Part 4 (2/2)

Calhoun had urged the construction of railroads to link the eastern and western parts of the South, but the political motive could not supply the want of industrial force. The figures of the census of 1850 were more eloquent than any orator as to the relative effects of free and slave labor. Intellectually the period had been prolific. Emerson had risen, the bright morning star of American literature. Bryant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, were telling their stories or singing their songs. Theology was fruitful of debate and change. The Unitarian movement had defined itself. Presbyterians and Congregationalists were discussing the tenets of old school and new. For ”women's rights” a strong and promising advance had been made, in the face of unpopularity and derision. Religious revivals, foreign missions, social reforms, were making active way. From all this intellectual and social movement, unless we except the emotional revivals of religion, the South stood apart. Literature it had virtually none; its theology was only conservative and defensive; at most so-called reforms it looked askance.

In two respects the South had an advantage. Its social system was aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites, including a great ma.s.s of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit the slave-holding cla.s.s had a social life in many ways attractive and delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and ”s.h.i.+ftlessness,” by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous ”Colonel Carter of Cartersville” had many a prototype in real life. A higher type was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Was.h.i.+ngton was not broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber side; plantation life was often a rank soil for pa.s.sions of tyranny and license. But its better fruitage added an element to the composite American type which could not and cannot be spared.

The other advantage the South possessed was the devotion of its strongest men to political life. The loss of commerce and literature was the gain of politics. The typical Southern leader was apt to be both a planter and a lawyer, with a strong and active interest in public affairs. Political oratory was a favorite resource in the spa.r.s.ely-settled districts. The personal force which in the North was scattered among twenty fields was here centered mainly in one. This feature of Southern society worked together with the fact that the section had in slavery a common interest and bond. That interest of the entire section, led by its ablest men, came naturally to be the dominant factor in American public life. When it could not rule through its own men, it found agents in subservient Northern politicians. And so it came about that in the early '50s the South, while outstripped altogether in population, wealth, industrial and intellectual achievement, was yet in substantial control of the governmental power. In the North, by the very magnitude of the commercial and industrial development the moral sentiment in public affairs seemed submerged or at least eclipsed.

It was during such a period of apathy that there was held an anti-slavery meeting at which two negroes were present, Sojourner Truth, an old woman whose shrewdness matched her fervor, and Frederick Dougla.s.s. Dougla.s.s was the son of a white father and a slave mother; he taught himself to read and write, made his escape into freedom, gained an education, and became an effective speaker for the anti-slavery cause. On this occasion he spoke with power and pa.s.sion of the gloomy prospects of their people; government, wealth, social advantage, all were on the side of their oppressors; good people seemed indifferent to their wrongs; was there indeed any help or hope? Then rose Sojourner Truth, and looking at him said only, ”Frederick! Is G.o.d dead?”

CHAPTER XII

SLAVERY AS IT WAS

And now, in the year 1852, there befell an event perhaps as momentous in American history as any between the establishment of the Const.i.tution and the Civil War. A frail little woman, the wife of an obscure theological professor in a Maine village, wrote a story, and that story captured the heart of the world. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ converted the North to the cause of the slave.

The typical Union volunteer of 1861 carried the book in his memory. It brought home to the heart of the North, and of the world, that the slave was a man,--one with mankind by that deepest tie, of human love and aspiration and anguish,--but denied the rights of a man.

The book was a birth of genius and love. It is absolutely sweet-spirited. Its intense and irresistible plea is not against a cla.s.s or a section, but against a system. It portrays among the Southern slave-holders characters n.o.ble and attractive,--Mrs Shelby, the faithful mistress, and the fascinating St. Clare. The worst villain in the story is a renegade Northerner. Its typical Yankee, Miss Ophelia, provokes kindly laughter. The book mixes humor with its tragedy; the sorrows of Uncle Tom and the dark story of Ca.s.sy are relieved by the pranks of Black Sam and the antics of Topsy. With all its woes, the story somehow does not leave a depressing effect; it abounds in courage and action; the fugitives win their way to freedom; the final impulse is to hopeful effort against the wrong. Its basal motive was the same as that of the Abolitionists, but its spirit and method were so different from Garrison's that it won response and sympathy where he had roused antagonism. Against pharisaical religion it uses effective satire,--which was intensified in its successor, _Dred_,--but the Christianity of faith and life is its animating spirit. No book is richer in the gospel of love to man and trust in G.o.d. Its rank is high in the new literature which has stimulated and led the great modern movement for the uplifting of the poor and oppressed. Its place is with Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_ and Tolstoi's _War and Peace_.

The motive of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an appeal to the heart of the American people. There was no reference to political action, far less any suggestion of servile insurrection, and there was no discussion of methods of emanc.i.p.ation. The book set forth an organized, monstrous wrong, which it was in the power of the American nation, and above all, of the Southern people, to remove. The effect at the North was immeasurably to widen and deepen the conviction of the wrong of slavery, and the desire to remove it. But the way to practical action did not open; and strangely enough there was at first no visible effect on politics. The political logic of the situation led straight, as a first step, to the support of the Free Soil party. But though _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ appeared (as a book) in April, 1852, and its popularity was instant, the Presidential election seven months later showed a Free Soil vote less by 100,000 than four years before. The political effect of the book was to appear only when public events two years later gave a sudden spur to the hesitating North.

The South turned a deaf ear to the appeal. It shut the book out from its borders as far as it could, and one who inquired for it in a Southern bookstore would probably be offered _Aunt Phillis's Cabin_ or some other mild literary anti-toxin. The South protested that the book's picture of slavery was untrue and unjust. It was monstrous, so they said, that their labor system should be shown as having its natural result in the whipping to death of a saintly negro for his virtuous conduct. Another reply was: ”If the book is true, it is really a eulogy of slavery, for it depicts slavery as producing in Uncle Tom a perfect character.”

To the objections to the fidelity of her portraiture Mrs. Stowe replied with _A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_,--a formidable array of proved facts, as to the laws of the slave States, and specific incidents which paralleled or exceeded all she had told. As now judged, the novel has some serious imperfections as a picture of slavery. Probably the most important of these was expressed by Judge Tourgee, para-phrasing the proverb about the Russian and the Tartar: ”Scratch one of Mrs. Stowe's negroes, and you will find a white man.” She failed adequately to differentiate the two races, and described the negro too much from such specimens as Uncle Tom and George and Eliza Harris. She had never lived in the South, and her knowledge was obtained from observation in the border town of Cincinnati, from acquaintance with fugitives, and from the reports of Northern travelers--all interpreted with the insight of genius and the impulse of philanthropy. Her avowed purpose was not to make a literal or merely artistic picture, but to show the actual wrongs and legalized possibilities of wrong which called for redress. It did not lessen the justice of her plea, that the ma.s.s of negroes were more degraded than she knew, or that their average treatment was kinder than her portrayal showed.

But a true historical judgment of slavery must rest on a comparison of doc.u.ments. The story told from the master's standpoint should be heard.

Among the faithful and graphic narrations of this sort may be named Mrs.

Burton Harrison's _Flower de Hundred_,--a volume of personal reminiscences of Virginia before the war. It is a charming story, without motive other than the pleasure of recalling happy memories, and it describes a society of various and vivid charm. The mention of the slaves is occasional and incidental; but the description of the plantation hands, and especially the household servants, trusted and beloved, gives a sunny and doubtless a real side of slavery. Another book is fuller and more impressive in its treatment. It might be said that every American ought to read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as a part of his education, and to follow it with two other books of real life. One of these is _A Southern Planter_,--a biography of Thomas Dabney, of Virginia and later of Mississippi, written by his daughter. It is a story amply worth reading for its human interest, and for its presentation of a man of n.o.ble and beautiful character. One is enriched by the acquaintance, even through a book, of a man like Thomas Dabney.

And it is most desirable for the Northerner to vivify his impression of the South by the knowledge of men like him. We are misled by general and geographical terms: ”an Englishman” is a vague and perhaps unattractive term to an American until he knows, in books or in flesh and blood, a few Britons of the right stamp. And so South and North need mutual interpretation not alone through their historic heroes, but through the best of their everyday people. And of those best, surely Thomas Dabney was one,--a strong, tender, n.o.ble man, fulfilling each relation in family and society with loyal conscience and sympathetic heart.

From the book we can give but a few instances of plantation life as such a man made it. When he was to move from Virginia to Mississippi he called together all his slaves,--some hundreds--and told them he wanted to take none of them against their will, and especially he would not break up any families. If any of them had wives or husbands on other plantations, he would sell or buy, just as they wished, so that every family should stay or go together. Every one of them elected to go with their old master. Settled in Mississippi, his cotton plantation became the admiration and envy of the neighbors, for the size of the crops as well as the condition of the workers. Their comfort was amply secured.

The general rule was three hours' rest at midday and a Sat.u.r.day half-holiday. At the height of the season hours were longer, but there was a system of prizes, for four or five months in the year, from $1 a week to a picayune; with an extra prize of a $5 gold piece for anyone picking 600 pounds a day; and these prizes roused such interest and excitement that some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave the field at night, wis.h.i.+ng to sleep at the end of their row. The inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good masters and mistresses at the South,--”and I have known very few who were not good,” adds the writer. The plantation trained and kept its own mechanics; two each of carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, with five seamstresses in the house. In the house, under the mistress's eye, were cut and made the clothes of all the negroes, two woolen and two cotton suits a year, with a gay calico Sunday dress for each woman. The women were taught sewing in the house. When their babies were born a nurse was provided, and all the mother's work done for her for a month, and for a year she was allowed ample leisure for the care of the baby. The sons of the family taught reading to those who wished to learn. Some of the house servants were very fine characters; the sketch of ”Mammy Maria”

one would gladly reproduce. When secession came on, Thomas Dabney altogether disapproved, and foresaw the ruin of the South. He proposed to his wife that they close up their affairs, and go to live in England.

Her reply was: ”What will you do with Abby? and with Maria and Harriet, and their husbands and children, and the rest of our people?” That was unanswerable. So he stayed, and with his family shared the fighting,--for, the war begun, Dabney gave his hearty support to the Southern cause, and his sons went to the field,--shared the hards.h.i.+ps of a devastated country, the social chaos that followed, and the slow reconstruction,--a more intrepid and lovable figure in adversity than before.

His daughter writes: ”In the family of Thomas Dabney the first feeling when the war ended was of joy that one dreadful responsibility at least was removed. Gradual emanc.i.p.ation had been a hope and a dream not to be realized.” ”A hope and a dream,”--it does not appear that it had ever been seriously considered as a purpose or a duty. ”Not an intelligent white man or woman in the South,” says the writer, ”would now wish slavery restored.” But why,--it is impossible not to return to the question,--why had the South done nothing to rid itself of the evil? Why had it centered its political energies in maintaining and extending it?

Why had it revolted from the Union and invited war and ruin, for a system which when once removed it recognized as a burden and a curse? No right minded man can ponder that question without taking a step further, and asking whether the evils in our present industrial system shall be allowed to go on till they bring down the temple on our heads, or be met with deliberate and resolute cure. And the good and conscientious man who does his best under the existing system--as Thomas Dabney did under slavery--is yet derelict unless he gives his thought and effort to such radical amendment as the system may need.

There is yet another book in ill.u.s.tration of slavery which ought to be read by every American. It is f.a.n.n.y Kemble Butler's _A Residence on a Georgia Plantation_. She was a woman of unusual genius, character, and sensibility; the inheritor of a great dramatic talent, and a brilliant actress until she married Mr. Butler of Georgia, and left the stage to live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her confidence as to her domestic affairs, but returning to the stage as a dramatic reader, and pa.s.sing into honored private life. After the outbreak of the Civil War she published, with some reserves and some additions, the journal she had kept during her life on the plantation.

As to her personal relations, except as touching the slaves, the book is entirely reticent, but it is plain that slavery as she saw it made life under those conditions literally intolerable. Below all special cruelties, she writes, she felt the ever-present, vivid wrong of living on the unpaid labor of servants. The special wrongs were constant. Thus she describes the parting of a family of slaves, and the husband's awful distress. She tells of the head-driver, Frank, an every way superior man, left at some seasons in sole charge of the plantation; but his wife was taken from him and made the mistress of the overseer. There was Engineer Ned, intelligent and capable, and himself not badly treated, but with a wife broken down by being driven to field work too soon after the birth of a child. Half the women on the plantation were diseased from the same cause. One woman brought to her mistress a pitiful tale of such suffering. A little later the mistress learned that the woman, on the ground that this visit had caused her day's labor to come short, had received a flogging. She appealed to her husband, but he refused to interfere. ”To Mr. ----'s a.s.sertion of the justice of poor Theresa's punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastizement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man. Mr. ---- said he thought it was disagreeable, and left me to my reflections with that concession.” Presently he refused to listen to any more such pet.i.tions from her. She writes: ”A wild wish rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours.”

The princ.i.p.al physical hards.h.i.+ps, she writes, fell to the women. The children and the old people are idle and neglected; the middle-aged men do not seem over-worked, and lead a mere animal existence, in itself not peculiarly cruel or distressing, but with a constant element of fear and uncertainty, ”and the trifling evils of unrequited labor, ignorance the most profound (to which they are condemned by law), and the unutterable injustice which precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits of voluntary exertion, and the progress that results from it.”

Her eye notes closely the faces about her. When she gathers the slaves to read prayers to them, she observes ”their sable faces, so many of them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions, and yet all of them so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression of patient suffering and religious fervor.” She says: ”Just in proportion as I have found the slaves on this plantation intelligent and advanced, I have observed this pathetic expression of countenance in them, a mixture of sadness and fear.” The plantation, she writes, was well reputed, and its management was considered above the average.

Her a.n.a.lysis of the master cla.s.s in the South is keen and striking. ”The shop is not their element, and the eager spirit of speculation and the sordid spirit of gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their very demeanor and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large proportion of the inhabitants of the Northern States. The Southerners are infinitely better bred men, according to English notions, than the men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives them a certain self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease. Their temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have the grace and spirit which seldom belong to the development of a Northern people; but upon more familiar acquaintance the vices of the social system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with their own peculiar taint; and haughty, over-bearing irritability, effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy and cruelty which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits.”

She gives another and darker picture of the planter cla.s.s. It goes without saying that it is only a part of the cla.s.s to which it fairly applies: ”A nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organization and temperament is that of the southern European, living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting, scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp, intrenched within their own boundaries, surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to conceive a more savage existence within the border of any modern civilization.” The picture of the poor whites is graphic and somber, but s.p.a.ce must limit these quotations.

<script>