The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Having thus begun to clear his mind of northern preconceptions, “I shall now relate the impressions which were involuntarily made upon me while residing in some of the slave states.” Among them:

  Good Order.

  “The streets of southern cities and towns immediately struck me as being remarkably quiet in the evening and at night. ‘What is the cause of so much quiet?’ I said to a friend. ‘Our colored people are mostly at home. After eight o’clock they cannot be abroad [outdoors] without a written pass, which they must show on being challenged, or go to the guard house.’” At first this struck Nehemiah as “interference with the personal liberty of the colored people,” but on reflection “it was easy to see that to keep such a part of the population out of the streets after a reasonable hour at night, preventing their unrestrained, promiscuous roving, is a great protection to them, as well as to the public peace.” Naturally, “if attending evening worship, a written pass is freely given.” Such restrictions worked to the advantage of “the moral and religious character of the colored people at the South,” and it was to be regretted that there were not similar laws in Boston “forbidding certain youths to be in the streets after a certain hour without a pass from their employers.”

  Dress.

  “Coming out of church the first Sabbath which I spent in a country village, I saw a group of colored men standing under the trees around the house, waiting for the rest of the people to pass out. I could not be mistaken in my impression from their looks that they were Christian men. Their countenances were intelligent and happy.” Even more convincing was the way they were dressed. “To see slaves with broad-cloth suits, well-fitting and nicely-ironed fine shirts, polished boots, gloves, umbrellas for sunshades, the best of hats… as respectable in their attire as any who that day went to the house of God, was more than I was prepared to see.” Had he not been in the company of other whites, Nehemiah “would have followed my impulse to shake hands with the whole of them, as a vent to my pleasure in seeing slaves with all the bearing of respectable, dignified Christian gentlemen. As it was, I involuntarily lifted my hat to them, which was responded to by them with smiles, uncovering of the head, and graceful salutations.”

  Absence of Popular Delusions.

  “Another striking peculiarity of southern society which is attributable to slavery” was that “while the colored people are superstitious and excitable, popular delusions and fanaticisms do not prevail among them … Second-adventism, Mormonism, and the whole spawn of errors which infest us, do not find subjects at the South. There is far more faith in the South, taken as a whole, than with us.”

  Absence of Pauperism.

  “Every slave has an inalienable claim in law upon his owner for support for the whole of his life. He cannot be thrust into an almshouse, he cannot become a vagrant, he cannot beg his living, he cannot be wholly neglected when he is old and decrepit.” For example: “Going into the office of a physician and surgeon, I accidentally saw the leg of a black man which had just been amputated for an ulcer. The patient will be a charge upon his owner for life. An action at law may be brought against one who does not provide a comfortable support for his servants.” As a result, there were almost no paupers in the South, and no need for those “large State workhouses, which we so patiently build for the dregs of the foreign population” (e.g. Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine.) Nehemiah also cited the case of the washerwoman who had saved enough to buy her freedom, but refused to do so. Why not? Because if she did, “she would have no one to take care of her for the rest of her life. Now her master is responsible for her support. She has no care about the future.” In fact “her only trouble is that her master may die before her; then she will ‘have to be free.’”

  Religious Instruction.

  “When religious instruction, the pure, simple gospel of Jesus Christ, is extended to our laboring classes generally, adults and children, as fully as it is enjoyed by the slaves in such parts of the South as I visited, an object will be gained of far more intrinsic importance to our national prosperity than all questions relating to slavery. Probably, in very many places at the South, a larger proportion of the slaves than of the whites have given evidence of being the children of God.” Nehemiah went to some of their services and heard such “beautiful and affecting” prayers as these: “‘O Lord, we prostrate ourselves before thee on the sinful hands and knees of our poor miserable bodies and souls.’ ‘O Lord, may our hearts all be set right to-night.’ ‘Bless our dear masters and brothers, who come here to read the Bible to us, and pay so much attention to us.’” Laws against teaching slaves to read did not mean that they were deprived of the Bible, for there were plenty of pious whites willing to read it to them. “How often at the north can we find a scene like this?—a Christian master, surrounded every morning by fifty laborers in his employ hearing the Bible read, repeating passages which were given out the preceding day, singing and praying, and then going forth to their labor.” To sum up: “of all the situations in which human beings can be placed favorable to the salvation of the soul … it is difficult to conceive of one better suited to this end, and in fact more successful, than the relation of these slaves to their Christian masters.”

  Slave Auctions.

  “Passing up the steps of a court-house in a southern town with some gentlemen, I saw a man sitting on the steps with a colored infant wrapped in a coverlet, its face visible, and the child asleep.” The sight “seemed out of place and strange. ‘Is the child sick?’ I said to the man, as I was going up the steps.

