CLIMATIC AND INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION.
The surface of the earth is naturally divided into zones or centres of
existence. These great centres of creation have each their _Fauna_ and
_Flora_, their animal and vegetable life peculiar to themselves alone.
Geographical writers use these terms, and speak of the temperate,
frigid, and torrid zones, etc., as mere designations of certain portions
of the earth where the climate is widely varied; but this is very
subordinate to the real differences that separate the great centres of
organic life. All creatures, indeed all organic and living things, have
their centres of existence, their local habitations, their places in the
mighty programme of creation. They are all adapted to these great
centres of life—their organic structure, their faculties, and the
purposes they were designed to fulfil, all harmonizing with their
localities, the positions the Almighty has assigned to them. There are
approximating forms of life, certain genera among animals and plants,
that may be said to belong to the same family or group, but which are
found in different zones or centres of existence, but there is no such
thing as the same _species_ being found in more than one centre of
creation. All the animals and plants of Europe are, therefore, different
from those of America, as all the creatures that belong to the northern
region of this continent are specifically different from those of the
tropics.
Each and every _specific_ creation is different from every other
specific existence, and differs just as widely in the circumstances that
surround it, and to which it is adapted, as it does in its own organic
structure. If an animal, for example, it has a special structure with
special instincts, qualities, etc., and the external circumstances, the
climate, the vegetation, all things are in perfect harmony. This law may
be said to be universal, for the few seeming exceptions scarcely deserve
notice. There are a few plants and cereals suited to all climates. The
potato, of American origin, is cultivated with equal success in Europe,
while most of our ordinary vegetables are of European origin. Wheat
grows with equal luxuriance in the Valley of the Nile, the table-lands
of Mexico, and the great Northwest. But while all of these things, and
many more, are thus capable of successful cultivation in different
localities from those in which they were originally created, the
external conditions must be preserved—the same or similar soil, and, to
a certain extent, the same climate or the same heat and moisture are
essential in their cultivation. This is also generally true of animals.
Our domestic animals are all suited to different climates. The horse,
dog, ox, sheep, etc., are of European origin—some of them Asiatic—and
they live and multiply with equal certainty under the fervid suns of the
tropics, or amid the icy blasts of the extreme North. They are striking
exceptions, however, to the general law which adapts—all creatures to
their own centres of existence, and, it would seem, were designed by the
Almighty and beneficent Creator for the especial purpose of benefiting
man. They have accompanied him in all his wanderings, especially the dog
and horse, shared his fortunes, aided in fighting his battles, and
however subordinate, played an important _rôle_ in the civilization of
mankind. They are closely associated in this capacity for resisting
external circumstances with man himself, that is, the Caucasian, or
master man, who, as regards mere climate, is capable of living and of
enjoying the healthy development of all his faculties in all climates
alike, unless, perhaps, the polar regions, or extreme North. As a
general law, all creatures, as they ascend in the scale of being, become
less and less subject to external influences; but some of our domestic
animals are certainly exceptions, for the dog and horse, at all events,
are capable of living where the negro, and possibly the Mongol, would
surely become extinct. The same general laws of climate affect the human
races, not exactly similarly, of course, but approximatively as they do
animals, and with a certain modification, as they do plants—that is,
they have all centres of existence to which they are _specifically_
adapted, with the sole exception of the Caucasian, as some of our
domestic animals, and indeed some vegetable existences are exceptions.
The white man, as has been said, can exist everywhere, where life of any
kind is possible, except the extreme North, and even here, as shown by
Kane and other explorers in those bleak and barren regions, by proper
precautions, or by complying with certain conditions, life is possible
for certain periods. He is, doubtless, designed for the temperate
latitudes, industrially considered, but, as regards climate, he is at
home everywhere. Writers, ignorant of the laws of climate, and indeed
ignorant of the specific character of races, have supposed that they
become weak, effete, and imbecile in tropical latitudes, and this notion
is, perhaps, very generally entertained by otherwise intelligent people.
The population found in these regions are negro, Indian, or Malay,
intermixed often with white blood, and these inferior people are
supposed to be a result of climate, and to exhibit the natural
consequences of a warm and enervating atmosphere! The white man under
the equator, living, or rather attempting to live, the life of the
negro—to labor under the rays of a vertical sun—would rapidly decline
and die, for his organic structure could not resist the external
influences that tend to destroy him. The _malaria_ springing from the
decomposition of the rank vegetation, which ascends in the early portion
and descends to the earth in the later portion of the day, would soon
poison all the springs of life, and fever would close the scene. Any
attempt at labor in midday would be still more rapidly fatal, for the
caloric generated by the exertion, without an excretory system to
relieve it, would end in fatal congestions of the vital organs,
especially the brain. We constantly witness an approximation to this in
our Western States and Territories, where nearly a generation
voluntarily sacrifice themselves in the effort of preparing comfortable
homes for their offspring. But after a certain progress is made, the
causes of disease subside, and the temperate climate enables them to
labor at all times.
But while the white man is forever forbidden by the laws of his physical
nature to labor, or by his own hands to grow the natural products of the
tropics, he can live there, and enjoy all his faculties of mind and body
with the same certainty and success that belong to the temperate
latitudes. It may be that the temptations to indulgence, to
voluptuousness, or to the gratification of the animal appetites, are
greater in these warm and glowing climes, but surely no more so than in
our own summers, compared with the winter or other less attractive
seasons. On the contrary, the necessities of cleanliness and the less
potent demand for stimulants, with the cooling and delicious fruits of
the tropics, tend to delicacy of tastes and appetites. At all events, it
is certain that the grossest, most brutal, and most immoral populations
of Europe are found in the far north, while those of southern Europe are
the most temperate and the most delicate in their habitudes of any
people in the world. But climate has little, if any, influence in these
respects. The white man under the same circumstances is the same being,
and his grossness and immorality, or his delicacy, temperance, and
morality, are things of chance, according as he has been educated, and
circumstances, public and private, have formed his character. As a
master, as the guide and protector of the subordinate negro, he may live
wherever the latter can, otherwise the negro would have been created in
vain—a blank in the economy of the universe, a contradiction in the
designs of Providence, and a blotch on the fair form of creation.
Generally speaking, climate or other external circumstances have
influence over the life, either human or animal, according as they are
low in the scale of being, and therefore while the Caucasian man can
live and enjoy the full development of all his powers in the tropics,
the negro and other inferior races are absolutely limited to their own
centres of existence. The Mongols have been confined to those portions
of Asia where they now exist, ever since known to history, for though in
the mighty invasions of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and others, when
millions of them spread like a flood over other regions, and even as far
as Chalons, in France, they almost as rapidly receded, and are now just
where history first found them.
The modern slave trade, carried on so extensively by the English of our
day, where these people, under various pretexts, are placed aboard ships
and sent to Jamaica, and other West Indian Islands, to supply the place
of the abandoned negro, must be a far greater wrong than the importation
of negroes from Africa, for it is a violation of the laws of climate
that must rapidly destroy them, while in the case of the negro he is
still within that centre of existence, where God himself placed him. The
Malay, too, is in his own centre of life, and like all the inferior
races, never migrates from it. The Esquimaux, buried in the bleak and
desolate North, never ventures beyond it, and should he be carried into
the tropics by the white man, would doubtless soon succumb under its
burning suns. We know but little of the Indian or aboriginal in these
respects. They now constitute the industrial forces of Mexico, and,
except Brazil, of all South America. There are some ten millions of
them, and as we know that the negro never can labor on the table-lands,
or live at all in an atmosphere several thousand feet above the level of
the sea, it may become a question of immense importance to the
civilization of this continent to determine the natural position and our
true relations to this race. The negro, more distinctly, perhaps, than
any other race, is limited to his centres of life. If Dr. Kane had taken
any with him in his Northwest explorations, it is hardly possible that
they could have lived through it, if of pure negro type. His organic
structure, while as perfectly adapted to a tropical climate as the eye
is to sight or any other organism to a given purpose or function,
utterly forbids him to live beyond a certain latitude. An individual may
do so, of course, or a generation or more may linger out a miserable
existence, but his structure forbids that he should multiply himself or
become a permanent resident in the extreme north. There are great
numbers in Canada, the result of that wide-spread ignorance of his true
nature that has worked out such tremendous evils to these poor people as
well as to the deluded and mistaken whites. Their situation in Canada is
the most miserable, perhaps, that human beings can possibly endure. It
would be miserable enough if they had masters, guides, protectors, and
providers for their wants, but, without these, with none of the external
circumstances with which God surrounded them when He first called them
into being, and then left to compete with white men for the means of
subsistence, it is repeated that their condition must be the most
deplorable to which unhappy human creatures could be subjected. The
constant accession to their numbers through the Underground Railroad
renders any thing like an estimate of the fatality among them quite out
of the question, but when, in addition to their abnormal social
condition, there is the pressure of an unnatural climate or of external
influences utterly opposite to those that God originally provided for
them, and directly in conflict with their organic structure, then it is
obvious, of course, that they must perish rapidly.
