CHAPTER XVII
THE RACE QUESTION--THE SITUATION IN DETAIL
The distinction between the two classes of southern negroes, glanced at in the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind--at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and four hundred thousand, in the lower class. The latter, being nineteen times as large as the other, first demands attention.
In the country many of the men are croppers. A group of negroes--generally parents and children--do the labor of preparation, cultivation, and gathering, while the owner contributes the land, necessary animals, and feed for the latter. The croppers get half the crop, and the land owner half. The latter retains out of their half whatever he has advanced the croppers. The advances must be limited with firmness, otherwise they will cause loss. These croppers are the great bulk of the agricultural laborers. So few of the men work for standing wages that they need not be noticed. In the towns the men subsist upon day labor, the pay of which ranges from 50 cents to $1.25. It hardly averages 80 cents. Some of the women, both in country and town, take places as house servants and nurses at weekly wages that vary from $1 to $2 with board. The growing disinclination of the women to these places is much stronger in the country than in town. In country and town the women do laundry for the whites at an average price per family of a dollar a week; and they get jobs of sewing, cleaning kitchen utensils, scrubbing, etc. In the country these women do some field labor, sometimes plowing, often hoeing. If trained in childhood they make expert cotton-pickers. But the women agricultural workers steadily decrease in number.
The negro has inherited from a thousand generations of forefathers, bred in the humid and enervating tropical West African climate, a laziness which is the extreme contrary of Caucasian energy and enterprise.[161] Thus we are told of him in Jamaica, "In many cases a field negro will not work for his employer more than four days a week. He may till his own plot of ground on one of the other days or not as the spirit moves him."[162] The first Saturday in June, 1904, I saw the thriving little town of Abbeville, South Carolina, thronged with idle negroes from the surrounding plantations. A merchant, who was kept busy in his store, offered to pay several of them 75 cents to cut up a load of firewood--something more than the market price. They do not work on Saturday unless compelled by something unusual; and so each one replied at once, without any inquiry if the logs were large or small, seasoned or not, and thus finding whether the job was hard or easy, that the weather was too hot. And yet these negroes all exhibited in their clothes and hungry looks unmistakable signs of want. Those that superintend the gangs working for contractors in Atlanta and the vicinity, all--except now and then one who has managed to form a small party of picked laborers--tell me that it is very seldom that a negro can be induced to work Saturday; if that does happen he will make up his lost holiday by not returning to work before Tuesday. Your cook, nurse, maid, or black servant of any kind will every now and then suddenly inconvenience you by taking an utterly unnecessary rest. When Booker Washington was starting his system of industrial training, as he tells us, "Not a few of the fathers and mothers urged that because the race had worked for 250 years or more, it ought to have a chance to rest."[163]
The negro has likewise inherited lack of forecast and providence. If at the end of the year he finds himself with a small purse from his part of the crop, standing wages, or profits from a tenancy, he will often squander much of it for a top buggy, a piano which none of his family can play, or expensive furniture. Those in the gangs just mentioned always want to fool away their money before it is made. If one has been advanced $4, and his wages amount to $5, he will hardly ever abridge his holiday by turning up to get the dollar balance when the others who have not been advanced are paid Saturday night. He will waste his cash on watermelons and fish that an average white will not even smell. When forced down to it he can live contentedly upon almost nothing. A very large proportion of both sexes are happy upon a real meal every two or three days, and a sly change of mate every two or three weeks. Toombs, who was always looking at Cuffee, pronounced him "rich in the fewness of his wants." Bring him out more clearly to yourselves by comparison with an Irishman struggling up from starvation wages of hard daily work into comfort and ease. Reflect over the only success a cotton mill has had with black labor, which was due to whipping the operatives for breach of duty.[164]
In Atlanta--which of course is but like other southern cities in the particular now to be mentioned--many of the men live upon their women. It is a common saying that you cannot keep a colored cook if you do not allow her to carry the keys. There is great complaint that the colored washerwomen help their dependents out of the clothes. The criminal class of negro men, women, and children is large and growing much faster than that of the whites. Two very striking developments are the negro burglar and the negro footpad. There are many breakings and entries every year in Atlanta, many holdups of pedestrians, and nearly all of them are by negroes. Now and then a negro snatches a lady's purse from her on the street. The prisoners sent to the Atlanta stockade during the twelve months beginning December 15, 1902, were
Colored. Whites. Men 2325 1030 Women 1168 100 Boys 471 18 ---- ---- 3964 1148
According to the twelfth census, the negro population of Atlanta was 35,727, and the white 54,090. So, while there are in every thousand of the whites 21 of these criminals, there are in every thousand of the blacks 110. But the case is worse still. About an equal number of convicts escaped the stockade by paying fines. Allowance for this will much increase the per cent of negro criminals. I wish I could get the approximate number whose fines are paid by their employers, white friends, mothers, wives, and other relatives. I have observed facts which make me confident that it is large. The number of boys that in one year were sent to the stockade--471--is a most important fact, showing as it does that a large per cent of negroes become criminals in childhood. Nearly all of these boys have been abandoned by their fathers. There are just as many abandoned girls in the city. Of course under the prevailing conditions the proportion of criminals in each generation must increase portentously.
The depth of the negroes' debasement is shown in the impurity of the women. This is another inheritance from their ancestors. The "ancient African chastity" alleged by Professor DuBois,[165] if it ever existed, was entirely prehistoric. A white who has not been bred in close contact with the race is quite unable to understand the degree and universality of this impurity. I will illustrate by a case which occurred in a prosperous town of Middle Georgia not very long before I settled in Atlanta. A prominent negro preacher had been caught in adultery. The woman, who was the mother of several children, and her husband, were both members of the same church as the preacher, and of unctuous piety. The detection was so complete and certain, and it had immediately become so notorious that church notice was unavoidable. The problem was how to whitewash the affair. The office of a lawyer friend of mine in the town last mentioned was waited on by a member of the church--a say-nothing sort of negro, who always applied for leave to attend the meetings at which the preacher was being tried. This office boy had returned several times with the news, when inquired of, that nothing had been done. At last, one day he answered that they had cleared the preacher. My friend commanded that this be explained. The darkie said, in his laconic way, "Well, he 'fessed de act, but he 'scused de act." "How in the world did he excuse it?" was asked. "He said his heart wasn't in it." "Were you fools enough to believe that?" was ejaculated. The negro, with an air as superior as was compatible with the great politeness of his race, replied, "He said it was de debble dat had his body dar; but all de time his soul was at de throne, praying for God's people. In course we couldn't blame him for what de debble done."
This defence, suggesting the make-believe loan of his body by the friar in the Decameron to the angel Gabriel, which, of course, had never been heard of by the accused, convinced the church, willing to be convinced. It appeased the injured husband, willing to be appeased. It fully vindicated the gay clergyman and the erring sister, who were in effect told to go and sin no more with such little discretion.
Had this case, or another like it, occurred at that time or since in any other negro church of that region, there would have been acquittal and justification of the accused, although perhaps the good plea and the right psychological moment to make it might not have been so aptly found.[166]
The habits and customs of the race mix men and women always and everywhere; and in those opportunities each one of the young and the old, married and unmarried of both sexes--of even children just arrived at puberty--chases a short-lived amour with ever eager zest.[167] The blacker the Lothario the more show of white blood he seeks in his fancies. Now and then furious desire for real white overmasters him. Surprising some unattended angel of a girl or matron, he chooses to see Rome and then die. Her avengers pour kerosene on him and burn him to a crisp. His lusty fellows think to themselves what Hermes, in the song of Demodocus, says to Apollo of the mishap to Ares and golden Aphrodite--that is, that for the same brief pleasure they would each gladly endure thrice the penalty.
Professor DuBois says that the chastity of the negro women has improved so greatly "that even in the back country districts not above nine per cent of the population may be classed as distinctly lewd."[168] Inquire of honest witnesses who have good opportunities of observing--the farmers, small and large, and the storekeepers, in the country, those who do contract work and the police in the cities--of all who have close access to negroes at all times, and especially at night; and the concurring report will be that right correction of Professor DuBois' statement just given cannot stop with mere inversion of his percentages; that the fact is, no negroes in this lower class which we are now dealing with are chaste except those whose physical condition has made a virtue of necessity.[169]
It is sadly true that men of all races are too prone to unchastity. It is chaste women that give human amelioration its main propulsion; for they make every husband to know that the children around his fireside are his own. If I were asked in what one particular had my life-long comparison convinced me that the two races are farthest apart, I would unhesitatingly answer, in the character of the women of each--the average white woman, from her marriage on, forgetting all other men but her husband, the black wife always with a paramour, if to be had.
The tie which holds the family stanch is wanting. The men often cast aside their domestic burdens, and begin their lives over in a distant region with a new woman. The wife and mother left behind does not mope. She has generally prearranged satisfactorily with another man.
Disease is making great ravages in this lower class of negroes. I never knew of a case of consumption among the slaves, and I can recall but one serious case of pneumonia. Now these two diseases slay the negroes by hundreds. Before the war the negro was regarded as immune from yellow fever, and almost immune from dangerous malarial affections. He has lost his charm against these also. There has been a dreadful increase of insanity among them. The only ante-bellum case that I can recall was due to an accidental injury of the head.
It is but natural that the death rate among the negroes mounts fearfully. Their great multiplication has far outrun their reasonable means of subsistence. We note what a heavy burden a large family is to a man in hard times. I must believe that the thirteenth census will show a still greater negro death-rate.
We shall sum up as to this lower class after we have described the displacement of black by white labor.
Now we must consider the upper class. We need look only at its main divisions, to wit, the negro farmers, and the well-to-do urban negroes.
The rose-colored statements of Professor DuBois as to the former cannot impose upon residents of the south.[170] I shall begin with the negro farm owners of Georgia. In what he says of them in the second Bulletin mentioned in the last footnote he hardly ever looks away from the report of the comptroller-general of the State. I shall deal with relevant facts about which the comptroller-general is not required to concern himself--and of which the census takes but little note. Where agricultural land commands only a few dollars per acre a large part of it will get into possession of purchasers under title-bond who expect to work it and pay for it in annual instalments out of its produce. Of course the vendor sees to it that he himself escapes taxation on this land, and so the purchasers, although they may have paid him but a trifle or nothing at all, are assessed as if they were the real owners, while the vendors are retaining the title as security. Soon after the war many a white planter, in order to get out of a failing business and procure capital for something else, sold his land in whole or part. He could find no purchaser but some exceptional negro; and the latter could buy only on credit. Much of the lands so sold had to be retaken because the purchasers failed to meet their payments. It was my observation when I left Greene county twenty-three years ago that in that and the adjoining counties the number of negro owners of agricultural land was decreasing, and it is my information that such is now the case. This indicates an important fact not shown in the reports of the comptroller-general, to wit, that a large number of the negroes appearing therein as owners are really not owners, and are losing their holdings.
The next fact to be mentioned is that, as I learn from residents, many farms of which a negro had acquired the fee are heavily encumbered, and often fall to the local merchants.
Further, as Professor DuBois states, "the land owned by negroes is usually the less fertile, worn-out tracts."[171]
According to the comptroller's report for 1903 the acres of white ownership are 29,762,259, returned at a value of $121,629,094; which is $4,139 per acre. The per cent of the total value owned by the blacks is 4.07. This result--that the negroes own a fraction over four per cent of the improved lands of Georgia--must be corrected by proper deduction for purchase money debts, and also for encumbrances. It must be further corrected by another deduction. The negroes land is considerably below the average of the rest in quality and market value. Yet while the white returns at $4.08 an acre, the other returns at $4.13. This higher valuation is not because of conscientious avoidance of tax-dodging. It comes from that optimistic exaggeration characterizing the race, which is vividly illustrated in Booker Washington's gravely stating that the love of knowledge by the average negroes of the south has become the "marvel of mankind,"[172] and in the extravagant assertion of Professor DuBois as to their chastity commented on a few pages back.
There are a few negro owners of farming lands that are prospering, but I am credibly informed that as a class they are falling behind.
The tenants--the renters, as they are commonly called--are the more prosperous negro farmers. The whites hold on to their lands more firmly than they did some years ago, and the tenantry class both of whites and blacks is becoming larger. The whites in the Black Belt all believe that the negroes generally belong to societies, in which they have bound themselves not to hire to the former as house servants or for standing wages except when they cannot otherwise subsist. So most of the cotton is made by tenants and croppers. They grade as many bad and mediocre, and a few good. The latter work with a will, and make fair crops. They send their children off to expensive schools. When they die the property they have accumulated is distributed and squandered, and a new tenant--generally, of late years, a white--succeeds.
It is to be observed everywhere that some reliable white man is generally backing or superintending a negro farmer that can get credit. The negro farmers, in almost any large county in the Black Belt that you may select, that are an exception can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Their implements and methods are primitive;[173] and they employ hardly any labor except that of their own families.[174] As soon as the negro farmer's children have grown up they leave him; the negro laborers in his neighborhood become more idle every year, and they become also more scarce. It is not to be thought of that he employ white labor. This class will give no help to the new agriculture, which I have glanced at in the last chapter.
Twenty-odd years ago when I left the planting section, the white landowners all preferred negro tenants. But white tenants are now preferred. They do not send their children to school as much as the negroes do, but keep them at work while the hoeing, which is the first main thing to the cotton farmer, and the gathering, which is the second and last and greatest by far, are unfinished. The negroes' hoeing and other cultivation are bad; and after the crop is laid by until Christmas, during which time comes the all-important laborious cotton-picking, they spend so much of their nights at church they are incapacitated from doing good work. They lose much time by going to camp-meetings in the late summer and early autumn, and riding on railroad excursion trains at every opportunity. The white tenants and their families, by careful "chopping out" and hoeing, get the proper "stand" and they pick clean; the negroes fall behind in both respects. The bettering credit of the white steadily hits the negro harder. The only tenants who are good for the rent are the class a few of whom have cash of their own and the rest can get credit with the local merchant for necessary supplies. Such tenants the landowners seek after, and find every year more and more among the whites, and less and less among the blacks.
Every year a larger part of the staple crops of the south is made by whites. The negroes have lately decreased in Kentucky. Mr. Tillinghast brings forward, from Hoffman, weighty proofs that in the State just mentioned, which has just become the principal seat of tobacco growing, and also in the largest yielding counties of Virginia, that black labor constantly grows less of the crop.[175] He uses Hoffman, too, to show that white labor is slowly expelling black from rice production.[176] The old south believed that rice culture was sure death to the white, Mr. Tillinghast quotes, as to the greatest agricultural product of the south, this from Professor Wilcox: "It would probably be a conservative statement to say that at least four-fifths of the cotton was ... in 1860 grown by negroes; at the present time [i.e. in 1899] probably not one-half is thus grown."[177]
Compare this further: "He [Hoffman] finds that 'with less than one-half as large a colored population as Mississippi,... Texas produced in 1894 almost three times the cotton crop of the former State.' Even more significant is the fact that with almost twice the colored population of 1860, Mississippi, in 1894, produced less cotton than thirty-four years ago.'"[178]
Very significant are the facts lately published by the Agricultural Department which show that in an area of some sixty-three per cent of the production, the white outpicks the negro. "One hundred and fifty-two counties, with a negro population amounting to seventy-five per cent of the whole, averaged one hundred and eleven pounds per day, whereas one hundred and ninety-two counties, with a white population constituting seventy-five per cent or more of the whole, averaged one hundred and forty-eight pounds per day,"[179] that is, the white picked one-third more than the black. There are other statements in this bulletin of importance here. I can give this one only:
"In the Indian Territory and Oklahoma, where the whites represent about eighty per cent of the population (including Indians) the average number of pounds picked is greater than in any of the States except Arkansas and Texas. The highest number of pounds picked in any State is one hundred and seventy-two in Texas, the counties represented having a white population of eighty per cent."[180]
In Arkansas the population of the counties mentioned was fifty-nine per cent white, the rest negro.
It is almost certain that the foregoing estimates do great injustice to the whites. They assume that there is no inferiority of the negro to the white except the per diem quantity of cotton picked. Ponder the statement as to a county of Georgia which I now give.
"According to the ginners' report, Madison county made sixteen thousand bales of cotton in 1902. Its negro population is about three thousand, its white, twelve thousand. The negroes are one-fifth and the whites four-fifths, and out of every five bales the negroes ought to have made at least one and the whites four. But the former do not average as well as the others. The white who runs one plow, whose wife and children do the hoeing and picking, probably makes ten bales. The negro who runs one plow, whose wife and children hoe and pick, hardly makes more than five or six bales. The greater part of the cotton credited to negro labor is made by negroes who are superintended by white men."[181]
Weighing all that I have just told, I am as sure as I can be of anything in the near future, that the negro will soon be of greatly diminished importance as laborer, cropper, renter, or farming landowner in the staples of southern agriculture.
There are other kinds of property than improved lands set out in the report of the comptroller-general, such as $3,531,471 of horses, cattle, and stock of all kinds, $810,553 of plantation and mechanical tools. Such needs no separate consideration. These holdings do not in view of what we have told, give the negro farmer any strong foothold.
Nearly all that remains of the rural upper class--the negroes in trades, professions, mercantile business, etc.--is so evidently dependent upon the masses of the lower class, now gravitating away from the country that the most of it can be incidentally disposed of at certain places later on in the chapter and the rest be treated as negligible.
The "city or town property" of the negroes of Georgia, according to the report of the comptroller-general for 1903, amounts in value to $44,668,620. From all that I can learn, while it is largely, it is considerably less, encumbered than the real and personal property of the negro farmers.
