 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
THE NEGRO QUESTION.
The Question.
I.
The matter that is made the subject of these
pages is not to-day the most prominent, but it is
the gravest, in American affairs. It is one upon
which, of late years, as we might say, much
inattention has been carefully bestowed. It has
become a dreaded question. We are not politically
indolent. We are dealing courageously with
many serious problems. We admit that no nation
has yet so shaken wrong and oppression from
its skirts that it may safely and honorably sit
down in a state of mercantile and æsthetical
pre-occupation. And yet the matter that gives
us daily the profoundest unrest goes daily by
default. The Nation's bitter experiences with
it in years past, the baffling complications that
men more cunning than wise have woven around
it, its proneness to swallow up all other questions
and the eruptions of rancor and strife that attend
every least sign of its spontaneous re-opening,
great majority, and especially to our commercial
impatience, that the public mind in large part
eagerly accepts the dangerous comfort of postponement.
What is this question? Superficially, it is
whether a certain seven millions of the people,
one-ninth of the whole, dwelling in and natives
to the Southern States of the Union, and by law
an undifferentiated part of the Nation, have or
have not the same full measure of the American
citizen's rights that they would have were they
entirely of European instead of wholly or partly
African descent. The seven millions concerning
whom the question is asked, answer as with one
voice, that they have not. Millions in the Northern
States, and thousands in the Southern, of
whites, make the same reply. While other millions
of whites, in North and South, respond not
so often with a flat contradiction as with a declaration
far more disconcerting. For the "Southerner"
speaks truly when he retorts that nowhere
in the entire Union, either North or South, are
the disadvantages of being a black, or partly
black, man confined entirely to the relations of
domestic life and private society; but that in
every part there is a portion, at least, of the community
that does not claim for, or even willingly
rights in the same far-reaching amplitude
and sacredness that they do for, or to, the white
man. The Southern white man points to thousands
of Northern and Western factories, counting-rooms,
schools, hotels, churches and guilds,
and these attest the truth of his countercharge.
Nowhere in the United States is there a whole
community from which the black man, after his
physical, mental and moral character have been
duly weighed, if they be weighed at all, is not
liable to suffer an unexplained discount for mere
color and race, which he would have to suffer
publicly in no other country of the enlightened
world. This being the fact, then, in varying degrees
according to locality, what does it prove?
Only that this cannot be the real point of issue
between North and South, and that this superficial
definition is not the true one.
Putting aside mere differences of degree, the
question is not, Are these things so? but, Ought
they so to be? To this a large majority in the
Northern States from all classes, with a small
minority of the Southern whites, also from all
ranks of life, and the whole seven million blacks,
irrespective of party leanings, answer No. On
the other hand, a large majority of the whites in
the Southern States—large as to the white population
in the Nation at large—answer a vehement "Yes;
these things should and shall be so."
But how does this small minority maintain
itself? It does so owing to the familiar fact that,
although by our scheme of government there is
a constant appeal to the majority of the whole
people, the same scheme provides, also, for the
defence of local interests against rash actions of
national majorities by a parallel counter-appeal
(constantly through its Senate and at times in
other ways) to the majority, not of the people
en masse, but of the States in their corporate
capacity. Now a very large minority in the
Northern States, whose own private declaration
would be against a difference between white
men's rights and other men's rights, nevertheless
refuse now, as they refused before the Civil War,
to answer with a plain yes or no, but maintain,
with the Southern white-rule party, that whether
these things ought so to be or not is a question that
every State must be allowed to answer for, and to,
itself alone; thus so altering the voice of the
Nation, when it speaks by States, as virtually to
nullify that negative answer which would be
given by a majority of the whole people. In the
Civil Rights bill the verdict of the States was
once given against all race discrimination in all
confining it within that true domain—of private
choice—to which the judgment of other Christian
nations consigns it. But the Civil Rights
bill, never practically effective in the communities
whose upper ranks were hostile to it, has at
last perished in the inner citadel of our government's
strong conservatism, the national Supreme
Court, and the Senate majority that passed the
bill was long ago lost by revolutions in the
Southern States. Thus, by a fundamental provision
in the National Government, intended for
the very purpose of protecting the weak from
the strong, a small national minority has for
twenty-five years been enabled to withstand the
pressure of an immense majority.
Whether this is by a right or wrong use of the
provision is part of the open question. The weak
are protected from the strong, but the still weaker
are delivered into the hands of the strong. Seven
millions of the Nation, mostly poor, ignorant and
degraded, are left for the definition and enjoyment
of rights, worth more than safety or property, to
the judgment of some ten other millions of unquestioned
intelligence and virtue, but whose
intelligence and virtue were not materially less
when, with a courage and prowess never surpassed,
they drenched their own land with their
slavery. However, be it a use or an abuse of the
Nation's scheme of order; be it right or wrong;
this is politically the stronghold of the conservative
party in the Southern States; and it is made
stronger still, steel-clad and turreted, as it were,
with the tremendous advantage of the status quo
—that established order of things which, good
or bad, until it becomes intolerable to themselves,
men will never attack with an energy equal to
that with which it is defended.
But political strength is little by itself. The
military maxim, that no defences are strong without
force enough in them to occupy their line,
is true of civil affairs. Entrenchment in the letter
of a constitution avails little with the people at
large on either side of a question, unless the line
of that entrenchment is occupied by a living
conviction of being in the right. The most
ultra-Southern position on the negro question
has an element of strength close akin to this.
To be right is the only real necessity; but where
is the community that will not make and defend
with treasure and blood the assumption that what
is necessary is right? "Southerners," in the
political sense of the term, may sometimes lack
a clear, firm-founded belief that they are right;
they may have no more than a restless confidence
at least a profound conviction that they are
moved by an imminent, unremitting, imperative
necessity. Not that this is all; hundreds of
thousands of them, incapacitated by this very
conviction from falling into sympathy with the
best modern thought, have been taught, and are
learning and teaching, not only on the hustings,
but in school, in college, at the fireside, through
the daily press, in the social circle and in church,
that in their attitude on the negro question they
are legally, morally and entirely right.
II.
Now, specifically, what are these things that
the majority of a free nation says ought not to
be, while a sectional majority triumphantly maintains
they must, will, ought to and shall be?
Give an example of an actual grievance. One
commonly esteemed the very least on the list is
this: Suppose a man, his wife and their child,
decent in person, dress and deportment, but
visibly of African or mixed blood, to take passage
on a railway train from some city of the
Eastern States, as Boston, or of the Western, as
Chicago. They will be thrown publicly into
company with many others, for an ordinary
American railway passenger coach seats fifty persons,
and they will receive the same treatment
from railway employés and passengers as if,
being otherwise just what they are, they were of
pure European descent. Only they will be much
less likely than white persons to seek, or be
offered, new acquaintanceships. Arriving in New
York, Philadelphia, or any other Northern city,
they will easily find accommodations in some
hotel of such grade as they would be likely to
choose if, exactly as they are, they were white.
