[Speech of Henry W. Grady at the annual banquet of the Boston
Merchants' Association, at Boston, Mass., December 12, 1889. Mr. Grady
was introduced by the President of the Association, Jonathan A. Lane,
as the spokesman for the South on the subject he was to treat. His
speech electrified his hearers, and was the feature of the occasion.]
MR. PRESIDENT:--Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of
the race problem--forbidden by occasion to make a political speech--I
appreciate, in trying to reconcile orders with propriety, the perplexity
of the little maid, who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, "Now
go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb and don't go near
the water."
The stoutest apostle of the Church, they say, is the missionary, and the
missionary wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in
deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the
standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston's banquet hall, and to discuss
the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr.
President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if
earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating
sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and
estrangement; if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and
to strengthen an untried arm--then, sir, I shall find the courage to
proceed.
Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New
England's historic soil and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and
her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill--where
Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing
preached--here in the cradle of American letters and almost of American
liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New
England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange
apparition! This stern and unique figure--carved from the ocean and the
wilderness--its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winter
and of wars--until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in
the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base--while startled
kings and emperors gazed and marvelled that from the rude touch of this
handful cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied
genius of human government and the perfected model of human liberty! God
bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of
their living sons--and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.
[Illustration: _HENRY WOODFIN GRADY Photogravure after a photograph
from life_ ]
Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the
attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done
everywhere, every word I then uttered--to declare that the sentiments I
then avowed were universally approved in the South--I realize that the
confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my
presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that
confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one
essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess,
Mr. President, before the praise of New England has died on my lips,
that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of
17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by
death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their
rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots and gone back home to pray
for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000
Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help
them, and may their sturdy tribe increase.
Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a
line--once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in
fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow--lies the
fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and
hospitable people. There is centred all that can please or prosper
humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the
husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the
cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the
sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the
fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the
rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures;
forests--vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering,
run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all
industries--cotton, iron and wood--that region has easy control. In
cotton, a fixed monopoly--in iron, proven supremacy--in timber, the
reserve supply of the Republic. From this assured and permanent
advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer
prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by
human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and
cheapest source of supply, but resting in divine assurance, within touch
of field and mine and forest--not set amid costly farms from which
competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny
lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a
limit--this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall
dazzle and illumine the world. That, sir, is the picture and the promise
of my home--a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but
fit setting in its material excellence for the loyal and gentle quality
of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting
the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives
new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy
and its courage. And yet--while in the Eldorado of which I have told you
but fifteen per cent. of its lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely
touched, and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the
sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to
Texas--while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England
stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new land in which to
carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the
South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in 1870--fewer in
'70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line
be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North
have crossed it over to the South, than when it was crimson with the
best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard
every inch of its way?
There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to
consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the
fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands
whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it
will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp
in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing,
sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear
understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and
such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and
Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and
illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was
ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon's mouth.
If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night--hear one thing
more. My people, your brothers in the South--brothers in blood, in
destiny, in all that is best in our past and future--are so beset with
this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.
Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the
Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields. You
will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do here
declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave
to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving
him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their
sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this
institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human
slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the free man remains.
With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling
conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil--with equal
political and civil rights--almost equal in numbers, but terribly
unequal in intelligence and responsibility--each pledged against
fusion--one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last
by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by
both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at
every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor
to the end.
Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never
before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an
alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the
way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this
Republic because he is an alien, and inferior. The red man was owner of
the land--the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable--but they
hindered both sections, and are gone! But the black man, affecting but
one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to
the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any
cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity.
It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without
rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks
have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an
irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however
similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil with equal
rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good
this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American
prejudice--to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible
between whites and blacks--and to reverse, under the very worst
conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to
this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay--a rigor
that accepts no excuse--and a suspicion that discourages frankness and
sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with
our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would--so
bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if
we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone
can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve
it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy--with less than the
knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood--and that,
when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall
feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving
hearts!
