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IN HIS SPEECH AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE BOSTON MERCHANTS’ ASSOCIATION
IN DECEMBER, 1889, MR. GRADY SAID:
MR. PRESIDENT: Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of the race
problem—forbidden by occasion to make a political speech—I appreciate in
trying to reconcile orders with propriety the predicament of the little
maid who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, “Now, go, my
darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don’t go near the
water.”
The stoutest apostle of the church, they say, is the missionary, and the
missionary, wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in
deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the
standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston’s banquet hall, and discuss
the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr.
President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if
earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating
sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and
estrangement, if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and
to strengthen an untried arm—then, sir, I find the courage to proceed.
Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New
England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and
her thrift. Here, within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where
Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing
preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American
liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New
England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange
apparition! This stern and unique figure—carved from the ocean and the
wilderness—its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters
and of wars—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in
the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base—while startled
kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this
handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the
embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human
liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers—and prosper the
fortunes of their living sons—and perpetuate the inspiration of their
handiwork.
Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the
attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done
everywhere, every word I then uttered—to declare that the sentiments I
then avowed were universally approved in the South—I realize that the
confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my
presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that
confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one
essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess,
Mr. President—before the praise of New England has died on my lips—that
I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of
17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by
death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their
rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots, and gone back home to pray
for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000
Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help
them—and may their sturdy tribe increase!
Far to the south, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line,
once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal
blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and
richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable
people. There, is centered all that can please or prosper humankind. A
perfect climate, above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every
product of the temperate zone. There, by night the cotton whitens
beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its
bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the
wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There, are
mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests, vast and primeval,
and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the
three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wool—that
region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly—in iron, proven
supremacy—in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic. From this
assured and permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions
cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries.
Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from
the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in Divine
assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest—not set amid costly
farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid
cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season
nor soil has set a limit—this system of industries is mounting to a
splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world.
That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home—a land better and
fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting, in its material
excellence, for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against
that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy
loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers and
touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet,
while in the Eldorado of which I have told you, but 15 per cent. of
lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched and its population so
scant that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could
not be heard from Virginia to Texas—while on the threshold of nearly
every house in New England stands a son, seeking with troubled eyes some
new land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact
remains that in 1880 the South had fewer Northern-born citizens than she
had in 1870—fewer in ’70 than in ’60. Why is this? Why is it, sir,
though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel,
fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it
was crimson with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the
slaveholder stood guard every inch of its way?
There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to
consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the
fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands
whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it
will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp
in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing,
sir, but this problem, and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear
understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and
such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and
Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices at Manassas and Gettysburg, and
illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was
ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon’s mouth.
If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night—hear one thing
more. My people, your brothers in the South—brothers in blood, in
destiny, in all that is best in our past and future—are so beset with
this problem that their very existence depends upon its right solution.
Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the
Republic sailed from your ports—the slaves worked in our fields. You
will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do hereby
declare that in its wise and humane administration, in lifting the slave
to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving
him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom—our fathers left their
sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this
institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human
slavery is gone forever from the American soil. But the freedman
remains. With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its
appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—with
equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly
unequal in intelligence and responsibility—each pledged against
fusion—one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by
a desolating war—the experiment sought by neither, but approached by
both with doubt—these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every
point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to
the end.
Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never
before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an
alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the
way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this
Republic because he is an alien and inferior. The red man was owner of
the land—the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable—but they
hindered both sections and are gone! But the black man, affecting but
one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to
the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any
cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity.
It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded,
without rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and
blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been
irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however
similar, have lived anywhere at any time on the same soil with equal
rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good
this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American
prejudice—to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible
between whites and blacks—and to reverse, under the very worst
conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to
this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—a rigor
that accepts no excuse—and a suspicion that discourages frankness and
sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with
our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—so bound
up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we
could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can
know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it
with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy—with less than the
knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood—and that
when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall
feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving
hearts.
The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South—the men whose
genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American
history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the
fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread
splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this
problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They
realize, as you cannot, what this problem means—what they owe to this
kindly and dependent race—the measure of their debt to the world in
whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their
feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with
its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes
clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in
passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow,
with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God
they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is
needed to complete their consecration!
Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.
President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here
the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible, and as just as your
people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place, to rightly
solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist
that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to
plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and
tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense
and common honesty—wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly
disregard—guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and
irresponsible of either race—compensating error with frankness, and
retrieving in patience what they lose in passion—and conscious all the
time that wrong means ruin,—admit this, and we may reach an
understanding to-night.
The President of the United States in his late message to Congress,
discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem,
asks: “Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will
the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights
that are his?” I shall not here protest against the partisanry that, for
the first time in our history in time of peace, has stamped with the
great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and
loyal section, though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier
who held the helm of state for the eight stormiest years of
reconstruction never found need for such a step; and though there is no
personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust
imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir,
backed by a record on every page of which is progress, I venture to make
earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. I bespeak
your patience, while with vigorous plainness of speech, seeking your
judgment rather than your applause, I proceed step by step. We give to
the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth
$45,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses and fruit. This
enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and
discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and
gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the
singing plow.
It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of its just hire. I
present the tax-books of Georgia, which show that the negro, 25 years
ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000 of assessed property,
worth twice that much. Does not that record honor him, and vindicate his
neighbors? What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For
every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he
prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes,
tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of
their children the helpful message their State sends them from the
schoolhouse door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia
we added last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more
than $1,000,000—and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered—of
the fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for
$10,000,000, and yet 49 per cent. of the beneficiaries are black
children—and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can
help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two
since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston.
Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of
little, the South with one-seventh of the taxable property of the
country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth
as much public land, and having back of its tax-books none of the half
billion of bonds that enrich the North—and though it pays annually
$26,000,000 to your section as pensions—yet gives nearly one-sixth of
the public-school fund. The South since 1865 has spent $122,000,000 in
education, and this year is pledged to $37,000,000 for state and city
schools, although the blacks paying one-thirtieth of the taxes get
nearly one-half of the fund.
Go into our fields and see whites and blacks working side by side. On
our buildings in the same squad. In our shops at the same forge. Often
the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower wages by the greater
need or simpler habits, and yet are permitted because we want to bar
them from no avenue in which their feet are fitted to tread. They could
not there be elected orators of the white universities, as they have
been here, but they do enter there a hundred useful trades that are
closed against them here. We hold it better and wiser to tend the weeds
in the garden than to water the exotic in the window. In the South,
there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists, doctors,
preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their race to
support them. In villages and towns they have their military companies
equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and societies
built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the testimony of
the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced felonies to
misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating punishment for crime,
that we might save, as far as possible, this dependent race from its own
weakness. In our penitentiary record 60 per cent. of the prosecutors are
negroes, and in every court the negro criminal strikes the colored
juror, that white men may judge his case. In the North, one negro in
every 1865 is in jail—in the South only one in 446. In the North the
percentage of negro prisoners is six times as great as native whites—in
the South, only four times as great. If prejudice wrongs him in southern
courts, the record shows it to be deeper in northern courts.
I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and upright as the bar of
Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion, that in the southern
courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life, liberty or property,
the negro has distinct advantage because he is a negro, apt to be
over-reached, oppressed—and that this advantage reaches from the juror
in making his verdict to the judge in measuring his sentence. Now, Mr.
President, can it be seriously maintained that we are terrorizing the
people from whose willing hands come every year $1,000,000,000 of farm
crops? Or have robbed a people, who twenty-five years from unrewarded
slavery have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of property? Or that we
intend to oppress the people we are arming every day? Or deceive them
when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our ability? Or outlaw
them when we work side by side with them? Or re-enslave them under legal
forms when for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit
of felonies and mitigated the severity of law? My fellow countryman, as
you yourself may sometimes have to appeal to the bar of human judgment
for justice and for right, give to my people to-night the fair and
unanswerable conclusion of these incontestible facts.
But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and
violence. This I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal
community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely it is
misjudged! It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the
negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these
dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition,
inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion.
Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an
incident—in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of
the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons, and
it scarcely arrests attention—a chance collision in the South among
relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one
race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was
ungrateful to the colored soldiers who followed its flag, because a
Grand Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran, as
for you to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or
to accept exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one
of those who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of
either section, and belie American character by declaring them to be
significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are
neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and the sin of our poor
fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its
weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that
society, sentient and responsible in every fibre, can mend and repair
until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.
These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia’s busy life as
they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And
if they did, not one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is
through them, and the men who think with them—making nine-tenths of
every southern community—that these two races have been carried thus far
with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on
earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness—more than in
all the laws that can be passed or all the bayonets that can be
mustered—is the hope of our future.
When will the black cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not
dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere
casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere
is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the
steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and
shiftless—then and not till then will the ballot of the negro be free.
The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in
prejudice against the blacks—not in sectional estrangement, not in the
hope of political dominion—but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is
this vast ignorant and purchasable vote—clannish, credulous, impulsive
and passionate—tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to
the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into
alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an
outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties
through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even
that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a
faction—strong enough in every community to control on the slightest
division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the
cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed on,
its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses
misdirected—and even its superstition made to play its part in a
campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every
approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as
this—the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every southern
community has drunk deeply—that the white people of the South are banded
together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if 300,000 black
men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot—banded in race
instinct, holding against you the memory of a century of slavery, taught
by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already
travestied legislation from your statehouse, and in every species of
folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.
But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous
menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long
been flippantly charged to be evidence, and has now been solemnly and
officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on
our part. Let us see. Virginia—a State now under fierce assault for this
alleged crime—cast in 1888 75 per cent. of her vote. Massachusetts, the
State in which I speak, 60 per cent. of her vote. Was it suppression in
Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last month Virginia cast
69 per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts, fighting in every district,
cast only 49 per cent. of hers. If Virginia is condemned because 31 per
cent. of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape in which 51
per cent. was dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen southern
States in 1888 cast 67 per cent. of their total vote—the six New England
States but 63 per cent. of theirs. By what fair rule shall the stigma be
put upon one section, while the other escapes? A congressional election
in New York last week, with the polling-place in touch of every voter,
brought out only 6000 votes of 28,000—and the lack of opposition is
assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State, in which an
opposition speech has not been heard in ten years, and the
polling-places are miles apart—under the unfair reasoning of which my
section has been a constant victim—the small vote is charged to be proof
of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of 10,000,
under hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000; in Iowa,
in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out, and an
opposition majority of 8000 was established. The change of 42,000 votes
in Iowa is accepted as political revolution—in Virginia an increase of
30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud. I
charge these facts and figures home, sir, to the heart and conscience of
the American people, who will not assuredly see one section condemned
for what another section is excused!
If I can drive them through the prejudice of the partisan, and have them
read and pondered at the fireside of the citizen, I will rest on the
judgment there formed and the verdict there rendered!
It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the
vote is not regularly cast, but more inexplicable that this should be so
in New England than in the South. What invites the negro to the
ballot-box? He knows that, of all men, it has promised him most and
yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of
“forty acres and a mule.” His second, the threat that Democratic success
meant his re-inslavement. Both have proved false in his experience. He
looked for a home, and he got the freedman’s bank. He fought under the
promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged
and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his
neighbors, with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up
in his—and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss
of their confidence and sympathy that is at last his best and his
enduring hope. And so, without leaders or organization—and lacking the
resolute heroism of my party friends in Vermont that makes their
hopeless march over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage—he
shrewdly measures the occasional agitator, balances his little account
with politics, touches up his mule and jogs down the furrow, letting the
mad world jog as it will!
The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if
partisans in the North would understand this. I have seen the white
people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed
sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as
Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and touching their eyes with faith,
bid them look abroad to see the very air “filled with the chariots of
Israel and the horsemen thereof.” If there is any human force that
cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and
responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption
cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law or divorced in force.
It is the inalienable right of every free community—and the just and
righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on
this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or
shotgun; but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility,
massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation
of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it
all the powers of the earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain
that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white
race—that before the moral and material power of her people once more
unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was
left alone vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts—as that night
should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills,
but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to Federal
election law, you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not
exist, that the very form of this government may be changed—this old
State that holds in its charter the boast that “it is a free and
independent commonwealth”—it may deliver its election machinery into the
hands of the government it helped to create—but never, sir, will a
single State of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to the
control of an ignorant and inferior race. We wrested our State
government from negro supremacy when the Federal drumbeat rolled closer
to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will
ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the
cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district of the South,
we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to
prevent its re-establishment!
I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in
seeming estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me
a path down which the white people of the South divided may walk in
peace and honor, I will take that path though I took it alone—for at the
end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my
section and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro
had not been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the
Republic united. His enfranchisement—against which I enter no
protest—holds the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we
offer for the problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply
report progress and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at
all—and I firmly believe it will, though nowhere else has it been—it
will be solved by the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply
pledged in honor to its solution. I had rather see my people render back
this question lightly solved than to see them gather all the spoils over
which faction has contended since Catiline conspired and Cæsar fought.
Meantime we treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the
fullness the strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the
steadfast ways of citizenship that he may no longer be the prey of the
unscrupulous and the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every
pursuit in which he can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and
capacity. We seek to hold his confidence and friendship, and to pin him
to the soil with ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own
hearthstone that sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know.
And we gather him into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility
that, though it now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible
and intelligent of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment
and justified in the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly
but surely to the end.
The love we feel for that race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I
attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there
looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the
sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her
black arms and led me smiling into sleep. This scene vanishes as I
speak, and I catch a vision of an old Southern home, with its lofty
pillars, and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I
see women with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet
helpless. I see night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions,
and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving
hands—now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of
mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal
man—as they lay a mother’s blessing there while at her knees—the truest
altar I yet have found—I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary,
because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin or guard at her chamber
door, puts a black man’s loyalty between her and danger.
I catch another vision. The crisis of battle—a soldier struck,
staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding
his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling
death—bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the
stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down
his life in his master’s stead. I see him by the weary bedside,
ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble
heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and
in honor to still the soldier’s agony and seal the soldier’s life. I see
him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the
death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the
mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and
with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange
fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure
is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave
comes a voice saying: “Follow him! Put your arms about him in his need,
even as he puts his about me. Be his friend as he was mine.” And out
into this new world—strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering
both—I follow! And may God forget my people—when they forget these!
Whatever the future may hold for them—whether they plod along in the
servitude from which they have never been lifted since the Cyrenian was
laid hold upon by the Roman soldiers and made to bear the cross of the
fainting Christ—whether they find homes again in Africa, and thus hasten
the prophecy of the psalmist who said: “And suddenly Ethiopia shall hold
out her hands unto God”—whether, forever dislocated and separated, they
remain a weak people beset by stronger, and exist as the Turk, who lives
in the jealousy rather than in the conscience of Europe—or whether in
this miraculous Republic they break through the caste of twenty
centuries and, belying universal history, reach the full stature of
citizenship, and in peace maintain it—we shall give them uttermost
justice and abiding friendship. And whatever we do, into whatever
seeming estrangement we may be driven, nothing shall disturb the love we
bear this Republic, or mitigate our consecration to its service. I stand
here, Mr. President, to profess no new loyalty. When General Lee, whose
heart was the temple of our hopes and whose arm was clothed with our
strength, renewed his allegiance to the government of Appomattox, he
spoke from a heart too great to be false, and he spoke for every honest
man from Maryland to Texas. From that day to this, Hamilcar has nowhere
in the South sworn young Hannibal to hatred and vengeance—but everywhere
to loyalty and to love. Witness the soldier standing at the base of a
Confederate monument above the graves of his comrades, his empty sleeve
tossing in the April wind, adjuring the young men about him, to serve as
honest and loyal citizens the government against which their fathers
fought. This message, delivered from that sacred presence, has gone home
to the hearts of my fellows! And, sir, I declare here, if physical
courage be always equal to human aspiration, that they would die, sir,
if need be, to restore this Republic their fathers fought to dissolve!
Such, Mr. President, is this problem as we see it; such is the temper in
which we approach it: such the progress made. What do we ask of you?
First, patience; out of this alone can come perfect work. Second,
confidence; in this alone can you judge fairly. Third, sympathy; in this
you can help us best. Fourth, give us your sons as hostages. When you
plant your capital in millions, send your sons that they may help know
how true are our hearts and may help to swell the Anglo-Saxon current
until it can carry without danger this black infusion. Fifth, loyalty to
the Republic—for there is sectionalism in loyalty as in estrangement.
This hour little needs the loyalty that is loyal to one section and yet
holds the other in enduring suspicion and estrangement. Give us the
broad and perfect loyalty that loves and trusts Georgia alike with
Massachusetts—that knows no south, no north, no east, no west; but
endears with equal and patriotic love every foot of our soil, every
State in our Union.
A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us
to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever
divides. We, sir, are Americans—and we fight for human liberty. The
uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth.
France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from
kingcraft and oppression—this is our mission. And we shall not fail. God
has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not
lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has
come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from
Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way—aye, even from the hour when,
from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of
the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that
stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid
our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past
with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the
bonds of love—loving from the lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed
in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of
human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path, and making
clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s
appointed time!
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