The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mini ebook reader .TXT) π
The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the semi-savage state.
It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant and so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders of the des
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halls. The sentiment of abolition was however not yet widely spread.
There were few Northerners who preferred to give up the Union
rather than live under a piebald constitution, or who
considered it just to break a solemn compact in obedience to an
abstract law. But there now arose a strong and resolute party
who declared that slavery might stay where it was, but that it
must go no farther. The South must be content with what it had.
Not another yard of slave soil should be added to the Union. On
the other hand, the South could not accept such terms. Slavery
extension was necessary for their lives. More land they must
have or they could not exist. There was waste land in abundance
in the South; but it was dead. Their style of agriculture was
precisely that which is pursued in Central Africa. They took a
tract from the wilderness and planted it again and again with
cotton and tobacco till it gave up the ghost, and would yield
no more. They then moved on and took in another piece. Obliged
to spend all their cash in buying prime slaves at two hundred
pounds a piece, they could not afford to use manure or to
rotate their crops; they could not afford to employ so costly a
species of labour on anything less lucrative than sugar,
cotton, and tobacco. Besides, if slavery were not to be
extended they would be surrounded and hemmed in by free states;
the old contract would be annulled. Already the South were in a
minority. The free states and slave states might be equal in
number; but they were not equal in population and prosperity.
The Northerner who travelled down South was astonished to find
that the cities of the maps were villages, and the villages
clusters of log huts. Fields covered with weeds, and moss-grown
ruins showed where farms once flourishing had been. He rode
through vast forests and cypress swamps, where hundreds of mean
whites lived like Red Indians, hunting and fishing for their
daily bread, eating clay to keep themselves alive, prowling
round plantations to obtain stolen food from the slaves. He saw
plantations in which the labour was conducted with the terrible
discipline of the prison and the hulks; and where as he
galloped past the line of hoeing slaves, so close that he
splashed them with mud, they hoed on, they toiled on, not
daring to raise their eyes from the ground. From early dawn to
dusky eve it was so with these poor wretches: no sound broke
the silence of those fearful fields but the voice of the
overseer and the cracking of the whip. And out far away in the
lone western lands, by the side of dark rivers, among trees
from which drooped down the dull grey Spanish moss, the
planters went forth to hunt; there were well-known coverts
where they were sure to find; and as the traveller rode through
the dismal swamp he might perhaps have the fortune to see the
game; a black animal on two legs running madly for its life,
and behind it the sounding of a horn, and the voices of hounds
in full cry β a chase more infernal than that of the Wild
Huntsman who sweeps through the forest with his spectral crew.
But the end of all this was at hand. Kansas, a tract of rich
prairie land, was about to become a territory, and would soon
become a state. It was situated above the 36Β° 3Oβ line, and
therefore belonged to the North. But the Southerners coveted
this Nabothβs vineyard; their power at Washington was great
just then; they determined to strike out the line which had
been in the first place demanded by themselves. With much show
of justice and reason they alleged that it was not fair to
establish the domestic institutions of a country without
consulting the inhabitants themselves. They proposed that, for
the future, the question of slavery or free soil should be
decided by a majority of votes among the settlers on the spot.
This proposal became law, and then commenced a race for the
soil. In Boston a political society was formed for the
exportation to Kansas of Northern men. In the slave state.
Missouri, blue lodges were formed for a similar purpose, and
hundreds of squatters, dressed in flannel shirts, and huge
boots up to their knees, and skin caps on their heads,
bristling with revolvers and bowie knives, stepped across the
Border. For the first time the people of the North and South
met face to face. A guerrilla warfare soon broke out; the New
Englanders were robbed and driven back; they were murdered, and
their scalps paraded by Border ruffians upon poles. The whole
country fell into a distracted state. The Southerners pursued
their slaves into Boston itself, and dragged them back,
according to the law. A mad abolitionist invaded Virginia with
a handful of men, shot a few peaceful citizens, and was hanged.
A time of terror fell upon the South; there was neither liberty
of print nor liberty of speech; the majority reigned; and the
man who spoke against it was lynched upon the spot. A
Southerner assaulted and battered a Northerner on the floor of
the Senate.
The North at last was thoroughly aroused. The people
itself began to stir; a calm, patient, law-abiding race,
slow to be moved, but when once moved, swerving never till the
thing was done. A presidential election was at hand, and a
Northerner was placed upon the throne. The South understood
that this was not a casual reverse, which might be redeemed
when the four years had passed away. It was to them a sign that
the days of their power had for ever passed. The temper of the
North was not to be mistaken. It had at last rebelled; it would
suffer tyranny no more. Mr. Lincolnβs terms were conciliatory
in the extreme. Had the South been moderate in its demands, he
would have been classed with those statesmen who added
compromise to compromise, and so postponed the evil but
inevitable day. He was not an abolitionist. He offered to give
them any guarantee they pleased β a constitutional amendment
if they desired it β that slavery as it stood should not be
interfered with. He offered to bring in a more stringent law,
by which their fugitive slaves should be restored. But on the
matter of extension he was firm. The Southerners demanded that
a line should again be drawn to the Pacific; that all south of
that line should be made slave soil, and that slavery should be
more clearly recognised by the central government, and more
firmly guaranteed. These terms were not more extravagant than
those which their fathers had obtained. But times had changed:
the sentiment of nationality was now more fully formed; βUncle
Tomβs Cabinβ had been written; the American people were heartily
ashamed of slavery; they refused to give it another lease. The
ultimatum was declined; the South seceded, and the North flew
to arms, not to emancipate the negro, but to preserve the
existence of the nation. They would not indeed submit to
slavery extension; they preferred disunion to such a disgrace.
But they had no intention when they went to war of destroying
slavery in the states where it existed; they even took pains to
prove to the South that the war was not an anti-slavery
crusade. The negroes were treated by the Northern generals not
as men, but as contraband of war; even Butler in New Orleans
did not emancipate the slaves; a general who issued a
proclamation of that nature was reprimanded by the government,
although he only followed the example of British generals in
the Revolutionary war. But as the contest became more severe
and more prolonged, and all hopes of reconciliation were at an
end, slavery became identified with the South in the Northern
mind, and was itself regarded as a foe. The astute and cautious
statesman at the head of affairs perceived that the time had
come; the constitution was suspended during the war; and so, in
all legality and with due form, he set free in one day four
million slaves.
It is impossible to view without compassion the misfortunes of
men who merely followed in the footsteps of their fathers, and
were in no sense more guilty than Washington and Jefferson, who
remained slaveholders to their dying day. It was easy for Great
Britain to pay twenty millions; it was easy for the Northern
states to emancipate their slaves, who were few in number, and
not necessary to their life. But it was impossible for the
South to abandon slavery. The money of a planter was sunk in
flesh and blood. Yet the Southern politicians must be blamed
for their crazy ambition, and their blind ignorance of the
world. Instead of preparing as the Cuban planters are preparing
now for those changes which had been rendered inevitable by the
progress of mankind, they supposed that it was in their power
to defy the spirit of the age, and to establish an empire on
the pattern of ancient Rome. They firmly believed that, because
they could not exist without selling cotton, Great Britain
could not exist without buying it from them; which is like a
shopkeeper supposing he could ruin his customers by putting up
his shutters.
It may console those who yet lament the lost cause if
we picture for their benefit what the Southern empire
would have been. There would have been an aristocracy of
planters, herds of slaves, a servile press, a servile pulpit,
and a rabble of mean whites formed into an army. Abolition
societies would have been established in the North, to
instigate slaves to rebel or run away; a cordon of posts with a
system of passports would have been established in the South.
Border raids would have been made by fanatics on the one side,
and by desperadoes on the other. Sooner or later there must
have been a war. Filibustering expeditions on Mexico and Cuba
would have brought about a war with Spain, and perhaps with
France. It was the avowed intention of the planters, when once
their empire was established, to import labour from Africa; to
re-open the trade as in the good old times. But this, Great
Britain would certainly have not allowed; and thus, again,
there would have been war. Even if the planters would have
displayed a little common sense, which is exceedingly
improbable, and so escaped extirpation from without, their
system of culture would have eaten up their lands. But happily
such hypotheses need no longer be discussed; a future of
another kind is in reserve for the Southern states. America can
now pursue with untarnished reputation her glorious career, and
time will soften the memories of a conflict, the original guilt
of which must be ascribed to the founders of the nation, or
rather to the conditions by which those great men were mastered
and controlled.
I have now accomplished the task which I set myself to do. I
have shown to the best of my ability what kind of place in
universal history Africa deserves to hold. I have shown that
not only Egypt has assisted the development of man by educating
Greece, Carthage by leading forth Rome to conquest, but that
even the obscure Sudan, or land of the negroes, has also
played its part in the drama of European life.
The slave-trade must be estimated as a war; though cruel and
atrocious in itself, it has, like most wars, been of service to
mankind. I shall leave it to others to trace cut in detail the
influence of the negro in the human progress. It will be
sufficient to observe that the grandeur of West Indian commerce
in the last generation, and of
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