The Uprising of a Great People Part 6

The third fact remains: Is it true that, in all the hypotheses, the cause of the negroes has just realized such progress that the ultimate issue of the contention can no longer be doubtful? This is most obvious.

Let there be separation or not, slavery has just entered upon the road which leads to abolition, more or less rapid, but infallible. If there be no separation, this immense progress will he effected with more wisdom and slowness; violent means will be averted, the benevolent influence of the Gospel will pave the way for progressive and peaceful transformation by preaching, to the slaves as to the masters, more of their duties than of their rights. If there be separation, emanc.i.p.ation will be accomplished much more quickly and more calamitously. Servile war will break out; ultra abolitionism, to which hitherto the prudence of the North has refused all real credit, will be no longer restrained by the prudence of a people desirous of shunning b.l.o.o.d.y catastrophes; sustained by the increasing animosity which will inflame the two Confederacies against each other, it will find means of introducing into the South appeals to revolt, and will multiply expeditions like that of John Brown.

But let us leave these generalities, and examine nearer by, from the stand-point of emanc.i.p.ation, the four or five hypotheses which we have signalled out most plainly, and between which seem to lie the chances of the future.

I shall examine first of all the one whose realization is evidently pursued by the able men of the extreme South. The question is, after having speedily gained over the North, thanks to Mr. Buchanan, to arrive as quickly as possible at something which shall have the appearance and authority of a fact accomplished. Audacity, and again audacity; upon this point, the politic and the violent meet in unison to-day. It has seceded, it has invaded the Federal property, it has trumped up a government, it has given itself a President, it is about to have an army, it is already attempting to represent itself officially at the courts of the great powers.

By the side of audacity, prudence has played its part. It has taken good care not to unfurl its flag, it has made itself small, modest, moderate, as much so, at least, as the pa.s.sions of the mob would permit; it asked nothing, in truth, but to live honestly in a corner of the globe. Who speaks, then, of conquests? Who would wish to re-establish the African slave trade on a large scale? Far from being retrogrades, the men of the South are champions of progress; witness their programme of commercial freedom! Are there no honest men to be found in the North, to restrain Mr. Lincoln, and to prevent him from oppressing them? Are there no governments in Europe that can interpose, and recommend the maintenance of peace? Is not this peace, which prevents the insurrections of negroes, and the destruction of cotton, for the interest of all? Why should there not be two Confederacies, living side by side, as good friends?

It is evident that the able party tend to this, and that the violent have allowed them to give, for the common interest, this subdued tone to the insurrectionary movement. The able party know too well what a prolonged war would be to desire it. They prepare for it in the hope, if not to avoid it entirely, at least to prevent its duration, and to obtain at once, in behalf of Southern secession, that species of security which is conferred in our times by the deed accomplished.

Perhaps the United States, yielding to a sentiment which certainly has something honourable in it, will allow the Confederacy of the Gulf States to subsist, rather than crush it, which would be but too easy, by bringing upon it a war which would be accompanied by slave insurrections. Let us not be in haste to blame such a course; let us remember that the whole world is prompting in this direction, that all the counsels given to Mr. Lincoln, in the Old World as in the New, begin invariably with the words: "Strive to avoid civil war;" let us remember also that, to solve the American problem, much more time will be needed than we imagine in Europe; let us endeavor to put ourselves in the place of those who see things as they are, and who find themselves in a struggle with the difficulties.

Patience will doubtless have here its great inconveniencies; the Confederacy of the cotton States, if combated without vigor, will seem the living proof of the right of separation; it will be an asylum all prepared, in which the discontented border States can take refuge at need. Nevertheless the question is to tolerate this Confederacy, but by no means to recognize the legitimacy of the act which gave it birth; the question is to make use of a generous forbearance, to which new threats of secession will necessarily put an end. Then, is it nothing to manifest a spirit of peace fitted to touch the most prejudiced, to bind the majority of the border States to the destinies of the Union, to give evidence of the distinction which exists between them and the extreme South, to force them, in fine, to declare themselves? If they surmount the present temptation, (and they will never encounter a stronger one,) if they consent to sacrifice their immediate interests, and to renounce the traffic in slaves, which is in danger of ceasing from day to day in case they do not join the "Confederate States;" is such a resolution nothing? does it contain no guarantees for the future? We do not set foot in the right path with impunity; honorable resolves always carry us further, thank G.o.d! than we counted on going. Suppose even that the border States which refuse to unite with the South design to impose on the North certain vexatious conditions, they will be none the less turned from their former alliances, they will have none the less begun to move in a new direction. We should do wrong if we did not recognize how honorable is the conduct of several among them; in watching over their legislatures, in enacting that the vote of secession shall be submitted to the ratification of the whole people, certain frontier States seem to have already shown themselves resolved to foil the intrigues at Charleston.

