"We learn from Herodotus, that the ancient Egyptians were black, and had woolly hair. These people astonished the world with their arts and sciences, in which they revelled with unbounded prodigality. They became the masters of the East, and the lords of the Hebrews. No arm less powerful than Jehovah"s, could pluck the children of Abraham from their hands. The plagues were marshalled against them, and the pillars of cloud and of fire, and at last the resistless sea. "Then the horse and his rider sank like lead in the mighty waters."[5] But the kingdom of the Pharaohs was still great.
The most exalted mortal eulogium that could be spoken of Moses, was, "that he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians."[6]
It was from them that he gathered the materials with which he reared that grand superstructure, partaking of law, poetry, and history, which has filled the world with wonder and praise.
Mournful reverses of fortune have pa.s.sed over that ill.u.s.trious people. The star that rose in such matchless splendour above the eastern horizon has had its setting. But Egypt, Africa"s dark-browed queen, still lives. Her pyramid tombs--her sculptured columns, dug from the sands to adorn modern architecture--the remnants of her once impregnable walls--the remains of her hundred-gated city, rising over the wide-spread ruins, as if to guard the fame of the race that gave them existence,--all proclaim what she once was.
"Whatever may be the extent of prejudice against colour, as it is falsely called and is so generally practised in this country, Solomon, the most renowned of kings, possessed none of it. Among the seven hundred wives and the three hundred concubines who filled his houses, the most favoured queen was the beautiful Sable daughter of one of the Pharaohs of Egypt.... When he had secured her, he bowed his great intellect before her, that he might do her that homage which he paid to no other woman. Solomon was a poet, and pure love awakened the sweetest melody in his soul. To her honour and praise he composed that beautiful poem called the CANTICLES, or SOLOMON"S SONG. For her he wove that gorgeous wreath which is unsurpa.s.sed in its kind, and with his own royal hand placed it upon her dark brow.
"The interior of Ethiopia has not been explored by modern adventurers. The antiquarian has made his way into almost every dominion where relics of former greatness have promised to reward him for his toil. But this country, as though she had concealed some precious treasure, meets the traveller on the outskirts of her dominions, with pestilence and death. Yet, in the Highlands that have been traversed, many unequivocal traces of former civilization have been discovered. Very lately, British enterprise has made some important researches in that region of country, all of which go to prove, that Homer did not misplace his regard for them, when he a.s.sociated them with the G.o.ds.
"Numerous other instances might be mentioned that would indicate the ancient fame of our ancestors:--a fame, which arose from every virtue and talent that render mortals pre-eminently great,--from the conquests of love and beauty, from the prowess of their arms, and their architecture, poetry, mathematics, generosity, and piety.
I will barely allude to the beautiful Cleopatra, who swayed and captivated the heart of Antony;--to Hannibal, the sworn enemy and scourge of Rome--the mighty General who crossed the Alps to meet his foes--the Alps which had never before been crossed by an army, nor ever since, if we except Napoleon, the ambitious Corsican;--to Terence, Euclid, Cyprian, Origen, and Augustine.
"In 1620, the very same year in which the Pilgrims landed on the cold and rocky sh.o.r.es of New England, a Dutch ship, freighted with souls, touched the banks of James river, where the wretched people were employed as Slaves in the cultivation of that hateful weed, tobacco. Wonderful coincidence! The angel of liberty hovered over New England, and the demon of Slavery unfurled his black flag over the fields of the "sunny south."
"But, latterly, the Slave-trade has been p.r.o.nounced to be piracy by almost all of the civilised world. Great Britain has discarded the chattel principle throughout her dominions. In 1824, Mexico proclaimed freedom to her Slaves. The Pope of Rome, and the sovereigns of Turkey and Denmark, and other nations, bow at the shrine of liberty. But France has laid the richest offering upon the altar of freedom, that has been presented to G.o.d in these latter days. In achieving her almost bloodless revolution, she maintained an admirable degree of consistency. The same blast of the trumpet of Liberty that rang through the halls of the Tuilleries, and shattered the throne of the Bourbons, also reached the sh.o.r.es of her remotest colonies, and proclaimed the redemption of every Slave that moved on French soil. Thus does France remember the paternal advice of La Fayette, and atone for the murder of Toussaint. Thanks be to G.o.d, the lily is cleansed of the blood that stained it. The nations of the earth will gaze with delight upon its democratic purity, wherever it shall be seen, whether in the grape-grown valleys where it first bloomed, or in the Isles of Bourbon, Guadaloupe, Martinique, or in Guiana.[7] The Coloured people of St. Bartholomew"s, who were emanc.i.p.ated by a decree of the king of Sweden last year, have lately sent an address to their liberator. Hayti, by the heroism of her Age, Toussaint L"Ouverture, Dessalines, Christophe, and Petion, has driven the demon of Slavery from that island, and has buried his carcase in the sea.
"Briefly and imperfectly have I noticed the former condition of the Coloured race. Let us turn for a moment to survey our present state. The woeful volume of our history, as it now lies open to the world, is written with tears and bound with blood. As I trace it, my eyes ache and my heart is filled with grief. No other people have suffered so much, and none have been more innocent. If I might apostrophise that bleeding country, I would say, O Africa, thou hast bled, freely bled, at every pore! Thy sorrow has been mocked, and thy grief has not been heeded. Thy children are scattered over the whole earth, and the great nations have been enriched by them. The wild beasts of thy forests are treated with more mercy than they. The Libyan lion and the fierce tiger are caged to gratify the curiosity of men, and the keeper"s hands are not laid heavily upon them. But thy children are tortured, taunted, and hurried out of life by unprecedented cruelty. Brave men, formed in the divinest mould, are bartered, sold, and mortgaged. Stripped of every sacred right, they are scourged if they affirm that they belong to G.o.d. Women, sustaining the dear relation of mothers, are yoked with the horned cattle, to till the soil, and their heart-strings are torn to pieces by cruel separations from their children. Our sisters, ever manifesting the purest kindness, whether in the wilderness of their father-land, or amid the sorrows of the middle pa.s.sage, or in crowded cities, are unprotected from the l.u.s.t of tyrants. They have a regard for virtue, and they possess a sense of honour, but there is no respect paid to these jewels of n.o.ble character. Driven into unwilling concubinage, their offspring are sold by their Anglo-Saxon fathers. To them, the marriage inst.i.tution is but a name, for their despoilers break down the hymenial altar and scatter its sacred ashes on the winds.
"Our young men are brutalised in intellect, and their manly energies are chilled by the frosts of Slavery. Sometimes they are called to witness the agonies of the mothers who bore them, writhing under the lash, and as if to fill to overflowing the already full cup of demonism, they are sometimes compelled to apply the lash with their own hands. h.e.l.l itself cannot overmatch a deed like this--and dark d.a.m.nation shudders as it sinks into its bosom and seeks to hide itself from the indignant eye of G.o.d."
The writer of the foregoing Discourse was formerly a Slave; his forefathers, stolen from Africa, lived and died in Slavery; he himself was born a Slave, and would have remained in that condition until the present time, had he not been so fortunate as to escape from the galling yoke of fetters and chains. Such an example of elevated humanity as he affords, compels the conviction, that out of the countless millions now doomed to perpetual bondage, many of them, though forcibly degraded to a level with the brute, are qualified to become ornaments, not only to their race but to humanity.
The contents of these pages demonstrate the Negro race to be possessed of intelligent and reflecting minds, capable of occupying a very different station in life to that which has been generally a.s.signed to them, and which they now mostly occupy. Although their sufferings in Slavery have long excited the interest and sympathy of the benevolent, little has been done to advance their position in society. Almost insurmountable obstacles exist, tending to counteract that improvement and elevation of character, to which, under more favourable circ.u.mstances, they are capable of attaining.
It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other people could have endured the privations or the sufferings to which they have been subjected, without becoming still _more_ degraded in the scale of humanity. Nothing has been left undone, to cripple their intellects, to darken their minds, to debase their moral nature, and to obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; yet, how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of oppression, under which they have been groaning for centuries!
The supporters and advocates of Slavery, in order to justify their oppressive conduct, allege, either in ignorance or from an affected philosophy, an inherent defect in the mental const.i.tution of the Negro race, sufficient to exclude them from the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, or the exercise of those rights which are equally bestowed by a beneficent Creator upon all his rational creatures.
Prejudice and misinformation have, for a long series of years, been fostered with unremitting a.s.siduity by those interested in upholding the Slave system, and their corrupt influence has enabled them to gain possession of the public ear, and to abuse public credulity to an extent not generally appreciated. They strenuously maintain that the Negro is only fitted and designed for a servile condition. The contents of these pages prove to the contrary, and will surely stop the mouths of those who, from ignorance or something worse, affirm an absolute difference in specific character between the two races, and hence, justify the consignment of the Black to a fate which only proves the fingering barbarism of the White.
But, should the cases here recorded be considered of too isolated a nature to elucidate a theory of general equality of races, it may be observed, that they are only a very fractional part of what might have been adduced. A ma.s.s of facts is still in reserve, teeming with unequivocal evidence, that the Almighty has not left the Negro dest.i.tute or deficient of those talents and capabilities which he has bestowed upon all his rational creatures, and which, however modified by circ.u.mstances in various cases, leave no section of the human family a right to boast that it inherits by birth a superiority, which might not, in the course of events, be manifested and claimed, with equal justice, by those whom they most despise.
In order more fully to demonstrate the capabilities of the Black races of Africa, the writer has selected a ma.s.s of facts ill.u.s.trative of the subject, which he has recently published, ent.i.tled "A TRIBUTE FOR THE NEGRO," in which their moral, intellectual, and religious capabilities are fully established. This Volume, including many engravings and portraits of eminent Negroes, embraces upwards of one hundred biographical sketches and anecdotes of this calumniated race, many of them not before published, which afford striking evidence that inferior abilities are not the necessary accompaniment of a Coloured skin, but demonstrating, on the contrary, that the Negro race are endowed with every characteristic const.i.tuting an ident.i.ty with the great family of man, and consequently ent.i.tled to those inalienable rights which have been denied them, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," any infringement on which is a daring usurpation of the prerogative of the Most High!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] America.
[2] "Truth is powerful, and will ultimately prevail."
[3] Gen. ii. 8, 9, 15.
[4] Prov. xiv. 34.
[5] Exod. xv. 1, 10.
[6] Acts vii. 22.
[7] The number of Slaves in the French colonies was almost 300,000.
ANTHONY PICKARD, PRINTER, TOP OF BRIGGATE, LEEDS.
JUST PUBLISHED,
A TRIBUTE FOR THE NEGRO,
BEING
A VINDICATION
OF THE
MORAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND RELIGIOUS CAPABILITIES
OF THE
COLOURED PORTION OF MANKIND,
WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE AFRICAN RACE
BY
WILSON ARMISTEAD, LEEDS.
LONDON: CHARLES GILPIN, 5, BISHOPSGATE WITHOUT; AND WILLIAM IRWIN, 39, OLDHAM-STREET, MANCHESTER; G. W. TAYLOR, PHILADELPHIA; WILLIAM HARNED, ANTI-SLAVERY OFFICE, NEW YORK.
REMARKS OF THE PRESS,
RESPECTING "A TRIBUTE FOR THE NEGRO."
"We are gratified to announce the publication of a Volume under this designation; and, especially, that it will emanate from the pen--we may add, also, from the heart--of a gentleman whose feelings and sympathies, no less than mental powers, so well fit him for the task of preparing it. It will be embellished with ten engravings, enriched by an Introductory Poem by Mr. Bernard Barton, and the profits devoted to the Anti-Slavery cause."--_The Universe._
"It is scarcely needful to do more than read the Prospectus, to be convinced that the Volume is likely to be one of no common interest, both to the Christian and to the Philanthropist. Indeed, it seems to promise a high treat to the Anti-Slavery public in particular; and, from the great labour and cost the author has bestowed on it, we trust an extensive sale awaits it."--_British Friend._
"From our acquaintance with the author of the "_Tribute for the Negro_,"
we feel no hesitation in saying that it will be one of deep research, as well as of intense interest, being on a subject most intimately connected with the happiness or misery of a large portion of the human family."--_The Citizen._
"It is with sincere pleasure we announce the appearance of this interesting publication. It includes upwards of one hundred biographical sketches of Africans, or their descendants, besides facts and anecdotes, testimonies of travellers, missionaries, &c., exhibiting an undoubted refutation of the unfounded calumnies which have been heaped on the unfortunate race of Africa. In addition to ill.u.s.trative engravings, it will contain the portraits of several distinguished men of Colour. From the character of the gentleman who has undertaken the pleasing, though arduous, task, and who contemplates no other reward but that of service to the deeply-oppressed race of Africa, we may with confidence recommend his production to the early and earnest attention of our readers, feeling a.s.sured that they will be both cheered and profited by its perusal. We are glad to perceive that, in addition to the names of many friends of the Negro, the subscription list is headed by the Queen."--_Anti-Slavery Reporter._