Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/195

Rh grant it; but I have deemed it important to show that the picture has a bright side. I am well aware that most of the negro authors are remarkable, principally because they are negroes. With considerable talent, they generally evince bad taste. I do not pretend that they are Scotts or Miltons; but I wish to prove that they are men, capable of producing their proportion of Scotts and Miltons, if they could be allowed to live in a state of physical and intellectual freedom. But where, at the present time, can they live in perfect freedom, cheered by the hopes and excited by the rewards, which stimulate white men to exertion? Every avenue to distinction is closed to them. Even where the body is suffered to be free, a hateful prejudice keeps the soul in fetters. I think every candid mind must admit that it is more wonderful they have done so much, than that they have done no more.

As a class, I am aware that the negroes, with many honorable exceptions, are ignorant, and show little disposition to be otherwise; but this ceases to be the case just in proportion as they are free. The fault is in their unnatural situation, not in themselves. Tyranny always dwarfs the intellect. Homer tells us, that when Jupiter condemns a man to slavery, he takes from him half his mind. A family of children treated with habitual violence or contempt, become stupid and sluggish, and are called fools by the very parents or guardians who have crushed their mental energies. It was remarked by M. Dupuis, the British Consul at Mogadore, that the generality of Europeans, after a long captivity and severe treatment among the Arabs, seemed at first exceedingly dull and insensible. "If they had been any considerable time in slavery," says he, "they appeared lost to reason and feeling; their spirits broken; and their faculties sunk in a species of stupor, which I am unable adequately to describe. They appeared degraded even below the negro slave. The succession of hardships, without any protecting law to which they can appeal for alleviation, or redress, seems to destroy every spring of exertion, or hope in their minds. They appear indifferent to everything around them; abject, servile, and brutish."

Lieutenant Hall, in his Travels in the United States,