CHAPTER XVI

THE RACE QUESTION--GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY

1. Dense fogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emancipation of the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers' war. The authors and defenders of the three amendments--especially of the fifteenth--have made many others believe that the inferiority of the southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having been removed by emancipation he became at once ready and well prepared for the exercise of political privileges; and that the practical denial to him of this exercise is a heinous crime of the southern whites. Politicians want southern negro ballots in national conventions and the northern negro vote in elections. The bounty, both public and private, founding, sustaining, and multiplying colleges, schools, and other negro educational institutions, finds a growing host of beneficiaries--such as site-owners, who scheme to sell for two prices, those who want to be presidents, principals, professors, teachers, even janitors and floor-scrubbers, schoolbook publishers, and still others--who would keep it copiously flowing; and so they all magnify the ability of the typical negro and the benefit to him of the institutions mentioned. Respectable and influential magazines and newspapers, with an increasing number of negro readers, really believe that very many more can be added by a little effort, and so they champion what these readers favor. Persuasive speakers and writers like Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, unconsciously influenced either by employers who would always have a wage-depressing lever at command, or by those who would have Cuffee do what they ought themselves to do, overrate the importance of negro labor as a southern resource. And the last fog makers whom I shall mention are the inveterate optimists--amiable beyond expression--who will not admit that there is now any serious menace to either race in the south.

The several fogs enumerated overlay one another in an aggregate too opaque for the uncleared eye to pierce. As examples of their obscuring effect, consider anything said in the census as to the negro, and the articles "Negro Education," "Negro in America," and especially "Hayti" in the Encyclopedia Americana lately published. The authors of the fifteenth amendment, in making voters and rulers of late negro slaves, repeated what had been done in Hayti. It seems therefore that the Encyclopedia must tell nothing of the island but what is good. So we read in the relevant article that it abolished slavery in 1804, being "the first country to rid humanity of such a sad practice;" that there education "is compulsory and gratuitous," a sixth of the revenues being devoted to it, and the most pleasant things concerning religion, liberal naturalization practice, natural and artificial products, railroads, telegraph, and telephone. One without other information would surely think the community greatly advanced and blessed. Its true condition is thus told in Brockhaus by somebody who does not swear by the fifteenth amendment: "It may be said in general that the country is sparsely populated, partly because of incessant civil wars, partly because of a high infant death rate."[147]

These fogs must be lifted. Great harm to each race will follow if we persist in keeping the facts concealed.

2. Do not confound the feeling that you are different from Jew, European, protestant, catholic, absolutist, socialist, anarchist, or any other white, with the feeling that you are different from negroes; for to do this is to keep you from all clear thinking upon our present subject. The former are all of our own race, and we can and do intermarry with them to the improvement of our population. If the per cent of negroes was no greater in the south than in the north, fusion could not be a very grave matter; for should it become complete, our lily-white would not be diminished by the fraction of a shade. But to absorb the eight millions of them now in our section would make us chocolate, if not mulatto. Their color is the smallest racial objection. Although their schooling for two centuries and more in American slavery has elevated them--as Mr. Tillinghast proves--far above what they were in native slavery, still their cranial capacity, brain convolutions, and moral, intellectual, and social development--inherited without fault of theirs--from West African ancestors, are still greatly inferior to ours. Remote generations of our forefathers were much lower than the present American negroes, as Darwin admits in the oft quoted passage, describing his first sight of the Fuegians. We should never forget that the Caucasian was once on a level with those Fuegians. The negroes when they came to America were little better. And yet they have gone up so much higher, it is plain that evolution, if only permitted to work in a proper environment, will do for them what it has done for us.

But the whites cannot consent to intermarriage. That would greatly benefit the negroes. While some who have never had good opportunity of actual observation confidently contend that there are no backward or lower races, we southerners have noted all our lives that a very great majority of the negroes who climb above the level and prosper in occupation, have a large admixture of white blood. It would be an enormous rise for the mass if fusion were assured. But for us--why, we should disinherit our children of their share in the grand destiny of the Caucasian race if we made average negroes their fathers or mothers.

Southern dread of amalgamation is not to be scouted as a mere bugbear. Think of the half-breeds that lined all the border between the States and the Indians; of how the whites have mixed with native races in Mexico, Central and South America; of white and negro intermingling in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, in the United States, and especially in the south. Think of whites and negroes now legally married and marrying in the neighboring States of the Union. In 1902, eight white women were living with negro husbands in Xenia, Ohio;[148] and there were children of all these mixed marriages except one.[149] Consider also that prominent negroes advocate these marriages. Douglass had a white wife. He preached that the American negro must set before himself assimilation as his true goal. Professor DuBois is really a disciple of Douglass, as appears from some of his utterances. We give in a footnote what another prominent negro has recently said in public.[150] The moment that the negro became an influential factor in southern politics, a real agitation against the anti-intermarriage laws would begin. There would come a small number of negroes, controlling votes, of so much property and respectability that their children would be regarded as eligible matches by some of the poorer and more destitute whites. Marriages between such, solemnized on a visit to a State permitting, would occur. And our laws last mentioned would be more and more evaded and their repeal become gradually more probable. When they had won political equality with the patricians, the Roman plebeians repealed the prohibition of intermarriage which the former had stubbornly maintained. These two orders were of the same race. Therefore intermarriage could not be the boon to the plebeians that it would now be to the southern negro, lifting him up as it would do. If he has opportunity, he will struggle for it more resolutely than the plebeians