The following pages, from which an excerpt was published in 1913, under the title—The Railroad The Conqueror—constitute an attempt to put within short compass the main causes of the shifting sectionalism of the people of the United States.

The facts and assertions upon which this sketch is based have, with others not included, been gathered and pondered for at least sixteen years, during which period, much at times interwoven, has, from time to time been cut, for fear that consideration of such might lead the thoughts of the possible reader away from the main theme.

As to the workmanship few can see more clearly than the author, how much better that could have been, had he who undertook it been accommodated with more leisure and equipped with scholarship and means. Yet it is doubtful if any one could have approached the task and pursued it through the years which have intervened between its inception and completion with a firmer determination to present the truth and nothing but the truth, as the writer saw and still sees it.

To publish what is herein set out, in this day of rampant commercialism and often unconscious intolerance, requires character and courage in a publisher.

On the other hand, submission to some, holding themselves out as publishers and soliciting manuscripts, involves occasional risk, and in this connection, the author feels that he would be lacking in ordinary gratitude, did he not record the rescue [Pg vi] of this manuscript, in an earlier form, from the clutch of a publishing house, which having obtained it on solicitation, for perusal and consideration, on terms declined, held it for a year, in spite of repeated requests for its return, replied to repeatedly, with untruthful assertions that it had been sent back. Without any knowledge of or interest in the contents, a stranger, to whose inquiries concerning local history, the author, from time to time had replied, C. W. Lewis, Esq., residing in the vicinity of the disreputable publishing house, upon request, by a personal call, forced the delivery of the manuscript and returned it to the author. Now complete it is submitted to the public without further comment to speak for itself.

In consideration of much that appears in the numerous contributions to the discussion of the Negro Question, it must be noticeable that in recent years, there has been quite a broadening of the field, and that, from what was in the past, mainly a question of slavery or freedom, for one particular class of people, in one great country, we have advanced to a consideration of what may effect the entire world in that, which has been entitled by some: “The Conflict of Color,” and by others not quite so pessimistic: “The Question of the Twentieth Century, the Question of Color.”

In such circumstances, an examination of the evolution of this question and a recital of some of the phases under which it has been brought up for discussion in the history of the United States, may tend to correct some misapprehensions and throw some additional light upon a subject, which, in spite of the efforts to suppress it, is continually forcing itself upon the attention of the world.

While freely admitting the impossibility of discussing this subject, within any reasonable limits, without necessarily omitting mention of many publications, containing an amount of extremely valuable information, the aim of this work will be to trace the evolution of the question as it has appeared, in the expression of both whites and Negroes, in that country in which public opinion is said [Pg 2] to exercise the greatest influence upon government. In undertaking such an examination it would be hardly necessary to make any very close scrutiny of the Colonial period, from the fact that while there was opinion that found expression in acts, statements and laws, the colonies, being under the control of Great Britain, were subjected to her policies and representative of her civilization. The extraordinary case therefore of a Massachusetts slave-owner, Maverick, who simply for breeding purposes, in 1636, forced an African woman of high rank, owned by him, to accept the embraces of a common young Negro [1] was but a way of expressing contempt for the race. The Maryland Act of 1663, a far less coarse expression, involved all white women who failed to entertain it. In Stroud’s “Sketch of the laws of Slavery,” published in 1827, we find on page 2:

Yet despite these two striking illustrations at these early dates, broadly speaking, we might claim that in British America “up to 1700 and perhaps beyond, the sentiment North and South concerning the Negro or his enslavement differed but slightly; for while the South Carolina Act of 1690 did provide severe regulations for Negro and Indian slaves, a [Pg 3] study of the statutes from 1698” [2] “and later of the press, indicates a sentiment against the importation of Negroes, which however was forced upon that province, as upon others, by the British Government.” [3]

The Revolutionary war, which shook off this controlling force, associated the States together, under the Articles of Confederation, thus paving the way for that great experiment, the Constitutional Federal Republic, which succeeded it.

It was in the deliberations of the great Convention, which framed that “more perfect union”, that the Negro question really first arose, as a matter of vital political concern; nor among all the questions which confronted that extraordinary body, did there appear a graver one, than that affecting the status of the colored people of the Union.

This class represented, at that time, about one-fifth of the population of the thirteen States, which it was the aim to unite, or 737,208 blacks as against 3,172,006 whites [4] , and while of these 737,208 colored persons some 59,527 were free, in every one of the thirteen States, except Massachusetts, there were slaves, and in only one State, outside of New England, Pennsylvania, were free persons of color more numerous than slaves.

In eight of the thirteen States the Negro slaves greatly outnumbered the free persons of color; while in still another, with a total of 5,572 colored persons, the colored freedmen exceeded the slaves by only 54.

[Pg 4]

Under these conditions, it was not unnatural that the question should have presented itself as one of slavery versus freedom, rather than Negroes versus whites, and for the seventy years in which slavery continued to exist, that fact served to obscure, to quite an extent, the appreciation of the distinct question of color and race. Yet by some, at an exceedingly early date, it was recognized, that apart from the consideration of how they might be held, the mere presence in the Republic of a large and growing number of people of an inferior race, presented a serious problem.

When the consideration of the basis upon which Federal representation should rest, and direct taxes be apportioned, was reached, the framers of the Constitution found themselves, therefore, confronted with a political question of the first magnitude, in the existence of the slave trade.

What was the slave? A man or a chattel?

The question was precipitated by a clause in the report of the committee of detail, presented by John Rutledge, of South Carolina, Article 7, Section 4. “No tax or duty shall be laid by the Legislature on articles exported from any State nor on the migration or importation of such persons as the several States shall think proper to admit, nor shall such migration or importation be prohibited.” [5]

In the light of what followed, of the existing legislation upon that subject in the State of South Carolina, and the history of the province and State, the introduction of the concluding clause of this [Pg 5] section by her most distinguished representative was unfortunate. It gave rise to declarations concerning the State which not only do not seem to have been absolutely borne out by the facts; but which the actions and votes of her deputies themselves, to some extent stultified; yet the State was nevertheless stamped with an unenviable precedence in a matter in which she cast but one of the seven votes, in a total of eleven, by which the final decision was arrived at.

In the discussion which immediately arose upon the introduction of the report, four views with regard to this clause found expression.

Luther Martin, of Maryland, a Representative from a State, which, as will subsequently be shown, could have then been described as the most complete slave State of the thirteen, had nevertheless the discernment to realize the dangers of such a condition, and proposed to alter the section, so as to allow a prohibition or tax on the importation of slaves. He presented three grounds of objection to the denial of such: “1. As five slaves are to be counted as three free-men in the apportionment of Representatives, such a clause would leave an encouragement of the traffic. 2. Slaves weakened one part of the Union, which the other parts were bound to protect; the privilege of importing them was, therefore, unreasonable. 3. It was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such features in the Constitution.”

[Pg 6]

In defending the clause Mr. Rutledge was not conciliatory. He “did not see how the importation of slaves could be encouraged by this section. He was not apprehensive of insurrections and would readily exempt the other States from their obligations to protect the Southern States against them. Religion and humanity had nothing to do with the question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. The true question at present is whether the Southern States shall or shall not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their interest they will not oppose the increase of slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the consumers.”

Mr. Ellsworth of Connecticut supported the clause in an argument pitched upon the same utilitarian plane, but strengthened with what was an assertion of the doctrine of States rights. He “was for leaving the clause as it stands. Let every State import what it pleases. The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the States themselves. What enriches a part enriches the whole, and the States are the best judges of their particular interests. The old Confederation had not meddled with this point and he did not see any greater necessity for bringing it within the policy of the new one.”

Mr. Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, while upholding the view of Mr. Rutledge, held out a hope of subsequent accord. He said “South Carolina can never receive the plan, if it prohibits the slave trade. In every proposed extension of the powers [Pg 7] of Congress, that State has expressly and watchfully excepted that of meddling with the importation of Negroes. If the States be all left at liberty on the subject, South Carolina may perhaps by degrees do of herself what is wished, as Virginia and Maryland have already done.” [6]

Upon the following day the discussion was resumed.

Mr. Sherman, of Connecticut, “was for leaving the clause as it stands. He disapproved of the slave trade; yet as the States were now possessed of the right to import slaves, as the public good did not require it to be taken from them and as it was expedient to have as few objections as possible to the proposed scheme of Government, thought it best to leave the matter as we found it. He observed that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it. He urged upon the Convention the necessity of dispatching its business.”

Col. Mason, of Virginia, took very high ground. He declared: “This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of the British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns not the importing States alone, but the whole Union. The evil of having slaves was experienced during the late war. Had slaves been treated as they might have been by the enemy, they would have proved dangerous instruments in their hands. But [Pg 8] their folly dealt by the slaves as it did by the Tories. He mentioned the dangerous insurrections of the slaves in Greece and Sicily, and the instructions given by Cromwell to the commissioners sent to Virginia to arm the servants and slaves in case other means of obtaining submission should fail. Maryland and Virginia, he said, had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be vain, if South Carolina and Georgia be at liberty to import. The Western people are already calling out for slaves in their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on morals. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had, from a lust of gain, embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the States being in possession of the right to import, this was the case with many other rights now to be properly given up. He held it essential in every point of view that the General Government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery.”

[Pg 9]

Mr. Ellsworth spoke again, and quite to the point: “As he had never owned a slave, could not judge of the effect of slavery on character. He said, however, that if it was to be considered in a moral light, we ought to go further and free those already in the country. As slaves also multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland that it is cheaper to raise than import them, whilst in the sickly swamps foreign supplies are necessary. If we go no further than is urged we shall be unjust to South Carolina and Georgia. Let us not intermeddle. As population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it. And the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts. As to the danger of insurrection from foreign influence that will become a motive to kind treatment of the slaves.”

Mr. Charles Pinckney said: “If slavery be wrong it is justified by the example of all the world. He cited the case of Greece, Rome and other States; the sanction given by France, England, Holland and other modern States. In all ages one half of mankind have been slaves. If the Southern States were left alone they will probably of themselves stop importation. He would himself, as a citizen of South Carolina, vote for it. An attempt to take away the right, as proposed, will produce serious objections to the Constitution which he wished to see adopted.”

[Pg 10]

Gen. C. C. Pinckney “declared it to be his firm opinion that if himself and all his colleagues were to sign the Constitution and use their personal influence it would be of no avail towards obtaining the assent of their constituents. South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves. As to Virginia, she will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value and she has more than she wants. It would be unequal to require South Carolina and Georgia to confederate on such unequal terms. He said the royal assent before the Revolution had never been refused to South Carolina as to Virginia. He contended that the importation of Slaves would be for the interest of the Whole Union. The more slaves the more produce to employ the carrying trade. The more consumption also, and the more of this the more of revenue for the common treasury. He admitted it to be reasonable that slaves should be dutied like other imports, but should consider a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of South Carolina from the Union.”

Mr. Baldwin, of Georgia, “had conceived national objects alone to be before the Convention, not such as like the present were of a local nature. Georgia was decided on this point. That State has always hitherto supposed a General Government to be the pursuit of the central States who wished to have a vortex for everything—that her distance would preclude her from equal advantage—and that she could not prudently purchase it by yielding national powers. From this it might be understood in what light she would view an attempt to abridge her favorite [Pg 11] prerogative. If left to herself she may probably put a stop to the evil. As one ground for this conjecture he took notice of the sect of which he said was a respectable class of people who carried their ethics beyond the mere equality of men, extending their humanity to the claims of the whole animal creation.”

Mr. Wilson, of Pennsylvania, “observed that if South Carolina and Georgia were themselves disposed to get rid of the importation of slaves in a short time, as had been suggested, they would never refuse to unite because the importation might be prohibited. As the section now stands all articles imported are to be taxed. Slaves alone are exempt. This is in fact a bounty on that article.”

Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.”

Mr. Dickinson, of Delaware, “considered it as inadmissible on every principle of honor and safety that the importation of slaves should be authorized to the States by the Constitution. The true question was whether the national happiness would be promoted or impeded by the importation, and the question ought to be left to the National Government, not to the States particularly interested. If England and France permit slavery, slaves are at the same time excluded from both these kingdoms. Greece and Rome were made unhappy by their slaves. He could not believe that the Southern States would refuse to confederate on the account [Pg 12] apprehended; especially as the power was not likely to be immediately exercised by the General Government.”

Mr. Williamson, of North Carolina, “stated the law of North Carolina on the subject, to wit, that it did not directly prohibit the importation of slaves. It imposed a duty of five pounds on each slave imported from Africa. Ten pounds on each from elsewhere, and fifty pounds on each from a State licensing manumission. He thought the Southern States could not be members of the Union if the clause should be rejected, and that it was wrong to force anything down not absolutely necessary and which any State must disagree to.”

Mr. King, of Massachusetts, “thought the subject should be considered in a political light only. If two States will not agree to the Constitution as stated on one side, he could affirm with equal belief on the other that great and equal opposition would be experienced from the other States. He remarked on the exemption of slaves from duty, while every other import was subjected to it, as an inequality that could not fail to strike the commercial sagacity of the Northern and Middle States.”

Mr. Langdon, of New Hampshire, “was strenuous for giving the power to the General Government. He could not with a good conscience leave it with the States who could then go on with the traffic, without being restrained by the opinion here given that they will themselves cease to import slaves.”

Gen. Pinckney, “thought himself bound to declare candidly that he did not think South Carolina would [Pg 13] stop her importation of slaves in any short time, but only stop them occasionally as she now does. He moved to commit the clause that slaves might be made liable to an equal tax with other imports, which he thought right, and which would remove one difficulty that had been started.”

Mr. Rutledge remarked: “If the Convention thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia will ever agree to the plan, unless their right to import slaves be untouched, the expectation is vain. The people of these States will never be such fools as to give up so important an interest. He was strenuous against striking out the section and seconded the motion of Gen. Pinckney for a commitment.”

Mr. Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, “wished the whole subject to be committed, including the clauses relating to taxes on exports, and on a Navigation Act. These things may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern States.”

Mr. Butler, of South Carolina, declared, “that he would never agree to the power of taxing exports.”

Mr. Sherman said: “It was better to let the Southern States import slaves than to part with them, if they made that a sine qua non . He was opposed to a tax on slaves imported as making the matter worse, because it implied they were property. He acknowledged that if the power of prohibiting the importation should be given to the General Government that it would be exercised. He thought it would be its duty to exercise the power.”

[Pg 14]

Mr. Reed, of Delaware, “was for the commitment provided the clause concerning taxes on exports should also be committed.”

Mr. Sherman, observed: “that that clause had been agreed to and therefore could not be committed.”

Mr. Randolph, of Virginia, “was for committing in order that some middle ground, if possible, be found. He could never agree to the clause as it stands. He would sooner risk the Constitution. He dwelt on the dilemma to which the Constitution was exposed by agreeing to the clause it would revolt the Quakers, the Methodists and many others in the States having no slaves. On the other hand, two States might be lost to the Union. Let us then,” he said, “try the chance of a commitment.” [7]

On the question of committing, the vote was: New Hampshire, no; Massachusetts, abstaining from voting; Connecticut, aye; New Jersey, aye; Pennsylvania, no; Delaware, no; Maryland, aye; Virginia, aye; North Carolina, aye; South Carolina, aye; Georgia, aye; [8] In a total of eleven States at Convention seven ayes, three noes, one not voting.

The clause having been referred to a committee consisting of Messrs. Langdon, King, Johnson, Livingston, Clymer, Dickinson, L. Martin, Madison, Williamson, C. C. Pinckney, and Baldwin, the committee reported in favor of the clause, with an amendment making it read: “The migration or importation of such persons as the several States now existing [Pg 15] shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Legislature prior to the year 1800, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such migration or importation at a rate not exceeding the average of the duties laid on imports.” [9]

Gen. Pinckney moved to strike out the words “the year 1800 and to insert the words eighteen hundred and eight.”

Mr. Gorham, of Massachusetts, seconded the motion. This action brought from one, who up to that time does not appear to have participated in the discussion, Mr. Madison, the declaration that: “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.” [10]

The reported clause had been referred to the committee against the vote of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Virginia and New Jersey both opposed the amendment; but as it received the vote of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which had not voted for the commitment, it was supported by seven out of the eleven States, the three New England States present and four of the five Southern States, the three Middle States present, and one Southern State, opposing.

While reasonable men must always be alive to the necessity of compromise, and while also the great [Pg 16] responsibilities of the situation concerning this matter are apparent, yet this most important discussion and vote establishes some facts, with regard to the constitutional Union, which the honest historian cannot disregard.

First: The migration or importation of Negroes was prohibited in spite of the declaration of the representatives of the three Southern States, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, that some of the Southern States could not accept the Constitution if it did.

Second: A tax upon the importation was imposed through the aid of the vote of New England, whose representatives had warned the Convention that it would be a recognition of slavery to tax importation. The claim, therefore made, that South Carolina and Georgia forced the recognition of the slave trade is not borne out by the facts in the case. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia followed the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, and, abandoning the principles for which they had contended, “formed a bargain” by which the slave trade was surrendered for the recognition of slavery by the Constitution.

Upon considering the discussion, although Ellsworth’s shrewd criticism crippled, to some extent, the lofty flight of Mason of Virginia, yet the speech of the latter puts him upon a higher plane of statesmanship than that occupied by any deputy present. On the other hand, no matter how high their reputations otherwise may have been established, none [Pg 17] descended to so low a plane as King, of Massachusetts and Rutledge of South Carolina; while no individual exhibited as much ignorance of the existing situation as he, who by the temperance of his utterance and the influence of his high personal character, most thoroughly mastered it.

Gen. C. C. Pinckney did not seem to know that South Carolina had not been permitted by Great Britain to throw off the slave trade, when, as a province, she sought to do so, [11] or that the sentiment of the people of his State, even while he was speaking, had found expression in an Act which prohibited the bringing into the State of “any Negro slave contrary to the Act to regulate the recovery of debts and prohibiting the importation of Negroes” [12] and which was sufficiently strong even after the above compromise to negative, by a vote of 93 to 40, Gillon’s attempt in the South Carolina Legislature in 1788, to repeal the law prohibiting importation. [13] No severer criticism of the General’s statesmanship on this point was ever promulgated than that, thirty-four years later, which his devoted brother, Gen. Thomas Pinckney, furnished, in some reflections, published by him [14] without any thought of how positively they ran counter to the dictum of his brother—“South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves”—he warned South Carolinians that Negro artisans were taking the places of whites.

[Pg 18]

But, turning from this discussion, it is of importance to consider just how the Negro population of the United States was located at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.

By the census taken in 1790 it was indicated that about six-sevenths of the entire colored population of the thirteen States constituting the Union, inhabited the four States of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, of which about one-half were found in Virginia, the population in the order of their numbers being as follows: Virginia 305,493; Maryland 111,099; South Carolina, 108,895; North Carolina, 105,547. The Negro population of Georgia at that date was but slightly in excess of the Negro population of New York, being only 29,662 to New York’s 25,978, while in the region north of Maryland there were nearly three times as many Negroes as in the region south of South Carolina.

Considering the percentage of blacks to whites in the different sections, South Carolina had the greatest, with a colored population rising as high as 44 per cent of the total. Virginia came second, with a percentage of 41, Georgia was third, with 36; Maryland fourth, with 35; North Carolina fifth, with 27; Delaware sixth, with 26; New Jersey seventh, with 9; New York eighth, with 8; Rhode Island ninth, with 7, and Pennsylvania tenth, with less than three per cent.

There is still another standpoint, however, from which this population might be considered; that is with regard to the area of the State containing the [Pg 19] same, and considered in this light, Maryland, with a Negro population in excess of that of South Carolina, and with an area of only one-third, was the most distinct Negro State of the Union. Delaware came second, and Virginia third. In the two States of Maryland and Virginia, with a combined area of 79,124 square miles, there was considerably more than one-half of the colored population of the United States, 416,572. In the region to the south, embracing the three States of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, with an area of 143,040 square miles, there were as yet but 244,104 Negroes, or about one-third of the number, considered with regard to the area they inhabited, which makes very obvious the contention of Ellsworth that the abrogation of the slave trade would have operated as a distinct commercial benefit to Maryland and Virginia, enabling them to supply to the region south of them, at enhanced prices, the slaves they might raise for market.

Virginia, Maryland and Delaware then constituted at this time the black belt, containing, as they did, four-sevenths of the colored population of the Union, three-fourths of the remainder being in the region below and one-fourth above.

In the first decade of the Constitution the density of this colored population in Virginia and Maryland was actually increased; while, at the same time, through an extraordinary accession to her white population, in spite of great gains to the colored, South Carolina’s colored percentage decreased, and it is on this account that what happened in the next [Pg 20] decade of the Constitution in South Carolina is of so much importance. A consideration of these events will show, that, in spite of the declaration of her great deputies, that “South Carolina could not do without slaves,” and that her people “would never be such fools as to give up so important an interest” as “their right to import slaves,” they not only proposed to give up the right, but strove earnestly to do so, and only after thirty years of unavailing effort, accompanied by an ever increasing investment in that class of property, did the strong minority, which had opposed it, acquiesce in Calhoun’s most unwise view, that the blacks furnished “the best substratum of population, upon which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.” [15]

Once it was accepted, the march was steadily on to disaster.

[Pg 21]

Following Gillon’s unsuccessful attempt in 1788, to repeal the existing law, the State of South Carolina, by successive enactments, in spite of the implied sanction of the Constitution until 1808, prohibited the importation of slaves [16] up to the year 1803. In that year Governor James B. Richardson, in his annual message to the General Assembly, indirectly suggested the repeal of such legislation.

The language of this message is so involved that, considered without reference to its effect, it seems to indicate some sympathy with the prohibition of the importation; but carefully considered, the secret sympathy of this official with those he condemns is obvious. The promptness with which it was seized upon by the opponents of prohibition, and the arguments culled from it, indicate that it was the opening wedge by which the defence against the black flood, was split, to admit it in such volume, as to make subsequent efforts to stop the flow almost useless.

That portion of the message which dealt with the importation of Negro slaves reads as follows:

“All possible diligence and my best efforts have been used to carry effectually into operation the law prohibiting the importation of Negroes into the State, but it is with concern that I have here to state to you, that it has been without success; whether it must be attributed principally to the ill consequences that are apprehended would result [Pg 22] from carrying the law into operation by emancipating the Negroes so brought in (a remedy deemed more mischievous than the evil of their introduction in servitude) or whether the interests of the citizens is so interwoven with that species of property, that it prevents their aiding the law in answering the salutary purposes, I will not presume to determine; but I am inclined to believe both causes operate as preventatives; for those people are continued to be brought into the State beyond the possibility of prevention. In all laws intended for the general benefit, they should be so calculated that their operation should be found equal in every part of the State; where this is not the case it means that there is some radical defect therein, or it is inimical to the interest of the citizens; with this law such is the situation; for in the present state of things, the citizens in the frontier and sea coast districts do accumulate this property without the possibility of being detected, while those of the interior and middle districts only experience the operation of that law from their remote situation, etc.... This indeed is a circumstance to be lamented, but such is the true state of our situation and therefore becomes a subject worthy of your consideration and one that I trust will engage your endeavors to render equally energetic in every part of the State that law which experience has proved partial in its operation and is oppressive upon such citizens in the interior districts as hold it the object of desire to augment their capital in the accumulation of such property.” [17]

[Pg 23]

This expression of opinion from the Governor brought up in the House the appointment of “a committee to inquire whether any and what amendments are necessary, to the Act entitled, ‘An Act to prevent Negro slaves from being brought into or entering this State’ [18] ; in the Senate a bill to permit their importation.” [19]

The leading opponent in the Senate of the bill to permit importation was State Senator Robert Barnwell, at that time in his forty-second year. He had served with credit in the Revolutionary war, in the course of which he had been seriously wounded; had been a delegate to the Continental Congress; and later a member of Congress from the 2nd Congressional district of South Carolina, later still he had been elected Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives. [20] He is described by Edward Hooker as “a tall, portly, well-built man of about sixty years—a man of singular gravity, and possessed of great influence in the Senate. Said to be an eminent orator and very religious character.” [21]

A synopsis of Mr. Barnwell’s remarks on this occasion has been preserved, although, as became more and more the custom with regard to all utterances concerning slavery, in any way critical, much was suppressed. The account reads as follows: “He maintained that by the immense influx of these persons into the State, the value of this species of property would be considerably diminished, insomuch [Pg 24] that he did believe Negroes would be soon not worth one half of what they might be sold for. The value of the produce raised by their labor would be in like manner depreciated. * * * The permission given by the bill would lead to ruinous speculation. Everyone would purchase Negroes. It was well known that those who dealt in this property would sell it at a very long credit. Our citizens would purchase at all hazards and trust to fortunate crops and favorable markets for making their payments and it would be found that South Carolina would in a few years, if this trade continued open, be in the same situation of debt, and subject to all the misfortunes which that situation had produced as at the conclusion of the Revolutionary war. The honorable member adduced in support of his opinion other arguments still more cogent and impressive, which from reasons very obvious, we decline making public.” [22]

The most prominent advocate of the bill was State Senator William Smith, the schoolmate of Andrew Jackson, later judge, and, later still, United States Senator, the most determined of Calhoun’s political opponents in after years. He was a native of North Carolina, of somewhat indefinite age, a reformed drunkard; but a man of firmness and power, and also of pleasing appearance. [23]

The report of his remarks upon this occasion is brevity itself, but sufficient to condemn him, as it is apparent that in a spirit of pessimism he voted [Pg 25] against his convictions. The report is: “Mr. Smith said he would agree to put a stop to the importation of Negroes but he believed it to be impossible. For this reason he would vote for the bill.” [24] The House had meantime reported that “the laws prohibiting the importation of Negroes can be so amended as to prevent their introduction among us,” but a strong faction were for action on the Senate bill. “Mr. Drayton was of the opinion that the committee should proceed to consider the bill from the Senate rather than the report of the committee of this House. He confessed that he was a friend to that bill in its utmost latitude. Many of the planters had cash which they could not so well dispose of as in purchasing Negroes, and he did not see why they should not be allowed to improve their estates in the best manner they were able, as well as merchants or any other class of persons.” [25]

The House was not, however, swayed from its course. It proceeded to consider the report of the committee, and a bill in accordance therewith was arranged to be brought before the House on the 12th. On that date, upon a motion to postpone the second reading to February 1, 1804, the same was lost by a vote of 41 to 63; and upon the following day the bill from the Senate came up, and, by a vote of 55 to 46, became a law. [26] With the majority appears only one great name, Langdon Cheves. With the minority is recorded the name of a new member, Joseph Alston, destined to something of a career, [Pg 26] who on this occasion, in opposition to the bill permitting importation, made a notable speech. [27]

From the achievement of her independence in 1783, South Carolina had legislated against the importation of Negro slaves with greater and greater severity. The indications are all that this reversal of her past policy was the result of the matter having been sprung as a surprise by Governor Richardson in the second year of his term of office, when the Senate was two to one in favor of such action as he suggested, and even in the more popular branch of the Legislature a majority of nine in one hundred and one votes could be secured. Under these conditions, that a strong effort should have been at once inaugurated by those who opposed the importation, to repeal the Act permitting same was natural, and, upon the reassembling of the Legislature in the fall of 1804, a bill having such for its purpose was introduced, pressed to a vote in the Senate, and lost by only one vote, the record being 16 for, 17 against repeal of Act permitting importation, and two absent. [28]

Four days later the House went into committee on the following resolution: “Resolved, that in the opinion of this House, it is inexpedient and impolitic to permit the importation of slaves into this State, and that a committee of five be appointed to bring in a bill for that purpose.” [29] The resolution was adopted by a vote of 69 to 39, and among the names of the majority appears that of William [Pg 27] Lowndes. Thus the two Houses being unable to agree before adjournment, it was to be inferred, from the heavy majority in the House, against importation and the extremely narrow margin by which it had been sustained in the Senate, the fight would again be made, at the convening of the Legislature, in the fall of 1805. And so it was, for upon its reassembling Governor Paul Hamilton at once and pointedly referred to the subject in his message: “I should be wanting in my endeavors towards the public good were I to omit soliciting you to legislate on the importation of slaves. Abstractedly from other considerations of it, on which indeed much may be said, I feel myself bound to represent its continuance as productive of effects the most injurious, in draining us of our specie, thereby embarrassing our commercial men and naturally lessening the sales of our produce; that viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness not our strength; for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would increase the means of defence and security. I will add, that an immediate stop to this traffic is, in my judgment, on every principle of sound policy, indispensable.” [30]

The message at once engaged the attention of the newly elected House, to the Speakership of which Joseph Alston had been elected. The young Speaker was a most interesting personality. His father, with perhaps one exception, was the largest slave-owner in the State, and of the latter, we are informed, [Pg 28] that “in his opinion the true interests of the planter were in exact accord with the dictates of an enlightened humanity. The consequence was that his numerous plantations were models of neatness and order and his slaves always exhibited an appearance of health and comfort, which spoke well for their treatment.” [31]

This election to the Speakership was the beginning of a political career for Joseph Alston, which soon led to the Governorship and might well have extended into national fields, had it not been for the tragedy which cut it short. He had just married Theodosia Burr, the fascinating and accomplished daughter of Aaron Burr. But the death of his only son in 1812 and almost immediately after, the loss of his wife at sea, seemed literally to destroy all his interest in life and take it from him. This debate in 1805, in which he was the foremost figure, is alluded to in the diary of Edward Hooker, by whom we are informed that the principle speakers in the House were Simons, Alston, Miles, Taylor and Wright. The resolution under consideration, as drawn up by Joseph Alston, was prefaced with several considerations, such as the inconsistency of the slave trade with the precepts of Christianity—with justice, humanity, etc., and later with the true interests of the State. In the argument of Mr. Miles, of Richland, appear the extraordinary insinuations of Governor Richardson, as to the injustice of the law with regard to those who found it difficult to violate it, and whom it did prohibit [Pg 29] from importing slaves. Of the members of the House and Senate who sufficiently struck the attention of Hooker to draw from him something like a pen portrait, Barnwell, Lowndes and Alston stand out the clearest. He estimated Alston to be about twenty-eight years of age. He was not quite twenty-seven. He describes him thus: “Mr. Alston is a short man and rather thick. Of a dark complexion, with thick black hair and a formidable pair of whiskers, that cover a great part of his face, and nearly meet at the chin. His dress and demeanor are well deserving the name buckish. When not in the legislative hall, he may be seen as often as anywhere, about the stables, looking at fine horses, dressed in a short jockey-like surtout or frock, and laced and tossled boots, with a segar in his mouth, and much more of the ‘gig and tandem’ levity than the austere virtues of a senatorial leader. Indeed he is one of the last persons that I should have picked out from the crowd of people in town for a president of one branch of the Legislature.”

Of the speech he says: “Alston’s speech appears to me more like an extemporaneous one, though it is said by such as are acquainted with him that he always, without exception, writes his speeches. He like Simons, used notes, but did not recur to them so often; nor did he confine himself so much to method, nor avoid so scrupulously every expression not stamped with elegance, yet his arrangement was not bad, nor his language undignified. He did not at first speak with uncommon fluency, indeed he stammered a little, but when he became once fairly engaged [Pg 30] his words appeared to flow with great ease. His figures and allusions were eminently striking and beautiful, and his speech abounded with them. He dropped some excellent moral and political sentiments, quoted two or three texts of sublime morality from the Scriptures, and with great vehemence and apparent sincerity urged the House to consult the dictates of justice and humanity, in opposition to sordid interest. His manner of delivery was extremely good and his gestures forcible and expressive. He labored some time, and with success, to show that the increase of slaves tends to destroy that equality which is the basis of our republican institutions and insists that it is not only unjust to bring them in, but demonstrably injurious to the real interests of the State. In his argument was a fund of good sense and useful information. The utmost silence pervaded the House while he spoke thirty-five or forty minutes.” [32]

The resolution was adopted, and the bill prohibiting importation was sent to the Senate by a vote of 56 to 28. [33]

Later, by the same pen, we have a brief description of the last speech upon this bill of that Senator, who in opposition to it, may be said to have cast the most important vote he was ever called upon to give.

