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

by John H. Van Evrie

And the different mental habits of the people of America generally, when contrasted with those of Europe, show sufficiently that all our ideas are accidental, the result of local circumstances, though, of course, all are in subordination to those fixed and fundamental laws of mind that are specific with the race. The presence, therefore, of the negro—of a widely different and subordinate element of the population of Virginia, and other States, when it became stationary and had to be provided for by the local legislatures, its specific wants as well as those of the citizenship looked after, and its social adaptations rendered harmonious with the welfare of the former—naturally developed new ideas of government and new modes of thought in the dominant and governing race. Except, possibly, some of the Spanish colonies south of us, there was no portion of the New World where so many of those who could claim connection with European aristocracy originally settled as in the province of Virginia.

In the earlier days of Massachusetts a great number of the most respectable of the middle classes of English society, and some few instances of the old hereditary nobility, found new homes in the colony, but in the latter case they had abandoned the old Norman traditions, and to enjoy their religion and “freedom of conscience,” identified themselves with Puritanism. In the Dutch province of New York, there was, perhaps, a somewhat larger infusion of the aristocratic element, but as Holland itself was essentially republican, and the Dutch really the originators of modern liberty in Europe, and, moreover, had a very limited landed aristocracy compared with England, France, etc., but few persons identified by tradition and association with the hereditary aristocracy of the Old World found their way into the Dutch settlements of the New.

But Virginia was originally settled—to a very large extent—by the offspring of the old Norman chivalry, by the cavaliers—the descendants of the proudest, most warlike, most chivalrous, heroic, and enterprising, and, at the same time, most tyrannical and oppressive aristocracy the world has ever seen. Those who belong to the race—the same species—of course will, under the same circumstances, manifest the same qualities, and therefore, if at any time the child of the princely Plantagenet or lordly Warwick had been exchanged in its cradle with the “base” progeny of some Saxon churl, who fed and kenneled with their hounds, the latter would have grown up with all the pride and chivalry, and princely bravery common to the former. Nevertheless, a class, an aristocracy, a privileged order, forms sentiments, ideas, etc., and transmits its traditions, rules, etc., to its descendants, that may, for centuries perhaps, preserve their integrity. Even in our social every-day life, and changing society, we often see families transmitting their family usages, habitudes, modes of thought as well as action, for several generations, and with only slight departures from the family model left by some original or venerated ancestor. Aristocracies, however, usually destroy themselves by the very means they resort to to preserve their ascendency over the great body of the people. In order to preserve the respect, the awe, the continued belief of the vulgar mass in their seeming superiority, they must avoid the populace and intermarry with their order, and the more completely this is done, the more they become a close corporation as it were, and violate the laws of consanguinity, the more rapidly they are deteriorated and fall below the general average of the people. The Northmen, the robust and enterprising fishermen of the Baltic, the fillibusters and pirates of the Northern Seas, invaded France and conquered Normandy, and Rolla and his roving horde of followers threatened to overrun Paris, and indeed the whole kingdom. They finally settled down in Normandy, from which, at a later date, they emerged into Italy, conquered Naples, the island of Sicily, and for a long time threatened an invasion of the Oriental World, which could hardly have resisted such an indomitable race of men. A Duke—a bastard Duke of Normandy, at that time laid claim to the crown of England, and with forty thousand followers landed in that country, and in a single battle so completely demolished the “Anglo-Saxons” and Anglo-Saxonism, so much boasted of in these days, that the former have remained slaves ever since, and the latter was so utterly annihilated that it disappeared for ever on that fatal day at Hastings. Then, for the first time, the Normans assumed the distinct form of an aristocracy or privileged order.

Though they had long since cast off the rude habits and uncouth manners of adventurers and conquerors, and when they invaded England were, perhaps, as intelligent and refined as any similar number of European people, and a great deal more so than those they conquered in England, they had never assumed the form, enacted laws, or established rules and regulations as an aristocracy or governing class. From this time forth, however, the Norman aristocracy ruled England with an iron hand, and though the wars of the Roses, and the still more fatal conflict with the Puritans or middle class, exterminated or drove out the remains of the Norman blood, and there is little, if any, in England at this time, the country is still governed by the traditions, the habits, in short, the system established by the old Norman aristocracy. Most of the great families became extinct, while the younger sons and others of broken fortunes emigrated to Virginia, and with the establishment of the commonwealth, very many of the Norman ancestry abandoned England. So many and so strong were the remnants of the old Norman families in Virginia, that they refused to recognize the commonwealth, and actually set at defiance the formidable power and iron will of Cromwell.

But these remains of the old Norman aristocracy—that aristocracy which for several centuries governed England—that have left their impress, their habits, their laws of primogeniture, their feudalistic customs, so deeply engraven on the English mind, that the aristocracy of the day, though entirely modern, and with scarcely any family connection with it, are able to govern the masses, through these habitudes, as absolutely as the Normans once did by the sword and the strong hand of arbitrary power, these descendants of the old Norman race in Virginia have changed completely about, and though their ancestors were the main supporters of kingly despotism, they are the originators and champions of democracy in America.

In all the changes and mutations of human society, there is scarcely any parallel to this change of ideas in Virginia, or to this extraordinary transformation which has changed the descendants of the old Norman aristocracy into the firmest and most reliable defenders of democracy. Of course, the early colonists of Virginia were of all classes and conditions of English society; not a few of them, perhaps, were kidnapped young peasants, without friends or relatives to protect them or to punish the base wretches who carried them over the sea and sold them here, as elsewhere, in the American colonies. But it is undoubtedly true that a larger, vastly larger body of “gentlemen” emigrated to Virginia than to any other colony, and as these were all cadets, or younger branches of the great houses in England, nearly all of which were Norman in descent, and nearly all of which in the direct line afterward perished in the wars of the commonwealth, it would seem equally certain that if there be any Norman blood anywhere, it must now be found, or mainly found, in Virginia.

The cause of this transformation, this radical and extraordinary change of opinion, which has made the descendants of the proudest and most despotic aristocracy ever known the authors and main supporters of democracy, must be a potent one, and as far removed from the ordinary causes which, in the progress of time, modify men’s opinions and habits, as the results themselves are extraordinary and without parallel. As has been remarked, all our ideas and mental habits are the result of circumstances, the external influences that surround us, the changed conditions of our existence, which give origin to new thoughts and new modes of mental action. And when we take these things into view and contemplate the changed conditions, the new and altogether different circumstances that surrounded these Virginia descendants of the cavaliers and gentlemen of England, then the causes are obvious—the new ideas that sprung up in men’s minds, legitimate and consistent with the extraordinary and indeed unparalleled circumstances under which they lived. They were in juxtaposition with negroes, with an inferior race, with widely different and subordinate social elements, and new thoughts, new ideas, as well as altogether different habits, naturally and necessarily followed. They saw these negroes were different beings from themselves, not in color alone, or in other physical characteristics, but in their mental qualities, their affections, their wants, in short, in their nature and the necessities of their social life, their welfare and happiness, and indeed the welfare of this subordinate element, demanded corresponding action, with, of course, corresponding ideas and modes of thought. They saw that this negro was not artificially or accidentally, but naturally different from themselves, that God himself had made him different and given him different faculties and different wants, and therefore designed him for different purposes, and that it was an imperative and unavoidable duty as well as necessity to adapt their social habits and legal and political institutions to this state or condition of fixed and unalterable fact. But this was not all, nor the limit to the new ideas that thus originated in the changed conditions under which they were living. Their traditions, the mental habits of their old cavalier ancestry, the ideas they carried from the mother country, taught them to regard the person of a king as something quite sacred, and to whom an absolute and unquestioning obedience was always due, while the class of gentlemen, the nobility, or aristocracy, that more immediately surrounded royalty was deemed to be altogether superior and different from the vulgar multitudes that made up the people. The celebrated formula of Archbishop Laud, that “passive obedience and non-resistance” was the absolute and universal duty of the people to the will of the king, expressed with brevity and accuracy the prevalent sentiment of the cavaliers, and they demanded from their special retainers the same unquestioning submission which they themselves accorded to royalty. The ignorance of the great mass of the people on one hand, and the actual power and tyranny of the nobles on the other, sunk so deep into the common mind of England and other European people during the middle ages, that though many generations have passed since, the sentiment of superiority in one class and of inferiority in the other, remains yet, and in England at this day is nearly as potent as ever.

But the descendants of the cavaliers in Virginia were placed face to face with facts that utterly exploded those factitious sentiments that had their origin in a certain condition of society, and not in nature or in the natural relations of men. They were in juxtaposition with negroes, with different and subordinate beings, human, it is true, like themselves, but different human beings, just as pigeons, while birds equally with robins, are different birds, or as hounds, though dogs, were different dogs from spaniels or bull-dogs. This was a great, starting, fixed fact, that no amount or extent of sentiment, theory, or mental habit could explain away or modify, or avoid in any respect. They saw this fact daily staring them in the face; they were compelled to recognize it, to legislate for it, or for these people, to adapt their social customs to it, in short, to conform to it, and therefore were forced to cast aside their preconceived notions, the traditions and mental habits of their ancestors, all their ideas of loyalty to a creature like themselves and of their own class-superiority which they had brought from the Old World. What was their fancied superiority over their own humbler brethren, when contrasted with this natural inferiority of the negro? What was the accident of education, of wealth, of refinement of manners, or any other factitious, temporary, or accidental thing worth, which separated them from their less fortunate neighbors, when compared with the handiwork of nature, with the fixed and impassable barriers that separated them both from negroes? What, in short, were the petty distinctions of human pride, vanity, and accident, in comparison with the ordinances of the Eternal?

Such were the facts that confronted them, such the external circumstances that developed new ideas and new modes of thought in the colonists of Virginia, such the potent causes that changed the descendants of English cavaliers into the earliest, most consistent, and most reliable champions of democracy in America. The same causes, to a certain extent, influenced the inhabitants of other colonies, and it will be found that in precise proportion to the amount and the fixedness of this negro element in any locality, there were clear, corresponding views of liberty and equality among white men. Indeed, this is as true now as ever before, and almost invariably there are sound and rational views of liberty and of democratic institutions in precise proportion to the presence, or imperfect and unsound notions in proportion to the absence, of this negro element. Those States like Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Alabama, that have relatively the largest negro population, are the most decidedly and consistently democratic, while Massachusetts, Vermont, etc., with the fewest negroes among them, are the most unsound in these respects, and however intelligent in regard to other things, are certainly behind most of the great American communities in political knowledge.

South Carolina, and perhaps some others, may seem exceptions to this very general truth, but if so in reality, it is owing to peculiar causes, such as the education of many of its people abroad, in Europe, and at the North, etc., but even as regards that State, so exceptional in many respects, land is more equally divided than in any other State, and where such a fact obtains, the general tendency to equality in citizenship must be strikingly manifested.