Defending African Slavery Brief Background: The three following documents come from defenders of slavery, George Fitzhugh, James Henry Hammond, and two Brazilian plantation owners, (documents 1, 2, 3). Note the types of arguments made by the various writers. First read this history and summary of the African slave trade . [Stop when you get to the section about gauchos in Argentina.] Using the slave trade as a rough quantitative indicator, African slavery had more than 10 times the impact in Latin America that it did in the North American colonies. Put another way colonies in what is now Latin America and the Caribbean imported about 9.5 million Africans, while British North America received 400,000. From 1526 through 1810, slave traders captured and carried away a total of 9.5 million Africans. Most slaves ended up on plantations in Brazil (3.6 million, 38%) and the Caribbean (nearly 4 million). The remainder ended up on plantations in coastal, tropical areas of the Spanish Mainland. Latin America and the Caribbean recieved 24 times as many slaves as did British North America. Knowing what you know about the impact and importance of (unwilling) African immigrants to the United States, you can understand just how profound and important the African presence is in Latin America. Thus it is vital to understand the African contribution in order to appreciate the diversity of Latin American culture and history. Document 1: George Fitzhugh, (1806-1881) "The Blessings of Slavery" (1857) From Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1857), 294-299 [Slavery advocate. From Port Royal, Va., Fitzhugh's old southern family fell on hard times. He practiced law and struggled as a small planter. Failing those pursuits, he tried his hand at writing. Very much a product of his racist times.] The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care or labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, no more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with som muh of license and abandon, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the gretest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself-and results from contentment in the present, and confident assurance of the future. We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so; for, whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploit them. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty and not a single right. . . . But the negro has neither energy nor enterprise, and, even in our sparser populations, finds with his improvident habits, that his liberty is a curse to himself, and a greater curse to the society around him. These considerations, and others equally obvious, have induced the South to attempt to defend negro slavery as an exceptional institution, admitting, nay asserting, that slavery, in the general or in the abstract, is morally wrong, and against common right. With singular inconsistency, after making this admission, which admits away the authority of the Bible, of profane history, and of the almost universal practice of mankind-they turn around and attempt to bolster up the cause of negro slavery by these very exploded authorities. If we mean not to repudiate all divine, and almost all human authority in favor of slavery, we must vindicate that institution in the abstract. To insist that a status of society, which has been almost universal, and which is expressly and continually justified by Holy Writ, is its natural, normal, and necessary status, under the ordinary circumstances, is on its face a plausible and probable proposition. To insist on less, is to yield our cause, and to give up our religion; for if white slavery be morally wrong, be a violation of natural rights, the Bible cannot be true. Human and divine authority do seem in the general to concur, in establishing the expediency of having masters and slaves of different races. In very many nations of antiquity, and in some of modern times, the law has permitted the native citizens to become slaves to each other. But few take advantage of such laws; and the infrequency of the practice establishes the general truth that master and slave should be of different national descent. In some respects the wider the difference the better, as the slave will feel less mortified by his position. In other respects, it may be that too wide a difference hardens the hearts and brutalizes the feeling of both master and slave. The civilized man hates the savage, and the savage returns the hatred with interest. Hence West India slavery of newly caught negroes is not a very humane, affectionate, or civilizing institution. Virginia negroes have become moral and intelligent. They love their master and his family, and the attachment is reciprocated. Still, we like the idle, but intelligent house-servants, better than the hard-used, but stupid outhands; and we like the mulatto better than the negro; yet the negro is generally more affectionate, contented, and faithful. The world at large looks on negro slavery as much the worst form of slavery; because it is only acquainted with West India slavery. But our Southern slavery has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world. How can we contend that white slavery is wrong, whilst all the great body of free laborers are starving; and slaves, white or black, throughout the world, are enjoying comfort? . . . . There is one strong argument in favor of negro slavery over all other slavery; that he, being unfitted for the mechanic arts, for trade, and all skillful pursuits, leaves those pursuits to be carried on by the whites; and does not bring all industry into disrepute, as in Greece and Rome, where the slaves were not only the artists and mechanics, but also the merchants. Whilst, as a general and abstract question, negro slavery has no other claims over other forms of slavery, except that from inferiority, or rather peculiarity, of race, almost all negroes require masters, whilst only the children, the women, and the very weak, poor, and ignorant, &c., among the whites, need some protective and governing relation of this kind; yet as a subject of temporary, but worldwide importance, negro slavery has become the most necessary of all human institutions. The African slave trade to America commenced three centuries and a half since. By the time of the American Revolution, the supply of slaves had exceeded the demand for slave labor, and the slaveholders, to get rid of a burden, and to prevent the increase of a nuisance, became violent opponents of the slave trade, and many of them abolitionists. New England, Bristol, and Liverpool, who reaped the profits of the trade, without suffering from the nuisance, stood out for a long time against its abolition. Finally, laws and treaties were made, and fleets fitted out to abolish it; and after a while, the slaves of most of South America, of the West Indies, and of Mexico were liberated. In the meantime, cotton, rice, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and other products of slave labor, came into universal use as necessaries of life. The population of Western Europe, sustained and stimulated by those products, was trebled, and that of the North increased tenfold. The products of slave labor became scarce and dear, and famines frequent. Now, it is obvious, that to emancipate all the negroes would be to starve Western Europe and our North. Not to extend and increase negro slavery, pari passu, with the extension and multiplication of free society, will produce much suffering. If all South America, Mexico, the West Indies, and our Union south of Mason and Dixon's line, of the Ohio and Missouri, were slaveholding, slave products would be abundant and cheap in free society; and their market for their merchandise, manufactures, commerce, &c., illimitable. Free white laborers might live in comfort and luxury on light work, but for the exacting and greedy landlords, bosses, and other capitalists. We must confess, that overstock the world as you will with comforts and with luxuries, we do not see how to make capital relax its monopoly-how to do aught but tantalize the hireling. Capital, irresponsible capital, begets, and ever will beget, the immedicabile vulnus of so-called Free Society. It invades every recess of domestic life, infects its food, its clothing, its drink, its very atmosphere, and pursues the hireling, from the hovel to the poor-house, the prison and the grave. Do what he will, go where he will, capital pursues and persecutes him. "Haeret lateri lethalis arundo!" Capital supports and protects the domestic slave; taxes, oppresses, and persecutes the free laborer. Document 2: "The "Mudsill" Theory of Humanity" by James Henry Hammond, Senator from South Carolina [Context: In 1858 William Seward delivered his "irrepressible conflict" speech and Abraham Lincoln his "house divided" statement. That same year, James Henry Hammond, a wealthy South Carolina slaveowner, delivered a forceful proslavery speech to the US Senate. Northerners, even racist Northerners, found Hammond's argument very disturbing. Hammond argued that every society needs two groups: one to perform all the menial labor and "the drudgery of life," and one to lead "progress, civilization, and refinement." He suggested that the North had those two classes, just as the South did. While the slaves in the South were black, those in the North were white. Such an endorsement of a class-based social hierarchy seemed to many Northerners a repudiation of American democracy and upward social mobility. Republicans seized on the speech, as they had on the previous year's Dred Scott decision, as evidence that a "slave power conspiracy" threatened American liberties.] In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mudsill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mudsill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common "consent of mankind," which, according to Cicero, "lex naturae est." The highest proof of what is Nature's law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by "ears polite;" I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal. The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, or your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than "an army with banners," and, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them? Document 3: Excerpts from two Brazilian slaveowners (A) "Regular Reader" of the Diario do Governo (Rio de Janeiro, April 22, 1823) and (B) Jose Barros Cobra, of Minas Gerais, July 21, 1871 (A) African slaves are generally rude, soft, and lascivious. Only the goad of slavery can rouse them from the profound inactivity in which they live. Free of that goading, they will return to their natural apathy. However, since they will have certain needs, there will be robberies and murders, and when these unfortunately people find theemselves greatly pursued, they will penetrate into the interior. There, surviving on fruits and jungle animals and, covering themselves with skins, they will suffer the same destiny as this country's native population. When the Author of Nature drew from nothing the precious continent of Brazil, it seems as through an act of His special Providence, he also created just opposite Brazil in the interior of Africa men who were deliberately constructed to serve on this continent; men who in the heart of summer, when any European would want to envelop himself in snow, seek out the sun and gather about a fire to warm themselves. In fact, it would be difficult, if not completely impossible, for Europeans to accustom thesmselves to work exposed to the fiery rays of the sun in the large part of Brazil. Stimulate European immigration, let these immigrants branch out and mix with the families of this country, let them propagate and produce, and within a few years we will have workers in abundance. The slaves will become useless, and the slave trade will cease all by itself. On the other hand, to pass laws intended specifically to abolish slavery appears to us a mistake which can bring many terrible results. (B) The servile institution unforunately appeared as a main element of our social organization [in Brazil], and for three long centuries it sank deep roots into our laws and soil; it represents immense and important capital investments, and almost the only instrument of agricultural labor. Agriculture is practically our only industry, and so almost the only source of our wealth and public revenue, of our prosperity and credit; as a result, the interests associated with slavery are extensive and complex; they are the interests of the entire society that relies upon them. Even in the United States the difference was great, because also there slavery was localized in the southern states, which made up a small part of the republic; so that the solution of the problem there, if fatal to the South, did not damage the greatness and general prosperity of the republic. Besides, those countries were energetic and rich, with resources sufficient to overcome the crisis, and agriculture was not practically the only source of income. However unjust, unhuman, and absurb the domination of one man by another is, that is, slavery, may be, it is certain that this condition was legally established by civil law, which created and regulated the master's property right over the slave. Therefore, for good or for evil, slavery became a legal institution among us more than three centuries ago, authorized and protectecd by law and strengthened by its antiquity, and therefore slave property is as sacred as any other, though illegitimate in principle. It is know that, thanks fo the generous and humane character of the Brazilians, slavery among us is so mild that the conditions of our slaves is greatly preferable to that of the working classes of some European countries; on the largest agricultural establishment, order and subordination are maintained entirely by means of a prudent system of constant and severe discipline, in which careful preventative measures ordinally make represssion unncessary.