White slavery

“ But the thoughtful and candid reader will join me in saying that the negro, in his very worst and most vicious condition to-day, is precisely what slavery made him. Slavery was based on cruelty and tyranny, and was alike destructive—morally, mentally, and commercially—of the best interests of black and white.
Slavery, in the very magnitude of its cruelty, denied the black man education, manhood, the right to think or act for himself. Slavery denied him all right to his own offspring, all right to regard himself as a man. ”

“ Does the slaveholder, while he is enjoying his slaves, reflect upon the deep injury and incalculable loss which the possession of that property inflicts upon the true interests of the country? Slavery, it is admitted, is an evil—it is an institution which presses heavily against the best interests of the State. It banishes free white labor, it exterminates the mechanic, the artisan, the manufacturer. It deprives them of occupation. It deprives them of bread. It converts the energy of a community into indolence, its power into imbecility, its efficiency into weakness. ”

“ The institution of slavery has accomplished the double feat, in America, not only of degrading and brutalizing 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. ”

“ These white laborers, themselves so near slavery, did not recognize the struggle of the black slave as part of their own struggle; rather they felt the sting of economic rivalry and underbidding for home and job; they easily absorbed hatred and contempt for Negroes as their first American lesson and were flattered by the white capitalists, slave owners and sympathizers with slavery into lynching and clubbing their dark fellow victims back into the pit whence they sought to crawl. ”

“ Shall the death of slavery add two-fifths to the entire power which slavery had when slavery was living? Shall one white man have as much share in the Government as three other white men merely because he lives where blacks outnumber whites two to one? Shall this inequality exist, and exist only in favor of those who without cause drenched the land with blood and covered it with mourning? ”

“ Nor is it unreasonable to anticipate other improvements in states which have renounced a long-cherished system of White Slavery, while they have done much to abolish or mitigate the slavery of others not white, and to overcome the inhuman prejudice of color. ”

“ The true curse of slavery is not what it did to the black man, but what it has done to the white man. For the existence of the institution produced the notion that the white man was of superior character, intelligence, and morality. ”

“ To do so, would be most paradoxical on my part, who was born a slave and spent the first nine years of my life in that most unnatural condition. What I do inveigh against, is the unequal manner in which the colored people were pitted against the white people; the placing of these helpless people absolutely in the power of this hereditary foeman—more absolutely in their power, at their mercy, than under the merciless system of slavery, when sordid interest dictated a modicum of humanity and care in treatment. ”

“ Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Aroused by the American Anti-slavery Society, the very white men who had forgotten and denied the claim of the black man to the rights of humanity, now thunder that claim at every gate, from cottage to capitol, from school-house to university, from the railroad carriage to the house of God. He has a place at their firesides, a place in their hearts—the man whom they once cruelly hated for his color. ”

“ If the gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps ... The common white people, or rather the labouring people, were the cause of rendering negroes unprofitable servants. Their scoffs and insults, their continual insinuations, filled the negroes with discontent, made them lazy, idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters, to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of economy. ”

“ The impression is cunningly made, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave's poverty and degradation. To make this enmity deep and broad, between the slave and the poor white man, the latter is allowed to abuse and whip the former, without hinderance. ”

“ It not only enfranchised four millions of American slaves of African descent, but made slavery forever impossible in the great Republic, and gave a new impulse to the cause of human freedom. Its influence upon American slaves was immediate and startlingly revolutionary, lifting them from the condition of despised chattels, bought and sold like sheep in the market, with no rights which the white man was bound to respect,—to the exalted plane of American citizenship; made them free men, the peers in every civil and political right, of their late masters. ”

“ We have seen how the ending of slavery and the beginning of freedom produced not only a shock, but a stand-still, and in many cases a collapse, that lasted several years in the life of many white men. If the sudden change thus affected the white man, should this not teach us that we should have more sympathy than has been shown in many cases with the Negro in connection with his new and changed life? That they made many mistakes, plunged into excesses, undertook responsibilities for which they were not fitted, in many cases took liberty to mean license, is not to be wondered at. ”

“ I shall say nothing about the moral effect of disfranchisement upon the white people, or upon the State itself. What slavery made of the Southern whites is a matter of history. The abolition of slavery gave the South an opportunity to emerge from barbarism. Present conditions indicate that the spirit which dominated slavery still curses the fair section over which that institution spread its blight. ”

“ It surprises me to see how poor white men, who, like the negroes, are victims of slavery, rally around the Stripes and Bars. These men, I believe, have been looked down on by the aristocratic slaveholders, and despised by the well-fed and comfortable slaves, yet they follow their leaders into the very jaws of death; face hunger, cold, disease, and danger; and all for what? What, under heaven, are they fighting for? Now, the negro, ignorant as he is, has learned to regard our flag as a banner of freedom, and to look forward to his deliverance as a consequence of the overthrow of the Rebellion. ”

“ But is not the murder of a slave by a white man, in any way, practically licensed in all the slave States? Who ever heard of a white man's being put to death, under Southern laws, for the murder of a slave? American slavery provides impunity for the white murderer of the slave, by its allowing none but whites—none but those who construct and uphold the system of abominations—to testify against the murderer. But why particularize causes of this impunity? The whole policy of the Southern slave system goes to provide it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was their labor that made it possible for the whole white population to take the field. It was their fidelity and kindliness that kept the social structure sound, even though pierced and plowed by the sword. Their conduct was a practical refutation of the belief that they were in general sufferers from inhuman treatment. It was a proof that slavery had included better influences than its opponents had recognized. But it suggested, too, that a people capable of such things under slavery were fully ready for an upward step, and might be trusted with freedom. ”

“ And still greater pains were taken, by those who were bent on the perpetuation of slavery, to make it generally believed throughout the country that negroes were naturally a very inferior race of men; utterly incapable of much mental or moral culture, and better off in domestic servitude on our continent than in their native state in Africa. Notwithstanding this disparagement of them, and the other inducements pressed upon the white people everywhere to acquiesce in their enslavement, many colored persons emancipated themselves, especially in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana ”

“ But it is still here, it still works and one of the most magnificent anomalies in modern human history is the labor and fighting of a half-million black men and two million whites for the freedom of four million slaves and these same slaves, dumbly but faithfully and not wholly unconsciously, protecting the mothers, wives and children of the very white men who fought to make their slavery perpetual. ”

“ Thus it came about that Negro slavery grew up on the mainland to replace the servitude of the white man, just as it had grown up in the West Indies to take the place of the slavery of the native Indians.
It most not be assumed, however, that the Negro slaves, because they were better able than the white man to stand the hardships of labor in the New World, did not suffer from the effects of the work they were compelled to do. The truth is that so many of them died that the stock of slaves had to be continually replenished. ”

“ And now let us briefly inquire into the influence of slavery on the white man's character; for in this evil there is a mighty re-action. "Such is the constitution of things, that we cannot inflict an injury without suffering from it ourselves: he who blesses another, benefits himself; but he who sins against his fellow-creature, does his own soul a grievous wrong." The effect produced upon slave-captains is absolutely frightful. ”

“ He admitted that slavery was in itself an evil, nay, more, that it was not profitable in Maryland. But what are the landed proprietors to do? The slaves have been bequeathed to them as property by their fathers, with certain obligations to be respected, and duties to be fulfilled. It is impossible to free them, because, at the moment of emancipation, nothing short of the confiscation of all the labour and property of the whites would be required to maintain the negroes, who would certainly refuse to work unless they had their masters’ land as their own. Where is white labour to be found? ”

“ If, then, we show that the condition of the negro at the South is superior to his condition in any other country, and that the abolition of slavery has always been followed by immediate retrogression, I ask of what has humanity to complain against the institution?
Sir, another argument that has been advanced by northern gentlemen, and by the leader of their party is, that the interests of the white race require the exclusion of this institution from new territory; that it should be dedicated to free soil, and to the freemen of the North. ”

“ The scenes that I have witnessed are enough to harrow up the soul; but could the slave be permitted to tell the story of his sufferings, which no white man, not linked with slavery, is allowed to know, the land would vomit out the horrible system, slaveholders and all, if they would not unclinch their grasp upon their defenceless victims. ”

“ There have not been wanting men and newspapers to urge that the United States should reimburse the slave-holders of the South for the wholesale confiscation, so to speak, of their property. True, these men and newspapers belong to that class of unrepentants who believed that slavery was a Divine institution and that the slave-holder was a sort of vicegerent of heaven, a holy Moses, as it were. ”

“ One may get the idea, from what I have said, that there was bitter feeling toward the white people on the part of my race, because of the fact that most of the white population was away fighting in a war which would result in keeping the Negro in slavery if the South was successful. In the case of the slaves on our place this was not true, and it was not true of any large portion of the slave population in the South where the Negro was treated with anything like decency. ”

“ But the vices of white men eventually provide a scourge for themselves. They increase the negro race, but the negro can never increase theirs; and this is one great reason why the proportion of colored population is always so large in slaveholding countries. As the ratio increases more and more every year, the colored people must eventually be the stronger party; and when this result happens, slavery must either be abolished, or government must furnish troops, of whose wages the free states must pay their proportion. ”

“ The whole history of American slavery, far from exhibiting the negro as incapable of improvement, shows him making a slow and irregular advance in the development of intellectual and moral qualities, under circumstances singularly unfavorable. It is the plea of the advocates of the slave-trade, that the black is civilized by contact with the white. ”

“ The question of slavery, which in the ancient world was usually no more than a question of status between individuals racially akin, merged in America with the different and profounder question of relationship between two races at opposite extremes of the human species and of the most contrasted types of tradition and culture. If the black man had been white, there can be little doubt that negro slavery, like white servitude, would have vanished from the United States within a generation of the Declaration of Independence as a natural consequence of the statements in that declaration. ”