Thus the inhabitants of the South would not be able, like
their Northern countrymen, to initiate the slaves gradually into a state of
freedom by abolishing slavery; they have no means of perceptibly diminishing
the black population, and they would remain unsupported to repress its
excesses. So that in the course of a few years, a great people of free negroes
would exist in the heart of a white nation of equal size.
The same abuses of power which still maintain slavery,
would then become the source of the most alarming perils which the white
population of the South might have to apprehend. At the present time the
descendants of the Europeans are the sole owners of the land; the absolute
masters of all labor; and the only persons who are possessed of wealth,
knowledge, and arms. The black is destitute of all these advantages, but he
subsists without them because he is a slave. If he were free, and obliged to
provide for his own subsistence, would it be possible for him to remain without
these things and to support life? Or would not the very instruments of the
present superiority of the white, whilst slavery exists, expose him to a
thousand dangers if it were abolished?
As long as the negro remains a slave, he may be kept in a
condition not very far removed from that of the brutes; but, with his liberty,
he cannot but acquire a degree of instruction which will enable him to
appreciate his misfortunes, and to discern a remedy for them. Moreover, there
exists a singular principle of relative justice which is very firmly implanted in
the human heart. Men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which
exist within the circle of the same class, than with those which may be
remarked between different classes. It is more easy for them to admit slavery,
than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal
infamy and hereditary wretchedness. In the North the population of freed
negroes feels these hardships and resents these indignities; but its numbers
and its powers are small, whilst in the South it would be numerous and strong.
As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the
emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two
alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two
alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part
or wholly mingle. I have already expressed the conviction which I entertain as
to the latter event. *r I do not imagine that the white and black races will
ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to
be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual
may surmount the prejudices of religion, of his country, or of his race, and if
this individual is a king he may effect surprising changes in society; but a
whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. A despot who should subject
the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed
in commingling their races; but as long as the American democracy remains at
the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be
foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the
more isolated will it remain. *s
r [ This opinion is sanctioned
by authorities infinitely weightier than anything that I can say: thus, for
instance, it is stated in the "Memoirs of Jefferson" (as collected by
M. Conseil), "Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than
the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races
will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so
insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have
established between them."]
s [ If the British West India
planters had governed themselves, they would assuredly not have passed the
Slave Emancipation Bill which the mother-country has recently imposed upon
them.]
I have previously observed that the mixed race is the
true bond of union between the Europeans and the Indians; just so the mulattoes
are the true means of transition between the white and the negro; so that
wherever mulattoes abound, the intermixture of the two races is not impossible.
In some parts of America, the European and the negro races are so crossed by
one another, that it is rare to meet with a man who is entirely black, or
entirely white: when they are arrived at this point, the two races may really
be said to be combined; or rather to have been absorbed in a third race, which
is connected with both without being identical with either.
Of all the Europeans the English are those who have mixed
least with the negroes. More mulattoes are to be seen in the South of the Union
than in the North, but still they are infinitely more scarce than in any other
European colony: mulattoes are by no means numerous in the United States; they
have no force peculiar to themselves, and when quarrels originating in
differences of color take place, they generally side with the whites; just as
the lackeys of the great, in Europe, assume the contemptuous airs of nobility
to the lower orders.
The pride of origin, which is natural to the English, is
singularly augmented by the personal pride which democratic liberty fosters
amongst the Americans: the white citizen of the United States is proud of his
race, and proud of himself. But if the whites and the negroes do not
intermingle in the North of the Union, how should they mix in the South? Can it
be supposed for an instant, that an American of the Southern States, placed, as
he must forever be, between the white man with all his physical and moral
superiority and the negro, will ever think of preferring the latter? The
Americans of the Southern States have two powerful passions which will always
keep them aloof; the first is the fear of being assimilated to the negroes, their
former slaves; and the second the dread of sinking below the whites, their
neighbors.
If I were called upon to predict what will probably occur
at some future time, I should say, that the abolition of slavery in the South
will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white
population for the men of color. I found this opinion upon the analogous
observation which I already had occasion to make in the North. I there remarked
that the white inhabitants of the North avoid the negroes with increasing care,
in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the
legislature; and why should not the same result take place in the South? In the
North, the whites are deterred from intermingling with the blacks by the fear
of an imaginary danger; in the South, where the danger would be real, I cannot
imagine that the fear would be less general.