Allusion has been before made to the brief reason given by Senator William Smith for his vote, for opening the ports to importation of slaves, which he declared himself not in favor of, but thought it impossible [Pg 31] to prevent, in 1803, when he, constituting one of the majority of two to one in that branch of the General Assembly, voted to open them. Public opinion had swept away that great majority, and from the House, with just such a vote, two to one, the bill to prohibit came to the Senate. The following is Hooker’s description of the situation, and the part played by Smith:

“The bill having passed the lower House, the public feeling is excited about its event here. Mr. Smith, a lawyer from York District, made a long and rather tedious speech against it. He is not fluent, nor does he use the handsomest language, but in the course of his argument gets out considerable that is to the purpose.” [34]

Smith’s vote was sufficient to kill the bill. It failed of passage by 15 to 16 in the Senate. [35] He thus, by his vote alone made impossible, what he claimed to favor, but declined to support, because he asserted he believed to be impossible. Later in the United States Senate he disclosed, that in the four years he thus secured for the slave trade to pour its flood upon South Carolina, in 202 vessels, 39,075 slaves were brought into the port of Charleston [36] for which he had the effrontery to hold almost everybody but himself responsible. This disastrous piece of legislation increased the Negro population of South Carolina in that decade 41 per cent, against an increase of only 9 per cent whites, and checked almost entirely the remarkable increase of whites, [Pg 32] which had marked the previous decade. As to the effect upon the business of Charleston, in the reminiscence of one of the editors of the daily press, we have an illuminating illustration of the truth of Senator Barnwell’s prophecy. Says Mr. Thomas: “In November 1803, I returned from my fourth voyage with a printed catalogue of fifty thousand volumes of books in every branch of literature, arts and sciences, being by far the largest importation ever made into the United States. I had only got them opened and arranged for sale three days when news arrived from Columbia that the Legislature then in session had opened the port for the importation of slaves from Africa. The news had not been five hours in the city before two large British Guineamen that had been laying off and on the port for several days, expecting it, came up to town, and from that day my business began to decline, although then in a situation to carry it on to three times the extent I had ever done before. Previous to this the planters had large sums of money laying idle in the banks, which they liberally expended not only for their actual, but supposed wants. A great change at once took place in everything. Vessels were fitted out in numbers for the coast of Africa, and as fast as they returned their cargoes were bought up with avidity, not only consuming the large funds which had been accumulating, but all that could be procured, and finally exhausting credit and mortgaging the slaves for payment, many of whom were not redeemed for ten years afterwards to my knowledge.” [37]

[Pg 33]

On the other hand the State of Ohio, which had been admitted in 1800 with 45,628 whites and only 336 colored, was so disturbed by the growth of its colored population that before they reached in number two thousand, that State passed the notorious Black Laws of January 9, 1805, of which Section 4 reads as follows: “That no black or mulatto person shall hereafter be permitted to be sworn or give evidence in any Court of record or elsewhere in the State in any cause depending or matter of controversy, where either party to the same is a white person, or in any prosecution which shall be instituted in behalf of this State against any white person.” [38]

While South Carolina did not permit the full sweep of such in her Courts, [39] holding a free person of color born of a free white woman an admissible witness yet, with such legislation in Ohio, and Indiana, it is not surprising, Fiske, of New York, six years later failed to establish his contention that “color was a mere matter of accident * * * All men were born free and equal”; and that his attempt to reject the Senate amendment to the Orleans bill, i. e. the insertion of the word “white” before the words “free male inhabitants,” in defining the electorate, should have been brushed aside by Sheffey, of Virginia, with the simple declaration that “such doctrines would prostrate the civil institutions of Virginia.” [40] It was one thing to protest as Col. Mason did against the slave trade; but, with some [Pg 34] four hundred thousand slaves, double what any other State possessed, Virginia was prepared to contend for her property rights, and the position seems to have been met with acquiescence by Congress.

[Pg 35]

Concerning free persons of color in the United States, of whom there were about 210,000, to 1,550,000 Negro slaves, in 1816, it was asserted, in the petition of the Kentucky Abolition Society to Congress, which asked that a suitable territory should be set apart as asylum for emancipated Negroes and mulattoes, “that when emancipated they were not allowed the privileges of free citizens and were prohibited from emigrating to other States and Territories.” [41]

Certainly if their testimony could only be received in courts of justice in cases, when not in opposition to the interests of the whites, which was the situation in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, their ability to protect themselves against injury from whites was seriously affected, but, at the same time, that this tiny stream, trickling into Ohio, was thus harshly dammed, the Negroes were pouring into South Carolina in such numbers, that legislation against their introduction from other States and Territories was passed. [42]

But again the same desire for ephemeral benefits to a class, which had sufficed to overthrow a wise law in 1803, induced action for repeal in 1818, and, with lamentable lack of foresight, the brilliant George McDuffie led the fight for the repeal of the law of 1816.

By the census of 1810, the colored population of South Carolina was 200,919, the white only 214,196.

[Pg 36]

With the exception of Louisiana, just admitted, with a colored population of 42,245, and a white population of 34,311, no State in the Union had, proportionately to its white, as great a Negro population as South Carolina. The increase of its colored population had been so accelerated by the mischievous action of Governor Richardson and his supporters in 1803, as to have increased almost two and a half times as much as that of Maryland, the Negro population of which, as has been before pointed out, was greater than that of South Carolina in 1790, and had increased from that day to 1800 in a greater proportion compared to its white population, than South Carolina.

It is true the increase of the colored population of North Carolina had also been very great; but, at the same time, the increase of the white population had been much greater than in South Carolina, and it had had originally so much larger a number of white inhabitants that they were still more than double the number of blacks.

To a large and important portion of South Carolina’s legislators, therefore, the evil of this continual increase of the Negro population was apparent, and these under the leadership of Robert Y. Hayne, at that time Speaker of the House, opposed the repeal of the law of 1816.

Unfortunately no Hooker was present to record his impressions of the discussion, and all that we know of this great struggle is, that the Act of 1816 was repealed after “one of the most eloquent and animated debates that has taken place on the floor [Pg 37] for many years.” [43] In the Senate the repeal was only secured by a vote of 22 to 19.

In the year which followed came in Congress the first great sectional struggle over the Missouri Question, involving the right of Southern men to move into the Northwest with their slaves, with regard to which some of them argued, that, in the long run, such diffusion of slaves would not increase their number or result in the extension of slavery, but rather tend to check the increase.

In his contemporaneous publication of speeches from both sides, the editor of Niles’ Register regrets his inability to secure a copy of the speech of William Lowndes, which, in all probability would have been the most illuminating exposition of the Southern view, which could have been submitted; but the speech of Tucker, of Virginia, does put forward the idea as about stated; while Sergeant, of Pennsylvania, the leading speaker on the Northern side, combats the same at sufficient length to create the impression, that it was held by more than one. But what is of greater interest is the distinct note of racial inferiority, which Sergeant sounds loudly. It is not only objection to the Negro slave; but to the Negro per se ; ... “Nature has placed upon them an unalterable mark ... They are and must forever remain distinct.” [44]

Senator Smith, who, by his vote in the South Carolina Legislature in 1805 had most materially assisted in setting aside the South Carolina law in [Pg 38] opposition to African importation, while at the same time fatuously declaring that he only did so because he thought it impossible to prevent it, now, in the United States Senate, refused all compromise, declaring that by sanctioning the slave trade in the Constitution, the Federal Government was responsible for existing conditions. But a compromise was effected, and in the year 1820, the Union, then consisting of just double the number of the original thirteen States, adjusted the difference on the Negro Question.

Geographically considered it was apparent that the black belt had slipped a little lower down upon the body politic. The total colored population of the Union was 1,771,856, more than half of whom were to be found in the three States of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. In Virginia, 402,031; in South Carolina, 265,301; in North Carolina, 219,629; a total of 886,961. Southwest of this section and south of the Ohio River, the Negro population amounted to 529,856; but in no State in the Union had the increase since 1800 been so enormous as in South Carolina; for with an area and white population only two-fifths of Virginia, the increase of the Negro population of the two States had practically been the same, viz.: 156,538 for Virginia, 156,457 for South Carolina. Nor could any comforting reassurance have been drawn from the fact that the percentage of increase of the same species of population in the States of Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky had been greater; for such had been accompanied, in these newer States, with an even [Pg 39] greater increase of their white population, and was based upon an original Negro population very small indeed, when compared to that of South Carolina in 1800. When comparison was made with Maryland, on the other hand, where the number of Negroes had originally been greater than in South Carolina, with the increase of the whites in the three decades not so great, small as had been the increase of the whites, it was yet greater than that of the colored, and originally the proportion of whites had been greater.

From all these causes South Carolina was becoming in place of Virginia the State most identified with the Negro question, in a section where it was becoming a larger and more important property interest.

Yet, while the increase of the Negro population in the lower South and Middle and Southwest had been very great, the census furnished no evidence of that movement of Negroes from North to South which has been so often alluded to. The Negro population of New York had increased by more than 50 per cent; New Jersey by at least 43; Connecticut, 40; and Delaware 38. Pennsylvania’s increase in the 30 years had been 200 per cent, and even in Massachusetts the increase had been 22 per cent. The only State in which there had been a decrease, which could be attributed to a movement to another section, was Rhode Island, and it was not large enough to be considered, amounting in all to less than a thousand. Considering the population of the Southern States, however, the census afforded information [Pg 40] well warranting the assumption that from Virginia and Maryland between the years 1810 and 1820 some 30,000 colored people had moved out. In the same time the colored population of North Carolina had increased by an accession of about 40,000; South Carolina, 65,000; Georgia, 44,000; Alabama, 24,000; Mississippi, 16,000; Louisiana, 35,000; Tennessee, 37,000; and Missouri, 7,000; the percentage of increase being, North Carolina 24 per cent; South Carolina 32 per cent; Georgia 42 per cent; Mississippi 95 per cent; Louisiana 55 per cent; Tennessee 80 per cent; Kentucky 58 per cent; and Missouri nearly 300 per cent, with no basis with which to estimate the 42,000 of Alabama.

These figures establish a movement from Virginia and Maryland but also from without, to the eight States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, averaging about 45 per cent increase in the decade, and with every reasonable allowance for the movement from Virginia and Maryland and New York, of which at least one-third must have gone to the Northwest and Missouri, illegal importation must have been proceeding apace. Now, if there was illegal importation, where would it be most likely to occur?

In Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; and there we find an increase of nearly 85 per cent, or an addition to the Negro population of something like 88,000.

These facts, therefore, disclose the weakness of the Southern argument that the diffusion of slaves [Pg 41] would not have resulted in any extension of slavery. Theoretically it was a sound argument, that the slaves being spread over the face of the country, they and their masters would be brought more and more under the influences which would work against slavery and for emancipation. But if illicit importation from abroad was proceeding to any great extent, the premise upon which the argument was based gave way, and this is what must have been the case, as has been shown.

This is also where the argument of Prof. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips fails to convince, when he expresses the opinion, that “the importance of the repeal, in 1818, of the law which had prohibited the importation of slaves from other States into South Carolina has been exaggerated.” He bases his reason for this view upon the claim that “the Federal Censuses show that the average rate of increase of the Negro population in South Carolina between 1810 and 1860, was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large, “which” he thinks, “indicates that South Carolina was in that half century more of a slave exporting than a slave importing State; and that a prohibition of slave imports would have had no appreciable influence upon the ratio of increase of her Negro population.” [45]

Unless it can be shown, however, that there were no accessions to the Negro population of the United States from without, between the periods selected by Prof. Phillips, the mere fact that the rate of increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was substantially [Pg 42] smaller than that of the United States at large does not establish that South Carolina was more of a slave exporting than importing State for that period; for the greater increase without could well be due to importation in great volume elsewhere, and that there was such was asserted by many, notably by Henry Middleton, in Congress, the very year of Hayne’s speech in the South Carolina Legislature against importations from other States. [46] But apart from this, before this, South Carolina had become the State with the largest Negro population to its white population of all the States of the Union and that, the rate of increase of her Negro population from this date, or even a decade earlier, to 1860, “was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large” was simply due to the tremendous accessions of the Negro population of the four new cotton States: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, superimposed upon a Negro population originally much smaller than that of South Carolina. The Negro population of those four States did in that period increase 1,384,555; but in the same time their white population increased 1,438,607; while in the same period the white and Negro population of South Carolina increased respectively 53,860 and 147,028. And so difficult was it to overcome this tremendous start attained by South Carolina in these early fatal years, that in 1860 the excess of South Carolina’s colored population over her white population was 121,029, as compared with an excess of only 83,505 for Mississippi, [Pg 43] the next greatest. Undoubtedly in the period selected by Prof. Phillips many Negro slaves passed out of South Carolina; but many whites did also; for “from 1820 to 1860, South Carolina was a beehive from which swarms were continually going forth to populate the newer growing cotton States of the Southwest,” and “in 1860 there were then living in other States 193,389 white persons born in South Carolina.” [47] In the half century the average rate of increase of South Carolina whites was between 7 and 8 per cent, colored 21. In Virginia and Maryland in 1810 the Negro population amounted to 668,515. It increased by 1860 by an addition of 151,523. In South Carolina in 1810 the Negro population amounted to 200,919, by 1860 it had received an addition of 212,401, of which 64,382 had arrived in the decade of the repeal of the law prohibiting importation from other States, and 58,021 in the following decade. It is true that in the following decade from 1830 to 1840, the increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was comparatively slight, being only 11,992, but it was followed in the next decade by again an increase of 58,630, while the white increase in the same two decades was respectively 2,221 and 15,479.

But there was another way of measuring the importance of the repeal. Necessarily with the inflowing tide came some such as Denmark Vesey and Gullah Jack, slaves and free Negroes whose past was not known, and according to the report of the Massachusetts legislative committee in 1821, dealing [Pg 44] with only 6,740 free persons of color in the State, among other “evils,” from such, appeared, inter alia :

2. Collecting in the large towns an indolent and disorderly and corrupt population.

3. Substituting themselves in many labors and occupations which in the end it would be more advantageous to have performed by the white and native population of the State. [48]

It is apparent then, from this, as well as from the arguments of Mr. Sergeant, that the real situation of the representatives of the two sections, in the great Missouri debate, has never been put with absolute accuracy. It was an assertion upon the part of the Southerners of their right to carry their property with them wherever they went in the Union, and upon the part of the Northerners a denial of this right. It precipitated an argument whether extension and diffusion of slavery meant the same thing, many Southern men, of eminence, contended that by the process of diffusion there would be apt to be the beginning of the end of slavery, and if there had been no illicit importation of slaves possible, there would have been great merit in this suggestion. But beyond all these arguments on the part of the Northerners, the Missouri Question indicated opposition to the mere presence of the Negro, bond or free, in the Northwest. He was an undesirable resident.

[Pg 45]

Up to this time, in the main, the attitude of the Southern statesmen had been free from sectionalism. On the other hand, New England had exhibited sectionalism, and it was New England’s deputies in the Constitutional Convention, who joining with those of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, had “formed a bargain,” abrogating the slave trade in such a way as practically to recognize slavery as a property interest secured by the Constitution. The time allowed the slave trade had been long enough, as Madison had said it would be. As great as had been the rate of increase of the white population, it had been exceeded by that of the colored in the proportions of 90 to 95 per cent. What Col. Mason had prophesied had also come to pass. He had declared in 1787: “The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia.”

They had been got no doubt in large numbers through South Carolina and Georgia; but also, in all probabilities, through Louisiana, and if not through, to some extent from, Maryland and Virginia. The Negro population had in the West, in three decades sprung up from 16,322 to 385,825; while the seven States, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, held some 1,193,732 head of this species of property, representing an investment of something like $477,492,800, stamped as property by having been made dutiable under Federal law up to 1808. Such a property interest was almost certain [Pg 46] to produce a sectional policy for its protection, and in the assertion of such a policy, South Carolina having the largest stake and the most forceful representatives, would naturally take the lead.

The consequences were that the broad national policy of Lowndes, from this date gradually succumbed to the influences which forced Calhoun away from it, despite his efforts to mould into one form a national and sectional policy, based upon the declared recognition of slavery, in place of, or in addition to, the implied recognition furnished by the Constitutional compromise or “bargain” over the sanction of the slave trade up to 1808. As the South drew together in support of slavery, the overshadowing dimensions of its greatest exponent cast into oblivion Barnwell, Hamilton and Alston, who had so clearly perceived the dangers from its increase, and even reduced the proportions of men as preëminently great as Lowndes and his successor, Robert Y. Hayne.

As long as the tariff held the center of the stage, the change was not so clearly apparent; but with the settling down, after the explosion of sentiment which nullification occasioned, the division between the sections was unmistakable. From that period the Lower South presented an unbroken front in defence of slavery, under the leadership of South Carolina.

From 1800 the South had, to a great extent, directed the policies of the Republic, and, in the persons of Lowndes, Cheves and Calhoun, South Carolina had from 1813 to 1820 been a potent influence [Pg 47] therein; but the Missouri Compromise and Taylor’s election over Lowndes in 1820, for the Speakership, marked the beginning of the change. No man saw it more clearly than the great man whom Taylor defeated. His views on the condition of affairs at this time is thus expressed by a contemporary: “The Northern people had outstripped the Southern and desired to see the offices of the Government in Northern hands. This inevitable result Mr. Lowndes saw clearly forty years ago, and thought it wise for the South to yield the hold she had so long possessed on political power, when she was no longer able to retain it.” [49] The clear judgment of Lowndes had revealed to him what the fatal brilliancy of Calhoun’s intellect prevented him from perceiving, viz.: that there could not be fashioned for the needs of imperfect humanity a perfectly symmetrical policy. Lowndes had brought Webster and Clay together and pushed through the tariff bill of 1816. [50]

Of that bill in reply to the fierce criticism that it was the worst thing done since universal suffrage, he simply said, “neither was altogether good, but the best possible for the time.” “He thought some protection due to infant industries and that the question was, what measure of protection do they require?” He held; “We are obliged to leave some questions to posterity. We do our best with those that come to us and future generations must bear their share of the trouble.” [51] Accordingly, when [Pg 48] the Baldwin bill of 1820 was brought forward, “he opposed it on the ground that the increased duties were not necessary.” [52] Before the tariff bill of 1824 could be presented, he had passed away; but in his place, to share with Webster, the honors of the splendid fight against it, South Carolina had sent up to Congress Robert Y. Hayne, by Benton extolled as: “Of all the young generation of statesmen coming on I consider him the safest, the most like William Lowndes, and best entitled to future eminent lead.” [53]

How well Hayne lived up to this a study of his achievements exhibits. But while so good a judge as the late Edward M. Shepard, in his Life of Van Buren, ranks Hayne’s effort in the Senate, against the tariff of 1824, as fully up to, if not beyond, that of Webster in the House, scarcely any attention is paid to it by those historians who extoll the speech of Webster.

Again, while almost every history deals at length with the Senatorial debates, and elaborates Hayne’s speech on the Panama Mission in 1825, absolutely no mention appears concerning the far more important utterance with regard to the Colonization Society in 1827. Yet Hayne’s speech, in his debate with Chambers over the Colonization Society, is one of the most important utterances ever made by a Southern Statesman. It indicates what was the prevailing view with regard to the Negro Question, before the unfortunate episode of nullification, by [Pg 49] which Calhoun fastened upon the South the belief that slavery as it existed in the Southern States, was a good. In the speech in 1827, Hayne first showed the absurdity of the scheme of transporting the blacks to Africa in such a number as to affect the situation. That the presence of Negroes in the country was an evil, he did not attempt to deny, but declared, “The progress of time and events is providing a remedy for the evil.” He showed by statistics that the relative increase of free white population was rising, while that of the colored, whether bond or free, was diminishing, and that “while this process is going on the colored classes are gradually diffusing themselves throughout the country, and are making steady advances in intelligence and refinement, and if half the zeal were displayed in bettering their condition that is wasted in the vain and fruitless effort of sending them abroad, their intellectual and moral improvement would be steady and rapid.” [54] Why is it that this utterance of the leader of his party in the Senate is never alluded to by historians? Is it because it invites investigation as to the condition of the blacks in the Northern and Western States at this period and for the twenty years which followed? It is difficult to tell. But from this time the question took a change. Subordinating to it the tariff and the interest in railroad development, with the conditions created by nullification by 1833, the State of South Carolina, and, by 1839, the South, was committed [Pg 50] to the view of Calhoun: “Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world, and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.” [55] And to this “Negro substratum population” policy both the tariff and the railroad development of the South were accordingly subordinated until Calhoun’s death, when Georgia, as a result of having outstripped South Carolina in both men and material, stepped into the place of leadership South Carolina could no longer fill, and with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific, in ten years, produced the War Between the States.

[Pg 51]

As has been shown, nine years subsequent to his unavailing struggle to restrict the swelling proportions of the Negro population in his own State, Robert Y. Hayne, in the United States Senate, stated his views concerning that class of our population with regard to the entire country. But before discussing that further it should be noted, that a renewed effort in 1822 had again been defeated by the narrow but effective majority of nine votes, drawing from Governor Bennett, of South Carolina the pessimistic declaration:

Along another line, therefore, was the last peaceful effort to be made to solve the Negro Question. Taken in connection with the great industrial work, in which he literally wore out his life, in 1839, Hayne’s speech in the United States Senate in 1827 is most illuminating. Upon that occasion he said:

[Pg 52]

Was it not the very irony of fate that, as this speaker, later, in 1839, lay dying at Asheville, North Carolina, while a wordy war was being waged over his great railroad to the West, criticism should have been “directed against the contracts given to planters to be executed with slave labor” by the chief lieutenant of that great South Carolinian, who had only the year before, in withdrawing from the enterprise, extolled Negro slaves as “the best substratum of population in the world?”

Col. Gadsden, from this time and on, more and more a confidant of Calhoun until they parted over Taylor’s candidacy for the Presidency, asked:

Between 1830 and 1840, two Southern States, South Carolina and Maryland, leading the Union in railroad development, were endeavoring to effect railroad connection with the Northwest. A comparison of their conditions prior and subsequent to 1810, suggests one of the reasons why one succeeded and the other failed.

From 1790 to 1810 the white population of Maryland increased from 208,649 to 235,117, or about [Pg 53] 11.10 per cent. In the same twenty years the white population of South Carolina rose from 140,178 to 214,196 or about 51.20 per cent. It is quite true that in the same period the Negro population in South Carolina increased from 108,805 to 200,919 or 85.6 per cent, while that of Maryland rose only from 111,079 to 145,129 or only 30.07 per cent. Yet, when we bear in mind that the area of South Carolina was two and a half times as great as Maryland, had the efforts which had been made in 1816 and in 1822 to stop Negro importation from outside succeeded, the economic conditions of South Carolina between 1830 and 1840 might have been stronger. Indeed in 1822 Gen. Thomas Pinckney declared cheap Negro labor, even then, was steadily undermining the white artisan class in South Carolina. [59] He was patriot enough to so declare, although his own great brother was more responsible than any one else for the evil.

In the three decades which followed 1810, and closed with the death of Hayne and the destruction of his five year effort to secure the Northwestern railroad connection, the colored population of Maryland, which did secure it, increased only 6,396, from 145,429 to 151,815, while its white population in the same period rose from 235,117 to 318,204, an increase of 83,087. In South Carolina in the same time the white population rising from 214,196 to 259,344 increased only 44,883, about one-half as much, while its Negro population rising from 200,314 to 335,344, or 134,395, about twenty times as much [Pg 54] as Maryland. Viewed in the light of the unfair criticism directed against the South Carolina Railroad, was not the message of Governor Paul Hamilton in 1804, to the South Carolina Legislature, vindicated?

How our forgotten great men fought to avoid the Nessus Shirt! Who remembers that Hamilton was big enough to be made Secretary of the Navy? Under the great upas tree of South Carolina all other greatness languished and by 1840 the property interests in Negroes had become so immense, that it not only paralyzed other industries, which could by any stretch of imagination be thought to threaten its efficiency, but it affected public opinion to a degree which now seems hardly credible.

Calhoun’s view in 1838, that the Negro furnished “the best substratum of population in the world and the one on which commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared” [61] was not singular in the South at that date. The great meeting of Southern business men at Augusta, Ga. in 1838 put on record its belief:

Even Hayne, himself, despite his realization of South Carolina’s wasteful cultivation of her soil, was so affected by the tremendous interests involved in slavery, and the fearful shock of any such disturbance as the Abolitionists threatened in 1835, as to declare at that time:

By 1838, conditions had reached such a development that the abolition of slavery could come but in one of two ways, either peacefully, through the slow process of changing industrial conditions, or swiftly and forcibly, as a war measure; therefore, when Calhoun withdrew his support from Hayne’s railroad to the Northwest in 1838, the sensible course would have been to prepare for the inevitable conflict.

Allusion has been made to the Black Laws of Ohio, which had their counterpart in Indiana and Illinois, and reference had to the Report of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee in 1821, as indicative of feeling in the North and Northeast, concerning the Negro as a citizen, and, if we consider conditions in [Pg 56] the Middle States at this period, we will find them hardly different. As depicted by the most highly educated member of the Negro race today in the United States, in Philadelphia conditions were as follows:

At this date, 1840, in ten of the eleven States which later constituted the Confederacy, there were 3,311,117 whites and 2,267,319 Negroes; and in three of them; South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the whites were in the minority, and they, therefore, best represented the condition which Calhoun in 1838 extolled. [65]

With such views, what more natural than that Calhoun should view as a “humbug” the great railroad measure of Hayne, founded as it was in some degree upon the belief of the latter that “wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable.” A railroad connecting Cincinnati with Charleston would certainly have tended to “put in full and successful operation [Pg 57] free labor,” and slave labor ceasing more and more to be profitable would have gradually passed out of existence in that region.

Yet it must be admitted, that the greatest writer and thinker who has ever discussed America, viewing conditions at that time, while utterly opposed to slavery, practically endorsed Calhoun’s views. Summing up his conclusion in 1838, de Tocqueville writes:

Time, however, has proven that both de Tocqueville and Calhoun were wrong.

From a Negro minority of 13,277 in 1810, the census indicated for South Carolina in 1840, a Negro majority of 76,230 an excess of the Negro population over the white of more than double what existed in Louisiana and quadruple that of Mississippi.

In 1843, for the better controlling of this “best substratum of population in the world” [67] only five years after its discovery as such, the following Act was passed by the General Assembly of South Carolina:

[Pg 58]

For whites, it was not apparently necessary to raise the grade of the offense from that of a misdemeanor. But if the above Act was not a sufficient vindication of the opposition of Barnwell, Paul Hamilton, Alston and Hayne to the continued increase of the Negro population of South Carolina, Calhoun, himself, furnished something of an argument against the “best substratum” by his declaration only nine years after its discovery:

If this is a true picture of conditions in 1847, as black as we may consider the Abolitionists of that day, one thing is evident, and that is, that without such a mass of “the best substratum of population” to work upon, the Abolitionists could not possibly have effected what Calhoun feared: therefore, the statesmanship of William Smith, McDuffie, and Calhoun, which had favored and assisted in the gathering of it, to that extent was inferior to the statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Barnwell, Alston and [Pg 59] Hayne which had attempted to arrest the growth. But that was not apparent to the South in 1850, and it is doubtful whether it would be very generally admitted even today; for interest will color opinion and Negro cheap labor is still the first consideration to many people in the South, just as European pauper labor is to many in the North. Both North and South can see clearly the mote in their brother’s eye; but not the beam in their own eye.

By the census of 1850, the population of the 33 States, which constituted the Union, summed up 22,969,603 persons, divided as follows: In the 19 Free States 13,230,231 whites; 213,346 free persons of color; 2,536 slaves. In the 14 Slave States there were: 6,113,068 whites; 210,085 free persons of color; 3,200,590 slaves. That meant that the South had invested in that species of property interest $1,280,200,000. By money values and population, at that time, that was an immense sum.

The Democratic Review, in this same year, published an article which was republished in the Charleston Mercury , and commended by that paper. This article sets forth certain distinct claims of considerable interest:

First that:

Figures were also introduced to show that the multiplication of free blacks in the Slave States was increasing upon the proportion of slaves and that it was observable that they did not emigrate from the Slave States, where it was claimed they must in time supplant the slaves as servants; and the laws of Ohio were pointed to as indicating an opposition, not to slavery, but to the presence of the Negro, which it claimed, had greatly retarded emancipation. In these claims truth was mingled with error.

As to the indisposition of the people of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, to admit any class of colored persons to enter as residents, there can be no doubt up to this date, although indications of a change of sentiment were appearing. The repeal of the Black Laws of Ohio was one illustration. With 1,955,059 whites to only 25,279 colored persons, the harsh provisions, which closed the mouths of these unfortunates when contending with the whites, in so called courts of justice, it was conceded by the whites of Ohio, could be safely done away with, and they had been repealed in 1848. It may also have been true that the free blacks did not emigrate from the Slave States; but that in that region they were gaining upon the slaves, and that there was any reasonable possibility of their supplanting them as servants, does hot seem to be borne out by examination of the census.

[Pg 61]

The Democratic Review claims that, while in 1800 there were in the Slave States 61,441 free persons of color to 73,100 in the Free States, that by 1830 the proportions were 182,070 in the Slave States to 137,525 in the Free States, a proportion raised by 1840 to 215,568 to 172,509. But this seems inexact. By the census of 1800 there were in the Slave States 52,188 free persons of color, to 55,464 in the Free States, and by 1830 the number in the Slave States had, it is true, surpassed the number in the Free States, such being respectively 160,063 to 153,384. But whether it was in consequence of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, or the Abolition ebullition of 1835, by 1840 there was a change in progress, the proportion being in that year 190,285 in the Slave States to 187,647 in the Free States, which, as has before been shown, by 1850 had changed to 210,085 in the Slave States to 213,346 in the Free States.

At the same time it could be noted that while the Negroes in the United States had increased by more than 28 per cent since 1840, the freedmen had increased by less than 13 per cent in the same time.

In the Free States of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut the free colored population had decreased by 1,402. In the Slave States of Louisiana and Mississippi it had decreased by 8,174, and that State in the South which held more than one-fourth of the whole number in the Southern States, Virginia, had appropriated $30,000 a year for their removal. [71]

[Pg 62]

The South was apparently, therefore, committed to the institution of African Slavery, and in defense of it some of its champions were wild enough to waive the question of the inferiority of the Negro race and contend, “that slavery, whether of black or white, is a normal, proper institution in society.” [72]

The Richmond, Va., Inquirer , The Muscogee, Ala., Herald , The New Orleans, La., Delta and the Charleston, S. C., Standard , are all quoted by an English writer, whose work appeared in print about 1855. [73] The three first as sustaining the above extraordinary claim; while the fourth called for a revival of the Slave Trade.

Even if correctly quoted the comments of these papers do not establish the prevailing sentiment in the South at that time; for the publication at Charleston and reception of Dr. John Bachman’s work on the “Unity of the Human Race” would to some extent constitute an opinion to the contrary.

But that the South was positively, unreservedly, and even aggressively committed to the institution of African Slavery is indisputable.

It had not been so always. The change began in 1833, when the Charleston Mercury declared—“The institution of slavery is not an evil but a benefit.” That paper had upon that occasion admitted that in the past the South had entertained a view to the contrary; but asserted in 1833, that even in Virginia and North Carolina:

[Pg 63]

“The great mass of the South sanction no such admission, that Southern Slavery is an evil to be deprecated.” [74]

And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds upon, in 1855, The Richmond Examiner was quoted as declaring:

Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances as extravagant.

In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited:

[Pg 64]

How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a bargain between the Northern and Southern States.”

This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven States participating.

The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to decide between the policy of Hayne, based [Pg 65] upon the effort to bind together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union.

To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas through Georgia.

To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only reply with the vague allusion to:

In this declaration there is unmistakably intense feeling for the Union; but also some indecision; for what could have been a more practical application of Calhoun’s teaching than Rhett’s amendment to Slade’s bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? That was a resolution upon which some strong action could be erected. Twelve years had passed, nothing had been done, and now came the resolution of the Vermont Legislature. In the first shock which it gave him, Calhoun was unjust to his own following. He said:

A month later he reviewed the political situation in a most elaborate and searching analysis, his last great speech, read for him by Senator Mason, of Virginia. “How Can the Union be Preserved?” In endeavoring to give an “answer to this great question,” he asserted that the discontent of the South was due to the fact that political power had been taken from that section and transferred to the North, not through natural causes, but by legislation which could be classed under three heads, the first of which was exclusion from common territory; second a system of revenue under which an undue portion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the South, and the proceeds appropriated to the North; third a system of measures changing the original character of the government. The result, he claimed, had been a change from a Constitutional Federal Republic to the despotism of a numerical majority in which a question of vital importance to the minority was threatened:

Whether right or wrong, the first of these claims had been settled by the Missouri Compromise in [Pg 67] 1820, which the South had acquiesced in. The second Calhoun, himself, had undertaken to right in 1832, and if there had been a failure it was due in some measure to his inability to diagnose with sufficient accuracy the situation at that time.

Along two lines from 1827 there had proceeded the effort of the South to recover her power and increase her population; to restore her waning political influence and rebuild her commercial strength. One was through revision of the tariff, the other through internal improvement by means of railroad development. The first, despite all the interest it attracted and the splendid forensic display it gave rise to, not only was a lamentable failure in its curative effect, but very probably added somewhat to the difficulties which hampered the other. Now with regard to the first, Calhoun had mapped out the plan, and undertook the responsibility through the nullification project, with which he effected the relegation of Hayne to the post of Governor of the State of South Carolina from the United States Senate, to which he, himself, repaired with almost ambassadorial powers. The effect of Nullification on the Tariff should be analysed before considering the railroad campaign, with which Calhoun could not refrain from interfering, with results most disappointing to those he induced to accept his view and abandon that of his faithful friend and quondam supporter, made by the Knoxville Convention of 1836, much more thoroughly the commercial leader of the South than Calhoun had ever been made its political guide.

[Pg 68]

Mr. John B. Cleveland says in his pamphlet on the “Controversy between John C. Calhoun and Robert Y. Hayne:

Upon many questions he could change and did change his views, but these changes all seem to have proceeded from a certain development of the man himself, not from any contact with others. So confident was he of his own powers that he could never profit by the realization of his mistakes. If in one of the greatest eulogies ever delivered by a great follower over a great leader, it could be asserted that:

a critical investigation of Calhoun’s failure in the revision of the tariff may not be without instruction; for it was for the purpose of securing a proper framing of such that Nullification was launched. Later we may consider the railroad.

[Pg 69]

The Nullification episode has been generally treated as a struggle between Jackson and Calhoun. In its outward manifestations it was a contest between the President and the State of South Carolina; but in the settlement it really was a struggle between Calhoun and Clay.

The position of Henry Clay, in 1833, was one to test to the utmost the powers of that great politician. In the preceding year he had sternly refused Hayne’s amendment to his tariff bill, enacting his own view coupled with a threat of enforcement. He had, however, seen his Act nullified by the State of South Carolina, under the governorship of Hayne, and himself beaten overwhelmingly for the presidency by Jackson, who, while threatening coercion in South Carolina, had nevertheless, made Hayne’s amendment to the tariff the basis of his own recommendation on that subject to Congress. A bill had been introduced in the House, to restore the duties to the scale of 1816. What could Clay do to redeem himself and his cause? Back to the Senate, in Hayne’s vacant seat, was Clay’s “old companion at arms with a practical power of attorney from the recalcitrant State.” [82]

Clay at once entered into negotiations with Calhoun himself, introducing a bill in the Senate, to the two principles of which, viz., “that time should be given the manufacturers and that an ad valorem duty should be provided for”, Calhoun assented [Pg 70] and the bill was referred to a select committee consisting of: Clay, Clayton, Calhoun, Grundy, Webster, Rives, and Dallas.

Then up came the Revenue Collection Bill, supported by thirty-two Senators, and passed with only seven besides Calhoun opposing, and the great politician from Kentucky had Calhoun safely tangled in his net. Against the protest of the latter, he amended his tariff bill with a provision that in the valuation of imported articles, “the valuation should be at the port in which the goods were imported.” Calhoun argued that this would be a great injustice to the South, as the price of goods being cheaper in the Northern than in the Southern cities, a home valuation would give the former a preference. [83] But that was exactly what Clay had proposed, and was determined to do, and although Webster and Silsbee of Massachusetts, Hill of New Hampshire, Dallas of Pennsylvania and Kane and Benton of Missouri came to Calhoun’s support, Calhoun fearing evidently to wreck his compromise with Clay, yielded this vital point. To consider all that was involved in the surrender of Calhoun, it will be necessary to revert to the past and to consider some political views emanating from the mightiest intellect South Carolina ever produced.

Prior to the framing of the Constitution of the United States and subsequent to the peace between Great Britain and the States, the value of the imports from Great Britain to America had exceeded the value of the exports from America to Great Britain [Pg 71] to such an amount as to be nearly three times as great; while the commerce between the two countries was very nearly ten times as great as that between the States and the rest of the world. This condition had produced anything but prosperity for America.

The statesman who had contributed most to the framing of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney, in his effort to secure its ratification by his own State, had made among other things this remarkable statement:

Thirty years later he warned Congress along similar lines, “that a country mainly agricultural and without mines of the precious metals, could not have its imports greatly in excess of its exports, without financial disaster.” [85]

From the time of the Union to the first embargo and the war of 1812, the immense preponderance of the value of imports had been greatly reduced from nearly treble to an excess of but twenty-five per cent; but in the two years which followed the peace they had increased to almost double the value of the exports. Under Lowndes’s tariff of 1816 they again fell to an excess of only about twenty per cent by 1821. [86]

[Pg 72]

From that period until the Compromise of 1833, they still further fell to an excess of about eight per cent; the value of the exports for these twelve years being $934,287,320, and that of the imports $1,007,853,830, a total excess of value for imports in the twelve years amounting to $73,566,502.

Considering the States through which this commerce moved, we find, with regard to Massachusetts, for this period, the value of exports, $125,378,462; imports, $182,861,825. Pennsylvania, exports, $86,062,157; imports, $139,891,027. Maryland, exports, $53,048,043; imports, $56,860,616. New York, exports, $267,371,444; imports, $473,671,382. An excess of imports at Northern ports of the value of $321,000,000.

Now taking the Southern States for the same period, we find Virginia, exports, $47,535,525; imports, $7,093,499. South Carolina, exports, $93,018,377; imports, $20,625,049. Georgia, exports, $56,167,842; imports $5,828,581. Alabama, exports, $14,897,425; imports, $1,631,343. Louisiana, exports, $138,670,081; imports, $68,321,568. An excess of exports amounting to $247,000,000. [87]

While, therefore, a great amount of money from the South may have been expended for Northern manufactures, a great deal also went out for importation of goods through Northern markets.

The revision of the tariff was to correct both wrongs.

But the result was simply that in a period half as long, six years, the excess of the value of imports [Pg 73] over exports for the whole country doubled and this without any appreciable gain in the exports of Virginia and but a slight gain, considering the agitation, for South Carolina; or totally a condition which, with even the greater gain of Georgia, still left the South Atlantic States in both import and export trade far behind the Gulf States, more rapidly developing, and fed by the great waterway of the Mississippi.

But it was when taking up for consideration the condition of the Northern States after 1833 that the absolute ineffectiveness of the revision of the tariff, at that time, to cure the wrongs of trade was most glaringly exhibited. Even with a declining export, Massachusetts, in the six years brought in goods to the amount of the value she had imported in the previous twelve, and with those of Maryland, exceeded those of the Gulf ports. The trade of Pennsylvania was indeed crippled. But while the exports of New York fell behind those of Louisiana, in the value of import goods in the six years, the importation of the previous twelve were exceeded. The revision of the tariff in 1833 had not only not got at the root of the trouble, it had apparently aggravated it; for it had while injuring Pennsylvania, stimulated Massachusetts, New York and Maryland to make on importation what they had lost on manufactures; while, in place of the money so expended remaining in circulation in the United States, a great volume of it must have gone abroad. The panic of 1837, which came in the spring, and which followed the greatest of New York’s importations, [Pg 74] a figure not attained again in fourteen years of increasing population, had its origin in New York. It did much to cramp the Southern railroad movement of that date; but neither it nor the panic of 1839 did as much to ham-string Southern effort as the divided councils and unfortunate rivalries of South Carolina and Georgia and Hayne and Calhoun.

It might have been unreasonable to have expected Georgians to have assisted a road to the West to pass through North Carolina from Charleston, to the neglect of their own State, and they had every right to start their “rival system,” as an apologist styles it; but for South Carolinians to abandon what was under way in their own State backed by North Carolina and Tennessee, however weakly, and to pour their money into Georgia, when at the very threshold there was refusal to permit the bridging of the Savannah river for them, was the very extremity of folly, no matter by whom advocated, and for writers of history to characterize as a bubble and fiasco the great scheme launched by the Knoxville Convention in 1836, is simply to indicate a lack of understanding of all that was involved in that undertaking, and to resolutely shut eyes to the nature of the obstructions which blocked its progress at the time it was most essential to push it most determinedly.

As it was by the railroads that the Slavery Question was eventually settled, it is interesting to note that the first intelligent move towards railroad construction in the United States was contemporaneous [Pg 75] with the great speech of Robert Y. Hayne in the United States Senate in 1827 on the Negro Question. Some evidence has been adduced to indicate the probability of his responsibility for the first suggestion of a railroad to be operated by steam power, in the United States, in 1821 to run from Charleston to Augusta, with a fork to Columbia. [88] While Hayne may have been this early suggester, it is quite possible and not all improbable that the suggester, “H”, might have been Elias Horry. But six years later, when the movement took definite shape, Hayne in the United States Senate made an utterance, which may be considered as, at that time, representing the view of his section concerning the Negro Question, viz., that:

“Time and patience,” he had then contended, were alone necessary to solve the Negro Problem. But Nullification in 1832 and the Abolition ebullition of 1835 had, however, later affected the sections profoundly and from this latter date the political history of the Republic depended more and more upon the influences which could be brought to bear upon the West by the South and the North, and upon the South and the North by the West. Every influence which contributed to homogeniety was an [Pg 76] influence towards peaceful development. That the Hayne of 1835 was, ipsissimus verbis , the Hayne of 1827 cannot be claimed; but to no statesman in the Union was the necessity more apparent for the promotion of this homogeneity than to him to whom had been confided by the representatives of nine States the stupendous task of pushing the great Western railroad from Charleston to Cincinnati, the front door of the great West for “free social and commercial intercourse,” [90] with:

The “rival system,” in favor of which Calhoun abandoned Hayne’s railroad in 1838, was not in all probability originally designed for but eventually became the vehicle of a scheme of political conquest, which aimed at an approach to the back door of the West through the new State of Arkansas. This statement may be received with impatience, but examination will show its truth.

The Charleston and Hamburg Railroad was chartered in 1828, and by 1831 was making fair progress. There must have been in contemplation at that date, the original plan of the fork to Columbia, and a continuation West, through North Carolina and Tennessee; for the first projector in Georgia, James A. Merriwether, mentions it in a letter to Elias Horry [Pg 77] of date June 8th, 1831. [92] In answer Elias Horry advises him distinctly that the company desires “the completion of a railroad, if possible, by way of the Saluda Gap,” but sees the importance of the one across Georgia, and advises that connection be made with Savannah, which should reap some of the advantages which she is entitled to. [93]

In the very year in which Calhoun was advising the people:—

in his report on the completion of the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad in 1833, Elias Horry alludes to the “Western and Atlantic Railroad Convention” held in Asheville, North Carolina, September 3rd, 1832, for a “Railroad up the French Broad River,” at which were pointed out the many and great advantages that would be produced ... not less in a political than in a commercial point of view, so indissolubly connecting the Southern and Western interests, strengthening the bonds of union and thereby perpetuating all the blessings of our valuable institutions. [95]

But with the death of Horry in 1834, the project seems to have slumbered until, in October, 1835, a well thought out statement, emanating from a group [Pg 78] of citizens of Ohio, one of whom was General Harrison, brought the matter up again, [96] and on July 4th, 1836, delegates from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, at Knoxville, launched the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to connect the West and South. Hayne became President of the company and Calhoun a Director. From the outset, however, Calhoun was a continually disturbing element. He was never able to shake off the view that railroads, if not adjuncts to water courses, would be failures. It was a natural view in his day, if it was an ignorant one, and one honestly held; but it was injurious to the enterprise.

His known distrust of the route through North Carolina chilled the enthusiasm of the people of North Carolina. [97] He deserted the South Carolina Company at the most critical time, when the prospects of the rival enterprise through Georgia seemed fairest. His powerful obstructive force arrested the Carolina road at Columbia, by a declaration pertinaciously sought to be made in advance that it should not go further [98] and by so doing diverted to the “rival system” in Georgia, funds in South Carolina which most materially aided in preserving the Georgia venture from utter failure, when it had collapsed, with unaccounted funds, to the extent of $2,602,457,26; [99] while his sadly triumphant designation of Hayne’s road as an ended “humbug,” one [Pg 79] year after Hayne’s death, when it was at last determined that it should not go beyond Columbia, has been accepted at its face value by those more inclined to believe it, than to take the trouble to examine the facts.

Yet Calhoun, himself, although he survived Hayne eleven years, died before the “rival system” was assured; and nine years after his own death, when, as yet, no great benefits to South Carolina trade had accrued from the construction of the Georgia road, a vigorous attempt was made to resurrect the French Broad route, with a declaration that only the gap from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Paint Rock, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, remained to be closed, C. G. Memminger, in opposing the resurrection of the L. C. & C. R. R., made the statement concerning it, that “it had been the mother of all our interior railroads, and had not cost the State a dollar of her money.” [100]

If such a statement could be made in 1858 by one who, while he had materially assisted it up to 1839, had then opposed it, it may be well to consider how the scheme was regarded in Europe, at the date at which Mr. Memminger led the movement for the stopping it at Columbia, evidently so as to concentrate all effort on the route through Georgia.

In the work of Alexander Trotter, of London, England, published in 1839, appears three allusions to Hayne’s Western road. One in the general discussion of conditions in the United States at large; one in the chapter treating of the State of South [Pg 80] Carolina; and one in that discussing Ohio. The first is as follows:

In that portion of his work which treats of South Carolina, Mr. Trotter enters more particularly into the plan of the connection:

Alluding to the Georgia route, he indicates the first as likely the route to be decided upon finally, and in the remarkably accurate map, for that date, shows that the line through North Carolina, is shorter by something like a fifth of the distance and that “the success of the South Carolina Railroad holds out a fair prospect for that of the greater work” as it—

Georgia had started its system from a point afterwards becoming Atlanta, towards which two roads were pointing, one from Augusta about due west [Pg 82] and another from Savannah northwest to Macon, from which by an inclination north it moved towards the same point.

Hayne’s review of the commercial situation in the spring of 1838 indicated how clearly he grasped the fact that the revision of the tariff had failed to cure the conditions under which the South labored; for exporting more than a sixth of the total exports of the country, the three States of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia imported less than one fortieth. If the South could only have been made to see it before the opportunity passed. His comment put it fairly:

[Pg 83]

But Kentucky and Tennessee did not constitute all that the railroad to Cincinnati led to. The description given by the English student of American affairs in 1839, shows what Ohio was at that date:

It was from Ohio in 1835 that the movement had come headed by General Harrison, for railroad connection [Pg 84] with South Carolina. We have discussed commercial conditions. What of political? Professor Paxson says:

But in 1835 Calhoun had been convinced that the movement of population and industry was towards Arkansas, [107] and that consequently “we should look much further West than Cincinnati or Lexington”. [108] This he announced in his letter to Hayne resigning from his position as one of the directors of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad in 1838.

On what did he base the view? The Census figures of 1830 as compared with those of 1820 indicated that the increase of population of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, were all greater than the increase in Arkansas, even if the increase of Ohio’s 581,295 to 937,903 was not as great a percentage of increase as that of Arkansas from 14,314, to 33,388 in the same period. Nevertheless at the time when the road was determined to be stopped at Columbia, [Pg 85] South Carolina, in favor of the movement to be worked out through Georgia to Arkansas, the white population of Ohio was 1,502,122, the colored 17,345. At the same date the white population of Arkansas was 77,174, the colored 20,865. If it be claimed that north of Arkansas was Missouri with a white population of 323,888 and a colored population of 61,388; yet, if we took the three States just north of Kentucky and across the Ohio River and the State of Michigan just beyond, we will know that the region which held 2,864,634 whites and 29,483 colored was abandoned to build to a region inhabited by 401,662 whites and 82,253 colored persons. Was this a reasonable commercial movement? If it was not, what was it? An attempt will be made to answer these two questions in the two following chapters, which attempt should open with some description of railroad movement in the North and West.

[Pg 86]

Realizing what a great benefit the Erie Canal had been to New York, by 1834, Pennsylvania had connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by canals, the greater part of which had been completed by 1832; [109] but with the revision of the tariff of 1833, so injurious to her, as has been shown, she bent every effort to supplement her waterways with railroads, and, by 1835, there were some 200 miles of railroads in the State. [110] The bulk of these it is true were coal roads, but by 1839, a railroad had been completed from Philadelphia to Columbia (Pa.) 82 miles in length, and there was in process of construction 41¾ miles additional in a southwestwardly direction to Gettysburg. [111] Philadelphia also had a railroad connection with New York to the North and Baltimore to the South.

In New York by 1836, railroad communication between Albany and Utica was open for traffic, [112] and work was being pushed on the Erie railroad, starting from lower down on the Hudson towards Lake Erie.

In Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio, begun about the same time as the Charleston and Hamburg, but, not as soon used for steam power operation, had by 1834 reached Harper’s Ferry, 82 miles. [113] There it connected by a viaduct over the Potomac River, with the Winchester Railroad, which by 1839, ran down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia [Pg 87] for 30 miles. A branch to Washington, some 33 miles in length, connected with the Richmond and Potomac Railroad [114] 70 miles in length, opened for traffic in 1836. [115] From Richmond, south, ran the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, in process of construction, and from Petersburg to Blakely, in North Carolina, complete, by 1839, to Wilmington by 1840. [116]

By 1842 the New York Central reached Buffalo, while, at the same time, Boston linked up with Albany.

The above vindicates the warning which Hayne issued to the people of South Carolina in 1835, upon the call from Ohio for Southern railroad connection, viz., that “New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore were moving for what was offered Charleston.” [117] In 1838 he declared to the people of Charleston:

To the people of South Carolina he said:

[Pg 88]

Six months later, when striving to induce Calhoun to reconsider his announced resignation from the Directorship of the L. C. & C. Co., he admitted:

But he also warned him, with true prophetic power, that cooperation with those he was deserting was: “the only plan, be assured, by which ever your views can be affected.” [120] Set and hardened in his views, Calhoun refused to be influenced by any argument, threw his influence against the plan, and considered the stopping of Hayne’s road at Columbia, one year after Hayne’s death, a personal triumph. [121] He thus destroyed the plan of a connection with Cincinnati, to which from the outset he had been opposed, although in veiled phrases, [122] on account of his determination to secure the combination of political and commercial benefits, which he was convinced must flow from a railroad across Tennessee to Arkansas. It is true that at the time of his resignation from the Carolina enterprise, 2000 men were at work on the line from Atlanta to Chattanooga, and expectation keen that by the fall of 1839, one hundred of the 138 miles would be finished; but without a precise statement of account to indicate how the expenditure of $2,602,457.26 had been incurred, [123] this work was suspended in 1841, without even the laying of the iron; which suspension stopped as well the Georgia and the Georgia Central [Pg 89] with 88 and 95 miles respectively from Augusta and Savannah, with some sixty miles still intervening between their most extended work and the southern point in this link of their chain to the West. It also stopped work from Nashville down towards the Northern point at Chattanooga. The suspension occurred just two years after the death of Hayne, and but one after the persistent resolve to stop work on the South Carolina Road at Columbia and dissolve the relations between it and Tennessee and North Carolina had been affected. To those who had effected this disastrous result it, therefore, became absolutely essential to push the Georgia road on to completion; which was effected by 1845.

“New subscriptions from Charleston and Augusta to the stock of the company, it seems, were largely responsible for the hastening of the road to completion”; [124] but what portion of the cost, $3,328,594, was borne by the contributors from South Carolina does not clearly appear. What is known, however, is that General Gadsden, who owed his elevation to the presidency of the South Carolina Railroad to the powerful assistance of Calhoun, contemporaneously with the completion of the Georgia Railroad in 1845, wrote to Calhoun urging him to attend the railroad convention to be held at Memphis the same year, declaring in his letter:

[Pg 90]

From 1836 to 1838, Calhoun was a director in the South Carolina enterprise, Gadsden its most inveterate foe. [126]

F. H. Elmore was more definite in his endorsement of the road to Memphis. He wrote Calhoun:

Of course it was not only possible, but not at all improbable, that in pressing the original route along the line from Charleston to Cincinnati, free labor might have injured the institution of slavery in South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, even more than familiarity with it might have softened the feelings of the inhabitants of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois towards slavery. But whichever way it worked, it must have knit more firmly together the sections, by the identity of thought, which would have made itself felt with closer commercial intercourse. What Elmore hoped to sustain in 1845, Conner saw beginning to crumble in 1849, for he writes Calhoun at that date:

In the light of this letter in 1849, we may well ponder what might not have been accomplished for peace had not what might have become a great artery of trade between Cincinnati and Charleston been so recklessly cut in 1840. It is hardly possible to doubt, that in the cutting, commercial conditions were made absolutely subservient to political in the cultivated growth concerning the Institution in which the disciples were continually forging ahead of the masters and teachers.

In 1846 Calhoun had suggested, to J. H. Hammond, the propriety of eulogizing Rev. Henry Bascomb for his vindication of the South on the occasion of the division of the Methodists, and Hammond had replied at some length with a declination. Calhoun’s rejoinder is of some interest:

Now if we go back twenty years from this expression of Calhoun’s, we will be within one year of the date of Hayne’s great speech in the United States Senate of 1827. In the twenty years, as well as can be arrived at, the whites had increased to the extent of about fifty per cent, the Negroes to the extent of about sixty per cent. Apparently he had expected too much. The increase rate of the whites had not been as great as that of the Negroes, no matter what were the causes, and with the increase, the estimate of the Institution increased. In the light of these facts it is scarcely surprising that in 1848, although railroads from Columbia to two points on the North Carolina line, were again under way, and an application for a charter for a third, along Hayne’s route to Spartanburg, pending, the City of Charleston was induced to give $500,000 to complete the railroad from Nashville to Chattanooga, in spite of the protest [130] of some of the citizens of Charleston, that it was not right to use corporate funds for work outside of the State, and even if it was, it was not expedient to do so, as long as Augusta refused, as she was then refusing, to permit a bridge to be built across the Savannah [Pg 93] River at the terminus of the Hamburg road, by which alone the South Carolina Railroad could connect with the Georgia system.

Upon Calhoun’s return from the trip to the West which had been urged upon him by the president of the South Carolina Railroad, Gadsden, he expressed himself to his son-in-law, Clemson, as satisfied with his reception in Memphis and elsewhere; but he could hardly have been pleased at the tone taken by Gadsden very shortly after with regard to the tariff.

Mention has previously been made with regard to what is herein considered Calhoun’s failure in 1833 to cope successfully with Clay; but the very slight gains then secured were wiped out in a new tariff in 1842. In 1846, being free from the terrific responsibilities and overshadowing dangers of Nullification, Calhoun secured legislation, which seems in its workings to have balanced very satisfactorily the imports and exports of the country, being apparently passed upon the sound principles of Lowndes’s legislation. But the effort drew from Gadsden’s swollen greatness, this insolent characterization of the main creator of it:

[Pg 94]

The conclusion must have been galling, and it was followed in 1847 with another letter in which, with professions of devotion, it was intimated that General Taylor’s candidacy for the Presidency would be a serious impediment to the only kind of candidacy Calhoun could undertake. Whether Mr. Gadsden received the early answer he requested on the ground “that the concert of action may be certain to secure the triumph of one, who will not court our influence to deceive,” [132] does not appear; but the next year there was a strong movement, led by George A. Trenholm of Charleston, to oust Gadsden from the presidency of the railroad, and in the last two years of his life, Calhoun’s intimacy with Gadsden is not evidenced by any correspondence. Rather it was upon Hammond that he leant more and more and it was to him that he addressed the last letter written to any one beyond the immediate circle of his own hearthstone.

To Hammond the dying statesman turned with a confidence calculated to inspire the latter’s belief in himself:

[Pg 95]

The convention was the Nashville Convention of 1850, which met a few months after Calhoun’s death. Hammond and many others hoped to have had Calhoun’s advice at it, and possibly the suggestion for a new Constitution framed by Calhoun. They believed emancipation was impending, and that with it the South would be reduced to the condition of Hayti. Hammond had declared to Calhoun:

The brilliant follower had passed quite beyond his leader. The orator who eight years later defiantly declared in the United States Senate, “Cotton is King,” tersely states in this letter his political creed, viz., that:

His conclusion was: “If leaders will only lead, neither they nor we have anything to fear.”

[Pg 96]

Property is said to be proverbially timid, and the powers of finance to dread war and its confusion; but Hammond’s conclusion was identical with that if the greatest banker of Charleston, of that day, who in the previous year had informed Calhoun after an extended journey, that the South was “ready to act.” [136]

With Calhoun’s death, however, the party of action was without any recognized head. There was no South Carolinian, who could in 1850 take his place without question, and accordingly by 1852, the leadership of the South passed to Georgia from South Carolina, and to some extent it did so pass from and through the blind efforts of the Titan of South Carolina to mould all things to his will; for it was through Calhoun to a considerable extent, that Georgia had secured and waxed fat upon the great railroad up into Tennessee and to the West. As soon as the Western and Atlantic, from Atlanta, reached Chattanooga, meeting there in 1851, the road from Nashville, which ran some 35 miles from Chattanooga towards the West, another subscription was secured from Charleston, [137] for a road thence to that point on the Mississippi river opposite Arkansas, although, in this instance, with some glimmer of sense, it was conditioned upon the removal of the obstruction caused by the city of Augusta’s refusal to permit a bridge from the South Carolina shore across the Savannah river, by which alone connection with the railroad beyond could be made from South Carolina. But it was only, when, in despair of [Pg 97] accomplishing this bridging of the Savannah river in 1852, [138] $500,000 was given to aid in pushing the South Carolina road on from Anderson, S. C., to Knoxville, Tennessee, that then, by purchase from Augusta, the right to bridge the Savannah river and connect with the Georgia Railroad was obtained; so that, in the end, some hundred or more miles of railroad had to be built beyond Columbia in South Carolina, merely to secure the connection with the Georgia road in 1853, for which Hayne’s great road had been stopped at Columbia in 1840. But by 1853, the futility of any hope of great benefit to South Carolina trade from the Georgia connection having possessed the minds of those directing affairs in South Carolina, $500,000 from Charleston and $1,000,000 [139] from the State was granted to promote the second of the two routes with which Calhoun had obstructed the French Broad Railway from its inception. For five years, with repeated disasters, the construction of this second string to the bow of Calhoun, was energetically pushed, with the vain hope of securing for South Carolina, at that late day, what had been thrown away eighteen years earlier in blind obedience to a great man’s imperious dictation. And it was in asking for an additional $1,000,000 from the State and resisting the arguments concerning the resurrection of the French Broad route that Mr. Memminger, later Secretary of the Treasury of Confederate States, declared of Hayne’s railroad:

[Pg 98]

If there was anything which could have been said to have further accentuated the fatal folly of the abandonment of this great enterprise in favor of the attempted junction with the Georgia roads in 1840 and a route to Arkansas instead of Ohio, it was epitomized unconsciously by the same speaker, Mr. Memminger, at the same time in 1858, in the same speech, from which the above extract was taken:

One word more with regard to the cost of this road, which if it had not been stopped at Columbia, might possibly have prevented the war between the States. In the three years from 1836 to 1839 the old Hamburg Railroad, run down and out of condition, had been purchased and put into such order as to raise the receipts from it fifty per cent, by 1839. Seventeen miles had been built on the fork to Columbia from Branchville, with preparations so well forward that to the $1,858,772 spent on the 153 miles, $584,304 additional, it was estimated, would enable the remaining 48 to be completed in a year to Columbia, with about $1,300,000 additional to be spent to reach the North Carolina line by 1846, when the total expenditure of the road [Pg 99] from Charleston to Augusta and from Branchville through Columbia to the North Carolina line via Spartanburg, would have reached $3,743,076. At that point $1,102,600 pledged by North Carolina and Tennessee would have been obtained, which with the work done and prepared for was all lost by the stoppage at Columbia. Yet nine years after Hayne’s death, 1848, the report of the president of the South Carolina Railroad, James Gadsden, shows $5,546,735.48 [142] spent in securing only an additional 51 miles of roadway.

[Pg 100]

The school of Georgia politicians in 1852 did not favor Secession. Their objection to it was that it would so reduce the value of slaves as to force the owners to emancipate them themselves; while, with the preservation of the Union, they believed they could force slavery to the Pacific.

Certainly Georgia was in many respects amply fitted to lead. By the census of 1850 it was disclosed that in the value of her personal property, returned for taxation, she led the Union with $213,499,486. Twelve million more than the old and wealthy State of Massachusetts, which returned $201,976,892. South Carolina came third with $178,130,217. Alabama fourth with $162,463,700. New York fifth with $150,719,379. [143]

In the value of their real estate, which could not be as well concealed as their personal property, the Northern States stood out richer, so that in her revenue, Georgia stood not higher than seventh, among the States of the Union; but, when revenue, expenditure and debt were considered together, no State in the Union was apparently in such an eminently sound and healthy condition; for, with her surplus, she could have extinguished her debt in five years.

Of course that which made the personal property returned for taxation by the residents of the Southern States, stand out so greatly in excess of that of the richer States of the North was the fact that the [Pg 101] bulk of it was in slaves. But that fact reveals why the institution of slavery had such a hold upon the South, when not more than ten per cent of its inhabitants were slave holders. If the statesmen and politicians who supported and defended it demanded “a guarantee for property fairly acquired,” that property bore the bulk of the tax. That was not the condition of the North, and the vice of the more advanced civilization of that section was that, by every device which could be conceived, more and more the burden of taxation was thrown upon the poor. [144]

While not to the swollen condition that is apparent today, the North was, for thirty years and more prior to the War between the States, the land of the capitalist, the abode of American capital.

How far the determination of Northern capital to keep the South financially tributary to it was responsible for the rapid railroad development of the North and West, it will require much investigation to disclose. Whether, with a higher and nobler personnel among its leaders and greater regard for the toiling masses of its white population, it could have prepared the way so thoroughly for the conquest of the South is doubtful; but having been stricken a blow, even if a weak one, by the tariff of 1833, with a home valuation it had parried the blow and sustained itself on the increased import trade until it could enact the tariff of 1842; and when that was replaced by Calhoun’s tariff of 1846, [Pg 102] marshalling its industrial dependents, it reached out with splendid energy, with one hand grasping the South and the other the West and bound them both to its girdle with bands of steel.

We have seen what was attempted in the South in the political commercial effort to stretch from the Atlantic to Arkansas, after the abandonment of the movement to Cincinnati in 1840. Now reverting to the West, we find that in Ohio, part of the Cincinnati, Sandusky and Cleveland Railroad was built in 1837; but it was not until 1848 that it was completed. [145]

In Kentucky, of the 97 miles projected, by 1839, there were in operation from Lexington to Frankfort, on one end, 28 miles; from Louisville to Portland on the other end, 3 miles. [146] But within nine years from the time at which the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad was stopped at Columbia, a railroad extended from Detroit across lower Michigan, and by 1851, Cleveland and Pittsburgh were connected by rail; while a second line from Toledo below Detroit, paralleled the road from Detroit to the lower end of Lake Michigan. By 1853, down from Lake Michigan to the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, a line continued these two from Toledo and Detroit; while from Cleveland a network of roads reached Indianapolis, sending out from that city a line West to Terre Haute and one North to Lake Michigan. By 1857 this had become a perfect mesh of railroads, crossing [Pg 103] and recrossing Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and reaching up into Wisconsin, while three constituent roads stretched across from the North Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River opposite Missouri.

The situation with regard to population was about as follows at this period: The three States mentioned above contained about 4,500,000 white inhabitants, which the population of Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa raised to about 6,000,000. Behind them were banked some 11,000,000 whites in New York, Pennsylvania and New England.

Meanwhile, to the Nashville Convention of 1850, South Carolina had sent a representative, who might have been considered a leaf from her great past, Langdon Cheves and against the independent secession of South Carolina, he strove successfully.

