Faulkner on the Disease

Hon. Charles James Faulkner, late [Ambassador] to the Court of the Tuileries, ex-Whig, ex-Democrat, and now avowed rebel, having been arrested as a traitor by our Government, and exchanged for the Hon. Alfred Ely, was a young and tolerably honest member of that Virginia Legislature of 1832 which took up the subject of Slavery, (under the spur of the Nat Turner insurrection,) and very nearly resolved on its abolition.  In his speech on that occasion, Mr. Faulkner, said:

“I am gratified to perceive that no gentleman has yet risen in this Hall the avowed advocate of slavery.  The day has gone by when such a voice could be listened to with patience or even with forbearance.  I even regret that there should be one among us, who enters the lists as its apologist, except on the ground of uncontrollable necessity.  Let me request him to compare the slave-holding portion of this Commonwealth, barren, desolate, seared as it were by the avenging hand of Heaven, with the descriptions which we have of this same country from those who first broke its virgin soil.  To what is this change ascribable? – Solely to the withering and blasting effects of slavery.  If this does not satisfy him, let me request him to travel to the Northern States, and contrast the contentment and happiness which prevail throughout the country; the busy, cheerful sounds of industry, the rapidly swelling growth of their population, their means and institutions of education, their skill and proficiency in useful arts, their enterprise and public spirit, the monuments of their commercial and manufacturing industry, and, above all, their devoted attachment to the Government from which they derive protection – let him compare all these with the division, discontent, indolence, and poverty of the Southern country.  To what is this ascribable?  It is to that vice in the organization of society by which one half of its inhabitants are arrayed in interest and feeling against the other half, to that unfortunate state of society, in which freemen regard labor as disgraceful, and slaves shrink from it as a burden tyrannically imposed upon them; to that condition of thing, in which half a million of your population can feel no sympathy with the society, in the prosperity of which they are forbidden to participate, and no attachment to a Government at whose hands they receive nothing but injustice.

“If the incredulous inquirer should suggest that this manifest contrast might be traced to difference of climate, or to other causes distinct from slavery itself, permit me to refer him to the two States of Kentucky and Ohio.  No difference of soil or climate, no diversity in the original settlement of those two States can be adduced to account for the remarkable disproportion in their advancement.  Separated by a river alone, they seem to have been purposefully and providentially designed to exhibit in their future histories the difference which necessarily results from a country afflicted with the curse of slavery, and a country that is free from it.  The same may be said of the two States of Missouri and Illinois.

“Slavery is an institution which presses heavily on the best interests of the State.  It banishes free white labor.  It exterminates mechanics, artisans, manufacturers.  It deprives them of occupation; it deprives them of bread.  It converts the energy of a community into indolence, its power into imbecility, its efficiency into weakness.  Being thus injurious, have we not a right to demand its extermination?  Shall all rights be subordinate to the interests of the slaveholder? – Has not the mechanic rights?  Have not the middle classes their rights? rights incompatible with the existence of Slavery!”

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 1, 1862, p. 2