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Title: The negro: the southerner's problem
Author: Thomas Nelson Page
Release Date: May 22, 2023 [eBook #70834]
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM
THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM
BY
THOMAS NELSON PAGE
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK :::::::: 1904
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published, November, 1904
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
TO
ALL THOSE WHO TRULY WISH TO HELP
SOLVE THE RACE PROBLEM, THESE
STUDIES ARE RESPECTFULLY
DEDICATED
INTRODUCTORY
In this volume of essays relating to one of the most vital and
pressing problems which has ever confronted a people, no pretence is
made that the subject has been fully discussed. All that is claimed
is that an attempt is made, after years of study and of more or less
familiarity with some phases of the Problem, to present them plainly,
candidly and, as far as possible, temperately. It is not even claimed
that this is wholly possible. No man can entirely dissociate himself
from the conditions amid which he grew up, or free himself from the
influences which surrounded him in his youth. The most he can do is
to strive earnestly for an open and enlarged mind and try to look at
everything from the highest and soundest standpoint he can reach. If
he does this and tries to tell the truth absolutely as he sees it,
though he may not have given the exact truth, he will, possibly, have
done his part to help others find it.
It is not claimed that the author is absolutely correct in all of
his propositions. Sometimes the information on which they are based
is, possibly, incorrect; the classification of facts incomplete or
inexact; and, no doubt, his deductions are occasionally erroneous;
but no proposition has been advanced for which he does not believe he
has sound authority; no fact has been stated without what appears to
him convincing proof, and whatever error his deductions contain may
readily be detected, as they are plainly stated.
Although it has appeared at one time or another that the race
question was in process of settlement, yet always, just when that
hope seemed brightest, it has been dashed to the ground, and the
Question has reappeared in some new form as menacing as ever. In
fact, it is much too weighty and far-reaching to be disposed of in
a short time. Where ten millions of one race, which increases at a
rate that doubles its numbers every forty years, confront within
the borders of one country another race, the most opposite to it on
earth, there must exist a question grave enough in the present and
likely to become stupendous in the future. Next to Representative
Government, this is to-day the most tremendous question which faces
directly one-third of the people of the United States, and only less
immediately all of them. It includes the labor question of the South,
and must, in time, affect that of the whole country. It does more; it
affects all those conditions which make life endurable and, perhaps,
even possible in a dozen States of the Union. Wherever it exists, it
is so vital that it absorbs for the time being all the energies of
the people, and excludes due consideration of every other question
whatsoever.
In dealing with this Question in the past, nearly every mistake that
could possibly be made has been made, and to-day, after more than
thirty-five years of peace and of material prosperity, the Question
is apparently as live as it was over a generation ago, when national
passion was allowed to usurp the province of deliberation, and the
Negro was taught two fundamental errors: first, that the Southern
white was inherently his enemy, and, secondly, that his race could be
legislated into equality with the white.
One unfortunate fact is that that portion of the white race living at
a distance from the region where the Problem is most vital have been
trained to hold almost universally one theory as to the Question,
while the portion who face the problem every day of their lives have
quite solidly held a view absolutely the opposite.
A singular feature of this difference in the views held by the two
sections is that whatever Southerners have said about conditions
at the South relating to the Negroes has usually been received
incredulously at the North, and it is only when some Northerner
has seen those conditions for himself and found the views of the
Southerners to be sound that those views were accepted. Thus, we have
had exhibited the curious fact that evidence upon a most vital matter
has been accepted rather with reference to the sectional status of
the witness than to his opportunity for exact knowledge.
A Southerner may be a high-minded and philanthropic gentleman, whose
views would be sought and whose word would be taken on every other
subject; he may be carrying his old slaves as pensioners; he may
treat the weakest and worst of them with that mingled consideration
and indulgence which is so commonly to be found in the South; but if
he expresses the results of a lifetime of knowledge of the Negro’s
character, it counts for nothing with a large class who fancy
themselves the only friends of the Negro.
The reason for this has, undoubtedly, been the belief held by many
Northerners that the Southerners were inherently incapable of doing
justice to the negroes. Happily for the proper solution of the
question, except with that portion of the people who belong to the
generation to whom the Baptist cried in the wilderness, this state
of mind is more or less passing away, and men of all sections are
awakening to the need for a proper solution.
In this discussion, one thing must be borne in mind: In
characterizing the Negroes generally, it is not meant to include
the respectable element among them, except where this is plainly
intended. Throughout the South there is such an element, an element
not only respectable, but universally respected. To say that Negroes
furnish the great body of rapists, is not to charge that all Negroes
are ravishers. To say that they are ignorant and lack the first
element of morality, is not to assert that they all are so. The race
question, however, as it exists in the South, is caused by the great
body of the race, and after forty years in which money and care have
been given unstintedly to uplift them, those who possess knowledge
and virtue are not sufficient in number and influence to prevent the
race question from growing rather than diminishing.
De Tocqueville, more than a century ago, declared that he was obliged
to confess that he did not regard the abolition of slavery as a means
of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern States.
Thomas Jefferson pronounced the same view, and declared that they
must be separated. In the light of modern conditions, it would appear
as though, unless conditions change, these views may be verified. It
may even be possibly true, as some believe, that, with the present
increase of the two races going on, whether the Negro race be
educated and enlightened or not, the most dangerous phases of the
problem would still exist in the mere continuance together of the two
races.
It is with the hope of throwing some light on this great Question
that these studies have been made.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SLAVERY AND THE OLD RELATION BETWEEN
THE SOUTHERN WHITES AND BLACKS 3
II. SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES 29
III. ITS PRESENT CONDITION AND ASPECT, AS
SHOWN BY STATISTICS 56
IV. THE LYNCHING OF NEGROES—ITS CAUSE
AND ITS PREVENTION 86
V. THE PARTIAL DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE
NEGRO 120
VI. THE OLD-TIME NEGRO 163
VII. THE RACE QUESTION 205
VIII. OF THE SOLUTION OF THE QUESTION 286
THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM
THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM
CHAPTER I
SLAVERY AND THE OLD RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUTHERN WHITES AND BLACKS
I
Among the chief problems which have vexed the country for the last
century and threaten to give yet more trouble in the future, is what
is usually termed “The Negro Question.” To the South, it has been
for nearly forty years the chief public question, overshadowing all
others, and withdrawing her from due participation in the direction
and benefit of the National Government. It has kept alive sectional
feeling; has inflamed partisanship; distorted party policies; barred
complete reconciliation; cost hundreds of millions of money, and
hundreds if not thousands of lives, and stands ever ready, like
Banquo’s ghost, to burst forth even at the feast.
For the last few years it has appeared to be in process of being
settled, and settled along the lines which the more conservative
element of the white race at the South has deemed for the permanent
good of both races, a view in which the best informed element at the
North apparently acquiesced. The States which the greater part of the
most ignorant element of the Negro race inhabited had substantially
eliminated this element from the participation in political
government, but had provided qualifications for suffrage which would
admit to participation therein any element of the race sufficiently
educated to meet what might to an impartial man appear a reasonable
requirement.[1] Meantime, the whites were taxing themselves heavily
and were doing all in their power to give the entire race the
education which would enable them to meet this requirement.
Those whites who know the race best and hold the most far-reaching
conception of the subject maintain that this disfranchisement was
necessary, and, even of the Negro race, those who are wisest and
hold the highest ideal for their people acquiesced in this—at least,
to the extent of recognizing that the Negroes at large needed a
more substantial foundation for full citizenship than they had yet
attained—and were preaching and teaching the imperative necessity
of the race’s applying its chief energies to building itself up
industrially.
The South, indeed, after years of struggle, considered that the
question which had confronted it and largely affected its policy
for more than a third of a century was sufficiently settled for the
whites to divide once more on the great economic questions on which
hang the welfare and progress of the people. Suddenly, however, there
has been a recrudescence of the whole question, and it might appear
to those who base their opinion wholly on the public prints as though
nothing had been accomplished toward its definite settlement in the
last generation.
Only the other day, the President extended a casual social invitation
to the most distinguished educator of the colored race: one who is
possibly esteemed at the South the wisest and sanest man of color
in the country, and who has, perhaps, done more than any other
to carry out the ideas that the Southern well-wishers of his race
believe to be the soundest and most promising of good results. And
the effect was so unexpected and so far-reaching that it astonished
and perplexed the whole country. On the other hand, this educator,
speaking in Boston to his race in a reasonable manner on matters as
to which he is a high authority, was insulted by an element, the
leaders of which were not the ignorant members of his race, but
rather the more enlightened—college-bred men and editors—and a riot
took place in the church in which he spoke, in which red pepper and
razors were used quite as if the occasion had been a “craps-game” in
a Southern Negro settlement. The riot was quelled by the police; but,
had it been in a small town, murder might easily have been done.
In view of these facts, it is apparent that the matter is more
complicated than appears at first thought, and must be dealt with
carefully.
One great trouble is the different way in which the body of the
people at the North and at the South regard this problem. We have
presented to us the singular fact that two sections of the same race,
with the same manners and customs, the same traits of character, the
same history and, until within a time so recent that the divergence
is within the memory of living men, the same historical relation to
the Negro race, should regard so vital a question from such opposite
points; the one esteeming the question to be merely as to the legal
equality of the races, and the other passionately holding it to be
a matter that goes to the very foundation of race-domination and
race-integrity. What adds to the anomaly is the pregnant fact that
the future of these two sections must hereafter run on together;
their interests become ever more and more identified, and if the
one is right in holding that its position is founded on a racial
instinct, the other, in opposing it, is fighting against a position
which it must eventually assume. Yet, their views have up to the
present been so divergent—they have, indeed, been so diametrically
opposed to each other, that if one is right, the other must be
radically wrong.
Another difficulty in the way of a sound solution of the problem is
the blind bigotry of the doctrinaire, which infects so many worthy
persons. An estimable gentleman from Boston, of quite national
reputation, observed a short time ago that it was singular that the
Southerners who had lived all their lives among the Negroes should
understand them so little, while they of the North who knew them so
slightly should yet comprehend them so fully. He spoke seriously and
this was without doubt his sincere belief. This would be amusing
enough were it not productive of such unhappy consequences. It
represents the conviction of a considerable element. Because they
have been thrown at times with a few well-behaved, self-respecting
Negroes, or have had in their employ well-trained colored servants,
they think they know the whole subject better than those who, having
lived all their life in touch with its most vital problems, have
come to feel in every fibre of their being the deep significance of
its manifestations. Such a spirit is the most depressing augury that
confronts those who sincerely wish to settle the question on sound
principles.
With a Negro population which has increased in the last forty years
from four and a half millions to nine millions, of whom eight
millions inhabit the South and four and a half millions inhabit the
six Southern Atlantic and Gulf States, where in large sections they
outnumber the whites two and three to one, and in some parishes ten
to one;[2] with this population owning less than 4 per cent. of the
property and furnishing from 85 to 93 per cent. of the total number
of criminals; with the two races drifting further and further apart,
race-feeling growing, and with ravishing and lynching spreading like
a pestilence over the country, it is time that all sensible men
should endeavor as far as possible to dispel preconceived theories
and look at the subject frankly and rationally.
It must appear to all except the doctrinaire and those to whose eyes,
seared by the red-hot passions of the war and the yet more angry
passions of the Reconstruction period, no ray of light can ever come,
that it is of vital importance that a sound solution of the problem
should be reached. It behooves all who discuss it to do so in the
most dispassionate and catholic spirit possible. The time has passed
for dealing with the matter either in a spirit of passion or of
cocksure conceit. Well-meaning theorists, and what Hawthorne termed
“those steel machines of the devil’s own make, philanthropists,”
have with the best intentions “confused counsel” and made a mess of
the matter. And after nearly forty years, in which money, brains,
philanthropy, and unceasing effort have been poured out lavishly,
the most that we have gotten out of it is the experience that forty
years have given, and a sad experience it is. The best-informed,
the most clear-sighted and straight-thinking men of the North admit
sadly that the experiment of Negro suffrage, entered into with so
much enthusiasm and sustained at so frightful a cost, has proved a
failure, as those who alone knew the Negro when the experiment was
undertaken prophesied it must, in the nature of things, prove. Only
those who, having eyes, see not, and ears, but will not hear, still
shut up their senses and, refusing to take in the plain evidences
before them, babble of outworn measures—measures that never had a
shred of economic truth for their foundation, and, based originally
upon passion, have brought only disaster to the whites and little
better to those whom they were intended to uplift.
II
Two principles may be laid down to which, perhaps, all will assent.
First, it is absolutely essential that a correct understanding of the
question should be had; and, secondly, the only proper settlement of
it is one that shall be founded on justice and wisdom—a justice which
shall embrace all concerned.
It is important that, at the very outset, we should start with proper
bearings. Therefore, though it would hardly appear necessary to
advert to the historical side of the question, yet so much ignorance
is displayed about it in the discussion that goes on, that, perhaps,
the statement of a few simple historical facts will serve to throw
light on the subject and start us aright.
* * * * *
Until a recent period, slavery existed as an institution almost
all over the world. Christianity, while it modified its status,
recognized it, and, up to the time of the abolition of the
institution, those who defended it drew their strongest arguments
from the sacred writings. Pious Puritans sent their ships to ply
along the middle passage, and deemed that they were doing God and man
a service to transport benighted savages to serve an enlightened
and Christian people. Pious and philanthropic churchmen bought these
slaves as they might have bought any other chattels.
The abolition of slavery came about gradually, and was due rather to
economic than to moral reasons. When, in 1790, slavery was abolished,
by a more or less gradual system, in the Northern States, it was
chiefly because of economic conditions. There were at that time
less than 42,000 slaves in all the Northern States, and the system
was not profitable there; whereas there were over 700,000 slaves
in the Southern States, and it appeared that the system there was
profitable. But the balance had not then been struck.
Though a respectable party of the representatives of the Southern
States advocated its abolition at that time, it was retained because
of economic conditions. From these facts, which are elementary, one
cannot avoid the conclusion that whatever difference existed in
the relation of the races in various sections was due to economic
causes rather than to moral or religious feeling. In fact, during
the Colonial period, so far from slavery having any moral aspect
to the great body of the people, it was generally regarded as
a beneficent institution. The Quakers, a sect who, having known
oppression themselves, knew how to feel for the oppressed, and a
small proportion of the most far-seeing in both sections, were
exceptions. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was as strong an advocate
of emancipation as James Otis and a much stronger advocate than John
Adams.[3]
When the principle that all men are created equal was enunciated
in the Declaration of Independence, a great majority of those who
signed it had no idea of embracing within its category the enslaved
Africans. To have done so would have been to stultify themselves. And
whether or not Thomas Jefferson at heart felt the far-reaching scope
of his enunciation, he gave no evidence of it at the time.
The Negro was discussed and legislated about as a chattel by the very
men who issued that great charter. The whites had conquered this
country from the savage and the wild, and they had no misgivings
about their rights.
The inclusion of three-fifths of the Negroes in the representation of
the several States was stated by Jefferson to have grown out of the
claim made by Adams and certain other Northern representatives that
they should be taxed just as the whites were taxed, every slave being
counted for this purpose just as every white laborer was counted.
This view the Southerners opposed and the matter was adjusted by a
compromise which reckoned only three out of every five slaves.[4]
Representation naturally followed.
It was, however, impossible that the spirit of liberty should be
so all-pervading and not in time be felt to extend to all men—even
to the slaves; but the growth of the idea was slow, and it was so
inextricably bound up with party questions that it was difficult to
consider it on its own merits. To show this, it is only necessary to
recall that, in 1832, Virginia, through her Legislature, came within
one vote of abolishing slavery within her borders, and that, in 1835,
William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by
a mob—an outrage which he says was planned and executed, not by the
rabble or workingmen, but “by gentlemen of property and standing from
all parts of the city.”[5]
Fugitive-slave laws found their first examples in the colonial
treaties of Massachusetts; yet in time fugitive-slave laws and the
attempt to enforce them against the sentiment of communities where
slavery had passed away played their part in fostering a sentiment of
championship of the Negro race.
Then came “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was the nail that, in the hands
of a woman, fastened Sisera to the ground. It presented only one side
of the question and did more, perhaps, than any one thing that ever
occurred to precipitate the war. It aroused and crystallized feeling
against the South throughout the world. For the first time, the world
had the imaginable horrors of slavery presented in a manner that
appealed alike to old and young, the learned and the ignorant, the
high-born and the lowly. It blackened the fame of the Southern people
in the eyes of the North and fixed in the mind of the North a concept
not only of the institution of slavery, but of the Southern people,
which lasted for more than a generation, and has only begun of late,
in the light of a fuller knowledge, to be dislodged.[6]
III
Mr. Lincoln has been so generally declared to be the emancipator
of the Negro race that it is probable the facts in all their
significance will never be generally received. The abolition of
slavery was no doubt his desire; but the preservation of the Union
was his passion. And, whatever Mr. Lincoln may have felt on the
subject of emancipation, he was too good a lawyer and too sound a
statesman to act with the inconsiderate haste that has usually been
accredited him. It was rather what he might do than what he actually
did that alarmed the South and brought about secession. And the
menace of destruction of the Union soon demanded all his energies and
forced him to relegate to the background even the emancipation of the
slaves.[7]
On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded,
he declared that the South would be in no more danger of being
interfered with as to slavery by a Republican administration than it
was in the days of Washington. In his inaugural address he declared:
“I have no more purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with
the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I
believe I have no right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.”
This declaration he had already made before. Indeed, he expressly
declared in favor of the enforcement of the fugitive-slave law.
Congress, in July, 1861, adopted a resolution, which Lincoln signed,
declaring that war was not waged for any “purpose of overthrowing
or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of
the Southern States, “but to defend and maintain the supremacy of
the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity,
equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc. As late
as March, 1862, he declared: “In my judgment, gradual and not sudden
emancipation is best for all.” The special message to Congress on
this subject Thaddeus Stevens stigmatized as “about the most diluted
milk-and-water gruel proposition that has ever been given to the
American people.” The war had been going on more than a year before
a bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels,
found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union,
should not be returned to their masters (as had hitherto been done
under the law), and they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.”
Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, expresses
on its face that it was issued on “military necessity.”
In fact, this proclamation did not really emancipate at all, for it
applied only to those slaves who were held in those States and “parts
of States” then “in rebellion,” and by express exception did not
extend to Negroes within the territory under control of the Federal
Government.
It is of record that, in some instances, owners near the Federal
lines sent their servants into the territory occupied by the Federal
troops to evade the proclamation.
A story is told of an officer under General Butler, on the James
River, who, having a Negro baby left on his hands by a refugee mother
who had returned to her home, sent the child back to her. Someone
reported that he was sending refugee Negroes back and the matter was
investigated. His defence was that he had sent the baby back to the
only place where he was free, to wit: within the region occupied by
the rebels.
Meantime, there was much reflection and no little discussion as to
the subject among the Southern people. The loyalty of the Negroes had
made a deep impression on them, and they were beginning to recognize
the feeling of the European countries touching slavery.[8]
The Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery) failed to pass in
the spring of 1864 and was not passed until January 31, 1865, when
all the Republicans and thirteen Democrats voted for it. Slavery,
however, was abolished by the final conquest of the South and the
enforced acquiescence of the Southern people, who recognized that
the collapse of the Confederacy had effected what legal enactments
had not been able to accomplish. Returning soldiers brought their
body-servants home with them, and on arrival informed them that they
were free; in some instances giving them the horses they had ridden,
or dividing with them whatever money they had.[9] Throughout the
South, the Negroes were told by their owners that they were free, in
some cases receiving regular papers of manumission.
IV
No race ever behaved better than the Negroes behaved during the war.
Not only were there no massacres and no outbreaks, but even the
amount of defection was not large. While the number who entered the
Northern Army was considerable,[10] it was not as great as might
have been expected when all the facts are taken into account. A
respectable number came from the North, while most of the others came
from the sections of the South which had already been overrun by
the armies of the Union and where mingled persuasion and compulsion
were brought to bear.[11] Certainly no one could properly blame
them for yielding to the arguments used. Their homes were more or
less broken up; organization and discipline were relaxed, and the
very means of subsistence had become precarious; while on the other
hand they were offered bounties and glittering rewards that drew
into the armies hundreds of thousands of other nationalities. The
number that must be credited to refugees who left home in the first
instance for the purpose of volunteering to fight for freedom is
believed by the writer to be not large; personally, he never knew
of one. However large the number was, the number of those who might
have gone, and yet threw in their lot with their masters and never
dreamed of doing otherwise, was far larger. Many a master going
off to the war intrusted his wife and children to the care of his
servants with as much confidence as if they had been of his own
blood. They acted rather like clansmen than like bondmen. Not only
did they remain loyal, but they were nearly always faithful to
any trust that had been confided to them. They were the faithful
guardians of their masters’ homes and families; the trusted agents
and the shrewd counsellors of their mistresses. They raised the crops
which fed the Confederate armies, and suffered without complaint the
privations which came alike to white and black from the exactions of
war. On the approach of the enemy, the trusted house servants hid
the family silver and valuables, guarded horses and other property,
and resisted all temptation to desert or betray. It must, of course,
rest always on conjecture; but the writer believes that, had the
Negro been allowed to fight for the South, more of them would have
volunteered to follow their masters than ever volunteered in the
service of the Union. Many went into the field with their masters,
where they often displayed not only courage but heroism, and,
notwithstanding all temptations, stood by them loyally to the end. As
Henry Grady once said, “A thousand torches would have disbanded the
Southern Army, but there was not one.”[12]
The inference that has been drawn from this is usually one which
is wholly in favor of the colored race. It is, however, rather a
tribute to both races. Had slavery at the South been the frightful
institution that it has ordinarily been pictured, with the
slave-driver and the bloodhound always in the foreground, it is
hardly credible that the failure of the Negroes to avail themselves
of the opportunities for freedom so frequently offered them would
have been so general and the loyalty to their masters have been so
devoted.
One other reason is commonly overlooked. The instinct for command of
the white race—at least, of that section to which the whites of this
country belong—is a wonderful thing: the serene self-confidence which
reckons no opposition, but drives straight for the highest place, is
impressive. It made the race in the past; it has preserved it in our
time. The Negroes knew the courage and constancy of their masters.
They had had abundant proof of them for generations, and their
masters were now in arms.
The failure of a servile population to rise against their masters in
time of war is no new thing. History furnishes many illustrations.
Plutarch tells how the besiegers of a certain city offered, not only
freedom to the slaves, but added to it the promise of their masters’
property and wives if they would desert them. Yet the offer was
rejected with scorn. During the Revolution, freedom on the same terms
was offered the slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas by the British,
but with little effect, except to inflame the masters to bitterer
resistance.[13] The result was the same during the Civil War.
V
The exactions of the war possibly brought the races nearer together
than they had ever been before. There had been, in times past,
some hostile feeling between the Negroes and the plain whites, due
principally to the well-known arrogance of a slave population toward
a poor, free, working population. This was largely dispelled during
the war, on the one side by the heroism shown by the poor whites, and
on the other by the kindness shown by the Negroes to their families
while the men were in the army. When the war closed, the friendship
between the races was never stronger; the relations were never more
closely welded. The fidelity of the Negroes throughout the war was
fully appreciated and called forth a warmer affection on the part
of the masters and mistresses, and the care and self-denial of the
whites were equally recognized by the Negroes. Nor did this relation
cease with the emancipation of the Negro. The return of the masters
was hailed with joy in the quarters as in the mansion. When the
worn and disheartened veteran made his last mile on his return from
Appomattox, it was often the group of Negroes watching for him at the
plantation gate that first caught his dimmed eye and their shouts of
welcome that first sounded in his ears.
A singular fact was presented which has not been generally
understood. The joy with which the slaves hailed emancipation did
not relax the bonds of affection between them and their former
masters and mistresses. There was, of course, _ex necessitate rei_,
much disorganization, and no little misunderstanding. The whites,
defeated and broken, but unquelled and undismayed, were unspeakably
sore; the Negroes, suddenly freed and facing an unknown condition,
were naturally in a state of excitement. But the transition was
accomplished without an outbreak or an outrage, and, so far as the
writer’s experience and information go, there were on either side
few instances of insolence, rudeness, or ill-temper, incident to the
break-up of the old relation. This was reserved for a later time,
when a new poison had been instilled into the Negro’s mind and
had begun to work. Such disorders as occurred were incident to the
passing through the country of disbanded troops, making their way
home without the means of subsistence, but even these were sporadic
and temporary.
For years after the war the older Negroes, men and women, remained
the faithful guardians of the white women and children of their
masters’ families.[14]
One reason which may be mentioned for the good-will that continued to
exist during this crisis, and has borne its part in preserving kindly
relations ever since, is that, among the slave-owning class, there
was hardly a child who had not been rocked in a colored mammy’s arms
and whose first ride had not been taken with a Negro at his horse’s
head; not one whose closest playmates in youth had not been the young
Negroes of the plantation. The entire generation which grew up during
and just after the war grew up with the young Negroes, and preserved
for them the feeling and sympathy which their fathers had had before
them. This feeling may hardly be explained to those who have not
known it. Those who have known it will need no explanation. It
possibly partakes somewhat of a feudal instinct; possibly of a clan
instinct. It is not mere affection; for it may exist where affection
has perished and even where its object is personally detested.
Whatever it is, it exists universally with those who came of the
slave-holding class in the South, who knew in their youth the Negroes
who belonged to their family, and, no matter what the provocation,
they can no more divest themselves of it than they can of any other
principle in their lives.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See chapter on “The Disfranchisement of the Negro.”
[2] The Negro population in 1860 was, in the Slave States, 4,215,614;
in the other States it was 226,216, a total of 4,441,830. In 1900 the
Negro population in the Southern States and the District of Columbia
was 8,081,270.
[3] By the census of 1781, there were in Virginia 12,866 free Negroes.
[4] See Randolph’s “Life of Jefferson,” Vol. I, pp. 22-24.
[5] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” Vol. II, p. 35, and
_Liberator_, No. 5, p. 197.
[6] An illustration of this may be found in T. W. Dwight’s paper
on the Dred Scott case in Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia, where
he refers to the fact that, in the Dred Scott case, Chief Justice
Taney’s learned opinion, reviewing historically the attitude of the
people toward the African race at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution, has been generally taken as giving his own opinion.
Even the late senior Senator from Massachusetts was recently reported
as quoting this as Chief Justice Taney’s opinion. But see Tyler’s
“Life of Chief Justice Taney.”
[7] Horace Greeley’s old paper, the _New York Tribune_, has recently,
in commenting on a statement made by the successor of Henry Ward
Beecher, felt compelled to declare that the war was primarily
undertaken to save the Union and not to emancipate slaves. But the
strongest single piece of testimony is Lincoln’s letter to Horace
Greeley of Aug. 22, 1862. Lincoln’s paramount object, as he boldly
avowed in this letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley, was “to
save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.”—Cong.
Globe, 2d Session, 37th Congress, Pt. II, p. 1154.
[8] General R. E. Lee emancipated his servants within eight days
after the proclamation was issued. On the 8th of January, 1863,
he wrote from his camp that he had executed and returned to his
lawyer a deed of manumission which he had had prepared by him. He
had discovered the omission of certain names and had inserted them.
And he added that if any other names had been omitted, he wished a
supplementary deed drawn up containing all that had been so omitted.
“They are all entitled to their freedom,” he writes, “and I wish to
give it to them. Those that have been carried away, I hope, are free
and happy. I cannot get their papers to them and they do not require
them. I will give them if they call for them.” See “Life of General
R. E. Lee,” by Fitzhugh Lee.
General Henry A. Wise, one of the most ultra-Democratic leaders in
the South, states that, had the South succeeded in its struggle,
he had intended to set his slaves free and canvass Virginia for
the abolition of slavery. See Report of Joint Commission on
Reconstruction, 1st Session, 39th Congress, p. 70.
[9] The writer recalls vividly one such case when his father returned
from Appomattox: “Ralph,” he said, as he dismounted at his door, “you
are free. You have been a good servant. Turn the horses out.” Ralph
is still living.
[10] The total number of colored troops enlisted during the war was
186,097.—“Statistical Records of the Armies of the United States,” by
Frederick Phisterer, late Captain, U. S. A.
[11] There was a growing sentiment in favor of enlisting the Negroes
to fight the Confederacy, and a number of regiments were enlisted.
One of these was enlisted in New Orleans; two were enlisted in
Virginia.
[12] The writer never heard of a body-servant deserting, and he knows
of sundry instances when they had abundant opportunity. In some cases
they would vanish for days and then reappear, laden with spoils that
they had gotten from the enemy. The body-servant of the writer’s
father, having been punished for some dereliction of duty while
before Petersburg, in 1865, ran away, but though he could easily have
crossed through the lines not three miles away, he walked sixty miles
and came home.
[13] Trevellyan’s “History of the American Revolution,” Part 2, Vol.
I.
[14] During the disorders following the war, the older Negroes at the
writer’s home were armed and stood guard over the ripened crops.
CHAPTER II
SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES
Such was the relation between the whites and the blacks of the South
when emancipation came. It remains now to show what changes have
taken place since that time; how these changes have come about, and
what errors have been committed in dealing with the Race-question
which still affect the two races.
The dissension which has come between the two races has either
been sown since the Negro’s emancipation or is inherent in the new
conditions that have arisen.
When the war closed, and the emancipation of the Negroes became an
established fact, the first pressing necessity in the South was
to secure the means of living; for in sections where the armies
had been the country had been swept clean, and in all sections the
entire labor system was disorganized. The internal management of the
whole South, from the general government of the Confederate States
to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the
slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces.
In most instances—indeed, in all of which the writer has any
knowledge—the old masters informed their servants that their homes
were still open to them, and that if they were willing to remain and
work, they would do all in their power to help them. But to remain,
in the first radiant holiday of freedom, was, perhaps, more than
could be expected of human nature, and most of the blacks went off
for a time, though later a large number of them returned.[15] In a
little while the country was filled with an army of occupation, and
the Negroes, moved partly by curiosity, partly by the strangeness
of the situation, and, perhaps mainly, by the lure of the rations
which the Government immediately began to distribute, not unnaturally
flocked to the posts of the local garrisons, leaving the fields
unworked and the crops to go to destruction.
From this time began the change in the Negroes and in the old
relation between them and the whites; a change not great at first,
and which never became great until the Negroes had been worked on by
the ignorant or designing class who, in one guise or another, became
their teachers and leaders. In some places the action of military
commanders had already laid the ground for serious misunderstanding
by such orders as those which were issued in South Carolina for
putting the Negroes in possession of what were, with some irony,
termed “abandoned lands.” The idea became widespread that the
Government was going to divide the lands of the whites among the
Negroes. Soon all over the South the belief became current that
every Negro was to receive “forty acres and a mule”; a belief that
undoubtedly was fostered by some of the U. S. officials. But, in
the main, the military commanders acted with wisdom and commendable
breadth of view, and the breach was made by civilians.
From the first, the conduct of the North toward the Negro was
founded on the following principles: First, that all men are equal
(whatever this may mean), and that the Negro is the equal of the
white; secondly, that he needed to be sustained by the Government;
and thirdly, that the interests of the Negro and the white were
necessarily opposed, and the Negro needed protection against the
white.
The South has always maintained that these were fundamental errors.
It appears to the writer that the position of the South on these
points is sound; that, however individuals of one race may appear the
equals of individuals of the other race, the races themselves are
essentially unequal.
The chief trouble that arose between the two races in the South
after the war grew out of the ignorance at the North of the actual
conditions at the South, and the ignorance at the South of the
temper and the power of the North. The North believed that the Negro
was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the
South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept
emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify
the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in
quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of
the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he
must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled
and compelled to work.
In fact, as ignorance of each other brought about the conditions
which produced the war between the sections, so it has brought about
most of the trouble since the war.
The basic difficulty in the way of reaching a correct solution of the
Negro problem is, as has been stated, that the two sections of the
American people have hitherto looked at it from such widely different
standpoints.
The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against
any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary
discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting
on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of
the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and
virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on
a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. The South,
in direct contact with the practical working of every phase of the
question, affected in its daily life by every form and change that
the question takes, resolutely asserts that the conception on which
that policy is predicated is fundamentally erroneous, and that this
policy would destroy not only the white race of the South, but even
the civilization which the race has helped to establish, and for
which it stands, and so, in time, would inevitably debase and destroy
the nation itself.
Thus, the South holds that the question is vastly more far-reaching
than the North deems it to be; that, indeed, it goes to the very
foundation of race preservation. And this contention, so far from
being a mere political tenet, is held by the entire white population
of the South as the most passionate dogma of the white race.
This confusion of definitions has in the past resulted in untold
evil, and it cannot be insisted on too often that it is of the utmost
importance that the truth, whatever it is, should be established.
When this shall be accomplished, and done so clearly that both
sides shall accept it, the chief difficulty in the way of complete
understanding between the sections will be removed. So long as the
two sections are divided upon it, the question will never be settled.
As soon as they unite in one view, it will settle itself on the only
sound foundation—that of unimpeachable economic truth.
To this ignorance and opposition of views on the part of the two
sections, unhappily, were added at the outset the misunderstandings
and passions engendered by war, which prevented reason having any
great part in a work which was to affect the whole future of the
nation. With a fixed idea that there could be no justice toward the
Negroes in any dealings of their former masters, all matters relating
to the Negroes were intrusted by the Government to the organization
which had recently been started for this very purpose under the
name of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was a subject which called for
the widest knowledge and the broadest wisdom, and, unhappily, both
knowledge and wisdom appeared to have been resolutely banished in the
treatment of the subject.
The basis of the institution of the Freedmen’s Bureau was the
assumption stated: that the interests of the blacks and of the whites
were necessarily opposed to each other, and that the blacks needed
protection against the whites in all cases. The densest ignorance of
the material on which the organization was to work prevailed, and
the personnel of the organization was as unsuited to the work as
could well be. With a small infusion of sensible men were mingled a
considerable element of enthusiasts who felt themselves called to
be the regenerators of the slaves and the scourge of their former
masters, and with these, a large element of reckless adventurers who,
recognizing a field for the exercise of their peculiar talents, went
into the business for what they could make out of it. Measures were
adopted which might have been sound enough in themselves if they had
been administered with any practical wisdom. But there was no wisdom
in the administration. Those who advised moderation and counselled
with the whites were set aside. Bred on the idea of slavery presented
in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and inflamed by passions engendered by the
war, the enthusiasts honestly believed that they were right in always
taking the side of the down-trodden Negro; while the adventurers,
gauging with an infallible appraisement the feelings at the North,
went about their work with businesslike methods to stir up sectional
strife and reap all they could from the abundant harvest. And of the
two, the one did about as much mischief as the other.
No statement of any Southern white person, however pure in life,
lofty in morals, high-minded in principle he might be, was accepted.
His experience, his position, his character, counted for nothing. He
was assumed to be so designing or so prejudiced that his counsel was
valueless.
It is a phase of the case which has not yet wholly disappeared, and
even now we have presented to us in a large section of the country
the singular spectacle of evidence being weighed rather by a man’s
geographical position than by his character and his opportunity for
knowledge.
This self-complacent ignorance is one of the factors which prevent
a complete understanding of the problem and tend to perpetuate the
errors which have cost so much in the past and, unless corrected, may
prove yet more expensive in the future.
The conduct of the Freedmen’s Bureau misled the Negroes and caused
the first breach between them and their former masters. Ignorance
and truculence characterized almost every act of that unhappy
time. Nearly every mistake that could be made was made on both
sides. Measures that were designed with the best intentions were so
administered as to bring these intentions to wreck.
On the emancipation of the slaves, the more enlightened whites of the
South saw quite as clearly as any person at the North could have
seen the necessity of some substitute for the former direction and
training of the Negroes, and schools were started in many places by
the old masters for the colored children.[16]
Teachers and money had come from the North for the education of
the Negroes, and many schools were opened. But the teachers, at
first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated the
good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they
might have accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust
in any case, for no people look with favor on the missionaries who
come to instruct them as to matters of which they feel they know
much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously
any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new
missionaries went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern
people. They lived with the Negroes, consorting with them, and
appearing with them on terms of apparent intimacy, and were believed
to teach social equality, a doctrine which was the surest of all
to arouse enmity then as now. The result was that hostility to
the public-school system sprang up for a time. In some sections
violence was resorted to by the rougher element, though it was of
short duration, and was always confined to a small territory.[17]
Before long, however, this form of opposition disappeared and the
public-school system became an established fact.
The next step in the alienation of the races was the formation of
the secret order of the Union League. The meetings were held at
night, with closed doors, and with pickets guarding the approaches,
and were generally under the direction of the most hostile members
of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The whites regarded this movement with
serious misgivings, as well they might, for, having as its basic
principle the consolidation of the Negro race against the white race,
it banded the Negroes in an organization which, with the exception
of the Confederate Army, was the most complete that has ever been
known in the South, and the fruits of which still survive to-day.
Without going into the question of the charges that the League
taught the most inflammatory doctrines, it may be asserted without
fear of question that its teaching was to alienate the Negroes from
the whites; to withdraw them wholly from reliance on their former
masters, and to drill into their minds the imperative necessity
of adherence to their new leaders, and those whom those leaders
represented.
Then came the worst enemy that either race had ever had: the
post-bellum politician. The problem was already sufficiently
complicated when politics were injected into it. Well might General
Lee say with a wise knowledge of men: “The real war has just begun.”
No sooner had the Southern armies laid down their guns and the
great armies of the North who had saved the Union disbanded, than
the vultures, who had been waiting in the secure distance, gathered
to the feast. The act of a madman had removed the wisest, most
catholic, most conservative, and the ablest leader, one whose last
thoughts almost had been to “restore the Union” by restoring the
government of the Southern States along constitutional lines; and
well the politicians used the unhappy tragedy for their purposes.
Those who had been most cowardly in war were bravest in peace, now
that peace had come. Even in Mr. Lincoln’s time the radical leaders
in Congress had made a strenuous fight to carry out their views, and
their hostility to his plan of pacification and reconstruction was
expressed with hardly less vindictiveness than they exhibited later
toward his successor.[18]
The Southern people, unhappily, acted precisely as this element
wished them to act; for they were sore, unquelled, and angry. They
met denunciation with defiance.
Knowing the imperative necessities of the time as no Northerner could
know them; fearing the effects of turning loose a slave population of
several millions, and ignorant of the deep feeling of the Northern
people; the Southerners hastily enacted laws regulating labor which
were certainly unwise in view of the consequences that followed, and
possibly, if enforced, might have proved oppressive, though they
never had a trial. Most of these laws were simply reënactments of
old vagrant laws on the statute books and some still stand on the
statute books; but they were enacted now expressly to control the
Negroes; they showed the animus of the great body of the whites, and
they aroused a deep feeling of distrust and much resentment among
the Northerners. And, finally, they played into the hands of the
politicians who were on the lookout for any pretext to fasten their
grip on the South.
The struggle just then became intensified between the President and
his opponents in Washington, with the Presidency and the control of
the Government as the stake, and with the South holding the balance
of power; and, unhappily, the Negroes appeared to the politicians
an element that could be utilized to advantage by being made the
“permanent allies” of what Mr. Stevens, Mr. Wade, and Mr. Sumner used
to term “the party of the Union.”
So, the Negro appeared to the politicians a useful instrument, and to
the doctrinaires “a man and brother” who was the equal of his former
master, and, if he were “armed with the weapon” of the ballot, would
be able to protect himself and would inevitably rise to the full
stature of the white.
A large part of the people of the North were undoubtedly inspired
by a missionary spirit which had a high motive beneath it. But
a missionary spirit undirected by knowledge of real conditions
is a dangerous guide to follow. And the danger was never better
illustrated than in this revolution. Doubtless, some of the
politicians were inspired partly by the same idea; but the major
portion had but one ruling passion—the securing of power and the
down-treading of the Southern whites.[19]
Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the
theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging
from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the
whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were
enfranchised.
It is useless to discuss the motives with which this was done. No
matter what the motives it was a national blunder; in its way as
great a blunder as secession.
It is not uncommonly supposed that Mr. Lincoln was the originator
of this idea. The weight of his name is frequently given to it
by the uninformed. Mr. Lincoln, however, was too level-headed and
clear-sighted a statesman ever to have committed so great a folly.
The furthest he ever went was in his letter to Governor Hahn, of
Louisiana, in which he “suggested” the experiment of intrusting
the ballot to “some of the colored people, for instance ... the
very intelligent,” and as a reward for those who had fought for the
Union.[20]
In fact, for a year or two after the war no one in authority dreamed
of investing the Negro race at once with the elective franchise.
This came after the South had refused to tolerate the idea of the
franchise being conferred on any of them, and after passions had
become inflamed.[21]
The eight years of Reconstruction possibly cost the South more than
the four years of war had cost her. To state it in mere figures,
it may be said that when the eight years of Negro domination under
carpet-bag leaders had passed, the public indebtedness of the
Southern States had increased about fourfold, while the property
values in all the States had shrunk, and in those States which were
under the Negro rule had fallen to less than half what they had been
when the South entered on that period. In Louisiana, for instance,
the cost of Negro rule for four years and five months amounted to
$106,020,337, besides the privileges and franchises given away to
those having “pulls,” and State franchises stolen. The wealth of
New Orleans shrank during these eight years from $146,718,790 to
$88,613,930, while real estate values in the country parishes shrank
from $99,266,083 to $47,141,699.[22]
In South Carolina and Mississippi, the other two States which were
wholly under Negro rule, the condition was, if anything, worse than
in Louisiana, while in the other Southern States it was not so bad,
though bad enough.
But the presentation of the statistics gives little idea of what the
people of the South underwent while their State Governments were
controlled by Negroes.
A wild Southern politician is said to have once truculently boasted
that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of the Bunker
Hill Monument. If the tradition is true, it was a piece of insolence
which naturally offended deeply the sentiment of the people of the
proud Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But this was mere gasconade.
Had he been able to carry out his threat, and then had he installed
his Negroes in the State-house of Massachusetts, and, by travesty
of law, filled the legislative halls with thieves and proceeded to
disfranchise the best and the proudest people of the Commonwealth;
then had he, sustained by bayonets, during eight years ridden
rough-shod over them; cut the value of their property in half;
quadrupled their taxes; sold out over twenty per cent. of the landed
property of the State for forfeiture; appointed over two hundred
Negro trial justices who could neither read nor write, put a Negro
on the bench of their highest court, and paraded through the State
something like 80,000 Negro militia, armed with money stolen from the
State, to insult and menace the people, while the whole South looked
coolly on and declared that this treatment was just; then might there
be a partial but not a complete parallel to what some of the States
of the South endured under Negro rule.
It is little wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and
carpet-bagger though he was, should have declared as he did in
writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan
and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[23]
The South does not hold that the Negro race was primarily responsible
for this travesty of government. Few reasonable men now charge
the Negroes at large with more than ignorance and an invincible
faculty for being worked on. But the consequences were none the less
disastrous.
The injury to the whites was not the only injury caused by the
reconstruction system. To the Negroes, the objects of its bounty, it
was no less a calamity.
However high the motive may have been, no greater error could have
been committed; nothing could have been more disastrous to the
Negro’s future than the teaching he thus received. He was taught
that the white man was his enemy when he should have been taught
to cultivate his friendship. He was told he was the equal of the
white when he was not the equal; he was given to understand that
he was the ward of the nation when he should have been trained in
self-reliance; he was led to believe that the Government would
sustain him when he could not be sustained. In legislation, he was
taught thieving; in politics, he was taught not to think for himself,
but to follow slavishly his leaders (and such leaders!); in private
life, he was taught insolence. A laborer, dependent on his labor, no
greater misfortune could have befallen him than estrangement from the
Southern whites. To instil into his mind the belief that the Southern
white was his enemy; that his interest was necessarily opposed to
that of the white, and that he must thwart the white man to the
utmost of his power, was to deprive him of his best friend and to
array against him his strongest enemy.
To the teachings which led the Negro to feel that he was “the ward
of the nation”; that he was a peculiar people whom the nation had
taken under its wing and would support and foster; and that he could,
by its fiat, be made the equal of the white, and would, by its
strong arm, be sustained as such, may, perhaps, be traced most of
the misfortunes of the Negro race, and, indeed, of the whole South,
since the war. The Negro saw the experiment being tried; he saw his
former master, who had been to him the type of all that was powerful
and proud, and brave, and masterful, put down and held down by the
United States Government, while he, himself, was set up and declared
his full equal. He is quick to learn, and during this period, when
he was sustained by the Government, he was as insolent as he dared
to be. The only check on him was his lurking recognition of the
Southerner’s dominant force.
The one thing that saved the Southerners was that they knew it
was not the Negroes but the Federal Government that held them in
subjection.
The day the bayonets were withdrawn from the South, the Negro power,
which but the day before had been as arrogant and insolent as ever in
the whole course of its brief authority, fell to pieces.
It is little less than amazing that the whites of the South should,
after all that they went through during the period of reconstruction,
have retained their kindly feeling for the Negroes, and not only
retained but increased their loyalty to the Union. To the writer, it
seems one of the highest tributes to the white people of the South
that their patriotism should have remained so strong after all they
had endured.
The explanation is that the hostility of the Southern people was
not directed so much against the United States or its Government,
to form which they had contributed so much and in which they had
taken so much pride, as against that element among the people of the
North that had always opposed them, particularly where slavery was
concerned. In seceding, the Southerners had acted on the doctrine
enunciated by so distinguished a Northerner as John Quincy Adams
in 1839, when he declared that it would be better for the States
to “part in friendship from each other than to be held together
by constraint,” and look forward “to form again a more perfect
friendship by dissolving that which could not bind, and to leave the
separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to
the centre,”[24] and now, slavery and secession having finally been
disposed of, they naturally and necessarily gravitated back to the
old feeling for the Union.
It is not less remarkable that, notwithstanding all the humiliation
they had to endure during the period of Negro domination, they
should still have retained their feeling of kindliness for the race.
The fact, however, was that they did not charge against the race
in general the enormities which were committed by them during that
period. However they might be outraged by their insolence and their
acts, they charged it rather against the leaders than against the
followers. The Southerners knew the Negroes; knew their weaknesses
and their merits, and knew how easily they were misled. And it was
always significant that though the Negroes universally followed their
leaders and, when they felt themselves in power, conducted themselves
with intolerable insolence, at other times they exhibited their old
kindliness, and no sooner was the instigation removed than they were
ready to resume their old relation of dependence and affection.
Indeed, those who had been the worst and most revolutionary had no
sooner sunk back into their former position of civility than they
were forgiven and treated with good-natured tolerance.[25]
With the overthrow of the carpet-bag governments, and the destruction
of Negro domination at the South, the South began to shoot up
into the light of a new prosperity. Burdened as she was by debt;
staggering under disasters that had well-nigh destroyed her; scarred
by the struggle through which she had gone, and scorched by the
passions of that fearful time, she set herself with all her energies
to recovering through the arts of peace her old place in the path
of progress. The burden she has borne has been heavy, but she has
carried it bravely and triumphantly.
Her property values have steadily increased. Mills have been started
and manufactories established, and this not only by Southern
investors, but, to a considerable extent, by Northern capital, until
the South has become one of the recognized fields for investment.
This, among other causes, has made the South restive under an
electorate which has confined her to one political party, shut her
off from ability to divide on economic questions, and which, to
a certain extent, withdrew her from her due participation in the
National Government. With this, another cause is the change of the
relation between the two races. It is useless to blink the question.
The old relation of intimacy and affection that survived to a
considerable extent even the strain and stress of the reconstruction
period, and the repressive measures that followed it, has passed
away, and in its place has come a feeling of indifference or contempt
on the one side, and indifference or envy on the other. In some
places, under some conditions, the old attitude of reliance and the
old feeling of affection still remain. For example, in many families,
the old relation of master and servant, of superior and retainer,
may still exist. In some neighborhoods or towns, individuals of
the colored race, by their ability and character, have achieved a
position which has brought to them the respect and sincere good-will
of the whites. A visit to the South will show anyone that, in the
main, the feeling of kindness and good-will has survived all the
haranguing of the politician and all the teaching of the doctrinaire.
Ordinarily, the children still play together, the men work together,
the elders still preserve their old good-will. The whites visit the
sick and afflicted, help the unfortunate, relieve the distressed,
console the bereaved, and perform the old offices of kindness. But
this is, to some extent, exceptional. It is mainly confined to the
very young, the old, or the unfortunate and dependent. The rule is a
changed relation and a widening breach. The teaching of the younger
generation of Negroes is to be rude and insolent. In the main, it
is only where the whites have an undisputed authority that the old
relation survives. Where the whites are so superior in numbers that
no question can be raised; or again, where, notwithstanding the
reversed conditions, the whites are in a position so dominant as not
to admit of question, harmony prevails.
When the relations are reversed there is danger of an outbreak.
The Negro, misled by the teaching of his doctrinaire friends into
thinking himself the equal of the white, asserts himself, and the
white resents it. The consequence is a clash, and the Negro becomes
the chief sufferer so invariably that it ought to throw some light on
the doctrine of equality.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] The same thing happened in Russia on the emancipation of the
serfs. See Kropotkin’s Memoirs.
[16] The writer knew personally of a number of these schools, which
began first as Sunday-schools immediately after the war. Indeed,
under the inspiration of a pious lady, the services of all the young
people in the neighborhood were called into requisition in the spring
of 1865, to help teach a Sunday-school for the Negro children, who
were at first taught their letters in the sand. A little later,
through the kindness of friends at the North, enough money was
secured to build a school-house, which still stands and was used at
first for a Sunday-school and afterward for a day-school.
[17] See Report of Congressional Committee in Government Ku-Klux
Trials.
[18] See “Reconstruction in the South During the War.”
[19] See Congressional debates and questions put to witnesses
before the various High Commissions organized by Congress for the
inquisition of affairs at the South, in 1865 and 1866.
[20] See Mr. Lincoln’s letter to Governor B. F. Hahn, January 13,
1864. This was at a time when it was necessary to have 10,000 votes
to reconstruct Louisiana.
[21] See chapter on “Disfranchisement of the Negro.”
[22] See “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 427.
[23] Governor Chamberlain has recently written an open letter to Mr.
James Bryce in which he espouses warmly the views held generally by
the Southern whites on this subject.
[24] See debates in Congress, April 3, 1839; January 23, 1842;
seq.: when John Quincy Adams presented a petition to Congress from
Haverhill, Mass., praying that Congress would “immediately adopt
measures possible to dissolve the union of the States.”
[25] For years, one of the popular paper-carriers of Richmond was a
certain Lewis Lindsay who, during the early period of reconstruction,
had been one of the most violent of the Negro leaders, and became
noted for a speech in which he declared that he wished to wade in
white blood up to his knees. In Charleston, another leader, equally
violent, later sold fish in the market, and among his customers were
the very persons toward whom he had once been so outrageous. In New
Orleans, another was a hostler. Such instances could readily be
multiplied.
CHAPTER III
ITS PRESENT CONDITION AND ASPECT, AS SHOWN BY STATISTICS
Having in the two previous papers undertaken to show the relation
between the whites of the South and the Negroes at the time of the
abolition of slavery, and having traced the change in that relation
and pointed out the mistakes which, in the writer’s opinion, were
mainly responsible for whatever trouble has since arisen between
them, it now remains to see what the present condition is; how far it
is attributable to those causes, and what promise the future holds of
amendment.
Thirty-eight years have passed since the Negro was set free and
became his own master. By sentimentalists and Negro writers and
orators, most of the Negro’s shortcomings are usually charged to
slavery, and undoubtedly slavery leaves certain traits which the
student can readily detect. But most of the class of writers referred
to ignore the fact that the Negro at the close of slavery was in a
higher condition of civilization than when he came a savage from the
wilds of Africa. Of slavery it may be said that it was the greatest
evil that ever befell this country. It kept the sections divided and
finally plunged the nation into a devastating civil war. This is
indictment enough. But to the Negro it was far from an unmixed evil.
This very period of slavery in America had given to him the only
semblance of civilization which the Negro race has possessed since
the dawn of history.
Whatever evils slavery may have entailed upon the Negro, this much
may unquestionably be predicted of it: it left him a trained laborer
and in good physical condition. He started in on a new era with a
large share of friendliness on the part of the South and with the
enthusiastic good-will of the North. He had little property, and not
more than two or three per cent. were able to read; but he commanded
the entire field of labor in the South, while a certain percentage,
composed of house-servants, had the knowledge which comes from
holding positions of responsibility and from constant association
with educated people.
When the war closed, among the four millions of Negroes who then
inhabited the South, there was, with the exception of the invalids,
the cripples, and the superannuated, scarcely an adult who was not
a trained laborer or a skilled artisan. In the cotton section they
knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew
how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay
belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops.
They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The
entire industrial work of the South was performed by them. They were
the trained domestic servants—laundresses, nurses, and midwives.
They were the carpenters, smiths, coopers, sawyers, wheelwrights,
bricklayers, and boatmen. They were the tanners and shoemakers,
miners and stonecutters, tailors and knitters, spinners and weavers.
Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They
manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South.
No exact statistics of the race at that time may be obtained, but
a reasonably approximate estimate may be made, based on the known
facts, as to the number of slave-holders, and the general relation
of house-servants, mechanics, etc., to the entire population. It
is known, for instance, that the slave-holder, whether he owned few
or many, invariably had his best slaves as domestic servants. It is
equally well known that the large plantations hired the services of
those on the larger estates.
In 1860 there were in the Southern States between five and six
hundred thousand slave-owners and slave hirers, and there were
four million and a quarter slaves, or about eight slaves to each
owner.[26] Of these slave-owners, perhaps, every one had at least
one house-servant, and most of them had several. Striking a mean
between the smaller slave-owner and the larger, it would probably
be found that the proportion of mechanics and artisans to the
entire population was about the same that it is in any agricultural
community, or, as the slave is known to be generally not as
industrious and efficient as the free workman, the percentage was
possibly higher than it is to-day in the West or in the agricultural
parts of the South. It is not pretended that this is more than
a conjecture, but it is a conjecture based upon what appears a
conservative estimate.
Since that time, according to the census of 1900, over $109,000,000
had been expended by the South on the Negro’s education, besides what
has been expended by private charity, which is estimated to amount to
$30,000,000.
The South has faithfully applied itself during all these years to
giving the Negroes all the opportunities possible for attaining
an education, and it is one of the most creditable pages in her
history that in face of the horror of Negro-domination during the
Reconstruction period; of the disappointment at the small results;
in face of the fact that the education of the Negroes has appeared
to be used by them only as a weapon with which to oppose the white
race, the latter should have persistently given so largely of its
store to provide this misused education. Of the $109,000,000 which
the Southern States have, since the war, applied to the education
of the Negro by voluntary taxation, over $100,000,000 was raised by
the votes of the whites from taxation on the property of the whites.
Several times of late years propositions have been made in various
legislatures in the South to devote the money raised by taxation of
the property of each race exclusively to the education of that race,
but in every case, to their credit be it said, the propositions have
been overwhelmingly defeated.[27] The total expenditure for public
schools in the South in the year 1898-1899 was $32,849,892, of which
$6,569,978 was to sustain Negro schools.
Inspection of the records will reveal something of the fruits of the
$140,000,000 expended on the education of the Negroes at the South,
and the rest must be learned from those who have studied the subject
at first hand.
It seems to the writer that one of the fundamental errors which have
inhered in all the discussion which has taken place on the Negro
question is in considering the Negroes as absolutely of one class.
A brief consideration of the matter will show on the contrary that
the colored population of the South, though they were, with the
exception of a few Arabs, all of Negro blood, were, when they came to
this country, of different tribes; and there were, even during the
time of slavery, and are yet more markedly now, grades among them:
grades of intellect, of character, and of ability, which point to,
if not varying racial, at least varying tribal forces. And however
they may all appear to herd together and look at most matters not
from an individual and rational, but from a racial standpoint, a
careful study will disclose certain distinctions which have the mark
of tribal distinctions, while others will show the elements of class
distinctions. These class distinctions, though still elementary, are
beginning to make themselves apparent.
The line of cleavage unhappily does not follow that of conduct or
good manners, much less that of character, but, perhaps, it may
approximate them more closely in time, and the upper class will learn
and cause it to be understood that conduct, character, and good
manners are the key to admission.
It is the intention of the writer in this discussion to recognize
this distinction, and, when he speaks of “the Negroes,” he desires
generally to be understood as referring to the great body of the
race, and not as including what may be termed the upper fraction—that
is, those who, by reason of intellect, education, and character,
form so clearly an exception that they must be considered as a
separate class.
The Negroes, indeed, may be divided into three classes.
The first is a small class, comparatively speaking, who are more or
less educated, some being well educated and well conducted; others,
with a semblance of education and none too well behaved. The former
constitute what may be termed the upper fraction; the latter possess
only a counterfeit culture and lack the essential elements of
character and even moral perception.
The second class is composed of a respectable, well-behaved,
self-respecting element; sensible, though with little or no
education, and, except when under the domination of passion, good
citizens. This class embraces most of the more intelligent of the
older generation who were trained in slavery, and a considerable
element of the intelligent middle-aged, conservative workers of the
race who were trained by that generation. The two together may be
called the backbone of the race.
The third class is composed of those who are wholly ignorant, or in
whom, though they have what they call education, this so-called
education is unaccompanied by any of the fruits of character which
education is supposed to produce. Among these are many who esteem
themselves in the first class, and, because of a veneer of education,
are not infrequently confounded with them.
The first two classes may easily be reckoned with. They contain the
elements which make good citizens and which should enable them to
secure all proper recognition and respect. They need no weapon but
that which they possess—good citizenship.
Unfortunately, the great body of the race, and a vast percentage of
the growing generation, belong to the third class. It is this class
which has to be reckoned with.
It is like a vast sluggish mass of uncooled lava over a large section
of the country, burying some portions and affecting the whole. It is
apparently harmless, but beneath its surface smoulder fires which
may at any time burst forth unexpectedly and spread desolation all
around. It is this mass, increasing from beneath, not from above,
which constitutes the Negro question.
In the discussion that takes place in the periodical press and in
conventions relating to the progress of the colored race, a great
deal is made of the advance of the race since the abolition of
slavery. It is asserted that the race has accumulated many hundreds
of millions of dollars. Just how much, it is difficult to say.
Authorities differ widely. The last Negro member of Congress,[28] in
a speech delivered in the House of Representatives on January 29,
1901, undertook to give the advance of his race in the thirty-two
preceding years. “Since that time,” he says, “we have reduced the
illiteracy of the race at least 45 per cent. We have written and
published nearly 500 books. We have nearly 300 newspapers, three of
which are dailies. We have now in practice over 2,000 lawyers and a
corresponding number of doctors. We have accumulated over $12,000,000
worth of school property and about $40,000,000 of church property. We
have about 140,000 farms and homes valued at in the neighborhood of
$750,000,000, and personal property valued at about $170,000,000....
We have 32,000 teachers in the schools of the country. We have built,
with the aid of our friends, about 20,000 churches, and support 7
colleges, 17 academies, 50 high schools, 5 law schools, 5 medical
schools, and 25 theological seminaries. We have over 600,000 acres of
land in the South alone.”
It might be assumed that, as he was glorifying his race, this is
the outside estimate of what they have accomplished, had not other
colored leaders and teachers since that time asserted that these
figures are far too low. To the writer these estimates would appear
grossly exaggerated. Certainly the educational achievement of which
they boast cannot justly be attributed, in the main, to the Negro
race. The white race furnished 95 per cent. of the money for the
schools, and a yet larger proportion for the colleges.
It is stated that “before the war the South had a free Negro
population in excess of a quarter of a million souls,” and, according
to an estimate which has been made by one of the distinguished
members of the race, the value of property owned by free Negroes was
between $35,000,000 and $40,000,000.[29] Although the exact amount
must be based somewhat on conjecture, it is certain that there were
a considerable number of free Negroes in the country at that time
who owned considerable property. Some of those in the South were
land-owners and slave-owners, while of the 226,216 who lived outside
of the slave States, a fair proportion were well-to-do. According
to the report of a Commission appointed by Mr. Lincoln in 1863 to
“examine and report upon the condition of the newly emancipated
Freedmen of the United States,” the Commission ascertained that the
free colored people of Louisiana in the year 1860 paid taxes on
an assessment of thirteen millions.[30] To this sum must be added
the amount that was accumulated during the Reconstruction period,
by other means than those of honest thrift. The residue marks the
advance of the Negro race in material progress.
Unhappily for those who claim that the Negro race has shown
extraordinary thrift since its emancipation thirty-eight years ago,
the records, when examined, fail to bear out the contention.
On the 29th of June, 1903, Mr. Charles A. Gardiner, of the New York
bar, delivered a notable address at Albany, before the Convocation
of the University of the State of New York, on a “Constitutional and
Educational Solution of the Negro Problem,” in which he presented
some remarkable statements relating to the condition of the Negroes.
He showed that, in 1890, the real and personal property of the
fifteen old slave States was $13,380,517,311, of which the blacks
owned only 3.3 per cent., an average of $64.20 per capita. The six
Atlantic and Gulf States had $3,215,127,929, of which the blacks
owned only 3.5 per cent., an average of $28.60 each. The writer has
tried to obtain the later statistics, but has not been successful
in securing complete statistics, owing to the fact that the United
States Census Bureau has not yet completed its calculations touching
this subject, and because many of the States do not keep separately
the records of the property owned by the whites and Negroes. He has,
however, secured from the records of the States of Arkansas, Georgia,
North Carolina, and Virginia, where the records are kept separately,
the statistics showing the actual and relative amount of property
owned by the Negroes for the year 1902:
ASSESSED VALUE OF ALL PROPERTY OWNED BY NEGROES.
———————————————————+—————————————+————————————————
| Population. | Assessed Value.
———————————————————+—————————————+————————————————
Arkansas | 366,856 | $11,263,400[31]
Georgia | 1,034,813 | 15,188,069
North Carolina | 624,468 | 9,765,986
Virginia | 660,722 | 17,580,390
———————————————————+—————————————+————————————————
Total | 2,686,859 | $53,797,845
———————————————————+—————————————+————————————————
It is possible that the States of Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina,
and Virginia may be considered quite representative of the entire
South. The Negroes are believed to be as well off in these States as
in any others. The four States contain 2,686,859 Negroes, which is
30.39 per cent. of the entire Negro population of the whole United
States, and the statistics show that this 30.39 per cent. of the
entire Negro population own now, in real and personal property listed
for taxation, only $53,797,845, which is but $20.02 per capita. The
assessed value of property in the Southern States may be stated to
be generally, at least, three-quarters of the actual value.
In the interesting and valuable statistics as to “The Negro Farmer,”
compiled by Prof. W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University, we find a
great many interesting facts:
PROPORTION OF SLAVE OWNERS AND OF SLAVES IN THE POPULATION OF THE
SOUTH, 1850 AND 1860.
—————————————+———————————————————————+———————————+———————————
| Per Cent. Owners— | Per Cent. |
| Form of | Slaves— | Average
CENSUS YEAR. +———————————+———————————+ Form of |Number of
| Total | White | Total |Slaves per
|Population.|Population.|Population.| Owner.
—————————————+———————————————————————+———————————+———————————
1860 | 3.2 | 5.1 | 34.5 | 11
1850 | 3.7 | 5.8 | 34.7 | 9
—————————————+———————————————————————+———————————+———————————
“These figures show that the slaves formed about one-third of the
total population of that section, but that the owners of these slaves
formed only between 5 and 6 per cent. of the white population and
between 3 and 4 per cent. of the total population, the proportion
being even lower in 1860 than in 1850.
“In 1900 there were 187,799 farms owned by Negroes, which was 25.2
per cent. of all farms operated by Negroes. In 1900 Negro farmers
who owned all of the land they cultivated formed 83.3 per cent. of
all Negro owners.
“If an estimate of the probable total farm wealth of the Negro
farmers, June 1, 1900, be desired, the value of the live stock
on rented farms, of which a large share generally belongs to the
tenants, should be added. That value for the colored tenants was
$57,167,206. Adding this sum to the preceding total, it appears the
value, June 1, 1900, of the farm property belonging to Negroes was
approximately $200,000,000, or a little less than $300 for each Negro
farmer.
“This estimate, however, takes no account of property owned by
Negroes and rented out to either Negroes or whites.... Therefore, we
are probably justified in adding 15 per cent. to the above estimated
value of property owned by Negro farmers in continental United
States, thus bringing the total up to $230,000,000.
“The value of the land in farms of all colored owners in continental
United States in 1900—including the value of the supplementary land
rented, which, if we assume it to be of the same average value as the
rest, amounted to about $7,500,000—was $102,022,601. While some of
the land is very good, most of it is poor, being often practically
worn out or disadvantageously situated as regards a market.”[32]
Statistics relating to the number of farms, acreage, and value of all
farm property, including land, improvements, implements, machinery,
and livestock, may be found in the Twelfth Census and in the Census
Bulletin No. 8, relating to Negroes in the United States in 1900,
table 69, page 308.
In this table it is shown that the total number of farm-property
owners including Negro, Indian, and Mongolian farmers is 174,434,
owning land and improvements, implements, and machinery valued at
$150,557,251, and part owners, 30,501, owning $27,358,225.
Georgia has been not infrequently cited as a State in which the
Negro has thriven somewhat exceptionally. It contains more Negroes
than does any other State, having, by the census of 1900, 1,034,813
Negroes. In 1860 it contained 465,698, so that the Negroes have
since that time increased there at the rate of 142,279 every ten
years. The Bulletin of the Department of Labor, No. 35, July 1901,
contains a valuable paper by Prof. Du Bois on the Negro landholder
in Georgia, based on a close study of the conditions of the Negro
in that State. Among other matters he gives a table containing the
assessed value of all property owned by Negroes in Georgia from
1874 to 1900:
ASSESSED VALUE OF TOTAL PROPERTY OWNED BY NEGROES OF GEORGIA, 1874
TO 1900.
Year. Assessed Value.
1874 $6,157,798
1875 5,393,885
1876 5,488,867
1877 5,430,844
1878 5,124,875
1879 5,182,398
1880 5,764,293
1881 6,478,951
1882 6,589,876
1883 7,582,395
1884 8,021,525
1885 8,153,390
1886 8,655,298
1887 8,963,479
1888 9,631,271
1889 10,415,330
1890 12,322,003
1891 14,196,735
1892 14,869,575
1893 14,960,675
1894 14,387,730
1895 12,941,230
1896 13,292,816
1897 13,619,690
1898 13,719,200
1899 13,447,423
1900 14,118,720
From this table it will be found that the taxable values of all
the property owned by Negroes in Georgia in the year 1874 were
$6,157,798. In 1890 the Negro population was 858,815. In 1892 the
property valuation has risen to $14,869,575, and in 1900, when the
population was 1,034,813, it was only $14,118,720, or an actual
falling off, though the Negroes appear to have increased 23.9 per
cent. in this time.[33]
Such is the showing of statistics as to the advance marked by the
accumulation of property. It fails to bear out the claim that the
Negro race has shown remarkable progress along this line. It must be
further observed that in reporting the property holdings no account
is taken of the mortgages and other indebtedness of the property
owners.
But under this economic presentation lies a deeper question. What
have the thousands of churches and schools and colleges, maintained
at the cost of more than a hundred and fifty million dollars,
produced? What kind of men and women have they turned out? What
fruits have they brought forth, of moral stamina; of character; of
purity of life; of loftiness or even correctness of ideals? These are
the true tests of progress.
To reach a correct answer to these questions, we may inquire first:
Has the percentage of crime decreased in the race generally? Has the
wage-earning capacity of the race generally increased in proportion
to the rise of wages? Has the race generally improved, morally and
mentally? Is the relative position of the race to that of the white
race higher than it was?
Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen
notably since the era of emancipation. A proportion of the colored
population—that is, the upper fraction—have not only accumulated
property but have, mainly in the cities and towns, attained a higher
standing, based partly on property, partly on character, and partly
on intellectual advance. But, unless the universal testimony of
the white people of the South is unreliable, this rise is confined
largely to those regions where the Negroes have had the aid,
sympathy, and encouragement of the whites. And it appears to the
writer that this element is not as large as is generally assumed, and
that this very advance has separated them all the more widely from
the great body of the colored race. Study of the question, moreover,
discloses the fact that almost all of the intellectual advance in the
Negro race is confined to this upper fraction of the race; that,
perhaps, nine-tenths of the property accumulated has been accumulated
by this class and by the other fraction which belongs to the second
class who were trained in slavery, and that, measured by the ordinary
standards of character, intellect, and civic standing, the other
nine-tenths of the race, so far from advancing in any way, have
either stood stagnant or have retrograded.
According to the United States Census of 1890, the native white
criminals in the United States numbered 40,471; the native whites
whose parents were also native-born numbered 21,037; the Negro
criminals (whose parents were native) numbered 24,277.[34]
A comparison of the rural colored population will show that possibly
over ninety per cent. of the property now owned by the Negroes has
been accumulated by those who were either trained in slavery or grew
up immediately after the war, so that they received the beneficial
effects of the habits of industry in which their race was at that
time trained. It will show in the next place that the proportion of
convicts in the State penitentiaries in the Southern States from the
Negroes is from 85 to 93 per cent. of the total number of convicts
confined. In Louisiana the proportion is 85 per cent. of all State
criminals. In Alabama it is 85.4 per cent. In Florida, 86.4 per cent.
In Mississippi it is 91 per cent. In Georgia it is 90 per cent.,
and in South Carolina it is 93.2 per cent.[35] In the District of
Columbia, where the Negroes are assumed to have had exceptional
advantages and where possibly a certain element of them are as well
off as anywhere in the country, they furnished, a year or two ago, 86
per cent. of the criminals. Of these convicts, more than nine-tenths
have grown up since slavery was abolished.
Meantime, the Negro has retrograded as a workman until he has
not only lost the field in which he once had no rival, but is in
danger of losing even the ability to compete for its recovery. The
superiority of the older farmhands to the younger generation is so
universally asserted throughout the South that it must be given some
of the validity of general reputation. And whereas, as has been
shown, a generation ago all the mechanical work of the South was in
the hands of the Negroes, only a small proportion of it is done by
them to-day.
Fifteen years ago one of the suburbs of Richmond was largely built
up by a contractor whose foreman was a Negro. There was no question
raised about it. The foreman knew his business; had been raised among
the whites; knew how to get along with white men, and was respected
and esteemed by them. This was at that time not uncommon.
What is the situation now? The races are more widely divided than
ever before. White mechanics and Negro mechanics no longer work
together, generally, as of old. No contractor could do now what the
man who built “Barton Heights” did fifteen years ago. The number of
Negro carpenters and mechanics is greatly reduced; and the writer is
informed by intelligent Negroes that such work as they do is mainly
among their own people. The causes are not far to seek. It is partly
due to a failure of ability in the Negro to hold his place in the
struggle of competition, and partly to the changed relations between
him and the white. The old feeling of friendliness and amity has
waned, and in its room has come a cold indifference, if not actual
hostility. The new Negro has been taught that he is the equal of the
white, and he is always asserting it and trying to prove it by any
way but the right way—the equality of his work.
Washington City has ever since the time of emancipation appeared
a sort of Mecca to many of the Negro race. There, numbers of that
race have had opportunities which have been wanting to them in the
South, and there to-day may be found, perhaps, the best educated
element of the race to be found anywhere. Within the last year the
Negro organization known as the True Reformers built in that city a
handsome and expensive structure for the use of their race, and built
it wholly with Negro labor. When, however, the workmen competent to
do such work were sought, it was found necessary to go to the South
for them.
Yet even in the South the Negro artisan sufficiently trained to
compete now with his white rival is comparatively rare.
“The slave-disciplined mechanic has no successor in the ranks of the
freedmen....”[36]
So far, then, as statistics would indicate, the improvement that
exists among the Negroes is not shown by the race at large as is
usually alleged, but is shown, in the main, by the upper fraction.
This proposition is borne out also by the testimony of the great
majority of the Southern whites who live in constant touch with the
blacks; who have known them in every relation of life in a way that
no one who has not lived among them can know them. Universally, they
will tell you that while the old-time Negroes were industrious,
saving, and, when not misled, well-behaved, kindly, respectful, and
self-respecting, and while the remnant of them who remain still
retain generally these characteristics, the “new issue,” for the most
part, are lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and
without the most rudimentary elements of morality.
They unite further in the opinion that education such as they receive
in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears
to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or
their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they
report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large
in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling
a reversion to barbarism.
It is commonly assumed that progress, as applied to a class or a
race, signifies some advance in moral standing, or, at least, some
improvement in the elements of character on which morality is based.
It is unfortunate that the statistics in the field of morality cannot
be obtained; but in this field, as in others, the testimony of those
who have had the best opportunities for observation is all one way.
Southerners of every class and calling, without exception, bear
witness to the depressing fact that, leaving out the small upper
fraction, the Negro race has not advanced at all in morality.
Unhappily, the fountain is tainted at the source. The great body of
the race have scarcely any notion of the foundation principles of
pure family life. They appear not only to have no idea of morality,
but to lack any instinct upon which such an idea can be founded. It
is usually charged that slavery was responsible for the absence of
morality throughout the race. Some of the Negro writers even speak
of “the ancient African chastity” having been debauched by slavery.
Doubtless, during slavery there was a sufficient amount of immorality
to be the basis for almost any reasonable charge, yet study of the
question has convinced at least one investigator that the illicit
relations between the two races during the period of slavery have
probably been greatly exaggerated. He has come to believe further
that while illicit intercourse between the two races is less and,
perhaps, markedly less now than it was during the period of slavery,
the immorality of the great body of the Negro race has increased
since that time. That this immorality exists is the testimony not
only of the whites, but also of members of the race who have, with
an open mind, made a study of the conditions of their people.
Perhaps the most remarkable study of the Negro which has appeared
is the book entitled, “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal
Thomas, of Massachusetts. No inconsiderable part of its value is
owing to the fact that the author, a free colored man, has had both
the power to observe closely and the courage to record boldly the
results of his observations. In the chapter on “Moral Lapses,” the
author says: “All who know the Negro recognize, however, that the
chief and overpowering element in his make-up is an imperious sexual
impulse which, aroused at the slightest incentive, sweeps aside all
restraints in the pursuit of physical gratification. We may say now
that this element of Negro character constitutes the main incitement
to degeneracy of the race and is the chief hindrance to its social
uplifting....
“The Negro’s ethical code sternly reprobates dancing, theatre
attendance, and all social games of chance. It does not, however,
forbid lying, rum-drinking, or stealing. Furthermore, a man may trail
his loathsome form into the sanctity of private homes, seduce a wife,
sister, or daughter with impunity, and be the father of a score of
illegitimate children by as many mothers, and yet be a disciple of
holiness and honored with public confidence.”
His chapter on this subject will be, to those unfamiliar with it, a
terrible exposure of the depravity of the Negroes in their social
life, but it is only what those who have studied the subject know.
The curse of this frightful immorality is over the church and the
school, and gives no evidence of abatement.
“The simple truth,” admits the writer already quoted, “is that there
is going on side by side in the Negro people a minimum progress
with a maximum regress.” “It is, therefore,” he says,[37] “almost
impossible to find a person of either sex over fifteen years of age
who has not had carnal intercourse.” And again,[38] he declares:
“Marital immoralities, however, are not confined to the poor, the
ignorant, and the degraded among the freed people, but are equally
common among those who presume to be educated and refined.”
Unfortunately for the race, this depressing view is borne out by the
increase of crime among them; by the increase of superstition, with
its black trail of unnamable immorality and vice; by the homicides
and murders, and by the outbreak and growth of the brutal crime which
has chiefly brought about the frightful crime of lynching which
stains the good name of the South and has spread northward with the
spread of the Negro ravisher.
It is a fact, which no one will deny, that the crime of rape was
substantially unknown during the period of slavery, and was hardly
known during the first years of freedom: it is the fatal product
of new conditions. Twenty-five years ago women in the South went
unattended, with no more fear of attack than they have in New
England. To-day, no woman in the South goes alone upon the highway
out of sight of white men, except on necessity, and no man leaves his
women alone in his house if he can help it. Over 500 white women and
children have been assaulted in the South by Negroes within that time.
This is a terrible showing, and the most depressing part of it is the
failure of the Negroes generally to address themselves to the moral
improvement of their race.
None of this will affect the views of the politician or the
doctrinaire, but it should, at least, give food for thought among
the rest of our people, that these views are held almost universally
by the intelligent white people of the South, irrespective of their
different political or religious views; irrespective of their social
or their business standing; and further, that, substantially, these
views are held by nearly all outsiders who go and see enough of the
South to secure opportunities for close and general observation; and,
precisely as their experience is broad and their means of information
extensive, their views approximate those held by the white residents.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] In Georgia, for example, there were in 1860, 462,198 slaves,
owned by 41,084 owners.
[27] According to the Educational Report of the United States
Bureau of Education for 1898-1899, “the total enrolment in the
public schools of the South (the sixteen former slave-States and
the District of Columbia) for the year 1898-1899 was 5,662,259; the
number of white children being 4,150,641 and the number of negro
children 1,511,618.” Of the white school population (5,954,400),
69.71 per cent. were enrolled in the public schools, and of the negro
school population (2,912,910), 51.89 per cent.
[28] George H. White, of North Carolina.
[29] “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, p. 74.
Macmillan & Co.
[30] Wrong of Slavery and Right of Emancipation: R. D. Owen,
Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1864.
[31] In Arkansas the total value of all property, including railroad
property of the State, is $225,276,681. The taxes assessed on the
property of the whites were $3,699,025, while the taxes assessed on
the property of the Negroes were $205,954. The value of the property
held by the Negroes was obtained by assigning to them an amount
proportionate to the taxes paid by them.
[32]
———————————————————+——————————+—————————————
|Number of |Value of Farm | Farms. | Property.
———————————————————+——————————+————————————— Owners | 174,434 |
$150,557,251 Part Owners | 30,501 | 27,358,225 Owners and Tenants
| 1,582 | 1,881,163 Managers | 1,824 | 9,777,377 Cash Tenants
| 274,663 | 178,300,242 Share Tenants | 284,760 | 178,849,250
———————————————————+——————————+—————————————
[33] The Comptroller-General of Georgia reports that the assessed
value of the property of the white taxpayers of Georgia for 1902
was $452,122,577. The property of the Negro taxpayers in the State
of Georgia for the same year was assessed at $15,188,069. This sum,
though considerably larger than that estimated by Professor Du Bois,
is only 3.25 per cent. of the total assessment of the State.
[34] _World_ Almanac, 1903.
[35] Address of Charles A. Gardiner, cited before.
[36] “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, p. 68.
[37] Page 183.
[38] Page 184.
CHAPTER IV
THE LYNCHING OF NEGROES—ITS CAUSE AND ITS PREVENTION[39]
In dealing with this question the writer wishes to be understood as
speaking not of the respectable and law-abiding element among the
Negroes, who unfortunately are so often confounded with the body
of the race from which come most of the malefactors. To say that
Negroes furnish most of the ravishers is not to say that all Negroes
are rapists.
* * * * *
The crime of lynching in this country has, at one time or another,
become so frequent that it has aroused the interest of the whole
people, and has even arrested the attention of people in other
countries. It has usually been caused by the boldness with which
crime was committed and the inefficiency of the law in dealing with
lawbreakers through its regular forms. Such, for instance, were the
acts of the Vigilantes in California in the old days, and such have
been the acts of the Vigilantes in other sections of the country
at times. In these cases, there has always been a form of trial,
which, however hasty, was conclusive on the essential points of
the commission of the crime, the identification of the prisoner,
the sentence of “Judge Lynch”—that is, of the mob—and the orderly
execution of that sentence. And, in such cases, most persons who are
well-informed as to all the conditions and circumstances have found
some justification for this “wild justice.”
Lynching, however, has never before been so common, nor has it
existed over so extended a region as of late years in the Southern
States. And it has aroused more feeling outside of that section than
was aroused formerly by the work of the Vigilantes. This feeling
has undoubtedly been due mainly to the belief that the lynching has
been directed almost exclusively against the Negroes; though a part
has, perhaps, come from the supposition that the laws were entirely
effective, and that, consequently, the lynching of Negroes has been
the result of irrational hostility or of wanton cruelty. Thus, the
matter is, to some extent, complicated by a latent idea that it has a
political complexion.
This is the chief ground of complaint in the utterances of the
Negroes themselves and also in those of a considerable part of the
outside press. And, indeed, for a good while, the lynching of Negroes
appeared to be confined to the South, though lynching of whites was
by no means the monopoly of that section, as may be recalled by
those familiar with the history of Indiana and some of the other
Northwestern States.
Of late, however, several revolting instances of lynching of Negroes
in its most dreadful form: burning at the stake, have occurred in
regions where hitherto such forms of barbarous punishment have been
unknown; and the time appears to be ripe for some efficient concert
of action, to eradicate what is recognized by cool heads as a blot on
our good name and a serious menace to our civilization.
In discussing the means to put an end to this barbarity, the first
essential is that the matter shall be clearly and thoroughly
understood.
The ignorance shown by much of the discussion that has grown out of
these lynchings would appear to justify plain speaking.
All thoughtful men know that respect for law is the basic principle
of civilization, and are agreed as to the evil of any overriding of
the law. All reasonable men know that the overriding of law readily
creates a spirit of lawlessness, under which progress is retarded
and civilization suffers and dwindles. This is as clearly recognized
at the South as at the North. To overcome this conviction and stir
up rational men to a pitch where the law is trampled under foot, the
officers of the law are attacked, and their prisoners taken from them
and executed, there must be some imperative cause.
And yet the record of such overriding of law in the past has been a
terrible one.
The _Chicago Tribune_ has for some time been collecting statistics
on the subject of lynching, and the following table taken from that
paper, showing the number of lynchings for a series of years, is
assumed to be fairly accurate:
1885 184
1886 138
1887 122
1888 142
1889 176
1890 127
1891 192
1892 235
1893 200
1894 190
1895 171
1896 131
1897 166
1898 127
1899 107
1900 115
1901 135
1902 96
1903 104
1904 (to Oct. 27) 86
—————————————————————————+———————+————————+——————+——————
Total lynchings. |Whites.|Negroes.|In the|In the
| | |South.|North.
—————————————————————————+———————+————————+——————+——————
1900 115 | 8 | 107 | 107 | 8
1901 135 | 26 | 107 | 121 | 14
1902 96 | 9 | 86 | 87 | 9
1903 (to Sept. 14) 76 | 13 | 63 | 66 | 10
—————————————————————————+———————+————————+——————+——————
_Causes Assigned._
1900. 1901.[40] 1902.[41] 1903.
Murder 39 39 37 32
Rape 18 19 19 8
Attempted rape 13 9 11 5
Race prejudice 10 9 2 3
Assaulting whites 6 — 3 3
Threats to kill 5 — 1 —
Burglary 4 1 — —
Attempt to murder 4 9 4 6
Informing 2 — — —
Robbery (theft) 2 12 1 —
Complicity in murder 2 6 3 5
Rape and murder — — — 1
Suspicion of murder 2 3 1 3
Suspicion of robbery 1 — — —
No offence 1 — — —
Arson 2 4 — —
Suspicion of arson 1 — — —
Aiding escape of murderer 1 — 1 —
Insulting a white woman — 1 — —
Cattle and horse stealing — 7 1 —
Quarrel over profit-sharing — 5 — —
Suspicion of rape — 1 — —
Suspicion of rape and murder — 1 — —
Unknown offences 2 6 — 4
Mistaken identity — 1 1 3
The lynchings in the various States and Territories in 1900 were as
follows:
Alabama 8
Arkansas 6
California 0
Colorado 3
Connecticut 0
Delaware 0
Florida 9
Georgia 16
Idaho 0
Illinois 0
Indiana 3
Iowa 0
Kansas 2
Kentucky 1
Louisiana 20
Maine 0
Maryland 1
Massachusetts 0
Michigan 0
Minnesota 0
Mississippi 20
Missouri 2
Montana 0
Nebraska 0
New Jersey 0
New Hampshire 0
New York 0
Nevada 0
North Carolina 3
North Dakota 0
Ohio 0
Oregon 0
Pennsylvania 0
Rhode Island 0
South Carolina 2
South Dakota 0
Tennessee 7
Texas 4
Vermont 0
Virginia 6
West Virginia 2
Wisconsin 0
Washington 0
Wyoming 0
Arizona 0
District of Columbia 0
New Mexico 0
Utah 0
Indian Territory 0
Oklahoma 0
Alaska 0
From these tables certain facts may be deduced. The first is that,
in the year of which an analysis is given (1900), over nine-tenths
of the lynchings occurred in the South, where only about one-third
of the population of the country were, but where nine-tenths of the
Negroes were; secondly, that, of these lynchings, about nine-tenths
were of Negroes and one-third were in the three States where the
Negroes are most numerous; thirdly, that, while the lynchings appear
to be diminishing at the South, the ratio, at least, is increasing at
the North. Of the lynchings in 1903, 12 occurred in the North and 92
in the South. Of the total number, 86 were Negroes, 17 were whites,
and 1 a Chinaman. Among the alleged causes were murder, 47; criminal
assault, 11; attempted criminal assault, 10; murderous assault, 7;
“race prejudice,” 5. Of those in 1904 there were 82 Negroes and 4
whites; 81 occurred in the South and 5 in the North.
It further appears that, though after the war lynching in the South
may have begun as a punishment for assault on white women, it has
extended until of late less than one-fourth of the instances are for
this crime, while over three-fourths of them are for murder, attempts
at murder, or some less heinous offence. This may be accounted for,
in part, by the fact that often the murders in the South partake
somewhat of the nature of race-conflicts.
Over 2,700 lynchings in eighteen years, with a steady increase in the
barbarity of the method and with the last the most shameful instance
of this barbarity, are enough to stagger the mind. Either we are
relapsing into barbarism, or there is some terrific cause for our
reversion to the methods of mediævalism, and our laws are inefficient
to meet it. The only gleam of light is that, of late years, the
number appears to have diminished.
To get at the remedy, we must first get at the cause.
Although in early times there were occasional assaults and even some
burnings at the stake these outrages appeared to have passed out of
fashion and time was when the crime of assault was substantially
unknown throughout the South. Though criminal assaults had been
sufficiently common at one time for many of the States to adopt laws
of Draconian severity relating to them, yet during the later period
of slavery, the crime of rape did not exist, nor did it exist to any
considerable extent for some years after emancipation.[42] During the
war the men were away in the army, and the Negroes were the loyal
guardians of the women and children. On isolated plantations and
in lonely neighborhoods, women were as secure as in the streets of
Boston or New York, indeed, were more secure.
Then came the period and process of Reconstruction, with its
teachings. Among these was the teaching that the Negro was the equal
of the white, that the white was his enemy, and that he must assert
his equality. The growth of the idea was a gradual one in the Negro’s
mind. This was followed by a number of cases where members of the
Negro militia ravished white women; in some instances in the presence
of their families.[43]
The result of the hostility between the Southern whites and
Government at that time was to throw the former upon reliance on
their own acts for their defence or revenge, with a consequent
training in lawless punishment of acts which should have been
punished by law. And here lynching, in its post-bellum stage, had its
evil origin.[44]
It was suggested some time ago, in a thoughtful paper read by
Professor Wilcox, of Washington, that a condition something like that
which exists in the South at present, had its rise in France during
the religious wars.
The first instance of rape, outside of these attacks by armed
Negroes, and of consequent lynching, that attracted the attention of
the country after the war was a case which occurred in Mississippi,
where the teaching of equality and of violence found one of its most
fruitful fields. A Negro dragged a woman down into the woods and,
tying her, kept her bound there a prisoner for several days, when he
butchered her. He was caught and was lynched.
With the resumption of local power by the whites came the temporary
and partial ending of the crimes of assault and of lynching.
As the old relation, which had survived even the strain of
Reconstruction, dwindled with the passing of the old generation from
the stage, and the “New Issue” with the new teaching took its place,
the crime broke out again with renewed violence. The idea of equality
began to percolate more extensively among the Negroes. In evidence
of it is the fact that since the assaults began again they have been
chiefly directed against the plainer order of people, instances of
attacks on women of the upper class, though not unknown, being of
rare occurrence.[45]
Conditions in the South render the commission of this crime
peculiarly easy. The white population is sparse, the forests are
extensive, the officers of the law distant and difficult to reach;
but, above all, the Negro population have appeared inclined to
condone the fact of mere assault.
Twenty-five years ago, women went unaccompanied and unafraid
throughout the South, as they still go throughout the North. To-day,
no white woman, or girl, or female child, goes alone out of sight
of the house except on necessity; and no man leaves his wife alone
in his house, if he can help it. Cases have occurred of assault and
murder in broad day, within sight and sound of the victim’s home.
Indeed, an instance occurred not a great while ago in the District of
Columbia, within a hundred yards of a fashionable drive, when, about
three o’clock of a bright June day, a young girl was attacked within
sight and sound of her house, and when she screamed her throat was
cut. So near to her home was the spot that her mother and an officer,
hearing her cries, reached her before life was extinct.
For a time, the ordinary course of the law was, in the main, relied
on to meet the trouble; but it was found that, notwithstanding
the inevitable infliction of the death-penalty, several evils
resulted therefrom. The chief one was that the ravishing of women,
instead of diminishing, steadily increased. The criminal, under
the ministrations of his preachers, usually professed to have
“got religion,” and from the shadow of the gallows called on his
friends to follow him to glory. So that the punishment lost to these
emotional people much of its deterrent force, especially where the
real sympathy of the race was mainly with the criminal rather than
with his victim. Another evil was the dreadful necessity of calling
on the innocent victim, who, if she survived, as she rarely did, was
already bowed to the earth by shame, to relate in public the story
of the assault—an ordeal which was worse than death. Yet another
was the constant delay in the execution of the law. With these,
however, was one other which, perhaps, did more than all the rest
taken together to wrest the trial and punishment from the courts and
carry them out by mob-violence. This was the unnamable brutality
with which the causing crime was, in nearly every case, attended.
The death of the victim of the ravisher was generally the least of
the attendant horrors. In Texas, in Mississippi, in Georgia, in
Kentucky, in Colorado, as later in Delaware, the facts in the case
were so unspeakable that they have never been put in print. They
simply could not be put in print. It is these unnamable horrors which
have outraged the minds of those who live in regions where they have
occurred, and where they may at any time occur again, and, upsetting
reason, have swept from their bearings cool men and changed them into
madmen, drunk with fury and the lust of revenge.
Not unnaturally, such barbarity as burning at the stake has shocked
the sense of the rest of the country, and, indeed, of the world. But
it is well for the rest of the country, and for the world, to know
that it has also shocked the sense of the South, and, in their calmer
moments, even the sense of those men who, in their frenzy, have been
guilty of it. Only, a deeper shock than even this is at the bottom of
their ferocious rage—the shock which comes from the ravishing and
butchery of their women and children.
It is not necessary to be an apologist for barbarity because one
states with bluntness the cause. The stern underlying principle of
the people who commit these barbarities is one that has its root deep
in the basic passions of humanity; the determination to put an end to
the ravishing of their women by an inferior race, or by any race, no
matter what the consequence.
For a time, a speedy execution by hanging was the only mode of
retribution resorted to by the lynchers; then, when this failed of
its purpose, a more savage method was essayed, born of a savage fury
at the failure of the first, and a stern resolve to strike a deeper
terror into those whom the other method had failed to awe.
The following may serve as an illustration. Ten or twelve years ago,
the writer lectured one afternoon in the early spring in a town in
the cotton-belt of Texas—one of the prettiest towns in the Southwest.
The lecture was delivered in the Court-house. The writer was
introduced by a gentleman who had been a member of the Confederate
Cabinet and a Senator of the United States, and the audience was
composed of refined and cultured people, representing, perhaps, every
State from Maine to Texas.
Two days later, the papers contained the account of the burning at
the stake of a Negro in this town. He had picked up a little girl of
five or six years of age on the street where she was playing in front
of her home, and carried her off, telling her that her mother had
sent him for her; and when she cried, he had soothed her with candy
which, with deliberate and devilish prevision, he had bought for the
purpose. When the child was found, she was unrecognizable. Her little
body was broken and mangled and he had cut her throat and thrown her
into a ditch.
A strong effort was made to save the wretch for the law, but without
avail: the people had reverted to the primal law of personal and
awful vengeance. Farmers came from fifty miles around to see that
vengeance was exacted. They had resolved to strike terror into the
breasts of all who might contemplate so hideous a crime, so that such
a thing should never occur again.
This was, perhaps, the second or third instance of burning in the
country after the war.
Of late, lynching at the stake has spread beyond the region where it
has such reason for existence as may be given by the conditions that
prevail in the South. Three frightful instances of burning at the
stake have occurred recently in Northern States, in communities where
some of these conditions were partly wanting. The horror of the main
crime of lynching was increased, in two of the cases, by a concerted
attack on a large element of the Negro population which was wholly
innocent. Even unoffending Negroes were driven from their homes, a
consequence which has never followed in the South, where it might
seem there was more occasion for it.
It thus appears that the original crime, and also the consequent
one in its most brutal form, are not confined to the South, and,
possibly, are only more frequent there because of the greater number
of Negroes in that section. The deep racial instincts are not limited
by geographical bounds.
These last-mentioned lynchings were so ferocious, and so unwarranted
by any such necessity, real or fancied, as may be thought to exist
at the South by reason of the frequency of assault and the absence
of a strong police force, that they not unnaturally called forth
almost universal condemnation. The President felt it proper to write
an open letter, commending the action of the Governor of Indiana
on the proper and efficient exercise of his authority to uphold
the law and restore order in his State. But who has ever thought
it necessary to commend the Governors of the Southern States under
similar circumstances? The militia of some of the Southern States are
almost veterans, so frequently have they been called on to protect
wretches whose crimes stank in the nostrils of all decent men. The
recent shameful instance where an officer is charged with having
connived with the mob is the single exception to fidelity that can be
recalled, and even in that case the men showed a fidelity in marked
contrast to that weakness. The Governor of Virginia boasted, a few
years ago, that no lynching should take place during his incumbency,
and he nearly made good his boast; though, to do so, he had to call
out at one time or another almost the entire military force of the
State.
Editorials in some of the Eastern papers note with astonishment
recent instances where law-officers in the South have protected
their prisoners or eluded a mob. The writers of these editorials
know so little of the South that one is scarcely surprised at their
ignorance. But men are hanged by law for this crime of assault every
few months in some State in the South. A few years ago, Sheriff
Smith, of Birmingham, protected a murderer at the cost of many lives;
a little later, Mayor Prout, of Roanoke, defended with all his power
a Negro ravisher and murderer, and, though the mob finally succeeded
in their aim, six men were killed by the guards before the jail was
carried. These are only two of the many instances in which brave and
faithful officers have, at the risk of their lives, defended their
charges against that most terrible of all assailants—a determined
mob.[46]
For a time, the assaults by Negroes were confined to young women who
were caught alone in solitary and secluded places. The company even
of a child was sufficient to protect them. Then the ravishers grew
bolder, and attacks followed on women when they were in company. And
then, not content with this, the ravishers began to attack women in
their own homes. Sundry instances of this have occurred within the
last few years. As an illustration, may be cited the notorious case
of Samuel Hose, who, after making a bet with a Negro preacher that
he could have access to a white woman, went into a farmer’s house
while the family, father, mother, and child, were at supper; brained
the man with his axe; threw the child into a corner with a violence
which knocked it senseless, ravished the wife and mother with
unnamable horrors, and finally butchered her. He was caught and was
burned.
Another instance, only less appalling, occurred two years ago in
Lynchburg, Va., where the colored janitor of a white female school,
who had been brought up and promoted by the Superintendent of
Schools, and was regarded as a shining example of what education
might accomplish with his race, entered the house of a respectable
man one morning, after the husband, a foreman in a factory, had
gone to his work; ravished the wife, and, then putting his knee on
her breast, coolly cut her throat as he might have done that of a
calf. There was no attempt at lynching; but the Governor, resolved
to preserve the good name of the Commonwealth, felt it necessary to
order out two regiments of soldiers, in which course he was sustained
by the entire sentiment of the State.
These cases were neither worse nor better than many of those which
have occurred in the South in the last twenty years, and in that
period hundreds of women and a number of children have been ravished
and slain.
* * * * *
Now, how is this crime of assault to be stopped? For stopped it must
be, and stopped it will be, whatever the cost. One proposition is
that separation of the races, complete separation by the deportation
of the Negroes, is the only remedy. The theory, though sustained by
many thoughtful men, appears Utopian. Colonization has been the dream
of certain philanthropists for a hundred years. And, meantime, the
Negroes have increased from less than a million to nine millions.
They will never be deported; not because we have not the money, for
an amount equal to that spent in pensions during three years would
pay the expenses of such deportation, and an amount equal to that
paid in six years would set them up in a new country. But the Negroes
have rights; many of them are estimable citizens; and even the great
body of them, when well regulated, are valuable laborers. It might,
therefore, as well be assumed that this plan will never be carried
out, unless the occasion becomes so imperative that all other rights
give way to the supreme right of necessity.
It is plain, then, that we must deal with the matter in a more
practicable manner, accepting conditions as they are, and applying
to them legal methods which will be effective. Lynching does not
end ravishing, and that is the prime necessity. Most right-thinking
men are agreed as to this. Indeed, lynching, through lacking the
supreme principle of law, the deliberateness from which is supposed
to come the certainty of identification, fails utterly to meet the
necessity of the case even as a deterrent, though it must be admitted
that there are a respectable number of thoughtful men who dissent
from this view. The growth of a sentiment which, at least, condones
lynching as a punishment for assaults on women is a significant and
distressing fact. Not only have assaults occurred again and again in
the same neighborhood where lynching has followed such crime; but,
a few years ago, it was publicly stated that a Negro who had just
witnessed a lynching for this crime actually committed an assault on
his way home. However this may be, lynching as a remedy is a ghastly
failure; and its brutalizing effect on the community is incalculable.
The charge that is often made, that the innocent are sometimes
lynched, has little foundation. The rage of a mob is not directed
against the innocent, but against the guilty; and its fury would not
be satisfied with any other sacrifice than the death of the real
criminal. Nor does the criminal merit any consideration, however
terrible the punishment. The real injury is to the perpetrators of
the crime of destroying the law, and to the community in which the
law is slain.
It is pretty generally conceded that the “law’s delay” is partly
responsible for the “wild justice” of mob vengeance, and this has
undoubtedly been the cause of many mobs. But it is far from certain
if any change in the methods of administration of law will effect the
stopping of lynching; while to remedy this evil we may bring about
a greater peril. Trial by jury is the bed-rock of our liberties,
and the inherent principle of such trial is its deliberateness. It
has been said that the whole purpose of the Constitution of Great
Britain is that twelve men may sit in the jury-box. The methods of
the law may well be reformed; but any movement should be jealously
scanned which touches the chief bulwark of all liberty.
The first step, then, would appear to be the establishment of a
system securing a reasonably prompt trial and speedy execution by
law, rather than a wholesale revolution of the existing system.
Many expedients have been suggested; some of the most drastic by
Northern men. One of them proposed, not long since, that to meet
the mob-spirit, a trial somewhat in the nature of a drum-head
court-martial might be established by law, by which the accused may
be tried and, if found guilty, executed immediately. Others have
proposed as a remedy emasculation by law; while a Justice of the
Supreme Court has recently given the weight of his personal opinion
in favor of prompt trial and the abolishment of appeals in such
cases. Even the terrible suggestion has been made that burning at the
stake might again be legalized!
These suggestions testify how grave the matter is considered to be by
those who make them.
But none of these, unless it be the one relating to emasculation,
is more than an expedient. The trouble lies deeper. The crime of
lynching is not likely to cease until the crime of ravishing and
murdering women and children is less frequent than it has been of
late. And this crime, which is well-nigh wholly confined to the Negro
race, will not greatly diminish until the Negroes themselves take it
in hand and stamp it out.
From recent developments, it may be properly inferred that the
absence of this crime during the later period of slavery was due more
to the feeling among the Negroes themselves than to any repressive
measures on the part of the whites. The Negro had the same animal
instincts in slavery that he exhibits now; the punishment that
follows the crime now is quite as certain, as terrible, and as swift
as it could have been then. So, to what is due the alarming increase
of this terrible brutality?
To the writer it appears plain that it is due to two things: first,
to racial antagonism and to the talk of social equality that inflames
the ignorant Negro, who has grown up unregulated and undisciplined;
and, secondly, to the absence of a strong restraining public opinion
among the Negroes of any class, which alone can extirpate the crime.
In the first place, the Negro does not generally believe in the
virtue of women. It is beyond his experience. He does not generally
believe in the existence of actual assault. It is beyond his
comprehension. In the next place, his passion, always his controlling
force, is now, since the new teaching, for the white women.[47]
That there are many Negroes who are law-abiding and whose influence
is for good, no one who knows the worthy members of the race—those
who represent the better element—will deny. But while there are, of
course, notable exceptions, they are not often of the “New Issue,”
nor, unhappily, even generally among the prominent leaders: those who
publish papers and control conventions.
As the crime of rape of late years had its baleful renascence in
the teaching of equality and the placing of power in the ignorant
Negroes’ hands, so its perpetuation and increase have undoubtedly
been due in large part to the same teaching. The intelligent Negro
may understand what social equality truly means, but to the ignorant
and brutal young Negro, it signifies but one thing: the opportunity
to enjoy, equally with white men, the privilege of cohabiting with
white women. This the whites of the South understand; and if it were
understood abroad, it would serve to explain some things which have
not been understood hitherto. It will explain, in part, the universal
and furious hostility of the South to even the least suggestion of
social equality.
A close following of the instances of rape and lynching, and the
public discussion consequent thereon, have led the writer to the
painful realization that even the leaders of the Negro race—at
least, those who are prominent enough to hold conventions and write
papers on the subject—have rarely, by act or word, shown a true
appreciation of the enormity of the crime of ravishing and murdering
women. Their discussion and denunciation have been almost invariably
and exclusively devoted to the crime of lynching. Underlying most
of their protests is the suggestion that the victim of the mob is
innocent and a martyr. Now and then, there is a mild generalization
on the evil of lawbreaking and the violation of women; but, for one
stern word of protest against violating women and cutting their
throats, the records of Negro meetings will show many resolutions
against the attack of the mob on the criminal. And, as to any serious
and determined effort to take hold of and stamp out the crime that
is blackening the good name of the entire Negro race to-day, and
arousing against them the fatal and possibly the undying enmity of
the stronger race, there is, with the exception of the utterances of
a few score individuals like Booker T. Washington, who always speaks
for the right, Hannibal Thomas, and Bishop Turner, hardly a trace of
such a thing. A crusade has been preached against lynching, even as
far as England; but none has been attempted against the ravishing and
tearing to pieces of white women and children.
Happily, there is an element of sound-minded, law-abiding Negroes,
representative of the old Negro, who without parade stand for good
order, and do what they can to repress lawlessness among their
people. Except for this class and for the kindly relations which are
preserved between them and the whites, the situation in the South
would long since have become unbearable. These, however, are not
generally among the leaders, and, unfortunately, their influence is
not sufficiently extended to counteract the evil influences which
are at work with such fatal results.
One who reads the utterances of Negro orators, editors and preachers
on the subject of lynching, and who knows the Negro race, cannot
doubt that, at bottom, their sympathy is generally with the “victim”
of the mob, and not with his victim.
Denunciatory resolutions may be adopted without end, and newspapers
may rave over the reversion to barbarism shown by the prevalence of
the mob spirit. But it may safely be asserted that until the Negroes
shall create among themselves a sound public opinion which, instead
of fostering, shall reprobate and sternly repress the crime of
assaulting women and children, the crime will never be extirpated,
and until this crime is stopped the crime of lynching will never be
extirpated. Lynching will never be done away with while the sympathy
of the whites is with the lynchers, and no more will ravishing
be done away with while the sympathy of the Negroes is with the
ravisher. When the Negroes shall stop applying all their energies to
harboring and exculpating Negroes, no matter what their crime may
be so it be against the whites, and shall distinguish between the
law-abiding Negro and the lawbreaker, a long step will have been
taken.
Should the Negroes sturdily and faithfully set themselves to prevent
the crime of rape by members of that race, it could be stamped out.
Should the whites set themselves against lynching, lynching would be
stopped. Even though lynching is not now confined to the punishment
of this crime, this crime is the one that gives the only excuse for
lynching. The remedy then is plain. Let the Negroes take charge of
the crime of ravishing and firmly put it away from them, and let the
whites take charge of the crime of lynching and put it away from
them. It is time that the races should address themselves to the
task; for it is with nations as with individual men; whatsoever they
sow that shall they also reap.
It is the writer’s belief that the arrest and the prompt handing
over to the law of Negroes by Negroes, for assault on white women,
would do more to break up ravishing, and to restore amicable
relations between the two races, than all the resolutions of all the
conventions and all the harangues of all the politicians.
It has been tried in various States to put an end to lynching by
making the county in which the lynching occurs liable in damages for
the crime. It is a good theory; and, if it has not worked well, it is
because of the difficulty of executing the provision. Could some plan
be devised to array each race against the crime to which it is prone,
both rape and lynching might be diminished if not wholly prevented.
* * * * *
The practical application of such a principle is difficult, but,
perhaps, it is not impossible. It is possible that in every community
Negroes might be appointed officers of the law, to look exclusively
after lawbreakers of their own race. The English in the East manage
such matters well, under equally complicated and delicate conditions.
For example, in the Island of Malta, where the population is of
different classes among whom a certain jealousy exists, there are
several classes of police: the naval police, the military police,
and the civil or municipal police. To each of these is assigned
more especially the charge of one of the three classes of whom the
population of the island is composed. Again, in Hong Kong, where the
situation is even more delicate, there are several classes of police:
the English, the Chinese, and the Indian police. Only the first are
empowered to make general arrests; the others have powers relating
exclusively to the good order of the races to which they belong,
though they may in all cases be called in to assist the English
police.
Somewhat in the same way, the Negroes might be given within their
province powers sufficiently full to enable them to keep order among
their people, and they might on the other hand be held to a certain
accountability for such good order. It might even be required that
every person should be listed and steadily kept track of, as is
done in Germany at present. The recent vagrant laws of Georgia,
where there are more Negroes than in the entire North, constitute an
attempt in this direction.
In the same way, the white officials charged with the good order
of the county or town might be given enlarged powers of summoning
_posses_, and might be held to a high accountability. For example,
_ipso facto_ forfeiture of the officers’ official bond and removal
from office, with perpetual disability to hold any office again,
might be provided as a penalty for permitting any persons to be taken
out of their hands.
Few ravishings by Negroes would occur if the more influential
members of the race were charged with responsibilities for the good
order of their race in every community; and few lynchings would
occur, at least after the prisoners were in the hands of the officers
of the law, if those officers by the mere fact of relinquishing their
prisoners should be disqualified from ever holding office again.
These suggestions may be as Utopian as others which have been made;
but if they cannot be carried out, it is because the ravishings by
Negroes and the murders by mobs have their roots so deep in racial
instincts that nothing can eradicate them, and in such case the
ultimate issue will be a resort to the final test of might, which in
the last analysis underlies everything.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] An interesting paper on “Lynch Law,” by Albert Matthews, of
Boston, was published in The Nation, December 4, 1902. Mr. Matthews,
after giving the numerous alleged derivations of the term, and
reciting a score or so of instances in which “Lynch Law” had been
applied (his first reference being to Wirt’s Life of Patrick Henry,
1818, page 372), states his conclusions, as follows:
“From this evidence and from other material in my possession, it
appears that the original term was “Lynch’s Law”; that this was
soon shortened to “Lynch (or lynch) Law,” and then to “Lynch”; that
originally lynch law was a whipping or other personal chastisement;
that lynch law originally obtained only in the border settlements,
where the administration of justice either was, or was supposed to
be uncertain; that in the early days of lynch law, innocent persons
were sometimes punished, and suits for damages were by no means
unknown; that, about 1830, writers regarded the practice as on the
wane and likely soon to disappear altogether; that before about 1835
the victims of lynch law were generally whites, occasionally Indians,
but never Negroes; that soon after 1830 a revival of lynch law took
place, due to the anti-slavery agitation, and the practice spread
throughout the country; that between 1830 and 1840 the term “lynch”
underwent a change in meaning and “to lynch” began to acquire the
sense of to put to death; that during the same period Negroes were
first lynched; that about 1835, we first hear of “Judge Lynch”;
that in recent years, lynching has been confined largely, but by no
means wholly, to Negroes in the South and West. It further appears
that there is a direct historical connection between the killing of
a Negro in a highly civilized community in 1902 and the whipping of
a white man along the frontiers in 1817. Step by step, the illegal
whippings of 1817 have led to the illegal burnings alive of 1902. In
short, the more civilized the country has become, the more brutal has
been the punishment meted out under lynch law.”
