CHAPTER VII

THE RACE QUESTION[65]

I

TO any calm observer of the present condition of our country painfully apparent must be the difference between the state of what from long usage we are accustomed to term “the two sections.”

We have one blood, one language, one religion, one common end, one government; but the North and the South are still “the two sections,” as they were one hundred years ago, when the bands of the Constitution were hardly cooled from the welding, or as they were in 1860, when they stood, armed to the teeth, facing each other, and the cloud of revolution was hovering above them soon to burst in the dread thunder of civil war.

Should one, hearing the phrase “the two sections,” take the map of the American Union and study its salient features, he would declare that “the two sections” were by natural geographical division the East and the West; should he study the commerce of the country with its vast currents and tides, its fields of agriculture and manufacture, he would be impelled to declare that by all the inexorable laws of interest they were the East and the West. And yet, we who stand amid the incontestable evidences of events know that against all laws, against all reason, against all right, there are two sections of this country, and they are not the East and the West, but the South and the rest of the Union.

It is proposed to show briefly why this unhappy condition exists; and to suggest a few things which, if earnestly considered and patiently advocated, may, in the providence of God, contribute to the solution of the distressing difficulties which confront us.

The divergence of the “two sections” was coeval with the planting of the continent; it preceded the establishment of the nation. It steadily increased until an irrepressible conflict became inevitable; and it was not until after this conflict had spent itself that reconcilement became possible.

The causes of that divergence, with the exception of one, it is not necessary to discuss here. This one has survived even the cauterization of war. Other causes have passed away. The right of secession is no longer an active issue. It has been adjudicated. That it once existed and was utilized on occasion by other States than those which actually exercised it is undeniable; that it passed away with the Confederate armies at Appomattox is equally beyond controversy. The very men who once asserted it and shed their blood to establish it, would now, while still standing by the rightness of their former position, admit that in the light of altered conditions the Union is no longer dissoluble. They are ready if need be to maintain the fact. It is, however, important to make it clear that the right did exist, because on this depends largely the South’s place in history. Without this we were mere insurgents and rebels; with it, we were a great people in revolution for our rights. In 1861 the South stood aligned against the Union and apparently for the perpetuation of slavery. The sentiment of the whole world was against it. We were defeated, overwhelmed. Unless we possess strength sufficient to maintain ourselves even in the face of this, the verdict of posterity will be against us. It is not unlikely that in fifty years the defence of slavery will be deemed the world over to have been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to have been. There is but one way to prevent the impending disaster: by establishing the real fact, that, whatever may have been the immediate and apparent occasion, the true and ultimate cause of the action of the South was her firm and unwavering adherence to the principle of self-government and her jealous devotion to her inalienable rights.

But if the other causes which kept the country divided have passed away as practical issues, one still survives and is, under a changed form, as vital to-day and as pregnant with evil as it was in 1861.

This is the question which ever confronts the South; the question which after twenty-five years of peace and prosperity still keeps the South “one section” and the rest of the nation the other. This is the ever-present, ever-menacing, ever-growing Negro Question.

It is to-day the most portentous as it is the most dangerous problem which confronts the American people.

The question is so misunderstood that even the terminology for it in the two sections varies irreconcilably. The North terms it simply the question of the civil equality of all citizens before the law; the South denominates it the question of Negro domination. More accurately it should be termed the Race Question.

Whatever its proper title may be, upon its correct solution depend the progress and the security, if not the very existence, of the American people.

In order that it may be solved it is necessary, first, that its real gravity shall be understood, and its true difficulties apprehended.

We have lived in quietude so long, and have become so accustomed to the condition of affairs, that we are sensible of no apprehension, but rest in the face of this as of other dangers, content and calm. So rest Alpine dwellers who sleep beneath masses of snow which have accumulated for years, yet which, quiet as they appear upon the mountain-sides above, may at any time without warning, by the mere breaking of a twig or the fall of a pebble, be transformed into the resistless and overwhelming avalanche.

There are signs of impending peril about us.

There is, first, the danger incident to the exigence under which the South has stood, of wresting if not of subverting the written law to what she deems the inexorable exactions of her condition.

It is often charged that the written law is not fully and freely observed at the South in matters relating to the exercise of the elective franchise. The defence is not so much a denial of the charge as it is a confession and avoidance. To the accusation it is replied that the written law, when subverted at all, is so subverted only in obedience to a higher law founded on the instinct of self-protection and self-preservation.

If it be admitted that this is true, is it nothing to us that a condition exists which necessitates the subversion of any law? Is it not an injury to our people that the occasion exists which places them in conflict with the law, and compels them to assert the existence of a higher duty? Can law be overridden without creating a spirit which will override law? a spirit ready to constitute itself the judge of what shall and what shall not be considered law; a spirit which eventually substitutes its will for law and confounds its interest with right? Is it a small matter that our people or any part of them should be compelled, by any exigency whatever, to go armed at any time in any place in defiance of law?

This is a grave matter and is to be considered with due deliberation; for on its right solution much depends. The first step toward cure is ever comprehension of the disease. The first step toward the proper solution of our trouble is to secure a perfect comprehension of it. To do this we must first comprehend it ourselves, then only can we hope to enlighten others.

Obedience to law, willing and invariable submission to law, is one of the highest qualities of a nation, and one of the chief promoters of national elevation. Antagonism to law, a spirit which rejects the restraints of law, depraves the individual conscience and retards national progress.

Can any fraud, evasion, or contrivance whatever be practised or connived at, without by so much impairing the moral sense and character of a people as well as of an individual? Can any deflection whatsoever, no matter how inexorable the occasion, from the path of absolute rectitude be tolerated without inflicting an injury on that sense of justice and right, which, allied to unflinching courage, constitutes a nation’s virtue? Who will say that the moral sense of our people now is as lofty as it was in the days of our fathers, when men voted with uplifted faces for the candidate of their choice?

The press of a portion of the land is filled with charges of injuries to the Negro. The real injury is not to him, but to the White. From opposition to law to actual lawlessness is but a step. This then is the first danger.

The physical peril from the overcrowding among our people of an ignorant and hostile race is not more real than this which threatens our moral rectitude; but it is more apparent.

Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on the 23d of February, 1889, in speaking of the South, said:

“I make these remarks with full knowledge of the difficult problem that awaits us, and the problem that especially concerns our friends south of Mason and Dixon’s line; but I remember when I make them that the person hears the sound of my voice this moment who, in his lifetime, will see fifty million Negroes dwelling in those States.”

Can language paint in stronger colors the peril which confronts us? The senator went on to depict the evils which might ensue. “If you go on,” he said, “with these methods which are reported to us on what we deem pretty good evidence, you are sowing in the breast of that race a seed from which is to come a harvest of horror and blood, to which the French Revolution or San Domingo is light in comparison.”

Senator Hoar, like most others of his latitude, thinks that he knows the Negro, and understands the pending question. He does not. Had he understood the true gravity of that problem, his cheek, as he caught the echo of his own words, would have blanched at the thought of the peril he is transmitting to his children and grandchildren; not the peril, perhaps, of fire and massacre, but a peril as deadly, the peril of contamination from the overcrowding of an inferior race. All other evils are but corollaries; the evil of race-conflict, though not so awful as the French Revolution or San Domingo; the evil of growing armies with their menace to liberty; the evil of race-degeneration from enforced and constant association with an inferior race: these are some of the perils which spring from that state of affairs and confront us. At one more step they confront the rest of the Anglo-American people to-day. For the only thing that stands to-day between the people of the North and the Negro is the people of the South. The time may come when the only thing that will stand between the Negro and the people of the North will be the people of the South.

II

The chief difficulty in the solution of the question exists in the different views held as to it by the two sections. They do not understand it alike. They stand as widely divided as to it to-day as they stood forty years ago. Their ultimate interests are identical; their present interests are not very widely divergent. Their opposite attitudes as to it must, therefore, be due to error somewhere. One or the other section must be in error as to it; possibly neither may be exactly right.

This much we know and can assert: there must be an absolutely right position. It is imperatively necessary that we find it; for on our discovery of it and our planting ourselves firmly on it depends our security. If we have not found it the sooner we realize that fact the better for us and for those that shall come after us; if we have found it the sooner we make it understood the better.

One thing is certain, there is no security in silence; no safety in inaction. If fifty million Negroes, or even a much smaller number, are to come with San Domingo and the French Revolution in their train, the white race has need to awake and bestir itself.

The recent census has happily showed that Senator Hoar and others like him have over-estimated the ratio of increase.[66] But the problem is grave enough as it is.

The first step to be taken is to turn the light on the subject. Let it be examined, measured, comprehended, and then dealt with as shall be found to be just and right. The old method of crimination and defiance will no longer avail; we must deal with the question calmly, rationally, philosophically. We must abandon all untenable positions whatsoever, place ourselves on the impregnable ground of right, and then whatever may befall meantime, we can calmly await the inevitable justification of events.

In the first place, let us disembarrass ourselves by discarding all irrelevant and extraneous questions. Putting aside all mere prejudice whatever, whether springing from the Negro’s former condition of servitude or from other causes, let us base our argument on facts and the final issue cannot be doubtful.

Whatever prejudice may exist, a constant, firm, and philosophic presentation of the facts of the case must in the end establish the truth, and secure the right remedy. The spirit of civilization must overcome at last, and whatever obstacles it shall encounter, right must eventually triumph.

The North deems the pending question merely one of the enforcement or subversion of an elective franchise law; it has never accepted the proposition that it is a great race question on which hinges the preservation of the Union, the security of the people, white and black alike, and the progress of American civilization. Perhaps no clearer or more authoritative exposition of the views held by the North on this question can be found than that set forth in a recent address by Mr. G. W. Cable delivered before the Massachusetts Club of Boston on the 22d of February, 1890. The favor with which it was received by the class to whom it was delivered testifies not the hostility of that class, but the extent to which the question is misunderstood in that section.

Mr. Cable, after negativing the Southern idea of the question, declares: “The problem is whether American citizens shall not enjoy equal rights in the choice of their rulers. It is not a question of the Negro’s right to rule. _It is simply a question of their right to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably do so now._” This is quoted with approval by even so liberal and well-informed a thinker as the Rev. Henry M. Field, who certainly bears only good-will to the South, as to the rest of mankind. The indorsement of these views by such a man proves that the North absolutely misapprehends the true question which confronts the nation at this time. It has from constant iteration accepted as facts certain statements such as those quoted, and these constitute its premises, on which it bases all its reasoning and all its action.

The trouble is that its first premise is fallacious. Its teachers, its preachers, its writers, its orators, its philosophers, its politicians, have with one voice, and that a mighty voice, been for a hundred years instilling into its mind the uncontradicted doctrine that the South brought the Negro here and bound him in slavery; that the South kept the Negro in slavery; that to perpetuate this enormity the South plunged the nation in war, and attempted to destroy the Union; that the South still desires the reëstablishment of slavery, and that meantime it oppresses the Negro, defies the North, and stands a constant menace to the Union.

The great body of the Northern people, bred on this food, never having heard any other relation, believes this implicitly, and all the more dangerously because honestly. If they are wrong and we right it behooves us to enlighten them.

There are, without doubt, some whom nothing can enlighten; who would not believe though one rose from the dead. They are not confined to one latitude. There are, with equal certainty, others who for place and profit trade in their brother’s blood, and keep open the wounds which peace, but for them, would long ago have healed; who for a mess of pottage would sell the birthright of the nation. The professional Haman can never sleep while Mordecai so much as sits at the gate; but we can have an abiding faith in the ultimate good sense and sound principles of the great Anglo-Saxon race wherever it may dwell; and to this we must address ourselves.

The second thing necessary to the solution of the question is to enlighten the people of the North. If we can show that the question is not, as Mr. Cable states and as the North believes, merely whether the Negro shall or shall not have the right to choose his ruler, but is a great race question on which depends the future as well as the present salvation of the nation, we need have no fear as to the ultimate result; sound sense and right judgment will prevail.

That there exists a race question of some sort must be apparent to every person who passes through the South. Where six millions of people of one color and one race live in contact with twelve millions of another color and race, there must, of necessity, be a race issue. The Negro has not behaved unnaturally: he has, indeed, in the main behaved well; but the race issue exists and grows. The feeling has not yet reached the point of personal hostility—at least on the part of the Whites; but as the older generation which knew the tie between master and servant passes away, the race feeling is growing intenser. The Negro becomes more assertive, the White more firm.

III

There are a multitude of men and women at the North who do not know that slavery ever really existed at the North. They may accept it historically in a dim, theoretical sort of way, as we accept the fact that men and women were once hanged for forgery or for stealing a shilling; but they do not take it in as a vital fact.

It may possibly aid the solution of our problem if it be shown that New England had quite as much to do with the establishment of African slavery on this continent as had the South, though it survived longest in the latter section; that slavery at the North was, while it continued, as rigorous a system as ever it was at the South; that abolition was at the North in the main deemed as illegal, and its advocates encountered as much obloquy there as at the South; that the emancipation of the slaves was effected not by the Northern people at large, but by a limited band of enthusiasts and in the wise providence of God; that the emancipation proclamation was not based on the lofty moral principle of universal freedom, to which it has been the custom to accredit it, but was a war-measure, resorted to only on “necessity of war,” and as a means of restoring the Union. Further, that the investment of the Negro with the elective franchise was not the result of a high moral sentiment founded on the rights of man, but was effected in a spirit of heat if not of revenge, and under a misapprehension of the true bearing of such an act; that the Negro has not used the power vested in him for the advantage of himself or of anyone else, but in a reckless, unreasonable, and dangerous way; that while there have been cases of injustice to him, in the main the restraints thrown around him at the South have been merely such as were rendered necessary to preserve the South from absolute and irretrievable ruin; that the same instincts under which the South has acted prevail at the North; that the Negro has been and is being educated by the South to an extent far beyond his right to claim, or the ability of the white race to contribute to it; that he is as yet incapable, as a race, of self-government. And finally, that unless the white race continues to assert itself and retains control, a large section of the nation will become hopelessly Africanized, and American civilization relapse and possibly perish.

Slavery was until within, historically speaking, a very recent period, as much a Northern institution as it was a Southern one; it existed in full vigor in all of the original thirteen colonies, and while it existed it was quite as rigorous a system at the North as at the South. Every law which formed its code at the South had its counterpart in the North, and with less reason; for while there were at the South not less than 600,000 slaves—Virginia having, by the census of 1790, 293,427—there were at the North, by the census of 1790, less than 42,000.

Regulations not wholly compatible with absolute freedom of will are necessary concomitants of any system of slavery, especially where the slaves are in large numbers; and it should move the hearts of our brethren at the North to greater patience with us that they, too, are not “without sin.”

Massachusetts has the honor of being the first community in America to legalize the slave-trade and slavery by legislative act; the first to send out a slave-ship, and the first to secure a fugitive-slave law.

Slavery having been planted on this continent (not by the South, as has been reiterated until it is the generally received doctrine, but by a Dutch ship, which in 1619 landed a cargo of “twenty negers” in a famished condition at Jamestown), it shortly took general root, and after a time began to flourish. Indeed, it flourished here and elsewhere, so that in 1636, only seventeen years later, a ship, _The Desire_, was built and fitted out at Marblehead as a slaver, and thus became the first American slave-ship, but by no means the last. In the early period of the institution it was conceived that as it was justified on the ground that the slaves were heathen, conversion to Christianity might operate to emancipate them. In Virginia, the leading Southern colony, it was adjudicated that this did not so operate; but long prior to that, and while it was the accepted theory, Negroes are shown, by the church records, to have been baptized. In Massachusetts, at that time, baptism was expressly prohibited.

The fugitive-slave law, which proved ultimately and naturally so powerful an excitant in the history of slavery, and which is generally believed to have been the product of only Southern cupidity and brutality, had its prototype in the Articles of the Confederation of the United Colonies of New England (19th May, 1643), in which Massachusetts was the ruling colony.

Many of the good people of Massachusetts, in their zeal and their misapprehension of the facts, have been accustomed to regard their own skirts as free from all taint whatsoever of the accursed doctrine of property in human beings, and have been wont to boast that slavery never existed by virtue of law in that grand old Commonwealth, and that certainly no human creature was ever born a slave on her sacred soil. For refutation one need go no further than the work of Mr. George H. Moore, entitled “History of Slavery in Massachusetts.”[67] Mr. Moore was librarian of the Historical Society of New York, and corresponding member of the Historical Society of Massachusetts. He says, page 19, citing Commonwealth _vs._ Aves, 18 Pick., Shaw, C. J.: “It has been persistently asserted and repeated by all sorts of authorities, historical and legal, up to that of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, that ‘slavery to a certain extent seems to have crept in; not probably by force of any law, for none such is found or known to exist.’” “In Mr. Sumner’s famous speech in the Senate, June 28, 1854, he boldly asserted that ‘in all her annals no person was ever born a slave on the soil of Massachusetts’; and, says he, ‘if in point of fact the issue of slaves was sometimes held in bondage, it was never by sanction of any statute law of colony or commonwealth.’”

