Richard Jacobs Haldeman

“ The fundamental idea of Rousseau and his school was the equality of all men, in a state of nature. This equality, he asserted, was lost through unjust laws and vicious social customs. He held up, in every way, the state of nature as the desirable one, and looked upon arts, science, and government as tending to debase human character, and make distinctions between men when God had intended that all should be perfectly equal. The natural rights of man were the texts of most of his writings, and he insisted that all societies, however constituted, had robbed humanity of its rights. ”

“ He withdrew into the land of the sun and his birth—Africa—leaving behind him no marks of culture, no civil institutions, no temples built in honor of the Deity, no legacies of learning, or science, or art, for the benefit of humanity; and in Africa, in India, in China, and in Asia Minor, to-day, as five thousand years ago, he is without religion, without organized society, without civil equality—a rude idolater—lowest in the scale of human beings. We have representations of the negro by six different nations of antiquity ”

“ Thus we might go over the whole world, showing that races of nearly kindred blood ruled, the one over the other, but it is unnecessary. These different races have been so commingled in the United States that we have merely a struggle between all the branches of the great Caucasian family on the one, hand, and the African race on the other—between the highest and lowest, races of the earth. ”

“ It left no trace behind it in works beneficial to the human family; and if we follow the path which it took in its southward march, until we reach the highest peak in the Abyssinian mountains, to then turn our gaze northward, we can see nothing which the African has added to the stock of human learning; not an iota which it has bequeathed for the advancement of the human race; not the faintest trace of an addition to the happiness or comfort of mankind which it has made. ”

“ Meanwhile we—who are as the sands of the sea-shore, and who are as the flies that are born in the morning and in the evening die—we, creatures who exist but for a moment of time upon earth, must deal with things as they are now—must take the negro as we find him—must do the best possible for him, and for us, when we find ourselves without act of our own, in juxtaposition. ”

“ We have received, as a legacy from the last century, an hitherto unquestioned belief in the perfectability of human nature, and the consequent natural equality of all men. Fourth of July orations, echoing the sentiments of the author of the Declaration of Independence, and imitating the brilliant rhetoric of the great leaders of the French Revolution, have firmly indoctrinated the American mind with theoretical opinions which are at variance with all experience and practice. ”

“ If we can show that the negro has been the slave of every other race with whom he came in contact, for five thousand years, it is fair to argue that it will require some thousands of years to elevate him to an equality with those races. ”

“ It is scarcely necessary for us to advert to the fact that the wars of modern times spring from this question of race; that even the somewhat mixed race of Italy is striving for Italian unity and nationality; that in the war between Russia and Turkey, the Selavonian provinces of Austria, of Prussia, and of Italy, all exhibited the strongest leaning toward their brethren in Russia; that the revolution now progressing in China is a war between the Chinese and their Tartar masters; that, in fine, the tendency throughout the whole world is towards an instinctive national unity. ”

“ Historians never examined into the social condition of a people—the origin of the races, their customs or their habits. All literature and civilization was confined to the favored few who surrounded the different courts, while the great mass of the people were serfs or slaves. No one attempted a history of the races or a scientific examination of their peculiarities. Scientific travelers had not yet brought back from all the quarters of the globe correct descriptions of what they had seen; the literature of India and China were yet sealed ”

“ Thus arose the Socialists, the Saint Simonians, the Fourierites, the Red Republicans and different organizations which believed in the necessity of destroying society as it then existed, to found it upon some basis which should be in accordance with the natural equality of men. These ideas gradually impregnated all the educated classes of Europe. Despots, like Frederick the Second, of Prussia, and the slave-holding aristocracy of France and Europe, united with literateurs who did not possess a sou, in adopting those attractive ideas, while all amused themselves with essays upon the subject. ”

“ We can show that the same races have ever been distinguished by the same characteristics—some superior morally, some physically, some intellectually—some exhibiting maritime tastes, others agricultural, others pastoral. Every race has its own modes of thinking; every race has its own civilization, in which it cannot educate another. ”

“ If we cast our gaze to the south, we shall behold at least fifty millions of negroes sunk in the profoundest ignorance and barbarism, inhabiting their own home in the same condition they were when they had the best opportunity of receiving civilization from India, from China, from Asia, from Asia Minor, or from Egypt. ”

“ The great difference between his status in one of the southern States and one of the northern is here; there he is a slave of individuals, here he is the slave of society. Only certain occupations are permitted to this inferior class, which cannot vote, which cannot bear arms, which cannot hold office, and which cannot intermarry with the whites. ”

“ The European cannot win the Asiatic to his mode of thinking; he cannot give his civilization to the Australian or to the negro. This difference of race has been practically shown since the commencement of time, and is now witnessed in every country of the world, and even among; races which are nearly allied to each other. The masses of the people in India have been in turn subjected by more than six different races, gliding with the English; the Tartars, at this time, rule China; one race in Asia now commands six or eight others ”

“ Now, although not prepared to say with the poet, that "whatever is, is right," we yet hold that whatever has been from the beginning is founded on some natural law, and that it is the peculiar duty of statesmen to deal with things as they are, while not imitating the madness of those architects of ruin in the last French Revolution, who sought to cut and trim society with the aid of the guillotine, in accordance with their abstract ideas of what is good and right. ”

“ We propose to analyze and describe the position of the enemy, examining the elemental ideas which compose bis strength and ours; and as in addressing Democrats we take it for granted, that no argument is necessary to show that the Republican party is rapidly drifting into the embrace of ultra-Abolitionism, we shall proceed upon that assumption; for we have seen this black cloud of Abolitionism starting some twenty-five years ago, no larger than a man's hand, from behind the hills of New England, and spreading until it has covered one-half of the land. ”

“ The effort in France resulted in anarchy and blood without attaining the object. How evident, then, the insanity of those who are drifting toward that same sea of blood in behalf of a race upon which the creator has stamped an eternal inferiority. ”

“ In the northern States this theoretical belief in the equality of all races has had peculiar opportunities of fixing itself in the public mind, owing to the comparative absence of an inferior race, which might serve as a practical proof and an immediate example of the inferiority of one numerous race, to another great race. ”

“ From the border of many States it is ignominiously excluded; and many enthusiastic Black Republican States, while making war upon the South for holding this race in bondage, yet cruelly exclude them from the enjoyment of even the Heaven-given franchises of earth, air and water. We have then to deal with a race that in times past has had many opportunities of civilization, which came in contact with the first great civilization that the world knew—with India—and melted away before it ”

“ The result was the French Revolution, which became a triumph of all those idealogues who were determined at any cost to reconstitute society. They were radical, for they cut off the heads of the great and noble ”

“ By means of monumental history as well as written, through the aid of the sciences of philology, craniology and the other branches of learning, which go to make up the science of ethnology, we can trace back the history of the races now inhabiting the earth to a period nearly five thousand years before Christ, at which time Europe and Asia seem to have been in the condition which we shall describe. ”

“ We repeat, that if we can only reply to the appeals to passion and feeling in which the Opposition speakers and editors indulge, in reference to the Constitution, that the people will tear to pieces a paper obstacle, and that it should be so treated. ”

“ We must do that which is best for them and us under all the circumstances. But we would not be excused in bearing from the soil and clime to which God has created them, these children of another land and another sun. ”

“ Again, there are in the Northern States and the Southern States different systems of labor, producing in each section very different social institutions and habits. The North is, to a considerable extent, manufacturing; the South is principally agricultural—the North is commercial ”

“ But the subject is with us much simplified, for it is between the white race and the black, and we do not find it necessary to enter into the subject of the original unity or diversity of the origin of men. ”

“ Whether the Bible be interpreted, to say that we are all descended from Adam and Eve or not, or whether, if so descended, there were some natural laws, since ceasing to exist, which, in antediluvian ages, produced changes in the races of men, it is not necessary to inquire. It is sufficient tor us that for four or five thousand years there have existed the same differences between different races of mankind, as are now observed ”