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

by John H. Van Evrie

The natural relations of parent and offspring, of brothers and sisters, of husbands and wives, are also measurably understood by the most ignorant, for natural instinct quite as much, as reason guides us in these things. The father knows that the child should obey him, and the latter feels instinctively that this obedience is a sacred duty. The same instinct prompts the brother to love his sister, and it may be said that all the relations of consanguinity, and the duties that spring from them, are regulated more by instinct than by reason. There are innumerable books written on this subject, to teach the duties of parents and offspring, husbands and wives, etc., but with a proper cultivation of the intellect and of the affections, just perceptions of the duties involved follow intuitively.

Passing beyond these domestic and family relations—the relations of individuals—of one man to another, and to the State or general citizenship, are less understood, for here nature must be led by reason, and though there are certain great and fixed facts that serve as landmarks for our guidance, we must mainly rely upon our reason.

It is true, Christianity indicated these relations two thousand years ago; nevertheless, they are almost totally disregarded in the Old World; but though too often misunderstood and misapplied among ourselves, they are sufficiently comprehended to constitute the foundation of our social order.

Another advance, and we arrive at the relations of races—of white men and negroes—and of other races that may chance to be in juxtaposition, and of which the whole world may be said to be profoundly ignorant in theory, while one-half of our people have justly and truly solved them in practice. The social order of the South—the social and legal status of the negro—reposes on the natural relations of the white and black races, and, as has been observed, while the world is ignorant of these relations, the people of the South, indeed it may be said the American people, have practically solved them, and to the mutual benefit of all concerned. But before we can enter on a discussion of the natural relations and social adaptations of races, we must first clearly understand the relations that we bear to each other as individuals, and to the State or aggregate of individuals.

All the individuals of a species, whether animal or human, of course have the same faculties, the same wants, in a word, the same specialties. Occasionally chance—some accident, remote or immediate—deforms or blights individuals; they may be idiotic, insane, or otherwise incapable, but these are exceptional cases that do not disturb the great, fixed, and, unchangeable equality, sameness, or uniformity of the race. The white or Caucasian race, as has been observed, varies much more than any other race. There are tall men and short men, giants and pigmies, blondes and brunettes, red-haired and black-haired, but the nature remains the same; and if they were all placed under the same circumstances of climate, government, religion, etc., all would exhibit the same moral characteristics, and, to a certain extent, the same physical appearances. This is sufficiently illustrated among ourselves every day. Almost universally our people have sprung from the “lower classes” of European society. The coarse skin, big hands and feet, the broad teeth, pug nose, etc., of the Irish and German laborer pass away in a generation or two, and their American offspring have more delicate and classical features than even the most favored and privileged European aristocracy. Having the same faculties, the same wants, etc., it is a self-evident truth that they are entitled to the same rights, the same opportunities, to live out the nature with which God has endowed them. The Divine Author of Christianity promulgated this vital truth with great impressiveness. He selected his disciples from the lowest and most oppressed classes of the people, and thundered his most terrible denunciations in the ears of the sacerdotal aristocracy. The great body of the Jewish people were mere beasts of burden to their brethren—the priestly oligarchy—which governed the State and lived in idle luxury on the toil, ignorance, superstition, and misery of the people. On all occasions these oppressors were denounced, and the great and everlasting truth that God was no respecter of persons, and all men equally precious in His sight—even the beggar Lazarus and the repentent Magdalene—were the daily teachings of Christ. And there can be no doubt that the persecution and final crucifixion of the Author of the Christian religion was intended, by the rulers of the Jews, to crush out the great doctrine of equality, and thus to preserve their ascendency over the minds and fortunes of the people. The Divine ordinance—to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us”—is a complete exposition of our natural relations to each other, and an indestructible rule of nature as well as a religious obligation. All men—that is, all who belong to the race or species—having the same nature and designed by the Creator for the same purposes, the same rights and the same duties, it is an obvious inference that all human governments should rest on this great fundamental truth. No man should be permitted, indeed no man should be base enough to claim privileges denied to his fellow, or to any class of his fellows, and the same great principle which Christ ordained should guide His followers in their personal relations, should be the only legitimate rule in their political relations. To do unto others as we would have them do to us—to recognize in all other men the rights we claim for ourselves—to admit those reciprocal obligations which, in truth, spring from the necessities of our being—in short, to demand equal rights for ourselves, and to admit the same rights on the part of our fellows, seems so obvious, so instinctive, so just, and indeed self-evident, that an intelligent and just mind wonders how it ever could be otherwise, or that systems of government can exist in our own enlightened times in utter contradiction to such simple and self-evident truths. Government, the State, the aggregate citizenship, based on the great fundamental truth of equality, becomes a simple, beneficent, and easily understood institution. It leaves all men where God and nature places them, in natural relation to each other. Its functions, however complicated the details, are simply protective, leaving individuals to ascend or descend in the social scale, just as their industry, cultivation, and moral worth may be appreciated by their fellow-citizens. It protects one man from the violence or injustice of another, and the aggregate citizenship or nation from foreign aggression.

It is a misnomer to speak of government conferring rights; it may (or the thing called government in other lands may) take away, suppress, or withhold rights; but rights, as declared by Mr. Jefferson, are inherent and in fact inseparable from individual existence. God has endowed every man with the capacity of self-government, and imposed this self-government as a duty as well as a right. He has given him certain wants instincts, desires, etc., and endowed him with reason to govern and guide these things. As a citizen, he of course does not, or can not surrender any of his natural rights or control over himself. The State protects him from wrong or injustice, but himself a portion of the citizenship, he still governs himself. It is a contradiction to suppose that one man can govern another better than he can govern himself—that is, under the same circumstances, and therefore it is palpably absurd to limit suffrage or to exclude a portion of the people from participation in the government. All being naturally equal—for though some men may have more mental capacity than others, as we sometimes see some have greater physical powers—they have all the same nature; and therefore govern themselves and fulfill the purposes of their creation when they all vote at elections and participate in the making of laws. For purposes of convenience, a limited number of the people are delegated to conduct the government, but the popular will, the desire of the people, the rule of the entire citizenship, is complete; every vote tells, every man’s voice is heard, every one governs himself. And the government, limited or rather confined to its legitimate function of protection, leaves every one a complete and boundless liberty to do every thing or any thing that his instincts, wishes, caprices even, may prompt him to do, so long as he does not infringe upon the rights, interests, etc., of others.

Such, then, are the natural relations we bear to each other, and the social and governmental adaptations that spring from them. The mere conventional formula may be varied at times—the circle of individual action contracted or expanded as the public exigencies may demand, but the right and the duty of every man to an equal participation in the government, or in the creation of laws which govern all, is vital, and every man denied this is necessarily a slave, for he is then governed by the will of others and not by his own, as God and nature have ordained he should be.

There are no contradictions or discords in nature. All creatures, and the purposes God has assigned to them, are perfectly harmonious; and all their relations to each other, and the duties that spring from them, are in perfect accord. It is our ignorance, and sometimes our caprices and vices, that interrupt this harmony; but it is consoling to know, that happiness is inseparable from the due fulfilment of our duties, and therefore the wiser the world becomes, the better it will be. The man who loves his wife the most will also have the tenderest affection for his children; those who are most careful to respect the rights of others will be the most secure in their own rights, and the government, or state, or nation based on the natural relations that men bear to each other, will be the most prosperous and powerful.

We are, it is true, at a great distance from the practical or complete development of our system, but in theory it is right, and most Americans recognize the truth and justice of its elementary principles. On the contrary, Europeans, and especially Englishmen, have scarcely a perception or glimpse of men’s natural relations to each other, and their whole social and political system, if thus it may be called, is in direct conflict with these relations, with the vital principle of democracy, with reason and common sense. A woman is the chief of the nation, whose husband is her subject—thus violating the relations of the sexes—of husband and wife—and thrusting her from the normal position of woman as well as contradicting the relations and duties of citizenship. God created her, adapted her, and designed her, for a wife and mother, a help-mate to her husband and the teacher and guide of her children; He endowed her with corresponding instincts to love, venerate, and obey her husband and devote her life to the happiness and welfare of her offspring, and to trample on His laws—to smother these instincts and force this woman to be a queen, a chief of state, the ruler over millions of men, is as sinful as it is irrational, as great an outrage on herself—her womanhood—as it is on the people who suffer from it. The annual expenditure for royalty amounts to several millions, and requires probably that some thirty thousand people should be employed or compelled to devote their labor to this purpose. Thirty thousand men, women, and children, ignorant, abject, and miserable, with no chance whatever for education, for the cultivation of their faculties or the healthy development of their natures, are bound to lives of toil and a mere animal existence in order to furnish means for this one family, not of happiness, but of boundless folly, which is supposed to constitute royal dignity. God created this woman with the same faculties, endowed her with the same instincts, and designed her for the same purposes as all other women in England, but the human law, disregarding the evident designs of the Almighty, has impiously sought to make her a different and superior being, to reverse the natural relations of the sexes, to render her husband subject to her will, to place her above many millions of men, the head of the state, to even force this fragile, weak, and helpless female to be the commander-in-chief of their armies, and they crush and pervert thirty thousand other people out of the natural order, and doom them to a mere animal existence, in order to sustain this one family in “royal splendor.” The two things are inseparable—the violation of the natural relation drags after it these frightful consequences. All these people thus doomed to ignorance and toil, to support the luxury and grandeur of royalty, would, under the same circumstances, be just as grand, majestic, and royal as the present royal family, and the wrong in the present instance may be measured or tested by the consideration that of these thirty thousand poor, ignorant, abject, and toiling creatures, whose labor, or the proceeds of whose labor is appropriated to the support of royalty, the majority would doubtless exhibit more capacity and refinement than those who rule over them, if, standing where nature placed them all in common, they were permitted to compete for superiority. The same unnatural order prevails on the Continent: the natural equality that God has stamped upon the race—for they are all white men—is disregarded, and though the people are ignorant, debased by poverty, excessive toil, and misery, the status quo preserved alone by force. Nearly four millions of armed men are kept in constant readiness to repress and keep down the instinct of equality, while a “civil” force of perhaps a million more is constantly acting in conjunction with the former, in preserving that artificial and unnatural rule which the few—a mere fraction of the population—exercise over the many. And so instinctive and irrepressible is this sentiment—this innate and eternal law written by the finger of the Almighty on the soul and organism of the race—that if these armed forces were withdrawn, every government in Europe would be demolished within a week. Nor can the existing condition be preserved much longer. Those writers ignorant of the essential nature of the race, often indulge in absurd fancies in regard to the future of European society. They are good enough to say that democratic institutions may do for America, but that they will not suit the people of Europe, and therefore monarchy is to be a permanent institution. Democracy or equality is a fact rather than a principle. Beings who have the same nature, the same wants, and the same instincts will struggle, as they must struggle, for ever, to enjoy the same rights and to live out the same life. And though they are chained down by ignorance and misery as well as by the armed hordes of their tyrants, there can be no peace, no cessation of the conflict, no stopping-place short of the universal recognition of their natural relations to each other, and that fixed and eternal equality which the Almighty Creator has stamped upon the race and fixed for ever in its physical and mental structure.

If the natural relations that men bear to each other are thus misunderstood and disregarded in Europe, it may well be supposed that they are wholly ignorant of the natural relations of races, and without even the remotest conception of the relations that naturally exist between white men and negroes. It is therefore a subject never introduced or treated of—a terra incognita to the European mind,—and dependent as we are on European authority, the natural relation of races, and the normal condition of the negro, have only quite recently become a subject of American investigation.