Title: Petition and Memorial of David Quinn, Asking for the Re-establishment of Negro Slavery in the United States
Author: Quinn, David
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Petition and Memorial of David Quinn, Asking for the Re-establishment of Negro Slavery in the United States" ***
DAVID QUINN, ASKING FOR THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF NEGRO SLAVERY IN THE
UNITED STATES ***



  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_



  PETITION AND MEMORIAL

  OF

  DAVID QUINN,

  ASKING FOR THE

  RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF NEGRO SLAVERY

  IN THE

  UNITED STATES.



To the Congress of the United States of America.


  GENTLEMEN:

The undersigned, an American citizen, respectfully petitions your
honorable body, and prays that measures may be immediately taken for
the re-establishment of _Negro_ slavery in the States from which
it has just been ejected, and also for its establishment by law in
all the other States and Territories, of our federal Union; and in
support of his petition, he herewith submits the following


MEMORIAL.

He is by no means insensible of the opposition he is likely to
encounter at the hands of the half-learned, the vain and the vicious;
but as the roar of the battle no longer drowns the voice of reason,
he expects to be heard, and when heard to be respected, and his
policy sooner or later adopted. The tempest, he is also aware, still
sweeps on in its old direction; but the bending forest is beginning
to rise, light to break, and when it comes, in that serenity which
follows the storm, he looks for the calm and candid judgment, not of
the vicious, but of the patriotic people of his nation.

At the foundation of all polities there are principles—equality at
the basis of democracy, and inequality at the basis of all other
systems. But whatever may be the propriety or impropriety of either,
all human laws to be wholesome must conform to the laws of nature.
From these there can be no variance without harm, therefore is it
incumbent on the statesman, who is of necessity a philosopher, to
study nature, and to conform all his policy to her demands. Her star
is the polar star of all wise legislation, but from it you have
turned aside, and inclined your ears to the siren songs of countries
beyond the seas until you are transformed into beasts, and become
the destroyers of your own kindred and kind. You have joined your
enemies in their false cry of _liberty_—a device invented for your
ruin; and in your delusion have assumed, as self-evidently true,
propositions which are as self-evidently false. You have assumed a
general equality of all the human races, and the equal adaptability
of all localities to their propagation and development. These are
both false, and in their falsity is to be found the great volume of
that disorder which has converted our States into antagonisms, drawn
the sword of the father upon the son, sent a million of our young
men to untimely graves, and burdened the living with a national debt
which is, even now, grinding them into the ground.

The superiority of mankind, we readily concede, is not determined by
shades and shadows; the standard is much higher. But as mind conforms
to matter, or matter to mind, mentalities are as diversified as are
the shades and colors of human skins. The exterior is but an index
of the interior, or life within; consequently, as exteriors differ,
so do interiors, and as gradation rises, so do equalities disappear,
as the sage, and all intermediate ascendencies, rise above the fool.
But nature rises by degrees, and, in the harmony of her adjustments,
divides and subdivides her divisions, as by the walls of a prison,
from which there can be no escape. She has classified her works into
_orders_, _genera_ and _species_, and to each fixed a boundary as
immutable as are the stars and the hills. Education may improve, but
it never can pass the _specific_ or _generic_ barriers which nature
has erected through all her works.

The dog which is a _genus_, ranked in the world of letters as the
genus _canis_, has his _specific_ divisions, as hound, bull, cur,
terrier, and the like—each marked by a peculiarity designating its
kind. These may be cultivated, but never changed or overcome. The
dog that runs by scent may be cultivated in his powers—may be taught
to scent closer and to increase his speed; so, too, may he that runs
by sight be improved in the same manner; but neither one can be
transformed into the other, for the specific division must continue
to the end of time.

These laws apply with no greater power to inferior than to superior
natures—are no more forcible on the beast than on the man; but, on
the contrary, as all nature is divided, the cat, the dog, the horse,
the sheep, the goat, the ox and the swine, each into his specific
kind, so, too, is divided the _Genus Homo_, or genus man.

The number of species of this _genus_—the crowning ultimate of
animated things—may, in the present condition of our knowledge, be
very imperfectly, if at all, determined. But enough is known to give
us, at least, seven varieties of men—the Mongolian, the Malay, the
Australian, the Indian, the Arctic, the Negro and the Caucasian—whose
divisions are as well marked as the divisions which separate the
spaniel from the hound, the tiger from the leopard, or the panther
from the cat. Their variances are all diversified, are physical,
mental and instinctive, and creative of different wants, so that as
one spaniel seeks the water while another shuns it, so do the various
species of men require different rules and forms, privileges and
restrictions, for the regulation of their aggregation in associated
life.

The American Indian shuns the cultivated field and populous city,
and clings to his native forest. There, though his fare be humble,
all the other wants of his nature are best supplied. Thus do his
instincts act to their end. He finds a restraint in civilization
which drives him to the forest, as heat drives the whale and
the walrus to polar seas. This instinct is the opposite of the
Caucasian’s, and, as a consequence, points to a specific line. It is
fundamental in nature, and there must forever remain. Could it be
overcome, the vast tribes who once occupied our country would not
now be numbered with the past, but would be with us still in the
character of civilized men.

Instincts mark the specific divisions with unerring certainty, but
mentalities are equally patent to the observing mind. The Indian’s
instinct contents him with his wigwam, but look to the outshoots of
his mentality, and you will find the division between him and the
Caucasian equally marked and legible. His man-of-war is a bark canoe;
his artillery, a bow and arrow; and his capitol of state, the limbs
of the forest which overhang the smoldering fire around which his
chiefs assemble in council. What but an inferiority of mentality,
coupled with a peculiarity of instinct, divides him thus from the
loftier outshoots of the Caucasian mind? And as the division is
fundamental, why is it not specific?

The Malay alone runs a muck. Why does he do so, if there be not
implanted in his nature a latent madness which belongs to no other
division of man? And as it so exists as a peculiarity, does it not
mark a specific division as effectually as does the scent of one
hound divide him from the sighting proclivities of another?

But let us not linger in discussion on either the Indian or Malay
nature; but, in the emergency of time, turn to that division of man,
which, with reference to your long and unceasing disquisitions, has
been termed, and by no means inappropriately, the “Eternal Negro.”

He is the opposite of the white man in color, and, as we shall
presently see, alike so in instinct and turn of mind. He also differs
from the Indian, for, unlike him, he does not seek an exclusive
independence, but inclines to the presence of his opposite race—the
white man. He seeks it by choice, and wheresoever found with it, no
matter what may be his condition before the law, equal or unequal, he
will be found menial and of secondary rank. He will brush his hair,
groom his horse, wait on his stables, dust his coat, and black his
boots, and when held as a slave, will value himself, not by his own,
but by his master’s worth. Why is this so, if nature does not give
the disposition?

