“Mr. Davis came in from an early visit to his office and went into his room, where I found him an hour afterwards on his knees in earnest prayer ‘for the divine support I need so sorely’ [as he said].... ‘The inauguration took place at twelve o’clock.’ [The anterior proceedings having been described, the contemporary account she quotes goes on thus:]“The president-elect then delivered his inaugural address. It was characterized by great dignity, united with much feeling and grace, especially the closing sentence. Throwing up his eyes and hands to heaven he said, ‘With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the providence which has so visibly protected the confederacy during its brief but eventful career,to Thee, O God, I trustingly commit myself, and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and its cause.’”
“Mr. Davis came in from an early visit to his office and went into his room, where I found him an hour afterwards on his knees in earnest prayer ‘for the divine support I need so sorely’ [as he said].... ‘The inauguration took place at twelve o’clock.’ [The anterior proceedings having been described, the contemporary account she quotes goes on thus:]
“The president-elect then delivered his inaugural address. It was characterized by great dignity, united with much feeling and grace, especially the closing sentence. Throwing up his eyes and hands to heaven he said, ‘With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the providence which has so visibly protected the confederacy during its brief but eventful career,to Thee, O God, I trustingly commit myself, and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and its cause.’”
Then she adds:
“Thus Mr. Davis entered on his martyrdom. As he stood pale and emaciated, dedicating himself to the service of the confederacy, evidently forgetful of everything but his sacred oath, he seemed to me a willing victim going to his funeral pyre; and the idea so affected me that, making some excuse, I regained my carriage and went home.”[135]
So did this thrice-noble man sacrifice his dearest wishes and with superhuman resolution step into the arena at the command of the fates, to be the target of their wrath against his people.
He was like Hamlet upon whom destiny had imposed a high task far beyond his powers. We can believe that to the end of his presidency Davis sorely sighed more and more often:
“The time is out of joint: O cursed spiteThat ever I was born to set it right.”
His official career from beginning to end was full of fatal mistakes. But in every one of these he did the right—to use Lincoln’s grand word—as God gave him to see it. This will more and more through all the future turn his failure to glory. He will be like Hector, who draws the admiration of the world a thousand-fold more than Achilles, his vanquisher.[136]
At the last, when the sword of Grant had beaten down the sword of Lee, and all of us, it seemed to me, knew that it was the highest duty of patriotism to yield our arms, he was for fighting on. Casabianca wouldnot go with those who were leaving the burning ship until his dead father bade him go. Davis would not abandon the cause of his nation without its command; and it could give none; for it was dead and he did not know it. He was trying his hardest to reach the west, intent upon prosecuting the war from a new base, when he was taken.
His capture was accepted by the southern people as the fall of the blue cross. Every man, woman, and child old enough to think, in the late confederacy became sick and faint. Sorrow after sorrow, and grief after grief tore their hearts. The first was the thought, for all the blood we have poured out during four years of such effort on the battlefield as the world never knew before we have lost; we have been beaten, and we are subjugated. The next thought that pierced was, the property that made our homes the sweetest and most comfortable on earth has all been destroyed, and for the rest of their lives our dear ones must pine in hardship and misery. O how this pang actually killed many old men and women! It seems to me that heart failure commenced in the south with the great harvest it gathered in the first five years succeeding the war. But the agony of agonies was that the negroes were put over us. Those five years—particularly the last three of them—are the one ugly dream of my life. To pay his debts, which would have been a small thing to him had he kept his slaves, but which were now monsters, my father overworked himself, while trying to make a cotton crop with freedmen. I did not learn of his imprudence until I had been summoned to see him die. There was something like this in every family. A night of impoverishment, misery, contumely, and insult descended upon us, and the sun would not rise. I kept the stoutest heart that I could. Now and then it was acomforting day dream to imagine how well it would have been for me if I had fallen in the front of my men on the second day of Gettysburg, when I was trying my utmost to make them do the impossibility of charging across the narrow bog staying us, and mixing with the men in blue lining the other side. Had that happened to me I should never have known, in the flesh, of our decisive defeats, nor of the trials of my people after they laid down arms; and even if my grave could not have been found, there would have been at a place here and there for some years honorable mention of me with tears on Memorial Day, to gladden my spirit taking note. This would sometimes be my thought, and thousands of others had like thoughts.
Early in this time of sorrow and suffering the women of the south instituted Memorial Day. Each year when it comes they do rites of remembrance to the fallen soldiers of the confederacy. These soldiers lie in every graveyard from the Ohio and Potomac to the Rio Grande. When the day comes these women in their unforgetting love assemble the people, have praises and lamentations of their dead darlings fitly spoken; and then they deck their graves with the fairest flowers of spring. It is an annual holiday, sacred to grief for our heroes who died in vain. It is the fairest, tenderest, and sweetest testimonial of love ever given—love from those who have nothing else to bestow, lavished upon those who can make no return; and it is further the most splendid and glorious, being the co-operative demonstration of a whole people of “true lovers.”[137]
I cannot say where and when the observance of Memorial Day began. Perhaps Miss Davidson correctly asserts that it was in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1866.[138]It had reached its height at Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1867, when as prelude to decorating the graves in Magnolia cemetery, Timrod’s hymn, containing this oft-quoted passage, was sung:
“Behold! your sisters bring their tears,And these memorial blooms.“Small tributes! but your shades shall smileMore proudly on these wreaths to-day,Than when some cannon-moulded pileShall overlook this bay.“Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!There is no holier spot of groundThan where defeated valor lies,By mourning beauty crowned.”
The “true lovers” could no more forget their living leader in prison than they could forget their soldiers in the grave. “Out of sight, out of mind” could not be said of Davis during his two years’ confinement. The concern of his people mounted steadily. They made all his sufferings their own, lamenting and praying for him as a loved father. When he was about to be released on bond the news gave the south a wilder joythan did the unexpected victory of First Manassas. He was brought in custody to Richmond by a James river steamboat. Mrs. Davis thus describes how he was received:
“A great concourse of people had assembled. From the wharf to the Spottswood Hotel there was a sea of heads—room had to be made by the mounted police for the carriages. The windows were crowded, and even on to the roofs people had climbed. Every head was bared. The ladies were shedding tears.... When Mr. Davis reached the Spottswood Hotel, where rooms had been provided for us, the crowd opened and the beloved prisoner walked through; the people stood uncovered for at least a mile up and down Main street. As he passed, one and another put out a hand and lightly touched his coat. As I left the carriage a low voice said: ‘Hats off, Virginians,’ and again every head was bared. This noble sympathy and clinging affection repaid us for many moments of bitter anguish.When Mr. Davis was released, one gentleman jumped upon the box and drove the carriage which brought him back to the hotel, and other gentlemen ran after him and shouted themselves hoarse. Our people poured into the hotel in a steady stream to congratulate, and many embraced him.”
“A great concourse of people had assembled. From the wharf to the Spottswood Hotel there was a sea of heads—room had to be made by the mounted police for the carriages. The windows were crowded, and even on to the roofs people had climbed. Every head was bared. The ladies were shedding tears.... When Mr. Davis reached the Spottswood Hotel, where rooms had been provided for us, the crowd opened and the beloved prisoner walked through; the people stood uncovered for at least a mile up and down Main street. As he passed, one and another put out a hand and lightly touched his coat. As I left the carriage a low voice said: ‘Hats off, Virginians,’ and again every head was bared. This noble sympathy and clinging affection repaid us for many moments of bitter anguish.
When Mr. Davis was released, one gentleman jumped upon the box and drove the carriage which brought him back to the hotel, and other gentlemen ran after him and shouted themselves hoarse. Our people poured into the hotel in a steady stream to congratulate, and many embraced him.”
Bear in mind the people, and where it was, and when it was, from whom this show of respect so great, so earnest and unfeigned, spontaneously came. They were of that part of the south which had lost more in blood, property, and devastation than any other, and who, one might think, were too embittered against their defeated leader to show him anything but disapproval. They were also of a State which had not been readmitted into the union. The axe was suspended over their necks by a party seeking excuses for letting it fall; by a party to whom Davis was the most hated of men. Surely these Virginians who thus risked their fortunes were the truest of lovers.
No reader of mine, though he search history and encyclopedias through and through for years, can find anything like the Southern Memorial Day and the honors given Davis in Richmond as we have just told. They unmistakably mark an ascent of humanity. But it is not my purpose to emphasize them as specially signalizing the south. Their great lesson is not learned if it is not understood that they are glories of federal government. Under any other form of government such demonstrations would be suppressed as disloyal and treasonable.
For more than twenty-two years after this auspicious day the ex-president of the southern confederacy lived most of his time among his people. Their love for him steadily grew. He proved worthy of it. He would not accept the bounty they stood ready to shower upon him, and he was poor and without money-making faculty. When Mississippi wanted to make him United States senator again, he felt that he was too old and broken to serve the State efficiently, and he declined. It occurred to all of us that he sorely needed the salary of the place. He struggled on under the load of poverty and ill-health. All of us knew that the latter came from that cruel and inhuman imprisonment, and the more he suffered the closer our hearts drew to him. The cause of his section he justified to the last, and with all his energy. His book defending that cause was written under difficulty almost insurmountable by man. His character as one tried in every way and found true came out clearer and clearer. He showed more and more of spotless virtue, becoming all the while to us a stronger justification of the fight we had made under him for the lost cause. We thought to ourselves with pride that the world will some day learn what a good man he was, and that will be our complete vindication from the slanders now current.
Let me tell of some of the other demonstrations made over him. I witnessed that in Atlanta, in 1886. April 30, all the State of Georgia was there, as it seemed. Old and young, white and colored, waited impatiently for the railroad train bringing him from Montgomery. My wife, divining the rare sight thus to be gained, secured a station out of town where she could see the train pass without obstruction. As long as she lived afterwards, his car, prodigally and appropriately bedecked with the fairest May flowers of the sunny south, was her proverb for that which pleases too greatly for description.
When he had come out of his bower of flowers and we knew he was resting, we felt as if the angel of the Lord was here with tidings of great joy for all our people.
Who can describe the rejoicing of the next day that came forth everywhere as Mr. Davis showed himself to his people! I have seen popular outbursts of gladness, but nothing like this. It surpassed in profundity of feeling and sustained energy and flow that which seemed to come straight out of the ground when, in 1884, we knew at last that Cleveland was elected, and the south was convulsed with an ecstasy of happy surprise. The women and men who had tasted the war all crying; all pouring benedictions upon his gray hairs as they came in sight; “God bless him” displayed on every corner. I am utterly unable adequately to report this grand occasion. I will tell only a few things that I saw or heard of. He passed by a long line of school-children in Peachtree street. They made the sincere and decided demonstrations of children whose pleasure is at its height. But what was especially noticeable to me here was the behavior in the section of colored children. Their delight seemed, if that were possible, to be somewhat wilder and more unrestrained than that of the white children. The occurrence has come back to me athousand times. Is it to be explained by Mr. Davis’s character as a master, to whom, as to all really typical masters, his slaves were but a little lower in his affections than his children? Or was it unconscious approval of the resistance by the south with all her might against the emancipation proclamation, the end of which may be the wholesale destruction of the black race in America, such approval being suggested by a cosmic influence as yet inexplicable?
When he was going through Mrs. Hill’s yard to enter her house, little girls on each side of the walk threw bouquets before him, every one begging, “Mr. Davis, please step on my flowers.” The feeble man tried to gratify all of them. The flowers that he did step on were eagerly caught up by the owners, to be treasured as the dearest of relics and keepsakes.
I was told that some old grayhead who met him during the day, gently raised Mr. Davis’s hands to his lips, saying, “Let me kiss the hands that were manacled for me,” and as he kissed his tears fell in a flood.
What we have just described occurred in Georgia—a State in which of all during the brothers’ war the most formidable opposition to his administration was developed. This opposition was lead or upheld by Toombs, both the Stephenses, and Brown—the most influential of all the Georgians at that time. That for all this the State gave him this wonderful ovation shows how deep and strong is the southern sentiment that glorifies the lost cause. It was Henry Grady, a Georgian revering and treasuring the men I have just mentioned, who when Mr. Davis was in Atlanta, in 1886, called him the uncrowned king of our hearts, the words evoking plaudits from the entire south. And remember that Georgia voted for Greeley in 1872, although Toombs and the Stephenses opposed him. I think I was representativeof the dominant public feeling at the time. While my companions and I avowed the fullest confidence in Greeley’s integrity and statesmanship, we each said we were in haste to honor with our votes the northern man who got Mr. Davis bailed and became one of his sureties. And Georgia is among the States which has made June 3 a legal holiday, because it is the anniversary of Mr. Davis’s birth.
Some northern paper sympathetically described the reception given Mr. Davis in Atlanta, in 1886, as the swan song of the southern confederacy. And to me it has always been the funeral of the old south. But there were other obsequies and swan songs. When he died December 6, 1889, the south sorrowed as it never sorrowed before. We are pleased to quote from the memoir, the noblest monument a true wife has ever given a dead husband—far nobler, more splendid and immortal than that which Artemisia gave Mausolus. Mrs. Davis tells:
“Floral offerings came from all quarters of our country. The orphan asylum, the colleges, the societies, drew upon their little stores to deck his quiet resting-place. Many thousands passed weeping by the bier where he lay in state, in his suit of confederate gray, guarded by the men who had fought for the cause he loved, and who revered his honest, self-denying, devoted life. His old comrades in arms came by thousands to mingle their tears with ours. The governors of nine states came to bear him to his rest. The clergy of all denominations came to pray that his rest be peaceful, and to testify their respect for and faith in him. Fifty thousand people lined the streets as the catafalque passed. Few, if any, dry eyes looked their last upon him who had given them his life’s service. The noble army of the West and that of Northern Virginia escorted him for the last time, and the Washington Artillery, now gray-haired men, were the guard of honor to his bier. The eloquentBishops of Louisiana and Mississippi, and the clergy of all denominations, delivered short eulogies upon him to weeping thousands, and the strains of ‘Rock of Ages,’ once more bore up a great spirit in its flight to Him who gave, sustained, and took it again to himself.”
These aptly chosen words come short of describing the general grief. Nobody can yet tell all of it. One but feebly expresses it by saying that when Jefferson Davis died, broken-hearted men, women, and children gathered in funeral assemblies everywhere in that vast area from Mason and Dixon’s line on the north to the Mexican border on the south, wept over his bier, and hung the air and heavens with black.
In 1893 his remains were carried to Richmond, the dead capital of the dead Confederate States, and there reinterred. The ceremonies were impressive, and thoroughly in keeping with those I have narrated in the foregoing.
