De l’influence de l’esclavage domestique sur l’accroissement des diverses classes de la population.

CHAP. 14: > On the influence of domestic slavery on the growth of the diverse classes of the population.

We have seen in the preceding chapters how domestic slavery affects the diverse classes of the population, in their morals, in their intellectual faculties, in their physical organs, and in their wealth: I now have to explain how it affects them in their multiplication.

Philosophers have observed that all beings of the animal kingdom, and even of the vegetable kingdom, tend to multiply infinitely, and that they do in fact multiply until they have reached the level of the means of existence offered to them. The human race is no exception in this regard to the universal rule; however, the differences that exist between it and all other kinds of animals produce some remarkable differences in the laws of growth and decline to which it is subject.

Men, by their own nature, tend to perfect themselves, that is to say, to develop their physical, intellectual, and moral faculties; they tend at the same time to transmit to their descendants the various kinds of perfection they believe they have acquired. From this quality, which is particular to them, it follows that as soon as a people has taken the first steps in civilization, there are found among them individuals or families who are, or who imagine themselves to be, more advanced than the others. They have or believe they have more varied knowledge, higher ideas, purer or gentler morals, more polished manners, greater power, a more considerable fortune, or other analogous advantages. By the very fact that each individual tends to rise and to see his race prosper, each feels an invincible repugnance to descending to a lower rank, or to seeing his children descend to one.

Men can be divided, and they are in fact sometimes divided, on some of the qualities that constitute greatness or degradation; errors exist in this regard as they exist on a multitude of subjects, and these errors produce all the effects of which I have spoken in the first book of this work; but there is no one who does not feel, more or less, the tendency I observe here; there is no one who does not aspire to approach as much as he can what, in his particular view, constitutes greatness, and to distance himself from what constitutes degradation; those who are most in love with equality are perhaps those in whom this tendency is strongest; if they are satisfied with the position in which they are placed, they do not aspire to descend, or to make their equals descend, they seek to raise to their level the greatest possible number of individuals.

This phenomenon, which manifests itself among peoples of all kinds and at all degrees of civilization, needed to be observed to prevent the false consequences that could be drawn from another phenomenon I have just recalled, from the tendency that all organized beings have to multiply until they no longer find means of existence. Men obey this latter tendency, like everything that exists; but they obey it only insofar as they can, without descending from the rank they have reached, and without degrading their lineage. In the social order, the means of existence vary with the morals and ideas of each of the classes of the population: what is sufficient to raise a family of workers would not be sufficient to raise a family in the middle class; what is sufficient for the latter would be insufficient to raise one of those families that, in monarchies, are placed in the first ranks; finally, a fortune that would give a courtier the means to raise a family might not give it to a prince. From this it follows that each considers himself as touching the last limit of his means of existence when he cannot marry without descending and without making his children descend to a rank he judges inferior to that in which he was raised; and a man can reach this point, not only without lacking anything necessary for life, but with a fortune sufficient to raise several families of farmers.

In countries where most labors are executed by an enslaved race, the men who belong to the master class cannot, therefore, multiply as rapidly as the slaves. If, for example, the labor of twenty slaves is needed to support a man of the master class in idleness, the number of possessors of men cannot increase by ten individuals without the number of possessed men increasing by two hundred. If the increase in the number of slaves took place in a lesser proportion, the masters would have to consume less wealth or engage in some kind of labor, which, in their view, would degrade them by bringing them closer to their slaves. In a country where great fortunes were formed, the number of slaves would have to increase in a still greater proportion; since the more an individual consumes wealth, the more hands must work for him.

The facts established in the colonies correspond to the deductions we draw from the nature of man. In Jamaica, the most considerable of England's sugar colonies, the population was divided, in 1658, into 1,400 slaves and 4,500 free persons. Since that time, the two classes have multiplied in the following proportions: from 1658 to 1670, the number of free persons increased by 3,000, the number of slaves by 6,600; from 1670 to 1734, the number of free persons increased by 3,100, that of slaves by 78,546; from 1734 to 1746, the number of free persons increased by 2,356, that of slaves by 25,882; from 1746 to 1768, the number of free persons increased by 7,947, that of slaves by 54,486; from 1768 to 1775, the free persons increased by only 553, the slaves increased by 24,000, to which must be added 3,700 freedmen [317]; finally, from 1775 to 1817, the number of slaves increased by 155,000; while the number of masters appears to have increased even more slowly than in the preceding years [318].

In the island of Antigua, we observe a still more curious phenomenon than the preceding one, but which is nevertheless only the result of the same causes. In 1741, the number of individuals who belonged to the master class amounted to 3,538, while the number of slaves amounted to 27,418; there were therefore nearly nine slaves for one free person. From that time, the number of free individuals began to decrease, and yet that of the slaves continued to increase [319]. Finally, in April 1821, the number of the former had fallen from 3,538 to 1,980; and the number of the latter had risen from 27,418 to 32,259, plus 4,182 freedmen [320]. The result is that, in a space of 80 years, nearly half of the race of the possessors of men has died out, while the race of the possessed men has grown by nearly a third. The decline of the first and the growth of the second must not even stop there; for in the class of free persons, the number of men exceeds that of women by 300, while in that of the slaves the number of women exceeds that of men by 2,153[321].The two classes of the population have followed roughly the same progression in their growth in the French colonies. In 1700, the number of free persons by birth in Martinique was 6,597; the number of slaves was 14,566; the number of freedmen and indigenous people amounted to only 507. From 1700 to 1736, the number of slaves increased by 57,434, and it increased by 8,000 from 1736 to 1778. In an interval of 78 years, the slaves thus increased by 65,434, while the number of free persons by birth increased by only 6,000. The same difference in growth between free persons and slaves occurred in Guadeloupe, since in 1777 there were 100,000 slaves there, and only 12,700 individuals of free birth [322].

The proportion between free persons and slaves was about the same in Saint-Domingue. In the space of a century and a half, the number of free persons by birth rose to 40,000, while the number of enslaved persons rose to as many as 452,000, and the number of freedmen to 28,000: such was the state of the population in 1788 [323]. Since that time, the men of the enslaved race have conquered their liberty; their number has risen to 935,335, and the individuals of the master race have disappeared.

The United States of America presents us with a phenomenon that is no less worthy of our attention than the preceding ones. The various States of which the federation is composed do not all admit the system of slavery, at least not as it is practiced in the sugar islands. Several of these States have only ever had a very small number of slaves, and, out of twenty-two, twelve have decreed its abolition. The result has been that, in the parts of the Union that have been exploited by free men of European origin, this part of the population has grown very rapidly. However, starting from a given period, one finds that individuals of the enslaved race have multiplied in the same proportion as individuals of the European race. In 1784, there were in the United States 2,650,000 whites, 600,000 slaves, and 50,000 freedmen. From that time until 1790, the number of slaves increased by 297,719, that is to say, it almost doubled in a span of six years, while the number of free men, not including freedmen, increased by only about a quarter, or 62,607. From 1790 to 1800, the number of slaves increased by 200,000; that of free men, including freedmen, increased by 1,172,210. From 1800 to 1804, the number of slaves increased by 95,051; that of freedmen rose to 126,000; that of whites increased by about 600,000. Finally, in 1809, the population of freedmen and slaves amounted to 1,305,000, and that of individuals of European origin to 5,810,000. Thus, the proportion between the men of the two races was, in 1809, the same as in 1784; both had increased by a little more than double [324].

In Brazil, the disproportion between free persons and slaves has been less great. In 1798, out of a population of 3,300,000 individuals, there were 800,000 whites; the remainder was composed of one million indigenous people, one million slaves, and several individuals of mixed race [325]. Various causes have contributed to multiplying the number of whites in this country more than in the French and English colonies, and the principal causes doubtless include the existence of a great number of indigenous people, the difference in cultivation, the perseverance with which the mother country continued to send to this country men condemned by the courts, and particularly those who were proscribed by the inquisition, such as Jews and individuals suspected of philosophy and of opinions condemned by the Roman clergy [326].

The Spanish, having invaded the most civilized part of America, had no need to buy Africans to make them cultivate the soil; the indigenous people continued to devote themselves to cultivation, and the regime to which they were subjected had more analogy with the feudal system than with the kind of slavery established in the islands. Thus, although domestic slavery was not prohibited in the Spanish colonies, only a very small number of slaves existed there at the moment they declared their independence, and the slaves there were treated less harshly than in any other country [327].

The number of slaves thus grows, in general, more rapidly than that of the masters; however, the growth is not uniform in all cases; it sometimes happens that the proportions vary. Several causes contribute to these variations; the principal ones are sometimes manumission, and sometimes the importation of a greater number of slaves; if, by some accidental circumstances, the number of freedmen is more considerable in one year than in another, the number of masters appears to grow in a more rapid proportion than that of the slaves; likewise, if extraordinary circumstances favor the importation of slaves, the latter appear to multiply more rapidly than the masters. In the first case, it is not the master race that multiplies, although the number of free men becomes more considerable; it is, in a way, a middle class that emerges from both, and that partakes of the qualities and vices of both.

Since the number of possessed men multiplies in a greater proportion than their possessors, must we not conclude from this phenomenon that the condition of the former is less miserable than it appears? This consequence would be just, in effect, if the growth of the slaves took place by generation; but that is not how it happens: it takes place by the continual importation of new slaves. The enslaved population, far from multiplying naturally in slavery, decreases, on the contrary, rapidly.

At the time when the island of Saint-Domingue was possessed by masters of European origin, the loss of enslaved individuals amounted every year to a twentieth, and accidents raised it to a fifteenth [328]. Thus, the possessors of men in this colony based their revenue on the annual destruction of 30,130 people, and on the tortures and privations inflicted on 450,000. In the course of a century, the number of human beings destroyed rose to more than three million, not counting an at least equal number of individuals who had to be slaughtered on the coasts of Africa to keep the number of slaves at full strength. Saint-Domingue, it was said, was the queen of the colonies.

Slaves are not equally miserable in all countries. Their fate depends on the kind of labor they have to perform, and on the subsistence granted to them; and these circumstances vary with the nature and position of the soil, and with commercial relations. Their fate also depends on the ease with which masters can replace those whom misery and ill-treatment cause to perish, an ease that governments diminish or increase, according as they protect or repress the slave trade. One must not, therefore, judge the decline of the slave population in all the colonies by that which was observed in the island of Saint-Domingue.

The English colonies in which the productions are analogous to those that Saint-Domingue formerly yielded are those in which the decline is most rapid. This decline has greatly diminished since the English government restricted the power of masters over slaves, especially since it severely forbade the trade. It is evident that, from that moment, the possessors of men were under the necessity of being sparing with their possessions, under penalty of not being able to renew them. However, such are the calamities attached to slavery that even since that time, the enslaved population continues to decline. In the island of Trinidad, the annual decrease is 3 3/5%; in Demerara, it is 2 to 3%; in Saint Lucia, it is 2.1%. In some islands where sugar is not cultivated, the decrease is nil [329].

In all countries, the possessors of men consider only command as worthy of them; every other kind of occupation seems unworthy of their noble hands. The possessors of men in the colonies can draw an income only from their lands, and this income is always in proportion to the number of their slaves. If, therefore, they continue to treat them with their accustomed cruelty, they will destroy the source of their wealth, since it will become more difficult every day to replenish them from the coasts of Africa. If, on the contrary, the lot of the slaves is softened, they will increase in number; but then the possessors will have another danger to fear, that of seeing this part of the population multiply in such a proportion that their security will be more and more compromised.

In States where domestic slavery is not tolerated, the fear of falling into excessive misery is an obstacle to a growth of population disproportionate to the means of existence. Most domestic servants impose celibacy upon themselves because, if they had children, their wages could not suffice to raise them, and they could not at the same time care for their own family and perform the labors attached to domesticity. But when workers or servants are considered the property of masters, they do not fear being dismissed; if they have children, it is the possessor who must have them raised. He must, consequently, remain charged with all the expenses of the family, and moreover renounce the services of the mother while she takes care of the children. Slaves, being essentially improvident and having to fear neither being dismissed nor seeing their posterity descend to a lower rank, must naturally abandon themselves to all their passions. The masters are thus faced with the choice of either resorting to violence to restrict the multiplication of enslaved men, or seeing an enemy population grow around them that absorbs their revenues at the same time as it threatens their existence.

Such is already the critical position in which the Anglo-Americans of the south find themselves, and in which all the masters of the colonies will sooner or later find themselves. How will they get out of it? That is a question that experience has not yet resolved in a satisfactory manner; but it is time to think about it.