Facts thus patent are strongly suggestive of a decline. But whatever they may be in reality, even appearances were not always so. The American man was not always below the measure of his European progenitors, nor is he now so in all localities and under all conditions of associated life. Our American men of the Revolution “were larger and stronger,” says Mr. Cobbett, an English writer of that period, “than the British troops, and by that superiority made,” he further says, the result of that war “such as an English pen refuses to write.” (Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men, §§275, 276 and 277.) This is European authority. But it stands not alone, for we find it fortified in records of proportions, which show our generals of that period, with but one exception, to have been all above the avoirdupois of two hundred pounds. Compare this with the weight of our like officers of the present day, and the superiority, of greater development, will be unhesitatingly accorded to the men of Revolutionary times.
We learn of no distinctions then existing between the different sections of our country, but on the contrary, as the information reaches us, there is room for no other conclusion than that every where alike, our American men were “larger and stronger than the British troops.” Such is the information given us, but such are not the conditions now, for, while the Northern man is reported to be of less compass of body than the European, the men of most, if not all, of that country lying south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and above the feverish swamps of the gulf and the Mississippi River, have kept up to their Revolutionary standard. No one fact, concerning our Western people, is more patent to the observer on the banks of the Ohio River than the fact, that the Kentuckians are larger, taller, and heavier than the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who for eight hundred miles skirt their northern border. The same is true of the Virginians. They are larger, both in height and circumference than their northern neighbors; and in every other Southern State, with the exceptions above noticed, we understand, that a similar development among the higher orders of society exists.
An English tourist, who visited both the Northern and Southern armies during the late war, observed this greater development of the Southern men, and so reported it for Blackwood’s Magazine. But the fact is presented with probably more precision by the records of the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors, for more than twenty years, have been weighed, measured, and their nativities noted. These records, say our informers, showed a difference, before the war, of three inches in height and twenty pounds in weight in favor of the Southern over the Northern man.
Such facts can not too forcibly command the attention of every man who aspires to the distinction of making public laws. They show the men of the South, at the beginning of the late war, in the same proportions that they show the men of the whole republic in the days of our revolution, when all the States or colonies, North as well as South, held negro slaves. To what cause, then, are we to impute the greater development of the Anglo-American at those particular times, and in those particular localities, than to the institution of negro slavery?
But this development of the Americanized Caucasian under the relation of white master and negro slave, though a commanding fact in determining the application of laws to localities, is nevertheless but little, if any thing, more than a story half told; for in addition to the greater physical proportions of the individual man, the institution has given us our loftiest shoots of intellectual power. It has given us a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison, and, as its limits were national in the dawning period of our republic, an Adams, a Hamilton, a Franklin, and, in fact, almost every other intellect of which the nation is justly proud. It was this institution which gave lofty manhood to the American mind, and threw the glove of defiance at the feet of the great Herculian English power. It gave birth to a nation of freemen, and when cut down in its limits by Northern folly, fanaticism, and design, its remaining noblemen, with but one third of the republic in population, for half a century gave direction to it all. They were giants in debate, and by their superiority, in the clash of sections, stung the pride of the opinionated Yankee, who, brooding over his wounds, sought that redress in the physical clash of numbers which he could not obtain in the battle of mind. Then, when Northern numbers, swelled by immigration to overpowering proportions, he, in the true spirit of a low cunning, discovered that “The Union was no longer worth a cus without the letting of a little blood;” and, as a consequence, hurried on—in his security of numbers—his vaunted “Irrepressible conflict of contending and induring forces.”
There could be no retreat from a conflict “irrepressible” in its nature. The child begotten must be born, and when defiance responds to aggression, there must come the shock of arms. It did come, and with a force that now tells the world of the madness in which it was conceived. Armies have met and have fought. The storm of war has passed over the nation, and beneath its debris now lies the American man, overcome and subdued, not by individual superiority, but by the force of mighty numbers—the madmen of his own country, in alliance with a world of immigrants and imported mercenaries, arrayed in arms against him. It was a conflict of unequal numbers and resources. Still it was a mighty struggle, for it was that shock in which “comes the tug of war.”
The American man, who fought his battles alone, went down, but he fell, as he ever falls, from the lakes to the gulf, “with his back to the ground and his feet to the foe.” With a population of but five millions, and but poorly provided, he disputed, for four long and bloody years, every inch of ground, against the twenty-five millions, who, with all the engines of modern warfare, and with all Europe at their command for soldiers, hurled their mighty armies against him. But he fell, and why should he not have fallen, when the herring is known to have smothered the whale?
The native Indian was brave and undaunted—no Roman was his superior, until he was cowed and subdued by the superiority of the bayonet and bomb over his war-club and his arrows. He met his doom, resigned and unshaken, as fate determined it, and so, too, now does his Anglo-successor—a proof in nature that the American man is designed for a soldier and a master, and not for a serf or slave.
The transplanted European in America may lose a portion of his cellular tissue, under one form of association, and may regain it, or expand it, under another; the cause of which may not readily be comprehended. But there is one point, not of proportions, but of physical action, resulting from some cause, known or unknown, and alike common to all forms of association, which can not, we think, impress itself too forcibly on the mind of every American legislator. It is the undeniable fact, that the Anglo-American man has not the same endurance, as a drudge or laborer, that pertains to the European—that he is less enduring, and, as a consequence, in labor’s conflict, loses ground. He is more fleet, and may do more for a time, but at the end of the year the European will, as a general rule, subject, of course, to its exceptions, make the best report.
By this superiority is the American forced from the field of labor, and his place monopolized by the immigrant from abroad. Look around you, and see who do your work! Look to your railroads and canals; look through your workshops, to your various modes of transportation, and your menial services, and when you have done so, tell me if you can keep up a supply, or even man a single boat on the Western waters, without the aid of immigrated hands. Business, in fact, would stop in almost every department, requiring heavy labor, if the European man was taken away. Is not this a dependence reaching to the very foundation of that liberty of which the Americans, more than any other people, are most prolific in their boasts? Can a people be free who are dependent on another people, equals with themselves before the law, for all the necessaries which labor alone can produce? Mexico bows to a master from abroad; and the United States, through the folly of her legislators, now leans dependent on foreign hands.