Slavery in the United States

Constitution of the United States The Constitutional Convention Slavery

The Great Compromise sparked a heated and no less contentious dispute over slavery. Even though the words slave and slavery do not appear in the Constitution, the convention included ten provisions dealing with slavery. The most serious dispute arose over how to assign House seats to Southern states. If seats in the House of Representatives were apportioned according to state populations that included slaves, Southern states would gain an advantage because of their large slave populations. Northern states pushed to exclude slaves from the population calculations altogether. Southern states resisted, threatening to scuttle the entire Constitution. Finally abolitionists from northern states compromised. They agreed to the infamous clause in Article I that counted slaves as only three-fifths of a person and that barred Congress from ending the slave trade before 1808. The settlement over slavery led the convention to accept the Great Compromise. (1)

In this Section about the Constitutional Convention: Constitutional Convention, Congressional Representation, Slavery, Presidency, Constitutional Convention and the Judiciary and Constitution Approval.

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Slavery Definition

The status or condition ot a slave. The keeping of slaves as a practice or legal institution.

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The status or condition ot a slave. The keeping of slaves as a practice or legal institution.

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This definition of Slavery Is based on the The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary . This definition needs to be proofread..

Civil Liberties and the Antislavery Controversy

United States Constitution

According to the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, about its article titled “Civil Liberties and the Antislavery Controversy”: Two civil liberties issues linked the freedom of communication enjoyed by whites with the cause of the slave: the mails controversy of 1835_1837 and the gag controversy of 1836_1844.By 1835, southern political leaders, anxiety-ridden by threats to the
(read more about Constitutional law entries here).

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Slavery in 1899 (United States)

The following information about Slavery is from the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers.

SLAVERY (IN U. S. HISTORY). It may be laid down as a fundamental proposition, that negro slavery in the colonies never existed or was originally established by law, but that it rested wholly on custom. The dictum, so often quoted, that slavery, being a breach of natural right, can be valid only by positive law, is not true: it is rather true that slavery, where it existed, being the creature of custom, required positive law to abolish or control it. In Great Britain, in 1772, custom had made slavery so odious that the Sommersett case justly held that positive law was necessary for the establishment of slavery there in any form; but the exact contrary of this rule, of course, held good in commonwealths where custom made slavery not odious, but legal. In these cases the laws which were passed in regard to slavery were only declaratory of a custom already established, and can not be said to have established slavery. The whole slavery struggle is therefore the history of a custom at first universal in the colonies, then peacefully circumscribed by the rise of a moral feeling opposed to it, but suddenly so fortified in its remaining territory by the rise of an enormous material interest as to make the final struggle one of force. In outlining the history of negro slavery in the United States, it seems advisable to make the following subdivisions: 1, the introduction of slavery, and its increase, 2, its internal policy; 3, the slave trade, foreign and domestic; 4 the suffrage clause and the slave power; and 5 slav
ery in the territories, including new states. The final abolition of slavery in each state, in the territories, and in the nation, is treated elsewhere. (See ABOLITION)

-I. INTRODUCTION OF SLAVERY, AND ITS INCREASE. When English colonization in North America began, Indian and negro slavery was already firmly established in the neighboring Spanish colonies; and from these, particularly from the West Indies, negro slavery was naturally and unconsciously introduced into the English colonies, the Barbadoes being the steppingstone for most of them. Nevertheless, the first authentic case of introduction was from an entirely different source. In August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war, temporarily in Virginia, landed fourteen negro slaves in exchange for provisions. This is the only colony in which a first case can be found. Everywhere else we find slavery, when first casually mentioned, an institution so long established as to have lost its novelty. In each of them there are three points to be noted: the first mention of slavery, its first regulation by law, and the establishment, by custom or positive law, of the civil law rule, partus sequitur ventrem, instead of the common law rule, partus sequitur patrem. The latter rule, making children take the condition of the father, was the natural rule for [726] English colonists, would have made negro slavery far more tolerable, and would have established a constant agent for its ultimate extinction, since any connection between a slave father and a free mother would have been comparatively rare. The former rule, that the children should take the condition of the mother, which was everywhere adopted by custom from the beginning, not only relieved the system from check, but even gave it an added horror, of which the variations in color among the inferior race are mute but indelible certificates. In summarizing the introduction of slavery into the original thirteen states, we will begin at Mason and Dixon’s line, going first southward, and then northward: its introduction into the new states and territories comes under the fifth subdivision.

-In Virginia the acts passed were at first for the mere regulation of servants, the legal distinction being between servants for a term of years (white immigrants under indentures), and servants for life (slaves). Dec. 14, 1662, the civil law rule, partus sequitur ventrem, was adopted by statute. Oct. 3, 1670, servants not Christians, imported by shipping, were declared slaves for their lives. Slavery was thus fully legalized in the colony.

-In Maryland slaves are first mentioned (slaves only excepted) in a proposed law of 1638. In 1663 the civil law rule was fully adopted by a provision that negroes or other slaves, then in the province or thereafter imported, should serve durante vita, and their children also.

-In Delaware the Swedes at first prohibited slavery, but it was introduced by the Dutch. It was in existence probably in 1636; but its first legal recognition was in 1721, in an act providing for the trial of negro and mulatto slaves by two justices and six freeholders. With this exception the system rested wholly on custom in Delaware.

-In Carolina, under the first union of the two provinces, the Locke constitution (see NORTH CAROLINA) provided practically for white slavery: the leetmen, or tenants of ten acres, were to be fixed to the soil under the jurisdiction of their lord without appeal; and the children of leetmen were to be leetmen, and so to all generations.

This provision, like most of the others, was never respected or obeyed. The 110th article provided that every freeman should have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves of what opinion or religion soever.

This met with more respect, and became the fundamental law of North Carolina without anything further than statutes for police regulation.

More about Slavery in the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States

-In South Carolina the first slavery legislation, an act of Feb. 7, 1690, for the better ordering of slaves, took place before the separation. Slaves are said to have been introduced by Gov. Yeamans about 1670. June 7, 1712, slavery was formally legalized by an act declaring all negroes and Indians, theretofore sold or thereafter to be sold, and their children, slaves to all intents and purposes.

The civil law rule was made law May 10, 1740. The police regulations of this colony were filled with cruel provisions, such as the gelding of a male slave who should run away for the fourth time; and yet an act was passed in 1704, and re-enacted in 1708, for enlisting and arming negro troops.

-In Georgia slavery was prohibited at the establishment of the colony, in 1732. In 1749, after repeated petitions from the colonists, the trustees obtained from parliament the repeal of the prohibition. In 1755 the legislature passed an act regulating the conduct of slaves; and in 1765 and subsequent years the laws of South Carolina were re-enacted by Georgia.

-In Pennsylvania slavery is first heard of in 1688, when Francis Daniel Pastorius drew up a memorial against the practice for the Germantown Quakers. It was not until 1696 that the Quaker yearly meeting was prepared to act favorably on the memorial. In 1700 the legislature forbade the selling of slaves out of the province without their consent. The other slavery legislation of the colony consisted of efforts, more or less successful, to check or abolish the slave trade; but, as soon as independence was fairly attained, arrangements were made for gradual abolition. So late as 1795, however, the state supreme court decided that slavery was not inconsistent with the state constitution.

-In New Jersey slavery was introduced by the Dutch, but was not recognized by law until the concessions of 1664 (see NEW JERSEY), in which the word slaves occurs. In East Jersey slaves were given trial by jury in 1694; and in West Jersey the word slave was omitted from the laws. Acts for regulating the conduct of slaves began with the junction of the province with New York, in 1702; but these were never harsh, and the condition of the slave was more tolerable than in any other colony where the system was really established.

-In New York slavery came in with the Dutch at an uncertain period, the Dutch West India company supplying the slaves. So early as 1628 the inhabitants were made nervous by the mutinous behavior of some of the slaves, but there was no legal recognition of slavery until 1665, when the duke of York’s laws forbade slavery of Christians, thus by implication allowing slavery of heathens. Full recognition was given by a proviso in the naturalization act of 1683, that it should not operate to free those held as slaves, and by an act of 1706, to allow baptism of slaves without freeing them.

-In Connecticut slavery was never directly established by statute, and the time of its introduction is uncertain. In 1680 the governor informed the board of trade, that, as for blacks, there come sometimes three or four in a year from Barbadoes, and they are sold usually at the rate of £22 apiece.

They were considered as servants, rather than as chattels, could sue their masters for ill treatment or deprivation of property, and the only legal recognition of slavery was in such police regulations as that of 1690, to check the wandering and running away of purchased negro servants.

-Rhode Island passed the first act for the abolition of slavery in our history, May 19, 1652. In order to check the common course practiced among Englishmen to buy negers (sic), the act freed all [727] slaves brought into the province after ten years’ service. Unfortunately, the act was never obeyed; custom was too strong for statute law, and existed without law until the final abolition. The only legal recognition of the system was in a series of acts, beginning Jan. 4, 1703, to control the wandering of Indian and negro slaves and servants, and a
nother, beginning in April, 1708, in which the slave trade was indirectly legalized by being taxed.

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-In Massachusetts a negro is mentioned in 1633 as an estray, conducted to his master.

In 1636 a Salem ship began the importation of negro slaves from the West Indies, and thereafter Peqnot slaves were constantly exchanged for Barbadoes negroes. In 1641 the fundamental laws forbade slavery, with the following cautious proviso:

unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars [Pequots], and such strangers as willingly sell themselves [probably indentured white immigrants] or are sold to us [negroes].

The explanations inserted will show that this was the first legal recognition of slavery in any colony. Under it slavery grew slowly, and the rule of partus sequitur ventrem was established by custom and court decisions. Public sentiment, after the year 1700, was slowly developed against the system. In December, 1766, a jury gave a negro woman £4 damages against her master for restraining her of her liberty. John Adams notes at the time that this was the first case of the kind he had known, though he heard that there had been many. In 1768 another case was decided for the master, and thereafter the decisions of juries varied to every point of the compass for twenty years; but it is known that many of the cases in which the slaves were successful were gained by connivance of the masters, in order to relieve themselves of the care of aged or infirm slaves. John Quincy Adams gives 1787 as the year in which the state supreme court finally decided, that, under the constitution of 1780, a man could not be sold in Massachusetts.

