De l’abolition de l’esclavage domestique.

CHAP. 21: > On the abolition of domestic slavery.

The teaching of the precepts of morality and religion, and the protection of governments, will be without influence on the lot and on the morals of slaves, as long as arbitrary power remains in the hands of their owners. It is even to be feared that the efforts being made to lead the enslaved population gradually to liberty may produce results contrary to those intended. At the same time, in fact, that the power of the possessors of men is left without limits, the men possessed are taught that they have moral and religious duties to fulfill; they are presented with a certain number of rules, and they are incited to observe them. The slaves thus find themselves subject to two kinds of laws: those that place them in the ranks of things or properties, and those that place them in the ranks of moral beings. In their capacity as things, they are taught that the supreme laws are the wills of their masters; in their capacity as persons, they are taught that the supreme laws are the precepts of morality and religion. These various laws being in direct opposition to one another, it is not difficult to see which ones must triumph in practice. I believe the missionaries to be very eloquent men; but there is an eloquence above theirs, and that is the eloquence of the carter's whips placed in the hands of the stewards. Thus, at the same time that slaves are taught the duties of morality, they are forced to violate them; it would be better that they were ignorant of them, for they would not acquire the habit of acting contrary to their belief.Would there not even be a barbarous absurdity in maintaining laws that subject a multitude of men, children, and women to the arbitrary wills of a certain number of masters, and at the same time having them taught that they have duties to fulfill independently of the wills of their possessors? Is it not, for example, a cruel absurdity to teach a young girl that chastity is a duty, and at the same time to give a being, degraded by the use of despotism, the power to lash her until she has prostituted herself? Is it not an equally atrocious absurdity to teach a husband that he must be the protector of his wife, a father that he must be the protector of his daughter, and then to condemn them both to the most cruel tortures if they attempt to fulfill the duties they have been taught? Is it not another absurdity to teach men that the Divinity has made it their duty to rest on such and such a day of the week, and at the same time to give other men the power to tear them apart with lashes if they do not work on the forbidden day? There is no middle ground between the obedience due to the precepts of morality and the obedience due to the arbitrary wills of the master. If you teach men that they have moral or religious duties to fulfill, leave to no other the power to command their violation; teach them that there are cases where resistance is permitted, and when these cases arise, unite with them to resist. If, on the contrary, you leave a master the means to compel them to conform to his wills or his desires, do not tell them that moral or religious duties exist for them; teach them, on the contrary, that the only duty they have is to conform in all things to the wills of their master; tell them that adultery, incest, theft, and murder are duties when they are commanded by the individual who possesses them; then doctrines will not be in opposition to conduct; one will not have a greater number of vices, and one will have less hypocrisy!

However, if it is not in the power of the governments of the mother countries to protect the slave population as long as the principle of slavery exists; if the teaching of morality or religion has no effect on morals, or if it has no other effect than to accustom men to act contrary to their thoughts, how is it possible to arrive at the gradual abolition of slavery? How can it be abolished all at once without compromising both the existence of the masters and even the future well-being of the enslaved population?

Let us not delude ourselves; the difficulties that present themselves are grave, and I even doubt that it is possible to avoid them all. I have observed elsewhere that it is in the nature of man that every vice and every crime be followed by a punishment. I have shown that one cannot shield a guilty individual from the penalty that is the natural consequence of his vices or his crimes, without bringing down upon oneself or upon others a much more terrible punishment [387]. Now, of all the acts we consider criminal, none is more grave than to have degraded a part of the human race by placing it in the rank of things; to have denied, with regard to it, the existence of all moral duties; to have exercised over it, for a long series of generations, all the vices and all the crimes of which men can be susceptible. Now that the consequences of this horrible system press upon us from all sides, we seek how to escape it without suffering the consequences; but it is difficult to find the means. We must hasten, however, for the edifice is falling into ruin on all sides; and the more one hesitates to make a decision, the more terrible the catastrophe may be.

The possessors of men in the English colonies resist with all their power the action that the mother country exercises over them to soften the lot of their slaves and prepare them for liberty; and it is probable that, if France and the other nations that still possess colonies wished to act in the same sense, they would meet the same resistance. Do means exist to overcome this opposition without resorting to violence? There are two very simple ones: the first and most effective would be the abolition of the monopoly granted to the possessors of slaves for the sale of their commodities; the second would be the recall of the troops sent to them to support the action they exercise over their slaves. It is established, in fact, that the possessors of land who have their labors executed by slaves pay much more for labor than those who have theirs executed by free men. If the former did not enjoy any monopoly, they would therefore be obliged, in order to sell their commodities, to employ the same means of cultivation as the latter; that is to say, they would be obliged, under penalty of perishing from misery, to emancipate their slaves. It is no less evident that, if they were left to their own devices, they would indulge less in their vices, because they would have a little more fear of insurrections. But the possessors of men have such an excess of ignorance, presumption, and pride that, if they were suddenly left to themselves, they might well bring some terrible catastrophe upon themselves. It is therefore the duty of the mother countries to shelter them from their own follies, and to help them to emerge from the position in which they find themselves, if not with profit, at least with the least possible loss.

There are persons who bear such a tender interest for all possessors of men that, in order not to compromise their repose and their enjoyments, they would willingly consent to close their eyes to the innumerable evils that servitude engenders; but they must consider that there has never been, for masters, any safety in slavery, and that there is less today than at any other time. The generations that supported the establishment of such a system, in the islands or on the continent of America, have disappeared, and they will not rise to defend it. The generations that have succeeded them are more enlightened; their habits or their practices are still behind their understanding, but this is a discord that cannot last long. England has already withdrawn the support it lent to the slave trade; France is marching on the same road; Spain can do nothing to sustain it; other States of the continent have prohibited it. In America, not only has the trade been prohibited, but several of the most considerable States have completely abolished slavery. The parts in which the most slaves exist are surrounded on all sides by free peoples who are growing in wealth, in number, and in enlightenment. In the very center, a formerly enslaved population enjoys complete independence, and, by the sole fact of its existence, it is a continual warning to masters and slaves. If the possessors of men have dangers to run, the most serious arise not from the regular abolition of slavery, but from the persistence in preserving it.

The possessors of men and the individuals who wish to maintain them in their possessions seem to see a multitude of dangers in the abolition of slavery; those who aspire to this abolition share a part of their fears; but, on both sides, they seem to be agitated only by panic terrors, for no one dares to specify the positive facts that they seem to dread. However, if the emancipation of slaves presents dangers, one must know how to face them, and determine clearly in what they consist; it is the only way to prevent them. To close one's eyes in order not to be afraid, and then to walk at random toward the proposed goal, is a bad way to avoid missteps.

The men who belong to the race of masters may see three dangers in the abolition of slavery: they may fear that their personal existence will be threatened, that their properties will not be safe, and that the freedmen will refuse to work for them, or will devote themselves to labor only insofar as they are forced to it by hunger.

This last danger is the least serious; but perhaps it is also the one most to be feared, at least for some time. One of the most infallible effects of slavery is to debase the action of man upon things; in a country exploited by slaves, to be free is to be idle, it is to live gratuitously on the labor of others. This way of judging will not change immediately after the abolition of slavery; the individuals of the master race will continue to see debasement in labor, and nobility in idleness. The freedmen will at first judge like the masters, and will imitate them if they can; if they do not have the means to live idle like them, they will at least aspire to become so. This is the history of all populations that have been divided into masters and slaves: in this respect, there is no difference between blacks and whites.

One must not believe, however, that this inconvenience is as serious as it first appears. In countries where slaves exist, a freedman's day is paid twice as much as a slave's day. The former must therefore work twice as much as the latter, or his labor must have twice the value. In all countries, the best a master can get from his slave is to leave him the entire disposition of his time, and to demand from him a sum for each of his workdays. The slave, stimulated by the hope of making savings, works first to pay his master the tax established on him, and he works afterward to maintain himself and often even to redeem himself. The man who is moved by the hope of rewards, therefore, acts with more intelligence and energy than the one who is moved only by the fear of punishments. A free man carries within him another principle of activity that is not found in the slave: it is the desire to have a family and the need to support it. A slave does not have to concern himself with the lot of his children; his labor has no influence on their destiny: it is the master who must feed them. Thus, even supposing the prejudice that slavery creates against labor has all the energy it can have, emancipation develops principles of activity more energetic and more continuous in their action than the punishments inflicted by masters. England was subjected to a slavery analogous to that which exists in Russia; today ten English workers do more work, in a given time, than fifty Russian slaves; an English lord who possesses the same extent of land as a Russian lord is ten times richer than he, although he does not possess a single slave, while the second possesses thousands.

One of the most inveterate prejudices of the possessors of men is to consider the possessed individuals as malevolent machines, which run in a tolerable manner only insofar as they are directed by a foreign intelligence, and which, in order not to be harmful to their possessors, need to be chained and driven by lashes. A master to whom one speaks of the emancipation of slaves experiences a sentiment analogous to that which we ourselves would experience if we were told of unchaining, in the midst of a numerous population, a multitude of ferocious beasts. Having always regulated all their movements himself and punished their faults according to his caprices, he imagines that everything will fall into disorder and confusion if his whip is torn from him. This is the error of all arbitrary governments; this error comes from attaching to the word emancipation ideas that not only it does not comprise, but that it excludes.

What is emancipating an enslaved man? It is quite simply to remove him from the violence and caprices of one or more individuals, in order to subject him to the regular action of public authority; it is, in other words, to prevent an individual who is called a master from indulging with impunity, toward others who are called slaves, in extortions, violence, and cruelties. To emancipate men is not to open the door to trouble, to disorder; it is to repress them; for disorder exists wherever violence, cruelty, and debauchery have no check. The most frightful of disorders reigns wherever the most numerous part of the population is delivered without defense to a few individuals, who can abandon themselves without reserve to all vices and all crimes, that is to say, wherever slavery exists. Order reigns, on the contrary, wherever no one can indulge with impunity in extortions, insults, or violence, wherever no one can fail in his obligations without exposing himself to punishments, wherever everyone can fulfill his duties without incurring any penalty; order is liberty.

This being understood, the question becomes easy to resolve; it is reduced to knowing whether violence and mistreatment inspire benevolence and gentleness, and whether protection and justice give energy to vengeance; whether the father whose daughter is outraged, or the husband whose wife is ravished, are less to be feared by the ravisher than an inoffensive man is to be feared by the individual whose family he respects; whether the man who enjoys his labors in complete security and who can enrich his children with his savings, is less disposed to respect the properties of others than the one who constantly sees the products of his labor ravished from him by violence; whether the one who can, without danger, fulfill all the duties that morality prescribes for him, will have less pure morals than the one who can fulfill no duty without exposing himself to cruel punishments.

It must be observed, in fact, that in escaping the arbitrary power of his possessor, the man who is called a slave does not acquire the independence of savages; he finds himself under the authority of the common law, and under the power of the magistrates; he can no more than before indulge with impunity in crimes. If he makes himself guilty of some offense, he will be punished for it as he would have been when he was a slave, but the penalty will be more proportioned to the offense; it will be applied without partiality, without vengeance; its purpose and result will be the repression of evil, and not the satisfaction of a sentiment of hatred or antipathy. If he indulges in a vice, he will bear the penalty for it far more infallibly than he would have borne it in the state of servitude; idleness or intemperance will be chastised by misery, just as labor and economy will be rewarded by ease or by wealth.

The men who propose the abolition of slavery have almost nothing to concern themselves with regarding the enslaved population. Their action must be exercised far more on the masters than on the slaves; it must have for its effect, not to subject them to violence, but to prevent them from exercising it on others with impunity. The enslavement of one man to another being nothing other than a privilege of impunity granted to the first for all the crimes of which he can make himself guilty toward the second, emancipation is nothing other than the revocation of this privilege. To declare that, in such a country, slavery is abolished, is to declare quite simply that offenses or crimes will be punished without respect to persons; to establish or maintain slavery is to grant or guarantee a malefactor's privileges. This is so evident that, to completely abolish servitude in all the places where it exists, it would suffice to subject to the dispositions of the penal laws the offenses committed by the possessors of men, without making any distinction between the persons offended.

One fears that, if justice is rendered to everyone, and if, consequently, the masters lose the privilege of committing iniquities, the men of the enslaved race will profit from the guarantees that will be given to them; that they will coalesce among themselves, and destroy their former possessors, or at least expel them from the country. It is very probable that, sooner or later, the islands cultivated by slaves will be possessed exclusively by men of their own kind; these men are by far the most numerous; they can do without their masters, and their masters cannot do without them. There will consequently be blacks or mulattoes in the colonies as long as there are whites; but it is not equally certain that there will be whites as long as there are blacks, since the latter can live without the help of the former. All the chances are therefore in favor of the latter.

But this revolution, in the European colonies, can be effected in two ways: it can be executed in a violent and rapid manner like that which was effected in Saint-Domingue; or it can be executed in a slow and progressive manner, and in such a way that, in withdrawing, the individuals of the master race carry away the value of their properties and the means to go and establish themselves elsewhere; the persistence of the masters in maintaining slavery can only lead to the first; the emancipation of the slaves would probably lead to the second.If, as a result of some extraordinary event, there were indeed a slave insurrection, their first thought would be to expel their masters, and perhaps to exterminate them. Placed between the necessity of conquering their independence and the danger of perishing under torture, they would probably end up as masters of the country; and once they had conquered it, it would not be easy to take it from them. The mother countries find their colonies too heavy a burden to make great sacrifices to reconquer them, should they happen to lose them.

The revolution that, following emancipation, would place blacks at the head of public affairs, would come about in so slow and imperceptible a manner that it is hardly possible to foresee the time when it would be complete. One must know very little of men to imagine that, upon emerging from the most degrading slavery that has ever existed, they will aspire to command and will organize among themselves to seize power. However numerous they may be compared to their masters, their ignorance, their misery, the difficulty of acquiring any landed property, and the influence of European governments will scarcely permit ambitious ideas to germinate in their minds, unless violence drives them to despair. When an aristocracy is deeply rooted in a country, it sustains itself, so to speak, by its own weight. Struggles begin for it only when there appear, in the ranks of the formerly enslaved, individuals who, by their wealth or their enlightenment, aspire to govern. These struggles are dangerous only insofar as the aristocracy excludes from its midst those men who, by their position, might aspire to enter it; for if it absorbs the wealth or talents that develop in the other classes of the population, there is no longer any reason for it to end. The small number of rulers is not sufficient to bring about the end of their empire: eight thousand Mamluks reigned for centuries over three or four million Egyptians; and their reign would still endure, had they not been destroyed by a foreign power.

The struggle between the descendants of the masters and the free descendants of the slaves will therefore begin to manifest itself when the latter have acquired enough wealth and enlightenment to aspire to the exercise of political power. It is very probable that electors of the Ethiopian kind, finding among the men of their race individuals capable of governing them well, would give them preference over whites. What we have seen in a city of the former Spanish colonies would then occur; whites would cease to be called to public office, and their position would become so disagreeable that they would choose to emigrate. But for such an event to occur, the industry and wealth of the freedmen would have to have greatly increased, and then the descendants of the masters could alienate their properties more advantageously than they could today. Indeed, their lands will lose all the more value the more persistently they maintain slavery; for labor will become ever more expensive, and the fear that the landowners will be expelled will grow ever greater.

Whatever one may think of these conjectures about the future, it is certain that there is no longer any security for the slave-owners of the colonies; that England is struggling with all its might to abolish slavery, and that, consequently, the only remaining question is the surest means of abolishing it.

In the system of slavery, one posits as a principle that the person called a slave is a thing; that this thing belongs to the owner, and that he may do with it whatever an ordinance of his government has not forbidden him. Consequently, one seeks to place limits on the disposal of this property, just as limits have been placed on the disposal of all others. I have shown, in the preceding chapter, that by following this system, there is no way to arrive at the abolition of slavery, because the arbitrary power that one proscribes in one form immediately reappears in another. It is as impossible to arrive at liberty by starting from the principle of servitude as it is to arrive at truth by taking an error as the basis of one's reasoning.

However slow the path one proposes to follow in the abolition of slavery, there is one step that must necessarily be taken all at once, because between error and truth there is no middle ground. One must not start from the mendacious fact that a human being is a thing, or a quarter of a thing, or an eighth of a thing; one must frankly recognize what is, that is, that he is a person with duties to fulfill toward himself, toward his father, his mother, his wife, his children, and all of humanity. As long as these truths are not recognized, there is no progress to be made; one can only oppose force with force. But also, the moment one recognizes that an enslaved man is a man, and that he has moral duties to fulfill like all others, the positions change; as a moral being, he becomes the equal of his master, since he has the same duties to fulfill as he.

Considering the men called slaves and the men called masters in this way, one cannot follow the procedure used when limiting the powers of an owner over his property; one cannot say that the master may do all that is not forbidden to him by public authority, or that the slave owes everything except what the government's ordinances have reserved for him; one is obliged to declare, on the contrary, that the master can demand nothing beyond what the government has positively granted him, and that the individual called a slave is free on all points that have not been restricted by a positive provision.

These two ways of proceeding may seem identical or to differ only in their terms; and yet there is an immense difference between them. In one, it is recognized that moral duties exist independent of the caprices of power; liberty is the principle; the obligation toward the master is an exception. In the other, all duties are made to derive from the will of governments; despotism is the principle; the exception is liberty, or what are called liberties, a word invented to remind the freedmen that they belong to themselves only in those parts of themselves that have been conceded to them by their possessors.

The specific description of each of the obligations imposed on the man called a slave, toward the man called a master, and the positive recognition that the former owes nothing to the latter beyond what is described, are of such high importance that the slave-owners would believe they had lost the most precious part of their authority if they were obliged to specify each of their claims in this way, and if they were reduced, in order to demand their fulfillment, to following legal forms.

If each of the slaves' obligations were determined by an act of public authority, the ministers of religion, who wish to prepare them for liberty through moral teaching, could speak to them of duties without indirectly inciting them to revolt; duties would then be limited only by the obligations imposed toward the masters; whereas, when the obligations toward the master remain undefined, no other duty can exist than that of blind obedience [388].

But what are the obligations to be imposed on the man called a slave, toward the man called a master? If the questions that divide men were always resolved according to the rules of morality, this one would have to be inverted; one should not ask what the obligations of the possessed man are toward his possessor; one should ask, on the contrary, what are the obligations of the latter toward the former; what does he owe him for the labor he has extracted from him, and for which he has not paid him the value, for the violence he has exercised upon him, or for the sufferings to which he has condemned him, and for which he has not indemnified him? But let us not get ahead of our century; let us accept as a grace the small portion of the products of his labor relinquished to the weak and poor man, and let us consider as a favor the slowing of injustice and violence.

However high the claims of the slave-owners and their friends may be, I suppose that all the services they claim are owed to them by the men they possess are quantifiable in money; a master would not dare to ostensibly demand anything but labor from his slave; and if this claim is admitted as just, he must not complain that one is too demanding. This point being agreed upon, the first measure to take is to determine the current value of a day's labor performed by a slave of a given age and sex. It is very probable that individuals will often depart from the common rule, that their labor will sometimes be worth a little more, and sometimes a little less; but as we are now reasoning within a system of expedients, and not on the rules of justice, it is not a matter of arriving at mathematical exactitude.

The price of a slave's day being fixed, the slave-owner cannot complain of injustice if the enslaved individual is granted the faculty of providing his labor or of paying its value. This alternative places the slave, in a way, in the same position as the free man; it restores in him, at least in part, the principle of activity that servitude destroys. The price of a free man's day having, in general, two or three times the value of a slave's day, it is evident that by giving a principle of activity to the population, one would double the quantity of labor, at the same time as one would banish the tortures at the price of which it is obtained. The slaves would thus obtain the facility to redeem themselves and to redeem the members of their families.

For the same reason that a slave-owner could not accuse of injustice the measure that would grant the slave the faculty of providing his labor or paying its value, he could not complain if a slave is permitted to redeem himself or to redeem his wife and children. The obligations imposed on an enslaved individual being quantifiable in money, nothing is easier than to determine the price at which a slave can emancipate himself. It is sufficient to calculate the average lifespan in slavery, and to subtract from the workdays of which this span is composed for each individual, the days devoted to rest, and those during which labor may be interrupted by accidents or illnesses.

The redemption of slaves is one of the measures to which slave-owners are most opposed. If one wishes to know the reasons for their opposition, one must not seek them in their speeches; one must observe the circumstances that influence the price of the individuals put up for sale. If one examines, in a market where human beings are sold, which individuals obtain preference, and whose price is the highest, one will see that, among the women, it is those who can most easily ignite the passions of their masters, and that, among the men, it is likewise the best-formed and most handsome. The quantity of labor they can perform is, in general, only a secondary consideration; a young and beautiful girl who, by her features and color, approaches the kind of the masters, will sell for twice as much as a negress who is twice as strong, but who has disagreeable forms and features. This single circumstance is irrefutable proof that slave-owners intend to impose on their slaves obligations other than that of working; but these obligations are not of a nature to be avowed, and we can disregard them.

From the recognized fact that a man is a man, and that as such he has moral duties to fulfill, it follows that when the individual we call a slave has delivered, in kind or in cash, the quantity of labor he is bound to pay to the individual we call a master, he owes him nothing more. From that moment, he depends only on the general laws and the magistrates; if he becomes guilty, he must be prosecuted and punished like all men; if, by his good conduct and his industry, he acquires some property, it must be guaranteed to him by the same authorities that guarantee that of the masters; his home must be inviolable like that of all other men; he is the protector of his children and his wife; and if his strength is not sufficient for him to fulfill his duties as a father or a husband, it is for the magistrates to supplement it [389].

By granting an enslaved individual the faculty of providing his possessor with his labor or the value of that labor, one attacks in the most powerful manner the prejudice that stigmatizes industrial occupations in countries exploited by slaves, and at the same time one causes the enslaved population to adopt habits of activity and economy. The man who, for several years, has worked and saved to acquire his liberty, will continue to work and save when he has become free, to ensure his independence and to provide himself with resources in his old age. The use of this means would in a short time produce very considerable effects: it would develop the intelligence of the slave population; it would form its mores and its habits; it would give it the means of existence, and would form, for the landowners, a class of intelligent and laborious workers. The commerce and industry of the mother countries would also find their advantage in it; equinoctial productions would be cheaper, and the demands for manufactured products would multiply, because the number of consumers would be greater. It must be added that the colonies could soon protect themselves, and that they would no longer be a cause of ruin for the nations to which they are subject.

I have not proposed to set forth, in this chapter, a plan for emancipation; I have wished only to demonstrate that the system of slavery rests on a principle diametrically opposed to the principle of liberty, and that it is impossible to pass from one regime to the other if one does not completely abandon the principle of the first to adopt the principle of the second. The mere fact of this change in principles, one must not conceal it, is a complete revolution; and any procedure founded on this change and followed with perseverance will lead promptly to the complete abolition of slavery. If I have indicated a particular mode of emancipation, it is not because I considered it the only good one, or as being complete: I proposed only to show some of the principal consequences to which one was led by the mere fact of the change in principles. But as long as the gross error on which slavery rests is considered a truth, one will struggle in vain against the consequences; one may, to stop or weaken them, employ much time, talent, and even wealth; vanquished in theory, they will triumph in practice.

The emancipation of slaves, or to speak more precisely, the curb placed on the passions and arbitrary power of slave-owners, is not so new a phenomenon that one cannot be enlightened by experience. In a span of forty years, six examples have been seen of a great number of slaves emancipated en masse, without any inconvenience ever resulting from their emancipation [390]. The freedmen have always had more orderly conduct than the masters. I have shown the reasons for this elsewhere.