CHAPTER XIII
The American Historical Association founded about 1889 has accomplished a great work in purifying the sources from which history has been drawn. It has stimulated the study of history and has afforded the field and opportunity for effort. By the Act of Incorporation it shall report annually its proceedings and the condition of historical study in America, to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, who shall communicate to Congress the whole of such reports or such portion thereof as he shall see fit.
In the year 1909, the President of the Association, invited, from certain selected individuals, papers on the Negro question limited to 1800 words, for one of the sessions of the Association. This was a limitation which every white person accepting should have scrupulously observed and no one should have accepted who was not willing to exert himself seriously. Yet the tendency of not a few whites to allow themselves always a little playfulness whenever discussing this subject seems ineradicable. To the one colored scholar, who accepted the invitation, the occasion afforded an opportunity not to be permitted to slip by unimproved, and with admirable nerve, he selected the darkest decade discernible in the consideration of the subject, as disclosed in the history of the United States, and addressed himself to a discussion of “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” in a paper of about 10,000 words.
In the disregard which he thereby showed of the terms of his invitation he was justified by his color and his brains and the merit of his work won for him the widest dissemination of his view. Like Sir Harry Johnston’s more elaborate book it is polemical; but superior in taste and style, being free from the little querelous snarls with which the Englishman garnished his treatise; for if there were sneers in DuBois’s exposition they were couched in language which passes muster among well bred people; while the fact that he was in reality an advocate, with a brief to maintain, accorded him license for such.
The opening could hardly be improved upon by any special pleader.
Writing in 1909, he declares:
“There is danger today that between the intense feeling of the South and the conciliatory spirit of the North grave injustice will be done the Negro American in the history of Reconstruction. Those who see in Negro suffrage the cause of the main evils of Reconstruction must remember that if there had not been a single freedman left in the South after war the problems of Reconstruction would still have been grave. Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement—a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization. Add to all this the presence of four million freedmen and the situation is further complicated.”[324]
That the training and the treatment of these ex-slaves became a central problem of Reconstruction, he admits; yet claims that three agencies, the Negro church; the Negro school and the Freedmen’s Bureau undertook the solution, without which, he maintains, it would have been far graver. But he absolutely disregards that product of ante-bellum Southern civilization then in the South, 132,819[325] free persons of color, many of whom were morally and mentally well fitted for what the Black Codes designed to give them, the suffrage. This element of the Southern population together with the majority of the House slaves would have probably furnished a base of about ten per cent of the total Negro population on which the new civilization would have been reared, had the South been permitted to test its plan. Having declared that the economic condition of the eleven States at the close of the war was “pitiable, their fear of Negro freedom genuine,” Dr. DuBois maintains, “yet it was reasonable to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction toward slavery.”
Admitting that:
“To some extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the Negro.”[326]—
he promptly contradicts his own admission, with the assertion:
“The Codes spoke for themselves. They have often been reprinted and quoted. No open minded student can read them without being convinced that they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.”[327]
Is this true? Can any student be absolutely open minded? A seer is a receiver and revealer of truths. Such a being can possibly approach the consideration of a subject with an open mind. One may imagine Socrates so approaching a subject; but by what process, by what mental cathartic, does one, who studies, divest his mind of all preconceived ideas of the subject every time he considers a theory concerning that which has interested him sufficiently to lead him to seek to know more of it?
No, the vast mass of us approach those subjects, when we are sincerely desirous of truth in the spirit of that individual who exclaimed to Christ—“Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” When the broken, beaten South attempted to frame the Codes, which no Negro has ever been able to consider judicially, the survivors could not possibly approach the condition they were in with an open mind. The greatest mind that has ever considered our great experiment in government, the French student De Tocqueville and that strong but shallower mind, that for so many years had with its resolutions overshadowed all others in the South, united in the dictum. Abolition means Africanization for the South. But the whites of the South were to a great extent British and Northern Irish in stock. They were eminently conservative. A stock greater in defeat than in victory, as history has shown the British to be.
