Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Present Aspect of Slavery in America: The Immediate Duty of the North; A Speech Delivered in the Hall of the State House, Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Convention, on Friday Night, January 29, 1858
It was left for America to begin a new experiment in the History of Civilization - to bring diverse races into closest contact. The Catholic Spaniard began the experiment: he mixed his blood with the Red man, whose country he sub dued; he brought hither also the Black man. Thus the Afri can savage, the American barbarian, and the civilized Cau casian of Spain, became joint stockholders in this new copar ceny of races. The Protestant Briton continued what his Catholic predecessor had begun and while the Puritan was painfully voyaging to Plymouth, in the wilderness seeking an asylum where the Apocalyptic woman might bear her man child to grow up in freedom, other Saxons were bringing a ship-load of negroes to the wilderness, to become slaves for ever. Thus the African came to British and Spanish America. Out of the inhabitants of this continent, I take it about are of this unfortunate race.
In the United States to-day, four of the five great races live side by side. There are some or Mongolian Chinese in California, I am told there are American Indians within our borders; perhaps Africans; and 26 Caucasians. The union of such diverse ethnological elements makes our experiment of democracy more complex, and perhaps more difficult than it would otherwise be.
The Mongolians are few in numbers, and so transient in their stay that nothing more need now be said of them.
It is plain where the Red man will go. In two hundred years, an Indian will be as rare in the United States as now in New England. Like the bear and the buffalo, he perishes with the forest, which to him and them was what cultivated fields, towns, and cities are to us. Our fathers tried to enslave the ferocious and unprogressive Indian he would not work for himself as a freeman, nor for others as a slave he would fight. He woulcl not be enslaved he could not help being killed. He perishes before us. The sinewy Caucasian laborer lays hold on the phlegmatic Indian warrior they struggle in deadly grasp-naked man to naked man, hand to shoulder, knee to knee, breast to breast; the white man bends the red man over, crushes him down, and chokes him dead. It is always so when the civilized meets the savage, or the barba rian-naked man to naked man: how much more fatal is the issue to the feeble when the white man shirted in iron has the Small Pox for his ally, and Rum for his tomahawk! In the long run of history, the race is always to the swift, and the battle to the strong. The Indian will perish utterly and soon.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
