Speaking in the Senate of the United States June 13, 1882, the bill for National "Aid to Common Schools" being under consideration, Senator Henry W. Blair, of New Hampshire, said:

Excluding the states of Maryland and Missouri and the District of Columbia, and the total yearly expenditure for both races is only $7,339,932, while in the whole country the annual expenditure is, from taxation, $70,341,435, and from school funds $6,580,632, or a total of $76,922,067, (see tables 2 and 7,) or one-tenth of the whole, while they contain one-fifth of the school-population. The causes which have produced this state of things in the Southern States are far less important than the facts themselves as they now exist. To find a remedy and apply it is the only duty which devolves upon us. Without universal education, not only will the late war prove to be a failure, but the abolition of slavery be proved to be a tremendous disaster, if not a crime.

The country was held together by the strong and bloody embrace of war, but that which the nation might and did do to retain the integrity of its territory and of its laws by the expenditure of brute force will all be lost if, for the subjection of seven millions of men, by the statutes of the States is to be substituted the thraldom of ignorance and the tyranny of an irresponsible suffrage. Secession, and a confederacy founded upon slavery as its chief cornerstone, would be better than the future of the Southern States—better for both races, too—if the nation is to permit one-third, and that the fairest portion of its domain, to become the spawning ground of ignorance, vice, anarchy, and of every crime. The nation as such abolished slavery as a legal institution; but ignorance is slavery, and no matter what is written in your constitutions and your laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the light of her smile.

Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies, highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities. Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all is changed. The suffrage is universal, and that means universal ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created by universal education. Until the republican constitutions, framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction which supplanted the governments initiated by President Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage, were unknown. Hence in a special manner the nation is responsible for the existence and support of those systems as well as for the order of things which made them necessary. That remarkable progress has been made under their influence is true, and that the common school is fast becoming as dear to the masses of the people at the South as elsewhere is also evident.

The Nation, through the Freedmen's Bureau, and perhaps to a limited extent in other ways, has expended five millions of dollars for the education of negroes and refugees in the earlier days of reconstruction, while religious charities have founded many special schools which have thus far cost some ten millions more. The Peabody fund has distilled the dews of heaven all over the South; but heavy rains are needed; without them every green thing must wither away.

This work belongs to the Nation. It is a part of the war. We have the Southern people as patriotic allies now. We are one; so shall we be forever. But both North and South have a fiercer and more doubtful fight with the forces of ignorance than they waged with each other during the bloody years which chastened the opening life of this generation.

The South lost in the destruction of property about two billion dollars and in prosecuting the war two billion more. No people can lose so much without seriously disarranging the entire mechanism of their government. It is for this reason, therefore, that the measure of "National Aid to Education" has so many and so persistent advocates. I wish to place myself among them. If the safety of republican government abides in the intelligence and virtue of the people, it can very readily be seen how much safety there is in the South at present. If it be true that an ulcer will vitiate the entire body, and endanger the life of the patient, we can see very plainly to what possible danger the spread of illiteracy may lead us.

Illiteracy in the South is one of the worst legacies which the rebellion bequeathed to the nation. It has been the prime cause of more misgovernment in the South than any other one cause, not even the insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers taking precedence of it. It has not only served as a provocation to peculation and chicanery, but it has nerved the courage of the assassin and made merry the midnight ride of armed mobs bent upon righting wrongs by committing crimes before which the atrocities of savage warfare pale. Wholesale murders have been committed and sovereign majorities awed into silence and inaction by reason of the widespread illiteracy of the masses. The very first principles of republican government have been ruthlessly trampled under foot because the people were ignorant of their sovereign rights, and had not, therefore, courage to maintain them.

That there should be in sixteen States and the District of Columbia a population of 5,703,218 people to be educated out of $12,475,044 is sufficient to arouse the apprehension of the most indifferent friend of good government. The State of New York alone, with a school population of only 1,641,173 spent, in 1880, $9,675,922.

But I base my argument for the establishment and maintenance of a comprehensive system of National education upon other grounds than the "safety of the Union," which is the same argument used by Mr. Lincoln when he emancipated the slaves. This argument is strong, and will always greatly influence a certain class of people. And, naturally, it should, for the perpetuation of the Union is simply the perpetuation of a republican form of government. But there are stronger grounds to be considered.

1. The United States government is directly responsible for the illiteracy and the widespread poverty which obtain in the South. Under its sanction and by its connivance the institution of slavery flourished and prospered, until it had taken such deep root as to be almost impossible of extirpation. It was the Union, and not the States, severally, which made slavery part and parcel of the fundamental law of the land. If this be a correct statement of the case, and I assume that it is, the Union (and not the States, severally) is responsible for the ignorance of the black people of the South. Slavery could not have existed and grown in the Union save by permission of all the States of the Union. It is therefore obvious that the agency which created and fostered a great crime is obligated, not only by the laws of God but of man as well, to assume the responsibility of its creation and to remedy, as far as possible, the evil results of that crime. The issue cannot be evaded. The obligation rests upon the Union, not upon the several States, to assume the direction of methods by which the appalling illiteracy of the South is to be diminished.

2. There have not been wanting men and newspapers to urge that the United States should reimburse the slave-holders of the South for the wholesale confiscation, so to speak, of their property. True, these men and newspapers belong to that class of unrepentants who believed that slavery was a Divine institution and that the slave-holder was a sort of vicegerent of heaven, a holy Moses, as it were. But when we leave the absurdity of this claim, which lies upon the surface, there is much apparent reason in their representations. It was the Union which legalized the sale and purchase of slave property, thereby inviting capitalists to invest in it; and it was the Union which declared such contracts null and void by the abolition of slavery, or confiscation of slave property. As I said before, I have no sympathy with those who invested their money in slave property. They not only received their just deserts in having their property confiscated, but they should have been compelled to make restitution to the last penny to the poor slaves whom they had systematically robbed. But perhaps this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal. For the great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the payment of debts contracted by the firm, for each member of the government is, measurably, an agent of the government, contracting and paying debts by its delegated authority. Thus the law holds him guilty who willfully breaks a contract entered into in good faith by all the parties to it. Instead of holding the slave-holder responsible for the robbery of the black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold the government responsible.

What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years! What claim has the slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and enervated and dwarfed manhood! A billion dollars would have bought every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased manhood. The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected. And yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the debasement—not to say enervation—of his manhood, by the great act by which he was made a free man and a citizen.

But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House—a boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the right of any man to enslave his fellow; I deny the right of any government, sovereign as the Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any regulation which robs one man or class to enrich another. Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country—men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of Junius, speak of the black man as the "ward of the nation"—a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold upon the soil by robbing the black man. When the rebellion at last closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich indeed in lands, while the black man was poor in everything, even in manhood, not because of any neglect or improvidence on his part, but because, though he labored from the rising to the setting of the sun, he received absolutely nothing for his labor, often being denied adequate food to sustain his physical man and clothing to protect him from the rude inclemency of the weather. He was a bankrupt in purse because the government had robbed him; he was a bankrupt in character, in all the elements of a successful manhood, because the government had placed a premium upon illiteracy and immorality. It was not the individual slave-owner who held the black man in chains; it was the government; for, the government having permitted slavery to exist, the institution vanished the instant the government declared that it should no longer exist!

I therefore maintain that the people of this Nation who enslaved the black man, who robbed him of more than a hundred years of toil, who perverted his moral nature, and all but extinguished in him the Divine spark of intelligence, are morally bound to do all that is in their power to build up his shattered manhood, to put him on his feet, as it were, to fit him to enjoy the freedom thrust upon him so unceremoniously, and to exercise with loyalty and patriotism the ballot placed in his hands—the ballot, in which is wrapped up the destiny of republican government, the perpetuity of democratic institutions. It is the proper function of government to see to it that its citizens are properly prepared to exercise wisely the liberties placed in their keeping. Self-preservation would dictate as much; for, if it be considered the better part of valor to discretely build and maintain arsenals and forts to bar out the invader, to prepare against the assaults of the enemy from without, how much more imperative it is to take timely precautions to counteract the mischief of insidious foes from within? Are our liberties placed more in jeopardy by the assaults of an enemy who plans our destruction three thousand miles away than of the enemy within our very bosoms? Was it the puissance of the barbarian arms or the corruption and enervation of the character of her people which worked the downfall of Rome? Was it influences from without or influences from within which corrupted the integrity of the people of Sparta and led to their subjugation by a more sturdy people? Let us learn by the striking examples of history. A people's greatness should be measured, not by its magnificent palaces, decked out in all the gaudy splendors of art and needless luxuries, the price of piracy or direct thievery; not in the number of colossal fortunes accumulated out of the stipend of the orphan and widow and the son of toil; not in the extent and richness of its public buildings and palaces of idle amusement; not in vast aggregations of capital in the coffers of the common treasury—capital unnecessarily diverted from the channels of trade, extorted from the people by the ignorance of their "wise men," who seek in vain for a remedy for the evil, because they do not want to find one.[11] A people's greatness should not be measured by these standards, for they are the parasites which eat away the foundations of greatness and stability. On the contrary, such greatness is to be found in the general diffusion of wealth, the comparative contentment and competency of the masses, and the general virtue and patriotism of the whole people. It should, therefore, manifestly be the end and aim of legislators to so shape the machinery placed in their hands as to operate with the least possible restraint upon the energies of the people. It should not be the studied purpose to enrich the few at the expense of the many, to restrain this man and give that one the largest possible immunity. No law should be made or enforced which would abridge my right while enlarging the right of my neighbor. That such is the case at this time—that legislatures are manipulated in the interest of a few, and that the great mass of the people feel only the burdens placed upon them by their servants, who are more properly speaking become their masters—that to such perversion of popular sovereignty we have come, is admitted by candid men.

Therefore, that the people may more clearly know their rights and how best to preserve them and reap their fullest benefits, they should be instructed in the language which is the medium through which to interpret their grand Magna Charta.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Since all sensible men know that the evil lies in a protective tariff and the bulky catalogue of monopoly.

CHAPTER VI

Education—Professional or Industrial

[Return to Table of Contents]

The "Religious Training of the Freedmen" and the "Education of the Freedmen" have raised up an army of people more peculiar in many respects than any other like class in all the history of mankind. They stand off by themselves; they are not to be approached by any counter method of "advocating a cause" or "building up the Kingdom of Christ" in their field. Millions of dollars have been "raised" to root out the illiteracy and immorality of the Freedmen, and to build up their shattered manhood. Indeed, there have been times when I have seriously debated the question, whether the black man had any manhood left, after the missionaries and religious enthusiasts had done picturing, or, rather, caricaturing his debased moral and mental condition. He has been made the victim of the most exalted panegyric by one set of fanatics, and of the most painful, malignant abuse and detraction by another set. The one has painted him as a sort of angel, and the other as a sort of devil; when, in fact, he is neither one nor the other; when, simply, he is a man, a member of the common family, possessing no more virtue nor vice than his brother, the brother who has managed to so impose upon himself that he is pretty thoroughly convinced that nature expended all its most choice materials in the construction of his class. But this is simply the work of the devil, who delights in throwing cayenne pepper into the eyes of good men.