All those physicians in the North who have had any experience of the
diseases of these people, know the tendencies to consumption or disease
of the respiratory organs so common, almost universal among them, but
few if any have known that this was a necessary result of the peculiar
structure of the negro. His entire surface is studded with innumerable
sebaceous glands, which are the safety-valves that nature has provided
for relieving his system from the action of vertical suns, but these
rendered torpid, indeed incapable of performing their functions in the
icy atmosphere of the North, congestion and disease of the lungs
necessarily follows. Almost every one has seen negroes in Northern
cities, who have lost their legs by frost at sea—a thing rarely
witnessed among whites, and yet where a single negro has been thus
exposed, doubtless a thousand of the former have. Climate, therefore,
has a fixed and absolute control over the existence of the negro. God
has adapted him, both in his physical and mental structure, to the
tropics, and though he can live in the temperate latitudes, his welfare,
his happiness, and the development of his faculties are secured just as
he conforms to the designs of the Almighty, as written in his organism,
and lives within the centre of existence where he was created. And those
ignorant and terribly mistaken people who have seduced and led him into
the bleak and forbidden North, have unconsciously committed a crime that
would appall them if they could truly comprehend it.
Such are, briefly, the more prominent laws of climate, and their
influence on men and animals; but as climate itself, in the ordinary
meaning of the word, has regard only to degrees of latitude, or to
modifications of heat and cold, they are of secondary importance, or, at
most, are only a portion of those general laws of adaptation which
govern animal existence, and harmonize it with the locality in which it
was originally created. Beyond the few exceptions referred to, all
organic existence is adapted to its own centre of life, and incapable of
living in any other. This is illustrated every day, and familiar to the
least observing among us. Cereals and vegetables of every kind demand,
if not always a special climate, certainly a special soil. Corn, wheat,
etc., require a soil suited to them—there must be a special adaptation
of external circumstances, for there is an eternal relation between the
organism and the circumstances that surround it. The most ignorant among
our agriculturists know from their own experience that certain things
can only grow on certain soils, and this fixed and indestructible law,
thus manifested in the simpler forms of being, pervades the whole
organic world. And, as remarked, it is in exceptional instances, or the
instances where climate does not govern, that these adaptations to
particular soils are essential. In general, it can not be transplanted
or removed from its own centre of existence. The products of the
tropics—the sugar cane, coffee, indigo, cotton, etc., the numerous
fruits, etc., can not be changed, or, at all events, can not be grown
successfully outside of their original centre of creation.
As we ascend in the scale, the laws of adaptation, are, of course,
multiplied, or become more elaborate, and in the case of human beings,
they are widely diversified with numerous secondary relations; but the
great universal and all-dominating law that unites men to their centres
of existence, is as indestructible and everlasting as it is in the
simplest form of vegetable existence. God has created both them and the
external circumstances, has given them a specific structure and
corresponding faculties, and He has made the earth, the soils, the form
of its products, its climate, etc., in perfect accord with the former,
and as time and chance, or human forces, can never change or modify the
works of the Almighty, this law of adaptation is everlasting.
The white man—as a laborer—is adapted to the temperate latitudes, not
because mere climate, or heat and cold, demand it, but because such is
his natural adaptation. All the external circumstances accord with his
nature—his physical structure and his intellectual endowments. The soil,
its natural products—the time and mode of their growth, their ripening
or maturity, in short, their cultivation is in perfect harmony with his
faculties. The farmer of Ohio or Illinois, for example, ploughs and
prepares his fields through the early summer, for sowing them with wheat
in the early autumn. The process is elaborate. The land must be manured,
ploughed carefully at different times, harrowed over at intervals, and
gradually made ready for the reception of the seed. Then he carefully
selects that which his experience assures him is best. After it is sown
he again harrows over his fields, watches them carefully for several
months, and then, the crop having ripened, another process begins.
This is equally elaborate and demands the fullest exercise of his mental
faculties as well as the labor of his body. He must watch and judge of
the weather, when he shall gather in his crops, how dispose of them,
etc.; then comes the threshing, the separation of the grain, etc., the
disposal of the straw, the feeding of his stock, all again needing the
fullest exercise of all his highest faculties. Then, again, begins
another process—if not personal or where he himself is the leading
party, where men like himself or with the same faculties as himself are
associated with him and engaged in completing the process which he
began. That which he planted and gathered is now still more elaborately
manipulated. The wheat is changed into flour by a lengthened and
elaborate process, and then passing through another elaboration, it
becomes bread—the sustenance of the race, the natural food of the
millions, the legitimate result of a healthy exercise of his specific
faculties and of the industrial adaptation of the race. Beginning with
the selection of the land, its preparation, the selection, etc., of the
seed, the planting, the care and estimate of the weather, the ripening,
the gathering, the separation of the grain, the transformation into
flour, the still greater change into bread, in the entire process, from
the occupation of the land to the moment when placed on the table of his
household, the _tout ensemble_ needs and calls into action the highest
faculties of reasoning and comparison, and however uneducated or
ignorant the individual may seem, when compared with the man of books,
the process, or rather processes, would be impossible, of course, to any
race except our own, or to beings with capacities inferior to those of
the white man.
It is the same with all the other products common or indigenous to
temperate latitudes. They all demand the highest capacities for their
cultivation. The nature of the soils, the fitness of particular products
to particular soils, the periods of growth, of ripening, the influences
of the atmosphere, the action of heat and cold, the change of seasons,
etc., are all in harmony with the elevated faculties, while the result,
their cultivation and uses, are all essential to the welfare and
happiness of the white man. The industrial adaptation is complete, the
varying soils, often widely different on the same farm, the numerous
regulations, the multiplied relations and connections involved, the
changing seasons and complicated circumstances render the temperate
latitudes as absolutely the centre of life to the white man,
industrially considered, as the tropics are to the negro, or as any of
the simpler forms of being are to the localities in which we find them.
The industrial and specific adaptation of the negro to his own centre of
life is, however, more palpable and demonstrable, for his limited
intelligence and more direct relations to external circumstances enable
us to grasp the facts involved more readily. The soil of the tropics has
little variation, and rarely needs any manure or preparation like those
of temperate latitudes. And the indigenous products, those that need
care and labor for their cultivation, however luxuriant their growth,
are few in number. There are almost innumerable species of fruits that
grow spontaneously, and indeed a great number of plants that are
nutritious, which need no care or labor, and which the negro, in his
isolated or barbarous state, lives on to a great extent. But the great
natural products of the tropics, those that are essential to human
welfare, which are at this instant the most important elements of modern
commerce, and are vitally affecting the civilization of our times, are
few in number, and need only the lowest grade of intelligence for their
cultivation. Cotton, for example, needs but little beyond planting and
picking, and sugar, so far as the labor is concerned, is even more
simple. It is true, in the complete elaboration and final perfection of
these products, the manufacture, etc., the highest order of intelligence
is called into action, but this has no necessary connection with the
negro. Cotton is shipped to the North or Europe, and passes altogether
into other hands, and though the negro labor was vital in the
preliminary stages, it has no more connection with the ultimate
disposition of this material than the labor of mules that were employed
to prepare the earth for its original cultivation. Coffee, tobacco,
indigo, etc., are all equally simple, all in accord with the simple
soils, the uniform atmosphere, the primitive laws of development, as
they may be termed, and in perfect harmony with the grade of
intelligence, the specific nature and industrial adaptation of the
negro.
His physical organism is adapted to the cultivation of these products as
perfectly as is his grade of intelligence. His head is protected from
the rays of a vertical sun by a dense mat of woolly hair, wholly
impervious to its fiercest heats, while his entire surface, studded with
innumerable sebaceous glands, forming a complete excretory system,
relieves him from all those climatic influences so fatal, under the same
circumstances, to the sensitive and highly organized white man. Instead
of seeking to shelter himself from the burning sun of the tropics, he
courts it, enjoys it, delights in its fiercest heats, and malaria—that
deadly poison to the white man, which, in the form of yellow fever, has
swept from existence vast multitudes of our race, is as harmless to the
negro organism as the balmy breezes of May or June to the organization
of the white man. Of course mulattoes and mongrels may have something
that approximates to the yellow fever of the white man, but to the negro
it is simply an organic impossibility. His faculties, his simple grade
of intelligence, his physical organism, his specific, climatic, and
industrial adaptations are therefore in perfect harmony with the
primitive soils, the simple products, and uniform atmosphere of the
tropics, and in complete relation and perfect union with the
circumstances that surround him in the centre of existence where the
Almighty has placed him.
The late Daniel Webster once declared that God had limited “slavery” to
certain climates, and that he, at least, would not “reënact the will of
God,” and this declaration, though as a form of speech absurd enough,
was certainly in close neighborhood to a great and vital truth. If he
had said that the Almighty had adapted the negro to certain climates, he
would have expressed just what we are now considering; but the relation
of the negro to the white man, the thing he called slavery, is, of
course, as proper and as natural in New York or Ohio as in Mississippi.
The vulgar notion, therefore, that “slave labor,” the industrial
capacities of the negro, is unprofitable in temperate latitudes is only
partially true. The “slave” relation, the normal condition, as
contrasted with the so-called free negro, presents just the difference
between a useful negro and a worthless negro, or a negro who adds to the
productive forces of a State, and one who lives on the State—a healthy
and a diseased social element, and therefore wherever found, if, indeed,
in the extreme North, it is simply absurd to speak of the former as
unprofitable when contrasted with the latter. But when the negro is
contrasted with the white man in Ohio or New York, then the whole
subject is changed. His industrial capacities are incompetent to grow
the indigenous products of the temperate latitudes.
