Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is The Small Number Of Blacks, It Is The
Liberty Of The Aboriginal Race, Of Which America Has Preserved
More
than eight millions and a half without mixture of foreign blood, that
characterizes the ancient continental possessions of Spain,
And
renders their moral and political situation entirely different from
that of the West Indies, where, by the disproportion between the free
men and the slaves, the principles of the Colonial System have been
developed with more energy. In the West Indian archipelago as in
Brazil (two portions of America which contain near 3,200,000 slaves)
the fear of [?] among the blacks, and the perils that surround the
whites, have been hitherto the most powerful causes of the security of
the mother countries and of the maintenance of the Portuguese dynasty.
Can this security, from its nature, be of long duration? Does it
justify the inertness of governments who neglect to remedy the evil
while it is yet time? I doubt this. When, under the influence of
extraordinary circumstances, alarm is mitigated, when countries in
which the accumulation of slaves has produced in society the fatal
mixture of heterogeneous elements may be led, perhaps unwillingly,
into an exterior struggle, civil dissensions will break forth in all
their violence and European families, innocent of an order of things
which they have had no share in creating, will be exposed to the most
imminent dangers.
We can never sufficiently praise the legislative wisdom of the new
republics of Spanish America which, since their birth, have been
seriously intent on the total extinction of slavery. That vast portion
of the earth has, in this respect, an immense advantage over the
southern part of the United States, where the whites, during the
struggle with England, established liberty for their own profit, and
where the slave population, to the number of 1,600,000, augments still
more rapidly than the whites.* (* In 1769, forty-six years before the
declaration of the Congress at Vienna, and thirty-eight years before
the abolition of the slave-trade, decreed in London and at Washington,
the Chamber of Representatives of Massachusetts had declared itself
against "the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind."
See Walsh's Appeal to the United States, 1819 page 312. The Spanish
writer, Avendano, was perhaps the first who declaimed forcibly not
only against the slave-trade, abhorred even by the Afghans
(Elphinstone's Journey to Cabul page 245), but against slavery in
general, and "all the iniquitous sources of colonial wealth."
Thesaurus Ind. tom. 1 tit. 9 cap. 2.) If civilization, instead of
extending, were to change its place; if, after great and deplorable
convulsions in Europe, America, between Cape Hatteras and the
Missouri, were to become the principal seat of the light of
Christianity, what a spectacle would be presented by that centre of
civilization, where, in the sanctuary of liberty, we could attend a
sale of negroes after the death of a master, and hear the sobbings of
parents who are separated from their children!
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