If, on the one hand, it be admitted (and the fact is
unquestionable) that the colored population perpetually accumulates in the
extreme South, and that it increases more rapidly than that of the whites; and
if, on the other hand, it be allowed that it is impossible to foresee a time at
which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same
benefits from society; must it not be inferred that the blacks and the whites
will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the Southern States of the Union?
But if it be asked what the issue of the struggle is likely to be, it will
readily be understood that we are here left to form a very vague surmise of the
truth. The human mind may succeed in tracing a wide circle, as it were, which
includes the course of future events; but within that circle a thousand various
chances and circumstances may direct it in as many different ways; and in every
picture of the future there is a dim spot, which the eye of the understanding
cannot penetrate. It appears, however, to be extremely probable that in the
West Indian Islands the white race is destined to be subdued, and the black
population to share the same fate upon the continent.
In the West India Islands the white planters are
surrounded by an immense black population; on the continent, the blacks are
placed between the ocean and an innumerable people, which already extends over
them in a dense mass, from the icy confines of Canada to the frontiers of
Virginia, and from the banks of the Missouri to the shores of the Atlantic. If
the white citizens of North America remain united, it cannot be supposed that
the negroes will escape the destruction with which they are menaced; they must
be subdued by want or by the sword. But the black population which is
accumulated along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, has a chance of success if
the American Union is dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins.
If the federal tie were broken, the citizens of the South would be wrong to
rely upon any lasting succor from their Northern countrymen. The latter are
well aware that the danger can never reach them; and unless they are
constrained to march to the assistance of the South by a positive obligation,
it may be foreseen that the sympathy of color will be insufficient to stimulate
their exertions.
Yet, at whatever period the strife may break out, the
whites of the South, even if they are abandoned to their own resources, will
enter the lists with an immense superiority of knowledge and of the means of
warfare; but the blacks will have numerical strength and the energy of despair
upon their side, and these are powerful resources to men who have taken up
arms. The fate of the white population of the Southern States will, perhaps, be
similar to that of the Moors in Spain. After having occupied the land for
centuries, it will perhaps be forced to retire to the country whence its
ancestors came, and to abandon to the negroes the possession of a territory,
which Providence seems to have more peculiarly destined for them, since they
can subsist and labor in it more easily that the whites.
The danger of a conflict between the white and the black
inhabitants of the Southern States of the Union—a danger which, however remote
it may be, is inevitable—perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans.
The inhabitants of the North make it a common topic of conversation, although
they have no direct injury to fear from the struggle; but they vainly endeavor
to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. In the
Southern States the subject is not discussed: the planter does not allude to
the future in conversing with strangers; the citizen does not communicate his
apprehensions to his friends; he seeks to conceal them from himself; but there
is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the South, than in the
clamorous fears of the Northern States.
This all-pervading disquietude has given birth to an
undertaking which is but little known, but which may have the effect of
changing the fate of a portion of the human race. From apprehension of the
dangers which I have just been describing, a certain number of American
citizens have formed a society for the purpose of exporting to the coast of
Guinea, at their own expense, such free negroes as may be willing to escape
from the oppression to which they are subject. *t In 1820, the society to which
I allude formed a settlement in Africa, upon the seventh degree of north
latitude, which bears the name of Liberia. The most recent intelligence informs
us that 2,500 negroes are collected there; they have introduced the democratic
institutions of America into the country of their forefathers; and Liberia has
a representative system of government, negro jurymen, negro magistrates, and
negro priests; churches have been built, newspapers established, and, by a
singular change in the vicissitudes of the world, white men are prohibited from
sojourning within the settlement. *u
t [ This society assumed the
name of "The Society for the Colonization of the Blacks." See its
annual reports; and more particularly the fifteenth. See also the pamphlet, to
which allusion has already been made, entitled "Letters on the
Colonization Society, and on its probable Results," by Mr. Carey,
Philadelphia, 1833.]
u [ This last regulation was
laid down by the founders of the settlement; they apprehended that a state of
things might arise in Africa similar to that which exists on the frontiers of
the United States, and that if the negroes, like the Indians, were brought into
collision with a people more enlightened than themselves, they would be
destroyed before they could be civilized.]
This is indeed a strange caprice of fortune. Two hundred
years have now elapsed since the inhabitants of Europe undertook to tear the
negro from his family and his home, in order to transport him to the shores of
North America; at the present day, the European settlers are engaged in sending
back the descendants of those very negroes to the Continent from which they
were originally taken; and the barbarous Africans have been brought into
contact with civilization in the midst of bondage, and have become acquainted
with free political institutions in slavery. Up to the present time Africa has
been closed against the arts and sciences of the whites; but the inventions of
Europe will perhaps penetrate into those regions, now that they are introduced
by Africans themselves. The settlement of Liberia is founded upon a lofty and a
most fruitful idea; but whatever may be its results with regard to the
Continent of Africa, it can afford no remedy to the New World.
In twelve years the Colonization Society has transported
2,500 negroes to Africa; in the same space of time about 700,000 blacks were
born in the United States. If the colony of Liberia were so situated as to be
able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the negroes
were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the Union were to supply
the society with annual subsidies, *v and to transport the negroes to Africa in
the vessels of the State, it would still be unable to counterpoise the natural
increase of population amongst the blacks; and as it could not remove as many
men in a year as are born upon its territory within the same space of time, it
would fail in suspending the growth of the evil which is daily increasing in
the States. *w The negro race will never leave those shores of the American
continent, to which it was brought by the passions and the vices of Europeans;
and it will not disappear from the New World as long as it continues to exist.
The inhabitants of the United States may retard the calamities which they
apprehend, but they cannot now destroy their efficient cause.
v [ Nor would these be the only
difficulties attendant upon the undertaking; if the Union undertook to buy up
the negroes now in America, in order to transport them to Africa, the price of
slaves, increasing with their scarcity, would soon become enormous; and the
States of the North would never consent to expend such great sums for a purpose
which would procure such small advantages to themselves. If the Union took
possession of the slaves in the Southern States by force, or at a rate
determined by law, an insurmountable resistance would arise in that part of the
country. Both alternatives are equally impossible.]
w [ In 1830 there were in the
United States 2,010,327 slaves and 319,439 free blacks, in all 2,329,766
negroes: which formed about one-fifth of the total population of the United
States at that time.]
I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the
abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in
the United States. The negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but
if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at
being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals
of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies. In the North
everything contributed to facilitate the emancipation of the slaves; and
slavery was abolished, without placing the free negroes in a position which
could become formidable, since their number was too small for them ever to
claim the exercise of their rights. But such is not the case in the South. The
question of slavery was a question of commerce and manufacture for the
slave-owners in the North; for those of the South, it is a question of life and
death. God forbid that I should seek to justify the principle of negro slavery,
as has been done by some American writers! But I only observe that all the
countries which formerly adopted that execrable principle are not equally able
to abandon it at the present time.
When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only
discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of
those States; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with
them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as
long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and
that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the
extirpation of one or other of the two races. Such is the view which the
Americans of the South take of the question, and they act consistently with it.
As they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to
emancipate them.
Not that the inhabitants of the South regard slavery as
necessary to the wealth of the planter, for on this point many of them agree
with their Northern countrymen in freely admitting that slavery is prejudicial
to their interest; but they are convinced that, however prejudicial it may be,
they hold their lives upon no other tenure. The instruction which is now
diffused in the South has convinced the inhabitants that slavery is injurious
to the slave-owner, but it has also shown them, more clearly than before, that
no means exist of getting rid of its bad consequences. Hence arises a singular
contrast; the more the utility of slavery is contested, the more firmly is it
established in the laws; and whilst the principle of servitude is gradually
abolished in the North, that self-same principle gives rise to more and more
rigorous consequences in the South.
The legislation of the Southern States with regard to
slaves, presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to
show how radically the laws of humanity have been perverted, and to betray the
desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been
promulgated. The Americans of this portion of the Union have not, indeed, augmented
the hardships of slavery; they have, on the contrary, bettered the physical
condition of the slaves. The only means by which the ancients maintained
slavery were fetters and death; the Americans of the South of the Union have
discovered more intellectual securities for the duration of their power. They
have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind. In
antiquity, precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his
chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the
desire of freedom. The ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but
they placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon education; and they
acted consistently with their established principle, since a natural termination
of slavery then existed, and one day or other the slave might be set free, and
become the equal of his master. But the Americans of the South, who do not
admit that the negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden
them to be taught to read or to write, under severe penalties; and as they will
not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that
of the brutes.
The hope of liberty had always been allowed to the slave
to cheer the hardships of his condition. But the Americans of the South are
well aware that emancipation cannot but be dangerous, when the freed man can
never be assimilated to his former master. To give a man his freedom, and to
leave him in wretchedness and ignominy, is nothing less than to prepare a
future chief for a revolt of the slaves. Moreover, it has long been remarked
that the presence of a free negro vaguely agitates the minds of his less
fortunate brethren, and conveys to them a dim notion of their rights. The
Americans of the South have consequently taken measures to prevent slave-owners
from emancipating their slaves in most cases; not indeed by a positive
prohibition, but by subjecting that step to various forms which it is difficult
to comply with. I happened to meet with an old man, in the South of the Union,
who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his negresses, and had had
several children by her, who were born the slaves of their father. He had
indeed frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but years
had elapsed without his being able to surmount the legal obstacles to their
emancipation, and in the mean while his old age was come, and he was about to
die. He pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market, and passing
from the authority of a parent to the rod of the stranger, until these horrid
anticipations worked his expiring imagination into frenzy. When I saw him he
was a prey to all the anguish of despair, and he made me feel how awful is the
retribution of nature upon those who have broken her laws.
These evils are unquestionably great; but they are the
necessary and foreseen consequence of the very principle of modern slavery.
When the Europeans chose their slaves from a race differing from their own,
which many of them considered as inferior to the other races of mankind, and
which they all repelled with horror from any notion of intimate connection,
they must have believed that slavery would last forever; since there is no
intermediate state which can be durable between the excessive inequality
produced by servitude and the complete equality which originates in
independence. The Europeans did imperfectly feel this truth, but without
acknowledging it even to themselves. Whenever they have had to do with negroes,
their conduct has either been dictated by their interest and their pride, or by
their compassion. They first violated every right of humanity by their
treatment of the negro and they afterwards informed him that those rights were
precious and inviolable. They affected to open their ranks to the slaves, but
the negroes who attempted to penetrate into the community were driven back with
scorn; and they have incautiously and involuntarily been led to admit of
freedom instead of slavery, without having the courage to be wholly iniquitous,
or wholly just.
If it be impossible to anticipate a period at which the
Americans of the South will mingle their blood with that of the negroes, can
they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security?
And if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage in order to save their own
families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best
adapted to that end? The events which are taking place in the Southern States
of the Union appear to me to be at once the most horrible and the most natural
results of slavery. When I see the order of nature overthrown, and when I hear
the cry of humanity in its vain struggle against the laws, my indignation does
not light upon the men of our own time who are the instruments of these
outrages; but I reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of
freedom, brought back slavery into the world once more.
Whatever may be the efforts of the Americans of the South
to maintain slavery, they will not always succeed. Slavery, which is now
confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, which is attacked by
Christianity as unjust, and by political economy as prejudicial; and which is
now contrasted with democratic liberties and the information of our age, cannot
survive. By the choice of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will
cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. If liberty
be refused to the negroes of the South, they will in the end seize it for
themselves by force; if it be given, they will abuse it ere long. *x
x [ [This chapter is no longer
applicable to the condition of the negro race in the United States, since the
abolition of slavery was the result, though not the object, of the great Civil
War, and the negroes have been raised to the condition not only of freedmen,
but of citizens; and in some States they exercise a preponderating political
power by reason of their numerical majority. Thus, in South Carolina there were
in 1870, 289,667 whites and 415,814 blacks. But the emancipation of the slaves
has not solved the problem, how two races so different and so hostile are to
live together in peace in one country on equal terms. That problem is as
difficult, perhaps more difficult than ever; and to this difficulty the author's
remarks are still perfectly applicable.]]
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