CHAPTER XVII

THE RACE QUESTION--THE SITUATION IN DETAIL

The distinction between the two classes of southern negroes, glanced at in

the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind--at the beginning, in the

middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we

say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in

numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred

thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and

four hundred thousand, in the lower class. The latter, being nineteen

times as large as the other, first demands attention.

In the country many of the men are croppers. A group of negroes--generally

parents and children--do the labor of preparation, cultivation, and

gathering, while the owner contributes the land, necessary animals, and

feed for the latter. The croppers get half the crop, and the land owner

half. The latter retains out of their half whatever he has advanced the

croppers. The advances must be limited with firmness, otherwise they will

cause loss. These croppers are the great bulk of the agricultural

laborers. So few of the men work for standing wages that they need not be

noticed. In the towns the men subsist upon day labor, the pay of which

ranges from 50 cents to $1.25. It hardly averages 80 cents. Some of the

women, both in country and town, take places as house servants and nurses

at weekly wages that vary from $1 to $2 with board. The growing

disinclination of the women to these places is much stronger in the

country than in town. In country and town the women do laundry for the

whites at an average price per family of a dollar a week; and they get

jobs of sewing, cleaning kitchen utensils, scrubbing, etc. In the country

these women do some field labor, sometimes plowing, often hoeing. If

trained in childhood they make expert cotton-pickers. But the women

agricultural workers steadily decrease in number.

The negro has inherited from a thousand generations of forefathers, bred

in the humid and enervating tropical West African climate, a laziness

which is the extreme contrary of Caucasian energy and enterprise.[161]

Thus we are told of him in Jamaica, "In many cases a field negro will not

work for his employer more than four days a week. He may till his own plot

of ground on one of the other days or not as the spirit moves him."[162]

The first Saturday in June, 1904, I saw the thriving little town of

Abbeville, South Carolina, thronged with idle negroes from the surrounding

plantations. A merchant, who was kept busy in his store, offered to pay

several of them 75 cents to cut up a load of firewood--something more than

the market price. They do not work on Saturday unless compelled by

something unusual; and so each one replied at once, without any inquiry if

the logs were large or small, seasoned or not, and thus finding whether

the job was hard or easy, that the weather was too hot. And yet these

negroes all exhibited in their clothes and hungry looks unmistakable signs

of want. Those that superintend the gangs working for contractors in

Atlanta and the vicinity, all--except now and then one who has managed to

form a small party of picked laborers--tell me that it is very seldom that

a negro can be induced to work Saturday; if that does happen he will make

up his lost holiday by not returning to work before Tuesday. Your cook,

nurse, maid, or black servant of any kind will every now and then suddenly

inconvenience you by taking an utterly unnecessary rest. When Booker

Washington was starting his system of industrial training, as he tells us,

"Not a few of the fathers and mothers urged that because the race had

worked for 250 years or more, it ought to have a chance to rest."[163]

The negro has likewise inherited lack of forecast and providence. If at

the end of the year he finds himself with a small purse from his part of

the crop, standing wages, or profits from a tenancy, he will often

squander much of it for a top buggy, a piano which none of his family can

play, or expensive furniture. Those in the gangs just mentioned always

want to fool away their money before it is made. If one has been advanced

$4, and his wages amount to $5, he will hardly ever abridge his holiday by

turning up to get the dollar balance when the others who have not been

advanced are paid Saturday night. He will waste his cash on watermelons

and fish that an average white will not even smell. When forced down to it

he can live contentedly upon almost nothing. A very large proportion of

both sexes are happy upon a real meal every two or three days, and a sly

change of mate every two or three weeks. Toombs, who was always looking at

Cuffee, pronounced him "rich in the fewness of his wants." Bring him out

more clearly to yourselves by comparison with an Irishman struggling up

from starvation wages of hard daily work into comfort and ease. Reflect

over the only success a cotton mill has had with black labor, which was

due to whipping the operatives for breach of duty.[164]

In Atlanta--which of course is but like other southern cities in the

particular now to be mentioned--many of the men live upon their women. It

is a common saying that you cannot keep a colored cook if you do not allow

her to carry the keys. There is great complaint that the colored

washerwomen help their dependents out of the clothes. The criminal class

of negro men, women, and children is large and growing much faster than

that of the whites. Two very striking developments are the negro burglar

and the negro footpad. There are many breakings and entries every year in

Atlanta, many holdups of pedestrians, and nearly all of them are by

negroes. Now and then a negro snatches a lady's purse from her on the

street. The prisoners sent to the Atlanta stockade during the twelve

months beginning December 15, 1902, were

Colored. Whites.

Men 2325 1030

Women 1168 100

Boys 471 18

---- ----

3964 1148

According to the twelfth census, the negro population of Atlanta was

35,727, and the white 54,090. So, while there are in every thousand of the

whites 21 of these criminals, there are in every thousand of the blacks

110. But the case is worse still. About an equal number of convicts

escaped the stockade by paying fines. Allowance for this will much

increase the per cent of negro criminals. I wish I could get the

approximate number whose fines are paid by their employers, white friends,

mothers, wives, and other relatives. I have observed facts which make me

confident that it is large. The number of boys that in one year were sent

to the stockade--471--is a most important fact, showing as it does that a

large per cent of negroes become criminals in childhood. Nearly all of

these boys have been abandoned by their fathers. There are just as many

abandoned girls in the city. Of course under the prevailing conditions the

proportion of criminals in each generation must increase portentously.

The depth of the negroes' debasement is shown in the impurity of the

women. This is another inheritance from their ancestors. The "ancient

African chastity" alleged by Professor DuBois,[165] if it ever existed,

was entirely prehistoric. A white who has not been bred in close contact

with the race is quite unable to understand the degree and universality of

this impurity. I will illustrate by a case which occurred in a prosperous

town of Middle Georgia not very long before I settled in Atlanta. A

prominent negro preacher had been caught in adultery. The woman, who was

the mother of several children, and her husband, were both members of the

same church as the preacher, and of unctuous piety. The detection was so

complete and certain, and it had immediately become so notorious that

church notice was unavoidable. The problem was how to whitewash the

affair. The office of a lawyer friend of mine in the town last mentioned

was waited on by a member of the church--a say-nothing sort of negro, who

always applied for leave to attend the meetings at which the preacher was

being tried. This office boy had returned several times with the news,

when inquired of, that nothing had been done. At last, one day he answered

that they had cleared the preacher. My friend commanded that this be

explained. The darkie said, in his laconic way, "Well, he 'fessed de act,

but he 'scused de act." "How in the world did he excuse it?" was asked.

"He said his heart wasn't in it." "Were you fools enough to believe

that?" was ejaculated. The negro, with an air as superior as was

compatible with the great politeness of his race, replied, "He said it was

de debble dat had his body dar; but all de time his soul was at de throne,

praying for God's people. In course we couldn't blame him for what de

debble done."

This defence, suggesting the make-believe loan of his body by the friar in

the Decameron to the angel Gabriel, which, of course, had never been heard

of by the accused, convinced the church, willing to be convinced. It

appeased the injured husband, willing to be appeased. It fully vindicated

the gay clergyman and the erring sister, who were in effect told to go and

sin no more with such little discretion.

Had this case, or another like it, occurred at that time or since in any

other negro church of that region, there would have been acquittal and

justification of the accused, although perhaps the good plea and the right

psychological moment to make it might not have been so aptly found.[166]

The habits and customs of the race mix men and women always and

everywhere; and in those opportunities each one of the young and the old,

married and unmarried of both sexes--of even children just arrived at

puberty--chases a short-lived amour with ever eager zest.[167] The blacker

the Lothario the more show of white blood he seeks in his fancies. Now

and then furious desire for real white overmasters him. Surprising some

unattended angel of a girl or matron, he chooses to see Rome and then die.

Her avengers pour kerosene on him and burn him to a crisp. His lusty

fellows think to themselves what Hermes, in the song of Demodocus, says to

Apollo of the mishap to Ares and golden Aphrodite--that is, that for the

same brief pleasure they would each gladly endure thrice the penalty.

Professor DuBois says that the chastity of the negro women has improved so

greatly "that even in the back country districts not above nine per cent

of the population may be classed as distinctly lewd."[168] Inquire of

honest witnesses who have good opportunities of observing--the farmers,

small and large, and the storekeepers, in the country, those who do

contract work and the police in the cities--of all who have close access

to negroes at all times, and especially at night; and the concurring

report will be that right correction of Professor DuBois' statement just

given cannot stop with mere inversion of his percentages; that the fact

is, no negroes in this lower class which we are now dealing with are

chaste except those whose physical condition has made a virtue of

necessity.[169]

It is sadly true that men of all races are too prone to unchastity. It is

chaste women that give human amelioration its main propulsion; for they

make every husband to know that the children around his fireside are his

own. If I were asked in what one particular had my life-long comparison

convinced me that the two races are farthest apart, I would unhesitatingly

answer, in the character of the women of each--the average white woman,

from her marriage on, forgetting all other men but her husband, the black

wife always with a paramour, if to be had.

The tie which holds the family stanch is wanting. The men often cast aside

their domestic burdens, and begin their lives over in a distant region

with a new woman. The wife and mother left behind does not mope. She has

generally prearranged satisfactorily with another man.

Disease is making great ravages in this lower class of negroes. I never

knew of a case of consumption among the slaves, and I can recall but one

serious case of pneumonia. Now these two diseases slay the negroes by

hundreds. Before the war the negro was regarded as immune from yellow

fever, and almost immune from dangerous malarial affections. He has lost

his charm against these also. There has been a dreadful increase of

insanity among them. The only ante-bellum case that I can recall was due

to an accidental injury of the head.

It is but natural that the death rate among the negroes mounts fearfully.

Their great multiplication has far outrun their reasonable means of

subsistence. We note what a heavy burden a large family is to a man in

hard times. I must believe that the thirteenth census will show a still

greater negro death-rate.

We shall sum up as to this lower class after we have described the

displacement of black by white labor.

Now we must consider the upper class. We need look only at its main

divisions, to wit, the negro farmers, and the well-to-do urban negroes.

The rose-colored statements of Professor DuBois as to the former cannot

impose upon residents of the south.[170] I shall begin with the negro farm

owners of Georgia. In what he says of them in the second Bulletin

mentioned in the last footnote he hardly ever looks away from the report

of the comptroller-general of the State. I shall deal with relevant facts

about which the comptroller-general is not required to concern

himself--and of which the census takes but little note. Where agricultural

land commands only a few dollars per acre a large part of it will get into

possession of purchasers under title-bond who expect to work it and pay

for it in annual instalments out of its produce. Of course the vendor sees

to it that he himself escapes taxation on this land, and so the

purchasers, although they may have paid him but a trifle or nothing at

all, are assessed as if they were the real owners, while the vendors are

retaining the title as security. Soon after the war many a white planter,

in order to get out of a failing business and procure capital for

something else, sold his land in whole or part. He could find no purchaser

but some exceptional negro; and the latter could buy only on credit. Much

of the lands so sold had to be retaken because the purchasers failed to

meet their payments. It was my observation when I left Greene county

twenty-three years ago that in that and the adjoining counties the number

of negro owners of agricultural land was decreasing, and it is my

information that such is now the case. This indicates an important fact

not shown in the reports of the comptroller-general, to wit, that a large

number of the negroes appearing therein as owners are really not owners,

and are losing their holdings.

The next fact to be mentioned is that, as I learn from residents, many

farms of which a negro had acquired the fee are heavily encumbered, and

often fall to the local merchants.

