Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

In his next letter, the governor acknowledges receipt of his commission as Governor of the Mississippi Territory, and pledges himself most earnestly, to "act with integrity, and to the best of his ability," but urges his bad health as a plea in advance of all omissions, &c. He also regrets being compelled to visit the terrritory without the judges, but expresses his intention immediately to depart. This letter is dated May 29th, 1798.

In a letter of the same date, he says:

"I do, indeed, accept your remarks in good faith, and you cannot confer on me a greater obligation than by continuing them. They may be honorable to myself and useful to the new government. The footing on which Governor Gayoso lived with the inhabitants of the Natchez, it may not be exactly in my power to observe, from the difference between the American and Spanish appointments, and which must be as well or better known to you than to myself. It shall be my study to conciliate and attach all parties to the United States.

"The opposition to my appointment, and the news which had preceded the same, was more than a little mortifying to me; as it was, however, only because I have been an Eastern man, the effects thereof are done away with, and to declare myself honestly, (which, perhaps, I am too prone to,) I should have felt myself infinitely more honored in one single nomination to a dignified trust, than dishonored or mortified by half a dozen rejections, notwithstanding my high respect for many members of the Senate, and I every day thank God for this branch of our government. May I, sir, solicit you to present my acknowledgments to the President? His moments are too precious for my immediate address; and with all the respect and admiration that it is possible for me to feel for the most dignified character in the Union, I should, I believe, be always compelled to silence, because I would not hazard intrusion.

"I have the honor to be, my dear sir, &c.,

"WINTHROP SARGENT."

In a postscript to the foregoing letter, he says

"You have had enough to do with them to know they are a very troublesome and expensive people.

"Are the Spaniards to be courted, (with due respect to ourselves,) or kept at a distance? Will it not be advantageous that an early attention be given to the land claims upon the Mississippi? I am told Gayoso was extremely liberal in grants ere his departure."

In a letter of June 4th, 1798, the governor wrote:—

"It will be my special duty to conciliate the good will of the white and red people, and 1 will endeavor to perform it. The latter are, in numbers, very frequently at Natchez; and I believe, expect to be fed by a patronizing country, as well as to receive some small presents."

On the 16th June, the governor wrote, just before starting to Natchez, as follows:

The reader has, in a former number, already learned what the governor was, at the date of this letter, ignorant of.

None of these grants were valid, except when allowed by United States Commissioners.

"I mention the state of my health to impress on you more strongly the necessity that the officers of the government should speedily repair to the territory. The presence of the judges cannot be dispensed with.

"From the best intelligence I have been able to procure, there prevails in the country of our destination a refractory and turbulent spirit, with parties headed by men of perverseness and cunning. They have run wild in the recess of government, and every moment's delay in adoption of rules and regulations, after the ordinance, &c. shall be promulgated amongst them, must be productive of growing evils and discontent.

"I am anxious to know who is the first judge, and that he should be on his way to this country. I trust he will be a law character of strictest integrity, of converse with all the states national, and a man unconnected with land speculations, and that shall make the duties of his office the primary consideration.

"The Supreme Court, from whose judgment there can be no appeal, should no more lack legal information than integrity.

*

"I most earnestly pray that a regular communication by post may be established between the general government and Natchez."

On the 2d July, 1798, the governor was at the rapids of the Ohio, (now Louisville,) on his way to Natchez; and on the 20th August, wrote to the Secretary of State of United States, announcing his arrival, and enclosing a copy of his address to the inhabitants of the territory. In this letter, as in many successive ones, he still earnestly prays for the appointment of judges, the want of whom he declares to be a source of great uneasiness. He says:

66

I pray God Mr. McGuire may soon arrive, or some law character. In a court from which there is no appeal, most certainly there should be law knowledge. Judge Bruin, a worthy and sensible man, is, beyond doubt, deficient, and Judge Tilton cannot have had more reading and experience. Under these circumstances, might it not be advisable to make some compensation to some gentleman learned in the law, as an attorney for the United States and territory?

"To one act I have been constrained since my arrival here.

Mr. Cox was at large within the territory, and an armed party at his command. Before my arrival his coming was talked of among some few disaffected persons here; and that he was to assume the government of the State of Georgia. He is now in close confinement, but with every indulgence that a state prisoner could expect, for I am not disposed to torture even a criminal.

"We have no printing office in this country. We are remote from all others; and under such circumstances I shall find it impracticable to diffuse a knowledge of the laws and other useful matter without the aid of government. A small traveling press, sufficient for half a sheet of post paper, which would give four pages, would be a blessing to the people of the territory, and I would myself contrive to manage it, if we may, through your goodness, be indulged.

