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The Sable Cloud by Nehemiah Adams

N >> Nehemiah Adams >> The Sable Cloud




"Dear me," said he, "I should try to feel and act just as I suppose
those Southerners do who, you say, are fairly represented by this lady's
letter about the slave-babe."

"Mr. North," said I, "suppose that the State should make you the
absolute owner of some of those boys who set fire to the Westboro' and
Deer Island institutions. In consideration of your personal
responsibility for them, there is ceded to you all right and title to
their services, and absolute control over them, subject, of course, to
the laws against misdemeanors and crimes against the person. My only
point is this: Where would be the sinfulness of that relation? All that
would be sinful about it would be in your neglect or violation of your
duty as a master."

"How glad all this makes me feel," said he, "that I am not troubled with
slaves. If we do not like our servants or apprentices, we can get rid of
them."

"Then," said I, "you surely ought to pity those who are bound to their
slaves and have to put up with a thousand things which you say we can
escape by changing our help."

"But," said he, "can they not sell off their slaves when they please?"

"Suppose, however," said I, "that they happen to be humane, as Mr. North
is, and as we all are in the Free States! and that they are unwilling to
turn off a poor helpless creature for her faults, to be sold, and to go
they know not where!"

"Slavery," said Mr. North, "is surely a great curse. I am so glad that I
live under free institutions."

"Who made us to differ from the South in this respect? How came those
blacks there? Whose ships, whose money, imported them? You remember that
it was by the votes of Free States, that the importation of slaves was
continued for eight years beyond the time when the Southern States had
voted in the Convention that it should cease. And now what would you
have the South do with the slaves, to-day?"

"Set them all free," said he, "'break every yoke; proclaim liberty to
the captives, the opening of the prison-doors to them that are bound.'"

"Allow me," said I, "to smile at your simplicity, for you are very
child-like, not to say childish, in your feelings. You would have the
colored people universally go free. Do you really think that Kate is
worse off in being what you call a slave, than that young, free black
woman who keeps a stall and sells verses and knives near our Park?"

"O dear sir," said he, "liberty is a priceless boon; liberty"--

"Liberty to what?" said I.

"Why," said he, "liberty not to be sold, nor to be beaten, nor to be
subject to the wicked passions of a master."

"Would you rather," said I, "have your daughter a servant in a Southern
family, brought up as a playmate with the children, a sharer in many of
their gifts, a partner with their parents, as the children grew up, in
the pride and joy of the parents, an honored member of the wedding party
when a daughter is married, one of the principal mourners when the bride
departs, identified with the history of the family, provided for in the
will, a support guaranteed to her by law in sickness and old age, and
that, too, not in a pauper establishment, but in her owner's home, and
when the parents die, if she survives, taken by some branch of the
family or neighbor from regard to her and to them; her moral and
religious character improved under their training, a respectable
standing in society conferred upon her by her connection with them, her
religious privileges sacredly secured to her, any insult redressed as
though it were the family's personal affair; she a partaker of their
food and of all their comforts, and followed to her grave with respect
and love; or, for the sake of 'priceless liberty,' 'heaven's best gift
to man,' would you prefer to see her seated under the iron fence of a
park, an old umbrella tied to the pickets for her shelter, and she, in
rain and sunshine, selling 'Old Dan Tucker,' 'Jim Crow, Illustrated,'
and pea-nuts, and sleeping you know not where? Which lot would you
choose for a child? Which is best for this world and the next? In one
case, she is 'owned,' she is 'a slave;' and in the other, she is a free
woman."

"You have no right," said he, with some warmth, "to take the best
condition in slavery, and the very worst in freedom, and compel me to
choose."

"'Best condition in slavery!'" said I; "is there any 'best' in being a
slave, in not being free? Does it admit of degrees? Is not being 'owned'
such a curse, such an unmixed iniquity in its essence, that to compare
its best estate with the worst in freedom, is like comparing the best
devil with the most inferior saint? Is not a devil's nature incapable of
comparison as good, better, best, with anything which is not, in its
nature, devilish? According to your conversation just now, it seemed as
though being 'owned' always implied an unmitigated transgression; and
now when I inquire whether you would prefer degradation to the iniquity
of being 'owned' in comfort and usefulness, respectability and
happiness, you shrink from the question. If freedom in the abstract is
the best thing under the sun, of course you will prefer it to everything
else. No happy condition, no happy prospect for this life, and the life
to come can, in your view, make being 'a slave,' as you call it, capable
of being compared with this abstract privilege of being free. In this
you and your friends labor under a huge mistake, and it poisons all your
views and feelings about slavery. When you denounce slave-holders and
slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors,
they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it
regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you
are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.

"Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and
getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the
South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to
be;--what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves' condition in
cases without number!"

"But," said he, "there are terrible evils underlying these fair features
of slavery."

"True," said I, "but why, in the name of truth and love do you never
hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition
societies? What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and
then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such
a letter should be offered. One case of whipping would have more effect
than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers. No one
from the continent of Europe would infer from those meetings that such
beings as Kate and her little babe, and this lady and her husband and
father, existed even in fiction, but that slave-holders are Legrees, and
the slaves their victims. What a beautiful effect it would have on us
and on the South, if touching tales of loving-kindness between masters
and slaves, instances of perfect happiness in that relation, should be
cited, and then you should enter your candid, but decided opposition to
the system, to its extension, to its evils where it exists. How soon we
should all be found working together, so far as we might, for the
amelioration of the colored race here, with a view to the extinction of
slavery in every form of it in which it is an evil, or a greater evil
than anything which might properly be substituted."

"Well," said Mrs. North, "husband, what do you say to that?"

"I like it," said he.

"But now," said I, "the language of the place of despair is exhausted in
describing and denouncing the South. If a man among us lifts up his
voice to say good things about Southerners, one universal hiss goes up
from all your conventions and anti-slavery prints. He may be seeking the
same end with you, namely, the peaceful removal of slavery, with due
regard to the highest good of all concerned; but let him utter a word in
arrest of your unqualified condemnation of slavery as it actually is,
and there are no persecutors, nor scourges, nor intolerance on the
earth, more fierce and cruel than you and your denunciations."

"Take it patiently, husband," said Mrs. North, "you know that you
deserve it."

"I know from this," said I, "if from nothing else, that your theory is
wrong. The truth does not excite such passions in those who love and
seek to promote it. We see that, in cases without number, the present
condition of the slaves is a blessing for both worlds, and that if all
who possess slaves were, as many are, slavery would cease to be any more
of a curse than any dependent condition in this world. There must always
be those who will do every sort of menial work. The great Father of all,
who himself says that he has 'deprived' the ostrich 'of wisdom, neither
hath he imparted to her understanding,' so arranges the capacities of
some that their happiness consists in leaning upon superior intelligence
and capability.

"The serving people, in some districts of country, are volunteers from
all races; at the South, they consist of one inferior, dependent race,
who for ages have been slaves in their own country, and would be such
even now, if they were there. We will not shut the door of hope forever
upon any part of the human family, as to their elevation among the
tribes of men, but this race has, for a long period of its history,
evidently been undergoing a tutelage and discipline at the hand of
Providence. There is some marvellous arrangement of Providence, it seems
to me, designing that this black race shall lean upon us. Let the same
number of any other immigrant race have gone from us to Canada as of
this colored race, and the world would have heard a better report from
them ere this. They thrive best in connection with us as their masters,
whether it be right or wrong for us to be in such relation to them."

"But now," said he,--in a persuasive tone, and evidently wishing to turn
the drift of the remarks,--"just set them free, and hire them; we shall
agree then. The slaves will be as well off, and so will their masters."

"Mr. North," said I, "being owned is, in itself, irrespective of the
character of the master, a means of protection to the negro. Somebody
then is responsible for him as his guardian and provider, and is
amenable to the State for his sustenance. You can easily see that, let
the colored people come to be a hireling class, and their interests and
those of their masters are disjoined. There would be conflicts and
oppressions among themselves; they would fall into a degraded, serf-like
condition; but now each of them partakes of his master's interests, and
rises with him. I am not here pleading for slavery in the abstract, but,
the blacks being on the soil, it is far better for them to be owned than
to be free. Why are the Southwestern States, one after another, passing
laws, or framing their constitutions, to shut out from their borders
free negroes,--people in the very condition into which you would reduce
by wholesale all the blacks in the South? I pray you look and see that
you are an abstractionist, setting what you deem a theoretical wrong
against a practical good, and under the circumstances, a real mercy."

"But," said Mr. North, "slavery impoverishes the soil, makes the whites
shun labor, feeling it to be degrading, and it keeps the white children
from industrial pursuits, and"--

"Please stop," said I, "my dear Sir, and think of what you are saying,
and be not carried away by that popular flood of cant phrases. Now you
know that God has given our Southern friends a south country, nearer
than ours to the tropics. Out-of-door labor there is injurious to the
white people, as you know. They are not to be blamed for this. God has
not given them strength to endure exposure to the sun. Had they a
northern climate, in which the labor required by the mechanic arts could
be performed with safety and comfort, do you not suppose that they
would have the same aptitude and relish as we for handicraft? Their
children cannot be brought up to manual labor to the extent that ours
are, because the God of heaven has ordained their lot in a land less
favorable than ours to toil. His providence, making use of the sins of
men, has placed the blacks here; you and the rest of the world, who
depend upon their cotton, are willing enough to use it in its countless
forms, while you reproach your Maker, as I think, for having caused it
to be raised as he has seen fit to do."

"But Oh," said Mr. North, "free labor is more profitable than slave
labor. You well know how it affects the soil, and that the great price
of slaves will in time make the system oppressive to the masters,
especially if they are all as considerate as you say they are about
selling."

"The good Aunt has replied to you as to the soil, and we need not
distress ourselves about the price of slaves; that will regulate itself.
You well understand," said I, "that I am not arguing in favor of slavery
_per se_, nor for the slave-trade, nor for the extension of slavery; but
I contend that where slavery now exists, no one has yet proposed a
scheme which is better than the continuance of ownership, the blacks
remaining on the same soil with their present masters. Nor do I mean to
say that the present system must inevitably continue forever. We must
leave future developments in other hands. Of course there are difficult
problems on such a subject as this. Intelligent Christian gentlemen at
the South say that the best schemes which have been proposed by
Europeans for the substitution of apprenticed negroes for slaves would
make the condition of the negro as far worse than our slavery as the
condition of a degraded negro here is below that of his master. Who will
care for him when he is old, or sick? Granting this apprentice scheme
to be arranged without oppression or sin of any kind, I hold that the
condition of our slaves owned by masters and mistresses, is better than
such a hireling condition, though it have the appearance of liberty."

"Why so?" inquired Mr. North.

"The slaves are not treated as hired horses are liable to be treated," I
replied. "We know how a man is likely to treat his own horse, compared
with the horse which he hires. Men nurse their slaves when they are
sick; they provide for them when they are old. By their care and
responsibility for them, and in relieving them from responsibility, they
pay them wages whose market-value, if it could be reckoned in dollars,
would be higher wages than are paid to the same class of laborers in the
land. There are not four millions of the lower class of the laboring
people in any one district of the earth whose condition is to be
compared with that of the Southern slaves for comfort and happiness."

"I presume," said Mrs. North, "that you would not regard exemption from
responsibility as in itself a blessing. You know how it educates us, how
it sharpens the faculties, how it makes a man more of a man; therefore
is it, after all, any kindness to the slaves, that they are relieved
from responsibility?"

"I thank you," said I, "for that question. Does it concern us that our
domestic servants are relieved, for the time, of all responsibility for
house-rent, taxes, political duties?

"Every condition of poverty and toil has its peculiar hardships and
sorrows. But putting together, respectively, all the advantages and the
disadvantages of our slaves, he who looks upon a population with
enlarged views of liabilities and of the inevitable results in the
working of different schemes of labor, and is not so weak or morbid as
to dwell inordinately on real and imaginary wrongs and miseries, which,
after all, if real, are compensated for by advantages or surpassed by
aggregated smaller evils in other conditions, must admit that, the
colored people being here, their being owned is the very best possible
thing for their protection, and the surest guarantee against all their
liabilities to want in hard times, sickness, and old age.

"Speaking of hard times leads me to say, that if you could put four
millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during
commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a
position where, while they were still active and useful, a single
thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would
be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor. There will not be the
same number of people in the laboring class throughout our land next
winter, in any one section, whose comfort and happiness will exceed that
of our slaves."

"Oh, well," said Mr. North, "all this may be true, but this does not
reconcile me to slavery. Our horses here at the North will all be
comfortably provided for, notwithstanding any money pressure. But I
would rather be a human being and fail, every winter, than be a horse."

"Husband," said Mrs. North, "do you consider that a parallel case? Mr.
C. is not arguing, as I understand him, that slavery is better than
freedom. He is not persuading us to be slaves rather than free. He takes
these four millions of blacks as he finds them, in bondage, and he asks,
What shall we do with them? You say, Set them free. He says, They are
better off, as a race, in their present bondage, than they would be if
made free, to remain here. Not that they are better off than four
millions of colored people, who had never been slaves, would be in a
commonwealth by themselves."

"I thank you, Mrs. North," said I, "for your clear and correct statement
of my position. And now I will take up Mr. North's parable about the
horses, and apply it justly. Let hay and grass be exceedingly scarce,
and I had rather take my chance with an owner and be a horse, in a
stable, and at work, than a horse roaming in search of food, chased away
everywhere. The comparison is between horse and horse, and man and man."

"You make me think," said Mrs. North, "of an interesting passage in a
late magazine, written by a lady. She was on a voyage to Cuba. She
arrived at Nassau. She says, 'There were many negroes, together with
whites of every grade; and some of our number, leaning over the side,
saw for the first time the raw material out of which Northern
Humanitarians have spun so fine a skein of compassion and sympathy. You
must allow me one heretical whisper,--very small and low. Nassau, and
all we saw of it, suggested to us the unwelcome question whether
compulsory labor be not better than none.'"[3]

[Footnote 3: _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1859, p. 604.]

"There is," said I, "this great question of right, with some, as to
slavery: As the State has a right to interpose and send vagrant children
to school, has the world a right to interpose, in certain cases, and
send certain races to labor for the good of mankind? This was the
question which broke upon the lady's mind. It is very interesting to see
the question thus stated, and to notice the graceful touch of apology,
and of playfulness, in the manner of stating it. There was risk, and
even peril, in making the suggestion, but, withal, some moral courage.
Still a lady may sometimes venture where it might not be safe for a
gentleman to go.

"But the question between us is not, 'Freedom or slavery,' in the
abstract, nor, Whether it is right, in any case, to reduce a people to
slavery; but, What is best for our slaves? All your proofs that freedom
is better than slavery in the abstract, are nothing to the point."

"It is the foulest blot on our nation in the eyes of the world," said
Mr. North, "that we have four millions of human beings in bondage."

"Have you read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin?'" I inquired.

"Ask me," said he, pleasantly, "if I know how to read. Every lover of
liberty and hater of oppression has read 'Uncle Tom.'"

"That is very far from being true," said I; "but still, you like Uncle
Tom as a character, do you?"

"You astonish me," said he, "by making a question about it. He is the
most perfect specimen of Christianity that I ever heard of."

"Among the martyrs," said I, "have you ever found his superior?"

"No, Sir!" was his energetic answer.

"Now," said I, "what made Uncle Tom the paragon of perfection?"

"What made him?" said he.

"Yes," said I, "what made him the model Christian? You do not reply, and
I will tell you. SLAVERY MADE UNCLE TOM. Had it not been for slavery, he
would have been a savage in Africa, a brutish slave to his fetishes,
living in a jungle, perhaps; and had you stumbled upon him he would very
likely have roasted you and picked your bones. A system which makes
Uncle Toms out of African savages is not an unmixed evil."

"But," said he, "it makes Legrees also."

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said I, "it does not make Legrees. There are
as many Legrees at the North as at the South, especially if we include
all the very particular 'friends of the slave.' Legree would be Legree
in Wall Street, or Fifth Avenue; Uncle Tom would not be Uncle Tom in the
wilds of Africa."

