yl CONTENTS.
X. The Geography of Amalgamation ... 102
XI. The Natural-Growth Policy 104
XII. " Move On " 109
THE CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.
i 1. A Model Prison 115
f- II. The Theory of Self-Support 119
\/ III. Evil Principles of the Lease System . 124
IV. In Tennessee — The System at its Best . 128
V. In North Carolina 140
VI. In Kentucky 146
VII. In South Carolina 149
VIII. In Georgia , 154
I IX. The Pardoning Power 156
X. In Texas 158
V XL In Alabama 167
XII. In Virginia 169
XIII. In Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana —
The System at its Worst 170
^ XIV. Conclusions 174
■ XV. Excuses for the System 175
APPENDIX.
I. The True South vs. The Silent South . 185
II. A Reply 193
III. Is It Sectional or National ? 206
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
I. THE nation's attitude.
THE greatest social problem before the American people to-day is, as it has been for a hundred years, the presence among us of the negro.
No comparable entanglement was ever drawn round itself by any other modern nation with so serene a disregard of its ultimate issue, or with a more distinct national responsibility. The African slave was brought here by cruel force, and with everybody's consent except his own. Everywhere the practice was favored as a measure of common aggrandizement. When a few men and women protested, they were mobbed in the public interest, with the public consent. There rests, therefore, a moral responsibility on the whole nation never to lose sight of the results of African-American slavery until they cease to work mischief and injustice.
It is true these responsibilities may not fall everywhere with the same weight; but they are nowhere entirely removed. The original seed of trouble was sown with the full knowledge and
consent of the nation. The nation was to blame; and so long as evils spring from it, their correction must be the nation's duty.
The late Southern slave has within two decades risen from slaveiy to freedom, from freedom to citizenship, passed on into political ascendency, and fallen again from that eminence. The amended Constitution holds him up in his new political rights as well as a mere constitution can. On the other hand, certain enactments of Congress, trying to reach further, have lately been made void by the highest court of the nation. And another thing has happened. The popular mind in the old free States, weary of strife at arm's length, bewildered by its complications, vexed by many a blunder, eager to turn to the cure of other evils, and even tinctured by that race feeling whose grosser excesses it would so gladly see suppressed, has retreated from its uncomfortable dictational attitude and thrown the whole matter over to the States of the South. Here it rests, no longer a main party issue, but a group of questions which are to be settled by each of these States separately in the light of simple equity and morals, and which the genius of American government is at least loath to force upon them from beyond their borders. Thus the whole question, become secondary in party contest, has yet reached a period of supreme importance.
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
II. OLD SOUTH AND NEW.
Before slavery ever became a grave question in the nation's politics,—when it seemed each State's private affair, developing unmolested,— it had two different fates in two different parts of the country. In one, treated as a question of public equity, it withered away. In the other, overlooked in that aspect, it petrified and became the corner-stone of the whole social structure; and when men sought its overthrow as a national evil, it first brought war upon the land, and then grafted into the citizenship of one of the most intelligent nations in the world six millions of people from one of the most debased races on the globe.
And now this painful and wearisome question, sown in the African slave-trade, reaped in our civil war, and garnered in the national adoption of millions of an inferior race, is drawing near a second seed-time. For this is what the impatient proposal to make it a dead and buried issue really means. It means to recommit it to the silence and concealment of the covered furrow. Beyond that incubative retirement no suppressed moral question can be pushed; but all such questions, ignored in the domain of private morals, spring up and expand once more into questions of public equity; neglected as matters of public equity, they blossom into questions of
A THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
national interest; and, despised in that guise, presently yield the red fruits of revolution.
This question must never again bear that fruit. There must arise,nay, there has arisen, in the South itself, a desire to see established the equities of the issue; to make it no longer a question of endurance between one group of States and another, but between the moral debris of an exploded evil, and the duty, necessity, and value of planting society firmly upon universal justice and equity. This, and this only, can give the matter final burial. True, it is still a question between States; but only secondarily, as something formerly participated in, or as it concerns every householder to know that what is being built against his house is built by level and plummet. It is the interest of the Southern States first, and consequently of the whole land, to discover clearly these equities and the errors that are being committed against them.
If we take up this task, the difficulties of the situation are plain. We have, first, a revision of Southern State laws which has forced into them the recognition of certain human rights discordant with the sentiments of those who have always called themselves the community; second, the removal of the entire political machinery by which this forcing process was effected; and, third, these revisions left to be interpreted and applied under the domination of these antagonistic sentiments. These being the three terms of the problem, one of three things must result. There will arise a system of vicious evasions eventually ruinous to public and private morals and liberty, or there will be a candid reconsideration of the sentiments hostile to these enactments, or else there will be a division, some taking one course and some the other.
This is what we should look for from our knowledge of men and history; and this is what we find. The revised laws, only where they could not be evaded,'have met that reluctant or simulated acceptance of their narrowest letter which might have been expected—a virtual suffocation of those principles of human equity which the unwelcome decrees do little more than shadow forth. But in different regions this attitude has been made in very different degrees of emphasis. In some the new principles have grown, or are growing, into the popular conviction, and the opposing sentiments are correspondingly dying out. There are even some districts where they have received much practical acceptance. While, again, other limited sections lean almost wholly toward the old sentiments; an easy choice, since it is the conservative, the unyielding attitude, whose strength is in the absence of intellectual and moral debate.
Now, what are the gains, what the losses of these diverse attitudes? Surely these are urgent
6 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
questions to any one in our country who believes it is always a losing business to be in the wrong. Particularly in the South, where each step in this affair is an unprecedented experience, it will be folly if each region, small or large, does not study the experiences of all the rest. And yet this, alone, would be superficial; we should still need to do more. We need to go back to the roots of things and study closely, analytically, the origin, the present foundation, the rationality, the rightness, of those sentiments surviving in us which prompt an attitude qualifying in any way peculiarly the black man's liberty among us. Such a treatment will be less abundant in incident, less picturesque; but it will be more thorough.
III. THE ROOTS OF THE QUESTION.
First, then, what are these sentiments? Foremost among them stands the idea that he is of necessity an alien. He was brought to our shores a naked, brutish, unclean, captive, pagan savage, to be and remain a kind of connecting link between man and the beasts of burden. The great changes to result from his contact with a superb race of masters were not taken into account. As a social factor he was intended to be as purely zero as the brute at the other end of his plow-line. The occasional mingling of his blood with that of the white man worked no
1 Sometimes he was not a mere savage but a trading, smithing, weaving, town-building, crop-raising barbarian.
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY. y
change in the sentiment; one, two, four, eight, multiplied upon or divided into zero, still gave zero for the result. Generations of American nativity made no difference; his children and children's children were born in sight of our door, yet the old notion held fast. He increased to vast numbers, but it never wavered. He accepted our dress, language, religion, all the fundamentals of our civilization, and became forever expatriated from his own land ; still he remained, to us, an alien. Our sentiment went blind. It did not see that gradually, here by force and there by choice, he was fulfilling a host of conditions that earned at least a solemn moral right to that naturalization which no one at first had dreamed of giving him. Frequently he even bought back the freedom of which he had been robbed, became a tax-payer, and at times an educator of his children at his own expense; but the old idea of alienism passed laws to banish him, his wife, and children by thousands from the State, and threw him into loathsome jails as a common felon, for returnincr to his native land. It will be wise to remember that these were the acts of an enlightened. God-fearing people, the great mass of whom have passed beyond all earthly accountability. They were our fathers. I am the son and grandson of slave-holders. These were their faults; posterity will discover ours; but these things must be frankly, fearlessly * Notably in Louisiana in 1810 and subsequently.
taken into account if we are ever to understand the true interests of our peculiar state of society. Why, then, did this notion, that the man of color must always remain an alien, stand so unshaken? We may readily recall how, under ancient systems, he rose not only to high privileges, but often to public station and power. Singutlarly, with us the trouble lay in a modern principle of liberty. The whole idea of American government rested on all men's equal, inalienable right to secure their life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by governments founded in their own consent. Hence, our Southern forefathers, shedding their blood, or ready to shed it, for this principle, yet proposing in equal good conscience to continue holding the American black man and mulatto and quadroon in slavery, had to anchor that conscience, their conduct, and their laws in the conviction that the man of African tincture was, not by his master's arbitrary assertion merely, but by nature and unalterably, an alien. If that hold should break, one single wave of irresistible inference would lift our whole Southern social fabric and dash it upon the rocks of negro emancipation and enfranchisement. How was it made secure? Not by books, though they were written among us from every possible point of view, but, with the mass of our slave- owners, by the calm hypothesis of a positive, intuitive knowledge. To them the statement was
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY. g
an axiom. They abandoned the methods of moral and intellectual reasoning, and fell back upon this assumption of a God-given instinct, nobler than reason, and which it was an insult to a freeman to ask him to prove on logical grounds.
Yet it was found not enough. The slave multiplied. Slavery was a dangerous institution. Few in the South to-day have any just idea how often the slave plotted for his freedom. Our Southern ancestors were a noble, manly people, springing from some of the most highly intelligent, aspiring, upright, and refined nations of the modern world ; from the Huguenot, the French Chevalier, the Old Englander, the New Englander. Their acts were not always right; whose are? But for their peace of mind they had to believe them so. They therefore spoke much of the negro's contentment with that servile condition for which nature had designed him. Yet there was no escaping the knowledge that we dared not trust the slave caste with any power that could be withheld from them. So the perpetual alien was made also a perpetual menial, and the belief became fixed that this, too, was nature's decree, not ours.
Thus we stood at the close of the civil war. There were always a few Southerners who did not justify slavery, and many who cared nothing whether it was just or not. But what we have
lO THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
described was the general sentiment of good Southern people. There was one modifying sentiment. It related to the slave's spiritual interests. Thousands of pious masters and mistresses flatly broke the shameful laws that stood between their slaves and the Bible. Slavery was right; but religion, they held, was for the alien and menial as well as for the citizen and master. They could be alien and citizen, menial and master, in church as well as out; and they were.Yet over against this lay another root of today's difficulties. This perpetuation of the alien, menial relation tended to perpetuate the vices that naturally cling to servility, dense ignorance and a hopeless separation from true liberty ; and as we could not find it in our minds to blame slavery with this perpetuation, we could only assume as a further axiom that there was, by
t nature, a disqualifying moral taint in every drop of negro blood. The testimony of an Irish, German, Italian, French, or Spanish beggar in a court of justice was taken on its merits; but the colored man's was excluded by law wherever it weighed against a white man. The colored man was a prejudged culprit. The discipline of the plantation required that the difference between master and slave be never lost sight of by either. It made our master caste a solid mass, and fixed a common masterhood and subserviency between
the ruling and the serving race. Every one of us grew up in the idea that he had, by birth and race, certain broad powers of poHce over any and every person of color.
All at once the tempest of war snapped off at the ground every one of these arbitrary relations, without removing a single one of the sentiments in which they stood rooted. Then, to fortify the freedman in the tenure of his new rights, he was given the ballot. Before this grim fact the notion of alienism, had it been standing alone, might have given way. The idea that slavery was right did begin to crumble almost at once. "As for slavery," said an old Creole sugar-planter and former slave-owner to me, it was damnable." The revelation came like a sudden burst of light. It is one of the South's noblest poets who has but just said :
"I am a Southerner; I love the South ; I dared for her To fight from Lookout to the sea, "With her proud banner over me : But from my hps thanksgiving broke. As God in battle-thunder spoke, And that Black Idol, breeding drouth And dearth of human sympathy
1 The old Louisiana Black Code says, " That free people of color ought never to . . . presume to conceive themselves equal to the white ; but, on the contrary, that they ought to yield to them in every occasion, and never speak or answer to them but with respect, under the penalty of imprisonment according to the nature of the offense." (Section 21, p. 164.)
12 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South,
Was, with its chains and human yoke, Blown hellward from the cannon's mouth,
While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!"
IV. WHAT THE WAR LEFT.
With like readiness might the old alien relation have given way if we could only, while letting that pass, have held fast by the other old ideas. But they were all bound together. See our embarrassment. For more than a hundred years we had made these sentiments the absolute essentials to our self-respect. And yet if we clung to them, how could we meet the freedman on equal terms in the political field ? Even to lead would not compensate us; for the fundamental profession of American politics is that the leader is servant to his followers. It was too much. The ex-master and ex-slave—the quarterdeck and the forecastle, as it were—could not come together. But neither could the American mind tolerate a continuance of martial law. The agonies of Reconstruction followed.
The vote, after all, was a secondary point, and the robbery and bribery on one side, and whipping and killing on the other, were but huge accidents of the situation. The two main questions were really these : on the freedman's side, how to establish republican State government
1 Maurice Thompson, in the " Independent."
under the same recognition of his rights that the rest of Christendom accorded him; and on the former master's side, how to get back to the old semblance of republican State government, and —allowing that the freedman was de facto a voter—still to maintain a purely arbitrary superiority of all whites over all blacks, and a purely arbitrary equality of all blacks among themselves as an alien, menial, and dangerous class.
Exceptionally here and there some one in the master caste did throw off the old and accept the new ideas, and, if he would allow it, was instantly claimed as a leader by the newly liberated thousands around him. But just as promptly the old master race branded him also an alien reprobate, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if he had not already done so, he soon began to confirm by his actions the brand on his cheek. However, we need give no history here of the dreadful episode of Reconstruction. Under an experimentative truce its issues rest to-day upon the pledge of the wiser leaders of the master class : Let us but remove the hireling demagogue, and we will see to it that the freedman is accorded a practical, complete, and cordial recognition of his equality with the white man before the law. As far as there has been any understanding at all, it is not that the originally desired ends of reconstruction have been abandoned, but that the men of North and South have agreed upon a
14 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
new, gentle, and peaceable method for reaching them; that, without change as to the ends in view, compulsory reconstruction has been set aside and a voluntary reconstruction is on trial.
It is the fashion to say we paused to let the " feelings engendered by the war " pass away, and that they are passing. But let not these truths lead us into error. The sentiments we have been analyzing, and upon which we saw the old compulsory reconstruction go hard aground— these are not the "feelings engendered by the war." We must disentangle them from the " feelings engendered by the war," and by reconstruction. They are older than either. But for them slavery would have perished of itself, and emancipation and reconstruction been peaceful revolutions.
Indeed, as between master and slave, the " feelings engendered by the war," are too trivial, or at least were too short-lived, to demand our present notice. One relation and feeling the war destroyed: the patriarchal tie and its often really tender and benevolent sentiment of dependence and protection. When the slave became a freed-man, the sentiment of alienism became for the first time complete. The abandonment of this relation was not one-sided; the slave, even before the master, renounced it. Countless times, since reconstruction began, the master has tried, in what he believed to be everybody's interest, to play on that old sentiment. But he found it a harp without strings. The freedman could not formulate, but he could see, all our old ideas of autocracy and subserviency, of master and menial, of an arbitrarily fixed class to guide and rule, and another to be guided and ruled. He rejected the overture. The old master, his well-meant condescensions slighted, turned away estranged, and justified himself in passively withholding that simpler protection without patronage which any one American citizen, however exalted, owes to any other, however humble. Could the freedman in the bitterest of those days have consented to throw himself upon just that one old relation, he could have found a physical security for himself and his house such as could not, after years of effort, be given him by constitutional amendments. Congress, United States marshals, regiments of regulars, and ships of war. But he could not; the very nobility of the civilization that had held him in slavery had made him too "much a man to go back to that shelter; and by his manly neglect to do so he has proved to us who once ruled over him that, be his relative standing among the races of men what it may, he is worthy to be free.
l6 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY,
V. FREED - NOT FREE.
To be a free, man is his still distant goal. Twice he has been a freedman. In the days of compulsory reconstruction he was freed in the presence of his master by that master's victorious foe. In these days of voluntary reconstruction he is virtually freed by the consent of his master, but the master retaining the exclusive right to define the bounds of his freedom. Many everywhere have taken up the idea that this state of affairs is the end to be desired and the end actually sought in reconstruction as handed over to the States. I do not charge such folly to the best intelligence of any American community; but I cannot ignore my own knowledge that the average thought of some regions rises to no better idea of the issue. The belief is all too common that the nation, having aimed at a wrong result and missed, has left us of the Southern States to get now such other result as we think best. I say this belief is not universal. There are those among us who see that America has no room for a state of society which makes its lower classes harmless by abridging their liberties, or, as one of the favored class lately said to me, has " got 'em so they don't give no trouble." There is a growing number who see that the one thing we cannot afford to tolerate at large is a class of people less than citezens; and that every interest in the land demands
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY. ^>j
that the freedman be free to become in all things, as far as his own personal gifts will lift and sustain him, the same sort of American citizen he would be if, with the same intellectual and moral calibre, he were white.
Thus we reach the ultimate question of fact. Are the freedman's liberties suffering any real abridgment? The answer is easy. The letter of the laws, with a few exceptions, recognizes him as entitled to every right of an American citizen; and to some it may seem unimportant that there is scarcely one public relation of life in the South where he is not arbitrarily and unlawfully compelled to hold toward the white man the attitude of an alien, a menial, and a probable reprobate, by reason of his race and color. One of the marvels of future history will be that it was counted a small matter, by a majority of our nation, for six millions of people within it, made by its own decree a component part of it, to be subjected to a system of oppression so rank that nothing could make it seem small except the fact that they had already been ground under it for a century and a half.
Examine it. It proffers to the freedman a certain security of life and property, and then holds the respect of the community, that dearest-of earthly boons, beyond his attainment. It gives him certain guarantees against thieves and robbers, and then holds him under the unearned 3
18 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
contumely of the mass of good men and women. It acknowledges in constitutions and statutes his title to an American's freedom and aspirations, and then in daily practice heaps upon him in every public place the most odious distinctions, without giving ear to the humblest plea concerning mental or moral character. It spurns his ambition, tramples upon his languishing self-respect, and indignantly refuses to let him either buy with money, or earn by any excellence of inner life or outward behavior, the most momentary immunity from these public indignities even for his wife and daughters. Need we cram these pages with facts in evidence, as if these were charges denied and requiring to be proven? They are simply the present avowed and defended state of affairs peeled of its exteriors.
Nothing but the habit, generations old, of enduring it could make it endurable by men not in actual slavery. Were we whites of the South to remain every way as we are, and our six million blacks to give place to any sort of whites exactly their equals, man for man, in mind, morals, and wealth, provided only that they had tasted two years of American freedom, and were this same system of tyrannies attempted upon them, there would be as bloody an uprising as this continent has ever seen. We can say this quietly. There is not a scruple's weight of present danger. These six million freedmen are dominated by
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
19
nine million whites immeasurably stronger than they, backed by the virtual consent of thirty odd millions more. Indeed, nothing but the habit of oppression could make such oppression possible to a people of the intelligence and virtue of our Southern whites, and the invitation to practice it on millions of any other than the children of their former slaves would be spurned with a noble indignation.
Suppose, for a moment, the tables turned. Suppose the courts of our Southern States, while changing no laws requiring the impaneling of jurymen without distinction as to race, etc., should suddenly begin to draw their thousands of jurymen all black, and well-nigh every one of them counting not only himself, but all his race, better than any white man. Assuming that their average of intelligence and morals should be not below that of jurymen as now drawn, would a white man, for all that, choose to be tried in one of those courts ? Would he suspect nothing ? Could one persuade him that his chances of even justice were all they should be, or all they would be were the court not evading the law in order to sustain an outrageous distinction against him because of the accidents of his birth ? Yet only read white man for black man, and black man for white man, and that—I speak as an eye-witness— has been the practice for years, and is still so today ; an actual emasculation, in the case of six
20 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
million people both as plaintiff and defendant, of the right of trial by jury.
In this and other practices the outrage falls > upon the freedman. Does it stop there? Far from it. It is the first premise of American principles that whatever elevates the lower stratum of the people lifts all the rest, and whatever holds it down holds all down. For twenty years, therefore, the nation has been working to elevate the freedman. It counts this one of the great necessities of the hour. It has poured out its wealth publicly and privately for this purpose. It is confidently hoped that it will soon bestow a royal gift of millions for the reduction of the illiteracy so largely shared by the blacks. Our Southern States are, and for twenty years have been, taxing themselves for the same end. The private charities alone of the other States have given twenty millions in the same good cause. Their colored seminaries, colleges, and normal schools dot our whole Southern country, and furnish our public colored schools with a large part of their teachers. All this and much more has been or is being done in order that, for the good of himself and everybody else in the land, the colored man may be elevated as quickly as possible from all the debasements of slavery and semi-slavery to the full stature and integrity of citizenship. And it is in the face of all this that the adherent of the old regime stands in the way
to every public privilege and place—steamer landing, railway platform, theatre, concert-hall, art display, public library, public school, courthouse, church, everything—flourishing the hot branding-iron of ignominious distinctions. He forbids the freedman to go into the water until he is satisfied that he knows how to swim, and for fear he should learn hangs mill-stones about his neck. This is what we are told is a small matter that will settle itself Yes, like a roosting curse, until the outraged intelligence of the South lifts its indignant protest against this stupid firing into our own ranks.
VI. ITS DAILY WORKINGS.
I say the outraged intelligence of the South for there are thousands of Southern-born white men and women, in the minority in all these places—in churches, courts, schools, libraries, theatres, concert-halls, and on steamers and railway carriages,—who see the wrong and folly of these things, silently blush for them, and withhold their open protests only because their belief is unfortunately stronger in the futility of their counsel than in the power of a just cause. I do not justify their silence; but I affirm their sincerity and their goodly numbers. Of late years, when condemning these evils from the platform in Southern towns, I have repeatedly found that those who I had earlier been told were the men
22 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
and women in whom the community placed most confidence and pride—they were the ones who, when I had spoken, came forward with warmest hand-grasps and expressions of thanks, and pointedly and cordially justified my every utterance. And were they the young South? Not by half The gray-beards of the old times have always been among them, saying in effect, not by any means as converts, but as fellow-discoverers, " Whereas we were bhnd, now we see,"
Another sort among our good Southern people make a similar but feeble admission, but with the time-worn proviso that expediency makes a more imperative demand than law, justice, or logic, and demands the preservation of the old order. Somebody must be outraged, it seems; and if not the freedman, then it must be a highly refined and enlightened race of people constantly offended and grossly discommoded, if not imposed upon, by a horde of tatterdemalions, male and female, crowding into a participation in their reserved privileges. Now, look at this plea. It is simply saying in another way that though the Southern whites far outnumber the blacks, and though we hold every element of power in greater degree than the blacks, and though the larger part of us claim to be sealed by nature as an exclusive upper class, and though we have the courts completely in our own hands, with the police on our right and the prisons on our left, and though we justly claim to be an intrepid people, and though we have a superb military experience, with ninety-nine hundredths of all the military equipment and no scarcity of all the accessories, yet with all these facts behind us we cannot make and enforce that intelligent and approximately just assortment of persons in public places and conveyances on the merits of exterior decency that is made in all other enlightened lands. On such a plea are made a distinction and separation that not only are crude, invidious, humiliating, and tyrannous, but which do not reach their ostensible end or come near it; and all that saves such a plea from being a confession of driveling imbecility is its utter speciousness. It is advanced sincerely; and yet nothing is easier to show than that these distinctions on the line of color are really made not from any necessity'-, but simply for their own sake—to preserve the old arbitrary supremacy of the master class over the menial without regard to the decency or indecency of appearance or manners in either the white individual or the colored.
See its every-day working. Any colored man gains unquestioned admission into innumerable places the moment he appears as the menial attendant of some white person, where he could not cross the threshold in his own right as a well-dressed and well-behaved master of himself The
24 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
contrast is even greater in the case of colored women. There could not be a system which when put into practice would more offensively condemn itself. It does more : it actually creates the confusion it pretends to prevent. It blunts the sensibilities of the ruling class themselves. It waives all strict demand for painstaking in either manners or dress of either master or menial, and, for one result, makes the average Southern railway coach more uncomfortable than the average of railway coaches elsewhere. It prompts the average Southern white passenger to find less offense in the presence of a profane, boisterous, or unclean white person than in that of a quiet, well-behaved colored man or woman attempting to travel on an equal footing with him without a white master or mistress. The holders of the old sentiments hold the opposite choice in scorn. It is only when we go on to say that there are regions where the riotous expulsion of a decent and peaceable colored person is preferred to his inoffensive company, that it may seem necessary to bring in evidence. And yet here again it is prima facie evidence; for the following extract was printed in the Selma (Alabama) " Times " not six months ago, and not as a complaint, but as a boast:
" A few days since, a negro minister, of this city, boarded the east-bound passenger train on the E. T., V. & G. Railway and
^ In the summer of 1S84.
took a seat in the coach occupied by white passengers. Some of the passengers complained to the conductor and brakemen, and expressed considerable dissatisfaction that they were forced to ride alongside of a negro. The railroad officials informed the complainants that they were not authorized to force the colored passenger into the coach set apart for the negroes, and they would lay themselves liable should they do so. The white passengers then took the matter in their own hands and ordered the ebony-hued minister to take a seat in the next coach. He positively refused to obey orders, whereupon the white men gave him a sound flogging and forced him to a seat among his own color and equals. We learned yesterday that the vanquished preacher was unable to fill his pulpit on account of the severe chastisement inflicted upon him. Now [says the delighted editor] the query that puzzles is, ' Who did the flogging ? '"
And as good an answer as we can give is that likely enough they were some of the men for whom the whole South has come to a halt to let them get over the " feelings engendered by the war." Must such men, such acts, such sentiments, stand alone to represent us of the South before an enlightened world ? No. I say, as a citizen of an extreme Southern State, a native of Louisiana, an ex-Confederate soldier, and a lover of my home, my city, and my State, as well as of my country, that this is not the best sentiment in the South, nor the sentiment of her best intelligence; and that it would not ride up and down that beautiful land dominating and domineering were it not for its tremendous power as the traditional sentiment of a conservative people. But is not silent endurance criminal? I cannot but repeat my own words, spoken near the scene and 4
26 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
about the time of this event. Speech may be silvern and silence golden ; but if a lump of gold is only big enough, it can drag us to the bottom of the sea and hold us there while all the world sails over us.
The laws passed in the days of compulsory reconstruction requiring " equal accommodations," etc., for colored and white persons were freedmen's follies. On their face they defeated their ends; for even in theory they at once reduced to half all opportunity for those more reasonable and mutually agreeable self-assortments which public assemblages and groups of passengers find it best to make in all other enlightened countries, making them on the score of conduct, dress, and price. They also led the whites to overlook what they would have seen instantly had these invidious distinctions been made against themselves: that their offense does not vanish at the guarantee against the loss of physical comforts. But we made, and are still making, a mistake beyond even this. For years many of us have carelessly taken for granted that these laws were being carried out in some shape that removed all just ground of complaint. It is common to say, '' We allow the man of color to go and come at will, only let him sit apart in a place marked off for him." But marked off how ? So as to mark him instantly as a menial. Not by railings and partitions merely, which, raised
against any other class in the United States with the same invidious intent, would be kicked down as fast as put up, but by giving him besides, in every instance and without recourse, the most uncomfortable, uncleanest, and unsafest place; and the unsafety, uncleanness, and discomfort of most of these places are a shame to any community pretending to practice public justice. If any one can think the freedman does not feel the indignities thus heaped upon him, let him take up any paper printed for colored men's patronage, or ask any colored man of known courageous utterance. Hear them:
"We ask not Congress, nor the Legislature, nor any other power, to remedy these evils, but we ask the people among whom we hve. Those who can remedy them if they ivill. Those who have a high sense of honor and a deep moral feeling. Those who have one vestige of human sympathy left. . . . Those are the ones we ask to protect us in our weakness and ill-treatments. ... As soon as the colored man is treated by the white man as a man, that harmony and pleasant feeling which should characterize all races which dwell together, shall be the bond of peace between them."
Surely their evidence is good enough to prove their own feelings. We need not lean upon it here for anything else. I shall not bring forward a single statement of fact from them or any of their white friends who, as teachers and missionaries, share many of their humiliations, though my desk is covered with them. But I beg to make the same citation from my own experience
28 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY,
that I made last June in the far South. It was this: One hot night in September of last year I was traveling by rail in the State of Alabama. At rather late bed-time there came aboard the train a young mother and her Httle daughter of three or four years. They were neatly and tastefully dressed in cool, fresh muslins, and as the train went on its way they sat together very still and quiet. At the next station there came aboard a most melancholy and revolting company. In filthy rags, with vile odors and the clanking of hackles and chains, nine penitentiary convicts chained to one chain, and ten more chained V^o another, dragged laboriously into the compartment of the car where in one corner sat C^this mother and child, and packed it full, and the train moved on. The keeper of the convicts told me he should take them in that car two hundred miles that night. They were going to the mines. My seat was not in that car, and I staid in it but a moment. It stank insufferably. I returned to my own place in the coach behind, where there was, and had all the time been, plenty of room. But the mother and child sat on in silence in that foul hole, the conductor having distinctly refused them admission elsewhere because they were of African blood, and not because the mother was, but because she was not, engaged at the moment in menial service. Had the child been white, and the mother not its natural but its hired guardian, 11884. 21S83.
<<ft)p
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY. 29
she could have sat anywhere in the train, and no one would have ventured to object, even had she been as black as the mouth of the coal-pit to which her loathsome fellow-passengers were being carried in chains.
Such is the incident as I saw it. But the illustration would be incomplete here were I not allowed to add the comments I made upon it when in June last I recounted it, and to state the two opposite tempers in which my words were received. I said: " These are the facts. And yet you know and I know we belong to communities that after years of hoping for, are at last taking comfort in the assurance of the nation's highest courts that no law can reach and stop this shameful foul play until we choose to enact a law to that end ourselves. And now the east and north and west of our great and prosperous and happy country, and the rest of the civilized world, as far as it knows our case, are standing and waiting to see what we will write upon the white page of to-day's and to-morrow's history, now that we are simply on our honor and on the mettle of our far and peculiarly famed Southern instinct. How long, then, shall we stand off from such ringing moral questions as these on the flimsy plea that they have a political value, and, scrutinizing the Constitution, keep saying, ' Is it so nominated in the bond? I cannot find it; 'tis not in the bond.'"
30 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
With the temper that promptly resented these words through many newspapers of the neighboring regions there can be no propriety in wranghng. When regions so estranged from the world's thought carry their resentment no further than a little harmless invective, it is but fair to welcome it as a sign of progress. If communities nearer the great centers of thought grow impatient with them, how shall we resent the impatience of these remoter ones when their oldest traditions are, as it seems to them, ruthlessly assailed ? There is but one right thing to do: it is to pour in upon them our reiterations of the truth without malice and without stint.
But I have a much better word to say. It is for those who, not voiced by the newspapers around them, showed both then and constantly afterward in public and private during my two days' subsequent travel and sojourn in the region, by their cordial, frequent, specific approval of my words, that a better intelligence is longing to see the evils of the old regime supplanted by a wiser and more humane public sentiment and practice. And I must repeat my conviction that if the unconscious habit of oppression were not already there, a scheme so gross, irrational, unjust, and inefficient as our present caste distinctions could not find place among a people so generally intelligent and high-minded. I ask attention to their bad influence in a direction not often noticed.
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
VII. THE CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM.
31
In studying, about a year ago, the practice of letting out public convicts to private lessees to serve out their sentences under private management, I found that it does not belong to all our once slave States nor to all our once seceded States.Only it is no longer in practice outside of them. Under our present condition in the South, it is beyond possibility that the individual black should behave mischievously without offensively rearousing the old sentiments of the still dominant white man. As we have seen too, the white man virtually monopolizes the jury-box. Add another fact: the Southern States have entered upon a new era of material development. Now, if with these conditions in force the public mind has been captivated by glowing pictures of the remunerative economy of the convict-lease system, and by the seductive spectacle of mines and railways, turnpikes and levees, that everybody wants and nobody wants to pay for, growing apace by convict labor that seems to cost nothing, we may almost assert beforehand thatthe popular mind will—not so maliciously as unreflectingly—yield to the tremendous temptation to hustle the misbehaving black man into the State prison under extravagant sentence, and sell
^See "The Convict Lease System in the Southern States," in this volume.
32 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY,
his labor to the highest bidder who will use him in the construction of public works. For ignorance of the awful condition of these penitentiaries is extreme and general, and the hasty half-conscious assumption naturally is, that the culprit will survive this term of sentence, and its fierce discipline " teach him to behave himself."
But we need not argue from cause to effect only. Nor need I repeat one of the many painful rumors that poured in upon me the moment I began to investigate this point. The official testimony of the prisons themselves is before the world to establish the conjectures that spring from our reasoning. After the erroneous takings of the census of 1880 in South Carolina had been corrected, the population was shown to consist of about twenty blacks to every thirteen whites. One would therefore look for a preponderance of blacks on the prison lists; and inasmuch as they are a people only twenty years ago released from servile captivity, one would not be surprised to see that preponderance large. Yet, when the actual numbers confront us, our speculations are stopped with a rude shock; for what is to account for the fact that in 1881 there were committed to the State prison at Columbia, South Carolina, 406 colored persons and but 25 whites ? The proportion of blacks sentenced to the whole black population was one to every 1488; that of the whites to the white population
THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY. ^^
was but one to every 15,644. In Georgia the white inhabitants decidedly outnumber the blacks; yet in the State penitentiary, October 20, 1880, there were 115 whites and 1071 colored; or if we reject the summary of its tables and refer to the tables themselves (for the one does not agree with the other), there were but 102 whites and 1083 colored. Yet of 52 pardons granted in the two years then closing, 22 were to whites and only 30 to blacks. If this be a dark record, what shall we say of the records of lynch law ? But for them there is not room here.
VIII. IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE.
A far pleasanter aspect of our subject shows itself when we turn from courts and prisons to the school-house. And the explanation is simple. Were our educational affairs in the hands of that not high average of the community commonly seen in jury-boxes, with their transient sense of accountability and their crude notions of public interests, there would most likely be no such pleasant contrast. But with us of the South, as elsewhere, there is a fairly honest effort to keep the public-school interests in the hands of the State's most highly trained intelligence. Hence our public educational work is a compromise between the unprogressive prejudices of the general mass of the whites and the progressive intelligence of their best minds.
24 THE FREEDMAJSrS CASE IN EQUITY.
Practically, through the great majority of our higher educational officers, we are fairly converted to the imperative necessity of elevating the colored man intellectually, and are beginning to see very plainly that the whole community is sinned against in every act or attitude of oppression, however gross or however refined.
Yet one thing must be said. I believe it is wise that all have agreed not to handicap education with the race question, but to make a complete surrender of that issue, and let it find adjustment elsewhere first and in the schools last. And yet, in simple truth and justice and in the kindest spirit, we ought to file one exception for that inevitable hour when the whole question must be met. There can be no more real justice in pursuing the freedman's children with humiliating arbitrary distinctions and separations in the school-houses than in putting them upon him in other places. If, growing out of their peculiar mental structure, there are good and just reasons for their isolation, by all means let them be proved and known; but it is simply tyrannous to assume them without proof. I know that just up the huge bugbear of Social Equality. Our eyes are filled with absurd visions of all Shanty-town pouring its hordes of unwashed imps into the company and companionship of our own sunny-headed darlings. What utter nonsense! As if our public schools had no gauge of cleanliness,
decorum, or moral character! Social Equality! What a godsend it would be if the advocates of the old Southern regime could only see that the color line points straight in the direction of social equality by tending toward the equalization of all whites on one side of the line and of all blacks on the other. We may reach the moon some day, not social equality; but the only class that really effects anything toward it are the makers and holders of arbitrary and artificial social distinctions interfering with society's natural self-distribution. Even the little children everywhere are taught, and begin to learn almost with their ABC, that they will find, and must be guided by, the same variations of the social scale in the public school as out of it; and it is no small mistake to put them or their parents off their guard by this cheap separation on the line of color.
IX. THE QUESTION OF INSTINCT.
But some will say this is not a purely artificial distinction. We hear much about race instinct. The most of it, I fear, is pure twaddle. It may be there is such a thing. We do not know. It is not proved. And even if it were established, it would not necessarily be a proper moral guide. We subordinate instinct to society's best interests as apprehended in the light of reason. If there is such a thing, it behaves with strange malignity toward the remnants of African blood in indi-
36 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
viduals principally of our own race, and with singular indulgence to the descendants of—for example—Pocahontas. Of mere race feeling we all know there is no scarcity. Who is stranger to it ? And as another man's motive of private preference no one has a right to forbid it or require it. But as to its being an instinct, one thing is plain: if there is such an instinct, so far from excusing the malignant indignities practiced in its name, it furnishes their final condemnation; for it stands to reason that just in degree as it is a real thing it will take care of itself.
It has often been seen to do so, whether it is real or imaginary. I have seen in New Orleans a Sunday-school of white children every Sunday afternoon take possession of its two rooms immediately upon their being vacated by a black school of equal or somewhat larger numbers. The teachers of the colored school are both white and black, and among the white teachers are young ladies and gentlemen of the highest social standing. The pupils of the two schools are alike neatly attired, orderly, and in every respect inoffensive to each other. I have seen the two races sitting in the same public high-school and grammar-school rooms, reciting in the same classes and taking recess on the same ground at the same time, without one particle of detriment that any one ever pretended to discover, although the fiercest enemies of the system swarmed about
"^THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY."
it on every side. And when in the light of these observations I reflect upon the enormous educational task our Southern States have before them, the inadequacy of their own means for performing it, the hoped-for beneficence of the general Government, the sparseness with which so much of our Southern population is distributed over the land, the thousands of school districts where, consequently, the multiplication of schools must involve both increase of expense and reductions of efficiency, I must enter some demurrer to the enforcement of the tyrannous sentiments of the old regime until wise experiments have established better reasons than I have yet heard given.
X. THE CASE SUBMITTED.
What need to say more? The question is answered. Is the freedman a free man? No. We have considered his position in a land whence I nothing can, and no man has a shadow of right to drive him, and where he is being multiplied as only oppression can multiply a people. We have carefully analyzed his relations to the finer and prouder race, with which he shares the ownership and citizenship of a region large enough for ten times the number of both. Without accepting one word of his testimony, we have shown that the laws made for his protection against the habits of suspicion and oppression in his late master are being constantly set aside, not for
38 THE FREEDMAN'S CASE IN EQUITY.
their defects, but for such merit as they possess. We have shown that the very natural source of these oppressions is the surviving sentiments of an extinct and now universally execrated institution; sentiments which no intelligent or moral people should harbor a moment after the admission that slavery was amoral mistake. We have shown the outrageousness of these tyrannies in some of their workings, and how distinctly they antagonize every State and national interest involved in the elevation of the colored race. Is it not well to have done so? For, I say again, the question has reached a moment of special importance. The South stands on her honor before the clean equities of the issue. It is no longer whether constitutional amendments, but whether the eternal principles of justice, are violated. And the answer must—it shall—come from the South. And it shall be practical. It will not cost much. We have had a strange experience : the withholding of simple rights has cost much blood; such concessions of them as we have made have never yet cost a drop. The answer is coming. Is politics in the way? Then let it clear the track or get run over, just as it prefers. But, as I have said over and over to my brethren in the South, I take upon me to say again here, that there is a moral and intellectual intelligence there which is not going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equity which it is every people's duty before God to seek, not along the line of politics,—God forbid !—but across it and across it and across it as many times as at may lie across the path, until the whole people of every once slave-holding State can stand up as one man saying, " Is the freedman a free man ? " and the whole world shall answer, " Yes."
THE SILENT SOU IH
THE SILENT SOUTH.
I. "a time to speak."
IN Tivoli Circle, New Orleans, from the center and apex of its green, flowery mound an immense column of pure white marble rises in the fair unfrowning- majesty of Grecian proportions high up above the city's house-tops into the dazzling sunshine and fragrant gales of the Delta. On its dizzy top stands the bronze figure of one of the world's greatest captains.
He is all alone. Not one of his mighty lieutenants stands behind or beside him or below at the base of his pillar. Even his horse is gone. Only his good sword remains, hanging motionless in its scabbard. His arms are folded on that breast that never knew fear or guile, and his calm, dauntless gaze meets the morning sun as it rises, like the new prosperity of the land he loved and served so masterly, above the far distant battle-fields where so many thousands of his ragged gray veterans lie in the sleep of fallen heroes.
Great silent one! who lived to see his stand-
^ THE SILENT SOUTH.
ards furled and hung in the halls of the conqueror; to hear the victor's festal jubilations; to behold a redistribution of rights riding over the proud traditions of his people, and all the painful fruits of a discomfited cause shaken to the ground; to hear and see the tempestuous and ofttimes bloody after-strife between the old ideas and the new; to see, now on one side, now on the other, the terms of his own grand surrender and parole forgotten or ignored; to have his ear filled with the tirades and recriminations of journals and parties, and the babble of the unthinking million; to note the old creeds changing, and to come, himself, it may be,—God knows,—to respect beliefs that he had once counted follies ; and yet, withal, never, before the world that had set him aside but could not forget him, never to quail, never to wince, never to redden with anger, never to wail against man or fate, or seek the salve of human praise or consolation; but silently amid the clamor of the times to stand and wait, making patience royal, with a mind too large for murmuring, and a heart too great to break, until a Messenger as silent as his bronze effigy beckoned Robert E. Lee to that other land of light and flowers where man's common inheritance of error is hidden in the merit of his honest purpose, and lost in the Divine charity.
So this monument, lifted far above our daily
THE SILENT SOUTH.
45
strife of narrow interests and often narrower passions and misunderstandings, becomes a monument to more than its one great and rightly loved original. It symbolizes our whole South's better self; that finer part which the world not always sees; unaggressive, but brave, calm, thoughtful, broad-minded, dispassionate, sincere, and, in the din of boisterous error round about it. all too mute. . It typifies that intelligence to which the words of a late writer most truly apply when he says concerning the long, incoherent discussion of one of our nation's most perplexing questions, "Amid it all the South has been silent"
But the times change—have changed. Whatever the merit or fault of earlier reticence, this mute, firm-rooted figure, with sheathed sword and folded arms, must yield a step, not backward, but forward. ** Where it has been silent it now should speak." Nay, already it speaks ; and the blessing of all good men should rest on this day if it reveals the Silent South laying off its unsurrendered sword, leaving brawlers to their brawls, and moving out upon the plane of patient, friendly debate, seeking to destroy only error, and to establish only truth and equity and a calm faith in their incomparable power to solve the dark problems of the future.
Within the last few months the voice of temperate discussion has been heard in well-nigh
THE SILENT SOUTH:
every quarter of our Southern States on themes that have scarcely been handled with patience and clemency these forty years. True, there has been some clamor, throwing stones, and casting dust; but calmer utterances have come from Memphis, from Louisville, Chattanooga, Lynchburg, Atlanta, Charleston, Dallas, and far San Angelo; some on one side, some on the other, of the debate, professing in common at least three quiet convictions: that recrimination and malignment of motive are the tactics of those who have no case; that the truth is worth more than any man's opinion; and that the domination of right is the end we are bound to seek.
Under these convictions the following pages are written; written in deprecation of all sectionalism ; with an admiration and affection for the South, that for justice and sincerity yield to none; in a spirit of faithful sonship to a Southern State; written not to gratify sympathizers, but to persuade opponents; not to overthrow, but to convince; and begging that all harshness of fact or vehemence of statement be attributed entirely to the weight of the interests under debate.
THE SILENT SOUTH.
II. POINTS OF AGREEMENT.
It Is pleasant to note how much common ground is occupied by the two sides in this contest of opinions. By both it is recognized that the fate of the national Civil Rights bill has not decided and cannot dismiss the entire question of the freedman's relations; but that it puts upon trial in each Southern State a voluntary reconstruction which can never be final till it has established the moral equities of the whole case. Says one opponent, imputing his words to a personified South, " Leave this problem to my working out. I will solve it in calmness and deliberation, without passion or prejudice, and with full regard for the unspeakable equities it holds." Says Mr. Watterson's paper, in Louisville, " We believe there is a general desire among the people of the South, that the negro shall have all the rights which a citizen of the United States, whatever be the color of his skin, is entitled to, but we know of no method to argue away or force down what may be called the caste of color. If we did ... or if anybody else did, the dark problem as to the future of this unfortunate race would be more quickly and more easily solved. None more earnestly than the Courier-Journal desires to see this question happily settled."
Is not this progress? It seems scarce a matter of months since we were saying the question was dead and should be buried. Now it rises to demand a wider grave, which both the writers quoted admit it must have, though one thinks nobody knows how to dig it, and another insists it must be dug without cutting away any more ground.
But the common field of assertion and admission broadens as we move on. On this side it has been carefully demonstrated that, not from Emancipation or Enfranchisement, or anything else in or of the late war, or of Reconstruction, but from our earlier relation to the colored man as his master, results our view of him as naturally and irrevocably servile; and that hence arises our proneness to confuse his social with his civil relations, to argue from inferiority of race a corresponding inferiority of his rights, and to infer that they fall, therefore, justly under our own benevolent domination and, at times, even our arbitrary abridgment. The point is made that these views, as remnants of that slavery which, we all admit, lias of right perished, ought to perish with it; and the fact is regretted that in many parts of the South they nevertheless still retain such force—though withal evidently weakening—that the laws affirming certain human rights discordant to the dominant race are sometimes openly evaded and sometimes virtually suf-
THE SILENT SOUTH.
focated under a simulated acceptance of their narrowest letter. How plainly we feel the date of this discussion to be 1884-85—not earlier— when we hear this evasion, once so hotly denied, admitted freely, nay, with emphasis, to be a " matter of record, and, from the Southern standpoint, mainly a matter of reputation."
And there are yet other points of agreement. As one who saw our great Reconstruction agony from its first day to its last in one of the South's most distracted States and in its largest city, with his sympathies ranged upon the pro-Southern side of the issue, and his convictions drifting irresistibly to the other, the present writer affirms of his knowledge, in the initial paper of this debate, that after we had yielded what seemed to us all proper deference to our slaves' emancipation and enfranchisement, there yet remained our invincible determination—seemingly to us the fundamental condition of our self-respect—never to yield our ancient prerogative of holding under our own discretion the colored man's status, not as a freedman, not as a voter, but in his daily walk as a civilian. This attitude in us, with our persistent mistaking his civil rights for social claims, this was the tap-root of the whole trouble. For neither would Jiis self-respect yield; and not because he was so unintelligent and base, but because he was as intelligent and aspiring as, in his poor way, he was, did he make this the cause of 7
50 THE SILENT SOUTH.
political estrangement. This estrangement— full grown at its beginning—was the carpet-bagger's and scallawag's opportunity. They spring and flourish wherever, under representative government, gentility makes a mistake, however sincere, against the rights of the poor and ignorant. Is this diagnosis of the Reconstruction malady contested by the other side? Nay, it is confirmed. The South, it tells us, "accepted the emancipation and enfranchisement of her slaves as the legitimate results of war that had been fought to a conclusion. These once accomplished, nothing more was possible. ' Thus far and no farther,' she said to her neighbors in no spirit of defiance, but with quiet determination. In her weakest moments, when her helpless people were hedged about by the unthinking bayonets of her conquerors, she gathered them for resistance at this point. Here she defended everything that a people should hold dear. There was little proclamation of her purpose," etc.
Surely hope is not folly, as to this Southern question, when such admissions come from this direction. What salutary clearing of the ground have we here! Our common assertion in the South has long been that the base governments of the Reconstruction period were overturned by force because they had become so corrupt that they were nothing but huge machines for the robbery of the whole public, a tangle of low po-
51 THE SILENT SOUTH.
litical intrigues that no human intelligence could unravel; that our virtue and intelligence sought not the abridgment of any man's rights, but simply the arrest of bribery and robbery; that this could be done only by revolution because of the solid black vote, cast, we said, without rationality at the behest of a few scoundrels who kept it solid by playing upon partisan catchwords, or by promise of spoils. And especially among those whose faith is strongest in our old Southern traditions, it always was and is, to-day, sincerely believed that this was the whole issue. It was this profession that averted the interference of Federal arms. It was upon this profession that the manliest youth and intelligence of New Orleans went forth to stake their lives, and some to pour out their hearts' blood in internecine war on the levee of their dear city. Sad sight to those who knew that this was not the whole matter—that the spring of trouble lay yet deeper down. To such it brings no small or selfish gladness to hear, at length,—if one may ' without offence coin a term,—to hear Southern traditionists admitting a truth which the South ( has denied with sincere indignation ten thousand times,—that in all that terrible era the real, fundamental issue was something else which the popular Southern mind was hardly aware of. "barely"—say these—"barely did the whispered word that bespoke her [the South's] resolution
52 THE SILENT SOUTH.
catch the listening ears of her sons; but for all this, the victorious armies of the North, had they been rallied again from their homes, could not have enforced and maintained among this disarmed people the policy indicated in the Civil Rights bill." This was the point at which, they say, and they say truly, the South "gathered for resistance."
Let us be sure these so gallantly spoken words are not misunderstood. There were two policies indicated in the Civil Rights bill: the policy of asserting congressional jurisdiction in the case; and the policy of legalizing, at all, such rights as it declared. One raised a question of State rights; the other, of Human rights. But the State-rights issue, by itself,—the mere question of whence the legislation should emanate, could never of itself make fierce strife. Any State could have settled that point by simply stepping ahead of Congress with the same legislation. No; the irreconcilable difference was not as to whence but as to what the law should be. The essential odium of the bill lay not in its origin, but in its definition of the black man's rights. Indeed, the main object of most of those who have written on the other side in the present controversy has been to assert the resolution never to recognize the freedman's rights upon that definition of them. In the meantime a gentle movement of thought, that sounds no trumpet before it, is gradually pressing toward that very recognition.
THE SILENT SOUTH.
53
III. THE STICKING POINT.
But now that we have clearly made out exactly zvhat this immovable hostility is, the question follows—and half the nation are asking it today with perplexed brows— why is it ? Yet the answer is simple. Many white people of the South sincerely believe that the recognition of rights proposed in the old Civil Rights bills or in " The Freedman's Case in Equity" would pre-cipitate a social chaos. They believe Civil Rights means Social Equality. This may seem a transparent error, but certainly any community in the world that believed it, would hold the two ideas in equal abomination; and it is because of the total unconsciousness and intense activity of this error at the South, and the subtle sense of un-safety that naturally accompanies it,—it is because of this, rather than for any lack of clearness in its statement of the subject, that the article on "The Freedman's Case in Equity" is so grossly misinterpreted even by some who undoubtedly wish to be fair. That this is the true cause of the misinterpretation is clear in the fact that from the first printing of the article until now the misconstruction has occurred only among those whose thinking still runs in the grooves of the old traditions.
Nothing in that paper touches or seeks to touch the domain of social privileges. The stand-
THE SILENT SOUTH,
ing of the magazine in which it appears is guarantee against the possibiHty of the paper containing any such insult to the intelligence of enlightened society. Social equality is a fool's dream. The present writer wants quite as little of it as the most fervent traditionist of the most fervent South. The North, the West, the East, and the rest of the intelligent world, want quite as little of it as the South wants. Social equality can never exist where a community, numerous enough to assert itself, is actuated, as every civilized community is, by an intellectual and moral ambition. No form of laws, no definition of rights, from Anarchy to Utopia, can bring it about. The fear that this or that change will produce it ought never to be any but a fool's fear. And yet there is this to be added; that no other people in America are doing so much for social equality as those who, while they warmly charge it upon others, are themselves thrusting arbitrary and cheap artificial distinctions into the delicate machinery of society's self-distribution as it revolves by the power of our natural impulses, and of morality, personal interest, and personal preferences. This, of course, is not the intention, and even these* persons retard only incidentally, unawares and within narrow limits, nature's social distributions, while taking diligent and absolutely needless pains to hold apart two races which really have no social affinity at all.
THE SILENT SOUTH.
55
Do we charge any bad intention or conscious false pretense ? Not at all! They are merely making the double mistake of first classing as personal social privileges certain common impersonal rights of man, and then turning about and treating them as rights definable by law—which social amenities are not and cannot be.
For the sake of any who might still misunderstand, let us enlarge here a moment. The family relation has rights. Hence marital laws and laws of succession. But beyond the family circle there are no such things as social rights; and when our traditionists talk about a too hasty sympathy having " fixed by enactment" the negro's social and civil rights they talk—unwisely. All the relations of life that go by impersonal right are Civil relations. All that go by personal choice are Social relations. The one is all of right, it makes no difference who we are; the other is all of choice, and it makes all the difference who we are; and it is no little fault against ourselves as well as others, to make confusion between the two relations. For the one we make laws; for the other every one consults his own pleasure; and the law that refuses to protect a civil right, construing it a social privilege, deserves no more regard than if it should declare some social privilege to be a civil right. Social choice, civil rights; but a civil privilege, in America, is simply heresy against both our great
national political parties at once. Now, "The Freedman's Case in Equity " pleads for not one thing belonging to the domain of social relations. Much less the family relation; it does not hint the faintest approval of any sort of admixture of the two bloods. Surely nothing that a man can buy a ticket for anonymously at a ticket-seller's hand-hole confers the faintest right to even a bow of recognition that any one may choose to withhold. But what says the other side ? " The South will never adopt the suggestion of the social intermindling of the two races." So they beg the question of equity, and suppress a question of civil right by simply miscalling it " social intermingling "; thus claiming for it that sacredness from even the law's control which only social relations have, and the next instant asserting the determination of one race to " control the social relations," so-called, of two. Did ever champions of a cause with blanker simplicity walk into a sack and sew up its mouth ? Not only thus, but from within it they announce a doctrine that neither political party in our country would venture to maintain ; for no party dare say that in these United States there is any room for any one class of citizens to fasten arbitrarily upon any other class of citizens a civil status from which no merit of intelligence, virtue, or possessions can earn an extrication. We have
^ Italicized only here.
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a country large enough for all the unsociality anybody may want, but not for incivility either by or without the warrant of law.
"What history shows," says a sound little book lately printed, " is that rights are safe only when guaranteed against all arbitrary power and all class and personal interest. " Class rule of any sort is bad enough, even with the consent of the ruled class ; un-American enough. But the domination of one fixed class by another without its consent, is Asiatic. And yet it is behind this error, of Asian antiquity and tyranny, this arbitrary suppression of impartial, impersonal civil rights, that we discover our intelligent adversaries in this debate fortified, imagining they have found a strong position ! " Neither race wants it," says one; alluding to that common, undivided participation in the enjoyment of civil rights, for which the darker race has been lifting one long prayer these twenty years, and which he absurdly miscalls " social intermingling." " The interest, as the inclination, of both races is against it," he adds. " Here the issue is made up."
But he mistakes. The issue is not made up here at all. It is not a question of what the race wants, but of wJiat the individual wants and has a right to. Is that question met ? No. Not a line has been written to disprove the individual freedman's title to these rights; but pages, to
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declare that his race does not want them and shall not have them if it does. Mark the contradiction. It does not want them—it shall not have them! Argument unworthy of the nursery; yet the final essence of all the other side's utterances. They say the colored race wants a participation in public rights separate from the whites; and that anyhow it has got to take that or nothing; *' The white and black races in the South must walk apart." One writer justifies this on the belief of a natal race instinct; but says that if there were no such thing the South "would, by every means in its power, so strengthen the race prejudice that it would do the work and hold the stubbornness and strength of instinct." Could any one more distinctly or unconsciously waive the whole question of right and wrong? Yet this is the standpoint on which it is proposed to meet the freedmen's case m equity. Under the heat of such utterances how the substance melts out of their writer's later proposition for the South to solve the question " without passion or prejudice and with full regard for the unspeakable equities it holds."
It is not the Louisville gentlemen who are found at this untenable standpoint. They admit the desirability of extirpating the state of affairs condemned by "The Freedman's Case in Equity," and merely ask with a smile, " in what manner
^ Italicized only here.
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the writer expects that evil to disappear before high-sounding imperatives," etc. As to that we leave others on that side to give the answer; hear it, from Atlanta : " Clear views, clear statement, and clear understanding are the demands of the hour. Given these, the common sense and courage of the American people will make the rest easy."
IV. CiViL RIGHT NOT SOCIAL CHOICE.
Let us then make our conception of the right and wrong of this matter unmistakable. Social relations, one will say, are sacred. True, but civil rights are sacred, also. Hence social relations must not impose upon civil rights nor civil rights impose upon social relations. We must have peace. But for peace to be stable we must have justice. Therefore, for peace, we must find that boundary line between social relations and civil rights, from which the one has no warrant ever to push the other; and, for justice, this boundary must remain ever faithfully the same, no matter whose the social relations are on one side or whose the civil rights are on the other.
Suppose a case. Mr. A. takes a lady, not of his own family, to a concert. Neither one is moved by compulsion or any assertion of right on the part of the other. They have chosen each other's company. Their relation is social. It could not exist without mutual agreement.
They are strangers in that city, however, and as they sit in the thronged auditorium and look around them, not one other soul in that house, so far as they can discern, has any social relation with them. But see, now, how impregnable the social relation is. That pair, outnumbered a thousand to one, need not yield a pennyweight of social interchange with any third person unless they so choose. Nothing else in human life is so amply sufficient to protect itself as are social relations. Provided one thing,—that the law will protect every one impartially in his civil rights, one of the foremost of which is that both men and laws shall let us alone to our personal social preferences. If any person, no matter who or what he is, insists on obtruding himself upon this pair in the concert-hall he can only succeed in getting himself put out. Why ? Because he is trying to turn his civil right-to-be-there into a social passport. And even if he make no personal advances, but his behavior or personal condition is so bad as to obtrude itself offensively upon others, the case is the same; the mistake and its consequences are his. But, on the other hand, should Mr. A. and his companion demand the expulsion of this third person when he had made no advances and had encroached no more on their liberty than they had on his, demanding it simply on the ground that he was their social or intellectual inferior or probably had relatives
who were, then the error, no matter who or what he is, would be not his, but theirs, and it would be the equally ungenteel error of trying to turn their social choice into a civil right; and it would be simply increasing the error and its offensive-ness, for them to suggest that he be given an equally comfortable place elsewhere in the house providing it must indicate his inferiority. There is nothing comfortable in ignominy, nor is it any evidence of high mind for one stranger to put it upon another.
Now, the principles of this case are not disturbed by any multiplication of the number of persons concerned, or by reading for concert-hall either theatre or steamboat or railway station or coach or lecture-hall or street car or public library, or by supposing the social pair to be English, Turk, Jap, Cherokee, Ethiopian, Mexican, or " American." But note the fact that, even so, Mr. A. and his companion's social relations are, under these rulings, as safe from invasion as they were before; nay, even safer, inasmuch as the true distinction is made publicly clearer, between the social and the civil relations. Mr. A. is just as free to decline every sort of unwelcome social advance, much or little, as ever he was; and as to his own house or estate may eject any one from it, not of his own family or a legal tenant, and give no other reason than that it suits him to do so. Do you not see it now,
gentlemen of the other side? Is there anything new in it? Is it not as old as truth itself? Honestly, have you not known it all along ? Is it i not actually the part of good breeding to know it? You cannot say no. Then why have you charged us with proposing " to break down every distinction between the races," and " to insist on their intermingling in all places and in all relations," when in fact we have not proposed to disturb any distinction between the races which nature has made, or molest any private or personal relation in life, whatever ? Why have you charged us with " moving to forbid all furthei assortment of the races," when the utmost we have done is to condemn an arbitrary assortment of the races, crude and unreasonable, by the stronger race without the consent of the weaker, and in places and relations where no one, exalted or lowly, has any right to dictate to another because of the class he belongs to? We but turn your own words to our use when we say this battery of charges " is as false as it is infamous." But let that go.
Having made it plain that the question has nothing to do with social relations, we see that it is, and is only, a question of indiscriminative civil rights. This is what "The Freedman's Case in Equity " advocates from beginning to end, not as a choice which a race may either claim or disclaim, but as every citizen's individual yet im-
personal right until he personally waives or forfeits it. The issue, we repeat, is not met at all by the assertion that " Neither race wants it." " There is one thing that neither race wants, but even this is not because either of them is one race or another, but simply because they are members of a civilized human community. It is that thing of which our Southern white people have so long had such an absurd fear; neither race, or in other words nobody, wants to see the civil rewards of decency in dress and behavior usurped by the common herd of clowns and Vagamuffins. But there is another thing that the colored race certainly does want: the freedom for those of the race who can to earn the indis-crim-inative and unchallenged civil — not social — rights of gentility by the simple act of being genteel. This is what we insist the best intelligence of the South is willing—in the interest of ricrht, and therefore of both races—to accord. But the best intelligence is not the majority, and the majority, leaning not upon the equities, but the traditional sentiments of the situation, charge us with "theory" and "sentiment" and give us their word for it that " Neither race wants it."
Why, that is the very same thing we used to say about slavery! Where have these traditionists been the last twenty years ? Who, that lived in the South through those days, but knows that the darker race's demand from the first day of the Reconstruction era to its last, was, " If you will not give us undivided participation in civil rights, then and in that case you must give us equal separate enjoyment of them"; and from the close of Reconstruction to this day the only change in its expression has been to turn its imperative demand into a supplication. This was the demand, this is the supplication of American citizens seeking not even their civil rights entire, but their civil rights mutilated to accommodate not our public rights but our private tastes. And how have we responded ? Has the separate accommodation furnished them been anywhere nearly equal to ours ? Not one time in a thousand. Has this been for malice ? Certainly not. But we have unconsciously—and what people in our position would not have made the same oversight?— allowed ourselves to be carried off the lines of even justice by our old notion of every white man holding every negro to a menial status.
Would our friends on the other side of the discussion say they mean only, concerning these indiscriminative civil rights, " Neither race wants them now " ? This would but make bad worse. For two new things have happened to the colored race in these twenty years; first, a natural and spontaneous assortment has taken place within the race itself along scales of virtue and intelligence, knowledge and manners; so that by
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no small fraction of their number the wrong of treating the whole race alike is more acutely felt than ever it was before; and, second, a long, bitter experience has taught them that " equal accommodations, but separate " means, generally, accommodations of a conspicuously ignominious inferiority. Are these people opposed to an arrangement that would give them instant release from organized and legalized incivility?— For that is what a race distinction in civil relations is when it ignores intelligence and decorum.
L V. CALLING THE WITNESSES.
