The Right of American SlaveryHoit, T. W. (True Worthy)
Philosophy
The Right of American Slavery
Hoit, T. W. (True Worthy)
Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States
It is not our purpose to blame the African for being a barbarian; but
to insist that emancipation is wrong because it restores him to
barbarism, and that slavery is right because it holds him to those
roles of justice which pertain to civilization, and protects him from
the injustice, violence, and degradation which are the concomitants of
barbarism. As the slave of civilization, he is raised infinitely above
his former condition as the subject of barbarism. He knows this, and
it satisfied. His instinct teaches him to love his master, because he
is his protector, and because, mistrusting his own capacity for
self-government, he knows the necessity for a master; and instances
are numerous, of slaves, having misjudged their own capacity for
self-government, having fled from supposed wrongs, they found they
were mistaken as to the means of bettering their condition, and
returned to voluntary servitude, begging, with tears, to be again
admitted to the sacred precincts of the patriarchial care.
FITNESS OF THE AFRICAN FOR SLAVERY.
It is the fitness of things that makes the African a slave. His brawny
limbs, seconding and aiding the intellect of the superior race,
constitute the left hand and foot of labor. Slavery is the left hand
of our body politic. Free labor is the right hand. Intellect is the
head. All combined, constitute a power which is felt and feared by the
foes of this Republic. Hence their endeavor to detach one portion from
the other, and thus weaken the whole. To change the position of the
slave is to interrupt or reverse the order of nature.
"What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,
Or hand to toil, aspired to be the head?
What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve, mere engines of the ruling mind?
Just as absurd for any part to claim
To be another in this general frame;
Just as absurd to mourn the tasks or pains
The great directing Mind of All ordains."
ABSURDITY OF NEGRO EQUALITY.
The truth is, slavery is right, and is proved to be so,
notwithstanding all the noisy declamation we hear about human
equality. The Negro is a barbarian, and barbarism is not humanity but
inhumanity; hence the unfitness to the case, of such illogical
reasoning as is adopted by the advocates of Negro equality. Human
equality, as applied to the Negro, is an idle fantasy, without even
the shadow or semblance of plausibility. White men are equals in few
things; certainly not in physical nor mental capacity, nor power. The
equality declared by our Revolutionary Sires was the political
equality of white men. Let us arise from that lethargy in which we
have dreamed of universal equality, and escape the dangers of that
moral and intellectual somnambulism in which we have been groping to
the verge of social and political destruction.
AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN RADICALISM.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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