CHAPTER X

As has been heretofore stated, George William Curtis, the most eminent

representative of former abolition sentiment, at that date (1888),

still alive in the United States, had propounded a query to the author

concerning political advantages obtained through the possession of the

suppressed vote swelling the electoral strength of the States, possibly

compelled to suppress its exercise.

Hampton, the most illustrious representative and “one of the most

distinguished leaders”[232] of the overthrown slavocracy, had, in his

reply to a press interview, indicated how little desirous he thought

the South was of retaining any advantage based on its possession, and

his lieutenant, Butler, elaborating the argument, had pressed for a

diffusion of the Negroes throughout the United States.

The fates gave Mr. Curtis the last word.

In _Harper’s Weekly_ in the early part of 1891 appeared an editorial

entitled “A Sign of the Times.” It was in part as follows:

“The associations, which under the general name of Farmers Alliance,

are organized throughout the country, are a sign of the times not to

be overlooked. They are the political form which is given to a feeling

which is observable on all sides, extending quite beyond the circle of

those who actually take part in such associations.... The mainspring

of the movement is hostility to what is called the aristocracy of

wealth. This hostility is due to the conviction that consolidated

capital commands special privileges, which are denied to the greatest

industrial interest of the country, that of agriculture.... The most

striking illustration of this movement was that in South Carolina. A

Farmers Convention composed of white Democrats, who were opposed to

what they called the aristocratic Democratic Ring, made the present

Governor ‘Ben’ Tillman, the Democratic candidate. His main appeal was

to the poor whites or ‘buckra’, as they are called, and despite the

fact that he was opposed by Judge Haskell, a representative of the old

governing class, who had the good will of most of the colored leaders,

Mr. Tillman was overwhelmingly elected.... Tillman’s election, which

was a signal defeat of the old Democratic regime in South Carolina was

followed by the defeat of the chief representative of that regime,

Senator Hampton, for re-election to the Senate.... One striking

incident in the campaign was the speech of a colored Republican, who

opposed Judge Haskell and who said that Tillman had made both the

whites and the Negroes readers and thinkers.”[233]

The colored man to whom Mr. Curtis referred was the Rev. Richard

Carroll, of Orangeburg, later of Columbia.

In the early fall of the year 1890 he had, in a letter to the editor of

_The News and Courier_, opposing Negro excursions, given, in addition

to the very sensible views he put forth concerning such, an indication

that he was alive to the greatest need of his race and how best it

might be met. Five years before Booker Washington came upon the stage

and twenty-two before he saw the light, Carroll seems to have seen it

and pointed to it as follows:

“Our Northern friends are turning their attention to the needs of

emigrants in the West. We should save money to buy homes while land is

cheap.”[234]

That Carroll was, at that date, a vigorous, original, independent

thinker and speaker, will be indicated by a fuller description of the

incident which Mr. Curtis alludes to above.

Upon the division which occurred in South Carolina between the

followers of Judge Haskell and Mr. Tillman, the Republican party

in that State, mainly composed of Negroes, had begun to stir and a

convention had been called of the leading colored men of the State to

consider the advisability of endorsing Judge Haskell and supporting his

candidacy, and, the delegates having assembled, a motion was made to

leave the matter to the Republican executive committee. The resolution

obtained support from many members in strong speeches. It was opposed

by one speaker. The following is the newspaper report of the speaker’s

remarks:

“The Rev. R. Carroll, of Orangeburg, could not approve leaving the

matter to the Republican executive committee, because he knew the

committee would endorse the Haskell ticket (How do you know?). Because

one of the leaders told me so. I am here to oppose the colored people

taking any action whatever. We have got what we have prayed for so

long, a split in the Democratic party. Join one side now and we

will grasp a shadow. Let the thing work. He believed Tillman ought

to be elected (Voices—‘Oh No’). Well let me talk. Before Tillman

was nominated, we were all Tillmanites. (Voices—‘No, No’). We all

rejoiced. We wanted his success. Now he has been nominated. Tillman

has done us more good than any living man since the war. He made

colored as well as white people thinkers and readers. Heretofore all

Democrats went into office on 76 and the Negro Question. Tillman

came along and let the Negro alone (Voices—‘Hamburg, Ellenton’). He

put people to thinking of other things than the Negro. He ought to

be Governor, and if I was a white Democrat I’d cast 10,000 votes to

reward him. I am not afraid of Tillman. I’m afraid of the men who got

into his waggon and were pulled into office by him. The white people

are divided, but the moment that the Negro comes in, they will get

together (applause). Both parties will turn on the Negro and he will

have to run to the mountains.... If you endorse Haskell I’ll enter

politics with 100,000 others (‘Won’t vote for Tillman’). He’ll be

governor just the same.”[235]

Although Carroll was in a minority, he fought the question to a vote,

replying to the charges with vigorous thrusts and with regard to the

claim that those whom Tillman represented were the lynchers of Negroes

asking: “Were they not led by aristocrats as well as common men?”

In fact Carroll appreciated, in advance, what Mr. Curtis deeply

interested as he was and keen observer also, never quite grasped,

viz., that the dominant faction, in South Carolina, did not intend to

permit the Negroes to participate. And this was in fact the greatest

fact of the Tillman movement and one which made it utterly unlike

all apparently similar efforts in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia

and other Southern States. The head of the camel never having been

permitted to enter in South Carolina, the difficulty experienced in the

other States in removing the camel, when he had completely filled the

tent, was never felt in South Carolina.

In storming his way to place and power, Tillman unquestionably

appealed to a class, the farming class, whom he declared constituted

seventy-five per cent of the white population, and whom he also averred

had been discriminated against. But Tillman really had less prejudice

against the old families of South Carolina than many who opposed his

candidacy. His people before him had been identified with the soil of

South Carolina for generations. His father had held Federal office

under Andrew Jackson, and one of his ablest lieutenants, W. D. Evans,

was, in 1890, still living on the land originally granted his ancestor

in the days of the province of South Carolina.

Once established in power, Tillman was for all classes.

But Mr. Curtis, clean and lovable man as he was, never could entirely

free himself from the feeling that, as an abolitionist, he had felt

toward the class which had led the South through the struggle in behalf

of slavery. He had great hopes that the elevation of Tillman and the

overthrow of the Hampton regime meant a chance for the Negro to come

back to some exercise, even if a restricted one, of the suffrage. He

expected that there would be a marked difference in the feelings and

sentiments of those whom Tillman led and those who had preceded them;

and in a letter of Jan. 21, he thus exhibited it:

“I do not know if you have seen a paper by the Rev. A. D. Mayo, who

for ten years has been busily engaged in promoting education in the

Southern States. He holds that the class which Tillman represents and

not the old planting aristocracy is the real hope of the Southern

country, and he makes a very strong statement.”[236]

But no class has any monopoly of selfishness and while it was most

unfortunate for South Carolina, yet it was in accordance with human

nature, that one of the first considerations of the class which had

seized the reins of power in South Carolina in 1890, was to benefit

its own class, by an attempt to perpetuate those very conditions which

for eighty years had done more to injure South Carolina than any one

thing in her history, and which her wisest sons had unavailingly

opposed, viz., the retention of a mass of ignorant, agricultural

laborers, reduced as close to the condition of serfs of the soil as it

was possible in each period to accomplish; for this is what the law,

enacted in most of the cotton States at that date, did in fact bring

about, by taxing out of existence those agencies which might have

relieved the State of considerable numbers of Negroes.

The South Carolina Act, passed December 4, 1891, can stand as typical

of this legislation, which was based upon the determination of the

white agriculturists of the Lower South, constituting as they did about

seventy per cent of the white population, to hobble, well within their

reach, cheap Negro labor. Coupled as the passage of such legislation

was with the fierce declarations against black brutes, with which

the perpetrators of such sought to excuse the numerous lynchings of

this period, it was apparent that, while the vengeance was swift in

overtaking the blacks who violated white women, the pound of cure was

preferred to the ounce of prevention; and so, exposing their women to

that risk which seemed inevitable with the tremendous Negro population

which abounded in the South, the men who made the laws still clung to

cheap Negro labor. It is true that as a whole, in the section covered

even by South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the white

population had gained upon the Negro population and was at this date

but slightly inferior in numbers, amounting to 2,917,000 whites, to

2,966,000 Negroes, in this black belt; but just what proportion of

whites were absolutely independent of the Negro agricultural laborer

it would be difficult to estimate. That there were then and are now

a very great number, who would profit to a very great degree by an

assisted emigration of Negroes, and that these whites were of the class

whose women folk necessarily were most exposed to the risk which a

juxtaposition of such an immense mass of Negroes presented, growing

race prejudice prevented the perception of, and the members of this

class lent their influence to this injurious legislation formulated as

follows:

“No person shall carry on the business of emigrant agent in the State

without first having obtained a license therefor from the State

Treasurer.

Section 2. That the term ‘emigrant agent’, as contemplated in the Act,

shall be construed to mean any person engaged in hiring laborers or

soliciting emigrants in the State to be employed beyond the limits of

the same.

Section 3. That any person shall be entitled to a license, which shall

be good for one year, upon payment unto the State Treasurer, for the

use of the State, of one thousand dollars in each county in which he

operates or solicits emigrants, for each year so engaged.

Section 4. That any person doing the business of an emigrant agent

without first having obtained such license shall be guilty of a

misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine not less

than five hundred dollars and not more than five thousand or may be

imprisoned in the county jail not less than four months or confined in

the State prison at hard labor not exceeding two years for each and

every offense, within the discretion of the Court.”[237]

It is doubtful if the injury which had been inflicted upon the South by

the vicious Federal legislation of 1868, had, in any way, been greater

than by its checking the natural diffusion of the Negroes throughout

the Union in consequence of their emancipation and the military

overthrow of those opposing such.

The effect of the legislation of 1868 had been to direct and stimulate

a movement to the South of Northern Negroes and white adventurers which

banked up the Negro population there, taught all to consider themselves

ladies and gentlemen, a fact which is still apparent in the apparel in

which many attempt to perform heavy manual work; and, until they were

disbanded in 1890, was most ludicrous, in their military aspirations,

as the Kodak by Johnson shows.

The overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, did to some degree produce

diffusion and by the Census of 1890 it became noticeable even in South

Carolina, where the Negro population was densest, that while the

numerical increase of the Negroes was still greater there than the

whites, the rate of increase of the former had fallen below the latter.

Yet in South Carolina the Negro population still exceeded the white by

226,296, a greater excess than appeared even in Mississippi, a State

of greater area and with a more numerous white population, where the

excess of the Negro population was but 197,698.

[Illustration: NEGRO NATIONAL GUARDSMAN—SOUTH CAROLINA, 1890

Product of Congressional Reconstruction]

Under such circumstances it was patent that legislation in either State

which tended to restrain the egress of the Negroes, even if temporarily

of industrial benefit to the land owners and agriculturists,

was against the true interest of the State and the people, and,

accordingly, in South Carolina, in the columns of “The Cotton Plant”,

the organ of the South Carolina agricultural class of that date,

the author of this work began an attack upon the law in a series of

articles.

Without asserting that it was in response to this agitation, it

nevertheless is a fact that closely following upon it, in 1893, the law

was amended by the addition of a clause in the nature of a compromise,

namely:

“That nothing in this act shall be construed to prevent emigrant

agents operating in this State between the 1st day of July and the

31st day of December of any year.”[238]

This amendment, permitting the opportunity for assisted removal of the

Negroes during that half of the year when such was least liable to

interfere with their contracts for labor, admitted of a gradual removal

of numbers of them and was a concession to public opinion and political

morality by those who, with their votes and influence, controlled the

political situation.

By 1890, it was scarcely to be doubted, that a great change in

sentiment was taking place in the world or rather in those three great

countries which, from their position, were most able to effect the

opinion of the world. In Great Britain, the United States of America

and Germany the extravagantly liberal and humanitarian ideas, with

regard to the race question, which had marked the twenty-five years

preceding 1890, were giving way to something which might be described

by the word race-imperialism. In Germany it made its appearance in many

forms, but more noticeably in the colonial ventures, which off the

coast of East Africa were smeared with a recrudescence of the slave

trade.[239] How it grew in that country and to what astounding lengths

of caste culture it proceeded, would be beyond the scope of this study,

but it might be mentioned that, by Paul Rohrback, without any credit to

the author, Calhoun’s black “substratum” theory was openly avowed as

the basis of colonial expansion.

Great Britain, with the Jameson raid and its _sequellae_, gave an

illustration of race intolerance that shocked the world, but avoided

the use of the black in conquering the white.

In the United States it took shape in the various constitutional

conventions in Southern States, aiming to disfranchise the bulk of the

Negro vote.

It was England, however, that altered the designation of “The Brother

in Black” to “The White Man’s Burden.”

In every way in 1890 the Negro seemed to have failed. His profligacy

was exaggerated, but in his profligacy he had betrayed Judge Tourgee. A

study of the Census of 1890 by the author of this work indicated that

in a total population of 62,620,000 in the United States, 45,770,000

were native whites; 9,240,000 were foreign born whites; 6,339,000 were

Negroes; 1,131,000 were mulattoes; 110,000 were Mongolians and 58,000

civilized Indians.

Comparing the two sections: There were a little more than twice as

many native born whites in the North and West as in the South. There

were about twelve times as many foreign born whites and about seven

times as many civilized Indians with fifty times as many Mongolians,

but there were only one-twelfth as many Negroes and one-fifth as many

mulattoes.[240]

North & West South

Native Whites 31,150,000 14,620,000

Foreign Born White 8,510,000 730,000

Negroes 489,000 5,850,000

Hybrids 195,000 936,000

Chinese & Japanese 108,000 2,000

Civilized Indians 51,000 7,000

In the eight Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida,

Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas there were

6,162,000 whites to 4,480,000 colored persons, and in the first six

named of these 3,599,000 whites to 3,492,000 colored persons. By States

the comparison was as follows:

Whites Colored

South Carolina 462,000 688,000

Georgia 978,000 858,000

Florida 224,000 166,000

Alabama 833,000 678,000

Mississippi 544,000 742,000

Louisiana 558,000 559,000

In the same year in which Tillman had risen to power in South Carolina,

Mississippi had disfranchised the great bulk of her Negro majority

and, with his control of political affairs, Tillman set to work to

accomplish the same thing in South Carolina. By 1895 he had succeeded

in obtaining a constitutional convention and in that year it met.

For almost two centuries the Negroes had been trained in slavery. Then

for a decade they had enjoyed what was much more akin to unbridled

license than liberty. For about twenty years succeeding that they had

been, by every device which could be conceived of, stripped of the

exercise of the franchise and to a very great degree excluded from

jury duty. The proposition was now to exclude the vast bulk of them

legally from the franchise. It is interesting to consider and observe

in what way they received the suggestion; for they were now absolutely

without white aid, and dependent entirely upon such arguments as they

themselves could advance. There was no attempt to hide the purpose.

It was openly avowed that the main purpose of the constitutional

convention of South Carolina for 1895 was to frame a law, by which the

tremendous preponderance of the Negro electorate should be reduced to

an inconsiderable minority. This had been accomplished in Mississippi,

and the inconsistency of the Emigrant Tax Law, restraining in the

State those whom the law makers had to protect the State from, escaped

attention for the time.

Blunt and rough as he was in his political utterances, the prime mover

for this convention, Senator B. R. Tillman, with a breadth of thought

greatly to his credit, sought unceasingly to make it representative

of all factions, classes and conditions of the white population of

the State and, when it finally assembled, it was found to be so. In

addition it contained a sprinkling of Negroes, through the presence of

six Negro delegates from two coast counties, where they were in such

overwhelming numbers as to preclude their exclusion by any methods

afforded by existing laws.

The attitude, behavior and utterance of these six Negroes in this

convention, in the State where twenty years previously the members

of their race had held their most pronounced legislative orgy and to

which they now came, to what they must have realized were the political

obsequies of the race, had in it, sentimentally considered, something

of the pathetic. It should be borne in mind that those who did come now

could only come from those two counties where the Negroes were at their

lowest, if contact with whites was elevating; for, in Beaufort and

Georgetown, the whites composed a very small minority.

It was not a time, however, for sentimental considerations, and to fuse

the general mass of the convention into a condition appreciative of

the scheme it was aimed to present at that stage in the proceedings,

Senator Tillman reviewed at great length and with terrific force the

previous frightful excesses of carpet-bag government and Negro rule in

the State. Upon the adoption of a resolution for the incorporation of

his speech in the journal of the Convention, with a fairness, a milder

man might not have exhibited, he requested that the replies of such of

the Negro delegates as desired to speak, should also be therein printed.

That Negro delegate designated by him as “the ablest man of color

I have ever met,” W. J. Whipper, (Dan. Chamberlain’s _piece de

resistance_ in the seventies), certainly the most notorious of all who

rose to prominence in Reconstruction days, failed to avail himself

of the privilege. While far less able, with a manly determination

distinctly to his credit, Robert Smalls did, and defended his character

with courage. He was accused of corruption. He pointed to the fact

that he had been pardoned, and he claimed with great earnestness that

the pardon had been granted him without solicitation on his part, and

in spite of his urgent demand for trial. While his remarks do not

indicate any exceptional intelligence, nor his reasons for desertion

the clearest conception of what constitutes public morality, there is a

ring of manly courage in his speech which wins sympathy.

After setting forth the above claim, he concluded as follows:

“Mr. President, I am through with this matter. It should not have

been brought here. All the thieves are gone, they are scattered over

the nation; but I have remained here. My race has honored me with a

seat on this floor and I shall serve them to the best of my ability.

My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in

this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All

they need is an equal chance in the battle of life. I am proud of

them and by their acts towards me, I know they are not ashamed of me,

for they have at all times honored me with their votes. I stand here

the equal of any man. I started out in the war with the Confederates;

they threatened to punish me, and I left them. I went to the Union

Army. I fought in seventeen battles to make glorious and perpetuate

the flag that some of you trampled under your feet. Innocent of every

charge attempted to be made here against me, no act or word of yours

can in any way blur the record that I have made at home and abroad.

