The valor and fighting qualities of the blacks in San Domingo were nourished by the wars which sprang from their own necessities. They were the native growths of the soil which had been long enriched by their innocent blood; more blood must be invested in it, if they would own it. Learning to fight was equivalent to learning to live. Their cause was neither represented nor championed by a single power on earth, and nothing but the hope of making enormous profits out of their despair led Anglo-American schooners to run English and French blockades, to land arms and powder in the little coves of the island. Will the negro fight as well, if the motive and the exigency are inferior?
We make a present to the Southern negro of an excellent chance for fighting, with our compliments. Some of us do it with our curses. The war does not spring for them out of enthusiasm and despair which seize their hearts at once, as they view a degradation from which they flee and a liberty to which they are all hurrying. They are asked to fight for us as well as for themselves, and this asking is, like emancipation, a military necessity. The motive lacks the perfect form and incandescence, like that of a star leaping from a molten sun, which lighted battle-ardors in the poor slaves of San Domingo. And we even hedge about this invitation to bleed for us with conditions which are evidently dictated by a suspicion that the motive is not great enough to make the negro depend upon himself. If the war does not entirely sweep away these poor beginnings and thrust white and black together into the arms of thrilling danger, we need not expect great fighting from him. He may not disgrace himself, but he will not ennoble the republic till his heart's core is the war's core, and the colors of two races run into one.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] See Numbers LVI., LVIII., LIX., and LXV. of this magazine.
[26] La Cause des Esclaves Nègres et des Habitans de la Guinée, portée au Tribunal de la Justice, de la Religion, de la Politique: I. 335; II. 66.
[27] Gros peau, thick skin, was the French equivalent to Bozal: peau fin was the Creole negro.
[28] Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, Vol. II. p. 134.
[29] Anthropologie der Naturvölker, von Dr. Theodor Waitz. Zweiter Theil: die Negervölker und ihre Verwandten. Leipzig, 1860. Very full, minute, and humane in tone, though telling all the facts about the manners and habits of native Africans.
Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de la Révolution de Saint Dominique. Par le Lieutenant-Général Baron Pamphile de La Croix. 2 Tom. Generally very fair to the negro soldier: himself a distinguished soldier.
Le Système Colonial dévoilé. Par le Baron de Vastey, mulatto. Terrible account of the plantation cruelties.