CHAPTER XXI.
NEGROES.
Two important questions present themselves with regard to negroes: first, the lawfulness or expediency of slavery; and secondly, the comparative equality of the whites and blacks. The History of the World teaches us that slavery is independent of colour, and existed every where of old, under every form of Government. But the abolition of slavery was the work of the Christian religion, of which it is one of the noblest mercies; and let us never forget the saying of Montesquieu, “that it is our business to prove the negroes less than men, lest they prove us to be less than Christians.”
The celebrated Abbé Grégoire was one of the most zealous and persevering advocates of the negroes. So enthusiastic was he in their cause, that he might have been supposed to have undertaken it as a reproach to their white brethren.
With regard to the question of innate equality between the two races, we cannot conceive a more apt illustration than that made by a Creole child, on hearing at his father’s table, a discussion upon negroes, a subject on which most colonists differ entirely from the Abbé Grégoire.
In the course of dessert, a gentleman, who had been loudest in opprobriating the negroes, desired to be helped to grapes. The child pertinaciously insisted on giving him white grapes instead of the black, to which he had pointed. “One kind is as good as the other,” said the gentleman, “the only difference is in the colour of the skin.” “And why then,” cried the child, “do you persist in refusing the same concession to the poor negroes?”
The scholiasts have written much which has tended only to render more obscure the origin of the negro race; some deriving it from Cain, and attributing its blackness to Divine wrath after the murder of Abel; others from Shem, the son of Noah, which is the opinion of Dr. Hanneman, as is seen in his Latin Treatise upon the colour of “the Descendants of Shem.” The learned German quotes numerous proofs of the culpable conduct of Shem towards his father; adding that Shem had long practised the art of magic, and being unable to transport into the ark all his works of witchcraft and magic, had them engraved upon brass and stone, so as to find them after the deluge. Hanneman cites the authority of Luther, who formally asserts that the skin of Shem was blackened as a punishment for his irreverence; and quotes a passage from the learned Ulricius, who in his treaty De Tacticis, established that the sons of Ham had white skins, those of Japhet a brownish complexion, while those of Shem were black as ebony.
The anatomist, Meiners, adopting the theory of the facial angle, excluded the negroes from the human race, and placed them in the family of apes and ourang-outangs.
According to the Abbé Grégoire, all black skinned races descend from the Ethiopian. He founds his opinion upon the works of Herodotus, Theophrastes, Pausanias, Athenœus, Eusebius, Heliodorus, Josephus, Pliny, and Terence; all of whom, in speaking of negroes, call them Ethiopians. As regards their origin, all we know is, that the Ethiopians are from the interior of Africa, and that their ancestors had short and woolly hair, black skins, and thick lips.