Time to Emancipate the Negro

Time to Emancipate the Negro

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: This article was submitted in 1998 to the “Southern National Newsletter” of the Southern National Party. The quotations are from How the World Was Peopled: Ethnological Lectures by Edward Fontaine(New York, 1872).]

Reverend Edward Fontaine was a New York professor of theology and natural science during the nineteenth century. He was a Negrophile, but unlike twentieth-century Negrophiles, he had a realistic and loving attitude towards Negroes instead of the politically correct maudlin and paternalistic attitude of the twentieth century. He had “tough love” for Negroes instead of an over mothering attitude that treats them as an infantile race as is done today.

In a lecture that he gave in 1872, we said the following about the Negroes who were emancipated following the War:

The immediate effect of their emancipation in the Southern States has been to diminish their number fearfully. On one healthy plantation in Hinds County, Mississippi, from 1860 to 1865, there had occurred among fifty of the negro slaves only six deaths in five years. They were generally pious members of different churches, and had been the slaves of the same Christian family, as their ancestors had been before them for several generations. They were emancipated, and left their owners in May, 1865, and, before January, 1868, only nineteen of the original fifty were alive. The [sic] most of the children had died, and only a few others were born. They were generally excellent servants. But their condition was changed. They were in competition with the whites, and they died; how, and by what causes, I cannot say. I mention this as a representative, and not an exceptional, case of many others which have occurred under my own observation. (p. 176.)

According to his observations, most Negroes fared better under the cruelty of slavery than under the compassion of federal welfare.

After describing the price in wealth and lives expended to emancipate the Negro slaves, he describes all that had been done following their emancipation:

They are not only emancipated from slavery, after having been taught practically every kind of labor in agriculture, in mechanics, and in all the arts of our country, and instructed in all the forms and doctrines of Christianity, but they have been clothed with all the rights of citizens of the United States, and favored with peculiar and extraordinary privileges, such as were never conferred before upon any of the freemen of America. Special and liberal grants of money are made from the public Treasury for their education. They are now subjected to the fearful experiment of a competition in the race of life, for all its prizes, with the white people among whom they are mingled, with all the advantages in their favor. In addition to the strong support of the United States Government, they are also favored with the prayers and heart-felt good wishes of the Christians of every land for their success, and it may be safely asserted that they also have the sympathy and aid of their former masters. Surely they ought, under these favorable circumstances, to redeem the character of their race, and become a great and prosperous people. If they have been wronged by the people of the United States, all their wrongs have been thoroughly redressed. Never, since the emancipation of the Israelites and their settlement in the land of Canaan, have any people been so highly favored and abundantly blessed. (pp. 182-183.)

Never have a people since ancient times been more blessed than the American Negro. This Negrophile of 125 years ago [now 145 years ago] felt that the time had come to cut the apron strings and let the Negro stand on his own two feet. Instead the Negro has been pampered like a spoiled brat. Until the Negro stands on his own without special consideration, aid, or privileges, and in spite of any discrimination, real or perceived, he can never be a true man. The time is long past to do what Mr. Fontaine suggested should have been done 125 years ago [now 145 years ago]. The emancipation of the Negro is way overdue.

Copyright © 1998, 2021 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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