_Sorrow and Gladness._
In the parlor of the sanitarium Earl sat awaiting the coming of Eunice,
his face telling of the hopes now alive within his heart.
With an exclamation of joy Eunice ran and threw herself into his arms.
During her whole stay in the sanitarium the Negro question had not been
broached to her and her mind seemed almost normal. Earl now sought to
complete the work by letting her know that things had at last been set
right and that the color of a man's skin was to no longer be in his way.
Standing over her he whispered:
"Eunice, the American people have decreed that the door of hope shall
not be closed to any of their citizens because of the accident of
birth."
A strange glow came into Eunice's eyes.
"When will the duly authorized power see to it that the states live
according to this decree and apply one test to voters of both races,"
asked Eunice so quietly, so intelligently, that hopes sprang up in
Earl's breast.
Stooping, he kissed his wife, saying:
"I can't say, my darling; but it will surely come in time."
"Time!" shrieked Eunice. "Same old thing! Time! Bah! We shall all die in
'time.' Earl, are you turning against me, coming to me with that old
word 'time?' Ah! Earl, are you a Southerner? Time! Earl, can't you
persuade the people to let justice do now what they are waiting for
'time' to do?"
Jumping up she whirled round and round until from sheer exhaustion she
fell into her weeping husband's arms.
"O thou of little faith, counterpart of my own darker days, Eunice,
awake! Awake! The currents are forming that will sweep the caste spirit
out of the political life of the nation. Awake, my Eunice! Awake!"
plaintively spoke the grief-stricken husband to the unheeding ears of
his wife.
While hope thus wrestles with despair, we visit another parlor.
* * * * *
In the parlor of Tiara's home Ensal sat awaiting the coming of the girl
that he had loved so long and so ardently, on whom he had now called for
the purpose of asking her to link her destiny with his.
[Illustration: "Without any pretense at delivering any one of the many
thousand little preliminary speeches framed for the
occasion, Ensal bent forward and kissed Tiara."
(290-291.)]
Ensal had delivered many speeches in the course of his lifetime, but he
could hardly recall one that had given him as much trouble as the short
speech which he had sought to prepare for Tiara. Form after form of
approach came to him, but they were all rejected as being inadequate to
the occasion, so that when the beautiful Tiara appeared in the parlor
door Ensal was absolutely and literally speechless.
With love-lit eyes Tiara walked unfalteringly in his direction and, with
a smile for which Ensal the great altruist, mark you, fancied he would
have been willing to return from a thousand Africas, she extended her
hand to him in greeting.
There is a saying among the Negroes to the effect that "If you give a
Negro an inch he will take an ell." Whatever may be the meaning of that
expression, this we do know, that when Tiara gave Ensal one hand, he
_deliberately_--no, we won't make the offense one of premeditation--he,
without deliberating the matter at all, hastily took not only more of
the hand than what Tiara offered, but the other one as well.
For the sake of Ensal's reputation for poise, already a little shaken,
we fear, we fain would draw the curtain just here; but as we have all
along sought to tell the whole truth about matters herein discussed, we
will have to allow our hero's reputation to take care of itself the best
way it can. Without obtaining any more consent than that which was
plainly written in Tiara's eyes, and without any pretense at delivering
any one of the many thousand little preliminary speeches framed for the
occasion, Ensal bent forward and kissed Tiara!
Now that he has by this act lost favor with you, dear reader, we shall
expose him to the utmost!
Dropping one of Tiara's hands, an arm stole around her waist, and Ensal
kissed her again and, sad to say, again, and, vexing thought, again. And
to cap the climax, the two were joyfully married that night, and on the
next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the American Negro,
should the demented Eunice prove to be a wiser prophet than the hopeful,
irrepressible Earl; should the good people of America, North and South,
grow busy, confused or irresolute and fail, to the subversion of their
ideals, to firmly entrench the Negro in his political rights, the denial
of which, and the blight incident thereto, more than all other factors,
cause the Ethiopian in America to feel that his is indeed "The Hindered
Hand."
[Illustration: THE END]
NOTES FOR THE SERIOUS.
1. The author of THE HINDERED HAND was an eyewitness of the driving of
"Little Henry" to his death by the officers of the law.
2. The details of the Maulville burning were given the author by an
eyewitness of the tragedy, a man of national reputation among the
Negroes. Some of the more revolting features of that occurrence have
been suppressed for decency's sake. We would have been glad to eliminate
all of the details, but they have entered into the thought-life of the
Negroes, and their influence must be taken into account.
3. The experiences of Eunice upon being assigned to membership in the
Negro race are by no means overdrawn. The refined, cultured and most
highly respected young woman whose actual experiences form the
groundwork of that part of the story was not only thus accosted and
insulted by a white man of the order indicated, but was actually beaten
in a most brutal manner and fined fifteen dollars in the police court.
4. The following statement of facts lends interest to the contention of
one of the characters of THE HINDERED HAND, to the effect that the
repressionist order of things brings forward, by its own force an
undesirable type of officials.
During the recent presidential campaign the repression of the Negro was
made an issue in the state of Tennessee.
