It’s probably not surprising that, in valorizing the Self, Carlyle turned violently against the Other. In 1849, sixteen years after Britain abolished slavery, he wrote an Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.

In it, Carlyle warned the world against the perils of abolition—this was fourteen years before Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation—describing black freedmen in Jamaica “with their beautiful muzzles up to their ears in pumpkins…while the sugar crops rot around them, uncut.”²⁸ To his mind, these former slaves weren’t at fault exactly. Like other beasts of burden, they inclined to torpor without the “beneficent whip.”²⁹ So he directed most of his anger toward those Millian philanthropists and utilitarians who with “rosepink sentimentalism” and “all-bewildering jargon”³⁰—words like benevolence and fraternity—had tried to persuade the public of a dangerous illusion: that pain might be abolished.

Since time immemorial, Carlyle wrote, the West Indies had “produced mere jungle, savagery, poison reptiles and swamp malaria,” and they would have remained in that state without colonization. Of the native islanders, he went on to write, “till the white European first saw them, they were as if not yet created.”³¹

The first settlers were heroes in the grand mold; they didn’t just have a warrior’s ability to subdue but could also create. With manful industry, they had tamed the “pestiferous jungle” and made it bear sweet sugar cane. In the face of such power, freedom and benevolence fell away.