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BLACK AND WHITE
_LAND, LABOR, and POLITICS in the SOUTH_
By
TIMOTHY THOMAS FORTUNE
1884
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In discussing the political and industrial problems of the South, I
base my conclusions upon a personal knowledge of the condition of
classes in the South, as well as upon the ample data furnished by
writers who have pursued, in their way, the question before me. That
the colored people of the country will yet achieve an honorable status
in the national industries of thought and activity, I believe, and try
to make plain.
In discussion of the land and labor problem I but pursue the theories
advocated by more able and experienced men, in the attempt to show
that the laboring classes of any country pay all the taxes, in the
last analysis, and that they are systematically victimized by
legislators, corporations and syndicates.
Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of the
machinery of government. Land monopoly--in the hands of individuals,
corporations or syndicates--is at bottom the prime cause of the
inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to
vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one
family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by
machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a
tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of
human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers,
where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome
of all visitors.
The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the social
problems in the South are, in the main, the same as those which
afflict every civilized country on the globe; and that the future
conflict in that section will not be racial or political in character,
but between capital on the one hand and labor on the other, with the
odds largely in favor of nonproductive wealth because of the undue
advantage given the latter by the pernicious monopoly in land which
limits production and forces population disastrously upon subsistence.
My purpose is to show that poverty and misfortune make no invidious
distinctions of "race, color, or previous condition," but that wealth
unduly centralized oppresses all alike; therefore, that the labor
elements of the whole United States should sympathize with the same
elements in the South, and in some favorable contingency effect some
unity of organization and action, which shall subserve the common
interest of the common class.
T. THOMAS FORTUNE.
New York City, July 20, 1884.
CONTENTS
I--Black 1
II--White 6
III--The Negro and the Nation 13
IV--The Triumph of the Vanquished 19
V--Illiteracy--Its Causes 28
VI--Education--Professional or Industrial 38
VII---How Not to Do It 55
VIII--The Nation Surrenders 62
IX--Political Independence of the Negro 67
X--Solution of the Political Problem 79
XI--Land and Labor 89
XII--Civilization Degrades the Masses 96
XIII--Conditions of Labor in the South 107
XIV--Classes in the South 120
XV--The Land Problem 133
XVI--Conclusion 145
Appendix 151
On a summer day, when the great heat induced a general thirst, a Lion
and a Boar came at the same moment to a small well to drink. They
fiercely disputed which of them should drink first, and were soon
engaged in the agonies of a mortal combat. On their suddenly stopping
to take breath for the fiercer renewal of the strife, they saw some
vultures in the distance, waiting to feast on the one which should
fall. They at once made up their quarrel, saying, "It is better
for us to be friends, than to become the food of crows or
vultures."--_Æsop's Fables_.
CHAPTER I
_Black_
There is no question to-day in American politics more unsettled than
the negro question; nor has there been a time since the adoption of
the Federal Constitution when this question has not, in one shape or
another, been a disturbing element, a deep-rooted cancer, upon the
body of our society, frequently occupying public attention to the
exclusion of all other questions. It appears to possess, as no other
question, the elements of perennial vitality.
The introduction of African slaves into the colony of Virginia in
August, 1619, was the beginning of an agitation, a problem, the
solution of which no man, even at this late date, can predict,
although many wise men have prophesied.
History--the record of human error, cruelty and misdirected
zeal--furnishes no more striking anomaly than the British Puritan
fleeing from princely rule and tyranny and dragging at his heels the
African savage, bound in servile chains; praying to a just God for
freedom, and at the same time riveting upon his fellow-man the gyves
of most unjust and cruel slavery. A parallel for such hypocrisy, such
sacrilegious invocation, is not matched in the various history of
peoples.
It did not matter to the early settlers of the American colonies that,
in the memorable struggle for the right to be represented if taxed, a
black man--Crispus Attucks, a full-blooded Negro--died upon the soil
of Massachusetts, in the Boston massacre of 1770, in common with other
loyal, earnest men, as the first armed protest against an odious
tyranny; it did not matter that in the armies of the colonies, in
rebellion against Great Britain, there were (according to the report
of Adjutant General Scammell), on the 24th day of August, 1778, 755
regularly enlisted negro troops; it did not matter that in the second
war with Great Britain, General Andrew Jackson, on the 21st day of
September, 1814, appealed to the "free colored people of Louisiana" as
"sons of freedom," who were "called upon to defend _our_ most
inestimable blessing," the right to be free and sovereign, and to
"rally around the standard of the eagle, to defend all which is dear
in existence;" it did not matter that in each of these memorable
struggles the black man was called upon, and responded nobly, to the
call for volunteers to drive out the minions of the British tyrant.
