The Hindered Hand Part 35

Mr. Dixon essays to portray Negro wors.h.i.+p and makes of it a very grotesque affair.

Over against Mr. Dixon's representation of Negro wors.h.i.+p as a heathenish affair, we place the old plantation melodies evolved in those and earlier days. Charged as these melodies are with true religious fervor, they stand as a bulwark against all who would a.s.sail these earlier gropings of the race after the unknown G.o.d. Equally misplaced are the sneers of Mr. Dixon at the Negro minister. The center of the whole social fabric erected by the Negro race in the South is the Negro church, and to the zeal and power of the untutored Negro pastor and his more favored successor is this success due. Subtract from the a.s.sets of the Negro race those things placed there through the instrumentality of the Negro minister and small will be the remnant.

Again, this religion and this minister at whom Mr. Dixon sneers, are really responsible for the pacific character of the Negro population of the South. The Negro race is a great fighting race. The native optimism of the individual soldier causing him to discount his own chances of being killed, coupled with his ability to be lost in his enthusiasms, make the Negro very effective as a soldier.

Africa has been one great battle field and the internecine strife of fighting Africans is in a measure responsible for the plight of the Negro race in the world, as a union of forces could have the better halted alien aggression. But in America the Negro was taught the Gospel of peace. The singing of the American Negro is said to lack the martial strain found in the fatherland. For the peace loving Negro, credit the church and the Negro minister, whom Mr. Dixon would have the world contemn.

MR. DIXON STABS TO KILL.

The late Hon. George F. h.o.a.r, of Ma.s.sachusetts, once remarked (we quote from memory), "Our population is composed of various races of mankind, but there are four great things upon which we are all united: Love of home, love of country, love of liberty and love of woman." The glory of the Anglo-Saxon race has come largely of the estimate it has placed on woman.

Mr. Dixon would break the accord of the American Negro with the rest of his fellows by picturing him as the savage enemy of womankind. In order to attain his end he picks up the degenerates within the Negro race and exploits them as the normal type. In one of his books Mr. Dixon makes a Negro school commissioner solicit a kiss from a white girl when she applies to him for a position. The man of this character in the Negro race is known of all men familiar with the Southern Negro to be an exotic, for nowhere in the world does woman get more instinctive deference from men than what Negro men render to the white women of the South. The very fact that degenerates sometimes make them the objects of a.s.saults, invests them with a double measure of sympathy and deference on the part of the great body of Negro men.

WHERE MR. DIXON'S POWER FAILS.

Mr. Dixon displays great power in depicting the emotions of the white people when the news was borne to them that a little white girl had been outraged and slain by a Negro.

Mr. Dixon, there were other hearts throbbing in that neighborhood! Oh, that you had the spirit and the power to give utterance to those heart throbs.

The Negroes, whose absence from the mob you would ascribe to sympathy with the criminal, were in their homes sorrowing over the death of the little one, sorrowing over the disgrace that was so undeservingly brought upon the race, and wondering whether your mob had the right man or was making a mistake that would leave the really guilty free to again bring death and grief and wrath to the white race and grief and shame unspeakable to the Negro race.

AS TO INTERMARRIAGE.

Not content with picturing the Negro race, as a race prolific with the a.s.saulters of women, Mr. Dixon would further have the world believe that the highest ambition of the cultured Negro man is to find for himself a white wife.

Perhaps it may not be out of place just here for the writer to disclose what he considers, from close observation, to be the att.i.tude of the Negroes on the question of the intermarriage of the races. They do not hold with that group of writers who contend that the Negro is inherently inferior to the whites and that a mixture of the blood of the races produces an essentially inferior being. Dumas, holding his own among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English, and Dougla.s.s, among the Americans, to their minds belie that a.s.sertion.

Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.

Accepting the race as it came to them from slavery, during which mulattoism was forced upon it, the Negroes have gone on developing race pride and visiting their supreme disfavor upon all who signify inability to find thorough contentment within the race. The marriage of Frederick Dougla.s.s to a white woman created a great gulf between himself and his people, and it is said that so great was the alienation that Mr.

Dougla.s.s was never afterwards the orator that he had been. The delicate network of wires over which the inner soul conveys itself to the hearts of its hearers was totally disarranged by that marriage.

PRIDE OF RACE.

It was this feeling of race pride which the Negroes have and thoroughly understand, that Mr. Dixon was picturing in that Northern statesman who would not give his daughter in marriage to a Negro suitor who was his political ally. This pride of race Mr. Dixon confounds with the prejudice which he would glorify. How utterly absurd it is to infer that it is inconsistent in a father to apply a totally different test to a man aspiring to be his son-in-law to that applied to a man asking for political rights! The rejection of a man because he lacks generations of approved blood behind him is cla.s.sed by Mr. Dixon as race discrimination, whereas such rejections are daily made for similar reasons within all civilized races.

BACKWARD AFRICA.

In his eager grasping after anything that would seem to serve his purpose of thoroughly discrediting the Negro, Mr. Dixon holds up the backwardness of Africa as an indication of the inherent inefficiency of the Negro race. The life of the great body of the Negro race has been cast for untold centuries in Africa. This one simple fact has meant and still means so much. The peculiar character of the African coast, lacking as it is in great indentations, the immense falls preventing entrance into its greatest river, the Congo--these things have caused Africans to be more nearly isolated from the rest of humanity than has been the case with any other large body of people. With isolation and lack of contact the Negroes have been compelled to rely upon their own narrow set of ideas, while the progress of other peoples has been the result of the union of what they begot with what strangers brought them.

The soil of Africa fed the Negroes so bountifully that they did not acquire the habit of industry, and with a plenty of time on their hands they warred incessantly. The hot, humid atmosphere made them black and sapped their energies. To save them from yellow fever, nature gave them pigment and lost them friends. Other peoples have hesitated to intermarry with them because of their rather unfavorable showing in personal appearance.

Some hold that a race is great in proportion to the distance it has wandered through intermarriage from the parent stock. The great races of the world, it is held, are the mixed races. When the Africans'

environments robbed them of comeliness and attractive qualities, they were thrown off to their own one blood, no one courting alliance with them.

The merest tyro of a sociologist knows that these are the essential facts which account for the backwardness of the African people, and yet Mr. Dixon would fasten upon Negroes the charge of inherent inferiority because of the showing made under circ.u.mstances most adverse to the development of civilization.

RECONSTRUCTION DAYS.

The most pathetic page in the history of the Negro race in America is the story of reconstruction days. Kept in ignorance during the days of slavery his one great desire under freedom was for knowledge and self-improvement. Because the white South was spiritually unprepared to deal with the new order of things, and because the North did not desire to make one great military camp of the South, the Negroes en ma.s.se were summoned forthwith to the task of establis.h.i.+ng governments in the Southern states in harmony with the Const.i.tution of the United States.

The men whom the Negroes supported accomplished that task well, but in other respects betrayed their trusts.

When corruption in office, a thing by no means confined to one era of the world's history, became manifest, in many quarters an appeal was made to the Negroes to help overturn the corruptionists. And be it said to the honor of the race, the cry for good government never failed to rally Negro support, even at a great sacrifice. When Wade Hampton was struggling for the dethronement of corrupt governments in South Carolina, six thousand Negroes took part in one of the parades during his canva.s.s for the governors.h.i.+p.

But some states did not have leaders prepared to deal with the Negroes as political equals, leaders who were wise enough to appeal to the good within the race. In such places the unreasoning, undiscriminating, brutal, murderous mobs arose to do by violence what better and wiser men had done elsewhere through moral suasion. Had enlightened methods been employed the sky would not have been as portentous as it is to-day. As it is, we have the sickening record of the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan and the heritage of evil and lawlessness left in its wake.

Over against Mr. Dixon's lurid and grossly misleading pictures of the conduct of the Negroes in reconstruction days, we offer the following tribute to the race, clipped from the columns of the Nashville _Banner_, perhaps the most widely read daily newspaper in the state of Tennessee, and a paper opposed to the reconstruction policy pursued by the federal government:

"Let us do the negroes justice. There is no spirit of bloodthirsty and incendiary revolt prevailing among them.

