Negroes at the North

NEGROES AT THE NORTH

Although abolition fanaticism has taken so determined a hold on the common heart beyond Mason and Dixon's line, it is a somewhat singular fact that wherever any considerable number of free negroes settle together, they are always looked upon with distrust, and even with disgust, by the great majority of their white neighbors. This should not be the case, were the political and social notions of the Abolitionists founded on a just estimate of the relations established between the races by Him who made them, and "who doeth all things well." Social and political equality with the favored race are claimed for the negro as his inalienable right, yet where in the North are these advantages awarded and where has he proved himself deserving of them? A Northern community of negroes is always a community of idlers, and petty larceny pilferers. There are exceptions, indeed, but they are by no means numerous, and even where they do occur, it will generally be found that and admixture with better blood has afforded an increase of energy and talent.

That there are less of the substantial comforts of life enjoyed by the negroes of New York than by those of New Orleans, no one familiar with both cities will pretend to deny; yet the negroes of the Northern emporium are possessed of a barren freedom, while most of those in its Southern rival are involuntary servants. We will not stoop to an unfair comparison between the comforts enjoyed by our Southern negroes, and those which their scanty wages afford to sewing women in the North; but we will say that the negroes of the South are better provided for by their masters than the majority of Northern negroes can provide for themselves.

It is not, however, simply to institute a comparison between the comforts enjoyed by negroes North and South that we have been induced to pen this article; our aim is rather to prove that the condition of servitude is that for which the negro appears to be adapted by nature, and that under any other circumstances his constant tendency is to lapse into barbarism.

Look at the emancipation experiment in the British West Indies! The negroes there have neither the health, the morality, nor the intelligence which they possessed while in a state of servitude, though their opportunities for procuring all the blessings of life were of the very highest order. Placed on islands where nature produced almost spontaneously, and aided by the sympathies teachers and missionaries of a nation which had purchased their freedom at a vast expense, still all efforts to elevate them proved unavailing, and their only advance has been in corruption, indolence, and sensuality The same facts, in the main, hold good when drawing a comparison between the bond and the free negroes in our own country, as the statistics furnished by our National Census Bureau conclusively establish. Idiocy, blindness, deafness, and all description of personal deformity, are ten times as common among communities of free negroes as among slaves, while as it regards duration of life and natural increase-tests of the highest importance in vital statistics-the advantages as it exists in our Southern States.

That we have not done injustice to the negro in judging of his unfitness for freedom and assuming the responsibility of honestly providing for his own wants, will be pretty clearly proven by a few statistics which we intend to introduce from the "Annual Report of the Inspectors of the (Canadian) Provincial Penitentiary for the year 1855, printed by order of the Legislative Assembly." These statistics have been carefully prepared, and cannot be objected to even by the most ultra Abolitionist on the score of prejudice. From them we find, in a table showing the comparative criminality of the different races-the numbers of each race being taken from the census of 1851,-52-that of the Indian or red race, there were, at the time when the census was taken, 7,120 persons in the Province; of the African, or black race, 8,000 persons, and of the European, or white race, 1,826,142 persons, making the total population of 1,842,265.

The African race was represented in the penitentiary by one convict for ever 154 of its total population in the country; the Indian race by one out of very 800, and the white race by one out of ever 3,884. It will, therefore, be perceived at a glance that the negroes in Canada are nearly six times as criminal as the neglected and despised remnant of the aboriginal race, and all but twenty-four times as criminal as the whites.

With such facts before us as these, we cannot wonder at the growing dissatisfaction of the people of Canada towards that dusky emigration for which they are indebted to the insane philanthropy of a portion of the republican neighbors, and the curious machinery of underground railroads. This dissatisfaction has grown amazingly of late years, notwithstanding the simultaneous growth of abolition notions in other quarters, and has been the direct result of the negro's proved unfitness for political and social equality with whites. The preponderance of his vicious propensities over his intellectual and moral facilities renders him unsafe, when not restrained by the mastery of a superior, for liberty with him is the liberty of a tiger, and not the liberty of a man, and the momentary gratification of his appetites to his highest aim.

Indeed, so great and criminal a nuisance have runaway negroes become in Canada, that the project of passing a prohibitory law against receiving any more of them, has been seriously entertained.

Such facts as these are worth of being calmly pondered, and we commend them especially to the worshipers of the woolly-headed race.