Black America

A.—THE POPULATION OF THE SOUTH IN 1890.

Up to the time of sending this book to the press, no official statistics of the relative proportions of the races in the Southern States of the Black Belt in 1890 have reached me from Washington. Bulletin No. 16 of the Census Office contains, however, a final statement as to the total population of each State in question. I give the figures in tabular form, leaving vacant columns for the insertion hereafter of the missing information:—

To the Forum for October, 1889 (Forum Publishing Company, 253, Fifth Avenue, New York), the Rev. John Snyder contributed an article with the above title. As it illustrates many points that are briefly touched upon in the present volume, I venture to append some further portions of it beyond those already quoted.

“A gifted American actor,” says Mr. Snyder, “has conceived a professional scheme which promises an affluent return of profit and reputation. He is convinced that, under certain clearly recognised conditions, the drama of Othello may be made popular in the Southern States. He sees clearly, of course, why this great product of the master’s genius has been ‘under a cloud,’ so to speak, south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and he purposes revealing to the art-loving people of that section the beauties of a work which the interpretative power of the greatest actors of the past has never made tolerable on the Southern stage.

“He is conscious of the natural difficulties to be overcome; of the state of social feeling which will always resent the intrusion of the African on the histrionic stage, except within the limited range of the minstrel show. But his system contemplates an easy solution of these apparently insuperable difficulties. He does not design to impart a less pronounced colour to the face of Othello, because experience has taught him that the slightest tinge of creaminess in the complexion and the faintest crinkle in the hair would leave the prejudice against his hero’s race practically unaffected. He simply intends to ‘improve’ Shakspeare so that the great bard’s creations may be made generally acceptable to all sections of our free and enlightened land.

“There is no intention wilfully to misrepresent Shakspeare, or to distort his plain meanings. But this artist has reasoned himself into the conviction that the great author’s hero could not have been a negro. Therefore, all the prejudice against him on that ground is manifestly unreasonable. In the very nature of things, he must have been the representative of another race, or else Brabantio’s friendship, Desdemona’s love, Cassio’s esteem, and the unstinted admiration of Venice would all be impossible and inconceivable. Accordingly, our actor holds, Othello must have resembled one of those stately Arab chiefs whose portraits gleam from the pages of ‘Picturesque Palestine.’

“Our Southern brethren are at last to have an Othello who cannot, as the moral circus advertisements say, ‘offend the most fastidious.’ Shakspeare, carefully modernised, will become popular once more in the sunny South. All references to the blackness of Othello’s face and the thickness of his lips are to be conscientiously softened down into less objectionable phrases, and those audiences which may be ethnologically unenlightened are to have their sensitive natures soothed by some such prologue as Bottom proposed for the sapient actors of Athens: ‘Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or I entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble; my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a “nigger,” it were a pity of my life. I am no such thing. I am an Arab.’ That would put all doubt at rest.

“The only thing likely to interfere with the success of this scheme of mingled philanthropy and profit is the presence of that vast amount of astute Shakspearean philosophy which is based upon the assumption of Othello’s objectionable ethnic relationship. What becomes of Professor D. J. Snider’s ‘System of Shakspeare’s Dramas.’? It is quite probable that Shakspeare, could he be consulted, would offer no strenuous objection to the proposed change. Having been an actor himself, he would doubtless sympathise with the despair to which the modern representative of his profession is reduced in the task of catering to the present unreasonable demand for dramatic novelties. As there is not the slightest appreciable trace of a ‘system’ in any of his dramas, and as the social prejudice against the African race as such is something which in his day and generation was still unborn, it is reasonable to suppose that Othello might be re-made into a Chinaman or a Choctaw without seriously affecting the motive of the tragedy.

“Still, when a man has constructed a ‘System of Shakspeare,’ and has announced that ‘Shakspeare makes race an ethical element of marriage, as important as chastity,’ and that ‘in Europe to-day the marriage of a lord and a servant-girl collides with the moral consciousness of the whole public,’ he naturally has the same kind of affection for that system which Dr. Sangrado had for his, and any attempt to upset its ‘ethical’ conclusions by substituting an Arabian Othello for an Ethiopian, will be apt to be resented. It is as fundamentally unethical to marry an Arab as a negro. It will be much wiser for our actor frankly to retain the African characteristics of his hero, letting it be understood that a true Shakspearean system employs this tragedy as an ‘awful example’ to warn those who are tempted to leap over the ethical fence of racial distinctions.

“Once outside of the atmosphere of American social life, it is difficult to treat the spirit of colour caste with seriousness or decent respect. Of course, that man would be but a shallow ethnologist who should maintain that the terms ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ do not justly mark the distinctions between races, or who should refuse to acknowledge that certain choice characteristics of civilisation are confined within fairly well-ascertained racial limitations. And the man who looks with disapproval upon marriage unions between the members of a progressive race like the Caucasian, and the members of a conditionally unimprovable race, is governed by principles of the simplest prudence, to say no more. The difficulty is always in determining this question of improvability. The Spanish race in its various colonies has seemed to stand still for three centuries, yet to attribute racial inferiority to the countrymen of Cervantes and Loyola would be manifestly unjust. The negro race in this country may be mentally and morally both inferior and unimprovable, and hence it would be both wise and ethical for our stock to refuse to make with it a mixture of blood. But the average American knows nothing and cares nothing about any physiological reasons for declining such marriages. In truth, the race question does not, with us, involve this marriage element at all. Generally speaking, nobody wants his daughter to marry a negro, and the negro is not anxious to seek such marriages. As a matter of fact, in the matter of marriage the negro is ridiculously fastidious, accepting without complaint the white man’s classification of every shade of colour, even the slightest, under the head of negro, and rigorously claiming for his own race every possible modification of the original type. There are plenty of octoroons and quadroons who might easily pass for members of the white race, but who never think of seeking marriage associations outside their mother’s stock. And they would be subjected to the severe censure of the black race if they did so. The bugbear of ‘miscegenation’ is the least substantial phantom that haunts the imagination of ignorant people.

“The cruel wall of caste which has been relentlessly built around the negro in this country was not created by the fear of racial deterioration on the part of the Caucasian. The feeling from which it sprang is so inexplicable as almost to defy any philosophical analysis. That in the Southern States slavery should have created a clearly defined colour caste was reasonable and natural. That among a people generous in disposition and generally religious in their habits of mind this caste feeling should have been strengthened by every argument tending to show the negro’s natural inferiority and fitness for his servile position was equally natural. That within the limits of slave territory every Southern gentleman should consider the presence of mental ability in an individual negro a reflection upon the system and a menace to its continuance, was the most reasonable thing in the world. But it is only justice to say that not in the South but in the North did this curious feeling of colour caste first have its rise. The Southern man apparently denied to the negro social recognition not primarily because he was a negro, but because he was a slave. The Northern man seems to hate the negro primarily on account of his colour. In domestic service, the filthiest and most ignorant Irish or German servant refuses to eat at the same table with the cleanest and most respectable negro. In some of our hotels the wealthiest negro in the land could not purchase, at any price, the privilege of sitting in the common dining-room, or of occupying one of the sleeping apartments. Industrially, he is practically restricted to a “beggarly account,” of the least profitable and most menial trades. Those labour unions which complain so bitterly of the oppression of capital, and announce Utopian principles of universal brotherhood, do not dare to cast their mantle of protection over the despised and neglected labourer with a black skin. But saddest of all is the attitude which the Church has held towards this spirit of colour caste. Ideally, at least, the Church is the home of human equality. All classes and conditions of men are supposed to meet there on a common ground. And while we constantly depart from this principle in practice, we usually try to cover and disguise our shortcomings by a thin veil of self-exculpation. We may not want the poor and poorly dressed man sitting in our pews, but we rarely make a frank confession of the fact. Only the negro is openly, and by common consent, excluded from the broad definition of Christian equality. We have not yet accepted Mr. Nasby’s advice, and altered our version of the New Testament so that it shall read ‘Suffer the little (white) children to come unto Me,’ but it would be quite consistent for us to do so.

“This condition of things would cease to be mysterious if it were based upon recognised physiological reasons. We can easily understand Brabantio’s surprise when his daughter became enamoured of a thick-lipped African, or Aunt Ophelia’s disgust at seeing Eva hanging about the neck of Uncle Tom. We are not disposed to question the good Puritan’s conviction that the pure negro is ‘an acquired taste.’ But we entertain the same personal and social repugnance for every possible modification of the negro. Even when the bleaching process has been so thorough that no external indication of African blood remains; even when the individual has assumed all the characteristics of Caucasian beauty and intelligence, we still treat him as a social pariah. Several years ago there was, at a certain school in Pittsburg, a very beautiful and intelligent young lady. In scholarship and deportment she stood for a year at the head of the school. At the end of that time somebody told the principal that his favourite pupil had lurking in her veins a few unsuspected and undiscoverable drops of African blood. She was turned out of the doors as ignominiously as if she had been guilty of unchastity or was afflicted with some infectious disease.

