Marriage, is of course, a natural relation among negroes as well as ourselves, and were it true that these four millions of people were living without it, then the denunciations heaped upon the people of the South would doubtless be merited. But a moment’s reflection should be sufficient to convince any one, at all events any American, that with a different nature, with different faculties, different wants, and different duties of these people, there must follow a different form or modification of this relation. The negro is substantially a child or undeveloped and undevelopable man, with affections, moral wants and faculties approximating, of course, to our own, but yet so different that his happiness as well as that of the white man demands a corresponding development. The affection of the sexes strongly resembles that of our school-children. It is sudden, capricious, superficial, and temporary, and sometimes violent, but rarely permanent, or would be rarely permanent were it not for the example of the whites, whose habitudes in these respects the imitative instincts of the negro impel him to copy after. In their native Africa, and without the influence and example of the superior race, polygamy is universal, the affection of the husband being a mere caprice in most cases, they sell their wives and children without compunction, but the mother, with that universal maternal instinct common to all human creatures, and to animals of the higher classes, clings tenaciously to her offspring, while perfectly willing to change husbands or owners, as they really are in fact. Many of the “rich men” of Africa are only so in the number of their wives and children, and they trade and traffic in this property as coolly and regularly as if they were legitimate subjects of commerce. Nevertheless, the natural law and the natural tendency of this people is to a single union, and probably a large majority of the native Africans have only one wife. There is no natural tendency to polygamy in any race, for the numbers of the sexes being equal, the natural impulse is to a single union. But their feeble and capricious affections lead to polygamy, and their incapacity to purchase or support wives is the only limit to the negro practice in these respects. Under the teachings and restraints of the superior race at the South, the negroes, male and female, are vastly elevated in this regard, as well as others above their African habitudes. They form sexual unions or marry essentially like the whites. The parties become intimate, an affection springs up, they ask and receive the consent of their masters, and they are married by a white clergyman or by a minister of their own people. Thus far, marriage among “slaves” is, on the surface at least, an exact copy of the marriage of whites. They ask the consent of their masters, as white persons ask the consent of their parents or guardians, and they are married with the same ceremonies either by a minister of their own, or, as very often occurs, by a white clergyman. But here they diverge. The negro does not and can not constitute a part or portion of that mighty fabric we term society. He has no social interests, no property to guard or to devise, for though he receives and enjoys a larger portion of the proceeds of his labor than any mere laborer in Europe, every thing legally belongs to the master. There are no family interests for which to provide, no reputation or character to protect, no social duties to perform, or rights to defend in his case; in short, he has no connection whatever with that vast and complicated machinery which we call society. Marriage, therefore, from our stand-point—that legal formula and social pledge so vital to the very existence of social order—is obviously absurd and impossible in the case of negroes. The natural affinity, the union of affection, the perfect adaptation so essential to a true marriage in our race, is substantially imitated and substantially similar in the case of negroes at the South, but to seek to force the negro beyond this—to force upon him the social responsibilities that attach to white people; or, in other words, to make marriage a legal contract in the case of negroes, would be as absurd as to force him to vote at an election, or to perform any other high social duties, and which are evidently impossible. In regard to his own wants, the well-being of his offspring, every thing connected with the best welfare and highest happiness that his race is capable of, he now enjoys, and any attempt to force him to marry as white people marry—that is, to make marriage a civil or legal contract—is not merely impossible, but it would be a crime and a monstrous outrage upon the nature God has given him. The Almighty has endowed the negro with wonderful imitative powers: of course, it is impossible for him to imitate all our higher qualities—he can only approximate to them—but when the master has presented him with a proper example, in this respect as well as in other respects, as parents and guardians are expected to do in the case of children, they have fulfilled their duties to these “slaves,” and generally the negro is restrained and governed by these examples. But the feeble and capricious affections of the negro give their masters much annoyance, and perhaps the greatest trouble they experience with these people is their faithlessness to their marital obligations. The ignorant “anti-slavery” lecturer at the North has distressing tales to tell of cruel masters who separate wives and husbands, and break up families; but while such things have doubtless happened, it is quite certain that masters have interfered a hundred times to keep them together to one instance to the contrary, or to sell them apart. Such things happen occasionally, when estates are to be settled and property divided; but the instincts of the whites and the happiness of the whites are more disturbed by them than the negroes themselves. The limited intellectual power—the feeble moral nature, and superficial and capricious affections of the negro lead him to regard these separations of wives and husbands—of parents and children, with indifference, or rather we should say he has none of our perceptions or our instincts in respect to these family relations, and therefore when they do happen he is relatively or comparatively unconscious of suffering. In his native Africa he sells his wife and children without hesitation, and all the suffering he now feels is borrowed or imitated from the whites—a feeling scarcely perceptible in his native state, but in his better and higher life at the South, it is doubtless exalted into something like a sentiment of family. Nevertheless, he readily adapts himself to whatever changes the chances of life may bring him, and where the white husband, and certainly the white wife, might despair and die, the negro and the negress, with new partners and another marriage, are quite as happy as if they had never been separated from their former ones.
But these things are exceptional, and husbands and wives are doubtless far less frequently forced apart by these accidents of society than are the wives and husbands of the “lower orders” in England by the pressure of want and that necessity of self-preservation which so often rends them asunder. The real trouble, however, as has been said, is in the negro himself—his feeble and capricious affections—substantially similar to those of white childhood, and which it requires the constant supervision and influence of the master to restrain so as to keep them faithful to each other. The limited mental endowment and the feeble moral perceptions of the negro render him incapable, in these respects, of little beyond the fulfilment of the universal command to “increase and multiply.” White husbands and wives, when one dies in early life, often remain unmarried, faithful to a memory forever; and still more frequently, perhaps, the affections that bound them together in their youth remain bright and untarnished in age and to the borders of the grave. Such a thing never happened with a negro. Not one of the countless millions that have lived upon the earth was ever kept from marrying a second time by a sentiment or a memory. With their limited moral endowment such a thing is an absolute moral impossibility. They live with each other to extreme old age, because they imitate the superior race, and because it has become a habit, perhaps, but the grand purposes of nature accomplished, there is little or nothing more, or of those blessed memories of joy and suffering—of early hope and chastened sorrows, which so bind and blend together the white husband and wife, and often render them quite as necessary to each other’s happiness as in the flush and vigor of youth. Affection for his master is, in fact, the strongest, and it may be said to be the only enduring affection of the negro nature, for it remains an ever-present feeling long after the feeble and capricious “family sentiment,” or love of wife and offspring, is entirely obliterated from his memory. Marriage of “Southern slaves” thus briefly presented, will be seen to be as real, decent, orderly, and natural, as the nature of the negro admits of, or relatively speaking, as the Almighty Creator himself has designed or decreed. He has endowed the negro with different and vastly subordinate moral wants and affections, but at the same time given him an imitative capacity that enables him to copy the higher nature and more exalted habitudes of the superior race. They therefore marry as white people marry, with the same forms and the same ceremonies, and such a thing as polygamy, or what the “Abolitionist” calls concubinage, is utterly unknown among these people. They are no portion or part of society, have no place in the social compact, they are unable to fulfil its duties, and therefore have none of its rights, hence legal marriage is obviously absurd and impossible. To the ignorant Abolition writer it may seem quite plain that marriage should be a civil contract with negroes as well as white people, for his theory that the negro is a black Caucasian, neutralizes all difficulties in this as in other things. But even they must see that to force them on the same social level in this vital respect must necessarily involve social equality in all other respects—a result, unless their theory be sound, obviously unnatural, monstrous, and wicked. The negro, isolated in his native Africa, is at this moment exactly what he was four thousand years ago, selling his wives and offspring with as utter disregard of marital relations, and unconsciousness of a family sentiment, as in the time of the Pharaohs; and when we contrast these things—the universal polygamy, the trade in wives, the caprice and savagism of the lawless husband or master with the decent and Christian marriage of “Southern slaves,” imitated from the superior race, and generally restrained by its example, may we not say with entire reverence and truth, that marriage, as it now actually exists among these people at the South, being all that their natures are capable of, and all that their wants and their highest happiness demand, is also, and of necessity, all that God Himself has decreed or designed in respect to this race?
