Letters on American Slavery/Letter 4
LETTER FROM EMILE DE GIRARDIN.
I seize the occasion now offered me to accuse myself of having too long believed, on the faith of American citizens and French travellers, that the slavery of the blacks neither could nor ought, for their own sakes, to be abolished, without a previous initiation to liberty, by labor, instruction, economy, and redemption—an individual purchase of each one by himself.
But this belief I end by classing among those inveterate errors, which are like the rings of a chain, that even the freest of men drag after them, and even the strongest find it difficult to break.
What I once believed, I believe no longer.
Of all the existing proofs that Liberty is to be conquered or gained, not given, or dealt out by halves, the strongest proof is that, in the United States, the freest of all countries, the maintenance of Slavery is not made a question of time, but of race. Now if the reasons there alleged for the perpetuating and the legalizing of Slavery are true, they will be no less true a thousand years hence than to-day; if they are false, they have no right to impose themselves for a day, for an hour, for a moment. Error has no right against truth; iniquity has no right against equity, for the same reason that the dying have no right against death.
I hold, then, as false—incontestably and absolutely false,—all that blind self-interest and limping common-place are continually repeating, in order to perpetuate and legalize Slavery in the United States; just as I hold as false all that was said and printed before 1789, to perpetuate and legitimate serfdom; and all that is still said in Russia, in favor of the same outrage of men against the nature of man. The slavery of the blacks is the opprobrium of the whites. Thus every wrong brings its own chastisement.
The punishment of the American people is to be the last of the nations, while it is also the first. It is the first, by that Liberty of which it has rolled back the limits, and it is the last by that Slavery whose inconsistency it tolerates; for there are no slaves without tyrants. What matter whether the tyrant be regal or legal?