The Conflict with Slavery Thomas Carlyle on the Slave Question.
by John Greenleaf Whittier
[1846.]
A late number of Fraser's Magazine contains an article bearing the
unmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle,
entitled, 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question', which would be
interesting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency so
unspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling of
amazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemous
irreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil of
Faust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts of
Christianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spices
from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation,--and that the
negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without
wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the
latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to
them, can afford to give,--the author considers himself justified in
denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was
specially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confned himself to
simple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christian
abolitionists of England--"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of Exeter
Hall"--there would have been small occasion for noticing his splenetic
and discreditable production. Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy
--the alloy of human frailty and folly--in the most righteous reforms,
which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater of
shows and falsities. Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics,
morals, or religion, comes very properly within the scope of his mockery,
and we bid him Godspeed in plying his satirical lash upon it. Impostures
and frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection and
exposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the
image of Bell and the Dragon.
But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply
his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to
humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the
amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred
rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his
Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the
poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a
Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on
the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and
auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good
taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults
his readers.
He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the
Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse
to facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West India
Islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that
God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the
white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their
masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that,
if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed
to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest
slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly
philosopher,--"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the
spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little
less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other
methods avail not, will be compelled to work."
It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such
offensive language with anything like respect. Common sense and
unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrine
they inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of man
towards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth and
travaileth unto this day." It is as old as sin; the perpetual argument
of strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greek
philosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born to
be slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, being
by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce
him to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine of
what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school of
philosophy,--the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer
of caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities and
unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the
East India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal.
Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He has
before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his
philosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia of
Paraguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction
and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his 'Letters
and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage and
almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the
age, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms," and squeamishness which shudders at
the sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for a
justification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he has
intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of
settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible
transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the
colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and
social evils of England. In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see this
devilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with the
strong. Might has a divine right to rule,--blessed are the crafty of
brain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennus
said when he threw his sword into the scale,--Woe to the conquered! The
negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has
no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and,
if need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the
oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh
and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is
squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism,"
maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to
scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and
"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substance
of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic
husbandry,--the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding
unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of
Transcendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for the
Sermon on the Mount.
He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the West
Indies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use and
behoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, these
islands would have been productive only of "jungle, savagery, and swamp
malaria." The negro alone could never have improved the islands or
civilized himself; and therefore their and his "born lord," the white
man, has a right to the benefits of his own betterments of land and "two-
legged cattle!" "Black Quashee" has no right to dispose of himself and
his labor because he owes his partial civilization to others! And pray
how has it been with the white race, for whom our philosopher claims the
divine prerogative of enslaving? Some twenty and odd centuries ago, a
pair of half-naked savages, daubed with paint, might have been seen
roaming among the hills and woods of the northern part of the British
island, subsisting on acorns and the flesh of wild animals, with an
occasional relish of the smoked hams and pickled fingers of some
unfortunate stranger caught on the wrong side of the Tweed. This
interesting couple reared, as they best could, a family of children, who,
in turn, became the heads of families; and some time about the beginning
of the present century one of their descendants in the borough of
Ecclefechan rejoiced over the birth of a man child now somewhat famous as
"Thomas Carlyle, a maker of books." Does it become such a one to rave
against the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaided
by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been,
at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of
Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his
Piet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvement
and spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on the
part of any nation or people? From people to people the original God-
given impulse towards civilization and perfection has been transmitted,
as from Egypt to Greece, and thence to the Roman world.
But the blacks, we are told, are indolent and insensible to the duty of
raising sugar and coffee and spice for the whites, being mainly careful
to provide for their own household and till their own gardens for
domestic comforts and necessaries. The exports have fallen off somewhat.
And what does this prove? Only that the negro is now a consumer of
products, of which, under the rule of the whip, he was a producer merely.
As to indolence, under the proper stimulus of fair wages we have reason
to believe that the charge is not sustained. If unthrifty habits and
lack of prudence on the part of the owners of estates, combined with the
repeal of duties on foreign sugars by the British government, have placed
it out of their power to pay just and reasonable wages for labor, who can
blame the blacks if they prefer to cultivate their own garden plots
rather than raise sugar and spice for their late masters upon terms
little better than those of their old condition, the "beneficent whip"
always excepted? The despatches of the colonial governors agree in
admitting that the blacks have had great cause for complaint and
dissatisfaction, owing to the delay or non-payment of their wages. Sir
C. E. Gray, writing from Jamaica, says, that "in a good many instances
the payment of the wages they have earned has been either very
irregularly made, or not at all, probably on account of the inability of
the employers." He says, moreover:--
"The negroes appear to me to be generally as free from rebellious
tendencies or turbulent feelings and malicious thoughts as any race of
laborers I ever saw or heard of. My impression is, indeed, that under a
system of perfectly fair dealing and of real justice they will come to be
an admirable peasantry and yeomanry; able-bodied, industrious, and hard-
working, frank, and well-disposed."
It must, indeed, be admitted that, judging by their diminished exports
and the growing complaints of the owners of estates, the condition of the
islands, in a financial point of view, is by no means favorable. An
immediate cause of this, however, must be found in the unfortunate Sugar
Act of 1846. The more remote, but for the most part powerful, cause of
the present depression is to be traced to the vicious and unnatural
system of slavery, which has been gradually but surely preparing the way
for ruin, bankruptcy, and demoralization. Never yet, by a community or
an individual, have the righteous laws of God been violated with
impunity. Sooner or later comes the penalty which the infinite justice
has affixed to sin. Partial and temporary evils and inconveniences have
undoubtedly resulted from the emancipation of the laborers; and many
years must elapse before the relations of the two heretofore antagonistic
classes can be perfectly adjusted and their interests brought into entire
harmony. But that freedom is not to be held mainly accountable for the
depression of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that Dutch
Surinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor,
is in an equally depressed condition. The 'Paramaribo Neuws en
Advertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date of
January 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints. People seek
and find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of the
place in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country. Of
a large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now be
called such. So deteriorated has property become within the last few
years, that many of these estates have not been able to defray their
weekly expenses. The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, into
which it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system is
speedily adopted. It is impossible that our agriculture can any longer
proceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and the
social position they held must undergo a revolution."
The paper from which we have quoted, the official journal of the colony,
thinks the condition of the emancipated British colonies decidedly
preferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continued
in force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the example
of Great Britain. The actual condition of the British colonies since
emancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them,
Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whatever
evils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be well
understood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towards
emancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils of
their own system.
This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyle
and others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has been
produced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838.
We have no fears whatever of the efect of this literary monstrosity,
which we have been considering upon the British colonies. Quashee, black
and ignorant as he may be, will not "get himself made a slave again."
The mission of the "beneficent whip" is there pretty well over; and it
may now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities,
with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days.
What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders of
slave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter of
encouragement, and that our anti-christian prejudices against the colored
man might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation and
sarcasm. On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of an
eloquent writer in the London Enquirer:--
"We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American people
than his [Carlyle's] last composition. Every cruel practice of social
exclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom. The slave-holder,
of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, but
enthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of European
celebrity. But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle's
hand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and the
denial of light to his mind. The free black will feel him, too, in the
more contemptuous and abhorrent scowl of his brother man, who will easily
derive from this unfortunate essay the belief that his inhuman feelings
are of divine ordination. It is a true work of the Devil, the fostering
of a tyrannical prejudice. Far and wide over space, and long into the
future, the winged words of evil counsel will go. In the market-place,
in the house, in the theatre, and in the church,--by land and by sea, in
all the haunts of men,--their influence will be felt in a perennial
growth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment. Amongst the
sufferers will be many to whom education has given every refined
susceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter. Men and women,
faithful and diligent, loving and worthy to be loved, and bearing, it may
be, no more than an almost imperceptible trace of African descent, will
continue yet longer to be banished from the social meal of the white man,
and to be spurned from his presence in the house of God, because a writer
of genius has lent the weight of his authority and his fame, if not of
his power, to the perpetuation of a prejudice which Christianity was
undermining."
A more recent production, 'Latter Day Pamphlets', in which man's
capability of self-government is more than doubted, democracy somewhat
contemptuously sneered at, and the "model republic" itself stigmatized as
a "nation of bores," may have a salutary effect in restraining our
admiration and in lessening our respect for the defender and eulogist of
slavery. The sweeping impartiality with which in this latter production
he applies the principle of our "peculiar institution" to the laboring
poor man, irrespective of color, recognizing as his only inalienable
right "the right of being set to labor" for his "born lords," will, we
imagine, go far to neutralize the mischief of his Discourse upon Negro
Slavery. It is a sad thing to find so much intellectual power as Carlyle
really possesses so little under the control of the moral sentiments. In
some of his earlier writings--as, for instance, his beautiful tribute to
the Corn Law Rhymer--we thought we saw evidence of a warm and generous
sympathy with the poor and the wronged, a desire to ameliorate human
suffering, which would have done credit to the "philanthropisms of Exeter
Hall" and the "Abolition of Pain Society." Latterly, however, like
Moliere's quack, he has "changed all that;" his heart has got upon the
wrong side; or rather, he seems to us very much in the condition of the
coal-burner in the German tale, who had swapped his heart of flesh for a
cobblestone.
