An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called AfricansChild, Lydia Maria
History
An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans
Child, Lydia Maria
Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
I will for a moment glance at what many suppose is still the intention
of the Colonization Society, viz., gradually to remove all the blacks in
the United States. The Society has been in operation more than fifteen
years, during which it has transported between two and three thousand
_free_ people of color. There are in the United States two million of
slaves and three hundred thousand free blacks; and their numbers are
increasing at the rate of seventy thousand annually. While the Society
have removed less than three thousand,--five hundred thousand have been
born. While one hundred and fifty _free_ blacks have been sent to Africa
in a _year_, two hundred _slaves_ have been born in a _day_. To keep the
evil just where it is, seventy thousand a year must be transported. How
many ships, and how many millions of money, would it require to do this?
It would cost three million five hundred thousand dollars a year, to
provide for the safety of our Southern brethren in this way! To use the
language of Mr. Hayne, it would "bankrupt the treasury of the world"
to execute the scheme. And if such a great number could be removed
annually, how would the poor fellows subsist? Famines have already been
produced even by the few that have been sent. What would be the result
of landing several thousand destitute beings, even on the most fertile
of our own cultivated shores?
And why _should_ they be removed? Labor is greatly needed, and we are
glad to give good wages for it. We encourage emigration from all parts
of the world; why is it not good policy, as well as good feeling, to
improve the colored people, and pay them for the use of their faculties?
For centuries to come, the means of sustenance in this vast country
must be much greater than the population; then why should we drive away
people, whose services may be most useful? If the moral cultivation of
negroes received the attention it ought, thousands and thousands would
at the present moment be gladly taken up in families, factories, &c.
And, like other men, they ought to be allowed to fit themselves for more
important usefulness, as far and as fast as they can.
There will, in all human probability, never be any decrease in the black
population of the United States. Here they are, and here they must
remain, in very large numbers, do what we will. We may at once agree
to live together in mutual good-will, and perform a mutual use to each
other--or we may go on, increasing tyranny on one side, and jealousy and
revenge on the other, until the fearful elements complete their work of
destruction, and something better than this sinful republic rises on the
ruins. Oh, how earnestly do I wish that we may choose the holier and
safer path!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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