_Illiteracy--Its Causes_
At the close of the rebellion there were in the Union (according to
the census of 1860) 4,441,830 people of African origin; in 1880 they
had increased to 6,580,793. Of this vast multitude in 1860, it is safe
to say, not so many as one in every ten thousand could read or write.
They had been doomed by the most stringent laws to a long night of
mental darkness. It was a crime to teach a black man how to read even
the Bible, the sacred repository of the laws that must light the
pathway of man from death unto life eternal. For to teach a slave was
to make a firebrand--to arouse that love of freedom which stops at
nothing short of absolute freedom. It is not, therefore, surprising
that every southern state should have passed the most odious
inhibitary laws, with severe fines and penalties for their infraction,
upon the question of informing the stunted intelligence of the slave
population. The following table will show the condition of education
in the South in 1880:
COMPARATIVE STATISTICS OF EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH
------------------------------------------------------------------------
White Colored
-------------------------- -------------------------
States School Enroll- [A] School Enroll- [A] [B]
population ment population ment
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alabama 217,590 107,483 49 170,413 72,007 42 $375,465
Arkansas [b]181,799 [c]53,229 29 [b]54,332 [c]17,743 33 238,056
Delaware 31,505 25,053 80 3,954 2,770 70 207,281
Florida [b]46,410 [c]18,871 41 [b]42,099 [c]20,444 49 114,895
Georgia [d]236,319 150,134 64 [d]197,125 86,399 45 471,029
Kentucky [e]478,597 [c]241,679 50 [e]66,564 [c]23,902 36 803,490
Louisiana [c]139,661 [d]44,052 32 [c]134,184 [d]34,476 26 480,320
Maryland [f]213,669 134,210 63 [f]63,591 28,221 44 1,544,367
Mississippi 175,251 112,994 64 251,438 123,710 49 850,704
Missouri 681,995 454,218 67 41,489 22,158 53 3,152,178
N.Carolina 291,770 136,481 47 167,554 89,125 53 352,882
S.Carolina [g]83,813 61,219 73 [g]144,315 72,853 50 324,629
Tennessee 403,353 229,290 57 141,509 60,851 43 724,862
Texas [h]171,426 138,912 81 [h]62,015 47,874 77 753,346
Virginia 314,827 152,136 48 240,980 68,600 28 946,109
W.Virginia 202,364 138,799 68 7,749 4,071 53 716,864
District of
Columbia 29,612 16,934 57 13,946 9,505 68 438,567
------------------------------------------------------------
Total 3,899,961 2,215,674 1,803,257 784,709 12,475,044
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Table Header A: Percentage of the school population enrolled]
[Table Header B: Total Expenditure for both races[a]]
[a] In Delaware the colored public schools have been supported by
the school tax collected from colored citizens only; recently,
however, they have received an appropriation of $2,400 from the State;
in Kentucky the school-tax collected from colored citizens is the only
State appropriation for the support of colored schools; in Maryland
there is a biennial appropriation by the Legislature; in the District
of Columbia one-third of the school moneys is set apart for colored
public schools, and in the other States mentioned above the school
moneys are divided in proportion to the school population without
regard to race.
[b] Several counties failed to make race distinctions.
[c] Estimated.
[d] In 1879.
[e] For whites the school age is 6 to 20, for colored 6 to 16.
[f] Census of 1870.
[g] In 1877.
[h] These numbers include some duplicates; the actual school
population is 230,527.
Speaking in the Senate of the United States June 13, 1882, the bill
for National "Aid to Common Schools" being under consideration,
Senator Henry W. Blair, of New Hampshire, said:
Excluding the states of Maryland and Missouri and the
District of Columbia, and the total yearly expenditure for
both races is only $7,339,932, while in the whole country
the annual expenditure is, from taxation, $70,341,435, and
from school funds $6,580,632, or a total of $76,922,067,
(see tables 2 and 7,) or one-tenth of the whole, while they
contain one-fifth of the school-population. The causes which
have produced this state of things in the Southern States
are far less important than the facts themselves as they now
exist. To find a remedy and apply it is the only duty which
devolves upon us. Without universal education, not only will
the late war prove to be a failure, but the abolition of
slavery be proved to be a tremendous disaster, if not a
crime.
The country was held together by the strong and bloody
embrace of war, but that which the nation might and did do
to retain the integrity of its territory and of its laws by
the expenditure of brute force will all be lost if, for the
subjection of seven millions of men, by the statutes of the
States is to be substituted the thraldom of ignorance and
the tyranny of an irresponsible suffrage. Secession, and a
confederacy founded upon slavery as its chief cornerstone,
would be better than the future of the Southern
States--better for both races, too--if the nation is to
permit one-third, and that the fairest portion of its
domain, to become the spawning ground of ignorance, vice,
anarchy, and of every crime. The nation as such abolished
slavery as a legal institution; but ignorance is slavery,
and no matter what is written in your constitutions and your
laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of
liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the
light of her smile.
Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies,
highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities.
Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while
they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all is
changed. The suffrage is universal, and that means universal
ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created
by universal education. Until the republican constitutions,
framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction
which supplanted the governments initiated by President
Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage,
were unknown. Hence in a special manner the nation is
responsible for the existence and support of those systems
as well as for the order of things which made them
necessary. That remarkable progress has been made under
their influence is true, and that the common school is fast
becoming as dear to the masses of the people at the South as
elsewhere is also evident.
The Nation, through the Freedmen's Bureau, and perhaps to a
limited extent in other ways, has expended five millions of
dollars for the education of negroes and refugees in the
earlier days of reconstruction, while religious charities
have founded many special schools which have thus far cost
some ten millions more. The Peabody fund has distilled the
dews of heaven all over the South; but heavy rains are
needed; without them every green thing must wither away.
This work belongs to the Nation. It is a part of the war.
We have the Southern people as patriotic allies now. We are
one; so shall we be forever. But both North and South have a
fiercer and more doubtful fight with the forces of ignorance
than they waged with each other during the bloody years
which chastened the opening life of this generation.
The South lost in the destruction of property about two billion
dollars and in prosecuting the war two billion more. No people can
lose so much without seriously disarranging the entire mechanism of
their government. It is for this reason, therefore, that the measure
of "National Aid to Education" has so many and so persistent
advocates. I wish to place myself among them. If the safety of
republican government abides in the intelligence and virtue of the
people, it can very readily be seen how much safety there is in the
South at present. If it be true that an ulcer will vitiate the entire
body, and endanger the life of the patient, we can see very plainly to
what possible danger the spread of illiteracy may lead us.
Illiteracy in the South is one of the worst legacies which the
rebellion bequeathed to the nation. It has been the prime cause of
more misgovernment in the South than any other one cause, not even the
insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers taking precedence of
it. It has not only served as a provocation to peculation and
chicanery, but it has nerved the courage of the assassin and made
merry the midnight ride of armed mobs bent upon righting wrongs by
committing crimes before which the atrocities of savage warfare pale.
Wholesale murders have been committed and sovereign majorities awed
into silence and inaction by reason of the widespread illiteracy of
the masses. The very first principles of republican government have
been ruthlessly trampled under foot because the people were ignorant
of their sovereign rights, and had not, therefore, courage to maintain
them.
That there should be in sixteen States and the District of Columbia a
population of 5,703,218 people to be educated out of $12,475,044 is
sufficient to arouse the apprehension of the most indifferent friend
of good government. The State of New York alone, with a school
population of only 1,641,173 spent, in 1880, $9,675,922.
But I base my argument for the establishment and maintenance of a
comprehensive system of National education upon other grounds than the
"safety of the Union," which is the same argument used by Mr. Lincoln
when he emancipated the slaves. This argument is strong, and will
always greatly influence a certain class of people. And, naturally, it
should, for the perpetuation of the Union is simply the perpetuation
of a republican form of government. But there are stronger grounds to
be considered.
1. The United States government is directly responsible for the
illiteracy and the widespread poverty which obtain in the South. Under
its sanction and by its connivance the institution of slavery
flourished and prospered, until it had taken such deep root as to be
almost impossible of extirpation. It was the _Union_, and not the
_States_, severally, which made slavery part and parcel of the
fundamental law of the land. If this be a correct statement of the
case, and I assume that it is, the _Union_ (and not the _States_,
severally) is responsible for the ignorance of the black people of the
South. Slavery could not have existed and grown in the Union save by
permission of all the States of the Union. It is therefore obvious
that the agency which created and fostered a great crime is obligated,
not only by the laws of God but of man as well, to assume the
responsibility of its creation and to remedy, as far as possible, the
evil results of that crime. The issue cannot be evaded. The
obligation rests upon the Union, not upon the several States, to
assume the direction of methods by which the appalling illiteracy of
the South is to be diminished.
2. There have not been wanting men and newspapers to urge that the
United States should reimburse the slave-holders of the South for the
wholesale confiscation, so to speak, of their property. True, these
men and newspapers belong to that class of unrepentants who believed
that slavery was a _Divine institution_ and that the slave-holder was
a sort of vicegerent of heaven, a holy Moses, as it were. But when we
leave the absurdity of this claim, which lies upon the surface, there
is much apparent reason in their representations. It was the _Union_
which legalized the sale and purchase of slave property, thereby
inviting capitalists to invest in it; and it was the _Union_ which
declared such contracts null and void by the abolition of slavery, or
confiscation of slave property. As I said before, I have no sympathy
with those who invested their money in slave property. They not only
received their just deserts in having their property confiscated, but
they should have been compelled to make restitution to the last penny
to the poor slaves whom they had systematically robbed. But perhaps
this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal. For the
great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go
behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to
invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the
payment of debts contracted by the firm, for each member of the
government is, measurably, an agent of the government, contracting and
paying debts by its delegated authority. Thus the law holds him guilty
who willfully breaks a contract entered into in good faith by all the
parties to it. Instead of holding the slave-holder responsible for the
robbery of the black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold
the _government_ responsible.
What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the
shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years! What claim has the
slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by
the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and
enervated and dwarfed manhood! A billion dollars would have bought
every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have
adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased
manhood. The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected. And
yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be
unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who
will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he
had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the
debasement--not to say enervation--of his manhood, by the great act by
which he was made a free man and a citizen.
But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest
possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and
citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that
which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the
second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every
conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House--a
boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to
be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a
help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper
status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the _right_ of any man to enslave
his fellow; I deny the _right_ of any government, sovereign as the
Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any
regulation which robs _one man or class_ to enrich _another_.
Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments
may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the
rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the
common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country--men too
of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the
masterly irony of _Junius_, speak of the black man as the "ward of the
nation"--a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous
and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among
them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be
reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery
and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard
the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too
narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The
people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized
robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have
overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching
sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen
out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold
upon the soil by robbing the black man. When the rebellion at last
closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich
indeed in lands, while the black man was poor in everything, even in
manhood, not because of any neglect or improvidence on his part, but
because, though he labored from the rising to the setting of the sun,
he received absolutely nothing for his labor, often being denied
adequate food to sustain his physical man and clothing to protect him
from the rude inclemency of the weather. He was a bankrupt in purse
because the _government_ had robbed him; he was a bankrupt in
character, in all the elements of a successful manhood, because the
_government_ had placed a premium upon illiteracy and immorality. It
was not the individual slave-owner who held the black man in chains;
it was the _government_; for, the government having permitted slavery
to exist, the institution vanished the instant the government declared
that it should no longer exist!
I therefore maintain that the people of this Nation who enslaved the
black man, who robbed him of more than a hundred years of toil, who
perverted his moral nature, and all but extinguished in him the Divine
spark of intelligence, are morally bound to do all that is in their
power to build up his shattered manhood, to put him on his feet, as
it were, to fit him to enjoy the freedom thrust upon him so
unceremoniously, and to exercise with loyalty and patriotism the
ballot placed in his hands--the ballot, in which is wrapped up the
destiny of republican government, the perpetuity of democratic
institutions. It is the proper function of government to see to it
that its citizens are properly prepared to exercise wisely the
liberties placed in their keeping. Self-preservation would dictate as
much; for, if it be considered the better part of valor to discretely
build and maintain arsenals and forts to bar out the invader, to
prepare against the assaults of the enemy from without, how much more
imperative it is to take timely precautions to counteract the mischief
of insidious foes from within? Are our liberties placed more in
jeopardy by the assaults of an enemy who plans our destruction three
thousand miles away than of the enemy within our very bosoms? Was it
the puissance of the barbarian arms or the corruption and enervation
of the character of her people which worked the downfall of Rome? Was
it influences from _without_ or influences from _within_ which
corrupted the integrity of the people of Sparta and led to their
subjugation by a more sturdy people? Let us learn by the striking
examples of history. A people's greatness should be measured, not by
its magnificent palaces, decked out in all the gaudy splendors of art
and needless luxuries, the price of piracy or direct thievery; not in
the number of colossal fortunes accumulated out of the stipend of the
orphan and widow and the son of toil; not in the extent and richness
of its public buildings and palaces of idle amusement; not in vast
aggregations of capital in the coffers of the common treasury--capital
unnecessarily diverted from the channels of trade, extorted from the
people by the ignorance of their "wise men," who seek in vain for a
remedy for the evil, _because they do not want to find one_.[11] A
people's greatness should not be measured by these standards, for
they are the parasites which eat away the foundations of greatness and
stability. On the contrary, such greatness is to be found in the
general diffusion of wealth, the comparative contentment and
competency of the masses, and the general virtue and patriotism of the
_whole_ people. It should, therefore, manifestly be the end and aim of
legislators to so shape the machinery placed in their hands as to
operate with the least possible restraint upon the energies of the
people. It should not be the studied purpose to enrich the few at the
expense of the many, to restrain this man and give that one the
largest possible immunity. No law should be made or enforced which
would abridge my right while enlarging the right of my neighbor. That
such is the case at this time--that legislatures are manipulated in
the interest of a few, and that the great mass of the people feel only
the burdens placed upon them by their servants, who are more properly
speaking become their masters--that to such perversion of popular
sovereignty we have come, is admitted by candid men.
Therefore, that the people may more clearly know their rights and how
best to preserve them and reap their fullest benefits, they should be
instructed in the language which is the medium through which to
interpret their grand _Magna Charta_.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Since all sensible men know that the evil lies in a protective
tariff and the bulky catalogue of monopoly.