Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South / on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery

ADDRESS

TO THE

NON-SLAVEHOLDERS OF THE SOUTH,

ON THE

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVILS

OF

SLAVERY.

New York:

PUBLISHED BY THE AM. & FOR. ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY,

WILLIAM HARNED, AGENT, 61 JOHN STREET.

☞ For Sale at the Depository of the Amer. and For. A. S. Society, No. 61 John Street, New York, at $35 per thousand, $4 per hundred, 50 cents per dozen, and 5 cents for a single copy.

WILLIAM HARNED, Publishing Agent.

ADDRESS

TO

THE NON-SLAVEHOLDERS OF THE SLAVE STATES.

Fellow-Citizens:

We ask your attention to the injuries inflicted upon you and your children, by an institution which lives by your sufferance, and will die at your mandate. Slavery is maintained by you whom it impoverishes and degrades, not by those upon whom it confers wealth and influence. These assertions will be received by you and others with surprise and incredulity. Before you condemn them, ponder the following considerations and statistics.

We all know that the sugar and cotton cultivation of the South is conducted, not like the agriculture of the North, on small farms and with few hands, but on vast plantations and with large gangs of negroes, technically called "the force." In the breeding States, men, women and children form the great staple for exportation; and like other stock, require capital on the part of those who follow the business of rearing them. It is also a matter of notoriety, that the price of slaves has been and still is such as to confine their possession almost exclusively to the rich. We might as well talk of poor men owning herds of cattle and studs of horses, as gangs of negroes. When an infant will bring one hundred, and a man from four hundred to a thousand dollars in the market, slaves are not commodities to be found in the cabins of the poor. You are moreover aware that the great capitalists of the South have their wealth chiefly invested in plantations and slaves, and not as with us in commerce and manufactures.

It has been repeatedly stated that Mr. Carroll, of Baltimore, the former president of the Colonization Society, was the owner of 1,000 slaves. The newspapers, in announcing the death of Mr. Pollock, of North Carolina, remarked that he had left 1,500 slaves. In the account of Mr. Madison's funeral, it was mentioned that he was followed to the grave by 100 of his slaves, and it is probable that the women and children were not included. The following article, from the Gospel Messenger for August, 1842, gives us some idea of the feudal vassalage prevailing on the estates of some of your lordly planters. "A noble deed.—Dr. Mercer, of Adams county, Mississippi, has lately erected, at his own expense, and for the advantage of his vast plantation, and the people on his lands, a neat church and parsonage house, at the cost of over $30,000. He pays the salary of the minister, $1,200 a year, besides his meat and bread. On Bishop Otey's late visit to that congregation, he and Mr. Deacon, the incumbent, baptized in one day one hundred and eight children and ten adults, all belonging to the plantation."

At the North a farmer hires as many men as his work requires; at the South the laborers cannot be separated from the women and children. These are property, and must be owned by somebody. Now when we take this last circumstance into consideration, and at the same time recollect that the very value of the slaves debars the poor from owning them—and connect these two facts with the character of the cultivation in which slave labor is employed; we must be ready to admit that those who do employ this species of labor, cannot on an average hold less than ten slaves, including able-bodied men, their wives and children. It appears by the census, that of the slave population, the two sexes are almost exactly equal in number; and that there are two children under ten years of age, for every male slave over that age. Hence, if a planter employs only three men, we may take it for granted that his slave family consists of at least 12 souls, viz.: 3 men, 3 women, and 6 children. We of course estimate the number of children too low, since there will be some over ten years of age. It thus appears that the average number of slaves we assign to each slaveholder is probably far below the truth; but we purposely avoid even the approach to exaggeration. Now the number of slaves in the United States by the last census, was 2,487,113; of course according to our estimate of ten slaves to one master, there can be only 248,711 slaveholders.

We are not forgetful that our enumeration must embrace some who are the sons of slaveholders, and who are therefore interested in upholding the system,—but we are fully convinced that our estimate of the number of slaveholders is far beyond the truth, and that we may therefore safely throw out of account the very moderate number of slaveholders' sons above 20 years of age, and not themselves possessing slaves.

Here then, fellow-citizens, you see your strength. You have a majority of 518,885 over the slaveholders; and now we repeat, that with a numerical majority of more than half a million, slavery lives or dies at your behest.

We know that this result is so startling and unexpected, that you will scarcely credit the testimony of figures themselves. It is so commonly taken for granted, that every white man at the South is a slaveholder, that many will doubtingly inquire, where are these non-slaveholding citizens to be found? We answer, everywhere. Is poverty of rare occurrence in any country? Has it ever happened that the mass of any people were rich enough to keep, for their own convenience, such expensive laborers—as southern slaves? Slavery moreover is monopolizing in its tendency, and leads to the accumulation of property in few hands. It is also to be observed, that the high price of slaves, and the character of the cultivation in which they are employed, both conspire to concentrate this class of laborers on particular spots, and in the hands of large proprietors. Now the census shows that in some districts the slaves are collected in vast numbers, while in others they are necessarily few. Thus, for instance, in Georgetown district, S. Carolina, there are about 7.5 slaves to every white man, woman and child, in the district. Now if from the white population in this district we exclude all but the slaveholders themselves, the average number of slaves held by them would probably exceed one hundred. On the other hand, we find all through the slave States, many districts where the slaves bear a very small proportion to the whites, and where, of course, the non-slaveholders must form a vast and overwhelming majority. A few instances must suffice.

There is not a State or Territory in the Union in which you, fellow-citizens, have not an overwhelming majority over the slaveholders; and the majority is probably the greatest in those in which the slaves are the most numerous, because in such they are chiefly concentrated on large plantations.

It has been the policy of the slaveholders to keep entirely out of sight their own numerical inferiority, and to speak and act as if their interests were those of the whole community. They are the nobility of the south, and they find it expedient to forget that there are any commoners. Hence with them slavery is the institution of the south, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south. It is their craft to magnify and extol the importance and advantages of their institution; and hence we are told by Gov. McDuffie, that slavery "is the CORNER STONE of our republican institutions." To defend this corner stone from the assaults of truth and reason, he audaciously proposed to the legislature, that abolitionists should be punished "with death without benefit of clergy." This gentleman, like most demagogues, while professing great zeal for the People, whose interests were for the most part adverse to slavery, was in fact looking to his own aggrandizement. He was, at the very time he uttered these absurd and murderous sentiments, a great planter, and his large "force" was said to have raised in 1836, no less than 122,500 lbs. of cotton. [2] In the same spirit, and with the same design, the Report of a Committee of the South Carolina Legislature, made in 1842, speaks of slavery "as an ancient domestic institution, cherished in the hearts of the people at the south, the eradication of which would demolish our whole system of policy, domestic, social, and political."

The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare. Thus have the landed proprietors of England declaimed loudly on the blessings of dear bread, because the corn laws keep up rents and the price of land. The wealth and influence of your aristocracy, together with your own poverty, have led you to look up to them with a reverence bordering on that which is paid to a feudal nobility by their hereditary dependents. Hence it is, that, unconscious of your own power, you have permitted them to assume, as of right, the whole legislation and government of your respective States. We now propose to call your attention to the practical results of that control over your interests, which, by your sufferance, they have so long exercised. We ask you to join us in the inquiry how far you have been benefitted by the care of your guardians, when compared with the people of the North, who have been left to govern themselves. We will pursue this inquiry in the following order:

I. INCREASE OF POPULATION.

The ratio of increase of population, especially in this country, is one of the surest tests of public prosperity. Let us then again listen to the impartial testimony of the late census. From this we learn that the increase of population in the free States from 1830 to 1840, was at the rate of 38 per cent., while the increase of the free population in the slave States was only 23 per cent. Why this difference of 15 in the two ratios? No other cause can be assigned than slavery, which drives from your borders many of the virtuous and enterprising, and at the same time deters emigrants from other States and from foreign countries from settling among you.

The influence of slavery on population is strikingly illustrated by a comparison between Kentucky and Ohio. These two States are of nearly equal areas, Kentucky however having about 3000 square miles more than the other. [3] They are separated only by a river, and are both remarkable for the fertility of their soil; but one has, from the beginning, been cursed with slavery, and the other blessed with freedom. Now mark their respective careers.

In 1792, Kentucky was erected into a State, and Ohio in 1802.

The representation of the two States in Congress, has been as follows:

The value of land, other things being equal, is in proportion to the density of the population. Now the population of Ohio is 38.8 to a square mile, while the free population of Kentucky is but 14.2 to a square mile—and probably the price of land in the two States is much in the same proportion. You are told, much of the wealth is invested in negroes—yet it obviously is a wealth that impoverishes; and no stronger evidence of the truth of this assertion is needed, than the comparative price of land in the free and slave States. The two principal cities of Kentucky and Ohio are Louisville and Cincinnati; the former with a population of 21,210, the latter with a population of 46,338. Why this difference? The question is answered by the Louisville Journal. The editor, speaking of the two rival cities, remarks, "The most potent cause of the more rapid advancement of Cincinnati than Louisville is the absence of slavery. The same influences which made Ohio the young giant of the West, and is advancing Indiana to a grade higher than Kentucky, have operated in the Queen City. They have no dead weight to carry, and consequently have the advantage in the race."

In 1840, Mr. C. M. Clay, a member of the Kentucky Legislature, published a pamphlet against the repeal of the law prohibiting the importation of slaves from the other States. We extract the following:

"The world is teeming with improved machinery, the combined development of science and art. To us it is all lost; we are comparatively living in centuries that are gone; we cannot make it, we cannot use it when made. Ohio is many years younger, and possessed of fewer advantages than our State. Cincinnati has manufactories to sustain her; last year she put up one thousand houses. Louisville, with superior natural advantages, as all the world knows, wrote 'to rent,' upon many of her houses. Ohio is a free State, Kentucky a slave State."

Mr. Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, in a pamphlet published the same year, and on the same subject, draws the following comparison between Virginia and New York:

"In 1790, Virginia, with 70,000 square miles of territory, contained a population of 749,308. New York, upon a surface of 45,658 square miles, contained a population of 344,120. This statement exhibits in favor of Virginia a difference of 24,242 square miles of territory, and 408,188 in population, which is the double of New York, and 68,600 more. In 1830, after a race of forty years, Virginia is found to contain 1,211,405 souls, and New York 1,918,608, which exhibits a difference in favor of New York of 607,203. The increase on the part of Virginia will be perceived to be 463,187, starting from a basis more than double as large as that of New York. The increase of New York, upon a basis of 340,120, has been 1,578,391 human beings. Virginia has increased in a ratio of 61 per cent., and New York in that of 566 per cent.

"The total amount of property in Virginia under the assessment of 1838, was $211,930,508. The aggregate value of real and personal property in New York, in 1839, was $654,000,000, exhibiting an excess in New York over Virginia of capital of $442,069,492.

"Statesmen may differ about policy, or the means to be employed in the promotion of the public good, but surely they ought to be agreed as to what prosperity means. I think there can be no dispute that New York is a greater, richer, a more prosperous and powerful State than Virginia. What has occasioned the difference?... There is but one explanation of the facts I have shown. The clog that has stayed the march of her people, the incubus that has weighed down her enterprise, strangled her commerce, kept sealed her exhaustless fountains of mineral wealth, and paralyzed her arts, manufactures and improvement, is NEGRO SLAVERY."

These statements were made before the results of the last census were known. By the census of 1840, it appears that in the ten preceding years,

Now let it be recollected that Maryland is nearly double the size of Massachusetts. In the last there are 98.8 free inhabitants to the square mile; in the former only 27.2.

If we turn to the new States, we find that slavery and freedom have the same influence on population as in the old. Take, for instance, Michigan and Arkansas. They came into the Union about the same time—

The ratio of increase of white inhabitants, for the last ten years, has been in Arkansas as 200 per cent; in Michigan, 574 per cent. In both instances the increase has been chiefly owing to immigration; but the ratio shows the influence of slavery in retarding immigration. Compare also Alabama and Illinois—

We surely need not detain you with farther details on this head, to convince you what an enormous sacrifice of happiness and prosperity you are offering on the altar of slavery. But of the character and extent of this sacrifice you have as yet had only a partial glimpse. Let us proceed to examine

II. THE STATE OF EDUCATION IN THE SLAVE
STATES.

The maxim that "Knowledge is power," has ever more or less influenced the conduct of aristocracies. Education elevates the inferior classes of society, teaches them their rights, and points out the means of enforcing them. Of course, it tends to diminish the influence of wealth, birth, and rank. In 1671, Sir William Berkley, then Governor of Virginia, in his answer to the inquiries of the Committee of the Colonies, remarked, "I thank God that there are no free schools nor printing presses, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years." The spirit of Sir William seems still to preside in the councils of his own Virginia, and to actuate those of the other slave States.

The power of the slaveholders, as we have already showed you, depends on the acquiescence of the major part of the white inhabitants in their domination. It cannot be, therefore, the interest or the inclination of the sagacious and reflecting among them, to promote the intellectual improvement of the inferior class.

In the free States, on the contrary, where there is no caste answering to your slaveholders—where the People literally partake in the government, mighty efforts are made for general education; and in most instances, elementary instruction is, through the public liberality, brought within the reach of the children of the poor. You have lamentable experience, that such is not the case where slaveholders bear rule.

But you will receive with distrust whatever we may say as to the comparative ignorance of the free and slave States. Examine then for yourselves the returns of the last census on this point. This document gives us the number of white persons over twenty years of age in each State, who cannot read and write. It appears that these persons are to the whole white population in the several States as follows, viz.:

It will be observed by looking at this table, that Indiana and Illinois are the only free States, which in point of education are surpassed by any of the slave States: for this disgraceful circumstance three causes may be assigned, viz., their recent settlement, the influx of foreigners, and emigration from the slave States. The returns from New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, are greatly affected by the vast number of foreigners congregated in their cities, and employed in their manufactories and on their public works. In Ohio, also, there is a large foreign population: and it is well known that comparatively few emigrants from Europe seek a residence in the slave States, where there is little or no employment to invite them. But what a commentary on slavery and slaveholders is afforded by the gross ignorance prevailing in the old States of South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina! But let us proceed. The census gives a return of "scholars at public charge."

Ohio alone has 51,812 such scholars,—more than are to be found in the 13 slave States! Her neighbor Kentucky has 429!! Let us compare in this particular the largest and the smallest State in the Union.

But we have some official confessions, which give a still more deplorable account of Southern ignorance. In 1837, Governor Clarke, in his message to the Kentucky Legislature, remarked, "By the computation of those most familiar with the subject, one third of the adult population of the state are unable to write their names."

Governor Campbell reported to the Virginia Legislature, that from the returns of 98 clerks, it appeared that of 4614 applications for marriage licenses in 1837, no less than 1047 were made by men unable to write.

These details will enable you to estimate the impudence of the following plea in behalf of slavery:

"It is by the existence of slavery, exempting so large a portion of our citizens from the necessity of bodily labor, that we have leisure for intellectual pursuits, and the means of attaining a liberal education."—Chancellor Harper of South Carolina on Slavery.—Southern Literary Messenger, Oct. 1838.

Whatever may be the leisure enjoyed by the slaveholders, they are careful not to afford the means of literary improvement to their fellow-citizens who are too poor to possess slaves, and who are, by their very ignorance, rendered more fit instruments for doing the will, and guarding the human property of the wealthier class.

III. INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE.

In a community so unenlightened as yours, it is a matter of course, that the arts and sciences must languish, and the industry and enterprise of the country be oppressed by a general torpor. Hence multitudes will be without regular and profitable employment, and be condemned to poverty and numberless privations. The very advertisements in your newspapers show that, for a vast proportion of the comforts and conveniences of life, you are dependent on Northern manufacturers and mechanics. You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged. The great staple of the South is cotton; and we have no desire to undervalue its importance. It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing. Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders. Yet on account of this article, we hear frequent vaunts of the agricultural riches of the South. With the exception of cotton, it is difficult to distinguish your agricultural products arising from slaves, and from free labor. But admitting, what we know is not the fact, that all the other productions of the soil are raised exclusively by free labor, we learn from the census, that the agricultural products of the North exceed those of the South, cotton excepted, $226,219,714. Here then we have an appalling proof of the paralyzing influence of slavery on the industry of the whites.

In every community a large portion of the inhabitants are debarred from drawing their maintenance directly from the cultivation of the earth. Other and lucrative employments are reserved for them. If the slaveholders chiefly engross the soil, let us see how you are compensated by the encouragement afforded to mechanical skill and industry.

Or less than one-fifth of the whole! But the difference is still more striking, when we take into consideration the comparative value of the shipping built in the two regions:

It would be tedious and unprofitable to compare the results of the different branches of manufacture carried on at the North and the South. It is sufficient to state that, according to the census, the value of the manufactures

Having already compared Ohio and Kentucky in reference to population and education, we will pursue the comparison as to agricultural and mechanical industry. On account of contiguity, and similarity of extent, soil and climate, no two States can perhaps be so aptly contrasted for the purpose of illustrating the influence of slavery. It should also be borne in mind that Kentucky can scarcely be called a cotton State, having in 1840 raised only 607,456 lbs. of that article. Hence the deficiency of agriculture and other products in Kentucky arises, not from a peculiar species of cultivation, but solely from the withering effects of slavery.

In one species of manufacture the South apparently excels the North, but unfortunately it is in appearance only. Of 9657 distilleries in the United States, no less than 7665 were found in the slave States and Territories; but for want of skill and capital these yield 1992 gallons less than the other.

Where there is so much ignorance and idleness, we may well suppose that the inventive faculties will be but little exercised; and accordingly we find that of the 545 patents granted for new inventions in 1846, only 80 were received by the citizens of the slave States. We have thus, fellow-citizens, offered you the testimony of figures, as to the different state of society under freedom and slavery; suffer us now to present you pictures of the two regions, drawn not by abolitionists, but by Southern artists, in unguarded hours. Mr. Clowney, of South Carolina, thus portrayed his native State, in the ardor of debate on the floor of Congress:

"Look at South Carolina now, with her houses deserted and falling to decay; her once fruitful fields worn out and abandoned for want of timely improvement or skilful cultivation; and her thousands of acres of inexhaustible lands, still promising an abundant harvest to the industrious husbandman, lying idle and neglected. In the interior of the State where I was born, and where I now live, although a country possessing all the advantages of soil, climate and health, abounding in arable land, unreclaimed from the first rude state of nature, there can now be found many neighborhoods where the population is too sparse to support a common elementary school for children. Such is the deplorable condition of one of the oldest members of this Union, that dates back its settlement more than a century and a half, while other States, born as it were but yesterday, already surpass what Carolina is or ever has been, in the happiest and proudest day of her prosperity."

This gentleman chose to attribute the decline of South Carolina to the tariff; rather than to the obvious cause, that one-half of the people of South Carolina are poor, ignorant, degraded slaves, and the other half suffering in all their faculties and energies, from a moral pestilence which they insanely regard as a blessing and not a curse. Surely it is not owing to the tariff, that this ancient member of the Union has 20,615 white citizens over twenty years of age who do not know their letters; while Maine, with double her population, has only 3,241.

Now look upon a very different picture. Mr. Preston, of South Carolina, not long since delivered a speech at Columbia in reference to a proposed rail-road. In this speech, in order to stimulate the efforts of the friends of the road, he indulged in the following strain:

"No Southern man can journey (as he had lately done) through the Northern States, and witness the prosperity, the industry, the public spirit which they exhibit—the sedulous cultivation of all those arts by which life is rendered comfortable and respectable—without feelings of deep sadness and shame as he remembers his own neglected and desolate home. There, no dwelling is to be seen abandoned—not a farm uncultivated. Every person and every thing performs a part towards the grand result; and the whole land is covered with fertile fields, with manufactories, and canals, and rail-roads, and edifices, and towns, and cities. We of the South are mistaken in the character of these people, when we think of them only as pedlars in horn flints and bark nutmegs. Their energy and enterprise are directed to all objects great and small within their reach. The number of rail-roads and other modes of expeditious intercommunication knit the whole country into a closely compacted mass, through which the productions of commerce and of the press, the comforts of life, and the means of knowledge, are universally diffused; while the close intercourse of travel and of business makes all neighbors, and promotes a common interest and a common sympathy. How different the condition of these things in the South! Here the face of the country wears the aspect of premature old age and decay. No improvement is seen going on, nothing is done for posterity. No man thinks of anything beyond the present moment."

Yet this same Mr. Preston, thus sensitively alive to the superior happiness and prosperity of the free States, declared in the United States Senate, "Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina, if we can catch him we will try him, and notwithstanding all the interference of all the governments of the earth, including the Federal Government, we will hang him." [7] In other words, the slaveholders, rather than part with their slaves, are ready to murder, with all the formalities of law, the very men who are laboring to confer on them the envied blessings of the North.