The states in which slavery at present prevails are fifteen in number, and occupy the southern and southwestern part of the Union. With the exception of Kentucky and Missouri, they are all south of the parallel of 36° 30' N., and skirt the shores of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico; or (as is the case with Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee) lie along the great rivers which traverse the wide valley of the Mississippi. The free population of those fifteen states is 6,393,758, and the number of slaves they contain 3,175,783. It is interesting to remark how in this, as in so many other parts of the world, the home of slave labour and of permanent slavery is, in a great degree, determined and limited by climatic, physico-geographical, and geological conditions. It is along the immediate coast-lines of the Atlantic and of the Mexican Gulf, and along the banks and branches of the great Mississippi, that slavery found at first, and still finds, its most congenial abode we had almost said its natural dwelling - place. A fringe of rich lowland, varying in breadth, skirts these seas and rivers, and yields the rice and sugar and cotton which are the staples of southern culture. Such is the tract of country in South Carolina and Georgia, which produces the famous sea-island cotton. The coast from the Santee river to the Savannah in the former state, and southward into Georgia, consists of "A series of islands,-the famous seaislands of the cotton markets. The mainland, which is separated from these islands by innumerable narrow and winding channels, is penetrated, for some distance inland, by a vast number of creeks and inlets. The islands present a bluff shore and a fine beach towards the ocean, but the opposite sides are often low and marshy. They were originally covered with a magnificent growth of the live or evergreen oak, one of the finest trees anywhere to be seen. The soil is light, but it possesses a fertility never yet attained in the dead and barren sands of the interior. These lands are protected by embankments from the tides and floods, and the fields are divided and drained by frequent dikes and ditches. Such of them as can be most conveniently irrigated with fresh water are cultivated as rice fields; the remainder are employed in the production of the long staple, or sea-island cotton-a species of vegetable wool, which excels every other in the length of its fibre, and almost rivals silk in strength and softness."-White Slave, p. 129. This fringe extends inland for twenty or thirty miles. To the lower lands the negroes repair at the proper season of the year, and put in, tend, or reap the sea-island cotton and rice, which yield great returns. The white masters, and even the overseers, visit them as rarely as possible, the climate in the hot season being rife with fever, and fatal to the constitution of the white man. Within this fringe of rich low-land, to which the black skin is only better suited than the white, lies a belt of barren sand, generally unfit for cultivation, and which, for hundreds of miles in length, girdles in the flat fertility of the Atlantic coast. Extending inland to a distance of eighty or a hundred miles from the coast, and occupying in South Carolina, for example, one-half of the surface of the state, this region forms, as most American travellers have seen, "One of the most barren, miserable, general, the soil is nothing but a thirsty uninviting countries in the universe. In sand, covered for miles and miles with forests of the long-leaved pine. These tracts are called, in the expressive phrase of the country, pine barrens. For a great distance inland, these barrens preserve almost a perfect level, raised but a few feet above the surface of the sea. The tall, straight, branchless trunks of the scattered pines, rise like slender columns, and are crowned with a tuft of gnarly limbs, and long bristly leaves, through which the breezes murmur with a monotonous sound, much like that of falling waters, or waves breaking on a beach. less where settlements have been made, and the arts of husbandry have introduced a new vegetation. From the endless pine-forest the traveller escapes into a treeless prairie, distinguished by a soil resting on chalk or chalky marl, and, like the soils of our English chalk downs, absorbent of moisture, and naturally dry. Of these three belts or zones, the low alluvial flat is widest in the southern states, and along the Gulf of Mexico; the pine belt probably in Georgia; and the chalk marl in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Coloured labourers alone can cultivate the richest parts of the first; the second is for the most part in a state of nature; the third produces Georgian wheat, and other crops, if occasionally watered, but is naturally unfavourable to slave labour. But in regions where slavery prevails, and field labour is supposed to degrade the white man, the institution of slavery spreads wherever slave labour can be employed without actual loss; so that over the chalk region of Alabama slave plantations are spread, and there is among the natural physical conditions of the country a circumstance In which greatly favours the extension of a wealthy planting proprietary. The country, as we have said, is naturally dry, and, as in our own chalk districts, water is only to be obtained by sinking through the chalk. 