Uncle Tom's Cabin
said it all the same to the virgin Mary herself, if she had come in the
way of his system.
“I used sometimes to hear my mother reasoning cases with
him,—endeavoring to excite his sympathies. He would listen to the most
pathetic appeals with the most discouraging politeness and equanimity.
‘It all resolves itself into this,’ he would say; ‘must I part with
Stubbs, or keep him? Stubbs is the soul of punctuality, honesty, and
efficiency,—a thorough business hand, and as humane as the general run.
We can’t have perfection; and if I keep him, I must sustain his
administration as a _whole_, even if there are, now and then, things
that are exceptionable. All government includes some necessary
hardness. General rules will bear hard on particular cases.’ This last
maxim my father seemed to consider a settler in most alleged cases of
cruelty. After he had said _that_, he commonly drew up his feet on the
sofa, like a man that has disposed of a business, and betook himself to
a nap, or the newspaper, as the case might be.
“The fact is my father showed the exact sort of talent for a statesman.
He could have divided Poland as easily as an orange, or trod on Ireland
as quietly and systematically as any man living. At last my mother gave
up, in despair. It never will be known, till the last account, what
noble and sensitive natures like hers have felt, cast, utterly
helpless, into what seems to them an abyss of injustice and cruelty,
and which seems so to nobody about them. It has been an age of long
sorrow of such natures, in such a hell-begotten sort of world as ours.
What remained for her, but to train her children in her own views and
sentiments? Well, after all you say about training, children will grow
up substantially what they _are_ by nature, and only that. From the
cradle, Alfred was an aristocrat; and as he grew up, instinctively, all
his sympathies and all his reasonings were in that line, and all
mother’s exhortations went to the winds. As to me, they sunk deep into
me. She never contradicted, in form, anything my father said, or seemed
directly to differ from him; but she impressed, burnt into my very
soul, with all the force of her deep, earnest nature, an idea of the
dignity and worth of the meanest human soul. I have looked in her face
with solemn awe, when she would point up to the stars in the evening,
and say to me, ‘See there, Auguste! the poorest, meanest soul on our
place will be living, when all these stars are gone forever,—will live
as long as God lives!’
“She had some fine old paintings; one, in particular, of Jesus healing
a blind man. They were very fine, and used to impress me strongly. ‘See
there, Auguste,’ she would say; ‘the blind man was a beggar, poor and
loathsome; therefore, he would not heal him _afar off!_ He called him
to him, and put _his hands on him!_ Remember this, my boy.’ If I had
lived to grow up under her care, she might have stimulated me to I know
not what of enthusiasm. I might have been a saint, reformer,
martyr,—but, alas! alas! I went from her when I was only thirteen, and
I never saw her again!”
St. Clare rested his head on his hands, and did not speak for some
minutes. After a while, he looked up, and went on:
“What poor, mean trash this whole business of human virtue is! A mere
matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical
position, acting with natural temperament. The greater part is nothing
but an accident! Your father, for example, settles in Vermont, in a
town where all are, in fact, free and equal; becomes a regular church
member and deacon, and in due time joins an Abolition society, and
thinks us all little better than heathens. Yet he is, for all the
world, in constitution and habit, a duplicate of my father. I can see
it leaking out in fifty different ways,—just the same strong,
overbearing, dominant spirit. You know very well how impossible it is
to persuade some of the folks in your village that Squire Sinclair does
not feel above them. The fact is, though he has fallen on democratic
times, and embraced a democratic theory, he is to the heart an
aristocrat, as much as my father, who ruled over five or six hundred
slaves.”
Miss Ophelia felt rather disposed to cavil at this picture, and was
laying down her knitting to begin, but St. Clare stopped her.
“Now, I know every word you are going to say. I do not say they _were_
alike, in fact. One fell into a condition where everything acted
against the natural tendency, and the other where everything acted for
it; and so one turned out a pretty wilful, stout, overbearing old
democrat, and the other a wilful, stout old despot. If both had owned
plantations in Louisiana, they would have been as like as two old
bullets cast in the same mould.”
“What an undutiful boy you are!” said Miss Ophelia.
“I don’t mean them any disrespect,” said St. Clare. “You know reverence
is not my forte. But, to go back to my history:
“When father died, he left the whole property to us twin boys, to be
divided as we should agree. There does not breathe on God’s earth a
nobler-souled, more generous fellow, than Alfred, in all that concerns
his equals; and we got on admirably with this property question,
without a single unbrotherly word or feeling. We undertook to work the
plantation together; and Alfred, whose outward life and capabilities
had double the strength of mine, became an enthusiastic planter, and a
wonderfully successful one.
“But two years’ trial satisfied me that I could not be a partner in
that matter. To have a great gang of seven hundred, whom I could not
know personally, or feel any individual interest in, bought and driven,
housed, fed, worked like so many horned cattle, strained up to military
precision,—the question of how little of life’s commonest enjoyments
would keep them in working order being a constantly recurring
problem,—the necessity of drivers and overseers,—the ever-necessary
whip, first, last, and only argument,—the whole thing was insufferably
disgusting and loathsome to me; and when I thought of my mother’s
estimate of one poor human soul, it became even frightful!
“It’s all nonsense to talk to me about slaves _enjoying_ all this! To
this day, I have no patience with the unutterable trash that some of
your patronizing Northerners have made up, as in their zeal to
apologize for our sins. We all know better. Tell me that any man living
wants to work all his days, from day-dawn till dark, under the constant
eye of a master, without the power of putting forth one irresponsible
volition, on the same dreary, monotonous, unchanging toil, and all for
two pairs of pantaloons and a pair of shoes a year, with enough food
and shelter to keep him in working order! Any man who thinks that human
beings can, as a general thing, be made about as comfortable that way
as any other, I wish he might try it. I’d buy the dog, and work him,
with a clear conscience!”
“I always have supposed,” said Miss Ophelia, “that you, all of you,
approved of these things, and thought them _right_—according to
Scripture.”
“Humbug! We are not quite reduced to that yet. Alfred who is as
determined a despot as ever walked, does not pretend to this kind of
defence;—no, he stands, high and haughty, on that good old respectable
ground, _the right of the strongest_; and he says, and I think quite
sensibly, that the American planter is ‘only doing, in another form,
what the English aristocracy and capitalists are doing by the lower
classes;’ that is, I take it, _appropriating_ them, body and bone, soul
and spirit, to their use and convenience. He defends both,—and I think,
at least, _consistently_. He says that there can be no high
civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real.
There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and
confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure
and wealth for a more expanded intelligence and improvement, and
becomes the directing soul of the lower. So he reasons, because, as I
said, he is born an aristocrat;—so I don’t believe, because I was born
a democrat.”
“How in the world can the two things be compared?” said Miss Ophelia.
“The English laborer is not sold, traded, parted from his family,
whipped.”
“He is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him.
The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death,—the capitalist
can starve him to death. As to family security, it is hard to say which
is the worst,—to have one’s children sold, or see them starve to death
at home.”
“But it’s no kind of apology for slavery, to prove that it isn’t worse
than some other bad thing.”
“I didn’t give it for one,—nay, I’ll say, besides, that ours is the
more bold and palpable infringement of human rights; actually buying a
man up, like a horse,—looking at his teeth, cracking his joints, and
trying his paces and then paying down for him,—having speculators,
breeders, traders, and brokers in human bodies and souls,—sets the
thing before the eyes of the civilized world in a more tangible form,
though the thing done be, after all, in its nature, the same; that is,
appropriating one set of human beings to the use and improvement of
another without any regard to their own.”
“I never thought of the matter in this light,” said Miss Ophelia.
“Well, I’ve travelled in England some, and I’ve looked over a good many
documents as to the state of their lower classes; and I really think
there is no denying Alfred, when he says that his slaves are better off
than a large class of the population of England. You see, you must not
infer, from what I have told you, that Alfred is what is called a hard
master; for he isn’t. He is despotic, and unmerciful to
insubordination; he would shoot a fellow down with as little remorse as
he would shoot a buck, if he opposed him. But, in general, he takes a
sort of pride in having his slaves comfortably fed and accommodated.
“When I was with him, I insisted that he should do something for their
instruction; and, to please me, he did get a chaplain, and used to have
them catechized Sunday, though, I believe, in his heart, that he
thought it would do about as much good to set a chaplain over his dogs
and horses. And the fact is, that a mind stupefied and animalized by
every bad influence from the hour of birth, spending the whole of every
week-day in unreflecting toil, cannot be done much with by a few hours
on Sunday. The teachers of Sunday-schools among the manufacturing
population of England, and among plantation-hands in our country, could
perhaps testify to the same result, _there and here_. Yet some striking
exceptions there are among us, from the fact that the negro is
naturally more impressible to religious sentiment than the white.”
“Well,” said Miss Ophelia, “how came you to give up your plantation
life?”
“Well, we jogged on together some time, till Alfred saw plainly that I
was no planter. He thought it absurd, after he had reformed, and
altered, and improved everywhere, to suit my notions, that I still
remained unsatisfied. The fact was, it was, after all, the THING that I
hated—the using these men and women, the perpetuation of all this
ignorance, brutality and vice,—just to make money for me!
“Besides, I was always interfering in the details. Being myself one of
the laziest of mortals, I had altogether too much fellow-feeling for
the lazy; and when poor, shiftless dogs put stones at the bottom of
their cotton-baskets to make them weigh heavier, or filled their sacks
with dirt, with cotton at the top, it seemed so exactly like what I
should do if I were they, I couldn’t and wouldn’t have them flogged for
it. Well, of course, there was an end of plantation discipline; and Alf