CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY

To fully understand the opposition of thought wherein our “irrepressible conflict” had its inception and lay so long in embryo, to burst forth at last in the awful and bloody travail of a nation divided and at arms, some knowledge of the history and psychology of the peoples who settled the American colonies is necessary; for a nation’s cataclysms are not spontaneously generated, but are the result of forces which though for generations are silent and hidden are gathering strength under the evils of superstition, oppression, or fanaticism, and only need such an explosive as the tongue of a Danton, Robespierre, Garrison, Beecher, or Stowe to hurl the people into death and desolation.

The early settlers who have left their impress on American life and character were of the same country and traditions, but their manners and ideals had been developed by the opposing forces which began to stir England during the Renaissance--a hundred and fifty years before the Reformation--forces of which our own Civil War seems as direct a sequence as were the religio-political feuds of the 16th and 17th century England. In the New World the exponents of these contrasting forces were divided for the first century and a half by what afterwards became known as Mason’s and Dixon’s Line and by vast areas of uninhabited wilderness.

Virginia was no Mecca for the religiously or politically oppressed, but drew to her soldiers of fortune--men impelled by a spirit of adventure, or those who for some delinquency wished to lose their identity in the vast, unknown New World; among them were many gentlemen who more often than not possessed the vices and follies of a corrupt age. The first who became permanent settlers were divided on the outward voyages by jealousies and dissensions. These differences were carried into the colony; aggravated by the greed and selfishness of those placed in authority, they became greater hardships than the illness, starvation, and Indian treacheries which hampered early progress. There were “poor gentlemen, Tradesmen, Servingmen, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoyle a Commonwealth, than either begin one, or but helpe to maintain one. For when neither the feare of God, nor the law, nor shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here, there is small hope ever to bring one in twenty of them ever to be good there. Notwithstanding, I confesse divers amongst them, had better mindes and grew much more industrious than was expected.”[2] Amid treacheries and deceits, John Smith stands forth a hero. Through his thought and action the colony not only survived the vicissitudes of fire, starvation, and massacre, but was saved from itself, for the evils of its own lawless, disturbing elements were greater dangers than those which came from without. The hope of gold was ostensibly the colony’s _raison d’être_: “The worst of all was our gilded refiners with their golden promises made all men their slaves in hope of recompenses; there was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold, such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands least they should by their art make gold of his bones.” This search for gold proved futile; in 1615 the land was parceled off to each settler in fifty-acre lots, tobacco was planted, and thus began Virginia’s prosperity.

Tobacco was introduced into Europe by the first Columbian voyagers and into England by Raleigh and Drake. Despite the strong social and religious pressure--even King James instituting a propaganda which led him to write the _Counterblast to Tobacco_--the habit spread with alarming rapidity, and was not confined to the men alone; chewing and smoking were indulgences common to the older women, while snuff was the favorite with the younger ones. This new taste created a demand which increased Virginia’s population and greatly extended her cultivated fields. Women were scarce, and the planters growing rich had a natural desire to return to England. This, however, was obviated by the importation of widows and virgins who were shipped to the colony as any other cargo. The nature of this bartering, which is unique in American history, may best be described from a letter, dated August 21, 1621, which accompanied one of these cargoes of colonial dames: “We send you in this ship one widow and eleven maids for wives for the people of Virginia. There hath been especial care had in the choice of them, for there hath not any one of them been received, but upon good recommendations.

“In case they can not be presently married, we desire that they be put in several households that have wives, till they can be provided with husbands. There are near fifty more which are shortly to come, are sent by our most honorable lord and treasurer, the Earl of Southampton (the patron of Shakspere), and certain worthy gentlemen, who taking into consideration that the plantations can never flourish till families be planted, and the respects of wives and children fix these people on the soil, therefore have given this fair beginning for the reimbursing those charges. It is ordered, that every man that marries them give one hundred and twenty pounds of the best leaf tobacco for each of them.

“Though we are desirous that the marriage be free according to the law of nature, yet we would not have these maids deceived and married to servants, but only to such freemen or tenants as have means to maintain them. We pray you, therefore to be as a father to them in this business not enforcing them to marry against their wills.”

Labor for the ever-increasing fields was another problem confronting the planter. King James decided that the London Company should solve this by transporting to Virginia English convicts, who thus removed from old environments and temptations might form a valuable industrial asset. Only one shipload of a hundred was sent, for about the same time a Dutch man-of-war arrived at Jamestown (August, 1619) and twenty negro slaves were sold to the planters. Qualms about such a transaction could scarcely be expected, for through all historic times it was only as a slave that the negro had been associated with other races. In ancient times he had been subservient to the Egyptians, bought for the Carthaginian galleys; slave to Assyrian, Arabian, Indian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman; and in early Christian centuries sold by the Venetians to the Moors of Spain.[3]

When the existence of new lands became known and labor was needed for their development, the negro’s native country became a hunting ground where he was not only stalked by the Dutch and Portuguese, but by the French and English who also had posts for that purpose in Africa. In fact the English, including therein the colonists of New England, became more extensively engaged in the traffic than all other slave-trading European nations combined. Compunctions about slavery as about many other things came only with the moral awakening of a later generation. “Scarcely any one seems to have regarded the trade as wrong. Theologians had so successfully labored to produce a sense of the amazing, I might almost say generical, difference between those who were Christians and those who were not, that to apply to the latter the principles that were applied to the former, would have been deemed a glaring paradox. If the condition of the negroes in this world was altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next were greatly improved. Besides, it was remembered that, shortly after the deluge Ham had behaved disrespectfully to his drunken father, and it was believed that the Almighty had, in consequence, ordained negro slavery.”[4] The utility of the negro being at once proven, African slavery had become something of an institution in Virginia, before the _Mayflower_ with its handful of men, women, and children landed on Plymouth Rock.

The stern, uncompromising attitude of these people in whom there was no quibbling with right or wrong as they perceived it, which gave them the physical courage to endure persecution, mutilation, and even death, was the result of the religious agitations which began in England with Wycliffe and were directed against the oppressions and corruptions which flourished within the Church’s powerful organization. Though suppressed, the leaven had sifted down to the people who, stultified by centuries of grossest superstition, had silently and patiently borne the yoke. In the stirrings of this religious Renaissance the book that reached them was Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible; this gave to them the Semitic conception of God--the one God--which the voices of those “primitive Puritans the Prophets” had saved from the obliterating dangers of idolatry and superstition. The stolid somberness of the Northern races responded to the majestic swing of this wonderful collection of Hebrew documents which traced a people’s struggles and thought development. Some of its characters as Huxley says of “Jepthah, Gideon, and Sampson are men of the old heroic stamp, who would look as much in place in a Norse Saga as where they are.” Stray chapters sometimes came into the possession of some yeoman who was fortunate enough to read; in silence and secrecy, when the day’s work was done, there would gather round him eager listeners. To know what this book’s message meant to them, one needs but read their subsequent history. To hear it, possess it, and believe it, they suffered the diabolical tortures and fiendish perpetrations which at once made martyrs and tyrants of men, and which laid in England the foundation of what Ranke calls the “heroic age of Protestantism in Western Europe.” Of this breed were the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Their inherent independence had been fostered by a long exile in Leyden; there the old Teutonic spirit of freedom had survived, and had given her men that sublime courage and determination, when besieged by the Duke of Alva and starving, “that rather than yield they would devour their left arms to enable them to continue the defense with their right.”[5] Leyden afterwards became a haven for those of other countries who, breaking from prescribed thought, dared to act accordingly. It was also a university center; political and religious tenets were subjects of common debate. Robinson who became one of the Pilgrim fathers took an active part in these discussions.

To these exiles the New World became a hope. Though homeless, they were loyal to James. While petitioning the London Company for lands, they begged of him the freedom to there worship God according to their own consciences. Though this was not actually granted it was permitted. An unkindly fate seemed to preside over their voyage--buffeting storms drove them farther north than their proposed destination; some historians state they were purposely steered out of their course by their Dutch pilot, and were forced to land on Plymouth Rock.

By a solemn covenant entered into aboard ship, they agreed that while they would be faithful to the English Crown, the polity they would establish among themselves would be an ideal state--a community of interests--fascinating as expounded by Plato, More, and Rousseau, but unfeasible for human nature as yet evolved since complete barbarism. United by a common faith--gloomy, austere--putting aside as mortal sin all the joys of life--forced to endure together in a wild, bleak, strange land, starvation, disease, frightful cold, and the terror of hostile Indians, by whom they would have probably been exterminated had not a deadly pestilence broken out among these savages--possibly no better opportunity for such an experiment has ever been offered civilized man. But among them too was the natural inequality of individuals which will probably always render futile and unenduring similar sociological experiments.

The Puritan settlements were gradually augmented by the persecuted from their native land, and it would seem that they could at last possess the religious security and contentment for which they had so long clamored, but dissent had become second nature; combativeness seemed essential to zeal, and as there was no Established or Roman Church at which to hurl themselves, their own tenets became mooted points; bitter differences arose. They showed themselves as intolerant in the New World as they had been intolerable in the Old, and those without the might to prove their right were driven forth. In this manner Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were settled. Much of their later history has to do with religious bickerings, mutilations, and witch-burnings. It was an outgrowth of this same spirit which confronted the South for thirty years before the final rupture which resulted in the War of Secession.

Thus from the beginning the North and the South were necessarily distinctive; settled under different circumstances, the one drew from England the stern, severe, and rigorously religious, while the other became the habitat for the Puritan’s opposite--the impecunious gentleman, the roistering cavalier, the insolvent debtor, and the Catholic nobleman--a class in which there had been a very general “reversion from virtuous and noble manhood to the lewdness of the ape and the cunning ferocity of the tiger.”[6] In the New World all alike were brought face to face with a great, overshadowing nature which presented the diversified physical conditions along which each section’s economic development would tend. Agriculture in austere New England would have been a too uneven wrestling with nature; existence wrought from the soil meant unending toil and often heart-breaking disappointment, so the New Englander’s pursuits became mercantile and seafaring--occupations in which the negro could be of little value, but following England’s initiative he found the slave-trade profitable, and the Southern planter a ready buyer. To repress Nature’s exuberance, the fields of tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and cane required man’s watchful care, and the negro, inured through all previous generations to the sun and rain, the jungle and the swamp, properly directed, became, and still is, the ideal laborer for work of the soil.

Since then our “mental endyses” have been many; we have associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and sympathetic and indignant thrills pass through us at sight of ill-treatment to one of these, so we cannot bring our attitude of to-day or of the last hundred years to judge the beginnings of American slavery. To 16th and 17th century Europeans it was palpable that the difference between the negro and the man-like apes was no greater than that existing between the negro and themselves, and it was debatable “with that brutishness which commonly appeareth in all their actions whether the people generally may be thought to be men in the skins of beasts; or beasts created in the likenesse and shape of man.”[7] The sentimentality which obtained some years ago and which led to such bitter hatred and seems almost maudlin when that phase of the question in which the indescribable wretchedness of the negro in his native land is considered--his gross and pitiable superstitions, his indifference to death and his regard for cruelty as a virtue; what slavery did for him seems analogous to what we suppose primitive man accomplished with the wolf--adopted it from the wild and made of it a faithful, domestic animal. True, the motives were utility and gain, but who can deny the mighty uplift in value and sagacity, both for the dog and the negro? Among the African tribes described in Pigafetta’s account of Lopez’s _African Travels_ (1598), and spoken of by Heylyn in his _Cosmographie_ (1657), are the Anziques, “the cruellest Cannibals in the world; for they do not onely eat their Enemies, but their friends and Kinsfolk. And that they may be sure not to want these Dainties, they have shambles of man’s flesh, as in other parts of Beef and Mutton. So covetous withall, that if their Slaves will yield but a penny more when sold joynt by joynt than if sold alive, they will cut them out, and sell them upon the shambles. Yet with these barbarous qualities they have many good ... of so great fidelity to their masters and to those which trust them, that they will rather choose to be killed than either abuse the trust, or betray their Masters. For that cause more esteemed by the Portugals than other Slaves.” So even the most bloodthirsty possessed potentially the quality of faithfulness, which when he was removed from his natural environment--where for thousands of years he had not progressed--made all his later development possible, and which aside from the cases where there has been an infusion of white or Indian blood, is largely responsible for what the best type of American negro is to-day. It was this quality, fostered by care and kindness, that has filled Southern tradition with touching and oftentimes heroic incidents of the slave’s devotion. When the old differences of Puritan and Cavalier, under other guises, called men to arms, it was to the fidelity of these blacks that the Southerner trusted wife, children, and home. That this trust was seldom violated is sufficient encomium for master and slave. Under the régime established in many places, after emancipation had converted the “slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperized man” (Huxley), when he was incited to open rebellion and nameless atrocities, to what sorrows would the desolated South have been subjected, had the old status of master and slave been different? Had the South been guilty of the charges laid to her door, despite Klu-Klux Klans and other precautions, the negro’s temper would have been much the same as that of the French canaille, who during the Commune “drank blood to vomit crime.” They had shown, in the San Domingo insurrections, that revenge lay within their nature.