Much has been said and written on the vices, great and small, of the
negro. He has been accused of being ignorant, brutish, and vicious, of
want of thrift, of having largely developed animal propensities, of a
chronic inability to tell the truth, of a disposition to accumulate
property not his own, and of a weakness to explore the chicken roosts
of his neighbors. In truth he has for more than a century been charged
with no end of small vices, and a propensity to do the meanest kind of
stealing. Heaven knows he has small vices enough. I admit it and deplore
it, as well for its bad effect on society generally, as for the damage
it inflicts on his own people. But the thoughtful and candid reader will
join me in saying that the negro, in his very worst and most vicious
condition to-day, is precisely what slavery made him. Slavery was based
on cruelty and tyranny, and was alike destructive—morally, mentally, and
commercially—of the best interests of black and white.
Slavery, in the very magnitude of its cruelty, denied the black man
education, manhood, the right to think or act for himself. Slavery denied
him all right to his own offspring, all right to regard himself as a man.
It caused him to be born a chattel, to be raised a chattel; it degraded
him, made him brutish, and sold him in the market like a beast of
burden. When the day of his deliverance came he was found to be exactly
what slavery made him—nothing more, nothing less. And I appeal to the
thoughtful reader, to the just and the generous, if it is not too great
an exaction to expect examples of morality and high Christian virtues, of
a race so long held in degrading bondage?
Criminal and vicious classes are not confined to race, color, or
country. They are found everywhere. A long residence in the South
enabled me to observe and study the habits of both black and white. A
more illiterate, vicious, and depraved—a class more reckless of human
life than the poor whites of the South it would be difficult to find in
any country. I refer more particularly to what are known as crackers,
wire-grass, and sand-hill men. Depraved and vicious to an extent almost
beyond belief, they yet, in many things, hold the better classes subject
to their dictation, and too frequently make them responsible for their
crimes. My experience has been that for Christian virtues, for all that
was kindly and tractable in human nature, the negro, even as a slave,
was by far the poor white’s superior; in truth, I never saw the time,
in the South, when I would not prefer trusting myself in his hands. Now
that the negro is a man, a citizen, a voter, and a factor in the body
politic of the South, it seems to me that it should not only be the
desire but the ambition of the “ruling classes” (I use an old and much
abused expression) to treat him fairly, as if he had always been a man
entitled to the value of his own labor, to educate and elevate him—in a
word, to make him part and parcel of their own welfare. They must make
him something more than he was when he came out of the fiery furnace of
slavery, as a means to their own protection. I would suggest, also, as I
did twenty-seven years ago, that the “ruling classes” of the South would
find it to their benefit to try the experiment of education on that large
and very dangerous class I referred to above, called poor whites. I make
this suggestion, fully aware that these poor whites—lawless, vicious, and
degraded as they are—have heretofore fiercely resisted all attempts in
that direction, firmly believing, as they do, that education is an evil,
and civilization an infringement of their sovereign rights to roam over
the sand hills, raid on the plantations of the rich, shoot negroes at
sight, and burn down school houses.
The present Governor of Kentucky understood the situation I have been
discussing perfectly when he said, in his message vetoing the act for
the restoration of that relic of barbarism and cruelty, the whipping
post: “Mankind is already too much degraded. He who can elevate and place
mankind on an higher plane is a benefactor of his race.” I have had these
words printed in letters of gold, framed, and hung on the walls of my
humble sanctum.