 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
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.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |