THE negro, long deemed
too indolent and stupid to discover and adopt any rational measure to secure
and defend his rights as a man, may now be congratulated upon the telling
contradiction which he has recently and strikingly given to this withering
disparagement and reproach. He has discovered and adopted a measure which may
assist very materially in the solution of some of the vital problems involved
in his sudden elevation from slavery to freedom. He has shown that Mississippi
can originate more than one plan, and that there is a possible plan for the
oppressed as well as for the oppressor. He has not chosen to copy the example
of his would-be enslavers. It is to his credit that he has steadily refused to
resort to those extreme measures of repression and retaliation to which the
cruel wrongs he has suffered might have tempted a less docile and forgiving
race. He has not imitated the plan of the oppressed tenant, who sneaks in
ambush and shoots his landlord, as in Ireland; nor the example of the Indian,
who meets the invader of his hunting-ground with scalping-knife and tomahawk;
he has not learned his lesson from the freed serfs of Russia, and organized
assassination against tyrant princes and nobles; nor has he copied the example
of his own race in Santa Domingo, who taught their French oppressors by fire
and sword the danger of goading too far "the energy that slumbers in the black
man's arm." On the contrary, he has adopted a simple, lawful and peaceable
measure. It is emigration--the quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and
muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable.
Innocent as this remedy is for the manifold ills which he has thus far borne
with marvelous patience, it is none the less significant and effective.
Nothing has occurred
since the abolition of slavery which has excited a deeper interest among
thoughtful men in all sections of the country than has this "exodus."
In the simple fact that a few thousand freedmen have deliberately laid down the
shovel and the hoe, quitted the sugar and cotton-fields of Mississippi and
Louisiana, and sought homes in Kansas, and that thousands more are seriously
meditating upon following their example, the sober thinking minds of the South
have discovered a new and startling peril to the welfare of that section of our
country. Already apprehension and alarm have led to noisy and frantic efforts
on the part of the South to arrest and put an end to what it considers a
depleting and ruinous evil.
It cannot be denied
that there is much reason for this apprehension and alarm. This exodus has
revealed to Southern men the humiliating fact that the prosperity and
civilization of the South are at the mercy of the despised and hated
negro--that it is for him more than for any other to say what shall be the
future of the late Confederate States; that within their ample borders he alone
can stand between the contending powers of savage and civilized life; that the
giving or withholding of his labor will bless or blast their beautiful country.
Important as manual
labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more important and absolutely indispensable
to the existence of society than in the more southern of the United States.
Machinery may continue to do--as it has done--much of the work of the North;
but the work of the South requires bone, sinew and muscle of the strongest and
most enduring kind for its performance. Labor in that section must know no
pause. Her soil is pregnant and prolific with life and energy. All the forces
of nature within her borders are wonderfully vigorous, persistent and active.
Aided by an almost perpetual Summer, abundantly supplied with heat and moisture,
her soil readily and rapidly covers itself with noxious weeds, dense forests
and impenetrable jungles. Only a few years of non-tillage would be required to
give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate
wilderness. From this condition, shocking for a Southern man to contemplate, it
is now seen that nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro can
save her. For him, as a Southern laborer, there is no competitor or substitute.
The thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human family, will
be found delusive and utterly impracticable. Neither Chinaman, German,
Norwegian nor Swede can drive him from the sugar and cotton-fields of Louisiana
and Mississippi. They would certainly perish in the black bottoms of these
States if they could be induced, which they cannot, to try the experiment.
Nature itself, in those
States, comes to the rescue of the negro, fights his battles and enables him to
exact conditions from those who would unfairly treat and oppress him. Besides
being dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor, the climate of
the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man.
He dreads it, shrinks from it, and refuses it. He shuns the burning sun of the
fields, and seeks the shade of the verandas. On the contrary, the negro walks,
labors and sleeps in the sunlight unharmed. The standing apology for slavery
was based upon a knowledge of this fact. It was said that the world must have
cotton and sugar, and that only the negro could supply this want; and that he
could be induced to do it only under the "beneficent whip" of some
bloodthirsty Legree. The last part of this argument has been happily disproved
by the large crops of these productions since Emancipation; but the first part
of it stands firm, unassailed and unassailable.
Even if climatic and
other natural causes did not protect the negro from all competition in the
labor-market of the South, inevitable social causes would probably effect the
same result. The slave system of that section has left behind it--as in the
nature of the case it must--manners, customs and conditions to which free white
laboring men will be in no haste to submit themselves and their families. They
do not emigrate from the free North, where labor is respected, to a lately
enslaved South, where labor has been whipped, chained and degraded for
centuries. Naturally enough, such emigration follows the lines of latitude in
which they who compose it were born. Not from South to North, but from East to
West, "the Star of Empire takes its way."
