THE RACE PROBLEM

To be continued

THE RACE PROBLEMBy James H. Branch

By James H. Branch

The present race problem is cognate to the African slavery problem, which preceded it in point of time. Slavery was a grievous fault, and grievously hath the South answered it. Morally, the whole country is responsible for its introduction.

The slave trade, the most degrading and offensive branch of slavery, was carried on by New England, they being a maritime people, and the South, an agricultural section then, bought the negroes as laborers. Then came the day when it was to shake the foundation stones of the republic. It was agitated in pulpit and hall; in song and in story. The art of the novelist, the moving strains of sacred song, and the dagger of the assassin, were alike employed to arouse interest and zeal in the fate of the poor, downtrodden negro.

These were the abolitionists whose chief seat was Boston, whose place of rendezvous was Faneuil Hall, a place made historic by great speeches and great meetings there in the early days, by the lovers of free institutions. Plymouth pulpit added its voice, and the days of slavery were then numbered; but the country was to be baptized with fire, and with blood, if nothing better. These people were fanatics, and fanaticism has been defined as “a popular movement acting without reason or judgment, always, however, founded upon some religious orphilanthropic idea or sentiment, to giveit character and volume.”

This bird of dark plumage and portentous croak, winged its way from Exeter Hall, London, the parent body of the American society meeting there. Results will forever mark an object lesson for true patriots, and practical statesmen and sound a note of warning against incorporating altruistic, philanthropic fads, and the various cults growing out of idealism into party platforms and making use of such explosive material to gain political advantage.

Slavery was abolished in the English colonies and elsewhere peacefully, as would have ultimately happened here; and though it may have been delayed a half century, nay, even a century, the net moral gain would have been far greater.

England had slavery also, and the Exeter Hall people, like those of Faneuil Hall, were fanatics. They exalted the negro and ascribed to him attributes, qualities and possibilities equal to those of the white race, and hated his owners and the constitution, government and laws of this republic as founded by the fathers. To-day many of the triflers with the stern facts of anthropological and ethnological science, who distort the truths of history while laboring under the magic spell of this fanaticism, confound all dark, dusky or colored peoples with the true negro of Africa. They have credited the ancient civilization of Egypt to the negro race, when many school boys know that the Egyptians, the founders of Thebes, of Memphis, the builders of the pyramids, and the carvers of the Sphinx, wereCoptics, not negroes. Neither Pharaoh, Ptolemy nor Cleopatra, the fair sorceress of the Nile, were negroes, though natives of Africa.

When the Constitution of the United States was framed many of the delegates to the convention traveled by private conveyance; and as slaveryexisted both at the North and South, many of them brought negro drivers or servants to the meeting place. Slavery was even then fully established, recognized and protected by a clause inserted in the Constitution as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This provision was adopted by the convention without opposition, and this solemn instrument, creating a government among men, which was to become at once the wonder and admiration of the statesmen of the world, bore the signatures of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton and Madison, but Senator Sumner, the leading spirit of rabid fanaticism, in the Senate of the United States, said that it was “a covenant with hell;” and advised resistance, by force if necessary. Many Northern states enacted “personal liberty laws” prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves to their owners.

The Republican party was formed upon this new-born craze, and incorporated these new and strange doctrines into its platform at Chicago, in June, 1860; and in five months the movement culminated in the election of Mr. Lincoln to the presidency.

If there is one thing more than another sedulously taught to Southern youth as a political creed it was that our government was based upon awrittenconstitution which should be obeyed, upheld and respected; to do otherwise was treasonable. The South then viewed the situation with horror and alarm.

Nat Turner, a negro preacher in North Carolina, had, some years before, fomented a servile insurrection and in the night time the negroes rose and murdered many white families.

John Brown, a white fanatic from the West, had gone down to Virginia and incited servile insurrection; and having armed men, made war against Virginia. He was taken, and after trial for treason, was legally executed. When his remains crossed the Potomac river, going North, his casket was covered with flowers, thus testifying that his aborted efforts in Virginia had many sympathizers. A servile insurrection thenceforth became a possibility to be thought of. A servile insurrection meant efforts at midnight assassination. The South is now, as then, desirous of preserving good order, peace and quiet, between the two races, and the people of other sections do not realize the situation.

