“That period of my life is the one with which I am the most nearly satisfied. A persistent, steady effort to do my duty—an effort persevered in in the midst of privation, hardship, and danger. If ever I was unselfish, it was then. If ever I was capable of self-denial, it was then. If ever I was able to trample on self-indulgence, it was then. If ever I was strong to make sacrifices, even unto death, it was in those days; and if I were called upon to say on the peril of my soul, when it lived its highest life, when it was least faithless to true manhood, when it was most loyal to the best part of man’s nature, I would answer, ‘It was when I followed a battle-torn flag through its shifting fortune of victory and defeat.’My comrades, how easy it is to name the word that characterizes and strikes the keynote of that time and should explain our pride to all the world—self sacrifice—that spirit and that conduct which raise poor mortals nearest to divinity. Oh, God in heaven, what sacrifices did we not make! How our very heart strings were torn as we turned from our home, our parents, our children!... How poor we were! How ragged! How hungry! When I recall the light-heartedness, the courage, the cheerfulness, the fidelity to duty which lived and flourished under such circumstances, from the bottom of my heart I thank God that for four long years I wore, if not brilliantly, at least faithfullyand steadfastly, in camp and bivouac, in advance and retreat, on the march and on the battlefield, the uniform of a confederate soldier.”[145]
“That period of my life is the one with which I am the most nearly satisfied. A persistent, steady effort to do my duty—an effort persevered in in the midst of privation, hardship, and danger. If ever I was unselfish, it was then. If ever I was capable of self-denial, it was then. If ever I was able to trample on self-indulgence, it was then. If ever I was strong to make sacrifices, even unto death, it was in those days; and if I were called upon to say on the peril of my soul, when it lived its highest life, when it was least faithless to true manhood, when it was most loyal to the best part of man’s nature, I would answer, ‘It was when I followed a battle-torn flag through its shifting fortune of victory and defeat.’
My comrades, how easy it is to name the word that characterizes and strikes the keynote of that time and should explain our pride to all the world—self sacrifice—that spirit and that conduct which raise poor mortals nearest to divinity. Oh, God in heaven, what sacrifices did we not make! How our very heart strings were torn as we turned from our home, our parents, our children!... How poor we were! How ragged! How hungry! When I recall the light-heartedness, the courage, the cheerfulness, the fidelity to duty which lived and flourished under such circumstances, from the bottom of my heart I thank God that for four long years I wore, if not brilliantly, at least faithfullyand steadfastly, in camp and bivouac, in advance and retreat, on the march and on the battlefield, the uniform of a confederate soldier.”[145]
The passage just quoted most truly expresses the feelings with which the southern people stood by their cause and now look back upon the support which they gave it. In this matter their word will be taken by everybody. Their actions before, during, and ever since the war speak louder than their word. There can be no doubt that in founding the Confederate States and waging the resulting war everything they did was counselled by the most tender and enlightened conscience. Bear in mind how they clung to Davis and how they still remember him, winning the precious eulogy
“—he that can endureTo follow with allegiance a fallen lordDoes conquer him that did his master conquer,And earns a place i’ the story.”
Bear in mind how truly they keep Memorial Day. The love which the south gives Davis and her dead soldiers protests to all the earth and heaven the righteousness of her lost cause. Calmly, serenely, confidently she awaits future judgment upon her love. It needs that all the north appreciate this fealty as the height of heaven-climbing virtue.
The real soldiers of each section—those who—to use a confederate saying—were “in the bullet department,” and fighting every day, learned great regard for their foes; and when the war ended they became at once advocates of speedy reconciliation. And the non-combatants on each side felt far less resentment towards the actual fightersof the other than they did towards its political leaders. It is a common error to overrate the accomplishment of potent and ambitious men in tumultuous times. As the world long ascribed meteorological phenomena to the mutations of the moon, conspicuous above all things else as the apparent cause, so most people now believe that revolutions are caused by the men who appear to be leading. We have explained above that the only effective leaders—even of revolutions—are those who are the most completely led by the people. To lead, the leader must keep on the tide and let it lead him. If he makes serious effort to balk it, he is at once stranded as a piece of drift thrown out of the current. All of us—both those north and those south of Mason and Dixon’s line—ought to learn this truth thoroughly. The former should correct their false judgments as to Calhoun, Toombs, Yancey, and Davis; the latter as to Sumner, Garrison, and Phillips. It was but to be expected that these false judgments would be cherished all through what we may call the era of civil fury. That begins with the excitement over the admission of California and extends to the time after the war when the project of giving a negro constituency the balance of political power in each southern State was abandoned. But now as the brothers can look back upon those evil days with at least the beginning of dispassionate calmness, the task of convincing the whole people of each section that the more prominent figures of the other in the era mentioned were all true men and patriots, should be pushed forward with his whole might by every one who loves his country. It is not demanded that we claim too much for them. To begin illustrating: Toombs’s Tremont Temple lecture on slavery is such an able and powerful defence of the south that its reputation must forever increase. Yet as we consider it now we see thatwhat he believed with all his heart to be the perpetual pillar and weal of his community was in fact its woe and ruin. We see, as to Calhoun, that if he had but given the resources of southern slavery against the implacable oppugnancy of free labor, roused for decisive combat, the sure and marvellous vision with which he searched the innermost nature of money, he would have had to acknowledge that the proud structure of southern society was wholly builded upon sands. The rains descended and the floods beat, and we saw the great fall. Of course we must admit that had our leaders been endowed with unerring prescience they ought to have warned us, and striven heart and soul for compensated emancipation. I need merely allude to State sovereignty, treated fully above. We of the south now see that though in advocating it we showed that the fathers were with us, and thus got the better of the argument, yet that the north was right in historical fact, and right also as to the true interest and welfare of America. Thus I have indicated some important acknowledgments which we of the south must make to our brothers of the north. Now I must state some that they must make to us.