The reasoning, the reflection, the elevated faculties called into
action, that are absolutely essential to the cultivation of their
products, the varying and complicated soils, their elaborate
preparation, the care and judgment needed in gathering them, etc., the
still more elaborate processes before they are rendered fit for human
sustenance, all this needs the high intelligence, and therefore the
large brain, of the white man, and to the isolated negro is impossible,
of course.
It is true, the master may guide them, and the owner of a hundred
negroes in Ohio may carry on these processes and cultivate the soils of
the Western and Middle States sometimes, perhaps, when all labor is
scarce, with tolerable success. But their inferiority, their lower grade
of intelligence, the time and trouble expended in this guidance, must be
so palpable to every one who reflects a moment, that the case only needs
to be stated to convince them of the relative worthlessness of this
labor. And leaving out of view the force of climate, the changing
seasons, the sudden frosts which sometimes disable and very generally
affect the negro injuriously, and in the end destroy him—leaving all
this out of consideration, and contemplating his mere industrial
adaptations, it is obvious that the negro can never be, as he never has
been, able to cultivate the soils or grow the products of the temperate
latitudes. But while the great dividing lines are distinct enough, while
the white man and negro, in their industrial adaptations, can never be
in conflict when each is within that centre of existence to which the
Almighty Creator has adapted and designed him, there is a large extent
of territory where they may both labor to advantage, and where time and
circumstances may often determine their presence and their fitness for
such labor. The white man is forever forbidden by the laws of his
organization to labor under a tropical sun, or to grow by his own
physical efforts the products indigenous to the tropics. The negro, by
the laws of both his physical structure and mental nature, is forever
incapable of cultivating the soil or of growing the products indigenous
or common to the temperate latitudes.
These great elementary and indestructible truths, which, fixed forever
by the hand of God, admit of no exception, change, or modification
whatever, which time, and circumstances, and human power can not
influence, any more than the laws of gravitation, or animal growth, or
the term of animal existence, or any other law of the Creator of the
universe, will not be mistaken; but when we come to consider the
approximating latitudes, then there is a wide field opened up, to our
view, to chance, to time, to a multitude of considerations.
In general terms, it may be said, that wherever the white man can labor
with effect, that is, can preserve his health and the full exercise of
his faculties, there his labor must be more valuable than is that of the
negro. People who are ignorant of the laws of climate and industrial
adaptations, and still worse, ignorant of the nature of the negro and
his relations to the white man, when traveling on the Ohio River,
observe that the populations on the Ohio side are more energetic,
industrious, and prosperous than they are on the Kentucky side of the
river, and they infer that it is because Kentucky has “slavery.” The
author is not prepared to admit their assumption, for though there may
be greater wealth and apparently greater prosperity in Ohio, the true
and only test of well-being in a State is the equality of condition and
of the happiness of its people, and we have no means of determining this
truth by applying this test in the present instance. England is vastly
more wealthy than any other State in Christendom—its annual production
is vastly greater, but this wealth is monopolized by a fraction of the
population. While the great body of the people are steeped in poverty to
the lips, and while the few are every day growing wealthier, the many
are, with equal rapidity and certainty, becoming more abject in their
poverty, and, consequently more ignorant, vicious, and miserable. If,
therefore, it were true that Ohio did increase in wealth more rapidly
than Kentucky, it would by no means follow that the people of Ohio were
in a better condition than those of Kentucky. But it is reasonable to
suppose that the production is greater than that of Kentucky, for while
the climate and industrial adaptation are suited to the white man, there
are none but white men in Ohio, while nearly half of the laboring
population of Kentucky are negroes. The same absurd assumption and
inference have been made in respect to Virginia and other so-called
Slave States, when contrasted with New York and other so-called Free
States. It has been said, “Virginia falls behind New York in general
prosperity.” “It is because she has half a million of slaves, and if she
will abolish this slavery, then she will soon equal, perhaps surpass,
New York, for Virginia has certain natural advantages which New York has
not.” Or, in other words, it is said that Virginia is less prosperous
than New York, because her half a million of negroes are in a normal
condition, and if she will thrust them from this condition and turn them
loose, as New York has done, then Virginia will soon be equally
prosperous as the latter! Possibly one out of twenty of the negroes in
New York, Ohio, or any other so-called Free State, is engaged in
productive labor, while the nineteen others live—temporarily—on the
labor of the producing classes of those States. The argument of these
political economists, therefore, is simply this: Virginia with half a
million of industrious and productive negroes, is less prosperous than
New York, but if she will transform them into half a million of idle,
non-productive, and good-for-nothing negroes, then she will rapidly
recover from her present depressed condition. But enough—these people
who set up an abstraction entirely nonsensical, must reach conclusions
equally preposterous. They are not only ignorant of what they argue
about so pompously, but they imagine conditions that not only do not but
can not exist, either here or elsewhere, in our own times or any other,
in the existing, or any other world.
Virginia, Kentucky, all of the transition States, all the States with
considerable negro populations that are in the temperate latitudes, are,
of course, less productive than those bordering on them with entire
white populations, for the negro is greatly inferior in his industrial
capabilities, as in all other respects, where white men can labor. Thus
far there can be no doubt, for there is no room for doubt, but it by no
means follows that the people of Ohio or Pennsylvania are in a better
condition than those of Kentucky and Virginia. The people of Virginia,
if not homogeneous in race, are so in interest, and that one great fact
underlying the social condition, is itself, or in the results that flow
from it, of vast benefit. The interests of the State, of all its people,
the “slaveholder,” “non-slaveholder,” and the negro or so-called slave,
are homogeneous, universal, and indivisible, and therefore without
social conflict, or causes for social conflict, the tendencies of the
social order are harmonious and beneficent. The only seeming conflict or
the sole thing that superficial thinkers might mistake for such, is the
fact that the negro is not adapted to the locality, and they might
suppose that therefore the owner of his services, or of this so-called
slave property, might, to a certain extent, monopolize the soil that of
right belonged to the white laborer. But a moment’s reflection will be
sufficient to convince any rational mind of the unsoundness of this
supposition.
A Virginia planter may, perhaps, inherit a thousand acres of land and a
hundred negroes. His poor white neighbor is without land perhaps, and
thinks it hard that these negroes, whom his instinct as well as reason
assures him are not as well adapted to the locality as himself, should
occupy it, while he has none. But the planter himself is worse off
still. The land is worn out—the negro capacity can not resuscitate
it—they barely earn sufficient for the common support—the planter finds
it hard to live at all, and only does so, perhaps, by parting with some
of his people, and therefore whatever the evil of this negro element in
localities which the changes of time and circumstances have brought
about, it is an evil that presses upon the owner of this species of
property with vastly greater force than it does on the non-slaveholder.
Of course the remedy is obvious—“Slavery Extension”—free and full
expansion—the acquisition of new territories suited to the industrial
capacities of the negro. For example, if we suppose the late General
Walker had been successful, and opened Central America to American
settlement, energy, civilization, and prosperity—the Virginia or
Maryland planter, who now finds it difficult to “make both ends meet,”
would gather up his household and migrate to these inviting and fertile
regions. His negroes producing double or treble, or even more, in their
new homes, he could afford to send his children to the North or Europe
to be educated, and himself spend his summers at the Springs or abroad,
and live as luxuriously as he pleased, while his negroes or so-called
slaves, in their centre of existence, where God ordained that they
should live, laving themselves in the genial heats of the tropics, with
all their best and highest capacities called into action, and the best
qualities of their nature healthily and naturally developed, would be
even more benefited, perhaps, than the master himself. The vacancy would
be filled by the increasing white population, by the constant inflowing
of the mighty masses pouring in upon us from the Old World, by the poor
German or other European peasant, who only needs liberty and the means
for developing the high nature with which God endowed him, to exhibit
himself as the equal of the kings and aristocrats who have crushed him
into an artificial inferiority actually resembling the natural
inferiority of the negro, and these impoverished soils being
resuscitated by his industry, his intelligence, in short, his industrial
adaptations, the now wasted and wasting lands of the transition States
would become, and doubtless will become some day, the very garden of the
republic. Nor would this be the whole of the beneficial process in
question. The world needs, and especially our own farmers and working
classes need, the products of the tropics. Sugar, and coffee, and
tropical fruits should be had at half their present prices, while the
increased production, the extension of commerce and general progress
would have a vast influence over the civilization of our times by this
simple application of industrial forces in conformity with the
fundamental laws of climatic and industrial adaptation. A large majority
of our negro population are at this moment outside of their own centre
of existence, and a time will come when the border or transition States
will probably have few of these people. As observed, it is absurd, a
contradiction, an abuse of language, to speak of “slavery,” or the
social subordination of the negro, as an evil, or as being, under any
possible circumstances, unprofitable, for that involves the anomaly of
supposing the idle and good-for-nothing negro a benefit to the State;
but the negro is profitable to his master, beneficial to the State, and
happy himself in such proportion as he approximates to the tropics, and
is placed in juxtaposition with the external circumstances to which God
has adapted him. They or their progenitors were mainly landed at
northern ports. They were, in the then scarcity of labor, possibly
needed even in the Central States. As an advanced guard in the rising
civilization of the New World, they were once, perhaps, essential to the
Provinces of Virginia, Maryland, etc., for the rich soil, the rank
vegetation, the extensive marshes and wild river bottoms generated an
extent and degree of malaria that was often fatal to the white man, and
rendered the labor and aid of these people of vital importance in the
early settlement of the country. But as the country became cultivated
and white laborers became plenty, it was seen that the labor of the
negro was less valuable; so that Mr. Jefferson, and many of his
contemporaries, actually fancied it an evil, and desired to be relieved
from it. And indeed, what was worse still—they confounded the existence
of the negro with the relation, the so-called slavery, of the negro; and
it was only when Louisiana was occupied, and new and appropriate regions
were opened to the negro, and in harmony with his industrial capacities,
that this erroneous notion of Mr. Jefferson and others disappeared from
the southern mind. Virginia has still a large negro population, but
while they are mainly employed in cultivating tobacco, suited to the
simple capacity and subordinate nature of the negro, the demand for
cotton, rice, sugar, etc., in the great tropical regions of the
republic, is rapidly attracting them southward, and in conformity with
their own happiness as well as the welfare of the white citizenship,
this process is destined to go on until they are all within their own
centre of existence. Whether or not Virginia, or any other transition
State, would be better without them at this time, it is of course
impossible to say, or to conjecture even. The simple fact, however, of
their presence there would seem to indicate that it was desirable to
have them among them yet, or at all events in considerable numbers, but
the industrial attraction is constantly carrying them further south—to
Texas, Florida, and other Gulf States, where their labor is more
valuable.
These general laws of climatic and industrial adaptation, which thus
underlie the social fabric when made up of mixed populations, are also
illustrated by the national history, and demonstrated in every step of
the national progress. When negroes were first introduced into the
British North American Colonies, there was, of course, and for many
years after, a great demand for labor. Here was a mighty continent, a
new world, open to the enterprise and energy of the most energetic and
most enterprising branch of the great master race of mankind. All that
was wanted was labor—labor, too, that was of the lowest kind in some
respects, and laborers whose imperfect innervation and low grade of
sensibility could resist the malarious influences always more or less
potent in new countries and virgin soils, even in temperate latitudes,
were often desirable. The Bristol and the Liverpool “slave merchants,”
therefore—the progenitors of the saints and philanthropists of Exeter
Hall—supplied these wants, ordinarily with negroes, but occasionally
with some of their own poorer and more helpless brethren, whom they did
not hesitate to kidnap and send out to labor on the American
plantations. Negroes, therefore, were forced from the sea-board to the
interior, even as far as Canada, while the Central Colonies had even
very considerable numbers of these people. With the downfall of the
British dominion, however, the Bristol merchants were forced to engage
in other enterprises, and as the genius and daring of Clive and his
companions had just then opened a new and boundless empire in India,
English capital, enterprise, and polity took another direction, and
though the African trade was continued for some years afterward by our
own people, there were, comparatively, but few negroes imported after
the overthrow of the British rule. After the removal of a foreign and
artificial rule, and the establishment of a political system in harmony
with the instincts and wants of our people, the social and industrial
laws were permitted a natural development, and from this period a widely
different movement began. Negro labor was less profitable in the Eastern
than in the Central States, and of course less profitable in the latter
than in Virginia, the Carolinas, etc., and therefore the industrial
attraction carried them from the interior to the sea-board, and from the
North to the South. The acquisition of Louisiana, of Florida, etc., the
opening of new regions and the formation of new States adapted to the
climatic wants and industrial capabilities of the negro, drained them
off still more rapidly. Mr. Jefferson and others, as has been observed,
confounding the relation of the races, or so-called slavery, with the
non-adaptability of the negro labor in temperate latitudes, desired to
exclude, not negroes, but the social relation which they supposed an
evil, from the northwest territory, and the old confederation, it will
be remembered, passed an ordinance to that effect. This “ordinance,”
which ignorance and folly have so long worshipped as a “bulwark of
freedom,” with as abject a spirit and total absence of reason as the
Hindoo worships his Juggernaut, of course never had, nor could have, the
slightest influence over the subject.
If there had been no extension of our southern borders, no Louisiana,
Florida, Alabama, or other States adapted to the wants and industrial
capabilities of the negro, the whole Northwest, at this moment, would be
what these blind and mistaken people term “slave territory.” The cheap
lands and fresh soils of the West, would attract the holders of this
species of property even more strongly than any others, and the only
difference, so far as the negro is concerned, would be, or could be,
that their numbers would be less than at present. As he approximates to
his centre of existence, or as the negro is in harmony with the external
conditions to which the Almighty has adapted him, his well-being is
secured, his vitality is greater, and he multiplies himself more
rapidly; therefore as regards the negro element, it would have been less
in the Northwest than it is now in the South-west, but the relation, of
course, would be as at present, for however willing Vermont, or some
other State without negroes might be to pervert these relations, and in
theory place themselves on a level with a subordinate race, those who
are in juxtaposition with negroes have never done so, or thus
voluntarily attempted social suicide.
Mr. Jefferson, by the acquisition of Louisiana and the extension of our
Southern limits, therefore, “saved” the Northwest from a negro
population and so-called slavery, just as the acquisition of Texas by
President Tyler and the eminent and far-seeing Calhoun and others, at a
later day, opened other and still wider regions adapted to the wants and
specific nature of our negro population, and which are now, by the
natural and indestructible laws of climate and industrial adaptation,
gradually withdrawing this population from the border or transition
States. Indeed, one only needs to examine the several census returns of
the federal government, from 1790 to 1860, to understand both the
history of the country, in these respects, and the operation of the laws
of climate and industrial adaptation. They will then see that the negro
element constantly tends southward—a black column ever on the march for
its own centre of existence—an advance guard of American civilization,
that moves on without cessation, and that must continue to advance until
it is in perfect accord with those external conditions to which it is
naturally adapted. Nor is the interest of the master—the increased value
of the negro labor—the sole motive power, though certainly the leading
cause of this progress southward. The increased and increasing white
population, with the vast European emigration, is pressing on its rear,
while the demands of modern society for the products of its labor, and
many other influences, are every day increasing in force, and impelling
the negro tropic-ward with greater rapidity at present, perhaps, than
ever before.
Persons wholly ignorant of these causes, or of the laws underlying this
progress of the negro southward, have blindly labored against it, and in
regard to the annexation of Texas, which opened such a wide and
beneficent field for negro industry, and therefore for the true welfare
of these people, they doubtless really believed they were doing them a
kindness when thus foolishly striving to reverse the ordinances of the
Eternal, and to prevent the expansion of this negro population. And this
expansion, or this industrial attraction constantly going on from
Virginia and other border States to Texas and the Gulf States, doubtless
does appear unjust, and, perhaps, inhuman to those ignorant of the negro
nature, as well as of those laws of industrial adaptation which always
have and always must govern the subject. The sale of negroes in Richmond
and Norfolk, to be sent South, seems to them, perhaps, a great hardship,
but while it is believed that the larger portion are accompanied by
their masters, who naturally seek new homes in Texas, etc., there is no
other possible mode or means through which they could reach a more
genial clime, and therefore, even if it were indeed a harsh procedure to
sell them in Richmond, it would still be vastly more inhuman to keep
them from approximating to their specific centre of existence. As it is,
it is true beneficence and kindness to facilitate their progress
southward; but if they really were black-_white_ men, as the ignorant
anti-slaveryite fancies they are, and without any specific affinity or
adaptation for a tropical climate, even in that case their public sale
at Richmond or Norfolk, to supply the labor market of Texas, would not
involve a thousandth part of the misery and physical suffering endured
by a very considerable portion of those British subjects who annually
arrive at New York. Indeed, it is safe to say that the thousand or so
diseased, half-starved, and miserable British _subjects_, which the
Mayor of New York had penned up and out of sight of the Prince of Wales
at Castle Garden, in order not to offend the olfactories or revolt the
senses of that young person, embodied more physical suffering, more
wrong and outrage on humanity, than _could_ be inflicted on negroes
through all eternity, so far as this process of extension southward may
be concerned. The master, or the man who purchases the service of the
negro, has, of course, the utmost interest in taking care of him and
providing for all his wants, while the negro himself, on the way to the
climate and the external conditions for which the Almighty has adapted
him, _must_ be in the pathway of progress, and advancing generally
toward that goal of happiness and well-being which the common Creator
has designed for all His creatures.
No law or legislation would seem to be needed—nothing but the removal of
all obstructions from the path of progress, and the free and full
development of the laws of industrial attraction. The demands for
tropical products, and the greater value of the negro labor—the
necessities of modern civilization and the interests of the master—have
carried the negro from the Central, as they are now carrying him from
the border States, toward the great tropical centre of the continent.
And by a beneficent and inevitable necessity which God himself has fixed
forever in the economy of the universe, the welfare of the negro is
secured in exact proportion as these laws of industrial attraction and
adaptation are permitted free action and full development.
In conclusion, therefore, it would seem that a simple removal of all
obstructions to these fixed and fundamental laws would be all that was
needed to secure the best welfare of all—white men and negroes—of the
North equally with the South, for while the industrial attraction would
remove the negro element just as fast as the interests of the border
States may demand, the West can always secure themselves from a
considerable negro population, by aiding in the removal of obstructions
from our southern borders, as Jefferson saved them sixty years ago.