There is no other comparison to make, or contrast to present, but that of African savagism; for that modern product of a world-wide delusion, “freedom,” or free negroism, as shown elsewhere, is a social abnormalism, a diseased condition, that necessarily ends in extinction; and unless it can be proven that disease is preferable to health, and death itself a greater good than life, no argument or proof drawn from it is legitimate or allowable.
CHAPTER XX.
CLIMATIC AND INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION.
The surface of the earth is naturally divided into zones or centres of existence. These great centres of creation have each their Fauna and Flora, their animal and vegetable life peculiar to themselves alone. Geographical writers use these terms, and speak of the temperate, frigid, and torrid zones, etc., as mere designations of certain portions of the earth where the climate is widely varied; but this is very subordinate to the real differences that separate the great centres of organic life. All creatures, indeed all organic and living things, have their centres of existence, their local habitations, their places in the mighty programme of creation. They are all adapted to these great centres of life—their organic structure, their faculties, and the purposes they were designed to fulfil, all harmonizing with their localities, the positions the Almighty has assigned to them. There are approximating forms of life, certain genera among animals and plants, that may be said to belong to the same family or group, but which are found in different zones or centres of existence, but there is no such thing as the same species being found in more than one centre of creation. All the animals and plants of Europe are, therefore, different from those of America, as all the creatures that belong to the northern region of this continent are specifically different from those of the tropics.
Each and every specific creation is different from every other specific existence, and differs just as widely in the circumstances that surround it, and to which it is adapted, as it does in its own organic structure. If an animal, for example, it has a special structure with special instincts, qualities, etc., and the external circumstances, the climate, the vegetation, all things are in perfect harmony. This law may be said to be universal, for the few seeming exceptions scarcely deserve notice. There are a few plants and cereals suited to all climates. The potato, of American origin, is cultivated with equal success in Europe, while most of our ordinary vegetables are of European origin. Wheat grows with equal luxuriance in the Valley of the Nile, the table-lands of Mexico, and the great Northwest. But while all of these things, and many more, are thus capable of successful cultivation in different localities from those in which they were originally created, the external conditions must be preserved—the same or similar soil, and, to a certain extent, the same climate or the same heat and moisture are essential in their cultivation. This is also generally true of animals. Our domestic animals are all suited to different climates. The horse, dog, ox, sheep, etc., are of European origin—some of them Asiatic—and they live and multiply with equal certainty under the fervid suns of the tropics, or amid the icy blasts of the extreme North. They are striking exceptions, however, to the general law which adapts—all creatures to their own centres of existence, and, it would seem, were designed by the Almighty and beneficent Creator for the especial purpose of benefiting man. They have accompanied him in all his wanderings, especially the dog and horse, shared his fortunes, aided in fighting his battles, and however subordinate, played an important rôle in the civilization of mankind. They are closely associated in this capacity for resisting external circumstances with man himself, that is, the Caucasian, or master man, who, as regards mere climate, is capable of living and of enjoying the healthy development of all his faculties in all climates alike, unless, perhaps, the polar regions, or extreme North. As a general law, all creatures, as they ascend in the scale of being, become less and less subject to external influences; but some of our domestic animals are certainly exceptions, for the dog and horse, at all events, are capable of living where the negro, and possibly the Mongol, would surely become extinct. The same general laws of climate affect the human races, not exactly similarly, of course, but approximatively as they do animals, and with a certain