The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and EnfranchisementMerriam, George Spring
History
The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement
Merriam, George Spring
African Americans -- History; Slavery -- United States -- History
the action of the several States, co-operating with the Federal
Government, and all acting in conformity with their respective
constitutions." Yet over these utterances of Lincoln and Seward some
conservatives in the party shook their heads, as liable to be
misinterpreted and to needlessly alarm the South. But men more radical
than Lincoln and Seward were coming to the front. Sumner was silenced
for the time, but among the leaders of Massachusetts now appeared John
A. Andrew, her future war Governor, large-brained and large-hearted. In
this year, 1858, at the State convention of which he was president, he
said, "I believe in the Republican party because I believe that slavery,
the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it
has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun
shines or grass grows or water runs."
One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a
rift in the solid South. It was _The Impending Crisis_, by Hinton Rowan
Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the
son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven.
His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white. "Yankee
wives"--so he begins--"have written the most popular anti-slavery
literature of the day. Against this I have nothing to say; it is all
well enough for women to give the pictures of slavery; men should give
the facts." His method is largely the comparison of the industrial
progress of the two sections, and his chief arsenal is the United States
census. North and South started, he says, with the establishment of the
government and the North's abolition of slavery, with advantage in soil,
climate, rivers, harbors, minerals, forests, etc., on the side of the
South, but in sixty years she has been completely outstripped. He
brackets Virginia and New York; at the start, Virginia had twice the
population of New York; now New York's population doubles Virginia's.
Virginia's exports have been about stationary at $3,000,000; New York's
have risen from $2,500,000 to $87,000,000. New York almost trebles
Virginia in valuation, even including slaves. So he compares North
Carolina and Massachusetts; the empty port of Beaufort and the teeming
one of Boston; the northern State with a production from manufactures,
mines, and mechanic arts double the whole cotton crop of the South. So
he compares South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Again: Sail down the Ohio,
and you will find the lands on the right bank worth double and treble
those on the left bank,--slavery makes all the difference. The hay crop
of the free States is worth more in dollars and cents than all the
cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, and hemp, in the slave States. The marble
and free-stone quarries in New England yield more wealth than all the
subterranean deposits in the slave States. And so for many pages he goes
on piling Pelion upon Ossa with his figures. He pictures the South's
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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