ANTIPATHY TO THE NEGRO.
[Fnom OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.] New York, September 29, 1865. IF it were not that I set a higher value upon the Spectator than upon any other paper I know of, these letters would not have been written, and yet it was with real pleasure that I saw the first paragraph and the subsequent leading article in its columns dis- senting from, controverting, and even sharply censuring my letter on The Negro in the North," published on the 26th of August. From the beginning these letters have had but one purpose ; not to please or to conciliate my British readers or to flatter my countrymen, but to tell the former the truth about the latter. Some months ago I sent a large collection of photographs,—two hundred and forty Yankees,—to a friend in London who has never been in this country. It was composed entirely of heads of our public men and of the acquaintances of the giver, the only limit of selection being birth and breeding in the United States. In acknowledging the gift he was kind enough to say that he had never seen a collection in which there was such a preponderance of good looks. He will remember my somewhat ungracious reply—that I cared less for his praise than I would have cared for his opinion whether the collection showed that the portraits drawn of Yan- kees for British eyes by British pens and pencils were truthful. It is a mistake constantly made about us (and the writer of the spirited article upon "Our American Cousins" in the Spectator of September 16 has not escaped the error), that we are annoyed at fault-finding, and cannot enjoy a joke at our own expense. No judgment could be more incorrect. We see our faults, al- though of course they do not strike us so strangely or so vividly as they do others not to the manner born, and we confess them to each other in private, and condemn them, as any one who reads may learn, in no very measured terms in public. The objection that we make to the representations of us that are prepared for the European market is, not that they are unple,asing, but that they are untrue, and generally not untrue in fact but untruthful in purpose. We are, it need hardly be said, not free from that human weakness which leads men to receive unpleasant truths with incredulity, and even with resentment ; but whether this opinion of ours about our self-elected censors is well founded may perhaps be left to be decided by the record of the last four years of the bulk of European journalism. I have felt that the courtesy, and still more the candour of the editors of the Spectator, was allowing me a great freedom in my presentation of my view of ourselves and our affairs in these letters,—a freedom of which I have availed myself without stint to say sometimes what I knew must conflict sharply with British prejudice, and sometimes, I fear, through earnestness and strong conviction on my side, even grate harshly upon British national feeling, which merited respect and consideration. And therefore it is that I read with a certain satisfaction in the case in question, and had read with similar feel- ing in other cases, a strong dissent from the views which I pre- sented in the very paper for which I am writing. For it gave me, and will give me as long as I have this pleasant office, a sense of freedom, a consciousness that I am not expected to shape or to shade the truth to the preconceived notions, the wishes, or the sympathies of my readers. The counsel for one party, whose cause, however, I think is best served by a simple statement of the case as I see it, I am more at my ease for the consciousness that the court can not only rule me out, but will, if it thinks proper, charge dead against me. This it did in the case of my letter on the feel- ing toward the negro in the North, and I now ask leave only to speak upon what seem to me some errors of fact, and some mis- conceptions of meaning on the part of my judges, and then to let the case go to final judgment.
And first, it was said that the man whose marriage with a white woman has made all this pother was not a negro, but "a mulatto or quadroon." The point is of very slight importance, and I only notice it to show that I was, as I always take some pains to be, coirect. As I have mentioned before, Jam acquainted with Green- wich, and it is upon the evidence of a friend a resident of the little place, who knows all about this affair, that I repeat the statement that Davenport was not a mulatto or a quadroon, but a negro. I will add that Mr. Button, the juryman who addressed him upon the offensiveness of his act, is a man of irreproachable character, a school teacher, and also an anti-slavery man, who has been a hearty supporter of the anti-slavery war. Two other mistakes of some real importance in the censure of my letter were :-1. The statement and the implication that that letter was an expression of my "own prejudice ;" the other, that I represented the pre- dominant feeling here toward the negro as one of "unutterable loathing." Now, in the first place, my letter was meant to be, and after a careful examination of it I venture to say very de- didedly that it was, nothing more than a statement of the degree and the nature of the feeling here upon this subject, such as might have been written by a foreign traveller who had no interest in the matter but as an observer (which I shall show before I end this letter); and in the second, not only is my own feeling toward the negro not that expressed in the phrase quoted above, but my letter did not attribute that feeling to the people of the North. What my letter did say was, that the general feeling here was " an antipathy to social contact with the negro," and again, "a dread of the social intermingling of the two races ;" and it was only in illustration of the fact that "this antipathy" exists here "as strongly among anti-slavery people" as among others that I men- tioned one case in which actual contact with the negro in large masses had begotten a loathing in one estimable clergyman, who had worked for years for the negro's freedom. The difference between what my letter did say and what it was misconceived as saying is, I submit, neither metaphysical nor insignificant.
