The Brothers' War Part 8

In this enumeration I have intentionally looked somewhat forward; for what is in one particular generation you cannot find out until its effects are plain in the next. I want to accentuate it that Webster belonged to a society which had made some of the extraordinary figures whose names are given, and was making the rest of them. When the view just suggested has been taken, and if in comparing New England with any other community--even with Athens, Florence, England, or Germany, in their best eras--periods of time be equalized and differences of population be properly allowed for, it will appear that the conditions moulding Webster were more energetic in productivity than can be found elsewhere. And if, in this comparison, the relative general condition of the ma.s.ses in each community be duly taken into the account, the result will be far more favorable to New England; for a high level of the ma.s.ses is a much better proof of a fecund culture than merely many striking individual instances.

Thus we bring out the point that Webster was born, grew up, and lived in a nursery prolific in men and women of extraordinary powers and virtues. How insignificant is the muster-roll of any other part of our country! I compare that of the south because I am familiar with it, and one can with better manners disparage his own section than another. The ante-bellum southern treasures of art and literature except speeches, political and forensic, can be counted on the fingers of one hand without taking them all. The poetry of Poe, a few essays of Legare, especially that on Demosthenes, Calhoun's Dissertation on Government, and Toombs's Tremont Temple lecture, are all that are pre-eminent; and some of the historians of our literature insist that Poe was southern only in his prejudices, and not in his making. To turn away from authors, how few can be found to compare in education, polish, and literary or scientific accomplishments with average New Englanders of their several professions or occupations.

Toombs, in the diamond-like brilliance of his extempore effusion in talks or speeches, is as solitary in the south as Catullus, the greatest of the spontaneous poets of his nation, was in the Rome of his day.

Webster absorbed and absorbed, a.s.similated and a.s.similated, all the better elements of this marvellous New England culture, which I am painfully conscious of having most insufficiently described above, until at last he mounted its eminences in his profession, in the politics of democracy, aesthetic taste, and especially statesmanly eloquence. So a.s.sured was his stand upon these eminences that all the wisest and most refined of the section spontaneously and involuntarily did him obeisance, recognizing in him their ideal of wisdom and counsel befittingly expressed. We can stop to give only two examples. Edward Everett is the one American master of grand rhetoric. He heard the reply to Hayne, and, as he says, he could not but be reminded throughout of Demosthenes' making the unrivalled crown oration. Choate, profoundly versed in the law, the incomparable forensic advocate and popular speaker, daily flying higher with inspiration drawn from Demosthenes and Cicero--he poured out his admiration in many utterances that have already become cla.s.sic. Webster was made in and by New England, and not for herself alone. The toast, "Daniel Webster,--the gift of New England to his country, his whole country, and nothing but his country," to which he responded December 22, 1843, tells but the truth. No American other than a New Englander ever had what one may term such a greatness breeding environment as he. And pa.s.sing in review all the famous children of those famous six States, whether they spent their lives at home as Choate, or developed elsewhere as Henry Ward Beecher, it is my decided opinion that Daniel Webster as fruit and example of her culture is New England's greatest glory.

There remain now but a few prominences of Webster for me to touch upon.

His speech of March 7, 1850, was fiercely denounced by the root-and-branch abolitionists. Horace Mann called him a fallen Lucifer. Sumner charged him with apostasy. Giddings said he had struck "a blow against freedom and the const.i.tutional rights of the free States which no southern arm could have given." Theodore Parker could think of no comparable deed of any other New Englander except the treachery of Benedict Arnold. Wittier condemned him to everlasting obloquy in a lofty lyric, which from its very t.i.tle of one word throughout was reprobation more stinging than the world-known lampoon of Catullus against Julius Caesar. The effect of this tempest has not yet all died out; and in many quarters of the north Webster is still regarded as a renegade. His defenders, however, multiply and become more earnest and strong. Let us consider this speech with the serenity and riper judgment which should mark the historical writer of to-day.

First and foremost let us grasp the wide difference of the situation from that at the beginning of 1833. Then, the question was only remotely a pro-slavery or southern one. A southern president, the most popular American, of great firmness of purpose and extraordinary courage, had taken a decided stand against the movement of one southern State hostile to the general government,--a stand the more decided because he cordially hated Calhoun, who was leading the movement. The southern leaders outside of that State did not approve of nullification; most of them believing it was an absurdity for a State to contend she could stay in the union and at the same time rightfully refuse to perform a condition of that union.

It seemed that no southern State except Virginia would stand by South Carolina in the event of a collision between her and the United States. We can well understand that Webster could then see no danger to the cause he loved above all others, that is, the union, in uncompromisingly demanding that the revenue be collected, and with force if necessary.

Nullification was palpably unjustifiable, even under the doctrine prevalent in the south. We have explained how Calhoun's extreme desire for peaceable remedies only, led him to champion this illogical measure. The theory of State sovereignty demanded that, instead of the nullification ordinance, South Carolina pa.s.s an ordinance of secession, conditioned to commence its operation at a stated time if the objectionable duties had not been repealed. The situation in 1833 was that all the north and nearly all of the south were arrayed under a southern leader against only one southern State, making a demand which was plainly untenable in either one of the two differing schools of const.i.tutional construction.

But the situation, in 1850, was a south solidly united, not upon such an obvious heresy as nullification, but aroused as one man to protect the very underpinning of its social structure. It was standing confidently upon the doctrine of State sovereignty, which, as the historical records all showed, was the creed of the generation, both north and south, that made the const.i.tution. As we have already told, Calhoun in 1833 probably convinced Webster that the States were sovereign. That did not mean that the force-bill was wrong; it meant only that if South Carolina chose, she could rightfully secede. And we may say that this great argument of Calhoun, demolis.h.i.+ng as it does the premises of Webster, was really irrelevant, for it did not support his own proposition. Now in 1850, as Webster saw it, the south was justified by the const.i.tution, however foolish might be her policy, and he was too conscientious to oppose what he believed right and just. In addition to this claim by the south of State sovereignty as abstractly right, his conscience told him that some of her practical demands were just. It had been provided not only that all of Texas south of 36 30' be admitted with slavery, but further that four other States be made out of the same territory. Although Webster was a free-soiler from first to last, his conscience told him peremptorily that the only honest course of congress as to the provision mentioned, which was really a solemn contract with Texas, was to perform the contract in good faith. This advice, of course, aroused the ire of the abolitionists, who had united upon the position that no other slave State should ever be admitted into the union. And he boldly said that the south was right in her complaint that there was disinclination both among individuals and public authorities at the north to execute the fugitive slave law.

Meditate these serious words:

"I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the north, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their const.i.tutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound minds at the north as a question of morals and a question of conscience, What right have they, in their legislative capacity or any other capacity, to endeavor to get round this const.i.tution, or to embarra.s.s the free exercise of the rights secured by the const.i.tution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before the face of the const.i.tution, are they, in my opinion, justified in such an attempt."

I must believe that as time rolls on the outcry against this position of Webster's, so unshakably founded in conscience and reason as the position is, must not only cease, but turn to words of praise and commendation. The northern fanatics who tried to abolish slavery by repudiating such solemn contracts as the resolution of March 1, 1845, respecting the admission of Texas, and the fugitive slave restoration clause of the federal const.i.tution, _while purposing to stay in the union_, were just as morally wrong as were the southern fanatics who proposed to stay in the union and enjoy its benefits and not pay the taxes necessary for its maintenance.

One other pa.s.sage of this speech has been strongly attacked. Webster opposed applying the Wilmot proviso to California and New Mexico, where, as he said, "the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth ... settles forever with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist." To apply the proviso would be, as he added, to "take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature," and "to re-enact the will of G.o.d;" and its insertion in a Territorial government bill would be "for the mere purpose of a taunt or reproach." Mr. Lodge, reprehending most severely, confidently a.s.serts that though these Territories were not suited to slave agriculture, yet that their many and rich mines could have been profitably worked by slaves.[80]

He stresses the fact that certain slave owners declared that they would, if they could, so work these mines. This distinguished author is to be reminded of how cheaply Seius could replace any one of his slaves that he worked to death in Ilva's mines. Let him re-read the Captivi of Plautus,--not to mention many other ancient records just as instructive,--and realize that in that time it was not only one race that furnished slaves, but that every free human being was in lifelong danger of falling to a master. The prisoners taken in the incessant wars kept the slave markets glutted. A few months' work of one of his slaves would bring the master enough to pay the purchase money and leave a considerable sum to his credit with the banker. The Spaniards worked their mines with Indians to be had for the catching in near-by places. And Mr. Lodge mentions mining with the labor of criminals and serfs. In all the instances that he has in mind the worker can be had for his keep or a little more than that. But to have mined with the slaves of the south,--that was widely different. There was no way to get such a slave except to rear or hire or buy him in a protected market. Does Mr. Lodge really believe that Seius would have permitted his eight hundred slaves to sicken in the mines of Ilva if each one had been worth at least $1,000 in the market? Really the leading industry of the south was slave rearing.

The profit was in keeping the slaves healthy and rapidly multiplying. This could be done at little expense in agriculture, where even the light workers were made to support themselves. But had a planter gone into a mining section, where he could get no land, for corn to feed his slaves and stock, and for cotton to bring him money, he would have found no margin of profit whatever in mining. I was reared in the gold-bearing district of Georgia. I can remember old Mr. John Wynne, a wealthy cotton planter living in Oglethorpe county, some six or seven miles from my father's, who, when--to use plantation parlance--he had laid by his crop at the middle or end of July, would work his gold mine until cotton-picking became brisk about the middle of September. He made money out of his gold mine, without injuring his other far more valuable mine, that is, the natural increase of his negroes. And I heard of other such mine workers. But you could not have tempted one of these shrewd business men to settle with his slaves outside of a cotton-making district in order to mine. Had either Mr. Clingman or Mr. Mason--mentioned by Mr.

Lodge--made the trial, he would have soon returned to his old neighborhood a sadder and wiser man.

The negro's work as a slave in the coal and iron mines of the south never commenced until after the thirteenth amendment freed him. Since then he has done much cruelly hard work as _servus poenae_--a slave of punishment--in these mines, for convict lessees, having no other interest in him than to get all the labor possible during his term.

So it is clear that Webster, in contending that the conditions in these Territories were prohibitive of slavery was as statesmanly and perspicacious as he was generally in other matters.

His detractors charged that the entire speech was a bid for the support of the south in his eager struggle for the presidency. That he pa.s.sionately longed for the chair was manifest. But his was not the sordid ambition of the professional place-hunter. He had a heaven-reaching aspiration to show America what a president should be in those angry times. He must have been conscious that he was the only man of gifts to do the great deed. What an appropriate climax that would have been for the invincible defender of the union, who, when replying to Hayne twenty years before, had outsoared Pindar in eulogizing South Carolina leading the south, and Ma.s.sachusetts leading the north, in the same breath; and who, neither from prepossession in favor of his native community or resentment because of attack upon it by those of the other section, had ever been removed out of brotherly love for all his countrymen alike. If you can do an all-important thing for your fellows which you believe no one else can do, and are without ambition for opportunity, are you not a poor grovelling creature? Webster, knowing that secession could not be peaceable, and seeing it become more and more probable, racked with fears for the union, and aghast at the menace of fraternal bloodshed, like Calhoun, he cheated himself with a futile remedy. We have told you of Calhoun's proposal to disarm the combatants. In his amiability Webster believed with his whole soul that he could as president make his countrymen love one another as he himself loved them, and that he could pour upon the waters now beginning to rage oil enough to safe the s.h.i.+p of union through the tempest soon to be at its height. It was an aspiration high and holy, deserving of eternal honor from all America. You cannot read this great speech of March 7 aright if you do not discern that Webster was seriously alarmed. When you see that a dear one's malady is fatal, you will not confess it to others,--not even to yourself. His excited exclamations, "No, sir! no, sir! There will be no secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession," cannot deceive a reader whose wont it has been to look into his own heart.

