The Return of Good Feeling [pp. 557-562]

RETURN OF GOOD FEELING.
from it, great difficulties present themselves to our minds, which
nothing but the current of events and the light of future experience will enable us to solve. The negroes already out-number the
whites along the ocean and Gulf coasts, and up to the heads of
all our navigable rivers except the Mississippi, and even
on that river they out-number them from Memphis to the
Gulf. These regions include most of the fertile land
ill the South. But the climate is malarious and unhealthy
for whites, whilst it is admirably adapted to negroes. It
has little water power, and no coal or iron mines; and hence is
neither adapted to the carrying on of manufactures, nor to cultivation by the whites. Besides, white laborers will not settle
where from the sparseness of white population, they can have little
society, few churches, no schools for their children, and be, moreover exposed to the competition and association with negro laborers. Under present circumstances, it is vain to expect immigration to these malarious, but fertile regions.-except negro immigration, and they are crowding down upon us much faster than
is needed or desirable. Instead of benefiting the South, we are
doing it sad and permanent injury by sending agents to decoy immigrants to our section. Man is something more than an animal
that wishes to fill his ]elly with the least possible amount of labor,
and if he were nothing more, he could live with half the labor at
the Northwest that he can live here. The European immigrants
who come to the South, under our present circumstances, will
meet with sad failure and disappointment, and their fate and example will deter future immigration when we may be better prepared to receive them. That is when the negro shall be remitted
to his appropriate condition as common laborer, and white immigrants may profit by employing him as such. The fertile portions
of the South are only fitted for the habitation of a very few wealthy
and extensive landholders, and for numerous horndes of hireling negroes. The rest of our white population should and will migrate
to other lands, unless some means can be discovered by which
our fertile malarious regions can be rendered fit and desirable residences for others than large landholders and negroes. We confess we can see or propose no such measures. For us, with our
present lights and experiences, it seems inevitable that the blacks
will crowd in such numbers on the fertile regions of the South, and
the whites so desert them, that in a short time the negroes, as in
Jamaica, will out-number the whites as twenty to one-and then
the negroes will rise in rebellion, massacre most of the whites, and
try to expel the rest. The attempt will prove, after oceans of
bloodshed, abortive. But how are we to prevent the attempt.
We call upon the collective wisdom of the nation to solve the
difficulty. It is equally the interest of North and South that savage hordes of negroes shall not seize upon the rich lands of the
South, convert them into mere forests and hunting grounds, arid
seize upon our rivers, exclude the whites from navigating them,
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