Despite the clumsiest management, the boat soon effected a junction with
our gangway, allowing some nameless official to come on board, and to go
through I know not what mysterious and indispensable formality. Other
boats then came, like a shoal of little fishes around the carcass of
a giant whale. There were many negroes, together with whites of every
grade; and some of our number, leaning over the side, saw for the first
time the raw material out of which Northern Humanitarians have spun so
fine a skein of compassion and sympathy.
Now we who write, and they for whom we write, are all orthodox upon this
mighty question; we have all made our confession of faith in private and
in public; we all, on suitable occasions, walk up and apply the match to
the keg of gun-powder which is to blow up the Union, but which, somehow,
at the critical moment, fails to ignite. But you must allow us one
heretical whisper,--very small and low. The negro of the North is an
ideal negro; it is the negro refined by white culture, elevated by white
blood, instructed even by white iniquity;--the negro among negroes is a
coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick-skulled creature, ugly as Caliban,
lazy as the laziest of brutes, chiefly ambitious to be of no use to any
in the world.
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