CRIME AGAINST WOMANHOOD
The rapist is a product of the reconstruction period. In the beginning he
commanded observation North less by reason of what he did than by reason
of what was done unto him. His chrysalis was a uniform; as a soldier he
could force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white
women; he was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came
into life in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of
social equality theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.
General Weitzel, resigning his command, wrote from La Fourche and La Teche
to Butler in New Orleans: "I can not command these negro regiments. Women
and children are in terror. It is heartrending."[25] General Halleck
wrote, April, 1865, to General Grant of a negro corps: "A number of cases
of atrocious rape by these men have already occurred. Their influence on
the coloured people is reported bad. I hope you will remove it." Similar
reports were made by other Federal officers. Governor Perry, of South
Carolina, says: "I continued remonstrances to Secretary Seward on the
employment of negro troops, gave detail of their atrocious conduct. At
Newberry ... (Crozier's story). At Anderson, they protected and carried
off a negro who had wantonly murdered his master. At Greenville, they
knocked down citizens in the streets without slightest provocation. At
Pocotaligo, they entered a gentleman's house, and after tying him,
violated the ladies." Mr. Seward wrote that Northern sentiment was
sensitive about negro troops. When Governor Perry handed Generals Meade
and Gillmore the Pocotaligo report, General Meade said he was opposed to
negro troops and was trying to rid the army of them, but had to exercise
great caution not to offend Northern sentiment. General Gillmore had some
offenders executed. Federal commanders largely relieved the South of black
troops, but carpet-bag officials restored them in the form of militia.
I have told elsewhere Crozier's story. Let me contrast his slayers with a
son of industry it was my honour to know, Uncle Dick, my father's
coachman. During the war, when my father had occasion to send a large sum
in gold coin through the country, Uncle Dick carried it belted around his
body under his shirt. My father's ward was attending the Southern Female
College in Danville when the President and his Cabinet, fleeing from
Richmond, reached that place. Knowing that Danville might become a
fighting center, Mr. Williams T. Davis, Principal, wrote my father to send
for Sue. The way to reach Danville was by private conveyance, seventy
miles or more. Uncle Dick, mounted high on his carriage-box, a
white-headed, black-faced knight-errant of chivalry, set forth. Nobody
knew where the armies were. He might have to cut his horses loose from his
carriage, mount Sue on one, himself take the other, and bring her through
the forest. In due time the carriage rolled into our yard, Uncle Dick
proud and happy on his box, Sue inside wrapped in rugs, sound asleep, for
it was midnight. That is the way we could trust our black men.
The following account by an ex-Confederate captain shows how General
Schofield handled a case of the crime which is now under discussion: "A
young white girl on her way to Sunday School was attacked by a negro;
'attempted' assault, the family said; it is usually put that way;
'consummated' nails the victim to a stake. Our people were in a state of
terror; they seemed paralysed; they were inured to dispossession and
outrage. No one seemed to know what to do. I picked up several young men
and trailed down the ruffian. Then I sent a letter to General Schofield
(with whom I had some acquaintance, as we had met each other hunting),
asking instructions. He sent two detectives and a file of soldiers,
requesting that I call for further assistance if occasion demanded. I
wrote full statement of facts, had the girl's testimony taken in private;
evidence was laid before General Schofield; the negro was sent to the
penitentiary for eighteen years. The promptness of his action inspired
people here with hope. We had no Ku Klux in Virginia--one reason, I have
always thought, was the swiftness with which punishment was meted out in
that case."
I have, as I believe, from Judge Lynch himself particulars of another case
in which, the law being inactive, citizens took justice into their own
hands:
"Two young girls, daughters of a worthy German settler, were out to bring
up cows, when attacked by a negro tramp; they ran screaming, but were
overtaken; he seized the older; the younger, about ten years old,
continued to run. Some passers on the nearest road, a private and lonely
one, rushed to the relief of the older girl, who was making such outcry as
she could. We found her prostrate, the negro having her pinioned with one
knee on either arm. His jack-knife open, was held between his teeth, and
he was stuffing his handkerchief in her mouth to stifle her cries. We
rescued her, took him prisoner, carried him to the nearest magistrate, a
carpet-bag politician, who committed him to jail to await the action of
the grand jury. He made his escape a few days afterward, was recaptured
and relodged in jail. Ten days later a band was organised among
respectable citizens in and around our town; a Northern settler was a
member. One detachment set out about dark for the rendezvous where they
met a score more of resolute, armed men, some with masks, some without.
They effected entrance into the jail, but their way was arrested when they
found the prisoner in a casemated cell, which other negroes readily
pointed out, one offering a lamp; a railroad section hand procured
crow-bars with which the casemate was crushed in; the prisoner was taken
in charge. He stood mute; seemed calm and unmoved; was put in a close
carriage, the purpose being to drive him to the exact spot of his crime,
but it coming on day, the company thought best to execute him at once. He
was placed upon a mule; a rope attached to his neck was tied to the limb
of a tree about ten feet above. The leader now learned of an intention to
riddle his body with bullets when the drop occurred. Each member had
pledged obedience to orders; each had been pledged to take no liquor for
hours before, or during this expedition--pledges so far rigidly observed.
The leader addressed them: 'We are here to avenge outrage on a helpless
child, and to let it be well known that such crime shall not go unpunished
in this community. But mutilation of this fiend's remains will be a
reflection upon ourselves and not a dispensation of justice.'
"The negro, seeing his end surely at hand, broke down, pleading for mercy;
confessed that he had appreciated in advance the great peril in which his
crime might place him, but had argued that, as a stranger, he would not be
liable to identification, and that as the country was thickly wooded, he
was sure of escape. 'But, fo' Gawd, gent'mun, ef a white man f'om de Norf
hadn't put't in my hade dat a white 'oman warn' none too good fuh--'
"Word was given, and he dropped into eternity. It was broad daylight when
the party got back to town. They overtook several negro men going to work
who knew full well what they had been about. But there was no sign of
protest or demur. The Commonwealth's Attorney made efforts to ascertain
the perpetrators of the deed, but as the company entered the town and jail
so quietly and left it with so little disturbance that only one person in
the village had knowledge of their coming and going, no one was discovered
who could name a single member of the party or who had any idea of whence
they came or whither they went. So of course no indictment could be
found." This was in 1870; since then till now no similar crime has
occurred in that community. Within the circumscribed radius of its
influence, lynching seems to eradicate the evil for which administered.
The moderation marking this execution has not always accompanied lynching.
Reading accounts of unnecessary tortures inflicted, of very orgies of
vengeance, people remote from the scenes, Southerners no less than others,
have shuddered with disgust, and trembled with concern for the dignity of
their own race. Only people on the spot, writhing under the agony of
provocation, comprehended the fury of response to the crime of crimes.
Vigilants meant to make their awful vengeance effective deterrent to the
crime's repetition. No other crime offers such problems to relatives and
officers of justice and to the people among whom it occurs; it is so
outside of civilisation that there seem no terms for dispassionate
discussion, no fine adjustment of civil trial and legal penalty.
Listen to this out of the depths of one Southern woman's experience: "I
stood once with other friends, who were trying to nurse her back to life
and reason, by the bedside of a girl--a beautiful, gentle, high-born
creature--who had been outraged. We were using all the skill and tact and
tenderness at our command. It seemed impossible for her to have one hour's
peaceful sleep. She would start from slumber with a shriek, look at us
with dilated eyes, then clutch us and beg for help. But the most
unspeakable pity of it all was her loathing for her own body; her prayers
that she might die and her body be burned to ashes. I heard her physician
say to an officer who came to take her deposition: 'I would be signing
that girl's death warrant if I let you in there to make her tell that
horrible story over again.' When a grim group came with some negroes they
wanted to bring before her for identification, her brothers and her lover
said: 'Only over our dead bodies.'"
Lynching is inexcusable, even for this crime, which is comparable to no
other, and to which murder is a trifle. So we may coolly argue when the
blow has not fallen upon ourselves or at our own door. When it has, we
think there's a wolf abroad and we have lambs. Those to whom the wrecked
woman is dear are quiveringly alive to her irreparable wrong. The victim
has rights, they argue; if, unhappily for herself, she survive the
outrage, she is entitled to what poor remnants of reason may be left her;
it is naturally their whole care to preserve her from memories that sear
and craze, and from rehearsal before even the most private tribunal, of
events that the merciful, even if not of her blood, must wish her to
forget. Under such strain, men see as the one thing imperative the prompt
and informal removal from existence of the offender, whom they look upon,
not as man, but beast or fiend.
The "poor white" is the most frequent sufferer from assault; the wife of
the small farmer attending household duties in her isolated home while her
husband is in the fields or otherwise absent about his work; or the small
farmer's daughter when she goes to the spring for water, or to the meadow
for the cows, or trudges a lonely road or pathway to school; these are
more convenient material than the lady of larger means and higher station,
who is more rarely unattended. In cases on record the ravished and slain
were children, five, six, eight years old; in others, mothers with babies
at their breasts, and the babies were slain with the mothers. Here is a
case cited by Judge M. L. Dawson: A negro raped and slew a farmer's
five-year-old child. Arrested, tried, convicted, appealed, sentence
reversed, reappealed (on insanity plea); people took him out and hung him.
In full-volumed indignation over lynching, the usual course of the
Northern press was to almost lose sight of the crime provoking it. It was
a minor fact that a woman was violated, that her skull was crushed or that
she sustained other injuries from which she died or which made her a wreck
for life--particulars too trivial to be noted by moulders of public
opinion writing eloquent essays on "Crime in the South." Picking up a
paper with this glaring headline, one would have a right to expect some
outburst of indignation over the ravishment and butchering of womanhood.
But there would be editorial after editorial rife with invectives against
lynching and lynchers, righteous with indignation over "lawlessness in the
South," and not one word of sympathy or pity for the white victim of negro
lust! The fact that there was such a victim seemed lost sight of; the
crime for which the negro was executed would often escape everything but
bare mention, sometimes that. What deductions were negroes to draw from
such distinctions, except that lynching was monstrous crime, rape an
affair of little moment, and strenuous objection to it only one feature of
damnable "Race Prejudice in the South"?
"They do not care, the men and women of the North," I have heard a
Southern girl exclaim, "if we are raped. They do not care that we are
prisoners of fear, that we fear to take a ramble in the woods alone, fear
to go about the farms on necessary duties, fear to sit in our houses
alone; fear, if we live in cities, to go alone on the streets at hours
when a woman is safe anywhere in Boston or New York."
From the Northern attitude as reflected in the press and in the pulpit,
negroes drew their own conclusions. Violation of a white woman was no
harm; indeed, as a leveler of social distinctions, it might almost be
construed into an act of grace. The way to become a hero in the eyes of
the white North and to win the crown of martyrdom for oneself and new
outbursts of sympathy for one's race was to assault a white woman of the
South. This crime was a development of a period when the negro was
dominated by political, religious and social advisers from the North and
by the attitude of the Northern press and pulpit. It was practically
unknown in wartime, when negroes were left on plantations as protectors
and guardians of white women and children.
"There was only one case,[26] as far as the writer can ascertain, of the
negro's crime against womanhood during all the days of slavery," said
Professor Stratton in the "North American Review" a few years ago, "while
his fidelity and simple discharge of duty during the Civil War when the
white men were away fighting against his liberty have challenged the
admiration of the world; but since he has been made free, his increase in
crime and immorality has gone side by side with his educational
advancement--and even in greater ratio." The Professor gave figures, as
others have done, which proved his case, if figures can prove anything.
Considered with reference to the crime under discussion, it is difficult
to see how purely intellectual training tends to its increase, if there is
any truth in the doctrine that brain development effects a reduction of
animal propensities. Only in moral education, however, rests any real
security for conduct. Negroes educated and negroes uneducated, in a
technical sense, have committed this crime.[27]
The rapist is not to be taken as literal index to race character; he is an
excrescence of the times; his crime is a horror that must be wiped out for
the honour of the land, the security of womanhood, the credit of our
negro citizenhood. The weapon for its destruction is in the hands of
Afro-Americans; overwhelming sentiment on their part would put an end to
it; they should be the last to stand for the rapist's protection; rather
should they say to him: "You are none of us!" They should be quick to aid
in his arrest, identification and deliverance to the law. Such attitude
would be more effective than any other one force that can be brought to
bear upon this crime and that of lynching. I chronicle here as worthy of
record, that in June, 1870, William Stimson, rapist, was tried before a
negro jury, convicted on negro evidence, and hung November 4. This
happened in North Carolina during negro rule.
The negro guilty of this hideous offense has committed against his race a
worse crime than lynching can ever be. By the brutish few the many are
judged--particularly when the many in vociferous condemnation of the
penalty visited upon the criminal seem to condone his awful iniquity
against themselves. Black men who have been and will be womanhood's
protectors outnumber the beasts who wear like skins as many thousands to
one; and it is not fair to themselves that they pursue any course, utter
any sentiment, which causes them to be classed in any way whatever with
these. Black men are seeing this and are setting their faces towards
stamping out the crime which causes lynching. Utterances from some of
their pulpits and resolutions passed by some of their religious bodies
indicate this.
The occurrence of rapes, lynchings and burnings in the North and West has
had beneficial influence upon the question at large. It has led white
people of other sections to understand in some degree the Southern
situation and to express condemnation of the crime that leads to lynching.
The attitude of the Northern press has undergone great change in recent
years, change effective for reform, in that while lynching is as severely
under the ban as ever--which it should be--the companion crime goes with
it. Southern sentiment is against lynching; I recall seven
governors--Aycock of North Carolina, Montague of Virginia, Heyward of
South Carolina, Candler and Terrell of Georgia, Jelks of Alabama, Vardaman
of Mississippi--who have so placed themselves conspicuously on record. All
our newspapers have done so, I believe, from the "Times-Dispatch" of
Richmond, the Charlotte "Observer," the "Constitution" and the "Journal"
of Atlanta, the "State" of Columbia, the Charleston "News-Courier," the
Savannah "News," to the "Times-Democrat" of New Orleans, and "Times-Union"
of Jacksonville.
One hope and promise of the new constitutions with which Southern States
lately replaced the Black and Tan instruments is the eradication of this
method of procedure. Soon after Virginia adopted hers, three negro rapists
in that State received legal trial and conviction and not over hasty
execution. On motion of District Attorney E. C. Goode, reprieve was
granted after conviction that a case in Mecklenburg might be looked into
more fully. Such deliberation has not been exceeded--if, indeed, it has
been equaled--north of Mason & Dixon's line. But as long as rapes are
committed, so long will there be danger of lynchings, not only in the
South, but anywhere else. In the presence of this worse than savage crime
the white race suffers reversion to savagery.
RACE PREJUDICE