The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 8 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 8 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
strong in the arms and shoulders, and a porter in the legs and
thighs. They raise fewer children than we do. The causes of
this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance.
The women very frequently attending the men in their
parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely
inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have
learned the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some
vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a
considerable time after. During these parties they are exposed
to numerous hazards, to excessive exertions, to the greatest extremities
of hunger. Even at their homes the nation depends
for food, through a certain part of every year, on the gleanings
of the forest; that is, they experience a famine once in every
year. With all animals, if the female be badly fed, or not fed at
all, her young perish; and if both male and female be reduced to
like want, generation becomes less active, less productive. To
the obstacles, then, of want and hazard, which nature has opposed
to the multiplication of wild animals, for the purpose of
restraining their numbers within certain bounds, those of labor
and of voluntary abortion are added with the Indian. No wonder,
then, if they multiply less than we do. Where food is
regularly supplied, a single farm will show more of cattle, than
a whole country of forests can of buffaloes. The same Indian
women, when married to white traders, who feed them and their
children plentifully and regularly, who exempt them from excessive
drudgery, who keep them stationary and unexposed to accident,
produce and raise as many children as the white women.
Instances are known, under these circumstances, of their rearing
a dozen children. An inhuman practice once prevailed in this
country, of making slaves of the Indians. It is a fact well
known with us, that the Indian women so enslaved produced
and raised as numerous families as either the whites or blacks
among whom they lived. It has been said that Indians have
less hair than the whites, except on the head. But this is a fact
of which fair proof can scarcely be had. With them it is disgraceful
to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to
hogs. They therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears. But
the traders who marry their women, and prevail on them to discontinue
this practice, say, that nature is the same with them as
with the whites. Nor, if the fact be true, is the consequence
necessary which has been drawn from it. Negroes have notoriously
less hair than the whites; yet they are more ardent. But
if cold and moisture be the agents of nature for diminishing the
races of animals, how comes she all at once to suspend their
operation as to the physical man of the new world, whom the
Count acknowledges to be "à peu près de même stature que
l'homme de notre monde," and to let loose their influence on his
moral faculties? How has this "combination of the elements
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