The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 53
Leaving my new acquaintance behind, at Augusta, where, as he said, he had business to attend to, and provided with the letters which he had promised me, I set out for Vicksburg.
Great was my joy at once more getting on the track of the lost ones; yet I could not but be harassed with many distressing doubts and uncertainties as to what, even if I found them, might be the results of my search.
The first part of my journey from Augusta led me through a district worn out and partially abandoned; a fac simile — and from the same causes — of what I had seen so much of in Virginia and the Carolinas. Crossing the Oconee, and presently the Oakmulgee, I reached a new country, of which the earliest settlements did not date back more than twenty years; but which already presented, here and there, specimens of the destructive agricultural system of the south, in gullied fields, especially on the hill sides from which the soil had been completely washed away; over which still stood erect the blackened trunks of the tenants of the original forest, killed by the process of girdling, but which, though dead and blasted, remained yet firmly rooted in the soil, sternly smiling, as it were, over the scene of destruction; the virgin soil, at first so fertile, having been washed into the neighboring hollows, and leaving exposed nothing but a barren surface of red and arid clay. Can there be a more striking symbol than one of these abandoned fields — the dead, giant trunks still towering over it, as if by way of memento of what it once was — of the natural effects of the plundering system upon which the whole organization of the slaveholding states is based; and which extends even to the land itself, rifled of its virgin strength by a shiftless system of ignorant haste to be rich, — and then abandoned to hopeless sterility? Having crossed the Flint, I entered then upon the primitive forests, the hunting grounds of the Creeks, but from which the insatiable cupidity of the greedy Georgians, backed by the power of the federal government, was already preparing forcibly to expel them — a thing soon after effected — in order to replace the wild, free tenants of the forest by gangs of miserable slaves purchased up and transferred from the wornout fields of Virginia and the Carolinas.
Upon presently reaching the banks of the Alabama, I emerged from these soon-to-be-violated solitudes, and thence to the banks of the Mississippi, traversed a country which the Indians had been already compelled to resign, and which was rapidly filling up with a most miscellaneous population from the more northern slave states; scions of the "first families" of Virginia, with such numbers of slaves as by some hocus pocus they could save from the grasp of their creditors, coming to refound their fortunes in this new country; gangs of slaves sent out under overseers by the wealthier slaveholders of the old states to open new plantations, where their labor might be more productive; Georgia "Crackers," with their pale, tallow-colored visages; with other wretched specimens of white poverty, ignorance, and degradation coming from North Carolina, squatters on these new lands; Yankee traders, and doctors, and lawyers, quacks and pettifoggers, with land speculators, slave traders, gamblers, horse thieves, and all kinds of adventurers, including a reasonable mixture of Baptist and Methodist preachers, — all, except the preachers, and not all of them, with but one idea in their heads, the growing rich suddenly; and with but two words in their mouths, namely, "niggers" and cotton.
It was, indeed, in these new settlements, had one leisure and curiosity for the purpose, that the slaveholding system of the United States might be seen operating unrestrained, and exhibiting its true character and richest development. All the old slave states had been originally planted as free communities on the British model, slavery having been superinduced thereupon as an excrescence or accessory; and, by tradition and habit, there still remain in those states — though fast dying out, under the influence of the slave breeding business — some good old wholesome English ideas. But the states of Alabama and Mississippi have been thoroughly slave states from the beginning, filled up by a colluvium of immigrants from the older slave states, mostly young men, who, in leaving their homes, would seem to have left behind them, as mere prejudices, every principle of humanity, justice, or moderation, ready, like so many ferocious sharks, to devour every thing and every body, and even each other. Nowhere in an part of the globe calling itself civilized, I doubt very much if any where, at any time, have ferocious enormities, and cold blooded murders, with pistols, rifles, and bowie knives, been so much a matter of everyday occurrence. Nowhere, between Lynch law committees on the one hand, and private murderers on the other, has life been so utterly insecure. As to the security of property, let the New York merchants who have traded to those states, let the English holders of Mississippi bonds, answer. Not that the holders of those bonds deserve any commiseration. Those securities were created — and the purchasers of them knew it, or ought to have known it — to raise funds with which to enable the Mississippi planters to increase their stock of slaves; and it is but a righteous retribution, that Englishmen who lent their money for so nefarious a purpose should be cheated out of every penny of it.
In the older slave states, the slaves living often on plantations on which they were born, and the connection between them and their owners being frequently hereditary, they cannot but establish certain ties of sympathy with those owners more or less strong, and customs of indulgence, and especially family relations among themselves, which have a partial operation to alleviate their condition. But in the migration southward, accomplished to a great extent through the agency of slave traders, all these ties and connections are broken up; all the horrors of the African slave trade are renewed; all the rudiments of ideas previously existing in Maryland and Virginia, and North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, that the negroes, after all, though they be slaves, are still men, and as such entitled to a certain degree of human sympathy and regard, and even to be looked upon as capable of improvement, of religious instruction, and perhaps, some time or other, of liberty; these shoots of the sentiment of humanity, which, though tender, and as it were scarcely daring to show themselves, and nipped, of late, by disastrous frosts, yet give promise and hope of a rich future harvest, — all these germs of consolation, in the transfer of the wretched slaves to the states of which I now speak, are assiduously plucked up as pernicious weeds in the nettle bed of slavery. Every better sentiment, every voice of sympathy, is carefully extinguished, the idea being sedulously inculcated by courts, and legislatures, and politicians, and newspapers, and by at least half or more of those who call themselves ministers of the gospel, that the negroes are in nature, what they are treated as being, mere merchandise, mere property, mere animals, intended to be used like horses and oxen in making cotton, and, like horses and oxen, to be kept forever under the yoke, the bridle, the goad, and the whip, never fit for or capable of being any thing but slaves.
The old English idea that liberty is to be favored — that idea which abolished slavery in Europe, and which once had considerable influence on the courts and legislatures of the more northern slave states — has, in these new hotbeds of cotton and despotism, been totally extinguished. Once a slave a slave forever, — black father or white father, whatever the complexion, — beyond the possibility even that the slave owning parent shall be able to emancipate his own children. Such is the diabolical doctrine of despotism, announced by Chief Justice Sharkey, — and never was judge more significantly named, — from the bench of the Supreme Court of Mississippi. And already this doctrine begins to find many advocates among the inhabitants of the new slave breeding Guinea, into which Virginia and Maryland have degenerated; nor, when the pinch comes, will there be wanting northern merchants, eager to please their southern customers; northern politicians, for the prospect of office, ready to worship Satan himself; northern editors, who publish papers for circulation at the south; northern doctors of divinity, ready to yield up, if not their own mothers, — for though he might say it in the heat of the moment, not even the famous Dr. Dewey is quite brave enough to stick to that, — yet, at all events, ready to surrender their own brothers into servitude, to keep the slaveholders quiet and good natured: plenty of such supple tools will not be wanting to preach, throughout the pretended free states, subscription to the perpetuity of servitude as the corner stone of the American Union!
Let those who would trace the onward march of American slavery, since the time of Washington and Jefferson, call to mind the difference between the principles avowed by them and those set up at the present day by the Mississippi Sharkeys and Virginia slave breeders for the market, who nominate the presidents, dictate the legislation, make tools of the politicians, and aspire, not unsuccessfully, to control the moral and religious sentiment of America!