Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861
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What is coarsely, but expressively, described in the political slang of
this country as "_The Everlasting Nigger Question_" might perhaps fairly
be considered exhausted as a topic of discussion, if ever a topic was.
Is it exhausted, however? Have not rather the smoke and sweat and dust
of the political battle in which we have been so long and so fiercely
engaged exercised a dimming influence on our eyes as to the true
difficulty and its remedy, as they have on the vision of other angry
combatants since the world began? It is easy to say, in days like these,
that men seem at once to lose their judgment and reason when they
approach this question,--to look hardly an arm's length before
them,--to become mere tools of their own passions; and all this is true,
and, in conceding it all, no more is conceded than that the men of the
present day are also mortal. How many voters in the last election,
before they went to the polls, had seriously thought out for themselves
the real issue of the contest, apart from party names and platforms and
popular cries and passionate appeals to the conscience and the purse?
In all parties, some doubtless were impelled by fanaticism,--many were
guided by instinct,--more by the voice of their leaders,--most by party
catchwords and material interests,--but how many by real reflection and
the exercise of reason? Was it every fifth man, or every tenth? Was it
every fiftieth? Let every one judge for himself. The history of the
reigning dynasty, its policy and tendency, are still open questions, the
discussion of which, though perhaps become tedious, is not exhausted,
and, if conducted in a fair spirit, will at least do no harm. What,
then, is all this thirty years' turmoil, of which the world is growing
sick, about? Are we indeed only fighting, as the party-leaders at the
North seem trying to persuade us, for the control, by the interests of
free labor or of slave-labor, of certain remaining national territories
into which probably slavery never could be made to enter?--or rather
is there not some deep innate principle,--some strong motive of
aggrandizement or preservation,--some real Enceladus,--the cause of this
furious volcano of destructive agitation? If, indeed, the struggle
be for the possession of a sterile waste in the heart of the
continent,--useless either as a slave-breeding or a slave-working
country,--clearly, whatever the politician might say to the contrary,
the patriot and the merchant would soon apply to the struggle the
principle, that sometimes the game is not worth the candle. If, however,
there be an underlying principle, the case is different, and the cost of
the struggle admits of no limit save the value of the motive principle.
He who now pretends to discuss this question should approach it neither
as a Whig, a Democrat, nor a Republican, but should look at it by the
light of political philosophy and economy, forgetful of the shibboleth
of party or appeals to passion. So far as may be, in this spirit it is
proposed to discuss it here.
"By its fruits ye shall know it." Look, then, for a moment, at the
fruits of the Cotton dynasty, as hitherto developed in the working of
its policy and its natural tendency,--observe its vital essence and
logical necessities,--seek for the result of its workings, when brought
in contact with the vital spirits and life-currents of our original
policy as a people,--and then decide whether this contest in which we
are engaged is indeed an irrepressible and inextinguishable contest,
or whether all this while we have not been fighting with shadows. King
Cotton has now reigned for thirty years, be the same less or more. To
feel sure that we know what its policy has wrought in that time, we must
first seek for the conditions under which it originally began its work.
Ever since Adam and Eve were forced, on their expulsion from Paradise,
to try the first experiment at self-government, their descendants have
been pursuing a course of homoeopathic treatment. It was the eating of
the fruit of the tree of knowledge which caused all their woes; and
in an increased consumption of the fruit of that tree they have
persistently looked for alleviation of them. Experience seems to prove
the wisdom of the treatment. The greater the consumption of the fruit,
the greater the happiness of man. Knowledge has at last become the basis
of all things,--of power, of social standing, of material prosperity,
and, finally, in America, of government itself. Until within a century
past, political philosophy in the creation of government began at the
wrong end. It built from the pinnacle downward. The stability of the
government depended on the apex,--the one or the few,--and not on the
base,--the foundation of the many. At length, in this country, fresh
from the hand of Nature, the astonished world saw a new experiment
tried,--a government systematically built up from the foundation of
the many,--a government drawing its being from, and dependent for its
continued existence on, the will and the intelligence of the governed.
