CHAPTER XX.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 theirFaunaandFlora, 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 samespeciesbeing 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 everyspecificcreation is different from every other specific existence, and differs just as widely in the circumstancesthat 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 importantrôlein 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 arespecificallyadapted, 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. Themalariaspringing from the decomposition of the rankvegetation, 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, accordingas 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 unnaturalclimate 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 degreesof 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 itsproducts, 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 changedinto 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, thetout ensembleneeds 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 adaptationof 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 contemplatinghis 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 tothe 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 Virginiais 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 probablyhave 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, israpidly 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, andthe 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 possiblemode 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-whitemen, 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 Britishsubjects, 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, thancouldbe 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,mustbe 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 civilizationand 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.