MULATTOISM AND MONGRELISM.
All the generic and specific forms of life are governed by their own
peculiar laws of interunion, and hybridism or hybridity is therefore a
phenomenon of varying character, having, it is true, certain
resemblances in those instances which approach each other, but
absolutely different in all cases. Naturalists have sometimes made great
blunders in this respect, for they have assumed that hybridism was
governed by the same laws in all cases, and therefore sought its
application or inferred its presence in instances the most remote and
contradictory. The most extraordinary, and, indeed, inexcusable instance
of the kind has been seen in the efforts made to confound the
distinctions of race, and to pervert truth into the most shameful and
what would seem to be the most palpable falsehoods. It has been assumed
by naturalists of high character that different genera never produce
offspring, that the _offspring_ of different species are incapable of
reproduction, and that varieties are unlimited in their powers of
virility. If, therefore, there were doubt in respect to the character of
certain (supposed) genera, and it was found that offspring followed a
conjunction of sexes, in this particular instance, it was inferred that
they were merely different species. And if the product or progeny of
these _species_ were found to be equally virile, then it was inferred
that they were all originally of the same species, and nothing but
varieties. This test, so simple that it can hardly be mistaken, serves
with sufficient accuracy to determine the real character, and when the
naturalist properly applies the laws of hybridity, that is, admits a
modification of these laws in all cases or in all the different genera
subjected to his examination, then he is armed with sufficient data to
render his labors accurate and effective. But however pains-taking or
correct in other particulars, when he assumes that hybridity is a unit,
and rigidly applies this in all cases, or to families widely remote in
other respects, his labors, from this defect, must be comparatively
valueless.
The instance already referred to, where hybridity was thus presented,
was as follows:—The mule, as is well-known, is the offspring of the
horse and ass. It does not, in its turn, reproduce itself, therefore the
horse and ass were different species. Prichard and others applied this
test, or marked this test, in the case of human beings, of whites and
negroes, and proved by it that they were of the same species. It was
seen that white men cohabited with negro women, and the offspring in
turn, reproduced itself, and consequently that the parents were of the
same species. Or, as this has passed as current coin hitherto, and
seemed perfectly satisfactory, indeed wholly unanswerable to naturalists
and men of science as well as others, it is best, perhaps, to place it
in distinct and categorical terms before the reader. 1st. It is
universally admitted by naturalists that incapacity in the offspring to
reproduce itself demonstrates the different species of the progenitors,
while, on the contrary, a capacity in the offspring to beget offspring
in its turn demonstrates similarity of species in the progenitors. 2d.
The mule, or the offspring of the horse and ass, does not reproduce
itself, therefore the horse and ass are different species. 3d. The
mulatto offspring of the white man and negro woman does beget offspring,
therefore the white man and negro woman are of the same species.
This was the assumption and the reasoning of Prichard and other European
ethnologists, and if hybridity were a unit, or principle of rigid and
uniform character in all cases, in human beings as in animals and
vegetables, in the case of the white man and negress, exactly as in that
of the horse and ass—then, indeed, would the inference seem unavoidable
that whites and negroes constituted in fact a single species. But they
were guilty of two fundamental errors in this matter—an error of fact,
and an error of reasoning, or perhaps it would be more correct to say
that both were errors of fact. At all events, _facts_ that demonstrate
difference of species in whites and negroes beyond possibility of doubt
were distorted into proofs which seemed to demonstrate sameness or
similarity of species with equal certainty.
Hybridity, as has been said, is not a unit, is not a fixed, uniform law
or principle. A moment’s consideration is sufficient to convince any
intelligent mind of this truth. Each form of life has necessarily its
own character, its own specific qualities, and the laws governing its
reproductive powers must be in correspondence, and just as differently
manifested as any of its specific qualities. To suppose that the laws of
the phenomena governing the reproductive functions of the horse and ass
are exactly similar to those manifested in the case of human beings, is
as absurd as to suppose that the term of gestation, the length of life,
the mode of their locomotion, or any other qualities—should be exactly
the same in both cases. But nothing more need be said. It is perfectly
obvious that the laws of reproduction must be radically different in the
human creatures, and therefore the inference of Pritchard and others,
that whites and negroes were of the same species, because the mulatto,
unlike the mule, did reproduce itself, is simply absurd. But they were
still further and still more vitally mistaken in respect to their
assumptions of fact. The mulatto, literally speaking, or in the ordinary
sense, does beget offspring, but mulattoism is as positively sterile as
muleism. The phenomenon of hybridity is manifested, as has been stated,
in conformity with the nature of the beings concerned, and as the human
creatures are separated by an almost measureless as well as impassable
distance from the horse and ass, the laws of hybridity are, of course,
correspondingly different. Instead of a single generation, as in the
animals referred to, sterility in the human creatures is embraced within
four generations, where a boundary is arrived at as absolutely fixed and
impassable as the single generation in the case of the former.
But in order to understand the matter clearly, it is proposed to present
the reader with the preliminary principles or facts, and inductive
facts, that lead to this vital and all-important conclusion. It is
all-important, not as demonstrating beyond doubt the vital and
fundamental truth of distinct species, for that is a self-evident and
indeed unavoidable truth that meets us at every step, and confronts our
senses almost every hour or day of our lives. But mulattoism is a
subject of stupendous importance in itself, and as the public are
generally, and the “anti-slavery” writers especially, profoundly
ignorant of it, and of all the laws that govern it, it is proposed to
present the elementary principles or basis on which the whole subject
rests.[1]
Footnote 1:
The author has devoted much time and labor to this interesting
subject, and, together with his own and the observations of friends
and correspondents, covering several thousand cases of the mixed
blood, is able to deduce the general laws as stated in the text, and
with entire confidence in their essential accuracy.
1st. In the case of the white man cohabiting with the negress, or
“married” to a negro female, there will be a more limited progeny than
if she were married to one of her own race.
2d. The mulatto offspring of this connection intermarrying with other
hybrids, will exhibit still less virility.
3d. The offspring of the former again intermarrying with hybrids equally
removed from the original parentage, shows a yet greater diminution of
virile power.
4th. By still intermarrying with hybrids, and of a corresponding remove,
virility is correspondingly decreased.
5th. Finally, the fourth generation of mulattoism is as absolutely
sterile as muleism, and though there may be, at rare intervals, a
possible exception, yet, in every practical sense, and for all the
purposes of philosophic inquiry, it may be assumed as the natural and
impassable barrier of this abnormal and exceptional form of being. Of
the essential correctness of these laws, or their data, almost every one
living in the South, or perhaps in the larger cities of the Middle
States, will be able to satisfy himself, if he will take the trouble to
investigate the matter. He need not pursue the subject to its ultimate
end, or to an extent necessary to arrive at all the results here
presented, but he may, with comparatively trifling attention to it,
satisfy himself of the _tendencies involved, and that there is somewhere
at least approximating to these laws a fixed and absolute barrier beyond
which mulattoism can not exist_. All the dealers in “slaves” and many
“slave owners” know this from observation and individual experience, and
while entirely ignorant of any thing like the scientific formulæ here
presented, not a few among the former have actually stated it to the
author in total unconsciousness that either he or any one else had ever
thus formalized the essential character of mulattoism. But there is a
very important feature of this matter, which, not understood or
overlooked, may lead astray those who undertake its investigation. As
has been said, hybridity is a phenomenon to be tested and determined by
the nature of the beings involved, and as it must be wholly different in
the human creatures from that manifested in animals, and life is limited
to four generations in the case of mulattoes, while the mule is confined
to a single generation, so, too, must the mere quality or capacity of
offspring be taken into consideration. The mule is remarkable for its
powers of endurance—the mulatto for its fragility and incapacity to
endure hardships. A northern climate is fatal to the negro, but the same
climate is still more fatal to the hybrid, for his approximation to the
Caucasian, and therefore capacity for a northern clime, is more than
balanced by his constitutional tendencies to fragility and decay. Thus,
of the ten thousand free negroes in Massachusetts, whom, “freedom” and
climate together, were there no more external additions, must finally
exterminate, the last man among them would be a typical negro, or, at
all events, approximating nearest to the typical standard.
But it is in the female hybrid that this tendency to decay, or this vice
of constitutional formation, is most apparent. Many of them are
incapable of nourishing or taking care of their offspring, and, together
with miscarriages and the numerous forms of disease connected with
maternity, they are often found to have had a large number of children,
not one of whom reached maturity. In taking into view, therefore, the
sterility of mulattoism, we must have regard to its vices of formation
as well as its limited virility, and that nature completes her
processes, whether of growth or decay, through many different forms; and
while mulattoism is as absolutely confined to four generations as mules
are to a single generation, the former result is worked out through
constitutional fragility and limited longevity as much, perhaps, as by
an imperfect reproductive capacity.
It is seen, therefore, that Prichard and the European ethnologists made
a radical mistake in this matter, and the very proofs which they relied
on to establish their single-race theory, or that whites and negroes
were of the same species, actually prove the precisely opposite fact,
that they are of different species. Not only is the phenomenon of
hybridity different in human beings, from that peculiar to animals, but
it differs in the different races of the former. The author’s inquiries
on this subject have been limited to the white and negro races or
species, but the evidence presented to his observation, during the war
with Mexico, was sufficiently authentic to warrant the conclusion that
hybrids have greater tenacity of life, when the offspring of whites and
aborigines, than in the case of whites and negroes. The former
approximate closer to our own race, and it is only reasonable to suppose
that, in precise proportion to this fact, or to this starting-point, is
the hybrid offspring endowed with vitality; and the same rule may be
applied with equal certainty to all the other species of men.
The sexual instinct, or the instinct of reproduction, is universal in
animal existence. It is that which multiplies its kind, that peoples the
earth and fills the world with innumerable tribes of beings and endless
processions of generations, each after its kind exhibiting the same
qualities and subject to the same laws as the original types, without
the slightest atom of change, though countless generations intervene
between them. In respect to human beings endowed with reason and moral
feeling, it is evidently designed by the Almighty Creator of all that
the instinct of reproduction should be held in subjection to those
higher qualities. Nevertheless, instinct in respect to the sexual
functions is strikingly manifest in the lower races of mankind.
When white men—travelers and explorers—suddenly make their appearance in
African villages, where they were never before seen, the females run and
hide themselves from their sight; and among the multitude of white
prisoners captured by the aborigines of this continent, there has
probably never been an instance of the violation of their persons by
their savage captors. In respect to the so-called insurrection of
negroes in Hayti or San Domingo, where, though all of the white blood,
men, women, and children in their nurses’ arms were remorselessly
butchered by the terror-stricken blacks, there are no authenticated
instances of the violation of white females.
A negro insurrection—that is, a revolt of the negro from the rule of the
white man, to obtain the liberty of the latter—is simply nonsensical: as
entirely so as to suppose an insurrection to obtain the complexion or
any other physical attribute of the superior race; but should some white
miscreant, as attempted lately at Harper’s Ferry, delude “slaves” to
slaughter the families of their masters, there need be little or no
apprehension in respect to that hideous and monstrous idea so prominent
in abolition writings—the violation of the persons of white females. It
is true, hybrids and mongrels might perpetrate such monstrous crimes,
but the negro—the typical, pure-blooded negro—driven on by his fears and
dread of the master race, would only seek its extermination, never the
indulgence to _him_ of such unnatural propensities.
The instinct of reproduction in animals is governed by fixed laws; but,
as has been said, designed by the common Creator to be ruled by the
reason and subjected to the moral affections in the higher human nature;
nevertheless, the ignorance and corruption of our social life have
perverted these designs, and covered society with blotches and ulcers
horrible to contemplate. In this city alone there are said to be ten
thousand prostitutes—lost creatures, so lost that nature denies them
offspring, to reproduce themselves, to form a link or have a place in
the mighty processions of their kind, that stand out distinct and
accursed, dead though alive. And yet each of these blasted ones was
created with capacities of love, of affection, of receiving and
conferring happiness boundless and measureless. God made them pure and
beautiful, and man has transformed them into beings so vile, that their
very existence must not be recognized by the pure and virtuous! God
created them but a little lower than the angels—man has perverted them
into something scarcely better than devils!
What an awful perversion of the instincts of reproduction—of that great
vital and fundamental law which animals obey without any violation of
it, but which we, in our lofty nature and God-given powers, have thus
transformed into such hideous shapes and worked into such sickening and
diseased results! The sexes are equal in numbers, and therefore nature
designs that all men should marry—that one man should be united to one
woman—that they should always be attracted to each other by the
affections, and, in their love and companionship, their care for their
offspring, for their home and its sweet enjoyments, it offers them
rewards the purest, the most exalted, as well as the most rational, that
our being is capable of feeling. And yet the sad spectacle is presented
every day and all about us, that that which God designed should be the
source of our greatest happiness is perverted into the most loathsome
and most hideous of social miseries! What may be the causes or the
principal causes (for there are doubtless many) of this hideous ulcer at
the very heart of modern society, it is needless to inquire—the actual
or proximate cause is the perversion of the sexual laws—the violation of
the instincts of reproduction wholly unknown among animals and
comparatively unknown among the subordinate races of mankind. It is the
proud Caucasian—the large-brained and gloriously endowed Caucasian—who
mostly exhibits this terrible crime against the higher law, and who thus
awfully sins against God and his own nature. Such a thing as
_prostitution_ is unknown among negroes—among the aborigines of this
continent, and scarcely perceptible among Mongols or Chinese. There are,
it is true, great vices, shocking indecencies and beastly practices
among the Mongols and other subordinate races, but prostitution—the
indiscriminate sale of the bodies as well as the desecration of the
souls of women for money, as practiced openly in all the great centres
of Christendom, is peculiar to the Caucasian alone—to that exalted and
highly endowed race which God has so gifted and placed at the head of
all other races of mankind.
_Mulattoism is to the South what prostitution is to the North_—that is,
those depraved persons who give themselves up to a wicked perversion of
the sexual instincts, resort to the mongrel or “colored women” instead
of houses of ill-fame, as in the former case. Such a thing as love, or
natural affection, never has nor can attract persons of different races,
and therefore all the cohabitations of white men and negro women are
abnormal—a perversion of the instincts of reproduction. This “original
sin,” as it may well be termed, carries with it, by inevitable
necessity, certain consequences, and the declaration of Holy Writ, that
the children are punished to the third and fourth generation for the
sins of their fathers, is literally true in a physiological sense. The
precise laws governing the generation of mulattoism have been already
stated, and need not be repeated in this place, but it may be well to
remember that the offspring constantly diminishes when hybrids
intermarry with hybrids of the same remove, until, reaching the fourth
generation, it loses all generative capacity as absolutely as the mule.
With this radical and fundamental vice of organization, it will be
readily seen that mongrelism can never become an important or dangerous
element of population. Mr. Clay once advanced the opinion that the mixed
blood of the South was rapidly increasing, and therefore a time would
probably come when the negro blood would be absorbed by the whites, and
the negro life be utterly extinct. The ignorant abolition writers have
made much of this opinion of Mr. Clay, but whatever the general
intellectual superiority of that distinguished gentleman, any common
sense person must know that his ignorance of the laws of organization
renders his opinion on this subject of no value whatever. Two hundred or
one hundred years ago, the proportion of the sexes among the white
people was doubtless less equal than now, and therefore those abnormal
cohabitations of white men with negro women were more frequent than at
present. But after a certain amount or number of the mixed blood these
cohabitations would take that direction, and, as at present, would be
mainly confined to the hybrid and “colored” women. And in view of the
fragility, sterility, and almost universal tendency to disease and
disorganization in this mixed and mongrel element, it is seen at a
glance how impossible it is that it should ever be of sufficient amount
to threaten the safety or even to disturb the peace of Southern society.
In proportion to the normal population or to the pure blood, it is
doubtless less than it was fifty years ago, and it may even become less
in the future, but it is wholly and absolutely impossible that it can
ever exist in larger proportion than at present.
This vicious intercourse with the mongrel women at the South, of course,
has no resemblance or relation to amalgamation; but it is ignorantly or
wilfully thus confounded by the abolition writers of the day.
Amalgamation is reciprocal union of the sexes, such as that between the
Normans and the Anglo-Saxons in England—that occurs constantly between
the natives of this country and those who have migrated here from
Europe, and indeed as occurred in Mexico and other Spanish provinces,
where the Spanish conquerors, who brought few Spanish females with them,
sought wives among the natives or Indian races. The white blood of the
South, like that of the North, is pure and untainted, and a white woman
so lost and degraded as to mate with a negro, would not be permitted to
even live among negroes in a Southern community. Occasionally a
monstrous indecency of this kind does occur at the North, but they are
usually English or other foreign-born persons, and unless there was some
moral or physical cause—some disease of body or mind which rendered her
incapable of self-guidance, it can hardly be supposed that an
American-born woman ever committed such an indecent outrage upon her own
womanhood, and sin against God, as to mate with a negro. At the South,
as has been said, such a thing is altogether impossible, for the woman
would not alone be driven from the society of her own race, as at the
North, but she would not be permitted (if known) to live even among
negroes! Amalgamation can never occur at the South, and scarcely needs
an exposition in this place; but as it is now actually taking place in
Jamaica and other islands, and, to a certain extent in Cuba, and,
moreover, such a monstrous social cataclysm is necessarily involved in
the theory or idea of the abolition of “slavery,” it is well enough,
perhaps, to give it an explanation.
There are about four millions of negroes in this country, and if, for
the purposes of illustration, we may suppose the theory of
anti-slaveryism to be finally reduced to practice, the following results
must or would occur:—Four millions of whites would form marital unions
with these negroes—the men taking negresses to wife, and the females
negroes for husbands, ending with the next generation, of course, in
mulattoes and the extinction of negroes. The third generation would
absorb the mulattoes and end in quadroons; the fourth generation would
manifest a corresponding diminution, and a time come when every atom of
negro blood would disappear as utterly as if there had never been a
negro on this continent. The popular notion would be, perhaps, like that
of Mr. Clay, that amalgamation of the races would absorb the negro
blood, it being the smaller element, and this would remain forever
floating in the veins of posterity. But this could not be: it would die
out, and in time become totally extinct.
If, for example, one hundred of the leading and influential
Abolitionists of the day should practically live out their own
doctrines—should be placed on some island in the Pacific Ocean, each
with a negress as wife, and utterly excluded from intercourse of any
kind with the rest of mankind, they and their posterity would, after a
certain time, utterly perish from existence. In the second generation
whites and negroes alike would be extinct—that which the hand of the
Eternal had fashioned, fixed, and designed for His glory and the
happiness of His creatures would be blotched, deformed, and transformed
by their own wickedness into mulattoes, and could no more exist beyond a
given period than any other physical degeneration, no more than tumors,
cancers, or other abnormal growths or physical disease can become
permanent conditions. The fourth generation, as stated elsewhere, with
diminished and diminishing vitality, would impart such feeble
glimmerings of life, that their immediate progeny would be as absolutely
limited in their powers of virility as mules, and the whole mass of
disease and corruption would disappear from the earth, which God has
forbidden it to desecrate any longer by its foul and disgusting
presence.[2] But contemplating the subject in mass, or practical
abolitionism, as it would work itself out among the millions, if we are
permitted, for the purposes of illustration, to suppose such a monstrous
and stupendous crime against God and our own being as the actual and
practical development of the theory, widely different results would
naturally follow. As has been said, four millions of our own white race
would be involved in this monstrous maelstrom of amalgamation with the
subject race, while the remaining twenty millions would be left
untouched and unpolluted by the physical degradation that must needs
follow such a stupendous sin as practical abolitionism. But they would
not escape the moral deterioration, and the nation, weighed down by
mulattoism, by such an ulcer on the body politic, by such a frightful
mass of disease and death, would doubtless fall a conquest to some other
nation or variety of the master race, and again become English provinces
or dependencies of some other European power!
Footnote 2:
Royalism, or a Hereditary Aristocracy, or class that attempts to
create a permanent superiority over the great body of the people by
incestuous intermarriage with its own members, is punished with
similar results as those that attend the violation of the sexual
relations of different Races. And the idiotic, impotent, and diseased
offspring of hereditary kings has always a certain physiological
resemblance to the effete and sterile mulatto. Both are violations of
the normal order, and both are limited to a determinate existence,
just as any other diseased conditions which nature forbids to live.
Nations are punished in this life, however it may be with individuals,
and a sin so enormous, a crime and impiety against God so awful, an
outrage on their own nature so boundless and bottomless as practical
abolitionism, or the actual living out of the abolition theory, would
drag after it, as an inexorable necessity, a corresponding punishment.
History is pregnant with examples of this inevitable law. Nations after
nations have risen, flourished, decayed, and died on the African
continent; millions upon millions of white Christian men have existed in
the valley of the Nile alone; three hundred Christian bishops have met
in convention on the site of ancient Carthage, when London was unknown
and Rome itself the seat of the heathen Cæsars; and now, of the five
hundred millions of Caucasians known to have existed on that continent
since the Christian era began, there are probably not one million of
typical white men left to tell the tale of their destruction, or to
mourn over the desolation brought upon them by the crimes and sins of
their progenitors. The vastly preponderating white element would
doubtless save us from similar consequences, should we ever commit such
a hideous crime as that involved in the practical application of the
abolition theory; but, as has been said, we would most likely fall a
conquest to some European power. But should this fate not overtake us,
should we be left to struggle with the load of sin and disease thus
brought upon ourselves by our crimes against reason and the ordinances
of the Eternal, the nation would in time slough off mulattoism, and
finally recover from the foul and horrible contamination of admixture
with the blood of the negro. The twenty millions of pure and untainted
blood would increase so rapidly over the diseased portion, that finally
every trace, atom, and drop or globule of the latter would be utterly
extinct, and though the time for this process to work itself out, or for
the white race to recover its healthy and natural condition, cannot be
estimated with any certainty, such would needs be the final result. This
same process, though the parties are directly reversed, is now in active
operation in Mexico, and all the Spanish-American States. The Spanish
conquerors brought few countrywomen with them, and therefore sought
wives among the natives or aboriginal race, and amalgamation became
universal in all the Spanish provinces, the result of which has been the
generation of a vast and wide-spread mongrelism. The Spanish dominion
usually embodied in the pure blood, not from any prejudice against the
mixed element, but from jealousy of the native born, preserved order and
general prosperity. But the overthrow of this dominion brought the
mongrel element into power, for though Iturbide, Santa Anna, Bravo,
Bustamente, Parades, all or nearly all the chiefs of Independence were
of pure Castilian blood, it was the mongrel element that overthrew the
Spanish power and established the republic. Spaniards were constantly
migrating to the American possessions of the Spanish crown, but, with
the overthrow of the Spanish dominion, this supply of white blood was
cut off, and instead of the generation of mongrelism, from that instant
the reparatory process began, which can only end in sloughing off the
mixed blood, and the restoration of the aboriginal race to its natural
and healthy condition, as it was before the Spanish conquest and the
admixture of the white element. This mixed or mongrel element is found
in the cities, but it is rapidly declining. Mexico had, at the era of
Independence, two hundred thousand inhabitants. It has now little over
one hundred thousand people. Puebla, Perote, Jalapa, all the cities of
Mexico decline in similar proportion, while the rural population—the
pure, untainted, aboriginal element—though placed under great and
striking disadvantages, holds its own, and were it guided and cared for,
as it was one hundred years ago, would doubtless rapidly increase in
number. Nor is it alone the fragility, feebleness, the vicious
organization and imperfect vitality of mulattoism, or of the mongrel
element, that is thus rapidly diminishing the population in Mexican
cities. The _morale_ of mongrelism partakes of the physical deformity,
and the vices of the mind are as striking and constant as the defects of
the body. A creature with half the nature and wants of the white man
united in the same existence with those of the Indian, is confronted
with another, perhaps three-fourths white, while on the other side of
him is one who has three-fourths Indian blood, and population made up of
such materials is necessarily and perpetually at war with itself. Hence
in all the revolutions of Mexico there is no design, no common object
that unite men in common purposes, no sense, reason, or common impulse
whatever, except to destroy, to overturn, to seize power to-day without
any purpose for to-morrow. And this goes on, and must go on until nature
repairs the outrages inflicted on her, until mongrelism dies out and the
aboriginal or Indian element is restored to its pristine condition,
until every atom of the white blood is extinct and the Indian race is
again what it was at the time of the Spanish conquest.
The subject opens up questions of mighty import to us, and possibly, as
Mr. Calhoun believed, great dangers to our people and the future of
civilization; but if understood—if American legislators and statesmen
comprehend the real character of these vast populations south of us,
known as the Spanish-American republics, and apply to them the true
principles of social and political economy, when the time comes to deal
with them, there need be little or no apprehension in regard to the
results. Meanwhile, the solution of these problems is every day becoming
simpler and more easily understood. The mixed blood is rapidly dying
out; a time must come when it will be wholly extinct, and then the white
American will stand face to face with the native, a race which, whatever
may be our experience of it in the North, is easily governed, and as has
been said, if understood, there need be little or no apprehension of
danger or difficulty in regard to it.
The same process is going on in Jamaica and other islands, though here
it is the negro instead of the Indian that is in issue. An idea or
assumption was set up in England that the negroes of these islands were
_black_ white men—men like themselves, except in color—and therefore
naturally entitled to the same rights; and a party sprung up that at
last induced the British Parliament to “abolish” the existing relations
of the whites and negroes, and to place them on the same political and
legal level. The white people protested against this wrong and outrage
on reason and common sense, but it was of no avail. Their cry for mercy
was unheard—at all events, disregarded—and the helpless and outraged
whites are now in process of utter extinction by amalgamation.
The same political and legal _status_ leads, of course, to the same
social level, and it, in turn, to the general admixture of blood. A
white woman is not likely, even under these unnatural circumstances, to
desecrate her womanhood by mating with a negro, though public sentiment
forces her to associate with them. But this woman marries a man with
one-eighth or one-fourth of negro blood, without hesitation, and the
woman of this shade readily mates with a mulatto, and the latter with
the typical negro. Thus, while natural instinct shrinks from such a
crime against nature and such an impiety toward God as the marriage or
mating of the pure types, the outward force of legal and political
systems impels all shades of mongrelism in the direction of the
preponderating element; and a time must come when the white blood,
becoming extinct, the negro will relapse, of course, into his native
Africanism.
The outward presence of a foreign government impels the unhappy white
people of these fertile and beautiful islands into this monstrous
violation of the laws of organization, and certain ultimate social
destruction; but the power of the government also restrains the negro
element from a rapid collapse into its native Africanism. In Hayti,
where all external or governmental influence is withdrawn, the negro
nature already strongly manifests its normal savagery, when no longer
restrained by the master race, and the worship of Obi or Feticism, and
even the native African dialect, is becoming common to many districts in
that island. In general terms, it may be said that the exact moment when
the white blood becomes extinct is also the instant when Africanism is
perfectly restored, but the outward presence of the British government
on the islands, and of the Colonization Society in Liberia, will prevent
the complete development of this otherwise natural and necessary law.
That the white blood of Jamaica must be absorbed, or rather must die
out, is a necessity, an effect, a fate that is unavoidable—the final end
being alone a question of time. A foreign government, as has been said,
regardless of the protests and the cry for mercy of its unfortunate
people, forcibly changed their relations to the subordinate race. It
declared the negroes the legal and political equals of the whites; this
necessarily led to social equality—that, in its turn, to the marriage of
whites and quadroons—quadroons with mulattoes, and mulattoes with
negroes; thus the process, beginning with the act of the British
Parliament abolishing “slavery,” ends naturally and necessarily in the
social immolation and final extinction of the white people of that
island.
All the links in the chain are continuous—all the series of events
dependent on each other—all the steps of the process naturally united;
the emancipation, the legal equality, the social level, the admixture of
blood, and the ultimate extinction, are part and parcel of the same
awful crime against nature and against God, against the laws of
organization and against the decrees of the Eternal. The _end_,
therefore, of these things must be the restoration of the pure Indian
type on the main land and that of the negro in the islands; and, as has
been said, though the time needed for the completion of this reparatory
process—for such it is, physiologically considered—may not be determined
with certainty, it can not be very distant, and were white men to stand
aloof and permit the process to work itself out, without interference,
it is quite probable that a hundred, or, at most, a hundred and fifty
years hence, there would not be a drop of white blood found south of our
own limits.
Mulattoism is an abnormalism—a disease—a result that brings suffering
unspeakable as well as extinction—that is unavoidable; and, in view of
this fate brought upon them by a foreign government, who can doubt but
that the total slaughter of the white people of Jamaica would have been
merciful, in comparison to that forced upon them by the abolition of
“slavery,” and equality with negroes? Or will any one sufficiently
informed on this subject, who understands the physical and moral
suffering involved or inseparably linked with the mixed blood, doubt for
a moment that, as a question of humanity, it would be vastly more humane
to slaughter all the negroes in our midst, rather than apply to them the
abolition theory, or rather than doom them to legal equality, to
amalgamation, to mulattoism, mongrelism, and that final unavoidable
extinction that necessarily attends the minor element under these
circumstances? But in addition to the physical suffering attending the
process of extinction in Jamaica, it was, or is, or must be, the
annihilation of Caucasian intelligence, of civilization, of all that God
has bestowed upon His creatures that is exalted and glorious, and
therefore the crime perpetrated, however blindly or well-intentioned,
must stand out in future ages the most awful and impious ever known in
human annals.
Such is a brief outline of the physiological laws governing mulattoism
and mongrelism—that abnormal or diseased condition which results from
admixture of the blood of separate races or species of men. Its mental
and moral features are equally distinct and discordant, though less
susceptible of explanation or of being classified, as in the case of the
merely physical qualities. As a general principle the mongrel has
intellectual ability in proportion as he approximates to the superior
race. This is a necessary truth; there is mental capacity or
intelligence, latent or actual, in exact proportion to the size of the
brain, in animals, indeed, as well as human beings, as certainly and
invariably as there is muscular power in proportion to the size and form
of the muscles; but this principle is hardly a guide or test in respect
to the moral qualities of the mixed blood. There is scarcely anything or
any phase of the general subject that has so blinded and led astray
“anti-slavery” writers as this subject of mulattoism; for they were not
only ignorant of it, but never dreamed for a moment that there was any
such thing in existence, and constantly assumed in their reasonings (?)
that the mulatto was a negro, and therefore presented him, and even the
quadroon, as an evidence of the mental capacity of that race. One of
these people would find his way to England or the North, was educated,
became an editor, physician, priest, sometimes even an author, on a
small scale perhaps, at all events a public lecturer, to whom white men
and women listened with the utmost gravity, and perfectly satisfied
themselves of the mental equality of the races, for here was a negro who
talked the same language, had the same ideas, and was quite as eloquent
as the general average among white men. Even the Abbé Gregoire labored
under this very absurd and very general misconception, and wrote a book
giving the biography of fifteen negroes to prove the mental equality of
the races, not one of whom was a negro at all! Some mules are doubtless
superior to some horses, but no mule was ever equal to the average
horse; and doubtless some mulattoes have been superior to some white
men, but no mulatto ever did nor ever can reach the intellectual
standard of the Caucasian. What nonsense it would be to point out a
favorite mule to show that asses were the equals of horses; yet this
nonsense, or similar nonsense, is practised every day by those who rely
upon mongrels and hybrids to prove the mental capacity of the negro!
Indeed, quadroons, and even mongrels, with only one-eighth of negro
blood, like Roberts, the President of Liberia, have been quoted as
illustrations of negro character and accepted as perfectly satisfactory
by the blind followers of the equally blind teachers of Abolitionism.
The fact that such a thing as an “educated” mulatto exists at all among
us, as long as we have uneducated white men, is a disgrace to the
nation, to our institutions, to our social development; and in England
it serves as a test of social wrong and wickedness frightful to
contemplate. As has been said, no mule was ever equal to the average
horse, so no mulatto was ever created equal to the standard white man;
yet in England there are eight millions unable to read or write, and
through human institutions rendered inferior to the “educated” mulatto!
The moral qualities of the mixed element are less definite, but every
one’s observations, as well as history and statistics, tend to the same
general conclusion—the greater viciousness of the mulatto when compared
with either of the original types or typical races. This essential
truth, common to all exceptional and abnormal conditions, is universally
manifested among “slaves” at the South, “free” negroes at the North,
mestizoes in Mexico, or the whilom hybrids of Hayti. The mongrels of
Mexico—the so-called Leperos—are thieves, ladrones, robbers, and
assassins, not like the Italian bravos of a former age, who, to a
certain extent, redeemed their horrible crimes by a kind of chivalrous
daring which gave their victims some chance for life, but secret,
crouching, and cowardly assassins, who never attack where there is the
slightest danger to themselves. They crouch, concealed in the shadow of
a wall or door-way, enveloped in huge cloaks, with the exception of the
arm that wields the keen, narrow-bladed, and double-edged knife, which
is plunged in the back of the hapless victim, and then they invariably
run away, unless supported by their vile companions. In the field they
never face white men except when their numbers are overwhelming, and
they give no quarter; but if themselves defeated, their cry for mercy is
so intolerable in its groveling clamor, that the victor is disposed to
dispatch them at once to get rid of it. With diminished vitality, and
less hold on existence than the pure blood, the mongrel, while utterly
reckless of life in respect to others, clings to it himself and shrinks
from death with an abject terror rarely or never witnessed in the
original races. The typical negro, for example, though brave enough when
led by his master, shrinks in terror from the face of the lordly
Caucasian when not thus supported, and a score or two of the latter in
the open field would doubtless drive a thousand negroes before them like
sheep to the slaughter. But a negro condemned to die, to be hanged, to
be burned even, rarely manifests dread or apprehension of any kind. His
imperfect innervation, his sluggish brain, and low grade of sensibility,
render him incapable of anticipating that terrible physical suffering
from which the elaborate and exquisitely organized Caucasian suffers
under these circumstances. So, too, the Indian—“the stoic of the
woods—the man without a tear,” as the poet Campbell, and others ignorant
of his nature, have represented him—a creature, according to their
absurd fancies, fashioned on the Roman model, with the self-poised and
philosophical indifference to outward things of a Seneca, and the calm
contempt of physical suffering of a Cato, but who, all this time, in his
grosser organization, has none of the white man’s perceptions of
physical pain, and therefore sings his death-song in total
unconsciousness of that which to us is the extreme, or supposed extreme,
of physical suffering.
This organic insensibility of the lower races to physical pain, which
renders them indifferent to the approach of death, is sometimes
equalled, and perhaps surpassed, as regards the outward expression, by
the dominating moral forces in the case of the higher organized
Caucasian. Lamartine has said that the mistress of Louis XV., the
notorious Duchess Du Barry, was the only person sent to the guillotine
during the reign of terror that asked for mercy, or shrank with terror
from the approach of death. Not men alone, but women, even delicately
nurtured young girls, who, under ordinary circumstances, would faint on
witnessing the death of a sparrow, ascended the steps of the guillotine
without a tear or the quiver of a muscle. They died for an idea, and a
false one at that, but they believed it true and immutable as heaven
itself, and the exaltation of the mind over the body, the dominating
moral forces over the laws of the physical being, enabled them to meet
death without a murmur, and, as regards the outward expression, to seem
as indifferent to the physical pain involved, as the Indian or the
negro, whose lower organization is incapable of such suffering.
But the mulatto or mongrel has neither the physical insensibility of the
inferior nor the moral force of the superior race, and the instinctive
consciousness of his feeble vitality renders him the most cowardly of
human beings. The generals and leaders of the mixed blood in Spanish
America, as well as those of Hayti, have been as much distinguished for
their monstrous vices, their treachery, cowardice, sensuality, and
ferocity, as for any special ability they may have displayed. The cruel
and despotic government of Spain, when desirous to crush the
revolutionists, invariably trusted the bloody work to mongrel chiefs,
who just as invariably exceeded their orders, and when directed to
decimate a town or village, often massacred the entire population.
The mongrel generals of Hayti were even more ferocious and bloody, if
not surpassing in treachery and cowardice the Indian mongrels of the
Continent. Rigaud, the most distinguished of the Haytien chiefs, was
also the most repulsive in his enormous and beastly vices. Christophe
and Dessalines were negroes, and they simply acted out the negro
instinct under those unnatural circumstances. They remorselessly
slaughtered all the white men, women, and children of the island that
they could find, for when the negro rises against his master, it is not
to conquer but to exterminate the dreaded race; and the helpless infant
or its frightened and despairing mother touches no chord of mercy in the
souls of these frantic and terror-stricken wretches when forced or
betrayed into resistance to their masters. But the mongrel leaders, and
especially Rigaud, were mere moral monsters, whose deeds of slaughter
were alternated with scenes of beastly debauchery and unnatural and
devilish revelry, such as could neither originate in the simple
animalism of the negro nor with the most sensual, perverse, and fiendish
among white men.
But we have this viciousness of the mongrel displayed continually before
us at the North as well as at the South. Nine-tenths of the crime
committed by so-called negroes is the work of the mongrel—the females
almost all being as lewd and lascivious as the males are idle, sensual,
and dishonest. The strange and disgusting delusion that has fastened
itself on so many minds at the North seeks to cast an air of romance
over these mongrel women—these “girls almost white”—and in negro novels
and on the stage represent them as “victims of caste,” and often doomed
to a fate worse than death to gratify the “vices of the whites.” And a
diseased sentimentality, as indecent as it is nonsensical, is indulged
by certain “pious ladies” in respect to these “interesting” quadroons,
etc., who are almost always essentially vicious, while their own white
sisters falling every hour from the ranks of pure womanhood, are
unheeded, and their terrible miseries totally disregarded.
Finally, it scarcely need be repeated that mongrelism is a diseased
condition—a penalty that nature imposes for the violation of her laws—a
punishment that, by an inexorable necessity, is inflicted on the
offspring of those who, in total disregard of her ordinances, of
instinct, of natural affection, and of reason, form sexual interunions
with persons of different races, but which, like all other abnormal
conditions, is confined within fixed limits and mercifully doomed to
final extinction.