The Future of the Colored Race in America: Being an article in the Presbyterian quarterly review of July, 1862Aikman, William
History
The Future of the Colored Race in America: Being an article in the Presbyterian quarterly review of July, 1862
Aikman, William
African Americans; Slavery -- United States
This feeling, which must have been noticed by any one whose
observation has been extensive or intelligent enough to collect
the facts, leads the race to remain by itself; and when left to its
natural course, such is the result. The statistics of this country
show that the free black does not and cannot mingle with the white
race. No elevation or freedom can produce such an intermixture. Here
and there, but so seldom as to present but perhaps a single case
only in widely separated communities, there is an inter-marriage.
This seeming want of inclination, coupled with a natural and
insuperable repugnance on the part of the white, must ever keep
the two races apart when they stand on an equal footing of freedom.
The often repeated argument against emancipation, founded on the
notion that it would be necessarily followed by amalgamation, is
the product of the grossest ignorance and thoughtlessness, while
at the same time it betrays a shameful want of confidence in the
white race itself. It surely argues no great power or stability
in a people when they are not able to keep themselves from being
mixed up with a confessedly inferior race. But facts point in
a wholly different direction: so far from freedom promoting this
intermixture, the only condition in which these two races are found
mingling is where the negro is in a state of servitude. Here the
process goes on freely and under the working of natural causes. The
influences which on either side under other circumstances make it
impossible, here become inoperative, and are overborne by other and
more powerful ones. The close intimacies, beginning with infancy
and extending over the whole life, destroying what under other
circumstances might seem to be a natural separation; a servile desire
to please on the part of the slave, lust and cupidity on the part
of the master, all combine to make the blood of the two races flow
in the same veins. Slavery is the source of amalgamation. The
mulatto and the quadroon tell you unerringly of a present or a
former servitude.
With this pliant ductility and this permanence of race, there is
another striking characteristic;--the negro's attachment to place.
It is probably a natural trait, but from easily perceived causes it
is perhaps intensified in the case of the American negro. He loves
his home and seldom goes willingly away from it, whether slave or
free. The number of fugitives from bondage would be prodigiously
multiplied were this feeling more easily overcome. Many a poor
bondman has turned back to slavery when the hard alternative has
been forced upon him to remain in it or go forever away from the
familiar and dear scenes of his childhood's home. It is necessity
scarcely less powerful than death that compels him to leave them
behind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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