-In New Hampshire there were but two legal recognitions of slavery, an act of 1714 to regulate the conduct of Indian, negro and mulatto servants and slaves; and another in 1718 to regulate the conduct of masters. There were but few slaves in the colony, and slavery had but a nominal existence.

-Vermont never recognized slavery. (See ABOLITION, I.)

-From all the cases it will be seen that slavery was the creature of custom. The only exceptions are a peculiar provision in the law of Maryland (1663) and Pennsylvania (1725-6) making the children of free-born mothers and slave fathers slaves to their father’s master until the age of thirty; and the laws in a few states re-enslaving freedmen who refused or neglected to leave the state. This latter provision was the law of Virginia from 1705, and was put into the state constitution in 1850; and laws fully equivalent were passed during their state existence by North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In the white heat of the antislavery struggle, laws were passed by Virginia in 1856, by Louisiana in 1859, and by Maryland in 1860, providing for the voluntary enslavement of free negroes; but these were exceptional. Milder provisions, to the same general effect, to punish by fine or sale the coming or remaining of free negroes in the state, were inserted in the constitution of Missouri in 1820, of Texas in 1836 (as a republic). of Florida in 1838, of Kentucky in 1850, of Indiana in 1851, and of Oregon in 1857. (See the states named.) The most troublesome to the northern states were the regulations of the seaboard slave states, under which negro seamen of northern vessels were frequently imprisoned, and sometimes sold. In 1844 Massachusetts sent Samuel Hoar to Charleston to bring an amicable suit there for the purpose of testing the constitutionality of the South Carolina act. He was received in a very unfriendly fashion. The legislature passed resolutions requesting the governor to expel him from the state, and an act making any such mission a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and banishment. Finally, on receiving unequivocal assurances of personal violence if he remained, Mr. Hoar left Charleston without fulfilling his mission.

-However strongly custom may have established negro slavery in the colonies, it has been suggested that the validity of the system was at least made doubtful by the Sommersett case in England In that country, in 1677, the courts held negro slaves to be property, as being usually bought and sold among merchants as merchandise, and also being infidels.

In 1750 custom had so far changed that the law was again in doubt. In 1771 Charles Stewart, of Boston, took his slave James Sommersett to London, where the latter fell sick, and was sent adrift by his master. Stewart, afterward finding Sommersett recovered, reclaimed him and put him on a ship in the Thames, bound for Jamaica. Lord Mansfield issued a writ of habeas corpus, and decided, June 22, 1772, that the master could not compel his slave to leave England, whose laws did not recognize so high an act of dominion.

If the colonies, by charter and otherwise, were forbidden to pass laws contrary to the laws of England, and if the laws of England did not recognize slavery. was slavery legal in the colonies? It must be remembered that the Sommersett decision was not that the laws of England forbade slavery, but that there was no law in England establishing slavery. There was no attempt to make an English custom override an American custom, and we can not draw any attack on the American system of slavery out of the Sommersett case.

-The colonies, then, began their forcible struggle against the mother country with a system of negro slavery, recognized everywhere by law, moribund in the north, but full of vigor in the south. In the north, where there was a general consciousness that slavery was doomed, the slaves were generally regarded as servants for life, as persons whose personality was under suspension. In the south they were regularly regarded by the law and by private opinion as things, as chattels, with no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government [728] might choose to grant them, with all the consequences arising from the fact that they had not come to America voluntarily, as persons, but involuntarily, as property. In so far the Dred Scott decision correctly stated the feeling of our forefathers. But the feeling was in great measure a consequence of the unfortunate adoption of the rule partus sequitur rentrem: a race to which the rule was applied could be no other than animal, and a people among whom the rule prevailed could never be emancipated from the feeling. For this reason the revolutionary congress made no attempt to interfere with slavery, except in regard to the slave trade, to be referred to hereafter. The state of war itself did little real harm to the system. In Virginia, Nov. 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore proclaimed freedom to all slaves who would fight for the king, and negro soldiers were enlisted by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. South Carolina refused to follow the recommendation of congress, in 1779, to enlist 3,000 negro troops. A return of the continental army, Aug. 24, 1778, shows 755 negro soldiers, not including the New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut or New York troops. At the end of the war Rhode Island, New York and Virginia freed their negro soldiers, but the system remained as before. The treaty of peace bound the British not to carry away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants; and this collocation of terms is repeated in the treaty of Ghent in 1814. All through the period of the confederation, slavery received no detriment, except in the action of individual states (see ABOLITION, I.), and in its exclusion from the northwest territory, to be referred to hereafter. The states and the nation began their course under the constitution with the same general system as before, but with three modifications: the apportionment of representation to three-fifths of the slaves; the power of congress to prohibit the slave trade after 1808; and the fugitive slave clause. The first of these made the system of slavery itself a political factor, represente
d in the government; the third offered a tempting and dangerous weapon to use against an opposing section; and the second was the death warrant of the whole system in the double event of the acquisition of foreign territory and the development of antagonistic sections. They are therefore treated in special subdivisions.

-Until this time the difference in the slave systems of the north and of the south had been a difference of degree rather than of kind. The basis and the general laws were nominally the same everywhere; and there was a general agreement that the system was evil in itself, and that it was desirable to rid the country of it by gradual abolition. But, from the beginning, the masterful white race had found, in the colder north, that it was easier to do work for itself than to compel work from the black race, and, in the warmer south, that it was easier to compel work from the black race than to do the work for itself. In both sections the ruling race followed naturally the line of least resistance, and negro slavery increased in the south, and decreased in the north. The process may be seen in the number of slaves in the colonies north and south of Mason and Dixon’s line, as estimated by the royal governors in 1715, as estimated by congress in 1775, and as ascertained by the first census, in 1790, as follows. North, (1715) 10,900, (1775) 46,102, (1790) 40,370; South, (1715) 47,950, (1775) 455,000, (1790) 657,527. Before 1790 the two sections had begun to show the contrasting results of pushing, self-interested free labor on the one hand, and shiftless, unwilling slave labor on the other. Gouverneur Morris, in the convention of 1787, thus spoke of slavery at the time:

It was the curse of Heaven on the states where it prevailed. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery. The moment you leave the eastern states and enter New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys, and entering Pennsylvania, every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed southwardly, and every step you take through the great regions of slaves presents a desert, increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings.

Nor was the assertion denied by the southerners who heard it. George Mason, of Virginia, said:

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.

And Jefferson, in the same year, after detailing the evils of slavery, added.

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice can not sleep forever.

But this substantial agreement in sentiment was very soon to be broken by an event which entirely altered the paths of the two sections.

More about Slavery in the Cyclopaedia

-Few influences have so colored the history of the United States and of negro slavery as the inventions of 1775-93 in England and America. In 1775 Crompton’s invention of the mule jenny superseded Hargreaves’ spinning machine; in 1783 Watt’s steam engine was adapted to the spinning and carding of cotton at Manchester; in 1785 cylinder printing of cottons was invented; and in 1786-8 the use of acid in bleaching was begun. All the machinery of the cotton manufacture was thus standing ready for material. Very little had thus far come from the United States, for a slave could clean but five or six pounds a day for market. In 1784 an American ship which brought eight bags of cotton to Liverpool was seized on the ground that so much of the article could not be the produce of the United States; and Jay’s treaty (see that title) at [729] first consented that no cotton should be exported from America. In 1793 Eli Whitney, of Connecticut, then residing in Georgia, changed the history of the country by his invention of the saw-gin, by which one slave could cleanse 1,000 pounds of cotton from its seeds in a day. He was robbed of his invention, which the excited planters instantly appropriated; and slavery ceased to be a passive, patriarchal institution, and became a means of gain, to be upheld and extended by its beneficiaries. The export of cotton, which had fallen from 189,316 pounds in 1791 to 138,328 in 1792, rose to 487,600 in 1793, to 1,601,760 in 1794, to 6,276,300 in 1795, and to 38,118,041 in 1804. Within five years after Whitney’s invention cotton had displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the slave states had become the cotton field of the world. In 1839 the export was 1,386. 468,562 pounds, valued at $161,434,923, and the next largest export (tobacco) was valued at but $21,074,038. Was it wonderful that southerners should say and believe that cotton is king, and that secession could never be attacked by blockade, since the great commercial nations, even the free states themselves, would not thus allow themselves to be deprived of the raw material of manufacture? The reader may judge the reasonableness of the belief, and the magnitude of the temptations to English intervention, by the value of the English imports of cotton from the United States and elsewhere, 1861-3, and the coincident rise in price: imports from the United States, (1861) $132,851,995, (1862) $6,106,385, (1863) $2,300,000; from other countries, (1861) $65,034,990, (1862) $148,358,840, (1863) $213, 700,000; price per lb., (1861) 7 cents, (1862) 13_ cents, (1863) 27_ cents. From a purely commercial and agricultural venture the cotton culture had taken a different aspect. Those who controlled it felt very much the same importance as a man might feel who had gained control of the magazine of a man of war, and could threaten to blow up the whole ship if he should be interfered with in any way.

-This development of the culture of cotton was pregnant with consequences to both sections. In the north, manufactures and commerce were developed, and the remnants of slavery slid to extinction down a steeper and smoother descent. In the south, the price of slaves was steadily increasing, and the increased profit thus indicated was steadily stamping labor itself as slavery. It is not in financial matters alone that bad money drives out good: wherever slave labor was extended, it tended constantly to expel free labor from the market. Immigration shunned slave soil as if by instinct, and it was not long before the whole population of the slave states was divided into three great classes: the rich whites, who did no work; the poor whites, who knew not how to work; and the slaves, who only worked when compelled to work. The results on the economical development of the country may easily be imagined. No one was under any special incentive to work, to invent, or to surpass his neighbors; slaves, the only working class, could not be trusted to engage in any labor requiring care or thought; success in anything higher than the culture of cotton, tobacco or sugar, meant the inevitable freedom of the laborer; and long before 1850 southern shiftlessness had become chronic, hopeless and proverbial, even in the south. The reader who wishes for details will find them (from the census of 1850) in von Holst’s third volume, or in Sumner’s speech of June, 1860. as cited below; and an instructive description of affairs in 1860 is in Olmstead’s two volumes.

-Even on the culture of the soil the influence of the slave system was for evil. Only free labor can get large profits from a small surface, and the unwilling and unintelligent labor of slaves required so much larger area for its exercise that in 1850 there were to the square mile only 18.93 inhabitants in the southern st
ates to 45.8 in the northern states. Slavery, like Tacitus’ Germans, demanded empty acres all around it. In 1860 the acreage of improved to unimproved lands in Virginia was 11,437,821 to 19,679,215; in North Carolina, 6,517,824 to 17,245,685; in South Carolina, 4,572,060 to 11,623,859; and in Georgia, 8,062,758 to 18,587,732. The older slave states have been selected; in the new slave states the comparison is equally or more unfavorable. In the old free state of New York the comparison stood 14,358,403 improved to 6,616,555 unimproved; in the new free state of Illinois, 13,096,374 to 7,815,615. Of the free states, all but California, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin had more improved than unimproved land in farms; of the slave states, only Delaware and Maryland. The comparison of the price of lands is still more unfavorable to slavery, varying in such near neighbors as Pennsylvania and Virginia from $25 per acre in the former to $8 per acre in the latter. The average value of northern farms in 1860 was $29 an acre; of southern farms, $9.80. This constant necessity for elbow room for slave labor was the ground reason for its constant effort to stretch out after new territory. A planter’s policy was to take up as much land as possible, scratch the surface until his slaves could or would extract no more from it, and then search for virgin soil; for it was cheaper to pass the Mississippi, or invade Texas, than to cultivate a wornout farm with slave labor. Scientific agriculture, and the revivification of so-called worn-out farms, were never attempted until the overthrow of slavery; and, since they have begun, we hear no more of the need for new territory for cotton.

-The influence of slavery upon the section in which it existed was particularly evil in regard to the possibilities of warfare. Not only did it throttle commerce, manufactures, literature, art, everything which goes to make a people independent of the rest of the world: its influence in checking the natural increase of fighting men is plainly perceptible in the decennial census tables. Even when there is an apparent equality of numbers between the two sections, the equality is delusive, [730] so long as the southern scale is partly filled with a population not only non-combatant but actually to be distrusted as possibly hostile. For this reason, in the following table, taking separately the states which were free and slave in 1860, the population of the free states is given first, then the population of the slave states (excluding slaves), and finally the slaves.

Whatever causes may be assigned to explain the growing disproportion of free population and fighting men of the two sections, it is evident that the slave states were worse fitted at the end of each successive period for a forcible struggle with the free states, and that the sceptre was departing from the south.

-It is not proposed in this article to touch on the moral aspect of slavery, or the absurd Biblical arguments for and against it. the rigid application of the partus sequitur ventrem rule, combined with the material interests of the cotton monopoly, will absolutely distinguish negro slavery in the United States from every system that has preceded it. We may summarize the economical evils of the system, in those points which no one can dispute, in a few words. It paralyzed invention and commerce; it prevented manufactures and the general introduction of railroads, steam machinery, or improved agricultural implements; it degraded labor by white as well as by black men; it stunted all the energies of the people, and deprived them of those physical comforts which were regarded elsewhere as almost necessaries; it dwarfed the military ability of the people, at the same time that it increased the military ambition of the ruling class, and kept the poor whites so ignorant that to them their state was a universe, its will sovereign, and its power irresistible. Every year increased the pile of explosives in the southern territory, and yet the force of events compelled slavery to grow more aggressive as it grew really weaker for war. That a people so situated, with no resources of their own and with little power to draw from without, should have waged the final war as they did, is almost enough to hide in the glory of their defeat the evil thing that went down with them. The enormous strides of the southern states from 1870 until 1880 show what the same people can do under free labor, and nearly all southern writers are agreed that the south was the greatest gainer by the overthrow of slavery. President Haygood, of Georgia, in a thanksgiving sermon of 1880, says:

For one illustration, take the home life of our people. There is ten times the comfort there was twenty years ago. Travel through your own country-and it is rather below than above the average-by any public or private road. Compare the old and the new houses. Those built recently are better in every way than those built before the war. I do not speak of an occasional mansion that in the old times lifted itself proudly among a score of cabins, but of the thousands of decent farm houses and comely cottages that have been built in the last ten years. I know scores whose new barns are better than their old residences. Our people have better furniture. Good mattresses have largely driven out the old-time feathers. Cook stoves, sewing machines, with all such comforts and conveniences, may be seen in a dozen homes to-day where you could hardly have found them in one in 1860. Lamps, that make reading agreeable, have driven out the tallow dip, by whose glimmering no eyes could long read and continue to see. Better taste asserts itself: the new houses are painted; they have not only glass, but blinds. There is more comfort inside. There are luxuries where once there were not conveniences. Carpets are getting to be common among the middle classes. There are parlor organs, pianos and pictures where we never saw them before. And so on, to the end of a long chapter. There are more people at work in the south to-day than were ever at work before; and they are raising not only more cotton, but more of everything else. And no wonder, for the farming of to-day is better than the farming of the old days, first, in better culture, second, in the ever-increasi

Author of this text: Alexander Johnston.

Slavery in 1899 (United States)

The following information about Slavery is from the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers.

SLAVERY is the right of property of one man in another man, in his family, in his posterity, and in the products of his labor.

-There is no injustice more revolting than slavery, and yet there is no fact so widespread in history. Hence slavery is as old as war, in which it had its origin. Both slavery and war are inexplicable in the eyes of philosophy, if we do not admit, with Christianity, an immemorial perturbation among the members of the human family.

-In antiquity the system of labor was everywhere slavery. It was found in Rome, in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria, in Gaul, among the Germans, and, it is said, even among the Scythians; it was recruited by war, by voluntary sale, by captivity for debt, and then by inheritance. It was not everywhere cruel, and in patriarchal life it was scarcely distinguishable from domestic service; in some countries, however, it approached the service of beasts of burden; the brutal insensibility with which Aristotle and Varro spoke of slaves is revolting; and the manner in which they were treated by the laws is even more so. These men, who were of the same race, who had the same intellect, and the same color as their
owners, were declared incapable of holding property, of appealing to the law, of defending themselves; in a word, of demeaning themselves like men in any of the circumstances of life. Only the law of the Hebrew people tempered servitude by humanity. Doubtless, we might quote certain words of Euripides or of Terence, of Epictetus or of Seneca, colored with a more tender pity and evincing some heart; we find also both in Greek and Roman laws, on the monuments, and in the inscriptions and epitaphs which our contemporaries have so carefully studied; we find, I say, in these the proof that the granting of freedom to slaves, in individual cases, was frequent, and that it was inspired, especially at the moment of death, by religious motives. But the brutal fact of slavery is incontestable. The evil outweighed the good in an enormous measure; servitude remained from century to century, from country to country, during all antiquity, the universal fact, and the legitimateness of servitude the universal doctrine.

-To the rare and barren protests of a few noble souls, Christianity finally added the power of its mighty voice. The brotherhood of men, the dignity of labor, the absolute duty of perfection: with these three principles, clothed with the authority of God himself, the human race entered a new phase, commenced the great battle of good against evil, and, little by little, forced back the scourges which, in the past, had reigned with undivided supremacy. Servitude was destined to be among the vanquished, but it was not without a long and grievous combat, which, at the present time, is not entirely terminated.

-The learned labors of M. Edouard Biot and M. Janoski warrant the affirmation that servitude had almost entirely disappeared in Christian Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth century; but it is only too well known that after the discovery of the new world, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the re-establishment of this odious institution in all the colonial possessions of the nations of Europe. What do I say? The most Christian kings of France, Spain and England did not blush to place their signature at the bottom of treaties intended to assure to them the monopoly of the sale and transportation of millions of human beings. An entire continent, Africa, became like a mine to be worked, charged with furnishing the other continents with the living merchandise, called in diplomatic acts a ton of negroes, just as we say a ton of charcoal.

-To the nineteenth century belongs the honor of waging against servitude a war which is not yet ended, but which has been distinguished, however, by remarkable victories. The revolution is complete as far as ideas are concerned. Morality spoke first, and all the sciences, little by little, came to agree with it. Philosophy gives to all slaves a soul equal to our own, which Aristotle, perhaps, refused to them. Physiology declares blacks and whites, despite important differences, to be members of the same family. History no longer discovers between slave owners and slaves the trace of any legitimate conquest. The law does not recognize any validity of a pretended [723] contract which has no title, the object of which is illicit, and one of the parties to which is not a free agent, and the other party to which is without good faith. Ethnology lifts to the dignity of a beautiful law the radical difference which places in the first rank the races which labor, like the European, and in the last rank the races who make others work for them, like the Turks. Political economy affirms the superiority of free labor to forced labor, and it condemns everything which deprives man of the family. Politics and charity, from different points of view, accept the same conclusion: charity, more tender, detests slavery because it oppresses the inferior race; politics, more lofty, condemns it, above all, because it corrupts the superior race. Thus the revolution above referred to, complete in the order of ideas, is far from being complete in the order of facts.

-At the beginning of the present century England possessed nearly 800,000 slaves, scattered among nineteen colonies, to wit: more than 300,000 in Jamaica, 80,000 in the Barbadoes, 80,000 in Guiana, more than 60,000 in Mauritius, and the rest in the little colonies of Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua, St. Vincent, etc. France, in her colonies of the Antilles, Bourbon, Guiana and Senegal, had 250,000 slaves. There were 27,000 in the little colonies of Denmark, and about 600 in the island of St. Bartholomew, belonging to Sweden. Holland, which knew how to avoid servile labor in Java, preserved more than 50,000 slaves at Surinam and Curaçoa. But these figures are trifling, compared to the number of the enslaved population of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, which amounted to at least 600,000 slaves; of Brazil, which is more than 2,000,000; and of the United States, which, before the American civil war, had 4,000,000 slaves.

More about Slavery in the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States

-France was the first to give the signal for the liberation of slaves, a liberation which unfortunately was sudden, violent, and did not last. In 1790-91 the constituent assembly, after much hesitation, admitted free people of color in the colonies to the rights of citizenship. The whites resisted, and when the convention tried to have the decree executed, the conflict between the blacks and whites led to the massacres which have been so falsely attributed to the emancipation of the slaves, proclaimed only at the end of 1793, and confirmed by the decree of Feb. 4, 1794, by which the convention decreed with enthusiasm the abolition of slavery in all French colonies. The result of the maritime wars was, to the colonies, disorder or conquest. At the same time, in the mother country, a reaction, aided by glory, carried men beyond the necessities of order. The year 1802, which witnessed the concordat, the life consulate, the peace of Amiens, the legion of honor, and the university, witnessed also the restoration of slavery and even the slave trade by the law of the 30th floreal, year X.

-Commenced with more wisdom, and conducted with more perseverance, the movement of emancipation in England naturally triumphed more promptly than in France. In 1102 a council held in the city of London, under the presidency of St. Anselm, forbade the slave trade. In 1763 an odious treaty assured to England, on the other hand, the monopoly of this traffic. In 1773 a generous Christian, William Wilberforce, first wrote against this public scandal. In 1780 Thos. Clarkson proposed its abolition to parliament, and in 1787 Wilberforce renewed the proposition, which, after having been seven times presented and seven times rejected, finally triumphed in 1806, and became, at the congress of Vienna, a solemn engagement of all the European powers (Declaration of Feb 4, 1815), which was followed by laws promulgated by each of these nations. May 15, 1823, Mr. Buxton proposed the abolition of slavery in all the English colonies. After long hesitation, the act of abolition presented in 1833, in the name of the government, by Lord Stanley, was promulgated Aug. 28, 1833. This memorable law, which devoted £500,000,000 to the ransom of 800,000 men, did not, however, accord them liberty until after an apprenticeship, which was to last from Aug. 1, 1834, to Aug. 1, 1840; but this uncertain system could not be maintained. Lord Brougham proposed its abolition in 1838, and the colonial legislatures spontaneously decreed complete emancipation in the years 1838 and 1839.

-At the same time, 1838, M. Passy proposed to the French chambers a bill with the same end in view, and in 1840 a commission was charged, under the presidency of the duke de Broglie, to prepare the way for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. At the same time, also, 1839, Pope Gregory XVI. published a bull, condemning slavery and the slave trade. The report of M. de Broglie is celebrated; we may call
it a judgment by a court of last resort, which, for the most elevated, decisive and practical reasons, condemned slavery forever. However, the sentence was not executed on account of the hesitation of the government and the resistance of the colonies. Slavery was not abolished in the colonies of France until after the revolution of February, by the decree of March 4, 1848, which M. Schoelcher had the honor of proposing.

-The result of emancipation in the French colonies was the liberation of the slaves in the Danish colonies, proclaimed July 3, 1848. Sweden had set the example of liberation as early as 1846.

-We here give a résumé of the economic and moral results of emancipation in the colonies of England and in those of France. Before emancipation, the colonies of the West Indies produced 3,640,000 quintals of sugar. These figures had sunk during the apprenticeship to 3,480,000 quintals, and after the liberation to 2,600,000. In 1848 the production was 3,795,311 quintals; in 1852, 3,376,000; and in 1858, 3,499,171. The emancipation of the slaves was followed by a diminution in production and an increase in prices, but also in wages; the result of commercial freedom was an increase in production and a diminution in prices, but also in wages. Twenty years after these two great trials the old figures were reached, the net cost was diminished, and if certain isolated [724] colonies suffer still while others prosper, there is no one in England who could have foreseen that two such radical experiments would not be followed by more disastrous and more prolonged consequences.

-Let us dwell a little further on the colonies of France. Despite a triple trial, the emancipation of the slaves, competition in the mother country and a radical revolution, the general movement of affairs of the French colonies was not lowered beyond one-half, while it was lowered more than a quarter so far as all the business transactions of France during the first period of five years were concerned; after another five years, the figures prior to emancipation were very slightly surpassed at Guadaloupe, nearly half at Guiana, more than a quarter at Martinique, and more than a half at Réunion.

-If we look only at production, after 1854, the figures prior to 1848 were surpassed, even for sugar, excepting at Guiana, which was transformed into a colony of consumption. The increase is in slow progress at Guadaloupe, important at Martinique, and extraordinary at Réunion. Wages are very little higher, the price of sale and renting of lands has increased, credit is more easy, thanks to the banks; new resources of credit and laws which permit the importation of cereals, rice, and also of machinery, arrive opportunely with the reduction of the customs duties; the price of sale is higher, the movement of ships has increased one-third, at the same time that the material and methods of manufacture have been changed. To the honor of liberty and that of the colonists, be it said, that, since emancipation, they have courageously made up their minds what to do; they have ceased to sigh, and begun to act. At Réunion tools have been changed, methods of processes improved, and the revenue from colonist settlements doubled; there is no hesitation in hiring a laborer for five years at double the price received at London for the importation of 6,000 coolies; those who bought with colonist settlements in 1848 have realized enormous fortunes, progress has followed wealth, and the general exposition of agriculture in 1862 showed sugar from Reunion which did not need to be refined. In the Antilles people are no longer contented with cursing the indigenous sugar refineries; they imitate them; central refineries have been established where, in 1874, the produce from sugar cane rose from 5 to 18 per cent., and there is hope of still further improvement; machinery and manuring were introduced, drainage has been tried, patents are taken out, landed credit is demanded, agricultural credit is used, free trade is called for; in a word, those routine and ruinous traditions which are the sad accompaniments of slavery are being departed from; and an endeavor is being made to realize these first four conditions of all economic progress: the perfecting of processes, abundance of hands, facility for credit, and the widening of the market.

