Thoughts on African ColonizationGarrison, William Lloyd
Philosophy
Thoughts on African Colonization
Garrison, William Lloyd
African Americans -- Colonization -- Africa; American Colonization Society; Slavery -- United States
'It is not now a novel or a debateable proposition, that slavery
is a great moral and political curse. It is equally clear that
its multitudinous evils are greatly increased by the existence
among us of a mongrel population, who, freed from the shackles
of bondage, yet bear about them the badge of inferiority,
stamped upon them indelibly by the hand of nature, and are
therefore deprived of those rights of citizenship, without which
they must necessarily be a degraded caste--depraved in morals
and vicious in conduct, and _exercising a mischievous and
dangerous influence over those to whom they are nominally
superior_. Their mere existence among the slaves is sufficient,
of itself, to excite in the bosoms of the latter a feeling of
dissatisfaction with their own condition, apparently worse,
because of the coercion to labor which it imposes; but
essentially better, because of the comforts which that labor
procures, and of which the idle and dissolute habits of the free
negro almost invariably deprive him. The slave, however, is not
capable of reasoning correctly, if he reasons at all, on these
truths. He envies the free negro his idleness, and his freedom
from restraint, with all its attendant disadvantages of poverty
and disease, crime and punishment--and hence, he will sometimes
indulge the delusive dream of effecting his own emancipation by
the murder of those who hold him in bondage. Take away from him
this cause of dissatisfaction, and this incentive to
insurrection, and then these "impracticable hopes," which now
sometimes flit before his imagination, will no longer embitter
his hours of labor, and urge him to the commission of those
horrid deeds of massacre, which, though they may glut a
momentary revenge, must result disastrously, not only to the
slaves engaged immediately in their perpetration, but to all
that unfortunate race. Our true interests require that they
shall remove from among us--and no longer be a source of
disquietude to the whites, _of envy to the slaves_, and of
degradation to themselves.'--[Lynchburg (Va.) Virginian.]
'For the most conclusive reasons this removal should be to
Africa. If it be to the West Indies, to Texas, to Canada, then,
how strong and various the objections to building up, in the
vicinity of our own nation, a mighty empire, from a race of men,
_so unlike ourselves_? But, if the removal be to Africa, then it
is to a _happy distance_ from us and to their father land....
Then let it aid in removing that population, which, under its
peculiar relation to the whites, and under its degrading social
and civil disabilities, is a most fruitful source of national
dishonor, demoralization, weakness and _horrid
danger_.'--[Memorial of the New-York State Colonization
Society.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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