The cause of emanc.i.p.ation takes, therefore, a very important step in advance, in the hypothesis of a Southern Confederacy reduced, or nearly so, to the Gulf States alone. Limited secession is perhaps of all combinations, the one most favorable to the suppression of slavery.

Picture to yourself, in fact, what this Southern Confederacy will he. It will be an impossible, short-lived republic, the separation of which will one day cease, and which, meanwhile, will be incapable of realizing any of its favorite projects. From the first hour, the extreme South found itself brought to face a dilemma: either to draw in all the slave States, and then to await the moment favorable to the execution of its grandiloquent plans, to hasten towards its destiny, its ideal, to conquer territories, to people them with negroes, and to perish through the accomplishment of an impious work; or, to remain alone and undertake nothing, and still perish, but this time through impotence to exist.

What is to be done when there is only the miserable Confederacy of some thousand whites, the owners and keepers of some hundred thousand blacks?

Make conquests? They dare not. Open the slave trade? It would draw down destruction upon them.

Now, mark that, in the bosom of a Confederacy morally isolated from the entire world, receiving aid neither from immigrants nor capital, deprived, in a large part at least, of the fresh supply of negroes which it formerly drew from the North, unable even to incur the risk of imitating Spain, which buys _free_ negroes from the slave-hunters of the African continent, not in a condition to stop the escapes which will take place on all her frontiers, the question of slavery will proceed necessarily towards its solution. The extreme South, strange to say, will find itself placed providentially as an obstacle between the United States and the countries of which it lately meditated the acquisition.

The United States will have the advantage of being unable even to think of Cuba, or Central America, or Mexico; they will be delivered for a time from these baleful temptations, and from the States in which they met the warmest support. And, during this time, the extreme South will be forced, in some sort, to look at the problem of slavery under an aspect before unknown to it.

Later will come the shock, the postponed but inevitable conflict.

Blockaded at the South, blockaded at the North, blockaded on the African side, undermined and torn by its intestine divisions, the extreme South will have to face, at one time or another, the irresistible power of the United States. Does any one imagine by chance that the latter will forever relinquish New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico? The more they become elevated and strengthened, the more they will be led, say rather, forced, to absorb again the portions of their former domain which have attempted to exist without them.

From this time, the discussion relative to slavery will a.s.sume in the United States a simple and decided bearing. The extreme South, in quitting them, will have given them every facility; it will have endowed them with political h.o.m.ogeneousness and liberal majorities. By the mere effect of the departure of the senators and representatives of the extreme South, the party opposed to slavery will have acquired, at the outset, the numerical majority which it lacked in Congress; it will be in a position to ensure the pa.s.sage of its bills, to form its administration, to const.i.tute by degrees courts in every respect favorable to its principles. Next, the border States who shall not have followed the fortunes of the extreme South will find themselves bound to those of the North, a.s.sociated with its interests, open to its ideas; and it is a fixed fact that several will not be long in completing the work of liberty already begun among them, and thus becoming, with their rich and extensive Territories, of the number of those fortunate States in which the suppression of slavery gives the signal for the fruitful invasion of immigrants, for agricultural progress, for wealth, and for credit. In this manner the "patriarchal inst.i.tution" will disappear peaceably from the intermediate region, while it will be threatened by more terrible shocks in the tropical region.