They may chance upon a house that will refuse,
on account of their color, to receive them; but
such action, if made known, will be likely to
receive a wide public reprobation, and scant applause
even from the press of the Southern
States. If the travelers choose to continue their
journey through the night, they will be free to
hire and occupy berths in a sleeping-car, and to
use all its accessories—basins, towels, pillows,
etc.—without the least chance of molestation in
act or speech from any one of the passengers or
employés, let such passengers or employés be
from any State of the Union, Northern or
Southern.
But, on reaching the Southern States, the three
travelers will find themselves at every turn under
special and offensive restrictions, laid upon them
but solely and avowedly on account of the
African tincture in their blood, however slight
that may be. They may still be enjoying the
comforts of the sleeping-car, by virtue of the
ticket bought in a Northern State and not yetfully
redeemed. But they will find that while in one
Southern State they may still ride in an ordinary
first-class railway coach without hindrance, in
another they will find themselves turned away
from the door of one coach and required to limit
themselves to another, equal, it may be, to the
first in appointments, and inferior only in the
social rank of its occupants. They may protest
that in America there are no public distinctions
of social rank; but this will avail them nothing.
They may object that the passengers in the car
from which they are excluded are not of one, but
palpably of many and widely different social
ranks, and that in the car to which they are
assigned are people not of their grade only but
of all sorts; they will be told with great plainness
that there is but one kind of negro. They
will be told that they are assigned equal but separate
accommodation because the presence of a
person of wholly, or partly, African blood in the
same railway car on terms of social equality with
the white passengers is to those white passengers
father replies that it is itself the height of vulgarity
to raise the question of private social rank
among strangers in railway cars, he will be fortunate
if he is only thrust without more ado into
the "colored car," and not kicked and beaten by
two or three white men whose superior gentility
has been insulted, and he and his wife and child
put off at the next station to appeal in vain to
the courts. For in court he will find that railway
companies are even required by the laws of
the State to maintain this ignominious separation
of all who betray an African tincture, refined or
unrefined, clean or unclean, from the presence
of the white passengers in the first-class cars, be
those passengers ever so promiscuous a throng.
Such is an example of one of the least grievances
of the colored man under the present régime
in the Southern States; and so dull is the
common perception of wrongs committed at a
distance, that hundreds of thousands of intelligent,
generous, sensitive people in the Northern
States are daily confessing their inability to see
any serious hardship in such a case, if only the
"colored car" be really equal in its appointments
to the one in which only white people of every
sort are admitted; as if a permanent ignominious
distinction on account of ancestry, made in public,
public rights were not an insult or an injury
unless joined to some bodily discomfort.
Let it be plainly understood that though at least
scores of thousands are intelligent and genteel,
yet the vast majority of colored people in the
United States are neither refined in mind nor very
decent in person. Their race has never had "a
white man's chance." In America it has been
under the iron yoke of a slavery that allowed no
distinction of worth to cross race lines; and in
Africa it has had to contend for the mastery of
wild nature on a continent so unconquerable
that for thousands of years the white race has
striven in vain to subdue it, and is only now at
last strong enough to pierce it, enriched, enlightened
and equipped by the long conquest
of two others less impregnable. For all that is
known the black is "an inferior race," though
how, or how permanently inferior, remains unproved.
But the core of the colored man's
grievance is that the individual, in matters of
right that do not justly go by race, is treated,
whether man or child, without regard to person,
dress, behavior, character or aspirations, in public
and by law, as though the African tincture, much
or little, were itself stupidity, squalor and vice.
But let us see whether the grievance grows.
On passing into a third Southern State, the
three travelers, though still holders of first-class
tickets, will be required to confine themselves to
the so-called second-class car, a place never
much better than a dram shop. When the
train stops for meals, and the passengers, men,
women and children, the rough, the polished, all
throng into one common eating-room to receive
a common fare and attention, those three must
eat in the kitchen or go hungry. Nor can they
even await the coming of a train, in some railway
stations, except in a separate "colored
room." If they tarry in some Southern city
they will encounter the most harassing and
whimsical treatment of their most ordinary public
rights as American citizens. They may ride
in any street car, however crowded, seated beside,
or even crammed in among, white men or
women of any, or every, station of life; but at
the platform of the railway train, or at the
threshold of any theatre, or concert, or lecture
hall, they will be directed to the most undesirable
part of the house, and compelled to take
that or nothing. They will find that the word
"public" rarely means public to them; that
they may not even draw books from the public
libraries or use their reading rooms.
Should the harried and exasperated man be
strike, some white man, he will stand several
chances to a white man's one of being killed on
the spot. If neither killed nor half-killed, but
brought into court, he will have ninety-nine
chances in a hundred of confronting a jury from
which, either by, or else in spite of, legal provision,
men of African tincture have been wholly
or almost wholly excluded. If sent to prison he
must come under a penal system which the report
of the National Commissioner of Prisons
officially pronounces "a blot upon civilization."
He will find the population of the State prisons
often nine-tenths colored, divided into chain-gangs,
farmed out to private hands, even subleased,
and worked in the mines, quarries, in
railway construction and on turnpikes, under
cordons of Winchester rifles; veritable quarry
slaves. He will find most of the few white convicts
under this system suffering the same outrages;
but he will also find that the system itself
disappears wherever this general attitude toward
the black race disappears, and that where it and
its outrages continue, the race line in prison is
obliterated only when the criminal becomes a
negotiable commodity and it costs the lessee
money to maintain the absurd distinction. He
would find the number of colored men within
the colored population outside, as compared with
the percentages of blacks in and out of prison in
States not under this régime. There are State
prisons in which he would find the colored convicts
serving sentences whose average is nearly
twice that of the white convicts in the same
places for the same crimes. In the same or
other prisons he would find colored youths
and boys by scores, almost by hundreds, consorting
with older criminals, and under sentences
of seven, ten, twenty years, while the State Legislatures
vote down year after year the efforts of
a few courageous and humane men either to
establish reformatories for colored youth, or to
introduce the element of reform into their so-called
penitentiaries.
But suppose he commits no offence against
person or property; he will make another list of
discoveries. He will find that no select school,
under "Southern" auspices, will receive his
child. That if he sends the child to a public
school, it must be, as required by law, to a school
exclusively for colored children, even if his child
is seven times more white than colored. Though
his child be gentle, well-behaved, cleanly and
decorously dressed, and the colored school so
situated as to be naturally and properly the
he will have no more liberty than before;
he will be told again, "We know but one kind
of negro." The child's father and mother may
themselves be professional instructors; but however
highly trained; of whatever reputation for
moral and religious character; however talented
as teachers or disciplinarians; holding the diploma
of whatever college or university, Wellesley,
Vassar, Yale, Cornell; and of whatever age
or experience, they will find themselves shut out
by law from becoming teachers in any public
school for white children, whether belonging to,
and filled from, the "best neighborhood," or in,
and for, the lowest quarter of alleys and shanties.
They will presently learn that in many hundreds
of Southern school-districts where the populations
are too sparse and poor to admit of separate
schools for the two races, the children of
both are being brought up in ignorance of the
very alphabet rather than let them enjoy a common
public right under a common roof. They
will find that this separation is not really based
on any incapacity of children to distinguish between
public and private social relations; but
that the same separation is enforced among
adults; and that while every Southern State is
adequate outlay for public education, and hundreds
of thousands of colored children are growing
up in absolute illiteracy largely for lack of
teachers and school-houses, an expensive isolation
of race from race is kept up even in the
normal schools and teachers' institutes. Even
in the house of worship and the divinity school
they would find themselves pursued by the same
invidious distinctions and separations that had
followed them at every step, and would follow
and attend them still to, and in, the very almshouse
and insane asylum.
III.
And then they would make one more discovery.
They would find that not only were they
victims of bolder infractions of the most obvious
common rights of humanity than are offered to
any people elsewhere in Christendom, save only
the Chinaman in the far West, but that to make
the oppression more exasperating still, there is
not a single feature of it in any one State, though
justifiable on the plea of stern necessity, that
does not stand condemned by its absence, under
the same or yet more pronounced conditions, in
a State will utterly stultify the attitude held in
another part. In Virginia or South Carolina a
colored person of decent appearance or behavior
may sit in any first-class railway car, but
in Georgia the law forbids it, and in Kentucky
the law leaves him to the caprice of railway managements,
some of which accord and others withhold
the right. In some States he is allowed in
the jury box, in some he is kept out by the letter
of statutes, and in some by evasion of them;
while in Tennessee some counties admit him to
jury duty and others exclude him from it. In
one or two Southern cities, the teachers in colored
public schools must be white. In certain
others they must be colored; and in still others
they may be either. In Louisiana certain railway
trains and steamboats run side by side,
within a mile of one another, where in the trains
a negro or mulatto may sit where he will, and on
the boats he must confine himself to a separate
quarter called the "freedman's bureau."
The Civil Rights bill was fought for years and
finally destroyed, with the plea that it infringed
the right of common carriers and entertainers to
use their own best judgment in distributing their
passengers and guests with an equitable consideration
for the comfort of all. In fact, it only
the common comfort, humor the demand of one
crudely self-assorted private social class for an
invariable, ignominious isolation or exclusion
of another. Yet the same States and persons
who so effectually made this plea, either allow
and encourage its use as a cover for this tyrannous
inequity, or else themselves ignore their
own plea, usurp the judgment of common carriers
and entertainers, and force them by law
to make this race distribution, whether they deem
it best or not.
And yet again, all over the South there are
scattered colleges, academies and tributary grammar
schools, established and maintained at the
expense of individuals and societies in the Northern
States, for the education, at low rates of tuition
and living, of the aspiring poor, without
hindrance as to race or sex. For more than
twenty years these establishments have flourished
and been a boon to the African-American, as well
as to the almost equally noted "poor whites" of
the Southern mountain regions, sandhills and
"pauper counties," and through both these classes
to the ultra-Southern white man of the towns and
plantations—a boon the national value of which
neither he nor one in a thousand of its hundreds
of thousands of Northern supporters has an adequate
receive seven times their present pecuniary support.
These institutions have graduated some
hundreds of colored students as physicians and
lawyers. At one time lately they had more than
eight hundred divinity students, nearly all of
them colored. Their pupils of all grades aggregate
over seventeen thousand, and the sixteen
thousand colored teachers in the public schools
of the South have come almost entirely from
them. But now in these institutions there is a
complete ignoring of those race distinctions in
the enjoyment of common public rights so religiously
enforced on every side beyond their borders;
and yet none of those unnamable disasters
have come to or from them which the advocates
of these onerous public distinctions and separations
predict and dread. On scores of Southern
hilltops these schools stand out almost totally
without companions or competitors in their peculiar
field, so many refutations, visible and complete,
of the idea that any interest requires the
colored American citizen to be limited in any of
the civil rights that would be his without question
if the same man were white. Virtually, the
whole guild of educators in the Southern States,
from once regarding these institutions with unqualified
condemnation and enmity, are now
cases, their converts. So widely have the larger
colleges demonstrated their unique beneficence
that in some cases Southern State Governments,
actively hostile to the privileges of civil liberty
they teach and apply, are making small annual appropriations
in contribution toward their support.
So bristling with inconsistencies, good and
bad, would our three travelers find this tyrannous
and utterly unrepublican régime. Nowhere
else in enlightened lands and in this day do so
many millions see their own fellow-citizens so
play football with their simplest public rights; for
the larger part of the Southern white people do
with these laws of their own making what they
please, keeping or breaking them as convenient.
But their discoveries would still go on. They
would hear these oppressions justified by Southern
white people of the highest standing, and
—more's the shame—by Northern tourists in
the South, on the ground that the people upon
whom they are laid are a dull, vicious, unclean
race, contact with which would be physically,
intellectually and morally offensive and mischievous
to a higher race. And when they
might ask why the lines of limited rights are not
drawn around the conspicuously dull, vicious
and unclean of both races for the protection of
to face upon the amazing assumption that the
lowest white man is somehow a little too good
for even so much contact with the highest black
as may be necessary for a common enjoyment of
public rights; and, therefore, that no excellence,
moral, mental or physical, inborn or attained,
can buy for a "man of color" from these separationists
any distinction between the restrictions
of his civil liberty and those of the stupidest
and squalidest of his race, or bring him one step
nearer to the enjoyment of the rights of a white
man; or, if at all, then only as a matter of the
white man's voluntary condescension and with
the right disguised as a personal privilege. They
would find that the race line is not a line of
physical, moral or intellectual excellence at all.
Stranger yet, they would learn that no proportion
of white men's blood in their own veins,
unless it washes out the very memory of their
African tincture, can get them abatement of those
deprivations decreed for a dull, vicious and unclean
race, but that—men, women and children
alike—hundreds and thousands of mixed race
are thus daily and publicly punished by their
brothers for the sins of their fathers. They
would find the race line not a race line at all.
They would find that the mere contact of race
any and every sort of contact on an equal footing.
They would find that what no money, no
fame, no personal excellence and no fractional
preponderance of European blood can buy, can
nevertheless be bought instantly and without
one of these things by the simple surrender of
the attitude of public equality. They would
find that the entire essence of the offence, any
and everywhere where the race line is insisted
on, is the apparition of the colored man or
woman as his or her own master; that masterhood
is all that all this tyranny is intended to preserve,
and that the moment the relation of master
and servant is visibly established between race
and race there is the hush of peace.
"What is that negro—what is that mulattress—doing
in here?" asks one private individual
of another in some public place, and the
other replies:—
"That's nothing; he is the servant of that
white man just behind him; she is the nurse of
those children in front of her."
"Oh, all right." And the "cordial relation"
is restored. Such conversation, or equivalent
soliloquy, occurs in the South a hundred times
a day.
