SOME SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS.
When freedom was first given to the Slaves in the South, no one
suspected that the measure was destined to create a new and more
difficult phase of a problem which had already brought the Union to the
verge of ruin. Nearly every one believed that manumission would, in
course of time, solve the race question; and those who did not believe
that manumission alone would produce this result, were apparently
convinced that manumission combined with extension of the suffrage, and
with the concession of full rights of citizenship to the freedmen, could
not possibly fail to be efficacious; and so Amendment XV. was passed as
a final panacea.
But, in fairness to the foresight of a discerning minority, it should be
remembered that the amendment was not passed unanimously. It was
rejected by California, Delaware, Kentucky, Indiana, Oregon, and
Tennessee, and later, on reflection, by New York. It is true that it was
ultimately ratified by 29 out of 37 States. Several of these were,
however, at the time under “Reconstruction,” and the ratification from
Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, may be supposed to have
been to some extent exacted under duress. Still, the question of giving
suffrage to the negro was not then anywhere regarded from the point of
view from which it is now seen by the best men of all parties. As Judge
Tourgée has pointed out, it was confidently predicted by every theorist
who speculated upon the subject, that the negro would wither away under
the influences of freedom and civilisation. It was unhesitatingly
asserted, and almost universally believed, that the first decade of
liberty would show the race to have been decimated by disease,
debauchery, and the lack of the master’s paternal care. It was not an
unnatural conclusion for men to arrive at who devoutly believed in the
negro’s incapacity for self-support. Mr. Tourgée adds:—
“That the people of the North should believe it also is hardly to be
wondered at. They have always reflected the Southern idea of the negro
in everything, except as to his natural right to be free and to
exercise the rights of the freeman. The North, however, has never
desired the numerical preponderance of the coloured man, and has
especially desired to avoid responsibility in regard thereto. From the
first it seems to have been animated by a sneaking notion that after
having used the negro to fight its battles, freed him as the natural
result of the overthrow of a rebellion based on slavery, and
enfranchised him to constitute a political foil to the ambition and
disloyalty of his former master, it could at any time unload him upon
the States where he chanced to dwell, wash its hands of all further
responsibility in the matter, and leave him to live or die as chance
might determine. It seems a hard saying, but there is very little
doubt that, side by side with the belief in the Northern mind that the
negro would disappear beneath the glare of civilisation, was a
half-conscious feeling that such disappearance would be a very simple
and easy solution of a troublesome question.
It being, then, the prevalent and all but general impression that the
negro would soon die out, it scarcely occurred to legislators to
question whether or nor it might complicate matters to make him, for his
short season on earth, a full voting citizen. Had it been foreseen that,
far from dying out, the negro would increase and multiply to an almost
unheard-of extent, there would, we may be sure, have been much more
hesitation than there was over the passing of Amendment XV. That
amendment may be repealed at any time by the action of two-thirds of
both Houses of Congress, and by subsequent ratification by three-fourths
of the States of the Union; but to look for its repeal now is hopeless.
Colonel T. B. Edgington, a Northerner, recognising the menace of negro
suffrage to Southern civilisation, proposed, in a speech delivered at
Memphis in June, 1889, to get over this phase of the difficulty by
limiting the right to vote among the negroes, and by making the office
of voter, or suffragist among them, an elective office—an office that a
man shall hold, say for four years, by election of the whole body of the
people, or by election of the coloured people alone, if this course seem
preferable. Thus no property or educational qualification would be
required. The end desired could be attained by so adjusting and limiting
the negro vote that it should not exceed say 5 or 10 per cent. of the
white vote on any given question or issue.
There have been many other advocates in favour of limitation or
suspension of negro suffrage; and a movement towards this end has lately
made much progress in Mississippi; but, upon the whole, it seems to me
that, as I have said, to look for the repeal of Amendment XV. is
hopeless.
Nor would its repeal at the present date solve the difficulty. It would
rather accentuate it; for the negro would not submit to be thus set back
upon his upward path. Indeed, repeal of the Amendment is even more
ridiculous as a remedy than is another measure which, nevertheless, has
more than once been advocated by speakers and writers who ought to have
known better—I mean the extermination of the inconvenient race: for,
whereas extermination would be undoubtedly effective, repeal would only
reopen the difficulty in a new and inflamed phase.
Neither policy is to be seriously considered. The United States have,
both as individual States and as a Union, incurred towards the negro
liabilities which cannot be repudiated or shirked. The country kidnapped
and imported the negro, enslaved him or connived at his enslavement,
used him for national purposes, freed him and put power into his hands;
and it cannot now or ever shake off all responsibility concerning him.
As he is, he is, for many reasons, an undesirable fellow-citizen; but he
was created a fellow-citizen to suit the temporary political interests
of the North; and, having served those interests, he is not now to be
disowned and cast out a beggar. Equality between the races is a hopeless
dream; yet the whole fabric of American institutions rests upon the
assumed equality of the citizens. If American institutions honestly and
freely tolerated the existence of “classes,” the race question would
never have attained its present importance. The negro, while “keeping
his place,” might still have enjoyed his vote. As things stand, he is
practically, in spite of his nominal rights, an alien. When, as in the
Reconstruction Period, he exercised his rights most fully, he did so to
the prejudice of the rights of the Southern white, who was then, as it
were, the alien. Now, when the white Southerner has fully resumed the
exercise of his rights, the black man suffers proportionately. And every
day’s experience shows more and more clearly that real equality in the
South, as between whites and blacks, is impossible of attainment. Says
the New York _Tribune_, with bitterness but with truth:—
“There may be one faith, one baptism, and one name under Heaven
whereby men may be saved, but in South Carolina there must be a white
man’s church, high-toned and very respectable, and a place somewhere
outside where the negroes may herd together without disturbing the
pious meditations of their superiors. Simon of Cyrene, who carried the
cross, was a negro, but that passage in the Gospels can be bracketed
if need be, and not read in the white churches of Charleston during
Holy Week. The Ethiopian eunuch baptised by Philip could not have had
a white skin, but that chapter can be omitted in the liturgical order
of second lessons. The white saints will kindly consent to pray every
Sunday for all sorts and conditions of men, provided ‘the niggers’ are
taught to remain in their own place and not to intrude where they are
not wanted. They will live and die in the faith and communion of their
white fathers and white grandfathers, with no negroes on the sacred
premises, except possibly the coloured sexton, who must not under any
circumstances be a communicant, but merely a sweep. What arrangements
will be made for their benefit in the next world they cannot tell, but
they may at least indulge the pious hope that there will be a separate
‘nigger heaven’—an adjunct, like their own coloured convention, to the
white man’s paradise—a separate missionary jurisdiction with swarthy
angels and combination negro melodies.”
I would merely add, by way of comment, that Charleston and South
Carolina are by no means the most intolerant and intolerable places in
which the Southern negro is at present dwelling.
I have alluded to two suggested, but ineffective or impracticable, ways
out of the difficulty. Another scheme, from which in the early days of
the negro’s freedom much was expected, was the gradual fusion of the
races. Miscegenation, or intermarriage between whites and blacks, was,
for a season, the favourite prescription of theorists, especially in the
North, whence to this moment comes plenty of theory, with little or no
practical help. Another suggested remedy was education. If, said the
counsellors, you educate the negro thoroughly well, you will render him
as good a citizen as the white man. Let me deal separately with each of
these plans, as well as with yet another—namely, the surrender of the
Black Belt to the black, and the constitution of recognised Black States
as members of the Union. I will deal with them in the order in which
they appear to have found favour, and first with the least promising.
Surrender, no matter in what form it may be advocated and brought about,
involves the unjustifiable premise that the negro is fit for
self-government. It has never been proposed that the States of the Black
Belt, or any portion of them, shall be allowed independence. No one has
gone further than to suggest that the whites, or the great body of
whites, shall retire from them with indemnity. The relationship of the
States to the Union would remain as at present. The State government and
representation would simply be left to the negroes and the coloured
people, the rights of such whites as might elect to stay being, of
course, as much as possible secured. The lessons of history and
experience are, in the highest degree, discouraging for the success of
such a scheme, could it, which I very much doubt, be carried out in its
initial stages. Says Mr. J. A. Froude, in “The English in the West
Indies”:—
“There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no rights which the
blacks are bound to recognise.... They can own no freehold property,
and exist only on tolerance. They are called ‘white trash.’ Black
dukes and marquises drive over them in the street and swear at
them.... Englishmen move about Jacmel as if they were ashamed of
themselves among their dusky lords and masters. The presence of
Europeans in any form is barely tolerated.”
And here is the same writer’s summary of the history of San Domingo:—
“St. Domingo, of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest
island discovered by Columbus, and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean.
The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and innocent
Indians, whom ... they converted off the face of the earth, working
them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their places
with blacks from Africa. They colonised, they built cities; they
throve and prospered for nearly two hundred years, when Hayti was
taken from them and made a French province. The French kept it till
the Revolution. They built towns, they laid out farms and sugar
fields, they planted coffee all over the island, where it now grows
wild. Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains, splendid houses
rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put out its strength;
there were churches and priests in every parish. So firm was the hold
that they had gained that Hayti, like Cuba, seemed to have been made a
part of the old world, and as civilised as France itself. The
Revolution came, and the reign of Liberty. The blacks took arms; they
surprised the plantations; they made a clean sweep of the whole French
population.... The island being thus derelict, Spain and England both
tried their hands to recover it, but failed; ... and a black nation,
with a Republican Constitution, and a population, perhaps, of about a
million and a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in
unchallenged possession, and has arrived at the condition which has
been described to us by Sir Spenser St. John.”
What that condition is has been painted in lurid, but not exaggerated,
colours by Sir Spenser, to whose book reference should be made. Mr.
Froude sufficiently sketches it in the following passages:—
“Morals in the technical sense they have none.”
“A religion which will keep the West Indian blacks from falling back
into devil-worship is still to seek,”
“In spite of schools and missionaries, 70 per cent. of the children
now born among them are illegitimate.”
“Behind the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible
revival of the Western African superstitions; the serpent-worship, and
the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism. The facts are notorious.”
“There is no sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the race
are improving either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence
is the other way.”
“Ninety years of negro self-government have had their use in showing
what it really means.... The movement is backward, not forward.”
Not only in St. Domingo has the experiment of negro self-government been
tried under pseudo-civilised conditions. It has been tried also in
Liberia, and with almost equally bad results. To-day in Liberia whites
are treated by the blacks much as blacks are treated by whites in the
South. A negro State has never yet shown itself worthy to rank on terms
of equality with a white one, and there are no symptoms that it will
ever reach that level. Diplomatic intercourse with such States cannot be
carried on under ordinary conditions; neither can commercial
transactions. Black rule means anarchy, and it invariably brings to the
front the fact that the negro hates the white as much as the white hates
him, and is even more ready than the white is to play the tyrant and the
oppressor. Life for a white in every existing negro State is well-nigh
unendurable. A fringe of negro States on the southern and south-eastern
borders of the Union would, therefore, be a perpetual danger to the
whole Federation.
