Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/73

Rh it, but those that sought such sable Venuses were so numerous, and so successful, that the cafe-au-lait progeny which began to appear in the population ex- cited the alarm of the legislators of the State. It is a wonder that some of the Southern States did not see this pending danger likewise, especially at a later date when it must have been still more evident, — for be it known, South Carolina, for example, had in 1734 no fewer than 22,000 slaves against a short 8,000 whites in her limits. Possibly altogether as many as 400,000 negro slaves were, during the entire history of the slave-trade, brought to the United States from Africa. There may be 4,000,000 of pure, unmixed African negroes in this country at the present writing (1903), but of the remainder of the ten millions that writers on the subject talk about, they are half- castes, — hybrids produced by incessant crossing with the whites and chiefly in the Southern States. It is easy to be imagined that from the time that the slaves were first brought into the country, up to and to include the time they were set free as a result of the Civil War, they were the cause of the framing and enforcing of no end of laws ; of start- ing all sorts of legislation ; of the formation of parties for and against the trade ; of exciting the Church to action ; of strife of many kinds and outbreaks of pas- sion and speech. It is not the intention of the present w,ork to pass into the history of this part of the sub- ject. It is the darkest and most emphatically the dirtiest page in American history ; and I must leave it to those who care to follow it along other lines. In- deed, enough would have been said in this chapter, had I stated the fact that the slave trade practically