CHAPTER XVII.

SLAVERY AS A MORAL EVIL, AND AS A SECTIONAL ISSUE.

It has been so long asserted, and dinned into the ears of mankind through so many channels, that the people of the New England States were the first to arrive at that high moral plane whereon human slavery is an . offense, that it is now almost ineradically stereotyped in the literature of English-speaking peoples; and as nearly eighteen centuries passed by before the student commenced the work of exposing the shams, the frauds, the mendacity, and the tyrannous rule of the ruffians of ancient Rome, so it may be centuries before the pretensions of "our Eastern brethren" are laid bare before the eyes of the world. But justice to all parties concerned demands an attempt at such an exposure, and as we probably have no "dark ages" to go through, it is hoped that some impression may be made on even the present generation.

The white people of the Southern States who were born after there began to be any doubts about the right of one man to own another, inherited African slavery, were accustomed to it from their infancy, and, if, as they grew up, they had any scruples about it, they could devise no practical and satisfactory means of emancipating their slaves. "They had the wolf by the ears," as Mr. Jefferson put it. They were no more willing to enfranchise them than were the people of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, and Oregon, whose State Constitutions denied the ballot to free colored persons (which North Carolina's Constitution did not do until 1835); or the people of Massachusetts. New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island, who ex

cluded them by educational or property qualifications, or both. Nor were they willing to turn adrift to shift for themselves such a mass of human beings, untrained to the duties of citizenship, of questionable ability to maintain themselves in the struggle for existence, and likely to become a public charge-one of the reasons, perhaps, why Indiana's Constitution (adopted in 1851) forbade the migration of free negroes into her borders.

The Southern people were not unacquainted with liberated slaves. From moral or other considerations thousands of slave-owners in the South, during and after the Revolution, set their slaves free, some transporting them to the Northwest, with means to support themselves for year; but in most cases the owner was unable to do this, and the ex-slaves, remaining in their old neighborhood, added nothing to its material advancement or its moral growth; on the contrary they were a clog on both. of color in the so-called Slave States: in 1800 61,241; in 1810 108,265, in 1820 135,434, etc., etc. In 1840 the numbers in Virginia and North Carolina, respectively, were 49,842 and 22,732.

In 1790 there were 32,635 free persons

The unsatisfactory results of freeing slaves in North Carolina, after the Revolution commenced, induced the Legislature in 1777 to enact that "no negro or mulatto slave shall hereafter be set free, except for meritorious services."

In North Carolina, to the other objections to the liberation of slaves was added the Constitutional provision, adopted in 1776 and never altered until 1835, that "all freemen of the age of twenty-one years X * shall

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be entitled to vote," etc. But, perhaps, the strongest objection is indicated in the act passed by the North Carolina Legislature in 1801 requiring persons who liberated slaves "to enter into bond in the sum of one hundred

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that such

pounds for each slave so liberated slave or negro shall not become chargeable on the parish or county"; and authorizing the wardens of the poor to arrest, if necessary, and place under bonds for a similar purpose any slave-holder who was about to move away and leave his slaves behind for the county to support.

In

This experience was not confined to the South. 1849 Cooper said in the Spy: "The old family servant, who, born and reared in the dwelling of his master, identified himself with the welfare of those whom it was his lot to serve, is giving place in every direction to that vagrant class which has sprung up within the last thirty years, and whose members roam through the country unfettered by principles, and uninfluenced by attachments." And in 1860 Thomas Prentice Kettell, "late editor of the Democratic Review," said in a volume entitled Southern Wealth and Northern Progress: "Those (fugitive slaves) only who have a good deal of white blood have sufficient energy to migrate; the true black, never. Enough of the black nature remains in the runaway, however, to unfit him for any useful purpose. This fact is within the knowledge of every citizen of the United States. In all the Northern States there are hanging on the outskirts of towns and villages pauper blacks, the miserable remnant of former well-fed slaves. These are always a nuisance, and so well known is it that even Ohio, * *

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among its first laws enacted one excluding blacks from the State on any pretence. The white person who brought in a free negro must give security in $500 for the behavior of the black, and that he should not come upon the town. Illinois and other States enacted the same law, and very justly. The free black, without referring to the fact that he is here through no fault of his own,

will not contribute his share to the exigencies of society, and it is too much to impose his support upon the labor of industrious whites. He claims to be free, but lives only to prey upon society."

As to genuine regard for the colored people and their equal rights as human beings, there seems to have been as much in the South as in the North;' and their status as "chattels" was no more offensive to the sensibilities of the white man in one section than in the other. The treaty of peace of 1783 containing the stipulation that "His Britannic Majesty shall * * without

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carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his armies," etc., etc., was negotiated by John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin-all Northern men. Four years afterwards, the final draft of a Constitution, containing the provision that the Congress should neither prohibit the importation of slaves nor levy any tax on them, was reported by a committee consisting of two Southern and three Northern members, namely, Rutledge of South Carolina, Randolph of Virginia, Gorham of Massachusetts, Ellsworth of Connecticut, and Wilson of Pennsylvania. Twenty years afterwards (1807), the act

1Of the greater kindness and indulgence, in fact, of the Southern man as a slave-holder, the testimony of the negro himself was convincing enough. The Northern man who came to the South and became a slave-holder was notoriously a more exacting slave driver than the Southerner was; and whenever it was suspected by the slaves that "young Missis" intended to marry a "Yankee," there was quite a commotion among them, and opposition to the match was loud and vigorous. Mrs. Stowe emphasized this distinction between the two classes of slave holders; her most brutal of all human monsters with white skins-Legree-was a New England Yankee. And in her appeal to the men and women of the North she says: "If the mothers of the free States had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free States would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves."

to prohibit the importation of African slaves was passed in the House of Representatives by 113 yeas to 5 nays, one of the nays being from Vermont, one from New Hampshire, two from Virginia, and one from South Carolina. In this same year (1807) another question was disposed of in the Congress which served the double purpose of removing any suspicion of sectional difference in those days as to the morality of African slavery, and of correctly defining the "extension of slavery,' which in after years became such a powerful weapon in the hands of dishonest agitators and ignorant fanatics, who were banded together for the destruction of that "domestic tranquillity," the insuring of which was one of the indispensable conditions on which the original thirteen States agreed to form a Union.

On July 13th of that year the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of Indiana Territory (embracing the present States of Indiana and Illinois) adopted by unanimous votes and sent to Congress a petition, asking it to suspend for ten years the 6th Article of compact in the Ordinance' for the government of the territory northwest of the Ohio; and permit the introduction of African slaves into the Territory. 2

This petition, transmitted to the Congress by Gov. William H. Harrison, was inspired by the wish of the people in the western part of the Territory to divert to their own borders the stream of immigration then pouring from the South into Missouri ("Upper Louisiana"), as is shown by a petition from 354 citizens of Randolph and St. Clair counties) now in southwest Illinois, bordering on the Mississippi River, sent to the Congress in

1 This prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory was voted for in the Congress of the Confederation (1787) by every delegate from the Southern States.

2 State Papers, First Session, Tenth Congress, Volume I.