The aspects of the work which has been done in the South for the colored people by "missionaries," so to term them, by the assistance of large sums of money donated by philanthropic men and women, are very many-sided indeed. I would in no wise underrate the magnitude of the work performed, nor attribute to those who have been the agents in disbursing these unparalleled benefactions motives other than of the purest and loftiest, in a majority of cases; but I think the time has arrived when we may disrobe the matter of the romance which writers have industriously woven about it. In the early stages of the work a few men and women of large fortunes, who had been "born with a silver spoon in their mouths," may have gone South to labor for humanity and the Master, may have left comfortable firesides and congenial companionships to make their homes among strangers who shut them out from their affections and sympathies because they had come to labor for the poor and the despised. Examples of this lofty devotion to a good cause there undoubtedly were in the days long ago; but the bulk of the work was performed by persons, male and female, to whom employment, an opportunity to make an honest living in an honest way, was a godsend. That they possessed much bravery to undertake a work which shut them out from the sympathy and social recognition of those who may be called their equals, is not denied; but that they were the pampered children of fortune, laboring simply for God and humanity, which zealous persons have painted them to be in newspapers and magazines, religious and other, is simply making a mountain out of a mole-hill. They were neither millionaires nor paupers, but they were educated men and women, like thousands throughout the North and West, who went into the field to labor because it was rich unto the harvest and the laborers were few. To say that salaries offered were not accepted always with promptness would be to get on the wrong side of a correct statement of fact. There are hundreds and thousands of educated men and women in the North and West to-day "waiting for something to turn up," and who would not hesitate a moment to embrace an opportunity, honorable and lucrative, which should present itself. There was little romance in the undertaking; there was far less in the work to be performed. I simply desire to protest against the correctness of the distorted pictures drawn ostensibly to magnify the sacrifices, which were many, and to belittle the rewards, which were great, in the performance of an ordinary piece of work, by a class of persons now rapidly disappearing from the scenes that once knew them. Their work is fast being transferred to the hands of colored men and women—the pupil is taking the place of the master; the demand drawing upon the colored—not the white—supply, because "birds of a feather flock together," more especially when one class is composed of chickens and the other of chicken-hawks. When lines are drawn, men unconsciously, as it were, keep on their own side. So, in colored churches and schools the whites are at a discount because it is easier and more congenial to employ colored help. Colored people are like white people. When they see nothing but white ministers in the white churches they conclude that it is best to have nothing but colored ministers in their own pulpits, and they are perfectly consistent and logical in their conclusion; the rule which actuates mankind in such matters being, not the biblical one, which enjoins that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, but, rather, do unto others as they do unto us; and this latter rule would seem to be better adapted for worldly success than the former, because it has more of the practical than the theoretical about it, and is more earthly than heavenly in its observance. The same is true of schools and school teachers. The colored people everywhere are constantly clamoring for colored teachers, since the rank injustice of separate schools is forced upon them.

I would interject just here a few words on the separate-school system. Aside from the manifest injustice of setting up two schoolhouses in the same ward or district—injustice to the children in the spirit, false from every standpoint, that one child is better than another—the double expense of maintaining two schools is obvious, and is sufficiently absurd to repel the sympathy or practical philanthropy of any man, Christian or Infidel. Why should the people be called upon to support two schools within speaking distance of each other to preserve an infamous distinction, a sneaking caste prejudice? Why! Because the people are wise in their own conceit—perfectly rational upon all other questions save the color question. The South is weighted down with debt, almost as poor as the proverbial "Job's turkey," and yet she supports a dual school system simple to gratify a prejudice. I notice with surprise that among the bills pending before Congress to give national aid to education it is not proposed to interfere with the irregular and ruinous dual caste schools; thereby, in effect, giving the national assent to a system repugnant to the genius of the constitution. But it is nothing new under the sun for the Congress of the Nation to aid and abet institutions and theories anti-republican and pernicious in all their ramifications.

Perhaps no people ever had more advantages to dedicate and prepare themselves for the ministry of Christ than the colored people of the South. The religious "idea" has been so thoroughly worked that other branches of study, other callings than the ministry, have paled into insignificance. The Cross of Christ has been held up before the colored youth as if the whole end and aim of life was to preach the Gospel, as if the philosophy of heaven superseded in practical importance the philosophy of life. The persistence with which this one "idea" has been forced upon colored students has produced the reverse of what was anticipated in a large number of cases, and very naturally. It is a false theory to suppose all the people of any one class to be specially fitted for only one branch of industry: for I maintain that preaching has largely become a trade or profession, in which the churches with large salaries have become prizes to be contended for with almost as much zeal and partisanship as the prizes in politics. This is true not only of colored ministers but white ones as well. It is no disparagement of colored ministers to say that day by day they grow more and more in favor of serving churches with fair salaries than in carrying around the cross as itinerants, without any special place to lay their heads when the storms blow and the rains descend. In this they do but pattern after white clergymen, who do not always set examples that angels would be justified in imitating.

Colored people are naturally sociable, and intensely religious in their disposition. Their excellent social qualities make them the best of companions. They are musical, humorous and generous to a fault. Coupled with their strong religious bias, these attractive qualities will in time lift them to the highest possible grade in our dwarfed civilization, where the fittest does not always survive; the drossiest, flimsiest, most selfish and superficial often occupying the high places, social and political. But I have still higher aspirations for my race. There is hope for any people who are social in disposition, for this supposes the largest capacity for mutual friendships, therefore of co-operation, out of which the highest civilization is possible to be evolved; while a love of music and the possession of musical and humorous talent is, undeniably, indicative of genius and prospective culture and refinement of the most approved standard.

Indeed, the constant evolution of negro character is one of the most marked and encouraging social phenomena of the times; it constantly tends upwards, in moral, mental development and material betterment. Those who contend that the negro is standing still, or "relapsing into barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions must, necessarily, be false. In the first place, disregarding the fact that the negroes of the South are nothing more nor less than the laboring class of the people, the same in many particulars as the English and Irish peasantry, they proceed to regard them as intruders in the community—as a people who continually take from but add nothing to the wealth of the community.

It is nothing unusual to see newspaper articles stating in the most positive terms that the schools maintained by the State for the education of the blacks are supported out of the taxes paid by white men; and, very recently, it was spoken of as a most laudable act of justice and generosity that the State of Georgia paid out annually for the maintenance of colored schools more money than the aggregate taxes paid into the treasury of the State by the Negro property owners of the State; while the grand commonwealth of Kentucky only appropriates for the maintenance of colored schools such moneys as are paid into the State treasury by the colored people. Can the philosophy of taxation be reduced to a more hurtful, a more demoralizing absurdity!

Suppose the same standard of distribution of school funds should be applied to the city or the State of New York; what would be the logical result? Should we appropriate annually from nine to twelve millions of dollars to improve the morals of the people by informing their intelligence? Would the State be able, after ten years of such an experiment, to pay the myriads of officials which would be required to preserve the public peace, to protect life and insure proper respect for the so-called rights of property? Such an experiment would in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult population of Ireland, to be turned into the "finest police in the world," to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium upon ignorance would entail. Since even under the present munificent and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a Board of Aldermen from any other than the slum elements of the population—the liquor dealers, the gamblers, and men of their kind, the President of the New York Board of Aldermen at this very writing being a liquor-dealer, who can estimate the calamity which the inauguration of the Kentucky system would bring upon the people of New York—appropriating to the support of the public schools only such taxes as were paid by the parents of the children who attend them!

And, yet, there is hardly an editor in the South who does not regard it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the colored people—for the proletarian classes generally, white and colored. They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in reach of, the poor man the opportunity to educate his child, the embryo man, the future citizen.

They think it a sounder principle of government to equip and maintain vast penal systems—with chain gangs, schools of crime, depravity and death, than to support schools and churches. Millions of money are squandered annually to curb crime, when a few thousand dollars, properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable preventive. The poor school teacher is paid twenty-five dollars per month for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid fifty dollars per month for twelve months—ninety days being the average length given to teach the child in the school and three hundred and sixty-five being necessary to teach him in the prison, whence he is frequently graduated a far worse, more hopeless enemy of society than when he matriculated.

And the brutality of the convict systems of Southern States is equaled by no similar institutions in the world, if we except the penal system enforced by Russia in Siberia. The terms of imprisonment for minor offenses are cruelly excessive, while the food and shelter furnished and the punishments inflicted would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a savage. The convict systems of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Arkansas are a burning disgrace to the Christian civilization which we boast. Nothing short of a semi-barbarous public opinion would permit them to exist. Governors have "called attention" to them; legislatures have "investigated" and "resolved" that they should be purified, and a few newspapers here and there have held them up to the scorn and contempt of the world; yet they not only grow worse year by year, but the number of them steadily multiplies. And so they will. How is it to be otherwise? To prevent such ulcerations upon the body you must purify the blood. You cannot root them out by probing; that simply aggravates them.

A system of misrepresentation and vilification of the character and condition of the Southern Negro has grown up, for the avowed purpose of enlisting the sympathies of the charitable and philanthropic people of the country to supply funds for his regeneration and education, which the government, State and Federal, studiously denies; so that it is almost impossible to form a correct opinion either of his moral, mental or material condition. Societies have organized and maintain a work among that people which requires an annual outlay of millions of dollars and thousands of employees; and to maintain the work, to keep up the interest of the charitable, it is necessary to picture, as black as imagination can conceive it, the present and prospective condition of the people who are, primarily, the beneficiaries. The work and its maintenance has really become a heavy strain upon the patience and generosity of the liberal givers of the land—whose profuse behests have no parallel in the history of any people. They have kept it up wellnigh a quarter of a century; and it is no disparagement to their zeal to say the tax upon them is becoming more of a burden than a pleasure. They have done in the name of humanity and of God for the unfortunate needy what the government should have done for its own purification and perpetuity for the co-equal citizen. And it is high time that the government should relieve the individual from the unjust and onerous tax.

I do not hesitate to affirm, that while the work done by the charitable for the black citizen of this Republic has been of the most incalculable benefit to him, it has also done him injury which it will take years upon years to eradicate. The misrepresentations resorted to, to obtain money to "lift him up," have spread broadcast over the land a feeling of contempt for him as a man and pity for his lowly and unfortunate condition; so that throughout the North a business man would much rather give a thousand dollars to aid in the education of the black heathen than to give a black scholar and gentleman an opportunity to honestly earn a hundred dollars. He has no confidence in the capacity of the black man. He has seen him pictured a savage, sunk in ignorance and vice—an object worthy to receive alms, but incapable of making an honest living. So that when a black man demonstrates any capacity, shows any signs of originality or genius, rises just a few inches above the common, he at once becomes an object rare and wonderful—a "Moses," a "leader of his people."—It is almost as hard for an educated black man to obtain a position of trust and profit as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The missionaries, the preachers, and the educators, assisted by the newspapers and the magazines, have educated the people into the false opinion that it is safer to "donate" a thousand dollars to a colored college than it is to give one black man a chance to make an honest living.

Let us now look at the system of education as it has been operated among the colored people of the South.

It cannot be denied that much of the fabulous sums of money lavishly given for the education of the Freedmen of the South, has been squandered upon experiments, which common sense should have dictated were altogether impracticable. Perhaps this was sequential in the early stages of the work, when the instructor was ignorant of the topography of the country, the temper of the people among whom he was to labor, and, more important still, when he was totally ignorant of the particular class upon whom he was to operate—ignorant of their temperament, receptive capacity and peculiar, aye, unique, idiosyncrasies. Thus thousands upon thousands of dollars were expended upon the erection and endowment of "colleges" in many localities where ordinary common schools were unknown. Each college was, therefore, necessarily provided with a primary department, where the child of ten years and the adult of forty struggled in the same classes with the first elements of rudimentary education. The child and the adult each felt keenly his position in the college, and a course of cramming was pursued, injurious to all concerned, to lessen the number in the primary and to increase the number in the college departments. No man can estimate the injury thus inflicted upon not only the student but the cause of education. Even unto to-day there are colleges in localities in the South which run all year while the common school only runs from three to eight months.