modification, as they do plants—that is, they have all centres of existence to which they are specifically adapted, with the sole exception of the Caucasian, as some of our domestic animals, and indeed some vegetable existences are exceptions. The white man, as has been said, can exist everywhere, where life of any kind is possible, except the extreme North, and even here, as shown by Kane and other explorers in those bleak and barren regions, by proper precautions, or by complying with certain conditions, life is possible for certain periods. He is, doubtless, designed for the temperate latitudes, industrially considered, but, as regards climate, he is at home everywhere. Writers, ignorant of the laws of climate, and indeed ignorant of the specific character of races, have supposed that they become weak, effete, and imbecile in tropical latitudes, and this notion is, perhaps, very generally entertained by otherwise intelligent people. The population found in these regions are negro, Indian, or Malay, intermixed often with white blood, and these inferior people are supposed to be a result of climate, and to exhibit the natural consequences of a warm and enervating atmosphere! The white man under the equator, living, or rather attempting to live, the life of the negro—to labor under the rays of a vertical sun—would rapidly decline and die, for his organic structure could not resist the external influences that tend to destroy him. The malaria springing from the decomposition of the rank vegetation, which ascends in the early portion and descends to the earth in the later portion of the day, would soon poison all the springs of life, and fever would close the scene. Any attempt at labor in midday would be still more rapidly fatal, for the caloric generated by the exertion, without an excretory system to relieve it, would end in fatal congestions of the vital organs, especially the brain. We constantly witness an approximation to this in our Western States and Territories, where nearly a generation voluntarily sacrifice themselves in the effort of preparing comfortable homes for their offspring. But after a certain progress is made, the causes of disease subside, and the temperate climate enables them to labor at all times.
But while the white man is forever forbidden by the laws of his physical nature to labor, or by his own hands to grow the natural products of the tropics, he can live there, and enjoy all his faculties of mind and body with the same certainty and success that belong to the temperate latitudes. It may be that the temptations to indulgence, to voluptuousness, or to the gratification of the animal appetites, are greater in these warm and glowing climes, but surely no more so than in our own summers, compared with the winter or other less attractive seasons. On the contrary, the necessities of cleanliness and the less potent demand for stimulants, with the cooling and delicious fruits of the tropics, tend to delicacy of tastes and appetites. At all events, it is certain that the grossest, most brutal, and most immoral populations of Europe are found in the far north, while those of southern Europe are the most temperate and the most delicate in their habitudes of any people in the world. But climate has little, if any, influence in these respects. The white man under the same circumstances is the same being, and his grossness and immorality, or his delicacy, temperance, and morality, are things of chance, according as he has been educated, and circumstances, public and private, have formed his character. As a master, as the guide and protector of the subordinate negro, he may live wherever the latter can, otherwise the negro would have been created in vain—a blank in the economy of the universe, a contradiction in the designs of Providence, and a blotch on the fair form of creation. Generally speaking, climate or other external circumstances have influence over the life, either human or animal, according as they are low in the scale of being, and therefore while the Caucasian man can live and enjoy the full development of all his powers in the tropics, the negro and other inferior races are absolutely limited to their own centres of existence. The Mongols have been confined to those portions of Asia where they now exist, ever since known to history, for though in the mighty invasions of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and others, when millions of them spread like a flood over other regions, and even as far as Chalons, in France, they almost as rapidly receded, and are now just where history first found them.
The modern slave trade, carried on so extensively by the English of our day, where these people, under various pretexts, are placed aboard ships and sent to Jamaica, and other West Indian Islands, to supply the place of the abandoned negro, must be a far greater wrong than the importation of negroes from Africa, for it is a violation of the laws of climate that must rapidly destroy them, while in the case of the negro he is still within that centre of existence, where God himself placed him. The Malay, too, is in his own centre of life, and like all the inferior races, never migrates from it. The Esquimaux, buried in the bleak and desolate North, never ventures beyond it, and should he be carried into the tropics by the white man, would doubtless soon succumb under its burning suns. We know but little of the Indian or aboriginal in these respects. They now constitute the industrial forces of Mexico, and, except Brazil, of all South America. There are some ten millions of them, and as we know that the negro never can labor on the table-lands, or live at all in an atmosphere several thousand feet above the level of the sea, it may become a question of immense importance to the civilization of this continent to determine the natural position and our true relations to this race. The negro, more distinctly, perhaps, than any other race, is limited to his centres of life. If Dr. Kane had taken any with him in his Northwest explorations, it is hardly possible that they could have lived through it, if of pure negro type. His organic structure, while as perfectly adapted to a tropical climate as the eye is to sight or any other organism to a given purpose or function, utterly forbids him to live beyond a certain latitude. An individual may do so, of course, or a generation or more may linger out a miserable existence, but his structure forbids that he should multiply himself or become a permanent resident in the extreme north. There are great numbers in Canada, the result of that wide-spread ignorance of his true nature that has worked out such tremendous evils to these poor people as well as to the deluded and mistaken whites. Their situation in Canada is the most miserable, perhaps, that human beings can possibly endure. It would be miserable enough if they had masters, guides, protectors, and providers for their wants, but, without these, with none of the external circumstances with which God surrounded them when He first called them into being, and then left to compete with white men for the means of subsistence, it is repeated that their condition must be the most deplorable to which unhappy human creatures could be subjected. The constant accession to their numbers through the Underground Railroad renders any thing like an estimate of the fatality among them quite out of the question, but when, in addition to their abnormal social condition, there is the pressure of an unnatural climate or of external influences utterly opposite to those that God originally provided for them, and directly in conflict with their organic structure, then it is obvious, of course, that they must perish rapidly.
All those physicians in the North who have had any experience of the diseases of these people, know the tendencies to consumption or disease of the respiratory organs so common, almost universal among them, but few if any have known that this was a necessary result of the peculiar structure of the negro. His entire surface is studded with innumerable sebaceous glands, which are the safety-valves that nature has provided for relieving his system from the action of vertical suns, but these rendered torpid, indeed incapable of performing their functions in the icy atmosphere of the North, congestion and disease of the lungs necessarily follows. Almost every one has seen negroes in Northern cities, who have lost their legs by frost at sea—a thing rarely witnessed among whites, and yet where a single negro has been thus exposed, doubtless a thousand of the former have. Climate, therefore, has a fixed and absolute control over the existence of the negro. God has adapted him, both in his physical and mental structure, to the tropics, and though he can live in the temperate latitudes, his welfare, his happiness, and the development of his faculties are secured just as he conforms to the designs of the Almighty, as written in his organism, and lives within the centre of existence where he was created. And those ignorant and terribly mistaken people who have seduced and led him into the bleak and forbidden North, have unconsciously committed a crime that would appall them if they could truly comprehend it.
Such are, briefly, the more prominent laws of climate, and their influence on men and animals; but as climate itself, in the ordinary meaning of the word, has regard only to degrees of latitude, or to modifications of heat and cold, they are of secondary importance, or, at most, are only a portion of those general laws of adaptation which govern animal existence, and harmonize it with the locality in which it was originally created. Beyond the few exceptions referred to, all organic existence is adapted to its own centre of life, and incapable of living in any other. This is illustrated every day, and familiar to the least observing among us. Cereals and vegetables of every kind demand, if not always a special climate, certainly a special soil. Corn, wheat, etc., require a soil suited to them—there must be a special adaptation of external circumstances, for there is an eternal relation between the organism and the circumstances that surround it. The most ignorant among our agriculturists know from their own experience that certain things can only grow on certain soils, and this fixed and indestructible law, thus manifested in the simpler forms of being, pervades the whole organic world. And, as remarked, it is in exceptional instances, or the instances where climate does not govern, that these adaptations to particular soils are essential. In general, it can not be transplanted or removed from its own centre of existence. The products of the tropics—the sugar cane, coffee, indigo, cotton, etc., the numerous fruits, etc., can not be changed, or, at all events, can not be grown successfully outside of their original centre of creation.