"Hung be the Heavens in Black"
We have sometimes wondered that the North did not get sick and tired of the everlasting negro it is now a full quarter of a century since Sambo may be said to have become a young man in Northern circles, and he has gone on, gradually increasing his popularity, until, for the last ten years, nothing else except themselves has been heard or talked of in Yankeedom. Even the conservative clears, whilst abstaining from any active measures for their liberation, were as Odericus as Desdemona to hear everything pertaining to the daily lives of there fascinating creature; and Harper's Magaxins was embellished monthly with any number of negro pictures from the pencil of Ports Crayon, a Virginia artist, now in the Yankee army. There were so many old niggers and young niggers, big niggers and little niggers, fat niggers and lean niggers, uncles and aunties, drivers, coach men, cooks, field hands, house servants, and fishermen, that it was a wonder to us how even Abolition appetite could stomach such monotony. The color of black is very good in the place but artists should use it as sparingly as Nature.--Neither in the flower garden, the forest, the field, nor the flood, does black out such a figure as in Harper's Magazines. Among man it is the color only of that race which is nearest the animal, and was affixed to them by the hand of the Almighty as a punishment of the of their ancestors. It is a badge of universal and perpetual servitude. --It has been so from the beginning, and, in spite of philanthropists, it will be so to the end.Yet, the morbid appetite of New England seems never to grow weary of its pet sables. White is lasipid. Even blue, though the color of the Heavens, whose stars ware copied from the United States flag; and of the ocean whose every wave is tributary to her keels is not to be thought of in comparison of black. The red men, who never could be made a slave, New England slew for that very reason. The Canossian type, which has produced all that is great in the world's history, is thrust aside from its regards to give place to the lowest type of humanity — to a race which never produced one great mind in any department of intellectual exertion.
Is not this an extraordinary appetite? Are the people who manifest it in their light tenses? Is here any way of accounting for such devotion to the Ethiop, except the "rich jewel in the Ethiop's ear," which after all may attract them more than the car to which it is attached? If they can supply the place of their own while labor by cheaper negro labor, black may well become their favorite wear. That experiment they are now trying, but they will turn as black themselves before it succeeds as the carcases of their countrymen on the Chickahominy beneath the burning guns of last June.
