THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM

THE NEGRO:

THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM

BY

THOMAS NELSON PAGE

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK :::::::::::::: 1904

Copyright, 1904, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published, November, 1904
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

TO
ALL THOSE WHO TRULY WISH TO HELP
SOLVE THE RACE PROBLEM, THESE
STUDIES ARE RESPECTFULLY
DEDICATED

INTRODUCTORY

In this volume of essays relating to one of the most vital and pressing problems which has ever confronted a people, no pretence is made that the subject has been fully discussed. All that is claimed is that an attempt is made, after years of study and of more or less familiarity with some phases of the Problem, to present them plainly, candidly and, as far as possible, temperately. It is not even claimed that this is wholly possible. No man can entirely dissociate himself from the conditions amid which he grew up, or free himself from the influences which surrounded him in his youth. The most he can do is to strive earnestly for an open and enlarged mind and try to look at everything from the highest and soundest standpoint he can reach. If he does this and tries to tell the truth absolutely as he sees it, though he may not have given the exact truth, he will, possibly, have done his part to help others find it.

It is not claimed that the author is absolutely correct in all of his propositions. Sometimes the information on which they are based is, possibly, incorrect; the classification of facts incomplete or inexact; and, no doubt, his deductions are occasionally erroneous; but no proposition has been advanced for which he does not believe he has sound authority; no fact has been stated without what appears to him convincing proof, and whatever error his deductions contain may readily be detected, as they are plainly stated.

Although it has appeared at one time or another that the race question was in process of settlement, yet always, just when that hope seemed brightest, it has been dashed to the ground, and the Question has reappeared in some new form as menacing as ever. In fact, it is much too weighty and far-reaching to be disposed of in a short time. Where ten millions of one race, which increases at a rate that doubles its numbers every forty years, confront within the borders of one country another race, the most opposite to it on earth, there must exist a question grave enough in the present and likely to become stupendous in the future. Next to Representative Government, this is to-day the most tremendous question which faces directly one-third of the people of the United States, and only less immediately all of them. It includes the labor question of the South, and must, in time, affect that of the whole country. It does more; it affects all those conditions which make life endurable and, perhaps, even possible in a dozen States of the Union. Wherever it exists, it is so vital that it absorbs for the time being all the energies of the people, and excludes due consideration of every other question whatsoever.

In dealing with this Question in the past, nearly every mistake that could possibly be made has been made, and to-day, after more than thirty-five years of peace and of material prosperity, the Question is apparently as live as it was over a generation ago, when national passion was allowed to usurp the province of deliberation, and the Negro was taught two fundamental errors: first, that the Southern white was inherently his enemy, and, secondly, that his race could be legislated into equality with the white.

One unfortunate fact is that that portion of the white race living at a distance from the region where the Problem is most vital have been trained to hold almost universally one theory as to the Question, while the portion who face the problem every day of their lives have quite solidly held a view absolutely the opposite.

A singular feature of this difference in the views held by the two sections is that whatever Southerners have said about conditions at the South relating to the Negroes has usually been received incredulously at the North, and it is only when some Northerner has seen those conditions for himself and found the views of the Southerners to be sound that those views were accepted. Thus, we have had exhibited the curious fact that evidence upon a most vital matter has been accepted rather with reference to the sectional status of the witness than to his opportunity for exact knowledge.

A Southerner may be a high-minded and philanthropic gentleman, whose views would be sought and whose word would be taken on every other subject; he may be carrying his old slaves as pensioners; he may treat the weakest and worst of them with that mingled consideration and indulgence which is so commonly to be found in the South; but if he expresses the results of a lifetime of knowledge of the Negro’s character, it counts for nothing with a large class who fancy themselves the only friends of the Negro.

The reason for this has, undoubtedly, been the belief held by many Northerners that the Southerners were inherently incapable of doing justice to the negroes. Happily for the proper solution of the question, except with that portion of the people who belong to the generation to whom the Baptist cried in the wilderness, this state of mind is more or less passing away, and men of all sections are awakening to the need for a proper solution.

In this discussion, one thing must be borne in mind: In characterizing the Negroes generally, it is not meant to include the respectable element among them, except where this is plainly intended. Throughout the South there is such an element, an element not only respectable, but universally respected. To say that Negroes furnish the great body of rapists, is not to charge that all Negroes are ravishers. To say that they are ignorant and lack the first element of morality, is not to assert that they all are so. The race question, however, as it exists in the South, is caused by the great body of the race, and after forty years in which money and care have been given unstintedly to uplift them, those who possess knowledge and virtue are not sufficient in number and influence to prevent the race question from growing rather than diminishing.

De Tocqueville, more than a century ago, declared that he was obliged to confess that he did not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern States. Thomas Jefferson pronounced the same view, and declared that they must be separated. In the light of modern conditions, it would appear as though, unless conditions change, these views may be verified. It may even be possibly true, as some believe, that, with the present increase of the two races going on, whether the Negro race be educated and enlightened or not, the most dangerous phases of the problem would still exist in the mere continuance together of the two races.

It is with the hope of throwing some light on this great Question that these studies have been made.

CONTENTS

THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM

THE NEGRO:
THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM

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

I

Among the chief problems which have vexed the country for the last century and threaten to give yet more trouble in the future, is what is usually termed “The Negro Question.” To the South, it has been for nearly forty years the chief public question, overshadowing all others, and withdrawing her from due participation in the direction and benefit of the National Government. It has kept alive sectional feeling; has inflamed partisanship; distorted party policies; barred complete reconciliation; cost hundreds of millions of money, and hundreds if not thousands of lives, and stands ever ready, like Banquo’s ghost, to burst forth even at the feast.

For the last few years it has appeared to be in process of being settled, and settled along the lines which the more conservative element of the white race at the South has deemed for the permanent good of both races, a view in which the best informed element at the North apparently acquiesced. The States which the greater part of the most ignorant element of the Negro race inhabited had substantially eliminated this element from the participation in political government, but had provided qualifications for suffrage which would admit to participation therein any element of the race sufficiently educated to meet what might to an impartial man appear a reasonable requirement.[1] Meantime, the whites were taxing themselves heavily and were doing all in their power to give the entire race the education which would enable them to meet this requirement.

Those whites who know the race best and hold the most far-reaching conception of the subject maintain that this disfranchisement was necessary, and, even of the Negro race, those who are wisest and hold the highest ideal for their people acquiesced in this—at least, to the extent of recognizing that the Negroes at large needed a more substantial foundation for full citizenship than they had yet attained—and were preaching and teaching the imperative necessity of the race’s applying its chief energies to building itself up industrially.

The South, indeed, after years of struggle, considered that the question which had confronted it and largely affected its policy for more than a third of a century was sufficiently settled for the whites to divide once more on the great economic questions on which hang the welfare and progress of the people. Suddenly, however, there has been a recrudescence of the whole question, and it might appear to those who base their opinion wholly on the public prints as though nothing had been accomplished toward its definite settlement in the last generation.

Only the other day, the President extended a casual social invitation to the most distinguished educator of the colored race: one who is possibly esteemed at the South the wisest and sanest man of color in the country, and who has, perhaps, done more than any other to carry out the ideas that the Southern well-wishers of his race believe to be the soundest and most promising of good results. And the effect was so unexpected and so far-reaching that it astonished and perplexed the whole country. On the other hand, this educator, speaking in Boston to his race in a reasonable manner on matters as to which he is a high authority, was insulted by an element, the leaders of which were not the ignorant members of his race, but rather the more enlightened—college-bred men and editors—and a riot took place in the church in which he spoke, in which red pepper and razors were used quite as if the occasion had been a “craps-game” in a Southern Negro settlement. The riot was quelled by the police; but, had it been in a small town, murder might easily have been done.

In view of these facts, it is apparent that the matter is more complicated than appears at first thought, and must be dealt with carefully.

One great trouble is the different way in which the body of the people at the North and at the South regard this problem. We have presented to us the singular fact that two sections of the same race, with the same manners and customs, the same traits of character, the same history and, until within a time so recent that the divergence is within the memory of living men, the same historical relation to the Negro race, should regard so vital a question from such opposite points; the one esteeming the question to be merely as to the legal equality of the races, and the other passionately holding it to be a matter that goes to the very foundation of race-domination and race-integrity. What adds to the anomaly is the pregnant fact that the future of these two sections must hereafter run on together; their interests become ever more and more identified, and if the one is right in holding that its position is founded on a racial instinct, the other, in opposing it, is fighting against a position which it must eventually assume. Yet, their views have up to the present been so divergent—they have, indeed, been so diametrically opposed to each other, that if one is right, the other must be radically wrong.

Another difficulty in the way of a sound solution of the problem is the blind bigotry of the doctrinaire, which infects so many worthy persons. An estimable gentleman from Boston, of quite national reputation, observed a short time ago that it was singular that the Southerners who had lived all their lives among the Negroes should understand them so little, while they of the North who knew them so slightly should yet comprehend them so fully. He spoke seriously and this was without doubt his sincere belief. This would be amusing enough were it not productive of such unhappy consequences. It represents the conviction of a considerable element. Because they have been thrown at times with a few well-behaved, self-respecting Negroes, or have had in their employ well-trained colored servants, they think they know the whole subject better than those who, having lived all their life in touch with its most vital problems, have come to feel in every fibre of their being the deep significance of its manifestations. Such a spirit is the most depressing augury that confronts those who sincerely wish to settle the question on sound principles.

With a Negro population which has increased in the last forty years from four and a half millions to nine millions, of whom eight millions inhabit the South and four and a half millions inhabit the six Southern Atlantic and Gulf States, where in large sections they outnumber the whites two and three to one, and in some parishes ten to one;[2] with this population owning less than 4 per cent. of the property and furnishing from 85 to 93 per cent. of the total number of criminals; with the two races drifting further and further apart, race-feeling growing, and with ravishing and lynching spreading like a pestilence over the country, it is time that all sensible men should endeavor as far as possible to dispel preconceived theories and look at the subject frankly and rationally.

It must appear to all except the doctrinaire and those to whose eyes, seared by the red-hot passions of the war and the yet more angry passions of the Reconstruction period, no ray of light can ever come, that it is of vital importance that a sound solution of the problem should be reached. It behooves all who discuss it to do so in the most dispassionate and catholic spirit possible. The time has passed for dealing with the matter either in a spirit of passion or of cocksure conceit. Well-meaning theorists, and what Hawthorne termed “those steel machines of the devil’s own make, philanthropists,” have with the best intentions “confused counsel” and made a mess of the matter. And after nearly forty years, in which money, brains, philanthropy, and unceasing effort have been poured out lavishly, the most that we have gotten out of it is the experience that forty years have given, and a sad experience it is. The best-informed, the most clear-sighted and straight-thinking men of the North admit sadly that the experiment of Negro suffrage, entered into with so much enthusiasm and sustained at so frightful a cost, has proved a failure, as those who alone knew the Negro when the experiment was undertaken prophesied it must, in the nature of things, prove. Only those who, having eyes, see not, and ears, but will not hear, still shut up their senses and, refusing to take in the plain evidences before them, babble of outworn measures—measures that never had a shred of economic truth for their foundation, and, based originally upon passion, have brought only disaster to the whites and little better to those whom they were intended to uplift.

II

Two principles may be laid down to which, perhaps, all will assent. First, it is absolutely essential that a correct understanding of the question should be had; and, secondly, the only proper settlement of it is one that shall be founded on justice and wisdom—a justice which shall embrace all concerned.

It is important that, at the very outset, we should start with proper bearings. Therefore, though it would hardly appear necessary to advert to the historical side of the question, yet so much ignorance is displayed about it in the discussion that goes on, that, perhaps, the statement of a few simple historical facts will serve to throw light on the subject and start us aright.

Until a recent period, slavery existed as an institution almost all over the world. Christianity, while it modified its status, recognized it, and, up to the time of the abolition of the institution, those who defended it drew their strongest arguments from the sacred writings. Pious Puritans sent their ships to ply along the middle passage, and deemed that they were doing God and man a service to transport benighted savages to serve an enlightened and Christian people. Pious and philanthropic churchmen bought these slaves as they might have bought any other chattels.