The surrender of this one point by the colored
amity; an amity clouded only by a slight but
distinct and constant air and tone of command
on the one part, a very gross and imperfect
attitude of deference on the other, and the perpetual
unrest that always accompanies forcible
possession of anything. But since no people
ever compelled another to pay too much for
peace without somehow paying too much for it
themselves, the master-caste tolerates, with unsurpassed
supineness and unconsciousness, a
more indolent, inefficient, slovenly, unclean,
untrustworthy, ill-mannered, noisy, disrespectful,
disputatious, and yet servile domestic and
public menial service than is tolerated by any
other enlightened people. Such is but one of
the smallest of many payments which an intelligent
and refined community has to make for
maintaining the lines of master and servant-hood
on caste instead of on individual ambition and
capacity, and for the forcible equalization of millions
of unequal individuals under one common
public disdain. Other and greater payments and
losses there are, moral, political, industrial, commercial,
as we shall see when we turn, as now
we must, to the other half of this task, and
answer the two impatient questions that jostle
each other for precedence as they spring from
of affairs.
The two questions are these: If the case is so
plain, then, in the first place, how can the millions
of intelligent and virtuous white people of
the South make such a political, not to say such
a moral, mistake? And, in the second place,
how can the overwhelming millions of the North,
after spending the frightful costs they spent in
the war of '61-'65, tolerate this emasculation of
the American freedom which that war is supposed
to have secured to all alike?
The Answer.
I.
As to the Southern people the answer is that,
although the Southern master-class now cordially
and unanimously admit the folly of slaveholding,
yet the fundamental article of political
faith on which slavery rested has not been displaced.
As to the people of the North the
answer is simpler still: the Union is saved.
The Northern cause in our civil war was not
primarily the abolition of slavery, although
many a Northern soldier and captain fought
while this remained. The Southern cause was
not merely for disunion, though many a Southern
soldier and captain would never have taken
up the sword to defend slave-holding stripped of
the disguise of State sovereignty. The Northern
cause was preëminently the National unity.
Emancipation—the emancipation of the negroes
—was not what the North fought for, but only
what it fought with. The right to secede was
not what the South fought for, but only what it
fought with. The great majority of the Southern
white people loved the Union, and consented to
its destruction only when there seemed to be no
other way to save slavery; the great bulk of the
North consented to destroy slavery only when
there seemed no other way to save the Union.
To put in peril the Union on one side and
slavery on the other was enough, when nothing
else was enough, to drench one of the greatest
and happiest lands on earth with the blood of
hundreds of thousands of her own children.
Now, what thing of supreme value rested on
this Union, and what on this slavery, that they
should have been defended at such cost? There
rested on, or more truly there underlay, each a
fundamental principle, conceived to be absolutely
essential to the safety, order, peace, fortune and
antagonistic.
They were more than antagonistic; they were
antipodal and irreconcilable. No people that
hold either of these ideas as cardinal in their
political creed will ever allow the other to be
forced upon them from without so long as blood
and lives will buy deliverance. Both were
brought from the mother country when America
was originally colonized, and both have their
advocates in greater or less number in the Northern
States, in the Southern, and wherever there
is any freedom of thought and speech.
The common subject of the two is the great
lower mass of society. The leading thought of
the one is that mass's elevation, of the other its
subjugation. The one declares the only permanent
safety of public society, and its highest development,
to require the constant elevation of
the lower, and thus of the whole mass, by the
free self-government of all under one common
code of equal civil rights. It came from England,
but it was practically, successfully, beneficently
applied on a national scale first in the
United States, and Americans claim the right to
call it, and it preëminently, the American idea,
promulgated and established, not by Northerners
or Southerners, one greatly more than another,
Nation born of the idea. The other principle
declares public safety and highest development
to require the subjugation of the lower mass
under the arbitrary protective supremacy of an
untitled but hereditary privileged class, a civil
caste. Not, as it is commonly miscalled, an aristocracy,
for within one race it takes in all ranks
of society; not an aristocracy, for an aristocracy
exists, presumably, at least, with the wide consent
of all classes, and men in any rank of life
may have some hope to attain to it by extraordinary
merit and service; but a caste; not the
embodiment of a modern European idea, but the
resuscitation of an ancient Asiatic one.
That one of these irreconcilable ideas should
by-and-by become all-dominant in the formation
of public society in one region, and its opposite
in the other region, is due to original differences
in the conditions under which the colonies were
settled. In the South, the corner-stone of the
social structure was made the plantation idea—
wide lands, an accomplished few, and their rapid
aggrandizement by the fostering oversight and
employment of an unskilled many. In the
North, it was the village and town idea—the
notion of farm and factory, skilled labor, an
intelligent many, and ultimate wealth through an
more natural than for African slavery, once introduced,
to flourish and spread under the one
idea, and languish and die under the other. It
is high time to be done saying that the South
retained slavery and the North renounced it
merely because to the one it was, and to the
other it was not, lucrative. It was inevitable that
the most conspicuous feature of one civilization
should become the public schoolhouse, and of
the other the slave yard. Who could wish to
raise the equally idle and offensive question of
praise and blame? When Northerners came
South by thousands and made their dwelling
there, ninety-nine hundredths of them fell into
our Southern error up to the eyes, and there is
nothing to prove that had the plantation idea, to
the exclusion of the village idea, been planted
in all the colonies, we should not by this time
have had a West Indian civilization from Florida
to Oregon. But it was not to be so. Wherever
the farm village became the germinal unit of
social organization, there was developed in its
most comprehensive integrity, that American
idea of our Northern and Southern fathers, the
representative self-government of the whole
people by the constant free consent of all to the
frequently reconsidered choice of the majority.
Such a scheme can be safe only when it includes
inherently the continual and diligent elevation
of that lower mass which human society
everywhere is constantly precipitating. But
slave-holding on any large scale could not make
even a show of public safety without the continual
and diligent debasement of its enslaved
lower millions. Wherever it prevailed it was
bound by the natural necessities of its own existence
to undermine and corrode the National
scheme. It mistaught the new generations of
the white South that the slave-holding fathers of
the Republic were approvers and advocates of
that sad practice, which by their true histories
we know they would gladly have destroyed. It
mistaught us to construe the right of a uniform
government of all by all, not as a common and
inalienable right of man, but as a privilege that
became a right only by a people's merit, and
which our forefathers bought with the blood of
the Revolution in 1776-'83, and which our slaves
did not and should not be allowed to acquire.
It mistaught us to seek prosperity in the concentration
instead of the diffusion of wealth, to
seek public safety in a state of siege rather than
in a state of peace; it gave us subjects instead
of fellow-citizens, and falsely threatened us with
the utter shipwreck of public and private society
millions to whom we had forbidden patriotism.
Thus, it could not help but misteach us also to
subordinate to its preservation the maintenance
of a National union with those Northern communities
to whose whole scheme of order slaveholding
was intolerable, and to rise at length
against the will of the majority and dissolve the
Union when that majority refused to give slaveholding
the National sanction.
The other system taught the inherent right of
all human society to self-government. It taught
the impersonal civil equality of all. It admitted
that the private, personal inequality of individuals
is inevitable, necessary, right and good; but condemned
its misuse to set up arbitrary public
inequalities. It declared public equality to be, on
the one hand, the only true and adequate counterpoise
against private inequalities, and, on the
other, the best protector and promotor of just
private inequalities against unjust. It held that
virtue, intelligence and wealth are their own
sufficient advantage, and need for self-protection
no arbitrary civil preponderance; that their
powers of self-protection are never inadequate
save when by forgetting equity they mass and
exasperate ignorance, vice and poverty against
them. It insisted that there is no safe protection
as much civil equipment for self-protection as
property needs; that the right and liberty to
acquire intelligence, virtue and wealth are just
as precious as the right and liberty to maintain
them, and need quite as much self-protection;
that the secret of public order and highest prosperity
is the common and equal right of all lawfully
to acquire as well as retain every equitable
means of self-aggrandizement, and that this right
is assured to all only through the consent of all
to the choice of the majority frequently appealed
to without respect of persons. And last, it truly
taught that a government founded on these principles
and holding them essential to public peace
and safety might comfortably bear the proximity
of alien neighbors, whose ideas of right and
order were not implacably hostile; but that it
had no power to abide unless it could put down
any internal mutiny against that choice of the
majority which was, as it were, the Nation's first
commandment.
The war was fought and the Union saved.
Fought as it was, on the issue of the consent of
all to the choice of the majority, the conviction
forced its way that the strife would never end in
peace until the liberty of self-government was
guaranteed to the entire people, and slavery, as
destroyed. Hence, first, emancipation,
and then, enfranchisement. And now even the
Union saved is not the full measure of the Nation's
triumphs; but, saved once by arms, it
seems at length to have achieved a better and
fuller salvation still; for the people of the once
seceded States, with a sincerity that no generous
mind can question, have returned to their old
love of this saved Union, and the great North,
from East to utmost West, full of elation, and
feeling what one may call the onus of the winning
side, cries "Enough!" and asks no more.
II.
Thus stands the matter to-day. Old foes are
clasping hands on fields where once they met in
battle, and touching glasses across the banqueting
board, pledging long life to the Union and prosperity
to the South, but at every feast there is
one empty seat.
Why should one seat be ever empty, and every
guest afraid to look that way? Because the
Southern white man swears upon his father's
sword that none but a ghost shall ever sit there.
And a ghost is there; the ghost of that old
heresy of public safety by the mass's subjugation.
This is what the Northern people cannot understand.
man an enigma to all the world beside, if not
also to himself. To-day the pride with which he
boasts himself a citizen of the United States and
the sincerity with which he declares for free government
as the only safe government cannot be
doubted; to-morrow comes an explosion, followed
by such a misinterpretation of what free
government requires and forbids that it is hard
to identify him with the nineteenth century.
Emancipation destroyed domestic bondage; enfranchisement,
as nearly as its mere decree can,
has abolished public servitude; how, then, does
this old un-American, undemocratic idea of subjugation,
which our British mother country and
Europe as well are so fast repudiating—how
does it remain? Was it not founded in these
two forms of slavery? The mistake lies just
there: They were founded in it, and removing
them has not removed it.
It has always been hard for the North to
understand the alacrity with which the ex-slaveholder
learned to condemn as a moral and economic
error that slavery in defense of which he
endured four years of desolating war. But it
was genuine, and here is the explanation: He
believed personal enslavement essential to subjugation.
Emancipation at one stroke proved it
for the whole Nation there was already before
emancipation came, a defined status, a peculiar
niche, waiting for freed negroes. They were
nothing new. Nor was it new to lose personal
ownership in one's slave. When, under emancipation,
no one else could own him, we quickly
saw he was not lost at all. There he stood, beggar
to us for room for the sole of his foot, the
land and all its appliances ours, and he, by the
stress of his daily needs, captive to the land.
The moment he fell to work of his own free will,
we saw that emancipation was even more ours
than his; public order stood fast, our homes
were safe, our firesides uninvaded; he still served,
we still ruled; all need of holding him in private
bondage was disproved, and when the notion of
necessity vanished the notion of right vanished
with it. Emancipation had destroyed private, but
it had not disturbed public subjugation. The
ex-slave was not a free man; he was only a free
negro.
Then the winners of the war saw that the
great issue which had jeopardized the Union was
not settled. The Government's foundation principle
was not reëstablished, and could not be
while millions of the country's population were
without a voice as to who should rule, who
we have seen, the absolute civil equality of privately
and socially unequal men was not the
whole American idea. It was counterbalanced
by an enlarged application of the same principle
in the absolute equality of unequal States in the
Federal Union, one of the greatest willing concessions
ever made by stronger political bodies
to weaker ones in the history of government.
Now manifestly this great concession of equality
among the unequal States becomes inordinate,
unjust and dangerous when millions of the people
in one geographical section, native to the
soil, of native parentage, having ties of interest
and sympathy with no other land, are arbitrarily
denied that political equality within the States
which obtains elsewhere throughout the Union.
This would make us two countries. But we cannot
be two merely federated countries without
changing our whole plan of government; and
we cannot be one without a common foundation.
Hence the freedman's enfranchisement. It was
given him not only because enfranchisement was
his only true emancipation, but also because it
was, and is, impossible to withhold it and carry
on American government on American ground
principles, Neither the Nation's honor nor its
safety could allow the restoration of revolted
divided by lines of status abhorrent to the whole
National structure.
Northern men often ask perplexedly if the
freedman's enfranchisement was not, as to the
South, premature and inexpedient; while Southern
men as often call it the one vindictive act of
the conqueror, as foolish as it was cruel. It was
cruel. Not by intention, and, it may be, unavoidably,
but certainly it was not cruel for its haste,
but for its tardiness. Had enfranchisement come
into effect, as emancipation did, while the smoke
of the war's last shot was still in the air, when
force still ruled unquestioned, and civil order
and system had not yet superseded martial law,
the agonies, the shame and the incalculable
losses of the Reconstruction period that followed
might have been spared the South and the
Nation. Instead there came two unlucky postponements,
the slow doling out of re-enfranchisement
to the best intelligence of Southern white
society and the delay of the freedman's enfranchisement—his
civil emancipation—until the
"Old South," instead of reorganizing public
society in harmony with the National idea,
largely returned to its entrenchments in the
notion of exclusive white rule. Then, too late
to avert a new strife, and as little more than a
citizenship, and the experiment begun of trying
to establish a form of public order, wherein,
under a political equality accorded by all citizens,
to all citizens, new and old, intelligence and virtue
would be so free to combine, and ignorance
and vice feel so free to divide, as to insure the
majority's free choice of rulers of at least enough
intelligence and virtue to secure safety, order
and progress. This experience, the North believed,
would succeed, and since this was the
organic embodiment of the American idea for
which it had just shed seas of blood, it stands to
reason the North would not have allowed it to
fail. But the old South, still bleeding from her
thousand wounds, but as brave as when she fired
her first gun, believed not only that the experiment
would fail, but also that it was dangerous
and dishonorable. And to-day, both in North
and South, a widespread impression prevails that
this is the experiment which was made and did
in fact fail. Whereas it is just what the Old
South never allowed to be tried.
This is the whole secret of the Negro Question's
vital force to-day. And yet the struggle
in the Southern States has never been by the
blacks for and by the whites against a black
supremacy, but only for and against an arbitrary
this day, in all the freedman's intellectual crudity,
he has held fast to the one true, National doctrine
of the absence of privilege and the rule of
all by all, through the common and steadfast
consent of all to the free and frequent choice of
the majority. He has never rejected white men's
political fellowship or leadership because it was
white, but only and always when it was unsound
in this doctrine. His party has never been a
purely black party in fact or principle. The
"solid black vote" is only by outside pressure
solidified about a principle of American liberty,
which is itself against solidity and destroys the
political solidity of classes wherever it has free
play. But the "solid white vote"—which is not
solid by including all whites, but because no
colored man can truly enter its ranks, much less
its councils, without accepting an emasculated
emancipation—the solid white vote is solid, not
by outside pressure but by inherent principle.
Solid twice over; first, in each State, from sincere
motives of slef-preservation, solid in keeping the
old servile class, by arbitrary classification, servile;
and then solid again by a tacit league of
Southern States around the assumed right of
each State separately to postpone a true and complete
emancipation as long as the fear remains
more—to all alike, the freedman would himself
usurp the arbitrary domination now held over
him and plunder and destroy society.
So, then, the Southern question at its root is
simply whether there is any real ground sufficient
to justify this fear and the attitude taken
against it. Only remove this fear, which rests
on a majority of the whole white South despite
all its splendid, well-proved courage, and the
question of right, in law and in morals, will vanish
along with the notion of necessity.
Whoever attempts to remove this apprehension
must meet it in two forms: First, fear of a
hopeless wreck of public government by a complete
supremacy of the lower mass; and second,
fear of a yet more dreadful wreck of private
society in a deluge of social equality.
III.
Now, as to public government, the freedman,
whatever may be said of his mistakes, has never
shown an intentional preference for anarchy.
Had he such a bent he would have betrayed
something of it when our civil war offered as
wide an opportunity for its indulgence as any
millions in bondage ever had. He has shown at
least as prompt a choice for peace and order as
said to be his in inordinate degree are only such
as always go with degradation, and especially
with a degraded status; and when, in Reconstruction
years, he held power to make and unmake
laws, amid all his degradation, all the
efforts to confine him still to an arbitrary servile
status, and all his vicious special legislation, he
never removed the penalties from anything that
the world at large calls a crime. Neither did he
ever show any serious disposition to establish
race rule. The whole spirit of his emancipation
and enfranchisement, and his whole struggle,
was, and is, to put race rule of all sorts under
foot, and set up the common rule of all. The
fear of anarchy in the Southern States, then, is
only that perfectly natural and largely excusable
fear that besets the upper ranks of society everywhere,
and often successfully tempts them to
commit inequitable usurpations; and yet a fear
of which no amount of power or privilege ever
relieves them—the fear that the stupid, the destitute
and the vicious will combine against them
and rule by sheer weight of numbers.
Majority rule is an unfortunate term, in that it
falsely implies this very thing; whereas its mission
in human affairs is to remove precisely this
danger. In fact a minority always rules. At least
for is the power to choose by what, and what
kind of, a minority it shall be ruled. What that
choosing majority shall consist of, and hence the
wisdom and public safety of its choice, will
depend mainly upon the attitude of those who
hold, against the power of mere numbers, the
far greater powers of intelligence, of virtue and
of wealth. If these claim, by virtue of their
own self-estimate, an arbitrary right to rule and
say who shall rule, the lower elements of society
will be bound together by a just sense of grievance
and a well-grounded reciprocation of distrust;
the forced rule will continue only till it
can be overturned, and while it lasts will be
attended by largely uncounted but enormous
losses, moral and material, to all ranks of society.
But if the wise, the upright, the wealthy, command
the courage of our American fathers to
claim for all men a common political equality,
without rank, station or privilege, and give their
full and free adherence to government by the consent
of all to the rule of a minority empowered by
the choice of the majority frequently appealed to
without respect of persons, then ignorance, destitution
and vice will not combine to make the
choosing majority. They cannot. They carry
in themselves the very principle of disintegration.
and sore grievance, they have no lasting powers
of cohesion. The minority always may rule.
It need never rule by force if it will rule by
equity. This is the faith of our fathers of the
Revolution, and no community in America that
has built squarely and only upon it has found it
unwise or unsafe.
This is asserted with all the terrible misrule
of Reconstruction days in full remembrance.
For, first be it said again, that sad history came
not by a reign of equal rights and majority rule,
but through an attempt to establish them while
the greater part of the wealth and intelligence of
the region involved held out sincerely, steadfastly
and desperately against them, and for the
preservation of unequal privileges and class
domination. The Reconstruction party, even
with all its taxing, stealing and defrauding, and
with the upper ranks of society at war as fiercely
against its best principles as against its bad practices,
planted the whole South with public schools
for the poor and illiterate of both races, welcomed
and cherished the missionaries of higher education,
and, when it fell, left them still both systems,
with the master-class converted to a belief in
their use and necessity. The history of Reconstruction
dispassionately viewed, is a final, triumphant
to make it safe and good, in the South as elsewhere,
is consent to it and participation in it by
the law-abiding, intelligent portions of the people,
with one common freedom, in and between high
life and low, to combine, in civil matters, against
ignorance and vice, in high life and low, across,
yet without disturbing, the lines of race or any
other line of private rank or predilection.
There are hundreds of thousands in the Southern
States who, denying this, would promptly
concede it all in theory and in practice, but for
the second form of their fear: the belief that
there would result a confusion of the races in
private society, followed by intellectual and moral
debasement and by a mongrel posterity. Unless
this can be shown to be an empty fear, our
Southern problem cannot be solved.
IV.
The mere ambiguity of a term here has cost
much loss. The double meaning of the words
"social" and "society" seems to have been a real
drawback on the progress of political ideas among
the white people of the South. The clear and
definite term, civil equality, they have made
synonymous with the very vague and indefinite
term, social equality, and then turned and totally
society. If the idea of civil equality had rightly
any such application, their horror would certainly
be just. To a forced private social equality the
rest of the world has the same aversion, but it
knows and feels that such a thing is as impossible
in fact as it is monstrous in thought. Americans,
in general, know by a century's experience, that
civil equality makes no such proposal, bears no
such results. They know that public society—
civil society—comprises one distinct group of
mutual relations, and private society entirely
another, and that it is simply and only evil to
confuse the two. They see that public society
comprises all those relations that are impersonal,
unselective, and in which all men, of whatever
personal inequality, should stand equal. They
recognize that private society is its opposite
hemisphere; that it is personal, selective, assortive,
ignores civil equality without violating it,
and forms itself entirely upon mutual private
preferences and affinities. They agree that civil
status has of right no special value in private
society, and that their private social status has
rightly no special value in their public social—
i. e., their merely civil—relations. Even the
Southern freedman is perfectly clear on these
points; and Northern minds are often puzzled to
almost alone, should be beset by a confusion of
ideas that costs them all the tremendous differences,
spiritual and material, between a state of
truce and a state of peace.
But the matter has a very natural explanation.
Slavery was both public and private, domestic as
well as civil. By the plantation system the
members of the master-class were almost constantly
brought into closer contact with slaves
than with their social equals. The defensive
line of private society in its upper ranks was an
attenuated one; hence there was a constant,
well-grounded fear that social confusion—for we
may cast aside the term "social equality" as preposterous
— that social confusion would be
wrought by the powerful temptation of close
and continual contact between two classes—the
upper powerful and bold, the under helpless and
sensual, and neither one socially responsible to the
other, either publicly or privately. It had already
brought about the utter confusion of race and
corruption of society in the West Indies and in
Mexico, and the only escape from a similar fate
seemed to our Southern master-class to be to
annihilate and forget the boundaries between
public right and private choice, and treat the
appearance anywhere of any one visibly of
assault upon the purity of private society, to be
repelled on the instant, without question of law
or authority, as one would fight fire. Now,
under slavery, though confessedly inadequate,
this was after all the only way; and all that the
whites in the Southern States have overlooked
is that the conditions are changed, and that this
policy has become unspeakably worse than useless.
Dissimilar races are not inclined to mix
spontaneously. The common enjoyment of equal
civil rights never mixed two such races; it has
always been some oppressive distinction between
them that, by holding out temptations to vice
instead of rewards to virtue, has done it; and
because slavery is the foulest of oppressions it
makes the mixture of races in morally foulest
form. Race fusion is not essential to National
unity; such unity requires only civil and political,
not private social, homogeneity. The contact of
superior and inferior is not of necessity degrading;
it is the kind of contact that degrades or
elevates; and public equality — equal public
rights, common public liberty, equal mutual
responsibility—this is the great essential to beneficent
contact across the lines of physical, intellectual
and moral difference, and the greatest
safeguard of private society that human law or
custom can provide.
V.
Thus we see that, so far from a complete emancipation
of the freedman bringing those results
in the Southern States which the white people
there so justly abhor, but so needlessly fear, it is
the only safe and effectual preventive of those
results, and final cure of a state of inflammation
which nothing but the remaining vestiges of an
incompletely abolished slavery perpetuates. The
abolition of the present stage of siege rests with
the Southern white man. He can abolish it, if
he will, with safety and at once. The results
will not be the return of Reconstruction days,
nor the incoming of any sort of black rule, nor
the supremacy of the lower mass—either white,
black or mixed; nor the confusion of ranks and
races in private society; nor the thronging of
black children into white public schools, which
never happened even in the worst Reconstruction
days; nor any attendance at all of colored
children in white schools or of white in colored,
save where exclusion would work needless hardship;
nor any new necessity to teach children—
what they already know so well—that the public
school relation is not a private social relation;
nor any greater or less necessity for parents to
oversee their children's choice of companions in
playmating of white and colored children
as there was in the days of slavery; nor any
new obstruction of civil or criminal justice; nor
any need of submitting to any sort of offensive
contact from a colored person, that it would be
right to resent if he were white. But seven dark
American-born millions would find themselves
freed from their constant liability to public, legalized
indignity. They would find themselves, for
the first time in their history, holding a patent,
with the seal of public approval, for all the aspirations
of citizenship and all the public rewards
of virtue and intelligence. Not merely would
their million voters find themselves admitted to,
and faithfully counted at, the polls—whether
they are already or not is not here discussed—
but they would find themselves, as never before,
at liberty to choose between political parties.
These are some of the good—and there need be
no ill—changes that will come whenever a majority
of the Southern whites are willing to vote
for them.
There is a vague hope, much commoner in
the North than in the South, that somehow, if
everybody will sit still, "time" will bring these
changes. A large mercantile element, especially,
would have the South "let politics alone." It is
politics alone is doomed. There are things that
mere time can do, but only vigorous agitation
can be trusted to change the fundamental convictions
on which a people has built society. Time
may do it at last, but it is likely to make bloody
work of it. For either foundation idea on which
society may build must, if let alone, multiply
upon itself. The elevation idea brings safety,
and safety constantly commends and intensifies
itself and the elevation idea. The subjugation
idea brings danger, and the sense of danger constantly
intensifies the subjugation idea. Time
may be counted on for such lighter things as the
removal of animosities and suspicions, and this
in our Nation's case it has done. Neither North
nor South now holds, or suspects the other of
holding, any grudge for the late war. But trusting
time to do more than this is but trusting to
luck, and trusting to luck is a crime.
What is luck doing? Here is the exclusive
white party in the Southern States calling itself,
and itself only, "The South," praying the Nation
to hold off, not merely its interference, but its
counsel—even its notice—while it, not removes,
but refines, polishes, decorates and disguises to
its own and the Nation's eyes, this corner-stone
of all its own and the South's, the whole South's
"understand the negro," when, in fact, itself has
had to correct more, and more radical mistakes
about the negro since the war than all the Nation
beside; failing still, more than twenty years since
Reconstruction began and more than ten since
its era closed, to offer any definition of the freedman's
needs and desires which he can accept;
making daily statements of his preferences which
the one hundred newspapers published for his
patronage, and by himself, daily and unanimously
repudiate; trying to settle affairs on the one only
false principle of public social order that keeps
them unsettled; proposing to settle upon a sine
qua non that shuts out of its councils the whole
opposite side of the only matter in question;
and holding out for a settlement which, whether
effected or not, can but perpetuate a disturbance
of inter-state equality fatal to the Nation's peace
—a settlement which is no more than a refusal
to settle at all.
Meanwhile, over a million American citizens,
with their wives and children, suffer a suspension
of their full citizenship, and are virtually subjects
and not citizens, peasants instead of freemen.
They cannot seize their rights by force, and the
Nation would never allow it if they could. But
they are learning one of the worst lessons class
pre-occupation in their rights as a class, and
inattention to the general affairs of their communities,
their States and the Nation. Meanwhile,
too, the present one-sided effort at settlement
by subjugation is not only debasing to the
under mass, but corrupting to the upper. For
it teaches these to set aside questions of right
and wrong for questions of expediency; to wink
at and at times to defend and turn to account
evasions, even bold infractions, of their own laws,
when done to preserve arbitrary class domination;
to vote confessedly for bad men and measures
as against better, rather than jeopardize the
white man's solid party and exclusive power; to
regard virtue and intelligence, vice and ignorance,
as going by race, and to extenuate and
let go unprosecuted the most frightful crimes
against the under class, lest that class, being
avenged, should gather a boldness inconsistent
with its arbitrarily fixed status. Such results as
these are contrary to our own and to all good
government.
VI.
There is now going on in several parts of the
South a remarkable development of material
wealth. Mills, mines, furnaces, quarries, railways
are multiplying rapidly. The eye that cannot
dull indeed. But many an eye, in North and
South, and to the South's loss, is crediting it
with values that it has not. To many the "New
South" we long for means only this industrial
and commercial expansion, and our eager mercantile
spirit forgets that even for making a
people rich in goods a civil order on sound
foundations is of greater value than coal or
metals, or spindles and looms. May the South
grow rich! But every wise friend of the South
will wish, besides, to see wealth built upon public
provisions for securing through it that general
beneficence, without which it is not really
wealth. He would not wish those American
States a wealth like that which once was Spain's.
He would not wish to see their society more
diligent for those conditions that concentrate
wealth than for those that disseminate it. Yet
he must see it. That is the situation, despite
the assurances of a host of well-meaning flatterers
that a New South is laying the foundations of a
permanent prosperity. They cannot be laid on
the old plantation idea, and much of that which
is loosely called the New South to-day is farthest
from it—it is only the Old South readapting the
old plantation idea to a peasant labor and mineral
products. Said a mine owner of the far
till they get rid of that idea." A lasting
prosperity cannot be hoped for without a disseminated
wealth, and public social conditions
to keep it from congestion. But this dissemination
cannot be got save by a disseminated intelligence,
nor intelligence be disseminated without
a disseminated education, nor this be brought to
any high value, without liberty, responsibility,
private inequality, public equality, self-regard,
virtue, aspirations and their rewards.
Many ask if this new material development of
the South will not naturally be followed by adequate
public provisions for this dissemination by-and-by.
There is but one safe answer: That it
has never so happened in America. From our
furthest East to our furthest West, whenever a
community has established social order in the
idea of the elevation of the masses, it has planned,
not for education and liberty to follow from
wealth and intelligence, but for wealth and intelligence
to follow from education and liberty; and
the community whose intelligent few do not
make the mass's elevation by public education
and equal public liberty the corner-stone of a
projected wealth, is not more likely to provide it
after wealth is achieved and mostly in their own
hands.
Our American public-school idea—American
at least in contrast with any dissimilar notion—
is that a provision for public education adequate
for the whole people, is not a benevolent concession
but a paying investment, constantly and
absolutely essential to confirm the safety of a
safe scheme of government. The maintenance
and growth of public education in the Southern
States, as first established principally under reconstruction
rule, sadly insufficient as it still is,
is mainly due to the partial triumph of this idea
in the minds of the Southern whites, and its eager
acceptance, with or without discordant conditions,
by the intelligent blacks, and in no region
is rightly attributable to an exceptionable increase
of wealth. Much less is it attributable, as is often
conjectured, to the influx of Northern capital and
capitalists, bringing Northern ideas with them.
It ought to go without saying, that immigration,
with or without capital, will always try to assimilate
itself to the state of society into which it
comes. Every impulse of commerce is not to
disturb any vexed issue until such issue throws
itself immediately across the path. It never purposely
molests a question of social order. So it
is in the South.
Certain public men in both North and South
have of late years made, with the kindest intentions,
make it appear that public society in the South
is doing, not all that should be done, but all it
can do, for the establishment of permanent safety
and harmony through the elevation of the lower
masses especially, in the matter of public education.
In truth, these facts do not prove the statement
they are called upon to prove, and do the
Southern States no kindness in lulling them to a
belief in it.[1] It is said, for instance, that certain
Southern States are now spending more annually
for public education, in proportion to their taxable
wealth, than certain Northern States noted
for the completeness of their public school systems.
Mississippi may thus be compared with
Massachusetts. But really the comparison is a
sad injustice to the Southern State, for a century
of public education has helped to make Massachusetts
so rich that she is able to spend annually
twenty dollars per head upon the children
in her public schools, while Mississippi, laying
a heavier tax, spends upon hers but two dollars
per head. Manifestly it is unfair to a State whose
public-school system is new to compare it with
any whose system is old. The public school
is over twice as great as that of ten States
of the New South, whose population is three and
a half times as large.[2] And yet one does not
need to go as far as the "new West" to find
States whose tax-payers spend far more for public
education than Southern communities thus
far see the wisdom or need of investing. With
one third more wealth than Virginia, and but
one-tenth the percentage of illiteracy, Iowa
spends over four times as much per year for
public instruction. With one-fourth less wealth
than Alabama, and but one-fourteenth the percentage
of illiteracy, Nebraska spends three and
a half times as much per year for public instruction.
With about the same wealth as North Carolina
and less than one-eighth the percentage of
illiteracy, Kansas spends over five times as much
per year for public education. If the comparison
be moved westward again into new regions, the
Territory of Dakota is seen making an "expenditure
in the year per capita on average attendance
in the public schools" of $25.77, being more
than the sum of the like per capita expenditures
by Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, North
Colorado it is about the same as in Dakota, while
in Nevada it is much greater and in Arizona twice
as large. As to comparative wealth, the taxable
wealth of Dakota in 1880, at least, was but one
two-thousandth part of that of the six States with
which it is compared.
Now what is the real truth in these facts?
That the full establishment of this American
public-school idea and of that elevation idea of
which it is an exponent, and which has had so
much to do toward making the people of the
Northern States the wealthiest people in the
world, waits in the South not mainly an increase
of wealth, but rather the simple consent of the
Southern white man to see society's best and
earliest safety, the quickest, greatest and most
lasting aggrandizement, in that public equality
of all men, that national citizenship, wider than
race and far wider than the lines of private
society, which makes the elevation of the masses,
by everything that tends to moral, æsthetical
and intellectual education, in school and out of
school, the most urgent and fruitful investment
of public wealth and trust. Just this sincere
confession. All the rest will follow. The black
man will not merely be tolerated in his civil and
political rights as now sometimes he is and
into, and encouraged and urged to a true understanding,
valuation and acceptance of every
public duty and responsibility of citizenship, according
to his actual personal ability to respond.
To effect this is not the herculean and dangerous
task it is sometimes said to be. The North
has 20,000,000 foreign immigrants to Americanize,
and only this way to do it. The South, for
all her drawbacks, has this comparative advantage;
that her lower mass, however ignorant
and debased, is as yet wholly American in its
notions of order and government. All that is
wanting is to more completely Americanize her
upper class, a class that is already ruling and
will still rule when the change is made; that
wants to rule wisely and prosperously, and that
has no conscious intention of being un-American.
Only this: To bring the men of best
blood and best brain in the South to-day, not to
a new and strange doctrine, but back to the
faith of their fathers. Let but this be done, and
there may be far less cry of Peace, Peace, than
now, but there will be a peace and a union between
the Nation's two great historic sections
such as they have not seen since Virginia's
Washington laid down his sword, and her Jefferson
his pen.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |