In his Lincoln, Mr. Stephenson says:

Just what was really happening in the world of politics in these dying days of the Confederacy may possibly never be known with any degree of exactness. The play of politics, not only in the United States; but around the world was quick and varied but very obscure. Mr. Stephenson, the most interesting and thoughtful observer of Lincoln’s career attaches very slight importance to Blair’s negotiations with the Confederacy; but more to the prior negotiations of Gilmore and Jacquess, even going so far as to assert, on the authority of Nicolay and Hay, that Davis had said in his interview with them:

Nicolay and Hay do assert that Jacquess asserted that Davis so stated; but they also give Davis’s account of the incident which he published in his “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.” In this we find no such assertion by Davis and on the contrary the following:

From this Mr. Davis proceeds to discuss the appointment of commissioners to Canada about the middle of 1864, their failure and the mission of Mr. Blair in December. Gen. E. G. Lee’s name is not among the commissioners, as stated, nor is there any reference to his mission in The Rise and Fall. But his article in The Land We Love[205] appearing in 1867 shows a knowledge and understanding of politics enveloping “Maximilian and His Empire,” viewed from the standpoint of the Confederate States, Louis Napoleon, and Wm. H. Seward, most interesting. This forgotten and youthful Virginian graduate of the oldest college in the United States, in the discussion of a matter in which he does not mention himself, must have had sources of information, which he does not reveal. His admiration for an opponent, Seward, is unrestrained. His contempt for Louis Napoleon is expressed with a refinement that imparts to it a greater force; and altogether as he passes from the stage an unreconstructed “Rebel,” dying even before Virginia shook off the grip of the blacks, he carries with him to the grave some history, which if more fully revealed might have added interest to Blair’s mission. At all events, if General Hill asked—

he yielded space and advanced to the front page of his magazine one best fitted to illustrate—“Audi alteram partem.”

A little later in an editorial praising Generals Hampton and Wright, Hill says:

In the elections of 1868, however, Congressional Reconstruction was overwhelmingly triumphant throughout the South and, with a fringe of whites, a black pall was thrown over the region.

So determined were the ruling political leaders of that day, to enforce their will upon a crushed and impoverished people, that in South Carolina in 1870, to enforce the provisions of legislation for social equality, these alien law makers did not hesitate to abrogate the elementary rule of the criminal law, which provides that the accused shall be deemed innocent until proven guilty, and so shaped the legislation, of the Civil Rights Act, that any one accused of violating its strict and far reaching provisions, on failure to prove his innocence of the charge, became liable to a fine of one thousand dollars and also imprisonment in the State penitentiary for five years at hard labor, which was increased to six years upon failure to pay the fine. Any one aiding or abetting in the infraction of the law was liable to a term of three years in the State penitentiary, with the loss of the right to vote or hold office.[208]

Now, it was while men’s minds in South Carolina were intensely agitated by the immense sweep of this act, that the whites of one of the religious denominations of this State found presented for their consideration, what was deemed by many of the various denominations as the entering wedge for the removal of distinctions between the races in the establishment of religious equality.

With regard to equality between men, it has been declared that there are at least four clearly distinguished connotations attached to the word, and a great variety of shades in each. These four connotations of equality are:

The South Carolina law of 1865 gave to all the Negroes the right to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property, and therefore apparently the law courts were opened to all alike; but whether the Negroes thereby obtained a right to trial by a jury of their peers is a question.

As to those members of the colored race possessing seven-eighths or more of Caucasian blood, as far as law could make them, they were white.

Reconstruction attempted to extend to all of the colored race what had been extended to this portion; and now a portion were applying for religious equality.

The question was whether there was any distinction between religious and social equality?

That depends upon the estimate of each individual as to what “The Church” is.

If it is in truth and fact a divine institution, then the necessity of subjecting it to those regulations which experience has proven most expedient, for the proper adjustment of civil relations, is not very clearly apparent.

If it is not a divine institution, then it is a social organization, no matter how high the plane upon which it is operated, and religious equality brings in its train social equality.

The attempt of British divines, face to face with the color question in South Africa, to readjust the religious views of the fifties, directed at people mainly outside their own doors and to justify the refusal to extend religious equality to the blacks in the Dominions, on the professed ground that there is not complete spiritual equality among men and that the final award for the use cannot be made a basis for the adjustment of earthly relations, moves somewhat limpingly, and, in lucidity, falls far below the utterance of that profound Negro, who has so clearly set forth the rights of his race in America, in the following declaration:

Of the Negro who made this sane well balanced pronouncement it is fitting that a white South Carolinian should have something to say, although he has been absolutely ignored by the most cultivated members of his race.

As we shall later note DuBois, who today comes nearer being recognized as the leading Negro of America than any who can be mentioned, has claimed that:

In 1874 in South Carolina, Judge John T. Green, a Republican, was a candidate for governor against D. H. Chamberlain. Green was a South Carolina Unionist, a lawyer of ability against whom it was impossible to find anything to hang a charge on. Chamberlain was the most brilliant of all the carpet-baggers and after he defeated Green and became governor of South Carolina he did turn to a great extent against the rottening thieves who had raised him to that position. His opposition to black Whipper most dramatically expressed, flashed all over the United States, when that Northern born Negro was a candidate for judicial honors, in the piquant phrase—“The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier is in danger”—made this Union soldier from Massachusetts almost a type of the fighting reformer, and there was need of such, although, as DuBois claims:

But when Chamberlain found, two years later, that in spite of his attack on those of his supporters of whom he was certainly entitled to declare that they were worse than he was, he nevertheless could not be the leader of what was best, he went back to the rotten element where, as the best of whites and blacks claimed in 1874, he always could be found when it suited his purpose; for the great mental gifts of the man made him prefer to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The fight against him was in 1874 led by Comptroller General Dunn, a Republican from Massachusetts. The candidates named by the Independent Republicans were Judge Green, a white South Carolinian, and Martin R. Delany, a Negro from the North, for governor and lieutenant governor. Allusion has been made to Delany before. He was born in Charleston, Virginia, in 1812, the child of a free Negro mother by a slave father. He was the recipient of an education which enabled him to support himself and achieve some distinction. He had resided in Pittsburgh for some time; had been in partnership with Fred Douglass; had founded the first colored total abstinence society; had moved to Canada and from there led a party of black explorers through a part of Africa, for which he had been noticed by the Royal Geographical Society of Britain about the year 1859; and, returning to America, had served in the Northern army with a commission.

By General J. B. Kershaw of South Carolina, who with Wade Hampton and General McGowan all supported the nominees, his absolute honesty was testified to.

Every effort was made by the bulk of the whites to support this attempt of the most honest of the Negroes and Republican whites to put honest men in office, Hampton going so far as to declare in the public prints over his signature:

Most of the notorious Negro leaders supported Chamberlain, R. B. Elliott being made chairman of Chamberlain’s Executive Committee; but a great number under Congressman R. H. Cain, Ransier and others, less notorious than Elliott and Whipper and not as gifted, stood staunchly for honest government. Cain went so far as to state that Green, who lacked very little of selection in the Republican convention which nominated Chamberlain, could have easily obtained the few votes necessary for such, as they had been offered his supporters at a comparatively small price; but that he and his friends had refused to purchase them. He also called to the attention of an audience of some thousands in Charleston that the white judge he had voted for as mayor in 1865 was presiding over a meeting supporting this effort of black Republicans to secure good government. But the most striking fact that the meeting developed was the entrance into politics of the profoundest thinker the Negro race has ever produced, William Hannibal Thomas, author a quarter of a century later of that remarkable book—“The American Negro—What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become.” Thomas had just reached his 31st year. At the close of the War between the States, while the harpies black and white in 1865 were winging their way Southward, a wounded United States soldier, he was lying in a hospital, with his right arm amputated above the elbow, having volunteered at the outset and rising to the rank of sergeant. Upon his discharge, after five months treatment, for three years he was a student of theology, going to Georgia in 1871 to teach. He moved to Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873 and was admitted to the bar in January, 1874. As a delegate from Newberry he supported the movement for reform. During the absence of the committee on credentials, he was invited to address the convention. It was reported:

This utterance seems to have won for him a position upon the committee on platform of five white and six colored members, one of the latter Cain, a congressman; yet Thomas was selected to submit it to the convention. Except in minor particulars it was the same as that which the convention nominating Chamberlain had framed, a not unreasonable platform for a Negro to support in 1874 in South Carolina, although scarcely acceptable in all its planks to the whites. In a total vote cast of 149,221, Judge Green was defeated by a majority against him of 11,585. Yet the strength of the vote cast against him was not without its effect upon the brilliant Chamberlain, who, from that time, shed his former skin and became a reformer.

How far a question which just about this time arose in the Episcopal Church may have affected political conditions is not to be asserted positively; but that it did affect the minds of whites and blacks can hardly be doubted, for, to not a few it was, above all, a religious question. And a religious question, to not a few, calls for sacrifice.

In the year 1875 there was presented in the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of South Carolina the application of a colored congregation for admission into union with the Convention, which application was referred to a committee to be appointed by the bishop to examine into and report upon in the following year.

In the minds of many men in the Southern States the admission of Negro delegates involved consequences which might be far reaching and this was very plainly presented in one of the two reports presented in 1876. This report opposing admission presented the matter in these words in part:

The mover of this report might have gone further. He might have shown the evidences of interests in the record office, upon the part of white men by deed and will from time to time, in the recognition, to some extent, of the claims on paternity. How powerful this appeal could become to some is evidenced most strikingly in a will made as far back as 1814,[216] and the value, therefore, of this presentation at the Convention lay in the fact that it turned attention full upon that phase of this question which Southern white men are most apt to ignore.

The imagination of the average Southern white man does become intensely excited over any intimation of that form of intercourse between the races which is most distasteful and repugnant to the whites, but from which there is the least likelihood of miscegenation to any perceptible degree. The imagination of the Southern white man is not, however, keenly alive to the steady, continuous progress, almost inevitably resulting from the presence side by side in one section of great numbers of the two races. Yet if miscegenation is a danger, it is not less so while proceeding in the way in which it is most insidious and least shocking to the whites.

To the educated moral mulatto this determined opposition by those who sought or were willing to accept joint political action, must have created distrust. When to that, violence grew sufficiently to bring from Jefferson Davis denunciation, it is not surprising that a man of the brilliancy and political astuteness of Chamberlain should have made himself an immense power in South Carolina and drawn to himself a following which it took every effort of the whites to overthrow.

Indeed, without Wade Hampton, it could not have been effected. In a convention of 1876, of 165 members, the leader of the Straightout faction could not gather more than 42 votes.[217] But in August of the same year when Hampton[218] threw the weight of his personality in its favor, by 82 to 65, the policy was adopted. It is an interesting fact that while the colored men W. J. Whipper and R. B. Elliott, Cardozo, Gleaves and H. E. Haynes are all mentioned, the name of W. H. Thomas appears in no history of Reconstruction that the writer has read.

Cardozo, the Treasurer, was warmly championed by Chamberlain, who declared of this colored official:

Chamberlain knew and R. B. Elliott, the brainiest of all his colored opponents, knew that it was useless to try to array Negroes against such a friend of the colored brother as that; and Smalls, Chamberlain’s friend, a good natured, bold mulatto, defeated Swails for the chairmanship, by a vote which indicated what was to be thrown for Chamberlain as the gubernatorial nominee. Elliott therefore made terms and was named for attorney general.

Yet during the exciting days of 1876 when both houses of representatives were meeting, it was W. H. Thomas upon whom the Republicans depended for brain work. He was made a member of the committee on credentials and, as chairman, reported in favor of the seating of the Republican contestants carrying the majority of the committee with him, although opposed by T. E. Miller, an octaroon or quadroon of considerable intelligence, who asked for fifteen minutes to reply to Thomas.

Miller later stated that he had refused to sign the report, because he thought that the Democratic contestees ought to have been heard. When he was beaten, he declared he had changed his mind, stating that it was their own fault, if they were not present, and announcing he was ready to sign the report. It was reported that Thomas had, upon this second utterance, made an inflammatory speech; but no part of it was published by the paper so declaring, which, upon the next day’s report, announced that in the midst of the stormy session, Thomas offered a prayer.[220]

Thomas was on the committee of Ways and Means and the Judiciary, and, until the collapse of the Republicans, seems to have been the individual most relied upon by the Speaker for all the serious work of the session.

