on that account, more resigned to his condition. But when he is once admitted to a political equality, much of this prestige would soon disappear. The effects of property, education, natural talent, would soon dispel the greater part of their own sense of inferiority, without proportionally altering the opinions of the whites; and the sullen ill-will, which even now occasionally exists, would be exchanged for the more bitter and implacable animosity that arises between equals and rivals struggling for the mastery. History affords little light upon this subject; but the fierce contests between the Saracenic and Gothic races in Spain, — and yet more, between the blacks and the whites of St. Domingo, which ended only in the extermination of the weaker party, — seem to be too much in accordance with the ordinary principles of our nature, not to warn us against so fearful an experiment."[1]
Certainly, the present condition of the great mass of the free colored population in the United States, affords but little encouragement to the sincere friends of emancipation and of the African race. Their degraded
- ↑ "Tucker‘s Life of Jefferson, vol. i., chap. v. "It is thought by the South, and by many at the North," remarks Mr. Freeman, "that immediate emancipation would render it necessary for the whites to exterminate the blacks, or abandon the Southern soil. The late abolition of slavery in the West India Colonies is pleaded as a refutation of this idea; but those who are best qualified to judge assert that the emancipation of the slaves upon the West India estates, is a very different thing from the immediate emancipation of two [three] millions of slaves in the Southern country; and that — without raising the question of the ultimate effect upon the whites in the West Indies — the banishment of the blacks, or the expatriation or annihilation of the whites of the South, would be the necessary consequence of immediate and universal emancipation here." — Plea, Conversation XVIII.