There is another way to settle this question of !Zct. One side in this debate advocates indiscriminative civil rights ; the other, separate— racial civil rights. It is not to be doubted that our opponents have received many letters from white men and women full of commendation and thanks for what they have written. Such, too, has been the present writer's experience. Such testimonials poured in upon him daily for four months, from east, west, north, and south. But how about the colored race? Have they written him, begging him to desist because " Neither race wants" the equities he pleads for? The pages of this essay are limited, but we beg room for a few extracts from colored correspondents' letters, each being from a separate letter and no letter from any colored person whom the pres-9
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ent writer has ever seen or known. One letter ends, " May all the spirits that aid justice, truth, and right constantly attend you in your effort." Another, " I hope that you will continue the work you have begun, and may God bless you." Another, "Accept this, dear sir, as the thanks of the colored people of this city." Another begins, " I am a negro. In behalf of the negroes and in behalf of equitable fair dealing on the principle of giving a dollar's worth for a dollar, without any possible reference to social matters, permit me to tender you my sincere thanks," etc Says another, " The judicious fairness with which you have treated our case renders your the iis worthy of our adoption as a Bill of Rights." A letter of thanks from a colored literary club says, "... We thank you for your recognition of our capacity to suffer keenly under the indignities we are made to endure." A similar society in another town sent a verbal expression of thanks by its president in person. (Followed since by its committee's formal resolution ornamentally written and mounted.) In Louisville a numerous impromptu delegation of colored citizens called upon the writer and tendered a verbal address of thanks. Another letter says, "If the people of the South will only regard your article in the same spirit as I believe it was intended, then I know, sir, great and enduring good will be accomplished." In Arkansas,
a meeting of colored people, called to express approval of the article on " The Freedman's Case in Equity," passed a resolution pronouncing its ideas "consonant with true religion and enlightened civilization," etc. Not one word of adverse criticism, written or printed, has come to him from a person of color. Has the same race given " In Plain Black and White," or *'The Freedman's Case in Reality," or any of the less dignified mass of matter on that side of the question, a like cordial ratification ? Or has only Mr. Jack Brown sent in his congratulation ? ^
* The Selma " Times," quoted in " The Freedman's Case in Equity " as rejoicing in the flogging of a colored preacher on a railway train for not leaving the passenger coach when ordered out by irresponsible ruffians, has since published a letter purporting to come from one "Jack Brown, colored," of Columbia, South Carolina. The letter denounces the present writer as one of the sort " that has brought on all the trouble between the white and colored people of the South. I do not know his initials or address," it continues, "or I would address him in person, as I am anxious to test his sincerity " Now," says the Selma " Times," " the above article bears every imprint of honesty and truthfulness. We don't believe any one but a sharp negro could have written or did write it. The handwriting, the loose grammar, the postmark on the envelope, all mark it as a genuine document coming from the man it purports to have come from. Not only is this true of such external marks as we have named, but so is it likewise of its internal, essential substance. It sounds as if it could have been thought out and written by a negro only,
I So italicized originally.
But it may be asked, may not a great many individuals, and even some clubs, impromptu delegations and public meetings called for the purpose, approve certain declarations and yet the great mass of a people not sanction them ? Then let us go one step farther. There are, it is said, eighty—some say a hundred—journals published in this country by colored men. They look to
We cannot conceive of a white man's putting himself so thoroughly into the place of a negro, mentally, as to have executed such a thing as a forgery. We shall find out if there is such a negro in Columbia, S. C, as Brown, and secure other proofs that he wrote it, because we know Mr. Cable and others are sure to challenge its authenticity. We confidently expect to be fully prepared to convince the most skeptical.
" The negro is right. Those of his race who have any sense cannot expect what Mr. Cable would give them, do not expect it, and would be unhappy and uncomfortable if, in any way, it could be forced upon them."
So if Jack Brown, colored, were a real person, nothing could be easier than to find him. Writing from a small inland city, getting through one hundred and seventy-five words of his letter before making a grammatical slip, a colored man in sympathy with the tritest sentiment of the dominant race, and with a taste for public questions,—such a man could not be hid, much less overlooked, in Columbia. But on the present writer's desk lies his own letter to Mr. Jack Brown, colored, stamped " Return to the writer," after having lain in the Columbia post-office for nearly a month, unclaimed. An exhaustive search and inquiry amongst the people of both races by a white gentleman resident on the spot, fails to find any "Jack Brown " except—to quote the gentleman's letter,—" a poor, illiterate fellow, who cannot read or write his name," and who, instead of being "twenty-seven years of age," is—to quote another letter—" an aged man."
the colored race for the great bulk of their readers and subscribers. Hence they are bound to be in large degree the organs of popular thought among the reading part, at least, of that people, but these papers are a unit for the ideas set forth in "The Freedman's Case hi Eqidtyy Now, to believe the other side we should have to make two impossible assumptions; that among a people treated rigorously as one race, compacted by a common status, the intelligent and comparatively refined part numerous enough to send —in spite of its poverty— twenty thousand students to normal schools and colleges and to support eighty newspapers, this portion, moreover, associated with the less intelligent portion more cordially in every interest than two such classes are amongst any other people in the world unless it be the Jews—that such a lump of leaven as this has no power to shape the views of the rest on matters of common public right! Such a thing may be credible on some other planet, not on this. And the second impossible assumption : That the intelligent and sensitive portions of a people shall submit to an ignominious mutilation of their public rights because the unin-telligence of their race chooses (?) to submit to it. This assumption is a crime against common justice; the other is a crime against common sense. It is simply a mistake that " the assortment of the races which has been described
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as shameful and unjust . . . commands the hearty assent of both."
True, our traditionist friends, who think they believe it, are glad to take the witness-stand and testify; but surely some of them should be lawyer enough to know that when they say the colored race shall not have the other thing in any event, their testimony as to which the colored race prefers is of no further account. At Atlanta, they are equally unfortunate in another witness. If the Georgia State Commissioner of Public Education will allow the personal mention from one who has met and admires him, we may say that throughout the United States he has won the high regard and praise of the friends of public education for the exceptional progress he—a man of the old South—has made in unlearning our traditional Southern prejudices. He stands a noble, personal refutation of the superficial notion that the world must look to the young South, only, for progressive ideas of human right among us. May be it was easy to make the mistake of calling this admirable gentleman to testify that "neither race wants it." But see how quickly Commissioner Orr provokes the reader to dismiss him, too, from the witness-stand : Speaking of mixed schools, which, he says, " both races would protest against"—but which, mark it, "The Freedman's Case in Equity" does not ask to have forced upon any community or forced
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by either race upon the other anywhere—Mr. Orr says, " I am so sure of the evils that would come from mixed schools that, even if they were possible, I would see the whole educational system swept away before I would see them established."
Ah! gentlemen, you are not before a Congressional investigating committee that gets Republican facts from Republican witnesses and Democratic facts from Democratic witnesses, and then makes two reports. You are before the judgment-seat of the world's intelligence; and if you cannot bring for evidence of a people's feelings their own spontaneous and habitual expressions to those who think with them; and, for the establishment of facts, the unconscious or unwilling testimony of your opponents, then it is high time you were taking your case out of this court. As for us we can prove all we need prove by the gentlemen themselves.
^ They might easily have brought in colored school teachers. Many of these favor separate colored schools, for the obvious reason that those are the only schools they may teach in. They do bring in just two witnesses from a side avowedly opposed to them; but it is not our side, either. One is the late Bishop Haven, of whom we shall speak presently. The other, a young white woman on a railway train, who—forbidden to enjoy her civil rights and her peculiar social preferences at the same time— threw away a civil right to retain the social preference; which ' was her business, not ours, and proves nothing whatever for or ' against anybody else; but whose expression of pride at being mistaken for a quadroon proves her an extremely silly person.
Once only does the opposite side bring forward the actual free utterance of a colored man professing to express a sentiment of his race; well nigh a magazine column of " negro eloquence " and adulation poured upon a conference of applauding " Bishops and Brethren" because of the amazing fact that when in the neighboring vestry-room, he had " thoughtlessly asked " the governor of the State if he could get a drink, that magnate sent for and handed him a glass of water ! Unlucky testimony! which no candid mind can deny is an elaborate confession of surprised delight at being treated with indis-criminative civility. We are told, however, that it is offered simply to show the affectionate " feeling of that people toward their white neighbors." Thus a display of affection is utilized to give a color of justice to the mutilation of just such equal rights as this one whose unexpected recognition called forth this display of affection ! So they go round and round their tether.
They summon her for " the sole object" of suggesting that she and such as agree with her—which lets us out as plainly as it does the other side—are " unsafe as advisers and unfair as witnesses." Certainly they are.
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VI. GUNS THAT SHOOT BACKWARD.
Our demonstration is complete; but there follows a short corollary : While the colored people always did and still do accept with alacrity an undivided enjoyment of civil rights with the white race wherever cordially offered, they never mistake them for social privileges, nor do they ever attempt to use them to compel social intercourse. We might appeal to the everyday streetcar experience of hundreds of thousands of residents in New Orleans and other Southern cities; or to the uniform clearness with which civil riehts are claimed and social advances disclaimed in the many letters from colored men and women that are this moment before the writer. But we need not. We need refer only to our opponents in debate, who bring forward, to prove their own propositions, a set of well-known facts that turn and play Balaam to their Balak. Hear their statement: "They"—the colored people—"meet the white people in all the avenues of business. They work side by side with the white bricklayer or carpenter in perfect accord and friendliness. When the trowel or hammer is laid aside, the laborers part, each going his own way. Any attempt to carry the comradeship of the day into private life would be sternly resisted by both parties in interest."
We prove, by the other side's own arguments,
lO
that the colored people always accept the common enjoyment of civil rights and never confound civil with social relations. But in just one phase of life there is a conspicuous exception ; and an exception especially damaging to the traditional arguments of our opponents. And who furnishes our evidence this time? Themselves again. We allude to the church relation. We are asked to confront the history of an effort made, they say, many times over, by Bishop Haven and the Northern Methodist church generally, soon after the late war ; an effort to abolish racial discrimination in the religious worship of the church in the South composed of Northern whites and Southern blacks; its constant and utter failure ; and the final separation of those churches into two separate conferences, and into separate congregations wherever practicable. These facts are brought forward to prove the existence of race instinct, intending to justify by race instinct the arbitrary control, by the whites of the relations between the two races; and the conclusion is sanguinely reached at a bound, that the only explanation of these churches' separation on the color line is each race's race instinct, " that spoke above the appeal of the bishop and dominated the divine influences that pulsed from pew to pew." But the gentlemen are too eager. What in their haste they omit to do is to make any serious search at all for a simpler explana-
tlon. And how simple the true explanation is ! Bishop Haven and his colleagues, if rightly reported, ought to have known they would fail. They were attempting under acute disadvantages what none of the Protestant churches in America, faithfully as they have striven for it, has ever been able extensively to accomplish. That is, to get high and low life to worship together. The character of much ritual worship and of nearly all non-ritual worship naturally and properly takes for its standard the congregation's average intelligence. But this good process of assortment, unless held in by every proper drawback, flies off to an excess that leaves the simple and unlearned to a spiritual starvation apparently as bad as that from which non-ritual worship, especially, professes to revolt. Bishop Dudley, of Kentucky, has lately laid his finger upon this mischief for us with great emphasis. But, moreover, as in society, so in the church, this intellectual standard easily degenerates toward a standard of mere manners or station. Thus the gate is thrown wide open to the social idea, and presently not our Dorcases only, but at times our very bishops and elders, are busy trying to make the social relation co-extensive with the church relation. With what result? Little, generally, save the bad result of congregations trimming themselves down to fit the limitations of social fellowship. See the case cited. Here were whites, cultured,
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and counting themselves, at least, as good as the best in the land; and here was an ignorant, superstitious race of boisterous worshipers just emerged from slavery; one side craving spiritual meat, the other needing spiritual milk, and both sides beset by our prevalent American error that social intimacy is one of the distinct earnings of church membership. Of course they separated. It is but a dwarfed idea of the church relation that cramps it into the social relation. The church relation is the grandest fraternity on earth. Social relations are good and proper, but can the social relation grasp all these conditions in one embrace ? Can any one social circle span from the drawing-room to the stable, from the counting-room or professional desk to the kitchen, from the judge's bench to the tailor's and cobbler's, from the prince's crown to the pauper's bowl? Yet without any social intimacy the prince may be the pauper's best friend, and even the pauper the prince's ; and the church relation ought to be so wide and high that all these ranks might kneel abreast in it in common worship, and move abreast in it in perfect, active, co-laboring fraternity and regard, gathering any or every social circle into its noble circumference, never pressing one injuriously upon another, and above all things never letting in the slender but
^ " There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female." Gai. iii. 28.
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mischievous error of confusing Christian fraternity with social equality. Yet the high and low nigh all our country over are kept apart in divine worship by just this error or the fear of it. Fifty thousand Bishop Havens could not, until they had overthrown the domination of this mistake, get the lofty and the lowly to worship together. How could they but separate? And the dragging in of a race instinct to account for the separation is like bringing a pole to knock down strawberries. Other things will, but a belief in instinct will not, keep the races apart. Look at the West Indies. But not even miscegenation—may the reader forgive us the bedraggled word—could have saved such a scheme from failure.
The gentlemen prove absolutely nothing for their case, but much against it. For here is shown by actual experiment that even where there is not of necessity a social relation, yet when the social idea merely gets in by mistake ' of both classes, the effect will not be social confusion, but a spontaneous and willing separation; along the strongest lines of social cleavage. The log—the church—will not split the wedge—the social impulse; but the wedge will split the log. The uncultured, be they white or black, in North or South, will break away on one side with even more promptness and spontaneity than the cultured on the other, and will recoil, moreover, to
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a greater distance than is best for any one concerned. Thus far are we from having the least ground to fear from the blacks that emptiest of phantasms, social aggression. Thus far are we from needing for the protection of social order any assumption of race instinct. And so do the advocates of our traditional sentiments continually establish the opposite of what they seek to prove.
They cite, again, to establish this assumption of race instinct, the spontaneous grouping together of colored people in such social or semi-social organizations as Masonic lodges, military companies, etc. But there is no proscription of whites in the lodges of colored Odd-fellows or Masons. In Georgia, for example, the law re-quires the separation of the races in military companies. The gentlemen forget that the colored people are subject to a strong expulsive power from the whites, which they say must and shall continue whether it is instinct or not; and that the existence of a race instinct can never be proved or disproved until all expulsive forces are withdrawn and both races are left totally free to the influences of those entirely self-sufficient social forces which one of the gentlemen has so neatly termed " centripetal." But even if these overlooked facts were out of existence, what would be proved ? Only, and for the second time, that the centripetal force of social selection operates
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SO completely to the fulfillment of these gentlemen's wishes, that there is no longer any call to prove or disprove the existence of race instinct, or the faintest excuse for arbitrary race separations in the enjoyment of civil rights.
Thus, setting out with the idea that the social integrity of the races requires vigorous protection from without, they prove instead by every argument brought to establish it, that every relation really social, partially social, or even mistakenly social, takes—instinct or no instinct—the most spontaneous and complete care of itself We are debating the freedman's title to a totally impersonal freedom in the enjoyment of all impersonal rights; and they succeed only in sayings never in bringing a particle of legitimate evidence to prove, that " Neither race wants it " ; an assertion which no sane man, knowing the facts, can sincerely make until, like these gentlemen, he has first made the most woful confusion in his own mind between personal social privileges and impersonal civil rights.
VII. THE RIGHT TO RULE.
But they have yet one last fancied stronghold. They say, " The interest of both races is against it"; that is, against a common participation in their civil rights ; and that it is, rather, in favor of a separate enjoyment of them. Now, there are people—but their number is steadily growing less
—who would mean by this merely that the interest of both races is against common participation because they are against it and have made separate participation the price of peace. But the gentlemen whom we have in view in these chapters, though they must confess their lines often imply this, give a reason somewhat less offensive in its intention. They say common participation means common sociality, and common sociality, race-amalgamation. Have we not just used their own facts to show conclusively that this is not what occurs ? Yet these two reasons, so called, are actually the only ones that scrutiny can find in all the utterances pledging these gentlemen to " the exactest justice and the fullest equity." Nay, there is another; we must maintain, they say, " the clear and unmistakable domination of the white race in the South."— Why, certainly we must! and we must do it honestly and without tampering with anybody's natural rights ; and we can do it! But why do they say we must do it ? Because ** character, intelligence, and property " belong preeminently to the white race, and " character, intelligence, and property" have "the right to rule." So, as far as the reasoning is sincere, they are bound to mean that not merely being white entails this right, but the possession of " character, intelligence, and property." And the true formula becomes "the clear and unmistakable
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domination" of " character, intelligence, and property " '' in the South." But if this be the true doctrine, as who can deny it is ? then why —after we have run the color line to suit ourselves through all our truly social relations— why need we usurp the prerogative to run it so needlessly through civil rights, also? It is widely admitted that we are vastly the superior race in everything—as a race. But is every colored man inferior to every white man in character, intelligence, and property ? Is there no " responsible and steadfast element " at all among a people who furnish 16,000 school-teachers and are assessed for ;^91,000,000 worth of taxable property? Are there no poor and irresponsible whites ? So, the color line and the line of character, intelligence, and property frequently cross each other. Then tell us, gentlemen, which are you really for; the color line, or the line of character, intelligence, and property that divides between those who have and those who have not " the right to rule" ? \Iom dare not declare for an inflexible color line; such an answer would shame the political intelligence of a Russian.)
Another point just here. The right to rule: What is it? It is not the right to take any peaceable citizen's civil right from him in v/hole or in part. It is not the right to decree who may earn or not earn any status within the reach of II
his proper powers. It is not the right to oppress. In America, to rule is to serve. There is a newspaper pubHshed in Atlanta called " The Constitution." The Instrument of which this name is intended to remind us, and of which it is well to keep us reminded, is founded on a simple principle that solves the problem of free government over which Europe sat in dark perplexity for centuries, shedding tears of blood; the principle that the right to rule is the consent of the ruled and is vested in the majority by the consent of all. It took ages of agony for the human race to discover that there is no moral right of class rule, and that the only safety to human freedom lies in the intelligence, virtue, and wealth of communities holding every right of every being in such sacred regard, and all claims for class or personal privilege in such uniform contempt, that unintelligence, vice, and poverty, having no potent common grievance, shall naturally invest intelligence, character, and property with the right to rule. It took ages for us to discover the necessity of binding intelligence, character, and property to the maintenance of this attitude by giving, once for all, to the majority the custody and right-of-assignment of this truly precious right to rule. Is this mere sentiment ? A scheme in the clouds ? Who says so cannot truly qualify as a whole American citizen. The safety of American government is that intelligence, virtue, and wealth
dare not press any measure whose viciousness or tyranny might suspend the expulsive forces that keep uninteUigence, vice, and poverty divided among themselves; and that intelligence and virtue hold themselves entirely free to combine now with wealth and now with poverty as now the lower million or now the upper ten shows the livelier disposition to impose upon the other. But the only way to preserve these conditions is to hold sacred the will and voice of the majority. Of course there are friction and imperfections in their working; but human wisdom has not yet found any other scheme that carries us so near to perfect government. The right to rule is a right to earn the confidence and choice of the majority of the whole unfettered people. Yet it is in the face of this fundamental principle oi American freedom that our traditionist friends stand, compelling six million freedmen to mass together under a group of common grievances, within a wall of these gentlemen's own avowed building, then charging them with being " leagued together in ignorance and irresponsibility," and then talking in large approval about " minorities "— not earning, but —** asscrtiiig and maintaining control." And a proposition to set such antique usurpation of human rights aside, to remove the real grievances that make a common cause for six million distrusted and distrusting people, to pull down that wall of civil— not
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social —distinctions that tends to keep them " leagued together in ignorance and irresponsibility," to open to them the civil —not social— rewards of gentility and education, and the responsibilities of knowledge and citizenship, to arouse in them the same concern in common public interests that we feel, and to make all their fortunes subject to the same influences as ours,— this, we are told, is '* against the interest of both races"! And this we have from men who, claiming a preeminent right to speak for the South, claim with it a " right to rule " that fails to signify anything better than the right of the white man to rule the black without his consent and without any further discrimination between intelligence and unintelligence or between responsibility and irresponsibility. In other words, a principle of political and civil selection such as no freeman could possibly choose and which cannot be the best interest of any American community. So the other side are our witnesses again. And now we may say to them, as the lawyers do in court,—'* That will do."
VIII. SUMMING UP.
The case is before the reader. The points of fact made in our earlier paper—the privations suffered by the colored people in their matters of civil rights—have been met with feeble half-denials equivalent to admissions by oppo-
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nents in controversy too engrossed with counter statements and arguments, that crumble at the touch, to attend to a statement of facts. In the end they stand thus : As to churches, there is probably not a dozen in the land, if one, " colored " or " white," where a white person is not at least professedly welcome to its best accommodations ; while the colored man, though he be seven-eighths white, is shut up, on the ground that " his race " prefers it, to the poor and often unprofitable appointments of the ** African" church, whether he like it best or not, unless he is ready to accept without a murmur distinctions that mark him, in the sight of the whole people, as one of a despised caste and that follow him through the very sacraments. As to schooling, despite the fact that he is to-day showing his eager wiUingness to accept separate schools for his children wherever the white man demands the separation, yet both his children and the white man's are being consigned to illiteracy wherever they are too few and poor to form separate j schools. In some mountainous parts of Ken- i tucky there is but one colored school district in a county. In railway travel the colored people's : rights are tossed from pillar to post with an ever-i varying and therefore more utterly indefensible! and intolerable capriciousness. In Virginia they ^ may ride exactly as white people do and in the same cars. In a neighboring State, a white man
may ride in the " ladies' car," while a colored man of exactly the same dress and manners— nay, his wife or daughter—must ride in the notorious *' Jim Crow car," unprotected from smokers and dram-drinkers and lovers of vile language. " In South Carolina," says the Charleston " News and Courier," on the other hand, " respectable colored persons who buy first-class tickets on any railroad ride in the first-class cars as a right, and their presence excites no comment on the part of their white fellow-passengers. It is a great deal pleasanter to travel with respectable and well-behaved colored people than with unmannerly and ruffianly white men." In Alabama the majority of the people have not made this discovery, at least if we are to believe their newspapers. In Tennessee the law rcq2dres the separation of all first-class passengers by race with equal accommodations for both; thus waiving the old plea of decency's exigencies and forcing upon American citizens adjudged to be first-class passengers an alienism that has thrown away its last shadow of an excuse. But this is only the law, and the history of the very case alluded to by our tra-ditionist friends, in which a colored woman gained damages for being compelled to accept inferior accommodation or none for a first-class ticket, is the history of an outrage so glaring that only a person blinded to the simplest rights of human beings could cite it in such a defense.
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A certain daily railway train was supplied, according to the law, with a smoking-car, and two first-class cars, one for colored and one for whites. The two first-class cars were so nearly of a kind that they were exchangeable. They generally kept their relative positions on the track; but the " ladies' car " of the morning trip became the " colored car" of the return, afternoon, trip, and vice versa. But the rules of the colored car were little regarded. Men, white and black, were sometimes forbidden, sometimes allowed, to smoke and drink there. Says the court, " The evidence is abundant to show that the rule excluding smoking from that car was but a nominal one, that it was often disregarded, that white passengers understood it to be a nominal rule, and that adequate means were not adopted to secure the same first-class and orderly passage to the colored passengers occupying that car as was accorded to the passengers in the rear car. Nor was the separation of the classes of the passengers complete. There is no evidence tending to show that the white passengers were excluded from the car assigned to colored passengers, and it appears that whenever the train was unusually crowded it was expected that the excess of white passengers would ride, as they then did ride, in the forward one of the two first-class cars. So, too, it appeared that persons of color, of whom the plaintiff was one, had several times occupied seats
in the rear car." A certain " person of lady-like appearance and deportment," one day in September, 1883, got aboard this train with a first-class ticket. She knew the train, and that, as the court states it, " in the rear car . . . quiet and good order were to so great an extent the rule that it was rarely if ever that any passenger gave annoyance by his conduct to his fellow-passengers." In the colored car there was at least one colored man smoking, and one white man whom she saw to be drunk. She entered the rear car and sat down, no one objecting. She was the only colored person there. The conductor, collecting his tickets, came to her. He was not disconcerted. Not long previously he had forbidden another colored person to ride in that car, who must also have been " of lady-like appearance and deportment," for when he saw this one he " supposed her to be the same person . . . intentionally violating the defendant's (Railroad's) rules and seeking to annoy his other passengersy Twice they exchanged polite request and refusal to leave the car; and then, in full presence of all those " other passengers" whom this person of lady-like appearance and deportment was erroneously suspected of seeking to annoy," there occured a thing that ought to make the nation blush. The conductor laid hands upon this defenseless woman, whose infraction of a rule was interfering neither with the
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running of the road, the collection of fares, nor the comfort of passengers, and " by force removed her from her seat and carried her out of the car. When near the door of the car the plaintiff promised that she would then, if permitted, leave the car rather than be forcibly ejected; but the conductor, as he says, told her that her consent came too late, and continued to remove her forcibly. On reaching the platform of the car, plaintiff left the train." Judgment was given for the plaintiff. But the point was carefully made that she would have been without any grievance if the " colored car" had only been kept first-class. In other words, for not providing separate first-class accommodations, five hundred dollars damages; for laying violent hands upon a peaceable, lady-like, and unprotected woman, nothing ; and nothing for requiring such a one publicly to sit apart from passengers of the same grade under a purely ignominious distinction. What! not ignominious? Fancy the passenger a white lady, choosing, for reasons of her own, to sit in a first-class " colored car "; infringing, if you please, some rule; but paying her way, and causing no one any inconvenience, unsafcty, or delay. Imagine her, on insisting upon her wish to stay, drawn from her seat by force, and lifted and carried out by a black conductor, telling her as he goes that her offer to walk out comes too late. If this is not
go
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ignominy, what is it ? To the commission and palliation of such unmanly deeds are we driven by our attempts to hold under our own arbitrary dictation others' rights that we have no moral right to touch, rights that in ourselves we count more sacred than property and dearer than life.
But we must not tarry. If we turn to the matter of roadside refreshment what do we see? Scarcely a dozen railroad refreshment-rooms from the Rio Grande to the Potomac,—is there one ?—where the weary and hungry colored passenger, be he ever so perfect in dress and behavior, can snatch a hasty meal in the presence of white guests of any class whatever, though in any or every one of them he or she can get the same food, and eat with the same knife, fork, and plate that are furnished to white strangers, if only he or she will take a menial's attitude and accept them in the kitchen. Tennessee has formally " abrogated the rule of the com.mon law " in order to make final end of " any right in favor of any such person so refused admission" to the enjoyment of an obvious civil right which no public host need ever permit any guest to mistake for a social liberty. As to places of public amusement, the gentlemen who say that " each [race] gets the same accommodation for the same money," simply—forget. The statement comes from Atlanta. But, in fact, in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the whole South, there is
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scarcely a place of public amusement—except the cheap museums, where there are no seated audiences—in which a colored man or woman, however unobjectionable personally, can buy, at any price, any but a second—sometimes any but a third or fourth-class accommodation. During a day's stay in Atlanta lately, the present writer saw many things greatly to admire ; many inspiring signs of thrift, stability, virtue, and culture. Indeed, where can he say that he has , not seen them, in ten Southern States lately visited? And it is in contemplation of these evidences of greatness, prosperity, safety, and the desire to be just, that he feels constrained to ask whether it must be that in the principal depot of such a city the hopeless excommunication of every person of African tincture from the civil rewards of gentility must be advertised by three signs at the entrances of three separate rooms, one for " Ladies," one for " Gentlemen," and the third a " Colored waiting-room " ? Visiting the principal library of the city, he was eagerly assured, in response to inquiry, that no person of color would be allowed to draw out books; and when a colored female, not particularly tidy in dress, came forward to return a^ book and draw another, it was quickly explained \ that she was merely a servant and messenger for ) some white person. Are these things necessary '■ to—are they consistent with—an exalted civiliza-
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tion founded on equal rights and the elevation of the masses ?
And the freedman's rights in the courts. It is regarding this part of our subject that our friends on the other side make a mistake too common everywhere and very common among us of the South. That is, they assume the state of affairs in more distant localities to be the same as that immediately around them. A statement concerning certain matters in Florida or Maryland is indignantly denied in Tennessee or Texas because it is not true of those regions; and so throughout. It is in this spirit that one of these gentlemen explains that in Georgia negroes are not excluded from the jury lists except for actual incompetency, and thereupon " assumes that Georgia does not materially differ from the other States." But really, in Tennessee they may not sit in the jury-box at all, except that in a few counties they may sit in judgment on the case of a colored person. While in Texas, at the very time of the gentleman's writing, the suggestion of one of her distinguished citizens to accord the right of jury duty to the colored people, was being flouted by the press as an " innovation upon established usage," and a " sentimental and utterly impracticable idea," This in the face of a State constitution and laws that give no warrant for the race distinction. So much for assumption.
The same mistake is repeated by the same writer in discussing the question of the freed-men's criminal sentences. No fact or person is brought forward to prove or disprove anything except for Georgia. And even the prosecuting attorney for the Atlanta circuit, brought in to testify, says, for the State's cities and towns, that the negro gets there " equal and exact j ustice before the courts " ; but he is not willing to deny " a lingering prejudice and occasional injustice " in remote counties. Why, with nearly 6,000,000 freed people getting " full and exact justice in the courts whether the jury is white or black," why could there not be found avi07ig tlieiJi two or three trustworthy witnesses to testify to this fact ? Their testimony would have been important, for these lines are written within hand's reach of many letters from colored men denying that such is the case.
The present writer does not charge, and never did, that our Southern white people consciously and maliciously rendered oppressive verdicts against the freedman.) On the contrary, it is plainly stated by him that they acted " not so maliciously as unreflectingly," and **' ignorant of the awful condition of the penitentiaries." His only printed utterance on the subject is on record in " The Freedman's Case in Equity," and is too long to quote ; but he cited the official reports of our Southern State prisons themselves, and asked
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how with their facts before us we are to escape the conviction that the popular mind had been seduced—as every student of American prison statistics knows it has—by the ghttering temptations of our Southern convict-lease system ; and not one word of reply have we had, except the assertion, which nobody would think of denying, that the black man, often in Georgia, and sometimes elsewhere, gets an even-handed and noble justice from white juries.
Have our opponents observed the workings of this convict-lease system ? To put such a system as a rod of punishment into the hands of a powerful race sitting in judgment upon the misdemeanors of a feebler and despised caste would warp the verdicts of the most righteous people under the sun. Examine our Southern penitentiary reports. What shall we say to such sentences inflicted for larceny alone, as twelve, fourteen, fifteen, twenty, and in one case forty years of a penal service whose brutal tasks and whippings kill in an average of five years ? Larceny is the peculiar crime of the poorest classes everywhere. In all penitentiaries out of the South the convicts for this offense always exceed and generally double the number of convicts for burglary. '\ Larceny has long been called the favorite crime of the negro criminal. \ What, then, shall we say to the facts, deduced from official records, that in the Georgia penitentiary
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and convict camps there were in 1882 twice as many colored convicts for burglary as for larceny, and that they were, moreover, serving sentences averaging nearly twice the average of the white convicts in the same places for the same crime ? This, too, notwithstanding a very large number of short sentences to colored men, and a difference between their longest and shortest terms twice as great as in the case of the whites. For larceny the difference is five times as great.^ Shall we from these facts draw hasty conclusions ? We draw none. If any one can explain them away, in the name of humanity let us rejoice to see him do so. We are far from charging any one with deliberately prostituting justice. We are far from overlooking " the depravity of the negro." ) But those who rest on this cheap explanation are bound to tell us which shows the greater maliciousness; for one man to be guilty of hog-stealing or for twelve jurors to send him to the coal mines for twenty years for doing it?; In Georgia outside her prisons there are eight whites to every seven blacks. Inside, there are eight whites to every eighty blacks. ) The depravity of the negro may explain away much, but we cannot know how much while there also remain in force the seductions of our atrocious convict-lease system, and our attitude of domi-
1 Without counting the exceptional forty years' sentence mentioned.
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nation over the blacks, so subtly dangerous to our own integrity. [Here is a rough, easy test that may go for what it is worth: These crimes of larceny and burglary are just the sort—since they are neither the most trivial nor the most horrible —to incur excessive verdicts and sentences, if the prejudices of qne class against another come into the account. ' Now, what is the fact in the prisons we have mentioned ? Of all the inmates under sentence for these crimes nineteen-twen-tieths are classed as of that race which we *'dominate" both out of and in the jury-box. We ask no opinion on these points from the stupid or vicious of either whites or blacks; but is it wise for us not to consider what may be their effect upon the minds of the property-holding, intelligent, and virtuous portion of the " dominated " race ? Is it right ?
IX. POLITICAL " SOLIDITY " WHY AND TILL
WHEN?
In the same number of The Century that contains " In Plain Black and White," appears an open letter on " The Solid South." It tells us that political " solidity," founded on the merits neither of candidates nor questions, is an emphatic national and still greater local evil; but that the whites of the South " had to be solid," because they feared, and that they still fear, the
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supremacy of the blacks. That if this fear were removed the whites would divide. Hence, we must first procure the division of the blacks; this is what it calls " the prerequisite." Is it ? Is that a wdse or just arbitration ? Must the side that is immeasurably the weaker begin the disarmament ? Is " noblesse oblige " untranslatable into " American " ? We are only told that " once divide the negro vote and the ' solid South' is broken." True statement, but sadly antique. An old catchword pulled out of the rubbish of the Reconstruction strife. And why was the negro vote solid ? The carpet-bagger and scalawag ? It was so believed, and these—the most of them richly deserving their fate—were suppressed. What then ? Less political activity among the blacks. But division ? No. Then why were the blacks still " solid " ? The open letter gives two causes: first, gratitude to the Republican party; second, fear of the Democratic. But these sentiments, it says, are fading out. Will their disappearance reveal the solid blacks divided ? That depends on the matter that forms—what the open letter does not touch —the solid bottom of this question. But the more ambitious article in the same number of the magazine boldly confesses it when it decrees the siibsej'viency of the freedinan's civil rights to the white man's domination. As long as that continues to be or to threaten, the blacks will be 13
solid. We—any people—would be so—would have to be so, in their place. Such a decree is equivalent to saying they must and shall be solid. Only let it be withdrawn and the solidity will vanish from the white vote and the black at the same instant.
This is what is coming. There is to-day no political party in America that is " solid " for this un-American and tyrannical principle; and the reason why the negro vote is a divided vote in the North to-day, and in the South shows more signs of dividing than ever before, is that the Republican party has grown fat and lazy concerning civil rights, while Democratic legislatures and governors, north, east, west, have been passing and signing civil rights bills, rooting out of the laws and of popular sentiment this heresy of domination by fixed class and race, and throwing to the winds ** legal discriminations on account of color [which] are not based on character or conduct and have no relation to moral worth and fitness for civic usefulness, but are rather relics of prejudice which had its origin in slavery. I recommend," says the present Democratic governor of Ohio, from whose message we are quoting, " I recommend their total repeal." It is but little over a year since the Democrats joined the Repubhcansin the legislature of Connecticut in making liable to fine and imprisonment "every person who subjects or causes to be
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subjected any other person to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution of the State or of the United States, on account of such person being an alien or by reason of his color or race." The time is still shorter since a Democratic majority in the legislature of New Jersey passed a bill of civil rights, as its own text says, "applicable alike to citizens of every race and color." Nor are they afraid of the names of things. "By direction of Governor Abbett," writes the executive clerk, " I send you copy of the Civil Rights bill^ as passed by the Legislature and approved by him." In Indiana, while these pages were being written, Democrats were endeavoring to pass a civil rights bill. In May of last year the legislature at Albany passed a bill removing the last remaining civil disabilities from the colored people in the city of New York, by a unanimous vote, "three-fifths being present "; and the governor who signed the act is now President of the United States.
" Ah!" some will say, " these Northern Democrats do this in their ignorance; they do not know the negro." Is this the whole truth ? Do not we forget that they have only gradually put aside from their own minds the very worst opinion of the negro that ever we had ? To get where they are they have left behind the very same prejudices and misconceptions of citizens'
* Italicized only here.
lOO
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rights that we are called to lay aside, and no others. Nay, even we assert facts now, that twenty years ago we used to say no man who knew the negro could honestly believe.
" But"—the answer comes again—" if they had the negro among them numerically powerful, they would not venture to concede"—etc. Let us see : From Georgia, where, we are told, the freedman shall never enjoy " the policy indicated in the Civil Rights bill," pass across its eastern boundary, and lo, we are in a State under Southern Democratic rule, where the blacks are in the majority, yet which is not afraid to leave on the printed page, from the days of Reconstruction, a civil rights bill, not nearly so comprehensive, it is true, but " fully as stringent," says its leading daily journal, " as any that Congress ever placed upon the statute-books," and attending whose enforcement " there is no friction or unpleasantness." This, in South Carolina!
May the time be not long delayed when her strong, proud people, that are sometimes wrong but ever conscientious and ever brave, not content with merely not undoing, shall broaden the applications of that law until it perfectly protects white man and black man alike in the enjoyment of every civil right, and their hearts behind the law open to the freedman equally with the white man, as far as in him lies to achieve it, every civil reward of intelligence, wealth, and virtue. Then
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shall it still be as true as it is to-day that " No special harm has come of it." Not only so ; but the freedman, free indeed, shall along with his other fetters cast off the preoccupation in this question of civil rights which now engrosses his best intelligence, and shall become a factor in the material and moral progress of the whole land. Be the fault now where it may, he will not then outnumber the white man on the prison rolls ^' eleven to one. And what is true of one Southern State is true of all. The temptations to which the negro—shutout from aspirations—now yields, will lose their power, and his steps be turned with a new hope and desire toward the prizes of industry, frugality, and a higher cultivation. Multiplying and refining his tastes, the rank energies of his present nature will not, as now, run entirely to that animal fecundity characteristic of all thriftless, reckless, unaspiring populations; his increase in civic value will be quickened, his increase in numbers retarded to a rate more like our own. And neither all the crops our sun-loved South can yield, nor all the metals and minerals that are under the soil made sacred by the blood of her patriots, can bring us such wealth and prosperity as will this change in the / hopes and ambitions of our once unaspiring, time-serving slaves. The solid black will be solid no longer; but he will still be black.
X« THE GEOGRAPHY OF AMALGAMATION.
Is it not wonderful ? A hundred years we have been fearing to do entirely right lest something wrong should come of it; fearing to give the black man an equal chance with us in the race of life lest we might have to grapple with the vast, vague afrite of Amalgamation ; and in all this hundred years, with the enemies of slavery getting from us such names as negrophiles, negro-worshipers, and miscegenationists; and while we were claiming to hold ourselves rigidly separate from the lower race in obedience to a natal instinct which excommunicated them both socially and civilly; just in proportion to the rigor, the fierceness, and the injustice with which this excommunication from the common rights of man has fallen upon the darker race, has amalgamation taken place. Look—we say again —at the West Indies. Then turn and look at those regions of our common country that we have been used to call the nests of fanaticism; Philadelphia, Boston, Plymouth Church, and the like. Look at Oberlin, Ohio. For years this place was the grand central depot, as one might say, of the "Underground Railway"; receiving and passing on toward Canada and freedom thousands of fugitive slaves; weeping over them, praying over them, feeding them, housing them, hiding them in her bosom, defying the law for them,