"And so," said he, "it is right to fit out ships, burn villages in
Africa, steal the flying people, bestow them in slave-ships, and sell
them into hopeless bondage!"

"So you all love to reason," said I, "or seek to force that conclusion
upon us. No such thing. If God overrules the evil doings of men, this is
no reason for repeating the wrong. I am insisting that slavery as it
exists in the South has been a blessing to the African. This does not
warrant you in perpetrating outrages on those who are still in Africa.

"But the result has been, through the mercy of God as though we had
taken millions of degraded savages out of Africa, and had made them
contribute greatly to the industrial interests of mankind.

"We have raised them from heathenish ignorance and barbarism to the
condition of intelligent beings. Look at them in their churches and
Sabbath-schools. Slavery has done this. See the colored population of
Charleston, S.C., voluntarily contributing, as they do, on an average,
three dollars apiece, annually, for the propagation of the Gospel at
home and abroad. See the meeting-house of the African Church at
Richmond, Va., a place selected for public speakers from the North to
deliver their addresses in it to the citizens of Richmond, because it is
more commodious than any other public building in the city. Think of the
membership of slaves in Christian Churches; of the multitudes of them
who have died in the faith and hope of the Gospel. Slavery has done
this. The question is whether slavery has been, or is, such a curse, on
the whole, to the African race, that we must now set free the whole
colored population? Please let us keep to the point. The reopening of
the slave-trade is a question by itself.

"It seems that God had chosen to redeem and save large numbers of the
African race by having them transported to this Christian land.
Philanthropists would not be at the cost and trouble of all this. God
has, therefore, used the cupidity of men to accomplish his purposes, and
he punishes the wicked agents of his own benevolent schemes. His curse
has for ages rested on the African race, and the laws of nature have, to
a great degree, interposed to prevent Christian efforts in their behalf.
God saw fit to change the prison-house, and prison yards and shops of
this race from one continent to another, and New England merchantmen, in
part, have been allowed to be the conveyers. In the process of
transferring these future subjects of civilization and Christianity,
vast misery is endured, as in opening a way by the sword for the
execution of his decrees, great slaughter is the inevitable attendant. I
look at the whole subject of slavery in the light of God's providence.
And I do not see that his providence yet indicates any way for its
termination consistent with the interests of the colored people.

"As to the extension of slavery, in this land, if the Most High has any
further purposes of mercy for the African race in connection with us, he
will not consult you nor me. He will open districts of our country for
them; if my political party refuses to be the instrument in doing this,
from benevolent motives, or from any other cause, He will make that
party to be defeated, it may be by a party below us in moral principle,
as we view it. This question of slavery, its extension and continuance,
is therefore among the great problems of God's providence. I shall do
all that I properly can to prevent it, and to encourage, and, if called
upon, to aid my brethren now in immediate charge of the slaves, to
fulfil their solemn trust; but anything like impatience and passion at
the existence of slavery, I hold to be a sin against God. I pity those
good men whose minds are so inflamed by the consideration of individual
cases of suffering as not to perceive the great and steadfast march of
the divine administration. Politicians and others who get their places,
or their bread, by easy appeals to sympathy for individual cases of
suffering, are the causes of much misplaced commiseration and of a low,
uninstructed view of the great interests involved in slavery. Yet these
very men who, for selfish purposes, stir up the passions of our people,
by dwelling on cases of hardship in slavery, are greatly disappointed
when Napoleon III., at Villafranca, prematurely terminates a war of
unparalleled slaughter. They would have preferred, for the cause of
constitutional liberty and for its possible influence against the Pope,
that the fighting had continued a month longer; we hear no pathetic
remonstrances from them on the score of the killed and maimed, the
widows and orphans and the childless, of homes made desolate, by this
additional month of battle. Such is man, so inconsistent, so blinded by
party prejudice, so ready to maintain that which, in a change of persons
and places, he will denounce. He will be wholly blinded by individual
acts of suffering to all that is good in a system; and again, the good
to be effected by a war will blind him to the hundreds of thousands of
dead or mutilated soldiers, with five times that number of bleeding
hearts, rifled by the sword of their precious treasures."

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