In it
we shall be able to see what has never before been discovered in
history; to wit: the absolute beginning of a people. Brought to these
shores by the ship-load as freight, and sold as merchandise; entirely
broken away from the tribes, races, or nations of their native land;
recognized only, as African slaves, and forbidden all movement looking
toward organic life; deprived of even the right of family or of
marriage, and corrupted in the most shameless manner by their powerful
and licentious oppressors--it is from this heterogeneous protoplasm
that the American Negro has been developed. The foundation from which
he sprang had been laid by piecemeal as the slave ships made their
annual deposits of cargoes brought from different points on the West
Coast, and basely corrupted as is only too well known; yet out of it
has grown, within less than three hundred years, an organic people.
Grandfathers, and great-grandfathers are among them; and personal
acquaintance is exceedingly wide. In the face of slavery and against
its teaching and its power, overcoming the seduction of the master
class, and the coarse and brutal corruptions of the baser overseer
class, the African slave persistently strove to clothe himself with
the habiliments of civilization, and so prepared himself for social
organization that as soon as the hindrances were removed, this vast
people almost immediately set themselves in families; and for over
thirty years they have been busily engaged hunting up the lost roots
of their family trees.
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