The foundation had first been laid deep and strong, and on it a goodly
superstructure of government was erected. Yet, even to this day, the
very subjects of that government itself do not realize that they, and
not the government, are the sources of national prosperity. In times of
national emergency like the present,--amid clamors of secession and
of coercion,--angry threats and angrier replies,--wars and rumors of
wars,--what is more common than to hear sensible men--men whom the
people look to as leaders--picturing forth a dire relapse into barbarism
and anarchy as the necessary consequence of the threatened convulsions?
They forget, if they ever realized, that the people made this
government, and not the government the people. Destroy the intelligence
of the people, and the government could not exist for a day;--destroy
this government, and the people would create another, and yet another,
of no less perfect symmetry. While the foundations are firm, there need
be no fears of the superstructure, which may be renewed again and again;
but touch the foundations, and the superstructure must crumble at once.
Those who still insist on believing that this government made the people
are fond of triumphantly pointing to the condition of the States of
Mexico, as telling the history of our own future, let our present
government be once interrupted in its functions. Are Mexicans Yankees?
Are Spaniards Anglo-Saxons? Are Catholicism and religious freedom, the
Inquisition and common schools, despotism and democracy, synonymous
terms? Could a successful republic, on our model, be at once instituted
in Africa on the assassination of the King of Timbuctoo? Have two
centuries of education nothing to do with our success, or an eternity of
ignorance with Mexican failure? Was our government a lucky guess, and
theirs an unfortunate speculation? The one lesson that America is
destined to teach the world, or to miss her destiny in failing to teach,
has with us passed into a truism, and is yet continually lost sight of;
it is the magnificent result of three thousand years of experiment: the
simple truth, that no government is so firm, so truly conservative, and
so wholly indestructible, as a government founded and dependent for
support upon the affections and good-will of a moral, intelligent, and
educated community. In our politics, we hear much of State-rights and
centralization,--of distribution of power,--of checks and balances,--of
constitutions and their construction,--of patronage and its
distribution,--of banks, of tariffs, and of trade,--all of them subjects
of moment in their sphere; but their sphere is limited. Whether they be
decided one way or the other is of comparatively little consequence:
for, however they are decided, if the people are educated and informed,
the government will go on, and the community be prosperous, be they
decided never so badly,--and if decided badly, the decision will he
reversed; but let the people become ignorant and debased, and all the
checks and balances and wise regulations which the ingenuity of man
could in centuries devise would, at best, but for a short space defer
the downfall of a republic. A well-founded republic can, then, be
destroyed only by destroying its people,--its decay need be looked for
only in the decay of their intelligence; and any form of thought or
any institution tending to suppress education or destroy intelligence
strikes at the very essence of the government, and constitutes a treason
which no law can meet, and for which no punishment is adequate.
Education, then, as universally diffused as the elements of God, is the
life-blood of our body politic. The intelligence of the people is the
one great fact of our civilization and our prosperity,--it is the
beating heart of our age and of our land. It is education alone which
makes equality possible without anarchy, and liberty without license. It
is this--which makes the fundamental principles of our Declaration of
Independence living realities in New England, while in France they still
remain the rhetorical statement of glittering generalities. From this
source flow all our possibilities. Without it, the equality of man is a
pretty figure of speech; with it, democracy is possible. This is a path
beaten by two hundred years of footprints, and while we walk it we are
safe and need fear no evil; but if we diverge from it, be it for never
so little, we stumble, and, unless we quickly retrace our steps, we fall
and are lost. The tutelary goddess of American liberty should be the
pure marble image of the Professor's Yankee school-mistress. Education
is the fundamental support of our system. It was education which made us
free, progressive, and conservative; and it is education alone which can
keep us so.
With this fact clearly established, the next inquiry should be as to
the bearing and policy of the Cotton dynasty as touching this
question of general intelligence. It is a mere truism to say that the
cotton-culture is the cause of the present philosophical and economical
phase of the African question. Throughout the South, whether justly or
not, it is considered as well settled that cotton can be profitably
raised only by a forced system of labor. This theory has been denied by
some writers, and, in experience, is certainly subject to some marked
exceptions; but undoubtedly it is the creed of the Cotton dynasty,
and must here, therefore, be taken for true.[A] With this theory, the
Southern States are under a direct inducement, in the nature of a bribe,
to the amount of the annual profit on their cotton-crop, to see as
many perfections and as few imperfections as possible in the system of
African slavery, and to follow it out unflinchingly into all its logical
necessities. Thus, under the direct influence of the Cotton dynasty, the
whole Southern tone on this subject has undergone a change. Slavery is
no longer deplored as a necessary evil, but it is maintained as in
all respects a substantial good. One of the logical necessities of a
thorough slave-system is, in at least the slave-portion of the people,
extreme ignorance. Whatever theoretically may be desirable in this
respect among the master-class, ignorance, in its worst form,--ignorance
of everything except the use of the tools with which their work is to
be done,--is the necessary condition of the slaves. But it is said that
slaves are property, without voice or influence in the government, and
that the ignorance of the black is no obstacle to the intelligence
of the white. This possibly may be true; but a government founded on
ignorance, as the essential condition of one portion of its people, is
not likely long to regard education as its vital source and essence.
Still the assertion that the rule of education does not apply to slaves
must be allowed; for we must deal with facts as we find them; and
undoubtedly the slave has no rights which the master is bound to
respect; and in speaking of the policy of the Cotton dynasty, the
servile population must be regarded as it is, ignoring the question of
what it might be; it must be taken into consideration only as a terrible
inert mass of domesticated barbarism, and there left. The question
here is solely with the policy and tendency of the Cotton dynasty
as affecting the master-class, and the servile class is in that
consideration to be summarily disposed of as so much labor owned by so
much capital.
[Footnote A: "In truth," the institution of slavery, as an agency for
cotton-cultivation, "is an expensive luxury, a dangerous and artificial
state, and, even in a-worldly point of view, an error. The cost of a
first-class negro in the United States is about L800, and the interest
on the capital invested in and the wear and tear of this human chattel
are equal to 10 per cent., which, with the cost of maintaining,
clothing, and doctoring him, or another 5 per cent, gives an annual cost
of L45; and the pampered Coolies in the best paying of all the tropical
settlements, Trinidad, receive wages that do not exceed on an average
on the year round 6s. per week, or about two-fifths, while in the East
Indies, with perquisites, they do not receive so much as two-thirds of
this. In Cuba, the Chinese emigrants do not receive so much even as
one-third of this."--_Cotton Trade of Great Britain_, by J.A. MANN.
--In India, labor is 80 per cent cheaper than in the United States.]
The dynasty of Cotton is based on the monopoly of the cotton-culture in
the Cotton States of the Union; its whole policy is directed to the two
ends of making the most of and retaining that monopoly; and economically
it reduces everything to subserviency to the question of cotton-supply;
--thus Cotton is King. The result necessarily is, that the Cotton States
have turned all their energies to that one branch of industry. All other
branches they abandon or allow to languish. They have no commerce of
their own, few manufactories, fewer arts; and in their abandonment of
self in their devotion to their King, they do not even raise their
own hay or corn, dig their own coal, or fell their own timber; and at
present, Louisiana is abandoning the sugar-culture, one of the few
remaining exports of the South, to share more largely in the monopoly of
cotton. Thus the community necessarily loses its fair proportions; it
ceases to be self-sustaining; it exercises one faculty alone, until all
the others wither and become impotent for very lack of use. This intense
and all-pervading devotion to one pursuit, and that a pursuit to which
the existence of a servile class is declared essential, must, in a
republic more than in any other government, produce certain marked
politico-philosophical and economical effects on the master-class as a
whole. In a country conducted on a system of servile labor, as in one
conducted on free, the master-class must be divided into the two great
orders of the rich and poor,--those who have, and those who have not.
That the whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making
broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent. It makes the
rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the
dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone
successfully produce cotton, he who has must be continually increasing
his store, while he who has not can neither raise the one staple
recognized by the Cotton dynasty, nor turn his labor, his only property,
to other branches of industry; for such have, in the universal
abandonment of the community to cotton, been allowed to languish and
die. The economical tendency of the Cotton dynasty is therefore to
divide the master-class yet more distinctly into the two great opposing
orders of society. On the one hand we see the capitalist owning the
labor of a thousand slaves, and on the other the laboring white unable,
under the destructive influence of a profitable monopoly, to make any
use of that labor which is his only property.
What influence, then, has the Cotton dynasty on that portion of the
master-class who are without capital? Its tendency has certainly
necessarily been to make their labor of little value; but they are still
citizens of a republic, free to come and go, and, in the eye of the law,
equal with the highest;--on them, in times of emergency, the government
must rest; their education and intelligence are its only sure
foundations. But, having made this class the vast majority of the
master-caste, what are the policy and tendency of the Cotton dynasty
as touching them? The story is almost too old to bear even the
shortest repetition. Philosophically, it is a logical necessity
of the Cotton dynasty that it should be opposed to universal
intelligence;--economically, it renders universal intelligence an
impossibility. That slavery is in itself a positive good to society is
a fundamental doctrine of the Cotton dynasty, and a proposition
not necessary to be combated here; but, unfortunately, universal
intelligence renders free discussion a necessity, and experience tells
us that the suppression of free discussion is necessary to the existence
of slavery. We are but living history over again. The same causes have
often existed before, and they have drawn after them the necessary
effects. Other peoples, at other times, as well as our Southern brethren
at present, have felt, that the suppression of general discussion was
necessary to the preservation of a prized and peculiar institution.
Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland
have all, at different times, experienced the forced suppression of
some one branch of political or religious thought. Their histories have
recorded the effect of that suppression; and the rule to be deduced
therefrom is simply this: If the people among whom such suppression is
attempted are ignorant, and are kept so as part of a system, the attempt
may be successful, though in its results working destruction to
the community;--if, however, they are intelligent, and the system
incautiously admits into itself any plan of education, the attempt
at suppression will be abandoned, as the result either of policy or
violence. In this respect, then, on philosophical grounds, the Cotton
dynasty is not likely to favor the education of the masses. Again, it
is undoubtedly the interest of the man who has not, that all possible
branches of industry should be open to his labor, as rendering that
labor of greater value; but the whole tendency of the Cotton monopoly is
to blight all branches of industry in the Cotton States save only that
one. General intelligence might lead the poor white to suspect this fact
of an interest of his own antagonistic to the policy of the Cotton King,
and therefore general intelligence is not part of that monarch's policy.
This the philosophers of the Cotton dynasty fairly avow and class high
among those dangers against which it behooves them to be on their guard.
They theorize thus:--
"The great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that
they have rights, and that they, too, are entitled to some of the
sympathy which falls upon the suffering. They are fast learning that
there is an almost infinite world of industry opening before them, by
which they can elevate themselves and their families from wretchedness
and ignorance to competence and intelligence. It is this great upheaving
of our masses which we have to fear, so far as our institutions are
concerned."[B]
[Footnote B: _De Bow's Review_, January, 1850. Quoted in Olmsted's _Back
Country_, p. 451.]
Further, the policy of the Cotton King, however honestly in theory it
may wish to encourage it, renders general education and consequent
intelligence an impossibility. A system of universal education is made
for a laboring population, and can be sustained only among a laboring
population; but if that population consist of slaves, universal
education cannot exist. The reason is simple; for the children of all
must be educated, otherwise the scholars will not support the schools.
It is an absolute necessity of society that in agricultural districts
cultivated by slave-labor the free population should be too sparsely
scattered to support a system of schools, even on starvation wages for
the cheapest class of teachers.
Finally, though it is a subject not necessary now to discuss, the effect
of the Cotton monopoly and dynasty in depressing the majority of the
whites into a species of labor competition in the same branch of
industry as the blacks, because the only branch open to all, can
hardly have a self-respect-inspiring influence on that portion of the
community, but should in its results rather illustrate old Falstaff's
remark,--that "there is a thing often heard of, and it is known to many
in our land, by the name of pitch; this pitch, as ancient writers do
report, doth defile: so doth the company thou keepest."
Such, reason tells us, should be the effect on the intelligence and
education of the free masses of the South of the policy and dynasty of
King Cotton. That experience in this case verifies the conclusions
of reason who can doubt who has ever set foot in a thorough Slave
State,--or in Kansas, or in any Free State half-peopled by the poor
whites of the South?--or who can doubt it, that has ever even talked on
the subject with an intelligent and fair-minded Southern gentleman? Who
that knows them will deny that the poor whites of the South make the
worst population in the country? Who ever heard a Southern gentleman
speak of them, save in Congress or on the hustings, otherwise than with
aversion and contempt?[C]
[Footnote C: Except when used by the accomplished statistician, there is
nothing more fallacious than the figures of the census. As the author of
this article is a disciple neither of Buckle nor De Bow, they have not
been used at all; but a few of the census figures are nevertheless
instructive, as showing the difference between the Free and the Servile
States in respect to popular education. According to the census of 1850,
the white population of the Slave States amounted to 6,184,477 souls,
and the colored population, free and slave, brought the total population
up to an aggregate of 9,612,979, of which the whole number of
school-pupils was 581,861. New York, with a population of 3,097,894
souls, numbered 675,221 pupils, or 98,830 more than all the Slave
States. The eight Cotton States, from South Carolina to Arkansas, with
a population of 2,137,264 whites and a grand total of 3,970,337 human
beings, contained 141,032 pupils; the State of Massachusetts, with a
total population of 994,514, numbered 176,475, or 35,443 pupils more
than all the Cotton States. In popular governments the great sources
of general intelligence are newspapers and periodicals; in estimating
these, metropolitan New York should not be considered; but of these
the whole number, in 1850, issued annually in all the Slave States was
61,038,698, and the number in the not peculiarly enlightened State of
Pennsylvania was 84,898,672, or 3,859,974 more than in all the Slave
States. In the eight Cotton States, the whole number was 30,041,991; and
in the single State of Massachusetts, 64,820,564, or 34,778,573 more,
and in the single State of Ohio, 30,473,407, or 431,416 more, than in
all the above eight States.]
Here, then, we come at once to the foundation of a policy and the cause
of this struggle. Whether it will or no, it is the inevitable tendency
of the Cotton dynasty to be opposed to general intelligence. It is
opposed to that, then, without which a republic cannot hope to exist;
it is opposed to and denies the whole results of two thousand years of
experience. The social system of which the government of to-day is
the creature is founded on the principle of a generally diffused
intelligence of the people; but if now Cotton be King, as is so boldly
asserted, then an influence has obtained control of the government of
which the whole policy is in direct antagonism with, the very elementary
ideas of that government. History tells us that eight bags of cotton
imported into England in 1784 were seized by the custom-house officers
at Liverpool, on the ground that so much cotton could not have been
produced in these States. In 1860, the cotton-crop was estimated at
3,851,481 bales. Thus King Cotton was born with this government, and
has strengthened with its strength; and to-day, almost the creature of
destiny, sent to work the failure of our experiment as a people, it has
led almost one-half of the Republic to completely ignore, if not to
reject, the one principle absolutely essential to that Republic's
continued existence. What two thousand years ago was said of Rome
applies to us:--"Those abuses and corruptions which in time destroy a
government are sown along with the very seeds of it and both grow up
together; and as rust eats away iron, and worms devour wood, and both
are a sort of plagues born and bred with the substance they destroy; so
with every form and scheme of government that man can invent, some vice
or corruption creeps in with the very institution, which grows up along
with and at last destroys it." No wonder, then, that the conflict
is irrepressible and hot; for two instinctive principles of
self-preservation have met in deadly conflict: the South, with the eager
loyalty of the Cavalier, rallies to the standard of King Cotton, while
the North, with the earnest devotion of the Puritan, struggles hard in
defence of the fundamental principles of its liberties and the ark of
its salvation.
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