r admit a dearer relation than their adopted paternity. The
negroes, if vicious and mean, owe it to that cruel divorcement from the
Southern social plan effected by their political leaders, and to the life
of vagabondage to which they are doomed under the new system; they are not
more so by nature than other men. If, therefore, the writer is tempted to
speak of their weaknesses, it is in no irreverential sense, and with a
laudable object in view, to which this policy will be seen to be strictly
antecedent.]

That the negro is by nature grossly superstitious, no one who has had even
tolerable means of information will deny. In another chapter we have
prevised something on general principles concerning the superstition of
mankind, but the comparison to be drawn between the negro and all other
branches of the Adamic tree, as to this particular fruitage, is so
unequal, that we shall ask the reader to accept the former as a very
modified presentation of a theory that was made to order for the crown of
Cuffey. And however much this may be untrue with regard to other animals,
this faculty of the individual under discussion has nothing whatever to do
with his aesthetical being. It does not in any sense enlist that high
poetic principle which is one of the conditions of his tropical nativity.
Left to himself, with all the appliances of civilization and the
encouragement of its examples about him, his superstition will subject
him, in the short space of a twelvemonth, to heathenish lapses which the
weak-headed Mongolian, under the same outward conditions, has resisted for
a period of six thousand years. Voudooism is, perhaps, the weakest form of
heathen worship which this moral condition has developed, and, despite the
few occasions admitted by the structure of our laws, it is strictly a
native product. Those who contend that it is an African transplant, or
borrowed from the congeners of the race on those shores, are surely not
guided by convictions derived from an examination into its philosophy.
But it is a very radical form of savagism in worship, including human
sacrifices among its rites, and as we have anticipated that it had its
birth in the rice- and cotton-fields of the South, further remark on this
division of the argument is deemed unnecessary.

In contrast with other races of beings, the world of shadows is to the
imagination of the black man a thing of gloom. The existences who people
this realm are hobgoblins, and t