And in 1896 the corner-stone of a monument to him was laid in Monroe Park. On this occasion General Stephen D. Lee delivered an oration which, as a monument itself, will long outlast the stone one.
Thus has the overthrown and most evilly entreated president of the Confederate States become, by some marvel of fortune, far more than the proudest conqueror. The honors which every one who “can above himself erect himself” estimates as the very richest, Mr. Davis has had given him more prodigally than any other man. These honors that make everything else shabby in appearance and cheap, are the spontaneous offerings of sincere love from those who know us. Smiles, tender words, prayers for blessing, tears of joy, admiration, pity, and sympathy, flowers—how dear are any of these from a friend, brother, sister, father, mother, sweetheart, wife, child.For almost a generation all these tokens were given the ex-president by everybody in the south, and each year to his death they were given in greater profusion. And really the whole south mourned at his burial. Our wives, mothers, and other dear ones give us up, and we give, them up, to fight and perhaps die for the country. We are so made that we love the great brotherhood better than we do ourselves. And so an offering of regard from that brotherhood—to be made to feel that throughout the whole of it one is recognized as most worthy of love—the true man would prize this above every other. Before this time this great honor has been given only by happy ones to their victors—to such as Washington, Lincoln, Grant. But the south has begun a new era. In the misery and ruin of her subjugation she magnifies her deposed chief. Much of the applause heaped upon the victor is selfish and feigned, but the whole of that given the conquered hero comes direct and straight from the hearts of his countrymen. It seems, therefore, to me that this decoration of the conquered hero is the crown of crowns of this world. It is Davis’s historical uniqueness that he has won this lone crown.
The achievement is so counter to common-sense that it is not yet credited nor understood. I cannot help believing that when all the fog raised by the brothers’ war has cleared away, and our historians tell what brought and what followed that war with unclouded vision of cosmic agency, that Jefferson Davis will be permanently placed high in the American temple of fame. There he will be the world’s contemplation, showing something like Hester Prynne. As what was at first to her the branding placard of guilt turned to a badge of the greatest righteousness, so has that which was unutterable obloquy and disgrace to him become unparalleled fortune and glory.
THE CURSE OF SLAVERY TO THE WHITE, AND ITS BLESSING TO THE NEGRO
Themaster got the curse and the negro the blessing of slavery.
We set out by mentioning how certain ants have been injured by becoming masters. Before this they were doubtless the equals of any non-slaveholding tribe in self-maintenance. Now they “are waited upon and fed by their slaves, and when the slaves are taken away the masters perish miserably.”[139]It did not become so bad as this with human slaveholders; but the consequent disadvantage was very great, as we shall now exemplify with some detail. We shall throughout keep to the average and typical man and woman. And for brevity’s sake, we shall not look beyond the domestic and agricultural spheres, because when the reader has learned what slavery did in these, he can of himself easily add the little required to make complete statement of its entire effect.
In non-slave communities baby is tended only by mother and near relatives. Though petted and indulged, it is steadily constrained into more obedience to those who tend it. In due time the child is taking care of itself in many things, and is also doing light chores. Until the parental roof has been left he or she has every day something to do. What we may call the open-air home-work is done by the boys, and the inside by thegirls. But in the old south baby commenced its life as a slaveholder with a nurse that it learned to command by inarticulate cries and signs before it could talk. And to the end, as grandfather or grandmother, self-service in many common things, as is usual with all other people, was never learned, but great expertness in getting these things done by slaves was learned instead.
I was only fifteen years old in 1851, when I entered the sophomore class in Princeton College, never having been out of the south before. Of course much of my time at first was consumed in observing and thinking over many sights very novel and strange to me. I came in August. Soon afterwards I saw them saving their Indian corn. In the south we “pulled” the fodder, and some weeks later we “pulled” the corn, leaving the stripped stalks standing. But the New Jersey farmers, without removing the blades or the ears, cut the stalks down, put them up in stacks, and after a while hauled them to the barn. This was such a wonder that I described it minutely in a letter to my mother. The next great surprise that I had was to note the lady of the family and her daughters doing everything in and about the house, which I used to see at home only the negroes do. They were marvellously more expert and neat in despatch than the negroes. Their easy and, as it seemed, effortless way of getting through their daily employment grew upon me steadily. What I intently observed in those times and reflected over much subsequently, I have had a recent experience to refresh and enforce. In the summer of 1902 two ladies from Pennsylvania took a house in Atlanta next to mine. They had never before been in the south. I found out these lonely strangers at once, and was soon seeing much of them. They kept no servant. The two did all the household tasks. The younger washed the clothes. This is something which but few city southernladies, except those whose ancestors were not slaveholders, have ever consented to do. The laundry of even the poorest families in our towns is nearly always the care of a negro washerwoman. Although their work was every day punctually done by my two new-found friends, and their house always the tidiest, like the New Jersey ladies of my boyhood at Princeton, they were never flustered nor worried, but were always pleasant and agreeable.
Plainly they lived in far more ease and comfort than the native housekeepers. There are two classes of the latter. In one is the woman who is greatly plagued by the waste, dishonesty, and eye-service of her negro cook and housemaid, and always in craven fear that she will wake up some morning to know that they have taken French leave. In the other class is the woman who often must, with the help only of her children, do everything at home. What a laborious, fatiguing botch they make of it! Their day-dream all the year round is to find that needle in a haystack, a servant who will take no more than the established holidays and always come in time to get breakfast.
I sorrow for these present housekeepers of the south. They all know by heart and often retell to their children the tales of their mothers and grandmothers,—how, early in the morning, the affectionate and faithful nurses stole the children out of the room, without waking papa and mamma; how the cook and the waiters, not superintended, had the best of breakfasts ready at the right time; how at this meal there was happy reunion of the family beginning a new day, the children bathed and in their clean clothes, each one pretty as a picture and sweet as a pink; and how all the affairs of the household under the magic touch of angel servants were fitly despatched without trouble or worry to mamma, until theday ended by the nurses’ bathing the little tots again, putting them to bed, and mammy’s getting them to sleep by telling “The Tar Baby” or some other adventure of Brer Rabbit over and over as often as sleepily called for, or by singing sweet lullabies. With this vision of a real fairyland in which their ancestors lived not so very long ago, how can any one of these mothers of the new south contentedly make herself the only nurse, cook, and house servant of her family? For many a year yet, to do every day the drudgery of all three will be the extreme of discomfort and sore trial to her. We must give her loving words and sympathy without ceasing, and trust her to the slow but sure healing of inevitable necessity.
This lamentable condition of our southern woman is due, as plainly appears, to the miseducation given their ancestors by slavery. Slavery went forty years ago; but it left the negro, and the dependence of these women upon her as their only servant. It is indispensable that they cut loose completely from this dependence. Their resolve should be firm and unwavering that they will learn to minister to themselves and their dear ones, and teach the blessed art to their children; as their northern sisters have always done. I would have them here receptively contemplate, as a part of the new lesson which they must learn, this true and enchanting picture of a New England home:
“There are no servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap, with the spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing had ever been done, or were to be done,—she and her girls, in some long-forgotten forepart of the daydid up the work, and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them, it isdone up. The old kitchen floor never seems stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking utensils never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes four meals a dayare got there, though the family washing and ironing is there performed, and though pounds of butter and cheese are in some silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence.”[140]
Of course it is not to be demanded that the southern woman exactly reproduce the New England system of fifty years ago just described by Mrs. Stowe. But she must learn to be entirely independent of servants in the era of co-operation, electric dish-washers, and other helping machines, about to begin.
Let us see how it has been with the fathers and boys. The planting of the old south required proportionally less cash outlay annually than any common business that I now call to mind. The owner of 750 acres of land—an ordinary plantation—worth $6,000, thirty slaves worth $18,000, and mules and live-stock worth $1,000, had usually but five considerable items of expense: the overseer with his family was “found”—to use the then current vogue—and paid not more than $150 yearly wages; a few sacks of salt to save the pork—a little to be given the live animals occasionally; a few bars of iron for the plantation blacksmith shop—the latter being furnished with bellows, anvil, tongs, screwplate, vise, and a few other tools, all hardly amounting to $100 investment; sometimes coarse cotton and woollen cloth for the clothes of the negroes, made by the slave-women tailors (even in my day this cloth was, on many plantations, spun and wove at home from the cotton and wool grown by the owner); and the fifth item was a moderate bill of the family physician for attendance upon the sick slaves. The whole would seldom amount to $350; and remember the income yielding capital was $25,000. This planter paid no wages for his labor; he bred his slaves, and all animalsserving for work, food, or pleasure;—in short, the establishment was self-supporting. The good manager sold every year more than enough of meat, grain, and other produce to pay the expense itemed a moment ago, and so the $1,200 from the sale of his crop of thirty bales of cotton was often net income.
The natural increase of slaves which I have explained above operated in many cases to encourage wastefulness and idleness. But even in the majority of these cases the estates more than held their own.
Let us illustrate the change wrought by emancipation by having you to contemplate a small middle Georgia farmer of to-day. If he employ but four hands to his two plows, he will, in wages, fertilizers that have come into general use since the war, purchase of meat, corn, and other supplies that the slaves used to produce, necessarily lay out annually more than did the planter making thirty bales as we mentioned above. If this small farmer makes twenty bales—which is far above the average—worth, if the price be, say, eight cents, $800—more than half of it will be needed to cover his outlay. It is to be emphasized that as a general rule this farmer and his boys have not yet been trained to work as steadily and diligently as their circumstances demand of them. As the women slight in the house what they regard as fit employment only of negroes, so the men do the same in the farm. The whites of both sexes cling to the negro instead of making good workers of themselves.
In the old south money grew of itself. Now constant alertness is needed to see that every dollar laid out comes back, if not with addition, at least without loss. To keep from falling behind, the farmer must have a very much higher degree of mercantile capacity than he could ever acquire under the old system. And he andhis boys ought to supplant much of the negro labor he now employs by their own systematic and steady work. All these necessary lessons are very hard to learn, because to do that we must first unlearn widely different ones.
This examination shows that the men of the new south are almost as inadequate to the demands of the day as we found the women to be.
I do not mean to say that our women and men have not improved at all in their respective spheres in the last forty years. I believe that when due allowance is made for the unavoidable effect upon them of the system into which they were all born it must be conceded that the little improvement which they have made is greater than what could have been reasonably expected. But I see clearly that the habits of thought and the modes of house and farm economy, bred first from our contact with the negro slave and then with the negro freedman, are yet an oppressively heavy load upon our section.
I have now to do with a still greater evil as part of the curse of slavery to the southern whites; which is, that it prevented the normal rise in the section of a white labor class. If one but look steadily at developments, either now in progress or surely impending, in Germany, France, England, the English colonies, and the United States he sees that the workers most of all are influencing the other classes to pursue the best policy in all departments of government. The truth is that in every stage of society there is the leading energy of some particular class. Let me make you reflect over a few well-known examples. In their unremitted struggle with the patricians, the plebeians of Rome gradually climbed out of their low estate into complete political, civil, and social equality with the former whohad long been the constituency of the so-called republic. Some centuries later a tacit combination of those belonging to each division of the middle class dried all the fountains of civil disorder and made domestic peace sure and permanent by establishing the Roman empire. Much later employers of the free labor which had displaced slavery made European towns democratic, and set them in such strong array against the feudal barons that the latter were at last restrained from plundering the new industry. The American revolution and the French revolution were each mainly middle-class movements. By them the middle class cleared out of its way, as far as it could, distinctions of birth, title, rank, and all other special personal privileges. But, unawares, it put in the place of the old hereditary lords and monopolists, known as such by everybody, a nobility in disguise. The members of this nobility make no claim to our labor or substance by reason of their having had such and such fathers or having received such and such grants or patents to themselves as natural persons. They pose as government agents in such functions as the transportation and monetary, of which efficient, cheap, and impartial performance is vital to the general welfare. Clandestinely they have had the law of the land made or interpreted and the practice of government shaped each as they want it; and sitting in their masks wherever these sovereign powers must be invoked by producer or worker, it is these usurpers and not the legitimate public authorities who must be applied to and given, not the just cost of the service, but the supreme extortion possible. These masked rulers toll our wages, profits, and property as insidiously and deeply as does indirect compared with direct taxation. In fact they are government licensees, levying upon us for their own benefit all the indirecttaxation that we can bear. Some—I may say, a large number—of middle-class property owners and producers are heart and soul in strong and strengthening resistance now forming against the tyrants they have unwittingly set up. But the initiative and most effective elements of this benign uprising do not come from the middle class. It was the workers who excited and kept at its height the righteous indignation of the country that shamed the coal-trust into decency. It is the workers who are the most influential of all that strive to arm us with those plutocracy-destroying weapons, direct nomination and direct legislation; and of all who demand that the railroads pay just taxes; of all who would lay the axe at the root of public corruption by having government resume its powers and do every one of its duties without favor or prejudice to a single human being. It is clear that the laborers are gathering all the anti-monopoly interests and classes of society to their banner, and that from the steady and increasing impulsion of these laborers, in unions and political campaigns, industrial democracy will at last come in, to open the millennium by keeping every man, woman, and child, except the wilfully idle and criminal, permanently supplied with necessaries and comforts.
Who are the laborers that are both to spur and lead us forward in this great course? Why, the white laborers, whose interests and whose qualifications to share in governments are the same as those of the rest of us; who are really part and parcel of the body politic and whose sons and daughters can be married by our sons and daughters without social degradation to themselves or degeneration of the proud Caucasian stock in their children. The negroes cannot do the great work we are contemplating. They are strangers in blood. They are as yet far too low in development. It is idle tothink of making these aliens, whose highest interests are irreconcilably antagonistic to ours and our children’s, allies of the white laborers—a point which will be treated at large in later chapters.