The root-and-branch abolitionists and many following their lead interpreted the statement in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and with inalienable liberty as both intentional and actual condemnation of the slavery then existing in our country. They shut their eyes to the significant fact that the same document published to the world, as one of the causes justifying the solemn act therein proclaimed, that the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us”; which means he had instigated the slaves to rise against their masters. Many of the signers owned slaves then and to the end of their lives afterwards. Palpably the declaration did not mean to say that the negroes inAmerica were unjustly held in slavery, but did mean to say that inciting them—as John Brown with the approval of Phillips, Garrison, and such, afterwards sought to do—to gain their liberty by insurrection was inhuman and atrocious. These root-and-branch abolitionists confidently alleged that slavery in America was proscribed by the christian religion. Yet Jesus, the founder, who definitely reprehended every particular sin, never once denounced slavery. Paul, or some one else, whom the canon accepts as speaking with the authority of Jesus, says: “All who are in the position of slaves should regard their masters as deserving of the greatest respect, so that the name of God, and our teaching may not be maligned. Those who have christian masters should not think less of them because they are brothers, but on the contrary they should serve them all the better, because those who are to benefit by their good work are dear to them as their fellow-christians. Those are the things to insist upon in your teaching. Any one who teaches otherwise, and refuses his assent to sound instruction—the instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ—and to the teaching of religion, is puffed up with conceit, not really knowing anything, but having a morbid craving for discussions and arguments.”[146]
The passage last quoted—to which several others from the new testament, almost as strong, can be added—demonstrates that christianity did not disapprove of slavery. Further, as I have already suggested, the slavery not rebuked by Jesus and his apostles was mainly that of kin in blood and race, of those who had been in a measure free themselves or descendants of the free. The slaves of the south were far remote in blood,and their native condition so bad that American slavery was for them elevation and great improvement.
The new testament, the declaration of independence, and the federal constitution—surely three very respectable authorities, in America at least—stand together in solid phalanx. They clearly demonstrate that the charge that southern slavery was heinously wrong in itself, and that the masters were wicked man-stealers and kidnappers, made for a long while in every corner of the north, was mere opprobrium and abuse. Both sections ought to learn that there was nothing in negro slavery to shock the moral sense, but that on the contrary it was in its general effect of the utmost beneficence to the slave. Both ought to learn also that the white-hot zeal with which the institution was fought was due mainly to these things:
1. Free labor had long been in an uncompromising hand-to-hand struggle with slave labor. Years before this commenced the employing class had subconsciously divined it was far more profitable to hire the laborer only when his work was needed, and then let him go until he was needed again. The worker with the advance of democracy had become more and more hostile to a system coercing his labor and denying him all political and civil rights. The co-operation of employer and laborer had expelled slavery of white men from Europe. The feeling towards slavery had become one of decided opposition.
2. In America the opposition to slavery was powerfully re-enforced, first, by the new cause the latter gave in competing with free labor for the unsettled public domain, and then in its operation to nationalize the south into a separate federation. With this combined the growing conception among the northern people of the negro as a man who had reached the stage ofdevelopment characterizing the typical white. This huge mistake, hugged to their bosoms and championed with unflagging zeal by the ablest and most influential root-and-branch abolitionists, had a prodigious propagandic effect. It identified the cause of the negro slave, whom evolution had not yet made ready for liberty, with that of the oppressed European who had been long ready for it; and consequently that cause was continuously advocated with the passion which the French revolution had started against human inequality. The root-and-branch abolitionists at last excited a pseudo-moral paroxysm among thousands at the north and kept it increasing for a long while.
Facts which cannot now be gainsaid plainly justify me in denying that conscientious conviction was the real primary motive. The northern and southern churches split, all the wisest and best of the former standing against, all those of the latter for slavery. You must see that their moral convictions were secondary, not primary motives; that some superior power had given to one side to regard slavery as wrong and to the other to regard it as right; that it really had given the two sides differing consciences. If you but invoke the universal history of mankind this fact now under consideration will cease to appear marvellous. You will find it to be the rule that the struggle for existence develops in every community an instinct which resistlessly prompts to the maintenance of its great economic interest. This instinct is the special preserver of the family, of the neighborhood, of the country. It is not strange that that which gives sustenance and comfort to one’s family, and what he sees all the best of his neighbors using as he does, will seem unquestionably right to him. It is not strange that, in such a serious conflict of interest as the intersectional one of dividing a vast empirebetween such fell competitors as free labor and slave labor, each side will differ diametrically in conscience as to right and wrong. Also it is not strange that they should lose temper, shower abuse upon their opponents, and fill the land with mutual accusations of heinous moral offences.
It is just as far wrong to regard the controversy between anti- and pro-slavery men—which was at bottom but a quarrel between north and south at first over the division of the Territories between the free labor system and the slave labor system, and later over the other question whether a slave republic should divide the continent with the United States—as a contest over a moral question, as it would be to make either the American or the French revolution such a contest. All three—the intersectional struggle as to slavery and the two revolutions—were mainly impelled by a desire of each side in every one to better or hold on to its material resources—that is, the leading impulsion was economic. Of course the combatants on each side claimed that they themselves were right and their adversaries wrong in morals. The rencounter between free labor and slave labor was very much like that now on between capitalists and labor organizations. Note how each side denounces the conduct of the other, alleging it to be against moral justice. The most superficial observer discerns that the real cause of difference between them is not one of conscience, but one of interest. We ought to understand that the crimination of the root-and-branch abolitionist and the recrimination of the fire-eater were each but stage thunder. The southern master must be wholly exonerated from the charge that in working his slave he committed moral offence against the dearest American rights; the claim for the African, who was in a far lower circle of development, of equal civil and politicalprivileges with the white must be disallowed; and it be fully conceded that the southern people, leaders and all, were but doing their conscience-commanded duty throughout. Also we of the south must learn that the root-and-branch abolitionist, even in his wildest moments—Sumner refusing in the United States senate to show respect to Butler’s gray hairs, Wendell Phillips degrading Washington below Toussaint, Garrison denouncing the slavery-protecting constitution as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, John Brown’s raid into Virginia—was just as conscientious as Robert Lee was when he was defending the soil of his native State. They were each irresistibly constrained by the powers working to save the union to think his particular action right and the highest patriotism.
When the quarrel is over, when the broil and the feud have been fought out and the survivors have shaken hands, when the lawsuit has become a thing of the past and the litigants have renewed their old relations, no wise and good man keeps repeating the accusations of bad faith and of unrighteous conduct which he passionately hurled against his adversary during the variance. Rather he confesses to himself, “I wronged him when I said those hot words;” and his repentance does not bring complete peace until he has found his brother and taken all of them back.
If it only could be, the nation ought to have a great reunion, a feast of reconcilement, where, with proper solemnities, the people of each section, with their forefathers and leaders, should be fully and finally exculpated as to everything done for or against slavery by the people of the other section. It is plain that both ought to forget and forgive. They ought to do still more. They ought to compete each in utmost effort to vindicate the favorites and loved ones of the otherthe more intelligently, and to admire and praise them the more enthusiastically. This would be to bring the millennium nearer, and give our country “a nobleness in record upon” all others. It only needs for this consummation to cast aside the remnant of greatly diminished prejudice, and make a brief study of a small volume of material evidence and of the ordinary principles which guide the conduct of the good citizen. Such study will show that southerner and northerner throughout their fell encounter have each the very highest claims to the respect and love of the entire nation.
What a golden deed it was of President McKinley when, December 14, 1898, fully using a rare opportunity, he spake in his high place to the members of the Georgia legislature this message of reunion:
“Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories, which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds. What cause we have for rejoicing, saddened only because so many of our brave men fell on the field or sickened and died from hardship and exposure, and others returning bring wounds and disease from which they will long suffer. The memory of the dead will be a precious legacy, and the disabled will be the nation’s care.Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while when those graves were made we differed widely about the nature of this government, these differences have been settled by the arbitrament of arms. The time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling, under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you the care of the graves of the confederate soldiers. The cordial feeling now happily existingbetween the north and south prompts this gracious act. If it needs further justification, it is found in the gallant loyalty to the union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead.”
“Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories, which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds. What cause we have for rejoicing, saddened only because so many of our brave men fell on the field or sickened and died from hardship and exposure, and others returning bring wounds and disease from which they will long suffer. The memory of the dead will be a precious legacy, and the disabled will be the nation’s care.
Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while when those graves were made we differed widely about the nature of this government, these differences have been settled by the arbitrament of arms. The time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling, under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you the care of the graves of the confederate soldiers. The cordial feeling now happily existingbetween the north and south prompts this gracious act. If it needs further justification, it is found in the gallant loyalty to the union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead.”
By the favor given Fitzhugh Lee, Joe Wheeler, and other old confederates, and his earnest and successful efforts for universal amnesty to all who had helped our cause, Mr. McKinley had already won the hearts of the southern people. This speech increased our love a hundred fold. We repeated the “soft words” over and over, companioning them with
“O they banish our anger foreverWhen they laurel the graves of our dead.”
On each one of our three subsequent Memorial Days during his life he was thought of as tenderly as the precious dead. And since the death of Jefferson Davis there has been no sorrow of the south equal to that over his assassination. This is the age of funerals that crown with supreme popular honor the doers of high deeds for country and race. The imposing obsequies given the president, the demonstrations in his own section, and those in foreign lands, have rarely been outdone. But he had a greater glory. It was the genuine lamentation over him that day by reconciled brothers and sisters in every southern household. You that know history better, tell me when and where a whiter and sweeter flower was ever laid upon a coffin.
Let all of us on each side of the old dividing line strive without ceasing to give the good work which the great peacemaker begun so well its fit consummation.
And replacing hate and anger with love, fiction with fact, and false doctrine with true, let the people of the north and the people of the south join heads, consciences, and hearts to ascertain what is our duty both to negro and white, and then join hands and do that duty.
THE RACE QUESTION—GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY
1.Densefogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emancipation of the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers’ war. The authors and defenders of the three amendments—especially of the fifteenth—have made many others believe that the inferiority of the southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having been removed by emancipation he became at once ready and well prepared for the exercise of political privileges; and that the practical denial to him of this exercise is a heinous crime of the southern whites. Politicians want southern negro ballots in national conventions and the northern negro vote in elections. The bounty, both public and private, founding, sustaining, and multiplying colleges, schools, and other negro educational institutions, finds a growing host of beneficiaries—such as site-owners, who scheme to sell for two prices, those who want to be presidents, principals, professors, teachers, even janitors and floor-scrubbers, schoolbook publishers, and still others—who would keep it copiously flowing; and so they all magnify the ability of the typical negro and the benefit to him of the institutions mentioned. Respectable and influential magazines and newspapers, with an increasing number of negro readers, really believe that very many more can be added by a little effort, and so they champion what these readers favor. Persuasive speakers and writers like Mr. Edgar GardnerMurphy, unconsciously influenced either by employers who would always have a wage-depressing lever at command, or by those who would have Cuffee do what they ought themselves to do, overrate the importance of negro labor as a southern resource. And the last fog makers whom I shall mention are the inveterate optimists—amiable beyond expression—who will not admit that there is now any serious menace to either race in the south.
The several fogs enumerated overlay one another in an aggregate too opaque for the uncleared eye to pierce. As examples of their obscuring effect, consider anything said in the census as to the negro, and the articles “Negro Education,” “Negro in America,” and especially “Hayti” in the Encyclopedia Americana lately published. The authors of the fifteenth amendment, in making voters and rulers of late negro slaves, repeated what had been done in Hayti. It seems therefore that the Encyclopedia must tell nothing of the island but what is good. So we read in the relevant article that it abolished slavery in 1804, being “the first country to rid humanity of such a sad practice;” that there education “is compulsory and gratuitous,” a sixth of the revenues being devoted to it, and the most pleasant things concerning religion, liberal naturalization practice, natural and artificial products, railroads, telegraph, and telephone. One without other information would surely think the community greatly advanced and blessed. Its true condition is thus told in Brockhaus by somebody who does not swear by the fifteenth amendment: “It may be said in general that the country is sparsely populated, partly because of incessant civil wars, partly because of a high infant death rate.”[147]
These fogs must be lifted. Great harm to each race will follow if we persist in keeping the facts concealed.
2. Do not confound the feeling that you are different from Jew, European, protestant, catholic, absolutist, socialist, anarchist, or any other white, with the feeling that you are different from negroes; for to do this is to keep you from all clear thinking upon our present subject. The former are all of our own race, and we can and do intermarry with them to the improvement of our population. If the per cent of negroes was no greater in the south than in the north, fusion could not be a very grave matter; for should it become complete, our lily-white would not be diminished by the fraction of a shade. But to absorb the eight millions of them now in our section would make us chocolate, if not mulatto. Their color is the smallest racial objection. Although their schooling for two centuries and more in American slavery has elevated them—as Mr. Tillinghast proves—far above what they were in native slavery, still their cranial capacity, brain convolutions, and moral, intellectual, and social development—inherited without fault of theirs—from West African ancestors, are still greatly inferior to ours. Remote generations of our forefathers were much lower than the present American negroes, as Darwin admits in the oft quoted passage, describing his first sight of the Fuegians. We should never forget that the Caucasian was once on a level with those Fuegians. The negroes when they came to America were little better. And yet they have gone up so much higher, it is plain that evolution, if only permitted to work in a proper environment, will do for them what it has done for us.
But the whites cannot consent to intermarriage. That would greatly benefit the negroes. While some who have never had good opportunity of actual observationconfidently contend that there are no backward or lower races, we southerners have noted all our lives that a very great majority of the negroes who climb above the level and prosper in occupation, have a large admixture of white blood. It would be an enormous rise for the mass if fusion were assured. But for us—why, we should disinherit our children of their share in the grand destiny of the Caucasian race if we made average negroes their fathers or mothers.
Southern dread of amalgamation is not to be scouted as a mere bugbear. Think of the half-breeds that lined all the border between the States and the Indians; of how the whites have mixed with native races in Mexico, Central and South America; of white and negro intermingling in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, in the United States, and especially in the south. Think of whites and negroes now legally married and marrying in the neighboring States of the Union. In 1902, eight white women were living with negro husbands in Xenia, Ohio;[148]and there were children of all these mixed marriages except one.[149]Consider also that prominent negroes advocate these marriages. Douglass had a white wife. He preached that the American negro must set before himself assimilation as his true goal. Professor DuBois is really a disciple of Douglass, as appears from some of his utterances. We give in a footnote what another prominent negro has recently said in public.[150]Themoment that the negro became an influential factor in southern politics, a real agitation against the anti-intermarriage laws would begin. There would come a small number of negroes, controlling votes, of so much property and respectability that their children would be regarded as eligible matches by some of the poorer and more destitute whites. Marriages between such, solemnized on a visit to a State permitting, would occur. And our laws last mentioned would be more and more evaded and their repeal become gradually more probable. When they had won political equality with the patricians, the Roman plebeians repealed the prohibition of intermarriage which the former had stubbornly maintained. These two orders were of the same race. Therefore intermarriage could not be the boon to the plebeians that it would now be to the southern negro, lifting him up as it would do. If he has opportunity, he will struggle for it more resolutely than the plebeians did. A small number of negroes have already been assimilated in America, and a few more are still to be assimilated, asI shall explain later on. This sure deliverance from the destruction which now threatens is more and more sought after by the intelligent few. And if the vote of the negroes was allowed to count, it would not be long until, under the example and appeal of their leaders, all of them would be making for that haven of refuge. Mongrelism beats upon the border all around the south; it threatens to burst forth from an exhaustless source within. We know we must keep it out as Holland does the ocean. Subconsciously discerning that fusion would probably follow the entrance of the negro into government, the whites have made of the race primary and other measuresde factodisfranchising him, dikes against the filthy waters of mongrelism which they would not have to wash over themselves. This is not because we hate the negro. We love and cherish him. It is not to be demanded of us that we sacrifice ourselves, our children, and our children’s children for his sake. We will gladly do all that friends—nay, that near relatives—can with justice ask of one another, to better his condition and rescue him. We cannot give him political power at the cost of our degeneration.
I would enforce the foregoing contents of this section with these profoundly true and very forcible words of a northern man, now residing in Columbia, South Carolina:
“A word about race hatred, race revulsion, or race antipathy. Many people in the north believe the devil is the author of it, and some people in the south are more devoted to it than to religion. Race antipathy is really a race instinct, a moral anti-toxin developed by nature in the individual whose environment involves constant and close contact with an inferior race in large numbers. It works for the salvation of the purity of the superior race.”[151]
Professor DuBois says that “legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution.”[152]And some writers seem to think it would be well to coerce miscegenators to legitimate their relations by intermarrying. An innocent girl—a maid—undone; all good men and women are agreed that her seducer should be made to marry her.[153]But that is only where the marriage would be tolerated by society. Thus it would not make man and wife of parties to an incestuous liaison. No moralist contends that one who has received a favor from a public woman is under obligation to become her husband. The miscegenation common is that between white men and promiscuous black women. How idle is the attempt to put these cases on a par with that of the ruin of a virtuous woman. And Professor DuBois could not have rightly weighed the words in which he represents them to be as criminal as those horrible offences which especially provoke lynching; that is, that the negro woman who consented most willingly to the embraces of her master was as foully wronged by him as her mistress would be by a slave who outraged her against her will.[154]No. Intermarriage of these mixed lovers is not demanded by any principle of justice. But the public weal does demand that such a tremendous evil as amalgamation be kept off by the surest and most decisive measures. It is playing with plague and curse unspeakable for us of the south to permit the existence of any condition which tends even in the slightest degree to legalize intermarriage.[155]
3. Writers still under the spell of the root-and-branch abolitionists who were wont to exalt Toussaint, the Haytian general, above our Washington, strain hard to conceal the real cause of the lamentable conditions now prevailing in Hayti and San Domingo. One tells us that because of the many mountains, there being no railroad system, separate communities are defended by almost impregnable natural barriers, and as neighboring peoples are hereditary enemies, there is always war somewhere. The remedy recommended is to build railroads in the island as the English have done in Jamaica. Another writer tells us that we must not jump to the conclusion that all the inhabitants of San Domingo are degraded negroes; that while the population of the interior are sunk in ignorance, superstition, and barbarism, yet in the capital and the coast towns there are some people of apparently lily-white strain, well educated, speaking two or three languages, who supply the mulatto republic with generals and political leaders. The masses of these Dominicans are very patriotic, and would indeed do finely if they were not divided into hostile parties by self-seeking agitators. And you may consult many others who keep back the real explanation. There is one cardinal fact which stands forth in the history of Hayti as prominently asslavery does in the train of American events which brought on the brothers’ war. It is this: soon after the outbreak of the French revolution the mulattoes were accorded political privileges, and then a little later—it was in 1794—France equalized the negroes of her colonies just freed with the whites in political and civil rights. This made the negroes of Hayti, who were in intelligence and development somewhat below those of the south when the latter were emancipated, full-fledged self-governing republicans. The whites were but few. What of them were not massacred at once by the blacks fled for their lives. The history of both the Haytian and the Dominican republic (the latter achieving its independence in 1844) is the same. Their people make a hell on earth of the most beautiful and fertile of islands. As slavery was plainly the cause of the southern confederacy, the grant of political power to the mulattoes and negroes not at all qualified to use it is just as plainly the cause and sole author of chronic civil war and anarchy in Hayti and San Domingo.
This enfranchisement of semi-barbarians was from the ’prentice hand of a new republic, without any experience in free institutions. The English did far better when they emancipated the Jamaica negro by the act of 1833. They gave him full protection of his liberty, person, and contract and property rights. Five sixths of the 800,000 of its present population are colored people or blacks. These—to quote the Encyclopedia Americana—“have no share in the government whatever.” It further says: “The Jamaica negroes are fairly good laborers when well fed; the menial work of the island is performed by them, and they are regarded as cheerful, honest, and respectful servants.”
This happy condition of quiet and content is not due to the fact that the railroads prevent settlement of thenegroes in separate neighboring communities to quarrel and fight with one another; but it is because the English never allowed them to get the taste of blood as the French permitted to their brothers in Hayti; they have not been incited by unseasonable political power to license and riot.
The negroes of Jamaica are evidently bettering in condition slowly. They need only enough of Booker Washingtons to rise much faster. I beg attention to this comparison of Jamaica and Hayti, made by a well-informed negro, a native of the former, who lived there until some nine years ago, and who has lately lived several years in Hayti:[156]
“They [the negroes of Jamaica] aim at rising, but many make the mistake of not rising,inbutoutof labor: the most intelligent flock to the professions, civil service, &c. Few turn their steps to what is for the real upbuilding of the country, agriculture, that for which it is best adapted.“The people of Hayti and San Domingo are of a political turn of mind, and sacrifice everything for politics, or are made to do so. That island produces as fine coffee and cocoa as can be found anywhere, but the most intelligent keep out and deprive these crops of scientific cultivation.”
“They [the negroes of Jamaica] aim at rising, but many make the mistake of not rising,inbutoutof labor: the most intelligent flock to the professions, civil service, &c. Few turn their steps to what is for the real upbuilding of the country, agriculture, that for which it is best adapted.
“The people of Hayti and San Domingo are of a political turn of mind, and sacrifice everything for politics, or are made to do so. That island produces as fine coffee and cocoa as can be found anywhere, but the most intelligent keep out and deprive these crops of scientific cultivation.”
The negroes of Hayti and San Domingo spurred by their politics into perpetual fighting and bloodshed; the negroes of Jamaica peaceful and ripe for industrial training, which it seems the English have resolved to give them—if Booker Washington had to choose one of the two islands for his future activity, do you not know that he would decide he could do great things in Jamaica and nothing in the other?
The thirteenth amendment emancipated the slavesinstantly and not gradually, the fourteenth made them complete citizens of the United States and of the particular State wherein they reside, and the fifteenth practically conferred unlimited suffrage upon them. The Hayti, and not the Jamaica, precedent was followed. The brothers that had conquered were blind from civil fury: and they had been brought by the root-and-branch abolitionists into full persuasion that the southern negroes were ready for and entitled to these high privileges. By the amendments they confidently tried to railroad the African slave in one instant of time up the long steep to the topmost Caucasian who had established liberty and self-government over a continent, and made it perpetual. We pray that they be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. Had the white population of the south been at the time as disproportionate to the black as it was in Hayti in 1794, it would also have been massacred. But the section was full of late confederate soldiers. When the fates had decided against the dear cause for which they had fought for four years they accepted peace in good faith. Now their conquerors turned loose a horde of black plunderers to despoil the little that war had left. When I read Professor Brown’s inability to say whether the work of the Ku-Klux was justifiable or not,[157]I thought of Christ’s asking if it was right to do good on the sabbath day.
The lesson to be learned here is that while it is now too late to make the thirteenth amendment what it ought to have been, and there is perhaps no need to alter the fourteenth, yet there must be abrogation of the fifteenth as to the great mass of southern negroes. In fact this has really come already through the white primary.Booker Washington is a great, a decisive authority on this question. He counsels the negroes to eschew politics. This is wise. It is the solid interest of the negro masses that they accept the inevitable; just as the south gave up slavery when we could hold on to it no longer.
4. The southern negroes have split into what I shall roughly distinguish as an upper and a lower class. The former includes property owners and such as are in higher occupations, trades, and professions. I do not believe that the entire class contains three per cent, but I shall take it to be five per cent of the whole negroes in the section. Exact accuracy here is not important. It needs only to be remembered that the lower class outnumbers the other many times over. They are moving in different directions. The dominant inclination of the upper class is towards incorporation as citizens, exercising all the rights of the white. The dominant inclination of the lower class is towards segregation in their own circles. A true representative of the former would always travel in a white railroad car, while a true representative of the other is perfectly content with the shabbiest Jim Crow, if the whites be kept out of it. Thousands in the south never think of any negroes but those of the lower, thousands in the north never think of any but those in the upper class. The lower class subsists mainly upon agricultural, domestic, and day labor. There is a rural and urban section of each one of the two. The rural section of the upper class has little promise of permanence and growth, but its urban section seems to have securer foothold. For a while this urban section will probably increase and rise in condition—both slowly. This upper class is now steadily sending some of its members from country and town, to settle in the north. As I read the signs its destiny is ultimatedispersion over the entire country and gradual disappearance. The lower class settles downwards steadily. The outlook for it is gloomy in the extreme.
5. Somewhere about 1890—which year we may regard as approximately beginning the manufacturing era of the South—many whites in the section had broken with the old ways and methods and resolved to substitute their own for negro labor as far as possible. These awakened men and women multiply. They are pushing the lower class out of all rural labor, and both classes out of agriculture; and they are also pushing some of the upper class out of the trades and more important occupations in both town and country. Evidently the powers have decreed that the labor class of the south shall be white and homogeneous with that of the north. These powers who delivered the white laborers of the west from the Chinese will also deliver the white laborers of the south from the negroes.
6. There is soon to be a New Industrial South, in which the most advanced machinery and laborers of the very highest skill are to be chief factors. A little later there is to be a still more important New Agricultural South. In this, the empirical restorative methods of the Chinese, which Liebig, in his day, showed to be ahead of the world, must be far surpassed. Economy of the enormous mass of fertile elements now washing into the sea; adequate exploitation of the nitrogen of the air and of all accessible mineral elements needed; scientific dairy industry, stock rearing, fruit culture, and all related branches; farmers of the most efficient training, and laborers whose deft hands are the proper instruments of the strongest brains—all these must combine to give the south that perfect intensive culture which she will add to her blessings of climate and soil in order to supply the fast growing demand of all the world outside forher especial products. Further, as everything now seems to indicate, the southern yield of the more important minerals and metals will lead that of the entire country. Further again, the bulk of transcontinental railroad traffic must be across the south on snow-free routes, and the upbuilding which in time will follow from this is as yet incalculable. And when the inter-ocean canal connects us with the Pacific trade—what new impetus will this give to our development! What needs and opportunities there will then be for skilled labor, for inventive talent, for managerial ability, for every element of a most highly organized community of unwontedly many diversified prospecting interests. The demand will be for a vast population of the very best strain and breed, knowing the best methods of physical, moral, and self-subsisting education of their children, out of whom will come the best of all workers and producers. To attempt to do the required tasks of the new south of the near future and hold our own against the competition of the world—to try to do these with negro laborers, negro farmers, negro producers, negro employers, would be like substituting the ox-wagon for the present railroad freight train. Nay, it would be more like one with a wooden leg, and a millstone around his neck, offering to run against a trained racer. The negro laborer, farmer, manufacturer, and contractor show more clearly every day that they are hopelessly outclassed in the struggle with white competitors. As a body where they now are they are becoming useless and an incubus. They will soon be still more in the way, and a more serious hindrance to southern development. They keep back the immigration which is especially called for. That is the immigration of northern and European farmers, producers, and manufacturers of all kinds to teach us their advanced methods, and the most skilledlabor in every department to stimulate with example our native white labor to its highest accomplishment. The northern people would come south very largely if there were no negroes here. Their desire to come increases steadily, and so does our desire to have them come. The whites of both sections naturally co-operate more and more earnestly to effect their joint wishes. The disinclination of the United States supreme court to overturn the recent anti-negro amendments of the constitutions of southern States, and the palpably growing favor showed these amendments at the north are very significant signs that the south is to be made more to the liking of northern settlers.
