During the Rebellion and at its close, there was one question that
appeared to overshadow all others; this was Negro Equality. While the
armies were on the field of battle, this was the great bugbear among
many who warmly espoused the cause of the Government, and who approved
all its measures, with this single exception. They sincerely wished
the rebels to be despoiled of their property. They wished every means
to be used to secure our success on the field, including Emancipation.
But they would grow pale at the words Negro Equality; just as if the
liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social
and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people
into our houses, and give them seats in our social circle, beyond what
we would accord to other total strangers. No advocate of Negro Equality
ever demanded for the race that they should be made pets. Protect them
in their natural, lawful, and acquired rights, is all they ask.
Social equality is a condition of society that must make itself.
There are colored families residing in every Southern State, whose
education and social position is far above a large portion of their
neighboring whites. To compel them to associate with these whites would
be a grievous wrong. Then, away with this talk, which is founded in
hatred to an injured people. Give the colored race in the South equal
protection before the law, and then we say to them--
“Now, to gain the social prize,
Paddle your own canoe.”
But this hue and cry about Negro Equality generally emanates from a
shoddy aristocracy, or an uneducated class, more afraid of the negro’s
ability and industry than of his color rubbing off against them,--men
whose claims to equality are so frail that they must be fenced about,
and protected by every possible guard; while the true nobleman fears
not that his reputation will be compromised by any association he
may choose to form. So it is with many of those men who fear negro
competition. Conscious of their own inferiority to the mass of mankind,
and recognizing the fact that they exist and thrive only by the aid of
adventitious advantages, they look with jealousy on any new rivals and
competitors, and use every means, fair and unfair, to keep them out of
the market.
The same sort of opposition has been made to the introduction of female
labor into any of the various branches of manufacture. Consequently,
women have always been discriminated against. They have been restricted
to a small range of employments; their wages have been kept down; and
many who would be perfectly competent to perform the duties of clerks
or accountants, or to earn good wages in some branch of manufacture,
have been driven by their necessities either to suicide or prostitution.
But the nation, knowing the Southerners as they did, aware of the deep
hatred to Northern whites, and still deeper hatred to their ex-slaves,
who aided in blotting out the institution of slavery, it was the duty
of the nation, having once clothed the colored man with the rights of
citizenship and promised him in the Constitution full protection for
those rights, to keep this promise most sacredly. The question, while
it is invested with equities of the most sacred character, is not
without its difficulties and embarrassments. Under the policy adopted
by the Democrats in the late insurrectionary States, the colored
citizen has been subjected to a reign of terror which has driven him
from the enjoyment of his rights and leaves him as much a nonenity
in politics, unless he obeys their behests, as he was when he was in
slavery. Under this condition of things to-day, while he if properly
protected in his rights would hold political supremacy in Mississippi,
Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, he has
little or no voice in either State or National Government.
Through fear, intimidation, assassination, and all the horrors that
barbarism can invent, every right of the negro in the Southern States
is to-day at an end. Complete submission to the whites is the only way
for the colored man to live in peace.
[Illustration: KU-KLUX EMBLEMS.]
Some time since there was considerable talk about a “War of Races,” but
the war was all on the side of the whites. The freedman has succumbed
to brute force, and hence the war of races is suspended; but let him
attempt to assert his rights of citizenship, as the white man does at
the North, according to the dictates of his own conscience and sense of
duty, and the bloody hands of the Ku-Klux and White Leaguer will appear
in all their horrors once more--the “dream that has passed” would
become a sad reality again.