To bring out the situation more clearly, suppose that instead of the eight millions of negroes now in the south we had eight millions of native white workers and no negroes at all. Would it not be far better for us of the section? Would it not be far better for the anti-monopoly cause in the north? Ought there not to be a real labor party in the south instead of what we now see? The so-called labor party of the south has a large percentage of leaders whose chief activity is to win positions in the unions, in agitation, in the city and State government wherein they can serve themselves by delivering the labor vote to corporate interests, or doing the latter legislative or official favor—a sure symptom that the movement is as yet merely incipient. In no northern State have the railroads and allied corporations such complete command of nominative, appointive, and legislative machinery as in Georgia; and it seems to me that Georgia is but fairly representative of all the south except South Carolina, which has advanced further in direct nomination than any other one of the United States. In many places the people of the north are successfully rising against the corporation oligarchs. In New York and Michigan the latter have been made to pay some of the taxes which they had always been dodging. In a recent Boston referendum the street railroad, which for years had ridden roughshod over the public at will, was snowed under, although it had the machine, all the five daily papers but one, and the outside of that, fighting for it with might and main. Los Angeles, followed by three or four other towns, has just made a beginning with theRecall. Oregon has directlegislation. Illinois has pushed ahead with both direct nomination and direct legislation. Cities here and there, in very grateful contrast with the apathy prevalent in this section, have awakened to the importance of rightly guarding the common property in public-service franchises. I could cite many other examples which show that the anti-plutocratic tide gathers force all over the north. Why is it that there is this blessed insurgence against corporation misrule there, and hardly a trace of it here? Simply because the north has and the south has not the motor of insurgence—a real labor class, growing steadily in zeal and organization, and rapidly increasing in numbers.
That a southern State has no real labor class with potent influence upon the public, puts it as far behind the most enlightened communities in political and governmental condition, as it was with its slaves behind them in productive condition. Such a State lacks a most essential organ of the highest types of democracy.[141]
To sum up: Slavery disqualified the white men and women of the south for the domestic and business management proper to this era; and ever since emancipation the presence of a large number of negroes available for labor in house and on the farm, and preventing the coming in of any other labor, has powerfully helped both races in their efforts naturally made to retain the familiar ways of the old system. Thus the south has been sadly retarded in her due economical rehabilitation. In the second place, it has kept the political influence of labor at the minimum, and consequently sent her backwards intrue democracy, while England, the English colonies, and the northern States, are slowly but surely going forward.
These are the main things. Let me in briefest mention suggest some of their results, which, at first blush, seem to be independent.
Slavery engendered among the whites a disrespect for labor, which, although now at last dying out, is still of hurtful influence.
As negroes were always and everywhere in number sufficient to do every task of labor, there was but little demand for labor-saving machines and methods—a fact which prevented the southern whites from developing the inventive faculty equally with their northern brothers. We all are beginning to see that, except in much of agriculture and other activities in which the process is that of nature and not of art, the future of industry belongs more and more to the constantly improving machine.
Think of such things as these in the brood of evils brought forth by slavery;—agriculture primitive or superannuated in many particulars; our entire structure of investment, production, and occupation bottomed upon slaves, property in which could be, and was, totally destroyed by a stroke of the pen; immigration both from Europe and the north repelled; slowness in exploiting our water power and mines; inferior common schools, and lack of town-meeting government due to the sparseness of the population and their roving habits which were incident to the plantation system. I have given some consideration to these in the “Old and New South,” and I refer you to that.[142]
Of course had there never been any negro slavery in America we should have escaped the brothers’ war, its spilling of blood, its waste of wealth, and the long sicknessof the section unto death which has ensued. And to-day in solid prosperity, institutions, government, and progressiveness in everything good, the section would be abreast of the other. Nay, her better climate, her agricultural products—especially her cotton, which she would have learned to make with white labor—these and other resources would, I fully believe, have by this time pushed her far into the lead. As it actually is, she is far, far behind. She has been sorely scourged, not for any moral guilt.
“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.”
It was because she did that which the wisest and best had done—the Greeks who gave the world culture and democracy, the Jews who gave it religion, the Romans who gave it law and civil institutions. She really did far better than they did. She did not enslave the free. She merely took some of the only inveterate slaves upon earth out of lawless slavery, in which they would have otherwise remained indefinitely without recognition of the dearest human rights, and placed them in a far other slavery which was for them an unparalleled rise in liberty and well-being; which was, as becomes more and more probable with time, the only opportunity by which any considerable portion of the negro race can ever evolve upward into the capability of enlightened self-government. In doing this she unconsciously antagonized the purposes of the iron-hearted powers guarding the American union, and when the critical moment of that union came, they dashed her to pieces.
It will be many a year before the pathos of southern history can be fully told. I must satisfy myself here by saying only that the curse of African slavery to her has been of magnitude and weight incredible, and that one cannot yet be sure when it will end.
The title of the chapter demands that I now tell you of the blessing of African slavery in the United States to the negro. Of course there are many who have been born into the unequalified condemnation of every form of slavery, which was resolutely preached for years all over the north by conscientious men and women of great ability and influence. Such will exclaim against me, and perhaps some of them will not even read the rest of the chapter. But it is my note, which becomes surer and more confident every year, that the great body of men and women shrink from every over-positively urged dogma. I have already mentioned those who are trying to curb the evils of drink. All the while an increasing majority of them recognize that to assert that any use of liquor, wine, or beer is a moral wrong, as do a noisy few in season and out of season, is too extreme to be true or even politic. The ultra democrat will zealously justify the assassination of Julius Cæsar, while the wisest friends of the people become more firmly convinced every century that the empire which Cæsar founded was, by reason of the circumstances, the best possible government for the Romans of that and the succeeding times;—the surest guaranty that the main benefits of ancient civilization should be preserved for the human race. And as there has now and then been something of substantial good in even absolute government, there has also been good to the slave in his slavery. Surely it was an improvement of the captor and a bettering of the condition of the prisoner of war, not to barbecue the latter, as was the custom for ages, but to have him work for a master. Perhaps the fabulist Æsop had been a slave. Terence, a great Roman dramatist, surely had been. Horace’s father had been one. It may well be true that it was slavery that gave each one of these three immortals hisopportunity. The more familiar you become with ancient history the larger you estimate the number of those to have been who as slaves got many of the benefits of Greek and Roman civilization, which benefits they afterwards transmitted to free descendants. I need not repeat what I have already told—how the negroes in the mass were advantaged by transfer from slavery in Africa to slavery in America. But do let me inquire, would Professor DuBois have ever outstripped all the white children in a New England school, graduated creditably from two American universities, studied at the university of Berlin, acquired the degree of Master of Arts and then that of Doctor of Philosophy, been made in sociology fellow of Harvard and assistant of the university of Pennsylvania, become president of the American Negro Academy, got the professorship of economics and history in Atlanta University, and pushed forward as an author into prominent and most respectable place; all before he was thirty-six years old—would Professor DuBois have surpassed this brilliant career, if an “evil, Dutch trader” had not seized his “grandfather’s grandmother—two centuries ago”?[143]If the transfer just mentioned had not been made what would now be Fred Douglass, Booker Washington, Richard R. Wright, Professor DuBois, Bishop Turner, and other great negroes, their good works and glory? Would Hayti have arranged for some of its young men to be trained in farming at Tuskegee? more especially do I ask, would negroes educated at Tuskegee be now teaching the missionaries how to christianize the Africans of Togoland? Who would now be arousing people north and south in behalf of the race? and where could nine millions of blacks be found—or even half a million—as far above the African level of to-day as ours?
My conclusion is that the whites and the negroes of the south ought to learn wisdom and interchange their holidays and great annual rejoicings. The former ought to keep the anniversary of the emancipation proclamation as the southern 4th of July, and the blacks ought to observe that day by wearing mourning and eating bitter herbs. Further, the negroes of America ought to celebrate the day when the Dutch ship landed the first Africans at Jamestown as the dawn of their hopes as a people.
THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND MORALLY RIGHT—BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION, AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY
Theproposition of the heading has really been demonstrated in the foregoing chapters. I feel that the demonstration should have impressive enforcement. It will surely be for the great good of our country if the brothers of each section be truly convinced that those of the other were morally right in the slavery struggle from beginning to end.
Let us begin by noting the ambiguity of the word “right.” Something may be right in expediency, policy, or reason, and yet wrong ethically. Likewise something may be a mistake and wrong in policy while it is right in morals. General Sherman was a conspicuous example of the almost universal proneness to confound right in the sense first mentioned above with it in the other. The two are widely different—not merely in degree, but in kind. That which is right or wrong in expediency is decided by the understanding—by the head; that which is right or wrong ethically is decided for every human being by his own conscience—by his heart. To try with all my might to do a particular thing may be my highest moral duty; to try with all your might to keep me from doing it may be yours. The brothers who set up the southern confederacy and defended it, the brothers who warred upon it and overturnedit—they were on each side sublimely conscientious; for every one—to use the high word of Lincoln—was doing the right as God gave him to see it. No people ever waged a war with deeper and more solemn conviction of duty than did our northern brothers. Rome, rising unvanquished from every great victory of Hannibal, much as she has been most justly lauded by foremost historians, fell behind them in supreme effort—in undaunted perseverance in spite of disaster after disaster until the difficulty insuperable was overcome. We of the south should be proud of this unparalleled achievement of our brothers. Most of all should we be proud of the complete self-abnegation and unwavering obedience to conscience with which they waded a sea of blood, for the welfare of future generations rather than their own. I am glad to observe that many who most affectionately remember the lost cause have come at last to concede without qualification that the restoration of the union by force of arms was morally right. But I note that as yet only a few at the north—men like Dr. Lyman Abbott, Mr. Charles F. Adams, and Professor Wendell—have learned that the south, in all that she did in “The Great War,”[144]was likewise morally right. To show that the confederates were exemplary champions of a legitimate government, I need not repeat what I have said above when I told how southern nationalization had given them a country of their own as dear to them and as much mistress of their consciences as the union was to the northern people. If there are those who cannot bring themselves to allow the all-potent coercion of the nationalization mentioned as justification, and who stillthink of us as traitors and rebels, I beg them to give due consideration to the feelings with which the southerner now looks back upon his life in the confederate army. I call a most convincing witness to testify. I do not know a man who ever followed what his conscience pronounced right more faithfully, who was truer to the better traditions of the old south, and who was a more devoted soldier in the brothers’ war, nor do I know another who now draws from every class in his community more respect for real manhood and honesty. All who know him will believe his word against an oracle or an angel. Here is what he said thirty-seven years after the close of the war: