SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES
Such was the relation between the whites and the blacks of the South
when emancipation came. It remains now to show what changes have
taken place since that time; how these changes have come about, and
what errors have been committed in dealing with the Race-question
which still affect the two races.
The dissension which has come between the two races has either
been sown since the Negro’s emancipation or is inherent in the new
conditions that have arisen.
When the war closed, and the emancipation of the Negroes became an
established fact, the first pressing necessity in the South was
to secure the means of living; for in sections where the armies
had been the country had been swept clean, and in all sections the
entire labor system was disorganized. The internal management of the
whole South, from the general government of the Confederate States
to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the
slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces.
In most instances—indeed, in all of which the writer has any
knowledge—the old masters informed their servants that their homes
were still open to them, and that if they were willing to remain and
work, they would do all in their power to help them. But to remain,
in the first radiant holiday of freedom, was, perhaps, more than
could be expected of human nature, and most of the blacks went off
for a time, though later a large number of them returned.[15] In a
little while the country was filled with an army of occupation, and
the Negroes, moved partly by curiosity, partly by the strangeness
of the situation, and, perhaps mainly, by the lure of the rations
which the Government immediately began to distribute, not unnaturally
flocked to the posts of the local garrisons, leaving the fields
unworked and the crops to go to destruction.
From this time began the change in the Negroes and in the old
relation between them and the whites; a change not great at first,
and which never became great until the Negroes had been worked on by
the ignorant or designing class who, in one guise or another, became
their teachers and leaders. In some places the action of military
commanders had already laid the ground for serious misunderstanding
by such orders as those which were issued in South Carolina for
putting the Negroes in possession of what were, with some irony,
termed “abandoned lands.” The idea became widespread that the
Government was going to divide the lands of the whites among the
Negroes. Soon all over the South the belief became current that
every Negro was to receive “forty acres and a mule”; a belief that
undoubtedly was fostered by some of the U. S. officials. But, in
the main, the military commanders acted with wisdom and commendable
breadth of view, and the breach was made by civilians.
From the first, the conduct of the North toward the Negro was
founded on the following principles: First, that all men are equal
(whatever this may mean), and that the Negro is the equal of the
white; secondly, that he needed to be sustained by the Government;
and thirdly, that the interests of the Negro and the white were
necessarily opposed, and the Negro needed protection against the
white.
The South has always maintained that these were fundamental errors.
It appears to the writer that the position of the South on these
points is sound; that, however individuals of one race may appear the
equals of individuals of the other race, the races themselves are
essentially unequal.
The chief trouble that arose between the two races in the South
after the war grew out of the ignorance at the North of the actual
conditions at the South, and the ignorance at the South of the
temper and the power of the North. The North believed that the Negro
was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the
South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept
emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify
the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in
quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of
the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he
must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled
and compelled to work.
In fact, as ignorance of each other brought about the conditions
which produced the war between the sections, so it has brought about
most of the trouble since the war.
The basic difficulty in the way of reaching a correct solution of the
Negro problem is, as has been stated, that the two sections of the
American people have hitherto looked at it from such widely different
standpoints.
The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against
any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary
discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting
on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of
the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and
virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on
a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. The South,
in direct contact with the practical working of every phase of the
question, affected in its daily life by every form and change that
the question takes, resolutely asserts that the conception on which
that policy is predicated is fundamentally erroneous, and that this
policy would destroy not only the white race of the South, but even
the civilization which the race has helped to establish, and for
which it stands, and so, in time, would inevitably debase and destroy
the nation itself.
Thus, the South holds that the question is vastly more far-reaching
than the North deems it to be; that, indeed, it goes to the very
foundation of race preservation. And this contention, so far from
being a mere political tenet, is held by the entire white population
of the South as the most passionate dogma of the white race.
This confusion of definitions has in the past resulted in untold
evil, and it cannot be insisted on too often that it is of the utmost
importance that the truth, whatever it is, should be established.
When this shall be accomplished, and done so clearly that both
sides shall accept it, the chief difficulty in the way of complete
understanding between the sections will be removed. So long as the
two sections are divided upon it, the question will never be settled.
As soon as they unite in one view, it will settle itself on the only
sound foundation—that of unimpeachable economic truth.
To this ignorance and opposition of views on the part of the two
sections, unhappily, were added at the outset the misunderstandings
and passions engendered by war, which prevented reason having any
great part in a work which was to affect the whole future of the
nation. With a fixed idea that there could be no justice toward the
Negroes in any dealings of their former masters, all matters relating
to the Negroes were intrusted by the Government to the organization
which had recently been started for this very purpose under the
name of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was a subject which called for
the widest knowledge and the broadest wisdom, and, unhappily, both
knowledge and wisdom appeared to have been resolutely banished in the
treatment of the subject.
The basis of the institution of the Freedmen’s Bureau was the
assumption stated: that the interests of the blacks and of the whites
were necessarily opposed to each other, and that the blacks needed
protection against the whites in all cases. The densest ignorance of
the material on which the organization was to work prevailed, and
the personnel of the organization was as unsuited to the work as
could well be. With a small infusion of sensible men were mingled a
considerable element of enthusiasts who felt themselves called to
be the regenerators of the slaves and the scourge of their former
masters, and with these, a large element of reckless adventurers who,
recognizing a field for the exercise of their peculiar talents, went
into the business for what they could make out of it. Measures were
adopted which might have been sound enough in themselves if they had
been administered with any practical wisdom. But there was no wisdom
in the administration. Those who advised moderation and counselled
with the whites were set aside. Bred on the idea of slavery presented
in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and inflamed by passions engendered by the
war, the enthusiasts honestly believed that they were right in always
taking the side of the down-trodden Negro; while the adventurers,
gauging with an infallible appraisement the feelings at the North,
went about their work with businesslike methods to stir up sectional
strife and reap all they could from the abundant harvest. And of the
two, the one did about as much mischief as the other.
No statement of any Southern white person, however pure in life,
lofty in morals, high-minded in principle he might be, was accepted.
His experience, his position, his character, counted for nothing. He
was assumed to be so designing or so prejudiced that his counsel was
valueless.
It is a phase of the case which has not yet wholly disappeared, and
even now we have presented to us in a large section of the country
the singular spectacle of evidence being weighed rather by a man’s
geographical position than by his character and his opportunity for
knowledge.
This self-complacent ignorance is one of the factors which prevent
a complete understanding of the problem and tend to perpetuate the
errors which have cost so much in the past and, unless corrected, may
prove yet more expensive in the future.
The conduct of the Freedmen’s Bureau misled the Negroes and caused
the first breach between them and their former masters. Ignorance
and truculence characterized almost every act of that unhappy
time. Nearly every mistake that could be made was made on both
sides. Measures that were designed with the best intentions were so
administered as to bring these intentions to wreck.
On the emancipation of the slaves, the more enlightened whites of the
South saw quite as clearly as any person at the North could have
seen the necessity of some substitute for the former direction and
training of the Negroes, and schools were started in many places by
the old masters for the colored children.[16]
Teachers and money had come from the North for the education of
the Negroes, and many schools were opened. But the teachers, at
first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated the
good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they
might have accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust
in any case, for no people look with favor on the missionaries who
come to instruct them as to matters of which they feel they know
much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously
any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new
missionaries went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern
people. They lived with the Negroes, consorting with them, and
appearing with them on terms of apparent intimacy, and were believed
to teach social equality, a doctrine which was the surest of all
to arouse enmity then as now. The result was that hostility to
the public-school system sprang up for a time. In some sections
violence was resorted to by the rougher element, though it was of
short duration, and was always confined to a small territory.[17]
Before long, however, this form of opposition disappeared and the
public-school system became an established fact.
The next step in the alienation of the races was the formation of
the secret order of the Union League. The meetings were held at
night, with closed doors, and with pickets guarding the approaches,
and were generally under the direction of the most hostile members
of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The whites regarded this movement with
serious misgivings, as well they might, for, having as its basic
principle the consolidation of the Negro race against the white race,
it banded the Negroes in an organization which, with the exception
of the Confederate Army, was the most complete that has ever been
known in the South, and the fruits of which still survive to-day.
Without going into the question of the charges that the League
taught the most inflammatory doctrines, it may be asserted without
fear of question that its teaching was to alienate the Negroes from
the whites; to withdraw them wholly from reliance on their former
masters, and to drill into their minds the imperative necessity
of adherence to their new leaders, and those whom those leaders
represented.
Then came the worst enemy that either race had ever had: the
post-bellum politician. The problem was already sufficiently
complicated when politics were injected into it. Well might General
Lee say with a wise knowledge of men: “The real war has just begun.”
No sooner had the Southern armies laid down their guns and the
great armies of the North who had saved the Union disbanded, than
the vultures, who had been waiting in the secure distance, gathered
to the feast. The act of a madman had removed the wisest, most
catholic, most conservative, and the ablest leader, one whose last
thoughts almost had been to “restore the Union” by restoring the
government of the Southern States along constitutional lines; and
well the politicians used the unhappy tragedy for their purposes.
Those who had been most cowardly in war were bravest in peace, now
that peace had come. Even in Mr. Lincoln’s time the radical leaders
in Congress had made a strenuous fight to carry out their views, and
their hostility to his plan of pacification and reconstruction was
expressed with hardly less vindictiveness than they exhibited later
toward his successor.[18]
The Southern people, unhappily, acted precisely as this element
wished them to act; for they were sore, unquelled, and angry. They
met denunciation with defiance.
Knowing the imperative necessities of the time as no Northerner could
know them; fearing the effects of turning loose a slave population of
several millions, and ignorant of the deep feeling of the Northern
people; the Southerners hastily enacted laws regulating labor which
were certainly unwise in view of the consequences that followed, and
possibly, if enforced, might have proved oppressive, though they
never had a trial. Most of these laws were simply reënactments of
old vagrant laws on the statute books and some still stand on the
statute books; but they were enacted now expressly to control the
Negroes; they showed the animus of the great body of the whites, and
they aroused a deep feeling of distrust and much resentment among
the Northerners. And, finally, they played into the hands of the
politicians who were on the lookout for any pretext to fasten their
grip on the South.
The struggle just then became intensified between the President and
his opponents in Washington, with the Presidency and the control of
the Government as the stake, and with the South holding the balance
of power; and, unhappily, the Negroes appeared to the politicians
an element that could be utilized to advantage by being made the
“permanent allies” of what Mr. Stevens, Mr. Wade, and Mr. Sumner used
to term “the party of the Union.”
So, the Negro appeared to the politicians a useful instrument, and to
the doctrinaires “a man and brother” who was the equal of his former
master, and, if he were “armed with the weapon” of the ballot, would
be able to protect himself and would inevitably rise to the full
stature of the white.
A large part of the people of the North were undoubtedly inspired
by a missionary spirit which had a high motive beneath it. But
a missionary spirit undirected by knowledge of real conditions
is a dangerous guide to follow. And the danger was never better
illustrated than in this revolution. Doubtless, some of the
politicians were inspired partly by the same idea; but the major
portion had but one ruling passion—the securing of power and the
down-treading of the Southern whites.[19]
Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the
theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging
from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the
whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were
enfranchised.
It is useless to discuss the motives with which this was done. No
matter what the motives it was a national blunder; in its way as
great a blunder as secession.
It is not uncommonly supposed that Mr. Lincoln was the originator
of this idea. The weight of his name is frequently given to it
by the uninformed. Mr. Lincoln, however, was too level-headed and
clear-sighted a statesman ever to have committed so great a folly.
The furthest he ever went was in his letter to Governor Hahn, of
Louisiana, in which he “suggested” the experiment of intrusting
the ballot to “some of the colored people, for instance ... the
very intelligent,” and as a reward for those who had fought for the
Union.[20]
In fact, for a year or two after the war no one in authority dreamed
of investing the Negro race at once with the elective franchise.
This came after the South had refused to tolerate the idea of the
franchise being conferred on any of them, and after passions had
become inflamed.[21]
The eight years of Reconstruction possibly cost the South more than
the four years of war had cost her. To state it in mere figures,
it may be said that when the eight years of Negro domination under
carpet-bag leaders had passed, the public indebtedness of the
Southern States had increased about fourfold, while the property
values in all the States had shrunk, and in those States which were
under the Negro rule had fallen to less than half what they had been
when the South entered on that period. In Louisiana, for instance,
the cost of Negro rule for four years and five months amounted to
$106,020,337, besides the privileges and franchises given away to
those having “pulls,” and State franchises stolen. The wealth of
New Orleans shrank during these eight years from $146,718,790 to
$88,613,930, while real estate values in the country parishes shrank
from $99,266,083 to $47,141,699.[22]
In South Carolina and Mississippi, the other two States which were
wholly under Negro rule, the condition was, if anything, worse than
in Louisiana, while in the other Southern States it was not so bad,
though bad enough.
But the presentation of the statistics gives little idea of what the
people of the South underwent while their State Governments were
controlled by Negroes.
A wild Southern politician is said to have once truculently boasted
that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of the Bunker
Hill Monument. If the tradition is true, it was a piece of insolence
which naturally offended deeply the sentiment of the people of the
proud Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But this was mere gasconade.
Had he been able to carry out his threat, and then had he installed
his Negroes in the State-house of Massachusetts, and, by travesty
of law, filled the legislative halls with thieves and proceeded to
disfranchise the best and the proudest people of the Commonwealth;
then had he, sustained by bayonets, during eight years ridden
rough-shod over them; cut the value of their property in half;
quadrupled their taxes; sold out over twenty per cent. of the landed
property of the State for forfeiture; appointed over two hundred
Negro trial justices who could neither read nor write, put a Negro
on the bench of their highest court, and paraded through the State
something like 80,000 Negro militia, armed with money stolen from the
State, to insult and menace the people, while the whole South looked
coolly on and declared that this treatment was just; then might there
be a partial but not a complete parallel to what some of the States
of the South endured under Negro rule.
It is little wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and
carpet-bagger though he was, should have declared as he did in
writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan
and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[23]
The South does not hold that the Negro race was primarily responsible
for this travesty of government. Few reasonable men now charge
the Negroes at large with more than ignorance and an invincible
faculty for being worked on. But the consequences were none the less
disastrous.
The injury to the whites was not the only injury caused by the
reconstruction system. To the Negroes, the objects of its bounty, it
was no less a calamity.
However high the motive may have been, no greater error could have
been committed; nothing could have been more disastrous to the
Negro’s future than the teaching he thus received. He was taught
that the white man was his enemy when he should have been taught
to cultivate his friendship. He was told he was the equal of the
white when he was not the equal; he was given to understand that
he was the ward of the nation when he should have been trained in
self-reliance; he was led to believe that the Government would
sustain him when he could not be sustained. In legislation, he was
taught thieving; in politics, he was taught not to think for himself,
but to follow slavishly his leaders (and such leaders!); in private
life, he was taught insolence. A laborer, dependent on his labor, no
greater misfortune could have befallen him than estrangement from the
Southern whites. To instil into his mind the belief that the Southern
white was his enemy; that his interest was necessarily opposed to
that of the white, and that he must thwart the white man to the
utmost of his power, was to deprive him of his best friend and to
array against him his strongest enemy.
To the teachings which led the Negro to feel that he was “the ward
of the nation”; that he was a peculiar people whom the nation had
taken under its wing and would support and foster; and that he could,
by its fiat, be made the equal of the white, and would, by its
strong arm, be sustained as such, may, perhaps, be traced most of
the misfortunes of the Negro race, and, indeed, of the whole South,
since the war. The Negro saw the experiment being tried; he saw his
former master, who had been to him the type of all that was powerful
and proud, and brave, and masterful, put down and held down by the
United States Government, while he, himself, was set up and declared
his full equal. He is quick to learn, and during this period, when
he was sustained by the Government, he was as insolent as he dared
to be. The only check on him was his lurking recognition of the
Southerner’s dominant force.
The one thing that saved the Southerners was that they knew it
was not the Negroes but the Federal Government that held them in
subjection.
The day the bayonets were withdrawn from the South, the Negro power,
which but the day before had been as arrogant and insolent as ever in
the whole course of its brief authority, fell to pieces.
It is little less than amazing that the whites of the South should,
after all that they went through during the period of reconstruction,
have retained their kindly feeling for the Negroes, and not only
retained but increased their loyalty to the Union. To the writer, it
seems one of the highest tributes to the white people of the South
that their patriotism should have remained so strong after all they
had endured.
The explanation is that the hostility of the Southern people was
not directed so much against the United States or its Government,
to form which they had contributed so much and in which they had
taken so much pride, as against that element among the people of the
North that had always opposed them, particularly where slavery was
concerned. In seceding, the Southerners had acted on the doctrine
enunciated by so distinguished a Northerner as John Quincy Adams
in 1839, when he declared that it would be better for the States
to “part in friendship from each other than to be held together
by constraint,” and look forward “to form again a more perfect
friendship by dissolving that which could not bind, and to leave the
separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to
the centre,”[24] and now, slavery and secession having finally been
disposed of, they naturally and necessarily gravitated back to the
old feeling for the Union.
It is not less remarkable that, notwithstanding all the humiliation
they had to endure during the period of Negro domination, they
should still have retained their feeling of kindliness for the race.
The fact, however, was that they did not charge against the race
in general the enormities which were committed by them during that
period. However they might be outraged by their insolence and their
acts, they charged it rather against the leaders than against the
followers. The Southerners knew the Negroes; knew their weaknesses
and their merits, and knew how easily they were misled. And it was
always significant that though the Negroes universally followed their
leaders and, when they felt themselves in power, conducted themselves
with intolerable insolence, at other times they exhibited their old
kindliness, and no sooner was the instigation removed than they were
ready to resume their old relation of dependence and affection.
Indeed, those who had been the worst and most revolutionary had no
sooner sunk back into their former position of civility than they
were forgiven and treated with good-natured tolerance.[25]
With the overthrow of the carpet-bag governments, and the destruction
of Negro domination at the South, the South began to shoot up
into the light of a new prosperity. Burdened as she was by debt;
staggering under disasters that had well-nigh destroyed her; scarred
by the struggle through which she had gone, and scorched by the
passions of that fearful time, she set herself with all her energies
to recovering through the arts of peace her old place in the path
of progress. The burden she has borne has been heavy, but she has
carried it bravely and triumphantly.
Her property values have steadily increased. Mills have been started
and manufactories established, and this not only by Southern
investors, but, to a considerable extent, by Northern capital, until
the South has become one of the recognized fields for investment.
This, among other causes, has made the South restive under an
electorate which has confined her to one political party, shut her
off from ability to divide on economic questions, and which, to
a certain extent, withdrew her from her due participation in the
National Government. With this, another cause is the change of the
relation between the two races. It is useless to blink the question.
The old relation of intimacy and affection that survived to a
considerable extent even the strain and stress of the reconstruction
period, and the repressive measures that followed it, has passed
away, and in its place has come a feeling of indifference or contempt
on the one side, and indifference or envy on the other. In some
places, under some conditions, the old attitude of reliance and the
old feeling of affection still remain. For example, in many families,
the old relation of master and servant, of superior and retainer,
may still exist. In some neighborhoods or towns, individuals of
the colored race, by their ability and character, have achieved a
position which has brought to them the respect and sincere good-will
of the whites. A visit to the South will show anyone that, in the
main, the feeling of kindness and good-will has survived all the
haranguing of the politician and all the teaching of the doctrinaire.
Ordinarily, the children still play together, the men work together,
the elders still preserve their old good-will. The whites visit the
sick and afflicted, help the unfortunate, relieve the distressed,
console the bereaved, and perform the old offices of kindness. But
this is, to some extent, exceptional. It is mainly confined to the
very young, the old, or the unfortunate and dependent. The rule is a
changed relation and a widening breach. The teaching of the younger
generation of Negroes is to be rude and insolent. In the main, it
is only where the whites have an undisputed authority that the old
relation survives. Where the whites are so superior in numbers that
no question can be raised; or again, where, notwithstanding the
reversed conditions, the whites are in a position so dominant as not
to admit of question, harmony prevails.
When the relations are reversed there is danger of an outbreak.
The Negro, misled by the teaching of his doctrinaire friends into
thinking himself the equal of the white, asserts himself, and the
white resents it. The consequence is a clash, and the Negro becomes
the chief sufferer so invariably that it ought to throw some light on
the doctrine of equality.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] The same thing happened in Russia on the emancipation of the
serfs. See Kropotkin’s Memoirs.
[16] The writer knew personally of a number of these schools, which
began first as Sunday-schools immediately after the war. Indeed,
under the inspiration of a pious lady, the services of all the young
people in the neighborhood were called into requisition in the spring
of 1865, to help teach a Sunday-school for the Negro children, who
were at first taught their letters in the sand. A little later,
through the kindness of friends at the North, enough money was
secured to build a school-house, which still stands and was used at
first for a Sunday-school and afterward for a day-school.
[17] See Report of Congressional Committee in Government Ku-Klux
Trials.
[18] See “Reconstruction in the South During the War.”
[19] See Congressional debates and questions put to witnesses
before the various High Commissions organized by Congress for the
inquisition of affairs at the South, in 1865 and 1866.
[20] See Mr. Lincoln’s letter to Governor B. F. Hahn, January 13,
1864. This was at a time when it was necessary to have 10,000 votes
to reconstruct Louisiana.
[21] See chapter on “Disfranchisement of the Negro.”
[22] See “Noted Men on the Solid South,” p. 427.
[23] Governor Chamberlain has recently written an open letter to Mr.
James Bryce in which he espouses warmly the views held generally by
the Southern whites on this subject.
[24] See debates in Congress, April 3, 1839; January 23, 1842;
seq.: when John Quincy Adams presented a petition to Congress from
Haverhill, Mass., praying that Congress would “immediately adopt
measures possible to dissolve the union of the States.”
[25] For years, one of the popular paper-carriers of Richmond was a
certain Lewis Lindsay who, during the early period of reconstruction,
had been one of the most violent of the Negro leaders, and became
noted for a speech in which he declared that he wished to wade in
white blood up to his knees. In Charleston, another leader, equally
violent, later sold fish in the market, and among his customers were
the very persons toward whom he had once been so outrageous. In New
Orleans, another was a hostler. Such instances could readily be
multiplied.