The mongrel generals of Hayti were even more ferocious and bloody, if not surpassing in treachery and cowardice the Indian mongrels of the Continent. Rigaud, the most distinguished of the Haytien chiefs, was also the most repulsive in his enormous and beastly vices. Christophe and Dessalines were negroes, and they simply acted out the negro instinct under those unnatural circumstances. They remorselessly slaughtered all the white men, women, and children of the island that they could find, for when the negro rises against his master, it is not to conquer but to exterminate the dreaded race; and the helpless infant or its frightened and despairing mother touches no chord of mercy in the souls of these frantic and terror-stricken wretches when forced or betrayed into resistance to their masters. But the mongrel leaders, and especially Rigaud, were mere moral monsters, whose deeds of slaughter were alternated with scenes of beastly debauchery and unnatural and devilish revelry, such as could neither originate in the simple animalism of the negro nor with the most sensual, perverse, and fiendish among white men.
But we have this viciousness of the mongrel displayed continually before us at the North as well as at the South. Nine-tenths of the crime committed by so-called negroes is the work of the mongrel—the females almost all being as lewd and lascivious as the males are idle, sensual, and dishonest. The strange and disgusting delusion that has fastened itself on so many minds at the North seeks to cast an air of romance over these mongrel women—these “girls almost white”—and in negro novels and on the stage represent them as “victims of caste,” and often doomed to a fate worse than death to gratify the “vices of the whites.” And a diseased sentimentality, as indecent as it is nonsensical, is indulged by certain “pious ladies” in respect to these “interesting” quadroons, etc., who are almost always essentially vicious, while their own white sisters falling every hour from the ranks of pure womanhood, are unheeded, and their terrible miseries totally disregarded.
Finally, it scarcely need be repeated that mongrelism is a diseased condition—a penalty that nature imposes for the violation of her laws—a punishment that, by an inexorable necessity, is inflicted on the offspring of those who, in total disregard of her ordinances, of instinct, of natural affection, and of reason, form sexual interunions with persons of different races, but which, like all other abnormal conditions, is confined within fixed limits and mercifully doomed to final extinction.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE “SLAVE TRADE,” OR THE IMPORTATION OF NEGROES.
In the preceding chapters of this work it has been shown that the human family, like all other forms of being, is composed of a certain number of species, all having a general resemblance, but each specifically different from the other—that the Caucasian and Negro are placed by the will of the Almighty Creator at the two extremes of humanity—the former being the most superior and the latter the most inferior of all the known human races; that the physical structure or organization is always and necessarily connected with corresponding faculties or functions, and therefore the more prominent physical qualities of the negro have been presented, in order to illustrate his mental and moral nature. It has also been shown that the all-powerful instinct (prejudice) which revolts at the commingling of the blood of different races (stronger even with the negro than our own race) springs from a fundamental organic necessity, impelling us to preserve our structural integrity, and if disregarded and violated, it carries with it a corresponding penalty, and the miserable progeny, like all other abnormal conditions, is limited to a determinate existence; that that which the Eternal hand has moulded and fashioned is also eternal, and beyond the power, caprice, ignorance, or wickedness of His creatures, to change or modify; and therefore all the departures from the typical standard—all forms and degrees of the mongrel or mixed blood—are doomed to final extinction. Here we have, then, four millions of a widely different race in our midst, and though we of the present generation may not be responsible for their presence among us, and are only called upon to deal with the fact itself, without regard to its origin, the subject is of profound interest, and however current or unanimous the opinion may now be against the original “slave trade,” it is believed that a larger knowledge and a more extended acquaintance with the facts embraced in that subject will finally result in a total change of popular (American) opinion. And what American will not rejoice at such a result, if, when all the facts are known and tested by reason and conscience and the dictates of a true humanity, it is found that, however censurable the means employed may sometimes have been, the “slave trade,” the original importation of African negroes by our ancestors, was right? The negro, as has been shown, from the necessities of his organism—the size and form of his brain—is, perforce, when isolated and by himself, a savage—an idle, non-advancing, and non-producing savage, and history, ancient and modern, in a word, all human experience, confirms this physiological and material fact. African travelers, finding occasionally the débris of Caucasian populations and the remains of Mahometan civilization, have told fanciful tales about negro industry, thrift, and morality, while dreamers at home have indulged in even more absurd fancies still in regard to the future of Africa. But why go to Africa to theorize about the negro, when we have him here, and subject to our senses as well as our reason? Why speculate on impossible assumptions, when the negro brain may be seen any day at a medical college, and its incapacity—its organic and inherent incapacity—to be any thing else, or to ever manifest any thing else, but just that which all human experience confirms and assures us must be, as it always has been, the destiny of this race, when left to itself? To talk of the civilization of the negro of Africa is like talking of the change of color of the negro, for it involves the same absurdities, the same impossibilities; and were not those who indulge in it utterly ignorant of the subject, one might say the same impieties, for the assumption that they can change the intellectual nature which God has given the negro, is as grossly impious as if they were to undertake his physical re-creation.
The negro, therefore, isolated in Africa, as has been said, must be in the future what he has been in the past, and without a supernatural interposition, must remain forever a simple, non-producing, and non-advancing savage. Can this have been the design of the Almighty? There are some things we are not permitted to know, that it is impious as well as foolish to seek to know, that the Almighty, in His infinite beneficence as well as wisdom forbids us to inquire into, or rather to attempt to inquire into; but in all that is necessary to our happiness and for the well-being of the innumerable creatures that surround us, we may know, indirectly, it is true, but none the less certainly, the design of the Almighty Creator.
All things are obviously designed for use—all the innumerable hosts of living creatures for specific purposes; the natures of many are known to us now; every day is adding to our knowledge, and a time will assuredly come when the nature and purposes of the most ferocious of wild animals and the most venomous of serpents will be clearly understood and applied to their proper uses. It is, therefore, the obvious design of the Creator that the negro should be useful, should labor, should be a producer, and as his organism forbids this, if left to himself, it is evidently intended that he should be in juxtaposition with the superior Caucasian. It is equally obvious that the tropical latitudes endowed with such exuberant fertility were designed for cultivation, for use, for the growth and production of those indigenous products found nowhere else except within the tropics and tropicoid regions of the earth. The organization of the Caucasian utterly forbids physical labor under a tropical sun. He may live there, enjoy life, longevity, the full and healthy spring of all his faculties, without lassitude or any of that weight upon his energies which ill-informed persons have supposed followed a residence in these climes, but he can not cultivate the earth or grow the products of the soil by his own labor. The negro organism, on the contrary, is adapted to this production, and the rays of a vertical sun stimulate and quicken his energies, instead of prostrating them, as in the case of the former. In another place this subject will be fully discussed, and therefore it will be sufficient in this place to simply state the fact, that the labor of the negro can alone grow the indigenous products of the tropics, and without this labor the great tropical centre of the American continent must consequently remain a barren waste.
The introduction of negroes into the Spanish islands of the West Indies can, therefore, hardly be called an accident. Negro servants were introduced into Spain by the Arabian and Moorish conquerors. From time immemorial negro “slaves” were the favorite household servants of the oriental Caucasians—not alone because they were the most docile and submissive of human beings, but because they were the most faithful and absolutely incapable of betraying their masters, and scarcely a Moorish family of consideration entered Spain without being accompanied by some of these trusty and favorite servants. The recent Portuguese discoveries and conquests on the African coasts had also brought many negroes into the Peninsula, and when Columbus and the Spaniards began their settlements in the New World, there were negroes to be found in almost every town in Spain. The conquest of the miserable natives of Hispaniola and Cuba, and their partition among the Spanish adventurers, failed to gratify their fierce desire for wealth, and from the brutality of their masters, the still lurking desire of these poor creatures for their former condition, or, it may have been, as declared by the Spanish writers, their original feebleness of constitution, they rapidly faded away in the mines and on the plantations, and more vigorous laborers became an absolute necessity, if cultivation, progress, and civilization were to be carried on in these islands. It was thus a material and industrial necessity, rather than any fancied humanity on the part of Las Casas and his friends in behalf of the Indians, that carried negroes into the Spanish islands. Some accompanied the earliest adventurers; they were seen to be safe, and to remain perfectly healthy when Spaniards themselves were constantly smitten down by the fierce suns and deadly malaria of the tropics, while instead of the drooping and listless air that distinguished the natives, these negroes were the most joyous and contented of human beings.
The interests of civilization and of a true humanity were, therefore, united with the humane desires of Las Casas and his friends in respect to the natives, and negroes soon became the sole reliance of the planters and others to whom lands had been assigned by the Spanish princes. Modern writers—Helps, Prescott, and others—laboring under the world-wide misconceptions of our times in regard to negroes, have expressed astonishment at the (to them) strange inconsistency of Las Casas, who, laboring so earnestly in behalf of the Indians, quite unconsciously aided in substituting the negro, and thus, as they suppose, laid the foundation or led the way to the enslavement of one race, while working for the freedom of another. But neither Las Casas, nor any one else, had any notion of freedom or slavery in connection with these negroes. Such a thing as a free negro was doubtless unknown in Spain or anywhere else, or, if known, it was simply because he had lost or strayed from his master. History does not, it is true, cast much light on the subject, but it is certain that neither Las Casas nor any of his cotemporaries had any conception of negro freedom, or associated with that race any other condition or social status than that which modern writers have universally designated as negro slavery.
Nor was he laboring for the freedom of the Indians, as that term is now understood. Many, perhaps most of those who defended the natives from the oppressions of the Spaniards, were prompted solely by religious zeal. These poor “heathens,” they held, were entitled, not to freedom, to political or social rights of any kind, but to the rights of religion, to participate in the Holy Sacraments, to enjoy the privileges which the Church promised to all who would accept them, and as the ferocity of the Spaniards constantly interfered with this, hunted them down and slaughtered them without mercy, or rapidly destroyed them by hard labor and the excessive burthens heaped upon them when they no longer resisted their invaders, the priests generally, and many others, sought to defend them.