 | The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States |  |
THE NEGRO EXODUS FROM
THE GULF STATES.
BY FREDERICK DOUGLAS.
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headline: The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States
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THE negro, long deemed too indolent and stupid to discover and adopt any rational measure to secure and defend his rights as a man, may now be congratulated upon the telling contradiction which he has recently and strikingly given to this withering disparagement and reproach. He has discovered and adopted a measure which may assist very materially in the solution of some of the vital problems involved in his sudden elevation from slavery to freedom. He has shown that Mississippi can originate more than one plan, and that there is a possible plan for the oppressed as well as for the oppressor. He has not chosen to copy the example of his would-be enslavers. It is to his credit that he has steadily refused to resort to those extreme measures of repression and retaliation to which the cruel wrongs he has suffered might have tempted a less docile and forgiving race. He has not imitated the plan of the oppressed tenant, who sneaks in ambush and shoots his landlord, as in Ireland; nor the example of the Indian, who meets the invader of his hunting-ground with scalping-knife and tomahawk; he has not learned his lesson from the freed serfs of Russia, and organized assassination against tyrant princes and nobles; nor has he copied the example of his own race in Santa Domingo, who taught their French oppressors by fire and sword the danger of goading too far "the energy that slumbers in the black man's arm." On the contrary, he has adopted a simple, lawful and peaceable measure. It is emigration—the quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable. Innocent as this remedy is for the manifold ills which he has thus far borne with marvelous patience, it is none the less significant and effective.
Nothing has occurred since the abolition of slavery which has excited a deeper interest among thoughtful men in all sections of the country than has this "exodus." In the simple fact that a few thousand freedmen have deliberately laid down the shovel and the hoe, quitted the sugar and cotton-fields of Mississippi and Louisiana, and sought homes in Kansas, and that thousands more are seriously meditating upon following their example, the sober thinking minds of the South have discovered a new and startling peril to the welfare of that section of our country. Already apprehension and alarm have led to noisy and frantic efforts on the part of the South to arrest and put an end to what it considers a depleting and ruinous evil.
It cannot be denied that there is much reason for this apprehension and alarm. This exodus has revealed to Southern men the humiliating fact that the prosperity and civilization of the South are at the mercy of the despised and hated negro—that it is for him more than for any other to say what shall be the future of the late Confederate States; that within their ample borders he alone can stand between the contending powers of savage and civilized life; that the giving or withholding of his labor will bless or blast their beautiful country.
Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more important and absolutely indispensable to the existence of society than in the more southern of the United States. Machinery may continue to do—as it has done—much of the work of the North; but the work of the South requires bone, sinew and muscle of the strongest and most enduring kind for its performance. Labor in that section must know no pause. Her soil is pregnant and prolific with life and energy. All the forces of nature within her borders are wonderfully vigorous, persistent and active. Aided by an almost perpetual Summer, abundantly supplied with heat and moisture, her soil readily and rapidly covers itself with noxious weeds, dense forests and impenetrable jungles. Only a few years of non-tillage would be required to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness. From this condition, shocking for a Southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro can save her. For him, as a Southern laborer, there is no competitor or substitute. The thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human family, will be found delusive and utterly impracticable. Neither Chinaman, German, Norwegian nor Swede can drive him from the sugar and cotton-fields of Louisiana and Mississippi. They would certainly perish in the black bottoms of these States if they could be induced, which they cannot, to try the experiment.
Nature itself, in those States, comes to the rescue of the negro, fights his battles and enables him to exact conditions from those who would unfairly treat and oppress him. Besides being dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor, the climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man. He dreads it, shrinks from it, and refuses it. He shuns the burning sun of the fields, and seeks the shade of the verandas. On the contrary, the negro walks, labors and sleeps in the sunlight unharmed. The standing apology for slavery was based upon a knowledge of this fact. It was said that the world must have cotton and sugar, and that only the negro could supply this want; and that he could be induced to do it only under the "beneficent whip" of some bloodthirsty Legree. The last part of this argument has been happily disproved by the large crops of these productions since Emancipation; but the first part of it stands firm, unassailed and unassailable.
Even if climatic and other natural causes did not protect the negro from all competition in the labor-market of the South, inevitable social causes would probably effect the same result. The slave system of that section has left behind it—as in the nature of the case it must—manners, customs and conditions to which free white laboring men will be in no haste to submit themselves and their families. They do not emigrate from the free North, where labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has been whipped, chained and degraded for centuries. Naturally enough, such emigration follows the lines of latitude in which they who compose it were born. Not from South to North, but from East to West, "the Star of Empire takes its way."
Hence it is seen that the dependence of the planters, landowners and old master-class of the South upon the negro, however galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is nearly complete and perfect. There is only one mode of escape for them, and that mode they will certainly not adopt. It is to take off their own coats, cease to whittle sticks and talk politics at the cross-roads, and go themselves to work in their broad and sunny fields of cotton and sugar. An invitation to do this is about as harsh and distasteful to all their inclinations as would be an invitation to step down into their graves. With the negro, all this is different. Neither natural, artificial nor traditional causes stand in the way of the freedman to such labor in the South. Neither the heat nor the fever-demon which lurks in her tangled and cozy swamps affright him, and he stands to-day the admitted author of whatever of prosperity, beauty and civilization are now
THE NEGRO EXODUS FROM THE GULF STATES.—AN EXAMPLE OF SOUTHERN CONTENT.
[Description: Illustration of three African-Americans riding horses along a country road. A man, with a basket slung over one arm, rides one horse; a woman rides the other, with a child riding behind her. The adults are dressed well; the man wears a top hat, suit, and bow tie; the woman wears a hat and long gown. Two more African-Americans, in ragged clothing, watch from the side of the road.]This, then, is the high vantage-ground of the negro: he has labor, the South wants it, and must have it or perish. Since he is free he can now give it or withhold it, use it where he is, or take it elsewhere, as he pleases. His labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable and independent. It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes or bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its pocket. This power served him well years ago, when in the bitterest extremity of his destitution. But for it he would have perished when he dropped out of slavery. It saved him then, and it will
save him again. Emancipation came to him, surrounded by exceedingly unfriendly circumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the people among whom he lived, but against their will and a death-struggle on their part to prevent it. His chains were broken in the tempest and whirlwind of civil war. Without food, without shelter, without land, without money, and without friends, he, with his children, his sick, his aged and helpless ones, were turned loose and naked to the open sky. The announcement of his freedom was instantly followed by an order from his master to quit his old quarters and to seek bread thereafter from the hands of those who had given him his freedom. A desperate extremity was thus forced upon him at the outset of his freedom, and the world watched, with humane anxiety, to see what would become of him. His peril was imminent. Starvation and death stared him in the face, and marked him for their victim.
It will not be soon forgotten that, at the close of a five-hours' speech by the late Senator Sumner, in which he advocated with unequaled learning and eloquence the enfranchisement of the freedmen, the best argument with which he was met, in the Senate, was that legislation at that point would be utterly superfluous; that the negro was rapidly dying out, and must inevitably and speedily disappear and become extinct.
Inhuman and shocking as was this consignment of millions of human beings to extinction, the extremity of the negro, at that date, did not contradict, but favored, the prophecy. The policy of the old master class, dictated by passion, pride and revenge, was then to make the freedom of the negro a greater calamity to him, if possible, than had been his slavery. But, happily, both for the old master class and for the recently emancipated, there came then, as there will come now, the sober second thought. The old master class then found that it had made a great mistake. It had driven away the means of its own support. It had destroyed the hands and left the mouths. It had starved the negro, and starved itself. Not even to gratify its own anger and resentment could it afford to allow its fields to go uncultivated, and its tables to go unsupplied with food. Hence the freedman, less from
But now, after fourteen years of service, and fourteen years of separation from the visible presence of slavery, during which he has shown both disposition and ability to supply the labor-market of the South, and that he could do so far better as a freedman than he ever did as a slave; that more cotton and sugar can be raised by the same hands, under the inspiration of liberty and hope, than can be raised under the influence of bondage and the whip, he is again, alas! in the deepest trouble—again without a home, out under the open sky, with his wife and his little ones. He lines the sunny banks of the Mississippi, fluttering in rags and wretchedness, mournfully imploring hard-hearted steamboat captains to take him on board; while the friends of the emigration movement are diligently soliciting funds all over the North to help him away from his old home to the new Canaan of Kansas.
Several causes have been assigned for this truly desperate and pitiable spectacle. Many of these are, upon their faces, superficial, insufficient and ridiculous. Adepts in political trickery and duplicity, who will never go straight to a point when they can go crooked, explain the exodus as a cunning scheme to force a certain nomination upon the Republican party in 1890. It does not appear how such an effect is to follow such a cause. For if the negroes are to leave the South, as the advocates of exodus tell us, and settle in the North, where all their rights are protected—if this is the remedy for all the ills of the negro, the country need not trouble itself about securing a President whose chief recommendation is supposed to be his will and power to protect the negro in the South, and the nomination is thus rendered unnecessary by the success of the measure which made it necessary.
Again, we are told that greedy speculators in Kansas have adopted this plan to sell and increase the value of their lands. This cannot be true. Men of that class are usually shrewd. They do not seek to sell land to those who have no money, and they are too sharp to believe that they can increase the value of their property by inviting to its neighborhood a class of people against whom there is an intense and bitter popular prejudice. So far from speculating in the negro, and attempting to increase their wealth by promoting this stampede, the negro has been a heavy charge upon Kansas. Her benevolence and welcome to these homeless emigrants has been large, beautiful and touching.
Malignant emissaries from the North, it is said, have been circulating among the freedmen, talking to them and deluding them with promises of the great things which will be done for them if they will only go to Kansas. Plainly enough this theory fails for the want of even the show of probable motive. The North can have no motive to cripple industry at the South, or elsewhere in this country. If she were malignant enough, which she is not, she is not blind enough to her own interests to do any such thing. She sees and feels that an injury to any part of this country is an injury to the whole of it.
Again, it is said that this exodus is all the work of the defeated and disappointed demagogues, white and black, who have been hurled from place and power by the men of property and intelligence in the South. There may be some truth in this theory. Human nature is capable of resentment. It would not be strange if people who have been degraded and driven from place and power by brute force and by fraud, were to resent the outrage in this and in any way open to them.
But it is still further said that the exodus is peculiarly the work of Senator Windom. His resolution and speech in the Senate last Winter, it is said, has set this black ball in motion, and much wrath has been poured out upon that able and humane gentleman for his part in the movement. It need not be denied that there is truth in this allegation. Senator Windom's speech and resolution certainly did serve as a powerful stimulus to this emigration. Until he spoke, there was no general stampede from the cotton and sugar plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana. There can be no doubt, either, that the freedmen received erroneous notions, from some quarter, of what the Government was likely to do for them in the new country to which they were now going. They may have been told the story of "forty acres and a mule," and some of them may have believed and acted upon that story. But it is manifest that the real cause of this extraordinary exodus lies deeper down than any point touched by any of the causes thus far alleged. Political tricksters, land speculators, defeated office-seekers, Northern malignants, speeches and resolutions in the Senate or elsewhere, unaided by other causes, could not have, of themselves, set such a multitudinous exodus in motion.
The colored race is a remarkably home-loving race. It has done little in the way of voluntary colonization. It shrinks from the untried and unknown. It thinks its own locality the best in the world. Of all the galling conditions to which the negro was subjected in the days of his bondage, the one most galling to him was the liability of separation from home and friends. His love of home and his dread of change made him even partially content in slavery. He could endure the smart of the lash, could work to the utmost of his power, and be content, till the thought of being sent away from the scenes of his childhood and youth was thrust upon his heart. This was ever too much for him.
But argument is less needed upon this point than testimony. We have the story of the emigrants themselves, and if any can reveal the true cause of this exodus, they can. They have spoken, and their story is before the country. It is a sad story, disgraceful and scandalous to our age and country. Much of their testimony has been given under the solemnity of an oath.
They tell us, with great unanimity, that they are very badly treated at the South. The landowners, planters, and the old master class generally, deal unfairly with them; that having had their labor for nothing when they were slaves, these men now endeavor, by various devices, to get it for next to nothing; that, work as hard, faithfully and constantly as they may, live as plainly and as sparingly as they may, they are no better off at the end of the year than at the beginning; that they are the dupes and victims of cunning and fraud, in signing contracts which they cannot read and cannot fully understand; that they are compelled to trade at stores owned in whole or in part by their employers, and that they are paid with orders, and not with money.