Hence it is seen that
the dependence of the planters, landowners and old master-class of the South
upon the negro, however galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is
nearly complete and perfect. There is only one mode of escape for them, and
that mode they will certainly not adopt. It is to take off their own coats,
cease to whittle sticks and talk politics at the cross-roads, and go themselves
to work in their broad and sunny fields of cotton and sugar. An invitation to
do this is about as harsh and distasteful to all their inclinations as would be
an invitation to step down into their graves. With the negro, all this is
different. Neither natural, artificial nor traditional causes stand in the way
of the freedman to such labor in the South. Neither the heat nor the
fever-demon which lurks in her tangled and cozy swamps affright him, and he
stands to-day the admitted author of whatever of prosperity, beauty and
civilization are now possessed by the South, and the admitted arbiter of her
destiny.
This, then, is the high
vantage-ground of the negro: he has labor, the South wants it, and must have it
or perish. Since he is free he can now give it or withhold it, use it where he
is, or take it elsewhere, as he pleases. His labor made him a slave, and his
labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable and independent. It is more
to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes or bayonets. It touches the heart of the
South through its pocket. This power served him well years ago, when in the
bitterest extremity of his destitution. But for it he would have perished when
he dropped out of slavery. It saved him then, and it will
save him again.
Emancipation came to him, surrounded by exceedingly unfriendly circumstances.
It was not the choice or consent of the people among whom he lived, but against
their will and a death-struggle on their part to prevent it. His chains were
broken in the tempest and whirlwind of civil war. Without food, without
shelter, without land, without money, and without friends, he, with his
children, his sick, his aged and helpless ones, were turned loose and naked to
the open sky. The announcement of his freedom was instantly followed by an
order from his master to quit his old quarters and to seek bread thereafter
from the hands of those who had given him his freedom. A desperate extremity
was thus forced upon him at the outset of his freedom, and the world watched,
with humane anxiety, to see what would become of him. His peril was imminent.
Starvation and death stared him in the face, and marked him for their victim.
It will not be soon
forgotten that, at the close of a five-hours' speech by the late Senator
Sumner, in which he advocated with unequaled learning and eloquence the
enfranchisement of the freedmen, the best argument with which he was met, in
the Senate, was that legislation at that point would be utterly superfluous;
that the negro was rapidly dying out, and must inevitably and speedily
disappear and become extinct.
Inhuman and shocking as
was this consignment of millions of human beings to extinction, the extremity
of the negro, at that date, did not contradict, but favored, the prophecy. The
policy of the old master class, dictated by passion, pride and revenge, was
then to make the freedom of the negro a greater calamity to him, if possible,
than had been his slavery. But, happily, both for the old master class and for
the recently emancipated, there came then, as there will come now, the sober
second thought. The old master class then found that it had made a great
mistake. It had driven away the means of its own support. It had destroyed the
hands and left the mouths. It had starved the negro, and starved itself. Not
even to gratify its own anger and resentment could it afford to allow its
fields to go uncultivated, and its tables to go unsupplied with food. Hence the
freedman, less from humanity than cupidity, less from choice than necessity,
was speedily called back to labor and life.
But now, after fourteen
years of service, and fourteen years of separation from the visible presence of
slavery, during which he has shown both disposition and ability to supply the
labor-market of the South, and that he could do so far better as a freedman
than he ever did as a slave; that more cotton and sugar can be raised by the
same hands, under the inspiration of liberty and hope, than can be raised under
the influence of bondage and the whip, he is again, alas! in the deepest
trouble--again without a home, out under the open sky, with his wife and his
little ones. He lines the sunny banks of the Mississippi, fluttering in rags
and wretchedness, mournfully imploring hard-hearted steamboat captains to take
him on board; while the friends of the emigration movement are diligently
soliciting funds all over the North to help him away from his old home to the
new Canaan of Kansas.
Several causes have
been assigned for this truly desperate and pitiable spectacle. Many of these
are, upon their faces, superficial, insufficient and ridiculous. Adepts in
political trickery and duplicity, who will never go straight to a point when
they can go crooked, explain the exodus as a cunning scheme to force a certain
nomination upon the Republican party in 1890. It does not appear how such an effect
is to follow such a cause. For if the negroes are to leave the South, as the
advocates of exodus tell us, and settle in the North, where all their rights
are protected--if this is the remedy for all the ills of the negro, the country
need not trouble itself about securing a President whose chief recommendation
is supposed to be his will and power to protect the negro in the South, and the
nomination is thus rendered unnecessary by the success of the measure which
made it necessary.
Again, we are told that
greedy speculators in Kansas have adopted this plan to sell and increase the
value of their lands. This cannot be true. Men of that class are usually
shrewd. They do not seek to sell land to those who have no money, and they are
too sharp to believe that they can increase the value of their property by
inviting to its neighborhood a class of people against whom there is an intense
and bitter popular prejudice. So far from speculating in the negro, and
attempting to increase their wealth by promoting this stampede, the negro has
been a heavy charge upon Kansas. Her benevolence and welcome to these homeless
emigrants has been large, beautiful and touching.
Malignant emissaries
from the North, it is said, have been circulating among the freedmen, talking
to them and deluding them with promises of the great things which will be done
for them if they will only go to Kansas. Plainly enough this theory fails for
the want of even the show of probable motive. The North can have no motive to
cripple industry at the South, or elsewhere in this country. If she were
malignant enough, which she is not, she is not blind enough to her own
interests to do any such thing. She sees and feels that an injury to any part
of this country is an injury to the whole of it.
Again, it is said that
this exodus is all the work of the defeated and disappointed demagogues, white
and black, who have been hurled from place and power by the men of property and
intelligence in the South. There may be some truth in this theory. Human nature
is capable of resentment. It would not be strange if people who have been
degraded and driven from place and power by brute force and by fraud, were to
resent the outrage in this and in any way open to them.
But it is still further
said that the exodus is peculiarly the work of Senator Windom. His resolution
and speech in the Senate last Winter, it is said, has set this black ball in
motion, and much wrath has been poured out upon that able and humane gentleman
for his part in the movement. It need not be denied that there is truth in this
allegation. Senator Windom's speech and resolution certainly did serve as a
powerful stimulus to this emigration. Until he spoke, there was no general
stampede from the cotton and sugar plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana.
There can be no doubt, either, that the freedmen received erroneous notions,
from some quarter, of what the Government was likely to do for them in the new
country to which they were now going. They may have been told the story of
"forty acres and a mule," and some of them may have believed and
acted upon that story. But it is manifest that the real cause of this
extraordinary exodus lies deeper down than any point touched by any of the
causes thus far alleged. Political tricksters, land speculators, defeated
office-seekers, Northern malignants, speeches and resolutions in the Senate or
elsewhere, unaided by other causes, could not have, of themselves, set such a
multitudinous exodus in motion.
The colored race is a
remarkably home-loving race. It has done little in the way of voluntary
colonization. It shrinks from the untried and unknown. It thinks its own
locality the best in the world. Of all the galling conditions to which the
negro was subjected in the days of his bondage, the one most galling to him was
the liability of separation from home and friends. His love of home and his
dread of change made him even partially content in slavery. He could endure the
smart of the lash, could work to the utmost of his power, and be content, till
the thought of being sent away from the scenes of his childhood and youth was
thrust upon his heart. This was ever too much for him.
But argument is less
needed upon this point than testimony. We have the story of the emigrants
themselves, and if any can reveal the true cause of this exodus, they can. They
have spoken, and their story is before the country. It is a sad story,
disgraceful and scandalous to our age and country. Much of their testimony has
been given under the solemnity of an oath.
They tell us, with
great unanimity, that they are very badly treated at the South. The landowners,
planters, and the old master class generally, deal unfairly with them; that
having had their labor for nothing when they were slaves, these men now
endeavor, by various devices, to get it for next to nothing; that, work as
hard, faithfully and constantly as they may, live as plainly and as sparingly
as they may, they are no better off at the end of the year than at the
beginning; that they are the dupes and victims of cunning and fraud, in signing
contracts which they cannot read and cannot fully understand; that they are
compelled to trade at stores owned in whole or in part by their employers, and
that they are paid with orders, and not with money.
They say they have to
pay double the value of nearly everything they buy; that they are compelled to
pay a rental of ten dollars a year for an acre of ground that will not bring
thirty dollars under the hammer; that land-owners are in league to prevent
land-owning by negroes; that when they work the land on shares, they barely
make a living; that outside the towns and cities no provision is made for their
education; and, ground down as they are, they cannot themselves employ teachers
to teach their children; that they are not only the victims of fraud and
cunning, but of violence and intimidation; that from their very poverty the
temples of justice are not open to them; that the jury-box is virtually closed
to them; that the murder of a black man by a white man is followed by no
conviction or punishment. That for a crime for which a white man goes free, a
black man is severely punished; that impunity and encouragement are given by
the wealthy and respectable classes to men of the "baser sort," who
delight in midnight raids upon the defenseless; that their ignorance of letters
has put them at the mercy of men bent upon making their freedom a greater evil
to them than was their slavery; that the law is the refuge of crime rather than
of innocence; that even the old slave-driver's whip has reappeared in the
South, and the inhuman and disgusting spectacle of the chain-gang is beginning
to be seen there; that the government of every Southern State is now in the
hands of the old slave oligarchy, and that both departments of the National
Government soon will be in the same hands; that they believe that when the
Government, State and National, shall be in the control of the old masters of
the South, they will find means for reducing the freedman to a condition
analagous to slavery; that they despair of any change for the better; that
everything is waxing worse for the negro in the South, and that the only means
of safety is to leave the South.
It must be admitted, if
this brief statement of complaints be only half true, that the explanation of
the exodus and the justification of the persons composing it are full and
ample. The complaints they make against Southern society are such as every man
of common honesty and humanity must wish ill-founded; unhappily, however, there
is nothing in the nature of these complaints to make them doubtful or
surprising. The unjust conduct charged against the late slaveholders is
eminently probable. It is an inheritance from the long exercise of
irresponsible power by man over man. It is not the natural inferiority of the
negro, or the color of his skin. Tyranny is the same proud and selfish thing
everywhere, and with all races and colors.
What the negro is now
suffering at the hands of his former masters, the white emancipated serfs of
Russia are now suffering from the lords and nobles by whom they were formerly
held as slaves. In form and appearance the emancipation of the latter was upon
better terms than in the case of the negro. The Empire, unlike the Republic,
gave her free serfs, or pretended to give them, three acres of land--a start in
the world. But the selection and bestowment of this land was unhappily confided
to the care of the nobles, their former lords and masters. Thus the lamb was
committed to the care of the wolf, and hence the organized assassination now
going on in that country; and it will be well for our Southern States if they
escape a like fate. The world is slow to learn that no man can wrong his
brother without doing a greater wrong to himself. Something may, however, be
learned from the lessons of alarm and consternation which are now written all
over Russia.
But in contemplating
this exodus, it should be kept in mind that the way of an oppressed people from
bondage to freedom is never smooth. There is ever in such transition much to
overcome on both sides. Neither the master nor the emancipated slave can at
once shake off the habits and manners of a long-established past condition. The
form may be abolished, but the spirit survives and lingers about the scenes of
its former life. The slave brings into the new relation much of the dependence,
improvidence and servility of slavery, and the master brings much of his pride,
selfishness and love of power. The influence of feudalism has not yet
disappeared from Europe. Norman pride is still visible even in England, though
centuries have passed since the Saxon was the slave of the Norman; and long
years must elapse before all traces of slavery shall disappear from our
country. Suffering and hardship made the Saxon strong; and suffering and hardship
will make the Anglo-African strong and ultimately successful on the soil of his
birth and in the climate to which his color and origin as well as his labor
adapt him.
Very evidently there
are to be asked and answered many important questions before the friends of
humanity can be properly called upon to give their support to this emigration
movement. A natural and primary inquiry is: What does it mean? How much ground is
it meant to cover? Is the total removal of the whole five millions of colored
people from the South contemplated? Or is it proposed to remove only a part?
And, if only a part, why a part and not the whole? Is the protection of the
rights of the many less important than the same of the few? If the few are to
be removed because of the intolerable oppression which prevails in the South,
why not the many also? If exodus is good for any, must it not be equally good
for all? Then, if the whole five millions are to leave the South, as a doomed
country--leave it as Lot left Sodom, or driven out as the Moors were driven out
of Spain--then there is a question of ways and means to be considered. Has any
definite estimate of the cost of this removal been made? How shall the one or
two hundred millions of dollars, which such removal would require, be obtained?
Shall it be appropriated by Congress, or voluntarily contributed by the public?
Manifestly, with such a debt upon the nation as the war for the Union has
created, Congress is not likely to be in a hurry to make any such
appropriation. It would much more willingly and readily enact the necessary
legislation to protect the freedmen where they are, than appropriate two
hundred millions of dollars to help them away to Kansas or elsewhere in the
North. The same amount of money and labor required to promote emigration,
would, if applied to that end, protect the negro where he is. But suppose, as
already suggested, the matter shall not be left at all to Congress, but remitted
to the voluntary contributions from the people. Then a swarm of agents must be
employed to circulate over the country, hat in hand, soliciting and collecting
these contributions, representing to the people everywhere that the cause of
the negro is lost in the South, that his only hope and deliverance from a
condition of things worse than slavery is removal to Kansas, or to some country
outside the Southern States. Then would such an arrangement, such an
apostleship of despair be beneficial, or would it be prejudicial to the cause
of the freedman? Precisely and plainly, this is a feature of the emigration
movement which is open to serious objection.
Voluntary, spontaneous,
self-sustained emigration on the part of the freedmen may or may not be
commendable. It is a matter with which they alone have to do. The public is not
called upon to say or do anything for or against it; but when the public is
called upon to take sides, to declare its views, to organize emigration
societies, appoint and send out agents to make speeches and collect money to
help the freedmen from the South, the public may very properly hesitate. it may
not wish to be responsible for the measure, or for the disheartening doctrines
by which the measure is supported.
Objection may properly
be made upon many grounds. It may well enough be said that the negro question
is not so desperate as the advocates of exodus would have the public believe;
that there is still reasonable ground of hope that the negro will ultimately
have his rights as a man, and be fully protected in the South; that in several
of the old slave States his citizenship and his right to vote are already
respected and protected; that the same, in time, will be secured for the negro
in the other States;
that the world was not
the work of a day; that even in free New England all the evils generated by
slavery did not disappear in a century after the abolition of the system, if,
indeed, they have yet entirely disappeared.
Within the last forty
years, a dark and shocking picture might be given of the persecution of the
negro and his friends, even in the now pre-eminently free State of
Massachusetts. It is not more than twenty years ago that Boston supplied a
pistol club, if not a rifle club, to break up an abolition meeting, and that
one of her most eminent citizens had to be guarded to and from his house, to
escape the hand of mobocratic assassins, armed in the interest of slavery. The
negro on the Sound between New York and Boston, though a respectable, educated
gentleman, was not allowed abaft the wheel, and must sleep, if he slept at all,
upon the naked deck, in the open air. Upon no condition, except that of a
servant or slave, could he be permitted to go into a cabin. All the handicrafts
of New England, too, were closed to him. The appearance of a black man in any
workshop or shipyard, as a mechanic, there would have scattered the whole gang
of white hands at once. The poor negro was not admitted into the factories to
work, or as an apprentice to any trade. He was barber, waiter, whitewasher and
wood-sawyer. All of what were considered respectable employments, by a power
superior to legal enactments were denied him. But none of these things have
moved the negro from New England, and it is well for him that he has remained there.
In some respects, Massachusetts was then what the South is now, good missionary
ground for anti-slavery writers and speakers. What has been accomplished there,
may be accomplished elsewhere.
Bad as is the condition
of the negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and
incomparably worse. A few years ago he had nothing--he had not even himself. He
belonged to somebody else, who could dispose of his person and his labor as he
pleased. Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the
other, as shall best suit his own happiness. He has more. He has a standing in
the supreme law of the land, in the Constitution of the United States--not to
be changed or affected by any conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in
the immediate or remote future. The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen,
and the Fifteenth makes him a voter. With power behind him, at work for him,
and which cannot be taken from him, the negro of the South may wisely bide his
time. The situation at the moment is exceptional and transient. The permanent
powers of the Government are all on his side. What though, for the moment, the
hand of violence strikes down the negro's rights in the South, those rights
will revive, survive and flourish again. They are not the only people who have
been in a moment of popular passion maltreated and driven from the polls. The
Irish and Dutch have frequently been so treated--Boston, Baltimore and New York
have been the scenes of this lawless violence; but those scenes have now
disappeared. A Hebrew may even now be rudely repulsed from the door of a hotel;
but he will not on that account get up another exodus, as he did three thousand
years ago, but will quietly "put money in his purse" and bide his time,
knowing that the rising tide of civilization will eventually float him, as it
floats all other varieties of the human family to whom floating in any
condition is possible.
Of one thing we may be
certain, and it is a thing which is destined to be made very prominent not long
hence--the negro will either be counted at the polls or not counted in the
basis of representation. The South must let the negro vote, or surrender its
power in Congress. The chosen horn of this dilemma will finally be to let the
negro vote, and vote unmolested. Let us have all the indignant and fiery
declamation which the warm hearts of our youthful orators can pour out against
Southern meanness, "White Leagues," "Bulldozers," and other
"Dark Lantern" organizations; but let us have a little calm, clear
reason as well. The latter is a safer guide than the former. On this great
question we want light rather than heat, thought rather than feeling, a
comprehensive view and appreciation of what the negro has already on his side,
as well as of the disadvantages against which he has thus far been compelled to
struggle, and still has to struggle.
Without abating one jot
of our horror and indignation at the outrages committed in some parts of the
Southern States against the negro, we cannot but regard the present agitation
of an African exodus from the South as ill-timed, and, in some respects,
hurtful. We stand to-day at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction.
There is a growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American
people to guard, protect and defend the personal and political rights of all
the people of all the States; to uphold the principles upon which rebellion was
suppressed, slavery abolished, and the country saved from dismemberment and
ruin.
We see and feel to-day,
as we have not seen and felt before, that the time for conciliation and
trusting to the honor of the late rebels and slave-holders has passed. The
President of the United States himself, while still liberal, just and generous
toward the South, has yet sounded a halt in that direction, and has bravely,
firmly and ably asserted the constitutional authority to maintain the public
peace in every State in the Union, and upon every day in the year, and has
maintained this ground against all the powers of House and Senate.
We stand at the gateway
of a marked and decided change in the statesmanship of our rulers. Every day
brings fresh and increasing evidence that we are, and of right ought to be, a
Nation; that Confederate notions of the nature and powers of our Government
ought to have perished in the rebellion which they supported; that they are
anachronisms and superstitions, and no longer fit to be above ground.
National ideas are
springing up all around us--the oppressor of the negro is seen to be the enemy
of the peace, prosperity and honor of the country.
The attempt to nullify
the national Election Laws, to starve the officers where they could not destroy
the offices, to attack the national credit when they could not prevent
successful resumption, to paralyze the Constitution where they could neither
pervert nor set it aside, has all worked against the old slave-holding element,
and in the interest of the negro. They have made it evident that the sceptre of
political power must soon pass from the party of reaction, revolution,
rebellion and slavery to the party of Constitution, liberty and progress. At a
time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of
despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South; unfortunate
that men are going over the country begging in the name of the poor colored men
of the South, and telling the people that the Government has no power to
enforce the Constitution and laws in that section, and that there is no hope
for the poor negro, but to plant him in the new soil of Kansas and Nebraska.
These men do the
colored people of the South a real damage. They give their enemies an advantage
in the argument for their manhood and freedom. They assume the inability of the
colored people of the South to take care of themselves--the country will be
told of the hundreds who go to Kansas, but not of the thousands who stay in
Mississippi and Louisiana.
They will be told of
the destitute who require material aid, but not of the multitude who are
bravely sustaining themselves where they are.
In Georgia the negroes
are paying taxes upon six millions of dollars; in Louisiana upon forty or fifty
millions; and upon unascertained sums elsewhere in the Southern States.
Why should a people who
have made such progress in the course of a few years, now be humiliated and
scandalized by exodus agents, begging money to remove them from their homes?
especially at a time when every indication favors the position that the wrongs
and hardships which they suffer are soon to be redressed.
Besides the objection
thus stated, it is manifest that the public and noisy advocacy of a general
stampede of the colored people from the South to the North is necessarily an
abandonment of the great and paramount principle of protection to person and
property in every State of the Union. It is an evasion of a solemn obligation
and duty. The business of this nation is to protect its citizens where they
are, not to transport them where they will not need protection. The best that
can be said of this exodus in this respect is, that it is an attempt to climb
up some other than the right way; it is an expedient, a half-way measure, and
tends to weaken in the public mind a sense of the absolute right, power and
duty of the Government, inasmuch as it concedes, by implication at least, that
on the soil of the South the law of the land cannot command obedience, the
ballot-box cannot be kept pure, peaceable elections cannot be held, the
Constitution cannot be enforced, and the lives and liberties of loyal and
peaceable citizens cannot be protected. It is a surrender, a premature,
disheartening surrender, since it would secure freedom and free institutions by
migration rather than by protection; by flight, rather than by right; by going
into a strange land, rather than by staying in one's own. It leaves the whole
question of equal rights on the soil of the South open, and still to be
settled, with the moral influence of exodus against us, since it is a
confession of the utter impracticability of equal rights and equal protection
in any State where those rights may be struck down by violence.
It does not appear that
the friends of freedom should spend either time or talent in furtherance of
this exodus, as a desirable measure, either for the North or the South, for the
blacks of the South or the whites of the North. If the people of this country
cannot be protected in every State of this Union, the Government of the United
States is shorn of its rightful dignity and power, the late rebellion has
triumphed, the sovereignty of the nation is an empty name, and the power and
authority in individual States is greater than the power and authority of the
United States.
Necessity often compels
men to migrate, to leave their old homes and seek new ones, to sever old ties
and create new ones; but to do this the necessity should be obvious and
imperative. It should be a last resort, and only adopted after carefully
considering what is against the measure, as well as what is in favor of it.
There are prodigal sons everywhere, who are ready to demand the portion of
goods that would fall to them, and betake themselves to a strange country.
Something is ever lost in the process of migration, and much is sacrificed at
home for what is gained abroad. A world of wisdom is in the saying of Mr.
Emerson, that "those who made Rome worth going to see, stayed there."
Five moves from house to house are said to be worse than a fire. That a rolling
stone gathers no moss, has passed into the world's wisdom.
The colored people of
the South, just beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the
foundation of family, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to
the banks of the Mississippi. The habit of roaming from place to place in
pursuit of better conditions of existence is by no means a good one. A man
should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to
make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes. The time and energy
expended in wandering about from place to place, if employed in making him a
comfortable home where he is, will in nine cases out of ten, prove the best
investment. No people ever did much for themselves or for the world without the
sense and inspiration of native land, of a fixed home, of familiar neighborhood
and common associations. The fact of being to the manor born has an elevating
power upon the mind and heart of a man. It is a more cheerful thing to be able
to say: I was born here, and know all the people, than to say: I am a stranger
here, and know none of the people.
It cannot be doubted
that in so far as this exodus tends to promote restlessness in the colored
people of the South, to unsettle their feeling of home and to sacrifice
positive advantages where they are for fancied ones in Kansas or elsewhere, it
is an evil. Some have sold their little homes, their chickens, mules and pigs,
at a sacrifice, to follow the exodus. Let it be understood that you are going,
and you advertise the fact that your mule has lost half his value--for your staying
with him makes half his value. Let the colored people of Georgia offer their
six millions' worth of property for sale, with the purpose to leave Georgia,
and they will not realize half its value. Land is not worth much where there
are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one
to drive him.
It may safely be
asserted that, whether advocated and commended to favor on the ground that it
will increase the political power of the Republican party, and thus help to
make a solid North against a solid South; or upon the ground that it will
increase the power and influence of the colored people as a political element,
and enable them the better to protect their rights, and insure their moral and
social elevation, the exodus will prove a disappointment, a mistake and a
failure; because, as to strengthening the Republican party, the emigrants will
go only to those States where the Republican party is strong and solid enough
already without their votes; and in respect to the other part of the argument,
it will fail because it takes colored voters from a section of the country
where they are sufficiently numerous to elect some of their number to places of
honor and profit, and places them in a country where their proportion to other classes
will be so small as not to be recognized as a political element, or entitled to
be represented by one of themselves. And, further, because, go where they will,
they must for a time inevitably carry with them poverty, ignorance and other
repulsive incidents, inherited from their former condition as slaves--a
circumstance which is about as likely to make votes for Democrats as for
Republicans, and to raise up bitter prejudices against them as to raise up
friends for them.
No people can be much
respected in this country, where all are eligible to office, that cannot point
to any one of their class in an honorable, responsible position. In sending a
few men to Congress, the negroes of the South have done much to dispel
prejudice and raise themselves in the estimation of the country and the world.
By staying where they are, they may be able to send abler, better and more
effective representatives of their race to Congress than it was possible for
them to send at first, because of their want of education and their recent
liberation from bondage. In the South the negro has at least the possibility of
power, in the North he has no such possibility; and it is for him to say how
well he can afford to part with this possible power.
But another argument in
favor of this emigration is, that having a numerical superiority in
Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, and thereby possessing the ability
to choose some of their own number to represent them in the State and Nation,
they are necessarily brought into antagonism with the white race, and invite
the very political persecution of which they complain. So they are told that
the best remedy for this persecution is to surrender the right and advantage
given them by the Constitution and the Government of electing men of color to
office. They are not to overcome prejudice and persecution where it is, but to
go where it is not; not to stand where they are, and demand the full
Constitutional protection which the Government is solemnly bound to give, but
to go where the protection of the Government is not needed. Plainly enough,
this is an evasion of a solemn obligation and duty; an attempt to climb up some
other way, a half-way measure, a makeshift, a miserable substitution of
expediency for right. For an egg, it gives the negro a stone.
The dissemination of
this doctrine by the agents of emigration cannot but do the cause of equal
rights much harm. It lets the public mind down from the high ground of a great
national duty to a miserable compromise, in which wrong surrenders nothing, and
right everything. The South is not to repent its crimes and submit to the
Constitution, in common with all other parts of the country, but such
repentance and submission is to be conveniently made unnecessary by removing
the temptation to commit violations of the law and the Constitution. Men may be
pardoned for refusing their assent to a measure supported upon a principle so
unsound, subversive and pernicious. The Nation should be held steadily to the
high and paramount principle that allegiance and protection are inseparable,
that this Government is solemnly bound to protect and defend the lives and
liberties of all its citizens, of whatever race or color, or of whatever
political or religious opinion, and to do this in every State and Territory
within the American Union.
Then, again, is there
to be no stopping-place for the negro? Suppose that, by-and-by, some
"Sand-lot orator" shall arise in Kansas, as in California, and take
it into his head to stir up the mob against the negro, as he stirred up the mob
against the Chinese? What then? Must the negro have another exodus? Does not
one exodus invite another? and in advocating one, do we not sustain the demand
for another?
Plainly enough, the
exodus is less harmful as a measure, than are the arguments by which it is
supported. The one is the result of a feeling of outrage and despair; but the
other comes of cool, selfish calculation. One is the result of honest despair,
and appeals powerfully to the sympathies of men; the other is an appeal to our
selfishness, which shrinks from doing right because the way is difficult.
Not only is the South
the best locality for the negro, on the ground of his political powers and
possibilities, but it is best for him as a field of labor. He is there, as he
is nowhere else, an absolute necessity. He has a monopoly of the labor market. His
labor is the only labor which can successfully offer itself for sale in that
market. This fact, with a little wisdom and firmness, will enable him to sell
his labor there, on terms more favorable to himself than he can elsewhere. As
there are no competitors or substitutes, he can demand living prices with the
certainty that the demand will be complied with. Exodus would deprive him of
this advantage. It would take him from a country where the landowners and
planters must have his labor, or allow their fields to go untilled and their
purses unsupplied with cash, to a country where the landowners are able and
proud to do their own work, and do not need to hire hands, except for limited
periods, at certain seasons of the year. The effect of this will be to send the
negro to the towns and cities to compete with white labor. With what result,
let the past tell. They will be crowded into lanes and alleys, cellars and
garrets, poorly provided with the necessaries of life, and will gradually die
out.
The negro, as already
intimated, is pre-eminently a Southern man. He is so both in constitution and
habits, in body as well as mind. He will not only take with him to the North
Southern modes of labor, but Southern modes of life. The careless and
improvident habits of the South cannot be set aside in a generation. If they
are adhered to in the North, in the fierce winds and snows of Kansas and
Nebraska, the emigration must be large to keep up their numbers.
It would appear,
therefore, that neither the laws of politics, labor nor climate favor this
exodus. It does not conform to the laws of healthy emigration, which proceeds
not from south to north, not from heat to cold, but from east to west, and in
climates to which the emigrants are more or less adapted and accustomed.
As an assertion of
power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt; as an emphatic and stinging
protest against highhanded, greedy and shameless injustice to the weak and
defenseless; as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors to their folly
and peril, the exodus has done valuable service. Whether it has accomplished
all of which it is capable in this particular direction, for the present, is a
question which may well be considered. With a moderate degree of intelligent
leadership among the laboring class at the South, properly handling the justice
of their cause, and wisely using the exodus example, they can easily exact
better terms for their labor than ever before. Exodus is medicine, not food; it
is for disease, not health--it is not to be taken from choice, but necessity.
In anything like a normal condition of things, the South is the best place for
the negro. Nowhere else is there for him a promise of a happier future. Let him
stay there if he can, and save both the South and himself to civilization.
While, however, it may be the highest wisdom in the circumstances for the
freedmen to stay where they are, no encouragement should be given to any
measures of coercion to keep them there. The American people are bound, if they
are or can be bound to anything, to keep the North gate of the South open to
black and white, and to all the people. The time to assert a right, Webster
says, is, when it is called in question. If it is attempted by force or fraud
to compel the colored people to stay there, they should by all means go--go
quickly, and die, if need be, in the attempt.
Thus far, and to this
extent, any man may be an emigrationist; and thus far, and to this extent, I
certainly am an emigrationist. In no case must the negro be "bottled up"
or "caged up." He must be left free, like every other American
citizen, to choose his own local habitation,
and to go where he
shall like. Though it may not be for his interest to leave the South, his right
and power to leave it may be the best means of making it possible for him to
stay there in peace.
Woe to the oppressed
and destitute of all countries and races, if the rich and powerful are to
decide when and where they shall go or stay! The deserving hired man gets his
wages increased when he can tell his employer that he can get better wages
elsewhere. And when all hope is gone from the hearts of the laboring classes of
the Old World, they can come across the sea to the New. If they could not do
that, their crushed hearts would break under increasing burdens. The right to
emigrate is one of the most useful and precious of all rights.
But not only to the
oppressed, but to the oppressor, is the free use of this right necessary. To
attempt to keep the freedmen in the South--those who are spirited enough to
undertake the risks and hardships of emigration--would involve great possible
danger to all concerned. Ignorant and cowardly as the negro may be, he has been
known to fight bravely for his liberty. He went down to Harper's Ferry with
John Brown, and fought as bravely and died as nobly as any. There have been
Nathaniel Turners and Denmark Veseys among them in the United States; Joseph
Cinquees, Madison Washingtons and Tillmons on the sea, and Toussaint
l'Ouvertures on land. Even his enemies, during the late war, had to confess
that the negro is a good fighter, when once in a fight. If he runs, it is only
as all men will run when they are whipped. This is no time to trifle with the
rights of men. All Europe to-day is studded with the material for a wild
conflagration. Every day brings us news of plots and conspiracies against
oppressive power.
An able writer in the
North American Review for July, himself a Nihilist, in a powerful article
defends the extremest measures of his party, and shows that the treatment of
the emancipated peasants by the Government and landed aristocracy of Russia is
very similar to that now practiced toward the freedmen by the landed
aristocracy of the South. Like causes will produce like effects the world over.
It will not be wise for the Southern slave-holders and their successors to
shape their policy upon the presumption that the negro's cowardice or
forbearance has no limit. The fever of freedom is already in the negro's blood.
He is not just what he was fourteen years ago. To forcibly dam up the stream of
emigration would be a measure of extreme madness, as well as oppression. It
would be exposing the heart of the oppressor to the pistol and dagger, and his
home to fire and pillage. The cry of "Land and Liberty," the watchword
of the Nihilistic party in Russia, has a music in it sweet to the ear of all
oppressed peoples; and well shall it be for the land-holders of the South if
they shall learn wisdom in time, and adopt such a course of just treatment
toward the landless laborers of the South in the future as shall make this
popular watchword uncontagious and unknown among them, and further stampedes to
the North wholly unknown, undesirable and impossible.