The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet ItHelper, Hinton Rowan
History
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
Helper, Hinton Rowan
Slavery -- United States
"What a difference, plain and heaven-wide, between the outward and
interior life of a slave and of a free community, resulting directly and
palpably from this difference in its labor. The cottage-home, amid trees
and shrubbery, its apartments well adorned and furnished, books on its
shelves, and the passing literature of the day scattered around; the few,
perhaps, but well-tilled acres, belonging to the man who tills them; the
happy children with sunny prospects; the frequent school; the church
arrayed with beauty; the thriving, handsome village; the flourishing
cities and prosperous marts of trade; the busy factories; railroads,
traffic, travel--where free labor tills the ground, how beautiful it all
is in contrast to the forlorn and dreary aspect of a country tilled by
slaves. The villages of such a country are mainly groups of miserable
huts. Its comparatively few churches are too often dilapidated and
unsightly. The common school-house, the poor man's college, is hardly
known, showing how little interest is felt in the chief treasures of the
State, the immortal minds of the multitude who are not born to wealth. The
signs of premature old age are visibly impressed upon everything that
meets the eye. The fields present a dread monotony. Everywhere you see
lands that are worn out, barren and deserted, in consequence of slave
tillage, left for more fertile lands in newer regions, which are also, in
their turn, to be smitten with sterility and forsaken. The free community
may increase its population almost without limit. The capacity of slave
countries to sustain a population is soon at an end, and then, it
diminishes. In all the elements of essential prosperity, in all that
elevates man, how striking the contrast between the region that is tilled
by slave, and the region that is tilled by free labor."
For the purpose of showing what Virginia, once the richest, most populous,
and most powerful of the States, has become under the blight of slavery,
we shall now introduce an extract from one of the speeches delivered by
Henry A. Wise, during the last gubernatorial campaign in that degraded
commonwealth. Addressing a Virginia audience, in language as graphic as it
is truthful, he says:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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