THE WELL-BEING OF THE SLAVES

161

of the time as a deterrent cause against their emancipation, cannot be determined. Undoubtedly such sentiments existed among many earnest men favorable thereto.

From the mass of facts and medley of voices certain conclusions can be drawn.

Thus it may be affirmed that the slaves in Virginia were better off as a result of their training and experience in servitude than they would have been had their ancestors never set foot upon her soil. It is equally true that theirs. was but a partial development and that freedom was necessary to the complete man. As the time comes in the life of a child when the privileges and dangers of selfexpression and self-control must supplant the restraints of the home and the school-room, so in the life of these children of larger growth, freedom with its awesome dangers and soul-inspiring possibilities was essential to any well-rounded and continuous advance.

Again, freedom was a help in the development of those who had made a certain measure of progress in their moral, intellectual and physical being; yet for those who were not thus prepared, its untimely coming might prove the dawn of a darker day, unless accompanied by wise nurture and sympathetic guidance of the feet, trained only for the paths of dependence.

Mr. Jefferson doubtless expressed the sentiments of a large class of thinkers when he said: "As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather to abandon, persons whose habits have been formed in slavery, is like abandoning children."

Experience with respect to emancipations made prior to the Civil War strongly tended to confirm these views.

'Writings of Jefferson, Ford, Vol. X, p. 66.

162 CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES, 1830-1860

The conditions, moral, intellectual and physical, of the free negroes of Virginia contrasted, as a rule, most unfavorably with that of their brethren still in bonds.

The results of emancipation where the slaves had been carried to free states, were, on the whole, not much more encouraging.

Professor MacMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the condition of the free negroes in those states at the time of the Missouri Compromise, writes: "In spite of their freedom they were a despised, proscribed, and poverty-stricken class."

Mr. Clay, speaking December 17, 1829, said:

Of all the descriptions of our population and of either portion of the African race, the free people of color are by far, as a class, the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned. There are many honourable exceptions among them, and I take pleasure in bearing testimony to some I know. It is not so much their fault as the consequence of their anomalous condition."2

Dr. Leonard Bacon, in a sermon before his congregation in New Haven, Conn., July 4, 1830, said:

"Who are the free people of color in the United States, and what are they? In this city there are from eight hundred to one thousand. Of these, a few families are honest, sober, industrious, pious and in many points of view, respectable But what are the remainder? Every one knows their condition to be a condition of deep and dreadful degradation, but few have formed any conception of the reality. The fact is, that as a class, they are branded with ignominy. There are in this country three hundred thousand freedmen, who are free men only in name, degraded to the dust and forming 'History of the United States, MacMaster, Vol. III, p. 558. "The African Repository and Colonial Journal, Vol. VI, No. 1, p. 12.

OUTLAY NECESSARY TO EMANCIPATION

163

hardly anything else than a mass of pauperism and crime." The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison have recorded that at the North, prior to the Civil War:

"The free colored people were looked upon as an inferior caste to whom their liberty was a curse, and their lot worse than that of the slaves, with this difference, that while the latter were to be kept in bondage 'for their own good' it would have been very wicked to enslave the former for their good."

We need not pause to consider the causes which reduced the free negroes of the Northern States to the conditions here described. That the free negroes of Virginia should have made little or no progress is easily accounted for by the abnormal conditions amid which they lived. There was confessedly scant chance for free negroes in communities densely populated with negro slaves. Many of the friends of emancipation, however, observing this same phenomenon in both slave and free states, came to the conclusion that freedom under existing conditions was hurtful rather than helpful. Others concluded that it was not freedom, but the lack of freedom with all its normal privileges, which had fettered the feet of these newly manumitted slaves. Let the state pay the owners and emancipate the whole body of slaves; let education and training for freedom go hand in hand with opportunity for achieving, and then emancipation would be justified of her children. For this immense outlay Virginia was confessedly not ready, and so the earnest believer in emancipation looked to colonization as the only door through which the slave might enter upon liberty with a man's chance for progress and self-respecting independence.

'Liberia Bulletin, No. 15, p. 7.

William Lloyd Garrison, by his children, Vol. I, pp. 253-254.

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES
WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF

EMANCIPATION (Continued)

BEYOND all the difficulties mentioned, there loomed the more portentous problem of the effect upon the state's political and social well-being of the introduction into her free population of a great company of negroes, whether as citizens or suffragists, or mere tenants at the will of their white brethren. What should be the outcome of such an unparalleled experiment as universal emancipation under the conditions existing in Virginia? The results of emancipation in the free states furnished no assurance because there the number of negroes was so small as to constitute a negligible quantity. What were the voices of history which came from over-sea? In Spain, after centuries of conflict, the whites had finally driven the remnant of the Moors literally into the Mediterranean. In San Domingo, after the carnival of blood had spent its force, the blacks had expelled all the surviving whites from the island.

"It is futile," said Mr. Jefferson, "to hope to retain and incorporate the blacks into the state. Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of the blacks, of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction Nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.

1History of Slavery in Virginia, Ballagh, p. 132.

STATUS OF THE FREE NEGRO IN THE STATE 165

But casting aside these tragic warnings, the question of what would be the result of the great experiment, stood unanswered. What place in the life of the commonwealth were these people to fill? Should they be trained for the obligations of freedom and then denied its privileges? Should they be accorded the right of suffrage? If not, how would its denial comport with the genius of our institutions and the aspirations of our people? If entrusted with the suffrage how was the well-being of communities to be assured where, having the majority, they would become political masters? Had negroes ever, in the world's history, ruled in peace and order a community largely populated by whites? Was the race to be kept in a state of quasi-dependence-beholden for their social and economic privileges to the very people with whom they must come in competition? What provision for the pauperism, the vagrancy, the lunacy and the crime which would certainly follow the removal of the restraints of slavery? What measure and character of education for the young and by whom provided? These and many more like them were the questions, which, from the close of the Revolution, had confronted the people of Virginia. What should be the relations, political and social, of the two races after emancipation? Speaking in September, 1850, in Congress, on the Wilmot Proviso, Gov. James McDowell, of Virginia, said:

'Physical amalgamation? . . . ruinous, if it were possible. . . . Political and civil amalgamation just as impossible. Emancipation with rights of residence and property, but exclusion from social, civil and political equality, would conduce, sooner or later, to a war of colors."

'Congressional Globe, 31st Congress. 1st Session. App. 1678.