History and experience have shown that there never existed a more tractable people considering all the trying conditions and circ.u.mstances to which they have been subjected. In time of war and in the frightful reconstruction period, when they were urged and tempted by false friends and incentives and had opportunities of evil appalling to contemplate, they were restrained as perhaps no other people would have been restrained and were more sinned against than sinning. And to-day as a people they have no mind except to accept the best that may come to them."

MR. DIXON VS. HON. JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Dixon's hope is evidently in the young North. That the young people may not be wedded to the traditions of their section, he would impress the young North that what their fathers did in the way of bestowing equality of citizens.h.i.+p upon the Negro, was the result of a leaders.h.i.+p blind with the spirit of revenge. As a complete reb.u.t.tal to this contention on his part, we quote from an article which appeared in the North American _Review_ from the pen of the late Hon. James G. Blaine:

"It must be borne in mind that the Republicans were urged and hastened to measures of amelioration for the Negro by very dangerous developments in the Southern States looking to his re-enslavement in fact, if not in form. The year that followed the accession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency was full of anxiety and warning to all the lovers of justice, to all who hoped for 'a more perfect union' of the States. In nearly every one of the Confederate States the white inhabitants a.s.sumed that they were to be restored to the Union with their State governments precisely as they were when they seceded in 1861, and that the organic change created by the Thirteenth Amendment might be practically set aside by State legislation. In this belief they exhibited their policy towards the Negro.

Considering all the circ.u.mstances, it would be hard to find in history a more causeless and cruel oppression of a whole race than was embodied in the legislation of those revived and reconstructed State governments. Their members.h.i.+p was composed wholly of the 'ruling cla.s.s,' as they termed it, and, in no small degree, of Confederate officers below the rank of brigadier-general, who sat in the legislature in the very uniforms which had distinguished them as enemies of the Union upon the battlefield. Limited s.p.a.ce forbids my transcribing the black code wherewith they loaded their statute books. In Mr.

Lamar's State the Negroes were forbidden, under very severe penalties, to keep firearms of any kind; they were apprenticed, if minors, to labor, preference being given by the statute to their 'former owners;' grown men and women were compelled to let their labor by contract, the decision of whose terms was wholly in the hands of the whites; and those who failed to contract were to be seized as 'vagrants,' heavily fined, and their labor sold by the sheriff at public outcry to the highest bidder. The terms 'master' and 'mistress' continually recur in the statutes, and the slavery that was thus inst.i.tuted was a far more degrading, merciless and mercenary than that which was blotted out by the Thirteenth Amendment.

"South Carolina, whose moderation and justice are so highly prized by Governor Hampton, enacted a code still more cruel than that I have quoted from Mississippi. Firearms were forbidden to the Negro, and any violation of the statute was punished by 'fine equal to twice the value of the weapon so unlawfully kept,' and 'if that be not immediately paid, by corporal punishment.' It was further provided that 'no person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade, or business of an artisan, mechanic, or shopkeeper, or any other trade or employment (besides that of husbandry or that of a servant under contract for labor), until he shall have obtained a license from the judge of the district court, which license shall be good for one year only.' If the license was granted to the Negro to be a shopkeeper or peddler he was compelled to pay $100 per annum for it, and if he pursued the rudest mechanical calling he could do so only by the payment of a license fee of $10 per annum. No such fees were exacted of the whites, and no such fee of free blacks during the era of slavery. The Negro was thus hedged in on all sides; he was down, and he was to be kept down, and the chivalric race that denied him a fair and honest compet.i.tion in the humblest mechanical pursuit was loud in its a.s.sertions of his inferiority and his incompetency.

"But it was reserved for Louisiana to outdo both South Carolina and Mississippi in this horrible legislation. In that State all agricultural laborers were compelled to make labor contracts during the first ten days of January for the next year. The contract was made, the laborer was not to be allowed to leave his place of employment during the year except upon conditions not likely to happen and easily prevented. The master was allowed to make deductions from the servants' wages for injuries done to 'animals and agricultural implements committed to his care,' thus making the Negro responsible for wear and tear. Deductions were to be made for 'bad or negligent work,'

the master being the judge. For every act of 'disobedience' a fine of $1 was imposed on the offender, disobedience being a technical term made to include, besides 'neglect of duty' and 'leaving home without permission,' such fearful offenses as 'impudence,' 'swearing,' 'indecent language in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent,' or 'quarreling or fighting with one another.' The master or his agent might a.s.sail every ear with profaneness aimed at the Negro man and outrage every sentiment of decency in the foul language addressed to the Negro women; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or restore indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of $1 for every outburst. The 'agent' referred to in the statute is the well-known overseer of the cotton region, and the care with which the lawmaker of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears and sensitive nerves should not be offended with an oath or an indecent word from a Negro will be appreciated by all who have heard the crack of the whip on a southern plantation.

"It is impossible to quote all the hideous provisions of these statutes under whose operation the Negro would have been relapsed gradually and surely into actual and admitted slavery.

Kindred legislation was attempted in a large majority of the Confederate States, and it is not uncharitable or illogical to a.s.sume that the ultimate re-enslavement of the race was the fixed design of those who framed the law and of those who attempted to enforce them.

"I am not speculating as to what would have been done or might have been done in the Southern States if the National Government had not intervened. I have quoted what actually was done by legislatures under the control of Southern Democrats, and I am only recalling history when I say that those outrages against human nature were upheld by the Democratic party of the country. All Democrats whose articles I am reviewing were in various degrees, active or pa.s.sive, princ.i.p.al or endorser, parties to this legislation; and the fixed determination of the Republican party to thwart and destroy it called down upon its head all the anathemas of Democratic wrath. But it was just at this point in our history when the Republican party was compelled to decide whether the emanc.i.p.ated slave should be protected by national power or handed over to his late master to be dealt with in the spirit of the enactments I have quoted.

"To restore the Union on a safe foundation, and to re-establish law and promote order, to insure justice and equal rights to all, the Republican party was forced to its reconstruction policy. To hesitate in its adoption was to invite and confirm the statute of wrong and cruelty to which I have referred. The first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving citizens.h.i.+p and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at least its trial.

"But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia, only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it was the legislature a.s.sembled under the reconstruction act that gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the unreconstructed legislature, which has his endors.e.m.e.nt and sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate, not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with grievous disabilities and pa.s.sed a criminal code of barbarous severity for his punishment.

"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June 13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867, the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States, composed wholly of men who had been loyal to the Government, or the legislatures of the rebel states, composed wholly of men who had been disloyal to the Government, should determine the basis on which their relation to the Union should be resumed.

In such a crisis the Republican party could not hesitate; to halt, indeed, would have been an abandonment of the principles on which the war had been fought; to surrender to the rebel legislatures would have been cowardly desertion of its loyal friends and a base betrayal of the Union cause.

"And thus, in March, 1867, after and because of the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment by Southern legislatures, Congress pa.s.sed the reconstruction act. This was the origin of Negro suffrage. The southern whites knowingly and willfully brought it upon themselves. The reconstruction act would have never been demanded had the Southern States accepted the Fourteenth Amendment in good faith. But that amendment contained so many provisions demanded by considerations of great national policy that its adoption became an absolute necessity. Those who controlled the Federal Government would have been recreant to their plainest duty had they permitted the power of these States to be wielded by disloyal hands against the measures deemed essential to the security of the Union. To have destroyed the rebellion on the battlefield and then permit it to seize the power of eleven States and put a check on all changes in the organic law necessary to prevent future rebellion would have been a weak and wicked conclusion to the grandest contest ever waged for human rights and for const.i.tutional liberty.

"Negro suffrage being thus made a necessity by the obduracy of those who were in control of the South, it became a subsequent necessity to adopt the Fifteenth Amendment. Nothing could have been more despicable than to use the Negro to secure the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and then to leave them exposed to the hazard of losing suffrage whenever those who had attempted to re-enslave them should regain political power in their State. Hence the Fifteenth Amendment, which never pretended to guarantee universal suffrage, but simply forbade that any man should lose his vote because he had once been a slave, or because his face might be black, or because his remote ancestors came from Africa."

Thus is scattered to the four winds, we feel, Mr. Dixon's claim that the Negro suffrage was born of the spirit of revenge.