Note (return) — Chapter X

It is evident from what has been said already that the idea of the Negro current about 1830 in the United States was not very exalted. It was seriously questioned if he was really a human being, and doctors of divinity learnedly expounded the "Cursed be Canaan" passage as applying to him. A prominent physician of Mobile151 gave it as his opinion that "the brain of the Negro, when compared with the Caucasian, is smaller by a tenth ... and the intellect is wanting in the same proportion," and finally asserted that Negroes could not live in the North because "a cold climate so freezes their brains as to make them insane." About mulattoes, like many others, he stretched his imagination marvelously. They were incapable of undergoing fatigue; the women were very delicate and subject to all sorts of diseases, and they did not beget children as readily as either black women or white women. In fact, said Nott, between the ages of twenty-five and forty mulattoes died ten times as fast as either white or black people; between forty and fifty-five fifty times as fast, and between fifty-five and seventy one hundred times as fast.