_Classes in the South_
Since the war the people of the South are, from a Northern standpoint,
very poor. There are very few millionaires among them. A man who has a
bank account of fifty thousand dollars is regarded as very rich. I am
reminded of an incident which shows that the Southern people fall down
and worship a golden calf the same as their deluded brothers of the
North and West.
A few years ago I was a resident of Jacksonville, the metropolis of
Florida. Florida is a great Winter resort. The wealthy people of the
country go there for a few months or weeks in the Winter. It is
fashionable to do so. A great many wealthy northern men have acquired
valuable landed interests in Jacksonville, among them the Astors of
New York, who have a knack for pinning their interests in the soil.
The people of Jacksonville were very proud to have as a resident and
property holder, Mr. Wm. B. Astor. And Mr. Astor appeared to enjoy
immensely the worship bestowed upon his money. He built one or two
very fine buildings there, which must net him a handsome return for
his investment by this time. Mr. Astor had with him a very shrewd "Man
Friday," and this Man Friday got it into his head that he would like
to be Mayor of Jacksonville, and he sought and obtained the support of
his very powerful patron. It leaked out that Mr. Astor favored his Man
Friday for Mayor. The "business interests" of the city took the matter
"under advisement." After much "consultation" and preliminary
skirmishing, it was decided that it would be unwise to antagonize Mr.
Astor's Man Friday; and so he was placed in nomination as the
"Citizens' Candidate." He was elected by a handsome majority. I
believe it is a disputed question to-day, whether Mr. Astor's Man
Friday was, or was not, a citizen of the place at the time he was
elected Mayor. Be that as it may, it showed beyond question that the
people knew how to go down upon their knees to the golden calf.
A condition of slavery or of serfdom produces two grievous evils,
around which cluster many others of less importance, viz: the creation
of vast landed estates, and the pauperization and debasement of labor.
Pliny declared that to the creation of vast _latifundia_ (aggregated
estates) Italy owed its downfall. The same is true of the downfall of
the South and its pet institution, since they produced a powerful and
arrogant class which was not content to lord it on their vast demesnes
and over their pauper labor, but must needs carry their high-flown
notions into the councils of the nation, flaunting their gentle birth
and undulating acres in the faces of horny-handed statesmen like
Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wilson, and others.
The operations of the vast landed estates of the South produced all
the industrial disjointments which have afflicted the South since the
war. The white man was taught to look upon labor as the natural
portion of the black slave; and nothing could induce a white man to
put his hand to the plow, but the gaunt visage of starvation at his
door. He even preferred ignominious starvation to honest work; and, in
his desperate struggle to avoid the horror of the one and the disgrace
of the other, he would sink himself lower in the scale of moral infamy
than the black slave he despised. He would make of himself a monster
of cruelty or of abject servility to avoid starvation or honest work.
It was from this class of vermin that the planters secured their
"Nigger drivers" or overseers, and a more pliable, servile, cruel,
heartless set of men never existed. They were commonly known as "_poor
white trash_," or "crackers." They were most heartily and righteously
detested by the slave population. As the poor whites of the South were
fifty years ago, so they are to-day--a careless, ignorant, lazy, but
withal, arrogant set, who add nothing to the productive wealth of the
community because they are too lazy to work, and who take nothing from
that wealth because they are too poor to purchase. They have graded
human wants to a point below which man could not go without starving.
They live upon the poorest land in the South, the "piney woods," and
raise a few potatoes and corn, and a few pigs, which never grow to be
hogs, so sterile is the land upon which they are turned to "root, or
die." These characteristic pigs are derisively called "shotes" by
those who have seen their lean, lank and hungry development. They are
awful counterparts of their pauper owners. It may be taken as an index
of the quality of the soil and the condition of the people, to observe
the condition of their live stock. Strange as it may appear, the
faithful dog is the only animal which appears to thrive on "piney
woods" land. The "piney woods" gopher, which may be not
inappropriately termed a "highland turtle," is a great desideratum in
the food supply of the pauper denizens of these portions of the South.
There is nothing enticing about the appearance of the gopher. But his
flesh, properly cooked, is passably palatable.
The poor white population of the South who live in the piney woods are
sunk in the lowest ignorance, and practice vices too heinous to be
breathed. They have no schools, and their mental condition hardly
warrants the charitable inference that they would profit much if they
were supplied with them. Still, I would like to see the experiment
tried. Their horrible poverty, their appalling illiteracy, their
deplorable moral enervation, deserve the pity of mankind and the
assistance of philanthropic men and a thoughtful government. Though
sunk to the lowest moral scale, _they are men_, and nothing should be
omitted to improve their condition and make them more useful members
of the communities in which they are now more than an incubus.
