When a great continent has been thus ransacked to stock a little farm, the qualities which meet are so various, and present such lively contrasts, that the term African loses all its application.  From the Mandingo, the Foulah, the Jolof, through the Felatahs, the Eboes, the Mokos, the Feloups, the Coromantines, the Bissagos, all the sullen and degraded tribes of the marshy districts and islands of the Slave Coast, and inland to the Shangallas, who border upon Southwestern Abyssinia, the characters are as distinct as the profiles or the colors.  The physical qualities of all these people, their capacity for labor, their religious tendencies and inventive skill, their temperaments and diets, might be constructed into a sliding scale, starting with a Mandingo, or a Foulah such as Ira Aldridge, and running to earth at length in a Papel.

The Mandingoes of the most cultivated type seldom found their way to the West Indies.  But if ever slave became noticeable for his temperate and laborious habits, a certain enterprise and self-subsistence, a cleanly, regular, and polished way, perhaps keeping his master’s accounts, or those of his own private ventures, in Arabic, and mindful of his future, he was found to be a Mandingo.  Their States are on the Senegal; Arabic is not their language, but they are zealous Mohammedans, and have schools in which the children learn the Koran.  The men are merchants and agriculturists; they control the trade over a great extent of country, and the religion also, for the Koran is among the wares they carry, and they impose at once the whole form of their social condition.  These Northern African nations have been subjected to Arab and Moorish influence, and they make it plain that great movements have taken place in regions which are generally supposed to be sunk in savage quiescence.  The Mandingoes, notwithstanding a shade of yellow in the complexion, are still negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood.  Their features are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace.  Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type.  Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside.  But what a history lies between the Fetichism which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship of one God without image or symbol!

In the administration of justice, some classes of their criminals are sold into slavery, and occasionally a Mandingo would be kidnapped.  But there are many Mandingoes who are still pagans, and know nothing of Arabic or commerce, yet who have the excellences of the dominant tribes:  these were found in the gangs of the slave-merchant.