Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 28

2. William Aikman, The Future of the Colored Race in America: Being an Article in the Presbyterian Quarterly Review, of July, 1862 (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1862). (35 p.)

Essay identifying emancipation as a war aim in addition to saving the Union. “He, then, who does not take slavery into the account in this thinking on this war, has not begun to get a glimpse of what it means; he who leaves it out in the settlement of it, will not advance a step.” Nevertheless, the author has no sympathy for African Americans as representatives of their race. “Thus, with this further reduction [as a result of being captors in Africa], you have in the African as he comes to the slave-ship, the lowest specimen of an inferior type of his people.” Mr. Stone has marked many passages of this pamphlet as they relate to the inferiority of people with pure African ancestry. However, the author sets persons of mixed-race ancestry apart, a point that Mr. Stone notes with vertical lines in the margin. “The energy, the fire, and activity, the ingenuity and perseverance of the Anglo-Saxon, joined to the plastic docility of the African, is a strange combination, yet one which may be seen every day, and which when made free and permitted to exert its unrestrained power, will be of unmeasured value. The mulatto makes a very bad slave, Anglo-Saxon blood being never intended to run in the veins of a voluntary bondman, but will be a noble freeman.”