It may not be out of place here to state that the Kuklux Klan, the
White Liners League, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other
lawless gangs which have in the past fifteen years made Southern
chivalry a by-word and reproach among the nations of the earth, were
largely recruited from this idle, vicious, ignorant class of
Southerners. They needed no preparation for the bloody work
perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than
Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the
condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and
receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than
themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very
substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of
the organized chivalrous brigands (as they had been of the slave
oligarch), whose superior intelligence made them blush at the
lawlessness they inspired, and who, therefore, gladly transferred to
other hands the execution of those deeds of blood and death which make
men shudder even now to think of them. It was long a common saying
among the black population of the South that "I'd rudder be a niggah
den a po' w'ite man!" and they were wise in their preference.
It is safe to say, that the peasantry of no country claiming to be
civilized stands more in need of the labors of the schoolmaster and
the preacher, than do the so-called "poor white trash" of the South.
On their account, if no other, I am an advocate of a compulsory system
of education, a National Board of Education, and a very large National
appropriation for common school and industrial education.
I name this class first because it is the very lowest.
Next to this class is the great labor force of the South, the class
upon whose ample shoulders have fallen the weight of Southern labor
and inhumanity for lo! two hundred years--_the black man_. Time was,
yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of _one_
condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich
men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of
whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God
expended no more time or ingenuity. Up to the close of the Rebellion,
of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican
government to their center, the great black population were truly the
"mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial
burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn
root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now
become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to
"dwell in a strange land, among strangers," to endure, like the
children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin
life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in
making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world,
the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and
pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the
selfishness and cupidity of man. And to-day, as in the dark days of
the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great
producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet
indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.
A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been
dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high
office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State
could very well dispense with her black population. That population
outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State
has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years
which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production
and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at
the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief
authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed
with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of
it--the most valuable part. And the time will come when it will hold
its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy
of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him
best. Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the
people this great magnus in the Nation's councils would supersede in
their divine rights.
When the war closed, as I said, the great black population of the
South was distinctively a laboring class. It owned no lands, houses,
banks, stores, or live stock, or other wealth. Not only was it the
distinctively laboring class but the distinctively pauper class. It
had neither money, intelligence nor morals with which to begin the
hard struggle of life. It was absolutely at the bottom of the social
ladder. It possessed nothing but health and muscle.
I have frequently contemplated with profound amazement the momentous
mass of subjected human force, a force which had been educated by the
lash and the bloodhound to despise labor, which was thrown upon itself
by the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender of
Robert E. Lee. Nothing in the history of mankind is at all comparable,
an exact counterpart, in all particulars, to that great event. A
slavery of two hundred years had dwarfed the intelligence and morality
of this people, and made them to look upon labor as the most baneful
of all the curses a just God can inflict upon humankind; and they were
turned loose upon the land, without a dollar in their hands, and, like
the great Christ and the fowls of the air, without a place to lay
their head.
And yet to-day, this people, who, only a few years ago, were bankrupts
in morality, in intelligence, and in wealth, have leaped forward in
the battle of progress like _veterans_; have built magnificent
churches, with a membership of over two million souls; have preachers,
learned and eloquent; have professors in colleges by the hundreds and
schoolmasters by the thousands; have accumulated large landed
interests in country, town and city; have established banking houses
and railroads; manage large coal, grocery and merchant tailoring
businesses; conduct with ability and success large and influential
newspaper enterprises; in short, have come, and that very rapidly,
into sharp competition with white men (who have the prestige of a
thousand years of civilization and opportunity) in all the industrial
interests which make a people great, respected and feared. The
metamorphosis has been rapid, marvelous, astounding. Their home life
has been largely transformed into the quality of purity and refinement
which should characterize the home; they have now successful farmers,
merchants, ministers, lawyers, editors, educators, physicians,
legislators--in short, they have entered every avenue of industry and
thought. Their efforts yet crude and their grasp uncertain, but they
are in the field of competition, and will remain there and acquit
themselves manfully.
Of course I speak in general terms of the progress the colored people
have made. Individual effort and success are the indicators of the
vitality and genius of a people. When individuals rise out of the
indistinguishable mass and make their mark, we may rest assured that
the mass is rich and capable of unlimited production. The great mass
of every government, of every people, while adding to and creating
greatness, go down in history unmentioned. But their glory, their
genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few
great spirits their fortunate condition produced. The governments of
antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were
intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into
vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been
handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred
years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like
Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, or Fulton. And this may
be true. There can now be no question that the African race in the
United States possess every element of vitality and genius possessed
by their fellow citizens of other races, and any calculation of race
possibilities in this country which assumes that they will remain
indefinitely the "mudsills" only of society will prove more brittle
than ropes of sand.
At this time the colored people of the South are largely the
industrial class; that is, they are the producing class. They are
principally the agriculturists of the South; consequently, being
wedded to the soil by life-long association and interest, and being
principally the laboring class, they will naturally invest their
surplus earnings in the purchase of the soil. Herein lies the great
hope of the future. For the man who owns the soil largely owns and
dictates to the men who are compelled to live upon it and derive
their subsistence from it. The colored people of the South recognize
this fact. And if there is any one idiosyncrasy more marked than
another among them, it is their mania for buying land. They all live
and labor in the cheerful anticipation of some day owning a home, a
farm of their own. As the race grows in intelligence this mania for
land owning becomes more and more pronounced. At first their
impecuniosity will compel them to purchase poor hill-lands, but they
will eventually get their grip upon the rich alluvial lands.
The class next to the great black class is the _small white farmers_.
This class is composed of some of the "best families" of the South who
were thrown upon their resources of brain and muscle by the results of
the war, and of some of the worst families drawn from the more thrifty
poor white class. Southern political economists labor hard to make it
appear that the vastly increased production of wealth in the South
since the war is to be traced largely to the phenomenally increased
percentum of small white farmers, but the assumption is too
transparent to impose upon any save those most ignorant of the
industrial conditions of the South, and the marvelous adaptability to
the new conditions shown by colored men. I grant that these small
white farmers, who were almost too inconsiderable in numbers to be
taken into account before the war, have added largely to the
development of the country and the production of wealth; but that the
tremendous gains of free labor as against slave labor are to be placed
principally to their intelligence and industry is too absurd to be
seriously debated. The Charleston (S.C.) _News and Courier_, a
pronounced anti-negro newspaper, recently made such a charge in all
seriousness. The struggle for supremacy will largely come between the
small white and black farmer; because each recurring year will augment
the number of each class of small holders. A condition of freedom and
open competition makes the fight equal, in many respects. Which will
prove the more successful small holder, the black or the white?
The fourth class is composed of the _hereditary land-lords_ of the
South; the gentlemen with flowing locks, gentle blood and irascible
tempers, who appeal to the code of honor (in times past) to settle
small differences with their equals and shoot down their inferiors
without premeditation or compunction, and who drown their sorrows, as
well as their joviality in rye or Bourbon whiskey; the gentlemen who
claim consanguinity with Europe's titled sharks, and vaunt their
chivalry in contrast to the peasant or yeoman blood of all other
Americans; the gentlemen who got their broad acres (however they came
by their peculiar blood) by robbing black men, women and children of
the produce of their toil under the system of slavery, and who
maintain themselves in their reduced condition by driving hard
bargains with white and black labor either as planters or
shop-keepers, often as both, the dual occupations more effectually
enabling them to make unreasonable contracts and exactions of those
they live to victimize. They are the gentlemen who constantly declare
that "this is a white man's government," and that "the Negro must be
made to keep his place." They are the gentlemen who have their grip
upon the throat of Southern labor; who hold vast areas of land, the
product of robbery, for a rise in values; who run the stores and
torture the small farmer to death by usurious charges for necessaries;
these are the gentlemen who are opposed to the new conditions
resultant from the war which their Hotspur impetuosity and Shylock
greed made possible. In short, these gentlemen comprise the moneyed
class. They are the gentlemen who are hastening the conflict of labor
and capital in the South. And, when the black laborer and the white
laborer come to their senses, join issues with the common enemy and
pitch the tent of battle, then will come the tug of war.
But the large land-owners and tradesmen of the South will not in the
future belong exclusively to the class of persons I have described. On
the contrary this class of hereditary land-owners will be sensibly
diminished and their places be taken by successful recruits from the
ranks of small white and black farmers. Indeed, I confess, I strongly
incline to the belief that the black man of the South will eventually
become the large land-holding class, and, therefore, the future
tyrants of labor in that section. All the indications strongly point
to such a possibility. It is estimated that, already, the colored
people own, in the cotton growing states, 2,680,800 acres, the result
of seventeen years of thrift, economy, and judicious management; while
in the State of Georgia alone they own, it is reliably estimated,
680,000 acres of land, and pay taxes on $9,000,000 worth of property.
