The Southern South

CHAPTER VII

The Southern mind likes to think of its episodes as contributions to the national history, and at the same time to claim as specifically Southern all that has taken place in the South since the foundation of the Federal Union. School histories are written and prescribed by legislatures to teach children a Southern point of view; the South of Washington and Jefferson, of Jackson and Calhoun, is looked upon as something apart from the nation. To some extent there is reason for this frame of mind; slavery, or rather the obstinate maintenance of slavery after it had disappeared in other civilized communities, put the South in a position of defiance of the world for near three quarters of a century; hence the history of the South from 1789 to 1861 can be separated from that of the Union as a whole in a manner impossible for New England and the West.

This separate history needs, like other eras of human history, to be envisaged in the light of things that actually were. Such calm and unbiased approach to the study of past times is difficult in the South because of the exaggeration of one of the fine traits of Southern character, of its respect for the past, its veneration for ancestors. In a world of progress a main influence is the conviction that things need to be improved, that the children are wiser than their fathers; but this spirit is out of accord with the Southern feeling of loyalty to section, to state, to kindred, and to ancestors. Charles Francis Adams spends years in showing up the inconsistencies of the character of his Puritan forbears; but to the Southern mind there would be something shocking in a South Carolina or Virginia writer who should set forth unfavorable views of the courage of General Moultrie or the legal skill of Patrick Henry.

For this reason, or for more occult reasons, there is a disposition in the South to hold to local traditional views of the history of the United States as a whole and of the South in particular. For instance, most North Carolinians seem addicted to the belief that Mecklenburg County drew up certain drastic resolutions of Independence, May 20, 1775; and the man who is not convinced of it had better live somewhere else than in North Carolina. In like manner many Southerners suppose it to be an established fact that the aristocracy in the South were descended from English Cavaliers, and the leaders in New England from the Puritans. Yet there is little evidence of permanent Cavalier influence in any Southern colony. The most recent historian of early Virginia, Bruce, says: “The principal figures in the history of Virginia in the seventeenth century were men of the stamp of Samuel Mathews, George Menefie, Robert Beverley, Adam Thoroughgood, Ralph Wormeley, William Fitzhugh, Edmund Scarborough, and William Byrd.” Are these names more heraldic than those of John Winthrop and John Endicott and Thomas Dudley? Aside from the titled governors who did not remain in the colonies, Lord Fairfax possessed the only Virginia title, and he may be balanced by Sir William Phipps, the Yankee knight. George Washington’s ancestors are known to have been respectable English squires, but where are the Cavalier forefathers of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis? The bone and sinew of the Colonial South, as of the North, was made up of the English middle class, yeomen and shopkeepers; and in both sections the descendants of those men chiefly came to eminence.

Another of the unfortified beliefs which have wide currency in the South is that under slavery the South was a prosperous, happy, and glorious community. Robert Toombs, of Georgia, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1856, said of the slave states: “In surveying the whole civilized world, the eye rests not on a single spot where all classes of society are so well content with their social system, or have greater reason to be so, than in the slaveholding States of this Union.... They may safely challenge the admiration of the civilized world.” Later books of reminiscence carry you back to the delightful days when “the old black mahogany table, like a mirror, was covered with Madeira decanters standing in silver casters, and at each plate was a glass finger bowl with four pipe-stem glasses on their sides just touching the water”; when “woman’s conquests were made by the charms and graces given them by nature rather than by art of women modistes and men milliners ... and the men prided themselves, above all things, on being gentlemen. This gave tone to society.”

This system was assumed to be especially happy for the slave; witness a recent Southern writer: “Hence, to the negro, the institution of slavery, so far from being prejudicial, was actually beneficial in its effects, in that, as a strictly paternal form of government, it furnished that combination of wise control and kind compulsion which is absolutely essential to his development and well-being.” Minor, in his recent “The Real Lincoln,” urges that “the children of slaveholders may be saved from being betrayed into the error of regarding with reprobation the conduct of their parents in holding slaves”; and justifies slavery on the ground that the slaves had “a more liberal supply of the necessaries of life than was ever granted to any other laboring class in any other place, or other age.” Reed, in his “Brothers’ War,” holds that “Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental.... Slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave.” No wonder that “Nicholas Worth” exclaims: “What I discovered was that the people did not know their own history; that they had accepted certain oft-repeated expressions about it as facts; and that the practical denial of free discussion of certain subjects had deadened research and even curiosity to know the truth.”

This theory that slavery was harmful, if harmful at all, only to the white race, has gone to the extent of insisting that slavery was educational; thus Thomas Nelson Page says that at the end of the War, among the able-bodied Negroes there was “scarcely an adult who was not a trained laborer or a skilled artisan. In the cotton section they knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops. They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The entire industrial work of the South was performed by them.... Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South.” And Mrs. Avary, in her “Dixie After the War,” thinks that “the typical Southern plantation was, in effect, a great social settlement for the uplift of Africans.” These arguments are perhaps not intended to suggest that the present free laboring population would be better off if reduced to slavery; but they fix upon the present generation the unhappy task of justifying all the mistakes of previous generations.

The natural and wholly justifiable pride in the military spirit of the South during the Civil War extends over to the constitutional, or rather psychical, question of Secession. No issue in the world is deader than the question whether states have a right to secede, for the simple reason that the experience of forty years ago shows that in case any state or group of states hereafter may wish to secede, the other states will infallibly combine to resist by military force: no state or section can ever again assert that it has reason to suppose that secession is a peaceful and constitutional remedy, which should be accepted quietly by the sister states. To justify the doctrine of secession now would mean to pull out the bracing of the Union, no part of which is more determined to be a portion of one great and powerful American nation than the Southern States. It can hardly be expected that the North, after sacrificing five hundred thousand lives and four billions of treasure, will, half a century later, come round to the point of view of the defeated section.

