The blacks have been too degraded to more than conceive of liberty, too
debased to think of resistance to the forces that crushed them, and they
have neither observed, nor sought for opportunities, to throw off their
chains and sweep over the lands, like a destroying element, with the
accumulated wrongs of centuries. Yet there were black men among them who
were capable of high cultivation. The long contact with the superior white
race had recast the faculties of their mind, and had altered perceptibly
the rugged contour of their forms and features.
The writer observed with wonder in the regiment of black men which formed
part of the column of the desperate assault upon Fort Wagner, beautiful
heads, whose classic and regular outlines recalled the finest of the
antique.
We believe with the writer in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," that contact
with the white races has given the negro the lines of the Caucasian form,
and that the Congo type can disappear or become greatly modified.
These changes in the typical form, which we have since observed elsewhere,
appear to have taken place sometimes without the admixture of the blood of
the whites.
That the black men in the United States army fought well, no one will
deny; that they conducted themselves admirably in the murderous assaults
at Fort Wagner, or under the destroying fire at Olustee, and in many other
conflicts, every one possessed of any candor will admit. When we consider
the degradation whence they suddenly rose, and the steadiness and
firmness, and the manly bearing they exhibited after the few lessons of
military training, we are compelled to render thanks to them for their
efforts in the struggle for national existence, and to admit the
probability of their attaining that degree of intelligence, wisdom, and
virtue which distinguish the true citizen. That these men will attain the
standard of intellect of the Caucasian, we neither expect nor believe; but
we do maintain, that in the nature of every race, however debased by
prejudice, and the avarice of superior society, there exists the element
of honesty, virtue, truth, and a horror of wrong, which may be developed
and turned to the good of all society, in repelling and resisting the
force of machination, the intrigue which arises from disappointed
ambition, or the insatiable lust of more favored and less considerate
classes.
No one acquainted with the history of the commerce of human beings will
wonder at the present condition of the blacks, or that they have not risen
in the scale of social and intellectual advancement. For, looking back to
the primitive ages we may see how the human species have been depressed in
servitude, and how the very same families, who carried the arts and
sciences to celestial limits, were affected by this influence. Persons of
the same blood and inheritance as the best families of Greece and Rome,
were often reduced to slavery, and they sank rapidly under its debasing
effects. They were tamed like the black man of the South; "like brutes, by
the stings of hunger and the lash; and their education was so conducted as
to render them commodious instruments of labor for their possessors. This
degradation of course depressed their minds, restricted the expansion of
their faculties, stifled almost every effort of genius, and exhibited them
to the world as beings endued with inferior capacities to the rest of
mankind. But for this opinion there appears to have been no foundation in
truth or justice. Equal to their fellow-men in natural talents, and alike
capable of improvement, any apparent or real difference between them and
some others must have been owing to the mode of education, to the rank
they were doomed to occupy, and to the treatment they were appointed to
endure."
After all, the world appears to be a vast arena, where the good and the
bad are gathered together, and men are left to their own efforts, whether
to rise up in that scale of intelligence and virtue which conducts to
immortality, or to grovel deeper into the depths of degradation, where
there is nothing but death and annihilation. The vault of heaven grows in
immensity as we gaze into its limitless expanse, whilst the shadows and
attractions of earth fade away from view, or allure only those who have
forsaken nature.