 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
I.
As to the Southern people the answer is that,
although the Southern master-class now cordially
and unanimously admit the folly of slaveholding,
yet the fundamental article of political
faith on which slavery rested has not been displaced.
As to the people of the North the
answer is simpler still: the Union is saved.
The Northern cause in our civil war was not
primarily the abolition of slavery, although
many a Northern soldier and captain fought
while this remained. The Southern cause was
not merely for disunion, though many a Southern
soldier and captain would never have taken
up the sword to defend slave-holding stripped of
the disguise of State sovereignty. The Northern
cause was preëminently the National unity.
Emancipation—the emancipation of the negroes
—was not what the North fought for, but only
what it fought with. The right to secede was
not what the South fought for, but only what it
fought with. The great majority of the Southern
white people loved the Union, and consented to
its destruction only when there seemed to be no
other way to save slavery; the great bulk of the
North consented to destroy slavery only when
there seemed no other way to save the Union.
To put in peril the Union on one side and
slavery on the other was enough, when nothing
else was enough, to drench one of the greatest
and happiest lands on earth with the blood of
hundreds of thousands of her own children.
Now, what thing of supreme value rested on
this Union, and what on this slavery, that they
should have been defended at such cost? There
rested on, or more truly there underlay, each a
fundamental principle, conceived to be absolutely
essential to the safety, order, peace, fortune and
antagonistic.
They were more than antagonistic; they were
antipodal and irreconcilable. No people that
hold either of these ideas as cardinal in their
political creed will ever allow the other to be
forced upon them from without so long as blood
and lives will buy deliverance. Both were
brought from the mother country when America
was originally colonized, and both have their
advocates in greater or less number in the Northern
States, in the Southern, and wherever there
is any freedom of thought and speech.
The common subject of the two is the great
lower mass of society. The leading thought of
the one is that mass's elevation, of the other its
subjugation. The one declares the only permanent
safety of public society, and its highest development,
to require the constant elevation of
the lower, and thus of the whole mass, by the
free self-government of all under one common
code of equal civil rights. It came from England,
but it was practically, successfully, beneficently
applied on a national scale first in the
United States, and Americans claim the right to
call it, and it preëminently, the American idea,
promulgated and established, not by Northerners
or Southerners, one greatly more than another,
Nation born of the idea. The other principle
declares public safety and highest development
to require the subjugation of the lower mass
under the arbitrary protective supremacy of an
untitled but hereditary privileged class, a civil
caste. Not, as it is commonly miscalled, an aristocracy,
for within one race it takes in all ranks
of society; not an aristocracy, for an aristocracy
exists, presumably, at least, with the wide consent
of all classes, and men in any rank of life
may have some hope to attain to it by extraordinary
merit and service; but a caste; not the
embodiment of a modern European idea, but the
resuscitation of an ancient Asiatic one.
That one of these irreconcilable ideas should
by-and-by become all-dominant in the formation
of public society in one region, and its opposite
in the other region, is due to original differences
in the conditions under which the colonies were
settled. In the South, the corner-stone of the
social structure was made the plantation idea—
wide lands, an accomplished few, and their rapid
aggrandizement by the fostering oversight and
employment of an unskilled many. In the
North, it was the village and town idea—the
notion of farm and factory, skilled labor, an
intelligent many, and ultimate wealth through an
more natural than for African slavery, once introduced,
to flourish and spread under the one
idea, and languish and die under the other. It
is high time to be done saying that the South
retained slavery and the North renounced it
merely because to the one it was, and to the
other it was not, lucrative. It was inevitable that
the most conspicuous feature of one civilization
should become the public schoolhouse, and of
the other the slave yard. Who could wish to
raise the equally idle and offensive question of
praise and blame? When Northerners came
South by thousands and made their dwelling
there, ninety-nine hundredths of them fell into
our Southern error up to the eyes, and there is
nothing to prove that had the plantation idea, to
the exclusion of the village idea, been planted
in all the colonies, we should not by this time
have had a West Indian civilization from Florida
to Oregon. But it was not to be so. Wherever
the farm village became the germinal unit of
social organization, there was developed in its
most comprehensive integrity, that American
idea of our Northern and Southern fathers, the
representative self-government of the whole
people by the constant free consent of all to the
frequently reconsidered choice of the majority.
Such a scheme can be safe only when it includes
inherently the continual and diligent elevation
of that lower mass which human society
everywhere is constantly precipitating. But
slave-holding on any large scale could not make
even a show of public safety without the continual
and diligent debasement of its enslaved
lower millions. Wherever it prevailed it was
bound by the natural necessities of its own existence
to undermine and corrode the National
scheme. It mistaught the new generations of
the white South that the slave-holding fathers of
the Republic were approvers and advocates of
that sad practice, which by their true histories
we know they would gladly have destroyed. It
mistaught us to construe the right of a uniform
government of all by all, not as a common and
inalienable right of man, but as a privilege that
became a right only by a people's merit, and
which our forefathers bought with the blood of
the Revolution in 1776-'83, and which our slaves
did not and should not be allowed to acquire.
It mistaught us to seek prosperity in the concentration
instead of the diffusion of wealth, to
seek public safety in a state of siege rather than
in a state of peace; it gave us subjects instead
of fellow-citizens, and falsely threatened us with
the utter shipwreck of public and private society
millions to whom we had forbidden patriotism.
Thus, it could not help but misteach us also to
subordinate to its preservation the maintenance
of a National union with those Northern communities
to whose whole scheme of order slaveholding
was intolerable, and to rise at length
against the will of the majority and dissolve the
Union when that majority refused to give slaveholding
the National sanction.
The other system taught the inherent right of
all human society to self-government. It taught
the impersonal civil equality of all. It admitted
that the private, personal inequality of individuals
is inevitable, necessary, right and good; but condemned
its misuse to set up arbitrary public
inequalities. It declared public equality to be, on
the one hand, the only true and adequate counterpoise
against private inequalities, and, on the
other, the best protector and promotor of just
private inequalities against unjust. It held that
virtue, intelligence and wealth are their own
sufficient advantage, and need for self-protection
no arbitrary civil preponderance; that their
powers of self-protection are never inadequate
save when by forgetting equity they mass and
exasperate ignorance, vice and poverty against
them. It insisted that there is no safe protection
as much civil equipment for self-protection as
property needs; that the right and liberty to
acquire intelligence, virtue and wealth are just
as precious as the right and liberty to maintain
them, and need quite as much self-protection;
that the secret of public order and highest prosperity
is the common and equal right of all lawfully
to acquire as well as retain every equitable
means of self-aggrandizement, and that this right
is assured to all only through the consent of all
to the choice of the majority frequently appealed
to without respect of persons. And last, it truly
taught that a government founded on these principles
and holding them essential to public peace
and safety might comfortably bear the proximity
of alien neighbors, whose ideas of right and
order were not implacably hostile; but that it
had no power to abide unless it could put down
any internal mutiny against that choice of the
majority which was, as it were, the Nation's first
commandment.
The war was fought and the Union saved.
Fought as it was, on the issue of the consent of
all to the choice of the majority, the conviction
forced its way that the strife would never end in
peace until the liberty of self-government was
guaranteed to the entire people, and slavery, as
destroyed. Hence, first, emancipation,
and then, enfranchisement. And now even the
Union saved is not the full measure of the Nation's
triumphs; but, saved once by arms, it
seems at length to have achieved a better and
fuller salvation still; for the people of the once
seceded States, with a sincerity that no generous
mind can question, have returned to their old
love of this saved Union, and the great North,
from East to utmost West, full of elation, and
feeling what one may call the onus of the winning
side, cries "Enough!" and asks no more.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |