Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/28

26 that the moral, industrious, enterprising slave surrounds himself with on our Southern plantations. Our slaves, however, have no cares about want from sickness or old age, while the freeman there works harder, every day of his life, than the slave does; and is, moreover, constantly kept on the tenter-hooks, lest his employer should dismiss him, or lest he should become in arrears to his creditors from sickness, or the enfeebling effects of age. This is the condition of the most respectable thriving negroes of Philadelphia. Now, let me hold up the curtain of misery, that hides from common observers the condition of the most degraded fugitive slaves, and the most degraded colored people of that city.

Do not understand me as intending to anathematize the inhabitants of the City of Brotherly Love for want of humanity to the colored people in their midst, as there are many noble philanthropists and Quakers there who freely give alms. My object is to prove that the black race are really inferior in their mental organization to the white race, and that God does not design them, in this country, to govern themselves; and that, when they are delivered up to self-government in the North, a large class of them languish and die from the effects of the climate, from obstinate laziness, vice, and drunkenness, and from their erratic mode of living. Dr. Benjamin Coates, of Philadelphia, who is a man of talent, observation, and education, says:—

"The negro, or even the mulatto, is a very different person in his physical and psychical conformation from that one who may be presumed to have been held in view in our legislation, the white Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or German. His ancestry, and the prototype of his race, are calculated for the torrid zone; and even the mixed progeny suffer severely and mortally by our cold. Cheerful, merry, lounging, and careless, the Ethiopian American deeply enjoys the sun and light; delights in the open air, and is, as a general rule, constitutionally free from that deep thoughtful anxiety for the future so conspicuous in his paler neighbor."

Dr. Coates also makes some sensible remarks on the dreadful effects of prison discipline and solitary confinement, for any length of time, on the blacks. "The face of heaven," says he, "seems to him necessary to his existence; and though long confinement is, in his case, less productive of gloomy remorse, it is far more depressing to his vitality." "The morbid effects of this are unhappily visible in the production of scrofula and pulmonary consumption; more than eighty-eight per cent, of the deaths being from chronic