Several causes contributed to the growth and permanence of slavery, the most notable being the invention of the cotton-gin by Whitney,—an event which gave a tremendous impetus to the culture of the cotton plant, necessitated a vast increase in the productive forces of agriculture, and led to increased activity in the importation of African negroes. For, in consequence of this invention, it is estimated that no less than a half-million of them were imported into the United States between the years of 1793 and 1808, the latter being the date at which the foreign slave traffic became illegal. But neither of these causes would have greatly affected the perpetuity of slavery, had not other controlling factors been enlisted in its behalf. The erection of mills in the New England states, for the manufacture of raw cotton into cotton cloth enlisted a powerful interest on the side of slavery, which, together with its commercial alliances, religious support, and legal protection, intrenched it in what appeared to be an impregnable fortress. The Southern slaveholders strenuously objected to the presence of manufacturing industries, on the ground that they would destroy slavery, and that already slave mechanics were half free. They also prevented the education of the poor whites, who outnumbered the slave autocrats ten to one. They were also stubbornly opposed to elevating negro labor above the crudest performance, notwithstanding the fact that ignorant and superficial cultivation speedily exhausted the soil. With chattelism finally established, there of necessity arose class distinctions, with the inevitable result that the government passed into the hands of its landed aristocrats.

The security of slavery rested on two fundamental conditions, viz. that there should be no instruction of the slave, and no discussion of the evils of slavery by white men. Slaves had no legal personality. The law of Louisiana said they should be considered as real estate, and that they could possess nothing, and acquire nothing but what belonged to their masters. On the other hand, the law of South Carolina declared that slaves should be decreed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal. The legislation in the other slave states was similar, though the greater number regarded slaves as chattel property. The slave code of the South was based on the Institutes of Justinian; but, while ancient slaveholding nations subjugated their slaves by fetters and death, the slaveholders of America kept their slaves in submission by debasing their minds and morals, and dominating their persons with execrable legal atrocities.

The following extracts are taken from the slave legislation of the South: “Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color or slave to spell, read, or write, shall, upon conviction thereof, be imprisoned not less than one or more than twelve months;” a statute of Louisiana. “Teaching slaves to read and write tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion; therefore, if any person shall give or sell to any slave a Bible, tract, or book of any kind, such person, if white, shall be punished with a fine of two hundred dollars, and if a free negro, with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back;” the law of North Carolina. The law of South Carolina punished any slave found receiving mental instruction with severe castigation and his instructor with a fine of five hundred dollars. These excerpts are not exceptions; every slave commonwealth made the mental instruction of the slave a crime and his teacher a criminal. Not only was the mental enlightenment of the slave inhibited, but all morality set at naught by the mandate of the law. The code of Louisiana declared that “slaves could not contract matrimony,” that their sexual association was “a relation without sanctity, and to which no civil rights adhere.” The law of slavery was that slaves were not amenable to church or state for incontinence or adultery, since they were not bound by marital ties nor subjected to their obligations.

The legal iniquities of slavery reached the climax of audacity in its criminal code. The universal law of negro slavery declared that “If any slave shall presume to strike any white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.” Slaves were mutilated and killed at the pleasure of their owners whenever, in their judgment, their safety required it, and no punishment, even in the most aggravated cases was inflicted other than the imposition of a trifling fine. When a non-slaveholding white killed a negro, payment of the price of the bondman was his acquittance; in no case was imprisonment or the death penalty inflicted. Slavery per se, upheld and fostered as it was in this country by an ostensibly free government, and justified and participated in by its free subjects, could not do otherwise than produce a monstrous aberration of the sense of human right.

The contact of whites and blacks in the relation of master and servant corrupted both races. The physical depravity of the enslaved negro exerted a pernicious influence on the white masters; it corrupted their language, warped their moral vision, and swept away the decent and orderly restraints which civilized society imposes on its members. Moral integrity was set aside, the caprice of the individual substituted. Slave-owners became self-indulgent, brutal and lustful, masterful in speech, audacious in action; and throughout the whole saturnalia of chattelism the whites sunk as the blacks rose in moral stamina, for the latter acquired, through the church and social regulations of the plantation, some knowledge of the duties and obligations of moral living.

The condition of the negro during slavery is thus graphically described by De Tocqueville: “The negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges. He was sold by the one, repulsed by the other; violence made him a slave, and the habits of servitude gave him the thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him; his understanding is degraded to the level of his soul, and he quietly enjoys the privilege of his debasement.” This luminous portrayal of negro nature is as true today, after thirty years of freedom, as when it was written by this keen-witted Frenchman.

It may be said that human bondage was not instituted to develop and cultivate the mental and moral qualities of those who were imported to toil and propagate their kind, especially where mercenary greed deliberately set aflame negro sensuality. Slavery, we know, caressed productive wantonness, and flogged barren prudery in its mad strife to increase human herds for traffic and use. We also know that moral integrity was impossible while the slaves lived in an atmosphere tainted with sensuous corruption. Furthermore, we know that just in proportion as the restraints of racial contact were removed, the corruption of white society increased, a fact conclusively established by millions of negroes whose blood is mixed with that of their masters. But whether in slavery or out of it, moral, deterioration is sure to follow in any race or individual gifted with high social development, when contact with another lower in the scale of civilization is unrestrained and of indefinite duration.

But while slavery wrought immeasurable evil in the white slaveholding class of the South, its positive iniquities bred a moral debasement in negro women, without parallel in modern annals, and whose consummate degradation was reached during our Civil War. It may have been the outcroppings of gratitude to Federal victors, or reckless abandon to lust, but the inciting cause is immaterial, so long as the shameful fact is true, that, wherever our armies were quartered in the South, the negro women flocked to their camps for infamous riot with the white soldiery. All occupied cities, suburban rendezvous, and rural bivouacs, bore witness to the mad havoc daily wrought in black womanhood by our citizen soldiery. We have personal knowledge of many Federal officers of high station, and some of strong prejudices against the race, who openly kept negro mistresses in their army quarters; nor do we doubt that the present lax morality everywhere observable among negro womenkind is largely due to the licentious freedom which the war engendered among them. Slavery had its blighting evils, but also its wholesome restraints.

Negro slavery was a many-sided affair, for at one and the same time it constituted a political force, an industrial factor, an ethical agency, a social institution, and a domestic feature. The character of the slaves themselves was largely affected by these several phases of enthralment. For example, the negroes coarse in speech and crude in action were assigned to labor in the field and forest; they were under the control of a white overseer who was assisted in his duties by negro drivers; men and women were herded together in work each with a definite assigned task. They were bound to a limited sphere of activities, which the least intelligence sufficed to execute, and where neither experience nor knowledge gave them a choice of methods. In the plantation social system field labor was its penal colony, and to be transported thither from other vocations was, in the eyes of the slaves, the most degrading punishment to which they could be subjected.

