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

refused them the use of public

halls. The sentiment of abolition was however not yet widely spread.

There were few Northerners who preferred to give up the Union

rather than live under a piebald constitution, or who

considered it just to break a solemn compact in obedience to an

abstract law. But there now arose a strong and resolute party

who declared that slavery might stay where it was, but that it

must go no farther. The South must be content with what it had.

Not another yard of slave soil should be added to the Union. On

the other hand, the South could not accept such terms. Slavery

extension was necessary for their lives. More land they must

have or they could not exist. There was waste land in abundance

in the South; but it was dead. Their style of agriculture was

precisely that which is pursued in Central Africa. They took a

tract from the wilderness and planted it again and again with

cotton and tobacco till it gave up the ghost, and would yield

no more. They then moved on and took in another piece. Obliged

to spend all their cash in buying prime slaves at two hundred

pounds a piece, they could not afford to use manure or to

rotate their crops; they could not afford to employ so costly a

species of labour on anything less lucrative than sugar,

cotton, and tobacco. Besides, if slavery were not to be

extended they would be surrounded and hemmed in by free states;

the old contract would be annulled. Already the South were in a

minority. The free states and slave states might be equal in

number; but they were not equal in population and prosperity.

The Northerner who travelled down South was astonished to find

that the cities of the maps were villages, and the villages

clusters of log huts. Fields covered with weeds, and moss-grown

ruins showed where farms once flourishing had been. He rode

through vast forests and cypress swamps, where hundreds of mean

whites lived like Red Indians, hunting and fishing for their

daily bread, eating clay to keep themselves alive, prowling

round plantations to obtain stolen food from the slaves. He saw

plantations in which the labour was conducted with the terrible

discipline of the prison and the hulks; and where as he

galloped past the line of hoeing slaves, so close that he

splashed them with mud, they hoed on, they toiled on, not

daring to raise their eyes from the ground. From early dawn to

dusky eve it was so with these poor wretches: no sound broke

the silence of those fearful fields but the voice of the

overseer and the cracking of the whip. And out far away in the

lone western lands, by the side of dark rivers, among trees

from which drooped down the dull grey Spanish moss, the

planters went forth to hunt; there were well-known coverts

where they were sure to find; and as the traveller rode through

the dismal swamp he might perhaps have the fortune to see the

game; a black animal on two legs running madly for its life,

and behind it the sounding of a horn, and the voices of hounds

in full cry — a chase more infernal than that of the Wild

Huntsman who sweeps through the forest with his spectral crew.

 

But the end of all this was at hand. Kansas, a tract of rich

prairie land, was about to become a territory, and would soon

become a state. It was situated above the 36° 3O’ line, and

therefore belonged to the North. But the Southerners coveted

this Naboth’s vineyard; their power at Washington was great

just then; they determined to strike out the line which had

been in the first place demanded by themselves. With much show

of justice and reason they alleged that it was not fair to

establish the domestic institutions of a country without

consulting the inhabitants themselves. They proposed that, for

the future, the question of slavery or free soil should be

decided by a majority of votes among the settlers on the spot.

This proposal became law, and then commenced a race for the

soil. In Boston a political society was formed for the

exportation to Kansas of Northern men. In the slave state.

Missouri, blue lodges were formed for a similar purpose, and

hundreds of squatters, dressed in flannel shirts, and huge

boots up to their knees, and skin caps on their heads,

bristling with revolvers and bowie knives, stepped across the

Border. For the first time the people of the North and South

met face to face. A guerrilla warfare soon broke out; the New

Englanders were robbed and driven back; they were murdered, and

their scalps paraded by Border ruffians upon poles. The whole

country fell into a distracted state. The Southerners pursued

their slaves into Boston itself, and dragged them back,

according to the law. A mad abolitionist invaded Virginia with

a handful of men, shot a few peaceful citizens, and was hanged.

A time of terror fell upon the South; there was neither liberty

of print nor liberty of speech; the majority reigned; and the

man who spoke against it was lynched upon the spot. A

Southerner assaulted and battered a Northerner on the floor of

the Senate.

 

The North at last was thoroughly aroused. The people

itself began to stir; a calm, patient, law-abiding race,

slow to be moved, but when once moved, swerving never till the

thing was done. A presidential election was at hand, and a

Northerner was placed upon the throne. The South understood

that this was not a casual reverse, which might be redeemed

when the four years had passed away. It was to them a sign that

the days of their power had for ever passed. The temper of the

North was not to be mistaken. It had at last rebelled; it would

suffer tyranny no more. Mr. Lincoln’s terms were conciliatory

in the extreme. Had the South been moderate in its demands, he

would have been classed with those statesmen who added

compromise to compromise, and so postponed the evil but

inevitable day. He was not an abolitionist. He offered to give

them any guarantee they pleased — a constitutional amendment

if they desired it — that slavery as it stood should not be

interfered with. He offered to bring in a more stringent law,

by which their fugitive slaves should be restored. But on the

matter of extension he was firm. The Southerners demanded that

a line should again be drawn to the Pacific; that all south of

that line should be made slave soil, and that slavery should be

more clearly recognised by the central government, and more

firmly guaranteed. These terms were not more extravagant than

those which their fathers had obtained. But times had changed:

the sentiment of nationality was now more fully formed; “Uncle

Tom’s Cabin” had been written; the American people were heartily

ashamed of slavery; they refused to give it another lease. The

ultimatum was declined; the South seceded, and the North flew

to arms, not to emancipate the negro, but to preserve the

existence of the nation. They would not indeed submit to

slavery extension; they preferred disunion to such a disgrace.

But they had no intention when they went to war of destroying

slavery in the states where it existed; they even took pains to

prove to the South that the war was not an anti-slavery

crusade. The negroes were treated by the Northern generals not

as men, but as contraband of war; even Butler in New Orleans

did not emancipate the slaves; a general who issued a

proclamation of that nature was reprimanded by the government,

although he only followed the example of British generals in

the Revolutionary war. But as the contest became more severe

and more prolonged, and all hopes of reconciliation were at an

end, slavery became identified with the South in the Northern

mind, and was itself regarded as a foe. The astute and cautious

statesman at the head of affairs perceived that the time had

come; the constitution was suspended during the war; and so, in

all legality and with due form, he set free in one day four

million slaves.

 

It is impossible to view without compassion the misfortunes of

men who merely followed in the footsteps of their fathers, and

were in no sense more guilty than Washington and Jefferson, who

remained slaveholders to their dying day. It was easy for Great

Britain to pay twenty millions; it was easy for the Northern

states to emancipate their slaves, who were few in number, and

not necessary to their life. But it was impossible for the

South to abandon slavery. The money of a planter was sunk in

flesh and blood. Yet the Southern politicians must be blamed

for their crazy ambition, and their blind ignorance of the

world. Instead of preparing as the Cuban planters are preparing

now for those changes which had been rendered inevitable by the

progress of mankind, they supposed that it was in their power

to defy the spirit of the age, and to establish an empire on

the pattern of ancient Rome. They firmly believed that, because

they could not exist without selling cotton, Great Britain

could not exist without buying it from them; which is like a

shopkeeper supposing he could ruin his customers by putting up

his shutters.

 

It may console those who yet lament the lost cause if

we picture for their benefit what the Southern empire

would have been. There would have been an aristocracy of

planters, herds of slaves, a servile press, a servile pulpit,

and a rabble of mean whites formed into an army. Abolition

societies would have been established in the North, to

instigate slaves to rebel or run away; a cordon of posts with a

system of passports would have been established in the South.

Border raids would have been made by fanatics on the one side,

and by desperadoes on the other. Sooner or later there must

have been a war. Filibustering expeditions on Mexico and Cuba

would have brought about a war with Spain, and perhaps with

France. It was the avowed intention of the planters, when once

their empire was established, to import labour from Africa; to

re-open the trade as in the good old times. But this, Great

Britain would certainly have not allowed; and thus, again,

there would have been war. Even if the planters would have

displayed a little common sense, which is exceedingly

improbable, and so escaped extirpation from without, their

system of culture would have eaten up their lands. But happily

such hypotheses need no longer be discussed; a future of

another kind is in reserve for the Southern states. America can

now pursue with untarnished reputation her glorious career, and

time will soften the memories of a conflict, the original guilt

of which must be ascribed to the founders of the nation, or

rather to the conditions by which those great men were mastered

and controlled.

 

I have now accomplished the task which I set myself to do. I

have shown to the best of my ability what kind of place in

universal history Africa deserves to hold. I have shown that

not only Egypt has assisted the development of man by educating

Greece, Carthage by leading forth Rome to conquest, but that

even the obscure Sudan, or land of the negroes, has also

played its part in the drama of European life.

 

The slave-trade must be estimated as a war; though cruel and

atrocious in itself, it has, like most wars, been of service to

mankind. I shall leave it to others to trace cut in detail the

influence of the negro in the human progress. It will be

sufficient to observe that the grandeur of West Indian commerce

in the last generation, and of