Following the Color Line Part 34

Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the Negro vote of Cleveland:

"I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in the same walks of life."

_Negro a National Problem_

I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional but a _national_ problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human, not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters, confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the South. Nothing short of the patient cooperation of the entire country, North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.

In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.

Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic, Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in it.

The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.

Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.

_What Slavery Did_

This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery, but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called "poor whites," whom even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.

If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery and liberated both Negro and poor white men.

Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education, religion, thought.

When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed in name from "slave" to "freeman," but not changed in nature. It found the poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all, are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many legal-minded men will not or cannot see.

What happened?

Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux Klan, the Patrollers, the b.l.o.o.d.y Shirt movement, were the agencies (violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle, and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust, but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up and ran again.

_The Struggle in South Carolina_

The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where the old aristocratic regime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern states.

In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to political supremacy.

General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old regime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen (and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.

Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal wound. There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned. The inst.i.tution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic advantage of _owning_ his labourers. He was reduced to an economic equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now the millstone of his doom.

Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed, the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The disappearance of compet.i.tive slave labour made them unexpectedly prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of freedom and power.

Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the people.

How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.

_Tillman, the Prophet_

So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the farmers' fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced, s.h.a.ggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long preparing in silence for his task--struggling upward in the poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.

Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read Carlyle's "French Revolution" and Gibbon's "Rome." He had in him, indeed, the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers, he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government be restored to the "plain people!" On one of the transparencies of those days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):

"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."

He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of Southern cities, he said:

"Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards G.o.d ever made."

And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:

"Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once more. Without it, you will remain slaves."

Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate, Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his fiery utterances.

"I am a rude man," he said, "and don't care."

That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.

"I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?"

"_I_ am before the Senate," screamed Tillman.

In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at last, was in power.

The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the new leaders of the "plain people" that they do not belong to the "old families" or to the "aristocracy." Governor Comer told me that he was a "doodle-blower"--a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and pa.s.sions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more democratic government in the South.

The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.

_"High Men" of the Old South_

And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the terms a "high man," an "incorruptible man." Beautiful names! For there was a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed "high men."

When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for itself--with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.

The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.

And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college, regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The "highest citizen" may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly higher.

Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where does _he_ come in?

_Where the Negro Comes In_

Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less literally true that up to the present time the Negro's real influence in politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an _issue_, but not an _actor_ in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.

They have talked _about_ the Negro, but they have not let _him_ talk. Even in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue of the power of the North. As a cla.s.s, the Negroes were not self-directed but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.

In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction, practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.