Contemporaneously with the overthrow of the Negro governments of South Carolina and Louisiana, the report opposing admission of colored delegates to the Diocesan Convention was sustained.

In 1879 the question came up again in a shape harder to resist and resting upon the example of the diocese of Virginia. The law-making power of South Carolina had, however, meanwhile enacted a statute making it—

Accordingly the lay delegates firmly opposed any union whatever, whether of clerical or lay members, with regard to the two races in the South.

Now if it is borne in mind that not only Calhoun, whose influence upon political thought in South Carolina had for many years been all pervasive; but also the profoundest student who has ever studied America, de Tocqueville, had condemned “all intermediate measures” and declared that unless the whites remained isolated from the colored race in the South, there must come either miscegenation or extirpation, at no time could the forecast of the future of that section have been as gloomy as that which appeared in the Census figures of 1880.

The white population of Louisiana, which even the war and its losses had only dropped a thousand or two below the colored, had increased by an addition of 92,189; but, in the same time, with Reconstruction, the colored had been swelled 119,445, giving a colored majority of something approximating 30,000. In Mississippi, where the ante bellum Negro majority of 84,000 had, by 1870, been reduced to 62,000, it had now risen to 206,090. But in South Carolina, with a smaller area and white population, the Negro majority had risen to 212,000. In the five Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the gain of the white population of only one, Alabama, had been greater than that of the blacks. Under such conditions discussion of that which was upon the minds of all was almost unavoidable, especially as Southern thought, freed from the shackles in which slavery had bound it, was free to move in whatever direction it saw fit and, from the pen of George W. Cable of New Orleans, there appeared “The Grandissimes,” published in 1880 and “Madam Delphine,” in 1881, of which the color question constitutes what might be called the motif.

The literary excellence of these works won the author a place in art and they were followed by other works of merit; but so strongly was the writer finally impressed with that which had first moved him to write, that in 1885 he dropped for a time the garb of fiction and voiced his belief in the necessity of a recognition of what he deemed a great wrong, through a brochure entitled “The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” To Cable, the portion of the race which was represented by the mulattoes and the quadroons made the strongest appeal; but he was not alone in the critical attitude he assumed toward the South. In the work of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a Northern soldier, who had staked his all on Reconstruction, with criticism, was voiced, in “A Fool’s Errand” by “One of the Fools,” something very much like despair. Later brooding, however, drew from this author a more critical and decidedly pretentious study, entitled “An Appeal to Caesar,” a study of the Census of 1880, from which, with some reason, he prophesied a speedy Africanization of the South, and in which he called upon the inhabitants of that section to bring forth fruits meet for repentance while there was still time.

Certainly there was basis for the claim. At no time had the rate of increase of the blacks been so high as the Census disclosed in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1880. Yet the first named set herself resolutely against any relaxation of the rule of rigid separation of the races, and in 1888 brought to a conclusion the discussion concerning the admission of clerical delegates to the Protestant Episcopal Convention, by a resolution reciting the “absolute necessity for the separation of the races in the diocese,”[222] effected upon a basis, putting all subsequent decisions within the control of the lay delegates.[223]

In the years in which it had been maintained in the South Negro supremacy had done more to destroy the belief of the bulk of the Northern public, as to the capacity of the race to assume the full duties of citizenship, than any argument of whites could have achieved. The following extracts from a letter of George W. Curtis at this date is interesting. Referring to conditions in the fifties, he writes:

With freedom of discussion assured, he now, in December, 1888, wrote:

The reply of the individual to whom this letter was addressed may well be omitted, in the light of what follows.

In 1889 two publications appeared from Southern sources most powerfully portraying the advantages of freedom of discussion and the inestimable value of that which Mr. Curtis had described as “the fundamental condition of human progress,”—“the right of the individual to express his opinion on any and every subject.” The first publication was the careful, exact and searching analysis of the condition of the mass of the blacks contained in “The Plantation Negro as a Freedman,” by Philip Alexander Bruce of Virginia. The second, the remarkable editorials of Carlyle McKinley, in The News and Courier, of Charleston, S. C., upon the impending movements of the freedmen in the United States.

With a prescience absolutely astounding, when we consider the only available source of information at that date, the Census of 1880, the same from which Judge Tourgee had drawn the figures upon which he based his gloomy prophecy of the speedy Africanization of the South, Mr. Carlyle McKinley wrote:

Differing in toto with the work of Judge Tourgee, which had unquestionably in some quarters produced a profound impression and one which was not obliterated until the figures of the Census of 1890 were published, in 1889 Carlyle McKinley confidently declared:

About a month later the same paper in an editorial entitled—“The Dispersion of the Colored Population”—admirably outlined the true policy which should guide since the importation of slaves and slavery itself had been abolished:

At the time of the publication of these editorials, the State of South Carolina was represented in the Senate of the United States by Wade Hampton and M. C. Butler. Both were members of families which had been identified with the history of the State of South Carolina from the Revolutionary War. Both belonged to the slave-holding planter class. Both had served with distinction in the Confederate War, rising respectively to the grades of lieutenant general and major general; the former having established a record while in command of the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, second to none, in handling that branch of the service. In addition Hampton had, in his own State, been the leader of the whites in the great political struggle of 1876, in which the Negro government had been overthrown, in which contest, he had been ably seconded by Butler. But the Hampton of 1867 had passed through many experiences since General D. H. Hill had commended his appeal, at that date, to the Southern Negro to consider the South as his home, and Green’s campaign of 1874 had probably convinced him that the bulk of the Negroes preferred the showy flashes of the characterless Elliott and Whipper to the sober honesty of Delany and Thomas. In the year that Gen. D. H. Hill, of South Carolina, died, B. R. Tillman pushed to completion Hill’s educational view with the founding of Clemson; while to Senator Hampton was propounded the query which the editorials had suggested, concerning the diffusion of the Negroes:

“Would any injury result to the South from an extensive exodus?”

The reply from that one in the South best qualified to answer such a question might well stand also as the best reply to the inquiry propounded by George William Curtis to the author of this work, before alluded to.

Hampton’s reply exhibited the broad statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Joseph Alston and Robert Barnwell in 1803, before South Carolina had been deluged with slaves, and the brave sincerity of Robert Y. Hayne, in 1818, 1827 and 1839.

Hampton said:

Senator Butler then took up the matter, and in the early part of 1890 sought to have enacted by congress a bill providing:

For the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this bill an appropriation of $5,000,000 was asked.

The bill excited some interest. It received most naturally the unqualified support of Senator Hampton, and it was also acceptable to Senator Vest of Missouri, and other Southern men of prominence; but it was not only opposed by Northern and Western senators but also by one at least from the South, Senator Vance, of North Carolina, although the argument of the latter was marked by neither strength nor depth of thought. On the other hand the argument with which Senator Butler presented his bill deserves consideration at some length and is apt to receive it in the future. While presented in a different style, it is comparable to the utterance of the great orator and debater of his State, Senator Hayne, upon somewhat the same subject in 1827.

Senator Butler said:

Proceeding with his argument Butler suggested:

It is hardly necessary to state that the bill did not pass. With the exception of his colleague, Senator Hampton, and Senator Vest, of Missouri, it scarcely received any support, and yet these Southern men recognized, more than thirty years ago, what is only now forcing itself upon the consciousness of the North, because the Negroes themselves have at last perceived the necessity of it.

But what do the prosperous think of? At this time little or nothing was known of the two little white republics, the Transvaal and the Orange River Free State, except that they maintained themselves without assistance in the heart of South Africa, surrounded by millions of warlike African savages. To the author of this work it seemed in 1890 worth while for the Northern statesmen and the Northern public to inform themselves of the views and policies of these people, before they legislated for the South on matters pertaining to the Race Problem. These little peoples had had no contact with Southern men. They came from a different nationality. Would it not be well for our Northern brethren to study their methods before legislating for the South? The suggestion was presented to The New York World, then calling for ideas. But that great paper, under Mr. Pulitzer, could not see the value. Later, although conquered, as the South was, the Boers have made their views felt in the world.

Was not an opportunity missed for obtaining helpful information in advance of Bigelow’s White Man’s Africa? Was not his book an indication of an unexplored field? Did it not influence opinion in the north of the United States?