His brain is from ten to fifteen per cent. smaller than the
Caucasian’s, and, at the same time, darker colored and differently
disposed. His back brain, or cerebellum, is comparatively larger,
while his fore brain, or cerebrum, the organ of thought, is much
smaller. Thus is he inferior as well as differently molded in the
organ of mind. Why, then, is he not below the white man in the scale
of being, and designed by nature for a secondary rank in the great
work assigned to man of “subduing the world?”

He is inferior as a mental being. But though less endowed in one
particular, is higher favored in another; for, while his brain
is smaller, his nervous system is larger, and, as a consequence,
stronger. This gives him power where the white man not unfrequently
fails. But it is a power which comes with greatest adaptability to
his condition as a slave: for it fortifies him against the wounds of
reproof, and aids his inferior mentality in overcoming the sting of
degradation under which the white man pines when subjected to the
lash.

Other properties of a defensive nature pertain to him in a similar
way. He shows his keeping as does a horse, an ox or an ass. If he be
well fed, he will be sleek, black, and glossy; but if ill fed, he
will be of a dull, dirty or ashy color. Thus is he defended, for in
this peculiarity of his nature is there a secret monitor telling the
world of a master’s care or of a master’s neglect.

But returning from properties to structure, we find his feet larger
and flatter than the white man’s, his arms longer, his head rounder,
his lips thicker, his nose flatter, and his eyes smaller; and what
is equally a mark of specific nature, we find his eyes and his hair,
with its kinks, always of the same color—invariably black. These are
marks of his being. But in descending the stream of reproduction, an
even more important peculiarity is displayed in transmission. All
of his offspring partake, in exact proportions, of these general
characteristics. They are all black eyed and black haired—rigidly so
fixed in nature. But no such uniformity follows the reproduction of
the white man. On the contrary, his children are never exact copies
of himself, nor, like beans, _fac-similes_ of one another, but vary
throughout—in the color of their hair and their eyes, and in the
different shades and tinges of their complexions.

These peculiarities not only mark specific lines, but greatly widen
the divisions by the properties which are found pertaining to them.

It is by these properties—the variability on the one hand, and
non-variability on the other—that men of science have classified
animated things into improvable and non-improvable species. Those
unchangeable in reproduction, as the lion, the tiger, the leopard and
the bear, who partake in exact proportions of the stripes, and spots,
and colors of their progenitors, are assigned to the division of
non-improvables, while the horse, the dog and the ox, who vary their
colors in reproduction, are assigned to the division of improvable
things.

The non-improvable are also non-progressive, consequently, as
the negro falls within that division, he must be assigned to the
non-progressive department of animated beings.

But how far the rule is general, we do not pretend to know, but
apprehend that, like most other rules, it is subject to exceptions.
Still, there can be no difficulty in perceiving that the little
dark eyes, bullet head and inexpressive countenance of the negro
are not the accompaniments of high mental unfoldings, nor is it
likely that civilization, though forced into the mind, could long be
retained when all these characteristics of inferiority are regularly
transmitted in reproduction. By the constant power of tuition he may
be forced to a particular limit, but, like the soft magnet, he lapses
into his native condition whenever the charging power is withdrawn.

In his native country his mentality, like a heavy fluid, has
scarcely, if ever, presented a ripple. Does not this point to a
non-progressive nature? The same sun which has risen and set upon
the white man, has also, with the same brilliancy shone upon him,
and for precisely the same number of revolving years. Why, then, has
he remained so far below the white man, if he be not of an inferior
species?

By the flow may we determine the character of the fountain; and, as
governments and laws are the outshoots of the minds which make them,
by such productions may normal status be determined. “Show me your
laws,” said a philosopher, “and I will tell you what you are.” Show
me that you have no laws, and the rule will apply with equal force
and precision, for then you prove yourself a barbarian. By this rule
then, as well as by any other, let the negro be measured.

All Africa, under the dominion of the negro mind—from the desert to
the cape—with her fifty to a hundred millions of people, is a country
of masters and slaves, nailed down by nature to the lowest possible
level of barbarian life. Men, women and children mingle together in
unbroken nudity, bask in their sands, feed on bugs and reptiles, and
even on the flesh of one another. The men strut as warriors, though
slaves to petty princes, and the women bend to their lots as bearers
of burdens. Are these nature’s arguments in favor of negro with white
equality before the law!

With all these facts before us, it is scarcely possible for us to
conceive of any two species of the same genus being more opposite to
each other than the white man and the negro. But men, educated to
a religious belief of a common origin, will cling to it, and on it
form theories of restorable natures, in spite of the most commanding
evidences which, in every way, thicken around them. Cain’s wife
may or may not have been of the seed of Adam. But whether she was
or was not, or of a different species, is a subject of but little
consequence to us in the present time, for we have to deal with
things, not as they were, nor as they may have been, but as we
actually now find them in being.

No common type of this great genus, man, has ever been produced by
either change of climate or country, nor by cross in reproduction.
But, on the contrary, amalgamation is found to be the down-hill to
the grave of all the species. The American Indian has disappeared by
the operation of many causes, but none other have been so fatal as
the intermingling of his blood with the Caucasian’s. The mulatto,
or mule man, of the black and white cross, also travels downward,
and soon disappears, if not reinforced with pure blood from one
or the other species. “He will not,” says a learned American
writer, “reproduce after the third remove from the original unity.”
Consequently, if the rule be unexceptionable, a mulatto, in the
fourth remove, unaided by an intervening black or white parent, does
not exist upon the whole face of the world. Why should not such
propositions be investigated, and facts determined, before a country
is torn to atoms by a madness built on the assumption of universal
equality, without regard to race or species? But men seeking
power through deception—the churchman seeking dominion over other
sects—the tory, the ascendency of the British crown—the half-starved
politician, the spoils of office—the vain, a strap or two of tinsel,
and the covetous trader, the plunder of a camp—may find negro
equality as convenient as any other device.

But you proclaim an age of progress, and dignify folly with the name
of an experiment—an ideal pomp around which has ever clustered the
frivolous and the vain. But do you not know that experiments are far
more common with the ignorant than with the learned? They experiment
because they know not of the experiments which have gone before them.

Africa is as old as Europe, Asia or America—her days as bright, her
years as long, and her seasons as refreshing. Why, then, does she
linger behind them? They educated themselves; why has she not also
done like them? If her children be claiming an equality before the
law, should they not be required to show us their equality behind it?

But you are trying, you tell us, an experiment—a point which we
concede as readily as you offer it. But in what way are you trying?
You are experimenting with the circle of darkness drawn close
up around you; for in that darkness, beyond your vision, every
experiment which you are attempting has been tried a hundred, and
possibly a thousand, times before.

For almost countless centuries, in the high antiquity of the past—as
is now shown by monumental Egypt—the negro mingled with the people
of the Nile; but was then, as he has ever since been, until madness
overthrew modest nature, the slave of a higher order of men.

Rome, at a remove of not less than three thousand years further down
the stream of time, and two thousand above the period on which we now
stand, also sought his elevation—bore him to the land of the learned;
but failed, as all others failed, both before and since, to force
the light of civilization and self-supremacy through the thick skull
which encompassed his little brain.

