Speaking of a man who could see nothing really disturbing in the institution of human slavery, Abraham Lincoln once remarked that this person was so constituted that he could not feel the lash that landed on somebody else’s back. Only if it hit his own back could he understand that a flogging was going on.
The insensitivity Lincoln was talking about is one of the commonest and most disastrous of all human traits, because it consents to cruelty and injustice; and it consents largely because the insensitive person does not even realize that these things exist unless they touch him personally. He can live next to monstrous wrong because he does not really know that it is there; it affects another person and so he does not feel it. Society approaches a respectable level of civilization only when it develops an active spirit of compassion.
Measuring by that yardstick one is forced to conclude that civilization has been rising rather slowly. Some of the darkest chapters in human history are in the books largely because simple compassion was lacking. There is always enough ill will, malignancy, and greed to give cruelty a start, Heaven knows, but what these qualities start would soon die if society as a whole insisted. Society usually does insist, once it understands what is happening, but there are times when understanding is tragically long in coming.
Cecil Woodham-Smith examines a most horrifying illustration of this point in her new book, The Great Hunger, which is a study of the terrible famine that afflicted Ireland in the 1840’s. This famine was one of the worst in history. It killed at least one and a half million people and drove about a million more to emigrate. Descending on a land that was already one of the most poverty-stricken in Europe, it created still more poverty, bringing in its train the manifold diseases that go with poverty. Its final legacy was hatredhatred so deep and lasting that Britain finally lost southern Ireland altogether.
In 1841 Ireland was one of the most densely populated regions in Europe, and one of the most thoroughly exploited. It had almost nothing in the way of industry. A few years earlier, a British economist reported that during most of the year, 2,385,000 persons had no employment because there was no work whatever to offer them. (This was in a country whose total population was a little more than 8,000,000.) Unless a man could somehow find a patch of land to grow potatoes on, he and his family would starve.
The natural result was that the land was divided and subdivided, over and over. It was not at all uncommon for a whole family to subsist on less than one acre of ground. Rents were high, most tenants could be turned off their land at the whim of the landlord, and the evicted tenant had no recourse at all except to try to get a quarter or half an acre on a sort of tenant-farmer arrangement.
The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith. Harper &: Row. 472 pp. $6.95.
What held this miserable arrangement up was the potato. With no other crop could a tiny parcel of land provide a year’s food for an entire family. To raise potatoes a man needed no equipment but a spade and no skill but the ability to dig in the ground. Ireland lived by the potato; if this crop should fail there simply was no chance at all to produce enough other food to support the teeming population.
Then, in 1845, came the potato blight, a frightening malady which caused potatoes to rot either in the hill or immediately after they had been harvested. It cut off Ireland’s supply of food; worse yet, it kept reappearing, year after year, and the situation became in the highest degree desperate.
Obviously, action by the British government was necessary, and in a sense the government did its best. It bought Indian corn, hoping that by throwing quantities of this on the market a general rise in the price of other foodstuffs might be prevented. It contributed fairly substantial sums to local agencies in Ireland, for the support of soup kitchens and workhouses. It appointed commissions of inquiry, and it spent quite a lot of money on work relief. All of this helped, but it did not help enough; people kept on dying; each year misery became more and more widespread; and in 1847, in despair, the British government relied on the operation of the Irish poor laws, which in effect meant that destitute Ireland would have to find the means to support famine’s victims.
This put the burden on the local landlords, some of whom had been making a good thing out of Ireland for many years; and it led directly to mass emigration, because it quickly occurred to the landlords that it was cheaper to ship a pauper to America than to continue to support him in Ireland. And the emigration became in itself a new chapter in human suffering, because it took thousands of people who had no resources at all, and who in most cases were in poor shape physically, and dumped them beyond the seas under conditions which-meant that many of them would simply die there instead of at home. Most of the New World’s immigrants came because they wanted to come, and were prepared to make a living under new conditions; these came because they had to, and were completely unprepared to make a living at all. Mrs. Woodham-Smith estimates that in 1847, fifteen thousand of them died on shipboard, and twenty thousand more died shortly after they disembarked.
It goes without saying that neither Canada nor the United States welcomed these newcomers gladly. Still, most of them did survive, and made their contribution to the new lands they had come to. One of them, for instance, was a man from County Cork named John Ford, who managed to get to Detroit and there, in time, became grandfather of Henry Ford.
