The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

CHAPTER XI

But if, in the personalities of Wigg and others, illustrations had been afforded of the advancement of the Negro in refinement, culture and morals, in the mass, the race was by no means fit to discharge the full duties of citizenship in the South. Even as the most active and progressive moved out and into other regions, they seemed to bring to bear upon the question, in propria persona, an argument which was inclining the inhabitants of the North and West more and more to the vociferous expression, that the Southern white man best understood the Negro; that the Negro was better off in the South than elsewhere; and that the South was the natural home of the Negro.

However else the whites of the North might differ, as Republicans or Democrats, philanthropists or politicians, there was almost unanimity of opinion, that the Negro was not wanted in the North. But he was pushing in.

Despite all his other claims to greatness, therefore, the fact, that he and his policy furnished the most effective means and instrument for retaining the Negroes in the South, contributed immensely to the late Dr. Booker T. Washington’s remarkable hold on Northern sentiment, for with his rise to fame and financial power, the Negro question took on a new phase. He had a mission and it is generally considered to have been to lead the Negroes to manual and industrial training, which it was in the main, but also its aim in part was to keep the Negroes in the South; for that is the meaning of: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Booker T. Washington came first prominently into view by the speech from which the above extract was taken, delivered by him at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895. What D. H. Hill had urged for the Southern whites in 1866, Washington now urged for the Negroes. The Northern people were growing somewhat weary of the Negroes’ continual appeals for political recognition and this speech, avoiding such and couched in the most conciliatory phrases concerning the Southern whites, was a surprising departure. It struck a popular chord. It was written up in the very best vein by the most celebrated journalistic correspondent of that period, James Creelman, then in the zenith of his career of feature writing, as an “epoch making oration.” This writer, commanding the pages of the most widely read New York paper of that day, ranked—

“Professor Booker T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee (Alabama) Normal and Industrial Institute, as the foremost man of his race in America.”[248]

But Creelman did not stand alone. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution telegraphed to the North that “the address was a revelation.”

The Boston Transcript declared: “It dwarfed all the other proceedings and the exposition itself.”[249]

President Cleveland was even quoted as affirming that “the exposition would be fully justified if it did not do more than furnish the opportunity for its delivery.”[250]

The key-note of the speech has been before noted. In addition it contained two specific declarations, which constituted “the revelation”:

“1. In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.[251]

2. The wisest of my race understand, that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us, must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”[252]

When to these expressions was added the further declaration:—

“that we shall prosper as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor.”[253]—

it was scarcely surprising that the speech was generally accepted in the South as a renunciation of all hopes of social equality, and an acceptance of a position for the Negro very near to that which Calhoun had assigned to him—“the best substratum of population in the world” for it would be one—“upon which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared.”

What fault then could the superficial Southern thinker find with such a policy? It certainly fitted very admirably with that which Senator Butler had declared some five years previously it was “not a common thing to hear men say,” viz., the Negroes make “a good peasant class.”

It is true the Senator had warned his fellow countrymen “that there is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government”; but Washington’s remarks were so much more soothing to the South than Butler’s warning, that the average Southern man put away from his contemplation the possibilities dormant in the great mass of Negroes packed in the South.

And if the Southern man is willing to chance these possibilities, what reasonable being can blame the more sensibly sectional Northern man, for his cheerful readiness to finance the experiment?

That, in turning the attention of the race to manual and industrial training, Washington performed a great work is not to be denied. That, in influencing many of his people to follow him in such a program, he has raised the ambition of not a few to a much higher plane than the race had shown itself heretofore capable of, must be admitted, and these are great achievements. But it is an error to imagine that Washington ever made for himself or his race any renunciation of the aspiration for social equality. He condemned the agitation, not the aspiration for it. In the opinion of Dr. Washington, “color prejudice” was incompatible with true greatness of soul, and the highest praise he could bestow upon a man was that he was destitute of “color prejudice.”

Writing of President Cleveland, he said:

“Judging from my personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, I do not believe he is conscious of possessing any color prejudice. He is too great for that. In my contact with people, I find that as a rule, it is only little, narrow people, who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open their souls in a way to permit them to come in contact with other souls—with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by color can come in contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind and narrow as race prejudice.”[254]

Although of very different temperaments, between the two colored men Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune, there seemed to be quite a sympathy. Washington in his autobiography avers it:

“In the summer of 1900, with the assistance of such prominent colored men as T. Thomas Fortune, who has always upheld my hands in every effort, I organized the National Negro Business League.”[255]

T. Thomas Fortune is a man of education and ability. As the editor for many years of the leading colored paper in the United States, its columns indicated that he certainly upheld the hands of Dr. Washington. Indeed he did not hesitate to belabor without stint the heads of such colored detractors of Dr. Washington as Monroe Trotter of Boston and others, even administering a rap or two to Professor W. E. Burghardt DuBois, when the latter failed to keep step with the Washington procession. But T. Thomas Fortune was of too independent a nature to be restrained from the expression of his own view, and shortly before his surrender of his position as editor of “The Age”, he published the following declaration:

“The question of the right to marry and give in marriage is at the bottom of the whole life of the Republic. The Afro-American who says he does not desire social equality is an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard, who sacrifices what he should know to be a primal right to a subservient purpose.”

Can it be believed that a man sufficiently fearless to make this declaration and feeling obliged to do so, would uphold at all times the hands of an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard? It is difficult to believe it. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that while Washington, with “the wisest” of his race understood: “that the agitation of questions of social equality was the extremest folly,” he nevertheless cherished the aspiration. And indeed it would be most unnatural if he did not.

Bearing all the possibilities in mind, the question is, however, whether any policy which tends to keep massed in the South so many of the Negroes as are banked there, is to the best interest of the South, or the Nation, or conducive of the greatest good to the greatest number?

But Washington did not stand as the unrivalled leader of his race. Two other members of it criticised his leadership with arguments which could not be brushed aside too lightly. The first of these compiled in 1899, what was the most thorough investigation into the conditions enveloping the Negro at the North, which had been printed up to that time. The author of “The Philadelphia Negro” is thus introduced by Dr. A. Bushnell Hart:

“The most distinguished literary man of the race W. E. Burghardt DuBois—an A. B. and Ph. D. of Harvard, who studied several years in Germany, and as Professor of Sociology in Atlanta University has had an unusual opportunity to study his people.”[256]

Dr. DuBois’s book was an entirely different style of work from the popular “Up from Slavery” published a year or two later, “with the painstaking and generous assistance of Max Bennett Thrasher”, as the autobiography of Washington.

DuBois’s book, “The Philadelphia Negro” is a most carefully made sociological investigation.

Later in 1903, Dr. DuBois published another volume entitled: “The Souls of Black Folk”—in which after a preface opening with:

“Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876, is the ascendency of Mr. Booker T. Washington.”—

followed by a fine tribute to his worth, the author declares:—

“the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and short comings of Mr. Washington’s career, etc.”

The criticism is this:

“His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean, if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. The South ought to be led by candid and honest criticism to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North, her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.... The black man of America has a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands.... But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the effect of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South or the Nation does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.”[257]

Between “the most distinguished literary man of the race” and “the most eminent man whom the African race has produced” there was then a profound difference, for what could be considered, by many, as the essential element of greatness in the policy of Washington, was that, for which this critic took him most severely to task, viz, his willingness that the burden of the Negro problem should be shifted from the shoulders of the whites to those of the Negroes.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the willingness of Northern and Southern whites, that it should be shifted is not to their credit, there is a virility in the promulgation of a policy for the Negroes by a Negro, which seeks to force the Negro “to stand upon his feet and play the game”, which offsets many imperfections, and for that Dr. Washington must get credit.

William Hannibal Thomas, 1900
Free Person of Color—Ohio, 1860

The second of the two Negro thinkers who questioned Dr. Washington’s leadership, has also been quoted by Professor Hart; but of William Hannibal Thomas, one of the few Negroes of distinct intellectual force as before narrated, who participated in the struggles of Reconstruction in South Carolina and emerged, uncriticised, Dr. Hart has but two allusions.

Of the author of—“The American Negro; What he was; What he is; and What he may become,” Professor Hart, in his own strong book, only says, first:

“He has made admissions with regard to the moral qualities of his fellow Negroes which have been widely taken up and quoted by anti-Negro writers.”[258]

Second:

“Thomas, himself a Negro, asserts that the sexual impulse constitutes the main incitement of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting.”[259]

In these two temperate utterances, as put, Professor Hart conveys what might be understood as disapproval; yet it can be urged in defense of Thomas’ criticism of his race in the last particular, that it is paralleled by the assertion of Professor Lombroso, himself an Italian, concerning Italians, when contrasting them with the English; while, with regard to the first, it would be difficult to find a paragraph framed by Thomas more suited for quotation by anti-Negro writers, than the following in Professor Hart’s book:

“The Negro preachers are universally believed to be the worst of their kind, and very often are. If things that are regularly told by the white people and sometimes admitted by the colored, are true, the majority of the Southern Negroes, rural and urban are in a horrible state both physically and morally.”[260]

Yet whatever the Negro preachers may have been, there is good reason to believe that, in the cities, their moral tone is improving, and there, now, high exemplars of morality can be found.

Again, despite his apparent pessimism, the future holds for Thomas a hope denied to not a few, who are impatient of his probe. Where can be found anything rising higher in optimism that the following:

“We believe American Christianity has in the person of the Negro, an unmeasured wealth of latent spiritual energy which will be aroused and consecrated, when the notion of sacerdotalism is scattered from before his clouded vision, when transmitted ethnic fetichism is eradicated from his religion and the virility of his nature, bared of empty forms of righteousness, is breathed upon by the spirit of God, himself.”[261]

The truth concerning this matter is, that Thomas had gone too deeply into it to be readily understood by those who have not had their powers of perception quickened by that daily contact, which teaches so much. Therefore, while Thomas’s book may seem extremely pessimistic; yet, when his philosophy is boiled down, it is not very different from what Dr. Washington is thought to have preached, that God helps him who helps himself, or as Thomas puts it:

“Every endowment of manhood and womanhood is within the reach of every human being, who puts integrity before material gain, and self respect before mendacious folly.”[262]

“When, therefore, the Negro race acquires in the broadest and best sense an industrial education, there will come a radical regeneration of Southern social economy, and Negro education will stand then for home life, domestic industry, public integrity and national welfare.”[263]

To some extent, therefore, the difference between Washington and Thomas was temperamental. Washington’s optimism led him to declare:

“Despite superficial and temporary signs, which might lead one to entertain a contrary opinion, there never was a time, when I felt more hopeful for the race than I do at the present time.”[264]

What these superficial and temporary signs leading to the contrary opinion were, Washington did not disclose; but Thomas did:

“I am firmly rooted in the conviction, that Negroism, as exemplified in the American type, is an attitude of mental density, a kind of spiritual sensuousness; but that each of these characteristics, though endowed with great persistency and potency, is nevertheless amendable to radical treatment.”[265]

According to Max Nordau, spiritual sensuousness is by no means a characteristic or state interfering with great achievement; for he credits Ignatius Loyola with it.

But now to consider the view of this Northern Negro.

With the possible exception of Alfred H. Stone, it is doubtful if, up to this date, any individual has proven himself better equipped for the discussion of the Negro question than William Hannibal Thomas. A comparison might warrant the statement, that if Mr. Stone has enjoyed the wider range, Thomas has been able to make the more exact study. If Stone has the stronger mind, and it is still further strengthened with a fuller culture, Thomas has the more judicially balanced temperament. Thomas’ work is done. Stone’s has not yet reached its fullest development. We can, therefore, get a clearer idea of Thomas’ view in its entirety than we can obtain of Stone’s.

No man has drawn more from his experience than Thomas, and few have possessed such varied experiences to draw from. Simply and modestly as he sketches his life and pedigree, the brief recital indicates opportunities for observation which were most unusual, and, had he kept a diary, it would have been simply invaluable. Should he ever publish his impression of the men he has met and the events he has been connected with, it could not fail to be a most interesting and instructive book; for to powers of observation, which are unusual, he unites judgment which is distinctly admirable. Some brief extracts may put the man and some of his views before the reader.

His book opens with an explanation, indicative of that which he thinks distinguishes the Negro from the white, characteristic traits rather than color, after which he briefly states his own pedigree and life history, as follows:

“None of my ancestors were owned in slavery, so far as my knowledge goes. On my mother’s side I come from German and English stock. My maternal grandfather, the son of a white indentured female servant by a colored man, was born at Bedford, Pennsylvania, about the year 1758. My maternal grandmother was a white German woman, born in 1770, and brought up at Hagerstown, Maryland. This branch of my ancestry emigrated to Ohio in 1792; and settled near the town of Marietta, where my mother was born in 1812. On the paternal side my grandparents, who were of mixed blood, were Virginians by birth. My father, who was born in 1808, near Moorfield, in Hardy County, removed to Ohio before attaining his majority. I was born on a farm, in a log cabin, on the fourth day of May, 1843, in Jackson Township, Pickaway County, Ohio.”[266]

After reciting the recollections of his youth, his father’s active interest concerning, and his own sympathy for, the “Underground railroad”, and his efforts to educate himself, Thomas asserts that at the outbreak of hostilities he tendered his services in 1861 to the Government, but was refused admission to the army on account of color. In a civil capacity, however, he entered the 42d. Ohio Infantry Regiment, and—

“was in the Big Sandy campaign with General Garfield, and during the summer of 1863, with the Union forces at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.”

In the fall of that year he joined the 95th. regiment, with which he remained, until the capture of Vicksburg, when, returning to Ohio, he enlisted in the 5th United States colored troops, and was appointed sergeant, and after service in the Department of the James, was in the assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and lost an arm in the capture of the city of Wilmington.

Going South to teach, he took up his residence first in Georgia, later in Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873, and was appointed a trial justice. In 1876 he was elected a member of the legislature, and after the fall of the radical governments of the South, “gave up the practice of law and withdrew from active participation in politics” to devote his attention to the educational advancement of the freedmen, in pursuit of which, he “visited every Southern State and community.”[267]

Certainly such a one would seem admirably equipped for the task of discussing most interestingly and instructively the Negro question, as a perusal of his book clearly indicates. Why then, is the book not more popular in the North, where is to be found the great reading public of the United States?

Despite the advanced civilization of that section, its enlightenment, and its assimilation of British ideals, with the growth of the material prosperity of its people, there has grown a belief that money, if given with sufficient liberality, can cure any trouble. This is more than hinted at in “The Souls of Black Folk.”[268] How then can it be other than extremely distasteful to those, so conscious of their great generosity, to read in place of the encomiums with which the assisted writings of Washington abound, the following audacious criticism:

“Our Northern philanthropists, with no trustworthy knowledge of the conditions of the freedmen, have neither sought nor acquired capable insight into the needs and wants of Negro life. Having been influenced by the special pleading of interested advocates, and their own imperious convictions, it is consequently small wonder that they have hitherto failed to deal with the problem in the most satisfactory manner.”[269]

It is true that in considering:

“The two antagonistic forces which germinated at about the same period in the Western world at Jamestown and Plymouth,”

Thomas thinks the product, as well as the seed, of the latter is far superior; but, to the residents of that portion of our common country, that has long been axiomatic and does not wipe away the offense of making admissions with regard to the moral qualities of his fellow Negroes, which have been widely taken up and quoted by anti-Negro writers.

Almost it might seem in anticipation of this, Thomas says:

“In this age of realism illusions should have no place and especially in a question of such perplexity as this and one involving such vital issues. The Negro above all others should welcome honest criticism, for in so doing, he will discover that those who point out faults are not always actuated by vindictive sentiments and he may learn that timely reproof and wise guidance may be derived even from the censure of enemies.”[270]

With regard to the possibilities of improvement, Thomas believes:

“That rural work constitutes a basis for character building incomparably beyond that of any agency within his (the Negro’s) reach.”[271]

While Thomas’s view concerning the injury to the South of the presence in it of the Negro is more strongly put it is the view expressed by Senator Butler in 1900, and of Senator Barnwell in 1803, in all probability; yet it is a striking fact that in South Carolina, since emancipation, after thirty years of experience, we came back to the view expressed in 1865, and this, in spite of the fact that, as stated by a great authority on the subject:

“It is very convenient for the Southern white man to include everybody with a trace of Negro blood under the general race designation.”[272]

Mr. Stone cannot include South Carolina as contributing to what he styles:

“The combined influence of Northern and Southern white men and of Negroes and mulattoes to perpetuate an absurd and unscientific fiction,”[273]

for the South Carolina law with regard to intermarriage between the races does not include every one with a trace of Negro blood as a Negro. And this brings us up to a consideration of this phase of the question.

The view of T. Thomas Fortune, on the intermarriage of persons of different races, has been cited.

DuBois’s, expressed with temperance, is as follows:

“Among the best classes of Negroes and whites, such marriages seldom occur.”[274]

Yet he maintains that:

“Any legislation against it, is inconsistent with the principle of freedom of choice in a matter exclusively pertaining to the individual.”

Twenty years later, in “The Comet”, he allowed his fancy fuller play.

When Thomas reaches this point in his discussion, we find neither the extravagant expression of Fortune, nor the apparently varying views and fancies of DuBois. Thomas says:

“There is no doubt that judicious race amalgamation is capable of exercising a profound and far reaching influence upon inferior types of people. Degenerate people are always improved by an infusion of virile blood; but the benefits derived from wise race admixture are to be found in transmitted capacity not color.... The redemption of the Negro is impossible through any process of physical amalgamation; it is possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the thoughts and ideals of American civilization.”[275]

Now, as has been shown, Washington thought a color prejudice a thing to be lamented, and yet he preached for years for the Negroes to remain in the South; where Thomas says:

“There is more absolute social equality and personal freedom in the intermingling of the races than has ever been obtained in the North, where, in the main the public social rights of the Negro are respected.”[276]

From which Thomas argues:

“That should wealth, culture and character come to the great body of the Negroes, all trace of race prejudice would disappear from our Southern section as effectually as it has been obliterated in Portugal and the Latin countries.”[277]

If Washington happened then to hold the same view as the above, even without expressing it, there was no discord between him and his lieutenant, Fortune, and therefore, while Mr. Stone was pondering the problem of the mulatto, Washington, looking with steady eye toward the future infusion of virile blood, cried to the applauding white people of the South;—“Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Is it for the best interest of all that the bucket should be cast down where we of the South are now?

By the census of 1900, Mr. Stone’s State was the one State of the three, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana with a Negro majority in 1890, which showed no improvement in this respect.

Louisiana’s Negro majority of 789 had given place to a white majority of 78,808; South Carolina’s tremendous Negro majority of 226,926 had at last felt the beginning of the ebb, and was 225,415; but Mississippi’s 197,708 had risen to 266,430, and, therefore, in Mississippi were the very worst conditions and those most fruitful for race friction; for Mr. Stone has declared:

“A primary cause of race friction is the vague rather intangible, but wholly real feeling of ‘pressure’ which comes to the white man almost instinctively in the presence of a mass of people of a different race. In a certain important sense, all racial problems are distinctly problems of racial distribution.... So today, no State in the Union would have separate car laws where the Negro constituted only 10 or 15 percent of its total population.”[278]

In another lecture Mr. Stone had declared:

“Negroes constitute practically a third of the population in the South both city and country. In the North they constitute but one fortieth of the city population and only an insignificant, really negligible one-ninetieth of that of the country.”

Yet, Mr. Stone quotes as an authority, Booker T. Washington, who declared:

“If we were to move four millions of the eight millions of Negroes from the South into the North and West ... a problem would be created far more serious and complicated than any now existing in the Southern States.”[279]

These two statements as they would be generally understood, are inconsistent with each other and contradictory. If it be meant that a sudden thrusting out of four million people from one section, and impelling them into another, as fast as they could be moved, would precipitate a problem, no one would be foolish enough to deny, or attempt to deny, that it would. But, as the gradual introduction of four million Negroes into the North and West could not bring the mass of them up to more than 10 percent of the whole population, then, in many respects, the problem would be ameliorated by any policy which led to their introduction in a reasonable process of diffusion, although it undoubtedly would dispel some dreams, and give rise to some friction and considerable inconvenience for a while.

And, that even Booker Washington commenced to see the advantages of diffusion, became apparent in at least one utterance before his death.

But, before treating of conditions and opinions in 1910, some information may be obtained from a careful consideration of what moral advancement the culture of the slave-holding South had produced in that class of its colored population, which as free persons of color, in the period of slavery, could themselves hold slaves.

In the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 1859 the list of taxpayers shows that 353 free persons of color returned for taxation, $679,164.00 of real estate. They also returned for taxation 290 slaves. Of these tax payers the wealthiest was Maria Weston, whose return for real estate was $41,575.00, slaves, 14; horses, 1. That was one-seventh of the value of the real estate returned by the wealthiest white tax payer in the city and two more slaves. But Maria Weston, while the wealthiest of the free persons of color in Charleston, was not very much more wealthy than R. E. Dereef and Robert Howard, and the average wealth of the free person of color was fairly up to the average wealth of the whites. The story is told in Charleston that when the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher visited the city, after the war between the States he invited himself to become the guest of R. E. Dereef, who received him with admirable hospitality, personally looking to it that the great man lacked nothing in the way of comfort and treating him with perfect civility; but studiously and tactfully avoiding all efforts upon the part of his guest to establish an intimacy. The great Abolitionist confided to a white resident his disappointment that he had met no other member of the family or aroused in the breast of his host any decided interest in one who had done so much to bring about emancipation of the Negroes. But his confidant called to his attention, that he had been treated with admirable and uncomplaining hospitality, by one whom he had relieved of considerable property. Yet it must not be imagined that all free persons of color owned slaves. Of an interesting family, the Holloways, nine taxpayers in all, the wealthiest returned for taxation, real estate to the amount of $8,300.00, while the total of the nine summed up $36,000.00, only one of the nine, however, owned a slave.[280]

It is through what has been preserved by a member of this family, that we get a glimpse of what may be considered to some extent as the viewpoint of this class. That the ideal of J. H. Holloway was somewhat cramped may be admitted; but if so it should also be admitted that the basis was one of the strongest upon which an ideal could repose. It was social purity. Holloway’s father, grandfather and greatgrandfather had all been free men. He was a saddler and harness maker by trade, but he was nevertheless an aristocrat. He was an unobtrusive individual, of gentle nature, true to his convictions and very virtuous. Being opposed to vaccination, he refused to pay the small fine imposed and went to jail instead, assuring the white judge who expressed his regret at being obliged to sentence him, that he had no feeling about the matter, believing the official was doing his duty. The intellect of Holloway was not extraordinary and to not a few his ambition may seem small and trifling; but it was pursued with such a patient faith and pious determination, as to impart to it, in the eyes of some whites in the same locality, who had accomplished something in life, a dignity entitling it to respect. His position resembled that of a priest of a dying cult, to whom the sight of the altars he intensely revered, more and more deserted, as he advanced in years, but the more added to the fervor of his worship; and so Holloway, to the day of his death, remained a devoted disciple of “The Brown” or as it was later called “The Century Fellowship,” the principle assets of which were a grave yard and some minute books. Holloway’s life was a living denial of the charge that the Negro has no interest in the past or future, for to him both of these periods were of importance. What was most noticeable in his thoughts was the balance of them.

On his business card: “J. H. Holloway—Harness Repair Shop, 39 Beaufain Street,” he had caused to be printed a quotation from the Bible—“Let your moderation be known to all men”, to which he had put the very practical addition—“in charges.” Upon the other side of the card he had paraphrased Oliver Wendell Holmes, as follows:

“Know old Charleston? Hope you do

Born there? Dont say so, I was too.

Born in a house with a shingle roof

Standing still, if you must have proof

And has stood for a century.”

“The Brown” or “Century Fellowship Society”, which occupied almost all of Holloway’s leisure thoughts, had been founded in 1790. In 1904 some ceremonies were enacted upon the occasion of the laying of a corner stone for the new hall, it was hoped later to erect.[281] The address of welcome was delivered by a venerable member, ninety-six years of age, and was very brief. The religious services were conducted by the rector of the oldest Episcopal Church in Charleston, himself a veteran of the Confederate war, who, as a major of engineers, had contributed greatly to the “Defense of Charleston Harbor,” the history of which, under such caption, as author, he had also preserved. There was an ode by a member of the Society, and an address by a member of the board of aldermen of the city, also an ex-Confederate soldier. But a review of the aims and aspirations of the Society by J. H. Holloway, throwing as it does a light upon the point of view of a class, not given to undue exposure of their opinions, was probably the most important utterance of the occasion.[282] He said:

“My first proposition is that our society was founded upon right principles, having as its foundation stone Charity and Benevolence, and its capstone social Purity. Environed as we have been by the varied conditions through which we have had to pass and to have survived one hundred and fourteen years, with a record no organization may be ashamed of, so we may well exclaim “To the Lord be all the praise.” Our guests today represent the conditions through which the Society has passed during the Century. On the one hand we have the dominant race and on the other we have the backward race. The first looked with a scrutinizing eye on our every movement, so as to charge us with being a disturbing element in the conditions that existed, and they made stringent legislative enactments; and the public sentiment of the masses was to discourage everything that our Society stood for; but fortunately there were the classes in society, and as our fathers allied themselves with them, as a consequence, they had their influence and protection and so they had to be in accord with them and stand for what they stood for. If they stood for close fellowship, so did our Fathers. If they stood for high incentive, so did our Fathers. If they stood for slavery, so did our Fathers, to a certain extent. But they sympathized with the oppressed, for they had to endure some of it, and fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and many times they had as individuals helped slaves to buy their freedom, and on one occasion our records prove that the Society loaned one of their members the money to purchase his family. Our Fathers were public spirited, for our records prove, that from 1811 to 1814 the Society was interested in the defense of Charleston. So under perplexing conditions our Society passed more than three score and ten years of existence until the war of the sixties and while their material prosperity was at stake, their sympathies were with the side that promised more liberties and larger opportunities; however, the members of the Society, not as an organization, but as individuals became the firemen to protect the city from flames caused at times by the shelling of the city. We have proof that some of the sons of our members wore the Blue, and at least one contributed his life blood for freedom at the charge of Battery Wagner under the lead of the brave Col. Shaw, of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and thus the blood of South Carolina and Massachusetts mingled as in the case of the Revolution.... The change of conditions after the War did not make any difference with our Society, they continued in the beaten path of Charity and Benevolence; but they still kept the compact close, feeling that the heritage of the Fathers was only dear to their children, and as we had three generations born since the organization, we could enjoy social equality among ourselves.... In conclusion I will say that we are not responsible for our birth, but God has placed us where we could best honor Him, and his command is—‘Honor thy Father and Mother that thy days may be long’. So we are honoring our Heavenly Father’s command in honoring our ancestry.”[283]

Had Holloway only lived to read the exposition of the subject—“The Negro in the New World”, which in 1910 appeared from the pen of the great English explorer and Negro character specialist, Sir Harry Johnston, he would have learned that:

“Money solves all human difficulties. It will buy you love, honor and respect, power and social standing.”[284]

Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency there was no reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Holloway evidently did not subscribe to the idea of Sir Harry Johnston as to the power of money to solve all human difficulties, for there were colored men of means in Charleston at the time. It was character, and particularly self control, that appealed to Holloway. His selection, therefore, was W. D. Crum, who had shown that he possessed characteristics very akin to those which Holloway had shown to be the ideals of the Century Fellowship Society, although Crum’s forbears had not been free persons of color before the War of Secession, a matter of importance to Holloway.

Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the benefit of the fiercely prejudiced English authors, who are unable to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s Nazareth.

James H. Fordham, 1891
Free Person of Color—South
Carolina, 1860

James H. Fordham, of the free persons of color before the war, held the position of a lieutenant on the police force of the city of Charleston, from 1874 to as late as 1896. He was a light quadroon, who might have been passed for a Spanish officer. Taciturn to a degree, he discharged the duties of his office thoroughly and conscientiously. Scarcely ever speaking, unless spoken to, and apparently never ruffling the white roundsmen under his command. Yet, in the longest speech he ever made, backed as it was by appropriate action, he evinced an understanding of, and devotion to the fundamental principles of democracy which, if appreciated by the great German people, might have saved them from the pains and penalties they are now undergoing for subjecting the world to the exigencies of military ambition.

The occasion of Fordham’s speech was an incident in 1891, occurring in one of those periodical struggles by which democracy in the United States perpetually renews its strength at the expense of officialdom. At the close of a warmly contested and close primary, the successful faction opposing the municipal administration in Charleston, found it difficult to bring the result in one ward to a count and decision. Impatient and suspicious, as the delay wore past midnight, a worthy but somewhat choleric individual, of the faction announced successful at every other point hours earlier, denounced the presence of the police in the poll where the delay was being maintained by the masterly inactivity of the administration manager.

One of the policemen on duty, ordinarily as amiable as he was strong and courageous, advanced toward the citizen and angrily challenged the accusation with the inquiry:

“What right have you to make charges against the police?”

Before the citizen could reply, the quadroon lieutenant sprang from his horse, pushed through the crowd and, placing himself between the two, the only colored man in a group of excited whites, firmly but quietly said to the policeman:

“What right has he to make charges against you? The right of any citizen, at any time to make charges against any policeman, and I am here to uphold that right.”[285]

It is useless to comment upon this incident; for, to any one who needed such, comment would be useless.

As an incident of the growth of caste feeling, twelve years later in the same locality, a mulatto policeman having arrested a drunken German for noisily quarreling with his wife upon the public streets was, upon the demand of the leading hyphenated politician of the city, dismissed from the force.

In the years which intervened between the events last narrated, the Democratic president, with regard to whom Dr. Washington had asserted that he possessed no color prejudice, had concluded his second term, made illustrious by the firm stand taken by him in the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute, which had been brought to his attention and fought to a decision,[286] against the extreme and arbitrary claims of Great Britain, by that almost forgotten Southerner, William L. Scruggs of Georgia.

Yet, despite the cloud in which this absolutely proper stand for justice between nations and maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine involved him for awhile, on account of the belittling comments of Anglophiles, Cleveland has passed into history as a strong president and a great man. He was succeeded in his high office by the gentlest mannered and sweetest tempered individual who has ever exhibited in such station the high personal traits which adorned the character of William McKinley.

Whatever these two men thought concerning the color question was no doubt discoverable; but it was not announced as a new gospel; for while great in spirit they were not noisily so. They were both great men. Cleveland, the Democrat, was greater in his public character and official achievements, the Republican, McKinley, in the personal integrity and absolute self abnegation which adorned his life and crowned his end. Cleveland opposed to malfeasance a rugged force, which did much to build up public integrity, lamentably lowered in Grant’s two terms. McKinley’s respect for law and order was so sincere, that in his dying moments he interposed to protect his assassin from the natural fury of the mob, thereby defending an anarchist from the outburst of anarchy which the vile deed occasioned, and giving, in his own suffering person, so interposing, the noblest appeal that could possibly be made against lynching.

The executive who succeeded McKinley was essentially different. No president of the United States has done as much as Mr. Roosevelt to wipe out distinctions between white and black. That he should have estranged Southern whites is not unnatural; that he should have aroused the enmity of Northern and Southern colored men discloses to what an extent the Negro is amenable to impulse rather than reason. Mr. Alfred Holt Stone has discussed three incidents which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s first term. Benjamin Brawley, a colored man, discusses the even more important incident which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s second term. In the first three Mr. Roosevelt held the centre of the stage, in the fourth, the Negroes were the actors, Mr. Roosevelt only responding. Mr. Stone treats the first three, in part, as follows:

“Three incidents marked the progress of the controversy which broke upon the country shortly after Roosevelt’s succession to the presidency. These were the Booker Washington dinner, the appointment of Crum, and the closing of the Indianola post office. There were four parties in interest—Mr. Roosevelt, the Southern press and people, the Northern press and people and the American Negro.... The President acted clearly within his ‘rights’ in each case. This point must be conceded without argument. The dinner episode was in itself no more than a matter of White House routine.... Within forty-eight hours, the President was being denounced for having crossed the social equality dead line through breaking bread with a negro.”[287]

According to Mr. Stone, the attitude of the South was one of general disapproval, the attitude of the Northern press a defence of the President. After a searching consideration of some fifty or more pages, in which Mr. McKinley’s attitude in distributing patronage is compared to that of Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Stone discusses the attitude of the Negroes. After taking up in turn various expressions by Professor Kelly Miller, Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois and Mr. William Pickens, Mr. Stone asks—“What then is the real meaning of their words?” Mr. Pickens says:

“—one side advises ‘quietly accept the imposition of inferiority. It is a lie but just treat it as the truth for the sake of peace. Diligently apply to the white man the title of gentleman, and care not if he persists in addressing you as he calls his horse and his dog. Be patient. This general disrespect and discrimination will develop into the proper respect and impartiality at some time in the long lapse of geological ages, just as the eohippus has developed into the race horse, and the ancestor of the baboon into a respectable Anglo-Saxon.’ The other side says, ‘I ask for nothing more or less than the liberty to associate with any free man who wishes to associate with me. Your colour discriminations, legal or not, are all damnable, inasmuch as they draw an artificial and heartless line, give encouraging suggestions to the vicious and allow the stronger in brute power to force bastardy upon the weaker without remedy. Colour has absolutely no virtue for me and however much I am outnumbered I will not retreat one inch from that principle. However little my position might affect savage opposition, by the God of your fathers and mine, I will never by voluntary act or word acknowledge as the truth what I know to be the grossest of lies. And you might ask all the truly valiant hearts of the world and the ages how they beat toward these contrary tenets.’”[288]

It is true this utterance was some five years later; but Mr. Stone thinks that—

“without the background of that Wednesday dinner at the White House, the canvass which subsequently absorbed and reflected such lurid colours would have given us an almost lifeless picture, as tame and dull as the usual afterglow of Southern appointments by Mr. Roosevelt’s predecessor.”[289]

To his discussion Mr. Stone appends the following interesting little note:

“The substance of this paper was embodied in an article submitted to several magazines while the Crum and Indianola incidents were being generally discussed throughout the country. The article was not found available.”[290]

In the same year that Mr. Pickens was declaring with fine oratorical fervor:

“Your colour discrimination, legal or not, are all damnable, inasmuch as they draw an artificial and heartless line, give encouraging suggestions to the vicious and allow the stronger in brute power to force bastardy upon the weaker without remedy.”[291]

—three Negro companies in the United States Army indicated, in their own way, their disapproval of these distinctions. The incident is treated by Mr. Benjamin Brawley, a colored writer of culture, as follows:

“In 1906 occurred an incident affecting the Negro in the army that received an extraordinary amount of attention in the public press. In August 1906 Companies B, C and D of the Twenty Fifth Regiment, United States Infantry were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas. On the night of the 13th took place a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed and another wounded and the Chief of Police injured. The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and on November 9th, President Roosevelt dismissed, without honor, the entire battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military or civil employ of the United States.”[292]

The author states, that, later, the civil disabilities were, by President Roosevelt, revoked and he exhibits the terms of a resolution in the Senate to investigate the matter; but the fact that the President’s action was sustained[293] apparently was not of sufficient importance to be made a matter of comment; nor the behavior of the soldiers.

The President’s comment at the time was eminently sane, just and commendable. He wrote:

“The fact that some of their number had been slighted by some of the citizens of Brownsville, though warranting criticism upon Brownsville, is not to be considered for a moment as a provocation for such a murderous assault. All the men of the companies concerned including their veteran non commissioned officers instantly banded together to shield the criminals. In other words they took action which cannot be tolerated in any soldiers black or white, in any policeman black or white, and which if taken generally in the army would mean not merely that the usefulness of the army was at an end, but that it had better be disbanded in its entirety at once.”[294]

The inability of even cultured Negroes to sympathize with the view of the President was their misfortune rather than their fault. It indicated that they lacked the elementary principle essential to the rulership of themselves, much less to the rulership of others.

It was not so much the amount of attention as the amazing attitude of the vast majority of Negroes capable of understanding what had occurred, which attended that attention. To the vast majority of Negroes, irrespective of rank, culture or professions of Christianity, there was something noble and manly in the behavior of “the veteran non-commissioned officers”, so absolutely repugnant to the practical politician Roosevelt, a high type of white. The inability of the succeeding occupant of the highest office in this country, genial in disposition, liberal in view; but yet unable to appreciate the flaming zeal and prompt action, with which a real leader of a free people meets such behavior in armed underlings, marks a certain weakness in that Northern white. Such weakness coupled as it was with the behavior of such public men as Senator Foraker did much to produce the deplorable incident ten years later so properly stamped with executive disapproval and inevitable punishment to the last degree.

It is quite possible and to some degree probable that weak and vicious comments on Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter had something to do with the Houston riot. The comment also affected the Southern white man profoundly in his attitude to colored soldiers and policemen.