“And,” says Mr. Moore further, “recent writers of history in Massachusetts have assumed a similar lofty and positive tone on this subject. Mr. Palfrey says: ‘In fact, no person was ever born into legal slavery in Massachusetts.’[68] Mr. Justice Gray, in an elaborate historical note to the case of Oliver _vs._ Sale, Quincy’s R. 29, says: ‘Previously to the adoption of the State Constitution in 1780, Negro slavery existed to some extent and Negroes held in slavery might be sold; but all children of slaves were by law free.’”

Is it any ground for wonder that with these apparently authoritative statements ever iterated and reiterated before them, the people of Massachusetts should really have believed that no child had ever been born into slavery on the sacred soil of Massachusetts, and that slavery itself only existed to “some extent”?

Mr. Moore, with authorities in hand, shows that these declarations are unfounded, and states the uncomfortable but real facts. He quotes the ninety-first article of “The Body of Liberties,” which appears in the first edition under the head of “Liberties of Forreiners & Strangers,” and in the second edition, that of 1660, under the title of “Bond-Slavery.”

“91. There shall never be any bond-slaverie, villinage or captivity amongst us unles it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are SOLD TO US. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authoritie.”[69]

After showing the evolution of this law, Mr. Moore, on page 18, says:

“Based on the Mosaic Code, it is an absolute recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself, as well as that of another man to buy him. It sanctions the slave-trade and the perpetual bondage of Indians and Negroes, their children and their children’s children, and entitles Massachusetts to precedence over any and all other colonies in similar legislation. It anticipates by many years anything of the sort to be found in the statutes of Virginia or Maryland or South Carolina, and nothing like it is to be found in the contemporary codes of her sister colonies in New England.”[70]

Chief-Justice Parsons, in the leading Massachusetts case of Winchendon _vs._ Hatfield in error, referring to the dictum of C. J. Dana in a previous case, that a Negro born in that colony prior to the Constitution of 1780 was free, though born of slave parents, admits candidly: “It is very certain that the general practice and common usage had been opposed to this opinion.”

These and other authorities cited by Mr. Moore would seem to place the matter absolutely beyond all question.

IV

Now as to the abolition of slavery.

What are the historical facts as to this? It is true that slavery had been abolished at the North; but this was under conditions which, had they prevailed at the South, would have been taken advantage of there also; and when the institution was abolished in the Northern States, it had become so unprofitable that no great credit can attach to the act of abolition.[71] It is also true that there were throughout the North a considerable body of men and women who, from a very long time back, believed sincerely that human slavery was a crime against nature, and strove zealously and persistently to overthrow it. At the South there were also many who labored with not less earnestness to effect the same end; though, owing to different conditions, the same means could not be employed; and, standing face to face with the immense slave population which existed at the South, they saw the same danger which faces us to-day, and sought in colonization the means at once to abolish slavery, to free America, and to Christianize Africa.

As to actual, immediate emancipation, however, it was no more the intentional work of the North as a people than it was of the South.

The credit for it, even so far as creating a public opinion which rendered it eventually possible, is due to a band of emancipators, who, for a long time absolutely insignificant in numbers, and ever comparatively few when contrasted with the great body of the people of the North, devoted their energies, their labors, their lives, to the accomplishment of this end. During their labors they encountered no less obloquy, and experienced scarcely less peril at the North than at the South, with this difference, that at the North the outrages perpetrated upon them were inspired by a mere sentiment, while at the South the vast number of slaves made any interference with them intolerable, and the treatment abolitionists received was based on a recognition of the fact that the doctrines they promulgated might at any moment plunge the South into the horrors of insurrection.

It was not at the South, but at the North, in Connecticut, that Prudence Crandall was, for teaching colored girls, subjected to a persecution as barbarous as it was persistent. After being sued and pursued by every process of law which a New England community could devise, she was finally driven forth into exile in Kansas.

She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous. The town-meeting promptly voted to “petition for a law against the bringing of colored people from other towns and States for any purpose, and more especially for the purpose of dissemination of the principles and doctrines opposed to the benevolent colonization scheme.” “In May an act prohibiting private schools for non-resident colored persons, and providing for the expulsion of the latter, was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicings in Canterbury, even to the ringing of church-bells.” The most vindictive and inhuman measures were adopted against the offender; the shops and meeting-houses were closed against her and her pupils.[72]

It was not at the South, but at Canaan, New Hampshire, that on August 10, 1835, the building of the Noyes Academy, open to pupils of both colors, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it be “removed,” was dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land belonging to the corporation, and left on the common, three hundred yeomen of the county participating. The teacher and colored pupils were given a month in which to quit the town.[73]

Throughout New England, less than thirty years before the promulgation of the emancipation proclamation abolitionists encountered not only opprobrium but violence. When George Thompson, the English abolitionist, went throughout the North in 1835, his windows were broken in Augusta, Maine, where a State anti-slavery convention was in progress, and a committee of citizens requested him to leave town immediately under pain of being mobbed if he reëntered the convention. At Concord, New Hampshire, he was interrupted with missiles while addressing a ladies’ meeting. At Lowell, Massachusetts, on his second visit, in the town hall a brick-bat thrown from without through the window narrowly escaped his head, and in spite of the manliness of the selectmen a meeting the next evening was abandoned in the certainty of fresh and deadly assaults.[74]

It is stated in a letter from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that Thompson had a narrow escape from the mob at Concord, and Whittier was pelted with mud and stones.[75] At a convention in Lynn, George Thompson was stoned. The next evening he was mobbed by three hundred men.

All this in New England. Finally, the English missionary was driven out of the country, being in danger, as Garrison wrote, “of assassination even in the streets of Boston.”[76] Indeed, mobs were as frequent at that period in New England as they could have been in Virginia or South Carolina had the abolitionists attempted to preach their doctrines here. William Lloyd Garrison himself was assailed and denounced, and even in the city of Boston was subjected to the bitterest and most persistent persecution. He was notified to close up the office of his paper, _The Liberator_, under penalty of tar and feathers. A placard was circulated, stating that a purse of one hundred dollars had been raised to reward the first man who should lay hands on the “infamous foreign scoundrel Thompson,” so that he might be brought to the tar-kettle before dark.

Finally, Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston, torn out of the house in which was the office of the Anti-Slavery Society, where he was attending a meeting of women, dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around him, and but for the cleverness of two sensible men who got him into the City Hall he would have been killed. Even there he was in such peril that he was put in the jail to keep him from the mob, which came near getting possession of him a second time.

This mob was not, as may be supposed, a mob of the creatures who usually constitute such an assemblage, but is said to have been composed of respectable and well-dressed persons. Garrison, attacking the mayor afterward, in the press, for not taking his part more firmly, declared that if it had been a mob of workingmen assaulting a meeting of merchants, no doubt he would have acted with energy, “but broadcloth and money alter the case.”[77] Indeed, he says, the mayor acknowledged that “the city government did not very much disapprove of the mob to put down such agitators as Garrison and those like him.”[78]

It is notable that the entire press of Boston, with hardly more than one or two exceptions, approved the action of the mob and censured Garrison.

This is what Garrison himself said of it:

“1. The outrage was perpetrated in Boston, the cradle of liberty, the city of Hancock and Adams, the headquarters of refinement, literature, intelligence, and religion. No comments can add to the infamy of this fact.

“2. It was perpetrated in the open daylight of heaven, and was therefore most unblushing and daring in its features.”

“3. It was dastardly beyond precedent, as it was an assault of thousands upon a small body of helpless females. Charleston and New Orleans have never acted so brutally.

“4. It was planned and executed, not by the rabble or the workingmen, but by ‘gentlemen of property and standing, from all parts of the city’—and now (October 25th) that time has been afforded for reflection, it is still either openly justified or coldly disapproved by the ‘higher classes,’ and exultation among them is general throughout the city....”

“5. It is evidently winked at by the city authorities. No efforts have been made to arrest the leading rioters....”

All of this was within three years of the time when a bill to abolish slavery in Virginia had failed in her General Assembly by only one vote and that vote the casting vote of the speaker.

There is surely no necessity to pile up more authority on this point. If there were it could be done; for not only in New England, but elsewhere in the North, instances can be cited in which violence, and once even murder, occurred. Elijah P. Lovejoy, after having his printing-office sacked three times, fell a martyr to the ferocity of a mob in Illinois for having, under an instinct of humanity, aided a fugitive slave to escape. On one thing, however, the North may with justice pride itself: that in the end, there was awakened in it a general sentiment for emancipation. For this it was indebted to a work of genius produced by a woman; a romance which touched the heart of Christendom. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” overruled the Supreme Court of the United States, and abrogated the Constitution. By arousing the general sentiment of the world against slavery, it contributed more than any other one thing to its abolition in that generation.

But not even then did the North set out to abolish slavery. President Lincoln is universally accredited as the emancipator of the African. It is his hand which is represented in bronze and marble as striking the shackles from the slave. He was the chosen and great standard-bearer of the most advanced element of the North, the great representative of their ideas, the idolized chief magistrate, and the trusted commander of their armies.

His words on this subject must be authoritative.

On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded, he says: “Do the Southern people really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with the slaves or with them about their slaves? ... The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”

On the 4th of March, 1861, in his official utterance, his inaugural address, he says: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

If there can possibly be a more authoritative declaration than this, we have it in a resolution passed by Congress of the United States, and signed by Lincoln as President in July, 1861, after the battle of Manassas:

“Resolved ... that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc.

Slave-holding even in Federal territory was not forbidden until June 19, 1862, which was just a month before the bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union should not be returned to their masters [as they had hitherto been under the law], and providing that they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.”

A Constitutional Amendment (the Thirteenth), abolishing and prohibiting evermore the enslavement of human beings, failed to pass in the House of Representatives in the session of 1864, and would have failed altogether had not a member from Ohio changed his vote in order to move a reconsideration and keep it alive till the following session, when Mr. Lincoln having been reëlected, and having recommended its passage, and the war being evidently near its end, it was passed by a vote of 119 yeas to 57 nays.

Indeed, before Mr. Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation he gave one hundred days’ warning to the revolutionary States to lay down their arms, and in the proclamation he places the entire matter forever at rest by declaring in terms, in that unmistakable English of which he was a master, that the measure was adopted “upon military necessity.”

No one can read this record and not admit that slavery was abolished in the providence of God, against the intention of the North and of the South alike, because its purpose had been accomplished, and the time was ripe for its ending.

V

The next step is the discussion of the attitude in which we, the white people of the South, stand to the Negro. This attitude is too striking, if not too anomalous, not to have attracted wide attention. A race with an historic and glorious past, in a high stage of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race, is at least unsympathetic. The two races cannot be termed with exactness hostile—in many respects, not even unfriendly; but they are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; the former slave race has been for over thirty years politically useful to the outsiders by whose sentiment they are sustained, and the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it.

Now what is the question? Is it merely the question, “whether the Negro shall not have the right to choose his own rulers”; or is it a great race issue between the Negro and the White?

If it is a question of mere perverse imposition by the white on the black, by the stronger on the weaker, a refusal to recognize his just rights, then the advocates of that side are right. If, however, it be the other, then the stronger race should be sustained, or else the people of the North are guilty of the fatuity which destroys nations.

The chief complication of the matter has arisen from the possession of the elective franchise by the newly emancipated Negro, and the peculiar circumstances which surround this possession. The very method of the bestowal of this franchise was pregnant with baleful results. It was given him not as a righteous and reasonable act; not because he was considered capable of exercising the highest function of citizenship: the making of laws, and the execution of laws; not with the philosophic deliberation which should characterize an act by which four millions of new citizens of a distinct and inferior race are suddenly added to the nation; but in heat, in a spirit of revenge, and chiefly because the cabal which then controlled the Republic thought that with the Negro as an ally it could dominate the South and perpetuate its own power. The South, just emerging from the furious struggle of war, physically prostrate, but with its dauntless spirit unbroken, confiding in its own integrity of purpose, and vainly believing that as the Constitution was the ægis under which the North had claimed to fight, the constitutional rights for which it had itself contended would be observed and respected, accepted the emancipation of the Negro, but not unnaturally found itself unwilling, indeed unable, to accept all that this emancipation might import. The North, partly in distrust of the sincerity of even the measure of acceptance which the South avowed; partly in the belief in the minds of a considerable portion of its people that the Negro might thus be elevated, and that he would, at least, be enabled to protect himself; but mainly to govern the intrepid and difficult South, at the instance of the partisan leaders who then directed the destinies of the Republic, struck down constitutional government throughout the South, and restored it only when it had placed it in the Negro’s hands.

No such act of fatuity ever emanated from a nation. Justification it can have none; its best excuse must be that it was accomplished under a certain enthusiasm just after a bitter war, and before passion had cooled sufficiently for reason to reassert her sway. It was a people’s insanity. The “Reconstruction of the South” was, on the part of the people of the North at large, simply that which in national life is worse than a crime, a blunder; on the part of the leaders who planned it and carried it through, it was a cool, deliberate, calculated act, violative of the terms on which the South had surrendered and disbanded her broken armies, and perpetrated for the purpose of securing—not peace, not safety, not righteous acknowledgment of lawfully constituted authority, but personal power to the leaders of the party which at that time was dominant, power with all that it implied of gain and revenge. For this they took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigor of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the eyes of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.

Within two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox there was not a Confederate within the limits of the Southern States who had not accepted honestly the status of affairs.

On the 18th of December, 1865, General Grant, who had been sent through the South to inspect and make a report on its condition, in his report to the President said:

“I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections—slavery and State-rights, or the right of the State to secede from the Union—they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to.”

Shortly after the assembling of Congress in December, 1865, the President was able to state that the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee had reorganized their State governments. The conventions of the seceding States had all repealed or declared null and void the ordinances of secession. The laws were in full operation, and the States were in reality back in the Union, with duly elected representatives, generally men who had been Union men, waiting to be admitted to Congress when it should assemble.[79]

Had Lincoln but been here, how different might have been the story! His wisdom, his sound sense, his catholic spirit, his pride in the restored Union which he had preserved, his patriotism, would have governed. For two years the influence of his views remained too potent to be overcome. Johnson, who had not much love for the South, had caught enough of his liberal and patriotic spirit to attempt the continuance of his pacific, constitutional, and sagacious policy. But he lacked his wisdom, and by the end of two years the dominant will of Thad. Stevens and his lieutenants had sufficiently warped public opinion to bend it to their pleasure and subvert it to their purpose. Thad. Stevens gave the keynote. On the 14th of December, 1865, he said: “According to my judgment they (the insurrectionary States) ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or of being counted as valid States, until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to _secure perpetual ascendancy to the party of the Union_.”

Charles Sumner was not behind him. He declared in January, 1867, that unless universal suffrage were conferred on all Negroes in the disorganized States, “you will not secure the new allies who are essential to the national cause.”

In pursuance of the scheme of Stevens, in March, 1867, acts were passed by Congress, virtually wiping out the States of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, and dividing the territory into military districts, under military rulers, who were to have absolute power over life, property, and liberty, subject only to the proviso that death sentences should be approved by the President.

When they were again created States, and brought back into the Union, the Whites had been disfranchised, and the Negro had been created a voter, drafted into the Union League, drilled under his carpet-bag officers, and accepted as the new ally through whom was to be secured “the perpetual ascendancy of the party of the Union.”

Lincoln in his wisdom and patriotism had never dreamed of such a thing. His only “suggestion” had been to let in “some of the colored people, ... as, for instance, the very intelligent.”[80]

The history of that period, of the reconstruction period of the South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written.[81] When that history shall be told it will constitute the darkest stain on the record of the American people. The sole excuse which can be pleaded at the bar of posterity, is that the system was inaugurated in a time of excitement which was not short of frenzy.

Ever since the Negro was given the ballot he has, true to his teaching, steadily remained the ally of the party which gave it to him, following its lead with more than the obedience of the slave, and on all issues, in all times, opposing the respectable white element with whom he dwelt with a steadfast habitude which is only explicable on the ground of steadfast purpose. The phenomenon has been too marked to escape observation. The North has drawn from it the not unnatural inference that the Negro is oppressed by the White, and thus at once asserts his independence and attempts to obtain his rights. The South, knowing that he is not oppressed, draws therefrom the juster inference that he naturally, wilfully, and inevitably allies himself against the White simply upon a race line and stands, irrespective of reason, in persistent opposition to all measures which the White advocates.

The North sees in the Negro’s attitude only the proper and laudable aspiration of a citizen and a man; the South detects therein a desire to dominate, a menace to all that the Anglo-American race has effected on this continent, and to the hopes in which that race established this nation.

VI

To ascertain which is the correct view it might be well at this point to examine the history of the Negro and his capacity as a citizen.

In discussing this matter we are fortunately not relegated to the shadowy and uncertain domain of mere theory; the argument may be based on the firm and assured foundation of actual experience.

In the first place, whatever a sentimental philanthropy may say; whatever a modern and misguided humanitarianism may declare, there underlies the whole matter the indubitable, potent, and mysterious principle of race quality. Ethnologically, historically, congenitally, the white race and the Negro differ widely.

Slavery will not alone account for it all. In the recorded experience of mankind slavery—mere slavery—has not repressed intelligence; the bonds of the person, however tightly drawn, have not served to shackle the mind. Slavery existed among the Greeks, the Romans, the Phœnicians, among our own ancestors of the Teuton race: slavery as absolute, as inexorable as ever was African slavery. Indeed, under some of those systems there was absolute chattel slavery, which never existed with us, for the Greek and the Roman possessed over their slaves the absolute power of life and death; they might slay them as an exhibition for their guests, or might cast them into their fish-ponds as food for their lampreys.

Yet under these systems, differentiated from African slavery by the two conditions of race similarity and intellectual potentiality, slaves attained not unfrequently to high position, and from them issued some of the most notable literary productions of those times. Æsop, Terence, Epictetus the Stoic were slaves. These and many more have proved that where the intellectual potentiality exists it will burst through the encumbering restraints of servitude, and establish the truth that bondage cannot enthrall the mind.

What of value to the human race has the Negro mind as yet produced? In art, in mechanical development, in literature, in mental and moral science, in all the range of mental action, no notable work has up to this time come from a Negro.

In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.

It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of any intellectual development. On the contrary, observation has led me to think that under certain conditions of intellectual environment, of careful training, and of sympathetic encouragement from the stronger races he may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development. To deny this is to deny the highest attribute of the intellectual essence, and is to shut the door of hope upon a race of God’s human creatures to whom I give my sympathy and my good-will. But the incontestable proof is that such cases of intellectual development are exceptional instances, and that after long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.

Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the influence and by the assistance of the stronger race. Where these have been wanting, whatever other conditions have existed, he has sensibly and invariably reverted toward the original type. Liberia, Hayti, Congo, are all in one line.

His history on his native continent is pregnant with suggestion. As far as the East is from the West, Negro-Africa is from the land of civilization. Generations have come and gone; centuries have followed centuries; peoples have succeeded peoples; nations have been grafted on nations, more and more crowned with the sunlight of progress and of civilization; but no faintest beam has ever pierced the impenetrable gloom of the “Dark Continent,” and the last African explorer’s latest book is “Darkest Africa.”

This has not been because opportunity has been wanting. Civilization first lit her golden torch upon her borders. The swelling waters of the Nile spread through a lettered and partly enlightened people when the Tiber crept through swamps and wilderness; when the Acropolis was a wild, and the seven hills of the Eternal City a range for wolves, Thebes and Memphis and Heliopolis contained a civilization which in some of its manifestations has never been equalled since. Rome stretched across the Mediterranean, and sent her civilizing power along the northern shore of the continent; and later, the Moors possessed a civilization there which is yet a marvel even to our race. In that record which all Christendom holds as its cherished possession we catch glimpses of a commerce and even of a civilization situate somewhere within the boundaries of Africa, and meeting with that of the greatest monarch of the time. The curtain suddenly lifts and we get a view all the more dazzling, because so mysterious, of a queen of Ethiopia coming with wonderful gifts to visit Solomon himself.

Since then civilization has swept triumphant over a large part of the earth. Only the land of the Negro has never yielded to her illumining and vivifying influence. The Roman has succeeded the Greek; the Gaul and the Frank have risen on the Roman; the Teuton, the Saxon, and the Celt have surpassed the Gaul. Only in Negro-Africa has barbarism held unbroken rule, and savagery maintained perpetual domain.

Stanley, Ward, Glave, and Emin Pasha found but a few years since the great Congo country as barbarous, as savage, as cannibal, as it was five thousand years ago, province preying on province, and village feeding on village, as debased and brutish as the beasts of the jungle about them.

But it is not only in Africa that the Negro has exhibited the absence of the essential qualities of a progressive race. It is everywhere. Since the dawn of history, the Negro has been in one place or another, in Egypt, in Rome, in other European countries, brought in contact with civilization, yet he has failed to receive the vitalizing current under which other races have risen in greater or less degree.

VII

Here in America for over two hundred years the Negro has been under the immediate influence of the most potent race the world has known, and within the sweep of the ripest period of the world’s history.

It may be charged that as a slave he never had an opportunity to give his faculties that exercise which is necessary to their development. But the answer is complete. He has not been a slave in all places, at all times. In Africa he was not a slave, save to himself and his own instincts; in Rome he was no more a slave than was the Teuton, the Greek, or the Gaul; in New England he has not been a slave for over a hundred years, and may be assumed to have had there as much encouragement, and to have received as sustaining an influence as will ever be accorded him by the White. What has been the result even in New England?

Dr. Henry M. Field a few years since wrote a book of travels in the South with his reflections thereon. Dr. Field comes of a distinguished Northern family, of which the whole country is proud. He is a close observer, a fair recorder, and the friend of the whole human race. He will not be accused of prejudice. Speaking of the present intellectual condition of the Negro in Massachusetts, he says:

“Yet here we are doomed to great disappointment. The black man has had every right that belongs to his white neighbor; not only the natural rights which, according to the Declaration of Independence, belong to every human being—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but the right to vote, and to have a part in making the laws. He could own his little home, and there sit under his own vine and fig-tree with none to molest or make him afraid. His children could go to the same common schools, and sit on the same benches, and learn the same lessons as white children.

“With such advantages, a race that had natural genius ought to have made great progress in a hundred years. But where are the men that it should have produced to be the leaders of their people? We find not one who has taken rank as a man of action or a man of thought; as a thinker or a writer; as artist or poet; as discoverer or inventor. The whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity.

“If any man ever proved himself a friend of the African race it was Theodore Parker, who endured all sorts of persecution and social ostracism, who faced mobs and was hissed and hooted in public meetings, for his bold championship of the rights of the Negro race. But rights are one thing, and capacity is another. And while he was ready to fight for them he was very despondent as to their capacity for rising in the scale of civilization. Indeed, he said in so many words: ‘In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.’ In 1857 he wrote to a friend: ‘There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men and always will. In two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England. But in twenty generations the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared.’

“That was more than thirty years ago. But to-day I look about me here in Massachusetts, and I see a few colored men; but what are they doing? They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes; the women take in washing. I find colored barbers and white-washers, shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps; but I do not know a single man who has grown to be a merchant or a banker, a judge or a lawyer, a member of the legislature or a justice of the peace, or even a selectman of the town. In all these respects they remain where they were in the days of our fathers. The best friends of the colored race, of whom I am one, must confess that it is disappointing and discouraging to find that with all these opportunities they are little removed from where they were a hundred years ago.”[82]

But suppose that the statements of others, whose observation has enabled them to pick out a well-to-do lawyer or dentist or doctor or restaurateur, be different, it only proves that in individual instances they may rise to a fair level; it simply emphasizes the fact that these are exceptions to the great rule, and does not in the least affect the argument, which is that the Negroes _as a race_ have never exhibited much capacity to advance; that as a race they are inferior to other races.[83]

Opportunity is afforded us to examine the Negro’s progress in two countries in which a civilization was created for him, and he was surrounded by every condition helpful to progress.

The first is Liberia. There he had a model republic founded by the Caucasian solely for his benefit, with freedom grafted in its name. It was founded in as splendid hopes as even this Republic itself. Christendom gave it its assistance and its prayers. How has the Negro progressed there? Let one of his own race tell the story, one who was thought competent to represent there the United States. Mr. Charles H. J. Taylor, late Minister from the United States to Liberia, has given a picture of life in Liberia, which cannot be equalled save in some other country under the same rule. He says, in a paper published in the _Kansas City Times_, April 22, 1888:

“Not a factory, mill, or workshop, of any kind, is to be found there. They (the government) have no money or currency in circulation of any kind. They have no boats of any character, not even a canoe, the two gunboats England gave them lying rotten on the beach.”... “Look from morn till night you will never see a horse, a mule, a donkey, or a broken-in ox. They have them not. There is not a buggy, a wagon, a cart, a slide, a wheelbarrow, in the four counties. The natives carry everything on their heads.”

The whole picture presented is hopeless.

If this were an isolated instance we might think that climatic influences or the proximity of a great savage continent had affected the result. But we have nearer home a yet more striking illustration, a yet more convincing proof that the real cause was the Negro’s inability to govern, his incapacity to rise.

For a hundred years now the Negro has cast his influence over sundry of the West Indies, and has had sole possession of one. With this Republic constructed by our fathers before him for a model, he has since 1804 been masquerading at governing Hayti, one of the most fertile spots that Spain ever ruled.

A more fantastic mummery never disgraced a people or degraded a land. From the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture to the present there has not been a break in the darkness which settled upon Santo Domingo when it passed under the control of the Negro.

The bloody Dessalines aping Napoleon, and with the oath of allegiance to the republic yet warm on his lips, crowning himself “Emperor” of half an island; the brutal Gonaives, Boyer, Soulouque, and their like, following each other, each as brutal and swinish as the other, or with degrees limited only by their capacity, present a picture such as history cannot duplicate.

