University of Virginia Library

A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION.

I. To bring any public question fairly into the
open field of literary debate is always a long
step toward its final adjustment. It is across
that field that the question must go to be so
purged of its irrelevancies, misinterpretations,
and misuses, personal, partisan, or illogical, and
so clarified and simplified, as to make it easy for
the popular mind to take practical and final action
on it and settle it once for all by settling it right.

It is in this field that the Negro problem still
forces itself to the front as a living and urgent
national question. Such distinguished and honored
men as Messrs. Hampton, Chandler, Colquitt,
Foraker, Halstead, Edmunds, and Watterson
are engaged in its debate, and in the October
(1888) number of the Forum Senator Eustis writes
that "this Negro question is still a running sore
in our body politic," and that among the problems
of this country it "promises to be the
most serious of all," and "is still far from being
solved."

Now, it is only fair to assume that each and
all the writers who have turned aside from the
more effective partisan media of the daily newspaper,

legislative halls, the public platform, and
the "stump," to the pages of the magazines and
reviews, have done so in the desire to help the
question along toward its final solution by aiding
to make it in each case clearer and simpler than
it was before. If so, then we may assume also
that writers, editors, and readers will not repel
an effort, if it be intelligent and sincere, to gather
from several of these writers' utterances some
conclusive replies to questions whose answer and
removal from the debate will greatly reduce the
intricacies of the problem.

II. Can the Southern question be solved?
There are men in the North and South, who say
no, and, without being at all able to tell what
they mean by the phrase, think it must be "left
to solve itself." But careful thinkers, on either
side of the question, never so reply. Their admission,
whether tacit or expressed, is that "can
be" is out of the debate; it must be solved. It
is a running, not a self-healing sore; one of those
great problems "whose solution," as Mr. Eustis
says, "strains the bonds of society and taxes the
wisest statesmanship;" that kind of problems
with some one of which "every nation must
deal." We must solve it.

Is it being solved? We look in vain for any
one's direct yes or no. Governor Colquitt seems

to come nearest to the distinct affirmation when
he says: "A sense of moral and religious
responsibility is restraining and directing us in
our State polity and practice; and . . . I think
we have had more than an average success in
discharging the obligations imposed upon us."
Among these he includes pointedly the assuring
of the Negro in the full enjoyment of his political
rights. But setting out to speak for the
South, he speaks in fact only for Georgia, and
makes no plain claim that, even so, the Negro
question in Georgia is really being pushed
toward its settlement. On the other hand, when
Senator Chandler says: "The political control
of the United States is now in the hands of
a Southern oligarchy as persistent and relentless
as was that which plunged the nation into
the slaveholders' rebellion;" and when Senator
Eustis falls short only by a slender "if" of the
blunt assertion that "the Negro problem still
exists in its original relations," these gentlemen
surely are not to be understood as implying that
the question has made or is making no advance
toward solution. Both of them yield a recognition
of facts which make it unreasonable so to
construe their meaning. In truth, it is indisputable
facts that we need from which to draw our
final answer to this important query, rather than
any person's or any multitude of persons' general
assurances or ever so profound beliefs. And for
some such facts we are indebted to these gentlemen
as well as to others.

III. The Negro question is three-quarters of a
century old. Within that period a vast majority
of the nation have totally changed their convictions
as to what are the Negro's public rights.
Within that period the sentiment of every community
and the laws of every State in the Union,
as well as the Federal Government, have been
radically altered concerning him. In their dimensions,
in their scope, in their character, the
problem's original relations have passed through
a great and often radical change. So far from
the problem still existing in its original relations,
only two or three of those original relations
any longer exist. Within the memory of
men still in active life there was not a foot of soil
under the American flag where a Negro detected
fleeing from slavery was safe from violence. Now,
it is several months since it was asserted in the
Forum[1] that the Negro in the United States "has
enjoyed for at least twenty years a larger share
of private, public, religious and political liberty
than falls to the lot of any but a few people—the

freest in the world," and thus far no writer, black
or white, has challenged the statement. And the
vast changes that have been effected—not by
time, mark it, but by men, sometimes at peril,
sometimes at cost, of their lives, in Northern
States as well as in Southern—have been very
uniformly in the direction of the great problem's
simplification and solution. The problem is being
solved; slowly, through the years, it is true; in
pain, in sweat, in blood, with many a mistake,
many a discouragement, many an enemy, and,
saddest of all, many a neutral friend in North
and South; yet it is being solved, and it is only
by misconceiving the motive of those who have
effected these changes that Mr. Eustis, for instance,
can call the long, fruitful and still persistent
and determined effort an "unsuccessful experiment."
For it is not, and never has been, an
effort "to balance or equalize the condition of
the white and Negro races in this country," but
only to balance or equalize their enjoyment of
their public and political rights, to establish a
common and uniform public justice and equity,
and trust the untrammeled selections of private
society and "the laws of nature and nature's
God" still to maintain all proper equalities and
inequalities of race and condition. The fact
must be admitted by all fair minds to be established
and removed from debate, that in some
aspects, at least, the Negro problem's "original"
relations are altered, when men like Governor
Colquitt, men in the front ranks of political life,
their political fortunes largely dependent on what
they say, eagerly choose to deny with indignation
that either they or their constituents, in
States where once it was against the law to teach
a colored child to read, now either practice or
believe in the entire or partial suppression of the
Negro vote, and as eagerly boast—with statistical
figures to back them—that their public schools
are educating twice as many thousands of colored
youth now as they were educating hundreds
fifteen years ago. True, there are men in the
South who talk very differently. Aye, and in
the North, too. When there are none such left
in the Southern States they will be far ahead, at
least of where the Northern are now, toward the
whole question's final solution.

IV. One of the most conclusive proofs that
the changes that have been made in the Negro's
status have been generally in the direction of
true progress, is that wherever and whenever
these changes have been made complete and
operative, opposition to them has disappeared
and they have dropped out of the main problem,
leaving it by so much the lighter and simpler.

The most notable instance, of course, is the abolition
of slavery; but there are many lesser
examples in the history of both Northern and
Southern States: the teaching of Negroes in
private schools; their admission into public
schools; their sitting on juries; their acceptance
as court witnesses; their riding in street cars;
their enlistment in the militia; their appointment
on the police, etc. It is a fact worthy of more
consideration than it gets from the debaters on
either side of the Negro question, that such
changes as these, which nobody finds any reason
for undoing in any place where they have been
fully established, were, until they were made, as
fiercely opposed and esteemed as dishonorable,
humiliating, unjust, and unsafe to white men and
women, as those changes which, in many regions
of our country, not all of them Southern, still
remain to be made before the Negro question
will let itself be dismissed. This fact no one will
dispute. Yet thousands shut their eyes and ears,
or let others shut them, to the equal though not
as salient truth of this fact's corollary, to wit:
that every step toward the perfecting of one
common public liberty for all American citizens
is opposed and postponed only where it never
has been fairly tried.

Even the various public liberties intended to

be secured to all men alike by the Civil Rights
Bill have rarely if ever, in any place, been actually
secured and made operative and afterward
withdrawn and lost. Only where they have been
merely legalized and not practically established,
but bitterly fought and successfully nullified
throughout reconstruction days, have they since
been unlegalized, condemned, and falsely proclaimed
to have been fairly tried and found wanting.
The infamous Glenn bill, in the Georgia
legislature, may be thrust before us by debaters
of the passionate sort on either side as a glaring
exception; but its fate, its final suffocation, makes
it more an example than an exception, even
though this was effected by a compromise which
will hardly be brought forward as evidence of "a
sensibility of honor that would `feel a stain like
a wound.' "[2]

V. But the Negro vote. Surely, many will
say, that was abundantly tried, and earned its
own condemnation in the corruptions and disasters
of the reconstruction period. Now this
would be a fair statement only if the ultimate
purpose of the reconstruction scheme had been
simply to secure the Negro in his right to vote.
We shall see that it was not. Much less was it

to establish, to use Senator Hampton's phrase,
"the political supremacy of the Negro," or, as Mr.
Watterson charges, to erect "a black oligarchy
at the South," or, as Governor Colquitt puts it, "to
Africanize the States of the South." These definitions
belong—to borrow again Mr. Watterson's
thought—to the hysterics of the question. That
fervid writer more than half refutes the charge
when he follows it closely with the assertion that
"the scheme was preposterous in its failure to recognize
the simplest operation of human nature
upon human affairs, and in its total lack of foresight."
But surely, whatever may be said of
Sumner, Stevens, and the men who gathered
around them, they were not a herd of perfect
fools with a "total lack of foresight." Not the
scheme was, but the charge that this was the
scheme is, "preposterous." The scheme included
the establishment of the Negro in his right to
vote; but its greater design was, as we have
stated in an earlier paper,[3] "to put race rule of
all sorts under foot, and set up the common rule
of all," or rather "the consent of all to the rule
of a minority the choice of the majority, frequently
appealed to without respect of persons."
As to the Negro in particular, the design,
even at its extreme, was to enable him—and
here we are indebted to Mr. Eustis for a phrase
—"to share with the white man the political
responsibility of governing;" or, more exactly,
the political responsibility of choosing governors.
This scheme was never allowed a fair trial in
any of the once seceding States. Every effort
to give it such was powerfully opposed by one
great national political party throughout the
whole Union, "while"—to quote again from the
same earlier paper—"the greater part of the
wealth and intelligence of the region directly involved
held out sincerely, steadfastly, and desperately
against it and for the preservation of
unequal public privileges and class domination."
"We thought we saw," says Governor Colquitt,
speaking for that Southern wealth and intelligence
for which he has so large a right to speak,
"a determined effort so completely to Africanize,"
etc. But Senator Eustis, who also has his right
to speak for them, treats that thought as an
absurdity worthy only the utterance of "that
foul bird of prey, the carpet-bagger," who, he
writes, "encouraged the deluded Negro to believe
that the Federal Government intended that
he should govern the white race in the South."
The thought was an absurdity; an absurdity so
palpable that an intelligent people must have
rejected it but for the conviction behind it that,
whatever might be the experiment's design,
"Negro supremacy" would be the result. And
here Messrs. Eustis, Colquitt, Hampton, and the
rest seem to agree. This seems to be the potential
conviction of all who speak or write on that
side of the debate; and we dwell upon the fact
because it furnishes such weighty evidence of
the entire truth of our earlier statement that this
conviction, this fear, is the whole tap-root of the
Negro question to-day. Man elsewhere may
hold some conjectural belief in "race antagonisms,"
or even in their divine appointment.
Nowhere in the world do the laws forbid a man
this belief. In every land, be it Massachusetts,
Martinique, or Sierra Leone, he may indulge it
to his heart's content in every private relation.
It is only where a people are moved by the fear
of "Negro supremacy" that the simple belief in
a divinely ordered race antagonism is used to
justify the withholding of impersonal public
rights which belong to every man because he is
a man, and with which race and its real or imagined
antagonisms have nothing whatever to do.
It is only under that fear that men stand up
before the intelligent and moral world saying,
"If this instinct does not exist it is necessary to
invent it."[4] There is a Negro question which
belongs to private society and morals and to the
individual conscience: the question what to do
to and with the Negro within that realm of our
own private choice where public law does not
and dare not come. But the Negro question
which appeals to the Nation, to the laws, and to
legislation, is only, and is bound to be only, the
question of public—civil and political—rights.
Mr. Eustis says truly, "Our plain duty should
be not to make its solution more difficult;" but
when he occupies eleven pages of the Forum with
a recriminative entanglement of these two matters,
one entirely within, the other entirely beyond,
the province of legislation, he is wasting
his own and his readers' time and impeding the
solution of the public question; and we here
challenge him, or any writer of his way of thinking,
to show from the pen of any Negro of national
reputation, Douglass, Lynch, Bruce, Downing,
Williams, Grimke, Matthews, Fortune, or
any other, anything but their repudiation of this
—blind, let us believe, rather than wilful—attempt
to make a "Siamese union," as Mr. Gladstone
would say, between these two distinct
issues. As far as it is or of right can be a municipal,
State, inter-State, or national problem at
all, the question to-day, pruned of all its dead
wood, is this: Shall the Negro, individually,
enjoy equally, and only equally, with the white
man individually, that full measure of an American
citizen's public rights, civil and political, decreed
to him both as his and as an essential to
the preservation of equal rights between the
States; or shall he be compelled to abandon:
these inalienable human rights to the custody of
Mr. Eustis's exclusively "white man's government,"
and "rely implicitly upon the magnanimity
of his white fellow-citizens of the South to
treat him with the justice and generosity due to
his unfortunate condition?" Shall or shall not
this second choice be forced upon him for fear
that otherwise these seven (million) black and
lean kine may, so to speak, devour the twelve
(million) white, fat kine, and "the torches of
Caucasian civilization be extinguished" in the
South, despite the "race antagonism" of the
most powerful fifty-three million whites on earth?
Is it not almost time for a really intrepid people
to be getting ashamed of such a fear.[5] But that
this fear is the main root of the whole Southern
problem is further proved by the fact that no
speaker or writer on that side of the debate,
North or South, ever denies it. And neither
does any attempt to prove that it is well
grounded. Like Senator Hampton, all these
debaters content themselves with the absurd
assumption that the peaceable enjoyment, by the
white man and the Negro, of an equal and common
civil and political citizenship was fairly tried in
the reconstruction period, and that "a large
class at the North" have believed in and still
want "Negro supremacy" wherever the Negro is
in the majority. Challenged to actual argument,
they are silent, until some one asks some subordinate
question: Is the Negro contented and
prosperous? Is he allowed to vote? Is his
vote fairly counted? Has he all his civil rights?
Are outbreaks due to political causes? Then
their answers are abundant again; and as final
proof that not these, but the earlier question, is
truly the main issue now, there are scarcely any
two who do not contradict themselves and one
another.

VI. The least discordance of statement on these
minor points is on that of "race antagonism."
And for the obvious reason that, attributed to
the Negro, who always denies it, it excuses the

bald assumption that no matter what he says, he
must want to establish a "black oligarchy;"
while, attributed to the white race, it excuses the
theory that the white man cannot even by way
of experiment give the black man white men's
rights, because natural instinct will not let him.
"But you must!" says conscience. "But I can't!"
says fear. Yet even on this point there is not
full concord. Mr. Eustis "believes"—he counts
it quite enough to "believe" and needless to prove
—that this instinctive antagonism justifies the
subjection of the Negro, forcible if need be, to a
"white man's government;" while, as far back
as 1867, General Hampton "recognized that in
a republic such as ours no citizen ought to be
excluded from any of the rights of citizenship
because of his color or of any other arbitrary
distinction." Where was and where is the gentleman's
instinctive race antagonism? It is not
in his list of necessities. He believed "a large
class" was bent on establishing "race supremacy,"
and if there was to be "race supremacy,"
then, of course, and naturally enough, it must
be the supremacy of the white race, instinct or
no instinct; while Mr. Eustis regarded the racesupremacy
scheme as a carpet-bagger's lie, and
could justify the subjugation of the Negro mainly
on the belief that to protest against it is "an insolent
demand for the revision of the laws of nature."
But under neither philosophy does the.
Negro get a white man's public rights.

We find still wider variances on some other
points. "Is the Negro vote suppressed?"
Messrs. Foraker, Edmunds, Chandler and Halstead
still roundly make the charge. But they
are all of one party and are human; what is the
reply of the other side? Human, too, of course;
but it is also what Mr. Silas Wegg might call
"human warious." Says Governor Colquitt:
"We therefore will not suffer the charge . . .
of defrauding the Negro out of his vote to go
unchallenged. We deny, as roundly as our
enemies make the charge, that the Negro is
denied a right to vote."

He speaks for the whole South. He addresses
himself to the "alleged suppression of the Negro
vote in the South," just as Mr. Watterson addresses
himself to "a claim . . . that the
Negro vote is suppressed . . . by the white
people of the South." True, Governor Colquitt
speaks especially for Georgia, but he distinctly
offers Georgia as a fair sample of all the Southern
States, and claims for the men on "the roll of
members elect from Georgia to the next Congress,
and in fact that from any other Southern
State," "a love of truth and honesty that would

cause them to refuse the presidency if it had to
be won by fraud on any one, black or white."
And Governor Colquitt ought to know. But
who ought to know better than Mr. Watterson?
And Mr. Watterson, not some time before, but
six months later, writes: "I should be entitled
to no respect or credit if I pretended that there
is either a fair poll or count of the vast overflow
of black votes in States where there is a negro
majority, or that in the nature of things present
there can be." Now, the worst about these flat
contradictions, in a matter confessedly involving
the right to the nation's "respect and credit," and
to a reputation for "love of truth and honesty,"
is that they will remain amicably unsettled. Each
respondent will sincerely believe what he has
stated, and the whole circle of party managers
on their side of the issue will go on playing
"thimble, thimble," with the tormented question.

Other secondary questions fare no better. Are
outbreaks between the two races in the South
frequently due to political causes? For twenty
years we have heard that they are and that they
are not. What says Senator Eustis? He has a
divinely ordered race antagonism to assert, and
so tells us that, this being the cause, almost anything
may be the occasion. "Some sudden
unforeseen incident, political, religious, educational,

social, or what not, may at any moment
arouse the passions of race hatred and convulse
society by the outbreak of race conflicts." To
him the real cause of amazement is "that these
conflicts are not more frequent and more bloody."
Exactly; the race antagonism theory does not
half work. What says Governor Colquitt?
"Friendly relations habitually exist between our
white and black citizens, and are never disturbed
except on those occasions when the exigencies
of party politics call for an agitation of race
prejudices."

VII. Such discrepancies are broad; but they
shrink to narrowness when compared with
Senator Eustis's contradictions of himself. Is
the Negro contented and prospering? There
are actually millions of citizens wanting to know.
Let Mr. Eustis answer: 1. "His [the Negro's]
craving for federal tutorship is still unsatisfied.
The white man's patience is to-day taxed as ever
by the unending complaints of the Negro and
his friends. . . . He still yearns for this fruitless
agitation touching his right and his status."
2. "This total want of possible assimilation produces
antipathy, quasi hostility, between the two
races, North as well as South," whose manifestations
"both races regard as the incidents of a
struggle for supremacy and domination." 3.

"If this [race antagonism] were not the case the
Negro would have the right to appeal to the
enlightened judgment and to the sense of justice
of the American people, to protect him against
the unfeeling arrogance and relentless proscription
which he has so long endured as the result
of the white man's intolerance." 4. "In the
South to-day he is happy, contented and satisfied!"
Mr. Eustis is almost as violently out of
tune with himself as to the Negro's acceptance
of his private social status, but we shall not
quote; the question of the Negro's entrance into
private white society, we again protest, is entirely
outside the circle of his civil rights. No
intelligent advocate of a common enjoyment of
all civil rights by both races has argued to the
contrary, and the present writer has never written
a line in favor of it. As a moral and personal
question it admits, no doubt, of public discussion,
but as to its connection with any problem of
political or civil rights between the two races, all
that needs recognition is that it is completely out
of that question.

Such is the conflict of testimony from the
choicest witnesses on one side of the case. It is
a common saying on that side, that communities
at a distance cannot understand this Negro
problem. The fact is quite overlooked that a

large majority of these communities no great
while back held the very same views about it
that are still held so largely in the South; and
the very feminine argument that opposing debaters
"cannot understand" because of "profound
ignorance," etc., is only an unconscious
way of admitting that one's own side cannot
agree upon one full and clear explanation.

Fortunately we need not insist upon uniform
answers to these questions. They are secondary.
Let us only push on to the problem's
main citadel. Whenever it falls all really dependent
questions must surrender. And many others;
as, for instance, Must the average mental and
moral calibre of the whole Negro race in America
equal that of the white race, before any Negro
in a Southern State is entitled to the civil and
political standing decreed to all citizens of the
United States except the criminal and insane?
Or this: Does the Negro throughout the domain
of civil rights enjoy impersonal but individual
consideration, or is he subjected to a merely class
treatment? The nation is tired of contradictory
answers to these questions. We can waive them,
if only such chosen witnesses as these Southern
writers in the Forum will answer this: Do you,
or your State party, recognize as civil rights,
whatever rights belong to any and every person

simply as a unit in the civil community or in any
public part of it; and do you advocate the
Negro's enjoyment of each and every one of
these rights under only and exactly the same
protections and limitations he would be under if,
just as he is in everything else, he were white?
This is not a national party question. The
Democratic Party is answering both yea and nay
to this in various parts of the Union. The
national party question is, whether the federal
government may compel the people of a State to
answer contrary to their will. We waive that
question. Will you, gentlemen, answer the
question we ask?

If your answer is that you favor a separated
but equivalent enjoyment of civil rights by the
two races, consider this: That equal civil rights
inhere in the individual and by virtue of individual
conditions and conduct. Equivalent civil
rights are fictitiously vested in classes and without
regard to individual conditions or conduct.
They cannot be even truly equivalent when substituted
for equal civil rights on the ground of
the offensiveness of one class to the other and
without regard to the conditions and conduct of
the individual. Do you not see that such pretended
equivalence establishes unequal civil liberties,
and do you favor, or do you condemn it?

Or answer a yet simpler question: If a free
ballot and a fair count should seem about to
decide in your State that equivalent civil rights
must give place to equal civil rights as the two
are above defined, would you or your State party
protect that free ballot and fair count and stand
by its decision?

Look at this question closely. It is not one
upon which American political parties can honestly
divide. It is the question whether the
American government shall or shall not be a
government "of the people, by the people, for
the people," according to the Constitution's definition
of who the people are. We beg to be
believed that every word here written is uttered
in a spirit of kindness and civil fraternity. We
believe that to these two questions a true American
loyalty can in calm reflection give but one
answer. But we as sincerely believe that these
gentlemen on the other side are as honorable
and loyal in their intentions and are as sincere
lovers of their State's and the nation's common
welfare as they certainly are courteous in debate.
We trust that loyalty and courtesy for an answer.