When the smoke of battle had dissolved into thin air; when the
precious right to be free and sovereign had been stubbornly fought for
and reluctantly conceded; when the bloody memories of Yorktown and New
Orleans had passed into glorious history, the black man, who had
assisted by his courage to establish the free and independent States
of America, was doomed to sweat and groan that others might revel in
idleness and luxury. Allured, in each instance, into the conflict for
National independence by the hope held out of generous reward and an
honest consideration of his manhood rights, he received as his portion
chains and contempt. The spirit of injustice, inborn in the Caucasian
nature, asserted itself in each instance. Selfishness and greed rode
roughshod over the promptings of a generous, humane, Christian nature,
as they have always done in this country, not only in the case of the
African but of the Indian as well, each of whom has in turn felt the
pernicious influence of that heartless greed which overleaps honesty
and fair play, in the unmanly grasp after perishable gain.
The books which have been written in this country--the books which
have molded and controlled intelligent public opinion--during the
past one hundred and fifty years have been written by white men, in
justification of the white man's domineering selfishness, cruelty and
tyranny. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, down
to the present time, the same key has been struck, the same song as
been sung, with here and there a rare exception--as in the case of
Mrs. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Judge Tourgée's _A Fool's Errand_,
Dr. Haygood's _Our Brother in Black_, and some others of less note.
The white man's story has been told over and over again, until the
reader actually tires of the monotonous repetition, so like the
ten-cent novels in which the white hunter always triumphs over the red
man. The honest reader has longed in vain for a glimpse at the other
side of the picture so studiously turned to the wall.
Even in books written expressly to picture the black man's side of the
story, the author has been compelled to palliate, by interjecting
extenuating, often irrelevant circumstances, the ferocity and
insatiate lust of greed of his race. He has been unable to tell the
story as it was, because his nature, his love of race, his inborn,
prejudices and narrowness made him a lurking coward.
And so it has been with the newspapers, which have ever been the
obsequious reflex of distempered public opinion, siding always with
the strong and powerful; so that in 1831, when the "Liberator"
(published in Boston by the intrepid and patriotic Garrison) made its
appearance, it was a lone David among a swarm of Goliaths, any one of
which was willing and anxious to serve the cause of the devil by
crushing the little angel in the service of the Lord. So it is to-day.
The great newspapers, which should plead the cause of the oppressed
and the down-trodden, which should be the palladiums of the people's
rights, are all on the side of the oppressor, or by silence preserve a
dignified but ignominious neutrality. Day after day they weave a false
picture of facts--facts which must measurably influence the future
historian of the times in the composition of impartial history. The
wrongs of the masses are referred to sneeringly or apologetically.
The vast army of laborers--men, women, and even tender children--find
no favor in the eyes of these Knights of the Quill. The Negro and the
Indian, the footballs of slippery politicians and the helpless victims
of sharpers and thieves, are wantonly misrepresented--held up to the
eyes of the world as beings incapable of imbibing the distorted
civilization in the midst of which they live and have their being.
They are placed in the attic, only to be aired when somebody wants an
"issue" or an "appropriation."
There are no "Liberators" to-day, and the William Lloyd Garrisons have
nearly all of them gone the way of all the world.
The part played by the ministry of Christ in the early conflict
against human slavery in this country would be enigmatical in the
extreme, utterly beyond apprehension, if it were not matter of history
that the representatives of the Christian Church, in conflicts with
every giant wrong, have always been the strongest supporters, the most
obsequious tools of money power and the political sharpers who have
imposed their vile tyrannies upon mankind. They have alternately
supplicated and domineered, crawled in the dust or mounted the
house-top, as occasion served, from Gregory to the Smiths and Joneses
of the present time. So that it has passed into a proverb, that the
ministers of the gospel may be always counted upon to take sides with
the strongest party--always seeking to conciliate "King Cotton," "King
Corporation," "King Monopoly," and all the other "Kings" of modern
growth--swaying, like the reed in the wind, to the powers that be,
whether of tyranny reared upon a thousand years of usurpation,
military despotism of a day's growth, or presumptuous wealth
accumulated by robbery, hypocrisy and insidious assassination. Instead
of leading in the reformation of leviathan wrongs, the ministry waits
for the rabble to applaud before it commends.[1] It was not in this
manner that the great Christ set the world in motion, sowed broadcast
the dynamite which uprooted long-established infamies, and prepared
the way for the ultimate redemption of the world from sin and error.
If the Christian ministry of the United States did at last recognize
the demoralization and iniquity of slavery, it was because the heroic
band, headed by William Lloyd Garrison, first fired the heart of the
people and forced the ministry to take sides with the righteous cause.
I speak not of the few heroic exceptions, but of the mass of the
American clergy. If in the evangelization of the black man since the
rebellion, the ministry have largely furthered the work, they have
done so because there were hundreds and thousands of brave men and
women ready to give their time and money to the upbuilding of outraged
humanity and the cause of Christ. They have simply put in operation
movements conceived and nurtured by the genius and philanthropy of
others, and no one of them will claim that he has not reaped an
abundant pecuniary harvest for his labors. Yet, I would accord to the
ministry of the United States full meed of praise for all that they
have done as the agents of the humane, intelligent and philanthropic
opinions of the times; and, too, there have been good men who fought
the good fight simply because the cause was just.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Be thou the first true merit to befriend,
His praise is lost who waits till all commend._
_Pope's_ Essay on Man.