The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

I

TO any calm observer of the present condition of our country painfully apparent must be the difference between the state of what from long usage we are accustomed to term “the two sections.”

We have one blood, one language, one religion, one common end, one government; but the North and the South are still “the two sections,” as they were one hundred years ago, when the bands of the Constitution were hardly cooled from the welding, or as they were in 1860, when they stood, armed to the teeth, facing each other, and the cloud of revolution was hovering above them soon to burst in the dread thunder of civil war.

Should one, hearing the phrase “the two sections,” take the map of the American Union and study its salient features, he would declare that “the two sections” were by natural geographical division the East and the West; should he study the commerce of the country with its vast currents and tides, its fields of agriculture and manufacture, he would be impelled to declare that by all the inexorable laws of interest they were the East and the West. And yet, we who stand amid the incontestable evidences of events know that against all laws, against all reason, against all right, there are two sections of this country, and they are not the East and the West, but the South and the rest of the Union.

It is proposed to show briefly why this unhappy condition exists; and to suggest a few things which, if earnestly considered and patiently advocated, may, in the providence of God, contribute to the solution of the distressing difficulties which confront us.

The divergence of the “two sections” was coeval with the planting of the continent; it preceded the establishment of the nation. It steadily increased until an irrepressible conflict became inevitable; and it was not until after this conflict had spent itself that reconcilement became possible.

The causes of that divergence, with the exception of one, it is not necessary to discuss here. This one has survived even the cauterization of war. Other causes have passed away. The right of secession is no longer an active issue. It has been adjudicated. That it once existed and was utilized on occasion by other States than those which actually exercised it is undeniable; that it passed away with the Confederate armies at Appomattox is equally beyond controversy. The very men who once asserted it and shed their blood to establish it, would now, while still standing by the rightness of their former position, admit that in the light of altered conditions the Union is no longer dissoluble. They are ready if need be to maintain the fact. It is, however, important to make it clear that the right did exist, because on this depends largely the South’s place in history. Without this we were mere insurgents and rebels; with it, we were a great people in revolution for our rights. In 1861 the South stood aligned against the Union and apparently for the perpetuation of slavery. The sentiment of the whole world was against it. We were defeated, overwhelmed. Unless we possess strength sufficient to maintain ourselves even in the face of this, the verdict of posterity will be against us. It is not unlikely that in fifty years the defence of slavery will be deemed the world over to have been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to have been. There is but one way to prevent the impending disaster: by establishing the real fact, that, whatever may have been the immediate and apparent occasion, the true and ultimate cause of the action of the South was her firm and unwavering adherence to the principle of self-government and her jealous devotion to her inalienable rights.

But if the other causes which kept the country divided have passed away as practical issues, one still survives and is, under a changed form, as vital to-day and as pregnant with evil as it was in 1861.

This is the question which ever confronts the South; the question which after twenty-five years of peace and prosperity still keeps the South “one section” and the rest of the nation the other. This is the ever-present, ever-menacing, ever-growing Negro Question.

It is to-day the most portentous as it is the most dangerous problem which confronts the American people.

The question is so misunderstood that even the terminology for it in the two sections varies irreconcilably. The North terms it simply the question of the civil equality of all citizens before the law; the South denominates it the question of Negro domination. More accurately it should be termed the Race Question.

Whatever its proper title may be, upon its correct solution depend the progress and the security, if not the very existence, of the American people.

In order that it may be solved it is necessary, first, that its real gravity shall be understood, and its true difficulties apprehended.

We have lived in quietude so long, and have become so accustomed to the condition of affairs, that we are sensible of no apprehension, but rest in the face of this as of other dangers, content and calm. So rest Alpine dwellers who sleep beneath masses of snow which have accumulated for years, yet which, quiet as they appear upon the mountain-sides above, may at any time without warning, by the mere breaking of a twig or the fall of a pebble, be transformed into the resistless and overwhelming avalanche.

There are signs of impending peril about us.

There is, first, the danger incident to the exigence under which the South has stood, of wresting if not of subverting the written law to what she deems the inexorable exactions of her condition.

It is often charged that the written law is not fully and freely observed at the South in matters relating to the exercise of the elective franchise. The defence is not so much a denial of the charge as it is a confession and avoidance. To the accusation it is replied that the written law, when subverted at all, is so subverted only in obedience to a higher law founded on the instinct of self-protection and self-preservation.

If it be admitted that this is true, is it nothing to us that a condition exists which necessitates the subversion of any law? Is it not an injury to our people that the occasion exists which places them in conflict with the law, and compels them to assert the existence of a higher duty? Can law be overridden without creating a spirit which will override law? a spirit ready to constitute itself the judge of what shall and what shall not be considered law; a spirit which eventually substitutes its will for law and confounds its interest with right? Is it a small matter that our people or any part of them should be compelled, by any exigency whatever, to go armed at any time in any place in defiance of law?

This is a grave matter and is to be considered with due deliberation; for on its right solution much depends. The first step toward cure is ever comprehension of the disease. The first step toward the proper solution of our trouble is to secure a perfect comprehension of it. To do this we must first comprehend it ourselves, then only can we hope to enlighten others.

Obedience to law, willing and invariable submission to law, is one of the highest qualities of a nation, and one of the chief promoters of national elevation. Antagonism to law, a spirit which rejects the restraints of law, depraves the individual conscience and retards national progress.

Can any fraud, evasion, or contrivance whatever be practised or connived at, without by so much impairing the moral sense and character of a people as well as of an individual? Can any deflection whatsoever, no matter how inexorable the occasion, from the path of absolute rectitude be tolerated without inflicting an injury on that sense of justice and right, which, allied to unflinching courage, constitutes a nation’s virtue? Who will say that the moral sense of our people now is as lofty as it was in the days of our fathers, when men voted with uplifted faces for the candidate of their choice?

The press of a portion of the land is filled with charges of injuries to the Negro. The real injury is not to him, but to the White. From opposition to law to actual lawlessness is but a step. This then is the first danger.

The physical peril from the overcrowding among our people of an ignorant and hostile race is not more real than this which threatens our moral rectitude; but it is more apparent.

Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on the 23d of February, 1889, in speaking of the South, said:

“I make these remarks with full knowledge of the difficult problem that awaits us, and the problem that especially concerns our friends south of Mason and Dixon’s line; but I remember when I make them that the person hears the sound of my voice this moment who, in his lifetime, will see fifty million Negroes dwelling in those States.”

Can language paint in stronger colors the peril which confronts us? The senator went on to depict the evils which might ensue. “If you go on,” he said, “with these methods which are reported to us on what we deem pretty good evidence, you are sowing in the breast of that race a seed from which is to come a harvest of horror and blood, to which the French Revolution or San Domingo is light in comparison.”

Senator Hoar, like most others of his latitude, thinks that he knows the Negro, and understands the pending question. He does not. Had he understood the true gravity of that problem, his cheek, as he caught the echo of his own words, would have blanched at the thought of the peril he is transmitting to his children and grandchildren; not the peril, perhaps, of fire and massacre, but a peril as deadly, the peril of contamination from the overcrowding of an inferior race. All other evils are but corollaries; the evil of race-conflict, though not so awful as the French Revolution or San Domingo; the evil of growing armies with their menace to liberty; the evil of race-degeneration from enforced and constant association with an inferior race: these are some of the perils which spring from that state of affairs and confront us. At one more step they confront the rest of the Anglo-American people to-day. For the only thing that stands to-day between the people of the North and the Negro is the people of the South. The time may come when the only thing that will stand between the Negro and the people of the North will be the people of the South.