In the two hundred years of African slavery the world’s progress was greater in the arts and sciences, and in all the appliances promotive of intelligence and human happiness, than in any period of historical time, of five centuries.  Why?  Because the labor was performed by the man formed for labor and incapable of thinking, and releasing the man formed to think, direct, and invent, from labor, other than labor of thought.  This influence was felt over the civilized world.  The productions of the tropics were demanded by the higher civilization.  Men forgot to clothe themselves in skins when they could do so in cloth.  As commerce extended her flight, bearing these rich creations of labor, elaborated by intelligence, civilization went with her, expanding the mind, enlarging the wants, and prompting progress in all with whom she communicated.  Its influence was first felt from the Antilles, extending to the United States.  In proportion to the increase of these products was the increase of commerce, wealth, intelligence, and power.  Compare the statistics of production by slave-labor with the increase of commerce, and they go hand in hand.  As the slave came down from the grain-growing region to the cotton and sugar region, the amount of his labor’s product entering into commerce increased four-fold.  The inventions of Whitney and Arkwright cheapened the fabric of cotton so much as to bring it within the reach of the poorest, and availed the world in all the uses of cloth.

The shipping and manufacturing interests of England grew; those of the United States, from nothing, in a few years were great rivals of the mother country, and very soon surpassed her in commercial tonnage.  Every interest prospered with the prosperity of the planter of the Southern States.  His class has passed away; the weeds blacken where the chaste, white cotton beautified his fields; his slave is a freedman—­a constitution-maker—­a ruler set up by a beastly fanaticism to control his master, and to degrade and destroy his country.

This must bear its legitimate fruit.  It is the beginning of the end of the negro upon this continent.  Two races with the same civil, political and social privileges cannot long exist in harmony together.  The struggle for supremacy will come, and with it a war of races—­then God have mercy on the weaker!  The mild compulsion which stimulated his labor is withdrawn, and with it the care and protection which alone preserved him.  He works no more; his day of Jubilee has come; he must be a power in the land.  Infatuated creature!  I pity you from my heart.  You cannot see or calculate the inevitable destiny now fixed for your race.  You cannot see the vile uses you are made to subserve for a time, or deem that those who now appear your conservators, are but preparing your funeral pyre.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE NATCHEZ TRADITIONS.

NATCHEZ—­MIZEZIBBEE; OR, THE PARENT OF MANY WATERS—­INDIAN MOUNDS—­THE CHILD OF THE SUN—­TREATMENT OF THE FEMALES—­POETIC MARRIAGES—­UNCHASTE MAIDS AND PURE WIVES—­WALKING ARCHIVES—­THE PROFANE FIRE—­ALAHOPLECHIA —­OYELAPE—­THE CHIEF WITH A BEARD.