 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
VIII.
But if the One-party idea still rules in the
South, men are longing and reaching out for
deliverance from it now as they have not done
before since thirty years ago it first laid its complete
bondage upon them. From out the South
itself has lately been heard a strange, new, most
worthy and most welcome sound, the voices of
southern white leaders of thought and action
charging upon the North the duty and necessity
of helping the South to solve the simple question
which the northern and southern seekers after
pure government through race-rule and postponed
rights have snarled into a bewildering problem.
This problem has been drawn into the
open field of literary debate, a field from which,
in these enlightened days, no practical question
can escape until it is solved. But the question
it is only how to persuade men to settle it.
As to this, let us first of all, stop blaming one
another; let us blame things not men; ill conditions,
false theories, bad schemes. Even among
these let us waste no more wrath, no more grief,
no more time, over such as are done and can
never be undone; but give ourselves faithfully,
fraternally, unflinchingly to the pursuit and destruction
of every living evil in theory or practice.
In the second place the new material development
of the South must go on. If wealth does
not necessarily make a people free or virtuous,
neither does poverty. But thinking men in the
South must rouse themselves to the economic
and political necessity for a wider diffusion of
wealth and more prosperous conditions of manual
labor. The inattention to the study of Economics
in most southern colleges amounts to a
calamity. To the spirit that prompts this is
largely owing a superficial treatment of commercial
and industrial conditions that characterizes
the greater part of the southern press, and
misleads a large class among the southern capitalists
of commerce and the industries, who
count only themselves practical.
And again, the struggle for pure government
the effort to procure it at the expense of free
government must be abandoned. Free government,
the equal freedom of all in all public relations,
must be recognized as its foremost and
supreme necessity. Yet we do not demand a
sudden and complete revolution of southern
sentiment and policy. All the nation is really
impatient for is to see the South once turn and
start in the right direction.
To this end let it be understood and declared
in southern circles, councils, newspapers, that
in the southern States, just as truly as in Kansas,
Ohio, or Massachusetts, a man can favor the
Negro's enjoyment of a white man's public
rights without being either a Republican or a
traitor. He can be an Equal-rights Democrat.
I venture to say that the great bulk of the Republican
party itself will look with more respect
and pleasure upon a band of southern opponents
declaring themselves Equal-rights Democrats,
than upon a like reënforcement to its own ranks
of Alabama protectionists trying to take the pitifully
impossible pose of color-line Republicans.
If men cannot reconcile it to their self-regard
or sense of expediency to declare for equality in
all public rights at once, let them try a few at a
time. Since 1865 the South has found on experiment,
a great many things consistent with honor,
safety and peace that they had looked upon with
loathing and alarm. Why not try a few more?
Take, at random, any phase of the matter; for
instance, railroad accommodation. If in every
southern town Negroes may ride in street-cars,
where people crowd one another and no separate
place offers to the rag-tag that refuge from the
better kept which they always covet, why not
try making first-class railway coaches equally
free to all kinds of people decent in person and
behavior, and require all kinds of rag-tag to accept
other accommodations? There is no risk in
such a step; nobody really believes there is any,
it is purely a matter of pride. But be it pride or
be it risk, the street-cars offered the extreme
case, and in them the question has long been
settled.
Or take another case. Probably the most
indefensible, wanton, cruel deprivations suffered
by Southern colored people on the score of race
is their exclusion from the privileges of the
public libraries. Let these excommunications
from the pure wells of inspiration that are in
good books be withdrawn. Let decent white
Southerners say to decent colored Southerners,
These concessions—or such as these—will we
for pure men and purifying measures. That
were a buying of votes without dishonor to
either side; and tens of thousands of colored
votes, both of those that money can, and that
money cannot buy, can be bought at that price.
Only let it not be fancied that even Negroes are
going to be outwitted more than once or twice
by promises that if they will concede something
now, their white fellow-citizens will concede
something to them by-and-by. Says the Rev.
Dr. Thirkield, of Atlanta, in a late allusion to
the failure of the Prohibition movement in that
city, "The Negro was recognized as a factor in
the great civil contest; he was met as a man
and a brother; promises were given him as to
his civil rights in the conduct of the city government.
Through his vote the campaign closed
in victory. Then the contact between the two
races was broken off; recognition and coöperation
in civil, moral and religious work ceased;
pledges as to his civil rights were broken. The
rum power saw its opportunity, . . . . organized
for victory, and brought again the reign of
rum." So it may always be; there is a vote that
divides but not destroys; and there is another
that solidifies but does not save.
True, to influence the colored vote men must
have mentioned are the daily spoken, written, and
printed demands of every sort of colored leader,
even of those who are accused of being influenced
by nothing except the prospect of public office
or its equivalent in cash. A full numerical
share of public offices, clerkships and contracts
is not, and never was, the ultimatum of the vast
colored vote, nor even of its colored leaders.
They certainly never got it. No party ever
promised them that all or half or one-fourth of
them should have offices or appointments, or
ever gave them all or half, if even a fourth of
the offices or appointments. But for the hostility
of the great majority of Southern white men to
an equality of public rights, no colored leader
need ever have been given an office or appointment
which he could not reasonably have been
expected to fill with credit and honor. With
genuine and coveted concessions offered to them
in the matter of civil rights, colored voters will
not be long finding leaders to whom it will be
enough to concede with sincere and practical
intent, that merely being a Negro is not an
insurmountable bar to the holding of office by
one otherwise qualified.
Let the lovers of pure government in the
South make such experiments. It can be made
counties, even States, one or two, in the South,
where the two national parties are nearly equal
in numbers. There, as elsewhere, the Negro
cares, as he should, far more about his own civil
and political rights than about who gets into
the White House. In such a region a party of
pure government ought, by reasonable and generous
concessions to a better and more equal
freedom, to gain enough colored votes to enable
it advantageously to sacrifice some very bad
white ones. Only, these concessions must be
made in the spirit and guise, not of condescension
and protection, but of civil and political
equality and fellowship, entering frankly and
fully into council with the Negro's recognized
leaders, white or colored, appealing to such as
are "out of politics," only when those who are
in politics will not listen to reason. Say what
you will of party leaders and managers, the great
Republican party itself would rather be hopelessly
outnumbered and defeated in Mississippi
or South Carolina by fair means in the interest
of free government, than to see a Republican
majority tyrannously defrauded under the pretence
of procuring or upholding pure government.
Nor do I doubt the great Democratic
party also would, in its turn, rather be so outnumbered
win victory at the price of honor.
But if southern white men will not even yet of
their own motion give this method of healing
"the nation's running sore," a fair trial, there
are still two ways by which such a trial may be
had. One is a means which no generous mind
in this nation would make other than its last
choice. I mean, of course, Federal intervention.
I earnestly protest I have learned too much
from the teachings of Washington ever to be a
partisan. On the race question I am a Republican;
on some others I am a Democrat, and on
all questions I know and am ready to avow exactly
where I stand. The southern party for
pure government first has been given the best
twelve years that ever shone on earth, in which
to make Federal intervention unnecessary, and
has so utterly failed, that it is to-day seen asking
in the United States Senate for a species of
Federal intervention by no means the safest or
best or most constitutional, to help it to remove
bodily to Africa the problem whose obvious
solution it will not allow even to be tried. I do
not favor Federal intervention for the establishment
of equal civil and political rights in any
State whatever, except as a last resort. As to
Federal elections, at least, it is a right placed
But even there the intention that it should
be never other than an unpreferred alternative is
plain.
Yet I see to-day only one alternative intervening.
Of it I shall speak in a moment. But
for this alternative, it seems to me totally incompatible
with the dignity and honor of this
nation, that, after twelve years of amiable, hopeful
waiting, it should let itself be kept indefinitely
waiting still for admission to its own simplest
rights by the plausible and eloquent doorkeepers
of a do-nothing policy. A despair that
prompts to action and deliverance is better than
any false hope, and if such a despair moves this
nation, this year or next, to the action it has
borne so much to avoid, it can point to these
door-keepers, whether they be of North or South,
and say, the blame of it and the shame of it be
on you!
The only alternative I see, a hope of whose
adoption can rightly postpone Federal intervention
any longer, is for the Democratic party of
the wide North and West to withdraw its support
from the southern policy now, as it did in
1860. Said one of the national Democratic
leaders to me a few years ago, "That is what
we have got to do. The votes we lose by it in
shall gain in the North." But I maintain the
case is better for them than this. They will gain
votes in the North; but they will no more lose
the southern white vote than they lost it when
with cannon, bayonets and sabres they forced it
back into the Union from which it had seceded.
Who will say that promptness on this point now
may not save them from another such long vacation
as procrastination cost them in 1860?
We have yet two years and a half before the
next presidential election, in 1892. Let it be
hoped and urged that before then the believers
in pure government instead of, or before, free
government will of their own choice abandon
their utterly self-condemned and futile policy, and
make at least a visible and appreciable beginning
upon that experiment of equal rights for all men
and all parties, which, in the modern world, at
least, has never failed on fair trial. Has never
failed; no, and would not fail in Hayti or San
Domingo themselves, if they would once give it
the supremacy thus far held by the alternating
military tyrannies of opposing factions each delirious
with the poison of the one One-party
idea.
During these two years and a half let it be
made yet plainer than ever before, that Federal
or any party, and that what it, with the
whole nation, most covets for every southern
State is as large, as full, as universal, and as
prosperous a self-government as can be found in
any part of this Union. And then, in all kindness,
for the South's own sake as much as for
the sake of any, in the name of the common
welfare and the nation's honor, let the word be
spoken, that if by 1892 any State in this Union
has not at least begun, with good show of completing,
the establishment of equal American
rights for all Americans, the men of this nation
who, in whatever party, believe in free government
first will strain their every nerve and sinew
to give the nation a president and a congress
that will establish it peaceably, promptly and
forever.
The day in which that is done, whether by
a southern majority's own motion or by the
Government's intervention, will be a great birthday.
It may date the birth of some momentary
and aimless strife, though this I doubt;
but it will certainly date the birth of a better
peace, a wider, richer prosperity, a happier
freedom of every citizen, and a freer, purer
government of this Union and of every State
in this Union, than this continent has ever yet
North and South. For it shall not have been
long done ere the whole South will rejoice in
the day of its doing as now it rejoices in the day
when Lincoln freed the Negro, and in the day
when Washington by spurning the offer of royal
rank and authority declared that the only road
to pure government is free government.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |