Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839

Of course, in freeing the slaves, it would be necessary to contemplate the possibility of their becoming eventual proprietors of the soil to some extent themselves. There is as little doubt that many of them would soon acquire the means of doing so (men who amass, during hours of daily extra labour, through years of unpaid toil, the means of buying themselves from their masters, would soon justify their freedom by the intelligent improvement of their condition), as that many of the present landholders would be ready and glad to alienate their impoverished estates by parcels, and sell the land which has become comparatively unprofitable to them, to its enfranchised cultivators. This, the future ownership of land by negroes, as well as their admission to those rights of citizenship which everywhere in America such ownership involves, would necessarily be future subjects of legislation; and either or both privileges might be withheld temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently, as might seem expedient, and the progress in civilisation which might justify such an extension of rights. These, and any other modifications of the state of the black population in the South, would require great wisdom to deal with, but their immediate transformation from bondsmen to free might, I think, be accomplished with little danger or difficulty, and with certain increase of prosperity to the Southern States.

On the other hand, it is not impossible that, left to the unimpeded action of the natural laws that govern the existence of various races, the black population, no longer directly preserved and propagated for the purposes of slavery, might gradually decrease and dwindle, as it does at the North—where, besides the unfavourable influence of a cold climate on a race originally African, it suffers from its admixture with the whites, and the amalgamation of the two races, as far as it goes, tends evidently to the destruction of the weaker. The Northern mulattoes are an unhealthy feeble population, and it might yet appear that even under the more favourable influence of a Southern climate, whenever the direct stimulus afforded by slavery to the increase of the negroes was removed, their gradual extinction or absorption by the predominant white race would follow in the course of time.

But the daily course of events appears to be rendering more and more unlikely the immediate effectual enfranchisement of the slaves: the President's proclamation will reach with but little efficacy beyond the mere borders of the Southern States. The war is assuming an aspect of indefinite duration; and it is difficult to conceive what will be the condition of the blacks, freed de jure but by no means de facto, in the vast interior regions of the Southern States, as long as the struggle raging all round their confines does not penetrate within them. Each of the combatants is far too busily absorbed in the furious strife to afford thought, leisure, or means, either effectually to free the slaves or effectually to replace them in bondage; and in the meantime their condition is the worst possible for the future success of either operation. If the North succeeds in subjugating the South, its earliest business will be to make the freedom of the slaves real as well as nominal, and as little injurious to themselves as possible. If, on the other hand, the South makes good its pretensions to a separate national existence, no sooner will the disseverment of the Union be an established fact than the slaveholders will have to consolidate once more the system of their 'peculiar institution,' to reconstruct the prison which has half crumbled to the ground, and rivet afresh the chains which have been all but struck off. This will be difficult: the determination of the North to restrict the area of slavery by forbidding its ingress into future territories and States has been considered by the slaveholders a wrong, and a danger justifying a bloody civil war; inasmuch as, if under those circumstances they did not abolish slavery themselves in a given number of years, it would infallibly abolish them by the increase of the negro population, hemmed with them into a restricted space by this cordon sanitaire drawn round them. But, bad as this prospect has seemed to slaveholders (determined to continue such), and justifying—as it may be conceded that it does from their point of view—not a ferocious civil war, but a peaceable separation from States whose interests were declared absolutely irreconcileable with theirs, the position in which they will find themselves if the contest terminates in favour of Secession will be undoubtedly more difficult and terrible than the one the mere anticipation of which has driven them to the dire resort of civil war. All round the Southern coast, and all along the course of the great Mississippi, and all across the northern frontier of the Slave States, the negroes have already thrown off the trammels of slavery. Whatever their condition may be—and doubtless in many respects it is miserable enough—they are to all intents and purposes free. Vast numbers of them have joined the Northern invading armies, and considerable bodies of them have become organised as soldiers and labourers, under the supervision of Northern officers and employers; most of them have learned the use of arms, and possess them; all of them have exchanged the insufficient slave diet of grits and rice for the abundant supplies of animal food, which the poorest labourer in that favoured land of cheap provisions and high wages indulges in to an extent unknown in any other country. None of these slaves of yesterday will be the same slaves to-morrow. Little essential difference as may yet have been effected by the President's proclamation in the interior of the South in the condition of the blacks, it is undoubtedly known to them, and they are waiting in ominous suspense its accomplishment or defeat by the fortune of the war; they are watching the issue of the contest of which they well know themselves to be the theme, and at its conclusion, end how it will, they must be emancipated or exterminated. With the North not only not friendly to slavery, but henceforward bitterly hostile to slaveholders, and no more to be reckoned upon as heretofore, it might have been infallibly by the Southern white population in any difficulty with the blacks (a fact of which the negroes will be as well aware as their former masters)—with an invisible boundary stretching from ocean to ocean, over which they may fly without fear of a master's claim following them a single inch—with the hope and expectation of liberty suddenly snatched from them at the moment it seemed within their grasp—with the door of their dungeon once more barred between them and the light into which they were in the act of emerging—is it to be conceived, that these four millions of people, many thousands of whom are already free and armed, will submit without a struggle to be again thrust down into the hell of slavery? Hitherto there has been no insurrection among the negroes, and observers friendly and inimical to them have alike drawn from that fact conclusions unfavourable to their appreciation of the freedom apparently within their grasp; but they are waiting to see what the North will really achieve for them. The liberty offered them is hitherto anomalous, and uncertain enough in its conditions; they probably trust it as little as they know it: but slavery they do know—and when once they find themselves again delivered over to that experience, there will not be ONE insurrection in the South; there will be an insurrection in every State, in every county, on every plantation—a struggle as fierce as it will be futile—a hopeless effort of hopeless men, which will baptise in blood the new American nation, and inaugurate its birth among the civilised societies of the earth, not by the manumission but the massacre of every slave within its borders.

Perhaps, however, Mr. Jefferson Davis means to free the negroes. Whenever that consummation is attained, the root of bitterness will have perished from the land; and when a few years shall have passed blunting the hatred which has been excited by this fratricidal strife, the Americans of both the Northern and Southern States will perceive that the selfish policy of other nations would not have so rejoiced over their division, had it not seemed, to those who loved them not, the proof of past failure and the prophecy of future weakness.

Admonished by its terrible experiences, I believe the nation will reunite itself under one government, remodel its constitution, and again address itself to fulfill its glorious destiny. I believe that the country sprung from ours—of all our just subjects of national pride the greatest—will resume its career of prosperity and power, and become the noblest as well as the mightiest that has existed among the nations of the earth.

notes

1

Some of our great English ladies are, I know, exquisite needlewomen; but I do not think, in spite of these exceptional examples, that young English ladies of the higher classes are much skilled in this respect at the present day; and as for the democratic daughters of America, who for many reasons might be supposed likely to be well up in such housewifely lore, they are for the most part so ignorant of it that I have heard the most eloquent preacher of the city of New York advert to their incapacity in this respect, as an impediment to their assistance of the poor; and ascribe to the fact that the daughters of his own parishioners did not know how to sew, the impossibility of their giving the most valuable species of help to the women of the needier classes, whose condition could hardly be more effectually improved than by acquiring such useful knowledge. I have known young American school girls, duly instructed in the nature of the parallaxes of the stars, but, as a rule, they do not know how to darn their stockings. Les Dames du Sacré Coeur do better for their high-born and well-bred pupils than this.

2

Of this woman's life on the plantation, I subsequently learned the following circumstances:—She was the wife of head-man Frank, the most intelligent and trustworthy of Mr. –'s slaves; the head driver—second in command to the overseer, and indeed second to none during the pestilential season, when the rice swamps cannot with impunity be inhabited by any white man, and when, therefore, the whole force employed in its cultivation on the island remains entirely under his authority and control. His wife—a tidy, trim, intelligent woman, with a pretty figure, but a decidedly negro face—was taken from him by the overseer left in charge of the plantation by the Messrs. –, the all-efficient and all-satisfactory Mr. K–, and she had a son by him, whose straight features and diluted colour, no less than his troublesome, discontented and insubmissive disposition, bear witness to his Yankee descent. I do not know how long Mr. K–'s occupation of Frank's wife continued, or how the latter endured the wrong done to him. When I visited the island, Betty was again living with her husband—a grave, sad, thoughtful-looking man, whose admirable moral and mental qualities were extolled to me by no worse a judge of such matters than Mr. K– himself, during the few days he spent with Mr. –, while we were on the plantation. This outrage upon this man's rights was perfectly notorious among all the slaves; and his hopeful offspring, Renty, alluding very unmistakably to his superior birth on one occasion when he applied for permission to have a gun, observed that, though the people in general on the plantation were not allowed fire-arms, he thought he might, on account of his colour, and added that he thought Mr. K– might have left him his. This precious sample of the mode in which the vices of the whites procure the intellectual progress of the blacks to their own endangerment, was, as you will easily believe, a significant chapter to me in the black history of oppression which is laid before my eyes in this place.

3

Of such is the white family so wonderfully described in Mrs. Stowe's 'Dred'—whose only slave brings up the orphaned children of his masters with such exquisitely grotesque and pathetic tenderness. From such the conscription which has fed the Southern army in the deplorable civil conflict now raging in America has drawn its rank and file. Better 'food for powder' the world could scarcely supply. Fierce and idle, with hardly one of the necessities or amenities that belong to civilised existence, they are hardy endurers of hardship, and reckless to a savage degree of the value of life, whether their own or others. The soldier's pay, received or promised, exceeds in amount per month anything they ever earned before per year, and the war they wage is one that enlists all their proud and ferocious instincts. It is against the Yankees—the northern sons of free soil, free toil and intelligence, the hated abolitionists whose success would sweep away slavery and reduce the southern white men to work—no wonder they are ready to fight to the death against this detestable alternative, especially as they look to victory as the certain promotion of the refuse of the 'poor white' population of the South, of which they are one and all members, to the coveted dignity of slaveholders.

4

These laws have been greatly increased in stringency and severity since these letters were written, and death has not been reckoned too heavy a penalty for those who should venture to offer these unfortunate people the fruit of that forbidden tree of knowledge, their access to which has appeared to their owners the crowning danger of their own precarious existence among their terrible dependents.

5

The only ilex trees which I have seen comparable in size and beauty with those of the sea-board of Georgia are some to be found in the Roman Campagna, at Passerano, Lunghegna, Castel Fusano, and other of its great princely farms, but especially in the magnificent woody wilderness of Valerano.