Black and White Part 2

Shylock must have his pound of flesh, though the unlucky victim bleed his life away. But there are laws "higher" than any framed in the interest of tyrannical capital. In my opinion, the man who deliberately invests his money to perpetuate so vile an inst.i.tution as slavery deserves not only to lose the interest upon his investment but the princ.i.p.al as well. I therefore have not a grain of sympathy for the greedy cormorants who invested their money in the so-called Confederate Government. Neither have I any sympathy for the people of the South who, having invested all their money in human flesh, found themselves at the close of the Rebellion paupers in more senses than one--being bankrupt in purse and unused to make an honest living by honest labor--too proud to work and too poor to loaf.

In a question of this kind, no one disputes the power of Virginia to contract debts to propagate opinions, erroneous or other, but it is a question whether the people of one generation have the right to tax--that is, enslave--the people of generations yet unborn. The creation of public debts is pernicious in practice, productive of more harm than good. What right have I to create debts for my grandson or granddaughter? I have no right even to presume that I will have a grandson, certainly none that he will be able to meet his own debts in addition to those I entail upon him. The character of the people called upon to settle the debt of Virginia, contracted in 1860, before or immediately after, differed radically from the character of the people who were called upon to tax themselves to cancel that debt. Not only had the character of the people undergone a radical change; the whole social and industrial mechanism of the state had undergone a wonderful, almost an unrecognizable, metamorphosis. The haughty aristocrat, with his magnificent plantation, his army of slaves, and his "cattle on a thousand hills," who eagerly contracted the debt, had been transformed into a sour pauper when called upon to honor his note; while the magnificent plantation had been in many instances cut into a thousand bits to make homes for the former slaves, now freemen and citizens, the equals of "my lord," while "his cattle on a thousand hills" had dwindled down to a stubborn jacka.s.s and a worn out milch cow. True, the white man possessed, largely, the soil; but he was, immediately after the war, utterly incapable of wringing from it the bounty of Nature; he had first to be re-educated.

But, when the b.l.o.o.d.y rebellion was over, the country, in its sovereign capacity, and by individual States, was called upon to deal with grave questions growing out of the conflict. Mr. Lincoln, by a stroke of the pen,[9] transferred the battle from the field to the halls of legislation. In view of the "Emanc.i.p.ation proclamation" as issued by Mr. Lincoln, and the invaluable service rendered by black troops[10]

in the rebellion, legislation upon the status of the former slave could not be avoided. The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power--the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be toyed with as with a doll-baby. So the statesmen proceeded to manufacture the "Reconstruction policy"--a policy more fatuous, more replete with fatal concessions and far more fatal omissions than any ever before adopted for the acceptance and governance of a rebellious people on the one hand and a newly made, supremely helpless people on the other. It is not easy to regard with equanimity the blunders of the "Reconstruction policy" and the manifold infamies which have followed fast upon its adoption.

The South scornfully rejected and successfully nullified the legislative will of the victors.

Judge Albion W. Tourgee says of this policy in his book called _A Fool's Errand_: "It was a magnificent sentiment that underlay it all,--an unfaltering determination, an invincible defiance to all that had the seeming of compulsion or tyranny. One cannot but regard with pride and sympathy the indomitable men, who, being conquered in war, yet resisted every effort of the conqueror to change their laws, their customs, or even the _personnel_ of their ruling cla.s.s; and this, too, not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success. One cannot but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation which had overpowered them--even in the teeth of her legislators--with perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge.

How they laughed to scorn the Reconstruction Acts of which the wise men boasted! How boldly they declared the conflict to be irrepressible, and that white and black could not and should not live together as co-ordinate ruling elements! How lightly they told the tales of blood--of the Masked Night-Riders, of the Invisible Empire of Rifle clubs and Saber clubs (all organized for peaceful purposes), of warnings and whippings and slaughter! Ah, it is wonderful! * * *

b.l.o.o.d.y as the reign of Mary, barbarous as the chronicles of the Comanche!"

FOOTNOTES:

[7] We of the United States take credit for having abolished slavery.

Pa.s.sing the question of how much credit the majority of us are ent.i.tled to for the abolition of Negro slavery, it remains true that we have only abolished one form of slavery--and that a primitive form which had been abolished in the greater portion of the country by social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same way in other parts of the country. We have not really abolished slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread form--in the form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, and we made no scruple of setting into it our own children--the citizens of the Republic yet to be. For what else are we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must live, if they are to live at all.--Henry George, _Social Problems_, p. 209.

[8] Although for the present there is a lull in the conflict of races at the South, it is a lull which comes only from the breathing-spells of a great secular contention, and not from any permanent pacification founded on a resolution of the race problem presented by the Negro question in its present aspects. So long as the existing ma.s.s of our crude and una.s.similated colored population holds its present place in the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political rights will oscillate between alternate perils--the peril that comes from the white man when he places civilization, or sometimes his travesty of it, higher than the Negro's political rights, and the peril that comes from the black man when his political rights are placed by himself or others higher than civilization--President James C. Willing, on "Race Education" in _The North American Review_, April, 1883.

[9] By virtue of the power and for the purposes aforesaid, I do ordain and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States, are and henceforth shall be free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.--Abraham Lincoln's _Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation_.

[10] From Williams's _History of the Negro Race in America_ I construct the following table showing the number of colored troops employed by the Federal Government during the war of the Rebellion:

Colored Troops Furnished 1861-65 Total of New England States 7,916 Total of Middle States 13,922 Total, Western States and Territories 12,711 Total, Border States 45,184 Total, Southern States 63,571 ------- Grand Total States 143,304 At Large 733 Not accounted for 5,083 Officers 7,122 ------- Grand total 156,242

This gives colored troops enlisted in the States in Rebellion; besides this, there were 92,576 colored troops (included with the white soldiers) in the quotas of the several States.

CHAPTER V

_Illiteracy--Its Causes_

At the close of the rebellion there were in the Union (according to the census of 1860) 4,441,830 people of African origin; in 1880 they had increased to 6,580,793. Of this vast mult.i.tude in 1860, it is safe to say, not so many as one in every ten thousand could read or write.

They had been doomed by the most stringent laws to a long night of mental darkness. It was a crime to teach a black man how to read even the Bible, the sacred repository of the laws that must light the pathway of man from death unto life eternal. For to teach a slave was to make a firebrand--to arouse that love of freedom which stops at nothing short of absolute freedom. It is not, therefore, surprising that every southern state should have pa.s.sed the most odious inhibitary laws, with severe fines and penalties for their infraction, upon the question of informing the stunted intelligence of the slave population. The following table will show the condition of education in the South in 1880:

COMPARATIVE STATISTICS OF EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH ------------------------------------------------------------------------ White Colored -------------------------- ------------------------- States School Enroll- [A] School Enroll- [A] [B]

population ment population ment ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Alabama 217,590 107,483 49 170,413 72,007 42 $375,465 Arkansas [b]181,799 [c]53,229 29 [b]54,332 [c]17,743 33 238,056 Delaware 31,505 25,053 80 3,954 2,770 70 207,281 Florida [b]46,410 [c]18,871 41 [b]42,099 [c]20,444 49 114,895 Georgia [d]236,319 150,134 64 [d]197,125 86,399 45 471,029 Kentucky [e]478,597 [c]241,679 50 [e]66,564 [c]23,902 36 803,490 Louisiana [c]139,661 [d]44,052 32 [c]134,184 [d]34,476 26 480,320 Maryland [f]213,669 134,210 63 [f]63,591 28,221 44 1,544,367 Mississippi 175,251 112,994 64 251,438 123,710 49 850,704 Missouri 681,995 454,218 67 41,489 22,158 53 3,152,178 N.Carolina 291,770 136,481 47 167,554 89,125 53 352,882 S.Carolina [g]83,813 61,219 73 [g]144,315 72,853 50 324,629 Tennessee 403,353 229,290 57 141,509 60,851 43 724,862 Texas [h]171,426 138,912 81 [h]62,015 47,874 77 753,346 Virginia 314,827 152,136 48 240,980 68,600 28 946,109 W.Virginia 202,364 138,799 68 7,749 4,071 53 716,864 District of Columbia 29,612 16,934 57 13,946 9,505 68 438,567 ------------------------------------------------------------ Total 3,899,961 2,215,674 1,803,257 784,709 12,475,044 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Table Header A: Percentage of the school population enrolled]

[Table Header B: Total Expenditure for both races[a]]

[a] In Delaware the colored public schools have been supported by the school tax collected from colored citizens only; recently, however, they have received an appropriation of $2,400 from the State; in Kentucky the school-tax collected from colored citizens is the only State appropriation for the support of colored schools; in Maryland there is a biennial appropriation by the Legislature; in the District of Columbia one-third of the school moneys is set apart for colored public schools, and in the other States mentioned above the school moneys are divided in proportion to the school population without regard to race.

[b] Several counties failed to make race distinctions.

[c] Estimated.

[d] In 1879.

[e] For whites the school age is 6 to 20, for colored 6 to 16.

[f] Census of 1870.

[g] In 1877.

[h] These numbers include some duplicates; the actual school population is 230,527.

Speaking in the Senate of the United States June 13, 1882, the bill for National "Aid to Common Schools" being under consideration, Senator Henry W. Blair, of New Hampshire, said:

Excluding the states of Maryland and Missouri and the District of Columbia, and the total yearly expenditure for both races is only $7,339,932, while in the whole country the annual expenditure is, from taxation, $70,341,435, and from school funds $6,580,632, or a total of $76,922,067, (see tables 2 and 7,) or one-tenth of the whole, while they contain one-fifth of the school-population. The causes which have produced this state of things in the Southern States are far less important than the facts themselves as they now exist. To find a remedy and apply it is the only duty which devolves upon us. Without universal education, not only will the late war prove to be a failure, but the abolition of slavery be proved to be a tremendous disaster, if not a crime.

The country was held together by the strong and b.l.o.o.d.y embrace of war, but that which the nation might and did do to retain the integrity of its territory and of its laws by the expenditure of brute force will all be lost if, for the subjection of seven millions of men, by the statutes of the States is to be subst.i.tuted the thraldom of ignorance and the tyranny of an irresponsible suffrage. Secession, and a confederacy founded upon slavery as its chief cornerstone, would be better than the future of the Southern States--better for both races, too--if the nation is to permit one-third, and that the fairest portion of its domain, to become the sp.a.w.ning ground of ignorance, vice, anarchy, and of every crime. The nation as such abolished slavery as a legal inst.i.tution; but ignorance is slavery, and no matter what is written in your const.i.tutions and your laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the light of her smile.

Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies, highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities.

Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all is changed. The suffrage is universal, and that means universal ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created by universal education. Until the republican const.i.tutions, framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction which supplanted the governments initiated by President Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage, were unknown. Hence in a special manner the nation is responsible for the existence and support of those systems as well as for the order of things which made them necessary. That remarkable progress has been made under their influence is true, and that the common school is fast becoming as dear to the ma.s.ses of the people at the South as elsewhere is also evident.

The Nation, through the Freedmen's Bureau, and perhaps to a limited extent in other ways, has expended five millions of dollars for the education of negroes and refugees in the earlier days of reconstruction, while religious charities have founded many special schools which have thus far cost some ten millions more. The Peabody fund has distilled the dews of heaven all over the South; but heavy rains are needed; without them every green thing must wither away.

This work belongs to the Nation. It is a part of the war.

We have the Southern people as patriotic allies now. We are one; so shall we be forever. But both North and South have a fiercer and more doubtful fight with the forces of ignorance than they waged with each other during the b.l.o.o.d.y years which chastened the opening life of this generation.

The South lost in the destruction of property about two billion dollars and in prosecuting the war two billion more. No people can lose so much without seriously disarranging the entire mechanism of their government. It is for this reason, therefore, that the measure of "National Aid to Education" has so many and so persistent advocates. I wish to place myself among them. If the safety of republican government abides in the intelligence and virtue of the people, it can very readily be seen how much safety there is in the South at present. If it be true that an ulcer will vitiate the entire body, and endanger the life of the patient, we can see very plainly to what possible danger the spread of illiteracy may lead us.

Illiteracy in the South is one of the worst legacies which the rebellion bequeathed to the nation. It has been the prime cause of more misgovernment in the South than any other one cause, not even the insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers taking precedence of it. It has not only served as a provocation to peculation and chicanery, but it has nerved the courage of the a.s.sa.s.sin and made merry the midnight ride of armed mobs bent upon righting wrongs by committing crimes before which the atrocities of savage warfare pale.

Wholesale murders have been committed and sovereign majorities awed into silence and inaction by reason of the widespread illiteracy of the ma.s.ses. The very first principles of republican government have been ruthlessly trampled under foot because the people were ignorant of their sovereign rights, and had not, therefore, courage to maintain them.

That there should be in sixteen States and the District of Columbia a population of 5,703,218 people to be educated out of $12,475,044 is sufficient to arouse the apprehension of the most indifferent friend of good government. The State of New York alone, with a school population of only 1,641,173 spent, in 1880, $9,675,922.

But I base my argument for the establishment and maintenance of a comprehensive system of National education upon other grounds than the "safety of the Union," which is the same argument used by Mr. Lincoln when he emanc.i.p.ated the slaves. This argument is strong, and will always greatly influence a certain cla.s.s of people. And, naturally, it should, for the perpetuation of the Union is simply the perpetuation of a republican form of government. But there are stronger grounds to be considered.

1. The United States government is directly responsible for the illiteracy and the widespread poverty which obtain in the South. Under its sanction and by its connivance the inst.i.tution of slavery flourished and prospered, until it had taken such deep root as to be almost impossible of extirpation. It was the _Union_, and not the _States_, severally, which made slavery part and parcel of the fundamental law of the land. If this be a correct statement of the case, and I a.s.sume that it is, the _Union_ (and not the _States_, severally) is responsible for the ignorance of the black people of the South. Slavery could not have existed and grown in the Union save by permission of all the States of the Union. It is therefore obvious that the agency which created and fostered a great crime is obligated, not only by the laws of G.o.d but of man as well, to a.s.sume the responsibility of its creation and to remedy, as far as possible, the evil results of that crime. The issue cannot be evaded. The obligation rests upon the Union, not upon the several States, to a.s.sume the direction of methods by which the appalling illiteracy of the South is to be diminished.

2. There have not been wanting men and newspapers to urge that the United States should reimburse the slave-holders of the South for the wholesale confiscation, so to speak, of their property. True, these men and newspapers belong to that cla.s.s of unrepentants who believed that slavery was a _Divine inst.i.tution_ and that the slave-holder was a sort of vicegerent of heaven, a holy Moses, as it were. But when we leave the absurdity of this claim, which lies upon the surface, there is much apparent reason in their representations. It was the _Union_ which legalized the sale and purchase of slave property, thereby inviting capitalists to invest in it; and it was the _Union_ which declared such contracts null and void by the abolition of slavery, or confiscation of slave property. As I said before, I have no sympathy with those who invested their money in slave property. They not only received their just deserts in having their property confiscated, but they should have been compelled to make rest.i.tution to the last penny to the poor slaves whom they had systematically robbed. But perhaps this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal. For the great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the payment of debts contracted by the firm, for each member of the government is, measurably, an agent of the government, contracting and paying debts by its delegated authority. Thus the law holds him guilty who willfully breaks a contract entered into in good faith by all the parties to it. Instead of holding the slave-holder responsible for the robbery of the black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold the _government_ responsible.

What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years! What claim has the slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and enervated and dwarfed manhood! A billion dollars would have bought every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased manhood. The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected. And yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the debas.e.m.e.nt--not to say enervation--of his manhood, by the great act by which he was made a free man and a citizen.

But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House--a boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the _right_ of any man to enslave his fellow; I deny the _right_ of any government, sovereign as the Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pa.s.s any regulation which robs _one man or cla.s.s_ to enrich _another_.

Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of G.o.d, the common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country--men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of _Junius_, speak of the black man as the "ward of the nation"--a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I p.r.o.nounce to be reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold upon the soil by robbing the black man. When the rebellion at last closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich indeed in lands, while the black man was poor in everything, even in manhood, not because of any neglect or improvidence on his part, but because, though he labored from the rising to the setting of the sun, he received absolutely nothing for his labor, often being denied adequate food to sustain his physical man and clothing to protect him from the rude inclemency of the weather. He was a bankrupt in purse because the _government_ had robbed him; he was a bankrupt in character, in all the elements of a successful manhood, because the _government_ had placed a premium upon illiteracy and immorality. It was not the individual slave-owner who held the black man in chains; it was the _government_; for, the government having permitted slavery to exist, the inst.i.tution vanished the instant the government declared that it should no longer exist!

I therefore maintain that the people of this Nation who enslaved the black man, who robbed him of more than a hundred years of toil, who perverted his moral nature, and all but extinguished in him the Divine spark of intelligence, are morally bound to do all that is in their power to build up his shattered manhood, to put him on his feet, as it were, to fit him to enjoy the freedom thrust upon him so unceremoniously, and to exercise with loyalty and patriotism the ballot placed in his hands--the ballot, in which is wrapped up the destiny of republican government, the perpetuity of democratic inst.i.tutions. It is the proper function of government to see to it that its citizens are properly prepared to exercise wisely the liberties placed in their keeping. Self-preservation would dictate as much; for, if it be considered the better part of valor to discretely build and maintain a.r.s.enals and forts to bar out the invader, to prepare against the a.s.saults of the enemy from without, how much more imperative it is to take timely precautions to counteract the mischief of insidious foes from within? Are our liberties placed more in jeopardy by the a.s.saults of an enemy who plans our destruction three thousand miles away than of the enemy within our very bosoms? Was it the puissance of the barbarian arms or the corruption and enervation of the character of her people which worked the downfall of Rome? Was it influences from _without_ or influences from _within_ which corrupted the integrity of the people of Sparta and led to their subjugation by a more st.u.r.dy people? Let us learn by the striking examples of history. A people's greatness should be measured, not by its magnificent palaces, decked out in all the gaudy splendors of art and needless luxuries, the price of piracy or direct thievery; not in the number of colossal fortunes acc.u.mulated out of the stipend of the orphan and widow and the son of toil; not in the extent and richness of its public buildings and palaces of idle amus.e.m.e.nt; not in vast aggregations of capital in the coffers of the common treasury--capital unnecessarily diverted from the channels of trade, extorted from the people by the ignorance of their "wise men," who seek in vain for a remedy for the evil, _because they do not want to find one_.[11] A people's greatness should not be measured by these standards, for they are the parasites which eat away the foundations of greatness and stability. On the contrary, such greatness is to be found in the general diffusion of wealth, the comparative contentment and competency of the ma.s.ses, and the general virtue and patriotism of the _whole_ people. It should, therefore, manifestly be the end and aim of legislators to so shape the machinery placed in their hands as to operate with the least possible restraint upon the energies of the people. It should not be the studied purpose to enrich the few at the expense of the many, to restrain this man and give that one the largest possible immunity. No law should be made or enforced which would abridge my right while enlarging the right of my neighbor. That such is the case at this time--that legislatures are manipulated in the interest of a few, and that the great ma.s.s of the people feel only the burdens placed upon them by their servants, who are more properly speaking become their masters--that to such perversion of popular sovereignty we have come, is admitted by candid men.

Therefore, that the people may more clearly know their rights and how best to preserve them and reap their fullest benefits, they should be instructed in the language which is the medium through which to interpret their grand _Magna Charta_.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Since all sensible men know that the evil lies in a protective tariff and the bulky catalogue of monopoly.