 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
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.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |