Volume 6 — MACAULAY ON SLAVERY.

Communication to the New York Tribune, March 3, 1860.

The same paper contained the article of Macaulay entitled “The West Indies,” from the Edinburgh Review, January, 1825, Vol. XLI. pp. 464-488. The day after its appearance, the New York Herald, in a leader with the caption, “Macaulay, Sumner, and Slavery,” sought to disparage the testimony, saying, among other things:—

“What Mr. Sumner now introduces is a proof how badly off the party must be for weapons, when they rake them up from the dead magazines of another generation, and written by a youth a little over twenty years of age; or Mr. Sumner has not yet recovered his usual strength of mind, since the injury he received a few years ago at the Capitol. And what does his article amount to? That the British planters in the West Indies treated their slaves very badly, which may or may not be true. But from the abuse of the institution in one place he argues against the policy of its continued existence in any other part of the world. He might as well conclude, that, because many of the English are cruel to their horses, and that it was necessary to pass an Act of Parliament for their protection, therefore horses ought to be emancipated in the United States, and let loose through the country. An argument from the abuse to the disuse of anything is the poorest kind of logic.”

Such was the tone of discussion on the eve of the Presidential election destined to decide the fate of American Slavery.

To the Editor of the New York Tribune:—

SIR,—I ask attention to an eloquent and characteristic article on Slavery, by Macaulay, never yet printed in our country with his name. It is in an old number of the “Edinburgh Review,” while Jeffrey was its editor, and in point of time preceded the famous article on Milton. It is, indeed, the earliest contribution of the illustrious writer to that Review, of which he became a chief support and ornament. As such, it belongs to the curiosities of literature, even if it did not possess intrinsic interest from subject and style.

Here are seen, no longer in germ, but almost in perfect development, those same great elements of style which appear in the maturer essays and the History,—mastery of language, clearness of statement, force, splendor of illustration, an irrepressible sequence of thought and argument, and that same whip of scorpions which he afterward flourished over Barère: all these are conspicuous in this first effort, where he utters the honest, gushing indignation of his soul. Never has Slavery inspired speaker or writer to more complete and scornful condemnation.

The article was called forth by British Slavery in the West Indies; but it is just as applicable to American Slavery. Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. Every line bears upon the slave-drivers of our country, with greater force even than upon the slave-drivers of the West Indies; for audacity here goes further than it was ever pushed in the British dominions. It is interesting to find how exact the parallel becomes. In the picture of illiberal men conspiring to support Slavery Macaulay seems to delineate us.

“The slave-drivers may boast, that, if our cause has received support from honest men of all religious and political parties, theirs has tended in as great a degree to combine and conciliate every form of violence and illiberality. Tories and Radicals, prebendaries and field-preachers, are to be found in their ranks. The only requisites for one who aspires to enlist are a front of brass and a tongue of venom.”[9]

Aiming to exhibit Slavery in its laws, without dwelling on the accumulated instances of cruelty, he puts the case on the strongest ground; and here his unimpeachable witness is the statute-book itself. But this same argument bears with equal force upon our Slavery; so that, in reading his indignant exposure of the West India jurisprudence, we see rising before us the kindred enormities of our own Slave States, and acknowledge the truth of his generous words.

He seems also to have anticipated that flagrant sophism, which, under the guise of Popular Sovereignty, insists that men shall be at liberty—“perfectly free” is the phrase of the Nebraska Bill—to buy and sell fellow-men.

“If you will adopt the principles of Liberty, adopt them altogether. Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims might be employed, with far greater justice, in favor of the emancipation of your bondsmen. When that event shall have taken place, your demand will deserve consideration. At present, what you require under the name of Freedom is nothing but unlimited power to oppress. It is the freedom of Nero.”[10]

The threats of disunion, coming from slave-drivers, are also foreshown, and treated with the scorn they merit.

“Who can refrain from thinking of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who, while raised sixty feet from the ground on the hand of the King of Brobdignag, claps his hand on his sword and tells his Majesty that he knows how to defend himself? You will rebel!… But this is mere trifling. Are you, in point of fact, at this moment able to protect yourselves against your slaves without our assistance? If you can still rise up and lie down in security,—if you can still eat the bread of the fatherless and grind the faces of the poor,—if you can still hold your petty Parliaments, and say your little speeches, and move your little motions,—if you can still outrage and insult the Parliament and people of England,—to what do you owe it?”[11]

The sensitiveness of slave property—the same in our Slave States as in the British West Indies—is aptly described in the remark, that a pamphlet of Mr. Stephen or a speech of Mr. Brougham is sufficient to excite all the slaves in the colonies to rebel. And it is shown that in a servile war the master must be loser; for his enemies are his chattels. Whether the slave conquer or fall, he is alike lost to the owner. In the mean time, the soil lies uncultivated, the machinery is destroyed. And when the possessions of the planter are restored to him, they have been changed into a desert.[12]

Here also is an exhibition of the incompatibility between Slavery and Christianity, which ought to be read in every Southern pulpit:—

“The immorality and irreligion of the slaves are the necessary consequences of their political and personal degradation. They are not considered by the law as human beings.… They must become men before they can become Christians.… Can a preacher prevail on his hearers strictly to fulfil their conjugal duties in a country where no protection is given to their conjugal rights,—in a country where the husband and wife may, at the pleasure of the master or by process of law, be in an instant separated forever?… The great body of the colonists have resolutely opposed religious instruction; and they are in the right. They know, though their misinformed friends in England do not know, that Christianity and Slavery cannot long exist together.”[13]

Such is the philippic against Slavery by the first writer of the English language in our day, and one of the first in all times. As testimony to a sacred cause, it is priceless; as a contribution to literature, it cannot be forgotten. Why it was suppressed by American publishers, who gave us the earliest collection of Macaulay’s Essays ever printed in England or America, I know not. Unhappily, this suppression was too much in harmony with the received American system from that day to this, whether in publishing Humboldt’s work on Cuba, the Bishop of Oxford’s work on the American Church, or the engraving of Ary Scheffer’s “Christus Consolator,” from all of which the slave is shut out. That this blame may not fall upon the author himself, it is important to know that the American collection was made without any list supplied by him. In the modesty of his nature, he regarded his contributions to Reviews as fugitive pieces, which he abandoned to the world, without caring to gather them together. It will be for posterity to rejudge this judgment.

In this statement, I rely upon personal recollection of conversations with him. More than twenty years ago—as also more recently—I was in the habit of meeting the great writer in the society of London; and I remember well how, on one of these occasions, when told that an American bookseller proposed to publish a collection of his articles, he very positively protested against it, and refused to furnish a list. Nor is it out of place to add here, that, while his wonderful conversation left on the mind an ineffaceable impression of eloquence and fulness, perhaps without parallel, it also showed a character of singular integrity.

This article is not alone in attesting his sympathy with the Antislavery cause. The first public appearance of Macaulay, while yet a very young man, was at an Antislavery meeting; and one of his most stinging speeches, at the maturity of his powers, in the House of Commons, bore testimony to the depth and constancy of this sentiment.[14] This was natural; for he was son of Zachary Macaulay, one of the devoted Abolitionists who helped to carry, first, the abolition of the slave-trade, and then, at a later day, the abolition of Slavery itself, in the British dominions.

The services of the father, as friend of the slave, have been aptly commemorated by a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey, situated in the nave, on the left side of the great door as you enter, and close to the imposing monument of Fox. The son now lies in the same historic burial-place and beneath the same mighty roof,[15] but in Poets’ Corner, distant by more than the whole length of the nave from the tablet erected in honor of his father. In all that multitude of monuments to the illustrious dead, if we except the line of kings, there is but one other instance of father and son enshrined in the Abbey, and that is Lord Chatham and William Pitt, whose monuments are also distant from each other by more than the whole length of the nave.

Such is the conspicuous fellowship of the two Pitts and the Macaulays, father and son, although most unlike in circumstances of life and the services which have secured this common foothold of immortality. In each case, the father, even with the fame of Lord Chatham, has new glory from the son. The resting-places of the two Pitts are known at once on entering the Abbey. Hereafter, the stranger, who has stood with grateful admiration before the grave of the younger Macaulay, will seek with reverent step the simple tribute to his father, the Abolitionist,—mindful that the love of Human Freedom in which the son was cradled and schooled gave to his character some of its best features, and to his career of authorship its earliest triumph.

My purpose is simply to introduce this new-found testimony against Slavery, and not to dwell on the life or character of the author. If I followed a hint from him, the way would be open. Nobody can forget that in one of his most magnificent essays he has availed himself of the interest, transient it may have been, created by a newly discovered prose work of Milton, and has reminded his readers that the dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a Saint till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him,—a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. Here, indeed, is a relic of Macaulay; but I venture no further.

Charles Sumner.