Note (return) — Chapter X

The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery. Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed. Said Alexander H. Everett:164 "We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing—that the African is a degraded member of the human family—that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization—when they constituted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it? They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt—in one word, from Africa.165 ... The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travelers from all quarters, when the grass is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.... It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization."