HKB
friends: he seeks to conceal them from himself: but there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the south, than in the clamorous fears of the northern states.
This all-pervading disquietude has given birth to an undertaking which is but little known, but which may have the effect of changing the fate of a portion of the human race. From apprehension of the dangers which I have just been describing, a certain number of American citizens have formed a society for the purpose of exporting to the coast of Guinea, at their own expense, such free negroes as may be willing to escape from the oppression to which they are subject.[254] In 1820, the society to which I allude formed a settlement in Africa, upon the 7th degree of north latitude, which bears the name of Liberia. The most recent intelligence informs us that two thousand five hundred negroes are collected there; they have introduced the democratic institutions of America into the country of their forefathers; and Liberia has a representative system of government, negro-jurymen, negro-magistrates, and negro-priests; churches have been built, newspapers established, and, by a singular change in the vicissitudes of the world, white men are prohibited from sojourning within the settlement.[255]
This is indeed a strange caprice of fortune. Two hundred years have now elapsed since the inhabitants of Europe undertook to tear the negro from his family and his home, in order to transport him to the shores of North America; at the present day, the European settlers are engaged in sending back the descendants of those very negroes to the continent from which they were originally taken; and the barbarous Africans have been brought into contact with civilisation in the midst of bondage, and have become acquainted with free political institutions in slavery. Up to the present time Africa has been closed against the arts and sciences of the whites; but the inventions of Europe will perhaps penetrate into those regions, now that they are introduced by Africans themselves. The settlement of Liberia is founded upon a lofty and a most fruitful idea; but whatever may be its results with regard to the continent of Africa, it can afford no remedy to the New World.
In twelve years the Colonization society has transported two thousand five hundred negroes to Africa; in the same space of time about seven hundred thousand blacks were born in the United States. If the colony of Liberia were so situated as to be able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the Union were to supply the society with annual subsidies,[256] and to transport the negroes to Liberia, there is little chance that the negro population of the United States would change.
In the South, however, this leaves two choices: either for the whites to remain in communities with the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. Such is the view which the Americans of the south take of the question, and they act consistently with it. As they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to emancipate them.