Instead of onward steps, there has been backsliding
in reference to slavery and the slave-trade during the last ten years.
This mournful fact has been one of the consequences of the nocturnal
surprise which, by surrounding the National Assembly of France with
cannon, and locking up the newspaper offices in the early morning of the
2d of December 1851, transformed an American republic into a Roman
Empire, and a President into a Caesar.
Arago, as minister for the colonies, proposed, and
the Provisional Government unanimously and by acclamation, decreed, the
abolition of slavery in 1848. This decree was very eloquently worded,
and after passing it, the members embraced each other. The Constituent
Assembly, while ratifying the decree by a law, fixed a day, in 1852, for
emancipating all the slaves in the French colonies; but long before the
day of freedom came, the day of despotism, and the imperial government,
instead of abolishing slavery, re-established it permanently. Slavery
has, indeed, often been abolished in law, but never in fact, by our
continental neighbours. Tinder every symbol of party power which has
been uppermost during the last seventy years, except the bees of the
Bonapartes under the lilies and red bonnets, the white cockades and the
tricolour cockades, slavery has been abolished by a series of laws; but
I cannot say that, in virtue of them, any negro has ever ceased to be a
slave.
But, in common with all the nations calling
themselves civilized, the French have been parties to treaties
abolishing the slave-trade. There is no nation, indeed, which has
boasted more of the humane ideas which these treaties embody, as the
offspring of the revolution of 1789. We shall see by and by how far the
ideas have been borne out by facts. It is not generally understood how
far the growth of sentiments hostile to the slave-trade in Great Britain
during the eighteenth century tended to alienate the planters of
Virginia from the mother country, and bring them more and more under
Gallican influences, preparing the way, in fact, for the declaration of
American independence. The Virginians, however much they loved liberty
for themselves, had no liking for it on behalf of blacks, nor, indeed,
of whites whose labour was profitable to them. Wonder has often been
expressed by travellers in the southern states of America because the
skins of the slaves are sometimes white. Why, it would be wonderful if
they were not, for there were many whites kidnapped into slavery in
Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is one of
the black spots in the history of Aberdeen, for example, that the
magistrates were guilty of conniving at the kidnapping of outcast
children, who were sold to be slaves in Virginia. When, indeed, the
Virginians revolted against Great Britain, they fought for slavery with
liberty upon their flags, contending for their property in men, while
proclaiming all men free and equal. But such was the force of public
opinion against the slave-trade in the beginning of the present century,
that the United States were forced to become parties to treaties
abolishing it. Such, again, was the influence of the emancipation of the
slaves in the British colonies, that it might have been predicted, as a
matter of course, that an anti-slavery party would spring up in the
northern states of America ; and such a party there is, composed of
persons endowed with the highest gifts, and animated by the most heroic
spirit.
But of late years slavery has been gaining ground
across the Atlantic, at least to all outward appearance. Nobody but a
friend of slavery can be elected President. The tendency of legislation
has been to extend the area of slavery, and to diminish the chances of
fugitives escaping from bondage. It was recently proposed in some of the
slave states to prevent negroes from meeting together upon any pretence
whatever. The frolics and balls, out of which so many quaint melodies
and humorous songs have come, are being suppressed. Meetings of
benevolent societies, and even public worship, are prohibited when the
preachers are black. Slaves must not drive about in hired carriages,
without the permission of their masters. Shopkeepers are requested to
have no dealings with negroes. Without passes from their masters, negro
husbands must no longer visit their distant wives. Five-and-twenty years
ago, there were two millions and a half of slaves in the States, and
there are now four millions. The price of an able-bodied slave was then
900 dollars, and the price is now 1400. It thus appears that while slave
estates are being managed more and more like penal settlements, there
has been a vast increase of their victims, and ever-increasing motives
for swelling their numbers.
But the French have gone still farther back than the
Americans. People who have been taught to admire the brilliant Frenchmen
who left the court of Louis the Sixteenth to fight with Washington, have
not been told that hostility to England was so much more their animating
motive than the love of liberty, that, on returning home, they solicited
and obtained an ordinance restricting the right of holding commissions
in the army to noblemen born. This fact is a specimen of how they had
learned liberty and equality in the army of independence. And facts of
this kind are characteristic of Gallican liberalism throughout its whole
history. For, did not the French National Assembly pass a law abolishing
slavery in the French colonies, and were not the blacks obliged to
conquer it for themselves under the heroic leadership of Toussaint
L'Ouverture, the liberator of Saint Domingo? And did not the first
Bonaparte, as soon as he seized the dictatorship, send an expedition to
re-subdue the blacks of Saint Domingo? No one, surely, can have
forgotten how Toussaint, the impersonation of negro freedom, was starved
to death in a prison among the snows of the Alps?
And now, under the second Empire, the French are the
greatest slave-dealers in the world. During the last ten years, they
have established a system of kidnapping upon the west coast of Africa.
Slave hunts have been got up to supply their marts. Their system was
brought fully to light by the affairs of the Charles et Georges and the
Regina Coeli. The Portuguese government cruisers having caught the
Charles et Georges upon the coast of Mozambique, fitted up as a
slaver, with manacles and feet-irons on board, seized her, and the
proper court tried and condemned her as a slaver. But the French
Government sent three war steamers to the Tagus, and, to use the words
of the King of Portugal, "took the question from the field of legal
right, and obliged his government to cede to the peremptory exaction of
the delivery of the vessel and the liberation of the captain." A cry of
indignation resounded over Europe against this deed; and the Emperor of
the French, desiring to soothe public opinion on this occasion,
published a letter, in which he promised to abandon his system of
African for Coolie emigration.
