The Ashland union. [volume] (Ashland, Ashland County, Ohio) 1854-1868, 1859-04-20

more filed with cruelty than Africa. Treadins
beneath their feet one of the most fertile soils
they cultivate almost nothing-liye on fruits
and nuts, with few cattle and little commerce
They are in the first place lazy beyond all hope
of self-improyement. They will not work.
Now, God has ordained the Law of labor so
surely, and SO universally, that if barbarians
will not work, civilization will yoke them UP
and dive them to it. This is fixed, sure as
light and gravity. Why not !? Why should
one quarter of the globe, one section Of the
human family do nothing for the race2 II
Ham will not bring timber for the ark Shem
and Japheth will drive him to it. rss9sf fsgsf
u But Africa is not only great wilderness OF
foangers, but of THE ;aIeaess grew all manner
of vices. Work is salvation. Work regener-
ates the earth and man. Work is progress,
and without it nothing. The title deedof the
earth to man had this proviso; that he should
subdue it and multiply upon it. Now, if he
only multiply and docs not subdue, he has only
a squdtter sovcreignty-no certified title till he
builds his house and tills his farm. Hence the
Indian must be driven out; he will not work on
any condition, neither selfmoved nor driven by
the hand of another, and therefore, the last
tomahawk of the red man will soon hang as a
trophy in the halls of the conqueror. Now the
African works patiently and well when driven
to it; he will work on no other condition. His
climate is terrible protection from white in
vasion, therfere he must be transported and
taught to work, thereby civilized, thereby
chrlstianized, thereby improved every way, and
perhaps by-and-by; sent back to yoke up and
subdue his whole continent, according TO the
pattern that has been shown him in this work
ing beehive of America.
You touch in no very fraternal manner some
of the social vices of your brethren at the South
Perhaps if they deserved the stone, it should
hardly come from an northern hand; the gar
ments of our cities are dripping with the wat
ers OF Sodom, and some of the Western States
sunder the marriage covenant with as little con-
sideration as the most ruthless slaveholder-
Sensuality is not at this hour producing as
much social degradation ordcstroying as many
lives at the South as at the North; but this is
not the point, What were the blacks socially.
when taken from Africa? The king of Daho-
,mey has four hundred wives, whom he en-
ploys in carrying palm oil to the coast, and
thence new rum and tobacco back to the palace
for their husband and king. This rum and
tobacco are the joint production of slavery and
freedom. Slavery produces the tobacco and
molasses, and then we Yankees make the rum
and send them both in our vessels to the coast
of Africa to buy oil gathered by women and
carried on their heads in jars from fifty to two
hundred miles. They are driven along by
herd of lazy men, and stepping carefully every
minute under the express condition that if one
pot of oil is spilled, one head of women and
wife must be cut off to atone for it. vIsscs
Nor, is it any great sin to catch set of these
lazy fellows, that live ON the earnings Of their
wives, learn them to work teach thspst laye one
another and to love Their eli iidress 80 that fhen.
highest ambition shall no longer be to buy an
extra number of wives that they may have a
few ':pickaninnies" (children) to. selP a wild
African recently brought to Boston by mer-'
chant begged for an old gun which he saw
When asked what he wanted of 1t, he replied:
'to buy a wife and have pickaninnics to SELL"
Is itany harm to yoke up such men, and work
the laziness and the brutality cut of them?-
Yes, but you say there is better way to do it.
There may be, but it wants evidence of a sue
cessful experiment. The Morayians once kind
led their alters of devotion all around the AT
rican coast, but the waves of barbarism have
extinguished them; Jamaica,sin spite of devo-
ted missionaries, British philanthropy, and
American sympathy, is fast receding through
idleness to barbarisIn. Half million of peo-
pie there in twenty years have not lifted as many
spades of earth as twenty thousand Yankees
in California in ono third of the time. If this
half million had the twenty thousand to- lead
them and guide them, and plan for them, then
that island which was once q fruitful field,
would not be going back to Wilderness
The best thing that could be done for Africa,
if they could live there, would be to send them
hundred thousand American shareholders, to
work them up to some degree of civilization
1t is charged that the life of a slave at the
South is sometimes at the mercy of the master.
In Africa the immediate body servants ofevery
chief at his death, arc at once beheaded and
hurried forward to attend the new wants of
their old master. Is it wicked to buy these de-
voted victims of heathenism and put them un-
der the protection of civilized, and often of
Christian masters? Just in proportion as the
price of these slaves is raised in Africa, just to
that degree is there a motive to the heirs to
spare their lives. So far as Africa is concern
ed. the slave trade was and is humane in its
operations; its abolition was the result of SEN
timent, and not the determination of calm and
deliberate craftsmanship. That it was not called
for by the condition of the world nor by any
deep-seated moral sentiment is proved from
the fact, that the natiop foremost in its abroga-
ton has now revived it on other shores and un-
der another name, adding to whatever sin there
is in direct open slave trade, the other sin of
hypocrisy and false pretence.
Jamaica wants laborers, not because there
are not plenty of them on the island, but be-
cause they will not work; and the same British
which stands guard over the stall
wart and Immensely lazy son of Ham, brings
In the feebler children of Shem, aud dooms
them to the same bondage under another name. |
Honor to the sagaeious and far-seeing states |
men of Georgia and South Carolina, almost the
only consistent slave States in the Union for |
hey breasted the united streams of British and |
American fanaticism. claimed and maintained |
heir rights and saved the South from barren
less and desolation, the North from a civil war,
md the negros from barbarism. If more labor
rs are needed for Texas, Central America,
PARTS of Mexico and Cuba, they ought to be /
,rought, without elections, under such humane
equation ag are made in other cases for the
omfort of passengers, These laborers should
ome from Africa, because they are stronger
nd make better slaves than any of the copper
olore d races, because they arc more susceptible
f transformation, and their improvement will
e greater, and, lastly, because they are the
host degraded.
AS to the influence of slavery on the charac-
er of the whites, that is quite another question;