66

*

At this place the Choctaw Indians frequently visit, and are sometimes troublesome to the inhabitants, by killing their cattle, &c. It might be well to keep them in good humor, by a little bread, beef and liquor, and some trifling presents, &c. I cannot make advances myself, as my own expenses will be greater than I had an idea of; living is higher than I had expected, and even house rent, I find, is estimated at $300 a year."

ART. VI.-HOW TO SAVE THE REPUBLIC, AND THE POSITION OF THE SOUTH IN THE UNION.

PHYSICAL

EMANCIPATION ABOLITION -NATURAL LAW OF SLAVERY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NEGRO-FATAL RESULTS OF SUBSTITUTING WHITE LABOR FOR BLACK AT THE SOUTH, ETC.

[Samuel A. Cartwright, M. D., of New-Orleans, long known and distinguished for his profound investigations upon the subject of Southern Slavery and the physiological character of the negro, has prepared for our pages the following most able paper, which we hasten to present to our readers, though necessarily attended with an enlargement of the number. It is too valuable to be postponed a single day.

The paper referred to by Dr. Cartwright as having been prepared by him for the Medical Convention, will be found in our July, August, and perhaps subsequent numbers of this year.]-Editor.

NEW-ORLEANS, July, 1851.

DEAR SIR,-There is shut up in the archives of the science of medicine enough of hidden knowledge to save the Union now and forever, if it were brought to light.

Knowledge is not power, unless it is made active by being set free. Imprisoned in the dissecting room, or in the student's closet, it is like light under a bushel. To be made an element of political power, the aid of the politician, the greater the better, is needed to give it an impulse that will send it to the cottage of every voter. The object of this communication, and of the first article in the Medical Journal, I herewith send you, is respectfully to call your attention to the result of some scientific investigations that I faintly hope may be converted into an instrument of good to assist in saving the Union, if brought upon the political arena at this important crisis.

Some time ago I was appointed by the Medical Association of Louisiana to make a report on the diseases and peculiarities of the negro race. In performing that duty, the third of a century's experience in treating diseases in a section of country where the white and black population are nearly equal, lent me its aid. A vast number of facts, standing thickly and closely along the obscure by-paths, that none but Southern physicians travel, have been interrogated, and the important truth demonstrated, that the same medical treatment, under the same external circum stances, which benefits or cures a white man, often injures or kills a negro. and vice versa." It may not be unworthy a great statesman to inquire, if what is true in Medicine may not be true in Government, and to investigate the question, whether the laws and free institutious, so beneficial to the white man, may not be detrimental and deteriorating to the negro? That a great difference exists between the organization of the white and black man, has long ago been proved by anatomists.

Sommerring, for instance, a learned author of the last century.-Difference in physiology also implies difference in structure. The practice of negroes in exposing their bare heads and backs, through choice, to the rays of a sun hot enough to blister the skin of a white man, proves that they are under different physiological laws from him—not from habit-(as such

66

[ocr errors]

habits cannot be acquired,) but from difference in structure. Comparative anatomy, physiology, and the phenomena drawn from daily observation, prove the fallacy of an hypothesis, that foreign writers, chiefly English, have been very industrious in propagating in this country, for the last twenty years: That there are no internal or physical differences in mankind, whether white or black." The reception of this hypothesis, as if it were an established truth, by a considerable number of our people, lies at the bottom of all those political troubles that endanger the Union; as it takes for granted that the personal freedom, so ennobling and beneficial to the white man, would be equally so for the negro. When this hypothesis was first announced by Gregoire, in the National Assembly of France, Robespierre, to stifle all objections, cried out, Perish the colonies, but save that principle." The prosperous colony of Haiti, with a population equaling a third of the United States of that day, was torn from France, not so much by the negroes in rebellion, as by the French army, under Southonax, having been instructed by the Home Government to carry out Robespierre's principles. Under that abolition principle, Haiti became a free negro republic, and instead of going up, pari passu, with us, immediately began to perish, and continued to perish, until it voluntarily threw itself into the arms of despotism. The British East India Company got the indigo culture transferred from Haiti, then making three-fourths of all the indigo in the world, to the East Indies, and have ever since monopolized it. The negroes got liberty, and after shamefully abusing it for more than half a century, voluntarily gave it up as a thing of no value to them.

Nowhere were the doctrines of the French Revolution more strongly denounced than in Great Britain; yet, after the practical workings of those doctrines were found to enrich the British East India possessions with a monopoly of the Indigo culture, the same doctrines were sent across the Atlantic in almost every English book, newspaper and periodical, urging us to give the negro liberty: the same thing as to urge us to give up our cotton and sugar culture, and let British Asia monopolize it as well as that of indigo.

None know better than our friends, the British, that free negroes will not work, (having tried the experiment,) and that white people cannot endure the hot sun of a cane or cotton field. To give an hundred millions per annum for a second-hand abstraction of Jacobin coinage, would be paying too dearly for a whistle to amuse the North, and a sword to pierce the South. The hypothesis that would place the negro on a political and social equality with our free white citizens, is urged upon us by a foreign people, who have neither social nor political equality among themselves, and whose laws and usages make distinctions where Nature makes none. Yet without annulling the artificial distinctions, dividing her own subjects into classes, Great Britain has permitted her pulpit to be desecrated, and her literature corrupted, to break down the distinctions that Nature has made between the white and the black races inhabiting the United States; her subjects preaching a false French hypothesis to us, as a sound Christian and republican doctrine, and taunting us daily as being only half way Christians and republicans, because we do not receive it. Having profited by the dissensions springing from the seed of their own sowing in the East Indies and elsewhere, the East India Company, the lords of the loom and those in their interest, have almost out-Yankeyed the Yankees, (as they call all Americans,) being in a fair way to carry back American manufactures to England, and the cotton and sugar culture to its old home in India, by humbugging us with abolition literature, abolition divines and agents, like George Thompson, to give up our glorious Union for a vain abstraction of Jacobin origin. Great Britain would, no doubt, form most favorable and

[blocks in formation]

66

highly friendly commercial alliances with any seceding state or states, just as long and no longer than it would take a bitter and bloody civil war between the North and the South to break up American manufactures, and to transfer the agricultural wealth of the South to British Asia, where she has already hundreds of thousands of Chinese (according to Leonard Wray, Esq., the author of the East India Sugar Planter,” a late work published in London) engaged in the cultivation of sugar and cotton, the experiments with Hindoo laborers not having been satisfactory. But the hypothesis which is undermining our Union, "that the negro is a white man only painted black," has no foundation in Truth or Nature. All history disproves it. The science of comparative anatomy bears positive testimony against it; the dark color not being confined to the skin, but pervading, to a certain extent, every membrane and muscle, tinging all the humors, and even the brain itself, with a shade of darkness.

The statue of the negro in Westminster Abbey, kneeling before that of Mr. Fox, is at once recognized as a veritable son of Africa, although made of the same white marble-thus disproving, by the artist's chisel, the mischievous sophism, which makes color the only difference.

Observation also proves that the negro is under different physiological laws from the white man. The Bible declares the same thing, as it gave him the significant name Canaan or (“ Submissive knee bender,") to express his nature, and doomed him to slavery, as a condition the most consonant to that nature. That book gave him but one commandment, to serve his brethren, to be their servant of servants-clearly implying that they are responsible for his observance of the other ten. Domestic slavery is made a blessing instead of a curse to the Ethiopian or Canaanite race by a different conformation of body, cast of mind, and turn of thought, imparting to that race a fitness for that institution, and an unfitness for any other. Hence justice, mercy, and the best interests of the slave race suffered no violation, (as Voltaire vainly thought and rejected the Bible as a fable on that ground,) but was promoted by Joshua taking their country from them, and reducing them to bondage; inasmuch as their organization, not less than that of children, rendered them unfit for independence. If both the North and the South were to study the African character more closely-the natural history of the Ethiopian or Canaanite, and what the Bible reveals concerning him-our happy and prosperous confederacy would be in no danger of dissolution. The former would see that personal freedom is in opposition to the negro's nature-and the latter would perceive, that, by the action of a higher law than the Constitution, or anything that fanaticism can do in the Union, or out, there is no more danger of his leaving servitude, provided it be the proper kind of servitude, to go in quest of liberty, than the ox his straw in search of animal food.

The consciences of many of our Northern people are very tender, because American liberty, equality, and republicanism do not come up to the abstract notions of British and some other writers of what such things ought to be. Our admirable system of government is founded on the Bacouian philosophy carried into politics, and not on impracticable abstractions. It would not reach the ideal, impracticable standard of liberty, equality, and republicanism, if the negroes were turned loose, until the women and children were allowed to vote, and all political and domestic restrictions removed from them. Natural distinctions in society is the rock on which American Republicanism is built-built on any other foundation, it never has stood, and never can stand. By virtue of those distinctions, that Nature alone has made, women, children, and negroes are assigned to such places only as best suit their physical peculiarities and natural capacities; nor could a female or a baby become the head of our

« ПредишнаНапред »