“Yet, if thine own, thy children’s life, be dear,
  Buy not a Cormantee, though healthy, young,
  Of breed too generous for the servile field: 
  They, born to freedom in their native land,
  Choose death before dishonorable bonds;
  Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hour
  Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,
  And thine own poniard bury in thy breast.”

All these kinds of negroes, and many others whom it would be tedious to mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another.  The delighted negroes went to mass as to their favorite Calenda; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness, appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great Gree-gree; the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their midnight serpent-worship.  The priests were white men, for the negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error.  The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day’s toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds.  But the curates declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper.  On the whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the noises in a church.  He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite.  What elevating influence could there be in the Colonial Church for these children of Nature, who were annually reinforcing Church and Colony at a frightful pace with heathenism?  Twenty or thirty tribes of pagans were imported at the rate of twenty thousand living heads per annum, turned loose and mixed together, with a sense of original wrong and continual cruelty rankling amid their crude and wild emotions, and prized especially for their alleged deficiency of soul, and animal ability to perform unwholesome labor.  Slavery never wore so black a face.  The only refining element was the admixture of superior tribes, a piece of good-fortune for the colony, which the planter endeavored as far as possible to miss by distributing the fresh cargoes according to their native characters.  A fresh Eboe was put under the tutelage of a naturalized Eboe, a Jolof with a Jolof, and so on:  their depressed and unhealthy condition upon landing, and their ignorance of the Creole dialect, rendered this expedient.[J]