It is equally idle at this period of the world’s history to deny to the Southern leaders in the Civil War sincerity and courage, or to withhold from the nation the credit of such lofty characters as Lee and Stonewall Jackson; but if they are to become world heroes alongside of Cromwell and Iredell, consistency demands that the corresponding Northern leaders shall likewise be accepted as sincere and courageous, and in addition as standing for those permanent national principles to which the children of their adversaries have now given allegiance. It is discouraging to discover such a book as Charles L. C. Minor’s “The Real Lincoln; from the Testimony of his Contemporaries,” which has gone to a second edition and the purpose of which is, by quoting the harsh and cruel things said of Lincoln in the North during his lifetime, to show that he was weak, bad, and demoralized. Far more modern the testimony of Grady in his New York speech of 1886, when he referred to him “who stands as the first typical American, the first who comprehended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of this republic—Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of Puritan and Cavalier; for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than Puritan, greater than Cavalier, in that he was American.”

If the South looks on the Civil War through some favorable haze, it is chiefly in the direction of magnifying genuinely great men, and few of the Confederate soldiers retain any bitterness toward the other side. This is not the case with Reconstruction—toward which, for a variety of reasons, the South feels the bitterest resentment. Only a few months ago a flowery speaker in Baltimore, addressing an audience composed chiefly of Northern people, declared that “all the ignominy, shame, bloodshed, moral debasement that followed the crowning infamy of the Fifteenth Amendment must be laid at the door of the North alone.... The whole movement was thoroughly revolutionary—anarchy, chaos, ruin was the inevitable result.” Thomas Dixon, Jr., rings all the changes and more on this theme. He makes Thaddeus Stevens, in the intervals that he can spare from his negro paramour, set out to confiscate the property of all the Southern Whites; and he supposes that the North sends down as its agents in the South “Army cooks, teamsters, fakirs, and broken-down preachers who had turned insurance agents.” He charges that by the North the attempt was “deliberately made to blot out Anglo-Saxon society and substitute African barbarism.”

The years from 1865 to 1871 were indeed sorrowful for the Southern States, and have planted seeds of hostility between North and South and also between the races in the South; but declamation and exaggeration add nothing to the real hardships of the process. Many Southerners still believe that their section was impoverished only by emancipation, which they say swept away two thousand million dollars’ worth of property; they overlook that the South was politically and economically ruined by the losses of four years of a war which, besides the actual destruction in the track of armies, by its terrible drain took all the accumulated capital of the section. After the war the South still retained the land and the Negroes to work it. The community as a whole lost nothing except from the dislocation of industry. Inasmuch as the South has recovered its productive capacity, and there is not a man of any standing in the South who, from the point of view of the white man’s interest, would go back to slavery if he could, it is time that the charges of spoliation by emancipation were withdrawn.

Both the duration and the intensity of the Reconstruction process have been overestimated. It was a period of general disorganization; the time of the Credit Mobilier scandals; the exact decade when the people of New York City were paying eighty million dollars for the privilege of being plundered by Boss Tweed. The Southern state governments had previously been economically administered, and the people keenly felt the degradation of corruption from which Northern States were also suffering; but the actual period of Reconstruction was much shorter than has usually been supposed. After the first attempts to reorganize the governments in 1865, they went back into the hands of the military, and the consensus of testimony is that the military government if harsh was honest. There they remained in all cases until 1868 and in Georgia until 1871. Within little more than a year after 1868 the Conservatives of Virginia regained control; in Alabama Reconstruction lasted only twenty-eight months; in the tidal wave of 1874 the carpetbag and scalawag power was broken in all the Southern States except South Carolina and Louisiana.

One year or five years of bad government was too much, but Southern lawlessness was not the monopoly of the Reconstruction governments. One of the greatest evils of the period was the Ku Klux Klan which Reed says “becomes dearer in memory every year.” There was reason for recovering white supremacy in the South, even though the conditions of the Reconstruction government have been somewhat exaggerated; but the Ku Klux aroused a spirit of disorder, a defiance of the vested rights of white men as well as of Negroes, which has been a malign influence for forty years. The night-riders in Kentucky are almost a conscious imitation of the Ku Klux, and only a few months ago it was suggested that it be reorganized in Georgia to deal with negro crime. It is one thing to read of the gallant struggle of the Ku Klux to protect womanhood and to asert the nobility of the white race; it is quite another to be told, incidentally, that in a certain county of Mississippi the Ku Klux “put a hundred and nineteen niggers into the river.” That is what some people call a massacre.

The attitude of some Southerners toward the Civil War and Reconstruction suggests the story of the Georgia captain who, after three years of honest fighting, reappeared on his farm and was welcomed home by his faithful Penelope. “The war is over,” said he; “I have come home to stay forever.” “Is that true, Jim? Have you licked the Yankees at last?” “Yes, I have licked them at last, but if they don’t stay licked, I don’t know but I may have to go up North and lick ’em again.”

Is the North to be “licked again” indefinitely? The suffering, the sacrifice, and the heroism of the Civil War were as great on its side of Mason and Dixon’s line as on the other side; and the historical perspective of that period of conflict covers some incidents which the North forgets with difficulty. For instance, the prison of Andersonville was hateful to the whole North. After forty years it is easier than at the time to understand the difficulties of an impoverished government guarding thousands of prisoners with a scanty force in a region lacking in food. Nevertheless, it is a deep conviction of the survivors among the prisoners and in the minds of many thousand other persons that these inherent difficulties were aggravated by the incompetency and heartlessness of Captain Wirz, who by accepting command assumed the responsibility for the condition of things. By the best showing of his friends he was an incompetent man, who had the power of life and death over thousands of his fellow-men, and let many of them die for want of humanity and common sense. The only reason for remembering Wirz is that he was obnoxious to the Northern soldiers in a time of great excitement. Yet the South of Lee and Jackson and Sidney Johnston has erected a monument to that man who performed no service to the Confederacy except to be executed, who led in no heroic action, represents no chivalry, and who did not so much as capture a color or an army wagon. It is an example of what in other parts of the world is thought an emotional disinclination to look facts in the face.

As to the period since Reconstruction—that is, the last thirty years—the acute sensibility of the South no longer takes the form of accusing the North of an attempt to submerge the white race, but rather is turned toward enlarged news of Southern wealth and prestige, which will be examined later in this book. It has been the service of Southern writers, teachers, and public men to look facts more squarely in the face. Still, one finds now and then an old man of the old Benton spirit. About two years ago a Mississippi newspaper greeted a visitor who had previously expressed some opinions on the South, as “an object of distaste to all decent people of Mississippi.... This blue-abdomened miscreant ... would have the world believe that the South has burnings, lynchings, and such horrors, with special trains, and the children of the public schools to witness. Are the people of Jackson going to hear this traducer of them; this man who prints broadcast over the country baseless slanders against the people who misguidedly invited him down here? Are they going to hear a man filled with venom who will take their good name.” And a high-toned Southern gentleman, up to that time a personal friend of the Northerner, thought it necessary to print a card in a newspaper, setting forth the fact that he at least had no responsibility for the presence of the Yankee.

CHAPTER VIII

Even the names habitually used by the Whites for their neighbors show contempt. “Nigger,” though often used among the blacks, is felt by them to be depreciatory; “Darky” is jocular; “Negro” is condescending; “Blacks” as a generic term is incorrect in view of the light color of a large fraction of the race. Afro-American, the invention of the Negroes, is pedantic. The Negroes themselves much prefer “Colored person,” which is also a term used in directories.

Every Southern man and woman consciously or unconsciously makes generalizations as to the whole race from those comparatively few individuals with whom he is acquainted. Hence conventional and offhand statements, obviously based upon little direct knowledge of the Negro, abound in private conversation, in public addresses and in print. For example, a few months ago the mayor of Houston, himself the son of a Massachusetts man, who went down to Texas before the Civil War, was led by an accidental question to deliver an extempore indictment of the whole negro race under twelve heads then and there noted down as follows:

(1) The old Negroes in slavery times were a good lot, but Negroes nowadays are worthless.

(2) The Negro is the best laborer that the South ever had.

(3) Education destroys the value of the Negro, by making him unwilling to work.

(4) The South makes great sacrifices to educate the Negroes.

(5) The Negroes on the farms often do well; but those are the old slaves.

(6) The young Negroes will not work on the land but drift off, probably to the cities.

(7) The pure Negro is much superior in character to the Mulattoes, who are the most vicious part of the race.

(8) The mulatto is physically weak and he is rapidly dying out.

(9) Five sixths of all the Negroes in this city have some white blood.

(10) The educated Negroes fill the prisons.

(11) Booker T. Washington has good ideas.

(12) Negroes must be “kept in their place,” otherwise there will be general rapine and destruction.

Some curious errors of perspective are discernible in this picture: the Negro is at the same time the best laborer and the worst laborer; the South continues to make great sacrifices to educate blacks who will not work and who fill the prisons; the mulatto is at the same time dying out and furnishing five sixths of the colored population of a large city. Such generalizations are the daily food of the South. Judge Norwood, of Georgia, on retiring from the bench of the city court of Savannah, where he had tried twelve thousand colored people, recently left on record his formal opinion that the Negro never works except from necessity or compulsion, has no initiative, is brutal to his family, recognizes no government except force, knows neither ambition, honor nor shame, possesses no morals; and the judge protests against “the insanity of putting millions of semi-savages under white men’s laws for their government.” The mayor of Winona, Miss., publicly announces that “The negro is a lazy, lying, lustful animal, which no conceivable amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate has said: “So the poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails.” Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in his farewell message to the Legislature, in January, 1908, called the Negroes, who are in a majority in his state: “A race inherently unmoral, ignorant and superstitious, with a congenital tendency to crime, incapable unalterably of understanding the meaning of free government, devoid of those qualities of mind and body necessary to self-control, and being unable to control themselves.”

One of the sources of confusion with regard to the Negro is that people speak of “the African Race” which they suppose to be pictured on the Egyptian monuments, to be briefly mentioned by Herodotus, and to be in the same condition now in Africa as it was when first described. As a matter of fact, there are several native races, varying in color from the intensely black and uncouth Guinea Negro of the West Coast to the olive-brown Arabs of the Sahara desert, and in civilization from the primitive dwarf tribes of Central Africa to the organized kingdoms of the Zulus and the thriving states of the Central lake region. Many arguments as to the negro character are based upon the supposed profound barbarism and cannibalism of all Africa. The truth is that the African tribes, with all their ferocity and immorality, had advanced farther in the path of civilization previous to their first contact with the Europeans than the North American Indians of the Atlantic and Mississippi regions; they had gone farther in the arts, had built up more numerous communities, and established a more complex society. The curse of Africa, from which the Indians were not free, was slavery and slave-hunting, which from time immemorial have led to ferocious wars and reckless destruction of life. On the side of religion, the African has built up a weird and emotional system, honeycombed with witchcraft and a belief in magic, stained with bloodshed and human sacrifice. Yet all explorers and residents in Africa find many attractive traits in the Negro; he loves a joke, makes a tolerable soldier, often shows faithful affection for his leaders, and under the supervision of white officials, seems capable of a peaceful and happy life.

That the character of the Negro should need to be a matter of absorbing interest to the Southern Whites and a study to Northern observers, is the fault of the Sixteenth Century European. The Negroes have for ages been in contact with white races on their northern and eastern borders; Ethiopian captives were brought to Rome, and the black slave is a favorite character in the “Arabian Nights.” But that this race, situated on the other side of the globe, should affect the commerce and obstruct the political development of America, is one of the oddities of history. The Negroes, who have never made a conquest outside their own continent, who were first brought to Europe on the same footing as ostrich feathers and elephants, as objects of trade and as curiosities, have, through the greed and cruelty of our ancestors, planted a colony of ten million people in our land; and other groups, mounting up to several millions, in the West Indies and Brazil.

Many attempts are made to determine the ability of the Negro by what he has done in Africa and in Latin America. He has not lifted himself out of barbarism in his own continent, though he has founded large and prosperous states carried on solely by Africans; and Winston Spencer Churchill, from his recent visit to the heart of Africa, sees reason to predict that he will form permanent communities. The curses of Africa for centuries have been inhuman superstitions and devastating slave raids, dignified by the name of wars, for which the white and Arab slave dealers are partly responsible. Torture of captives, sack of towns, murder of infants, coffles of slaves marching to a market, are not so far away from the practice of European nations two or three centuries ago that we can brand them as evidence of irreclaimable barbarism. Pappenheim at Magdeburg and Lannes at the takings of Saragossa could match many of the worst crimes of the African impi on a raid, or of a white agent of the Congo Free State collecting his rubber tax. Protestant Germany and England left off the cruelest treatment of supposed witches only about two centuries ago. Cannibalism and the slave trade seem now on their last legs in Africa, and those white men who have lived longest in the heart of Africa seem to have the largest hope that the Dark Continent may be enlightened and a confidence in an African capacity for an existence much above the savage traditions.

These hopes are based in most cases on the expectation that white people will furnish the government and direct the industries. Whatever Africa may do for itself, the one notable effort to create an African state on an Anglo-Saxon model has been a failure. The Republic of Liberia was founded nearly a century ago, as a means of regenerating Africa by Christian civilization diffused from this spot on the coast into the interior; it was to be an outport for tropical products and to furnish Africa an example of democratic state building. Liberia is the African state in which the United States is especially interested, for it was planted by American missionaries and agents of the Colonization Society; and has been an offshoot and almost a colony of this country. From the first it has been cursed by malaria, by the inroads and pressure of savages, and by a situation off the world’s highways of commerce. To be sure its 15,000 civilized people have a public revenue of about $300,000, with a total import and export trade of about $1,000,000; but all efforts to induce a considerable number of Negroes from America to try their fortunes in Liberia have been failures. A colored magazine in Boston has had the humor and good-temper lately to reprint the following squib upon the opportunities in that country for the American Negro:

Liberia’s bridges, mills, and dams,
Need many thousand Afro-Ams.

Liberia’s ewes, Liberia’s lambs,
Like black sheep, baa for Afro-Ams.

Liberia’s road, Liberia’s trams,
For steady jobs want Afro-Ams.

The barber shops, like Uncle Sam’s,
Give hope to myriad Afro-Ams.

There’s bacon, hominy, yes, hams,
For all industrious Afro-Ams.

With faintest praise Liberia damns
The slow-arriving Afro-Ams.

Unless their woes at home are shams,
Why don’t they go, the Afro-Ams?

The inquiry of the final stanza is to the point, for though the American Colonization Society is still in existence, and within a few years has tried to send out a shipload of Negroes, Liberia attracts almost nobody and is a failure, either as a tropical home for the American Negro or as a center of Christianity and civilization for Africa.

How is it with the colonies and independent states of Americanized Africans in the West Indies, where there have been blacks for as much as four centuries? Of these communities Cuba, Porto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Windward and Leeward Islands were, or have been until recently, European colonies. Cuba’s population is about half Negro; and they come nearer social and political equality with the Whites than anywhere else in the world; but there the dominant element is the pure Spanish or Spanish mestizo. In Jamaica since the emancipation of 1833 the races have had but one conflict, that of 1866, which was at the time thought to be due to the cruelty and panic of Governor Eyre. The blacks of Jamaica, to a large extent small proprietors, support themselves in the easy fashion of the tropics; but the 15,000 Whites who live among the 750,000 blacks seem less able than the like class in the Southern states to organize negro labor and make it profitable. The Negroes are taught to read and write, they have furnished thousands of acceptable laborers for the Panama Canal, and their death-rate is nearly down to the normal figures of the white people for their latitude. Their illiteracy, however, is about that of their brethren in the United States and nearly two thirds of all the children are illegitimate. Their government is practically still, as for two centuries and a half, out of their hands and in control of the English.

The Negroes in Hayti are popularly supposed to have deteriorated intellectually and morally. To be sure the alternating series of despotism and anarchy in that unhappy country are not very different from the course of things in the white community of Venezuela; and it would be a great mistake to suppose that the Haytian Negroes when they became independent a century ago had absorbed the civilization of their Spanish and French masters; most of them were still a fierce and intractable folk recently brought from Africa. Their experience, however, and that of their neighbors in Santo Domingo, throws light upon the capacity of the African to build up a state, for both these lands are wholly governed by people of the African race. Neither has gained stability or improved in education or morals in half a century, though the Haytians are trying to set forth one of the arts of civilization by borrowing more money than they are willing to pay. The moral, or rather unmoral, conditions of this and other West Indian islands are a fair basis for argument as to the average character of the race.

The experience of the race in the Northern states leads rather to negative than to positive conclusions as to their intellectual and moral power. Time was when there were slaves on Beacon Hill; when Venus, “servant to Madam Wadsworth,” was admitted to the First Church of Cambridge; and the Faculty of Harvard College warned the students not to consort with Titus, “servant of the late President Wadsworth.” The colonial Negroes, who in no Northern colony were more numerous than six or seven per cent of the population, have left an offspring to which, since the Civil War, has been added a considerable immigration from the South. In 1900, 356,000 Africans born in the South were living in the North, and that proportion has since steadily increased. Nobody can pretend that this movement has improved the conditions of the Northern states, and the Negroes themselves encounter many hardships; they can vote, they get some small offices, and would get more if they could settle factional quarrels and unite behind single candidates; they have full and equal rights before the courts; they are commonly admitted to the public schools. On the other hand, separate negro schools have been provided in Indianapolis, in some places in New Jersey, and are likely to spread farther. Partly because many trades unions will not receive them, partly because they are thought to be less effective than Whites, partly from sheer race prejudice, they find many avenues of employment closed to them. Few people like them as neighbors, and though admitted to most Northern high schools and colleges they do not find that free intercourse of mind with mind which is not only one of the joys of living, but is a great upbuilder of character.

The situation of the Negroes in the North is frankly discouraging, both from their own point of view and that of the Northern White. Here if anywhere the race ought to show those qualities of determination and thrift and uprightness which its friends desire for it. Many of the Northern Negroes live on the same plane as the white people; many others do well, considering their lesser opportunities; and as a whole they earn their living; for where the men are lazy the women take care of them. But they are the objects of a steady prejudice; the reason for the school separation is that parents do not wish their children to be on such terms of acquaintance that they can learn all that the negro children know. Throughout the North there is a distrust of the negro voter, a belief that the Negroes furnish more than their share of the criminals.

To a large degree this is simply saying that the lowest part of the population is thought to be low; people dislike Negroes for the same reason that they object to many other persons, whether foreign or American born; the woeful difference is that any incompetent white individual may pull himself or push his children out of the slums and into association with the best, while color sets the Negro apart, no matter what his success in life; and the most respectable of them is treated as though responsible for the worst of his race. The door of opportunity is open in the North, but it does not open wide; the Northern colored man enters into what our ancestors called the half-way covenant; he, like his Southern brother, walks within the veil. Or is the bottom difficulty described by the immigrant from South Carolina to the North who said, “Yes, dere mought be more chances in New York than dere is in Charleston, but, please Gawd, ’pears like you ain’t so likely to take dem chances.”

The fundamental reason why race relations in the South are regulated by the white people, and are circumscribed by what they think best for themselves, is the universal white belief that the African is of an inferior race, so inferior that he cannot be trusted to take a part in the political life of the community, or even to manage his own affairs. That opinion is temperately stated by Thomas Nelson Page as follows: “After long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.” It is brutally stated by Governor Vardaman: “God Almighty created the Negro for a menial—he is essentially a servant.... When left to himself, he has universally gone back to the barbarism of his native jungles. While a few mixed breeds and freaks of the race may possess qualities which justify them to aspire above that station, the fact remains that the race is fit for that and nothing more.”

The supposed inferiority of the negro race is not a foregone conclusion. First it rests on the tacit assumption that there is a “negro race” which can be distinguished from the white race, not only by color but also by aptitudes, moral standards and habits of mind. Some experts in the South, who have studied the race as scientific men study the Indians of the Amazon, declare that they are unable to find any large body of traits which all Negroes possess; that they observe in no colored person characteristics which cannot be found in some Whites; and that they possess every variety of intellectual power and moral capacity. Then there is the question of the mulatto, who in his race mixture may be more white man than Negro. Is he to be included in the general indictment of inferiority? And, finally, what is to be argued from the men of power whom the negro race has displayed—a few in slavery days, and many in these later times?

The most extravagant statement of negro inferiority is that the worst white man is better than the best Negro because of the supernal quality of the white race. A Southern writer talks of “The endless creations of art and science and religion and law and literature and every other form of activity, the full-voiced choir of all the Muses, the majestic morality, the hundred-handed philosophy, the manifold wisdom of civilization—all of this infinite cloud of witnesses gather swarming upon us from the whole firmament of the past and proclaim with pentacostal tongue the glory and supremacy of Caucasian man.” Judged by their achievements from the dawn of history to the present moment, the white race has indubitably achieved immensely more than the black race, but it has also achieved more than its own ancestors whom Taine thus characterizes: “Huge white bodies, ... with fierce, blue eyes, ... ravenous stomachs, ... of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to brutal drunkenness: ... Pirates at first: ... seafaring, war, and pillage was their whole idea of a freeman’s work.... Of all barbarians ... the most cruelly ferocious.”

After all, a race cannot be proved inferior by what it has not done; the United States as a war-making power has so far been inferior to the Germans and the Japanese, but its strength has not been tested. The real question is, does the Negro now, in the things that he is actually doing, show as much power as low and ignorant white people who have had no more than his opportunity? The Reconstruction governments, which are the stock in trade of those who decry the Negro, are little to the point, because they were to a considerable degree engineered by Whites, and because they lasted only from one to eight years. On the other hand, the great powers of a few select members of the race, and the excellent mentality and character of many others, are not proof that its average stamina is up to that of the white man; they must be tested by what they do.

The African in America has had little opportunity to work out a civilization of his own, and it certainly cannot be charged against him as a fault that he has accepted the white civilization which was at first forced upon him. As one of their own number says: “The Negro has advanced in exactly the same fashion as the white race has advanced, by taking advantage of all that has gone before. Other men have labored and we have entered into their labors.” Yet, having accepted a heritage of literature, law and religion, from his white brother, the Negro cannot escape from the standard of the white man among whom he lives who have had like opportunities; and if he does not measure up to it it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the race is inferior. Either the Negro is a white man with a black skin, who after a reasonable term of probation must now take the responsibilities of equal character (though not as yet of equal performance), or else it must be admitted that, though a man, he is a somewhat different kind of man from the White.

A favorite Southern phrase is: “The Negro is a child,” and many considerable people accord him a child’s privileges. The ignorant black certainly has a child’s fondness for fun, freedom from care for the morrow, and incapacity to keep money in his pocket; but some planters will talk to you all day about the shrewdness with which he manages to get money out of the unsuspecting white man; and when it comes to serious crime, it is not every judge who makes allowance for childishness in the race. The theory that the negro mind ceases to develop after adolescence perhaps has something in it; but there are too many hard-headed and far-sighted persons, both full bloods and mulattoes, who have unusual minds, to permit the problem to be settled by the phrase, “The Negro is a child.”

Genuine friends and well-wishers of the Negro feel intensely the irresponsibility of the race. A business man who all his life has been associated with them says: “He has all the good qualities of the lazy, thriftless person, he is amiable, generous and tractable. He has no activity in wrongdoing. He has the imitative gift in a remarkable degree, and always I love him for his faults, he is without craftiness, without greed. You will find no Rockefellers nor Carnegies among them. He is not a scoundrel from calculation.... He takes as his pattern the highest type of white man he is acquainted with. He has no sort of regard for what he thinks the poor white trash.... I don’t know how best to help him, but I like him, like him and his careless devil-may-care ways. I like him because his whole soul is not absorbed in this craze for getting money. I like him because he does no evil by premeditation, because he sees no evil in everything he does, then goes and does it. I like him because some day in the distant past I was like him.”

The main issue must be fairly faced by the friends as well as the enemies of the colored race. Measuring it by the white people of the South, or by the correspondingly low populations of Southern or Northern cities, the Negroes as a people appear to be considerably below the Whites in mental and moral status. There are a million or two exceptions, but they do not break the force of the eight or nine millions of average Negroes. A larger proportion of the mulattoes than of the pure bloods come up to the white race in ability; but if fifty thousand people in the negro quarter of New Orleans or on the central Alabama plantations be set apart and compared with a similar number of the least promising Whites in the same city or counties, fewer remarkable individuals and less average capacity would be found. Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.

CHAPTER IX

The negro problem in the South cannot be solved, nor is much light thrown upon it by the conditions of the race elsewhere. The immediate and pressing issue is the widespread belief that the great numbers of them in the South are an unsatisfactory element of the population. The total Negroes in the United States in 1900, the last available figures, was 8,834,000. They are, however, very unequally distributed throughout the Union; in twenty Northern states and territories there are only 50,000 altogether; in the states from Pennsylvania northward there are about 400,000; from Ohio westward about 500,000; while in the one state of Georgia there are over a million; 7,898,000 lived in the fifteen former slaveholding states; 7,187,000 in the eleven seceding states; and 5,055,000 in the seven states of the Lower South. At the rate of increase shown during the last forty years there will soon be 10,000,000 in the South alone. These figures have since 1900 been somewhat disturbed by the natural growth of population and by the interstate movement, so that the proportion of blacks in the North is doubtless now a little larger; but the fact remains that the habitat of the black is in the Southern States. Even there, great variations occur from state to state, and from place to place. In Briscoe County, Texas, there are 1,253 Whites and not a single Negro; in Beaufort County, S. C., there are 3,349 Whites and 32,137 Africans; on the island of St. Helena in this last county are 8,700 colored and 125 white people; and on Fenwick’s Island there are something like 100 Negroes and not a white person.

As between country and city, the Negro is a rural man; the only Southern cities containing over 50,000 of them in the Lower South are New Orleans and perhaps Atlanta; in the former slaveholding states out of 8,000,000 Negroes only about 1,000,000 lived in cities of 8,000 people and upwards, which is less in proportion than the Whites. In a very black district like the Delta of the Mississippi they form a majority of the city population. In 72 of the Southern places having a population of 2,500 or more at least half the population is African; but their drift cityward is less marked than that of the white people, eighty-five per cent of all the Negroes live outside of cities and towns. The Negroes have no race tradition of city life in Africa, are no fonder than Whites of moving from country to city, and throw no unendurable strain on the city governments.

A favorite assertion is that the American Negroes are either dying out or nearing the point where the death-rate will exceed the birth-rate. Hoffmann, in his “Race Traits,” has examined this question in a painstaking way, and proves conclusively that both North and South the death-rate of the black race is much higher than that of the Whites. In Philadelphia, for instance, the ratios are 30 to 1,000 against 20 to 1,000. Upon this point there are no trustworthy figures for the whole country; but an eighth of the Negroes live in the so-called “registration area,” which includes most of the large cities; and in that area the death-rate in 1900 is computed at 30 to 1,000 for Negroes and 17 to 1,000 for the Whites. This excess is largely due to the frightful mortality among negro children, which is almost double that among Whites in the same community. In Washington in 1900 one fifth of the white children under a year old died and almost one half of the colored children.

When Hoffmann attempts to show that the negro death-rate is accelerating, he is obliged to depend upon scanty figures from a few Southern cities. In Charleston, for instance, the records show in the forties (a period of yellow fever) a white death-rate of 16 and a colored death-rate of 20, against recent rates of 22 and 44 to the 1,000 respectively; but in New Orleans Mr. Hoffmann’s own figures show a reduction of the colored death-rate from 52 in the fifties to 40 in the nineties. The only possible conclusion from these conflicting results is that the earlier mortality statistics on which he relies are few and unreliable.

Nevertheless, the present conditions of negro mortality are frightful. They appear to be due primarily to ignorance and neglect in the care of children, and secondly, to an increase of dangerous diseases. The frequent statement that consumption was almost unknown among Negroes in slavery times is abundantly disproved by Hoffmann; but the disease is undoubtedly gaining, for much the same reason that it ravages the Indians in Alaska, namely, that the people now live in close houses which become saturated with the virus of the disease. Syphilis is also fearfully prevalent, and the most alarming statements are made by physicians who have practice or hospital service among the Negroes; but the testimony as to the extent of the disease is conflicting, and there are other race elements in the United States which are depleted by venereal disease. The blacks also suffer from the use of liquor, though drunkards are little known among the cotton hands; but drugs, particularly cocaine and morphine, are widely used. In one country store a clerk has been known to make up a hundred and fifty packages of cocaine in a single night.

Notwithstanding the undoubtedly high death-rate, the birth-rate is so much greater that at every census the negro race is shown to be still growing; as Murphy says: “Whenever the Negro has looked down the lane of annihilation he has always had the good sense to go around the other way.” The census of 1870 was so defective that it must be thrown out of account, but the negro population, which was about 4,400,000 in 1860, and 6,600,000 in 1880, had grown to 8,800,000 in 1900. It is true that the rate of increase is falling off both absolutely and in proportion to the white race. In the South Central group of states, which includes most of the Lower South, the population increased about forty-eight per cent from 1860 to 1880 and only thirty-nine per cent in the next double decade; while the white population has in both periods increased at about sixty per cent, with a rising ratio.

The urban Negro has a high death-rate, not only in the South but in Northern cities; in Boston and Indianapolis the birth-rate of the Negroes does not keep pace with the deaths, and they would disappear but for steady accessions from the South. The Southern blacks on the land are doing better and are growing steadily; neither statistics nor observations support the theory that the Negro is dying out in the South; and comparatively slight changes in resort to skilled physicians, in the spread of trained nurses, in infants’ food, may check the child mortality. On the other hand, any increase in thrift and in saving habits will almost certainly affect the size of families and diminish the average birth-rate.

The very words “The Negro” suggest the misleading idea that there is within the Southern states a clearly defined negro race. In fact, physically, intellectually, and morally, it is as much subdivided as the white race. What is supposed to be the pure African type is the Guinea Negro, very black, very uncouth, and hard to civilize. What these people are is easy to find out, for a great part of the inhabitants of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia are of that race and speak what is called the Gullah dialect, which Joel Chandler Harris has preserved in his “Daddy Jack.” Besides these children and grandchildren of imported Negroes there is near Mobile a small group of sturdy people perfectly well known to have been brought into the United States in 1858 in the yacht Wanderer. These may be part of a cargo from which Senator Tillman’s family bought a gang, and he says of them: “These poor wretches, half starved as they have been, were the most miserable lot of human beings—the nearest to the missing link with the monkey I have ever put my eyes on.”

The whole African problem is immeasurably complicated and contorted by the fact that of the Negroes in the United States not more than four fifths at the highest are pure blacks. The remainder are partially Caucasian in race, and occupy a midway position, often of unhappiness and sometimes of downright misery. As to the number of mulattoes, there is no trustworthy statistical statement; the census figures for 1890 reported that out of the total “negro” population eighteen per cent was mulatto in the northern group of Southern states, and about fifteen per cent in the Lower South; but these figures are confessedly defective and are probably vitiated by including some members of the lighter negro races as mulattoes.

Shannon, in his “Racial Integrity,” while unhesitatingly accepting these very imperfect figures, attempts to supplement them by calculations made from an inspection of crowds; and it is his opinion that in the smaller cities, the towns and villages, about twenty-two per cent are mulattoes—“and that unless this amalgamation is effectually checked in some way, this ratio will continue to rise until practically the whole of the negro race will come to be of mixed blood.” Shufeldt, in his “The Negro, A Menace,” asserts that at least sixty per cent of the Negroes have some white blood, and is confident that the proportion is increasing. The census authorities of 1900 commit themselves only to the generalization that the mulattoes are most numerous in proportion to the number of Whites in any given community. As to the testimony of observers, there is every variety of appearance. You may see crowds of Negroes at a railway station in Georgia, of whom two thirds are purely mulatto; you may visit islands in South Carolina in which not one fortieth part have white blood.

The number of mulattoes is less important than their character and general relation to the negro problem. Most Southerners assert and doubtless believe that the mulatto is physically weak; but you see them working side by side with pure blacks, as roustabouts and plantation hands, and some planters tell you that one is as good as another in the field. People assert that mulattoes are more susceptible to disease, so that they are dying out; and some authorities say that there are no mulatto children after the third or fourth generation. There is no scientific ground for these assertions, and one of the highest medical authorities in the South is of the conviction that except for a somewhat greater liability to tuberculosis they are as healthy as the full bloods. Of course, the greater number of mulattoes in the United States are the children of mulattoes, and to what extent the proportion is kept up by further accessions from the white race is absolutely impossible to determine. Many statements on the whole subject come from people who hate the mulatto and like to think that he is a poor creature who is going to relieve the world of a disagreeable problem by leaving it.

From the same source comes the assertion that the mulatto is fundamentally vicious, frequently made by people who argue in the same breath that the so-called progress of the negro race means nothing, because it is all due to mulattoes. The mulattoes do include a much larger proportion of the educated than the pure bloods, and hence are more likely to furnish such criminals as forgers and embezzlers; but there seems no ground for the widespread belief that the mulattoes are more criminal than the pure blacks. That there is a special temptation more likely to come to some members of the mulatto section than to the pure black was suggested by a Southern gentleman when he said: “The black girls won’t work and the yellow girls don’t have to, they are looked after!” When asked to suggest who it was who looked after them, the conversation languished. The question of the character of the mulatto is a serious one, because most of the spokesmen and markedly successful people of the race are not pure bloods; and because of the unhappy position of thousands of men and women who have the aptitudes, the tastes, and the educations of white people; yet in the common estimation are bracketed with the rudest, most ignorant and lowest of a crude, ignorant and low race.

The status of the Negroes is in many ways altered by the steady though limited movement from South to North. The Negroes are subject to waves of excitement, and in 1879 a colored agitator created a furore for colonization by spreading abroad the news that in Liberia there was a “bread tree” and another tree which ran lard instead of sap, so that all you had to do was to cut from one and catch from the other. A systematic effort has been made to settle colored people in Indiana, in order to hold that State in the Republican column; and there are now probably nearly a hundred thousand there, a third of whom are settled in Indianapolis, where they furnish a race problem of growing seriousness. The Negroes in the city of Washington have increased eight times in forty years. They have repeatedly been brought into the North as strike breakers, often with the result of serious riots. In 1879 thousands of them left various parts of the South for Kansas, and in some cases the river boats refused to take them. As a result some Southern states passed statutes requiring heavy license fees (sometimes as much as $1,000 a year) from labor agents who should induce people to go to other states. Nevertheless, there are now over 50,000 in Kansas and over 100,000 in the neighboring new State of Oklahoma. At present there are in New York and Philadelphia nearly a hundred agents who draw Negroes northward, and they bring thousands of people every year, chiefly to enter domestic service. The movement is ill organized and does not by any means include the most thrifty, since passage money is often advanced by the agents.

The numbers of the Negroes are not in themselves alarming. In most Southern states they are fewer in proportion than the foreign element in many Northern states. The hostility to the Negro is not based on his numbers, but on his supposed inferiority of character. On this point there is a painful lack of accurate knowledge, because there is so little contact between the Whites and their negro neighbors. The white opinion of the blacks is founded with little knowledge of the home life of the other race. How many white people in the city of Atlanta, for instance, have actually been inside the house of a prosperous, educated Negro? How many have actually sat over the fire of a one-room negro cabin? The Southern Whites, with few exceptions, teach no Negroes, attend no negro church services, penetrate into no negro society, and they see the Negro near at hand chiefly as unsatisfactory domestic servants, as field hands of doubtful profit, as neglectful and terrified patients, as clients in criminal suits or neighborhood squabbles, as prisoners in the dock, as convicted criminals, as wretched objects for the vengeance of a mob.

An encouraging sign is the disposition of both white and colored investigators to study the Negro in his home. Professor DuBois has directed such researches both in Southern cities and in the open country; there are also two monographs upon the religious life of the Negro, one directed by Vanderbilt University and the other by Atlanta University; and Mr. Odum, of the University of Mississippi, has prepared a study upon the Negro in fifty towns in various states which, still in manuscript, is one of the most instructive inquiries ever made into negro life.

Naturally, such investigations are easier in the cities, and we know much more about the urban Negro, a sixth of the population, than of the rural black, who are five sixths. In the large cities there is an African population, a considerable part of which is prosperous. Here are the best colored schools, the greatest demand for African labor, the largest opportunity for building up small businesses among the Negroes themselves. Here are to be found most of the rich or well-to-do Negroes; and there is a large contingent of steady men employed in all kinds of capacities, about whom there is little complaint. On the other hand, a broad fringe of the population lives in houses or rooms actually less spacious and less decent than the one-room cabin in the fields. This floating and unsteady part of the negro race finds a favorable habitat in the towns and small cities, where there is less opportunity for steady employment than in the large cities. From this class come the domestic servants, who will be considered in a later chapter.

The typical social life of the Negro is that of the field laborer, who lives in a poor and crude way. The most common residence is the one-room house, without a glass window, set in a barren and unfenced waste, with a few wretched outhouses, the worst cabins being on the land of the least progressive and humane planters. You may see on the land of a wealthy White one-room houses with chinks between the logs such that the rain drives into them, the tenant family crowded into the space between the fireplace and the unenticing beds, dirty clothing hanging about, hardly a chair to sit upon, outside the house not a paling or a building of any kind, and pigs rooting on the ground under the floor. On a tolerable Mississippi plantation with seventy-four families, seventeen had one-room cabins, and one of those families comprised eleven persons. Some Southerners have a theory that you can be sure that a cabin with a garden is occupied by a White; but that is a fallacy, for there are many negro gardens, although some planters prohibit them on the ground that they will become weed spots. In the cities the Negroes live for the most part in settlements by themselves, in which there are miserable tenements, usually owned by white people and no better than the one-room country house. Of course, thrifty colored people in country or city are able to build comfortable houses for themselves.

Inasmuch as both father and mother work either in the fields or in domestic service, there is little family life either in country or city. The food is poor and monotonous; it is chiefly salt pork, bacon, corn bread (usually pone), and some sort of molasses. Fresh meat is almost impossible to get outside of town, chickens are raised though not very plentiful, vegetables are few. For little children this diet is intolerable, and that is why so many of them die in infancy. Close observers declare that Negroes are brutal to their children, but one may be much among them without seeing any instances. They are also accused of deserting their old people; children often wander away and lose track of their parents, but you will find districts where the old are well looked after by their kindred. The most serious interference in family life is the field work of the women, and the breaking up of families by the desertion of the father; but somehow in all these family jars the children are seldom left without anyone to care for them.

Public amusements are almost wanting for the Negro. They are commonly not admitted to white theaters, concerts, and other similar performances. In the country there is nothing better than to crowd the plantation store of a Saturday night in a sort of club. Few of them read for pleasure, and there is little to relieve the monotony. Perhaps for that reason they are fond of going about the country, and you see them everywhere on horseback, or in little bull carts, or on foot. They will spend their last dollar for an excursion on the railroad, and at the turn of the year, January 1st, many of them may be seen moving. The circus is one of the greatest delights of the Negro; he will travel many miles for this pleasure. The field hand is thrown back on coarse enjoyments; hard drinking is frequent among both men and women, yet the habitual drunkard is rare; the country Negro is fond of dances, which often turn out unseemly and lead to affrays and murders.

For their social and jovial needs Negroes find some satisfaction in their church life. Their own statisticians claim 3,254,000 communicants worshiping in 27,000 church buildings, of which the greater part are in the country. Contrary to expectation forty years ago, the Negroes have been little attracted to the Catholic Church, which is so democratic in its worship, and possesses a ritual which might be expected to appeal to negro nature. Nearly half the church members are some sort of Baptists, and half of the rest adhere to the Methodist denominations. Some city churches have buildings costing twenty, thirty, and even fifty thousand dollars, and they are pertinacious about raising money for construction and other similar purposes.

These churches do not represent an advanced type of piety. Conversions are violent and lapses frequent, and the minister is not certain to lend the weight of his conduct to his words. There are many genuinely pious and hard-working ministers, but at least half of them in both city and country are distrusted by the Whites and discredited by their own people. Simply educating the minister does not solve the problem, for what the people want is somebody who will arouse them to a pleasurable excitement. That is, the present type of piety among the negro churches is about that which prevailed among the white people along the frontier fifty years ago, and which has not entirely died out in the backwoods and the mountains. A genuine colored service is extremely picturesque, the preacher working like a locomotive going up a heavy grade, while the hearers assist him with cries of, “Talk to um, preacher—Great God—Ha! Ha! You is right, brudder—Preaching now—Talk ’bout um—Holy Lord.” Then the brethren are called upon to pray; in that musical intoning which is so appropriate for the African voice; then the minister lines out the hymns and the congregation bursts out into that combination of different minor keys which is the peculiar gift of the negro race.

Another negro enjoyment is the secret orders, which are almost as numerous as the churches and probably have as many male members. These societies are first of all burial and benefit orders with dues ranging from fifty cents a month upward, for which sick benefits of four dollars a week are paid and about forty dollars for burial. The societies build lodge houses not only in cities but in plantation regions; and the judgment of those who have most carefully examined them is that they are on the whole a good thing. They give training in public speaking and in common action; they furnish employment to managers and clerks; and their considerable funds are for the most part honestly managed. Some of them publish newspapers chiefly devoted to publishing the names of officers and members. In Mississippi there are thirty-four licensed orders with 8,000 members. They carry $30,000,000 of risks, and in a year paid $430,000 to policy holders. Naturally they have rather high-sounding names, such as “Grand Court of Calanthe,” “Lone Star of Race Pride,” “United Brethren of Friendship and Sisters of Mysterious Ten,” “Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise.” Some efforts are making to build up national societies such as the “Royal Trust Company” and “The Ethiopian Progressive Association of America,” which, according to its own statement, is “incorporated with an authorized Capital Stock a hundred times larger than the next most heavily capitalized Negro corporation on Earth. It is designed to fraternize, build and cement the vital interests of Negroes throughout the world into one colossal Union.” The order and the church are both social clubs and include a good part of the race both in city and country, and these organizations are the work of the last forty years, for in slavery times the negro churches were closely watched by the Whites, and secret societies would have been impossible.