The slave trade

Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency there was no reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Holloway evidently did not subscribe to the idea of Sir Harry Johnston as to the power of money to solve all human difficulties, for there were colored men of means in Charleston at the time. It was character, and particularly self control, that appealed to Holloway. His selection, therefore, was W. D. Crum, who had shown that he possessed characteristics very akin to those which Holloway had shown to be the ideals of the Century Fellowship Society, although Crum’s forbears had not been free persons of color before the War of Secession, a matter of importance to Holloway.

Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the benefit of the fiercely prejudiced English authors, who are unable to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s Nazareth.

James H. Fordham, of the free persons of color before the war, held the position of a lieutenant on the police force of the city of Charleston, from 1874 to as late as 1896. He was a light quadroon, who might have been passed for a Spanish officer. Taciturn to a degree, he discharged the duties of his office thoroughly and conscientiously. Scarcely ever speaking, unless spoken to, and apparently never ruffling the white roundsmen under his command. Yet, in the longest speech he ever made, backed as it was by appropriate action, he evinced an understanding of, and devotion to the fundamental principles of democracy which, if appreciated by the great German people, might have saved them from the pains and penalties they are now undergoing for subjecting the world to the exigencies of military ambition.

The occasion of Fordham’s speech was an incident in 1891, occurring in one of those periodical struggles by which democracy in the United States perpetually renews its strength at the expense of officialdom. At the close of a warmly contested and close primary, the successful faction opposing the municipal administration in Charleston, found it difficult to bring the result in one ward to a count and decision. Impatient and suspicious, as the delay wore past midnight, a worthy but somewhat choleric individual, of the faction announced successful at every other point hours earlier, denounced the presence of the police in the poll where the delay was being maintained by the masterly inactivity of the administration manager.

One of the policemen on duty, ordinarily as amiable as he was strong and courageous, advanced toward the citizen and angrily challenged the accusation with the inquiry:

“What right have you to make charges against the police?”

Before the citizen could reply, the quadroon lieutenant sprang from his horse, pushed through the crowd and, placing himself between the two, the only colored man in a group of excited whites, firmly but quietly said to the policeman:

It is useless to comment upon this incident; for, to any one who needed such, comment would be useless.

As an incident of the growth of caste feeling, twelve years later in the same locality, a mulatto policeman having arrested a drunken German for noisily quarreling with his wife upon the public streets was, upon the demand of the leading hyphenated politician of the city, dismissed from the force.

In the years which intervened between the events last narrated, the Democratic president, with regard to whom Dr. Washington had asserted that he possessed no color prejudice, had concluded his second term, made illustrious by the firm stand taken by him in the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute, which had been brought to his attention and fought to a decision,[286] against the extreme and arbitrary claims of Great Britain, by that almost forgotten Southerner, William L. Scruggs of Georgia.

Yet, despite the cloud in which this absolutely proper stand for justice between nations and maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine involved him for awhile, on account of the belittling comments of Anglophiles, Cleveland has passed into history as a strong president and a great man. He was succeeded in his high office by the gentlest mannered and sweetest tempered individual who has ever exhibited in such station the high personal traits which adorned the character of William McKinley.

Whatever these two men thought concerning the color question was no doubt discoverable; but it was not announced as a new gospel; for while great in spirit they were not noisily so. They were both great men. Cleveland, the Democrat, was greater in his public character and official achievements, the Republican, McKinley, in the personal integrity and absolute self abnegation which adorned his life and crowned his end. Cleveland opposed to malfeasance a rugged force, which did much to build up public integrity, lamentably lowered in Grant’s two terms. McKinley’s respect for law and order was so sincere, that in his dying moments he interposed to protect his assassin from the natural fury of the mob, thereby defending an anarchist from the outburst of anarchy which the vile deed occasioned, and giving, in his own suffering person, so interposing, the noblest appeal that could possibly be made against lynching.

The executive who succeeded McKinley was essentially different. No president of the United States has done as much as Mr. Roosevelt to wipe out distinctions between white and black. That he should have estranged Southern whites is not unnatural; that he should have aroused the enmity of Northern and Southern colored men discloses to what an extent the Negro is amenable to impulse rather than reason. Mr. Alfred Holt Stone has discussed three incidents which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s first term. Benjamin Brawley, a colored man, discusses the even more important incident which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s second term. In the first three Mr. Roosevelt held the centre of the stage, in the fourth, the Negroes were the actors, Mr. Roosevelt only responding. Mr. Stone treats the first three, in part, as follows:

According to Mr. Stone, the attitude of the South was one of general disapproval, the attitude of the Northern press a defence of the President. After a searching consideration of some fifty or more pages, in which Mr. McKinley’s attitude in distributing patronage is compared to that of Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Stone discusses the attitude of the Negroes. After taking up in turn various expressions by Professor Kelly Miller, Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois and Mr. William Pickens, Mr. Stone asks—“What then is the real meaning of their words?” Mr. Pickens says:

It is true this utterance was some five years later; but Mr. Stone thinks that—

To his discussion Mr. Stone appends the following interesting little note:

In the same year that Mr. Pickens was declaring with fine oratorical fervor:

—three Negro companies in the United States Army indicated, in their own way, their disapproval of these distinctions. The incident is treated by Mr. Benjamin Brawley, a colored writer of culture, as follows:

The author states, that, later, the civil disabilities were, by President Roosevelt, revoked and he exhibits the terms of a resolution in the Senate to investigate the matter; but the fact that the President’s action was sustained[293] apparently was not of sufficient importance to be made a matter of comment; nor the behavior of the soldiers.

The President’s comment at the time was eminently sane, just and commendable. He wrote:

The inability of even cultured Negroes to sympathize with the view of the President was their misfortune rather than their fault. It indicated that they lacked the elementary principle essential to the rulership of themselves, much less to the rulership of others.

It was not so much the amount of attention as the amazing attitude of the vast majority of Negroes capable of understanding what had occurred, which attended that attention. To the vast majority of Negroes, irrespective of rank, culture or professions of Christianity, there was something noble and manly in the behavior of “the veteran non-commissioned officers”, so absolutely repugnant to the practical politician Roosevelt, a high type of white. The inability of the succeeding occupant of the highest office in this country, genial in disposition, liberal in view; but yet unable to appreciate the flaming zeal and prompt action, with which a real leader of a free people meets such behavior in armed underlings, marks a certain weakness in that Northern white. Such weakness coupled as it was with the behavior of such public men as Senator Foraker did much to produce the deplorable incident ten years later so properly stamped with executive disapproval and inevitable punishment to the last degree.

It is quite possible and to some degree probable that weak and vicious comments on Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter had something to do with the Houston riot. The comment also affected the Southern white man profoundly in his attitude to colored soldiers and policemen.