The Journal of Negro History Volume II Part 10

_American Patriots and Statesmen from Was.h.i.+ngton to Lincoln._ By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART. P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1916. Five Volumes.

The editor deserves great credit for bringing together so much original material reflecting the thought of the men who made the nation. Every phase of American life and politics has been considered, giving both the scholar and the layman a ready reference and guide for a more intensive study of public opinion in this country than can be obtained from the ordinary treatises on history and government. The manner of selecting and arranging the materials exhibits evidence of breadth of view on the part of the compiler and places his long experience as a professor in the leading university of this country at the disposal of persons who have not labored in this field so long.

Here we have the thoughts of almost every distinguished man who materially influenced the history of this country from the time of the discovery of America to the outbreak of the Civil War. The writer has drawn on the works of all cla.s.ses, statesmen, sages, men of affairs, State officials, congressmen, senators, presidents, judges; ministers, doctors, lawyers, educators, novelists, essayists and travellers; poets and orators. Every section of the country, too, is represented in this collection and a few foreigners who have manifested peculiar interest in Americans have also been included. Some of these important subjects treated in these doc.u.ments are such questions as "Expectations from the New World," "The First Immigrants," "Principles of Personal Liberty," "Extension of Colonial Freedom," "The American Revolution," "Independence of the United States," "Liberty in a Federal Const.i.tution," "National Democracy," "The Frontier," "States Rights," "Slavery," "Nullification," and "The Popularization of Government." Important treatises having a special bearing on the Negro have not been omitted. Among these are Hinton Rowan Helpers' _Appeal to the Non-slaveholding Whites_, Benjamin Wade's _Defiance of Secession_, John Brown's _Last Speech of a Convicted Abolitionist_, William H. Seward's _Irrepressible Conflict_, Abraham Lincoln's _A House Divided against itself cannot Stand_, his _Meaning of the Declaration of Independence_, his _Philosophy of Slavery_, the _Gettysburg Address_, and the _Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation_.

The collection as a whole makes a valuable reference work for the modern teacher who is trying to explain the past in terms of present achievements. These materials are so arranged as to show that what we now call new problems in American life are issues of old, that the questions now arising as to how to manage the army and navy, how to deal with our colonies, how to maintain our position as a world power, and how to promote national preparedness, have all been discussed pro and con by leading statesmen in the past. Libraries in need of source material lying in this field would make no mistake in purchasing this valuable collection.

A. H. CLEMMONS.

FOOTNOTES:

[120] All of these letters are taken from Roberts Vaux's "Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet," pp. 25-62.

[121] Written by Patrick Henry.

NOTES

Harrison and Sons, London, have published an "_Anthropological Report on Sierra Leone_," by Northcote W. Thomas, in three parts. Part I covers the law and customs of the Tinne and other tribes. Part II consists of a "Tinne-English dictionary" and part III of a grammar and stories.

This firm has also brought out "_Specimens of Languages from Sierra Leone_" by the same author. This work contains tabular vocabularies with short stories and notes on Tones, ill.u.s.trated with the Staff Notation.

Macmillan and Company have published the "_My Yoruba Alphabet_" by R.

E. Bennett.

"_Maliki Law_" by F. H. Buxton has appeared with the imprint of Luzac and Company. This is a summary from French Translations of the "_Mukhtasar of Sidi Khalil_" by Captain Buxton of the Political Department of Nigeria. It was published by order of Sir F. D. Sugard, Governor-General of Nigeria.

"_Native Life in South Africa before and since the European War and the Boer Rebellion_" by Sol. T. Plaatje has been published by P. S.

King. This work is especially valuable for students of Negro History in that they may obtain from it the other side of the race problem in that country. The author is an educated native who has served the government as an interpreter, and now edits for a native syndicate _Tsala ea Batho_ (The People's Friend). The purpose of the writer is to explain the grievances of the natives and especially that one resulting from the Land Act of 1913.

Allen and Unwin have published the third volume of "_The History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872_" by G. McCall Theal. The work is to be completed in five volumes.

Among Putnam's recent publications is F. W. Seward's "_Reminiscences of a War Time Statesman and Diplomat_," being his father William H.

Seward.

The University of Chicago Press has published "_Slavery in Germanic Society during the Middle Ages_."

C. R. Hall has published through the Princeton University Press his "_Andrew Johnson: Military Governor of Tennessee_."

Stokes has published J. A. B. Scherer's _Cotton as a World Power_.

Mr. Henry B. Rankin's "_Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln_"

has come from the press of the Putnams. This book is interesting and valuable in that it is written by a man who studied law under Lincoln and Herndon.

The Chicago Historical Society has published a booklet ent.i.tled "_The Convention that nominated Lincoln_," giving its outward and local aspects.

In C. J. Heatwole's _History of Education in Virginia_, published by Macmillan, pa.s.sing mention is given the effort to enlighten the Negroes in that State. The writer is mainly concerned with the efforts for the uplift of the Negro since emanc.i.p.ation. He seemed to be ignorant of the many efforts at education put forth by the Negroes with the help of their friends even before the Civil War.

E. S. Green's _History of the University of South Carolina_ has been published by the State Publis.h.i.+ng Company at Columbia. In treating the period during which the Negroes were in control of that inst.i.tution the author is adversely critical of the freedmen in general, but mentions some colored graduates and pays a tribute to the high character of Richard Theodore Greener, who served there as instructor.