1849 there were already 500 wells in that state, sunk to a depth of from 400 to 600 feet, one being generally sunk on each plantation. Petty farming, and a minute division of the land, becomes, under such conditions, in a new country, all but impossible. Hence the slave culture of the low sea-board has leaped over the pine barrens-narrow in Alabama-and settled itself where free labour in another century, when the virgin freshness of the soil shall have gone, will alone be found remunerative. The following section across the country, from the sea to the mountains, represents to the eye the substance of the preceding popular description, and exhibits at the same time the close relation which exists between the geological structure of the whole, and the kinds of culture and of human labour which appear at present the best adapted to each of its several parts : It will be seen by the letterpress beneath this section, that cach change in the agricultural character and value of the surface is coincident with a similar change in the geological character and age of the underlying rocks; so that the existence of slavery and the economy of slave labour appear to be determined by the united influence of physical and geological influences. It was not without a show of broad natural reason, therefore, that Daniel Webster declared his conviction that California and New Mexico were unsuited to the condition of slavery, so that he would not take the trouble of prohibiting it. "I would not take pains uselessly to re-affirm an ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God." Yet all experience, ancient and modern, in Europe and America, is opposed to Webster's doctrine. Taking its rise in some more favoured region, it is the tendency of the system to diffuse itself over regions in which it is healthy for the white man to labour, as upon the uplands of Alabama and Georgia, and the inland states of Kentucky and Tennessee. And no one will deny that the lords of the soil in California and Sonora might as profitably employ slave population in their silver mines and gold-washings, as the conquering Spaniards did the native races whom they successively subdued. So much on the physical characters of the slave region, and their relation to the institution of slavery. But a not less interesting feature, in connection with these states, is found in the classes of men by whom they are inhabited. We are accustomed to think only of the slaves and the free, as the main divisions of society in the southern states. But the free form two classes-the rich and the poor-which are as distinct from each other as the latter are from the slaves. Manual labour is beneath the dignity of a white man, so that if he is too poor to buy land and slaves, only the lowest and meanest pursuits of life are open to him; and he gradually sinks into a misery and degradation, and his children into a brutal ignorance, which are only less profound than among the mass of the slaves. To this fact one author alludes in the following terms :— "In Carolina, as in Lower Virginia, the poor whites are extremely rude and ignorant, and acquainted with but few of the comforts of civilised life. They are idle, dissipated, and vicious, and with all that vulgar brutality of vice which poverty and ignorance render so conspicuous and disgusting. Without land, or, at best, possessing some little tract of barren and exhausted soil, which they have neither skill nor industry to render productive; without any trade or handicraft art; and looking upon all manual labour as degrading to freemen, and fit only for a state of servitude these poor white men have become the jest of the slaves, and are at once feared and hated by the select aristocracy of rich planters. It is only the right of suffrage which they possess that preserves them the show of consideration and respect with which they are yet treated. "It is this which makes the chief difference between the slaves and these poor whites. In North Carolina, a very great number of them can neither read nor write, nor tell their own age; nor are they, in any intellectual or moral respect, (except that consciousness of their being their own masters-which goes so far towards making a man,) superior to the generality of the plantation slaves. The system hangs like a millstone about their neck, since it makes almost every kind of manual labour disgraceful; and apart from manual labour, how few other chances have the poor to acquire that capital necessary to give them a start in the world! And yet, with all these impediments in their own way, it is still this class of the poor free whites which forms the substratum and basis of our southern civilisation, such as it is—which insists most strenuously on the natural superiority of the white man, and is most shocked at the idea of allowing freedom to the niggers.'"-The White Slate. Another writer speaks more calmly thus "The Southern non-slaveholding white has not money to buy an education, and the public does not provide it for him. Partly from the policy of keeping him ignorant for the purposes of the slaveholder, partly from the essential difficulties of instituting common schools in a country cut up into large tracts for plantations, the common-school system does not exist in the slave states. The nonslaveholding white grows up ignorant, and continues so; and with ignorance come its natural companions-shiftlessness, poverty, love of low vices, want of self-respect, servility. In 1840, according to the census of that year, more than one free person in nine in North Carolina was unable so much as to read and write. In 1830, Governor Campbell of Virginia told his legislature, that of 4614 men, applicants for marriage-licences, 1047 -- - Fire could not write their names." Years' Progress of the Slave Power, p. 6. Struck with these statements, we naturally ask what numerical proportion the poor bear to the rich, or slaveholding whites, in these states; and the answer to this question only adds to our surprise. No general census of the number of slaveholders in the states has ever been taken; but in 1848 such a census was taken in the state of Kentucky. This state possessed then 192,470 slaves, and only 8,743 slave-owners, being an average of more than twenty-two slaves to each master. From this and other data, it has been estimated that the number of slaveholding voters does not exceed 100,000; and, allowing six to a family, that not more than 600,000 persons are directly interested in and supported by the labour of slaves. But the white population of the slave states amounts to 6,169,387,* so that of this poor and degraded class there are not less than 5,569,387, or they are to the rich and educated as 9 to 1! Whatever temptations the free states may present to our emigrating population, neither the charms of society, nor the love of knowledge, nor the hope of speedily bettering his condition, can lure a man to leave his paternal home for a residence in the southern states. A knowledge of this condition of things explains why there is so large a number of restless men in these southern states ready for every emergency, and panting after an outlet, just or unjust, for the exercise of their festering energies. It explains also, what at first sight is very inexplicable on this side of the Atlantic, that the whole free population of the slave states is actually decreasing instead of increasing, as we are in the habit of believing to be the case all over the Union. Thus, in the two censuses of 1840 and 1850, the total free population in the free and slave states respectively was as follows: redundancy of white men. It is not surprising, therefore, that as many of the poor as can find the means should wish to leave the slave states, and that the population should, in consequence, rapidly decrease. Leaving now the seat of slavery in North America-its physical characteristics, and the classes of men by whom it is occupied-we turn to the institution itself; and the first thing in regard to it that strikes every one not a citizen of the United States, is the inconsistency of its existence with the early history of the commonwealth, and with their famous Declaration of Independence. On the 4th of July 1776, the delegates of thirteen British colonies in North America-the immortal fiftysix-were solemnly met in Philadelphia, John Hancock, president, in the chair. On the motion of Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, one of their number, seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts, this assembly declared the said thirteen colonies to be thenceforward free, sovereign, and independent states-that the political connection with Great Britain was for ever cut asunder, and that they relied for success on the justice of their cause, with a strong confidence in the overruling providence of God. Every year since that famous Declaration, the 4th of July has been held in all corners of the United States as a great national holiday. Amid universal rejoicings, the young are publicly catechised on the events of 1776, while the grown-up are harangued in set speeches in praise of political liberty, in natural commendation of the patriots of the Revolution, and in equally natural exaggeration of the tyranny of Great Britain, and her insufferable oppression. In the preparation of such addresses, the genius Deducting from the total free, 6,393,758, the number of free coloured in these states, which is 224,429. + American Almanac for 1852, p. 199. We quote the following as samples of the catechetical exercises to which the youth of the United States were subjected on the 4th of July 1842, as reported by an eyewitness. The writer was invited to dine with Squire Smith, of the village of Virgil, in Peoria county, Illinois, when, among other proceedings "Mr Smith called together his two eldest lads, and his daughter, Pluma Adaliza, and thus examined them : Q. When was Independence declared? A. On the 4th of July 1776. of the greatest orators of the country has exercised itself; and it is only just to say, that among them are to be found many bursts of brilliant and stirring eloquence. The Declaration of Independence drawn up by Jefferson commenced with these memorable words-"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." At the time of the Declaration, the thirteen confederated states contained a free population of about two and a-half millions, and a slave population of about half a million. And at the very moment when Jefferson penned, and Congress issued to the world, the above sentence, as an excuse for breaking their allegiance, they were taking measures to rivet immovably the chains of slavery on half a million of their own countrymen, whom darker skins and thicker lips rendered unworthy of the liberty which was the inalienable birthright of the white race! Of what a bundle of inconsistencies are we made up! The two pictures, the ancient and the modern, how strangely do they contrast with each other! In 1776, the Parliament of Great Britain Q. How many states or colonies were there then? Q. What were they declared to be? A. Free, sovereign, and independent states. Q. By whom was the motion made and seconded? A. It was made by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. Q. In what were the Americans deficient? A. In almost everything necessary for carrying on a war. Q. On what did they rely? A. On the justice of their cause-with a strong confidence in the overruling providence of God. These answers were given with much precision; but in the evening another class did not acquit themselves quite so satisfactorily. Mr Smith had driven his guests over to Babylon, a small village on the Spoon river. On the river-side a group of boys, of from nine to fourteen years of age, were collected round one who had a gun, which he was firing off now and then, to the infinite delight of the party. They went up to the boys to interrogate them about the 4th of July. 'Well, boys, what day is this?' 'Independence, sir.' 'What do you mean by Independence?' One looked to another for an answer. At last the gunner replied,' Wall, I reckon, sir, it was on the 4th the Declaration was signed by John Hancock and them others. We've got it up to our house, right up thar." "Name some of the others?' 'Wall, I forget now. I know John Hancock's the first, (shaking his head knowingly ;) his name's written right big-bigger'n any o' the rest. That's what makes me min'. True enough. The brave Hancock was the first to inscribe his name on the immortal document, and he did it with a full pen and a fearless heart. 'What are you shooting for?' 'For fun.' 'Why do people shoot more on this day than on others?' 'Because it's Independence.' 'Why shoot on Independence?' 'I don't know, sir.' 'Because,' said another, 'they feel happy for whipping the British.' And why should they whip the British, and be happy for it?' None of them, however, could answer this. As one of them said,' they had never thought clear down to that.""-Emigrants' Guide to the Western States of America, by JOHN REGAN. P. 151. |