 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT.
I.
The world has ceased to look to imperial rule
for pure government. Men may at times still
couple the two, but it is only in momentary
resentment of the fact that nowhere yet is there
a people under electoral rule whose government
is entirely pure.
Yet, excepting Russia, there is hardly a people
of European origin on earth that has not secured
in some valuable degree the enjoyment of electoral
representative government; and although
the impurities remaining in such governments lie
mainly in their defective electoral methods, yet
the world refuses to look back to imperial rule
for refuge or remedy. Not the suffocation, but
the purification, of the ballot is recognized as
the key to the purification of government.
But how shall we purify the ballot? We cannot
say only the pure shall vote, and then decide,
on crude generalizations who, or what sorts, are
pure. That would be as if instead of making a
filter work thoroughly, we should forbid that any
party is so pure but its vote needs the filtration
of effective electoral methods; methods so effective
as to bear the whole strain of a genuinely
popular vote. For any class to say, "The pure
shall constitute the State, and we are the pure,"
is itself imperial tyranny. But we can say the
vote shall be pure, and trust ultimately to see a
purified ballot purify the balloters. Not the
banishment of all impure masses from the polls,
but the equal and complete emancipation of all
balloters from all impure temptations or constraints,
is the key to the purification of the ballot.
It stands to reason that most men want good
government. If without constraints they choose
bad government it is by mistake. Society disfranchises
the felon, the idiot, the pauper, the
lunatic, because it is fair to infer, as it is not of
men in general, that they have no clear choice
for good government. The only trouble is that
though most men want good government, they
want it, mostly, for themselves. From these two
truths rise the wisdom and necessity of self-government.
Men can never safely depend upon
others to supply them benevolently with good
government. "No man is good enough to
govern another without his consent;" the only
free government is self-government. But the
scale being electoral and representative, the
purity of the ballot becomes a vital necessity.
For the only true end of self-government is
free government, and of free government, pure
government, as of pure government it is the
purity, no less than the prosperity, of the whole
people. No government or political party has
ever yet attained complete purity, because ends
must wait on means and pure government cannot
be got except through free government, nor
free government except by self-government
Indeed, purity and freedom are so interwoven
and identified with one another that to distinguish
between them scarcely separates them in the
mind. But a pure government is especially one
where all the people are wholly and equally protected
from the possible corruptness of officials;
while a free government is one in which all civil
classes, in office or out of office, and all political
parties, in power or out of power, are fully and
equally protected from each other. Obviously,
there can be no united and effective effort for
such pure government, while an insecurity of
free government keeps classes or parties preoccupied
with one another's actual or possible
aggressions. Probity is the one absolute essential
of society's happiness. An impure government
would be society's transcendent necessity
were it not that to lose free government is to
lose both. The end must wait on the means.
Pure government is pure gold; but to get gold
in continuous supply you must first have iron.
Free government is iron—iron and steel. So
first of all free government, and then pure
government.
Yet we must confront the opposite truth. A
government not free, nor trying to become free,
must become corrupt—cannot become pure; but
even a free government cannot remain corrupt
and continue free. True freedom is liberty with
equity; corruption is liberty without equity; and
no man gets a freedom he ought not to have,
without paying for it some other freedom he
cannot afford to lose. The Reconstruction State
governments in the South after the Civil War
were set up on very broad and commendable
foundations of free government; but not using
free government as an end to pure government,
they fell, owing their fall largely to the corruption
of the ballot, and actually overthrown
by a party whose opposing policy was the impracticable
proposition of pure government first,
free government afterward.
And now, as to these things, where do we,
There is probably not a State in our Union whose
good citizens do not confess and lament corruption
in its elections. What the Governor of New
York writes of his own State is true of the whole
Union. "Bribery and intimidation are not confined
to any locality." How is this?
For one thing, overlooking the degree of
freedom attained by other countries since we
declared ours, we have learned to lay upon our
freedom the false charge of having produced
our political corruption. Many countries have
become almost or quite as free as we, even in
the matter of suffrage, and are pressing forward,
while among us voices are heard repenting our
rashness, as though in manhood suffrage we had
made a mistake which the rest of the world was
condemning. Whether of the French, the Germans,
the Italians, we admit or deny that they
are as free as we, we have to confess that such
freedom as they enjoy is not a gift bestowed
upon them by the purity of "strong" governments.
It is a prize snatched by them from corrupt
governments, and such purification as they
have wrought is the product of freedom. Even
if they have, with less freedom than we, effected
some larger purifications of government—this
of the ballot, for instance—still they have done
pure government the end. They teach us not
that we are too free, but only that we have been
too well pleased with freedom as an ultimate
end.
But our fathers had not only to establish free
States and free institutions without models before
them; they had other great tasks. For instance,
they had to learn State and national banking and
general public financiering; and they learned
them in a series of gigantic blunders in comparison
with whose devastating results those of
the Southern Reconstruction governments of
1868-'77 sink into insignificance. In other
words, they had to learn how to vote wisely;
and no people ever learned how to vote except
by voting.
Moreover, while for over a hundred years we
have had great freedom, for three-fourths of that
time we had also a great slavery, which constantly
threatened the destruction of true freedom.
Not that even the pro-slavery party, whatever
its leaders may have been, wanted government
to be bad, or free men to be less free; they
even looked forward—though with more longing
than hope—to some indefinite day, when their
own slaves might somehow enter into freedom.
Beyond dispute, then, as to-day, a vast majority
wanted both free and pure government; but we
were divided into two opposing hosts; one for
pure government through free government, the
other for pure government before free government.
Out of the resulting strife has come the
nation's declaration for all time, that pure government
cannot come before free government, and
that not even in the name of pure government
shall true freedom be abridged.
Another obvious truth: pure and free governments
advance by alternating steps. Men will
not help others to set up pure government who
refuse them free government. Nor will men
help those to advance free government who
refuse them pure government; and if each school
holds out hostilely against the other, ruin must
follow; but if not, a patriotic and entirely noble
political commerce may spring up between the
two. A nation so doing may have to see itself
outstripped for a moment in the direction of
free government by others less pure, or of pure
government by others less free, or of material
wealth by others neither so pure nor so free;
but it is, nevertheless, on a broader, higher road
to perfect freedom, purity, and prosperity at last,
than any different sort can possibly be.
II.
There is a part of our country, however, where
conditions are seemingly so peculiar and exceptional
that to innumerable minds both there and
throughout the nation, no theorizing on the relations
and necessities of pure and free government
can be made to appear practicably applicable.
We must grapple with the very facts in this
specific case, or else our theorizings are of no
use to those who, in the North or South, stand
distraught between two seemingly antagonistic
necessities, the one for pure, the other for free,
governments in our Southern States.
Even the initial axiom, that most men want
good government, is denied. Most white men,
yes; but here is the whole lower mass made up
of an inferior race which, we are assured, neither
knows nor cares anything about good government.
So ignorant, unintelligent, and base are
they, it is said, that to give them any larger freedom
than they are now allowed would only be
to make them easily and certainly the tools of
the most vicious misleaders of popular cupidity,
vanity and passion. To offer by genuine proffers
of fuller civil freedom to buy their cooperation
for measures looking to purer government, it is
maintained, would make them drunk with self-importance,
that the present ruling class is not strong and
pure enough to establish and maintain pure
government without the aid of the ruled. To
give the Negro the same full civil and political
freedom that the white man has, would, they
say, be fatal, because in that case white men
would never divide on questions of public policy,
lest the blacks, if not already united, should at
once unite, and under corrupt leaders seize the
reins of power.
Now to these things what can we answer?
Let us take them seriatim. First, then, as to
the statement that virtually the whole mass of
Negroes in the South care nothing for good
government, we say, that to establish such a vast
exception to so general a truth requires exhaustive
proofs. Where are they? Reconstruction
times do not furnish them. They may show
that the Reconstruction party, white and Negro,
constantly and formidably opposed by a party
exclusively white and hostile to the equal civil
liberties of whites and Negroes, did not achieve,
may be did not often earnestly try to achieve,
purity in government. But they do not prove
that the Negroes would not have been well
pleased to join pure government with free. They
only prove our premise, that there can be no
of free government keeps classes or
parties occupied with one another's actual or
possible aggressions. The great majority of the
Negroes are illiterate, improvident, reckless and
degraded. But so is the Irish peasant. So is
the Russian serf. The fact is proof presumptive
that Irish, Russian, or Negro—they are far more
concerned for a better freedom, whether economic,
civil or political, than for pure government;
but not that pure government is something
they would rather not have.
How could it be? Tens of thousands of them
own the land they till, the houses they live in.
With scarcely a very rich man among them, they
own to-day certainly not less than $100,000,000,
some say $160,000,000 worth of taxable wealth.
Over 1,000,000 of their children, half their total
school population, are enrolled in the public
schools, where their average daily attendance is
more than 600,000. Their principal industry is
agriculture, the most peaceable and peace-promoting
labor of the hand known to mankind.
Their crops in the year 1889, unless high journalistic
authority is in error, aggregated the value
of $900,000,000. Is it to be believed that the
whole mass, or any preponderating fraction of
such a people as this is so supinely indifferent to,
pure over corrupt government, that they prefer
the corrupt, other things being equal? And are
we to credit this statement on the bare, emotional
declaration of communities that a few
years ago—claiming to be the only people who
are in a position to understand the Negro—honestly
believed he would not earn his bread in a
state of freedom, and was mentally incapable of
receiving an ordinary common school education?
Must we go even further and believe that none
of them, not even a moderate number, care
enough for the purification of the governments
over them to vote for pure measures and good
rulers, even if these should boldly declare for a
removal of unjust encroachments upon their
public rights and liberties? Hundreds of thousands
of them take pains—not a few take risks—
to vote, voting far oftener for white men than
for colored. Do these prefer corrupt rulers and
measures, and for mere corruption's sake? The
answer is familiar. Their leaders, it is said, do
actually want corruption for its own sake, to
fatten on it, and in vast solid masses the great
black herd blindly follows these leaders. But
wherein lies the strange power of these leaders?
In consanguinity? They are oftener white than
colored. In promises of official patronage?
among the leaders. How then? By the literal
buying of the ballots? Ballot buying may turn
the fortune of a close election, but it can never
make whole vast masses of people vote all one
way. How then do they lead them? They lead
them by means that prevail, not because these
masses are of Negro race, nor because they are
ignorant and degraded, but because they are
human; by means of promises of deliverance
from oppressive or offensive public conditions,
from which they see other men profitably free,
and long themselves to be delivered. That men
should be willing to follow whoever is for their
induction into all and only the full measure of
American freedom, and count that their supreme
necessity, is the poorest proof in the world that
they are all opposed to pure government. It is
rarely, if ever, said that the Negroes have no
patriotism. But patriotism inevitably implies
some worthy measure of desire for pure government.
Can any one suppose there is no patriotism
anywhere among 8,000,000 of people who
cannot be worried out of the country of their
birth? The assertion that the whole mass of
Negroes in the South is inimical to pure government,
is emotional, not rational.
III.
But we have next the assertion that they
would become so if the hand of suppression
were withdrawn. This is a very ancient argument.
A century ago it was believed and practically
applied against millions of white men, just
as it is now urged against millions of Negroes,
and was based on the same specious assumption,
that the ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed
man is virtually in all cases dangerous to society
and government, and most dangerous when invested
with civil and political liberty. Nor was
its repudiation any rash leap taken initially by
our own country in the heat of revolution.
Manhood suffrage, even for white citizens of the
United States, is barely seventy-five years old,
and of all the earlier States of the Union, is
youngest in New England. To-day, except only
Russia and one or two others less notable, every
white man's government in the world has either
reached or is steadily moving toward manhood
suffrage. The republics of South and Central
America, some of which are not purely white
men's governments at all, are well along on the
same road, and wherever they have also shaken
off the slavery of slaveholding and the fetters of
ecclesiastical tyranny, are rising into commercial
meet the same argument, long overturned as to
white men, but readapted and made special
against Negroes as so far exceeding white
men in cupidity, vanity and passion, that what
political experiment may have proved even as to
ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed white
men, is not thereby made even supposably possible
as to Negroes.
The loose assertions offered to support this
assumption we deny. We deny that this utter
and manifest unfitness of the Negro is believed
by all respectable Southern white men. All
through the South there are worthy white men
who deny that the experiment need be futile
or disastrous. We deny that Southern white
men by virtue of close daily contact with the
Negro in multitude are so exclusively able to
decide this point, that their word ought to be
final. Some men may be too far off, but just as
certainly others may be too near, to decide it
uncounselled; and in fact every great step thus
far taken towards the Negro's real betterment
has been first proposed by those remote from
him while it has been condemned as idle or
dangerous by those nearest him. We deny that
the experiment of full civil and political liberty
has ever been fairly tried on the Negroes of the
want of which has made the experiment a false
and unfair trial. It always lacked the consent—
it had the constant vehement opposition—of
almost the whole upper class of society in the
commonwealth where the freedman's new and
untried citizenship rested. Without land-ownership,
commerce, credit, learning, political or
financial experience, the world's acquaintance
and esteem, the habit of organization, or any
other element of political power except the naked
ballot and the ability to appeal at last resort to
the Federal authority, and with almost the
whole upper class of society, and well nigh all
these elements of power skillfully arrayed against
them, the Negroes, accepting the party leadership
and fellowship of any and every sort of
white man who would only recognize their new
tenure of rights, took up the task, abandoned to
them in confident derision by their former masters,
of establishing equal free government for all,
in the States whose governments had never before
been free to other than white men. The
resulting governments were lamentably corrupt.
But it was the day of Tweed, rings and Credit
Mobiliers, great and small, the climacteric hour
of official corruption throughout a whole nation
hitherto absorbed in the rougher work of establishing
to rise on broader, truer foundations of political
liberty and equity than had ever been laid in
those States before: and certainly no people, even
when not antagonized by the great bulk of a
powerful class above them, ever set up both free
and pure government in the first twelve years of
their bodily emancipation or the first nine years
of their enfranchisement. Another twelve years
has passed, with the Negroes' political power
nullified, and the white, intelligent, wealth holding
class in uninterrupted control; and still that
class is longing and groping in vain for pure
government, and is confessedly farther from it at
the end of its twelfth year of recovered control
than it was at the end of its first, while the principles
of free government are crowded back to
where they were twenty years ago. No, it is
not the admission of, it is the refusal to admit,
the Negro into political co-partnership—not
monopoly—on the basis of a union of free and
pure governments, that has produced the very
conditions which it was argued such admission
would precipitate.
It was this refusal that threw him, intoxicated
with more importance and power than either
friend or foe intended him to have, into the arms
of political hypocrites and thieves. It is this
the truth, counted suicidal to confess, that
even the present ruling class is not strong enough
or pure enough to establish and maintain pure
government without the aid and consent of the
governed. I admit the Negro problem is not always
and only political. No problem can be.
It is not in the nature of politics for any question
to be only political. The Negro question is
fundamentally a question of civil rights, including
political rights as the fortress of all the others.
It is not always a peculiarly African proneness to
anarchy; nor is it always race instinct; it is
often only the traditional pride of a master-class,
that remands the Negro to a separate and invidious
tenure of his civil rights; but it is to
perpetuate this alienism that he is excluded from
the political co-partnership; and it is the struggle
to maintain this exclusion that keeps the colored
vote solid, prevents its white antagonists from
dividing where they differ as to other measures,
and holds them under a fatal One-Party idea
that rules them with a rod of iron.
We see then how far the facts of history and
present conditions are from proving the Southern
States an exception to the rule that pure
government cannot be got by setting its claims
before and above free government. Rather, they
government itself falling into decay through the
well-meant but fatal policy of seeking its purification
by constricting the rights and liberties of
the weaker and inferior ranks of society.
IV.
Washington, bidding a last farewell to public
office, and uttering his parental warnings to the
people, pronounced, not largeness or universality
of freedom, nor illiteracy, nor unintelligence, but
a rankness of party spirit the worst enemy of
popular government. If he could characterize
"the alternate domination of one faction over
another" as "itself a frightful despotism," what
would he have said of an arbitrarily permanent
domination of one party over another and a culmination
of party spirit into the One-Party idea;
the idea that a certain belief and policy are so
entirely, surely and exclusively right that men
who do not assent to them are incendiary, vile,
outrageous, and not morally entitled to an equal
liberty and security under the laws with those
from whom they dissent? A State ruled by
such a sentiment is no longer under a free
government. A people seeking pure government
under that idea are trifling with destiny
and hurrying towards disaster, and in simple
those who see their error ought to stop them if
there is a way to do it consistent with righteous
law.
Is there any such way? Let us look at the
situation. The Reconstruction governments in
the South; while still holding, not for Negro
domination, which they never held for, but for
equal free government for all, lost in large measure
the nation's respect and good-will by an
acute moral and financial defalcation. They were
allowed to be overturned by measures often
severely revolutionary, on the assurance of their
opponents to the nation and to the world that
their only desire and design was pure government,
and that they were more than willing and
amply able to furnish it at once and follow it
closely with the amplest measure of free government
contemplated in the Amendments to the
Constitution. Some Southern men may deny
that this was the understanding on which their
party was allowed to retake the monopoly of its
State governments. The question is not important,
for it is not proposed here to mourn the
extinction of the Reconstruction governments
as one mourns the death of the righteous, nor
to lay upon the men who destroyed them the
whole blame of the error committed. Whatever
for a moment be denied that this was the hope
and expectation of the great North and West.
The blame—if blame were worthy of count—
was on those—whether in North or South, in
the Republican, or Democratic, or any third or
fourth party—who comforted themselves with
the delusion that a policy of pure government
first, free government afterward, could produce
either free or pure government. Seeing at last
that this delusion is what was and is to blame,
the question who was to blame—where no side
was wrong by choice—is a question we may
sink, with its answer, forever beneath the sea
of oblivion.
Through twelve weary and distressful years
this fallacy has been given as fair a trial as anything
ever had, and to-day more manifestly than
ever before it is weighed in the balances and found
wanting. For years the show and promise of
better things joined themselves with a faith in
the all-healing power of time, peace and material
prosperity, to soothe the nation's solicitude and
sustain its hope.
The Southern State governments had hardly
changed hands, when their financial credit began
to rise with a buoyancy which proved—if such
proof had been needed—that it was only the
wealth-holding portion of the people that were
bankrupt, and, whether their action was justifiable
or not, it was nearer the truth to say
the people had bankrupted the governments
than that the governments had bankrupted the
people.
For a long time the sincerity and earnest diligence
of the more intelligent and liberal wing
of the Southern Conservatives bent itself to a
most commendable progressive measure; one
which had already been irrevocably begun under
the Reconstruction governments as an indispensable
adjunct to the extension of civil or political
freedom. This measure was the expansion
of the public school system, a system which,
wherever it has found large establishment—in
America, England, or elsewhere—has always
followed, not produced, the extension of the suffrage.
This measure was, and is, practicable
even under the rule of the One-Party idea,
because, while public education is the own child
of the scheme of free government first, it is
almost the only important factor of that scheme
which does not obviously antagonize the opposite
policy. And yet this opposite policy of pure
government first is not, and by nature cannot be,
the zealous promoter of the free school system
policy of freedom first inevitably precipitates and
perpetuates an immediate and imperative exigency
which can be met only by an entirely
ample provision for the whole people's education.
The policy of pure government first, assuming
that ignorance and impurity are much the
same thing, promises that ignorance shall therefore
not participate in government, and casting
about, now on the right hand and now on the
left, for expedients to prevent it, accepts free
schools as one, but with a divided credence and
a tame enthusiasm. This is why the Southern
States to-day have only schools enough for half
their school population, and believe they are
bearing as heavy a burden of school tax as any
people of equal means can, while the States and
territories of the West, under the ideas of free government
first and of two parties of equal rights,
are taxing themselves far heavier, even where
they have less wealth. The example of some of
these Western communities is complete proof
that the only sense in which it can be said that
the South is doing all it can for public education
is that Southern State legislators may be levying
as heavy a school tax as they can reasonably hope
to collect from a people lulled by the assurances
and methods of a policy of pure government
and re-echoed in the North that the task of
public education in the Southern States suffers
a unique and unparalleled drawback in the fact
that while the Negroes enjoy nearly half the outlay
of the school funds, almost the entire amount
of those funds is paid by white taxpayers.
