_The Negro and the Nation_
The war of the Rebellion settled only one question: It forever settled
the question of chattel slavery[3] in this country. It forever choked
the life out of the infamy of the Constitutional right of one man to
rob another, by purchase of his person, or of his honest share of the
produce of his own labor. But this was the only question permanently
and irrevocably settled. Nor was this _the_ all-absorbing question
involved. The right of a State to secede from the so-called _Union_
remains where it was when the treasonable shot upon Fort Sumter
aroused the people to all the horrors of internecine war. And the
measure of protection which the National government owes the
individual members of States, a right imposed upon it by the adoption
of the XIVth Amendment[4] to the Constitution, remains still to be
affirmed.
It was not sufficient that the Federal government should expend its
blood and treasure to unfetter the limbs of four millions of people.
There can be a slavery more odious, more galling, than mere chattel
slavery. It has been declared to be an act of charity to enforce
ignorance upon the slave, since to inform his intelligence would
simply be to make his unnatural lot all the more unbearable. Instance
the miserable existence of Æsop, the great black moralist. But this is
just what the manumission of the black people of this country has
accomplished. They are more absolutely under the control of the
Southern whites; they are more systematically robbed of their labor;
they are more poorly housed, clothed and fed, than under the slave
régime; and they enjoy, practically, less of the protection of the
laws of the State or of the Federal government. When they appeal to
the Federal government they are told by the Supreme Court to go to the
State authorities--as if they would have appealed to the one had the
other given them that protection to which their sovereign citizenship
entitles them!
Practically, there is no law in the United States which extends its
protecting arm over the black man and his rights. He is, like the
Irishman in Ireland, an alien in his native land. There is no central
or auxiliary authority to which he can appeal for protection. Wherever
he turns he finds the strong arm of constituted authority powerless to
protect him. The farmer and the merchant rob him with absolute
immunity, and irresponsible ruffians murder him without fear of
punishment, undeterred by the law, or by public opinion--which
connives at, if it does not inspire, the deeds of lawless violence.
Legislatures of States have framed a code of laws which is more cruel
and unjust than any enforced by a former slave State.
The right of franchise[5] has been practically annulled in every one
of the former slave States, in not one of which, to-day, can a man
vote, think or act as he pleases. He must conform his views to the
views of the men who have usurped every function of government--who,
at the point of the dagger, and with shotgun, have made themselves
masters in defiance of every law or precedent in our history as a
government. They have usurped government with the weapons of the
coward and assassin, and they maintain themselves in power by the most
approved practices of the most odious of tyrants. These men have shed
as much innocent blood as the bloody triumvirate of Rome. To-day,
red-handed murderers and assassins sit in the high places of power,
and bask in the smiles of innocence and beauty.
The newspapers of the country, voicing the sentiments of the people,
literally hiss into silence any man who has the courage to protest
against the prevailing tendency to lawlessness[6] and bare-faced
usurpation; while parties have ceased to deal with the question for
other than purposes of political capital. Even this fruitful mine is
well-nigh exhausted. A few more years, and the usurper and the man of
violence will be left in undisputed possession of his blood-stained
inheritance. No man will attempt to deter him from sowing broadcast
the seeds of revolution and death. Brave men are powerless to combat
this organized brigandage, complaint of which, in derision, has been
termed "waving the bloody shirt."
Men organize themselves into society for mutual protection. Government
justly derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. But
what shall we say of that society which is incapable of extending the
protection which is inherent in it? What shall we say of that
government which has not power or inclination to insure the exercise
of those solemn rights and immunities which it guarantees? To declare
a man to be free, and equal with his fellow, and then to refrain from
enacting laws powerful to insure him in such freedom and equality, is
to trifle with the most sacred of all the functions of sovereignty.
Have not the United States done this very thing? Have they not
conferred freedom and the ballot, which are necessary the one to the
other? And have they not signally failed to make omnipotent the one
and practicable the other? The questions hardly require an answer. The
measure of freedom the black man enjoys can be gauged by the power he
has to vote. He has, practically, no voice in the government under
which he lives. His property is taxed and his life is jeopardized, by
states on the one hand and inefficient police regulations on the
other, and no question is asked or expected of him. When he protests,
when he cries out against this flagrant nullification of the very
first principles of a republican form of government, the insolent
question is asked: "What are you going to do about it?" And here lies
the danger.
You may rob and maltreat a slave and ask him what he is going to do
about it, and he can make no reply. He is bound hand and foot; he is
effectually gagged. Despair is his only refuge. He knows it is useless
to appeal from tyranny unto the designers and apologists of tyranny.
Ignominious death alone can bring him relief. This was the case of
thousands of men doomed by the institution of slavery. _But such is
not the case with free men._ You cannot oppress and murder freemen as
you would slaves: you cannot so insult them with the question, "What
are you going to do about it?" When you ask free men that question you
appeal to men who, though sunk to the verge of despair, yet are
capable of uprising and ripping hip and thigh those who deemed them
incapable of so rising above their condition. The history of mankind
is fruitful of such uprisings of races and classes reduced to a
condition of absolute despair. The American negro is no better and no
worse than the Haytian revolutionists headed by Toussaint l'Overture,
Christophe and the bloody Dessalaines.
I do not indulge in the luxury of prophecy when I declare that the
American people are fostering in their bosoms a spirit of rebellion
which will yet shake the pillars of popular government as they have
never before been shaken, unless a wiser policy is inaugurated and
honestly enforced. All the indications point to the fulfillment of
such declaration.
The Czar of Russia squirms upon his throne, not because he is
necessarily a bad man, but because he is the head and center of a
condition of things which squeezes the life out of the people. His
subjects hurl infernal machines at the tyrant because he represents
the system which oppresses them. But the evil is far deeper than the
throne, and cannot be remedied by striking the occupant of it-_the
throne itself must be rooted out and demolished_. So the Irish
question has a more powerful motive to foment agitation and murder
than the landlord and landlordism. The landlord simply stands out as
the representative of the real grievance. To remove _him_ would not
remove the evil; agitation would not cease; murder would still stalk
abroad at noonday. _The real grievance is the false system which makes
the landlord possible._ The appropriation of the fertile acres of the
soil of Ireland, which created and maintains a privileged class, a
class that while performing no labor, wrings from the toiler, in the
shape of rents, so much of the produce of his labor that he cannot on
the residue support himself and those dependent upon him aggravates
the situation. It is this system which constitutes the real grievance
and makes the landlord an odious loafer with abundant cash and the
laborer a constant toiler always upon the verge of starvation.
Evidently, therefore, to remove the landlord and leave the system of
land monopoly would not remove the evil. Destroy the latter and the
former would be compelled to go.
Herein lies the great social wrong which has turned the beautiful
roses of freedom into thorns to prick the hands of the black men of
the South; which made slavery a blessing, paradoxical as it may
appear, and freedom a curse. It is this great wrong which has crowded
the cities of the South with an ignorant pauper population, making
desolate fields that once bloomed "as fair as a garden of the Lord,"
where now the towering oak and pine-tree flourish, instead of the corn
and cotton which gladdened the heart and filled the purse. It was this
gigantic iniquity which created that arrogant class who have exhausted
the catalogue of violence to obtain power and the lexicon of sophistry
for arguments to extenuate the exceeding heinousness of crime. How
could it be otherwise? To tell a man he is free when he has neither
money nor the opportunity to make it, is simply to mock him. To tell
him he has no master when he cannot live except by permission of the
man who, under favorable conditions, monopolizes all the land, is to
deal in the most tantalizing contradiction of terms. But this is just
what the United States did for the black man. And yet because he has
not grown learned and wealthy in twenty years, because he does not own
broad acres and a large bank account, people are not wanting who
declare he has no capacity, that he is improvident by nature and
mendacious from inclination.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall
exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.--Art. XIII. Sec. 1 of the Constitution.
[4] All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State in which they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; _nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws_--XIVth Amendment, Section 1.
[5] The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account
of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.--XVth Amendment,
Sec. 1.
[6] While I write these lines, the daily newspapers furnish the
following paragraph. It is but one of the _waifs_ that are to be found
in the newspapers day by day. There is always some _circumstance_
which justifies the murder and exculpates the murderer. The black
always deserves his fate. I give the paragraph:
"SPEAR, MITCHELL CO., N.C., March 19, 1884.--Col. J.M. English, a
farmer and prominent citizen living at Plumtree, Mitchell County,
N.C., shot and killed a mulatto named Jack Mathis at that place
Saturday, March 1. There had been difficulty between them for several
months.
"Mathis last summer worked in one of Col. English's mica mines.
Evidence pointed to him being implicated in the systematic stealing of
mica from the mine. Still it was not direct enough to convict him, but
he was discharged by English. Mathis was also a tenant of one of
English's houses and lots. In resentment he damaged the property by
destroying fences, tearing off weather boards from the house, and
injuring the fruit trees. For this Col. English prosecuted the negro,
and on Feb. 9, before a local Justice, ex-Sheriff Wiseman, he got a
judgment for $100. On the date stated, during a casual meeting, hot
words grew into an altercation, and Col. English shot the negro.
Mathis was a powerful man. English is a cripple, being lame in a leg
from a wound received in the Mexican war.
"A trial was had before a preliminary court recently, Col. S.C. Vance
appearing for Col. English. After a hearing of all the testimony the
court reached a decision of justifiable homicide and English was
released. The locality of the shooting is in the mountains of western
North Carolina, and not far from the Flat Rock mica mine, the scene of
the brutal midnight murder, Feb. 17, of Burleson, Miller, and Horton
by Rae and Anderson, two revenue officers, who took this means to gain
possession of the mica mine."
My knowledge of such affairs in the South is, that the black and the
white have an altercation over some trivial thing, and the white to
end the argument shoots the black man down. The negro is always a
"_powerful fellow_" and the white man a "weak sickly man." The law and
public opinion always side with the white man.