  “‘No, master. She is going to be sold.’

  “‘Sold! Where is her mother?’

  “‘At home, master.’

  “‘How old is the child?’

  “‘She is about a year, master.’

  “It is hardly necessary to say that my heart died within me. Now I had found slavery in its most awful feature—the separation of a child from its mother!” Unwilling to witness such a distressing scene, Nehemiah “walked into a friend’s law office, and looked at his books. I heard the sheriff’s voice, the ‘public outcry’ as the vendue [auction] is called, but did not go out, partly because I would not betray the feelings which I knew would be awakened.”

  On leaving the office he was told that the child had been sold for $140.

  “I could take this case, so far as I have described it, go into any pulpit or upon any platform at the North, and awaken the deepest emotions known to the human heart, harrow up the feelings of every father and mother, and make them pass a resolution surcharged with all the righteous indignation which language can express …” But wait! Soon afterward “three or four estimable gentlemen,” feeling “that such a transaction needed to be explained and justified,” told him what had really happened: “The mother of the infant belonged to a man who had become embarrassed in his circumstances, in consequence of which the mother was sold to another family in the same place, before the birth of the child; but the first owner still laid claim to the child, and there was some legal doubt with regard to his claim.” To dispose of the first owner’s claim, a distinguished lawyer had come up with a legal maneuver whereby “through an old execution the child should be levied upon, be sold at auction, and thus removed from him. The plan succeeded. The child was attached, advertised, and offered for sale. The mother’s master bought it, at more than double the ratable price, and the child went to its mother.”

  This revelation provided food for reflection. “Had I not known the sequel to this story, what a thrilling, effective appeal could I have made at the North by the help of this incident! Then what injustice I should have inflicted upon the people of that place! … How might I have helped on the dissolution of the Union, how have led half our tribes to swear that they would have war with the rest forever, when in truth the men and women who had done this thing had performed one of the most tender and humane actions.”

  And this story was by no means unique. “Very many of the slave auctions advertised with f
ull descriptions, looking like invitations to buy, are merely legal appointments to determine claims, settle estates, without any purpose to let the persons offered for sale pass from families to which they belong.” In fact, when “settling estates, good men exercise as much care with regard to the disposition of slaves as though they were providing homes for white orphan children.”

  Approaches to Emancipation.

  After quoting from the resolution on slavery adopted by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1818—“We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as … utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves”—Nehemiah wondered what had happened to the anti-slavery sentiment once so common in the South. “This was not a mere ecclesiastical movement,” but widespread “public sentiment.” But then “a great change very soon came over the South. Remonstrances from among themselves, legislative measures, free, earnest discussions of slavery, all tending to its removal as soon as the best method could be determined, were suddenly hushed.”

  Was this, as widely supposed in the North, due to the “astounding revelations of the profitableness of cotton?” To believe this was not only absurd, it was to slander “the Christian character of a community distinguished for intellectual and moral excellence.” No, the real reason for the sudden hush was “the din and clamor of northern invectives against slavery … Abolition societies were formed to effect the immediate emancipation of the slaves. Publications were scattered through the South whose direct tendency was to stir up insurrection among the colored people. A traveling agent of a northern society was arrested, and on searching his trunk there were found some prints which might well have wrought, as they did, upon the feelings of the southern people. These prints were pictorial illustrations of the natural equality before God of all men, without distinction of color, and setting forth the happy fruits of this truth by exhibiting a white woman in no equivocal relations to a colored man.” Along with these obscene pictures, “incendiary sentiments” were printed on handkerchiefs to be distributed in the South, and “the old-fashioned, blue-paper wrappers of chocolate had within them some eminently suggestive emblems. When these amalgamation [blacks with whites] pictures were discovered, husbands and fathers at the south considered that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defense, the protection of their households against a servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office, and seized and burned abolition papers? Indeed, no excesses are surprising in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed. Then ensued those more stringent laws, so general now throughout the slave-holding States, forbidding the slaves to be publicly instructed.” And then also ensued the general embargo on even discussing the issue of slavery. “Nothing forces itself more constantly upon the thoughts of a northerner at the South, who looks into the history and present state of slavery, than the vast injury which has resulted from northern interference.”

  A Final Thought.

  “Instead of regarding the South as holding their fellow-men in cruel bondage, let us consider whether we may not think of them as guardians, educators, and saviors of the African race in this country … The South is competent to manage this subject without our help.”

