white race itself. It surely argues no great power or stability
in a people when they are not able to keep themselves from being
mixed up with a confessedly inferior race. But facts point in
a wholly different direction: so far from freedom promoting this
intermixture, the only condition in which these two races are found
mingling is where the negro is in a state of servitude. Here the
process goes on freely and under the working of natural causes. The
influences which on either side under other circumstances make it
impossible, here become inoperative, and are overborne by other and
more powerful ones. The close intimacies, beginning with infancy
and extending over the whole life, destroying what under other
circumstances might seem to be a natural separation; a servile desire
to please on the part of the slave, lust and cupidity on the part
of the master, all combine to make the blood of the two races flow
in the same veins. Slavery is the source of amalgamation. The
mulatto and the quadroon tell you unerringly of a present or a
former servitude.

With this pliant ductility and this permanence of race, there is
another striking characteristic;--the negro's attachment to place.
It is probably a natural trait, but from easily perceived causes it
is perhaps intensified in the case of the American negro. He loves
his home and seldom goes willingly away from it, whether slave or
free. The number of fugitives from bondage would be prodigiously
multiplied were this feeling more easily overcome. Many a poor
bondman has turned back to slavery when the hard alternative has
been forced upon him to remain in it or go forever away from the
familiar and dear scenes of his childhood's home. It is necessity
scarcely less powerful than death that compels him to leave them
behind.