Indeed, the multiplication of colleges and academies for the "higher education of colored youth" is one of the most striking phenomena of the times: as if theology and the classics were the things best suited to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the mechanic and the farmer—to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the prospects of the student. To educate him for a lawyer when there are no clients, for medicine when the patients, although numerous, are too poor to give him a living income, to fill his head with Latin and Greek as a teacher when the people he is to teach are to be instructed in the a b c's—such education is a waste of time and a senseless expenditure of money.

I do not inveigh against higher education; I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or a cranky homiletician. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation for a future work; hence men should be educated with special reference to that work.

If left to themselves men usually select intuitively the course of preparation best suited to their tastes and capacities. But the colored youth of the South have been allured and seduced from their natural inclination by the premiums placed upon theological, classical and professional training for the purpose of sustaining the reputation and continuance of "colleges" and their professorships.

I do not hesitate to say that if the vast sums of money already expended and now being spent in the equipment and maintenance of colleges and universities for the so called "higher education" of colored youth had been expended in the establishment and maintenance of primary schools and schools of applied science, the race would have profited vastly more than it has, both mentally and materially, while the results would have operated far more advantageously to the State, and satisfactorily to the munificent benefactors.

Since writing the above, I find in a very recent number of Judge Tourgèe's magazine, The Continent, the following reflections upon the subject, contributed to that excellent periodical by Prof. George F. Magoun of Iowa College. Mr. Magoun says:

May I offer one suggestion which observation a few years since among the freedmen and much reflection, with comparisons made in foreign countries, have impressed upon me? It is this, that the key of the future for the black men of the South is industrial education. The laboring men of other lands cannot hold their own in skilled labor save as they receive such education, and this of a constantly advancing type. The English House of Commons moved two years since for a Royal Commission to study the technical schools of the continent, and the report respecting France made by this commission has been republished at Washington by the United States Commissioner of Education. In our two leading northwestern cities, St. Louis and Chicago, splendid manual training-schools have been formed, and east and west the question of elementary manual training in public schools is up for discussion and decision. All this for white laboring men. As long ago as December, 1879, the Legislature of Tennessee authorized a brief manual of the Elementary Principles of Agriculture to be "taught in the public schools of the State," for the benefit of white farmers again. The Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, prepared the book—107 pages. Where in all this is there anything for the educational improvement of the black laborer just where he needs education most? The labor of the South is subject in these years to a marvelous revolution. The only opportunity the freedman has to rise is by furnishing such skilled labor as the great changes going on in that splendid section of the land require. How can he furnish it, unless the education given him is chiefly industrial and technical? Some very pertinent statements of the situation are made in the Princeton Review for May. They confirm all that you have said.[12] As to the various bills before Congress, the writer says: "Immediate assistance should be rendered to the ex-slave States in the development of an education suited to their political and industrial needs." Can this be an education in Latin and Greek?"(The writer contends earnestly for retaining these studies in classical college and academy courses for students of all colors.) Can it be anything else than training in elementary industry, such as is now demanded for our Northern common-schools? If the denominational freedmen's schools find this a necessity, is it anything less for the Southern public schools act which is contemplated in the bills before Congress?

Mr. Magoun reasons wisely. If the colored men of the South are to continue their grip as the wage-workers and wealth-producers of that section they must bring to their employments common intelligence and skill; and these are to be obtained in the South as in the North, by apprenticeship and in schools specially provided for the purpose. Instead of spending three to seven years in mastering higher education, which presupposes favorable conditions, colored youth should spend those years in acquiring a "common school education," and in mastering some trade by which to make an honest livelihood when they step forth into the world of fierce competition.

Some may ask: Shall we, then, not have some scholars, men learned in all that higher education gives? Of course; and we should have them. Men fitted by nature for special pursuits in life will make preparation for that work. Water will find its level. Genius cannot be repressed. It will find an audience, even though the singer be Robert Burns at his plow in the remoteness of Ayr, or the philosophic Æsop in the humble garb of a Greek pedant's slave. Genius will take care of itself; it is the mass of mankind that must be led by the hand as we lead a small boy. It is therefore that I plead, that the masses of the colored race should receive such preparation for the fierce competition of every day life that the odds shall not be against them. I do not plead for the few, who will take care of themselves, but for the many who must be guided and protected lest they fall a prey to the more hardy or unscrupulous.

Mr. Magoun follows out his train of thought in the following logical deductions:

Plainly, if this opportunity for furnishing the skilled labor of the South hereafter (as he has furnished the unskilled heretofore) slips away from the black man, he can never rise. In the race for property, influence, and all success in life, the industrially educated white man—whatever may be said of Southern white men "hating to work"—will outstrip him. Before an ecclesiastical body of representative colored men at Memphis, in the autumn of 1880, I urged this consideration, when asked to advise them about education, as the one most germane to their interests; and preachers and laymen, and their white teachers, approved every word, and gave me most hearty thanks. I counseled aspiring young men to abstain from unsuitable attempts at merely literary training; from overlooking the intermediate links of culture in striving after something "beyond their measure;" from expecting any more to be shot up into the United States Senatorships, etc., by a revolution which had already wellnigh spent its first exceptional force (as a few extraordinary persons are thrown up into extraordinary distinction in the beginning of revolutions); from ambitious rejection of the steady, thorough, toilsome methods of fitting themselves for immediate practical duties and nearer spheres, by which alone any class is really and healthfully elevated. To shirk elementary preparation and aspire after the results of scholarship without its painstaking processes is the temptation of colored students, as I know by having taught them daily in college classes. I rejoice in every such student who really climbs the heights of learning with exceeding joy. But a far greater proportion than has thus far submitted to thorough-going preparation for skilled labor must do so, or there is no great future for them in this land as a race.

But already the absurdity of beginning at the apex of the educational fabric instead of at the base is being perceived by those who have in hand the education of colored youth. A large number of colleges are adding industrial to their other features, and with much success, and a larger number of educators are agitating the wisdom of such feature.

Perhaps no educational institution in the Union has done more for the industrial education of the colored people of the South than the Hampton (Virginia) Normal and Agricultural Institute under the management of General S.C. Armstrong. The success of this one institution in industrial education, and the favor with which it is regarded by the public, augurs well for the future of such institutions. That they many multiply is the fervent wish of every man who apprehends the necessities of the colored people.

In a recent issue of the New York Globe, Prof. T. McCants Stewart of the Liberia (West Africa) College, who is studying the industrial features of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for use in his capacity as a professor among the people of the Lone Star Republic, photographs in the following manner the great work being done at Hampton. Prof. Stewart says:

The day after my arrival, I was put into the hands of an excellent New England gentleman, who was to show me through the Institute. He took me first to the barn, a large and substantial building in which are stored the products of the farm, and in which the stock have their shelter. We ascended a winding staircase, reached the top, and looked down upon the Institute grounds with their wide shell-paved walls, grassplots, flower-beds, orchards, groves and many buildings—the whole full of life, and giving evidence of abundant prosperity, and surrounded by a beautiful and charming country. We came down and began our rounds through "the little world" in which almost every phase of human life has its existence.

We went into the shoe-making department. It is in the upper part of a two-story brick building. On the first floor the harness-making department is located. We were told that Frederick Douglass has his harness made here. One certainly gets good material and honest work; and reasonable prices are charged. In the shoe department several Indian boys and youths were at work. There were also three or four colored boys. They make annually for the United States government two thousand pairs of shoes for the Indians. They also look after outside orders, and do all the repairing, etc., of boots and shoes for the faculty, officers, and students—making fully five thousand pairs of shoes a year, if we include the repairing in this estimate. At the head of this department is a practical shoemaker from Boston. Each department has a practical man at its head. We visited, not all the first day, the blacksmith, wheelwright and tin shops, and looked through the printing office, and the knitting-room, in which young men are engaged manufacturing thousands of mittens annually for a firm in Boston. These two departments are in a commodious brick edifice, called the "Stone Building." It is the gift of Mrs. Valeria Stone.

One of the most interesting departments is located also in the "Stone Building"—the sewing-room. In it are nearly a score, perhaps more, of cheerful, busy girls. The rapid ticking of the machine is heard, and the merry laugh followed by gentle whispers gives life to the room. These young girls are the future wives and mothers; and the large majority of them will be married to poor men. In the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they are acquiring a knowledge and habits of industry that will save their husbands' pennies, and thus keep them from living from hand to mouth, making an everlasting struggle to save their nose from the grindstone. In the schoolroom, they are gathering up those intellectual treasures, which will make them in a double sense helpmeets unto their husbands.

Standing in the carpenter and paint shops, and in the saw mill, and seeing Negro youths engaged in the most delicate kind of work, learning valuable and useful trades, I could not help from feeling that this is an excellent institution, and that I would like to have my boys spend three years here, from fourteen to seventeen, grow strong in the love for work, and educated to feel the dignity of labor, and get a trade: then if they have the capacity and desire to qualify for a "top round in the ladder," for leadership in the "world's broad field of battle," it will be time enough to think of Harvard and Yale and Edinburgh, or perhaps similar African institutions.

Mr. George H. Corliss, of Rhode Island, presented to the school in 1879 a sixty-horse power Corliss engine. Soon after Mr. C.P. Huntington, of the Missouri & Pacific R.R., gave a saw mill, and as a result of these gifts large industrial operations were begun. The saw mill is certainly an extensive enterprise. Logs are brought up from the Carolinas, and boards are sawn out, and in the turning department fancy fixtures are made for houses, piazzas, etc.

There are two farms. The Normal School farm, and the Hemenway farm, which is four miles from the Institute. On the former seventy tons of hay and about one hundred and twenty tons of ensilaged fodder-corn were raised last year, besides potatoes, corn, rye, oats, asparagus, and early vegetables. Five hundred thousand bricks were also made. The Hemenway farm, of five hundred acres, is in charge of a graduate and his wife. Its receipts reach nearly three thousand dollars a year, and the farm promises to do invaluable service in time towards sustaining this gigantic work. All of the industries do not pay. For example, the deficit in the printing office last year was about seven hundred dollars. This is due to the employment and training of student labor. The primary aim is not the making of money but the advancement of the student. After they learn, they are good, profitable workmen; but they then leave the Institute to engage in the outside world in the battle of life. On the farm is a large number of stock, milch cows and calves, beef cattle, horses and colts, mules, oxen, sheep and hogs—in all nearly five hundred heads.

In these various industries, the farm, saw mill, machine shop, knitting, carpentering, harness making, tinsmithing, blacksmithing, shoe-making, wheel-wrighting, tailoring, sewing, printing, etc., over five hundred students were engaged in 1883. They earned over thirty thousand dollars—an average of seventy dollars each. There is no question about the fact that this is a "beehive" into which a bee can enter, if accepted, with nothing but his soul and his muscle, and get a good education!

Professor Stewart's article carries upon its face the proper reply to Mr. Magoun's apprehensions and my own deductions, and is the very strongest argument for a complete and immediate recasting of the underlying principles upon which nearly all colored colleges are sustained and operated.

