When the French expedition, under the command of General Le Clerc, failed to recover the island in 1803, and the Haytians, though their independence was not recognized by the French republic, were able, through the aid of the British, to assume the position of an independent power, they commenced a national existence peculiarly favored in many respects. The mulattoes—generally the children of French masters—were many of them highly educated, having been sent to Paris for this purpose in childhood. They had the sympathy of the French people, and indeed of the whole world on their side, for the worst tyrants and oppressors of Europe, while laboring with all their might to crush out the liberty of white men, were then as now deeply interested in the freedom of the black. Moreover, they had the physical as well as the moral support of England, and without a single enemy in the world to embarrass their progress. But though without foreign enemies or wars of any kind to check their advance, with the finest climate and most fertile soil in the world, they have rapidly collapsed into their natural Africanism.
Internal commotions, as now in Mexico, began at once among the mongrels, and bloodshed and misery of every kind prevailed until this element was necessarily destroyed, and the stolid, idle, and useless savagism of Africa became the essential characteristic of these people. Two causes alone have held in check the tendencies to Africanism—the white blood and the surrounding civilization. The mongrel element, though constantly diminishing in numbers, naturally governed, until it became so feeble that Solouque, a typical negro and an embodiment of Africanism, of fetichism, and a worshiper of Obi, seized the supreme power and inaugurated savagism. Accident of some kind or other has recently pushed this worthy aside and placed one Jeffrard, a griffe, or “colored man,” or mulatto, in power, who calls himself president, but he will doubtless soon give place to some negro chief. Nevertheless, there is a considerable infusion of white blood still in Hayti, and therefore, the true negro condition—the natural condition when isolated, the condition it has always been in and that it always must remain in when isolated from the Caucasian man—is not yet entirely restored. Again, the surrounding civilization—the contact with Europeans and Americans that commerce or trade in fruits growing almost spontaneously together, with the few adventurous spirits always attracted to such a fertile soil as Hayti would, perhaps, always give to its people a somewhat different external character from the African type.
But if we can be permitted to suppose the absence of these things—the utter extinction of the Caucasian innervation and absolute isolation of the negro as in Africa—then, in the tropics, the same climate with similar soils, in short, similar circumstances to those surrounding him in Africa, of course, the negro type, the negro nature, the negro being, would be the same as it always has been and is now in Africa. On the coast, where he is brought in contact with the white man, where there are a good many with white blood in their veins, who therefore retain to some extent the habitudes of the superior race, the traditions and historic recollections of their former masters are preserved. But in the interior, where the negro is permitted to live out his African tendencies, he has lost all knowledge of the events of seventy years ago. History, religion, even the French language has disappeared, and in their place there is Obiism and African dialects, while probably not one in a thousand has any perception, knowledge, or recollection whatever of Christophe, Dessalines, or others of those notorious chiefs who a little over half a century since filled the island with the terror of their names. As observed, the utter extinction of the Caucasian innervation and absolute isolation of the negro in Hayti, would of necessity end in complete Africanism, and to this end, this final culmination of savagism the whole British and European policy is now necessarily tending. It is true, the existence of a white government by mere juxtaposition as well as the prestige of power, holds in check the strong tendencies to Africanism, but the policy—the official employment of negroes always carrying with it under the monarchical regime social importance—tends powerfully to degrade the white blood and induce amalgamation, to drag after it, of course, that inevitable extinction of the mongrel progeny which the Almighty has decreed forever and everywhere.
Thus, the British “anti-slavery” policy tends rapidly and constantly to the restoration of Africanism, to savagery—to the building up of a mighty barbarism in the very heart of the American continent—to the establishment of a huge heathenism that shall spread itself over fifty degrees of the most fertile and beautiful portion of the New World. This, then, is the legitimate termination of that wide-spread delusion of modern times, which has drawn into its fatal and monstrous embrace multitudes of honest and well-meaning men, and while it already has worked out evils so stupendous as to be almost beyond our powers of computation to measure them, and never in an instance, direct or indirect, done the slightest good whatever, at this moment it threatens to inflict even greater evils on the world than those it has hitherto cursed it with. The process through which all this mischief is worked out can not or need not be mistaken—a man may run and read it, and though a fool understand it. It is this: 1st. The dogma of a single race—that the negro is a black-white man. 2d. The “anti-slavery” policy of Pitt, nominally to put down the “slave trade.” 3d. “Emancipation”—and whites and negroes declared equal. 4th. The policy of European governments to elevate negroes and depress whites, inducing social equality and consequent amalgamation. 5th. Absorption of the white blood by mongrelism. 6th. Sterility and extinction of the mixed element. 7th. Restoration of the African type and consequent savagism—a huge heathenism—indeed, Africa itself literally lifted up and planted down in the center of the New World—thus erecting a mighty barbarism directly in the path of American civilization; and which, in all coming time, as the ally or instrument of European monarchists, shall beat back the waves of democracy, and dwarf the growth and limit the power of the American Republic.
The “free negro” in our midst perishes; but in the tropics, in his own climate, he poisons and destroys the white blood, and then relapses into his inherent and organic Africanism, toward which he is rapidly impelled by the British “anti-slavery policy.” If that policy could ever be successful—if fifty degrees of latitude in the heart of this continent should ever be permanently turned over to free negroism, or ever occupied by a huge barbarism—which should not alone render the fairest portion of the New World a barren waste, but interrupt that great law of progress which impels us onward, to carry our system, our republican idea of government, and our civilization, over the whole “boundless continent,” then, indeed, might the friends of freedom despair of the future. But it is not possible that the rising civilization of America is to be thus broken down by the monarchists of the Old World. The law of progress—of national growth, of very necessity—that has carried us to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Pacific Ocean, will continue to impel us onward, and to restore the rapidly perishing civilization of the great tropical center of the continent. All humane and good men desire that this grand result shall be worked out by moral causes, by the exposure of the monstrous delusion in regard to negroes that has been productive of so much evil; but either through an appeal to reason or to the sword—through the operation of natural causes or through bloodshed and national suffering—the final end must be the restoration of the negro to his normal condition, and consequent restoration of civilization in the finest portion of our great continent.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
It has been shown in the foregoing pages of this work how that providential arrangement of human affairs, in which the negro is placed in natural juxtaposition with the white man, has resulted in the freedom of the latter and the general well-being of both. It has been seen how a subordinate and widely different social element in Virginia and other States, naturally gave origin to new ideas and new modes of thought, which, thrusting aside the mental habits and political notions brought from the Old World, naturally culminated in the grand idea of 1776, and the establishment of a new political existence, based on the natural, organic, and everlasting equality of the race. It has been seen, moreover, how the great civil revolution of 1800, which, under the lead of Mr. Jefferson, restored the purity and simplicity of republican principles, saved the Northern laboring and producing classes from the rule of an oligarchy, otherwise unavoidable, however it might have been disguised by republican formulas.
It is scarcely necessary to appeal to the political history of the country since 1800 to demonstrate the vital importance—indeed, the measureless benefit—of what, by an absurd perversion of terms, has been called negro slavery, to the freedom, progress, and prosperity of the laboring and producing classes of the North, and, indeed, to all mankind. It is seen that the existence of an inferior race—the presence of a natural substratum in the political society of the New World—has resulted in the creation of a new political and social order, and relieved the producing classes from that abject dependence on capital which in Europe, and especially in England, renders them mere beasts of burthen to a fraction of their brethren. The simple but transcendent fact, that capital and labor are united at the South—that the planter, or so-called slaveholder, is, per se and of necessity, the defender of the rights of the producing classes—this simple fact is the key to our political history, and the hinging-point of our party politics for half a century past.
The Southern planter and Northern farmer—the producing classes—a Southern majority and a Northern minority—have governed the country, fought all its battles, acquired all its territories, and conducted the nation step by step to its present position of strength, power, and grandeur. Just as steadily a Northern majority and a Southern minority have opposed this progress, and labored blindly, doubtless, to return to the system of the federalists, indeed to the European idea of class distinctions, and to render the government an instrument for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.
They have sought to create national banks; demanded favors for those engaged in manufactures; for others engaged in Northern fisheries; for the benefit of bands of jobbers and speculators, under pretence of internal improvements; in short, the Northern majority have labored continually to render the government, as in England, an instrument for benefiting classes at the expense of the great body of the people.