“Tell the average American that he is descended from Pocahontas, that his blood may be traced to Confucius, or that his daughter has secretly married one of Madame Blavatsky’s mythical Indian Mahatmas, and the chances are that he will be flattered and gratified. You stumble over no ‘ethical principle’; you encounter no fatal racial prejudice. Tell him that his great-great-grandfather was probably a powerful potentate from the Congo or the Niger, and you touch the acme of insult. It would be safer to accuse him of highway robbery.

“But the most astonishing feature of this colour caste is found in the complacent assumption of the average American that it is something inherent and natural in the human mind, and is therefore universal. Tell such a person that it is the result of social and political education, and he will smile at your ignorance. Yet when such an American steps over the borders of his own country he does not find this prejudice shared by any other nation. The Frenchman, Englishman, or German may not want his daughter to marry a negro, but in no part of Europe do you detect the presence of that galling system of social discrimination which so exasperates the black man in this country. All over the continent of Europe you find the negro living in the best hotels, travelling in first class coaches, and sitting as an equal on the benches of the great scientific and art schools. You find no trace of this prejudice in the press or literature of Europe; you find no taint of it in its social life. London is the great meeting-place of all the varied races of the world. A new Peter would find there the representatives of more peoples than listened to the many-tongued sermon on the Day of Pentecost. All colours and conditions of men make up the varied web and woof of its marvellous life. Each man’s condition is determined by his rank, his wealth, his social position. Social caste indeed exists of the most rigid type; but it is never based on colour, hardly ever upon racial distinctions. It may be, as the author of the ‘System of Shakspeare’s Dramas’ affirms, that the marriage of a lord and a servant-girl ‘collides with the moral consciousness of the whole public,’ but a man’s treatment is conditioned upon his wealth, his intelligence, his knowledge, his rank, or his personal character, never upon the colour of his skin. In the light of this fact our colour caste seems as provincial as it is undeniably absurd, cruel, and indefensible.”

The following letter was addressed in 1888 to the Editor of, and was printed in, the Charleston News and Courier. As it deals very ably, though from a pronouncedly Southern standpoint, with the responsibility of the North towards the negro, I reprint it with a few insignificant corrections:—

“Sir,—I was glad to see your editorial on March 9th last on the Emancipation Proclamation. It is surprising how much ignorance exists upon the subject of emancipation in some of the usually best-informed circles. I desire to call your attention to two instances of this in that usually accurate journal, the Nation (of New York). In a recent number there appeared the review of a letter written from Washington to a paper in Frankfort:—

“‘The condition of our negro population is the subject of a Washington letter in the Frankfurter Zeitung of December 24th, 1887. The writer’s view of their social status is correct enough, but he is rather at sea in his historical retrospect, as when he says that the South was at one time more opposed to slavery than was the North, and that the Civil War was a struggle between “the sons of the slave-owners and the planters to whom their fathers had sold their dark commodities.” This is a corollary to the misleading statement that “in 1790 the negroes were distributed throughout this country, and were almost exclusively slaves,” but that, “during the first quarter of a century the inhabitants of the Northern States gradually sold their slaves to the South, where climate and the nature of the agricultural products increase the value of negro labour,” all of which sounds as if the countryman of Von Holst had drawn his inspiration from the pro-slavery pamphlets of Buchanan’s Administration.’

“I have not seen this letter, nor do I know who is the writer, but if you will allow me space I think I can convince even the Nation, and its readers who shall happen to see this communication, that the statements quoted are not so wide of the mark as the Nation seems to think.

“If such, as the Nation suggests, was indeed the source of the writer’s information, can the following facts and figures, which are taken mostly from a work of that time, be disputed? The author from whom I take the figures, as I cannot at this moment put my hand upon the census of 1790, was, it is true, a Rebel brigadier, the heroic defender of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, where he was killed; but, all the same, can the statements be denied?—(‘Cobb on Slavery,’ Philadelphia, T. and I. W. Johnson and Co., 1858):—

“By the census of 1790 there were 40,370 slaves in the States north of Virginia. Now how were those 40,000 slaves emancipated? Can any one point to a single Act by any Northern State by which any negro was actually and immediately emancipated? We ask this because it is clear that all the gradual emancipation schemes had just the effect which the Frankfort writer states: to wit, they caused the inhabitants of the Northern States generally to sell their slaves to the South. Laws prohibiting slavery after some future date were but warnings to the owners of slaves to send them out of the State before the Act should go into effect. The inevitable working of such Acts was to send the slaves South for sale.

