In my lifetime, I have not only witnessed a series of tumultuous occurrences, but also experienced my own painful hardships, yet nothing contends the unfortunate pleasure that your pro-slavery essays have granted me. It is within your writings that have gained national recognition that you irrefutably attempt to paint the practice of slavery as a positive good, regarding us as the true oppressors of freedom in the war is brewing at the forefront, inching its talons closer and closer. The audacity of Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! leaves young abolitionists and other defenders of basic rights like me struck in awe as we are left to bear witness to the compromise of ethics as you harness the notion of freedom, relentlessly twisting and contorting its meaning to fit your pro-slavery agenda, planting seeds of doubt in the minds of northerners. To make matters worse, these undignified arguments contain a series of discrepancies worth noting for the sake of prevailing amongst the ignorance.
The belief that slavery is an unnecessary good, casting a shadow over the foundation of liberty and freedom that our society has established, has gradually but surely trickled down into the minds of good-hearted citizens with a moral compass for the betterment and progress of our country. However, you fail to recognize the severity behind this practice with the impression that slavery is simply another form of independence, one where its adherents are generously provided with the necessities for life and safe from “poor-houses, jails, and graves,” (Fitzhugh 9) that free blacks may experience. Even more so, the way you regard freedom is just a perverted form of captivity with so-called benefits that, in reality, barely keep an individual on the brink of survival, never knowing what it truly feels like to walk free on this Earth, enslaved to a vast plantation and repetitive routine picking cotton in the South for farmers, waging their lives for the harvest that fills your pockets. You even digress far enough to criticize the concept of freedom in contemporary society, asserting that it is “absurd and impracticable,” (Fitzhugh 12), seeing as business ventures in Boston have ended abruptly and failed while plantations in the South continuously thrived and profited in an agricultural-based economy. You turn to regard this as a practice free of “tricks, cunning and speculation,” (Fitzhugh 11) but little do you know that the root of slavery itself began with villages of people being kidnapped and forcibly taken across the Atlantic Ocean, subjected to repulsive conditions and viewed as barely human, counting only three-fifths of a vote, inherently inferior due to the pigmentation of something as uncontrollable as skin. While we have collectively progressed as a society, there is still much work to do because of individuals like yourself who foolishly believe that slaves are self-determining and content with the livelihoods they have been granted.
Even more so, the very signers of our nation’s founding documents “did not hesitate to speak of slavery, not only as an evil but as the direct curse inflicted upon our country,” (Leggett 32). While you may argue that this issue was did not prove to be as controversial when the Constitution was initially drafted, I abide by abolitionist William Leggett’s statement on the matter published in the New York Evening Post, “[The Founding Fathers] did not refrain from indulging a hope that the stain one day or other be wiped,” (Leggett 32). It is clear that the unity of one indivisible nation was prioritized, and for good reason, rather than dealing with the consequences of secession as the South so viciously threatened due to their pride and resistance. Instead, they maintained this allegiance with the belief that the institution of slavery would ultimately be deemed immoral and banned within this nation for being a disruptive force to humanity and spilling the blood of thousands of undeserving individuals.
While you may claim that slaveholding in the South is “peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trade unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law,” (Fitzhugh 17), the misconception that slavery and optional wage-labor are in any way, shape or form comparable is a normalization of an unjust institution that continues to taint our history. This distorted representation is not only harmful to impressionable minds but bleeds boastfulness that allows for slavery to continue as is, using lynching and psychological torture as a means to instill fear into the minds of the enslaved, silent about their unfair and inhumane conditions. Notably, Frederick Douglass conveyed this terror and degradation through his autobiography titled The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with, “For a time I thought I should bleed to death and think now that I should have done so,” (Douglass 45). My question still stands – is this the tranquility you claim your slaves enjoy? No, it is not, because they are so often dehumanized, stripped of their individuality and milked of their labor, regarded as property, the title deed that controls their lives at the palms of your uncalloused hands. If anything, they are not met with blatant death, as Douglass recounted with, “Master Thomas ridiculed the idea that there was any danger of Mr. Covey’s killing me, and said that he knew Mr. Covey; that he was a good man, and that he could not think of taking me from him; that, should he do so, he would lose the whole year’s wages,” (Douglass 46). Slaves were spared of their lives merely out of self-interest and greed rather than humanity’s natural inclination toward moral and ethical behavior.
Moreover, you go on to state that the “moral effect of a free society is to banish Christian virtue, that virtue which bids us love our neighbor as yourself, and to substitute the very equivocal virtues preceding from mere selfishness,” (Fitzhugh 10). This oozes a sense of hypocrisy and self-righteousness that speaks volumes to how abhorrent the institution of slavery is for upholding itself on the basis of Christianity as a justification. Suppression is ultimately more favorable than allowing individuals basic human rights in your mind, which holds no logic and diminishes the right to “recognize them as suitably qualified to be members of Christian churches,” (Garrison 36). How dare you claim Christianity and use it to defend your corrupt beliefs, fueled by the drive for money and land, but not dare to recognize the very scriptures that do not protect the practice of slavery. I demand that you assert yourself and put theory into practice rather than sitting on a throne of self-proclaimed truths that, in the eyes of many progressive, free-minded people, showcase a number of illogical facts.
As I near the end of my response, I continue to fear the polarization regarding this controversial issue. I urge you to grow more compassionate, to develop an understanding of basic human rights of ultimate freed that is not clouded by your personal beliefs or your essays, from Cannibals All! to Sociology for the South. Mr. Fitzhugh, open your privileged eyes and dare to look at the costly consequences you have had a hand in creating in your numerous plantations and beyond. Ask yourself, how is the North perpetuating oppression when the South creates an environment that degrades human beings, treating people like cattle? Look beyond the melanin in their skin and the inferiority you have prescribed to them due to years of institutionalized and systemic racism. It is time to condemn enslavement, to wrangle it by its neck and snap the exploitation it creates. The United States must make an effort to abolish slavery – not only for the devastating effects it has had on countless generations of innocent human beings who were kidnapped across the sea and whisked into a world unlike their own. We must protect freedom and justice for all at this moment or be caught in an onslaught of bloodshed in the future, a divided country motivated by either greed and self-interest like the South or one that vouches for the end to torture and the virtue of ethics like the North. A society that functions without slavery is on the horizon, but we cannot continue to defend slavery, seeing as it is not a positive good, but rather an unnecessary evil.