Mr. G. M. Pinckney, the most sympathetic of all Calhoun’s biographers, thus sums up the situation in 1850:

Professor Paxson’s view of the situation for the same time seems somewhat in accord with the above:

[Pg 104]

Such a coincidence of view in such widely separated quarters is entitled to the highest respect; but it is not the view entertained by the writer of this work, to whom 1850 seems to have been too late to affect the situation favorably for secession, even if Calhoun had survived; for, judged by his career, it is exceedingly doubtful if he would have forced matters to a head. It would not have been in accord with his past. He was a great parliamentarian and an even greater debater; but all through his career his hand had been forced. He was never quite ready for the situation as it developed. It may have been greatly to his credit and consistent with his views; but he always consulted and pondered. His political methods so disclose him. McDuffie forced his hand with regard to Nullification. Clay forced his hand with regard to the tariff of 1833. For Rhett’s resolution of 1838, he was not ready, although that was the logical time and the logical course.

Those who feel, that for this great Republic a world task was and is reserved, may rejoice that no effort to secede was moved in 1838, but that does not effect the question of its possible success had it been attempted. Conditions in South Carolina were very much confused by Calhoun’s death. To supply [Pg 105] his place in the United States Senate, Governor Seabrook first appointed F. H. Elmore and, upon his death in a month or two, Robert W. Barnwell, but upon the meeting of the General Assembly of South Carolina, six months later, that body elected R. Barnwell Rhett, who, for about a year and a quarter, strove for the accomplishment of the policy of secession and failing, resigned and gave way to W. F. DeSaussure, apparently in accord with the Georgia policy of pushing slavery to the Pacific, within the Union, and in the wake of Georgia, South Carolina moved until 1860, when her representatives again took the initiative with the full approval of the leaders of the Empire State of the South. [149]

For the carrying into effect, in 1850, of the Georgia scheme of pushing slavery to the Pacific there were in Missouri 592,004 whites, in Arkansas 163,189, and in Kentucky and Tennessee 1,518,247, to which the entire South remaining could add 3,422,923, and even if Arkansas had doubled her white population since 1840, the 450,000 whites with which Ohio’s population had been increased in the same time, put in that State one-tenth of the total white population of the Union, which, with that with which Indiana and Illinois disposed of in about the same space as Kentucky and Tennessee below, furnished fully two and a half times as many to draw upon. It should have been apparent, therefore, that it would take all that the South could do to hold Missouri, much less invade the further Northwest, even if Iowa, at that, time did not have very many more [Pg 106] white inhabitants than Arkansas. There was a chance to have affected Ohio in 1840; but by 1855 the movement from the East and the railroads had made it the powerful advanced outpost of the Abolitionists. The ten years between 1838 and 1848 practically determined the course of events, making more and more for war between the slowly separating sections, and for the steadily increasing black population of slaves in the South.

If it is true that:

—the colonizing stream with which the great and populous State of Ohio, from 1840 fecundated the prairies of the West might have poured to a considerable extent into the valleys of the Blue Ridge, the Alleghany and the Cumberland mountains along the lines of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to meet and mingle with the stream which had been moving westward from South Carolina, since 1820. [151] In such a case the country might and in all probability would have developed at a slower pace; but it would have been as a more homogeneous people. It is idle to declare that there was an irrepressible conflict. That has always been the claim of those who are determined to precipitate such and are absolutely dead to—

[Pg 107]

The presidential election of 1852, tended at first to allay excitement. A New Englander, affiliating closely with Southern men, Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, won the Democratic nomination over competitors much more prominent. Of these competitors Buchanan and Cass had long and intimately been connected with the party leaders of their States in the time of Andrew Jackson; trained in the old school of politics; drawing what strength they had from faithful service. The third competitor, a comparatively new leader in the West, forceful, aggressive and impatient of restraint, Stephen A. Douglas, was of an entirely different type. Determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn, he evolved the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, and with it soon had the country in a turmoil.

The condition was strange. The Georgians had a policy and the lead of a section, but no man among them possessed the qualities essential for such a task, as their bold program of pushing slavery to the Pacific within the Union, demanded. Howell Cobb approached nearer the station of leader than any other man of his State; but he scarcely measured up to what was required. Besides as great as Georgia was among the Southern States, second only to Virginia, in point of population, and quite beyond in wealth and resources, among the States of the Union, in point of population, she barely ranked tenth. From the continuous stream of white immigrants pouring into Illinois that great State was, [Pg 108] however, rapidly moving up to the position of fourth in population, while in Stephen A. Douglas, she possessed one of the most audacious and resourceful of politicians who had ever moved in the affairs of the Union, to a great height. Carrying at his heels some forty-two Northern votes in Congress, he appeared to be just the man the Georgians needed, and accordingly in the Congress which met in December, 1853, he introduced his bill for the organization of the territory of Nebraska, framing the provisions thereof upon the precedents set in the organization of the territories of Utah and New Mexico four years before. Of this bill, a distinguished author, later president of the United States, has said:

Mr. Woodrow Wilson was of the opinion that Southern members had never dreamed of demanding such a measure and that no one but Douglas, would have dreamed of offering it to them; but yet he says the President had been consulted and had given his approval to it, upon the ground that “it was founded upon a sound principle which the compromise of 1820 had infringed upon.” [153] And certain it is that the President had consulted, concerning it, that Southerner who was destined to occupy [Pg 109] the most prominent position ever held by a Southerner. Jefferson Davis knew of it.

Of the author of the bill, Robert Toombs declared some seven years later, with his characteristic exaggeration, that the Apostle Paul was about his only superior as a leader. While Alexander H. Stephens, with absolute devotion, clung to him, until secession swept them apart, Toombs was less faithful. Forty-four Northern Democrats, and all but nine of the Southern members of the House of Representatives, supported the bill, and in the popular branch of Congress, it prevailed, by a majority of thirteen votes; in the Senate, by a vote of nearly three to one. [154] But Mr. Wilson declares that the Act contained a fatal ambiguity. When was squatter sovereignty to give its decision on the question of slavery?

Here was where the break came, when the Act was being tried out in practical operation.

The Southern members thought that Douglas represented their view. Mr. Davis, Secretary of War at the time of its introduction, distinctly declares, that, at Douglas’s request, he obtained the interview between Douglas’s committee and the President on Sunday, January 22, 1854, by which the President’s approval was secured, and he avers, that from the terms of the bill and arguments used in its support, he thought its purpose was to open the territory “to the people of all the States with every species of property recognized by any of them.” [155]

[Pg 110]

But Douglas was not simply leading the Southern minority. He was endeavoring to formulate a policy by means of which he could yoke both sections to his triumphal car, and he was just as ready to use the Southerners, as they were to use him. When the Southerners found out how he proposed to over-reach them, Alexander H. Stephens still clung to him; but Toombs, less faithful, vociferated that he “didn’t have a leg to stand upon.”

The truth was, compromise upon compromise had so involved the question, that it was almost impossible to disentangle it without the use of the sword.

In 1787 there had been a compromise, by which slavery and the slave trade had been both recognized; and over the Missouri question in 1820, the Southern States had had a perfect constitutional right to dissolve the Union; but again compromise had been accepted.

The admission of California and the law of 1850 was a distinct breach of the second compromise and the right to secede was just as clear, as it had been in 1820; but the expediency of such action was nothing like as clear. There was no great and towering personality around which men could gather. Rhett’s resolution in Congress in 1838 was the logical result of Calhoun’s teaching since 1833; but Calhoun was not ready to act. If ever secession was a practical policy it was in 1838 as presented by Rhett in Congress. [156]

[Pg 111]

In South Carolina in 1850, Calhoun was dead, and there was the view of Rhett and the view of Cheves. In Georgia there was the view of Cobb and the view of Toombs, and the view of Hill and the view of Stephens.

Of the man who did more than any other to arrest secession in 1850, we know least, and what we do know does not help us to any great extent to understand him. What policy Howell Cobb represented is not very clear. He was strong enough to be denounced as a traitor by those who could not drive him from their path, and somewhat in the same way that Hayne was taken out of national politics, when State politics required a man of unusual force, Cobb stepped down in 1852 from the high station of Speaker of the House of Representatives, to become Governor of Georgia; while in the last four years before secession, he was silenced by his position in Buchanan’s Cabinet.

But apart from leaders the country had changed, and in spite of the declarations to the contrary, in nowhere more than in the South.

The continual increase of the Negro population and the immense sums invested in that species of property had worked a disintegration of former views.

Nullification had accelerated the change, for the views of Hayne in 1827 and Calhoun in 1836, were certainly wide apart.

In 1845 Calhoun had congratulated Hammond on the progress of opinion in the South to the high ground he had held in advance; but it may well be [Pg 112] doubted whether Calhoun, himself, would not have been startled by the progress disclosed in 1855, as evinced by the agitation for the re-opening of the slave trade.

In 1845 when Wise, then United States Minister to Brazil, disclosed the manner of conducting the slave trade in that country, in which both Englishmen and Americans were implicated, the President, in whose cabinet Calhoun then was Secretary of State, condemned it without stint, rejoicing that “our own coasts are free from its pollution”; although he was forced to admit that there were “many circumstances to warrant the belief that some of our citizens are deeply involved in its guilt.” [157]

Calhoun’s criticism of Wise on this occasion was only that he feared he was injudicious, and that his declarations might affect the relations between Brazil and the United States. [158]

Certainly Calhoun was not the man to have favored what his chief styled “pollution,” and to have remained in his cabinet.

Again, there is no reason to believe that Calhoun sympathized at all with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific. Whatever may have been the merits or demerits of his policies, they were strictly defensive, and he clung almost religiously to the phrase, “slavery as it exists in the South.”

What that was, to some extent was disclosed by the committee on religious instruction of the Negroes, [Pg 113] which, in 1845 received reports from all quarters of the South.

Robert Barnwell Rhett, was at the head of one of the principal committees and among its members were D. E. Huger, Basil Gildersleeve, Robert W. Barnwell and many others prominent in affairs of State and matters of culture and religion in the South.

The account from Alabama of “the servant Ellis” is most interesting. His blood and color, it was claimed were unmixed, and he gave much aid in the meetings among the Negroes, though “more retiring and modest than most people of his condition, when they have ability above their fellows.” [159]

It is said he could read both Greek and Latin and was anxious to undertake Hebrew; and the synods of Alabama and Mississippi proposed to purchase him, in order to send him to Africa as a Missionary.

Conditions such as these reports revealed were absolutely ignored by the fanatical Abolitionists of that day although they are but some of the many indications how mild and humanizing slavery, as it then existed in the South, was.

But the question was, could it so continue? And by 1855 there were ominous signs of a change. Agitation began for the re-opening of the slave trade.

What a frightful moral injury to the South this would have been, is evidenced by the statement alone of those who advocated this course, and at the same time had the courage to express their views on the [Pg 114] inadequacy of the laws then in existence for the proper protection of those of the inferior race, who were then in the South, improved as they had been by years of training.

In 1856, Governor James H. Adams, of South Carolina, had thus expressed himself:

[Pg 115]

That was the true, the honest, the intelligent and the reasonable statement of the case; the hopes and fortunes of those in control were indissolubly associated with the form of society which slavery had erected in the South.

In the elaborate report of the committee of the General Assembly of South Carolina, in reply to the message, in which the said Act was recommended to be nullified; while the honesty and sincerity of the members may not be questioned, their woeful unfitness for the position of responsibility placed upon them, has, in the light of time, been made almost ludicrously apparent. Their utter inability to appreciate the terrific evils, to the civilization they thought they were defending and strengthening by their advocacy of the re-opening of the slave trade, was most strikingly indicated by their impressions of the effect of emancipation, less lurid than Hammond’s picture, but as strikingly incorrect.

When to this were added the effusions of men like Spratt, we can scarcely realize, that this was from the State which had produced Robert Barnwell, Joseph Alston, William Lowndes and Robert Y. Hayne.

In the minority report, however, of an adopted son, J. Johnston Pettigrew, who six years later fell [Pg 116] with honor and renown, high in rank, in the retreat from Gettysburg, the State found better representation; while the brilliant Hammond, who had averred that he: “endorsed without reserve the much abused sentiment of Governor McDuffie, that ‘slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice’;” nevertheless also had declared, in his controversy with Clarkson: “I might say, that I am no more in favor of slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy or any other inequality of the human family; that I love perfection and I think I should enjoy a millennium such as God has promised.” [162]

It was not then that men like Hammond, Adams and Robert G. Harper, of Georgia, were blind to the abuses of slavery, for Adams, the advocate of the re-opening of the slave trade, had in his message to the General Assembly of South Carolina only the year before declared:

Yet Governor Adams was willing to risk the frightful increase of such recognized evils, by the flooding of the South with a host of barbarians fresh from the jungles of Africa.

But against this, Harper, of Georgia, was a tower of strength.

[Pg 117]

Prof. DuBois declares that “although such hot-heads as Spratt were not able, as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the South with them, in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards, yet the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an attitude, which regarded the opening of the African slave trade as merely a question of expediency.” [164]

This he attempted to sustain by quotations from the Charleston Standard , Richmond Examiner , New Orleans Delta , and other Southern papers, intimating that Johnston Pettigrew’s minority report cost him his re-election to the Legislature of South Carolina. As had been shown, it did not, however, stand in the way of his elevation to a high command of the forces South Carolina furnished for the War between the States; while Senator Hammond, who had risen to the highest honor his State could bestow, declared unequivocablly in 1858, with regard to the re-opening of the slave trade: “I once entertained the idea myself, but on further investigation abandoned it. I will not now go into the discussion of it further than to say that the South is itself divided on that policy, and from appearances, opposed to it by a vast majority.” [165]

James Chesnut, the other senator from South Carolina, also announced himself publicly against it in the same year. But it was in the profoundly thoughtful and admirably thorough argument of [Pg 118] Harper of Georgia, that the opponents of re-opening found the best representation.

Southern to the core, it is a defense of slavery “as it existed in the South,” that cannot be improved upon.

Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor. Like Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor was cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the slaves of the South. He realized that capital would inevitably reach out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic, bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle rich. He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the same demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had freed herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated her expensive laboring class. He saw this cheap imported slave labor invading the province of the remnant of the white working class of the South, and rendering it inimical to the institution. But above and beyond all this, he saw the slave trade, as his forbears had seen it in the days the South produced her strongest men, and without any reserve he declared:

As objectionable as slavery is in the abstract, it is a debatable question whether Harper of Georgia, advocate of slavery, as it existed in the South in 1858, but determined opponent of the re-opening of the slave trade, did not occupy higher ground from a humanitarian standpoint, than did Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut in 1787, who was then, “for leaving the clause as it stands, let every State import what it pleases.... As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.”

Ellsworth might have gone further and declared with truth, that, if poor laborers were not sufficiently plenteous, they could be imported. In 1912 they were being brought in in such swarms that our civilization was said to be threatened thereby.

But while there was this pronounced opposition to the re-opening of the slave trade in the South, there is not much room to doubt that the slave population of the South had been largely recruited with illicit importations from abroad from 1808. To what extent it is difficult to arrive at with any degree of accuracy.

In his “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Prof. DuBois quotes Congressional documents, to indicate that from Amelia Island, on the Gulf Coast, in 1817 [Pg 120] the pirates had eleven armed vessels with which they captured slavers, and brought their cargoes into the United States [167] and that, a year after the capture of the island by United States troops, African and West Indian Negroes were almost daily illicitly introduced into Georgia. [168] He also claims that the estimates of three representatives of Congress, Tallmadge of New York, Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright of Virginia, in the year 1819, were that slaves were then being brought into the country at the rate of about 14,000 a year. [169] He thinks while smuggling never entirely ceased, the participation of Americans declined between 1825 and 1835, when it again revived, reaching its highest activity between 1840 and 1860, when the city of New York was “the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce, although Portland and Boston were only second.” [170] He quotes DeBow for the statement that, in 1856, forty slavers cleared annually from Eastern harbors, clearing yearly $17,000,000, and from the report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, that between 1857 and 1858 twenty-one of the twenty-two slavers seized by the British cruisers proved to be American, from New York, Boston and New Orleans; [171] and Stephen A. Douglas claimed to have seen recently imported slaves at Vicksburg and Memphis in 1859. [172]

[Pg 121]

The Charleston Courier in 1839 printed an extract from the New York Journal of Commerce , to the effect that twenty-three vessels under the American flag had sailed about that time from Havana on the slave trade [173] . And the Charleston Mercury in 1849 declared: “The slave trade is again very active in Cuba.” [174]

In support of these claims it can be said:

Of the increase of the colored population of the United States from 1850 to 1860, more than one-half was in the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, into which slaves could most easily be imported, and the temper of the most northerly of those was becoming extremely sensitive upon the subject of allusions to the institution of slavery, as the following extract of a resolution adopted by the Legislature of that State, and sent to the other States of the Union, indicates:

It is interesting to note that in his very able and extremely interesting paper on “The Fight for the Northwest,” 1860, the map which accompanies the article of Prof. W. E. Dodd, does not include Ohio.

Quoting from a speech of Senator Hammond in 1858, in which the latter declared: “The most valuable part of the Mississippi belongs to us, and although those who have settled above us, are now opposed to us, another generation will tell another tale,” [176] Mr. Dodd draws from it the conclusion that “Hammond’s idea was that the railroads connecting the West and the South, would so stimulate reciprocal trade between the farmers and the planters, that the resistance of the Chicago-Detroit region would be overcome.”

But it should be borne in mind that in 1858-1860, between the West and the South there stretched a great tract of country over six hundred miles in length, and nearly three hundred miles in breadth, through the whole extent of which not a single railroad stretched across from the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry to the junction of the Ohio River with the Mississippi, near the northeastern corner of Arkansas.

To have crossed this great stretch just about the center at its widest part was the scheme of Hayne’s road which had been abandoned for a scheme of [Pg 123] weakly paralleling below, the network stretching west above.

The effort of the presidential campaign by the Democrats may have been for an election in the House in 1860, and may have been lost, as Prof. Dodd declares, “only by a narrow margin by the votes of the foreigners, whom the railroads poured in numbers into the contested region;” but that triumph at the most would have only deferred the contest for another four years, for by its special correspondent in the West, the Columbus, Georgia, Times had been informed in 1854:

The attempt then, inaugurated in 1840, to parallel the Northern systems, pouring population westward, was recognized as an impossible task in 1860, and with the election of Lincoln, known as the man who had declared a house divided against itself cannot stand, the South attempted to end the division by Secession.

To such a solution the more powerful North was unwilling to consent, and the war followed for the Union.

[Pg 124]

From a consideration of the wisdom, propriety and morality of importing African slaves as an article of commerce in 1787, the Negro Question in the United States had progressed to the wisdom and propriety of preventing any extension of the institution of slavery beyond those limits in which it existed in 1820, and from this, with repeated agitations, fairly shaking the Union to its foundation, followed by compromises satisfactory to none, there had flared up a consideration of the re-opening of the Slave Trade in 1856, swiftly followed by Secession and war in 1860, and Emancipation, as a war measure, in 1863, directed against the eleven Confederate States.

Throughout the four years of desperate struggle between the seceding States and the consolidated Northern and Western States, the slaves, by their behavior, illustrated moral character greatly to their credit, and indisputably indicative of the civilizing influences of the institution, in which they had been trained. But peace in 1865 at once precipitated the question of the status of the freedman. In the Northern States it was an important question. In the Southern States it beggared all other questions.

With a property loss running up into the billions and a loss in virile manhood almost incalculable and an indescribable uprooting and overturning of industrial conditions, the failure of Secession left the eleven States, which had constituted the Southern Confederacy, with a white population of about [Pg 125] 5,000,000, and a colored population of about 4,000,000; but in three of them, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana the colored population exceeded the white.

Was the forecast of Calhoun and de Tocqueville to be verified?

In no States was the outlook as dark as in South Carolina, where there could hardly have been more than 250,000 whites to 400,000 Negroes, and in Mississippi, where the colored majority was not quite so large, the proportions there being 350,000 white to some 430,000 Negroes. Yet of the colored population in South Carolina, judging from the number of free persons of color, in 1860, some 9,914, [178] and the number of house slaves and mechanics in Charleston returned for taxation in 1859, [179] in the great mass, there were those of the Negroes, who, on account of training, education and environment, together with inherited tradition, if they had only been left unplayed upon by those who knew them not, might have been relied upon in any great emergency. These, at an estimate, might have amounted to 30,000 in South Carolina; in Mississippi, less.

In both of these States, therefore, an earnest, thoughtful attempt was designed by the former ruling class of whites, to rebuild the political structure, at the same time readjusting the Negroes to the changed condition brought about by emancipation. But, before considering this much berated effort of [Pg 126] the vanquished, a short sketch of conditions in South Carolina in the spring and summer of 1865 will show to some extent the increasing complexities and difficulties of the problem, which Lincoln’s death saved him from, and which Andrew Johnson had to face.

Even before Lincoln’s assassination there was evidence of a strong disposition, upon the part of the pronounced abolitionists, to humiliate the overthrown, and, in particular, that State and city which for three decades had led the fight for “Slavery as we know it in the Southern States.”

On April 6, 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, United States Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, Judge Kelly of Pennsylvania, Theodore Tilton and his intimate friend Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of New York, with George Thompson of England, visited Charleston.

By General Saxton of Massachusetts, they were personally conducted to the Citadel Green on Calhoun Street, a circumstance calling for some facetious remarks by Major Delany, a very remarkable colored member of the General’s Staff, and there the general presented the great abolitionist to the immense throng that had gathered to hear him. But, as thoroughly as the general and his distinguished guests considered that they understood conditions, it is possible, they were slightly surprised by the aplomb with which Samuel J. Dickerson (as a slave a bricklayer, but as a local freedman, dropping his tools for a higher pursuit and destined to become the mountebank of the bar) thrust himself and his [Pg 127] two daughters into the very centre of the picture. In a fluent speech, Dickerson presented Garrison with a wreath. The great man complimented him in his reply, exalted the State of Massachusetts and himself introduced Senator Wilson, as one of the “mudsills” of Massachusetts, who had from such condition risen to the eminence he had attained. Then the great abolitionist gave way to the Senator, who proclaimed the occasion “the proudest day of his life.”

Shouting to the excitable throng before him that he felt “the slave power under his heel” he bellowed out his sentiments as follows:

He was followed by Judge Kelly, who denounced ex-President Buchanan and eulogized Sam Dickerson. Other speeches followed in a similar vein and to such an extent did the orgy of oratory extend that the apparently one sane member of the band felt himself impelled upon the occasion of a later address delivered at Zion Church to warn the Negroes against—

The war was not as yet absolutely over and this speech of Senator Wilson’s widely advertised must [Pg 128] have rendered many Confederate officers desperate. Don C. Seitz in his very valuable volume, “Braxton Bragg, General of the Confederacy” gives a most interesting letter from Wade Hampton, not a fortnight later, to Jefferson Davis, arguing against acceptance of the terms of General Sherman to General Johnston, in which he pictures most effectively the conditions worse than war, which were foreshadowed by surrender. But fierce as was the blaze that Wilson and his like were fanning, it became a devouring flame with the assassination of Lincoln. This President Johnson, with the aid of Seward, strove earnestly to quench.

Born in North Carolina, the most democratic State of the old South, Andrew Johnson had raised himself from the humblest of origins to a position of distinct prominence in that western Southern State Tennessee, mainly peopled from North Carolina. Having been governor of and senator from Tennessee, he had been placed in the dangerous office of war governor in that State at a time, when through it echoed and reëchoed the continual tramp of opposing armies, as they reeled back and forward in contests rivalling those which soaked the soil of Virginia with blood.

With nothing of the personal magnetism or the attractive traits of his predecessor, the great rail splitter and wrestler of the West; immovable to every suggestion that he should purchase support with prostitution of the appointing power, even for a good end; giving out his sentiments with an aggressive honesty, which must have shocked the careless [Pg 129] average; nothing could have more clearly marked the gulf between him and the sentimentality of the abolitionists, Garrison, Davis, Kelly and others, than his reception in the very first days of his presidency of the delegation of colored men who called upon him chiefly to indulge in that, to them the dearest right of freedom, free speech. To these and to the general public of the North, his reply must have been offensive, whatever truth it may have contained. He said in part:

It is almost idle, after the above, to state that Johnson was absolutely devoid of the kindly tact and vulgar humor, which had so endeared Lincoln, the supplest politician of his time, to the coarse mass of the electorate, as he had voiced for it, its thoughts in a tongue it could understand and appreciate.

When we reflect, that Johnson, a Southern man, the Vice President coming from the conquered South, was handed the reins at the moment when the victorious North, flushed with conquest, saw its great leader, identified with the West, hurled from his [Pg 130] high position to bloody death, at the hands of a murderer, who proclaimed his sympathy with the vanquished South, the immensity of the difficulties about to confront him begins to appear. In addition, he, himself, before being steadied by the responsibilities of the office, had “breathed threatenings and slaughter.”

In a proclamation, claiming that Jefferson Davis and others had incited, concocted and procured the atrocious murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, ex-President Jefferson Davis had been held up to obloquy and, upon his capture, imprisoned and chained; but what was infinitely more horrible, Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville, was made a human sacrifice, under circumstances which have left an ineffaceable blot upon all in any way responsible for making him the scapegoat for the very effective military policy which refused the Confederate offer to exchange prisoners. If it took the magnanimity and fortitude of Seward to point out the method by which the Union might be saved from the fate in which the Congressional conspirators meant to involve it, for their own immediate ends, and if, in this hacked victim of the assassins, Johnson found the anchor by which he rode out the storm which burst upon him; yet it should be remembered that nothing but the sturdiest integrity and most indomitable courage could have nerved Johnson to even attempt the struggle, he fought out to the end. Conditions in the South were appalling. Bled to a whiteness, which not even [Pg 131] France experienced in the Great War; with her labor system hopelessly disorganized by the Freedman’s Bureau; not only by its methods but by the openly announced suggestions of its head, General Howard, that the landholders should be compelled by the Federal Government to furnish their former slaves with land, [183] industry stood still. With Negro troops quartered in every direction under “the deliberate purpose to emphasize the completeness of the catastrophe which the war had brought upon the South,” [184] collisions between them and the whites were of almost daily occurrence. But these could not, in the bulk of cases, be attributed to the truculence of Southern slave holders from the fact that instances were not few, in which Northern troops, acting in the line of duty, were assailed by colored men. A Federal soldier, acting as guard and on his post at a house in Abbeville, was shot by colored soldiers, [185] incensed against the inmates. Sergeant Terry and four members of the 127th New York Volunteers, acting as a guard on the Battery at Charleston, were set upon by Negroes abetted by members of the 35th United States Colored Troops and two of the guard wounded, before the arrival of additional white troops scattered the assailants with five casualties and some arrests. [186] Later, Lieutenant A. S. Bodine, of the same regiment, for clearing a meeting of whites of uninvited Negroes, among whom appeared Negro soldiers with sidearms, was courtmartialed by order of General Hatch in command at Charleston, [Pg 132] the court finding him guilty, on the flimsiest evidence, of “unwarrantable exercise of arbitrary power” and sentencing him to reprimand by his superior officer, which reprimand was immediately ordered to be withdrawn by the general in command of the department. [187]

With such conditions in towns and cities it is scarcely surprising to read the account of the execution a little later of James Grippen and Ben Redding of Co. F, 104th United States Colored Troops, on charges of rape, arson and burglary, they with others, not apprehended, having broken into a house near McPhersonville, South Carolina, and there ravished four white women, named. [188] With such facts leaking out from time to time, in spite of the pressure from outside of his cabinet to induce him to leave South Carolina for a couple of years under military rule, President Johnson determined to appoint a provisional governor and, for this purpose, issued a proclamation which was in part as follows:

In the proclamation appeared the command that the military authorities should in no way obstruct, hinder or interfere with the above. [189] Just previously to Governor Perry’s proclamation calling such convention, a letter appeared contributing greatly to the success of the President’s plan in South Carolina. The writer of the letter was Wade Hampton, late Lieutenant General, C.S.A. The letter reveals the despairing condition of many, in its attempt to assuage such. It was widely reproduced and ran thus:

The convention was held and following it an election for governor and members of the General Assembly under the new Constitution and the most distinguished members of the convention, without regard to differences of opinion as to policies, united in recommending as candidate for governor Hon. James L. Orr, who prior to the war had been Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and with the organization of the Confederate States, a Senator from South Carolina and who had organized a command and seen service in the War between the States.

Despite these facts and in the teeth of his published declination of a nomination, in his absence, General Hampton was nominated for governor by the mechanics of Charleston and only defeated by 733 votes in a total of 19,113 cast, a vote measured by the white males of voting age just after the war [Pg 137] and its disabilities, which must have been at least forty per cent of what could have possibly been polled.

A legislature most representative of the State assembled and from the names appended to the: “Act preliminary to the legislation induced by the emancipation of slaves,” passed Nov. 19, 1865, W. D. Porter, President of the Senate, C. H. Simonton, Speaker of the House, and James L. Orr, Governor, appear officially responsible for the legislation; but the main work of framing it was done by D. L. Wardlaw and Armistead Burt. Although continuously and often very incorrectly assailed, viewed by a critic in no way partial to the South, these efforts of the vanquished, before the flood of Reconstruction was let loose by Congress upon the South, do not appear as frightful as they still are alleged to be.

Professor Burgess, speaks of them in general in the following terms:

Professor Dunning in a later work states that:

The license required for a shopkeeper was substantial, also that for a pedlar. It was one hundred dollars a year. In both of these vocations the mass of the Negroes could be easily fleeced by the shrewd and unscrupulous members of the race; but in all other vocations, except those free, it was only ten dollars. [193]

While accusing Wilson, Sumner and other extremists of distorting the spirit and purpose of both the laws and the lawmakers of the South, Professor Dunning says:

In his opinion:

If there is ground for condemnation in the above, the South must be condemned for thinking better of their conquerors than they deserved. The South Carolina Act, above alluded to, excepted from the provisions of what has been called the “Black Code”—“every person who may have of Caucasian blood, seven-eighths or more,” who it provided “shall be deemed a white person,” [196] declaring, however, that: “all other free Negroes, mulattoes and mestizos, all freed women and all descendants through either sex of any of these, except as above, shall be known as persons of color.”

It declared that the statutes and regulations concerning slaves were inapplicable to persons of color and although such were not entitled to social or political equality with white persons, they were given the right to own and dispose of property, to make contracts, to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property.

While the Black Code did therefore regulate the relations and restrain persons of color, in Mr. Dunning’s and Mr. Burgess’s opinion, there was little in the South Carolina Act calculated to arouse any pronounced hostility in the North. In the opinion of the latter, indeed, it—

[Pg 140]

Two provisions it did contain of great importance, which it must be borne in mind were framed by the representatives of 250,000 whites surrounded by 400,000 Negroes, ninety per cent of whom were densely ignorant. The first of these was aimed to prevent the burden of this helpless ignorance from increasing; the second to secure to this population a measure of protection, which those who had emancipated the slaves had not granted to the freedmen in their own section, by their own laws, for the greater part of the time of their living in Free States.—

This act further provided that upon failure to furnish bond the free person of color could be ordered to leave the State, and, upon failure to leave, be subjected to corporal punishment within a certain time, and if still contumacious, could be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period. The other act granted to the immense black majority what the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, for almost half a century, had denied to the feeble minority of free blacks who had entered their borders:

[Pg 141]

In its day and since, this legislation has been roundly denounced. Those in control of Federal politics saw in it a peaceful settlement of great questions which threatened their supremacy, and bitterly and unreservedly reprobated it, stirring up public opinion in that section, which yet flushed with its conquest, was unwilling to permit any interference with its great mission of “putting the bottom rail on top.”

The conquerors had preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Those were two immense achievements, even if ruthlessly attained.

As terrible as was the price which the South paid for the abolition of slavery, it was not too great, taking all things into consideration; and the manner of the abolition was such, also, that in time it must have given rise to as it did eventually produce, that mutual respect between the sections which had not before existed.

While Emancipation, being confiscation of property without due process of law, can never be legally justified, and only can be excused as a war measure, yet, if the Southern people, white and black, could only be made to see conditions as they are now in the South and to realize that posterity does fairly demand some consideration from those who bring it into being, one hundred years will not have passed [Pg 142] before it will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Emancipation was more beneficial to the South than to the North. This statement is made with a full appreciation of the fact that the War, Emancipation and Reconstruction so reduced the South and checked its industrial development, that thirty years were required from the inception of the War to bring that section again up to the position it had reached in 1860, in point of wealth and industry.

War and Emancipation can therefore be excused, but Reconstruction will ever remain an ineffaceable stain upon the conquerors. Yet, as an emetic sometimes produces good which nothing else can bring about, so Reconstruction may in time be shown to have been not without its good.

Just what might have been the effects of the attempt made by the Southern States to readjust the Negroes to the changed conditions of 1865 must now always remain a matter of surmise; for the differentiations of color, race and condition, which they attempted then to establish, were ruthlessly swept out of existence by military control and universal suffrage followed by the Civil Rights Bill.

But before considering that era of frantic sentimentality concerning the African people in the United States, the period of Congressional Reconstruction, a little more light should be thrown upon the struggle made by the surviving soldiery of the Confederacy, led by Wade Hampton of South Carolina and others less well remembered, as Wright of Georgia, to support the policy of Seward and President [Pg 143] Johnson. Not unnaturally in so doing attention will be concentrated to a very great degree upon the Scape Goat, The Hot Bed of Secession, The Prostrate State, although it was from without, if upon her borders, the record was preserved by one of her sons, an almost forgotten soldier and scholar of the Old South, in his tireless, patriotic and absolutely sincere and highly intelligent effort to mentally avert the overthrow of the remnants of Southern civilization, threatened in the advance of the black horde of freedmen marching to plunder, under the leadership of Sumner, Stevens and Wilson and the half averted countenance of Grant.

This description by a Southern man may seem possibly too comprehensive and severe, until we read the declaration of that American Negro most generally esteemed in the North in his day, the leader of the Negro race in America:

How can the characterization be doubted when we remember Senator Wilson’s speech in Charleston and the fact that with such a record as he had and such a field to choose from, he was made Grant’s running mate, the Aaron for that Moses.

[Pg 144]

The Southerner who preserved this record of the aspirations of the Old South was so identified with the political thought of the great State of North Carolina, that, like Andrew Jackson, whom he knew and asserted to be a South Carolinian, he also, though such, was thought to be a North Carolinian. But Daniel Harvey Hill was, on July 12, 1821, born in South Carolina, at Hill’s Iron Works, an iron manufacturing establishment founded in the New Acquisition (later York District), by his grandfather, prior to the Revolutionary War, where cannon were forged for the American army. A graduate of West Point and a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, in which he rose to the brevet of Major, he resigned from the United States army to embrace the highest avocation a man may follow and became in 1849 a professor of mathematics at Washington College, Lexington, “the Athens” of Virginia, and later, was put in control of the Military Institute of North Carolina; whence he entered the Confederate Army, served through the war with distinction, rising to the rank of lieutenant general, and issuing from Charlotte, May, 1866, the first number of the monthly magazine, The Land We Love , published by him from that place until April, 1869, through which he voiced the aspirations, hopes and resolves, in the main, of the disbanded forces of the Confederacy, probably, at that date constituting seventy per cent or more of the white manhood of the South. If the magazine was modeled upon an English rather than an American type, it was the more representative of the South Atlantic States [Pg 145] at that time. If forty per cent or more of its contents bore upon the recent war, considering the times and the conditions of the section upon which it was dependent for support, that was most natural.

In it can be found not infrequent contributions from that Georgian said by Professor Trent to have been the one poet the War produced from the South; also some papers from that novelist of South Carolina whom Lewisohn has mentioned in his article on South Carolina, in The Nation in 1922; and one from that Northern adopted son of South Carolina, to whom the State owes the great institution, Clemson College, for the aims of which General Hill strove so hard in his opening article on “Education.” Space will not admit of more than three extracts; the discussion by General Hill of education; an allusion to E. G. Lee’s “Maximilian and His Empire,” and a still briefer allusion to and endorsement of Wade Hampton and his policy concerning the freedmen. The first is the most important. After discussing the number of presidents from the South, including Lincoln and Johnson, eleven out of the seventeen, up to that time elected, coming from the South and an even greater proportion of secretaries of state and attorney generals, General Hill indicates, that when business ability was desired, as in the offices of secretary of the treasury and postmaster general, the situation was at once reversed, and thus proceeds:

Is it surprising that a man who thus exhorted the South in that day and hour should have been condemned by both Sumner of Massachusetts and Pollard of Virginia?

[Pg 148]

For three years, the worst in the history of the South, he kept his magazine before the people of South with a circulation of 12,000 copies and agents in every Southern State and in addition in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. He never gave up the fight and in the year of his death saw his dream come true, but he did not get that support his cause would have entitled him to particularly expect from the then leading port of the South Atlantic. For even a devoted citizen of Charleston must admit, that Charleston, by such evidences as exist, was rather cold to this voice of the South. For a few months Burke and Boinest were the agents in that city, then no names appear as representatives in the greatest city of the South, with the exception of New Orleans; while, at little places in South Carolina, Mayesville, Edgefield, Society Hill and Kingstree, the agents held on to the end, faithful unto death. But in Charleston, within one month from the suspension of The Land We Love , a new Southern magazine was launched, The XIX Century , edited by F. G. DeFontaine, distinctly lighter, and, as events indicated, with less lasting power.

Returning to General Hill’s magazine, if manual and industrial training was a hobby and if his criticism of the former political training and lack of industrial enterprise was too sweeping; yet in his columns was afforded space for the most interesting illustration of what that political training could flower into, which can be found anywhere in the printed page in the United States. This is a sweeping [Pg 149] statement itself; but if the highest type of cultivated diplomat, thoroughly conversant with the haute politique will read and ponder “Maximilian and His Empire” contributed by Gen. E. G. Lee, Feb. 1867, he would be curious to know who this Gen. E. G. Lee was and what were his opportunities for gathering the political knowledge which appears most interestingly spread with something of the assurance of a political seer, as time has shown.

E. G. Lee was a Virginian, only a brigadier. Born at Leeland, May 25, 1835, a graduate of William and Mary College, he served under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley campaign. Forced by ill health to withdraw from military service between 1863 and 1864, he was, in the latter part of the last mentioned year, sent to Canada on secret service for the Confederate Government, just about the time at which Blair approached the officials of the Confederacy, according to Alex. H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, aiming to bring about—

[Pg 150]

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 [Pg 151] 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 [Pg 152] 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 [Pg 153] 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 [Pg 155] 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.

[Pg 156]

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.

[Pg 158]

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 [Pg 159] 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 [Pg 161] 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 [Pg 163] 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:

[Pg 164]

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]

[Pg 165]

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.

[Pg 166]

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 [Pg 167] 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 [Pg 168] 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:

[Pg 169]

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 [Pg 170] 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 [Pg 171] 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 [Pg 172] 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 [Pg 173] 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 [Pg 176] 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?

[Pg 177]

As has been heretofore stated, George William Curtis, the most eminent representative of former abolition sentiment, at that date (1888), still alive in the United States, had propounded a query to the author concerning political advantages obtained through the possession of the suppressed vote swelling the electoral strength of the States, possibly compelled to suppress its exercise.

Hampton, the most illustrious representative and “one of the most distinguished leaders” [232] of the overthrown slavocracy, had, in his reply to a press interview, indicated how little desirous he thought the South was of retaining any advantage based on its possession, and his lieutenant, Butler, elaborating the argument, had pressed for a diffusion of the Negroes throughout the United States.

The fates gave Mr. Curtis the last word.

In Harper’s Weekly in the early part of 1891 appeared an editorial entitled “A Sign of the Times.” It was in part as follows:

The colored man to whom Mr. Curtis referred was the Rev. Richard Carroll, of Orangeburg, later of Columbia.

In the early fall of the year 1890 he had, in a letter to the editor of The News and Courier , opposing Negro excursions, given, in addition to the very sensible views he put forth concerning such, an indication that he was alive to the greatest need of his race and how best it might be met. Five years before Booker Washington came upon the stage and twenty-two before he saw the light, Carroll seems to have seen it and pointed to it as follows:

[Pg 179]

That Carroll was, at that date, a vigorous, original, independent thinker and speaker, will be indicated by a fuller description of the incident which Mr. Curtis alludes to above.

Upon the division which occurred in South Carolina between the followers of Judge Haskell and Mr. Tillman, the Republican party in that State, mainly composed of Negroes, had begun to stir and a convention had been called of the leading colored men of the State to consider the advisability of endorsing Judge Haskell and supporting his candidacy, and, the delegates having assembled, a motion was made to leave the matter to the Republican executive committee. The resolution obtained support from many members in strong speeches. It was opposed by one speaker. The following is the newspaper report of the speaker’s remarks:

Although Carroll was in a minority, he fought the question to a vote, replying to the charges with vigorous thrusts and with regard to the claim that those whom Tillman represented were the lynchers of Negroes asking: “Were they not led by aristocrats as well as common men?”

In fact Carroll appreciated, in advance, what Mr. Curtis deeply interested as he was and keen observer also, never quite grasped, viz., that the dominant faction, in South Carolina, did not intend to permit the Negroes to participate. And this was in fact the greatest fact of the Tillman movement and one which made it utterly unlike all apparently similar efforts in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and other Southern States. The head of the camel never having been permitted to enter in South Carolina, the difficulty experienced in the other States in removing the camel, when he had completely filled the tent, was never felt in South Carolina.

In storming his way to place and power, Tillman unquestionably appealed to a class, the farming class, whom he declared constituted seventy-five per cent of the white population, and whom he also averred had [Pg 181] been discriminated against. But Tillman really had less prejudice against the old families of South Carolina than many who opposed his candidacy. His people before him had been identified with the soil of South Carolina for generations. His father had held Federal office under Andrew Jackson, and one of his ablest lieutenants, W. D. Evans, was, in 1890, still living on the land originally granted his ancestor in the days of the province of South Carolina.

Once established in power, Tillman was for all classes.

But Mr. Curtis, clean and lovable man as he was, never could entirely free himself from the feeling that, as an abolitionist, he had felt toward the class which had led the South through the struggle in behalf of slavery. He had great hopes that the elevation of Tillman and the overthrow of the Hampton regime meant a chance for the Negro to come back to some exercise, even if a restricted one, of the suffrage. He expected that there would be a marked difference in the feelings and sentiments of those whom Tillman led and those who had preceded them; and in a letter of Jan. 21, he thus exhibited it:

[Pg 182]

But no class has any monopoly of selfishness and while it was most unfortunate for South Carolina, yet it was in accordance with human nature, that one of the first considerations of the class which had seized the reins of power in South Carolina in 1890, was to benefit its own class, by an attempt to perpetuate those very conditions which for eighty years had done more to injure South Carolina than any one thing in her history, and which her wisest sons had unavailingly opposed, viz., the retention of a mass of ignorant, agricultural laborers, reduced as close to the condition of serfs of the soil as it was possible in each period to accomplish; for this is what the law, enacted in most of the cotton States at that date, did in fact bring about, by taxing out of existence those agencies which might have relieved the State of considerable numbers of Negroes.

The South Carolina Act, passed December 4, 1891, can stand as typical of this legislation, which was based upon the determination of the white agriculturists of the Lower South, constituting as they did about seventy per cent of the white population, to hobble, well within their reach, cheap Negro labor. Coupled as the passage of such legislation was with the fierce declarations against black brutes, with which the perpetrators of such sought to excuse the numerous lynchings of this period, it was apparent that, while the vengeance was swift in overtaking the blacks who violated white women, the pound of cure was preferred to the ounce of prevention; and so, exposing their women to that risk which seemed inevitable with the tremendous Negro [Pg 183] population which abounded in the South, the men who made the laws still clung to cheap Negro labor. It is true that as a whole, in the section covered even by South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the white population had gained upon the Negro population and was at this date but slightly inferior in numbers, amounting to 2,917,000 whites, to 2,966,000 Negroes, in this black belt; but just what proportion of whites were absolutely independent of the Negro agricultural laborer it would be difficult to estimate. That there were then and are now a very great number, who would profit to a very great degree by an assisted emigration of Negroes, and that these whites were of the class whose women folk necessarily were most exposed to the risk which a juxtaposition of such an immense mass of Negroes presented, growing race prejudice prevented the perception of, and the members of this class lent their influence to this injurious legislation formulated as follows:

It is doubtful if the injury which had been inflicted upon the South by the vicious Federal legislation of 1868, had, in any way, been greater than by its checking the natural diffusion of the Negroes throughout the Union in consequence of their emancipation and the military overthrow of those opposing such.

The effect of the legislation of 1868 had been to direct and stimulate a movement to the South of Northern Negroes and white adventurers which banked up the Negro population there, taught all to consider themselves ladies and gentlemen, a fact which is still apparent in the apparel in which many attempt to perform heavy manual work; and, until they were disbanded in 1890, was most ludicrous, in their military aspirations, as the Kodak by Johnson shows.

The overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, did to some degree produce diffusion and by the Census of 1890 it became noticeable even in South Carolina, where the Negro population was densest, that while the numerical increase of the Negroes was still greater there than the whites, the rate of increase of the former had fallen below the latter. Yet in South Carolina the Negro population still exceeded the white by 226,296, a greater excess than appeared [Pg 185] even in Mississippi, a State of greater area and with a more numerous white population, where the excess of the Negro population was but 197,698.

Under such circumstances it was patent that legislation in either State which tended to restrain the egress of the Negroes, even if temporarily of industrial benefit to the land owners and agriculturists, was against the true interest of the State and the people, and, accordingly, in South Carolina, in the columns of “The Cotton Plant”, the organ of the South Carolina agricultural class of that date, the author of this work began an attack upon the law in a series of articles.

Without asserting that it was in response to this agitation, it nevertheless is a fact that closely following upon it, in 1893, the law was amended by the addition of a clause in the nature of a compromise, namely:

This amendment, permitting the opportunity for assisted removal of the Negroes during that half of the year when such was least liable to interfere with their contracts for labor, admitted of a gradual removal of numbers of them and was a concession to public opinion and political morality by those who, with their votes and influence, controlled the political situation.

By 1890, it was scarcely to be doubted, that a great change in sentiment was taking place in the [Pg 186] world or rather in those three great countries which, from their position, were most able to effect the opinion of the world. In Great Britain, the United States of America and Germany the extravagantly liberal and humanitarian ideas, with regard to the race question, which had marked the twenty-five years preceding 1890, were giving way to something which might be described by the word race-imperialism. In Germany it made its appearance in many forms, but more noticeably in the colonial ventures, which off the coast of East Africa were smeared with a recrudescence of the slave trade. [239] How it grew in that country and to what astounding lengths of caste culture it proceeded, would be beyond the scope of this study, but it might be mentioned that, by Paul Rohrback, without any credit to the author, Calhoun’s black “substratum” theory was openly avowed as the basis of colonial expansion.

Great Britain, with the Jameson raid and its sequellae , gave an illustration of race intolerance that shocked the world, but avoided the use of the black in conquering the white.

In the United States it took shape in the various constitutional conventions in Southern States, aiming to disfranchise the bulk of the Negro vote.

It was England, however, that altered the designation of “The Brother in Black” to “The White Man’s Burden.”

In every way in 1890 the Negro seemed to have failed. His profligacy was exaggerated, but in his profligacy he had betrayed Judge Tourgee. A study of the Census of 1890 by the author of this work [Pg 187] indicated that in a total population of 62,620,000 in the United States, 45,770,000 were native whites; 9,240,000 were foreign born whites; 6,339,000 were Negroes; 1,131,000 were mulattoes; 110,000 were Mongolians and 58,000 civilized Indians.

Comparing the two sections: There were a little more than twice as many native born whites in the North and West as in the South. There were about twelve times as many foreign born whites and about seven times as many civilized Indians with fifty times as many Mongolians, but there were only one-twelfth as many Negroes and one-fifth as many mulattoes. [240]

In the eight Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas there were 6,162,000 whites to 4,480,000 colored persons, and in the first six named of these 3,599,000 whites to 3,492,000 colored persons. By States the comparison was as follows:

[Pg 188]

In the same year in which Tillman had risen to power in South Carolina, Mississippi had disfranchised the great bulk of her Negro majority and, with his control of political affairs, Tillman set to work to accomplish the same thing in South Carolina. By 1895 he had succeeded in obtaining a constitutional convention and in that year it met.

For almost two centuries the Negroes had been trained in slavery. Then for a decade they had enjoyed what was much more akin to unbridled license than liberty. For about twenty years succeeding that they had been, by every device which could be conceived of, stripped of the exercise of the franchise and to a very great degree excluded from jury duty. The proposition was now to exclude the vast bulk of them legally from the franchise. It is interesting to consider and observe in what way they received the suggestion; for they were now absolutely without white aid, and dependent entirely upon such arguments as they themselves could advance. There was no attempt to hide the purpose. It was openly avowed that the main purpose of the constitutional convention of South Carolina for 1895 was to frame a law, by which the tremendous preponderance of the Negro electorate should be reduced to an inconsiderable minority. This had been accomplished in Mississippi, and the inconsistency of the Emigrant Tax Law, restraining in the State those whom the law makers had to protect the State from, escaped attention for the time.

Blunt and rough as he was in his political utterances, [Pg 189] the prime mover for this convention, Senator B. R. Tillman, with a breadth of thought greatly to his credit, sought unceasingly to make it representative of all factions, classes and conditions of the white population of the State and, when it finally assembled, it was found to be so. In addition it contained a sprinkling of Negroes, through the presence of six Negro delegates from two coast counties, where they were in such overwhelming numbers as to preclude their exclusion by any methods afforded by existing laws.

The attitude, behavior and utterance of these six Negroes in this convention, in the State where twenty years previously the members of their race had held their most pronounced legislative orgy and to which they now came, to what they must have realized were the political obsequies of the race, had in it, sentimentally considered, something of the pathetic. It should be borne in mind that those who did come now could only come from those two counties where the Negroes were at their lowest, if contact with whites was elevating; for, in Beaufort and Georgetown, the whites composed a very small minority.

It was not a time, however, for sentimental considerations, and to fuse the general mass of the convention into a condition appreciative of the scheme it was aimed to present at that stage in the proceedings, Senator Tillman reviewed at great length and with terrific force the previous frightful excesses of carpet-bag government and Negro [Pg 190] rule in the State. Upon the adoption of a resolution for the incorporation of his speech in the journal of the Convention, with a fairness, a milder man might not have exhibited, he requested that the replies of such of the Negro delegates as desired to speak, should also be therein printed.

That Negro delegate designated by him as “the ablest man of color I have ever met,” W. J. Whipper, (Dan. Chamberlain’s piece de resistance in the seventies), certainly the most notorious of all who rose to prominence in Reconstruction days, failed to avail himself of the privilege. While far less able, with a manly determination distinctly to his credit, Robert Smalls did, and defended his character with courage. He was accused of corruption. He pointed to the fact that he had been pardoned, and he claimed with great earnestness that the pardon had been granted him without solicitation on his part, and in spite of his urgent demand for trial. While his remarks do not indicate any exceptional intelligence, nor his reasons for desertion the clearest conception of what constitutes public morality, there is a ring of manly courage in his speech which wins sympathy.

After setting forth the above claim, he concluded as follows:

But it must not be imagined from this, that the speaker was in any sense hacked. On the contrary he continued to participate in the work of the convention to the best of his ability.

As an amendment to Section 34, of the draft of the Constitution, which provided—“The marriage of any white person with a Negro or mulatto person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.”—Smalls proposed the addition,—“and any white person who lives and cohabits with a Negro, mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood shall be disqualified from holding any office of emolument or trust in this State, and the offspring of any such living or cohabiting, shall bear the name of father and shall be entitled to inherit and acquire property the same as if they were legitimate.” But the Convention voted it down and not improperly, for [Pg 192] though clever politics, the concluding clause was vicious legislation. The amiable boldness of the mulatto Smalls won for him, however, general tolerance and some regard; but he was not intellectually in the class with that octaroon, Thomas E. Miller, who, in the minds of most persons, made on this occasion the greatest display of talent.

Miller made many speeches and furnished much acceptable copy for the press. He, therefore, not unnaturally, loomed large in the eyes of the knights of the quill, and his ablest speech was later utilized, by the most cultured representative of the race in this country, Professor W. E. Burghardt DuBois, as one buttress of a defense of Reconstruction, in a paper read by him at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1909, which was published later in the Review . Still the speeches of both Smalls and Miller were defensive.

Of another and less known colored delegate to this convention, this could not be said as denoting his attitude. While bearing himself with dignity and strictly observing the proprieties of debate, the mulatto of whom mention is next made, eloquently illustrated the adage, that “the business of an opposition is to oppose.” The man and his efforts historically considered deserve some recognition.

James E. Wigg, was born at Linden Park, Bluffton, Beaufort District, South Carolina, March 25, 1850, the son of a colored woman by a white man. As a small boy he attracted the attention of Gen. David Hunter, upon whom he waited at Hilton Head, who, after the war, took him with him to Washington, [Pg 193] D. C., and placed him at Whalen Institute. He was said to have been well versed in theology, and “an earnest follower of Swedenborg.” [242] His work in the Convention was marked by a distinct exhibition of intelligence. He submitted a draft for a constitution which was creditable, and he proposed an ordinance, to the Committee on Finance and Taxation, of distinct merit. It constituted politics of a high order. It was a bold challenge to the white majority, on a line hard to defend the unfavorable report of the Committee in response to.

Wigg’s ordinance was as follows:

The Convention voted this down, although the subject is known to be one upon which much loose generalization is continually indulged in as the basis of political appeals to voters.

But Wigg struck a more telling note than this. The concluding clause of Article 1, Sec. II being reported:

[Pg 194]

To this Wigg suggested the simple addition, “or any one engaged in lynching.” [243] The amendment was voted down, but in what position did the vote so disposing of it place the law-making whites? How does it read today?

Wigg’s speech on the suffrage clause, from the standpoint of his race, was also a strong presentation of the subject, pitched upon a high plane, eloquent and dignified. No extracts from it will do it justice. To be appreciated at its full value, it must be read as a whole. In it was none of that amusing buffoonery, which in another colored delegate’s remarks so captivated the press representatives; but it did contain not a little biting sarcasm. It is a speech well worth the perusal of the careful student of history, who is desirous of informing himself of the various styles of men, our institutions and our practices have evolved. But with all that has been stated, yet the most interesting incident connected with this colored man’s service in the Convention, was his clash with the strongest and most influential member of that body, in an impromptu debate, arising almost accidentally, in which, by no stretch of imagination, can the colored man be said to have been worsted. That he owed his triumph to the weakness of the position of his adversary was his fortune, and he used it to effect.

As has been before suggested, by passing such a law to restrain the egress of the Negroes, as the new regime had done in 1890, the inconsistency of declarations concerning the dangerous characteristics [Pg 195] of the race had been made manifest, and in the full tide of his progress as leader of the Convention, Senator Tillman found himself on a shoal from which it took some floundering to get again into natatory water.

As reported in the press the incident appears as follows:

Mr. Wigg (a young colored man) asked Senator Tillman:

To this distinct specification of the act passed while he was Governor Tillman at first hastily claimed that it had been passed during his predecessor’s term of office; but later, on reflection, made a point of informing the Convention that he found he had signed it and desired, “to apologize to the State for having done so.”

[Pg 196]

The author of the Act, a cotton planter from Marlboro, W. D. Evans, then arose and also apologized for it, and a verbal pledge was given, that the Act should be repealed. At that time the Act was in its amended form, only operative for one-half of the year. But so far from being repealed, the only action concerning it, was the making of it operative for the whole year as originally drawn, license reduced.

As dissatisfying as such a statement may be to those to whom the injustice of it, and the disregard of a promise given under such solemn conditions, is repugnant, it must be borne in mind, that similar legislation of the State of Georgia had been, in the mean time, reviewed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and sustained upon the grounds inter alia , that—

The Supreme Court of the United States, therefore, shares with the Lower South the responsibility for this harsh and unwise restriction of the right of labor to its fullest wage, as well as the denial to a peculiarly ignorant and helpless mass of the population, of an assisted egress from localities where they are said to be such a menace from their extraordinary numbers, that a setting aside of all law and depriving of individuals of life without law by mobs is sometimes by some people justified.

[Pg 197]

But, while arguing for labor its right to go where it wishes to win its highest wage, we need not shut our eyes to the rank selfishness of the industrial agencies, which sweep out of a community the bulk of the able-bodied males and leave only the dependent women and children as a burden on it. That, however, could and should be met by legislation preventative of the breaking up of families simply to meet the demands of industrial slavery. But the right of the laborer to all that his work can earn should be protected, nevertheless.

As fruitful as the incidents of this extraordinary Convention were, in illustration of phases of the Negro question, the most remarkable of all, however, remains yet to be narrated. It has been previously stated, that in 1865, when the States of the then defunct Confederacy endeavored to rehabilitate themselves, as members of the Union, after Emancipation, but before Reconstruction, both South Carolina and Mississippi adopted codes, in which were the provisions that “every person who may have of Caucasian blood seven-eighths or more shall be deemed a white person,” thus separating such from “persons of color”, a denomination including all Negroes and mixed blood having less than seven-eighths of Caucasian blood, who were declared at the same time, “not entitled to social or political equality with white persons.”

This would appear to have been only another way of stating that those who did have seven-eighths or more of Caucasian blood were entitled to social and political equality with the whites. But Reconstruction, [Pg 198] as has been shown, swept this legislation out of existence, in the attempt then made to place all upon one plane of social equality, and to punish as severely as a law could be framed to, such as might be accused of any discrimination of a social nature. This preposterous piece of legislation was in its turn done away with when Reconstruction passed away, and in its place there was enacted the law which penalized marriage between whites and Negroes. In the South Carolina convention of 1895, an attempt was made to so frame the law, as to make it conform to the view held in South Carolina and Mississippi in 1865; but to this there was opposition in the shape of an amendment reading as follows:

Over this amendment to the report of the committee much discussion arose and among other expressions of opinion, was one from Mr. Sligh of Newberry, that it would be better to allow any one with only one sixteenth of Negro blood to raise white, rather than force such, to raise colored children. Sentiment was, however, against his view, and the proposed amendment was accepted as above outlined.

But in two weeks, after many renewals of discussion as to the wrong and injury which might result from accusations apt to be based upon a proportion so indefinite, according to press report:

[Pg 199]

Mr. George D. Tillman’s effort was successful, and the section, as finally adopted stands:

[Pg 201]

But if, in the personalities of Wigg and others, illustrations had been afforded of the advancement of the Negro in refinement, culture and morals, in the mass, the race was by no means fit to discharge the full duties of citizenship in the South. Even as the most active and progressive moved out and into other regions, they seemed to bring to bear upon the question, in propria persona, an argument which was inclining the inhabitants of the North and West more and more to the vociferous expression, that the Southern white man best understood the Negro; that the Negro was better off in the South than elsewhere; and that the South was the natural home of the Negro.

However else the whites of the North might differ, as Republicans or Democrats, philanthropists or politicians, there was almost unanimity of opinion, that the Negro was not wanted in the North. But he was pushing in.

Despite all his other claims to greatness, therefore, the fact, that he and his policy furnished the most effective means and instrument for retaining the Negroes in the South, contributed immensely to the late Dr. Booker T. Washington’s remarkable hold on Northern sentiment, for with his rise to fame and financial power, the Negro question took on a new phase. He had a mission and it is generally considered to have been to lead the Negroes to manual and industrial training, which it was in the main, but also its aim in part was to keep the [Pg 202] Negroes in the South; for that is the meaning of: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Booker T. Washington came first prominently into view by the speech from which the above extract was taken, delivered by him at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895. What D. H. Hill had urged for the Southern whites in 1866, Washington now urged for the Negroes. The Northern people were growing somewhat weary of the Negroes’ continual appeals for political recognition and this speech, avoiding such and couched in the most conciliatory phrases concerning the Southern whites, was a surprising departure. It struck a popular chord. It was written up in the very best vein by the most celebrated journalistic correspondent of that period, James Creelman, then in the zenith of his career of feature writing, as an “epoch making oration.” This writer, commanding the pages of the most widely read New York paper of that day, ranked—

But Creelman did not stand alone. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution telegraphed to the North that “the address was a revelation.”

The Boston Transcript declared: “It dwarfed all the other proceedings and the exposition itself.” [249]

President Cleveland was even quoted as affirming that “the exposition would be fully justified if it [Pg 203] did not do more than furnish the opportunity for its delivery.” [250]

The key-note of the speech has been before noted. In addition it contained two specific declarations, which constituted “the revelation”:

When to these expressions was added the further declaration:—

it was scarcely surprising that the speech was generally accepted in the South as a renunciation of all hopes of social equality, and an acceptance of a position for the Negro very near to that which Calhoun had assigned to him—“the best substratum of population in the world” for it would be one—“upon which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared.”

What fault then could the superficial Southern thinker find with such a policy? It certainly fitted very admirably with that which Senator Butler had declared some five years previously it was [Pg 204] “not a common thing to hear men say,” viz., the Negroes make “a good peasant class.”

It is true the Senator had warned his fellow countrymen “that there is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government”; but Washington’s remarks were so much more soothing to the South than Butler’s warning, that the average Southern man put away from his contemplation the possibilities dormant in the great mass of Negroes packed in the South.

And if the Southern man is willing to chance these possibilities, what reasonable being can blame the more sensibly sectional Northern man, for his cheerful readiness to finance the experiment?

That, in turning the attention of the race to manual and industrial training, Washington performed a great work is not to be denied. That, in influencing many of his people to follow him in such a program, he has raised the ambition of not a few to a much higher plane than the race had shown itself heretofore capable of, must be admitted, and these are great achievements. But it is an error to imagine that Washington ever made for himself or his race any renunciation of the aspiration for social equality. He condemned the agitation, not the aspiration for it. In the opinion of Dr. Washington, “color prejudice” was incompatible with true greatness of soul, and the highest praise he could bestow upon a man was that he was destitute of “color prejudice.”

Writing of President Cleveland, he said:

Although of very different temperaments, between the two colored men Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune, there seemed to be quite a sympathy. Washington in his autobiography avers it:

T. Thomas Fortune is a man of education and ability. As the editor for many years of the leading colored paper in the United States, its columns indicated that he certainly upheld the hands of Dr. Washington. Indeed he did not hesitate to belabor without stint the heads of such colored detractors of Dr. Washington as Monroe Trotter of Boston and others, even administering a rap or two to Professor W. E. Burghardt DuBois, when the latter failed to keep step with the Washington procession. But T. Thomas Fortune was of too independent a nature [Pg 206] to be restrained from the expression of his own view, and shortly before his surrender of his position as editor of “The Age”, he published the following declaration:

Can it be believed that a man sufficiently fearless to make this declaration and feeling obliged to do so, would uphold at all times the hands of an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard? It is difficult to believe it. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that while Washington, with “the wisest” of his race understood: “that the agitation of questions of social equality was the extremest folly,” he nevertheless cherished the aspiration. And indeed it would be most unnatural if he did not.

Bearing all the possibilities in mind, the question is, however, whether any policy which tends to keep massed in the South so many of the Negroes as are banked there, is to the best interest of the South, or the Nation, or conducive of the greatest good to the greatest number?

But Washington did not stand as the unrivalled leader of his race. Two other members of it criticised his leadership with arguments which could not be brushed aside too lightly. The first of these compiled in 1899, what was the most thorough investigation into the conditions enveloping the Negro [Pg 207] at the North, which had been printed up to that time. The author of “The Philadelphia Negro” is thus introduced by Dr. A. Bushnell Hart:

Dr. DuBois’s book was an entirely different style of work from the popular “Up from Slavery” published a year or two later, “with the painstaking and generous assistance of Max Bennett Thrasher”, as the autobiography of Washington.

DuBois’s book, “The Philadelphia Negro” is a most carefully made sociological investigation.

Later in 1903, Dr. DuBois published another volume entitled: “The Souls of Black Folk”—in which after a preface opening with:

followed by a fine tribute to his worth, the author declares:—

The criticism is this:

Between “the most distinguished literary man of the race” and “the most eminent man whom the African race has produced” there was then a profound difference, for what could be considered, by many, as the essential element of greatness in the policy of Washington, was that, for which this critic took him most severely to task, viz, his willingness that the burden of the Negro problem should be shifted from the shoulders of the whites to those of the Negroes.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the willingness of Northern and Southern whites, that it should be shifted is not to their credit, there is a virility in the promulgation of a policy for the Negroes by a Negro, which seeks to force the Negro “to stand upon his feet and play the game”, which [Pg 209] offsets many imperfections, and for that Dr. Washington must get credit.

The second of the two Negro thinkers who questioned Dr. Washington’s leadership, has also been quoted by Professor Hart; but of William Hannibal Thomas, one of the few Negroes of distinct intellectual force as before narrated, who participated in the struggles of Reconstruction in South Carolina and emerged, uncriticised, Dr. Hart has but two allusions.

Of the author of—“The American Negro; What he was; What he is; and What he may become,” Professor Hart, in his own strong book, only says, first:

Second:

In these two temperate utterances, as put, Professor Hart conveys what might be understood as disapproval; yet it can be urged in defense of Thomas’ criticism of his race in the last particular, that it is paralleled by the assertion of Professor Lombroso, himself an Italian, concerning Italians, when contrasting them with the English; while, with regard to the first, it would be difficult to find a paragraph framed by Thomas more suited for [Pg 210] quotation by anti-Negro writers, than the following in Professor Hart’s book:

Yet whatever the Negro preachers may have been, there is good reason to believe that, in the cities, their moral tone is improving, and there, now, high exemplars of morality can be found.

Again, despite his apparent pessimism, the future holds for Thomas a hope denied to not a few, who are impatient of his probe. Where can be found anything rising higher in optimism that the following:

The truth concerning this matter is, that Thomas had gone too deeply into it to be readily understood by those who have not had their powers of perception quickened by that daily contact, which teaches so much. Therefore, while Thomas’s book may seem extremely pessimistic; yet, when his philosophy is [Pg 211] boiled down, it is not very different from what Dr. Washington is thought to have preached, that God helps him who helps himself, or as Thomas puts it:

To some extent, therefore, the difference between Washington and Thomas was temperamental. Washington’s optimism led him to declare:

What these superficial and temporary signs leading to the contrary opinion were, Washington did not disclose; but Thomas did:

According to Max Nordau, spiritual sensuousness is by no means a characteristic or state interfering with great achievement; for he credits Ignatius Loyola with it.

[Pg 212]

But now to consider the view of this Northern Negro.

With the possible exception of Alfred H. Stone, it is doubtful if, up to this date, any individual has proven himself better equipped for the discussion of the Negro question than William Hannibal Thomas. A comparison might warrant the statement, that if Mr. Stone has enjoyed the wider range, Thomas has been able to make the more exact study. If Stone has the stronger mind, and it is still further strengthened with a fuller culture, Thomas has the more judicially balanced temperament. Thomas’ work is done. Stone’s has not yet reached its fullest development. We can, therefore, get a clearer idea of Thomas’ view in its entirety than we can obtain of Stone’s.

No man has drawn more from his experience than Thomas, and few have possessed such varied experiences to draw from. Simply and modestly as he sketches his life and pedigree, the brief recital indicates opportunities for observation which were most unusual, and, had he kept a diary, it would have been simply invaluable. Should he ever publish his impression of the men he has met and the events he has been connected with, it could not fail to be a most interesting and instructive book; for to powers of observation, which are unusual, he unites judgment which is distinctly admirable. Some brief extracts may put the man and some of his views before the reader.

His book opens with an explanation, indicative of that which he thinks distinguishes the Negro from [Pg 213] the white, characteristic traits rather than color, after which he briefly states his own pedigree and life history, as follows:

After reciting the recollections of his youth, his father’s active interest concerning, and his own sympathy for, the “Underground railroad”, and his efforts to educate himself, Thomas asserts that at the outbreak of hostilities he tendered his services in 1861 to the Government, but was refused admission to the army on account of color. In a civil capacity, however, he entered the 42d. Ohio Infantry Regiment, and—

In the fall of that year he joined the 95th. regiment, with which he remained, until the capture of Vicksburg, when, returning to Ohio, he enlisted in [Pg 214] the 5th United States colored troops, and was appointed sergeant, and after service in the Department of the James, was in the assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and lost an arm in the capture of the city of Wilmington.

Going South to teach, he took up his residence first in Georgia, later in Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873, and was appointed a trial justice. In 1876 he was elected a member of the legislature, and after the fall of the radical governments of the South, “gave up the practice of law and withdrew from active participation in politics” to devote his attention to the educational advancement of the freedmen, in pursuit of which, he “visited every Southern State and community.” [267]

Certainly such a one would seem admirably equipped for the task of discussing most interestingly and instructively the Negro question, as a perusal of his book clearly indicates. Why then, is the book not more popular in the North, where is to be found the great reading public of the United States?

Despite the advanced civilization of that section, its enlightenment, and its assimilation of British ideals, with the growth of the material prosperity of its people, there has grown a belief that money, if given with sufficient liberality, can cure any trouble. This is more than hinted at in “The Souls of Black Folk.” [268] How then can it be other than extremely distasteful to those, so conscious of their great generosity, to read in place of the encomiums with [Pg 215] which the assisted writings of Washington abound, the following audacious criticism:

It is true that in considering:

Thomas thinks the product, as well as the seed, of the latter is far superior; but, to the residents of that portion of our common country, that has long been axiomatic and does not wipe away the offense of making admissions with regard to the moral qualities of his fellow Negroes, which have been widely taken up and quoted by anti-Negro writers.

Almost it might seem in anticipation of this, Thomas says:

[Pg 216]

With regard to the possibilities of improvement, Thomas believes:

While Thomas’s view concerning the injury to the South of the presence in it of the Negro is more strongly put it is the view expressed by Senator Butler in 1900, and of Senator Barnwell in 1803, in all probability; yet it is a striking fact that in South Carolina, since emancipation, after thirty years of experience, we came back to the view expressed in 1865, and this, in spite of the fact that, as stated by a great authority on the subject:

Mr. Stone cannot include South Carolina as contributing to what he styles:

for the South Carolina law with regard to intermarriage between the races does not include every one with a trace of Negro blood as a Negro. And this brings us up to a consideration of this phase of the question.

The view of T. Thomas Fortune, on the intermarriage of persons of different races, has been cited.

[Pg 217]

DuBois’s, expressed with temperance, is as follows:

Yet he maintains that:

Twenty years later, in “The Comet”, he allowed his fancy fuller play.

When Thomas reaches this point in his discussion, we find neither the extravagant expression of Fortune, nor the apparently varying views and fancies of DuBois. Thomas says:

Now, as has been shown, Washington thought a color prejudice a thing to be lamented, and yet he preached for years for the Negroes to remain in the South; where Thomas says:

[Pg 218]

From which Thomas argues:

If Washington happened then to hold the same view as the above, even without expressing it, there was no discord between him and his lieutenant, Fortune, and therefore, while Mr. Stone was pondering the problem of the mulatto, Washington, looking with steady eye toward the future infusion of virile blood, cried to the applauding white people of the South;—“Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Is it for the best interest of all that the bucket should be cast down where we of the South are now?

By the census of 1900, Mr. Stone’s State was the one State of the three, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana with a Negro majority in 1890, which showed no improvement in this respect.

Louisiana’s Negro majority of 789 had given place to a white majority of 78,808; South Carolina’s tremendous Negro majority of 226,926 had at last felt the beginning of the ebb, and was 225,415; but Mississippi’s 197,708 had risen to 266,430, and, therefore, in Mississippi were the very worst conditions and those most fruitful for race friction; for Mr. Stone has declared:

In another lecture Mr. Stone had declared:

Yet, Mr. Stone quotes as an authority, Booker T. Washington, who declared:

These two statements as they would be generally understood, are inconsistent with each other and contradictory. If it be meant that a sudden thrusting out of four million people from one section, and impelling them into another, as fast as they could be moved, would precipitate a problem, no one would be foolish enough to deny, or attempt to deny, that it would. But, as the gradual introduction of four million Negroes into the North and West could not bring the mass of them up to more than 10 percent of the whole population, then, in many respects, the problem would be ameliorated by any policy which led to their introduction in a reasonable process of diffusion, although it undoubtedly would dispel some dreams, and give rise to some friction and considerable inconvenience for a while.

And, that even Booker Washington commenced [Pg 220] to see the advantages of diffusion, became apparent in at least one utterance before his death.

But, before treating of conditions and opinions in 1910, some information may be obtained from a careful consideration of what moral advancement the culture of the slave-holding South had produced in that class of its colored population, which as free persons of color, in the period of slavery, could themselves hold slaves.

In the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 1859 the list of taxpayers shows that 353 free persons of color returned for taxation, $679,164.00 of real estate. They also returned for taxation 290 slaves. Of these tax payers the wealthiest was Maria Weston, whose return for real estate was $41,575.00, slaves, 14; horses, 1. That was one-seventh of the value of the real estate returned by the wealthiest white tax payer in the city and two more slaves. But Maria Weston, while the wealthiest of the free persons of color in Charleston, was not very much more wealthy than R. E. Dereef and Robert Howard, and the average wealth of the free person of color was fairly up to the average wealth of the whites. The story is told in Charleston that when the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher visited the city, after the war between the States he invited himself to become the guest of R. E. Dereef, who received him with admirable hospitality, personally looking to it that the great man lacked nothing in the way of comfort and treating him with perfect civility; but studiously and tactfully avoiding all efforts upon the part of his guest to establish an intimacy. The great Abolitionist confided to a white [Pg 221] resident his disappointment that he had met no other member of the family or aroused in the breast of his host any decided interest in one who had done so much to bring about emancipation of the Negroes. But his confidant called to his attention, that he had been treated with admirable and uncomplaining hospitality, by one whom he had relieved of considerable property. Yet it must not be imagined that all free persons of color owned slaves. Of an interesting family, the Holloways, nine taxpayers in all, the wealthiest returned for taxation, real estate to the amount of $8,300.00, while the total of the nine summed up $36,000.00, only one of the nine, however, owned a slave. [280]

It is through what has been preserved by a member of this family, that we get a glimpse of what may be considered to some extent as the viewpoint of this class. That the ideal of J. H. Holloway was somewhat cramped may be admitted; but if so it should also be admitted that the basis was one of the strongest upon which an ideal could repose. It was social purity. Holloway’s father, grandfather and greatgrandfather had all been free men. He was a saddler and harness maker by trade, but he was nevertheless an aristocrat. He was an unobtrusive individual, of gentle nature, true to his convictions and very virtuous. Being opposed to vaccination, he refused to pay the small fine imposed and went to jail instead, assuring the white judge who expressed his regret at being obliged to sentence him, that he had no feeling about the matter, [Pg 222] believing the official was doing his duty. The intellect of Holloway was not extraordinary and to not a few his ambition may seem small and trifling; but it was pursued with such a patient faith and pious determination, as to impart to it, in the eyes of some whites in the same locality, who had accomplished something in life, a dignity entitling it to respect. His position resembled that of a priest of a dying cult, to whom the sight of the altars he intensely revered, more and more deserted, as he advanced in years, but the more added to the fervor of his worship; and so Holloway, to the day of his death, remained a devoted disciple of “The Brown” or as it was later called “The Century Fellowship,” the principle assets of which were a grave yard and some minute books. Holloway’s life was a living denial of the charge that the Negro has no interest in the past or future, for to him both of these periods were of importance. What was most noticeable in his thoughts was the balance of them.

On his business card: “J. H. Holloway—Harness Repair Shop, 39 Beaufain Street,” he had caused to be printed a quotation from the Bible—“Let your moderation be known to all men”, to which he had put the very practical addition—“in charges.” Upon the other side of the card he had paraphrased Oliver Wendell Holmes, as follows:

[Pg 223]

“The Brown” or “Century Fellowship Society”, which occupied almost all of Holloway’s leisure thoughts, had been founded in 1790. In 1904 some ceremonies were enacted upon the occasion of the laying of a corner stone for the new hall, it was hoped later to erect. [281] The address of welcome was delivered by a venerable member, ninety-six years of age, and was very brief. The religious services were conducted by the rector of the oldest Episcopal Church in Charleston, himself a veteran of the Confederate war, who, as a major of engineers, had contributed greatly to the “Defense of Charleston Harbor,” the history of which, under such caption, as author, he had also preserved. There was an ode by a member of the Society, and an address by a member of the board of aldermen of the city, also an ex-Confederate soldier. But a review of the aims and aspirations of the Society by J. H. Holloway, throwing as it does a light upon the point of view of a class, not given to undue exposure of their opinions, was probably the most important utterance of the occasion. [282] He said:

Had Holloway only lived to read the exposition of the subject—“The Negro in the New World”, which in 1910 appeared from the pen of the great English explorer and Negro character specialist, Sir Harry Johnston, he would have learned that:

Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency [Pg 226] there was no reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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

Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the benefit of the fiercely prejudiced [Pg 227] English authors, who are unable to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s Nazareth.

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

The occasion of Fordham’s speech was an incident in 1891, occurring in one of those periodical struggles by which democracy in the United States perpetually renews its strength at the expense of officialdom. At the close of a warmly contested and close primary, the successful faction opposing the municipal administration in Charleston, found it difficult to bring the result in one ward to a count and decision. Impatient and suspicious, as the delay wore past midnight, a worthy but somewhat choleric individual, of the faction announced successful at every other point hours earlier, denounced [Pg 228] the presence of the police in the poll where the delay was being maintained by the masterly inactivity of the administration manager.

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

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

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

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

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

In the years which intervened between the events last narrated, the Democratic president, with regard to whom Dr. Washington had asserted that he possessed no color prejudice, had concluded his [Pg 229] second term, made illustrious by the firm stand taken by him in the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute, which had been brought to his attention and fought to a decision, [286] against the extreme and arbitrary claims of Great Britain, by that almost forgotten Southerner, William L. Scruggs of Georgia.

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

Whatever these two men thought concerning the color question was no doubt discoverable; but it was not announced as a new gospel; for while great in spirit they were not noisily so. They were both great men. Cleveland, the Democrat, was greater in his public character and official achievements, the Republican, McKinley, in the personal integrity and absolute self abnegation which adorned his life and crowned his end. Cleveland opposed to malfeasance a rugged force, which did much to build up public integrity, lamentably lowered in Grant’s two terms. McKinley’s respect for law and order was so sincere, that in his dying moments he interposed to protect his assassin from the natural fury of the mob, thereby defending an anarchist from the outburst of [Pg 230] anarchy which the vile deed occasioned, and giving, in his own suffering person, so interposing, the noblest appeal that could possibly be made against lynching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Pg 233]

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

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

[Pg 234]

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

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

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

[Pg 235]

Despite the incidents related in the last chapter, which might be claimed to be almost isolated or pertaining to a very small class of the Negro population, to comprehend clearly all that is embraced in the diffusion of the Negroes throughout the United States, and the consequent dissolution of the mass in the Southern States, while endeavoring to grasp what is so intelligently urged by Mr. Alfred Stone, concerning “pressure”, the investigator should not fail to realize that in the Southern States, if the Negro was willing to accept unreservedly the position of an inferior and a menial, there was formerly no distinct repugnance to him, per se. In fact, with a small class, the descendants of slave holders, he obtained and still obtains tolerance and not a little patronizing affection, being treated in about the way in which a careless, amiable, hot tempered father might treat an amusing child.

As long as the child remains a child, it might not be so bad for him; but the question is what kind of a man does it make of him?

With regard to the views and practices of the whites of the Northern States concerning the Negro question, they may be divided into three classes.

The first class, corresponding to a similar class in Great Britain, may be not unfairly described as a small, sentimental, somewhat hysterical class, lacking in neither culture, character nor wealth. These entertain a prejudice in favor of the Negro on account of his color and previous condition of servitude. At one period in the history of the United [Pg 236] States, wielding power out of all proportion to the wealth, culture or numbers of its members and representing the disintegrating force of an idea to “sap the power of rank, of wealth and of numbers,” it has left its mark on the history of the country in the great almost incalculable good of Emancipation; and in the terrific injury, injustice and folly of Reconstruction.

The second class is best described as having no color prejudice. While considerably larger than the first, it is scarcely the largest in point of numbers; yet, until very lately, it could have been declared with accuracy, as the most influential class in the Northern States. It is true that it must be borne in mind that it has not yet felt what the most thorough white student of the Race question has described as:

But, with this reservation, it may be styled as calm, tolerant, kindly tempered and quite considerate of an opposing view; and, as its possessors are singularly free from sentimentality, they wield just the degree of power and influence which is the accompaniment of such great qualities.

The third class is, in point of numbers, first, and although, today, the power and influence this class wields is not proportionate to its numerical strength, it is slowly but steadily increasing its influence. The great majority of the members of this class entertain [Pg 237] towards the Negro an intense prejudice. Some members of it cannot bear the presence of a Negro near them in any capacity; being utterly unable to accept with any patience, from such, the most menial services. Undoubtedly such a prejudice tends to prevent miscegenation and, without it, all the laws which may be enacted will offer but a comparatively feeble bar.

On the other hand, wherever there are two races living side by side in fairly kind feeling, as long as men and women remain creatures of such an infinite variety of individual tastes, desires, powers of restraint, passions and appetites, miscegenation, to some extent will prevail, and such being the case, where the inferior exists in the greatest numbers there will be the greatest result from it; while, on the other hand, as the great numbers of the inferior race are lessened, the tendency toward miscegenation must also be lessened.

This happens from various reasons. First, from the simple fact, that, with the lesser numbers of the inferior race, there must be lesser opportunity. Second, from the very important fact that the fewer the number of the inferior race, the more its members must be brought into contact with and under the influence of the standards of the superior race, and absorbing their ideals, with a consequent increase of personal dignity, and decency; from which will necessarily increase the disposition to refuse solicitations provocative of miscegenation, except on terms not readily granted.

From these deductions, it must be apparent, that, in a broadly national conception of patriotism, as [Pg 238] opposed to sectionalism, however disguised, the natural and slow diffusion of the Negroes throughout the United States must result in an elevation and improvement of the condition of the population white and black, taken as a whole; although it is quite possible, by some portions, which have been perfectly free from any share whatever of the burden of an inferior race, a share of the weight and responsibility could then be no longer avoided, or discharged entirely by sermons to the portions less happily situated, or the payment of something like a bounty.

Finally, to those Southerners who cherish the wild delusion, that, with a retention of great numbers of the inferior race in their midst, a sentiment, backed by laws against intermarriage, is sufficient protection against miscegenation, the illustration afforded by East Africa may be pointed to. East Africa lies just south of the oldest civilization we know of, and has been invaded in the past by horde after horde of whites.

The Biblical story of Cain and Abel may be taken in part as illustrative of the two vocations by which mankind slowly arose from the savage occupation of the hunter to the two higher divisions, namely, those who tamed the beasts, and those who tilled the soil.

Modern medical opinion is to the effect that no occupation so develops the physical perfection of humanity as the pastoral vocation; while reflection would indicate that it must cultivate a stronger set of characteristics than either hunting or tillage.

[Pg 239]

Bring into collision in a comparatively primitive state a pastoral people and one engaged in agriculture and the shepherds and herdsmen will rule.

But will their contempt for those they have brought under and subjected to their rule suffice to prevent miscegenation? That is the serious question for the Southern man.

It is apparent in East Africa, where this contact has existed for many generations, despite the preservation of every racial prejudice which marks the Southern white man, the superior race has not avoided miscegenation, but, upon the contrary, it has steadily progressed, until distinctions in color are almost gone, and even the more stubbornly yielding distinctions of facial traits and hair texture are gradually giving away, and this miscegenation seems to have checked progress in civilization.

Writing of the two classes of Negroes found near the great African lakes, the explorer Stanley says:

All of which indicates great pride still in the superior race; but a reduction to what is practically two classes of Negroes, as far as the outside world is concerned. Note Livingston also in Southwest Africa.

But in addition to the reasons advanced why this matter of the diffusion of the Negroes through the United States should be accepted as best, there is the consideration that it is inevitable. That it is in progress can no longer be doubted, although, as Robert Y. Hayne declared in 1827, it would be, “a very gradual operation.”

The strong grip which the Republican party maintained in Federal politics for the sixteen years, up to 1912, has in some measure to be credited to the influx from the South of Negroes into the North and West, where they most naturally and reasonably vote the Republican ticket. Indeed it has been positively asserted by one whose devotion to that party could scarcely, at the time, have been questioned, that they may have been brought there for this purpose.

Says Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, in his very interesting and instructive book, “The Southern South”:

[Pg 241]

It is true that the Census for 1910 only disclosed in Indiana 60,280 Negroes; but Mr. Hart’s not unreasonable estimate was probably based upon the preceding Censuses of 1880, 1890 and 1900, alone available in 1910, when he wrote, which did indicate a rising rate of that species of population, from 15% to 27%, while that of 1910 indicated for that State a drop of 4.8%. A similar falling off being recorded in Illionis, where the rate of increase dropped from 49 percent to 28.2 percent, and in Ohio alone of these three great States, the rate increased. There it had risen from 11 to 15 percent. Proceeding East, a decline was also recorded for Pennsylvania from 43 to 23.6; for New Jersey from 47 to 28.5; for New York from 40 to 35.2 percent. The total increase of the Northern States east of the Mississippi from the year 1900 to 1910 being only 142,363 as against 188,347 from 1890 to 1900; but west of the Mississippi from 1900 to 1910 the increase was 107,747, as against 51,194 from 1890 to 1900; a total increase in the whole area outside of the South of about 250,000 against about 240,000 for the previous decade. At the same time in the South for the decade 1900 to 1910 an increase of Negroes of only 757,901 as against 1,079,054 from 1890 to 1900, with an actual decrease in the population of the three [Pg 242] States, Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee, amounting to 33,020.

This would seem to indicate a rate of increase in the South of about ten percent and outside of the South, in the rest of the United States about twenty-five percent, up to 1910.

But in connection with the above there is another fact which is of some importance, and that is the increase of the entire Negro population of the United States, in 1900 amounting to 8,849,789, as exhibited by the Census of 1910 was 351,029 less than the increase of the 7,488,788 Negroes in the United States in 1890 to 1900.

What has caused the difference?

The not unnatural but wholly unsatisfactory suggestion of the Census authorities, that the discrepancy is due to the errors of others Censuses, should be received with politeness coming from such efficient workers; but can hardly be taken at its face value. After all the Censuses are our safest guides, and there is not much reason for thinking one so very much better than another.

Again, there is a class of reasoners prone to take to themselves the somewhat comforting conclusion that the Negroes may be moving into the North and West from the South; but that they cannot live there and die out; to clinch the argument, they point to Canada, where it is asserted just about and after the war a great number of Negroes had settled in Ontario, and certain it is that by the official Census of Canada for 1911, the Negro population had decreased [Pg 243] from 17,437 in 1901 to 16,877 in 1911. [298] Yet there are other facts and circumstances leading to speculations affording explanation of a part of the loss.

From 1900 to 1920, there passed over into Canada from the United States some 1,318,834 citizens of the latter country, some of whom have been Negroes, how many mulattoes, not designated.

It is true that, as Negroes, not more than 383 so classified entered Canada up to 1911, and only 13 during the fiscal year 1910-1911; [299] but many more under the classification “citizens of the United States;” must have entered in the light of the following newspaper comments:

By subsequent and fuller accounts it appeared this party numbering 200 were finally permitted to go on and settle, the correspondent of the London Times, writing to this paper as follows, from Toronto:

The correspondent went on to observe that refusal of homesteads might arouse “feeling in Washington” and also fail to meet “the approbation of the Canadian people.” But he thought, if it was the beginning of a formidable movement from the Southern States, there would certainly be a demand for as vigorous regulations as could safely be devised to prevent or limit Negro immigration. From Washington came the news item that “if it appeared that the Canadian Government had decided to bar American citizens because of their color, the State Department would protest”, and later it was asserted that by representations to American railways interested in the movement, it had been stopped. [301]

In the light of the actual decline in the very small number of Negroes in Canada’s population, dropping from 17,437 in 1901, out of a total of 5,371,315 inhabitants, to 16,877 out of a total of 7,206,643 in 1911, the alarm and excitement over this “invasion” is absolutely incomprehensible. Yet there is a possible [Pg 245] explanation in the following speculation. The Indians in Canada in 1901 numbered, with the half breeds, 127,914; presumably without, in 1911, they numbered only 105,492. At the same time two origins, “various” and “unspecified,” increased from 32,999 to 165,655, and it is not at all impossible that among these 165,655 we may find many mulatto “invaders,” as it is scarcely possible, no matter how prolific the Indian half-breeds may have proved themselves to be, that they could have supplied more than twenty percent of the increase of 132,656, whose origin were not disclosed in 1911.

Sir Harry Johnston’s estimate of the Negro and Negroid population for Canada in 1910 was 30,000. It may well have been much more.

Now, of the 4,880,009 Negroes in the United States in 1870, not more than 584,049 could be classed as mulattoes; while of the 9,827,763 colored of 1910, 2,050,686 are so classed; [302] it, therefore, appears as if miscegenation is preceding at a pretty rapid rate, the mulattoes increasing just about twice as fast as the entire colored population; but while the proportion of mulattoes in the Northern colored population is still much larger than it is in the Southern population, the increase of the mulattoes of the South is about four times as great as at the North. Under these conditions it would be amusing, if it were not tragic to hear the average Southerner, who thinks he thinks about the subject, placidly declare that his objection to the diffusion of the Negro in the United States is that, outside of [Pg 246] the South, they amalgamate with the whites. Of course it is not pretended that this tremendous difference in the increase of this class in the two sections is due entirely to a greater amount of miscegenation between whites and colored in the South than at the North, for there is no way of ascertaining how many of the mulattoes of the North have in the last ten years passed on into Canada as “Unspecified” or “Various” in the “Origin”; but making every allowance which reasonably may be made, it does not seem as if there is any greater degree of miscegenation at the North than at the South, if there is as much; while the North possesses in Canada a safety valve, which practically insures that region from any serious injury from Negro immigration. How unfortunate, therefore, it is, that it has not occurred sooner to the Negro leaders, to preach the advantages to be derived from the members of their race in moving out to some degree from the South into the West.

Seventeen years after his famous advice—“Cast down your bucket where you are,” Booker T. Washington gave a glance Westward as follows:

Had Washington directed one-half of the phenomenal energy he exhibited in the eighteen years [Pg 247] of his prominence in endeavoring to keep the Negroes in the South, towards assisting them in obtaining their share of the land in the West, what progress might they not have made?

Eighteen years ago, before the great world problem of color had arisen, there was nothing to chill the zeal of the British Negrophilist; but in South Africa the British Negrophobe is increasing in numbers and his influence is also being felt in Canada. Still there are opportunities for the Negro yet, if the leaders of the race will only awaken to the necessities of diffusion. But time and tide wait for no man.

As has been attempted to be shown, the idea, not unreasonably entertained soon after the war between the States, that there was apt to be with time, a greater and greater increase of Negro population in the five Southern States, considered as the Black Belt, is no longer tenable.

Immediately after the war the Negroes were in a majority of 19,808 in this belt of contiguous States, which the processes and excesses of Reconstruction did raise to 168,965, discernable four years after its overthrow. But by 1890 this Negro majority had been reduced to 150,661 and by 1900 to 92,610. In the following decade this black majority through white immigration and black emigration, was replaced by a white majority in the so called Black Belt of 423,717; which now has risen to over a million and a quarter. The increase of whites has been greatest in the two States in the center of the belt. In the State of Alabama from the conclusion of the [Pg 248] war, the increase of the white majority has been steady and continuous, rising from 45,874 in 1870 to 320,566 in 1910 and to 546,980 in 1920. The increase of the white majority in Georgia was less rapid. Reconstruction had cut down the white majority of 93,884 to 81,773 by 1870, but from the overthrow of Reconstruction it rose to 254,849 in 1910, and has now reached 482,749. Louisiana’s Negro majority of 2,114 in 1870, Reconstruction had raised to 28,701 by 1880, but in the forty years which have followed, it has now become 396,354 whites in excess of blacks.

In the other two States progress has been slower.

South Carolina, laden with Negroes to the very gunwales by the subjects of “King Cotton,” emerged from the storm of war with a Negro majority of 126,147, which Reconstruction speedily increased in “The Prostrate State” to 213,229 by 1880, a number so far beyond her small white population, that even with a decreasing rate of increase, the black majority had increased by 1890 to 226,926, the decrease of which in 1900 was barely perceptible; but by 1910 had fallen to 156,681 and in 1920 was still further reduced to 45,941. And even Mississippi, whose Negro majority rose steadily from 31,305 in 1870, to 266,430 in 1900, dropped in 1910 to 223,338, which by 1920 had fallen to 81,222. This is in all probability due to the migration which Carlyle McKinley predicted in 1889, although Hoffman, who published a painstaking work in 1896, thinking to establish that the Negro was dying out, as “in the Northern States the colored race does not hold his [Pg 249] own, for the deaths out number the births,” yet concluded that the Negro was—

As in the North and West the numbers of the Negroes have since 1870 to 1920 risen from 250,000 to 1,550,000 and in the South during the same time from 4,585,000 to 8,990,000, the two assertions above do not hang together.

When we consider the view advanced by that great writer, the author of “The American Commonwealth”, we find it very difficult for him to shake himself loose from the impression that the Negro must remain in the South, and that it is best that he should, although what he says, himself, would seem to disprove the assertion. He finds first evidently by consideration of the census figures up to 1900, that:

Carlyle McKinley, with more prophetic ken, eleven years earlier foresaw this, but also beyond what is shown above, that from this region the Negro would move out, North and West.

Mr. Bryce finds:

The writer lays it down specifically:

Contrasting the views of Booker Washington and DuBois, he finds a cultured group which declare they do not seek social equality with the whites, yet in spite of the fact, stressed, that where he is isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be retarded, a condition of the South, building upon such a foundation, Mr. Bryce does not hesitate to declare, that because, at the North, “the white laborers may refuse to work with him ... the Negro is after all better at the South.”

Apparently in the view of this great Englishman, the risk of a relapse into barbarism is not as serious a matter to the Negro, as exposure to the cold shoulder or angry scowl of a white laborer; and so [Pg 251] he dismisses the Negro and his future with an attempt to epitomize the philosophy of Dr. Washington into what is really Mr. Bryce’s imperious conviction, viz, that there is:

But even while this epitome was appearing in print for the first time, the inability of the great author to fully plumb the depths of Dr. Washington’s political philosophy was shown by the New York Age, the leading colored paper of the United States, which, upon the nomination of Mr. Taft for the presidency in 1908, published what was asserted to be the facsimile of the telegram sent him by Dr. Washington, to the effect that he expected to see him elected and by his (Washington’s) people, as no doubt he was, to a very great degree, by their votes in the Northern States.

If then—

surely a way had been found for the colored man to do more than Mr. Bryce thought he could. He can move out of that section where in mass his vote was destructive into that one, in which it is sought, and there cast it for what he deems his interest.

If in 1908, the Negroes moved into the North for the purpose of supporting Mr. Taft and defeating [Pg 252] Mr. Bryan, they did what they had a right to do, and under conditions which made it hardly possible that it could inflict much damage, even if the vote was cast more as a commodity of merchandise is disposed of, than as an exercise of a free man’s franchise; for no matter for whom cast, it could hardly swamp the opposition. When, as a mass of delegates from the South, however, four years later in 1912, the Negroes assisted Mr. Taft’s friends in party convention assembled, to secure for him the renomination for the presidency, against the wish of one, deemed by many as the most powerful cleansing factor of the Republican party, the evil effects flowing from so great and determinative occupation with politics by the Negroes of the South, became so apparent to many earnest Northern men, that the reported view of Mr. Roosevelt, as to the distinction between the exercise of the right by the Negro in the South and out of it, did not seem so strange.

To extreme Negrophiles, of course, it is merely an indication of the marvelous progress of what is called the Southern “color psychosis.” It is in fact one of the many illustrations constantly appearing, of the realization of the fact that, when invested too swiftly and fully with power and privilege, backward people are apt to stumble; and in this connection it might be well to consider the morality of the Negroes of South Africa, thirteen years after the overthrow of the Boer republics, under whose rule they had been protected from the oppression of the more savage members of their race; but nevertheless kept in a distinctly menial condition.

[Pg 253]

A report appearing in 1913 in that country is, in itself, some evidence of the value of the suggestion made by the author of this work to the great New York paper, which in 1890 had invited ideas to be suggested to it.

An impartial study of the color psychosis of these two little white republics in a sea of blacks, cut off to a great degree from the influence of European and American ideas, as they were in 1890; but evolving not only a people, stated by the London Lancet to be the finest physical specimens in the world; but also a Botha and a Smuts, surely must have been of great educational value to the United States. Here is the report ten years after South African Reconstruction:

The Englishman, in 1921 is just commencing to see some virtue in the Boer who, until very recently, has shared with the South Carolinian the distinction of being the most vilified of all people. Like the South Carolinian, the Boer believes that, between the races, “familiarity breeds contempt.” Both peoples hold to their views very tenaciously. No change has ever induced the white people of South Carolina to alter their attitude against divorce. Perhaps this is one of the reasons which has induced the advanced thinkers of the higher civilizations to generalize most fiercely against the white inhabitants of this small State of the Union.

In 1910, Sir Harry Johnston produced his book “The Negro in the New World.” The author, a traveler and student, at the suggestion of President Roosevelt, brought to the consideration of his subject much knowledge and not a little temper. The aim of the book is popularity. From a scroll below the map of the Western Hemisphere, the heads of Dr. Burghardt DuBois and Booker T. Washington project, silent witnesses to an entirely colored United States with the exception of the tips of New England and Florida; but as all of England, France and Italy are colored, no reflection is evidently intended. [Pg 255] In his preface, with amusing naivete, he confesses:

When he reaches that part of his book which is to show:

Evidently there is no need to take into consideration any “of the difficulties of the situation” in the Southeastern States of the Union. Sir Harry Johnston has been called upon to curse the Southeastern States of the Union, and being a firmer type of man than Balaam, he does it thoroughly. But incidentally he exclaims impatiently:

To which he adds the following rich, dark, daub:

[Pg 256]

The author has not proceeded a page in his chapter, “Slavery in the United States” before he begins to inveigh against South Carolina and Charleston. He tells his readers:

He writes of slave insurrections in South Carolina in 1710, 1720, and 1740, and states that in 1760 there was a slave population of 400,000 in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia; but he fails to mention that during this period these people were all under British control. He actually makes it a complaint of South Carolina that: “these were the people so admired by Gladstone, Kingsley, Huxley and Carlyle.” [312]

The more he writes the angrier he gets with South Carolina:

But he cannot keep away from 1740:

[Pg 257]

The truth about this insurrection is as follows. No insurrection occurred in South Carolina in 1740; but in 1739, when as Sir Harry Johnston failed to state, the province was under British control:

There was no Charleston revolt in 1740.

[Pg 259]

In the more scholarly portions of this book, the author invites comparison with the great work of Ripley, the American, which unavoidably detracts from the confidence of the reader in the wealth of expression of the Englishman. The book is a mass of information, in which much prejudice is apparent. When he gets down to advice, the writer informs the reader that what he regards as “a matter of crucial importance to the civilized Christian Negro,” [318] Mr. Roosevelt evidently thought non-sense, for that great American informed him, that he would never—

Sir Harry wished—

It is hardly necessary to make any great endeavor to discover the exact meaning of the author’s mouth filling phrase:

For while he tells us that:

If Sir Harry Johnston, or for the matter of that, his patron, President Roosevelt, had only been able to study that neglected and impoverished Negro seer, the only one of the teachers of his people who gave his blood for their freedom, proving his faith by his works and not by mere lip service, the repudiation of whom by the Negroes and their leaders is the severest indictment which could be drawn against the race, they might have been wiser. But from time immemorial the call to the prophet has always been: “Prophesy unto us smooth things.”—and W. Hannibal Thomas having fought in the ranks of the Union army and lived in the midst of Reconstruction, knew a little too much, despite his exaltation of the civilization of New England, and his criticism of the South’s attempt in 1865 to mould again its own, apart from slavery, to ever be accepted by those who had participated in or were responsible for Reconstruction.

[Pg 261]

The American Historical Association founded about 1889 has accomplished a great work in purifying the sources from which history has been drawn. It has stimulated the study of history and has afforded the field and opportunity for effort. By the Act of Incorporation it shall report annually its proceedings and the condition of historical study in America, to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, who shall communicate to Congress the whole of such reports or such portion thereof as he shall see fit.

In the year 1909, the President of the Association, invited, from certain selected individuals, papers on the Negro question limited to 1800 words, for one of the sessions of the Association. This was a limitation which every white person accepting should have scrupulously observed and no one should have accepted who was not willing to exert himself seriously. Yet the tendency of not a few whites to allow themselves always a little playfulness whenever discussing this subject seems ineradicable. To the one colored scholar, who accepted the invitation, the occasion afforded an opportunity not to be permitted to slip by unimproved, and with admirable nerve, he selected the darkest decade discernible in the consideration of the subject, as disclosed in the history of the United States, and addressed himself to a discussion of “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” in a paper of about 10,000 words.

In the disregard which he thereby showed of the terms of his invitation he was justified by his color [Pg 262] and his brains and the merit of his work won for him the widest dissemination of his view. Like Sir Harry Johnston’s more elaborate book it is polemical; but superior in taste and style, being free from the little querelous snarls with which the Englishman garnished his treatise; for if there were sneers in DuBois’s exposition they were couched in language which passes muster among well bred people; while the fact that he was in reality an advocate, with a brief to maintain, accorded him license for such.

The opening could hardly be improved upon by any special pleader.

Writing in 1909, he declares:

[Pg 263]

That the training and the treatment of these ex-slaves became a central problem of Reconstruction, he admits; yet claims that three agencies, the Negro church; the Negro school and the Freedmen’s Bureau undertook the solution, without which, he maintains, it would have been far graver. But he absolutely disregards that product of ante-bellum Southern civilization then in the South, 132,819 [325] free persons of color, many of whom were morally and mentally well fitted for what the Black Codes designed to give them, the suffrage. This element of the Southern population together with the majority of the House slaves would have probably furnished a base of about ten per cent of the total Negro population on which the new civilization would have been reared, had the South been permitted to test its plan. Having declared that the economic condition of the eleven States at the close of the war was “pitiable, their fear of Negro freedom genuine,” Dr. DuBois maintains, “yet it was reasonable to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction toward slavery.”

Admitting that:

he promptly contradicts his own admission, with the assertion:

[Pg 264]

Is this true? Can any student be absolutely open minded? A seer is a receiver and revealer of truths. Such a being can possibly approach the consideration of a subject with an open mind. One may imagine Socrates so approaching a subject; but by what process, by what mental cathartic, does one, who studies, divest his mind of all preconceived ideas of the subject every time he considers a theory concerning that which has interested him sufficiently to lead him to seek to know more of it?

No, the vast mass of us approach those subjects, when we are sincerely desirous of truth in the spirit of that individual who exclaimed to Christ—“Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” When the broken, beaten South attempted to frame the Codes, which no Negro has ever been able to consider judicially, the survivors could not possibly approach the condition they were in with an open mind. The greatest mind that has ever considered our great experiment in government, the French student De Tocqueville and that strong but shallower mind, that for so many years had with its resolutions overshadowed all others in the South, united in the dictum. Abolition means Africanization for the South. But the whites of the South were to a great extent British and Northern Irish in stock. They were eminently conservative. A stock greater in defeat [Pg 265] than in victory, as history has shown the British to be.

To obtain additional strength with which to withstand the flood of ignorance and incompetence let loose or about to break loose, they accepted the leadership of the poor white Andrew Johnson, despite the repugnance they felt for him, as keen and lively as any Englishman ever felt for Joe Chamberlain or Lloyd George or Ramsay McDonald. They did more. As far as legislation could affect it, they extended social equality to the least darkened of the dark race by which they were surrounded. The political principle, upon which they sought to adjust themselves to the changed condition, was based apparently upon the thought that if all the Southern whites and that proportion of the Colored population constituting about one-tenth, reasonably the most elevated in the minds of the theorists, from the fact that they closest approached the whites in physical texture, united, such union must strengthen the rulers even as it weakened the ruled. Dr. DuBois therefore is quite wrong when he intimates with some generosity, that the Black Codes were framed under hasty excitement, in declaring:

No, whatever may eventually be found to be the character of the Black Codes of the beaten South, they bear upon their faces the imprint of cool, calm, thoughtful action. Even the most cursory consideration of them will disclose that they were framed [Pg 266] more for the irresponsible freedman than the freedmen in general; for instance, if the freedman owned a farm or had a permit, the possession of gun, pistol or sword, otherwise forbidden, was not denied. On the other hand the inhibition of the right of sale or barter of domestic produce did not apply to the Negro generally; but to the servant under contract with a master engaged in husbandry, and not even then, if the servant had written evidence from such master, or from a person authorized by him, or from a District Judge, whose oath specifically required him to do what was required by law “without prejudice for or against color.” [329] In addition the servant was given the right to—

The law went further. It gave the servant the right of departure coupled with the right to recover wages due for service rendered up to the time of his departure, for any—

And not even the death of the master terminated the contract, without the assent of the servant, for the enforcement of which the servant had a lien as high as rent. And when wrongfully discharged [Pg 267] the servant was entitled to recover wages for the whole period of service, according to the contract. [332]

That the master was given the right to administer corporal punishment to the servant under some conditions cannot be denied; but the phraseology of the South Carolina Act is:

Yet it specifically provided that:

Finally, not to prolong the discussion, when we note that the servant was not liable civilly or criminally for any act done by the command of the master, for any tort on the master’s premises [336] and that the former slave holder was not permitted to dispossess the non paying helpless former slave, for a year and a month from the occupancy of dwellings belonging to the former master, but occupied without any return by the former slave, [337] and what elaborate provisions in detail were made for the care of such in his or her helpless condition, we will find that we look in vain in England, old or New, for such humanitarian legislation, at this date. Why [Pg 268] then were the Codes overthrown? Dr. DuBois is prejudiced and naturally so. He is not as well informed as he deems himself to be; but he desires to be fair and just; and so we have from this, the most cultured member of the colored race in the United States, the real reason for “Reconstruction and its Benefits.”

So, the terrific losses, which he himself itemizes were not enough. The beaten South was to be manacled. And how does he picture the victors in that dreadful hour?

[Pg 269]

Remember this is not a Southerner, black or white; but the most cultured of Northern colored men, who so describes the conquering East from which he sprang.

It is scarcely possible to state more comprehensively in less space than that in which Dr. DuBois describes the effects of Congressional Reconstruction:

But he palliates this with the following:

He fails to furnish any authorized evidence of the first; but the three last should be accepted as in some degree exculpatory of the Negroes.

There is something almost pathetic in Dr. DuBois’s description of the Negroes’ contribution to Reconstruction:

And this he follows with what he means to be an indictment:

When we reflect that the Confederate generals, Wade Hampton, Kershaw and McGowan, as has been shown, all supported the revolt of Delany, Cain and William Hannibal Thomas, against Chamberlain and R. B. Elliott in 1874 in South Carolina, and that in the columns of “The Crisis,” today, Elliott is eulogized as a great representative of the colored race; while no mention has ever appeared of those two Northern Negroes who most conspicuously opposed the evils of Reconstruction, Martin Delany and William Hannibal Thomas, we can only acquit Dr. DuBois of insincerity on the ground of rank carelessness and immovable prejudice.

The summing up of this very interesting defense of Reconstruction and plea for the Negroes as lawmakers is unquestionably an able presentation:

[Pg 271]

It would be idle to deny that these Reconstruction constitutions were other than most effective.

William Hannibal Thomas, who might be fitly described as in charge of the rear guard when the Negro government fell in South Carolina and who has criticised the Black Codes even more severely than Dr. DuBois, states:

[Pg 272]

They were framed to complete the conquest of the overthrown States, Dr. Dodd puts it thus:

The war having ended in a complete conquest of the South and a sentimental control of the vigorous West, expanded by the East as it exploited the broken South; through the destruction of the codes and the imposition of Congressional Reconstruction, the whites of the South were welded into a new mass, cruder and tougher and not unnaturally quite inimical to the Negro who had been made to rule over [Pg 273] them, until by revolutionary methods they had overthrown such. That they, the Negroes, and the Western whites had all been subjected to the control of the East as thoroughly as economic laws could subject them to it, was not for decades appreciated in the South or West.

Had Lincoln not been assassinated and had he remained true to his Western ideals, he would have been broken on the wheel of capitalism as relentlessly as was his great Southern successor, who struck down Germany in her hour of triumph. But Lincoln was spared that test and died without realizing the entire measure of his service to the Union and the whites who inhabited it; for to him the Negroes were a negligible quantity, despite all the phrases with which he utilized them, in his purpose of preserving the Union. Indeed it was not until the fountains of the great deep were broken in the World War, that the inevitable consequences of emancipation forced themselves upon public opinion, and, in this connection, a small episode, of the above related meeting of the American Historical Association in 1909, throws some light upon the state of mind of the East at that date.

At the same meeting in which Dr. DuBois read his bold, elaborate and interesting defense of Congressional Reconstruction, the author of this study submitted, on request, a paper on the Negro question, in accordance with the limitations, which, while accepted and edited for publication by the Board, was not permitted publication in the Report of the Historical Association, Mr. Charles D. Walcott having [Pg 274] the power to exclude it from such, and using the power. That the skeleton piece of 1750 words was to some slight degree critical of the East is not to be denied; but if the Eastern scholars rose above their prejudices when presented with truth why could not the official? The gist of the little paper when printed does not appear very inflammatory.

But while Dr. DuBois and the author of this study, in response to the invitation of Dr. Hart, before the historians of the United States were discussing, each in his own way, a subject they thought of some importance, it is of interest to consider what was occupying the mind of the wisest and most neglected Negro in the United States, at the same time. About the same date William Hannibal Thomas wrote to the author of this study:

We might measure the scope of this Negro’s dream in the autumn of 1909, by the following news item of April 17, 1923, which apparently was only another dream:

[Pg 276]

Whatever difference of opinion may exist amongst railway experts as to the merits of the legislation concerning railroads which the Iowa senator has made his name synonymous with, few doubt his knowledge. Yet he would seem to be just about fourteen years behind the neglected Ohio Negro, whose opportunities were restricted to two sessions of the South Carolina legislature in Reconstruction days. Is there anything that has ever been resolved with regard to railroads better calculated to serve the general public, than that introduced by Thomas, when opposing the most brilliant of the Carpet Baggers, Daniel H. Chamberlain, in 1874?—

Both conventions had to subscribe to that; but if it represented the views of Daniel H. Chamberlain, [Pg 277] the Reformers under Thomas and others must be credited with some influence in turning him from his earlier views on railroads, when he was the legal guardian of the State.

Observe him, fresh from the East.

What a terrible indictment of the Negro intelligentsia is their utter neglect of William Hannibal Thomas, the great Negro who could think of something more than himself and his race, who wished to serve humanity at large.

[Pg 278]

With the year 1914, the world entered a new era of thought, for the effect upon civilization of that great convulsion which afflicted the world in 1914 was felt far beyond the arenas upon which the World War was fought. The conflict was on too gigantic a scale for it to be grasped during its waging. It tested civilization to a supreme degree. Loosely knit bonds, that in all reason should have parted under the immense strain to which they were submitted, held all the tighter under the tugs to which they were subjected. That portion of humanity which had least to give, gave with a fullness beyond the imagination of man. Nothing in all time has ever equalled the volunteer movement of the men of Britain and her dominion states. Conscription might have produced a more efficient army and less weakened the State; but the great soldier and greater man, who in the main fashioned the armies of Britain to the admiration of his country’s foes, knew that, in that great hour, nothing could equal the moral effect of that wonderful volunteer movement. Democracy was put to the test and rang absolutely true.

So much happened before the United States flung her immense force into the scale, that an infinitude of fact has passed from the memory of men. Never in the history of the world was it more thoroughly demonstrated, that “Order is (not) heaven’s first law.” Democracy moved up to the sacrifice unfalteringly. Autocracy broke under the strain and, in his own appointed time and in spite of all that [Pg 279] man proposed, God disposed of the event, in a way no one could have dreamed of. But before the great Republic of the West intervened, in many ways the United States was affected, and in none more profoundly than by the migration of the Negroes from the South and their diffusion throughout the country. The war between the States and emancipation had made this diffusion only a question of time and it had been progressing with a quickened and then a retarded flow, during the decades previous to the Great War; but the war’s great check on immigration from Europe speeded up the movement. Lecturing at the University of Chicago in June, 1916, the author of this study was struck with the nature of the reception accorded the subject: “The Readjustment of the Negro to the Social System of the Sixties,” in which the necessity for diffusion was stressed.

Active from 1890 to 1900, later, the standard of living of the Northern Negro had risen, and just as capital in the North and West had forced out the English, German and Irish workmen and replaced them with cheaper and inferior people; so too, the Northern Negro could not live as cheaply as the Slav, Greek, Italian and Slovene. [352] These in their turn, however, the World War had been sweeping away, since the middle of 1914; and, while the sentimental regard for the Negro’s advancement, which had been very broad and active a generation earlier, had gradually become restricted to assisting in fitting him for a residence in “his natural home, the [Pg 280] South,” the need for the brawn and sinew which he could supply, being felt in the North and West, in obedience to its demand, the Negro, for a consideration, was moving out of “his natural home”; for the philanthropy of the North, the greatest in the world, as it draws its supplies from, is to some degree, subservient to, the commercialism of its section.

Almost contemporaneously with the lectures in the great Western city, which is destined to be the center of Northern Negro opinion, from the metropolis of the Union came an utterance of immense importance from the most aggressive, intelligent and humane publication, spreading out its influence from the center of American and world finance.

As viewed by The New Republic, the situation in the summer of 1916 was thus stated:

The fact that this very able statement is not entirely exact in all its details takes very little from the value of the presentation of it. As has been disclosed by Mr. Warne, in his, “Immigrant Invasion,” the Negro had quite a chance until the decade 1900-1910. That he did not improve it as fully as he might have done was due; first, to his ignorance; second, to his retention for quite a while of servile instincts; third, to the determination, on the part of a very considerable and influential portion of the Northern and Western public, that the Negro must be kept out of the North and West; and of the controlling [Pg 282] portion of the Southern public, assisted by the Republican Supreme Court of the United States, that he should be kept, as near to the condition of a serf of the soil in the South, as he could be by those so restraining him, keeping themselves, meanwhile, on the windy side of the law; fourth, to an active, continuous, well financed propaganda, led by the most influential member of the race, that he should cling to the South.

Against such forces what could be affected by the few Southern white men, Carlyle McKinley, Wade Hampton, and M. C. Butler, as early as 1889, preaching “Diffusion”?

North and South, in the main for purely selfish reasons, the force of the country was against diffusion of the Negro and for banking him in the South, where he had been so long a slave. For such a paper, therefore, as The New Republic , to advocate diffusion was a matter of the very first importance.

Continuing the discussion in its issue of July 1, 1916. The New Republic declared:

Weighing duly what is urged above, without necessarily accepting all of it as accurate, is it not apparent, that, for a Southern white man to argue that the Negroes should remain in the South, in the masses in which they now exist there, is an indication that he refuses to consider anything as beneficial, which affects industrial conditions he has become accustomed to? For the Negro so to think is simply the survival of the servile instinct, which the bulk of the Southern whites claim is latent in all Negroes.

To stress the matter a little further, the view of a Southern and a Northern Negro will be submitted and contrasted.

The first is the view of a colored man, Rev. Richard Carroll, who, in 1890, had attracted the attention of George William Curtis, as has been before mentioned, by his bold and original utterance, that Tillman had made the whites as well as the Negroes readers and thinkers. Some eight years later this colored man had served as the chaplain of a colored regiment in Cuba. Later he had occupied himself with a colored school near Columbia, South Carolina, and, to some extent, had become, to the press of the State of South Carolina, the type of the good Negro, who agrees with the best of the whites. That is the distinct ear mark of the “Good Negro.”

[Pg 284]

Describing the departure of the Negroes from South Carolina in 1916, he states that:

Next he describes the tearful, melodramatic appeal of a Georgia divine, entreating the Negroes not to leave the South:

Having shown the patriotic unselfishness of Captain Tillman and quoted the wail of the Georgia divine, the colored educator proceeds to state his own view:

Just about fifty years before Carroll’s utterance, people in the South, to some degree answering to [Pg 285] Carroll’s description of the Hampton type, framed the Black Codes, as they thought, “for the good of each race, and at the same time each race in its place.” But, after Reconstruction, Wade Hampton thought diffusion of the Negro was the only remedy.

After detailing cases, where he claimed to know that Negro men of property had been ordered out of the State simply because they owned property and were prosperous, Carroll states that when they came to him for advice, he advised them to—

The Black Codes made this obligatory on all masters for their servants. The framers of the codes were raised in the school of politics which Rhett, in 1850, announced the basic principle of, as follows:

Residence in the South, a considerable time after maturity, had therefore apparently lessened the independence of this colored man. He had come, not unnaturally, to prefer security to independence.

But, in the same year and about the same time, there appeared in the same paper a temperately [Pg 286] worded article from the pen of another Negro, also a minister, R. R. Wright, Jr., residing in Philadelphia, who had been employed at various times by the United States Bureau of Labor and the University of Pennsylvania.

He had also, at an earlier date, published an essay on the Negro Problem, which treats the subject as a scientific investigation, in which all temper and feeling is out of place. With regard to the movement of the Negroes he declared there had been at least four different migrations of the Negroes from the South to the North since the war between the States, and estimating in 1916 that there were then, in that section, usually called the North but embracing a considerable portion of the West, he thought, of the 1,600,000 Negroes there, three fourths had been born in the South. With regard to the number of Negroes in the North at that date this estimate was above what the Census of 1920 disclosed; for by it, the date 1910, there were only 1,059,000 Negroes in the North and West and therefore, even if they had increased by 1916 to 1,600,000, three fourths of these could not have been from the South, even if the total addition of 541,000 had come from that section, as of the 1,059,000 in 1910, only forty per cent were from the South; [357] but whether 40%, 50% or 75% were from the South, Wright believed 80% of those who had moved up would stay, because he was confident, the most efficient could compete with the Slavs and Italians in rough work. Indeed he claimed it was no uncommon thing to see a Negro [Pg 287] foreman over groups of Italians in Pennsylvania. Having seen the same thing practically as to Negroes and Spaniards, during the World War the writer can believe this. Higher wages and better educational facilities also Wright claimed would draw the Negro, North and West, and finally he cited what is in his opinion the most powerful inducement, for the Negro to move in increasing numbers from the South to the North:

Meanwhile with views for and views against, shouted to them, from all sides, the Negroes moved up from the South to the North and West and to the great centers of industry, to supply the place of immigrants and soldiers passed and passing to Europe for the great war.

To the reading Negro, wherever he was, North or South in this year just before the entrance of the great Republic into the greatest war of all time, came “The New Negro, His Political and Civil Status and Related Essays,” by William Pickens, Lit. D. Easily comprehended, popularly composed, they opened with the usual attack upon the black laws of the South in the sixties, the author especially singling out the code of South Carolina for criticism. Of them generally he says:

But strange to say this critic, in 1916, actually proclaims that—

If this was a handicap in 1916, what must it have been in 1865? Forty one years before this Negro scholar discovered the handicap, the South, in attempting to readjust itself to the consequences of defeat and the overthrow of its industrial system, had legislated to preserve that acquaintanceship by a system of apprenticeship, which if it was calculated to work out the problem very slowly; yet was calculated to produce something superior even to the free persons of color that slavery had evolved, a worthy product which no Negro or Northern scholar has ever had the patience to think about. Little as the author of this study knows about the free persons of color whom the South reared; yet it is not fair to accuse them of what Pickens is absolutely justified in stating with regard to the mass of Southern colored citizens who were the product of Congressional Reconstruction. Pickens indeed is refreshingly frank in this respect and so much so that the Negroes will avoid his book. It will not be found advertised in any list of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Race. He is dangerously near William Hannibal Thomas in the following:

But in the year which followed that in which Pickens’s book was published the United States entered the World War.

Before discussing the effect of that great adventure upon the Negro minority of one-tenth of the population of the United States, the force which swung the whole should have some slight consideration, and from the pen of a political opponent, the editor of the greatest Republican paper of the West this is pictured as follows:

But he did more, a Southerner, conscious of the deep prejudices of his own section and against the protests of many State officials, he determined that a certain proportion of colored men should have training as officers; nor did he permit this military training to be stopped even after the Houston riot, when for the second time Negro soldiery shot up a Southern city. Those who were guilty were court martialed promptly; but to the surprise of not a few of the Negro aspirants for office, the training of Negro officers proceeded. Again not quoting from a friend; but taking a Negro’s statement we note:

President Wilson’s action in this matter was a vindication of President Roosevelt’s action in the previous riot at Brownsville and a stern condemnation of the sentimentalists, white and black whose strictures upon Roosevelt had led the Negro soldiery to harbor the amazing idea, that troops of any color could take the law into their own hands and make Zaberns in America, on a scale beyond the wildest imaginations of any War Lord’s minions, in Europe.

[Pg 293]

In the year immediately following the end of the great World War armed clashes between whites and Negroes in the United States occurred in the great cities of the North and West, Washington, Chicago and Omaha and also in the State of Arkansas. These race riots drew comment from whites and Negroes. Prior to these riots in the time of peace, there had been others during the World War at Chester and Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania and one in Illinois at East St. Louis. Both Dr. DuBois, the president of “The National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People,” and the colored minister Wright, whose article on Negro migration has been alluded to, gave advice. It is interesting to compare their utterances. The communication of the minister is first cited.

The appeal of DuBois is more dramatic:

In a consideration of these two utterances, if it be conceded that in point of literary excellence, DuBois’s appeal is superior, yet that does not establish that in his call he better plays the part of leader than the Negro minister, first quoted, whose exhortation to his race, unlike that of DuBois, is in no [Pg 297] way overstrained, nor pitched too high for the humblest, if possessed of rudimentary intelligence, to grasp. The detailed instructions in Wright’s publication, simple as they are, contain wisdom, the wisdom which crieth out in the streets from of old; while if the comparison instituted, by DuBois between the Northern and the Southern whites, in respect to the police and public opinion in the two sections, is true, it is passing strange, that unlike the Negro minister, he is not found advising the migration from the worse to the better section, as far as the needs of his race are concerned. If in the North, even if justice moves limpingly as he describes; yet according to him justice does move. And for the poor and oppressed what gain can out-weigh justice? But there is a graver comparison to be instituted between these calls. DuBois in his publication exclaims:

Now whatever wrongs or supposed wrongs the Negro soldiery suffered in Houston, can it be reasonably contended that they, armed by the Federal Government and enlisting to be under its orders, in breaking away from the control of their superior officers and with weapons put in their hands for other purposes, in any way assisted civilization and order by precipitating themselves upon the white population in an attempt to shoot up the city? If he does so claim then he is worse than the Negro soldiery who so acted, or those Negroes and whites, [Pg 298] no matter who they were, who criticised Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter. No matter to what lofty station Roosevelt’s critics may have been advanced; no matter what service they may claim to have rendered peace and civilization, their weakness in that first instance induced the graver breach, for which, under President Wilson, as commander-in-chief, the Negro soldiery were courtmartialed and punished for their excesses at Houston. Yet while the perusal of DuBois’s call, as above, does not convey a positive stand for or against the Negro soldiery and is open to the criticism which appears in Pickens’s book:

apparently his view changed. As editor of The Crisis, Dr. DuBois upon the occasion of the Chicago riots as above noted honored every man, black or white, who, in either Houston or Chicago, gave his life for civilization and order; later he expressed the following, which is nothing more nor less than a justification of the behavior of the Negro soldiery at Houston:

Now, how does this exhibit this extremely gifted man, as a leader of his race? In the roar and blaze of the Chicago riot, in 1919 he was for “Honor, [Pg 299] endless and undying Honor to every man black or white in Houston ... who gave his life for civilization and order”; but by the end of 1920, the executed Negro soldiers had become martyrs, murdered by the government.

But in justice to this most excitable man, it must be admitted that there can be found whites of cultivation and intellect just as wild. Take the case of Dr. H. J. Seligman.

With all the insufferable conceit of a certain class of white, he appropriates the work of Negroes, (easily recognized by those who have heard their most intelligent speakers), denatures it of the humor which makes its appeal and presents it to the public, as his own indictment of the South. “The Southern dogma colors the rest of the country,” he says. Yet he admits—“In so far as the South is concerned, conditions improve as the Negro moves out.” Another writer, Stephen Graham, starts his book with crediting to the Negro slaves emancipated in 1863 the “twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races blending in America.” [367] As the census postdating his book gives only 10,389,328 Negroes for 1920, and as in all reason nearly two millions of these may be argued to be the progeny of the free persons of color of 1860, the contribution to the race from the class of colored person invariably ignored by English and Northern writers must approach almost a third. But that is not sensational. So journeying through Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana [Pg 300] and Mississippi, visiting Negroes, accepting their hospitality and practicing social equality, Graham most inconsiderately denounces their smell and, because he failed to reach and establish any spiritual touch, in his attempt to address them, stupidly decides there was none to be attained. Expressing the belief that the Negroes of New York and Chicago were firmer in flesh and will than those in the South and yield more hope for the race in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes, he nevertheless crawls back to the feet of Northern prejudice with the declaration against the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and the consequent even distribution over the whole of the country, because it would take “hundreds of years to even them out” and “they would probably crowd more and more into the large cities and be as much involved in evil conditions, as they were in the South.” Can it be possible that there are nothing but evil conditions in the great cities of the North and West? Is it not the belief of the Northern authorities, that what the Negro needs is education? What education is equal to residence in these great pulses of our civilization? Has not Mr. Graham, himself attested “the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes?” Why then attempt to throw doubts on the benefits to the Negro from diffusion? It might as well be faced without any more squirming. It is inevitable. By the law of compensation, that section of our great country, which for a hundred years or more has represented to the admiring [Pg 301] world all the virtue, intelligence and civilization of the United States, especially in its treatment of the colored race will have to endeavor to live up to its reputation. The aspiring Negro is not going to be denied that contact with the most advanced civilization of this country, which those who freed him owe to him. If he crowds into the great cities, it is because there he finds its most advertised display, and so the most active and energetic push into it with some contempt for their feeble self elected leaders, who have preached against or kept quiet concerning it.

For three decades prior to the war between the States, the Southern States of the Union had made railroad development secondary to the Negro question. Constituting as they did in area at that time fully one-half of the States; peopled with 3,575,634 whites and 2,176,127 Negroes, they had been led to base their civilization on the substratum of an inferior race, putting that wild conception even above the Federal Union, that great experiment in government, which they had been most instrumental in framing. After their overthrow, Reconstruction raised the spectre of the Negro outstripping the whites in the South and almost assuredly in the lower South. And what establishes the wonderful clearness of the vision of the Negro, William Hannibal Thomas, was his ability, two years before the overthrow of Reconstruction, to see through the mists of 1874, which so completely shrouded the vision of Judge Albion Tourgee as late as 1888 in his “Appeal to Caesar.”

[Pg 302]

For Thomas realized, from the outset, that the Negro majority of South Carolina could not last.

In the hundred years which have elapsed since 1820, the proportion of the Negro population to the whites in the United States, as a whole, has dropped from 19 per cent to 9.9 per cent, the whites rising from 81 per cent to 90.1 per cent. With regard to the Negro population in the Southern States as compared with the rest of the United States, the proportion in the South has dropped from 92.5 per cent to 84.2 per cent, the percentage of the rest of the United States rising from 8 per cent to 15.98 per cent. But while it is treated as a movement of one hundred years, as far as the South is concerned, on account of the unknown accretions prior to 1860 through the illicit slave trade and the magnetic attraction of Reconstruction, it could be more accurately represented as a movement of forty years.

In the five great States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, embracing an area of about 224,960 square miles of contiguous territory, the white population had risen from 4,112,564 in 1880, to 7,444,218 in 1920; while in the same period the Negro population had increased from 2,408,654 only to 3,223,791. But what is even more striking is the fact that in the last decade there has been an actual decrease of 143,288 in the Negro population of this Southern area.

At the same time in the five great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin the Negro population has risen to 514,589, and to the East of the great Northwest, in the Middle States and [Pg 303] New England 709,453 were found to be; while West of the Mississippi river, outside of the old South, into a region, which before the war between the States was prairie and almost unexplored mountain and desert, 314,879 Negroes have moved. Yet in the South they still constitute 26 per cent of the population to only 3 per cent outside, in the rest of the Union.

Mr. Graham’s impression, however, that it will “take hundreds of years to even them out” is a hasty and illconsidered judgment. Louisiana, which forty years ago had a colored majority of 28,707, had by the Census of 1920 a white majority of 396,360. Georgia had increased its white majority from 90,773 in 1880 to 482,749 in 1920; while the great cotton planting State of Alabama had raised its majority in the same period from 62,083 to 546,972. Considering what the Census figures show for Virginia, suffering as no State suffered from the war between the States, engaged in by her for no purpose of sustaining a black substratum for her civilization; but for a purpose identical with that which the civilized world acclaimed for Belgium and supporting the shock of war with a courage and devotion not surpassed by France in the Great War, she was shorn of about a third of her area and four-tenths of her white population, in utter defiance of the Constitution; but, now with a white majority which has risen from 57.5 per cent to 70.1 per cent, she is in a healthier condition than the portion which was carved out of her flank. The gain of North Carolina is even greater. Taking the whole South, [Pg 304] we find, that from 1880 to 1920 the white population has increased from 12,309,087 to 25,016,579; while during the same period the colored has only risen from 6,013,215 to 8,801,753. It is true that by the Census of 1920 two Southern States, Mississippi and South Carolina still each had a colored majority; but one which had shrunk from 213,227 to only 46,181 in South Carolina and from 170,893 in Mississippi to 81,262; the percentage of whites in South Carolina being 48.6 per cent and in Mississippi 48.3 per cent. [368]

Until the Census of 1930 is published we shall not know positively; but in this, the fifth year since the last census, all available information seems to indicate that in both States the white minority has been converted into a white majority. By the census of the United States for 1920 in the 875,670 square miles which constitute the Southern States there were 25,016,579 whites and 8,801,753 colored inhabitants; while the remaining 2,150,600 square miles of the Union held 70,925,032 whites and 1,552,402 Negroes, with 109,966 under strictly Federal control at Washington. But again, North of the Northern line of the United States extends a region greater in area than the United States in which as indicated by the Canadian census of 1921 there are only 8,750,643 inhabitants. The door of opportunity therefore still remains open to the Negro in America and his inability to see this, throughout the fifty eight years of his freedom in which it has been accessible to him by foot, while handicapped [Pg 305] by their ignorance of our wants, our customs and our language, the impoverished whites of Europe have crossed the three thousand miles of water which barred them, offers the most striking proof of the Negro’s lack of capacity to help himself.

Perhaps, in justice to the Negroes as a whole, it should be noted that in no race that has ever existed has it been easier to use the supposed leaders against the true interests of the masses, than is apparent in the history of the Negroes. Yet even these, as they now clash with each other, emit some sparks of political intelligence. Meanwhile the masses are growing more accustomed to judge for themselves. Northern environment has not been without its effect upon them. They are taking something from it and they are going to give something to it.

In the Northwest, in all probability, they are in the next decade apt to gather in such numbers, as to affect both the South and Canada, although in exactly opposite ways. To a considerable extent what The New Republic foresaw in 1916 is coming to pass; but in somewhat quicker movement than that paper anticipated. The last great effort to induce them to remain in the South their “natural home” has been made. It has utterly failed. They are steadily moving out and diffusion is proceeding without any of the ills so continuously alleged as inseparable with such a movement.

And now to this last effort, the comments upon it and what may be called the first Negro Crusade, [Pg 306] we should pay some attention, and then close with an allusion to the most helpful discussion ever instituted concerning the Negro.

[Pg 307]

At Birmingham, Alabama, President Harding spoke on the Negro question, October 25, 1921. Elected president by the greatest majority which had ever placed a president in power, his remarks, if not very profoundly wise, were unquestionably bravely frank. His position was that unless there should “be recognition of the absolute divergence in things social and racial,” there might be “occasion for great and permanent differentiation.” To quote him in such passages as most clearly and unequivocally expressed his views, he will be found to have said:

To this he added, as if replying to some unexpressed utterance, altho’ he was the sole speaker:

In these two utterances President Harding put himself in accord with Abraham Lincoln and in opposition to Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner to Booker [Pg 308] Washington, and, from this, he drew near to what is supposed to be the teaching of Booker Washington:

From these generalizations, after quoting from F. D. Lugard a paragraph which even a Philadelphia lawyer would be puzzled to unravel, in which it is declared that while there shall be equality in the paths of knowledge and culture and equal admiration and opportunity, yet each must pursue his own inherited traditions, and while agreeing to be spiritually equal diverge physically and materially, the President reached the piece-de-resistance of his discourse:

To this, the most important part of the President’s remarks, while complimenting the tone and spirit of the whole, the same paper in which Carlyle McKinley [Pg 309] in 1889 sought to reveal to the South its true policy, thus replied:

The comment of that Northern publication which had, as has been shown, most intelligently discussed the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and West in 1916, was to the effect that while the President’s scheme had much to recommend it as far as the spirit was concerned, yet—

The President’s speech appeared about the time at which Dr. DuBois returned from the second of the Pan-African congresses in Europe, which he had been mainly instrumental in convening and at which there were Negroes and mulattoes from West and South Africa, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, Nigeria and the Gold Coast; Indians from India and East Africa; colored men from London; and twenty-five American Negroes. There were meetings at London, Brussels and Paris.

The London congress over which presided a distinguished English administrator, later Secretary [Pg 310] of State for India, Sir Sidney Olivier, was mild, the chairman making no attempt to control the findings. But at Brussels, where—

presided—

DuBois says—

It seems Oswald Garrison Villard, with that refreshing conceit which tempts him to discuss any subject whether he knows anything about it or not, had been ignorantly denouncing conscription, imposed on French Negroes.

With infinitely superior political acumen the London congress under the leadership of DuBois, or certainly with his approval, claimed the right to bear it equally with white Frenchmen, as long as France recognized racial equality; but when DuBois at Brussels, after a few days of harmless palaver—

there was some stir. This is the scene, as depicted by DuBois:

Dr. DuBois does not explain wherein it was not; but contents himself with declaring that Diagne used his power as chairman and prevented a vote, the question being referred to the French congress. Later in conversation with DuBois, Diagne declared that he had “only sought to prevent the assassination of a race.”

In his final analysis of the congress at Paris, DuBois says:

DuBois thought Diagne and Candace, while unwavering defenders of racial opportunity, education for and the franchise for the civilized, “curiously timid” when the industrial problems of Africa “were” approached. Well so was the Negro, Martin R. Delany, candidate for lieutenant governor of [Pg 312] South Carolina in 1874. He had had advantages for studying the African problems which Dr. DuBois had possibly not enjoyed to the same degree. Delany in his younger days had been an African explorer and, even if he had not penetrated very deeply into “The Dark Continent,” had seen the African Negro in his lair. He and his younger co-laborer for reform in South Carolina, William Hannibal Thomas, ex-Union soldier from Ohio, as has been narrated, supported the candidacy of Judge Green for governor of South Carolina, in 1874, against the brilliant white Carpet-Bagger Daniel H. Chamberlain and his lieutenant, the even less reputable black Carpet-Bagger, R. B. Elliott. But while Thomas accepted Chamberlain, in 1876, as a changed man, with regard to Chamberlain’s accompaniment, Delany, who had been in South Carolina since 1865, eleven years to Thomas’s three, was still “curiously timid.”

DuBois later enlarged his experience by a trip to Africa and, before that, possibly may have been moved by the work of a French Negro scholar who had made some mark in the literary world and occasioned some stir in French colonial politics, just after the Pan-African congress. But upon his return from these in 1921 DuBois at once addressed himself to the consideration of President Harding’s Birmingham speech.

With a curious sympathy for the man, Harding, and a display of rank ingratitude to that white leader who had dared to do more for the Negro, than Harding thought became a white man, DuBois declared:

[Pg 313]

Although thus praising the President and with a wholly gratuitous sneer at the dead Roosevelt who had dared the “disgrace” and suffered for it, the Doctor asserted Harding’s “braver clearer utterance” was “an inconceivably dangerous and undemocratic demand,” which he disposes of with one sweep of his pen, which not only wiped out Harding’s speech; but also brushed away the basis upon which John Stuart Mill erected his political economy, to wit—“the first impulse of mankind is to follow and obey, servitude rather than freedom is their natural state.”

Not so in the view of Dr. DuBois:

In reply to this it may be said, that when the Negroes are thoroughly diffused throughout the United States, they are apt to get as free a ballot as the whites and proportionately the same education; but when all who labor, white or black, get a just wage, the millennium will have arrived and the capitalistic lion will be lying down with the horny headed laboring lamb.

[Pg 314]

It cannot be denied, however, that Dr. DuBois stirred up some comment with his congresses and those who believe in the exhortation—“let there be light” will be interested in the French and German utterances thereon.

The Paris Temps, generally considered the organ of the French government, editorializes in these words:

This is a world wide echo of Hayne’s Speech on the floor of the United States Senate just about a century earlier. It is also to some extent an endorsement of Diagne, whom DuBois had criticised as “curiously timid.” The portrait of the remarkable Senegalese who played such an Ajax to DuBois’s ambitious Hector does not appear; but an entire front page of The Crisis is given to Maran, the Black Thersites of the race.

If DuBois would accept Diagne as the leader of the Negro people some results might come; but the Negro in DuBois will scarcely permit this. He might accept the far less able white, Oswald Garrison Villard. But no Negro.

The German comment on the congress is less cautious than the French but points in the same direction:

[Pg 315]

In this report it is claimed both the United States and England are handled harshly, while France is praised. It seems Sir Harry Johnston is, to some [Pg 316] degree, in accord with this praise of France, at the expense of his own country, his opinion being:

It is this very fluent gifted linguist, in all probability, who is responsible for the picturesque conclusion:

But if from a representative of Imperial Germany, the only country which ever enacted as a part of its organic law the principle of Nullification, it surpasses in grandiosity and positiveness of statement the dictum of Calhoun in 1837:

[Pg 317]

We of the South know, we did not successfully resist emancipation; were not extirpated; but do form part of “the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time.” We must realize that, no matter what was the price paid for it, emancipation was salvation for the South. It was a deliverance from the “body of death,” Reviewing our history, we find that in the same year that Calhoun, the greatest disruptive force in our politics, pronounced the dictum last quoted, a comparatively young and unknown politician, destined to be the greatest cementing force of the Union, declared—

In discussing this utterance of Lincoln, his latest biographer, Mr. Stephenson, who declares it reveals the dawn of his intellect, beautifully pictures how—

Going back ten years before the dawn of Lincoln’s intellect, and four prior to the declaration that the Negro question was, as he, Calhoun, saw it an African slave substratum on which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared, Hayne, on the floor of the United States Senate, voiced in his own words, Lincoln’s subsequently sponsored thought.

[Pg 318]

Harken to Hayne:

In 1827, it is apparent that the Negro question was a different question than it later became to the South; and that the strengthening and possible spread of slavery was in some measure due to Calhoun’s devotion to it, over and above all other questions, even before Nullification, is evidenced by his letter to Maxcy in 1830:

Strange to state, even at that early date, he writes of the South possibly being compelled to “rebel,” to preserve her “peculiar institution.”

Fortunately for the Lower South, Lincoln and not Seward was elected president in 1860; for had Seward been raised to that position of preeminence, in all human probability the seven States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would have been allowed to secede and attempt the experiment of government involved therein, with a population of 2,619,116 whites, 36,861 free persons of color, many of whom were slave owners, and 2,312,372 Negro slaves.

That the colored population would have increased rapidly is a reasonable conclusion. Virginia, North [Pg 319] Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, in all probability, would have speedily divested themselves of a great proportion of the 1,324,166 slaves they held and, even if such Southern statesmen as Leonidas Washington Spratt had not been able to reopen the African slave trade, the smuggling in of slaves on a greater and greater increasing scale would have been a consequence. Slavery being the corner stone of the new political structure, it would have been natural that the view of Governor Seabrook, that slave holding Negroes should be admitted to the ballot, would have eventually prevailed. War might have come between the large and small sections of North America from some frontier incident concerning Arkansas, the Indian Territory or Mexico; but it could scarcely have been the pulverizing conflict which the Lower South sustained by the two and a half million additional whites of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, maintained for four years of desperate struggle.

Each year that the conflict was delayed would have found the States which remained in the old Union stronger and whiter, sickling the seceded States with railroads and quite possibly drawing Canada into their orbit; for as Sir Charles Dilke has pointed out in his Problems of Greater Britain, published when the annexation of Canada was still a debatable question—

The days of the “Little Englanders” were only then passing, when the colonies had almost been considered a nuisance.

But whether the region mapped out now as Winnipeg, Alberta and the other wheat areas of the Canadian West might have been attached to the great white Union in the sixties, if undisturbed by war and moving with continuingly accelerated industrial development or not, the Union would have become whiter, as the Lower South darkened; and Calhoun’s “substratum” theory would have there been tested to the fullest extent and risk.

From this Lincoln’s adroit political play induced the Lower South, by firing on the flag, to save itself, unknowingly. By the invasion of Virginia he forced that State, as well as North Carolina and Tennessee, into the Confederacy, against which, in 1862, he drew the weapon of emancipation without the least idea as to how deep it must cut. For it has proven to be a two edged sword.

Nothing more clearly reveals Lincoln’s ignorance of the inevitable consequences of emancipation, than his message to Congress in December, 1862:

If this was the Great Emancipator’s view of emancipation, what wonder that the “Southern color psychosis” should spread like measles, from contact alone.

The Congressional Reconstructionists thought that they had won in the war between the States what has since been styled euphoniously, “a sphere of influence,” a subject people to sell goods to. But the mass of Northern and Western whites, true Americans, sickened of the excesses of Congressional Reconstruction. The Federal troops were withdrawn on the order of a true patriot, Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, and not of a section.

Chastened and disciplined by their fall from power, the most energetic and industrious, the boldest and most assertive Negroes have, since 1876, been steadily moving into the mammoth cities of the North and West, to there build up in the segregated districts, groups of New Negroes, as the Report of the Chicago riot shows “more perfect thro suffering.”

[Pg 322]

By a joint committee of blacks and whites that riot has been discussed and that makes the discussion the more valuable.

In that great city of two and a half million of inhabitants, after ten days of riot, bloodshed, arson and murder, in response to the appeal of representative citizens, Governor Lowden appointed an emergency committee to study the underlying causes of the riot of 1919 and to make recommendations. According to the Census of 1920 there were then in Chicago 109,458 Negroes. The chairman of the committee was Edgar A. Bancroft, a leading lawyer, subsequently appointed by President Coolidge Ambassador to Japan. The vice chairman was Dr. Francis W. Sheppardson, at one time of the University of Chicago. The most prominent Negro on the Committee was Robert S. Abbott, proprietor of the greatest and most influential Negro paper in the United States, The Chicago Defender . The report was published in 1922. It indicates 38 persons killed in the riot, 15 whites and 23 Negroes. Of the 527 injured, 178 were white, 342 Negroes, the race denomination of 17 not being established.

For the 38 deaths, there were nine presentments for murder returned, four persons being convicted.

While it is stated that the merciless bombing of Negro households was due to a systematic campaign conducted by the press against Negroes buying properties to one side of the district in which 90 per cent of the Negro population reside, that they moved, (on account of their increase), towards the side to [Pg 323] which they did go, rather than in the opposite direction, the report says—

That Negroes were killed deliberately, as a business measure, in response to propaganda against them simply as Negroes, is an unavoidable conclusion. Extracts from “The Property Owners Journal” show that again and again there was an attempt to appeal to a “Higher Law” than the law of the land. It seems to have been the law of greed. Here is an extract:

Following this hypocritical appeal, 58 houses, bought by Negroes, were bombed, the residence of Jesse Binga, a Negro banker having been bombed six times without breaking down his firm determination to stand the storm. The house of a Negro woman was bombed three times. Her home had been attacked in the riots and the front door battered down; but, upon calling on the police, she and her husband were by them arrested, altho’ later acquitted. The report charges gross and continuous exaggeration during the riot, in which it is distinctly stated that the Chicago Tribune led, although it is also stated, that the paper owned by one of the [Pg 324] committee, in one instance, could hardly have been surpassed. That this last statement should have been made, speaks volumes for the fairness of the committee and the member of the committee thus concurring with the stricture on himself. It also states, of the paper published by Robert S. Abbott, “The Defender”:

The Governor in his FOREWORD states that the report shows “that the presence of Negroes in large numbers in our great cities is not a menace in itself.” Incidents cited showed high courage and efficiency on the part of Negro policeman and the exhibition of a stern sense of duty controlling race prejudice.

The report says:

Sustaining the country’s stand against the unrestricted immigration of the ante bellum period, just about this time, the New Republic asserted:

In his FOREWORD to the Chicago report, Governor Lowden places himself in absolute opposition to Lincoln. He says:

But the report of the Chicago riot contains much more than an expression of the views of the committee as to the cause of that outburst of savagery. In its 667 pages are the views of many Negroes on the greatest variety of subjects. The first article of the belief of the members of the Negro Urban League of Chicago is—

That is a short sentence, but it contains much.

Here is another which indicates that the Negro will not only learn much from the Northern and Western white man; but also teach him a bit. It is not very sweetly expressed, but it is well worth pondering for all that:

Only one trait, but what an important one!

[Pg 327]

Passing from the report of the Negro riot in Chicago, of 1919 to the Negro Year Book for the same date, we find therein the assertion, that the aggregate wealth of the 10,300,000 Negroes in the United States, at that date, was estimated at $1,100,000,000.

Whatever the wealth or progress of the Negroes in the United States is asserted to be, at any time, it is customary to allude to it, as that much in excess of nothing at the time of Emancipation. The Negro writers in particular are prone to claim this. This has been, in some degree, shown in this study to be incorrect; but it may be well to go a little further into the matter.

In the year 1860 the 4,441,800 colored persons in the United States consisted of 488,070 free persons of color and 3,953,730 Negro and mulatto slaves. The 488,070 free persons of color were about evenly divided between the Northern and the Southern States. They possessed property. What was the probable value of their holdings?

The Census of 1860 shows, that in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, there were 3,237 free persons of color and that 357 of them returned property for taxation, on which they paid $12,015.60 in taxes, mainly upon real estate, probably about seven-eighths of the whole. But they also paid taxes on income and business, as well as head taxes on the slaves they owned and upon their horses, carriages and dogs. With the generally accepted average value for slaves and a safe valuation for horse-flesh, [Pg 328] as the value of the real estate is disclosed, we can calculate that the aggregate wealth of the free persons of color in Charleston, S. C., in 1860 must have been about $888,650. Unless there was some particular advantage, materially, in a residence, by free persons of color, in that State and city most identified with “the peculiar institution,” the per capita established can be extended to the whole population of this class in the United States, at that date; which would have accordingly amounted to about $133,989,231.

Of course there may have been greater wealth among the free persons of color in Charleston than in the rest of the State of South Carolina; but for the same reason there would have been still greater wealth in New Orleans and the greater cities of the North, where real estate was necessarily of greater value with a greater growth.

As the free persons of color had more than quadrupled in the six decades ending in 1860, what reason is there to think that, inured to the responsibilities of freedom, their rate of increase, after the emancipation of the mass of slaves, should have materially lessened?

With the Negro slaves emancipated in mass it would be different; and therefore it is not at all unlikely, that of the $1,100,000,000 owned in 1919 by the entire Negro population of the United States, something like $535,957,124 should be credited to the descendants of the free persons of color, best equipped at the outset to reap their share of the wealth the War between the States brought to the [Pg 329] North and West, rather than to the greater number of the emancipated remaining in the impoverished South and suffering with the whites the evils of Congressional Reconstruction. That it took the South until 1890 to regain in material wealth what they had lost between 1861 and 1876, while in the same period the advance in material gain in the North and West was the envy of the world, but clinches the argument.

Selfishness is, however, not infrequently the accompaniment of increasing prosperity and, therefore, it should not surprise any thoughtful individual to note, that the cultured DuBois and not a few of his white acclaimers look somewhat askance at the steady movement of the Southern Negroes out of the South and into the North and West.

This is not the attitude, however, of that Negro whose name heads the report of the committee on the Chicago riot.

Robert S. Abbott comes nearer the Biblical description of the owner of the vineyard. He wishes to share with the laborers of his race the fields he has garnered so successfully with his weekly paper, the “Chicago Defender” and therefore whatever may be his extravagances of expression, he seems to be the most unselfish leader the Negroes have.

In thus turning to the weekly rather than attempting the more ambitious daily, the Negroes show a clear-sightedness to their credit.

[Pg 330]

This is a very simple statement, but it contains a great amount of wisdom.

For that part of humanity which lacks wealth the weekly paper is a great protector. The news passes thro’ a filterer. It gives the honest editor and publisher an opportunity to scrutinize that which the fierce competition for the daily item of news may hardly permit.

The call for copy is not infrequently a call of distress. To fill a void may bring about a hasty selection of cartoon plate, by no means hastily prepared; but possibly for just such a contingency. These so selected, not seldom undo the effect of an editorial, while much masquerading as news, but in reality propaganda, may be hastily slapped into the forms around two o’clock in the morning. The Negroes, therefore, in clinging to weeklies “are wiser in their generation than the children of light.”

Happily for humanity, sentimentality destroyed slavery of the Negroes in the United States; but the result was an intense stimulation of economic slavery of whites and blacks, by the simple process of letting in from Europe masses of whites, many of whom were below the standards of numbers of American Negroes. That having been checked, the Negro laborer in every line must now measure himself against the Slav and the Latin. In physical power he is superior to the Latin; but the Latin makes up for it in greater pertinacity and orderliness of method. While the statement will probably be received with derision, the training of the slave by the Southern slave-holder and the working of the [Pg 331] Negro by the Southerner is not at the driving pace at which the North and West move, and under that spur the Northern Negro becomes a more efficient tool. But North or South the mass has been helped more than hindered by that which a cultivated young Negro addressing one of the leading educational institutions of the United States thus described:

Even if he has since recanted, this was the view of William Pickens in 1903, when awarded the Ten Eyck Prize at Yale University. But if the Negro is affected by the presence of the white to the Negro’s betterment, it is only fair and just to quote a Southern opinion with regard to the reverse.

Only two years later than the award to Pickens at Yale University, a Southern scholar published “The Coming Crisis”; which despite the fact that it is written in flawless English, exhibits a symmetry of composition which is altogether admirable, and advances views held today by a vast number, not a few of whom have achieved some reputation in the discussion of them less intelligently than Mr. Pinckney in 1905, his book, nevertheless, at that date, fell absolutely flat. What Mr. Pinckney discerned before the World War others can now also see. His view of the Negro problem was not in accord with the view of the author of this study. He would have [Pg 332] been surprised to hear that it could have been thought to be in accord with that of Abraham Lincoln, to a great degree, altho’ with some differences. But in Pinckney’s discussion the Negro is merely incidental to the subject which is to him so inspiring as to be visualized in a passage worth pondering:

Nowhere can be found a more delicate satire, than the chapter in his book which is entitled “Salary and Sentiment—Reason and Revenue.” There is also very clear and convincing reasoning. But it is in regard to what Mr. Pinckney has to say of the presence of the Negroes in the South that reference now is had.

[Pg 333]

In opposition to the view of Wade Hampton, M. C. Butler and Carlyle McKinley, according to Mr. Pinckney:

This is in agreement with the view, that the Southern States are Democratic, because the presence of the Negro, now freed, forces them to be so.

There may be truth in that; but it may be, that they are and have been Democratic in spite of the Negro.

The publication of the List of Tax-Payers in Charleston, “The Hot-Bed of Secession”, in 1860 was an illustration of the thorough-going democracy of the place and the people, at that time. It was an [Pg 334] open display of the strength and weakness of each and every governmental burden bearer, and of the burdens imposed. What could be more democratic than that? There was a tax of 1.4 per cent on real estate; a tax of 1.4 per cent on stocks of goods. There was no tax on bonds and no tax on stock, because, without interest or dividends, the scrip is mere paper. But there was a tax on interest and dividends of 2.5 per cent; the same on gross income; commissions; annuities and gross receipts of all commercial agencies. On premiums of insurance there was a tax of 1.25 per cent. On capital in shipping, as it should have been, the tax was light, only .75 per cent; for shipping is the very life of a seaport. But it was also gainful, so it was taxed for some of its gain. The foolish idea of absolute exemption was avoided. Luxuries were taxed fairly, in the additional head taxes. The carriage drawn by two horses was taxed a third more than the carriage drawn by one. Sulkeys were taxed lower than one horse carriages and horses and mules lower still. Slaves were taxed, but the head tax of $3 per slave, when it is realized that some sold for $1200 apiece was indefensibly light compared to the tax on horse-flesh and property of that kind. One per cent on a Negro to ten per cent on a mule by the average value and lessening with the increase of value of either was an immense incentive to slave-holding. With apparently this one exception, in the absence of that procrustean bed, the uniform rate, upon which all property which cannot be concealed is now stretched, the wealthy paid according to their [Pg 335] wealth, the poor according to their poverty; but all, who had anything, contributed to the general welfare, and bore a fair share of the general burden.

That is the real reason why they fought so long and well. For instance on $385,000 of real estate, 28 slaves, 1 carriage and 2 horses, Otis Mills and Otis Mills & Co. paid a tax of $5,524. On $281,000 of real estate, 14 slaves, a carriage and 2 horses, William Aiken paid a tax of $4,027.40. On $101,500 of real estate, $2,724.16, interest on bonds, 3 slaves and $45,000 of shipping, the estate of James Adger paid a tax of $1,835.60. On $15,000 of real estate, $1,982 interest on bonds, $14,642 commissions, 14 slaves, 1 carriage, 3 horses and 2 dogs, Wm. C. Bee and Wm. C. Bee & Co. paid a tax of $732.60. On a stock of goods $16,000, commissions $9,000, Jeffords & Co. paid a tax of $449. On $8,000 shipping, $4,600 income and 3 slaves E. Lafitte & Co. paid a tax of $184. On a stock of goods of $1,000, Samuel P. Lawrence paid a tax of $14. On 1 slave Mrs. M. S. H. Godber paid a tax of $3. On $200 of real estate Dr. Charles M. Hitchcock paid a tax of $1.80. On a stock of goods valued at $100, C. H. Brunson paid a tax of $1.40. The tax imposed on the manufacture of gas light was lighter than that imposed on shipping; but it was gainful and on a capital of $755,700 the Company paid a tax $3,778.50. [405]

That the condition of the Southern States was incalculably improved by the abolition of slavery is the firm belief of the author of this study. But [Pg 336] that from the tax legislation that followed, the morals of all have suffered tremendously, is the belief of many, with which he agrees.

The presence of the Negroes in the masses in which they still remained in the South after emancipation retarded even the remarkable recovery that the South has made. In this year of 1925, the first in a century in which the white population of South Carolina has exceeded in numbers the colored, it is apparent that the small industries of country life are becoming distinctly more gainful. Why? With lessening mass the Negro is feeling the effect of environment. He is less of a pilferer. And with less friction and consequent material gain, wider opens the door to literature and art.

That there is an immense educational power in art has again and again been demonstrated by artists who have had a purpose deeper than—“Art for art’s sake.”

As an illustration, one cannot fail to note that while the educated Negroes of the North could not possibly take at the hands of a Negro Union soldier, who had fought for the freedom of the race and gone thro’ the days of Congressional Reconstruction without a stain, as a distinct Legislative leader, a faithful description of the great mass of Negroes in the South, they acclaimed the French Negro author of “Batouala,” whose realistic novel of the Negro in Africa while criticising severely their white French rulers, damns the Negroes, even more so. The book is not only interesting, it is instructive to those who need the instruction; and the increasing numbers of [Pg 337] educated Negroes at the North needed just such a book, in order to show them what they were rescued from in Africa.

Rene Maran says:

Describing French Colonial Africa, he quotes, the Senegalese, Diagne:

This is in the preface.

The book opens with the awakening of the hero “Batouala” in the hut in which he sleeps with his eighth and favorite wife, Yassiguindjia. It recalls another awakening in another realistic piece of literature, “Old Bram” in “The Black Border.” The only difference is between the awakening of a wolf and the awakening of an old watch dog, “the friend of man,” a tamed wolf. The story revolves around the politics and desires of Batouala, Bissibingui and Yassiguindjia. Batouala is a wolf who cares for the pack; Bissibingui, a young wolf, as fierce, who cares but for himself and his desires. Yassiguindjia can only be described by one of the items with which she was purchased.

In “The Black Border” it is true we are in South Carolina, along the coast; but, as has been eloquently stated by a Scotch South Carolinian, in that region “there is Africa in every breath we draw.” With [Pg 338] artistic power Maran pictures the sounds of the African dawn.

What a perfect picture of the Negro without “the power of a stronger hand,” which William Pickens saw so clearly the need of in 1903. And the philosophy of it! Moved to visit Africa in 1924, Dr. DuBois makes a discovery:

The Doctor praises the “manners” of the Africans.

As to the great truth, happiness depends upon what is in the soul of the man, not upon his surroundings.

But Batouala while he disliked work could exert himself to hunt or fight. His grievance was that which has moved men more than any other thro’ all the ages. He and his people were too heavily taxed. He gathered the people together and harangued them.

Then follows a description of the great dance.

But the arrival of the commandant saves the guilty couple. Batouala, however, still plots the life of Bissibingui, who is plotting the robbery of his own people, as one of the commandant’s soldiery. In the great hunt Batouala hurls a javelin at his rival, misses him and is himself struck down by an infuriated passing panther. So the dark patriot falls and the black scalawag wins. It is an impressive picture of African life, the men, the women and the conjugality.

Turn we now to the coast of South Carolina, where in “The Black Border,” the scene is laid, for “Jim Moultrie’s Divorce,” the deepest in discernment of all the life like sketches of that moving book.

Jim, too, was a great hunter, an unwearied pursuer. No animal. But a black man. A believer in divorce, as almost all Negroes in America are, even in South Carolina, where the law refuses it.

At the end of a cold blustering day in February, after pushing his clumsy dug-out canoe into every creek and lead of the Jehossee marshes, to flush ducks for the white sportsman who had hired him, [Pg 341] at sun set he is turning home. How the picture appeals to us of the coast.

The obstinate silence of the woman is related and the parting in silence. Then follows the attempt of the woman to appease him, her jealousy gone. His refusal. His resentment that she should have believed an idle lie. His determination that it was too late. And then the last two lines, which hold so much.

Jim Moultrie’s conceptions as to conjugality might be improved upon; but they are certainly cycles ahead of Batouala’s. It is in the sketches this book contains and in the altogether admirable “Duel in Cummings” that we find the Southern coast country Negro as he is, most observant, not lacking in a [Pg 343] homely philosophy, and, as Thomas, the Ohio Negro, noted (altho’ utterly lacking it himself) a creature of infinite humor. Whence does he derive it? He seems to lose it to some extent as he moves out of the coast region. But he becomes more efficient. He has benefited immensely by his sojourn in America. He ought to take more interest in his race elsewhere than the cultivated members seem to. It is good for the Negroes of the United States that numbers should continue to move into the Northern and Western States. It is providing a most interesting experiment. The urban Negro dwellers of the great cities of the North and West are furnishing a most interesting illustration of that mysterious power which leads humanity to its betterment. By the Census of 1920, in the great city of New York there were 152,467 Negroes. By the estimates of the Department of Commerce for July, 1923, this had been increased to 183,248. [414] Unless the migratory movement has slowed down as that estimate is for July 1, 1923, the Negro population of New York, today must be 194,445, with that of Philadelphia at 163,248 and Chicago at 148,326. There is no urban Negro population of these figures anywhere in the Southern States. The nearest would be New Orleans where the Negro population may be 107,530. But in addition in the great cities which stretch along and thro’ the rich and populous territory between New York and Chicago up to the borders of Canada the Negro population is steadily increasing. Detroit at the very door [Pg 344] of Canada holds a Negro population greater than that of any Southern city except New Orleans; for Baltimore is practically a Northern city now.

While the urban Negro population of the Southern States appears to be increasing it is scarcely increasing at the rate at which it is increasing in the great section of the North above described and as has been shown in not a few States of the South the Negro population as a whole is decreasing slightly; while the white population is increasing actively. But the civilization of the Southern whites has been handicapped by the weight of the Negro population which it has carried for a century and more. It should not bear any more than its fair proportion of that load and in the natural movement of the Negroes from the South up to the north central portion of the Union and to some extent into Canada, by the amalgamation of Negroes and mulattoes, a brown people affected by the civilization of these sections, differing in some degrees from the darker Negroes who will more slowly develop in the Southern States, will show in their progress what the North and West can do to improve them. With ever lessening numbers in the South, they will the better respond to their environment, which will be the better for such lessening. The result will be the advance of all to a better condition and a higher plane of thought.