OPEN QUESTIONS.
In the evening Robert and Rev. Carmicle called on Dr. Gresham, and found
Dr. Latrobe, the Southerner, and a young doctor by the name of Latimer,
already there. Dr. Gresham introduced Dr. Latrobe, but it was a new
experience to receive colored men socially. His wits, however, did not
forsake him, and he received the introduction and survived it.
"Permit me, now," said Dr. Gresham, "to introduce you to my friend, Dr.
Latimer, who is attending our convention. He expects to go South and
labor among the colored people. Don't you think that there is a large
field of usefulness before him?"
"Yes," replied Dr. Latrobe, "if he will let politics alone."
"And why let politics alone?" asked Dr. Gresham.
"Because," replied Dr. Latrobe, "we Southerners will never submit to
negro supremacy. We will never abandon our Caucasian civilization to an
inferior race."
"Have you any reason," inquired Rev. Carmicle, "to dread that a race
which has behind it the heathenism of Africa and the slavery of America,
with its inheritance of ignorance and poverty, will be able, in less
than one generation, to domineer over a race which has behind it ages of
dominion, freedom, education, and Christianity?"
A slight shade of vexation and astonishment passed over the face of Dr.
Latrobe. He hesitated a moment, then replied:--
"I am not afraid of the negro as he stands alone, but what I dread is
that in some closely-contested election ambitious men will use him to
hold the balance of power and make him an element of danger. He is
ignorant, poor, and clannish, and they may impact him as their policy
would direct."
"Any more," asked Robert, "than the leaders of the Rebellion did the
ignorant, poor whites during our late conflict?"
"Ignorance, poverty, and clannishness," said Dr. Gresham, "are more
social than racial conditions, which may be outgrown."
"And I think," said Rev. Carmicle, "that we are outgrowing them as fast
as any other people would have done under the same conditions."
"The negro," replied Dr. Latrobe, "always has been and always will be an
element of discord in our country."
"What, then, is your remedy?" asked Dr. Gresham.
"I would eliminate him from the politics of the country."
"As disfranchisement is a punishment for crime, is it just to punish a
man before he transgresses the law?" asked Dr. Gresham.
"If," said Dr. Latimer, "the negro is ignorant, poor, and clannish, let
us remember that in part of our land it was once a crime to teach him to
read. If he is poor, for ages he was forced to bend to unrequited toil.
If he is clannish, society has segregated him to himself."
"And even," said Robert, "has given him a negro pew in your churches
and a negro seat at your communion table."
"Wisely, or unwisely," said Dr. Gresham, "the Government has put the
ballot in his hands. It is better to teach him to use that ballot aright
than to intimidate him by violence or vitiate his vote by fraud."
"To-day," said Dr. Latimer, "the negro is not plotting in beer-saloons
against the peace and order of society. His fingers are not dripping
with dynamite, neither is he spitting upon your flag, nor flaunting the
red banner of anarchy in your face."
"Power," said Dr. Gresham, "naturally gravitates into the strongest
hands. The class who have the best brain and most wealth can strike with
the heaviest hand. I have too much faith in the inherent power of the
white race to dread the competition of any other people under heaven."
"I think you Northerners fail to do us justice," said Dr. Latrobe. "The
men into whose hands you put the ballot were our slaves, and we would
rather die than submit to them. Look at the carpet-bag governments the
wicked policy of the Government inflicted upon us. It was only done to
humiliate us."
"Oh, no!" said Dr. Gresham, flushing, and rising to his feet. "We had no
other alternative than putting the ballot in their hands."
"I will not deny," said Rev. Carmicle, "that we have made woeful
mistakes, but with our antecedents it would have been miraculous if we
had never committed any mistakes or made any blunders."
"They were allies in war," continued Dr. Gresham, "and I am sorry that
we have not done more to protect them in peace."
"Protect them in peace!" said Robert, bitterly. "What protection does
the colored man receive from the hands of the Government? I know of no
civilized country outside of America where men are still burned for real
or supposed crimes."
"Johnson," said Dr. Gresham, compassionately, "it is impossible to have
a policeman at the back of each colored man's chair, and a squad of
soldiers at each crossroad, to detect with certainty, and punish with
celerity, each invasion of his rights. We tried provisional governments
and found them a failure. It seemed like leaving our former allies to be
mocked with the name of freedom and tortured with the essence of
slavery. The ballot is our weapon of defense, and we gave it to them for
theirs."
"And there," said Dr. Latrobe, emphatically, "is where you signally
failed. We are numerically stronger in Congress to-day than when we went
out. You made the law, but the administration of it is in our hands, and
we are a unit."
"But, Doctor," said Rev. Carmicle, "you cannot willfully deprive the
negro of a single right as a citizen without sending demoralization
through your own ranks."
"I think," said Dr. Latrobe, "that we are right in suppressing the
negro's vote. This is a white man's government, and a white man's
country. We own nineteen-twentieths of the land, and have about the same
ratio of intelligence. I am a white man, and, right or wrong, I go with
my race."
"But, Doctor," said Rev. Carmicle, "there are rights more sacred than
the rights of property and superior intelligence."
"What are they?" asked Dr. Latrobe.
"The rights of life and liberty," replied Rev. Carmicle.
"That is true," said Dr. Gresham; "and your Southern civilization will
be inferior until you shall have placed protection to those rights at
its base, not in theory but in fact."
"But, Dr. Gresham, we have to live with these people, and the North is
constantly irritating us by its criticisms."
"The world," said Dr. Gresham, "is fast becoming a vast whispering
gallery, and lips once sealed can now state their own grievances and
appeal to the conscience of the nation, and, as long as a sense of
justice and mercy retains a hold upon the heart of our nation, you
cannot practice violence and injustice without rousing a spirit of
remonstrance. And if it were not so I would be ashamed of my country and
of my race."
"You speak," said Dr. Latrobe, "as if we had wronged the negro by
enslaving him and being unwilling to share citizenship with him. I think
that slavery has been of incalculable value to the negro. It has lifted
him out of barbarism and fetich worship, given him a language of
civilization, and introduced him to the world's best religion. Think
what he was in Africa and what he is in America!"
"The negro," said Dr. Gresham, thoughtfully, "is not the only branch of
the human race which has been low down in the scale of civilization and
freedom, and which has outgrown the measure of his chains. Slavery,
polygamy, and human sacrifices have been practiced among Europeans in
by-gone days; and when Tyndall tells us that out of savages unable to
count to the number of their fingers and speaking only a language of
nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares, I do not
see that the negro could not have learned our language and received our
religion without the intervention of ages of slavery."
"If," said Rev. Carmicle, "Mohammedanism, with its imperfect creed, is
successful in gathering large numbers of negroes beneath the Crescent,
could not a legitimate commerce and the teachings of a pure Christianity
have done as much to plant the standard of the Cross over the ramparts
of sin and idolatry in Africa? Surely we cannot concede that the light
of the Crescent is greater than the glory of the Cross, that there is
less constraining power in the Christ of Calvary than in the Prophet of
Arabia? I do not think that I underrate the difficulties in your way
when I say that you young men are holding in your hands golden
opportunities which it would be madness and folly to throw away. It is
your grand opportunity to help build up a new South, not on the shifting
sands of policy and expediency, but on the broad basis of equal justice
and universal freedom. Do this and you will be blessed, and will make
your life a blessing."
After Robert and Rev. Carmicle had left the hotel, Drs. Latimer,
Gresham, and Latrobe sat silent and thoughtful awhile, when Dr. Gresham
broke the silence by asking Dr. Latrobe how he had enjoyed the evening.
"Very pleasantly," he replied. "I was quite interested in that parson.
Where was he educated?"
"In Oxford, I believe. I was pleased to hear him say that he had no
white blood in his veins."
"I should think not," replied Dr. Latrobe, "from his looks. But one
swallow does not make a summer. It is the exceptions which prove the
rule."
"Don't you think," asked Dr. Gresham, "that we have been too hasty in
our judgment of the negro? He has come handicapped into life, and is now
on trial before the world. But it is not fair to subject him to the same
tests that you would a white man. I believe that there are possibilities
of growth in the race which we have never comprehended."
"The negro," said Dr. Latrobe, "is perfectly comprehensible to me. The
only way to get along with him is to let him know his place, and make
him keep it."
"I think," replied Dr. Gresham, "every man's place is the one he is best
fitted for."
"Why," asked Dr. Latimer, "should any place be assigned to the negro
more than to the French, Irish, or German?"
"Oh," replied Dr. Latrobe, "they are all Caucasians."
"Well," said Dr. Gresham, "is all excellence summed up in that branch of
the human race?"
"I think," said Dr. Latrobe, proudly, "that we belong to the highest
race on earth and the negro to the lowest."
"And yet," said Dr. Latimer, "you have consorted with them till you have
bleached their faces to the whiteness of your own. Your children nestle
in their bosoms; they are around you as body servants, and yet if one of
them should attempt to associate with you your bitterest scorn and
indignation would be visited upon them."
"I think," said Dr. Latrobe, "that feeling grows out of our Anglo-Saxon
regard for the marriage relation. These white negroes are of
illegitimate origin, and we would scorn to share our social life with
them. Their blood is tainted."
"Who tainted it?" asked Dr. Latimer, bitterly. "You give absolution to
the fathers, and visit the misfortunes of the mothers upon the
children."
"But, Doctor, what kind of society would we have if we put down the bars
and admitted everybody to social equality?"
"This idea of social equality," said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear
which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro.
I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and
I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on
his death-bed cannot be the equal of St. Paul or the Beloved Disciple."
"Doctor," said Dr. Gresham, "I sometimes think that the final solution
of this question will be the absorption of the negro into our race."
"Never! never!" exclaimed Dr. Latrobe, vehemently. "It would be a death
blow to American civilization."
"Why, Doctor," said Dr. Latimer, "you Southerners began this absorption
before the war. I understand that in one decade the mixed bloods rose
from one-ninth to one-eighth of the population, and that as early as
1663 a law was passed in Maryland to prevent English women from
intermarrying with slaves; and, even now, your laws against
miscegenation presuppose that you apprehend danger from that source."
"Doctor, it is no use talking," replied Dr. Latrobe, wearily. "There
are niggers who are as white as I am, but the taint of blood is there
and we always exclude it."
"How do you know it is there?" asked Dr. Gresham.
"Oh, there are tricks of blood which always betray them. My eyes are
more practiced than yours. I can always tell them. Now, that Johnson is
as white as any man; but I knew he was a nigger the moment I saw him. I
saw it in his eye."
Dr. Latimer smiled at Dr. Latrobe's assertion, but did not attempt to
refute it; and bade him good-night.
"I think," said Dr. Latrobe, "that our war was the great mistake of the
nineteenth century. It has left us very serious complications. We cannot
amalgamate with the negroes. We cannot expatriate them. Now, what are we
to do with them?"
"Deal justly with them," said Dr. Gresham, "and let them alone. Try to
create a moral sentiment in the nation, which will consider a wrong done
to the weakest of them as a wrong done to the whole community. Whenever
you find ministers too righteous to be faithless, cowardly, and time
serving; women too Christly to be scornful; and public men too noble to
be tricky and too honest to pander to the prejudices of the people,
stand by them and give them your moral support."
"Doctor," said Latrobe, "with your views you ought to be a preacher
striving to usher in the millennium."
"It can't come too soon," replied Dr. Gresham.