A summer on the borders of the Caribbean sea.

by J. Dennis Harris

A retired merchant of Philadelphia, a man of large thought and liberal views, having an experience of fifteen or twenty years’ residence in Hayti, in reply to certain letters asking for information and advice respecting the subject now under consideration, published a pamphlet in which he says: “There is a long view as well as a short view to be taken of every great question which bears upon human progress; but we are often unable or unwilling to take the former, until some time after a question is settled.

“‘Manifest destiny’ has been, for some years, a familiar and accepted phrase in the mouths of our politicians, and each class suggests a plan for carrying it out in accordance with its own specific interests, or some preconceived theory. The pro-slavery adventurer may yet gain a footing in Central America, but it will not be to establish slavery. Slavery once abolished, has never been reëstablished in the same place, in America, except in one instance—that of the smaller French colonies, now again free. The vain effort to reënslave St. Domingo cost the French forty thousand men. The free negro, that nothing else can arouse, will fight against the replacement of the yoke which he has once thrown off; and the number of these in Central America is sufficient to prove a stumbling-block if not a barrier to its return. To reëstablish slavery permanently, where it has once been abolished, is to swim against the great moral current of the age.

“We can acknowledge to-day that the persecution of the Puritans by Laud and his predecessors, only intended, as it was, to produce conformity to the Church, really produced New England. And we can now see that the obstinacy of George the Third was as much a cause of the Declaration of Independence, at the time it was made, as the perseverance of John Adams,—the one being the necessary counterpart of the other, the two together forming the entire implement which clipped the tie. Now if we can make the above admissions in respect to these, the two greatest settled questions of modern times, without excusing either persecution or obstinacy in wrong, but keeping steadily in view that every man is responsible for the motives which govern his conduct, be the result of that conduct what it may, why should we not begin to look at this, the third great question of the same class, still unsettled, from the same point of view?

“If, then, I were asked what was probably the final purpose of negro slavery, I should answer—To furnish the basis of a free population for the tropics of America.

“I believe that the Anglo-Americans, with the Africans, whom a part of the former now hold in bondage, will one day unite to form this race for the tropics, with or without combination with the races already there. But whether the African quota of it shall be transferred thither by convulsive or organized movements—or be gradually thinned out from their present abode, as from a great nursery, by directed but spontaneous transition—or retire, by degrees, with the ‘poor whites,’ before the peaceful encroachments of robust Northern labor, it would be useless now to conjecture. It is enough now to know that labor, like capital, goes in the end to the place where it is most wanted; and that labor, free from the destructive element of caste, has been, and still is, the great desideratum of the tropics, as it is of all other places which do not already possess it. I have already spoken of the presumed ability of the Southern States to spare this kind of labor. Should there, however, prove to be any part of the Union where the climate or the culture really requires the labor of the black man, then there he will remain, and eventually be absorbed by the dominant race; and from that point the complexion of our population will begin to shade off into that of the dark belt of Anglo-Africans, which will then extend across the northern tropics.

“I know that most of our Northern people, while they demand, in the strongest terms, all the rights of man for the negro or mulatto, are unable to eradicate from their minds a deeply-grounded prejudice against his person. In spite of themselves, they shrink from the thought of an amalgamation such as the foregoing observations imply. But these friends are not aware how quickly this prejudice begins to melt away as soon as one has entered any part of the tropics where the African race is in the ascendant, or where people of colored blood have attained to such social consideration as to make themselves respected. I suppose no Northern man ever forgets the occasion when, for the first time, he arrives at such a place, and the colored merchant to whom he is addressed comes forward, with the self-possession which attends self-respect, and offers him his hand. He begins to be healed of his prejudice from that hour.”

I am also aware that the notion prevails generally in the United States that the mulatto has no vitality of race; that after three or four generations he dies out. This idea, I believe, finds its strongest advocates among the slaveholders and the readers of De Bow’s “Review,” and possibly it may be correct when applied to the colder latitudes; but I have no reason to think it is so in or near the tropics. Moreau de St. Mery, in his minute “Description of the French part of St. Domingo,” says, with respect to the vitality of the mulatto, which term includes all persons of color, however slight, of mixed European and African descent: “Of all the combinations of white and black, the mulatto unites the most physical advantages. It is he who derives the strongest constitution from these crossings of race, and who is the best suited to the climate of St. Domingo. To the strength and soberness of the negro he adds the grace of form and intelligence of the whites, and of all the human beings of St. Domingo he is the longest lived.... I have already said they are well made and very intelligent; but they are as much given to idleness and love of repose as the negro.”

Hermann Burmeister, Professor of Zoölogy in the University of Halle, who spent fourteen months, in 1850-51, in studying at Brazil the “Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the American Negro,” speaks thus of the Brazilian mulatto: “The greatest number of the colored inhabitants of Brazil are of the negro and European races, called mulattoes. It may be asserted that the inferior classes of the free population are composed of such. If ever there should be a republic, such as exists in the United States of America, as it is the aim of a numerous party in Brazil to establish, the whole class of artisans would doubtless consist of a colored population. * * * Already in every village and town the mulattoes are in the ascendant, and the traveller comes in contact with more of them than of whites.” There is nothing in these extracts, or in the essay from which they are taken, to indicate that the Brazilian mulatto is dying out. These are the observations of a patient investigator and man of science, and they have the more value, inasmuch as they were not set down to support any particular theory. The Professor speaks elsewhere in high but qualified terms of the moral and intellectual qualities of the mulatto, coming to conclusions similar to those of Moreau de St. Mery, except that he does not accuse them of indolence.

The author of “Remarks on Hayti and the Mulatto,” whose experience as a merchant I have mentioned, further says:

“This race, if on the white side it derives its blood from either the English or French stock, possesses within itself a combination of all the mental and physical qualities necessary to form a civilized and progressive population for the tropics, and it is the only race yet found of which this can be said.”