Further, as Professor DuBois states, "the land owned by negroes is usually

the less fertile, worn-out tracts."[171]

According to the comptroller's report for 1903 the acres of white

ownership are 29,762,259, returned at a value of $121,629,094; which is

$4,139 per acre. The per cent of the total value owned by the blacks is

4.07. This result--that the negroes own a fraction over four per cent of

the improved lands of Georgia--must be corrected by proper deduction for

purchase money debts, and also for encumbrances. It must be further

corrected by another deduction. The negroes land is considerably below the

average of the rest in quality and market value. Yet while the white

returns at $4.08 an acre, the other returns at $4.13. This higher

valuation is not because of conscientious avoidance of tax-dodging. It

comes from that optimistic exaggeration characterizing the race, which is

vividly illustrated in Booker Washington's gravely stating that the love

of knowledge by the average negroes of the south has become the "marvel of

mankind,"[172] and in the extravagant assertion of Professor DuBois as to

their chastity commented on a few pages back.

There are a few negro owners of farming lands that are prospering, but I

am credibly informed that as a class they are falling behind.

The tenants--the renters, as they are commonly called--are the more

prosperous negro farmers. The whites hold on to their lands more firmly

than they did some years ago, and the tenantry class both of whites and

blacks is becoming larger. The whites in the Black Belt all believe that

the negroes generally belong to societies, in which they have bound

themselves not to hire to the former as house servants or for standing

wages except when they cannot otherwise subsist. So most of the cotton is

made by tenants and croppers. They grade as many bad and mediocre, and a

few good. The latter work with a will, and make fair crops. They send

their children off to expensive schools. When they die the property they

have accumulated is distributed and squandered, and a new

tenant--generally, of late years, a white--succeeds.

It is to be observed everywhere that some reliable white man is generally

backing or superintending a negro farmer that can get credit. The negro

farmers, in almost any large county in the Black Belt that you may select,

that are an exception can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Their implements and methods are primitive;[173] and they employ hardly

any labor except that of their own families.[174] As soon as the negro

farmer's children have grown up they leave him; the negro laborers in his

neighborhood become more idle every year, and they become also more

scarce. It is not to be thought of that he employ white labor. This class

will give no help to the new agriculture, which I have glanced at in the

last chapter.

Twenty-odd years ago when I left the planting section, the white

landowners all preferred negro tenants. But white tenants are now

preferred. They do not send their children to school as much as the

negroes do, but keep them at work while the hoeing, which is the first

main thing to the cotton farmer, and the gathering, which is the second

and last and greatest by far, are unfinished. The negroes' hoeing and

other cultivation are bad; and after the crop is laid by until Christmas,

during which time comes the all-important laborious cotton-picking, they

spend so much of their nights at church they are incapacitated from doing

good work. They lose much time by going to camp-meetings in the late

summer and early autumn, and riding on railroad excursion trains at every

opportunity. The white tenants and their families, by careful "chopping

out" and hoeing, get the proper "stand" and they pick clean; the negroes

fall behind in both respects. The bettering credit of the white steadily

hits the negro harder. The only tenants who are good for the rent are the

class a few of whom have cash of their own and the rest can get credit

with the local merchant for necessary supplies. Such tenants the

landowners seek after, and find every year more and more among the whites,

and less and less among the blacks.

Every year a larger part of the staple crops of the south is made by

whites. The negroes have lately decreased in Kentucky. Mr. Tillinghast

brings forward, from Hoffman, weighty proofs that in the State just

mentioned, which has just become the principal seat of tobacco growing,

and also in the largest yielding counties of Virginia, that black labor

constantly grows less of the crop.[175] He uses Hoffman, too, to show that

white labor is slowly expelling black from rice production.[176] The old

south believed that rice culture was sure death to the white, Mr.

Tillinghast quotes, as to the greatest agricultural product of the south,

this from Professor Wilcox: "It would probably be a conservative

statement to say that at least four-fifths of the cotton was ... in 1860

grown by negroes; at the present time [i.e. in 1899] probably not one-half

is thus grown."[177]

Compare this further: "He [Hoffman] finds that 'with less than one-half as

large a colored population as Mississippi,... Texas produced in 1894

almost three times the cotton crop of the former State.' Even more

significant is the fact that with almost twice the colored population of

1860, Mississippi, in 1894, produced less cotton than thirty-four years

ago.'"[178]

Very significant are the facts lately published by the Agricultural

Department which show that in an area of some sixty-three per cent of the

production, the white outpicks the negro. "One hundred and fifty-two

counties, with a negro population amounting to seventy-five per cent of

the whole, averaged one hundred and eleven pounds per day, whereas one

hundred and ninety-two counties, with a white population constituting

seventy-five per cent or more of the whole, averaged one hundred and

forty-eight pounds per day,"[179] that is, the white picked one-third more

than the black. There are other statements in this bulletin of importance

here. I can give this one only:

"In the Indian Territory and Oklahoma, where the whites represent

about eighty per cent of the population (including Indians) the

average number of pounds picked is greater than in any of the States

except Arkansas and Texas. The highest number of pounds picked in any

State is one hundred and seventy-two in Texas, the counties

represented having a white population of eighty per cent."[180]

In Arkansas the population of the counties mentioned was fifty-nine per

cent white, the rest negro.

It is almost certain that the foregoing estimates do great injustice to

the whites. They assume that there is no inferiority of the negro to the

white except the per diem quantity of cotton picked. Ponder the statement

as to a county of Georgia which I now give.

"According to the ginners' report, Madison county made sixteen

thousand bales of cotton in 1902. Its negro population is about three

thousand, its white, twelve thousand. The negroes are one-fifth and

the whites four-fifths, and out of every five bales the negroes ought

to have made at least one and the whites four. But the former do not

average as well as the others. The white who runs one plow, whose wife

and children do the hoeing and picking, probably makes ten bales. The

negro who runs one plow, whose wife and children hoe and pick, hardly

makes more than five or six bales. The greater part of the cotton

credited to negro labor is made by negroes who are superintended by

white men."[181]

Weighing all that I have just told, I am as sure as I can be of anything

in the near future, that the negro will soon be of greatly diminished

importance as laborer, cropper, renter, or farming landowner in the

staples of southern agriculture.

There are other kinds of property than improved lands set out in the

report of the comptroller-general, such as $3,531,471 of horses, cattle,

and stock of all kinds, $810,553 of plantation and mechanical tools. Such

needs no separate consideration. These holdings do not in view of what we

have told, give the negro farmer any strong foothold.

Nearly all that remains of the rural upper class--the negroes in trades,

professions, mercantile business, etc.--is so evidently dependent upon the

masses of the lower class, now gravitating away from the country that the

most of it can be incidentally disposed of at certain places later on in

the chapter and the rest be treated as negligible.

The "city or town property" of the negroes of Georgia, according to the

report of the comptroller-general for 1903, amounts in value to

$44,668,620. From all that I can learn, while it is largely, it is

considerably less, encumbered than the real and personal property of the

negro farmers.

A large admixture of Caucasian blood marks nearly every member of the

upper class both in country and town. I note that occasionally a coalblack

acquires property, on which his miser grip is tighter than that of an

accumulating Irishman; but such are very few. There is hardly a well-to-do

negro in work, occupation, profession, or property, who is not several

shades at least removed from coalblack. Mr. Tillinghast observes "that the

porters, cooks, and waiters on a Pullman train are usually mulattoes,

while the laborers in the gang on the roadbed are nearly all black."[182]

In this day when the pictures of prominent men and women are in many

illustrated magazines and papers, it is to be observed that hardly one of

a negro shows unmixed blood. Thus a recent monthly contains pictures of

Judson W. Lyons, R. H. Terrell, Kelly Miller, Archibald H. Grinke, T.

Thomas Fortune, Daniel Murray, and Booker Washington.[183] Of these the

third only, to my eye, seems all negro; and I cannot be confident that he

is wholly without appreciable white blood. His head has the shape of a

white man's.

It is my observation that a negro entirely pure in blood hardly ever gets

out of the lower class; and that if he does he is much more unprogressive

than an average member of the upper class. Note what Bishop Holsey says of

how amalgamation with the white improves the descendants of the blacks, in

a passage quoted later herein.

This upper class contains only persons of exceptional blood, talent, or

some other rare fortune. The higher education, and the education which is

now best of all for the negro--industrial education--is for this little

circle only. Hampton and Tuskegee do not open to all comers. Mr.

Tillinghast convincingly proves that those who have got really good

training at the two institutions just named are far above the average

negro in physical stamina, education, and other important

particulars.[184] The graduates go forth, not to benefit their brothers in

the lower class, but to win for themselves surer and higher standing in

the upper class.

Some of the resources which this urban section of the upper class have

enjoyed for a while they are losing, as I shall tell when I hereinafter

summarize the details of white encroachment. But other resources open to

them. Such are professions like dentists, eye, ear, and throat surgeons,

doctors, barbers, and others who must content themselves with only colored

patronage; such the growing retail trade, multiplying boarding-houses,

restaurants, and saloons, finding their custom exclusively in the

increasing negro town population. The number of negroes who become

teachers, lecturers, preachers, authors, etc., steadily augments. Other

resources of this upper class can be pointed out, but it needs not here.

Although nearly always when the father who has struggled up dies, his

property, as we saw to be the case with the negro farmer, goes, and no

child succeeds to his occupation, there is perhaps generally compensation

for his loss by the accession of some other who has got up out of the

lower class by an extraordinarily lucky jump. It is clear that the class

is without the wholesome influence of uninterrupted inheritance, from

generation to generation, of faculty and character progressively

improving. Take this inheritance away from the men and women of any

enlightened nation and it would be to lower them very near to the level of

barbarism. It is also nearly certain that there will be no further

infusion of white blood into this class, by reason of the hostility to

inter-mixture which becomes stronger--yea, intenser--every year. The

probable consequence will be the dilution of much of the white blood now

in the upper class through the lower class to such an extent that it will

practically disappear. But some of it, I think, will persist, perhaps

increase in degree--preserved by the aversion of many to intermarriage

with persons less white than themselves, and occasional intermarriage with

white persons in northern States.

Exceptional ones of this class enjoy privileges of the higher education,

afforded by schools and colleges opulently endowed by private persons,

which education is bringing forth fruit in teachers, clergymen, and

representatives of the learned class. There are already some good books,

as well as sermons, speeches, poems, essays, and short articles, by

negroes which have won favorable opinion in our literature; and there is

evidently to be steady increase.

There is among some of this urban upper class the beginning at least of

better things under the lead of better mothers. We must not be

unreasonable in our demands that these women who carry in their veins a

very appreciable proportion of polyandrous blood shall become immaculately

chaste at once. Leave them to the influence of the improving society in

which they move; to the noble and faithful efforts of such as Mrs. Booker

Washington; their persistent imitation of white mothers; the teachings of

the really christian pastors whom the negro universities are beginning to

send abroad in numbers far too few; but especially of all to devoted

conjugal, maternal, and domestic duty. This last has made the pigeon

mother unconquerably true to her life mate. It will do the same for the

negro woman.--Let us consider the class further for a moment.

The longer you look at it with unbefogged eyes the more plainly you see it

is really a natural aristocracy hugging its special privileges more

jealously every year, and that cleavage in interest, affection, and

destiny between it and the other class goes on so steadily that it must

after some little while yawn in the sight of the entire nation. Here in

Atlanta, as seems to be the case in all the southern cities, there are

respectable negro districts and also negro slums. The latter are the more

numerous and far more populous. The inhabitants of these several districts

are almost as wide apart as are the whites in the fashionable circle and

the million of poor folk without.

I must postpone my final contrast of these two classes until I have

completed what remains to be said of the displacement of black by white

labor. For a few years after the war it was so slow moving that I was not

confidently aware of it. Now it has proceeded so far, and so much

accelerated its pace, that I can indicate it with something like accuracy.

In the thirteenth chapter I noted its beginning. This was when the mother

and her girls took upon themselves the daily indoor work, and the father

and sons took upon themselves the outdoor work, morning, noon, and night,

around the house and the horse-lot,--the word which in the south

corresponds to the barnyard of the northern farmer. Especially significant

is it that a large per cent of the white matrons in the country have at

last discarded the negro laundry-woman and habitually themselves use the

washtub for their families. The impulse to supplant negro labor showed its

greatest energy where the black population had been sparse. I have heard

my friend, F. C. Foster, a resident of Morgan county, often mention that

what were before the war the rich and poor sides of that county have

become interchanged; where most of the large slave-owners lived was the

rich, but now is the poor side; and the other, where there were but few

slaves, is now the rich side.

I see many proofs in every quarter that the whites of the Black Belt have

commenced to learn good lessons from their neighbors outside, and show

every year a greater self-reliance. Many more causes than I have space to

set down conspire to increase this self-reliance. The small farmer must,

by himself or his wife and children or white help, do such things as

these: work his brood mare; care for his blooded stock, fine poultry, and

bees; handle his reaper, mower, and more expensive tools and implements;

give all necessary attention to his orchards and larger and smaller

fruits,--industries which, with that of the dairy, are now pushing

forward with mounting energy; for he has learned that the average negro

cannot be trusted in these and many other things which can be suggested.

I must not overstate the advance of white production and labor upon black

in the country. In the regions of densest negro populations the whites

show a backwardness in taking to work that is discouraging. A very

observant man familiar with Jackson and Madison counties of Georgia, both

of which are out of the Black Belt, and who now lives where negroes

outnumber the whites, not long ago made this comparison, while answering

my inquiries: "In Jackson and Madison the whites work. A farmer who runs

but one plow does all the plowing. He hires but one negro. In my present

county the one-horse farmer always hires two negroes, one to plow and the

other to hoe, and the only work he does is to boss them." But the negroes

are going away from many parts, in fact from nearly all, of the Black

Belt. Wherever they have become scarce, the whites go to work; and, as is

now occurring in that part of Greene county called "The Fork," and in

places in adjoining counties, the lands rise greatly in market value. In

many parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, where

negroes were doing practically all the agricultural labor when I came to

Atlanta, I learn that many white boys are becoming good all-around

workers. It surprised me greatly to be told that in this region in

different places the white women and children, as soon as the dew is off

in the morning, go to cotton picking, and they become so efficient that

often no extra labor need be hired to finish that greatest task of all to

the farmer. Before the war, all of us white boys picked just enough of

cotton to learn that our backs could never be made to stand picking all

day. The whites now beating the negro in what we once thought he only

could do, and white women in the old slave regions doing the family

laundry,--these begin a marvellous economic revolution.

The cotton mills and other manufactories rapidly springing up in many

southern localities are developing a class of white operatives. Mining of

various kinds is on the increase. Stone, slate, and marble cutting,

cabinet making, and other trades attract greater numbers to follow them.

White railroad employees, printers, engravers, stenographers, typewriters,

and those in numerous other gainful occupations, grow in numbers. White

women and girls stream to work for employers every morning. In all places,

if you but look long enough, you catch sight of swelling crowds of the

race who once lived almost entirely from slave labor now doing their own

labor.

I will close what I have to say of this part of the subject by

observations of Atlanta. When I settled here, the barbers, shoe repairers,

blacksmiths, band-musicians, sick-nurses, seamstresses, ostlers, and

carriage-drivers were, so far as I noted, black almost without exception.

Now the first five are nearly all white, and whites steadily multiply in

the rest, although they are far from being in a majority. The only

expulsion of white by negro labor that I have noted is the substitution by

the bicycle messenger service and the telegraph of negro for white

messengers, made not long ago. These messenger services thrive by

exploiting child labor. By the change mentioned they got much larger and

stronger boys--often grown-up ones--for the same price which they used to

pay white children a year or two older than mere tots. Against the recent

loss just told I have these two recent gains of the whites to tell. There

had always been only negro waiters in the restaurants. In some of them

the eaters at the lunch counters are now served by a white man standing

behind it; and what he needs, if it is not kept in store so near that he

can reach it, is brought to him, at his command, by a negro, whom you may

call his waiter. This negro also wipes off the counter. After we became

used to white barbers we generally preferred them to the black ones. And I

note that a growing majority of those who frequent the counters like the

white waiters, although I now and then hear a growler say that he would

rather have a waiter that he can reprimand and speak to as he pleases.

Some of the restaurants begin to advertise that their help is all white.

With the superior alertness and quickness of his race, a white behind the

counter accomplishes more than twice as much as the former black. To use a

common saying, the white waiters keep at active work all their twelve

hours as if they were fighting fire, while the negroes commanded by them

take things easy. Every one of the whites is constantly on the lookout for

a better place; and generally he manages somehow, after a short while, to

get it. One who now serves me studies bookkeeping two hours every night,

and will doubtless soon be giving satisfaction in his chosen occupation to

some business house. The negroes look out only for tips, are interested in

nothing but amusements, and never get any higher. Bear in mind, they are

considerably above the average negro in qualifications and station.

The other instance is that some co-operating Greek boys have recently

captured a very considerable proportion of the shoe-shining. They provide

more convenient and comfortable seats and give a better shine than the

negro does, in a much shorter time, and for the same price. It looks now

as if they are bound to make full conquest of the business. With my

experience it is more of a surprise to me to see clothes laundered,

tables waited on, and shoes shined by the whites, than even to see cotton

picked by them.

But to go on with Atlanta. Occupations requiring the management of

machinery or peculiar skill are nearly always filled by whites. The street

railroad conductors and motormen are all white. The only negroes connected

with the road that I, as a passenger, generally see is the curve-greaser,

and now and then a helper on the construction car. The steam railroads

will employ a negro fireman because of his ability to stand heat, but they

do not trust him to oil and wipe. In the smaller buildings negro

elevator-runners some time ago were frequent, but now it is clear that the

whites will soon have the occupation exclusively. There is, I believe,

more building, in this year of 1904, in Atlanta than ever before. The

preparation of all the material is done by white labor in the

planing-mills and machine-shops, while the more unskilled work of putting

it in place is done by the negro carpenter.

The lathers and plasterers are all negroes, there are more negro brick and

stone masons than white, and the carpenters are nearly all negroes, there

being but few young white ones. The painters are about equally divided.

The negro's standard of living is so much lower than that of the white,

that where there is competition he proves victor by accepting a price upon

which the white man cannot live. But the latter does not throw up the

sponge. At the point where race competition begins he induces the negroes,

whenever he can, to join his union, and soon to have one of their own.

Just now (August, 1904) there are not enough of brickmasons to supply the

demand, and there is both a white and black union of that trade. But so

far there has been no success in the efforts made for a black carpenters'

union. The negroes have of late years kept such firm hold of the trade,

that it seems no young whites come into it, there being but few white

carpenters in Atlanta under forty years of age. The negroes understand

that their grip is due to their ability to work for lower pay than the

whites, and when the union is proposed they say to themselves, that means

only more places for white carpenters and less for us. But the trend to

form unions seems to strengthen. There is a mixed union of tailors,

separate unions of blacksmiths' helpers, moulders' helpers, painters, and

also of brickmasons, as just mentioned. There is a black union of

plasterers and no white one. It is to be remembered that the initiative to

unionize the negro workman comes from the other race, the purpose being to

balk the exertions of employers to depress wages by encouraging the

cheaper worker. Consider the dilemma of the negro workman invited into the

union by whites. He foresees that if he accepts, his race will after a

while be swamped in the trade by white competition. At the same time he

foresees that if he does not accept, he cannot increase his income, which

in its smallness becomes more and more inadequate to sustain himself and

family under the constant demands of the day for larger and larger

expenditure. The immediate needs of those dependent upon him will

generally decide his course. I cannot say how long the negro carpenters of

Atlanta will refuse the proposal to federate themselves in a union with

the whites; but this I can say, that all attempts of the negroes to keep

the whites out of any well-paid vocation must fail, even with the most

resolute and stubbornly maintained effort. As I view it on the spot the

white forward movement palpably strengthens and the defence weakens. Bear

in mind that the whites receive constant re-enforcement from all other

white American and European communities, and the blacks are confined to

their own resources of supply, all the while declining.

What I have just told as happening in Atlanta intelligent and observant

negroes detect to be but a part of the general recession before white

competition. The National Negro Business League had its last meeting at

Indianapolis. In one of the resolutions adopted, mainly because of the

influence of Dr. Booker T. Washington, its president, occurs this

allegation, "During our discussions it has been clearly developed that the

race has been steadily losing many avenues of valuable employment." The

resolution ascribes this to lack of proper training, and recommends that

the lack be supplied. A negro makes this acute and true comment, which I

would have attended to here, and considered again when further on I

discuss what the industrial schools can do:

"That the colored man has of late years been losing many avenues of

employment is quite true, but the conclusion that this is due to a

lack of training is not to be hastily accepted. Nobody believes that

our people are now less capable of work than they were when recognized

in these avenues of labor. As a matter of fact they are far better

equipped now than they were then, or Tuskegee and Hampton and the

other industrial schools that are crowded from year to year are making

a signal failure. In those days men were picked up here and there and

started in as apprentices as green as they could be. Now thousands of

them are prepared before they go out to work. The two chief reasons

our folks are not employed so universally now is, first, the fact,

that _the white south has gone to work with its own hands_, and

second, the negro refuses longer to work for nothing. _The continued

assertion by some of our leaders that a man who can labor will not be

discriminated against, is untrue. The preference is given to the white

man in almost every case, and the negro is allowed to do the work he

refuses._ It is well enough to ask our people to secure industrial

education, but it is wrong to place all our ills upon a lack of such

training or to recommend industrial education as a panacea. Though it

was quite inevitable that the league should adopt such a resolution as

an endorsement of its president's policy."[185]

I have italicized in the quotation the statements specially pertinent

here. They are very weighty proofs supporting my proposition of fact, to

wit, that there is now waging between the whites and negroes an

internecine war for every opportunity of labor above the very lowest and

unskilled.

I ask also that it be noted that the writer is utterly unconscious of any

negroes than those of the upper class. Not a thing that he says can be

applied to the ninety-five per cent.

The death rate of the negro is coming close to, while that of the white

keeps far below, the birth rate. Rapid native increase and vigorous

immigration for the whites, nothing but slow and decreasing propagation

for the negroes; and larger and larger hosts of the former giving their

champions active sympathy and help--the event of this inter-race struggle

over the trades and occupations may be delayed, but it cannot be doubtful.

The reader must not forget that the negroes now in mind belong all to what

I have called the upper class. Their number is so small and its promise of

increase so slight that I should hardly have done more than allude to

them, if the subject did not emphasize so impressively as it does the

inevitable expulsion of negro by white labor. Let me explain this fully.

Professor Wilcox, summarizing the pertinent information of the twelfth

census as to ten leading occupations competed for by the two races in the

south, states that in the year 1900 the per cent of negroes was larger in

seven and smaller in nine of them than ten years before.[186] That alone

shows white gain. But I want you to add to Professor Wilcox's statement

something of which the census gives no hint, that is, the bound forward of

the negroes on one side, and the inaction of the whites on the other,

during many years beginning with emancipation in 1865. When that has been

done, the encroachment of white labor upon black effected in the

comparatively short time since its beginning appears almost prodigious. It

is somewhat like the race-horse, who, falling far behind in the first

stages of a long heat, at last wakes up and gains so fast that nobody will

bet against him. It means that the whites are now as ruthlessly taking all

opportunities of labor away from the blacks, as their fathers took his

lands away from the American Indian.

We can now say our last word in contrasting the two classes. Many fail to

see clearly the difference between them. Thus Ernest Hamlin Abbott[187]

and Edgar Gardner Murphy,[188] in their pleasant discussions, only here

and there, and as if casually, say something which momentarily implies

existence of the lower class, and then relapse into claiming for all of

the southern negroes, if not the actual condition of the upper class, at

least hopeful possibility of soon achieving it. These two kind-hearted men

represent a large number who firmly believe that education and the church

are now rapidly elevating the negro masses, when the fact is far

otherwise. Many from the north see nothing but the upper class. In what he

writes of the negroes whom he knew in public life, the late Senator Hoar

was utterly unconscious of the average negro whom all of us in the south

know.[189] Dr. Lyman Abbott, a most benign example of broad and almost

perfect tolerance to both sections, taking all southern hearts by his

loving sympathy with and full justice to the better sentiment of our

section in every matter of importance except the appointment of negroes to

office, he never seems to have in mind any negroes but the prominent ones

who are giving their fellows industrial or the higher education, and those

who have been blessed with either. Do but consider how pathetically he

lately lamented the case of the "white negro" lady shut out from the

circle of cultivation and kept confined in one of ignorance and lowness.

This last circle--its magnitude, its bad and desperate state--he really

knows nothing about. He can no more study its deplorable and heartrending

conditions than the mother can endure to have the expectoration of her

child threatened with tuberculosis examined under the microscope. Chicago

has been for some while "farthest to the front" in the struggle against

corporation rule. Her battles for direct nomination, direct legislation,

and municipal ownership have been chronicled more accurately and

intelligently in the _Public_ than I can find elsewhere. Therefore I read

it with diligence; and I relish more and more Mr. Post's sound and able

anti-machine and anti-plutocratic advocacy. But in everything that the

paper says or quotes on the race question I am pained to note that its

shortcoming is greater than its very high merit in preaching democratic

democracy. Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott does now and then call the negroes a

child race, but Mr. Post repudiates all backwardness and inferiority of

race. He seems to maintain the equality of the average negro to the

average white in all essentials of good citizenship with the zeal of

Wendell Phillips, when the providence of the American union frenzied and

deputed him to infuriate its defenders against the disunion slave-owners.

Mr. Post, as appears to me, believes with all his heart in the doctrine of

Mrs. Stowe and Whittier, to mention no others, as to the negro. Every

pertinent utterance in his paper indicates that he has no thought whatever

of the lower class. A most striking illustration of this is how he treats

the story of the negro Richard R. Wright.[190] When the latter was ten

years old he won great fame by the answer he made General Howard, who had

inquired of the negro children at the Storrs School in Atlanta, just after

the close of the war, "Tell me what message I shall take back from you to

the people of the north?" His face ablaze with enthusiasm, the boy Richard

said, "Tell 'em we're risin'." Whittier went as far astray over this as we

saw that he did in his "Laus Deo." In his poem celebrating he sang--

"O black boy of Atlanta!

But half was spoken:

The slave's chain and the Master's

Alike are broken.

The one curse of the races

Held both in tether:

They are rising--all are rising,

The black and white together."

I never read the last two lines without in mind admonishing the author,

"Praise in departing."

When Mr. Post published the story, he ought to have mentioned that while

the boy who sent forth the winged words did rise and has become president

of the Georgia Industrial College, yet that such negroes are far more rare

than millionaires, and the main host of their people in the south were

sinking at the time, and have been sinking ever since. It is not true that

"all are rising." The whites have recently begun to rise; five per cent

only of the negroes, most of whom are largely white, are rising, while the

rest of them are doomed, if the nation does not interpose. And the colored

dentist of Chicago, slighted by some of the white dentists--Mr. Post sees

in him, just as he sees in Richard R. Wright, a representative of the

negro millions.

These conscientious and amiable gentlemen are wasting much effort

uselessly. There is no very urgent problem as to the upper class of

negroes. It has two strings to its bow. If the lower class should perish,

a large part of it--perhaps the greater part--will be assimilated. Every

day I detect a larger movement toward the north among our better-to-do

negroes. I hear of girls that get places as chambermaids and cooks, of

boys that find places as ostlers or other domestic service; and I have

heard of a few families who have gone in a body, also of some men who have

left wife and children here. They believe the north will allow their votes

to be counted, will not proscribe them in society as the south does, and

they will probably get for themselves or their descendants intermarriage

with whites. The determination of these southern negroes towards the north

will probably gain in volume and energy. It is plain that those who go do

much increase their chances of final absorption into the body of whites.

This assimilation is one of the two strings. And if the American negroes

shall one day be conceded their own State, as I hope and pray for, their

leaders must come from the upper class. That is the other of the two

strings.

This upper class of southern negroes has demonstrated full ability to take

care of itself. It has its schools and colleges, newspapers, magazines,

and augmenting literature, its widening circle of students and readers,

and its good shepherds and able leaders. It rapidly wins favor in the

south. A few of our residents see no other negroes but those in this upper

class, a most striking instance of which is Joel Chandler Harris's

sweeping assertion "that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all

parts of the south, _especially in the agricultural regions, are leading_

sober and _industrious lives_."[191] When one who fully understands the

situation studies the assertion just quoted he sees from the context that

the writer was led to make it because he had at the time in his eyes only

a few of the better negroes in the Atlanta upper class. This is powerful

testimony to their prosperity and self-maintaining faculty. Similarly the

Chicago _Public_ rates the four hundred inhabitants of Boley in the Creek

nation as common or average negroes. According to a news dispatch

mentioned in that paper the town is only a year old, has "two churches, a

school-house, several large stores, and a $5,000 cotton gin, owned and

controlled exclusively by negroes." It is without a system of law and

without municipal government, and "yet no serious crime or offence of any

kind has been committed in the place." These four hundred negroes do not

permit any white man to settle in the town. Commenting in conclusion upon

the news, the _Public_ says, "If that dispatch is not a canard,

Anglo-Saxon civilization has something to learn of one race which it has

outraged and abused and despised."[192]

Any such place as Boley, if a reality, is peopled only by negroes of the

upper class, and, further, only by those who have been sifted out from the

rest of that class by a peculiarly drastic selection. Had they not each

had remarkable good fortune, extraordinary capacity, and exceptional

experience and training, Boley would never have been heard of. I ask that

the fair-minded make two comparisons. 1. Suppose four hundred negroes--not

naturally selected, but taken in a body, just as each one comes, from the

masses of the lower class described herein--given opportunity to found a

town of their own amid what we may call Boley conditions, what would be

the result? You may be sure that what occurred in Hayti when the reins of

government were suddenly given to the negroes at large would in some sort

be repeated. 2. Compare Boley in all its bloom and happy condition as

described in the _Public_ with certain communities of select whites, which

have flourished now and then for years, without formal government; say the

Amana community. If this be rightly done, social organism of select whites

will at once appear to be incomparably superior to that of select negroes.

I have tried my hardest to make my readers see as clearly as one bred in

the south ought to see what a world-wide difference there is between the

small upper class and the numerous lower class of negroes. If I have

succeeded they will agree with me that it is the better policy to leave

the upper class, for the present, just where it is. If this advice be

followed, that class will flourish, and some day either be assimilated, or

be giving benign salvation to the lower class in the negro State.

Especially should this upper class eschew politics. Booker Washington in

preaching this is the only real American prophet of the day. With all of

his zeal for his race, he is far better appreciated in the south than in

the north, and perhaps just as popular. What a lamentable arrest of its

benign development it would be to this upper class to turn it away from

industrial betterment of its condition to lead the mass of the negroes at

the polls in a struggle for rule and office! That would be something like

renewing the conditions that developed the Ku-Klux Klan.

It is the great body of the southern negroes--those in the lower class,

who have no string at all, nor even a bow--that demands the profoundest

attention. I wish I could make every white man, woman, and child of

America see them just as they are. As I compare them with what they were

in 1865 I note they have advanced somewhat in mental arithmetic, because

of practice in computing small sums of money involved in their wages and

purchases; that they have learned somewhat of self-providence, and very

much endurance of want (which last is really a reversion to a trait of

their West African ancestors); and that the per cent of illiteracy among

them has been greatly lessened. On the other hand, each generation becomes

more disinclined to work, and its vagrants multiply; each generation more

prone to live by crime, more unchaste, and more quick to desert their

conjugal partners and children. Especially are they far more unhealthy and

prone to insanity, and their death rate rapidly rising. They have no

resource but unskilled labor of the lowest and cheapest grade; white

competition in agriculture and domestic service, machinery in other

fields, such as the scrape which has superseded the dump-cart, the

improved steam-shovel and method of handling construction trains, and the

steam laundry, steadily curtailing that resource; a slothful, improvident,

and wasteful disposition curtailing it still further. The resurrecting

hand of the trades union cannot reach down to them. Steadily they are more

useless to every upbuilder of the coming south except the wage-depresser.

More and more they get in the way of real progress in every direction. And

as their supplies of necessaries diminish they get in one another's way.

Nearly all of the whites who were bound to them in the domestic love of

the old south times are dead. Most naturally and unavoidably as the new

generation discerns the growing incompatibility of their stay in the

section with its true welfare, unfriendliness comes and grows. Listless,

lethargic, careless, without initiative, without opportunity and coercion

to make use of it, these multitudes of inveterate have-nothings are in a

bottomless gulf of want, immorality, crime, and disease. A true

philanthropist has familiarized the world with the "submerged tenth." Mr.

Ernest Hamlin Abbott, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Dr. Abbott,

Mr. Post, stand beside me on the strand, and fix your eyes, minds, and

hearts upon the slowly drowning ninety-five per cent of the southern

negroes. Lay aside the excess of your devotion to the upper class. It does

not need it. The Chicago dentist, as the _Public_ itself reports, was

really more than indemnified for the insult given him because of his color

by the sympathetic resentment of white members of his profession. Why will

you keep agitating the nation in behalf of a few thousands, who are well

able to maintain themselves, and neglect millions who require, as Mr.

Tillinghast says, some heroic remedy for their salvation?

I shall now tell you the utter inadequacy of Hampton, Tuskegee, and the

like, after which I shall consider what, in my judgment, is the only

remedy.

The annual output, as we may call it, of all the negro educational

institutions in the south is a mere drop in the bucket when compared with

the enormous need. The latest reliable figures accessible to me are those

of Booker Washington for 1897. They are as follows: 13,581 receiving

industrial training, 2,108 collegiate education, 2,410 classical

instruction, and 1,311 "taking the professional course,"[193]--the last

three aggregating 5,829. Suppose the entire 17,999 were following

industrial courses, and that every one graduated with credit; and suppose

there be added the work of the land companies providing homes and every

other enterprise helping the negro in any way--suppose this output to be

trebled annually from this time on (which is far above possibility for

many years yet, to say nothing of probability), what would be its

accomplishment? Why, no more than a slight shower in a few townships

during the drought a few years ago would have done in preventing injury to

the Kansas corn crop. When you attend, you understand that the great

advantages of these excellent institutions are only for a few lucky

negroes,--picked ones of the upper class,--and not for the millions whose

crying need is for opportunity to earn honest daily bread and a really

benevolent coercion to use the opportunity. The problem, what to do for

this mass, cannot be solved by philippics against such things as _de

facto_ or constitutional disfranchisement of the blacks, lynching them,

showing them disrespect in military parades, giving them Jim Crow cars,

and not dividing the educational fund more liberally with them; nor would

it contribute one jot or tittle towards its solution if every lady in

America cordially received in her drawing-room the few negroes who have

most deservedly won the respect of the nation. To solve this problem,

something must be found which will train and elevate the average negro,

while the exceptional one is at the industrial school or college, or

studying for a profession; something which will check the prevalent

reversion away from monogamic family life, and stimulate that life to

develop steadily; something also which will impart to this entire mass

permanent and strengthening impulse to better its condition. The only

thing that can do this is to separate the negro as far as may be from the

whites, give him his own State in our union, and constrain him there with

vigilant kindness to subsist and govern himself in such ways as suit him.

I have long thought that our negroes had far stronger claim upon the

nation for land than the uncivilizable redskins on whom we have lavished

so much expense in vain.

Righteousness demands that we give the former full opportunity to develop

normally in self-government. Put him in a State of his own on our

continent; provide irrepealably in the organic law that all land and

public service franchises be common property; give no political rights

therein to those of any other race than the African; compel nobody to

settle in this State, but let every black reside in whatever part of the

nation that pleases him; let this community while in a Territorial

condition, and also for a reasonable time after it has been admitted as a

State, be faithfully superintended by the nation in order that republican

government be there preserved,--do these things, and there need be no fear

that the examples of Hayti and San Domingo, which were not so

superintended, will be repeated. Nearly all of the American Indians,

because of rigid adherence to their old customs and ways, were crushed by

Caucasian rule. But the negro, wherever he comes in contact with a

superior, shows a pliancy, a self-adaptability to new circumstances, to

which no parallel has ever been suggested, so far as I know. If civilized

self-government will but kindly keep him a while at its labor school where

he is to learn by doing, I am profoundly convinced that he will develop

into the very best of citizens. And I am also just as profoundly convinced

that if something like what I recommend is not done at a comparatively

early day, after some while, as there are now in America a few prosperous

Indians and in New Zealand a few prosperous Maoris, we will have here and

there a few prosperous negroes; but the rest of them will either be

confirmed degenerates, or have gone no one will know whither. And Booker

Washington, the moral exemplar of the day, rivalling Horace's

"Iustum et tenacem propositi virum,"

as he resists the pernicious counsels of the overwhelming majority of

negroes and keeps to the wise and right course which they passionately

condemn; who is far more able and who has accomplished infinitely more of

good than Toussaint or Douglass--he will be a great hero statesman of a

great cause lost. The historian of the future that has something like

Shakspeare's genius for contrast will make his glory and that of Calhoun

magnify each other by comparison.

The foregoing as to a negro State, which is the result of years of

observation and reflection, had all been written for some time when I fell

in with the address of Bishop Holsey, mentioned above. It is the

proposition of the address that a part of the United States should be

assigned to the negroes. I add an abstract from the synopsis of his views

given in the address:

1. Negroes and whites "are so distinct and dissimilar in racial traits,

instincts, and character, it is impossible for them to live together on

equal terms of social and political relation, or on terms of equal

citizenship."

2. The general government only has power to settle the problem, and it

ought to settle it.

3. Separation of the negroes and whites "is the most practicable, logical,

and equitable solution of the problem."

4. "Segregation and separation should be gradual ... and non-compulsory,

so as not to injure ... labor, capital, and commerce ... where the negro

is an important factor of production and consumption."

5. The southern negroes should petition the president and congress "for

suitable territory ... as ... equal citizens ... and not go out of their

country to be exposed to doubtful experiment and foreign complications.

Afro-Americans should remain in their own country, in the zone of

greatness, and in the latitude of progress."

6. The government should, in effecting segregation, maintain "civil order,

peace, progress, and prosperity."

7. The place for the negroes may be in the western public domain, such as

a part of the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or elsewhere in the west.

8. No white person unless married to a negro, or a resident federal

official, to be allowed citizenship in the negro State or Territory, but

all citizens of the United States to be protected therein as in the other

States.[194]

9. Only those of reputable character and some degree of education, and

perhaps those possessed of a year's support, to become citizens. Criminals

and undesirable persons to be kept out.

It was gratification extreme to me to find a prominent negro so much in

accord with my long-cherished project. I hope there is a determination of

the mass of southern negroes thitherward, as seems to be indicated by the

activity both of Bishop Holsey and also by that of Bishop Turner. With

nearly all of the negro writers and speakers now in the public eye

upper-class sympathies are dominant. But Holsey, demanding a State in the

union, and Turner, putting his whole soul into immigration to Liberia, are

actuated by lower-class sympathies. The others just mentioned really

advocate assimilation,--and at bottom, only the assimilation of the upper

class,--but these two are of far different and higher ambition. They are

patriotic, and as true to their race as that famous heathen who rejected

christianity when told that it consigned his forefathers to perdition. He

declared he would go to hell with his people and not to heaven without

them. The others are representative of only some five per cent, these two

represent the ninety-five per cent--the real negroes. I never took to

Bishop Turner's proposal, for all of the ability with which he advocates

it, because I want the negroes where our nation can foster and protect

their State, it matters not what may be the resulting pains and expense. I

highly approve the earnestness of Bishop Holsey in objecting to

expatriation by the Afro-Americans.

Let our negroes have their own State. That will be the fit culmination

which was foreshadowed in their deserting the galleries assigned them in

our churches and flocking to their own churches, immediately upon

emancipation, and their effecting soon afterwards the removal of their

cabins from the old site. Their masses have ever since been inclining

towards a community of their own by an internal impulsion in harmony with

the external white expulsion. The impulsion and the expulsion are each, as

it seems to me, manifestations of the same all-powerful cosmic force.

Further, I would say a negro State makes a precedent for the world

federation. Each race that ought not to intermarry with others can

flourish under its separate autonomy. Then loving brotherhood between

white, yellow, red, and black people will bless all the earth. Whether the

proneness of opposites to fancy each other, progressively going from the

smaller to the greater differences, will ultimately compound a universal

color, no man can now tell.

Of course some reader has exclaimed, "Your proposal is absurdly

chimerical." Is it indeed chimerical to demand of the great republic that

it do its very highest duty? Suppose an ignorant, neglected child taken

home by a rich man, taught to work, the world of industry, with all of its

prizes, kept in his sight, until he begins to cherish the hope that some

day he can have a happy fireside of his own; suppose further that just as

he reaches the age of discretion the adopting father sets him where he may

see the fair world plainer and long for it more than ever, but so

completely strips him of all means and opportunity that there is nothing

for the outcast but ignoble life and uncared-for death. How you would pity

the outcast! how you would curse the false father! I cannot believe that

the nation will prove such an unnatural parent to these its helpless and

lovable children. It may be that some thousands of them, nay, some

millions, may be left to perish in their dire constraint. But when the

people fully understand, their consciences will awaken, and they will give

the American negro a bright house-warming.

Suppose we do not give him his State, or suppose it will be long years

before we give it to him, what do you say we are to do for him?

We must help Booker Washington and his co-laborers to the utmost. Grant

that they can snatch only a few brands from the burning. Is it not most

praiseworthy to save even one? Further, I can never abandon the hope that

the nation will yet allot the negroes their State, even if to do it land

must be condemned on a large scale. When that fair day does dawn on

America, out of the scholars of these worthy teachers will come many a

good shepherd for the blacks in their new land. This may now be but a

glimmering of hope. All the good must join in effort to enlarge and

brighten it.

We should not begrudge the higher education to the few in the upper class

who can get it. The negroes need teachers, preachers, writers, and others

of the learned occupations.

We should impartially equalize the negro population to the white in common

school privileges. Both ought to have rational industrial training. The

right primary education is just beginning to show itself. It will more and

more recognize what a prominent factor the hand has been in evolution.

Think of the superiority of animals with, to those without, hands. What a

high brain the elephant has made for himself by exercising his single

hand; the polar bear kills the seal by throwing a block of ice; the 'coon

goes through his master's pockets for sweetmeats; the greater intelligence

of the house-cat as compared with the average dog is due to long use of

the forepaws as rudimentary hands. Think of how we note humanity dawning

in the monkey ever busy with his hands. Think of the importance of his

hands to beginning man. With them he could gather fruits, rub fire-sticks

together, make war-clubs, spears, fish-hooks, bow and arrows, bar up his

cave door against beasts of prey, elevate his roosting place in a tree too

high for night prowlers, and do all other vital things up the whole ascent

to civilization. The steady enlargement of man's brain has been mainly

because of his progressive use of his hands; for whenever a new thing was

to be done his brain had first to acquire faculty of telling hands how to

do it. To train the hands is the true way to develop brain power. The

negroes in American slavery had risen far above the level of West African

hand ability, and at emancipation they were prepared to go higher by leaps

and bounds. Had they from that time steadily on been drafted off into

their State, gradually, as Bishop Holsey suggests, and a tithe of the

millions which have since been lavished in giving them premature literacy

and smattering of learning been applied in teaching their children

handicraft faculty and the best methods of labor, the promise for them now

would be satisfactory to their dearest friends. Somebody wisely advises,

Never do the second thing first. Those who took charge of the negro when

he was freed tried to make him do the hundredth or thousandth thing first.

Instead of patiently schooling him in handicraft and self-support until he

was really ready to take part in his own self-government, they made the

ignorant and inexperienced slave of yesterday a complete citizen, and

plunged him up to his neck into politics and letters. What a baleful

_hysteron proteron_ was this. The looming greatness of Booker Washington

is that he teaches by his actions that the seeming advance was in fact

prodigious retrogression, and he strives with all his might to draw the

negro backwards to his right beginning. Let us further his good work by

incorporating the utmost practicable of his industrial training in our

common school system for both whites and blacks. America has learned

important military lessons from the redskin; and, as I am almost sure, she

acted on his suggestion when she confederated the separate colonies. Let

her now show similar good sense in permitting a negro to teach her the

true system of education for the new times.[195]

Now as to lynching. It is entirely wrong to conceive of a popular outbreak

against one who has outraged a sacred woman as lawless. It is the furthest

possible from that, being prompted by the most righteous indignation. The

wretch has outlawed himself. Society can no more tolerate such an insult

to its peace than it can permit a tiger to go at large. It is under no

obligation to him whatever. It is the people dealing with him that should

concern us. We ought to keep them from brutalizing themselves and their

children. We must put down lynching with gentle firmness. The first thing

to do is to shorten the "law's delay" as much as possible. After the State

has made the enabling constitutional amendment, if such be necessary, let

an act provide that whenever an alleged crime likely to excite popular

violence has been committed the governor select a judge to try and finally

dispose of the case, three days only, say, being allowed for motion for

new trial or taking direct bill of exceptions; both the supreme court and

the court below to proceed as fast as may be through all stages until

acquittal or execution. Let the governor earnestly ask for some such

measure, and let him also, after he gets it, impressively appeal to the

people to assist in enforcing the law. With this preparation, more than

ninety per cent of the whites will approve the most decided action of the

military protecting prisoners, if that be necessary. Just at this time

(September 27, 1904) there is a very decided manifestation of

anti-lynching public opinion in the south. We should strike while the iron

is hot, and bring it about that the law itself make quick riddance of the

ravisher. It should be a spur to us that the party opposed in politics to

the great majority of southerners finds much support and help from every

lynching in this section. Why should we play into its hands?

The last thing that I have to say is that the south ought to invite

immigrants only of white blood. We want no settlers from whose

intermarriage mongrels would spring. All Europeans should receive

welcome--the Germans perhaps the warmest. But in my judgment those that

will most advantage us are the truckmen, growers of the smaller and larger

fruits, grass, grain, and stock farmers, manufacturers, miners, builders,

contractors, business men, and skilled laborers, of the north. It looks

now as if the cotton mills of England as well as of the north would be

profited by coming to us; and it also seems probable that there will be

for many years so great a demand for our cotton that the worn-out soil of

the older parts of the lower south must be restored to more than virgin

richness by the method which Dr. Moore has patented and made a gift of to

the nation, or some other intensive culture; and that there must be

consequently great multiplication of southern mill-operatives and

agricultural workers in the near future. Recall what we have said in the

last chapter as to the future promise of the section. Every day the south

by disclosing some new opportunity cogently makes new invitation to

immigrants. It is the interest as well as the duty of the nation to remove

the great clog upon development of the south. That clog is the presence of

some millions of unassimilable negroes in the section. It is also the best

interest and the highest duty of the nation to segregate these negroes

into a territory of their own. As Bishop Holsey says, and what I believe

with my whole soul, "The union of the States will never be fully and

perfectly recemented with tenacious integrity until black Ham and white

Japheth dwell together in separate tents."[196]

* * * * *

I must add an epilogue to these chapters on the race question as I did to

that on Toombs.

Brothers and sisters of the north, you should learn why there is a solid

south. There is but one cause. It is the menace to the whites from the

political power given the negroes by the fifteenth amendment. There is

nothing in your section--in its past or its present--from which I can

illustrate to you the gravity of this menace to us. In not one of your

States are there ignorant negroes in so great a number that, by combining

with the debased whites, they can make for it such a constitution and laws

and set up such authorities as they please. We, your brothers and sisters

of the south, have lived under the rule of this foulest of coalitions. We

know from actual experience how it plunders and preys upon honest workers,

producers, and property owners; how it licenses and fosters crime. In my

own State, from the first day that a governor, elected by fiat voters and

ex-whites, as we called the latter, was inaugurated, until we virtually

restored the supremacy of our race by carrying the three days' election in

December, 1870, fifty dollars would get a pardon for the greatest offence,

and robberies, burglaries, horse-stealing, and the like each went free for

a much smaller sum. Is it forgotten that the negro speaker was voted one

thousand dollars by a South Carolina legislature, ostensibly as extra

compensation for unusual services, but really of purpose to reimburse him

for a bet lost upon a horse race? Why, the foremost of our people in

virtue, wisdom, and patriotism were agreed that these sordid tyrannies

should be subverted at once and at any cost to ourselves. The emergency

justified any practice, device, or stratagem at the polls by which we

could defend our homes, families, and subsistence against assassins of the

public peace, wholesale robbers of the people, and instigators and

protectors of every crime. It justified the shotgun and six-shooter in

politics just as legitimate war justifies the musket in the hands of the

soldier. It called forth most righteously the Ku-Klux. That spontaneous

resistance finds a close parallel in the battles of Lexington and Bunker

Hill, fought before American independence was declared. But the Ku-Klux

fought for something still dearer than the dear cause for which our

forefathers bled in the two battles just mentioned. Had the latter failed

in the war they had thus begun, their children and people would

nevertheless have had such good government as England is now giving the

defeated Boers; but had the southern whites failed in their defence, their

land would have for long years been befouled like Hayti, and those who had

not been slaughtered unspeakably degraded. I think that all our countrymen

who so rightfully eulogize the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill should

also learn to give the greater praise to the southern heroes whose

indomitable spirit routed the madmen that, with all the power of the

federal government in their hands, tried their best to give the section

over to negro rulers. Brothers and sisters, "picture it, think of it,"

until you can fully understand that hour of our trial. All my northern

acquaintances who have resided in the south for several years--they are

many--come to look at the subject just as the natives do. A candid and

honest settler from Vermont has told me how he was made to change his

mind. Conversing with a southerner, he had reprehended the different ways

in which the negro's ballot had been rendered nugatory. The other replied,

"Suppose that there was an incursion of Indians given suffrage into your

State in such a mass as to make them seventy-five per cent of all the

voters, wouldn't you whites in some way manage either to outvote or

outcount them!" The Vermonter answered in the affirmative. We had to

deliver ourselves. We used the only means at our command.

It was not to be thought of that these negro governments be endured, even

if tempered by the Ku-Klux, for government is in its nature lasting and

permanent while the other was only temporary. They would have gradually

gathered strength. Then there would have been rapid enrichment of a few

exceptional negroes and rapid expulsion of the whites impoverished by

emancipation, from all their little that was left. And then, the leading

negroes desiring nothing else so much, there would have come many white

men and women, each one willing to climb out of the depths of want by

intermarriage with a prosperous negro. Who can predict what would have

been the future of mongrelism thus beginning? We of the south are most

conscientiously solid against what we know from actual trial to be the

worst and most corrupting of all government; and we are still more solid

against everything that tends to promote amalgamation. Can you blame us

for standing in serried phalanx by white domination and against the

misrule exampled in the early years of reconstruction, and for our own

uncontaminated white blood and against fusion with the negro? We must be

solid in the face of these dangers, and as long as they are threatened by

the presence of millions of negroes in our midst. There is no other

solidity in the south. In all matters of the locality republicans and

democrats count alike. When one offers to vote in the primary, if his name

is on the registry list, and he appears on inspection to be white, his

vote is accepted; and he generally casts that vote, not for the interest

of a political party, but for that of the public. The triumphant election

in November, 1904, of independents or democrats, in four northern States

which at the same time went for Mr. Roosevelt, indicates solidity for the

true local welfare of the people as against the behests of party. So what

the white primary has produced in the south, has commenced in the north.

And the result in Missouri, voting for Roosevelt, republican, and Folk,

democrat, shows that what we may call federal independentism has commenced

in the south. This will spread as the people learn it does not hurt them

to split their tickets while voting upon national questions, if they but

maintain their solidity while voting upon State or municipal.

Now may I be allowed some decided words, most kindly and inoffensively

spoken, as to appointing negroes to federal offices in the south. It is no

sound argument for it that now and then some negro may have been appointed

in a northern community which manifested no opposition. Consider the case

of Mr. William H. Lewis, a negro lately made assistant district attorney

in Boston by Mr. Roosevelt. He is a Harvard graduate, was captain of the

Harvard eleven while in college, had represented Cambridge in the

Massachusetts legislature, and the community was not at all averse to his

appointment.[197] Therefore when it was made there was no disregard of the

wishes and feelings of Boston and the regions adjoining. But when a negro

is given office in the south, it is felt by all the community to be an

insult. Would President Roosevelt cram the appointment of a white down the

throats of a northern community in which all the best citizens protested

against it? Would he not confess to himself that the wishes and feelings

of these good people ought to be respected, even if he considered them

foolish and unreasonable? It seems to me that he would, and that he would

find for the place somebody else in his party acceptable to the locality.

Why should he not do the like when his southern brothers and sisters who

have such convincing reasons against the encouragement of negroes in their

politics, protest unanimously against his filling an office in their midst

with a negro? Will he snub them because a negro has more sacred right than

a white? Is that what he means by keeping open the door of hope and

opportunity? Or will he snub them because enough of punishment has not yet

been given them, and because the south is still a province or dependency

on which he is justified in quartering his partisans and pets without

regard to the feelings and wishes of all the better inhabitants?

Brothers and sisters of the north, I cannot believe that any one of you

who impartially considers the subject, would ever approve appointing even

the most competent and deserving negro to a southern office in the teeth

of universal objection by the whites of the community.

My last word is to implore every honest one in the country to lay aside

all prejudice and master the southern situation before judging. Whoever

does this, whoever will accurately place himself in the shoes of a good

southern citizen, will, I most firmly believe, approve the attitude of the

south, with his whole heart and soul.

APPENDIX

THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH, a Centennial article for the International Review,

afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes &

Co. 1876.

The approach of the Centennial Celebration is not hailed in the south with

the demonstrative joy of the north. It would be out of taste to expect

that the former should appear to triumph greatly over the life of the

nation preserved at the cost of her recent overthrow. Her late antagonist

can rejoice in a vast and happy population, great material prosperity, and

the fresh fame of a world-renowned success. It is meet, while remembering

she has so lately saved the union by her stupendous armipotence, that the

north should exult as a people never did before. The south has been made

to feel the pangs of a sudden impoverishment and the incalculable

discomfort of complete economical unsettlement; and she has not learned

the new lessons which she must learn to become self-sustaining and

progressive. But her earnest spirits, doing painfully the slow task of

repairing lost fortunes; seeking after the system proper to succeed

planting; striving to make their homes pleasant again and to give their

children a fair hope in the land,--these intent workers, who are most of

them scarred confederate veterans, even if they will not say it loudly,

have come around to hold in steadfast faith that it is far better the Blue

Cross fell, and the American union stands forever unchallengeable

hereafter. And they have brought with them the great mass of their people.

They cannot joy so happily as the north, but they have a warm welcome for

the Great Commemoration. For they see that the evils which followed as the

scourge of defeat are soon to pass away, while the fall of slavery and

the failure of secession are to prove greater and greater blessings as

years roll on.

And so the time has come for a southerner calmly to discuss the past,

present, and future of the south. He has no use for the methods of popular

and unscientific politics, wherein everything is blamed or applauded as

being the result of party measures. The intentions and motives of the

actors, on both sides of the late strife, will give but proximate

explanations. How the two sections became, to use the fine phrase of Von

Holst, economically contrasted; how the southern people and their

representative politicians were bred, under their circumstances, into

opposition to the union; and how the northern people and their

representative politicians were bred, under widely different

circumstances, into love of the union; how the long clashing in politics

culminated in civil war; how the south was utterly crushed and her whole

industrial system destroyed; how she slowly re-erects herself into a new

condition better than the old,--the ultimate solution of these questions

can only be found by discussing them in the light of those laws of

development which give every community a policy suited to what it discerns

to be its best interest. These laws are of far more importance than the

politician, who is but their creature. Leaving to others to fight over the

old struggles of the political arena and bandy hard words with one

another, we will try to discuss our subject in the manner we have

indicated to be appropriate.

To understand the present and future, we must first understand the past.

To understand the New south, we must first understand the Old south, the

distinguishing feature of which was negro slavery. Mr. Stephens, then

Vice-President of the southern confederacy, in an address to a large

assembly in Savannah, in March, 1861, said of the new government: "Its

foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that

the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to

the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." There is no doubt

slavery was the corner-stone of southern society; and when it was removed,

four years later, a thorough disintegration of the whole fabric was the

logical result.

When our country was first settled, the southern regions were far more

attractive in soil and climate; and their other natural

resources--minerals, good harbors, navigable streams, water-power idling

everywhere, to mention no more--were equal to those of the other section.

The subsequent advancement of the north has been so rapid as to excite the

wonder of the world; while it is said by us of the south, jesting upon our

worn-out and exhausted land, that we have done worse for the country than

the Indians before us, who stayed here many centuries and yet left the

soil as good as they found it.

The plantation system was the great barrier to southern progress. From its

first historical appearance, among the Carthaginians, from whom the Romans

seem to have derived it, this rude and wholesale method of farming has

rested on slaveholding. Its workings have been similar everywhere. In

Italy, under the Roman republic, absorbing the petty holdings, it drove

out the small farmer; it destroyed the former respect for trades and

handicrafts, and brought them into disfavor; it prevented the development

of the industrial arts; it created a non-reciprocal commerce. Centuries

later, it did the same things in our southern States.

A sketch of the leading features and results of the plantation system, as

it existed in America, is our proper beginning.

The driver, as the negro foreman was called, was not very common in the

south, and was generally under the superintendence of the overseer. Could

the planters have made a good overseer of the driver, of course they would

have consulted their interest, and reproduced the ancient slave-steward of

Rome. Slaveholders keep their slaves under careful surveillance, but they

do not usually overlook them in person. It is not often that a master

engages in an employment which brings him into daily and intimate contact

with the lowest orders, and which he instinctively feels to be degrading.

The planter could have neither his first choice, which would have been a

slave overseer, nor his second choice, a superintendent from his own rank

in society; and so, as the next best thing, he took as overseer a white

hireling from the non-slaveholding class. The tillage of the fields was

thus intrusted to the overseers, who were, for the most part, men of

little education and business skill, and who had no interest in their

employment except to draw its wages. Thus the foremost, if not the only,

southern industry was managed by incompetent and careless agents.

The Roman master, in the later days of the republic, having always vast

markets open to him, shunned the expense of providing for women and

children, and bought new slaves instead of breeding them; but the closing

of the African slave-trade, and the softer hearts and manners of modern

times, led our planters, at last, to rely on propagation as their only

source of supply. The negroes were, therefore, well cared for, and, in a

genial clime, increased rapidly. This increase, however, did not keep pace

with the increasing demand for southern products, and so the market value

of the slave rose rapidly. To the Roman slaveholder, land was almost

everything, and his rustic slaves nothing; to the southerner, the slaves

were almost everything, and the land nothing. There was no careful

cultivation of the soil, no judicious rotation of crops, and no adequate

system of fertilization. Southern husbandry was, for the most part, a

reckless pillage of the bounty of nature. The planter became possessed

with a roving spirit, and was continually seeking "fresh land," as virgin

soil was termed. In the older sections, where there was most stability,

the best farming consisted in judiciously eking out the natural fertility

of the fields, and when that was exhausted, in leaving them to recuperate

by years of rest. Thus a given working force required, year by year, a

greater and greater allowance of land, and the plantations became steadily

larger, the small farmer retiring, and the white population becoming

continually less. Many of these older sections turned, from being

agricultural communities, into nurseries, rearing slaves for the younger

States where virgin soil was abundant. The fertile lands of the new

settlements, by yielding bountiful crops, gave fresh impulse to the

plantation system, and here the small holdings were absorbed more rapidly

than they had been in the older States. The southern slaves, regarded as

property, were the most desirable investment open to the generality of

people that has ever been known. They were patient, tractable, and

submissive, and never revolted in combined insurrections, as did the

slaves of antiquity. Their labor was richly remunerative; their market

value was constantly rising; they were everywhere more easily convertible

into money than the best securities; and their natural increase was so

rapid that a part of it could be squandered by a shiftless owner every

year to make both ends meet, and he still be left enough of accumulation

to enrich him steadily. And so the plantation, or rather the slave, system

swallowed up everything else.

There were no distinct industrial classes. There were negro blacksmiths,

negro carpenters, negro shoemakers, etc., all over the land, but they were

mere appendages to the plantations, and far inferior in capacity and skill

to the artisan slaves of antiquity.

The commerce of the south was non-reciprocal. She traded raw produce for

manufactures which she should have made herself, or which she should have

got in exchange for manufactures of her own. The over-mastering energy of

slave property, dissolving, as it were, all things into itself, kept her

from that development of trades, manufactories, and industrial arts which

is the solid and unprecedented progress, and far more durable wealth, of

the north.

There were a few exceptions in the way of restorative agriculture, and of

diversified investments of capital in railways, manufactories, inland

navigation, and mercantile enterprises. All along the northern border

there were efforts to let go slavery, and non-slave industry was slowly

emerging in a few places; but these things were as dust in the balances.

The slave system was rooted in the best portions of the land, and nearly

all of the productive wealth of the south was in, or dependent upon,

planting. Implacable enemies of slavery were rapidly increasing in numbers

and power, but she continued blindly sacrificing everything to rear

negroes. When actual emancipation came--that nipping May frost--the south

showed, on a gigantic scale, in her poverty and one solitary and

portentously dried-up source of wealth, a parallel to Ireland, smitten

with famine by the sudden failure of her only supply of food. When the

charity of the world and the returning bounty of nature had again fed the

Green Isle, everything fell back into the old track, and she could go on

smoothly as before. But not so with the south: her wealth has fled; her

occupation, the plantation system, is gone; and she must, for a

generation, grope painfully in the dark, trying novel ways of subsisting,

enduring want and many failures, before finding again the light of plenty

and comfort.

The duties of the planter have changed. The management of a farm is not

like that of a plantation, and one skilled in the management of slaves is

not necessarily efficient in the directing of freedmen. Many other

countries have been impoverished by wars; but is not this instantaneous

and almost complete taking away of a great people's mode of living unique

in history? The most resolute secessionist would have lost heart and put

up his sword, could he have seen, before the war commenced, how easily the

solitary prop of southern wealth and comfort could be overturned, to be

set up no more. But in none of the ablest of the anti-secession arguments

of 1860 were the consequences of defeat predicted.

Some portions of our country have been built up into a high degree of

prosperity by a steady influx of foreign settlers. How much has been added

to the power and wealth of the northern States by the immigration from the

old lands of those who, when first they come, can do no more than subsist

themselves by their own industry, almost defies computation. How the force

of the preponderant population of the north pressed upon the south during

the war, and at last crushed her down! Slavery repelled the free immigrant

from the south, and he went elsewhere with his power to enrich and defend.

The uniform and rapid advancement of civilization is mainly due to the

struggle of the poor to better their condition. These efforts result in

complex division of labor, accumulation of wealth, and better than these,

in the production of a great population engaged in diversified industries.

In such a population, improving year by year in business habits, consists

the strength of a nation. The slave had no hope of rising, and the system

of which he was a part repelled free workingmen, and thus the south lost

the benign emulation and energy of a lower class. The ancient slaves were

not alone rural laborers and domestic servants, as were those of the

south. The former, being of kindred blood with their masters and near

their level in natural capacity, were initiated in the various industries,

some of which flourished greatly under their management. Though the slaves

of old were very degraded, they were not as low and grovelling as those of

our day. Enfranchisement was common; and, in a few generations afterwards,

the descendants of the freedman were indistinguishable amid the body of

free citizens. The ancient states were not, therefore, prevented by

slavery from having advanced and diversified industries, nor were they

denied the impulse of a possible rising from the lower to the higher

classes. But the American slave was of the remotest race, far below his

master in development, and the horror of receiving him into the body of

free citizens grew continually stronger. The law discouraged manumission,

and frowned upon the increase of freedmen. Thus, the African slavery of

the south was the most hopeless form of servitude the civilized world has

ever seen; and, by preventing the formation of a great class of freemen,

engaged in respectable industry, it killed the very roots of social

progress. These influences of slavery, so repugnant to American ideas,

will be more vividly seen and understood in the answer to the question,

What would have been the present condition of the south had it not been

for slavery? Undoubtedly her land would have smiled with a fertility

richer than the endowment of nature; her industrial arts would, ere this

time, have branched out into multifarious activity; her own ships would

have been carrying her produce and manufactures abroad; and, as the crown

of all, she would have had a teeming population of workers, whose

education in the methods of self-support would have been the assurance of

unlimited future advancement. In brief, in all the elements of the

greatness of a community, the south might now have equalled, if not

excelled, the north.

But there are some other effects of slavery to be noted before the outline

of the Old south can be clearly and fully drawn.

Among the planters, costly and liberal instruction was given to a few of

those who were to adorn places of leisured ease, or to fill the necessary

professions and public positions; but, in the midst of the sparse and

shifting rural population, there could not be that devotion to the

education of all, which is one of the most conspicuous glories of the

northern States.

In consequence of the sparseness of the planters and their roving habits,

there was not that subdivision of different portions of the counties into

small self-governing wards, which Jefferson so fondly desired. He said of

the New England townships, that they had "proved themselves the wisest

invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of

self-government, and for its preservation." He also said that he

considered the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging

on two hooks, to wit, "the public education, and the subdivision into

wards." This government of every vicinage in its home affairs by itself,

as originated in New England, and is now spread far and wide throughout

the northern States, is the most beneficent achievement of American

democracy. By this coercion of the citizen to participate in the constant

administration of public matters directly concerning his interests,

self-government becomes, as it should be, the business of everybody, and

everybody is compulsorily educated in the best of all learning for the

race.

The finale of slavery remains to be told. As opposition to it increased

from without, the south became more and more closely united. She honestly

believed that wanton intermeddlers were attacking her dearest rights. The

steady and continually strengthening warfare against slavery, and her

continuous and earnest defence of it, began--it is impossible to determine

precisely when--to knit her into a nationality of her own. He who

understands what Mr. Bagehot calls "nation-making" will discover, in the

past history of the south, if he looks attentively, many signs of this

tendency, which steadily progressed unperceived on her part, and still

more so on the part of the north, until the south began to coalesce into a

nation as compact as her scattered and random elements would permit. The

long advocacy and support of slavery in the political arena had fevered

her whole people, and finally, under these promptings to a national life,

politics absorbed nearly all of her intellectual powers.

There is a striking parallel between this sustained effort of the south

and the struggle of Ireland, when the latter, for the fifty years ending

with the advent of the present century, was arrayed against the British,

in their encroachments upon her independent government. During this

half-century, Ireland maintained that she was an independent integral part

of the British Empire, just as Virginia contended that she was a sovereign

in the federation of States. Ireland, like a southern State, challenged

every seeming interference, by the general government, in her local

affairs; and the claims put forth, in each instance, were inexorably

contested by an adverse government, claiming supremacy and supported by

superiority of power. Both were on the eve of revolutionary secession

without knowing it. The results in Ireland and the south were similar:

there was but one intellectual activity, namely, politics. The memory of

all Irishmen of that time not forgotten--and many of their names are

familiar words--is nothing but resistance to English aggression. Even

Curran, Ireland's great forensic advocate, made his world-wide fame in

defending Irishmen against the prosecutions of the British ministry. It

was much the same at the south in the period antecedent to the civil war.

She had neither literature nor science; but she had statesmen and

advocates, who will be remembered as long as her soldiers and generals.

The national germ had long been growing below the surface, in darkness,

and at last it burst into view, and shot up into a body of amazing

proportions. There was not the birth of a new nation at Montgomery in

1861; only the majority of this vigorous young member of the family of

nations was there proclaimed. But, for all of the eloquence of its orators

and the virtue and bravery of its people, it was, as compared with its

adversary, in raw and untutored nonage, and the great disaster that befell

four years afterwards was then preordained. It was her unshunnable fate

that she should be denationalized on the battle-field.

The late war was a conflict between implacable enemies. Each belligerent,

standing up for national life, was resistlessly coerced to fight to the

last. Neither can be blamed. The past may be taxed with lack of wisdom. It

may be that as Scotland and, more lately, Ireland have been peacefully

denationalized, a preventive, anticipating the dreadful event of war,

might years before have been devised by statesmanly forecast. The actual

combatants--the southerner fighting for the confederacy, and the northern

soldier bearing up the flag of the union--were equals in manhood and

virtue. The survivors, federal and confederate, at last see this, and

therefore they go in company to decorate alike the graves of the dead of

both armies.

The cause of all these evils--the backwardness and stationariness of the

south; a wasteful husbandry, without other industries; the instability of

her wealth; her want of a great class of freemen engaged in the different

arts; her barbarically simple social structure; her neglect of common

schools; the absorption of all her intellectual energies in feverish and

revolutionary politics; and, finally, secession and the reddened ground of

a thousand battle-fields--was slavery. It is gone. The malignant cancer,

involving, as it seemed, every vital and menacing hideous and loathsome

death, was plucked out by the roots; and after a ten years' struggle of

nature, we see the body politic slowly but surely reviving to a health and

soundness never known before.

Here we find the dividing line between the Old and the New south. The

former ended, and the latter began, with the giving of freedom to the

negroes--an event which will prove in the future to have been an

emancipation even more beneficial to master than to slave. Immunity from

all the evils of slavery which we have catalogued will distinguish the

New south from the Old.[198]

The sudden impoverishment of the southern people, and the unlooked-for

change in their ways of living and thinking, had they occurred in the most

peaceful times, and been followed with the best of government, would have

produced a profound shock and a long paralysis. But the bitterness of

subjugation, and the mistake of needlessly offensive and goading

government, with harsh reconstructive measures, have prolonged the

lethargy. And yet the American union shows benignly in the present

condition and promised future of the section. The ten years since

emancipation are instructive. Slowly has the New south been disentangling

herself from the debris of the Old, and she has emerged far enough to

enable us to perceive that a better era has commenced. Much has been lost,

but more has been saved. All the germs of true wealth and power and the

solid well-being of a community have survived; and solace for the past and

earnest of a great future may be found in the fact that she has reached at

last, and for the first time, a position in which she can develop these

elements, free from the suffocating hindrances of former days. We may now

properly inquire, What of the past does the south retain, and in what will

consist her future progress?

She retains her genial climate, her kindly soil, and her many natural

resources. If the peace of the American union is assured, as everything

now graciously promises, these natural advantages will, in a few

generations, far more than compensate for all her losses, and ultimately

place her in the very van of progress.

The best inheritance of the New from the Old south is the southern people.

We have seen how slavery checked industrial development, and how many of

its other effects were hurtful. After allowing fully for all these, there

will be found a great residuum of progressive energy, of intellectual

strength, and of moral worth in the people of the southern States. They

need not fear a comparison, in these respects, with the most enlightened

communities. Great men, like Washington, Jefferson, Calhoun, Jackson, and

Lee; political and military heroes, judges, lawyers, and orators, such as

the south has given birth to, in unbroken succession,--are the

unmistakable signs of a great people.

The rank and file of the confederate armies have given proof that the men

of the south must be classed, in all the elements of complete character,

with the best that the world has ever seen. Crime was so infrequent that a

single morning of the term of a rural court, before the war, nearly always

sufficed to dispose of every indictment; there was little want or

pauperism; virtue was everywhere the rule in private life, and there was

seldom even the suspicion of corruption in government or the

administration of justice. The history of this people since the war shows

that they are possessed of the best Anglo-Saxon mettle. They are slowly

beginning to thrive wherever they have been left to govern themselves, in

spite of the complete industrial revolution, the loss of property, and

change of occupation, of which we have written. And in many places, where

reconstruction has been harshest, and negro misrule yet prevails, the

whites have developed an unlooked-for self-maintaining capacity, and have

demonstrated that even there must be the eventual predominance of

intelligence and virtue, should "natural selection" alone work to secure

it.

The southern people have learned much wisdom in the last ten years. Their

heavy vote in 1872 for Horace Greeley--a man to whom a foreigner would

have supposed them unappeasably hostile--if there was nothing else, would

alone suffice to show that they are rapidly laying aside all hindrances to

progress. And now that slavery is gone and she has so quickly conquered

the animosities of the war, the south may be likened to a capable and

energetic young man, who, having failed, as the result of inevitable

misfortune, in a wrongly-chosen business, has been relieved of all

embarrassments and has entered upon his proper calling. More may

reasonably be expected of such a man than of one more prosperous who has

not had the like discipline.

As her nationalizing tendency has been destroyed by the removal of

slavery, and as her future must necessarily be shaped by union influences,

she will heartily embrace the political creed of the union. The doctrine

of the sovereignty of the States, which was advocated with very great

ability by many of the southern statesmen--notably by Calhoun, in his

speeches in congress, and in his "Discourse on the Constitution of the

United States," and with still more taking effect by Mr. Stephens in his

"Constitutional View of the War between the States,"--has now no disciples

at the south. General Logan gave expression to the prevailing creed of the

present, when he said, at a recent reunion of former confederate

companions:

"In considering, then, the future of the south, there is one fact

suggested at the outset which has been demonstrated to us by the logic

of events. It is, that under the operation of causes, which, although

unseen at the time, appear now to have been inevitable in their

results, a vast _social organism_ has been developed, and is now so

far advanced in its growth as a _national body politic_, and no longer

a mere aggregation of States, that _unity_ is a necessity of its

further development. In reviewing the past, we can now clearly see

that this national organism has been _gradually developed_; and, while

many seek by various theories to account for the failure of the

confederacy, the result may be regarded as the necessary consequence

of those laws of development under which this social organism--the

United States--was being evolved."

And the south is pleased to observe that there are no genuine signs of too

much centralization. On the contrary, the town system is destined to

spread fast and far; and the increase of local option laws; the splitting

of larger into smaller counties; the strengthening tendency to submit

constitutions and many legislative acts to voters; the greater disposition

often to amend the State constitutions in the interests of progress; the

vigorous growth in each State of its own body of laws; the rapid

multiplication of towns and cities, with governments peculiar to each, are

some of the many convincing proofs that local self-government is

increasing and flourishing. Of the last particular Judge Dillon says:

"We have popularized and made use of municipal institutions to such an

extent as to constitute one of the most striking features of our

government. It owes to them, indeed, in a great degree, its

decentralized character. When the English Municipal Corporations

Reform Act of 1835, was passed, there were, in England and Wales,

excluding London, only two hundred and forty-six places exercising

municipal functions; and their aggregate population did not exceed two

millions of people. In this country, our municipal corporations are

numbered by thousands, and the inhabitants subjected to their rule, by

millions."

Reflecting southerners see, in the present condition of the southern

States, the very strongest possible guaranty that the true balance

between national cohesion and local freedom is to be preserved. They see

that the happy equilibrium is of a character so permanent and stable as to

have survived the convulsion of civil war. The southern States are not

held as conquered provinces. On the contrary, aside from the abolition of

slavery and the fundamental legislation securing to the old slaves the

full fruition of their freedom, there has been no perceptible change in

the relations of these States to the United States.

Surely, to the student of history, wherein _vae victis!_ is written on

every page, this fact has wonderful significance. It recommends the

American form of government to the rest of the world as the incoming of

the new stage of civilization, wherein oppression and war shall become

unknown. However long contending armies may devour populations and

paralyze industry elsewhere, we are assured that war-sick America will

fight with herself no more. This assurance repays the south a thousand

fold for all that she has lost and endured.

The great economical interest of the south is her agriculture; and in this

industry, as well as among those who conduct it, a constant transition has

been taking place during the ten years since emancipation. There is a

melancholy change in the homes of landholders from the case and comfort of

_ante bellum_ days. The neat inclosures have fallen; the pleasant grounds

and the flower-gardens, once so trim and flourishing, are a waste; all the

old smiles and adornments are gone. Change at home is accompanied by still

greater change without. The negroes--and they constitute the great bulk of

the laboring population--tend to become a tenantry, cultivating the land,

in some instances, for a part of the produce, but oftener for a fixed sum

of money. Many of these realize from their labors little more than enough

to pay a moderate rent. Others work for wages, either in money or in some

portion of the crop made by their labor. As the negroes are scarce, and

their labor so important, they have often, directly or indirectly, a voice

in the area of land cultivated, the mode of cultivation, and the kind of

crop raised. The result, in many places, is retrogression. The face of

the country is much altered. Only a small part of the land, as compared

with that tilled before the war, is under cultivation, the remainder

becomes wild. Could the fallen confederates return they would not in many

places recognize their old homes. Nearly every man of average business

ability could control his slaves, before the war, with little trouble; but

it now requires far more than ordinary capacity to find and keep good

tenants, to employ laborers amid the present scarcity, and to retain and

make them remunerative when employed. The freedman is a different

character from his former slave self, and is to be governed by different

methods; and the true art of managing him is cabalism to many who were

prosperous planters before the war. Multitudes of these show great

despondency, for there have been thousands of failures among them.

But when we examine into this depression, we find that it is but the

result of the transition from the former _regime_, and not a deep-seated

and fatal decay of the vitals. These are some of the symptoms of assured

recovery, noted within the last three or four years: a steady contraction

of credit, and widening prevalency of the cash system; growing conviction

that the whites must depend upon their own labor more, and less on that of

the negroes; augmenting number of land-owners who decline to secure the

merchants advancing supplies to their tenants and laborers; a greater

acreage devoted to food crops; general advocacy of diversified planting;

spreading dissatisfaction with the laws giving large exemptions to

debtors. Southern economical affairs, in their sinking, "touched bottom"

(to use the forcible expression now in vogue) about the end of 1874.[199]

There has been a probable increase since of the mass of distress, as the

heat of a summer day increases, by accumulation, for a while after noon,

though the sun is imparting less and less. Steady amelioration will soon

be general. A new system is slowly developing, and can be plainly

discerned among the rubbish of the old. The change from former days most

noticeable now is the multiplication, increased energy, and continually,

growing trade of the smaller towns. This is due to the decay of planting,

which was a wholesale system, and the coming-in of farming, which is a

small trading system using much less concentrated capital. The large

moneyed man, for evident economical reasons, buys in commercial

centres--in cities--but the small purchaser must needs buy in the nearest

market. Allowing for the great increase of farmers, and the control by the

negroes of their earnings, there are many thousands more of small buyers

in the south than there were before the war, and towns build up to sell to

them.

There is another fact, not so noticeable as the rapidly growing local

trade, but still more important. A class of new planters, consisting

mainly of men too young to have become fixed in the methods and habits of

former days, is springing up. They are new yet; but there is, in many

parts of the south, at least one who is teaching many watching idlers by

deeds and silence. They have remodelled their domestic economy,

accommodating it to their smaller incomes and to the uncertainty of

household help. They have discarded the outside kitchen, have substituted

the cooking stove for the old voracious fireplace, and have brought the

well with a pump in it, instead of the old windlass and bucket, under the

roof of the dwelling, so that the household duties may be more easily

despatched by their wives and children. And they have also remodelled

their planting. They diversify their crops and products, raising more

grain, and introducing clover and new forage plants. Some abandon entirely

the cultivation of the old slave crops, and supply the nearest towns with

feed and provisions. These planters of the New south till less land, and

strive to improve it; they study the superiority and economy of machinery;

they provide themselves with better cotton-gins, often using steam to work

them; they have presses which require fewer hands than the old

packing-screw; better plows are used; and harrows, reapers, and mowers,

which, in many parts of the south, were seldom known before the war, are

now common. This little band keeps pace with agricultural progress, as

recorded in the journals; they seek for and find many new sources of

profit; they prepare the people for laws fostering the interest of the

planter in many particulars; they mold the opinion of their neighborhood;

and their ability, skill, and wealth slowly increase. They struggle with a

new order of things, having to think for themselves at every turn, and

often misstep and fall in the dark, but they pick themselves up, and find

the way again. The light of the new experience which they are kindling

grows brighter each year, and is beginning to draw some of their neighbors

to travel in it.

It is not our object to give a false impression of the influence of the

class of farmers last referred to. They are but few, and their efforts are

but the beginnings of the happy coming change. Their courage, power, and

numbers are manifestly on the increase; and, as there is no other

progressive activity in agriculture, and they meet no opposition save the

passive resistance of despondency and inaction, it is almost certain that

they will lay deep and sure the foundations of the needed renovation of

the south. It is their belief that, to make agriculture generally

prosperous, and to school the people to habits of thrift and saving, are

the first steps, and that manufactories and trades and heterogeneous

industries will naturally follow.

They desire northern settlers, to add useful features to agricultural

economy, and diversify planting. A few have come, and they are prospering.

It seems rational to expect a steady influx of these for many years,

bringing capital and methods better suited to the needs of the changed

times, raising the value of landed property out of its impeding

prostration, and strengthening the industrial force. The climate; the

abundance of cheap, cleared land; the long settlement having demonstrated

the country to be healthy; the fact that plowing and other important

outdoor work can be done on the farms all the winter round; the many

railways, the multiplying towns and growing cities; the variety of

products, and easy access to market--now that slavery and the animosity of

war are gone, and the misrule of the carpetbagger has ended nearly

everywhere--these, and many other advantages daily disclosing themselves,

excel most of the new States and the Territories in offering inducements

to immigrants; and, in due course of time, a vast number of settlers, both

American and foreign, will be added to the population. There are many

indications that the immigration of stock-raisers, wool-growers,

market-gardeners, orchardists, beekeepers, in fine, small farmers of every

kind, adapted to the soil and climate, will soon begin in earnest. When it

does, the rebuilding of the south will be rapid.

The coming-in of northern capitalists, to invest in railways, mines,

manufactories, and other large moneyed enterprises--most especially to

develop the great resources of water-power--may be expected to begin at

once, and considerably, upon the close of the centennial year. It seems

now that this is the most powerful agency that may be expected to begin

immediate work, in introducing the much-needed higher type of industrial

organization.

The feelings of the two races toward each other were, for a few years

after the war, bitterly hostile. The whites had, all their lives, seen the

negroes in slavery, and from their infancy they had heard their preachers

defend slavery, not in the abstract, as their phrase was, but in the

concrete. The "concrete" meant African slavery, which was justified on the

ground that the African was divinely intended in his nature for slavery,

which was to him christianization and civilization, so long as he remained

a slave; while, the moment he was set free, he would revert to his

primitive barbarism. When these God-given slaves were suddenly cut loose

from mastership, and the wealth of the capitalist, the portion of the

orphan, and the mite of the widow were swept away at once by emancipation,

either directly or as a necessary consequence, there was a great shock

given to the whites. But when, three years afterwards, a new constituency

was created, in which the slaves, just emancipated, outnumbered the

whites, in many counties, the storm of passion that burst forth can hardly

be described. The whites feared that the old relation was about to be

inverted, and that they would be made slaves to the negroes. There was

many a deed of violence, and many a poor negro paid his life for a few

offensive words.