A large admixture of Caucasian blood marks nearly every member of the upper class both in country and town. I note that occasionally a coalblack acquires property, on which his miser grip is tighter than that of an accumulating Irishman; but such are very few. There is hardly a well-to-do negro in work, occupation, profession, or property, who is not several shades at least removed from coalblack. Mr. Tillinghast observes "that the porters, cooks, and waiters on a Pullman train are usually mulattoes, while the laborers in the gang on the roadbed are nearly all black."[182] In this day when the pictures of prominent men and women are in many illustrated magazines and papers, it is to be observed that hardly one of a negro shows unmixed blood. Thus a recent monthly contains pictures of Judson W. Lyons, R. H. Terrell, Kelly Miller, Archibald H. Grinke, T. Thomas Fortune, Daniel Murray, and Booker Washington.[183] Of these the third only, to my eye, seems all negro; and I cannot be confident that he is wholly without appreciable white blood. His head has the shape of a white man's.
It is my observation that a negro entirely pure in blood hardly ever gets out of the lower class; and that if he does he is much more unprogressive than an average member of the upper class. Note what Bishop Holsey says of how amalgamation with the white improves the descendants of the blacks, in a passage quoted later herein.
This upper class contains only persons of exceptional blood, talent, or some other rare fortune. The higher education, and the education which is now best of all for the negro--industrial education--is for this little circle only. Hampton and Tuskegee do not open to all comers. Mr. Tillinghast convincingly proves that those who have got really good training at the two institutions just named are far above the average negro in physical stamina, education, and other important particulars.[184] The graduates go forth, not to benefit their brothers in the lower class, but to win for themselves surer and higher standing in the upper class.
Some of the resources which this urban section of the upper class have enjoyed for a while they are losing, as I shall tell when I hereinafter summarize the details of white encroachment. But other resources open to them. Such are professions like dentists, eye, ear, and throat surgeons, doctors, barbers, and others who must content themselves with only colored patronage; such the growing retail trade, multiplying boarding-houses, restaurants, and saloons, finding their custom exclusively in the increasing negro town population. The number of negroes who become teachers, lecturers, preachers, authors, etc., steadily augments. Other resources of this upper class can be pointed out, but it needs not here. Although nearly always when the father who has struggled up dies, his property, as we saw to be the case with the negro farmer, goes, and no child succeeds to his occupation, there is perhaps generally compensation for his loss by the accession of some other who has got up out of the lower class by an extraordinarily lucky jump. It is clear that the class is without the wholesome influence of uninterrupted inheritance, from generation to generation, of faculty and character progressively improving. Take this inheritance away from the men and women of any enlightened nation and it would be to lower them very near to the level of barbarism. It is also nearly certain that there will be no further infusion of white blood into this class, by reason of the hostility to inter-mixture which becomes stronger--yea, intenser--every year. The probable consequence will be the dilution of much of the white blood now in the upper class through the lower class to such an extent that it will practically disappear. But some of it, I think, will persist, perhaps increase in degree--preserved by the aversion of many to intermarriage with persons less white than themselves, and occasional intermarriage with white persons in northern States.
Exceptional ones of this class enjoy privileges of the higher education, afforded by schools and colleges opulently endowed by private persons, which education is bringing forth fruit in teachers, clergymen, and representatives of the learned class. There are already some good books, as well as sermons, speeches, poems, essays, and short articles, by negroes which have won favorable opinion in our literature; and there is evidently to be steady increase.
There is among some of this urban upper class the beginning at least of better things under the lead of better mothers. We must not be unreasonable in our demands that these women who carry in their veins a very appreciable proportion of polyandrous blood shall become immaculately chaste at once. Leave them to the influence of the improving society in which they move; to the noble and faithful efforts of such as Mrs. Booker Washington; their persistent imitation of white mothers; the teachings of the really christian pastors whom the negro universities are beginning to send abroad in numbers far too few; but especially of all to devoted conjugal, maternal, and domestic duty. This last has made the pigeon mother unconquerably true to her life mate. It will do the same for the negro woman.--Let us consider the class further for a moment.
The longer you look at it with unbefogged eyes the more plainly you see it is really a natural aristocracy hugging its special privileges more jealously every year, and that cleavage in interest, affection, and destiny between it and the other class goes on so steadily that it must after some little while yawn in the sight of the entire nation. Here in Atlanta, as seems to be the case in all the southern cities, there are respectable negro districts and also negro slums. The latter are the more numerous and far more populous. The inhabitants of these several districts are almost as wide apart as are the whites in the fashionable circle and the million of poor folk without.
I must postpone my final contrast of these two classes until I have completed what remains to be said of the displacement of black by white labor. For a few years after the war it was so slow moving that I was not confidently aware of it. Now it has proceeded so far, and so much accelerated its pace, that I can indicate it with something like accuracy. In the thirteenth chapter I noted its beginning. This was when the mother and her girls took upon themselves the daily indoor work, and the father and sons took upon themselves the outdoor work, morning, noon, and night, around the house and the horse-lot,--the word which in the south corresponds to the barnyard of the northern farmer. Especially significant is it that a large per cent of the white matrons in the country have at last discarded the negro laundry-woman and habitually themselves use the washtub for their families. The impulse to supplant negro labor showed its greatest energy where the black population had been sparse. I have heard my friend, F. C. Foster, a resident of Morgan county, often mention that what were before the war the rich and poor sides of that county have become interchanged; where most of the large slave-owners lived was the rich, but now is the poor side; and the other, where there were but few slaves, is now the rich side.
I see many proofs in every quarter that the whites of the Black Belt have commenced to learn good lessons from their neighbors outside, and show every year a greater self-reliance. Many more causes than I have space to set down conspire to increase this self-reliance. The small farmer must, by himself or his wife and children or white help, do such things as these: work his brood mare; care for his blooded stock, fine poultry, and bees; handle his reaper, mower, and more expensive tools and implements; give all necessary attention to his orchards and larger and smaller fruits,--industries which, with that of the dairy, are now pushing forward with mounting energy; for he has learned that the average negro cannot be trusted in these and many other things which can be suggested.
I must not overstate the advance of white production and labor upon black in the country. In the regions of densest negro populations the whites show a backwardness in taking to work that is discouraging. A very observant man familiar with Jackson and Madison counties of Georgia, both of which are out of the Black Belt, and who now lives where negroes outnumber the whites, not long ago made this comparison, while answering my inquiries: "In Jackson and Madison the whites work. A farmer who runs but one plow does all the plowing. He hires but one negro. In my present county the one-horse farmer always hires two negroes, one to plow and the other to hoe, and the only work he does is to boss them." But the negroes are going away from many parts, in fact from nearly all, of the Black Belt. Wherever they have become scarce, the whites go to work; and, as is now occurring in that part of Greene county called "The Fork," and in places in adjoining counties, the lands rise greatly in market value. In many parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, where negroes were doing practically all the agricultural labor when I came to Atlanta, I learn that many white boys are becoming good all-around workers. It surprised me greatly to be told that in this region in different places the white women and children, as soon as the dew is off in the morning, go to cotton picking, and they become so efficient that often no extra labor need be hired to finish that greatest task of all to the farmer. Before the war, all of us white boys picked just enough of cotton to learn that our backs could never be made to stand picking all day. The whites now beating the negro in what we once thought he only could do, and white women in the old slave regions doing the family laundry,--these begin a marvellous economic revolution.
The cotton mills and other manufactories rapidly springing up in many southern localities are developing a class of white operatives. Mining of various kinds is on the increase. Stone, slate, and marble cutting, cabinet making, and other trades attract greater numbers to follow them. White railroad employees, printers, engravers, stenographers, typewriters, and those in numerous other gainful occupations, grow in numbers. White women and girls stream to work for employers every morning. In all places, if you but look long enough, you catch sight of swelling crowds of the race who once lived almost entirely from slave labor now doing their own labor.
I will close what I have to say of this part of the subject by observations of Atlanta. When I settled here, the barbers, shoe repairers, blacksmiths, band-musicians, sick-nurses, seamstresses, ostlers, and carriage-drivers were, so far as I noted, black almost without exception. Now the first five are nearly all white, and whites steadily multiply in the rest, although they are far from being in a majority. The only expulsion of white by negro labor that I have noted is the substitution by the bicycle messenger service and the telegraph of negro for white messengers, made not long ago. These messenger services thrive by exploiting child labor. By the change mentioned they got much larger and stronger boys--often grown-up ones--for the same price which they used to pay white children a year or two older than mere tots. Against the recent loss just told I have these two recent gains of the whites to tell. There had always been only negro waiters in the restaurants. In some of them the eaters at the lunch counters are now served by a white man standing behind it; and what he needs, if it is not kept in store so near that he can reach it, is brought to him, at his command, by a negro, whom you may call his waiter. This negro also wipes off the counter. After we became used to white barbers we generally preferred them to the black ones. And I note that a growing majority of those who frequent the counters like the white waiters, although I now and then hear a growler say that he would rather have a waiter that he can reprimand and speak to as he pleases. Some of the restaurants begin to advertise that their help is all white. With the superior alertness and quickness of his race, a white behind the counter accomplishes more than twice as much as the former black. To use a common saying, the white waiters keep at active work all their twelve hours as if they were fighting fire, while the negroes commanded by them take things easy. Every one of the whites is constantly on the lookout for a better place; and generally he manages somehow, after a short while, to get it. One who now serves me studies bookkeeping two hours every night, and will doubtless soon be giving satisfaction in his chosen occupation to some business house. The negroes look out only for tips, are interested in nothing but amusements, and never get any higher. Bear in mind, they are considerably above the average negro in qualifications and station.
The other instance is that some co-operating Greek boys have recently captured a very considerable proportion of the shoe-shining. They provide more convenient and comfortable seats and give a better shine than the negro does, in a much shorter time, and for the same price. It looks now as if they are bound to make full conquest of the business. With my experience it is more of a surprise to me to see clothes laundered, tables waited on, and shoes shined by the whites, than even to see cotton picked by them.
But to go on with Atlanta. Occupations requiring the management of machinery or peculiar skill are nearly always filled by whites. The street railroad conductors and motormen are all white. The only negroes connected with the road that I, as a passenger, generally see is the curve-greaser, and now and then a helper on the construction car. The steam railroads will employ a negro fireman because of his ability to stand heat, but they do not trust him to oil and wipe. In the smaller buildings negro elevator-runners some time ago were frequent, but now it is clear that the whites will soon have the occupation exclusively. There is, I believe, more building, in this year of 1904, in Atlanta than ever before. The preparation of all the material is done by white labor in the planing-mills and machine-shops, while the more unskilled work of putting it in place is done by the negro carpenter.
The lathers and plasterers are all negroes, there are more negro brick and stone masons than white, and the carpenters are nearly all negroes, there being but few young white ones. The painters are about equally divided. The negro's standard of living is so much lower than that of the white, that where there is competition he proves victor by accepting a price upon which the white man cannot live. But the latter does not throw up the sponge. At the point where race competition begins he induces the negroes, whenever he can, to join his union, and soon to have one of their own. Just now (August, 1904) there are not enough of brickmasons to supply the demand, and there is both a white and black union of that trade. But so far there has been no success in the efforts made for a black carpenters' union. The negroes have of late years kept such firm hold of the trade, that it seems no young whites come into it, there being but few white carpenters in Atlanta under forty years of age. The negroes understand that their grip is due to their ability to work for lower pay than the whites, and when the union is proposed they say to themselves, that means only more places for white carpenters and less for us. But the trend to form unions seems to strengthen. There is a mixed union of tailors, separate unions of blacksmiths' helpers, moulders' helpers, painters, and also of brickmasons, as just mentioned. There is a black union of plasterers and no white one. It is to be remembered that the initiative to unionize the negro workman comes from the other race, the purpose being to balk the exertions of employers to depress wages by encouraging the cheaper worker. Consider the dilemma of the negro workman invited into the union by whites. He foresees that if he accepts, his race will after a while be swamped in the trade by white competition. At the same time he foresees that if he does not accept, he cannot increase his income, which in its smallness becomes more and more inadequate to sustain himself and family under the constant demands of the day for larger and larger expenditure. The immediate needs of those dependent upon him will generally decide his course. I cannot say how long the negro carpenters of Atlanta will refuse the proposal to federate themselves in a union with the whites; but this I can say, that all attempts of the negroes to keep the whites out of any well-paid vocation must fail, even with the most resolute and stubbornly maintained effort. As I view it on the spot the white forward movement palpably strengthens and the defence weakens. Bear in mind that the whites receive constant re-enforcement from all other white American and European communities, and the blacks are confined to their own resources of supply, all the while declining.
What I have just told as happening in Atlanta intelligent and observant negroes detect to be but a part of the general recession before white competition. The National Negro Business League had its last meeting at Indianapolis. In one of the resolutions adopted, mainly because of the influence of Dr. Booker T. Washington, its president, occurs this allegation, "During our discussions it has been clearly developed that the race has been steadily losing many avenues of valuable employment." The resolution ascribes this to lack of proper training, and recommends that the lack be supplied. A negro makes this acute and true comment, which I would have attended to here, and considered again when further on I discuss what the industrial schools can do:
"That the colored man has of late years been losing many avenues of employment is quite true, but the conclusion that this is due to a lack of training is not to be hastily accepted. Nobody believes that our people are now less capable of work than they were when recognized in these avenues of labor. As a matter of fact they are far better equipped now than they were then, or Tuskegee and Hampton and the other industrial schools that are crowded from year to year are making a signal failure. In those days men were picked up here and there and started in as apprentices as green as they could be. Now thousands of them are prepared before they go out to work. The two chief reasons our folks are not employed so universally now is, first, the fact, that _the white south has gone to work with its own hands_, and second, the negro refuses longer to work for nothing. _The continued assertion by some of our leaders that a man who can labor will not be discriminated against, is untrue. The preference is given to the white man in almost every case, and the negro is allowed to do the work he refuses._ It is well enough to ask our people to secure industrial education, but it is wrong to place all our ills upon a lack of such training or to recommend industrial education as a panacea. Though it was quite inevitable that the league should adopt such a resolution as an endorsement of its president's policy."[185]
I have italicized in the quotation the statements specially pertinent here. They are very weighty proofs supporting my proposition of fact, to wit, that there is now waging between the whites and negroes an internecine war for every opportunity of labor above the very lowest and unskilled.
I ask also that it be noted that the writer is utterly unconscious of any negroes than those of the upper class. Not a thing that he says can be applied to the ninety-five per cent.
The death rate of the negro is coming close to, while that of the white keeps far below, the birth rate. Rapid native increase and vigorous immigration for the whites, nothing but slow and decreasing propagation for the negroes; and larger and larger hosts of the former giving their champions active sympathy and help--the event of this inter-race struggle over the trades and occupations may be delayed, but it cannot be doubtful.
The reader must not forget that the negroes now in mind belong all to what I have called the upper class. Their number is so small and its promise of increase so slight that I should hardly have done more than allude to them, if the subject did not emphasize so impressively as it does the inevitable expulsion of negro by white labor. Let me explain this fully. Professor Wilcox, summarizing the pertinent information of the twelfth census as to ten leading occupations competed for by the two races in the south, states that in the year 1900 the per cent of negroes was larger in seven and smaller in nine of them than ten years before.[186] That alone shows white gain. But I want you to add to Professor Wilcox's statement something of which the census gives no hint, that is, the bound forward of the negroes on one side, and the inaction of the whites on the other, during many years beginning with emancipation in 1865. When that has been done, the encroachment of white labor upon black effected in the comparatively short time since its beginning appears almost prodigious. It is somewhat like the race-horse, who, falling far behind in the first stages of a long heat, at last wakes up and gains so fast that nobody will bet against him. It means that the whites are now as ruthlessly taking all opportunities of labor away from the blacks, as their fathers took his lands away from the American Indian.
We can now say our last word in contrasting the two classes. Many fail to see clearly the difference between them. Thus Ernest Hamlin Abbott[187] and Edgar Gardner Murphy,[188] in their pleasant discussions, only here and there, and as if casually, say something which momentarily implies existence of the lower class, and then relapse into claiming for all of the southern negroes, if not the actual condition of the upper class, at least hopeful possibility of soon achieving it. These two kind-hearted men represent a large number who firmly believe that education and the church are now rapidly elevating the negro masses, when the fact is far otherwise. Many from the north see nothing but the upper class. In what he writes of the negroes whom he knew in public life, the late Senator Hoar was utterly unconscious of the average negro whom all of us in the south know.[189] Dr. Lyman Abbott, a most benign example of broad and almost perfect tolerance to both sections, taking all southern hearts by his loving sympathy with and full justice to the better sentiment of our section in every matter of importance except the appointment of negroes to office, he never seems to have in mind any negroes but the prominent ones who are giving their fellows industrial or the higher education, and those who have been blessed with either. Do but consider how pathetically he lately lamented the case of the "white negro" lady shut out from the circle of cultivation and kept confined in one of ignorance and lowness. This last circle--its magnitude, its bad and desperate state--he really knows nothing about. He can no more study its deplorable and heartrending conditions than the mother can endure to have the expectoration of her child threatened with tuberculosis examined under the microscope. Chicago has been for some while "farthest to the front" in the struggle against corporation rule. Her battles for direct nomination, direct legislation, and municipal ownership have been chronicled more accurately and intelligently in the _Public_ than I can find elsewhere. Therefore I read it with diligence; and I relish more and more Mr. Post's sound and able anti-machine and anti-plutocratic advocacy. But in everything that the paper says or quotes on the race question I am pained to note that its shortcoming is greater than its very high merit in preaching democratic democracy. Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott does now and then call the negroes a child race, but Mr. Post repudiates all backwardness and inferiority of race. He seems to maintain the equality of the average negro to the average white in all essentials of good citizenship with the zeal of Wendell Phillips, when the providence of the American union frenzied and deputed him to infuriate its defenders against the disunion slave-owners. Mr. Post, as appears to me, believes with all his heart in the doctrine of Mrs. Stowe and Whittier, to mention no others, as to the negro. Every pertinent utterance in his paper indicates that he has no thought whatever of the lower class. A most striking illustration of this is how he treats the story of the negro Richard R. Wright.[190] When the latter was ten years old he won great fame by the answer he made General Howard, who had inquired of the negro children at the Storrs School in Atlanta, just after the close of the war, "Tell me what message I shall take back from you to the people of the north?" His face ablaze with enthusiasm, the boy Richard said, "Tell 'em we're risin'." Whittier went as far astray over this as we saw that he did in his "Laus Deo." In his poem celebrating he sang--
"O black boy of Atlanta! But half was spoken: The slave's chain and the Master's Alike are broken. The one curse of the races Held both in tether: They are rising--all are rising, The black and white together."
I never read the last two lines without in mind admonishing the author, "Praise in departing."
When Mr. Post published the story, he ought to have mentioned that while the boy who sent forth the winged words did rise and has become president of the Georgia Industrial College, yet that such negroes are far more rare than millionaires, and the main host of their people in the south were sinking at the time, and have been sinking ever since. It is not true that "all are rising." The whites have recently begun to rise; five per cent only of the negroes, most of whom are largely white, are rising, while the rest of them are doomed, if the nation does not interpose. And the colored dentist of Chicago, slighted by some of the white dentists--Mr. Post sees in him, just as he sees in Richard R. Wright, a representative of the negro millions.
These conscientious and amiable gentlemen are wasting much effort uselessly. There is no very urgent problem as to the upper class of negroes. It has two strings to its bow. If the lower class should perish, a large part of it--perhaps the greater part--will be assimilated. Every day I detect a larger movement toward the north among our better-to-do negroes. I hear of girls that get places as chambermaids and cooks, of boys that find places as ostlers or other domestic service; and I have heard of a few families who have gone in a body, also of some men who have left wife and children here. They believe the north will allow their votes to be counted, will not proscribe them in society as the south does, and they will probably get for themselves or their descendants intermarriage with whites. The determination of these southern negroes towards the north will probably gain in volume and energy. It is plain that those who go do much increase their chances of final absorption into the body of whites. This assimilation is one of the two strings. And if the American negroes shall one day be conceded their own State, as I hope and pray for, their leaders must come from the upper class. That is the other of the two strings.
This upper class of southern negroes has demonstrated full ability to take care of itself. It has its schools and colleges, newspapers, magazines, and augmenting literature, its widening circle of students and readers, and its good shepherds and able leaders. It rapidly wins favor in the south. A few of our residents see no other negroes but those in this upper class, a most striking instance of which is Joel Chandler Harris's sweeping assertion "that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all parts of the south, _especially in the agricultural regions, are leading_ sober and _industrious lives_."[191] When one who fully understands the situation studies the assertion just quoted he sees from the context that the writer was led to make it because he had at the time in his eyes only a few of the better negroes in the Atlanta upper class. This is powerful testimony to their prosperity and self-maintaining faculty. Similarly the Chicago _Public_ rates the four hundred inhabitants of Boley in the Creek nation as common or average negroes. According to a news dispatch mentioned in that paper the town is only a year old, has "two churches, a school-house, several large stores, and a $5,000 cotton gin, owned and controlled exclusively by negroes." It is without a system of law and without municipal government, and "yet no serious crime or offence of any kind has been committed in the place." These four hundred negroes do not permit any white man to settle in the town. Commenting in conclusion upon the news, the _Public_ says, "If that dispatch is not a canard, Anglo-Saxon civilization has something to learn of one race which it has outraged and abused and despised."[192]
Any such place as Boley, if a reality, is peopled only by negroes of the upper class, and, further, only by those who have been sifted out from the rest of that class by a peculiarly drastic selection. Had they not each had remarkable good fortune, extraordinary capacity, and exceptional experience and training, Boley would never have been heard of. I ask that the fair-minded make two comparisons. 1. Suppose four hundred negroes--not naturally selected, but taken in a body, just as each one comes, from the masses of the lower class described herein--given opportunity to found a town of their own amid what we may call Boley conditions, what would be the result? You may be sure that what occurred in Hayti when the reins of government were suddenly given to the negroes at large would in some sort be repeated. 2. Compare Boley in all its bloom and happy condition as described in the _Public_ with certain communities of select whites, which have flourished now and then for years, without formal government; say the Amana community. If this be rightly done, social organism of select whites will at once appear to be incomparably superior to that of select negroes.
I have tried my hardest to make my readers see as clearly as one bred in the south ought to see what a world-wide difference there is between the small upper class and the numerous lower class of negroes. If I have succeeded they will agree with me that it is the better policy to leave the upper class, for the present, just where it is. If this advice be followed, that class will flourish, and some day either be assimilated, or be giving benign salvation to the lower class in the negro State. Especially should this upper class eschew politics. Booker Washington in preaching this is the only real American prophet of the day. With all of his zeal for his race, he is far better appreciated in the south than in the north, and perhaps just as popular. What a lamentable arrest of its benign development it would be to this upper class to turn it away from industrial betterment of its condition to lead the mass of the negroes at the polls in a struggle for rule and office! That would be something like renewing the conditions that developed the Ku-Klux Klan.
It is the great body of the southern negroes--those in the lower class, who have no string at all, nor even a bow--that demands the profoundest attention. I wish I could make every white man, woman, and child of America see them just as they are. As I compare them with what they were in 1865 I note they have advanced somewhat in mental arithmetic, because of practice in computing small sums of money involved in their wages and purchases; that they have learned somewhat of self-providence, and very much endurance of want (which last is really a reversion to a trait of their West African ancestors); and that the per cent of illiteracy among them has been greatly lessened. On the other hand, each generation becomes more disinclined to work, and its vagrants multiply; each generation more prone to live by crime, more unchaste, and more quick to desert their conjugal partners and children. Especially are they far more unhealthy and prone to insanity, and their death rate rapidly rising. They have no resource but unskilled labor of the lowest and cheapest grade; white competition in agriculture and domestic service, machinery in other fields, such as the scrape which has superseded the dump-cart, the improved steam-shovel and method of handling construction trains, and the steam laundry, steadily curtailing that resource; a slothful, improvident, and wasteful disposition curtailing it still further. The resurrecting hand of the trades union cannot reach down to them. Steadily they are more useless to every upbuilder of the coming south except the wage-depresser. More and more they get in the way of real progress in every direction. And as their supplies of necessaries diminish they get in one another's way. Nearly all of the whites who were bound to them in the domestic love of the old south times are dead. Most naturally and unavoidably as the new generation discerns the growing incompatibility of their stay in the section with its true welfare, unfriendliness comes and grows. Listless, lethargic, careless, without initiative, without opportunity and coercion to make use of it, these multitudes of inveterate have-nothings are in a bottomless gulf of want, immorality, crime, and disease. A true philanthropist has familiarized the world with the "submerged tenth." Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Post, stand beside me on the strand, and fix your eyes, minds, and hearts upon the slowly drowning ninety-five per cent of the southern negroes. Lay aside the excess of your devotion to the upper class. It does not need it. The Chicago dentist, as the _Public_ itself reports, was really more than indemnified for the insult given him because of his color by the sympathetic resentment of white members of his profession. Why will you keep agitating the nation in behalf of a few thousands, who are well able to maintain themselves, and neglect millions who require, as Mr. Tillinghast says, some heroic remedy for their salvation?
I shall now tell you the utter inadequacy of Hampton, Tuskegee, and the like, after which I shall consider what, in my judgment, is the only remedy.
The annual output, as we may call it, of all the negro educational institutions in the south is a mere drop in the bucket when compared with the enormous need. The latest reliable figures accessible to me are those of Booker Washington for 1897. They are as follows: 13,581 receiving industrial training, 2,108 collegiate education, 2,410 classical instruction, and 1,311 "taking the professional course,"[193]--the last three aggregating 5,829. Suppose the entire 17,999 were following industrial courses, and that every one graduated with credit; and suppose there be added the work of the land companies providing homes and every other enterprise helping the negro in any way--suppose this output to be trebled annually from this time on (which is far above possibility for many years yet, to say nothing of probability), what would be its accomplishment? Why, no more than a slight shower in a few townships during the drought a few years ago would have done in preventing injury to the Kansas corn crop. When you attend, you understand that the great advantages of these excellent institutions are only for a few lucky negroes,--picked ones of the upper class,--and not for the millions whose crying need is for opportunity to earn honest daily bread and a really benevolent coercion to use the opportunity. The problem, what to do for this mass, cannot be solved by philippics against such things as _de facto_ or constitutional disfranchisement of the blacks, lynching them, showing them disrespect in military parades, giving them Jim Crow cars, and not dividing the educational fund more liberally with them; nor would it contribute one jot or tittle towards its solution if every lady in America cordially received in her drawing-room the few negroes who have most deservedly won the respect of the nation. To solve this problem, something must be found which will train and elevate the average negro, while the exceptional one is at the industrial school or college, or studying for a profession; something which will check the prevalent reversion away from monogamic family life, and stimulate that life to develop steadily; something also which will impart to this entire mass permanent and strengthening impulse to better its condition. The only thing that can do this is to separate the negro as far as may be from the whites, give him his own State in our union, and constrain him there with vigilant kindness to subsist and govern himself in such ways as suit him. I have long thought that our negroes had far stronger claim upon the nation for land than the uncivilizable redskins on whom we have lavished so much expense in vain.
Righteousness demands that we give the former full opportunity to develop normally in self-government. Put him in a State of his own on our continent; provide irrepealably in the organic law that all land and public service franchises be common property; give no political rights therein to those of any other race than the African; compel nobody to settle in this State, but let every black reside in whatever part of the nation that pleases him; let this community while in a Territorial condition, and also for a reasonable time after it has been admitted as a State, be faithfully superintended by the nation in order that republican government be there preserved,--do these things, and there need be no fear that the examples of Hayti and San Domingo, which were not so superintended, will be repeated. Nearly all of the American Indians, because of rigid adherence to their old customs and ways, were crushed by Caucasian rule. But the negro, wherever he comes in contact with a superior, shows a pliancy, a self-adaptability to new circumstances, to which no parallel has ever been suggested, so far as I know. If civilized self-government will but kindly keep him a while at its labor school where he is to learn by doing, I am profoundly convinced that he will develop into the very best of citizens. And I am also just as profoundly convinced that if something like what I recommend is not done at a comparatively early day, after some while, as there are now in America a few prosperous Indians and in New Zealand a few prosperous Maoris, we will have here and there a few prosperous negroes; but the rest of them will either be confirmed degenerates, or have gone no one will know whither. And Booker Washington, the moral exemplar of the day, rivalling Horace's
"Iustum et tenacem propositi virum,"
as he resists the pernicious counsels of the overwhelming majority of negroes and keeps to the wise and right course which they passionately condemn; who is far more able and who has accomplished infinitely more of good than Toussaint or Douglass--he will be a great hero statesman of a great cause lost. The historian of the future that has something like Shakspeare's genius for contrast will make his glory and that of Calhoun magnify each other by comparison.
The foregoing as to a negro State, which is the result of years of observation and reflection, had all been written for some time when I fell in with the address of Bishop Holsey, mentioned above. It is the proposition of the address that a part of the United States should be assigned to the negroes. I add an abstract from the synopsis of his views given in the address:
1. Negroes and whites "are so distinct and dissimilar in racial traits, instincts, and character, it is impossible for them to live together on equal terms of social and political relation, or on terms of equal citizenship."
2. The general government only has power to settle the problem, and it ought to settle it.
3. Separation of the negroes and whites "is the most practicable, logical, and equitable solution of the problem."
4. "Segregation and separation should be gradual ... and non-compulsory, so as not to injure ... labor, capital, and commerce ... where the negro is an important factor of production and consumption."
5. The southern negroes should petition the president and congress "for suitable territory ... as ... equal citizens ... and not go out of their country to be exposed to doubtful experiment and foreign complications. Afro-Americans should remain in their own country, in the zone of greatness, and in the latitude of progress."
6. The government should, in effecting segregation, maintain "civil order, peace, progress, and prosperity."
7. The place for the negroes may be in the western public domain, such as a part of the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or elsewhere in the west.
8. No white person unless married to a negro, or a resident federal official, to be allowed citizenship in the negro State or Territory, but all citizens of the United States to be protected therein as in the other States.[194]
9. Only those of reputable character and some degree of education, and perhaps those possessed of a year's support, to become citizens. Criminals and undesirable persons to be kept out.
It was gratification extreme to me to find a prominent negro so much in accord with my long-cherished project. I hope there is a determination of the mass of southern negroes thitherward, as seems to be indicated by the activity both of Bishop Holsey and also by that of Bishop Turner. With nearly all of the negro writers and speakers now in the public eye upper-class sympathies are dominant. But Holsey, demanding a State in the union, and Turner, putting his whole soul into immigration to Liberia, are actuated by lower-class sympathies. The others just mentioned really advocate assimilation,--and at bottom, only the assimilation of the upper class,--but these two are of far different and higher ambition. They are patriotic, and as true to their race as that famous heathen who rejected christianity when told that it consigned his forefathers to perdition. He declared he would go to hell with his people and not to heaven without them. The others are representative of only some five per cent, these two represent the ninety-five per cent--the real negroes. I never took to Bishop Turner's proposal, for all of the ability with which he advocates it, because I want the negroes where our nation can foster and protect their State, it matters not what may be the resulting pains and expense. I highly approve the earnestness of Bishop Holsey in objecting to expatriation by the Afro-Americans.
Let our negroes have their own State. That will be the fit culmination which was foreshadowed in their deserting the galleries assigned them in our churches and flocking to their own churches, immediately upon emancipation, and their effecting soon afterwards the removal of their cabins from the old site. Their masses have ever since been inclining towards a community of their own by an internal impulsion in harmony with the external white expulsion. The impulsion and the expulsion are each, as it seems to me, manifestations of the same all-powerful cosmic force.
Further, I would say a negro State makes a precedent for the world federation. Each race that ought not to intermarry with others can flourish under its separate autonomy. Then loving brotherhood between white, yellow, red, and black people will bless all the earth. Whether the proneness of opposites to fancy each other, progressively going from the smaller to the greater differences, will ultimately compound a universal color, no man can now tell.
Of course some reader has exclaimed, "Your proposal is absurdly chimerical." Is it indeed chimerical to demand of the great republic that it do its very highest duty? Suppose an ignorant, neglected child taken home by a rich man, taught to work, the world of industry, with all of its prizes, kept in his sight, until he begins to cherish the hope that some day he can have a happy fireside of his own; suppose further that just as he reaches the age of discretion the adopting father sets him where he may see the fair world plainer and long for it more than ever, but so completely strips him of all means and opportunity that there is nothing for the outcast but ignoble life and uncared-for death. How you would pity the outcast! how you would curse the false father! I cannot believe that the nation will prove such an unnatural parent to these its helpless and lovable children. It may be that some thousands of them, nay, some millions, may be left to perish in their dire constraint. But when the people fully understand, their consciences will awaken, and they will give the American negro a bright house-warming.
Suppose we do not give him his State, or suppose it will be long years before we give it to him, what do you say we are to do for him?
We must help Booker Washington and his co-laborers to the utmost. Grant that they can snatch only a few brands from the burning. Is it not most praiseworthy to save even one? Further, I can never abandon the hope that the nation will yet allot the negroes their State, even if to do it land must be condemned on a large scale. When that fair day does dawn on America, out of the scholars of these worthy teachers will come many a good shepherd for the blacks in their new land. This may now be but a glimmering of hope. All the good must join in effort to enlarge and brighten it.
We should not begrudge the higher education to the few in the upper class who can get it. The negroes need teachers, preachers, writers, and others of the learned occupations.
We should impartially equalize the negro population to the white in common school privileges. Both ought to have rational industrial training. The right primary education is just beginning to show itself. It will more and more recognize what a prominent factor the hand has been in evolution. Think of the superiority of animals with, to those without, hands. What a high brain the elephant has made for himself by exercising his single hand; the polar bear kills the seal by throwing a block of ice; the 'coon goes through his master's pockets for sweetmeats; the greater intelligence of the house-cat as compared with the average dog is due to long use of the forepaws as rudimentary hands. Think of how we note humanity dawning in the monkey ever busy with his hands. Think of the importance of his hands to beginning man. With them he could gather fruits, rub fire-sticks together, make war-clubs, spears, fish-hooks, bow and arrows, bar up his cave door against beasts of prey, elevate his roosting place in a tree too high for night prowlers, and do all other vital things up the whole ascent to civilization. The steady enlargement of man's brain has been mainly because of his progressive use of his hands; for whenever a new thing was to be done his brain had first to acquire faculty of telling hands how to do it. To train the hands is the true way to develop brain power. The negroes in American slavery had risen far above the level of West African hand ability, and at emancipation they were prepared to go higher by leaps and bounds. Had they from that time steadily on been drafted off into their State, gradually, as Bishop Holsey suggests, and a tithe of the millions which have since been lavished in giving them premature literacy and smattering of learning been applied in teaching their children handicraft faculty and the best methods of labor, the promise for them now would be satisfactory to their dearest friends. Somebody wisely advises, Never do the second thing first. Those who took charge of the negro when he was freed tried to make him do the hundredth or thousandth thing first. Instead of patiently schooling him in handicraft and self-support until he was really ready to take part in his own self-government, they made the ignorant and inexperienced slave of yesterday a complete citizen, and plunged him up to his neck into politics and letters. What a baleful _hysteron proteron_ was this. The looming greatness of Booker Washington is that he teaches by his actions that the seeming advance was in fact prodigious retrogression, and he strives with all his might to draw the negro backwards to his right beginning. Let us further his good work by incorporating the utmost practicable of his industrial training in our common school system for both whites and blacks. America has learned important military lessons from the redskin; and, as I am almost sure, she acted on his suggestion when she confederated the separate colonies. Let her now show similar good sense in permitting a negro to teach her the true system of education for the new times.[195]
Now as to lynching. It is entirely wrong to conceive of a popular outbreak against one who has outraged a sacred woman as lawless. It is the furthest possible from that, being prompted by the most righteous indignation. The wretch has outlawed himself. Society can no more tolerate such an insult to its peace than it can permit a tiger to go at large. It is under no obligation to him whatever. It is the people dealing with him that should concern us. We ought to keep them from brutalizing themselves and their children. We must put down lynching with gentle firmness. The first thing to do is to shorten the "law's delay" as much as possible. After the State has made the enabling constitutional amendment, if such be necessary, let an act provide that whenever an alleged crime likely to excite popular violence has been committed the governor select a judge to try and finally dispose of the case, three days only, say, being allowed for motion for new trial or taking direct bill of exceptions; both the supreme court and the court below to proceed as fast as may be through all stages until acquittal or execution. Let the governor earnestly ask for some such measure, and let him also, after he gets it, impressively appeal to the people to assist in enforcing the law. With this preparation, more than ninety per cent of the whites will approve the most decided action of the military protecting prisoners, if that be necessary. Just at this time (September 27, 1904) there is a very decided manifestation of anti-lynching public opinion in the south. We should strike while the iron is hot, and bring it about that the law itself make quick riddance of the ravisher. It should be a spur to us that the party opposed in politics to the great majority of southerners finds much support and help from every lynching in this section. Why should we play into its hands?
The last thing that I have to say is that the south ought to invite immigrants only of white blood. We want no settlers from whose intermarriage mongrels would spring. All Europeans should receive welcome--the Germans perhaps the warmest. But in my judgment those that will most advantage us are the truckmen, growers of the smaller and larger fruits, grass, grain, and stock farmers, manufacturers, miners, builders, contractors, business men, and skilled laborers, of the north. It looks now as if the cotton mills of England as well as of the north would be profited by coming to us; and it also seems probable that there will be for many years so great a demand for our cotton that the worn-out soil of the older parts of the lower south must be restored to more than virgin richness by the method which Dr. Moore has patented and made a gift of to the nation, or some other intensive culture; and that there must be consequently great multiplication of southern mill-operatives and agricultural workers in the near future. Recall what we have said in the last chapter as to the future promise of the section. Every day the south by disclosing some new opportunity cogently makes new invitation to immigrants. It is the interest as well as the duty of the nation to remove the great clog upon development of the south. That clog is the presence of some millions of unassimilable negroes in the section. It is also the best interest and the highest duty of the nation to segregate these negroes into a territory of their own. As Bishop Holsey says, and what I believe with my whole soul, "The union of the States will never be fully and perfectly recemented with tenacious integrity until black Ham and white Japheth dwell together in separate tents."[196]
* * * * *
I must add an epilogue to these chapters on the race question as I did to that on Toombs.
Brothers and sisters of the north, you should learn why there is a solid south. There is but one cause. It is the menace to the whites from the political power given the negroes by the fifteenth amendment. There is nothing in your section--in its past or its present--from which I can illustrate to you the gravity of this menace to us. In not one of your States are there ignorant negroes in so great a number that, by combining with the debased whites, they can make for it such a constitution and laws and set up such authorities as they please. We, your brothers and sisters of the south, have lived under the rule of this foulest of coalitions. We know from actual experience how it plunders and preys upon honest workers, producers, and property owners; how it licenses and fosters crime. In my own State, from the first day that a governor, elected by fiat voters and ex-whites, as we called the latter, was inaugurated, until we virtually restored the supremacy of our race by carrying the three days' election in December, 1870, fifty dollars would get a pardon for the greatest offence, and robberies, burglaries, horse-stealing, and the like each went free for a much smaller sum. Is it forgotten that the negro speaker was voted one thousand dollars by a South Carolina legislature, ostensibly as extra compensation for unusual services, but really of purpose to reimburse him for a bet lost upon a horse race? Why, the foremost of our people in virtue, wisdom, and patriotism were agreed that these sordid tyrannies should be subverted at once and at any cost to ourselves. The emergency justified any practice, device, or stratagem at the polls by which we could defend our homes, families, and subsistence against assassins of the public peace, wholesale robbers of the people, and instigators and protectors of every crime. It justified the shotgun and six-shooter in politics just as legitimate war justifies the musket in the hands of the soldier. It called forth most righteously the Ku-Klux. That spontaneous resistance finds a close parallel in the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, fought before American independence was declared. But the Ku-Klux fought for something still dearer than the dear cause for which our forefathers bled in the two battles just mentioned. Had the latter failed in the war they had thus begun, their children and people would nevertheless have had such good government as England is now giving the defeated Boers; but had the southern whites failed in their defence, their land would have for long years been befouled like Hayti, and those who had not been slaughtered unspeakably degraded. I think that all our countrymen who so rightfully eulogize the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill should also learn to give the greater praise to the southern heroes whose indomitable spirit routed the madmen that, with all the power of the federal government in their hands, tried their best to give the section over to negro rulers. Brothers and sisters, "picture it, think of it," until you can fully understand that hour of our trial. All my northern acquaintances who have resided in the south for several years--they are many--come to look at the subject just as the natives do. A candid and honest settler from Vermont has told me how he was made to change his mind. Conversing with a southerner, he had reprehended the different ways in which the negro's ballot had been rendered nugatory. The other replied, "Suppose that there was an incursion of Indians given suffrage into your State in such a mass as to make them seventy-five per cent of all the voters, wouldn't you whites in some way manage either to outvote or outcount them!" The Vermonter answered in the affirmative. We had to deliver ourselves. We used the only means at our command.
It was not to be thought of that these negro governments be endured, even if tempered by the Ku-Klux, for government is in its nature lasting and permanent while the other was only temporary. They would have gradually gathered strength. Then there would have been rapid enrichment of a few exceptional negroes and rapid expulsion of the whites impoverished by emancipation, from all their little that was left. And then, the leading negroes desiring nothing else so much, there would have come many white men and women, each one willing to climb out of the depths of want by intermarriage with a prosperous negro. Who can predict what would have been the future of mongrelism thus beginning? We of the south are most conscientiously solid against what we know from actual trial to be the worst and most corrupting of all government; and we are still more solid against everything that tends to promote amalgamation. Can you blame us for standing in serried phalanx by white domination and against the misrule exampled in the early years of reconstruction, and for our own uncontaminated white blood and against fusion with the negro? We must be solid in the face of these dangers, and as long as they are threatened by the presence of millions of negroes in our midst. There is no other solidity in the south. In all matters of the locality republicans and democrats count alike. When one offers to vote in the primary, if his name is on the registry list, and he appears on inspection to be white, his vote is accepted; and he generally casts that vote, not for the interest of a political party, but for that of the public. The triumphant election in November, 1904, of independents or democrats, in four northern States which at the same time went for Mr. Roosevelt, indicates solidity for the true local welfare of the people as against the behests of party. So what the white primary has produced in the south, has commenced in the north. And the result in Missouri, voting for Roosevelt, republican, and Folk, democrat, shows that what we may call federal independentism has commenced in the south. This will spread as the people learn it does not hurt them to split their tickets while voting upon national questions, if they but maintain their solidity while voting upon State or municipal.
Now may I be allowed some decided words, most kindly and inoffensively spoken, as to appointing negroes to federal offices in the south. It is no sound argument for it that now and then some negro may have been appointed in a northern community which manifested no opposition. Consider the case of Mr. William H. Lewis, a negro lately made assistant district attorney in Boston by Mr. Roosevelt. He is a Harvard graduate, was captain of the Harvard eleven while in college, had represented Cambridge in the Massachusetts legislature, and the community was not at all averse to his appointment.[197] Therefore when it was made there was no disregard of the wishes and feelings of Boston and the regions adjoining. But when a negro is given office in the south, it is felt by all the community to be an insult. Would President Roosevelt cram the appointment of a white down the throats of a northern community in which all the best citizens protested against it? Would he not confess to himself that the wishes and feelings of these good people ought to be respected, even if he considered them foolish and unreasonable? It seems to me that he would, and that he would find for the place somebody else in his party acceptable to the locality. Why should he not do the like when his southern brothers and sisters who have such convincing reasons against the encouragement of negroes in their politics, protest unanimously against his filling an office in their midst with a negro? Will he snub them because a negro has more sacred right than a white? Is that what he means by keeping open the door of hope and opportunity? Or will he snub them because enough of punishment has not yet been given them, and because the south is still a province or dependency on which he is justified in quartering his partisans and pets without regard to the feelings and wishes of all the better inhabitants?
Brothers and sisters of the north, I cannot believe that any one of you who impartially considers the subject, would ever approve appointing even the most competent and deserving negro to a southern office in the teeth of universal objection by the whites of the community.
My last word is to implore every honest one in the country to lay aside all prejudice and master the southern situation before judging. Whoever does this, whoever will accurately place himself in the shoes of a good southern citizen, will, I most firmly believe, approve the attitude of the south, with his whole heart and soul.
APPENDIX
THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH, a Centennial article for the International Review, afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1876.
The approach of the Centennial Celebration is not hailed in the south with the demonstrative joy of the north. It would be out of taste to expect that the former should appear to triumph greatly over the life of the nation preserved at the cost of her recent overthrow. Her late antagonist can rejoice in a vast and happy population, great material prosperity, and the fresh fame of a world-renowned success. It is meet, while remembering she has so lately saved the union by her stupendous armipotence, that the north should exult as a people never did before. The south has been made to feel the pangs of a sudden impoverishment and the incalculable discomfort of complete economical unsettlement; and she has not learned the new lessons which she must learn to become self-sustaining and progressive. But her earnest spirits, doing painfully the slow task of repairing lost fortunes; seeking after the system proper to succeed planting; striving to make their homes pleasant again and to give their children a fair hope in the land,--these intent workers, who are most of them scarred confederate veterans, even if they will not say it loudly, have come around to hold in steadfast faith that it is far better the Blue Cross fell, and the American union stands forever unchallengeable hereafter. And they have brought with them the great mass of their people. They cannot joy so happily as the north, but they have a warm welcome for the Great Commemoration. For they see that the evils which followed as the scourge of defeat are soon to pass away, while the fall of slavery and the failure of secession are to prove greater and greater blessings as years roll on.
And so the time has come for a southerner calmly to discuss the past, present, and future of the south. He has no use for the methods of popular and unscientific politics, wherein everything is blamed or applauded as being the result of party measures. The intentions and motives of the actors, on both sides of the late strife, will give but proximate explanations. How the two sections became, to use the fine phrase of Von Holst, economically contrasted; how the southern people and their representative politicians were bred, under their circumstances, into opposition to the union; and how the northern people and their representative politicians were bred, under widely different circumstances, into love of the union; how the long clashing in politics culminated in civil war; how the south was utterly crushed and her whole industrial system destroyed; how she slowly re-erects herself into a new condition better than the old,--the ultimate solution of these questions can only be found by discussing them in the light of those laws of development which give every community a policy suited to what it discerns to be its best interest. These laws are of far more importance than the politician, who is but their creature. Leaving to others to fight over the old struggles of the political arena and bandy hard words with one another, we will try to discuss our subject in the manner we have indicated to be appropriate.
To understand the present and future, we must first understand the past. To understand the New south, we must first understand the Old south, the distinguishing feature of which was negro slavery. Mr. Stephens, then Vice-President of the southern confederacy, in an address to a large assembly in Savannah, in March, 1861, said of the new government: "Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." There is no doubt slavery was the corner-stone of southern society; and when it was removed, four years later, a thorough disintegration of the whole fabric was the logical result.
When our country was first settled, the southern regions were far more attractive in soil and climate; and their other natural resources--minerals, good harbors, navigable streams, water-power idling everywhere, to mention no more--were equal to those of the other section. The subsequent advancement of the north has been so rapid as to excite the wonder of the world; while it is said by us of the south, jesting upon our worn-out and exhausted land, that we have done worse for the country than the Indians before us, who stayed here many centuries and yet left the soil as good as they found it.
The plantation system was the great barrier to southern progress. From its first historical appearance, among the Carthaginians, from whom the Romans seem to have derived it, this rude and wholesale method of farming has rested on slaveholding. Its workings have been similar everywhere. In Italy, under the Roman republic, absorbing the petty holdings, it drove out the small farmer; it destroyed the former respect for trades and handicrafts, and brought them into disfavor; it prevented the development of the industrial arts; it created a non-reciprocal commerce. Centuries later, it did the same things in our southern States.
A sketch of the leading features and results of the plantation system, as it existed in America, is our proper beginning.
The driver, as the negro foreman was called, was not very common in the south, and was generally under the superintendence of the overseer. Could the planters have made a good overseer of the driver, of course they would have consulted their interest, and reproduced the ancient slave-steward of Rome. Slaveholders keep their slaves under careful surveillance, but they do not usually overlook them in person. It is not often that a master engages in an employment which brings him into daily and intimate contact with the lowest orders, and which he instinctively feels to be degrading. The planter could have neither his first choice, which would have been a slave overseer, nor his second choice, a superintendent from his own rank in society; and so, as the next best thing, he took as overseer a white hireling from the non-slaveholding class. The tillage of the fields was thus intrusted to the overseers, who were, for the most part, men of little education and business skill, and who had no interest in their employment except to draw its wages. Thus the foremost, if not the only, southern industry was managed by incompetent and careless agents.
The Roman master, in the later days of the republic, having always vast markets open to him, shunned the expense of providing for women and children, and bought new slaves instead of breeding them; but the closing of the African slave-trade, and the softer hearts and manners of modern times, led our planters, at last, to rely on propagation as their only source of supply. The negroes were, therefore, well cared for, and, in a genial clime, increased rapidly. This increase, however, did not keep pace with the increasing demand for southern products, and so the market value of the slave rose rapidly. To the Roman slaveholder, land was almost everything, and his rustic slaves nothing; to the southerner, the slaves were almost everything, and the land nothing. There was no careful cultivation of the soil, no judicious rotation of crops, and no adequate system of fertilization. Southern husbandry was, for the most part, a reckless pillage of the bounty of nature. The planter became possessed with a roving spirit, and was continually seeking "fresh land," as virgin soil was termed. In the older sections, where there was most stability, the best farming consisted in judiciously eking out the natural fertility of the fields, and when that was exhausted, in leaving them to recuperate by years of rest. Thus a given working force required, year by year, a greater and greater allowance of land, and the plantations became steadily larger, the small farmer retiring, and the white population becoming continually less. Many of these older sections turned, from being agricultural communities, into nurseries, rearing slaves for the younger States where virgin soil was abundant. The fertile lands of the new settlements, by yielding bountiful crops, gave fresh impulse to the plantation system, and here the small holdings were absorbed more rapidly than they had been in the older States. The southern slaves, regarded as property, were the most desirable investment open to the generality of people that has ever been known. They were patient, tractable, and submissive, and never revolted in combined insurrections, as did the slaves of antiquity. Their labor was richly remunerative; their market value was constantly rising; they were everywhere more easily convertible into money than the best securities; and their natural increase was so rapid that a part of it could be squandered by a shiftless owner every year to make both ends meet, and he still be left enough of accumulation to enrich him steadily. And so the plantation, or rather the slave, system swallowed up everything else.
There were no distinct industrial classes. There were negro blacksmiths, negro carpenters, negro shoemakers, etc., all over the land, but they were mere appendages to the plantations, and far inferior in capacity and skill to the artisan slaves of antiquity.
The commerce of the south was non-reciprocal. She traded raw produce for manufactures which she should have made herself, or which she should have got in exchange for manufactures of her own. The over-mastering energy of slave property, dissolving, as it were, all things into itself, kept her from that development of trades, manufactories, and industrial arts which is the solid and unprecedented progress, and far more durable wealth, of the north.
There were a few exceptions in the way of restorative agriculture, and of diversified investments of capital in railways, manufactories, inland navigation, and mercantile enterprises. All along the northern border there were efforts to let go slavery, and non-slave industry was slowly emerging in a few places; but these things were as dust in the balances. The slave system was rooted in the best portions of the land, and nearly all of the productive wealth of the south was in, or dependent upon, planting. Implacable enemies of slavery were rapidly increasing in numbers and power, but she continued blindly sacrificing everything to rear negroes. When actual emancipation came--that nipping May frost--the south showed, on a gigantic scale, in her poverty and one solitary and portentously dried-up source of wealth, a parallel to Ireland, smitten with famine by the sudden failure of her only supply of food. When the charity of the world and the returning bounty of nature had again fed the Green Isle, everything fell back into the old track, and she could go on smoothly as before. But not so with the south: her wealth has fled; her occupation, the plantation system, is gone; and she must, for a generation, grope painfully in the dark, trying novel ways of subsisting, enduring want and many failures, before finding again the light of plenty and comfort.
The duties of the planter have changed. The management of a farm is not like that of a plantation, and one skilled in the management of slaves is not necessarily efficient in the directing of freedmen. Many other countries have been impoverished by wars; but is not this instantaneous and almost complete taking away of a great people's mode of living unique in history? The most resolute secessionist would have lost heart and put up his sword, could he have seen, before the war commenced, how easily the solitary prop of southern wealth and comfort could be overturned, to be set up no more. But in none of the ablest of the anti-secession arguments of 1860 were the consequences of defeat predicted.
Some portions of our country have been built up into a high degree of prosperity by a steady influx of foreign settlers. How much has been added to the power and wealth of the northern States by the immigration from the old lands of those who, when first they come, can do no more than subsist themselves by their own industry, almost defies computation. How the force of the preponderant population of the north pressed upon the south during the war, and at last crushed her down! Slavery repelled the free immigrant from the south, and he went elsewhere with his power to enrich and defend.
The uniform and rapid advancement of civilization is mainly due to the struggle of the poor to better their condition. These efforts result in complex division of labor, accumulation of wealth, and better than these, in the production of a great population engaged in diversified industries. In such a population, improving year by year in business habits, consists the strength of a nation. The slave had no hope of rising, and the system of which he was a part repelled free workingmen, and thus the south lost the benign emulation and energy of a lower class. The ancient slaves were not alone rural laborers and domestic servants, as were those of the south. The former, being of kindred blood with their masters and near their level in natural capacity, were initiated in the various industries, some of which flourished greatly under their management. Though the slaves of old were very degraded, they were not as low and grovelling as those of our day. Enfranchisement was common; and, in a few generations afterwards, the descendants of the freedman were indistinguishable amid the body of free citizens. The ancient states were not, therefore, prevented by slavery from having advanced and diversified industries, nor were they denied the impulse of a possible rising from the lower to the higher classes. But the American slave was of the remotest race, far below his master in development, and the horror of receiving him into the body of free citizens grew continually stronger. The law discouraged manumission, and frowned upon the increase of freedmen. Thus, the African slavery of the south was the most hopeless form of servitude the civilized world has ever seen; and, by preventing the formation of a great class of freemen, engaged in respectable industry, it killed the very roots of social progress. These influences of slavery, so repugnant to American ideas, will be more vividly seen and understood in the answer to the question, What would have been the present condition of the south had it not been for slavery? Undoubtedly her land would have smiled with a fertility richer than the endowment of nature; her industrial arts would, ere this time, have branched out into multifarious activity; her own ships would have been carrying her produce and manufactures abroad; and, as the crown of all, she would have had a teeming population of workers, whose education in the methods of self-support would have been the assurance of unlimited future advancement. In brief, in all the elements of the greatness of a community, the south might now have equalled, if not excelled, the north.
But there are some other effects of slavery to be noted before the outline of the Old south can be clearly and fully drawn.
Among the planters, costly and liberal instruction was given to a few of those who were to adorn places of leisured ease, or to fill the necessary professions and public positions; but, in the midst of the sparse and shifting rural population, there could not be that devotion to the education of all, which is one of the most conspicuous glories of the northern States.
In consequence of the sparseness of the planters and their roving habits, there was not that subdivision of different portions of the counties into small self-governing wards, which Jefferson so fondly desired. He said of the New England townships, that they had "proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation." He also said that he considered the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on two hooks, to wit, "the public education, and the subdivision into wards." This government of every vicinage in its home affairs by itself, as originated in New England, and is now spread far and wide throughout the northern States, is the most beneficent achievement of American democracy. By this coercion of the citizen to participate in the constant administration of public matters directly concerning his interests, self-government becomes, as it should be, the business of everybody, and everybody is compulsorily educated in the best of all learning for the race.
The finale of slavery remains to be told. As opposition to it increased from without, the south became more and more closely united. She honestly believed that wanton intermeddlers were attacking her dearest rights. The steady and continually strengthening warfare against slavery, and her continuous and earnest defence of it, began--it is impossible to determine precisely when--to knit her into a nationality of her own. He who understands what Mr. Bagehot calls "nation-making" will discover, in the past history of the south, if he looks attentively, many signs of this tendency, which steadily progressed unperceived on her part, and still more so on the part of the north, until the south began to coalesce into a nation as compact as her scattered and random elements would permit. The long advocacy and support of slavery in the political arena had fevered her whole people, and finally, under these promptings to a national life, politics absorbed nearly all of her intellectual powers.
There is a striking parallel between this sustained effort of the south and the struggle of Ireland, when the latter, for the fifty years ending with the advent of the present century, was arrayed against the British, in their encroachments upon her independent government. During this half-century, Ireland maintained that she was an independent integral part of the British Empire, just as Virginia contended that she was a sovereign in the federation of States. Ireland, like a southern State, challenged every seeming interference, by the general government, in her local affairs; and the claims put forth, in each instance, were inexorably contested by an adverse government, claiming supremacy and supported by superiority of power. Both were on the eve of revolutionary secession without knowing it. The results in Ireland and the south were similar: there was but one intellectual activity, namely, politics. The memory of all Irishmen of that time not forgotten--and many of their names are familiar words--is nothing but resistance to English aggression. Even Curran, Ireland's great forensic advocate, made his world-wide fame in defending Irishmen against the prosecutions of the British ministry. It was much the same at the south in the period antecedent to the civil war. She had neither literature nor science; but she had statesmen and advocates, who will be remembered as long as her soldiers and generals.
The national germ had long been growing below the surface, in darkness, and at last it burst into view, and shot up into a body of amazing proportions. There was not the birth of a new nation at Montgomery in 1861; only the majority of this vigorous young member of the family of nations was there proclaimed. But, for all of the eloquence of its orators and the virtue and bravery of its people, it was, as compared with its adversary, in raw and untutored nonage, and the great disaster that befell four years afterwards was then preordained. It was her unshunnable fate that she should be denationalized on the battle-field.
The late war was a conflict between implacable enemies. Each belligerent, standing up for national life, was resistlessly coerced to fight to the last. Neither can be blamed. The past may be taxed with lack of wisdom. It may be that as Scotland and, more lately, Ireland have been peacefully denationalized, a preventive, anticipating the dreadful event of war, might years before have been devised by statesmanly forecast. The actual combatants--the southerner fighting for the confederacy, and the northern soldier bearing up the flag of the union--were equals in manhood and virtue. The survivors, federal and confederate, at last see this, and therefore they go in company to decorate alike the graves of the dead of both armies.
The cause of all these evils--the backwardness and stationariness of the south; a wasteful husbandry, without other industries; the instability of her wealth; her want of a great class of freemen engaged in the different arts; her barbarically simple social structure; her neglect of common schools; the absorption of all her intellectual energies in feverish and revolutionary politics; and, finally, secession and the reddened ground of a thousand battle-fields--was slavery. It is gone. The malignant cancer, involving, as it seemed, every vital and menacing hideous and loathsome death, was plucked out by the roots; and after a ten years' struggle of nature, we see the body politic slowly but surely reviving to a health and soundness never known before.
Here we find the dividing line between the Old and the New south. The former ended, and the latter began, with the giving of freedom to the negroes--an event which will prove in the future to have been an emancipation even more beneficial to master than to slave. Immunity from all the evils of slavery which we have catalogued will distinguish the New south from the Old.[198]
The sudden impoverishment of the southern people, and the unlooked-for change in their ways of living and thinking, had they occurred in the most peaceful times, and been followed with the best of government, would have produced a profound shock and a long paralysis. But the bitterness of subjugation, and the mistake of needlessly offensive and goading government, with harsh reconstructive measures, have prolonged the lethargy. And yet the American union shows benignly in the present condition and promised future of the section. The ten years since emancipation are instructive. Slowly has the New south been disentangling herself from the débris of the Old, and she has emerged far enough to enable us to perceive that a better era has commenced. Much has been lost, but more has been saved. All the germs of true wealth and power and the solid well-being of a community have survived; and solace for the past and earnest of a great future may be found in the fact that she has reached at last, and for the first time, a position in which she can develop these elements, free from the suffocating hindrances of former days. We may now properly inquire, What of the past does the south retain, and in what will consist her future progress?
She retains her genial climate, her kindly soil, and her many natural resources. If the peace of the American union is assured, as everything now graciously promises, these natural advantages will, in a few generations, far more than compensate for all her losses, and ultimately place her in the very van of progress.
The best inheritance of the New from the Old south is the southern people. We have seen how slavery checked industrial development, and how many of its other effects were hurtful. After allowing fully for all these, there will be found a great residuum of progressive energy, of intellectual strength, and of moral worth in the people of the southern States. They need not fear a comparison, in these respects, with the most enlightened communities. Great men, like Washington, Jefferson, Calhoun, Jackson, and Lee; political and military heroes, judges, lawyers, and orators, such as the south has given birth to, in unbroken succession,--are the unmistakable signs of a great people.
The rank and file of the confederate armies have given proof that the men of the south must be classed, in all the elements of complete character, with the best that the world has ever seen. Crime was so infrequent that a single morning of the term of a rural court, before the war, nearly always sufficed to dispose of every indictment; there was little want or pauperism; virtue was everywhere the rule in private life, and there was seldom even the suspicion of corruption in government or the administration of justice. The history of this people since the war shows that they are possessed of the best Anglo-Saxon mettle. They are slowly beginning to thrive wherever they have been left to govern themselves, in spite of the complete industrial revolution, the loss of property, and change of occupation, of which we have written. And in many places, where reconstruction has been harshest, and negro misrule yet prevails, the whites have developed an unlooked-for self-maintaining capacity, and have demonstrated that even there must be the eventual predominance of intelligence and virtue, should "natural selection" alone work to secure it.
The southern people have learned much wisdom in the last ten years. Their heavy vote in 1872 for Horace Greeley--a man to whom a foreigner would have supposed them unappeasably hostile--if there was nothing else, would alone suffice to show that they are rapidly laying aside all hindrances to progress. And now that slavery is gone and she has so quickly conquered the animosities of the war, the south may be likened to a capable and energetic young man, who, having failed, as the result of inevitable misfortune, in a wrongly-chosen business, has been relieved of all embarrassments and has entered upon his proper calling. More may reasonably be expected of such a man than of one more prosperous who has not had the like discipline.
As her nationalizing tendency has been destroyed by the removal of slavery, and as her future must necessarily be shaped by union influences, she will heartily embrace the political creed of the union. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the States, which was advocated with very great ability by many of the southern statesmen--notably by Calhoun, in his speeches in congress, and in his "Discourse on the Constitution of the United States," and with still more taking effect by Mr. Stephens in his "Constitutional View of the War between the States,"--has now no disciples at the south. General Logan gave expression to the prevailing creed of the present, when he said, at a recent reunion of former confederate companions:
"In considering, then, the future of the south, there is one fact suggested at the outset which has been demonstrated to us by the logic of events. It is, that under the operation of causes, which, although unseen at the time, appear now to have been inevitable in their results, a vast _social organism_ has been developed, and is now so far advanced in its growth as a _national body politic_, and no longer a mere aggregation of States, that _unity_ is a necessity of its further development. In reviewing the past, we can now clearly see that this national organism has been _gradually developed_; and, while many seek by various theories to account for the failure of the confederacy, the result may be regarded as the necessary consequence of those laws of development under which this social organism--the United States--was being evolved."
And the south is pleased to observe that there are no genuine signs of too much centralization. On the contrary, the town system is destined to spread fast and far; and the increase of local option laws; the splitting of larger into smaller counties; the strengthening tendency to submit constitutions and many legislative acts to voters; the greater disposition often to amend the State constitutions in the interests of progress; the vigorous growth in each State of its own body of laws; the rapid multiplication of towns and cities, with governments peculiar to each, are some of the many convincing proofs that local self-government is increasing and flourishing. Of the last particular Judge Dillon says:
"We have popularized and made use of municipal institutions to such an extent as to constitute one of the most striking features of our government. It owes to them, indeed, in a great degree, its decentralized character. When the English Municipal Corporations Reform Act of 1835, was passed, there were, in England and Wales, excluding London, only two hundred and forty-six places exercising municipal functions; and their aggregate population did not exceed two millions of people. In this country, our municipal corporations are numbered by thousands, and the inhabitants subjected to their rule, by millions."
Reflecting southerners see, in the present condition of the southern States, the very strongest possible guaranty that the true balance between national cohesion and local freedom is to be preserved. They see that the happy equilibrium is of a character so permanent and stable as to have survived the convulsion of civil war. The southern States are not held as conquered provinces. On the contrary, aside from the abolition of slavery and the fundamental legislation securing to the old slaves the full fruition of their freedom, there has been no perceptible change in the relations of these States to the United States.
Surely, to the student of history, wherein _vae victis!_ is written on every page, this fact has wonderful significance. It recommends the American form of government to the rest of the world as the incoming of the new stage of civilization, wherein oppression and war shall become unknown. However long contending armies may devour populations and paralyze industry elsewhere, we are assured that war-sick America will fight with herself no more. This assurance repays the south a thousand fold for all that she has lost and endured.
The great economical interest of the south is her agriculture; and in this industry, as well as among those who conduct it, a constant transition has been taking place during the ten years since emancipation. There is a melancholy change in the homes of landholders from the case and comfort of _ante bellum_ days. The neat inclosures have fallen; the pleasant grounds and the flower-gardens, once so trim and flourishing, are a waste; all the old smiles and adornments are gone. Change at home is accompanied by still greater change without. The negroes--and they constitute the great bulk of the laboring population--tend to become a tenantry, cultivating the land, in some instances, for a part of the produce, but oftener for a fixed sum of money. Many of these realize from their labors little more than enough to pay a moderate rent. Others work for wages, either in money or in some portion of the crop made by their labor. As the negroes are scarce, and their labor so important, they have often, directly or indirectly, a voice in the area of land cultivated, the mode of cultivation, and the kind of crop raised. The result, in many places, is retrogression. The face of the country is much altered. Only a small part of the land, as compared with that tilled before the war, is under cultivation, the remainder becomes wild. Could the fallen confederates return they would not in many places recognize their old homes. Nearly every man of average business ability could control his slaves, before the war, with little trouble; but it now requires far more than ordinary capacity to find and keep good tenants, to employ laborers amid the present scarcity, and to retain and make them remunerative when employed. The freedman is a different character from his former slave self, and is to be governed by different methods; and the true art of managing him is cabalism to many who were prosperous planters before the war. Multitudes of these show great despondency, for there have been thousands of failures among them.
But when we examine into this depression, we find that it is but the result of the transition from the former _régime_, and not a deep-seated and fatal decay of the vitals. These are some of the symptoms of assured recovery, noted within the last three or four years: a steady contraction of credit, and widening prevalency of the cash system; growing conviction that the whites must depend upon their own labor more, and less on that of the negroes; augmenting number of land-owners who decline to secure the merchants advancing supplies to their tenants and laborers; a greater acreage devoted to food crops; general advocacy of diversified planting; spreading dissatisfaction with the laws giving large exemptions to debtors. Southern economical affairs, in their sinking, "touched bottom" (to use the forcible expression now in vogue) about the end of 1874.[199] There has been a probable increase since of the mass of distress, as the heat of a summer day increases, by accumulation, for a while after noon, though the sun is imparting less and less. Steady amelioration will soon be general. A new system is slowly developing, and can be plainly discerned among the rubbish of the old. The change from former days most noticeable now is the multiplication, increased energy, and continually, growing trade of the smaller towns. This is due to the decay of planting, which was a wholesale system, and the coming-in of farming, which is a small trading system using much less concentrated capital. The large moneyed man, for evident economical reasons, buys in commercial centres--in cities--but the small purchaser must needs buy in the nearest market. Allowing for the great increase of farmers, and the control by the negroes of their earnings, there are many thousands more of small buyers in the south than there were before the war, and towns build up to sell to them.
There is another fact, not so noticeable as the rapidly growing local trade, but still more important. A class of new planters, consisting mainly of men too young to have become fixed in the methods and habits of former days, is springing up. They are new yet; but there is, in many parts of the south, at least one who is teaching many watching idlers by deeds and silence. They have remodelled their domestic economy, accommodating it to their smaller incomes and to the uncertainty of household help. They have discarded the outside kitchen, have substituted the cooking stove for the old voracious fireplace, and have brought the well with a pump in it, instead of the old windlass and bucket, under the roof of the dwelling, so that the household duties may be more easily despatched by their wives and children. And they have also remodelled their planting. They diversify their crops and products, raising more grain, and introducing clover and new forage plants. Some abandon entirely the cultivation of the old slave crops, and supply the nearest towns with feed and provisions. These planters of the New south till less land, and strive to improve it; they study the superiority and economy of machinery; they provide themselves with better cotton-gins, often using steam to work them; they have presses which require fewer hands than the old packing-screw; better plows are used; and harrows, reapers, and mowers, which, in many parts of the south, were seldom known before the war, are now common. This little band keeps pace with agricultural progress, as recorded in the journals; they seek for and find many new sources of profit; they prepare the people for laws fostering the interest of the planter in many particulars; they mold the opinion of their neighborhood; and their ability, skill, and wealth slowly increase. They struggle with a new order of things, having to think for themselves at every turn, and often misstep and fall in the dark, but they pick themselves up, and find the way again. The light of the new experience which they are kindling grows brighter each year, and is beginning to draw some of their neighbors to travel in it.
It is not our object to give a false impression of the influence of the class of farmers last referred to. They are but few, and their efforts are but the beginnings of the happy coming change. Their courage, power, and numbers are manifestly on the increase; and, as there is no other progressive activity in agriculture, and they meet no opposition save the passive resistance of despondency and inaction, it is almost certain that they will lay deep and sure the foundations of the needed renovation of the south. It is their belief that, to make agriculture generally prosperous, and to school the people to habits of thrift and saving, are the first steps, and that manufactories and trades and heterogeneous industries will naturally follow.
They desire northern settlers, to add useful features to agricultural economy, and diversify planting. A few have come, and they are prospering. It seems rational to expect a steady influx of these for many years, bringing capital and methods better suited to the needs of the changed times, raising the value of landed property out of its impeding prostration, and strengthening the industrial force. The climate; the abundance of cheap, cleared land; the long settlement having demonstrated the country to be healthy; the fact that plowing and other important outdoor work can be done on the farms all the winter round; the many railways, the multiplying towns and growing cities; the variety of products, and easy access to market--now that slavery and the animosity of war are gone, and the misrule of the carpetbagger has ended nearly everywhere--these, and many other advantages daily disclosing themselves, excel most of the new States and the Territories in offering inducements to immigrants; and, in due course of time, a vast number of settlers, both American and foreign, will be added to the population. There are many indications that the immigration of stock-raisers, wool-growers, market-gardeners, orchardists, beekeepers, in fine, small farmers of every kind, adapted to the soil and climate, will soon begin in earnest. When it does, the rebuilding of the south will be rapid.
The coming-in of northern capitalists, to invest in railways, mines, manufactories, and other large moneyed enterprises--most especially to develop the great resources of water-power--may be expected to begin at once, and considerably, upon the close of the centennial year. It seems now that this is the most powerful agency that may be expected to begin immediate work, in introducing the much-needed higher type of industrial organization.
The feelings of the two races toward each other were, for a few years after the war, bitterly hostile. The whites had, all their lives, seen the negroes in slavery, and from their infancy they had heard their preachers defend slavery, not in the abstract, as their phrase was, but in the concrete. The "concrete" meant African slavery, which was justified on the ground that the African was divinely intended in his nature for slavery, which was to him christianization and civilization, so long as he remained a slave; while, the moment he was set free, he would revert to his primitive barbarism. When these God-given slaves were suddenly cut loose from mastership, and the wealth of the capitalist, the portion of the orphan, and the mite of the widow were swept away at once by emancipation, either directly or as a necessary consequence, there was a great shock given to the whites. But when, three years afterwards, a new constituency was created, in which the slaves, just emancipated, outnumbered the whites, in many counties, the storm of passion that burst forth can hardly be described. The whites feared that the old relation was about to be inverted, and that they would be made slaves to the negroes. There was many a deed of violence, and many a poor negro paid his life for a few offensive words.
But a wonderful change has taken place. When the southern States were "reconstructed," as it is termed, in 1868, a negro school-keeper or preacher, if known to be a republican in politics--as he generally was--was hardly safe anywhere beyond the limits of a city. The negro schools were often broken up by mobs, and sometimes black congregations were attacked at night in their churches and dispersed by armed whites in disguise. Now, the colored children troop securely to school, and the colored churches and their congregations are sternly protected by law everywhere. Seven years ago a colored person could hardly get justice, in even the plainest case, from a jury of the other race. Now, in all of the courts, he has the influence of white men to aid him, and rarely is an unjust verdict rendered against him. He makes better friends of the whites. There is no need for him to legislate or hold office over them; he cannot yet do these things right for himself. He rises, however, and his importance is felt more and more. His labor is a necessity. Learning to use it aright, he will surely win all that he deserves. The healthful sentiment prevails everywhere, at the north as at the south, and with the late slave also, that to force his growth is as unfortunate to him as is misjudged parental assistance, which often keeps adult children from ever becoming self-reliant. The colored race in the south must be educated by the struggle for existence into self-maintenance. This training, like the material recuperation of the south, will require time, with patience and hopefulness.
The negro tends resistlessly to a fixed position in his own class. He does not wish to ride in the same railway-car with fine ladies and gentlemen, nor could you persuade him to send his children to a mixed school to be teased by white scholars. He will not be legislated out of his natural circle, where he feels comfortable, into one where he will be ill at case. He seeks for himself a separate home, school, church, and occupation, in all of which he can, at a distance, imitate the white, to whom he is ever looking up. The statute books may be covered with laws having a different purpose, but they will be as powerless to check the current of separation as prescribed rates of interest are impotent to keep down usury when money is dear. In a domestic world, a company and circle of his own, the negro will make a start for himself.
But the negro is grossly misunderstood. It is too generally forgotten that he is many centuries below the white in evolution. Slavery has elevated him far above the savagery of Africa, and introduced him to perhaps his only chance of civilization.
His future in the south is a mystery. Many of his best friends do not believe that he can hold all the great advantages that he has gained in the last ten years. The whites have been muzzled by hostile government. They were stunned, while the negro was stimulated, by emancipation. Their natural effort to hold on to the _ante bellum_ system has also helped the old slave. But, when small and diversified farming is fully developed, and accumulating capital brings in the higher industries, there may be a general need for more efficient and skilled labor than the average negro can supply. While he is forever safe politically against the white, he may not be economically safe.
In noticing the leading features of the New south, we have merely hinted at her rich natural endowments. We have deemed of more importance the character of her people, the new views and principles beginning to assert themselves, the great economical changes following and to follow the abolition of slavery, and the potent effects soon to be wrought by copious immigration. For upon these the future mainly depends.
The south is in a thorough and long transition. Her fields are to be made fertile and to smile beautifully with an infinite variety of products; her provisional labor is to be gradually supplanted by a permanent system; industries, trades, and manufactories are to be founded and everywhere multiplied; she is to have local organizations which will foster more of self-government; her common schools are to be reconstituted and rendered truly serviceable to all; and she has also her part to do in literature, science, and art, as well as in domestic and national politics. We must not be oversanguine in hope of her immediate progress; but we can certainly take courage, when we find that every one who perceptibly influences society by precept or by example--whether he be prominent like Gordon or Lamar, or only a humble planter leading the fore-row in his fields--is seeking for and finding the right path. These leaders must, in the nature of things, have a larger following every year. In due time, their children and their children's children will make the south of a piece with the more prosperous portions of our country.
* * * * *
[I intended to incorporate in the foregoing these two passages, but by some inadvertence they were not printed in their several places:
I said of Von Holst:
"Though he does not equal Mommsen's vivid delineation of the effects of Roman slavery, his work is in grateful contrast with most of the anti- and pro-slavery literature of America, by reason of his freedom from ethical declamation, and his presentation of the real evils of slavery, in the light of social, and especially economical, laws."
I also said of the negro:
"His flexibility; his receptivity to civilization, so different from the inveterate repugnance of the Indian; his satisfaction and almost complete freedom from discontent, insuring him against any violent change; the probably long necessity for his labor; are all great things in his favor."]
INDEX
[To decide what is the right handle to a passage not pointed to by a chapter title, and place it in an index where an average reader will expect it, is often very hard. An alphabetical list of proper names and rememberable words that are in or near passages which one may wish to look for is much more easy to make than a minute subject-index, and it supplies much surer clews. What an _Index Nominum_ does for the Latin or Greek scholar suggests the serviceableness of this Index.]
A.
Abbott, Ernest Hamlin, 404.
Abbott, Dr. Lyman, 347, 405.
Abolitionists, root-and-branch, 15, 16, 84 _sq._
Achæan league, 62.
Adams, Charles F., 28, 57, 58, 347.
Adams, John, 59, 142.
Adams, John Q., 20, 256.
Æschines, 69.
Æsop, 343.
Africa, "poor, oppressed, bleeding," 180, 185.
Alamance, 77.
Alexander, Tom, 277.
Altgeld, 112.
Amana community, 409.
Aristides, 293.
Aristocracies, natural, 90.
Aristotle, 37, 39, 106.
Arnold, Matthew, 196, 376.
Athens, 89.
Atlanta stockade, 381.
B.
Bacon, 144.
Bagehot, 437.
Barnett, Samuel, 279.
"Battle Hymn of the Republic," 205.
Bayard, 241, 244.
Beatrice, 195.
Beauregard, 293, 316.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 152.
Beecher, Dr. Lyman, 189.
Benjamin, 239.
Benton, 126.
Bentonville, 60.
Bible, the, 39.
Binney, 64.
Bishop, J. P., 141.
Blaine, 39.
Boley, 374, 408.
Bonnivard, 128.
Breckinridge, 266.
Brockhaus, 296, 360.
Brooks, Preston S., 237.
Brown, John, 264, 270, 352.
Brown, Joseph E., 317.
Brown, Prof. William Garrot, 274, 289, 369.
Buena Vista, 310.
Bunyan, 145.
Burgoyne, 317.
Burke, 41, 187, 204.
Butler, 244.
C.
Cæsar, 244, 343.
California, 40, 80.
Calhoun Correspondence, 100, 105, 123.
Calhoun, Floride, 99.
Calhoun, John C., 17, 18, 19, 22, 30, 40, 65 _sq._, 85, 89, 135, 143, 150, 152, 153, 158, 186, 208, 209, 212, 225, 226, 239, 247, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 299, 311, 351.
Casabianca, 319.
Cass, 239.
Catullus, 151, 278.
Centralizing and decentralizing forces in America, 5.
Channing, 196.
Chase (of Maryland), 54.
Chase, Salmon P., 21.
Choate, 146, 219.
Cicero, 15, 18, 38, 124, 144, 237.
Classics, ancient, 37.
Clay, 97, 246, 251.
Cleopatra, 19.
Cleveland, Grover, 325.
Clingman, 157.
Clinton, George, 96.
Cobb, Howell, 214, 229, 252, 253, 261, 285.
Cobb, T. R. R., 38, 39, 42, 48, 266.
Coleridge, 202.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, the Anglo-African composer, 25.
Comings, S. H., 368, 419.
Cone, 218, 222.
Confederate States, its evolution similar to that of the United States, 53; African slave-trade prohibited by its constitution, 55; its commissioners, 74.
Cornwallis, 317.
Cosmic force and law, 26, 211.
Cotton, 35.
Cowper, 136.
Crawford, George W., 246.
Crawford, William H., 218.
Crittenden compromise, 262.
Crocket, 144.
Cromwell, Oliver, 274, 281.
Cromwell, Richard, 297, 298.
Cumming, Major Joseph B., 35, 321, 347, 348.
Curran, 437.
Curtis, 70.
D.
Dahlonega mint, 231, 245.
Dane, Nathan, 64.
Dante, 36, 129, 144.
Darwin, 119.
Davidson, Miss, 322.
Davis, Jefferson, 18, 19, 30, 262, 272, 284, 349.
Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, 22, 238, 300, 301, 302, 305, 306, 308, 315, 318, 323, 327.
Decameron, 170, 383.
Decatur, 79.
Declaration of independence, 41, 42.
Delaware, 45, 56.
Del Mar, 109.
Demodocus, 384.
Demosthenes, 18, 69, 124, 144, 258.
De Quincey, 145.
Dillon, 442.
Dispensary, South Carolina, 111.
Dixon, 369.
Doolittle, 266.
Douglas, Stephen A., 21, 262, 264, 266.
Douglass, Frederick, 25, 362, 414.
Dred Scott decision, 91.
DuBois, Professor, 171, 193, 344, 362, 365, 382, 384, 386, 387.
Duer, 233.
Dumas, father and son, 25.
E.
"Edwards's Sabbath Manual," 198.
Elizabeth, Queen, 38.
Epaminondas, 273.
Erichsen, Hugo, 360.
Erskine, 218, 237.
Everett, Edward, 70.
F.
Falstaff, 248.
Farmville, 60.
Faust, 118.
Fessenden, 243.
Fire-eaters, 15.
First Manassas, 73, 315.
Force-bill of 1833, 65 _sq._
Forrest, 290-293, 294.
Fort Darling, 283.
Fort Donelson, 283.
Foster, F. C., 396.
Frankland, 80.
Franklin, battle of, 60.
Freed Slave, the statue, 202.
Free-labor and slave-labor systems, their antagonism, 45 _sq._, 49.
Freeman, 62.
Fuegians, 361.
G.
Gaius, 141.
Galphin claim, 245 _sq._
Gardner, James, 286.
Garrison, 88, 350.
Georgia Platform, 8-11, 183, 209, 215, 259, 260, 261, 263, 266.
Germany, 77.
Gethsemane, 197.
Giddings, 152.
Goethe, 144.
Gordon, 273, 450.
Grady, 326.
Grant, U. S., 20, 30, 293.
Greeley, 326, 441.
Green, 235.
Grinke, Archibald H., 392.
Grover, 227.
Grundy, Mrs., 274.
"Gulliver's Travels," 202.
H.
Hale, 141, 244.
Ham, descendants of, 38.
Hamilton, Alexander, 59, 64, 141, 247.
Hamilton, Governor, 65.
Hamlet, 319.
Hammond, 246.
Hampton, 393, 411.
Hampton, Wade, 129.
Hannibal, 258, 294.
Hans, the Berlin horse, 25.
Hardeman, S. H., 279.
Harlan, 240 _sq._
Harris, Joel Chandler, 408.
Harvey, 141.
Hastings, 60.
Hawkins, Sir John, 38.
Hayne, Robert Y., 30, 82, 144.
Hayti, 360, 366 _sq._
Heine, 197.
Henry, Patrick, 21, 64, 97, 272.
Herculaneum, 43.
Hill, Ben, 277.
Hill, Mrs. Ben, 326.
Hilliard, 254.
Hoar, Senator, 404.
Holsey, Bishop, 362, 422.
Homer, 144.
Horace, 343.
Horatius, 249.
Houmas land, 246.
Howard, General, 406.
Howell, 54.
Hunter, 238.
Huschke, 141.
Huse, Caleb, 289.
I.
Iowa contested election, 240 _sq._
Ireland, 51, 52, 437.
Iroquois, 77, 126.
_Isabel_ (steamer), 245.
Italy, 77.
J.
Jackson, President, 283.
Jackson, Stonewall, 91, 259.
Jamaica, negroes of, 367 _sq._, 379.
Jamestown, 36, 37, 345.
Jefferson, 41, 53, 54, 56, 59, 106, 142, 147, 436.
Jesus, 40, 128, 352.
Jevons, 107.
Johnson, Andrew, 307.
Johnston, Joseph E., 284, 316.
K.
Kansas, 209.
Kent, Chancellor, 65.
Kentucky, 186.
Kimball House fire, 280.
King's Mountain, 61.
Knight, Landon, 296, 303, 305, 312, 316, 317, 319.
Ku-Klux, 369, 423.
L.
"Lana Rookh," 187.
Lamar, 450.
Landon, Miss, 177.
Langdon, John, 96.
Lassigeray, 293.
"Laus Deo," 205.
Lear, 128, 202.
Lee, R. E., 20, 21, 128, 259, 276, 299, 356.
Lee, Stephen D., 328.
Legaré, 150.
Lewis, William H., 425.
Lexington, 77.
Lieber, 187.
Liebknecht, 112.
Lincoln, Abraham, 20, 21, 23, 30, 33, 64, 160, 169, 210, 262, 267.
"Little Giffen," 29.
Livy, 146.
Lloyd, H. D., 187.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 70, 72, 133, 134, 136, 137, 146, 155.
Logan, General, 441.
Lower class of negroes, 24-26, 410 _sq._
Lucanian ox, 200.
Lucifer, 273.
Lucretius, 87.
Lumpkin, 83, 219, 222.
M.
Madison, 56-58, 64, 68, 96, 133.
Mallory, 272.
Mann, Horace, 152.
Mansfield, 141.
Maoris, 413.
March, 146.
Marshall, C. J., 141.
Martial, 278.
Marx Carl, 107, 124.
Maryland, 54.
Mason, Jeremiah, 136.
Maximilian, 298.
McClellan, 294
McClung, 309.
McDonald, 261.
McDuffie, 222.
McKinley, President, 357.
McMaster, 70, 134.
Megareans, 265.
Mell, Dr., 277.
Memorial Day, 322.
Mexico, 51.
Michaelangelo, 129.
Mill, John Stuart, 106, 107, 265.
Miller, Kelley, 392.
Milton, 136.
Missouri question, 40, 84, 209.
Mitchell, John, 240.
Mommsen, 260, 450.
Monitor, 289.
Monterey, 309.
Morgan, Joshua, 223.
Morgan, Lewis H., 76, 126.
Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 359, 404.
N.
Napoleon, 297 _sq._, 310.
Nationalization, American, 4, 5, 61-83.
Nationalization, southern, 4, 6-14, 51-61, 436-438.
National Negro Business League, 402.
Nations, law of, 75.
Natural increase of slave property, 48, 49.
New England, 54, 59; environment of Webster therein, 147-152.
New Jersey, 56.
New York, 54.
Niagara, 251.
Noah's curse, 38.
North Carolina, 80, 109.
O.
Oedipus, 279.
Oregon, 80, 84, 101, 226.
P.
Pace, J. M., 322.
Page, Thomas Nelson, 165, 384.
Parker, Theodore, 152.
Parsons, Prof. Frank, 109.
Pennsylvania, 54.
Pennsylvania ladies, two, 331.
Peonage decision, 373.
Pericles, 110, 265.
Philippine, the, 26.
Phillips, Wendell, 21, 88, 274, 356.
Pickett, 19.
Pierce, Bishop, 277.
Pierce, President, 299.
_Pilgrim, The_, 296.
"Pilgrim's Progress," 202.
Pingree, 112.
Pinkney, Gustavus M., 98, 112, 119.
Pinkney, William, 41, 79.
Plato, 37, 106, 144.
Plautus, 155, 195.
Pliny, 39.
Poe, 143, 150.
Polk, President, 103.
Pompeii, 43.
Pompey, 212.
Pope, 136.
Post, Louis F., 25, 403, 406.
Prentiss, S. S., 305.
Primary, Georgia, 111.
Primary, South Carolina, 111.
Princeton, 331.
Propontic, 259.
Prynne, Hester, 329.
Pugh, 239.
Q.
Quintilian, 37.
R.
Race question, 23-26.
Randolph, John, 69, 97, 222.
Ransy Sniffles, 87.
Rebellion, 81.
Reed, of South Carolina, 54.
Renascence, 36, 41.
"Republic of Republics," 64, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74.
Rhode Island, 56, 80.
Rhodes, James Ford, 17.
Ricardo, 108, 109, 286.
Roman law as to slavery, 42.
Roosevelt, President, 33, 425.
Ruskin, 202.
S.
Saint Pierre, 43.
Savage, 196.
Sawyer, 307.
Schurz, Carl, 134.
Scipio, 294.
Scott, General, 309.
Scribner, Anne, 406.
Sellers, Mulberry, 288.
Seneca, 37.
Seward, William H., 21, 22, 236.
Shakspeare, 30, 136, 138, 144, 278.
Sharpsburg, 273.
Sherman, General, 346.
Shiloh, 283.
Shirley, 136.
Simmons, 243.
Simonides, 171.
Slavery. (See chaps. ii., iii., x., xiv.)
Slavery, ancient contrasted with southern, 155 _sq._, 432.
Slave-trade, African, 46.
Smith, Adam, 107.
Smith, James M., 391.
Smith, W. B., 365.
Socrates, 196.
South Carolina, 54, 90, 111.
Southerners and northerners contrasted, 59-61.
Southern Mutual Fire Insurance Co., 225.
Spaight, 54.
Spencer, Herbert, 144.
Starke, W. Pinkney, 93, 94, 97, 100.
State, for the negroes, 413 _sq._
Staunton, 255.
Stephens, A. H., 21, 55, 69, 71, 82, 99, 106, 219, 221, 227, 232, 249, 251, 252, 254, 257, 264, 266, 268, 285, 286 _sq._, 290, 306, 430.
Story, 64.
Stovall, 222, 290.
Stowe, Mrs., 185, 187, 189, 197, 333.
Stuart, J. E. B., 294.
Sulla, 244.
Sullivan, 106.
Summer, Charles, 89, 152, 356.
Summer, Colonel, 312.
Surratt, Mrs., 298.
Switzerland, 77.
T.
Taylor, Dick, 273.
Taylor, Edward B., 364, 383.
Territories, intersectional strife over, 3, 46-49.
Texas, 51, 80, 101.
"The Fork," 397.
Thomas, Thomas W., 266.
Thomas, William Hannibal, 383.
Thucydides, 27.
Thurston, 381.
Ticknor, Dr., 29.
Tillinghast, 163, 166, 194, 361, 379, 380, 389, 392, 393, 411.
Timrod, 29, 322.
Titania, 198.
Tobacco, 35, 55.
Togoland, 344.
Toombs, 18, 19, 30, 32, 41, 90, 99, 130-135, 150, 164, 186, 191, 198, 208, 209, 284, 290, 292, 313, 380.
Toucey, 238.
Toussaint, 366.
Town-meeting, 90, 436.
Trent, 119.
Troup, 256.
Troy, 294.
Turner, Bishop, 416.
Tuskegee, 344, 411.
Tyrtæus, 29.
U.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 40, 161 _sq._
Upper class of negroes, 24, 25, 370.
Upson, Frank L., 43.
V.
Van Buren, 230.
Vanderslice, 27.
Vergil, 145.
Vicksburg, 283.
Virginia, 35, 36, 45, 54, 59, 153.
Von Holst, 70, 101, 104, 119, 122, 123, 124, 439, 450.
W.
Waddell, James, 262.
Waddell, Moses, 93, 94.
Wade, 239, 243, 266.
Walker, J. B. A., 368.
Washington, Booker, 25, 380, 387, 402, 409, 411, 414, 415, 417, 419, 420.
Washington, Mrs. Booker, 395.
Washington, George, 19, 53, 56, 64, 115, 118, 282, 440.
Waterloo, 60.
Watson, Tom, 224.
Webster, Daniel, 19, 30, 64, 65 _sq._, 82, 83, 85, 100, 105, 113, 118, 120, 121, 247, 255, 266, 275 _sq._, 304, 307.
Wendell, Prof. Barrett, 28-30, 161, 162, 163, 206.
West Territory, 54.
White labor class, 336 _sq._
Whittier, 29, 88, 406.
Wilfer, Reginald, 207.
Willcox, Professor, 390, 403.
Wilmot proviso, 155, 227.
Wilson, General, 308.
Winthrop, 252.
Wirt, 141.
Wirz, 298.
Wright, Richard R., 344, 406.
Wright, Silas, 242.
Wyeth, 291.
Wynne, John, 156.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Where Black Rules White," article by Hugo Erichsen, in _The Pilgrim_ for July, 1905.
[2] De Officiis, 1, § 89.
[3] Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol. i. 579-583.
[4] Gettysburg, 164, 165.
[5] Quoted by himself in his Charleston speech, mentioned later on.
[6] Speech at the banquet of the New England Society of Charleston, S. C.
[7] A Literary History of America, 345.
[8] _Id._ 346.
[9] _Id._ 489.
[10] A Literary History of America, 494, 495.
[11] Major Joseph B. Cumming, speaking to the toast, "New Ideas, New Departures, New South," at fourteenth annual dinner of New England Society of Charleston, S. C., December 22, 1893.
[12] See Cobb, Slavery, xcvii, xcviii, for relevant citations. Chaps. V. and VI. of the Historical Sketch, the former entitled "Slavery in Greece," and the latter, "Slavery among the Romans" (pp. lix-xcviii), are very readable, learned, and adequate treatments of their respective subjects.
[13] Cobb, Slavery, cxii.
[14] _Id._
[15] Aristotle maintained the justice of wars undertaken to procure slaves. See Cobb, Slavery, xii, foot-note 3, for references.
[16] "Pliny compares them to the drones among the bees, to be forced to labor, even as the drones are compelled." _Id._ xcviii.
[17] In his chapter entitled "Slavery among the Jews" Mr. Cobb cites most of the important passages. _Id._ xxxviii _sq._
[18] Twenty Years in Congress, vol. i. I.
[19] 1, 2, 2.
[20] _Id._ 1, 3, 1-2.
[21] Dig. 1, 1, 4, where, in an excerpt from Ulpian, it is said that all human beings are _jure naturali_ (that is, by the law of nature) born free.
We of to-day must not regard the last three passages cited from the Corpus Juris Civilis as particularly reprehending the property of the master in his slave. Cicero asserts that there is no private property whatever according to the law of nature; that according to that law all things are common property. He details some of the ways by which private appropriation is made, such as long holding, entry into vacant lands, capture in war, acquisition by contract, etc. According to this, a prisoner of war stood on the same footing as a horse captured from the enemy. By the law of nature there could be private property in neither. But this law of nature was really repealed by the _jus gentium_, under which both horse and prisoner alike became private property. If another took either the horse or slave away from the owner, he would--to use Cicero's language--violate the law of human society. De Officiis Lib. 1. cap. 7, §§ 20, 21.
[22] Inst. 1, 8, 1. When Mr. Cobb says that there is "but one voice in the Digest and Code," book cited, xcviii, meaning that they give no countenance to slavery, the statement is misleading.
[23] In the first chapter of his History of England Macaulay ascribes this result to moral causes, and to religion as chief agent. He is only one of many acute historians who overlook the play of economical forces.
[24] Cobb, Slavery, ccxviii (foot-note).
[25] See p. 437 _infra_, where I have compared the struggle of Ireland for autonomy during the last half of the eighteenth century with that of the south narrated in this book.
[26] Charleston Address mentioned above, 15.
[27] Hist. of Fed. Gov., 2d ed., 59.
[28] _Id._ 2.
[29] See the Republic of Republics, 4th ed. The references in the copious index, under the names Dane, Henry, Story, Webster (Daniel, not Noah), will suffice to put the student in the way to finding ample support of the statements in the text.
[30] See Republic of Republics, 204-212 (chap. viii. of Part III.) entitled "Daniel Webster's Masterpiece of Criticism," for copious proofs of the statements made in the text. Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, and Franklin are cited, and some eight or nine quotations from Washington are made. The chapter is also instructive in showing State-rights utterances of Webster made before and after the speech.
[31] See Stephens, War between the States, vol. i. 388, 389-392, 397-8; and Republic of Republics, 4th ed., 207-211.
[32] War between the States, two volumes.
[33] The Republic of Republics; or, American Federal Liberty. By P. C. Centz, Barrister, 4th ed., Boston, 1881. See what I said of it in 1882, Am. Law Studies, §§ 943, 944. Subsequent examination and comparison have given me a still higher opinion of this book; which in its well-digested presentation of evidence exhaustively collected, and complete demonstration of its main proposition, to wit, that in the opinion of the draftsmen, also of all the advocates of the constitution, and of the people ratifying, the States were sovereign before adoption and would so remain afterwards, is unique, and far foremost, in the literature of the subject. Compare this strong statement of Henry Cabot Lodge, uttered in 1883:
"When the constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment by the States and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised." Daniel Webster, 176.
[34] Republic of Republics, 4th ed., 23. The entire chapter entitled "Secession and Coercion," _id._ 22-27, will repay consideration, setting forth as it does what according to the author the brothers on each side ought to have done under the law of nations.
[35] Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society, 103.
[36] Morgan, Ancient Society, 132.
[37] "It used to be a remark often made by Chief Justice Lumpkin, who was a man himself of wonderful genius, profound learning, and the first of his State, that Webster was always foremost amongst those with whom he acted on any question, and that even in books of selected pieces, whenever selections were made from Webster, these were the best in the book." A. H. Stephens, War between the States, vol. i. 336.
[38] Ransy Sniffles is a character in Georgia Scenes, who has long been a proverb in the south for one who habitually provokes personal encounters among his neighbors.
[39] See _infra_, p. 436.
[40] See what he said February 20, 1860, in the United States senate, to Clark, repeating the charge, as reported in the "Globe."
[41] W. Pinkney Starke, Account of Calhoun's Early Life, Calhoun Correspondence, 69.
[42] The inscription on her tombstone states--so I have been informed--that she died in May, 1802. In a short while afterwards he put the mother of his future wife in her place and bestowed on her the highest filial love.
[43] W. Pinkney Starke, Account of Calhoun's Early Life, Calhoun Correspondence, 78.
[44] Starke's Account of Calhoun's Early Life, Calhoun Correspondence, 87.
[45] Life of John C. Calhoun. By Gutasvus M. Pinkney, of the Charleston, S. C., Bar, Charleston, S. C., 1903.
[46] Calhoun Correspondence, 88.
[47] Von Holst, John C. Calhoun, 41.
[48] War between the States, vol. i. 341.
[49] A Disquisition on Government, and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, Works, vol. i.
[50] Works, vol. i. (A Disquisition on Government) 72.
[51] They were made in the United States Senate, one, September 19, 1837, on the bill authorizing issue of treasury notes; the other, October 3, 1837, on his amendment of the bill just mentioned.
[52] His "Barbara Villiers" and his "History of Money in America" are very important. But his most valuable addition to the few books which have taught true monetary doctrine is his "Science of Money." While in this he does not state the fundamental principle of good money as clearly as Calhoun does, yet he assumes it most accurately and builds upon it everywhere.
[53] "Rational Money," published by C. F. Taylor, 1520 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. The author does not show the deep insight and genial originality of Calhoun and Del Mar; but he has presented the entire subject with a judgment so sane in accepting the true and rejecting the false in the belonging theory, that the book is the very best of existing compilations.
[54] To be nominated in the South Carolina primary, a candidate for governor or any other State place must receive a majority in the whole State, one for congress a majority in the district, one for a county place a majority in the county. Where no candidate receives a majority a new primary is held only to decide between the two who got the largest vote. The primary first mentioned is a State primary, held on the last Tuesday of August. At this date, the crop--to use planting parlance--having been laid by for some six weeks, the voters have had ample opportunity from reading the papers, talks with one another, and hearing speeches to inform themselves fully. Just across the Savannah in Georgia, the State democratic executive committee, so called, being the faithful organ of the railroads, has since 1898 put the primary in the early days of June, in busiest crop-time. This precludes any real canvass. It also keeps thousands from voting; and so the always full turnout of railroad regulars and workers--which is but a relatively small portion of the body of electors--wins a plurality. The committee allows a plurality to nominate, as of course a plurality can be had more easily than a majority. To be sure of the State senate, nominations to it are made by a convention instead of a primary. And conventions in the congressional districts nominate candidates for the lower house.
Contrasting the results--in South Carolina nomination is really the voice of the people; in Georgia the people seem to get, while the railroads really get, the governor, and, as everybody now expects, the railroads and liquor men always have at least twenty-three of the forty-four senators.
I believe that the Swiss-like grip of the people of South Carolina upon their liberties, shaming Georgia so greatly as it does, is mainly due to the influence of Calhoun. That influence is still benignly powerful, even where unrecognized.
I think that if the dispensary law were so altered as to give each county the purchase of its liquor by, say, its supervisor, nominated by this primary, the opportunity of graft, now discrediting the administration of the law with many, would be effectually closed. There would then be everywhere a trustworthy official, of their own election, to keep the people advised as to proper prices and cost. It would be to lose all chance of re-election for the official to cheat the public by colluding with the liquor sellers.
[55] Life of John C. Calhoun, 225-229.
[56] _Id._
[57] Heyward thus translates: "Reason and good sense express themselves with little art. And when you are seriously intent on saying something, is it necessary to hunt for words?"
[58] Von Holst, John C. Calhoun, 133.
[59] _Id._ 141.
[60] Von Holst, John C. Calhoun, 148.
[61] As illustrating his anti-tariff progress, see what he says in his letter of July, 1828, to James Monroe, Correspondence, 266; what in that to his relative, Noble, of January, 1829, _id._ 269, 270; in that to Samuel L. Gouvernour, of February, 1832, _id._ 310, 311; and what as to benefit from having concentrated opinions in south, in that to his brother-in-law, _id._ 313, 314.
[62] Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, Works, vol. i. 392.
[63] Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, Works, vol. i. 393.
[64] Ancient Society, 147, 148.
[65] A Disquisition on Government, Works, vol. i. 92-96. Compare for Calhoun's treatment Benton's report of his conversations, and the pertinent excerpts he gives from Calhoun's speech in the United States Senate of February 15 and 16, 1833, Thirty Years' View, vol. i. 335 _sq._
[66] Daniel Webster, 50.
[67] _Id._ 45, 46.
[68] _Id._ 46.
[69] _Id._ 48.
[70] In his _Encyclopedia Americana_ article Mr. Carl Schurz strains as hard as Mr. Lodge does in his biography to conceal the real position of Webster. I commend the homespun reasoning of this paragraph to all such.
[71] Daniel Webster, 59.
[72] McMaster, Daniel Webster, 88.
[73] Daniel Webster, 52.
[74] Dartmouth College Causes.--Mr. Lodge's narrative, Daniel Webster, 74-98--is a very helpful introduction to the book just mentioned.
[75] Lodge, Daniel Webster, 22.
[76] _Id._ 22.
[77] The twelve words meant are, "The congress shall have power to regulate commerce among the several States."
[78] Huschke ought to have stated this fact at page 19 of his edition of Gaius, in order to give the latter his full posthumous glory.
[79] We support our statement in this sentence by quoting below in this footnote two passages which stand a page or two apart in the Plymouth oration, italicizing one word in the former, and one word and a clause in the other, which, if Webster had taken accurate note of the intellectual ferment then active throughout all New England, he would have made much stronger:
"We may flatter ourselves that the means of education at present enjoyed in New England are not only adequate to the diffusion of the elements of knowledge among all classes, but sufficient also for _respectable_ attainments in literature and the sciences."
"With nothing in our past history to discourage us, and with _something_ in our present condition and prospects to animate us, let us hope, that, as it is our fortune to live in an age when we may behold a wonderful advancement of the country in all its other great interests, _we may see also equal progress and success attend the cause of letters_."
[80] Daniel Webster, 318-321.
[81] _Ante_, 28-30.
[82] Literary History of America, 354.
[83] _Id._
[84] Consider his virtual confession when Mrs. Davis good humoredly taxes him with saying in his speeches hard things of slavery which he knew from actual observation to be fictions. Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol. i. 581.
[85] Lecture in Tremont Temple, Stephens, War between the States, vol. i. 637, 638 (Appendix G).
[86] The Negro in Africa and America, by Alexander Tillinghast, M. A., N. Y., 1902.
This really scientific work, very complete though very brief, is as indispensable to whomsoever would enlighten the country upon the race question, as is the latest and best text-book to the lawyer considering a case under the law treated therein.
Mr. Page's "The Negro: The Southerner's Problem," N. Y., 1904, has not the scientific merit of the last. But it most ably advocates the side generally taken by the south.
Both books are free from blinding passion and prejudice.
[87] Book cited, 88. The italics are mine.
[88] _Id._ 88.
[89] The Negro in Africa and America, 88, 89. Italics mine, again.
[90] Uncle Tom's Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. i. p. xviii.
[91] These quotations from The Author's Introduction, Riverside ed., lviii, lix. The last sentence italicized by me.
[92] Tremont Temple Lecture, Stephens, War between the States, vol. i. 641. The italics are mine.
[93] Professor DuBois, born in 1868, in New England, whose writings show that his mind has been soaked to saturation in abolition misstatement and bitterness, and that consequently he is utterly unfamiliar with either the average negro slave of the south and the conditions and effects of slavery in the section, attributes the present unchastity of the negroes to the frequent separation of man and wife by the master. Here is what he says:
"The plague-spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development, nor the fruit of emancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master's consent, took up with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with. If now the master needed Sam's work in another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master's interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years." The Souls of Black Folk, 142.
This statement is utterly untrue, as Professor DuBois can easily find out from thousands of most credible witnesses. I never knew of a single such separation. Of course, I will not say that there were none at all. But I do say, in contradiction of his assertion, as flat as contradiction can be, that the separations which he describes were not common. Every impartial investigator who has formed his opinion from the actual evidence knows that the unchastity of the negro slave of America was an inheritance from Africa. I do not dispute the assertion often made that there were and are still chaste negro tribes of that continent. But our negroes did not come from them. They came from the West Africans, accurately described above in citations from Mr. Tillinghast.
[94] Uncle Tom's Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. i. p. lxxxix _sq._
[95] Uncle Tom's Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. ii. 273.
[96] Georgians, 128.
[97] The Life of Robert Toombs, 29-49 (New York, Cassell Pub. Co.).
[98] Bethany, A Story of the Old South, 10 _sq._
[99] Johnston and Browne's Life of A. H. Stephens, 218.
[100] Toombs thus anticipates the trenchant but kindly criticism by Woodrow Wilson of congressional ways of governing. Congressional Gov. 58-192, and in other places.
[101] What he says July 29, 1857, on death of Preston S. Brooks is a good example of the forced and labored style of his set speeches. Stephens often said that his set speeches were failures. And unless they were made, as that on the invasion of States, that on the duty of congress to protect slavery in the Territories, and his justification of secession, January 7, 1861, under the excitement of a great cause, working the same effect upon him as the ardor of extemporaneous effort, his set speeches are below the mark. And I wish he had more carefully revised the three just mentioned, following the example of Cicero, Erskine and Webster, who habitually corrected and improved their words after they had been spoken. He does not seem to have given his good speeches--the extemporaneous ones--any systematic correction. Of all speakers and orators I ever knew or heard of, he has used the file the least. It is my belief that he did not know how to use it. Had he but polished just some of his best unpremeditated efforts; as for instances his first speech for the retired naval officers; his most important utterances under various heads of internal improvements; his humorous anti-pension harangues; and his titanic struggle in vain with his own party to keep Harlan seated--what a find they would be for the school speech books of the future! His lecture on slavery, delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24, 1859,--a good copy of which is given by Stephens (The War between the States, vol. i. 625-647)--is the best specimen extant, within my knowledge, of his deliberate style. If I may make such a distinction, it was carefully revised, but never corrected. The reader will find it, I believe, the very ablest of all the many defences of slavery in the south.
Mrs. Davis states that during the times of excitement concerning the compromise of 1850, "He [Toombs] would sit with one hand full of the reporter's notes of his speeches, for correction," with a French play in the other, over which he was roaring with laughter. (Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol. i. 411.) As his speech of December 13, 1849, and the Hamilcar speech of June next following, need very little correction, I incline to believe that he did at least try to revise them. Naturally leading such a novel movement as he then was--it will be fully explained a little later on--he would desire to send forth his views in only carefully considered words, and probably he corrected the proofs of the two speeches just mentioned with something like diligence. In his pleadings, law-briefs, sketches of proposed statutes, letters, etc., of which I saw much in his last years, he was so palpably indifferent towards improving his first draft that one might know it came from lifelong habit.
[102] Third Session, 240-244.
[103] _Globe_, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., Appendix, 360 (I am thus particular in giving this reference, from a sense of justice to the memory of George W. Crawford, which is now and then ignorantly aspersed because of the Galphin claim).
[104] See his argument, May 25, 1858, for putting duties on the home valuation of imports; note also how familiar he is with trade, the motive of smuggling, the relation of exchange; also what he says of the tariff of 1857, _Globe_, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., 466, 467, 470. For his mastery of trade and commerce, see what he says June 9, 1858, especially pp. 2832-2834.
[105] Stephens, War between the States, vol. ii. 338.
[106] War between the States, vol. ii. 186.
[107] Address in the Supreme Court of Georgia, March 9, 1886.
[108] War between the States, vol. ii. 217.
[109] Waddell, Life of Linton Stephens, 237.
[110] The rare perfection of Catullus's spontaneous poetic expression is something like adequately represented in two quotations made by Baehrens, one from Niebuhr, and the other from Macaulay, especially in the former. Catulli Veronensis, Liber II. 42.
[111] War Between the States, vol. ii. 329-333.
[112] Pleasant A. Stovall, The Life of Robert Toombs, 218.
[113] The War between the States, vol. ii. 781 (Appendix).
[114] The supplies for the Confederate Army, How they were obtained in Europe and How paid for.--Personal Reminiscences and Unpublished history. By Caleb Huse, Major and Purchasing Agent, C. S. A. Boston, Press of T. R. Marvin & Son, 1904.
I commend this narrative to Professor Brown. Should he study it he will have cause to retract what he has written (The Lower South in American History, 164) in disparagement of this resource. Had Toombs, or Stephens, or Cobb been president and represented by such an extraordinarily able agent, the Confederate States would have got ironclads, broken the blockade, kept out invaders, and had a money that would have held its own much better than the greenbacks unsustained by cotton or anything like it. From what I know of these men I am sure the right agent would have been found.
[115] Book cited, 164, 165.
[116] Stovall, Life of Robert Toombs, 226.
[117] Wyeth, Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, 268, 269.
[118] _Id._ 271.
[119] See his 14th chapter.
[120] "I see a vision of awful shapes--mighty presences of gods arrayed against Troy." _Æneid_, II. 622-23, Transl. by JOHN CONINGTON, _Writings_, II., Longmans, Green & Co. (1872).
[121] In six consecutive numbers of the _Pilgrim_, beginning with that of October, 1903. This is a monthly, edited by Willis J. Abbot, and published by the Pilgrim Magazine Co., _Ltd._, Battle Creek, Mich.
[122] Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol. i. 59.
[123] Memoir, vol. i. 86.
[124] _Id._ 52, 53.
[125] Memoir, _Id._ vol. i. 59, 60.
[126] Mrs. Davis tells all the details most delightfully; Memoir, vol. i. 207-212.
[127] Memoir, vol. i. 214, 215. Compare what Stephens says of the speech made by President Davis at the African church in Richmond in February, 1865, just after the return of our Commissioners who had sought in vain for terms of peace which the south could consider. We give the part of the passage pertinent here.
"The newspaper sketches of that speech were meagre, as well as inaccurate ... and ... came far short of so presenting its substance even, as to give those who did not hear it anything like an adequate conception of its full force and power. It was not only bold, undaunted, and confident in tone, but had that loftiness of sentiment and rare form of expression, as well as magnetic influence in its delivery, by which the passions of the people are moved to their profoundest depths, and roused to the highest pitch of excitement. Many who had heard this Master of Oratory in his most brilliant displays in the senate and on the hustings, said they never before saw him so really majestic. The occasion, and the effects of the speech, as well as all the circumstances under which it was made, caused the minds of not a few to revert to like appeals by Rienzi and Demosthenes." War between the States, vol. ii. 623, 824.
[128] Memoir, vol. i. 146, 147.
[129] Landon Knight, "The Real Jefferson Davis," already cited.
[130] Landon Knight, "The Real Jefferson Davis."
[131] Mrs. Davis's Memoir, vol. i. 392.
[132] In his fourth chapter.
[133] Memoir, vol. ii. 18.
[134] _Id._ 32, 33.
[135] Memoir, vol. ii. 180-183.
[136] Mr. Landon Knight is happy in showing the fidelity, diligence, courage, and unsurpassed conscientiousness, of Mr. Davis in his presidency, and especially how he bore himself amid the multiplying disasters of the last two years.
[137] "We embraced the cause [i. e., of the Confederate States] in the spirit of lovers. True lovers all were we--and what true lover ever loved less because the grave had closed over the dear and radiant form?--And so we--we, at least, who as men and women inhaled the true spirit of that momentous time--come together on these occasions not only with the fresh new flowers in our hands, but with the old memories in our thoughts and the old, but ever fresh, lover spirit in our hearts, and seek to make these occasions not unworthy of the cause we loved unselfishly and of these its sleeping defenders." Major Joseph B. Cumming, in introducing General Butler, orator of the day, when the Confederate soldiers' graves were decorated at the Augusta (Ga.) cemetery in 1895.
[138] The celebration at Covington, Georgia, April 26, 1866, was complete. My friend Hon. J. M. Pace has just shown me a copy of the local newspaper issued the next day, containing an account of the ceremony and the rarely appropriate address which he made as part thereof. The fact is that the observance of Memorial Day commenced everywhere in the south at the time just mentioned.
[139] Encyc. Americana, article "Ant."
[140] Uncle Tom's Cabin and Key, vol. i. 206 (Riverside ed.).
[141] Says John Mitchell: "The Southern States, which have made rapid progress, especially in cotton manufacturing, have, as a general rule, not responded to the demand for a shorter working-day--the south lacking effective labor organizations to compel such legislation." (Organized Labor, 122.) He might have said the same as to the desired prohibition of child labor.
[142] _Infra_, pp. 431-438.
[143] The Souls of Black Folk, 254.
[144] In an address mentioned in the next footnote Major Joseph B. Cumming rightly insists that this is the proper name for what is called "the American Civil War" with some show of justification, and "the war of rebellion" without any justification whatever.
[145] Address of Major Joseph B. Cumming, entitled "The Great War," before Camp 435 of United Confederate Veterans, Augusta, Ga., Memorial Day, 1902.
[146] I Timothy vi. 1-4. I have quoted the Twentieth Century Testament because of its extremely faithful version. Of course the italics are mine.
[147] "Where Black Rules White," by Hugo Erichsen, in the _Pilgrim_ for July, 1905, deserves the title "Hayti As It Is." The Americana article ought to be conspicuously labelled "Hayti Whitewashed."
[148] Bureau of Labor Bulletin, No. 48, September, 1903, pp. 1006, 1013, 1019.
[149] _Id._ 1020.
[150] Bishop Lucius H. Holsey, D.D., of the colored M. E. Church, is much more in touch and sympathy with the negro masses than Professor DuBois. Here is something recently said by him:
"_As long as the two races live in the same territory in immediate contact, their relations will be such as to intermingle in that degree that half-bloods, quarter-bloods and a mongrel progeny will result._ This is not only going on now, but is destined to annihilate the true typical ante-bellum negro type, and put in his place a stronger, a longer lived, and a more Anglo-Saxon-like homogeneous race. In other words, the negro to come will not be the negro of the emancipation proclamation, but he will be the Anglo-Saxonized Afro-American. It seems true, as has been said, 'No race can look the Anglo-Saxon in the face and live.' Certainly no other race can hold its own in his immediate presence. Being in immediate contact and underrating the mental and moral virtues of others and exercising a sovereignty over them, his opportunities are enlarged to make other races his own in consanguinity. This he never fails to do." Address before the National Sociological Society at the Lincoln Temple Congregational Church, The Possibilities of the Negro in Symposium, 107 (Atlanta, Ga.).
In the same address, just a little above the quotation just made, this occurs: "Legal intermarriage in the south, although not wrong in its consummation, is a matter as yet undebatable, and belongs only to the future." _Id._ 107.
These words of Bishop Holsey are weighty proof that the negroes strongly desire and expect amalgamation.
[151] Edward B. Taylor, _The Outlook_, July 16, 1904, p. 670.
[152] The Souls of Black Folk, 106.
[153] See Exodus xxii. 16.
[154] The Souls of Black Folk, 106.
[155] May 6, 1905. Having finished my work I read two days ago, "The Color Line. A Brief in behalf of the Unborn." By William Benjamin Smith, N. Y., 1905. It ably and vividly explains the transcendent importance of keeping the blood of Caucasians in America uncontaminated with that of the African, and demonstrates that to do this the color line must be rigidly maintained between negroid as well as coal-black, on one side, and white on the other. The utter impossibility of making the man of a particular race like the man of another extremely remote one by even the most careful education is shown with startling effect. The inability of the black to hold his own against white competition, and his gradual and sure expulsion is proved by overwhelming evidence. The book is useful as an introduction to all the literature of the subject. The only fault that I note is its excessive warmth and combativeness--especially in the first half. With the dispassionate serenity of Mr. Tillinghast, it would have been perfect.
[156] The quotations which immediately follow are from a letter of J. B. A. Walker, dated Tuskegee, Ala., July 27, 1904, written to S. H. Comings, who has kindly permitted me to make use of it.
[157] Lower South in Am. Hist. 223. When Professor Brown read "The Clansman" doubtless his hesitation ended.
[158] Clyatt _v._ United States, March 13, 1905.
[159] Possibly this is the village of Boley, mentioned in the next chapter.
[160] They are Stephen, a slave, _v._ State, 2 Ga. 225; Jesse, a slave, _v._ State, 20 Ga. 161.
[161] See Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and America, 10-14.
[162] New Encyc. Britan., Article, "Jamaica."
[163] Working with the Hands, 40.
[164] Tillinghast, book cited above, 180, 181. Consider the quotation there made from Thurston, the negro manager, in which he asserts that it is only by this means that negro operatives can be made to do good work.
[165] Souls of Black Folk, 9.
[166] During the years after the war until the end of 1881, when I came to Atlanta, I kept my eye upon the negro preachers in the country. Whenever I could closely observe one and had opportunity of sifting members of his congregation, I generally found him to be _vir gregis_. My acquaintances tell me that there has been no perceptible change. Compare what Mr. Edward B. Taylor, a northern man, now residing in Columbia, S. C., says of "the immoral negro preacher" in _The Outlook_ of July 16, 1904.
[167] William Hannibal Thomas, a negro of Massachusetts, says the same as to the early corruption of children and "marital immoralities" both of the poor, the ignorant, and the degraded among the freed people, and also of those who assume to be educated and refined. Quoted by Mr. Page, The Negro; The Southerner's Problem, 82-84.
[168] Encyc. Am. Article, "Negro in America."
[169] Noticing Mr. Page's book just mentioned, Professor DuBois treats William Hannibal Thomas as utterly unworthy of credit. All of us in the south familiar with negroes know that Thomas's statement quoted by Mr. Page is unqualifiedly true.
[170] That part of Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau Census, Bulletin 8, called "The Negro Farmer," is by him. Consider the extravagant claims made therein for the magnitude of negro farming in the United States in the comment on Table xxxv. p. 92. Professor DuBois is also author of the "Negro Landholder of Georgia," Bulletin of Department of Labor, No. 35, July, 1901.
[171] Bulletin 8, before cited, 75.
[172] Article, "Negro Education," Encyclopedia Americana.
[173] Professor DuBois, Bulletin 8, cited above, 73.
[174] _Id._ 77.
[175] Book cited, 183-185.
[176] _Id._ 184.
[177] Book cited, 184.
[178] _Id._ 184.
[179] Bureau of Statistics--Bulletin No. 28, p. 71.
[180] _Id._ 72.
[181] Extract from a letter of Hon. James M. Smith to the author. He is, I believe, the largest planter in Georgia. His lands lie in the adjoining edges of Oglethorpe county, which is in the Black Belt, and of Madison county, which is outside. From his experience, and because of the great accuracy of his observation, which I have noted for nearly forty years, I regard him as better qualified than any one else who can be suggested, to give a correct opinion on the subjects he deals with in the quotation. Especially do I emphasize his exceptional advantages for comparing whites and negroes as farmers, tenants, croppers, and laborers for standing wages, in making cotton.
[182] Book cited above, 121, 122.
[183] The Voice of the Negro, September, 1904 (Atlanta, Ga.)--Consider picture of "Board of Directors of the True Reformers' Bank, Richmond, Va.," in number of same magazine for November, 1904. These directors are nine in all, and there is but one who is decidedly black. Six of them look to be more than three-quarters white. The number for March, 1905, contains a sketch of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Ph.D., stating that the Professor's ancestry is largely white and his color a rich brown. The picture of his mother shows her hair to be straight and her complexion bright.
[184] Book cited above, 213-215.
[185] The Voice of the Negro, October, 1904, p. 435.
[186] Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of the Census, Bulletin 8, Negroes in the United States, p. 13.
[187] I have in mind his late articles in the _Outlook_.
[188] See his "Problems of the Present South."
[189] Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. ii. 60-62.
[190] By Anne Scribner, and copied in the _Public_ of September 17, 1904, from the Chicago _Evening Post_.
[191] The passage with the context quoted by Dr. Booker Washington, "Working with the Hands," 238.
[192] Issue of October 15, 1904.
[193] Encyclopedia Americana, Article "Negro Education."
[194] But the most drastic provisions to keep the greedy whites from preying upon the negroes as they did upon the Indians most be adopted, such as permitting the negro State to tax without limit whites owning property or doing business therein. This will prevent the result anticipated by Booker Washington.
[195] The best thing upon the joint education of hand and brain known to me is "Pagan _vs._ Christian Civilization," by S. H. Comings (Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago). The title does not indicate, as it ought to do, the special purpose of the book to show that to give the scholar expertness with his hands at the first and thus develop his self-supporting ability is far better than to cram his memory. What the author says in maintenance of his proposition, that our industrial schools should be operated upon a plan that will make the scholar pay as he goes, out of his own work, for his subsistence and expense of education during the entire course, deserves respectful and thoughtful consideration. In its brevity, and at the same time variety and fulness, coming as it does at the beginning of a new era, it reminds me of Sullivan's tract which some years ago started the American agitation for direct legislation, with store of examples and exposition almost sufficient for its entire needs.
The above had been written when Booker Washington's "Working with the Hands" came along. The well-chosen title informs accurately as to the subject of the book. Its scope covers working with the hands from its beginning in childhood to the close of life. As illustration of his principles Dr. Washington circumstantially tells of the beneficent industrial and moral training given at Tuskegee, in all its many departments, to children, youth, and adults, in everything which it is important that a negro of either sex should know how to do. Besides its wisdom, its attention-commanding and interest-exciting style deserves high commendation. Any reader longing for the day of real education to dawn who opens the book will go to the end, without skipping, in a delightful gallop. It is my conviction that it will be of far more advantage to the white industrial and technological schools than to those for which it is specially intended by the author.
[196] Book cited, 119.
[197] See Collier's Weekly for November 26, 1904.
[198] The English translation of the first volume of Von Holst's "Constitutional and Political History of the United States" has just been published. The titles of the ninth and tenth chapters, to wit, "The Economic Contrast between the Free and Slave States," and "Development of the Economic Contrast between the Free and Slave States," are very apt and striking, and the contents of the chapters are profoundly original and instructive. Having ample space, the author has, among other merits, well handled the following incidents and consequences of slavery:
1. Implacable hostility of slave and non-slave labor.
2. Self-protecting necessity to slavery of continuous expansion, and, to insure this expansion, necessity that the south keep political mastery of the country.
3. Economic importance to south of invention of cotton-gin in 1793.
4. Exclusive possession by north of wholesale trade.
5. Greater immigration to north.
6. Missouri Compromise, and rise therefrom of geographical parties.
7. Internal improvements and tariff passing inter-geographical question.
8. Economic decay of south due to slavery, and not to tariff.
9. Opposition of slavery to the spirit of the age.
The following is a brief statement of the chief demerits of the two chapters:
1. Misstatement that there were different circles of slaveholders; overstatement of inhumanity of masters; and unjust disparagement of character of smaller slaveholders.
2. Failure to note the great absorbing energy of slave property.
3. Failure to note the lack of a population of free workers.
But the work, considering the short time the clouds of battle have had to clear away, recollecting, too, that the author is a foreigner, is, excepting a little heated partisanship here and there, a most valuable contribution to the history of our country.
[199] I see now--in 1905--that the statement in the text was a great mistake; and that nadir was not reached until some fifteen or twenty years later.
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