The Hindered Hand Part 34

No attempt is here made to deal with Mr. Dixon's second book bearing on the race problem, it being the hope of the writer to give that matter serious and independent attention.

2. In spite of the solemn a.s.surances of the writer that the incidents depicted in "The Hindered Hand" are based upon actual occurrences, there has appeared here and there a slight air of questioning with regard to some things related. Particularly does it seem hard to believe what is told of the manner of the death of Bud and Foresta Harper. The writer would be only too glad if he could but free his mind of the knowledge that the picture is true to life in the utmost horrible detail, The Nashville _American_, one of the leading Southern daily papers, at the time of its occurrence, accepted the account as we have given it as correct and made editorial comment upon the same, and no one would dare p.r.o.nounce that paper hostile to the South.

We stand ready to furnish ample evidence of the absolute correctness of each and every portrayal to be found in "The Hindered Hand."

SUTTON E. GRIGGS, No. 610 Webster St., Nashville, Tenn.

A HINDERING HAND

SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE HINDERED HAND.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr._

A HINDERING HAND.

THE POOR WHITE AND THE NEGRO.

From the door of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of the South, prior to his emanc.i.p.ation by the Civil War, looked out upon a world whose honors and emoluments cast no favoring glances in his direction.

Between the poor white and his every earthly hope stood the Negro slave.

As his thoughts now and then stole upward toward the higher social circles, he realized that the absence of slave quarters from his home entailed his absence from those upper realms. If in the marts of toil he offered the labor of his hands, he felt his cheeks tingling from the consciousness that others regarded him as being upon a level with slaves; and at the best the market for his labor was very limited, for the fatted slave stood in his way.

So utterly forlorn was the condition of the poor white that the enslaved Negro felt justified in meeting his protruding claim of racial superiority with contemptuous scorn. In the very nature of things the strongest sort of repulsion developed between this cla.s.s of whites and the Negro slaves. The work, therefore, of overseeing and driving the slaves on the plantations of the more wealthy whites, fitted the habitual mood of the poor white exactly. No form of service was more congenial to him than that of whipping intractable Negroes for their masters.

It thus came to pa.s.s that the poor white man registered it as his first duty to wreak vengeance upon this unbowing, scornful Negro standing between him and all that was dear to his heart. This feeling of hostility was handed over from father to son, from generation to generation, until the very social atmosphere was charged with this bitter feeling.

When the Civil War came this neglected and despised cla.s.s suddenly became important and furnished its quota of soldiers and commanders.

Nathan Bedford Forrest hailed from this cla.s.s, and as a result the American people have on their annals Fort Pillow and its savage-like ma.s.sacre. When the war was over, the poor white cla.s.s began to bestir itself in civil life, and from that cla.s.s the nation derived the Hon.

Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina.

And now literature is receiving its contribution from this cla.s.s of whites, in the work being done by Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., of North Carolina, who does not hail from the more wealthy and more friendly element of Southern whites, but from mingling with the poorer cla.s.ses, where hatred of the Negro was a part of the legacy handed down from parent to child. For, before Mr. Dixon's marriage he was a poor man and was viewed by the Negroes of Raleigh, N. C., as one belonging to the cla.s.s of their hereditary enemies. It is with the outpourings of a man who has been steeped in all the traditions of this hostile atmosphere that we are now called upon to deal.

The goal toward which Mr. Dixon is striving is the ejection from America of nearly ten million of his fellow citizens, against the overwhelming majority of whom he can allege no unusual offense save that they are of African descent.

The work of their fathers and of themselves in wresting the fields of the South from the clutch of forest; in crimsoning American soil with their blood in every war that has been fought; in yielding of all of the best of their heart and mind for this country's good is, according to Mr. Dixon, to count for naught.

HARNESSING HATRED.

It is to be conceded that the presence in large numbers of two distinct races in the same territory under a democratic form of government const.i.tutes a grave problem, and profound is the wish of many of both races that a separation might be effected. Mr. Dixon is by no means a pioneer in desiring a separation. The great emanc.i.p.ator desired this result.

But Mr. Dixon is a pioneer in the matter of seeking to attain his end by an attempt to thoroughly discredit the Negroes, to stir up the baser pa.s.sions of men against them and to send them forth with a load of obloquy and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over, sufficient to appall a nation of angels.

Mark the essentially _barbarous_ character of Mr. Dixon's method of warfare.

There is the good and the bad in all men. The world has learned since the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there is in men.

Mankind has been grouping itself from time immemorial, according to certain physical likenesses, and each race or group has had more or less of prejudice against alien groups. It has been the one struggle of the higher human instincts to enable men, in spite of differences of form, of feature, to find a common bond of sympathy linking mankind together.

Uncle Tom's Cabin grappled in the mire of Southern slavery and lifted a despised and helpless race into living sympathy with the white race at the North. To cut these chords of sympathy and re-establish the old order of repulsion, based upon the primitive feeling of race hatred is the first item on Mr. Dixon's programme.

The adopting of a course so patently barbaric stamps Mr. Dixon as a spiritual reversion to type, violently out of accord with the best tendencies of his times.

The very opposite of Mr. Dixon is Professor Nathaniel F. Shaler, of Harvard, himself a Southerner, who approaches this same grave question of the relation of the races and seeks to prepare the American people for the consideration of the subject free from the distorting influence of prejudice.

A SERIOUS HANDICAP.

The cultivation of race hatreds on the part of Mr. Dixon and others who labor with him, if successful will react on the American people sadly to their detriment. The wonderful activity of American industries call loudly for the world as a market for their goods. The dark races of the world, now backward in the matter of manufacturing, must largely furnish these markets. The cloven foot of America's race prejudice will make itself manifest, and its owner will find it increasingly difficult to secure a ready purchaser for his goods.

We have a hint of what will happen in the awakened darker world in the boycott of American goods by the Chinese, because of the rude treatment by American custom officials, of unoffending Chinese, a treatment born of the spirit of race hatred.

MR. DIXON IS SHREWD.

Let us now take note of the various artifices resorted to by Mr. Dixon to unhorse the Negro in the esteem of the North and bestow his place upon those who would repress him.

In his first Anti-Negro book, Mr. Dixon was shrewd enough not to make a Southerner who was _persona non grata_ to the North the hero of the story. The poor old Ex-Confederate soldier, rank secessionist, the real hero and dominating figure of his times, in this book is tied out in the back yard, while the post of honor is given to a little boy whose father fought most unwillingly against the Union. Mr. Dixon's choosing for a hero this lad, whose father wore a confederate uniform over a union heart, forcibly reminds one of the reply of the whimpering soldier whom the captain was upbraiding for cowardice under fire.

"You act as though you were a baby," angrily shouted the captain to the frightened soldier.

"I wish I was a baby and a gal baby at that," whimpered the soldier, reasoning that "gal babies" were exempt not only from that battle, but from all others.

While Mr. Dixon was in search of a hero that would be far removed from what was regarded as treason in those days he might have made a.s.surance doubly sure by doing further violence to the predominating sentiment of the day by making his hero--not his heroine--a "gal" baby.

MR. DIXON SCOFFS.

One of the brightest pages in the history of this nation will be that which tells the story of those men and women of the North, who, over the protests of loved ones, faced the ostracism of their kind in the South that they might open the Negroes' eyes to the hitherto forbidden glories of modern civilization and take care that the spiritual was not lost sight of in the new maze of world wonders.

Withered indeed must be the soul that could scoff at such moral heroism, and yet that is just what Mr. Dixon does. He suggests that the people who produced a Washington and a Jefferson hardly needed missionaries to perform work among the Negroes within their borders.

But it must be borne in mind that as a part of the propaganda in favor of retaining the Negro in slavery, the white people of the South thoroughly committed themselves to the doctrine of the _ineffaceable_, _inherent_ inferiority of the Negro, and had no largeness of faith in his possibilities along lines of higher culture. It is evident, then, that if salvation was to come at all, it was to come from a source that deemed such an outcome possible.

THE EARLIER CHURCH LIFE OF THE NEGRO.