Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.Van Evrie, John H.
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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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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