The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ distrust, shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.

      Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened not his tea. What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr. Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected of slavery?6 It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater shakes testily from his corroded pen. How far the effluvia of the slave-ship will be wafted, into what strange latitudes of temperance and sturdy independence, even to the privacy of solemn and high-minded thought! A nation can pass through epochs of the black-death, and recover and improve its average health; but does a people ever completely rally from this blackest death of all?

      The Guinea trader brought to San Domingo in the course of eighty years representatives of almost every tribe upon the west coast of Africa and of its interior for hundreds of miles. Many who were thus brought were known only by the names of their obscure neighborhoods; they mingled their shade of color and of savage custom with the blood of a new Creole nation of slaves. With these unwilling emigrants the vast areas of Africa ran together into the narrow plains at the end of a small island; affinity and difference were alike obedient to the whip of the overseer, whose law was profit, and whose method cruelty, in making this strange people grow.

      When a great continent has been thus ransacked to stock a little farm, the qualities which meet are so various, and present such lively contrasts, that the term African loses all its application. From the Mandingo, the Foulah, the Jolof, through the Felatahs, the Eboes, the Mokos, the Feloups, the Coromantines, the Bissagos, all the sullen and degraded tribes of the marshy districts and islands of the Slave Coast, and inland to the Shangallas, who border upon Southwestern Abyssinia, the characters are as distinct as the profiles or the colors. The physical qualities of all these people, their capacity for labor, their religious tendencies and inventive skill, their temperaments and diets, might be constructed into a sliding scale, starting with a Mandingo, or a Foulah such as Ira Aldridge, and running to earth at length in a Papel.

      The Mandingoes of the most cultivated type seldom found their way to the West Indies. But if ever slave became noticeable for his temperate and laborious habits, a certain enterprise and self-subsistence, a cleanly, regular, and polished way, perhaps keeping his master's accounts, or those of his own private ventures, in Arabic, and mindful of his future, he was found to be a Mandingo. Their States are on the Senegal; Arabic is not their language, but they are zealous Mohammedans, and have schools in which the children learn the Koran. The men are merchants and agriculturists; they control the trade over a great extent of country, and the religion also, for the Koran is among the wares they carry, and they impose at once the whole form of their social condition. These Northern African nations have been subjected to Arab and Moorish influence, and they make it plain that great movements have taken place in regions which are generally supposed to be sunk in savage quiescence. The Mandingoes, notwithstanding a shade of yellow in the complexion, are still negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood. Their features are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type. Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside. But what a history lies between the Fetichism which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship of one God without image or symbol!

      In the administration of justice, some classes of their criminals are sold into slavery, and occasionally a Mandingo would be kidnapped. But there are many Mandingoes who are still pagans, and know nothing of Arabic or commerce, yet who have the excellences of the dominant tribes: these were found in the gangs of the slave-merchant.

      So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips: a nonchalant air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor. They have magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early contact with Christians. It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres.

      The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the sources of the Rio Grande. The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among them. French writers represent them as being capable of sustained labor; they cultivate carefully the millet, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lentils, and have numerous herds. Their mutton is famous, and their oxen are very fat. The Foulahs are mild and affable, full of esprit, fond of hunting and music; they shun brandy, and like sweet drinks. It is not difficult to govern them, as they unite good sense to quiet manners, and have an instinct for propriety. Their horror of slavery is so great, that, if one of them is condemned to be sold, all the neighbors club together to pay his forfeit or purchase a ransom; so that few of them were found in the slave-ships, unless seized in the fields, or carried off from the villages by night.

      They have mechanics who work in iron and silver, leather and wood; they build good houses, and live in them cleanly and respectable. The Foulahs show, quite as decidedly as the Mandingoes, that great passions and interests have given to these parts of Africa a history and developed stocks of men. When the Foulahs are compared with the wandering Felatahs, from whom they came, who speak the same language and wear the same external characters, it will be seen how Nature has yearned for her children in these unknown regions, and set herself, for their sakes, great stints of work, in that motherly ambition to bring them forward in the world. Yes,—thought the Guinea trader,—these skilful Foulahs are Nature's best gifts to man.

      Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point. Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and the extent of his intelligence,—this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to that race; he was a Foulah."7

      D'Eichthal develops at great length his theory, that the Foulahs are descended from some Eastern people of strong Malay characters, who found their way to their present site through Madagascar, along the coast, to Cordofan, Darfour, and Haoussa. They are bronzed, or copper-colored, or like polished mahogany,—the red predominating over the black. Their forms are tall and slim, with small hands and feet, thin curved noses, long hair braided into several queues, and an erect profile. Certain negro traits do not exist in them.

      Burmeister, who saw Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality СКАЧАТЬ