In those countries where the slave codes are mild, where emancipation is rendered easy, and inducements are offered to industry, insurrections are not feared, and free people of color form a valuable portion of the community. If we persist in acting in opposition to the established laws of nature and reason, how can we expect favorable results? But it is pronounced unsafe to change our policy. Every progressive improvement in the world has been resisted by despotism, on the ground that changes were dangerous. The Emperor of Austria thinks there is need of keeping his subjects ignorant, that good order may be preserved. But what he calls good order, is sacrificing the happiness of many to the advancement of a few; and no doubt knowledge is unfavorable to the continuation of such a state of things. It is precisely so with the slave holder; he insists that the welfare of millions must be subordinate to his private interest, or else all good order is destroyed.
It is much to be regretted that Washington enfranchised his slaves in the manner he did; because their poverty and indolence have furnished an ever ready argument for those who are opposed to emancipation.[1] To turn slaves adrift in their old age, unaccustomed to take care of themselves, without employment, and in a community where all the prejudices were strongly arrayed against free negroes, was certainly an unhappy experiment.
But if slaves were allowed to redeem themselves progressively, by purchasing one day of the week after another, as they can in the Spanish colonies, habits of
- ↑ With all my unbounded reverence for Washington, I have, I confess, sometimes found it hard to forgive him for not manumitting his slaves long before his death. A fact which has lately come to my knowledge, gave me great joy; for it furnishes a reason for what had appeared to me unpardonable. It appears that Washington possessed a gang of negroes in right of his wife, with which his own negroes had intermarried. By the marriage settlement, the former were limited, in default of issue of the marriage, to the representatives of Mrs Washington at her death; so that her negroes could not be enfranchised. An unwillingness to separate parents and children, husbands and wives, induced Washington to postpone the manumission of his own slaves. This motive is briefly, and as it were accidentally, referred to in his will.
