Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/9

 Now this is one of the most appalling representations that has ever been put upon paper. (a) Here is a nation of people, for a population that runs up its numbers to six or seven millions, is not merely a people—it is a. Here then is a nation, resident for more than seven generations amid the vast populations of this Christian country; and yet, as Dr. Tucker avers, so low and degraded in moral character, that he, himself, is forced even now, after twenty years of freedom, to declare that they are a demoralized people on the downward track to ruin.

(b) Yet notice that this Negro nation has been for two centuries under the absolute control and moulding of the Christian Church and people of the South. They have not been separate in locality, as the Israelites in Goshen were from the Egyptians. They have been living, in all their generations, on the farms and in the houses and families of their masters. So thoroughly intermingled have they been with the life and society of their superiors that they have lost entirely their native tongues, and have taken English as their vernacular. Moreover, they presented the resistance of no organic religion to the faith of their masters. They had a heterogeneous paganism when they came from Africa—so inchoate and diversified that it soon fell before the new circumstances in which they were placed.

(c) Hence, it is evident (1) that the paganism of the African was no formidable obstacle to the Christian Church; (2) that the Christian Church had the opportunity of easy conquest; and (3) joining to the numerical inferiority of the Negro population the vast resources of the southern Christian, in all the elements of power and available resources, we can see at once the high vantage ground of the Christian Church.

(d) But what now is the fact presented by Dr. Tucker? It is this, viz.: That after two and a half centuries, the