Since the last sentence was written that court has ruled it to be a crime, punishable severely, to hold one to the performance of a contract to pay his debt by laboring for you.[158]The average negro has no resource but credit on the faith of such a contract. So soon as it becomes generally known that he cannot be lawfully held to its performance, the credit will be denied. As has been suggested to me by an observant and far-seeing man, the decision overturns the main pillar of the negro’s subsistence. It will powerfully favor northern immigration, as well as the substitution of white for black labor—that is, if it is vigorously enforced.
7. I believe that the two races together, in the same community as they are now in the south, are oil and water. Meditate the course and portent of these facts. Immediately upon emancipation the negroes set up their own churches and schools; they manifested approval of the separate passenger car for themselves, politely hinting in season that the whites ought to be kept out of it; and they influenced the planter to remove their cabins out of sight and hearing of the BigHouse. They showed a great disinclination, the men to do agricultural work by the year for standing wages, the women to hire as house servants. It was some while before the whites really recognized this drift of the negro towards segregation, when many of them—especially the wives and mothers—gave the rein to much unreasonable resentment. Now, if you but know how to look, you will find everywhere the proofs of deepening antagonism. The black driver will not see even a white lady—not to mention a man—on the crossing, but he will always see a negro of either sex. The face of the white inconveniently stepping aside flushes with momentary anger. If your colored servant tells you there is a lady at the door you may know it is a negro woman; he never calls a “white ’oman” a lady. A negro woman is prone to make the most prominent white lady give the street. In Atlanta, a negro man or a white boy cannot safely go at night the former through the factory white settlement, the latter through Summer Hill, a negro residence quarter. I have been informed that where the mill operatives of Anderson, South Carolina, have their cottages, there is conspicuously posted, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you here.” I hear that the same is true of certain places in the Texas Panhandle; also that a negro settlement in the Indian territory displays a similar warning to the white man.[159]Parties of black and white children meeting on unfrequented streets of Atlanta nearly always exchange opprobrious language, often throw stones at one another, and sometimes fight—a proof so significant that, whenever I see it, it always makes me serious. The most decided change from old times that I note is that white society everywhere proscribes mixed sexual intercourse andthe procreation of mulattoes with rapidly increasing severity. The advocate of mixed marriages is more and more regarded as a fiend. The white woman seized by a negro man—how gladly would she change place with the victim of the torturing savage or of the tiger that would mangle and eat her alive! This menace is everywhere, and naturally it is magnified by excited imagination. It increases in fact. The trial of negroes for capital offences was given the superior court of Georgia in 1850. From then until the end of the brothers’ war but two cases of rape of white women by negroes are in the supreme court reports;[160]and I never heard of but two other cases occurring in that time. But there have been many since. It steadily becomes more frequent. Women more and more dread to be left alone. And now there is hardly a man in the Black Belt who, when he is to be a night away from wife, daughters, mother, and sisters, without help at call, does not have uncomfortable thoughts of the sooty desecrator. The increasing effect of these multiplying outrages and the increasing horror which they cause is proved by a fact which ought to receive more intelligent recognition from everybody. This fact is that lynching of a negro for rape, and lately for other crimes of violence against whites, whether in the south or in the north, seems to be every time marked with a greater outburst of popular fury. The public grows more decidedly anti-negro. They give as little heed to the appeals of the papers in these matters as they do to the editorials always advocating the projects of the machine and corporations. The mob sweeps aside the military. The military will not load its rifles. If they were loaded it would probably refuse to fire, or would fire into theair. A few exclaim against lawlessness, while it is plain that the great mass of the whites do not really condemn in their hearts.
Let us try to understand the real cause of these things. The plainest parallel that occurs to me is the riots and violence excited by attempts to execute the fugitive slave law. The greatest of our southern statesmen misunderstood. What they thought to be lawlessness was in fact the struggle of nature by which the social organism of the United States expelled all cause of dissolution. These hostile demonstrations of the day against negroes are, as they seem to me, far other than acts of unenlightened and ignorant race prejudice, to which some writers ascribe them. They indicate, I think, another struggle of nature to expel a foreign and death-breeding substance out of the American body politic; they are each the protest of the self-preserving instincts against keeping the negro with us to counteract our progress, to debase our politics, to corrupt our blood, to injure us more than even successful secession could have done. How aptly has Matthew Arnold said, “O man, how true are thine instincts, how overhasty thine interpretation of them!”
8. Plainly the disparity of the negro in the deadly struggle with the white over every resource of subsistence fast becomes greater; plainly does his stay in the south more and more injure both sections; plainly under the effects of hard life, growing idleness and growing crime, increasing ravages of disease, and the naturally engendered feeling of helplessness, the average negro in the lower class gravitates downwards; plainly this negro ought to have, in a sphere of his own, opportunity and stimulus for self-recovery and progress. Plainly whites and negroes ought to be separated. The latter seriously clog the evolution of the desired southernlabor class, and the southern whites completely exclude the negroes from public life. The two are really each different communities in juxtaposition, but not united. You may think of them as plants, one of which has a diseased root, and the other has its top kept in the dark and out of the sun. Both these evils result unavoidably from keeping the two races together. So let us give the negro his own State in our union. That will allow the root of the one plant to get well, and it will give the top of the other permanently to the sun.
We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is his due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from town meeting to congress.
If something like this is not done it is extremely probable that the great mass of the lower class of the negroes will die out. Let not this crime be committed by the American nation.
9. We should be extremely liberal to the negro in education—in primary, in industrial, and also in the higher. Especially ought we to combine the second with the first, and give it the lead for both races.
10. All the southern states should at once by proper constitutional and legal provisions substitute judicial for mob lynching.
THE RACE QUESTION—THE SITUATION IN DETAIL
Thedistinction between the two classes of southern negroes, glanced at in the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind—at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and four hundred thousand, in the lower class. The latter, being nineteen times as large as the other, first demands attention.
In the country many of the men are croppers. A group of negroes—generally parents and children—do the labor of preparation, cultivation, and gathering, while the owner contributes the land, necessary animals, and feed for the latter. The croppers get half the crop, and the land owner half. The latter retains out of their half whatever he has advanced the croppers. The advances must be limited with firmness, otherwise they will cause loss. These croppers are the great bulk of the agricultural laborers. So few of the men work for standing wages that they need not be noticed. In the towns the men subsist upon day labor, the pay of which ranges from 50 cents to $1.25. It hardly averages 80 cents. Some of the women, both in country and town, take places as house servants and nurses at weekly wages that vary from $1 to $2 with board. The growingdisinclination of the women to these places is much stronger in the country than in town. In country and town the women do laundry for the whites at an average price per family of a dollar a week; and they get jobs of sewing, cleaning kitchen utensils, scrubbing, etc. In the country these women do some field labor, sometimes plowing, often hoeing. If trained in childhood they make expert cotton-pickers. But the women agricultural workers steadily decrease in number.
The negro has inherited from a thousand generations of forefathers, bred in the humid and enervating tropical West African climate, a laziness which is the extreme contrary of Caucasian energy and enterprise.[161]Thus we are told of him in Jamaica, “In many cases a field negro will not work for his employer more than four days a week. He may till his own plot of ground on one of the other days or not as the spirit moves him.”[162]The first Saturday in June, 1904, I saw the thriving little town of Abbeville, South Carolina, thronged with idle negroes from the surrounding plantations. A merchant, who was kept busy in his store, offered to pay several of them 75 cents to cut up a load of firewood—something more than the market price. They do not work on Saturday unless compelled by something unusual; and so each one replied at once, without any inquiry if the logs were large or small, seasoned or not, and thus finding whether the job was hard or easy, that the weather was too hot. And yet these negroes all exhibited in their clothes and hungry looks unmistakable signs of want. Those that superintend the gangs working for contractors in Atlanta and the vicinity, all—except now and then one who has managed to form a small party of picked laborers—tell me that it is very seldom that a negrocan be induced to work Saturday; if that does happen he will make up his lost holiday by not returning to work before Tuesday. Your cook, nurse, maid, or black servant of any kind will every now and then suddenly inconvenience you by taking an utterly unnecessary rest. When Booker Washington was starting his system of industrial training, as he tells us, “Not a few of the fathers and mothers urged that because the race had worked for 250 years or more, it ought to have a chance to rest.”[163]
The negro has likewise inherited lack of forecast and providence. If at the end of the year he finds himself with a small purse from his part of the crop, standing wages, or profits from a tenancy, he will often squander much of it for a top buggy, a piano which none of his family can play, or expensive furniture. Those in the gangs just mentioned always want to fool away their money before it is made. If one has been advanced $4, and his wages amount to $5, he will hardly ever abridge his holiday by turning up to get the dollar balance when the others who have not been advanced are paid Saturday night. He will waste his cash on watermelons and fish that an average white will not even smell. When forced down to it he can live contentedly upon almost nothing. A very large proportion of both sexes are happy upon a real meal every two or three days, and a sly change of mate every two or three weeks. Toombs, who was always looking at Cuffee, pronounced him “rich in the fewness of his wants.” Bring him out more clearly to yourselves by comparison with an Irishman struggling up from starvation wages of hard daily work into comfort and ease. Reflect over the only success a cotton mill has had with black labor, which was due to whipping the operatives for breach of duty.[164]
In Atlanta—which of course is but like other southern cities in the particular now to be mentioned—many of the men live upon their women. It is a common saying that you cannot keep a colored cook if you do not allow her to carry the keys. There is great complaint that the colored washerwomen help their dependents out of the clothes. The criminal class of negro men, women, and children is large and growing much faster than that of the whites. Two very striking developments are the negro burglar and the negro footpad. There are many breakings and entries every year in Atlanta, many holdups of pedestrians, and nearly all of them are by negroes. Now and then a negro snatches a lady’s purse from her on the street. The prisoners sent to the Atlanta stockade during the twelve months beginning December 15, 1902, were
According to the twelfth census, the negro population of Atlanta was 35,727, and the white 54,090. So, while there are in every thousand of the whites 21 of these criminals, there are in every thousand of the blacks 110. But the case is worse still. About an equal number of convicts escaped the stockade by paying fines. Allowance for this will much increase the per cent of negro criminals. I wish I could get the approximate number whose fines are paid by their employers, white friends, mothers, wives, and other relatives. I have observed facts which make me confident that it is large. The number of boysthat in one year were sent to the stockade—471—is a most important fact, showing as it does that a large per cent of negroes become criminals in childhood. Nearly all of these boys have been abandoned by their fathers. There are just as many abandoned girls in the city. Of course under the prevailing conditions the proportion of criminals in each generation must increase portentously.
The depth of the negroes’ debasement is shown in the impurity of the women. This is another inheritance from their ancestors. The “ancient African chastity” alleged by Professor DuBois,[165]if it ever existed, was entirely prehistoric. A white who has not been bred in close contact with the race is quite unable to understand the degree and universality of this impurity. I will illustrate by a case which occurred in a prosperous town of Middle Georgia not very long before I settled in Atlanta. A prominent negro preacher had been caught in adultery. The woman, who was the mother of several children, and her husband, were both members of the same church as the preacher, and of unctuous piety. The detection was so complete and certain, and it had immediately become so notorious that church notice was unavoidable. The problem was how to whitewash the affair. The office of a lawyer friend of mine in the town last mentioned was waited on by a member of the church—a say-nothing sort of negro, who always applied for leave to attend the meetings at which the preacher was being tried. This office boy had returned several times with the news, when inquired of, that nothing had been done. At last, one day he answered that they had cleared the preacher. My friend commanded that this be explained. The darkie said, in his laconic way, “Well, he ’fessed de act, but he ’scused de act.” “How in the world did he excuse it?” was asked. “He saidhis heart wasn’t in it.” “Were you fools enough to believe that?” was ejaculated. The negro, with an air as superior as was compatible with the great politeness of his race, replied, “He said it was de debble dat had his body dar; but all de time his soul was at de throne, praying for God’s people. In course we couldn’t blame him for what de debble done.”
