THE NEGRO
Not many years ago a traveler was lured into a London music hall by
the sign: _Spirited American Singing and Dancing_. He saw on the stage
a sextette of black-faced comedians, singing darky ragtime to the
accompaniment of banjo and bones, dancing the clog and the cakewalk,
and reciting negro stories with the familiar accent and smile, all to
the evident delight of the audience. The man in the seat next to him
remarked, "These Americans are really lively." Not only in England,
but on the continent, the negro's melodies, his dialect, and his
banjo, have always been identified with America. Even Americans do not
at once think of the negro as a foreigner, so accustomed have they
become to his presence, to his quaint mythology, his soft accent, and
his genial and accommodating nature. He was to be found in every
colony before the Revolution; he was an integral part of American
economic life long before the great Irish and German immigrations,
and, while in the mass he is confined to the South, he is found today
in every State in the Union.
The negro, however, is racially the most distinctly foreign element in
America. He belongs to a period of biological and racial evolution far
removed from that of the white man. His habitat is the continent of
the elephant and the lion, the mango and the palm, while that of the
race into whose state he has been thrust is the continent of the horse
and the cow, of wheat and the oak.
There is a touch of the dramatic in every phase of the negro's contact
with America: his unwilling coming, his forcible detention, his final
submission, his emancipation, his struggle to adapt himself to
freedom, his futile competition with a superior economic order. Every
step from the kidnaping, through "the voiceless woe of servitude" and
the attempted redemption of his race, has been accompanied by tragedy.
How else could it be when peoples of two such diverse epochs in racial
evolution meet?
His coming was almost contemporaneous with that of the white man.
"American slavery," says Channing,[7] "began with Columbus, possibly
because he was the first European who had a chance to introduce it:
and negroes were brought to the New World at the suggestion of the
saintly Las Casas to alleviate the lot of the unhappy and fast
disappearing red man" They were first employed as body servants and
were used extensively in the West Indies before their common use in
the colonies on the continent. In the first plantations of Virginia a
few of them were found as laborers. In 1619 what was probably the
first slave ship on that coast--it was euphemistically called a "Dutch
man-of-war"--landed its human cargo in Virginia. From this time onward
the numbers of African slaves steadily increased. Bancroft estimated
their number at 59,000 in 1714, 78,000 in 1727, and 263,000 in 1754.
The census of 1790 recorded 697,624 slaves in the United States. This
almost incredible increase was not due alone to the fecundity of the
negro. It was due, in large measure, to the unceasing slave trade.
It is difficult to imagine more severe ordeals than the negroes
endured in the day of the slave trade. Their captors in the jungles of
Africa--usually neighboring tribesmen in whom the instinct for
capture, enslavement, and destruction was untamed--soon learned that
the aged, the inferior, the defective, were not wanted by the trader.
These were usually slaughtered. Then followed for the less fortunate
the long and agonizing march to the seaboard. Every one not robust
enough to endure the arduous journey was allowed to perish by the way.
On the coast, the agent of the trader or the middle-man awaited the
captive. He was an expert at detecting those evidences of weakness and
disease which had eluded the eye of the captor or the rigor of the
march. "An African factor of fair repute," said a slave captain,[8]
"is ever careful to select his human cargo with consummate prudence,
so as not only to supply his employers with athletic laborers, but to
avoid any taint of disease." But the severest test of all was the
hideous "middle passage" which remained to every imported slave a
nightmare to the day of his death. The unhappy captives were crowded
into dark, unventilated holds and were fed scantily on food which was
strange to their lips; they were unable to understand the tongue of
their masters and often unable to understand the dialects of their
companions in misfortune; they were depressed with their helplessness
on the limitless sea, and their childish superstitions were fed by a
thousand new terrors and emotions. It was small wonder that, when
disease began its ravages in the shipload of these kidnaped beings,
"the mortality of thirty per cent was not rare." That this was
primarily a physical selection which made no allowance for mental
aptitudes did not greatly diminish in the eyes of the master the
slave's utility. The new continent needed muscle power; and so tens of
thousands of able-bodied Africans were landed on American soil, alien
to everything they found there.
These slaves were kidnaped from many tribes. "In our negro
population," says Tillinghast, "as it came from the Western Coast of
Africa, there were Wolofs and Fulans, tall, well-built, and very
black, hailing from Senegambia and its vicinity; there were hundreds
of thousands from the Slave Coast--Tshis, Ewes, and Yorubans,
including Dahomians; and mingled with all these Soudanese negroes
proper were occasional contributions of mixed stock, from the north
and northeast, having an infusion of Moorish blood. There were other
thousands from Lower Guinea, belonging to Bantu stock, not so black in
color as the Soudanese, and thought by some to be slightly superior to
them."[9] No historian has recorded these tribal differences. The new
environment, so strange, so ruthless, swallowed them; and, in the
welter of their toil, the black men became so intermingled that all
tribal distinctions soon vanished. Here and there, however, a careful
observer may still find among them a man of superior mien or a woman
of haughty demeanor denoting perhaps an ancestral prince or princess
who once exercised authority over some African jungle village.
Slavery was soon a recognized institution in every American colony. By
1665 every colony had its slave code. In Virginia the laws became
increasingly strict until the dominion of the master over his slaves
was virtually absolute. In South Carolina an insurrection of slaves in
1739, which cost the lives of twenty-one whites and forty-four blacks,
led to very drastic laws. Of the Northern colonies, New York seems to
have been most in fear of a black peril. In 1700 there were about six
thousand slaves in this colony, chiefly in the city, where there were
also many free negroes, and on the large estates along the Hudson.
Twice the white people of the city for reasons that have not been
preserved, believing that slave insurrections were imminent, resorted
to extreme and brutal measures. In 1712 they burned to death two
negroes, hanged in chains a third, and condemned a fourth to be
broken on the wheel. In 1741 they went so far as to burn fourteen
negroes, hang eighteen, and transport seventy-one.
In New England where their numbers were relatively small and the laws
were less severe, the negroes were employed chiefly in domestic
service. In Quaker Pennsylvania there were many slaves, the proprietor
himself being a slave owner. Ten years after the founding of
Philadelphia, the authorities ordered the constables to arrest all
negroes found "gadding about" on Sunday without proper permission.
They were to remain in jail until Monday, receiving in lieu of meat or
drink thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.
Protests against slavery were not uncommon during the colonial period;
and before the Revolution was accomplished several of the States had
emancipated their slaves. Vermont led the way in 1777; the Ordinance
of 1787 forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory; and by 1804 all
the Northern States had provided that their blacks should be set free.
The opinion prevailed that slavery was on the road to gradual
extinction. In the Federal Convention of 1787 this belief was
crystallized into the clause making possible the prohibition of the
slave trade after the year 1808. Mutual benefit organizations among
the negroes, both slave and free, appeared in many States, North and
South. Negro congregations were organized. The number of free negroes
increased rapidly, and in the Northern States they acquired such civil
rights as industry, thrift, and integrity commanded. Here and there
colored persons of unusual gifts distinguished themselves in various
callings and were even occasionally entertained in white households.
The industrial revolution in England, with its spinning jenny and
power loom, indirectly influenced the position of the negro in
America. The new machinery had an insatiable maw for cotton. It could
turn such enormous quantities of raw fiber into cloth that the old
rate of producing cotton was entirely inadequate. New areas had to be
placed under cultivation. The South, where soil and climate combined
to make an ideal cotton land, came into its own. And when Eli
Whitney's gin was perfected, cotton was crowned king. Statistics tell
the story: the South produced about 8000 bales of cotton in 1790;
650,000 bales in 1820; 2,469,093 bales in 1850; 5,387,052 bales in
1860.[10] This vast increase in production called for human muscle
which apparently only the negro could supply.
Once it was shown that slavery paid, its status became fixed as
adamant. The South forthwith ceased weakly to apologize for it, as it
had formerly done, and began to defend it, at first with some
hesitation, then with boldness, and finally with vehement
aggressiveness. It was economically necessary; it was morally right;
it was the peculiar Southern domestic institution; and, above all, it
paid. On every basis of its defense, the cotton kingdom would brook no
interference from any other section of the country. So there was
formed a race feudality in the Republic, rooted in profits, protected
by the political power of the slave lords, and enveloped in a spirit
of defiance and bitterness which reacted without mercy upon its
victims. Tighter and tighter were drawn the coils of restrictions
around the enslaved race. The mind and the soul as well as the body
were placed under domination. They might marry to breed but not to
make homes. Such charity and kindness as they experienced, they
received entirely from individual humane masters; society treated them
merely as chattels.
Attempted insurrections, such as that in South Carolina in 1822 and
that in Virginia in 1831 in which many whites and blacks were killed,
only produced harsher laws and more cruel punishments, until finally
the slave became convinced that his only salvation lay in running
away. The North Star was his beacon light of freedom. A few thousand
made their way southward through the chain of swamps that skirt the
Atlantic coast and mingled with the Indians in Florida. Tens of
thousands made their way northward along well recognized routes to the
free States and to Canada: the Appalachian ranges with their
far-spreading spurs furnished the friendliest of these highways; the
Mississippi Valley with its marshlands, forests, and swamps provided
less secure hiding places; and the Cumberland Mountains, well supplied
with limestone caves, offered a third pathway. At the northern end of
these routes the "Underground Railway"[11] received the fugitives.
From the Cumberlands, leading through the heart of Tennessee and
Kentucky, this benevolent transfer stretched through Ohio and Indiana
to Canada; from southern Illinois it led northward through Wisconsin;
and from the Appalachian route mysterious byways led through New York
and New England.
How many thus escaped cannot be reckoned, but it is known that the
number of free negroes in the North increased so rapidly that laws
discriminating against them were passed in many States. Nowhere did
the negro enjoy all the rights that the white man had. In some States
the free negroes were so restricted in settling as to be virtually
prohibited; in others they were disfranchised; in others they were
denied the right of jury duty or of testifying in court. But in spite
of this discrimination on the part of the law, a great sympathy for
the runaway slave spread among the people, and the fugitive carried
into the heart of the North the venom of the institution of which he
was the unhappy victim.
Meanwhile the slave trade responded promptly to the lure of gain which
the increased demand for cotton held out. The law of 1807 prohibiting
the importation of slaves had, from the date of its enactment, been
virtually a dead letter. Messages of Presidents, complaints of
government attorneys, of collectors and agents called attention to the
continuous violation of the law; and its nullity was a matter of
common knowledge. When the market price of a slave rose to $325 in
1840 and to $500 after 1850, the increase in profits made slave piracy
a rather respectable business carried on by American citizens in
American built ships flying the American flag and paying high returns
on New York and New England capital. Owing to this steady importation
there was a constant intermingling of raw stock from the jungles with
the negroes who had been slaves in America for several generations.
In 1860 there were 4,441,830 negroes in the United States, of whom
only 488,070 were free. About thirteen per cent of the total number
were mulattoes. Among the four million slaves were men and women of
every gradation of experience with civilization, from those who had
just disembarked from slave ships to those whose ancestry could be
traced to the earliest days of the colonies. It was not, therefore, a
strictly homogeneous people upon whom were suddenly and dramatically
laid the burdens and responsibilities of the freedman. Among the
emancipated blacks were not a few in whom there still throbbed
vigorously the savage life they had but recently left behind and who
could not yet speak intelligible English. Though there were many who
were skilled in household arts and in the useful customary
handicrafts, large numbers were acquainted only with the simplest toil
of the open fields. There were a few free blacks who possessed
property, in some instances to the value of many thousands of
dollars, but the great bulk were wholly inexperienced in the
responsibilities of ownership. There were some who had mastered the
rudiments of learning and here and there was to be found a gifted
mind, but ninety per cent of the negroes were unacquainted with
letters and were strangers to even the most rudimentary learning.
Their religion was a picturesque blend of Christian precepts and
Voodoo customs.
The Freedmen's Bureau, authorized by Congress early in 1865, had as
its functions to aid the negro to develop self-control and
self-reliance, to help the freedman with his new wage contracts, to
befriend him when he appeared in court, and to provide for him schools
and hospitals. It was a simple, slender reed for the race to lean upon
until it learned to walk. But it interfered with the orthodox opinion
of that day regarding individual independence and was limited to the
period of war and one year thereafter. It was eyed with suspicion and
was regarded with criticism by both the keepers of the _laissez faire_
faith and the former slave owners. It established a number of schools
and made a modest beginning in peasant proprietorship and free
labor.[12]
When this temporary guide was withdrawn, private organizations to some
extent took its place. The American Missionary Association continued
the educational work, and volunteers shouldered other benevolences.
But no power and no organization could take the place of the national
authority. If the Freedmen's Bureau could have been stripped of those
evil-intentioned persons who used it for private gain, been so
organized as to enlist the support of the Southern white population,
and been continued until a new generation of blacks were prepared for
civil life, the colossal blunders and criminal misfits of that bitter
period of transition might have been avoided. But political
opportunism spurned comprehensive plans, and the negro suddenly found
himself forced into social, political, and economic competition with
the white man.
The social and political struggle that followed was short-lived. There
were a few desperate years under the domination of the carpetbagger
and the Ku Klux Klan, a period of physical coercion and intimidation.
Within a decade the negro vote was uncast or uncounted, and the
grandfather clauses soon completed the political mastery of the former
slave owner. A strict interpretation of the Civil Rights Act denied
the application of the equality clause of the Constitution to social
equality, and the social as well as the political separation of the
two stocks was also accomplished. "Jim Crow," cars, separate
accommodations in depots and theaters, separate schools, separate
churches, attempted segregations in cities--these are all symbolic of
two separate races forcibly united by constitutional amendments.
But the economic struggle continued, for the black man, even if
politically emasculated and socially isolated, had somehow to earn a
living. In their first reaction of anger and chagrin, some of the
whites here and there made attempts to reduce freedmen to their former
servitude, but their efforts were effectually checked by the Fifteenth
Amendment. An ingenious peonage, however, was created by means of the
criminal law. Strict statutes were passed by States on guardianship,
vagrancy, and petty crimes. It was not difficult to bring charges
under these statutes, and the heavy penalties attached, together with
the wide discretion permitted to judge and jury, made it easy to
subject the culprit to virtual serfdom for a term of years. He would
be leased to some contractor, who would pay for his keep and would
profit by his toil. Whatever justification there may have been for
these statutes, the convict lease system soon fell into disrepute, and
it has been generally abandoned.
It was upon the land that the freedman naturally sought his economic
salvation. He was experienced in cotton growing. But he had neither
acres nor capital. These he had to find and turn to his own uses ere
he could really be economically free. So he began as a farm laborer,
passed through various stages of tenantry, and finally graduated into
land ownership. One finds today examples of every stage of this
evolution.[13] There is first the farm laborer, receiving at the end
of the year a fixed wage. He is often supplied with house and garden
and usually with food and clothing. There are many variations of this
labor contract. The "cropper" is barely a step advanced above the
laborer, for he, too, furnishes nothing but labor, while the landlord
supplies house, tools, live stock, and seed. His wage, however, is
paid not in cash but in a stipulated share of the crop. From this
share he must pay for the supplies received and interest thereon. This
method, however, has proved to be a mutually unsatisfactory
arrangement and is usually limited to hard pressed owners of poor
land.
The larger number of the negro farmers are tenants on shares or
metayers. They work the land on their own responsibility, and this
degree of independence appeals to them. They pay a stipulated portion
of the crop as rent. If they possess some capital and the rental is
fair, this arrangement proves satisfactory. But as very few negro
metayers possess the needed capital, they resort to a system of
crop-lienage under which a local retail merchant advances the
necessary supplies and obtains a mortgage on the prospective crop.
Many negro farmers, however, have achieved the independence of cash
renters, assuming complete control of their crops and the disposition
of their time. And finally, 241,000 negro farmers are landowners.[14]
By 1910 nearly 900,000 negroes had achieved some degree of rural
economic stability.
The negro has not been so fortunate in his attempts to make a place
for himself in the industrial world. The drift to the cities began
soon after emancipation. During the first decade, the dissatisfaction
with the landlordism which then prevailed, seconded by the demand for
unskilled labor in the rapidly growing cities, drew the negroes from
the land in such considerable numbers that the landowners were induced
to make more liberal terms to keep the laborers on their farms. While
there has been a large increase in the number of negroes engaged in
agriculture, there has at the same time been a very marked current
from the smaller communities to the new industrial cities of the South
and to some of the manufacturing centers of the North. In recent years
there have been wholesale importations of negro laborers into many
Northern cities and towns, sometimes as strike breakers but more
frequently to supply the urgent demand for unskilled labor. Many of
the smaller manufacturing towns of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Illinois, and Indiana are accumulating a negro population.
Very few of these industrial negroes, however, are skilled workers.
They toil rather as ordinary day laborers, porters, stevedores,
teamsters, and domestics. There has been a great deal written of the
decline of the negro artisan. Walter F. Willcox, the eminent
statistician, after a careful study of the facts concludes that
economically "the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined
more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and
is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the
country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives."
It appears, therefore, that the pathway of emancipation has not led
the negro out of the ranks of humble toil and into racial equality. In
order to equip him more effectively for a place in the world,
industrial schools have been established, among which the most noted
is the Tuskegee Institute. Its founder, Booker T. Washington, advised
his fellow negroes to yield quietly to the political and social
distinctions raised against them and to perfect themselves in
handicrafts and the mechanic arts, in the faith that civil rights
would ultimately follow economic power and recognized industrial
capacity. His teaching received the almost unanimous approval of both
North and South. But opinion among his own people was divided, and in
1905 the "Niagara Movement" was launched, followed five years later by
the organizing of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. This organization advised a more aggressive attitude
towards race distinctions, outspokenly advocated race equality,
demanded the negro's rights, and maintained a restless propaganda.
These champions of the race possibilities of the negro point to the
material advance made since slavery; to the 500,000 houses and the
221,000 farms owned by them; their 22,000 small retail businesses and
their 40 banks; to the 40,000 churches with nearly 4,000,000 members;
to the 200 colleges and secondary schools maintained for negroes and
largely supported by them; to their 100 old people's homes, 30
hospitals, 300 periodicals; to the 6000 physicians, dentists, and
nurses; the 30,000 teachers, the 18,000 clergymen. They point to the
beacon lights of their genius: Frederick Douglass, statesman; J.C.
Price, orator; Booker T. Washington, educator; W.E.B. DuBois, scholar;
Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet; Charles W. Chestnutt, novelist. And they
compare this record of 50 years' achievement with the preceding 245
years of slavery.
This, however, is only one side of the shield. There is another side,
nowhere better illustrated, perhaps, than in the neglected negro
gardens of the South. Near every negro hut is a garden patch large
enough to supply the family with vegetables for the entire year, but
it usually is neglected. "If they have any garden at all," says a
negro critic from Tuskegee, "it is apt to be choked with weeds and
other noxious growths. With every advantage of soil and climate and
with a steady market if they live near any city or large town, few of
the colored farmers get any benefit from this, one of the most
profitable of all industries." In marked contrast to these wild and
unkempt patches are the gardens of the Italians who have recently
invaded portions of the South and whose garden patches are almost
miraculously productive. And this invasion brings a real threat to the
future of the negro. His happy-go-lucky ways, his easy philosophy of
life, the remarkable ease with which he severs home ties and shifts
from place to place, his indifference to property obligations--these
negative defects in his character may easily lead to his economic doom
if the vigorous peasantry of Italy and other lands are brought into
competition with him.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: _History of the United States_, vol. I, p. 116.]
[Footnote 8: _Captain Canot: or Twenty Years in a Slaver_, by Brantz
Mayer. p. 94 ff.]
[Footnote 9: _The Negro in Africa and America_, p. 113.]
[Footnote 10: Coman, _Industrial History of the United States_, p.
238. Bogart gives the figures as 1,976,000 bales in 1840, and
4,675,000 bales in 1860. _Economic History of the United States_, p.
256.]
[Footnote 11: See _The Anti-Slavery Crusade_, by Jesse Macy (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapter VIII.]
[Footnote 12: See _The Sequel of Appomattox_, by Walter L. Fleming (in
_The Chronicles of America_), Chapter IV.]
[Footnote 13: See _The New South_ by Holland Thompson (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapters IV and VII.]
[Footnote 14: _Negroes in the United States_, Census Bulletin No. 129,
p. 37.]