t once in the
old-fashioned way, you read it once more with Judge Douglas's version. It
will then run thus:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all British subjects who
were on this continent eighty-one years ago were created equal to all
British subjects born and then residing in Great Britain."
And now I appeal to all--to Democrats as well as others--are you really
willing that the Declaration shall thus be frittered away?--thus left no
more, at most, than an interesting memorial of the dead past?--thus shorn
of its vitality and practical value, and left without the germ or even the
suggestion of the individual rights of man in it?
But Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing
of blood by the white and black races. Agreed for once--a thousand times
agreed. There are white men enough to marry all the white women and black
men enough to many all the black women; and so let them be married. On
this point we fully agree with the Judge, and when he shall show that his
policy is better adapted to prevent amalgamation than ours, we shall drop
ours and adopt his. Let us see. In 1850 there were in the United States
405,751 mulattoes. Very few of these are the offspring of whites and free
blacks; nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white masters. A
separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation;
but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to
keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black
people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.
That is at least one self-evident truth. A few free colored persons
may get into the free States, in any event; but their number is too
insignificant to amount to much in the way of mixing blood. In 1850 there
were in the free States 56,649 mulattoes; but for the most part they were
not born there--they came from the slave States, ready made up. In the
same year the slave States had 348,874 mulattoes, all of home production.
The proportion of free mulattoes to free blacks--the only colored classes
in the free States is much greater in the slave than in the free States.
It is worthy of note, too, that among the free States those which make the
colored man the nearest equal to the white have proportionably the fewest
mulattoes, the least of amalgamation. In New Hampshire, the State which
goes farthest toward equality between the races, there are just 18
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