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.... It will probably be asked, Why not
retain and incorporate the blacks into the
state, and thus save the expense of
supplying, by importation of white settlers,
the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted
prejudices entertained by the whites; ten
thousand recollections, by the blacks, of
the injuries they have sustained; new
provocations; the real distinctions which
nature has made; and many other
circumstances, will divide us into parties,
and produce convulsions, which will probably
never end but in the extermination of the
one or the other race. - To these
objections, which are political, may be
added others, which are physical and moral.
The first difference which strikes us is
that of colour. - Whether the black of the
negro resides in the reticular membrane
between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the
scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from
the colour of the blood, the colour of the
bile, or from that of some other secretion,
the difference is fixed in nature, and is as
real as if its seat and cause were better
known to us. And is this difference of no
importance? Is it not the foundation of a
greater or less share of beauty in the two
races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and
white, the expressions of every passion by
greater or less suffusions of colour in the
one, preferable to that eternal monotony,
which reigns in the countenances, that
immovable veil of black which covers all the
emotions of the other race? Add to these,
flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of
form, their own judgment in favour of the
whites, declared by their preference of
them, as uniformly as is the preference of
the Oranootan for the black women over those
of his own species. The circumstance of
Superior beauty, is thought worthy attention
in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and
other domestic animals; why not in that of
man? Besides those of colour, figure, and
hair, there are other physical distinctions
proving a difference of race. They have less
hair on the face and body. They secrete less
by the kidneys, and more by the glands of
the skin, which gives them a very strong and
disagreeable odour. This greater degree of
transpiration renders them more tolerant of
heat, and less so of cold than the whites.
Perhaps too a difference of structure in the
pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious
experimentalist has discovered to be the
principal regulator of animal heat, may have
disabled them from extricating, in the act
of inspiration, so much of that fluid from
the outer air, or obliged them in
expiration, to part with more of it. They
seem to require less sleep. A black after
hard labour through the day, will be induced
by the slightest amusements to sit up till
midnight, or later, though knowing he must
be out with the first dawn of the morning.
They are at least as brave, and more
adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed
from a want of forethought, which prevents
their seeing a danger till it be present..-
When present, they do not go through it with
more coolness or steadiness than the whites.
They are more ardent after their female: but
love seems with them to be more an eager
desire, than a tender delicate mixture of
sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are
transient. Those numberless afflictions,
which render it doubtful whether heaven has
given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are
less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.
In general, their existence appears to
participate more of sensation than
reflection. To this must be ascribed their
disposition to sleep when abstracted from
their diversions, and unemployed in labour.
An animal whose body is at rest, and who
does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep
of course. Comparing them by their faculties
of memory, reason, and imagination, it
appears to me that in memory they are equal
to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I
think one could scarcely be found capable of
tracing and comprehending the investigations
of Euclid; and that in imagination they are
dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be
unfair to follow them to Africa for this
investigation.
We will consider them here, on the same
stage with the whites, and where the facts
are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to
be formed. It will be right to make great
allowances for the difference of condition,
of education, of conversation, of the sphere
in which they move. Many millions of them
have been brought to, and born in America.
Most of them indeed have been confined to
tillage, to their own homes, and their own
society: yet many have been so situated,
that they might have availed themselves of
the conversation of their masters; many have
been brought up to the handicraft arts, and
from that circumstance have always been
associated with the whites. Some have been
liberally educated, and all have lived in
countries where the arts and sciences are
cultivated to a considerable degree, and
have had before their eyes samples of the
best works from abroad. The Indians, with no
advantages of this kind, will often carve
figures on their pipes not destitute of
design and merit. They will crayon out an
animal, a plant, or a country, so as to
prove the existence of a germ in their minds
which only wants cultivation. They astonish
you with strokes of the most sublime
oratory; such as prove their reason and
sentiment strong, their imagination glowing
and elevated. But never yet could I find
that a black had uttered a thought above the
level of plain narration; never saw even an
elementary trait of painting or sculpture.
In music they are more generally gifted than
the whites with accurate ears for tune and
time, and they have been found capable of
imagining a small catch.
Whether they will be equal to the
composition of a more extensive run of
melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to
be proved. Misery is often the parent of the
most affecting touches in poetry. Among the
blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no
poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the
poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles
the senses only, not the imagination.
Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis
Whately but it could not produce a poet. The
compositions published under her name are
below the dignity of criticism. The heroes
of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to
the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho has
approached nearer to merit in composition;
yet his letters do more honour to the heart
than the head. They breathe the purest
effusions of friendship and general
philanthropy, and show how great a degree of
the latter may be compounded with strong
religious zeal. He is often happy in the
turn of his compliments, and his style is
easy and familiar, except when he affects a
Shandean fabrication of words. But his
imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes
incessantly from every restraint of reason
and taste, and, in the course of its
vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as
incoherent and eccentric, as is the course
of a meteor through the sky. His subjects
should often have led him to a process of
sober reasoning: yet we find him always
substituting sentiment for demonstration.
Upon the whole, though we admit him to the
first place among those of his own colour
who have presented themselves to the public
judgment, yet when we compare him with the
writers of the race among whom he lived and
particularly with the epistolary class, in
which he has taken his own stand, we are
compelled to enrol him at the bottom of the
column. This criticism supposes the letters
published under his name to be genuine, and
to have received amendment from no other
hand; points which would not be of easy
investigation. The improvement of the blacks
in body and mind, in the first instance of
their mixture with the whites, has been
observed by every one, and proves that their
inferiority is not the effect merely of
their condition of life. We know that among
the Romans, about the Augustan age
especially, the condition of their slaves
was much more deplorable than that of the
blacks on the continent of America. The two
sexes were confined in separate apartments,
because to raise a child cost the master
more than to buy one. Cato, for a very
restricted indulgence to his slaves in this
particular, took from them a certain price.
But in this country the slaves multiply as
fast as the free inhabitants. Their
situation and manners place the commerce
between the two sexes almost without
restraint. The same Cato, on a principle of
oeconomy, always sold his sick and
superannuated slaves. He gives it as a
standing precept to a master visiting his
farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old
tools, old and diseased servants, and every
thing else become useless. . . . The
American slaves cannot enumerate this among
the injuries and insults they receive. It
was the common practice to expose in the
island Esculapius, in the Tyber, diseased
slaves, whose cure was like to become
tedious. The emperor Claudius, by an edict,
gave freedom to such of them as should
recover, and first declared that if any
person chose to kill rather than expose
them, it should be deemed homicide. The
exposing them is a crime of which no
instance has existed with us; and were it to
be followed by death, it would be punished
capitally. We are told of a certain Vedius
Pollio, who, in the presence of Augustus,
would have given a slave as food to his
fish, for having broken a glass. With the
Romans, the regular method of taking the
evidence of their slaves was under torture.
Here it has been thought better never to
resort to their evidence. When a master was
murdered, all his slaves, in the same house,
or within hearing, were condemned to death.
Here punishment falls on the guilty only,
and as precise proof is required against him
as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding
these and other discouraging circumstances
among the Romans, their slaves were often
their rarest artists. They excelled too in
science, insomuch as to be usually employed
as tutors to their masters' children.
Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were
slaves. But they were of the race of whites.
It is not their condition then, but nature,
which has produced the distinction. Whether
further observation will or will not verify
the conjecture, that nature has been less
bountiful to them in the endowments of the
head, I believe that in those of the heart
she will be found to have done them justice.
That disposition to theft with which they
have been branded, must be ascribed to their
situation, and not to any depravity of the
moral sense. The man, in whose favour no
laws of property exist, probably feels
himself less bound to respect those made in
favour of others. When arguing for
ourselves, we lay it down as a fundamental,
that laws, to be just, must give a
reciprocation of right; that, without this,
they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct,
founded in force, and not in conscience: and
it is a problem which I give to the master
to solve, whether the religious precepts
against the violation of property were not
framed for him as well as his slave? And
whether the slave may not as justifiably
take a little from one, who has taken all
from him, as he may slay one who would slay
him? That a change in the relations in which
a man is placed should change his ideas of
moral right or wrong, is neither new, nor
peculiar to the colour of the blacks. Homer
tells us it was so 2600 years ago.
Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth
away.
