Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/6

 social, civil, educational, ecclesiastical—since the day of freedom; and we regard it a most grievous misdemeanor in Dr. Tucker that he has blindly ignored that change.

I have read Dr. Tucker's pamphlet with very much care and attention, and I cannot resist the conclusion that it is one of the most unjust and injurious statements that I have ever met with. First of all, on the hypothesis that his representation of the moral condition of the Negro is correct—but which I deny—his pamphlet, instead of being a lamentation over wrong and injustice, is an indictment, alike gross and undeserving, of a deeply-wronged people. Unless I greatly misunderstand Dr. Tucker, and his endorsers also, he attributes gross moral depravity, general lewdness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy as Negro peculiarities, and as such constitutional to him. But I beg to say that these charges are unjust. These traits of character, so far as they maintain at the South, are American characteristics—the legitimate outcome of the pernicious system of bondage which has crushed this race for more than two hundred years. For, first, when Dr. Tucker and his endorsers declare that the Negro, as such, is void of the family feeling; that moral purity is an unknown virtue; that dishonesty is almost an instinct; that both economy and acquisitiveness are exotics in his nature, they testify that of which they do not know.

I have lived nigh twenty years in West Africa. I have come in contact with peoples of not less than forty tribes, and I aver, from personal knowledge and acquaintance, that the picture drawn by Dr. Tucker is a caricature. I am speaking of the native Negro. (a) All along the West Coast of Africa the family tie and the marriage bond are as strong as among any other primitive people. The very words in which Cicero and Tacitus describe the homes and