“The Almighty has thought well to place certain of His creatures in certain fixed positions in this world of ours, for what cause He has not seen fit to make quite clear to our limited capacities; and why an ass is not a man, and a man is not an ass, will probably for ever remain a mystery.” “God made the world; God gave thee thy place, my hirsute brother, and, according to all earthly possibilities and probabilities, it is thy destiny there to remain, bray as thou wilt. From the same great power have our sable friends, Messrs. Sambo, Cuffee, & Co., received their position also.... Alas, my poor black brother! thou, like thy hirsute friend, must do thy braying in vain.”[66]
Are there laws on our statute-books to prevent asses from being taught to read?
The Richmond Examiner says—
“These immigrants do not, like our ancestors, fly from religious and political persecution; they come merely as animals in search of a richer and fresher pasture. They come to gratify physical want—for moral, intellectual, or religious wants they have not acquired. They will settle in large masses, and, for ages to come, will practise and inculcate a pure (or rather impure) materialism. Mormonism is a fit exponent, proof, and illustration of our theory. The mass of them are sensual, grovelling, low-minded agrarians, and nine-tenths of them would join the Mormons, or some such brutal, levelling sect, if an opportunity offered to do so.
“European writers describe a large class of population throughout England and the Continent as being distinguished by restless, wandering, nomadic habits, and by a peculiar conformation of the skull and face. Animal and sensual nature largely predominates, with them, over the moral and intellectual. It is they who commit crimes, fill prisons, and adorn the gallows. They will not submit to the restraints of law or religion, nor can they be educated. From their restless and lawless habits, we should infer they composed a large part of the northern immigration.”
If all this were true, and were felt by us to be true, should we think it necessary to put the minds of these beings in fetters? Should we hold it to be dangerous if one should undertake to strengthen their intellects, to give them larger ideas?
If all the slaves in the United States were “real Congo niggers,” which not one in a thousand is, and if all real Congo niggers were as incapable, and as beastly, and as savage in their propensities as the very worst of them are asserted to be, would the method of dealing with them which the legislation of the Slave States, and which a large part of the labour of the Congress and Executive of our nation is directed to the purpose of perpetuating, be felt to be strictly in accordance with sound and well-established economico-political principles? The purpose of that legislation is avowed to be merely to secure safety with economy. Would a project for establishing an institution planned upon the principles of the ancient Bedlam and the ancient Bridewell be felt to-day to be completely justified among us, by the statement that highwaymen and maniacs will endanger life and the security of our property if they are not somehow taken care of?
If there had been no Mettray with its Demetz, no Norfolk Island with its Machonochie, no Hanwell with its Connolly, no Abendberg with its Guggenbuhl; if the courage, devotion, and labour of Pinel, Sicard, and Seguin had been in vain; if there had been no progress in the science of civilized society since the days of Howard, we might listen with merely silent sadness to such, an excuse for debilitating the weak, for holding down the fallen; for permitting brutal keepers to exasperate the mad, and mercenary nurses to stupefy the idiotic; we might, if we saw it to be necessary to preserve a civilized community from destruction, even give its object our aid; but with the knowledge which in our time is everywhere else acted upon, it is impossible for us not to feel that such an argument is a specious and a fallacious one, and that no State can long act upon it with safety, much less with economy.
And surely the system by which intellectual demands and ambition are repressed in the negro is as little calculated to produce the security which is its object, as it is to turn his physical abilities to the most profitable use for his owner. How far it fails in this respect, the extra-legal measures of safety and the semi-instinctive habits of unconscious precaution which pervade Southern society evince. I say unconscious precaution, because Southerners themselves seem to have generally a very inadequate idea of the influence of slavery upon their habits in this way, and this is very natural.
“Every habit breeds unconsciousness of its existence in the mind of the man whom it controls, and this is more true of habits which involve our safety than of any others. The weary sailor aloft, on the look-out, may fall asleep; but, in the lurch of the ship, his hands will clench the swaying cordage only the more firmly, that they act in the method of instinct. A hard-hunted fugitive may nod in his saddle, but his knees will not unloose their hold upon his horse. Men who live in powder-mills are said to lose all conscious feeling of habitual insecurity; but visitors perceive that they have acquired a constant softness of manner and of voice.