5.5 Comparing Views on Slavery: Anti-Slavery and Anti-Industry Sources

Excerpt from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Tom hardly  realized  anything;  but  still  the  bidding  went  on,—rattling,  clattering,  now  French,  now English.  Down  goes  the  hammer  again,—Susan  is  sold!  She  goes  down  from  the  block,  stops,  looks wistfully  back,—her  daughter  stretches  her  hands  towards  her.  She  looks  with  agony  in  the  face  of  the man  who  has  bought  her,—a  respectable  middle-aged  man,  of  benevolent  countenance.

“O,  Mas’r,  please  do  buy  my  daughter!”

“I’d  like  to,  but  I’m  afraid  I  can’t  afford  it!”  said  the  gentleman,  looking,  with  painful  interest,  as  the young  girl  mounted  the  block,  and  looked  around  her  with  a  frightened  and  timid  glance…

Her  master  is  Mr.  Legree,  who  owns  a  cotton  plantation  on  the  Red  River.  She  is  pushed  along  into the  same  lot  with  Tom  and  two  other  men,  and  goes  off,  weeping  as  she  goes.   The  benevolent  gentleman  is  sorry;  but,  then,  the  thing  happens  every  day!  One  sees  girls  and  mothers crying,  at  these  sales,  always!  it  can’t  be  helped,  &c.;  and  he  walks  off,  with  his  acquisition,  in  another direction.

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Book review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in the 1852 Southern Press Review

Mrs. Stowe may have seen, during her residence in Cincinnati, in the arrival and departure of emigrants, and in the trade and navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi, more families separated forever; she must know that from that single city more husbands, brothers, sons and fathers have gone voluntarily, as she calls it, from wives, mothers and children, and, in the pursuit of trade, met with untimely death by fevers and cholera on the river, or in the wilderness, leaving their families to suffer from want, their children to perish from neglect, than probably all who have been separated by the slave trade. Why don't she write a romance against emigration, and navigation and commerce? They are all permitted by our laws.

But Mrs. Stowe complains that slavery gives to one man the power over another to do these things. Well, does not freedom, as she calls it? Cannot the landlord of Cincinnati turn out a family from his dwelling if unable to pay the rent? Cannot those who have food and raiment refuse them to such as are unable to buy? And does not Mrs. Stowe herself virtually do these very things?

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Excerpt from George Fithugh’s 1854 book, “Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society”

There is no rivalry, no competition to get employment among slaves, as among free laborers. Nor is there a war between master and slave. The master’s interest prevents his reducing the slave’s allowance or wages in infancy or sickness, for he might lose the slave by so doing. His feeling for his slave never permits him to stint him in old age. The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future – no fear of want. A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings – the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise. A state of independence always begets more or less of jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons. When his children grow up and assert their independence, he is apt to transfer his affection to his grand-children. He ceases to love his wife when she becomes masculine or rebellious; but slaves are always dependent, never the rivals of their master. Hence, though men are often found at variance with wife or children, we never saw one who did not like his slaves, and rarely a slave who was not devoted to his master...

The institution of slavery gives full development and full play to the affections. Free society chills, stints and eradicates them. In a homely way the farm will support all, and we are not in a hurry to send our children into the world, to push their way and make their fortunes, with a capital of knavish maxims. We are better husbands, better fathers, better friends, and better neighbors than our Northern brethren. The tie of kindred to the fifth degree is often a tie of affection with us. First cousins are scarcely acknowledged at the North, and even children are prematurely pushed off into the world. Love for others is the organic law of our society, as self-love is of theirs. . . .

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Frederick Douglass remarks from 1846

I feel much delight in presenting myself to such a large and respectable audience as I now see before me. I am always delighted to meet with those who, in sympathising affection, assemble to consider the wrongs of their race. It is the peculiar characteristic of Christianity that it is a code of mercy,—that it interests itself in the welfare of man,—and is ever ready to lend its ear to the distressed, and to send them succour.I am here to-night to let you know the wrongs, the miseries, and the stripes of three millions of human beings for whom the Saviour died and though time would fail me to give all the details of the horrid system by which they are held, I yet hope to place before you sufficient acts to enlist your sympathies in their behalf. Having last night directed attention to the relations of master and slave, and to the perversion of Christianity by the slave-holders, I now wish to state a few facts which have come under my own experience.

I was born a slave. My master's name is Thomas Auld. Besides me, he had other relations of our family whom he counted as his own property, and at this moment I have four sisters and one brother in the same state of degradation and bondage from which I myself have happily escaped. I have a grandmother who has reared twelve children, all of whom have been driven to the Southern slave market and sold; and now she is left desolate and forlorn, groping her way in the dark, without one to give her a cup of water in her declining moments. Thus does slavery break asunder the parental and domestic ties; the mother is separated from her children—the husband from the wife—and the brother from the sister; while all are driven about, like beasts of burden, at the will of their oppressors. And yet among this class are to be found individuals of the most exalted virtue—true and honourable to each other, while uniting in hatred of those who call themselves their masters, and sometimes even living as man and wife,—joined no doubt by Him whose tie no one can break asunder, though unacknowledged by their heartless taskmasters. I have an old aunt sold away 1000 miles from my grandmother, and three or four other relations are sharing the same doom,—all participating in the wrongs of the slave, who is denied every right,—moral, social, political, and religious,—and stript entirely of all that distinguishes man as a rational being. I was born in this condition myself.

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