The negro in his normal condition has attractive qualities. He is not degraded, for none of God’s creatures are naturally degraded, and his fidelity and affection for his master and his master’s family, sometimes reach a dignity that would reflect honor on the white man. Nor is there any prejudice or hatred between the races when they are in true relation to each other. One may travel for months, perhaps years, in the South, and never witness a collision or the slightest disturbance between them; but, on the contrary, they will often see a kindly feeling displayed even when the negro is not owned by those who exhibit it. The negro is in a social position and relation that accords with his nature, his wants, the purposes that God has adapted him to, in short, lives out his own life, and therefore, all that is good, that is healthy in his moral nature as in his physical nature, is duly manifested. But at the North, where he is thrust from his natural sphere and forced to live out the life of a different being, he exhibits the same moral defects that he does in his physical nature. He is a social monstrosity—and though his subordinate nature renders him less likely to commit great crimes than the superior white man, the tendencies to petty immoralities are almost universal. Some, indeed, bred up in well-regulated families, and others who are nearly white, escape the general demoralization of this people, but the instances are probably few—the moral defects march hand in hand with the physical, and, as they tend continually to disease and death, so, too, do they tend to universal immorality. And as it would be strange, indeed, if Providence visited the sins of the dominant race on these poor creatures alone, they are extensively associated, as has been observed, with the vices of the whites. With feeble perceptions of moral obligations, with strong tendencies to animal indulgences of every kind, and an utter repugnance to productive labor, they congregate in the cities; and the social exclusion to which they are exposed, as well as the absence of moral sentiment among them, renders them, to a wide extent, the instruments of the vices and corruptions of the whites.
Thus, it is not alone the negro’s non-productiveness—the burden, the absolute tax imposed on the laboring classes—but the demoralization of this abnormal element, of this social monstrosity, that is inflicted on society as the legitimate and unavoidable punishment for having placed the negro in an abnormal condition. God created him a negro—a different and inferior being, and, therefore, designed him for a different and inferior social position. Society, or the State, has ignored the work of the Almighty, and declared that he should occupy the same position and live out the life of the white man; and the result is, the laboring and producing classes are burdened with his support, and society, to a certain extent, poisoned by his presence. To the negro it is death—necessarily death, as it always must be to all creatures, human or animal, forbidden to live the life God has blessed them with, or to live in accord with the conditions He has imposed on them. The ultimate doom of the poor creatures, therefore, is only a question of time. The great “anti-slavery” imposture of our times, which has rested on popular ignorance of a few fundamental truths in ethnology and political economy, has at last culminated, and few, if any more of these people will ever be turned loose, or manumitted as it has been called. Whether they will be restored to society and to usefulness at the North may be doubted, but necessity as well as humanity will doubtless prompt such a policy at the South; but, in any event, it is absolutely certain that, as a class, they will become extinct, and a hundred years hence it is reasonable to suppose that no such social monstrosity as a “free negro” will be found in America.
But another and far more embarrassing question is presented by free negroism outside of the American Union, and that now confronts us in Cuba, Jamaica, Hayti, Mexico, and on the whole line of our Southern border. This is the danger, the sole danger of the so-called slavery question, and it involves possibilities that are fearful to think of, though scarcely dangerous at all if our own people were truly enlightened on the general subject.
In a previous chapter it has been shown how climatic and industrial laws govern our mixed populations, and, without the slightest interference of government, the negro element goes just where its own welfare as well as that of the white citizenship and the general interests of civilization demand its presence. This law of industrial adaptation has carried it from northern ports into the Central States, from the latter to the Border States, and is now, with even increased activity, carrying it from Virginia, etc., into the Gulf States, and thus permitted to go on, with all obstacles removed from the path of its progress, a time will come when the negro population of the New World will be within the centre of existence where it was created, and where the Almighty Creator has provided for its well-being. A sectional party in the North, taking advantage of popular ignorance, and actually enacting a law prohibiting it to exist anywhere where white labor is best adapted, could not by that sole act do any practical injury to the social order of the South. Such an act would indeed be a violation of the spirit of the federal compact, and, as an adjunct of the hostile policy of the foreign enemies of republican institutions, its moral bearings would be full of mischief; but, disconnected or disunited with the British free negro policy, it would be harmless, for, as Mr. Webster once declared, it would only be a “reënactment of the will of God.” But, as already observed, the danger of this whole question lies beyond the boundaries of the American Union, and if it be true that we have a considerable number in our midst disaffected to democratic institutions—then every man opposed to the existing condition, or so-called slavery, is, however ignorant of it, to a certain extent an instrument of the enemies of these institutions; and the policy of any such party, as well as the action of any among us, whether in concert with, or independently of any such party, for the same common object or end, becomes treason, and treason the most wicked and revolting that the mind can conceive of, for it involves the natural supremacy of the white man over the negro, as well as the permanence, peace, and prosperity of our republican system. The Spanish, still less the Portuguese conquerors of America, have never exhibited that healthy natural instinct which preserves the integrity of races, so universally as the Anglo-Americans have done. They have intermixed and amalgamated with the Indians or Aboriginals with little hesitation; and though they have always manifested a certain repugnance to an equality with the still more subordinate negro, they have largely intermixed, and therefore, extensively deteriorated and ruined themselves.
In Brazil there are nearly four millions of negroes that are called slaves, but held more by the bonds of pecuniary interest than they are by nature, as with us. There is a large mulatto and mongrel population, often highly educated, possessing vast wealth, with, of course, all the advantage? that these things give when society does not rest on natural distinctions. A mulatto or mongrel in Virginia or Mississippi may be left to take cure of himself, or be a so-called freeman, but he can never be a citizen—can never in any thing whatever be legally endowed with the social attributes, any more than he can with the natural attributes, of the white man. But in Brazil, and, indeed, in Cuba, the mulatto, mongrel, or negro may by law become a citizen, may own slaves, may, in short, be artificially invested with all the “rights” by the government that nature—that God himself has withheld or forbidden. The white man in Cuba is a slave to a foreign dominion, and this same foreign power, while it withholds from him his natural rights, forces the negro by the same arbitrary power into legal equality with him. The arbitrary force is less in Brazil, but the low grade of manhood in the white element, its extensive affiliation and consequent deterioration with the subject race, has rendered them incapable of either comprehending liberty or of enjoying free institutions. The negro that was a slave once becomes a citizen, with all the legal rights of the white man, and, if he inherits wealth, educates his children, etc., then these artificial and accidental things, instead of the distinctions of nature, become the line of demarcation in society. If a planter has a family of children by his negro slaves, and educates them and leaves them his wealth, then they become influential citizens, makers of the government, etc., and leaders of fashion, perhaps, in Rio Janeiro and other cities. The white man is so degraded, the instinct of race so perverted, the sense of superiority so obtuse—in short, the nature of the Caucasian so completely corrupted by extensive affiliations with the subject race, that natural distinctions are no longer a line of demarcation, and wealth, accident, etc., as in Europe, and as the Federalists once desired, are the basis of the political and social order. It is somewhat different in Cuba, for here the American instinct of race and the high appreciation of manhood common to all societies based on the order of nature have a certain influence. But even in Cuba, in our own neighborhood, within a few hours’ sail of our coast, society rests upon an artificial basis, and what is called slavery rather involves pecuniary considerations than a question of races.
The social condition, therefore, or so-called slavery may be overthrown any day in Brazil or Cuba, for, resting on a basis of property instead of the distinctions of nature common with us, there is no permanent security for the social safety, and in view of the policy of England on this subject and its influence in Brazil, we should not be surprised at any moment to hear that a revolution had broken out, and that slavery was overthrown in every portion of the Brazilian empire. This result which may happen at any moment, and which circumstances alone may protract for an indefinite period, would seem to be ultimately inevitable—for the white element is every day becoming more deteriorated and feeble; and, without the mental and moral power, without the healthy instinct of the race to buoy it up amid such corrupt and corrupting tendencies, without that high sense of manhood which makes the American “slaveholder” the perfect type and complete embodiment of the strength and power of the great master race of mankind, without, in short, the natural superiority of the white man to restrain this negro and mongrel population, it is certain sooner or later to escape from all legal restraint, and any hour the whole social fabric may collapse into utter and hopeless ruin. It will be well for Americans who desire to preserve American institutions and American civilization to heed this and ponder well on the uncertain and rotten foundations of social order in Brazil and Cuba, and which, already fatally undermined, may at any moment, as has been said, collapse into a huge mass of free negroism, and thus become a portion of that diseased, monstrous, and nameless condition which ignorance, and folly, and imposture, and hatred to American democracy have combined to pervert language as well as stultify reason and call freedom.
Elsewhere it has been shown that the negro isolated in Africa is in a natural condition, for he multiplies himself, but that he is in his normal, healthy, educated or civilized condition at the South, for he then multiplies with vastly greater rapidity than in a state of isolation, and consequently, must be more in harmony with those fixed and eternal decrees that God has ordained for the government of all His creatures. It has also been shown that the negro abandoned and left to himself in Virginia, etc., dies out, but, of course, less rapidly than at the North where the notion prevails that he is the same being as themselves, and therefore, in their efforts to make him manifest the same qualities, or, in other words, to force on him the same “rights,” he rapidly tends to extinction. But there is still another phase of free negroism vastly more extended and more dangerous to republican institutions and the future civilization of America.
The negro is a creature of the tropics, and his labor is essential to the cultivation of tropical and tropicoid products, which, in turn, are essential to the happiness and well-being of all mankind. But, as has been shown, his mental organism renders him incapable—as absolutely and inevitably as the physical organism of the white man renders him incapable of tropical production. In the brief space allowed in this work to the consideration of this vital and most momentous truth, the author could only present a few leading facts in its support, but these facts are so overwhelming that no rational or honest mind in Christendom will venture to dispute the truth in question. Furthermore it may be stated without chance or possibility of historical contradiction, that in the entire experience of mankind no single instance has ever been known when the isolated negro or the labor of the white man has cultivated the soil or grown the products of the tropics. The mind of the white man and the body of the negro—the intellect of the most elevated and the industrial capacities of the most subordinate of all the known human races, therefore, constitute the elements and motive forces of tropical civilization. Every mind capable of reasoning at all will know that civilization is impossible without production, and production in the great tropical centre of our continent being forever absolutely and necessarily impossible without negro labor guided, controlled, and managed by the higher intelligence of the white man—it is therefore absolutely certain that the social relation which English writers have taught the world to regard as a condition of slavery, is simply that social adaptation of the industrial forces of the subordinate race, essential, not alone to their own welfare but to the welfare of all mankind, and without which there can no more exist what we call civilization in a large portion of America than there can be life without food or light without the sun. This is obvious, and indeed unavoidable to those who are in actual juxtaposition with negroes. But in Europe where there are white men only, and where negroes, Indians, Malays, etc., are in the popular imagination beings like themselves except in the complexion, and only need to be civilized, as they suppose, to be like others, it was an easy matter to excite a public feeling hostile to the prosperity of the people of the tropics. The theory, or rather dogma of a single race, that all mankind was a unit, and negroes, Indians, etc., had a common origin and common nature, and therefore common rights, had been set up by English writers during the conflict with the American colonies; and Dr. Johnson, with his usual coarseness of expression, had declared that “the Virginia slaveholders were the loudest yelpers for liberty”—thus, in utter unconsciousness, paying them a compliment when he believed he was inflicting a sarcasm of peculiar virulence.
The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence had reacted in Europe, and the French Revolution, which followed so closely on the American, threatened to overthrow the whole social fabric in the Old World and to reconstruct its governments on the basis of the great American idea promulgated by Jefferson. To counteract these tendencies, the English statesmen of the day sought to distract the attention of the people from their own wrongs to the fancied wrongs of the negro—and Wilberforce, Dr. Johnson, and other tory leaders and writers, originated that world-wide delusion and imposture which, in the name of freedom, has probably done more damage to freedom than all other influences combined, within the last seventy years. The assumption of a single race—that the negro was a black-white man, and therefore entitled to all the rights of white men, naturally attracted the attention and aroused the sympathies of the English masses, and when the supposed wrongs of the negro in America were contrasted with their own, the latter, doubtless, seemed utterly insignificant in comparison.
The English government, therefore, entered on an “anti-slavery” policy, which, beginning with the abrogation of the “slave trade” has continued ever since, and though it has impoverished, and, in fact, destroyed some of the finest provinces of the British empire, it is as avowed, defined, and energetic at this moment, perhaps even more so than at any other period since it was commenced. Mr. Calhoun and others have supposed that the so-called emancipation of negroes in the British West India Islands originated in a spirit of commercial rivalry, and in order to monopolize tropical production in their East Indian possessions that they were willing to sacrifice utterly their West Indian colonies. There can be no doubt that British statesmen universally believed that the example they were about to give us in this respect would be followed by universal “emancipation” in the United States, as, indeed, it has been followed by all the European governments owning American possessions. But while this was expected by every body in England, and thus far may be said to have been the prime motive of their action, it is not reasonable to assume that British statesmen were prompted by a spirit of commercial rivalry or believed for a moment that they were concocting a grand scheme for securing a monopoly of tropical products. The policy begun by Pitt forty years previous, naturally and necessarily culminated in the “emancipation” of 1832, though the desire to neutralize the popular excitement then prevailing in respect to parliamentary reform, doubtless hastened the action of the government. English statesmen may be unable, and probably are unable to explain the motives for their “anti-slavery” policy, but they never mistake or fail to recognize its vital importance to the preservation of their system. Democracy and aristocracy are necessarily antagonistic in all their tendencies, and the progress, strength, and extension of the former necessarily involve the downfall and destruction of the latter. And, as it is the South—the “slaveholders,” the States, and the people whose social life rests upon natural distinctions that have always struck the deadliest blows at the British system, and, as declared by the old tory, Dr. Johnson, eighty years ago, have been the warmest supporters of liberty, British statesmen, in their turn, desired to break down a condition thus dangerous and thus in conflict with their own.