177 Impending Crisis of the South (1857)

We have not breathed away seven and twenty years in the South without becoming acquainted with the demagogical maneuverings of the oligarchy. Their intrigues and tricks of legerdemain are as familiar to us as household words. In vain might the world be ransacked for a more precious junta of flatterers and cajolers. It is amusing to ignorance, amazing to credulity, and insulting to intelligence to hear them in their blathering efforts to mystify and pervert the sacred principles of liberty and turn the curse of slavery into a blessing. To the illiterate poor whites—made poor and ignorant by the system of slavery—they hold out the idea that slavery is the very bulwark of our liberties and the foundation of American independence! For hours at a time, day after day, will they expatiate upon the inexpressible beauties and excellencies of this great, free, and independent nation. And finally with the most extravagant gesticulations and rhetorical flourishes, conclude their nonsensical ravings by attributing all the glory and prosperity of the country from Maine to Texas and from Georgia to California to the “invaluable institutions of the South!” With what patience we could command, we have frequently listened to the incoherent and truth-murdering declamations of these champions of slavery and in the absence of a more politic method of giving vent to our disgust and indignation, have involuntarily bit our lips into blisters.

The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks who are bought and sold and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the “poor white trash”, the great majority of the Southern people, know of the real condition of the country is indeed sadly astonishing. The truth is, they know nothing of public measures and little of private affairs except what their imperious masters, the slave-drivers, condescend to tell. And that is but precious little and even that little, always garbled and one-sided, is never told except in public harangues. For the haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh.

Whenever it pleases and to the extent it pleases a slaveholder to become communicative, poor whites may hear with fear and trembling but not speak. They must be as mum as dumb brutes and stand in awe of their august superiors or be crushed with stern rebukes, cruel oppressions, or downright violence. If they dare to think for themselves, their thoughts must be forever concealed. The expression of any sentiment at all conflicting with the gospel of slavery dooms them at once in the community in which they live. And then whether willing or unwilling they are obliged to become heroes, martyrs, or exiles. They may thirst for knowledge but there is no Moses among them to smite it out of the rocks of Horeb. The black veil, through whose almost impenetrable meshes light seldom gleams, has long been pendent over their eyes. And there with fiendish jealousy the slave-driving ruffians sedulously guard it. Non-slaveholders are not only kept in ignorance of what is transpiring at the North, but they are continually misinformed of what is going on even in the South. Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged.

It is expected that the stupid and sequacious [malleable] masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe and as a general thing they do believe whatever the slaveholders tell them. And thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.

We have already intimated that the opinion is prevalent throughout the South that the free States are quite sterile and unproductive and that they are mainly dependent on us for breadstuffs and other provisions. So far as the cereals, fruits, garden vegetables and esculent [edible] roots are concerned, we have shown the utter falsity of this opinion. And we now propose to show that it is equally erroneous in other particulars and very far from the truth in the general reckoning. We can prove and we intend to prove from facts in our possession that the hay crop of the free States is worth considerably more in dollars and cents than all the cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, and hemp produced in the fifteen slave States. This statement may strike some of our readers with amazement and others may for the moment regard it as quite incredible. But it is true nevertheless, and we shall soon proceed to confirm it. The single free State of New York produces more than three times the quantity of hay that is produced in all the slave States. Ohio produces a larger number of tons than all the Southern and Southwestern States and so does Pennsylvania. Vermont, little and unpretending as she is, does the same thing with the exception of Virginia. Look at the facts and let your own eyes, physical and intellectual, confirm you in the truth.

And yet, forsooth, the slave-driving oligarchy would whip us into the belief that agriculture is not one of the leading and lucrative pursuits of the free States. That the soil there is an uninterrupted barren waste and that our Northern brethren, having the advantage in nothing except wealth, population, inland and foreign commerce, manufactures, mechanism, inventions, literature, the arts and sciences, and their concomitant branches of profitable industry—miserable objects of charity—are dependent on us for the necessaries of life.

Source: Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/impendingcrisissouthhelper.html