When white men—travelers and explorers—suddenly make their appearance in African villages, where they were never before seen, the females run and hide themselves from their sight; and among the multitude of white prisoners captured by the aborigines of this continent, there has probably never been an instance of the violation of their persons by their savage captors. In respect to the so-called insurrection of negroes in Hayti or San Domingo, where, though all of the white blood, men, women, and children in their nurses’ arms were remorselessly butchered by the terror-stricken blacks, there are no authenticated instances of the violation of white females.
A negro insurrection—that is, a revolt of the negro from the rule of the white man, to obtain the liberty of the latter—is simply nonsensical: as entirely so as to suppose an insurrection to obtain the complexion or any other physical attribute of the superior race; but should some white miscreant, as attempted lately at Harper’s Ferry, delude “slaves” to slaughter the families of their masters, there need be little or no apprehension in respect to that hideous and monstrous idea so prominent in abolition writings—the violation of the persons of white females. It is true, hybrids and mongrels might perpetrate such monstrous crimes, but the negro—the typical, pure-blooded negro—driven on by his fears and dread of the master race, would only seek its extermination, never the indulgence to him of such unnatural propensities.
The instinct of reproduction in animals is governed by fixed laws; but, as has been said, designed by the common Creator to be ruled by the reason and subjected to the moral affections in the higher human nature; nevertheless, the ignorance and corruption of our social life have perverted these designs, and covered society with blotches and ulcers horrible to contemplate. In this city alone there are said to be ten thousand prostitutes—lost creatures, so lost that nature denies them offspring, to reproduce themselves, to form a link or have a place in the mighty processions of their kind, that stand out distinct and accursed, dead though alive. And yet each of these blasted ones was created with capacities of love, of affection, of receiving and conferring happiness boundless and measureless. God made them pure and beautiful, and man has transformed them into beings so vile, that their very existence must not be recognized by the pure and virtuous! God created them but a little lower than the angels—man has perverted them into something scarcely better than devils!
What an awful perversion of the instincts of reproduction—of that great vital and fundamental law which animals obey without any violation of it, but which we, in our lofty nature and God-given powers, have thus transformed into such hideous shapes and worked into such sickening and diseased results! The sexes are equal in numbers, and therefore nature designs that all men should marry—that one man should be united to one woman—that they should always be attracted to each other by the affections, and, in their love and companionship, their care for their offspring, for their home and its sweet enjoyments, it offers them rewards the purest, the most exalted, as well as the most rational, that our being is capable of feeling. And yet the sad spectacle is presented every day and all about us, that that which God designed should be the source of our greatest happiness is perverted into the most loathsome and most hideous of social miseries! What may be the causes or the principal causes (for there are doubtless many) of this hideous ulcer at the very heart of modern society, it is needless to inquire—the actual or proximate cause is the perversion of the sexual laws—the violation of the instincts of reproduction wholly unknown among animals and comparatively unknown among the subordinate races of mankind. It is the proud Caucasian—the large-brained and gloriously endowed Caucasian—who mostly exhibits this terrible crime against the higher law, and who thus awfully sins against God and his own nature. Such a thing as prostitution is unknown among negroes—among the aborigines of this continent, and scarcely perceptible among Mongols or Chinese. There are, it is true, great vices, shocking indecencies and beastly practices among the Mongols and other subordinate races, but prostitution—the indiscriminate sale of the bodies as well as the desecration of the souls of women for money, as practiced openly in all the great centres of Christendom, is peculiar to the Caucasian alone—to that exalted and highly endowed race which God has so gifted and placed at the head of all other races of mankind.
Mulattoism is to the South what prostitution is to the North—that is, those depraved persons who give themselves up to a wicked perversion of the sexual instincts, resort to the mongrel or “colored women” instead of houses of ill-fame, as in the former case. Such a thing as love, or natural affection, never has nor can attract persons of different races, and therefore all the cohabitations of white men and negro women are abnormal—a perversion of the instincts of reproduction. This “original sin,” as it may well be termed, carries with it, by inevitable necessity, certain consequences, and the declaration of Holy Writ, that the children are punished to the third and fourth generation for the sins of their fathers, is literally true in a physiological sense. The precise laws governing the generation of mulattoism have been already stated, and need not be repeated in this place, but it may be well to remember that the offspring constantly diminishes when hybrids intermarry with hybrids of the same remove, until, reaching the fourth generation, it loses all generative capacity as absolutely as the mule. With this radical and fundamental vice of organization, it will be readily seen that mongrelism can never become an important or dangerous element of population. Mr. Clay once advanced the opinion that the mixed blood of the South was rapidly increasing, and therefore a time would probably come when the negro blood would be absorbed by the whites, and the negro life be utterly extinct. The ignorant abolition writers have made much of this opinion of Mr. Clay, but whatever the general intellectual superiority of that distinguished gentleman, any common sense person must know that his ignorance of the laws of organization renders his opinion on this subject of no value whatever. Two hundred or one hundred years ago, the proportion of the sexes among the white people was doubtless less equal than now, and therefore those abnormal cohabitations of white men with negro women were more frequent than at present. But after a certain amount or number of the mixed blood these cohabitations would take that direction, and, as at present, would be mainly confined to the hybrid and “colored” women. And in view of the fragility, sterility, and almost universal tendency to disease and disorganization in this mixed and mongrel element, it is seen at a glance how impossible it is that it should ever be of sufficient amount to threaten the safety or even to disturb the peace of Southern society. In proportion to the normal population or to the pure blood, it is doubtless less than it was fifty years ago, and it may even become less in the future, but it is wholly and absolutely impossible that it can ever exist in larger proportion than at present.
This vicious intercourse with the mongrel women at the South, of course, has no resemblance or relation to amalgamation; but it is ignorantly or wilfully thus confounded by the abolition writers of the day. Amalgamation is reciprocal union of the sexes, such as that between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons in England—that occurs constantly between the natives of this country and those who have migrated here from Europe, and indeed as occurred in Mexico and other Spanish provinces, where the Spanish conquerors, who brought few Spanish females with them, sought wives among the natives or Indian races. The white blood of the South, like that of the North, is pure and untainted, and a white woman so lost and degraded as to mate with a negro, would not be permitted to even live among negroes in a Southern community. Occasionally a monstrous indecency of this kind does occur at the North, but they are usually English or other foreign-born persons, and unless there was some moral or physical cause—some disease of body or mind which rendered her incapable of self-guidance, it can hardly be supposed that an American-born woman ever committed such an indecent outrage upon her own womanhood, and sin against God, as to mate with a negro. At the South, as has been said, such a thing is altogether impossible, for the woman would not alone be driven from the society of her own race, as at the North, but she would not be permitted (if known) to live even among negroes! Amalgamation can never occur at the South, and scarcely needs an exposition in this place; but as it is now actually taking place in Jamaica and other islands, and, to a certain extent in Cuba, and, moreover, such a monstrous social cataclysm is necessarily involved in the theory or idea of the abolition of “slavery,” it is well enough, perhaps, to give it an explanation.
There are about four millions of negroes in this country, and if, for the purposes of illustration, we may suppose the theory of anti-slaveryism to be finally reduced to practice, the following results must or would occur:—Four millions of whites would form marital unions with these negroes—the men taking negresses to wife, and the females negroes for husbands, ending with the next generation, of course, in mulattoes and the extinction of negroes. The third generation would absorb the mulattoes and end in quadroons; the fourth generation would manifest a corresponding diminution, and a time come when every atom of negro blood would disappear as utterly as if there had never been a negro on this continent. The popular notion would be, perhaps, like that of Mr. Clay, that amalgamation of the races would absorb the negro blood, it being the smaller element, and this would remain forever floating in the veins of posterity. But this could not be: it would die out, and in time become totally extinct.
If, for example, one hundred of the leading and influential Abolitionists of the day should practically live out their own doctrines—should be placed on some island in the Pacific Ocean, each with a negress as wife, and utterly excluded from intercourse of any kind with the rest of mankind, they and their posterity would, after a certain time, utterly perish from existence. In the second generation whites and negroes alike would be extinct—that which the hand of the Eternal had fashioned, fixed, and designed for His glory and the happiness of His creatures would be blotched, deformed, and transformed by their own wickedness into mulattoes, and could no more exist beyond a given period than any other physical degeneration, no more than tumors, cancers, or other abnormal growths or physical disease can become permanent conditions. The fourth generation, as stated elsewhere, with diminished and diminishing vitality, would impart such feeble glimmerings of life, that their immediate progeny would be as absolutely limited in their powers of virility as mules, and the whole mass of disease and corruption would disappear from the earth, which God has forbidden it to desecrate any longer by its foul and disgusting presence.[[2]] But contemplating the subject in mass, or practical abolitionism, as it would work itself out among the millions, if we are permitted, for the purposes of illustration, to suppose such a monstrous and stupendous crime against God and our own being as the actual and practical development of the theory, widely different results would naturally follow. As has been said, four millions of our own white race would be involved in this monstrous maelstrom of amalgamation with the subject race, while the remaining twenty millions would be left untouched and unpolluted by the physical degradation that must needs follow such a stupendous sin as practical abolitionism. But they would not escape the moral deterioration, and the nation, weighed down by mulattoism, by such an ulcer on the body politic, by such a frightful mass of disease and death, would doubtless fall a conquest to some other nation or variety of the master race, and again become English provinces or dependencies of some other European power!
[2]. Royalism, or a Hereditary Aristocracy, or class that attempts to create a permanent superiority over the great body of the people by incestuous intermarriage with its own members, is punished with similar results as those that attend the violation of the sexual relations of different Races. And the idiotic, impotent, and diseased offspring of hereditary kings has always a certain physiological resemblance to the effete and sterile mulatto. Both are violations of the normal order, and both are limited to a determinate existence, just as any other diseased conditions which nature forbids to live.
Nations are punished in this life, however it may be with individuals, and a sin so enormous, a crime and impiety against God so awful, an outrage on their own nature so boundless and bottomless as practical abolitionism, or the actual living out of the abolition theory, would drag after it, as an inexorable necessity, a corresponding punishment.