“The Columbian Orator” inspirerade en av slaveriets främsta motståndare
Ett exemplar av “The Columbian Orator” på National Civil Rights Museum i Memphis, Tennessee.
År 1797 släpptes en samling dikter, politiska essäer, dialoger och utdrag från kända tal i det ganska nyligen formade USA. Samlingen gick under namnet “The Columbian Orator” och boken fungerade som undervisningsmaterial i amerikanska klassrum. Det brukar sägas att den lästes av i stort sett varje amerikansk skolpojke under 1800-talets första hälft.
Bland de 84 texterna fanns en som stack ut extra. Den heter ”Dialogue Between a Master and Slave” och beskriver just en dialog mellan en slavägare och en slav. Vad som var revolutionerande var att den gestaltar slaven som en vältalig och skicklig debattör – raka motsatsen till hur slavar vanligtvis framställdes. I samtalet argumenterar slaven för sin frihet, och vinner på varje punkt mot sin meningsmotståndare. Ett utdrag:
Master: ”It is in the order of Providence that one man should become subservient to another. It ever has been so, and ever will be. I found the custom, and did not make it.”
Slave: ”You cannot but be sensible, that the robber who puts a pistol to your breast may make just the same plea. Providence gives him a power over your life and property; it gave my enemies a power over my liberty. But it has also given me legs to escape with; and what should prevent me from using them? Nay, what should restrain me from retaliating the wrongs I have suffered, if a favorable occasion should offer?”
Master: “Gratitude; I repeat, gratitude! Have I not endeavored ever since I possessed you to alleviate your misfortunes by kind treatment; and does that confer no obligation? Consider how much worse your condition might have been under another master.”
Slave: “You have done nothing for me more than for your working cattle. Are they not well fed and tended? do you work them harder than your slaves? is not the rule of treating both designed only for your own advantage? You treat both your men and beast slaves better than some of your neighbors, because you are more prudent and wealthy than they.”
Master: You might add, more humane too.
Slave: “Humane! Does it deserve that appellation to keep your fellow-men in forced subjection, deprived of all exercise of their free will, liable to all the injuries that your own caprice, or the brutality of your overseers, may heap on them, and devoted, soul and body, only to your pleasure and emolument? Can gratitude take place between creatures in such a state, and the tyrant who holds them in it? Look at these limbs; are they not those of a man? Think that I have the spirit of a man too.”
Master: “But it was my intention not only to make your life tolerably comfortable at present, but to pro|vide for you in your old age.”
Slave: “Alas! is a life like mine, torn from country, friends, and all I held dear, and compelled to toil under the burning sun for a master, worth thinking about for old age? No; the sooner it ends, the sooner I shall obtain that relief for which my soul pants.”
Master: “Is it impossible, then, to hold you by any ties but those of constraint and severity?”
Slave: “It is impossible to make one, who has felt the value of freedom, acquiesce in being a slave.”
Master: “Suppose I were to restore you to your liberty, would you reckon that a favor?”
Slave: “The greatest: for although it would only be undoing a wrong, I know too well how few among mankind are capable of sacrificing interest to justice, not to prize the exertion when it is made.”
Master: “I do it, then; be free.”
Just den här texten skulle några decennier senare inspirera en av historiens mest inflytelserika amerikaner och en av abolitionismens viktigaste förkämpar. Mer om det i nästa inlägg.
Läs mer: ”The Influence of The Columbian Orator” av The E Pluribus Unum Project (Assumtion College).