"_The South To-day_" by John M. Moore has been published by the Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada.

The JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY has received a copy of Charles E.

Benton's "_Troutbeck: A Dutchess County Homestead_," with an introduction by John Borroughs. Among the beautiful ill.u.s.trations in this pamphlet is that of Webutuck River at Troutbeck during the performance of the "Hiawatha Pageant" at the fifth Amenia Field Day, August 15, 1914.

A. A. Schomburg's _Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry_ has been published as one of a series of monographs edited by Charles F. Heartman of New York. It is a valuable work.

The Argosy Company, Georgetown, British Guiana, has recently published a work ent.i.tled _Black Talk_. This book consists of notes on Negro dialect compiled by C. G. Cruickshank. It is an interesting and informing volume.

THE JOURNAL

OF

NEGRO HISTORY

VOL. II--APRIL, 1917--No. 2

I

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SLAVE STATUS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Slavery and freedom were const.i.tuent elements in American inst.i.tutions from the very beginning. In the inherent antagonism of the two, DeTocqueville recognized the most serious menace to the permanence of the nation.[122] Slavery, which came in time to be known as the "peculiar inst.i.tution" of the South, gradually shaped the social, moral, economic and political ideas of that section to fit its genius.

The more democratic tendencies of the free industrial order of the North served by contrast to crystallize still more the group consciousness of the South. In this wise the erstwhile loyal South was slowly transformed into a section that was prepared to place local and sectional interests above national, and the result was secession. Just as it was not loyalty to inalienable human rights in the abstract that brought about the abolition of slavery in the North, but rather the gradual expansion of the idea of liberty through the free give and take of a vigorous democracy in which economic and social conditions militated against slavery, so it was not loyalty to States' rights in the abstract that brought about the Civil War but rather the alien group consciousness of the slave States which was the outgrowth of totally different economic and social conditions. It is the object of this paper to trace the influence of these various factors upon the status of the slave.

Slavery of both Indians and Negroes and white servitude were well recognized forms of social status in all the colonies, and slavery was general down to the time of the American Revolution. As early as 1639 we hear of a Negro slave in Pennsylvania. In 1644 Negroes were in demand to work the lowlands of the Delaware. In 1685 William Penn directed his steward at Pennsbury to secure blacks for work "since they might be held for life," which was not true of indentured servants.[123] Negro slaves were sold in Maryland in 1642.[124]

Negroes are referred to in the Connecticut records as early as 1660.[125] An "act against trading with negro slaves" was pa.s.sed in Elizabeth-Town, New Jersey, in 1682.[126] An entry in Winthrop's Journal, February 26, 1638, states that a "Mr. Peirce, in the Salem s.h.i.+p, the _Desire_, returned from the West Indies after seven months.

He had been to Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and _Negroes_, etc."[127] The twenty Negroes sold to the colonists at Jamestown, 1619, were the first landed on the soil of Virginia and possibly the first brought to the American colonies.[128]

There is evidence to show that the status of the Negro was at first very closely affiliated with that of the white servant with whom the colonists were thoroughly familiar and who stood half way between freedom and complete subjection. It is probable, therefore, that both Indian and Negro servitude preceded Indian and Negro slavery in all the colonies,[129] though the transition to slavery as the normal status of the Negro was very speedily made. The first and essential feature in this transition was the lengthening of the period of servitude from a limited time to the natural life. The slave differed from the servant then not so much in the loss of liberty, civil and political, as in the perpetual nature of that loss.[130]

There were several factors operating in the case of the Negro to fix the status of the slave as his normal condition, the earliest and one of the strongest of which was economic in character. Certainly the influences which brought Negro slavery to the West-Indies and later to the British colonies to the north were primarily economic. As a result of her great commercial expansion in the first half of the fifteenth century Spain had established a thriving slave trade with the west coast of Africa. When it was discovered that the natives of the West Indies, who had been enslaved to meet the labor demands of the new world, were unable to do the work Spain began to import Negro slave labor at the suggestion of Bishop Las Casas, thus turning the stream of slave trade westward about the beginning of the sixteenth century.

By way of the English island colonies, the Bermudas and Barbados, the slave trade extended northward to the American colonies, the first slaves being brought from the West Indies to Virginia in 1619, so that by the end of the seventeenth century the traffic had reached proportions that frightened the colonists into taking measures for its restriction.[131]

The fact that Negro slavery reached American soil by way of the West Indies is not without significance as throwing light upon the status of the slave especially in the southern colonies such as the Carolinas and Georgia. The first Negro slaves imported into South Carolina came from Barbados in 1671 and there is reason for thinking that the Barbadian slave code and customs were imported with the slaves, for the act pa.s.sed in Barbados in 1668 declaring Negro slaves to be real estate was copied very closely in the South Carolina act of 1690.[132] The stringency of the Barbadian slave code and the resulting barbarous treatment of the slaves have made the little island famous in history. "For a hundred years," says Johnston, "slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor'

whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery of Virginia. The difference in the status of the slave in Virginia and in the northern colonies as opposed to the colonies farther south, where in some places the Barbadian conditions were at least approximated, is to be explained in terms of the different social and economic conditions rather than the character of the slave-owners. The West Indian type of slavery was not conducive to the more intimate and sympathetic relations which arose between slave and master in the colonies to the north where a fairly complete integration of the Negro in the social consciousness of the white took place.