Altogether, the Irish famine was one of the great disasters in human history. It must be admitted that it presented the British government with a problem altogether too large for easy handling; it must also be admitted that the handling the government gave it was abominable. And it was abominable, not because of active ill will but largely because of a singular obtuseness, an inability to be deeply and passionately moved by someone else’s sufferings. There was no attempt to end the age-old system of exploitation that had created the conditions under which failure of the potato crop must mean indescribable suffering. Throughout, the government was guided by the belief that it must not interfere with the operation of natural causes, that too much famine relief would corrupt the Irish people by teaching them to rely on the government, that the ancient virtues of self-reliance and industry must be promoted. The simple compassion that would have forced men to override such considerations and relieve the agony at any price was lacking.
The lash was coming down on the other man’s back.
Poverty and Cholera
By BRUCE CATTON
It would of course be comforting to think that this moral obtuseness was peculiar to Englishmen. It seems, however, to have been prevalent in America as well, and the cholera epidemics of the last century bring the thing into focus.
In 1832 the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera struck the United States. It was a complete mystery; no one knew what caused it or how it was transmitted, but since it passed most rapidly through areas where water and food supplies could be contaminated—and such areas were numerous in American cities of the 1830’s— it seemed likely that cholera was a natural accompaniment of filth, misery, vice, and intemperance. Loose living, in short, brought on cholera, and the man who died of it probably had himself to blame. It attacked mostly “the very scum of the cities,” and the scum would not have caught it if its members had not consented to be part of the scum.
The case is analyzed in The Cholera Years, by Charles E. Rosenberg, a book which can properly be taken as a sort of sequel to Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s study of the Irish famine. The epidemic of 1832 was wholly incomprehensible to the people of that time, and medical science was incompetent to provide any solution. All anyone could see was that the disease raged most violently in the slums, which were full of ignorant immigrants who perversely chose to live in filth and poverty. It seemed evident that cholera struck chiefly at the sinner and the poor, who had brought it on themselves. The sinner, intemperate in all things, laid himself wide open, obviously, and the poor man usually was poor because he was intemperate, improvident, and more or less immoral, and so what happened to both was nothing less than a Godly man might have anticipated. All in all, cholera appeared to be a result of increased immigration.
So the epidemic of 1832 was dismissed as a natural result of the evil ways of ignorant people who probably ought not to have come to America in the first place. There was another outbreak in 1849, but once again “the well-nourished, the prudent, and the temperate” —that is, the people who had money enough to live in decent surroundings, and who could flee the city when the infection spread—seemed to escape; which only emphasized the fact that the epidemic must be a natural visitation on those who chose to live in slums.
The Cholera Years, by Charles E. Rosenberg. University of Chicago Press. 257 pp. $5.95.
At the same time, it began to dawn on people that there was some sort of connection between lack of public sanitation and the outbreak of cholera, and now and again right-living people who did not prefer to live in slums were stricken. It remained clear that most cholera victims had only themselves to blame, but there were exceptions, and perhaps something could be done. One journalist suggested cynically that the best way would be to bribe the New York City council to enforce regulations about sanitation; and when one residential street was at last cleared of knee-deep filth that had been there for many years, a lady looked out on the pavement which was visible for the first time in her life and asked, in bewilderment: “Where did those stones come from?”
But as Mr. Rosenberg points out, cholera was not just a blight that struck the city slums. Cholera went west, ravaging country towns like Kenosha, Wisconsin, destroying a tenth of the population in St. Louis, afflicting the idyllic Ohio town of Sandusky even worse, hitting villages and army camps, and killing ten thousand slaves in the almost excessively rural Southland. It was impossible to do anything about it, partly because even the wisest men did not know what to do and partly because of the old belief that cholera came from vice and vice came from poverty and poverty was pretty largely self-inflicted. People who chose to be poor and vicious would get cholera, and that was all there was to it.
… Not quite. Slowly but surely, the facts of life began to dawn even on people whose native insensitivity had insulated them from reality. Cholera came out of poverty, and poverty was considered a moral rather than a social phenomenon; still, cholera did jump the fence occasionally, and now and then people of the better sort were stricken, not to mention industrious artisans who resisted the temptations of evil living. Possibly society itself ought to do something about slums, filthy streets, contaminated water systems, and overcrowded housing. Possibly a society that put up with such things was going to have epidemics which would, on occasions, go out of bounds and smite down people who lived amid better surroundings. Cholera called for social reconstruction.
In 1866 there was another outbreak, and by this time medical science had learned something. It had begun to see that this was a contagious disease, and it was not simply a product of loose living, intemperance, and vice. Public sanitation was all to the good, but a scientific attack on the specific channels of infection might be even better. New York City by now had a board of health, with broad powers and a disposition to work at its job—and suddenly it developed that this new epidemic was, in comparison with the two previous ones, relatively harmless. Cholera could be controlled, not by pious criticisms of vice and poverty, but by disinfection and quarantine. It was a social problem.
Credit much of this, of course, to the simple fact that doctors knew more in 1866 than they had known in 1832. Credit some of it, though, to an increased awareness that it is good to worry about what happens to the other man, if for no better reason than the fact that what happens to him may also happen to you.
Numbness on the Heart
By BRUCE CATTON
Of all of the black chapters that would not appear in the history books if it were not for man’s insensitivity to the sufferings of other men, the AfroAmerican slave trade probably is the worst. Here, if anywhere, is the account of a trade that was built on unvarnished cruelty and on the almost incredible sufferings of millions of men, women, and children. We put up with it, here in America, for a great many years, because it was highly profitable—and because we did not actually see the victims and so could not feel the lash that struck their backs. It was a trade that could not have lasted one week in a truly compassionate society; it actually lasted for generations, and in the end the entire country paid a staggering price by way of atonement.
It is examined in detail in Black Cargoes, an excellent new book written by Daniel P. Mannix in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, which makes timely reading for these years of Civil War centennial observance. (An excerpt from the book appeared in our February 1963 issue.) Here is what lay under the war; here is the terrible reality that finally led Lincoln in his second inaugural to say that it might be God’s will that the war go on until America had atoned, drop by drop, for all of the blood which the Negro slave had shed.
The people who benefited by the trade were numerous: the New England merchants who engaged in it, the southern planters who got a supply of forced labor for their plantations, the African chiefs who sold people like cattle, and the sea captains and their underlings who carried on the actual transportation. What the African chiefs may have been like is beyond the scope of this review, but of the northern traders and the southern planters it can be said that they were, at bottom, decent human beings who simply could not feel the agony that they were bringing into being. They saw the dollars that came out of it, and the dollars limited their field of vision. To all the rest they were insensitive.
The sailors who brought the slaves over saw things, but they learned to harden themselves. The authors quote a slave trader who said that the trade soon “renders most of those engaged in it too indifferent to the sufferings of their fellow creatures.” The Negroes who made up the cargoes of the slave ships had to be treated like cattle, and the need to treat them so “gradually brings a numbness on the heart.”
That numbness afflicted everybody. It had to, or the trade could not have gone on. The ordinary slave ship had to be abandoned after a voyage or so because it became so impregnated with filth that even a sailor who had hardened himself could not bear to live on it. Every slaver carried with him a little instrument known (and what nice names we can devise for things) as a “speculum oris”—a pair of dividers with notched legs and a thumbscrew. Many slaves, during the voyage from Africa to America, tried to starve themselves to death and would not eat. The speculum oris would be driven between such a slave’s teeth, and when the thumbscrew was turned his jaws would be forced apart; then he could be fed by force, and in due time he could be delivered alive in America to take his place in the gang on a cotton plantation.
It would be possible to go on at great length about the evils of the Middle Passage; possible, also, to explain in detail why the trade was so profitable, why traders and planters clubbed together to keep it going in spite of everything; but there is not much point in piling horror upon horror, and about all that need be done here is to refer the reader to Black Cargoes. What is worth noting is the peculiar numbness (to use the slave trader’s own word) which afflicted everybody connected with the trade and made possible its long continuance.
Be it noted that the trade thrived as long as slavery existed in what is now the United States. When slavery ended there, the trade itself died. As the authors remark, “the doom of the slave trade was sounded by the guns at Fort Sumter and was sealed at Antietam and Gettysburg.” Considering everything, it seems to have been a costly way to bring it to a close.
Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, by Daniel P. Mannix in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley. Viking Press. 306 pp. $6.95.
So it may be that the quality of compassion, the ability to feel unendurable anguish because of misery inflicted on someone else, has an actual, tangible, concrete value for the society which at last develops it. If we had had that quality a couple of centuries earlier, we would not have had slavery or the slave trade, and if we had not had those things, we would not have had the Civil War. The war cost substantially more than 600,000 American lives. It can perhaps be argued that the inability to feel the lash that strikes another man’s back is about the most expensive trait human beings can possess.
