Page:Anglo-African Magazine volume 1.pdf/9

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

of dollars in personal and real estate.' This is about one thousand dollars per individual—a sum three times as great as the census of 1850 gives to the individuals composing the farming population of Vermont.

In a school exhibition in the city of New York, in December 1858, there were productions from twenty white, and one colored, Ward Schools; of the thirty prizes awarded, three were gained by the colored school; which may be thus formularized for the use of that distinguished archæologist, craniologist and ethnologist, Dr. Nott, of Alabama:—3/10 : 1/20 :: black children's intellect : white children's intellect.

In the Concours of the colleges of France in 1858, the laurels once worn by Abelard, fell upon the brows of a black youth from Hayti, M. Faubert, who won the highest prize, two other young Haytiens winning other prizes. It is well-known that not a few white Americans are among the students of the French colleges; as none of these have yet won this distinguished honor, we must again formularize for Dr. Nott—0/0 : 1 :: white American students in Paris : black Haytien students in Paris.

Here, then, we have the vital force, the physical force, and some slight inklings of the yet undeveloped mental power of the negro. The negro is a constant quantity; other races may be, and are, variables; he is positive and reliable, and seems fixed so. The panic of 1857 was arrested by the cotton crop, and even at this moment, when the West is bankrupt, with its 'enchanted' free laborers, and 'enchanted' stores of grain, the vitality of trade is maintained by the products of black labor, which it is the ambition of the so-called republican party to sweep from the land. What a glorious destiny awaits the negro when soil now fertilized by his agony and bloody sweat, shall teem under his energies, renewed and developed by freedom! for

"Freedom hand in hand with labor,
Walketh strong and brave,
On the forehead of his neighbor
No man writeth slave!"

The negro is the 'coming man, heralded by Dr. Arnold. The European race would seem to have reached its destined development—of Arts in Greece, of Jurisprudence in Rome and of Industrial Economies in England and the United States. To advance still further, the tide of civilization requires what the great commoner of England prescribed for Ireland—new blood. And whence can this be procured, unless from a race hitherto unmixed in the current of civilization?

In addition to an expose of the condition of the blacks, this Magazine will have the aim to uphold and encourage the now depressed hopes of thinking black men, in the United States—the men who, for twenty years and more have been active in conventions, in public meetings, in societies, in the pulpit, and through the press, cheering on and laboring on to promote emancipation, affranchisement and education; some of them in, and some of them past the prime of life, yet see, as the apparent result of their work and their sacrifices, only Fugitive Slave laws and Compromise bills, and the denial of citizenship on the part of the Federal and State Governments, and, saddest of all, such men as Seward and Preston King insulting the rights of their black constituents by voting to admit Oregon as a state with a constitution denying to black men even an entrance within its borders.

It is not astonishing that the faith of such should grow weak, or that they should set up a breast-work in distant regions; yet it is clear that they are wrong to despond, wrong to change the scene of the contest. The sterner and fiercer the conflict, the sterner and steadier should be the soldiers engaged in it,

    "Be sure, no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
For carrying out God's end. No creature works
So ill observed, that there he's cashiered.
The honest, earnest man must stand and work."

Neither can it aid our cause to found an empire in Yoruba; they might as