It is to be observed everywhere that some reliable white man is generally backing or superintending a negro farmer that can get credit. The negro farmers, in almost any large county in the Black Belt that you may select, that are an exception can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Their implements and methods are primitive;[173]and they employ hardly any labor except that of their own families.[174]As soon as the negro farmer’s children have grown up they leave him; the negro laborers in his neighborhood become more idle every year, and they become also more scarce. It is not to be thought of that he employ white labor. This class will give no help to the new agriculture, which I have glanced at in the last chapter.
Twenty-odd years ago when I left the planting section, the white landowners all preferred negro tenants. But white tenants are now preferred. They do not sendtheir children to school as much as the negroes do, but keep them at work while the hoeing, which is the first main thing to the cotton farmer, and the gathering, which is the second and last and greatest by far, are unfinished. The negroes’ hoeing and other cultivation are bad; and after the crop is laid by until Christmas, during which time comes the all-important laborious cotton-picking, they spend so much of their nights at church they are incapacitated from doing good work. They lose much time by going to camp-meetings in the late summer and early autumn, and riding on railroad excursion trains at every opportunity. The white tenants and their families, by careful “chopping out” and hoeing, get the proper “stand” and they pick clean; the negroes fall behind in both respects. The bettering credit of the white steadily hits the negro harder. The only tenants who are good for the rent are the class a few of whom have cash of their own and the rest can get credit with the local merchant for necessary supplies. Such tenants the landowners seek after, and find every year more and more among the whites, and less and less among the blacks.
Every year a larger part of the staple crops of the south is made by whites. The negroes have lately decreased in Kentucky. Mr. Tillinghast brings forward, from Hoffman, weighty proofs that in the State just mentioned, which has just become the principal seat of tobacco growing, and also in the largest yielding counties of Virginia, that black labor constantly grows less of the crop.[175]He uses Hoffman, too, to show that white labor is slowly expelling black from rice production.[176]The old south believed that rice culture was sure death to the white, Mr. Tillinghast quotes, as to the greatest agricultural product of the south, this from ProfessorWilcox: “It would probably be a conservative statement to say that at least four-fifths of the cotton was ... in 1860 grown by negroes; at the present time [i.e. in 1899] probably not one-half is thus grown.”[177]
Compare this further: “He [Hoffman] finds that ‘with less than one-half as large a colored population as Mississippi,... Texas produced in 1894 almost three times the cotton crop of the former State.’ Even more significant is the fact that with almost twice the colored population of 1860, Mississippi, in 1894, produced less cotton than thirty-four years ago.’”[178]
Very significant are the facts lately published by the Agricultural Department which show that in an area of some sixty-three per cent of the production, the white outpicks the negro. “One hundred and fifty-two counties, with a negro population amounting to seventy-five per cent of the whole, averaged one hundred and eleven pounds per day, whereas one hundred and ninety-two counties, with a white population constituting seventy-five per cent or more of the whole, averaged one hundred and forty-eight pounds per day,”[179]that is, the white picked one-third more than the black. There are other statements in this bulletin of importance here. I can give this one only:
“In the Indian Territory and Oklahoma, where the whites represent about eighty per cent of the population (including Indians) the average number of pounds picked is greater than in any of the States except Arkansas and Texas. The highest number of pounds picked in any State is one hundred and seventy-two in Texas, the counties represented having a white population of eighty per cent.”[180]
In Arkansas the population of the counties mentioned was fifty-nine per cent white, the rest negro.
It is almost certain that the foregoing estimates do great injustice to the whites. They assume that there is no inferiority of the negro to the white except the per diem quantity of cotton picked. Ponder the statement as to a county of Georgia which I now give.
“According to the ginners’ report, Madison county made sixteen thousand bales of cotton in 1902. Its negro population is about three thousand, its white, twelve thousand. The negroes are one-fifth and the whites four-fifths, and out of every five bales the negroes ought to have made at least one and the whites four. But the former do not average as well as the others. The white who runs one plow, whose wife and children do the hoeing and picking, probably makes ten bales. The negro who runs one plow, whose wife and children hoe and pick, hardly makes more than five or six bales. The greater part of the cotton credited to negro labor is made by negroes who are superintended by white men.”[181]
Weighing all that I have just told, I am as sure as I can be of anything in the near future, that the negro will soon be of greatly diminished importance as laborer, cropper, renter, or farming landowner in the staples of southern agriculture.
There are other kinds of property than improved lands set out in the report of the comptroller-general, such as $3,531,471 of horses, cattle, and stock of all kinds, $810,553 of plantation and mechanical tools. Such needs no separate consideration. These holdingsdo not in view of what we have told, give the negro farmer any strong foothold.
Nearly all that remains of the rural upper class—the negroes in trades, professions, mercantile business, etc.—is so evidently dependent upon the masses of the lower class, now gravitating away from the country that the most of it can be incidentally disposed of at certain places later on in the chapter and the rest be treated as negligible.
The “city or town property” of the negroes of Georgia, according to the report of the comptroller-general for 1903, amounts in value to $44,668,620. From all that I can learn, while it is largely, it is considerably less, encumbered than the real and personal property of the negro farmers.
A large admixture of Caucasian blood marks nearly every member of the upper class both in country and town. I note that occasionally a coalblack acquires property, on which his miser grip is tighter than that of an accumulating Irishman; but such are very few. There is hardly a well-to-do negro in work, occupation, profession, or property, who is not several shades at least removed from coalblack. Mr. Tillinghast observes “that the porters, cooks, and waiters on a Pullman train are usually mulattoes, while the laborers in the gang on the roadbed are nearly all black.”[182]In this day when the pictures of prominent men and women are in many illustrated magazines and papers, it is to be observed that hardly one of a negro shows unmixed blood. Thus a recent monthly contains pictures of Judson W. Lyons, R. H. Terrell, Kelly Miller, Archibald H. Grinke, T. Thomas Fortune, Daniel Murray, and Booker Washington.[183]Of these the third only, to my eye, seems allnegro; and I cannot be confident that he is wholly without appreciable white blood. His head has the shape of a white man’s.
It is my observation that a negro entirely pure in blood hardly ever gets out of the lower class; and that if he does he is much more unprogressive than an average member of the upper class. Note what Bishop Holsey says of how amalgamation with the white improves the descendants of the blacks, in a passage quoted later herein.
This upper class contains only persons of exceptional blood, talent, or some other rare fortune. The higher education, and the education which is now best of all for the negro—industrial education—is for this little circle only. Hampton and Tuskegee do not open to all comers. Mr. Tillinghast convincingly proves that those who have got really good training at the two institutions just named are far above the average negro in physical stamina, education, and other important particulars.[184]The graduates go forth, not to benefit their brothers in the lower class, but to win for themselves surer and higher standing in the upper class.
Some of the resources which this urban section of the upper class have enjoyed for a while they are losing, as I shall tell when I hereinafter summarize the details of white encroachment. But other resources open to them. Such are professions like dentists, eye, ear, and throatsurgeons, doctors, barbers, and others who must content themselves with only colored patronage; such the growing retail trade, multiplying boarding-houses, restaurants, and saloons, finding their custom exclusively in the increasing negro town population. The number of negroes who become teachers, lecturers, preachers, authors, etc., steadily augments. Other resources of this upper class can be pointed out, but it needs not here. Although nearly always when the father who has struggled up dies, his property, as we saw to be the case with the negro farmer, goes, and no child succeeds to his occupation, there is perhaps generally compensation for his loss by the accession of some other who has got up out of the lower class by an extraordinarily lucky jump. It is clear that the class is without the wholesome influence of uninterrupted inheritance, from generation to generation, of faculty and character progressively improving. Take this inheritance away from the men and women of any enlightened nation and it would be to lower them very near to the level of barbarism. It is also nearly certain that there will be no further infusion of white blood into this class, by reason of the hostility to inter-mixture which becomes stronger—yea, intenser—every year. The probable consequence will be the dilution of much of the white blood now in the upper class through the lower class to such an extent that it will practically disappear. But some of it, I think, will persist, perhaps increase in degree—preserved by the aversion of many to intermarriage with persons less white than themselves, and occasional intermarriage with white persons in northern States.
Exceptional ones of this class enjoy privileges of the higher education, afforded by schools and colleges opulently endowed by private persons, which education is bringing forth fruit in teachers, clergymen, andrepresentatives of the learned class. There are already some good books, as well as sermons, speeches, poems, essays, and short articles, by negroes which have won favorable opinion in our literature; and there is evidently to be steady increase.
There is among some of this urban upper class the beginning at least of better things under the lead of better mothers. We must not be unreasonable in our demands that these women who carry in their veins a very appreciable proportion of polyandrous blood shall become immaculately chaste at once. Leave them to the influence of the improving society in which they move; to the noble and faithful efforts of such as Mrs. Booker Washington; their persistent imitation of white mothers; the teachings of the really christian pastors whom the negro universities are beginning to send abroad in numbers far too few; but especially of all to devoted conjugal, maternal, and domestic duty. This last has made the pigeon mother unconquerably true to her life mate. It will do the same for the negro woman.—Let us consider the class further for a moment.
The longer you look at it with unbefogged eyes the more plainly you see it is really a natural aristocracy hugging its special privileges more jealously every year, and that cleavage in interest, affection, and destiny between it and the other class goes on so steadily that it must after some little while yawn in the sight of the entire nation. Here in Atlanta, as seems to be the case in all the southern cities, there are respectable negro districts and also negro slums. The latter are the more numerous and far more populous. The inhabitants of these several districts are almost as wide apart as are the whites in the fashionable circle and the million of poor folk without.
I must postpone my final contrast of these two classesuntil I have completed what remains to be said of the displacement of black by white labor. For a few years after the war it was so slow moving that I was not confidently aware of it. Now it has proceeded so far, and so much accelerated its pace, that I can indicate it with something like accuracy. In the thirteenth chapter I noted its beginning. This was when the mother and her girls took upon themselves the daily indoor work, and the father and sons took upon themselves the outdoor work, morning, noon, and night, around the house and the horse-lot,—the word which in the south corresponds to the barnyard of the northern farmer. Especially significant is it that a large per cent of the white matrons in the country have at last discarded the negro laundry-woman and habitually themselves use the washtub for their families. The impulse to supplant negro labor showed its greatest energy where the black population had been sparse. I have heard my friend, F. C. Foster, a resident of Morgan county, often mention that what were before the war the rich and poor sides of that county have become interchanged; where most of the large slave-owners lived was the rich, but now is the poor side; and the other, where there were but few slaves, is now the rich side.
I see many proofs in every quarter that the whites of the Black Belt have commenced to learn good lessons from their neighbors outside, and show every year a greater self-reliance. Many more causes than I have space to set down conspire to increase this self-reliance. The small farmer must, by himself or his wife and children or white help, do such things as these: work his brood mare; care for his blooded stock, fine poultry, and bees; handle his reaper, mower, and more expensive tools and implements; give all necessary attention to his orchards and larger and smaller fruits,—industries which,with that of the dairy, are now pushing forward with mounting energy; for he has learned that the average negro cannot be trusted in these and many other things which can be suggested.
I must not overstate the advance of white production and labor upon black in the country. In the regions of densest negro populations the whites show a backwardness in taking to work that is discouraging. A very observant man familiar with Jackson and Madison counties of Georgia, both of which are out of the Black Belt, and who now lives where negroes outnumber the whites, not long ago made this comparison, while answering my inquiries: “In Jackson and Madison the whites work. A farmer who runs but one plow does all the plowing. He hires but one negro. In my present county the one-horse farmer always hires two negroes, one to plow and the other to hoe, and the only work he does is to boss them.” But the negroes are going away from many parts, in fact from nearly all, of the Black Belt. Wherever they have become scarce, the whites go to work; and, as is now occurring in that part of Greene county called “The Fork,” and in places in adjoining counties, the lands rise greatly in market value. In many parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, where negroes were doing practically all the agricultural labor when I came to Atlanta, I learn that many white boys are becoming good all-around workers. It surprised me greatly to be told that in this region in different places the white women and children, as soon as the dew is off in the morning, go to cotton picking, and they become so efficient that often no extra labor need be hired to finish that greatest task of all to the farmer. Before the war, all of us white boys picked just enough of cotton to learn that our backs could never be made to stand picking all day. The whites now beatingthe negro in what we once thought he only could do, and white women in the old slave regions doing the family laundry,—these begin a marvellous economic revolution.
The cotton mills and other manufactories rapidly springing up in many southern localities are developing a class of white operatives. Mining of various kinds is on the increase. Stone, slate, and marble cutting, cabinet making, and other trades attract greater numbers to follow them. White railroad employees, printers, engravers, stenographers, typewriters, and those in numerous other gainful occupations, grow in numbers. White women and girls stream to work for employers every morning. In all places, if you but look long enough, you catch sight of swelling crowds of the race who once lived almost entirely from slave labor now doing their own labor.
I will close what I have to say of this part of the subject by observations of Atlanta. When I settled here, the barbers, shoe repairers, blacksmiths, band-musicians, sick-nurses, seamstresses, ostlers, and carriage-drivers were, so far as I noted, black almost without exception. Now the first five are nearly all white, and whites steadily multiply in the rest, although they are far from being in a majority. The only expulsion of white by negro labor that I have noted is the substitution by the bicycle messenger service and the telegraph of negro for white messengers, made not long ago. These messenger services thrive by exploiting child labor. By the change mentioned they got much larger and stronger boys—often grown-up ones—for the same price which they used to pay white children a year or two older than mere tots. Against the recent loss just told I have these two recent gains of the whites to tell. There had always been only negro waiters in the restaurants. In some ofthem the eaters at the lunch counters are now served by a white man standing behind it; and what he needs, if it is not kept in store so near that he can reach it, is brought to him, at his command, by a negro, whom you may call his waiter. This negro also wipes off the counter. After we became used to white barbers we generally preferred them to the black ones. And I note that a growing majority of those who frequent the counters like the white waiters, although I now and then hear a growler say that he would rather have a waiter that he can reprimand and speak to as he pleases. Some of the restaurants begin to advertise that their help is all white. With the superior alertness and quickness of his race, a white behind the counter accomplishes more than twice as much as the former black. To use a common saying, the white waiters keep at active work all their twelve hours as if they were fighting fire, while the negroes commanded by them take things easy. Every one of the whites is constantly on the lookout for a better place; and generally he manages somehow, after a short while, to get it. One who now serves me studies bookkeeping two hours every night, and will doubtless soon be giving satisfaction in his chosen occupation to some business house. The negroes look out only for tips, are interested in nothing but amusements, and never get any higher. Bear in mind, they are considerably above the average negro in qualifications and station.
The other instance is that some co-operating Greek boys have recently captured a very considerable proportion of the shoe-shining. They provide more convenient and comfortable seats and give a better shine than the negro does, in a much shorter time, and for the same price. It looks now as if they are bound to make full conquest of the business. With my experience it is more of a surprise to me to see clothes laundered,tables waited on, and shoes shined by the whites, than even to see cotton picked by them.
But to go on with Atlanta. Occupations requiring the management of machinery or peculiar skill are nearly always filled by whites. The street railroad conductors and motormen are all white. The only negroes connected with the road that I, as a passenger, generally see is the curve-greaser, and now and then a helper on the construction car. The steam railroads will employ a negro fireman because of his ability to stand heat, but they do not trust him to oil and wipe. In the smaller buildings negro elevator-runners some time ago were frequent, but now it is clear that the whites will soon have the occupation exclusively. There is, I believe, more building, in this year of 1904, in Atlanta than ever before. The preparation of all the material is done by white labor in the planing-mills and machine-shops, while the more unskilled work of putting it in place is done by the negro carpenter.
The lathers and plasterers are all negroes, there are more negro brick and stone masons than white, and the carpenters are nearly all negroes, there being but few young white ones. The painters are about equally divided. The negro’s standard of living is so much lower than that of the white, that where there is competition he proves victor by accepting a price upon which the white man cannot live. But the latter does not throw up the sponge. At the point where race competition begins he induces the negroes, whenever he can, to join his union, and soon to have one of their own. Just now (August, 1904) there are not enough of brickmasons to supply the demand, and there is both a white and black union of that trade. But so far there has been no success in the efforts made for a black carpenters’ union. The negroes have of late years kept suchfirm hold of the trade, that it seems no young whites come into it, there being but few white carpenters in Atlanta under forty years of age. The negroes understand that their grip is due to their ability to work for lower pay than the whites, and when the union is proposed they say to themselves, that means only more places for white carpenters and less for us. But the trend to form unions seems to strengthen. There is a mixed union of tailors, separate unions of blacksmiths’ helpers, moulders’ helpers, painters, and also of brickmasons, as just mentioned. There is a black union of plasterers and no white one. It is to be remembered that the initiative to unionize the negro workman comes from the other race, the purpose being to balk the exertions of employers to depress wages by encouraging the cheaper worker. Consider the dilemma of the negro workman invited into the union by whites. He foresees that if he accepts, his race will after a while be swamped in the trade by white competition. At the same time he foresees that if he does not accept, he cannot increase his income, which in its smallness becomes more and more inadequate to sustain himself and family under the constant demands of the day for larger and larger expenditure. The immediate needs of those dependent upon him will generally decide his course. I cannot say how long the negro carpenters of Atlanta will refuse the proposal to federate themselves in a union with the whites; but this I can say, that all attempts of the negroes to keep the whites out of any well-paid vocation must fail, even with the most resolute and stubbornly maintained effort. As I view it on the spot the white forward movement palpably strengthens and the defence weakens. Bear in mind that the whites receive constant re-enforcement from all other white American and European communities, and the blacks areconfined to their own resources of supply, all the while declining.
What I have just told as happening in Atlanta intelligent and observant negroes detect to be but a part of the general recession before white competition. The National Negro Business League had its last meeting at Indianapolis. In one of the resolutions adopted, mainly because of the influence of Dr. Booker T. Washington, its president, occurs this allegation, “During our discussions it has been clearly developed that the race has been steadily losing many avenues of valuable employment.” The resolution ascribes this to lack of proper training, and recommends that the lack be supplied. A negro makes this acute and true comment, which I would have attended to here, and considered again when further on I discuss what the industrial schools can do:
“That the colored man has of late years been losing many avenues of employment is quite true, but the conclusion that this is due to a lack of training is not to be hastily accepted. Nobody believes that our people are now less capable of work than they were when recognized in these avenues of labor. As a matter of fact they are far better equipped now than they were then, or Tuskegee and Hampton and the other industrial schools that are crowded from year to year are making a signal failure. In those days men were picked up here and there and started in as apprentices as green as they could be. Now thousands of them are prepared before they go out to work. The two chief reasons our folks are not employed so universally now is, first, the fact, thatthe white south has gone to work with its own hands, and second, the negro refuses longer to work for nothing.The continued assertion by some of our leaders that a man who can labor will not be discriminated against, is untrue. The preference is given to the white man in almost every case, and the negro is allowed to do the work he refuses.It is well enough to ask our people to secure industrial education, but it is wrongto place all our ills upon a lack of such training or to recommend industrial education as a panacea. Though it was quite inevitable that the league should adopt such a resolution as an endorsement of its president’s policy.”[185]
I have italicized in the quotation the statements specially pertinent here. They are very weighty proofs supporting my proposition of fact, to wit, that there is now waging between the whites and negroes an internecine war for every opportunity of labor above the very lowest and unskilled.
I ask also that it be noted that the writer is utterly unconscious of any negroes than those of the upper class. Not a thing that he says can be applied to the ninety-five per cent.
The death rate of the negro is coming close to, while that of the white keeps far below, the birth rate. Rapid native increase and vigorous immigration for the whites, nothing but slow and decreasing propagation for the negroes; and larger and larger hosts of the former giving their champions active sympathy and help—the event of this inter-race struggle over the trades and occupations may be delayed, but it cannot be doubtful.
The reader must not forget that the negroes now in mind belong all to what I have called the upper class. Their number is so small and its promise of increase so slight that I should hardly have done more than allude to them, if the subject did not emphasize so impressively as it does the inevitable expulsion of negro by white labor. Let me explain this fully. Professor Wilcox, summarizing the pertinent information of the twelfth census as to ten leading occupations competed for by the two races in the south, states that in the year 1900 the per cent of negroes was larger in seven and smallerin nine of them than ten years before.[186]That alone shows white gain. But I want you to add to Professor Wilcox’s statement something of which the census gives no hint, that is, the bound forward of the negroes on one side, and the inaction of the whites on the other, during many years beginning with emancipation in 1865. When that has been done, the encroachment of white labor upon black effected in the comparatively short time since its beginning appears almost prodigious. It is somewhat like the race-horse, who, falling far behind in the first stages of a long heat, at last wakes up and gains so fast that nobody will bet against him. It means that the whites are now as ruthlessly taking all opportunities of labor away from the blacks, as their fathers took his lands away from the American Indian.
We can now say our last word in contrasting the two classes. Many fail to see clearly the difference between them. Thus Ernest Hamlin Abbott[187]and Edgar Gardner Murphy,[188]in their pleasant discussions, only here and there, and as if casually, say something which momentarily implies existence of the lower class, and then relapse into claiming for all of the southern negroes, if not the actual condition of the upper class, at least hopeful possibility of soon achieving it. These two kind-hearted men represent a large number who firmly believe that education and the church are now rapidly elevating the negro masses, when the fact is far otherwise. Many from the north see nothing but the upper class. In what he writes of the negroes whom he knew in public life, the late Senator Hoar was utterly unconscious of the average negro whom all of us in the south know.[189]Dr. Lyman Abbott, a most benign example of broad and almost perfect tolerance to both sections, taking all southern hearts by his loving sympathy with and full justice to the better sentiment of our section in every matter of importance except the appointment of negroes to office, he never seems to have in mind any negroes but the prominent ones who are giving their fellows industrial or the higher education, and those who have been blessed with either. Do but consider how pathetically he lately lamented the case of the “white negro” lady shut out from the circle of cultivation and kept confined in one of ignorance and lowness. This last circle—its magnitude, its bad and desperate state—he really knows nothing about. He can no more study its deplorable and heartrending conditions than the mother can endure to have the expectoration of her child threatened with tuberculosis examined under the microscope. Chicago has been for some while “farthest to the front” in the struggle against corporation rule. Her battles for direct nomination, direct legislation, and municipal ownership have been chronicled more accurately and intelligently in thePublicthan I can find elsewhere. Therefore I read it with diligence; and I relish more and more Mr. Post’s sound and able anti-machine and anti-plutocratic advocacy. But in everything that the paper says or quotes on the race question I am pained to note that its shortcoming is greater than its very high merit in preaching democratic democracy. Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott does now and then call the negroes a child race, but Mr. Post repudiates all backwardness and inferiority of race. He seems to maintain the equality of the average negro to the average white in all essentials of good citizenship with the zeal of Wendell Phillips, when the providence of the American union frenzied and deputed him to infuriate its defenders against thedisunion slave-owners. Mr. Post, as appears to me, believes with all his heart in the doctrine of Mrs. Stowe and Whittier, to mention no others, as to the negro. Every pertinent utterance in his paper indicates that he has no thought whatever of the lower class. A most striking illustration of this is how he treats the story of the negro Richard R. Wright.[190]When the latter was ten years old he won great fame by the answer he made General Howard, who had inquired of the negro children at the Storrs School in Atlanta, just after the close of the war, “Tell me what message I shall take back from you to the people of the north?” His face ablaze with enthusiasm, the boy Richard said, “Tell ’em we’re risin’.” Whittier went as far astray over this as we saw that he did in his “Laus Deo.” In his poem celebrating he sang—
“O black boy of Atlanta!But half was spoken:The slave’s chain and the Master’sAlike are broken.The one curse of the racesHeld both in tether:They are rising—all are rising,The black and white together.”
I never read the last two lines without in mind admonishing the author, “Praise in departing.”
When Mr. Post published the story, he ought to have mentioned that while the boy who sent forth the winged words did rise and has become president of the Georgia Industrial College, yet that such negroes are far more rare than millionaires, and the main host of their people in the south were sinking at the time, and have been sinking ever since. It is not true that “all are rising.”The whites have recently begun to rise; five per cent only of the negroes, most of whom are largely white, are rising, while the rest of them are doomed, if the nation does not interpose. And the colored dentist of Chicago, slighted by some of the white dentists—Mr. Post sees in him, just as he sees in Richard R. Wright, a representative of the negro millions.
These conscientious and amiable gentlemen are wasting much effort uselessly. There is no very urgent problem as to the upper class of negroes. It has two strings to its bow. If the lower class should perish, a large part of it—perhaps the greater part—will be assimilated. Every day I detect a larger movement toward the north among our better-to-do negroes. I hear of girls that get places as chambermaids and cooks, of boys that find places as ostlers or other domestic service; and I have heard of a few families who have gone in a body, also of some men who have left wife and children here. They believe the north will allow their votes to be counted, will not proscribe them in society as the south does, and they will probably get for themselves or their descendants intermarriage with whites. The determination of these southern negroes towards the north will probably gain in volume and energy. It is plain that those who go do much increase their chances of final absorption into the body of whites. This assimilation is one of the two strings. And if the American negroes shall one day be conceded their own State, as I hope and pray for, their leaders must come from the upper class. That is the other of the two strings.
This upper class of southern negroes has demonstrated full ability to take care of itself. It has its schools and colleges, newspapers, magazines, and augmenting literature, its widening circle of students and readers, and its good shepherds and able leaders. It rapidly wins favorin the south. A few of our residents see no other negroes but those in this upper class, a most striking instance of which is Joel Chandler Harris’s sweeping assertion “that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all parts of the south,especially in the agricultural regions, are leadingsober andindustrious lives.”[191]When one who fully understands the situation studies the assertion just quoted he sees from the context that the writer was led to make it because he had at the time in his eyes only a few of the better negroes in the Atlanta upper class. This is powerful testimony to their prosperity and self-maintaining faculty. Similarly the ChicagoPublicrates the four hundred inhabitants of Boley in the Creek nation as common or average negroes. According to a news dispatch mentioned in that paper the town is only a year old, has “two churches, a school-house, several large stores, and a $5,000 cotton gin, owned and controlled exclusively by negroes.” It is without a system of law and without municipal government, and “yet no serious crime or offence of any kind has been committed in the place.” These four hundred negroes do not permit any white man to settle in the town. Commenting in conclusion upon the news, thePublicsays, “If that dispatch is not a canard, Anglo-Saxon civilization has something to learn of one race which it has outraged and abused and despised.”[192]
Any such place as Boley, if a reality, is peopled only by negroes of the upper class, and, further, only by those who have been sifted out from the rest of that class by a peculiarly drastic selection. Had they not each had remarkable good fortune, extraordinary capacity, and exceptional experience and training, Boleywould never have been heard of. I ask that the fair-minded make two comparisons. 1. Suppose four hundred negroes—not naturally selected, but taken in a body, just as each one comes, from the masses of the lower class described herein—given opportunity to found a town of their own amid what we may call Boley conditions, what would be the result? You may be sure that what occurred in Hayti when the reins of government were suddenly given to the negroes at large would in some sort be repeated. 2. Compare Boley in all its bloom and happy condition as described in thePublicwith certain communities of select whites, which have flourished now and then for years, without formal government; say the Amana community. If this be rightly done, social organism of select whites will at once appear to be incomparably superior to that of select negroes.
I have tried my hardest to make my readers see as clearly as one bred in the south ought to see what a world-wide difference there is between the small upper class and the numerous lower class of negroes. If I have succeeded they will agree with me that it is the better policy to leave the upper class, for the present, just where it is. If this advice be followed, that class will flourish, and some day either be assimilated, or be giving benign salvation to the lower class in the negro State. Especially should this upper class eschew politics. Booker Washington in preaching this is the only real American prophet of the day. With all of his zeal for his race, he is far better appreciated in the south than in the north, and perhaps just as popular. What a lamentable arrest of its benign development it would be to this upper class to turn it away from industrial betterment of its condition to lead the mass of the negroes at the polls in a struggle for rule and office! That wouldbe something like renewing the conditions that developed the Ku-Klux Klan.
It is the great body of the southern negroes—those in the lower class, who have no string at all, nor even a bow—that demands the profoundest attention. I wish I could make every white man, woman, and child of America see them just as they are. As I compare them with what they were in 1865 I note they have advanced somewhat in mental arithmetic, because of practice in computing small sums of money involved in their wages and purchases; that they have learned somewhat of self-providence, and very much endurance of want (which last is really a reversion to a trait of their West African ancestors); and that the per cent of illiteracy among them has been greatly lessened. On the other hand, each generation becomes more disinclined to work, and its vagrants multiply; each generation more prone to live by crime, more unchaste, and more quick to desert their conjugal partners and children. Especially are they far more unhealthy and prone to insanity, and their death rate rapidly rising. They have no resource but unskilled labor of the lowest and cheapest grade; white competition in agriculture and domestic service, machinery in other fields, such as the scrape which has superseded the dump-cart, the improved steam-shovel and method of handling construction trains, and the steam laundry, steadily curtailing that resource; a slothful, improvident, and wasteful disposition curtailing it still further. The resurrecting hand of the trades union cannot reach down to them. Steadily they are more useless to every upbuilder of the coming south except the wage-depresser. More and more they get in the way of real progress in every direction. And as their supplies of necessaries diminish they get in one another’s way. Nearly all of the whites who were bound to themin the domestic love of the old south times are dead. Most naturally and unavoidably as the new generation discerns the growing incompatibility of their stay in the section with its true welfare, unfriendliness comes and grows. Listless, lethargic, careless, without initiative, without opportunity and coercion to make use of it, these multitudes of inveterate have-nothings are in a bottomless gulf of want, immorality, crime, and disease. A true philanthropist has familiarized the world with the “submerged tenth.” Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Post, stand beside me on the strand, and fix your eyes, minds, and hearts upon the slowly drowning ninety-five per cent of the southern negroes. Lay aside the excess of your devotion to the upper class. It does not need it. The Chicago dentist, as thePublicitself reports, was really more than indemnified for the insult given him because of his color by the sympathetic resentment of white members of his profession. Why will you keep agitating the nation in behalf of a few thousands, who are well able to maintain themselves, and neglect millions who require, as Mr. Tillinghast says, some heroic remedy for their salvation?
I shall now tell you the utter inadequacy of Hampton, Tuskegee, and the like, after which I shall consider what, in my judgment, is the only remedy.
The annual output, as we may call it, of all the negro educational institutions in the south is a mere drop in the bucket when compared with the enormous need. The latest reliable figures accessible to me are those of Booker Washington for 1897. They are as follows: 13,581 receiving industrial training, 2,108 collegiate education, 2,410 classical instruction, and 1,311 “taking the professional course,”[193]—the last three aggregating5,829. Suppose the entire 17,999 were following industrial courses, and that every one graduated with credit; and suppose there be added the work of the land companies providing homes and every other enterprise helping the negro in any way—suppose this output to be trebled annually from this time on (which is far above possibility for many years yet, to say nothing of probability), what would be its accomplishment? Why, no more than a slight shower in a few townships during the drought a few years ago would have done in preventing injury to the Kansas corn crop. When you attend, you understand that the great advantages of these excellent institutions are only for a few lucky negroes,—picked ones of the upper class,—and not for the millions whose crying need is for opportunity to earn honest daily bread and a really benevolent coercion to use the opportunity. The problem, what to do for this mass, cannot be solved by philippics against such things asde factoor constitutional disfranchisement of the blacks, lynching them, showing them disrespect in military parades, giving them Jim Crow cars, and not dividing the educational fund more liberally with them; nor would it contribute one jot or tittle towards its solution if every lady in America cordially received in her drawing-room the few negroes who have most deservedly won the respect of the nation. To solve this problem, something must be found which will train and elevate the average negro, while the exceptional one is at the industrial school or college, or studying for a profession; something which will check the prevalent reversion away from monogamic family life, and stimulate that life to develop steadily; something also which will impart to this entire mass permanent and strengthening impulse to better its condition. The only thing that can do this is to separate the negro as far as may be from the whites, give him his own Statein our union, and constrain him there with vigilant kindness to subsist and govern himself in such ways as suit him. I have long thought that our negroes had far stronger claim upon the nation for land than the uncivilizable redskins on whom we have lavished so much expense in vain.
Righteousness demands that we give the former full opportunity to develop normally in self-government. Put him in a State of his own on our continent; provide irrepealably in the organic law that all land and public service franchises be common property; give no political rights therein to those of any other race than the African; compel nobody to settle in this State, but let every black reside in whatever part of the nation that pleases him; let this community while in a Territorial condition, and also for a reasonable time after it has been admitted as a State, be faithfully superintended by the nation in order that republican government be there preserved,—do these things, and there need be no fear that the examples of Hayti and San Domingo, which were not so superintended, will be repeated. Nearly all of the American Indians, because of rigid adherence to their old customs and ways, were crushed by Caucasian rule. But the negro, wherever he comes in contact with a superior, shows a pliancy, a self-adaptability to new circumstances, to which no parallel has ever been suggested, so far as I know. If civilized self-government will but kindly keep him a while at its labor school where he is to learn by doing, I am profoundly convinced that he will develop into the very best of citizens. And I am also just as profoundly convinced that if something like what I recommend is not done at a comparatively early day, after some while, as there are now in America a few prosperous Indians and in New Zealand a few prosperous Maoris, we will have here and there afew prosperous negroes; but the rest of them will either be confirmed degenerates, or have gone no one will know whither. And Booker Washington, the moral exemplar of the day, rivalling Horace’s
“Iustum et tenacem propositi virum,”
as he resists the pernicious counsels of the overwhelming majority of negroes and keeps to the wise and right course which they passionately condemn; who is far more able and who has accomplished infinitely more of good than Toussaint or Douglass—he will be a great hero statesman of a great cause lost. The historian of the future that has something like Shakspeare’s genius for contrast will make his glory and that of Calhoun magnify each other by comparison.
The foregoing as to a negro State, which is the result of years of observation and reflection, had all been written for some time when I fell in with the address of Bishop Holsey, mentioned above. It is the proposition of the address that a part of the United States should be assigned to the negroes. I add an abstract from the synopsis of his views given in the address:
1. Negroes and whites “are so distinct and dissimilar in racial traits, instincts, and character, it is impossible for them to live together on equal terms of social and political relation, or on terms of equal citizenship.”
2. The general government only has power to settle the problem, and it ought to settle it.
3. Separation of the negroes and whites “is the most practicable, logical, and equitable solution of the problem.”
4. “Segregation and separation should be gradual ... and non-compulsory, so as not to injure ... labor, capital, and commerce ... where the negro is an important factor of production and consumption.”
5. The southern negroes should petition the president and congress “for suitable territory ... as ... equal citizens ... and not go out of their country to be exposed to doubtful experiment and foreign complications. Afro-Americans should remain in their own country, in the zone of greatness, and in the latitude of progress.”
6. The government should, in effecting segregation, maintain “civil order, peace, progress, and prosperity.”
7. The place for the negroes may be in the western public domain, such as a part of the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or elsewhere in the west.
8. No white person unless married to a negro, or a resident federal official, to be allowed citizenship in the negro State or Territory, but all citizens of the United States to be protected therein as in the other States.[194]
9. Only those of reputable character and some degree of education, and perhaps those possessed of a year’s support, to become citizens. Criminals and undesirable persons to be kept out.
It was gratification extreme to me to find a prominent negro so much in accord with my long-cherished project. I hope there is a determination of the mass of southern negroes thitherward, as seems to be indicated by the activity both of Bishop Holsey and also by that of Bishop Turner. With nearly all of the negro writers and speakers now in the public eye upper-class sympathies are dominant. But Holsey, demanding a State in the union, and Turner, putting his whole soul into immigration to Liberia, are actuated by lower-classsympathies. The others just mentioned really advocate assimilation,—and at bottom, only the assimilation of the upper class,—but these two are of far different and higher ambition. They are patriotic, and as true to their race as that famous heathen who rejected christianity when told that it consigned his forefathers to perdition. He declared he would go to hell with his people and not to heaven without them. The others are representative of only some five per cent, these two represent the ninety-five per cent—the real negroes. I never took to Bishop Turner’s proposal, for all of the ability with which he advocates it, because I want the negroes where our nation can foster and protect their State, it matters not what may be the resulting pains and expense. I highly approve the earnestness of Bishop Holsey in objecting to expatriation by the Afro-Americans.
Let our negroes have their own State. That will be the fit culmination which was foreshadowed in their deserting the galleries assigned them in our churches and flocking to their own churches, immediately upon emancipation, and their effecting soon afterwards the removal of their cabins from the old site. Their masses have ever since been inclining towards a community of their own by an internal impulsion in harmony with the external white expulsion. The impulsion and the expulsion are each, as it seems to me, manifestations of the same all-powerful cosmic force.
Further, I would say a negro State makes a precedent for the world federation. Each race that ought not to intermarry with others can flourish under its separate autonomy. Then loving brotherhood between white, yellow, red, and black people will bless all the earth. Whether the proneness of opposites to fancy each other, progressively going from the smaller to the greaterdifferences, will ultimately compound a universal color, no man can now tell.
Of course some reader has exclaimed, “Your proposal is absurdly chimerical.” Is it indeed chimerical to demand of the great republic that it do its very highest duty? Suppose an ignorant, neglected child taken home by a rich man, taught to work, the world of industry, with all of its prizes, kept in his sight, until he begins to cherish the hope that some day he can have a happy fireside of his own; suppose further that just as he reaches the age of discretion the adopting father sets him where he may see the fair world plainer and long for it more than ever, but so completely strips him of all means and opportunity that there is nothing for the outcast but ignoble life and uncared-for death. How you would pity the outcast! how you would curse the false father! I cannot believe that the nation will prove such an unnatural parent to these its helpless and lovable children. It may be that some thousands of them, nay, some millions, may be left to perish in their dire constraint. But when the people fully understand, their consciences will awaken, and they will give the American negro a bright house-warming.
Suppose we do not give him his State, or suppose it will be long years before we give it to him, what do you say we are to do for him?
We must help Booker Washington and his co-laborers to the utmost. Grant that they can snatch only a few brands from the burning. Is it not most praiseworthy to save even one? Further, I can never abandon the hope that the nation will yet allot the negroes their State, even if to do it land must be condemned on a large scale. When that fair day does dawn on America, out of the scholars of these worthy teachers will come many a good shepherd for the blacks in their new land. Thismay now be but a glimmering of hope. All the good must join in effort to enlarge and brighten it.
We should not begrudge the higher education to the few in the upper class who can get it. The negroes need teachers, preachers, writers, and others of the learned occupations.
We should impartially equalize the negro population to the white in common school privileges. Both ought to have rational industrial training. The right primary education is just beginning to show itself. It will more and more recognize what a prominent factor the hand has been in evolution. Think of the superiority of animals with, to those without, hands. What a high brain the elephant has made for himself by exercising his single hand; the polar bear kills the seal by throwing a block of ice; the ’coon goes through his master’s pockets for sweetmeats; the greater intelligence of the house-cat as compared with the average dog is due to long use of the forepaws as rudimentary hands. Think of how we note humanity dawning in the monkey ever busy with his hands. Think of the importance of his hands to beginning man. With them he could gather fruits, rub fire-sticks together, make war-clubs, spears, fish-hooks, bow and arrows, bar up his cave door against beasts of prey, elevate his roosting place in a tree too high for night prowlers, and do all other vital things up the whole ascent to civilization. The steady enlargement of man’s brain has been mainly because of his progressive use of his hands; for whenever a new thing was to be done his brain had first to acquire faculty of telling hands how to do it. To train the hands is the true way to develop brain power. The negroes in American slavery had risen far above the level of West African hand ability, and at emancipation they were prepared to go higher by leaps and bounds. Had theyfrom that time steadily on been drafted off into their State, gradually, as Bishop Holsey suggests, and a tithe of the millions which have since been lavished in giving them premature literacy and smattering of learning been applied in teaching their children handicraft faculty and the best methods of labor, the promise for them now would be satisfactory to their dearest friends. Somebody wisely advises, Never do the second thing first. Those who took charge of the negro when he was freed tried to make him do the hundredth or thousandth thing first. Instead of patiently schooling him in handicraft and self-support until he was really ready to take part in his own self-government, they made the ignorant and inexperienced slave of yesterday a complete citizen, and plunged him up to his neck into politics and letters. What a balefulhysteron proteronwas this. The looming greatness of Booker Washington is that he teaches by his actions that the seeming advance was in fact prodigious retrogression, and he strives with all his might to draw the negro backwards to his right beginning. Let us further his good work by incorporating the utmost practicable of his industrial training in our common school system for both whites and blacks. America has learned important military lessons from the redskin; and, as I am almost sure, she acted on his suggestion when she confederated the separate colonies. Let her now show similar good sense in permitting a negro to teach her the true system of education for the new times.[195]
Now as to lynching. It is entirely wrong to conceive of a popular outbreak against one who has outraged a sacred woman as lawless. It is the furthest possible from that, being prompted by the most righteous indignation. The wretch has outlawed himself. Society can no more tolerate such an insult to its peace than it can permit a tiger to go at large. It is under no obligation to him whatever. It is the people dealing with him that should concern us. We ought to keep them from brutalizing themselves and their children. We must put down lynching with gentle firmness. The first thing to do is to shorten the “law’s delay” as much as possible. After the State has made the enabling constitutional amendment, if such be necessary, let an act provide that whenever an alleged crime likely to excite popular violence has been committed the governor select a judge to try and finally dispose of the case, three days only, say, being allowed for motion for new trial or taking directbill of exceptions; both the supreme court and the court below to proceed as fast as may be through all stages until acquittal or execution. Let the governor earnestly ask for some such measure, and let him also, after he gets it, impressively appeal to the people to assist in enforcing the law. With this preparation, more than ninety per cent of the whites will approve the most decided action of the military protecting prisoners, if that be necessary. Just at this time (September 27, 1904) there is a very decided manifestation of anti-lynching public opinion in the south. We should strike while the iron is hot, and bring it about that the law itself make quick riddance of the ravisher. It should be a spur to us that the party opposed in politics to the great majority of southerners finds much support and help from every lynching in this section. Why should we play into its hands?
The last thing that I have to say is that the south ought to invite immigrants only of white blood. We want no settlers from whose intermarriage mongrels would spring. All Europeans should receive welcome—the Germans perhaps the warmest. But in my judgment those that will most advantage us are the truckmen, growers of the smaller and larger fruits, grass, grain, and stock farmers, manufacturers, miners, builders, contractors, business men, and skilled laborers, of the north. It looks now as if the cotton mills of England as well as of the north would be profited by coming to us; and it also seems probable that there will be for many years so great a demand for our cotton that the worn-out soil of the older parts of the lower south must be restored to more than virgin richness by the method which Dr. Moore has patented and made a gift of to the nation, or some other intensive culture; and that there must be consequently great multiplication of southern mill-operativesand agricultural workers in the near future. Recall what we have said in the last chapter as to the future promise of the section. Every day the south by disclosing some new opportunity cogently makes new invitation to immigrants. It is the interest as well as the duty of the nation to remove the great clog upon development of the south. That clog is the presence of some millions of unassimilable negroes in the section. It is also the best interest and the highest duty of the nation to segregate these negroes into a territory of their own. As Bishop Holsey says, and what I believe with my whole soul, “The union of the States will never be fully and perfectly recemented with tenacious integrity until black Ham and white Japheth dwell together in separate tents.”[196]
I must add an epilogue to these chapters on the race question as I did to that on Toombs.
Brothers and sisters of the north, you should learn why there is a solid south. There is but one cause. It is the menace to the whites from the political power given the negroes by the fifteenth amendment. There is nothing in your section—in its past or its present—from which I can illustrate to you the gravity of this menace to us. In not one of your States are there ignorant negroes in so great a number that, by combining with the debased whites, they can make for it such a constitution and laws and set up such authorities as they please. We, your brothers and sisters of the south, have lived under the rule of this foulest of coalitions. We know from actual experience how it plunders and preys upon honest workers, producers, and property owners; how it licenses and fosters crime. In my own State, from the first day that a governor, elected by fiat voters andex-whites, as we called the latter, was inaugurated, until we virtually restored the supremacy of our race by carrying the three days’ election in December, 1870, fifty dollars would get a pardon for the greatest offence, and robberies, burglaries, horse-stealing, and the like each went free for a much smaller sum. Is it forgotten that the negro speaker was voted one thousand dollars by a South Carolina legislature, ostensibly as extra compensation for unusual services, but really of purpose to reimburse him for a bet lost upon a horse race? Why, the foremost of our people in virtue, wisdom, and patriotism were agreed that these sordid tyrannies should be subverted at once and at any cost to ourselves. The emergency justified any practice, device, or stratagem at the polls by which we could defend our homes, families, and subsistence against assassins of the public peace, wholesale robbers of the people, and instigators and protectors of every crime. It justified the shotgun and six-shooter in politics just as legitimate war justifies the musket in the hands of the soldier. It called forth most righteously the Ku-Klux. That spontaneous resistance finds a close parallel in the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, fought before American independence was declared. But the Ku-Klux fought for something still dearer than the dear cause for which our forefathers bled in the two battles just mentioned. Had the latter failed in the war they had thus begun, their children and people would nevertheless have had such good government as England is now giving the defeated Boers; but had the southern whites failed in their defence, their land would have for long years been befouled like Hayti, and those who had not been slaughtered unspeakably degraded. I think that all our countrymen who so rightfully eulogize the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill should also learn to give the greater praise to the southernheroes whose indomitable spirit routed the madmen that, with all the power of the federal government in their hands, tried their best to give the section over to negro rulers. Brothers and sisters, “picture it, think of it,” until you can fully understand that hour of our trial. All my northern acquaintances who have resided in the south for several years—they are many—come to look at the subject just as the natives do. A candid and honest settler from Vermont has told me how he was made to change his mind. Conversing with a southerner, he had reprehended the different ways in which the negro’s ballot had been rendered nugatory. The other replied, “Suppose that there was an incursion of Indians given suffrage into your State in such a mass as to make them seventy-five per cent of all the voters, wouldn’t you whites in some way manage either to outvote or outcount them!” The Vermonter answered in the affirmative. We had to deliver ourselves. We used the only means at our command.
It was not to be thought of that these negro governments be endured, even if tempered by the Ku-Klux, for government is in its nature lasting and permanent while the other was only temporary. They would have gradually gathered strength. Then there would have been rapid enrichment of a few exceptional negroes and rapid expulsion of the whites impoverished by emancipation, from all their little that was left. And then, the leading negroes desiring nothing else so much, there would have come many white men and women, each one willing to climb out of the depths of want by intermarriage with a prosperous negro. Who can predict what would have been the future of mongrelism thus beginning? We of the south are most conscientiously solid against what we know from actual trial to be the worst and most corrupting of all government;and we are still more solid against everything that tends to promote amalgamation. Can you blame us for standing in serried phalanx by white domination and against the misrule exampled in the early years of reconstruction, and for our own uncontaminated white blood and against fusion with the negro? We must be solid in the face of these dangers, and as long as they are threatened by the presence of millions of negroes in our midst. There is no other solidity in the south. In all matters of the locality republicans and democrats count alike. When one offers to vote in the primary, if his name is on the registry list, and he appears on inspection to be white, his vote is accepted; and he generally casts that vote, not for the interest of a political party, but for that of the public. The triumphant election in November, 1904, of independents or democrats, in four northern States which at the same time went for Mr. Roosevelt, indicates solidity for the true local welfare of the people as against the behests of party. So what the white primary has produced in the south, has commenced in the north. And the result in Missouri, voting for Roosevelt, republican, and Folk, democrat, shows that what we may call federal independentism has commenced in the south. This will spread as the people learn it does not hurt them to split their tickets while voting upon national questions, if they but maintain their solidity while voting upon State or municipal.
Now may I be allowed some decided words, most kindly and inoffensively spoken, as to appointing negroes to federal offices in the south. It is no sound argument for it that now and then some negro may have been appointed in a northern community which manifested no opposition. Consider the case of Mr. William H. Lewis, a negro lately made assistant districtattorney in Boston by Mr. Roosevelt. He is a Harvard graduate, was captain of the Harvard eleven while in college, had represented Cambridge in the Massachusetts legislature, and the community was not at all averse to his appointment.[197]Therefore when it was made there was no disregard of the wishes and feelings of Boston and the regions adjoining. But when a negro is given office in the south, it is felt by all the community to be an insult. Would President Roosevelt cram the appointment of a white down the throats of a northern community in which all the best citizens protested against it? Would he not confess to himself that the wishes and feelings of these good people ought to be respected, even if he considered them foolish and unreasonable? It seems to me that he would, and that he would find for the place somebody else in his party acceptable to the locality. Why should he not do the like when his southern brothers and sisters who have such convincing reasons against the encouragement of negroes in their politics, protest unanimously against his filling an office in their midst with a negro? Will he snub them because a negro has more sacred right than a white? Is that what he means by keeping open the door of hope and opportunity? Or will he snub them because enough of punishment has not yet been given them, and because the south is still a province or dependency on which he is justified in quartering his partisans and pets without regard to the feelings and wishes of all the better inhabitants?
Brothers and sisters of the north, I cannot believe that any one of you who impartially considers the subject, would ever approve appointing even the most competent and deserving negro to a southern office in the teeth of universal objection by the whites of the community.
My last word is to implore every honest one in the country to lay aside all prejudice and master the southern situation before judging. Whoever does this, whoever will accurately place himself in the shoes of a good southern citizen, will, I most firmly believe, approve the attitude of the south, with his whole heart and soul.