Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.

by John H. Van Evrie

The features reflect the inner nature, the faculties or specific qualities, and they are distinct or indistinct, developed or undeveloped, as we ascend or descend in the scale of being. In the simpler forms of animal existence, there is close resemblance to vegetable life in this respect; but ascending to the vertebrata, and especially the mammalia, there is a broad distinction between the head and body, and instead of an undefined uniformity pervading the whole exterior surface, the face becomes a centre in which the essential character of the creature is written by the hand of Nature. It is true, that the general form of the body is significant of the grosser qualities. The muscular and motive forces of the horse are evidently designed for swiftness; those of the lion, and the felinæ generally, are designed both for strength and swiftness; while that of the ox and other mammalia is adapted to a negative kind of strength which results from a combination of all the physical forces, and not, as in the former case, from an excessive muscular development. But the higher qualities, even in animals, are legibly written in the face or features. In the human creation, of course, this external reflection of the inner nature in the features becomes vastly more distinct and real, and in our own race not unfrequently does the face become a very window of the soul, where may be read the sweetest and most exquisite emotions of a sensitive and delicate nature, or, as sometimes happens, the gross and sensual thoughts of a depraved and perverted one. There are, indeed, countless and innumerable variations in our own race in this respect. The white or Caucasian men of Asia, of Africa, Europe, and America, are so modified by climate, habits, government, religion, etc., that those ethnologists who are not anatomists have sometimes confounded them, and classed them as distinct species. Even on the same continent, in the same country, sometimes the same family, these variations are so marked that they always seem to belong to different species. The globular head, broad forehead, oval cheeks, straight nose, and distinct, well-defined lips and mouth, however, whatever may be the expression, always remain the same, and can never be confounded with any other race of men. And these modifications in the Caucasian are not confined to the face, but pervade the whole surface. White, black, and red hair, white skin and brown ones, blondes and brunettes, are often found in the same family. It is even so in regard to size—some are short and others tall—some pigmies while others are giants—and not unfrequently in the same household, while the same nation exhibits every possible variety in this respect. The Caucasian race alone presents these variations—the other races great uniformity; and the negro, lowest in the scale, presents an almost absolute resemblance to each other. Of all the millions that have existed on the earth, their hair not only in color but in form has been absolutely the same, and such a being as a different-colored or straight-haired, or long-haired negro never existed. On visiting a plantation at the South, one sees a thousand negroes so nearly alike, that except where wide differences of age exist, they are all alike, and even in size rarely depart from that standard uniformity that nature has stamped upon the race. The entire external surface, as well as his interior organism, differs radically from the Caucasian. His muscles, the form of the limbs, his feet, hands, pelvis, skeleton, all the organs of locomotion, give him an outward attitude that, while radically different from the Caucasian, approaches an almost absolute uniformity of character in the negro. His longitudinal head, narrow and receding forehead, flat nose, enormous lips and protuberant jaws, in short, his flat, shapeless and indistinct features strikingly approximate to the animal creation, and they are as utterly incapable of reflecting certain emotions as so much flesh and blood of any other portion of his body. The Almighty and All-Wise Creator has made all things perfect, and adapted the negro features, as well as those of the white man, to the inner nature, but if it were true that the negro had certain qualities with which ignorance and delusion would endow him, then it would be quite evident that the Almighty Creator had made a fatal blunder in this case, for it is clearly a matter of physical demonstration that the negro features cannot reflect these qualities. The features of the animal are made to express its wants, to reflect the nature God has given it. We witness this every day among our domestic animals—the cat, the dog, the horse, all exhibit their qualities, their wants, their moods, at different times their anger, suffering, and affection, all that their natures are capable of, are reflected in their faces, and we understand them. In our own race, the transparent skin, the deeply cut and distinct features become often a perfect mirror of the inner nature, and reflect the nicest shades of feeling as well as the deepest emotions of the soul. Envy, anger, pride, shame, scowling hate and malignant fear, as well as gentle affection and the most exalted love, are written as legibly in the face as if they were things of physical form, and their innumerable modifications and variations are witnessed all about us, and every day of our lives. How grandly this is displayed in the case of the orator! This must have been apparent to those who heard Mr. Clay in the Senate, and saw those wonderful changes of feature—one moment convulsed with anger, then lit up with genius, or with pride and pomp of conscious power, and in another reflecting, perhaps, all a woman’s sweetness or a child’s gentleness. Color, of course, is essential to this, for a display of the passions and emotions on the dark ground-work of the negro skin would be as impossible as a rainbow at midnight, but without the deeply cut and distinctly marked features of the Caucasian, color would be comparatively useless in reflecting the grander emotions of the soul. Any one referring to his own experience for a moment will see how impossible, as a mere physical matter, that the negro face can reflect the qualities attributed to him by those who are ignorant of his real nature. The narrow and receding forehead, the shallow eyes, flat nose, almost on a level with the cheeks, the protruding and enormous lips,—the only thing that really can be said to be distinct in the negro face,—the tout ensemble without form or meaning when contrasted with the white man, is, in connection with the color, the dark ground of the negro skin, clearly incapable of reflecting certain qualities of our own race. The negro has, of course, moral emotions, as have all human creatures, and his face, like that of the Caucasian, is capable of reflecting all his wants, his likes and dislikes, his hopes and fears, but every one who has seen him must know that the higher qualities of the Caucasian cannot find expression in the negro features, and therefore he does not possess those qualities, or, as has been said, the All-Wise and Almighty Creator of all has committed a fatal mistake, and unjustly endowed him with qualities which he is forever forbidden to express!

CHAPTER IX.
LANGUAGE.

A few years since, an eminent historian, in a public lecture, discussed the probabilities of a universal language as an instrument of universal history, and as means for the universal civilization of mankind! Another public lecturer discussing this subject, and on a professedly scientific basis, held that language had a miraculous origin, though the period when this supernatural gift was conferred on man was left wholly to the imagination of his audience. Others, and among them Buffon, Pritchard, and even several ethnologists, have scarcely risen above this nonsense, while their uses or application of this faculty have been vastly more injurious to science than even their original misconceptions on the general subject.

Language is naturally divided into two distinct and widely separated portions, having no necessary connection, though at certain points or stages uniting and combining together. First, is that universal capacity of expressing itself—its wants, its sufferings, and its enjoyments—which God has given to all His creatures, from the insect at our feet to the Caucasian man standing at the head of this vast and innumerable host of living beings. In the second place, in its structure and arrangement into parts or portions of speech; in short, its grammatical construction. With the former it is alone or mainly proposed to deal in this place, though it will be necessary occasionally to refer to the latter. As has been said, all living or rather all animal beings have the faculty of expressing their wants, and they have a vocal organism in exact correspondence with these wants and the purposes for which they are designed by the common Creator of all. Except to a few laborious and enthusiastic students of natural history, the vast world of insect life is a terra incognita, but each one of these myriad of beings is adapted to some specific purpose and beneficently designed by the Almighty Master of Life for the same universal enjoyment which is so distinctly revealed as the end of their existence in the more elaborately organized and higher endowed classes of animal being. And millions of these minute and often unseen creatures are daily and hourly singing praises to the Almighty Creator for His infinite goodness, rendering the fields and forests vocal with the music of their gratitude and the exuberance of their enjoyment. As we ascend in the scale of animated existence, the vocal faculty or language becomes still more distinctly revealed, with a vocal apparatus or organism in exact correspondence with the function or faculty that God has given to the being in question. The pigeon, of course, cannot give us the notes of the canary bird, nor the owl sing the songs of the nightingale. The serpent cannot exchange his hiss for the growl of the tiger, nor the ass abandon its uncouth utterances for the mighty roar or the majestic voice of the lion. Each is permitted to express its wants, its sufferings, and its joys, and each is provided with a vocal organism specific and peculiar to itself and to its kind, and in accord with the universal law of adaptation which inseparably unites organism with function. This, then, in its elementary form, is language—a faculty common to the animal world, and a necessity of animal existence. It differs in no essential respect in regard to human beings, or it varies no more from that of the animal world than other functions or faculties of the human being. There is, it is true, a point of departure or divergence where the analogies of the animal world are no longer applicable to human beings, or where animal beings cannot furnish parallels for those endowed with a moral nature and destined for immortality; but a vocal organism with its corresponding faculty or function is essentially the same thing in both, and differs only in form and degree among the innumerable beings that compose or are comprised within the vast world of animated existence. While language, therefore, the voice or faculty by which animals as well as human beings express their wants, is universal and only varied as the structure and nature are varied, and while the vocal organism is in exact harmony with the faculty or function in all cases and in every phase of animated existence, there is also, and of necessity, a specific modification of this faculty in the case of the several human races or species. The vocal organs of the negro differ widely from those of the white man, and of course there is a corresponding difference in the language. The specific or the most essential feature of the negro nature is his imitative instincts, or his capacity for imitating the qualities and for acquiring the habitudes of the white man. This, of course, is limited to his actual juxtaposition with the superior race, for aside from that organic necessity which utterly forbids its being otherwise, there is no historical fact better attested than that which shows him invariably relapsing into savageism whenever he is left without the restraining support of the former. But for wise and beneficent purposes, God has endowed him with a capacity of imitation, and he is enabled to apply it to such an extent that those ignorant of the negro nature actually offer it as a proof of his equal capacity! But with all his power to thus imitate the habits and to copy the language of the white man, it is not possible that a single example can be furnished of his success in regard to the latter. With us, and especially at the North, all are negroes who are tainted with negro blood, and thus many persons will imagine that they have seen negroes who were as competent to speak our language as white men themselves. But no actual or typical negro will be able—no matter what pains have been taken to “educate” him—to speak the language of the white man with absolute correctness. European ethnologists have, notwithstanding, sought to make language the means for tracing the history and determining the character of races, the worthlessness and indeed the absurdity of which only needs a single illustration to expose it. The negroes of Hayti have imitated or copied the language of their former masters, the French, therefore they are of the same race, and the future ethnologists would pronounce them Frenchmen! As the negro cannot preserve anything that he copies from the Caucasian beyond a certain period, the negroes of that island are rapidly losing all that they obtained from their former masters, and though the educated portion on the coasts, and especially the mongrels, yet retain the French language, those in the interior are rapidly relapsing into their native African tongue. And a century or two hence, when the French is entirely extinct and the existing negro population speak an African dialect, or what is far more probable, speak our own, the ethnological enquirer would decide that those led by Touissant and Christophe in the war of “Independence” were Frenchmen instead of Negroes, because, forsooth, the public documents of the time showed they spoke the French language! Thus, while language is an important means for tracing nationalities or varieties of our own race, as, for example, the modern Spanish, French, Italian, etc., in connection with the great Latin family of southern Europe, it is simply absurd to apply it to distinct species like Caucasians and negroes. Each race or each species, as each and every other form of life, is in perfect harmony with itself, and therefore the voice of the negro, both in its tones and its structure, varies just as widely from that of the white man as any other feature or faculty of the negro being. Any one accustomed to negroes would distinguish the negro voice at night among any number of those of white men by its tones alone, and without regard to his peculiar utterances. Tones or mere sounds are of course indescribable, and therefore no comparison in this respect is possible, but all those familiar with the tones of the negro voice know that it is never musical or capable of those soft and sweet inflections or modulations common to our own race. Music is to the negro an impossible art, and therefore such a thing as a negro singer is unknown. It is true that, a few years since, certain amiable people, both at the North and in England, believed for a time that they had secured a prodigy of this kind in the person of the “Black Swan,” but after a careful and patient trial, it was found to be a mistake. She was not even a negress, though perhaps of predominating negro blood, and was aided and encouraged by every possible means, especially in England, where she was actually placed under the care of Queen Victoria’s music master, but without avail—Nature was superior to art—the laws of God more potent than those of human invention—and the “Black Swan” finally disappeared from public view. The negro is fond of music, as are all other beings, and indeed all animal beings of the more elevated classes, but music is to him merely a thing of the senses. With the white race music is perceived as well as felt—an intellectual as well as sensuous thing—and though it by no means follows that intellectual persons, with minds above the common average, should also have musical powers, that sensitive and exquisite organization which is necessary to a musical genius must be united with a brain of corresponding complexity. The brain and the nerves constitute a whole—a system—however widely portions of the latter may diverge in their especial functions, and it is as impossible that the musical temperament, or that the elaborate and exquisitely sensuous system of the Caucasian could be united with the brain of the negro, as it would be to unite the color of the former with the negro structure. The negro, therefore, neither perceives nor can he give expression to music—he has neither the brain nor the delicacy of nerve nor the vocal organism that is essential to this faculty—all that is possible to him is a certain approximation through his wonderful powers of imitation, but which is less available to him in this respect perhaps than any other. His brain is much smaller, but his nerves are much larger, and his senses are consequently much more acute, and here is the cause of that “musical power” with which ignorant and mistaken persons have endowed him. Music is felt by the nerves rather than perceived by the brain, in his feet as much as in his head, and with an intensity unknown and unfelt by whites. His imitative instinct enables him to rapidly acquire the language of his master, but he also loses it with similar rapidity. The negroes imported to the West India Islands, though living on large plantations, soon acquired the language of the few whites, so far as words were concerned, but an organic necessity compelled them to retain the structure of their original tongue. Thus, those in British islands spoke English, in French islands, French, etc., but the general structure remained the same in all, and now, when the external force applied by the several European governments has removed the control and guidance of the superior race, they are rapidly losing the words of their former masters, and in this as well as every other respect returning to their native Africanism. In Hayti, where the imitative capacity has little or nothing to stimulate it, this process is very rapid indeed, and could they be entirely isolated, the utter extinction of the French language would doubtless occur within the present century.

CHAPTER X.
THE SENSES.

The senses are those special organisms that connect us with the outer world through which external impressions are received and transmitted to the brain—the great sensorium or centre of the nervous system. They are popularly designated as sight, hearing, smelling, touch, and taste, each having its own peculiar organism; some, as sight, exceedingly elaborate, and others, like taste, quite simple, being little more than a delicate expansion of nervous matter spread upon the tongue and lining the inner surface of the mouth. The nervous system includes the brain and the nerves, but is, in fact, an indivisible whole, of which the brain forms the centre, and the nerves the circumference, in exact proportion as we ascend in the scale of being. The centre of the nervous system is increased and the circumference diminished as the brain becomes larger and the nerves smaller. Among quadrupeds—the horse, for example—the nerves are enormously large in comparison with the brain of that animal; and this holds good throughout, so that an intelligent physiologist might determine the possible capabilities of any of the higher order of animals by a simple comparison of the brain and nerves. And in the human creation a single skull of a Mongol, or Malay, or Negro, and especially of the latter, should be quite sufficient to enable a physiologist to comprehend the essential character of the race to which it belonged. True, he might, as has often happened, mistake it for an abnormal specimen of the Caucasian, and thus display a vast amount of learned nonsense of the Gall-Spurzheim order, but if he knew it to be an actual negro skull, and then compared it with that of the Caucasian, he should be able not only to determine the intellectual inferiority, but the vastly preponderating sensualism of the former. He would see that the relatively small cerebrum, and the large cerebellum, must be united with a corresponding development of the senses, and a comparatively dominating sensualism. The mere organism of the senses, of sight, hearing, etc., though of course differing widely from those of the Caucasian, it is not necessary to describe, for even in animals of the higher class there is a certain resemblance, and the student of anatomy studies the mechanism of the eye in the ox or horse as satisfactorily as in that of the human creature.

The organisms while thus, in a sense, similar—of the eye, for example—in whites and negroes, is more elaborately and delicately constituted in the case of the former, and therefore it is also vastly more liable to disease, to congenital defects, to strabismus, etc., and especially short-sightedness. The negro, on the contrary, rarely suffers from these things, or even from inflammation of the eyes, so common among white people, and though, in keeping with the imitative instinct of the race, the negro “preacher” dons spectacles as well as white neck-cloth, it may be doubted if there ever was a case of near-sightedness in the typical negro. Though in extreme old age they doubtless lose the power of vision common to their youth, it is rare that negroes need spectacles at any age. The organism is supplied with a larger portion of nervous matter than in the case of the whites, and the function or sense is thus endowed with a strength and acuteness vastly greater than are the senses of the Caucasian. Travelers and others mingling among savages, Indians, negroes, etc., have observed the extraordinary power and acuteness of the external senses, and have supposed that this was a result of their savage condition, which, calling for a constant exercise of these faculties, gave them an extraordinary development. And Pritchard, carrying this theory or notion to an extreme, inferred that men were originally created negroes, for the exigencies of savage life demanded, as he supposed, a black color as well as acuteness of the senses! Doubtless the civilized negro of America ordinarily displays less strength and acuteness of sense than his wild brother of Africa, but he is born with the same faculties, and were the surrounding circumstances changed so as to call them into more active exercise, he would exhibit similar characteristics.

