Thomas Carlyle was, perhaps, the most important public intellectual in Victorian Britain. Central to his thought was the idea that Britain, and Western civilisation as a whole, had gone off the rails during the Enlightenment. Natural and proper hierarchy, which required dominance and rule of society by inherently superior kings and aristocrats, had been rejected in favour of democracy because traditional rulers had become incompetent. The “Hero”, who for Carlyle was the proper leader of society, was
he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary Trivial: his being is in that, he declares that abroad, by act of speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life… is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men’s life is – but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times: the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial because it cannot be hidden from them.
This extraordinary being, aware of his extraordinariness, is the natural ruler of society. He knows his place in the natural order, and recognizes it to be one of wisdom and authority. The ultimate hero, the hero as king, embodies the dignity of heaven and earth in his power of command. He is the “Able-man,” the one most fitted to rule – Carlyle, to make a long story mercifully short, incorrectly derives “king” from “can” – the one who naturally should be the ruler. The best form of government is that in which the ablest man rises to rulership with everyone submitting to him. Our task, once the ablest personage has been identified, is merely to do what he assigns to us “with right loyal thankfulness, and nothing doubting.” This system, Carlyle declares, is “the ideal of constitutions.”
Given this view of the proper political order, it is not surprising that Carlyle subscribed to a conception of humanity that was racially hierarchical, with white northwestern Europeans at the top, and Africans at the bottom. This was made most explicit by Carlyle’s notorious “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” initially published in Fraser’s Magazine in December 1849 and published, in an expanded version as a pamphlet in 1853.
The essay takes the form of an address to a fictional “Universal Abolition of Pain Association” meeting, like the societies which sought to abolish slavery and proselytize the non-white world, in Exeter Hall in London. The speaker warns his audience that they will not like the speech, and although some leave angrily, he eventually wins over the majority by his eloquence and the force of his argument.
The British government, the speaker explains, had spent twenty million pounds to end slavery in the West Indies and free a population that did not equal one of the Yorkshire ridings. As a result the “beautiful blacks” of the West Indies were sitting “up to the ears in pumpkins” while in Britain there were “doleful whites” without potatoes to eat. The West Indies were short of plantation labour because the black man could provide for himself with little effort, while the white man who “himself cannot work” was forced to import African indentured labour to keep the estates working. If the newly-imported Africans were to develop a taste for “pumpkins” the only remedy would be to import yet more labourers until the country was crowded with black people who would be forced by hunger to sell their labour – that is, to turn the West Indies into a black Ireland. Carlyle informs us that the forces that would bring about this horrible outcome were “Exeter Hall Philanthropy” and the “Dismal Science”, his pejorative term for political economy. This noxious combination would “give birth to progenies and prodigies, dark extensive moon-calves, unnamable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!” The monstrosity that had arisen in the British West Indies was the sight of a “Black gentleman” eating “pumpkins” and guzzling rum while around him formerly flourishing estates revert to jungle. To combat this would be simple, black people would have to be forced back into servitude, “to the sacred appointment of labour.” Indeed, the tacit, unconscious prayer of the idle “Nigger” was “compel me!”
For Carlyle, work was a requirement of natural law while eating pumpkins was not, and compulsion would make the black person happier. In fact, it was his right to be compelled to work and thus “to do the Maker’s will who has constructed him with such and such capabilities, and prefigurements of capabilities.” The Exeter Hall Methodists and Baptists, who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery, were thus portrayed as frustrating the will of their god who had created black people expressly to be servants. The “idleness” of black people in the West Indies, linked to their refusal to work on the plantations where they had been enslaved, appeared to Carlyle as a repudiation of the divinely ordained hierarchy of nature. Carlyle held that all men, white and black, of all stations, had the “divine right” to be compelled to do their appointed work. Under such compulsion the world would be perfect because it would be best ordered when the wisest men were at the head of affairs, and the rest ranked hierarchically below, down to the “Demerara Nigger” who was barely wiser than a horse. The world would be worst ordered when that “Demerara Nigger” had a vote equal to that of a Francis Bacon.
In the case of the West Indies, perfection would be attained by slaves producing spices, sugar, coffee and other plantation crops under the “beneficent whip” of their white masters. Otherwise, the West Indies would become a larger Haiti with “Black Peter exterminating Black Paul.” This would be tragic because the West Indies had been won through the expenditure of much English heroism, and that legacy should not be abandoned. Once the philanthropic nonsense of Exeter Hall had abated, planters would have to require corvée labour from the black population. It would take some time to determine the just terms under which the black people of the West Indies would be “servants for life”, but it was necessary to do this lest Britain lose the West Indies to “Brother Jonathan or still another” who would, unlike the “quack-ridden incompetents” that the English would have proved themselves to be, rule with beneficent whip.
Carlyle added twenty-three paragraphs to the text when he issued it as a pamphlet in 1853. In the intercalation, addressed to “Senator Hickory Buckskin,” Carlyle disavows any perniciously racist intent but reinforces his argument with an attack on the intolerable slavery of the strong to the weak, exemplified by democracy and founded on “Dismal Sciences, Statistics, Constitutional Philosophies and other Fool Gospels.” The main intent of the intercalated passage is to urge American politicians to retain slavery while making it “actually fair” through a “proper code of law” that would, inter alia, permit slaves to buy their freedom at a fixed sum as a safety-valve against revolt.
Even in Victorian Britain such racist rodomontade could not pass unchallenged. In a rival magazine, The Inquirer, a few days later, an anonymous commentator sharply attacked Carlyle’s notions, even though accepting some of his assumptions, such as the laziness of black people. That indolence, however, was not the result of an inherent depravity, but the product of three centuries of slavery and a sense of self-preservation. Carlyle’s essay appeared to this contemporary as a “true work of the Devil, the fostering of a tyrannical prejudice.
More importantly, there appeared in the next issue of Fraser’s a powerful and strongly-reasoned response to Carlyle, in the form of a long letter written by John Stuart Mill, using the pseudonym “D.” Mill saw nothing divine in being forced to work. It was simply an expression of the “old law of the strongest,” and if this law were divinely willed then it was a human duty to resist the gods who had willed it.
Mill attributed the abolition of slavery not to philanthropic sentiment but to a long struggle based on principles of justice and moral obligation. Over half a century the movement gathered more and more support until slavery was abolished and the black people of the West Indies obtained the freedom to live their own lives and to take their chances on the labour market:
These chances proved favourable to them, and for the last ten years they afford the unusual spectacle of a labouring class whose labour bears so high a price that they can exist in comfort on the wages of a comparatively small quantity of work. This, to the ex-slave-owners, is an inconvenience but I have not yet heard that any of them has been reduced to beg his bread, or even to dig for it as the negro, however scandalously he enjoys himself, still must; a carriage or some other luxury the less, is, in most cases, I believe the limit of their privations – no very hard measure of retributive justice, those who have had tyrannical power taken way from them, may think themselves fortunate if they come off so well.
Britain has no obligation, in Mill’s eyes, to help the planters maintain their lifestyles. To Carlyle, notes Mill, this is the “abomination of abominations;” he had read a description of a strike in a Blue Book and produced from it a picture of black indolence and inactivity drawn from the most extreme statements of the pro-slavery party before emancipation, even though the custom-house returns showed little change in production.
Mill follows this argument with a sharp, satirical attack on Carlyle’s “gospel of work,” contending, for his part, that work is not good in itself but merely necessary to sustain life. Rather, he argues that work should be reduced and shared more equally so that all can have the leisure to develop “the finer attributes of their nature.” In the case of the West Indies, if Carlyle wishes to have blacks compelled to work, then the product of their labour should also belong to them, and whites as well as blacks should experience “the divine right” of compulsory labour and receive “the same share in the produce that they have in the work.” In opposition to Carlyle’s argument for slavery, Mill has erected an argument for socialism. As for the “many thousands of British men,” the Sedgwicks, Braynes, Fortescues and so on whom Carlyle praises for having given their lives to obtain the West Indies for England whose bones lie under the soil of Jamaica, Mill demanded to know “how many hundred thousand” Africans shared that resting place with them. While Carlyle might contend that it was whites who developed the West Indies, Mill responds that those who did the actual work “really had something to do with the matter.” As for Carlyle’s argument that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and fitted merely to serve them: the fact that blacks had a less developed culture was a mere accident of history, and improvement by internal development was a rare phenomenon. Even if whites were naturally superior to blacks, still the whites would not have a right to compel the blacks to labour. Carlyle’s objective, Mill concludes, was not so much the restoration of slavery in the West Indies as to support the slave-owning party in the United States:
Circulated as his dissertation will probably be, by those whose interests profit by it, from one end of the American Union to the other, I hardly know of an act by which one person could have done so much mischief as this may probably do; and I hold that by thus acting he has made himself an instrument of what an able writer in the Inquirer justly calls “a true work of the devil.”
It would be wrong to dismiss the “Nigger Question” as a simple racist tract. Carlyle was warning England that a dismal fate awaited it if the natural pattern of creation, with its hierarchy of powers and abilities, continued to be violated. Beneath the overheated rhetoric lies a concern that degeneracy could spread from the West Indies to Britain. To prevent his, the rot has to be stopped at the source, in the West Indies. The abolition of slavery meant that limits had been imposed on those people who were best suited to rule, and the result was that the ruled, left to their own devices, had sunk into an abysmal torpor. The West Indian “nigger” is a living example of what the white could become if not brought to realize the enormity of the course being followed at home and abroad. The choices were clear: either restore aristocratic authority or see the mass of the population at home become white “niggers”
Mill’s attitude is the converse of Carlyle’s, and a forerunner of the Creole nationalism that was to emerge in the West Indies a few decades later. Rather than the English becoming more like West Indian blacks, the latter would come to resemble the English if given the opportunity so to do. Rather than deteriorating, conditions were improving, people were becoming more humane. The “occupation of the age” was the extirpation of the remaining forms of suffering imposed by some people on others. Freedom might not be the sole human need, but to point that out was not to advocate removing it.
Carlyle and Mill were to have another opportunity to debate the matter, with a concrete issue rather than an abstract concern before them. They did this in the 1860s as leaders of rival factions within the British intellectual establishment debating the actions of Edward John Eyre, governor of Jamaica, in suppressing the Morant Bay Rebellion of October 1865.
The revolt, led by Paul Bogle, a Native Baptist deacon and a smallholder in the hill village of Stony Gut in southeastern Jamaica, spread rapidly through the southeast of the island. Expeditious action by Governor Eyre, including the declaration of martial law in all eastern Jamaica, except Kingston, the calling out of the Maroons, and the rapid dispatch of troops overland and by sea, brought the rebellion under control. Within a few days, the rebels were defeated and their leaders captured. Martial law remained in effect for a month. It was this last fact, along with one other, which made the Morant Bay Rebellion into what became known as the “Governor Eyre Controversy”. The brutal suppression of the revolt – 439 people put to death for rebellion, 600 more flogged, and about a thousand cottages and houses burned – would have been cause for some concern. However, Eyre also transported George William Gordon, a radical biracial member of the colonial House of Assembly, from Kingston, where martial law had not been proclaimed, to Morant Bay where it was in effect. Gordon was tried by a totally unfair court martial, found guilty of “having conspired to foment insurrection,” sentenced to death, and hanged on 23 October, 1865.
Over the next three years, the Jamaica Affair, as it was also called, excited controversy over whether Eyre ought to be fêted as a hero or tried as a murderer. Britain’s intellectuals split into to factions on the issue. A “Jamaica Committee” formed to prosecute Eyre failed in its efforts, although Eyre was dismissed from the colonial service and had to wait several years before receiving a pension. The Jamaica Committee, led by Mill, included Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Lyell, Herbert Spencer, John Bright, Thomas Hughes, Francis Newman, Edmond Beales, Frederic Harrison, Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen, A.V. Dicey, T.H. Green, and Godwin Smith. Opposing them was an “Eyre Defence Committee” led by Carlyle, which included such notables as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, John Tyndall, and Joseph Dalton Hooker.
In his last political essay, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Carlyle argued that underlying civil law was a martial law that was anterior to and more valid than all other written law. Eyre should have been rewarded for having saved a valuable West Indian colony, rather than cast aside as a sacrifice to “rabid Nigger philanthropists”. Reflecting on a black revolt on the West Indian island of Dominica, Carlyle suggests that a solution to the problem would be the planting of a white colony in the mountains to dominate the blacks in the lowlands and place the whole under some sprig of nobility who would rule autocratically over the colony.
Mill, who was from 1865 to 1868 Member of Parliament for Westminster, took up the cudgels for the other side. Speaking in the House of Commons in July 1866, he condemned the cruelty with which the rebellion had been suppressed, comparing Eyre’s actions to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The primary issue for Mill was the right of British subjects to be tried by the civil courts rather than courts martial. In his view, race should not be a relevant issue when justice was at stake. In his Autobiography, Mill notes that the atrocities committed by Eyre and his subordinates had been defended “by the same kind of people who had so long upheld negro slavery.” The uprising itself had been a mere “disturbance in Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, and exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion.” The fundamental issue, both in the Autobiography and in his speech before Parliament, was whether British subjects “were to be under the government of law, or of military license,” this he regarded as a much larger question than the rights of black people, “imperative as was that consideration.”
In a sense, even though it was to involve the concrete case of the Morant Bay Rebellion, the Carlyle-Mill confrontation was about a comfortingly abstract issue: should people’s rights be dependent on such a factor as race? Crucial as this was to British rule in the West Indies, it was being contemplated from across the Atlantic by thinkers who never themselves set foot in the West Indies. Carlyle’s assumption of the inherent inferiority of black people was not based on observation of communities in which blacks predominated. Mill’s assumptions that blacks needed education and were entitled to the same rights as white subjects of the Crown was equally a matter of lofty contemplation from afar.
The title of the original article was “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”. The more offensive title by which it is known today was given to the 1853 pamphlet.
1 comment:
The best talk on Carlyle I ever saw.
The best talk on Carlyle I ever saw.
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