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herself. Law and society may decree; but in our normal humanity there throbs a sentiment which neutralizes every external impulse contrary to its promptings. In meditating on the varied history of the Negro in the United States, since his first landing on the banks of the James River in 1619 till the Emancipation Act of President Lincoln in 1865, it is curious to observe that the elevation of the race, though in a great measure secured, proceeded from circumstances almost the reverse of those that operated so favourably in the same direction elsewhere. The men of the slave-holding States, chiefly Puritans or influenced by Puritanic surroundings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway which rendered possible in the West Indies and other Catholic countries the establishment of the reciprocal bonds of god-parents and god-children. The self-same causes operated to prevent any large blending of the two races, inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who [247] had gone forth from his country to better his fortune had not left behind him his attachment to the institutions of the mother-land, among which marrying, whenever practicable, was one of the most cherished. Above all, too, as another powerful check at first to such alliances between the ruling and servile races of the States, there existed the native idiosyncracy of the Anglo-Saxon. That class of them who had left Britain were likelier than the more refined of their nation to exhibit in its crudest and cruellest form the innate jealousy and contempt of other races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon bosom. It is but a simple fact that, whenever he condescended thereto, familiarity with even the loveliest of the subject people was regarded as a mighty self-unbending for which the object should be correspondingly grateful. So there could, in the beginning, be no frequent instances of the romantic chivalry that gilded the quasi-marital relations of the more fervid and humane members of the Latin stock. But this kind of intercourse, which in the earlier generation was undoubtedly restricted in North America by the checks above adverted to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unintelligibility [248] in speech, gradually expanded with the natural increase of the slave population. The American-born, English-speaking Negro girl, who had in many cases been the playmate of her owner, was naturally more intelligible, more accessible, more attractive--and the inevitable conseque
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