_The Triumph of the Vanquished_
There are those throughout the length and breadth of our great country
who make a fair living by traducing better men than themselves; by
continually crying out that the black man is incapable of being
civilized; that he is born with the elements of barbarity,
improvidence and untruthfulness so woven into his very nature that no
amount of opportunity, labor, love, or sacrifice can ever lift him out
of the condition, the "sphere God designed him to occupy"--as if the
great Common Parent took any more pains in the making of one man than
another. But those who utter such blasphemy, who call in the
assistance of the Almighty to fight the battles of the devil, are the
very persons who do most by precept and example to make possible the
verification of their blasphemy. They carry their lamentations into
the pulpit, grave convocations, newspapers, and even into halls of
legislation, State and Federal. They are the false prophets who blind
the eye of reason and blunt the sympathies of honest, well-meaning
men. They are the Jonases on board the ship of progress. They belong
to that class of men who would pick flaws in the finest work of art.
They find fault with the great mass of ignorance around them,
contending that the poor victims have only themselves to blame for
their destitute and painful condition, and, therefore, are not
entitled to the sympathy or charity of their more fortunate
brethren--unmindful that the great Master, judging by the false laws
of men, declared that "the poor ye have always with you;" while the
very rich are held up as monsters of selfishness, rapacity and the
most loathsome of social vices. It is, therefore, hardly to be
expected that this class of persons would find anything good in the
nature of the lately enslaved black man, or any improvement in his
condition since a generous Government had made him an ignorant voter
and a confirmed pauper--the victim of his former master, to be robbed
outright by designing and unscrupulous harpies of trade, and to be
defrauded of his franchise by blatant demagogues or by outlaws, to
whom I will not apply the term "assassins" for fear of using bad
English.
When the American Government conferred upon the black man the boon of
freedom and the burden of the franchise, it added four million men to
the already vast army of men who appear to be specially created to
labor for the enrichment of vast corporations, which have no souls,
and for individuals, whom our government have made a privileged class,
by permitting them to usurp or monopolize, through the accepted
channel of barter and trade, the soil, from which the masses, the
laboring masses, must obtain a subsistence, and without the privilege
of cultivating which they must faint and die.[7] It also added four
millions of souls to what have been termed, in the refinement of
sarcasm, "the dangerous classes"[8]--meaning by which the vast army of
men and women who, while willing and anxious to make an honest living
by the labor of their hands, and who--when speculators cry
"over-production," "glutted market," and other clap-trap--threaten to
take by force from society that which society prevents them from
making honestly.
When a society fosters as much crime and destitution as ours, with
ample resources to meet the actual necessities of every one, there
must be something radically wrong, not in the society but in the
foundation upon which society is reared. Where is this ulcer located?
Is it to be found in the dead-weight of illiteracy which we carry? The
masses of few countries are more intelligent than ours. Is it to be
found in burdensome taxation or ill-adjusted tariff regulations? Few
countries are burdened with less debt, and many have far worse tariff
laws than curse our country. Is it to be found in an unjust pension
list? We hardly miss the small compensation which we grant to the men
(or their heirs) who, in the hour of National peril, gave their lives
freely to perpetuate the Union of our States. Where, then, is secreted
the parasite which is eating away the energies of the people, making
paupers and criminals in the midst of plenty and the grandest of
civilizations? Is it not to be found in the powerful monopolies we
have created? Monopoly in land, in railroads, telegraphs, fostered
manufactures, etc.,--the gigantic forces in our civilization which
are, in their very nature, agents of public convenience, comfort and
absolute necessity? Society, in the modern sense, could not exist
without these forces; they are part and parcel of our civilization.
Naturally, therefore, society should control them, or submit to the
humiliation of being ruled by them. And this latter is largely the
case at the present time. Having evolved those forces out of its
necessities, made them strong and permanent, society failed to impose
such conditions as wise policy should have dictated, and now suffers
the calamitous consequences. The tail wags the dog, instead of the dog
wagging the tail.
No government can afford, with any degree of safety, to make four
million of citizens out of so many slaves. And when it is remembered
that our slaves were turned loose upon their former masters--lifted by
one stroke of the pen, as it were, from the most degraded condition to
the very pinnacle of sovereign manhood--the equals in unrestricted
manhood, with the privileges and immunities of citizens who had been
born to rule, apparently, instead of being ruled--it will be seen
readily how critical was the situation.
