University of Virginia Library

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.

This is what makes the Southern white
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

was not. But it proved no more. Unfortunately
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

should judge, and what should be law. But, as
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
States to their autonomy with their populations
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

defensive offset, the freedman was invested with
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

pure white supremacy. From the very first until
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
that, with full American liberty—this and no
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.