Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/24

22 in the South, that, if their weak-minded abolitionist brother will imitate the like self-sacrifice, and send them a check on their bank for the above-named necessary sum of carnal dust, for each of their slaves, they too will carry out towards them in good faith the sentiment of Paul. That, although meat is permitted him to eat, every day, by God himself, he will give it up, rather than offend even a simple, narrow-minded, but sincere lover of Jesus Christ.

The Southern men are educated as planters, not manufacturers, or merchants; and, consequently, if our slaves are taken from us, we are sunk in poverty. A white man cannot bear the scorching sun of the South, like the African who luxuriates in the heat of our climate, and dies when he is subjected to the cold of the North. Even the mulatto cannot bear the heat of our cotton-fields. Consequently, if the slaves were given their freedom, the cotton that supplies the whole North would cease to be grown; for none but our black people can raise it; and they are so inherently lazy, that they never could be hired to work consecutively, for a whole year, without compulsion. Their capriciousness would, without fail, lose every crop of cotton. Let me here quote for you some remarks that I have found in letters written from Dominica, after the emancipation of the slaves in the British West India Islands. These letters were addressed to a Mr. Roberts, of New Jersey, by his son-in-law in Dominica. He says: "The emancipation of the negroes has, my dear father, been the destruction of Dominica; and the whole colony is completely ruined, as the negroes will not work."

"Your coffee estates on this island, that in 1803 yielded you twenty thousand a year, do not now yield your son one dollar. The price of sugar and coffee is so much depreciated, that half the estates in the West Indies give no income whatever to the proprietors. The free negroes are so lazy, they will not pick up the coffee for love or for money, and we do not make enough to pay for the freight of our produce to England. The estates here, that were valued at several hundred thousand dollars, if sold now, would not command the sums that were made from their yearly produce alone. I should be very glad if I could give up business, but the truth is, those who are concerned in West India affairs are sunk to the lowest state of depression; many planters who had their ten thousand pounds a year have now no income at all." Can any real lover of his country wish to see any part of the United States thus impoverished, by giving the negroes up to the only freedom which their degraded minds crave? Which is freedom