Part 2

Experiments were numerous abroad, but had not the circle of darkness crowded up to the very tips of your noses, you would see that the experiment which you are trying, or at least pretending to try, had already been tried, and its vanity proved within the reach of your own hands, and at the very stoops of your own doors. The Eastern and Middle States, of the Union, in a spirit of mistaken philanthropy, about the close of the revolutionary war, emancipated, or rather turned their negroes loose without masters to direct them in life. Such was the action. What, then, has been the result? It is simply this: that not one of those emancipated people is now alive upon the world; nor have they—if the sphere of our own observations be an index of the whole—left a progeny equal to one tenth of their own numbers. They have died out under a mistaken liberty, while the slaves of the South have greatly outrun the multiplication of their white masters. Is this the millennium with which your experiment is to bless the negro?

You can answer the question yourselves by simply citing us to the wants of your Freedmen’s Bureau—to the mortality among the negroes—and to such scenes as that of Memphis in the winter of 1863, when four hundred out of forty thousand contrabands were daily consigned to “hospitable graves.”

Malpractice may be covered by a shroud, and the remains of African experiments overgrown with brambles; but such stupendous monuments of folly or of spite, or ulterior design, are not easily overlooked by men not interested in keeping them from public view. The negro you have started on a rapid down-hill march to the grave, and will so find his movement written in every succeeding census that will hereafter be taken in the United States. But let us turn from your follies to your sum of excuses.

You have done all, if your own words may be taken as expressive of your intentions, for the sake of that _beau ideal_ of the world called civil or political liberty. But have you ever stopped in your career long enough to ask yourselves what such liberty is?

The German radical sees it only in equality, the toper in his drams, the brigand in his plunder, and even Mr. Wendell Phillips, whom you have followed as the sheep with the bell, has displayed but little, if any, more wisdom in his definitions. It is, he tells us, “The reservation of all natural rights with civil liberty to defend them.”

Could inconsistency be more complete? If all natural rights be retained, from whence come the civil ones? Of what materials are they made? If my natural rights be undisturbed, by what authority am I crowded from the fields of my neighbor? Did nature give him more dominion over them than she gave to me? Or, if the proposition be not as empty as the air on which it floated, by what authority did the United States government wage that war against the Southern States, for the support of which Mr. Phillips was even then, while making the utterance, haranguing the people? Did not the government assume that the Southern people had surrendered certain _natural rights_, which they could not, at pleasure, resume?

Sir William Blackstone, whose views have stood the abrasion of time with as much durability as any other of his fellow contributors, discusses the subject with as much clearness and precision as is, we apprehend, in any other place to be found. He divides the subject into three heads, and to each gives particular bounds—into absolute liberty, natural liberty, and that division which is called civil or political liberty.

The first—absolute liberty—he tells us is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit.”

The second—natural liberty—is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature,” and the third and last—civil liberty—is “Natural liberty so far restrained, and no farther than is essential for the public good.”

The first of these, it will no doubt readily be seen, can have no existence below him to whom all things move by command. For none other can do whatever he sees fit to do, consequently such liberty has no existence in the world of men.

But natural liberty—the power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature—may have an existence, as by a man placed alone on a mountain, in a desert, or, like Selkirk, on an island in the ocean, for then, there are none his rights to dispute. But as man is a being of many wants, which he can not himself supply, such liberty is possibly the most grievous of all oppressions.

From such liberty man flees to a state of society, and, in doing so, surrenders a portion of his natural rights that he may secure and enjoy others. This state, we concede, when natural liberty is so far restrained and no farther than is just essential, etc., is civil liberty. But what amount of restraint is just so essential is the great practical problem, at the very beginning of which the commentator’s theory ends. Settle this, and in the language of “great Cesar,”

“Our toils may cease, The sword be sheathed, and earth be blessed with peace.”

But how will you settle it by declaring unequals in nature, equals by force of law?

The problem, by your theory of a general equality of the _genus homo_, ignoring the distinction of races, can not be solved, nor can peace and happiness return to the nation while legislation and nature are at war. You must concede the division of inequality of species, and upon that division frame your laws. Then may true civil liberty be assigned to all.

Nature, though our greatest friend, is, at the same time, our greatest oppressor; for she keeps us in a constant struggle for life. We must be fed, and clothed, and sheltered, and, to be happy, must have many other wants supplied. To secure these we retreat into society, throw off native rights, and continue our retreat until we find the point at which our wants are best supplied. When we have done this, then have we found the true measure of our civil liberty. But, as species differ, both in their abilities and in their instincts, no two find their measures at the same point, but are scattered all along the line from the lowest to the highest endowment of intellectual man. The white man, in obedience to the demands of his own nature, must reserve dominion over himself, for the moment he surrenders it, he loses his liberty. But it is not so with the negro, for he is differently endowed, and a being of different wants. Where the white man’s nature craves for dominion, his craves for protection, and as that point is not attained short of an absolute surrender, he gives up self-dominion that he may receive, in return, that shelter which his nature desires. When this is done—when he has made the surrender and secured the protection, then has he attained to his time measure of civil liberty: then his cares of the future are thrown upon his master, and, as a consequence, he can sing, and dance, and chatter, regardless alike of what is or is to be, and live out his life in accordance with his own nature. Thus his civil liberty and the civil liberty of the white man are as opposite as are the colors of their skins. One man is a being dominant and commanding; the other inferior and subordinate, and by this opposition do they harmonize in civil life. One supplies what the other wants; one thinks and directs, the other labors and obeys, and, as a consequence, the circle is complete. If one gets hands to do his physical labor, the other gets a mind, superior to his own, for his care and protection.

The negro, as a slave, is contented with his lot, and, under it, is the _freest_ as well as the happiest man in the world; for he is freed from the cares of life, and particularly from the cares of state, which, on the civilized plane, he has ever found himself unable successfully to manage.

His subordination as a race of man pertains to him alone; and yet we have a very marked parallel within the very limits of our own species. We are males and females; but to the male alone belongs the desire of dominion. Our women reject the right of suffrage and official position in the state. They do not want to be voters, or legislators, or officers in command, nor do they even want the position of suitors in our courts of law; because such rights to them are burdens, therefore do they reject them, and find their civil liberty, not by accepting, but by rejecting those very rights which alone make their husbands freemen. Why is this so? It is because, in nature, the woman is subordinate to the man, as is also the negro to the Caucasian species.

This is almost a parallel case. The woman has not the rights which make the man free. But does this make her a slave? If it does, then is her slavery just what her nature requires.

The “woman’s-rights man” sees this parallel, and very properly concludes that if the negro be oppressed by a deprivation of political rights, the woman, whose very existence, both political and legal, is merged in that of her husband, can be none the less so. Here we must approve his arguments, and, with him, censure the abolitionist for inconsistency who is not also a woman’s-rights man; for if the negro be enslaved by being relieved of rights which to him are burdens, why is not the woman equally a slave who is, in the same way, excluded. His logic, from his premises, is, we think, unanswerable. But he does not seem to have discovered that different natures require different rules, limits and extensions for the attainment of proper civil status in society. When he discovers this, he may find, as others have found before him, that,

Concerning man, “though wrangle e’er so long, ’Tis only this, if Heaven hath made him wrong.”

Here, for the present, we take our leave of the negro, and turn our attention more directly to that loftier shoot of humanity, who, for a name, applicable alike to the whole of a general division—to the blue-eyed Teuton as well as to the black-eyed Arab—we have (in obedience to the classification of others) called the Caucasian.

He is a native of Western Asia, Northern Africa, and of the whole of Europe, and, within these limits, flourishes to a native fullness, and multiplies with a profusion which is now forcing his children out upon all the world. But the problem of his like success in other localities yet remains to be solved. Will he multiply and continue, on this continent, as he multiplies and continues on his own?

The Aztecs are already gone. The builders of our ancient American monuments (supposed to have been of our own race) unknown—gone probably through a decline, from causes which may still be cropping out. But the Caucasian is here master, as he is wherever else he moves upon the world. But he is not here actually native, for nature did not here place him at first. Why this exclusion, we may never know; or why the red-man of the forest was assigned to the continent long hid in the western seas. But if it be held that all men sprung from a common _progenitor_, and that countries and climates have divided them into races or species, why, then, are we not now in a transition from the Caucasian to the Indian? But as no such tendency is apparent, and our sphere of action is limited to things, not as they were, or as they may have been, but to that form in which we now actually find them, we need not linger on probabilities so remote and indefinable. Ours is the present time, and elements ours only as they exist. But whatever may be the operating influences of our continent, no one can help seeing that the Caucasian in America is undergoing a change. Where it will ultimate, time only can determine, but social conditions have already varied its course. The combination of white master and negro slave has given it one direction, while general individuality has given it another.

