THE AFRICAN IS DEEMED A BARBARIAN IN THE NORTHERN STATES.
It will be seen that the arguments here advanced are predicated, to some extent, upon the fact that the African is a barbarian. That he is so in his native wilds, we have shown by high authority. That he is so in this country, is obvious, from the fact that in the South he is held a slave, and is satisfied with his condition; and because, as a race, the African in this country, and on this continent, shows not the least capacity for self-control. In the South, the African, in his best estate, is a slave. In the North, laws are wisely enacted to prevent him from going there, because of his barbarism, and because that portion of the most advanced race on earth shrinks from contact with it. The fact, then, of his barbarism is sustained, fully,—by his normal condition in Africa; his condition of retrogradation in Jamaica and San Domingo, where the experiment of emancipation has proved a failure, where the relapse into barbarism is sure and irrevocable; and in this country, where common sense and public opinion and public law, both North and South, hold him in the condition of social, moral, and physical vassalage and servitude, and confine him effectually within certain prescribed limits, or hold him in that marked estimation of inferiority which makes him forever conscious of his own degradation. I have felt justified, therefore, not by way of opprobrium, nor in the spirit of invidious or odious comparison, to name the category in which he belongs, and then, by fair moral and philosophical argument to deduce the justice and right of civilization in holding dominion over him.
EMANCIPATION IS WRONG.
It is not our purpose to blame the African for being a barbarian; but to insist that emancipation is wrong because it restores him to barbarism, and that slavery is right because it holds him to those roles of justice which pertain to civilization, and protects him from the injustice, violence, and degradation which are the concomitants of barbarism. As the slave of civilization, he is raised infinitely above his former condition as the subject of barbarism. He knows this, and it satisfied. His instinct teaches him to love his master, because he is his protector, and because, mistrusting his own capacity for self-government, he knows the necessity for a master; and instances are numerous, of slaves, having misjudged their own capacity for self-government, having fled from supposed wrongs, they found they were mistaken as to the means of bettering their condition, and returned to voluntary servitude, begging, with tears, to be again admitted to the sacred precincts of the patriarchial care.
FITNESS OF THE AFRICAN FOR SLAVERY.
It is the fitness of things that makes the African a slave. His brawny limbs, seconding and aiding the intellect of the superior race, constitute the left hand and foot of labor. Slavery is the left hand of our body politic. Free labor is the right hand. Intellect is the head. All combined, constitute a power which is felt and feared by the foes of this Republic. Hence their endeavor to detach one portion from the other, and thus weaken the whole. To change the position of the slave is to interrupt or reverse the order of nature.
"What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,
Or hand to toil, aspired to be the head?
What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve, mere engines of the ruling mind?
Just as absurd for any part to claim
To be another in this general frame;
Just as absurd to mourn the tasks or pains
The great directing Mind of All ordains."
ABSURDITY OF NEGRO EQUALITY.
The truth is, slavery is right, and is proved to be so, notwithstanding all the noisy declamation we hear about human equality. The Negro is a barbarian, and barbarism is not humanity but inhumanity; hence the unfitness to the case, of such illogical reasoning as is adopted by the advocates of Negro equality. Human equality, as applied to the Negro, is an idle fantasy, without even the shadow or semblance of plausibility. White men are equals in few things; certainly not in physical nor mental capacity, nor power. The equality declared by our Revolutionary Sires was the political equality of white men. Let us arise from that lethargy in which we have dreamed of universal equality, and escape the dangers of that moral and intellectual somnambulism in which we have been groping to the verge of social and political destruction.