But assuming this to be quite true in every other
regard, there are two points in which it is not so.
First, the very alphabet of economics teaches us
that all taxes do not rest entirely on those from
whom they are collected, but that hundreds of
thousands of men who are too poor to be found
enumerated on the tax-rolls are for all that
reached by taxation through the medium of rents
and similar indirections. And, second, that the
fact quoted is far from being unique and unparalleled.
The only thing peculiar about it is
that this lower and unmoneyed mass, which, as
interest, is in every State in the Union freely
accorded an enjoyment of the school funds out
of all proportion to its money contributions,
happens in the South to be a distinct race which
has been working for the last one hundred and
fifty years, but has been drawing wages only for
the last twenty-five.
The Donaldsonville (La.) Chief, of Feb. —, 1890, says:
"We have 38 public schools in this parish and 9855 scholars to
educate in them, or about 260 pupils to the teacher!
"Taking the maximum number of pupils fixed by the law, it
would require no less than 250 teachers to do justice to the
educational subjects of the parish. The `vast improvement' is
mere brain figment. The whole yearly school income for our
parish is not much more than enough to conduct properly a sufficient
number of schools presided over by competent instructors
for thirty days. It is all that we can pay, however."
V.
Another great progressive measure which
accompanied and still accompanies the policy
of pure-government-first, though it, too, began
under the opposite régime, was one which no
policy save absolute anarchy can ever resent.
This was the development of natural resources,
the multiplication of industries, the increase of
material wealth. The party that represented
the bulk of society's landed and personal
wealth, inspired by the only policy it could
believe to be honorable or safe, entered into
entirely new relations to the public credit of
their towns, counties and States, and gave the
energy of a new hope to the making of private
fortunes. The successes of this movement have
been positively brilliant. The unadorned true
stories of Anniston and Chattanooga and Birmingham,
of Memphis and Nashville, and Atlanta
they are inspiring, a theme lingered upon by
Northern tongues and a Northern press with a
warmth that indicates a proper recognition of the
North's own great gain in the South's prosperity.
Nevertheless, the very fullness and renown of this
success has wrought two grave errors. A sagacious
and enterprising few may get rich in any
country blessed with natural resources; but no
country ever won or can win a large and permanent
prosperity save by the prosperity of its poor.
No country can ever build a sound prosperity
while it tolerates conditions that keep a large
lower mass on low wages and long hours. This
is the word, not of politicians alone, but of
economists and financiers, and this is a fact which
the sunburst of a sudden great material development
in many regions of the South has hidden in
deep shadow. That Southern men, still so largely
under the stress of Southern traditions, should
overlook this is largely natural and excusable;
but that the North, too, with its so wide and
fortunate experience of better conditions, should
not see and point out the oversight seems strange.
It may be doubted that there is a high-school
between Boston and Denver whose pupils are
not taught that the greatest source of the decay
of nations is the congestion of wealth and degradation
have yet been found in any scheme of public
society, but the search for them is the great
quest of the age, and the safety, peace and prosperity
of Europe, the Americas, and the great
Australasian colonies is mainly due to the adoption
of such noble, though incomplete, offsets
as have been found. These are equal rights and
protection to opposing parties, free schools for
the whole people, manhood suffrage, and a pure,
free ballot.
Such is one of the two great errors that have
fastened themselves upon the otherwise entirely
admirable material development of the "New
South." The other is twin to it. It is that this
material development is not only economically
sound, but that it has also a political potentiality,
and can of itself solve, and is solving, the Southern
problem. Where is its solution? The claim is
absurd. It is simply fantastical to expect a mere
aggregation of private movements for the building
of private fortunes to unravel the snarled
thread of civil and political entanglements in a
commonwealth. It may in self-defence rally to
the support of public financial credit; but farther
it is not in its nature to go. What has this one
done? We are reminded that "in the South
there are Negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
and multiplying with the increasing ability of
their race to support them." But whence
came they? Nine-tenths of those teachers and
preachers and ninety-nine hundredths of those
lawyers, editors, dentists and doctors have got
their professions in colleges built and sustained by
Northern money, and taught by Northern missionary
teachers whom the great bulk of this New
South rewards with social ostracism. They work
in peace. But what a peace! A peace bought by
silent endurance of a legalized system of arrogant
incivilities that make them, in almost every public
place, conspicuous objects of a public disdain
which is not always even silent. What single
one of those tyrannous and vulgar intrusions
of private social selection into purely public
places, has this New South of iron and coal
mines, and new railways and cotton mills, and
oil-presses removed? Not one! From the ennobling
relaxations of the drama, the opera, the
oratorio, the orchestral symphony and sonata;
from the edifying diversions of the popular lecture,
the picture gallery, and even the sacred
service and sermon of the popular preacher;
from the refining comforts of the first-class railway
coach and the public restaurant; from the
character making labors, disciplines and rewards
and divinity school, supported by Southern
money and attended by white youth; and from
the popular respect paid to those who enjoy these
things and withheld from those to whom they
are forbidden, these "Negro lawyers, teachers,
editors, dentists, doctors and preachers, working
in peace and multiplying with the increasing
ability of their race to support them," are shut
out by rules sustained by State legislation,
which refuses to share even the Decalogue on
equal terms with the Negro, but annexes to it
an eleventh and "colored" commandment—
"Thou shalt try to become a gentleman." Where
has this New South movement opened to colored
people, paying taxes or not, professionally educated
or not, the privileges of a single public
library?
Our attention is challenged to $900,000,000
worth of crops raised in the South last year.
We are not told that the producers of this vast
abundance enjoy in one full and common measure
all the public rights declared to be theirs by
the national Constitution. That falsehood so
long believed by so many even of those who
uttered it in North and South, is utterly worn
out. But we are asked if we can doubt that
such a product came from peaceful fields and
can! Did the vast wheat crops of ancient
Egypt come from peaceful fields and a well-contented
husbandry? Are her pyramids the product
of duly remunerated labor? Did the great
crop of 1860—raised when the Negroes were
half their present numbers—come from men
satisfied with their wages? From the eastern
borders of Russia, a huge wave of material development
is at present rolling eastward across
Siberia with an energy and speed until lately
supposed by Americans to be found only in our
own great, free West. The commerce of the
Volga rivals that of the Mississippi. The volume
of trade of the city of Nizhni Novogorod
rose from some $60,000,000 in 1868 to about
$120,000,000 in 1881. A great through Siberian
railway, to be completed in from three to six
years, is now in various stages of survey and construction,
whose trunk line alone will stretch
eastward to the Japan Sea, about 5000 miles beyond
Moscow. It runs already through millions
of acres of fruitful fields tilled by an industrious
peasantry. But is Siberia a free country? Spain
is a land of harvest and song. Have the laborers
in her vineyards and olive-yards a freedom that
ought to satisfy a citizen of the United States?
Has America any class of society in which we
or a Spanish measure of civil or political
liberty? There is a contentment which is more
intolerable to the order and interest of a free
country like ours, than a discontent that leaves
the ripened grain unharvested to guard the
rights of free man. Which of the two has this
industrial development, or any other outcome of
the policy of pure government first, cherished
and stimulated? For twelve years it has persuaded
an apparent majority of the nation to
leave to it the fitting of the Negro for citizenship,
even refusing national aid to lift the burden of
public education it counts insupportable; yet to
this day it has made not the slightest provision
for admitting any Negro to the full measure of
any civil or political right by virtue of acquired
fitness. The New Orleans Times-Democrat of
Nov. 5th, says, "The race issue is a national antagonism
. . . and has nothing whatever to do
with education or the lack of education. To
the Negro varnished with such learning as he is
capable of acquiring, there is even a more pronounced
antipathy than to the Negro of the
cotton-field and kitchen." "The schools," says
the Atlanta Constitution barely six months ago,
"have been in active operation for over twenty-five
years, and it is estimated that several hundred
read and write. The difficulties, however, have
increased with the progress of education, and are
now more difficult than they ever were before. . . .
Not the slightest advancement toward an adjustment
of the two races on political grounds has
been made anywhere, and even the direction of
such advance is a matter of speculation." In
plain words, after twelve years of wandering
through a night of false political traditions, these
largely sincere guides to pure government first
and free government afterwards, acknowledge at
last that they are lost in the woods under a starless
sky.
VI.
The failure to get good government has been
absolutely abject. Not only has no material
advance been made toward free government,
but the governments that started out twelve
years ago full of honest intentions to be or
become pure, have grown confessedly corrupt,
and are now avowing with hardihood or shame
things that a few years ago they denied with
indignation. Let it be gladly admitted that open
personal bribery of officials is rare. And naturally;
for where an upper and property holding
class holds secure and arbitrary power over an
illiterate and destitute laboring class, and really
will still be demanded after equity has
been overlooked in legislation; and whereas in
the struggle of an under class for better freedom
against great odds, the personal impurities of
leaders may be for some time overlooked, in an
effort of an upper class for pure government the
personal dishonesty of officials will be the last
symptom of hopeless and corrupt failure. The
fact still stands that the Southern party, which
really started in quest of the higher grounds of
pure government, is moving in a mass of corrupt
measures. In the late Prohibition movement in
Georgia its wholesale bribery of ignorant Negro
voters was open and boastful.
In Alabama, Mississippi, and other cotton
States, under a domination which more and
more tends to become merely a taxpayers'
government, there has sprung up a system
of crop-lien laws, mainly if not wholly devoted
to the protection of landholders and storekeepers
against farm tenants, so barren of
counter protections for the tenant that they
have fairly earned the name given them by a
United States judge in Arkansas, of "anaconda
mortgages." Said this gentleman in an address
before the Arkansas State Bar Association, in
1886, "as a result of these defective and bad
lenders, traders, and methods of doing business
the like of which was never seen before." Quoting
from a parliament report the statement that
a certain creditor in Ireland had charged a Connaught
peasant a rate of interest aggregating
43½ per cent. per annum, he asked, "What is
43½ per cent. compared to the profits charged
by the holders of anaconda mortgages on tenants
in Arkansas? They would scorn 43½ per cent."
And another member of the Association had
already said of a signer of one of these mortgages,
"a place where he could borrow money
at usury would be an asylum to him . . . .
I have known men—laboring men, farmers and
renters—to pay twenty and twenty-five per cent.
interest for money and secure its payment, rather
than mortgage their property and buy supplies
on credit." If in the face of these facts Negroes
are moving by tens of thousands from North
and South Carolina to Mississippi and Arkansas,
that surely is something not for us, but for North
and South Carolina to explain. Probably the
best explanation, beyond the eager enterprise of
railroad companies, is that these ignorant laborers,
like thousands of other immigrants, do not know
what they are going to.
It will be said that the burdens of this system
black. That may be, but it is a system unknown
in our free land except in States where the tenant
class is mostly Negroes, and just as far as white
debtors fall under it, it illustrates a fact of which
it is far from being the only proof; that this
whole policy of the black man's repression under
a taxpayer's government is constantly escaping
from its intended bounds and running into a
fierce and general oppression of the laboring
classes, white or black. Yet the wealth-holding,
taxpaying citizens of these same States, still
really and untiringly bent upon a large and
noble renaissance in commerce, industry and
government, hold conventions and subscribe
money to promote immigration. Can no one
make them understand that a desirable immigration
will never come to a land of long hours,
low wages and "anaconda mortgages." The
only way to make the South a good place for
white men to come to is to make it a good
place for black men to stay in.
It belongs to the imperfections of human
society even at its best, that as yet, even under
the purest, freest conditions, the poor suffer
many times more chances than the rich of being
legally punished for criminal errors. Moreover,
the poor man's home and neighborhood become
discharges, pardons and escapes. The penal
system of a country is therefore supremely the
very poor man's concern, if not even his supreme
concern. Hence it can never be stripped of a
political value. If there were no other reason
why the poor and ignorant should enjoy the
scant self-protection of manhood suffrage, this
would be enough. And with what clearness
has the Southern party of one-party-and-pure-government
proved this? For twelve years
it has retained the Convict Lease System, a
prison system entirely peculiar to the Southern
States, and baffling comparison for corrupt and
mortal cruelty with any system of prisons between
here and St. Petersburg. It has not merely
retained the system. Legislatures and governors
have, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially,
allowed "penitentiary rings" to become financial
and political factors in the fortunes of their parties
and their States, while all the better elements of
the party and press, burning with righteous
shame and resentment, and crying out against
them, nevertheless endure the outrage clamped
and riveted upon them by the exigencies of a
One-party policy and the alienation of the great
bulk of the poor man's vote. Nowhere this side
of Russia and Turkey is there a region of country,
suicidally barren of reformatories for destitute
and wayward boys and girls.
But there are other fruits of this well-meant
but vain policy. In 1868 the Reconstruction
party in North Carolina adopted, by a new constitution,
the township system so well and favorably
known in the States of the North and West.
When in 1875 the party of pure-government-first
gained power, however much personal corruption
in office it may have found, it found also
as perfect a form of republican State government
as there was in the Union. Every provision
which any State enjoyed for the protection of
public society from its bad members and bad
impulses, was either provided or easily procurable
under the constitution of the State. Yet
within a year this party, for the avowed purpose
of nullifying the power of their opponents in
every county where those opponents were still in
the majority, so amended the State constitution
as to take away the powers of self-government
from every county in the State and centralize
them in the legislature under a base counterfeit
of the system of government displaced by the
"radicals" in 1868. Under this system — unknown
to any other State—a preponderance of
power over elections and election returns is secured
great that no party retaining it can clear itself
of the charge of corrupt intentions. In South
Carolina this same party, now that rifle clubs
and tissue ballots have passed away, confesses,
with the pardonable buoyancy of a relieved conscience,
that those measures were intolerably
corrupt. Yet the eight-box system still stands
in their stead, raising the same blush of mortification,
yet commanding from them the same
subjection as do lynch law and the convict
lease system.
