February 2, 1861; The New York Herald
The statistics of the colored population in New York, which we published the other day, must suggest to every thinking mind the inferiority of condition which characterizes the negro race in the free States, as compared with the African living under the Southern system of servitude. Since 1850 the total population of the city has increased some three hundred thousand, while in the same time the negro population, black and mulatto, has decreased from 13,815 in 1850 to 10,831 in the present year – a falling off of nearly three thousand in a single decade. At this rate of decrease the whole free negro population of the country will have vanished in half a century from now, unless preserved by some unusual migration from the Southern States. Out of the ten thousand negroes now in the metropolis, only eighty five own any real estate, and not quite eight hundred own personal estate. They have completely abandoned all employments requiring active manual labor, and are to be found for the most part in the position of waiters and domestic servants, and the females in the capacity of washerwomen and laundresses. A negro mechanic is a rarity – the whole number in the city not reaching eighty; and in any higher pursuit there are none to be found, excepting fourteen clergymen of different persuasions, eight physicians, eight musical professors and seventeen teachers.
In the wards where they are the most numerous they form the very lowest stratum of society; in the Fifth ward especially prostitution and indiscriminate intercourse between the sexes is the common rule of life. The number of mulattoes among the colored population shows the immorality of the female portion in a very marked manner, considering that only thirty two cases of intermarriages with white women are returned by the census marshals, and not one case of intermarriage between a white man and a black woman. Of the thirteen thousand colored people in the metropolis, nevertheless, no less than three thousand are the offspring of black and white parents, and the census shows that more than five sixths of them were born in free States, and most of them in this city.
These facts prove that the negroes in the much lauded condition of freemen are descending in the scale of civilization and diminishing in numbers. No such results can be deduced from the statistics of the negro in Southern servitude. The very converse of the picture is presented there. The negro of the South is physically strong and sound, healthy and fruitful, happy, contented, and, in many cases, moral and religious; increasing in numbers year by year, and never exposed to the vicissitudes of poverty. There is something in this to induce philosophical reflection. It is the best answer that can be made to the fanatical outcry about the equal right of the black man and the white to perfect liberty and a joint civilization.