Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.Van Evrie, John H.
History
Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.
Van Evrie, John H.
African Americans; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States
What might have been, it is useless to conjecture; but the notion of a
certain class of sentimentalists among us, that we have done the Indian
great wrong, and that, had we treated him with kindness and justice, he
might have become civilized, and a part of our permanent population, of
course, is absurd; for it is founded on that foolish dogma of a single
race, which Europe has fastened on the American mind, and which supposes
the Indian, as the Negro, etc., to have the same nature as themselves.
Nor is the notion of others, that the Indian is incapable of
civilization, and therefore destined to give way before the advance of
the white man, worthy of any consideration; for this involves the
paradox of being created without a purpose, a supposition not to be
entertained a moment; for the most insignificant beings in the lowest
forms of organic life have their uses, and the human creature, surely,
was not created in vain. The simple truth is, that we need to know what
the Indian is in fact, his true nature and true relations to our own
race, and then, as we have done in the case of the Negro, adapt the
social and governmental machinery to the wants of both races. But this
employment and consequent destruction of the Indians of America by the
monarchists of Europe, though often inflicting great temporary evil on
our border settlements, did not retard our progress in the least, nor
did England, to any appreciable extent, succeed in her objects. The
theory or dogma of a single race, which her writers and publicists had
set up about the time of the Revolution, produced, however, immense
practical results both in Europe and America. The doctrines of the
American Revolution, as was foreseen by British statesmen, soon became
universally accepted in France, and threatened to overturn monarchy all
over the Continent, and indeed in England itself. Dr. Johnson,
Wilberforce, Pitt, and all the great writers and leaders of England,
naturally enough adopted the notion that Indians, Negroes, etc., were
men like themselves, except in color, cultivation, etc.; but they were
impelled, by the necessities of their system and the preservation of
monarchical institutions, to practicalize this theory to the utmost
extent in their power, and thus divert the attention of their own
oppressed white people from _their_ wrongs, by holding up before them
continually the _imaginary_ wrongs of “American slaves.” They said, “It
is true, you laborers of Yorkshire and operatives of Birmingham have a
hard life, a life of constant toil and privation; but you are free-born
Englishmen, and your own masters, and in all England there is not a
single slave; while in America, in that so-called land of freedom, where
there is no king, or noble, or law of primogeniture, and where, in
theory, it is declared that all men are created free and equal, one
sixth of the population are slaves, so abject and miserable that they
are sold in the public markets, like horses and oxen. What, then, are
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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