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.
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