The abolition of slavery came about gradually, and was due rather to economic than to moral reasons. When, in 1790, slavery was abolished, by a more or less gradual system, in the Northern States, it was chiefly because of economic conditions. There were at that time less than 42,000 slaves in all the Northern States, and the system was not profitable there; whereas there were over 700,000 slaves in the Southern States, and it appeared that the system there was profitable. But the balance had not then been struck.

Though a respectable party of the representatives of the Southern States advocated its abolition at that time, it was retained because of economic conditions. From these facts, which are elementary, one cannot avoid the conclusion that whatever difference existed in the relation of the races in various sections was due to economic causes rather than to moral or religious feeling. In fact, during the Colonial period, so far from slavery having any moral aspect to the great body of the people, it was generally regarded as a beneficent institution. The Quakers, a sect who, having known oppression themselves, knew how to feel for the oppressed, and a small proportion of the most far-seeing in both sections, were exceptions. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was as strong an advocate of emancipation as James Otis and a much stronger advocate than John Adams.[3]

When the principle that all men are created equal was enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, a great majority of those who signed it had no idea of embracing within its category the enslaved Africans. To have done so would have been to stultify themselves. And whether or not Thomas Jefferson at heart felt the far-reaching scope of his enunciation, he gave no evidence of it at the time.

The Negro was discussed and legislated about as a chattel by the very men who issued that great charter. The whites had conquered this country from the savage and the wild, and they had no misgivings about their rights.

The inclusion of three-fifths of the Negroes in the representation of the several States was stated by Jefferson to have grown out of the claim made by Adams and certain other Northern representatives that they should be taxed just as the whites were taxed, every slave being counted for this purpose just as every white laborer was counted. This view the Southerners opposed and the matter was adjusted by a compromise which reckoned only three out of every five slaves.[4] Representation naturally followed.

It was, however, impossible that the spirit of liberty should be so all-pervading and not in time be felt to extend to all men—even to the slaves; but the growth of the idea was slow, and it was so inextricably bound up with party questions that it was difficult to consider it on its own merits. To show this, it is only necessary to recall that, in 1832, Virginia, through her Legislature, came within one vote of abolishing slavery within her borders, and that, in 1835, William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob—an outrage which he says was planned and executed, not by the rabble or workingmen, but “by gentlemen of property and standing from all parts of the city.”[5]

Fugitive-slave laws found their first examples in the colonial treaties of Massachusetts; yet in time fugitive-slave laws and the attempt to enforce them against the sentiment of communities where slavery had passed away played their part in fostering a sentiment of championship of the Negro race.

Then came “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was the nail that, in the hands of a woman, fastened Sisera to the ground. It presented only one side of the question and did more, perhaps, than any one thing that ever occurred to precipitate the war. It aroused and crystallized feeling against the South throughout the world. For the first time, the world had the imaginable horrors of slavery presented in a manner that appealed alike to old and young, the learned and the ignorant, the high-born and the lowly. It blackened the fame of the Southern people in the eyes of the North and fixed in the mind of the North a concept not only of the institution of slavery, but of the Southern people, which lasted for more than a generation, and has only begun of late, in the light of a fuller knowledge, to be dislodged.[6]

III

Mr. Lincoln has been so generally declared to be the emancipator of the Negro race that it is probable the facts in all their significance will never be generally received. The abolition of slavery was no doubt his desire; but the preservation of the Union was his passion. And, whatever Mr. Lincoln may have felt on the subject of emancipation, he was too good a lawyer and too sound a statesman to act with the inconsiderate haste that has usually been accredited him. It was rather what he might do than what he actually did that alarmed the South and brought about secession. And the menace of destruction of the Union soon demanded all his energies and forced him to relegate to the background even the emancipation of the slaves.[7]

On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded, he declared that the South would be in no more danger of being interfered with as to slavery by a Republican administration than it was in the days of Washington. In his inaugural address he declared: “I have no more purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I believe I have no right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.” This declaration he had already made before. Indeed, he expressly declared in favor of the enforcement of the fugitive-slave law.

Congress, in July, 1861, adopted a resolution, which Lincoln signed, declaring that war was not waged for any “purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the Southern States, “but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc. As late as March, 1862, he declared: “In my judgment, gradual and not sudden emancipation is best for all.” The special message to Congress on this subject Thaddeus Stevens stigmatized as “about the most diluted milk-and-water gruel proposition that has ever been given to the American people.” The war had been going on more than a year before a bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels, found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union, should not be returned to their masters (as had hitherto been done under the law), and they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.” Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, expresses on its face that it was issued on “military necessity.”

In fact, this proclamation did not really emancipate at all, for it applied only to those slaves who were held in those States and “parts of States” then “in rebellion,” and by express exception did not extend to Negroes within the territory under control of the Federal Government.

It is of record that, in some instances, owners near the Federal lines sent their servants into the territory occupied by the Federal troops to evade the proclamation.

A story is told of an officer under General Butler, on the James River, who, having a Negro baby left on his hands by a refugee mother who had returned to her home, sent the child back to her. Someone reported that he was sending refugee Negroes back and the matter was investigated. His defence was that he had sent the baby back to the only place where he was free, to wit: within the region occupied by the rebels.

Meantime, there was much reflection and no little discussion as to the subject among the Southern people. The loyalty of the Negroes had made a deep impression on them, and they were beginning to recognize the feeling of the European countries touching slavery.[8]

The Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery) failed to pass in the spring of 1864 and was not passed until January 31, 1865, when all the Republicans and thirteen Democrats voted for it. Slavery, however, was abolished by the final conquest of the South and the enforced acquiescence of the Southern people, who recognized that the collapse of the Confederacy had effected what legal enactments had not been able to accomplish. Returning soldiers brought their body-servants home with them, and on arrival informed them that they were free; in some instances giving them the horses they had ridden, or dividing with them whatever money they had.[9] Throughout the South, the Negroes were told by their owners that they were free, in some cases receiving regular papers of manumission.

IV

No race ever behaved better than the Negroes behaved during the war. Not only were there no massacres and no outbreaks, but even the amount of defection was not large. While the number who entered the Northern Army was considerable,[10] it was not as great as might have been expected when all the facts are taken into account. A respectable number came from the North, while most of the others came from the sections of the South which had already been overrun by the armies of the Union and where mingled persuasion and compulsion were brought to bear.[11] Certainly no one could properly blame them for yielding to the arguments used. Their homes were more or less broken up; organization and discipline were relaxed, and the very means of subsistence had become precarious; while on the other hand they were offered bounties and glittering rewards that drew into the armies hundreds of thousands of other nationalities. The number that must be credited to refugees who left home in the first instance for the purpose of volunteering to fight for freedom is believed by the writer to be not large; personally, he never knew of one. However large the number was, the number of those who might have gone, and yet threw in their lot with their masters and never dreamed of doing otherwise, was far larger. Many a master going off to the war intrusted his wife and children to the care of his servants with as much confidence as if they had been of his own blood. They acted rather like clansmen than like bondmen. Not only did they remain loyal, but they were nearly always faithful to any trust that had been confided to them. They were the faithful guardians of their masters’ homes and families; the trusted agents and the shrewd counsellors of their mistresses. They raised the crops which fed the Confederate armies, and suffered without complaint the privations which came alike to white and black from the exactions of war. On the approach of the enemy, the trusted house servants hid the family silver and valuables, guarded horses and other property, and resisted all temptation to desert or betray. It must, of course, rest always on conjecture; but the writer believes that, had the Negro been allowed to fight for the South, more of them would have volunteered to follow their masters than ever volunteered in the service of the Union. Many went into the field with their masters, where they often displayed not only courage but heroism, and, notwithstanding all temptations, stood by them loyally to the end. As Henry Grady once said, “A thousand torches would have disbanded the Southern Army, but there was not one.”[12]

The inference that has been drawn from this is usually one which is wholly in favor of the colored race. It is, however, rather a tribute to both races. Had slavery at the South been the frightful institution that it has ordinarily been pictured, with the slave-driver and the bloodhound always in the foreground, it is hardly credible that the failure of the Negroes to avail themselves of the opportunities for freedom so frequently offered them would have been so general and the loyalty to their masters have been so devoted.

One other reason is commonly overlooked. The instinct for command of the white race—at least, of that section to which the whites of this country belong—is a wonderful thing: the serene self-confidence which reckons no opposition, but drives straight for the highest place, is impressive. It made the race in the past; it has preserved it in our time. The Negroes knew the courage and constancy of their masters. They had had abundant proof of them for generations, and their masters were now in arms.

The failure of a servile population to rise against their masters in time of war is no new thing. History furnishes many illustrations. Plutarch tells how the besiegers of a certain city offered, not only freedom to the slaves, but added to it the promise of their masters’ property and wives if they would desert them. Yet the offer was rejected with scorn. During the Revolution, freedom on the same terms was offered the slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas by the British, but with little effect, except to inflame the masters to bitterer resistance.[13] The result was the same during the Civil War.

V

The exactions of the war possibly brought the races nearer together than they had ever been before. There had been, in times past, some hostile feeling between the Negroes and the plain whites, due principally to the well-known arrogance of a slave population toward a poor, free, working population. This was largely dispelled during the war, on the one side by the heroism shown by the poor whites, and on the other by the kindness shown by the Negroes to their families while the men were in the army. When the war closed, the friendship between the races was never stronger; the relations were never more closely welded. The fidelity of the Negroes throughout the war was fully appreciated and called forth a warmer affection on the part of the masters and mistresses, and the care and self-denial of the whites were equally recognized by the Negroes. Nor did this relation cease with the emancipation of the Negro. The return of the masters was hailed with joy in the quarters as in the mansion. When the worn and disheartened veteran made his last mile on his return from Appomattox, it was often the group of Negroes watching for him at the plantation gate that first caught his dimmed eye and their shouts of welcome that first sounded in his ears.

A singular fact was presented which has not been generally understood. The joy with which the slaves hailed emancipation did not relax the bonds of affection between them and their former masters and mistresses. There was, of course, ex necessitate rei, much disorganization, and no little misunderstanding. The whites, defeated and broken, but unquelled and undismayed, were unspeakably sore; the Negroes, suddenly freed and facing an unknown condition, were naturally in a state of excitement. But the transition was accomplished without an outbreak or an outrage, and, so far as the writer’s experience and information go, there were on either side few instances of insolence, rudeness, or ill-temper, incident to the break-up of the old relation. This was reserved for a later time, when a new poison had been instilled into the Negro’s mind and had begun to work. Such disorders as occurred were incident to the passing through the country of disbanded troops, making their way home without the means of subsistence, but even these were sporadic and temporary.

For years after the war the older Negroes, men and women, remained the faithful guardians of the white women and children of their masters’ families.[14]

One reason which may be mentioned for the good-will that continued to exist during this crisis, and has borne its part in preserving kindly relations ever since, is that, among the slave-owning class, there was hardly a child who had not been rocked in a colored mammy’s arms and whose first ride had not been taken with a Negro at his horse’s head; not one whose closest playmates in youth had not been the young Negroes of the plantation. The entire generation which grew up during and just after the war grew up with the young Negroes, and preserved for them the feeling and sympathy which their fathers had had before them. This feeling may hardly be explained to those who have not known it. Those who have known it will need no explanation. It possibly partakes somewhat of a feudal instinct; possibly of a clan instinct. It is not mere affection; for it may exist where affection has perished and even where its object is personally detested. Whatever it is, it exists universally with those who came of the slave-holding class in the South, who knew in their youth the Negroes who belonged to their family, and, no matter what the provocation, they can no more divest themselves of it than they can of any other principle in their lives.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See chapter on “The Disfranchisement of the Negro.”

[2] The Negro population in 1860 was, in the Slave States, 4,215,614; in the other States it was 226,216, a total of 4,441,830. In 1900 the Negro population in the Southern States and the District of Columbia was 8,081,270.

[3] By the census of 1781, there were in Virginia 12,866 free Negroes.

