The negro: the southerner's problem
Date: 2023-05-22T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: African Americans; United States -- Race relations

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Title: The negro: the southerner's problem

Author: Thomas Nelson Page

Release date: May 22, 2023 [eBook #70834]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEGRO: THE SOUTHERNER'S PROBLEM ***

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. |
| Per Cent. Owners— | Slaves— | Average
CENSUS YEAR. | Form of | 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. | Year. | Assessed Value.
1874 | $6,157,798 | 1888 | $9,631,271
1875 | 5,393,885 | 1889 | 10,415,330
1876 | 5,488,867 | 1890 | 12,322,003
1877 | 5,430,844 | 1891 | 14,196,735
1878 | 5,124,875 | 1892 | 14,869,575
1879 | 5,182,398 | 1893 | 14,960,675
1880 | 5,764,293 | 1894 | 14,387,730
1881 | 6,478,951 | 1895 | 12,941,230
1882 | 6,589,876 | 1896 | 13,292,816
1883 | 7,582,395 | 1897 | 13,619,690
1884 | 8,021,525 | 1898 | 13,719,200
1885 | 8,153,390 | 1899 | 13,447,423
1886 | 8,655,298 | 1900 | 14,118,720
1887 | 8,963,479 | |

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 | 1895 | 171
1886 | 138 | 1896 | 131
1887 | 122 | 1897 | 166
1888 | 142 | 1898 | 127
1889 | 176 | 1899 | 107
1890 | 127 | 1900 | 115
1891 | 192 | 1901 | 135
1892 | 235 | 1902 | 96
1893 | 200 | 1903 | 104
1894 | 190 | 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 | New York | 0
Arkansas | 6 | Nevada | 0
California | 0 | North Carolina | 3
Colorado | 3 | North Dakota | 0
Connecticut | 0 | Ohio | 0
Delaware | 0 | Oregon | 0
Florida | 9 | Pennsylvania | 0
Georgia | 16 | Rhode Island | 0
Idaho | 0 | South Carolina | 2
Illinois | 0 | South Dakota | 0
Indiana | 3 | Tennessee | 7
Iowa | 0 | Texas | 4
Kansas | 2 | Vermont | 0
Kentucky | 1 | Virginia | 6
Louisiana | 20 | West Virginia | 2
Maine | 0 | Wisconsin | 0
Maryland | 1 | Washington | 0
Massachusetts | 0 | Wyoming | 0
Michigan | 0 | Arizona | 0
Minnesota | 0 | District of Columbia | 0
Mississippi | 20 | New Mexico | 0
Missouri | 2 | Utah | 0
Montana | 0 | Indian Territory | 0
Nebraska | 0 | Oklahoma | 0
New Jersey | 0 | Alaska | 0
New Hampshire | 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 | New York | 3
Arkansas | 0 | Nevada | 0
California | 5 | North Carolina | 9
Colorado | 0 | North Dakota | 1
Connecticut | 1 | Ohio | 1
Delaware | 0 | Oregon | 1
Florida | 1 | Pennsylvania | 15
Georgia | 14 | Rhode Island | 0
Idaho | 2 | South Carolina | 3
Illinois | 0 | South Dakota | 0
Indiana | 0 | Tennessee | 4
Iowa | 0 | Texas | 18
Kansas | 0 | Vermont | 0
Kentucky | 0 | Virginia | 7
Louisiana | 6 | West Virginia | 0
Maine | 0 | Wisconsin | 0
Maryland | 3 | Wyoming | 0
Massachusetts | 0 | Washington | 2
Michigan | 0 | Arizona | 4
Minnesota | 0 | District of Columbia | 3
Mississippi | 1 | New Mexico | 0
Missouri | 3 | Utah | 0
Montana | 3 | Indian Territory | 0
Nebraska | 0 | Oklahoma | 0
New Jersey | 4 | Alaska | 0
New Hampshire | 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 | ” | 49 | ” | ” | ” | ”
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 | 26 | Ohio | 2.4
2 | South Dakota | 0.6 | 27 | Maine | 2.4
3 | Montana | 0.6 | 28 | Oklahoma | 2.5
4 | Nevada | 0.6 | 29 | Colorado | 2.7
5 | Wyoming | 0.7 | 30 | Vermont | 2.9
6 | Massachusetts | 0.8 | 31 | Indiana | 3.6
7 | Minnesota | 0.8 | 32 | Maryland | 4.1
8 | Nebraska | 0.8 | 33 | Missouri | 4.8
9 | Connecticut | 0.8 | 34 | Delaware | 5.6
10 | Oregon | 0.8 | 35 | Texas | 6.1
11 | Utah | 0.8 | 36 | Arizona | 6.2
12 | Dist. of Columbia | 0.8 | 37 | Mississippi | 8.0
13 | North Dakota | 0.9 | 38 | Florida | 8.6
14 | Idaho | 0.9 | 39 | West Virginia | 10.0
15 | California | 1.0 | 40 | Virginia | 11.1
16 | New York | 1.2 | 41 | Arkansas | 11.6
17 | Iowa | 1.2 | 42 | Georgia | 11.9
18 | Wisconsin | 1.3 | 43 | Kentucky | 12.8
19 | Kansas | 1.3 | 44 | South Carolina | 13.6
20 | New Hampshire | 1.5 | 45 | Indian Territory | 14.0
21 | Michigan | 1.7 | 46 | Tennessee | 14.2
22 | New Jersey | 1.7 | 47 | Alabama | 14.8
23 | Rhode Island | 1.8 | 48 | Louisiana | 17.3
24 | Illinois | 2.1 | 49 | North Carolina | 19.5
25 | Pennsylvania | 2.3 | 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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Table of Contents

- THE NEGRO: THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM
- INTRODUCTORY
- CONTENTS

- CHAPTER I SLAVERY AND THE OLD RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUTHERN WHITES AND BLACKS

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER II SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES

- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER III ITS PRESENT CONDITION AND ASPECT, AS SHOWN BY STATISTICS

- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER IV THE LYNCHING OF NEGROES—ITS CAUSE AND ITS PREVENTION[39]

- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER V THE PARTIAL DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO

- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER VI THE OLD-TIME NEGRO

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER VII THE RACE QUESTION[65]

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER VIII OF THE SOLUTION OF THE QUESTION

- FOOTNOTES:

- APPENDIX SOUTHERN TAXATION AND EDUCATION.

- ILLITERACY IN THE SOUTH.

- Transcriber’s Notes

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE