It hinders the education of the people. Look at this. In 1850, the South had but 18,000 public schools, the North, 62,000; the South had 19,000 teachers, the North 73,000; the South had 700,000 pupils in schools, academies and colleges, the North 2,900,000—2,200,000 more than all the South. In 1854, Virginia paid $70,000 for educating her poor; $73,000 for a Public Guard to keep the slaves from rising up and saying, Sic semper tyrannis. One day $73,000,000 will not do it. Sic semper tyrannis will be the slave's motto as it is his master's now.
Out of a white population of less than 6,000,000, the South has 500,000 native white inhabitants who cannot read the word Buchanan; while out of a white population of 13,500,000, the North has not quite a quarter of a million natives who cannot read the New Testament all through and the Declaration of Independence besides.
Whence come the practical inventions patented at Washington? Eleven-twelfths of them come from a Northern brain, and the one-twelfth which has emanated from the Southern mind is hardly worth the parchment which records it.
Whence comes the literature of the nation—its histories, essays, romances, poems, plays, great sermons? All from the North. For fifty years the South has not produced a great writer who has even a national reputation; no historian, no philosopher, no poet, no moralist, even no preacher.
Whence comes the nation's science? From the same quarter. Yet I do know two eminent men of science of whom Virginia may well be proud that she gave them birth, as Massachusetts that she gave them each a home; but their parents were Scotch, married in Scotland; the children were only born in Virginia. It was the Scotch egg of freedom which was brooded over only in the Virginia nest of slaveholders—and it was not a slaveholder which brooded that.
Slavery strikes the Southern mind with palsy; the people cannot be educated there. Talent enough, no doubt, is born there; it cannot be bred. If the star of genius stands still over a southern home, yet the “desire of all nations,” whose birth it heralds, is stifled by the asses that bray around the young child's cradle, and seek its life.
