As we ascend in the scale, the laws of adaptation, are, of course, multiplied, or become more elaborate, and in the case of human beings, they are widely diversified with numerous secondary relations; but the great universal and all-dominating law that unites men to their centres of existence, is as indestructible and everlasting as it is in the simplest form of vegetable existence. God has created both them and the external circumstances, has given them a specific structure and corresponding faculties, and He has made the earth, the soils, the form of its products, its climate, etc., in perfect accord with the former, and as time and chance, or human forces, can never change or modify the works of the Almighty, this law of adaptation is everlasting.
The white man—as a laborer—is adapted to the temperate latitudes, not because mere climate, or heat and cold, demand it, but because such is his natural adaptation. All the external circumstances accord with his nature—his physical structure and his intellectual endowments. The soil, its natural products—the time and mode of their growth, their ripening or maturity, in short, their cultivation is in perfect harmony with his faculties. The farmer of Ohio or Illinois, for example, ploughs and prepares his fields through the early summer, for sowing them with wheat in the early autumn. The process is elaborate. The land must be manured, ploughed carefully at different times, harrowed over at intervals, and gradually made ready for the reception of the seed. Then he carefully selects that which his experience assures him is best. After it is sown he again harrows over his fields, watches them carefully for several months, and then, the crop having ripened, another process begins.
This is equally elaborate and demands the fullest exercise of his mental faculties as well as the labor of his body. He must watch and judge of the weather, when he shall gather in his crops, how dispose of them, etc.; then comes the threshing, the separation of the grain, etc., the disposal of the straw, the feeding of his stock, all again needing the fullest exercise of all his highest faculties. Then, again, begins another process—if not personal or where he himself is the leading party, where men like himself or with the same faculties as himself are associated with him and engaged in completing the process which he began. That which he planted and gathered is now still more elaborately manipulated. The wheat is changed into flour by a lengthened and elaborate process, and then passing through another elaboration, it becomes bread—the sustenance of the race, the natural food of the millions, the legitimate result of a healthy exercise of his specific faculties and of the industrial adaptation of the race. Beginning with the selection of the land, its preparation, the selection, etc., of the seed, the planting, the care and estimate of the weather, the ripening, the gathering, the separation of the grain, the transformation into flour, the still greater change into bread, in the entire process, from the occupation of the land to the moment when placed on the table of his household, the tout ensemble needs and calls into action the highest faculties of reasoning and comparison, and however uneducated or ignorant the individual may seem, when compared with the man of books, the process, or rather processes, would be impossible, of course, to any race except our own, or to beings with capacities inferior to those of the white man.
It is the same with all the other products common or indigenous to temperate latitudes. They all demand the highest capacities for their cultivation. The nature of the soils, the fitness of particular products to particular soils, the periods of growth, of ripening, the influences of the atmosphere, the action of heat and cold, the change of seasons, etc., are all in harmony with the elevated faculties, while the result, their cultivation and uses, are all essential to the welfare and happiness of the white man. The industrial adaptation is complete, the varying soils, often widely different on the same farm, the numerous regulations, the multiplied relations and connections involved, the changing seasons and complicated circumstances render the temperate latitudes as absolutely the centre of life to the white man, industrially considered, as the tropics are to the negro, or as any of the simpler forms of being are to the localities in which we find them. The industrial and specific adaptation of the negro to his own centre of life is, however, more palpable and demonstrable, for his limited intelligence and more direct relations to external circumstances enable us to grasp the facts involved more readily. The soil of the tropics has little variation, and rarely needs any manure or preparation like those of temperate latitudes. And the indigenous products, those that need care and labor for their cultivation, however luxuriant their growth, are few in number. There are almost innumerable species of fruits that grow spontaneously, and indeed a great number of plants that are nutritious, which need no care or labor, and which the negro, in his isolated or barbarous state, lives on to a great extent. But the great natural products of the tropics, those that are essential to human welfare, which are at this instant the most important elements of modern commerce, and are vitally affecting the civilization of our times, are few in number, and need only the lowest grade of intelligence for their cultivation. Cotton, for example, needs but little beyond planting and picking, and sugar, so far as the labor is concerned, is even more simple. It is true, in the complete elaboration and final perfection of these products, the manufacture, etc., the highest order of intelligence is called into action, but this has no necessary connection with the negro. Cotton is shipped to the North or Europe, and passes altogether into other hands, and though the negro labor was vital in the preliminary stages, it has no more connection with the ultimate disposition of this material than the labor of mules that were employed to prepare the earth for its original cultivation. Coffee, tobacco, indigo, etc., are all equally simple, all in accord with the simple soils, the uniform atmosphere, the primitive laws of development, as they may be termed, and in perfect harmony with the grade of intelligence, the specific nature and industrial adaptation of the negro.
