songs are the coinage of an occasion, and not the free note of nature.
The slave sang of griefs he was not allowed to discuss, hence his songs.
This cheerfulness has enabled the Negro to live and increase under
circumstances which, in all other instances, have decimated, if not
exterminated, inferior peoples. His plasticity to moulding forces and his
resiliency against crushing ones come from a Thalian philosophy,
unconscious and unstudied, that extracts Epicurean delights from funeral
meats.

The above traits are inborn and fundamental, belonging to the race
everywhere, in Africa as well as America. Strict correctness requires,
however, that attention be called to the fact that there are tribal
differences among African Negroes that amount almost to the national
variations of Europe; and these are reflected in American Negroes, who are
the descendants of these different tribes. There is as much difference
between the Mandingo and the Hottentot, both black, as between the Italian
and the German, both white; or between the Bushman and the Zulu, both
black, as between the Russian and the Englishman, both white. Scientific
exactness, therefore, would require a closer analysis of racial
characteristics than an article of this length could give; but, speaking
in a large way, it may be said that in whatever outward conformity may
come to the race in America by reason of training or contact, these traits
will lie at the base, the very warp and woof of his soul texture.

If, now, we turn to consider his inbred traits, those the result of
experience, conditions and environments, we find that they exist mainly as
deficiencies and deformities. These have been superimposed upon the native
soul endowment. Slavery has been called the Negro's great schoolmaster,
because it took him a savage and released him civilized; took him a
heathen and released him a Christian; took him an idler and released him a