Upon a more important point, however, the charge of transcen- dentalism and metaphysical subtlety unworthy of one who deals with the real interests of politics is directly brought. That point is the assertion in my letter of the fact that "the mass of the peo- ple here were ready to fight against slavery, but had no intention of fighting for the negro,"—that we accepted a great war "to pre- vent the extension of slavery," but would not have fought to
-" free those individual negroes held in bondage at the South." If this had been, as it was misconceived to be, an attempt, in the words of my censor, to "distinguish between the sin of slavery and that of keeping slaves," he might most justly have stigmatized it, as he did, as "unmanly nonsense." But my letter did not speak in general terms of individual negroes, but specifically of "the individual negroes" and "those individual negroes held in bondage." Now in my mother-tongue as it is spoken here the definite article and the demonstrative pronoun have a very dis- tinct and unmistakeable value ; and what that value was in this case I shall show, not by an illustration, but by the very case in question. "Against whom," asks the Spectator, "is slavery a sin, if not against the slaves and their descen- dants ?" Against no one ; except, I believe, that it comes nearer than any other known to man to that undefined sin against the Holy Ghost. But the statement of my letter not only did not involve the descendants of slaves, but specifically excluded them. And this is the actual case in question. We accepted the war rather than let slavery, i. e., the right to keep certain men and their descendants in bondage, go into the territories ; but were slavery by such provisions of law as have been made in some States to have ceased in the whole country with the lives of the present slaves, we should have let the slaveholders take "those individual negroes held in bondage in the South," every negro of them, into every territory, and not have sacrificed our brothers by the hundred thousand, and our treasure by the thousand mil- lion to prevent it ; no, we would not have fired a gun or spent a dollar. Even to set those individual slaves free, there are very few of us who would have given much of the blood and riches of the nation. The benefit conferred would not have been deemed worth the cost at which it was purchased. If this distinction is not a very plain and practical one in the Spectator's judgment, I stand convicted, though not convinced.
But the general existence of the antipathy of our race to social contact with the negro spoken of in my former letter is denied, not only by the Spectator but by others, and my statement is set
down as the expression of an individual or not widely-felt pre- judice. I have claimed above that that statement was merely one of fact, such as might be made by any unprejudiced and observant traveller. Let us see. If there ever was such a traveller, one who not only observed facts but penetrated motives, and understood sentiments, it was De 'Focqueville, whose work upon this country, although not without some errors of detail, seems worthier of admiration year by year. Hear him :—
" Yon may free the negro, but you cannot make him other than an alien to the European. Nor is this all : this man who is born in de- gradation, this stranger whom slavery has brought amongst us has, in our eyes, hardly the features common to mankind. To us his face is hideous, his intelligence dwarfed, his instincts grovelling. He seems to us little more than a link between man and the brutes. The moderns, after having abolished slavery, have yet to overcome three prejudices much more difficult to grapple with, and much more stubborn,—the prejudice of mastery, the prejudice of race, and the prejudice of colour. To us, who have had the good fortune to be born among men whom nature has made like us, and law our equals, it is very difficult to com- prehend the impassable gulf which separates the negro from the
European in America The prejudice of race appears to me far stronger in the States which have abolished slavery than in those in which it still exists, and nowhere does it show itself so intolerant as in
those States in which slavery was never known At the North the white no longer sees a barrier which distinctly separates him from a degraded race, and he shuns the negro with the more solicitude because he fears that the day may come when they may be confounded. At the South nature sometimes, claiming her rights, establishes a momentary equality between the races. At the North pride holds in check the most imperious of human passions. The Northerner might perhaps consent to make the negress the momentary companion of his pleasures, if legislators had not declared that she might aspire to be the lawful sharer of his bed; but she can become his wife, and he shrinks from her with a sort of horror."—Democracy in America, Vol I., chap. 18.
Now I venture the assertion that although I did not say that the general feeling here toward the negro was one of "unutterable loathing," Alexis De Tocqueville did. De Toequeville wrote thirty years ago. Is there no witness of the present day whose testimony upon this subject ought to be accepted, not as the expression of an individual prejudice which is cherished as a private luxury (as Sir — will always keep hatred of the Yankees in some private bin in his bosom), but as the utterance of an earnest and a truthful man who knew the people of this country? I call Abraham Lincoln. He is speaking to an assemblage of free negroes, the most intelligent that he could find, at the White House on the 14th of August, 1862.
"Yon and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether this is right or wrong I need not discuss ; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free ; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you. I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal."
Remember that this was spoken directly to negroes of such a comparative grade of intelligence that Mr. Lincoln looked to them to help him carry out his scheme of colonization. It was of course made as inoffensive as his gentle nature could make it. In what language would he have expressed the same idea to white men? And without presuming to compare myself with him, I ask those who condemned my letter as unreasonable and superfluous, to compare the last sentence of the passage quoted above with what was not written with Mr. Lincoln's speech in mind,—the last sentence of my former letter. "I am not defending this aversion, or saying that it is either right or reasonable. I merely tell you of its existence, and that it must needs be considered by wise statesmen as much as a Mussulman's horror of pork or a Brah- min's loathing of a tanner."
Thus far in explanation and in support of my-former state- ments, as to which I shall no more try the patience of my readers. I intended to consider the reason of this antipathy, and to show, what is as plain as the sun in the heavens, that the fear that the granting of suffrage to the negro will, in spite of the antipathy, bring him into social and even family contact with the white race, is not illogical ; but the length of this letter obliges me to postpone that subject.
One more personal word upon another and a trivial topic. Two protests from Yankees against my negro letter appeared in the Spectator. All well. I was glad to see them. But one of the protestant& attempts to wear his Yankeeism with a difference from me by signing himself "A New England Yankee," because, I suppose, my letters are dated at New York. But "the difference is not patible." Unless my friend's forefathers sat in council with both the lirinthrops, John of Connecticut as well as John of Mas- sachusetts, and unless he can show a few New England acres which have been in his family and in his name for two ceuturies, he must not thus tome into court to question my right to call
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