Money contributed for eleemosynary purposes is a sacred trust, and should so be applied as to net the greatest good not only to the beneficiary but the donor. The primary object of educational effort among the colored people thus far has been to purify their perverted moral nature and to indoctrinate in them correcter ideas of religion and its obligations; and the effort has not been in vain. Yet I am constrained to say, the inculcation of these principals has been altogether a too predominant idea. Material possibilities are rightly predicated upon correct moral and spiritual bases; but a morally and spiritually sound training must be sustained by such preparation for the actual work of life, as we find it in the machine shop, the grain field, and the commercial pursuits. The moralist and missionary are no equals for the man whose ideas of honest toil are supplemented by a common school training and an educated hand. This is exemplified every day in the ready demand for foreign-born skilled labor over our own people, usually educated as gentlemen without means, as if they were to be kid-gloved fellows, not men who must contend for subsistence with the horny-handed men who have graduated from the machine shops and factories and the schools of applied sciences of Europe. Indeed, the absence of the old-time apprentices among the white youth of the North, as a force in our industrial organization to draw upon, can be accounted for upon no other ground than that the supply of foreign-born skilled help so readily fills the demand that employers find it a useless expenditure of means to graduate the American boy. Thus may we account for the "grand rush" young men make for the lighter employments and the professions, creating year after year an idle floating population of miseducated men, and reducing the compensation for clerical work below that received by hod-carriers. This is not a fancy picture; it is an arraignment of the American system of education, which proceeds upon the assumption that boys are all "born with a silver spoon in their mouths" and are destined to reach—not the poor-house, but the Senate House or the White House.

The American system of education proceeds upon a false and pernicious assumption; and, while I protest against its application generally, I protest, in this connection, against its application in the case of the colored youth in particular. What the colored boy, what all boys of the country need, is industrial not ornamental education; shall they have it? Let the State and the philanthropists answer.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Judge Tourgee has for years been urgently and admirably writing in advocacy of National Aid in Southern Education.

CHAPTER VII

How Not to Do It

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Revolutions are always the outgrowth of deepest wrongs, clearly defined by long and heated agitation, which inflame the mind of the people, and divide them into hostile factions. The field of battle is simply the theater upon which the hostile factions decide by superior prowess, or numbers, or sagacity, the questions at issue. In these conflicts, right usually, but not invariably, triumphs, as it should always do. Revolutions quicken the conscience and intelligence of the people, and wars purify the morals of the people by weeding out the surplus and desperate members of the population; just as a thunderstorm clarifies the atmosphere.

But the problems involved in the agitation which culminated in the War of the Rebellion are to-day as far from solution as if no shot had been fired upon Fort Sumter or as if no Lee had laid down traitorous arms four years thereafter.

The giant form of the slave-master, the tyrant, still rises superior to law, to awe and oppress the unorganized proletariat—the common people, the laboring class. Even when slavery was first introduced into this country, Fate had written upon the walls of the nation that it "must go," and go it must, as the result of wise statesmanship or amid the smoke of battle and the awful "diapason of cannonade." No man can tell whether wisdom will dictate further argument of peaceful, or there must be found a violent, solution; but all men of passable intelligence know and feel that justice will prevail. Progress goes forward ever, backward never.

That human intelligence has reached higher ground within the present century than it ever before attained, goes without saying. That we have marvelously improved upon all the mechanism of government is equally true. But whether we have improved upon the time-honored rules of dealing with rebels by extending to them general amnesty for all their sins of commission is seriously to be debated. If we may judge of the proper treatment of treason by the example which, according to Milton, High Heaven made of Lucifer, amnesty is a failure; if we may judge by the almost absolute failure of the results of the war of the Rebellion, we may emphatically pronounce amnesty to be a noxious weed which should not be permitted to take too firm a rooting in our dealing with traitors. Human, it may be, to err, and to forgive Divine; but for man to extend forgiveness too far is positively fatal. Examples are not wanting to show the truthfulness of the reasoning.

There is no error which has been productive of more disaster and death than the stupid plan adopted by the Federal government in what is known as the "Reconstruction policy." This policy, born out of expediency and nurtured in selfishness, was, in its inception, instinct with the elements of failure and of death. Perhaps no piece of legislation, no policy, was ever more fatuous in every detail. How could it be otherwise? How could the men who devised it expect for it anything more than a speedy, ignominous collapse? All the past history of the Southern states unmistakably pointed to the utter failure of any policy in which the whites were not made the masters; unless, indeed, they were subjected to that severe governmental control which their treason merited, until such time as the people were prepared for self-government by education, the oblivion of issues out of which the war grew, the passing away by death of the old spirits, and the complete metamorphosis of the peculiar conditions predicated upon and fostered by the unnatural state of slavery.

At the close of the Rebellion, in 1865, the United States government completely transformed the social fabric of the Southern state governments; and, without resorting to the slow process of educating the people; without even preparing them by proper warnings; without taking into consideration the peculiar relations of the subject and dominant classes—the slave class and the master class—instantly, as it were, the lamb and the lion were commanded to lie down together. The master class, fresh from the fields of a bloody war, with his musket strapped to his shoulder and the sharp thorn of ignominious defeat penetrating his breast; the master class, educated for two hundred years to dominate in his home, in the councils of municipal, state and Federal government; the master class, who had been taught that slavery was a divine institution and that the black man, the unfortunate progeny of Ham, was his lawful slave and property; and the slave class, born to a state of slavery and obedience, educated in the school of improvidence, mendacity and the lowest vices—these two classes of people, born to such widely dissimilar stations in life and educated in the most extreme schools, were declared to be free, and equal before the law, with the right to vote; to testify in courts of law; to sit upon jury and in the halls of legislation, municipal and other; to sue and be sued; to buy and to sell; to marry and give in marriage. In short, these two classes of people were made co-equal citizens, entitled alike to the protection of the laws and the benefits of government.

I know of no instance in the various history of mankind which equals in absurdity the presumption of the originators of our "Reconstruction policy" that the master class would accept cordially the conditions forced upon them, or that the enfranchised class would prove equal to the burden so unceremoniously forced upon them. On the one hand, a proud and haughty people, who had stubbornly contested the right of the government to interfere with the extension of slavery, not to say confiscation of slave property—a people rich in lands, in mental resources, in courage; on the other, a poor, despised people, without lands, without money, without mental resources, without moral character—these peoples equal, indeed! These peoples go peaceably to the ballot-box together to decide upon the destiny of government! These peoples melt into an harmonious citizenry! These peoples have and exercise mutual confidence, esteem and appreciation of their common rights! These peoples dissolve into one people! The bare statement of the case condemns it as impracticable, illusory, in the extreme. And, yet, these two peoples, so different in character, in education and material condition, were turned loose to enjoy the same benefits in common—to be one! And the wise men of the nation—as, Tourgee's Fool ironically names them—thought they were legislating for the best; thought they were doing their duty. And, so, having made the people free, and equal before the law, and given them the ballot with which to settle their disputes, the "wise men" left the people to live in peace if they could, and to cut each other's throats if they could not. That they should have proceeded to cut each other's throats was as natural as it is for day to follow night.

I do not desire to be understood as inveighing against the manumission of the slave or the enfranchisement of the new-made free man. To do so, would be most paradoxical on my part, who was born a slave and spent the first nine years of my life in that most unnatural condition. What I do inveigh against, is the unequal manner in which the colored people were pitted against the white people; the placing of these helpless people absolutely in the power of this hereditary foeman—more absolutely in their power, at their mercy, than under the merciless system of slavery, when sordid interest dictated a modicum of humanity and care in treatment. And I arraign the "Reconstruction policy" as one of the hollowest pieces of perfidy ever perpetrated upon an innocent, helpless people; and in the treatment of the issues growing out of that policy, I arraign the dominant party of the time for base ingratitude, subterfuge and hypocrisy to its black partisan allies. With the whole power of the government at its back, and with a Constitution so amended as to extend the amplest protection to the new-made citizen, it left him to the inhuman mercy of men whose uncurbed passions, whose deeds of lawlessness and defiance, pale into virtues the ferocity of Cossack warfare. And, for this treachery, for leaving this people alone and single-handed, to fight an enemy born in the lap of self-confidence, and rocked in the cradle of arrogance and cruelty, the "party of great moral ideas" must go down to history amid the hisses and the execrations of honest men in spite of its good deeds. There is not one extenuating circumstance to temper the indignation of him who believes in justice and humanity.

As I stand before the thirteen bulky volumes, comprising the "Ku Klux Conspiracy," being the report of the "Joint Select Committee, to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late Insurrectionary States," on the part of the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, reported February 19, 1872, my blood runs cold at the merciless chronicle of murder and outrage, of defiance, inhumanity and barbarity on the one hand, and usurpation and tyranny on the other.

If the shot upon Fort Sumter was treason, what shall we call the bloody conflict which the white men of the South have waged against the Constitutional amendments from 1866 to the murder of innocent citizens at Danville, Virginia, in 1883—even unto the present time? If the shot upon Fort Sumter drew down upon the South the indignation and the vengeance of the Federal government, putting father against son, and brother against brother, what shall we say the Federal Government should have done to put a period to the usurpation and the murders of these leagues of horror?

The entire adult male population of the South, though no longer in armed "Rebellion," appeared to be in league against the government of the United States. The arm of State authority was paralyzed, the operation of courts of justice was suspended, lawlessness and individual license walked abroad, and anarchy, pure and simple, prevailed. Under the name of the "Ku Klux Klan," the South was bound by the following oath, ironclad, paradoxical and enigmatical as it is:

I, [name] before the great immaculate Judge of heaven and earth, and upon the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God, do, of my own free will and accord, subscribe to the following sacred, binding obligation:

I. I am on the side of justice and humanity and constitutional liberty, as bequeathed to us by our forefathers in its original purity.

II. I reject and oppose the principles of the radical party.

III. I pledge aid to a brother of the Ku-Klux Klan in sickness, distress, or pecuniary embarrassments. Females, friends, widows, and their households shall be the special object of my care and protection.

IV. Should I ever divulge, or cause to be divulged, any of the secrets of this order, or any of the foregoing obligations, I must meet with the fearful punishment of death and traitor's doom, which is death, death, death, at the hands of the brethren.

Murderers, incendiaries, midnight raiders on the "side of justice, humanity and Constitutional liberty"! Let us see what kind of "justice, humanity and Constitutional liberty" is meant. In Volume I, page 21, I find the following:

Taking these statements from official sources, showing the prevalence of this organization in every one of the late insurrectionary States and in Kentucky, it is difficult now, with the light that has recently been thrown upon its history, to realize that even its existence has been for so long a mooted question in the public mind. Especially is this remarkable in view of the effects that are disclosed by some of this documentary evidence to have been produced by it. That it was used as a means of intimidating and murdering negro voters during the presidential election of 1868, the testimony in the Louisiana and other contested-election cases already referred to clearly establishes.

Taking the results in Louisiana alone as an instance, the purpose of the organization at that time, whatever it may have been at its origin, could hardly be doubted.