  Six years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, also addressed the topics of class warfare, but with a solution that would have startled Karl Marx had Sociology for the South been published in Germany: slavery, not communism, was the only way to “place labor and capital in harmonious or friendly relations.” But though coming to different conclusions, the two men had much in common, particularly their outrage at the exploitation and injustice that characterized the free enterprise system. “The bestowing upon men of rights is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak,” wrote Fitzhugh. “Liberty and equality throw the whole weight of society on its weakest members. The employer cheapens their wages, and the retailer takes advantage of their ignorance…They are the producers and artificers of all the necessaries, the comforts, the luxuries, the pomp and splendor of he world; they create it all, and enjoy none of it; they are at constant war with those above them, asking higher wages but getting lower; for they are also at war with each other, underbidding to get employment. This process of underbidding never ceases so long as employers want profits or laborers want employment. It ends, when wages are reduced too low to afford subsistence, in filling poor-houses, and jails, and graves. It has reached that point already in France, England and Ireland. A half million died in one year in Ireland,” died during the Great Famine because they were free, whereas “had they been vassals or serfs” they would have been fed. “Slaves never die of hunger.”

  Then there was the “moral effect of free society,” which was “to banish Christian virtue, that virtue which bids us love our neighbor as ourself, and to substitute the very equivocal virtues proceeding from mere selfishness. The intense struggle to better one’s pecuniary condition, the rivalries, the jealousies, the hostilities which it begets, leave neither time nor inclination to cultivate the heart or the head … What makes money, and what costs money, are alone desired. Temperance, frugality, thrift, attention to business, industry, and skill in making bargains are virtues in high repute, because they enable us to supplant others and increase our own wealth. The character of our Northern brethren is proof enough of the justice of these reflections.” By contrast, “domestic slavery in the Southern states has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome. He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent; he is superior to the Northerner in everything but the arts of thrift. History proves this.

  “But the chief and far most important inquiry is, how does slavery affect the condition of the slave? One of the wildest sects of Communists in France proposes not only to hold all property in common, but to divide the profits not according to each man’s input and labor, but according to each man’s wants. Now this is precisely the system of domestic slavery with us. We provide for each slave in old age and infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor but according to his wants. The master’s wants are more costly and refined, and he therefore gets a larger share of the profits. A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern in which the slave consumes more than the master of the coarse products, and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of a support; he is only transferred to another master to participate in the profits of another concern; he marries when he pleases, because he knows he will have to work no more with a family than without one, and whether he live or die that family will be taken care of; he exhibits all the pride of ownership, boasts of ‘our crops, horses, fields and cattle;’ and is as happy as a human being can be.

  “There is no rivalry, no competition to get employment among slaves, as among free laborers. Nor is there a war between master and slave. The master’s interest prevents his reducing the slave’s allowance or wages in infancy and sickness, for he might lose the slave by doing so. His feelings for his slave never permits him to stint him in old age.” Indeed, the benign influence of the peculiar institution “gives full development and full play to the affections. Free society chills, stints and eradicates them … We are better husbands, better fathers, better friends and better neighbors than our Northern brethren. Love for others is the organic law of our society, as self-love is of theirs. At the slave-holding South all is peace, quiet, plenty, and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages … Wealth is more equally distributed than at the North, where a few millionaires own most of the property of the country. These millionaires are men of cold hearts and weak minds; they know how to make money, but not how to use it, either for the benefit of themselves or of others. High intellectual and moral attainments, refinement of the head and heart, give standing to a man in
the South, however poor he may be.

  “Until the last fifteen years our great error was to imitate Northern habits, customs and institutions … We distrusted our social system. We thought slavery morally wrong, we thought it would not last, we thought it unprofitable. The Abolitionists assailed us; we looked more closely into our circumstances; became satisfied that slavery is morally right, that it would continue ever to exist, that it was as profitable as it was humane. This begat self-confidence, self-reliance. Since then our improvement has been rapid. Now we may safely say that we are the happiest, most contented and prosperous people on earth. The inter-meddling of foreign pseudo-philanthropists in our affairs, though it has occasioned great irritation and indignation, has been of inestimable advantage in teaching us to form a right estimate of our condition.”

  Fitzhugh’s claim that “high intellectual and moral attainments, refinement of head and heart, give standing to a man in the South,” touched on the belief, often asserted though never fully substantiated, that there had evolved in the South a degree of civilization not seen since the days of ancient Greece. This topic was taken up by the South Carolina politician and lawyer, William Harper, in his 1838 Memoir on Slavery:

  “President Dew [of the College of William and Mary] has shown that the institution of slavery is a principal cause of civilization. Perhaps nothing can be more evident than that it is the sole cause. If anything can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labor beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence … The coercion of slavery alone is adequate to form man to habits of labor. Without it there can be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no tastes for comfort or elegancies which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization. He who has obtained the command of another man’s labor, first begins to accumulate and provide for the future, and the foundations of civilization are laid.