Prior to the emancipation act in the British West Indies, the famous Exeter Hall Junto sent out a number of emissaries of the East India Company to Jamaica, in the garb of missionaries. After remaining a year or two in the assumed character of Christian ministers, they began to preach insurrectionary doctrines, and caused a number of so-called insurrections to break out simultaneously in different parts of the island. The insurgents in every neighborhood were confined to the personal acquaintances of the Exeter Hall miscreants, who succeeded in infusing their will only into those who had listened to their incendiary harangues. This was proved upon them by the genuine missionaries, who had long been on the island, and had gathered into their various churches a vast number of converts. For, in no instance, did a single convert, or any other negro, join in the numerous insurrectionary movements who had not been personally addressed by the wolves in sheep's clothing. The Christian missionaries, particularly the Methodists, Baptist, Moravians, and Catholics, were very exact in collecting the evidence of this most important ethnological truth, in consequence of some of the planters, at the first outbreak, having confounded them with the Exeter Hall incendiaries.
The planters finally left the Christian missionaries and their flocks undisturbed, but proceeded to expel the false missionaries, to hang their converts, and to burn down their chapels. The event proved that they were wrong in not hanging the white incendiaries; because they went home to England, preached a crusade—traveling all over the United Kingdom—proclaiming, as they went, that they had left God's houses in flames throughout Jamaica, and God's people hanging like dogs from the trees in that sinful island. This so inflamed public sentiment in Great Britain against the planters, as to unite all parties in loud calls for the immediate passage of the emancipation act. There is good reason to believe that the English ministry, in view of the probable effect of that measure on the United States, and the encouragement it would afford to the culture of sugar and other tropical products in the East Indies and Mauritius, had previously determined to make negro freedom a leading measure in British policy, well knowing that its effect would be to Africanize the sugar and cotton growing regions of America. The ethnology of the prognathous race does not stop at proving that subordination to the white race is its normal condition. It goes further, and proves that social and political equality is abnormal to it, whether educated or not. Neither negroes nor mulattoes know how to use power when given to them. They always use it capriciously and tyrannically. Tschudi, a Swiss naturalist, [see Tschudi's Travels in Peru, London, 1848,] says, "that in Lima and Peru generally, the free negroes are a plague to society. Dishonesty seems to be a part of their very nature. Free born negroes, admitted into the houses of wealthy families, and have received, in early life, a good education, and treated with kindness and liberality, do not differ from their uneducated brother."
Tschudi is mistaken in supposing that dishonesty is too deeply rooted in the negro character to be removed. They are dishonest when in the abnormal condition without a master. They are also dishonest when in a state of subordination, called slavery, badly provided for and not properly disciplined and governed. But when properly disciplined, instructed, and governed, and their animal wants provided for, it would be difficult to find a more honest, faithful, and trustworthy people than they are. When made contented and happy, as they always should be, they reflect their master in their thoughts, morals, and religion, or at least they are desirous of being like him. They imitate him in every thing, as far as their imitative faculties, which are very strong, will carry them. They take a pride in his wealth, or in any thing which distinguishes him, as if they formed a part of himself, as they really do, being under the influence of his will, and in some measure assimilated, in their spiritual nature, to him—loving him with all the warm and devoted affection which children manifest to their parents. He is sure of their love and friendship, although all the world may forsake him. But to create and maintain this happy relation, he must govern them with strict reference to their ethnological peculiarities. He must treat them as inferiors, not as equals, as they are not satisfied with equality, and will despise a master who attempts to raise any one or more of them to an equality with himself; because they become jealous and suspicious that their master's favorites will exercise a sinister influence over him against them.
Impartiality of treatment in every particular, down to a hat or pair of shoes, is what they all regard as one of their dearest rights. Hence, any special favors or gifts to one, is an offense to all the rest. They also regard as a right, when punished, not to be punished in anger, but with cool deliberation. They will run from an angry or enraged master or overseer, armed with a gun or a pistol. They regard all overseers who come into the field armed with deadly weapons as cowards, and all cowards have great difficulty in governing them. It is not physical force which keeps them in subjection, but the spiritual force of the white man's will. One unarmed brave man can manage a thousand by the moral force of his will alone, much better than an hundred cowards with guns in their hands. They also require as a right when punished, to be punished with a switch or a whip, and not with a stick or the fist. In this particular the ethnical law of their nature is different from all other races of men. It is exactly the reverse of that of the American Indian. The Indian will murder any man who strikes him with a switch, a cowhide, or a whip, twenty years afterward, if he gets an opportunity; but readily forgets blows, however severe, inflicted on him with the fist, a cudgel, or a tomahawk. A remarkable ethnological peculiarity of the prognathous race is, that any deserved punishment, inflicted on them with a switch, cowhide, or whip, puts them into good humor with themselves and the executioner of the punishment, provided he manifest satisfaction by regarding the offense as atoned for.
The negro requires government in every thing, the most minute. The Indian, on the contrary, submits to government in nothing whatever. Mr. Jefferson was the first to notice this ethnical law of the red man. [See his letter to Gilmer, June 7, 1816, vol. iv, page 279, Jefferson's Correspondence.] "Every man with them," (the Indians,) says Mr. Jefferson, "is perfectly free to follow his own inclinations; but if, in doing this, he violates the rights of another, he is punished by the disesteem of society or tomahawked. Their leaders conduct them by the influence of their characters only; and they follow or not, as they please, him of whose character, for wisdom or war, they have the highest opinion, but, of all things, they least think of subjecting themselves to the will of one man." Whereas the black man requires government even in his meat and drink, his clothing, and hours of repose. Unless under the government of one man to prescribe rules of conduct to guide him, he will eat too much meat and not enough of bread and vegetables; he will not dress to suit the season, or kind of labor he is engaged in, nor retire to rest in due time to get sufficient sleep, but sit up and doze by the fire nearly all night. Nor will the women undress the children and put them regularly to bed. Nature is no law unto them. They let their children suffer and die, or unmercifully abuse them, unless the white man or woman prescribe rules in the nursery for them to go by. Whenever the white woman superintends the nursery, whether the climate be cold or hot, they increase faster than any other people on the globe; but on large plantations, remote from her influence, the negro population invariably diminishes, unless the overseer take upon himself those duties in the lying-in and nursery department, which on small estates are attended to by the mistress. She often sits up at night with sick children and administers to their wants, when their own mothers are nodding by them, and would be sound asleep if it were not for her presence. The care that white women bestow on the nursery, is one of the principal causes why three hundred thousand Africans, originally imported into the territory of the United States have increased to four millions, while in the British West Indies the number imported, exceeded, by several millions, the actual population. It is also the cause why the small proprietors of negro property in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri are able to supply the loss on the large Southern plantations, which are cut off from the happy influence of the presiding genius over civilization, morality, and population—the white woman.
The prognathous race require government also in their religious exercises, or they degenerate into fanatical saturnalia. A discreet white man or woman should always be present to regulate their religious meetings.
Here the investigation into the ethnology of the prognathous race must close, at least, for the present, leaving the most interesting part, Fetichism, the indigenous religion of the African tribes, untouched. It is the key to the negro character, which is difficult to learn from mere experience. Those who are not accustomed to them have great trouble and difficulty in managing negroes; and in consequence thereof treat them badly. If their ethnology was better and more generally understood, their value would be greatly increased, and their condition, as a laboring class, would be more enviable, compared to the European peasants, than it already is.
