CHAPTER XIV.

THE “SLAVE TRADE,” OR THE IMPORTATION OF NEGROES.

In the preceding chapters of this work it has been shown that the human family, like all other forms of being, is composed of a certain number of species, all having a general resemblance, but each specifically different from the other—that the Caucasian and Negro are placed by the will of the Almighty Creator at the two extremes of humanity—the former being the most superior and the latter the most inferior of all the known human races; that the physical structure or organization is always and necessarily connected with corresponding faculties or functions, and therefore the more prominent physical qualities of the negro have been presented, in order to illustrate his mental and moral nature. It has also been shown that the all-powerful instinct (prejudice) which revolts at the commingling of the blood of different races (stronger even with the negro than our own race) springs from a fundamental organic necessity, impelling us to preserve our structural integrity, and if disregarded and violated, it carries with it a corresponding penalty, and the miserable progeny, like all other abnormal conditions, is limited to a determinate existence; that that which the Eternal hand has moulded and fashioned is also eternal, and beyond the power, caprice, ignorance, or wickedness of His creatures, to change or modify; and therefore all the departures from the typical standard—all forms and degrees of the mongrel or mixed blood—are doomed to final extinction. Here we have, then, four millions of a widely different race in our midst, and though we of the present generation may not be responsible for their presence among us, and are only called upon to deal with the fact itself, without regard to its origin, the subject is of profound interest, and however current or unanimous the opinion may now be against the original “slave trade,” it is believed that a larger knowledge and a more extended acquaintance with the facts embraced in that subject will finally result in a total change of popular (American) opinion. And what American will not rejoice at such a result, if, when all the facts are known and tested by reason and conscience and the dictates of a true humanity, it is found that, however censurable the means employed may sometimes have been, the “slave trade,” the original importation of African negroes by our ancestors, was right? The negro, as has been shown, from the necessities of his organism—the size and form of his brain—is, perforce, when isolated and by himself, a savage—an idle, non-advancing, and non-producing savage, and history, ancient and modern, in a word, all human experience, confirms this physiological and material _fact_. African travelers, finding occasionally the _débris_ of Caucasian populations and the remains of Mahometan civilization, have told fanciful tales about negro industry, thrift, and morality, while dreamers at home have indulged in even more absurd fancies still in regard to the future of Africa. But why go to Africa to theorize about the negro, when we have him here, and subject to our senses as well as our reason? Why speculate on impossible assumptions, when the negro brain may be seen any day at a medical college, and its incapacity—its organic and inherent incapacity—to be any thing else, or to ever manifest any thing else, but just that which all human experience confirms and assures us must be, as it always has been, the destiny of this race, when left to itself? To talk of the civilization of the negro of Africa is like talking of the change of color of the negro, for it involves the same absurdities, the same impossibilities; and were not those who indulge in it utterly ignorant of the subject, one might say the same impieties, for the assumption that they can change the intellectual nature which God has given the negro, is as grossly impious as if they were to undertake his physical re-creation.

The negro, therefore, isolated in Africa, as has been said, must be in the future what he has been in the past, and without a supernatural interposition, must remain forever a simple, non-producing, and non-advancing savage. Can this have been the design of the Almighty? There are some things we are not permitted to know, that it is impious as well as foolish to seek to know, that the Almighty, in His infinite beneficence as well as wisdom forbids us to inquire into, or rather to attempt to inquire into; but in all that is necessary to our happiness and for the well-being of the innumerable creatures that surround us, we may know, indirectly, it is true, but none the less certainly, the design of the Almighty Creator.

All things are obviously designed for use—all the innumerable hosts of living creatures for specific purposes; the natures of many are known to us now; every day is adding to our knowledge, and a time will assuredly come when the nature and purposes of the most ferocious of wild animals and the most venomous of serpents will be clearly understood and applied to their proper uses. It is, therefore, the obvious design of the Creator that the negro should be useful, should labor, should be a producer, and as his organism forbids this, if left to himself, it is evidently intended that he should be in juxtaposition with the superior Caucasian. It is equally obvious that the tropical latitudes endowed with such exuberant fertility were designed for cultivation, for use, for the growth and production of those indigenous products found nowhere else except within the tropics and tropicoid regions of the earth. The organization of the Caucasian utterly forbids physical labor under a tropical sun. He may live there, enjoy life, longevity, the full and healthy spring of all his faculties, without lassitude or any of that weight upon his energies which ill-informed persons have supposed followed a residence in these climes, but he can not cultivate the earth or grow the products of the soil by his own labor. The negro organism, on the contrary, is adapted to this production, and the rays of a vertical sun stimulate and quicken his energies, instead of prostrating them, as in the case of the former. In another place this subject will be fully discussed, and therefore it will be sufficient in this place to simply state the fact, that the labor of the negro can alone grow the indigenous products of the tropics, and without this labor the great tropical centre of the American continent must consequently remain a barren waste.

The introduction of negroes into the Spanish islands of the West Indies can, therefore, hardly be called an accident. Negro servants were introduced into Spain by the Arabian and Moorish conquerors. From time immemorial negro “slaves” were the favorite household servants of the oriental Caucasians—not alone because they were the most docile and submissive of human beings, but because they were the most faithful and absolutely incapable of betraying their masters, and scarcely a Moorish family of consideration entered Spain without being accompanied by some of these trusty and favorite servants. The recent Portuguese discoveries and conquests on the African coasts had also brought many negroes into the Peninsula, and when Columbus and the Spaniards began their settlements in the New World, there were negroes to be found in almost every town in Spain. The conquest of the miserable natives of Hispaniola and Cuba, and their partition among the Spanish adventurers, failed to gratify their fierce desire for wealth, and from the brutality of their masters, the still lurking desire of these poor creatures for their former condition, or, it may have been, as declared by the Spanish writers, their original feebleness of constitution, they rapidly faded away in the mines and on the plantations, and more vigorous laborers became an absolute necessity, if cultivation, progress, and civilization were to be carried on in these islands. It was thus a material and industrial necessity, rather than any fancied humanity on the part of Las Casas and his friends in behalf of the Indians, that carried negroes into the Spanish islands. Some accompanied the earliest adventurers; they were seen to be safe, and to remain perfectly healthy when Spaniards themselves were constantly smitten down by the fierce suns and deadly malaria of the tropics, while instead of the drooping and listless air that distinguished the natives, these negroes were the most joyous and contented of human beings.

The interests of civilization and of a true humanity were, therefore, united with the humane desires of Las Casas and his friends in respect to the natives, and negroes soon became the sole reliance of the planters and others to whom lands had been assigned by the Spanish princes. Modern writers—Helps, Prescott, and others—laboring under the world-wide misconceptions of our times in regard to negroes, have expressed astonishment at the (to them) strange inconsistency of Las Casas, who, laboring so earnestly in behalf of the Indians, quite unconsciously aided in substituting the negro, and thus, as they suppose, laid the foundation or led the way to the enslavement of one race, while working for the freedom of another. But neither Las Casas, nor any one else, had any notion of freedom or slavery in connection with these negroes. Such a thing as a free negro was doubtless unknown in Spain or anywhere else, or, if known, it was simply because he had lost or strayed from his master. History does not, it is true, cast much light on the subject, but it is certain that neither Las Casas nor any of his cotemporaries had any conception of negro freedom, or associated with that race any other condition or social status than that which modern writers have universally designated as negro slavery.

Nor was he laboring for the freedom of the Indians, as that term is now understood. Many, perhaps most of those who defended the natives from the oppressions of the Spaniards, were prompted solely by religious zeal. These poor “heathens,” they held, were entitled, not to freedom, to political or social rights of any kind, but to the rights of religion, to participate in the Holy Sacraments, to enjoy the privileges which the Church promised to all who would accept them, and as the ferocity of the Spaniards constantly interfered with this, hunted them down and slaughtered them without mercy, or rapidly destroyed them by hard labor and the excessive burthens heaped upon them when they no longer resisted their invaders, the priests generally, and many others, sought to defend them.

