THE STANDARD: 09/10/1887 Defense of Slavery
- From: "Mark M." <mark@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:54:18 -0600
The following article appeared in Henry George's New York weekly paper, THE STANDARD.
Mark M.
THE STANDARD
VOL. 2
SEPTEMBER 10, 1887
A VOICE FROM THE TOMB.
A Defence of Chattel Slavery on Religious and Economic Grounds—An
Extraordinary Forecast of the Present Social Condition as the Outcome of
the Free Labor System.
A correspondent sends us the following extract from a fast-day sermon
delivered in the Presbyterian church of Columbia, S. C, by the Rev.
James H. Thornwell, D.D., just one month before the secession of the
state of South Carolina.
Dr. Thornwell, says our correspondent, was in his day looked upon as a
bright ornament of the Presbyterian church. He was elected a moderator
of its general assembly in 1847, and from 1852 to 1855 was president of
the South Carolina college, doing duty as college chaplain and as
professor of moral philosophy. A keen and close logician, and of great
controversial power, he had, as you will see, the courage of his
conclusions and did not shrink from publicly stating them. He was a man
of great learning, and of his wonderful eloquence many who heard him
preach both north and south still live to testify. During the latter
part of the career of John C. Calhoun, Dr. Thornwell, who was his bosom
friend, wielded in South Carolina an influence scarcely less than that
of the father of secession himself, and would in all probability, but
for his sacred calling, have succeeded the celebrated South Carolinian
in the senate of the United States.
The extract referred to is as follows:
Having adverted to the sins which belong to us as members of the
confederacy, let us turn to those that belong to us as a particular
commonwealth. I shall restrict myself to our dealings with the
institution which has produced the present convulsion of the country and
brought us to the verge of ruin. That the relation betwixt the slave and
his master is not inconsistent with the Word of God, we have long since
settled. Our consciences are not troubled, and have no reason to be
troubled, on this score. We do not hold our slaves in bondage from
remorseless considerations of interest. If I know the character of our
people, I think I can safely say that if they were persuaded of the
essential immorality of slavery, they would not be backward in adopting
measures for the ultimate abatement of the evil. We cherish the
institution, not from avarice, but from principle. We look upon it as an
element of strength, and not of weakness, and confidently anticipate the
time when the nations that now revile us would gladly change places with
us. In its last analysis, slavery is nothing but an organization of
labor, and an organization by virtue of which labor and capital are made
to coincide.
Under this scheme labor can never be without employment, and the wealth
of the country is pledged to feed and clothe it. Where labor is free,
and the laborer not a part of the capital of the country, there are two
causes constantly at work, which, in the excessive contrasts which they
produce, must end in agrarian revolutions and intolerable distress. The
first is the tendency of capital to accumulate. Where it does not
include the laborer as a part, it will employ only that labor which will
yield the largest returns. It looks to itself, and not to the interest
of the laborer. The other is the tendency of population to outstrip the
demands for employment. The multiplication of laborers not only reduces
wages to the lowest point, but leaves multitudes wholly unemployed.
While the capitalist is accumulating his hoards, rolling in affluence
and splendor, thousands who would work if they had the opportunity are
doomed to perish of hunger. The most astonishing contrasts of poverty
and riches are constantly increasing. Society is divided between princes
and beggars. If labor is left free, how is this condition of things to
be obviated? The government must either make provision to support people
in idleness, or it must arrest the law of population and keep them from
being born, or it must organize labor. Human beings cannot be expected
to starve. There is a point at which they will rise in desperation
against a social order which dooms them to nakedness and famine, while
their lordly neighbor is clothed in purple and fine linen and faring
sumptuously every day. They will scorn the logic which makes it their
duty to perish in the midst of plenty. Bread they must have, and bread
they will have, though all the distinctions of property have to be
abolished to provide it.
The government, therefore, must support them, or an agrarian revolution
is inevitable. But shall it support them in idleness? Will the poor, who
have to work for their living, consent to see others as stout and able
as themselves clothed and fed like the lilies of the field, while they
toil not neither do they spin? Will not this be to give a premium to
idleness? The government, then, must find them employment; but how shall
this be done? On what principle shall labor be organized so as to make
it certain that the laborer shall never be without employment, and
employment adequate for his support? The only way in which it can be
done, as a permanent arrangement, is by converting the laborer into
capital—that is, by giving the employer a right of property in the labor
employed; in other words, by slavery. The master must always find work
for his slave, as well as food and raiment. The capital of the country,
under this system, must always feed and clothe the country. There can be
no pauperism, and no temptations to agrarianism. That non-slaveholding
states will eventually have to organize labor, and to introduce
something so like slavery that it will be impossible to discriminate
between them, or to suffer from the most violent and disastrous
insurrections against the system which creates and perpetuates their
misery, seems to be as certain as the tendencies in the laws of capital
and population to produce the extremes of poverty and wealth.
We do not envy them their social condition. With sanctimonious
complacency they may affect to despise us, and to shun our society as
they would shun the infection of a plague. They may say to us, “Stand
by—we are holier than thou!” But the day of reckoning must come. As long
as the demand for labor transcends the supply, all is well; capital and
labor are mutual friends, and the country grows with mushroom rapidity.
But when it is no longer capital asking for labor, but labor asking for
capital; when it is no longer work seeking men, but men seeking work,
then the tables are turned, and unemployed labor and selfish capital
stand face to face in deadly hostility. We desire to see no such state
of things among ourselves, and we accept as a good and merciful
constitution the organization of labor which providence has given us in
slavery. Like every human arrangement, it is liable to abuse; but in its
idea, and in its ultimate influence upon the social system, it is wise
and beneficent. We see in it a security for the rights of property and a
safeguard against pauperism and idleness, which our traducers may yet
live to wish had been engrafted upon their own institutions. The idle
declamation about degrading men to the condition of chattels, and
treating them as cows, oxen or swine; the idea that they are regarded as
tools and instruments, and not as beings possessed of immortal souls,
betray gross ignorance of the real nature of the relation. Slavery gives
one man the right of property in the labor of another. The property of
man in man is only the property of man in human toil. The laborer
becomes capital, not because he is a thing, but because he is the
exponent of a presumed amount of labor. This is the radical notion of
the system, and all legislation upon it should be regulated by this
fundamental idea.
.
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