CHAPTER VIII.

ECONOMICAL EFFECTS OF SLAVERY.

We are not propagandists of slavery. The highest wish of Virginia with reference to it was, that now it had been fastened on her against her remonstrances by others, she should be let alone to manage it as she judged the best: a right which had been solemnly pledged to her by her present aggressors. We had no desire to force it on others, or to predict its universal prevalence, as the best organization of society. But having claimed that the Word of God and publick justice authorize it, we admit that it is reasonable we should meet those who assert economical and social results of it so evil, as to render it in credible that a wise and benevolent God should sanction such a mischief. We hope to show that slavery, instead of being wasteful, impoverishing, and mischievous, is so far useful and benevolent as to vindicate the divine wisdom in ordaining it, and to show that we were wisely content with our condition so far as this relation of labour and capital was concerned.

We would also urge this preliminary remark: that the economical effects of American slavery have usually been argued from an amazingly unreasonable point of view. Our enemies persist in discussing it as an election to be made between a system of labour by christianized, enlightened, free yeomen of the same race, on one hand; and a system of labour by African slaves on the other; as though the South had any such election in its power! It was not a thing for us to decide, whether we should have these Africans, or civilized, free, white labour; the former were here; here, not by the choice of our forefathers, but forced upon us by the unprincipled cupidity of the slave-trading ancestors of the Abolitionists of Old and New England who now revile us; forced upon us against the earnest protest of Virginia. Did Abolitionists ever propose a practical mode of removing them, and supplying their places, which would not inflict on both parties more mischief than slavery occasion? They should have showed us some way to charm the four millions of Africans among us, away to some happy Utopia, where they might be more comfortable than we made them; and to repair the shock caused by the abstraction of all this productive labour. Until they did this, the question was not whether it would be wisest for a legislator creating a totally new community, to form it like Scotland or New England; or like Virginia. The true question was, these Africans being here, and there being no humane or practicable way to remove them, what shall be done with them? If the social condition of Virginia exhibited points of inferiority in its system of labour, to that of its rivals, the true cause of the evil was to be sought in the _presence_ of the Africans among us, not in his _enslavement_. We shall indeed assert, and prove, that these points of inferiority were vastly fewer and smaller than our enemies represent. But, we emphatically repeat, the source of the evils apparent in our industrial system was the presence among us of four millions of heterogeneous pagan, uncivilized, indolent, and immoral people; and for that gigantic evil, slavery was, in part at least, the lawful, the potent, the beneficent remedy. Without this, who cannot see that such an _incubus_ must have oppressed and blighted every interest of the country? Such an infusion must have tainted the sources of our prosperity. It would have been a curse sufficient to paralyze the industry, to corrupt the morals, and to crush the development of any people on earth, to have such a race spread abroad among them like the frogs of Egypt. And that the South not only delivered itself from this fate, but civilized and christianized this people, making them the most prosperous and comfortable peasantry in the world, developed a magnificent agriculture, and kept pace with the progress of its gigantic rival, attests at once the energy of our people, and the wisdom and righteousness of the expedient by which all this has been accomplished.

§ 1. _Slavery and Republican Government._

Intelligent men at the South found something to reconcile them to their condition, in the wholesome influence of their form of labour, upon their republican institutions. The effect of slavery to make the temper of the ruling caste more honourable, self-governed, reflective, courteous, and chivalrous, and to foster in them an intense love of, and pride in, their free institutions, has been already asserted, and substantiated by resistless facts. The testimony of these facts is concurrent with that of all history. But those qualities are just the ones which fit a people for beneficent self-government. Again: our system disposed, at one potent touch, of that great difficulty which has beset all free governments: the difficulty of either entrusting the full franchises of the ruling caste to, or refusing them to, the moneyless class. The Word of God tells us that the poor shall always be with us. Natural differences of capacity, energy, and thrift, will always cause one part to distance the other part of the society, in the race of acquisition; and the older and denser any population becomes, the larger will be the penniless class, and the more complete their destitution as compared with the moneyed class. Shall they be refused all participation in the suffrage and powers of government? Then, by what means shall the constitution make them secure against the iniquities of class-legislation, which wickedly and selfishly sacrifices their interests and rights to the ruling class? And yet more: by what argument can they be rendered content in their political disfranchisement, when they are of the same race, colour, and class, with their unauthorized oppressors, save as money makes an artificial distinction? The perpetual throes and reluctations of the oppressed class against the oppressors, will agitate and endanger any free government; as witness the strifes of the conservative and radical parties in England, and the slumbering eruptions which the ideas of the democrats of 1848 have kindled under every throne in Western Europe. But on the other hand, if the full franchises of the ruling class be conceded to the moneyless citizens, they seize the balance of power, and virtually hold the reins over the rights, property, and lives of the moneyed classes. But the qualities which have made them continue penniless in a liberal government, together with the pressure of immediate hardship, destitution, ignorance and passion, will ever render them most unsafe hands to hold this power. The man who has "the wolf at his door," who knows not where to-morrow's dinner for his wife and babes is to be obtained, is no safe man to be entrusted with power over others' property, and submitted to all the arts and fiery passions of the demagogue. The inevitable result will be, that his passions will drive him, under the pressure of his destitution, to some of those forms of agrarianism or legislative plunder, by which order and economical prosperity are blighted; and society is compelled, like democratic France and New England, to take refuge from returning anarchy and barbarism, in the despotism of a single will. This truth cannot be more justly stated than in the language of Lord Macaulay, himself once an ardent advocate of British Reform. If the democratic States of America seemed, for a time, to offer an exception to these tendencies, it proves nothing; for in those States, the intense demand for labour, the cheapness of a virgin soil, and the rapid growth of a new and sparse population, rendered the working of the law, for a time, imperceptible. But even there, it had begun to work with a portentous power. Witness the violence and frightful mutations of their parties, the loathsome prevalence of demagogueism, and the great party of free-soil, which is but a form of agrarianism reaching out its plundering hand against the property class across Mason's and Dixon's lines, instead of the property class at home. So completely had the danger we have described been verified, even in these new and prosperous communities, that the moment a serious strain came upon their institutions, the will of the mob burst over constitutions and publick ethics like a deluge, and the pretended republicks rushed into a centralized despotism, with a speed and force which astounded the world. All the pleas of _universal suffrage_ have received a damning and final refutation, from the events of this revolution.

But the solution which Southern institutions gave to this great _dilemma_ of republicks was happy and potent. The moneyless labouring class was wholly disfranchised of political powers, and thus disarmed of its powers of mischief. Yet this was effected without injustice to them, or cruelty; because they were at the same time made _parts of the families_ of the ruling class; and ensured an active protection and competent maintenance, by law, and by motives of affection and self-interest in the masters; which experience proved to be more beneficent in practice to the labouring class, than any po