“Do you mean, that if the Southampton
negroes come here, you will join them?“
“Yes, massa.“
The master was broken-hearted. The earth had yawned under his feet, and swallowed up all his hope and confidence. A new period, how- ever, was opening, though he and all others were unaware of it. The Southampton rising was the last for a quarter of a century: and the one which occurred in 1857 was induced if not imagined by the slave-holders. Their political orators had expatiated in public on the certainty of abolition if Colonel Fremont became President, so as to excite great agitation among the negroes: but it was not a planned insurrection.
In 1832, four men, citizens of Massachusetts, met in a poor garret, and sat with their feet upon a wood-pile, resolving that slavery, the curse of their country, should be abolished: and to work they went, in a peaceable way, to enlighten public opinion. Their opening appeal, in the first number of their newspaper, is a historical document which will move the souls of future generations. Up to that time, nothing had been done in the direction of emancipation, since the northern States had freed their slaves; though one measure had been attempted for expatriating troublesome negroes to Africa. From 1832 onwards, there was a manifest improvement in the material treatment of slaves, from the eyes of the nation and the world being directed upon their condition. In some States there were relaxations in their favour; in others, fresh restrictions on their liberties. But hope had now arisen among them: and the immediate consequence was a truce to insurrection. They believed that more could be done for them by their friends in the free States than they could do for themselves, and they waited — except those who could get away. They brought up their children in the knowledge of the north star, which was to guide them some day to the free land of Canada. More and more escaped every year, till an agency was established — called the Under- ground Railroad — by which fugitive slaves were succoured and forwarded to Canada. This was not the business of the abolitionist body; because that body contends with the vicious principle of slavery by means of opinion only; but there were always friends along the lines taken by fugitives. From the increase of escapes, and the growth of opinion, arose legislation in Congress. In 1832, it was said by the leading statesmen there that the subject of slavery would never be heard of in Congress. It was all but excluded from the constitution (entirely so in words), and so it would ever be from Congress. Before twenty years had passed, there was never a debate in Congress which did not issue in some discussion of slavery; and then ensued the passage of laws — the Fugitive Slave Law, for one— which are declared unconstitutional by so many of the citizens that there can be no rest while they are enforced. Several States have repudiated them by their own legislation — by personal liberty laws irreconcileable with those of Congress. The impending question is, in fact, whether the ob- I noxious laws which force the defence of slavery on the whole nation shall be nullified by slavery ceasing to be a national institution; or whether the free States shall compel the slave States to abolish slavery altogether.
Of late, however, a great change has been working, opening a new prospect to all parties. While the politicians were busy, the friends of free labour were obtaining a better position for the negro in society. There were always free negroes who were rich and educated, and their number has greatly increased. The common schools of Massachusetts are now open to children of all complexions, without distinction. Many churches, railway carriages, and hotels are now open also. The free blacks hold annual conven- tions, at which they organise their opposition to all schemes for inducing them to leave their coun- try, on any pretence whatever, while there is a slave of their race on its soil
While these people have been rising, the slaveholders have been sinking in fortunes. Their whole number, according to the census returns, is 350,000, out of the 27,000,000 of the population. Seven-tenths of the white population of the slave States are persons too poor to hold slaves, and for the most part descendants of old familie« once prosperous. A most singular conflict has begun between these two classes of white residents.
Various incidents, and particularly the publication of a remarkable book,* have aroused the “poor whites“ — or “mean whites,” as they are locally called — to a sense of their wretched condition: and their first idea was, naturally, that it was hard that the possession of slaves should be monopolised by a very few planters — an exceedingly small aristocracy. Hence the recent cry for the re-opening of the African slave-trade. At the same time, it has been found impossible to obtain in any direction the new soil which is necessary to the maintenance of slavery. In the south- west, not only does a desert without water come up to the frontier line of Texas, but in Texas itself the free labour of Germans and other intelligent cultivators is gaining largely on slave- labour by being more profitable. The attempt to introduce slavery into Kansas has more than failed: it has prepared Missouri for emancipation. All this makes the slaveholders more tenacious than ever of their monopoly; and to preserve it they are actually joining political forces with Northern parties to obtain an anti-slavery President at the next election. They oppose the slave- trade: they give up the idea of new territory; and they desire a President who shall be in favour of confining the institution within its present bounds, as to both space and numbers.
But the frontier States — those which border on the free States — ask what they are to do, now that thousands of slaves are escaping from them and through them, and that they are sure of being the sufferers in any conflict between their neighbours on either hand. Some have long been selling away their negroes to the extreme South; some have tried the plan of oppressing the free blacks, and either expatriating or enslaving them, because their very presence prepares men’s minds
- Helper’s “Impending Crisis of the South.”
