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
Such has been our political and current party history, and from the
nature and necessities of things, every “extension of slavery,” or every
expansion of territory, must in the future, as it has in the past,
strengthen the cause of the producing classes, and give greater scope
and power to the American idea of government.
The acquisition of Louisiana, of Florida, of Texas, etc., of those great
producing States on the Gulf Coast, has nearly overwhelmed the
anti-republican tendencies of the North, and rendered almost powerless
those combinations of capital and speculation which have always
endangered the purity and simplicity of our republican system, and thus
the rights and safety of the laboring and producing millions everywhere.
Indeed, it is a truth, a simple fact, that can not be too often
repeated, that in precise proportion to the amount or extent of
so-called “slaveholding”—of the number of negroes in their normal
condition—is freedom rendered secure to the white millions of the North.
And when in the progress of time Cuba and Central America, and the whole
tropical center of the continent is added to the Union and placed in the
same relation to New York and Ohio that Mississippi, Alabama, etc., are
now, then it is evident that the democratic or American idea of
government will be securely established forever, and the rights and
interests of the producing millions who ask nothing from government but
its protection, will be no longer endangered by those anti-republican
tendencies which in the North have so long conflicted with the natural
development of our system, and struggled so long and fiercely against
its existence.
If this freedom and prosperity of the white man rested on wrong or
oppression of the negro, then it would be valueless, for the Almighty
has evidently designed that all His creatures should be permitted to
live out the life to which He has adapted them. But when all the facts
are considered, and the negro population of the South contrasted with
any similar number of their race now or at any other time in human
experience, then it is seen that, relatively considered, they are,
perhaps, benefited to even a greater extent than the white population
themselves.
The efforts, as has been shown, to reverse the natural order of
things—to force the negro into the position of the white man—are not
merely failures, but frightful cruelties—cruelties that among ourselves
end in the extinction of these poor creatures, while in the tropics it
destroys the white man and impels the negro into barbarism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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