PREFACE
I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody brothers’ war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn:
1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose being to destroy slavery because it was the sine qua non of southern nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal constitution was adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution, and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these mighty powers.
2. The cruel cotton tax; the constitution amended to prevent repentance of uncompensated emancipation, which is the greatest confiscation on record; the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the negroes; and other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north?
3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in Calhoun’s speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after the brothers’ war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the other day was Dixon’s masterly effort to prove that the real, even if unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” as he says, “for the first time we see the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in which Aryan society has caged him.”
These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell’s strong paper opposing negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in Collier’s, and which last month obtained for Dixon’s article just mentioned the first pages of the Saturday Evening Post. When we get full audience, other such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great advantage of the whole country.
The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting against his entertainment of Booker Washington, “Have I done worse than you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?” Suppose, as is true, that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr. Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the president and Mr. Wanamaker for their conduct towards Booker Washington seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice of the best and wisest southerners.
Amid all her gettings let the south get complete calmness upon everything connected with the race question—complete deliverance from morbid sensitiveness and intemperate speech in its discussion.
Now here is what the north should learn:
1. Slavery in America was the greatest benefit that any large part of the negro race ever received; and sudden and unqualified emancipation was woe inexpressible to nearly all the freedmen. The counter doctrine of the abolitionists who taught that the negro is equal to the Caucasian worked beneficently to save the union, but it ought now to be rejected by all who would understand him well enough to give him the best possible development. The fifteenth amendment was a stupendous blunder. It took for granted that the southern negroes were as ready for the ballot as the whites. The fact is that they were as a race in a far lower stage of evolution. Consider the collective achievement of this race, not in savage West Africa, but where it has been long in contact with civilization, in Hayti, and the south. Hayti has been independent for more than a hundred years. “Sir Spencer St. John ... formerly British Minister Resident in Hayti, after personally knowing the country for over twenty years, claims that it is ... in rapid decadence, and regards the political future of the Haytians as utterly hopeless. At the termination of his service on the island, he said: ‘I now quite agree with those who deny that the negro can ever originate a civilization, and who assert that with the best of educations he remains an inferior type of man.’
“According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed, cannibalism, and superstition of the most sensual and degrading character. Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly rapid.”[1]
In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from the fields to excursion trains and “protracted meetings.” Perhaps their most noticeable institutions are “societies,” some prohibiting hiring as domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen’s refusal to split rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.
Institutions—what I have just called the collective achievement of a race—mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions, is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution, and is now about to crown its grand work with direct legislation, it is like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator’s return of 1864 count as a gold one.
And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this—he would have it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding progress.
Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair samples of the average negro of the south. Dr. Washington and Professor DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington’s blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to “break into” white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon snub to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, “See how this coal-black and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!” This man, almost white, is to them a coal-black, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas, Douglass, and Booker Washington—to their negro blood or to their white blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood does not do far better?
I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His head has the shape of a white man’s. The greyhound crossed once with the bull-dog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bull-dog was visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the desired trait of the bull-dog. Who can say that there is not among the professor’s American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a lusus naturae.
The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is hardly involved in the race question.
The negroes in the south outside of the upper class—the latter not amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population—are slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently assume that our weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while. The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same powers are now in both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks, of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable in marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana. These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to speak more plainly every day the fiat, “If Black and White are not separated, Black shall perish utterly.” I am convinced that at the close of the century, if this separation has not been made long before, Professor Willcox’s apparently conservative estimate of what will then be their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.
Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the south do him justice and loving kindness, by transplanting him into favorable environment.
2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It mustered, not assassins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged, but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, disbanded two or three months later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men—bogus Ku Klux, as we, the genuine, called them—did afterwards. The exalted glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan’s desert. It becomes dearer in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the bloody pine thicket at First Manassas, where it outfought four times its own number; at Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson’s brigade, coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing back Mahone, and won the field. But I am prouder of my career in the Ku Klux Klan. The part of it under my command rescued Oglethorpe county, in which the negroes had some thousand majority, at the presidential election of 1868,—the very first opportunity,—and held what had been the home of William H. Crawford, George R. Gilmer, and Joseph H. Lumpkin, until permanent victory perched upon the banners of the white race in Georgia.
3. I observe that the north begins in some sort the learning of the two lessons above mentioned. But now comes one which seems hard indeed. Calhoun, Toombs, Davis, and the other pro-slavery leaders, ought to be thoroughly studied and impartially estimated. They were not agitators, nor factionists, nor conspirators. They were the extreme of conservatism. Their conscientious faithfulness to country has never been surpassed. Their country was the south, whose meat and bread depended upon slavery. The man whose sight can pierce the heavy mists of the slavery struggle still so dense cannot find in the world record of glorious stands for countries doomed by fate superiors in moral worth and great exploit. In their careers are all the comfort, dignity, and beauty of life, supreme virtue, and happiness of that old south, inexpressibly fair, sweet and dear to us who lived in it; and in these careers are also all the varied details of its inexpressibly pathetic ruin. What is higher humanity than to grieve with those who grieve? Brothers and sisters of the north, you will never find your higher selves until you fitly admire the titanic fight which these champions made for their sacred cause, and drop genuine tears over their heart-breaking failure.
The foregoing summarizes the larger obstacles which bar true sight of the south and the north. The devastation attending Sherman’s march beyond Atlanta, the alleged inhumanity at Andersonville, and many other things that were bitterly complained of during the brothers’ war, and afterwards, by one side or the other, seem to me almost forgotten and forgiven. Brothers who wore the gray with me, brothers who wore the blue against me, I would have all of you freed from the delusions which still keep you from that perfect love which Webster, Lincoln, and Stephens gave south and north alike. I am sure that you must make the corrections indicated above before you can rightly begin the all-important subject of this book. With this admonition I commit you to the opening chapter, which I hope you will find to be a fit introduction.
JOHN C. REED.
Atlanta, Ga.,
September, 1905.