The Brothers' War Part 22

Exceptional ones of this cla.s.s enjoy privileges of the higher education, afforded by schools and colleges opulently endowed by private persons, which education is bringing forth fruit in teachers, clergymen, and representatives of the learned cla.s.s. There are already some good books, as well as sermons, speeches, poems, essays, and short articles, by negroes which have won favorable opinion in our literature; and there is evidently to be steady increase.

There is among some of this urban upper cla.s.s the beginning at least of better things under the lead of better mothers. We must not be unreasonable in our demands that these women who carry in their veins a very appreciable proportion of polyandrous blood shall become immaculately chaste at once. Leave them to the influence of the improving society in which they move; to the n.o.ble and faithful efforts of such as Mrs. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton; their persistent imitation of white mothers; the teachings of the really christian pastors whom the negro universities are beginning to send abroad in numbers far too few; but especially of all to devoted conjugal, maternal, and domestic duty. This last has made the pigeon mother unconquerably true to her life mate. It will do the same for the negro woman.--Let us consider the cla.s.s further for a moment.

The longer you look at it with unbefogged eyes the more plainly you see it is really a natural aristocracy hugging its special privileges more jealously every year, and that cleavage in interest, affection, and destiny between it and the other cla.s.s goes on so steadily that it must after some little while yawn in the sight of the entire nation. Here in Atlanta, as seems to be the case in all the southern cities, there are respectable negro districts and also negro slums. The latter are the more numerous and far more populous. The inhabitants of these several districts are almost as wide apart as are the whites in the fas.h.i.+onable circle and the million of poor folk without.

I must postpone my final contrast of these two cla.s.ses until I have completed what remains to be said of the displacement of black by white labor. For a few years after the war it was so slow moving that I was not confidently aware of it. Now it has proceeded so far, and so much accelerated its pace, that I can indicate it with something like accuracy.

In the thirteenth chapter I noted its beginning. This was when the mother and her girls took upon themselves the daily indoor work, and the father and sons took upon themselves the outdoor work, morning, noon, and night, around the house and the horse-lot,--the word which in the south corresponds to the barnyard of the northern farmer. Especially significant is it that a large per cent of the white matrons in the country have at last discarded the negro laundry-woman and habitually themselves use the washtub for their families. The impulse to supplant negro labor showed its greatest energy where the black population had been spa.r.s.e. I have heard my friend, F. C. Foster, a resident of Morgan county, often mention that what were before the war the rich and poor sides of that county have become interchanged; where most of the large slave-owners lived was the rich, but now is the poor side; and the other, where there were but few slaves, is now the rich side.

I see many proofs in every quarter that the whites of the Black Belt have commenced to learn good lessons from their neighbors outside, and show every year a greater self-reliance. Many more causes than I have s.p.a.ce to set down conspire to increase this self-reliance. The small farmer must, by himself or his wife and children or white help, do such things as these: work his brood mare; care for his blooded stock, fine poultry, and bees; handle his reaper, mower, and more expensive tools and implements; give all necessary attention to his orchards and larger and smaller fruits,--industries which, with that of the dairy, are now pus.h.i.+ng forward with mounting energy; for he has learned that the average negro cannot be trusted in these and many other things which can be suggested.

I must not overstate the advance of white production and labor upon black in the country. In the regions of densest negro populations the whites show a backwardness in taking to work that is discouraging. A very observant man familiar with Jackson and Madison counties of Georgia, both of which are out of the Black Belt, and who now lives where negroes outnumber the whites, not long ago made this comparison, while answering my inquiries: "In Jackson and Madison the whites work. A farmer who runs but one plow does all the plowing. He hires but one negro. In my present county the one-horse farmer always hires two negroes, one to plow and the other to hoe, and the only work he does is to boss them." But the negroes are going away from many parts, in fact from nearly all, of the Black Belt. Wherever they have become scarce, the whites go to work; and, as is now occurring in that part of Greene county called "The Fork," and in places in adjoining counties, the lands rise greatly in market value. In many parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, where negroes were doing practically all the agricultural labor when I came to Atlanta, I learn that many white boys are becoming good all-around workers. It surprised me greatly to be told that in this region in different places the white women and children, as soon as the dew is off in the morning, go to cotton picking, and they become so efficient that often no extra labor need be hired to finish that greatest task of all to the farmer. Before the war, all of us white boys picked just enough of cotton to learn that our backs could never be made to stand picking all day. The whites now beating the negro in what we once thought he only could do, and white women in the old slave regions doing the family laundry,--these begin a marvellous economic revolution.

The cotton mills and other manufactories rapidly springing up in many southern localities are developing a cla.s.s of white operatives. Mining of various kinds is on the increase. Stone, slate, and marble cutting, cabinet making, and other trades attract greater numbers to follow them.

White railroad employees, printers, engravers, stenographers, typewriters, and those in numerous other gainful occupations, grow in numbers. White women and girls stream to work for employers every morning. In all places, if you but look long enough, you catch sight of swelling crowds of the race who once lived almost entirely from slave labor now doing their own labor.

I will close what I have to say of this part of the subject by observations of Atlanta. When I settled here, the barbers, shoe repairers, blacksmiths, band-musicians, sick-nurses, seamstresses, ostlers, and carriage-drivers were, so far as I noted, black almost without exception.

Now the first five are nearly all white, and whites steadily multiply in the rest, although they are far from being in a majority. The only expulsion of white by negro labor that I have noted is the subst.i.tution by the bicycle messenger service and the telegraph of negro for white messengers, made not long ago. These messenger services thrive by exploiting child labor. By the change mentioned they got much larger and stronger boys--often grown-up ones--for the same price which they used to pay white children a year or two older than mere tots. Against the recent loss just told I have these two recent gains of the whites to tell. There had always been only negro waiters in the restaurants. In some of them the eaters at the lunch counters are now served by a white man standing behind it; and what he needs, if it is not kept in store so near that he can reach it, is brought to him, at his command, by a negro, whom you may call his waiter. This negro also wipes off the counter. After we became used to white barbers we generally preferred them to the black ones. And I note that a growing majority of those who frequent the counters like the white waiters, although I now and then hear a growler say that he would rather have a waiter that he can reprimand and speak to as he pleases.

Some of the restaurants begin to advertise that their help is all white.

With the superior alertness and quickness of his race, a white behind the counter accomplishes more than twice as much as the former black. To use a common saying, the white waiters keep at active work all their twelve hours as if they were fighting fire, while the negroes commanded by them take things easy. Every one of the whites is constantly on the lookout for a better place; and generally he manages somehow, after a short while, to get it. One who now serves me studies bookkeeping two hours every night, and will doubtless soon be giving satisfaction in his chosen occupation to some business house. The negroes look out only for tips, are interested in nothing but amus.e.m.e.nts, and never get any higher. Bear in mind, they are considerably above the average negro in qualifications and station.

The other instance is that some co-operating Greek boys have recently captured a very considerable proportion of the shoe-s.h.i.+ning. They provide more convenient and comfortable seats and give a better s.h.i.+ne than the negro does, in a much shorter time, and for the same price. It looks now as if they are bound to make full conquest of the business. With my experience it is more of a surprise to me to see clothes laundered, tables waited on, and shoes s.h.i.+ned by the whites, than even to see cotton picked by them.

But to go on with Atlanta. Occupations requiring the management of machinery or peculiar skill are nearly always filled by whites. The street railroad conductors and motormen are all white. The only negroes connected with the road that I, as a pa.s.senger, generally see is the curve-greaser, and now and then a helper on the construction car. The steam railroads will employ a negro fireman because of his ability to stand heat, but they do not trust him to oil and wipe. In the smaller buildings negro elevator-runners some time ago were frequent, but now it is clear that the whites will soon have the occupation exclusively. There is, I believe, more building, in this year of 1904, in Atlanta than ever before. The preparation of all the material is done by white labor in the planing-mills and machine-shops, while the more unskilled work of putting it in place is done by the negro carpenter.

The lathers and plasterers are all negroes, there are more negro brick and stone masons than white, and the carpenters are nearly all negroes, there being but few young white ones. The painters are about equally divided.

The negro's standard of living is so much lower than that of the white, that where there is compet.i.tion he proves victor by accepting a price upon which the white man cannot live. But the latter does not throw up the sponge. At the point where race compet.i.tion begins he induces the negroes, whenever he can, to join his union, and soon to have one of their own.

Just now (August, 1904) there are not enough of brickmasons to supply the demand, and there is both a white and black union of that trade. But so far there has been no success in the efforts made for a black carpenters'

union. The negroes have of late years kept such firm hold of the trade, that it seems no young whites come into it, there being but few white carpenters in Atlanta under forty years of age. The negroes understand that their grip is due to their ability to work for lower pay than the whites, and when the union is proposed they say to themselves, that means only more places for white carpenters and less for us. But the trend to form unions seems to strengthen. There is a mixed union of tailors, separate unions of blacksmiths' helpers, moulders' helpers, painters, and also of brickmasons, as just mentioned. There is a black union of plasterers and no white one. It is to be remembered that the initiative to unionize the negro workman comes from the other race, the purpose being to balk the exertions of employers to depress wages by encouraging the cheaper worker. Consider the dilemma of the negro workman invited into the union by whites. He foresees that if he accepts, his race will after a while be swamped in the trade by white compet.i.tion. At the same time he foresees that if he does not accept, he cannot increase his income, which in its smallness becomes more and more inadequate to sustain himself and family under the constant demands of the day for larger and larger expenditure. The immediate needs of those dependent upon him will generally decide his course. I cannot say how long the negro carpenters of Atlanta will refuse the proposal to federate themselves in a union with the whites; but this I can say, that all attempts of the negroes to keep the whites out of any well-paid vocation must fail, even with the most resolute and stubbornly maintained effort. As I view it on the spot the white forward movement palpably strengthens and the defence weakens. Bear in mind that the whites receive constant re-enforcement from all other white American and European communities, and the blacks are confined to their own resources of supply, all the while declining.

What I have just told as happening in Atlanta intelligent and observant negroes detect to be but a part of the general recession before white compet.i.tion. The National Negro Business League had its last meeting at Indianapolis. In one of the resolutions adopted, mainly because of the influence of Dr. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, its president, occurs this allegation, "During our discussions it has been clearly developed that the race has been steadily losing many avenues of valuable employment." The resolution ascribes this to lack of proper training, and recommends that the lack be supplied. A negro makes this acute and true comment, which I would have attended to here, and considered again when further on I discuss what the industrial schools can do:

"That the colored man has of late years been losing many avenues of employment is quite true, but the conclusion that this is due to a lack of training is not to be hastily accepted. n.o.body believes that our people are now less capable of work than they were when recognized in these avenues of labor. As a matter of fact they are far better equipped now than they were then, or Tuskegee and Hampton and the other industrial schools that are crowded from year to year are making a signal failure. In those days men were picked up here and there and started in as apprentices as green as they could be. Now thousands of them are prepared before they go out to work. The two chief reasons our folks are not employed so universally now is, first, the fact, that _the white south has gone to work with its own hands_, and second, the negro refuses longer to work for nothing. _The continued a.s.sertion by some of our leaders that a man who can labor will not be discriminated against, is untrue. The preference is given to the white man in almost every case, and the negro is allowed to do the work he refuses._ It is well enough to ask our people to secure industrial education, but it is wrong to place all our ills upon a lack of such training or to recommend industrial education as a panacea. Though it was quite inevitable that the league should adopt such a resolution as an endors.e.m.e.nt of its president's policy."[185]

I have italicized in the quotation the statements specially pertinent here. They are very weighty proofs supporting my proposition of fact, to wit, that there is now waging between the whites and negroes an internecine war for every opportunity of labor above the very lowest and unskilled.

I ask also that it be noted that the writer is utterly unconscious of any negroes than those of the upper cla.s.s. Not a thing that he says can be applied to the ninety-five per cent.

The death rate of the negro is coming close to, while that of the white keeps far below, the birth rate. Rapid native increase and vigorous immigration for the whites, nothing but slow and decreasing propagation for the negroes; and larger and larger hosts of the former giving their champions active sympathy and help--the event of this inter-race struggle over the trades and occupations may be delayed, but it cannot be doubtful.

The reader must not forget that the negroes now in mind belong all to what I have called the upper cla.s.s. Their number is so small and its promise of increase so slight that I should hardly have done more than allude to them, if the subject did not emphasize so impressively as it does the inevitable expulsion of negro by white labor. Let me explain this fully.

Professor Wilc.o.x, summarizing the pertinent information of the twelfth census as to ten leading occupations competed for by the two races in the south, states that in the year 1900 the per cent of negroes was larger in seven and smaller in nine of them than ten years before.[186] That alone shows white gain. But I want you to add to Professor Wilc.o.x's statement something of which the census gives no hint, that is, the bound forward of the negroes on one side, and the inaction of the whites on the other, during many years beginning with emanc.i.p.ation in 1865. When that has been done, the encroachment of white labor upon black effected in the comparatively short time since its beginning appears almost prodigious. It is somewhat like the race-horse, who, falling far behind in the first stages of a long heat, at last wakes up and gains so fast that n.o.body will bet against him. It means that the whites are now as ruthlessly taking all opportunities of labor away from the blacks, as their fathers took his lands away from the American Indian.

We can now say our last word in contrasting the two cla.s.ses. Many fail to see clearly the difference between them. Thus Ernest Hamlin Abbott[187]

and Edgar Gardner Murphy,[188] in their pleasant discussions, only here and there, and as if casually, say something which momentarily implies existence of the lower cla.s.s, and then relapse into claiming for all of the southern negroes, if not the actual condition of the upper cla.s.s, at least hopeful possibility of soon achieving it. These two kind-hearted men represent a large number who firmly believe that education and the church are now rapidly elevating the negro ma.s.ses, when the fact is far otherwise. Many from the north see nothing but the upper cla.s.s. In what he writes of the negroes whom he knew in public life, the late Senator h.o.a.r was utterly unconscious of the average negro whom all of us in the south know.[189] Dr. Lyman Abbott, a most benign example of broad and almost perfect tolerance to both sections, taking all southern hearts by his loving sympathy with and full justice to the better sentiment of our section in every matter of importance except the appointment of negroes to office, he never seems to have in mind any negroes but the prominent ones who are giving their fellows industrial or the higher education, and those who have been blessed with either. Do but consider how pathetically he lately lamented the case of the "white negro" lady shut out from the circle of cultivation and kept confined in one of ignorance and lowness.

This last circle--its magnitude, its bad and desperate state--he really knows nothing about. He can no more study its deplorable and heartrending conditions than the mother can endure to have the expectoration of her child threatened with tuberculosis examined under the microscope. Chicago has been for some while "farthest to the front" in the struggle against corporation rule. Her battles for direct nomination, direct legislation, and munic.i.p.al owners.h.i.+p have been chronicled more accurately and intelligently in the _Public_ than I can find elsewhere. Therefore I read it with diligence; and I relish more and more Mr. Post's sound and able anti-machine and anti-plutocratic advocacy. But in everything that the paper says or quotes on the race question I am pained to note that its shortcoming is greater than its very high merit in preaching democratic democracy. Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott does now and then call the negroes a child race, but Mr. Post repudiates all backwardness and inferiority of race. He seems to maintain the equality of the average negro to the average white in all essentials of good citizens.h.i.+p with the zeal of Wendell Phillips, when the providence of the American union frenzied and deputed him to infuriate its defenders against the disunion slave-owners.

Mr. Post, as appears to me, believes with all his heart in the doctrine of Mrs. Stowe and Whittier, to mention no others, as to the negro. Every pertinent utterance in his paper indicates that he has no thought whatever of the lower cla.s.s. A most striking ill.u.s.tration of this is how he treats the story of the negro Richard R. Wright.[190] When the latter was ten years old he won great fame by the answer he made General Howard, who had inquired of the negro children at the Storrs School in Atlanta, just after the close of the war, "Tell me what message I shall take back from you to the people of the north?" His face ablaze with enthusiasm, the boy Richard said, "Tell 'em we're risin'." Whittier went as far astray over this as we saw that he did in his "Laus Deo." In his poem celebrating he sang--

"O black boy of Atlanta!

But half was spoken: The slave's chain and the Master's Alike are broken.

The one curse of the races Held both in tether: They are rising--all are rising, The black and white together."

I never read the last two lines without in mind admonis.h.i.+ng the author, "Praise in departing."

When Mr. Post published the story, he ought to have mentioned that while the boy who sent forth the winged words did rise and has become president of the Georgia Industrial College, yet that such negroes are far more rare than millionaires, and the main host of their people in the south were sinking at the time, and have been sinking ever since. It is not true that "all are rising." The whites have recently begun to rise; five per cent only of the negroes, most of whom are largely white, are rising, while the rest of them are doomed, if the nation does not interpose. And the colored dentist of Chicago, slighted by some of the white dentists--Mr. Post sees in him, just as he sees in Richard R. Wright, a representative of the negro millions.

These conscientious and amiable gentlemen are wasting much effort uselessly. There is no very urgent problem as to the upper cla.s.s of negroes. It has two strings to its bow. If the lower cla.s.s should perish, a large part of it--perhaps the greater part--will be a.s.similated. Every day I detect a larger movement toward the north among our better-to-do negroes. I hear of girls that get places as chambermaids and cooks, of boys that find places as ostlers or other domestic service; and I have heard of a few families who have gone in a body, also of some men who have left wife and children here. They believe the north will allow their votes to be counted, will not proscribe them in society as the south does, and they will probably get for themselves or their descendants intermarriage with whites. The determination of these southern negroes towards the north will probably gain in volume and energy. It is plain that those who go do much increase their chances of final absorption into the body of whites.

This a.s.similation is one of the two strings. And if the American negroes shall one day be conceded their own State, as I hope and pray for, their leaders must come from the upper cla.s.s. That is the other of the two strings.

This upper cla.s.s of southern negroes has demonstrated full ability to take care of itself. It has its schools and colleges, newspapers, magazines, and augmenting literature, its widening circle of students and readers, and its good shepherds and able leaders. It rapidly wins favor in the south. A few of our residents see no other negroes but those in this upper cla.s.s, a most striking instance of which is Joel Chandler Harris's sweeping a.s.sertion "that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all parts of the south, _especially in the agricultural regions, are leading_ sober and _industrious lives_."[191] When one who fully understands the situation studies the a.s.sertion just quoted he sees from the context that the writer was led to make it because he had at the time in his eyes only a few of the better negroes in the Atlanta upper cla.s.s. This is powerful testimony to their prosperity and self-maintaining faculty. Similarly the Chicago _Public_ rates the four hundred inhabitants of Boley in the Creek nation as common or average negroes. According to a news dispatch mentioned in that paper the town is only a year old, has "two churches, a school-house, several large stores, and a $5,000 cotton gin, owned and controlled exclusively by negroes." It is without a system of law and without munic.i.p.al government, and "yet no serious crime or offence of any kind has been committed in the place." These four hundred negroes do not permit any white man to settle in the town. Commenting in conclusion upon the news, the _Public_ says, "If that dispatch is not a canard, Anglo-Saxon civilization has something to learn of one race which it has outraged and abused and despised."[192]

Any such place as Boley, if a reality, is peopled only by negroes of the upper cla.s.s, and, further, only by those who have been sifted out from the rest of that cla.s.s by a peculiarly drastic selection. Had they not each had remarkable good fortune, extraordinary capacity, and exceptional experience and training, Boley would never have been heard of. I ask that the fair-minded make two comparisons. 1. Suppose four hundred negroes--not naturally selected, but taken in a body, just as each one comes, from the ma.s.ses of the lower cla.s.s described herein--given opportunity to found a town of their own amid what we may call Boley conditions, what would be the result? You may be sure that what occurred in Hayti when the reins of government were suddenly given to the negroes at large would in some sort be repeated. 2. Compare Boley in all its bloom and happy condition as described in the _Public_ with certain communities of select whites, which have flourished now and then for years, without formal government; say the Amana community. If this be rightly done, social organism of select whites will at once appear to be incomparably superior to that of select negroes.

I have tried my hardest to make my readers see as clearly as one bred in the south ought to see what a world-wide difference there is between the small upper cla.s.s and the numerous lower cla.s.s of negroes. If I have succeeded they will agree with me that it is the better policy to leave the upper cla.s.s, for the present, just where it is. If this advice be followed, that cla.s.s will flourish, and some day either be a.s.similated, or be giving benign salvation to the lower cla.s.s in the negro State.

Especially should this upper cla.s.s eschew politics. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton in preaching this is the only real American prophet of the day. With all of his zeal for his race, he is far better appreciated in the south than in the north, and perhaps just as popular. What a lamentable arrest of its benign development it would be to this upper cla.s.s to turn it away from industrial betterment of its condition to lead the ma.s.s of the negroes at the polls in a struggle for rule and office! That would be something like renewing the conditions that developed the Ku-Klux Klan.

It is the great body of the southern negroes--those in the lower cla.s.s, who have no string at all, nor even a bow--that demands the profoundest attention. I wish I could make every white man, woman, and child of America see them just as they are. As I compare them with what they were in 1865 I note they have advanced somewhat in mental arithmetic, because of practice in computing small sums of money involved in their wages and purchases; that they have learned somewhat of self-providence, and very much endurance of want (which last is really a reversion to a trait of their West African ancestors); and that the per cent of illiteracy among them has been greatly lessened. On the other hand, each generation becomes more disinclined to work, and its vagrants multiply; each generation more p.r.o.ne to live by crime, more unchaste, and more quick to desert their conjugal partners and children. Especially are they far more unhealthy and p.r.o.ne to insanity, and their death rate rapidly rising. They have no resource but unskilled labor of the lowest and cheapest grade; white compet.i.tion in agriculture and domestic service, machinery in other fields, such as the sc.r.a.pe which has superseded the dump-cart, the improved steam-shovel and method of handling construction trains, and the steam laundry, steadily curtailing that resource; a slothful, improvident, and wasteful disposition curtailing it still further. The resurrecting hand of the trades union cannot reach down to them. Steadily they are more useless to every upbuilder of the coming south except the wage-depresser.

More and more they get in the way of real progress in every direction. And as their supplies of necessaries diminish they get in one another's way.

Nearly all of the whites who were bound to them in the domestic love of the old south times are dead. Most naturally and unavoidably as the new generation discerns the growing incompatibility of their stay in the section with its true welfare, unfriendliness comes and grows. Listless, lethargic, careless, without initiative, without opportunity and coercion to make use of it, these mult.i.tudes of inveterate have-nothings are in a bottomless gulf of want, immorality, crime, and disease. A true philanthropist has familiarized the world with the "submerged tenth." Mr.

Ernest Hamlin Abbott, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Post, stand beside me on the strand, and fix your eyes, minds, and hearts upon the slowly drowning ninety-five per cent of the southern negroes. Lay aside the excess of your devotion to the upper cla.s.s. It does not need it. The Chicago dentist, as the _Public_ itself reports, was really more than indemnified for the insult given him because of his color by the sympathetic resentment of white members of his profession. Why will you keep agitating the nation in behalf of a few thousands, who are well able to maintain themselves, and neglect millions who require, as Mr.

Tillinghast says, some heroic remedy for their salvation?

I shall now tell you the utter inadequacy of Hampton, Tuskegee, and the like, after which I shall consider what, in my judgment, is the only remedy.

The annual output, as we may call it, of all the negro educational inst.i.tutions in the south is a mere drop in the bucket when compared with the enormous need. The latest reliable figures accessible to me are those of Booker Was.h.i.+ngton for 1897. They are as follows: 13,581 receiving industrial training, 2,108 collegiate education, 2,410 cla.s.sical instruction, and 1,311 "taking the professional course,"[193]--the last three aggregating 5,829. Suppose the entire 17,999 were following industrial courses, and that every one graduated with credit; and suppose there be added the work of the land companies providing homes and every other enterprise helping the negro in any way--suppose this output to be trebled annually from this time on (which is far above possibility for many years yet, to say nothing of probability), what would be its accomplishment? Why, no more than a slight shower in a few towns.h.i.+ps during the drought a few years ago would have done in preventing injury to the Kansas corn crop. When you attend, you understand that the great advantages of these excellent inst.i.tutions are only for a few lucky negroes,--picked ones of the upper cla.s.s,--and not for the millions whose crying need is for opportunity to earn honest daily bread and a really benevolent coercion to use the opportunity. The problem, what to do for this ma.s.s, cannot be solved by philippics against such things as _de facto_ or const.i.tutional disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the blacks, lynching them, showing them disrespect in military parades, giving them Jim Crow cars, and not dividing the educational fund more liberally with them; nor would it contribute one jot or t.i.ttle towards its solution if every lady in America cordially received in her drawing-room the few negroes who have most deservedly won the respect of the nation. To solve this problem, something must be found which will train and elevate the average negro, while the exceptional one is at the industrial school or college, or studying for a profession; something which will check the prevalent reversion away from monogamic family life, and stimulate that life to develop steadily; something also which will impart to this entire ma.s.s permanent and strengthening impulse to better its condition. The only thing that can do this is to separate the negro as far as may be from the whites, give him his own State in our union, and constrain him there with vigilant kindness to subsist and govern himself in such ways as suit him.

I have long thought that our negroes had far stronger claim upon the nation for land than the uncivilizable redskins on whom we have lavished so much expense in vain.

Righteousness demands that we give the former full opportunity to develop normally in self-government. Put him in a State of his own on our continent; provide irrepealably in the organic law that all land and public service franchises be common property; give no political rights therein to those of any other race than the African; compel n.o.body to settle in this State, but let every black reside in whatever part of the nation that pleases him; let this community while in a Territorial condition, and also for a reasonable time after it has been admitted as a State, be faithfully superintended by the nation in order that republican government be there preserved,--do these things, and there need be no fear that the examples of Hayti and San Domingo, which were not so superintended, will be repeated. Nearly all of the American Indians, because of rigid adherence to their old customs and ways, were crushed by Caucasian rule. But the negro, wherever he comes in contact with a superior, shows a pliancy, a self-adaptability to new circ.u.mstances, to which no parallel has ever been suggested, so far as I know. If civilized self-government will but kindly keep him a while at its labor school where he is to learn by doing, I am profoundly convinced that he will develop into the very best of citizens. And I am also just as profoundly convinced that if something like what I recommend is not done at a comparatively early day, after some while, as there are now in America a few prosperous Indians and in New Zealand a few prosperous Maoris, we will have here and there a few prosperous negroes; but the rest of them will either be confirmed degenerates, or have gone no one will know whither. And Booker Was.h.i.+ngton, the moral exemplar of the day, rivalling Horace's

"Iustum et tenacem propositi virum,"

as he resists the pernicious counsels of the overwhelming majority of negroes and keeps to the wise and right course which they pa.s.sionately condemn; who is far more able and who has accomplished infinitely more of good than Toussaint or Dougla.s.s--he will be a great hero statesman of a great cause lost. The historian of the future that has something like Shakspeare's genius for contrast will make his glory and that of Calhoun magnify each other by comparison.

The foregoing as to a negro State, which is the result of years of observation and reflection, had all been written for some time when I fell in with the address of Bishop Holsey, mentioned above. It is the proposition of the address that a part of the United States should be a.s.signed to the negroes. I add an abstract from the synopsis of his views given in the address:

1. Negroes and whites "are so distinct and dissimilar in racial traits, instincts, and character, it is impossible for them to live together on equal terms of social and political relation, or on terms of equal citizens.h.i.+p."

2. The general government only has power to settle the problem, and it ought to settle it.

3. Separation of the negroes and whites "is the most practicable, logical, and equitable solution of the problem."

4. "Segregation and separation should be gradual ... and non-compulsory, so as not to injure ... labor, capital, and commerce ... where the negro is an important factor of production and consumption."

5. The southern negroes should pet.i.tion the president and congress "for suitable territory ... as ... equal citizens ... and not go out of their country to be exposed to doubtful experiment and foreign complications.

Afro-Americans should remain in their own country, in the zone of greatness, and in the lat.i.tude of progress."

6. The government should, in effecting segregation, maintain "civil order, peace, progress, and prosperity."

7. The place for the negroes may be in the western public domain, such as a part of the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or elsewhere in the west.