The Moors, also, midway between the Romans and the English theorists
and their American apes, bore him in triumph to conquered Spain; but
failed, as all others failed, to crowd him a single round further up
the ladder of light.

Here reason would have been content. But darkness again drew her
circle in contraction around the European mind—shut out the light
of history—and, accordingly, a new brood of “experimenters” revived
the old struggle with patient old Nature’s laws. A religious change
had come upon the world, and, as living gods are always more
powerful than dead ones, Africa, it was conceived, could be moved
by the power of the Cross, where Isis burned her fires in despair,
and Jove’s thunders fell harmless at the negro’s feet. Accordingly
Portugal, about four centuries ago—then wild with the pomp of a
fancied greatness, and stimulated with papal attention (a bull from
Pope Martin V)—dashed forth in what she vainly conceived to be a new
enterprise in the affairs of the world. It may, in its origin, have
been the outshoot of philanthropic desire, but in its continuance,
like all other movements of its kindred, swelled with the impulses
of fanatical thought, and grew in its energy with the emotions
which ultimately gave it force. Expedition after expedition was
sent forth—missionaries provided, salaried and commissioned, and
“school-marms” drawn from Lisbon, as they are now drawn from the “Hub
of the Universe,” to teach the negro idea how to shoot. But, after
a long and determined effort, nature over vanity prevailed. African
mentality still clung to its old level—instincts ran in their old
channels; the white man died, or returned to his native Europe, and
all that now remains of the gigantic enterprise are a few moldering
ruins, overgrown with brambles, yet to be seen near the mouth of the
Congo river.

This, with the wise, would also have determined the measure of might.
But, in the variation of creeds and changing dominion of sects,
other experimenters also arose, and pressed on in the same display
of fancies. Protestant England must needs be as energetic as her
Catholic mother, and, in the pomp of an equal vanity, must needs toss
her lances into the same mountain. Accordingly the old struggle,
under new phases, was again begun, and, through changes, cessations
and variations, continued down even to the present time. But,
notwithstanding so powerful and continued a struggle, running through
three centuries from its beginning, the negro continues to-day as the
worshipers of Osiris, on the Nile, fifty centuries ago, found him in
his native jungles. He is still a barbarian—runs in his nakedness,
feeds on human flesh, worships reptiles, and dignifies the funerals
of his princes with the wholesale slaughter of subjects or slaves.

In the first half of the Protestant struggle many enterprises
rose and fell, leaving scarcely a shadow behind them. But the one
most gigantic—aided by Church and State, and intended not only to
civilize, but to anglicise the negro and his continent—has left,
like the Catholic effort on the Congo, a few moldering ruins yet to
be seen near the mouth of the Niger; but all else has drifted away
with the winds. Thus did experiment succeed experiment, and failure
succeed failure, until the mind of the learned sickened, while the
ignorant as successively thought of experimenting again.

But men of thought finally faltered and reflected, and though they
reasoned from various points of view, ultimately united in assuming
that nature had not created the negro without at the same time
coupling his being with a design. But no design was tangible until
the American plantations called for laborers, and the negro was found
fitted for the demand. Then opened there, upon the minds of civilized
nations, a secret which until then had been wrapped up among the
mysteries of the world. It was then seen that the negro as a slave,
and the white man as a master, could be united for each other’s good.
Consequently a commerce was opened with the African coast, and all
Christendom united in commending and approving the trade. A new era
thus opened, and all the world said, Amen! But European kings were
not then troubled with a republic which, for their own safety, they
deemed it best to destroy, nor were white slaves at home controlled
by fixing their attentions on black slaves abroad. Interests were
different. Europe owned America, and sought its welfare. England
was not then an enemy, nor was there a tory party on this side of
the water, crushed by a revolution, struggling for resurrection and
re-establishment in power.

The slave trade thus encouraged grew into vast proportions, and, by
its expansion and appendages of cruelty, swelled from a propriety
into a withering curse. But taken as a whole, it has been productive
of great good. It civilized America, subdued the forest, and built
up the best as well as the last system of civilization which has yet
appeared upon the world. The best, because the most harmonious and
nearest in conformity to the requisitions of nature’s laws—a system,
which, by force of individual capital, existing in slaves, makes
population rural, draws it from cities, and plants it upon fields—a
system, which scatters concentrated vice and to which poorhouses and
penitentiaries are but little known.

This was the system under which America rose and flourished, and
through which she commanded the respect and admiration of the world.
But as the Genius of evil wandered up and down, his eyes fell upon
“my servant Job,” and—permitted to torture—he belched forth, in deep,
grinding hatred, his mighty volumes of dark and malignant spite. He
first planted his batteries at a great distance, and masked them
in artful disguise. He commenced in an English pulpit, in the name
of philanthropy, and from thence spread his fire through kings and
nobles, and by degrees to commoners, until finally reaching the tory
mind of America, he let forth the full volumes of his hate and his
crushing powers, until he saw the blood of the nation gushing from a
million of streams, and liberty weltering and struggling beneath the
grinding weight of an insurmountable national debt. Thus has America
fallen and her enemies triumphed through deception and design.

Experiments were numerous abroad, but had not the circle of darkness
crowded up to the very tips of your noses, you would see that the
experiment which you are trying, or at least pretending to try, had
already been tried, and its vanity proved within the reach of your
own hands, and at the very stoops of your own doors. The Eastern and
Middle States, of the Union, in a spirit of mistaken philanthropy,
about the close of the revolutionary war, emancipated, or rather
turned their negroes loose without masters to direct them in life.
Such was the action. What, then, has been the result? It is simply
this: that not one of those emancipated people is now alive upon
the world; nor have they—if the sphere of our own observations be
an index of the whole—left a progeny equal to one tenth of their
own numbers. They have died out under a mistaken liberty, while the
slaves of the South have greatly outrun the multiplication of their
white masters. Is this the millennium with which your experiment is
to bless the negro?

You can answer the question yourselves by simply citing us to
the wants of your Freedmen’s Bureau—to the mortality among the
negroes—and to such scenes as that of Memphis in the winter of 1863,
when four hundred out of forty thousand contrabands were daily
consigned to “hospitable graves.”

Malpractice may be covered by a shroud, and the remains of African
experiments overgrown with brambles; but such stupendous monuments
of folly or of spite, or ulterior design, are not easily overlooked
by men not interested in keeping them from public view. The negro
you have started on a rapid down-hill march to the grave, and will
so find his movement written in every succeeding census that will
hereafter be taken in the United States. But let us turn from your
follies to your sum of excuses.

You have done all, if your own words may be taken as expressive of
your intentions, for the sake of that _beau ideal_ of the world
called civil or political liberty. But have you ever stopped in your
career long enough to ask yourselves what such liberty is?

The German radical sees it only in equality, the toper in his drams,
the brigand in his plunder, and even Mr. Wendell Phillips, whom you
have followed as the sheep with the bell, has displayed but little,
if any, more wisdom in his definitions. It is, he tells us, “The
reservation of all natural rights with civil liberty to defend them.”

Could inconsistency be more complete? If all natural rights be
retained, from whence come the civil ones? Of what materials are
they made? If my natural rights be undisturbed, by what authority am
I crowded from the fields of my neighbor? Did nature give him more
dominion over them than she gave to me? Or, if the proposition be not
as empty as the air on which it floated, by what authority did the
United States government wage that war against the Southern States,
for the support of which Mr. Phillips was even then, while making the
utterance, haranguing the people? Did not the government assume that
the Southern people had surrendered certain _natural rights_, which
they could not, at pleasure, resume?

Sir William Blackstone, whose views have stood the abrasion of time
with as much durability as any other of his fellow contributors,
discusses the subject with as much clearness and precision as is, we
apprehend, in any other place to be found. He divides the subject
into three heads, and to each gives particular bounds—into absolute
liberty, natural liberty, and that division which is called civil or
political liberty.

The first—absolute liberty—he tells us is “The power of one to do
whatever he sees fit.”

The second—natural liberty—is “The power of one to do whatever he
sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature,” and the third
and last—civil liberty—is “Natural liberty so far restrained, and no
farther than is essential for the public good.”

The first of these, it will no doubt readily be seen, can have no
existence below him to whom all things move by command. For none
other can do whatever he sees fit to do, consequently such liberty
has no existence in the world of men.

But natural liberty—the power of one to do whatever he sees fit to
do, subject only to the laws of nature—may have an existence, as by a
man placed alone on a mountain, in a desert, or, like Selkirk, on an
island in the ocean, for then, there are none his rights to dispute.
But as man is a being of many wants, which he can not himself supply,
such liberty is possibly the most grievous of all oppressions.

From such liberty man flees to a state of society, and, in doing
so, surrenders a portion of his natural rights that he may secure
and enjoy others. This state, we concede, when natural liberty is
so far restrained and no farther than is just essential, etc., is
civil liberty. But what amount of restraint is just so essential
is the great practical problem, at the very beginning of which the
commentator’s theory ends. Settle this, and in the language of “great
Cesar,”

                                    “Our toils may cease,
    The sword be sheathed, and earth be blessed with peace.”

But how will you settle it by declaring unequals in nature, equals by
force of law?

The problem, by your theory of a general equality of the _genus
homo_, ignoring the distinction of races, can not be solved, nor can
peace and happiness return to the nation while legislation and nature
are at war. You must concede the division of inequality of species,
and upon that division frame your laws. Then may true civil liberty
be assigned to all.

Nature, though our greatest friend, is, at the same time, our
greatest oppressor; for she keeps us in a constant struggle for
life. We must be fed, and clothed, and sheltered, and, to be happy,
must have many other wants supplied. To secure these we retreat
into society, throw off native rights, and continue our retreat
until we find the point at which our wants are best supplied. When
we have done this, then have we found the true measure of our civil
liberty. But, as species differ, both in their abilities and in their
instincts, no two find their measures at the same point, but are
scattered all along the line from the lowest to the highest endowment
of intellectual man. The white man, in obedience to the demands of
his own nature, must reserve dominion over himself, for the moment
he surrenders it, he loses his liberty. But it is not so with the
negro, for he is differently endowed, and a being of different wants.
Where the white man’s nature craves for dominion, his craves for
protection, and as that point is not attained short of an absolute
surrender, he gives up self-dominion that he may receive, in return,
that shelter which his nature desires. When this is done—when he has
made the surrender and secured the protection, then has he attained
to his time measure of civil liberty: then his cares of the future
are thrown upon his master, and, as a consequence, he can sing,
and dance, and chatter, regardless alike of what is or is to be,
and live out his life in accordance with his own nature. Thus his
civil liberty and the civil liberty of the white man are as opposite
as are the colors of their skins. One man is a being dominant
and commanding; the other inferior and subordinate, and by this
opposition do they harmonize in civil life. One supplies what the
other wants; one thinks and directs, the other labors and obeys, and,
as a consequence, the circle is complete. If one gets hands to do his
physical labor, the other gets a mind, superior to his own, for his
care and protection.

The negro, as a slave, is contented with his lot, and, under it,
is the _freest_ as well as the happiest man in the world; for he
is freed from the cares of life, and particularly from the cares
of state, which, on the civilized plane, he has ever found himself
unable successfully to manage.

His subordination as a race of man pertains to him alone; and yet
we have a very marked parallel within the very limits of our own
species. We are males and females; but to the male alone belongs
the desire of dominion. Our women reject the right of suffrage and
official position in the state. They do not want to be voters, or
legislators, or officers in command, nor do they even want the
position of suitors in our courts of law; because such rights to them
are burdens, therefore do they reject them, and find their civil
liberty, not by accepting, but by rejecting those very rights which
alone make their husbands freemen. Why is this so? It is because, in
nature, the woman is subordinate to the man, as is also the negro to
the Caucasian species.

This is almost a parallel case. The woman has not the rights which
make the man free. But does this make her a slave? If it does, then
is her slavery just what her nature requires.

The “woman’s-rights man” sees this parallel, and very properly
concludes that if the negro be oppressed by a deprivation of
political rights, the woman, whose very existence, both political
and legal, is merged in that of her husband, can be none the less
so. Here we must approve his arguments, and, with him, censure the
abolitionist for inconsistency who is not also a woman’s-rights man;
for if the negro be enslaved by being relieved of rights which to
him are burdens, why is not the woman equally a slave who is, in
the same way, excluded. His logic, from his premises, is, we think,
unanswerable. But he does not seem to have discovered that different
natures require different rules, limits and extensions for the
attainment of proper civil status in society. When he discovers this,
he may find, as others have found before him, that,

    Concerning man, “though wrangle e’er so long,
    ’Tis only this, if Heaven hath made him wrong.”

Here, for the present, we take our leave of the negro, and turn our
attention more directly to that loftier shoot of humanity, who,
for a name, applicable alike to the whole of a general division—to
the blue-eyed Teuton as well as to the black-eyed Arab—we have (in
obedience to the classification of others) called the Caucasian.

He is a native of Western Asia, Northern Africa, and of the whole of
Europe, and, within these limits, flourishes to a native fullness,
and multiplies with a profusion which is now forcing his children
out upon all the world. But the problem of his like success in other
localities yet remains to be solved. Will he multiply and continue,
on this continent, as he multiplies and continues on his own?