But the condition having once been created by the strong arm of the
Federal Government, based upon a bloody and costly war in open
defiance of the Constitution as designed by the compromising Fathers
of the Republic; the slave once made a free man the same as his former
master, and given the ballot, the highest privilege of government a
man can exercise;--the Government having once gone so far, there was
absolutely nothing for it to do but to interpose its omnipotent
authority between the haughty and arrogant free man on the one hand
and the crouching and fearful freed man on the other--the lion and the
lamb. To do less would be more than cruel, it would be murderous;--the
agency which created the condition was bound by all law and precedent
to see that those conditions were maintained in their entirety. It
could not evade the issue except at the expense of dignity,
consistency and humanity. There was but one honorable course to
pursue. Any other would be a horrible abandonment of principle. If it
were powerful to create, to make free men and citizens, it must,
manifestly, be powerful to insure the enjoyment of the freedom
conferred, and protect the inviolability of the franchise granted. Any
other conclusion would make government a by-word and a scoffing to the
nations; any other conclusion would make its conferring of freedom and
citizenship absurd in the extreme, a mere trick of the demagogue to
ease the popular conscience. To do such a thing would sink a decent
government lower in the estimation of the world than the miserable
apology of government represented by the Khedive of Egypt.
No patriotic American would admit to himself, or to a foreigner, that
the United States Government, through its accredited representatives
in Congress, possessed constitutional power to confer a benefit and
did not possess power to make that benefit available; to contract an
obligation, pecuniary or other, which it had not inherent power to
liquidate. The validity of a contract, as a matter of fact, depends
upon the ability of the parties to enter into it, for no court can
enforce a contract when it is shown that the principals to it had not
legal right to make it or to fulfill the conditions of it. It is
accepted as a surety of power to observe the conditions when a
sovereign government makes itself a party to a contract. The people
are bound by their agents, to whom they delegate authority. Nothing is
regarded in a more obnoxious light than the repudiation of their
honest debts by sovereign States. It is regarded in financial circles
as the crime of all crimes the blackest. The credit of the State is
reduced to a song, and moneyed men shun it as they would a
rattlesnake. The State and its people are held up as monsters of
depravity. It matters not how unjust the debt, how poor the people;
the mere fact that they repudiate an obligation which they entered
into in good faith is sufficient to destroy their credit in New York
or London and make them the target of every virtuous newspaper which
voices the sentiment of the class that deals in "futures" and
"corners." As an illustration, take the State of Virginia. The people
of that State contracted large debts to aid and abet the cause of the
so-called Confederate Government, a thing which crystallized around
the question: "Have the Sovereign States absolute, undivided authority
to regulate their own internal concerns, slave and other, or is this
authority vested in the Federal or National Government?" When the
people of Virginia contracted those large debts, drawing upon her
future resources, and placing burdens upon men yet unborn, to
propagate theories at variance with sound doctrines of government, and
to perpetuate an institution too vile to be mentioned with respect, in
1860, and immediately subsequent thereto, when the State of Virginia
contracted the debts in question for the perpetuation of slavery, she
had a population of 1,047,299; 65.6 per cent of which was white
(free), and 34.4 per cent was colored (slave). Virginia, therefore, in
contracting debts in 1860, did not calculate that twenty-two years
thereafter the obligations would be repudiated, and the credit of the
State depreciated, by the assistance of the very class of persons to
bind whom to a cruel and barbarous servitude those debts were
contracted. It is one of the most striking instances of retributive
justice that I ever knew. Nothing was more natural, when the question
came up for final settlement a few years ago, than that the black
voters of Virginia should take sides with those who opposed the full
settlement of the indebtedness. It is too much to expect of sensible
men that they will assent, in a state of sovereign citizenship, to
cancel debts contracted when they had no voice in the matter, and
when, as a matter of fact, the debts were contracted to rivet upon
them the chains of death. And yet for the part the black men of
Virginia took upon the settlement of her infamous debt, they have been
abused and maligned from one end of the country to the other. Because
they refused to vote to tax themselves to pay money borrowed without
their consent, and applied to purposes of death and slaughter, no man
has been found to commend them or to accept as sufficiently
extenuating, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the question.
Shylock must have his pound of flesh, though the unlucky victim bleed
his life away. But there are laws "higher" than any framed in the
interest of tyrannical capital. In my opinion, the man who
deliberately invests his money to perpetuate so vile an institution as
slavery deserves not only to lose the interest upon his investment but
the principal as well. I therefore have not a grain of sympathy for
the greedy cormorants who invested their money in the so-called
Confederate Government. Neither have I any sympathy for the people of
the South who, having invested all their money in human flesh, found
themselves at the close of the Rebellion paupers in more senses than
one--being bankrupt in purse and unused to make an honest living by
honest labor--too proud to work and too poor to loaf.
In a question of this kind, no one disputes the power of Virginia to
contract debts to propagate opinions, erroneous or other, but it is a
question whether the people of one generation have the right to
tax--that is, enslave--the people of generations yet unborn. The
creation of public debts is pernicious in practice, productive of more
harm than good. What right have I to create debts for my grandson or
granddaughter? I have no right even to presume that I will have a
grandson, certainly none that he will be able to meet his own debts in
addition to those I entail upon him. The character of the people
called upon to settle the debt of Virginia, contracted in 1860, before
or immediately after, differed radically from the character of the
people who were called upon to tax themselves to cancel that debt. Not
only had the character of the people undergone a radical change; the
whole social and industrial mechanism of the state had undergone a
wonderful, almost an unrecognizable, metamorphosis. The haughty
aristocrat, with his magnificent plantation, his army of slaves, and
his "cattle on a thousand hills," who eagerly contracted the debt,
had been transformed into a sour pauper when called upon to honor his
note; while the magnificent plantation had been in many instances cut
into a thousand bits to make homes for the former slaves, now freemen
and citizens, the equals of "my lord," while "his cattle on a thousand
hills" had dwindled down to a stubborn jackass and a worn out milch
cow. True, the white man possessed, largely, the soil; but he was,
immediately after the war, utterly incapable of wringing from it the
bounty of Nature; he had first to be re-educated.
But, when the bloody rebellion was over, the country, in its sovereign
capacity, and by individual States, was called upon to deal with grave
questions growing out of the conflict. Mr. Lincoln, by a stroke of the
pen,[9] transferred the battle from the field to the halls of
legislation. In view of the "Emancipation proclamation" as issued by
Mr. Lincoln, and the invaluable service rendered by black troops[10]
in the rebellion, legislation upon the status of the former slave
could not be avoided. The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's
ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the
war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever
relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still
to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that
treacherous yet brave power--the South. They had not yet learned that
Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the
extreme, and could not be toyed with as with a doll-baby. So the
statesmen proceeded to manufacture the "Reconstruction policy"--a
policy more fatuous, more replete with fatal concessions and far more
fatal omissions than any ever before adopted for the acceptance and
governance of a rebellious people on the one hand and a newly made,
supremely helpless people on the other. It is not easy to regard with
equanimity the blunders of the "Reconstruction policy" and the
manifold infamies which have followed fast upon its adoption.
The South scornfully rejected and successfully nullified the
legislative will of the victors.
Judge Albion W. Tourgee says of this policy in his book called _A
Fool's Errand_: "It was a magnificent sentiment that underlay it
all,--an unfaltering determination, an invincible defiance to all that
had the seeming of compulsion or tyranny. One cannot but regard with
pride and sympathy the indomitable men, who, being conquered in war,
yet resisted every effort of the conqueror to change their laws, their
customs, or even the _personnel_ of their ruling class; and this, too,
not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success. One cannot
but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation
which had overpowered them--even in the teeth of her legislators--with
perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge.
How they laughed to scorn the Reconstruction Acts of which the wise
men boasted! How boldly they declared the conflict to be
irrepressible, and that white and black could not and should not live
together as co-ordinate ruling elements! How lightly they told the
tales of blood--of the Masked Night-Riders, of the Invisible Empire of
Rifle clubs and Saber clubs (all organized for peaceful purposes), of
warnings and whippings and slaughter! Ah, it is wonderful! * * *
Bloody as the reign of Mary, barbarous as the chronicles of the
Comanche!"
FOOTNOTES:
[7] We of the United States take credit for having abolished slavery.
Passing the question of how much credit the majority of us are
entitled to for the abolition of Negro slavery, it remains true that
we have only abolished one form of slavery--and that a primitive form
which had been abolished in the greater portion of the country by
social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave
it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same
way in other parts of the country. We have not really abolished
slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread
form--in the form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from
having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, and we
made no scruple of setting into it our own children--the citizens of
the Republic yet to be. For what else are we doing in selling the land
on which future citizens must live, if they are to live at all.--Henry
George, _Social Problems_, p. 209.
[8] Although for the present there is a lull in the conflict of races
at the South, it is a lull which comes only from the breathing-spells
of a great secular contention, and not from any permanent pacification
founded on a resolution of the race problem presented by the Negro
question in its present aspects. So long as the existing mass of our
crude and unassimilated colored population holds its present place in
the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political
rights will oscillate between alternate perils--the peril that comes
from the white man when he places civilization, or sometimes his
travesty of it, higher than the Negro's political rights, and the
peril that comes from the black man when his political rights are
placed by himself or others higher than civilization--President James
C. Willing, on "Race Education" in _The North American Review_, April,
1883.
[9] By virtue of the power and for the purposes aforesaid, I do ordain
and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated
States and parts of States, are and henceforth shall be free; and that
the Executive Government of the United States, including the military
and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom
of said persons.--Abraham Lincoln's _Emancipation Proclamation_.
[10] From Williams's _History of the Negro Race in America_ I
construct the following table showing the number of colored troops
employed by the Federal Government during the war of the Rebellion:
Colored Troops Furnished 1861-65
Total of New England States 7,916
Total of Middle States 13,922
Total, Western States and Territories 12,711
Total, Border States 45,184
Total, Southern States 63,571
-------
Grand Total States 143,304
At Large 733
Not accounted for 5,083
Officers 7,122
-------
Grand total 156,242
This gives colored troops enlisted in the States in Rebellion; besides
this, there were 92,576 colored troops (included with the white
soldiers) in the quotas of the several States.