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William Priest - Travels in the United States of America
certain, that whatever day makes a man a slave, takes half his worth away.' But the slaves Homer speaks
of were whites.
"But to return to the blacks. Notwithstanding this consideration, which must weaken their respect for the
laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity; and as many as
among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.
"The opinion that they are inferiour in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with
great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion requires many observations, even where the subject may
be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, to analysis by fire or solvents: how much more,
then, when it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the
senses; where the conditions of it's existence are various, and variously combined; where the effects of
those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, in a circumstance where our
conclusions would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings, which their Creator
may perhaps have given them! To our reproach it must be said, though for a century and a half we have
had under our eyes the races of black and red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of
natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks[Footnote: Where Jefferson
makes use of the word Black, in this extract, it is rigidly confined to the Negroes
originally from the coast of Africa, or their descendants.], whether originally a distinct race, or made so
by time and circumstances, are inferiour to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."
* * * * *
Boston, December 29th, 1796.
DEAR FRIEND,
Upon my arrival here, I had once more the mortification to find myself in the neighbourhood of the
yellow fever, which had lately been imported. The uncommon, early, and severe north-west winds
entirely prevented it from spreading; a fortunate circumstance for the inhabitants of Boston, as, from the
narrowness of their streets, great population, and other circumstances, it must have been very fatal, had it
not been by this means destroyed.
In order to give you the most regular account of this disorder I could procure, I must repeat several
circumstances from former letters.
The yellow fever, which has lately been so fatal, is a new disorder, first brought to the West
Indies, in a slave-ship from the coast of Africa, late in the year 1792. It spread rapidly from island to
island, and in July, 1793, was first imported to the continent in a french schooner to Philadelphia. The
physicians of that city, naturally concluding it was the usual yellow fever of the West Indies, applied the
common remedies in that case: viz., bark, and other astringents. In nine cases out of ten, death was the
inevitable consequence to all who took these medicines. The disease was equally fatal to the faculty. A
universal despondency took place, till doctor Rush, suspecting this was a new disorder, applied an
opposite method of cure, by mercurial medicines, and copious bleedings; which, when administered in
the first or second stage of the disorder, had the desired effect.
I send you an extract from the doctor's pamphlet, wherein he explains his motives for adopting this
method of cure, &c.
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