The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

II

The chief difficulty in the solution of the question exists in the different views held as to it by the two sections. They do not understand it alike. They stand as widely divided as to it to-day as they stood forty years ago. Their ultimate interests are identical; their present interests are not very widely divergent. Their opposite attitudes as to it must, therefore, be due to error somewhere. One or the other section must be in error as to it; possibly neither may be exactly right.

This much we know and can assert: there must be an absolutely right position. It is imperatively necessary that we find it; for on our discovery of it and our planting ourselves firmly on it depends our security. If we have not found it the sooner we realize that fact the better for us and for those that shall come after us; if we have found it the sooner we make it understood the better.

One thing is certain, there is no security in silence; no safety in inaction. If fifty million Negroes, or even a much smaller number, are to come with San Domingo and the French Revolution in their train, the white race has need to awake and bestir itself.

The recent census has happily showed that Senator Hoar and others like him have over-estimated the ratio of increase.[66] But the problem is grave enough as it is.

The first step to be taken is to turn the light on the subject. Let it be examined, measured, comprehended, and then dealt with as shall be found to be just and right. The old method of crimination and defiance will no longer avail; we must deal with the question calmly, rationally, philosophically. We must abandon all untenable positions whatsoever, place ourselves on the impregnable ground of right, and then whatever may befall meantime, we can calmly await the inevitable justification of events.

In the first place, let us disembarrass ourselves by discarding all irrelevant and extraneous questions. Putting aside all mere prejudice whatever, whether springing from the Negro’s former condition of servitude or from other causes, let us base our argument on facts and the final issue cannot be doubtful.

Whatever prejudice may exist, a constant, firm, and philosophic presentation of the facts of the case must in the end establish the truth, and secure the right remedy. The spirit of civilization must overcome at last, and whatever obstacles it shall encounter, right must eventually triumph.

The North deems the pending question merely one of the enforcement or subversion of an elective franchise law; it has never accepted the proposition that it is a great race question on which hinges the preservation of the Union, the security of the people, white and black alike, and the progress of American civilization. Perhaps no clearer or more authoritative exposition of the views held by the North on this question can be found than that set forth in a recent address by Mr. G. W. Cable delivered before the Massachusetts Club of Boston on the 22d of February, 1890. The favor with which it was received by the class to whom it was delivered testifies not the hostility of that class, but the extent to which the question is misunderstood in that section.

Mr. Cable, after negativing the Southern idea of the question, declares: “The problem is whether American citizens shall not enjoy equal rights in the choice of their rulers. It is not a question of the Negro’s right to rule. It is simply a question of their right to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably do so now.” This is quoted with approval by even so liberal and well-informed a thinker as the Rev. Henry M. Field, who certainly bears only good-will to the South, as to the rest of mankind. The indorsement of these views by such a man proves that the North absolutely misapprehends the true question which confronts the nation at this time. It has from constant iteration accepted as facts certain statements such as those quoted, and these constitute its premises, on which it bases all its reasoning and all its action.

The trouble is that its first premise is fallacious. Its teachers, its preachers, its writers, its orators, its philosophers, its politicians, have with one voice, and that a mighty voice, been for a hundred years instilling into its mind the uncontradicted doctrine that the South brought the Negro here and bound him in slavery; that the South kept the Negro in slavery; that to perpetuate this enormity the South plunged the nation in war, and attempted to destroy the Union; that the South still desires the reëstablishment of slavery, and that meantime it oppresses the Negro, defies the North, and stands a constant menace to the Union.

The great body of the Northern people, bred on this food, never having heard any other relation, believes this implicitly, and all the more dangerously because honestly. If they are wrong and we right it behooves us to enlighten them.

There are, without doubt, some whom nothing can enlighten; who would not believe though one rose from the dead. They are not confined to one latitude. There are, with equal certainty, others who for place and profit trade in their brother’s blood, and keep open the wounds which peace, but for them, would long ago have healed; who for a mess of pottage would sell the birthright of the nation. The professional Haman can never sleep while Mordecai so much as sits at the gate; but we can have an abiding faith in the ultimate good sense and sound principles of the great Anglo-Saxon race wherever it may dwell; and to this we must address ourselves.

The second thing necessary to the solution of the question is to enlighten the people of the North. If we can show that the question is not, as Mr. Cable states and as the North believes, merely whether the Negro shall or shall not have the right to choose his ruler, but is a great race question on which depends the future as well as the present salvation of the nation, we need have no fear as to the ultimate result; sound sense and right judgment will prevail.

That there exists a race question of some sort must be apparent to every person who passes through the South. Where six millions of people of one color and one race live in contact with twelve millions of another color and race, there must, of necessity, be a race issue. The Negro has not behaved unnaturally: he has, indeed, in the main behaved well; but the race issue exists and grows. The feeling has not yet reached the point of personal hostility—at least on the part of the Whites; but as the older generation which knew the tie between master and servant passes away, the race feeling is growing intenser. The Negro becomes more assertive, the White more firm.