These facts are of interest now only in throwing light upon the view point of the South, when a new political party triumphed, the leading principle of which was interference with slavery. Aside from pecuniary considerations as to the value of the slaves, the effect upon the slaves themselves of these agitations was a matter of the deepest concern and the South sought safety and repose in withdrawing from the Union as a last resort. Its people were divided on the subject and the ordinances of secession passed by narrow majorities, thus showing that under normal conditions, the South was strongly attached to the Union.

It is painful to utter views not in accordance with a well founded hope for the final uplifting of all men, but naught shall be set down in malice or ill-will to an inferior and weaker race. The white man of the South has a duty and a burden; and if he has, as has been often charged, suppressed negro votes and elected legislatures, he has, at the same time, in ten Southern states, impoverished and ruined by war, appropriated for negro schools overone hundred millions of dollars. While the South has encouraged the negro in industrial, educational, and moral training, and produced some fine specimens of the negro race, still there are millions who are just as they were, and many good observers see evidences of retrogression in the generation since emancipation.

No prophetic vision can see, no intellect can foretell, what the final result will be. All sorts of speculationshave been indulged, extinction by absorption, by a gradual dispersion over the states, or, remaining in the South, a co-equal parallel development of the two races.

A race problem of course implies race antagonisms, and the chief factor in bringing about race antagonism is not in the bare fact that the negro vote is Republican, but in the fact that the race,vote as a race, solidly,en masse, andnaturally, in view of the manner of its emancipation. It is not that white men see in mere party allegiance a menace to good order, or are intolerant of Republican politics, especially thenationalandeconomicpolitics of the party, for many are at heart protectionists; but it is the perpetualsolidarityof the vote of the negro race, voting as a race that sharply accentuates race attrition. Much has been spoken and written about thesolidarityof the Southern states in voting, and little notice taken of thecause, which is thesolidarityof the negro vote. Thus onesolidaritybegets anothersolidarity, and the South has not been in a normal condition, politically, since emancipation.

Is there not a problem in this?

It is submitted to all fair minded men whether it is not true—that if any race whatever vote solidly and habitually, as a race, be they German, Irish, Jew, Negro or Chinese, that it would inevitably produce race antagonism, in any state in the union. The South had at the close of the Civil War, its share of the Whig party, who on account ofnegro solidaritywere driven intowhite solidarity—the Democratic party, and they and their descendants have remained solidly there, voting solidly against the solid negro vote. In many parts of the South the negroes outnumber the whites, and could elect, if their solid vote was counted as cast, judges, clerks and sheriffs, and in at least three states, state officials, a state of affairs as much to be desired as a Chinaman mayor of San Francisco, or governor of California. The negro vote has been in some way neutralized, or he has not voted the full numerical strength of the race, else such results must have followed.

The fact is, the negro has been practically disfranchised for thirty-five years, and the South has grown tired of dishonesty in elections. Thus, by restricting suffrage, thecausa causansis removed.

Under these constitutions a new star of hope for civic virtue and fair elections has just arisen upon the Southern horizon. Throughout this long midnight of political darkness hope has been cherished of a brighter day. The political wanton, or fanatic, only, could seek to disturb, or obstruct it. The best element of the citizens of Alabama are not unlike, and are morally and intellectually the equals of citizens of other states, and they may be trusted to do equal justice to both races. With the right to vote restricted, and the removal of the fear of negro majorities, white men can afford to divide and sternly call each other to account at the ballot box. Two parties are essential in the American political system, and the best results cannot be obtained without them. When these new constitutions shall be acquiesced in, or judicially tested and sustained,solidarityin the South will disappear; and the republic will rest upon surer foundations. The constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, with the facilities afforded him for education, moral and industrial training, are of far more value to the negro than the political right to vote; which in the present stage of his progress has served only to make friction between the races. After a time it may be the part of wisdom to remove present restrictions, and time alone can point the way.

Intelligent and patriotic negroes will not fail to discern, that when vast masses of the race no longer vote solidly against their white neighbors, Southern white men will be more and more disposed to enforce, in his favor, the rights enumerated. In other words, the race is restricted in a purely political function, but it is enlarged in every other direction by that very restriction.

It may require the passing of several generations of negroes to determine their real capabilities under the uplifting influence of American institutions, for they have failed sadly in other emancipation countries. There were 6,000,000 Africans held as slaves on this continent, at the beginning of the century just closed. Only 883,602 of this number, were held in the United States; about 2,000,000 by Spain on the continent and West Indian Islands, about 900,000 by England on the continent and in the West Indies. The remainder were held by the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes and Norwegians in their various colonies. Their descendants have all been emancipated, some for a hundred years, some for only a few years, and they furnish fields for observing the experiments made with the negro as a part and parcel of the social, political, and economic affairs of those countries.