The French Celt of Lower Canada—now about a million in his individual numbers—has already, at the end of two centuries of American life, dwindled into a pigmy compared with his European progenitors, and the same is correspondingly true of the Castilian of Peru and Mexico. Do these facts determine, or rather, do they not throw shadows, on the ultimate of that experiment now in the full tide of its progress—the replanting of one continent with a people who are alone indigenous to another?

Situated between these extremes—between Canada on one side and Mexico on the other—is it probable that nature to us will be more kind than she has been to them. But evidences of changing natures is already patent among us. Our American men, say intelligent clothiers of our Northern cities, are from two to three inches less around the chest than are the Europeans. This is a significant fact. But he who opens his eyes, and looks upon our slender-waisted and light-muscled American women, and compares them with the heavy-chested and strong-armed women of Europe, will see even a greater change. The European women are the heaviest.

Men of science tell us that the Caucasian in America loses a portion of that cellular cushion which underlies the skin, or intervenes between it and what is called the aponeurosis; and that, as a consequence, not only does the chest diminish, but the face loses its fullness, the features sharpen, and the system generally experiences a change. This may be an immediate cause, for few facts are more patent among us than the marked fullness of European, and particularly of Teutonic faces; but for the ultimate cause, there has not yet been given, or, within our knowledge, even an attempted solution.

Facts thus patent are strongly suggestive of a decline. But whatever they may be in reality, even appearances were not always so. The American man was not always below the measure of his European progenitors, nor is he now so in all localities and under all conditions of associated life. Our American men of the Revolution “were larger and stronger,” says Mr. Cobbett, an English writer of that period, “than the British troops, and by that superiority made,” he further says, the result of that war “such as an English pen refuses to write.” (_Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men_, §§275, 276 and 277.) This is European authority. But it stands not alone, for we find it fortified in records of proportions, which show our generals of that period, with but one exception, to have been all above the avoirdupois of two hundred pounds. Compare this with the weight of our like officers of the present day, and the superiority, of greater development, will be unhesitatingly accorded to the men of Revolutionary times.

We learn of no distinctions then existing between the different sections of our country, but on the contrary, as the information reaches us, there is room for no other conclusion than that every where alike, our American men were “larger and stronger than the British troops.” Such is the information given us, but such are not the conditions now, for, while the Northern man is reported to be of less compass of body than the European, the men of most, if not all, of that country lying south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and above the feverish swamps of the gulf and the Mississippi River, have kept up to their Revolutionary standard. No one fact, concerning our Western people, is more patent to the observer on the banks of the Ohio River than the fact, that the Kentuckians are larger, taller, and heavier than the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who for eight hundred miles skirt their northern border. The same is true of the Virginians. They are larger, both in height and circumference than their northern neighbors; and in every other Southern State, with the exceptions above noticed, we understand, that a similar development among the higher orders of society exists.

An English tourist, who visited both the Northern and Southern armies during the late war, observed this greater development of the Southern men, and so reported it for Blackwood’s Magazine. But the fact is presented with probably more precision by the records of the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors, for more than twenty years, have been weighed, measured, and their nativities noted. These records, say our informers, showed a difference, before the war, of three inches in height and twenty pounds in weight in favor of the Southern over the Northern man.

Such facts can not too forcibly command the attention of every man who aspires to the distinction of making public laws. They show the men of the South, at the beginning of the late war, in the same proportions that they show the men of the whole republic in the days of our revolution, when all the States or colonies, North as well as South, held negro slaves. To what cause, then, are we to impute the greater development of the Anglo-American at those particular times, and in those particular localities, than to the institution of negro slavery?

But this development of the Americanized Caucasian under the relation of white master and negro slave, though a commanding fact in determining the application of laws to localities, is nevertheless but little, if any thing, more than a story half told; for in addition to the greater physical proportions of the individual man, the institution has given us our loftiest shoots of intellectual power. It has given us a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison, and, as its limits were national in the dawning period of our republic, an Adams, a Hamilton, a Franklin, and, in fact, almost every other intellect of which the nation is justly proud. It was this institution which gave lofty manhood to the American mind, and threw the glove of defiance at the feet of the great Herculian English power. It gave birth to a nation of freemen, and when cut down in its limits by Northern folly, fanaticism, and design, its remaining noblemen, with but one third of the republic in population, for half a century gave direction to it all. They were giants in debate, and by their superiority, in the clash of sections, stung the pride of the opinionated Yankee, who, brooding over his wounds, sought that redress in the physical clash of numbers which he could not obtain in the battle of mind. Then, when Northern numbers, swelled by immigration to overpowering proportions, he, in the true spirit of a low cunning, discovered that “The Union was no longer worth a _cus_ without the letting of a little blood;” and, as a consequence, hurried on—in his security of numbers—his vaunted “Irrepressible conflict of contending and induring forces.”

There could be no retreat from a conflict “irrepressible” in its nature. The child begotten must be born, and when defiance responds to aggression, there must come the shock of arms. It did come, and with a force that now tells the world of the madness in which it was conceived. Armies have met and have fought. The storm of war has passed over the nation, and beneath its debris now lies the American man, overcome and subdued, not by individual superiority, but by the force of mighty numbers—the madmen of his own country, in alliance with a world of immigrants and imported mercenaries, arrayed in arms against him. It was a conflict of unequal numbers and resources. Still it was a mighty struggle, for it was that shock in which “comes the tug of war.”

The American man, who fought his battles alone, went down, but he fell, as he ever falls, from the lakes to the gulf, “with his back to the ground and his feet to the foe.” With a population of but five millions, and but poorly provided, he disputed, for four long and bloody years, every inch of ground, against the twenty-five millions, who, with all the engines of modern warfare, and with all Europe at their command for soldiers, hurled their mighty armies against him. But he fell, and why should he not have fallen, when the herring is known to have smothered the whale?

The native Indian was brave and undaunted—no Roman was his superior, until he was cowed and subdued by the superiority of the bayonet and bomb over his war-club and his arrows. He met his doom, resigned and unshaken, as fate determined it, and so, too, now does his Anglo-successor—a proof in nature that the American man is designed for a soldier and a master, and not for a serf or slave.

The transplanted European in America may lose a portion of his cellular tissue, under one form of association, and may regain it, or expand it, under another; the cause of which may not readily be comprehended. But there is one point, not of proportions, but of physical action, resulting from some cause, known or unknown, and alike common to all forms of association, which can not, we think, impress itself too forcibly on the mind of every American legislator. It is the undeniable fact, that the Anglo-American man has not the same endurance, as a drudge or laborer, that pertains to the European—that he is less enduring, and, as a consequence, in labor’s conflict, loses ground. He is more fleet, and may do more for a time, but at the end of the year the European will, as a general rule, subject, of course, to its exceptions, make the best report.

By this superiority is the American forced from the field of labor, and his place monopolized by the immigrant from abroad. Look around you, and see who do your work! Look to your railroads and canals; look through your workshops, to your various modes of transportation, and your menial services, and when you have done so, tell me if you can keep up a supply, or even man a single boat on the Western waters, without the aid of immigrated hands. Business, in fact, would stop in almost every department, requiring heavy labor, if the European man was taken away. Is not this a dependence reaching to the very foundation of that liberty of which the Americans, more than any other people, are most prolific in their boasts? Can a people be free who are dependent on another people, equals with themselves before the law, for all the necessaries which labor alone can produce? Mexico bows to a master from abroad; and the United States, through the folly of her legislators, now leans dependent on foreign hands.

Labor, in the conflict of life, draws to itself the capital of that country in which its productions are used, or to the hands which produce them; consequently, when a society is composed of two kinds, or divisions of people, one of whom are better, or more enduring laborers than the other, that division, so favored, will, sooner or later, obtain the property, and with it political and social dominion of the nation.

Already is our property in rapid transit from native to immigrated hands, and we, even rejoicing at the opportunities which circumstances give us, of selling or giving our country away. Look around you, and see who are vendors and who are purchasers of real estate, and the point will at once become palpable and plain. See, too, who are becoming landlords, and who are becoming tenants; and, under the new order of things—outside of that combination of wholesale swindlers who converted our property into national securities, and then stole to their fullness—who are the holders of our national bonds? Look at them here and abroad, as they are now sporting on property wrenched from American hands, and you may have some idea of the condition into which you are driving your nation.