Now the question arises, and it is important to know, how this state
of affairs is viewed by the better classes of the Southern States. I
will tell you, and I venture to say in advance, if our hearts were
not already hardened by familiarity with crimes against the Negro, we
should be shocked and astonished, not only by these mobocratic crimes,
but by the attitude of the better classes of the Southern people and
their law-makers, towards the perpetrators of them. With a few noble
exceptions, just enough to prove the rule, the upper classes of the
South seem to be in full sympathy with the mob and its deeds. There
are but few earnest words ever uttered against either. Press, platform
and pulpit are generally either silent or they openly apologise for
the mob and its deeds. The mobocratic murderers are not only permitted
to go free, untried and unpunished, but are lauded and applauded as
honourable men and good citizens, the high-minded guardians of Southern
virtue. If lynch law is in any case condemned by them, it is only
condemned in one breath and excused in another.
The great trouble with the Negro in the South is that all presumptions
are against him. A white man has but to blacken his face and commit
a crime to have some Negro lynched in his stead. An abandoned woman
has only to start a cry, true or false, that she has been insulted
by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the
mob. Frightened and tortured by his captors, confused, he may be,
into telling crooked stories about his whereabouts at the time when
the crime is alleged to have been committed, and the death penalty
is at once inflicted, though his story may be but the incoherency of
ignorance or the distraction caused by terror.
In confirmation of what I have said, I have before me the utterances
of some of the best people of the South, and also the testimony of
one from the North, a lady of high character, from whom, considering
her antecedents, we should have expected a more considerate, just and
humane utterance.
In a late number of the _Forum_, Bishop Haygood, author of the “Brother
in Black,” says that “The most alarming fact is that execution by
lynching has ceased to surprise us. The burning of a human being for
any crime, it is thought, is a horror that does not occur outside of
the Southern states of the American Union, yet unless assaults by
Negroes come to an end, there will most probably be still further
display of vengeance that will shock the world, and men who are just
will consider the provocation.”
In an open letter addressed to me by ex-Governor Chamberlain, of South
Carolina, published in the Charleston _News and Courier_, in reply
to an article of mine on the subject of lynching, published in the
_North American Review_, the ex-Governor says: “Your denunciation of
the South on this point is directed exclusively, or nearly so, against
the application of lynch law for the punishment of one crime; the
existence, I suppose I might say the prevalence, of this crime at the
South is undeniable. But I read your article in vain for any special
denunciation of the crime itself. As you say, your people are lynched,
tortured and burned, for assault on white women. As you value your own
good fame and safety as a race, stamp out the infamous crime.”
And now comes the sweet voice of a Northern woman, Miss Frances
Willard, of the W. C. T. U., distinguished among her sisters for
benevolence and Christian charity. She speaks in the same bitter tone
and hurls against us the same blasting accusation. She says in a letter
now before me, “I pity the Southerners. The problem in their hands
is immeasurable. The coloured race multiplies like the locusts of
Egypt. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a
thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the
sight of their own roof tree.” Such, then, is the crushing indictment
drawn up against the Southern Negroes, drawn up, too, by persons who
are perhaps the fairest and most humane of the Negro’s accusers. Yet
even they paint him as a moral monster, ferociously invading the sacred
rights of woman and endangering the homes of the whites.