The Aztecs are already gone. The builders of our ancient American
monuments (supposed to have been of our own race) unknown—gone
probably through a decline, from causes which may still be cropping
out. But the Caucasian is here master, as he is wherever else he
moves upon the world. But he is not here actually native, for nature
did not here place him at first. Why this exclusion, we may never
know; or why the red-man of the forest was assigned to the continent
long hid in the western seas. But if it be held that all men sprung
from a common _progenitor_, and that countries and climates have
divided them into races or species, why, then, are we not now in a
transition from the Caucasian to the Indian? But as no such tendency
is apparent, and our sphere of action is limited to things, not as
they were, or as they may have been, but to that form in which we now
actually find them, we need not linger on probabilities so remote and
indefinable. Ours is the present time, and elements ours only as they
exist. But whatever may be the operating influences of our continent,
no one can help seeing that the Caucasian in America is undergoing a
change. Where it will ultimate, time only can determine, but social
conditions have already varied its course. The combination of white
master and negro slave has given it one direction, while general
individuality has given it another.

The French Celt of Lower Canada—now about a million in his individual
numbers—has already, at the end of two centuries of American life,
dwindled into a pigmy compared with his European progenitors, and the
same is correspondingly true of the Castilian of Peru and Mexico. Do
these facts determine, or rather, do they not throw shadows, on the
ultimate of that experiment now in the full tide of its progress—the
replanting of one continent with a people who are alone indigenous to
another?

Situated between these extremes—between Canada on one side and Mexico
on the other—is it probable that nature to us will be more kind than
she has been to them. But evidences of changing natures is already
patent among us. Our American men, say intelligent clothiers of
our Northern cities, are from two to three inches less around the
chest than are the Europeans. This is a significant fact. But he who
opens his eyes, and looks upon our slender-waisted and light-muscled
American women, and compares them with the heavy-chested and
strong-armed women of Europe, will see even a greater change. The
European women are the heaviest.

Men of science tell us that the Caucasian in America loses a portion
of that cellular cushion which underlies the skin, or intervenes
between it and what is called the aponeurosis; and that, as a
consequence, not only does the chest diminish, but the face loses
its fullness, the features sharpen, and the system generally
experiences a change. This may be an immediate cause, for few facts
are more patent among us than the marked fullness of European, and
particularly of Teutonic faces; but for the ultimate cause, there
has not yet been given, or, within our knowledge, even an attempted
solution.

Facts thus patent are strongly suggestive of a decline. But whatever
they may be in reality, even appearances were not always so. The
American man was not always below the measure of his European
progenitors, nor is he now so in all localities and under all
conditions of associated life. Our American men of the Revolution
“were larger and stronger,” says Mr. Cobbett, an English writer of
that period, “than the British troops, and by that superiority made,”
he further says, the result of that war “such as an English pen
refuses to write.” (_Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men_, §§275, 276 and
277.) This is European authority. But it stands not alone, for we
find it fortified in records of proportions, which show our generals
of that period, with but one exception, to have been all above the
avoirdupois of two hundred pounds. Compare this with the weight
of our like officers of the present day, and the superiority, of
greater development, will be unhesitatingly accorded to the men of
Revolutionary times.

We learn of no distinctions then existing between the different
sections of our country, but on the contrary, as the information
reaches us, there is room for no other conclusion than that every
where alike, our American men were “larger and stronger than the
British troops.” Such is the information given us, but such are not
the conditions now, for, while the Northern man is reported to be of
less compass of body than the European, the men of most, if not all,
of that country lying south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and above the
feverish swamps of the gulf and the Mississippi River, have kept up
to their Revolutionary standard. No one fact, concerning our Western
people, is more patent to the observer on the banks of the Ohio
River than the fact, that the Kentuckians are larger, taller, and
heavier than the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who for eight
hundred miles skirt their northern border. The same is true of the
Virginians. They are larger, both in height and circumference than
their northern neighbors; and in every other Southern State, with the
exceptions above noticed, we understand, that a similar development
among the higher orders of society exists.

An English tourist, who visited both the Northern and Southern
armies during the late war, observed this greater development of
the Southern men, and so reported it for Blackwood’s Magazine. But
the fact is presented with probably more precision by the records
of the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors, for more than twenty
years, have been weighed, measured, and their nativities noted. These
records, say our informers, showed a difference, before the war, of
three inches in height and twenty pounds in weight in favor of the
Southern over the Northern man.

Such facts can not too forcibly command the attention of every man
who aspires to the distinction of making public laws. They show the
men of the South, at the beginning of the late war, in the same
proportions that they show the men of the whole republic in the days
of our revolution, when all the States or colonies, North as well as
South, held negro slaves. To what cause, then, are we to impute the
greater development of the Anglo-American at those particular times,
and in those particular localities, than to the institution of negro
slavery?

But this development of the Americanized Caucasian under the relation
of white master and negro slave, though a commanding fact in
determining the application of laws to localities, is nevertheless
but little, if any thing, more than a story half told; for in
addition to the greater physical proportions of the individual man,
the institution has given us our loftiest shoots of intellectual
power. It has given us a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison, and,
as its limits were national in the dawning period of our republic,
an Adams, a Hamilton, a Franklin, and, in fact, almost every
other intellect of which the nation is justly proud. It was this
institution which gave lofty manhood to the American mind, and threw
the glove of defiance at the feet of the great Herculian English
power. It gave birth to a nation of freemen, and when cut down in
its limits by Northern folly, fanaticism, and design, its remaining
noblemen, with but one third of the republic in population, for half
a century gave direction to it all. They were giants in debate, and
by their superiority, in the clash of sections, stung the pride
of the opinionated Yankee, who, brooding over his wounds, sought
that redress in the physical clash of numbers which he could not
obtain in the battle of mind. Then, when Northern numbers, swelled
by immigration to overpowering proportions, he, in the true spirit
of a low cunning, discovered that “The Union was no longer worth a
_cus_ without the letting of a little blood;” and, as a consequence,
hurried on—in his security of numbers—his vaunted “Irrepressible
conflict of contending and induring forces.”

There could be no retreat from a conflict “irrepressible” in its
nature. The child begotten must be born, and when defiance responds
to aggression, there must come the shock of arms. It did come, and
with a force that now tells the world of the madness in which it was
conceived. Armies have met and have fought. The storm of war has
passed over the nation, and beneath its debris now lies the American
man, overcome and subdued, not by individual superiority, but by the
force of mighty numbers—the madmen of his own country, in alliance
with a world of immigrants and imported mercenaries, arrayed in arms
against him. It was a conflict of unequal numbers and resources.
Still it was a mighty struggle, for it was that shock in which “comes
the tug of war.”

The American man, who fought his battles alone, went down, but he
fell, as he ever falls, from the lakes to the gulf, “with his back to
the ground and his feet to the foe.” With a population of but five
millions, and but poorly provided, he disputed, for four long and
bloody years, every inch of ground, against the twenty-five millions,
who, with all the engines of modern warfare, and with all Europe at
their command for soldiers, hurled their mighty armies against him.
But he fell, and why should he not have fallen, when the herring is
known to have smothered the whale?

The native Indian was brave and undaunted—no Roman was his superior,
until he was cowed and subdued by the superiority of the bayonet and
bomb over his war-club and his arrows. He met his doom, resigned
and unshaken, as fate determined it, and so, too, now does his
Anglo-successor—a proof in nature that the American man is designed
for a soldier and a master, and not for a serf or slave.

