The Battle of Principles | Page 8

is interesting to note that five of the slave States imposed heavy penalties upon any one who should teach the slaves to read or write. Virginia, however, permitted the owner to teach his slave in the interest of better management of the plantation. North Carolina finally consented to arithmetic. After 1831 and the Nat Turner negro insurrection more stringent laws were passed to prevent the slaves learning how to read, lest they chance upon abolition documents. A Georgian planter said that "The very slightest amount of education impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their contentedness; and since you do not contemplate changing their condition, it is surely doing them an ill service to destroy their acquiescence in it." In spite of the law, however, domestic servants were frequently taught to read. Frederick Douglass found a teacher in his mistress, where he was held as a domestic slave, and Douglass in turn taught his fellow slaves on the plantation by stealth. The advertisements of slaves that mention the slave's ability to read and cipher, as a reason for special value, prove that the more intelligent slaves had at least the rudiments of knowledge. Olmstead, in his "Cotton Kingdom," says he visited a plantation in Mississippi, where one of the negroes had, with the full permission of his master, taught all his fellows how to read.
An examination of the influence of slavery upon the poorer whites shows that two-thirds of the white population suffered hardly less than did the coloured people. The slaveholding class formed an aristocracy, who dominated and ruled as lords. When the war broke out, there were about four hundred thousand slave-holders, and nine and a half million people. But of these four hundred thousand slave-holders, only about eight thousand owned more than fifty slaves each, and it was this mere handful who lived in splendid homes, surrounded with luxury, beauty, and refinement. Travellers who have thrown the veil of romance and enchantment about the Southern home, with a great house embowered in magnolia trees, its rooms stored with art treasures, its walls lined with marbles and bronzes, and its banqueting room at night crowded with beautiful women and handsome men--these travellers speak of what was as a matter of fact exceptional. We must remember that these men represented a small aristocracy; that their mode of life, so charmingly pictured by many accomplished writers, was the life of a select group, and that the great slave plantations numbered not more than eight thousand in that vast area.
From the hour of the organization of the Abolition Society, these Southern planters assumed an aggressive position. Their editors, politicians and lawyers began to publish briefs, in support of the peculiar institution. The usual argument began with ridicule of Thomas Jefferson's famous statement that all men are born equal. The second argument was an economic one, based on the value of the slaves. Three million slaves would average a value of five hundred dollars each, and this meant a billion five hundred millions of property, that had to be considered as so much property in ships, factories, engines, reapers, pastures, meadows, herds and flocks. All planters invoked the words of Moses, permitting the Hebrews to hold slaves, and therefore exhibiting slavery as a divine institution. Statesmen justified the Fugitive Slave Law by triumphantly quoting Paul's letter, sending Onesimus back to his rich master, Philemon. Jefferson Davis rested his argument upon the curse that God pronounced upon Canaan, and asserted that slavery was established by a decree of Almighty God and that through the portal of slavery alone the descendant of the graceless son of Noah entered the temple of civilization. Once a year the Southern minister preached from the text, "Cursed be Canaan, the son of Ham. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."
A few scholars grounded themselves on the scientific argument. These men held that the black man was separated from the Saxon by a great chasm, that if freed he was not equal to self-government, that he was a mere child when placed in competition with the white man, and that the strong owed it to the weak, that it was the duty of every superior man to take charge of the inferior, and impose government from without.
The politician had a stronger argument in defense of slavery. He held that the nation that was strong, educated, prosperous, with an army and navy, had not only the right but the duty of imposing government upon a colony that was ignorant, poor, and degraded, and that this example of the nation governing a colony by force of arms proved that the white man, as master, should impose government from without upon the slave.
Not until years after the war was over did men fully realize that slavery was