FRENCH AND SPANISH TERRITORY.
SETTLERS ON THE TOMBIGBEE AND MISSISSIPPI RIVERS--LA SALLE--NATCHEZ--
FAMILY APPORTIONMENT--THE HILL COUNTRY--HOSPITALITY--BENEFIT OF
AFRICAN SLAVERY--CAPACITY OF THE NEGRO--HIS FUTURE.
About the year 1777, many persons of the then colonies, fearful of the
consequences of the war then commencing for the independence of the
colonies, removed and sought a home beyond their limits. Some selected
the Tombigbee, and others the Mississippi River, and, braving the
horrors of the wilderness, made a home for themselves and posterity,
amid the rude inhospitalies of uncultivated nature.
There were, at that time, small settlements of French and Spanish
adventurers upon these streams, in different localities. La Salle
descended upon Canada, and, taking possession of Louisiana in the name
of the French king, had created among many of the chivalrous and
adventurous spirits of France a desire to take possession of the entire
country, from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to that of the
Mississippi. Nova Scotia, called Acadia by its first settlers, and the
provinces of Canada, were his already, and France desired to restrict
the further expansion of the English colonies, now growing into
importance along the Atlantic coast.
The vast extent of the continent and its immense fertility, with its
mighty rivers, its peculiar adaptation to settlement, and the yielding
of all the necessaries and luxuries of human wants, had aroused the
enterprise of Europe. Spain had possessed herself of South America,
Mexico, and Cuba, the pride of the Antilles. The success of her scheme
of colonization stimulated both England and France to push forward
their settlements, and to foster and protect them with Governmental
care. After some fruitless attempts, the mouth of the Mississippi had
been discovered, and approached from the Gulf. The expedition under La
Salle had failed to find it. The small colony brought by him for
settlement upon the Mississippi, had been landed many leagues west of
the river's mouth, and owing to disputes between that great and
enterprising man and the officer commanding the two ships which had
transported them across the Atlantic, they were mercilessly left by
this officer, without protection, and almost without provisions, upon
the coast of what is now Texas. La Salle had started with a small
escort, by land, to find the great river. These men became
dissatisfied, and not sharing in the adventurous and energetic spirit
of their leader, remonstrated with him and proposed to return to their
companions; but, disregarding them, he pressed on in his new
enterprise. In wading a small stream, one of the men was carried off by
an alligator, and a day or so after, another was bitten and killed by a
rattle-snake. Terror seized upon his men, and all their persuasions
proving fruitless, they determined to assassinate him and return. They
did so, only to find the colony dispersed and nowhere to be found.
After many hazardous adventures they reached the Arkansas River, and
descended it to its mouth, where they proposed preparing some means of
ascending the Mississippi, and thus return to Canada. Fortunately they
had been there but a few hours, when a small boat or two, which had
been dispatched from Canada to look after the colony so long expected,
arrived, and, learning the unfortunate issue of the enterprise, took on
board the party, and returned up the river. They reported the colony
destroyed, and it was not until many years after, that it was
discovered that those left on the sea-side had been found, and conveyed
to the Jesuit Mission, at San Antonio, where they had been cared for
and preserved by the pious and humane missionaries.
Subsequently a colony was located at Boloxy, on the shore of the lake,
and thence was transferred to New Orleans. Mobile, soon after, was made
the nucleus of another colony, and from these two points had proceeded
the pioneers of the different settlements along these rivers--the
Tombigbee and the Mississippi. It was to these settlements or posts, or
their neighborhoods, that these refugees from the Revolutionary war in
the colonies had retired. Natchez and St. Francisville, on the
Mississippi, and St. Stephen's and McIntosh's Bluff, on the Tombigbee,
were the most populous and important.
About these, and under the auspicious protection of the Spanish
Government, then dominant in Louisiana and Florida, commenced the
growth of the Anglo-Norman population, which is now the almost entire
population of the country. There proceeded from South Carolina, about
the time mentioned above, a colony of persons which located near
Natchez. They came down the Holston, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers,
on flat-boats; and after many escapes from the perils incident to the
streams they navigated, and the hostility of the savages who dwelt
along their shores, they reached this Canaan of their hopes. They had
intended to locate at New Madrid. The country around was well suited
for cultivation, being alluvial and rich, and the climate was all they
could desire; but they found a population mongrel and vicious,
unrestrained by law or morals, and learning through a negro belonging
to the place of an intended attack upon their party, for the purpose of
robbery, they hastily re-embarked what of their property and stock they
had debarked. Under pretense of dropping a few miles lower down the
river for a more eligible site, they silently and secretly left in the
night, and never attempted another stop until reaching the Walnut
Hills, now Vicksburg. A few of the party concluded to remain here,
while the larger number went on down; some to the mouth of Cole's
Creek, some to Natchez, and others to the cliffs known by the name of
one of the emigrants whose party concluded to settle there.
These cliffs, which are eighteen miles below Natchez, have always been
known as Ellis' Cliffs. In their rear is a most beautiful, and
eminently fertile country. Grants were obtained from the Spanish
Government of these lands, in tracts suited to the means of each
family. A portion was given to the husband, a portion to the wife, and
a portion to each child of every family. These grants covered nearly
all of that desirable region south of St. Catharine's Creek and west of
Second Creek to the Mississippi River, and south to the Homochitto
River. Similar grants were obtained for lands about the mouth, and
along the banks of Cole's Creek, at and around Fort Adams, ten miles
above the mouth of Red River, and upon the Bayou Pierre. The same
authority donated to the emigrants lands about McIntosh's Bluff, Fort
St. Stephens, and along Bassett's Creek, in the region of the Tombigbee
River. Here the lands were not so fertile, nor were they in such bodies
as in the region of the Mississippi. The settlements did not increase
and extend to the surrounding country with the same rapidity as in the
latter country. Many of those first stopping on the Tombigbee,
ultimately removed to the Mississippi. Here they encountered none of
the perils or losses incident to the war of the Revolution. The
privations of a new country they did, of necessity, endure, but not to
the same extent that those suffer who are deprived of a market for the
products of their labor. New Orleans afforded a remunerative market for
all they could produce, and, in return, supplied them with every
necessary beyond their means of producing at home. The soil and climate
were not only auspicious to the production of cotton, tobacco, and
indigo--then a valuable marketable commodity--but every facility for
rearing without stint every variety of stock. These settlements were
greatly increased by emigration from Pennsylvania, subsequently to the
conclusion of the war, as well as from the Southern States.
Very many who, in that war, had sided with the mother country from
conscientious, or mercenary views, were compelled by public opinion, or
by the operation of the law confiscating their property and banishing
them from the country, to find new homes. Those, however, who came
first had choice of locations, and most generally selected the best;
and bringing most wealth, maintained the ascendency in this regard, and
gave tone and direction to public matters as well as to the social
organization of society. Most of them were men of education and high
social position in the countries from which they came. Constant
intercourse with New Orleans, and the education of the youth of both
sexes of this region in the schools of that city, carried the high
polish of French society into the colony.
Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, was first settled by the
nobility and gentry of France. They were men in position among the
first of that great and glorious people. Animated with the ambition for
high enterprise, they came in sufficient numbers to create a society,
and to plant French manners and customs, and the elegance of French
learning and French society, upon the banks of the Mississippi.
The commercial and social intermingling of these people resulted in
intermarriages, which very soon assimilated them in most things as one
people, at least in feeling, sentiment and interest. From such a stock
grew the people inhabiting the banks of the Mississippi, from Vicksburg
to New Orleans. In 1826, young men of talent and enterprise had come
from Europe, and every section of the United States, and, giving their
talents to the development of the country, had created a wealth,
greater and more generally diffused than was, at that time, to be found
in any other planting or farming community in the United States. Living
almost exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were
homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of
their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so
rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the
means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental
attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The
country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes,
was sublimely grand, and seemed to inspire ideas and aspirations
commensurate with its own majesty in the people upon its borders.
In no country are to be found women of more refined character, more
beauty, or more elegance of manners, than among the planters' wives and
daughters of the Mississippi coast. Reared in the country, and
accustomed to exercise in the open air, in walking through the shady
avenues of the extensive and beautifully ornamented grounds about the
home or plantation-house; riding on horseback along the river's margin,
elevated upon the levee, covered with the green Bermuda grass, smoothly
spreading over all the ground, save the pretty open road, stretching
through this grass, like a thread of silver in a a cloth of green; with
the great drab river, moving in silent majesty, on one side, and the
extended fields of the plantation, teeming with the crop of cane or
cotton, upon the other. Their exercise, thus surrounded, becomes a
school, and their ideas expand and grow with the sublimity of their
surroundings. The health-giving exercise and the wonderful scene yields
vigor both to mind and body. Nor is this scene, or its effects, greater
in the development of mind and body than that of the hill-country of
the river-counties of Mississippi.
These hills are peculiar. They are drift, thrown upon the primitive
formation by some natural convulsion, and usually extend some twelve or
fifteen miles into the interior. They consist of a rich, marly loam,
and, when in a state of nature were clothed to their summits with the
wild cane, dense and unusually large, a forest of magnolia, black
walnut, immense oaks, and tulip or poplar-trees, with gigantic vines of
the wild grape climbing and overtopping the tallest of these forest
monarchs. Here among these picturesque hills and glorious woods, the
emigrants fixed their homes, and here grew their posterity surrounding
themselves with wealth, comforts, and all the luxuries and elegances of
an elevated civilization. Surrounded in these homes with domestic
slaves reared in them, and about them, who came at their bidding, and
went when told, but who were carefully regarded, sustained, and
protected, and who felt their family identity, and were happy, served
affectionately, and with willing alacrity, the master and his
household. In the midst of scenes and circumstances like these grew
women in all that constitutes nobility of soul and sentiment, delicacy,
intelligence, and refined purity, superior to any it has ever been my
fortune to meet on earth.
Here in these palatial homes was the hospitality of princes. It was not
the hospitality of pride or ostentation, but of the heart; the welcome
which the soul ungrudgingly gives, and which delights and refines the
receiver. It is the welcome of a refined humanity, untainted with
selfishness, and felt as a humane and duly bound tribute to
civilization and Christianity; such hospitality as can only belong to
the social organization which had obtained in the community from its
advent upon this great country.
The independence of the planter's pursuit, the institution of domestic
slavery, and the form and spirit of the Government, all conduce to
this. The mind is untrammelled and the soul is independent, because
subservient neither to the tyrannical exactions of unscrupulous
authority, or the more debasing servility of dependence upon the
capricious whims of petty officials, or a monied aristocracy.
Independently possessing the soil and the labor for its cultivation,
with only the care necessary to the comforts and necessities of this
labor, superadded to those of a family, they were without the necessity
of soliciting or courting favors from any one, or pandering to the
ignorant caprices of a labor beyond their control. Independence of
means is the surest guarantee for independence of character. Where this
is found, most private and most public virtues always accompany it.
Truth, sincerity, all the cardinal virtues are fostered most where
there is most independence. This takes away the source of all
corruption, all temptation. This seeks dependence, and victimizes its
creatures to every purpose of corruption and meanness.
Under the influences of the institutions of the South, as they were,
there was little of the servile meanness so predominant where they were
not, and the lofty and chivalrous character of the Southern people was
greatly owing to these institutions, and the habits of the people
growing out of them. The slave was a class below all others. His master
was his protector and friend; he supplied his wants and redressed his
wrongs, and it was a point of honor as well as duty to do so; he was
assured of his care and protection, and felt no humility at his
condition. The white man, without means, was reminded that, though
poor, he was above the slave, and was stimulated with the pride of
position as contrasted with that of the slave; his political, legal,
and social rights were unrestrained and equal with those of the
wealthiest. This was the only distinction between him and the
wealthiest in the land, and this wealth conferred no exclusive
privilege, and its acquisition was open to his energy and enterprise,
and he gloried in his independence. He could acquire and enjoy without
dependence, and his pride and ambition were alike stimulated to the
emulation of those who shared most fortune's favors.
The beneficial influences of the institution of African slavery were
not only apparent in the independent and honorable bearing and conduct
of the Southern people, growing from the habit of command, and
involuntary contrast of condition, but upon the material advancement
and progress of the country. The product of slave labor, when directed
by a higher intelligence than his own, is enormous, and was the basis
of the extended and wealth-creating commerce of the entire country.
These products could be obtained in no other manner, and without this
labor, are lost to the world. The African negro, in osseous and
muscular developments, and in all the essentials for labor, is quite
equal to those of the white race; in his cerebral, greatly inferior.
The capacities of his brain are limited and incapable of cultivation
beyond a certain point. His moral man is as feeble and unteachable as
his mental. He cannot be educated to the capacity of self-government,
nor to the formation and conducting of civil government to the extent
of humanizing and controlling by salutary laws a people aggregated into
communities. He learns by example which he imitates, so long as the
exampler is present before him; but this imitation never hardens to
fixed views or habits, indicating the design of Providence, that these
physical capacities should be directed and appropriated for good, by an
intelligence beyond the mental reach of the negro.
Why is this so? In the wisdom and economy of creation every created
thing represents a design for a use. The soil and climate of the
tropical and semi-tropical regions of the earth produce and mature all,
or very nearly all of the necessaries and luxuries of human life. But
human beings of different races and different capacities fill up the
whole earth. The capacity to build a fire and fabricate clothing is
given only to man. Was the element of fire and the material for
clothing given for any but man's use? This enables him to inhabit every
clime. But the capacity to produce all the necessaries and luxuries of
life is given only to a certain portion of the earth's surface; and its
peculiar motions give the fructifying influences of the sun only to the
middle belt of the planet. The use of this organization is evidenced in
the production of this belt, and these productions must be the result
of intelligently directed labor.
The peculiarity of the physical organization of the white man makes it
impossible for him to labor healthfully and efficiently for the
greatest development of this favored region. Yet his wants demand the
yield and tribute of this region. His inventive capacity evolved sugar
from the wild canes of the tropics, than which nothing is more
essential to his necessities, save the cereals and clothing. He
fabricated clothing from the tropical grass and tropical cotton, found
the uses of cassia, pimento, the dye woods, and the thousand other
tropical products which contribute to comfort, necessity, and luxury;
advancing human happiness, human progress, and human civilization.
The black man's organization is radically different. He was formed
especially to live and labor in these tropical and semi-tropical
regions of the earth; but he is naturally indolent, his wants are few,
and nature unaided supplies them. He is uninventive, and has always,
from creation down, lived amid these plants without the genius to
discover, or the skill and industry to develope their uses. That they
are used, and contribute to human health and human necessities, is
abundant evidence of Divine design in their creation.
The black man's labor, then, and the white man's intelligence are
necessary to the production and fabrication, for human use, of these
provisions of Providence. This labor the black man will not yield
without compulsion. He is eminently useful under this compulsion, and
eminently useless, even to himself, without it. That he was designed to
obey this authority, and to be most happy when and where he was most
useful, is apparent in his mental and moral organization. By moral I
mean those functions of the nervous system which bring us in relation
with the external world. He aspires to nothing but the gratification of
his passions, and the indulgence of his indolence. He only feels the
oppression of slavery in being compelled to work, and none of the moral
degradation incident to servility in the higher or superior races. He
is, consequently, more happy, and better contented in this, than in any
other condition of life. His morals, his bodily comforts, and his
status as a man, attain to an elevation in this condition known to his
race in no other.
All the results of his condition react upon the superior race, holding
him in the condition designed for him by his Creator, producing results
to human progress all over the world, known to result in an equal ratio
from no other cause. The institution has passed away, and very soon all
its consequences will cease to be visible in the character of the
Southern people. The plantation will dwindle to the truck-patch, the
planter will sink into the grave, and his offspring will degenerate
into hucksters and petty traders, and become as mean and contemptible
as the Puritan Yankee.
In the two hundred years of African slavery the world's progress was
greater in the arts and sciences, and in all the appliances promotive
of intelligence and human happiness, than in any period of historical
time, of five centuries. Why? Because the labor was performed by the
man formed for labor and incapable of thinking, and releasing the man
formed to think, direct, and invent, from labor, other than labor of
thought. This influence was felt over the civilized world. The
productions of the tropics were demanded by the higher civilization.
Men forgot to clothe themselves in skins when they could do so in
cloth. As commerce extended her flight, bearing these rich creations of
labor, elaborated by intelligence, civilization went with her,
expanding the mind, enlarging the wants, and prompting progress in all
with whom she communicated. Its influence was first felt from the
Antilles, extending to the United States. In proportion to the increase
of these products was the increase of commerce, wealth, intelligence,
and power. Compare the statistics of production by slave-labor with the
increase of commerce, and they go hand in hand. As the slave came down
from the grain-growing region to the cotton and sugar region, the
amount of his labor's product entering into commerce increased
four-fold. The inventions of Whitney and Arkwright cheapened the fabric
of cotton so much as to bring it within the reach of the poorest, and
availed the world in all the uses of cloth.
The shipping and manufacturing interests of England grew; those of the
United States, from nothing, in a few years were great rivals of the
mother country, and very soon surpassed her in commercial tonnage.
Every interest prospered with the prosperity of the planter of the
Southern States. His class has passed away; the weeds blacken where the
chaste, white cotton beautified his fields; his slave is a freedman--a
constitution-maker--a ruler set up by a beastly fanaticism to control
his master, and to degrade and destroy his country.
This must bear its legitimate fruit. It is the beginning of the end of
the negro upon this continent. Two races with the same civil, political
and social privileges cannot long exist in harmony together. The
struggle for supremacy will come, and with it a war of races--then God
have mercy on the weaker! The mild compulsion which stimulated his
labor is withdrawn, and with it the care and protection which alone
preserved him. He works no more; his day of Jubilee has come; he must
be a power in the land. Infatuated creature! I pity you from my heart.
You cannot see or calculate the inevitable destiny now fixed for your
race. You cannot see the vile uses you are made to subserve for a time,
or deem that those who now appear your conservators, are but preparing
your funeral pyre.