The man's foresight and keen understanding continues to amaze me: so
much of what he had to say about America in the 1830s still holds true
today. Note also how clearly his words about "the ills that threaten
the future of the Union" foreshadow the American Civil War.
The Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in
which they have lived, but the destiny of the Negroes is in some
measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are
fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable
to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills
that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a
black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of
the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States,
the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.
Generally speaking, men must make great and unceasing efforts before
permanent evils are created; but there is one calamity which penetrated
furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely
distinguishable amid the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with
an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like
some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil; but it afterwards
nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread naturally with the
society to which it belonged. This calamity is slavery. Christianity
suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century
re-established it, as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and
restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted
upon humanity, though less extensive, was far more difficult to cure.
It is important to make an accurate distinction between slavery itself
and its consequences. The immediate evils produced by slavery were very
nearly the same in antiquity as they are among the moderns, but the
consequences of these evils were different. The
slave among the ancients belonged to the same race as his master, and
was often the superior of the two in education and intelligence.
Freedom was the only distinction between them; and when freedom was
conferred, they were easily confounded together. The ancients, then,
had a very simple means of ridding themselves of slavery and its
consequences: that of enfranchisement; and they succeeded as soon as
they adopted this measure generally. Not but that in ancient states the
vestiges of servitude subsisted for some time after servitude itself
was abolished. There is a natural prejudice that prompts men to despise
whoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal;
and the real inequality that is produced by fortune or by law is always
succeeded by an imaginary inequality that is implanted in the manners
of the people. But among the ancients this secondary consequence of
slavery had a natural limit; for the freedman bore so entire a
resemblance to those born free that it soon became impossible to
distinguish him from them. (emphasis added)
Truer
words have rarely been spoken. African-Americans may now enjoy all the
freedoms of any other Americans on paper, but to be black is still, in
many eyes, to be presumed innately inferior.
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