The transplanted European in America may lose a portion of his
cellular tissue, under one form of association, and may regain it,
or expand it, under another; the cause of which may not readily be
comprehended. But there is one point, not of proportions, but of
physical action, resulting from some cause, known or unknown, and
alike common to all forms of association, which can not, we think,
impress itself too forcibly on the mind of every American legislator.
It is the undeniable fact, that the Anglo-American man has not
the same endurance, as a drudge or laborer, that pertains to the
European—that he is less enduring, and, as a consequence, in labor’s
conflict, loses ground. He is more fleet, and may do more for a time,
but at the end of the year the European will, as a general rule,
subject, of course, to its exceptions, make the best report.

By this superiority is the American forced from the field of labor,
and his place monopolized by the immigrant from abroad. Look around
you, and see who do your work! Look to your railroads and canals;
look through your workshops, to your various modes of transportation,
and your menial services, and when you have done so, tell me if
you can keep up a supply, or even man a single boat on the Western
waters, without the aid of immigrated hands. Business, in fact,
would stop in almost every department, requiring heavy labor, if the
European man was taken away. Is not this a dependence reaching to the
very foundation of that liberty of which the Americans, more than any
other people, are most prolific in their boasts? Can a people be free
who are dependent on another people, equals with themselves before
the law, for all the necessaries which labor alone can produce?
Mexico bows to a master from abroad; and the United States, through
the folly of her legislators, now leans dependent on foreign hands.

Labor, in the conflict of life, draws to itself the capital of that
country in which its productions are used, or to the hands which
produce them; consequently, when a society is composed of two kinds,
or divisions of people, one of whom are better, or more enduring
laborers than the other, that division, so favored, will, sooner or
later, obtain the property, and with it political and social dominion
of the nation.

Already is our property in rapid transit from native to immigrated
hands, and we, even rejoicing at the opportunities which
circumstances give us, of selling or giving our country away. Look
around you, and see who are vendors and who are purchasers of real
estate, and the point will at once become palpable and plain. See,
too, who are becoming landlords, and who are becoming tenants;
and, under the new order of things—outside of that combination
of wholesale swindlers who converted our property into national
securities, and then stole to their fullness—who are the holders of
our national bonds? Look at them here and abroad, as they are now
sporting on property wrenched from American hands, and you may have
some idea of the condition into which you are driving your nation.

The political tendency is no less marked than the transition of
estates, and may by as simple an effort be disclosed. You can try it
by the same rule, no matter what may be your party relations. If you
be a democrat, try and elect even a constable in any ward of any city
of the United States without first consulting your Irish supports,
and then see the point at which your efforts will end. Or if you be
a republican, and think your condition more tolerable, try the same
“experiment” without in like manner first asking permission of “my
German friends,” and when you have ended the trial let us know the
end of the horn at which you made your exit. You know that you can
not so elect, therefore are you humbled to influences from abroad.

Such are conditions before the ballot. Americans no longer masters of
their own position. But what are conditions behind it?

When you wanted revenue, you unhesitatingly imposed a duty of two
dollars on a gallon of whisky; but when you came to lager beer, you
very modestly stopped at the short figures of three cents on the
gallon. Why did you do so? We will not venture an answer for you;
but, as Americans make whisky, and Germans make lager beer, we have
no trouble in seeing who are favored, and who are oppressed. The
American man, and particularly the Western one, whipped out of his
independence, submits to whatever you dare to impose. But Deitrich
is not quite so pliable. He waits upon _his servants_ in force. This
he did with his various committees, while his servants were imposing
duties, and, shaking his fingers in their faces, with a leer of the
eye, and a significant turn of the mouth, said: “You must not dax te
lager peer!” What then followed? Deitrich knew his power, and Mr.
Congressman his dependence—both, of course, alike manly, unterrified,
and impartial. But when the bill came forth, we found a tax of two
dollars on whisky and three cents on beer. Further comment might be
disrespectful.

In this picture may you see your condition. Deprived of your own
laborer, and made dependent on laborers from abroad, you are passing
into subjugation almost as fast as you transformed four millions of
useful negroes into four millions of vagabonds.

Why are you thus hastening downward? It is because you have drank
of foreign ideas until you have become frenzied, and, in an apish
vanity of foreign things, have turned your backs on advantages which
the God of nature, has, during the whole of your existence, been
arduously forcing upon you.

He prepared your country for a great purpose, brought it forth at the
proper period of time, and made it the joint receptacle of two great
species of the genus man—the one a race of masters, the other a race
of subordinates or slaves.

To the subordinate, in his subordinate condition, he gave an increase
of physical power, and to the superior whom he deprived of some
portion of his laborious indurance, that he might be charitable and
humane, gave a high-toned manhood, an undaunted spirit, and, for the
privation which he imposed, gave him the subordinate hands with which
to do his labor. Thus, in this, as in all other things, is he alike
good in what he gives and in what he denies. But you, in your spite
or vanity, have rejected his blessings.

Our Northern system—now made national—is but the European system in
all its material phases, and under its present character—equality of
whites and blacks, States reduced to dependencies, power centralized,
bond-holding lords sapping the labor of the people, and the foreign
mind controlling interior forces—is probably little, if any thing,
more or less than the European system botched or spoiled. It is a
system under which men of fortune, having their wealth in money, seek
the localities in which profit and luxury unite, and as the poor,
the menial, and the artful, like the mistletoe, draw their succor
from larger boughs, they, too, congregate around the same centers,
and thus are made up great cities which, under a political and social
view, have very justly been characterized as great sores.

But it is not so where the institution of white master and negro
slave exists, for there the same law of self-interest works to a
different end. Wealth existing in slaves, the owner selects that
order of life in which his property may be best protected and
yield him the best return; consequently he eschews the city, and
settles down on a plantation where both he and his negroes are alike
protected against the contaminating influences of congregated luxury,
poverty, and vice. For these reasons have penitentiaries been few,
and poorhouses scarcely known in the Southern States, while both have
been numerous and crowded from their cellars to their garrets in the
North.

Why, then, have you destroyed negro slavery? and I particularly
use the word negro, for no white blood should ever be held in such
bondage. Are you madmen, or knaves sacrificing your country for party
ends, or have you dropped from the high mentalities of your fathers
down to a generation of fools?

Spite is a fierce motive power in the human mind, and when it breaks
forth from a long pent up fountain, it comes forth with terrific
power. So, we fear, has it been in our time. The tory, who fell
with Lord North in 1776, rose again with Abraham Lincoln in 1860;
and writhing under the stings of long defeat, found no bounds to his
vengeance. He therefore, in the consummation of his “irrepressible
conflict,” wanted “a little blood.”

But let us not be misunderstood or inappropriate in the application
of names to conditions.

