De l’influence de l’esclavage sur la liberté des individus qui appartiennent à la classe des maîtres

CHAP. 12: > On the influence of slavery on the liberty of individuals who belong to the master class, and on the existence of those who belong neither to the master class nor to that of the slaves.

In countries where the population is divided into free men and slaves, a serious difficulty first presents itself for the former. How will they guarantee the existence of servitude without compromising their own liberty? Or how will they guarantee their own liberty without weakening or breaking the bonds of servitude? Will every individual be presumed free, until it has been proven that he is a slave? Will he be presumed a slave, until it has been proven that he is free? During the lawsuits to which disputes over the status of persons will give rise, to whom will belong the provisional possession of the individual whose liberty is in question? If a person is presumed free until it has been proven that she is not, how will masters manage to keep their slaves? How will they pursue them if they flee? How will they know in what places they have taken refuge? If, on the contrary, every individual is presumed a slave until it has been proven that he is free, how will free persons not be constantly exposed to being treated as slaves?

There is no doubt that similar questions often arose among the peoples who formerly admitted domestic slavery, and that they compromised the liberty of many persons, and disturbed the security of the greatest number. The history of Rome has transmitted to us the memory of the lawsuit to which the person of Virginia gave rise, because the murder of this young girl produced a revolution; but, if her father had not plunged a dagger into her breast to save her from the immodest embraces of the decemvir, she would have passed from her mother's arms into the power of the patrician who coveted her, and history would never have spoken of her. How could there exist any security for children, fathers, and mothers, in a country where there was always an open market for the sale of human beings? In a country where everyone entrusted his children to the care of his slaves, and where it was almost impossible to find them when they had disappeared [265]?

In the English colonies, any person of Ethiopian origin, or bearing the slightest tint of the color that distinguishes the peoples of this species, is presumed a slave until proven otherwise. An individual of the master species, provided he is of pure race, can therefore seize any person, man, woman, or child, who is a little colored, and hold them as property, until they prove that they are free, or until they are claimed by another owner. He who can remove, by cunning or by violence, the titles that prove that such and such an individual is free, makes him a slave by this fact alone; and, to appropriate him, it is enough to take possession of him. If a person has the misfortune of losing the titles that prove she is not a slave, she becomes one, even if no one comes forward to claim her as property. In this case, the public authority seizes her, confines her in a house of detention, and announces, through the newspapers, that if, within a certain time, no one has claimed ownership of her, she will be sold publicly, which, in effect, is executed [266].

In the parts of the United States where slavery is established, a similar law exists. An act adopted in 1740 in the Carolinas, and confirmed in perpetuity in 1783, declares that all blacks and mulattoes who are in these colonies, as well as their children, born and to be born, are and shall remain forever slaves. In a second provision, it is said that every black person will always be presumed a slave, until proven otherwise. From these two provisions result iniquities exactly similar to those that take place in the English colonies. If a free person loses the titles that prove his liberty, or if they are taken from him by fraud or violence, he becomes the slave of the first individual who sees fit to seize him [267].

The existence of slavery in the southern States even influences the liberty of citizens in the northern States. The governments of these latter States understood that if they admitted on their territory the principle established in France, that every man is free as soon as he has set foot on the territory, the slaves of the south would constantly tend to emigrate to their own soil. But, as they wished neither to favor the flight of slaves, nor to expressly recognize the legitimacy of slavery, they have resorted to indirect means: they have made laws that maintain slavery in an indirect manner, and that apply to men of all colors.

In our legislation, the obligation to do a thing or to render certain services is resolved in damages, when the one by whom it was contracted, or in whose name it was contracted, does not wish, or is not able, to fulfill it. If it were otherwise, one would arrive at the establishment of slavery, since a man would have the faculty to sell himself, and he who had bought him would have the faculty to alienate him.

The Anglo-Americans, unable to resolve to frankly proscribe slavery, have found the means to preserve the thing and banish the name. Among them, the obligation to do a thing, or to render certain services, is never resolved in damages: when it has been contracted, it must, willingly or by force, be executed. The engaged individual cannot hope to escape his engagement by flight; for the law forbids any person to give him asylum, under penalty of a fine. He is brought back to his master by public force as soon as he is caught, and he is condemned, moreover, to serve for a number of weeks equal to the number of days he has caused his owner to lose. If the master does not want to pursue him, he sells him to whoever wants to buy him, and the purchaser is substituted in his place. By virtue of this law, if the citizen of a State where slavery is proscribed wants to have slaves, he goes to one of the States where it is permitted to buy them; but, instead of having a bill of sale drawn up, he has an act of apprenticeship drawn up for ten or fifteen years [268], and he brings home his apprentices, whom he uses as his property. At the term fixed for the apprenticeship, he has the choice of leaving them in freedom, or of going to resell them in perpetuity in the country where he bought them. He who resells them can, by means of the price he gets from them, procure new apprentices, whom he will go and sell again before the expiration of the apprenticeship term. The inhabitants of the south who go to the north can bring their slaves there, and take them away afterward, without this appearing to cause the slightest difficulty. The constitutions of the countries where this is practiced say, in express terms: All men are born equally free and independent [269].

The measures taken to prevent or render futile the flight of slaves have established a kind of commerce that greatly resembles the white slave trade. American captains take, in Europe, individuals who engage themselves for a certain number of years of service, to pay for their passage to the United States. These captains, having arrived in their country, announce in the newspapers that they are bringing a certain number of persons of such an age, sex, and profession, and that they will hold a public sale of them on such and such a day. The passengers are sold, in effect, to the highest bidder, who can, in turn, go and resell them in the countries where the price of labor is highest. Men, and even women, can thus be sold and resold until the term of their engagement has expired. Americans can also sell themselves or sell their children, for a determined number of years [270].

In the southern States, every individual being presumed a slave, simply because he has a more or less dark complexion, and every man who engages in any manual labor whatsoever being degraded, it follows that individuals who have escaped slavery without having risen to the dignity of idlers and possessors of men, remain in the most profound contempt. Contempt being the product of their color and of their need to work, they cannot hope to be esteemed for any moral quality; there is no virtue capable of weakening the effect produced by the color of their complexion. A vice that gives them the means to enrich themselves or merely to live in idleness like the master race, makes them more estimable in the eyes of the latter, than an honorable labor that enriches them, but which has the disadvantage of lowering them to the level of slaves. They must therefore be idle and lazy, to be less despised; for idle poverty is still less degraded than laborious ease [271].

The degradation in which individuals who need to engage in some kind of industry to exist are plunged, determines them to leave the country, and to take refuge in countries cultivated by free hands, as soon as they have the means. Even those who have some small properties hasten to sell them, to go and buy some in countries where a free man can work without being degraded [272]. In these countries, men of color still have to suffer the contempt that is attached to their complexion; but, by working, they do not degrade themselves, they do not place themselves below the whites. The desertion of men who belong neither to the master class nor to that of the slaves manifests itself in several ways; but there is none that demonstrates it more strikingly than the general aspect of the country, and the large number of colored people one encounters in the northern States. In South Carolina, there are neither intermediate classes nor properties: everything is planter or slave. A planter is on his plantation surrounded by his negroes, who sleep in bad huts near his house. A few miles away another lives in the same manner, and then another; in short, always the same, as far as the low country of South Carolina extends [273].

If the miserable state of the blacks, says Francis Hall, left them the means to reflect, they could laugh in their chains, seeing how the existence of slavery has made the country hideous. The smiling villages and the happy population of the eastern and central States are replaced here by the splendid equipages of a small number of planters, and by a miserable population of blacks crawling in dirty huts; for, after crossing the Susquehanna, one encounters almost no more villages, but only plantations; this single word says more than volumes [274].

However, although men for whom labor is a necessity emigrate as much as they can from countries cultivated by slaves to countries where labor is performed by free hands, not all have this faculty. In the cities, several remain who are held back by their habits, by the hope of gain, or by the impossibility of moving elsewhere. The condition of persons of this class, says the traveler I have just cited, is scarcely preferable to that of the slaves. Subject to the same mode of procedure, exposed to the same surveillance, deprived of the rights or privileges of citizens, surrounded by pitfalls of all kinds, legal and illegal, their liberty appears a mockery added to the oppression of servitude. The law declares that every person of color is presumed a slave, and all the public papers are the daily commentaries on this unjust and barbarous provision; they announce every day that men of color have been arrested on suspicion of being slaves; that they have been put in prison, and that, if no owner presents himself, they will be sold to pay their expenses [275].Men of the master race have sometimes been seen to band together to reduce free men of color to servitude. When this type of thief had set their sights on their victim, man or woman, one of them would bring a false accusation against him or her; upon this complaint, a warrant was issued, and the accused was put in prison. There, without friends and without money, he awaited judgment for a crime he knew nothing of, on an accusation brought by a stranger. In a short time, he would lose heart, and his fears would make him foresee the worst that could happen to him. A police officer would then appear; he would exaggerate the dangers of his situation, and explain how little chance he had of recovering his liberty, even if he were found innocent, because of his expenses in prison or the court costs. But, he would add, I know a worthy man who takes an interest in your case, and who will do what is necessary to have you regain your liberty; he imposes no other condition on you than to serve him for a certain number of years. The worthy slave trader would then appear on the scene; he would paint for the unfortunate man a charming picture of the country life he was about to lead. The deed of enslavement was executed; the victim was thrown onto a ship, and nothing more was ever heard of him. This traffic lasted a long time before it was discovered [276].

In the English colonies, the lot of the part of the population that belongs neither to the master class nor to that of the slaves differs little from what it is in the southern part of the United States. Since the morals of the masters there are the same, the slaves are treated even more harshly, and the laws concerning free men of color are similar, the lot of these men cannot be different; it is, with few exceptions, as harsh as that of the enslaved population. The fears that free men of color inspire in the slave-owners even appear more acute in the English colonies than they are in the United States, if we judge by the measures that have been taken to prevent their multiplication. In almost all the islands, a heavy fine is imposed on masters who free their slaves; in several, blacks and men of color are forbidden, on pain of confiscation, to acquire land as proprietors, and to rent a house for a term exceeding seven years; in some, a slave cannot be freed before he has reached the age of forty and on the condition that he be immediately deported [277].

Finally, in the French colonies, free men of color are treated by the master race almost as harshly as the slaves: there exists for them almost no kind of guarantee.

In all countries where the mass of the population is divided into masters and slaves, the individuals who belong to neither of these two classes have only a precarious existence, and can almost never escape from indigence. Since household service and the labors of the countryside are performed by enslaved individuals, only occasional work is left for free workers. The arts cannot be a resource for them, either because the existence of slavery prevents their development, as will be seen in the following chapter, or because the masters claim a monopoly on them by means of their slaves. They are therefore condemned to an eternal indigence, first by the opinion that debases laboring men, and then by the impossibility of engaging in any lucrative occupation. When, in such a country, individuals of the master class fall into misery, they can almost no longer escape it, unless it be through conquests or extortions.

The morals of the part of the population with which I have been concerned in this chapter partake at once of those of the masters and of the slaves, without however being as vicious as those of either. They partake of the morals of the masters through the esteem granted to idleness, through the contempt for the enslaved population, and through the vices that idleness engenders. They partake of the morals of the slaves through servility toward the masters, by the deceit that is born of the feeling of oppression, and by the cowardice that comes from the feeling of weakness [278].