But in order to understand the matter clearly, it is proposed to present the reader with the preliminary principles or facts, and inductive facts, that lead to this vital and all-important conclusion. It is all-important, not as demonstrating beyond doubt the vital and fundamental truth of distinct species, for that is a self-evident and indeed unavoidable truth that meets us at every step, and confronts our senses almost every hour or day of our lives. But mulattoism is a subject of stupendous importance in itself, and as the public are generally, and the “anti-slavery” writers especially, profoundly ignorant of it, and of all the laws that govern it, it is proposed to present the elementary principles or basis on which the whole subject rests.[[1]]
[1]. The author has devoted much time and labor to this interesting subject, and, together with his own and the observations of friends and correspondents, covering several thousand cases of the mixed blood, is able to deduce the general laws as stated in the text, and with entire confidence in their essential accuracy.
1st. In the case of the white man cohabiting with the negress, or “married” to a negro female, there will be a more limited progeny than if she were married to one of her own race.
2d. The mulatto offspring of this connection intermarrying with other hybrids, will exhibit still less virility.
3d. The offspring of the former again intermarrying with hybrids equally removed from the original parentage, shows a yet greater diminution of virile power.
4th. By still intermarrying with hybrids, and of a corresponding remove, virility is correspondingly decreased.
5th. Finally, the fourth generation of mulattoism is as absolutely sterile as muleism, and though there may be, at rare intervals, a possible exception, yet, in every practical sense, and for all the purposes of philosophic inquiry, it may be assumed as the natural and impassable barrier of this abnormal and exceptional form of being. Of the essential correctness of these laws, or their data, almost every one living in the South, or perhaps in the larger cities of the Middle States, will be able to satisfy himself, if he will take the trouble to investigate the matter. He need not pursue the subject to its ultimate end, or to an extent necessary to arrive at all the results here presented, but he may, with comparatively trifling attention to it, satisfy himself of the tendencies involved, and that there is somewhere at least approximating to these laws a fixed and absolute barrier beyond which mulattoism can not exist. All the dealers in “slaves” and many “slave owners” know this from observation and individual experience, and while entirely ignorant of any thing like the scientific formulæ here presented, not a few among the former have actually stated it to the author in total unconsciousness that either he or any one else had ever thus formalized the essential character of mulattoism. But there is a very important feature of this matter, which, not understood or overlooked, may lead astray those who undertake its investigation. As has been said, hybridity is a phenomenon to be tested and determined by the nature of the beings involved, and as it must be wholly different in the human creatures from that manifested in animals, and life is limited to four generations in the case of mulattoes, while the mule is confined to a single generation, so, too, must the mere quality or capacity of offspring be taken into consideration. The mule is remarkable for its powers of endurance—the mulatto for its fragility and incapacity to endure hardships. A northern climate is fatal to the negro, but the same climate is still more fatal to the hybrid, for his approximation to the Caucasian, and therefore capacity for a northern clime, is more than balanced by his constitutional tendencies to fragility and decay. Thus, of the ten thousand free negroes in Massachusetts, whom, “freedom” and climate together, were there no more external additions, must finally exterminate, the last man among them would be a typical negro, or, at all events, approximating nearest to the typical standard.
But it is in the female hybrid that this tendency to decay, or this vice of constitutional formation, is most apparent. Many of them are incapable of nourishing or taking care of their offspring, and, together with miscarriages and the numerous forms of disease connected with maternity, they are often found to have had a large number of children, not one of whom reached maturity. In taking into view, therefore, the sterility of mulattoism, we must have regard to its vices of formation as well as its limited virility, and that nature completes her processes, whether of growth or decay, through many different forms; and while mulattoism is as absolutely confined to four generations as mules are to a single generation, the former result is worked out through constitutional fragility and limited longevity as much, perhaps, as by an imperfect reproductive capacity.
It is seen, therefore, that Prichard and the European ethnologists made a radical mistake in this matter, and the very proofs which they relied on to establish their single-race theory, or that whites and negroes were of the same species, actually prove the precisely opposite fact, that they are of different species. Not only is the phenomenon of hybridity different in human beings, from that peculiar to animals, but it differs in the different races of the former. The author’s inquiries on this subject have been limited to the white and negro races or species, but the evidence presented to his observation, during the war with Mexico, was sufficiently authentic to warrant the conclusion that hybrids have greater tenacity of life, when the offspring of whites and aborigines, than in the case of whites and negroes. The former approximate closer to our own race, and it is only reasonable to suppose that, in precise proportion to this fact, or to this starting-point, is the hybrid offspring endowed with vitality; and the same rule may be applied with equal certainty to all the other species of men.
The sexual instinct, or the instinct of reproduction, is universal in animal existence. It is that which multiplies its kind, that peoples the earth and fills the world with innumerable tribes of beings and endless processions of generations, each after its kind exhibiting the same qualities and subject to the same laws as the original types, without the slightest atom of change, though countless generations intervene between them. In respect to human beings endowed with reason and moral feeling, it is evidently designed by the Almighty Creator of all that the instinct of reproduction should be held in subjection to those higher qualities. Nevertheless, instinct in respect to the sexual functions is strikingly manifest in the lower races of mankind.