But the slaves of which Homer speaks were
whites. Notwithstanding these considerations
which must weaken their respect for the laws
of property, we find among them numerous
instances of the most rigid integrity, and
as many as among their better instructed
masters, of benevolence, gratitude and
unshaken fidelity. The opinion, that they
are inferior in the faculties of reason and
imagination, must be hazarded with great
diffidence. To justify a general conclusion,
requires many observations, even where the
subject may be submitted to the anatomical
knife, to optical classes, to analysis by
fire, or by solvents. How much more then
where it is a faculty, not a substance, we
are examining; where it eludes the research
of all the Senses; where the conditions of
its existence are various and variously
combined; where the effects of those which
are present or absent bid defiance to
calculation; let me add too, as a
circumstance of great tenderness, where our
conclusion would degrade a whole race of men
from the rank in the scale of beings which
their Creator may perhaps have given them.
To our reproach it must be said, that though
for a century and a half we have had under
our eyes the races of black and of red men,
they have never yet been viewed by us as
subjects of natural history. I advance it
therefore as a suspicion only, that the
blacks, whether originally a distinct race,
or made distinct by time and circumstances,
are inferior to the whites in the endowments
both of body and mind. It is not against
experience to suppose, that different
Species of the same genus, or varieties of
the same species, may possess different
qualifications. Will not a lover of natural
history then, one who views the gradations
in all the races of animals with the eye of
philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those
in the department of man as distinct as
nature has formed them? This unfortunate
difference of colour, and perhaps of
faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the
emancipation of these people. Many of their
advocates, while they wish to vindicate the
liberty of human nature are anxious also to
preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of
these, embarrassed by the question `What
further is to be done with them?' join
themselves in opposition with those who are
actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the
Romans emancipation required but one effort.
The slave, when made free, might mix with,
without staining the blood of his master.
But with us a second is necessary, unknown
to history. When freed, he is to be removed
beyond the reach of mixture.
The particular customs and manners that may
happen to be received in that state? It is
difficult to determine on the standard by
which the manners of a nation may be tried,
whether catholic, or particular. It is more
difficult for a native to bring to that
standard the manners of his own nation,
familiarized to him by habit. There must
doubtless be an unhappy influence on the
manners of our people produced by the
existence of slavery among us. The whole
commerce between master and slave is a
perpetual exercise of the most boisterous
passions, the most unremitting despotism on
the one part, and degrading submissions on
the other. Our children see this, and learn
to imitate it; for man is an imitative
animal. This quality is the germ of all
education in him. From his cradle to his
grave he is learning to do what he sees
others do. If a parent could find no motive
either in his philanthropy or his self love,
for restraining the intemperance of passion
towards his slave, it should always be a
sufficient one that his child is present.
But generally it is not sufficient. The
parent storms, the child looks on, catches
the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same
airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives
a loose to the worst of passions, and thus
nursed, educated, and daily exercised in
tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with
odious pecularities. The man must be a
prodigy who can retain his manners and
morals undepraved by such circumstances. And
with what execration should the statesman be
loaded, who, permitting one half the
citizens thus to trarnple on the rights of
the other, transforms those into despots,
and these into enemies, destroys the morals
of the one part, and the amor patriae of the
other. For if a slave can have a country in
this world, it must be any other in
preference to that in which he is born to
live and labour for another; in which he
must lock up the faculties of his nature,
contribute as far as depends on his
individual endeavours to the evanishment of
the human race, or entail his own miserable
condition on the endless generations
proceeding from him. With the morals of the
people, their industry also is destroyed.
For in a warm climate, no man will labour
for himself who can make another labour for
him. This is so true, that of the
proprietors of slaves a very small
proportion indeed are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of a nation be thought
secure when we have removed their only firm
basis, a conviction in the minds of the
people that these liberties are of the gift
of God? That they are not to be violated but
with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that
considering numbers, nature and natural
means only, a revolution of the wheel of
fortune, an exchange of situation is among
possible events: that it may become probable
by supernatural interference! The almighty
has no attribute which can take side with us
in such a contest. - But it is impossible to
be temperate and to pursue this subject
through the various considerations of
policy, of morals, of history natural and
civil. We must be contented to hope they
will force their way into every one's mind.
I think a change already perceptible, since
the origin of the present revolution. The
spirit of the master is abating, that of the
slave rising from the dust, his condition
mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under
the auspices of heaven, for a total
emancipation, and that this is disposed, in
the order of events, to be with the consent
of the masters, rather than by their
extirpation. |