[40] In 1901 one Indian and one Chinaman were lynched.
[41] In 1902 one Indian was lynched.
[42] For an interesting study of the early history of lynching and
its causes, see note, p. 86.
[43] For outrages in Arkansas, see “Brooks-Baxter War.”
[44] Mr. Matthews points out that though rape existed and was
frequently legislated against during the Colonial period, he
cannot find between 1676 and 1825 a single instance of the illegal
punishment of the crime.
[45] It is significant that, on large plantations where the Negroes,
though in large numbers, are still in the position of old plantation
servants, the crime of assault is almost unknown.
[46] The following table is from the _Chicago Tribune_. The number
of legal executions in 1900 was 118, as compared with 131 in 1899,
109 in 1898, 128 in 1897, 122 in 1896, 132 in 1895, 132 in 1894, 126
in 1893, and 107 in 1892. The executions in the several States and
Territories were in 1900 as follows:
Alabama 4 Arkansas 0 California 5 Colorado 0 Connecticut 1 Delaware
0 Florida 1 Georgia 14 Idaho 2 Illinois 0 Indiana 0 Iowa 0 Kansas 0
Kentucky 0 Louisiana 6 Maine 0 Maryland 3 Massachusetts 0 Michigan 0
Minnesota 0 Mississippi 1 Missouri 3 Montana 3 Nebraska 0 New Jersey
4 New Hampshire 0 New York 3 Nevada 0 North Carolina 9 North Dakota 1
Ohio 1 Oregon 1 Pennsylvania 15 Rhode Island 0 South Carolina 3 South
Dakota 0 Tennessee 4 Texas 18 Vermont 0 Virginia 7 West Virginia 0
Wisconsin 0 Wyoming 0 Washington 2 Arizona 4 District of Columbia 3
New Mexico 0 Utah 0 Indian Territory 0 Oklahoma 0 Alaska 0
There were 80 hanged in the South and 39 in the North, of whom 60
were whites, 58 were blacks, and one a Chinaman. The crimes for which
they were executed were: murder, 113; rape, 5; arson, 1. Thus, of the
119 hangings, about two-thirds (80) were in the South and one-third
(39) in the North; about one-half (60) of the entire number were of
whites, and one-half (58) were of blacks. So, the South appears to
have done its part in the matter of punishing by law as well as by
violence.
[47] See “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, pp. 65,
177.
CHAPTER V
THE PARTIAL DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO
Among the various factors that have contributed to bring about
the recrudescence of the Negro question in the last year or two
a prominent one is the movement in the South to disfranchise the
ignorant element of the Negro race. This is usually termed the
“Disfranchisement of the Negro.” But although the object of the
movement is frankly to disfranchise the large ignorant element among
that race, while an ignorant element among the whites is left the
ballot, the term is by no means exact.
Few things are rarer yet nothing is more important than accuracy in
definitions. In the matter under consideration much misapprehension
exists as to the extent of the disfranchisement, and possibly more as
to its effect.
Reams of paper have been covered with frantic denunciation; courts
have been appealed to; threats have been made against the Southern
States of reducing their representation in Congress, and still the
movement has gone on under the direction of the most enlightened and
conservative men in the South. And so far as has yet been tested, it
has proceeded by legal methods.
The disfranchisement clauses have not only caused an outcry on the
part of the politicians, white and colored, and the doctrinaires who
were brought up on hostility to the South, but they have excited
unfavorable comment even among some friendly enough to the South,
who, while conceding that the former “experiment” has proved a
disastrous failure so far as the South is concerned, yet believe
that a manifest injustice is done to the rest of the country by one
section holding a representation in Congress which, according to the
votes cast there, appears to be in excess of that held by the rest of
the country.
A singular feature of the case is that the division-line of opinion
for or against the measure is not so much that of party affiliation
as that of familiarity with the conditions that have brought about
the changes in the constitutions of the Southern States.
Within the last year, a man of national reputation, a gentleman of
high standing, of broad sympathies and much learning,[48] whose
affiliations are with the party that is dominant in the South, in an
address before the New England Suffrage Conference, warmly approved
the reconstruction measures of Thaddeus Stevens setting aside the
civil governments in the South, putting the Southern States under
military control, and providing for the Congressional system of
reconstruction based on Negro suffrage. “The measure finally adopted
was,” he says, “of proved necessity. Thus, and thus only, could the
lives of the colored men and white Union men be protected. They
needed every weapon that we could place in their hands, and this
weapon was among them.”
This statement presents clearly the basic error which underlies all
others. It is that the Negro needs “weapons” with which to oppose the
white, and that “we” must place them in his hands.
Yet another gentleman of varied experience and extensive general
knowledge,[49] whose affiliations have at times been with the
same party, has recently published a paper written with all his
well-known ability, based, however, mainly on a study which he made
of conditions at the South during a rapid tour in 1865. Neither
of these gentlemen has added much to his knowledge of the Negro
question since that time. That men of these gentlemen’s standing can
really believe at this day the facts stated by them demonstrates the
hopelessness of ever having the matter clearly viewed by a large body
of well-meaning people.
The weapon which the advocate of universal suffrage applauds
himself for having helped to place in the Negro’s hands has been
his destruction. It was a torch placed in the hands of a child,
with which he has ravaged all about him and involved himself in the
general conflagration.
Happily, this somewhat outworn view of conditions at the South is not
the view of the body of the American people who have any familiarity
with the subject, or of any portion of them who have had experience
of the conditions which existed under the Negro _régime_.
A respectable element among the white Republicans of the South have
given it up. One of the most distinguished and thoughtful Northern
men in the country, a life-long Republican, a man of approved
Republicanism, declared before the leading Republican club of the
country not long ago, that the “experiment entered on with so much
enthusiasm” had undoubtedly proved a failure.
Looking back on this period, it is impossible for the open-minded
student not to see that whatever the motive, the result was, as Mr.
Root declared before the Union League Club, a miserable failure,
disastrous to both races. The South was devastated and humiliated
beyond belief; the Negroes were hopelessly misled in matters where
right direction was vitally necessary to their permanent progress.
And the consequence was a riot of civic debauchery which must bring
shame to every honest man of the African race and will always prove a
bar to the possibility of Negro domination hereafter.[50]
Whether it be recognized as yet or not, the whole country owes a
debt to the Southern people who withstood to the end the policy
of the misguided fanatics and politicians who would have put the
South permanently under Negro domination. But for the resolution
and constancy of the Southern whites, one-sixth of the then
existing States of the Union would have become Negroized and we
should possibly have had by this time several States of the Union
substantially what Santo Domingo is to-day.
As the realization is becoming more common that the “experiment”
which was entered on with so much enthusiasm a generation ago, of
arming the Negro with “the weapon” of the ballot, has proved a
disastrous failure, it is also gradually being recognized that the
kind of education on which so much money, both from public taxation
and from private philanthropy, has been lavished, and so much care
has been expended, has not only failed to bring about the results
which had been expected, but has, so far as the great body of the
race is concerned, proved an absolute failure. The Negroes at large
and the doctrinaires will not accept this, but nevertheless it is
recognized by those who know the Negro best and have sufficient
breadth of knowledge to look at things as they are. The sanest and
most broad-minded among the Negro leaders of to-day has recognized
it, and the foundation of his success is his recognition of it—the
recognition of it by him and the recognition of it by the whites of
the South, who have, because of it, sustained him by their sympathy
and their aid. It is because of this that Booker T. Washington has
become the best proof of what the Negro race at its best may produce,
and is the most unanswerable argument adduced since the war of the
value of Negro education.
He believes that the Negroes at large should be taught, first of all,
to work; that they should begin by being made trained laborers and
skilled artisans, and that then they will develop themselves. This
principle, though sound, is strongly repudiated by a considerable
element among the more advanced Negroes. And the riot in the
Boston church in July, 1903, when the Principal of Tuskegee spoke
on the industrial training of the Negro, was precipitated by an
educated element who believe in agitation rather than in Principal
Washington’s pacific and rational methods. The latter acts on the
theory that, in the main, the education of the Negroes as hitherto
conducted has not been generally a success. Those who espouse the
other view assert, on the contrary, that the education has been a
marked success and that the Negro is in every way the equal of the
white. And to prove their case they use red pepper and razors.
The limits of this paper do not admit of even the most cursory
discussion of the comparative equality of the two races. It may
be stated, however, that, notwithstanding exceptional instances,
the case of the South rests frankly on the present demonstrable
inferiority of the Negro race to the White race. Its superiority is a
dogma of the White race wherever it may have established itself, and
without doubt, as Mr. Chamberlain recently pointed out in his address
at Birmingham, this profound conviction has been one of the sources
of its strength.
Much injury has been done the Negro race by the misdirected zeal of
those who continually prate about their right to equality with the
whites.
In 1865, when the Negro was set free, he held without a rival the
entire field of industrial labor throughout the South. Ninety-five
per cent. of all the industrial work of the Southern States was in
his hands. And he was fully competent to do it. Every adult was
either a skilled laborer or a trained mechanic. It was the fallacious
teaching of equality which deluded him into dropping the substance
for the shadow. To-day their wisest leader is trying to emulate his
great teacher, Armstrong, and lead them back to the field which they
so carelessly abandoned. Men who are the equals of others do not
go about continually asserting it. They show their equality by the
fruits of their intellect and character. Among the whites, the poor
class are not always haranguing and adopting resolutions as to their
equality with the other classes, any more than are the well-to-do
class always insisting upon their equality with the wealthy class.
They know that they are equal, if not superior, and do not feel
continually called on to assert it offensively. The same may be said
about the best educated, best behaved, and most worthy among the
Negroes. It is the blatant demagogue and “mouthy” Negro—a term that
was well known during the period of slavery—who is mainly heard on
this subject. Happily for the Negroes, the major portion of them
have retired from the struggle for political power, and, except when
excited by agitators, live harmoniously enough with the whites; and
the industrious element are saving, and are building themselves homes.
While, however, the body of the Negro race are going about their
business in good-humored content, generally in good fellowship with
the people on whose friendship they are most dependent, the so-called
“leaders” and their so-called “friends” are spending their time
in stirring them up, adopting lurid resolutions, asserting their
equality and calling on everybody outside of the South to help them
establish it.
The phrase usually employed is that the Negro is “robbed of his
vote,” this formula being equally applied whether he is restrained
from voting by the unlawful act of one or more individuals or by the
most solemn act that a people can perform—the provision of a duly
ordained constitution.
It may be well, at the outset of the discussion of this matter, to
call attention to a fact somewhat generally overlooked: that the
right to vote is not an inherent right. It is a privilege conferred
by positive enactment on those citizens possessed of certain
specified qualifications.
Further, the right to determine the qualification for the
suffrage—that is, to declare on what condition a citizen shall
exercise the suffrage—rests with the several States; the only
limitation to this being the express restrictions contained in the
Constitution of the United States bearing on the subject. Where a
State duly enacts a law it stands until it is changed by law or is
declared invalid by the proper court of competent jurisdiction. Its
provisions are until then the law.
It is not necessary to go largely into the history of the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments. They were the offspring of ignorance and
passion. They were adopted partly to punish the South, partly to arm
the Negroes with a weapon which would enable them to hold their own
against the whites, and partly to perpetuate the ascendancy of the
radical wing of the Republican Party.
Prior to, and even for some time subsequent to the war, the idea
of endowing the Negro race generally with the ballot had not been
seriously entertained by any considerable portion of the American
people.
Mr. Lincoln again and again, during his debates with Douglas,
declared his opposition to the idea. He said in one of his speeches:
“I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way
the social and political equality of the white and black races; I
am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of
Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office or intermarry with the
white people; and I will say in addition, that there is a physical
difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will
ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality.”
This declaration he reiterated in a speech delivered at Columbus.
The furthest he ever went in favor of admitting any Negroes to the
privilege of the ballot was when, on March 13, 1864, in his letter
to his provisional governor in Louisiana, Governor Hahn, he said:
“I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of
the colored people may not be let in: as, for instance, the very
intelligent and especially those who have fought so gallantly in our
ranks.”
Of the thirty-four States which formed the Union in January, 1861,
thirty excluded Negroes from the franchise by constitutional
provision; while in the four States whose constitutions contained
no such provision—New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New
Hampshire—owing to the small number of Negroes among their
population, and the property and educational qualifications, the
Negro vote was so small as to be a negligible quantity.[51]
The opposition to universal Negro suffrage was so great throughout
the North during the agitation of the question which was subsequently
embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment, that, excluding the enforced
acquiescence of the Southern States, it was when submitted to the
people defeated in every State except Iowa and Minnesota.[52] After
the adoption of the Amendment other States voted for it.
It is probable that, had the South not been so intractable in
matters relating to the Negroes, the admission of the Negroes to
the suffrage would have been along the line suggested by Mr. Lincoln
to Governor Hahn. But at that time it was deemed necessary to quell
the South though the heavens fell. Moreover, there was grave danger
that the South might again hold the balance of power in the National
Assembly. With stern and reckless determination the implacable
leaders of the radical wing of the dominant party created what one of
them termed a force of “perpetual allies.”
Having been drilled by years of slavery to follow the lead of
their masters, and being reasonably apt at imitation, these allies
followed slavishly the direction of their new leaders. It was
perfectly natural that they should at that time have given themselves
unreservedly to the representatives of the agencies which had
emancipated them, which stood for them, and which held out to them
such glittering rewards as complete equality with, and finally
domination over, their former masters. Possibly, it was not unnatural
that they should have followed with unexampled credulity the most
unprincipled among those representatives who steadily held out to
them greater and greater rewards.
However it was, this was the history of the exercise of the
suffrage. With the weapon of the ballot, the Negro soon exceeded the
expectation of the most sanguine advocate of Negro suffrage. Only the
supreme constancy of the Southern whites saved the Southern States.
From this beginning, every question became a race question, until
to-day no question can arise which is not regarded by the Negroes
generally from a racial standpoint. It may be asserted that this was
quite natural. But the fact that it is so is the best argument for
the Southern view.
It is a somewhat curious if not pertinent fact that in the place
where Negro suffrage was first established by Act of Congress, the
District of Columbia (where it was established by the Act of January
8, 1867), which has always been under the direct control of National
Government, subsequent conditions became so insupportable that it
was deemed necessary to do away with the ballot altogether.
In all the years that have passed the same unhappy condition has
continued. The Negroes remained solidly banded against the whites.
This solidarity effectually prevented the whites from dividing
on any of the great economic questions of the time. To meet this
condition, one method after another was essayed. At times force was
openly resorted to to prevent the recurrence of conditions that
rendered life unbearable; at times shifts came into vogue that no
one pretended to excuse except by the argument of necessity—such,
for example, as the system of having separate ballot-boxes for
each candidate, with a view to shifting them about; the system of
“understanding-clauses” unequally applied; the system of ballot-box
stuffing; the system of bribery, whether of leaders or of individuals.
In some places the question was seriously debated whether it was
worse to use force or fraud, the necessity for one or the other being
simply assumed. In others, some Negroes substantially auctioned off
their votes.[53]
The result of such conditions was the retirement of many of the best
men in the South from all part in public affairs, the withdrawal
of the South from due participation in all other questions of the
national life, the menace of the debauchery of public morals.
In this wretched state of affairs the Southern people resolved to
eliminate by law, as far as possible, the ignorant Negro vote. How
universal the conviction was of its necessity may be judged from the
fact that it has been attempted in nearly every State in the South.
How legal it may be is a question for the Supreme Court of the United
States.
The new movement is being followed by stringent laws striking at all
debauchery of the ballot.
As absolutely necessary, however, as the South has deemed this
movement, perhaps nothing of late has done more to arouse feeling
in the North, than the small vote cast in the latter section. It
would appear as though the North deemed itself discriminated against
and consequently injured by this action. The charge is constantly
made that owing to this disfranchisement, the South has a larger
representation than the North.
This idea has recently been set forth in a paper in one of the
leading magazines, which, admitting that the law has not been
contravened, has yet gone so far as to suggest that a sixteenth
amendment to the Constitution of the United States should be adopted
to rectify this inequality. This suggestion would appear to be based
on a false conception of the fundamental law. Representation is
apportioned by law according to the number of the population, not of
the voting population, and each State has the absolute right to make
its qualification for the suffrage high or otherwise, subject only to
the restrictions contained in the amendments to the Constitution.
The feeling seems to be that in some way the South without violating
the amendments, has, by proving that they do not cover the case,
secured an undue advantage over the North. It is, however, difficult
to understand how it should be an advantage when a State, by acting
within the law, simply cuts down its suffrage list. How was North
Carolina, which in 1880 cast a vote equal to 81 per cent. of its
voting population injured by the fact that Massachusetts in that
election cast only 56 per cent. of its voting population; or how was
South Carolina, which, that year, cast 82 per cent. of its entire
vote, injured by Rhode Island’s casting only 37 per cent.? How would
Delaware, which requires no qualification for the suffrage, except
that a resident voter shall have paid a registration fee of $1, be
discriminated against by the fact that California provides that only
those may vote who can read the Constitution in English and can write
his name; or, how are the people of Colorado, where women, as well as
men vote, injured by the fact that only men vote in Massachusetts and
Virginia?
Yet, as plain as this would have seemed, the action of the Southern
States has undoubtedly aroused a feeling in the North that the
Northern people have, in some way, been injured thereby.
It has been proposed to cut down the representation of the Southern
States in Congress, and resolutions have been introduced in Congress
to carry out this idea. Possibly the movement has not been as serious
as it has appeared. However, it has been already serious enough
in its consequences to excite the Negroes into a state of renewed
aggressiveness.
This proposition, which is intended to be partly monitory and partly
punitive, is warmly advocated by most if not all of the Negro
leaders and their doctrinaire friends.
It would undoubtedly be strongly opposed by the majority of the white
people of the South, and possibly by some of the more far-sighted
friends of the Negro race outside of the South, who, looking a little
beyond the immediate disfranchisement of ignorant Negroes, see that
the ultimate effect will be to establish a general and impartial
electoral system, based on the disfranchisement of ignorance and vice.
Before the proposal is carried into effect, it might be well for its
advocates to consider certain facts.
In the first place, it is a grave question whether the section of
the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution on which such
action must be based is now valid or whether it was not repealed
by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits
disfranchisement on account of race, color, etc. The latter view was
taken and was ably argued in the recent notable address delivered
in Albany in June, 1903, by Charles A. Gardiner, Esq., of New York,
before the Forty-first Annual Convocation of the University of the
State of New York. He maintains that “a State can discriminate
against Negro suffrage only by an organic or statutory law,” and that
before Congress can penalize a State such a law must be adopted and
it must be a valid law. But (he argues) since the adoption of the
Fifteenth Amendment, no law which violated its provision could be
valid. It would not merely be voidable, but void _ab initio_. “And a
void law is no law.”[54]
But even assuming that the Congress might have the authority to cut
down the representation under the present law, it is a question
whether the disfranchising clauses of the New Constitution in the
Southern States afford any basis for such an attempt at reduction in
their representation.
The qualifications for voting in the various States of the South
would not seem to be in any way improper on the face of their
constitutions. The impropriety charged against them is based wholly
on the fact that they disfranchise more of one class of citizens than
of others.
According to the tabulation of the “Qualifications for Voting in each
State in the Union,” published in the _World_ Almanac for 1904, and
“communicated to it” and corrected to date “by the Attorneys-General
of the respective States,” all the States except the two Carolinas
have the “Australian Ballot Law,” or a modification of it, in force,
and all the States require that the “Voters shall be citizens of
the State or of the United States, or an alien who has declared
intention to become naturalized”; and all the States except Maine,
Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Vermont exclude from the
right of suffrage those convicted of felony or infamous crime, unless
pardoned.
Besides these, paupers and persons _non compos mentis_ are generally
excluded. These provisions are general.
Arkansas, however, excludes from the right to the suffrage those
who have failed to pay the poll-tax. California excludes everyone
unable to read the Constitution in English and to write his name.
Connecticut requires for citizenship that a man shall be a citizen
of the United States who can read the English language. Delaware
requires the payment of a registration fee of $1; Georgia requires
the payment of all taxes since 1877. Louisiana admits only those
able to read and write, or who own $300 worth of property assessed
in their names, or whose father or grandfather was entitled to vote
on January 1, 1867. (This last is the celebrated “Squaw Clause.”)
Massachusetts admits only those who can read and write. Mississippi
admits only those who can read or understand the Constitution when
read to them. Missouri requires voters to have paid their poll-taxes
for the current year. Pennsylvania requires a voter, if twenty-two
years of age or more, to have paid taxes within two years. South
Carolina requires that a voter shall have paid six months prior to
the election any poll-taxes then due, and shall be able to read and
write any section of the State Constitution, or to show that he owns
and has paid the previous year all taxes on property in the State
assessed at $300 or more.
Tennessee requires that a voter shall have paid his poll-tax for the
preceding year. Vermont excludes from the suffrage “those who have
not obtained the approbation of the local board of civil authority.”
Virginia’s qualification for registration is as follows, until 1904:
“First, a person who, prior to the adoption of the Constitution,
served in time of war in the army or navy of the United States or
the Confederate States, or of any State of the United States or
of the Confederate States; or, second, a son of any such person;
or, third, a person who owns property upon which, in the year
next preceding that in which he offers to register, State taxes
aggregating at least $1 have been paid; or, fourth, a person able to
read any section of the Constitution submitted to him by the officers
of registration, and to give a reasonable explanation of the same,
or if unable to read such section, able to understand and give a
reasonable explanation thereof when read to him by the officers.”
Those registering prior to 1904 form a permanent roll. After 1904 the
soldier’s-son clause and the understanding clause are done away with,
and a poll-tax must be paid.
Thus, it will be seen that Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, and
Tennessee require the prepayment of a poll-tax, while Delaware
requires the payment of a registration fee of $1; that Georgia and
Pennsylvania require the prepayment of taxes, while South Carolina,
Louisiana, and Virginia require the payment of taxes in the
alternative, another alternative being that the voter must, in South
Carolina and Louisiana, as in California, be able to read and write,
while in Virginia, as in Mississippi, he is required only to be able
to read or understand the Constitution when read to him, though in
Virginia this last requirement was only for two years; and after two
years the voter must be able to read and write.
Louisiana excepts those whose father or grandfather was entitled to
vote on January 1, 1867, and Virginia excepts until 1904 those who
were soldiers or seamen or whose fathers served as soldiers or seamen
in time of war.
Vermont, on the other hand, has the singular requirement that the
voter must “obtain the approbation of the local board of civil
authority”—a requirement which would seem to place the qualification
wholly at the mercy of the party in power.
Though the representation in Congress of the Southern States would
appear at present to be greater than the recorded vote of those
States would entitle them to, the inequality is by no means so real
as it appears, and is not greater than that which exists between some
of the Eastern and Western States.[55]
It has been well shown by the same distinguished member of the New
York Bar already quoted that “the disparity between the Southern
States where the ignorant Negro vote has been practically eliminated
and the Eastern States, though glaring, is less than that between
the Eastern States and some of the Western States. For example,
“Rhode Island’s vote is 1.59 times as great as Alabama’s, but South
Dakota’s is 3.39 as great as that of Rhode Island. Vermont’s is
2.22 times as great as Florida’s, but Utah’s is 3.01 as great as
Vermont’s. Maine’s is 2.36 as great as Georgia’s, but Colorado’s is
3.48 times as great as Maine’s.”[56]
The figures cited fail to give the strength of the Southern vote. The
small vote in the Southern States is due partly to the fact that the
ascendancy of one political party is so great that voters do not feel
it necessary to attend the polls.
In the next place, though it was frankly admitted that the motive
of the disfranchisement clauses was to disfranchise the ignorant
colored vote, while the ignorant white vote was admitted for a time,
provided the voters or their fathers had been soldiers, this is but
a temporary inequality; and that the ignorant colored vote does not
come within the grandfather clause or other saving clauses is an
incident of the time. In a comparatively short time the effect of
these saving clauses will have passed away and the suffrage will be
based on a purely educational or property qualification.
A writer in _The Outlook_ of June 13, 1903, in an article entitled,
“Negro Suffrage in the South,” says: “How far do they exclude him
(the Negro) in point of fact? In answering this question the reader
must note that in three of the States, Alabama, South Carolina, and
Virginia, a Negro who possesses property amounting in value to $300
and has paid his taxes may vote. He may not be able to read and
write, he may not be able to understand the Constitution when it
is read to him. But if he has had the industry, the sobriety, the
thrift which have enabled him to accumulate taxable property to the
amount of $300, he has the ballot. How many Negroes there are in the
South who under this provision are admitted to the ballot we have
no means of knowing. It has been estimated that the total ownings
of Negroes in the Southern States mount up to $300,000,000 worth of
personal and real estate. It is officially reported that in Virginia
they own one-twenty-sixth of all the land in the State. These facts
would seem to indicate that a not inconsiderable number of Negroes
are admitted to the ballot in the Southern States under the property
qualification. On the other hand, a considerable white population has
been disfranchised under this property-qualification clause. We are
informed by a Southern correspondent, whose means of acquaintance
justify our placing some confidence in his statement, that in Alabama
fully fifty thousand white men, under the practical operation of the
Constitution, by non-payment of poll-taxes or other clauses, have
been disfranchised.”
It may also be well to consider the effect of such a penalizing
measure on the future of the Negro himself. To adopt it would be
to violate the one principle on which the permanent advance of the
Negro race must be founded. That is, the recognition, even at this
late hour, by the Negro that he must stand on his own merits and is
to be left to work out politically, as well as economically, his own
future. To adopt it would mislead him into thinking he is still the
ward of the nation and is to be supported by it, irrespective of
his conduct—an idea to which may be traced a considerable portion
of all that has retarded the Negro’s advance in the past. It will
tend to divert once more his aim from the paths of industry to which
it is being turned by the wisest of his friends. It will engender
a new hostility to him on the part of the stronger race, on whose
friendship his future welfare must depend.
Finally, should such a measure be adopted, it might lead the
whites of the South to do what they have hitherto steadfastly
refused to do—apply the money derived by taxation on the property
of each race exclusively to the education of that race. It has
been publicly alleged and appears to be generally assumed that the
recent election in Mississippi was in a measure reactionary. The
ground for this assumption seems to be that the successful candidate
for the Governorship had declared himself to a certain extent
opposed to a continuance of the prevailing system. The writer,
while recognizing the disappointing results that have followed the
large expenditure for the education of the Negroes, would deplore
immeasurably any backward step in the matter of education in the
South. Light, however glimmering, is far better than darkness. The
present system of education may be a poor one, but it is infinitely
better than none. Every consideration of public policy would seem
to urge its continuance until a better system can be devised. And
one consideration would appear unanswerable. The Negroes will always
have their own leaders, and it is better that these leaders should be
enlightened rather than ignorant. No more deplorable disaster could
befall the South than in this age of advancing enlightenment to have
a great pariah class hopelessly and irrevocably ignorant established
within her borders.
In this view he believes the great body of thoughtful Southerners
will unite. But no one can foretell what effect on public sentiment a
crusade against the South, based on her attitude toward the Negroes,
might produce. It might sweep away the last remnant of good feeling
that remains, and with it every dollar raised by taxation on the
property of the whites to educate the blacks. The South is now
spending on the education of the Negro race, by voluntary taxation
of the property of the white race, over five and one-half millions
of dollars annually. It would be a poor bargain to exchange for
the figment of a right which ignorance should never have had, the
remaining good-will of the Whites of the South and the sum they
annually expend from their own pockets in trying to uplift the Negro
and fit him for the exercise of that right.
It is the conviction of the writer, and he gives it for what it is
worth, that the disfranchisement of the main body of the Negro race
in the Southern States was a measure of high necessity. He further
believes that this disfranchisement is for the permanent welfare of
both races. It removes for the time being what is the chief cause of
bitterness—a bitterness from which the Negro is a greater sufferer
than the white. It will turn the Negro generally from the field
where, in his present condition, he has proved a failure, and leave
him to develop himself in a field where he may be the equal of any
other man.
One who has been a serious and, as is generally agreed, a profound
student of our Government and our people has recently given his
conclusions after study of conditions in the South, and they agree
substantially with the views of the more conservative element of
the Southern whites.[57] Mr. James Bryce declares, “that those who
rule subject Races on despotic methods ... do not realize all the
difficulties that arise in a Democracy. The capital instance is
afforded by the history of the Southern States since the Civil War....
“The moral to be drawn from the case of the Southern States seems to
be that you must not, however excellent your intentions and however
admirable your sentiments, legislate in the teeth of facts. The
great bulk of the Negroes were not fit for the suffrage; nor under
the American Federal system was it possible (without incurring other
grave evils) to give them effective protection in the exercise of
the suffrage. It would, therefore, have been better to postpone the
bestowal of this dangerous boon. True it is that rocks and shoals
were set thick around every course; true that it is easier to
perceive the evils of a course actually taken than to realize other
evils that might have followed some other course. Nevertheless, the
general opinion of dispassionate men has come to deem the action
taken in A.D., 1870, a mistake.
“The social relations of two Races which cannot be fused raise
problems even more difficult, because incapable of being regulated by
law....
“The tremendous problem presented by the Southern States of America,
and the likelihood that similar problems will have to be solved
elsewhere, as, for instance, in South Africa and the Philippine
Isles, bid us ask, What should be the duty and the policy of a
dominant Race where it cannot fuse with a backward Race? Duty and
policy are one, for it is equally to the interest of both Races that
their relations should be friendly.
“The answer seems to be that as regards political rights, Race and
blood should not be made the ground of discrimination. Where the
bulk of the colored Race are obviously unfit for political power, a
qualification based on property and education might be established
which should permit the upper section of that Race to enjoy the
suffrage. Such a qualification would doubtless exclude some of
the poorest and most ignorant whites, and might on that ground be
resisted. But it is better to face this difficulty than to wound and
alienate the whole of the colored Race by placing them without the
pale of civic functions and duties.”
One of the fundamental errors has been in considering the Negroes
as a special class, to be regarded, discussed, legislated for,
aided, and sustained as such, instead of as plain human beings who,
judged according to certain universal standards, belong to various
classes in which those standards would place other members of the
human family. This was the fundamental error of the doctrinaire in
the first instance, and, unfortunately, the Negroes themselves have
gotten the idea so firmly fixed in their minds that they have long
regarded their race as a special species, to be considered from quite
a special standpoint, judged by different standards, and dealt with
in a different manner from the rest of the world.
Nothing could be more unwise, because nothing tends more to mislead
the Negro as to the future and keep up the misunderstanding which
blocks the way to a proper solution of the question. The Negroes must
learn that before they can claim to be accorded the treatment that
the Whites receive they must themselves act along lines which govern
the conduct of the whites.
If a white man is a brute or a blackguard, all whites do not feel it
necessary to defend him. If a white man commits a crime, all whites
do not conspire to shield him and aid him in escaping the penalties
of the law. If a white man is arrested, all whites do not assail the
arresting officers; he is left to his remedy at law. If a white man
has committed rape and murder and a mob catches and lynches him, all
white men, however they deplore and denounce lawlessness, do not feel
it necessary to declare the miscreant innocent and a martyr.
A great step will be taken toward the correct solution of the problem
when the Negroes shall be considered and shall consider themselves
not “in the lump,” but as individuals, just as any other members of
the community are considered; not as a separate class, but as part
of various classes to which their standing morally, mentally, and
personally would assign them—when they shall be judged by the same
standards and governed by the same rules; when the malefactor shall
be dealt with as a malefactor; the reputable man shall be esteemed
for his good character: in other words, when every man shall be
judged on his own merits and shall stand or fall on his own showing.
This must be the work of both races. It is what the more enlightened
Negroes say they desire; but, unfortunately, not a great many of them
appear to act upon this. Their acts, their addresses delivered at
Afro-American meetings, their newspapers, their writings, all tend to
show that those who claim and would appear to be the leaders among
them regard all matters wholly from a racial standpoint. They clamor
for recognition and for assistance as Negroes; make inflammatory
speeches; call on Congress to intervene in their behalf as such, and
at times even suggest, in case Congress does not interpose, that an
appeal be made to foreign nations.
It is worth while to note that most of the appeals, addresses,
resolutions, and other clamors that tend to stir up the Negroes
in the South come from those who are outside of her borders, and
consequently are beyond any direct suffering from the oppression
and other outrages against which they protest. This feeling is,
therefore, entirely racial. In the main, the Negroes in the South
appear to get on fairly well with their other fellow-citizens; and
the resolutions and addresses that emanate from these are much more
temperate and reasonable than those which come from the outside.
Compare, for example, the addresses and resolutions of the Negro
Convention held two years ago at Louisville with those in some of the
Northern cities.
A sentiment has developed in parts of the South since the recent
agitation to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of
the United States, but this has not been strong enough to lead to any
overt, much less concerted attempt to promote such a movement. On the
contrary, the leaders among the Southern people have hitherto firmly
opposed the suggestion of such a measure. One reason undoubtedly has
been the practical difficulties in the way of carrying it through;
but another has been that they have generally not wished to exclude
from the suffrage the best element among the Negroes.
Personally the writer does not, under existing conditions, believe in
repealing the amendment. He would, indeed, rather have it repealed
than have a perpetual continuance of the evils that have resulted
from unrestricted suffrage. But he believes that these evils will to
a large extent be done away with by the new constitutions, and he
believes that, proper restrictions being provided, the rule should be
applied impartially to all; and those individuals, whether white or
black, should be admitted to the rights of citizenship who measure up
to the full standard of citizenship.
A certain element among the Negroes are good citizens, and are
becoming better citizens all the time. When this element shall have
broken away from the false teaching which has been their bane, they
will have no need to ask for outside aid. The South will recognize
their value, and their reward will be the clear distinction between
them and the ignorant element which now weighs them down.
It has long appeared to the writer that the prime necessity of the
Negroes is to learn to distinguish between Negroes and Negroes;
between the law-abiding and self-respecting Negro and the lawbreaker
and blackguard; between the honest man and the thief; the decent
man and the dive-frequenter; the good citizen and the “tough”—in
other words, to create for themselves some standard of virtue and
right living for both men and women according to which they shall
be classified. Not the least evil of the solidifying of the Negro
race during the period of reconstruction was the destruction of all
distinctions between virtue and vice, as a qualification for civic
promotion. After thirty years the upright, law-abiding, conservative
Negro is bound by that manacle to the thief and the evil-liver,
and strangely enough he mainly appears unwilling to help break the
shackles which hold him down.
These laws give him a chance to break away from his burden, if he
but has the sense to see it. It will tend to break up the dense
solidarity of the Negroes, and will give the best among them—that
is, the conservative, the industrious, the thrifty, and the
enlightened—an opportunity to rise and range themselves in a class
where they will be freed from the burden of the ignorant mass which
weighs them down, and may form a better class to which the others may
aspire. And this the writer esteems a supreme necessity. It leaves
open the avenue by which all who are capable may reënter the former
field, not as Negroes who are admitted simply as such, however feeble
and dull they may be, but as men who are admitted because they are
strong and intelligent.
The Negro as a race, considered and acting solidly, may be a burden
and a menace; but many Negroes are good men and good citizens. They
contribute their part to the public wealth and are on every ground of
justice and sound policy entitled to consideration.
This upper fraction of the race, relieved from the incubus of the
great body which they have been forced to carry as it were on their
backs, would inevitably secure political representation in the South
precisely as they have secured it in the North. They would before
long probably have the intelligence to divide upon all economic
questions just as any other race divides, and the whites, released
from the necessity of maintaining a solidarity, would likewise be
free to divide, in which case there would always be an inducement to
secure rather than to repress the Negro vote.
A possible step in reaching the solution of the question might be
for a reasonably limited number of representative Southern men to
meet in conference a reasonable number of those colored men of the
South who are more familiar with actual conditions there, and thus
are representative of the most enlightened and experienced portion
of that race. These, in a spirit of kindness and of justice, might
confer together and try to find some common ground on which both
shall stand, and formulate some common measures as to which both
sides shall agree and which both shall advocate.
One guiding principle should be, that having established a law to
eliminate forthwith the ignorant Negro and henceforth all ignorance,
this law should be administered honestly, bravely, and impartially.
It is not imagined that such a conference could settle the question,
but at least it would throw some light on it, and it would serve
two good purposes. It would be a starting point for securing
information which would command respect, and it would show what the
most conservative and broad-minded element at the South, both of the
whites and of the blacks, who know the subject thoroughly and have no
personal interest to subserve except that arising from the just and
reasonable settlement of this vital problem, think of it, after they
have had the fullest means of securing information.
Meantime, let the politician and the doctrinaire, if they are truly
the Negro’s friends, hold hands off. The best service the Negro’s
best friend can render him is to tell him the truth. The direst
injury the Negro’s worst enemy can do him is to perpetuate hostility
between him and the Southern White. Left to themselves they would
settle the question along economic lines, and this it must come to at
last.
However one side or the other may dogmatize, it is safe to assume
that any final settlement of the problem must be one that will
commend itself to the body of the intelligent whites at the South. No
other settlement will ever be final.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Mr. Moorfield Storey.
[49] Mr. Carl Schurz.
[50] For conditions in the South during that period, see _post_,
chapter on The Race Problem.
[51] In 1860 there were, of Negro men of voting age in New
Hampshire, 149; in Vermont, 194; in Massachusetts, 2,512, and in
New York, 12,989. In New York alone, prior to 1868, was a Negro
allowed by express provision to vote; but a Negro voter was subject
to a property qualification of $250 not applicable to the white
voter.—Thorp’s Const. Hist, of the U. S., pp. 226-7.
[52] See “The Fifteenth Amendment. An Account of its Enactment,” p.
5. A. Caperton Braxton. Everett-Waddey Co., Richmond, Va.
The Reconstruction Act forced through Congress in August, 1864, by
the radical wing of the Republican Party, and vetoed by Mr. Lincoln
by a pocket veto, expressly limited the franchise to adult whites.
The platform of the Republican Party on which Lincoln was renominated
and reëlected in November, 1864, made no reference to Negro suffrage.
During this year (1864) the Union people adopted new or amended old
constitutions in Arkansas, Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland,
Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia, but no
mention was made of Negro suffrage except to exclude it. _Id._
In December, 1865, when the question of the establishment of Negro
suffrage in the District of Columbia was submitted to the voters
there, the vote stood, in Georgetown, 1 vote for and 812 votes
against the measure, and in Washington, 35 votes for and 6,521 votes
against the measure. _Id._, p. 27.
In September, 1865, the question was submitted to the voters of the
Territory of Colorado. The vote stood 476 for and 4,192 against it.
_Ib._
In June, 1866, the people of Nebraska adopted a constitution which
limited suffrage to whites. In October, 1867, the proposition for
Negro suffrage in Ohio was voted down by over 50,000 majority. In
November of that year the people of Kansas and Minnesota “voted it
down by large majorities.” _Id._, p. 29.
In November, 1868, the people of Iowa voted to strike out the word
“white” from the Constitution. In this State by the census of 1870
there were 289,162 whites and 1,542 blacks. The vote, however, on
this measure was 22,000 less than that for the Republican ticket.
_Id._, p. 39, citing _Tribune_ Almanac for 1869, p. 75.
In November, 1868, the people of Minnesota once more voted on
the measure, and this time it was carried through by only about
three-fifths of the majority given the Republican ticket. By the
census of 1870 there were in that State 114,344 adult white men and
246 adult Negro men. _Id._, p. 40.
In 1868, in Missouri, the measure was voted down by 18,000 majority.
_Ib._
In Michigan, in 1868, when the Republican Party carried the State by
nearly 32,000 majority, the question of Negro suffrage was voted down
by nearly 39,000 majority. _Ib._
In 1869 the people of New York defeated the proposed measure by over
32,000 majority, and the Legislature of that State rescinded a former
act of the previous Legislature, which had, by a majority of two,
ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. _Id._, p. 65.
On the 4th of March, 1869, in Indiana, seventeen Senators and
thirty-six Representatives resigned from the Legislature to break a
quorum and prevent the ratification of the amendment. Every one of
these, with a single exception, was subsequently reëlected by the
people. _Id._, p. 66-7.
Meantime, under the “Reconstruction Acts,” the amendment was forced
on the South. Seven of the Southern States ratified it by the Negro
vote, the whites being generally disfranchised, while in three of
them—Virginia, Mississippi and Texas—ratification was assented to as
a condition of readmission to the Union. _Ib._
See also Eckenrode’s “Reconstruction in Virginia,” Johns Hopkins
Press, 1904.
[53] For such an instance, see Dr. H. M. Field’s “Sunny Skies and
Dark Shadows.”
[54] 1 Cr. 137; 118 U. S. Rep. 142.
[55] For example, in 1880 the vote of
North Carolina was 81 per cent. of its voting population.
Massachusetts ” 56 ” ” ” ” South Carolina ” 82 ” ” ” ” Rhode Island ”
37 ” ” ” ”
Mississippi was 49 per cent. of its voting population. Vermont ” 66 ”
” ” ” Alabama ” 58 ” ” ” ” Florida ” 83 ” ” ” ”
Maryland’s vote for each Congressman at the last Congressional
election (1902) averaged:
Maryland 44,085 Illinois 45,275 New York 41,826 Pennsylvania 36,662
North Carolina 29,267 Virginia 26,409 Massachusetts 29,628 Rhode
Island 28,284 Vermont 28,108 Maine 26,430 South Dakota 96,131
Colorado 92,167 Alabama 17,731 Florida 12,677 Georgia 11,155
Louisiana 9,770 Mississippi 7,388 South Carolina 7,259
[56] Address of Mr. Charles A. Gardiner, cited ante.
[57] See the Romanes Lectures, 1902: The Relations of the Advanced
and the Backward Races of Mankind. By James Bryce, D.C.L.
CHAPTER VI
THE OLD-TIME NEGRO
I
That the “old-time Negro” is passing away is one of the common
sayings all over the South, where once he was as well known as the
cotton-plant and the oak tree. Indeed, he has become so rare that
even now when a gray and wrinkled survivor is found he is regarded as
an exceptional character, and he will soon be as extinct as the dodo.
That he will leave a gap which can hardly be filled is as certain as
that the old-time cavalier or the foster-father of romance has left
his gap.
The “new issue” at which the old-time Negro, who had been the servant
and the associate of gentlemen, once turned up his nose from his
well-secured position, and of which he spoke in terms of scornful
reprobation, has, with the passing of time, pushed him from his
stool, and is no longer the “new issue,” but the general type that
prevails commonly—the Negro with his problem; a problem which it
may, as has been well said by Mr. Root, take all the wisdom, all the
forbearance, and all the resolution of the white race to solve.
Some of the “Afro-Americans,” with the veneer of a so-called
education, to judge from recent works written by certain of them,
presume to look down somewhat scornfully on this notable development
of their race, and assume a fine scorn of the relation which once
existed all over the South between the old-time Southerner and
the old-time darky, and which still exists where the latter still
survives.
They do not consider that large numbers of this class held positions
of responsibility and trust, which they discharged with a fidelity
and success that is the strongest proof of the potentiality of the
race. They do not reckon that warm friendship which existed between
master and servant, and which more than any other one thing gives
promise of future and abiding friendship between the races when left
to settle their relations without outside interference.
One going through the South now—even through those parts where the
old-time darky was once the regular and ordinary picture—unless he
should happen to drift into some secluded region so far out of the
sweep of the current that its life has been caught as in an eddy,
would never know what the old life had been, and what the old-time
Negroes were in that life. Their memory is still cherished in the
hearts of those to whom they stood in a relation which cannot be
explained to and cannot be understood by those who did not know it
as a vital part of their home-life. Even these will soon have passed
from the stage, and in another decade or two the story of that
relation, whose roots were struck deep in the sacredest relations of
life, will be only a tradition kept alive for a generation or two,
but gradually fading until it is quite blurred out by time.
Curiously, whatever the Southerners may think of slavery—and there
were many who reprobated its existence—whatever they may think of
“the Negro” of to-day, there is scarcely one who knew the Negro in
his old relation who does not speak of him with sympathy and think of
him with tenderness. The writer has known men begin to discuss new
conditions fiercely, and on falling to talking of the past, drift
into reminiscences of old servants and turn away to wipe their eyes.
And not the least part of the bitterness of the South over the Negro
question as it has existed grows out of resentment at the destruction
of what was once a relation of warm friendship and tender sympathy.
Of African slavery it may be said that whatever its merits and
demerits, it divided this country into two sections, with opposing
interests, and finally plunged it into a vast and terrible war. This
is condemnation enough.
One need not be an advocate of slavery because he upsets ideas that
have no foundation whatever in truth and sets forth facts that can be
substantiated by the experience of thousands who knew them at first
hand.
II
It is well known by those who knew the old plantation-life that there
were marked divisions between the Negroes. There were among them
what might almost be termed different orders. These were graded by
the various relations in which the individuals stood to the “white
folks”—that is, to the master and mistress and their family.
The house-servants represented a class quite distinct from and quite
above the “field-hands,” of whom they were wont to speak scornfully
as “cornfield niggers,” while among the former were degrees as
clearly defined as ever existed in an English gentleman’s house,
where the housekeeper and the butler held themselves above the rest
of the servants, only admitting to occasional fellowship the lady’s
maid.
Among the first in station were the mammy, the butler, the
body-servant, the carriage-driver, the ladies’ maids, the cook, and
the gardener, with, after an interval, the “boys” who were attached
to one or the other position as assistants and were in training for
the places when the elders should fail. Among the “field-hands” was,
first, the “head man.”[58]
The “head man” was the equal of any other servant—a rank due,
perhaps, partly to his authority and partly to the character that
brought him this authority. He was the foreman, or assistant
superintendent of the plantation. He carried the keys; he called the
hands to work; directed them, and was, to some extent, in authority
over them. Such a one I knew, mighty in word and act, who towered
above the hands he led, a “head man,” indeed.
A somewhat inaccurate idea prevails of the Southern plantation
life, due, possibly, to the highly colored pictures that have been
painted of it in books of a romantic order, in which the romance much
outweighed the ha’penny-worth of verisimilitude. The current idea
is that a Southern plantation was generally a great estate, teeming
with black slaves who groaned under the lash of the drivers and at
night were scourged to their dungeons, while their masters revelled
in ill-used luxury and steeped themselves in licentiousness, not
stopping at times to “traffic in their own flesh and blood.”
It may be well to say in the outset that nothing could be further
from the truth.
There were great estates, but they were not numerous. There were,
possibly, a score of persons in Virginia who owned over three hundred
slaves, and ten or a dozen who owned over five hundred. Such estates
were kept up in a certain style which almost always accompanies large
wealth. But the great majority of the plantations in Virginia, and,
so far as my reading and observation have gone, elsewhere, however
extensive were the lands, were modest and simple, and the relation
between masters and servants was one of close personal acquaintance
and friendliness, beginning at the cradle and scarcely ending at the
grave.
At the outbreak of the war, while the number of the white population
of the Southern States was about thirteen millions, the number of
slave-owners and slave-hirers, including those who owned or hired but
one slave, was, perhaps, less than half a million; that is, of the
adult whites, men and women, estimating them as one-fifth each of the
population, less than one in ten owned or hired slaves.[59]
Thus, while slavery on the great plantations, where the slaves
numbered several hundreds, was liable to such abuses as spring
readily from absenteeism, on most of the plantations the slaves and
the masters were necessarily brought into fairly close contact, and
the result of this contact was the relation of friendship which has
been the wonder and the mystification of those who considered slavery
the sum of all the villainies.
The chief idea that prevails as to the relation is taken from a work
of fiction which, as a political pamphlet written under the stress
of deep feeling, whatever truth it had as basis, certainly does not
present a true picture.
Work was parcelled out among the “hands,” the “hands” being divided
into sections: pough-hands, drivers, hoe-hands, etc.
Their homes were known as “the quarters.” On the larger plantations
they were divided by streets.
On the plantation which the writer knew best, there were several
double-cabins on the quarters-hill and three or four facing on the
backyard. In one of the latter was a room which was the joy of his
heart, and which, after forty years, is still touched with a light
more radiant than many a palace apartment he has seen. It was known
as “Unc’ Balla’s room,” and its occupant was so great a man to me
that in his own field I have never known his superior. “Uncle Balla”
was the carriage-driver, and not from Jehu down was ever one who, in
the writer’s mind, could equal him in handling the reins. He was the
guide, philosopher, and friend of my boyhood. And no better, saner,
or more right-minded guide ever lived.
In that room were “chists,” which I even now think of with an
indrawing of the breath, as I imagine their precious and unexplored
contents. Verily, they must have held golden ingots! Then, there was
his cobbler’s bench, for he was a harness-maker and cobbler—and his
cooper’s bench, for he made the noggins and piggins and pails for
the milkmaids and housewives, deriving therefrom a little income.
And when it came to horses! As I have sat and heard the learned at
races and horse-shows air their knowledge, I have often been filled
with a sudden longing that Uncle Balla were there to show what real
knowledge was.
He lived for thirty years after the war in a little house on the
edge of the plantation, and when he began to fail he was brought
home, where he could be better looked after. At the end, his funeral
services were conducted from the front portico and he was followed to
the grave by white and black.
Each cabin had, or might have had, its little yard and garden, and
each family had its chicken-house and yard.
On the larger plantations, where the Negroes numbered two hundred
or more, nearly everything was made by them, so that such an estate
was a little world in itself, substantially self-supporting. On our
place, while the spinning and weaving and the carpentry-work were
done on the place, most of the cloth for clothing and the shoes were
bought in town in the spring and autumn, and the tailor and cobbler
kept them in order. In purchasing the shoes, each person brought his
measure, a stick the exact length of his foot. This stick had certain
marks or notches on it, and the Negro kept a duplicate, by which to
identify his shoes when they arrived.
III
No servants or retainers of any race ever identified themselves more
fully with their masters. The relation was rather that of retainers
than of slaves. It began in the infancy of both master and servant,
grew with their growth, and continued through life. Such a relation
does not now, so far as I know, exist, except in the isolated
instances of old families who have survived all the chances and
changes with the old family servants still hanging on. Certainly,
I think, it did not exist anywhere else, unless, perhaps, on the
country estates of the gentry in England and, possibly, in parts of
France and Germany.
This relation in the South was not exceptional. It was the general,
if not the universal rule. The servants were “my servants” or “my
people”; the masters were to the servants, “_my_ master and _my_
mistis,” or “my white folks.” Both pride and affection spoke in that
claim.
In fact, the ties of pride were such that it was often remarked that
the affection of the slaves was stronger toward the whites than
toward their own offspring. This fact, which cannot be successfully
disputed, has been referred by Professor Shaler to a survival of a
tribal instinct which preponderated over the family instinct. Others
may possibly refer it to the fact that the family instinct was,
owing to the very nature of the institution of slavery, not allowed
to take deep root. Whatever the cause, it does not appear even now
to have taken much root, at least, according to the standard of the
Anglo-Saxon, a race whose history is founded upon the family instinct.
The family ties among the Negroes often appear to be scarcely
as strong now as they were under the institution of slavery.
Marital fidelity is, if we are to believe those who have had good
opportunities of observation, not as common now as it was then. The
instances of desertion of husbands, of wives, of parents, or children
would possibly offset any division that took place under that
institution.
A number of old Negroes whom I have known have been abandoned by
nearly all of their children. Often, when they grow up, they leave
them with scarcely less unconcern than do any order of the lower
animals.
The oldest son of our dining-room servant went off at the time of one
of Sheridan’s raids and was never heard of again until some twenty
years after the war, when it was learned that he was a fisherman on
the lower James, and although he lived, and may be living yet, within
a hundred miles of his old home, where his father and mother lived,
he never took the trouble even to communicate with them once. The
next son went off to the South after the war, and the only time that
he ever wrote home, so far as I know, was when he wrote to ascertain
his age, in order that he might qualify to vote. The same may be said
of many others.
* * * * *
The Mammy was, perhaps, the most important of the servants, as she
was also the closest intimate of the family. She was, indeed, an
actual member of the household. She was usually selected in her
youth to be the companion of the children by reason of her being
the child of some favored servant and, as such, likely to possess
sense, amiability, judgment, and the qualities which gave promise
of character and efficiency. So she grew up in intercourse with the
girls of the family, and when they married she became, in turn, the
nurse and assistant to the old mammy, and then the mammy of her young
mistress’s children, and, after, of their children.
She has never been adequately described. Chiefly, I fancy, because it
was impossible to describe her as she was.
Who may picture a mother? We may dab and dab at it, but when we have
done our best we know that we have stuck on a little paint, and the
eternal verity stands forth like the eternal verity of the Holy
Mother, outside our conception, only to be apprehended in our highest
moments, and never to be truly pictured by pen or pencil.
So, no one can describe what the Mammy was, and only those can
apprehend her who were rocked on her generous bosom, slept on her
bed, fed at her table, were directed and controlled by her, watched
by her unsleeping eye, and led by her precept in the way of truth,
justice, and humanity.
She was far more than a servant. She was a member of the family in
high standing and of unquestioned influence. She was her mistress’s
coadjutress and her wise adviser, and where the children were
concerned, she was next to her in authority.
My father’s mammy, old Krenda, was said to have been an African
princess, and whether there was any other foundation for the idea
than her commanding presence and character, I know not; but these
were unquestionable. Her aphorisms have been handed down in the
family since her time. Among them was one which has a smack of the
old times and at least indicates that she had not visited some modern
cities: “Good manners will cyah you whar money won’t.”
I remember my mammy well, though she died when I was a child. Her
name was Lydia, and she was the daughter of old Betty, who had been
my great-grandmother’s maid. Betty used to read to her mistress
during the latter years of her life when she was blind. Lydia had
been my mother’s mammy before she was mine and my brother’s, and she
had the authority and prestige of having been such.
After forty-five years, I recall with mingled affection and awe my
mammy’s dignity, force, and kindness; her snowy bed, where I was put
to sleep in the little up-stairs room, sealed with pictures from the
illustrated papers and with fashion-plates, in which her artistic
feeling found its vent; I recall also the delicious “biscuit-bread”
she made, which we thought better than that of all the cooks and
bakers in the world. In one corner stood her tea-table, with her
“tea-things,” her tea and white sugar.
I remember, too, the exercise of her authority, and recall, at least
two “good whippings” that she gave me.
One curious recollection that remains is of a discussion between her
and one of her young mistresses on the subject of slavery, in which
the latter fell back on what is, possibly, one of the strongest
arguments of the slave-holder, the Bible, and asserted that God had
put each of them in their places. It may be left to the reader to say
which had the better of the argument. The interest of the matter now
is rather academic than practical.
A few days before my mammy’s death she made her will, dividing her
“things,” for such wills were as strictly observed as if they had
been admitted to probate. Among her bequests her feather-bed and
pillows were left to my elder brother. She made my mother bring a
pen and write his name on the bed and pillows. And these pillows are
now in his rectory.
It was from our mammies that we learned those delightful stories of
“Brer Fox” and “Brer Hyah,” which the children of a later generation
have learned through the magic pen of “Uncle Remus.” It was from them
also that we learned many of the lessons of morality and truth.
Next to the mammy in point of dignity was, of right, the butler. He
held much the same position that is held by the butler in English
houses. He was a person in authority, and he looked that every inch.
He had his ideas, and they usually prevailed. He was the governor of
the young children, the mentor of the young men, and their counsellor
even after they had grown up.
Some of my readers may have seen in some hotel a Negro head-waiter
who was a model of dignity and of grave authority—a field-marshal in
ebony—doing the honors of his dining-room like a court chamberlain,
and ruling his subordinates with the authority of a benignant despot.
Such a one was probably some gentleman’s butler, who had risen by his
abilities to be the chief of the dining-room.
More than one such character rises before me from the past, and the
stories of their authority are a part of the traditional record of
every family. The most imposing one that I personally remember was
“Uncle Tom,” the butler of a cousin, whose stateliness impressed my
childhood’s fancy in a way which has never been effaced. I have seen
monarchs less impressive. His authority was so well recognized that
he used to be called in to make the children take their physic.
It was said that one of the children, who is now a matron of great
dignity and a grandmother, once, in an awed whisper, asked her
grandmother, who was the mistress of “Uncle Tom” and of several
hundred other servants, “Gran’ma, is you feared o’ Unc’ Tom?” And her
grandmother, who told the story, used to add: “And you know the truth
is, I am.”
It was a cousin of hers, Mrs. Carter, of Shirley, who used to say
that when she invited company she always had to break it to Clarissy,
her maid.
In truth, whatever limitation there was on the unstinted hospitality
of the South was due to the fact that the servants were always
considered in such matters.
This awe of the butler in his grandeur often did not pass away with
youth. He both demanded and received his due respect even from
grown members of the family. Of one that I knew it is told now by
gray-headed men how, on occasion, long after they were grown, he
would correct their manners, even at table, by a little rap on the
head and a whispered reproof, as he leaned over them to place a dish.
And I never knew one who did not retain his position of influence and
exercise his right of admonition.
I have known butlers to take upon themselves the responsibility of
saying what young gentlemen should be admitted as visitors at the
house, and to whom the ladies should be denied. In fact, every wise
young man used to be at pains to make friends with the old servants,
for they were a sagacious class and their influence in the household
was not inconsiderable. They had an intuitive knowledge, which
amounted to an instinct, for “winnowing the grain from the chaff,”
and they knew a “gent’man” at sight. Their acute and caustic comments
have wrecked the chances of many an aspiring young suitor who failed
to meet with their approval.
IV
There is a universal belief that the Negroes under slavery had no
education. I have seen it stated a number of times that it was made
a crime by law, in every State of the South, to teach one to read.
Such a statement is not true.[60] Teaching them was not encouraged,
generally, and such laws existed at one time in four of the States
of the South; but they did not exist in Virginia. Several of our
Negroes could read, and if it was not the same on most of the
plantations, it was at least the same on those of which I had any
knowledge. My great-grandmother’s maid used, I have heard, to read
to her regularly, and in our family the ladies used to teach the
girls as much as they would learn. But apart from book-learning, they
had, especially the house-servants, the education which comes from
daily association with people of culture, and it was an education
not to be despised. Some gentlemen carried on a correspondence about
home affairs with their butlers during their absence from home. For
instance, I recall hearing that when Mr. Abel P. Upshur was Secretary
of the Navy, some gentlemen were at his house, and were discussing at
table some public matter, when the butler gave them the latest news
about it, saying that he had that morning received a letter from his
master.
There is an idea that the Negroes were in the state of excitement
and agonized expectancy of freedom that the Anglo-Saxon race felt
it would have been in under similar circumstances. Much is made, at
certain kinds of meetings, of the great part which they contributed
toward saving the Union. Discussion of this may be set aside as
bordering on the controversial. But it may not be outside of this
phase of the matter, and it will throw some light on it to state
briefly what was the attitude of the Negro slave population toward
the quarrel between the North and the South.
The total number of Negro enlistments and reënlistments on the
Federal side was between 189,000 and 190,000. When it is considered
that this embraced all the soldier element of the Negroes in the
North and of the refugee element in the South, who were induced to
enter the army, either by persuasion of bounties or under stress
of compulsion, whether of military draft or of “belly-pinching,”
the number does not appear large. After midsummer, 1863, the North
occupied the States of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, half of
Virginia, of Tennessee, of Louisiana, of Arkansas, of Mississippi,
and considerable portions of the Carolinas and Alabamas. That is,
she occupied a third, and nearer a half, of the entire slave-holding
territory of the South, while the penetration of her raiding parties
into the regions occupied by the Southern troops furnished, at times,
opportunity to, possibly, a fourth of the young men of that section
to escape from bondage had they been moved by the passion of freedom.
It is at once a refutation of the charge of the cruelty of slavery,
so commonly accepted, and an evidence of the easy-going amiability
and docility of the Negro race that, under all the excitement and
through all the opportunities and temptations surrounding them, they
should not only have remained faithful to their masters, but that the
stress of the time should have appeared to weld the bond between them.
That there was a wild and adventurous element among them is well
known. It was to be expected, and was an element in whom the
instincts of wild life in the jungle and the forests survived. Every
large plantation had one or more who had the runaway spirit keenly
alive. There were several on our place. They ran away when they were
crossed in love or in any other desire of their hearts. They ran away
if they were whipped, and, as they were the shirkers and loafers on
the plantations, if anyone was whipped, it was likely to be one of
them. Yet, curiously enough, if a runaway was caught and was whipped,
he was very unlikely to run off again until the spirit seized him,
when nothing on earth could stop him.[61]
One other class was likely to furnish the element that went off, and
this was the “pampered class.” House-servants were more likely to go
than field-hands. Their ears were somehow more attuned to the song of
the siren.[62]
Against those who availed themselves of the opportunities offered
them to escape from the bondage of domestic slavery may be put the
great body of the Negro race who, whether from inability to grasp the
vastness of the boon of liberty held out to them, or from fear of
the ills they knew not of, or from sheer content with a life where
the toil was not drudgery and the flesh-pots overbalanced the idea
of freedom, not only held fast to their masters, but took sides with
them with a quickened feeling and a deepened affection. For every one
who fled to freedom, possibly one hundred stood by their masters’
wives and children.
Doubtless there were many—possibly, the most of them—who remained
from sheer inertia or fear to leave. But a far larger number
identified themselves with their masters, and this union was not one
of lip-service, but of sentiment, of heart and soul.
In truth, they were infected with the same spirit and ardor that
filled the whites, and had the South called for volunteers from the
Negroes, I question not that they could have gotten half a million
men.[63]
A story is told of one of the old Negroes who belonged to the family
into which General Scott married. He went to the war to take care of
one of his young masters. He had no doubt whatever as to the justice
of the cause, but General Scott was to his mind the embodiment of
war and carnage, and the General had espoused the other side. This
disturbed him greatly, and one night he was heard praying down
outside the camp. After praying for everyone, he prayed: “And O Lord,
please to convut Marse Lieutenan’ Gen’l Scott and turn him f’om de
urrer o’ he ways.”
The devotion of slaves to their masters in time of war is no new
thing under the sun. The fact that their masters are in arms has
always, no doubt, borne its part in the phenomenon. But it does not
wholly account for the absolute devotion of the Negroes. It is to
the eternal credit at once of the Whites and of the Negroes that,
during these four years of war, when the white men of the South
were absent in the field they could intrust their homes, their
wives, their children, all they possessed, to the guardianship and
care of their slaves, with absolute confidence in their fidelity.
And this trust was never violated. The Negroes were their faithful
guardians, their sympathizing friends, and their shrewd advisers,
guarding their property, enduring necessary denial with cheerfulness,
and identifying themselves with their masters’ fortunes with the
devotion, not of slaves, but of clansmen.
The devotion of the body-servants to their masters in the field is
too well known almost to need mention, and what is said of them in
this paper is owing rather to the feeling that the statement of the
fact is a debt due to the class from which these came rather than to
thinking it necessary to enlighten the reader.
When the Southern men went into the field there was always a contest
among the Negroes as to who should accompany them. Usually, the
choice of the young men would be for some of the younger men among
the servants, while the choice of the family would be for some of
the older and more staid members of the household, who would be
prudent, and so, more likely to take better care of their masters.
And thus there was much heart-burning among the younger Negroes, who
were almost as eager for adventure as their masters.
Of all the thousands of Negroes who went out as servants with their
masters, I have never heard of one who deserted to the North, and I
have known of many who had abundant opportunity to do so. Some were
captured, but escaped; others apparently deserted, but returned laden
with spoils.
My father’s body-servant, Ralph Woodson, served with him throughout
the entire war. While at Petersburg, where the armies were within
a mile of each other, he was punished for getting drunk and he ran
away. But instead of making for the Union lines and surrendering
to a Union picket, which he could easily have done, he started for
home, sixty miles away. He was, however, arrested as a straggler or
runaway, and my father, hearing of him, sent and brought him back to
camp, where he remained to the end.
An even more notable instance which has come to my knowledge was
that of Simon, the servant of a friend of mine. He disappeared from
camp during the Spottsylvania campaign, and just when his master had
given him up he reappeared with a sack full of all sorts of things,
useful for the mess, which he declared “dem gent’mens on the other
side had gin him.” He had borrowed of the Egyptians.
The letters and annals of the time are full of references to the
singular, but then well-known fact, that while the people of the
South gave their sons joyfully to the cause, they were most unwilling
to allow their Negroes to go. The reason for this has been much
misapprehended. It has been generally supposed outside that it was
because they were afraid to lose their property. Nothing could be
more unfounded. They were afraid their servants might be hurt or
suffer some harm.
Fathers who wrote their sons to be always at the post of honor,
would give them explicit directions how to keep their servants out
of danger. The war in some way was concerned with the perpetuation
of slavery, and it was felt that it was not just to expose slaves to
danger when such was the case.
Something of this same feeling played its part in the decision not
to enlist Negroes in the army of the Confederacy.
In the field they showed both courage and sagacity, and many are the
instances in which, when their masters were wounded and left on the
field, they hunted for them through scenes which tested men’s courage
as much as the battle itself. The records of the time are full of
such instances.
V
When the war closed and the Negroes were set free, the feeling
between them and their old masters was never warmer, the bonds of
friendship were never more close. The devotion which the Negro had
shown during the long struggle had created a profound impression
on the minds of the Southern whites. Even between the Negroes and
poorer whites, who had always been rather at enmity, a better
feeling had grown up. The close of the war had accomplished what
all the emancipation proclamations could not effect. Their masters
universally informed their servants that they were free.
I remember my father’s return from Appomattox. For days he had been
watched for. Appomattox was less than a hundred miles from our home.
The news of the surrender had come to us first through one of the
wagon-drivers, who told it weeping. I seem to see the return now—my
father on his gray horse, with his body-servant, Ralph, behind him.
I remember the way in which, as he slipped from his horse, he put
his hand over his face to hide his tears, and his groan, “I never
expected to come home so.” All were weeping. A few minutes later
he came out on the porch and said: “Ralph, you are free; take the
saddles off and turn the horses out.”
He had carried a silver half-dollar all through the war, saving it
till the last pinch. This had come when he reached the river on his
way home. The ferryman had declined to take Confederate money, and he
paid him his half-dollar to ferry him across.
Such was the end of slavery, the institution which had divided this
country in twain, and finally had convulsed it and brought on a
terrible war.
When the end of slavery came there was, doubtless, some
heart-burning, but the transition was accomplished without an
outbreak, and well-nigh without one act of harshness or even of
rudeness.
If there was jubilation among the Negroes on the plantation it was
not known to the Whites. In fact the Negroes were rather mystified.
The sudden coming of that for which they had possibly hoped, with the
loom of the unknown future, had sobered at least the elders. Their
owners, almost without exception, conveyed to them the information
of their freedom, which thus had a more comprehensible security than
could have been given by the acts of Congress, or the orders of
military authorities.
In some cases the old Negroes sought and held long conferences with
their mistresses or masters in which the whole matter was canvassed.
In every instance the assurance was given them that they should
live on the old plantations, if they wished to do so and were still
willing to work and would obey orders.
As was natural, the Negroes, in the first flush of freedom, left
the estates and went off “for themselves,” as the phrase ran.[64]
They flocked either to the cities, or to the nearest centre
where a garrison of Union troops was posted, and where rations
were distributed partly as a measure of necessity and partly from
a philanthropic sentiment which had more or less ground for its
existence. But after a time, many of them returned to work. Those of
them who had anything shared what they had with their masters. Some
of them brought eggs and chickens; others saved a part of the rations
given by the Government.
It is no part of my intention in this paper to go generally into
the relation of the two races since the emancipation of the
Negroes. Certain phases of this relation have been dealt with by me
elsewhere. While it is easy to see what mistakes have been made in
dealing with the subject, no one can tell with any assurance how a
different system might have worked out. All we can say, with absolute
certainty, is that hardly any other system could have been more
disastrous than the one which was adopted.
One fact, I think, cannot be soundly controverted—that the
estrangement of the Negro from the white race in the South is the
greatest misfortune that has befallen the former in his history, not
excepting his ravishment from his native land.
VI
The old-time Negro has almost quite passed from the earth, as have
his old master and his old mistress. A few still remain, like the
last leaves on the tree, but in no long time they, too, will have
disappeared. But so long as he survives, the old family feeling of
affection will remain in the hearts of those who knew him. Every week
or two the newspapers contain the mention of the passing from the
stage of one or more of those whose place in some old family made
them notable in their lives and caused them to be followed to the
grave by as sincere mourners among the whites as among the blacks.
But how many of them pass without any other notice than the unfeigned
mourning of those whom they loved and served so faithfully!
No Southerner, whatever his feelings of antagonism may be to the
Negro race, ever meets an old Negro man or woman without that feeling
rising in his breast which one experiences when he meets some old
friend of his youth on whom Time has laid his chastening hand.
Nor has the old feeling by any means died out in the breast of the
old Negro himself. Only as the whites look on the young blacks with
some disapproval, so the old Negro regards the younger generation of
whites as inferior to the generation he knew.
Not long since a friend in Richmond told me the following story: A
friend of his in that city invited him in the shooting season to go
down to his father’s place to shoot partridges. The house had been
burned down, but old Robin was still living there, and had told him
not long before that there were a good many birds on the place.
Accordingly, the two gentlemen one morning took their guns and dogs
and drove down to the old Ball plantation, where they arrived about
sunrise. Old Robin was cutting wood in front of his cabin, and my
friend began to shout for him: “Oh, Robin! Oh, Robin!” The old fellow
stopped, and coming to the brow of the hill above them, called: “Who
dat know me so much bettuh den I know him?”
“Come down here!” called his master.
When the old fellow discovered who it was he was delighted.
“Yes, suh,” said he; “dyah’s plenty of buds down here on de branch.
I sees ’em eve’y evenin’ most when I comes down atter my cow. You go
’long and kill ’em and I’ll take keer of yo’ horse for yo’ and tell
Mandy to hev some snack for yo’ ’bout twelve o’clock.”
Just as he was leaving, he stopped, and leaning out of the wagon,
said: “Marse Gus, don’t yo’ shoot any ole hyahs down dere. I takes
my gun down wid me when I goes down atter my cow. Dem buds flies too
fas’ for me, but I kin manage to shoot a ole hyah if I ketch one
settin’ in de baid.”
The promise was given and was kept by the hunters until they were
about to stop for lunch. Just then a fine hare jumped up in front of
Marse Gus, and gave him a fair shot. In his ardor he fired at it and
knocked it over. At that moment old Robin was heard calling to them
to come on up to the house as “snack was ready.”
“There!” said Gus, as he picked up the hare, “now I’ve gone and
killed this hare, and that old man will never forgive me.”
“Take it and give it to him for his wife,” said his friend.
“Oh, no!” he said, “you don’t know old Robin; he will never forgive
me.”
“Well, put it down in the bottom of your game-bag; he will never know
the difference,” said his friend. And this was shamelessly done.
They were greeted by the old man cheerfully, with “You must have got
plenty of buds, I heard you shoot so much?”
“Oh, yes, we had very good luck!” said the huntsmen.
“You didn’t shoot any ole hyahs?” he inquired confidently.
The silence aroused his suspicion, and, turning, he shot a keen
glance at his master, which took in the well-filled game-bag.
“What you got in dem game-pockets to make ’em look so big? You
certain’y ain’ shoot as many buds as dat in dis time?”
Gus, convicted, poked his hand into his bag and drew out the rabbit.
“Here, Uncle Robin,” he said in some confusion, “this is the only one
I shot. I want you to take it and give it to Mandy.”
But the old man declined. “Nor, I don’ want it and Mandy don’ want
it,” he said, half-scornfully; “you done shoot it and now yo’ better
keep it.”
He stalked on up the hill in silence. Suddenly, stopping, he turned
back.
“Well, well,” he said, “times certain’y is changed! Marse Gus, yo’ pa
wouldn’t ’a’ told me a lie for a mule, let ’lone a’ ole hyah.”
* * * * *
The character of the old-time Negro can hardly be better illustrated
than by the case of an old friend of mine, John Dabney, to whom
I, in common with nearly all my acquaintances in Richmond, used
to be greatly indebted, for he was the best caterer I ever knew.
John Dabney was, in his boyhood, a race-rider for a noted Virginia
turfman, Major William R. Johnson, but, possibly because of his gifts
as a cook, he soon grew too fat for that “lean and hungry” calling,
and in time he became a celebrated cook and caterer. He belonged to a
lady in the adjoining county to my native county, and, prior to the
war, he bought himself from his mistress, as was not infrequently
done by clever Negroes. When the war closed, he still owed his
mistress several hundred dollars on account of this debt, and as
soon as he was able to raise the sum he sent it to her. She promptly
returned it, telling him that he was free and would have been free
anyhow and that he owed her nothing. On this, John Dabney took the
money, went to his old home and insisted on her receiving it, saying
that his old master had brought him up to pay his debts, and that
this was a just debt which he proposed to pay. And pay it he did.
The instances are not rare in which old family servants who have
worked under the new conditions more successfully than their former
owners, have shown the old feeling by rendering them such acts of
kindness as could only have sprung from a deep and abiding affection.
Whoever goes to the White House will find at the door of the
executive offices an elderly and very stout Negro door-keeper, with
perfect manners, a step as soft as the fall of the leaf, and an
aplomb which nothing can disturb. His name is Arthur Simmons, and,
until toward the close of the war, he was a gentleman’s servant in
North Carolina; then he came North. He is, possibly, the oldest
employee in the White House, having been appointed by General Grant
during his first term, and having held his position, with the
exception of a single term—that of General Harrison—to the present
time. It is said that Mr. Cleveland’s first appointment after
his return to office was that of Arthur Simmons to his old post.
Possibly, Mr. Cleveland had heard this story of him: Once, Arthur,
having learned that his old mistress had expressed a desire to see
the President of the United States, invited her to Washington, met
her at the station, saw to her comfort while in the city, arranged an
interview with the President for her, and then escorted her back to
take her train home.
On a part of the old plantation which I have attempted to describe
has lived for the past thirty years, free of rent, the leading Negro
politician in the upper end of Hanover County. His wife, Hannah, was
my mother’s old maid, who, after the war, as before it, served us
with a fidelity and zeal of which I can give no conception. It may,
however, illustrate it to state that, although she lived a mile and
a quarter from the house and had to cross a creek, through which,
in times of high water, she occasionally had to wade almost to her
waist, she for thirty years did not miss being at her post in the
morning more than a half-score times.
Hannah has gone to her long home, and it may throw some light on the
old relation between mistress and servant to say that on the occasion
of the golden wedding of her old master and mistress, as Hannah was
at that time too ill to leave her home, they took all the presents
in the carriage and carried them over to show them to her. Indeed,
Hannah’s last thought was of her old mistress. She died suddenly one
morning, and just before her death she said to her husband, “Open the
do’, it’s Miss ——.” The door was opened, but the mistress was not
there, except to Hannah’s dying gaze. To her, she was standing by her
bedside, and her last words were addressed to her.
It is a continual cause of surprise among those who do not know
the South intimately that Southerners should be so fond of the old
Negroes and yet should be so intolerant of things which Northerners
would regard with indifference. It is a matter which can hardly
be explained, but if anyone goes and lives at the South, he will
quickly find himself falling into Southern ways. Let one go on the
plantations where the politician is absent and the “bloody-shirt”
newspaper is unknown, and he will find something of the old relation
still existing.
I have seen a young man (who happened to be a lieutenant in a
volunteer company) kiss his old mammy on the parade ground in sight
of the whole regiment.
Some years ago, while General Fitzhugh Lee was Governor of Virginia,
a wedding took place in the executive mansion at Richmond. At the
last moment, when the company were assembled and all had taken their
places, waiting for the bride to appear, it was discovered that mammy
Celia, the bride’s mammy, had not come in, and no less a person than
General Lee, the Governor of Virginia, went and fetched her in on his
arm to take her place beside the mother of the bride.
VII
Unhappily, whatever the future may produce, the teachings of
doctrinaires and injudicious friends have lost the Negroes of the
present generation their manners and cost them much of the friendship
of the Whites.
None of us knows what relation the future may produce between the two
races in the South, but possibly when the self-righteous shall be
fewer than they are now and the teachings which have estranged the
races shall become more sane, the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is
dominant, and the Negro race, which is amiable, if not subservient,
will adjust their differences more in accordance with the laws which
must eventually prevail, and the old feeling of kindliness, which
seems, under the stress of antagonism, to be dying away, will once
more reassert itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] The name “driver” was unknown in Virginia, whatever it may have
been in the South. And the “driver” of slave-horror novels was as
purely the creature of the imagination as Cerberus, or the Chimera.
[59] In Georgia, for example, as shown by the investigation of
Professor Du Bois, one of the best educated and trained colored
men in the South, there were, in 1860, 455,698 negroes and 591,550
whites. Of these, there were 3,500 free negroes and 462,195 slaves
owned by 40,773 slave-holders, or about 10½ to each slave-holder.
Of these slave-holders,
16 per cent. of all—6,713 owned 1 slave. 10 ” ” —4,353 ” 2 slaves.
8 ” ” —3,482 ” 3 ” 2,984 ” 4 ” 2,543 ” 5 ” 2,213 ” 6 ” 1,839 ” 7 ”
1,647 ” 8 ” 1,415 ” 9 ” 4,707 ” 10 or under 15 slaves. 2,523 ” 15 ” ”
20 ” 2,910 ” 20 ” ” 30 ” 1,400 ” 30 ” ” 40 ” 739 ” 40 ” ” 50 ” 729 ”
50 ” ” 70 ” 373 ” 70 ” ” 100 ” 181 ” 100 ” ” 200 ” 23 ” 200 ” ” 300 ”
7 ” 300 ” ” 500 ” 1 ” 500 ” ” 1,000 ”
From this table it will be seen that 6,713, or about 16½ per cent.,
owned only one slave, 10½ per cent. owned only two slaves, and 50 per
cent. owned five slaves or fewer, while 66 per cent. (27,191) owned
under ten slaves; 1,102 owned between fifty and one hundred, and but
212 owned over one hundred, while only twenty-three owned over two
hundred.
[60] As to the education of the Negroes: See Report of U. S.
Commissioner of Education, 1901, vol. i, p. 745, _et seq._, for a
valuable paper by Prof. Kelly Miller, one of the most intelligent
colored men in the country. Citing the Report of U. S. Commissioner
of Education, 1868, he shows that such laws were adopted in Alabama,
Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, about 1830-34. While in
Virginia in 1831, as in Delaware in 1863, public meetings were
prohibited. These laws grew out of the Nat Turner Insurrection. V.
Appendix.
[61] We had three or four such young men on our plantation, and
although the plantation lay within two or three miles of the roads
down which Sheridan and Stoneman passed, and within twelve or fifteen
miles of those along which Grant passed, these were the only negroes
from our place who went off during the war. In all, four young men
left us.
If anyone wishes to get an insight into this phase of the negro
character and at the same time pass a delightful half hour, let him
read Harry Stillwell Edwards’s story, “Two Runaways.”
[62] That very “Uncle Tom,” of whom I have spoken as a stern
and terrifying spectacle of grandeur, left his home and went to
Philadelphia.
[63] Several regiments were enlisted in the beginning of the war, but
the plan was changed and they were disbanded.
[64] Prince Kropotkin mentioned in his memoirs that the Russian serfs
who wanted to show their emancipation did the same thing.
CHAPTER VII
THE RACE QUESTION[65]
I
TO any calm observer of the present condition of our country
painfully apparent must be the difference between the state of what
from long usage we are accustomed to term “the two sections.”
We have one blood, one language, one religion, one common end,
one government; but the North and the South are still “the two
sections,” as they were one hundred years ago, when the bands of the
Constitution were hardly cooled from the welding, or as they were in
1860, when they stood, armed to the teeth, facing each other, and the
cloud of revolution was hovering above them soon to burst in the
dread thunder of civil war.
Should one, hearing the phrase “the two sections,” take the map of
the American Union and study its salient features, he would declare
that “the two sections” were by natural geographical division the
East and the West; should he study the commerce of the country
with its vast currents and tides, its fields of agriculture and
manufacture, he would be impelled to declare that by all the
inexorable laws of interest they were the East and the West. And yet,
we who stand amid the incontestable evidences of events know that
against all laws, against all reason, against all right, there are
two sections of this country, and they are not the East and the West,
but the South and the rest of the Union.
It is proposed to show briefly why this unhappy condition exists; and
to suggest a few things which, if earnestly considered and patiently
advocated, may, in the providence of God, contribute to the solution
of the distressing difficulties which confront us.
The divergence of the “two sections” was coeval with the planting
of the continent; it preceded the establishment of the nation.
It steadily increased until an irrepressible conflict became
inevitable; and it was not until after this conflict had spent itself
that reconcilement became possible.
The causes of that divergence, with the exception of one, it is
not necessary to discuss here. This one has survived even the
cauterization of war. Other causes have passed away. The right of
secession is no longer an active issue. It has been adjudicated.
That it once existed and was utilized on occasion by other States
than those which actually exercised it is undeniable; that it passed
away with the Confederate armies at Appomattox is equally beyond
controversy. The very men who once asserted it and shed their blood
to establish it, would now, while still standing by the rightness of
their former position, admit that in the light of altered conditions
the Union is no longer dissoluble. They are ready if need be to
maintain the fact. It is, however, important to make it clear that
the right did exist, because on this depends largely the South’s
place in history. Without this we were mere insurgents and rebels;
with it, we were a great people in revolution for our rights. In
1861 the South stood aligned against the Union and apparently for
the perpetuation of slavery. The sentiment of the whole world
was against it. We were defeated, overwhelmed. Unless we possess
strength sufficient to maintain ourselves even in the face of this,
the verdict of posterity will be against us. It is not unlikely
that in fifty years the defence of slavery will be deemed the world
over to have been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to
have been. There is but one way to prevent the impending disaster:
by establishing the real fact, that, whatever may have been the
immediate and apparent occasion, the true and ultimate cause of
the action of the South was her firm and unwavering adherence to
the principle of self-government and her jealous devotion to her
inalienable rights.
But if the other causes which kept the country divided have passed
away as practical issues, one still survives and is, under a changed
form, as vital to-day and as pregnant with evil as it was in 1861.
This is the question which ever confronts the South; the question
which after twenty-five years of peace and prosperity still keeps the
South “one section” and the rest of the nation the other. This is the
ever-present, ever-menacing, ever-growing Negro Question.
It is to-day the most portentous as it is the most dangerous problem
which confronts the American people.
The question is so misunderstood that even the terminology for it in
the two sections varies irreconcilably. The North terms it simply
the question of the civil equality of all citizens before the law;
the South denominates it the question of Negro domination. More
accurately it should be termed the Race Question.
Whatever its proper title may be, upon its correct solution depend
the progress and the security, if not the very existence, of the
American people.
In order that it may be solved it is necessary, first, that its real
gravity shall be understood, and its true difficulties apprehended.
We have lived in quietude so long, and have become so accustomed to
the condition of affairs, that we are sensible of no apprehension,
but rest in the face of this as of other dangers, content and calm.
So rest Alpine dwellers who sleep beneath masses of snow which have
accumulated for years, yet which, quiet as they appear upon the
mountain-sides above, may at any time without warning, by the mere
breaking of a twig or the fall of a pebble, be transformed into the
resistless and overwhelming avalanche.
There are signs of impending peril about us.
There is, first, the danger incident to the exigence under which the
South has stood, of wresting if not of subverting the written law to
what she deems the inexorable exactions of her condition.
It is often charged that the written law is not fully and freely
observed at the South in matters relating to the exercise of the
elective franchise. The defence is not so much a denial of the charge
as it is a confession and avoidance. To the accusation it is replied
that the written law, when subverted at all, is so subverted only in
obedience to a higher law founded on the instinct of self-protection
and self-preservation.
If it be admitted that this is true, is it nothing to us that a
condition exists which necessitates the subversion of any law?
Is it not an injury to our people that the occasion exists which
places them in conflict with the law, and compels them to assert the
existence of a higher duty? Can law be overridden without creating a
spirit which will override law? a spirit ready to constitute itself
the judge of what shall and what shall not be considered law; a
spirit which eventually substitutes its will for law and confounds
its interest with right? Is it a small matter that our people or any
part of them should be compelled, by any exigency whatever, to go
armed at any time in any place in defiance of law?
This is a grave matter and is to be considered with due deliberation;
for on its right solution much depends. The first step toward cure is
ever comprehension of the disease. The first step toward the proper
solution of our trouble is to secure a perfect comprehension of it.
To do this we must first comprehend it ourselves, then only can we
hope to enlighten others.
Obedience to law, willing and invariable submission to law, is one
of the highest qualities of a nation, and one of the chief promoters
of national elevation. Antagonism to law, a spirit which rejects the
restraints of law, depraves the individual conscience and retards
national progress.
Can any fraud, evasion, or contrivance whatever be practised or
connived at, without by so much impairing the moral sense and
character of a people as well as of an individual? Can any deflection
whatsoever, no matter how inexorable the occasion, from the path of
absolute rectitude be tolerated without inflicting an injury on that
sense of justice and right, which, allied to unflinching courage,
constitutes a nation’s virtue? Who will say that the moral sense of
our people now is as lofty as it was in the days of our fathers, when
men voted with uplifted faces for the candidate of their choice?
The press of a portion of the land is filled with charges of injuries
to the Negro. The real injury is not to him, but to the White. From
opposition to law to actual lawlessness is but a step. This then is
the first danger.
The physical peril from the overcrowding among our people of an
ignorant and hostile race is not more real than this which threatens
our moral rectitude; but it is more apparent.
Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, speaking on the floor of the United
States Senate on the 23d of February, 1889, in speaking of the South,
said:
“I make these remarks with full knowledge of the difficult problem
that awaits us, and the problem that especially concerns our friends
south of Mason and Dixon’s line; but I remember when I make them
that the person hears the sound of my voice this moment who, in his
lifetime, will see fifty million Negroes dwelling in those States.”
Can language paint in stronger colors the peril which confronts us?
The senator went on to depict the evils which might ensue. “If you go
on,” he said, “with these methods which are reported to us on what we
deem pretty good evidence, you are sowing in the breast of that race
a seed from which is to come a harvest of horror and blood, to which
the French Revolution or San Domingo is light in comparison.”
Senator Hoar, like most others of his latitude, thinks that he knows
the Negro, and understands the pending question. He does not. Had he
understood the true gravity of that problem, his cheek, as he caught
the echo of his own words, would have blanched at the thought of the
peril he is transmitting to his children and grandchildren; not the
peril, perhaps, of fire and massacre, but a peril as deadly, the
peril of contamination from the overcrowding of an inferior race.
All other evils are but corollaries; the evil of race-conflict,
though not so awful as the French Revolution or San Domingo; the
evil of growing armies with their menace to liberty; the evil of
race-degeneration from enforced and constant association with an
inferior race: these are some of the perils which spring from that
state of affairs and confront us. At one more step they confront
the rest of the Anglo-American people to-day. For the only thing
that stands to-day between the people of the North and the Negro is
the people of the South. The time may come when the only thing that
will stand between the Negro and the people of the North will be the
people of the South.
II
The chief difficulty in the solution of the question exists in the
different views held as to it by the two sections. They do not
understand it alike. They stand as widely divided as to it to-day as
they stood forty years ago. Their ultimate interests are identical;
their present interests are not very widely divergent. Their opposite
attitudes as to it must, therefore, be due to error somewhere. One or
the other section must be in error as to it; possibly neither may be
exactly right.
This much we know and can assert: there must be an absolutely right
position. It is imperatively necessary that we find it; for on our
discovery of it and our planting ourselves firmly on it depends our
security. If we have not found it the sooner we realize that fact
the better for us and for those that shall come after us; if we have
found it the sooner we make it understood the better.
One thing is certain, there is no security in silence; no safety in
inaction. If fifty million Negroes, or even a much smaller number,
are to come with San Domingo and the French Revolution in their
train, the white race has need to awake and bestir itself.
The recent census has happily showed that Senator Hoar and others
like him have over-estimated the ratio of increase.[66] But the
problem is grave enough as it is.
The first step to be taken is to turn the light on the subject.
Let it be examined, measured, comprehended, and then dealt with as
shall be found to be just and right. The old method of crimination
and defiance will no longer avail; we must deal with the question
calmly, rationally, philosophically. We must abandon all untenable
positions whatsoever, place ourselves on the impregnable ground of
right, and then whatever may befall meantime, we can calmly await
the inevitable justification of events.
In the first place, let us disembarrass ourselves by discarding all
irrelevant and extraneous questions. Putting aside all mere prejudice
whatever, whether springing from the Negro’s former condition of
servitude or from other causes, let us base our argument on facts and
the final issue cannot be doubtful.
Whatever prejudice may exist, a constant, firm, and philosophic
presentation of the facts of the case must in the end establish the
truth, and secure the right remedy. The spirit of civilization must
overcome at last, and whatever obstacles it shall encounter, right
must eventually triumph.
The North deems the pending question merely one of the enforcement
or subversion of an elective franchise law; it has never accepted
the proposition that it is a great race question on which hinges the
preservation of the Union, the security of the people, white and
black alike, and the progress of American civilization. Perhaps no
clearer or more authoritative exposition of the views held by the
North on this question can be found than that set forth in a recent
address by Mr. G. W. Cable delivered before the Massachusetts Club
of Boston on the 22d of February, 1890. The favor with which it was
received by the class to whom it was delivered testifies not the
hostility of that class, but the extent to which the question is
misunderstood in that section.
Mr. Cable, after negativing the Southern idea of the question,
declares: “The problem is whether American citizens shall not enjoy
equal rights in the choice of their rulers. It is not a question of
the Negro’s right to rule. _It is simply a question of their right
to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more
white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably
do so now._” This is quoted with approval by even so liberal and
well-informed a thinker as the Rev. Henry M. Field, who certainly
bears only good-will to the South, as to the rest of mankind. The
indorsement of these views by such a man proves that the North
absolutely misapprehends the true question which confronts the nation
at this time. It has from constant iteration accepted as facts
certain statements such as those quoted, and these constitute its
premises, on which it bases all its reasoning and all its action.
The trouble is that its first premise is fallacious. Its teachers,
its preachers, its writers, its orators, its philosophers, its
politicians, have with one voice, and that a mighty voice, been for
a hundred years instilling into its mind the uncontradicted doctrine
that the South brought the Negro here and bound him in slavery; that
the South kept the Negro in slavery; that to perpetuate this enormity
the South plunged the nation in war, and attempted to destroy the
Union; that the South still desires the reëstablishment of slavery,
and that meantime it oppresses the Negro, defies the North, and
stands a constant menace to the Union.
The great body of the Northern people, bred on this food, never
having heard any other relation, believes this implicitly, and all
the more dangerously because honestly. If they are wrong and we right
it behooves us to enlighten them.
There are, without doubt, some whom nothing can enlighten; who would
not believe though one rose from the dead. They are not confined
to one latitude. There are, with equal certainty, others who for
place and profit trade in their brother’s blood, and keep open the
wounds which peace, but for them, would long ago have healed; who
for a mess of pottage would sell the birthright of the nation. The
professional Haman can never sleep while Mordecai so much as sits at
the gate; but we can have an abiding faith in the ultimate good sense
and sound principles of the great Anglo-Saxon race wherever it may
dwell; and to this we must address ourselves.
The second thing necessary to the solution of the question is to
enlighten the people of the North. If we can show that the question
is not, as Mr. Cable states and as the North believes, merely whether
the Negro shall or shall not have the right to choose his ruler,
but is a great race question on which depends the future as well as
the present salvation of the nation, we need have no fear as to the
ultimate result; sound sense and right judgment will prevail.
That there exists a race question of some sort must be apparent to
every person who passes through the South. Where six millions of
people of one color and one race live in contact with twelve millions
of another color and race, there must, of necessity, be a race issue.
The Negro has not behaved unnaturally: he has, indeed, in the main
behaved well; but the race issue exists and grows. The feeling has
not yet reached the point of personal hostility—at least on the part
of the Whites; but as the older generation which knew the tie between
master and servant passes away, the race feeling is growing intenser.
The Negro becomes more assertive, the White more firm.
III
There are a multitude of men and women at the North who do not know
that slavery ever really existed at the North. They may accept it
historically in a dim, theoretical sort of way, as we accept the fact
that men and women were once hanged for forgery or for stealing a
shilling; but they do not take it in as a vital fact.
It may possibly aid the solution of our problem if it be shown that
New England had quite as much to do with the establishment of African
slavery on this continent as had the South, though it survived
longest in the latter section; that slavery at the North was, while
it continued, as rigorous a system as ever it was at the South; that
abolition was at the North in the main deemed as illegal, and its
advocates encountered as much obloquy there as at the South; that the
emancipation of the slaves was effected not by the Northern people
at large, but by a limited band of enthusiasts and in the wise
providence of God; that the emancipation proclamation was not based
on the lofty moral principle of universal freedom, to which it has
been the custom to accredit it, but was a war-measure, resorted to
only on “necessity of war,” and as a means of restoring the Union.
Further, that the investment of the Negro with the elective franchise
was not the result of a high moral sentiment founded on the rights
of man, but was effected in a spirit of heat if not of revenge, and
under a misapprehension of the true bearing of such an act; that
the Negro has not used the power vested in him for the advantage
of himself or of anyone else, but in a reckless, unreasonable, and
dangerous way; that while there have been cases of injustice to
him, in the main the restraints thrown around him at the South have
been merely such as were rendered necessary to preserve the South
from absolute and irretrievable ruin; that the same instincts under
which the South has acted prevail at the North; that the Negro has
been and is being educated by the South to an extent far beyond his
right to claim, or the ability of the white race to contribute to
it; that he is as yet incapable, as a race, of self-government. And
finally, that unless the white race continues to assert itself and
retains control, a large section of the nation will become hopelessly
Africanized, and American civilization relapse and possibly perish.
Slavery was until within, historically speaking, a very recent
period, as much a Northern institution as it was a Southern one; it
existed in full vigor in all of the original thirteen colonies, and
while it existed it was quite as rigorous a system at the North as
at the South. Every law which formed its code at the South had its
counterpart in the North, and with less reason; for while there were
at the South not less than 600,000 slaves—Virginia having, by the
census of 1790, 293,427—there were at the North, by the census of
1790, less than 42,000.
Regulations not wholly compatible with absolute freedom of will are
necessary concomitants of any system of slavery, especially where the
slaves are in large numbers; and it should move the hearts of our
brethren at the North to greater patience with us that they, too, are
not “without sin.”
Massachusetts has the honor of being the first community in
America to legalize the slave-trade and slavery by legislative
act; the first to send out a slave-ship, and the first to secure a
fugitive-slave law.
Slavery having been planted on this continent (not by the South, as
has been reiterated until it is the generally received doctrine, but
by a Dutch ship, which in 1619 landed a cargo of “twenty negers” in
a famished condition at Jamestown), it shortly took general root,
and after a time began to flourish. Indeed, it flourished here and
elsewhere, so that in 1636, only seventeen years later, a ship,
_The Desire_, was built and fitted out at Marblehead as a slaver,
and thus became the first American slave-ship, but by no means the
last. In the early period of the institution it was conceived that
as it was justified on the ground that the slaves were heathen,
conversion to Christianity might operate to emancipate them. In
Virginia, the leading Southern colony, it was adjudicated that this
did not so operate; but long prior to that, and while it was the
accepted theory, Negroes are shown, by the church records, to have
been baptized. In Massachusetts, at that time, baptism was expressly
prohibited.
The fugitive-slave law, which proved ultimately and naturally so
powerful an excitant in the history of slavery, and which is
generally believed to have been the product of only Southern cupidity
and brutality, had its prototype in the Articles of the Confederation
of the United Colonies of New England (19th May, 1643), in which
Massachusetts was the ruling colony.
Many of the good people of Massachusetts, in their zeal and their
misapprehension of the facts, have been accustomed to regard their
own skirts as free from all taint whatsoever of the accursed doctrine
of property in human beings, and have been wont to boast that slavery
never existed by virtue of law in that grand old Commonwealth, and
that certainly no human creature was ever born a slave on her sacred
soil. For refutation one need go no further than the work of Mr.
George H. Moore, entitled “History of Slavery in Massachusetts.”[67]
Mr. Moore was librarian of the Historical Society of New York, and
corresponding member of the Historical Society of Massachusetts. He
says, page 19, citing Commonwealth _vs._ Aves, 18 Pick., Shaw, C.
J.: “It has been persistently asserted and repeated by all sorts
of authorities, historical and legal, up to that of the chief
justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, that ‘slavery to a
certain extent seems to have crept in; not probably by force of any
law, for none such is found or known to exist.’” “In Mr. Sumner’s
famous speech in the Senate, June 28, 1854, he boldly asserted that
‘in all her annals no person was ever born a slave on the soil of
Massachusetts’; and, says he, ‘if in point of fact the issue of
slaves was sometimes held in bondage, it was never by sanction of any
statute law of colony or commonwealth.’”
“And,” says Mr. Moore further, “recent writers of history in
Massachusetts have assumed a similar lofty and positive tone on
this subject. Mr. Palfrey says: ‘In fact, no person was ever born
into legal slavery in Massachusetts.’[68] Mr. Justice Gray, in an
elaborate historical note to the case of Oliver _vs._ Sale, Quincy’s
R. 29, says: ‘Previously to the adoption of the State Constitution
in 1780, Negro slavery existed to some extent and Negroes held in
slavery might be sold; but all children of slaves were by law free.’”
Is it any ground for wonder that with these apparently authoritative
statements ever iterated and reiterated before them, the people of
Massachusetts should really have believed that no child had ever
been born into slavery on the sacred soil of Massachusetts, and that
slavery itself only existed to “some extent”?
Mr. Moore, with authorities in hand, shows that these declarations
are unfounded, and states the uncomfortable but real facts. He quotes
the ninety-first article of “The Body of Liberties,” which appears
in the first edition under the head of “Liberties of Forreiners &
Strangers,” and in the second edition, that of 1660, under the title
of “Bond-Slavery.”
“91. There shall never be any bond-slaverie, villinage or captivity
amongst us unles it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and
such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are SOLD TO US. And
these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law
of God established in Israel concerning such persons doeth morally
require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged
thereto by authoritie.”[69]
After showing the evolution of this law, Mr. Moore, on page 18, says:
“Based on the Mosaic Code, it is an absolute recognition of slavery
as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself,
as well as that of another man to buy him. It sanctions the
slave-trade and the perpetual bondage of Indians and Negroes, their
children and their children’s children, and entitles Massachusetts to
precedence over any and all other colonies in similar legislation.
It anticipates by many years anything of the sort to be found in the
statutes of Virginia or Maryland or South Carolina, and nothing like
it is to be found in the contemporary codes of her sister colonies in
New England.”[70]
Chief-Justice Parsons, in the leading Massachusetts case of
Winchendon _vs._ Hatfield in error, referring to the dictum of C.
J. Dana in a previous case, that a Negro born in that colony prior
to the Constitution of 1780 was free, though born of slave parents,
admits candidly: “It is very certain that the general practice and
common usage had been opposed to this opinion.”
These and other authorities cited by Mr. Moore would seem to place
the matter absolutely beyond all question.
IV
Now as to the abolition of slavery.
What are the historical facts as to this? It is true that slavery had
been abolished at the North; but this was under conditions which, had
they prevailed at the South, would have been taken advantage of there
also; and when the institution was abolished in the Northern States,
it had become so unprofitable that no great credit can attach to the
act of abolition.[71] It is also true that there were throughout the
North a considerable body of men and women who, from a very long
time back, believed sincerely that human slavery was a crime against
nature, and strove zealously and persistently to overthrow it. At the
South there were also many who labored with not less earnestness
to effect the same end; though, owing to different conditions, the
same means could not be employed; and, standing face to face with
the immense slave population which existed at the South, they saw
the same danger which faces us to-day, and sought in colonization
the means at once to abolish slavery, to free America, and to
Christianize Africa.
As to actual, immediate emancipation, however, it was no more the
intentional work of the North as a people than it was of the South.
The credit for it, even so far as creating a public opinion which
rendered it eventually possible, is due to a band of emancipators,
who, for a long time absolutely insignificant in numbers, and ever
comparatively few when contrasted with the great body of the people
of the North, devoted their energies, their labors, their lives, to
the accomplishment of this end. During their labors they encountered
no less obloquy, and experienced scarcely less peril at the North
than at the South, with this difference, that at the North the
outrages perpetrated upon them were inspired by a mere sentiment,
while at the South the vast number of slaves made any interference
with them intolerable, and the treatment abolitionists received
was based on a recognition of the fact that the doctrines they
promulgated might at any moment plunge the South into the horrors of
insurrection.
It was not at the South, but at the North, in Connecticut, that
Prudence Crandall was, for teaching colored girls, subjected to a
persecution as barbarous as it was persistent. After being sued and
pursued by every process of law which a New England community could
devise, she was finally driven forth into exile in Kansas.
She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and
was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It
was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all
mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia,
in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to
start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous.
The town-meeting promptly voted to “petition for a law against the
bringing of colored people from other towns and States for any
purpose, and more especially for the purpose of dissemination of
the principles and doctrines opposed to the benevolent colonization
scheme.” “In May an act prohibiting private schools for non-resident
colored persons, and providing for the expulsion of the latter,
was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicings in
Canterbury, even to the ringing of church-bells.” The most vindictive
and inhuman measures were adopted against the offender; the shops and
meeting-houses were closed against her and her pupils.[72]
It was not at the South, but at Canaan, New Hampshire, that on
August 10, 1835, the building of the Noyes Academy, open to pupils
of both colors, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it
be “removed,” was dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land
belonging to the corporation, and left on the common, three hundred
yeomen of the county participating. The teacher and colored pupils
were given a month in which to quit the town.[73]
Throughout New England, less than thirty years before the
promulgation of the emancipation proclamation abolitionists
encountered not only opprobrium but violence. When George Thompson,
the English abolitionist, went throughout the North in 1835, his
windows were broken in Augusta, Maine, where a State anti-slavery
convention was in progress, and a committee of citizens requested him
to leave town immediately under pain of being mobbed if he reëntered
the convention. At Concord, New Hampshire, he was interrupted
with missiles while addressing a ladies’ meeting. At Lowell,
Massachusetts, on his second visit, in the town hall a brick-bat
thrown from without through the window narrowly escaped his head, and
in spite of the manliness of the selectmen a meeting the next evening
was abandoned in the certainty of fresh and deadly assaults.[74]
It is stated in a letter from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that
Thompson had a narrow escape from the mob at Concord, and Whittier
was pelted with mud and stones.[75] At a convention in Lynn, George
Thompson was stoned. The next evening he was mobbed by three hundred
men.
All this in New England. Finally, the English missionary was driven
out of the country, being in danger, as Garrison wrote, “of
assassination even in the streets of Boston.”[76] Indeed, mobs were
as frequent at that period in New England as they could have been in
Virginia or South Carolina had the abolitionists attempted to preach
their doctrines here. William Lloyd Garrison himself was assailed
and denounced, and even in the city of Boston was subjected to the
bitterest and most persistent persecution. He was notified to close
up the office of his paper, _The Liberator_, under penalty of tar
and feathers. A placard was circulated, stating that a purse of one
hundred dollars had been raised to reward the first man who should
lay hands on the “infamous foreign scoundrel Thompson,” so that he
might be brought to the tar-kettle before dark.
Finally, Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston, torn out of the house
in which was the office of the Anti-Slavery Society, where he was
attending a meeting of women, dragged through the streets of Boston
with a rope around him, and but for the cleverness of two sensible
men who got him into the City Hall he would have been killed. Even
there he was in such peril that he was put in the jail to keep him
from the mob, which came near getting possession of him a second time.
This mob was not, as may be supposed, a mob of the creatures who
usually constitute such an assemblage, but is said to have been
composed of respectable and well-dressed persons. Garrison, attacking
the mayor afterward, in the press, for not taking his part more
firmly, declared that if it had been a mob of workingmen assaulting a
meeting of merchants, no doubt he would have acted with energy, “but
broadcloth and money alter the case.”[77] Indeed, he says, the mayor
acknowledged that “the city government did not very much disapprove
of the mob to put down such agitators as Garrison and those like
him.”[78]
It is notable that the entire press of Boston, with hardly more than
one or two exceptions, approved the action of the mob and censured
Garrison.
This is what Garrison himself said of it:
“1. The outrage was perpetrated in Boston, the cradle of liberty,
the city of Hancock and Adams, the headquarters of refinement,
literature, intelligence, and religion. No comments can add to the
infamy of this fact.
“2. It was perpetrated in the open daylight of heaven, and was
therefore most unblushing and daring in its features.”
“3. It was dastardly beyond precedent, as it was an assault of
thousands upon a small body of helpless females. Charleston and New
Orleans have never acted so brutally.
“4. It was planned and executed, not by the rabble or the workingmen,
but by ‘gentlemen of property and standing, from all parts of
the city’—and now (October 25th) that time has been afforded for
reflection, it is still either openly justified or coldly disapproved
by the ‘higher classes,’ and exultation among them is general
throughout the city....”
“5. It is evidently winked at by the city authorities. No efforts
have been made to arrest the leading rioters....”
All of this was within three years of the time when a bill to abolish
slavery in Virginia had failed in her General Assembly by only one
vote and that vote the casting vote of the speaker.
There is surely no necessity to pile up more authority on this point.
If there were it could be done; for not only in New England, but
elsewhere in the North, instances can be cited in which violence,
and once even murder, occurred. Elijah P. Lovejoy, after having his
printing-office sacked three times, fell a martyr to the ferocity of
a mob in Illinois for having, under an instinct of humanity, aided a
fugitive slave to escape. On one thing, however, the North may with
justice pride itself: that in the end, there was awakened in it a
general sentiment for emancipation. For this it was indebted to a
work of genius produced by a woman; a romance which touched the heart
of Christendom. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” overruled the Supreme Court of
the United States, and abrogated the Constitution. By arousing the
general sentiment of the world against slavery, it contributed more
than any other one thing to its abolition in that generation.
But not even then did the North set out to abolish slavery. President
Lincoln is universally accredited as the emancipator of the African.
It is his hand which is represented in bronze and marble as
striking the shackles from the slave. He was the chosen and great
standard-bearer of the most advanced element of the North, the great
representative of their ideas, the idolized chief magistrate, and
the trusted commander of their armies.
His words on this subject must be authoritative.
On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded,
he says: “Do the Southern people really entertain fears that a
Republican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with
the slaves or with them about their slaves? ... The South would be in
no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
On the 4th of March, 1861, in his official utterance, his inaugural
address, he says: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now
exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no
inclination to do so.”
If there can possibly be a more authoritative declaration than this,
we have it in a resolution passed by Congress of the United States,
and signed by Lincoln as President in July, 1861, after the battle of
Manassas:
“Resolved ... that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit
of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor
purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established
institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the
supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the
dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc.
Slave-holding even in Federal territory was not forbidden until June
19, 1862, which was just a month before the bill was passed providing
that all “slaves of persistent rebels found in any place occupied or
commanded by the forces of the Union should not be returned to their
masters [as they had hitherto been under the law], and providing that
they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.”
A Constitutional Amendment (the Thirteenth), abolishing and
prohibiting evermore the enslavement of human beings, failed to
pass in the House of Representatives in the session of 1864, and
would have failed altogether had not a member from Ohio changed his
vote in order to move a reconsideration and keep it alive till the
following session, when Mr. Lincoln having been reëlected, and having
recommended its passage, and the war being evidently near its end, it
was passed by a vote of 119 yeas to 57 nays.
Indeed, before Mr. Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation he
gave one hundred days’ warning to the revolutionary States to lay
down their arms, and in the proclamation he places the entire matter
forever at rest by declaring in terms, in that unmistakable English
of which he was a master, that the measure was adopted “upon military
necessity.”
No one can read this record and not admit that slavery was abolished
in the providence of God, against the intention of the North and of
the South alike, because its purpose had been accomplished, and the
time was ripe for its ending.
V
The next step is the discussion of the attitude in which we, the
white people of the South, stand to the Negro. This attitude is too
striking, if not too anomalous, not to have attracted wide attention.
A race with an historic and glorious past, in a high stage of
civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves,
invested with every civil and political right which they themselves
possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if
not inimical to the dominant race, is at least unsympathetic. The
two races cannot be termed with exactness hostile—in many respects,
not even unfriendly; but they are suspicious of each other; their
interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in
others may easily be made so; the former slave race has been for over
thirty years politically useful to the outsiders by whose sentiment
they are sustained, and the former dominant race is unalterably
assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the
inferior race and not be governed by it.
Now what is the question? Is it merely the question, “whether the
Negro shall not have the right to choose his own rulers”; or is it a
great race issue between the Negro and the White?
If it is a question of mere perverse imposition by the white on the
black, by the stronger on the weaker, a refusal to recognize his just
rights, then the advocates of that side are right. If, however, it be
the other, then the stronger race should be sustained, or else the
people of the North are guilty of the fatuity which destroys nations.
The chief complication of the matter has arisen from the possession
of the elective franchise by the newly emancipated Negro, and the
peculiar circumstances which surround this possession. The very
method of the bestowal of this franchise was pregnant with baleful
results. It was given him not as a righteous and reasonable act; not
because he was considered capable of exercising the highest function
of citizenship: the making of laws, and the execution of laws; not
with the philosophic deliberation which should characterize an act
by which four millions of new citizens of a distinct and inferior
race are suddenly added to the nation; but in heat, in a spirit of
revenge, and chiefly because the cabal which then controlled the
Republic thought that with the Negro as an ally it could dominate the
South and perpetuate its own power. The South, just emerging from the
furious struggle of war, physically prostrate, but with its dauntless
spirit unbroken, confiding in its own integrity of purpose, and
vainly believing that as the Constitution was the ægis under which
the North had claimed to fight, the constitutional rights for which
it had itself contended would be observed and respected, accepted
the emancipation of the Negro, but not unnaturally found itself
unwilling, indeed unable, to accept all that this emancipation might
import. The North, partly in distrust of the sincerity of even the
measure of acceptance which the South avowed; partly in the belief
in the minds of a considerable portion of its people that the Negro
might thus be elevated, and that he would, at least, be enabled to
protect himself; but mainly to govern the intrepid and difficult
South, at the instance of the partisan leaders who then directed the
destinies of the Republic, struck down constitutional government
throughout the South, and restored it only when it had placed it in
the Negro’s hands.
No such act of fatuity ever emanated from a nation. Justification
it can have none; its best excuse must be that it was accomplished
under a certain enthusiasm just after a bitter war, and before
passion had cooled sufficiently for reason to reassert her sway.
It was a people’s insanity. The “Reconstruction of the South” was,
on the part of the people of the North at large, simply that which
in national life is worse than a crime, a blunder; on the part of
the leaders who planned it and carried it through, it was a cool,
deliberate, calculated act, violative of the terms on which the South
had surrendered and disbanded her broken armies, and perpetrated
for the purpose of securing—not peace, not safety, not righteous
acknowledgment of lawfully constituted authority, but personal
power to the leaders of the party which at that time was dominant,
power with all that it implied of gain and revenge. For this they
took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their
devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigor of
intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude
in defeat, had just elevated their race in the eyes of mankind, and
placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is
nothing like it in modern history.
Within two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox there was not
a Confederate within the limits of the Southern States who had not
accepted honestly the status of affairs.
On the 18th of December, 1865, General Grant, who had been sent
through the South to inspect and make a report on its condition, in
his report to the President said:
“I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the South accept the
present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which
have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two
sections—slavery and State-rights, or the right of the State to
secede from the Union—they regard as having been settled forever by
the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to.”
Shortly after the assembling of Congress in December, 1865, the
President was able to state that the people of North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Tennessee had reorganized their State governments. The conventions
of the seceding States had all repealed or declared null and void
the ordinances of secession. The laws were in full operation, and
the States were in reality back in the Union, with duly elected
representatives, generally men who had been Union men, waiting to be
admitted to Congress when it should assemble.[79]
Had Lincoln but been here, how different might have been the story!
His wisdom, his sound sense, his catholic spirit, his pride in the
restored Union which he had preserved, his patriotism, would have
governed. For two years the influence of his views remained too
potent to be overcome. Johnson, who had not much love for the South,
had caught enough of his liberal and patriotic spirit to attempt the
continuance of his pacific, constitutional, and sagacious policy. But
he lacked his wisdom, and by the end of two years the dominant will
of Thad. Stevens and his lieutenants had sufficiently warped public
opinion to bend it to their pleasure and subvert it to their purpose.
Thad. Stevens gave the keynote. On the 14th of December, 1865, he
said: “According to my judgment they (the insurrectionary States)
ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or
of being counted as valid States, until the Constitution shall have
been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to
_secure perpetual ascendancy to the party of the Union_.”
Charles Sumner was not behind him. He declared in January, 1867,
that unless universal suffrage were conferred on all Negroes in the
disorganized States, “you will not secure the new allies who are
essential to the national cause.”
In pursuance of the scheme of Stevens, in March, 1867, acts were
passed by Congress, virtually wiping out the States of Virginia,
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, and dividing the territory into
military districts, under military rulers, who were to have absolute
power over life, property, and liberty, subject only to the proviso
that death sentences should be approved by the President.
When they were again created States, and brought back into the Union,
the Whites had been disfranchised, and the Negro had been created a
voter, drafted into the Union League, drilled under his carpet-bag
officers, and accepted as the new ally through whom was to be secured
“the perpetual ascendancy of the party of the Union.”
Lincoln in his wisdom and patriotism had never dreamed of such a
thing. His only “suggestion” had been to let in “some of the colored
people, ... as, for instance, the very intelligent.”[80]
The history of that period, of the reconstruction period of the
South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be
written.[81] When that history shall be told it will constitute the
darkest stain on the record of the American people. The sole excuse
which can be pleaded at the bar of posterity, is that the system was
inaugurated in a time of excitement which was not short of frenzy.
Ever since the Negro was given the ballot he has, true to his
teaching, steadily remained the ally of the party which gave it to
him, following its lead with more than the obedience of the slave,
and on all issues, in all times, opposing the respectable white
element with whom he dwelt with a steadfast habitude which is only
explicable on the ground of steadfast purpose. The phenomenon has
been too marked to escape observation. The North has drawn from it
the not unnatural inference that the Negro is oppressed by the White,
and thus at once asserts his independence and attempts to obtain his
rights. The South, knowing that he is not oppressed, draws therefrom
the juster inference that he naturally, wilfully, and inevitably
allies himself against the White simply upon a race line and stands,
irrespective of reason, in persistent opposition to all measures
which the White advocates.
The North sees in the Negro’s attitude only the proper and laudable
aspiration of a citizen and a man; the South detects therein a
desire to dominate, a menace to all that the Anglo-American race
has effected on this continent, and to the hopes in which that race
established this nation.
VI
To ascertain which is the correct view it might be well at this point
to examine the history of the Negro and his capacity as a citizen.
In discussing this matter we are fortunately not relegated to the
shadowy and uncertain domain of mere theory; the argument may be
based on the firm and assured foundation of actual experience.
In the first place, whatever a sentimental philanthropy may say;
whatever a modern and misguided humanitarianism may declare,
there underlies the whole matter the indubitable, potent, and
mysterious principle of race quality. Ethnologically, historically,
congenitally, the white race and the Negro differ widely.
Slavery will not alone account for it all. In the recorded experience
of mankind slavery—mere slavery—has not repressed intelligence; the
bonds of the person, however tightly drawn, have not served to
shackle the mind. Slavery existed among the Greeks, the Romans, the
Phœnicians, among our own ancestors of the Teuton race: slavery as
absolute, as inexorable as ever was African slavery. Indeed, under
some of those systems there was absolute chattel slavery, which never
existed with us, for the Greek and the Roman possessed over their
slaves the absolute power of life and death; they might slay them
as an exhibition for their guests, or might cast them into their
fish-ponds as food for their lampreys.
Yet under these systems, differentiated from African slavery by the
two conditions of race similarity and intellectual potentiality,
slaves attained not unfrequently to high position, and from them
issued some of the most notable literary productions of those times.
Æsop, Terence, Epictetus the Stoic were slaves. These and many more
have proved that where the intellectual potentiality exists it will
burst through the encumbering restraints of servitude, and establish
the truth that bondage cannot enthrall the mind.
What of value to the human race has the Negro mind as yet produced?
In art, in mechanical development, in literature, in mental and
moral science, in all the range of mental action, no notable work has
up to this time come from a Negro.
In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt
and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of
centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served
to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of
the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the
Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah
the son of Hilkiah.
It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of
any intellectual development. On the contrary, observation has led me
to think that under certain conditions of intellectual environment,
of careful training, and of sympathetic encouragement from the
stronger races he may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon
instances a considerable degree, of mental development. To deny this
is to deny the highest attribute of the intellectual essence, and
is to shut the door of hope upon a race of God’s human creatures
to whom I give my sympathy and my good-will. But the incontestable
proof is that such cases of intellectual development are exceptional
instances, and that after long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro
race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in
every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced
civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.
Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the
influence and by the assistance of the stronger race. Where these
have been wanting, whatever other conditions have existed, he has
sensibly and invariably reverted toward the original type. Liberia,
Hayti, Congo, are all in one line.
His history on his native continent is pregnant with suggestion.
As far as the East is from the West, Negro-Africa is from the land
of civilization. Generations have come and gone; centuries have
followed centuries; peoples have succeeded peoples; nations have
been grafted on nations, more and more crowned with the sunlight of
progress and of civilization; but no faintest beam has ever pierced
the impenetrable gloom of the “Dark Continent,” and the last African
explorer’s latest book is “Darkest Africa.”
This has not been because opportunity has been wanting. Civilization
first lit her golden torch upon her borders. The swelling waters of
the Nile spread through a lettered and partly enlightened people when
the Tiber crept through swamps and wilderness; when the Acropolis
was a wild, and the seven hills of the Eternal City a range for
wolves, Thebes and Memphis and Heliopolis contained a civilization
which in some of its manifestations has never been equalled since.
Rome stretched across the Mediterranean, and sent her civilizing
power along the northern shore of the continent; and later, the Moors
possessed a civilization there which is yet a marvel even to our
race. In that record which all Christendom holds as its cherished
possession we catch glimpses of a commerce and even of a civilization
situate somewhere within the boundaries of Africa, and meeting with
that of the greatest monarch of the time. The curtain suddenly lifts
and we get a view all the more dazzling, because so mysterious, of
a queen of Ethiopia coming with wonderful gifts to visit Solomon
himself.
Since then civilization has swept triumphant over a large part of
the earth. Only the land of the Negro has never yielded to her
illumining and vivifying influence. The Roman has succeeded the
Greek; the Gaul and the Frank have risen on the Roman; the Teuton,
the Saxon, and the Celt have surpassed the Gaul. Only in Negro-Africa
has barbarism held unbroken rule, and savagery maintained perpetual
domain.
Stanley, Ward, Glave, and Emin Pasha found but a few years since the
great Congo country as barbarous, as savage, as cannibal, as it was
five thousand years ago, province preying on province, and village
feeding on village, as debased and brutish as the beasts of the
jungle about them.
But it is not only in Africa that the Negro has exhibited the absence
of the essential qualities of a progressive race. It is everywhere.
Since the dawn of history, the Negro has been in one place or
another, in Egypt, in Rome, in other European countries, brought
in contact with civilization, yet he has failed to receive the
vitalizing current under which other races have risen in greater or
less degree.
VII
Here in America for over two hundred years the Negro has been under
the immediate influence of the most potent race the world has known,
and within the sweep of the ripest period of the world’s history.
It may be charged that as a slave he never had an opportunity to give
his faculties that exercise which is necessary to their development.
But the answer is complete. He has not been a slave in all places,
at all times. In Africa he was not a slave, save to himself and his
own instincts; in Rome he was no more a slave than was the Teuton,
the Greek, or the Gaul; in New England he has not been a slave for
over a hundred years, and may be assumed to have had there as much
encouragement, and to have received as sustaining an influence as
will ever be accorded him by the White. What has been the result even
in New England?
Dr. Henry M. Field a few years since wrote a book of travels in
the South with his reflections thereon. Dr. Field comes of a
distinguished Northern family, of which the whole country is proud.
He is a close observer, a fair recorder, and the friend of the whole
human race. He will not be accused of prejudice. Speaking of the
present intellectual condition of the Negro in Massachusetts, he says:
“Yet here we are doomed to great disappointment. The black man has
had every right that belongs to his white neighbor; not only the
natural rights which, according to the Declaration of Independence,
belong to every human being—the right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness—but the right to vote, and to have a part in
making the laws. He could own his little home, and there sit under
his own vine and fig-tree with none to molest or make him afraid. His
children could go to the same common schools, and sit on the same
benches, and learn the same lessons as white children.
“With such advantages, a race that had natural genius ought to have
made great progress in a hundred years. But where are the men that it
should have produced to be the leaders of their people? We find not
one who has taken rank as a man of action or a man of thought; as a
thinker or a writer; as artist or poet; as discoverer or inventor.
The whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity.
“If any man ever proved himself a friend of the African race it was
Theodore Parker, who endured all sorts of persecution and social
ostracism, who faced mobs and was hissed and hooted in public
meetings, for his bold championship of the rights of the Negro race.
But rights are one thing, and capacity is another. And while he was
ready to fight for them he was very despondent as to their capacity
for rising in the scale of civilization. Indeed, he said in so many
words: ‘In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at
the bottom, the American Indian next.’ In 1857 he wrote to a friend:
‘There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble
relation to the rest of men and always will. In two generations what
a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in
New England. But in twenty generations the Negroes will stand just
where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared.’
“That was more than thirty years ago. But to-day I look about me here
in Massachusetts, and I see a few colored men; but what are they
doing? They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes;
the women take in washing. I find colored barbers and white-washers,
shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps; but I do not know a single man who
has grown to be a merchant or a banker, a judge or a lawyer, a member
of the legislature or a justice of the peace, or even a selectman of
the town. In all these respects they remain where they were in the
days of our fathers. The best friends of the colored race, of whom
I am one, must confess that it is disappointing and discouraging to
find that with all these opportunities they are little removed from
where they were a hundred years ago.”[82]
But suppose that the statements of others, whose observation has
enabled them to pick out a well-to-do lawyer or dentist or doctor
or restaurateur, be different, it only proves that in individual
instances they may rise to a fair level; it simply emphasizes the
fact that these are exceptions to the great rule, and does not in the
least affect the argument, which is that the Negroes _as a race_ have
never exhibited much capacity to advance; that as a race they are
inferior to other races.[83]
Opportunity is afforded us to examine the Negro’s progress in two
countries in which a civilization was created for him, and he was
surrounded by every condition helpful to progress.
The first is Liberia. There he had a model republic founded by the
Caucasian solely for his benefit, with freedom grafted in its name.
It was founded in as splendid hopes as even this Republic itself.
Christendom gave it its assistance and its prayers. How has the Negro
progressed there? Let one of his own race tell the story, one who was
thought competent to represent there the United States. Mr. Charles
H. J. Taylor, late Minister from the United States to Liberia, has
given a picture of life in Liberia, which cannot be equalled save in
some other country under the same rule. He says, in a paper published
in the _Kansas City Times_, April 22, 1888:
“Not a factory, mill, or workshop, of any kind, is to be found there.
They (the government) have no money or currency in circulation of
any kind. They have no boats of any character, not even a canoe, the
two gunboats England gave them lying rotten on the beach.”... “Look
from morn till night you will never see a horse, a mule, a donkey, or
a broken-in ox. They have them not. There is not a buggy, a wagon,
a cart, a slide, a wheelbarrow, in the four counties. The natives
carry everything on their heads.”
The whole picture presented is hopeless.
If this were an isolated instance we might think that climatic
influences or the proximity of a great savage continent had affected
the result. But we have nearer home a yet more striking illustration,
a yet more convincing proof that the real cause was the Negro’s
inability to govern, his incapacity to rise.
For a hundred years now the Negro has cast his influence over sundry
of the West Indies, and has had sole possession of one. With this
Republic constructed by our fathers before him for a model, he has
since 1804 been masquerading at governing Hayti, one of the most
fertile spots that Spain ever ruled.
A more fantastic mummery never disgraced a people or degraded a land.
From the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture to the present there has not
been a break in the darkness which settled upon Santo Domingo when it
passed under the control of the Negro.
The bloody Dessalines aping Napoleon, and with the oath of allegiance
to the republic yet warm on his lips, crowning himself “Emperor” of
half an island; the brutal Gonaives, Boyer, Soulouque, and their
like, following each other, each as brutal and swinish as the other,
or with degrees limited only by their capacity, present a picture
such as history cannot duplicate.
We have accounts of Hayti by two Englishmen, one the historian
Froude, the other, Sir Spencer St. John, for years British resident
at Hayti, both of whom assert that they have no race antipathy. And
what a picture do they present! Santo Domingo, once the Queen of
the Antilles, has in less than a hundred years of Negro rule sunk
well-nigh into a state of primeval barbarism.
Sir Spencer St. John, in his astounding work, “The Black Republic,”
has given a picture of Hayti under Negro rule which is enough to give
pause alike to the wildest theorist and the most vindictive partisan.
He takes pains to tell us that he has lived for thirty-five years
among colored people of various races, and has no prejudice against
them; that the most frequent and not the least honored guests at
his table in Hayti for twelve years were of the black and colored
races. The picture he has presented is the blackest ever drawn:
revolution succeeding revolution, and massacre succeeding massacre;
the country once, under white rule, teeming with wealth and covered
with beautiful villas and plantations, with “a considerable foreign
commerce, now in a state of decay and ruin, without trade or
resources of any kind; peculation and jobbery paramount in all public
offices”; barbarism substituted for civilization; Voudou worship
in place of Christianity, and occasions when human flesh has been
actually sold in the market-place of Port au Prince, the capital of
the country.
Sir Spencer St. John says that a Spanish colleague once said to him:
“If we could return to Hayti fifty years hence, we should find the
negresses cooking their bananas on the site of these warehouses.” On
which he remarks: “It is more than probable—unless in the mean time
influenced by some higher civilization—that this prophecy will come
true. The negresses are, in fact, cooking their bananas amid the
ruins of the best houses of the capital.”
If it shall seem to those who have no actual knowledge upon the
subject that I have overdrawn the picture, I would refer them to the
papers which I have cited, and the works which I have quoted, and to
the great body of the Southern people who have had experience of what
Negro domination imports.
What has been stated has been said in no feeling of personal
hostility, or even unfriendliness to the Negro, for I have no
unfriendliness toward any Negro on earth; on the contrary, I have a
feeling of real friendliness toward many of that race, and am the
well-wisher of the whole people.
What is contained in this paper is stated under a sense of duty,
with the hope and in the belief that it may serve to call attention
to the real facts in the case; that it may help to discard from the
discussion all mere sentimentality or prejudice, and to base the
future consideration of the matter upon the only solid ground—the
ground of naked fact.
The examples cited, if they establish anything, establish the fact
that the Negro race does not possess, in any development which he has
yet attained, the fundamental elements of character, the essential
qualifications to conduct a government, even for himself, and that if
the reins of government be intrusted to his unaided hands, he will
fling reason to the winds, and drive to ruin. Were this, however,
only Hayti or Liberia, we might bear it with such philosophic
patience as our philanthropy calls to our aid, but we have nearer
home a proof not less overwhelming of this truth. The Negro has had
control of the government in the Southern States; for eight years
a number of Southern States were partly, and three of them were
wholly given up to the control of the Negroes, directed by men of,
at least, ability and experience, and sustained by the invigorating
influence of the entire North. It was “an experiment” entered on with
“enthusiasm.”
The reconstruction acts gave the black the absolute right of
suffrage, and disfranchised the whites. The Negro was invested
with absolute power, and turned loose. He selected his rulers. The
entire weight of the government—an immense force—was under the
misapprehension, born of the passion which then reigned, thrown
blindly in the Negroes’ favor; whatever they asserted was believed;
whatever they demanded was done; the ballot was given them, and
all the forms established by generations of Caucasian patriots and
jurists, and consecrated by centuries of Caucasian blood, were
solemnly set up and solemnly followed. The Negro at least then
selected his own rulers. The Negro had thus his opportunity then, if
ever. The North had put him up as a citizen against the protest of
the South, and stood obliged to sustain him. What was the result?
Such a riot of folly and extravagance, such a travesty of justice,
such a mummery of government as was never before witnessed, save in
those countries in which he had himself furnished the illustration.
In Virginia, where the Negroes were in a numerical minority and
where the prowess of the Whites had been but now displayed before
their eyes in an impressive manner which they could not forget, we
escaped the inconveniences of carpet-baggism, and the Hunnycuts,
Underwoods, and such vultures kept the carcass for their own picking,
and were soon gorged and put to flight. But it was not so where the
Negroes were in a large majority. In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in
Mississippi, and in other Southern States there was a very carnival
of riot and rapine.
Space will not permit the going into detail. Reference can only be
made to one or two facts, from which the whole dreadful story may be
gathered. Louisiana will be first cited.
Warmouthism and Kelloggism, in Louisiana, and carpet-baggism
generally, with all their environments of chicanery and venality, and
all their train of poverty and profligacy, cannot be done justice
to in a paper of this character.[84] Such a relation of theft,
debauchery, and crime has not been found outside of those countries
in which carpet-baggism has ruled, with the Negro as its facile and
ignorant instrument.
In Louisiana, soon after Warmouth came into office, he stated in
his message of 4th January, 1868, to his legislature: “Our debt is
smaller than that of almost any State in the Union, with a tax-roll
of $251,000,000, and a bonded debt that can at will be reduced to
$6,000,000. There is no reason that our credit should not be at
par.” This was too good a field for Warmouth and his associates to
lose. Says Mr. Sage: “The census of 1870 showed the debt of the
State to have increased to $25,021,734, and that of the parishes
and municipalities to $28,065,707. Within a year the State debt
was increased fourfold, and the local indebtedness had doubled.
Louisiana, according to the census, stood, in the matter of debt, at
the head of the Union.”[85]
This was but the beginning. The total cost of four years and five
months of Republican rule amounted to $106,020,337, or $24,040,089
per year. “To this,” says Mr. Sage, “must be added the privileges and
franchises given away and the State property stolen.”[86] Taxation
went up in proportion—in some places to 7 or 8 per cent.;[87] in
others as high as 16 per cent.[88] This was confiscation.
The public printing of the State had, in previous years, cost
about $37,000 per year. During the first two years of Warmouth’s
_régime_ the New Orleans _Republican_, in which he was a principal
stockholder, received $1,140,881.77 for public printing.[89]
When Warmouth ran for governor, he was so poor that a mite chest was
placed beside the ballot-box to receive contributions to pay his
expenses to Washington. When he had been in office only a year, it
was estimated that he was worth $225,000, and when he retired he was
said to have had one of the largest fortunes in Louisiana.
The Louisiana State Lottery, with all the debauchery of morals and
sentiment which it has occasioned, was chartered by Warmouth and
his gang, and is a legacy which they have left to the people of that
State, an octopus which they have vainly striven to shake off.[90]
Time fails to tell of the rapine, the vice, the profligacy in which
the government—State and municipal—was the prize which was tossed
about like a shuttle-cock, from one faction to the other; of the
midnight orders to seize the government, the carnival of corruption
and crime, until the Whites were forced to band themselves into a
league to prevent absolute anarchy. It suffices to say that it was in
Louisiana under Negro rule that troops were marched into the State
House, and drove out the assembled representatives of the State, at
the point of the bayonet, a thing which has happened during peace
only twice before in the history of modern civilization, once under
Cromwell and once under Napoleon.
“The vampire Warmouthism had reduced the wealth of New Orleans from
$146,718,790 at Warmouth’s advent, to $88,613,930 at Kellogg’s
exit—a net decline of $58,104,860 in eight years; while real estate
in the country parishes had shrunk in value from $99,266,839.85 to
$47,141,696, or about one-half. During this period the Republican
leaders had squandered nearly $150,000,000, giving the State little
or nothing to show therefor.”[91]
In Mississippi the corruption was almost as great, and the result
almost as disastrous. The State levy for 1871 was four times what it
was in 1869; for 1872 it was four times as great; for 1873 it was
eight and a half times as great; for 1874 it was fourteen times as
great. Six million four hundred thousand acres of land, comprising
20 per cent. of all the lands in the State, had been forfeited for
non-payment of taxes.
* * * * *
In South Carolina, if it were possible, the situation was even worse,
and the paper contributed to the series to which I have already
alluded, by the Hon. John J. Hemphill, to which I wish to acknowledge
my indebtedness, outlines briefly the condition of affairs, and
presents a picture which ought to be read by every man in the Union.
The General Assembly, which convened in 1868, in Columbia, consisted
of 72 Whites and 85 Negroes. In the house were 14 Democrats, and in
the senate 7; the remaining 136 were Republicans. One of the first
acts passed was somewhat anomalous. After defending the rights of the
colored man on railroads, in theatres, etc., it provided that if a
person whose rights under the act were claimed to be violated, was a
Negro, then the burden of proof should shift and be on the defendant,
and he should be presumed to be guilty until he established his
innocence. This Act was more or less expressive of the spirit in
which a good many people at the North still appear to regard all
questions arising between the Southern Whites and the Negroes.
When the legislature met, they proceeded to furnish the halls at
a cost of $50,000, for which they appropriated $95,000. This hall
has since been entirely refurnished at a cost of $3,061. They paid
out in four years, for furniture, over $200,000, and when, in 1877,
the matter was investigated, it was found that, even placing what
remained at the original purchase price, there was left by them in
the State House only $17,715 worth; the rest had disappeared.
“They opened another account, known under the vague but comprehensive
head of ‘Supplies, sundries, and incidentals.’ This amounted, in a
single session, to $350,000. For six years they ran an open bar in
one of the legislative committee rooms, open from 8 A.M., to 3 P.M.,
at which all the officials and their friends helped themselves, with
cost—save to the unfortunate and helpless taxpayers.’
They organized railroad frauds, election frauds, census frauds,
general frauds—whatever they organized was filled with fraud. They
enlisted and equipped an armed force, the governor—one Scott—refusing
to accept any but colored companies. Ninety-six thousand colored men
were enrolled at a cost, for the simple enrolment, of over $200,000.
One thousand Winchester rifles were obtained, for which the State was
charged about $38,000; 1,000,000 cartridges cost the State $37,000;
10,000 Springfield muskets were bought, and charged at a cost, they
claim, of $187,050; it was all charged to the State at $250,000. The
troops, as organized, were employed by Scott and the notorious Moses
as their heelers and henchmen. The armed force, or constabulary, were
armed and maintained for the same purpose.[92]
Governor Scott spent $374,000 of the funds of the State in his
canvass.[93] Eight porters were employed in the State House; they
issued certificates to 238; eight laborers and from five to twenty
pages were employed; certificates were issued to 159 of the former
and 124 of the later. One lot of 150 certificates were issued at
once—all fraudulent. During one session pay certificates were issued
to the amount of $1,168,255, all of which but about $200,000 was
unvarnished robbery.
The public printing was another field for their robbery. The total
cost of the printing in South Carolina for the eight years of
Republican domination, 1868-76, was $1,326,589. The total cost for
printing for 78 years previous—from 1790 to 1868—was $609,000,
showing an excess for the cost of printing in eight years, over
78 years previous, of $717,589. The average cost of the public
printing under the Republican administration per year, was $165,823;
average cost per annum under Hampton’s administration, $6,178. The
amount appropriated for one year, 1872-73, by the Republicans, for
printing, was $450,000; amount appropriated in 25 years ending in
1866, $278,251. Excess of one year’s appropriation over 25 years,
$171,749. The cost of printing in South Carolina exceeded in one year
by $122,932.13 the cost of like work in Massachusetts, New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland together.
In 1860 the taxable values in the State amounted to $490,000,000, and
the tax to a little less than $400,000. In 1871 the taxable value had
been reduced to $184,000,000, and the tax increased to $2,000,000.
In 19 counties taken together, 93,293 acres of land were sold in
one year for unpaid taxes. After four years of Republican rule, the
debt of the State had increased from $5,407,306 to $18,515,033.
There had been no public works of any importance, and the “entire
thirteen millions of dollars represented nothing but unnecessary and
profligate expenditures and stealings.”[94]
The governor’s pardon was a matter of mere bargain and sale. During
Moses’s term of two years, he issued 457 pardons—pardoning during the
last month of his tenure of office 46 of the 168 convicts whom he had
hitherto left in jail.
In May, 1875, Governor Chamberlain declared, in an interview with a
correspondent of the _Cincinnati Commercial_, that when at the end
of Moses’s administration he entered on his duties as governor, 200
trial justices were holding offices by executive appointment who
could neither read nor write.[95]
These statements are but fragments taken from the papers by Mr.
Hemphill, Governor Hampton, and others, who cite the public records,
and are simply bare statistics. No account has been taken of the
imposition practised throughout the South during the period of Negro
domination; of the vast, incredible, and wanton degradation of the
Southern people by the malefactors, who, with hoards of ignorant
Negroes just freed from the bonds of slavery as their instruments,
trod down the once stately South at their will. No wonder that
Governor Chamberlain, Republican and carpet-bagger as he was, should
have declared, as he did in writing to the New England Society:
“The civilization of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and
Huguenot, is in peril.”[96]
A survey of the field and a careful consideration of the facts have
convinced me that I am within the bounds of truth, when I say that
the Southern States, with the exception, perhaps, of one or two of
the border States, were better off in 1868, when reconstruction went
into force, than they were in 1876, when the carpet-bag governments
were finally overthrown; and that the eight years of Negro domination
in the South cost the South directly and indirectly more than the
entire cost of the war, inclusive of the loss of values in slave
property. I think if Mr. Cable, and those who accept his theorem,
will study the history of the Southern States, even as written
only in the statistics, taking no account, if they please, of the
suffering and the humiliation inflicted on the white race of the
South during the period in which the South was under the domination
of the rulers selected by the Negroes, they will find that there is
not so much difference between the proposition which he formulates
and that which the South states, when it declares that the pending
question is one of race domination, on which depends the future
salvation of the American people.
VIII
Twenty-seven years have rolled by since the Negro was given his
freedom; nearly twenty-five years have passed since he was given a
part in the government, and was taken up to be educated.[97] The laws
were so adapted that there is not now a Negro under forty years old
who has not had the opportunity to receive a public school education.
Through private philanthropy these public schools (many of which are
of a high grade) have been supplemented by institutions established
on private foundations. That the Negroes have had a not ungeneral
ambition to attend school is apparent from the school attendance of
the race, as shown by the statistics, the Negro enrolment in the
schools for the session of 1878-88 being 1,140,405, or a little over
one-half of their entire school population.
Besides this, every profession, every trade, and every department
of life have been open to him as to the White; he has had his own
race as his constituency; he has possessed the backing of the North,
and the good-will of the South. But what has he done? What has he
attained?
The South has viewed his political course with suspicion, and in
this field of activity has opposed him with all her resources; but
she has not been mean or niggardly toward him. On the contrary, in
every place, at all times, even while she was resisting and assailing
him for his political action, she has displayed toward him in the
expenditures for his education a liberality which, in relation to her
ability, amounted to lavishness.
The Rev. Dr. A. D. Mayo, eminent alike for his learning and
philanthropy, and a Northern educator of note, declared not long
ago that “No other people in human history has made an effort so
remarkable as the people of the South in reëstablishing their schools
and colleges. Overwhelmed by war and bad government, they have done
wonders, and with the interest and zeal now felt in public schools
in the South, the hope for the future is brighter than ever.” “Last
year,” he says, speaking in 1888, “these sixteen States paid nearly
$1,000,000 each for educational purposes, a sum greater according to
their means than ten times the amount now paid by most of the New
England States.”
Virginia has expended on her public schools, including the session
of 1890-91, according to the figures of Colonel Ruffin, the Second
Auditor of Virginia, taken from official sources, $23,380,309.97. Her
Negro schools cost her for the year 1889-90, by the same estimate,
$420,000, of which the Negroes paid about $60,000.[98]
Governor Gordon, of Georgia, in a recent address, said of that State:
“When her people secured possession of the State government, they
found about six thousand colored pupils in the public schools, with
the school exchequer bankrupt. To-day, instead of six thousand, we
have over one hundred and sixty thousand colored pupils in the public
schools, with the exchequer expanding and the schools multiplying
year by year.” He says further, “The Negroes pay one-thirtieth of the
expense, and the other twenty-nine-thirtieths are paid by the whites.”
The other Southern States have not been behind Virginia and Georgia
in this matter.
Now what has the Negro accomplished in this quarter of a century? The
picture drawn by Dr. Field of his accomplishment in Massachusetts
would do for the South.
“They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes;
the women take in washing.” They are barbers and white-washers,
shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps. Here and there we find a lawyer
or two, unhappily with their practice in inverse ratio to their
principle. Or now and then there is a doctor. But almost invariably
these are men with a considerable infusion of white blood in their
veins. And even they have, in no single instance, attained a position
which in a white would be deemed above mediocrity. Fifteen years
ago there were in Richmond a number of Negro tobacco and other
manufacturers in a small way. Now there are hardly any except
undertakers.
They do not appear to possess the faculties which are essential to
conduct any business in which reason has to be applied beyond the
immediate act in hand.
They appear to lack the faculty of organization on which rests all
successful business enterprise.
They have been losing ground as mechanics. Before the war, on
every plantation there were first-class carpenters, blacksmiths,
wheelwrights, etc. Half the houses in Virginia were built by Negro
carpenters. Now where are they? In Richmond there may be a few
blacksmiths and a dozen or two carpenters; but where are the others?
A great strike occurred last year in one of the large iron-works of
the city of Richmond. The president of the company stated afterward
that, although the places at the machines were filled later on by
volunteers, and although there were many Negroes who did not strike
employed in the works, it never occurred to either the management or
to the Negroes that they could work at the machines, and not one had
ever suggested it.
The question naturally arises, Have they improved? Many persons
declare that they have not. My observation has led to a somewhat
different conclusion. Where they have been brought into contact with
the stronger race under conditions in which they derived aid, as in
cities, they have in certain directions improved; where they have
lacked this stimulating influence, as in sections of the country
where the association has steadily diminished, they have failed to
advance. In the cities, where they are in touch with the whites, they
are, I think, becoming more dignified, more self-respecting, more
reasonable; in the country, where they are left to themselves, I fail
to see this improvement.
This improvement, however, such as it is, does not do away with
the race issue. So far from it, it rather intensifies the feeling,
certainly on the part of the Negro, and makes the relation more
strained. Yet it is our only hope. The white race, it is reasonably
certain, is not going to be ruled by the Negro either North or South.
That day is far off, and neither Lodge bills nor any other bills
can bring it about until they can reverse natural law, enact that
ignorance shall be above intelligence, and exalt feebleness over
strength. The history of that race is a guarantee that this cannot
be. It has been a conquering race from its first appearance, like the
Scythians of old,
“Firm to resolve and steadfast to endure.”
The section of it which inhabits the United States is not yet
degenerate. That part of it at the South assuredly is not. It is not
necessary to recall its history. It is one of the finest pages in
the history of the human race. Let one who has not been generally
regarded as unduly biassed in favor of the South speak for it.
Senator Hoar, speaking of the people of the South on the floor of the
Senate, in the speech already referred to, said:
They have some qualities which I cannot even presume to claim in an
equal degree for the people among whom I, myself, dwell. They have
an aptness for command which makes the Southern gentleman, wherever
he goes, not a peer only, but a prince. They have a love for home;
they have, the best of them, and the most of them, inherited from
the great race from which they come, the sense of duty and the
instinct of honor as no other people on the face of the earth. They
are lovers of home. They have not the mean traits which grow up
somewhere in places where money-making is the chief end of life.
They have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and
superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition and
without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired
and without getting diverted, can pursue a great public object, in
and out, year after year and generation after generation.
This is the race which the Negro confronts. It is a race which,
whatever perils have impended, has always faced them with a steadfast
mind.
Professor James Bryce in a recent paper on the Negro question arrives
at the only reasonable conclusion: that the Negro be let alone
and the solution of the problem be left to the course of events.
Friendship for the Negro demands this. It has become the fashion of
late for certain Negro leaders to talk in conventions held outside of
the South of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that
of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak
would settle the question.
To us of the South it appears that a proper race pride is one of
the strongest securities of our nation. No people can become great
without it. Without it no people can remain great. We purpose to
stand upon it.
The question now remains, What is to become of the Negro? It is not
likely that he will remain in his present status, if, indeed, it is
possible for him to do so. Many schemes have been suggested, none of
them alone answerable to the end proposed. The deportation plan does
not seem practicable at present. It is easy to suggest theories, but
much more difficult to substantiate them. I hazard one based upon
much reflection on the subject. It is, that the Negro race in America
will eventually disappear, not in a generation or a century—it may
take several centuries. The means will be natural. Certain portions
of the Southern States will for a while, perhaps, be almost given
up to him; but in time he will be crowded out even there. Africa
may take a part; Mexico and South America a part; the rest will, as
the country fills up, as life grows harder and competition fiercer,
become diffused and disappear, a portion, perhaps, not large,
by absorption into the stronger race, the residue by perishing
under conditions of life unsuited to the race. The ratio of the
death-rate of the race is already much larger than that of the white.
Consumption and zymotic diseases are already making their inroads.[99]
Meantime he is here, and something must be done to ameliorate
conditions.
In the first place, let us have all the light that can be thrown
on the subject. Form an organization to consider and deal with
the subject, not in the spirit of narrowness or temper, but in a
spirit of philosophic deliberation, such as becomes a great people
discussing a great question which concerns not only their present but
their future position among the nations. We shall then get at the
right of the matter.
Let us do our utmost to eliminate from the question the complication
of its political features. Get politics out of it, and the problem
will be more than half solved. Senator Hampton stated not long
ago in a paper contributed by him to the _North American Review_
that, to get the Negro out of politics, he would gladly give up the
representation based on his vote. Could anything throw a stronger
light on the apprehension with which the Negro in politics is
regarded at the South?
There never was any question more befogged with demagogism than that
of manhood suffrage. Let us apply ourselves to the securing some more
reasonable and better basis for the suffrage. Let us establish such
a proper qualification as a condition precedent to the possession
of the elective franchise as shall leave the ballot only to those
who have intelligence enough to use it as an instrument to secure
good government rather than to destroy it. In taking this step we
have to plant ourselves on a broader principle than that of a race
qualification. It is not merely the Negro, it is ignorance and
venality which we should disfranchise. If we can disfranchise these
we need not fear the voter, whatever the color. At present it is not
the Negro who is disfranchised, but the white. We dare not divide.
Having limited him in a franchise which he has not in a generation
learned to use, continue to teach him. It is from the educated
Negro; that is, the Negro who is more enlightened than the general
body of his race, that order must come. The ignorance, venality, and
superstition of the average Negro are dangerous to us. Education will
divide them and will uplift them. They may learn in time that if
they wish to rise they must look to the essential qualities of good
citizenship. In this way alone can the race or any part of the race
look for ultimate salvation.
It has appeared to some that the South has not done its full duty by
the Negro. Perfection is, without doubt, a standard above humanity;
but, at least, we of the South can say that we have done much for
him; if we have not admitted him to social equality, it has been
under an instinct stronger than reason, and in obedience to a law
higher than is on the statute-books: the law of self-preservation.
Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmitigated
evil it is fancied to have been. Its time has passed. No power could
compel the South to have it back. But to the Negro it was salvation.
It found him a savage and a cannibal and in two hundred years gave
seven millions of his race a civilization, the only civilization it
has had since the dawn of history.
We have educated him; we have aided him; we have sustained him in all
right directions. We are ready to continue our aid; but we will not
be dominated by him. When we shall be, it is our settled conviction
that we shall deserve the degradation into which we shall have sunk.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] This paper was written some years ago and was published in a
volume of essays by the author, entitled “The Old South.” It is
reprinted here substantially as it was then published, partly with
a view to having the entire discussion of the subject by the author
in one volume, and partly to show the result of studies of the Race
Question at that time and since that time. A comparison may readily
be made by anyone who may be sufficiently interested in the matter to
make it.
[66] The percentage of increase of the Negro race is shown to be
considerably less than that of the white; the percentage of deaths
among the former race being largely in excess of that of the latter.
See “Vital Statistics of the Negro,” by Frederick L. Hoffman, _The
Arena_, April, 1891, p. 529.
[67] “The commissioners of the United Colonies found occasion to
complain to the Dutch governor in New Netherlands in 1646 of the
fact that the Dutch agent in Hartford had harbored a fugitive Indian
slave-woman, of whom they say in their letter: ‘Such a servant is
parte of her master’s estate, and a more considerable parte than
a beaste.’ A provision for the rendition of fugitives, etc., was
afterward made by treaty between the Dutch and the English” (Moore’s
“History of Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 28, citing Plymouth Colony
Rec. IX. 6, 64, 190).
[68] “History of New England,” II., p. 30, note; Moore, p. 21.
[69] M. H. S. Coll. III, VIII. 231.
[70] Compare Hildreth, I. 278.
[71] “The breeding of slaves was not regarded with favor. Dr. Belknap
says that negro children were considered an encumbrance in a family;
and when weaned were given away like puppies” (Moore, p. 57, citing
M. H. S. Coll. 1, IV. 200).
[72] “Carriage in public conveyances was denied them; physicians
would not wait upon them; Miss Crandall’s own family and friends were
forbidden under penalty of heavy fines to visit her; the well was
filled with manure, and water from other sources refused; the house
itself was smeared with filth, assailed with rotten eggs, and finally
set on fire.” (“Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” I. p. 321.)
[73] Id. p. 494.
[74] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” I. p. 452.
[75] _Id._ p. 517.
[76] Letter from Garrison to his wife, November 9, 1835.
[77] Lib. 5, 197.
[78] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” II. p. 35.
[79] In Virginia the Legislature which assembled in December,
1865, had in the House of Delegates but one member who was not an
old-time Whig, and in the Senate it was “pretty much the same.” (“The
Political Hist. of Va., During Reconstruction,” by Hamilton James
Eckenrode, p. 41. Johns Hopkins Press, 1904.)
[80] Lincoln’s letter to Governor Hahn, March 13, 1864.
[81] A valuable contribution to it, entitled “Noted Men on the Solid
South,” has recently appeared, and to the papers comprised in it I am
indebted for much material in this branch of my subject.
[82] Since this was written, a certain class have shown marked signs
of advance.
[83] “Sunny Skies and Dark Shadows,” p. 144.
[84] I would refer to the valuable paper contributed by the Hon. B.
J. Sage to the volume “Noted Men on the Solid South,” already cited.
[85] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 404.
[86] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 406.
[87] _Id._ p. 406.
[88] Dr. Henry M. Field, “Bright Skies and Dark Shadows.”
[89] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 408.
[90] Since writing this, after a struggle which taxed all the civil
resources of the government, this organization has been overthrown.
[91] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 427.
[92] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” Mr. Hemphill’s paper, p. 94.
[93] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 95.
[94] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” pp. 99-102.
[95] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 104.
[96] Governor Chamberlain has recently written an open letter to Mr.
James Bryce, the eminent English student of American governmental
conditions, in which after thirty-odd years’ experience he takes
absolutely the Southern side of the Race Question.
[97] This was written in 1892.
[98] See Appendix.
[99] See “Vital Statistics of the Negro.” Cited _supra_.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE SOLUTION OF THE QUESTION
The question is often asked, “Now that the race problem in the
South has been laid down and discussed, what solution of it do you
offer—what have you to propose to ameliorate the conditions which
have grown out of that problem?”
The answer is simple. None, but to leave it to work itself out
along the lines of economic laws, with such aid as may be rendered
by an enlightened public spirit and a broad-minded patriotism.
The solution proposed so glibly by ignorant doctrinaires is like
the nostrum of the quack—good only for fools. The single solution
that can really solve it is that which time alone can disclose—the
natural and imperative resultant of the forces represented in the two
races. The racial traits, instincts, and forces which have governed
and propelled them since the dawn of history will in all human
probability still control and propel them so long as they exist as
races.
One fact that may be stated with some degree of assurance is that
there is no one universal Negro problem or question except the single
one constituted by the existence in the same country of two populous
and fecund races, essentially and, perhaps, radically different in
their history, manners, life, and instincts. In fact, the problems
are almost as numerous and as various as the communities where the
two races exist side by side. For example, one problem exists where
the races are equally educated; another, where they are equally
ignorant; a third, where the one race or the other is in numerical
superiority; yet another, where the members of either race are of one
class or another. All of these things have to be fully considered in
determining the various questions that seem to be inherent in the
subject, and any positive formulation of one set of conditions may
readily be met by the production of a partially if not a totally
different set of conditions.
Out of all these questions, as has been stated, but one essentially
common to the whole obtrudes itself: Whether two races, like
the white race and the black, with such histories and such
characteristics as those races have, can continue permanently to live
together under conditions similar to those which exist in the United
States with mutual benefit to both?
On the proper answer to this question depends our future, both as
a people and as a nation. Next to the question of Representative
government, this would appear to be the most vital and fundamental
question that exists within the limits of the United States to-day.
Hinging upon it are such subordinate questions as representation,
personal security, freedom of speech, race integrity, national
strength and permanency, and, possibly, even national existence.
The Negro race has already doubled three times in the United States
since the beginning of the last century, and, unless conditions
change, it is possible that before the end of the century there may
be between sixty and eighty millions of Negroes in this country; a
situation which will tax all, and more than all, of the wisdom and
constancy of the white race.
In fact, the situation is already too serious to be disposed of
without the expenditure of all the courage, wisdom, and patriotism
of the entire white race in America, or, at least, without more than
they have yet shown. Hitherto, the Negro race has been treated on the
one side as an amiable and servile class, useful under regulation
and direction to furnish the labor of a great section, and on the
other side as a pliable class, useful under certain conditions as a
weapon to punish or control the opposite party. The one section has
leaned decidedly to keeping the Negro as a mere laborer; the other
has leaned with firmness to using him for its own advantage. But,
when the Negro race shall reach the numbers suggested, new questions
will have arisen. The question then will be, “What shall be done with
this colored population of sixty to eighty millions of souls?”
It is true that prognostications of increase in a population often
fail, but judging the future by the past and taking into account
known racial characteristics, it would appear that the number thus
prophesied will in all human probability exist in the United States
by the end of the century. If it does exist, it is useless for us
of the present generation to blink our eyes to the gravity of the
situation.
The answer at present would appear to be alternative: either they
must live separately among us—that is, a people within a people,
separate and distinct—or they must be amalgamated and mixed in with
the whites; or, they must be removed and still live separate and
distinct, whether in some country beyond the confines of the United
States, or in some portion of this country which shall be given up to
them.
It is not believed by those best acquainted with the subject that
the solution of the race question will ever be along the lines of
amalgamation. That there will be some intermixture is doubtless true,
but unless all observations are erroneous, while the percentage of
mulattoes in the total Negro population has increased, this increase
is mainly due to the intermixture of the white with the mulatto, or
of the mulatto with the pure Negro, and the intermixture between the
pure Negro and the pure white is growing less all the time.
“The general conclusion,” says the Director of the Department of
Commerce and Labor of the Census Bureau, after giving tables of
increasing per cent. of mulattoes to total Negro population of
the several divisions of the country, “seems warranted that the
proportion of mulattoes to total Negroes was found by the enumerators
to be high or low, according as the proportion of whites to Negroes
is high or low. That is, it appears that where the whites are in
large numbers and the Negroes in small numbers, the proportion of
mulattoes to Negroes is likely to be higher than where the whites are
in small numbers and the Negroes in large numbers.”
Moreover, the percentage of mulattoes in the total Negro population
is decidedly greater in cities than in the country.
Although the reports are admittedly incomplete,[100] “yet even
so,” says the Director, “it is a step away from ignorance to have
the observation of many thousand enumerators at four independent
inquiries as evidence that in the United States between one-ninth and
one-sixth of the Negroes were of mixed blood, while in Cuba one-half
and in Porto Rico five-sixths have been so classed by the census.”
As race feeling grows the intermixture of the two races will
necessarily grow less and less.
The solution of the question, then, must be along one of the other
lines suggested. That is, the Negro race must either remain distinct
and keep to itself, or it must be removed to some region, whether
within or without the confines of the United States, where it will be
substantially separated.
There are those who advocate warmly the attempt, however apparently
Herculean, to remove the Negro race without further delay. That it
may come to this in the future is certainly possible. It is, however,
much more likely that the Negro race will find its best security in
remaining in this country, a people within a people, separate and
distinct, but acting in amity with the stronger race and trying to
minimize rather than magnify contentions upon those points as to
which the stronger race is most determined. Should the time ever come
when, for any reason whatever, a conflict arises between the two
races, which would appear to jeopard the supremacy of the stronger
race, the weaker race would go down, never to rise again on this
continent.
When the writer first began to study the conditions of the race
problem they appeared to be most disheartening. As, however, he
surveyed the entire field, he has become more hopeful, and certainly
more firm in his convictions as to a few principles.
One of these principles is the absolute and unchangeable superiority
of the white race—a superiority, it appears to him, not due to any
mere adventitious circumstances, such as superior educational and
other advantages during some centuries, but an inherent and essential
superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy. He
does not believe that the Negro is the equal of the white, or ever
could be the equal. Race superiority is founded on courage (or,
perhaps, “constancy” is the better word), intellect, and the domestic
virtues, and in these the white is the superior of every race.
Another principle is that many, if not most, of the difficulties
of the race problem since the war have been caused, or at least
increased, by the ignorance of those outside of the South, who, most
cocksure of their position where they were most in error, have tried
to force a solution on lines contrary to natural and unchangeable
laws. The selfish politician and the cocksure theorist have equally
contrived to create problems where none might have been but for their
bigotry and their folly.
The first step toward the solution of the problem would be taken if
the Negro were simply let alone and left to his own resources, with
such help as equity or philanthropy might contribute—in other words,
if the whites and blacks were left to settle their difficulties and
troubles in the various States and sections precisely as they would
be left were all whites or all blacks.
Among the errors made in the early years none was more fatal than
the inculcation in the mind of the Negro that he was the ward of
the nation, and, as such, would be sustained. He was not sustained
in the end and he never can be; but he learned just enough from the
experience of that time to know that the Government was powerful
enough to trample down the Southern whites. The memory of that
time has been an _ignis fatuus_ to delude him ever since. And the
continual harping on this theme by the section of the Northern press
and the politicians, who forget that this is no longer the decade
following the war, is just sufficient to mislead them.
At the end the Negroes must rise by their own exertions and their own
approach to the standards by which peoples rise. And the chief aid in
this is the sympathy of those among whom they live.
Left alone, the whites and the blacks of the South would settle their
difficulties along the lines of substantial justice and substantial
equity.
Yet another principle is that the final settlement must be one in
which the great body of that portion of the white race who know the
Negroes best shall acquiesce. No other will ever be final.
The “MacVeagh Commission,” which visited Louisiana in 1876, reported
that the Negro party had a great majority in the State, had had
possession of every branch of the State Government, and had been
sustained by the United States Government, and yet the whites had
defeated and ousted them. Were the same conditions to exist to-day
the same results would occur. This country is as “fatally reserved
for” the Anglo-Saxon race as it was when the Virginia Adventurers
declared it to be so in their first report to Elizabeth.
And, lastly, I am satisfied that the final settlement must be by the
way of elevating both races.
There is much truth in the saying that unless the whites lift the
Negroes up, the Negroes will drag them down, though it is not true in
the full sense in which it was intended. It is not true to the extent
that the white must lift the Negro up to his own level; it is true
to the extent that he must not leave him debased—at least, must not
leave him here debased. If he does, then the Negro will inevitably
hold him, if not drag him down. No country in the present state of
the world’s progress can long maintain itself in the front rank,
and no people can long maintain themselves at the top of the list
of peoples if they have to carry perpetually the burden of a vast
and densely ignorant population, and where that population belongs
to another race, the argument must be all the stronger. Certainly,
no section can, under such a burden, keep pace with a section which
has no such burden. Whatever the case may have been in the past,
the time has gone by, possibly forever, when the ignorance of the
working-class was an asset. Nations and peoples and, much more,
sections of peoples, are now strong and prosperous almost in direct
ratio to their knowledge and enlightenment.
It can readily be demonstrated by unquestioned proof that the wealth
and strength of modern nations are in almost exact proportion to
the education of the population. It is not, however, necessary for
the present argument to go outside of America. Viewing the matter
economically, the Negro race, like every other race, must be of far
more value to the country in which it is placed, if the Negro is
properly educated, elevated, and trained, than if he is allowed
to remain in ignorance and degradation. He is a greater peril to
the community in which he lives if he remains in ignorance and
degradation than if he is enlightened. If the South expects ever to
compete with the North, she must educate and train her population,
and, in my judgment, not merely her white population, but her entire
population.
I know well all the arguments against educating the Negroes. I
know the struggle that the South made in the days of her poverty
to educate that race, even at the expense of her white children;
expending upon them, out of taxes levied by the whites on the
property of the whites, over $110,000,000, though over a fifth of the
whites were left in ignorance.[101] I know the disappointment from
which she has suffered. What is charged as to the educated Negro’s
being just educated enough to make him worthless as a laborer and
leave him useless for anything else has in it often too much truth.
I am well aware that often the young Negro thinks his so-called
education gives him a license to be insolent, and that not rarely it
is but an aid to his viciousness. But, for all this, the economic
laws are as invariable and as certain in their operation as any other
laws of nature.
In the first place, it seems to me that our plain duty is to do the
best we can to act with justice and a broad charity and leave the
consequences to God.
But there are other reasons for our continuing in well-doing. And
not for sentimental reasons and not for political reasons, but
for reasons on which depend the future of the South and of the
Southern people; for reasons as certain as that light is safer than
darkness, and that intelligence is better than stupidity, or even
mere craftiness, the South must educate all her population. She
must do this, or she must fall behind the rest of the country. She
has no option in this matter. She has the population and they are
increasing. The matter seems to me to be not susceptible of question
on sound economic grounds. We must educate them. It is not a question
of choice, but of necessity.
We have the Negro here among us to the number of ten millions and
increasing at a rate of about twenty-five per cent. every ten years.
They are here; what must we do with them? One of three courses must
be taken: We must either debase them, keep them stationary, or
improve them.
Everyone will discard the first plan.
No one can make the second feasible. A race, like a class, is always
in a state of change, at least, under conditions like those in
America.
Then, we must adopt the third course.
At this point, the question arises: How shall they be improved? One
element says, Improve them, but only as laborers, for which alone
they are fitted; another, with a larger charity, says, Enlarge this
and give them a chance to become good mechanics, as they have shown
themselves capable of improvement in the industrial field; a third
class goes further yet, and says, Give them a yet further chance—a
chance to develop themselves; enlighten them and teach them the
duties of citizenship and they will become measurably good citizens.
Yet another says, Give him the opportunity and push him till he is
stuffed full of the ideas and the learning that have made the white
race what it is.
The last of these theories appears to the writer as unsound as the
first, which is certainly unsound. Keep them ignorant, and the clever
and the enterprising will go off and leave to the South the dull, the
stupid, and the degraded.
The question is no longer a choice between the old-time Negro and the
“new issue,” but between the “new issue,” made into a fairly good
laborer and a fairly enlightened citizen, who in time will learn his
proper place, whatever it may be, or the “new issue,” dull, ignorant,
brutish, liable to be worked on by the most crafty of those who would
use him; a noisome, human hot-bed, in which every form of viciousness
will germinate.
Perhaps, the best argument ever advanced for general suffrage was
that of George Mason in the Constitutional Convention: that through
a general suffrage it may be known what is underneath. The Negroes
will always have their leaders, and it is better to have enlightened
leaders than ignorant.
Nothing could be more disheartening than the poor return that
the Southerner has received for his outlay and patience. Often,
worthlessness and insolence on the part of the beneficiaries of his
bounty, and misunderstanding and abuse on the part of Pharisaical
critics, have been his reward. But, for all this, let us keep on
doing what we believe to be right. We have in the past had experience
of the Negro fairly well trained and in amity with the white, where
he recognized the latter’s superiority. We have the high authority of
one of the leading Negro teachers and leaders, that the Negro yearns
toward the white. This is strongly corroborated by the well-known
fact that wherever the Negroes and the Southern whites are let alone,
and are not affected by outside influences, they, for the most part,
live in harmony. If we keep on and manage the race question with
firmness and with equity, we shall yet show the Negro that his true
interest lies in maintaining amity with the Southern white. This we
can never do if we take ground against educating him and leave the
Northern white to advocate uplifting him. In such case, the North
would always have an argument, and the Negro always proof, that the
Northerner is his friend and the Southerner not.
The alleged danger of the educated Negro becoming a greater menace
to the white than the uneducated is a bugaboo which will not stand
the test of light. That this might be true if the white is allowed
to remain uneducated, may readily be admitted. The answer, however,
to the argument, if it has any merit whatever, is that we must give
a sound and not a spurious education and simply educate our whites
better. If there were not a Negro on the continent of America, we
shall have to do this anyhow, unless we are willing to have the
Southern people fall ever further and further behind the people of
the North and West.[102]
Education is now the talisman—the desire and aim of all the vast
influx of immigrants who come within our gates. The children of the
foreign-born population of the country are, by the last census, less
illiterate, even in the North, than those of the native-born. Unless
we furnish these people good schools, we can never hope to get a good
class of immigrants to come to us. Without good schools, if we get
any, it will be only the poorest class. And nothing would help us
more in the South than to get in the best class.
* * * * *
Now, as to the form of education which will be of most value to the
Negroes and of most value to the South—for the two, instead of being
opposed to each other, as, according to our self-righteous critics,
we appear to believe, are bound up in one.
Unhappily, the system of education heretofore pursued with the
Negroes has been so futile in its results that a considerable
proportion of Southerners, knowing the facts against all the
assertion of Negro leaders, and all the clamor of those outside the
South who are ignorant of the facts, believe sincerely that the
educated are more worthless and more dangerous to the welfare and
peace of the community in which they live than the uneducated.
That is, it is the sincere belief of a considerable number of
enlightened and thoughtful whites, perfectly conversant with the
situation, that the earnest effort of the South to educate the
Negroes, extending through a generation, at an expense of over
$110,000,000, contributed out of the property of the Southern whites,
has been a complete failure in that the beneficiaries of this effort
are not as good workers, or as good citizens, as the generation which
preceded them, and use the education so given them, where they use
it at all, in ways which are not beneficial to themselves and are
injurious to the whites.
This is a condition sufficiently grave to require thoughtful
consideration, and it must be met by argument rather than by
vilification, or even by mere dogmatism.
It is, undoubtedly, true that the apparent result of the effort to
educate the Negro has been disappointing. There are a few thousand
professional men, a considerable number of college or high school
graduates, but, for the greater part, there is discernible little
apparent breadth of view, no growth in ability, or tendency to
consider great questions reasonably. There is, indeed, rather a
tendency to racial solidarity in opposition to the whites on all
questions whatsoever; continued failure to distinguish soundly
between outward gifts and character; a general inclination to
deny crime and side with criminals against the whites, no matter
how flagrant the crime may be. There is, moreover, a not rare
belief among the whites that the preachers and leaders contribute
to increase these tendencies and teach hostility rather than try
to uplift the race morally. This view is held sincerely by a
considerable section of the well-informed whites of the South.
All this is very disappointing, and yet the only lamp by which we can
guide our way safely is the light of experience. Enlightenment and
religion are the two great powers that have raised races and peoples.
Since the dawn of history, Education and Christianity have raised
the Western nations, among them the Anglo-Saxon race. With all the
faults men show in practice, these two contain the vital principles.
They are founded on those precepts, by which alone nations rise and
civilization advances—knowledge, morality, and duty.
Whatever disappointment, then, there may be, this much at least may
be laid down: There are only two ways to solve the Negro problem in
the South. One is to remove him; the other is to elevate him. The
former is apparently out of the question. The only method, then, is
to improve him.
In suggesting the method of education that will prove of greatest
service, it is easier to criticise than to reform. Hitherto, the
idea has been to educate the Negro race just as the white race is
educated; that is, to give him book education and “turn him loose.”
There was, it is true, no field except the curious politics of the
time in which the Negro could exercise his powers, based on such an
education. The whites did not want this; the Negroes could not use
it; but this made no difference with those who had the matter in
charge. Education was understood to be ability to show book-learning.
With this meagre equipment, the “educated Negro” rushed into
politics, or into the pulpit, which mainly was but another name for
the same thing. Sentiment, however, demanded that the Negro should
be placed on an equality with the whites, and other conditions were
left out of account, with disheartening results.
It is axiomatic to say that the education given to the Negro should
be of the kind which will benefit him most. A few plain principles
may be stated: He should be taught that education consists of
something more than a mere ability to read and write and speak;
that education includes moral elevation as well as intellectual
development; that religion includes morality and is more than
emotional excitement. He should be taught that one of the strongest
elements in racial development is purity of family life; he should
be taught that the duties of citizenship are much more than the
ability to cast a ballot, or even to hold an office; that elevation
to superiority among the people of his own race is of far greater
moment to him at this time than external equality with another race,
and that true superiority is founded on character. He should be
taught to become self-sustaining, self-reliant, and self-respecting.
A people, like a class, to advance must either be strong enough to
make its way against all hostility, or must secure the friendship of
others, particularly of those nearest it. If the Negro race in the
South proposes, and is powerful enough to overcome the white race,
let it try this method—it will soon find out its error; if not, it
must secure the friendship of that race. Owing to conditions, the
friendship and the sympathy of the Southern section of that race are
almost as much more important to the Negro race than is that of the
North, as the friendship of the latter is more important than that of
the yet more distant Canadian section of the white race.
The best way—perhaps the only way—for the Negro race to progress
steadily is to secure the sympathy and aid of the Southern whites.
It will never do this until the race solidarity of the Negroes is
broken and the Negroes divide on the same grounds on which the whites
divide; until they unite with the whites and act with them on the
questions which concern the good of the section in which they both
have their most vital interests.
The urgent need is for the Negroes to divide up into classes, with
character and right conduct as the standard for elevation. When
they make distinctions themselves, others will recognize their
distinctions.
As a result of the above principles, it would appear, first, that
elementary education should be universal. Even the commonest laborer,
speaking in general terms, profits by it.
This education should be of the kind best adapted to the great body
of those for whom it is provided. The wisest and most conservative
teacher of the Negro race, following the precepts of his own great
teacher, General Armstrong, has attained his distinction largely
by the success he has achieved in applying methods of industrial,
rather than of mere literary education. In this view he is bitterly
opposed by many, perhaps by most, of the “educated Negroes,” who
are fond of declaring that they act upon principle; that the object
of education is to make men, not to make potatoes, or even to make
carpenters; little realizing that “men,” in the sense in which the
term is, or should be used, are no more made by the superficial and
counterfeit education which most of their so-called college graduates
display, than are vegetables or mechanics. It has taken a generation
and something like $150,000,000, including the entire input from
public and private sources, to produce one Booker T. Washington,
and—to select from the other school—one Professor Du Bois, though I
take pleasure in stating my belief that there are a considerable
and possibly an increasing number of modest, unassuming, faithful,
and devoted teachers and representatives of both schools not so
distinguished, but, perhaps, not less worthy than these. But, the
question arises, or should arise, How many thousands are there who,
in the making of these, have been ruined for the life for which they
were fitted?
It might seem that the true principle should be elementary education
for all, including in the term “industrial education,” and special,
that is, higher education of a proper kind for the special
individuals who may give proof of their fitness to receive and profit
by it.
A college education should be the final reward and prize only of
those who have proven themselves capable of appreciating it and who
give promise of being able to use it for the public good.
To ignore rules founded on such plain common sense is worse than
folly. The money so expended is not merely thrown away; this might
be tolerated; it is an actual and positive injury. It unfits the
recipient for the work for which alone in any case he might be fit,
and gives him in exchange only a bauble to amuse himself with, or a
weapon with which to injure himself and others.
Finally, and as the only sound foundation for the whole system of
education, the Negro must be taught the great elementary truths of
morality and duty. Until he is so established in these that he claims
to be on this ground the equal of the white, he can never be his
equal on any other ground. When he is the equal of the white, it will
make itself known. Until then, he is fighting not the white race, but
a law of nature, universal and inexorable—that races rise or fall
according to their character.
FOOTNOTES:
[100] Twelfth U. S. Census; Bulletin 8, p. 17.
[101] See Appendix.
[102] See Appendix.
APPENDIX
SOUTHERN TAXATION AND EDUCATION.
As small as may appear to be the amount expended by the South on
public education, those who have not known conditions there can have
little idea as to the strain upon her resources which this amount has
caused. In “The Present South,” pp. 42, 43 _et seq._, Edgar Gardner
Murphy says:
“The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870
there was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern
property and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years
from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss.
“In 1860 the assessed value of property in Massachusetts was
$777,000,000, as contrasted with $5,200,000,000 for the whole South.
“But at the close of the war period Massachusetts had, in 1870,
$1,590,000,000 in taxable property, as contrasted with but
$3,000,000,000 for the whole South.
“It is interesting to note that in 1890 there was ‘expended for
public schools on each $100 of true valuation of all real and
personal property’ 22.3 cents in Arkansas and 24.4 cents in
Mississippi, as compared with 20.5 cents in New York and 20.9 in
Pennsylvania. See Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education,
1902, Vol. I. p. xci.”
ILLITERACY IN THE SOUTH.
The following is taken from Publication 8, Twelfth United States
Census:
“The illiteracy of the native white population of the Southern States
ranges from 8.6 per cent. in Florida, 8 per cent. in Mississippi,
and 6.1 per cent. in Texas, to 17.3 per cent. in Louisiana, and 19.5
per cent. in North Carolina, as contrasted with 0.8 per cent. in
Nebraska, 1.3 per cent. in Kansas, 2.1 per cent. in Illinois, 1.2
per cent. in New York, and 0.8 per cent. in Massachusetts. A far
juster comparison, however, is that which indicates the contrast, not
between the South and the rest of the country in 1900, but between
the South of 1880 and the South of to-day.’
TABLE SHOWING THE RANK OF EACH STATE IN PERCENTAGE OF ILLITERACY OF
THE NATIVE WHITE POPULATION TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OVER:
1900.
1 Washington 0.5
2 South Dakota 0.6
3 Montana 0.6
4 Nevada 0.6
5 Wyoming 0.7
6 Massachusetts 0.8
7 Minnesota 0.8
8 Nebraska 0.8
9 Connecticut 0.8
10 Oregon 0.8
11 Utah 0.8
12 Dist. of Columbia 0.8
13 North Dakota 0.9
14 Idaho 0.9
15 California 1.0
16 New York 1.2
17 Iowa 1.2
18 Wisconsin 1.3
19 Kansas 1.3
20 New Hampshire 1.5
21 Michigan 1.7
22 New Jersey 1.7
23 Rhode Island 1.8
24 Illinois 2.1
25 Pennsylvania 2.3
26 Ohio 2.4
27 Maine 2.4
28 Oklahoma 2.5
29 Colorado 2.7
30 Vermont 2.9
31 Indiana 3.6
32 Maryland 4.1
33 Missouri 4.8
34 Delaware 5.6
35 Texas 6.1
36 Arizona 6.2
37 Mississippi 8.0
38 Florida 8.6
39 West Virginia 10.0
40 Virginia 11.1
41 Arkansas 11.6
42 Georgia 11.9
43 Kentucky 12.8
44 South Carolina 13.6
45 Indian Territory 14.0
46 Tennessee 14.2
47 Alabama 14.8
48 Louisiana 17.3
49 North Carolina 19.5
50 New Mexico 29.4
POPULATION AT LEAST TEN YEARS OF AGE AND NUMBER AND PER CENT.
ILLITERATE FOR THE NEGRO AND WHITE RACES: 1900 AND 1890.
———————————————————+—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
| POPULATION AT LEAST TEN YEARS OF AGE.
+——————————+——————————+———————————————————+———————————
RACE. | | | Number Illiterate.| Per Cent.
| | | |Illiterate.
| 1900 | 1890 +—————————+—————————+—————+—————
| | | 1900 | 1890 |1900 |1890
———————————————————+——————————+——————————+—————————+—————————+—————+—————
Continental U. S.: | | | | | |
Negro population. | 6,415,581| 5,328,972|2,853,194|3,042,668| 44.5| 57.1
White population. |51,250,918|41,931,074|3,200,746|3,212,574| 6.2| 7.7
———————————————————+——————————+——————————+—————————+—————————+—————+—————
South Atlantic and | | | | | |
South Central | | | | | |
divisions: | | | | | |
Negro population.| 5,664,975| 4,751,763|2,717,606|2,883,216| 48.0| 60.7
White population.|12,020,539| 9,456,368|1,401,273|1,412,983| 11.7| 14.9
———————————————————+——————————+——————————+—————————+—————————+—————+—————
“There are 352 counties in the United States in which one-half the
Negro population at least 10 years of age was illiterate in 1900.
With the exception of New Madrid County, Mo., all these counties are
in the South.
“If the educational facilities of the country should remain up
to their present standards, but not improve, and should impart
the elements of education to as large a proportion of the rising
generation as they have done to those between 10 and 14 years in
1900, then, at the end of the generation, illiteracy among the
Negroes in the country will have sunk from 44.5 to 30.1 per cent.;
that is, nearly one-third of it will have disappeared. At the
same time, illiteracy among the whites in the country will have
sunk, immigration aside, from 6.2 to 3.5 per cent.; that is,
about three-sevenths of the illiteracy among the whites will have
disappeared.
“At the present time, nearly one-half of the Negroes in the Southern
States are unable to write, but if educational facilities for that
race remain about as they are at present for another generation,
and be availed of to the same extent, the proportion would sink to
one-third. The illiteracy of the Negro at the present time is about
four times that of the white in both the North and the South; in the
North a little less, in the South a little more.”
COST OF VIRGINIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Total amount of State and Local Taxes
expended in Virginia on Public Schools
from 1870-71 to 1890-91—20 years $22,759,249.38
Amount received from Peabody Fund 296,134.00
Private contributions 324,926.59
——————————————
Total $23,380,309.97
==============
Cost of Negro education in Public Schools,
including total Current Expenses $4,792,290.06
Amounts appropriated by the State to
Hampton and Virginia Normal Institutes 471,708.72
Cost of permanent improvements, sites,
buildings, etc., for Colored Schools 588,223.05
—————————————
Total cost of Colored Public Schools and
Normal Institutes for 20 years $5,852,222.57
Total cost of White Schools for same period 17,528,087.60
——————————————
Total of all Public Schools same period $23,380,310.17
==============
Percentage of whole fund expended on White Schools $75.00
Percentage of whole fund expended on Colored
Schools 25.00
——————
$100.00
Actual statistics for 1891 show the following facts:
Total taxes. Per cent. of whole.
White $1,769,576.06 91.7
Colored 163,175.67 8.3
————————————— —————
Total $1,959,751.73 100.0
The U. S. Census for 1890 shows the population of Virginia to be as
follows:
White 1,015,123 = 61.3%
Colored 640,857 = 38.7%
————————— ——————
Total 1,655,980 = 100.0%
Thus showing that while the Negroes comprise nearly four-tenths
of the population, they furnish less than one-tenth of the amount
expended on public schools.
The number of Public Schools for the year 1898-90 was
White 5,358
Colored 2,153
—————
7,511
The total cost of Public Schools for the year
1889-90 was $1,604,508.80
The cost of Negro Schools for the same year
was about 420,000.00
Now, if we use the percentages on preceding pages and allow all the
taxes paid by Negroes (on both personal and real property) to go into
the School Fund, we will see that there was a deficit of $256,824.33
to be made up from the taxes paid by white people, or, in other
words, the total amount of taxes on personal and real property paid
by the Negroes will cover less than half the expense of their schools
alone.
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Transcriber’s Notes
pg ix Changed: due consideration of every other question whatsover.
to: due consideration of every other question whatsoever.
pg 115 Changed: barbarism shown by the prevalance
to: barbarism shown by the prevalence
pg 218 Changed: any other relation, believes this implicity
to: any other relation, believes this implicitly
pg 237 Changed: that this war it not waged
to: that this war is not waged
pg 299 Changed: hte enterprising will go off
to: the enterprising will go off
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