Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  influences that come over them! In Vermont or Maine, the

  children have the means of education at hand in public schools,

  and they have all around them in society avenues of success that

  require only industry to make them available. The boys have

  their choice among all the different trades, for which the or-

  ganisation of free society makes a steady demand. The girls,

  animated by the spirit of the land in which they are born, think

  useful labour no disgrace, and find, with true female ingenuity,

  a hundred ways of adding to the family stock. If there be one

  member of a family in whom diviner gifts and higher longings

  seem to call for a more finished course of education, then cheer-

  fully the whole family unites its productive industry to give that

  one the wider education which his wider genius demands; and

  thus have been given to the world such men as Roger Sherman

  and Daniel Webster.

  But take this same family and plant them in South Carolina

  or Virginia--how different the result! No common school

  opens its doors to their children; the only church, perhaps, is

  fifteen miles off, over a bad road. The whole atmosphere of

  the country in which they are born associates degradation and

  slavery with useful labour; and the only standard of gentility

  is ability to live without work. What branch of useful labour

  opens a way to its sons? Would he be a blacksmith?--The

  planters around him prefer to buy their blacksmiths in Virginia.

  Would he be a carpenter?--Each planter in his neighbourhood

  owns one or two now. And so coopers and masons. Would

  he be a shoemaker?--The plantation-shoes are made in Lynn

  and Natick, towns of New England. In fact, between the free

  labour of the North and the slave labour of the South, there

  is nothing for a poor white to do. Without schools or churches,

  these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil,

  in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are

  the pest of the neighbourhood, the scoff and contempt or pity

  even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the

  mouths of the negroes, of “poor white trash,” says all for this

  luckless race of beings that can be said. From this class

  spring a tribe of keepers of small groggeries, and dealers, by

  a kind of contraband trade, with the negroes, in the stolen

  produce of plantations. Thriving and promising sons may

  perhaps hope to grow up into negro-traders, and thence be

  exalted into overseers of plantations. The utmost stretch of

  ambition is to compass money enough, by any of a variety of

  nondescript measures, to “buy a nigger or two,” and begin to

  appear like other folks. Woe betide the unfortunate negro

  man or woman, carefully raised in some good religious family,

  when an execution or the death of their proprietors throws

  them into the market, and they are bought by a master and

  mistress of this class! Oftentimes the slave is infinitely the

  superior, in every respect--in person, manners, education, and

  morals; but, for all that, the law guards the despotic authority

  of the owner quite as jealously.

  From all that would appear, in the case of Souther, which

  we have recorded, he must have been one of this class. We

  have certain indications in the evidence that the two white

  witnesses, who spent the whole day in gaping, unresisting

  survey of his diabolical proceedings, were men of this order.

  It appears that the crime alleged against the poor victim was

  that of getting drunk and trading with these two very men,

  and that they were sent for probably by way of showing them

  “what a nigger would get by trading with them.” This

  circumstance at once marks them out as belonging to that band

  of half-contraband traders who spring up among the mean

  whites, and occasion owners of slaves so much inconvenience

  by dealing with their hands. Can any words so forcibly show

  what sort of white men these are, as the idea of their standing

  in stupid, brutal curiosity, a whole day, as witnesses in such

  a hellish scene?

  Conceive the misery of the slave who falls into the hands

  of such masters! A clergyman, now dead, communicated to

  the writer the following anecdote:--In travelling in one of the

  Southern States, he put up for the night in a miserable log

  shanty, kept by a man of this class. All was dirt, discomfort,

  and utter barbarism. The man, his wife, and their stock of

  wild, neglected children, drank whiskey, loafed, and predo-

  minated over the miserable man and woman who did all the

  work and bore all the caprices of the whole establishment. He

  --the gentleman--was not long in discovering that these slaves

  were in person, language, and in every respect, superior to their

  owners; and all that he could get of comfort in this miserable

  abode was owing to their ministrations. Before he went away,

  they contrived to have a private interview, and begged him to

  buy them. They told him that they had been decently brought

  up in a respectable and refined family, and that their bondage

  was therefore the more inexpressibly galling. The poor crea-

  tures had waited on him with most assiduous care, tending his

  horse, brushing his boots, and anticipating all his wants, in the

  hope of inducing him to buy them. The clergyman said that

  he never so wished for money as when he saw the dejected

  visages with which they listened to his assurances that he was

  too poor to comply with their desires.

  This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern

  States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs.

  Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some

  blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly

  over everything in its way.

  Singular as it may appear, though slavery is the cause of the

  misery and degradation of this class, yet they are the most

  vehement and ferocious advocates of slavery.

  The reason is this: They feel the scorn of the upper classes,

  and their only means of consolation is in having a class below

  them, whom they may scorn in turn. To set the negro at

  liberty would deprive them of this last comfort; and accord-

  ingly no class of men advocate slavery with such frantic and

  unreasoning violence, or hate abolitionists with such demoniac

  hatred. Let the reader conceive of a mob of men as brutal and

  callous as the two white witnesses of the Souther tragedy, led

  on by men like Souther himself, and he will have some idea of

  the materials which occur in the worst kind of Southern mobs.

  The leaders of the community, those men who play on other

  men with as little care for them as a harper plays on a harp,

  keep this blind furious monster of the mob, very much as an

  overseer keeps plantation-dogs, as creatures to be set on to any

  man or thing whom they may choose to have put down.

  These leading men have used the cry of “abolitionism” over

  the mob, much as a huntsman uses the “s
et on” to his dogs.

  Whenever they have a purpose to carry, a man to put down,

  they have only to raise this cry, and the monster is wide awake,

  ready to spring wherever they shall send him.

  Does a minister raise his voice in favour of the slave?--Im-

  mediately, with a whoop and hurra, some editor starts the mob

  on him, as an abolitionist. Is there a man teaching his negroes

  to read?--The mob is started upon him--he must promise to

  give it up or leave the State. Does a man at a public hotel-

  table express his approbation of some anti-slavery work?--Up

  come the police, and arrest him for seditious language;* and on

  the heels of the police, thronging round the justice's office, come

  the ever-ready mob--men with clubs and bowie-knives, swear-

  ing that they will have his heart's blood. The more respectable

  citizens in vain try to compose them; it is quite as hopeful to

  reason with a pack of hounds, and the only way is to smuggle

  the suspected person out of the State as quickly as possible.

  All these are scenes of common occurrence at the South. Every

  Southern man knows them to be so, and they know, too, the

  reason why they are so; but, so much do they fear the monster,

  that they dare not say what they know.

  This brute monster sometimes gets beyond the power of his

  masters, and then results ensue most mortifying to the patriot-

  ism of honourable Southern men, but which they are powerless

  to prevent. Such was the case when the Honourable Senator

  Hoar, of Massachusetts, with his daughter, visited the city of

  Charleston. The senator was appointed by the sovereign State

  of Massachusetts to inquire into the condition of her free coloured

  citizens detained in South Carolina prisons. We cannot sup-

  pose that men of honour and education, in South Carolina, can

  contemplate without chagrin the fact that this honourable gen-

  tleman, the representative of a sister State, and accompanied by

  his daughter, was obliged to flee from South Carolina, because

  they were told that the constituted authorities would not be

  powerful enough to protect them from the ferocities of a mob.

  This is not the only case in which this mob power has escaped

  from the hands of its guiders, and produced mortifying results.

  The scenes of Vicksburg, and the succession of popular whirl-

  winds which at that time flew over the South-western States,

  have been forcibly painted by the author of “The White Slave.”

  They who find these popular outbreaks useful when they serve

  their own turns are sometimes forcibly reminded of the conse-

  quences--

  Of letting rapine loose, and murder,

  To go just so far, and no further;

  And setting all the land on fire,

  To burn just so high, and no higher.

  The statements made above can be substantiated by various

  documents--mostly by the testimony of residents in slave

  States, and by extracts from their newspapers.

  Concerning the class of poor whites, Mr. William Gregg,

  of Charleston, South Carolina, in a pamphlet called “Essays

  on Domestic Industry, or an Inquiry into the expediency of

  establishing Cotton Manufactories in South Carolina, 1845,”

  says, p. 22:--

  Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people

  among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starva-

  tion? Many a one is reared in proud South Carolina, from birth to manhood,

  who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been

  stinted for meat. Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are

  but scantily provided with bread, and much more scantily with meat; and, if they

  be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowances

  of food. These may be startling statements, but they are nevertheless true; and

  if not believed in Charleston, the members of our legislature who have traversed

  the State in electioneering campaigns can attest the truth.

  The Rev. Henry Duffner, D.D., President of Lexington Col-

  lege, Va., himself a slaveholder, published in 1847 an address

  to the people of Virginia, showing that slavery is injurious to

  public welfare, in which he shows the influence of slavery in

  producing a decrease of the white population. He says:--

  It appears that in ten years, from 1830 to 1840, Virginia lost by emigra-

  tion no fewer than 375,000 of her people; of whom East Virginia lost

  304,000, and West Virginia 71,000. At this rate, Virginia supplies the West,

  every ten years, with a population equal in number to the population of the State

  of Mississippi in 1840.***She has sent--or, we should rather

  say, she has driven--from her soil at least one-third of all the emigrants who have

  gone from the old States to the new. More than another third have gone from

  the other old slave States. Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave

  States, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of

  the West. These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who

  found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them.

  It is a truth, a certain truth, that slavery drives free labourers--farmers, mechanics

  and all, and some of the best of them too--out of the country, and fills their places

  with negroes.***Even the common mechanical trades do not

  flourish in a slave State. Some mechanical operations must, indeed, be performed

  in every civilised country; but the general rule in the South is to import from

  abroad every fabricated thing that can be carried in ships, such as household furni-

  ture, boats, boards, laths, carts, ploughs, axes, and axe-helves; besides innumerable

  other things, which free communities are accustomed to make for themselves.

  What is most wonderful is, that the forests and iron mines of the South supply, in

  great part, the materials out of which these things are made. The Northern

  freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and pig-iron, work them up,

  supply their own wants with a part, and then sell the rest at a good profit in the

  Southern markets. Now, although mechanics, by setting up their shops in the

  South, could save all these freights and profits, yet, so it is, that Northern me-

  chanics will not settle in the South; and the Southern mechanics are undersold

  by their Northern competitors.

  In regard to education, Rev. Theodore Parker gives the fol-

  lowing statistics, in his, “Letters on Slavery,” p. 65.

  In 1671, Sir William Berkely, Governor of Virginia, said, “I thank God that

  there are no free schools nor printing-presses (in Virginia), and I hope we shall

  not have them these hundred years.” In 1840, in the fifteen slave States and

  territories, there were at the various primary schools 201,085 scholars; at the various

  primary schools of the free States, 1,626,028. The State of Ohio alone had, at

  her primary schools, 17,524 more scholars than all the fifteen slave States. New

  York alone had 301,282 more.

  In the slave States there are 1,368,325 free white children between the ages of

  f
ive and twenty; in the free States, 3,536,689 such children. In the slave States,

  at schools and colleges, there are 301,172 pupils; in the free States, 2,212,444

  pupils at schools or colleges. Thus, in the slave States, out of twenty-five free

  white children between five and twenty, there are not quite five at any school

  or college; while out of twenty-five such children in the free States there are more

  than fifteen at school or college.

  In the slave States, of the free white population that is over twenty years of age,

  there is almost one-tenth part that are unable to read and write: while in the free

  States there is not quite one in 156 who is deficient to that degree.

  In New England there are but few born therein, and more than twenty years of

  age, who are unable to read and write; but many foreigners arrive there with no

  education, and thus swell the number of the illiterate, and diminish the apparent

  effect of her free institutions. The South has few such immigrants; the ignorance

  of the Southern States, therefore, is to be ascribed to other causes. The Northern

  men who settle in the slaveholding States have perhaps about the average culture

  of the North, and more than that of the South. The South, therefore, gains educa-

  tionally from immigration, as the North loses.

  Among the Northern States, Connecticut, and among the Southern States

  South Carolina, are to a great degree free from disturbing influences of this cha-

  racter. A comparison between the two will show the relative effects of the

  respective institutions of the North and South. In Connecticut there are 163,843

  free persons over twenty years of age; in South Carolina, but 111,663. In Con-

  necticut there are but 526 persons over twenty who are unable to read and write;

  while in South Carolina there are 20,615 free white persons over twenty years of

  age unable to read and write. In South Carolina, out of each 626 free whites

  more than twenty years of age, there are more than 58 wholly unable to read or

  write; out of that number of such persons in Connecticut, not quite two! More

  than the sixth part of the adult freemen of South Carolina are unable to read the

  vote which will be deposited at the next election. It is but fair to infer that at

  least one-third of the adults of South Carolina, if not much of the South, are unable