“Vermont, we know, claims the honour of having been the first to exclude slavery. She claims that this was done by her Bill of Rights in 1777. But the census of 1790 shows seventeen slaves. Her Bill of Rights could not have done a very perfect work since it allowed seventeen slaves to remain in bonds thirteen years after its adoption. Slavery, which had been introduced into Massachusetts soon after its first settlement, was ‘tolerated,’ as Chief Justice Parsons gently expresses it, certainly until the adoption of the Constitution of 1780. Nor, indeed, did the Constitution of 1780, by any express provision or declaration, prohibit slavery. But a very few days ago a letter of Mr. Thomas Silloway, of Boston, appeared in the Charleston Sun, giving instances of bills of sale and disposition by will of Indian and negro slaves in Massachusetts as late as 1771. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes Old Sophy, the nurse of Elsie Venner, the daughter of a slave mother. So gradual was the decadence of slavery in Massachusetts that as late as 1833 her Supreme Court could not say by what specific Act the institution had been abolished. (Winchendon v. Hatfield, 4 Mass. 123; Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pick, 209.)

“In Belknap’s ‘New Hampshire,’ Vol. III., 280, published in 1792, the matter is thus explained:—

“‘Slavery is not prohibited by any express law. Negroes were never very numerous in New Hampshire. Some of them purchased their freedom during the late war by serving three years in the army. Others have been made free by the justice and humanity of their masters. In Massachusetts they are all accounted free by the first article in the Declaration of Rights, “All men are born free and equal.” In the Bill of Rights of New Hampshire the first article is expressed in these words: “All men are born equally free and independent;” which, in the opinion of most persons, will bear the same construction. But others have deduced from it this inference, that all who are born since the Constitution was made are free; and that those who were in slavery before remain there still. For this reason, in the late census, the blacks in New Hampshire are distinguished into free and slaves. It is not in my power to apologise for this inconsistency.’

“The author then goes on to explain, as we Southerners afterwards continued to do, how much better off those who were slaves were than those who were free in other States. By the census of 1790 there were 158 slaves in New Hampshire, and in 1840 there was still one remaining.

“In the plantations of Rhode Island slaves were more numerous than in the other New England States, as, indeed, they necessarily were, considering that the merchants and sailors of that little State were the greatest slave traders of this country. But as the negroes could not thrive in that latitude, her Legislature provided a gradual scheme of emancipation, which took a lifetime to work out, leaving as late as 1840 five slaves in that State. Connecticut was too much interested to indulge her philanthropy at the expense of an immediate emancipation. In 1790 she had 2,750 slaves. So she too adopted a plan of gradual emancipation, by the slow and prudent workings of which seventeen of her slaves remained as such in 1840.

“As Mr. Bancroft observes: ‘that New York is not a slave State like Carolina, is due to her climate and not to the superior humanity of her founders.’ (Vol. II., 303). When South Carolina prohibited the importation of slaves from Africa in 1789, New York imported them and shipped the savages to this State as American slaves. As late as 1858 the London Times charged that New York had become the greatest slave-trading mart in the world, a charge which Wilson, in the ‘Rise and Fall of the Slave Power,’ fully corroborates. In 1790 New York had 21,324 slaves. She, too, adopted an Act of gradual emancipation, by the operation of which in 1840 all but four slaves had been gotten rid of. New Jersey, though adopting the same scheme, was slower in getting rid of her slaves, 674 still remaining in 1840.

“Adam Smith observed:—‘The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property such a resolution could never have been taken.’ (‘Wealth of Nations.’) There were 3,737 slaves in Pennsylvania in 1790, and, as Adam Smith predicted, she would not sacrifice so much property. So she, too, provided for gradual emancipation. The census of 1840 showed sixty-five negroes still in slavery. In 1823 a negro woman was put up on the auction block along with some machinery, smith’s tools, and one cow, and sold for debt by the sheriff of Fayette County, in the State of Brotherly Love. They were still discussing this case in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania as late as 1837, but it was the inadequacy of the price the poor wretch brought, and not the iniquity of the transaction, about which they were contending. (Lynch v. Commonwealth, 6 Watts 495.) It was the frosts and snows which put an end to slavery at the North, not philanthropy.

“It is familiar history that the slave trade by which slavery was established in this country was carried on by Old England and New England, and not by the South. As Mr. Lecky points out, the New England trade, just prior to the Revolution, consisted in sending her lumber out and bringing slaves in.

“Some time since in his notes, in this same paper, while reviewing a work on ‘Brazil and Slavery,’ the editor of the Nation wrote as follows:—

“‘We can recommend it for its own sake, but we have read it with the deepest interest for its reflected light on that irrepressible conflict which ended, some would say, in April, 1865, and others in March, 1876. First, and above all, it inspires a sense of profound thankfulness that there never existed in this country a party, or a policy, or a measure of gradual emancipation. We mean, of course, against that purely Southern slave power which dictated the compromises of the Federal Constitution.’

“In this the editor of the Nation could not have meant that there never existed in this country a policy or a measure of gradual emancipation, for, as we have seen, just such a policy was adopted throughout the Northern States. It was by just such measures that the Northern people rid themselves of the institutions which they had so large a hand in imposing upon the South. But was this statement correct even if limited by his last sentence, ‘We mean, of course, against the Southern slave power,’ &c.?

“Mr. Lincoln declared, in his inaugural address, that the Republican party had no intention to interfere with the institution of slavery; and Congress, by a joint resolution, approved July 22nd, 1861, repeated Mr. Lincoln’s declaration, and announced to the South that the war was only for the preservation of the Union, and not for the abolition of slavery; and Congress actually passed in March, 1861, by a two-thirds vote, a proposed amendment to the Constitution that:—

“‘No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorise or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labour or service by the laws of the said State.’

“Upon the recommendation, however, of Mr. Lincoln, made in a special message in April, 1862, Congress passed another joint resolution offering pecuniary aid from the General Government to induce the States to adopt ‘general abolishment of slavery.’

“Mr. Lincoln expressed the sentiment of the North, which enabled him to carry on the war successfully, when, on the 22nd August, 1862, he said:

“‘My paramount object is to save the Union, and not to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.’

“The slaves in the States at war with the Federal Government were freed as a military and not as a political measure. The Federal Government did not free the slaves in Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. The results of the war rendered slavery impracticable, but that was all.

“The truth is that the South could at any time during the war have secured the institution of slavery at the sacrifice of the right of secession. That sacrifice she would not voluntarily make, and she lost both her sovereignty and her slaves. She was the unfortunate, innocent, last holder of a dishonoured bill, and the emitters of it turned upon her and called to the world to see how they would punish her for holding it.

To this it may be added that, under the old territorial laws of Illinois, persons were allowed to bring slaves into the Territory under the name of indentured servants. As such they might be held in bondage for a term of ninety-nine years or less. This was in direct violation of the spirit of the ordinance of 1787, which interdicted slavery or involuntary servitude in all the territory north of the Ohio River. The first Illinois State Constitution, adopted in 1818, prohibited the further introduction of slaves, but did not abolish this species of slavery by liberating the victims of the old Territorial enactments. Thus slavery existed in Illinois in defiance of the ordinance of 1787 until the adoption of the Constitution of 1848, which contained the following provision:—“There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in this State, except as a punishment for crime.” After the adoption of the Constitution of 1818, the first Legislature re-enacted the law “respecting free negroes, mulattoes, servants, and slaves” of Territorial times. No severer law was to be found in any slave State. It forbade negroes or mulattoes to settle in the State without certificates of freedom. No person was to employ any negro or mulatto without such certificate, under a penalty of $1.50 for each day. To harbour any slave or servant, or hinder the owner in retaking a slave, was made a felony, punishable by restitution or a fine of two-fold value, and by a whipping not to exceed thirty stripes. Every black or mulatto without a proper certificate was subject to arrest as a runaway slave, to be advertised for six weeks by the sheriff, when, if not reclaimed or his freedom established, he was sold for one year, after which he was entitled to a freedom certificate. Any slave or servant found ten miles from home without permit was liable to arrest and thirty-five stripes, on the order of a justice. For misbehaving to his master or family he was punishable with the lash. Indeed, punishment with the lash to the number of thirty-nine and forty stripes was prescribed for each of a long list of offences, real or of legal construction. Even after the adoption of the Constitution of 1848, which required the General Assembly at its first session to pass such laws as should effectually prohibit free persons of colour from immigrating to, or settling in this State, and should prohibit the owners of slaves from bringing them there for the purpose of setting them free, the Legislature passed an Act, February 12th, 1853, which imposed on every such coloured person a fine of $50. If the fine was not paid forthwith he was to be advertised and sold to any one who would pay the fine and costs for the shortest period of such person’s service. A case under this law was carried up to the Supreme Court, and decided, so late as 1864, to be valid. Other provisions of these enactments, which were known as the Black Laws, were almost equally detestable. On February 7th, 1865, they were repealed. Had it not been for these Black Laws the census of Illinois would not be blotted with an enrolment of “168 slaves” in 1810; 917 in 1820; 747 in 1830; and 331 in 1840—the last census that carries such a stain. Fortunately, the masters and people at large were better than their laws.

The following table shows the white and coloured populations of the whole of the United States at the various decennial periods from 1790 to the present time:—