The Negro and the Nation Part 18

"Politics and philanthropy are a grind; only when one is at the post of duty and knows it, there is a sensation of being lifted and lifting (_et teneo et teneor_) which sometimes comes gradually over one. Detail is grinding, the whole inspiring. G.o.d's kings and priests must drudge in seedy clothes before they can wear the purple."

"From the deep human heart to the infinite heart there is a line along which will pa.s.s the real cry and the sympathetic answer--a double flash from the moral magnetism that fills the universe. Its conditions are not found in theological belief, but in the spirit of a little child. We can no more understand our human brother than our Father in heaven without bringing faith--the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for--to our aid."

"All progress of strong hearts is by action and reaction. Human life is too weak to be an incessant eagle flight toward the Sun of Righteousness. Wings will be sometimes folded because they are wings....

The earthly struggle must be enduring--that is all. There must be no surrenders; we can't expect much of victory here."

"The longer I live, the less I think and fear about what the world calls success; the more I tremble for true success, for the purity and sanct.i.ty of the soul, which is as a temple."

"Doing what can't be done is the glory of living."

"What are Christians put into the world for but to do the impossible in the strength of G.o.d?"

In the contemplation of such a spirit we rest for a little from the turmoils of politics, the mixture of motives, the half-successes. Here is what glorified the whole business,--the development of souls like this; and in such is the promise of the future. Fitly to Armstrong belongs what Matthew Arnold has written of his father, a kindred soul:--

Servants of G.o.d!--or sons Shall I not call you? because Not as servants ye knew Your Father's innermost mind, His, who unwillingly sees One of his little ones lost-- Yours is the praise, if mankind Hath not as yet in its march Fainted, and fallen, and died!

See! In the rocks of the world Marches the host of mankind A feeble, wavering line.

Where are they tending?--A G.o.d Marshal'd them, gave them their goal-- Ah, but the way is so long!

Years they have been in the wild!

Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks, Rising all round, overawe; Factions divide them, their host Threatens to break, to dissolve-- Ah, keep, keep them combined!

Else, of the myriads who fill That army, not one shall arrive; Sole they shall stray; on the rocks Batter forever in vain, Die one by one in the waste.

Then, in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Ye, like angels, appear, Radiant with ardor divine.

Beacons of hope, ye appear!

Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow.

Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away.

Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re-inspire the brave.

Order, courage, return; Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go.

Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of G.o.d!

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

EVOLUTION

The story of slavery merges in the stories of the white man and the black man, to which there is no end. As the main period to the present study we have taken the beginning of President Hayes's administration in 1877, when the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South marked the return of the States of the Union to their normal relations, and also marked the disappearance of the negro problem as the central feature in national politics. From that time to the present we shall take but a bird's-eye view of the fortunes and the mutual relation of the two races.

The people of the Southern States realized gradually but at last fully that the conduct of their affairs was left in their own hands. From this time there was no important Federal legislation directed specially at the South. The restrictive laws left over from the reconstruction period were in some cases set aside by the Supreme Court and in general pa.s.sed into abeyance. There was rare and brief discussion of a renewal of Federal supervision of elections. But the Northern people, partly from rational conviction and partly from absorption in new issues, were wholly indisposed to any further interference. Without such interference there was no slightest chance of any restoration of political preponderance of the negroes over the whites. The specter of "negro domination" haunted the Southern imagination long after it had become an impossibility. Then it was used as a bogy by small politicians. But the only serious attempt at national legislation for the South has been of a wholly different character. It was the plan of Senator Blair of New Hamps.h.i.+re, long urged upon Congress, and sometimes with good hope of success, for national a.s.sistance to local education, on the basis of existing illiteracy, for a term of ten years, to a total amount of $100,000,000. That is the only kind of special legislation for the South that has had any chance of enactment for almost thirty years.