Webster did not see the future with the superhuman prevision of Calhoun; but he had observed the course of things in that stormy session. Is it to be believed that he had overlooked the tremendous significance of Toombs's speech of December 13, and of the wild plaudits it brought from the southern members? And try to conceive what must have been the effect upon him of that most solemn and the saddest great speech in all oratory of Calhoun just three days before. Read the 7th of March speech by its circ.u.mstances and it is revealed to you, as by a flashlight, that Webster had peeped behind the curtain which he had prayed should never rise in his lifetime. Horror-struck as he was, he would not despair of his country,--he would not believe that the brothers' union was about to turn into a brothers' war. Oh, let n.o.body dishonor his better self by seeing in this glorious speech, which our best and most lovable have placed in their hearts beside Was.h.i.+ngton's farewell address, the bid of a turncoat. Rather let us learn to understand its supreme statesmanly reach; its impartiality towards and just rebuke of the orator's own section and its merited castigation of the other courageously given, while affection for both is kept uppermost; its grand dignity, moral height, and pre-eminent patriotism. Let us also learn properly to estimate the disfavor with which he regarded ever afterwards during the rest of his life the active anti-slavery men of the north, whom he could not understand to be other than bringers of the unspeakable calamity he would avert. And let us give him his due commiseration for missing the nomination, and realizing that the hopes of saving his country which he had cherished so fondly were all, all shattered. When we do our full duty to him we will, northerners and southerners alike, agree that Whittier's palinode ought to have gone full circle before it paused.

What is Webster's highest and best fame? In answer we think at once of the reply to Hayne, its loftiness throughout, its eagle ascensions here and there, and most of all the organ melodies at the grand close, beside which the famous apostrophe of Longfellow is harsh overstrain. The next moment we feel he is higher in his profound love for his whole country than in his unequalled eloquence. He and Lincoln were the supereminent Americans who could never, never forget that the people of the other section were their own full-blood brothers and sisters. They are the supreme exponents of that American brotherhood, more deeply founded and more lasting than either one of the nationalizations which we have explained, out of which a continental is first, and then a world-union to come. To save our union was also to do the better deed of saving that brotherhood. For this each strove in his own way. I believe that the people of the world-union will pair them in Walhalla, and set them above all other heroes, crowning Webster as the monarch of speech which prepared millions with faith and fort.i.tude for the crisis, and crowning Lincoln the monarch of counsels and acts in the crisis. It will be understood that neither was called away before his mission was finished. The greatest work of each was example of the love with which we should all love one another; and that was complete.

CHAPTER IX

"UNCLE TOM'S CABIN"

The misrepresentations in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the character of the negro and his usual treatment in southern slavery have been taken as true by the best-informed and most unprejudiced everywhere outside of the south. The quotations which I make above from Prof. Barrett Wendell's _bahnbrechend_ work on American literature[81] show a rare and exemplary freedom from sectional bias. But he is a most convincing witness to the statement with which I begin this chapter, as I shall now show by two other excerpts from the same book, making it appear that even Professor Wendell has accepted without question the misrepresentations mentioned. In these excerpts I italicize the important statements, and I follow each with a contradictory one of my own. I invite close attention to what Professor Wendell says on one side and I on the other, for they make up issues of fact that must be rightly settled before the historical merit of the work which is the subject of this chapter can be accurately judged.

This is the first excerpt:

"Written carelessly, and full of crudities, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' even after forty-eight years, remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The truth is that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling; but her characters, even though little studied in detail, have a pervasive vitality which no study can achieve; _you unhesitatingly accept them as real. Her descriptive power, meanwhile, was such as to make equally convincing the backgrounds in which her action and her characters move. What is more, these backgrounds, most of which she knew from personal experience, are probably so faithful to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them may generally be accepted as true._"[82]

I say as to the characters in the novel that the negroes are monstrous distortions, being drawn in the main with the leading peculiarities of whites and without those of negroes; and that as to her most representative southern whites Mrs. Stowe is utterly untrue to fact by making them all anti-slavery. I say as to the "backgrounds," that she knew as little of them as she did of the negroes. I expect to demonstrate that the "personal experience" claimed for her by Professor Wendell was scanty and inadequate in the extreme.

I now give the second and last excerpt: "She [Mrs. Stowe] differed from most abolitionists _in having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery_."[83]

I do not dispute that her opportunity of learning southern slavery, small as it was, was very far superior to that of the other prominent abolitionists except Seward, who had taught school in the black belt of Georgia.[84] I maintain that she knew but little of southern slavery, and they less; that what both they and she conscientiously and most confidently believed to be their knowledge of this slavery, the slave, and of the slaveholder, was but a prodigious ma.s.s of delusion and prejudice.

I shall show, I think, that, instead of observing, she merely fancied and imagined, and that, to say the least, it is very misleading to allege that this fancying and imagining of hers was done "on the spot."

By the words, "all the tragic evils of slavery," Professor Wendell evidently means that the evils of southern slavery to the slave were both very many and very great. I shall show, I believe, that the condition of the average negro in southern slavery was far better than it was in Africa whence he came, and far better than it is now since he has been freed.

There are occasionally incident to every human condition--even to the relation of parent and child--some tragic evils of its own. In the native home of the negro in West Africa all the women and nearly all the men are slaves of brutally cruel savages, without any protection of law whatever.

The social organism is in the very lowest stage; and there is complete inability to evolve into a better one as the stationariness of ages proves. In the new south, certain causes which I have described at length in the last two chapters of this book have, ever since emanc.i.p.ation, been steadily and with acceleration depressing the average negro; and the rise of the few who have managed to acquire some property, or to get a good industrial education, only brings out more conspicuously the misery and wretchedness of the ma.s.s. It is correct to say that there was a vast mult.i.tude of tragic evils to the negroes in West Africa; and it is also correct to say that there is now the same to them in the south; but it is not correct to say that the tragic evils of southern slavery to the slave were frequent or general. The truth as to southern slavery ought to be known everywhere, which is, that it raised the negro very greatly in condition, and, now that he has been taken out of it, his progress has been arrested, and he is relapsing.

The great proposition of Mrs. Stowe and of the root-and-branch abolitionists was that slavery in the south was such a flagrant and atrocious wrong to the negro, that every human being was commanded by conscience to do everything possible to help him if he should try to escape from his master. Combating this proposition, without any concession whatever, I think it well that we try at the outset to ascertain how southern slavery affected the negro, whether cruelly or beneficially. To do this, his condition in his native land, his condition while a slave in America, and, lastly, his condition after his emanc.i.p.ation, must be compared. I beg my reader to follow me attentively as I now review and contrast these three conditions. First, as to his condition in Africa.

Here is what Toombs said of him to a Boston audience, January 24, 1856:

"The monuments of the ancient Egyptians carry him back to the morning of time--older than the pyramids; they furnish the evidence both of his national ident.i.ty and his social degradation before history began.

We first behold him a slave in foreign lands; we then find the great body of his race slaves in their native land; and after thirty centuries, illuminated by both ancient and modern civilization, have pa.s.sed over him, we still find him a slave of savage masters, as incapable as himself of even attempting a single step in civilization--we find him there still, without government or laws of protection, without letters or arts of industry, without religion, or even the aspirations which would raise him to the rank of an idolater; and in his lowest type, his almost only mark of humanity is, that he walks erect in the image of the Creator. Annihilate his race to-day, and you will find no trace of his existence within half a score of years; and he would not leave behind him a single discovery, invention, or thought worthy of remembrance by the human family."[85]

If my reader deems Toombs's picture overdrawn let him consult those parts of the recent work of a most diligent and conscientious investigator describing the negroes of West Africa, and note what is there told of heathen practices still surviving,--slavery of women to their polygamic husbands, pitiless destruction of useless members of the family, robbery, murder, cannibalism, the utter want of chast.i.ty.[86] We quote this as to slavery, which is especially important here:

"Slavery, having existed from time immemorial, is bound up with the whole social and economic organization of West African society. There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of slaves: those captured in war, those purchased from outside the tribe,--usually from the interior,--and the native-born slaves. _All alike_ are mere chattels, and _by law are absolutely subject to the master's will without redress_. But in practice a difference is made, for obvious reasons, between native-born slaves and captives taken from hostile tribes.

_The latter are numerous, and the severest forms of labor fall to their lot. They are treated with constant neglect, and cruelly punished on the slightest provocation. Their lives are at no time secure; they serve as victims for the sacrifice; when sick they are driven into the jungle; in times of scarcity they starve._"[87]

The master has the power of life and death over all slaves.[88]

The same author adds: "_The p.a.w.ning of persons for debt is exceedingly common. If the debt is never paid in full, the p.a.w.n_ and his descendants become slaves in perpetuity."[89]

Surely the reader who has attended to these details which I have given from Mr. Tillinghast will admit that the southern master transferred the African into a condition far better than any he could find at home. In the south two agencies gave him beneficent favor to which he and his fathers had always been strangers. The law of the land protected his life and s.h.i.+elded him from cruelty; and his high market value made it the interest of his American master not to overwork or under- feed and clothe him. And he was introduced into the first stage of monogamic life, which he developed steadily and rapidly until he was freed. In this he was travelling the only true road up from barbarism. If he could have but stayed in it until, after some generations--perhaps centuries--chaste wives and mothers had been evolved, he would have stood firmly on the threshold of permanent civilization and improvement.

Whatever evil of southern slavery to the negro my readers, prompted by the root-and-branch abolitionists, may suggest, they will find on reflection that it would have been far greater to him and more frequent had he remained in Africa. Separation of members of the family has been repeatedly emphasized as a most horrible evil of slavery in the south.

Such separation was incalculably more cruel and frequent in West Africa than it ever was among the negro slaves in America. And how have the root-and-branch abolitionists mended matters? What do we see in the new south, now that slavery, the great rupturer of family circles, is no more, and a master no longer can part parent and child, or husband and wife?

Before the end of the brothers' war there had not been a single separation of a family among my father's slaves. At much expense and inconvenience he had bought the husband of one and the wife of another in order to keep each one of these two pairs united. In 1866, Bob, a boy of sixteen, who, because of his obedience and merry-making gifts, had always been a greatly indulged pet, signalized his new-found freedom by stealing from the house of one of our neighbors some articles of considerable value. He fled from justice, and, never seeing his parents or his brothers and sisters again, died among strangers. In 1868, Lewis abandoned his wife Esther and their young child, and went to a distant town. Some ten years afterwards, Bill, a brother of Bob, and several years younger, convicted of an unmentionable crime, received a ten years' chain-gang sentence. Not long before this the body of one of his two wives who was at the time out of his favor was found in a well. Reputable whites living near were convinced that he had murdered her. If that be true, it should count as a separation. While he was serving out his sentence his remaining wife married again, and this should be set down also as a separation. Bob, Lewis, Esther, and Bill were slaves of my father. He did not own twenty in all. This example shows how, as to the same negroes, southern slavery operated to prevent separation of families, and how freedom has operated to encourage and stimulate it. It is not an exceptional example. My maternal grandfather and a maternal aunt owned each many more slaves than my father did. Some of my father's near neighbors had slaves in considerable number. In all of these slaves, while I knew them, there never was a separation of a family except by death or the voluntary act of parties to a marriage? But when they were freed in 1865 separation at once became rife, and it has always been active. What I have just told is fairly representative of the new south throughout the cotton States.

There were now and then sales made of slaves which sundered man and wife, and parent and child; but such were extremely few, and their proportion was steadily decreasing under two potent influences. Restraint of them by the law had commenced and was growing. But the stronger influence was custom and public opinion. Before approaching sales at public outcry by sheriffs or representatives of a deceased, and also before private sales, the slaves to be sold were given opportunity to find their new masters.

There was generally a neighbor who owned husband, wife, parents, or children, or wanted a cook, washerwoman, seamstress, boy to make a carpenter, striker, or blacksmith of, somebody careful with stock, etc., and the upshot would be that the man selected by the slave had got him.

The seller had natural feelings. His wife and all of his children would do their utmost to get such new masters as the negroes preferred. I shall always cherish in memory the affectionate regard which the mother of the household and all the family habitually showed to their slaves. As I write, a sweet reminiscence comes of how the children would always clamor and mutiny against the most merited punishment of their nurse by father or overseer. There is no doubt that the slave steadily won larger place in the domestic affections, and that his treatment by each generation of masters was more kind and humane. And as a part of this amelioration the percentage of forced separation of slave families was all the while becoming less.

Let us devote a moment to the negro trader, as he was called, and his slave-pens, which were the subjects of much and heated invective. The first suggestion in order here is that there were such in West Africa, far more frequent and far exceeding in cruelty any ever known in the south.

To take the African away from the latter and turn him over to the former was great kindness to him. I remind my readers, in the next place, that the factors constantly minimizing separation of slaves from other members of the family--law, public opinion becoming more sensitive, custom becoming more merciful, and the sway of the domestic affections stronger--were _pari pa.s.su_ humanizing every incident of the commerce in slaves as property. Lastly, the negro trader and the pen, by reason of the small number of the slaves to whom they caused real suffering, were mercy and prosperous condition itself beside the convict gangs and pens which emanc.i.p.ation has put in their place, as will come out more clearly in a short while.

His use of the lash was a dire accusation of the master. The reader thinks at once of the relevant words in a famous pa.s.sage so often quoted from one of President Lincoln's messages: "If this struggle is to be prolonged till ... every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." This was said March 4, 1865, a month and five days only before General Lee's surrender, and when all the great battles of the brothers' war had been fought,--a war by far the most sanguinary in the world's history. Blood did sometimes follow the blow of the lash, but not often. The overseer who could not correct without breaking the skin always lost his place. When the statement of Mr. Lincoln just commented on is compared with the actual fact, it appears to be one of the most extravagant hyperboles ever uttered.

Before I have my readers to look at the actual facts I want to say a preliminary word. The parent was enjoined by Solomon not to spare the rod.

The rod was permitted to the master of the apprentice, the school-teacher, the drill officer, and others. It was often used with great severity. As we see from the Decameron husbands were wont to correct their wives by beating them with sticks. Whipping on the bare back was a common execution of the judgment of a criminal court. Our insubordinate convicts are strapped. The usual punishment of a slave's disobedience was to whip him.

A switch was not generally used, because by reason of his thick and tough skin and lower nervous development--to use a common expression--it would not hurt him. It was a familiar thing to me in my childhood to hear some negro tell of the use of a switch on him by women or feeble men, how the blows could scarcely be felt, and yet with what outcry and clamor he pretended that each one gave him great pain. The cowhide, but far more frequently the whip, took the place of the switch. The former was more and more discredited, because it could seldom be laid on hard enough without cutting the skin. The whip had a flat lash at the end, with which, as the strap or paddle now used on our convicts, a stinging blow could be hit that would not draw blood.

An ordinary correction of a negro did not cause him as much pain as your child, with his far superior sensitiveness, receives when you give him the rod. Large and heavy as the overseer's whip looked, the negro, with his high degree of insensibility to physical pain inherited from his African ancestors, who for a hundred generations or more had bestowed upon one another all kinds of corporal torture, cared far less for it than the abolitionist who insisted on making him merely a black white man, could ever understand. How little of both mental and corporal suffering the lash causes the average negro is strikingly shown by the fact that ever since his emanc.i.p.ation, when he is detected in a serious offence, he is p.r.o.ne to propose that he be whipped instead of being carried to court. If his offer is accepted he strips off his clothes with alacrity, exclaims the conventional "O, Lordy!" under every fall of the whip; and when the contract number of lashes has been given he goes away with the look and air of one who has just learned that he has drawn a lottery prize of thousands; and his nearest and dearest, his wife and children, all his sweethearts, congratulate him cordially, and the entire negro community rate him as rarely fortunate. This is enough here of the lash; but a word or two more will be appropriate when we give the chain-gang attention.