Education is a supposed panacea that has been more widely advocated; and
amongst its ablest champions is Judge Tourgée. But education, although
it may in time civilise and soften the more naturally intelligent of the
coloured people, will, I am convinced, do very little for the
pure-blooded negro, the man with the facial angle of about 70 deg. You
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and you cannot make a Solon
out of a person with an unsuitably constructed head. Coloured people and
blacks in the South have now for quite twenty years been more or less
subjected to the influences of education. Almost anyone who may have so
desired has been able during that period, and, indeed, for a longer
time, to obtain instruction of all kinds—technical, linguistic,
mathematical, scientific, and philosophical, as well as elementary. In
fact, there is in the South even less practical difficulty in the way of
the poor negro of genius, if such a being exist, than in the way of the
poor white of genius; for philanthropic people have established free
colleges and schools for him, and stand ready to give him all possible
encouragement to persevere and make a name and a fortune. Yet, in spite
of this, the pure-blooded negroes who have come to the front in any way
may be counted on one’s fingers—perhaps on the fingers of one hand. A
greater number of coloured people—mulattoes and cross-breeds of various
tinctures—have profited by the opportunities given. Among these, one of
the most noteworthy is Mr. B. K. Bruce, of Mississippi. He was born of
slave parents in Virginia, in 1841, and went to Mississippi in his
boyhood, subsequently removing to Missouri, but returning in 1869. His
education was limited, and while following the occupation of a planter,
he held the position of Sergeant-at-Arms of the State Senate for two
years, Sheriff and Tax Collector of Bolivar County for four years, a
Levée Commissioner for three years, and was elected to the U.S. Senate
in 1875. He now holds a responsible Government post at Washington.
Another notable coloured man is Mr. F. Douglass, who is many times
mentioned in these pages, and who is now United States Minister to
Hayti. He had previously been one of the San Domingo Commissioners; was
a trustee of the Howard University and of the Freedman’s Bank, and was
appointed United States Marshal for the District of Columbia by
President Hayes, and Recorder of Deeds for the District by President
Garfield. He is the fourth coloured Minister to Hayti, his predecessors
having been Messrs. E. D. Bassett, J. U. Langston, and J. E. W.
Thompson. Mr. R. B. Elliott, a coloured man who was born at Boston and
educated in England, has held several high positions in South Carolina,
including a seat in the Forty-second and Forty-third Congress, from
which he resigned. Mr. Pinchback, Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, who
afterwards contested a seat in the Senate, is another of the leading
coloured men.
But these are not the individuals with the negro facial angle and the
full negro characteristics, neither do they form the majority of the
negro and negroid population. Moreover, they are, I am assured,
decreasing in numbers, and, although more intelligent than the pure
blacks, are, as a general rule, even less desirable as citizens. But of
this later. Suffice it to say that education has not produced such
results as might fairly be expected from it; and that the educated man
of colour, if severed from white influence and stimulus, seems to evince
an ineradicable tendency to “hark back” to the vices, the superstitions,
and the weaknesses of his ancestors; while, as I have already said,
education does not abolish race prejudice, and scarcely ameliorates it.
The educated black becomes doubly conscious of the contempt in which the
whites hold him and his race; while the white looks upon the educated
black as a doubly dangerous rival and possible enemy. In the meantime,
with every scrap of education that he assimilates, the black imbibes
increased anxiety to assume that position as a citizen which the white
is, above all things, determined that the coloured man shall never hold
in the South. Even the Boston _Transcript_, a Northern paper, recognises
this fact. “We have always said,” it declares, “that the very
improvement of the negroes’ condition socially makes worse the prospect
of quieting down that burning question. Naturally, the more they get the
more they want, and the more they will have, too. The only logical
position was to keep them slaves. Once citizens, they have as good right
as anybody to ride in your Pullman, or sit in your theatre or
restaurant, sleep in your hotel or church, or live in your street or
block. Lack of money is all that intervenes at present, and that will
not always.”
And Dr. S. M. Smith, D.D., of Columbia, South Carolina, writing in the
_Presbyterian Quarterly_ for October, 1889, takes the same view. His
conclusions are thus summed up by the Raleigh _State Chronicle_:—
“The patent panacea for all negro defects, education, does not mend
matters in the least; an ‘educated’ negro is just as much negro as
before, just the same raw hide volume with the incongruous addition of
a gilt edge; he is only a little more aggressively offensive than his
less ornate brother. Social complications are not at all lessened by
education, nor mitigated by ‘light complexions’ either.”
Miscegenation is the most widely favoured and venerable of what I may
call the quack nostrums for the cure of existing evils. The late Mr.
Henry Woodfin Grady, one of the truest friends that the negro ever had,
laid it down as an axiomatic condition of harmony between races “that
each race should earnestly desire a fusion of blood, in which all
differences would be lost.” The action of the natural law thus stated
has made white North America what it is to-day. But, as the author of
“An Appeal to Pharaoh” points out, the law that governs the
distribution, association, and conduct of all other living creatures
rules the action of men also. Birds and beasts, fishes, reptiles, and
insects—nay, trees, and flowers, and weeds—group themselves together
after their kind: and man is no exception to the universal rule. In
every land and clime, under whatever circumstances and conditions he may
be placed, he recognises and obeys nature by seeking his own kind,
avoiding every other, and warring with his dissimilar neighbour.
Families, classes, societies, tribes, nations form around some common
centre of agreement or likeness that unites the like and excludes the
unlike from the invisible but impassable circle. The map of the world is
a map of the larger groups. The history of the world is chiefly the
history of the formation, organisation, and contentions of these groups.
The history of North America is a particular demonstration of the action
of the law under consideration. Four centuries have not elapsed since
the white man first set his foot on the eastern shore of the New World.
Every step of his progress westward has been marked by the blood of the
dissimilar race, which he found there and drove before him. He sits on
the grave of the red man; he has shut the door in the face of the yellow
man from China; what shall he do with the black man from Africa?
Intermarry with him, say the quacks. But, to again quote Mr. Grady, “not
only do the two races not earnestly desire fusion, but both races are
pledged against it as the one impossible thing.” This is quite notorious
throughout the South, where it has even inspired legislation against
miscegenation; yet many humanitarian theorists in the North still put
forward intermarriage as the panacea.
I summarise here an interesting article which was contributed to
_Belford’s Magazine_ for September, 1889, by Mr. Cone on the
significance of racial colour. The writer attempts to prove that colour
of the skin is inseparably connected with the brain and higher faculties
of the individual, and that according to a fundamental law of Nature the
negro, being black, always has been, and for ever must remain, an
inferior grade of humanity. The alleged law, as stated by Mr. Cone, is
as follows:—“Whatever race or species is changeless from generation to
generation as to the colour of its skin, hair, and eyes—if it be man or
animal—or eyes and plumage, if it be bird, evinces low brain-power, is
‘inferior’; while that which is changeful from generation to generation
as to the colour of its skin, hair and eyes, or plumage, shows high
brain-power, is ‘superior.’ Or, more briefly: The invariable as to
racial colour is the ‘inferior’; the variable is the ‘superior’ race.”
After an elaborate investigation of attempts to domesticate wild birds
and wild animals, and of efforts to raise black men and red men to a
higher plane of civilisation, the conclusion is reached that all such
attempts have been absolute failures. The cases of Hayti and Jamaica are
cited to prove that the black man, when raised by a higher race to a
level of life which he was unable to himself attain, has never shown any
ability to maintain himself there; he “lacks the brain-fibre, the
brain-power, which is necessary to do so, and, left to himself, he
retrogrades, reverts.” The red Egyptian and the yellow Chinaman, though
more variable, and, therefore, of a higher type than the negro, are
forcible illustrations of arrested development. “Hybridism in animals,
and the sterility of miscegenation when pressed beyond certain
well-known limitations, are proof that Nature punishes in her own
effective way the violation of her laws, whether men have understood
those laws or not.” This fundamental law of Mr. Cone declares that
racial intellect, racial superiority and inferiority, are written in
racial colour; and the writer concludes by saying:—“If this be true,
then other conclusions inevitably follow, which a wise statesmanship,
sincere in purpose, lofty in motive, scholarly in grasp, and philosophic
in breadth of view, will not disregard.”
It is true that America has become a mighty nation from the
intermingling of races, but almost entirely from the intermingling of
races that belong to the Indo-Germanic stock. The more nearly allied the
races, the more successful has been the intermingling. English, Scotch,
Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians have harmoniously united to
produce the American; but the Latins, as we see in Canada and Louisiana,
blend much less readily with the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, and continue to
hold aloof long after races more nearly akin have inextricably merged in
one composite but individual people. The French, the Italians, and the
Spaniards are those that thus hold aloof. Some of them seem to
intermarry—and this is peculiarly noticeable in Central and South
America—more readily with the native Indian, or even with the negro,
than with the Anglo-Saxon. In Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, Salvador, Honduras, and Southern Mexico, for example, the mass of
the population is Indo-Spanish. It would seem as if the Southern
European does not possess the colour-antipathy as the pure white
possesses it; and, surely, his own dark colour lends plausibility to the
theory that he is one step nearer than the pure white is to the Indian
and negro stocks. But nowhere does the pure white, as represented by the
Anglo-Teutonic races, generally admit coloured races to social and
family equality. There are mulattoes in the United States, but nearly
every mulatto is the offspring not of marriage but of an irregular,
temporary, and disgraceful union. There are Eurasians in India, where,
after all, whites and coloured people are racially related; yet even
there most of the half-breeds are illegitimate. In Africa, in the
meanwhile, the Hottentot and the Bushman, instead of blending with the
whites, are vanishing. In Australia, too, and New Zealand, the
aboriginal inhabitant is disappearing fast. Race, more than anything
else, has to this day kept Central Africa a secret from the white world.
And the numerical superiority of the negroes in the Black Belt is, more
than anything else, responsible for the fact that the Black Belt is
almost a _terra incognita_ to the mass of Northerners, and for the
equally important fact that European and Northern brains and capital do
not go there as they go to the whiter but not richer West. In the South,
in the past five-and-twenty years, the negro has improved in very many
respects; but that makes no radical difference. He is still the negro,
and he always will be the negro.
Yet, in spite of these and other considerations that must be ever
present to the minds of all who know the South and are unprejudiced
observers of what is there for them to see, we find people persistently
advocating miscegenation as the certain cure for the evils of the
situation. Mr. Frederick Douglass, a mulatto, and, perhaps, the most
distinguished coloured American now living, takes a somewhat neutral
position. Writing in the _North American Review_ for May, 1886, on
miscegenation, he says:—“I am not a propagandist, but a prophet. While I
would not be understood as advocating the desirability of such a result,
I would not be understood as deprecating it.” But many whites have been
bolder. The opinion of the Rev. Dr. B. T. Tanner is that “whether the
whites and the blacks of the country shall mix is no longer an open
question, being settled by the fact that the mixing has already, and to
a large extent, taken place.... As we gaze,” he continues, “upon the
millions of whites and millions of blacks confronting each other, and as
we remember that where there is no association there can be no certain
amity, and that where there is no amity there can be no lasting peace,
we are made to ask, What will the harvest be? As there cannot be other
than one Government, so there must not be ultimately more than one
people. The union of which we so justly boast must comprehend both.” The
Rev. J. W. Hamilton, of Boston, is another prophet and advocate of
miscegenation. And the language of Prof. S. B. Darnell, of the Cookman
Institute, Jacksonville, is:—“However we may feel on the subject, the
stern logic of sequences will make, in the coming years, ‘our brother in
black’ a misnomer; and the diverse streams of blood will so mingle that
our posterity shall quote again, ‘God hath made of one blood all nations
of men.’” On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln, in his reply to Senator
Douglas in 1857, said, “There is a natural disgust in the minds of
nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of
the white and black races.” And again:—“There is a physical difference
between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably for ever forbid
their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and,
inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I,
as well as Judge Douglas, am in favour of the race to which I belong
having the superior position.” And these prejudices belong not only to
the pure white branches of the great Indo-Germanic stock. In our West
Indian colonies there are about 10,000 coolies, of whom Mr. Froude
says:—“They are proud, and will not intermarry with the Africans. If
there is no jealousy, there is no friendship. The two races are more
absolutely apart than the white and the black.” Between the races in
America, as Judge Tourgée expresses it, “there is no equalisation, no
fraternity, no assimilation of rights, no reciprocity of affection.
Children may caress each other, because they are children. Betwixt
adults fewer demonstrations of affection are allowed than the master
bestows upon his dog. Ordinary politeness becomes a mark of shame. A
caress implies degradation. In all that region no man would stand in a
lady’s presence unless uncovered. Yet not a white man in its borders
dares lift his hat to a coloured woman in the street, no matter how pure
her life, how noble her attributes, or how deep his obligations to her
might be.”
If such be the prevailing sentiments among Southern white people, the
questioner may say, How then do you account for the mulattoes, thousands
of whom are found in and far beyond the limits of the Black Belt? The
point is one concerning which I am anxious to convey a very clear
understanding, for it is a most important point. There is, undoubtedly,
a large mixed population; and, as the Rev. Dr. T. B. Tanner has said,
“the mixing has already taken place.” It has taken place; it took place
amid conditions which have ceased to exist; and practically it takes
place no longer. It is in his assumption that the mixing process
continues, and in his implied assumption that the causative unions were
at any period and to any considerable extent legitimate ones, that Dr.
Tanner creates a false impression. Here are the facts, so far as I have
been able to ascertain them; and I have spared no pains in my efforts to
get at the bottom of them.
The mulatto, strictly classified, is the offspring of a pure white and a
pure black parent, and he is much less common than is generally
supposed. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand he is
of illegitimate birth, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
except, perhaps, in Louisiana, where there is a large population of
French descent and of modified anti-negro prejudices, he is a person no
longer a minor. I made inquiries in Charleston with the object of
discovering there a mulatto child of tender years, but in vain. I found
mulattoes of five-and-twenty or thirty, but I could find no children.
More than once in the street I thought that I had come upon what I was
looking for; but in every case the child proved to be not a genuine
mulatto, but simply a coloured child, the offspring, that is, of a
parent or parents with some white blood, but not the direct offspring of
black and white. The coloured people, as distinct from the pure-blooded
negroes, are everywhere common enough, and may be casually mistaken by
the unfamiliar observer for mulattoes. But the real mulatto is
comparatively rare, and is daily becoming rarer. Most of the coloured
people have less than one-half white blood; an overwhelming majority,
indeed, have less than one-quarter. A coloured person with but
one-eighth or one-sixteenth of negro blood is very rare indeed. The kind
of proportion that is common is ten-twelfths or fourteen-sixteenths, or
even more. All this points to the fact that miscegenation, although at
one time prevalent, has, as I have said, practically ceased. It also
points to the fact that, as the author of “An Appeal to Pharaoh” puts
it:—
“The process is never continued beyond a few steps further, and halts
abruptly at the point where it promises to prove effective by the
obliteration of the negro type in an individual who shall still
represent the union of the two diverse strains of blood. Such an
individual may, indeed, exist in America; but, if so, he wisely holds
his peace as to his pedigree. The octoroon is nearly white, and is
usually attractive in person. He is free to marry in his own class, or
below it; but he is as far from marrying a white woman as was his
blackest ancestor. And so of the mythical individual, whose case we
have just considered.”
The truth is that the mulatto, the quadroon, and the octoroon are
chiefly products of the slavery period. Since the war, the birth of a
mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon out of wedlock has been of the rarest
occurrence; and legislation and prejudice have limited, and well-nigh
put a stop to, the birth of these people in wedlock. Mulattoes
intermarry, and, in some cases, have intermarried for generations. In
more than one place in the South they, with occasional admixture of
quadroons, constitute a small, distinct community of highly respectable
people, living to themselves for the most part, and having as little in
common with their black as with their white neighbours; for white blood,
even in small quantities, “tells,” and the pride of the mulatto or
quadroon, as a rule, rebels as much at the idea of alliance with the
negro as does the pride of the white at the idea of alliance with
coloured or black. The mulatto originated in the desire of the slave
woman to enjoy the favour of her white master, and in the desire of the
master to add to his possessions—as well as, to some extent, in white
brutality and youthful dissoluteness, at a period when these could be
very freely indulged. The black slave woman and the white master have
disappeared, and all the conditions have changed. With the changed
conditions the birth of mulattoes, of quadroons, and of octoroons has
steadily grown rarer and rarer, until it threatens to cease altogether.
If miscegenation ever promised to solve the negro problem—and this I
doubt—emancipation hopelessly destroyed the prospect. Whatever
miscegenation there was, was entirely confined to white men and negro or
coloured women. The Southern white woman has had no part in it. In her
opinion it is, in all circumstances and conditions, loathsome and
abominable. Miscegenation, upon the only principles in accordance with
which it has ever been practised between the races in the United States,
is, after all, no real miscegenation at all. It was one-sided, it was
criminal, it involved the disowning of the child by the stronger of its
parents. Could any satisfactory admixture have been effected on such
terms? And there has never been the slightest sign of assimilation on
any other terms.
There is yet another aspect of the question, and that is, Is the
mulatto, the quadroon, the octoroon, a desirable product? It cannot be
denied that the intelligence, the general aptitude for affairs, the
business and political capacity, the æsthetic faculty, and the finer
qualities of the coloured man, are always closely proportionate to the
degree of whiteness of his skin. In the coloured man we continually find
a perception of artistic beauty in form, colour, and effect, and what
may be called a natural sense of decency and shame. These are foreign to
the negro nature; and their peculiar absence seems to widen the already
sufficiently broad gulf between pure black and pure white. In the
coloured man, again, we find the natural leader of the negro in all
movements, political, religious, and social. The only representative of
the coloured population who ever sat in the United States Senate was
nearly white; and in the Reconstruction period the masters of the
situation in the South were, not Northern whites and Southern negroes,
but Northern whites and Southern coloured men. The hybrid of the white
man’s begetting was then the white man’s scourge. Beyond a doubt, he is
intellectually a great improvement upon the black. But he is no nearer
the white than was his black mother. “If,” says the author of “An Appeal
to Pharaoh,” “the negro race were wholly supplanted on American soil by
a race of mulattoes, or even of octoroons, the race problem would be so
far from approaching a solution, that it would be at least as perplexing
and as fraught with present difficulty and promise of future trouble as
is the negro problem of to-day.” And, apart from this, the mulatto is
physically and constitutionally, and also to, I fear, a very large
extent, morally, a failure. Although both white and negro are long-lived
races, the mulatto, born of Anglo-Saxon and negro, very rarely attains
the age of fifty; and he is particularly and abnormally subject to
certain forms of disease. Moreover, there is a general and, I believe, a
not unfounded impression that nature refuses to perpetuate beyond two or
three generations this race of human hybrids. Dr. J. C. Knott, after
nearly fifty years of residence among the black and white races of the
South, declared mulattoes to be “the shortest-lived of any class of the
human family,” and that the product of the cross between the Anglo-Saxon
and the negro dies off before the dark stain can be washed out by
amalgamation; while Professor Drummond says, “Inappropriate hybridism is
checked by the law of sterility.” This last doctrine may, it is just
possible, not apply, or may only apply to a limited extent, to the
mulatto. There is, unfortunately, less room for doubt that, in the
South, people of mixed blood furnish a surprisingly and
disproportionately large quota to the criminal population. It was
estimated that in the Mississippi Penitentiary, on the 1st of December,
1885, there was one white for every 4,480 white inhabitants of the
State, one black for every 918 black inhabitants, and one “coloured” for
every 314 “coloured” inhabitants. I am not desirous of asking too much
attention to this particular estimate, which is open to error, for the
reason that, in the census reports, black and “coloured” people are
classed together; but I feel bound to say that, upon showing this
estimate to the superintendents of several convict establishments in the
South, I have been invariably told that, whether exact or inexact, it
might be accepted as expressive of the general truth. If, therefore, the
products of miscegenation be short life and excessive tendency to
disease and crime, is miscegenation, even supposing honourable and legal
miscegenation to be possible, a desirable way out of the difficulty? I
venture to think not. Honourable miscegenation, besides, is out of the
question.
One other solution has been proposed. It is, however, too important and
many-sided a scheme for me to deal with at the close of this already too
lengthy chapter.