This defence, suggesting the make-believe loan of his body by the friar in the Decameron to the angel Gabriel, which, of course, had never been heard of by the accused, convinced the church, willing to be convinced. It appeased the injured husband, willing to be appeased. It fully vindicated the gay clergyman and the erring sister, who were in effect told to go and sin no more with such little discretion.
Had this case, or another like it, occurred at that time or since in any other negro church of that region, there would have been acquittal and justification of the accused, although perhaps the good plea and the right psychological moment to make it might not have been so aptly found.[166]
The habits and customs of the race mix men and women always and everywhere; and in those opportunities each one of the young and the old, married and unmarried of both sexes—of even children just arrived at puberty—chases a short-lived amour with ever eager zest.[167]The blacker the Lothario the moreshow of white blood he seeks in his fancies. Now and then furious desire for real white overmasters him. Surprising some unattended angel of a girl or matron, he chooses to see Rome and then die. Her avengers pour kerosene on him and burn him to a crisp. His lusty fellows think to themselves what Hermes, in the song of Demodocus, says to Apollo of the mishap to Ares and golden Aphrodite—that is, that for the same brief pleasure they would each gladly endure thrice the penalty.
Professor DuBois says that the chastity of the negro women has improved so greatly “that even in the back country districts not above nine per cent of the population may be classed as distinctly lewd.”[168]Inquire of honest witnesses who have good opportunities of observing—the farmers, small and large, and the storekeepers, in the country, those who do contract work and the police in the cities—of all who have close access to negroes at all times, and especially at night; and the concurring report will be that right correction of Professor DuBois’ statement just given cannot stop with mere inversion of his percentages; that the fact is, no negroes in this lower class which we are now dealing with are chaste except those whose physical condition has made a virtue of necessity.[169]
It is sadly true that men of all races are too prone to unchastity. It is chaste women that give humanamelioration its main propulsion; for they make every husband to know that the children around his fireside are his own. If I were asked in what one particular had my life-long comparison convinced me that the two races are farthest apart, I would unhesitatingly answer, in the character of the women of each—the average white woman, from her marriage on, forgetting all other men but her husband, the black wife always with a paramour, if to be had.
The tie which holds the family stanch is wanting. The men often cast aside their domestic burdens, and begin their lives over in a distant region with a new woman. The wife and mother left behind does not mope. She has generally prearranged satisfactorily with another man.
Disease is making great ravages in this lower class of negroes. I never knew of a case of consumption among the slaves, and I can recall but one serious case of pneumonia. Now these two diseases slay the negroes by hundreds. Before the war the negro was regarded as immune from yellow fever, and almost immune from dangerous malarial affections. He has lost his charm against these also. There has been a dreadful increase of insanity among them. The only ante-bellum case that I can recall was due to an accidental injury of the head.
It is but natural that the death rate among the negroes mounts fearfully. Their great multiplication has far outrun their reasonable means of subsistence. We note what a heavy burden a large family is to a man in hard times. I must believe that the thirteenth census will show a still greater negro death-rate.
We shall sum up as to this lower class after we have described the displacement of black by white labor.
Now we must consider the upper class. We needlook only at its main divisions, to wit, the negro farmers, and the well-to-do urban negroes.
The rose-colored statements of Professor DuBois as to the former cannot impose upon residents of the south.[170]I shall begin with the negro farm owners of Georgia. In what he says of them in the second Bulletin mentioned in the last footnote he hardly ever looks away from the report of the comptroller-general of the State. I shall deal with relevant facts about which the comptroller-general is not required to concern himself—and of which the census takes but little note. Where agricultural land commands only a few dollars per acre a large part of it will get into possession of purchasers under title-bond who expect to work it and pay for it in annual instalments out of its produce. Of course the vendor sees to it that he himself escapes taxation on this land, and so the purchasers, although they may have paid him but a trifle or nothing at all, are assessed as if they were the real owners, while the vendors are retaining the title as security. Soon after the war many a white planter, in order to get out of a failing business and procure capital for something else, sold his land in whole or part. He could find no purchaser but some exceptional negro; and the latter could buy only on credit. Much of the lands so sold had to be retaken because the purchasers failed to meet their payments. It was my observation when I left Greene county twenty-three years ago that in that and the adjoining counties the number of negro owners of agricultural land was decreasing, and it is my information that such is nowthe case. This indicates an important fact not shown in the reports of the comptroller-general, to wit, that a large number of the negroes appearing therein as owners are really not owners, and are losing their holdings.
The next fact to be mentioned is that, as I learn from residents, many farms of which a negro had acquired the fee are heavily encumbered, and often fall to the local merchants.
Further, as Professor DuBois states, “the land owned by negroes is usually the less fertile, worn-out tracts.”[171]
According to the comptroller’s report for 1903 the acres of white ownership are 29,762,259, returned at a value of $121,629,094; which is $4,139 per acre. The per cent of the total value owned by the blacks is 4.07. This result—that the negroes own a fraction over four per cent of the improved lands of Georgia—must be corrected by proper deduction for purchase money debts, and also for encumbrances. It must be further corrected by another deduction. The negroes land is considerably below the average of the rest in quality and market value. Yet while the white returns at $4.08 an acre, the other returns at $4.13. This higher valuation is not because of conscientious avoidance of tax-dodging. It comes from that optimistic exaggeration characterizing the race, which is vividly illustrated in Booker Washington’s gravely stating that the love of knowledge by the average negroes of the south has become the “marvel of mankind,”[172]and in the extravagant assertion of Professor DuBois as to their chastity commented on a few pages back.
There are a few negro owners of farming lands that are prospering, but I am credibly informed that as a class they are falling behind.
The tenants—the renters, as they are commonly called—are the more prosperous negro farmers. The whites hold on to their lands more firmly than they did some years ago, and the tenantry class both of whites and blacks is becoming larger. The whites in the Black Belt all believe that the negroes generally belong to societies, in which they have bound themselves not to hire to the former as house servants or for standing wages except when they cannot otherwise subsist. So most of the cotton is made by tenants and croppers. They grade as many bad and mediocre, and a few good. The latter work with a will, and make fair crops. They send their children off to expensive schools. When they die the property they have accumulated is distributed and squandered, and a new tenant—generally, of late years, a white—succeeds.