[4] See Randolph’s “Life of Jefferson,” Vol. I, pp. 22-24.

[5] “Life of William Lloyd Garrison,” Vol. II, p. 35, and Liberator, No. 5, p. 197.

[6] An illustration of this may be found in T. W. Dwight’s paper on the Dred Scott case in Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia, where he refers to the fact that, in the Dred Scott case, Chief Justice Taney’s learned opinion, reviewing historically the attitude of the people toward the African race at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, has been generally taken as giving his own opinion. Even the late senior Senator from Massachusetts was recently reported as quoting this as Chief Justice Taney’s opinion. But see Tyler’s “Life of Chief Justice Taney.”

[7] Horace Greeley’s old paper, the New York Tribune, has recently, in commenting on a statement made by the successor of Henry Ward Beecher, felt compelled to declare that the war was primarily undertaken to save the Union and not to emancipate slaves. But the strongest single piece of testimony is Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley of Aug. 22, 1862. Lincoln’s paramount object, as he boldly avowed in this letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley, was “to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.”—Cong. Globe, 2d Session, 37th Congress, Pt. II, p. 1154.

[8] General R. E. Lee emancipated his servants within eight days after the proclamation was issued. On the 8th of January, 1863, he wrote from his camp that he had executed and returned to his lawyer a deed of manumission which he had had prepared by him. He had discovered the omission of certain names and had inserted them. And he added that if any other names had been omitted, he wished a supplementary deed drawn up containing all that had been so omitted. “They are all entitled to their freedom,” he writes, “and I wish to give it to them. Those that have been carried away, I hope, are free and happy. I cannot get their papers to them and they do not require them. I will give them if they call for them.” See “Life of General R. E. Lee,” by Fitzhugh Lee.

General Henry A. Wise, one of the most ultra-Democratic leaders in the South, states that, had the South succeeded in its struggle, he had intended to set his slaves free and canvass Virginia for the abolition of slavery. See Report of Joint Commission on Reconstruction, 1st Session, 39th Congress, p. 70.

[9] The writer recalls vividly one such case when his father returned from Appomattox: “Ralph,” he said, as he dismounted at his door, “you are free. You have been a good servant. Turn the horses out.” Ralph is still living.

[10] The total number of colored troops enlisted during the war was 186,097.—“Statistical Records of the Armies of the United States,” by Frederick Phisterer, late Captain, U. S. A.

[11] There was a growing sentiment in favor of enlisting the Negroes to fight the Confederacy, and a number of regiments were enlisted. One of these was enlisted in New Orleans; two were enlisted in Virginia.

[12] The writer never heard of a body-servant deserting, and he knows of sundry instances when they had abundant opportunity. In some cases they would vanish for days and then reappear, laden with spoils that they had gotten from the enemy. The body-servant of the writer’s father, having been punished for some dereliction of duty while before Petersburg, in 1865, ran away, but though he could easily have crossed through the lines not three miles away, he walked sixty miles and came home.

[13] Trevellyan’s “History of the American Revolution,” Part 2, Vol. I.

[14] During the disorders following the war, the older Negroes at the writer’s home were armed and stood guard over the ripened crops.

CHAPTER II
SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES

Such was the relation between the whites and the blacks of the South when emancipation came. It remains now to show what changes have taken place since that time; how these changes have come about, and what errors have been committed in dealing with the Race-question which still affect the two races.

The dissension which has come between the two races has either been sown since the Negro’s emancipation or is inherent in the new conditions that have arisen.

When the war closed, and the emancipation of the Negroes became an established fact, the first pressing necessity in the South was to secure the means of living; for in sections where the armies had been the country had been swept clean, and in all sections the entire labor system was disorganized. The internal management of the whole South, from the general government of the Confederate States to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces.

In most instances—indeed, in all of which the writer has any knowledge—the old masters informed their servants that their homes were still open to them, and that if they were willing to remain and work, they would do all in their power to help them. But to remain, in the first radiant holiday of freedom, was, perhaps, more than could be expected of human nature, and most of the blacks went off for a time, though later a large number of them returned.[15] In a little while the country was filled with an army of occupation, and the Negroes, moved partly by curiosity, partly by the strangeness of the situation, and, perhaps mainly, by the lure of the rations which the Government immediately began to distribute, not unnaturally flocked to the posts of the local garrisons, leaving the fields unworked and the crops to go to destruction.

From this time began the change in the Negroes and in the old relation between them and the whites; a change not great at first, and which never became great until the Negroes had been worked on by the ignorant or designing class who, in one guise or another, became their teachers and leaders. In some places the action of military commanders had already laid the ground for serious misunderstanding by such orders as those which were issued in South Carolina for putting the Negroes in possession of what were, with some irony, termed “abandoned lands.” The idea became widespread that the Government was going to divide the lands of the whites among the Negroes. Soon all over the South the belief became current that every Negro was to receive “forty acres and a mule”; a belief that undoubtedly was fostered by some of the U. S. officials. But, in the main, the military commanders acted with wisdom and commendable breadth of view, and the breach was made by civilians.

From the first, the conduct of the North toward the Negro was founded on the following principles: First, that all men are equal (whatever this may mean), and that the Negro is the equal of the white; secondly, that he needed to be sustained by the Government; and thirdly, that the interests of the Negro and the white were necessarily opposed, and the Negro needed protection against the white.

The South has always maintained that these were fundamental errors.

It appears to the writer that the position of the South on these points is sound; that, however individuals of one race may appear the equals of individuals of the other race, the races themselves are essentially unequal.

The chief trouble that arose between the two races in the South after the war grew out of the ignorance at the North of the actual conditions at the South, and the ignorance at the South of the temper and the power of the North. The North believed that the Negro was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled and compelled to work.

In fact, as ignorance of each other brought about the conditions which produced the war between the sections, so it has brought about most of the trouble since the war.

The basic difficulty in the way of reaching a correct solution of the Negro problem is, as has been stated, that the two sections of the American people have hitherto looked at it from such widely different standpoints.

The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. The South, in direct contact with the practical working of every phase of the question, affected in its daily life by every form and change that the question takes, resolutely asserts that the conception on which that policy is predicated is fundamentally erroneous, and that this policy would destroy not only the white race of the South, but even the civilization which the race has helped to establish, and for which it stands, and so, in time, would inevitably debase and destroy the nation itself.

Thus, the South holds that the question is vastly more far-reaching than the North deems it to be; that, indeed, it goes to the very foundation of race preservation. And this contention, so far from being a mere political tenet, is held by the entire white population of the South as the most passionate dogma of the white race.

This confusion of definitions has in the past resulted in untold evil, and it cannot be insisted on too often that it is of the utmost importance that the truth, whatever it is, should be established. When this shall be accomplished, and done so clearly that both sides shall accept it, the chief difficulty in the way of complete understanding between the sections will be removed. So long as the two sections are divided upon it, the question will never be settled. As soon as they unite in one view, it will settle itself on the only sound foundation—that of unimpeachable economic truth.

To this ignorance and opposition of views on the part of the two sections, unhappily, were added at the outset the misunderstandings and passions engendered by war, which prevented reason having any great part in a work which was to affect the whole future of the nation. With a fixed idea that there could be no justice toward the Negroes in any dealings of their former masters, all matters relating to the Negroes were intrusted by the Government to the organization which had recently been started for this very purpose under the name of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was a subject which called for the widest knowledge and the broadest wisdom, and, unhappily, both knowledge and wisdom appeared to have been resolutely banished in the treatment of the subject.

The basis of the institution of the Freedmen’s Bureau was the assumption stated: that the interests of the blacks and of the whites were necessarily opposed to each other, and that the blacks needed protection against the whites in all cases. The densest ignorance of the material on which the organization was to work prevailed, and the personnel of the organization was as unsuited to the work as could well be. With a small infusion of sensible men were mingled a considerable element of enthusiasts who felt themselves called to be the regenerators of the slaves and the scourge of their former masters, and with these, a large element of reckless adventurers who, recognizing a field for the exercise of their peculiar talents, went into the business for what they could make out of it. Measures were adopted which might have been sound enough in themselves if they had been administered with any practical wisdom. But there was no wisdom in the administration. Those who advised moderation and counselled with the whites were set aside. Bred on the idea of slavery presented in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and inflamed by passions engendered by the war, the enthusiasts honestly believed that they were right in always taking the side of the down-trodden Negro; while the adventurers, gauging with an infallible appraisement the feelings at the North, went about their work with businesslike methods to stir up sectional strife and reap all they could from the abundant harvest. And of the two, the one did about as much mischief as the other.

No statement of any Southern white person, however pure in life, lofty in morals, high-minded in principle he might be, was accepted. His experience, his position, his character, counted for nothing. He was assumed to be so designing or so prejudiced that his counsel was valueless.

It is a phase of the case which has not yet wholly disappeared, and even now we have presented to us in a large section of the country the singular spectacle of evidence being weighed rather by a man’s geographical position than by his character and his opportunity for knowledge.

This self-complacent ignorance is one of the factors which prevent a complete understanding of the problem and tend to perpetuate the errors which have cost so much in the past and, unless corrected, may prove yet more expensive in the future.

The conduct of the Freedmen’s Bureau misled the Negroes and caused the first breach between them and their former masters. Ignorance and truculence characterized almost every act of that unhappy time. Nearly every mistake that could be made was made on both sides. Measures that were designed with the best intentions were so administered as to bring these intentions to wreck.

On the emancipation of the slaves, the more enlightened whites of the South saw quite as clearly as any person at the North could have seen the necessity of some substitute for the former direction and training of the Negroes, and schools were started in many places by the old masters for the colored children.[16]

Teachers and money had come from the North for the education of the Negroes, and many schools were opened. But the teachers, at first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated the good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they might have accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust in any case, for no people look with favor on the missionaries who come to instruct them as to matters of which they feel they know much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new missionaries went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern people. They lived with the Negroes, consorting with them, and appearing with them on terms of apparent intimacy, and were believed to teach social equality, a doctrine which was the surest of all to arouse enmity then as now. The result was that hostility to the public-school system sprang up for a time. In some sections violence was resorted to by the rougher element, though it was of short duration, and was always confined to a small territory.[17] Before long, however, this form of opposition disappeared and the public-school system became an established fact.

The next step in the alienation of the races was the formation of the secret order of the Union League. The meetings were held at night, with closed doors, and with pickets guarding the approaches, and were generally under the direction of the most hostile members of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The whites regarded this movement with serious misgivings, as well they might, for, having as its basic principle the consolidation of the Negro race against the white race, it banded the Negroes in an organization which, with the exception of the Confederate Army, was the most complete that has ever been known in the South, and the fruits of which still survive to-day. Without going into the question of the charges that the League taught the most inflammatory doctrines, it may be asserted without fear of question that its teaching was to alienate the Negroes from the whites; to withdraw them wholly from reliance on their former masters, and to drill into their minds the imperative necessity of adherence to their new leaders, and those whom those leaders represented.

Then came the worst enemy that either race had ever had: the post-bellum politician. The problem was already sufficiently complicated when politics were injected into it. Well might General Lee say with a wise knowledge of men: “The real war has just begun.”

No sooner had the Southern armies laid down their guns and the great armies of the North who had saved the Union disbanded, than the vultures, who had been waiting in the secure distance, gathered to the feast. The act of a madman had removed the wisest, most catholic, most conservative, and the ablest leader, one whose last thoughts almost had been to “restore the Union” by restoring the government of the Southern States along constitutional lines; and well the politicians used the unhappy tragedy for their purposes. Those who had been most cowardly in war were bravest in peace, now that peace had come. Even in Mr. Lincoln’s time the radical leaders in Congress had made a strenuous fight to carry out their views, and their hostility to his plan of pacification and reconstruction was expressed with hardly less vindictiveness than they exhibited later toward his successor.[18]

The Southern people, unhappily, acted precisely as this element wished them to act; for they were sore, unquelled, and angry. They met denunciation with defiance.

Knowing the imperative necessities of the time as no Northerner could know them; fearing the effects of turning loose a slave population of several millions, and ignorant of the deep feeling of the Northern people; the Southerners hastily enacted laws regulating labor which were certainly unwise in view of the consequences that followed, and possibly, if enforced, might have proved oppressive, though they never had a trial. Most of these laws were simply reënactments of old vagrant laws on the statute books and some still stand on the statute books; but they were enacted now expressly to control the Negroes; they showed the animus of the great body of the whites, and they aroused a deep feeling of distrust and much resentment among the Northerners. And, finally, they played into the hands of the politicians who were on the lookout for any pretext to fasten their grip on the South.

The struggle just then became intensified between the President and his opponents in Washington, with the Presidency and the control of the Government as the stake, and with the South holding the balance of power; and, unhappily, the Negroes appeared to the politicians an element that could be utilized to advantage by being made the “permanent allies” of what Mr. Stevens, Mr. Wade, and Mr. Sumner used to term “the party of the Union.”

So, the Negro appeared to the politicians a useful instrument, and to the doctrinaires “a man and brother” who was the equal of his former master, and, if he were “armed with the weapon” of the ballot, would be able to protect himself and would inevitably rise to the full stature of the white.

A large part of the people of the North were undoubtedly inspired by a missionary spirit which had a high motive beneath it. But a missionary spirit undirected by knowledge of real conditions is a dangerous guide to follow. And the danger was never better illustrated than in this revolution. Doubtless, some of the politicians were inspired partly by the same idea; but the major portion had but one ruling passion—the securing of power and the down-treading of the Southern whites.[19]

Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were enfranchised.

It is useless to discuss the motives with which this was done. No matter what the motives it was a national blunder; in its way as great a blunder as secession.

It is not uncommonly supposed that Mr. Lincoln was the originator of this idea. The weight of his name is frequently given to it by the uninformed. Mr. Lincoln, however, was too level-headed and clear-sighted a statesman ever to have committed so great a folly. The furthest he ever went was in his letter to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, in which he “suggested” the experiment of intrusting the ballot to “some of the colored people, for instance ... the very intelligent,” and as a reward for those who had fought for the Union.[20]

In fact, for a year or two after the war no one in authority dreamed of investing the Negro race at once with the elective franchise. This came after the South had refused to tolerate the idea of the franchise being conferred on any of them, and after passions had become inflamed.[21]

The eight years of Reconstruction possibly cost the South more than the four years of war had cost her. To state it in mere figures, it may be said that when the eight years of Negro domination under carpet-bag leaders had passed, the public indebtedness of the Southern States had increased about fourfold, while the property values in all the States had shrunk, and in those States which were under the Negro rule had fallen to less than half what they had been when the South entered on that period. In Louisiana, for instance, the cost of Negro rule for four years and five months amounted to $106,020,337, besides the privileges and franchises given away to those having “pulls,” and State franchises stolen. The wealth of New Orleans shrank during these eight years from $146,718,790 to $88,613,930, while real estate values in the country parishes shrank from $99,266,083 to $47,141,699.[22]

In South Carolina and Mississippi, the other two States which were wholly under Negro rule, the condition was, if anything, worse than in Louisiana, while in the other Southern States it was not so bad, though bad enough.

But the presentation of the statistics gives little idea of what the people of the South underwent while their State Governments were controlled by Negroes.

A wild Southern politician is said to have once truculently boasted that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of the Bunker Hill Monument. If the tradition is true, it was a piece of insolence which naturally offended deeply the sentiment of the people of the proud Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But this was mere gasconade. Had he been able to carry out his threat, and then had he installed his Negroes in the State-house of Massachusetts, and, by travesty of law, filled the legislative halls with thieves and proceeded to disfranchise the best and the proudest people of the Commonwealth; then had he, sustained by bayonets, during eight years ridden rough-shod over them; cut the value of their property in half; quadrupled their taxes; sold out over twenty per cent. of the landed property of the State for forfeiture; appointed over two hundred Negro trial justices who could neither read nor write, put a Negro on the bench of their highest court, and paraded through the State something like 80,000 Negro militia, armed with money stolen from the State, to insult and menace the people, while the whole South looked coolly on and declared that this treatment was just; then might there be a partial but not a complete parallel to what some of the States of the South endured under Negro rule.

It is little wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and carpet-bagger though he was, should have declared as he did in writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[23]

The South does not hold that the Negro race was primarily responsible for this travesty of government. Few reasonable men now charge the Negroes at large with more than ignorance and an invincible faculty for being worked on. But the consequences were none the less disastrous.

The injury to the whites was not the only injury caused by the reconstruction system. To the Negroes, the objects of its bounty, it was no less a calamity.

However high the motive may have been, no greater error could have been committed; nothing could have been more disastrous to the Negro’s future than the teaching he thus received. He was taught that the white man was his enemy when he should have been taught to cultivate his friendship. He was told he was the equal of the white when he was not the equal; he was given to understand that he was the ward of the nation when he should have been trained in self-reliance; he was led to believe that the Government would sustain him when he could not be sustained. In legislation, he was taught thieving; in politics, he was taught not to think for himself, but to follow slavishly his leaders (and such leaders!); in private life, he was taught insolence. A laborer, dependent on his labor, no greater misfortune could have befallen him than estrangement from the Southern whites. To instil into his mind the belief that the Southern white was his enemy; that his interest was necessarily opposed to that of the white, and that he must thwart the white man to the utmost of his power, was to deprive him of his best friend and to array against him his strongest enemy.

To the teachings which led the Negro to feel that he was “the ward of the nation”; that he was a peculiar people whom the nation had taken under its wing and would support and foster; and that he could, by its fiat, be made the equal of the white, and would, by its strong arm, be sustained as such, may, perhaps, be traced most of the misfortunes of the Negro race, and, indeed, of the whole South, since the war. The Negro saw the experiment being tried; he saw his former master, who had been to him the type of all that was powerful and proud, and brave, and masterful, put down and held down by the United States Government, while he, himself, was set up and declared his full equal. He is quick to learn, and during this period, when he was sustained by the Government, he was as insolent as he dared to be. The only check on him was his lurking recognition of the Southerner’s dominant force.

The one thing that saved the Southerners was that they knew it was not the Negroes but the Federal Government that held them in subjection.

The day the bayonets were withdrawn from the South, the Negro power, which but the day before had been as arrogant and insolent as ever in the whole course of its brief authority, fell to pieces.

It is little less than amazing that the whites of the South should, after all that they went through during the period of reconstruction, have retained their kindly feeling for the Negroes, and not only retained but increased their loyalty to the Union. To the writer, it seems one of the highest tributes to the white people of the South that their patriotism should have remained so strong after all they had endured.

The explanation is that the hostility of the Southern people was not directed so much against the United States or its Government, to form which they had contributed so much and in which they had taken so much pride, as against that element among the people of the North that had always opposed them, particularly where slavery was concerned. In seceding, the Southerners had acted on the doctrine enunciated by so distinguished a Northerner as John Quincy Adams in 1839, when he declared that it would be better for the States to “part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint,” and look forward “to form again a more perfect friendship by dissolving that which could not bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the centre,”[24] and now, slavery and secession having finally been disposed of, they naturally and necessarily gravitated back to the old feeling for the Union.

It is not less remarkable that, notwithstanding all the humiliation they had to endure during the period of Negro domination, they should still have retained their feeling of kindliness for the race. The fact, however, was that they did not charge against the race in general the enormities which were committed by them during that period. However they might be outraged by their insolence and their acts, they charged it rather against the leaders than against the followers. The Southerners knew the Negroes; knew their weaknesses and their merits, and knew how easily they were misled. And it was always significant that though the Negroes universally followed their leaders and, when they felt themselves in power, conducted themselves with intolerable insolence, at other times they exhibited their old kindliness, and no sooner was the instigation removed than they were ready to resume their old relation of dependence and affection.

Indeed, those who had been the worst and most revolutionary had no sooner sunk back into their former position of civility than they were forgiven and treated with good-natured tolerance.[25]

With the overthrow of the carpet-bag governments, and the destruction of Negro domination at the South, the South began to shoot up into the light of a new prosperity. Burdened as she was by debt; staggering under disasters that had well-nigh destroyed her; scarred by the struggle through which she had gone, and scorched by the passions of that fearful time, she set herself with all her energies to recovering through the arts of peace her old place in the path of progress. The burden she has borne has been heavy, but she has carried it bravely and triumphantly.

Her property values have steadily increased. Mills have been started and manufactories established, and this not only by Southern investors, but, to a considerable extent, by Northern capital, until the South has become one of the recognized fields for investment. This, among other causes, has made the South restive under an electorate which has confined her to one political party, shut her off from ability to divide on economic questions, and which, to a certain extent, withdrew her from her due participation in the National Government. With this, another cause is the change of the relation between the two races. It is useless to blink the question. The old relation of intimacy and affection that survived to a considerable extent even the strain and stress of the reconstruction period, and the repressive measures that followed it, has passed away, and in its place has come a feeling of indifference or contempt on the one side, and indifference or envy on the other. In some places, under some conditions, the old attitude of reliance and the old feeling of affection still remain. For example, in many families, the old relation of master and servant, of superior and retainer, may still exist. In some neighborhoods or towns, individuals of the colored race, by their ability and character, have achieved a position which has brought to them the respect and sincere good-will of the whites. A visit to the South will show anyone that, in the main, the feeling of kindness and good-will has survived all the haranguing of the politician and all the teaching of the doctrinaire. Ordinarily, the children still play together, the men work together, the elders still preserve their old good-will. The whites visit the sick and afflicted, help the unfortunate, relieve the distressed, console the bereaved, and perform the old offices of kindness. But this is, to some extent, exceptional. It is mainly confined to the very young, the old, or the unfortunate and dependent. The rule is a changed relation and a widening breach. The teaching of the younger generation of Negroes is to be rude and insolent. In the main, it is only where the whites have an undisputed authority that the old relation survives. Where the whites are so superior in numbers that no question can be raised; or again, where, notwithstanding the reversed conditions, the whites are in a position so dominant as not to admit of question, harmony prevails.

When the relations are reversed there is danger of an outbreak. The Negro, misled by the teaching of his doctrinaire friends into thinking himself the equal of the white, asserts himself, and the white resents it. The consequence is a clash, and the Negro becomes the chief sufferer so invariably that it ought to throw some light on the doctrine of equality.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] The same thing happened in Russia on the emancipation of the serfs. See Kropotkin’s Memoirs.

[16] The writer knew personally of a number of these schools, which began first as Sunday-schools immediately after the war. Indeed, under the inspiration of a pious lady, the services of all the young people in the neighborhood were called into requisition in the spring of 1865, to help teach a Sunday-school for the Negro children, who were at first taught their letters in the sand. A little later, through the kindness of friends at the North, enough money was secured to build a school-house, which still stands and was used at first for a Sunday-school and afterward for a day-school.

[17] See Report of Congressional Committee in Government Ku-Klux Trials.

[18] See “Reconstruction in the South During the War.”

[19] See Congressional debates and questions put to witnesses before the various High Commissions organized by Congress for the inquisition of affairs at the South, in 1865 and 1866.

[20] See Mr. Lincoln’s letter to Governor B. F. Hahn, January 13, 1864. This was at a time when it was necessary to have 10,000 votes to reconstruct Louisiana.

[21] See chapter on “Disfranchisement of the Negro.”

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

[23] Governor Chamberlain has recently written an open letter to Mr. James Bryce in which he espouses warmly the views held generally by the Southern whites on this subject.

[24] See debates in Congress, April 3, 1839; January 23, 1842; seq.: when John Quincy Adams presented a petition to Congress from Haverhill, Mass., praying that Congress would “immediately adopt measures possible to dissolve the union of the States.”

[25] For years, one of the popular paper-carriers of Richmond was a certain Lewis Lindsay who, during the early period of reconstruction, had been one of the most violent of the Negro leaders, and became noted for a speech in which he declared that he wished to wade in white blood up to his knees. In Charleston, another leader, equally violent, later sold fish in the market, and among his customers were the very persons toward whom he had once been so outrageous. In New Orleans, another was a hostler. Such instances could readily be multiplied.

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

Having in the two previous papers undertaken to show the relation between the whites of the South and the Negroes at the time of the abolition of slavery, and having traced the change in that relation and pointed out the mistakes which, in the writer’s opinion, were mainly responsible for whatever trouble has since arisen between them, it now remains to see what the present condition is; how far it is attributable to those causes, and what promise the future holds of amendment.

Thirty-eight years have passed since the Negro was set free and became his own master. By sentimentalists and Negro writers and orators, most of the Negro’s shortcomings are usually charged to slavery, and undoubtedly slavery leaves certain traits which the student can readily detect. But most of the class of writers referred to ignore the fact that the Negro at the close of slavery was in a higher condition of civilization than when he came a savage from the wilds of Africa. Of slavery it may be said that it was the greatest evil that ever befell this country. It kept the sections divided and finally plunged the nation into a devastating civil war. This is indictment enough. But to the Negro it was far from an unmixed evil. This very period of slavery in America had given to him the only semblance of civilization which the Negro race has possessed since the dawn of history.

Whatever evils slavery may have entailed upon the Negro, this much may unquestionably be predicted of it: it left him a trained laborer and in good physical condition. He started in on a new era with a large share of friendliness on the part of the South and with the enthusiastic good-will of the North. He had little property, and not more than two or three per cent. were able to read; but he commanded the entire field of labor in the South, while a certain percentage, composed of house-servants, had the knowledge which comes from holding positions of responsibility and from constant association with educated people.

When the war closed, among the four millions of Negroes who then inhabited the South, there was, with the exception of the invalids, the cripples, and the superannuated, scarcely an adult who was not a trained laborer or a skilled artisan. In the cotton section they knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops. They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The entire industrial work of the South was performed by them. They were the trained domestic servants—laundresses, nurses, and midwives. They were the carpenters, smiths, coopers, sawyers, wheelwrights, bricklayers, and boatmen. They were the tanners and shoemakers, miners and stonecutters, tailors and knitters, spinners and weavers. Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South.

No exact statistics of the race at that time may be obtained, but a reasonably approximate estimate may be made, based on the known facts, as to the number of slave-holders, and the general relation of house-servants, mechanics, etc., to the entire population. It is known, for instance, that the slave-holder, whether he owned few or many, invariably had his best slaves as domestic servants. It is equally well known that the large plantations hired the services of those on the larger estates.

In 1860 there were in the Southern States between five and six hundred thousand slave-owners and slave hirers, and there were four million and a quarter slaves, or about eight slaves to each owner.[26] Of these slave-owners, perhaps, every one had at least one house-servant, and most of them had several. Striking a mean between the smaller slave-owner and the larger, it would probably be found that the proportion of mechanics and artisans to the entire population was about the same that it is in any agricultural community, or, as the slave is known to be generally not as industrious and efficient as the free workman, the percentage was possibly higher than it is to-day in the West or in the agricultural parts of the South. It is not pretended that this is more than a conjecture, but it is a conjecture based upon what appears a conservative estimate.

Since that time, according to the census of 1900, over $109,000,000 had been expended by the South on the Negro’s education, besides what has been expended by private charity, which is estimated to amount to $30,000,000.

The South has faithfully applied itself during all these years to giving the Negroes all the opportunities possible for attaining an education, and it is one of the most creditable pages in her history that in face of the horror of Negro-domination during the Reconstruction period; of the disappointment at the small results; in face of the fact that the education of the Negroes has appeared to be used by them only as a weapon with which to oppose the white race, the latter should have persistently given so largely of its store to provide this misused education. Of the $109,000,000 which the Southern States have, since the war, applied to the education of the Negro by voluntary taxation, over $100,000,000 was raised by the votes of the whites from taxation on the property of the whites. Several times of late years propositions have been made in various legislatures in the South to devote the money raised by taxation of the property of each race exclusively to the education of that race, but in every case, to their credit be it said, the propositions have been overwhelmingly defeated.[27] The total expenditure for public schools in the South in the year 1898-1899 was $32,849,892, of which $6,569,978 was to sustain Negro schools.

Inspection of the records will reveal something of the fruits of the $140,000,000 expended on the education of the Negroes at the South, and the rest must be learned from those who have studied the subject at first hand.

It seems to the writer that one of the fundamental errors which have inhered in all the discussion which has taken place on the Negro question is in considering the Negroes as absolutely of one class. A brief consideration of the matter will show on the contrary that the colored population of the South, though they were, with the exception of a few Arabs, all of Negro blood, were, when they came to this country, of different tribes; and there were, even during the time of slavery, and are yet more markedly now, grades among them: grades of intellect, of character, and of ability, which point to, if not varying racial, at least varying tribal forces. And however they may all appear to herd together and look at most matters not from an individual and rational, but from a racial standpoint, a careful study will disclose certain distinctions which have the mark of tribal distinctions, while others will show the elements of class distinctions. These class distinctions, though still elementary, are beginning to make themselves apparent.

The line of cleavage unhappily does not follow that of conduct or good manners, much less that of character, but, perhaps, it may approximate them more closely in time, and the upper class will learn and cause it to be understood that conduct, character, and good manners are the key to admission.

It is the intention of the writer in this discussion to recognize this distinction, and, when he speaks of “the Negroes,” he desires generally to be understood as referring to the great body of the race, and not as including what may be termed the upper fraction—that is, those who, by reason of intellect, education, and character, form so clearly an exception that they must be considered as a separate class.

The Negroes, indeed, may be divided into three classes.

The first is a small class, comparatively speaking, who are more or less educated, some being well educated and well conducted; others, with a semblance of education and none too well behaved. The former constitute what may be termed the upper fraction; the latter possess only a counterfeit culture and lack the essential elements of character and even moral perception.

The second class is composed of a respectable, well-behaved, self-respecting element; sensible, though with little or no education, and, except when under the domination of passion, good citizens. This class embraces most of the more intelligent of the older generation who were trained in slavery, and a considerable element of the intelligent middle-aged, conservative workers of the race who were trained by that generation. The two together may be called the backbone of the race.

The third class is composed of those who are wholly ignorant, or in whom, though they have what they call education, this so-called education is unaccompanied by any of the fruits of character which education is supposed to produce. Among these are many who esteem themselves in the first class, and, because of a veneer of education, are not infrequently confounded with them.

The first two classes may easily be reckoned with. They contain the elements which make good citizens and which should enable them to secure all proper recognition and respect. They need no weapon but that which they possess—good citizenship.

Unfortunately, the great body of the race, and a vast percentage of the growing generation, belong to the third class. It is this class which has to be reckoned with.

It is like a vast sluggish mass of uncooled lava over a large section of the country, burying some portions and affecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its surface smoulder fires which may at any time burst forth unexpectedly and spread desolation all around. It is this mass, increasing from beneath, not from above, which constitutes the Negro question.

In the discussion that takes place in the periodical press and in conventions relating to the progress of the colored race, a great deal is made of the advance of the race since the abolition of slavery. It is asserted that the race has accumulated many hundreds of millions of dollars. Just how much, it is difficult to say. Authorities differ widely. The last Negro member of Congress,[28] in a speech delivered in the House of Representatives on January 29, 1901, undertook to give the advance of his race in the thirty-two preceding years. “Since that time,” he says, “we have reduced the illiteracy of the race at least 45 per cent. We have written and published nearly 500 books. We have nearly 300 newspapers, three of which are dailies. We have now in practice over 2,000 lawyers and a corresponding number of doctors. We have accumulated over $12,000,000 worth of school property and about $40,000,000 of church property. We have about 140,000 farms and homes valued at in the neighborhood of $750,000,000, and personal property valued at about $170,000,000.... We have 32,000 teachers in the schools of the country. We have built, with the aid of our friends, about 20,000 churches, and support 7 colleges, 17 academies, 50 high schools, 5 law schools, 5 medical schools, and 25 theological seminaries. We have over 600,000 acres of land in the South alone.”

It might be assumed that, as he was glorifying his race, this is the outside estimate of what they have accomplished, had not other colored leaders and teachers since that time asserted that these figures are far too low. To the writer these estimates would appear grossly exaggerated. Certainly the educational achievement of which they boast cannot justly be attributed, in the main, to the Negro race. The white race furnished 95 per cent. of the money for the schools, and a yet larger proportion for the colleges.

It is stated that “before the war the South had a free Negro population in excess of a quarter of a million souls,” and, according to an estimate which has been made by one of the distinguished members of the race, the value of property owned by free Negroes was between $35,000,000 and $40,000,000.[29] Although the exact amount must be based somewhat on conjecture, it is certain that there were a considerable number of free Negroes in the country at that time who owned considerable property. Some of those in the South were land-owners and slave-owners, while of the 226,216 who lived outside of the slave States, a fair proportion were well-to-do. According to the report of a Commission appointed by Mr. Lincoln in 1863 to “examine and report upon the condition of the newly emancipated Freedmen of the United States,” the Commission ascertained that the free colored people of Louisiana in the year 1860 paid taxes on an assessment of thirteen millions.[30] To this sum must be added the amount that was accumulated during the Reconstruction period, by other means than those of honest thrift. The residue marks the advance of the Negro race in material progress.

Unhappily for those who claim that the Negro race has shown extraordinary thrift since its emancipation thirty-eight years ago, the records, when examined, fail to bear out the contention.

On the 29th of June, 1903, Mr. Charles A. Gardiner, of the New York bar, delivered a notable address at Albany, before the Convocation of the University of the State of New York, on a “Constitutional and Educational Solution of the Negro Problem,” in which he presented some remarkable statements relating to the condition of the Negroes. He showed that, in 1890, the real and personal property of the fifteen old slave States was $13,380,517,311, of which the blacks owned only 3.3 per cent., an average of $64.20 per capita. The six Atlantic and Gulf States had $3,215,127,929, of which the blacks owned only 3.5 per cent., an average of $28.60 each. The writer has tried to obtain the later statistics, but has not been successful in securing complete statistics, owing to the fact that the United States Census Bureau has not yet completed its calculations touching this subject, and because many of the States do not keep separately the records of the property owned by the whites and Negroes. He has, however, secured from the records of the States of Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the records are kept separately, the statistics showing the actual and relative amount of property owned by the Negroes for the year 1902:

ASSESSED VALUE OF ALL PROPERTY OWNED BY NEGROES.

It is possible that the States of Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia may be considered quite representative of the entire South. The Negroes are believed to be as well off in these States as in any others. The four States contain 2,686,859 Negroes, which is 30.39 per cent. of the entire Negro population of the whole United States, and the statistics show that this 30.39 per cent. of the entire Negro population own now, in real and personal property listed for taxation, only $53,797,845, which is but $20.02 per capita. The assessed value of property in the Southern States may be stated to be generally, at least, three-quarters of the actual value.

In the interesting and valuable statistics as to “The Negro Farmer,” compiled by Prof. W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University, we find a great many interesting facts:

PROPORTION OF SLAVE OWNERS AND OF SLAVES IN THE POPULATION OF THE SOUTH, 1850 AND 1860.

“These figures show that the slaves formed about one-third of the total population of that section, but that the owners of these slaves formed only between 5 and 6 per cent. of the white population and between 3 and 4 per cent. of the total population, the proportion being even lower in 1860 than in 1850.

“In 1900 there were 187,799 farms owned by Negroes, which was 25.2 per cent. of all farms operated by Negroes. In 1900 Negro farmers who owned all of the land they cultivated formed 83.3 per cent. of all Negro owners.

“If an estimate of the probable total farm wealth of the Negro farmers, June 1, 1900, be desired, the value of the live stock on rented farms, of which a large share generally belongs to the tenants, should be added. That value for the colored tenants was $57,167,206. Adding this sum to the preceding total, it appears the value, June 1, 1900, of the farm property belonging to Negroes was approximately $200,000,000, or a little less than $300 for each Negro farmer.

“This estimate, however, takes no account of property owned by Negroes and rented out to either Negroes or whites.... Therefore, we are probably justified in adding 15 per cent. to the above estimated value of property owned by Negro farmers in continental United States, thus bringing the total up to $230,000,000.

“The value of the land in farms of all colored owners in continental United States in 1900—including the value of the supplementary land rented, which, if we assume it to be of the same average value as the rest, amounted to about $7,500,000—was $102,022,601. While some of the land is very good, most of it is poor, being often practically worn out or disadvantageously situated as regards a market.”[32]

Statistics relating to the number of farms, acreage, and value of all farm property, including land, improvements, implements, machinery, and livestock, may be found in the Twelfth Census and in the Census Bulletin No. 8, relating to Negroes in the United States in 1900, table 69, page 308.

In this table it is shown that the total number of farm-property owners including Negro, Indian, and Mongolian farmers is 174,434, owning land and improvements, implements, and machinery valued at $150,557,251, and part owners, 30,501, owning $27,358,225.

Georgia has been not infrequently cited as a State in which the Negro has thriven somewhat exceptionally. It contains more Negroes than does any other State, having, by the census of 1900, 1,034,813 Negroes. In 1860 it contained 465,698, so that the Negroes have since that time increased there at the rate of 142,279 every ten years. The Bulletin of the Department of Labor, No. 35, July 1901, contains a valuable paper by Prof. Du Bois on the Negro landholder in Georgia, based on a close study of the conditions of the Negro in that State. Among other matters he gives a table containing the assessed value of all property owned by Negroes in Georgia from 1874 to 1900:

ASSESSED VALUE OF TOTAL PROPERTY OWNED BY NEGROES OF GEORGIA, 1874 TO 1900.

From this table it will be found that the taxable values of all the property owned by Negroes in Georgia in the year 1874 were $6,157,798. In 1890 the Negro population was 858,815. In 1892 the property valuation has risen to $14,869,575, and in 1900, when the population was 1,034,813, it was only $14,118,720, or an actual falling off, though the Negroes appear to have increased 23.9 per cent. in this time.[33]

Such is the showing of statistics as to the advance marked by the accumulation of property. It fails to bear out the claim that the Negro race has shown remarkable progress along this line. It must be further observed that in reporting the property holdings no account is taken of the mortgages and other indebtedness of the property owners.

But under this economic presentation lies a deeper question. What have the thousands of churches and schools and colleges, maintained at the cost of more than a hundred and fifty million dollars, produced? What kind of men and women have they turned out? What fruits have they brought forth, of moral stamina; of character; of purity of life; of loftiness or even correctness of ideals? These are the true tests of progress.

To reach a correct answer to these questions, we may inquire first: Has the percentage of crime decreased in the race generally? Has the wage-earning capacity of the race generally increased in proportion to the rise of wages? Has the race generally improved, morally and mentally? Is the relative position of the race to that of the white race higher than it was?

Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen notably since the era of emancipation. A proportion of the colored population—that is, the upper fraction—have not only accumulated property but have, mainly in the cities and towns, attained a higher standing, based partly on property, partly on character, and partly on intellectual advance. But, unless the universal testimony of the white people of the South is unreliable, this rise is confined largely to those regions where the Negroes have had the aid, sympathy, and encouragement of the whites. And it appears to the writer that this element is not as large as is generally assumed, and that this very advance has separated them all the more widely from the great body of the colored race. Study of the question, moreover, discloses the fact that almost all of the intellectual advance in the Negro race is confined to this upper fraction of the race; that, perhaps, nine-tenths of the property accumulated has been accumulated by this class and by the other fraction which belongs to the second class who were trained in slavery, and that, measured by the ordinary standards of character, intellect, and civic standing, the other nine-tenths of the race, so far from advancing in any way, have either stood stagnant or have retrograded.

According to the United States Census of 1890, the native white criminals in the United States numbered 40,471; the native whites whose parents were also native-born numbered 21,037; the Negro criminals (whose parents were native) numbered 24,277.[34]

A comparison of the rural colored population will show that possibly over ninety per cent. of the property now owned by the Negroes has been accumulated by those who were either trained in slavery or grew up immediately after the war, so that they received the beneficial effects of the habits of industry in which their race was at that time trained. It will show in the next place that the proportion of convicts in the State penitentiaries in the Southern States from the Negroes is from 85 to 93 per cent. of the total number of convicts confined. In Louisiana the proportion is 85 per cent. of all State criminals. In Alabama it is 85.4 per cent. In Florida, 86.4 per cent. In Mississippi it is 91 per cent. In Georgia it is 90 per cent., and in South Carolina it is 93.2 per cent.[35] In the District of Columbia, where the Negroes are assumed to have had exceptional advantages and where possibly a certain element of them are as well off as anywhere in the country, they furnished, a year or two ago, 86 per cent. of the criminals. Of these convicts, more than nine-tenths have grown up since slavery was abolished.

Meantime, the Negro has retrograded as a workman until he has not only lost the field in which he once had no rival, but is in danger of losing even the ability to compete for its recovery. The superiority of the older farmhands to the younger generation is so universally asserted throughout the South that it must be given some of the validity of general reputation. And whereas, as has been shown, a generation ago all the mechanical work of the South was in the hands of the Negroes, only a small proportion of it is done by them to-day.

Fifteen years ago one of the suburbs of Richmond was largely built up by a contractor whose foreman was a Negro. There was no question raised about it. The foreman knew his business; had been raised among the whites; knew how to get along with white men, and was respected and esteemed by them. This was at that time not uncommon.

What is the situation now? The races are more widely divided than ever before. White mechanics and Negro mechanics no longer work together, generally, as of old. No contractor could do now what the man who built “Barton Heights” did fifteen years ago. The number of Negro carpenters and mechanics is greatly reduced; and the writer is informed by intelligent Negroes that such work as they do is mainly among their own people. The causes are not far to seek. It is partly due to a failure of ability in the Negro to hold his place in the struggle of competition, and partly to the changed relations between him and the white. The old feeling of friendliness and amity has waned, and in its room has come a cold indifference, if not actual hostility. The new Negro has been taught that he is the equal of the white, and he is always asserting it and trying to prove it by any way but the right way—the equality of his work.

Washington City has ever since the time of emancipation appeared a sort of Mecca to many of the Negro race. There, numbers of that race have had opportunities which have been wanting to them in the South, and there to-day may be found, perhaps, the best educated element of the race to be found anywhere. Within the last year the Negro organization known as the True Reformers built in that city a handsome and expensive structure for the use of their race, and built it wholly with Negro labor. When, however, the workmen competent to do such work were sought, it was found necessary to go to the South for them.

Yet even in the South the Negro artisan sufficiently trained to compete now with his white rival is comparatively rare.

“The slave-disciplined mechanic has no successor in the ranks of the freedmen....”[36]

So far, then, as statistics would indicate, the improvement that exists among the Negroes is not shown by the race at large as is usually alleged, but is shown, in the main, by the upper fraction.

This proposition is borne out also by the testimony of the great majority of the Southern whites who live in constant touch with the blacks; who have known them in every relation of life in a way that no one who has not lived among them can know them. Universally, they will tell you that while the old-time Negroes were industrious, saving, and, when not misled, well-behaved, kindly, respectful, and self-respecting, and while the remnant of them who remain still retain generally these characteristics, the “new issue,” for the most part, are lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality.

They unite further in the opinion that education such as they receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.

It is commonly assumed that progress, as applied to a class or a race, signifies some advance in moral standing, or, at least, some improvement in the elements of character on which morality is based.

It is unfortunate that the statistics in the field of morality cannot be obtained; but in this field, as in others, the testimony of those who have had the best opportunities for observation is all one way. Southerners of every class and calling, without exception, bear witness to the depressing fact that, leaving out the small upper fraction, the Negro race has not advanced at all in morality.

Unhappily, the fountain is tainted at the source. The great body of the race have scarcely any notion of the foundation principles of pure family life. They appear not only to have no idea of morality, but to lack any instinct upon which such an idea can be founded. It is usually charged that slavery was responsible for the absence of morality throughout the race. Some of the Negro writers even speak of “the ancient African chastity” having been debauched by slavery. Doubtless, during slavery there was a sufficient amount of immorality to be the basis for almost any reasonable charge, yet study of the question has convinced at least one investigator that the illicit relations between the two races during the period of slavery have probably been greatly exaggerated. He has come to believe further that while illicit intercourse between the two races is less and, perhaps, markedly less now than it was during the period of slavery, the immorality of the great body of the Negro race has increased since that time. That this immorality exists is the testimony not only of the whites, but also of members of the race who have, with an open mind, made a study of the conditions of their people. Perhaps the most remarkable study of the Negro which has appeared is the book entitled, “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, of Massachusetts. No inconsiderable part of its value is owing to the fact that the author, a free colored man, has had both the power to observe closely and the courage to record boldly the results of his observations. In the chapter on “Moral Lapses,” the author says: “All who know the Negro recognize, however, that the chief and overpowering element in his make-up is an imperious sexual impulse which, aroused at the slightest incentive, sweeps aside all restraints in the pursuit of physical gratification. We may say now that this element of Negro character constitutes the main incitement to degeneracy of the race and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting....

“The Negro’s ethical code sternly reprobates dancing, theatre attendance, and all social games of chance. It does not, however, forbid lying, rum-drinking, or stealing. Furthermore, a man may trail his loathsome form into the sanctity of private homes, seduce a wife, sister, or daughter with impunity, and be the father of a score of illegitimate children by as many mothers, and yet be a disciple of holiness and honored with public confidence.”

His chapter on this subject will be, to those unfamiliar with it, a terrible exposure of the depravity of the Negroes in their social life, but it is only what those who have studied the subject know.

The curse of this frightful immorality is over the church and the school, and gives no evidence of abatement.

“The simple truth,” admits the writer already quoted, “is that there is going on side by side in the Negro people a minimum progress with a maximum regress.” “It is, therefore,” he says,[37] “almost impossible to find a person of either sex over fifteen years of age who has not had carnal intercourse.” And again,[38] he declares: “Marital immoralities, however, are not confined to the poor, the ignorant, and the degraded among the freed people, but are equally common among those who presume to be educated and refined.”

Unfortunately for the race, this depressing view is borne out by the increase of crime among them; by the increase of superstition, with its black trail of unnamable immorality and vice; by the homicides and murders, and by the outbreak and growth of the brutal crime which has chiefly brought about the frightful crime of lynching which stains the good name of the South and has spread northward with the spread of the Negro ravisher.

It is a fact, which no one will deny, that the crime of rape was substantially unknown during the period of slavery, and was hardly known during the first years of freedom: it is the fatal product of new conditions. Twenty-five years ago women in the South went unattended, with no more fear of attack than they have in New England. To-day, no woman in the South goes alone upon the highway out of sight of white men, except on necessity, and no man leaves his women alone in his house if he can help it. Over 500 white women and children have been assaulted in the South by Negroes within that time.

This is a terrible showing, and the most depressing part of it is the failure of the Negroes generally to address themselves to the moral improvement of their race.

None of this will affect the views of the politician or the doctrinaire, but it should, at least, give food for thought among the rest of our people, that these views are held almost universally by the intelligent white people of the South, irrespective of their different political or religious views; irrespective of their social or their business standing; and further, that, substantially, these views are held by nearly all outsiders who go and see enough of the South to secure opportunities for close and general observation; and, precisely as their experience is broad and their means of information extensive, their views approximate those held by the white residents.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] In Georgia, for example, there were in 1860, 462,198 slaves, owned by 41,084 owners.

[27] According to the Educational Report of the United States Bureau of Education for 1898-1899, “the total enrolment in the public schools of the South (the sixteen former slave-States and the District of Columbia) for the year 1898-1899 was 5,662,259; the number of white children being 4,150,641 and the number of negro children 1,511,618.” Of the white school population (5,954,400), 69.71 per cent. were enrolled in the public schools, and of the negro school population (2,912,910), 51.89 per cent.

[28] George H. White, of North Carolina.

[29] “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, p. 74. Macmillan & Co.

[30] Wrong of Slavery and Right of Emancipation: R. D. Owen, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1864.

[31] In Arkansas the total value of all property, including railroad property of the State, is $225,276,681. The taxes assessed on the property of the whites were $3,699,025, while the taxes assessed on the property of the Negroes were $205,954. The value of the property held by the Negroes was obtained by assigning to them an amount proportionate to the taxes paid by them.

[32]

[33] The Comptroller-General of Georgia reports that the assessed value of the property of the white taxpayers of Georgia for 1902 was $452,122,577. The property of the Negro taxpayers in the State of Georgia for the same year was assessed at $15,188,069. This sum, though considerably larger than that estimated by Professor Du Bois, is only 3.25 per cent. of the total assessment of the State.

[34] World Almanac, 1903.

[35] Address of Charles A. Gardiner, cited before.

[36] “The American Negro,” by William Hannibal Thomas, p. 68.

[37] Page 183.

[38] Page 184.

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

In dealing with this question the writer wishes to be understood as speaking not of the respectable and law-abiding element among the Negroes, who unfortunately are so often confounded with the body of the race from which come most of the malefactors. To say that Negroes furnish most of the ravishers is not to say that all Negroes are rapists.

The crime of lynching in this country has, at one time or another, become so frequent that it has aroused the interest of the whole people, and has even arrested the attention of people in other countries. It has usually been caused by the boldness with which crime was committed and the inefficiency of the law in dealing with lawbreakers through its regular forms. Such, for instance, were the acts of the Vigilantes in California in the old days, and such have been the acts of the Vigilantes in other sections of the country at times. In these cases, there has always been a form of trial, which, however hasty, was conclusive on the essential points of the commission of the crime, the identification of the prisoner, the sentence of “Judge Lynch”—that is, of the mob—and the orderly execution of that sentence. And, in such cases, most persons who are well-informed as to all the conditions and circumstances have found some justification for this “wild justice.”

Lynching, however, has never before been so common, nor has it existed over so extended a region as of late years in the Southern States. And it has aroused more feeling outside of that section than was aroused formerly by the work of the Vigilantes. This feeling has undoubtedly been due mainly to the belief that the lynching has been directed almost exclusively against the Negroes; though a part has, perhaps, come from the supposition that the laws were entirely effective, and that, consequently, the lynching of Negroes has been the result of irrational hostility or of wanton cruelty. Thus, the matter is, to some extent, complicated by a latent idea that it has a political complexion.

This is the chief ground of complaint in the utterances of the Negroes themselves and also in those of a considerable part of the outside press. And, indeed, for a good while, the lynching of Negroes appeared to be confined to the South, though lynching of whites was by no means the monopoly of that section, as may be recalled by those familiar with the history of Indiana and some of the other Northwestern States.

Of late, however, several revolting instances of lynching of Negroes in its most dreadful form: burning at the stake, have occurred in regions where hitherto such forms of barbarous punishment have been unknown; and the time appears to be ripe for some efficient concert of action, to eradicate what is recognized by cool heads as a blot on our good name and a serious menace to our civilization.

In discussing the means to put an end to this barbarity, the first essential is that the matter shall be clearly and thoroughly understood.

The ignorance shown by much of the discussion that has grown out of these lynchings would appear to justify plain speaking.

All thoughtful men know that respect for law is the basic principle of civilization, and are agreed as to the evil of any overriding of the law. All reasonable men know that the overriding of law readily creates a spirit of lawlessness, under which progress is retarded and civilization suffers and dwindles. This is as clearly recognized at the South as at the North. To overcome this conviction and stir up rational men to a pitch where the law is trampled under foot, the officers of the law are attacked, and their prisoners taken from them and executed, there must be some imperative cause.

And yet the record of such overriding of law in the past has been a terrible one.

The Chicago Tribune has for some time been collecting statistics on the subject of lynching, and the following table taken from that paper, showing the number of lynchings for a series of years, is assumed to be fairly accurate:

Causes Assigned.

The lynchings in the various States and Territories in 1900 were as follows:

From these tables certain facts may be deduced. The first is that, in the year of which an analysis is given (1900), over nine-tenths of the lynchings occurred in the South, where only about one-third of the population of the country were, but where nine-tenths of the Negroes were; secondly, that, of these lynchings, about nine-tenths were of Negroes and one-third were in the three States where the Negroes are most numerous; thirdly, that, while the lynchings appear to be diminishing at the South, the ratio, at least, is increasing at the North. Of the lynchings in 1903, 12 occurred in the North and 92 in the South. Of the total number, 86 were Negroes, 17 were whites, and 1 a Chinaman. Among the alleged causes were murder, 47; criminal assault, 11; attempted criminal assault, 10; murderous assault, 7; “race prejudice,” 5. Of those in 1904 there were 82 Negroes and 4 whites; 81 occurred in the South and 5 in the North.

It further appears that, though after the war lynching in the South may have begun as a punishment for assault on white women, it has extended until of late less than one-fourth of the instances are for this crime, while over three-fourths of them are for murder, attempts at murder, or some less heinous offence. This may be accounted for, in part, by the fact that often the murders in the South partake somewhat of the nature of race-conflicts.

Over 2,700 lynchings in eighteen years, with a steady increase in the barbarity of the method and with the last the most shameful instance of this barbarity, are enough to stagger the mind. Either we are relapsing into barbarism, or there is some terrific cause for our reversion to the methods of mediævalism, and our laws are inefficient to meet it. The only gleam of light is that, of late years, the number appears to have diminished.

To get at the remedy, we must first get at the cause.

Although in early times there were occasional assaults and even some burnings at the stake these outrages appeared to have passed out of fashion and time was when the crime of assault was substantially unknown throughout the South. Though criminal assaults had been sufficiently common at one time for many of the States to adopt laws of Draconian severity relating to them, yet during the later period of slavery, the crime of rape did not exist, nor did it exist to any considerable extent for some years after emancipation.[42] During the war the men were away in the army, and the Negroes were the loyal guardians of the women and children. On isolated plantations and in lonely neighborhoods, women were as secure as in the streets of Boston or New York, indeed, were more secure.

Then came the period and process of Reconstruction, with its teachings. Among these was the teaching that the Negro was the equal of the white, that the white was his enemy, and that he must assert his equality. The growth of the idea was a gradual one in the Negro’s mind. This was followed by a number of cases where members of the Negro militia ravished white women; in some instances in the presence of their families.[43]

The result of the hostility between the Southern whites and Government at that time was to throw the former upon reliance on their own acts for their defence or revenge, with a consequent training in lawless punishment of acts which should have been punished by law. And here lynching, in its post-bellum stage, had its evil origin.[44]

It was suggested some time ago, in a thoughtful paper read by Professor Wilcox, of Washington, that a condition something like that which exists in the South at present, had its rise in France during the religious wars.

The first instance of rape, outside of these attacks by armed Negroes, and of consequent lynching, that attracted the attention of the country after the war was a case which occurred in Mississippi, where the teaching of equality and of violence found one of its most fruitful fields. A Negro dragged a woman down into the woods and, tying her, kept her bound there a prisoner for several days, when he butchered her. He was caught and was lynched.

With the resumption of local power by the whites came the temporary and partial ending of the crimes of assault and of lynching.

As the old relation, which had survived even the strain of Reconstruction, dwindled with the passing of the old generation from the stage, and the “New Issue” with the new teaching took its place, the crime broke out again with renewed violence. The idea of equality began to percolate more extensively among the Negroes. In evidence of it is the fact that since the assaults began again they have been chiefly directed against the plainer order of people, instances of attacks on women of the upper class, though not unknown, being of rare occurrence.[45]

Conditions in the South render the commission of this crime peculiarly easy. The white population is sparse, the forests are extensive, the officers of the law distant and difficult to reach; but, above all, the Negro population have appeared inclined to condone the fact of mere assault.

Twenty-five years ago, women went unaccompanied and unafraid throughout the South, as they still go throughout the North. To-day, no white woman, or girl, or female child, goes alone out of sight of the house except on necessity; and no man leaves his wife alone in his house, if he can help it. Cases have occurred of assault and murder in broad day, within sight and sound of the victim’s home. Indeed, an instance occurred not a great while ago in the District of Columbia, within a hundred yards of a fashionable drive, when, about three o’clock of a bright June day, a young girl was attacked within sight and sound of her house, and when she screamed her throat was cut. So near to her home was the spot that her mother and an officer, hearing her cries, reached her before life was extinct.

For a time, the ordinary course of the law was, in the main, relied on to meet the trouble; but it was found that, notwithstanding the inevitable infliction of the death-penalty, several evils resulted therefrom. The chief one was that the ravishing of women, instead of diminishing, steadily increased. The criminal, under the ministrations of his preachers, usually professed to have “got religion,” and from the shadow of the gallows called on his friends to follow him to glory. So that the punishment lost to these emotional people much of its deterrent force, especially where the real sympathy of the race was mainly with the criminal rather than with his victim. Another evil was the dreadful necessity of calling on the innocent victim, who, if she survived, as she rarely did, was already bowed to the earth by shame, to relate in public the story of the assault—an ordeal which was worse than death. Yet another was the constant delay in the execution of the law. With these, however, was one other which, perhaps, did more than all the rest taken together to wrest the trial and punishment from the courts and carry them out by mob-violence. This was the unnamable brutality with which the causing crime was, in nearly every case, attended. The death of the victim of the ravisher was generally the least of the attendant horrors. In Texas, in Mississippi, in Georgia, in Kentucky, in Colorado, as later in Delaware, the facts in the case were so unspeakable that they have never been put in print. They simply could not be put in print. It is these unnamable horrors which have outraged the minds of those who live in regions where they have occurred, and where they may at any time occur again, and, upsetting reason, have swept from their bearings cool men and changed them into madmen, drunk with fury and the lust of revenge.

Not unnaturally, such barbarity as burning at the stake has shocked the sense of the rest of the country, and, indeed, of the world. But it is well for the rest of the country, and for the world, to know that it has also shocked the sense of the South, and, in their calmer moments, even the sense of those men who, in their frenzy, have been guilty of it. Only, a deeper shock than even this is at the bottom of their ferocious rage—the shock which comes from the ravishing and butchery of their women and children.

It is not necessary to be an apologist for barbarity because one states with bluntness the cause. The stern underlying principle of the people who commit these barbarities is one that has its root deep in the basic passions of humanity; the determination to put an end to the ravishing of their women by an inferior race, or by any race, no matter what the consequence.

For a time, a speedy execution by hanging was the only mode of retribution resorted to by the lynchers; then, when this failed of its purpose, a more savage method was essayed, born of a savage fury at the failure of the first, and a stern resolve to strike a deeper terror into those whom the other method had failed to awe.

The following may serve as an illustration. Ten or twelve years ago, the writer lectured one afternoon in the early spring in a town in the cotton-belt of Texas—one of the prettiest towns in the Southwest. The lecture was delivered in the Court-house. The writer was introduced by a gentleman who had been a member of the Confederate Cabinet and a Senator of the United States, and the audience was composed of refined and cultured people, representing, perhaps, every State from Maine to Texas.

Two days later, the papers contained the account of the burning at the stake of a Negro in this town. He had picked up a little girl of five or six years of age on the street where she was playing in front of her home, and carried her off, telling her that her mother had sent him for her; and when she cried, he had soothed her with candy which, with deliberate and devilish prevision, he had bought for the purpose. When the child was found, she was unrecognizable. Her little body was broken and mangled and he had cut her throat and thrown her into a ditch.

A strong effort was made to save the wretch for the law, but without avail: the people had reverted to the primal law of personal and awful vengeance. Farmers came from fifty miles around to see that vengeance was exacted. They had resolved to strike terror into the breasts of all who might contemplate so hideous a crime, so that such a thing should never occur again.

This was, perhaps, the second or third instance of burning in the country after the war.

Of late, lynching at the stake has spread beyond the region where it has such reason for existence as may be given by the conditions that prevail in the South. Three frightful instances of burning at the stake have occurred recently in Northern States, in communities where some of these conditions were partly wanting. The horror of the main crime of lynching was increased, in two of the cases, by a concerted attack on a large element of the Negro population which was wholly innocent. Even unoffending Negroes were driven from their homes, a consequence which has never followed in the South, where it might seem there was more occasion for it.

It thus appears that the original crime, and also the consequent one in its most brutal form, are not confined to the South, and, possibly, are only more frequent there because of the greater number of Negroes in that section. The deep racial instincts are not limited by geographical bounds.

These last-mentioned lynchings were so ferocious, and so unwarranted by any such necessity, real or fancied, as may be thought to exist at the South by reason of the frequency of assault and the absence of a strong police force, that they not unnaturally called forth almost universal condemnation. The President felt it proper to write an open letter, commending the action of the Governor of Indiana on the proper and efficient exercise of his authority to uphold the law and restore order in his State. But who has ever thought it necessary to commend the Governors of the Southern States under similar circumstances? The militia of some of the Southern States are almost veterans, so frequently have they been called on to protect wretches whose crimes stank in the nostrils of all decent men. The recent shameful instance where an officer is charged with having connived with the mob is the single exception to fidelity that can be recalled, and even in that case the men showed a fidelity in marked contrast to that weakness. The Governor of Virginia boasted, a few years ago, that no lynching should take place during his incumbency, and he nearly made good his boast; though, to do so, he had to call out at one time or another almost the entire military force of the State.

Editorials in some of the Eastern papers note with astonishment recent instances where law-officers in the South have protected their prisoners or eluded a mob. The writers of these editorials know so little of the South that one is scarcely surprised at their ignorance. But men are hanged by law for this crime of assault every few months in some State in the South. A few years ago, Sheriff Smith, of Birmingham, protected a murderer at the cost of many lives; a little later, Mayor Prout, of Roanoke, defended with all his power a Negro ravisher and murderer, and, though the mob finally succeeded in their aim, six men were killed by the guards before the jail was carried. These are only two of the many instances in which brave and faithful officers have, at the risk of their lives, defended their charges against that most terrible of all assailants—a determined mob.[46]

For a time, the assaults by Negroes were confined to young women who were caught alone in solitary and secluded places. The company even of a child was sufficient to protect them. Then the ravishers grew bolder, and attacks followed on women when they were in company. And then, not content with this, the ravishers began to attack women in their own homes. Sundry instances of this have occurred within the last few years. As an illustration, may be cited the notorious case of Samuel Hose, who, after making a bet with a Negro preacher that he could have access to a white woman, went into a farmer’s house while the family, father, mother, and child, were at supper; brained the man with his axe; threw the child into a corner with a violence which knocked it senseless, ravished the wife and mother with unnamable horrors, and finally butchered her. He was caught and was burned.

Another instance, only less appalling, occurred two years ago in Lynchburg, Va., where the colored janitor of a white female school, who had been brought up and promoted by the Superintendent of Schools, and was regarded as a shining example of what education might accomplish with his race, entered the house of a respectable man one morning, after the husband, a foreman in a factory, had gone to his work; ravished the wife, and, then putting his knee on her breast, coolly cut her throat as he might have done that of a calf. There was no attempt at lynching; but the Governor, resolved to preserve the good name of the Commonwealth, felt it necessary to order out two regiments of soldiers, in which course he was sustained by the entire sentiment of the State.

These cases were neither worse nor better than many of those which have occurred in the South in the last twenty years, and in that period hundreds of women and a number of children have been ravished and slain.

Now, how is this crime of assault to be stopped? For stopped it must be, and stopped it will be, whatever the cost. One proposition is that separation of the races, complete separation by the deportation of the Negroes, is the only remedy. The theory, though sustained by many thoughtful men, appears Utopian. Colonization has been the dream of certain philanthropists for a hundred years. And, meantime, the Negroes have increased from less than a million to nine millions. They will never be deported; not because we have not the money, for an amount equal to that spent in pensions during three years would pay the expenses of such deportation, and an amount equal to that paid in six years would set them up in a new country. But the Negroes have rights; many of them are estimable citizens; and even the great body of them, when well regulated, are valuable laborers. It might, therefore, as well be assumed that this plan will never be carried out, unless the occasion becomes so imperative that all other rights give way to the supreme right of necessity.

It is plain, then, that we must deal with the matter in a more practicable manner, accepting conditions as they are, and applying to them legal methods which will be effective. Lynching does not end ravishing, and that is the prime necessity. Most right-thinking men are agreed as to this. Indeed, lynching, through lacking the supreme principle of law, the deliberateness from which is supposed to come the certainty of identification, fails utterly to meet the necessity of the case even as a deterrent, though it must be admitted that there are a respectable number of thoughtful men who dissent from this view. The growth of a sentiment which, at least, condones lynching as a punishment for assaults on women is a significant and distressing fact. Not only have assaults occurred again and again in the same neighborhood where lynching has followed such crime; but, a few years ago, it was publicly stated that a Negro who had just witnessed a lynching for this crime actually committed an assault on his way home. However this may be, lynching as a remedy is a ghastly failure; and its brutalizing effect on the community is incalculable.

The charge that is often made, that the innocent are sometimes lynched, has little foundation. The rage of a mob is not directed against the innocent, but against the guilty; and its fury would not be satisfied with any other sacrifice than the death of the real criminal. Nor does the criminal merit any consideration, however terrible the punishment. The real injury is to the perpetrators of the crime of destroying the law, and to the community in which the law is slain.

It is pretty generally conceded that the “law’s delay” is partly responsible for the “wild justice” of mob vengeance, and this has undoubtedly been the cause of many mobs. But it is far from certain if any change in the methods of administration of law will effect the stopping of lynching; while to remedy this evil we may bring about a greater peril. Trial by jury is the bed-rock of our liberties, and the inherent principle of such trial is its deliberateness. It has been said that the whole purpose of the Constitution of Great Britain is that twelve men may sit in the jury-box. The methods of the law may well be reformed; but any movement should be jealously scanned which touches the chief bulwark of all liberty.

The first step, then, would appear to be the establishment of a system securing a reasonably prompt trial and speedy execution by law, rather than a wholesale revolution of the existing system.

Many expedients have been suggested; some of the most drastic by Northern men. One of them proposed, not long since, that to meet the mob-spirit, a trial somewhat in the nature of a drum-head court-martial might be established by law, by which the accused may be tried and, if found guilty, executed immediately. Others have proposed as a remedy emasculation by law; while a Justice of the Supreme Court has recently given the weight of his personal opinion in favor of prompt trial and the abolishment of appeals in such cases. Even the terrible suggestion has been made that burning at the stake might again be legalized!

These suggestions testify how grave the matter is considered to be by those who make them.

But none of these, unless it be the one relating to emasculation, is more than an expedient. The trouble lies deeper. The crime of lynching is not likely to cease until the crime of ravishing and murdering women and children is less frequent than it has been of late. And this crime, which is well-nigh wholly confined to the Negro race, will not greatly diminish until the Negroes themselves take it in hand and stamp it out.

From recent developments, it may be properly inferred that the absence of this crime during the later period of slavery was due more to the feeling among the Negroes themselves than to any repressive measures on the part of the whites. The Negro had the same animal instincts in slavery that he exhibits now; the punishment that follows the crime now is quite as certain, as terrible, and as swift as it could have been then. So, to what is due the alarming increase of this terrible brutality?

To the writer it appears plain that it is due to two things: first, to racial antagonism and to the talk of social equality that inflames the ignorant Negro, who has grown up unregulated and undisciplined; and, secondly, to the absence of a strong restraining public opinion among the Negroes of any class, which alone can extirpate the crime. In the first place, the Negro does not generally believe in the virtue of women. It is beyond his experience. He does not generally believe in the existence of actual assault. It is beyond his comprehension. In the next place, his passion, always his controlling force, is now, since the new teaching, for the white women.[47]

That there are many Negroes who are law-abiding and whose influence is for good, no one who knows the worthy members of the race—those who represent the better element—will deny. But while there are, of course, notable exceptions, they are not often of the “New Issue,” nor, unhappily, even generally among the prominent leaders: those who publish papers and control conventions.

As the crime of rape of late years had its baleful renascence in the teaching of equality and the placing of power in the ignorant Negroes’ hands, so its perpetuation and increase have undoubtedly been due in large part to the same teaching. The intelligent Negro may understand what social equality truly means, but to the ignorant and brutal young Negro, it signifies but one thing: the opportunity to enjoy, equally with white men, the privilege of cohabiting with white women. This the whites of the South understand; and if it were understood abroad, it would serve to explain some things which have not been understood hitherto. It will explain, in part, the universal and furious hostility of the South to even the least suggestion of social equality.

A close following of the instances of rape and lynching, and the public discussion consequent thereon, have led the writer to the painful realization that even the leaders of the Negro race—at least, those who are prominent enough to hold conventions and write papers on the subject—have rarely, by act or word, shown a true appreciation of the enormity of the crime of ravishing and murdering women. Their discussion and denunciation have been almost invariably and exclusively devoted to the crime of lynching. Underlying most of their protests is the suggestion that the victim of the mob is innocent and a martyr. Now and then, there is a mild generalization on the evil of lawbreaking and the violation of women; but, for one stern word of protest against violating women and cutting their throats, the records of Negro meetings will show many resolutions against the attack of the mob on the criminal. And, as to any serious and determined effort to take hold of and stamp out the crime that is blackening the good name of the entire Negro race to-day, and arousing against them the fatal and possibly the undying enmity of the stronger race, there is, with the exception of the utterances of a few score individuals like Booker T. Washington, who always speaks for the right, Hannibal Thomas, and Bishop Turner, hardly a trace of such a thing. A crusade has been preached against lynching, even as far as England; but none has been attempted against the ravishing and tearing to pieces of white women and children.

Happily, there is an element of sound-minded, law-abiding Negroes, representative of the old Negro, who without parade stand for good order, and do what they can to repress lawlessness among their people. Except for this class and for the kindly relations which are preserved between them and the whites, the situation in the South would long since have become unbearable. These, however, are not generally among the leaders, and, unfortunately, their influence is not sufficiently extended to counteract the evil influences which are at work with such fatal results.

One who reads the utterances of Negro orators, editors and preachers on the subject of lynching, and who knows the Negro race, cannot doubt that, at bottom, their sympathy is generally with the “victim” of the mob, and not with his victim.

Denunciatory resolutions may be adopted without end, and newspapers may rave over the reversion to barbarism shown by the prevalence of the mob spirit. But it may safely be asserted that until the Negroes shall create among themselves a sound public opinion which, instead of fostering, shall reprobate and sternly repress the crime of assaulting women and children, the crime will never be extirpated, and until this crime is stopped the crime of lynching will never be extirpated. Lynching will never be done away with while the sympathy of the whites is with the lynchers, and no more will ravishing be done away with while the sympathy of the Negroes is with the ravisher. When the Negroes shall stop applying all their energies to harboring and exculpating Negroes, no matter what their crime may be so it be against the whites, and shall distinguish between the law-abiding Negro and the lawbreaker, a long step will have been taken.

Should the Negroes sturdily and faithfully set themselves to prevent the crime of rape by members of that race, it could be stamped out. Should the whites set themselves against lynching, lynching would be stopped. Even though lynching is not now confined to the punishment of this crime, this crime is the one that gives the only excuse for lynching. The remedy then is plain. Let the Negroes take charge of the crime of ravishing and firmly put it away from them, and let the whites take charge of the crime of lynching and put it away from them. It is time that the races should address themselves to the task; for it is with nations as with individual men; whatsoever they sow that shall they also reap.

It is the writer’s belief that the arrest and the prompt handing over to the law of Negroes by Negroes, for assault on white women, would do more to break up ravishing, and to restore amicable relations between the two races, than all the resolutions of all the conventions and all the harangues of all the politicians.

It has been tried in various States to put an end to lynching by making the county in which the lynching occurs liable in damages for the crime. It is a good theory; and, if it has not worked well, it is because of the difficulty of executing the provision. Could some plan be devised to array each race against the crime to which it is prone, both rape and lynching might be diminished if not wholly prevented.