The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South--the men
whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of
American history--whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years
of the fiercest war--whose energy has made bricks without straw and
spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes--these men wear
this problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night. They
realize, as you cannot, what this problem means--what they owe to this
kindly and dependent race--the measure of their debt to the world in
whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their
feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its
burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness,
nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate
moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid
abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go,
are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete
their consecration!
Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.
President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here
that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as
your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly
solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist
that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to
plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and
tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense
and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly
disregard--guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and
irresponsible of either race--compensating error with frankness, and
retrieving in patience what they lose in passion--and conscious all the
time that wrong means ruin--admit this, and we may reach an
understanding to-night.
The President of the United States, in his late message to Congress,
discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem,
asks: "Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will
the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights
that are his?" I shall not here protest against a partisanry that, for
the first time in our history, in time of peace, has stamped with the
great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and
loyal section; though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier,
who held the helm of State for the eight stormiest years of
reconstruction, never found need for such a step; and though there is no
personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust
imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir,
backed by a record, on every page of which is progress, I venture to
make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. We
give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth,
$450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses, and fruit. This
enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and
discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and
gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the
singing plough. It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of
its just hire. I present the tax books of Georgia which show that the
negro, twenty-five years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000
of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor
him, and vindicate his neighbors?
What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every
Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers,
I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling
their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their
children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse
door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added
last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than
$1,000,000,--and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered--of the
fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for
$10,000,000, and yet forty-nine per cent. of the beneficiaries are black
children; and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can
help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two
since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston.
Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of little
the South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with
relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth as much of
public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the $500,000,000
of bonds that enrich the North--and though it pays annually $26,000,000
to your section as pensions--yet gives nearly one-sixth to the public
school fund. The South, since 1865, has spent $122,000,000 in education,
and this year is pledged to $32,000,000 more for State and city schools,
although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes, get nearly
one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and blacks
working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our shops
at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower
wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are permitted,
because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their feet are
fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of white
universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a hundred
useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it better and
wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the
window.
In the South there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their
race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military
companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and
societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the
testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced
felonies to misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating
punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this
dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record sixty
per cent. of the prosecutors are negroes, and in every court the negro
criminal strikes the colored juror, that white men may judge his case.
In the North, one negro in every 185 is in jail--in the South only one
in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as
great as that of native whites, in the South, only four times as great.
If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be
deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and
upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion,
that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life,
liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a
negro, apt to be over-reached, oppressed--and that this advantage
reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring
his sentence.
Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are
terrorizing the people from whose willing hands comes every year
$1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five
years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of
property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every
day? Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of
our ability? Or outlaw them when we work side by side with them? Or
re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even
imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of
law? My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to
appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to
my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these
incontestable facts.
But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and
violence. This, I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal
community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely is it
misjudged. It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the
negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these
dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition
inflamed by prejudice and partisanry has led to injustice and delusion.
Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an
incident--in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit
of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons
and it scarcely arrests attention--a chance collision in the South among
relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one
race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was
ungrateful to the colored soldiers who followed its flag because a Grand
Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you
to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept
exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those
who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either
sections, and belie American character by declaring them to be
significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are
neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor
fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its
weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that
society, sentient and responsible in every fibre, can mend and repair
until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.
These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as
they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And
if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is
through them, and the men who think with them--making nine-tenths of
every southern community--that these two races have been carried thus
far with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on
earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness--more than
in all the laws that can be passed, or all the bayonets that can be
mustered--is the hope of our future.
When will the blacks cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not
dominated by the will of the intelligent. When the laborer anywhere
casts a vote unhindered by his boss. When the vote of the poor anywhere
is not influenced by the power of the rich. When the strong and the
steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and
shiftless--then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be
free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in
prejudice against the blacks--not in sectional estrangement--not in the
hope of political dominion--but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is
this vast ignorant and purchasable vote--clannish, credulous, impulsive
and passionate--tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to
the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into
alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an
outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties
through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even
that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a
faction--strong enough in every community to control on the slightest
division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the
cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon,
its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses
misdirected--and even its superstition made to play its part in a
campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every
approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as
this--the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every
southern community has drunk deeply--that the white people of the South
are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if
300,000 men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot--banded in
race instinct holding against you the memory of a century of slavery,
taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already
travestied legislation from your State House, and in every species of
folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.
But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous
menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long
been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and
officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on
our part. Let us see. Virginia--a State now under fierce assault for
this alleged crime--cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent. of her vote,
Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent. of her vote.
Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last
month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts,
fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent. of hers. If
Virginia is condemned because thirty-one per cent. of her vote was
silent, how shall this State escape in which fifty-one per cent. was
dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in '88
cast sixty-seven per cent. of their total vote--the six New England
States but sixty-three per cent. of theirs. By what fair rule shall the
stigma be put upon one section, while the other escapes? A congressional
election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every
voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of
opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State,
in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years and the
polling places are miles apart--under the unfair reasoning of which my
section has been a constant victim--the small vote is charged to be
proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of
12,000, under hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000;
in Iowa, in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out and an
opposition majority of 8,000 was established. The change of 40,000 votes
in Iowa is accepted as political revolution--in Virginia an increase of
30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud.
It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the
vote is not regularly cast. But more inexplicable that this should be so
in New England, than in the South. What invites the negro to the
ballot-box? He knows that of all men it has promised him most and
yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of
"forty acres and a mule." His second, the threat that Democratic success
meant his re-enslavement. Both have been proved false in his experience.
He looked for a home, and he got the Freedman's Bank. He fought under
promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged
and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his
neighbors with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in
his--and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss
of their confidence and sympathy, that is at last his best and enduring
hope. And so, without leaders or organization--and lacking the resolute
heroism of my party friends in Vermont that make their hopeless march
over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage--he shrewdly measures the
occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches
up his mule, and jogs down the furrow letting the mad world wag as it
will!
The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if
partisans at the North would understand this. I have seen the white
people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed
sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as
Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith,
bid them look abroad to see the very air "filled with the chariots of
Israel and the horsemen thereof." If there is any human force that
cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and
responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption
cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force.
It is the inalienable right of every free community--the just and
righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on
this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or
shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility,
massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation
of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it
all the powers of earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that
Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white
race--that before the moral and material power of her people once more
unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was
left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts--as that night
should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills,
but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to federal
election law, you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not
exist, that the very form of this government may be changed, you may
invite federal interference with the New England town meeting, that has
been for a hundred years the guarantee of local government in
America--this old State which holds in its charter the boast that it "is
a free and independent commonwealth"--it may deliver its election
machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create--but
never, sir, will a single State of this Union, North or South, be
delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race. We
wrested our State governments from negro supremacy when the Federal
drum-beat rolled closer to the ballot-box, and Federal bayonets hedged
it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free
government. But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in
every voting district of the South, we still should find in the mercy of
God the means and the courage to prevent its re-establishment. I regret,
sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming
estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me a path
down which the white people of the South, divided, may walk in peace and
honor, I will take that path though I take it alone--for at its end, and
nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section
and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not
been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the republic
united. His enfranchisement--against which I enter no protest--holds
the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the
problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply report progress,
and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at all--and I firmly
believe it will, though nowhere else has it been--it will be solved by
the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honor
to its solution. I had rather see my people render back this question
rightly solved than to see them gather all the spoils over which faction
has contended since Catiline conspired and Cæsar fought. Meantime we
treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the fulness the
strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of
citizenship that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and
the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every pursuit in which he
can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and capacity. We seek to
hold his confidence and friendship--and to pin him to the soil with
ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own hearthstone that
sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know. And we gather him
into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility, that, though it
now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible and intelligent
of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment, and justified in
the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly but surely to the
end.
The love we feel for that race, you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I
attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy, from her home up
there, looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals
the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her
black arms and led me smiling to sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak,
and I catch a vision of an old Southern home with its lofty pillars and
its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women
with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see
night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big
homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands--now worn
and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and
stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man--as they lay a
mother's blessing there, while at her knees--the truest altar I yet
have found--I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her
slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin, or guard at her chamber door, puts
a black man's loyalty between her and danger.
I catch another vision. The crisis of battle--a soldier struck,
staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding
his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of hurtling
death--bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the
stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down
his life in his master's stead. I see him by the weary bedside,
ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble
heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and
in honor to still the soldier's agony and seal the soldier's life. I see
him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the
death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him, when the
mould is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and
with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange
fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure
is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave
comes a voice saying, "Follow him! put your arms about him in his need,
even as he put his about me. Be his friend as he was mine." And out into
this new world--strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both--I
follow! And may God forget my people--when they forget these!
Whatever the future may hold for them, whether they plod along in the
servitude from which they have never been lifted since the Cyrenian was
laid hold upon by the Roman soldiers, and made to bear the cross of the
fainting Christ--whether they find homes again in Africa, and thus
hasten the prophecy of the psalmist, who said: "And suddenly Ethiopia
shall hold out her hands unto God"--whether for ever dislocated and
separate, they remain a weak people, beset by stronger, and exist, as
the Turk, who lives in the jealousy rather than in the conscience of
Europe--or whether in this miraculous Republic they break through the
caste of twenty centuries, and, belying universal history, reach the
full stature of citizenship, and in peace maintain it--we shall give
them uttermost justice and abiding friendship. And whatever we do, into
whatever seeming estrangement we may be driven, nothing shall disturb
the love we bear this Republic, or mitigate our consecration to its
service. I stand here, Mr. President, to profess no new loyalty. When
General Lee, whose heart was the temple of our hopes, and whose arm was
clothed with our strength, renewed his allegiance to this government at
Appomattox, he spoke from a heart too great to be false, and he spoke
for every honest man from Maryland to Texas. From that day to this
Hamilcar has nowhere in the South sworn young Hannibal to hatred and
vengeance, but everywhere to loyalty and to love. Witness the veteran
standing at the base of a Confederate monument, above the graves of his
comrades, his empty sleeve tossing in the April wind, adjuring the young
men about him to serve as earnest and loyal citizens the government
against which their fathers fought. This message, delivered from that
sacred presence, has gone home to the hearts of my fellows! And, sir, I
declare here, if physical courage be always equal to human aspiration,
that they would die, sir, if need be, to restore this Republic their
fathers fought to dissolve!
Such, Mr. President, is this problem as we see it, such is the temper in
which we approach it, such the progress made. What do we ask of you?
First, patience; out of this alone can come perfect work. Second,
confidence; in this alone can you judge fairly. Third, sympathy; in this
you can help us best. Fourth, give us your sons as hostages. When you
plant your capital in millions, send your sons that they may know how
true are our hearts and may help to swell the Caucasian current until it
can carry without danger this black infusion. Fifth, loyalty to the
Republic--for there is sectionalism in loyalty as in estrangement. This
hour little needs the loyalty that is loyal to one section and yet holds
the other in enduring suspicion and estrangement. Give us the broad and
perfect loyalty that loves and trusts Georgia alike with
Massachusetts--that knows no South, no North, no East, no West, but
endears with equal and patriotic love every foot of our soil, every
State of our Union.
A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us
to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever
divides. We, sir, are Americans--and we stand for human liberty! The
uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth.
France, Brazil--these are our victories. To redeem the earth from
kingcraft and oppression--this is our mission! And we shall not fail.
God has sown in our soil the seed of His millennial harvest, and He will
not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until His full and perfect day
has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle
from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way--aye, even from the hour
when, from the voiceless and traceless ocean, a new world rose to the
sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of
that stupendous day--when the old world will come to marvel and to learn
amid our gathered treasures--let us resolve to crown the miracles of our
past with the spectacle of a Republic, compact, united, indissoluble in
the bonds of love--loving from the lakes to the gulf--the wounds of war
healed in every heart as on every hill, serene and resplendent at the
summit of human achievement and earthly glory, blazing out the path and
making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in
God's appointed time! [Great applause.]