This is a chance which is common to limited and to total secession, but which is still more unavoidable in the last. Face to face with the miserable Confederacy of the extreme South, the United States can afford to be patient; face to face with the Confederacy comprising all the slave States, (or, which means the same, face to face with two distinct Confederacies, comprising, the one the cotton States, the other the border States, yet united against the North through an old instinct of complicity,) the att.i.tude of the United States, as every one foresees, will inevitably be more hostile. Total secession itself can be born only from a sentiment of declared hostility; it amounts to a declaration of war. Suppose that Mr. Lincoln rejects the advice of those of his cabinet who would incline to accept the fact of separation; suppose that, while treating the South with gentleness, and striving to spare it the horrors of an armed strife, he persists in protecting the rights of the Confederation, and securing to it, by a maritime blockade, the collection of taxes; suppose that the blockade is organized from South Carolina to the Rio Grande, supported by Forts Pickens, Jefferson, and Taylor, which will have been revictualled at all costs after the forced evacuation of Fort Sumter; suppose that, in this manner, watch is kept over the ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, may it not happen that the insurrectional government at Montgomery will decide to effect a march on Was.h.i.+ngton? Is it not probable that North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland will allow themselves to be crossed without saying a word? More than this, are we not justified in believing that these States, and with them a considerable number of the central ones, rallied around their ancient banner by the very approach of peril, will make common cause with the slave Confederacy? In such a case, how avert the chances of a direful conflict? Will the United States carry patience with respect to the aggressors, the fear of giving a signal of ruin, deference to the counsels lavished on them perhaps, so far as to refuse to return a violent attack, and to consent to the ravishment of their capital? It is hard to believe. If the South make the attack, the war will break out, and the border States will be exposed to the first blow.

But admit that they succeed in preventing an immediate explosion, the mere fact of a total secession, and of the formation of two Confederacies, almost equal, (in appearance at least,) will permit no one to count on the prolonged preservation of peace. What repulsion, what grievances will be found in all relations, in all questions! And from a grievance to war, from war to negro insurrections, what will be the distance, I ask? The South will be then an immense powder magazine, to which the first spark will set fire. And the South will not lose its habits of arrogance, it will be quarrelsome as always. Has it not already announced in its journals that, on the first encouragement given to its fugitive slaves, it will draw the sword? Now, such encouragement certainly will not be wanting. The South does not know at the present time how much the North, of which it complains, contributes to prevent the escapes which it fears. The Federal Government is at hand to oppose them, in some measure at least. When the preventive obstacle shall have disappeared, the South will see with what rapidity its slavery will glide away on every point of its frontier; it will see its _happy_ negroes ready to brave a thousand perils rather than remain under its law. Alas! it will see many other proofs of their devotion to servitude. I do not like to bring b.l.o.o.d.y images, at which I shudder, too often before the eyes of the reader; it must be said, notwithstanding, while it is yet time, that the general Confederacy of the South, intoxicated with its projects, resolved to increase its possessions, forced to demand from the African slave trade the means of repeopling its States, depopulated by escape, and to install slavery into new territories, will draw upon it, not only the wrath of the United States, but the indignation of the entire world. And what misery, what ruin will ensue from the first conflict!

I like better to fix my thoughts on the third hypothesis--that of a return to the now broken Union. Taught by experience, recognizing how little weight it has in the world since its separation from the United States, poor, weak, divided, comprehending the impossibility of realizing its true plans without exposing itself to calamities, losing its resources, one after another, even to the cultivation of cotton, which also demands credit and security, incapable of preventing the flight of its slaves, and not daring to brave that great power of public opinion which will interdict it the African trade, the Southern Confederacy, exhausted and dismayed, will perhaps one day prefer returning to the bosom of the Union, to plunging into the extremity of misfortune. In this case, again, the question of affranchis.e.m.e.nt will have made vast strides. The United States will have taken a decided position in the absence of the South, which its return cannot destroy; convictions will be fixed, the final impulse will have been given, and to this impulse, the South, come to repentance, will know that nothing is left it but to submit.

Finally comes a last hypothesis, which I mention because it is necessary to foresee every possibility. Under the combined influence of the border States and the States of the North, equally desirous of maintaining the Union, the attempts of the extreme South will have failed, its secession will have lasted only a few months, and a compromise will have served to cover its retreat. But what compromise could compensate for a fact so important as the election of Mr. Lincoln? It has a deep significance which no compromise will remove; it signifies that the conquests of slavery are ended. This proven, the future is easy to foresee: increasing majorities in the North, increasing disproportion of the two parts of the Confederation. At the end of the four years of a Lincoln administration, the slave States will have lost all hope of struggling, with their eight thousand whites charged with keeping four millions of blacks, against the twenty millions of citizens that inhabit the free States. Let us add that, the future once fixed and the question of preponderance once resolved, many pa.s.sions will moderate by degrees. The number of free States will increase, not only by the settling of new territories, but also by the affranchis.e.m.e.nt of the thinly scattered slaves, becoming continually more thinly scattered, of Maryland, of Delaware, or of Missouri. We can even now describe this affranchis.e.m.e.nt, so well is the _American method_ known. It consists, as every one knows, in emanc.i.p.ating the children that are to be born. This is the method which has been uniformly applied in the Northern States, and which will be doubtless applied some day in the border States, provided, however, civil war does not come to accomplish a very different emanc.i.p.ation --emanc.i.p.ation by the rising of the slaves. There will be nothing of this, I hope; pacific progress will have its way. We shall then see these intermediate States, one after the other, regaining life in the same time as liberty: they will become transformed as if touched by the wand of a fairy.

Such are the future prospects which offer themselves to us. If we remember, besides, the movement which is beginning to be wrought in the religious societies and the churches--a movement which cannot fail to be soon complete, we shall know on what to rely concerning the fate which awaits a social iniquity against which are at once conspiring the follies of its friends; and the indignation of its foes.

CHAPTER IX.

COEXISTENCE OF THE TWO RACES AFTER EMANc.i.p.aTION.

Something more difficult to foresee than the suppression, henceforth certain, of slavery, is the consequence of this suppression. The problem of the coexistence of the two races rests at the present hour with a crus.h.i.+ng weight on the thoughts of all; it mingles poignant doubts with the hopes of some, it exasperates the resistance of others. Is it true that emanc.i.p.ation would be the signal of a struggle for extermination?

Is there not room upon American soil for free blacks by the side of free whites? I do not conceal from myself that there is here an accredited prejudice, an admitted opinion which, perhaps more than any thing else, trammels the progress of the United States. Let us attempt to estimate it.

M. de Tocqueville, who has judged America with so sure an eye, has been, notwithstanding, mistaken upon some points; his warmest admirers must admit it. Writing at an epoch when the great results of English emanc.i.p.ation had not yet been produced, he was led to frame that formidable judgment of which so much advantage has been taken: "Hitherto, wherever the whites have been the more powerful, they have held the negroes in degradation and slavery; wherever the negroes have been the more powerful, they have destroyed the whites. This is the only account which can ever be opened between the two races."

Another account is opened, thank G.o.d, and no one will rejoice at it more sincerely than M. de Tocqueville--he who is so generous, and whose abolition sentiments are certainly no mystery to any of his colleagues of the Chamber. But his opinion remains in his book, and every one repeats after him, that the blacks and the whites cannot live together on the same soil, unless the latter be subject to the former.

I repeat, that at the time at which he wrote, he had reason, or at least known facts gave him reason, to say this; the liberty of the blacks had then but one name--St. Domingo. To-day, the victories of Christian emanc.i.p.ation have come, to contrast with the catastrophes provoked by impenitent despotism.

The English Colonies bear a striking a.n.a.logy to the Southern States of the Union. The blacks there are numerous, more numerous even in proportion to the whites than in the Carolinas or Florida. The climate is even more scorching, and the cultures demand still more imperiously the labor of the blacks. As to the prejudices of the masters, I dare affirm that the planters of the Continent and those of the Antilles have not long had any thing with which to reproach each other.

Notwithstanding, what has happened in the Antilles? Not only has liberty been proclaimed--this was the act of the metropolis--but the coexistence of races has subsisted. It is to this point that I claim attention.

They, the whites and the blacks, alike free, invested with the same privileges, exercising the same rights, encountering each other in the ranks of the militia, in the magistracy, and even in the seats of the colonial a.s.semblies, admirably accept this life in common. And the whites there, observe, are Anglo-Saxons; that is, they belong to that race which is declared incapable of enduring free blacks in its neighborhood.

It is necessary to appeal sometimes from those axioms so boldly laid down, which serve us to make inflexible laws for that which must be subject in an infinite measure to the mobility of circ.u.mstances and influences. The influence of the Gospel, especially, is a fact, the scope of which is never sufficiently measured. It has created in the Antilles a negro population which maintains its equality face to face with the whites, yet which does not entirely reject their patronage; a dependent population which is also a free population, free in the most absolute sense of the word. The blacks of the Antilles labor on the plantations, and secure the success of large plantations; but, at the same time, they themselves become landholders, forming by degrees one of the happiest and most remarkable cla.s.ses of peasants that ever existed.

Their little fields, their pretty villages, manifest real prosperity; and there is something among them that is worth more than prosperity, there is moral progress, the development of intellect, and the elevation of souls.

It will be demanded of us if, in the midst of so much progress, the production of sugar has not suffered. I answer that, on the contrary, it has increased. It had been predicted that emanc.i.p.ation would be a death-blow to the British colonies. I suspect that many people are even yet persuaded of it; now, in spite of the faults committed by the planters, who have neglected nothing to disgust the negroes with labor and to drive them from their old mills, they are found to return to them, contenting themselves with wages that scarcely rise above an average of a s.h.i.+lling a day. If we compare the two last censuses of liberty with the two last years of slavery, we shall discover that the total production of sugar has increased in the colonies in which emanc.i.p.ation was effected in 1834. And they have not only had to endure this crisis of emanc.i.p.ation, but also another crisis still more formidable, that of the sudden introduction of free trade in 1834. The colonial sugars, exposed to compet.i.tion with the sugar produced at Havana and elsewhere by slave labor, experienced a prodigious decline.

There was cause to believe that the production was about to be destroyed; it has risen again, notwithstanding, and the English Antilles, with their free negroes and their unprotected sugar, forced to face entire liberty in all its forms, import to-day into the metropolis nearly a million more hogsheads than at the moment when the crisis of free trade broke forth.

Liberty works miracles. We always distrust her, and she replies to our suspicions by benefits. The English Antilles, which, during the last thirty years, have had to surmount, besides the two crises of emanc.i.p.ation and free trade, the earthquake of 1840 and six consecutive years of drought; the English Antilles, which have had to liquidate their old debts, and to repair the ruin accruing from the failure of the bank of Jamaica, are now in an att.i.tude which proves that they have no fears for the future and scarcely regret the past.

Under slavery, the Antilles were hastening to their ruin; with liberty, they have become one of the richest channels of exportation which England possesses; under slavery, they could not have supported the shock of free trade; with liberty, they have gained this new battle: such are the net proceeds of experience. If we still have doubts, let us compare Dutch Guiana, which holds slaves, to English Guiana, which has emanc.i.p.ated them. The resources of these two countries are almost equal; English Guiana is progressing, while the cultures of Surinam are forsaken; three-fourths of its plantations are already abandoned, and the rest will follow.

But the question of profits and losses is not the only one here, I think, and after having computed the proceeds of sugar, after having shown that in this respect English emanc.i.p.ation is in rule, it is allowable to mention also another kind of result. Look at these pretty cottages, this neat and almost elegant furniture, these gardens, this general air of comfort and civilization; question these blacks, whose physical appearance has become modified already under the influence of liberty, these blacks, who decreased rapidly in numbers during the epoch of slavery, and who have begun to increase, on the contrary, since their affranchis.e.m.e.nt; they will tell us that they are happy. Some have become landowners, and labor on their own account, (this is not a crime, I imagine;) others unite to strengthen large plantations, or perhaps to carry to the works of rich planters the canes gathered by them on their own grounds; some are merchants, many hire themselves out as farmers.

Whatever may be the faults of some individuals, the ensemble of free negroes has merited the testimony rendered in 1857 by the Governor of Tobago: "I deny that our blacks of the country are of indolent habits.

So industrious a cla.s.s of inhabitants does not exist in the world."

An admirable spectacle, and one which the history of mankind presents to us too rarely, is that of a degraded population elevating itself more and more, and placing itself on a level with those who before despised it. Concubinage, so general in times of servitude as to give rise to the famous axiom, "Negroes abhor marriage," is now replaced by regular unions. In becoming free, the negroes have learned to respect themselves: the unanimous reports of the governors mark the progress of their habits of sobriety. Crimes have greatly diminished among them.

They are polite and well brought up, falling even into the excess of exaggerated courtesy. They respect the aged: if an old man pa.s.ses through the streets, the children rise and cease their play.

These children are a.s.siduously sent to schools, the support of which depends, in a great part, upon the voluntary gifts of the negroes.

Grateful to the Gospel which has set them free, the former slaves have become pa.s.sionately attached to their pastors; their first resources are consecrated to churches, to schools, and sometimes, also, to distant missions, to the evangelization of that Africa which they remember to do it good. We should be at once surprised and humiliated, were we to compare the much-vaunted gifts of our charity with those of these poor people, these freed men of yesterday, whom we think that we may rightfully treat with disdain.

Thanks to the Gospel, and it is to this that I return, the problem of the coexistence of races is resolved in the most pacific manner in the Antilles. Among freemen, however little these freemen may be Christianized, specific inequalities become speedily effaced, and the prejudice of skin is not found to be ultimately as insurmountable as we have been told. In these English colonies, which are true republics, governing themselves, and which also remind us, through this feature, of the Southern States, the blacks have come to be accepted as fellow-citizens. They practise the liberal professions; they are electors and often elected, for they form of themselves alone one-fifth of the Colonial a.s.sembly at Jamaica; they are officers of the police and the militia, and their authority never fails to be recognized by all. I named Jamaica just now. Some may seek to bring it as an argument against me. The fact is, that this great island has seemed to form an exception to the general prosperity; considerable fortunes have been sunk there, and the transformation has been slower and more painful there than elsewhere. But, when they arm themselves with these circ.u.mstances, they forget two things: first, that the causes of the malady were anterior to emanc.i.p.ation; next, that the cure has come from emanc.i.p.ation itself.

Before emanc.i.p.ation, Jamaica was insolvent, her plantations were mortgaged beyond their value, and its planting was threatened in other ways far more than now. Do you know what has since happened?

Difficulties which appeared insoluble have been resolved; to-day, the cape is doubled, and men navigate in peace. At the present time, Jamaica comprises two or three hundred villages, inhabited by free negroes; the latter are willing to work; for, according to the latest information, (February, 1861,) the price of daily labor decreases instead of rising.

Among these free negroes, there are not less than ten thousand landholders, and three-eighths of the cultivated soil is in their hands.

They have established sugar-mills everywhere, imperfect, rude, yet working in a pa.s.sable manner; and mills of this sort are numbered by thousands. The middle cla.s.s of color thus grows richer day by day; the families that compose it all own a horse or a mule; they have their bank-books and their accounts with the savings banks. Lastly, which is of more value than all else, the free negroes of Jamaica have built more than two hundred chapels, and as many schools. At the very moment when I write these lines, an enthusiastic religious movement is prevailing among them; the rum-shops are abandoned, the most degraded cla.s.ses enter in their turn the path of reformation.

I should have been glad to cite our own colonies instead of confining myself to the English islands. I have been prevented from this, not only by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above all, by the circ.u.mstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that, moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than of the Coolies and others employed, which has secured the success of our experiment; whence it follows that this success is far from being as conclusive as that which has been obtained elsewhere under the system of full liberty.

Nevertheless, our success, which is no less real, signifies something also. If we have not yet those little free villages, that cla.s.s of small negro landholders of which I just spoke, we have, like the English, free negroes in our militia and in our marine; like them, we have had our elections, and all cla.s.ses of the population have taken part in them; like them, and perhaps in a greater degree, we have increased our sugar production since emanc.i.p.ation. It is true that the crisis of free trade has not yet pa.s.sed among us, and that we cannot know how this would be supported by our colonial sugars. But it will not be long before we shall be informed on this point: by an act which we cannot but applaud, and which continues the work it has undertaken, the French government has just suppressed the protection continued hitherto to our planters.

If, ere long, as it is justifiable to hope, they are delivered from the charges of the colonial system, whose advantages they have lost, we shall see them struggle, and successfully, I am convinced, against the Spanish sugars produced by slave labor.

It will be, perhaps, maintained, that the antipathy of race is stronger in the United States than elsewhere, and that the Americans, in this respect, are inferior to the English. I am as conscious as any one else of those infamous proceedings towards free negroes which are the crime of the North, a crime no less odious than that of the South. What conscience is not aroused at the thought of those prejudices of skin which do not permit blacks to sit by the side of whites, in schools, churches, or public vehicles? Only the other day, nothing less than a denunciation in open parliament was needed to begin the destruction, by a public rebuke, of the cla.s.sification which is being made on the English steamers themselves between Liverpool and New York. There are some new States which purely and simply exclude free negroes from their Territory; those which do not exclude them from the Territory, repulse them from the ballot-box. The injustice, in fine, is as gross, as crying, as it is possible to imagine.

Must we conclude from this that the coexistence of races, possible elsewhere, is impossible in the United States? I distrust those sweeping a.s.sertions which resolve problems at one stroke; I refuse, above all, to admit so easily that iniquity must be maintained for the sole reason that it exists, and that it suffices to say: "I am thus made; what would you have? I cannot change myself," to abstract one's self from the accomplishment of the most elementary duty. To endure negroes at one's side, to respect their independence, to abstain from wrongs towards them, to consent to the full exercise of their rights, is an elementary duty; Christian duty, I need not say, demands something better.

Does this mean that we are to set ourselves up as judges, and brand as wretches all those who thus mistake the laws of charity and justice? I fear much that, in their place, we would do precisely as they. Living in the South, we would have slaves, and would defend slavery to the last; living in the North, we would tread under foot the free colored cla.s.s.

Is there then neither the true, nor the false, nor justice, nor injustice? G.o.d forbid! The just and the true remain; iniquity should be condemned without pity; but we are bound to be more indulgent towards men than, towards things. We are bound to remember that the influence of surroundings is enormous, and that, if crimes are always without excuse, there are many excusable criminals. When we examine men by the prejudice of skin, such as prevails in the United States, we are not long in discovering that it rests in great part on a misunderstanding: men mistake coexistence for amalgamation. I do not fear to affirm that the second would be as undesirable as the first would be desirable. Why dream of blending or of a.s.similating the two races? Why pursue as an ideal frequent marriages between them, and the formation of a third race: that of mulattoes? America does right to resist such ideas, and to inscribe her testimony against such a future, evidently very little in conformity with the designs of G.o.d.

But coexistence by no means draws amalgamation in its train. On this point, also, experience has spoken. In the English colonies, the liberty of the blacks is entire, the legal equality of the two races is not contested, public manners have shaped themselves to that mutual consideration without which they could not live together; yet neither amalgamation nor a.s.similation is in question, and the aristocracy of skin remains what it should be, a lasting distinction, accepted on both sides, between races which are not designed to mingle together. I do not know that many marriages are contracted between the whites and the negresses of Jamaica, and I believe that the cla.s.s of mulattoes increases much more rapidly under slavery than with liberty. Look in this respect at what takes place even now in the United States: as quadroons sell better than blacks, mixtures, of white or almost white slaves abound there, and the unhappy women who refuse to lend themselves to certain combinations are often whipped in punishment.

With liberty, each race can at least remain by itself; with it, there can be coexistence without amalgamation; both mingling and hostility can be prevented. This is the more easy, inasmuch as the negroes, with the gentleness of their race, willingly accept the second place, and by no means demand what we insist on refusing them. Let their liberty be complete, let legal equality and friendly relations be maintained, and they will ask no more.

But they will ask no less, and they are right. I do not understand, in truth, why so harmless a co-existence should be so long repulsed by the enlightened people of the United States. There are negroes in Spanish America who have reached the highest grades of the army, and who show as much intelligence, decorum, and dignity in command as white men could do. I myself have seen at Paris, a clergyman of ebony blackness, who was really the most distinguished, unexceptionable man that it was possible to meet; he was a remarkable scholar, and had received the t.i.tle of doctor from several European universities.