If any one were to propose to give the negro straight hair, or a flowing beard, or transparent color, or to force on him any other physical feature of the white man, everybody would denounce the wrong as well as the folly of thus torturing the poor creature with that which nature forbids to be done. It has been shown that, in the mental qualities and instincts of the negro, the differences between him and the white man are exactly measured by the differences in the physical qualities, and therefore the efforts of the Abolitionists to endow the negro with freedom involve exactly the same impieties and the same follies as if they sought to change the color of the skin. Or if it was sought to force the child to live out the life of the adult—or the woman that of the man, or to compel our domestic animals to change their manifestations and to contradict the nature God has given them, it would be promptly denounced as cruel, impious, and foolish. All that could be done would be to destroy them—to shorten the life of the unhappy creatures; and this is exactly what has been done, and is now done, in regard to negroes; but, owing to a universal ignorance and wide-spread misconception, that which should be denounced as the grossest wrong has been regarded as the highest morality and philanthropy!
The negro is thrust from the care and protection of a master at the South, but he has none of the responsibilities of society laid on him, and furthermore, there is no very pressing competition for the means of subsistence. He has nothing of what are called rights—that is, is not forced to live the life of another being—and though he has no master to teach and guide him, his powers of imitation are, to a certain extent, called into action, for he is still in juxtaposition and subordination. But even under these favorable circumstances, he rapidly—as contrasted with those under the care of masters—declines and dies. There is, at this time, a large number of these people in Maryland, Virginia and other transition States. Their condition is truly deplorable, and is every day getting worse, for the increase of whites is every day adding to the pressure on them, and rendering the means of subsistence more difficult to obtain. It seems to many, doubtless, a great wrong to place them again in a normal condition, and true relation to the whites—which would be a wrong like that of the inebriate forced back into temperance—a process, in truth, of great suffering, but desirable in the end. If the abnormal habit of drunkenness continues, the man will die within a given time; but if he reforms and recovers his normal state, he may live many years.
There will be few, if any, more negroes “emancipated,” as forcing them out of a normal condition has been termed, in the South, and therefore it is only a question of time when these people, left as they are now, will become extinct. As a question of kindness and humanity, therefore, it is like that of the drunkard: left as they are, they must perish; but if restored to a normal state, whatever their temporary suffering, they or their descendants may live forever. Most unfortunately, however, there is another difficulty involved in the fortunes of these poor people. They have a large infusion of white blood—a very large portion, perhaps, are mulattoes, and therefore while in the case of the typical negro there could be no doubt where true humanity pointed us, in the case of these mongrels there is room for doubt and difficulty. But in the more Northern States, where it is sought to force the habitudes of white men on them, they perish rapidly. The mortality is greater in New England than in the Middle States, and greatest of all in Massachusetts where they are citizens, and the ignorant and misguided, however well-meaning, “friends of freedom” have their own way, and give full scope to their terrible kindness. The whole subject may be summed up thus:—The negro, in a normal condition, increases more rapidly than the whites—for the negress, if not more prolific, escapes by her lower sensibility the numerous chances of miscarriage, premature births, weakly children, etc., which ordinarily attend on the higher and more susceptible organization of the white female.
The “free” or abnormal negro of the Southern States tends to extinction—of the Middle States still more rapidly—and finally, most rapidly of all in New England. Or the actual laws governing this matter may be summed up thus:—In precise proportion as the negro is thrust from his normal condition into that of the white man, he tends to extinction, or one might say, that precisely as the rights of the white man are forced on the negro, he is destroyed. All the negroes brought to this continent were in a normal condition. The monstrous assumption set up by British writers when the colonists began to throw off the British dominion, that negroes were black-white men, and, naturally considered, entitled to the same status, after nearly a hundred years, and an amount of wrong, falsehood, and suffering to these people that is beyond computation, has at last culminated. From this time forth, few, if any, will be “emancipated.” Indeed, it is far more likely that the numbers restored to a normal condition will outnumber those thrust from their natural relations to white men. If all the legislation on the subject were suddenly blotted out, of course there would be no such thing as a “free negro” on this continent, and this is the point towards which the course of American society is now rapidly tending. It may be somewhat difficult to determine that period—for we know not what may be the action of many of the States that have a considerable population of this kind—but one can not err when saying that it can not be remote, and it is absolutely certain to arrive within the next hundred years. Indeed, it is most probable that from the culmination of the great “anti-slavery” imposture, or from the starting-point of the reaction, to the final period when such a social monstrosity as a “free” negro will be entirely extinct in the New World, the interval will be less than that of the strange and wide-spread delusion which has so long run riot over the understanding, the common sense, the interests, and self-respect of our people.
Of course, no comparison proper can be made with so shadowy and intangible a thing as this. It is not a condition—it is only an attempt after that which neither has nor can have an existence. If it had been assumed simply that the status of the negro was wrong at the South, and that some other status was proper for him, then possibly an experiment would have been legitimate. But, as it was assumed that the negro was a Caucasian, whose color merely was different, and naturally entitled to the position of the white man, all these efforts were made to reduce the assumption to practice, and compel him to live out the life of the former. There could be and can be only a single end to such effort. God created him a negro, a different and inferior being, and of course no human power could alter or modify, to the millionth part of an atom, the work of the Eternal. That which destroys a creature, or under which he dies, can never be right, or even approach to that which is right. When nature is so outraged that she refuses to indorse the human action, or when she in mercy interposes her power to limit such action, then we can not possibly mistake the wrong we are doing, or attempting to do. It is an historical fact that slaves never propagated while in that condition, and the supply was constantly kept up by fresh wars and increased captives. It was such a stupendous outrage on the natural relations, that men of the same species bear to each other, or on that natural and unchangeable equality common to the race, that nature refused to propagate it, or to consent to its permanent existence. Nature also refuses offspring to prostitution—that terrible cancer so corrupting to Northern society, and who does not see her wisdom and beneficence in thus refusing a permanent existence to so foul a blot on the sexual relations? So, too, in the case of mulattoism, where a monstrous violation of the physical integrity of the races is involved, nature interposes and forbids it to live. And in incest—the violation of the laws of consanguinity, where relatives intermarry—nature appropriately punishes them, through the idiocy and impotency of their offspring, which is always forbidden to exist beyond a determinate period. Free negroism, therefore—the attempt to force a different and inferior being to live out the life of a different and superior being—is not a condition, and can not be compared with that which is, or that which the higher law of nature grants, a fixed order of life. There are, then, only two possible conditions for the negro—isolation or juxtaposition with the white man—African heathenism or subordination to a master—a blank in the economy of the universe, or the social order of the South, where he is an important element in the civilization, progress, and general welfare of both races. It is not in the scope of this work to treat of the natural relations or social adaptations of other races. They must be determined by experience, though the starting-point—the fundamental truth—that when in juxtaposition they must occupy a subordinate social position, corresponding with the degree of inferiority to the white man, may be said to be self-evident, or, at all events, an unavoidable truth.
In conclusion, it may be well to repeat the great leading truths that underlie the subject discussed in this chapter.
All of God’s creatures, animal as well as human, have a right to live out the life—the specific nature—that He has endowed them with, and we have comprehended this great, vital, and fundamental law in respect to our domestic animals, and generally conform to it. The natural relations of the sexes—of parents and offspring—are also understood, and generally lived up to in our daily life. The natural relations of men to each other are less understood, but the natural order, the equality of rights, and equality of duties, based on an equality of wants, is a vital principle of Christianity, and however far we may be from living it out in practice, our political system, and the whole superstructure of our civil and legal institutions, repose upon this fundamental law of nature.
This natural order is generally disregarded in the Old World, though even there, with all their numerous false traditions, relics of barbarism, and ancient wrongs, as well as modern corruptions, they are forced, to a certain extent, in their legal and civil institutions, to recognize it. Nature absolutely forbids any change or any violation of her laws, or, in other words, the work of the Almighty can not be altered by human force or accident. The millions of Europe are, therefore, unchanged in their essential natures, and the few who rule and wrong them are only able to prevent the development of their specific and latent capabilities by their systems of repression. But the natural order—the natural relations they bear to each other—the inherent and eternal equality that God has stamped forever on the organism of the race, is perpetually struggling to manifest itself; and though buried in a profound animalism, though deluded by false theories and corrupted by innumerable lies, and steeped in poverty and misery fathomless and measureless, they are only temporarily kept from asserting the natural order and specific nature of the race by four millions of bayonets.
The natural relations of races, and especially of the white man and negro, have been wholly misunderstood, for, ignorant of the nature and specific wants of the negro, it necessarily followed that it should be so. But while in theory we have been ignorant of these relations, the people of the South have solved them in practice. Their actual experience of the negro nature, of its wants, its capacities, its industrial adaptations, perhaps we may say, the instinctive necessities of a society where widely different social elements are in juxtaposition, have developed a social order in practical harmony with the best interests and highest happiness of both races. That society rests on the same basis as that of the North, with the superadded negro element, which, in social subordination corresponding with its natural inferiority and natural relations to the white man, is immovable and everlasting, so long as the foundations of the world remain unaltered and unalterable. Ignorance and impiety may beat against it; folly, delusion, and madness may waste their wild energies in blind warfare on it; European kings and nobles, all those who live and flourish for a time on the perversion of the natural order and the degradation of so many millions of their kind—their natural equals—may combine to overthrow it; dupes, instruments, open foes and secret traitors may aid them, and the great ignorant and deluded masses for a time may be blindly impelled in this direction, but all in vain; the social order—the supremacy of the master and the obedience of the “slave”—will remain forever, for it is based on the higher law of the Almighty, the natural relations of the races, the organic and eternal superiority of the white man and the organic and everlasting inferiority of the negro.