The affair of the Regina Coeli is another
illustration of the modern French slave-trade. The Queen of Heaven was a
slaver. This fact was proved by abundant evidence. Six English
gentlemen, passengers on board the Ethiope steam-packet, signed their
names to a declaration, saying they had seen irons on board of her. The
negroes, although they were called emigres or engages,
were really slaves bought from the most determined slave dealer in Manoo.
The very fact that they rose up and massacred the crew of the Regina
Coeli, proves they were not free emigrants on their way to a land of
promise. It has been pretended that two hundred and seventy men
massacred a crew of eleven sailors, in consequence of a quarrel about
cooking bananas or smoking at the stove; but if there had been any truth
in this pretext, the Liberian Government never would have deemed the
massacre justifiable, and never could have refused to punish the
massacrers.
When the British Government remonstrated with the
French in reference to the revival of the slave-trade, the Emperor
promised to give up his peculiar system of emigration, if supplied with
a suffi-cient number of labourers from British India. Now nobody is
ignorant now-a-days respecting what labourers are in the French
colonies; they are slaves. Yet it is authoritatively stated that there
are no less than 49,000 British subjects in the condition of
labourers or slaves in the island of Reunion alone. The treaty or pact
under which this transaction has taken place has never been submitted to
the consideration of the Parliament or the public, and yet the treaty is
said to be so far binding, that the supply of British subjects to be
French slaves cannot be stopped without giving eighteen months' notice.
This may be the proper place to mention that there
was recently in London, and in communication with the Foreign Office, an
African lad, a British subject, who had been kidnapped into slavery in
Cayenne, and from whence he managed to escape.
Kidnapping has just been detected in China and the
West Indies. The kidnapping in China has been proved by 105 depositions
denounced by British and French commanders-in-chief. Here is a specimen
of these depositions, and a sample of the system pursued by certain
Americans:—
Ung Cheo-Foo, a Tartar, states: "About twelve days
ago I was selling herbs in the streets of Canton; it was in the
south suburbs. A man (Chinese) came up and asked me to go to Honan to
fetch something to Canton. Got into a boat, and was taken to Chung Chow.
I objected to go to that place, and was struck. I was placed on board a
foreign ship, and asked if I would go to a foreign country. I declined.
The foreigner said I was to be taken back, as I had refused to go. I was
again put into the kidnapping boat, and beaten on my back with the flat
of a sword. I received four blows, and was told I must, when on board
the foreign ship, say I was willing, or I should be killed. I was
afraid, and consented to go. I was kept below in the foreign ship, my
dress was changed, and I was not allowed on deck. There were 189 coolies
down in that place. We had plenty of room, and plenty to eat. All were
unwilling to go, and had been kidnapped. Six days ago I was brought away
from the foreign vessel."
The skipper of the Alice Rodgers, one Braley, has
recently excited great indignation in Jamaica. This man, having
inveigled two black boys, bearing the Scottish names of Campbell and
Raeburn, to engage as his apprentices to the trade of seamen, took them
to Norfolk, Virginia, where he tried to sell them as slaves. Fortunately
for the boys, the American gentleman to whom this British kidnapper
offered them, denounced him to the police, and had him arrested for
violating the laws of the State.
From St. Helena we learn that the number of slaves
brought into depot there is larger than ever was known before. American
captains boast openly in this port that the slave-trade is far too
profitable ever to be put down.
When slavery was abolished in the British Empire,
moralists remarked how astonishing it was that an iniquity so flagrant
should have endured so long. Surely it is astounding not merely that
slavery should still survive, but that the slave-trade should have
revived and flourished once more. Slavery deprives men of their souls
with the freedom of their bodies. When slave-dealers try to prove that
negroes are not of the one human species, but something beneath it, they
are trying to cast upon nature the degradation which is their own work.
A community of slaves is a community of men, but souls are wanting
there.
Agitation for the abolition of slavery is merely
supporting the plea of men to be men. Gloomy as the present aspect of
slavery and the slave-trade undoubtedly is, it is but a phase;
and the history of humanity, like the history of every man, is chequered
with black and white aspects. The English-speaking nation in America can
preserve slavery permanently only by annihilating among them the
knowledge of the language of Milton and Clarkson. The Dred-Scott
decision may say every territory has a right to maintain iniquity if it
pleases, and Presidents may be elected to stand by the Dred-Scott
decision, but nothing will be decided by all that, whilst words of
righteousness have the power of disturbing the consciences of men.
"King Cotton," again, is said to be the mainstay of
slavery and the slave-trade, and this industrial monarch may destroy the
institution he upholds. Hitherto we have been told that Cotton is King,
and must have slaves. But there is a whisper gone over the whole
geographical area of the cotton plant, saying, Cultivate cotton, for the
British cotton-spinners cannot obtain enough of it. At present, the
slave-owning planters can produce a quantity of cotton for threepence
which they can sell for tenpence, and the labour of their slaves is very
profitable to them. However, India, Australia, and Africa can all grow
cotton, and King Cotton is summoning free labour to compete with slave
labour in supplying his wants. The very fury of the slave-owners is a
sign of weakness. Three thousand slaves escaped last year from the slave
states to Mexico. The slave-owners could not afford to be magnanimous to
poor Captain Brown. Why, a book-hawker was burned in Texas the other day
for selling anti-slavery books! Magnetic wires and steam-engines, the
discoveries of travellers, and the enterprise of industrials, the
economical law which produces competition for profits, is working at the
bases and undermining the foundations of the institutions of slavery and
the slave trade. King Cotton, after having bolstered them up, seems
destined to crumble them down.