Such are the conditions after twelve years of efforts
by an intelligent, accomplished, determined,
persistent, heroic people to hold down free government
with one hand till they can set up pure
government with the other. For twelve of our
modern years, each one worth an ancient century,
the cry of pure government first has prevailed,
not only among themselves but throughout the
nation. For its sake, this nation, almost as universally
dazed as they by the bright plausibility
of the mistake, has endured more deadly outrages
against its citizens within its own borders
than it would have tamely submitted to from all
the great powers of the earth combined. The
mass to be held in subjection has been the inferior
in numbers, prowess, intelligence, wealth and
strength; not turbulent and ferocious, but on
the Southern white man's testimony, tractable,
amiable, dependent. The great national party
that, unhindered, might have lifted this subjection,
has for twenty-five years found itself opposed,
and for the last twelve years pinioned,
by another party quite or almost its match in
numbers, power, integrity, and skill, vehemently
charging it with rushing to the rescue of freedom
too rashly for freedom's good. The class
proposing to rule the South alone, is honest
in purpose, still filled with the spirit of freedom
that gave us Washington, and yet as imperial
as ancient Rome. It is not they, it is
only their policy, that is found wanting. If any
people on earth could have carried that policy
to success they could. They have proved for
all time and for all mankind that it can never
be done.
The day in which this truth becomes a popular
conviction among our white brethren of the
South and among millions in the North whose
conversion waits only on theirs, will be the
brightest, gladdest, best day that ever dawned
on this continent. I believe that dawn is now
breaking.
VII.
True, we hear voices through the Southern
press crying new schemes for avoiding the simple
necessities of free government: the establishment
of a Negro Territory; a disfranchisement
of over half the Negroes by an educational
qualification at the polls; their total disfranchisement
by the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment;
and in the very Senate a proposition to
deport the Negro to Africa at the national
expense, although at the same time and all over
the South, men in the same party from which
the project comes are stating with new frankness
their old doctrine, that though the country shall
never belong to the Negro, the Negro simply
shall belong to the country. But the very forlornness
of these absurd projects, built, themselves,
on open confessions that the past is a
failure and that something different must be done
with all speed, is a final admission that the party
pledged to solve the Negro Question without
consulting the Negro, feels that it must change
its policy or drop from under the nation's misplaced
hopes.
The press of the nation almost with one voice
rejects the scheme of a Negro territory. We
have more Negro territories now than either
and Indian deportations and reservations
have only wronged the savage, dishonored civilization,
complicated the whole Indian question,
and still hold it over us in costly and bloody suspense
until we shall muster humanity and common
sense enough to do unto him as we would
that our Southern brother would do unto the
Negro—cease condescension, bounty, and fraud,
and show mercy, justice and human fraternity.
The proposition to repeal the Fourteenth
Amendment deserves as little respect and attention
as it is receiving. It would disfranchise
thousands of taxpayers and thousands of men
able to read and write, still leaving the franchise
with hundreds of thousands of total illiterates
paying no direct taxes. It would simply reestablish
a system of irrational race discrimination.
It is well for the honor of the good State
of Mississippi, where the proposition has arisen,
that along with it comes word that at last an
attempt has been made, with some hope of
permanent success, to abolish in that State the
Convict Lease System.
As to the South Carolina scheme to limit the
suffrage by an educational qualification, it seems
to have died at birth, smothered under the evident
fact that a State, nearly half of whose people
of school age are without public provision against
illiteracy, has no reason, as it has no right, to
hope for an honest vote to disfranchise the illiterate.
Well for it that there is no such hope. For no
people ever escapes the incubus of a large illiteracy
in its poorer classes except by providing a
system of public education ample for the whole
people; the demand for ample free education is
created not by the contraction, but by the enlargement,
of the right of suffrage. The most
suicidal thing a party of free education can do is
to favor an educational qualification of the suffrage
before free education is amply supplied; for
whenever the issue is between adequate and
inadequate provision the vote that tips the scale
aright is just the bugbear itself—the illiterate
man's vote.
I hold that to prove the moral wrong of a
thing is to prove just so far its practical worthlessness.
To disfranchise the illiterate is to make
the most defenceless part of a community more
defenceless still. There is, I know, an educational
qualification in Massachusetts, and there
are a few illiterates. But there is no illiterate
class, and the educational qualification here is
not mainly for the protection of the suffrage, but
a correctional punishment for inexcusable ignorance.
almost as much overstated as its economic loss
has been overlooked. Far the greatest danger
in a wide illiteracy is to the illiterate themselves,
and though there are reciprocal risks, the supreme
urgency for its removal is not their dangerousness
to the more fortunate and powerful classes,
but the dangerousness of those classes to them.
As for the Australian ballot system, wherever in
this great union of States it goes for the better
liberty of every honest voter, learned or ignorant,
rich or poor, and for the confusion of bribers and
bribe-takers, learned or ignorant, rich or poor,
may God give it good speed. But, alas! for public
liberty, purity or safety, wherever it is put
into use to abridge the right of suffrage. No
people is justly ready for a system of elections
that prevents the voting of the illiterate man
until it has first provided full public facility for
every such man to learn to read and write, and
has then given him fair warning and time to
learn.
The last and, it seems to me, the most irrational
scheme of all, is that embodied in the
Bill for the deportation of Negroes to Africa.
The graceful arguments of its advocates in the
Senate have been fully, ably, brilliantly answered
in the Senate, and there is no excuse for more
and confessions of Abraham Lincoln have
been much used in this debate by excellent men,
who still repudiate and antagonize the conclusions
of his latest wisdom as they once did his
earlier. Let us in that wonderful spirit of more
than Washingtonian generosity which made him
impregnable and irresistible in debate, make
every supposition of the advocates of deportation
that can be supposed. Say the bill is found
to be not unconstitutional; that hundreds of
thousands of Negroes want to go, and that
Southern white men generally will let them go,
despite the palpable fact that the men most
likely to go will be, to use an old Southern word,
the most "likely" men, the men of health,
strength, self-reliance, enterprise, and despite,
again, the fact that no large emigration can take
place without carrying away millions of ready
money with it. Every 100,000 of European
emigrants to this country bring about $8,000,000
with them. The industrial value of 100,000 unskilled
laborers is $80,000,000. Is a white immigration
likely to make up such losses? Let us
suppose even this, although no one ever yet
heard of one set of emigrants pouring into a
country from which a poorer set was pouring
out; and although if they will come at all there
deporting a single Negro.
