The peculiarity of the physical organization of the white man makes it impossible for him to labor healthfully and efficiently for the greatest development of this favored region.  Yet his wants demand the yield and tribute of this region.  His inventive capacity evolved sugar from the wild canes of the tropics, than which nothing is more essential to his necessities, save the cereals and clothing.  He fabricated clothing from the tropical grass and tropical cotton, found the uses of cassia, pimento, the dye woods, and the thousand other tropical products which contribute to comfort, necessity, and luxury; advancing human happiness, human progress, and human civilization.

The black man’s organization is radically different.  He was formed especially to live and labor in these tropical and semi-tropical regions of the earth; but he is naturally indolent, his wants are few, and nature unaided supplies them.  He is uninventive, and has always, from creation down, lived amid these plants without the genius to discover, or the skill and industry to develope their uses.  That they are used, and contribute to human health and human necessities, is abundant evidence of Divine design in their creation.

The black man’s labor, then, and the white man’s intelligence are necessary to the production and fabrication, for human use, of these provisions of Providence.  This labor the black man will not yield without compulsion.  He is eminently useful under this compulsion, and eminently useless, even to himself, without it.  That he was designed to obey this authority, and to be most happy when and where he was most useful, is apparent in his mental and moral organization.  By moral I mean those functions of the nervous system which bring us in relation with the external world.  He aspires to nothing but the gratification of his passions, and the indulgence of his indolence.  He only feels the oppression of slavery in being compelled to work, and none of the moral degradation incident to servility in the higher or superior races.  He is, consequently, more happy, and better contented in this, than in any other condition of life.  His morals, his bodily comforts, and his status as a man, attain to an elevation in this condition known to his race in no other.

All the results of his condition react upon the superior race, holding him in the condition designed for him by his Creator, producing results to human progress all over the world, known to result in an equal ratio from no other cause.  The institution has passed away, and very soon all its consequences will cease to be visible in the character of the Southern people.  The plantation will dwindle to the truck-patch, the planter will sink into the grave, and his offspring will degenerate into hucksters and petty traders, and become as mean and contemptible as the Puritan Yankee.