The Future of the Colored Race in America - William Aikman (e book reader .TXT) 📗

it, bringing every quickened power which marks them among the nations, and, under God, they will complete it.

How it shall be done we do not feel competent to intimate, and it was not the purpose of this paper to attempt to indicate. No man, perhaps, is sufficient for that. The Providence of God we believe will mark the path, and events will hurry us if we be ready to follow them in right line of the work.

There are some things, however, which may be said that may possibly cast some light upon the supposed difficulties of the matter of emancipation without colonization. These difficulties, we think, arise in many cases from a mistaken estimate of the negro character and capabilities.

It is not our design to enter upon the question of the inferiority of the race or the impossibility of its ever living on an equality with the white; while we are not ready to grant the first, certainly not to the extent to which it is pushed, we are disposed to believe the latter. It is doubtful, we are inclined to believe it impossible, that the two races can ever on this continent abide on terms of social equality. We are, too, inclined to believe that this country is not to be the ultimate home of the colored race. It will go out from it. We think that there is that in the character of the African race which makes this probable, perhaps certain. In the strange workings of Divine Providence this race has in a marvellous manner been brought to this land, and put under a tutelage for a great future, and that Africa, its home, may become the recipient of blessing, the foundation and preparation for which were made in this country.

The bondage of the Israelites in Egypt was not an accident, but a divinely ordered procedure, which had a striking bearing upon the character of the Jew and shaped his whole after history. It was a work of preparation, and it was not done in a short time, but took two or three centuries to be brought to perfection. American slavery, like this Egyptian bondage, will have its results on the future or Africa.

In saying this, of course no reader will suppose that there is in the thought a justification of slavery, any more than when speaking of the great benefits which flowed from the bondage in Egypt to the Jew, we justify the selling of Joseph, or the tyranny of Pharaoh. It is God's wonderful work to bring the greatest good out of the deepest evils; the Fall to issue in Redemption.

It is impossible to discuss the future of the black people in this country without immediately being brought into contact with the future of Africa. The one is closely connected with the other. The movements of Providence are synchronous. How wonderfully events are prepared in distant places, that they may be brought together at the appointed moment! The fact that at just the time when the great and absorbing questions which relate to this people in our own land are forcing themselves upon our attention, the continent of Africa is attracting more of interest in the way of discovery and travel than any other portion of the earth, has, we think, a meaning.

Geographical research has almost exhausted other lands, while here almost a continent, at least till within a few years, has remained unexplored. This has not been because no efforts have been made to break through the thick veil that has always hung over it. Travellers have been unceasing in their attempts to penetrate into the interior, and have failed, not from want of energy, but because of the insuperable difficulties in the way. If they have succeeded in reaching the shores, they died under the fatal coast fever. If they have escaped this death, and pressed towards the interior, it has been only to fall victims to savage beasts or more savage men. So that African exploration has been, until perhaps within the last fifteen years, a history of melancholy disaster and sacrifice of valuable life.

Of late, new and marked success has crowned the efforts made to lay open this continent to the knowledge of the world.

What has been accomplished will strike with surprise any one whose attention has not before been called to the facts of the case. Let the reader take a well prepared map of to-day and compare it with that from which he studied his lessons a score of years ago. He will remember how simple and easy to be remembered was the information to be conveyed by that wide and lightly-colored track which bore the words, "Unexplored Regions ." It embraced the largest portion of the whole continent. But this has been encroached upon year after year, on the South by Livingstone and Cumming, on the North by Barth, on the East by Barton, and on the West by Wilson and Du Chaillu, until the discoveries have almost touched each other. Wide stretches of thousands of miles, given up hitherto in the thoughts of men to perpetual desolation and drought, have been shown to hold vast inland seas, deep navigable rivers, and to be teeming with animal life, populous with men and faithful of all the products of tropical luxuriance. So Africa begins to be known; by-and-by it will be opened up, made ready, we think, to link its history with a people on the other side of the ocean.

Leaving the point as proved, that the blacks are to remain, at least for an indefinite period in this country, (we do not say that it will be forever, but of this we shall speak in another place,) we naturally ask whether there is anything in the African character that is possible of future progress and elevation. We answer unhesitatingly, there are natural characteristics which will in a very marked and peculiar way be a means of their speedier rise.

It has been the misfortune, if so we may call it, of the African continent and the African people, to present their worst and most repulsive aspects first. This is the case with the country. The coast to which the voyager comes, for the most part lies low, and everywhere in its teeming bottoms disease and death are lurking. If he escapes the one he never avoids the other. The "African Fever" on the West coast is the certain welcome of the new comer, the only question is whether he will survive it. The incidental mention which the missionary traveller, Livingstone, makes of his thirty-seventh attack of fever, and Du Chaillu of his fiftieth, and the exhaustion of the last of fourteen ounces of quinine which he had taken on his journey, are ominous of the inhospitable reception which the country gives. But as soon as the traveller passes inland he comes into an entirely different region. Towering mountains, snow-capped and forest-crowned rise before him, and down through their passes healthful and bracing winds are winds are blowing, wide champaigns already full of uncultivated fruitfulness, or grass and bush-covered tracts, which nature seems to exult in filling with animal life, in its most beautiful, as well as gigantic and ferocious forms, everywhere appear. While at first it would seem as if here were a continent capable of doing little or nothing for the world, fit only to give, as in the past, a little indigo, ivory and palm oil, borne on the backs of degraded natives to the coast, we find that it is in reality a continent already producing unassisted harvests of cotton and sugar, and some of the products most necessary to man, and only needing that development which Christian civilization can give, but has never given, to bring it into the closest sympathy, and for good, with the rest of the world.

What is true of the Africa continent has been emphatically true of the people. The world has always seen the African race in its lowest form. This seems true as far back as Egyptian monumental times. One is struck, when looking at copies of ancient hicroglyhics, with the degraded type of negro feature which always appears when these captive people are delineated. The African race seems to have been fated to be always represented by a slave, and, as was inevitable, it has been judged by the example seen. But the researches of travellers have, of late, compelled us to reverse many, if not all these conceptions. Africa, gives us indeed, perhaps the lowest types of humanity in the Bushman * or Hottentot, yet the explorations of travellers have also shown these are not true and normal examples of the African stock.

*Even these Bushmen seem to have suffered in reputation from their observers. "Those who inhabit," says Livingstone, "the hot sandy plains of the desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion, and severe privation. Many are of low stature, but not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like coster-mongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way, as if the ugliest specimens of the English were exhibited in Africa as characteristic of the entire British nation."

It can readily be seen that whatever the African character is measured by the standard of an African slave, the judgement must necessarily be an erroneous one. The best tribes are not, in the nature of things, those out of which slaves are made. The bolder, more energetic and intelligent are those who make slaves. War and conquest are the fruitful sources of slavery; they have been in all age, in every country, and are so today in Africa. But the abler tribes are the warriors and the conquerors, while the weaker and the lower are the captives. Thus at the outset the slave declares by the fact of his servitude his inferiority of lineage.

To this we are also to add the pretty well-known fact that the poorest of these captives are those who came into the hands of the slave-dealer on the coast, while the better made and the more intelligent are reserved for the service of their captors. Thus, with this further reduction, you have in the African as he comes to the slave-ship, the lowest specimen of an inferior type of his people. But just these have been the exponents of the African race, and it is not only not surprising, but entirely natural that a false estimate should have been made of the whole negro family.

What we would infer, the exploration of recent travellers show to be actually the case. Within the limits of a single article such as this, it is of course impossible to traverse the whole ground. We might, however, refer to the Caffrees in the south, close upon the regions where the Hottentot is found, a race of stalwart and noble men, who have had skill and bravery enough to resist the power of the Dutch, and even to wage a determined war with the English power itself. To the east of these, Dr. Lindley, one of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, found tribes among whom he lived for a quarter of century, and whom he describes as being physically inferior to no race, the men in some districts averaging nearly six feet in height. "They might be called stupid," says Livingstone, (p.21,) speaking of Bakwains, a people with whom he was much associated in South Africa, in "matters which had not come within the sphere of their own observation, but in other things they showed more intelligence than is to be met with in our own uneducated peasantry." Two of the missionaries of the American Board, Messrs. Preston and Adams, speaking ( Missionary Herald , 1856,)