Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
The negroes in the south outside of the upper class--the latter not
amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are
slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by
slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They
greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the
head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There
appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion
with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently
assume that our weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion
of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it
would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for
centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are
more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and
intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while.
The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy
certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same
powers are now in both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks,
of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable
in marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent
lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in
Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many
white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York
City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana.
These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of
the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to
speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not
separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close
of the century, if this separation has not been made long before,
Professor Willcox's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be
their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes
far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.
Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the
south do him justice and loving kindness, by transplanting him into
favorable environment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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