Chapter III: Southern Testimony Against Slavery (2)

If the question, _slavery_ or _no slavery_, could be fairly presented for the decision of the legal voters of North Carolina at the next popular election, we believe at least two-thirds of them would deposite the _no slavery_ ticket. Perhaps one-fourth of the slaveholders themselves would vote it, for the slaveholders in this State are more moderate, decent, sensible, and honorable, than the slaveholders in either of the adjoining States, or the States further South; and we know that many of them are heartily ashamed of the vile occupations of slaveholding and slave-breeding in which they are engaged, for we have the assurance from their own lips. As a matter of course, all the non-slaveholders, who are so greatly in the majority, would vote to suppress the degrading institution which has kept them so long in poverty and ignorance, with the exception of those who are complete automatons to the beck and call of their imperious lords and masters, the major-generals of the oligarchy.

How long shall it be before the citizens of North Carolina shall have the privilege of expressing, at the ballot-box, their true sentiments with regard to this vexed question? Why not decide it at the next general election? Sooner or later, it must and will be decided--decided correctly, too--and the sooner the better. The first Southern State that abolishes slavery will do herself an immortal honor. God grant that North Carolina may be that State, and soon! There is at least one plausible reason why this good old State should be the first to move in this important matter, and we will state it. On the 20th of May, 1775, just one year one month and fourteen days prior to the adoption of the Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence, by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, July 4, 1776, the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, the authorship of which is generally attributed to Ephraim Brevard, was proclaimed in Charlotte, Mecklenburg county, North Carolina, and fully ratified in a second Convention of the people of said county, held on the 31st of the same month. And here, by the way, we may remark, that it is supposed Mr. Jefferson made use of this last-mentioned document as the basis of his draft of the indestructible title-deed of our liberties. There is certainly an identicalness of language between the two papers that is well calculated to strengthen this hypothesis. This, however, is a controversy about which we are but little concerned. For present purposes, it is, perhaps, enough for us to know, that on the 20th of May, 1775, when transatlantic tyranny and oppression could no longer be endured, North Carolina set her sister colonies a most valorous and praiseworthy example, and that they followed it. To her infamous slaveholding sisters of the South, it is now meet that she should set another noble example of decency, virtue, and independence. Let her at once inaugurate a policy of common justice and humanity--enact a system of equitable laws, having due regard to the rights and interests of all classes of persons, poor whites, negroes, and nabobs, and the surrounding States will ere long applaud her measures, and adopt similar ones for the governance of themselves.

Another reason, and a cogent one, why North Carolina should aspire to become the first free State of the South is this: The first slave State that makes herself respectable by casting out "the mother of harlots," and by rendering enterprise and industry honorable, will immediately receive a large accession of most worthy citizens from other States in the Union, and thus lay a broad foundation of permanent political power and prosperity. Intelligent white farmers from the Middle and New England States will flock to our more congenial clime, eager to give thirty dollars per acre for the same lands that are now a drug in the market because nobody wants them at the rate of five dollars per acre; an immediate and powerful impetus will be given to commerce, manufactures, and all the industrial arts; science and literature will be revived, and every part of the State will reverberate with the triumphs of manual and intellectual labor.

At this present time, we of North Carolina are worth less than either of the four adjoining States; let us abolish slavery at the beginning of the next regular decade of years, and if our example is not speedily followed, we shall, on or before the first day of January, 1870, be enabled to purchase the whole of Virginia and South Carolina, including, perhaps, the greater part of Georgia. An exclusive lease of liberty for ten years would unquestionably make us the Empire State of the South. But we have no disposition to debar others from the enjoyment of liberty or any other inalienable right; we ask no special favors; what we demand for ourselves we are willing to concede to our neighbors. Hereby we make application for a lease of freedom for ten years; shall we have it? May God enable us to secure it, as we believe He will. We give fair notice, however, that if we get it for ten years, we shall, with the approbation of Heaven, keep it twenty--forty--a thousand--forever!

We transcribe the Mecklenburg Resolutions, which, it will be observed, acknowledge the "inherent and inalienable rights of man," and "declare ourselves a free and independent people, are, and of right ought to be, a sovereign and self-governing association, under the control of no power other than that of our God, and the general government of the Congress."

MECKLENBURG DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE,

As proclaimed in the town of Charlotte, North Carolina, May 20th, 1775, and ratified by the County of Mecklenburg, in Convention, May 31st, 1775.

"I. _Resolved_--That whosoever, directly or indirectly, abetted, or
in any way, form or manner, countenanced the unchartered and
dangerous invasion of our rights as claimed by Great Britain, is an
enemy to this country, to America, and to the inherent and
inalienable rights of man.

"II. _Resolved_--That we the citizens of Mecklenburg County, do
hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the
mother country, and hereby absolve ourselves from all allegiance to
the British Crown, and abjure all political connection, contract or
association with that nation, who have wantonly trampled on our
rights and liberties, and inhumanly shed the blood of American
patriots at Lexington.

"III. _Resolved_--That we do hereby declare ourselves a free and
independent people, are, and of right ought to be, a sovereign and
self-governing association, under the control of no power other than
that of our God, and the general government of the Congress; to the
maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other
our mutual co-operation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred
honor.

"IV. _Resolved_--That as we now acknowledge the existence and control
of no law or legal officer, civil or military, within this county, we
do hereby ordain and adopt, as a rule of life, all, each, and every
of our former laws--wherein, nevertheless, the crown of Great Britain
never can be considered as holding rights, privileges, immunities or
authority therein."

Had it not been for slavery, which, with all its other blighting and degrading influences, stifles and subdues every noble impulse of the heart, this consecrated spot would long since have been marked by an enduring monument, whose grand proportions should bear witness that the virtues of a noble ancestry are gratefully remembered by an emulous and appreciative posterity. Yet, even as things are, we are not without genuine consolation. The star of hope and promise is beginning to beam brightly over the long-obscured horizon of the South; and we are firm in the belief, that freedom, wealth, and magnanimity, will soon do justice to the memory of those fearless patriots, whose fair fame has been suffered to moulder amidst the multifarious abominations of slavery, poverty, ignorance and grovelling selfishness.

Judge Iredell's testimony, which will be found on a preceding page, and to which we request the reader to recur, might have been appropriately introduced under our present heading.

In the Provincial Convention held in North Carolina, in August, 1774, in which there were sixty-nine delegates, representing nearly every county in the province, it was--

"_Resolved_--That we will not import any slave or slaves, or purchase
any slave or slaves imported or brought into the Province by others,
from any part of the world, after the first day of November next."

In Iredell's Statutes, revised by Martin, it is stated that,

"In North Carolina, no general law at all was passed, prior to the
revolution, declaring who might be slaves."

That there is no _legal_ slavery in the Southern States, and that slavery no where can be legalized, any more than theft, arson or murder can be legalized, has been virtually admitted by some of the most profound Southern jurists themselves; and we will here digress so far as to furnish the testimony of one or two eminent lawyers, not of North Carolina, upon this point.

In the debate in the United States Senate, in 1850, on the Fugitive Slave Bill, Mr. Mason, of Virginia, objected to Mr. Dayton's amendment, providing for a trial by jury, because, said he:--

"A trial by jury necessarily carries with it a trial of the whole
right, and a trial of the right to service will be gone into,
according to all the forms of the Court, in determining upon any
other fact. Then, again, it is proposed, as a part of the proof to be
adduced at the hearing, after the fugitive has been re-captured, that
evidence shall be brought by the claimant to show that slavery is
established in the State from which the fugitive has absconded. Now
this very thing, in a recent case in the city of New-York, was
required by one of the judges of that State, which case attracted the
attention of the authorities of Maryland, and against which they
protested. In that case the State judge went so far as to say that
the only mode of proving it was by reference to the Statute book.
Such proof is required in the Senator's amendment; and if he means by
this that proof shall be brought that slavery is established by
existing laws, it is impossible to comply with the requisition, for
no such law can be produced, I apprehend, in any of the slave States.
I am not aware that there is a single State in which the institution
is established by positive law."

Judge Clarke, of Mississippi, says:--

"In this State the legislature have considered slaves as reasonable
and accountable beings; and it would be a stigma upon the character
of the State, and a reproach to the administration of justice, if the
life of a slave could be taken with impunity, or if he could be
murdered in cold blood, without subjecting the offender to the
highest penalty known to the criminal jurisprudence of the country.
Has the slave no rights, because he is deprived of his freedom? He is
still a human being, and possesses all those rights of which he is
not deprived by the positive provisions of the law. The right of the
master exists not by force of the law of nature or nations, but by
virtue only of the positive law of the State."

The Hon. Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, says:--

"Arguments drawn from the well-established principles, which confer
and restrain the authority of the parent over the child, the tutor
over the pupil, the master over the apprentice, have been pressed on
us. The Court does not recognize their application; there is no
likeness between the cases; they are in opposition to each other, and
there is an impassable gulf between them. The difference is that
which exists between freedom and slavery, and a greater cannot be
imagined. In the one, the end in view is the happiness of the youth,
born to equal rights with that governor on whom the duty devolves of
training the young to usefulness, in a station which he is afterwards
to assume among freemen. To such an end, and with such a subject,
moral and intellectual instruction seem the natural means, and, for
the most part, they are found to suffice. Moderate force is
superadded only to make the others effectual. If that fail, it is
better to leave the party to his own headstrong passions, and the
ultimate correction of the law, than to allow it to be immoderately
inflicted by a private person. With slavery it is far otherwise. The
end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety;
the subject, one doomed, in his own person and his posterity, to live
without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own,
and to toil that another may reap the fruits. What moral
considerations shall be addressed to such a being to convince him,
what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can
never be true, that he is thus to labor upon a principle of natural
duty, or for the sake of his own personal happiness? Such services
can only be expected from one who has no will of his own; who
surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such
obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the
body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect.
The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of
the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of
this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can; and as a
principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must
repudiate it."

An esteemed friend, a physician, who was born and bred in Rowan county, North Carolina, and who now resides there, informs us that Judge Gaston, who was one of the half dozen Statesmen whom the South has produced since the days of the venerable fathers of the Republic, was an avowed abolitionist, and that he published an address to the people of North Carolina, delineating, in a masterly manner, the material, moral, and social disadvantages of slavery. Where is that address? Has it been suppressed by the oligarchy? The fact that slaveholders have, from time to time, made strenuous efforts to expunge the sentiments of freedom which now adorn the works of nobler men than the noble Gaston, may, perhaps, fully account for the oblivious state into which his patriotic address seems to have fallen.

THE VOICE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

Poor South Carolina! Folly is her nightcap; fanaticism is her day-dream; fire-eating is her pastime. She has lost her better judgment; the dictates of reason and philosophy have no influence upon her actions. Like the wife who is pitiably infatuated with a drunken, worthless husband, she still clings, with unabated love, to the cause of her shame, her misery, and her degradation.

A Kentuckian has recently expressed his opinion of this State in the following language:--

"South Carolina is bringing herself irrecoverably in the public
contempt. It is impossible for any impartial lover of his country,
for any just thinking man, to witness her senseless and quenchless
malignancy against the Union without the most immeasurable disgust
and scorn. She is one vast hot-bed of disunion. Her people think and
talk of nothing else. She is a festering mass of treason."

In 1854, there were assessed for taxation in

SOUTH CAROLINA,

Acres of Land 17,289,359
Valued at $22,836,374
Average value per acre $1,32

At the same time there were in

NEW JERSEY,

Acres of Land, 324,800
Valued at $153,161,619
Average value per acre $28,76

We hope the Slavocrats will look, first on that picture, and then on this; from one or the other, or both, they may glean a ray or two of wisdom, which, if duly applied, will be of incalculable advantage to them and their posterity. We trust, also, that the non-slaveholding whites will view, with discriminating minds, the different lights and shades of these two pictures; they are the parties most deeply interested; and it is to them we look for the glorious revolution that is to substitute Freedom for Slavery. They have the power to retrieve the fallen fortunes of South Carolina, to raise her up from the loathsome sink of iniquity into which slavery has plunged her, and to make her one of the most brilliant stars in the great constellation of States. While their minds are occupied with other considerations, let them not forget the difference between _twenty-eight dollars and seventy-six cents_, the value of land per acre in New Jersey, which is a second-rate free State, and _one dollar and thirty-two cents_, the value of land per acre in South Carolina, which is, _par excellence_, the model slave State. The difference between the two sums is twenty-seven dollars and forty-four cents, which would amount to precisely two thousand seven hundred and forty-four dollars on every hundred acres. To present the subject in another form, the South Carolina tract of land, containing two hundred acres, is worth now only two hundred and sixty-four dollars, and is depreciating every day. Let slavery be abolished, and in the course of a few years, the same tract will be worth five thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars, with an upward tendency. At this rate, the increment of value on the total area of the State will amount to more than three times as much as the present estimated value of the slaves!

South Carolina has not always been, nor will she always continue to be, on the wrong side. From Ramsay's History of the State, we learn that, in 1774, she--

"_Resolved_--That His Majesty's subjects in North America (without
respect to color or other accidents) are entitled to all the inherent
rights and liberties of his natural born subjects within the Kingdom
of Great Britain; that it is their fundamental right, that no man
should suffer in his person or property without a fair trial, and
judgment given by his peers, or by the law of the land."

One of her early writers, under the _non de plume_ of Philodemus, in a political pamphlet published in Charleston in 1784, declares that--

"Such is the fatal influence of slavery on the human mind, that it
almost wholly effaces from it even the boasted characteristic of
rationality."

This same writer, speaking of the particular interests of South Carolina, says:--

"It has been too common with us to search the records of other
nations, to find precedents that may give sanction to our own errors,
and lead us unwarily into confusion and ruin. It is our business to
consult their histories, not with a view to tread right or wrong in
their steps, but in order to investigate the real sources of the
mischiefs that have befallen them, and to endeavor to escape the
rocks which they have all unfortunately split upon. It is paying
ourselves but a poor compliment, to say that we are incapable of
profiting by others, and that, with all the information which is to
be derived from their fatal experience, it is in vain for us to
attempt to excel them. If, with all the peculiar advantages of our
present situation, we are incapable of surpassing our predecessors,
we must be a degenerate race indeed, and quite unworthy of those
singular bounties of Heaven, which we are so unskilled or undesirous
to turn to our benefit."

A recent number of Frazer's Magazine contains a well-timed and well-written article from the pen of Wm. Henry Hurlbut, of this State; and from it we make the following extract:--

"As all sagacious observers of the operation of the system of slavery
have demonstrated, the profitable employment of slave-labor is
inconsistent with the development of agricultural science, and
demands a continual supply of new and unexhausted soil. The
slaveholder, investing his capital in the purchase of the laborers
themselves, and not merely in soil and machines, paying his free
laborers out of the profit, must depend for his continued and
progressive prosperity upon the cheapness and facility with which he
can transfer his slaves to fresh and fertile lands. An enormous
additional item, namely, the price of slaves, being added to the cost
of production, all other elements of that cost require to be
proportionably smaller, or profits fail."

In an address delivered before the South Carolina Institute, in Charleston, Nov. 20th, 1856, Mr. B. F. Perry, of Greenville, truthfully says:--

"It has been South Carolina's misfortune, in this utilitarian age, to
have her greatest talents and most powerful energies directed to
pursuits, which avail her nothing, in the way of wealth and
prosperity. In the first settlement of a new country, agricultural
industry necessarily absorbs all the time and occupation of its
inhabitants. They must clear the forests and cultivate the earth, in
order to make their bread. This is their first consideration. Then
the mechanical arts, and manufactures, and commerce, must follow in
the footsteps of agriculture, to insure either individual or national
prosperity. No people can be highly prosperous without them. No
people ever have been. Agriculture, alone, will not make or sustain a
great people. The true policy of every people is to cultivate the
earth, manufacture its products, and send them abroad, in exchange
for those comforts and luxuries, and necessaries, which their own
country and their own industry cannot give or make. The dependence of
South Carolina on Europe and the Northern States for all the
necessaries, comforts and luxuries, which the mechanic arts afford,
has, in fact, drained her of her wealth, and made her positively
poor, when compared with her sister States of the Confederacy. It is
at once mortifying and alarming, to see and reflect on our own
dependence in the mechanic arts and manufactures, on strangers and
foreigners. In the Northern States their highest talents and energy
have been diversified, and more profitably employed in developing the
resources of the country, in making new inventions in the mechanic
arts, and enriching the community with science and literature,
commerce and manufactures."

THE VOICE OF GEORGIA.

Of the States strictly Southern, Georgia is, perhaps, the most thrifty. This prosperous condition of the State is mainly ascribable to her hundred thousand free white laborers--more than eighty-three thousand of whom are engaged in agricultural pursuits. In few other slave States are the non-slaveholders so little under the domination of the oligarchy. At best, however, even in the most liberal slave States, the social position of the non-slaveholding whites is but one short step in advance of that of the negroes; and as there is, on the part of the oligarchy, a constantly increasing desire and effort to usurp greater power, the more we investigate the subject the more fully are we convinced that nothing but the speedy and utter annihilation of slavery from the entire nation, can save the masses of white people in the Southern States from ultimately falling to a political level with the blacks--both occupying the most abject and galling condition of servitude of which it is possible for the human mind to conceive.

Gen. Oglethorpe, under whose management the Colony of Georgia was settled, in 1733, was bitterly opposed to the institution of slavery. In a letter to Granville Sharp, dated Oct. 13th, 1776, he says:--

"My friends and I settled the Colony of Georgia, and by charter were
established trustees, to make laws, &c. We determined not to suffer
slavery there. But the slave merchants and their adherents occasioned
us not only much trouble, but at last got the then government to
favor them. We would not suffer slavery, (which is against the
Gospel, as well as the fundamental law of England,) to be authorized
under our authority; we refused, as trustees, to make a law
permitting such a horrid crime. The government, finding the trustees
resolved firmly not to concur with what they believed unjust, took
away the charter by which no law could be passed without our
consent."

On the 12th of January, 1775, in indorsing the proceedings of the first American Congress, among other resolutions, "the Representatives of the extensive District of Darien, in the Colony of Georgia" adopted the following:--

"5. To show the world that we are not influenced by any contracted or
interested motives, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of
whatever climate, language, or complexion, we hereby declare our
disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of slavery in
America, (however the uncultivated state of our country or other
specious arguments may plead for it,) a practice founded in injustice
and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our liberties, (as well as
lives,) debasing part of our fellow creatures below men, and
corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest; and is laying the basis
of that liberty we contend for, (and which we pray the Almighty to
continue to the latest posterity,) upon a very wrong foundation. We
therefore resolve, at all times, to use our utmost endeavors for the
manumission of our slaves in this Colony, upon the most safe and
equitable footing for the masters and themselves."

The Hon. Mr. Reid, of this State, in a speech delivered in Congress, Feb. 1, 1820, says:--

"I am not the panegyrist of slavery. It is an unnatural state, a dark
cloud, which obscures half the lustre of our free institutions. For
my own part, though surrounded by slavery from my cradle to the
present moment, yet--

'I hate the touch of servile hands,
I loathe the slaves who cringe around.'"

As an accompaniment to those lines, he might have uttered these:--

"I would not have a slave to till my ground;
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earned."

Thus have we presented a comprehensive summary of the most unequivocal and irrefragable testimony of the South against the iniquitous institution of human slavery. What more can we say? What more can we do? We might fill a folio volume with similar extracts; but we must forego the task; the remainder of our space must be occupied with other arguments. In the foregoing excerpts is revealed to us, in language too plain to be misunderstood, the important fact that every truly great and good man the South has ever produced, has, with hopeful confidence, looked forward to the time when this entire continent shall be redeemed from the crime and the curse of slavery. Our noble self-sacrificing forefathers have performed their part, and performed it well. They have laid us a foundation as enduring as the earth itself; in their dying moments they admonished us to carry out their designs in the upbuilding and completion of the superstructure. Let us obey their patriotic injunctions.

From each of the six original Southern States we have introduced the most ardent aspirations for liberty--the most positive condemnations of slavery. From each of the nine slave States which have been admitted into the Union since the organization of the General Government, we could introduce, from several of their wisest and best citizens, anti-slavery sentiments equally as strong and convincing as those that emanated from the great founders of our movement--Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry and the Randolphs. As we have already remarked, however, the limits of this chapter will not admit of the introduction of additional testimony from either of the old or of the new slave States.

The reader will not fail to observe that, in presenting these solid abolition doctrines of the South, we have been careful to make such quotations as triumphantly refute, in every particular, the more specious sophistries of the oligarchy.

The mention of the illustrious names above, reminds us of the fact, that the party newspapers, whose venal columns are eternally teeming with vituperation and slander, have long assured us that the Whig ship was to be steered by the Washington rudder, that the Democratic barque was to sail with the Jefferson compass, and that the Know-Nothing brig was to carry the Madison chart. Imposed upon by these monstrous falsehoods, we have, from time to time, been induced to engage passage on each of these corrupt and rickety old hulks; but, in every instance, we have been basely swamped in the sea of slavery, and are alone indebted for our lives to the kindness of Heaven and the art of swimming. Washington the founder of the Whig party! Jefferson the founder of the Democratic party! Voltaire the founder of Christianity! God forbid that man's heart should always continue to be the citadel of deception--that he should ever be to others the antipode of what he is to himself.

There is now in this country but one party that promises, in good faith, to put in practice the principles of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the other venerable Fathers of the Republic--the Republican party. To this party we pledge unswerving allegiance, so long as it shall continue to pursue the statism advocated by the great political prototypes above-mentioned, but no longer. We believe it is, as it ought to be, the desire, the determination, and the destiny of this party, to give the death-blow to slavery; should future developments prove the party at variance with this belief--a belief, by the bye, which it has recently inspired in the breasts of little less than one and a half millions of the most intelligent and patriotic voters in America--we shall shake off the dust of our feet against it, and join one that will, in a summary manner, extirpate the intolerable grievance.