They say they have to pay double the value of nearly everything they buy; that they are compelled to pay a rental of ten dollars a year for an acre of ground that will not bring thirty dollars under the hammer; that land-owners are in league to prevent land-owning by negroes; that when they work the land on shares, they barely make a living; that outside the towns and cities no provision is made for their education; and, ground down as they are, they cannot themselves employ teachers to teach their children; that they are not only the victims of fraud and cunning, but of violence and intimidation; that from their very poverty the temples of justice are not open to them; that the jury-box is virtually closed to them; that the murder of a black man by a white man is followed by no
It must be admitted, if this brief statement of complaints be only half true, that the explanation of the exodus and the justification of the persons composing it are full and ample. The complaints they make against Southern society are such as every man of common honesty and humanity must wish ill-founded; unhappily, however, there is nothing in the nature of these complaints to make them doubtful or surprising. The unjust conduct charged against the late slaveholders is eminently probable. It is an inheritance from the long exercise of irresponsible power by man over man. It is not the natural inferiority of the negro, or the color of his skin. Tyranny is the same proud and selfish thing everywhere, and with all races and colors.
What the negro is now suffering at the hands of his former masters, the white emancipated serfs of Russia are now suffering from the lords and nobles by whom they were formerly held as slaves. In form and appearance the emancipation of the latter was upon better terms than in the case of the negro. The Empire, unlike the Republic, gave her free serfs, or pretended to give them, three acres of land—a start in the world. But the selection and bestowment of this land was unhappily confided to the care of the nobles, their former lords and masters. Thus the lamb was committed to the care of the wolf, and hence the organized assassination now going on in that country; and it will be well for our Southern States if they escape a like fate. The world is slow to learn that no man can wrong his brother without doing a greater wrong to himself. Something may, however, be learned from the lessons of alarm and consternation which are now written all over Russia.
But in contemplating this exodus, it should be kept in mind that the way of an oppressed people from bondage to freedom is never smooth. There is ever in such transition much to overcome on both sides. Neither the master nor the emancipated slave can at once shake off the habits and manners of a long-established past condition. The form may be abolished, but the spirit survives and lingers about the scenes of its former life. The slave brings into the new relation much of the dependence, improvidence and servility of slavery, and the master brings much of his pride, selfishness and love of power. The influence of feudalism has not yet disappeared from Europe. Norman pride is still visible even in England, though centuries have passed since the Saxon was the slave of the Norman; and long years must elapse before all traces of slavery shall disappear from our country. Suffering and hardship made the Saxon strong; and suffering and hardship will make the Anglo-African strong and ultimately successful on the soil of his birth and in the climate to which his color and origin as well as his labor adapt him.
Very evidently there are to be asked and answered many important questions before the friends of humanity can be properly called upon to give their support to this emigration movement. A natural and primary inquiry is: What does it mean? How much ground is it meant to cover? Is the total removal of the whole five millions of colored people from the South contemplated? Or is it proposed to remove only a part? And, if only a part, why a part and not the whole? Is the protection of the rights of the many less important than the same of the few? If the few are to be removed because of the intolerable oppression which prevails in the South, why not the many also? If exodus is good for any, must it not be equally good for all? Then, if the whole five millions are to leave the South, as a doomed country—leave it as Lot left Sodom, or driven out as the Moors were driven out of Spain—then there is a question of ways and means to be considered. Has any definite estimate of the cost of this removal been made? How shall the one or two hundred millions of dollars, which such removal would require, be obtained? Shall it be appropriated by Congress, or voluntarily contributed by the public? Manifestly, with such a debt upon the nation as the war for the Union has created, Congress is not likely to be in a hurry to make any such appropriation. It would much more willingly and readily enact the necessary legislation to protect the freedmen where they are, than appropriate two hundred millions of dollars to help them away to Kansas or elsewhere in the North. The same amount of money and labor required to promote emigration, would, if applied to that end, protect the negro where he is. But suppose, as already suggested, the matter shall not be left at all to Congress, but remitted to the voluntary contributions from the people. Then a swarm of agents must be employed to circulate over the country, hat in hand, soliciting and collecting these contributions, representing to the people everywhere that the cause of the negro is lost in the South, that his only hope and deliverance from a condition of things worse than slavery is removal to Kansas, or to some country outside the Southern States. Then would such an arrangement, such an apostleship of despair be beneficial, or would it be prejudicial to the cause of the freedman? Precisely and plainly, this is a feature of the emigration movement which is open to serious objection.
Voluntary, spontaneous, self-sustained emigration on the part of the freedmen may or may not be commendable. It is a matter with which they alone have to do. The public is not called upon to say or do anything for or against it; but when the public is called upon to take sides, to declare its views, to organize emigration societies, appoint and send out agents to make speeches and collect money to help the freedmen from the South, the public may very properly hesitate. it may not wish to be responsible for the measure, or for the disheartening doctrines by which the measure is supported.
Objection may properly be made upon many grounds. It may well enough be said that the negro question is not so desperate as the advocates of exodus would have the public believe; that there is still reasonable ground of hope that the negro will ultimately have his rights as a man, and be fully protected in the South; that in several of the old slave States his citizenship and his right to vote are already respected and protected; that the same, in time, will be secured for the negro in the other States;
that the world was not the work of a day; that even in free New England all the evils generated by slavery did not disappear in a century after the abolition of the system, if, indeed, they have yet entirely disappeared.
Within the last forty years, a dark and shocking picture might be given of the persecution of the negro and his friends, even in the now pre-eminently free State of Massachusetts. It is not more than twenty years ago that Boston supplied a pistol club, if not a rifle club, to break up an abolition meeting, and that one of her most eminent citizens had to be guarded to and from his house, to escape the hand of mobocratic assassins, armed in the interest of slavery. The negro on the Sound between New York and Boston, though a respectable, educated gentleman, was not allowed abaft the wheel, and must sleep, if he slept at all, upon the naked deck, in the open air. Upon no condition, except that of a servant or slave, could he be permitted to go into a cabin. All the handicrafts of New England, too, were closed to him. The appearance of a black man in any workshop or shipyard, as a mechanic, there would have scattered the whole gang of white hands at once. The poor negro was not admitted into the factories to work, or as an apprentice to any trade. He was barber, waiter, whitewasher and wood-sawyer. All of what were considered respectable employments, by a power superior to legal enactments were denied him. But none of these things have moved the negro from New England, and it is well for him that he has remained there. In some respects, Massachusetts was then what the South is now, good missionary ground for anti-slavery writers and speakers. What has been accomplished there, may be accomplished elsewhere.
Bad as is the condition of the negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse. A few years ago he had nothing—he had not even himself. He belonged to somebody else, who could dispose of his person and his labor as he pleased. Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other, as shall best suit his own happiness. He has more. He has a standing in the supreme law of the land, in the Constitution of the United States—not to be changed or affected by any conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in the immediate or remote future. The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen, and the Fifteenth makes him a voter. With power behind him, at work for him, and which cannot be taken from him, the negro of the South may wisely bide his time. The situation at the moment is exceptional and transient. The permanent powers of the Government are all on his side. What though, for the moment, the hand of violence strikes down the negro's rights in the South, those rights will revive, survive and flourish again. They are not the only people who have been in a moment of popular passion maltreated and driven from the polls. The Irish and Dutch have
Of one thing we may be certain, and it is a thing which is destined to be made very prominent not long hence—the negro will either be counted at the polls or not counted in the basis of representation. The South must let the negro vote, or surrender its power in Congress. The chosen horn of this dilemma will finally be to let the negro vote, and vote unmolested. Let us have all the indignant and fiery declamation which the warm hearts of our youthful orators can pour out against Southern meanness, "White Leagues," "Bulldozers," and other "Dark Lantern" organizations; but let us have a little calm, clear reason as well. The latter is a safer guide than the former. On this great question we want light rather than heat, thought rather than feeling, a comprehensive view and appreciation of what the negro has already on his side, as well as of the disadvantages against which he has thus far been compelled to struggle, and still has to struggle.
Without abating one jot of our horror and indignation at the outrages committed in some parts of the Southern States against the negro, we cannot but regard the present agitation of an African exodus from the South as ill-timed, and, in some respects, hurtful. We stand to-day at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is a growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of all the States; to uphold the principles upon which rebellion was suppressed, slavery abolished, and the country saved from dismemberment and ruin.
We see and feel to-day, as we have not seen and felt before, that the time for conciliation and trusting to the honor of the late rebels and slave-holders has passed. The President of the United States himself, while still liberal, just and generous toward the South, has yet sounded a halt in that direction, and has bravely, firmly and ably asserted the constitutional authority to maintain the public peace in every State in the Union, and upon every day in the year, and has maintained this ground against all the powers of House and Senate.
We stand at the gateway of a marked and decided change in the statesmanship of our rulers. Every day brings fresh and increasing evidence that we are, and of right ought to be, a Nation; that Confederate notions of the nature and powers of our Government ought to have
National ideas are springing up all around us—the oppressor of the negro is seen to be the enemy of the peace, prosperity and honor of the country.
The attempt to nullify the national Election Laws, to starve the officers where they could not destroy the offices, to attack the national credit when they could not prevent successful resumption, to paralyze the Constitution where they could neither pervert nor set it aside, has all worked against the old slave-holding element, and in the interest of the negro. They have made it evident that the sceptre of political power must soon pass from the party of reaction, revolution, rebellion and slavery to the party of Constitution, liberty and progress. At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South; unfortunate that men are going over the country begging in the name of the poor colored men of the South, and telling the people that the Government has no power to enforce the Constitution and laws in that section, and that there is no hope for the poor negro, but to plant him in the new soil of Kansas and Nebraska.
These men do the colored people of the South a real damage. They give their enemies an advantage in the argument for their manhood and freedom. They assume the inability of the colored people of the South to take care of themselves—the country will be told of the hundreds who go to Kansas, but not of the thousands who stay in Mississippi and Louisiana.
They will be told of the destitute who require material aid, but not of the multitude who are bravely sustaining themselves where they are.
In Georgia the negroes are paying taxes upon six millions of dollars; in Louisiana upon forty or fifty millions; and upon unascertained sums elsewhere in the Southern States.
Why should a people who have made such progress in the course of a few years, now be humiliated and scandalized by exodus agents, begging money to remove them from their homes? especially at a time when every indication favors the position that the wrongs and hardships which they suffer are soon to be redressed.
Besides the objection thus stated, it is manifest that the public and noisy advocacy of a general stampede of the colored people from the South to the North is necessarily an abandonment of the great and paramount principle of protection to person and property in every State of the Union. It is an evasion of a solemn obligation and duty. The business of this nation is to protect its citizens where they are, not to transport them where they will not need protection. The best that can be said of this exodus in this respect is, that it is an attempt to climb up some other than the right way; it is an expedient, a half-way measure, and tends to weaken in the public mind a sense of the absolute right, power and duty of the Government, inasmuch as it concedes, by implication at least, that on the soil of the South the law of the land cannot command obedience, the ballot-box cannot be kept pure, peaceable elections cannot be held, the Constitution cannot be enforced, and the lives and liberties of loyal and peaceable citizens cannot be protected. It is a surrender, a premature, disheartening surrender, since it would secure freedom and free institutions by migration rather than by protection; by flight, rather than by right; by going into a strange land, rather than by staying in one's own. It leaves the whole question of equal rights on the soil of the South open, and still to be settled, with the moral influence of exodus against us, since it is a confession of the utter impracticability of equal rights and equal protection in any State where those rights may be struck down by violence.
It does not appear that the friends of freedom should spend either time or talent in furtherance of this exodus, as a desirable measure, either for the North or the South, for the blacks of the South or the whites of the North. If the people of this country cannot be protected in every State of this Union, the Government of the United States is shorn of its rightful dignity and power, the late rebellion has triumphed, the sovereignty of the nation is an empty name, and the power and authority in individual States is greater than the power and authority of the United States.
Necessity often compels men to migrate, to leave their old homes and seek new ones, to sever old ties and create new ones; but to do this the necessity should be obvious and imperative. It should be a last resort, and only adopted after carefully considering what is against the measure, as well as what is in favor of it. There are prodigal sons everywhere, who are ready to demand the portion of goods that would fall to them, and betake themselves to a strange country. Something is ever lost in the process of migration, and much is sacrificed at home for what is gained abroad. A world of wisdom is in the saying of Mr. Emerson, that "those who made Rome worth going to see, stayed there." Five moves from house to house are said to be worse than a fire. That a rolling stone gathers no moss, has passed into the world's wisdom.
The colored people of the South, just beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the foundation of family, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to the banks of the Mississippi. The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is by no means a good one. A man should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes. The time and energy expended in wandering about from place to place, if employed in making him a comfortable home where he is, will in nine cases out of ten, prove the best investment. No people ever did much for themselves or for the world without the sense and inspiration of native land, of a fixed home, of familiar neighborhood and common associations. The fact of being to the manor born has an elevating power upon the mind and heart of a man. It is a more cheerful thing to be able to say: I was born here, and know all the people, than to say: I am a stranger here, and know none of the people.
It cannot be doubted that in so far as this exodus tends to promote restlessness in the colored people of the South, to unsettle their feeling of home and to sacrifice positive advantages where they are for fancied ones in Kansas or elsewhere, it is an evil. Some have sold their little homes, their chickens, mules and pigs, at a sacrifice, to follow the exodus. Let it be understood that you are going, and you advertise the fact that your mule has lost half his value—for your staying with him makes half his value. Let the colored people of Georgia offer their six millions' worth of property for sale, with the purpose to leave Georgia, and they will not realize half its value. Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.
It may safely be asserted that, whether advocated and commended to favor on the ground that it will increase the political power of the Republican party, and thus help to make a solid North against a solid South; or upon the ground that it will increase the power and influence of the colored people as a political element, and enable them the
No people can be much respected in this country, where all are eligible to office, that cannot point to any one of their class in an honorable, responsible position. In sending a few men to Congress, the negroes of the South have done much to dispel prejudice and raise themselves in the estimation of the country and the world. By staying where they are, they may be able to send abler, better and more effective representatives of their race to Congress than it was possible for them to send at first, because of their want of education and their recent liberation from bondage. In the South the negro has at least the possibility of power, in the North he has no such possibility; and it is for him to say how well he can afford to part with this possible power.
But another argument in favor of this emigration is, that having a numerical superiority in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, and thereby possessing the ability to choose some of their own number to represent them in the State and Nation, they are necessarily brought into antagonism with the white race, and invite the very political persecution of which they complain. So they are told that the best remedy for this persecution is to surrender the right and advantage given them by the Constitution and the Government of electing men of color to office. They are not to overcome prejudice and persecution where it is, but to go where it is not; not to stand where they are, and demand the full Constitutional protection which the Government is solemnly bound to give, but to go where the protection of the Government is not needed. Plainly enough, this is an evasion of a solemn obligation and duty; an attempt to climb up some other way, a half-way measure, a makeshift, a miserable substitution of expediency for right. For an egg, it gives the negro a stone.
The dissemination of this doctrine by the agents of emigration cannot but do the cause of equal rights much harm. It lets the public mind down from the high ground of a great national duty to a miserable compromise, in which wrong surrenders nothing, and right everything. The South is not to repent its crimes and submit to the Constitution, in common with all other parts of the country, but such repentance and submission is to be conveniently made unnecessary by removing the temptation to commit violations of the law and the Constitution. Men may be pardoned for refusing their assent to a measure supported upon a principle so unsound, subversive and pernicious. The Nation should be held steadily to the high and paramount principle that allegiance and protection are inseparable, that this Government is solemnly bound to protect and defend the lives and liberties of all its citizens, of whatever race or color, or of whatever political or religious opinion, and to do this in every State and Territory within the American Union.
Then, again, is there to be no stopping-place for the negro? Suppose that, by-and-by, some "Sand-lot orator" shall arise in Kansas, as in California, and take it into his head to stir up the mob against the negro, as he stirred up the mob against the Chinese? What then? Must the negro have another exodus? Does not one exodus invite another? and in advocating one, do we not sustain the demand for another?
Plainly enough, the exodus is less harmful as a measure, than are the arguments by which it is supported. The one is the result of a feeling of outrage and despair; but the other comes of cool, selfish calculation. One is the result of honest despair, and appeals powerfully to the sympathies of men; the other is an appeal to our selfishness, which shrinks from doing right because the way is difficult.
Not only is the South the best locality for the negro, on the ground of his political powers and possibilities, but it is best for him as a field of labor. He is there, as he is nowhere else, an absolute necessity. He has a monopoly of the labor market. His labor is the only labor which can successfully offer itself for sale in that market. This fact, with a little wisdom and firmness, will enable him to sell his labor there, on terms more favorable to himself than he can elsewhere. As there are no competitors or substitutes, he can demand living prices with the certainty that the demand will be complied with. Exodus would deprive him of this advantage. It would take him from a country where the landowners and planters must have his labor, or allow their fields to go untilled and their purses unsupplied with cash, to a country where the landowners are able and proud to do their own work, and do not need to hire hands, except for limited periods, at certain seasons of the year. The effect of this will be to send the negro to the towns and cities to compete with white labor. With what result, let the past tell. They will be crowded into lanes and alleys, cellars and garrets, poorly provided with the necessaries of life, and will gradually die out.
The negro, as already intimated, is pre-eminently a Southern man. He is so both in constitution and habits, in body as well as mind. He will not only take with him to the North Southern modes of labor, but Southern modes of life. The careless and improvident habits of the South cannot be set aside in a generation. If they are adhered to in the North, in the fierce winds and snows of Kansas and Nebraska, the emigration must be large to keep up their numbers.
It would appear, therefore, that neither the laws of politics, labor nor climate favor this exodus. It does not conform to the laws of healthy emigration, which proceeds not from south to north, not from heat to cold, but from east to west, and in climates to which the emigrants are more or less adapted and accustomed.
As an assertion of power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt; as an emphatic and stinging protest against highhanded, greedy and shameless injustice to the weak and defenseless; as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors to their folly and peril, the exodus has done valuable service. Whether it has accomplished all of which it is capable in this particular direction, for the present, is a question which may well be considered. With a moderate degree of intelligent leadership among the laboring class at the South, properly handling the justice of their cause, and wisely using the exodus example, they can easily exact better terms for their labor than ever before. Exodus is medicine, not food; it is for disease, not health—it is not to be taken from choice, but necessity. In
Thus far, and to this extent, any man may be an emigrationist; and thus far, and to this extent, I certainly am an emigrationist. In no case must the negro be "bottled up" or "caged up." He must be left free, like every other American citizen, to choose his own local habitation,
and to go where he shall like. Though it may not be for his interest to leave the South, his right and power to leave it may be the best means of making it possible for him to stay there in peace.
Woe to the oppressed and destitute of all countries and races, if the rich and powerful are to decide when and where they shall go or stay! The deserving hired man gets his wages increased when he can tell his employer that he can get better wages elsewhere. And when all hope is gone from the hearts of the laboring classes of the Old World, they can come across the sea to the New. If they could not do that, their crushed hearts would break under increasing burdens. The right to emigrate is one of the most useful and precious of all rights.
But not only to the oppressed, but to the oppressor, is the free use of this right necessary. To attempt to keep the freedmen in the South—those who are spirited enough to undertake the risks and hardships of emigration—would involve great possible danger to all concerned. Ignorant and cowardly as the negro may be, he has been known to fight bravely for his liberty. He went down to Harper's Ferry with John Brown, and fought as bravely and died as nobly as any. There have been Nathaniel Turners and Denmark Veseys among them in the United States; Joseph Cinquees, Madison Washingtons and Tillmons on the sea, and Toussaint l'Ouvertures on land. Even his enemies, during the late war, had to confess that the negro is a good fighter, when once in a fight. If he runs, it is only as all men will run when they are whipped. This is no time to trifle with the rights of men. All Europe to-day is studded with the material for a wild conflagration. Every day brings us news of plots and conspiracies against oppressive power.
An able writer in the North American Review for July, himself a Nihilist, in a powerful article defends the extremest measures of his party, and shows that the treatment of the emancipated peasants by the Government and landed aristocracy of Russia is very similar to that now practiced toward the freedmen by the landed aristocracy of the South. Like causes will produce like effects the world over. It will not be wise for the Southern slave-holders and their successors to shape their policy upon the presumption that the negro's cowardice or forbearance has no limit. The fever of freedom is already in the negro's blood. He is not just what he was fourteen years ago. To forcibly dam up the stream of emigration would be a measure of extreme madness, as well as oppression. It would be exposing the heart of the oppressor to the pistol and dagger, and his home to fire and pillage. The cry of "Land and Liberty," the watchword of the Nihilistic party in Russia, has a music in it sweet to the ear of all oppressed peoples; and well shall it be for the land-holders of the South if they shall learn wisdom in time, and adopt such a course of just treatment toward the landless laborers of the South in the future as shall make this popular watchword uncontagious and unknown among them, and further stampedes to the North wholly unknown, undesirable and impossible.
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