To obtain additional strength with which to withstand the flood of ignorance and incompetence let loose or about to break loose, they accepted the leadership of the poor white Andrew Johnson, despite the repugnance they felt for him, as keen and lively as any Englishman ever felt for Joe Chamberlain or Lloyd George or Ramsay McDonald. They did more. As far as legislation could affect it, they extended social equality to the least darkened of the dark race by which they were surrounded. The political principle, upon which they sought to adjust themselves to the changed condition, was based apparently upon the thought that if all the Southern whites and that proportion of the Colored population constituting about one-tenth, reasonably the most elevated in the minds of the theorists, from the fact that they closest approached the whites in physical texture, united, such union must strengthen the rulers even as it weakened the ruled. Dr. DuBois therefore is quite wrong when he intimates with some generosity, that the Black Codes were framed under hasty excitement, in declaring:
“To be sure it was not a time to look for calm, cool, thoughtful action on the part of the white South.”[328]
No, whatever may eventually be found to be the character of the Black Codes of the beaten South, they bear upon their faces the imprint of cool, calm, thoughtful action. Even the most cursory consideration of them will disclose that they were framed more for the irresponsible freedman than the freedmen in general; for instance, if the freedman owned a farm or had a permit, the possession of gun, pistol or sword, otherwise forbidden, was not denied. On the other hand the inhibition of the right of sale or barter of domestic produce did not apply to the Negro generally; but to the servant under contract with a master engaged in husbandry, and not even then, if the servant had written evidence from such master, or from a person authorized by him, or from a District Judge, whose oath specifically required him to do what was required by law “without prejudice for or against color.”[329] In addition the servant was given the right to—
“Depart from the master’s service for an insufficient supply of wholesome food; for an unauthorized battery upon his own person or one of his family, not committed in defense of the person, family, guests or agents of the master, nor to prevent a crime or aggravated misdemeanor.”[330]
The law went further. It gave the servant the right of departure coupled with the right to recover wages due for service rendered up to the time of his departure, for any—
“invasion of the conjugal rights of the servant, or his (employer’s) failure to pay wages when due.”[331]
And not even the death of the master terminated the contract, without the assent of the servant, for the enforcement of which the servant had a lien as high as rent. And when wrongfully discharged the servant was entitled to recover wages for the whole period of service, according to the contract.[332]
That the master was given the right to administer corporal punishment to the servant under some conditions cannot be denied; but the phraseology of the South Carolina Act is:
“The master may moderately correct servants who have made contracts and are under eighteen years of age”—[333] but it also commanded:
“It shall also be his duty to protect his servant from violence by others in his presence.”[334]
Yet it specifically provided that:
“Corporal punishment is intended to include only such modes of punishment, not affecting life or limb, as are used in the army or navy of the United States, adapted in kind and degree to the nature of the offense.”[335]
Finally, not to prolong the discussion, when we note that the servant was not liable civilly or criminally for any act done by the command of the master, for any tort on the master’s premises[336] and that the former slave holder was not permitted to dispossess the non paying helpless former slave, for a year and a month from the occupancy of dwellings belonging to the former master, but occupied without any return by the former slave,[337] and what elaborate provisions in detail were made for the care of such in his or her helpless condition, we will find that we look in vain in England, old or New, for such humanitarian legislation, at this date. Why then were the Codes overthrown? Dr. DuBois is prejudiced and naturally so. He is not as well informed as he deems himself to be; but he desires to be fair and just; and so we have from this, the most cultured member of the colored race in the United States, the real reason for “Reconstruction and its Benefits.”
“The difficulties that stared Reconstruction politicians in the face were these: (a) They must act quickly. (b) Emancipation had increased the political power of the South by one sixth; could this increased political power be put in the hands of those, who in defense of slavery had disrupted the Union?”[338]
So, the terrific losses, which he himself itemizes were not enough. The beaten South was to be manacled. And how does he picture the victors in that dreadful hour?
“There might have been less stealing in the South during Reconstruction without negro suffrage but 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. This was the day when a national secretary of war was caught stealing, a Vice President presumably took bribes, a private Secretary of the President, a chief clerk of the Treasury and eighty-six government officials stole millions in the whisky frauds, while the Credit Mobilier filched fifty millions and bribed the government to an extent never revealed; not to mention less distinguished thieves like Tweed.”[339]
Remember this is not a Southerner, black or white; but the most cultured of Northern colored men, who so describes the conquering East from which he sprang.
It is scarcely possible to state more comprehensively in less space than that in which Dr. DuBois describes the effects of Congressional Reconstruction:
“When incompetency gains political power in an extravagant age the result is widespread dishonesty.”[340]
But he palliates this with the following:
“The dishonesty in the Reconstruction of the South was helped on by three circumstances:
1. The former dishonesty of the political South.
2. The presence of many dishonest Northern politicians.
3. The temptation to Southern politicians at once to profit by the dishonesty and to discredit Negro government.
4. The poverty of the negro.”[341]
He fails to furnish any authorized evidence of the first; but the three last should be accepted as in some degree exculpatory of the Negroes.
There is something almost pathetic in Dr. DuBois’s description of the Negroes’ contribution to Reconstruction:
“Undoubtedly there were many ridiculous things connected with Reconstruction governments: the placing of ignorant field hands who could neither read nor write in the Legislature, the golden spitoons of South Carolina, the enormous printing bill of Mississippi—all these were extravagant and funny, and yet somehow to one who sees beneath all that is bizarre, the real human tragedy of the upward striving of down-trodden men, the groping for light among people born in darkness, there is less tendency to laugh and gibe than among shallower minds and easier consciences. All that is funny is not bad.”[342]
And this he follows with what he means to be an indictment:
“—the greatest stigma on the white South is not that it opposed Negro suffrage and resented theft and incompetence, but that when it saw the reform movement growing and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger & a 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.”[343]
When we reflect that the Confederate generals, Wade Hampton, Kershaw and McGowan, as has been shown, all supported the revolt of Delany, Cain and William Hannibal Thomas, against Chamberlain and R. B. Elliott in 1874 in South Carolina, and that in the columns of “The Crisis,” today, Elliott is eulogized as a great representative of the colored race; while no mention has ever appeared of those two Northern Negroes who most conspicuously opposed the evils of Reconstruction, Martin Delany and William Hannibal Thomas, we can only acquit Dr. DuBois of insincerity on the ground of rank carelessness and immovable prejudice.
The summing up of this very interesting defense of Reconstruction and plea for the Negroes as lawmakers is unquestionably an able presentation:
“Reconstruction constitutions practically unaltered were kept in:
Florida, 1868-1885 17 years
Virginia, 1870-1902 32 years
South Carolina, 1868-1895 27 years
Mississippi, 1868-1890 22 years
Even in the case of States like Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana, which adopted new constitutions to signify the overthrow of Negro rule, the new constitutions are nearer the model of the Reconstruction document than they are to the previous constitutions. They differ from the Negro Constitution in minor details, but very little in general conception. Besides this there stands on the statute books of the South today law after law passed between 1868 and 1876 and which has been found wise effective and worthy of preservation. Paint the carpet bag governments and Negro rule as black as may be, the fact remains that the essence of the revolution which the overturning of the Negro Governments made was to put these black men and their friends out of power. Outside of the curtailing of expenses and stopping of extravagance, not only did their successors make few changes in the work which these Legislatures and Conventions had done, but they largely carried out their plans, followed their suggestions, and strengthened their institutions. Practically the whole new growth of the South has been accomplished under laws which black men helped to frame thirty years ago. I know of no greater compliment to Negro suffrage.”[344]
It would be idle to deny that these Reconstruction constitutions were other than most effective.
William Hannibal Thomas, who might be fitly described as in charge of the rear guard when the Negro government fell in South Carolina and who has criticised the Black Codes even more severely than Dr. DuBois, states:
“The Constitutions of the Reconstructed States were framed by white men under the direction and with the approval of the best legal intelligence of America.”[345]
They were framed to complete the conquest of the overthrown States, Dr. Dodd puts it thus:
“The cause of the planters had gone down in irretrievable disaster. For forty years they had contended with their rivals of the North, and having staked all on the wager of battle they had lost. Just four years before they had entered with unsurpassed zeal and enthusiasm upon the gigantic task of winning their independence. They had made the greatest fight in history up to that time. Lost the flower of their manhood and wealth untold. They now renewed once and for all time their allegiance to the Union, which had up to that time been an experiment, a government of uncertain powers. More than three hundred thousand lives and not less than four billions of dollars had been sacrificed in the fight of the South. The planter culture, the semi-feudalism of the ‘Old South’ was annihilated, while the industrial and financial system of the East was triumphant. The cost to the North had been six hundred thousand lives and an expense to the governments, State and National, of at least five billion dollars. But the East was the mistress of the United States, and the social and economic ideals of that section were to be stamped permanently upon the country.”[346]
The war having ended in a complete conquest of the South and a sentimental control of the vigorous West, expanded by the East as it exploited the broken South; through the destruction of the codes and the imposition of Congressional Reconstruction, the whites of the South were welded into a new mass, cruder and tougher and not unnaturally quite inimical to the Negro who had been made to rule over them, until by revolutionary methods they had overthrown such. That they, the Negroes, and the Western whites had all been subjected to the control of the East as thoroughly as economic laws could subject them to it, was not for decades appreciated in the South or West.
Had Lincoln not been assassinated and had he remained true to his Western ideals, he would have been broken on the wheel of capitalism as relentlessly as was his great Southern successor, who struck down Germany in her hour of triumph. But Lincoln was spared that test and died without realizing the entire measure of his service to the Union and the whites who inhabited it; for to him the Negroes were a negligible quantity, despite all the phrases with which he utilized them, in his purpose of preserving the Union. Indeed it was not until the fountains of the great deep were broken in the World War, that the inevitable consequences of emancipation forced themselves upon public opinion, and, in this connection, a small episode, of the above related meeting of the American Historical Association in 1909, throws some light upon the state of mind of the East at that date.
At the same meeting in which Dr. DuBois read his bold, elaborate and interesting defense of Congressional Reconstruction, the author of this study submitted, on request, a paper on the Negro question, in accordance with the limitations, which, while accepted and edited for publication by the Board, was not permitted publication in the Report of the Historical Association, Mr. Charles D. Walcott having the power to exclude it from such, and using the power. That the skeleton piece of 1750 words was to some slight degree critical of the East is not to be denied; but if the Eastern scholars rose above their prejudices when presented with truth why could not the official? The gist of the little paper when printed does not appear very inflammatory.
“Says a distinguished Northern writer—‘The North is learning every day by valuable experiences that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races.’ Certainly nothing has afforded such an opportunity for the North to acquire these valuable experiences day by day, as the diffusion of the Negroes throughout the Union. Meanwhile as the masses in the South are reduced the Negroes will not constitute, to the degree they now do, the criminal class; their good qualities must become more noticeable and their bad ones excite less that intense or contemptuous regard, which has, in the minds of many Southern men, made Negro and criminal almost synonymous terms. The war made the Negro question a national question, and it is too late to say—‘the man of the South must be trusted to work out this (the evolution of the Negro race to higher conditions) in his own good time’ and that ‘he is charged with the burden and must bear it.’ That is a sectional attitude just to neither the Negro nor the white man of the South. In time and with greatly reduced numbers of the Negroes about him, the Southern white man may change the view, which inheritance of ideas almost forces him to hold, viz., that the Negro is essentially servile; but that is his sentiment today; and while, therefore, he may be best fitted to rule him as such, he is not constituted to assist him in the evolution to a higher condition. As they spread out, the Negroes must come more and more in contact with all grades of our civilization and from such draw the lessons best adapted to their own development. The sentiment therefore, which would deny them this; which would seek to confine the masses to the South, deciding for them that it is their natural home and having but little sympathy for them beyond the pale, is in my opinion, the greatest obstacle to their advancement and, to some degree, a cause of moral deterioration of the higher race.”[347]
But while Dr. DuBois and the author of this study, in response to the invitation of Dr. Hart, before the historians of the United States were discussing, each in his own way, a subject they thought of some importance, it is of interest to consider what was occupying the mind of the wisest and most neglected Negro in the United States, at the same time. About the same date William Hannibal Thomas wrote to the author of this study:
“It has long been my dream to see all the railroads under one management. Therefore had I the influence and cooperation of others, I would procure a charter from the Congress of the United States creating a National Railway Company capitalized at fifteen billion of dollars and empowered to issue bonds for a like amount. Five great subdivisions would be created. All south of the Potomac river and east of the Mississippi would constitute the Southern division. New England the Eastern division. New York and the states north and east of the Mississippi, would form the central division. Westward of that great river there would be a northern and southern Pacific division. Such in brief is the scheme I have in mind and, as an economical factor in National uplift, I know of but one other thing that would surpass it.”[348]
We might measure the scope of this Negro’s dream in the autumn of 1909, by the following news item of April 17, 1923, which apparently was only another dream:
“Legislation to make affective the plans being worked out by the interstate commerce commission for consolidation and regional supervision of the railroad systems of the country will be undertaken in the next Congress, Chairman Cummins of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee said today, after a discussion of the railroad problem with President Harding—‘I think consolidation for the railway system as initiated in the transportation act is the only means of gaining the efficiency that the country requires of the railroads,’ said Senator Cummins. Moreover it seems to me to be the only method of bringing down freight rates on commodities on which the rate must be lowered.”[349]
Whatever difference of opinion may exist amongst railway experts as to the merits of the legislation concerning railroads which the Iowa senator has made his name synonymous with, few doubt his knowledge. Yet he would seem to be just about fourteen years behind the neglected Ohio Negro, whose opportunities were restricted to two sessions of the South Carolina legislature in Reconstruction days. Is there anything that has ever been resolved with regard to railroads better calculated to serve the general public, than that introduced by Thomas, when opposing the most brilliant of the Carpet Baggers, Daniel H. Chamberlain, in 1874?—
“VIII. We hold that all franchises granted by the State should be subservient to the public good; that charges for travel and freight should be equitable and uniform and no unjust discrimination be made between through and local travel.”[350]
Both conventions had to subscribe to that; but if it represented the views of Daniel H. Chamberlain, the Reformers under Thomas and others must be credited with some influence in turning him from his earlier views on railroads, when he was the legal guardian of the State.
Observe him, fresh from the East.
“Office of the Attorney General,
Columbia, S. C. January 5, 1870.
My dear Kimpton: Parker arrived last evening and spoke of the G. & C. matter, etc. I told him I had just written you fully on that matter and also about the old Bk. bills. Do you understand fully the plan of the G. & C. enterprise? It is proposed to buy $350,000 worth of the G. & C. Stock. This with $433,000 of stock held by the State, will give entire control to us. The Laurens branch will be sold in February by decree of court and will cost not more than $50,000 and probably not more than $40,000. The Spartanburg and Union can also be got without difficulty. We shall then have in G. & C. 168 miles, in Laurens, 31, and in S. & U. 70 miles—in all 269 miles—equipped and running—put a first mortgage of $20,000 a mile—sell the bonds at $85 or $90, and the balance, after paying all outlays for cost and repairs, is immense, over $2,000,000. There is a mint of money in this or I am a fool. Then we will soon compel the S. C. R. R. to fall into our hands and complete the connection to Asheville, N. C. There is an infinite verge of expansion of power before us. Write me fully and tell me every thing you want done. My last letter was very full. Harrison shall be attended to at once. I don’t think Neagle will make any trouble. Parker hates Neagle, and magnifies his intentions.
Yours truly,
D. H. Chamberlain”[351]
What a terrible indictment of the Negro intelligentsia is their utter neglect of William Hannibal Thomas, the great Negro who could think of something more than himself and his race, who wished to serve humanity at large.