Through the twelve years of political reconstruction, 1865-77, the Southern people were gradually adapting themselves to the new industrial and social conditions. Then the body of the whites, finding themselves fully restored to political mastery, grasped the entire situation with new clearness and vigor. They thrust the freedmen not only out of legislative majorities and the State offices, but out of all and any effective exercise of the suffrage. The means were various, consisting largely of indirect and technical hindrances, "tissue-paper ballots" and the like. The intelligent cla.s.s ma.s.sed against the ignorant found no serious difficulty in having their own way at all points. A considerable number of negroes still voted, and had their votes counted, but their party was always somehow put in the minority; almost all offices pa.s.sed out of their hands; their representatives speedily disappeared from Congress, and before long from the Legislatures. Negro suffrage was almost nullified, and that, too, before the legislation of the last decade.

But, in a.s.serting their complete political superiority, the whites also recognized a large responsibility for the race they controlled. A degree of civil rights was secured to them, short of a perfect equality with the whites, but far beyond the status intended by the "black codes" of 1865-6. The fundamental rights, of liberty to dispose of their labor and earnings in their own way, and protection of person and property by the law and the courts, were substantially secured. And, very notably, the common school education of blacks as well as whites was undertaken with fidelity, energy and new success. This great and vital advance, inaugurated by the Southern Republican governments, was accepted and carried on, loyally and at heavy cost, by the succeeding Democratic governments. The figures show a great advance from 1875 to 1880 in the number of schools and scholars of both races throughout the South.

Political inferiority for the negroes, but civil rights, industrial freedom, and rudimentary education,--that was the theory and largely the practice of their white neighbors.

One clause they added with emphatic affirmation: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." Social superiority, indicated by separation in all the familiar and courteous intercourse of daily life, was a.s.serted by the whites with a rigor beyond that of the days of slavery. When humiliated and stung by the political ascendency of their former bondmen, they wrapped themselves in their social superiority with a new haughtiness. The pride of race, of color, of the owner above the serf, stripped of its old power and insignia, but no whit weakened in root and core, set an adamantine wall along the line of social familiarity. Let the black man have his own place--in school and church, in street and market and hotel; but the same place, never! Separate schools, churches, cars. And as in a hospitable country the social meal is the special occasion and symbol of good fellows.h.i.+p and equal comrades.h.i.+p, right there let the line be fixed,--no black man or woman shall sit at table with whites.

The usage came down by tradition, and became only a little more rigid under the new conditions. At the North the general practice had always been much the same; but there it was occasionally and growingly superseded, when people of the two races found a common level of education and manners. The Southern whites for a while took their own practice as a matter of course. But then, especially as by degrees some black men and women acquired mental cultivation and social polish,--then came question and challenge from the world without and from conscience within; why this rigid separation? An answer must be found or made,--and presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and drink together, play and work together,--then they will intermarry, and the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the conviction, the creed, the s.h.i.+bboleth, of the Southern whites,--race purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social intimacy, especially as symbolized by the common meal. And the prohibition was enforced among the whites by the penalty of sure and stern ostracism.

Under these conditions, then, the two sections of the Southern people have been working their way, for almost thirty years. How first have the negroes fared? Of the prophecies for their future, made when they were in bondage and in view of possible emanc.i.p.ation, one was that they would die out,--but in less than half a century they have doubled. Another was that if freed they would refuse to work,--but the industrial product of the South has never fallen off, but has steadily and vastly increased, with the negro still as the chief laborer. Another prediction was that they would lapse into barbarism. The Southern negroes as a ma.s.s have a fringe of barbarism--a heavy fringe. So has every community, white, black or yellow, the world over. Have the Southern blacks, as a body, moved toward barbarism or toward civilization since they were set free?

The comparative tests between civilization and barbarism are, broadly speaking, productive industry, intelligence and morality. If we gauge industry by results, we find that the cla.s.s which forty years ago entered into freedom with empty hands now owns more than $300,000,000 of property by the tax-gatherers' lists. Another estimate--cited by Prof.

Albert Bushnell Hart--puts their entire property holdings at $500,000,000. Though most of them are tenants or hired laborers, yet there are more than 173,000 who own their farms. The total number of farms worked by them in the South--owned, leased, or rented on shares--is figured at 700,000. The census of 1900 shows that in almost every profession, trade and handicraft the black race has numerous representatives--their range of occupation and industrial opportunity being far wider in the South than in the North. Taking the whole country, the percentage of adults in gainful pursuits is a trifle higher among blacks than among whites. Allow for the more frequent employment in toil of the black woman; allow, too, for the more intermittent character of black labor,--yet the relative showing is not unfavorable to the enfranchised race. And this comparison touches, too, the more difficult problem of morality,--for industry is itself a chief safeguard of morality.

As to intelligence, the statistics show that, roughly speaking, about half the blacks over ten years old can read and write. That is not much below the status of the people of England half a century ago. In the higher fields of intelligence, the American negroes,--there are 9,000,000 of them,--supply to-day a large part of their own teachers, ministers, lawyers and doctors, and in all these professions the standard is steadily rising.

In regard to morality, generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites.

There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are wanting for exact comparison, either with the whites, or among the blacks at different periods. Yet there are few or no sections at the South, even in the worst parts of the Black Belt, as to which the public gets the impression of any general lawlessness. And in any comparison of the present with the time of slavery, we must remember what Carlyle says in speaking of the cruelties of the French Revolution as compared with those of the tyranny which preceded it,--when the high-born suffer the world hears of it, but the woes of the inarticulate are unheard. Wrongs at the South which shock us to-day,--or wrongs as great--were commonplace, were unnoted and unchronicled, under slavery. It is offenses against women that rouse the hottest resentment. But for centuries the black woman's chast.i.ty had absolutely no protection under the law, and her woes were pitiful beyond telling. For the Southern negro, true family life was impossible until within fifty years. With so brief experience in the best school of character, there is no ground for doubting that he has won a vast moral advance, and the promise of greater.

Of the negroes, as of every race or community, we may consider the lowest stratum, the great ma.s.s, and the leaders. Regarding not morality only, but general conditions, there is a considerable element of the Southern blacks whose condition is most pitiable. Such especially are many of the peasants of the Black Belt; barely able to support themselves, often plundered with more or less of legality by landlord and storekeeper, shut up to heavy, dull, almost hopeless lives.

Inheritance weighs on them as well as environment; when these plantations were recruited from Virginia, it was only the worst of the slaves whom their masters would sell, and the bad elements propagated their like. The case of these people to-day presents one of the open sores, the unanswered questions,--we might say the impossible tasks, did we not remember Armstrong's att.i.tude toward things "impossible."

Yet, even as to these,--are they not better off than when enslaved? A part of their trouble is the burden of responsibility--for themselves, their wives and children. In slavery they had no responsibility beyond the day's task; the whip and the full stomach were the two extremes of their possibilities. Now at least they are men--with manhood's burdens, but with its possibilities, too.

Of the great middle cla.s.s, something has already been said, as to industry, property and education. But statistics are cold and dead, could we but see the living human realities which they vainly try to express. The growth of a slave, or a slave's child, into a free man or woman,--the birth and development of true family life,--could we see this in its millions of instances, or even distinctly in one typical instance, with all its phases of struggle, mistake, disappointment, success, the growth of character, the blossoming of manhood and womanhood,--it would be a more moving spectacle than any that Shakespeare has given. Here, again, it is mostly the inarticulate cla.s.s, and their story is not told to the world. We especially fail to learn it, because of the wall of caste by which the white man shuts himself out from the finest sights and the most brotherly opportunities. More than farming or carpentry, more than school or church, and taking in the best fruits of all these, is family life, in its fullest and best. That is where the negro is coming to highest manhood.

A necessary test of a race is its power to furnish its own leaders. The negro race in America is developing a leaders.h.i.+p of its own,--small as yet, but choice and growing. It was part of Armstrong's central idea to create and supply such a leaders.h.i.+p. Hampton has gone steadily on in the work, and the sisters and the children of Hampton are multiplying their fruits. It was by an ideal fitness of things that Armstrong attracted, inspired and started as his worthy successor one of the negro race. At Tuskegee the black man is doing for himself what at Hampton the white man is doing for him. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton is the pupil and successor of Armstrong, but he has his own distinct individuality, his own word and work. His constant precept and practice has been that the black man should make himself so serviceable and valuable to the community that every door will open as fast as he is fit to enter it. It is the gospel of wisdom and of peace. Toward all the opportunities denied to the race, its att.i.tude is one of patience but of untiring persistence. Its constant word is, Make yourself fit for any function, any place, and sooner or later it will be yours. Against political exclusion Mr.

Was.h.i.+ngton on due occasion speaks his calm word, but he does not beat against the closed gate; he knows that when the black man shows his full capacity for citizens.h.i.+p it cannot long be denied him. The social exclusion he accepts with quiet self-respect; let time see to that, let us only do our full work, learn our full lesson. His teaching goes far beyond the schoolroom; he gathers in conference the heads of families, the fathers and mothers; he sets them to study and practice the curriculum of the family and the neighborhood. In his intense practicality he lacks something of the spiritual inspiration which Armstrong had and gave. But his teaching is in no wise narrow or selfish, for always it is animated by the spirit of brotherhood and service. His personal story, _Up from Slavery_, is one of the most moving of human doc.u.ments; in itself it is an answer to all pessimism.

It is a typical story; even as these sheets are written there comes to hand another like unto it, the story of another boy, William Holtzclaw, who groped his way up from a negro cabin, caught the sacred fire at Tuskegee, did battle with misfortune and adversity, and now in his turn is carrying on the good work. And for every such story that gets told there are a hundred that are acted.

The wider leaders.h.i.+p of the negroes by their own men is exemplified,--it is not measured or exhausted,--by a pregnant little volume of essays ent.i.tled _The Negro Problem_. Seven of its phases are discussed by Booker Was.h.i.+ngton, Professor DuBois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Wilfred H.

Smith, H. T. Kealing, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune. As a collection, these essays are noteworthy for their cogency and clearness, for their earnest and self-respectful plea for full justice and opportunity, and their calmness and candor. The race that can speak for itself in such tones has an a.s.sured future,--if democracy, evolution, Christianity, are the ruling powers.

This story is concerned mainly with the slave and the freedman, but it must also touch on his former master, now his neighbor and fellow-citizen. The new South is far too ample a theme for a paragraph or a chapter. But it must be said in a word that its main trait is the subst.i.tution, for a territorial and slave-owning aristocracy, of an industrial democracy. It is the coming of the new man,--laborious, enterprising, pus.h.i.+ng his way. His development began when the whole community was set to work its way up from the impoverishment left by the war. It was accelerated when new resources were found, when coal and iron mines were started, when cotton manufacturing began where the cotton is grown. New types of character and society are developing, yet blending with the remnant of the old.

Politics, in all its forms, plays a smaller part in to-day's society than in that of fifty years ago. Not only has the South never regained its old ascendency at Was.h.i.+ngton, but it has not stood, and does not stand, for any distinct set of ideas or principles in the national life.

It has clung closely together, under the influence of old sentiments and lingering apprehensions. In its fear of a recurrence of "negro domination," it has lost touch with the living questions of to-day and to-morrow. "The Solid South" has meant a secure contingent of electoral votes for the Democratic Presidential candidate,--whether he stood for a gold or a silver currency, for revenue reform or its opposite, for radicalism or conservatism,--and a solid array of members in Senate and House equally without pilotage on living issues. Until the South breaks away from its fetish of past fears and prejudices, it cannot rise to its proper opportunities of statesmans.h.i.+p.

Yet better than the old-time absorption in Federal politics and the prizes of the Capitol is the more diversified life of the South to-day.

It is being swept into the current of industrialism--with its energies, its prizes, its perils. In other directions, too, the new life of the South flows free and strong. It is creating a literature,--a branch of American literature,--incomparably beyond any product of its earlier days. After what may be called a literature of statesmans.h.i.+p,--the work of Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall,--the old South was almost wholly barren of original scholars.h.i.+p and creative genius. Now it bears a harvest so rich that one cannot here begin to cla.s.sify or to name. The war-time is bearing an aftermath, of less importance in its romances, but admirable and delightful in its biographies and reminiscences. Of these the most notable feature, full as they are of vivid human interest and striking personal characteristics,--is the freedom from rancor, the generosity toward old foes which seems even unconscious of any necessity to forgive. And in these personal sketches there are disclosed certain broad yet distinct types of manhood and womanhood, the special Southern contributions to the composite American. In general literature, too, the South is doing its full share. In its histories, the note of provincialism still lingers,--inevitably, and not blamably. The Southern essayist or historian naturally gravitates to the past of his own section,--and naturally he seeks to vindicate his comrades or his ancestors, and to interpret the past from their standpoint. But, compared with the provincialism of the South of 1860, he is a cosmopolitan.

The new South is doing perhaps its best work in education. Its leaders are both raising and widening their standards,--they are reaching out toward modern and progressive ways, while they are trying to amplify their systems so as to include the whole youthful population. Their intelligence and enthusiasm are seen alike in the ancient universities like that of Virginia, in the younger colleges such as Roanoke and Berea, and in the leaders of the public schools. Intelligence, enthusiasm, devotion,--all are needed, and all will be tasked to the utmost. For the education of the people's children, everywhere the most pressing of common concerns, and the most perplexing in the transition from old to new ideas and methods--bears with especial weight and importunity upon the South. Its thinly-spread population, its still limited resources of finance, the presence of the two races with their separate and common needs,--all set a gigantic task to the South, and one that calls for sympathy and aid from the nation at large.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

EBB AND FLOW

Thus, in broadest outline, have the two races at the South been faring on their way. And now in recent years, under their separate development and with their close intermingling, have come new complications and difficulties. The tendency has been in some ways to a wider separation.

The old relations between the household servants and their employers, often most kindly, and long continuing to link the two races at numberless points, have pa.s.sed away with the old generation. Once the inmates of mansion and cabin knew well each other's ways. Now they are almost unacquainted. The aristocracy and its dependents had their mutual relations of protection and loyalty, and gracious and helpful they often were. Now comes democracy,--vigorous, jostling, self-a.s.sertive,--its true social ideal of brotherly comrades.h.i.+p being yet far from realization. The negro is in a doubly hard position; under democratic compet.i.tion the weaker is thrust to the wall, yet he has not even the equality which democracy a.s.serts, but is held in the lower place by caste. And so there is a new or a newly apparent aggression upon the weaker race.

Its most obvious form is the legal limitation of suffrage. The irregular and indirect suppression of the negro vote which had prevailed since the close of the Reconstruction period, was not thorough and sure enough to satisfy the white politicians. And the lawless habit which it fostered, and whose effects could by no means be confined to one race, alarmed the better cla.s.ses. So from two directions there was a pressure toward some restriction of the negro vote which should be both legal and effective.

The movement became active about the year 1895, and accomplished its end in the States of Virginia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, by const.i.tutional amendments. The qualifications thus prescribed are so various and so variously combined that a full statement here is forbidden by limits of s.p.a.ce, but their general characteristics are these: The requirement (in Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana) of $300 worth of property; the payment of a poll tax (in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana); the ability to read and write (in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana); the ability, if not to read, to understand and explain any section of the Const.i.tution (in Virginia, Mississippi); regular employment in some lawful occupation, good character, and an understanding of the citizen's duties and obligations (Alabama).[2]