George Williams - History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (Vol. 1&2)

28Prichard, vol. ii. p. 44.

29Josephus, Antiq., lib. 2, chap. 6.

30Poole.

31Smyth's Unity Human Races, chap. II, p. 41.

32Herodotus, vii., 69, 70. Ancient Univ. Hist., vol. xviii. pp. 254, 255.

33Strabo, vol. I. p. 60.

34It is not wise, to say the least, for intelligent Negroes in America to seek to drop the word "Negro." It is a good, strong, and healthy word, and ought to live. It should be covered with glory: let Negroes do it.

35Journal of Ethnology, No. 7, p. 310.

36Pickering's Races of Men, pp. 185–89.

37Burckhardt's Travels, p. 341.

38Euterpe, lib. 6.

39Jeffries's Nat. Hist. of Human Race, p. 315.

40Types of Mankind, p. 259.

41Types of Mankind, p. 262.

42Even in Africa it is found that Negroes possess great culture. Speaking of Sego, the capital of Bambara, Mr. Park says: "The view of this extensive city, the numerous, canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilization and magnificence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa." See Park's Travels, chap. ii.

Mr. Park also adds, that the population of this city, Sego, is about thirty thousand. It had mosques, and even ferries were busy conveying men and horses over the Niger.

43See Ambassades Mémorables de la Companie des Indes orientales des Provinces Unies vers les Empereurs du Japan, Amst., 1680; and Kaempfer.

44Wilkinson's Egypt, vol. iii. p. 340.

45Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus, p. 91. Dr. William Jones, vol. iii., p. 377.

46Asiatic Researches, vol. vi. pp. 436–448.

47Heber's Narrative, vol. i. p. 254.

48Nat. Hist. of the Human Species, pp. 209, 214, 217.

49Asiatic Researches, vol. i. p 427. Also Sir William Jones, vol. iii. 3d disc.

50Nat. Hist. Human Species, p. 126.

51Prichard, pp. 188–219.

52Matt. xxiii. 4.

53Discours sur la cause physicale de la couleur des nègres.

54Earth and Man. Lecture x. pp. 254, 255.

55Blumenbach, p. 107.

Table of Contents

The Ancient and High Degree of Negro Civilization.—Egypt, Greece, and Rome borrow from the Negro the Civilization that made them Great.—Cause of the Decline and Fall of Negro Civilization.—Confounding the Terms "Negro" and "African."

It is fair to presume that God gave all the races of mankind civilization to start with. We infer this from the known character of the Creator. Before Romulus founded Rome, before Homer sang, when Greece was in its infancy, and the world quite young, "hoary Meroe" was the chief city of the Negroes along the Nile. Its private and public buildings, its markets and public squares, its colossal walls and stupendous gates, its gorgeous chariots and alert footmen, its inventive genius and ripe scholarship, made it the cradle of civilization, and the mother of art. It was the queenly city of Ethiopia—for it was founded by colonies of Negroes. Through its open gates long and ceaseless caravans, laden with gold, silver, ivory, frankincense, and palm-oil, poured the riches of Africa into the capacious lap of the city. The learning of this people, embalmed in the immortal hieroglyphic, flowed adown the Nile, and, like spray, spread over the delta of that time-honored stream, on by the beautiful and venerable city of Thebes—the city of a hundred gates, another monument to Negro genius and civilization, and more ancient than the cities of the Delta—until Greece and Rome stood transfixed before the ancient glory of Ethiopia! Homeric mythology borrowed its very essence from Negro hieroglyphics; Egypt borrowed her light from the venerable Negroes up the Nile. Greece went to school to the Egyptians, and Rome turned to Greece for law and the science of warfare. England dug down into Rome twenty centuries to learn to build and plant, to establish a government, and maintain it. Thus the flow of civilization has been from the East—the place of light—to the West; from the Oriental to the Occidental. (God fixed the mountains east and west in Europe.)

"Tradition universally represents the earliest men descending, it is true, from the high table-lands of this continent; but it is in the low and fertile plains lying at their feet, with which we are already acquainted, that they unite themselves for the first time in natural bodies, in tribes, with fixed habitations, devoting themselves to husbandry, building cities, cultivating the arts—in a word, forming well-regulated societies. The traditions of the Chinese place the first progenitors of that people on the high table-land, whence the great rivers flow: they mike them advance, station by station as far as the shores of the ocean. The people of the Brahmins come down from the regions of the Hindo-Khu, and from Cashmere, into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges; Assyria and Bactriana receive their inhabitants from the table-lands of Armenia and Persia.

"These alluvial plains, watered by their twin rivers, were better formed than all other countries of the globe to render the first steps of man, an infant still, easy in the career of civilized life. A rich soil, on which overflowing rivers spread every year a fruitful loam, as in Egypt, and one where the plough is almost useless, so movable and so easily tilled is it, a warm climate, finally, secure to the inhabitants of these fortunate regions plentiful harvests in return for light labor. Nevertheless, the conflict with the river itself and with the desert—which, on the banks of the Euphrates, as on those of the Nile and the Indus, is ever threatening to invade the cultivated lands—the necessity of irrigation, the inconstancy of the seasons, keep forethought alive, and give birth to the useful arts and to the sciences of observation. The abundance of resources, the absence of every obstacle, of all separation between the different parts of these vast plains, allow the aggregation of a great number of men upon one and the same space, and facilitate the formation of those mighty primitive states which amaze us by the grandeur of their proportions.

"Each of them finds upon its own soil all that is necessary for a brilliant exhibition of its resources. We see those nations come rapidly forward, and reach in the remotest antiquity a degree of culture of which the temples and the monuments of Egypt and of India, and the recently discovered palaces of Nineveh are living and glorious witnesses.

"Great nations, then, are separately formed in each of these areas, circumscribed by nature within natural limits. Each has its religion, its social principles, its civilization severally. But nature, as we have seen, has separated them; little intercourse is established between them; the social principle on which they are founded is exhausted by the very formation of the social state they enjoy, and is never renewed. A common life is wanting to them: they do not reciprocally share with each other their riches. With them movement is stopped: every thing becomes stable and tends to remain stationary.

"Meantime, in spite of the peculiar seal impressed on each of these Oriental nations by the natural conditions in the midst of which they live, they have, nevertheless some grand characteristics common to all, some family traits that betray the nature of the continent and the period of human progress to which they belong, making them known on the one side as Asiatic, and on the other side as primitive." 56

Is it asked what caused the decline of all this glory of the primitive Negro? why this people lost their position in the world's history? Idolatry! Sin! 57

Centuries have flown apace, tribes have perished, cities have risen and fallen, and even empires, whose boast was their duration, have crumbled, while Thebes and Meroe stood. And it is a remarkable fact, that the people who built those cities are less mortal than their handiwork. Notwithstanding their degradation, their woes and wrongs, the perils of the forest and dangers of the desert, this remarkable people have not been blotted out. They still live, and are multiplying in the earth. Certainly they have been preserved for some wise purpose, in the future to be unfolded.