The tory has a character by which he may be known under all
disguises, as effectually as the ass was known by his bray when
clothed in the skin of the lion. He is generally a worshiper of
money, and to get it and hold it to himself and his children forever,
to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor, or, in his own language, to
steady the ship of state, he seeks a _centralization_ of power in a
_congress_ or in a _crown_.

He is the man who sees all national perfections abroad, and all
imperfections at home; the man who tells you that “England did so
and so”—that England abolished slavery—that England has a great
national debt—that England has a subjugated Ireland, and that we,
of necessity, to be great must be just like England. These points
alone mark the tory. He is a centralizationist and British in his
proclivities. But he has other stripes, ear-marks, and croppings
by which he may be known. He is the man who governs by fraud or
force, who sees wisdom in deception, and honesty as a twin sister
of ignorance, and vulgar life—he is often artfully pious; but runs
the nation wildly into debt, converts its property into national
bonds, then steals them or divides them with his friends without
the least compunction of conscience, but is shockingly horrified
if some one happens to say repudiation, or, no more high tariffs,
stamp duties, or excise taxes. He is often exceedingly reverential,
but very forgetful when new desires conflict with old obligations.
He goes into a Know-nothing lodge, swears immortal hatred to all
foreigners, and particularly to that division of our species whom he
has politely styled “the d—d Dutch,” and also in the same obligation
swears unchanging fidelity to his native brother, but, on the next
day, joins in a crusade with these very identical “d—d Dutch” to
murder and destroy those very men whom, on the day preceding, he as
arduously swore ever to defend and never to desert.

He is the man who steals the goods, and then diverts attention by
crying “stop thief!”—the man who has revolutionized our government,
without incurring the responsibility of a rebellion.

His views vary exceedingly under the influence of the stand-point
which he occupies as a member of the _ins_ or of the _outs_. Under
one condition, he sees the bonds of our federal Union as “a league
with hell and a covenant with death,” and, in some individualities,
“struggles for sixteen years to get fifteen States out of it.” But
under the other, he becomes more _Union_ than Union itself—runs
forth, with his mouth wide open, shouting his devotions with all the
power of his lungs, and with a rope in his hand to hang all persons
whose roaring capacities are not equal to his own.

He also, under one condition, sees our “star-spangled banner”
as “a flaunting lie,” and a “hated rag.” But under the other,
lashes himself into a blazing fury, and breathes forth blood, and
murder, and annihilation against his own countrymen—but not against
foreigners—who dare to insult that time-honored emblem of a great
nation’s pride, liberty and honor.

He is the man who divided our country into two party sections,
because he had power in the one and not in the other; then held his
Convention at Chicago, and, as a war challenge to the other section,
nominated his candidates in a wigwam, with a bowie-knife eight feet
long, hanging over his speaker’s chair.

He is the man who converted the pulpit into a political rostrum, and
from it, in the name of religion, preached politics and sectarian and
sectional spite.

He is the man who is always humble in defeat, but who, when
successful, never gets done kicking a fallen foe.

He changes nature (in his own estimation) by changing names; but is
here no way punctilious in regard to proprieties. He says “_Colored_
People”—can’t say Negro, for that would be paying too much respect
to nature’s divisions; therefore, he adopts, and clings to the prefix
_colored_, though his philosophy of light tells him that black is not
a color, but the absorption of all colors and the reflection of none.
If he were honest he would here pause; but the deception is the very
thing which alone sweetens the morsel to his tongue: for, by saying
“colored people,” he may so work on the imagination of some fool,
as to make him believe, that all that divides the negro from the
Caucasian is merely the exterior shade or color of his skin.

He is deceptious and often pretentiously pious; but, in addition to
both, is excessively malignant, and hates from the very bottom of his
soul, wherein is generated the deepest spite, which, in its struggle
for vent from its dark-vaulted, heaving and burning interior, bursts
forth with such fulminations as “Copperhead” and “Locofoco.” They
are the effusions of his own soul—display his own character, and, by
their escape, give him relief.

He was for the Union when the Southern States wished to get out of
it; and against the Union when they wished to be counted in. Thus is
he a good Christian—by being all things to all men.

He is sufficiently variable to be counted among the progressive
species; for, like his brother, the dandy, he changes his clothing
with every change of fashion. At one time he is a federal, at another
a national republican, at another a whig, at another a republican
without a prefix, and at another, _par excellence_, a Union man.
Thus does he change, in his exterior, with times and fashions. But
follow him back to his nakedness, and you will always find him a
centralizationists, and an admirer of English polity, or an English
church, or an English crown. He will be somewhere lurking under the
curtain, and, although the way be dark and mysterious, wherever
you hear the spiteful utterances of “Copperhead” or “Locofoco,” or
kindred fulminations, or the soft and plaintive whispers of “Colored
People,” you may know that you are in the right course to that dark
nucleus of many exteriors known to our revolutionary dialect as the
American tory.

This explains what we mean by a term which otherwise might be
regarded as improper or inappropriate in these connections. But let
us return from so long a digression.

Our bird of liberty has already flown to the mountains, and left us,
not independent, as we are wont to be, but dependent—dependent for
American labor on European hands, and through that dependence and
other kindred relations—the result of kindred policies—subject to
the European mind in our affairs of State. This is all the result
of unwise legislation. But it began long anterior to present time;
still to you has been reserved the infliction of the most fatal of
all inflicted blows. You have, as already noticed, converted four
millions of laborers into four millions of vagabonds—have transformed
or inverted them from a natural to an unnatural condition, and there
left them to pay the penalty of your own crimes, by a rapid decline
and ultimate extinction. You have forced our American youth to
unequal competition in the field of labor, and not contented with
holding our delicate-muscled American women—the most beautiful, I
have not a doubt, beneath the sun, and designed by nature for ladies
to command—to an unequal conflict with the heavy armed laboring woman
of the old world; but you have forced them to a still more unequal
and degraded conflict with the gross and insensitive negroes, yet
wavering between imposed civilization and native barbarism.

You have destroyed our own kindred that you may give their lands away
to immigrants from abroad—to a people of another continent, who even
now darken the seas with their numbers, on their ways to receive and
appropriate to themselves homes made desolate by your destruction of
American men, women, and children. You will not deny the impeachment,
but will interpose your plea of loyalty—the plea of the tory over
three quarters of a century ago—but can you hide the fact that, _had
there been no abolitionists there would have been no secessionists or
secession_?

But the battle is over, and we may now count the loss, and in the
sequel see how effectually your blows have rebounded to the injury of
all sections, both North and South. You have destroyed a million of
our most valuable men, and imposed upon us a debt of three thousand
millions of dollars—the heaviest burden, computing its interest at
but six percent, while England’s draws but three, that now bears on
any people in the known world. But even this, though great beyond
indurance, for neither principal nor interest ever can be paid, is
not the greatest of the afflictions which you have imposed upon us:
you have destroyed the unity of sections, and killed our own goose
that laid our golden eggs. This a few figures will effectually
explain.

Take for elucidation, of American commerce and production, any one
year, when nature was unobstructed by the clash of arms, and it will
unfold, not only the suicidal nature of your policy, but the great
fountain out of which has flown American wealth and prosperity. Take,
for example, the year 1859, the year preceding the tory rise and the
American fall, and it will elucidate the point in question.

The whole agricultural exports—the only reliable foundation of
our national prosperity—of that year were, in round numbers, just
$199,000,000, of that sum $161,000,000 was cotton, and $21,000,000
tobacco, leaving but $17,000,000 as the whole export of our cereals
and provisions of that year. This whole sum of Northern exports
would not now pay Ohio’s share of the interest on the national debt.
How then is she to pay taxes and support life when the currency of
the country, now blown into a froth, shall again have settled down to
a solidity? She can not pay; nor can any other State not upheld by
arbitrary laws, robbing other people for her benefit.

In two years out of three, and probably three out of four, the Baltic
and Black Sea, with their cereals and provisions, can undersell us in
the markets of Western Europe, consequently a reliance on a direct
trade of our northern productions with countries beyond our own,
would be so uncertain as to leave us two years out of three, and
probably three out of four, in a condition almost as helpless as if
we had raised nothing above our own consumptive wants.

Under such conditions one half of the Northwest would probably
relapse into a wilderness—into that condition into which it would
undoubtedly have remained had your policy began with the history
of the nation. But our conditions have been of a very different
character, and until disturbed by madmen, were, I have not a doubt,
the best regulated for the production of national prosperity that any
where existed upon the face of the world.

The Northwest was the cereal garden of the South. We fed the negro
while he raised cotton; thus our productions went into the bale,
and with it, or of it, were exported to Europe, and there sold for
money. This sent a stream of gold across the ocean, which spread over
all our country, nourishing our corn-producing fields of the North,
as well as the cotton fields of the southern plantations. This was
the fountain of our prosperity. It brought the best market in the
world to our western doors, and among its consequences forced out
a stream of emigration from abroad which set into our country to
head the golden tide which, by American labor alone, under American
regulations, preceded it. But now, this stream is already more than
half dried up, and still diminishing in its volume.

What, then, unless some specialty, as a foreign famine or European
war, comes to our relief, is to be our future? Our old channels of
commerce broken up—our great American staple vastly reduced in its
volume—our corn without a market in the world—a mountain of debt
bearing down upon us—a tax on every thing around us, on all we eat,
and drink, and wear—and a revenue stamp demanded wherever a stamp
can be made to stick;—our people, like their prosperity, by force
of institutions, on the decline, and Europe, both internally and
externally, exerting a moving influence on our nation! Does not the
fate of Mexico already look down upon us? and will not some future
Napoleon send to us some future Maximilian to collect interests on
United States bonds, as well as the present one now does on the
bonds of Mexico? Is any result more certain, if your present wild and
senseless policy be continued and pursued?

Europe, with reference to humanity, is the great positive pole of
the world. Her waves radiate from a center, and have swept, and
will continue to sweep around the earth, unless, in the combination
of elements, new barriers be formed that will break her surges and
roll back her billows. This has been done in America, and, by its
power, forced the dominion of European kings from American shores.
It was done by the unity of two elements directly opposite in their
natures—the Caucasian and the negro; the one as subordinate, and the
other as supreme. But the moment this unity has been severed, the
ramparts of the state have weakened, and foreign waves have again
broken in upon us.

What, then, shall we do in the advancement of our own greatness, or
in the defense of our own rights and liberties? Shall we, like stupid
toads, lend a suppliant ear to the siren songs of distant royalty,
and extinguish ourselves in an apish effort to duplicate some other
people? Or shall we not rise, in the dignity of our Revolutionary
independence, and conform our society to the requisitions of nature
at home. This, if you be wise, you will do—you will, with some
modifications of past systems, re-establish negro slavery; and,
instead of giving your country away—retreating before new tides,
and beckoning for new invasions in the name of immigrations—you will
re-open the slave-trade, and bring your laborers from the coast of
Africa. Then you will have a laboring power of your own—a power which
you can transmit, with your lands, to your children—and so protect
the generations which are to follow you, against that dependence with
which the youth of the present age are sorely oppressed.

Then you will have your social laws based on nature’s laws, and each
man, with his species, in his appropriate condition, enjoying the
highest measure of civil liberty that nature and good government can,
by possibility, afford. Then will America be free, and her sons, in
reality, independent. Then will they roll back the tide of foreign
insolence, presumption and dictation. Then will they have a national
character; and, standing to their arms as soldiers, drilled to the
military art, protect their rights, their laws, and their liberties
against whomsoever may dare to intrude.

  Very respectfully, yours,
  DAVID QUINN.

CHICAGO, ILL., June 13th, 1866.



NOTICE.


  _To the People of the United States_:

It was the intention of the undersigned, when writing the within
article, to present it to Congress immediately, but on reflection he
has concluded, that, inasmuch as the prayer of the petition reaches
beyond Congress, to the Constitution-making power of the nation,
it may be best to withhold the presentation until the paper can be
read by the people. He will therefore delay bringing the subject,
formally, before Congress until next winter, and in the meantime
publish the article and endeavor to get it before the nation.

For this reason the paper will be placed in the hands of some
publisher, as soon as one can be procured, and the pamphlets sold at
such prices as will merely cover expenses. But for the present, any
orders addressed to us at Chicago, will be attended to and the books
forwarded at ten cents a piece.

Publishers and readers who wish to interest themselves in the sale or
circulation, are requested to write to us, and newspaper publishers
are requested to notice the article, or to publish it if they desire,
and for doing either, will, if they send us their paper, marked, be
forwarded two copies of the pamphlet.

  DAVID QUINN.

_Chicago, Ill._, June 13, 1866.



  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 8 Changed: Those unchangable in reproduction
            to: Those unchangeable in reproduction

  pg 14 Changed: But, notwitstanding so powerful
             to: But, notwithstanding so powerful

  pg 15 Changed: but to anglacise the negro
             to: but to anglicise the negro

  pg 23 Changed: They do not want to be votors
             to: They do not want to be voters

  pg 28 Changed: They are larger, both in hight
             to: They are larger, both in height

  pg 29 Changed: the Smithsonian Institute, whose visiters
             to: the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors

  pg 29 Changed: of three inches in hight
             to: of three inches in height

  pg 36 Changed: made it the joint recepticle
             to: made it the joint receptacle

  pg 37 Changed: penitentiaries been few, and poor-houses
             to: penitentiaries been few, and poorhouses

  pg 41 Changed: but the absorbtion of all colors
             to: but the absorption of all colors

  pg 44 Changed: and inposed upon us a debt
             to: and imposed upon us a debt

  pg 44 Changed: interest at but six present
             to: interest at but six percent

  pg 48 Changed: and their liberties against whomsover
             to: and their liberties against whomsoever



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Petition and Memorial of David Quinn, Asking for the Re-establishment of Negro Slavery in the United States" ***


Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.