The African character has its own marked and distinctive peculiarities. It is tropical. It has passion deep and pervasive, slumbering within a rounded form and in deep dreamy eyes. It is ductile and plastic, ready to receive impressions and to be shapen by them. It does not posses the hard, aggressive features of the character of the tribes of Northern Europe; it does not seek by conquest to extend its power, or to mould other people to its form. It is adapted to receive rather than to give. It is therefore essentially imitative. From this comes the rapidity with which under favorable influences, the African advances in civilization. Wherever these influences are numerous and powerful enough to be the most prominent, the negro yields to them with marvellous rapidity.
There is, perhaps, no race that gives up so readily and fully old habits and associations. We find no granite formations of character underlying the race, such as are met with in the tribes and peoples of Asia. Compare, for instance, the plastic mobility of the Pangwee and Bakwain with the rigidity of the Hindu or Chinese. Or where the case may be seen in even a more striking way, compare the African negro with the American Indian; take the one from his tropical wilds, the other from his forest home, and place them both under the same civilizing influences, and where at the end of a fixed period will you find them? In a single generation the one is nearly at your side, the other is simply a savage still.
The rapid rise of the negro race in the West India Islands, Jamaica, for example, when made free by the British Government, is a very striking illustration, though the time has been too short to bring it out to the full. Taking all the facts as they are given us, we find the people rising almost at once, (for thirty years are usually as nothing in the life of a people,) out of the barbarism of slavery, into a nation self-supporting, self-governing to a considerable extent, moral and religious, not, indeed, in the highest degree, but still wonderfully advanced. * We believe that it is without a parallel.
*See Sewell's "West Indies, or the Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West India Islands," an evidently dispassionate and disinterested view of the condition of these islands. An attentive consideration of his stateements would go far to relieve the matter of emancipation of some of the difficulties with which to many it seems environed. "These people," he remarks, "who live comfortably and independently, own houses and stock, pay taxes and poll votes, and pay their money to build churches, are the same people whom we have heard represented as idle, worthless, fellows, obstinately opposed to work, and ready to live on an orange or banana, rather than earn their daily bread."
Together with this plastic docility, the African has another which at first sight seems in flagrant contradiction;—the race has a peculiar power of resistance permanence. It is said, probably truthfully, that no race has ever been able to abide a close contact with the Anglo-Saxon. One of two results has always followed;—either it has been swallowed up and lost as a river in an ocean, or it has gone down and been swept away. But this race has neither been absorbed nor destroyed. It has grown under the most adverse influences, and asserts itself in all its peculiar characteristics under foreign skies, and after the lapse of two centuries. The negro of America is a true African still.
This race has not greatly mingled with other races. It is, we are inclined to believe, rather a characteristic of it not to seek an amalgamation with another people, its tendency is to remain apart. We are well aware, indeed, that this is exactly contrary to the views of many who have built their opinions on popular assertions and prejudice rather than on observed facts. The assumption is that the negro desires to mingle his blood with that of the white races. The reverse is the fact. There is, though it may seem to some unaccountable, a certain pride of race, which leads the negro to exult in the purity of his blood, and to regard a foreign element in it as not only not desirable, but even objectionable. This feeling does not belong simply to the negro on his own continent; it perpetuates, perhaps magnifies itself when surrounded by another people. Among them in this country a pure-blooded negro will, with biting sarcasm, taunt the mulatto with the fact that the blood of another race is in his veins.
This feeling, which must have been noticed by any one whose observation has been extensive or intelligent enough to collect the facts, leads the race to remain by itself; and when left to its natural course, such is the result. The statistics of this country show that the free black does not and cannot mingle with the white race. No elevation or freedom can produce such an intermixture. Here and there, but so seldom as to present but perhaps a single case only in widely separated communities, there is an inter-marriage. This seeming want of inclination, coupled with a natural and insuperable repugnance on the part of the white, must ever keep the two races apart when they stand on an equal footing of freedom.
The often repeated argument against emancipation, founded on the notion that it would be necessarily followed by amalgamation, is the product of the grossest ignorance and thoughtlessness, while at the same time it betrays a shameful want of confidence in the white race itself. It surely argues no great power or stability in a people when they are not able to keep themselves from being mixed up with a confessedly inferior race. But facts point in a wholly different direction: so far from freedom promoting this intermixture, the only condition in which these two races are found mingling is where the negro is in a state of servitude. Here the process goes on freely and under the working of natural causes. The influences which on either side under other circumstances make it impossible, here become inoperative, and are overborne by other and more powerful ones. The close intimacies, beginning with infancy and extending over the whole life, destroying what under other circumstances might seem to be a natural separation; a servile desire to please on the part of the slave, lust and cupidity on the part of the master, all combine to make the blood of the two races flow in the same veins. Slavery is the source of amalgamation. The mulatto and the quadroon tell you unerringly of a present or a former servitude.
With this pliant ductility and this permanence of race, there is another striking characteristic;—the negro's attachment to place. It is probably a natural trait, but from easily perceived causes it is perhaps intensified in the case of the American negro. He loves his home and seldom goes willingly away from it, whether slave or free. The number of fugitives from bondage would be prodigiously multiplied were this feeling more easily overcome. Many a poor bondman has turned back to slavery when the hard alternative has been forced upon him to remain in it or go forever away from the familiar and dear scenes of his childhood's home. It is necessity scarcely less powerful than death that compels him to leave them behind.
The efforts which philanthropy has made to promote their colonization have met with an insuperable obstacle here, and will be compelled to contend, more or less unsuccessfully with it, till there shall be strength and education enough given the black to rise above it.