What shall we say? We say pass your bill;
get your ships ready; proclaim free passage to
whomsoever will accept it. Only let there be
no compulsion. As a whole nation we are
branded with our fathers' sin of bringing these
people here; let us not now add to that our own
sin of driving them back. Therefore, no compulsions.
But the land is full of compulsions. The
main argument for the Negroes going is that we
are making their stay here intolerable to them.
Before we buy or hire one ship, whether these
compulsions are in South Carolina or Mississippi,
Illinois, Ohio or Massachusetts, let the compulsions
be removed. When State and Federal governments
have exhausted, as neither has yet done,
all their powers of legislation and police to make
the Negro in America as free as the white man,
then, if the Negro cannot be content, and the people
choose to bear the expense of his deportation,
let the folly be charged to him, not us, of leaving
a free land to which better men were glad to
come and fill his voided place. But let this
nation never again open the Sacred Scriptures
on Independence Day, or on the birthday of
Washington lift up its hands to God, if, as matters
now stand, it provides money or ships for
own tyrannies. This is not the way to settle, but
only to delay and hinder the settlement of the
Negro question. Emigrants have been pouring
out of Ireland for forty years, and their Government
has encouraged their going, and still Ireland
is full of Irish and the Irish Question is
not settled. Pass your Deportation Bill. Help
hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Negroes
to sail to Africa. But unless you remove the
already existing compulsions upon which you
are counting to drive them on shipboard, the
white immigrant will not come to take his place,
and the Negro and the Negro Question will be
with us still.
It is true, also, that the infatuation for buying
pure government at some other price than the
Negro's civil freedom and political coöperation
still maintains the iron rule of the one-party idea.
It is to this sentiment and policy that we owe
the enormities of Lynch-law, with its record of
crimes beyond all cavil darker and fouler than
all the robberies of Carpet-bag Governments.
For these murderous deeds are committed only
because the lovers of order and pure government
make no serious effort to prevent them, and
these make no serious effort only because to
punish these murderers would break the solid
dissent from its doctrines infamous and criminal,
the only party that ever has dared to declare
openly to this free nation that it must and will
rule, whether it represents a majority of the
people or not. Is not that the very germinating
and perpetuating principle of political corruption?
Under what strange skies, on what distant
planet, can we believe that such a tree will
put forth the flowers and fruit of pure government?
In Nashville lately a gentleman of the southern
political orthodoxy gave me this story as
strict fact: A traveller, similarly orthodox, sat
down at the large supper-table of an Arkansas
tavern. The landlord bearing two large steaming
covered vessels, identical in size and pattern,
one in each hand, passed from guest to guest
with always the same hospitable offer of choice:
"Tea or Coffee?" "Tea or Coffee." "Coffee,"
said one. He poured coffee. "Coffee," said a
second. He poured coffee. "Coffee," said a
third, fourth and fifth. Again once, twice,
thrice, the tea-pot was deferentially drawn back
and the coffee-pot poured forth its strong, black
flood. So our traveller was reached. "Tea or
coffee?" "Tea." The landlord drew back
bristling, but the next instant was gracious
forward and poured from it the same hot, rank
"Rio" that he had been pouring from the
other pot, saying as he poured, "tea! in Arkansas!
No sir. In Arkansas you take coffee
or you take nothing." Our traveller drank
it without milk. It was, after all, simply his
own one-party idea and he had to swallow it.
VIII.
But if the One-party idea still rules in the
South, men are longing and reaching out for
deliverance from it now as they have not done
before since thirty years ago it first laid its complete
bondage upon them. From out the South
itself has lately been heard a strange, new, most
worthy and most welcome sound, the voices of
southern white leaders of thought and action
charging upon the North the duty and necessity
of helping the South to solve the simple question
which the northern and southern seekers after
pure government through race-rule and postponed
rights have snarled into a bewildering problem.
This problem has been drawn into the
open field of literary debate, a field from which,
in these enlightened days, no practical question
can escape until it is solved. But the question
it is only how to persuade men to settle it.
As to this, let us first of all, stop blaming one
another; let us blame things not men; ill conditions,
false theories, bad schemes. Even among
these let us waste no more wrath, no more grief,
no more time, over such as are done and can
never be undone; but give ourselves faithfully,
fraternally, unflinchingly to the pursuit and destruction
of every living evil in theory or practice.
In the second place the new material development
of the South must go on. If wealth does
not necessarily make a people free or virtuous,
neither does poverty. But thinking men in the
South must rouse themselves to the economic
and political necessity for a wider diffusion of
wealth and more prosperous conditions of manual
labor. The inattention to the study of Economics
in most southern colleges amounts to a
calamity. To the spirit that prompts this is
largely owing a superficial treatment of commercial
and industrial conditions that characterizes
the greater part of the southern press, and
misleads a large class among the southern capitalists
of commerce and the industries, who
count only themselves practical.
And again, the struggle for pure government
the effort to procure it at the expense of free
government must be abandoned. Free government,
the equal freedom of all in all public relations,
must be recognized as its foremost and
supreme necessity. Yet we do not demand a
sudden and complete revolution of southern
sentiment and policy. All the nation is really
impatient for is to see the South once turn and
start in the right direction.
To this end let it be understood and declared
in southern circles, councils, newspapers, that
in the southern States, just as truly as in Kansas,
Ohio, or Massachusetts, a man can favor the
Negro's enjoyment of a white man's public
rights without being either a Republican or a
traitor. He can be an Equal-rights Democrat.
I venture to say that the great bulk of the Republican
party itself will look with more respect
and pleasure upon a band of southern opponents
declaring themselves Equal-rights Democrats,
than upon a like reënforcement to its own ranks
of Alabama protectionists trying to take the pitifully
impossible pose of color-line Republicans.
If men cannot reconcile it to their self-regard
or sense of expediency to declare for equality in
all public rights at once, let them try a few at a
time. Since 1865 the South has found on experiment,
a great many things consistent with honor,
safety and peace that they had looked upon with
loathing and alarm. Why not try a few more?
Take, at random, any phase of the matter; for
instance, railroad accommodation. If in every
southern town Negroes may ride in street-cars,
where people crowd one another and no separate
place offers to the rag-tag that refuge from the
better kept which they always covet, why not
try making first-class railway coaches equally
free to all kinds of people decent in person and
behavior, and require all kinds of rag-tag to accept
other accommodations? There is no risk in
such a step; nobody really believes there is any,
it is purely a matter of pride. But be it pride or
be it risk, the street-cars offered the extreme
case, and in them the question has long been
settled.
Or take another case. Probably the most
indefensible, wanton, cruel deprivations suffered
by Southern colored people on the score of race
is their exclusion from the privileges of the
public libraries. Let these excommunications
from the pure wells of inspiration that are in
good books be withdrawn. Let decent white
Southerners say to decent colored Southerners,
These concessions—or such as these—will we
for pure men and purifying measures. That
were a buying of votes without dishonor to
either side; and tens of thousands of colored
votes, both of those that money can, and that
money cannot buy, can be bought at that price.
Only let it not be fancied that even Negroes are
going to be outwitted more than once or twice
by promises that if they will concede something
now, their white fellow-citizens will concede
something to them by-and-by. Says the Rev.
Dr. Thirkield, of Atlanta, in a late allusion to
the failure of the Prohibition movement in that
city, "The Negro was recognized as a factor in
the great civil contest; he was met as a man
and a brother; promises were given him as to
his civil rights in the conduct of the city government.
Through his vote the campaign closed
in victory. Then the contact between the two
races was broken off; recognition and coöperation
in civil, moral and religious work ceased;
pledges as to his civil rights were broken. The
rum power saw its opportunity, . . . . organized
for victory, and brought again the reign of
rum." So it may always be; there is a vote that
divides but not destroys; and there is another
that solidifies but does not save.
True, to influence the colored vote men must
have mentioned are the daily spoken, written, and
printed demands of every sort of colored leader,
even of those who are accused of being influenced
by nothing except the prospect of public office
or its equivalent in cash. A full numerical
share of public offices, clerkships and contracts
is not, and never was, the ultimatum of the vast
colored vote, nor even of its colored leaders.
They certainly never got it. No party ever
promised them that all or half or one-fourth of
them should have offices or appointments, or
ever gave them all or half, if even a fourth of
the offices or appointments. But for the hostility
of the great majority of Southern white men to
an equality of public rights, no colored leader
need ever have been given an office or appointment
which he could not reasonably have been
expected to fill with credit and honor. With
genuine and coveted concessions offered to them
in the matter of civil rights, colored voters will
not be long finding leaders to whom it will be
enough to concede with sincere and practical
intent, that merely being a Negro is not an
insurmountable bar to the holding of office by
one otherwise qualified.
Let the lovers of pure government in the
South make such experiments. It can be made
counties, even States, one or two, in the South,
where the two national parties are nearly equal
in numbers. There, as elsewhere, the Negro
cares, as he should, far more about his own civil
and political rights than about who gets into
the White House. In such a region a party of
pure government ought, by reasonable and generous
concessions to a better and more equal
freedom, to gain enough colored votes to enable
it advantageously to sacrifice some very bad
white ones. Only, these concessions must be
made in the spirit and guise, not of condescension
and protection, but of civil and political
equality and fellowship, entering frankly and
fully into council with the Negro's recognized
leaders, white or colored, appealing to such as
are "out of politics," only when those who are
in politics will not listen to reason. Say what
you will of party leaders and managers, the great
Republican party itself would rather be hopelessly
outnumbered and defeated in Mississippi
or South Carolina by fair means in the interest
of free government, than to see a Republican
majority tyrannously defrauded under the pretence
of procuring or upholding pure government.
Nor do I doubt the great Democratic
party also would, in its turn, rather be so outnumbered
win victory at the price of honor.
But if southern white men will not even yet of
their own motion give this method of healing
"the nation's running sore," a fair trial, there
are still two ways by which such a trial may be
had. One is a means which no generous mind
in this nation would make other than its last
choice. I mean, of course, Federal intervention.
I earnestly protest I have learned too much
from the teachings of Washington ever to be a
partisan. On the race question I am a Republican;
on some others I am a Democrat, and on
all questions I know and am ready to avow exactly
where I stand. The southern party for
pure government first has been given the best
twelve years that ever shone on earth, in which
to make Federal intervention unnecessary, and
has so utterly failed, that it is to-day seen asking
in the United States Senate for a species of
Federal intervention by no means the safest or
best or most constitutional, to help it to remove
bodily to Africa the problem whose obvious
solution it will not allow even to be tried. I do
not favor Federal intervention for the establishment
of equal civil and political rights in any
State whatever, except as a last resort. As to
Federal elections, at least, it is a right placed
But even there the intention that it should
be never other than an unpreferred alternative is
plain.
Yet I see to-day only one alternative intervening.
Of it I shall speak in a moment. But
for this alternative, it seems to me totally incompatible
with the dignity and honor of this
nation, that, after twelve years of amiable, hopeful
waiting, it should let itself be kept indefinitely
waiting still for admission to its own simplest
rights by the plausible and eloquent doorkeepers
of a do-nothing policy. A despair that
prompts to action and deliverance is better than
any false hope, and if such a despair moves this
nation, this year or next, to the action it has
borne so much to avoid, it can point to these
door-keepers, whether they be of North or South,
and say, the blame of it and the shame of it be
on you!
The only alternative I see, a hope of whose
adoption can rightly postpone Federal intervention
any longer, is for the Democratic party of
the wide North and West to withdraw its support
from the southern policy now, as it did in
1860. Said one of the national Democratic
leaders to me a few years ago, "That is what
we have got to do. The votes we lose by it in
shall gain in the North." But I maintain the
case is better for them than this. They will gain
votes in the North; but they will no more lose
the southern white vote than they lost it when
with cannon, bayonets and sabres they forced it
back into the Union from which it had seceded.
Who will say that promptness on this point now
may not save them from another such long vacation
as procrastination cost them in 1860?
We have yet two years and a half before the
next presidential election, in 1892. Let it be
hoped and urged that before then the believers
in pure government instead of, or before, free
government will of their own choice abandon
their utterly self-condemned and futile policy, and
make at least a visible and appreciable beginning
upon that experiment of equal rights for all men
and all parties, which, in the modern world, at
least, has never failed on fair trial. Has never
failed; no, and would not fail in Hayti or San
Domingo themselves, if they would once give it
the supremacy thus far held by the alternating
military tyrannies of opposing factions each delirious
with the poison of the one One-party
idea.
During these two years and a half let it be
made yet plainer than ever before, that Federal
or any party, and that what it, with the
whole nation, most covets for every southern
State is as large, as full, as universal, and as
prosperous a self-government as can be found in
any part of this Union. And then, in all kindness,
for the South's own sake as much as for
the sake of any, in the name of the common
welfare and the nation's honor, let the word be
spoken, that if by 1892 any State in this Union
has not at least begun, with good show of completing,
the establishment of equal American
rights for all Americans, the men of this nation
who, in whatever party, believe in free government
first will strain their every nerve and sinew
to give the nation a president and a congress
that will establish it peaceably, promptly and
forever.
The day in which that is done, whether by
a southern majority's own motion or by the
Government's intervention, will be a great birthday.
It may date the birth of some momentary
and aimless strife, though this I doubt;
but it will certainly date the birth of a better
peace, a wider, richer prosperity, a happier
freedom of every citizen, and a freer, purer
government of this Union and of every State
in this Union, than this continent has ever yet
North and South. For it shall not have been
long done ere the whole South will rejoice in
the day of its doing as now it rejoices in the day
when Lincoln freed the Negro, and in the day
when Washington by spurning the offer of royal
rank and authority declared that the only road
to pure government is free government.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |