The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery: How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go outO'Brien, James Bronterre
History
The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery: How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out
O'Brien, James Bronterre
Labor; Labor movement; Slavery; Social problems; Working class
Nor is this class-insolence, this two-fold pride of blood and riches,
confined to monarchical countries. It is as rife in republican Americas
as in purse-proud, aristocratic England. In Spanish America both kinds
of pride exist in full vigour; but that of caste, or blood, is carried
to such excess as must render the excluded classes perfectly miserable
all their lives. In the Free States even of republican America a man of
colour dared not sit in the same part of a church or a theatre with the
whites. Intermarriage between the two races was regarded with horror,
and with difficulty could a clergyman be found to officiate at such
a ceremony. In travelling, the people of colour must not enter the
same carriages, nor (if in a steamboat) must they be seen in the same
cabin as the whites. The negro-class, male and female, must travel in
inferior trains by land, and sleep in inferior berths or upon deck when
at sea or in excursions up and down the rivers. At places of public
amusement they have their “coloured” seat and in the house of God their
“coloured” gallery. In New Orleans and other cities in the South there
are great numbers of coloured ladies of excellent education--ladies
highly accomplished, and possessed, too, of great wealth, who lived in
concubinage with white men, because they could not be legally married
to them. There was a distinguished American general in the States who
had several children, the offspring of such concubinage; and, with all
his influence, he could not find admission into society for the members
of his family. They and their like find barriers everywhere opposed to
them.
It is true, these are not so much distinctions of wealth and pedigree,
as distinctions of blood and race. But the principle of exclusiveness
is the same. It is the exercise of injustice by the strong against the
weak--the oppression of one class by another--a particular form or
phase of slavery, which under any and every phase is anti-Christian
and anti-human. Liberty and Christianity do not require a black
man to marry a white woman, nor _vice versâ_; but both liberty and
Christianity forbid coercive laws against such marriages, and more
especially do they repudiate and reprobate the system of exclusiveness
and unnecessary insults so universally exercised by the whites against
the people of colour. Had the Christianity which overthrew paganism,
in the three first centuries, continued to prevail in the world, and
succeeded in assimilating the laws and institutions of nations to the
law of the Gospel, it is certain slavery must have long since become
extinct. Christianity knows no distinction between black men and white
men--between noble and peasant--between proletarian and millionaire.
Wages-slavery is as incompatible with its spirit as is chattel-slavery.
Were that spirit to prevail, our laws and institutions would be such
that neither form of slavery could for an instant raise its head
anywhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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