A favored class was the domestic servants employed in various capacities in the homes of the planters. These were usually bright and intelligent negroes, who, through contact and sympathetic supervision acquired in many instances a training in manners and methods of incomparable grace and efficiency. Another equally intelligent, but more self-reliant class, was the slaves employed in porterage in commercial centres, together with many others engaged in occupations which required little supervision, but a fair degree of personal intelligence and practical judgment to perform rightly. But the superior slave class, and the one which represented all that was best in negro development, was the mechanics who were in most cases conspicuous for their ability and achievements, for slavery included among its mechanical industries every form of handicraft, and as the ability to acquire a mechanical art carries with it a fair degree of intelligence, it is not surprising that negro artisans, who were carefully selected for their special lines of work, should have developed characters superior to their less fortunate fellows.

From the formation of the Union slavery was, in authority and influence, an aggressive force and dominating factor in the national government. The evidence in support of this is found in the Ordinance of 1787, providing for the return of fugitive slaves; in the compromises of the Federal Constitution with slavery, viz.: the organic recognition of a class of bondmen; the provision for the rendition of fugitives of that class to their masters; the concession that three-fourths of them should be counted in the apportionment for Congressional representation, a concession which gave the South representation for property, and by which the vote of the owner of five hundred slaves equalled that of three hundred non-slaveholding white citizens; finally, by the extension of the slave trade for twenty years from the formation of the Federal government.

The direct legal responsibility of the nation for slavery is established by the treaty made with the Creek Indians, in 1790, in which they agreed to return the runaway slaves among them. By the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which permitted the owner of a runaway to recover his slave in any state to which he had fled. By the act governing the District of Columbia, which affirmed that the laws of Virginia and Maryland should respectively remain in force. By the direct affirmation of Congress, that “The legal presumption is, that persons of color going at large without evidence of their freedom are absconding slaves, and prima facie liable to arrest as such; “that if a free man of color should be apprehended as a runaway, “he is subject to the payment of all fees and rewards, given by law, for the apprehending of runaways, and upon failure to make such payment, is liable to be sold as a slave.” By permitting slavery, in 1798, to be extended in the territory ceded by Georgia and North Carolina. By the Treaty of Ghent, whereby the English were required to pay to the United States $1,200,000 for the benefit of Southern slaveholders, whose negroes had escaped to the English army. By the invasion of Spanish Florida, for the express purpose of recovering Georgia fugitive negroes. By the Missouri Compromise, which was a clear and unequivocal Federal recognition of slavery. By the acquisition of Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and the legal authorization of slavery therein, as well as in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By judicial defence of slavery by the United States Supreme Court, as shown in the celebrated Dred Scott decision, wherein it was affirmed that the Missouri Compromise was not warranted by the Constitution, and was therefore null and void, that negroes were not included in the word “citizen” employed in the Constitution, and that they were regarded as an inferior order of beings, altogether unfit for association with white men, in social or political relations, and therefore might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for the benefit of white men.

That slavery was a national institution, recognized and protected by the Constitution, by foreign treaties, by Federal legislation, and by judicial decisions is a fundamental fact. It is equally true that from the foundation of the government up to 1860 no act inimical to slavery was ever enacted into law by the Congress of the United States. The Missouri Compromise may be cited as an instance to the contrary, but all the facts connected therewith show that, while the bill was introduced by a Northern Senator, it was admittedly a Southern measure, and enacted by Southern voters in the belief that it would efficiently check the spread of free institutions southward.

During the decade between 1850 and 1860 slavery was more popular in the South than at any previous period. The foreign slave trade was openly pursued. It is officially stated that at least forty slavers, whose net annual profits exceeded $15,000,000, were annually fitted out in the United States, chiefly from the port of New York. Moreover, near the close of this decade, the whole South was engaged in efforts to secure through national legislation a reopening of the African slave trade. In fact, never in the history of the nation had slavery been so aggressive in demands, so unyielding in purpose, as in 1861, when, for the first time, it had absolute right and security in all the states and territories by national legislation. But perhaps no single legislative act so significantly exemplified the paramount influence of the slave barons in national affairs, as the fact that, notwithstanding the open rebellion of several of the slave states, an amendment to the constitution was adopted by both Houses of Congress in January, 1861, and its submission for ratification to the several states ordered, which provided for the perpetual observance of the Fugitive Slave Act, the protection of slavery in all states and territories, and further provided that no subsequent amendment to the Constitution should ever be made that would impair these obligations or permit Congress to legislate adversely to slavery. This crowning injury and wanton surrender of freedom to slavery was heartily supported by many Republican members who have since become conspicuous in the councils of the nation, and, strange to say, two states, Ohio and Maryland, gave their assent to it.

In its later moods, slavery stood on the ground that negro chattelism was an essential element of a high civilization, and, in support of its pretensions, enlisted the activities of the ostensible Christian teachers of the South, most of whom owned slaves, and who deliberately taught from the pulpit and through the religious press that slavery was not only right in itself, but that it was a God-ordained institution. Nor was this the only class who supported this monstrous iniquity. The American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, together with all other distinctly religious organizations North and South, with the exception of the Society of Friends, the Methodist Protestant, and the United Brethren churches, were at one period distinctly committed to the support of negro slavery.

The religious sentiment of the country therefore constituted one of the chief bulwarks of the slave system, a statement amply justified by even the most. cursory examination of American sectarian history. For instance, the Episcopal Church, at that time representing the wealth and culture of the country, was proslavery to the core. The Presbyterian Church, after much internal dissension over the question of its communicants and ministers holding slaves, separated into a Northern and a Southern wing in 1837. And the church of John Wesley, whose founder had proclaimed slavery to be the “sum of all villanies,” was, a few years later, rent in twain by a slaveholding faction led by a slaveholding bishop. Nor was the Baptist Church one whit behind its sectarian brethren in defending the enthralment of the blacks. Moreover, while, in all denominations negro slaves were included among their communicants, none of them permitted their black brethren to testify in church tribunals against white members, it mattered not how heinous were the crimes they had committed against the person of the negro.

But while the American slave system had not the slightest shred of moral justification, yet, if we would be just in our conclusions respecting it, we must needs distinguish between slavery and slaveholding. Slavery, in itself, had no moral status, but slaveholding had in many instances commendable and extenuating features. Every master, the good and the bad, had at his disposal the services and life of his slave. In the long run absolute power will corrupt the best human beings. But candor compels us to say that there were many examples of Southern slaveholders who in their treatment of their black bondmen were actuated by a lofty sense of duty and principles of Christian benevolence. To be sure, they were part and parcel of an odious system, and to that extent their beneficent activities were checked; still, for all that, their wholesome examples and generous deeds left all indelible impress upon many negro men and women, who were ennobled thereby.

Nor has the universal kinship of humanity ever been more fitly realized than in the results achieved in negro bondage. Despite its barbarities, slavery wrought a salutary transformation in the negro race. It made rational men out of savage animals, and industrious serfs out of wanton idlers. It found the negro rioting in benighted ignorance, and led him to the threshold of light and knowledge. It clothed nakedness in civilized habiliments, and taught a jungle idolater of Christ and immortality. Moreover, paradoxical as it may appear, many a negro slave man was girt with a freedom of mind and nobility of soul far beyond anything his master comprehended; for, just as the maimed Phrygian slave, Epictetus, embalmed his name in immortality, while that of his master lies buried in oblivion save for that one brutal act, so some American negro slaves have carved out for themselves fame, while their white owners are numbered among the unknown.

But, in order to form a direct estimate of the Southern slave-owner, it is necessary to take into account the hereditary traits and religious beliefs of the original settlers, which, as a matter of course had a profound bearing on their future domestic economy. Virginia was settled by English adherents of the Episcopal Church, and later was noted for its aristocratic landed gentry. North Carolina, settled by the Scotch-Irish and Quakers, was not only democratic in sentiment, but was the first of the thirteen colonies to declare for independence and strike a blow in defence of civic freedom. South Carolina, peopled by Cavaliers and Huguenots, developed an imperious aristocracy, whose social organism rested on negro slavery and white domination. Florida and Louisiana had each a social condition peculiar to itself. All of the Southern commonwealths, therefore, developed certain characters, which during centuries underwent but slight change. Practically, each of them grew, separated by broad distinctions and pronounced traits from its neighbors, with the characteristics of ancestors faithfully transmitted to descendants, which characteristics, through the isolation of plantation life and the intermarriage of a segregated people, gave tone and color to its sectional impulse. It is not surprising that unique traits were developed in a people free from restraints and yet possessed of strong notions of despotic power, which the early introduction of negro slavery gave them an opportunity to exercise, and the continuance of which undoubtedly exerted a tremendous influence upon the individual character of the slaveholding class.

This discussion would be lacking in completeness were not attention directed to the influence which negro bondage exerted on the white women of the South, who in many respects are unlike their Northern sisters. Between the two no fair comparison could be instituted. This much, however, may be said, without involving the least implication of sinister motive. The Southern white women are essentially indolent; their environment invites repose, and under the influence of the slave régime many of them sank into effeminate sensuousness or became vindictive and cruel. And yet we have evidence of numberless instances of moral heroism exhibited by Southern women under conditions that would have reflected credit on the rarest Spartan courage. What is immediately relevant to the matter in hand, however, is the effect which the obvious immoralities of negro enthralment produced upon the women of the master class. Human nature is essentially the same the world over, and the presumption is inconceivable that Southern white women were not susceptible to the licentious carnival which rioted about them, for before their eyes fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons revelled with slave concubines. That it dulled their moral sensibilities cannot be denied; that it aroused resentment is to be inferred, though we have seen the wives of white planters tenderly caring for the negro illegitimates of their husbands, and showering a wealth of affection upon them—altogether unlike the inconsistency of Sarah, which made Hagar an outcast and her child a desert marauder. If nothing else may be said, this is self-evident, the licentiousness of slavery made these women tolerant of social lapses and conjugal unfaithfulness, wherever indulged in with what they conceived to be an inferior race. In so doing they have dishonored all womankind. Nor does it extenuate their guilt to say of them that they have maintained for themselves an unsullied standard of social purity. In any attestation of their own chastity their selfish indifference to the social impurity about them is made apparent. Nor does their culpability end here, inasmuch as their neglect to inculcate and enforce their own conception of moral living on their women dependants has wrought untold social mischief among the black women of the South, and contributed in no slight degree toward unsettling the foundations of Southern society. When all the facts incident thereto are weighed and adjusted, we must conclude, if we would be candid, that slavery has wrought as great evil to the whites as to the blacks.

While the suppression of the African slave trade was largely brought about by an enlightened public, indignant at its remorseless barbarities, whose interest in the subject extended no farther than its cessation, there were not wanting those far-sighted enough to realize that a suppression of the African slave trade rendered the ultimate extinction of slavery inevitable. The suppression of the foreign traffic, therefore, was followed by vigorous efforts for the emancipation of the domestic enslaved. In the American slaveholding countries negro emancipation took place in Mexico in 1829, in the English West Indian possessions in 1834, and in the French colonies in 1848. Portugal issued a decree, in 1858, which provided that after a lapse of twenty years her slaves should be free. The Dutch freed their slaves in 1863. The Spanish Cortes passed an act for the gradual emancipation of the negro slaves in Cuba in 1870, and the Brazilian government approved of a similar measure in 1871.

From the advent of the first cargo of negro slaves in America, down to the day of the eradication of human chattelism, there were those who doubted the expediency of slave labor and were opposed to its existence. The question of negro emancipation ante-dated the formation of the Federal Union, and in its earlier stages found many strong supporters both in the North and South. Among the latter were many large slave-owners. The decisive objection raised to negro emancipation, at least the one that appears to have had the most weight in deciding the matter adversely, was the alleged fear of revolt and retaliation on the part of the freed negroes for real or fancied wrongs committed against them during, their enslavement. Another objection, which was also strongly urged against such a movement, was that negro emancipation would produce immediate and widespread amalgamation of the races. That either objection could have been sincerely entertained by a sober-minded generation appears, in the light of subsequent events, to border on the absurd. The matter of retaliation has always been out of the question; and as for race amalgamation, slavery is the responsible factor in negro race admixture.

That a strong antislavery sentiment obtained in all the colonies during the progress of the Revolutionary War is attested by their legislative acts. Delaware, in 1776, adopted a new constitution prohibiting any further importation of negro slaves, and removing all restraints upon emancipation. Maryland did the same in 1783. So likewise New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Pennsylvania declared that no slaves should be brought into that state after 1780; that all negro citizens born after that date should be free. Massachusetts abolished slavery, not by direct enactment, but under a Supreme Court decision in 1780. New York, in 1785, enacted that all children of slaves thereafter born should be free, and have the same rights as other freemen. Both Georgia and South Carolina united in prohibiting traffic in the African slave trade, and in the latter state that prohibition was not repealed until 1803.

The ablest statesmen of the revolutionary and constitutional period of United States history, advocated the emancipation of slaves. Washington said, “The abolition of slavery must take place, and that, too, at a period not remote,” and showed the courage of his convictions by emancipating his own slaves. Jefferson uttered these words in reference to negro slavery, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Madison declared that it was “wrong to admit into the Constitution even the idea that there could be property in man.” Patrick Henry affirmed, “That we owe it to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with the law which warrants slavery, and it would rejoice my very soul to know that every one of my fellow-beings was emancipated.” Robert Morris, in the Constitutional Convention, declared slavery to be “a nefarious institution.” The celebrated Dr. Rush declared slavery to be “repugnant to the principles of Christianity, and rebellion against the authority of a common Father”; and William Pinckney, in 1789, boldly affirmed in the Maryland House of Delegates, that, “By the eternal principles of natural justice, no master in this state has a right to hold his slave for a single hour.” Luther Martin, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Maryland, opposed the adoption of the Constitution on the ground that it contained no express provision against slavery; and General Lee of Virginia lamented that no provision was made in the document for the gradual abolition of slavery; while Judge Tucker of the same state, in a letter to its General Assembly, recommending the abolition of their slaves, said, “It is our first duty to effectuate so desirable an object, and to remove from us a stigma, with which our enemies will never fail to upbraid us, nor our consciences to reproach us.” In the Virginia convention, called together for the ratification of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Johnson said, “The principle of emancipation has begun since the Revolution, let us do what we will, it will come around”; and in a similar convention in North Carolina, Mr. Iredell, who was afterward a justice of the United States Supreme Court, remarked, “When the entire abolition of slavery takes place, it will be an event which must be pleasing to every generous mind and every friend of human nature.” Colonel Laurens, a noble patriot, and large slave-owner of South Carolina, informed his son that he was devising means to manumit his slaves, and requested his aid in the matter. Mr. Leigh of Virginia affirmed that, “During the Revolution, and for many years after, the abolition of slavery was a favorite topic with many of our ablest statesmen, who entertained with respect all the schemes which wisdom or ingenuity could suggest for accomplishing the object.” These citations, which need not be further indulged in, undoubtedly show the existence of a widespread antislavery sentiment among the American people at an early date in our national history.

But a more significant confirmation of the prevalence of early antislavery sentiment is shown by the action of the Constitutional Convention in the promulgation of its ordinance for the government of the Northwest Territory, which contained these significant words, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, shall exist”; nor has slavery ever had the least foothold in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Michigan, the five states which were afterward carved out of this magnificent territory, whose free character was made possible by the unanimous vote of slaveholding states.

With this array of credible evidence before us, the conclusion is irresistible that the representative public sentiment of the country was largely antislavery in character. That a powerful reaction subsequently took place is no less obvious. It is, therefore, worth while inquiring into the causes which wrought so great a change in the popular mind. We have already referred to the invention of the cotton-gin, which, perhaps more than any one event, was responsible for the extension and continuance of slavery, when viewed from an industrial standpoint. But it must also be borne in mind that the irreconcilable strife between freedom and slavery, though lulled by the Revolution, was renewed in the Constitutional Convention, and fanned into flame as the South, step by step, wrested from its adversary ignoble concessions, and that these conflicts strengthened and crystallized the convictions and purposes of each side. The proslavery sentiment was also abetted by the lack of education among the masses of the Southern whites, a large proportion of whom could neither read nor write. It was further fostered by the geographical isolation of the states, the lack of means for rapid transit, the rarity of personal and postal intercourse, the commercial greed of the North, the dearth of civil knowledge, the conflict in the public mind regarding the nature and functions of the Federal government, which grew out of a concurrent belief in the sovereign capacity of each state. The supreme agency, however, which assured permanence to slavery, was the overthrow of the Federal party in 1800, an event that gave the South for sixty years practical control of the national government.

The first measurement of strength between slavery and freedom took place in 1819, and grew out of the application of the citizens of the territory of Missouri for admission to statehood. A bitter and hostile feeling was at once developed, which ended in a drawn battle with the odds in favor of the South. Missouri came into the Union as a slave state, though slavery, by the terms of the famous Compromise Act of the following year, was forever prohibited north of 36° 30', in all territory acquired from France by the Louisiana Purchase. The second attempt to check and curb the expansion of slavery was embodied in the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, and though it failed to become incorporated into law, it was, nevertheless, a courageous endeavor to consecrate American soil to freedom. Moreover, the fact that its author, David Wilmot, was a Democrat from Pennsylvania invests the measure with historic interest. That Texas and slavery were interchangeable terms was a foregone conclusion, when the matter of its admission was made the issue in 1845; but, notwithstanding the most strenuous opposition, slavery was again the victor. In 1850 a prolonged and bitter contest ensued over the petition of California for admission to the Union as a free state. A second compromise was effected, California was admitted; the slave trade was prohibited in the District of Columbia, but a Fugitive Slave Law of the most atrocious character was enacted to appease the South. In 1854 the Missouri Compromise Act was repealed, in order to introduce slavery into Kansas and Nebraska; and though the South scored a legislative triumph, both of these territories were subsequently admitted as free states.

The exclusion of slavery from Kansas became the turning-point in the contest between slavery and freedom, and assured the free element in our population a future ascendency in national affairs. Previously the South had maintained its power in the general government with unscrupulous persistence, for it permitted the admission of no free state that was not offset by the admission of a slave state, so that, up to 1850, when we had fifteen free and fifteen slave states, the numerical parity of the two sections was kept intact. But, after the admission of California, Oregon, and Minnesota as states of the Union, the South foresaw the eradication of slavery decreed. The illimitable Northwest, with its millions of acres of inviting soil, awaiting the advent of free labor, was undergoing rapid settlement with persons opposed to servile toil, hence with the circumscription of slave territory the freedom of the negroes became merely a question of time and methods.

The course of the South on the slave question vividly illustrates the power of coherence in conviction and purpose, when exerted by a determined minority. In 1860 that section had twelve million of inhabitants, of which one-third were, slaves, owned by less than four hundred thousand persons; and we are treated to the unique spectacle of seeing less than half a million persons, in absolute control of eight million of free persons in their own section, arrogantly dominating twenty millions of white freemen in another part of a country whose laws declare all its members equal. Truly the world furnishes no parallel to it, and it appears impossible that, in this age, rational men should so long have submitted to such a subversion of their liberties and denial of rights. And, inasmuch as the autonomy which the slave advocates had in mind, and which they sought to engraft on the noblest and truest conception of the rights of man that the blurred vision of humanity had hitherto realized, was a republican oligarchy based on class supremacy, there necessarily arose a conflict. The Southern slaveholding class had no adequate conception of the nature and functions of republican institutions. How could they, representing as they did a self-constituted oligarchy, with their notions of government drawn from Greek and Roman sources, and every local condition constantly suggesting analogous states between themselves and their classical slaveholding predecessors in these ancient republics?

The nomination of Abraham Lincoln by the Republican party for President of the United States created a direct issue between slavery and freedom, and on that issue the South, for the first time in the history of the government, was defeated. Secession had been the threat which, like the sword of Damocles, the South had long held over the North. In 1787 Georgia and South Carolina had refused to come into the Union unless slavery was recognized and the slave trade permitted. In 1820 the South as a unit threatened to dissolve the Union unless Missouri was admitted as a slave state. It took the same position, though with greater vehemence, when California came up for admission as a free state, and, in the judgment of many sane men, the dissolution of the republic was only averted by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Southern arrogance rose to the height of frenzy in the Kansas matter, and the manifest determination of the slave party to dominate the nation or destroy it awakened the free spirit of the North, as nothing else had done before; still there was a general feeling that it would never proceed to the extreme length of actual separation. But, notwithstanding the incredulity of the North and the impassioned protests of the conservative South, one after another of the slave states seceded, to inaugurate a war that aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the Federal government. In the sober perspective of to-day it will hardly be questioned that slavery was the immediate incitement, as well as the underlying motive, which led to the Civil War. Nor is this conclusion unwarranted, for Alexander Stephens said at the organization of the Secession government, “Slavery is the cornerstone of the new Confederacy.”

President Lincoln had a preëminent endowment of moral qualities. He was a leader of consummate parts, a statesman of prophetic wisdom, a magistrate of unwavering fidelity, a citizen of transcendant loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation. He was unalterably opposed to slavery, which he fitly characterized as having its origin and continuance in the selfishness of man. “My paramount object,” said he, “is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery; if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” Yet he was mindful to say, “If God wills that the war continue until all the wealth of the bondman's toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.’ ”

President Lincoln was the chosen head and front of the military and civil power of the nation. That he had authority in either capacity to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves of the Southern insurgents is beyond question, nor does the fact that negro emancipation was not the purpose, but a strategic incident, of the war detract from the value of the act to the enslaved race. The primary purpose of the United States, in employing all available means for the suppression of the Rebellion, was to maintain national integrity. But future union without universal freedom was impossible, for servile bondage in a free government bad been made impossible. The executive act, then, which conferred physical freedom on the negro was not due in any measure to fanaticism, but to a sense of duty and exalted conceptions of national patriotism.

In the historical evolution of negro freedom five great epoch-making events precede its final consummation. These were the prohibition of the slave trade in 1774 by the Continental Congress; the Declaration of Independence, in 1776; the Free State Ordinance of 1787; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; and the invasion of Virginia by John Brown in 1859. Each of these events had a marked influence on the institution of slavery. The earlier ones circumscribed its bounds, and fostered an antislavery spirit among the non-slaveholding classes. The latter thoroughly awakened the country to the dangers of a servile insurrection. The John Brown invasion, in its ultimate reaches, possessed tremendous significance. The weakness of the South was laid bare; all saw that its social fabric rested on a slumbering volcano; the nation was alarmed and gave voice to its fears by its votes.

The years between 1860 and 1865 marked the inception and culmination of the most practical and effectual antislavery agitation and legislation the country had witnessed. Beginning in July, 1861, the first act of a series of similar measures directed against slavery was passed by the Congress of the United States, freeing all slaves employed by the Confederate authorities in rebellious acts against the government and authority of the United States. The second, prohibiting officers of the Federal army from returning slaves to their masters, was enacted early in 1862. The third was the adoption by Congress of the joint resolution recommended by President Lincoln, tendering national pecuniary aid in furtherance of state emancipation. Mr. Lincoln constantly urged upon the Union-adhering states gradual emancipation, and pleaded for national compensation; but his wise and disinterested efforts were not destined to bear fruit. The fourth act was the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, April 16, 1862. This was a national act, pure and simple, and vindicated the antislavery contention of over half a century; namely, that Congress had exclusive jurisdiction over slavery within the District. About three thousand slaves were included in and benefited by this act of emancipation. The average pay of the government to their owners was about $300. To one of the payments a singular incident was attached. It appears that a free negro, who had some years before bought and paid for his slave wife, demanded payment for his wife and children. The claim was allowed on legal grounds, it being held that, as purchaser, he was the actual owner of his wife, and, as a slave woman, the children followed the condition of the mother. The fifth measure, passed in June, 1862, forever prohibited slavery in all the territories of the United States then held, or that might thereafter be acquired. The sixth made free all slaves of disloyal owners who found refuge within Union lines, and forbade their return to masters by army officers on pain of dismissal from the Federal service.

The seventh act was a law to prohibit the African slave trade. The eighth was the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, in June, 1864. The ninth was the prohibition of the interstate slave trade, which Randolph of Virginia, in the early part of the century, characterized as “worse and more odious than the foreign slave trade itself.” The tenth and crowning antislavery act was the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, which forever prohibits slavery in the United States and territories. This consummate measure was suggested and its adoption urged by Mr. Lincoln himself, after he had failed to secure the coöperation of the border states in the matter of gradual emancipation. When, therefore, universal freedom was decreed by the Thirteenth Amendment, the obstinate Union slaveholders found themselves entirely shut out from receiving any compensation for their negro property. One notable exception, however, to the mandatory operations of this amendment should be mentioned. Maryland, by a popular vote, in October, 1864, freed her slaves.

In reviewing the causes which brought about the abolishment of slavery, we are painfully impressed with the indifferent attitude of negroes toward the agencies which consummated their freedom, an indifference which leads us to conclude that they have neither intelligent knowledge of the magnitude of the boon conferred on the race, nor sensible gratitude for one who performed the most heroic act for them. This apathy and ingratitude becomes all the more inexplicable when we recall that negroes of the United States continue to commemorate English slave emancipation, while the anniversary of our own great epoch-making event, the liberation of four million chattel slaves, with its attendant strife, carnage, disrupted homes, and disabled survivors, is passed over in silence and forgetfulness by a people who ought to be the first and foremost in perpetuating its memories. Not only is there no racial recognition of the 22d of September, the date of the issuance of the emancipation proclamation, nor of the 1st of January, the time when it went into effect, but negroes neither celebrate within their own ranks, nor unite with their fellow-citizens, in commemorating the anniversary of the great emancipator's birthday.

Before the war the South had a free negro population in excess of a quarter of a million souls, most of whom were engaged in some form of industry; many of them had wealth. They occupied, however, an anomalous social and political relation to the white race, which cannot be more concisely depicted than by taking this lucid description from the pages of an eminent writer: “The free negro can neither share the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labors, nor the afflictions of him whose equal he has been declared to be, and he cannot meet him upon fair terms of life, or in death; and these obvious inequalities established by laws are perpetuated by manners.” But, notwithstanding their admitted oppression and servile state, the official records show that thousands of free negroes tendered their services as soldiers, and were duly enrolled and equipped by the Confederate authorities. Moreover, not a few of them owned slaves, and gave both sympathy and money in support of the Southern cause. But free negro soldiers were no strangers to the South. General Jackson had employed them at New Orleans; they were also regularly enrolled as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and, in the main, all of the colonies favored their employment, in one form or another, in military service. Virginia, it may be recalled, led off in offering freedom to all negro slaves who should enlist for colonial defence, though there is no proof that any considerable number availed themselves of the privilege. On the contrary, more than thirty thousand slaves fled to the English army, and a later generation repeated the experience during the Civil War, when vast multitudes deserted their homes to cast in their lot with the Union forces.

So far as the slaves themselves were concerned there was a belief, both here and abroad, that when a favorable opportunity came they would rise in rebellion against their masters, But, contrary to a century of prophecy, as well as current expectation, neither a general insurrection nor local outbreak of any kind occurred. The negroes, largely left to their own devices, quietly tilled the soil, raising cotton for exportation and food for their own and army uses. They built fortifications for Southern defence, and spun and wove the cloth for its soldiers' garments, and, in the most praiseworthy manner, took care of the wives and children of their absent enslavers. The slaves therefore were important and powerful auxiliaries of the Southern Confederacy, and, in the light of later developments, we are led to believe that, had they been enrolled in the Confederate army early in the Rebellion, recognition of the Confederacy would have come from both England and France, in which event the final issue would have been problematical.

That the negroes did not revolt is one of the incomprehensible features of our Civil War. Every chance for success was theirs, nor were they ignorant of their opportunity for striking an effectual and crushing blow against their oppressors. Why was it not done? Several potent causes combined to render any widespread insurrection at that time impossible. There was, in the first place, a genuine affection for the white race, implanted in hundreds of thousands of negroes by amalgamation; there was, in no less degree, a race love created by the foster parental relations which negro women sustained toward white children; there was also a genuine desire on the part of the negro men to discharge worthily the duties with which they were intrusted by their absent masters. But the supreme and all-pervading influence which restrained them was rooted in their religious convictions; for the slave negro, unlike the modern freedman, was a being in whom religious fervor was intensely and overwhelmingly manifest.

In the last analysis, then, the key to negro passiveness is found in his religious notions, and the fact that he had unquestioning faith in his eventual liberation through some extraordinary but always supernatural method of interference, explains many otherwise inexplicable phases of his character and attitude during slavery. Faith in negro freedom was the dying prophecy of white-haired patriarchs, the parting legacy of fathers and mothers to weeping children of whom they were bereft by a dehumanizing chattelism. At moments it awakened in the most abject of bondmen a dim sense of manhood, while the far-seeing were lifted toward the summits of the Mount of Transfiguration, and beheld themselves clothed in God-ordained rights and divinely imposed duties. Convictions of eventual manumission were so thoroughly inwrought into every fibre of the negro's being that triumphant freedom became the refrain of every aspiration and the burden of all invocation.

These sentiments were kept at white heat through plaintive songs and the impassioned speech of their own religious teachers, who, likening their thraldom to that of the Hebrews of old in bondage to the Egyptians, were wont to attribute their ultimate deliverance to a mandate recorded on high in response to tears and groans and midnight wrestlings in prayer, and which was to be executed on earth with fiery vengeance. Hence, when freedom came, the credulous mind of the negro saw the likeness between the Hebrews and himself verified. Were not Pharaoh and his army drowned in the Red Sea in a mad pursuit of the escaping Israelites? Did not every battle-field of whitened bones and unmarked graves bear witness to the stubborn determination of the white masters not to let God's black children be free? Nor did the analog cease here, for, as the dead first-born in every Egyptian household testified to the ampleness of God's anger toward the merciless oppressors of his people, so every Southern household was wrapped in sadness, and every hearthstone shadowed by grief, because some loved one was stricken down by a soldier of freedom.

To the religious slave negro, scriptural statements were literal facts, and with his mind filled with its memorized texts he believed himself to walk and talk with God. When, therefore, Lincoln's proclamation of liberty was first read in the slave cabins of the South, their inmates were filled with inexpressible rapture. An unutterable joy swept into the hearts of every decrepit father, aged mother, toilworn brother, and burden-ladened sister, who had watched and waited through long weary years for the fruitage of a faith which had sent heavenward unnumbered prayers to Him who watches even the sparrow's fall. But when the last word of Liberty's message was read, and they realized that its tremendous mandate made them free, and ushered in the dawn of a new era, it could not be expected that they would be fully conscious of its vital significance. Before them, spread out in freshness and beauty, lay the Promised Land of Liberty, with its illimitable possibilities of manly growth and womanly development, with its unexplored opportunities for mind-training and soul-culture,—for fraternal consort with American ideas, for investiture with American citizenship, for industrial achievement at the forge and factory, for racial reciprocity and friendly strivings for national unity,—with only the Jordan of preparation, sobriety, steadiness, and purpose lying between. But no Joshua was with them to part the waters, and so, turning back from visions of grandeur and high-wrought hopes, they were speedily enwrapped in the darkness of industrial servitude.

The emancipation of the negroes brought about a social and economic revolution in the methods and habits of Southern life, and introduced grave and disturbing issues that have not yet ceased to exist. The truth is that neither the white nor black people were prepared for the abolition of slavery. The former, humiliated by their defeats in war and exasperated by the loss of property at home, were in no mood to submit to an arbitrary deprivation of that industrial force on which they had depended for centuries; nor were the latter, in any essential respect, qualified to pass from a state of bondage to one of freedom. Such a transition, fraught with untried responsibilities and unknown duties, carried them beyond their depth. To be sure, the negroes had a dim consciousness that they were free,—but free to do what? To eat, to drink, to sleep, and roam at will, so much was conceivable and eagerly sought to be realized; but that as free men and women they owed duties to each other and society in general, they had no clear conception.

Set adrift as the freedmen were, without capable self-direction, among a superior governing class embittered by a conscious impotence to arrest the movement of an aimless people standing out in the broad sunlight of physical liberty, they were aware only of an escape from a hitherto interminable system of unpaid toil. It was obviously impossible that an event so abrupt should not produce serious disarrangement of the previous social order. To their credit be it said, however, that but few of the negro men and women who were living together as husband and wife, under the régime of slavery, abandoned each other when emancipation gave them the opportunity to sever such relations. On the contrary, intoxicating as the joys of freedom may have been to them, its new birth of feeling and experience gave them not only a sense of personal ownership of body and limb, of muscle and movement, but reasonable notions as well of conjugal duty, parental rights, filial obligations, and fraternal relations which acquired greater coherency as the stability and endurance of these relations became more clearly manifest. The negro, however, in his early emergence into domestic freedom, was not without the helpful counsels of the better men and women of the slaveholding class, which did much to hold in check the turbulence of his unstable nature.

The negroes entered on their career of freedom barren of all material possessions other than the tattered garments with which their bodies were partially covered, to begin under untried conditions a grim conflict with industrial servitude. Responsible ownership, with its provident oversight, had cared for them in the matter of clothing, food, shelter, and general supervision of labor and conduct. This now gave way to a whimsical and irresponsible method of living. It has always been to us a source of ceaseless regret that the liberated slaves were not committed to some method of probationary oversight, which would have provided for their industrial and mental training. Examples were not wanting; for that which European serfdom did for the slaves of Europe, and industrial apprenticeship for the emancipated negroes of the British West Indies, might have been successfully invoked in behalf of our own released bondmen with infinite profit to themselves and the nation. Negro labor under slavery was bred to subjection and dependent control. When directive oversight was withdrawn, and the negro left to his own volition, his productiveness and reliability as a worker, for obvious causes, deteriorated. He had no aspiration to create, no ambition to excel; to him labor was bondage; idleness, freedom.

The negro is legally free, but out of the changed relation between the two races a problem of perilous reality has grown, one which even at this late day is but little understood by the great body of the American people. We are satisfied that the groundwork of this problem in not race aversion. The negro cherishes no resentment toward the whites, notwithstanding that race appears to be imbued with a deliberate and set purpose to forego none of its ancient customs; nor have the white people any inherent or ineradicable aversion to the negro. But, nevertheless, there are wrongs to be effaced and rights to be enthroned before enduring harmony can be established between them.

We believe this problem to be solvable despite the irrational attitude of each race toward existing misunderstandings, though until each side is ready to make substantial concessions an ever widening breach must continue to exist between two interdependent classes. We find, to put the facts in a sentence, that transmitted influences have implanted in the white race a masterful spirit, which imperiously disregards the rights of the freedmen to such an extent as to exclude from the start every consideration of their equal participation in the common benefits of life. On the other hand, we discover that the negro has no true sense of his relation to the other race, or of those obligations which such relations impose; nor does he appear to realize that neither race appreciation nor self-respect can be secured—except by acquiring ability for capable doing. Each side, therefore, contributes to the general issue its selfish and crude notions of social justice, and, because of it, social injustice dominates their lives and living.

AT the end of the Civil War no steps had been taken by the Federal government to define what relation the states lately in rebellion should thenceforth sustain to the national Union. Not only had no permanent civic status of the states been arranged, but the future condition and relation of the negro to his environment was wholly undecided. Local government in the South remained under the control of those who had waged stubborn warfare in support of slavery. It was under these circumstances a natural outcome of events that those who were in actual control of affairs, and who had previously sought by every available means to perpetuate negro enthralment, should strive in other respects to keep the freedmen in as rigorous subjection as possible to their established customs. The consequence was that, for three years after the war, the negro occupied a nondescript relation to Southern society. He was neither slave nor freeman, though he partook of the nature of both. It was during this period that the most odious class legislation was enacted which has ever disgraced the pages of American jurisprudence, nor is it too much to say that the industrial bondage to which the freed people were subjected embraced all of the abominations of chattelism, without possessing, in the least degree, any of its humane features.

It is not necessary, to the end we have in view, to reproduce in full the “Black Code” of the period, which was essentially the same in text and character in all of the Southern states. A brief reference to its salient features will give sufficient insight into the nature and purpose of the many measures which hedged about the person of the disenthralled bondman. Under the established laws negroes were compelled, under heavy penalties, to hire themselves within a specified time to the white planters, at such wages as the latter had determined. They were forbidden to leave their place of employment without written permission from their employer; nor could they be absent after nightfall without liability to arrest and severe punishment. Moreover, should they quit their places of service, they could be arrested by any white man, and lodged in the nearest jail, to await identification and recovery. The cost of such proceedings was fixed upon the absconding negroes. Among other restrictions the freedmen were forbidden for any cause or provocation to offer resistance to their employers, either by word or act. It was made a felony for them to have a gun, pistol, or knife in their possession, nor were they permitted to keep any livestock, or to raise domestic produce for individual use, or to barter in such things, or to have them in their possession. Corn, cotton, and flesh foods were especially named in the statutes, and when found in the hands of a freedman were deemed prima facie evidence of theft.

The law further decreed that all plantation negroes not in the employ of a white person were to be treated as vagrants, and, as such, were liable to arrest and sale to the highest bidder, for a term of service not exceeding six months. It was also directed that the unemployed negroes in cities should be put to work, without pay, by the city in which they were found, and kept in confinement at night, during a period of six months. Every male negro was required to pay a heavy poll tax, which constituted a lien on his wages; but when not paid by his employer, the delinquent negro debtor was compelled to work out the tax, with added cost, for the benefit of the state. Negroes were also prohibited from assembling or, holding meetings for any purpose, without first having obtained municipal license. These legal enactments fitly portray the temper and attitude of the South toward the freedmen in the years immediately after the war. That such legislation had not a shred of justification is obvious. Southern civilization was rightly discredited when it transformed its freed people into social outcasts, and stripped them of all ability to exert either physical or legal resistance to the most heinous injuries against their person or rights. Theoretically, the negro was liberated by law from physical slavery; but, as a matter of fact, he was simply transferred from responsible ownership and provident care to the negligent oversight of an irresponsible industrial servitude, and consigned to a condition from which there was neither appeal nor revolt.

The correctness of this conclusion is established by a brief recital of existing labor methods. The Southern economic unit, from the colonial period to the present, has been the plantation, which during slavery was also a social and civic centre. Labor on a plantation is divided into three classes. The first is the wage system, in which the planter stipulates to pay a certain sum to the laborer for a year's work. The second is payment in kind,—that is, the laborer agrees to accept a certain portion of the projected crop for services rendered. Crop sharing is the compensation of the third class: under this system the tiller undertakes to return a certain share of the crop grown for the use of the land in cultivation; and it is only under this latter method that thrifty and industrious negroes of the tenant class find opportunity for material progress. All of these several classes of labor are usually provided with subsistence by the planter. The adult negro, when employed, is allowed a monthly ration of one bushel of corn meal, fifteen pounds of pork, and two quarts of molasses; flour, sugar, and tea are extras, for which, if used, the employee is charged, and payment is taken out of his wages. Contracts for plantation labor are usually made for a year; wages are due at the end of the season. Accrued earnings are forfeited to the employer, through any voluntary quittance by the laborer. In the civil courts, the planter is the recognized accountant of both parties. His books of record are unimpeachable evidence, though abounding with fraudulent entries, and by his exhibit the negro is usually a debtor, and rarely a creditor, of the planter. We have knowledge of numerous instances where the written agreements drawn by the white planter's hand were the reverse of verbal contracts between himself and workmen; but what of that, so long as the negro's sign manual is appended to the acknowledged instrument—an admission that stops controversy or litigation.

In Southern crop-raising cotton leads as a staple production. The cereals are incidents of plantation growth, hence needful domestic subsistence is neglected, notwithstanding idle and fertile fields lie ready to yield abundant support. This obvious food improvidence compels planters to have recourse to merchants for annual supplies. Subsistence for plantation use includes everything in the nature of domestic wants,—for example, food and clothing for the planter's family; grain and hay for animals; pork, meal, molasses, and tobacco for negroes; with implements, seeds, and fertilizer for land. Payment for supplies is secured to merchants by mortgage of the ungrown crop and real estate of planter, and credited supplies command a monthly interest of two or more per cent on indebtedness, with the result that the planter is always in bondage to the shopkeeper, and the negro laborer to the planter. At maturity the cotton is picked, baled, and consigned in liquidation to the commission merchant who advanced the planter supplies. Should it prove insufficient to discharge the claims of both merchant and laborer, the latter goes unpaid, no matter to what depth of poverty or length of suffering he, who has borne the heat and burden of the day, in the care and cultivation of the crop, is by that act reduced. Nor is there any remedy for the negro, since the commission merchant has priority of claims over all other creditors; besides, the new year opens with contracts that create fresh obligations and beget new securities.

This summary of current plantation methods shows that such a life is not one round of balmy sunshine and careless indifference for the industrial serf, who, born in penury and reared in ignorance, ceaselessly begins a year of toil in want, and ends it in debt. His shelter is never more than a barren hovel; his luxuries, coarse food and scanty clothing; his recreations, the weird music and emotional religion of the unlettered; his realities, ploddings of unvarying sameness under the sweltering sun of a Southern sky. He is paraded as a well-paid wage-earner; but one fails to understand how, by any known method of economy, eight dollars a month will support a family and make men well-to-do. This sombre picture of the freedmen, alternating between hope and despair, awaiting the dawn of a better day, is not the fairest painting one might desire. But there is no other. The negro, so born and bred, toils and dies in helpless bondage to an environment as unyielding as the mountains of his own Southland. Moreover, under the present economic system of the South, there is no way out of this condition of affairs; for negro destitution gluts the labor market and dominates the manual activities of the freedmen as resistlessly as similar conditions overstock and control the pauperized centres of Europe. On the other hand, the employers of the negro say that he is an improvident spendthrift, and that all of his earnings go to the shopkeepers. Such statements are not without an amount of truth, but it should be understood that the credit system is the basis of Southern business economy, and the negro wage-earner is paid not always in cash, but largely by planters' orders on stores in which they may have a direct or indirect interest. There the sight of gaudy attire and flashy trinkets flame the desire and bedazzle the vision of the average freedman, who rarely exercises sound judgment in expenditure. At any rate, cajolery and chicanery, with remorseless insistence, wrest from the pockets of a weak and credulous people every dollar of their hard-won earnings, and leave them stripped of all means,—to enter anew on a round of interminable endeavor.

We have not unfairly depicted the condition of the wage-working plantation negroes; but when all is said that can be said in behalf of a downtrodden class, it must be admitted that they have but dim notions of the value of time, of personal obligations and the sacredness of contracts. They are willing mendicants, where they ought to be manly producers, and, even when at work and receiving wages in cash, they are not thrifty and provident. Strongly averse to self-denial, they habitually indulge in extravagances in food, dress, and pleasures, from which other races who have abundant means to waste in folly refrain. But as thrifty industry was never a heritage of the Southern slave, the actual industrial power of the negro is more the promise of possibilities than substance of achievement. The negro, then, has yet to find his place and vocation in our social structure; and that will not be done until he has attained, through self-comprehension, an adequate knowledge of his powers and limitations; nor will the acquirement of mere dexterous activity avail him, for nothing less than first-hand knowledge gives men actual capacity, and the ability for well-doing.

From a purely economic standpoint no people understands the benefits and possibilities of free labor more clearly than do the former slaveholding class, and from no quarter would come stronger opposition to any proposal to reëstablish negro bondage on its former basis. The advantage to the slaveholding class accruing from free labor may be readily seen by observing that the interest on capital formerly invested in slave property, now pays the wages of an equal number of freedmen. Nevertheless, the free industrial serf, who does more work than a slave, and whose labor nets a larger value to his employer, receives barely enough in wages to clothe himself and family in the vilest shoddy or coarsest of homespun, to say nothing of other needful domestic expenses, or those demands which sickness and death everywhere entail.

The obvious superiority of free hired labor over chattel bondage is very clearly demonstrated by a simple illustration. We will take, for example, the planter who undertakes to raise fifteen hundred bales of cotton by the labor of one hundred negro hands, and who has had an intelligent experience with both slave and free labor, and contrast the difference in outlay between the two systems. Now observe, in the first instance, that the planter is required to expend at least $80,000 for the purchase of slaves before beginning his crop-raising; note further, that their clothing, food, and incidental expenses for a year, will add, say $20,000 more, or, in all, $100,000 for the first year's cost of slave labor; then compare these expenditures with the present cost of free labor. The annual wage hire of one hundred hands for a plantation will be about $6000; less than $4000 will provide for their food and other expenses connected therewith, so that, taken altogether, the total cost of hired labor for a year will not exceed $10,000. The profits derived from the products of the two systems of labor will still more clearly show the disparity between free and slave service. Supposing that, in each instance, cotton sells for ten cents a pound; fifteen hundred bales will bring $60,000,—an annual net gain to the employer of free labor of $50,000. But in using all slave labor, two years would be required to realize a sum equal to the initial purchase outlay; while the third year, though showing a profit of $30,000, would be $120,000 less than the net gains of free labor. But not only did the freeing of the slave liberate imprisoned capital, but that event now compels its toiling millions to reimburse the South every decade for its pecuniary losses in chattel property; and it has so transformed that section that wealth revels where poverty once reigned.

The industrial bondage of the freedman, is, however, the logical sequence of negro chattelism. It has no justification in law or reason, though it strongly reminds us of the several phases of servitude which ancient bondmen underwent before individual liberty was attained. For example, in ancient industrial slavery, serfdom constituted the first step toward the personal freedom of the laboring class; the serf, unlike a slave, being an inalienable adjunct of the soil, could only be parted from along with the land to which he and his family were attached. Feudalism marks the second great stride in industrial emancipation; while the third and fundamental step in industrial progress was the legal emancipation of the individual worker from personal ownership, and the substitution of the wage system for unpaid toil. A comparison of the freedman's condition with that of historical industrial servitude suggests, in many respects, his relations to the Southern plantation. He is a wage-working serf when bound by debt to a particular planter; and a mortgaged crop makes him a feudal tenant. But, though the freedman is an industrial serf, the groundwork of his bondage is not racial prejudice, but mental and manual inefficiency; on the other hand, we are aware that, while his nominal drift is toward extravagance, follies, and aversion to substantial acquisition, his earning capacity is greater than the compensation received. Industrial oppression, however, draws no color line, for both white and black breadwinners are under its sway. In all ages, and under every form of civilization, it has existed, and will continue to exist so long as idleness and industry, poverty and affluence, ignorance and knowledge, dwell side by side, and mankind divides into a served and a serving class.

Many of the complex forces which environ modern society are of our own creating, and irremediable so long as the capable and incapable jostle each other, and receive indiscriminate recognition in the industrial world. That men who have the right to live have a right to equal opportunity for acquiring the means of living, is a sane conclusion. But as all men are not equally endowed with capacity for labor, and have not the ability to render service equal in quality and productiveness, justice to both requires that laborers should be compensated for specific results—that is, for the quality and character of the work they perform—rather than for the time consumed in a given operation. Our convictions are that the God-ordained function of every human being is self-support; that people who can work and ought to work by reason of having health, strength, and unprovided physical needs, but who will not work, ought never to be made objects of charity, but should be subjected to such disciplinary processes as would compel their self-support. The only classes of unemployed deserving the slightest sympathy or assistance are the physically disabled and that truly unfortunate group of humanity, able and willing to work but unable to secure employment. For the physically helpless the state should furnish shelter and subsistence. To the other sort preference should be given, when opportunity offers, by all who employ manual labor; and that done, deserving physical want would be reduced to a minimum.

We now take up those questions which bear directly on negro industrial development. It is conservatively computed that there are eight million freedmen in the United States; of that number nearly seven million reside in sixteen states of the Union. They constitute one-fourth of the manual labor class of the nation; in station and capacity they represent the crude, raw material of industrial muscular force. That negroes are not capable workers, and fail to acquire a high degree of proficiency and efficiency in their undertakings, is due to many explicable and correctible causes. The chief and foremost of these is their profound ignorance of industrial possibilities and abhorrence of disciplinary methods, They chafe under the restraints imposed by the requirement of capable performance, and crave to exchange for its exactions what they are pleased to term liberty—but which in reality is license—to do as they please. Nor can they be made to comprehend that the workingman is the uncrowned king of the industrial realm, and educated labor enthroned vitality; or that only freemen—free to do or forbear—work with genuine fidelity, and give to toil their highest endeavor. Inasmuch, then, as they have no true sense of work or abiding inclination for intelligent production, they have naturally sunk into industrial bondage. Not only has social inefficiency imperilled and thwarted race uplifting, but false and pernicious notions regarding the nature and functions of industrial endeavor have been sown broadcast in the minds of the negro people. The specious teachings of pulpits and schoolrooms have wrought havoc, in creating a well-defined aversion to manual industry among the negro young men and women,—to such an extent that the evils of idleness are ripening into bitter fruit, and are fast unsettling the foundations of orderly living.

It is notably true that the Southern educated negro shuns all work involving manual effort, and, in imitation of a superior environment, calls in to his aid, for domestic, garden, and field service, the sinewy arms of unskilled muscular force. It is this be