We have accounts of Hayti by two Englishmen, one the historian Froude, the other, Sir Spencer St. John, for years British resident at Hayti, both of whom assert that they have no race antipathy. And what a picture do they present! Santo Domingo, once the Queen of the Antilles, has in less than a hundred years of Negro rule sunk well-nigh into a state of primeval barbarism.

Sir Spencer St. John, in his astounding work, “The Black Republic,” has given a picture of Hayti under Negro rule which is enough to give pause alike to the wildest theorist and the most vindictive partisan. He takes pains to tell us that he has lived for thirty-five years among colored people of various races, and has no prejudice against them; that the most frequent and not the least honored guests at his table in Hayti for twelve years were of the black and colored races. The picture he has presented is the blackest ever drawn: revolution succeeding revolution, and massacre succeeding massacre; the country once, under white rule, teeming with wealth and covered with beautiful villas and plantations, with “a considerable foreign commerce, now in a state of decay and ruin, without trade or resources of any kind; peculation and jobbery paramount in all public offices”; barbarism substituted for civilization; Voudou worship in place of Christianity, and occasions when human flesh has been actually sold in the market-place of Port au Prince, the capital of the country.

Sir Spencer St. John says that a Spanish colleague once said to him: “If we could return to Hayti fifty years hence, we should find the negresses cooking their bananas on the site of these warehouses.” On which he remarks: “It is more than probable—unless in the mean time influenced by some higher civilization—that this prophecy will come true. The negresses are, in fact, cooking their bananas amid the ruins of the best houses of the capital.”

If it shall seem to those who have no actual knowledge upon the subject that I have overdrawn the picture, I would refer them to the papers which I have cited, and the works which I have quoted, and to the great body of the Southern people who have had experience of what Negro domination imports.

What has been stated has been said in no feeling of personal hostility, or even unfriendliness to the Negro, for I have no unfriendliness toward any Negro on earth; on the contrary, I have a feeling of real friendliness toward many of that race, and am the well-wisher of the whole people.

What is contained in this paper is stated under a sense of duty, with the hope and in the belief that it may serve to call attention to the real facts in the case; that it may help to discard from the discussion all mere sentimentality or prejudice, and to base the future consideration of the matter upon the only solid ground—the ground of naked fact.

The examples cited, if they establish anything, establish the fact that the Negro race does not possess, in any development which he has yet attained, the fundamental elements of character, the essential qualifications to conduct a government, even for himself, and that if the reins of government be intrusted to his unaided hands, he will fling reason to the winds, and drive to ruin. Were this, however, only Hayti or Liberia, we might bear it with such philosophic patience as our philanthropy calls to our aid, but we have nearer home a proof not less overwhelming of this truth. The Negro has had control of the government in the Southern States; for eight years a number of Southern States were partly, and three of them were wholly given up to the control of the Negroes, directed by men of, at least, ability and experience, and sustained by the invigorating influence of the entire North. It was “an experiment” entered on with “enthusiasm.”

The reconstruction acts gave the black the absolute right of suffrage, and disfranchised the whites. The Negro was invested with absolute power, and turned loose. He selected his rulers. The entire weight of the government—an immense force—was under the misapprehension, born of the passion which then reigned, thrown blindly in the Negroes’ favor; whatever they asserted was believed; whatever they demanded was done; the ballot was given them, and all the forms established by generations of Caucasian patriots and jurists, and consecrated by centuries of Caucasian blood, were solemnly set up and solemnly followed. The Negro at least then selected his own rulers. The Negro had thus his opportunity then, if ever. The North had put him up as a citizen against the protest of the South, and stood obliged to sustain him. What was the result? Such a riot of folly and extravagance, such a travesty of justice, such a mummery of government as was never before witnessed, save in those countries in which he had himself furnished the illustration.

In Virginia, where the Negroes were in a numerical minority and where the prowess of the Whites had been but now displayed before their eyes in an impressive manner which they could not forget, we escaped the inconveniences of carpet-baggism, and the Hunnycuts, Underwoods, and such vultures kept the carcass for their own picking, and were soon gorged and put to flight. But it was not so where the Negroes were in a large majority. In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in other Southern States there was a very carnival of riot and rapine.

Space will not permit the going into detail. Reference can only be made to one or two facts, from which the whole dreadful story may be gathered. Louisiana will be first cited.

Warmouthism and Kelloggism, in Louisiana, and carpet-baggism generally, with all their environments of chicanery and venality, and all their train of poverty and profligacy, cannot be done justice to in a paper of this character.[84] Such a relation of theft, debauchery, and crime has not been found outside of those countries in which carpet-baggism has ruled, with the Negro as its facile and ignorant instrument.

In Louisiana, soon after Warmouth came into office, he stated in his message of 4th January, 1868, to his legislature: “Our debt is smaller than that of almost any State in the Union, with a tax-roll of $251,000,000, and a bonded debt that can at will be reduced to $6,000,000. There is no reason that our credit should not be at par.” This was too good a field for Warmouth and his associates to lose. Says Mr. Sage: “The census of 1870 showed the debt of the State to have increased to $25,021,734, and that of the parishes and municipalities to $28,065,707. Within a year the State debt was increased fourfold, and the local indebtedness had doubled. Louisiana, according to the census, stood, in the matter of debt, at the head of the Union.”[85]

This was but the beginning. The total cost of four years and five months of Republican rule amounted to $106,020,337, or $24,040,089 per year. “To this,” says Mr. Sage, “must be added the privileges and franchises given away and the State property stolen.”[86] Taxation went up in proportion—in some places to 7 or 8 per cent.;[87] in others as high as 16 per cent.[88] This was confiscation.

The public printing of the State had, in previous years, cost about $37,000 per year. During the first two years of Warmouth’s _régime_ the New Orleans _Republican_, in which he was a principal stockholder, received $1,140,881.77 for public printing.[89]

When Warmouth ran for governor, he was so poor that a mite chest was placed beside the ballot-box to receive contributions to pay his expenses to Washington. When he had been in office only a year, it was estimated that he was worth $225,000, and when he retired he was said to have had one of the largest fortunes in Louisiana.

The Louisiana State Lottery, with all the debauchery of morals and sentiment which it has occasioned, was chartered by Warmouth and his gang, and is a legacy which they have left to the people of that State, an octopus which they have vainly striven to shake off.[90] Time fails to tell of the rapine, the vice, the profligacy in which the government—State and municipal—was the prize which was tossed about like a shuttle-cock, from one faction to the other; of the midnight orders to seize the government, the carnival of corruption and crime, until the Whites were forced to band themselves into a league to prevent absolute anarchy. It suffices to say that it was in Louisiana under Negro rule that troops were marched into the State House, and drove out the assembled representatives of the State, at the point of the bayonet, a thing which has happened during peace only twice before in the history of modern civilization, once under Cromwell and once under Napoleon.

“The vampire Warmouthism had reduced the wealth of New Orleans from $146,718,790 at Warmouth’s advent, to $88,613,930 at Kellogg’s exit—a net decline of $58,104,860 in eight years; while real estate in the country parishes had shrunk in value from $99,266,839.85 to $47,141,696, or about one-half. During this period the Republican leaders had squandered nearly $150,000,000, giving the State little or nothing to show therefor.”[91]

In Mississippi the corruption was almost as great, and the result almost as disastrous. The State levy for 1871 was four times what it was in 1869; for 1872 it was four times as great; for 1873 it was eight and a half times as great; for 1874 it was fourteen times as great. Six million four hundred thousand acres of land, comprising 20 per cent. of all the lands in the State, had been forfeited for non-payment of taxes.

* * * * *

In South Carolina, if it were possible, the situation was even worse, and the paper contributed to the series to which I have already alluded, by the Hon. John J. Hemphill, to which I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness, outlines briefly the condition of affairs, and presents a picture which ought to be read by every man in the Union. The General Assembly, which convened in 1868, in Columbia, consisted of 72 Whites and 85 Negroes. In the house were 14 Democrats, and in the senate 7; the remaining 136 were Republicans. One of the first acts passed was somewhat anomalous. After defending the rights of the colored man on railroads, in theatres, etc., it provided that if a person whose rights under the act were claimed to be violated, was a Negro, then the burden of proof should shift and be on the defendant, and he should be presumed to be guilty until he established his innocence. This Act was more or less expressive of the spirit in which a good many people at the North still appear to regard all questions arising between the Southern Whites and the Negroes.

When the legislature met, they proceeded to furnish the halls at a cost of $50,000, for which they appropriated $95,000. This hall has since been entirely refurnished at a cost of $3,061. They paid out in four years, for furniture, over $200,000, and when, in 1877, the matter was investigated, it was found that, even placing what remained at the original purchase price, there was left by them in the State House only $17,715 worth; the rest had disappeared.

