The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

CHAPTER IX

From a consideration of the wisdom, propriety and morality of importing African slaves as an article of commerce in 1787, the Negro Question in the United States had progressed to the wisdom and propriety of preventing any extension of the institution of slavery beyond those limits in which it existed in 1820, and from this, with repeated agitations, fairly shaking the Union to its foundation, followed by compromises satisfactory to none, there had flared up a consideration of the re-opening of the Slave Trade in 1856, swiftly followed by Secession and war in 1860, and Emancipation, as a war measure, in 1863, directed against the eleven Confederate States.

Throughout the four years of desperate struggle between the seceding States and the consolidated Northern and Western States, the slaves, by their behavior, illustrated moral character greatly to their credit, and indisputably indicative of the civilizing influences of the institution, in which they had been trained. But peace in 1865 at once precipitated the question of the status of the freedman. In the Northern States it was an important question. In the Southern States it beggared all other questions.

With a property loss running up into the billions and a loss in virile manhood almost incalculable and an indescribable uprooting and overturning of industrial conditions, the failure of Secession left the eleven States, which had constituted the Southern Confederacy, with a white population of about 5,000,000, and a colored population of about 4,000,000; but in three of them, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana the colored population exceeded the white.

Was the forecast of Calhoun and de Tocqueville to be verified?

In no States was the outlook as dark as in South Carolina, where there could hardly have been more than 250,000 whites to 400,000 Negroes, and in Mississippi, where the colored majority was not quite so large, the proportions there being 350,000 white to some 430,000 Negroes. Yet of the colored population in South Carolina, judging from the number of free persons of color, in 1860, some 9,914,[178] and the number of house slaves and mechanics in Charleston returned for taxation in 1859,[179] in the great mass, there were those of the Negroes, who, on account of training, education and environment, together with inherited tradition, if they had only been left unplayed upon by those who knew them not, might have been relied upon in any great emergency. These, at an estimate, might have amounted to 30,000 in South Carolina; in Mississippi, less.

In both of these States, therefore, an earnest, thoughtful attempt was designed by the former ruling class of whites, to rebuild the political structure, at the same time readjusting the Negroes to the changed condition brought about by emancipation. But, before considering this much berated effort of the vanquished, a short sketch of conditions in South Carolina in the spring and summer of 1865 will show to some extent the increasing complexities and difficulties of the problem, which Lincoln’s death saved him from, and which Andrew Johnson had to face.

Even before Lincoln’s assassination there was evidence of a strong disposition, upon the part of the pronounced abolitionists, to humiliate the overthrown, and, in particular, that State and city which for three decades had led the fight for “Slavery as we know it in the Southern States.”

On April 6, 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, United States Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, Judge Kelly of Pennsylvania, Theodore Tilton and his intimate friend Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of New York, with George Thompson of England, visited Charleston.

By General Saxton of Massachusetts, they were personally conducted to the Citadel Green on Calhoun Street, a circumstance calling for some facetious remarks by Major Delany, a very remarkable colored member of the General’s Staff, and there the general presented the great abolitionist to the immense throng that had gathered to hear him. But, as thoroughly as the general and his distinguished guests considered that they understood conditions, it is possible, they were slightly surprised by the aplomb with which Samuel J. Dickerson (as a slave a bricklayer, but as a local freedman, dropping his tools for a higher pursuit and destined to become the mountebank of the bar) thrust himself and his two daughters into the very centre of the picture. In a fluent speech, Dickerson presented Garrison with a wreath. The great man complimented him in his reply, exalted the State of Massachusetts and himself introduced Senator Wilson, as one of the “mudsills” of Massachusetts, who had from such condition risen to the eminence he had attained. Then the great abolitionist gave way to the Senator, who proclaimed the occasion “the proudest day of his life.”

Shouting to the excitable throng before him that he felt “the slave power under his heel” he bellowed out his sentiments as follows:

“I want the proud and haughty chivalry of South Carolina to know ... that the black men and black women of South Carolina are as free as they are.... And further that they are loyal to the flag of the country, while they are false and traitorous.... We have beaten; we have whipped them; their power is broken and they are lost forever.”[180]

He was followed by Judge Kelly, who denounced ex-President Buchanan and eulogized Sam Dickerson. Other speeches followed in a similar vein and to such an extent did the orgy of oratory extend that the apparently one sane member of the band felt himself impelled upon the occasion of a later address delivered at Zion Church to warn the Negroes against—

“their remaining enemies, pride, indolence, impertinence; they are the serpents which will tempt the people.”[181]

The war was not as yet absolutely over and this speech of Senator Wilson’s widely advertised must have rendered many Confederate officers desperate. Don C. Seitz in his very valuable volume, “Braxton Bragg, General of the Confederacy” gives a most interesting letter from Wade Hampton, not a fortnight later, to Jefferson Davis, arguing against acceptance of the terms of General Sherman to General Johnston, in which he pictures most effectively the conditions worse than war, which were foreshadowed by surrender. But fierce as was the blaze that Wilson and his like were fanning, it became a devouring flame with the assassination of Lincoln. This President Johnson, with the aid of Seward, strove earnestly to quench.

Born in North Carolina, the most democratic State of the old South, Andrew Johnson had raised himself from the humblest of origins to a position of distinct prominence in that western Southern State Tennessee, mainly peopled from North Carolina. Having been governor of and senator from Tennessee, he had been placed in the dangerous office of war governor in that State at a time, when through it echoed and reëchoed the continual tramp of opposing armies, as they reeled back and forward in contests rivalling those which soaked the soil of Virginia with blood.

With nothing of the personal magnetism or the attractive traits of his predecessor, the great rail splitter and wrestler of the West; immovable to every suggestion that he should purchase support with prostitution of the appointing power, even for a good end; giving out his sentiments with an aggressive honesty, which must have shocked the careless average; nothing could have more clearly marked the gulf between him and the sentimentality of the abolitionists, Garrison, Davis, Kelly and others, than his reception in the very first days of his presidency of the delegation of colored men who called upon him chiefly to indulge in that, to them the dearest right of freedom, free speech. To these and to the general public of the North, his reply must have been offensive, whatever truth it may have contained. He said in part:

“It is easy in Congress and from the pulpit, North and South to talk about polygamy and Brigham Young and debauchery of various kinds; but there is also one great fact that four millions of people lived in open and notorious concubinage. The time has come when you must correct this thing. You know what I say is true and you must do something to correct it by example as well as words and professions.... I trust in God the time may come when you shall be gathered together in a clime and country suited to you, should it be found that the two races cannot get along together.”[182]

It is almost idle, after the above, to state that Johnson was absolutely devoid of the kindly tact and vulgar humor, which had so endeared Lincoln, the supplest politician of his time, to the coarse mass of the electorate, as he had voiced for it, its thoughts in a tongue it could understand and appreciate.

When we reflect, that Johnson, a Southern man, the Vice President coming from the conquered South, was handed the reins at the moment when the victorious North, flushed with conquest, saw its great leader, identified with the West, hurled from his high position to bloody death, at the hands of a murderer, who proclaimed his sympathy with the vanquished South, the immensity of the difficulties about to confront him begins to appear. In addition, he, himself, before being steadied by the responsibilities of the office, had “breathed threatenings and slaughter.”

In a proclamation, claiming that Jefferson Davis and others had incited, concocted and procured the atrocious murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, ex-President Jefferson Davis had been held up to obloquy and, upon his capture, imprisoned and chained; but what was infinitely more horrible, Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville, was made a human sacrifice, under circumstances which have left an ineffaceable blot upon all in any way responsible for making him the scapegoat for the very effective military policy which refused the Confederate offer to exchange prisoners. If it took the magnanimity and fortitude of Seward to point out the method by which the Union might be saved from the fate in which the Congressional conspirators meant to involve it, for their own immediate ends, and if, in this hacked victim of the assassins, Johnson found the anchor by which he rode out the storm which burst upon him; yet it should be remembered that nothing but the sturdiest integrity and most indomitable courage could have nerved Johnson to even attempt the struggle, he fought out to the end. Conditions in the South were appalling. Bled to a whiteness, which not even France experienced in the Great War; with her labor system hopelessly disorganized by the Freedman’s Bureau; not only by its methods but by the openly announced suggestions of its head, General Howard, that the landholders should be compelled by the Federal Government to furnish their former slaves with land,[183] industry stood still. With Negro troops quartered in every direction under “the deliberate purpose to emphasize the completeness of the catastrophe which the war had brought upon the South,”[184] collisions between them and the whites were of almost daily occurrence. But these could not, in the bulk of cases, be attributed to the truculence of Southern slave holders from the fact that instances were not few, in which Northern troops, acting in the line of duty, were assailed by colored men. A Federal soldier, acting as guard and on his post at a house in Abbeville, was shot by colored soldiers,[185] incensed against the inmates. Sergeant Terry and four members of the 127th New York Volunteers, acting as a guard on the Battery at Charleston, were set upon by Negroes abetted by members of the 35th United States Colored Troops and two of the guard wounded, before the arrival of additional white troops scattered the assailants with five casualties and some arrests.[186] Later, Lieutenant A. S. Bodine, of the same regiment, for clearing a meeting of whites of uninvited Negroes, among whom appeared Negro soldiers with sidearms, was courtmartialed by order of General Hatch in command at Charleston, the court finding him guilty, on the flimsiest evidence, of “unwarrantable exercise of arbitrary power” and sentencing him to reprimand by his superior officer, which reprimand was immediately ordered to be withdrawn by the general in command of the department.[187]

With such conditions in towns and cities it is scarcely surprising to read the account of the execution a little later of James Grippen and Ben Redding of Co. F, 104th United States Colored Troops, on charges of rape, arson and burglary, they with others, not apprehended, having broken into a house near McPhersonville, South Carolina, and there ravished four white women, named.[188] With such facts leaking out from time to time, in spite of the pressure from outside of his cabinet to induce him to leave South Carolina for a couple of years under military rule, President Johnson determined to appoint a provisional governor and, for this purpose, issued a proclamation which was in part as follows:

“Whereas the 4th section of the 4th article of the Constitution of the United States declares that the United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion and domestic violence; and whereas the President of the United States is by the Constitution made Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy as well as chief civil executive officer of the United States, and is bound by solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed; and whereas the rebellion which has been waged by a portion of the people of the United States against the properly constituted authorities of the Government thereof in the most violent and revolting form, but whose organized and armed forces have been almost entirely overcome, has in its revolutionary progress, deprived the people of the State of South Carolina of all civil government; and whereas it becomes necessary and proper to carry out and enforce the obligations of the United States to the people of South Carolina in securing them in the enjoyment of a republican form of government. Now therefore, in obedience to the high and solemn duties imposed upon me by the Constitution of the United States, and for the purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a State Government, whereby justice may be established, domestic tranquillity insured and loyal citizens protected in all their rights of life, liberty and property, I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy of the United States do hereby appoint Benjamin F. Perry of South Carolina, Provisional Governor of the State of South Carolina, whose duty it shall be at the earliest practicable time to prescribe such regulations as may be necessary and proper for convening a Convention composed of delegates to be chosen by that portion of the people of said State who are loyal to the United States and no others, for the purpose of altering or amending the Constitution thereof and with authority to exercise within the limits of said State all the powers necessary and proper to enable such loyal people of the State of South Carolina to restore said State to its constitutional relation to the Federal Government and to present such a republican form of State Government as will entitle the State to the guarantee therefor and its people to the protection of the United States against invasion, insurrection and domestic violence; provided that in any election that may hereafter be held for choosing delegates to any State Convention as aforesaid, no person shall be qualified as an elector or shall be eligible as a member of such convention unless he shall have previously taken and subscribed the oath of amnesty as set forth in the President’s proclamation, May 29th, 1865 and is a voter as prescribed by the Constitution or laws of the State of South Carolina in force immediately before the date of the so called Ordinance of Secession. And the said convention which convenes, or the Legislature that may thereafter be assembled will prescribe the qualifications of electors and the eligibility of persons to hold office under the Constitution and laws of the State, as or may the people of the several States composing the Federal Union have rightfully exercised from the origin of the Government to the present time. And I do hereby direct, etc.”

In the proclamation appeared the command that the military authorities should in no way obstruct, hinder or interfere with the above.[189] Just previously to Governor Perry’s proclamation calling such convention, a letter appeared contributing greatly to the success of the President’s plan in South Carolina. The writer of the letter was Wade Hampton, late Lieutenant General, C.S.A. The letter reveals the despairing condition of many, in its attempt to assuage such. It was widely reproduced and ran thus:

“To the editor of the Columbia Phoenix, Sir:

Numerous communications having been addressed to me, proposing to form a colony to emigrate, I take this method of answering them, not only on account of their number but because of the want of all mail facilities. The desire to leave a country which has been reduced to such a deplorable condition as ours and whose future has so little of hope is doubtless as widespread as it is natural. But I doubt the propriety of this expatriation of so many of our best men. The very fact that our State is passing through so terrible an ordeal as the present should cause her sons to cling the more closely to her. My advice to all of my fellow citizens is that they should devote their whole energies to the restoration of law and order, the reestablishment of agriculture and commerce, the promotion of education and the rebuilding of our cities and dwellings which have been laid in ashes. To accomplish these objects, the highest that patriotism can conceive, I recommend that all, who can do so should take the oath of allegiance to the United States Government, so that they may participate in the restoration of Civil Government to our State. War, after four years of heroic but unsuccessful struggle has failed to secure to us the rights for which we engaged in it. To save any of our rights—to rescue anything more from the general ruin—will require all the statesmanship and all the patriotism of our citizens. If the best men of our country—those who for years past have risked their lives in her defence—refuse to take the oath, they will be excluded from the councils of the State, and its destiny will be committed of necessity to those who forsook her in her hour of need or to those who would gladly pull her down to irretrievable ruin. To guard against such a calamity, let all true patriots devote themselves with zeal and honesty of purpose to the restoration of law, the blessings of peace and the rescue of whatever liberty may be saved from the general wreck. If, after an honest effort to effect that object, we fail we can then seek a home in another country. A distinguished citizen of our State—an honest man and true patriot—has been appointed Governor. He will soon call a Convention of the people which will be charged with the most vital interests of our State. Choose for this Convention your best and truest men; not those who have skulked in the hour of danger—nor those who have worshipped Mammon, while their country was bleeding at every pore—nor the politicians, who after urging war dared not encounter its hardships, but those who laid their all upon the altar of their country. Select such men and make them serve as your representatives. You will then be sure that your rights will not be wantonly sacrificed, nor your liberty bartered for a mess of pottage. My intention is to pursue this course. I recommend it to others. Besides the obligations I owe to my State, there are others of a personal character, which will not permit me to leave the country at present. I shall devote myself earnestly, if allowed to do so, to the discharge of these obligations, public and private. In the meantime I shall obtain all information which would be desirable in the establishment of a colony, in case we should be ultimately forced to leave the country. I invoke my fellow citizens, especially those who have shared with me the perils and the glories of the last four years, to stand by our State manfully and truly. The Roman Senate voted thanks to one of their generals, because in the darkest hour of the Republic, he did not despair. Let us emulate the example of the Romans and thus entitle ourselves to the gratitude of our country.

Respectfully,
Wade Hampton.[190]

July 27, 1865.

The convention was held and following it an election for governor and members of the General Assembly under the new Constitution and the most distinguished members of the convention, without regard to differences of opinion as to policies, united in recommending as candidate for governor Hon. James L. Orr, who prior to the war had been Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and with the organization of the Confederate States, a Senator from South Carolina and who had organized a command and seen service in the War between the States.

Despite these facts and in the teeth of his published declination of a nomination, in his absence, General Hampton was nominated for governor by the mechanics of Charleston and only defeated by 733 votes in a total of 19,113 cast, a vote measured by the white males of voting age just after the war and its disabilities, which must have been at least forty per cent of what could have possibly been polled.

A legislature most representative of the State assembled and from the names appended to the: “Act preliminary to the legislation induced by the emancipation of slaves,” passed Nov. 19, 1865, W. D. Porter, President of the Senate, C. H. Simonton, Speaker of the House, and James L. Orr, Governor, appear officially responsible for the legislation; but the main work of framing it was done by D. L. Wardlaw and Armistead Burt. Although continuously and often very incorrectly assailed, viewed by a critic in no way partial to the South, these efforts of the vanquished, before the flood of Reconstruction was let loose by Congress upon the South, do not appear as frightful as they still are alleged to be.

Professor Burgess, speaks of them in general in the following terms:

“When the newly reorganized States came to assume jurisdiction over matters concerning the freedmen, they found themselves driven to some legislation to prevent the whole Negro race from becoming paupers and criminals. It was in the face of such a situation that the legislatures of these States passed laws concerning apprenticeship, vagrancy and civil rights which were looked upon at the North as attempts to reenslave the newly emancipated and served to bring the new State governments at the South into deep reproach. It must be remembered, however, that at the time of the passage of the Stevens resolution by the House of Representatives, only two of Mr. Johnson’s reconstructed States had passed any laws upon these subjects. These two were Mississippi and South Carolina, and a close examination of the text of these enactments will hardly justify the interpretation placed upon them by the Radical Republicans.”[191]

Professor Dunning in a later work states that:

“South Carolina forbade persons of color to engage in any trade or business other than husbandry and farm or domestic service, except under a license requiring a substantial annual fee; and in the code concerning master and servants embodied many rules that strongly suggested those formerly in force as to master and slave.”[192]

The license required for a shopkeeper was substantial, also that for a pedlar. It was one hundred dollars a year. In both of these vocations the mass of the Negroes could be easily fleeced by the shrewd and unscrupulous members of the race; but in all other vocations, except those free, it was only ten dollars.[193]

While accusing Wilson, Sumner and other extremists of distorting the spirit and purpose of both the laws and the lawmakers of the South, Professor Dunning says:

“Yet as a matter of fact, this legislation, far from embodying any spirit of defiance towards the North or any purpose to evade the conditions which the victors had imposed, was, in the main, a conscientious and straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order out of social and economic chaos which a full acceptance of the war and emancipation involved.”[194]

In his opinion:

“After all, the greatest fault of the Southern lawmakers was not that their procedure was unwise per se, but that when legislating as a conquered people, they failed adequately to consider and be guided by the prejudices of their conquerors.”[195]

If there is ground for condemnation in the above, the South must be condemned for thinking better of their conquerors than they deserved. The South Carolina Act, above alluded to, excepted from the provisions of what has been called the “Black Code”—“every person who may have of Caucasian blood, seven-eighths or more,” who it provided “shall be deemed a white person,”[196] declaring, however, that: “all other free Negroes, mulattoes and mestizos, all freed women and all descendants through either sex of any of these, except as above, shall be known as persons of color.”

It declared that the statutes and regulations concerning slaves were inapplicable to persons of color and although such were not entitled to social or political equality with white persons, they were given the right to own and dispose of property, to make contracts, to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property.

While the Black Code did therefore regulate the relations and restrain persons of color, in Mr. Dunning’s and Mr. Burgess’s opinion, there was little in the South Carolina Act calculated to arouse any pronounced hostility in the North. In the opinion of the latter, indeed, it—

“provided for substantial equality in civil rights between persons of color and white persons.”[197]

Two provisions it did contain of great importance, which it must be borne in mind were framed by the representatives of 250,000 whites surrounded by 400,000 Negroes, ninety per cent of whom were densely ignorant. The first of these was aimed to prevent the burden of this helpless ignorance from increasing; the second to secure to this population a measure of protection, which those who had emancipated the slaves had not granted to the freedmen in their own section, by their own laws, for the greater part of the time of their living in Free States.—

“XXII. No person of color shall migrate into and reside in this State, unless within twenty days after his arrival within the same he shall enter into bond with two freeholders as sureties to be approved by the Judge of the District Court or a Magistrate, in a penalty of one thousand dollars conditioned for his good behavior and for his support if he should become unable to support himself.”[198]

This act further provided that upon failure to furnish bond the free person of color could be ordered to leave the State, and, upon failure to leave, be subjected to corporal punishment within a certain time, and if still contumacious, could be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period. The other act granted to the immense black majority what the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, for almost half a century, had denied to the feeble minority of free blacks who had entered their borders:

“In every case civil and criminal in which a person of color is a party or which affects the person or property of a person of color, persons of color shall be competent witnesses.”[199]

In its day and since, this legislation has been roundly denounced. Those in control of Federal politics saw in it a peaceful settlement of great questions which threatened their supremacy, and bitterly and unreservedly reprobated it, stirring up public opinion in that section, which yet flushed with its conquest, was unwilling to permit any interference with its great mission of “putting the bottom rail on top.”

The conquerors had preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Those were two immense achievements, even if ruthlessly attained.

As terrible as was the price which the South paid for the abolition of slavery, it was not too great, taking all things into consideration; and the manner of the abolition was such, also, that in time it must have given rise to as it did eventually produce, that mutual respect between the sections which had not before existed.

While Emancipation, being confiscation of property without due process of law, can never be legally justified, and only can be excused as a war measure, yet, if the Southern people, white and black, could only be made to see conditions as they are now in the South and to realize that posterity does fairly demand some consideration from those who bring it into being, one hundred years will not have passed before it will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Emancipation was more beneficial to the South than to the North. This statement is made with a full appreciation of the fact that the War, Emancipation and Reconstruction so reduced the South and checked its industrial development, that thirty years were required from the inception of the War to bring that section again up to the position it had reached in 1860, in point of wealth and industry.

War and Emancipation can therefore be excused, but Reconstruction will ever remain an ineffaceable stain upon the conquerors. Yet, as an emetic sometimes produces good which nothing else can bring about, so Reconstruction may in time be shown to have been not without its good.

Just what might have been the effects of the attempt made by the Southern States to readjust the Negroes to the changed conditions of 1865 must now always remain a matter of surmise; for the differentiations of color, race and condition, which they attempted then to establish, were ruthlessly swept out of existence by military control and universal suffrage followed by the Civil Rights Bill.

But before considering that era of frantic sentimentality concerning the African people in the United States, the period of Congressional Reconstruction, a little more light should be thrown upon the struggle made by the surviving soldiery of the Confederacy, led by Wade Hampton of South Carolina and others less well remembered, as Wright of Georgia, to support the policy of Seward and President Johnson. Not unnaturally in so doing attention will be concentrated to a very great degree upon the Scape Goat, The Hot Bed of Secession, The Prostrate State, although it was from without, if upon her borders, the record was preserved by one of her sons, an almost forgotten soldier and scholar of the Old South, in his tireless, patriotic and absolutely sincere and highly intelligent effort to mentally avert the overthrow of the remnants of Southern civilization, threatened in the advance of the black horde of freedmen marching to plunder, under the leadership of Sumner, Stevens and Wilson and the half averted countenance of Grant.

This description by a Southern man may seem possibly too comprehensive and severe, until we read the declaration of that American Negro most generally esteemed in the North in his day, the leader of the Negro race in America:

“I felt that the Reconstruction policy, so far as it related to my race was in a large measure on a false foundation, was artificial and forced. In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of Southern whites.”[200]

How can the characterization be doubted when we remember Senator Wilson’s speech in Charleston and the fact that with such a record as he had and such a field to choose from, he was made Grant’s running mate, the Aaron for that Moses.

The Southerner who preserved this record of the aspirations of the Old South was so identified with the political thought of the great State of North Carolina, that, like Andrew Jackson, whom he knew and asserted to be a South Carolinian, he also, though such, was thought to be a North Carolinian. But Daniel Harvey Hill was, on July 12, 1821, born in South Carolina, at Hill’s Iron Works, an iron manufacturing establishment founded in the New Acquisition (later York District), by his grandfather, prior to the Revolutionary War, where cannon were forged for the American army. A graduate of West Point and a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, in which he rose to the brevet of Major, he resigned from the United States army to embrace the highest avocation a man may follow and became in 1849 a professor of mathematics at Washington College, Lexington, “the Athens” of Virginia, and later, was put in control of the Military Institute of North Carolina; whence he entered the Confederate Army, served through the war with distinction, rising to the rank of lieutenant general, and issuing from Charlotte, May, 1866, the first number of the monthly magazine, The Land We Love, published by him from that place until April, 1869, through which he voiced the aspirations, hopes and resolves, in the main, of the disbanded forces of the Confederacy, probably, at that date constituting seventy per cent or more of the white manhood of the South. If the magazine was modeled upon an English rather than an American type, it was the more representative of the South Atlantic States at that time. If forty per cent or more of its contents bore upon the recent war, considering the times and the conditions of the section upon which it was dependent for support, that was most natural.

In it can be found not infrequent contributions from that Georgian said by Professor Trent to have been the one poet the War produced from the South; also some papers from that novelist of South Carolina whom Lewisohn has mentioned in his article on South Carolina, in The Nation in 1922; and one from that Northern adopted son of South Carolina, to whom the State owes the great institution, Clemson College, for the aims of which General Hill strove so hard in his opening article on “Education.” Space will not admit of more than three extracts; the discussion by General Hill of education; an allusion to E. G. Lee’s “Maximilian and His Empire,” and a still briefer allusion to and endorsement of Wade Hampton and his policy concerning the freedmen. The first is the most important. After discussing the number of presidents from the South, including Lincoln and Johnson, eleven out of the seventeen, up to that time elected, coming from the South and an even greater proportion of secretaries of state and attorney generals, General Hill indicates, that when business ability was desired, as in the offices of secretary of the treasury and postmaster general, the situation was at once reversed, and thus proceeds:

“The facts and figures above have been given in warning, not in boastfulness. The pride which we might have felt in the glories of the past is rebuked by the thought that they were purchased at the expense of the material prosperity of the country; for men of wealth and talents did not combine their fortunes, their energies and their intellects to develop the immense resources of the land of their nativity. What factories did they erect? What mines did they dig? What foundries did they establish? What machine shops did they build? What ships did they put afloat? Their minds and their hearts were engrossed in the struggle for national position and national honors. The yearning desire was for political supremacy and never for domestic thrift and economy. Hence we became dependent upon the North for everything from a lucifer match to a columbiad, from a pin to a railroad engine. A state of war found us without the machinery to make a single percussion cap for a soldier’s rifle, or a single button for his jacket. The system of labor which erected a class covetous of political distinction has been forever abolished; but the system of education based upon it is still unchanged and unmodified.... The old method of instruction was never wise; it is now worse than folly—’tis absolute madness. Is not attention to our fields and firesides of infinitely more importance to us than attention to national affairs? Is not a practical acquaintance with the ax, the plane, the saw, the anvil, the loom, the plow and the mattock vastly more useful to an impoverished people, than familiarity with the laws of nations and the science of government?... All unconscious of it though most of us may be, a kind providence is working in the right way for the land we love. As a people we specially needed two things. We needed the cutting off the temptation to seek political supremacy, in order that our common school, academic and collegiate training should be directed to practical ends.... The state of probation, pupilage, vassalage, or whatever it may be called in which we have been placed by the dominant party in Congress is we believe intended by the Giver of every good and perfect gift to give us higher and nobler ideas of education and the duties of educated men.... Again we needed to have manual labor made honorable. And here a kind Providence has brought good out of evil.... God is now honoring manual labor with us, as he has never done with any other nation. It is the high born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our minds with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.... Now that labor has been dignified and cherished we want it to be recognized in our schools and colleges.... The peasant who would confine the teachings of his son to Machiavelli’s Discourse ‘On the Prince’ or Fenelon’s ‘instruction to his royal pupils,’ would be no more ignoring his rank and station than are our teachers ignoring the condition of the country. Is the law of nations important to us who constitute nor state, nor colony, nor territory? Is the science of mind useful to us just now, when our highest duty is to mind our own business? Will logic help us in our reasoning whether we are in or out of the Union? Will the flowers of rhetoric plant any roses in our burnt districts?... We want on the contrary a comprehensive plan of instruction, which will embrace the useful rather than the profound, the practical rather than the theoretic; a system which will take up the ignorant in his degredation, enlighten his mind, cultivate his heart, and fit him for the solemn duties of an immortal being; a system which will come to the poor in his poverty and instruct him in the best method of procuring food, raiment and the necessaries of life; a system which will give happiness to the many, and not aggrandizement to the few, a system which will foster and develop mechanical ingenuity and relieve labor of its burden; which will entwine its laurel wreath around the brow of honest industry and frown with contempt upon the idle and worthless.”[201]

Is it surprising that a man who thus exhorted the South in that day and hour should have been condemned by both Sumner of Massachusetts and Pollard of Virginia?

For three years, the worst in the history of the South, he kept his magazine before the people of South with a circulation of 12,000 copies and agents in every Southern State and in addition in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. He never gave up the fight and in the year of his death saw his dream come true, but he did not get that support his cause would have entitled him to particularly expect from the then leading port of the South Atlantic. For even a devoted citizen of Charleston must admit, that Charleston, by such evidences as exist, was rather cold to this voice of the South. For a few months Burke and Boinest were the agents in that city, then no names appear as representatives in the greatest city of the South, with the exception of New Orleans; while, at little places in South Carolina, Mayesville, Edgefield, Society Hill and Kingstree, the agents held on to the end, faithful unto death. But in Charleston, within one month from the suspension of The Land We Love, a new Southern magazine was launched, The XIX Century, edited by F. G. DeFontaine, distinctly lighter, and, as events indicated, with less lasting power.

Returning to General Hill’s magazine, if manual and industrial training was a hobby and if his criticism of the former political training and lack of industrial enterprise was too sweeping; yet in his columns was afforded space for the most interesting illustration of what that political training could flower into, which can be found anywhere in the printed page in the United States. This is a sweeping statement itself; but if the highest type of cultivated diplomat, thoroughly conversant with the haute politique will read and ponder “Maximilian and His Empire” contributed by Gen. E. G. Lee, Feb. 1867, he would be curious to know who this Gen. E. G. Lee was and what were his opportunities for gathering the political knowledge which appears most interestingly spread with something of the assurance of a political seer, as time has shown.

E. G. Lee was a Virginian, only a brigadier. Born at Leeland, May 25, 1835, a graduate of William and Mary College, he served under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley campaign. Forced by ill health to withdraw from military service between 1863 and 1864, he was, in the latter part of the last mentioned year, sent to Canada on secret service for the Confederate Government, just about the time at which Blair approached the officials of the Confederacy, according to Alex. H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, aiming to bring about—

“a secret military convention between the belligerents with a view of preventing the establishment of a French Empire in Mexico by the joint operation of the Federal and Confederate armies in maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine. In this way (writes Mr. Stephens) Mr. Blair thought, as Mr. Davis stated to me, a fraternization would take place between the two armies and peace be ultimately obtained by a restoration of the Union without the subjugation of the Southern States.”[202]

In his Lincoln, Mr. Stephenson says:

“While the amendment (abolishing slavery) was taking its way through Congress, a shrewd old politician who thought he knew the world better than most men, that Montgomery Blair, Senior, who was father to the Postmaster General, had been trying on his own responsibility to open negotiations between Washington and Richmond. His visionary ideas, which were wholly without the results he intended have no place here. And yet this fanciful episode had a significance of its own. Had it not occurred, the Confederate Government probably would not have appointed commissioners charged with the hopeless task of approaching the Federal Government for the purpose of negotiating peace between ‘the two countries.’”

Just what was really happening in the world of politics in these dying days of the Confederacy may possibly never be known with any degree of exactness. The play of politics, not only in the United States; but around the world was quick and varied but very obscure. Mr. Stephenson, the most interesting and thoughtful observer of Lincoln’s career attaches very slight importance to Blair’s negotiations with the Confederacy; but more to the prior negotiations of Gilmore and Jacquess, even going so far as to assert, on the authority of Nicolay and Hay, that Davis had said in his interview with them:

“You have already emancipated nearly two millions of our slaves; and if you will take care of them, you may emancipate the rest. I had a few when the war began. I was of some use to them; they never were of any to me.”[203]

Nicolay and Hay do assert that Jacquess asserted that Davis so stated; but they also give Davis’s account of the incident which he published in his “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.” In this we find no such assertion by Davis and on the contrary the following:

“Mr. Gilmore addressed me and in a few minutes conveyed the information that the two gentlemen had come to Richmond impressed with the idea that the Confederate Government would accept a peace on the basis of a reconstruction of the Union, the abolition of slavery and the grant of an amnesty to the people of the States as repentant criminals.... The impudence of the remarks could only be extenuated because of the ignorance displayed and the profuse avowal of the kindest motives and intentions.”[204]

From this Mr. Davis proceeds to discuss the appointment of commissioners to Canada about the middle of 1864, their failure and the mission of Mr. Blair in December. Gen. E. G. Lee’s name is not among the commissioners, as stated, nor is there any reference to his mission in The Rise and Fall. But his article in The Land We Love[205] appearing in 1867 shows a knowledge and understanding of politics enveloping “Maximilian and His Empire,” viewed from the standpoint of the Confederate States, Louis Napoleon, and Wm. H. Seward, most interesting. This forgotten and youthful Virginian graduate of the oldest college in the United States, in the discussion of a matter in which he does not mention himself, must have had sources of information, which he does not reveal. His admiration for an opponent, Seward, is unrestrained. His contempt for Louis Napoleon is expressed with a refinement that imparts to it a greater force; and altogether as he passes from the stage an unreconstructed “Rebel,” dying even before Virginia shook off the grip of the blacks, he carries with him to the grave some history, which if more fully revealed might have added interest to Blair’s mission. At all events, if General Hill asked—

“Is not attention to our fields and firesides of infinitely more importance to us than attention to national affairs?”[206]

he yielded space and advanced to the front page of his magazine one best fitted to illustrate—“Audi alteram partem.”

A little later in an editorial praising Generals Hampton and Wright, Hill says:

“So far as we have been able to ascertain every Southern newspaper edited by a Confederate soldier, has followed the lead of these distinguished officers. The prominent idea held out by Generals Hampton and Wright, is that the freedman is to be trained to feel that he is a Southern man, identified with the South in its interests, its trials and its suffering. He is to be taught to feel that he is no alien upon the soil, but that this is his country and his home.”[207]

In the elections of 1868, however, Congressional Reconstruction was overwhelmingly triumphant throughout the South and, with a fringe of whites, a black pall was thrown over the region.

So determined were the ruling political leaders of that day, to enforce their will upon a crushed and impoverished people, that in South Carolina in 1870, to enforce the provisions of legislation for social equality, these alien law makers did not hesitate to abrogate the elementary rule of the criminal law, which provides that the accused shall be deemed innocent until proven guilty, and so shaped the legislation, of the Civil Rights Act, that any one accused of violating its strict and far reaching provisions, on failure to prove his innocence of the charge, became liable to a fine of one thousand dollars and also imprisonment in the State penitentiary for five years at hard labor, which was increased to six years upon failure to pay the fine. Any one aiding or abetting in the infraction of the law was liable to a term of three years in the State penitentiary, with the loss of the right to vote or hold office.[208]

Now, it was while men’s minds in South Carolina were intensely agitated by the immense sweep of this act, that the whites of one of the religious denominations of this State found presented for their consideration, what was deemed by many of the various denominations as the entering wedge for the removal of distinctions between the races in the establishment of religious equality.

With regard to equality between men, it has been declared that there are at least four clearly distinguished connotations attached to the word, and a great variety of shades in each. These four connotations of equality are:

“1. Social equality, the tests of which are that we can invite each other to meet our friends in our homes without any thought of condescension or patronage and that our sons and daughters may freely intermarry....

2. Political equality, which is confined to the common possession of a vote....

3. Religious equality, which consists in common access to religious privileges on the fulfilment of the conditions prescribed by the church or the religious bodies.

4. Equality before the law, where the law courts are open to all alike for the protection of person and property.”[209]

The South Carolina law of 1865 gave to all the Negroes the right to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property, and therefore apparently the law courts were opened to all alike; but whether the Negroes thereby obtained a right to trial by a jury of their peers is a question.

As to those members of the colored race possessing seven-eighths or more of Caucasian blood, as far as law could make them, they were white.

Reconstruction attempted to extend to all of the colored race what had been extended to this portion; and now a portion were applying for religious equality.

The question was whether there was any distinction between religious and social equality?

That depends upon the estimate of each individual as to what “The Church” is.

If it is in truth and fact a divine institution, then the necessity of subjecting it to those regulations which experience has proven most expedient, for the proper adjustment of civil relations, is not very clearly apparent.

If it is not a divine institution, then it is a social organization, no matter how high the plane upon which it is operated, and religious equality brings in its train social equality.

The attempt of British divines, face to face with the color question in South Africa, to readjust the religious views of the fifties, directed at people mainly outside their own doors and to justify the refusal to extend religious equality to the blacks in the Dominions, on the professed ground that there is not complete spiritual equality among men and that the final award for the use cannot be made a basis for the adjustment of earthly relations, moves somewhat limpingly, and, in lucidity, falls far below the utterance of that profound Negro, who has so clearly set forth the rights of his race in America, in the following declaration:

“The Negro has a God ordained right to protest against his exclusion from means of self support. He has equal right to protest when deprived of legal and civil justice, or when the opportunity of knowledge or sober living is denied him. He has no just cause of complaint, however, when excluded from social intercourse with the white race, for the obvious reason that mankind does not mingle on terms of social equality—a fact as true of black men as of white. Nor is Negro exclusion from membership in white churches a trespass on Negro rights, for after all, a church is neither more nor less than a social family.”[210]

Of the Negro who made this sane well balanced pronouncement it is fitting that a white South Carolinian should have something to say, although he has been absolutely ignored by the most cultivated members of his race.

As we shall later note DuBois, who today comes nearer being recognized as the leading Negro of America than any who can be mentioned, has claimed that:

“the greatest stigma on the white South is ... that when it saw the reform movement growing and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black voters learning to vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a Reign of Terror to a campaign of education, and disfranchised Negroes instead of punishing rascals.”[211]

In 1874 in South Carolina, Judge John T. Green, a Republican, was a candidate for governor against D. H. Chamberlain. Green was a South Carolina Unionist, a lawyer of ability against whom it was impossible to find anything to hang a charge on. Chamberlain was the most brilliant of all the carpet-baggers and after he defeated Green and became governor of South Carolina he did turn to a great extent against the rottening thieves who had raised him to that position. His opposition to black Whipper most dramatically expressed, flashed all over the United States, when that Northern born Negro was a candidate for judicial honors, in the piquant phrase—“The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier is in danger”—made this Union soldier from Massachusetts almost a type of the fighting reformer, and there was need of such, although, as DuBois claims:

“—it is certainly highly instructive to remember that the mark of the thief which dragged its slime across nearly every great Northern State and almost up to the presidential chair could not certainly in those cases be charged against the vote of black men.”[212]

But when Chamberlain found, two years later, that in spite of his attack on those of his supporters of whom he was certainly entitled to declare that they were worse than he was, he nevertheless could not be the leader of what was best, he went back to the rotten element where, as the best of whites and blacks claimed in 1874, he always could be found when it suited his purpose; for the great mental gifts of the man made him prefer to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The fight against him was in 1874 led by Comptroller General Dunn, a Republican from Massachusetts. The candidates named by the Independent Republicans were Judge Green, a white South Carolinian, and Martin R. Delany, a Negro from the North, for governor and lieutenant governor. Allusion has been made to Delany before. He was born in Charleston, Virginia, in 1812, the child of a free Negro mother by a slave father. He was the recipient of an education which enabled him to support himself and achieve some distinction. He had resided in Pittsburgh for some time; had been in partnership with Fred Douglass; had founded the first colored total abstinence society; had moved to Canada and from there led a party of black explorers through a part of Africa, for which he had been noticed by the Royal Geographical Society of Britain about the year 1859; and, returning to America, had served in the Northern army with a commission.

By General J. B. Kershaw of South Carolina, who with Wade Hampton and General McGowan all supported the nominees, his absolute honesty was testified to.

Every effort was made by the bulk of the whites to support this attempt of the most honest of the Negroes and Republican whites to put honest men in office, Hampton going so far as to declare in the public prints over his signature:

“I look upon it as the imperative duty of every good citizen whatever may have been his own previous predilection to sustain heartily the action of that convention (of the whites); for our only hope is in unity. The delegates to that convention set a noble example of patriotism when they sacrificed all political aspirations, all personal consideration, and all former prejudice for the single purpose and in the sole hope of redeeming the State.”[213]

Most of the notorious Negro leaders supported Chamberlain, R. B. Elliott being made chairman of Chamberlain’s Executive Committee; but a great number under Congressman R. H. Cain, Ransier and others, less notorious than Elliott and Whipper and not as gifted, stood staunchly for honest government. Cain went so far as to state that Green, who lacked very little of selection in the Republican convention which nominated Chamberlain, could have easily obtained the few votes necessary for such, as they had been offered his supporters at a comparatively small price; but that he and his friends had refused to purchase them. He also called to the attention of an audience of some thousands in Charleston that the white judge he had voted for as mayor in 1865 was presiding over a meeting supporting this effort of black Republicans to secure good government. But the most striking fact that the meeting developed was the entrance into politics of the profoundest thinker the Negro race has ever produced, William Hannibal Thomas, author a quarter of a century later of that remarkable book—“The American Negro—What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become.” Thomas had just reached his 31st year. At the close of the War between the States, while the harpies black and white in 1865 were winging their way Southward, a wounded United States soldier, he was lying in a hospital, with his right arm amputated above the elbow, having volunteered at the outset and rising to the rank of sergeant. Upon his discharge, after five months treatment, for three years he was a student of theology, going to Georgia in 1871 to teach. He moved to Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873 and was admitted to the bar in January, 1874. As a delegate from Newberry he supported the movement for reform. During the absence of the committee on credentials, he was invited to address the convention. It was reported:

“He made a stirring address in which the Bond Ring was effectually shown up. It was time that a stop should be put to crime and fraud in the State. It was time that the country should understand that the citizens of the South demanded peace and good government. It was a fallacy to say that in this movement, the Republicans of the State were abandoning their party principles. The plain truth was that the people in their might intended to rise and shake off the shackles of slavery and political bondage. The colored people had given evidence of their earnestness by asking their white fellow citizens to join them in this effort. Intelligence and respectability must rule in the future and the colored race must see to it that they were educated up to the standard. By harmonizing it was not meant that either race should give up its party principles. It meant only that both the majority and the minority should have fair representation in the government and there could be no permanent peace and prosperity until this was established. Ninety-nine years ago the American people had rebelled against the British Government because they were taxed without representation. How could they expect a large minority to submit to this now? Our white friends must help us heartily. They must not approach us with gloves on. They must convince us that they are in earnest and will join us in the effort to reform the government and purify the State. I believe they are in earnest in their professions this time and it remains for us to receive their proffered help in the same spirit in which it is tendered. Beyond a doubt in four or six years the white race will be in a majority in this State. It is bound to come to this and if we show now that we are willing to share the government with them, we will get the same from them when the white majority shall have reached and passed the colored vote. It is common sense to do this nothing more. He heartily urged upon his race the necessity of working for Reform. He said he had been in the Union army in the late war but he for one was ready to shake hands across the bloody chasm and forget the past and unite with the Conservatives in securing wealth and prosperity for the State.”[214]

This utterance seems to have won for him a position upon the committee on platform of five white and six colored members, one of the latter Cain, a congressman; yet Thomas was selected to submit it to the convention. Except in minor particulars it was the same as that which the convention nominating Chamberlain had framed, a not unreasonable platform for a Negro to support in 1874 in South Carolina, although scarcely acceptable in all its planks to the whites. In a total vote cast of 149,221, Judge Green was defeated by a majority against him of 11,585. Yet the strength of the vote cast against him was not without its effect upon the brilliant Chamberlain, who, from that time, shed his former skin and became a reformer.

How far a question which just about this time arose in the Episcopal Church may have affected political conditions is not to be asserted positively; but that it did affect the minds of whites and blacks can hardly be doubted, for, to not a few it was, above all, a religious question. And a religious question, to not a few, calls for sacrifice.

In the year 1875 there was presented in the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of South Carolina the application of a colored congregation for admission into union with the Convention, which application was referred to a committee to be appointed by the bishop to examine into and report upon in the following year.

In the minds of many men in the Southern States the admission of Negro delegates involved consequences which might be far reaching and this was very plainly presented in one of the two reports presented in 1876. This report opposing admission presented the matter in these words in part:

“The members of this congregation with very few exceptions are mulattoes, many of whom were free before the war and were known as a peculiar class in our community, owning slaves themselves and generally avoiding intercourse with those who were entirely black. Some of this class had established with their former masters and among our white people generally reputations for integrity and civility.... The females of this class sometimes held relations with white men which they seemed to consider and respect, very much like, if not truly marriage. The results of such associations are numerous in our streets. It is this class in which miscegenation is seen and which tempts to miscegenation. If miscegenation should be encouraged among us, then this class should be cherished and advanced.”[215]

The mover of this report might have gone further. He might have shown the evidences of interests in the record office, upon the part of white men by deed and will from time to time, in the recognition, to some extent, of the claims on paternity. How powerful this appeal could become to some is evidenced most strikingly in a will made as far back as 1814,[216] and the value, therefore, of this presentation at the Convention lay in the fact that it turned attention full upon that phase of this question which Southern white men are most apt to ignore.

The imagination of the average Southern white man does become intensely excited over any intimation of that form of intercourse between the races which is most distasteful and repugnant to the whites, but from which there is the least likelihood of miscegenation to any perceptible degree. The imagination of the Southern white man is not, however, keenly alive to the steady, continuous progress, almost inevitably resulting from the presence side by side in one section of great numbers of the two races. Yet if miscegenation is a danger, it is not less so while proceeding in the way in which it is most insidious and least shocking to the whites.

To the educated moral mulatto this determined opposition by those who sought or were willing to accept joint political action, must have created distrust. When to that, violence grew sufficiently to bring from Jefferson Davis denunciation, it is not surprising that a man of the brilliancy and political astuteness of Chamberlain should have made himself an immense power in South Carolina and drawn to himself a following which it took every effort of the whites to overthrow.

Indeed, without Wade Hampton, it could not have been effected. In a convention of 1876, of 165 members, the leader of the Straightout faction could not gather more than 42 votes.[217] But in August of the same year when Hampton[218] threw the weight of his personality in its favor, by 82 to 65, the policy was adopted. It is an interesting fact that while the colored men W. J. Whipper and R. B. Elliott, Cardozo, Gleaves and H. E. Haynes are all mentioned, the name of W. H. Thomas appears in no history of Reconstruction that the writer has read.

Cardozo, the Treasurer, was warmly championed by Chamberlain, who declared of this colored official:

“Let me tell you that if I knew that your suffrages would sink me so deep that no bubble would rise to tell where I went down, I would stand by F. L. Cardozo.”[219]

Chamberlain knew and R. B. Elliott, the brainiest of all his colored opponents, knew that it was useless to try to array Negroes against such a friend of the colored brother as that; and Smalls, Chamberlain’s friend, a good natured, bold mulatto, defeated Swails for the chairmanship, by a vote which indicated what was to be thrown for Chamberlain as the gubernatorial nominee. Elliott therefore made terms and was named for attorney general.

Yet during the exciting days of 1876 when both houses of representatives were meeting, it was W. H. Thomas upon whom the Republicans depended for brain work. He was made a member of the committee on credentials and, as chairman, reported in favor of the seating of the Republican contestants carrying the majority of the committee with him, although opposed by T. E. Miller, an octaroon or quadroon of considerable intelligence, who asked for fifteen minutes to reply to Thomas.

Miller later stated that he had refused to sign the report, because he thought that the Democratic contestees ought to have been heard. When he was beaten, he declared he had changed his mind, stating that it was their own fault, if they were not present, and announcing he was ready to sign the report. It was reported that Thomas had, upon this second utterance, made an inflammatory speech; but no part of it was published by the paper so declaring, which, upon the next day’s report, announced that in the midst of the stormy session, Thomas offered a prayer.[220]

Thomas was on the committee of Ways and Means and the Judiciary, and, until the collapse of the Republicans, seems to have been the individual most relied upon by the Speaker for all the serious work of the session.

Contemporaneously with the overthrow of the Negro governments of South Carolina and Louisiana, the report opposing admission of colored delegates to the Diocesan Convention was sustained.

In 1879 the question came up again in a shape harder to resist and resting upon the example of the diocese of Virginia. The law-making power of South Carolina had, however, meanwhile enacted a statute making it—

“Unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any Negro, mulatto, Indian or mestizo; or for any white woman to intermarry with any other than a white man.”[221]

Accordingly the lay delegates firmly opposed any union whatever, whether of clerical or lay members, with regard to the two races in the South.

Now if it is borne in mind that not only Calhoun, whose influence upon political thought in South Carolina had for many years been all pervasive; but also the profoundest student who has ever studied America, de Tocqueville, had condemned “all intermediate measures” and declared that unless the whites remained isolated from the colored race in the South, there must come either miscegenation or extirpation, at no time could the forecast of the future of that section have been as gloomy as that which appeared in the Census figures of 1880.

The white population of Louisiana, which even the war and its losses had only dropped a thousand or two below the colored, had increased by an addition of 92,189; but, in the same time, with Reconstruction, the colored had been swelled 119,445, giving a colored majority of something approximating 30,000. In Mississippi, where the ante bellum Negro majority of 84,000 had, by 1870, been reduced to 62,000, it had now risen to 206,090. But in South Carolina, with a smaller area and white population, the Negro majority had risen to 212,000. In the five Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the gain of the white population of only one, Alabama, had been greater than that of the blacks. Under such conditions discussion of that which was upon the minds of all was almost unavoidable, especially as Southern thought, freed from the shackles in which slavery had bound it, was free to move in whatever direction it saw fit and, from the pen of George W. Cable of New Orleans, there appeared “The Grandissimes,” published in 1880 and “Madam Delphine,” in 1881, of which the color question constitutes what might be called the motif.

The literary excellence of these works won the author a place in art and they were followed by other works of merit; but so strongly was the writer finally impressed with that which had first moved him to write, that in 1885 he dropped for a time the garb of fiction and voiced his belief in the necessity of a recognition of what he deemed a great wrong, through a brochure entitled “The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” To Cable, the portion of the race which was represented by the mulattoes and the quadroons made the strongest appeal; but he was not alone in the critical attitude he assumed toward the South. In the work of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a Northern soldier, who had staked his all on Reconstruction, with criticism, was voiced, in “A Fool’s Errand” by “One of the Fools,” something very much like despair. Later brooding, however, drew from this author a more critical and decidedly pretentious study, entitled “An Appeal to Caesar,” a study of the Census of 1880, from which, with some reason, he prophesied a speedy Africanization of the South, and in which he called upon the inhabitants of that section to bring forth fruits meet for repentance while there was still time.

Certainly there was basis for the claim. At no time had the rate of increase of the blacks been so high as the Census disclosed in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1880. Yet the first named set herself resolutely against any relaxation of the rule of rigid separation of the races, and in 1888 brought to a conclusion the discussion concerning the admission of clerical delegates to the Protestant Episcopal Convention, by a resolution reciting the “absolute necessity for the separation of the races in the diocese,”[222] effected upon a basis, putting all subsequent decisions within the control of the lay delegates.[223]

In the years in which it had been maintained in the South Negro supremacy had done more to destroy the belief of the bulk of the Northern public, as to the capacity of the race to assume the full duties of citizenship, than any argument of whites could have achieved. The following extracts from a letter of George W. Curtis at this date is interesting. Referring to conditions in the fifties, he writes:

“I was mobbed in Philadelphia and the halter was made ready for me and I was only protected by the entire police force merely because I spoke against slavery.”[224]

With freedom of discussion assured, he now, in December, 1888, wrote:

“I am very much obliged by your letter of Nov., I do not think the feeling of this part of the country is precisely understood in your part. It is in a word this, that admitting the force of all that is said about Negro supremacy, the colored vote ought not to be suppressed and the advantages based upon it retained. Of course I do not say it should be suppressed. I am assuming that there is great reason in the remark that under the same conditions the people in the Northern States would do likewise, and I ask whether, under that assumption, the people of those States ought to expect to retain what they are not entitled to? It is unreasonable to ask acquiescence in the suppression of legal votes, which makes the white vote in Mississippi count more than the white vote in Massachusetts or New York. An educational test would be of no avail in a community where color is the disqualification according to Mr. Grady and Mr. Watterson. I shall be very glad to hear from you and I should like to know the reply to the statement, that it is not fair to suppress the vote and retain the advantages based upon it.”[225]

The reply of the individual to whom this letter was addressed may well be omitted, in the light of what follows.

In 1889 two publications appeared from Southern sources most powerfully portraying the advantages of freedom of discussion and the inestimable value of that which Mr. Curtis had described as “the fundamental condition of human progress,”—“the right of the individual to express his opinion on any and every subject.” The first publication was the careful, exact and searching analysis of the condition of the mass of the blacks contained in “The Plantation Negro as a Freedman,” by Philip Alexander Bruce of Virginia. The second, the remarkable editorials of Carlyle McKinley, in The News and Courier, of Charleston, S. C., upon the impending movements of the freedmen in the United States.

With a prescience absolutely astounding, when we consider the only available source of information at that date, the Census of 1880, the same from which Judge Tourgee had drawn the figures upon which he based his gloomy prophecy of the speedy Africanization of the South, Mr. Carlyle McKinley wrote:

“The Negro question and all questions growing out of it will be rendered one hundred fold more easy of prompt and right adjustment when the Negroes themselves are more equally distributed throughout the republic.”[226]

Differing in toto with the work of Judge Tourgee, which had unquestionably in some quarters produced a profound impression and one which was not obliterated until the figures of the Census of 1890 were published, in 1889 Carlyle McKinley confidently declared:

“The currents which are moving from nearly every part of the cotton belt towards the Mississippi basin will not stop there. The Southern States have already all the colored population that they want and more than they want. Future movements in the same direction must inevitably extend beyond the cotton and cane fields of the region and being deflected around the northern borders of Texas spread into the vast prairie country beyond or perhaps curve northward into the States bordering the Mississippi and its tributaries.”[227]

About a month later the same paper in an editorial entitled—“The Dispersion of the Colored Population”—admirably outlined the true policy which should guide since the importation of slaves and slavery itself had been abolished:

“The Negro Question, whatever it be, is properly a national question, it should be settled on a national basis. It can never be settled on any basis while the Negroes are concentrated in one part of the country. The first interests of the South and especially of those Southern States where the Negroes are in a majority is to effect the general distribution of the race more equally throughout both sections or to remove the excess of the colored population in the South to some part of the western territory which has not yet been occupied.... So far as the South is concerned, the Negro Question now is the question of how best to promote Negro emigration northward and westward.”[228]

At the time of the publication of these editorials, the State of South Carolina was represented in the Senate of the United States by Wade Hampton and M. C. Butler. Both were members of families which had been identified with the history of the State of South Carolina from the Revolutionary War. Both belonged to the slave-holding planter class. Both had served with distinction in the Confederate War, rising respectively to the grades of lieutenant general and major general; the former having established a record while in command of the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, second to none, in handling that branch of the service. In addition Hampton had, in his own State, been the leader of the whites in the great political struggle of 1876, in which the Negro government had been overthrown, in which contest, he had been ably seconded by Butler. But the Hampton of 1867 had passed through many experiences since General D. H. Hill had commended his appeal, at that date, to the Southern Negro to consider the South as his home, and Green’s campaign of 1874 had probably convinced him that the bulk of the Negroes preferred the showy flashes of the characterless Elliott and Whipper to the sober honesty of Delany and Thomas. In the year that Gen. D. H. Hill, of South Carolina, died, B. R. Tillman pushed to completion Hill’s educational view with the founding of Clemson; while to Senator Hampton was propounded the query which the editorials had suggested, concerning the diffusion of the Negroes:

“Would any injury result to the South from an extensive exodus?”

The reply from that one in the South best qualified to answer such a question might well stand also as the best reply to the inquiry propounded by George William Curtis to the author of this work, before alluded to.

Hampton’s reply exhibited the broad statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Joseph Alston and Robert Barnwell in 1803, before South Carolina had been deluged with slaves, and the brave sincerity of Robert Y. Hayne, in 1818, 1827 and 1839.

Hampton said:

“An inconvenience, but no injury. We would gladly see the colored people move elsewhere, and we would be willing to suffer any reduction of representation that might result from their departure. It would deprive us of much of our labor and make it a little harder for the present generation, but it would be the salvation of the future.”[229]

Senator Butler then took up the matter, and in the early part of 1890 sought to have enacted by congress a bill providing:

“That upon the application of any person of color to the nearest United States Commissioner, setting forth that he, she or they desire to emigrate from any of the Southern States and designating the point to which he, she or they wish to go, with a view to citizenship and permanent residence in said country, and also setting forth that he, she or they are too poor to pay the necessary traveling expenses.... That it shall be the duty of the Quarter Master General of the Army on receipt of such application, to furnish transportation to such.” ...[230]

For the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this bill an appropriation of $5,000,000 was asked.

The bill excited some interest. It received most naturally the unqualified support of Senator Hampton, and it was also acceptable to Senator Vest of Missouri, and other Southern men of prominence; but it was not only opposed by Northern and Western senators but also by one at least from the South, Senator Vance, of North Carolina, although the argument of the latter was marked by neither strength nor depth of thought. On the other hand the argument with which Senator Butler presented his bill deserves consideration at some length and is apt to receive it in the future. While presented in a different style, it is comparable to the utterance of the great orator and debater of his State, Senator Hayne, upon somewhat the same subject in 1827.

Senator Butler said:

“I shall confine myself to a dispassionate and simple statement of facts and of such reference to events, as candor and truth justify.... To my mind it is too grave a subject to be diverted by party considerations or confined within the narrow boundaries and limits of party lines. It is all pervading, momentous and important.... Whoever concludes, that the quieting of the agitation which concerns the political status of the Negro would be a settlement of the race question, discloses, how little he knows of its magnitude and comprehensiveness and how superficially he looks at it.” ...

Proceeding with his argument Butler suggested:

“The inquiry will be made why should the Negro move out of the Southern States? He will not except on his own volition. There is nothing in this bill which coerces him or compels him to move. My answer, however, is that it would be for his own good and for the good of his white neighbors also. It cannot have escaped the attention of the most casual observer that where the Negro remains in large masses and exceeds in numbers their white neighbors, they not only do not advance, but actually retrograde. It is not needful for any intelligent white man to read St. John’s dismal narrative of ‘The Black Republic of Hayti,’ or Bruce’s graphic story, ‘The plantation Negro as a Freeman,’ or Froude’s ‘Negro in the West Indies,’ to establish the truth of the proposition. On the other hand, observation and experience convince us, that in regions of the South, where the whites are largely in the majority, the Negro is better off and the white man is better off. The Negro dresses better and is more intelligent and thrifty and the white man is more prosperous and progressive.... It is conceded on all hands, that if the Negro is to attain the full stature of his manhood, if he is to become an independent self-reliant, self-respecting man, and be made fully competent to discharge all the high responsibilities and duties of life, he must finally rely upon himself, he must elevate himself in the moral social and industrial scale by his own exertions, by his own self-assertion. To do this effectually, he must have a fair chance in an open field. Can he be expected to accomplish this; can it be expected of him under the shadow and amid the scenes of dependence and inferiority which enshroud him in the surroundings of his former debased condition? Take him away from them and allow his pulse of freedom to throb unobstructed by the memories and associations of his servile bondage. I am not one of those who believe in the total, hopeless depravity of the Negro race. I believe that there are great possibilities in store for him. I do not undervalue the worth of the labor of the Negro in what was accomplished in the way of the material development of the South. All that I mean to say is but for that kind of labor, the South would have been far ahead of her present development.... Nor do I underestimate the obligations we are all under to the race for the fidelity and most praiseworthy conduct during our depleting civil strife. Whatever fate the future may have in store for him nothing can deprive the Negro of this record; nothing can destroy or obliterate the strong ties of affectionate kindness between him and his former owner.... I repeat Sir it is for his good and the good of his future generations, as well as the good of his former master and his descendants, that I would have him more generally distributed among the great mass of his white fellow citizens, from whose energy and thrift and enlightenment and progress he can gather hope and inspiring example in his struggle for an equal chance in life.... It is not an uncommon thing to hear men say—‘Let the negro alone; he makes a good peasant class; he is the best laborer we can get for the cotton fields, etc.’ Do not all such forget that there is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government? Do they not forget that the Negro is a free American citizen, entitled by virtue of his citizenship, if on no other account, to equality before the law with the foremost citizens of the land, equality of opportunity, equality of rights.... Is it not about time, Mr. President that the thinking men of this country, men who have some concern for the future of coming generations as well as the temporary triumph of party should meet upon the common plane of the general good and dispose of this question fairly and humanely?... I should welcome such a day as a new era in our history, from which to date new hopes for the perpetuity of a constitutional republic.”[231]

It is hardly necessary to state that the bill did not pass. With the exception of his colleague, Senator Hampton, and Senator Vest, of Missouri, it scarcely received any support, and yet these Southern men recognized, more than thirty years ago, what is only now forcing itself upon the consciousness of the North, because the Negroes themselves have at last perceived the necessity of it.

But what do the prosperous think of? At this time little or nothing was known of the two little white republics, the Transvaal and the Orange River Free State, except that they maintained themselves without assistance in the heart of South Africa, surrounded by millions of warlike African savages. To the author of this work it seemed in 1890 worth while for the Northern statesmen and the Northern public to inform themselves of the views and policies of these people, before they legislated for the South on matters pertaining to the Race Problem. These little peoples had had no contact with Southern men. They came from a different nationality. Would it not be well for our Northern brethren to study their methods before legislating for the South? The suggestion was presented to The New York World, then calling for ideas. But that great paper, under Mr. Pulitzer, could not see the value. Later, although conquered, as the South was, the Boers have made their views felt in the world.

Was not an opportunity missed for obtaining helpful information in advance of Bigelow’s White Man’s Africa? Was not his book an indication of an unexplored field? Did it not influence opinion in the north of the United States?