliked slavery, but nationality was dear to them and they

believed that an attack upon the “domestic institution” of the

South endangered the safety of the Union. But the abolitionists

became a sect; they increased in numbers and in talent; they

would admit of no compromise; they cared little for the country

itself so long as it was stained. They denounced the

constitution as a covenant with death, and an agreement with

hell. No union with slaveholders! they cried. No union with

midnight robbers and assassins! Hitherto the war between the

two great sections of the country had been confined to

politicians. The Southerners had sent their boys to Northern

colleges and schools. Attended by a retinue of slaves they had

passed the summer at Saratoga or Newport, and some times the

winter at New York. But now their sons were insulted, their

slaves decoyed from them by these new fanatics; and the South

went North no more.

 

Abolition societies were everywhere formed, and envoys

were sent into the slave states to distribute abolition tracts

and to publish abolition journals, and to excite, if they could,

a St. Domingo insurrection. The Northerners were shocked at

these proceedings and protested angrily against them. But

soon there was a revulsion of feeling in their minds, The wild

beast temper arose in the South, and went forth lynching all it met.

Northerners were flogged and even killed. Negroes were burnt alive.

And so the meetings of abolitionists were no longer interrupted at the

North; mayors and select-men no longer