His physical organism is adapted to the cultivation of these products as perfectly as is his grade of intelligence. His head is protected from the rays of a vertical sun by a dense mat of woolly hair, wholly impervious to its fiercest heats, while his entire surface, studded with innumerable sebaceous glands, forming a complete excretory system, relieves him from all those climatic influences so fatal, under the same circumstances, to the sensitive and highly organized white man. Instead of seeking to shelter himself from the burning sun of the tropics, he courts it, enjoys it, delights in its fiercest heats, and malaria—that deadly poison to the white man, which, in the form of yellow fever, has swept from existence vast multitudes of our race, is as harmless to the negro organism as the balmy breezes of May or June to the organization of the white man. Of course mulattoes and mongrels may have something that approximates to the yellow fever of the white man, but to the negro it is simply an organic impossibility. His faculties, his simple grade of intelligence, his physical organism, his specific, climatic, and industrial adaptations are therefore in perfect harmony with the primitive soils, the simple products, and uniform atmosphere of the tropics, and in complete relation and perfect union with the circumstances that surround him in the centre of existence where the Almighty has placed him.
The late Daniel Webster once declared that God had limited “slavery” to certain climates, and that he, at least, would not “reënact the will of God,” and this declaration, though as a form of speech absurd enough, was certainly in close neighborhood to a great and vital truth. If he had said that the Almighty had adapted the negro to certain climates, he would have expressed just what we are now considering; but the relation of the negro to the white man, the thing he called slavery, is, of course, as proper and as natural in New York or Ohio as in Mississippi. The vulgar notion, therefore, that “slave labor,” the industrial capacities of the negro, is unprofitable in temperate latitudes is only partially true. The “slave” relation, the normal condition, as contrasted with the so-called free negro, presents just the difference between a useful negro and a worthless negro, or a negro who adds to the productive forces of a State, and one who lives on the State—a healthy and a diseased social element, and therefore wherever found, if, indeed, in the extreme North, it is simply absurd to speak of the former as unprofitable when contrasted with the latter. But when the negro is contrasted with the white man in Ohio or New York, then the whole subject is changed. His industrial capacities are incompetent to grow the indigenous products of the temperate latitudes.
The reasoning, the reflection, the elevated faculties called into action, that are absolutely essential to the cultivation of their products, the varying and complicated soils, their elaborate preparation, the care and judgment needed in gathering them, etc., the still more elaborate processes before they are rendered fit for human sustenance, all this needs the high intelligence, and therefore the large brain, of the white man, and to the isolated negro is impossible, of course.
It is true, the master may guide them, and the owner of a hundred negroes in Ohio may carry on these processes and cultivate the soils of the Western and Middle States sometimes, perhaps, when all labor is scarce, with tolerable success. But their inferiority, their lower grade of intelligence, the time and trouble expended in this guidance, must be so palpable to every one who reflects a moment, that the case only needs to be stated to convince them of the relative worthlessness of this labor. And leaving out of view the force of climate, the changing seasons, the sudden frosts which sometimes disable and very generally affect the negro injuriously, and in the end destroy him—leaving all this out of consideration, and contemplating his mere industrial adaptations, it is obvious that the negro can never be, as he never has been, able to cultivate the soils or grow the products of the temperate latitudes. But while the great dividing lines are distinct enough, while the white man and negro, in their industrial adaptations, can never be in conflict when each is within that centre of existence to which the Almighty Creator has adapted and designed him, there is a large extent of territory where they may both labor to advantage, and where time and circumstances may often determine their presence and their fitness for such labor. The white man is forever forbidden by the laws of his organization to labor under a tropical sun, or to grow by his own physical efforts the products indigenous to the tropics. The negro, by the laws of both his physical structure and mental nature, is forever incapable of cultivating the soil or of growing the products indigenous or common to the temperate latitudes.
These great elementary and indestructible truths, which, fixed forever by the hand of God, admit of no exception, change, or modification whatever, which time, and circumstances, and human power can not influence, any more than the laws of gravitation, or animal growth, or the term of animal existence, or any other law of the Creator of the universe, will not be mistaken; but when we come to consider the approximating latitudes, then there is a wide field opened up, to our view, to chance, to time, to a multitude of considerations.
In general terms, it may be said, that wherever the white man can labor with effect, that is, can preserve his health and the full exercise of his faculties, there his labor must be more valuable than is that of the negro. People who are ignorant of the laws of climate and industrial adaptations, and still worse, ignorant of the nature of the negro and his relations to the white man, when traveling on the Ohio River, observe that the populations on the Ohio side are more energetic, industrious, and prosperous than they are on the Kentucky side of the river, and they infer that it is because Kentucky has “slavery.” The author is not prepared to admit their assumption, for though there may be greater wealth and apparently greater prosperity in Ohio, the true and only test of well-being in a State is the equality of condition and of the happiness of its people, and we have no means of determining this truth by applying this test in the present instance. England is vastly more wealthy than any other State in Christendom—its annual production is vastly greater, but this wealth is monopolized by a fraction of the population. While the great body of the people are steeped in poverty to the lips, and while the few are every day growing wealthier, the many are, with equal rapidity and certainty, becoming more abject in their poverty, and, consequently more ignorant, vicious, and miserable. If, therefore, it were true that Ohio did increase in wealth more rapidly than Kentucky, it would by no means follow that the people of Ohio were in a better condition than those of Kentucky. But it is reasonable to suppose that the production is greater than that of Kentucky, for while the climate and industrial adaptation are suited to the white man, there are none but white men in Ohio, while nearly half of the laboring population of Kentucky are negroes. The same absurd assumption and inference have been made in respect to Virginia and other so-called Slave States, when contrasted with New York and other so-called Free States. It has been said, “Virginia falls behind New York in general prosperity.” “It is because she has half a million of slaves, and if she will abolish this slavery, then she will soon equal, perhaps surpass, New York, for Virginia has certain natural advantages which New York has not.” Or, in other words, it is said that Virginia is less prosperous than New York, because her half a million of negroes are in a normal condition, and if she will thrust them from this condition and turn them loose, as New York has done, then Virginia will soon be equally prosperous as the latter! Possibly one out of twenty of the negroes in New York, Ohio, or any other so-called Free State, is engaged in productive labor, while the nineteen others live—temporarily—on the labor of the producing classes of those States. The argument of these political economists, therefore, is simply this: Virginia with half a million of industrious and productive negroes, is less prosperous than New York, but if she will transform them into half a million of idle, non-productive, and good-for-nothing negroes, then she will rapidly recover from her present depressed condition. But enough—these people who set up an abstraction entirely nonsensical, must reach conclusions equally preposterous. They are not only ignorant of what they argue about so pompously, but they imagine conditions that not only do not but can not exist, either here or elsewhere, in our own times or any other, in the existing, or any other world.