Las Casas, who seems to have been a generous and noble-hearted man, devoted himself for many years, indeed a whole life-time, to the cause of the natives, but at no time or in any way was he laboring for their freedom or to secure to them social or political rights of any kind. Other priests labored to secure their spiritual welfare, or what they believed to be this, while Las Casas, though a profoundly religious man, sought their material preservation, and to save them from that direful fate of total extinction which even then was threatened, and which finally has been so complete, that at this moment there is not one single descendant of these people left to tell the tale of their destruction. The popular notion, therefore, that Las Casas was the author or originator of the “slave trade,” and of American (negro) “slavery,” in order to “free” the native race, is altogether groundless.

It originated, as has been stated, in an industrial necessity—and while he assented to it, with the humane belief, doubtless, that it would tend to benefit the native race in relieving it from the excessive and fatal burthens imposed by the Spaniards, his assent or dissent could have no influence whatever on the subject. And as he was not laboring for the freedom of the natives—for nothing whatever but their mere material preservation—of course he could have no doubts or anxieties in regard to negroes in that respect, and when he saw them resisting alike the deadly malaria of the climate and the brutality of their masters, and contented and happy, he doubtless felt that it was a wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence that had thus adapted them to their condition and to the fulfilment of the great purposes of civilization and human progress.

The supply of negro labor in San Domingo, Cuba, and other islands, was followed, however, by extensive importations for the main land, and finally the trade, falling into the hands of the Dutch and English, became a world-wide commerce, and negroes were taken into every nook and corner of the New World where there were found buyers, or where the traders could dispose of their human cargoes. And here begins the wrong side of the matter—the cruelties, injustice, outrages, and inhumanities which, together with the false theories, morbid philanthropy, and a certain amount of falsehood, have made the term “slave trade” synonymous with everything that is diabolical and devilish that the imagination can conceive of. The Spanish government of the day limited the introduction of negroes, and provided for an equal number of females, and encouraged the importation of children; indeed, while there is no reason to suppose that they ever contemplated the negro as abstractly entitled to the rights claimed for them in our times, it is certain that both the governments of Charles V. and Philip II. did regard them as human, and made every provision that was proper for their kind and humane treatment, both in regard to their passage from Africa and their treatment on the plantations. But when the physical adaptation of the negro had become so clearly demonstrated in the Spanish islands, the British and Dutch merchants began to import them in such multitudes, and the prices fell so low, that it would not pay to import women and children, and then began that nameless and unspeakable outrage, not merely on human but on animal nature, which has distinguished this trade ever since, and, to the disgrace of all Christendom, which at this moment distinguishes it in the neighboring island of Cuba—the separation of the sexes and the violation of the rights of reproduction. Instead of a simple supply of negro labor essential to tropical production, and which violated no instinct, want, or necessity of the negro nature, ships were now fitted out on speculation; cargoes of men, as mere work-animals, were obtained in Africa and carried to any port where there was a chance of a market, not in the tropics alone, but all over North America; and the British Provinces of New England, as well as Cuba and Porto Rico, became the marts for traffic in human beings. This accounts for the great mortality of these people in the islands. In general terms, it may be said the negro will work no more than he ought to work; that is, nature has so adapted him that he can not be forced in this respect; but when they could be purchased so cheaply, the master had little interest in their health, and together with the very small native increase going on, the mortality vastly preponderated. The New England as well as the Middle States were fully supplied with these cheap negroes, but they never were profitable, and the laws of industrial adaptation has steadily carried their descendants southward.

The “slave trade,” after the first fifty years of its commencement, up to the American Revolution, may be said to have been in the hands of the British mainly, of the merchants of Bristol and Liverpool. These traders, as has been said, made it a mere matter of commerce, dealing in it just as they did in any other article of commerce, and many of the largest fortunes in England are believed to have had their foundations laid in this traffic. So far as the colonists participated in it, they approached somewhat to the earliest Spaniards, and though there were more males imported than there were females, the horrible practice of the islands, which forbade these people to fulfill the command of the Almighty, and multiply their kind, did not prevail to any considerable extent. Nature always recovers from the outrages committed on her laws, and though no legislation or human means has sought to remedy the disproportions of the sexes, they are now probably equal, though of the imported progenitors of our negroes probably two-thirds at least were males, and though even a larger proportion than this were imported into Northern ports, there are now scarcely a quarter of a million in the Northern States, while the descendants of those imported into the North have expanded into four millions at the South! What a lesson these facts present to the blind and infatuated “friends of freedom” in Kansas, and the equally blind believers in the ordinance of 1787. The negro, by a higher law than human enactments, goes where he is needed, and _permanently_ no where else. A broad and liberal survey of the whole ground—the nature of the negro, his utter uselessness when isolated or separated from the white man—his organic adaptation to tropical production—the wonderful fertility of tropical soils—the vast importance of their peculiar products to civilization and human well-being—demonstrates, beyond doubt the right and justice of the original “slave trade,” or the original importation of African negroes into America. The abuses that finally attended it have been made to overshadow the thing itself, in the popular estimation, but despite all these, and all other drawbacks, it is certain that the introduction of these negroes has resulted in a vastly preponderating good to our race, while the four millions of Christianized and enlightened negroes in our midst, when compared with any similar number of their race in Africa, are in a condition so immeasurably happy and desirable, that we can find no terms that will sufficiently express it.

The frightful tales invented of their cruel treatment on the passage from Africa may be dismissed with the single remark that it was the highest interest of the traders to take the utmost care of them, and if that be not sufficient, with the simple but pregnant fact that the average mortality, when the trade was legal, was only eleven per cent., while the illegal trade, the efforts to put it down, the false philanthropy, and mistaken interference, have raised the mortality to something like forty per cent.!

There were but two mistakes, wrongs, inhumanities, outrages on nature, whatever we may term them, involved in the “slave trade,” so far as we were concerned: 1st, the importation mainly of males, and the consequent violation of the laws of reproduction—of that fundamental and universal command of the Almighty to multiply their kind and to replenish the earth; and, 2d, their importation into northern latitudes, unsuited to the physical and industrial nature of the negro. But, as has been said, nature, sooner or later, recovers from every outrage upon her laws, and while we, in our ignorance and folly, have been disputing over our petty theories in respect to this subject, her reparatory processes have silently and steadily gone on and corrected our mistakes, and, therefore, both of the real _wrongs_ connected with the “slave trade” are now substantially _righted_.

It is, however, discreditable to our intelligence that the statute-book of the nation is disfigured by our laws and legislation on this subject. England has waged a war upon the distinctions of nature and the natural relations of races, ever since we threw off her dominion, and set up a new system of government founded on the fixed and unchangeable laws of nature. The preservation of her own system—the rule of classes and of artificial distinctions among men of the same race—impels her by a blind instinct quite as much, perhaps, as reason, to pursue this policy, and therefore, under the pretense of putting down the “slave trade,” she has constantly labored to obliterate the distinctions of race, and force or corrupt the white men of America into affiliation and equality with negroes. The war upon the “slave trade” was simply the means for accomplishing her ends—the equalization of races in the New World, and in Canada, the West Indies, in all her American possessions, she has succeeded. Negroes, whites, Indians, and mongrels are all alike her _subjects_, and the distinctions of society, as in Europe, are wholly artificial, while those of race, of nature, that are fixed by the hand of the Eternal, are impiously disregarded. And we have been her tools, her miserable dupes, and ourselves labored for our own degradation, to accomplish her objects and obliterate the distinctions of races. The question of importing more negroes—to keep open or to prohibit the “slave trade”—was and is a question of expediency, that our government should decide for itself, without regard to the opinions or policy of any other people. But to blindly follow England in her nefarious and impious efforts to break down the distinctions of race, to pronounce the conduct of our own ancestors infamous and worthy of death because English opinion and monarchical influences and exigencies demand it, is a disgrace to the manhood of our people and the intelligence of our statesmen that should not be permitted to disgrace our government any longer; and it is to be hoped that the time is not distant when this disgraceful legislation will be swept from our statute book.