A member of the committee which took that testimony thus sums it up:

The testimony shows that over 2,000 persons were killed, wounded, and otherwise injured in that State within a few weeks prior to the presidential election; that half the State was overrun by violence; midnight raids, secret murders, and open riot kept the people in constant terror until the Republicans surrendered all claims, and then the election was carried by the Democracy. The parish of Orleans contained 29,910 voters, 15,020 black. In the spring of 1868 that parish gave 13,973 republican votes. In the fall of 1868 it gave Grant 1,178, a falling off of 12,795 votes. Riots prevailed for weeks, sweeping the city of New Orleans, and filling it with scenes of blood, and Ku-Klux notices were scattered through the city warning the colored men not to vote. In Caddo there were 2,987 Republicans. In the spring of 1868 they carried the parish. In the fall they gave Grant one vote. Here also there were bloody riots.

But the most remarkable case is that of St. Landry, a planting parish on the River Teche. Here the Republicans had a registered majority of 1,071 votes. In the spring of 1868 they carried the parish by 678. In the fall they gave Grant no vote, not one; while the democrats cast 4,787, the full vote of the parish, for Seymour and Blair.

Here occurred one of the bloodiest riots on record, in which the Ku-Klux killed and wounded over two hundred Republicans, hunting and chasing them for two days and nights through fields and swamps. Thirteen captives were taken from the jail and shot. A pile of twenty-five dead bodies was found half buried in the woods. Having conquered the Republicans, killed and driven off the white leaders, the Ku-Klux captured the masses, marked them with badges of red flannel, enrolled them in clubs, led them to the polls, made them vote the Democratic ticket, and then gave them certificates of the fact.

It is not my purpose to weary the reader with tedious citations from the cumbersome reports of the "Ku Klux conspiracy." Those reports are accessible to the reading public. They tell the bloody story of the terrible miscarriage of the "Reconstruction policy;" they show how cruel men can be under conditions favorable to unbridled license, undeterred by the strong arm of constituted authority; they show how helpless the freed people were; how ignorant, how easily led by unscrupulous adventurers pretending to be friends and how easily murdered and overawed by veterans inured to the dangers and the toils of war; and, lastly, they show how powerless was the national government to protect its citizens' rights, specifically defined by the Federal constitution. Was, do I say? It is as powerless to day!

In this brief review, then, of the history and present political condition of the American Negro I cannot omit, though I shall not detail, the horrors of the Ku Klux period. They are a link in the chain: and though today's links are different in form and guise, the chain is the same. Let the reader, then, be a little patient at being reminded of things which he has perhaps forgotten.

CHAPTER VIII

The Nation Surrenders

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The mind sickens in contemplating the mistakes of the "Reconstruction policy;" and the revolting peculation and crime—which went hand in hand from 1867-8 to 1876, bankrupting and terrorizing those unfortunate States—plunging them into all but anarchy, pure and simple.

A parallel to the terror which walked abroad in the South from 1866, down to 1876, and which is largely dominant in that section even unto the present hour, must be sought for in other lands than our own, where the iron hand of the tyrant, seated upon a throne, cemented with a thousand years of usurpation and the blood of millions of innocent victims, presses hard upon the necks of the high and the backs of the low; we must turn to the dynastic villanies of the house of Orleans or of Stuart, or that prototype of all that is tyrannical, sordid and inhuman, the Czar of all the Russias. The "Invisible Empire," with its "Knights of the White Camelia," was as terrible as the "Empire" which Marat, Danton and Robespierre made for themselves, with this difference: the "Knights of the White Camelia" were assassins and marauders who murdered and terrorized in defiance of all laws, human or divine, though claiming allegiance to both; while the Frenchmen regarded themselves as the lawful authority of the land and rejected utterly the Divine or "higher law." The one murdered men as highwaymen do, while the other murdered them under the cover of law and in the name of Liberty, in whose name, as Madame Roland exclaimed on the scaffold of revolutionary vengeance, so many crimes are perpetrated! The one murdered kings and aristocrats to unshackle the limbs of the proletariat of France; the other murdered the proletariat of the South to re-rivet their chains upon the wretched survivors. And each class of murders proclaimed that it was actuated by the motive of justice and humanity. Liberty was the grand inspiration that steeled the arm and hardened the heart of each of the avengers!

And thus it has been in all the history of murder and plunder. Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and sacred to the race. The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell, were they not drawn in the name of Liberty—the People? The guillotine of the French Commune and the derringer of J. Wilkes Booth, were they not inspired by Liberty—the People?

The innocent blood which has been spilt in the name of liberty and the people, which has served the purposes of tyranny and riveted upon the people most galling chains, "would float a navy."

By the side of the robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and unnecessary taxation upon the people of that state by the Carpet-Bag harpies, aided and abetted by the ignorant negroes whom our government had not given time to shake the dust of the cornfield from their feet before it invited them to seats in the chambers of legislature, we must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburgh and Ellenton.

By the side of the misgovernment, the honeycomb of corruption in which the Carpet-Bag government of Louisiana reveled, we must place the universal lawlessness which that state witnessed from 1867 to 1876.

The whole gamut of states could be run with the same deplorable, the same sickening conclusion.

The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to watch the fire-brand. The "wise men" of the nation had made possible a system of government in which robbery and murder were to contend for the mastery, in which organized ignorance and organized brigandage were to contend for the right to rule and to ruin.

It is not complimentary to the white men of the South that their organized brigandage proved to be more stubborn, more far-sighted than was unorganized ignorance. In a warfare of this disreputable nature very little honor can be accorded to the victorious party, be he brigand or ignoramus. The warfare is absolutely devoid of principle, and, therefore, victory, any way it is twisted, is supremely dishonorable.

The South, therefore, although she rooted out the incubus of carpet-baggism (one of the most noxious plants that ever blossomed in the garden of any nascent society), and stifled the liberties and immunities of a whole people, turning their new-found joy into sadness and mourning—although the South succeeded in accomplishing these results, she lies prostrate to-day, feared by her fellow-citizens, who will not trust her with power, and shunned by the industrious aliens who seek our shores, because they will not become members of a society in which individualism and absolutism are the supreme law—for was it not to escape these parasites that they expatriated themselves from the shores of the Volga, the Danube and the Rhine? Men will not make their homes among people who, spurning the accepted canons of justice and the courts of law, make themselves a community of banditti. Thus, the South lies prostrate, staggering beneath a load of illiteracy sufficient to paralyze the energies of any people; dwelling in the midst of usurpation, where law is suspended and individual license is the standard authority; where criminals and suspected criminals are turned over to the rude mercy of mobs, masked and irresponsible; where caste corrupts every rivulet that issues from the fountain of aspiration or of chastity;[13] where no man is allowed to think or act for himself who does not conform his thoughts and shape his actions to suit the censorious and haughty dictum of the dominant class.

"You must think as we think and act as we act, or you must go!" This is the law of the South.

In each of the late rebellious states the ballotbox has been closed against the black man. To reach it he is compelled to brave the muzzles of a thousand rifles in the hands of silent sentinels who esteem a human life as no more sacred than the serpent that drags his tortuous length among the grasses of the field, and whose head mankind is enjoined to crush.

The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal constitution which grew out of the public sentiment created by thirty long years of agitation of the abolitionists and of the "emancipation proclamation"—issued as a war measure by President Lincoln—are no longer regarded as fundamental by the South. The beneficiaries of those amendments have failed in every instance to enjoy the benefits that were, presumably, intended to be conferred.

These laws—having passed both branches of the Federal legislature, having received the approval and signature of the Chief Executive of the nation, and having been ratified by a majority of the states composing the sisterhood of states—these laws are no longer binding upon the people of the South, who fought long and desperately to prevent the possibility of their enactment; and they no longer benefit, if they ever did, the people in whose interest they were incorporated in the Magna Charta of American liberty; while the Central authority which originated them, has, through the Supreme Court, declared nugatory, null and void all supplementary legislation based upon those laws, as far as the government of the United States is concerned! The whole question has been remanded to the legislatures of the several states! The Federal Union has left to the usurped governments of the South the adjudication of rights which the South fought four years in honorable warfare to make impossible, and which it has since the war exhausted the catalogue of infamy and lawlessness to make of no force or effect. The fate of the lamb has been left to the mercy of the lion and the tiger.

The "party of great moral ideas," having emancipated the slave, and enfranchised disorganized ignorance and poverty, finally finished its mission, relinquished its right to the respect and confidence of mankind when, in 1876, it abandoned all effort to enforce the provisions of the war amendments. That party stands today for organized corruption, while its opponent stands for organized brigandage. The black man, who was betrayed by his party and murdered by the opponents of his party, is absolved from all allegiance which gratitude may have dictated, and is to-day free to make conditions the best possible with any faction which will insure him in his right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The black men of the United States are, today, free to form whatever alliances wisdom dictates, to make sure their position in the social and civil system of which, in the wise providence of a just God, they are a factor, for better or for worse.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] "Southerners fire up terribly, as has been noted in these columns again and again, when the subject of intermarriage between whites and negroes is discussed. But the terrible state of immorality which exists there, involving white men and colored women, is something upon which the papers of that region are silent as a rule. Not so the grand jury that met recently at Madison, Ga., which thus spoke out in its presentment with all plainness of the Old Testament:

"After several days of laborious investigation we have found the moral state of our country in a fair condition, and the freedom of our community from any great criminal offenses is a subject for congratulation to our people. But the open and shameless cohabitation of white men with negro women in our community cries to heaven for abatement. This crime in its nature has been such as to elude our grasp owing to the limited time of our session. It is poisoning the fountains of our social life; it is ruining and degrading our young men, men who would scorn to have imputation put on them of equalization with negroes, but who have, nevertheless, found the lowest depths of moral depravity in this unnatural shame of their lives."

"The despatch chronicling the presentment adds: 'The reading of this presentment in court aroused a great feeling of indignation among men who declare that the private affairs of the people should not be intruded upon.' It strikes the Northern mind that until these 'private affairs' do not need to be 'intruded upon,' Southern newspapers and Southern clergymen would with better grace bottle up their indignation upon the terrible evils likely to result from the legitimate intermarriage of the two races."—Newspaper waif.

CHAPTER IX

Political Independence of the Negro

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The following chapter is, in the main, a reproduction of an address delivered by me before the Colored Press Association, in the city of Washington, June 27, 1882:—

In addressing myself to a consideration of the subject: "The colored man as an Independent Force in our Politics," I come at once to one of the vital principles underlying American citizenship of the colored man in a peculiar manner. Upon this question hang all the conditions of man as a free moral agent, as an intelligent reasoning being; as a man thoughtful for the best interests of his country, of his individual interests, and of the interests of those who must take up the work of republican government when the present generation has passed away. When I say that this question is of a most complex and perplexing nature, I only assert what is known of all men.

I would not forget that the arguments for and against independent action on our part are based upon two parties or sets of principles. Principles are inherent in government by the people, and parties are engines created by the people through which to voice the principles they espouse. Parties have divided on one line in this country from the beginning of our national existence to the present time. All other issues merge into two distinct ones—the question of a strong Federal Government, as enunciated by Alexander Hamilton, and maintained by the present Republican party, and the question of the rights and powers of the States, as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, and as maintained by the present Democratic party,—called the "party of the people," but in fact the party of oligarchy, bloodshed, violence and oppression. The Republican party won its first great victory on the inherent weakness of the Democratic party on the question of Human Rights and the right of the Federal Government to protect itself from the assumption, the aggression, the attempted usurpation, of the States, and it has maintained its supremacy for so long a time as to lead to the supposition that it will rule until such time as it shall fall to pieces of itself because of internal decay and exterior cancers. There does not appear to exist sufficient vitality outside of the Republican party to keep its members loyal to the people or honest to the government. The loyal legislation which would be occasioned by dread of loss of power, and the administration of the government in the most economical form, are wanting, because of the absence of an honest, healthy opposing party.

But it is not my purpose to dwell upon the mechanism of parties, but rather to show why colored Americans should be independent voters, independent citizens, independent men. To this end I am led to lay it down: (1.) That an independent voter must be intelligent, must comprehend the science of government, and be versed in the history of governments and of men; (2.) That an independent voter must be not only a citizen versed in government, but one loyal to his country, and generous and forbearing with his fellow-citizens, not looking always to the word and the act, but looking sometimes to the undercurrent which actuates these—to the presence of immediate interest, which is always strong in human nature, to the love of race, and to the love of section, which comes next to the love of country.

Our country is great not only in mineral and cereal resources, in numbers, and in accumulated wealth, but great in extent of territory, and in multiplicity of interests, out-growing from peculiarities of locality, race, and the education of the people. Thus the people of the North and East and West are given to farming, manufacturing, and speculation, making politics a subordinate, not a leading interest; they are consequently wealthy, thrifty and contented: while the people of the South, still in the shadow of defeat in the bloodiest and most tremendous conflict since the Napoleonic wars, are divided sharply into two classes, and given almost exclusively to the pursuits of agriculture and hatred of one another. The existence of this state of things is most disastrous in its nature, and deplorable in its results. It is a barrier against the progress of that section and alien to the spirit and subversive of the principles of our free institutions.

It is in the South that the largest number of our people live; it is there that they encounter the greatest hardships; it is there the problem of their future usefulness as American citizens must have full and satisfactory, or disastrous and disheartening demonstration. Consequently, the colored statesman and the colored editor must turn their attention to the South and make that field the center of speculation, deduction and practical application. We all understand the conditions of society in that section and the causes which have produced them, and, while not forgetting the causes, it is a common purpose to alter the existing conditions, so that they may conform to the logic of the great Rebellion and the spirit and letter of the Federal Constitution. It is not surprising, therefore, that, as an humble worker in the interest of my race and the common good, I have decided views as to the course best to be pursued by our people in that section, and the fruits likely to spring from a consistent advocacy of such views.

I may stand alone in the opinion that the best interests of the race and the best interests of the country will be conserved by building up a bond of union between the white people and the negroes of the South—advocating the doctrine that the interests of the white and the interests of the colored people are one and the same; that the legislation which affects the one will affect the other; that the good which comes to the one should come to the other, and that, as one people, the evils which blight the hopes of the one blight the hopes of the other; I say, I may stand alone among colored men in the belief that harmony of sentiment between the blacks and whites of the country, in so far forth as it tends to honest division and healthy opposition, is natural and necessary, but I speak that which is a conviction as strong as the Stalwart idea of diversity between Black and White, which has so crystallized the opinion of the race.

It is not safe in a republican form of government that clannishness should exist, either by compulsory or voluntary reason; it is not good for the government, it is not good for the individual. A government like ours is like unto a household. Difference of opinion on non-essentials is wholesome and natural, but upon the fundamental idea incorporated in the Declaration of Independence and re-affirmed in the Federal Constitution the utmost unanimity should prevail. That all men are born equal, so far as the benefits of government extend; that each and every man is justly entitled to the enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, so long as these benign benefits be not forfeited by infraction upon the rights of others; that freedom of thought and unmolested expression of honest conviction and the right to make these effective through the sacred medium of a fair vote and an honest count, are God-given and not to be curtailed—these are the foundations of republican government; these are the foundations of our institutions; these are the birthright of every American citizen; these are the guarantees which make men free and independent and great.

The colored man must rise to a full conception of his citizenship before he can make his citizenship effective. It is a fatality to create or foster clannishness in a government like ours. Assimilation of sentiment must be the property of the German, the Irish, the English, the Anglo-African, and all other racial elements that contribute to the formation of the American type of citizen. The moment you create a caste standard, the moment you recognize the existence of such, that moment republican government stands beneath the sword of Damocles, the vitality of its being becomes vitiated and endangered. If this be true, the American people have grave cause for apprehension. The Anglo-African element of our population is classed off by popular sentiment, and kept so. It is for the thoughtful, the honest, the calm but resolute men of the race to mould the sentiment of the masses, lift them up into the broad sunlight of freedom. Ignorance, superstition, prejudice, and intolerance are elements in our nature born of the malign institution of servitude. No fiat of government can eradicate these. As they were the slow growth, the gradual development of long years of inhuman conditions, so they must be eliminated by the slow growth of years of favorable conditions. Let us recognize these facts as facts, and labor honestly to supplant them with more wholesome, more cheering realities. The Independent colored man, like the Independent white man, is an American citizen who does his own thinking. When some one else thinks for him he ceases to be an intelligent citizen and becomes a dangerous dupe—dangerous to himself, dangerous to the State.

It is not to be expected now that the colored voters will continue to maintain that unanimity of idea and action characteristic of them when the legislative halls of States resounded with the clamor of law-makers of their creation, and when their breath flooded or depleted State treasuries. The conditions are different now. They find themselves citizens without a voice in the shapement of legislation; tax-payers without representation; men without leadership masterful enough to force respect from inferior numbers in some States, or to hold the balance of power in others. They find themselves at the mercy of a relentless public opinion which tolerates but does not respect their existence as a voting force; but which, on the contrary, while recognizing their right to the free exercise of the suffrage, forbids such exercise at the point of the shotgun of the assassin, whom it not only nerves but shields in the perpetration of his lawless and infamous crimes. And why is this? Why is it that the one hundred and twenty thousand black voters of South Carolina allow the eighty thousand white voters of that State to grind the life out of them by laws more odious, more infamous, more tyrannical and subversive of manhood than any which depopulate the governments of the old world? Is it because the white man is the created viceregent of government? The Scriptures affirm that all are sprung from one parental stem. Is it because he is the constitutionally invested oligarch of government? The magna charta of our liberties affirms that "all men are created equal." Is it because the law of the land reserves unto him the dominance of power? The preamble of the Federal Constitution declares that "We" and not "I," constitute "the people of the United States." If the law of God and the law of man agree in the equality of right of man, explain to me the cause which keeps a superior force in subjection to a minority. Look to the misgovernment of the Reconstruction period for the answer—misgovernment by white men and black men who were lifted into a "little brief authority" by a mighty but unwieldy voting force. That black man who connived at and shared in the corruption in the South which resulted in the subversion of the majority rule, is a traitor to his race and his country, wherever he may now be eking out a precarious and inglorious existence, and I have nothing to heap upon his head but the curses, the execrations of an injured people. Like Benedict Arnold he should seek a garret in the desert of population, living unnoticed and without respect, where he might die without arousing the contempt of his people.

The love of Liberty carries with it the courage to preserve it from encroachments from without and from contempt from within. A people in whom the love of liberty is in-born cannot be enslaved, though they may be exterminated by superior force and intelligence, as in the case of the poor Indian of our own land—a people who, two hundred years ago, spread their untamed hordes from the icebergs of Maine to the balmy sunland of Florida. But to-day where are they? Their love of freedom and valorous defense of priority of ownership of our domain have caused them to be swept from the face of the earth. Had they possessed intelligence with their more than Spartan courage, the wave of extermination could never have rolled over them forever. As a man I admire the unconquerable heroism and fortitude of the Indian. So brave a race of people were worthy a nobler and a happier destiny. As an American citizen, I feel it born in my nature to share in fullest measure all that is American. I sympathize in all the hopes, aspirations and fruitions of my country. There is no pulsation in the animated frame of my native land which does not thrill my nature. There is no height of glory we may reach as a government in which I should not feel myself individually lifted; and there is no depth of degradation to which we may fall to which I should not feel myself individually dragged. In a word, I am an American citizen. I have a heritage in each and every provision incorporated in the Constitution of my country, and should this heritage be attempted to be filched from me by any man or body of men, I should deem the provocation sufficiently grievous to stake even life in defense of it. I would plant every colored man in this country on a platform of this nature—to think for himself, to speak for himself, to act for himself. This is the ideal citizen of an ideal government such as ours is modelled to become. This is my conception of the colored man as an independent force in our politics. To aid in lifting our people to this standard, is one of the missions which I have mapped out for my life-work. I may be sowing the seed that will ripen into disastrous results, but I don't think so. My conception of republican government does not lead me to a conclusion so inconsistent with my hopes, my love of my country and of my race.

I look upon my race in the South and I see that they are helplessly at the mercy of a popular prejudice outgrowing from a previous condition of servitude; I find them clothed in the garments of citizenship by the Federal Government and opposed in the enjoyment of it by their equals, not their superiors, in the benefits of government; I find that the government which conferred the right of citizenship is powerless, or indisposed, to force respect for its own enactments; I find that these people, left to the mercy of their enemies, alone and defenseless, and without judicious leadership, are urged to preserve themselves loyal to the men and to the party which have shown themselves unable to extend to them substantial protection; I find that these people, alone in their struggles of doubt and of prejudice, are surrounded by a public opinion powerful to create and powerful to destroy; I find them poor in culture and poor in worldly substance, and dependent for the bread they eat upon those they antagonize politically. As a consequence, though having magnificent majorities, they have no voice in shaping the legislation which is too often made an engine to oppress them; though performing the greatest amount of labor, they suffer from overwork and insufficient remuneration; though having the greater number of children, the facilities of education are not as ample or as good as those provided for the whites out of the common fund, nor have they means to supply from private avenues the benefits of education denied them by the State. Now, what is the solution of this manifold and grievous state of things? Will it come by standing solidly opposed to the sentiment, the culture, the statesmanship, and the possession of the soil and wealth of the South? Let the history of the past be spread before the eyes of a candid and thoughtful people; let the bulky roll of misgovernment, incompetence, and blind folly be enrolled on the one hand, and then turn to the terrors of the midnight assassin and the lawless deeds which desecrate the sunlight of noontide, walking abroad as a phantom armed with the desperation of the damned!

I maintain the idea that the preservation of our liberties, the consummation of our citizenship, must be conserved and matured, not by standing alone and apart, sullen as the melancholy Dane, but by imbibing all that is American, entering into the life and spirit of our institutions, spreading abroad in sentiment, feeling the full force of the fact that while we are classed as Africans, just as the Germans are classed as Germans we are in all things American citizens, American freemen. Since we have tried the idea of political unanimity let us now try other ideas, ideas more in consonance with the spirit of our institution. There is no strength in a union that enfeebles. Assimilation, a melting into the corporate body, having no distinction from others, equally the recipients of government—this is to be the independent man, be his skin tanned by the torrid heat of Africa, or bleached by the eternal snows of the Caucasus. To preach the independence of the colored man is to preach his Americanization. The shackles of slavery have been torn from his limbs by the stern arbitrament of arms; the shackles of political enslavement, of ignorance, and of popular prejudice must be broken on the wheels of ceaseless study and the facility with which he becomes absorbed into the body of the people. To aid himself is his first duty if he believes that he is here to stay, and not a probationer for the land of his forefathers—a land upon which he has no other claim than one of sentiment.

What vital principle affecting our citizenship is championed by the National Republican party of to-day? Is it a fair vote and an honest count? Measure our strength in the South and gaze upon the solitary expression of our citizenship in the halls of the National Legislature. The fair vote which we cast for Rutherford B. Hayes seemed to have incurred the enmity of that chief Executive, and he and his advisers turned the colored voters of the South over to the bloodthirsty minority of that section.

The Republican party has degenerated into an ignoble scramble for place and power. It has forgotten the principles for which Sumner contended, and for which Lincoln died. It betrayed the cause for which Douglass, Garrison and others labored, in the blind policy it pursued in reconstructing the rebellious States. It made slaves freemen and freemen slaves in the same breath by conferring the franchise and withholding the guarantees to insure its exercise; it betrayed its trust in permitting thousands of innocent men to be slaughtered without declaring the South in rebellion, and in pardoning murders, whom tardy justice had consigned to a felon's dungeon. It is even now powerless to insure an honest expression of the vote of the colored citizen. For these things, I do not deem it binding upon colored men further to support the Republican party when other more advantageous affiliations can be formed. And what of the Bourbon Democratic party? There has not been, there is not now, nor will there ever be, any good thing in it for the colored man. Bourbon Democracy is a curse to our land. Any party is a curse which arrays itself in opposition to human freedom, to the universal brotherhood of man. No colored man can ever claim truthfully to be a Bourbon Democrat. It is a fundamental impossibility. But he can be an independent, a progressive Democrat.

The hour has arrived when thoughtful colored men should cease to put their faith upon broken straws; when they should cease to be the willing tools of a treacherous and corrupt party; when they should cease to support men and measures which do not benefit them or the race; when they should cease to be duped by one faction and shot by the other. The time has fully arrived when they should have their position in parties more fully defined, and when, by the ballot which they hold, they should force more respect for the rights of life and property.

To do this, they must adjust themselves to the altered condition which surrounds them. They must make for themselves a place to stand. In the politics of the country the colored vote must be made as uncertain a quantity as the German and Irish vote. The color of their skin must cease to be an index to their political creed. They must think less of "the party" and more of themselves; give less heed to a name and more heed to principles.

The black men and white men of the South have a common destiny. Circumstances have brought them together and so interwoven their interests that nothing but a miracle can dissolve the link that binds them. It is, therefore, to their mutual disadvantage that anything but sympathy and good will should prevail. A reign of terror means a stagnation of all the energies of the people and a corruption of the fountains of law and justice.

The colored men of the South must cultivate more cordial relations with the white men of the South. They must, by a wise policy, hasten the day when politics shall cease to be the shibboleth that creates perpetual warfare. The citizen of a State is far more sovereign than the citizen of the United States. The State is a real, tangible reality; a thing of life and power; while the United States is, purely, an abstraction—a thing that no man has successfully defined, although many, wise in their way and in their own conceit, have philosophized upon it to their own satisfaction. The metaphysical polemics of men learned in the science of republican government, covering volume upon volume of "debates," the legislation of ignoramuses, styled statesmen, and the "strict" and "liberal" construction placed upon their work by the judicial magi, together with a long and disastrous rebellion, to the cruel arbitrament of which the question had been, as was finally hoped, in the last resort, submitted, have failed, all and each, to define that visionary thing the so-called Federal government, and its just rights and powers. As Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson left it, so it is to-day, a bone of contention, a red flag in the hands of the political matadors of one party to infuriate those of the other parties.

No: it is time that the colored voter learned to leave his powerless "protectors" and take care of himself. Let every one read, listen, think, reform his own ideas of affairs in his own locality; let him be less interested in the continual wars of national politics than in the interests of his own town and county and state; let him make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness of his own neighborhood, so far as to take an intelligent part among his neighbors, white and black, and vote for the men and for the party that will do the best for him and his race, and best conserve the interest of his vicinity. Let there be no aim of solidifying the colored vote; the massing of black means the massing of white by contrast. Individual colored men—and many of them—have done wonders in self-elevation; but there can be no general elevation of the colored men of the South until they use their voting power in independent local affairs with some discrimination more reasonable than an obstinate clinging to a party name. When the colored voters differ among themselves and are to be found on both sides of local political contests, they will begin to find themselves of some political importance; their votes will be sought, cast, and counted.

And this is the key to the whole situation; let them make themselves a part of the people. It will take time, patience, intelligence, courage; but it can be done: and until it is done their path will lie in darkness and perhaps in blood.

CHAPTER X

Solution of the Political Problem

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I have no faith in parties. In monarchical and imperial governments they are always manipulated by royal boobies, who are in turn manipulated by their empty-pated favorites and their women of soporific virtue; while in republics they are always manipulated by demagogues, tricksters, and corruptionists, who figure in the newspapers as "bosses," "heelers" and "sluggers," and in history as statesmen, senators and representatives. These gentlemen, who rule our government and ruin our people, comprise what Mr. Matthew Arnold recently termed the "remnant" which should be permitted to run things to suit themselves, the people, the great mass, being incapable of taking care of themselves and the complex machinery of government. Of course, Mr. Arnold, who is necessarily very British in his ideas of government, intended that the "remnant" he had in his "mind's eye," should comprise men of the most exalted character and intelligence, the very things which keep them out of the gutters of politics. Men of exalted character are expected in our country to attend to their own concerns, not the concerns of the people, and to give the "boys" a chance; while the men of exalted intelligence are, by reason of the great industry and seclusiveness necessary to their work, too much wedded to their books and their quiet modes of life to rush into ward meetings and contend for political preferment with the "Mikes" and "Jakes" who make their bread and butter out of the spoils and peculations of office. A Clay or Webster, a Seward or Sumner, sometimes gets into politics, but it is by accident. There is not enough money in our politics to cause honest men to make it an object, while the corruption frequently necessary to maintain a political position, is so disgusting as to deter honest men from making it a business.

A love of power easily degenerates from patriotism into treason or tyranny, or both. As it is easier to fall from virtue to vice than it is to rise from vice to virtue, so it is easier to fall from patriotism than to rise to it.

Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as an elegant pastime. They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money. They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough exposition of their profound penetralia. It may be, too, that their assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously for a few pennies to keep soul and body together. And your Southern grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow. Their vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and the land, nature's own flower garden and man's inalienable heritage, brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season. Southern intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not profundity, was the passport to popularity. Hence, Southern hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen) became almost as proverbial in the polite circles of America and Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the French. And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South, shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners. But the shadow alone remains; the substance has departed—"There are no birds in last year's nest."

If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men—fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention—the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative.

The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high literary effort. In the process of that demonstration, I am fully persuaded that the Anglo-African—with his brilliant wit and humor, his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for literary pursuits—will contribute largely to give the South an enviable and honorable position.

What the South lacked in literary effort before the war she made up in a magnificent galaxy of meteoric statesmen, who rushed into politics with the instinct of ducks taking to water, and who were forgotten, in the majority of cases, before they had run out their ephemeral career. A few names have survived the earthquake, and are remembered for their cleverness rather than their depth. A few more decades, and they will be remembered only by the curious student who plods his weary way through the labyrinth of Congressional records and the musty archives of States, seeking for data of times which long ago passed into the hazy vista of history and romance. Before the war the Southern man of leisure took to politics more as a pastime than as a serious business. But as the pastime was agreeable, and as it gave additional weight and distinction, all those who could, strived to make it appear that they were men of importance in the Nation. They were largely a nation of politicians, always brilliant, shallow, bellicose and dogmatic, as ready to decide an argument with the shotgun or saber as with reason and logic.

This was the temper of the people who rushed into the war with the confidence of a schoolboy and who limped out like a man overtaken in his gymnastic exercise by a paralytic stroke. The war taught the South a very useful lesson, but did not sufficiently convince it that it was preëminently a supercilious, arrogant people, who did not and do not possess all the virtue, intelligence, and courage of the country; that its stock of these prime elements is woefully small considering the long years it had posed as America's own patrician class.

But when the war was over, and the Southern nobility turned its thoughts once more to social arrogance and political dominion, it found that Othello's occupation was entirely gone. A revolution had swept over the country more iconoclastic and merciless than that which followed in the wake of the French revolution nearly a hundred years before. The bottom rail had been violently placed upon the top; industrial adjustments had been so completely metamorphosed as to defy detection; while the basis and the method of political representation and administration had been so altered as to confound both the old and the new forces.

Aside from the ignorance of the black citizens and the insatiate greed and unscrupulousness of their carpet-bag leaders—a band of vultures more voracious and depraved than any which ever before imposed upon and abused the confidence of a credulous people—the white men of the South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine court for fit parallel.

But, as I have said, a love of power easily degenerates into treason. If we may not call the violence, the assassinations, which have disgraced the South, treason by what fitter name, pray, shall we call it? If the nullification of the letter and spirit of the amendments of the Federal Constitution by the conquered South was not renewed treason, what was it? What is it?

The white men of the South, to the "manor born," having shown their superiority in the superlative excellencies of murder, usurpation and robbery (and I maintain they have gone further in the execution of these infamies than was true of the Negro-Carpet-bag bacchanalia); having made majorities dwindle into iotas and vaulted themselves into power at the point of the shot gun and dagger (regular bandit style); having made laws which discriminate odiously against one class while giving the utmost immunity to the other; having, after doing these things, modeled the government they rule upon the pro-slavery doctrine that it is a "white man's government"—having had time to become sobered, the white men of the South should be open to reason, if not to conviction.

The black men of the South know full well that they were disfranchised by illegal and violent methods; they know that laws are purposely framed to defraud and to oppress them. This is dangerous knowledge, dangerous to the black and the white man. It will be decided by one of two courses—wise and judicious statesmanship or bloody and disastrous insurrection. When men are wronged they appeal either to the arbitrament of reason or of violence. No man who loves his country would sanction violence in the adjudication of rights save as a last resort. Reason is the safest tribunal before which to arraign injustice and wrong; but it is not always possible to reach this tribunal.

The black and white citizens of the South must alter the lines which have divided them since the close of the war. They are, essentially, one people, and should be mutual aids instead of mutual hindrances to each other. By "one people" I don't wish to be understood as implying that the white and black man are one in an ethnological, but a generic sense, having a common origin. Living in the same communities, pursuing identical avocations, and subject to the same fundamental laws, however these may differ in construction and application in the several States, it is as much, if not even more, the interest of the white man that the black should be given every possible opportunity to better his mental, material and civil condition. Society is not corrupted from the apex but from the base. It is not the pure rain that falls from the heavens, but the stagnant waters of the pool, that breed disease and death. The corruption of the ballot by white men of the South is more pernicious than the misuse of it by black men; the perversion of the law in the apprehension and punishment of criminals, by being wielded almost exclusively against colored men, not only brings law into contempt of colored men but encourages crime among white men. Thus the entire society is corrupted. Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core. When men find that laws are purposely framed to oppress and defraud them they become desperate and reckless; and mob law, by usurping the rightful functions of the judiciary, makes criminals of honest men. As Alexander Pope expressed it:

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,
That to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with his face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The South has nothing to gain and everything to lose in attempting to repress the energies and ambition of the colored man. It is to the safety as well as to the highest efficiency of society that all its members should be allowed the same opportunities for moral, intellectual and material development. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." There is no escape from the law of God. You either deal justly or suffer the evil effects of wrong-doing. The disorders which have made the South a seething cauldron for fifteen years have produced the most widespread contempt of lawful authority not only on the part of the lawless whites but the law-abiding blacks, who have suffered patiently the infliction of all manner of wrong because they were a generation of slaves, suddenly made freemen. They permitted themselves to be shot because they had been educated to bare their backs at the command of the white oligarch. But that sort of pusillanimous cowardice cannot be expected to last always. Men in a state of freedom instinctively question the right of others to impose unequal burdens upon them, or to deny to them equal and exact protection of the laws. When oppressed people begin to murmur, grow restless and discontented, the opposer had better change his tactics, or lock himself up, as does the cowardly tyrant of Russia.

A new generation of men has come upon the stage of action in the South. They know little or nothing of the regulations or the horrors of the slave régime. They know they are freemen; they know they are cruelly and unjustly defrauded; and they question the right of their equals to oppose and defraud them. A large number of these people have enjoyed the advantage of common school education, and not a few of academic and collegiate education, and a large number have "put money in their purse." The entire race has so changed that they are almost a different people from what they were when the exigencies of war made their manumission imperative. Yet there has been but little change in the attitude of the white men towards this people. They still strenuously deny their right to participate in the administration of justice or to share equally in the blessings of that justice.

There must be a change of policy. The progress of the black man demands it; the interest of the white man compels it. The South cannot hope to share in the industrious emigration constantly flowing into our ports as long as it is scattered over the world that mob law and race distractions constantly interrupt the industry of the people, and put life and property in jeopardy of eminent disturbance; and she cannot hope to encourage the investment of large capital in the development of her industries or the extension of her national system. Capital is timid. It will only seek investment where it is sure of being let alone. Again, while the present state continues, no Southern statesman, however capable he may be, can hope to enjoy the confidence of the country or attain to high official position. Thoughtful, sober people will not entrust power to men who sanction mob law, and who rise to high honor by conniving at or participating in assassination and murder. They have too much self-respect to do it.

Only a few weeks since, a narrow-minded senator from the State of Alabama, speaking upon the question of "National Aid to Education," said he would rather vote for an appropriation to place the Southern States in direct communication with the Congo than to vote money to educate the blacks. There is no ingrate more execrable than the one who lifts up his hand or his voice to wrong the man he has betrayed. This senator from Alabama does not represent the majority of the people of his state. Take away the shot gun and mob law and he would be compelled to crawl back into the obscurity out of which he was dragged by his accomplices in roguery.

The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any attempt to put him out. The expatriation of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 people to an alien country needs only to be suggested to create mirth and ridicule. The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the black men will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness. The talk about the black people being brought to this country to prepare themselves to evangelize Africa is so much religious nonsense boiled down to a sycophantic platitude. The Lord, who is eminently just, had no hand in their forcible coming here; it was preëminently the work of the devil. Africa will have to be evangelized from within, not from without. The Colonization society has spent mints of money and tons of human blood in the selfish attempt to plant an Anglo-African colony on the West Coast of Africa. The money has been thrown away and the human lives have been sacrificed in vain. The black people of this country are Americans, not Africans; and any wholesale expatriation of them is altogether out of the question.

The white men of the South should not deceive themselves: the blacks are with them to remain. Whether they like it or not, it is a fact that will not be rubbed out.

If this be true, what should be the policy of the whites towards the blacks? The question should need no answer at my hands. If it were not for the unexampled obtuseness of the editors, preachers and politicians of that section, I should close this chapter here.

The white men and women of the South should get down from the delectable mountain of delusive superiority which they have climbed; and, recognizing that "of one blood God made all the children of men," take hold of the missionary work God has placed under their nose.

Instead of railing at the black man, let them take hold of him in a Christian spirit and assist him in correcting those moral abscesses and that mental enervation which they did so awfully much to infuse into him; they should first take the elephant out of their own eyes before digging at the gnat in their neighbor's eyes. They should encourage him in his efforts at moral and religious improvement, not by standing off and clapping their hands, but by going into his churches and into his pulpits, showing him the "light and the way" not only by precept but example as well. Can't do it, do you say? Then take your religion and cast it to the dogs, for it is a living lie; it comes not from God but from Beelzebub the Prince of Darkness. A religion that divides Christians is unadulterated paganism; a minister that will not preach the Gospel to sinners, be they black or white, is a hypocrite, who "steals the livery of Heaven to serve the Devil in." They should make liberal provision for the schools set apart for the colored people, and they should visit these schools, not only to mark the progress made, and to encourage teacher and pupil, but to show to the young minds blossoming into maturity and usefulness that they are friends and deeply interested in the progress made. In public, they should seek first to inspire the confidence of colored men by just laws and friendly overtures and by encouraging the capable, honest and ambitious few by placing them in position of honor and trust. They should show to colored men that they accept the Constitution as amended, and are earnestly solicitous that they should prosper in the world, and become useful and respected citizens. You can't make a friend and partisan of a man by shooting him; you can't make a sober, industrious, honest man by robbing and outraging him. These tactics will not work to the uplifting of a people. "A soft answer turns away wrath." Even a dog caresses the hand that pats him on the head.

The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources; she must get off the "race line" hobby and pay more attention to the common man; she must wake up to the fact that—

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,

and that it is to her best interest to place all men upon the same footing before the law; mete out the same punishment to the white scamp that is inexorably meted out to the black scamp, for a scamp is a scamp any way you twist it; a social pest that should be put where he will be unable to harm any one. In an honest acceptance of the new conditions and responsibilities God has placed upon them, and in mutual forebearance, toleration and assistance, the South will find that panacea for which she has sought in vain down to this time.

CHAPTER XI

Land and Labor

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There is more prose than poetry in the desperate conflict now waging in every part of the civilized world between labor and capital,—between the dog and his tail, again, for, when the question is reduced to a comprehensive statement of fact, it will be readily seen that capital is the offspring of labor, not labor the offspring of capital. Capital can produce nothing. Left to itself, it is as valueless as the countless millions of gold, silver, copper, lead and iron that lie buried in the unexplored womb of Nature. This storied wealth counts for nothing in its crude, undeveloped state. As it is to-day, so it was a thousand years ago. Years may add to the bulk, and, therefore, the richness of its value; but until man, by his labor of muscle and brain, has brought it forth, it has no value whatever. To have value, it must become an object of barter, of circulation, in short, of exchange. As its value depends upon its utility, so when it can no longer be used it again becomes a useless mass of perishable wealth. It is the product of labor, pure and simple. Speaking on "Management of the Banks" (footnote p. 223), in his work on Labor and Capital, Edward Kellogg says:—

All who become rich by speculations in bank, state and other stocks, gain their wealth at the expense of the producing classes; for no increased production is made by the changing market value of these stocks. It is clear, that when the rate of interest is increased, the gains of money-lenders are augmented, and the money gained will buy a greater quantity of property and labor. The increased gains of the lender must be paid by the borrowers, by the productions of their own or of others' labor.

So Adam Smith, speaking of "the Origin and Use of Money" (Wealth of Nations, p. 33), says:

In order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the divisions of labor, must naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry.

Labor is the one paramount force which develops the resources of the world. It produces all the wealth; it pays, in the last analysis, all the taxes—National, State and municipal; it produces the wealth which sustains all the institutions of learning, as well as ministers to the profligate luxuries of the idlers and sharpers who add nothing to the wealth of society, but on the contrary constantly take from it, and who have not inaptly been termed by Dr. Howard Crosby the "dangerous classes;" it makes the wealth which gives a few men millions of dollars as their share, either as rental or usurious interest upon capital invested in the production of wealth; and it creates the vast surplus which lies in the coffers of the Federal and State treasuries of our land.

The producing agency, without which there could be no wealth; without which the landlord could exact no rent and capital could draw no interest, the producing agency alone receives an inadequate proportion of the wealth it produces. The man who conducts any business requiring labor and capital not only exacts an unjust proportion of the laborer's hire, but takes more than he justly should as interest upon his capital and as reward for his own time and labor, often amounting to no trouble or labor, he delegating to other hands, such as foremen or overseers, the absolute control of his investment. Yet, the man who invests capital not only derives, in a majority of cases, a sufficient income to enable him to live in more than comfort but to have a healthy bank account; while the laborer, who alone makes capital draw interest by giving it employment in developing the resources of nature, derives only a bare subsistence, frequently not sufficient to meet the absolute necessaries of his daily life. His wife and children must be content with life simply—bare, cold life—often without any of the conveniences or the commonest luxuries which make existence anything more than the curse it is to a large majority of humankind. This is peculiarly true of the condition of the masses of the Old World, and is fast becoming true in our own young and vigorous country.

In every quarter of the globe the cry of depressed and defrauded labor is heard. The enormous drain upon the producing agents necessary to maintain in idleness and luxury the great capitalists of the world who accumulated their ill-gotten wealth by fraud, perjury and "conquest," so called, grinds the producing agent down to the lowest possible point at which he can live and still produce. The millionaires of the world, so called "aristocracies," and the taxes imposed by sovereign states to liquidate obligations more frequently contracted to enslave than to ameliorate the conditions of mankind, are a constant drain which comes ultimately out of the laboring classes in every case.

What are millionaires, any way, but the most dangerous enemies of society, always eating away its entrails, like the cultures that preyed upon the chained Prometheus? Take our own breed of these parasites; note how they grind down the stipend they are compelled to bestow upon the human tools they must use to still further swell their ungodly gains! Note how they take advantage of the public; how they extort, with Shylock avarice, every penny they possibly can from those who are compelled to use the appliances which wealth enables them to contrive for the public convenience and comfort; how they corrupt legislatures and dictate to the unscrupulous minions of the law. The Athenians were wise who enacted into law the principle that when a citizen became too powerful or rich to be controlled within proper bounds, the safety of society demanded that he should be exiled—sent where his power or riches could not be used to the detriment of his fellow-citizens. Should such a rule be applied to-day, society in every land could disgorge with much advantage the men who ride the people as the Old Man of the Sea rode Sindbad the luckless sailor. But our civilization is built upon a higher conception of individual right and immunity; there is now no limit to the right of one man to rob another of the produce of his labor or his natural and conferred rights. Not only may individuals rob and plunder their fellows with absolute impunity, but our laws have put breath into that soulless thing which has become notoriously infamous as a "corporation." Around this thing, this engine of extortion and oppression, our laws have placed bulwarks which the defrauded laborer, the widow and orphan, and even the sovereign public, cannot overleap. Here is where Monopoly first shows its cormorant head.

If millionaires are enemies of society, and I assume that they are—not because they have property, but because, as a rule, they have acquired it by unjust processes and use it tyrannically—what excuse have we for aristocracies, an idle class, a privileged class, who toil not, nor spin? What is a recognized aristocracy, such as England maintains? From what perennial fountain did it draw its nobility and wealth? Came they not through Norman conquest and robbery? Who pay the heavy taxes levied upon the people to support the privileged classes of England? The royal revenues and princely preserves, are they not supported out of the sweat of the poorer classes, upon whom all the burdens of society fall at last? And why should there be royal revenues and princely preserves? Do they add anything to the wealth of a nation or the happiness of a people? Let us see.

Brassey (Sir Thomas), in his book on Work and Wages, p. 71, says:

The Irish Poor Law Commissioners stated that the average produce of the soil in Ireland was not much above one half the average produce in England, whilst the number of laborers employed in agriculture was, in proportion to the quantity of land under cultivation more than double, viz.: as five to two. Thus ten laborers in Ireland raised only the same quantity of produce that four laborers raised in England, and this produce was generally of an inferior quality.