the hostility existing between the free blacks, and the whites, in the United States, is even more inveterate than that of slaves towards their masters; and that, in some of the States, (Virginia especially,) it has been thought necessary to enact laws, by which all manumitted slaves are compelled to quit the commonwealth; while in others it is forbidden, under heavy fines, and even corporal punishments, to teach a slave to read or write.[1]
Mexico is exempt from all these evils. In her territory, the African race is already amalgamated with the Indigenous; and when education shall have prepared its descendants for exercising the higher rights of citizenship, there is neither law, nor custom, to prevent them from attaining the first offices in the state. In the mean time, they furnish the Tierras calientes with a most useful race of labourers, who, from not being liable to the Vomito, (or Vera Cruz fever,) perform most of the drudgery in the towns upon the coast, and cultivate, in the interior, those productions, which are peculiar to the Tierra caliente.
However the question of free labour may be agitated elsewhere, in Mexico it is already decided.
- ↑ Vide Mr. Politica's Sketch of the Internal Condition of the United States, from which many of the above observations are borrowed.
instance, the free people of colour are ineligible by law to any public situation. A Senator, or Representative, must be a free white man, uncontaminated by any mixture of African blood.—Vide Mellish's United States, p. 27.5.