Mr. President, I am through and shall not hereafter notice any

personal remark. You have the facts in the case, by them I ask to be

judged.”[241]

But it must not be imagined from this, that the speaker was in any

sense hacked. On the contrary he continued to participate in the work

of the convention to the best of his ability.

As an amendment to Section 34, of the draft of the Constitution, which

provided—“The marriage of any white person with a Negro or mulatto

person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood, shall be unlawful

and void.”—Smalls proposed the addition,—“and any white person who

lives and cohabits with a Negro, mulatto or person who shall have

one-eighth or more Negro blood shall be disqualified from holding any

office of emolument or trust in this State, and the offspring of any

such living or cohabiting, shall bear the name of father and shall

be entitled to inherit and acquire property the same as if they were

legitimate.” But the Convention voted it down and not improperly, for

though clever politics, the concluding clause was vicious legislation.

The amiable boldness of the mulatto Smalls won for him, however,

general tolerance and some regard; but he was not intellectually in the

class with that octaroon, Thomas E. Miller, who, in the minds of most

persons, made on this occasion the greatest display of talent.

Miller made many speeches and furnished much acceptable copy for the

press. He, therefore, not unnaturally, loomed large in the eyes of the

knights of the quill, and his ablest speech was later utilized, by the

most cultured representative of the race in this country, Professor W.

E. Burghardt DuBois, as one buttress of a defense of Reconstruction, in

a paper read by him at the annual meeting of the American Historical

Association in 1909, which was published later in the _Review_. Still

the speeches of both Smalls and Miller were defensive.

Of another and less known colored delegate to this convention, this

could not be said as denoting his attitude. While bearing himself with

dignity and strictly observing the proprieties of debate, the mulatto

of whom mention is next made, eloquently illustrated the adage, that

“the business of an opposition is to oppose.” The man and his efforts

historically considered deserve some recognition.

James E. Wigg, was born at Linden Park, Bluffton, Beaufort District,

South Carolina, March 25, 1850, the son of a colored woman by a white

man. As a small boy he attracted the attention of Gen. David Hunter,

upon whom he waited at Hilton Head, who, after the war, took him with

him to Washington, D. C., and placed him at Whalen Institute. He was

said to have been well versed in theology, and “an earnest follower of

Swedenborg.”[242] His work in the Convention was marked by a distinct

exhibition of intelligence. He submitted a draft for a constitution

which was creditable, and he proposed an ordinance, to the Committee

on Finance and Taxation, of distinct merit. It constituted politics of

a high order. It was a bold challenge to the white majority, on a line

hard to defend the unfavorable report of the Committee in response to.

Wigg’s ordinance was as follows:

“Be it ordained by the people of South Carolina, in convention

assembled, that the Comptroller General, County Auditors, County

Treasurers and all persons charged with the collections of State

or municipal taxes, be and are hereby required, to keep separate

and distinct accounts of all tax returns and taxes paid by white

and colored taxpayers and that the same be always open for public

inspection.”

The Convention voted this down, although the subject is known to be one

upon which much loose generalization is continually indulged in as the

basis of political appeals to voters.

But Wigg struck a more telling note than this. The concluding clause of

Article 1, Sec. II being reported:

“After the adoption of this constitution any person who shall fight a

duel or send or accept a challenge, for that purpose, or be an aider

or abettor in fighting a duel, shall be deprived of holding any office

of honor or trust in the State, and shall be otherwise punished as the

law shall prescribe.”

To this Wigg suggested the simple addition, “or any one engaged in

lynching.”[243] The amendment was voted down, but in what position did

the vote so disposing of it place the law-making whites? How does it

read today?

Wigg’s speech on the suffrage clause, from the standpoint of his

race, was also a strong presentation of the subject, pitched upon a

high plane, eloquent and dignified. No extracts from it will do it

justice. To be appreciated at its full value, it must be read as a

whole. In it was none of that amusing buffoonery, which in another

colored delegate’s remarks so captivated the press representatives;

but it did contain not a little biting sarcasm. It is a speech well

worth the perusal of the careful student of history, who is desirous

of informing himself of the various styles of men, our institutions

and our practices have evolved. But with all that has been stated,

yet the most interesting incident connected with this colored man’s

service in the Convention, was his clash with the strongest and most

influential member of that body, in an impromptu debate, arising almost

accidentally, in which, by no stretch of imagination, can the colored

man be said to have been worsted. That he owed his triumph to the

weakness of the position of his adversary was his fortune, and he used

it to effect.

As has been before suggested, by passing such a law to restrain

the egress of the Negroes, as the new regime had done in 1890, the

inconsistency of declarations concerning the dangerous characteristics

of the race had been made manifest, and in the full tide of his

progress as leader of the Convention, Senator Tillman found himself on

a shoal from which it took some floundering to get again into natatory

water.

As reported in the press the incident appears as follows:

“Senator Tillman said he would preface his remarks by reading from his

first or inaugural message, when he advocated township government....

‘At that time we were hampered by this Sinbad’s old man, the Negro. He

is here and he is going to be here and we must look out for the nigger

in the wood pile.’”

Mr. Wigg (a young colored man) asked Senator Tillman:

“Do I understand that you object to the presence of the Negro in South

Carolina?”

“Senator Tillman: Not a bit, but I would place no restraint upon his

emigration.

“Mr. Wigg: Did you not sign a bill calculated to prevent his leaving?

“Senator Tillman: I never signed such a measure.[244]

“Mr. Wigg: I mean the act imposing a tax on emigration agents.”

To this distinct specification of the act passed while he was Governor

Tillman at first hastily claimed that it had been passed during his

predecessor’s term of office; but later, on reflection, made a point of

informing the Convention that he found he had signed it and desired,

“to apologize to the State for having done so.”

The author of the Act, a cotton planter from Marlboro, W. D. Evans,

then arose and also apologized for it, and a verbal pledge was given,

that the Act should be repealed. At that time the Act was in its

amended form, only operative for one-half of the year. But so far from

being repealed, the only action concerning it, was the making of it

operative for the whole year as originally drawn, license reduced.

As dissatisfying as such a statement may be to those to whom the

injustice of it, and the disregard of a promise given under such solemn

conditions, is repugnant, it must be borne in mind, that similar

legislation of the State of Georgia had been, in the mean time,

reviewed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and sustained upon

the grounds _inter alia_, that—

“If it can be said to affect the freedom of egress from the State

or the freedom of the contract, it does only incidentally and

remotely.”[245]

The Supreme Court of the United States, therefore, shares with the

Lower South the responsibility for this harsh and unwise restriction

of the right of labor to its fullest wage, as well as the denial to a

peculiarly ignorant and helpless mass of the population, of an assisted

egress from localities where they are said to be such a menace from

their extraordinary numbers, that a setting aside of all law and

depriving of individuals of life without law by mobs is sometimes by

some people justified.

But, while arguing for labor its right to go where it wishes to win its

highest wage, we need not shut our eyes to the rank selfishness of the

industrial agencies, which sweep out of a community the bulk of the

able-bodied males and leave only the dependent women and children as

a burden on it. That, however, could and should be met by legislation

preventative of the breaking up of families simply to meet the demands

of industrial slavery. But the right of the laborer to all that his

work can earn should be protected, nevertheless.

As fruitful as the incidents of this extraordinary Convention were,

in illustration of phases of the Negro question, the most remarkable

of all, however, remains yet to be narrated. It has been previously

stated, that in 1865, when the States of the then defunct Confederacy

endeavored to rehabilitate themselves, as members of the Union, after

Emancipation, but before Reconstruction, both South Carolina and

Mississippi adopted codes, in which were the provisions that “every

person who may have of Caucasian blood seven-eighths or more shall be

deemed a white person,” thus separating such from “persons of color”,

a denomination including all Negroes and mixed blood having less than

seven-eighths of Caucasian blood, who were declared at the same time,

“not entitled to social or political equality with white persons.”

This would appear to have been only another way of stating that those

who did have seven-eighths or more of Caucasian blood were entitled to

social and political equality with the whites. But Reconstruction,

as has been shown, swept this legislation out of existence, in the

attempt then made to place all upon one plane of social equality, and

to punish as severely as a law could be framed to, such as might be

accused of any discrimination of a social nature. This preposterous

piece of legislation was in its turn done away with when Reconstruction

passed away, and in its place there was enacted the law which penalized

marriage between whites and Negroes. In the South Carolina convention

of 1895, an attempt was made to so frame the law, as to make it conform

to the view held in South Carolina and Mississippi in 1865; but to this

there was opposition in the shape of an amendment reading as follows:

“Sec. 34. The marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto

person who shall have _any_ Negro blood, shall be unlawful, and the

parties to such marriage, upon conviction shall be punished as the

General Assembly may direct.”[246]

Over this amendment to the report of the committee much discussion

arose and among other expressions of opinion, was one from Mr. Sligh

of Newberry, that it would be better to allow any one with only one

sixteenth of Negro blood to raise white, rather than force such, to

raise colored children. Sentiment was, however, against his view, and

the proposed amendment was accepted as above outlined.

But in two weeks, after many renewals of discussion as to the wrong

and injury which might result from accusations apt to be based upon a

proportion so indefinite, according to press report:

“On motion of Mr. W. D. Evans, Sec. 34, was recurred to, and trouble

began. Mr. Evans proposed to amend the section by providing that the

miscegenation law shall not apply to persons of mixed blood, whose

status is that of white people. Mr. George Tillman stated, that he

was very feeble, but that he felt compelled to say something on this

subject. For one, he had felt ashamed when the delegate from Beaufort

had clapped his hands, and declared that the coons had a dog up a

tree. He was further mortified to see that the gentleman from Newberry

(Mr. Sligh) and the gentleman from Edgefield (Mr. B. Tillman) goaded

and taunted into putting in the constitution, that no person with

any trace of Negro blood should intermarry with a white person and

that for such marriage the Legislature should provide punishment even

beyond that of bastardizing children and adulterizing marriage. Mr.

Tillman said the Mississippi law forbidding marriage between white

people with those with more than one-eighth Negro blood is the old

South Carolina law. If the law is made, as it now stands, respectable

families in Aiken, Barnwell, Colleton and Orangeburg will be denied

right to intermarry among the people with whom they are now associated

and identified. At least one hundred families would be affected, to

his knowledge. They had sent good soldiers to the Confederate Army,

and are now landowners and taxpayers. He asserted, as a scientific

fact that there was not a full blooded Caucasian on the floor of the

Convention. Every member had in him a certain mixture of Mongolian,

Arab, Indian or other colored blood. The pure blooded white man had

needed and received an infusion of darker blood, to give him readiness

and purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless

litigation, of scandal, horror, feud and bloodshed to undertake to

annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro

blood. By the rule of evidence traditional notoriety was admissible

in proving pedigree. The doors would be opened to scandal, malice and

greed; to statements on the witness stand, that the father or the

grandfather, or grandmother had said that A or B had Negro blood in

their veins. Any man who is half a man would be ready to blow up half

the world with dynamite, to prevent or avenge attacks upon the honor

of his mother or the legitimacy or purity of the blood of his father.

He moved the restoration of the section to its original form.”[247]

Mr. George D. Tillman’s effort was successful, and the section, as

finally adopted stands:

“Art. III, Sec. 33. The marriage of a white person with a Negro or

mulatto or person who shall have one eighth or more of Negro blood

shall be unlawful and void.”

FOOTNOTES:

[232] Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Revised Edition (1910) p. 503,

V. 2.

[233] _Harper’s Weekly_, January 31st, 1891.

[234] _News and Courier_, September 15th, 1890.

[235] Ibid. October 16th, 1890.

[236] Geo. William Curtis, Letter to Author, Jan. 21st, 1891.

[237] Statutes South Carolina, Vol. 20,—p. 1084.

[238] Ibid. Vol. 21, p. 429.

[239] _News and Courier_, September 17th, 1890.

[240] Theo. D. Jervey, Migration of the Negroes, pp. 1-2.

[241] Journal of S. C. Constitutional Convention 1895, p. 476.

[242] S. H. Rogers, Letter to Author, December 9th, 1910.

[243] _News and Courier_, October 3rd, 1895.

[244] Ibid. October 26, 1895.

[245] Supreme Court Reporter, Williams vs. Fears Vol. 21, pp. 128-130.

[246] _News and Courier_, October 4th, 1895.

[247] Ibid. October 17th, 1895.

CHAPTER XI

But if, in the personalities of Wigg and others, illustrations had

been afforded of the advancement of the Negro in refinement, culture

and morals, in the mass, the race was by no means fit to discharge the

full duties of citizenship in the South. Even as the most active and

progressive moved out and into other regions, they seemed to bring

to bear upon the question, in propria persona, an argument which was

inclining the inhabitants of the North and West more and more to the

vociferous expression, that the Southern white man best understood the

Negro; that the Negro was better off in the South than elsewhere; and

that the South was the natural home of the Negro.

However else the whites of the North might differ, as Republicans or

Democrats, philanthropists or politicians, there was almost unanimity

of opinion, that the Negro was not wanted in the North. But he was

pushing in.

Despite all his other claims to greatness, therefore, the fact, that he

and his policy furnished the most effective means and instrument for

retaining the Negroes in the South, contributed immensely to the late

Dr. Booker T. Washington’s remarkable hold on Northern sentiment, for

with his rise to fame and financial power, the Negro question took on

a new phase. He had a mission and it is generally considered to have

been to lead the Negroes to manual and industrial training, which it

was in the main, but also its aim in part was to keep the Negroes in

the South; for that is the meaning of: “Cast down your bucket where you

are.”

Booker T. Washington came first prominently into view by the speech

from which the above extract was taken, delivered by him at the Atlanta

Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895.

What D. H. Hill had urged for the Southern whites in 1866, Washington

now urged for the Negroes. The Northern people were growing somewhat

weary of the Negroes’ continual appeals for political recognition and

this speech, avoiding such and couched in the most conciliatory phrases

concerning the Southern whites, was a surprising departure. It struck

a popular chord. It was written up in the very best vein by the most

celebrated journalistic correspondent of that period, James Creelman,

then in the zenith of his career of feature writing, as an “epoch

making oration.” This writer, commanding the pages of the most widely

read New York paper of that day, ranked—

“Professor Booker T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee (Alabama)

Normal and Industrial Institute, as the foremost man of his race in

America.”[248]

But Creelman did not stand alone. The editor of the Atlanta

Constitution telegraphed to the North that “the address was a

revelation.”

The Boston Transcript declared: “It dwarfed all the other proceedings

and the exposition itself.”[249]

President Cleveland was even quoted as affirming that “the exposition

would be fully justified if it did not do more than furnish the

opportunity for its delivery.”[250]

The key-note of the speech has been before noted. In addition it

contained two specific declarations, which constituted “the revelation”:

“1. In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as

the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual

progress.[251]

2. The wisest of my race understand, that the agitation of questions

of social equality is the extremest folly and that progress in the

enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us, must be the

result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial

forcing.”[252]

When to these expressions was added the further declaration:—

“that we shall prosper as we learn to dignify and glorify common

labor.”[253]—

it was scarcely surprising that the speech was generally accepted in

the South as a renunciation of all hopes of social equality, and an

acceptance of a position for the Negro very near to that which Calhoun

had assigned to him—“the best substratum of population in the world”

for it would be one—“upon which great and flourishing commonwealths

could be most easily and safely reared.”

What fault then could the superficial Southern thinker find with such

a policy? It certainly fitted very admirably with that which Senator

Butler had declared some five years previously it was “not a common

thing to hear men say,” viz., the Negroes make “a good peasant class.”

It is true the Senator had warned his fellow countrymen “that there

is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government”;

but Washington’s remarks were so much more soothing to the South than

Butler’s warning, that the average Southern man put away from his

contemplation the possibilities dormant in the great mass of Negroes

packed in the South.

And if the Southern man is willing to chance these possibilities, what

reasonable being can blame the more sensibly sectional Northern man,

for his cheerful readiness to finance the experiment?

That, in turning the attention of the race to manual and industrial

training, Washington performed a great work is not to be denied. That,

in influencing many of his people to follow him in such a program,

he has raised the ambition of not a few to a much higher plane than

the race had shown itself heretofore capable of, must be admitted,

and these are great achievements. But it is an error to imagine that

Washington ever made for himself or his race any renunciation of the

aspiration for social equality. He condemned the agitation, not the

aspiration for it. In the opinion of Dr. Washington, “color prejudice”

was incompatible with true greatness of soul, and the highest praise he

could bestow upon a man was that he was destitute of “color prejudice.”

Writing of President Cleveland, he said:

“Judging from my personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, I do not

believe he is conscious of possessing any color prejudice. He is too

great for that. In my contact with people, I find that as a rule, it

is only little, narrow people, who live for themselves, who never read

good books, who do not travel, who never open their souls in a way to

permit them to come in contact with other souls—with the great outside

world. No man whose vision is bounded by color can come in contact

with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men in many

places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the

most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have

also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind

and narrow as race prejudice.”[254]

Although of very different temperaments, between the two colored men

Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune, there seemed to be quite a

sympathy. Washington in his autobiography avers it:

“In the summer of 1900, with the assistance of such prominent colored

men as T. Thomas Fortune, who has always upheld my hands in every

effort, I organized the National Negro Business League.”[255]

T. Thomas Fortune is a man of education and ability. As the editor

for many years of the leading colored paper in the United States, its

columns indicated that he certainly upheld the hands of Dr. Washington.

Indeed he did not hesitate to belabor without stint the heads of such

colored detractors of Dr. Washington as Monroe Trotter of Boston and

others, even administering a rap or two to Professor W. E. Burghardt

DuBois, when the latter failed to keep step with the Washington

procession. But T. Thomas Fortune was of too independent a nature to

be restrained from the expression of his own view, and shortly before

his surrender of his position as editor of “The Age”, he published the

following declaration:

“The question of the right to marry and give in marriage is at the

bottom of the whole life of the Republic. The Afro-American who says

he does not desire social equality is an unmitigated fool or an

outrageous blackguard, who sacrifices what he should know to be a

primal right to a subservient purpose.”

Can it be believed that a man sufficiently fearless to make this

declaration and feeling obliged to do so, would uphold at all times

the hands of an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard? It is

difficult to believe it. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that

while Washington, with “the wisest” of his race understood: “that the

agitation of questions of social equality was the extremest folly,”

he nevertheless cherished the aspiration. And indeed it would be most

unnatural if he did not.

Bearing all the possibilities in mind, the question is, however,

whether any policy which tends to keep massed in the South so many of

the Negroes as are banked there, is to the best interest of the South,

or the Nation, or conducive of the greatest good to the greatest number?

But Washington did not stand as the unrivalled leader of his race. Two

other members of it criticised his leadership with arguments which

could not be brushed aside too lightly. The first of these compiled

in 1899, what was the most thorough investigation into the conditions

enveloping the Negro at the North, which had been printed up to that

time. The author of “The Philadelphia Negro” is thus introduced by Dr.

A. Bushnell Hart:

“The most distinguished literary man of the race W. E. Burghardt

DuBois—an A. B. and Ph. D. of Harvard, who studied several years in

Germany, and as Professor of Sociology in Atlanta University has had

an unusual opportunity to study his people.”[256]

Dr. DuBois’s book was an entirely different style of work from the

popular “Up from Slavery” published a year or two later, “with the

painstaking and generous assistance of Max Bennett Thrasher”, as the

autobiography of Washington.

DuBois’s book, “The Philadelphia Negro” is a most carefully made

sociological investigation.

Later in 1903, Dr. DuBois published another volume entitled: “The Souls

of Black Folk”—in which after a preface opening with:

“Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro

since 1876, is the ascendency of Mr. Booker T. Washington.”—

followed by a fine tribute to his worth, the author declares:—

“the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter

courtesy of the mistakes and short comings of Mr. Washington’s career,

etc.”

The criticism is this:

“His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift

the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand

aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the

burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean,

if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. The South

ought to be led by candid and honest criticism to assert her better

self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is

still wronging. The North, her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her

conscience by plastering it with gold.... The black man of America

has a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, a forward movement

to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr.

Washington preaches Thrift, Patience and Industrial Training for the

masses, we must hold up his hands.... But so far as Mr. Washington

apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value

the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the effect of caste

distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our

brighter minds,—so far as he, the South or the Nation does this,—we

must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.”[257]

Between “the most distinguished literary man of the race” and “the

most eminent man whom the African race has produced” there was then

a profound difference, for what could be considered, by many, as

the essential element of greatness in the policy of Washington, was

that, for which this critic took him most severely to task, viz, his

willingness that the burden of the Negro problem should be shifted from

the shoulders of the whites to those of the Negroes.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the willingness of Northern

and Southern whites, that it should be shifted is not to their credit,

there is a virility in the promulgation of a policy for the Negroes by

a Negro, which seeks to force the Negro “to stand upon his feet and

play the game”, which offsets many imperfections, and for that Dr.

Washington must get credit.

[Illustration: WILLIAM HANNIBAL THOMAS, 1900

Free Person of Color—Ohio, 1860]

The second of the two Negro thinkers who questioned Dr. Washington’s

leadership, has also been quoted by Professor Hart; but of William

Hannibal Thomas, one of the few Negroes of distinct intellectual force

as before narrated, who participated in the struggles of Reconstruction

in South Carolina and emerged, uncriticised, Dr. Hart has but two

allusions.

Of the author of—“The American Negro; What he was; What he is; and What

he may become,” Professor Hart, in his own strong book, only says,

first:

“He has made admissions with regard to the moral qualities of

his fellow Negroes which have been widely taken up and quoted by

anti-Negro writers.”[258]

Second:

“Thomas, himself a Negro, asserts that the sexual impulse constitutes

the main incitement of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its

social uplifting.”[259]

In these two temperate utterances, as put, Professor Hart conveys what

might be understood as disapproval; yet it can be urged in defense

of Thomas’ criticism of his race in the last particular, that it is

paralleled by the assertion of Professor Lombroso, himself an Italian,

concerning Italians, when contrasting them with the English; while,

with regard to the first, it would be difficult to find a paragraph

framed by Thomas more suited for quotation by anti-Negro writers, than

the following in Professor Hart’s book:

“The Negro preachers are universally believed to be the worst of their

kind, and very often are. If things that are regularly told by the

white people and sometimes admitted by the colored, are true, the

majority of the Southern Negroes, rural and urban are in a horrible

state both physically and morally.”[260]

Yet whatever the Negro preachers may have been, there is good reason to

believe that, in the cities, their moral tone is improving, and there,

now, high exemplars of morality can be found.

Again, despite his apparent pessimism, the future holds for Thomas a

hope denied to not a few, who are impatient of his probe. Where can be

found anything rising higher in optimism that the following:

“We believe American Christianity has in the person of the Negro, an

unmeasured wealth of latent spiritual energy which will be aroused and

consecrated, when the notion of sacerdotalism is scattered from before

his clouded vision, when transmitted ethnic fetichism is eradicated

from his religion and the virility of his nature, bared of empty forms

of righteousness, is breathed upon by the spirit of God, himself.”[261]

The truth concerning this matter is, that Thomas had gone too deeply

into it to be readily understood by those who have not had their powers

of perception quickened by that daily contact, which teaches so much.

Therefore, while Thomas’s book may seem extremely pessimistic; yet,

when his philosophy is boiled down, it is not very different from what

Dr. Washington is thought to have preached, that God helps him who

helps himself, or as Thomas puts it:

“Every endowment of manhood and womanhood is within the reach of every

human being, who puts integrity before material gain, and self respect

before mendacious folly.”[262]

“When, therefore, the Negro race acquires in the broadest and best

sense an industrial education, there will come a radical regeneration

of Southern social economy, and Negro education will stand then

for home life, domestic industry, public integrity and national

welfare.”[263]

To some extent, therefore, the difference between Washington and Thomas

was temperamental. Washington’s optimism led him to declare:

“Despite superficial and temporary signs, which might lead one to

entertain a contrary opinion, there never was a time, when I felt more

hopeful for the race than I do at the present time.”[264]

What these superficial and temporary signs leading to the contrary

opinion were, Washington did not disclose; but Thomas did:

“I am firmly rooted in the conviction, that Negroism, as exemplified

in the American type, is an attitude of mental density, a kind of

spiritual sensuousness; but that each of these characteristics, though

endowed with great persistency and potency, is nevertheless amendable

to radical treatment.”[265]

According to Max Nordau, spiritual sensuousness is by no means a

characteristic or state interfering with great achievement; for he

credits Ignatius Loyola with it.

But now to consider the view of this Northern Negro.

With the possible exception of Alfred H. Stone, it is doubtful if, up

to this date, any individual has proven himself better equipped for

the discussion of the Negro question than William Hannibal Thomas. A

comparison might warrant the statement, that if Mr. Stone has enjoyed

the wider range, Thomas has been able to make the more exact study. If

Stone has the stronger mind, and it is still further strengthened with

a fuller culture, Thomas has the more judicially balanced temperament.

Thomas’ work is done. Stone’s has not yet reached its fullest

development. We can, therefore, get a clearer idea of Thomas’ view in

its entirety than we can obtain of Stone’s.

No man has drawn more from his experience than Thomas, and few have

possessed such varied experiences to draw from. Simply and modestly

as he sketches his life and pedigree, the brief recital indicates

opportunities for observation which were most unusual, and, had he

kept a diary, it would have been simply invaluable. Should he ever

publish his impression of the men he has met and the events he has

been connected with, it could not fail to be a most interesting and

instructive book; for to powers of observation, which are unusual, he

unites judgment which is distinctly admirable. Some brief extracts may

put the man and some of his views before the reader.

His book opens with an explanation, indicative of that which he thinks

distinguishes the Negro from the white, characteristic traits rather

than color, after which he briefly states his own pedigree and life

history, as follows:

“None of my ancestors were owned in slavery, so far as my knowledge

goes. On my mother’s side I come from German and English stock. My

maternal grandfather, the son of a white indentured female servant

by a colored man, was born at Bedford, Pennsylvania, about the

year 1758. My maternal grandmother was a white German woman, born

in 1770, and brought up at Hagerstown, Maryland. This branch of my

ancestry emigrated to Ohio in 1792; and settled near the town of

Marietta, where my mother was born in 1812. On the paternal side my

grandparents, who were of mixed blood, were Virginians by birth. My

father, who was born in 1808, near Moorfield, in Hardy County, removed

to Ohio before attaining his majority. I was born on a farm, in a log

cabin, on the fourth day of May, 1843, in Jackson Township, Pickaway

County, Ohio.”[266]

After reciting the recollections of his youth, his father’s active

interest concerning, and his own sympathy for, the “Underground

railroad”, and his efforts to educate himself, Thomas asserts that

at the outbreak of hostilities he tendered his services in 1861 to

the Government, but was refused admission to the army on account of

color. In a civil capacity, however, he entered the 42d. Ohio Infantry

Regiment, and—

“was in the Big Sandy campaign with General Garfield, and during the

summer of 1863, with the Union forces at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.”

In the fall of that year he joined the 95th. regiment, with which he

remained, until the capture of Vicksburg, when, returning to Ohio, he

enlisted in the 5th United States colored troops, and was appointed

sergeant, and after service in the Department of the James, was in the

assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and lost an arm in the capture

of the city of Wilmington.

Going South to teach, he took up his residence first in Georgia,

later in Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873, and was appointed a trial

justice. In 1876 he was elected a member of the legislature, and after

the fall of the radical governments of the South, “gave up the practice

of law and withdrew from active participation in politics” to devote

his attention to the educational advancement of the freedmen, in

pursuit of which, he “visited every Southern State and community.”[267]

Certainly such a one would seem admirably equipped for the task of

discussing most interestingly and instructively the Negro question, as

a perusal of his book clearly indicates. Why then, is the book not more

popular in the North, where is to be found the great reading public of

the United States?

Despite the advanced civilization of that section, its enlightenment,

and its assimilation of British ideals, with the growth of the material

prosperity of its people, there has grown a belief that money, if

given with sufficient liberality, can cure any trouble. This is more

than hinted at in “The Souls of Black Folk.”[268] How then can it be

other than extremely distasteful to those, so conscious of their great

generosity, to read in place of the encomiums with which the assisted

writings of Washington abound, the following audacious criticism:

“Our Northern philanthropists, with no trustworthy knowledge of

the conditions of the freedmen, have neither sought nor acquired

capable insight into the needs and wants of Negro life. Having been

influenced by the special pleading of interested advocates, and their

own imperious convictions, it is consequently small wonder that they

have hitherto failed to deal with the problem in the most satisfactory

manner.”[269]

It is true that in considering:

“The two antagonistic forces which germinated at about the same period

in the Western world at Jamestown and Plymouth,”

Thomas thinks the product, as well as the seed, of the latter is far

superior; but, to the residents of that portion of our common country,

that has long been axiomatic and does not wipe away the offense of

making admissions with regard to the moral qualities of his fellow

Negroes, which have been widely taken up and quoted by anti-Negro

writers.

Almost it might seem in anticipation of this, Thomas says:

“In this age of realism illusions should have no place and especially

in a question of such perplexity as this and one involving such vital

issues. The Negro above all others should welcome honest criticism,

for in so doing, he will discover that those who point out faults are

not always actuated by vindictive sentiments and he may learn that

timely reproof and wise guidance may be derived even from the censure

of enemies.”[270]

With regard to the possibilities of improvement, Thomas believes:

“That rural work constitutes a basis for character building

incomparably beyond that of any agency within his (the Negro’s)

reach.”[271]

While Thomas’s view concerning the injury to the South of the presence

in it of the Negro is more strongly put it is the view expressed

by Senator Butler in 1900, and of Senator Barnwell in 1803, in all

probability; yet it is a striking fact that in South Carolina, since

emancipation, after thirty years of experience, we came back to the

view expressed in 1865, and this, in spite of the fact that, as stated

by a great authority on the subject:

“It is very convenient for the Southern white man to include everybody

with a trace of Negro blood under the general race designation.”[272]

Mr. Stone cannot include South Carolina as contributing to what he

styles:

“The combined influence of Northern and Southern white men and of

Negroes and mulattoes to perpetuate an absurd and unscientific

fiction,”[273]

for the South Carolina law with regard to intermarriage between the

races does not include every one with a trace of Negro blood as a

Negro. And this brings us up to a consideration of this phase of the

question.

The view of T. Thomas Fortune, on the intermarriage of persons of

different races, has been cited.

DuBois’s, expressed with temperance, is as follows:

“Among the best classes of Negroes and whites, such marriages seldom

occur.”[274]

Yet he maintains that:

“Any legislation against it, is inconsistent with the principle

of freedom of choice in a matter exclusively pertaining to the

individual.”

Twenty years later, in “The Comet”, he allowed his fancy fuller play.

When Thomas reaches this point in his discussion, we find neither the

extravagant expression of Fortune, nor the apparently varying views and

fancies of DuBois. Thomas says:

“There is no doubt that judicious race amalgamation is capable of

exercising a profound and far reaching influence upon _inferior types

of people_. Degenerate people are always improved by an infusion of

virile blood; but the benefits derived from wise race admixture are

to be found in transmitted capacity not color.... The redemption of

the Negro is impossible through any process of physical amalgamation;

it is possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the

thoughts and ideals of American civilization.”[275]

Now, as has been shown, Washington thought a color prejudice a thing to

be lamented, and yet he preached for years for the Negroes to remain in

the South; where Thomas says:

“There is more absolute social equality and personal freedom in

the intermingling of the races than has ever been obtained in the

North, where, in the main the public social rights of the Negro are

respected.”[276]

From which Thomas argues:

“That should wealth, culture and character come to the great body of

the Negroes, all trace of race prejudice would disappear from our

Southern section as effectually as it has been obliterated in Portugal

and the Latin countries.”[277]

If Washington happened then to hold the same view as the above, even

without expressing it, there was no discord between him and his

lieutenant, Fortune, and therefore, while Mr. Stone was pondering the

problem of the mulatto, Washington, looking with steady eye toward the

future infusion of virile blood, cried to the applauding white people

of the South;—“Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Is it for the best interest of all that the bucket should be cast down

where we of the South are now?

By the census of 1900, Mr. Stone’s State was the one State of the

three, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana with a Negro majority

in 1890, which showed no improvement in this respect.

Louisiana’s Negro majority of 789 had given place to a white majority

of 78,808; South Carolina’s tremendous Negro majority of 226,926 had at

last felt the beginning of the ebb, and was 225,415; but Mississippi’s

197,708 had risen to 266,430, and, therefore, in Mississippi were the

very worst conditions and those most fruitful for race friction; for

Mr. Stone has declared:

“A primary cause of race friction is the vague rather intangible, but

wholly real feeling of ‘pressure’ which comes to the white man almost

instinctively in the presence of a mass of people of a different race.

In a certain important sense, all racial problems are distinctly

problems of racial distribution.... So today, no State in the Union

would have separate car laws where the Negro constituted only 10 or

15 percent of its total population.”[278]

In another lecture Mr. Stone had declared:

“Negroes constitute practically a third of the population in the South

both city and country. In the North they constitute but one fortieth

of the city population and only an insignificant, really negligible

one-ninetieth of that of the country.”

Yet, Mr. Stone quotes as an authority, Booker T. Washington, who

declared:

“If we were to move four millions of the eight millions of Negroes

from the South into the North and West ... a problem would be created

far more serious and complicated than any now existing in the Southern

States.”[279]

These two statements as they would be generally understood, are

inconsistent with each other and contradictory. If it be meant that

a sudden thrusting out of four million people from one section, and

impelling them into another, as fast as they could be moved, would

precipitate a problem, no one would be foolish enough to deny, or

attempt to deny, that it would. But, as the gradual introduction of

four million Negroes into the North and West could not bring the mass

of them up to more than 10 percent of the whole population, then, in

many respects, the problem would be ameliorated by any policy which led

to their introduction in a reasonable process of diffusion, although it

undoubtedly would dispel some dreams, and give rise to some friction

and considerable inconvenience for a while.

And, that even Booker Washington commenced to see the advantages of

diffusion, became apparent in at least one utterance before his death.

But, before treating of conditions and opinions in 1910, some

information may be obtained from a careful consideration of what moral

advancement the culture of the slave-holding South had produced in that

class of its colored population, which as free persons of color, in the

period of slavery, could themselves hold slaves.

In the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 1859 the

list of taxpayers shows that 353 free persons of color returned for

taxation, $679,164.00 of real estate. They also returned for taxation

290 slaves. Of these tax payers the wealthiest was Maria Weston, whose

return for real estate was $41,575.00, slaves, 14; horses, 1. That was

one-seventh of the value of the real estate returned by the wealthiest

white tax payer in the city and two more slaves. But Maria Weston,

while the wealthiest of the free persons of color in Charleston, was

not very much more wealthy than R. E. Dereef and Robert Howard, and

the average wealth of the free person of color was fairly up to the

average wealth of the whites. The story is told in Charleston that when

the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher visited the city, after the war between

the States he invited himself to become the guest of R. E. Dereef,

who received him with admirable hospitality, personally looking to it

that the great man lacked nothing in the way of comfort and treating

him with perfect civility; but studiously and tactfully avoiding all

efforts upon the part of his guest to establish an intimacy. The great

Abolitionist confided to a white resident his disappointment that

he had met no other member of the family or aroused in the breast of

his host any decided interest in one who had done so much to bring

about emancipation of the Negroes. But his confidant called to his

attention, that he had been treated with admirable and uncomplaining

hospitality, by one whom he had relieved of considerable property. Yet

it must not be imagined that all free persons of color owned slaves.

Of an interesting family, the Holloways, nine taxpayers in all,

the wealthiest returned for taxation, real estate to the amount of

$8,300.00, while the total of the nine summed up $36,000.00, only one

of the nine, however, owned a slave.[280]

It is through what has been preserved by a member of this family,

that we get a glimpse of what may be considered to some extent as the

viewpoint of this class. That the ideal of J. H. Holloway was somewhat

cramped may be admitted; but if so it should also be admitted that the

basis was one of the strongest upon which an ideal could repose. It was

social purity. Holloway’s father, grandfather and greatgrandfather had

all been free men. He was a saddler and harness maker by trade, but

he was nevertheless an aristocrat. He was an unobtrusive individual,

of gentle nature, true to his convictions and very virtuous. Being

opposed to vaccination, he refused to pay the small fine imposed and

went to jail instead, assuring the white judge who expressed his regret

at being obliged to sentence him, that he had no feeling about the

matter, believing the official was doing his duty. The intellect of

Holloway was not extraordinary and to not a few his ambition may seem

small and trifling; but it was pursued with such a patient faith and

pious determination, as to impart to it, in the eyes of some whites in

the same locality, who had accomplished something in life, a dignity

entitling it to respect. His position resembled that of a priest of

a dying cult, to whom the sight of the altars he intensely revered,

more and more deserted, as he advanced in years, but the more added to

the fervor of his worship; and so Holloway, to the day of his death,

remained a devoted disciple of “The Brown” or as it was later called

“The Century Fellowship,” the principle assets of which were a grave

yard and some minute books. Holloway’s life was a living denial of the

charge that the Negro has no interest in the past or future, for to him

both of these periods were of importance. What was most noticeable in

his thoughts was the balance of them.

On his business card: “J. H. Holloway—Harness Repair Shop, 39 Beaufain

Street,” he had caused to be printed a quotation from the Bible—“Let

your moderation be known to all men”, to which he had put the very

practical addition—“in charges.” Upon the other side of the card he had

paraphrased Oliver Wendell Holmes, as follows:

“Know old Charleston? Hope you do

Born there? Dont say so, I was too.

Born in a house with a shingle roof

Standing still, if you must have proof

And has stood for a century.”

“The Brown” or “Century Fellowship Society”, which occupied almost all

of Holloway’s leisure thoughts, had been founded in 1790. In 1904 some

ceremonies were enacted upon the occasion of the laying of a corner

stone for the new hall, it was hoped later to erect.[281] The address

of welcome was delivered by a venerable member, ninety-six years of

age, and was very brief. The religious services were conducted by the

rector of the oldest Episcopal Church in Charleston, himself a veteran

of the Confederate war, who, as a major of engineers, had contributed

greatly to the “Defense of Charleston Harbor,” the history of which,

under such caption, as author, he had also preserved. There was an ode

by a member of the Society, and an address by a member of the board of

aldermen of the city, also an ex-Confederate soldier. But a review of

the aims and aspirations of the Society by J. H. Holloway, throwing as

it does a light upon the point of view of a class, not given to undue

exposure of their opinions, was probably the most important utterance

of the occasion.[282] He said:

“My first proposition is that our society was founded upon right

principles, having as its foundation stone Charity and Benevolence,

and its capstone social Purity. Environed as we have been by the

varied conditions through which we have had to pass and to have

survived one hundred and fourteen years, with a record no organization

may be ashamed of, so we may well exclaim “To the Lord be all the

praise.” Our guests today represent the conditions through which the

Society has passed during the Century. On the one hand we have the

dominant race and on the other we have the backward race. The first

looked with a scrutinizing eye on our every movement, so as to charge

us with being a disturbing element in the conditions that existed,

and they made stringent legislative enactments; and the public

sentiment of the masses was to discourage everything that our Society

stood for; but fortunately there were the classes in society, and

as our fathers allied themselves with them, as a consequence, they

had their influence and protection and so they had to be in accord

with them and stand for what they stood for. If they stood for close

fellowship, so did our Fathers. If they stood for high incentive, so

did our Fathers. If they stood for slavery, so did our Fathers, to

a certain extent. But they sympathized with the oppressed, for they

had to endure some of it, and fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind,

and many times they had as individuals helped slaves to buy their

freedom, and on one occasion our records prove that the Society loaned

one of their members the money to purchase his family. Our Fathers

were public spirited, for our records prove, that from 1811 to 1814

the Society was interested in the defense of Charleston. So under

perplexing conditions our Society passed more than three score and

ten years of existence until the war of the sixties and while their

material prosperity was at stake, their sympathies were with the side

that promised more liberties and larger opportunities; however, the

members of the Society, not as an organization, but as individuals

became the firemen to protect the city from flames caused at times

by the shelling of the city. We have proof that some of the sons of

our members wore the Blue, and at least one contributed his life

blood for freedom at the charge of Battery Wagner under the lead of

the brave Col. Shaw, of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and thus

the blood of South Carolina and Massachusetts mingled as in the case

of the Revolution.... The change of conditions after the War did not

make any difference with our Society, they continued in the beaten

path of Charity and Benevolence; but they still kept the compact

close, feeling that the heritage of the Fathers was only dear to their

children, and as we had three generations born since the organization,

we could enjoy social equality among ourselves.... In conclusion I

will say that we are not responsible for our birth, but God has placed

us where we could best honor Him, and his command is—‘Honor thy Father

and Mother that thy days may be long’. So we are honoring our Heavenly

Father’s command in honoring our ancestry.”[283]

Had Holloway only lived to read the exposition of the subject—“The

Negro in the New World”, which in 1910 appeared from the pen of the

great English explorer and Negro character specialist, Sir Harry

Johnston, he would have learned that:

“Money solves all human difficulties. It will buy you love, honor and

respect, power and social standing.”[284]

Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His

Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened

in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector

of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of

that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by

Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the

appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned

into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what

its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly

philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and

further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency there was no

reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to

Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of

the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference

of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it

would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for

condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less

than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged

over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself

solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he

departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through

which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent

warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the

paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Holloway evidently did not subscribe to the idea of Sir Harry Johnston

as to the power of money to solve all human difficulties, for there

were colored men of means in Charleston at the time. It was character,

and particularly self control, that appealed to Holloway. His

selection, therefore, was W. D. Crum, who had shown that he possessed

characteristics very akin to those which Holloway had shown to be the

ideals of the Century Fellowship Society, although Crum’s forbears had

not been free persons of color before the War of Secession, a matter of

importance to Holloway.

Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the

benefit of the fiercely prejudiced English authors, who are unable

to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s

Nazareth.

[Illustration: JAMES H. FORDHAM, 1891

Free Person of Color—South Carolina, 1860]

James H. Fordham, of the free persons of color before the war, held the

position of a lieutenant on the police force of the city of Charleston,

from 1874 to as late as 1896. He was a light quadroon, who might have

been passed for a Spanish officer. Taciturn to a degree, he discharged

the duties of his office thoroughly and conscientiously. Scarcely ever

speaking, unless spoken to, and apparently never ruffling the white

roundsmen under his command. Yet, in the longest speech he ever made,

backed as it was by appropriate action, he evinced an understanding

of, and devotion to the fundamental principles of democracy which, if

appreciated by the great German people, might have saved them from the

pains and penalties they are now undergoing for subjecting the world to

the exigencies of military ambition.

The occasion of Fordham’s speech was an incident in 1891, occurring

in one of those periodical struggles by which democracy in the United

States perpetually renews its strength at the expense of officialdom.

At the close of a warmly contested and close primary, the successful

faction opposing the municipal administration in Charleston, found it

difficult to bring the result in one ward to a count and decision.

Impatient and suspicious, as the delay wore past midnight, a worthy

but somewhat choleric individual, of the faction announced successful

at every other point hours earlier, denounced the presence of the

police in the poll where the delay was being maintained by the masterly

inactivity of the administration manager.

One of the policemen on duty, ordinarily as amiable as he was strong

and courageous, advanced toward the citizen and angrily challenged the

accusation with the inquiry:

“What right have you to make charges against the police?”

Before the citizen could reply, the quadroon lieutenant sprang from his

horse, pushed through the crowd and, placing himself between the two,

the only colored man in a group of excited whites, firmly but quietly

said to the policeman:

“What right has he to make charges against you? The right of any

citizen, at any time to make charges against any policeman, and I am

here to uphold that right.”[285]

It is useless to comment upon this incident; for, to any one who needed

such, comment would be useless.

As an incident of the growth of caste feeling, twelve years later in

the same locality, a mulatto policeman having arrested a drunken German

for noisily quarreling with his wife upon the public streets was, upon

the demand of the leading hyphenated politician of the city, dismissed

from the force.

In the years which intervened between the events last narrated, the

Democratic president, with regard to whom Dr. Washington had asserted

that he possessed no color prejudice, had concluded his second term,

made illustrious by the firm stand taken by him in the Anglo-Venezuelan

dispute, which had been brought to his attention and fought to a

decision,[286] against the extreme and arbitrary claims of Great

Britain, by that almost forgotten Southerner, William L. Scruggs of

Georgia.

Yet, despite the cloud in which this absolutely proper stand for

justice between nations and maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine involved

him for awhile, on account of the belittling comments of Anglophiles,

Cleveland has passed into history as a strong president and a great

man. He was succeeded in his high office by the gentlest mannered and

sweetest tempered individual who has ever exhibited in such station the

high personal traits which adorned the character of William McKinley.

Whatever these two men thought concerning the color question was no

doubt discoverable; but it was not announced as a new gospel; for

while great in spirit they were not noisily so. They were both great

men. Cleveland, the Democrat, was greater in his public character

and official achievements, the Republican, McKinley, in the personal

integrity and absolute self abnegation which adorned his life and

crowned his end. Cleveland opposed to malfeasance a rugged force,

which did much to build up public integrity, lamentably lowered in

Grant’s two terms. McKinley’s respect for law and order was so sincere,

that in his dying moments he interposed to protect his assassin from

the natural fury of the mob, thereby defending an anarchist from the

outburst of anarchy which the vile deed occasioned, and giving, in his

own suffering person, so interposing, the noblest appeal that could

possibly be made against lynching.

The executive who succeeded McKinley was essentially different. No

president of the United States has done as much as Mr. Roosevelt to

wipe out distinctions between white and black. That he should have

estranged Southern whites is not unnatural; that he should have aroused

the enmity of Northern and Southern colored men discloses to what

an extent the Negro is amenable to impulse rather than reason. Mr.

Alfred Holt Stone has discussed three incidents which occurred in Mr.

Roosevelt’s first term. Benjamin Brawley, a colored man, discusses the

even more important incident which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s second

term. In the first three Mr. Roosevelt held the centre of the stage, in

the fourth, the Negroes were the actors, Mr. Roosevelt only responding.

Mr. Stone treats the first three, in part, as follows:

“Three incidents marked the progress of the controversy which

broke upon the country shortly after Roosevelt’s succession to the

presidency. These were the Booker Washington dinner, the appointment

of Crum, and the closing of the Indianola post office. There were four

parties in interest—Mr. Roosevelt, the Southern press and people, the

Northern press and people and the American Negro.... The President

acted clearly within his ‘rights’ in each case. This point must be

conceded without argument. The dinner episode was in itself no more

than a matter of White House routine.... Within forty-eight hours, the

President was being denounced for having crossed the social equality

dead line through breaking bread with a negro.”[287]

According to Mr. Stone, the attitude of the South was one of general

disapproval, the attitude of the Northern press a defence of the

President. After a searching consideration of some fifty or more pages,

in which Mr. McKinley’s attitude in distributing patronage is compared

to that of Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Stone discusses the attitude of the

Negroes. After taking up in turn various expressions by Professor Kelly

Miller, Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois and Mr. William Pickens, Mr. Stone

asks—“What then is the real meaning of their words?” Mr. Pickens says:

“—one side advises ‘quietly accept the imposition of inferiority.

It is a lie but just treat it as the truth for the sake of peace.

Diligently apply to the white man the title of gentleman, and care not

if he persists in addressing you as he calls his horse and his dog. Be

patient. This general disrespect and discrimination will develop into

the proper respect and impartiality at some time in the long lapse

of geological ages, just as the eohippus has developed into the race

horse, and the ancestor of the baboon into a respectable Anglo-Saxon.’

The other side says, ‘I ask for nothing more or less than the liberty

to associate with any free man who wishes to associate with me. Your

colour discriminations, legal or not, are all damnable, inasmuch

as they draw an artificial and heartless line, give encouraging

suggestions to the vicious and allow the stronger in brute power to

force bastardy upon the weaker without remedy. Colour has absolutely

no virtue for me and however much I am outnumbered I will not retreat

one inch from that principle. However little my position might affect

savage opposition, by the God of your fathers and mine, I will never

by voluntary act or word acknowledge as the truth what I know to

be the grossest of lies. And you might ask all the truly valiant

hearts of the world and the ages how they beat toward these contrary

tenets.’”[288]

It is true this utterance was some five years later; but Mr. Stone

thinks that—

“without the background of that Wednesday dinner at the White House,

the canvass which subsequently absorbed and reflected such lurid

colours would have given us an almost lifeless picture, as tame

and dull as the usual afterglow of Southern appointments by Mr.

Roosevelt’s predecessor.”[289]

To his discussion Mr. Stone appends the following interesting little

note:

“The substance of this paper was embodied in an article submitted to

several magazines while the Crum and Indianola incidents were being

generally discussed throughout the country. The article was not found

available.”[290]

In the same year that Mr. Pickens was declaring with fine oratorical

fervor:

“Your colour discrimination, legal or not, are all damnable, inasmuch

as they draw an artificial and heartless line, give encouraging

suggestions to the vicious and allow the stronger in brute power to

force bastardy upon the weaker without remedy.”[291]

—three Negro companies in the United States Army indicated, in their

own way, their disapproval of these distinctions. The incident is

treated by Mr. Benjamin Brawley, a colored writer of culture, as

follows:

“In 1906 occurred an incident affecting the Negro in the army that

received an extraordinary amount of attention in the public press. In

August 1906 Companies B, C and D of the Twenty Fifth Regiment, United

States Infantry were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas. On

the night of the 13th took place a riot in which one citizen of the

town was killed and another wounded and the Chief of Police injured.

The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and on

November 9th, President Roosevelt dismissed, without honor, the entire

battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either

the military or civil employ of the United States.”[292]

The author states, that, later, the civil disabilities were, by

President Roosevelt, revoked and he exhibits the terms of a resolution

in the Senate to investigate the matter; but the fact that the

President’s action was sustained[293] apparently was not of sufficient

importance to be made a matter of comment; nor the behavior of the

soldiers.

The President’s comment at the time was eminently sane, just and

commendable. He wrote:

“The fact that some of their number had been slighted by some of the

citizens of Brownsville, though warranting criticism upon Brownsville,

is not to be considered for a moment as a provocation for such a

murderous assault. All the men of the companies concerned including

their veteran non commissioned officers instantly banded together to

shield the criminals. In other words they took action which cannot be

tolerated in any soldiers black or white, in any policeman black or

white, and which if taken generally in the army would mean not merely

that the usefulness of the army was at an end, but that it had better

be disbanded in its entirety at once.”[294]

The inability of even cultured Negroes to sympathize with the view

of the President was their misfortune rather than their fault. It

indicated that they lacked the elementary principle essential to the

rulership of themselves, much less to the rulership of others.

It was not so much the amount of attention as the amazing attitude

of the vast majority of Negroes capable of understanding what had

occurred, which attended that attention. To the vast majority of

Negroes, irrespective of rank, culture or professions of Christianity,

there was something noble and manly in the behavior of “the veteran

non-commissioned officers”, so absolutely repugnant to the practical

politician Roosevelt, a high type of white. The inability of the

succeeding occupant of the highest office in this country, genial in

disposition, liberal in view; but yet unable to appreciate the flaming

zeal and prompt action, with which a real leader of a free people meets

such behavior in armed underlings, marks a certain weakness in that

Northern white. Such weakness coupled as it was with the behavior of

such public men as Senator Foraker did much to produce the deplorable

incident ten years later so properly stamped with executive disapproval

and inevitable punishment to the last degree.

It is quite possible and to some degree probable that weak and vicious

comments on Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter had something

to do with the Houston riot. The comment also affected the Southern

white man profoundly in his attitude to colored soldiers and policemen.

FOOTNOTES:

[248] Washington, Up from Slavery, p. 239.

[249] Ibid. p. 226.

[250] Ibid. p. 227.

[251] Ibid. p. 221.

[252] Ibid. p. 223.

[253] Ibid. p. 220.

[254] Ibid. p. 228.

[255] Ibid. p. 316.

[256] Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South, p. 16.

[257] DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 41-58-59.

[258] Hart, The Southern South, p. 15.

[259] Ibid. p. 134.

[260] Ibid. p. 135.

[261] Wm. H. Thomas, The American Negro, p. 165.

[262] Ibid. p. XI.

[263] Ibid. p. 264.

[264] Thomas, The American Negro, p. XXII.

[265] Washington, Up from Slavery, p. 318.

[266] Ibid. p. XI.

[267] Ibid. p. XVIII.

[268] DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 58.

[269] Thomas, The American Negro, p. 268.

[270] Ibid. p. 141.

[271] Ibid. p. 75.

[272] Stone, The American Race Problem, p. 397.

[273] Ibid. p. 398.

[274] DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, pp. 366-358-359.

[275] Thomas, The American Negro, pp. 408-410.