-As far as the moral order is concerned, all the results of the English experiment may be summed up in the words of Lord Stanley, in 1842, which were substantially as follows: There has been progress in industrious habits, improvement in the social and religious system, and development in individuals of those qualities of heart and mind which are more necessary to happiness than the material goods of life. The negroes are happy and contented, they devote themselves to labor, they have bettered their way of living, increased their well-being, and, while crime has diminished, moral habits have become better. The number of marriages has increased. Under the influence of the ministers of religion, education has become more widespread. In short, the result of the great experiment of emancipation tried upon the whole of the population of the West Indies has surpassed the most ardent hopes.

-In the French colonies, 40,000 marriages, 20,000 legitimate children, 30,000 acknowledged children, the population resuming a regular course and increase, the churches filled, the schools attended; at Guadaloupe and Martinique, 20,000 adults at the night schools; at Réunion, 23 societies of mutual aid among the freedmen, crimes against the person diminished (at least until the arrival of immigrants), justice and the clergy improved, peace maintained with garrisons less strong than before 1848: such are the gifts presented to French colonial society by the emancipation of its slaves.

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-It would be too long to show in detail, year by year, the economic and moral results of emancipation, since they became complicated by reason of the effect of political events and attempts at commercial liberty in France. Let it suffice to affirm that civilization has gained much, that wealth has lost little, that its losses have been repaired and more than repaired, at least in all the colonies in which the new régime has been accepted in good faith; finally, that the call of a million men to liberty, in distant lands, did not cause the tenth part of the trouble occasioned in the more civilized nations of Europe by the least important political question.

-European nations quickly understood that the slave trade would never be completely abolished unless slavery itself was suppressed. Unfortunately, the United States of America did not understand this as quickly. The illustrious founders of the Union, fearing a dissolution of it at the very moment of its formation, and hoping, that to suppress the evil it would be sufficient to dry up its source, limited themselves to inserting in the constitution that the slave trade should be prohibited, beginning with the year 1808. As far as slavery was concerned, they had the weakness not even to mention its name, leaving to each state the task of ridding itself of the institution of slavery, which, at that period, was very little developed. In Washington’s time, there were scarcely 700,000 slaves within the whole extent of the United States. Washington freed his own slaves by will, and we know from his correspondence with Lafayette that he busied himself with plans of emancipation. Many of the northern states successively freed their slaves; but the progress of the cultivation of cotton, the cession of Louisiana, the purchase of Florida and the conquest of Texas [725] had not been foreseen. Sixty years after Washington’s time, the American republic had advanced with giant steps, slavery had grown with it, and the southern states contained 4,000,000 of enslaved blacks. A fact so enormous, so abnormal, produced in the bosom of the Union a profound perturbation. Not only did honor and morality suffer therefrom, but a terrible division took pl
ace between the north, which controlled the commerce, the shipping and the tariff of the Union, and the south, which, previous to the American civil war, controlled politics, the congress, and the laws of the Union. Without relating the long and lamentable history of this conflict, without speaking of the fugitive slave law, of the territorial question, of the debates on the right of search, of the projects for an invasion of Cuba, finally of all the electoral struggles for the presidency, let us recall that the question of slavery had become in 1856, and again in 1860, the sole stumbling block of the general elections. In 1856 the south triumphed for the last time in the person of Mr. Buchanan; in 1860 the north bore away the victory in the person of Abraham Lincoln, and the southern states immediately revolted, and declared war. This formidable war had the character of a war of independence; the north fought for the constitution, the south to obtain its autonomy. But for what purpose did the south thus wish to separate itself from a glorious nation? In order to perpetuate, maintain and extend slavery, and to have no more uneasiness as to the fate of that institution which its publicists dared to call the best system of labor. The north was led by circumstances to strike at the very root of the war, by attacking slavery. In its session of 1862, congress successively adopted: 1st, emancipation in the District of Columbia; 2d, the recognition of the republics of Hayti and Liberia; 3d, the measures proposed by the president for gradual emancipation in the states and immediate emancipation in the rebel states, beginning Jan. 1, 1863. We know that the defeat of the south assured the definitive abolition of slavery in the United States. Slavery having disappeared in North America, its foundations were necessarily shaken in South America. The republics separated from Spain have abolished it. Holland delivered its American colonies from slavery by a law of Aug. 8, 1862, and a law of December, 1871, paved the way for its suppression in Brazil.

-This rapid review is confined to Christian countries. In Mohammedan and pagan countries, slavery exists almost everywhere; here more patriarchal, there more barbarous; maintained in the bosom of Africa by perpetual wars and a pitiless traffic. A Mohammedan sovereign, the bey of Tunis, however, abolished slavery in his states, even before France, in 1847; but the scourge of slavery will evidently never disappear from pagan nations, except from contact with, and the example of, Christian nations. We may hope that the nineteenth century will see servitude disappear; this would be its principal glory. The condition precedent to the disappearance of slavery is the persevering accord of all opinions, of all creeds, of all nations, that it should be abolished, and this accord is now an accomplished fact. (See SLAVERY, in U. S. History.)

Author of this text: Augustin Cochin.

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