The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

VI

To ascertain which is the correct view it might be well at this point to examine the history of the Negro and his capacity as a citizen.

In discussing this matter we are fortunately not relegated to the shadowy and uncertain domain of mere theory; the argument may be based on the firm and assured foundation of actual experience.

In the first place, whatever a sentimental philanthropy may say; whatever a modern and misguided humanitarianism may declare, there underlies the whole matter the indubitable, potent, and mysterious principle of race quality. Ethnologically, historically, congenitally, the white race and the Negro differ widely.

Slavery will not alone account for it all. In the recorded experience of mankind slavery—mere slavery—has not repressed intelligence; the bonds of the person, however tightly drawn, have not served to shackle the mind. Slavery existed among the Greeks, the Romans, the Phœnicians, among our own ancestors of the Teuton race: slavery as absolute, as inexorable as ever was African slavery. Indeed, under some of those systems there was absolute chattel slavery, which never existed with us, for the Greek and the Roman possessed over their slaves the absolute power of life and death; they might slay them as an exhibition for their guests, or might cast them into their fish-ponds as food for their lampreys.

Yet under these systems, differentiated from African slavery by the two conditions of race similarity and intellectual potentiality, slaves attained not unfrequently to high position, and from them issued some of the most notable literary productions of those times. Æsop, Terence, Epictetus the Stoic were slaves. These and many more have proved that where the intellectual potentiality exists it will burst through the encumbering restraints of servitude, and establish the truth that bondage cannot enthrall the mind.

What of value to the human race has the Negro mind as yet produced? In art, in mechanical development, in literature, in mental and moral science, in all the range of mental action, no notable work has up to this time come from a Negro.

In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.

It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of any intellectual development. On the contrary, observation has led me to think that under certain conditions of intellectual environment, of careful training, and of sympathetic encouragement from the stronger races he may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development. To deny this is to deny the highest attribute of the intellectual essence, and is to shut the door of hope upon a race of God’s human creatures to whom I give my sympathy and my good-will. But the incontestable proof is that such cases of intellectual development are exceptional instances, and that after long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.

Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the influence and by the assistance of the stronger race. Where these have been wanting, whatever other conditions have existed, he has sensibly and invariably reverted toward the original type. Liberia, Hayti, Congo, are all in one line.

His history on his native continent is pregnant with suggestion. As far as the East is from the West, Negro-Africa is from the land of civilization. Generations have come and gone; centuries have followed centuries; peoples have succeeded peoples; nations have been grafted on nations, more and more crowned with the sunlight of progress and of civilization; but no faintest beam has ever pierced the impenetrable gloom of the “Dark Continent,” and the last African explorer’s latest book is “Darkest Africa.”

This has not been because opportunity has been wanting. Civilization first lit her golden torch upon her borders. The swelling waters of the Nile spread through a lettered and partly enlightened people when the Tiber crept through swamps and wilderness; when the Acropolis was a wild, and the seven hills of the Eternal City a range for wolves, Thebes and Memphis and Heliopolis contained a civilization which in some of its manifestations has never been equalled since. Rome stretched across the Mediterranean, and sent her civilizing power along the northern shore of the continent; and later, the Moors possessed a civilization there which is yet a marvel even to our race. In that record which all Christendom holds as its cherished possession we catch glimpses of a commerce and even of a civilization situate somewhere within the boundaries of Africa, and meeting with that of the greatest monarch of the time. The curtain suddenly lifts and we get a view all the more dazzling, because so mysterious, of a queen of Ethiopia coming with wonderful gifts to visit Solomon himself.

Since then civilization has swept triumphant over a large part of the earth. Only the land of the Negro has never yielded to her illumining and vivifying influence. The Roman has succeeded the Greek; the Gaul and the Frank have risen on the Roman; the Teuton, the Saxon, and the Celt have surpassed the Gaul. Only in Negro-Africa has barbarism held unbroken rule, and savagery maintained perpetual domain.

Stanley, Ward, Glave, and Emin Pasha found but a few years since the great Congo country as barbarous, as savage, as cannibal, as it was five thousand years ago, province preying on province, and village feeding on village, as debased and brutish as the beasts of the jungle about them.

But it is not only in Africa that the Negro has exhibited the absence of the essential qualities of a progressive race. It is everywhere. Since the dawn of history, the Negro has been in one place or another, in Egypt, in Rome, in other European countries, brought in contact with civilization, yet he has failed to receive the vitalizing current under which other races have risen in greater or less degree.