Emancipation occurred in Hayti in 1792, as an incident of the French Revolution, and the negroes rose and exterminated every man, woman and child of the white race in the island, with atrocious and revolting details unrecorded. They then set up a republic, a military despotism it was, and such it has remained. Splendid sugar and coffee plantations left untilled, grew up in wild growths, the rich resources of the island were consumed. For a brief space the orderly habits of the white race flickered, and then went out in darkness, eclipsed by a saturnalia of idleness and crime. Negro nature, left to itself, relapsed into barbarism.

“But,” says Froude, the most distinguished modern English historian, “behind the immorality, behind the religiosity, there lies active and live, the horrible revival of the West African superstition; the serpent worship, the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it.” A missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago, within his personal knowledge. The facts are notorious. A full account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his country.[11]

Bishop Kingsley, who visited the island in 1871, says: “The chief center of this detestable system (Obeahism or Vaudoux worship) is St. Vincent, where, so I am told by one who knows that island well, some sort of secret college or school of the diabolic prophets exists.... In Jamaica I was assured by a non-conformist missionary, who had long lived there, Obeah is by no means on the decrease, and in Hayti it is probably on the increase, and taking, at least until the fall and death of Salnave, shapes which when made public in the civilized world will excite more than mere disgust. But of Hayti I shall be silent, having heard more of the state of society in that unhappy place than it is prudent, for the sake of the few white residents, to tell at present.”[12]

Again he says: “The same missionary told me that in Sierra Leone also, Obeah and poisoning go hand in hand.” Ibid. p. 345.

Sir Spencer St. John, for twelve years the British Minister to Hayti, later Minister to Mexico, in a work entitled “Hayti, the Black Republic,” pp. 196-204, gives at length the horrible details of these practices, as brought out in a legal trial by the evidence, to which trial he was an eye witness. Several persons were charged with, and convicted of, cannibalism. A child being the victim, was first offered as a sacrifice, to propitiate the serpent. “In treating of the black,” says Sir Spencer, “and the mulatto, as they appeared to me during my residence among them, I fear that I shall be considered by some to judge harshly. Such, however, is not my intention. Brought up under Sir James Brook, whose enlarged sympathies could endure no prejudice of race or color, I do not remember ever to have felt any repugnance to my fellow creatures on account of difference of complexion. I have dwelt about thirty-five years among colored peopleof various races, and am sensible of no prejudice against them” (pp. 8 and 9). “All who know me know that I had no prejudice of color, and if I place the Haytian in general in an unenviable light, it is from a strong conviction that it is necessary to describe the people as they are, and not as one would wish them to be. The most difficult chapter to write was that on Vaudoux worship and cannibalism. I have endeavored to paint it in the least sombre colors, and none who know the country will think that I have exaggerated; in fact, had I listened to the testimony of many experienced residents I should have described rites at which dozens of human victims were sacrificed at a time. Everything I have related has been founded on evidence collected in Hayti, from Haytian official documents, from trustworthy officers of the Haytian government, my foreign colleagues, and from respectable residents, principally, however, from Haytian sources.”

Sir Spencer St. John is an Englishman, a gentleman, and in no way concerned with the race problem under discussion. His testimony should stimulate honest inquiry among conservative thinkers, and should sober fanaticism. While the negro of the Southern states has not fallen to the level of the Haytian, there is abundant proof in the history of every country where emancipation has taken place, that the negro race in every instance, when left to guide itself, and the prop of the white man’s rule withdrawn, has retrograded—reverted to the original type.

Retrogression, decay, vice and Voodoism are the same in Jamaica as in Hayti, modified now for the better, since it has been changed from a responsible colony, as classified in the British Colonial system, to a crown colony, and the elective franchise withdrawn from the negroes. The crown colonies are governed directly by the home government.

Emancipation began there in 1838 and was accomplished through the agitations of Exeter Hall. Jamaica is one of the most fertile spots on the earth’s surface; and tilled under the direction of Englishmen, it was a garden spot, producing vast quantities of coffee and sugar, yielding a large revenue to the government. Indolence followed emancipation, and the once beautiful plantations became waste places. Poverty and want prevailed, revenues failed, and the parliament appointed committees to investigate. The evidence taken showed that the negroes had quit work, the plantations had grown up in bush, and they had squatted in the forests and along the streams. The Exeter Hall Society made many excuses and explanations, and all failing to account for the negro’s degeneracy, they finally urged that he be given the right to vote, in order to encourage him; and under the tireless exertions of these fanatics, parliament enacted a universal suffrage law, with a proviso that the voter should own some real estate, but without specifying the amount. The land had been abandoned and had little value, and the Exeter Hall Society bought a tract of about 1,200 acres, and gave it in small parcels to the negroes until 50,000 of them were qualified to vote under the law, which was not passed anticipating such a result.

The negroes then had a majority over the whites, and speedily took charge of the government of the island, and nearly all white men left their property and the country. “That Jamaica,” says a British official, “was a land of wealth, rivaling the East in its means of riches—nay, excelling it as a market for capital, as a place in which money might be turned; and that it now is a spot on the earth almost more poverty stricken than any other, so much is known to almost all men.”

The little island of Barbadoes contained 160,000 negroes and about 300 white men, and as there was no waste land for the negroes to squat upon, and the white men took care that they obtained no land so as to qualify, that island has remained a highly cultivated, prosperous and happy country.These last named islands furnish striking contrasts, and the islands of Jamaica and Hayti are irrefragable proofs that unrestricted negro suffrage and negro government bring desolation and ruin to both races; and there is no instance to the contrary in all of the emancipation colonies, including the Hispano-American colonies.

San Domingo, once a Spanish colony, and in which emancipation had taken place, is naturally the most fertile of these islands, and was abandoned by Spain. During General Grant’s term of office, a commission was sent there to examine this island and its resources, with a view of appropriating it, and establishing a negro state, by emigration from the United States. Senator Sumner, the leading exponent of abolition, defeated its ratification in the Senate, well knowing the negro’s incapacity for self-government.

Out of the vast mass of evidence the limits of this paper will not permit more than a few opinions additional, from travelers and men of science, in each instance wholly disinterested in American politics, being natives and residents of other countries.

David Page, of Edinburgh, F. N. S. & C., says: “However much mistaken philanthropy may argue to the contrary, there can be but little doubt that the Ethiopian, or black man of Africa, is inferior both to Mongol and Malay, and still more to the Caucasian. He has had possession of the African Continent with all its variety of situation, climate and produce, from time immemorial, and yet has no arts save the rudest, no literature, no science, no temples, no ships, no cities, no moral code; in most instances no idea even of a Supreme Being; nothing in fine, that removes him beyond the desires and necessities of animal existence.[13]”

Professor Page then quotes the English traveler, Sir Samuel Baker, and says: “Notwithstanding all this and a thousand times more (he refers to the Andamaner and the native of Australia) there are some who still argue about the equality of the human race, and talk high sounding generalizations regarding the unity and brotherhood of men. As well might they contend for equality of brothers of the same family, or equal capacity among the men and families of a nation. As in the physical world there are suns, systems, and satellites, so in the vital and intellectual, there are higher and lower, races born to command and lead, and others as certainly destined to obey and follow.

“It is not because one race has risen under favorable circumstances, and another retrograded or remained stationary under conditions of an adverse nature, but because of aboriginal differences and capabilities, which no circumstances can efface nor appliances counteract.

“Brotherhood there may be and ought to be, as far as the inherent instincts of race toward race will permit; and these instincts are not to be disregarded with impunity; but as to unity, if by unity is meant oneness of power and tendency, it is an assertion that all history and present experience must deny. It is a mere phrase that may please the unthinking ear, but it is not a fact that can satisfy the reason.[14]”

Captain Richard Burton, geographer, explorer, ethnical psychologist, a shrewd and sagacious observer, says: “The study of psychology in Eastern Africa is the study of man’s rudimental mind; when subject to the agency of material nature, he neither progresses nor retrogrades.

“He would appear rather a degeneracy from the civilized man than a savage rising to the first step, were it not for his apparent incapacity for improvement. He has not the ring of the true metal. There is no rich nature as in the New Zealander for education to cultivate. He seems to belong to one of those childish races, which, never rising to man’s estate, fall like worn out links from the great chain of animated nature. He unites the incapacity of infancy with the unpliancyof age. For centuries he has been in direct intercourse with the most advanced people of the Eastern Coast (Arabs), still he has stopped short at the threshold of progress; he shows no sign of development; no higher or varied orders of intellect are called into being.[15]”

“I have,” says Du Chaillu, “been struck with the steady decrease of the population even during the short time I have been in Africa, on the coast and in the interior, but before I account for it, let me raise my voice in defense of the white man who has been accused of being the cause of it. Wherever he settles, the aborigines are said to disappear. I admit that such is the case; but the decrease of the population had already taken place before the white man came; the white man noticed, but could not stop it. The decrease of African population is due to several causes—witchcraft taking away more lives than ever the slave trade did.

“I have found no vestige whatever of ancient civilization. Other travelers in different parts of Africa have not been more successful—I think everything tends to show, that the negro is of great antiquity, and has always remained stationary. As to his future capabilities I think extreme views have prevailed. Some think that the negro will never rise higher than he is; others think he is capable of reaching the highest state of civilization. I do not agree with either of these opinions. I believe that the negro may become a more useful member of mankind than he is at present, that he may be raised to a higher standard, but if left to himself he will soon fall back into barbarism, for we have no example to the contrary.

“The efforts of missionaries for hundreds of years have had no effect. The missionary goes away and the people relapse into barbarism. That he (the African) will disappear in time from the land I have but little doubt; and that he will follow in the course of time the inferior races who have preceded him. So let us write his history.”[16]

The foregoing is from the pen of a man of science, an eminent naturalist, and is worthy of the thoughtful consideration of all persons to whom evidence has meaning.

That the present condition of the negro in the Southern states is superior to the African in his native lair, or his descendants in other emancipation countries, cannot be doubted. But it should not be forgotten, that whatever improvement there may be, is due to the training of a superior race of white men, for many generations, and since emancipation, to the facilities for education, morally, intellectually, and industrially.

The Southern white man, under normal conditions, in the absence of excitement and irritating circumstances, is the negro’s best friend. He can here work out his destiny, slowly, as natural law moves—through generations, and he will reach his goal, whether it be high or low, and no man should obstruct, or deny him this. It is only insisted that he is not yet fitted for the elective franchise unrestricted—a right, as jurists hold, not springing out of man’s nature, but a civil right to be conferred by the state upon those most capable of its intelligent exercise. Nor is it conferred by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution; those amendments are merely limitations upon the states preventing them from enacting a law excluding negroes from voting, because they are negroes.

They do not prevent restrictions upon voting, if reasonable, and applied to both races.

About one-fourth of the area of the United States is directly afflicted with this race problem, and while the people of the South are more interested in its wise management than the people of other states, yet every patriot and every business man looking forward to that high destiny which awaits us as a nation, must feel concerned for its proper solution.

The matter should be put upon ahigher plane than party politics. Investments and rapidly developing industries in the South would be retarded by partisan agitation, and business men, acting through their organizations, should seek to avert it. It is believed that all of the Southern states had, at the time of the adoption of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, universal suffrage fixed in their constitutions, and since the legislatures could not restrict suffrage under the old constitutions, the effect of those amendments, was to suddenly enfranchise ex-slaves, while most of their former owners were disfranchised for participation in rebellion.

The latter was not unnatural, but the former was, and must stand in history as the extreme limit to which partisan and fanatical passions have carried men. The most rapacious exactions of pecuniary indemnity, or the stripping the conquered of the very soil of their fathers, are in comparison trifling inconveniences.

That one great enlightened section of the white race, was willing to submerge another great section of its own race, beneath a sea of African ex-slaves, has a parallel only in England’s calling to its aid “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

The one was an offense againstlife.

The other an offense againstinstitutions.

The one violated every known rule of civilized warfare; the other consigned the conquered to the dominion of African ex-slaves.

Both will live in history—both will testify to enlightened men, the one, of the horrors of war, the other, of the baleful sequences of war.

By every consideration of prudence, and the general welfare of all concerned the status of the negroes of the Southern states should not be interfered with by congressional, or other outside action. His unrestricted right to vote, and his solid vote as a race, have been the greatest impediments to good government in the Southern states. Never was there a more appropriate field for the application of the doctrine oflaissez faire.

[11]The English In the West Indies, p. 333.[12]At Last a Christmas in the West Indies, p. 338.[13]Man, p. 77.[14]Great Basin of the Nile, Vol. 1, p. 250.[15]Lake Regions of Central Africa, p. 489.[16]A Journey to Ashango Land, pp. 435-437.

[11]The English In the West Indies, p. 333.

[12]At Last a Christmas in the West Indies, p. 338.

[13]Man, p. 77.

[14]Great Basin of the Nile, Vol. 1, p. 250.

[15]Lake Regions of Central Africa, p. 489.

[16]A Journey to Ashango Land, pp. 435-437.

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