Part 2 (1/2)
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.