of slavery?[E] 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?

[Footnote E: _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. I. pp. 32, 34; No. II. pp. 23,
25, 47; No. III. p. 3. "And you, Quashee, my pumpkin, idle Quashee,
I say you must get the Devil sent away from your elbow, my poor dark
friend!" We say amen to that, with the reserved privilege of designating
the Devil. "Ware that Colonial Sand-bank! Starboard now, the Nigger
Question!" Starboard it is!]

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