The most representative audience that assembled during the whole
campaign in the State was wrought to its highest pitch of enthusiasm by
the following outburst of eloquence from the Junior Senator of that
state: "The man that does not know the difference between a white man
and a 'nigger' is not fit to be President." The kind of a state
Legislature begotten by a campaign in which the foregoing remark marked
the highest level of the discussion so far as the popular taste was
concerned, may be judged from the following comments on that Legislature
after it adjourned:
"There were many men in the last Legislature upon whose faces
the mark of incompetency or worse was as plain as the noonday
sun."--_The Nashville American._
"It would be better for Tennessee to groan on under present
laws and let the Legislature meet no more in ten years if it
were possible under the Constitution."--_Lebanon Banner._
"Mediocrity was in the saddle, and picayunish partisan politics
held the center of the boards."--_Franklin Review-Appeal._
"The Legislature has adjourned. Many praises unto the 'Great I
Am.'"--_Murfreesboro News-Banner._
"Throwing bricks at the Legislature is a favorite pastime, but
really a brick is hardly big enough for the purpose.--_Franklin
County Truth._
"In our opinion the present Legislature will go down in history
as the most incompetent body of lawmakers that ever sat in the
capitol of Tennessee."--_Tullahoma Guardian._
"The Tennessee Legislature has adjourned and perhaps done less
to commend itself than any of its predecessors."--_Obion
Democrat._
"The people elect the legislators and the people are
responsible for the character of men they elect and send to
Nashville to make and unmake laws. We know the Legislature was
bad, even miserable, but the members got their commissions from
the people."--_Gallatin News._
"The weekly press of the state is almost unanimous in its
condemnation of the late Legislature. * * * As we have said
before, the general littleness of the body, its petty conduct
in many instances, its trades and combinations, the autocratic
methods of self-seeking members, the quarrels, the cheap
declamations and intemperate and undignified and unwarrantable
public denunciations by members who should have shown a better
sense of dignity and decency, the dishonesty in juggling with
bills, the unreliability of promises--the general record and
conduct of the body marked it as unworthy of the state or the
approval of the people. What man of established reputation
would care to be known as a member of such a Legislature as the
one recently adjourned?"--_The Nashville American._
These comments are from newspapers of the same political faith as the
Legislature.
5. The question might be raised as to whether the conditions set forth
in THE HINDERED HAND are true of some special locality or are general in
character.
As to how general the conditions complained of are one may infer from
the following editorial from a leading Southern newspaper, which never
fails in defense of the South where defense is possible.
"In South Carolina, as we have noted, the safest crime is the
crime of taking human life. The conditions are the same in
almost every Southern State. Murder and violence are the
distinguishing marks of our present-day civilization. We do not
enforce the law. We say by statute that murder must be punished
by death, and murder is rarely punished by death, or rarely
punished in any other way in this State, and in any of the
Southern States, except where the murderer is colored, or is
poor and without influence. Now this state of affairs cannot
last forever. We have grown so accustomed to the failure of
justice in cases where human life is taken by violence that we
excuse one failure and another until it will become a habit and
the strong shall prevail over the weak, and the man who slays
his brother shall be regarded as the incarnation of
power."--_The Charleston News and Courier._
6. Since the recent defeat of the ultra radical element in the national
campaign, there has been a marked improvement as to the more violent
manifestations of race prejudice, emphasizing the fact that actual
political power can procure respect.
7. It must never be concluded by those interested in these matters that
the mere suppression of mob violence approaches a solution of the race
problem. The programme of the Negro race, that must be ever kept in mind
as a factor to be dealt with, is the obtaining of all the rights and
privileges accorded by the State to other American citizens.
8. Acknowledgment is here made of the generous aid often extended the
Negro race in its efforts to rise by the liberal element among the
whites of the South. One of the most notable achievements of this
element has been the manner in which they have fought off the attacks of
the repressionists, directed against the education of the Negroes in the
public school systems of the South, so amply provided for by the
"Reconstruction" Governments.
9. The overwhelmingly predominant sentiment of the American Negroes is
to fight out their battles on these shores. The assigning of the
thoughts of the race to the uplift of Africa, as affecting the situation
in America, must be taken more as the dream of the author rather than as
representing any considerable responsible sentiment within the race,
which, as has been stated, seems at present thoroughly and unqualifiedly
American, a fact that must never be overlooked by those seeking to deal
with this grave question in a practical manner.
THE AUTHOR.
NOTES TO THE THIRD EDITION.
1. The present edition of "The Hindered Hand" differs from previous
editions in that a review of Mr. Thomas Dixon's "Leopard Spots" appears
in former editions in the form of a conversation between two of the
characters of the book, whereas in the present edition the review is
more fully given in an article appearing in the rear of this book after
the closing of the story.
No attempt is here made to deal with Mr. Dixon's second book bearing on
the race problem, it being the hope of the writer to give that matter
serious and independent attention.
2. In spite of the solemn assurances of the writer that the incidents
depicted in "The Hindered Hand" are based upon actual occurrences, there
has appeared here and there a slight air of questioning with regard to
some things related. Particularly does it seem hard to believe what is
told of the manner of the death of Bud and Foresta Harper. The writer
would be only too glad if he could but free his mind of the knowledge
that the picture is true to life in the utmost horrible detail, The
Nashville _American_, one of the leading Southern daily papers, at the
time of its occurrence, accepted the account as we have given it as
correct and made editorial comment upon the same, and no one would dare
pronounce that paper hostile to the South.
We stand ready to furnish ample evidence of the absolute correctness of
each and every portrayal to be found in "The Hindered Hand."
SUTTON E. GRIGGS,
No. 610 Webster St., Nashville, Tenn.
* * * * *
A HINDERING HAND
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE HINDERED HAND.
[Illustration]
_A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr._
* * * * *
A HINDERING HAND.
THE POOR WHITE AND THE NEGRO.
From the door of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent
spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of
the South, prior to his emancipation by the Civil War, looked out upon a
world whose honors and emoluments cast no favoring glances in his
direction.
Between the poor white and his every earthly hope stood the Negro slave.
As his thoughts now and then stole upward toward the higher social
circles, he realized that the absence of slave quarters from his home
entailed his absence from those upper realms. If in the marts of toil he
offered the labor of his hands, he felt his cheeks tingling from the
consciousness that others regarded him as being upon a level with
slaves; and at the best the market for his labor was very limited, for
the fatted slave stood in his way.
So utterly forlorn was the condition of the poor white that the enslaved
Negro felt justified in meeting his protruding claim of racial
superiority with contemptuous scorn. In the very nature of things the
strongest sort of repulsion developed between this class of whites and
the Negro slaves. The work, therefore, of overseeing and driving the
slaves on the plantations of the more wealthy whites, fitted the
habitual mood of the poor white exactly. No form of service was more
congenial to him than that of whipping intractable Negroes for their
masters.
It thus came to pass that the poor white man registered it as his first
duty to wreak vengeance upon this unbowing, scornful Negro standing
between him and all that was dear to his heart. This feeling of
hostility was handed over from father to son, from generation to
generation, until the very social atmosphere was charged with this
bitter feeling.
When the Civil War came this neglected and despised class suddenly
became important and furnished its quota of soldiers and commanders.
Nathan Bedford Forrest hailed from this class, and as a result the
American people have on their annals Fort Pillow and its savage-like
massacre. When the war was over, the poor white class began to bestir
itself in civil life, and from that class the nation derived the Hon.
Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina.
And now literature is receiving its contribution from this class of
whites, in the work being done by Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., of North
Carolina, who does not hail from the more wealthy and more friendly
element of Southern whites, but from mingling with the poorer classes,
where hatred of the Negro was a part of the legacy handed down from
parent to child. For, before Mr. Dixon's marriage he was a poor man and
was viewed by the Negroes of Raleigh, N. C., as one belonging to the
class of their hereditary enemies. It is with the outpourings of a man
who has been steeped in all the traditions of this hostile atmosphere
that we are now called upon to deal.
The goal toward which Mr. Dixon is striving is the ejection from America
of nearly ten million of his fellow citizens, against the overwhelming
majority of whom he can allege no unusual offense save that they are of
African descent.
The work of their fathers and of themselves in wresting the fields of
the South from the clutch of forest; in crimsoning American soil with
their blood in every war that has been fought; in yielding of all of the
best of their heart and mind for this country's good is, according to
Mr. Dixon, to count for naught.
HARNESSING HATRED.
It is to be conceded that the presence in large numbers of two distinct
races in the same territory under a democratic form of government
constitutes a grave problem, and profound is the wish of many of both
races that a separation might be effected. Mr. Dixon is by no means a
pioneer in desiring a separation. The great emancipator desired this
result.
But Mr. Dixon is a pioneer in the matter of seeking to attain his end by
an attempt to thoroughly discredit the Negroes, to stir up the baser
passions of men against them and to send them forth with a load of
obloquy and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over,
sufficient to appall a nation of angels.
Mark the essentially _barbarous_ character of Mr. Dixon's method of
warfare.
There is the good and the bad in all men. The world has learned since
the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the
largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there
is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary
character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to
attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there is in men.
Mankind has been grouping itself from time immemorial, according to
certain physical likenesses, and each race or group has had more or less
of prejudice against alien groups. It has been the one struggle of the
higher human instincts to enable men, in spite of differences of form,
of feature, to find a common bond of sympathy linking mankind together.
Uncle Tom's Cabin grappled in the mire of Southern slavery and lifted a
despised and helpless race into living sympathy with the white race at
the North. To cut these chords of sympathy and re-establish the old
order of repulsion, based upon the primitive feeling of race hatred is
the first item on Mr. Dixon's programme.
The adopting of a course so patently barbaric stamps Mr. Dixon as a
spiritual reversion to type, violently out of accord with the best
tendencies of his times.
The very opposite of Mr. Dixon is Professor Nathaniel F. Shaler, of
Harvard, himself a Southerner, who approaches this same grave question
of the relation of the races and seeks to prepare the American people
for the consideration of the subject free from the distorting influence
of prejudice.
A SERIOUS HANDICAP.
The cultivation of race hatreds on the part of Mr. Dixon and others who
labor with him, if successful will react on the American people sadly to
their detriment. The wonderful activity of American industries call
loudly for the world as a market for their goods. The dark races of the
world, now backward in the matter of manufacturing, must largely furnish
these markets. The cloven foot of America's race prejudice will make
itself manifest, and its owner will find it increasingly difficult to
secure a ready purchaser for his goods.
We have a hint of what will happen in the awakened darker world in the
boycott of American goods by the Chinese, because of the rude treatment
by American custom officials, of unoffending Chinese, a treatment born
of the spirit of race hatred.
MR. DIXON IS SHREWD.
Let us now take note of the various artifices resorted to by Mr. Dixon
to unhorse the Negro in the esteem of the North and bestow his place
upon those who would repress him.
In his first Anti-Negro book, Mr. Dixon was shrewd enough not to make a
Southerner who was _persona non grata_ to the North the hero of the
story. The poor old Ex-Confederate soldier, rank secessionist, the real
hero and dominating figure of his times, in this book is tied out in the
back yard, while the post of honor is given to a little boy whose father
fought most unwillingly against the Union. Mr. Dixon's choosing for a
hero this lad, whose father wore a confederate uniform over a union
heart, forcibly reminds one of the reply of the whimpering soldier whom
the captain was upbraiding for cowardice under fire.
"You act as though you were a baby," angrily shouted the captain to the
frightened soldier.
"I wish I was a baby and a gal baby at that," whimpered the soldier,
reasoning that "gal babies" were exempt not only from that battle, but
from all others.
While Mr. Dixon was in search of a hero that would be far removed from
what was regarded as treason in those days he might have made assurance
doubly sure by doing further violence to the predominating sentiment of
the day by making his hero--not his heroine--a "gal" baby.
MR. DIXON SCOFFS.
One of the brightest pages in the history of this nation will
be that which tells the story of those men and women of the North, who,
over the protests of loved ones, faced the ostracism of their kind in
the South that they might open the Negroes' eyes to the hitherto
forbidden glories of modern civilization and take care that the
spiritual was not lost sight of in the new maze of world wonders.
Withered indeed must be the soul that could scoff at such moral heroism,
and yet that is just what Mr. Dixon does. He suggests that the people
who produced a Washington and a Jefferson hardly needed missionaries to
perform work among the Negroes within their borders.
But it must be borne in mind that as a part of the propaganda in favor
of retaining the Negro in slavery, the white people of the South
thoroughly committed themselves to the doctrine of the _ineffaceable_,
_inherent_ inferiority of the Negro, and had no largeness of faith in
his possibilities along lines of higher culture. It is evident, then,
that if salvation was to come at all, it was to come from a source that
deemed such an outcome possible.
THE EARLIER CHURCH LIFE OF THE NEGRO.
Mr. Dixon essays to portray Negro worship and makes of it a very
grotesque affair.
Over against Mr. Dixon's representation of Negro worship as a heathenish
affair, we place the old plantation melodies evolved in those and
earlier days. Charged as these melodies are with true religious fervor,
they stand as a bulwark against all who would assail these earlier
gropings of the race after the unknown God. Equally misplaced are the
sneers of Mr. Dixon at the Negro minister. The center of the whole
social fabric erected by the Negro race in the South is the Negro
church, and to the zeal and power of the untutored Negro pastor and his
more favored successor is this success due. Subtract from the assets of
the Negro race those things placed there through the instrumentality of
the Negro minister and small will be the remnant.
Again, this religion and this minister at whom Mr. Dixon sneers, are
really responsible for the pacific character of the Negro population of
the South. The Negro race is a great fighting race. The native optimism
of the individual soldier causing him to discount his own chances of
being killed, coupled with his ability to be lost in his enthusiasms,
make the Negro very effective as a soldier.
Africa has been one great battle field and the internecine strife of
fighting Africans is in a measure responsible for the plight of the
Negro race in the world, as a union of forces could have the better
halted alien aggression. But in America the Negro was taught the Gospel
of peace. The singing of the American Negro is said to lack the martial
strain found in the fatherland. For the peace loving Negro, credit the
church and the Negro minister, whom Mr. Dixon would have the world
contemn.
MR. DIXON STABS TO KILL.
The late Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, once remarked (we quote
from memory), "Our population is composed of various races of mankind,
but there are four great things upon which we are all united: Love of
home, love of country, love of liberty and love of woman." The glory of
the Anglo-Saxon race has come largely of the estimate it has placed on
woman.
Mr. Dixon would break the accord of the American Negro with the rest of
his fellows by picturing him as the savage enemy of womankind. In order
to attain his end he picks up the degenerates within the Negro race and
exploits them as the normal type. In one of his books Mr. Dixon makes a
Negro school commissioner solicit a kiss from a white girl when she
applies to him for a position. The man of this character in the Negro
race is known of all men familiar with the Southern Negro to be an
exotic, for nowhere in the world does woman get more instinctive
deference from men than what Negro men render to the white women of the
South. The very fact that degenerates sometimes make them the objects of
assaults, invests them with a double measure of sympathy and deference
on the part of the great body of Negro men.
WHERE MR. DIXON'S POWER FAILS.
Mr. Dixon displays great power in depicting the emotions of the white
people when the news was borne to them that a little white girl had been
outraged and slain by a Negro.
Mr. Dixon, there were other hearts throbbing in that neighborhood! Oh,
that you had the spirit and the power to give utterance to those heart
throbs.
The Negroes, whose absence from the mob you would ascribe to sympathy
with the criminal, were in their homes sorrowing over the death of the
little one, sorrowing over the disgrace that was so undeservingly
brought upon the race, and wondering whether your mob had the right man
or was making a mistake that would leave the really guilty free to again
bring death and grief and wrath to the white race and grief and shame
unspeakable to the Negro race.
AS TO INTERMARRIAGE.
Not content with picturing the Negro race, as a race prolific with the
assaulters of women, Mr. Dixon would further have the world believe that
the highest ambition of the cultured Negro man is to find for himself a
white wife.
Perhaps it may not be out of place just here for the writer to disclose
what he considers, from close observation, to be the attitude of the
Negroes on the question of the intermarriage of the races. They do not
hold with that group of writers who contend that the Negro is
inherently inferior to the whites and that a mixture of the blood of the
races produces an essentially inferior being. Dumas, holding his own
among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English,
and Douglass, among the Americans, to their minds belie that assertion.
Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion
for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence
Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.
Accepting the race as it came to them from slavery, during which
mulattoism was forced upon it, the Negroes have gone on developing race
pride and visiting their supreme disfavor upon all who signify inability
to find thorough contentment within the race. The marriage of Frederick
Douglass to a white woman created a great gulf between himself and his
people, and it is said that so great was the alienation that Mr.
Douglass was never afterwards the orator that he had been. The delicate
network of wires over which the inner soul conveys itself to the hearts
of its hearers was totally disarranged by that marriage.
PRIDE OF RACE.
It was this feeling of race pride which the Negroes have and thoroughly
understand, that Mr. Dixon was picturing in that Northern statesman who
would not give his daughter in marriage to a Negro suitor who was his
political ally. This pride of race Mr. Dixon confounds with the
prejudice which he would glorify. How utterly absurd it is to infer that
it is inconsistent in a father to apply a totally different test to a
man aspiring to be his son-in-law to that applied to a man asking for
political rights! The rejection of a man because he lacks generations of
approved blood behind him is classed by Mr. Dixon as race
discrimination, whereas such rejections are daily made for similar
reasons within all civilized races.
BACKWARD AFRICA.
In his eager grasping after anything that would seem to serve his
purpose of thoroughly discrediting the Negro, Mr. Dixon holds up the
backwardness of Africa as an indication of the inherent inefficiency of
the Negro race. The life of the great body of the Negro race has been
cast for untold centuries in Africa. This one simple fact has meant and
still means so much. The peculiar character of the African coast,
lacking as it is in great indentations, the immense falls preventing
entrance into its greatest river, the Congo--these things have caused
Africans to be more nearly isolated from the rest of humanity than has
been the case with any other large body of people. With isolation and
lack of contact the Negroes have been compelled to rely upon their own
narrow set of ideas, while the progress of other peoples has been the
result of the union of what they begot with what strangers brought them.
The soil of Africa fed the Negroes so bountifully that they did not
acquire the habit of industry, and with a plenty of time on their hands
they warred incessantly. The hot, humid atmosphere made them black and
sapped their energies. To save them from yellow fever, nature gave them
pigment and lost them friends. Other peoples have hesitated to
intermarry with them because of their rather unfavorable showing in
personal appearance.
Some hold that a race is great in proportion to the distance it has
wandered through intermarriage from the parent stock. The great races of
the world, it is held, are the mixed races. When the Africans'
environments robbed them of comeliness and attractive qualities, they
were thrown off to their own one blood, no one courting alliance with
them.
The merest tyro of a sociologist knows that these are the essential
facts which account for the backwardness of the African people, and yet
Mr. Dixon would fasten upon Negroes the charge of inherent inferiority
because of the showing made under circumstances most adverse to the
development of civilization.
RECONSTRUCTION DAYS.
The most pathetic page in the history of the Negro race in America is
the story of reconstruction days. Kept in ignorance during the days of
slavery his one great desire under freedom was for knowledge and
self-improvement. Because the white South was spiritually unprepared to
deal with the new order of things, and because the North did not desire
to make one great military camp of the South, the Negroes en masse were
summoned forthwith to the task of establishing governments in the
Southern states in harmony with the Constitution of the United States.
The men whom the Negroes supported accomplished that task well, but in
other respects betrayed their trusts.
When corruption in office, a thing by no means confined to one era of
the world's history, became manifest, in many quarters an appeal was
made to the Negroes to help overturn the corruptionists. And be it said
to the honor of the race, the cry for good government never failed to
rally Negro support, even at a great sacrifice. When Wade Hampton was
struggling for the dethronement of corrupt governments in South
Carolina, six thousand Negroes took part in one of the parades during
his canvass for the governorship.
But some states did not have leaders prepared to deal with the Negroes
as political equals, leaders who were wise enough to appeal to the good
within the race. In such places the unreasoning, undiscriminating,
brutal, murderous mobs arose to do by violence what better and wiser men
had done elsewhere through moral suasion. Had enlightened methods been
employed the sky would not have been as portentous as it is to-day. As
it is, we have the sickening record of the atrocities of the Ku Klux
Klan and the heritage of evil and lawlessness left in its wake.
Over against Mr. Dixon's lurid and grossly misleading pictures of the
conduct of the Negroes in reconstruction days, we offer the following
tribute to the race, clipped from the columns of the Nashville _Banner_,
perhaps the most widely read daily newspaper in the state of Tennessee,
and a paper opposed to the reconstruction policy pursued by the federal
government:
"Let us do the negroes justice. There is no spirit of
bloodthirsty and incendiary revolt prevailing among them.
History and experience have shown that there never existed a
more tractable people considering all the trying conditions and
circumstances to which they have been subjected. In time of war
and in the frightful reconstruction period, when they were
urged and tempted by false friends and incentives and had
opportunities of evil appalling to contemplate, they were
restrained as perhaps no other people would have been
restrained and were more sinned against than sinning. And
to-day as a people they have no mind except to accept the best
that may come to them."
MR. DIXON VS. HON. JAMES G. BLAINE.
Mr. Dixon's hope is evidently in the young North. That the young people
may not be wedded to the traditions of their section, he would impress
the young North that what their fathers did in the way of bestowing
equality of citizenship upon the Negro, was the result of a leadership
blind with the spirit of revenge. As a complete rebuttal to this
contention on his part, we quote from an article which appeared in the
North American _Review_ from the pen of the late Hon. James G. Blaine:
"It must be borne in mind that the Republicans were urged and
hastened to measures of amelioration for the Negro by very
dangerous developments in the Southern States looking to his
re-enslavement in fact, if not in form. The year that followed
the accession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency was full of
anxiety and warning to all the lovers of justice, to all who
hoped for 'a more perfect union' of the States. In nearly every
one of the Confederate States the white inhabitants assumed
that they were to be restored to the Union with their State
governments precisely as they were when they seceded in 1861,
and that the organic change created by the Thirteenth Amendment
might be practically set aside by State legislation. In this
belief they exhibited their policy towards the Negro.
Considering all the circumstances, it would be hard to find in
history a more causeless and cruel oppression of a whole race
than was embodied in the legislation of those revived and
reconstructed State governments. Their membership was composed
wholly of the 'ruling class,' as they termed it, and, in no
small degree, of Confederate officers below the rank of
brigadier-general, who sat in the legislature in the very
uniforms which had distinguished them as enemies of the Union
upon the battlefield. Limited space forbids my transcribing the
black code wherewith they loaded their statute books. In Mr.
Lamar's State the Negroes were forbidden, under very severe
penalties, to keep firearms of any kind; they were apprenticed,
if minors, to labor, preference being given by the statute to
their 'former owners;' grown men and women were compelled to
let their labor by contract, the decision of whose terms was
wholly in the hands of the whites; and those who failed to
contract were to be seized as 'vagrants,' heavily fined, and
their labor sold by the sheriff at public outcry to the highest
bidder. The terms 'master' and 'mistress' continually recur in
the statutes, and the slavery that was thus instituted was a
far more degrading, merciless and mercenary than that which was
blotted out by the Thirteenth Amendment.
"South Carolina, whose moderation and justice are so highly
prized by Governor Hampton, enacted a code still more cruel
than that I have quoted from Mississippi. Firearms were
forbidden to the Negro, and any violation of the statute was
punished by 'fine equal to twice the value of the weapon so
unlawfully kept,' and 'if that be not immediately paid, by
corporal punishment.' It was further provided that 'no person
of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade, or business
of an artisan, mechanic, or shopkeeper, or any other trade or
employment (besides that of husbandry or that of a servant
under contract for labor), until he shall have obtained a
license from the judge of the district court, which license
shall be good for one year only.' If the license was granted to
the Negro to be a shopkeeper or peddler he was compelled to pay
$100 per annum for it, and if he pursued the rudest mechanical
calling he could do so only by the payment of a license fee of
$10 per annum. No such fees were exacted of the whites, and no
such fee of free blacks during the era of slavery. The Negro
was thus hedged in on all sides; he was down, and he was to be
kept down, and the chivalric race that denied him a fair and
honest competition in the humblest mechanical pursuit was loud
in its assertions of his inferiority and his incompetency.
"But it was reserved for Louisiana to outdo both South Carolina
and Mississippi in this horrible legislation. In that State all
agricultural laborers were compelled to make labor contracts
during the first ten days of January for the next year. The
contract was made, the laborer was not to be allowed to leave
his place of employment during the year except upon conditions
not likely to happen and easily prevented. The master was
allowed to make deductions from the servants' wages for
injuries done to 'animals and agricultural implements committed
to his care,' thus making the Negro responsible for wear and
tear. Deductions were to be made for 'bad or negligent work,'
the master being the judge. For every act of 'disobedience' a
fine of $1 was imposed on the offender, disobedience being a
technical term made to include, besides 'neglect of duty' and
'leaving home without permission,' such fearful offenses as
'impudence,' 'swearing,' 'indecent language in the presence of
the employer, his family, or agent,' or 'quarreling or fighting
with one another.' The master or his agent might assail every
ear with profaneness aimed at the Negro man and outrage every
sentiment of decency in the foul language addressed to the
Negro women; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to
resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with
impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or restore
indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of $1 for every
outburst. The 'agent' referred to in the statute is the
well-known overseer of the cotton region, and the care with
which the lawmaker of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears
and sensitive nerves should not be offended with an oath or an
indecent word from a Negro will be appreciated by all who have
heard the crack of the whip on a southern plantation.
"It is impossible to quote all the hideous provisions of these
statutes under whose operation the Negro would have been
relapsed gradually and surely into actual and admitted slavery.
Kindred legislation was attempted in a large majority of the
Confederate States, and it is not uncharitable or illogical to
assume that the ultimate re-enslavement of the race was the
fixed design of those who framed the law and of those who
attempted to enforce them.
"I am not speculating as to what would have been done or might
have been done in the Southern States if the National
Government had not intervened. I have quoted what actually was
done by legislatures under the control of Southern Democrats,
and I am only recalling history when I say that those outrages
against human nature were upheld by the Democratic party of the
country. All Democrats whose articles I am reviewing were in
various degrees, active or passive, principal or endorser,
parties to this legislation; and the fixed determination of the
Republican party to thwart and destroy it called down upon its
head all the anathemas of Democratic wrath. But it was just at
this point in our history when the Republican party was
compelled to decide whether the emancipated slave should be
protected by national power or handed over to his late master
to be dealt with in the spirit of the enactments I have quoted.
"To restore the Union on a safe foundation, and to re-establish
law and promote order, to insure justice and equal rights to
all, the Republican party was forced to its reconstruction
policy. To hesitate in its adoption was to invite and confirm
the statute of wrong and cruelty to which I have referred. The
first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving
citizenship and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that
he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should
be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have
been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in
the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro
suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and
conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as
suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates
among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment
it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite
within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at
least its trial.
"But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth
Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures
of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a
single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia,
only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in
Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where
Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in
advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be
found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would
have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it
was the legislature assembled under the reconstruction act that
gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the
unreconstructed legislature, which has his endorsement and
sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate,
not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with
grievous disabilities and passed a criminal code of barbarous
severity for his punishment.
"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts
in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of
time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June
13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867,
the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except
Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was
forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States,
composed wholly of men who had been loyal to the Government, or
the legislatures of the rebel states, composed wholly of men
who had been disloyal to the Government, should determine the
basis on which their relation to the Union should be resumed.
In such a crisis the Republican party could not hesitate; to
halt, indeed, would have been an abandonment of the principles
on which the war had been fought; to surrender to the rebel
legislatures would have been cowardly desertion of its loyal
friends and a base betrayal of the Union cause.
"And thus, in March, 1867, after and because of the rejection
of the Fourteenth Amendment by Southern legislatures, Congress
passed the reconstruction act. This was the origin of Negro
suffrage. The southern whites knowingly and willfully brought
it upon themselves. The reconstruction act would have never
been demanded had the Southern States accepted the Fourteenth
Amendment in good faith. But that amendment contained so many
provisions demanded by considerations of great national policy
that its adoption became an absolute necessity. Those who
controlled the Federal Government would have been recreant to
their plainest duty had they permitted the power of these
States to be wielded by disloyal hands against the measures
deemed essential to the security of the Union. To have
destroyed the rebellion on the battlefield and then permit it
to seize the power of eleven States and put a check on all
changes in the organic law necessary to prevent future
rebellion would have been a weak and wicked conclusion to the
grandest contest ever waged for human rights and for
constitutional liberty.
"Negro suffrage being thus made a necessity by the obduracy of
those who were in control of the South, it became a subsequent
necessity to adopt the Fifteenth Amendment. Nothing could have
been more despicable than to use the Negro to secure the
adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and then to leave them
exposed to the hazard of losing suffrage whenever those who had
attempted to re-enslave them should regain political power in
their State. Hence the Fifteenth Amendment, which never
pretended to guarantee universal suffrage, but simply forbade
that any man should lose his vote because he had once been a
slave, or because his face might be black, or because his
remote ancestors came from Africa."
Thus is scattered to the four winds, we feel, Mr. Dixon's claim that
the Negro suffrage was born of the spirit of revenge.
MR. DIXON'S WIDE HEARING.
If Mr. Dixon is so wholly false as we have set forth in this paper, the
question naturally arises as to how he could have obtained such a
hearing as has been accorded him. Of the many factors which perhaps
operated to secure this hearing we shall mention a few that commend
themselves to us as possible causes.
In the first place, there is that great American spirit of fair play.
The Negro through Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Tourgee novels had his day
in court, and it was felt to be only just that the South be heard in all
fullness.
Another factor in Mr. Dixon's success in obtaining his hearing we
believe to be his choice of the hour in the world's history in which to
demand a hearing. Queen Victoria, who had reigned so long and honorably,
had just summoned by her death all of Anglo-Saxondom to her bier, where
in a common sorrow over the departure of a great and good woman they
learned anew how that, fundamentally, they were all about alike.
About this time, too, a poet had arisen, with voice to reach, for the
time being, at least, the whole English speaking world, furnishing
another scrap of evidence that differing forms of government, wide seas
and varying problems had not affected their spiritual unity.
Anglo-Saxon lads, peacefully sleeping in the harbor of a Latin nation,
had been treacherously blown up, and at the sight of that which was
thicker than water in the hold of the Maine, the Anglo-Saxons of the
world got still closer together.
In the war that followed, the South had its first opportunity of
attesting with its blood its professions of love for the Union flag
which it had sought to lower in four years of bloody strife. As a result
of that war the Northern and controlling section of the country felt
impelled by the logic of the situation to force an unaccepted relation
upon an alien race, thereby providing the one outstanding section of the
Anglo-Saxon race with some form of a race problem.
These various happenings brought the English speaking people wondrously
close together and bridged the chasms made by internecine wars and
conflicting ideas of government.
Listen now to the dream of Thomas Carlyle as set forth in his lecture on
"The Hero" as a poet. Says he:
"England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a
small fraction of the English; in America, in New Holland, east
and west to the very antipodes, there will be a great Saxondom
covering great spaces of the globe. And now, what is it that
can keep all these together in virtually one nation, so that
they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in
brother-like intercourse, helping one another? This is justly
regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all
manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish:
what is it that will accomplish this? Acts of parliament,
administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from
us, so far as parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic,
for there is much reality in it; here, I say, is an English
king whom no time or chance, parliament or combination of
parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does he not
shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest,
gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible;
really more valuable in that point of view than any other means
or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over
all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From
Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of
parish-constable soever, English men and women are, they will
say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours, we produced
him, and we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and
kind with him.'"
As set forth here the travail of the English heart is toward a unified
Saxondom, and, as indicated above, its hour had come. It was in the hour
when the world paused in awe to see a fruition of this dream, that Mr.
Dixon asked--_insisted_ upon being heard. Anxious to know upon what
terms the South would be a contented member of this new accord, Mr.
Dixon, essaying to speak for the South, got his hearing.
What a terrible enemy to humanity does Mr. Dixon prove himself to be
when, essaying to speak for the South, he would impart to this mighty
force, with work before it worthy of the gods, a larger measure of the
virus of race prejudice. Rather, may this unified Saxondom, as the agent
of that "divinity that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will,"
choose the opening hours of its era for the purging from its great heart
all the lingering vestiges of hatred of men, and with eyes ever on the
heights above, begin the final climb of the human race toward the ideal
state. May this trumpet call to a greatness of soul in keeping with its
greatness of power, supplant the voice of Dixon the hater, summoning men
to grovellings in the valleys of a thousand years agone.
MR. DIXON'S BORROWED POWER.
We shall now make mention of a force within Mr. Dixon which, from our
point of view, enabled him to seize the passing opportunity and
challenge the attention of so great a constituency. There is nothing
more patent to an observer of life in the South than the fact that the
Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are producing in each other modifications of
many of their racial characteristics. The erstwhile, abounding humor of
the Negro has found its echo in the white race of the South and we find
the dignified L. Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, succeeded in his grasp
upon public attention by the witty, fun-loving John Sharp Williams,
while the great American humorist, Mark Twain is likewise a product of
the South.
The unquestioning faith of the Negro in the Bible is largely responsible
for the militant orthodoxy of the white Christian ministry of the South,
which makes life miserable for any mind retaining and applying to
religious matters the old Anglo-Saxon habit of investigating. "The hand
that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world," even if that
hand is a black hand. It is the boast of the Southern white preacher
that he was nursed by a black mammy.
Along emotional lines there is appearing a marked difference between the
white people of the South and those of the North. It was remarked of the
National Democratic Convention, held in the city of St. Louis in 1904,
that such an emotional convention could only have been held somewhere in
the South. The Negro race is noted for its highly emotional nature, and
while contact with the Anglo-Saxon race is toning it down, there is also
evidence that the Negro race is affecting the Anglo-Saxon.
Now, Mr. Dixon's publishers, in announcing a second book from his pen,
singled out for purposes of parade what they regarded as the most
powerful element in his work, namely, his grasp upon the emotions of
men, his ability to arouse and sway their feelings. In the long line of
men of letters of the Anglo-Saxon race we find no counterpart of Mr.
Dixon. So the question is very pertinent as to what influence has given
power to this pale-face shout exciter, this expert player upon men's
emotions, this literary (we beg a thousand pardons for seeming
billingsgate) demagogue and exotic in Anglo-Saxondom. The irony of fate!
Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., beyond doubt owes his emotional power to the very
race which he has elected to scourge.
Mr. Dixon has not breathed the Negro air of emotionalism without being
affected thereby. The Negro minister whom Mr. Dixon derides in his book
is beyond all doubt Mr. Dixon's spiritual parent so far as power is
concerned. The fact that Mr. Dixon has chosen the discomfiture of the
Negro race as the chief end of his existence is not inconsistent with
the fact that the predominating element in his power is the gift of that
race. It is perhaps this subconscious feeling on the part of Mr. Dixon
that he is in the grasp of a power not Anglo-Saxon that causes him to
rant and cry for a freedom that his own Southern brethren less affected
do not understand.
THE REAL PROBLEM.
Ah, good people of America, here is your real problem! Southern
self-interest may be relied upon to keep the Negro here; being here, no
human power can prevent him from contributing his quota to the
atmosphere of the group in which all the sons of the South must find
their environing inheritance. In the contact of the street workman with
his boss; in the cook kitchen; in the nursery room; in the concubine
chamber; in the street song; in the brothel; in the philosophizings of
the minstrel performer; in the literature which he will ere long create,
by means of which there can be contact not personal; in myriad ways the
Negro will write something upon the soul of the white man. It should be
the care of the American people that he write well.
Mr. Dixon trembles at a possible physical amalgamation and would have
the races separated. The "nay" which the nation renders to his cause so
badly plead makes the spiritual amalgamation a certainty.
That the contribution of the Negro to the coming composite Americanism
may be of the highest quality is the nation's problem.
Just now the American people seem much engrossed with the training of
the hand of the Negro, confessedly a work of tremendous moment. _But be
it known unto you, oh Americans, that it is through his mind, his
spirit, the exhalations of his soul, his dreams or lack of dreams, that
the Negro is to leave his most marked influence on American life._ Let
the use to which Mr. Dixon is putting his borrowed emotional power
recall the nation to the slumbering Negro mind that must ere long awake
to power. May the coming, then, of Mr. Dixon, the literary exotic, serve
as a reminder to the American people that they give the Negro a healthy
place, a helpful atmosphere in which to evolve all that is good within
himself and eliminate all the bad. If this be done, even Mr. Dixon will
not have lived and frothed in vain.
A FINAL WORD.
A final word with regard to Mr. Dixon. The appearance of such a man with
such a spirit might incline one to think that the world is going
backward rather than forward. But there is this redeeming thought. Mr.
Dixon represents the ultra radical element of Southern whites. The
coming of this radical of radicals before the bar of public opinion,
clothed in his garb of avowed prejudice of the rankest sort, means that
the self-satisfied isolation of the past is over, that even the radicals
desire or see the need of sympathetic consideration from other portions
of the human family--decidedly a step forward for them. The coming to
the light of this type where civilization may work upon it is in this
respect one of the most hopeful signs of America's future. Soberly the
great world consciousness will deal with this enemy of the human race,
and the universal finger of scorn that will surely in the end be pointed
toward him will render it certain that no other like unto him shall ever
arise.
If, when his services are in demand, the chiseler of the epitaph for Mr.
Dixon's tombstone desires to carve words that will be read with patience
in the coming better days of the world, let him carve thus:
"This misguided soul ignored all of the good in the aspiring
Negro; made every vicious offshoot that he pictured typical of
the entire race; presented all mistakes independent of their
environments and provocations; ignored or minimized all the
evil in the more vicious element of whites; said and did all
things which he deemed necessary to leave behind him the
greatest heritage of hatred the world has ever known. Humanity
claims him not as one of her children."
SUTTON E. GRIGGS.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
1. Words or phrases that were italized in the original are enclosed in
underscores ('_') in this edition. Words and phrases bolded in the
original are enclosed in pond signs ('#').
2. Unusual, irregular and obsolete spellings and punctuation have been
preserved as in the original text.
3. The following printer's errors have been corrected in this edition:
CHAPTER II monoply --> monopoly
CHAPTER III go there. "Well, Bud --> go there. Well, Bud
CHAPTER V "Name ... more," replied
--> "'Name ... more,' replied
CHAPTER VII missles --> missiles
totaly --> totally
CHAPTER IX astonshiment --> astonishment
CHAPTER X "I am ambitious?" --> "I am ambitious."
CHAPTER XVIII Authur --> Arthur
The fifth conclusion --> "The fifth conclusion
CHAPTER XX you?" Asked --> you?" asked
CHAPTER XXII When, therefore, --> "When, therefore,
'"What do they take --> "'What do they take
CHAPTER XXIII Two and fro --> To and fro
CHAPTER XXIV impluse --> impulse
Having at length --> "Having at length
CHAPTER XXV "Its a pity --> "It's a pity
CHAPTER XXIX she loved another! --> she loved another!"
CHAPTER XXXI Hostlity --> Hostility
CHAPTER XXXII her out a reserve --> her out of a reserve
CHAPTER XXXIV shall not vex him." --> shall not vex him.'
CHAPTER XXXV wont be gone --> won't be gone
'darkey', coon --> 'darkey', 'coon'
CHAPTER XXXVI wooes --> woos
of the Negro," --> of the Negro?"
SUPPLEMENTAL SECTION -- MR DIXON SCOFFS
brighest --> brightest
SUPPLEMENTAL SECTION -- MR DIXON'S WIDE HEARING
Parmatta --> Paramatta