The Almighty Creator, with infinite wisdom, has adapted all His creatures to the ends or purposes of their creation. The Caucasian or white man, with his large brain and elevated reasoning powers, is thus provided with all that is necessary to guard his safety and to increase his happiness. Inferior races, with smaller brains and feebler mental powers are endowed with strength and acuteness of the external senses which enable them to contend specifically with surrounding circumstances and to provide for their safety. This is strikingly manifest in the North American Indian who marks or makes a trail in the forest which he follows with unerring confidence, though the eye of the white man sees nothing whatever. The descriptions of Indian character in Cooper’s novels are in these respects perfectly correct and true to nature, as are all those of the Indianized white man, Leather-Stocking, Hawkeye, etc. The one depends upon his senses—his sight, hearing, etc., the other on his powers of reasoning or reflection, which in the end enable him to “sarcumvent” his Huron enemies and to win the victory. Each, according to his “gifts,” is able to fulfil the purposes of his creation, and while the superior intelligence of the Caucasian is spreading that race, with its benign and civilizing consequences, over the whole northern continent, the strength and acuteness of his senses have enabled the Indian to resist to a degree all these mighty forces for three hundred years.

Some historians have advanced the notion that Rome was overrun by northern barbarians, similar to our North American Indians, but if the mighty hordes led by Alaric and Genseric to the conquest of Italy, had been Indians, not one would have escaped to tell the tale of their destruction. A high civilization, rotten at heart, falls an easy conquest to ruder and more simple communities of the same race—thus, the effete and corrupt Roman aristocracy fell before the simple and rude populations of Northern Europe, as the polished and scholastic Greeks had succumbed to the Romans, when the latter practised the simple and hardy virtues of their earlier history. In our own times we have seen Spain, long ruled over by an effete and worn-out aristocracy, sink from a first class to a fourth rate power, while France, relieved from the dead weight of “nobility,” has in half a century become the leading power of the world. And if the English masses have not sufficient vitality to cast off the mighty pressure of a diseased and effete aristocracy by an internal reform like that which the French passed through in 1789, then it is certain that, at no distant day, the nation will fall a conquest to some external power that has greater vitality than itself, however deficient it may be in wealth and learning, and those refinements that pass for high civilization. But while nations ruled over by privileged classes thus carry within them the seeds of their own destruction, and sooner or later fall a conquest to ruder and simpler societies, the intellectual superiority of the white man always enables him to conquer inferior races, whatever may be the disparity of numbers, and Clive with three thousand Europeans, attacking the Hindoo horde of one hundred thousand, or Cortez invading Mexico with five hundred followers, amply illustrates the natural supremacy of the Caucasian race. But, on the contrary, if the Aztecs had had the intellectual capacity of the Caucasian superadded to their own specific qualities—the strength and acuteness of the senses—common to the native race, not alone would Cortez have failed to conquer them, but it may be doubted if all Europe, combined together for that purpose, could have accomplished it.

There are no examples for testing the capabilities of negroes in these respects, for there is no instance in history where they have contested the supremacy of the white man, the insurrection in Hayti having been the work of the “colored people” and mulattoes, and the negroes only forced into it by their fears after the outbreak was complete. But we have the actual physical facts as well as our every-day experience of the negro qualities, and therefore can arrive at positive truth when comparing him with the superior race. The large distribution of nervous matter to the organs of sense and consequent dominating sensualism (not mere animalism), is the direct cause of that extreme sloth and indolence universal with the race. The small brain and limited reasoning power of the negro render him incapable of comprehending the wants of the future, while the sloth dependent on the dominating sensualism, together with strong animal appetites impelling him always to gross self-indulgence, render a master guide or protector essential to his own welfare. Indeed it may be matter of doubt which is the paramount cause of the negro’s inability to provide for future necessities—his limited reasoning power or his indolence—his small brain or his dominating sensualism. It is a statistical fact that “free” negroes do not produce sufficient for their support, and consequently that they tend perpetually to extinction, and when it is remembered that the small brain and feeble intellectual power render them incapable of reasoning on the future rewards of self-denial, and that the large distribution of nervous matter in the organs of sense, and the consequent sensualism impels them to gross indulgence of the present, and moreover that they are in juxtaposition, and must contend with white people, then it is plain enough to see that it could not be otherwise, and that the total extinction of these unfortunate beings is necessarily a question of time alone.