Breakfasted with Mr. Hodgson, where I met Mr. Locke, Mr.
Ward, Mr. Green, and Mrs. Hodgson and her sister. There were in attendance some
good-looking little negro boys and men dressed in liveries, which smacked of
our host's Orientalism; and they must have heard our discussion, or rather
allusion, to the question which would decide whether we thought they are human
beings or black two-legged cattle, with some interest, unless indeed the boast
of their masters, that slavery elevates the character and civilizes the mind of
a negro, is another of the false, pretences on which the institution is rested
by its advocates. The native African, poor wretch, avoids being carried into
slavery totis viribus, and it would argue ill for the effect on his mind
of becoming a slave, if he prefers a piece of gaudy calico even to his
loin-cloth and feather head-dress. This question of civilizing the African in
slavery, is answered in the assertion of the slave owners themselves, that if
the negroes were left to their own devices by emancipation, they would become
the worst sort of barbarians — a veritable Quasheedom, the like of which was
never thought of by Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I doubt if the aboriginal is not as
civilized, in the true sense of the word, as any negro, after three degrees of
descent in servitude, whom I have seen on any of the plantations — even though
the latter have leather shoes and fustian or cloth raiment and felt hat, and
sings about the Jordan. He is exempted from any bloody raid indeed, but he is
liable to be carried from his village and borne from one captivity to an other,
and his family are exposed to the same exile in America as in Africa. The
extreme anger with which any unfavorable comment is met publicly, shows the
sensitiveness of the slave owners. Privately, they affect philosophy; and the
blue books, and reports of Education Commissions and Mining Committees, furnish
them with an inexhaustible source of argument, if you once admit that the summum
bonum lies in a certain rotundity of person, and a regular supply of coarse
food. A long conversation on the old topics — old to me, but of only a few
weeks’ birth. People are swimming with the tide. Here are many men, who would
willingly stand aside if they could, and see the battle between the Yankees,
whom they hate, and the Secessionists. But there are no women in this party. Wo
betide the Northern Pyrrhus, whose head is within reach of a Southern tile and
a Southern woman's arm!
I revisited some of the big houses afterwards, and found the
merchants not cheerful, but fierce and resolute. There is a considerable
population of Irish and Germans in Savannah, who to a man are in favor of the
Confederacy, and will fight to support it. Indeed, it is expected they will do
so, and there is a pressure brought to bear on them by their employers which
they cannot well resist. The negroes will be forced into the place the whites
hitherto occupied as laborers — only a few useful mechanics will be kept, and
the white population will be obliged by a moral force drafting to go to the
wars. The kingdom of cotton is most essentially of this world, and it will be
fought for vigorously. On the quays of Savannah, and in the warehouses, there
is not a man who doubts that he ought to strike his hardest for it, or
apprehends failure. And then, what a career is before them! All the world
asking for cotton, and England dependent on it. What a change since Whitney
first set his cotton-gin to work in this state close by us! Georgia, as a vast
country only partially reclaimed, yet looks to a magnificent future. In her
past history the Florida wars, and the treatment of the unfortunate Cherokee
Indians, who were expelled from their lands as late as 1838, show the people
who descended from old Oglethorpe's band were fierce and tyrannical, and apt at
aggression, nor will slavery improve them. I do not speak of the cultivated and
hospitable citizens of the large towns, but of the bulk of the slaveless
whites.
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 157-8
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