“They opened another account, known under the vague but comprehensive head of ‘Supplies, sundries, and incidentals.’ This amounted, in a single session, to $350,000. For six years they ran an open bar in one of the legislative committee rooms, open from 8 A.M., to 3 P.M., at which all the officials and their friends helped themselves, with cost—save to the unfortunate and helpless taxpayers.’

They organized railroad frauds, election frauds, census frauds, general frauds—whatever they organized was filled with fraud. They enlisted and equipped an armed force, the governor—one Scott—refusing to accept any but colored companies. Ninety-six thousand colored men were enrolled at a cost, for the simple enrolment, of over $200,000. One thousand Winchester rifles were obtained, for which the State was charged about $38,000; 1,000,000 cartridges cost the State $37,000; 10,000 Springfield muskets were bought, and charged at a cost, they claim, of $187,050; it was all charged to the State at $250,000. The troops, as organized, were employed by Scott and the notorious Moses as their heelers and henchmen. The armed force, or constabulary, were armed and maintained for the same purpose.[92]

Governor Scott spent $374,000 of the funds of the State in his canvass.[93] Eight porters were employed in the State House; they issued certificates to 238; eight laborers and from five to twenty pages were employed; certificates were issued to 159 of the former and 124 of the later. One lot of 150 certificates were issued at once—all fraudulent. During one session pay certificates were issued to the amount of $1,168,255, all of which but about $200,000 was unvarnished robbery.

The public printing was another field for their robbery. The total cost of the printing in South Carolina for the eight years of Republican domination, 1868-76, was $1,326,589. The total cost for printing for 78 years previous—from 1790 to 1868—was $609,000, showing an excess for the cost of printing in eight years, over 78 years previous, of $717,589. The average cost of the public printing under the Republican administration per year, was $165,823; average cost per annum under Hampton’s administration, $6,178. The amount appropriated for one year, 1872-73, by the Republicans, for printing, was $450,000; amount appropriated in 25 years ending in 1866, $278,251. Excess of one year’s appropriation over 25 years, $171,749. The cost of printing in South Carolina exceeded in one year by $122,932.13 the cost of like work in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland together.

In 1860 the taxable values in the State amounted to $490,000,000, and the tax to a little less than $400,000. In 1871 the taxable value had been reduced to $184,000,000, and the tax increased to $2,000,000. In 19 counties taken together, 93,293 acres of land were sold in one year for unpaid taxes. After four years of Republican rule, the debt of the State had increased from $5,407,306 to $18,515,033. There had been no public works of any importance, and the “entire thirteen millions of dollars represented nothing but unnecessary and profligate expenditures and stealings.”[94]

The governor’s pardon was a matter of mere bargain and sale. During Moses’s term of two years, he issued 457 pardons—pardoning during the last month of his tenure of office 46 of the 168 convicts whom he had hitherto left in jail.

In May, 1875, Governor Chamberlain declared, in an interview with a correspondent of the _Cincinnati Commercial_, that when at the end of Moses’s administration he entered on his duties as governor, 200 trial justices were holding offices by executive appointment who could neither read nor write.[95]

These statements are but fragments taken from the papers by Mr. Hemphill, Governor Hampton, and others, who cite the public records, and are simply bare statistics. No account has been taken of the imposition practised throughout the South during the period of Negro domination; of the vast, incredible, and wanton degradation of the Southern people by the malefactors, who, with hoards of ignorant Negroes just freed from the bonds of slavery as their instruments, trod down the once stately South at their will. No wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and carpet-bagger as he was, should have declared, as he did in writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[96]

A survey of the field and a careful consideration of the facts have convinced me that I am within the bounds of truth, when I say that the Southern States, with the exception, perhaps, of one or two of the border States, were better off in 1868, when reconstruction went into force, than they were in 1876, when the carpet-bag governments were finally overthrown; and that the eight years of Negro domination in the South cost the South directly and indirectly more than the entire cost of the war, inclusive of the loss of values in slave property. I think if Mr. Cable, and those who accept his theorem, will study the history of the Southern States, even as written only in the statistics, taking no account, if they please, of the suffering and the humiliation inflicted on the white race of the South during the period in which the South was under the domination of the rulers selected by the Negroes, they will find that there is not so much difference between the proposition which he formulates and that which the South states, when it declares that the pending question is one of race domination, on which depends the future salvation of the American people.

VIII

Twenty-seven years have rolled by since the Negro was given his freedom; nearly twenty-five years have passed since he was given a part in the government, and was taken up to be educated.[97] The laws were so adapted that there is not now a Negro under forty years old who has not had the opportunity to receive a public school education. Through private philanthropy these public schools (many of which are of a high grade) have been supplemented by institutions established on private foundations. That the Negroes have had a not ungeneral ambition to attend school is apparent from the school attendance of the race, as shown by the statistics, the Negro enrolment in the schools for the session of 1878-88 being 1,140,405, or a little over one-half of their entire school population.

Besides this, every profession, every trade, and every department of life have been open to him as to the White; he has had his own race as his constituency; he has possessed the backing of the North, and the good-will of the South. But what has he done? What has he attained?

The South has viewed his political course with suspicion, and in this field of activity has opposed him with all her resources; but she has not been mean or niggardly toward him. On the contrary, in every place, at all times, even while she was resisting and assailing him for his political action, she has displayed toward him in the expenditures for his education a liberality which, in relation to her ability, amounted to lavishness.

The Rev. Dr. A. D. Mayo, eminent alike for his learning and philanthropy, and a Northern educator of note, declared not long ago that “No other people in human history has made an effort so remarkable as the people of the South in reëstablishing their schools and colleges. Overwhelmed by war and bad government, they have done wonders, and with the interest and zeal now felt in public schools in the South, the hope for the future is brighter than ever.” “Last year,” he says, speaking in 1888, “these sixteen States paid nearly $1,000,000 each for educational purposes, a sum greater according to their means than ten times the amount now paid by most of the New England States.”

Virginia has expended on her public schools, including the session of 1890-91, according to the figures of Colonel Ruffin, the Second Auditor of Virginia, taken from official sources, $23,380,309.97. Her Negro schools cost her for the year 1889-90, by the same estimate, $420,000, of which the Negroes paid about $60,000.[98]

Governor Gordon, of Georgia, in a recent address, said of that State: “When her people secured possession of the State government, they found about six thousand colored pupils in the public schools, with the school exchequer bankrupt. To-day, instead of six thousand, we have over one hundred and sixty thousand colored pupils in the public schools, with the exchequer expanding and the schools multiplying year by year.” He says further, “The Negroes pay one-thirtieth of the expense, and the other twenty-nine-thirtieths are paid by the whites.”

The other Southern States have not been behind Virginia and Georgia in this matter.

Now what has the Negro accomplished in this quarter of a century? The picture drawn by Dr. Field of his accomplishment in Massachusetts would do for the South.

“They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes; the women take in washing.” They are barbers and white-washers, shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps. Here and there we find a lawyer or two, unhappily with their practice in inverse ratio to their principle. Or now and then there is a doctor. But almost invariably these are men with a considerable infusion of white blood in their veins. And even they have, in no single instance, attained a position which in a white would be deemed above mediocrity. Fifteen years ago there were in Richmond a number of Negro tobacco and other manufacturers in a small way. Now there are hardly any except undertakers.

They do not appear to possess the faculties which are essential to conduct any business in which reason has to be applied beyond the immediate act in hand.

They appear to lack the faculty of organization on which rests all successful business enterprise.

They have been losing ground as mechanics. Before the war, on every plantation there were first-class carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, etc. Half the houses in Virginia were built by Negro carpenters. Now where are they? In Richmond there may be a few blacksmiths and a dozen or two carpenters; but where are the others?

A great strike occurred last year in one of the large iron-works of the city of Richmond. The president of the company stated afterward that, although the places at the machines were filled later on by volunteers, and although there were many Negroes who did not strike employed in the works, it never occurred to either the management or to the Negroes that they could work at the machines, and not one had ever suggested it.

The question naturally arises, Have they improved? Many persons declare that they have not. My observation has led to a somewhat different conclusion. Where they have been brought into contact with the stronger race under conditions in which they derived aid, as in cities, they have in certain directions improved; where they have lacked this stimulating influence, as in sections of the country where the association has steadily diminished, they have failed to advance. In the cities, where they are in touch with the whites, they are, I think, becoming more dignified, more self-respecting, more reasonable; in the country, where they are left to themselves, I fail to see this improvement.

This improvement, however, such as it is, does not do away with the race issue. So far from it, it rather intensifies the feeling, certainly on the part of the Negro, and makes the relation more strained. Yet it is our only hope. The white race, it is reasonably certain, is not going to be ruled by the Negro either North or South. That day is far off, and neither Lodge bills nor any other bills can bring it about until they can reverse natural law, enact that ignorance shall be above intelligence, and exalt feebleness over strength. The history of that race is a guarantee that this cannot be. It has been a conquering race from its first appearance, like the Scythians of old,

“Firm to resolve and steadfast to endure.”

The section of it which inhabits the United States is not yet degenerate. That part of it at the South assuredly is not. It is not necessary to recall its history. It is one of the finest pages in the history of the human race. Let one who has not been generally regarded as unduly biassed in favor of the South speak for it. Senator Hoar, speaking of the people of the South on the floor of the Senate, in the speech already referred to, said:

They have some qualities which I cannot even presume to claim in an equal degree for the people among whom I, myself, dwell. They have an aptness for command which makes the Southern gentleman, wherever he goes, not a peer only, but a prince. They have a love for home; they have, the best of them, and the most of them, inherited from the great race from which they come, the sense of duty and the instinct of honor as no other people on the face of the earth. They are lovers of home. They have not the mean traits which grow up somewhere in places where money-making is the chief end of life. They have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition and without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired and without getting diverted, can pursue a great public object, in and out, year after year and generation after generation.

This is the race which the Negro confronts. It is a race which, whatever perils have impended, has always faced them with a steadfast mind.

Professor James Bryce in a recent paper on the Negro question arrives at the only reasonable conclusion: that the Negro be let alone and the solution of the problem be left to the course of events. Friendship for the Negro demands this. It has become the fashion of late for certain Negro leaders to talk in conventions held outside of the South of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.

To us of the South it appears that a proper race pride is one of the strongest securities of our nation. No people can become great without it. Without it no people can remain great. We purpose to stand upon it.

The question now remains, What is to become of the Negro? It is not likely that he will remain in his present status, if, indeed, it is possible for him to do so. Many schemes have been suggested, none of them alone answerable to the end proposed. The deportation plan does not seem practicable at present. It is easy to suggest theories, but much more difficult to substantiate them. I hazard one based upon much reflection on the subject. It is, that the Negro race in America will eventually disappear, not in a generation or a century—it may take several centuries. The means will be natural. Certain portions of the Southern States will for a while, perhaps, be almost given up to him; but in time he will be crowded out even there. Africa may take a part; Mexico and South America a part; the rest will, as the country fills up, as life grows harder and competition fiercer, become diffused and disappear, a portion, perhaps, not large, by absorption into the stronger race, the residue by perishing under conditions of life unsuited to the race. The ratio of the death-rate of the race is already much larger than that of the white. Consumption and zymotic diseases are already making their inroads.[99]

Meantime he is here, and something must be done to ameliorate conditions.

In the first place, let us have all the light that can be thrown on the subject. Form an organization to consider and deal with the subject, not in the spirit of narrowness or temper, but in a spirit of philosophic deliberation, such as becomes a great people discussing a great question which concerns not only their present but their future position among the nations. We shall then get at the right of the matter.

Let us do our utmost to eliminate from the question the complication of its political features. Get politics out of it, and the problem will be more than half solved. Senator Hampton stated not long ago in a paper contributed by him to the _North American Review_ that, to get the Negro out of politics, he would gladly give up the representation based on his vote. Could anything throw a stronger light on the apprehension with which the Negro in politics is regarded at the South?

There never was any question more befogged with demagogism than that of manhood suffrage. Let us apply ourselves to the securing some more reasonable and better basis for the suffrage. Let us establish such a proper qualification as a condition precedent to the possession of the elective franchise as shall leave the ballot only to those who have intelligence enough to use it as an instrument to secure good government rather than to destroy it. In taking this step we have to plant ourselves on a broader principle than that of a race qualification. It is not merely the Negro, it is ignorance and venality which we should disfranchise. If we can disfranchise these we need not fear the voter, whatever the color. At present it is not the Negro who is disfranchised, but the white. We dare not divide.

Having limited him in a franchise which he has not in a generation learned to use, continue to teach him. It is from the educated Negro; that is, the Negro who is more enlightened than the general body of his race, that order must come. The ignorance, venality, and superstition of the average Negro are dangerous to us. Education will divide them and will uplift them. They may learn in time that if they wish to rise they must look to the essential qualities of good citizenship. In this way alone can the race or any part of the race look for ultimate salvation.

It has appeared to some that the South has not done its full duty by the Negro. Perfection is, without doubt, a standard above humanity; but, at least, we of the South can say that we have done much for him; if we have not admitted him to social equality, it has been under an instinct stronger than reason, and in obedience to a law higher than is on the statute-books: the law of self-preservation. Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmitigated evil it is fancied to have been. Its time has passed. No power could compel the South to have it back. But to the Negro it was salvation. It found him a savage and a cannibal and in two hundred years gave seven millions of his race a civilization, the only civilization it has had since the dawn of history.

We have educated him; we have aided him; we have sustained him in all right directions. We are ready to continue our aid; but we will not be dominated by him. When we shall be, it is our settled conviction that we shall deserve the degradation into which we shall have sunk.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] This paper was written some years ago and was published in a volume of essays by the author, entitled “The Old South.” It is reprinted here substantially as it was then published, partly with a view to having the entire discussion of the subject by the author in one volume, and partly to show the result of studies of the Race Question at that time and since that time. A comparison may readily be made by anyone who may be sufficiently interested in the matter to make it.

[66] The percentage of increase of the Negro race is shown to be considerably less than that of the white; the percentage of deaths among the former race being largely in excess of that of the latter. See “Vital Statistics of the Negro,” by Frederick L. Hoffman, _The Arena_, April, 1891, p. 529.

[67] “The commissioners of the United Colonies found occasion to complain to the Dutch governor in New Netherlands in 1646 of the fact that the Dutch agent in Hartford had harbored a fugitive Indian slave-woman, of whom they say in their letter: ‘Such a servant is parte of her master’s estate, and a more considerable parte than a beaste.’ A provision for the rendition of fugitives, etc., was afterward made by treaty between the Dutch and the English” (Moore’s “History of Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 28, citing Plymouth Colony Rec. IX. 6, 64, 190).

[68] “History of New England,” II., p. 30, note; Moore, p. 21.

[69] M. H. S. Coll. III, VIII. 231.

[70] Compare Hildreth, I. 278.

[71] “The breeding of slaves was not regarded with favor. Dr. Belknap says that negro children were considered an encumbrance in a family; and when weaned were given away like puppies” (Moore, p. 57, citing M. H. S. Coll. 1, IV. 200).

[72] “Carriage in public conveyances was denied them; physicians would not wait upon them; Miss Crandall’s own family and friends were forbidden under penalty of heavy fines to visit her; the well was filled with manure, and water from other sources refused; the house itself was smeared with filth, assailed with rotten eggs, and finally set on fire.” (“Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” I. p. 321.)

[73] Id. p. 494.

[74] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” I. p. 452.

[75] _Id._ p. 517.

[76] Letter from Garrison to his wife, November 9, 1835.

[77] Lib. 5, 197.

[78] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” II. p. 35.

[79] In Virginia the Legislature which assembled in December, 1865, had in the House of Delegates but one member who was not an old-time Whig, and in the Senate it was “pretty much the same.” (“The Political Hist. of Va., During Reconstruction,” by Hamilton James Eckenrode, p. 41. Johns Hopkins Press, 1904.)

[80] Lincoln’s letter to Governor Hahn, March 13, 1864.

[81] A valuable contribution to it, entitled “Noted Men on the Solid South,” has recently appeared, and to the papers comprised in it I am indebted for much material in this branch of my subject.

[82] Since this was written, a certain class have shown marked signs of advance.

[83] “Sunny Skies and Dark Shadows,” p. 144.

[84] I would refer to the valuable paper contributed by the Hon. B. J. Sage to the volume “Noted Men on the Solid South,” already cited.

[85] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 404.

[86] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 406.

[87] _Id._ p. 406.

[88] Dr. Henry M. Field, “Bright Skies and Dark Shadows.”

[89] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 408.

[90] Since writing this, after a struggle which taxed all the civil resources of the government, this organization has been overthrown.

[91] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 427.

[92] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” Mr. Hemphill’s paper, p. 94.

[93] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 95.

[94] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” pp. 99-102.

[95] “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 104.

[96] Governor Chamberlain has recently written an open letter to Mr. James Bryce, the eminent English student of American governmental conditions, in which after thirty-odd years’ experience he takes absolutely the Southern side of the Race Question.

[97] This was written in 1892.

[98] See Appendix.

[99] See “Vital Statistics of the Negro.” Cited _supra_.