Dr. Alexander Crummell, a most learned African, in a very interesting
pamphlet drawn out by the malicious misstatements of Dr. Tucker,
before referred to by me, makes the following deductions and
statements, to wit:
Let me suggest here another estimate of this landed property
of the Negro, acquired _since_ emancipation. Taking the old
slave States in the general, there has been a large
acquisition of land in each and all of them. In the State of
Georgia, as we have just seen, it was 680,000 acres. Let us
put the figure as low as 400,000 for each State--for the
purchase of farm lands has been everywhere a passion with
the freedman--this 400,000 acres multiplied into 14, _i.e._
the number of the chief Southern States, shows an aggregate
of 5,600,000 acres of land, the acquisition of the black
race in less than twenty years.
But Dr. Tucker will observe a further fact of magnitude in
this connection: It is the increased PRODUCTION which has
been developed on the part of the freedman since
emancipation. I present but _one_ staple, and for the reason
that it is almost exclusively the result of $1.
I will take the five years immediately preceding the late
civil war and compare them with the five years preceeding
the last year's census-taking; and the contrast in the
number of cotton-bales produced will show the industry and
thrift of the black race as a consequent on the gift of
freedom:
_Years_ _Bales_
1857 2,939,519
1858 3,113,962
1859 3,851,481
1860 4,669,770
1861 3,656,006
----------
Total 18,230,738
_Years_ _Bales_
1878 4,811,265
1879 5,073,531
1880 5,757,397
1881 6,589,329
1882 5,435,845
-----------
The five years' work of _freedom_ 27,667,367
The five years' work of _slavery_ 18,230,738
----------
Balance in favor of freedom 9,436,629
Now this item of production is a positive disproof of Dr.
Tucker's statement, "that the average level in material
prosperity is but little higher than it was before the war."
Here is the fact that the Freedman has produced one-third
more in five years than he did in the same time when a
slave!
Another view of this matter is still more striking. The
excess of yield in cotton in seven years [_i.e._, from 1875
to 1882] over the seven years [_i.e._, from 1854 to 1861]
is 17,091,000 bales, being $1. If Dr. Tucker will glance at
the great increase of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops
South, as shown in Agricultural Reports from 1865 to 1882,
and reflect that NEGROES have been the producers of these
crops, he will understand their indignation at his
outrageous charges of "laziness and vagabondage:" and
perhaps he will listen to their demand that he shall take
back the unjust and injurious imputations which, without
knowledge and discrimination, he makes against a whole race
of people.
This impulse to thrift on the part of the Freedmen was no
tardy and reluctant disposition. It was the _immediate_
offspring of freedom.
It is not possible even to approximate the landed acquisitions of the
colored people, but that they have been large purchasers of small
holdings will readily be admitted by all candid persons who are
acquainted with the intense pastoral nature of the people, their
constant thrift, and their deepseated determination to own their own
homes. If we assume, with Dr. Crummell, that in the past seventeen
years, the hardest, most disadvantageous years they will ever again be
compelled to go through, they have come into possession of 5,600,000
acres, the gain in the next seventeen years must be vastly greater. At
any rate, we are free to place the holdings in the next fifty years at
not less than 35,000,000 acres, and the probability is that it will be
vastly more.
In the _Popular Science Monthly_ for October 1881, Mr. J. Stahl
Patterson, in an article on the "Movement of the Colored Population,"
says: "It would seem that in the industrial aspects of the case the
white and colored men may be, under certain circumstances, the
complement of each other." Again: "There are two distinct classes of
colored economists. One is satisfied with dependence on others for
employment, the other affects independent homes, and struggles to
secure them, however humble. Some even acquire wealth."
In the same monthly for February, 1883, Prof. E.W. Gilliam has a long
article on the "African in the United States," in which he does all he
can to make wider the breach between the blacks and the whites. He has
very little good to say of the black man. But he was forced to make
the following admissions, viz:
"The blacks are an improving race, and the throb of aspiration is
quickening. * * * Advancement in mental training and in economic
science must needs be slow but there _is_ advancement."
The learned professor makes the interesting calculation that the
blacks in the Southern States will increase from 6,000,000 in 1880, to
192,000,000, in 1980; while the whites in the South, in 1880,
12,000,000, will number only 96,000,000, in 1980. The learned
professor infers that this vast army will be "doomed to remain where
they have been, and be hewers of wood and drawers of water," because
they form a "distinct alien race." I think, if the professor will wait
until 1980, he will find that this "alien race," which profligate
white men have done and are doing so much to amalgamate with their own
race, will not only increase approximately as he has figured it out,
in numbers, but in wealth as well.
The future landlord and capitalist of the South are no longer confined
to the white race: the black man has become a factor, and he must be
counted.