TWO MEN WHO HAVE THRILLED THE STATE.
AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING ON THE STREET, IN WHICH TWO GREAT MEN ARE RECOGNIZED AS THE TYPES OF TWO CLASHING THEORIES—TOOMBS’S SUCCESSES—BROWN’S JUDGMENT.
THE other day I saw two men meet on the street, bow cordially, and pass. I was struck by the contrast between them—by the difference in their walk, appearance and manner. This suggested that the contrast in their lives, in their lineage and their methods, was even greater than their physical make-up. And then, forgetting for the moment that a gubernatorial campaign of great fierceness was raging, I fell to wondering if there had ever been two masterful men whose paths lay near each other, and whose performance was so nearly equal, who had been born in such dissimilar conditions, and moved by such dissimilar motives. Joe Brown and Bob Toombs! Both illustrious and great—both powerful and strong—and yet at every point, and from every view, the perfect opposites of each other.
Through two centuries have two strains of blood, two conflicting lines of thought, two separate theories of social, religious and political life, been working out the two types of men, which have in our day flowered into the perfection of contrast—vivid, thorough pervasive. For seven generations the ancestors of Joe Brown have been aggressive rebels; for a longer time the Toombs have been dauntless and intolerant followers of the king and kingliness. At the siege of Londonderry—the most remarkable fasting match beyond Tanner—Margaret and James Brown, grandparents of the James Brown who came to America and was grandparent of Joe Brown, were within the walls starving and fighting for William and Mary; and I have no doubt there were hard-riding Toombs outside the walls charging in the name of the peevish and unhappy James. Certain it is that forty years before, the direct ancestors of General Toombs on the Toombs estate were hiding good King Charles in the oak at Boscabel, where, I have no doubt, the father and uncles of the Londonderry Brown, with cropped hair and severe mien, were proguing about the place with their pikes, searching every bush, in the name of Cromwell and the psalm-singers. From these initial points sprang the two strains of blood—the one affluent, impetuous, prodigal, the other slow, resolute, forceful. From these ancestors came the two men—the one superb, ruddy, fashioned with incomparable grace and fulness; the other pale, thoughtful, angular, stripped down to bone and sinew. From these opposing theories came the two types—the one patrician, imperious, swift in action and brooking no stay; the other democratic, sagacious, jealous of rights and submitting to no imposition. The one for the king; the other for the people. It does not matter that the elder Toombs was a rebel in Virginia against the fat George, for that revolt was kingly of itself, and the Virginian cavaliers went into it with love-locks flying and care cast to the winds, feeling little of the patient spirit of James Brown, who, by his Carolina fireside, fashioned his remonstrance slowly, and at last put his life upon the issue.
Governor Brown and General Toombs started under circumstances in accordance with the suggestions of the foregoing. General Toombs’s father had a fine estate, given him by the State of Georgia, and his son had a fine education and started in life in liberal trim. Governor Brown had nothing, and for years hauled wood to Dahlonega; and sold vegetables from a basket to the hotel and what others would buy. Young Toombs made money rapidly, his practice for the first five years amounting to much over $50,000. He conquered by the grace of his genius, and went easily from triumph to triumph. Young Brown moved ahead laboriously but steadily. He made only about $1200 his first year, and then pushed his practice to $2000 or $3000. He made no brilliant reputation, but never lost a client, and added to his income and practice. His progress was the result of hard labor and continuous work. He lived moderately and his habits were simple. General Toombs has lived in princely style all his life, and has always been fond of wine and cards. Both men are rich, and both are well preserved for their time of life. General Toombs is seventy-one and Governor Brown fifty-nine. Each had a lucky stroke early in life, and in both cases it was in a land investment. General Toombs bought immense tracts of Texas land, of which he has sold perhaps $100,000 profit and still holds enough to yield double or treble that much more. Governor Brown, when very young, paid $450 for a piece of land, and afterward sold a half interest in a copper mine thereon for $25,000. This he invested in farms, and thus laid the basis of his fortune.
The first time these men met was in Milledgeville, in 1851 or ’52, when Governor Brown was a young Democratic State Senator and General Toombs was a Whig Congressman—then the idol of his party and the most eloquent man in Georgia. They were then just such men physically as one who had never seen them would imagine from reading their lives. General Toombs was, as Governor Brown has told me, “the handsomest man he ever saw.” His physique was superb, his grand head fit for a crown, his presence that of a king, overflowing with vitality, his majestic face illumined with his divine genius. Governor Brown was then pallid, uncomely—his awkward frame packed closely with nerve and sinew, and fed with a temperate flow of blood. They met next at Marietta, where Toombs had a fiery debate with that rare master of discussion, the late Robert Cowart. Governor Brown was deeply impressed with the power and genius of that wonderful man, but General Toombs thought but little of the awkward young mountaineer. For later, when in Texas, hearing that Joe Brown was nominated for Governor, he did not even remember his name, and had to ask a Georgia-Texan “who the devil it was.”
But the next time he met him he remembered it. Of course we all remember when the “Know-Nothings” took possession of the Whig party, and Toombs and Stephens seceded. Stephens having a campaign right on him, and being pressed to locate himself, said he was neither Whig nor Democrat, but “was toting his own skillet,” thus introducing that homely but expressive phrase into our political history. Toombs was in the Senate and had time for reflection. It ended by his marching into the Democratic camp. Shortly afterward he was astounded at seeing the standard of his party, upon the success of which his seat in the Senate depended, put in the hands of Joe Brown, a new campaigner, while the opposition was led by Ben Hill, then as now an audacious and eloquent speaker, incomparable on the stump. Hill and Brown had had a meeting at Athens, I believe, and it was reported that Brown had been worsted. Howell Cobb wrote Toombs that he must take the canvass in hand at once, at least until Brown could learn how to manage himself. Toombs wrote to Brown to come to his home at Washington, which he did. General Toombs told me that he was not hopeful when he met the new candidate, but after talking to him awhile, found that he had wonderful judgment and sagacity. After coquetting with Mr. Hill a while, they started on a tour together, going to south Georgia. General Toombs has talked to me often about this experience. He says that after two or three speeches Governor Brown was as fully equipped as if he had been in public for forty years, and he was amazed at the directness with which he would get to the hearts of the masses. He talked in simple style, using the homeliest phrases, but his words went home every time. There was a sympathy between the speaker and the people that not even the eloquence of Toombs could emphasize, or the matchless skill of Mr. Hill disturb. In Brown the people saw one of themselves, lifted above them by his superior ability, and his unerring sagacity, but talking to them common sense in a sensible way. General Toombs soon saw that the new candidate was more than able to take care of himself, and left him to make his tour alone—impressed with the fact that a new element had been introduced into our politics and that a new leader had arisen.
It is hard to say which has been the more successful of the two men. Neither has ever been beaten before the people. General Toombs has won his victories with the more ease. He has gone to power as a king goes to his throne, and no one has gainsaid him. Governor Brown has had to fight his way through. It has been a struggle all the time, and he has had to summon every resource to carry his point. Each has made unsurpassed records in his departments. As Senator, General Toombs was not only invincible, he was glorious. As Governor, was not only invincible, he was wise. General Toombs’s campaigns have been unstudied and careless, and were won by his presence, his eloquence, his greatness. His canvass was always an ovation, his only caucusing was done on the hustings. With Governor Brown it was different. He planned his campaigns and then went faithfully through them. His victories were none the less sure, because his canvass was more laborious. His nomination as Governor, while unexpected, was not accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of his young life, disciplined so marvelously, so full of thought, sagacity and judgment. If he had not been nominated Governor then, his time would have come at last, just as sure as cause produces result. His record as Governor proves that he was prepared for the test—just as his brilliant record in the Senate proves that he is fitted for any sphere to which he might be called.
To sum it up: Toombs is the embodiment of genius, and Brown is the embodiment of common sense. One is brilliant, the other unerring; one is eloquent, the other sagacious. Toombs moves by inspiration; Brown is governed by judgment. The first is superb; the latter is sage. Despite the fact that Governor Brown is by instinct and by inheritance a rebel, he is prudent, conservative, and has a turn for building things up. General Toombs, despite his love for kingliness and all that implies, has an almost savage instinct for overturning systems and tearing things down. It must not be understood that I depreciate General Toombs’s wisdom. Genius often flies as true to its mark as judgment can go. The wisest speech, and the ablest ever made by an American, in my opinion, is Mr. Toombs’s speech on slavery, delivered in Boston about ten years before the war. In that speech he showed a prescience almost divine, and clad in the light of thirty years of confirmation, it is simply marvelous. His leadership of the southern Whigs in the House during the contest of 1850 was a masterpiece of brilliancy, and even his Hamilcar speech, delivered after the most exasperating insults, was sublime in its lofty eloquence and courage. Safer as a leader, Governor Brown is more sagacious on material points—truer to the practical purposes of government: but no man but Toombs could have represented Georgia as he did for the decade preceding 1860.
Messrs. Brown and Toombs have disagreed since the war. That Governor Brown may have been wiser in “reconstruction” than Mr. Toombs, many wise men believe, and events may have proved. In that matter my heart was with Mr. Toombs, and I have never seen reason to recall it. That Governor Brown was honest and patriotic in his advice, my knowledge of the man would not permit me to doubt. The trouble between these gentlemen came very near resulting in a duel. While I join with all good men that this duel was arrested, I confess that I have been wicked enough to speculate on its probable result—had it occurred. In the first place, General Toombs made no preparation for the duel. He went along in his careless and kingly way, trusting, presumably, to luck and quick shot. Governor Brown, on the contrary, made the most careful and deliberate preparation. He made his will, put his estate in order, withdrew from the church, and then clipped all the trees in his orchard practicing with the pistol. Had the duel come off—which fortunately it did not—General Toombs would have fired with his usual magnificence and his usual disregard of rule. I do not mean to imply that he would not have hit Governor Brown; on the contrary, he might have perforated him in a dozen places at once. But one thing is sure—Governor Brown would have clasped his long white fingers around the pistol butt, adjusted it to his gray eye, and sent his bullet within the eighth of an inch of the place he had selected. I should not be surprised if he drew a diagram of General Toombs, and marked off with square and compass the exact spot he wanted to hit.
General Toombs has always been loose and prodigal in his money matters. Governor Brown has been precise and economical all his life, and gives $50,000 to a Baptist college—not a larger amount probably than General Toombs has dispensed casually, but how much more compact and useful! This may be a good fact to stop on, as it furnishes a point of view from which the two lives may be logically surveyed. Two great lives they are, illustrious and distinguished—utterly dissimilar. Georgia could have spared neither and is jealous of both. I could write of them for hours, but the people are up and the flags are flying, and the journalist has no time for moralizing or leisurely speculation.
“BOB.”
How an Old Man “Come Home.”
A Story Without a Moral, Picked Out of a Busy Life.
[WRITTEN FOR THE SUNDAY GAZETTE.]
“YOU are the no-countest, laziest, meanest dog that ever wore breeches! Never let me see you again!”
Thus Mrs. Tag to Mr. Tag, her husband; she standing in the door, her arms akimbo, and, cat-like, spitting the words at him.
Mr. Tag made no reply. He did not even put up his hands in evasion. He stood dazed and bewildered, as one who hesitates in a sudden shower, and then turning, pulled his old hat down over his shoulders, as if she was throwing rocks at him instead of words, and shambled off in silence, quickening his retreat by a pitiful little jerk, every time she launched a new volley at him.
This she did as often as her brains could forge them and her tongue send them. She stood there, the very picture of fury. And at length, with disgust on every feature, she turned, sprawled a weevilly little child that was clinging to her skirts, and went into the house.
As for Mr. Tag, he hurried on, never once looking back until he had reached a hill, against which the sun was setting. He then slowed up a little, lifted the flap of his hat cautiously, as if to be sure he was out of ear-shot—then stopped. He pulled off his hat, shook it to and fro—unconsciously, I think—in his hand as one who comes out of the storm. He looked about him a while, as if undetermined, and then browsed about vaguely in the sunset, until his bent, shambling figure seemed melting into the golden glory that enveloped it; and his round, chubby head was tipped with light.
I thought probably he wanted to see me, so I climbed up the hill. He seemed to approve of my coming, and walked down in the shade to meet me.
“Ann was sorter rough to me, wan’t she?” he said, with a chuckle of deprecation.
I assented quietly to the lack of smoothness in Ann’s remarks.
“You aint know’d me long,” he said, with a sudden flicker of earnestness; “and you’ve knowed the worst part of me. You’ve knowed the trouble and the fag-end. You warn’t in at the good part of my life!”
I should think not, poor fellow. Ever since I had known him he had been the same shabby, good-for-nothing that he is now. He had grown a bit more serious of late, and his long face—it was abnormally long between the eyes and the chin—had whitened somewhat, but otherwise he was about the same shabby, ragged, half-starved old fellow I had known for a year or so. Yes, Bob, I had clearly known the worst of you!
“I was a better man once; not a better man, either, as I know of, but I had luck. When me and Ann married, there warn’t a happier couple nowhere. I remember just as well when I courted her. She didn’t think about me then as she does now. We had a buggy to ourselves, and we turned down a shady road. I fetched it on soon after we left the crowd, and she was about as well pleased as me. It seemed like that road was the road to heaven, and we was so happy that we wasn’t in no hurry to get to the end of it. Ann was handsome then. Oh yes, she was!”—as I winced at this,—“and at first as good a wife to me as ever a man had.
“It may a-been me that started the trouble. I was unfortnit in everything I touched. My fingers slipped off o’ everything and everything slipped off o’ them. I could get no grip on nothin’. I worked hard, but something harder agin me. Ann was ambitious and uppish, and I used to think when I come home at night, most tired to death, she was gettin’ to despise me. She’d snap me up and abuse me till actually I was afraid to come home. I never misused her or give her a back word. I thought maybe she wasn’t to blame, and that what she said about me was true. Things kept a-gitten worse, and we sold off pretty much what we had. Five years ago a big surprise came to us. It was a baby—a boy—him!” nodding toward the hut. “It was a surprise to both of us. We’d been married fourteen years. It made Ann harder on me than ever. She never let me rest; it was all the time hard words and hard looks. I never raised even a look against her, o’ course. I thought she was right about me. He never had a cross word with me. Him and me knowed each other from the start. We had a langwidge of our own. Ther wasn’t no words in it—just looks and grunts. I never could git ‘nough, nuther could he. He know’d more an’ me. Ther was a kinder way-off look in his eyes that was solemn and deep, I tell you. At last Ann got to breaking me up. Whenever she catch me with him she’d drive me off. I’d always hurry off, ’cause I never wanted him to hear her ’spressin herself ’bout me. ’Peared like he understood every word of it. Mos’t two years ago, and I ain’t had one since. I couldn’t git one. Ann commenced takin’ in washing, and one day she said I shouldn’t hang around no more a-eatin’ him and her out of house and home. That was more’n a year ago, and I seen him since to talk to him. Every time I go about she hustles me about like she did to-day. I never make no fuss. She’s right about me, I reckon. I am powerful no ’count. But he has stirred things in me I ain’t felt movin’ for many a year!”
“What’s his name, Bob?”
“Got none. She never would let me talk to her ’bout it, and I ain’t got no right to name him. I ast her once how it would do to call him little Bob, and she said I better git him sumpin’ to eat; he couldn’t eat a name, nor dress in it neither; which was true. But he’s got my old face on him, and my look. I know that, and he knows it too.”
“Did you ever drink, Bob?”
“Me? You know I didn’t. I did get drunk once. The boys give me the wine. They say liquor makes a man savage, and makes him beat his wife. It didn’t take me that way. I was the happiest fellow you ever see. I felt light and free. My blood was warm, and just jumped along—and beat Ann? why, all the old love come back to me, as I went to’ards home, feelin’ big as a king. I made as how I’d go up to Ann and put arm aroun’ her neck in the old way, and tell her if she’d only encourage me a little, I’d get about for her and him and make ’em both rich. I couldn’t hardly wait to get home, I was so full of it. She was just settin’ down a pail of water when I come in. I made for her, gentle like, and had just got my arms to her neck, when she drawed back, with a few words like them this evening, and dosed the pail of water full in my face. As I scrambled out o’ the door, sorter blind like, I struck the edge o’ the gulley there, rolled down head over heels, and fotch up squar’ at the bottom, as sober a man as ever you see!”
I met Bob a few days after that in a state of effusive delight. He would not disclose himself at first. He followed me through several blocks, and at length, diving into an alley, beckoned me cautiously to him. He took off his old hat, always with him a preliminary to conversation, and glancing cautiously around, said in a hoarse whisper:
“Had a pic-nic to-day.”
“A pic-nic! Who?”
“Me and him!”
And his wrinkled, weather-beaten old face was broken by smiles and chuckles, that struggled to the surface, as porpoises do, and then shrunk back into the depths from whence they came.
“You don’t know Phenice—the neighbor’s gal as nusses him sometimes? Well, I seed her out with him, to-day, and I tolled her off kinder, till she got beyant the hill, and then I give her a quarter I had got, and purposed as how she should gi’ me a little time with him. She sciddled off to town to git her quarter spent, and I took him and made for the woods, to meet her thar agin, by sun!”
“He’s a deep one, I tell you!” he said, drawing a breath of admiration; “as deep a one as I ever see. He’d never been in the woods before, but he jest knowed it all! You orter seed him when a jay-bird come and sot on a high limb, and flung him some sass, and tried to sorter to make free with him. The look that boy give him couldn’t a’ been beat by nobody. The jay tried to hold up to it and chaffered a little, but he finally had to skip, the wust beat bird you ever saw!”
And so the old fellow went on, telling me about that wonderful pic-nic; how he had gathered flowers for the baby, and made little bouquets, which the baby received with a critical air, as if he had spent his life in a florist’s shop, and being a connoisseur in flowers, couldn’t afford to become enthusiastic over pied daisies; how a gray squirrel scampering down a near tree had startled him out of his wits, while the baby, seated still nearer the disturbance than he, remained a marvel of stolidity and presence of mind; how the baby was finally coaxed out of his wise reserve by a group of yellow butterflies pulsating in the golden sunshine, and by the flashing of the silvery brook that ran beneath them; how all the birds in the county seemed to have entered into a conspiracy to upset that baby’s dignity; and how they would assail him with pert bursts of song and rapid curvetings about his head, while Bob sat off at a distance, “and let ’em fight it out, not helping one side or t’other,” always to see the chatterers retire in good-humored defeat before the serene impassibility of the youngster; how the only drawback to the pic-nic was that there was not a thing to eat, and besides its being in violation of all pic-nic precedent, there was danger of the little one getting very hungry; and how, in the evening—what would have been after dinner if they’d had any dinner—the baby, who was sitting opposite Bob on the grass, suddenly assumed an air of deeper solemnity, even than he had worn before, and gazed at Bob with a dense and inscrutable gaze, until he was actually embarrassed by the searching and fixed character of this look; and how the round, grave head suddenly keeled to one side as if it were so heavy with ideas that it could not be held upright any longer; and how then, suddenly, and without a sign or hint of warning, this self-possessed baby tumbled over in the grass, shot his little toes upward, and, before Bob could reach him, was dead asleep! And Bob told me then, with the glittering tears gathering in his eyes and rolling down his old cheeks, how he had picked the baby up and cuddled him close to his old bosom, and listened to his soft breathing, and stroked his chubby face, and almost guessed the wise dreams that were flitting through his round fuzzy head,—hugged him so close, and pressed him to his bosom with such hungry, tender love, that he felt as if he had him “layin’ agin’ my naked heart, and warmin’ it up, and stirrin’ all its strings with his little fingers!”
It was late that night when I went home—after one o’clock; a fearful night, too. The rain was pouring in torrents and the wind howled like mad. Taking a near cut home, I passed by the hut where Bob’s wife lived. Through the drifting rain, I saw a dark figure against the side of the house. Stepping closer, I saw that it was Bob, mounted on a barrel, flattened out against the planks, his old felt hat down about his ears, and the rain pouring from it in streams—his face glued to the window.
Poor old follow! there he was! oblivious to the storm, to hunger and everything else—clinging like some homeless night-bird, drifting and helpless, to the outside of his own home; gazing in stealthily at the bed where the little one slept, and warming his old heart up with the memory of that wondrous pic-nic—of the solemn contest with the impertinent jay-bird, and the grave rapture over the butterflies that swung lazily about in their rift of sunshine.
One morning, many months after the pic-nic, Bob came to me sideways. His right arm hung limp and inert by his side, and his right leg dragged helplessly after the left. The yielding muscles of the neck had stiffened and drawn his head awry. He stumbled clumsily to where I was standing, and received my look of surprise shamefacedly.
“I’ve had a stroke,” he said. “Paralysis? It’s most used me up. I reckon I’ll never be able to do anything for him! It came on me sudden,” he said, as if to say that if it had given him any sort of notice, he could have dodged it.
After that Bob went on from worse to worse. His face, all save that fixed in the rigid grasp of the paralysis, became tremulous, pitiful and uncertain. He had lost all the chirrupy good-humor of the other days, and became shy and silent. There was a wistfulness and yearning in his face that would have made your heart ache; a hungry passion had struggled from the depth of his soul, and peered out of his blue eyes, and tugged at the corners of his mouth. There was, too, a pitiful, scary look about him. He had the air of one who is pursued. At the slightest sigh he would pluck at his lame leg sharply, and shamble off, turning full around at intervals to see if he was followed. I learned that his wife had become even harder on him since his trouble, and that he was even more than ever afraid of her.
He had never had another “pic-nic.” He had snatched a furtive interview with the baby, under protection of the occasional nurse, from each of which he came to me with a new idea of the “deepness” of that infant. “He’s too much for me, that baby is!” he would say. “If I just had his sense!” He was rapidly getting shabbier, and thinner and more woe-begone. He became a slink. He hid about in the day-time, avoiding everybody, and seeming to carry off his love and his passion, as a dog with a bone, seeking an alley. At night he would be seen hanging like a guilty thief about the hut in which his treasure was hid.
“I’ve a mind,” he said one morning, “to go home. I don’t think she” (he had quit calling her “Ann” now) “could drive me out now. All I’d want would be to just sit in a corner o’ the house and be with him. That’s all.”
“Bob,” I said to him one morning, “you rascal, you are starving!”
He couldn’t deny it. He tried to put it off, but he couldn’t. His face told on him.
“Have you had anything to eat to-day?”
“No, sir.”
“Nor yesterday?”
“No, sir.”
I gave him a half-dollar. A wolfish glare of hunger shot into his eyes as he saw the money. He clutched it with a spasm of haste and started off. I watched his side-long walk down the street, and then went to work, satisfied that he would go off and pack himself full.
It was hardly an hour before he came back, his face brighter than I had seen it in months. He carried a bundle in his live hand. He laid it on my desk, and then fell back on his dead leg while I opened it. I found in the bundle a red tin horse, attached to a blue tin wagon, on which was seated a green tin driver. I looked up in blank astonishment.
“For him!” he said simply. And then he broke down. He turned slowly on his live leg as an axis and leaned against the wall.
“Could you send it to him?” he said at last. “If she knew I sent it, she mightn’t let him have it. He’s never had nothin’ o’ this kind, and I thought it might pearten him up.”
“Bob, is this the money I gave you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you were starving when you left here?”
“Oh, I got some bread!”
I suppose every man, woman and child remembers that terrible night three years ago when we had lightning while the snow was on the ground. The flashes plowed great yellow seams through the gray of the day, and at night a freezing storm of sleet and rain came.
It was a terrible night. I staggered home through it to where a big fire, and blue eyes and black, and slippers, and roasting apples were awaiting me. I thought of Bob—my old night-owl, with a heart in him, and wondered whether he was keeping his silent, but uncomplaining vigil about the little hut on the hillside. I even went so far as to speculate on this point with a certain blue-eyed youngster on my knee, to whom Bob’s life was a romance and a wonder.
Bless me! and all the time I was pitying him, I didn’t know that he had “gone home” and was all right.
His wife slept uneasily that night, as she has since said. She rolled in her sleep a long time, and at last got up and went to the window and looked out. She shuddered at the sound of the whizzing sleet and pitiless hum of the rain on the roof. Then she stumbled sleepily back to her couch, and dreamed of a long shady lane, and a golden-green afternoon in May, and a bright-faced young fellow that looked into her heart, and held her face in his soft fingers. How this dream became tangled in her thoughts that night of all nights, she never could tell. But there it was gleaming like a thread of gold through the dismal warp and woof of her life.
It was full day when she awoke. As she turned lazily upon her side she started up in affright. There was a man, dripping wet, silent, kneeling by her bedside. An old felt hat lay upon the floor. The man’s head was bowed deep down over the bed and his hands were bundled tenderly about one of the baby’s fists that had been thrown above its head.
The worn, weatherbeaten figure was familiar to her. But there was something that stopped her, as she started forward angrily. She stood posed like a statue for a moment, then bent down, curiously and tenderly, and with trembling fingers pulled the cover back from the bed, and looked up into the man’s face steadily. Then she put her fingers on his hand furtively and shrinkingly. And then a strange look crept into her face—the dream of the night came to her like a flash—and she sank back upon the floor, and dropped her head between her knees.
Ah, yes, Bob had “come home.”
And the poor fellow had come to stay. Not even his place in the corner would he want now! No place about the scanty board! Just to stay—that was all; not to offend by his laziness, or to annoy with his ugly, shambling figure, and his no-count ways. Just “come home to stay!”
And there the baby slept quietly, all unconscious of the shadow and the mystery that hung above his wise little head—unconscious of the shabby old watcher, and the woman on the floor, dreaming, perhaps, of the swinging butterflies and the chaffing birds and the brook flashing in the sunshine. And there was old Bob—brave, at last, through love—“come home.”
Out of the storm like a night-bird! In the door stealthily like a thief! Groping his way to the bedside through the dark like a murderer! But there was no danger in him—no ill-omen about him. It was only old Bob, come home, “come home to stay!”
He had clasped the little hand he loved so well in his rough palm and cuddled it close, as if he hoped to hold it always—fondled it in his hands, as if he hoped to ride his own life on the spring-tide that gathered in its rosy palm, or to catch that young life in the ebbing billows that wasted from his cold fingers. But no; the baby was “too much for him!” And the young heart, all unconscious and all perverse, sent the rich blood through the little arm, down the slender wrist, and into the dimpled fist, where it pulsed and throbbed uneasily, as it broke against the chill, stark presence of Death!
COTTON AND ITS KINGDOM.[[1]]
[1]. Reprinted from Harper’s Magazine, Oct., 1881.
IT has long been the fortune of the South to deal with special problems—slavery, secession, reconstruction. For fifty years has the settlement of these questions engaged her people, and challenged the attention of the world. As these issues are set aside finally, after stubborn and bloody conflict, during which she maintained her position with courage, and abided results with fortitude, she finds herself confronted with a new problem quite as important as either of those that have been disposed of. In the cultivation and handling, under the new order of things, of the world’s great staple, cotton, she is grappling with a matter that involves essentially her own welfare, and is of the greatest interest to the general public. To the slaveholder the growing of cotton was straight and easy, as the product of his land was supplemented by the increase of his slaves, and he prospered in spite of himself. To the Southern farmer of post-bellum days, impoverished, unsettled, and thrown upon free labor, working feverishly with untried conditions, poorly informed as to the result of experiments made by his neighbors, and too impatient to wait upon his own experience, it is quite a different affair. After sixteen years of trial, everything is yet indeterminate. And whether this staple is cultivated in the South as a profit or a passion, and whether it shall bring the South to independence or to beggary, are matters yet to be settled. Whether its culture shall result in a host of croppers without money or credit, appealing to the granaries of the West against famine, paying toll to usurers at home, and mortgaging their crops to speculators abroad even before it is planted—a planting oligarchy of money-lenders, who have usurped the land through foreclosure, and hold by the ever-growing margin between a grasping lender and an enforced borrower—or a prosperous self-respecting race of small farmers, cultivating their own lands, living upon their own resources, controlling their crops until they are sold, and independent alike of usurers and provision brokers—which of these shall be the outcome of cotton culture the future must determine. It is certain only in the present that the vigor of the cotton producers and the pace at which they are moving are rapidly forcing a settlement of these questions, and that the result of the experiments now swiftly working out in the South will especially concern a large part of the human race, from the farmer who plods down the cotton row, cutting through his doubts with a hoe, to the spinner in Manchester who anxiously balances the totals of the world’s crop.
It may be well to remark at the outset that the production of cotton in the South is practically without limit. It was 1830 before the American crop reached 1,000,000 bales, and the highest point ever reached in the days of slavery was a trifle above 4,500,000 bales. The crop of 1880-81 is about 2,000,000 in excess of this, and there are those who believe that a crop of 8,000,000 bales is among the certainties of the next few years. The heavy increase in the cotton crop is due entirely to the increase of cotton acreage brought about by the use of fertilizers. Millions of acres of land, formerly thought to be beyond the possible limit of the cotton belt, have been made the best of cotton lands by being artificially enriched. In North Carolina alone the limit of cotton production has been moved twenty miles northward and twenty miles westward, and the half of Georgia on which no cotton was grown twenty years ago now produces fully half the crop of the State. The “area of low production” as the Atlantic States are brought to the front by artificial stimulation is moving westward, and is now central in Alabama and Florida. But the increase in acreage, large as it is, will be but a small factor in the increase of production, compared to the intensifying of the cultivation of the land now in use. Under the present loose system of planting, the average yield is hardly better than one bale to three acres. This could be easily increased to a bale an acre. In Georgia five bales have been raised on one acre, and a yield of three bales to the acre is credited to several localities. President Morehead, of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Planters’ Association, says that the entire cotton crop of the present year might have been easily raised in fourteen counties along the Mississippi River. It will be seen, therefore, that the capacity of the South to produce cotton is practically limitless, and when we consider the enormous demand for cotton goods now opening up from new climes and peoples, we may conclude that the near future will see crops compared to which the crop of the past year, worth $300,000,000, will seem small.
Who will be the producers of these vast crops of the future? Will they be land-owners or tenants—planters or farmers? The answer to this inquiry will be made by the average Southerners without hesitation. “Small farms,” he will say, “well tended by actual owners, will be the rule in the South. The day of a land-holding oligarchy has passed forever.” Let us see about this.
The history of agriculture—slow and stubborn industry that it is—will hardly show stronger changes than have taken place in the rural communities of the South in the past fifteen years. Immediately after the war between the States there was a period of unprecedented disaster. The surrender of the Confederate armies found the plantations of the South stripped of houses, fences, stock, and implements. The planters were without means or prospects, and uncertain as to what should be done. The belief that extensive cotton culture had perished with slavery had put the price of the staple up to thirty cents. Lured by the dazzling price, which gave them credit as well as hope, the owners of the plantations prepared for vast operations. They refitted their quarters, repaired their fences, summoned hundreds of negro croppers at high prices, and invested lavishly their borrowed capital in what they felt sure was a veritable bonanza. The few years that followed are full of sickening failure. Planters who had been princes in wealth and possessions suddenly found themselves irretrievably in debt and reduced to beggary. Under the stimulation of high prices the crops grew, until there was a tumble from thirty to ten cents per pound. Unable to meet their engagements with their factors, who, suddenly awakening to the peril of the situation, refused to make further advances or grant extensions, the planters had no recourse but to throw their lands on the market. But so terrible had been their experience—many losing $100,000 in a single season—that no buyers were found for the plantations on which they had been wrecked. The result of this panic to sell and disinclination to buy was a toppling of land values. Plantations that had brought from $100,000 to $150,000 before the war, and even since, were sold at $6000 to $10,000, or hung on the hands of the planter and his factor at any price whatever. The ruin seemed to be universal and complete, and the old plantation system, it then seemed, had perished utterly and forever. While no definite reason was given for the failure—free labor and the credit system being the causes usually and loosely assigned—it went without contradiction that the system of planting under which the South had amassed its riches and lived in luxury was inexorably doomed.
Following this lavish and disastrous period came the era of small farms. Led into the market by the low prices to which the best lands had fallen, came a host of small buyers, to accommodate whom the plantations were subdivided, and offered in lots to suit purchasers. Never perhaps was there a rural movement, accomplished without revolution or exodus, that equalled in extent and swiftness the partition of the plantations of the ex-slave-holders into small farms. As remarkable as was the eagerness of the negroes—who bought in Georgia alone 6850 farms in three years—the earth-hunger of the poorer class of the whites, who had been unable under the slave-holding oligarchy to own land, was even more striking. In Mississippi there were in 1867 but 412 farms of less than ten acres, and in 1870, 11,003; only 2314 of over ten and less than twenty acres, and 1870, 8981; only 16,024 between twenty and one hundred acres, and in 1870, 38,015. There was thus in this one State a gain of nearly forty thousand small farms of less than one hundred acres in about three years. In Georgia the number of small farms sliced off of the big plantations from 1868 to 1873 was 32,824. In Liberty County there were in 1866 only three farms of less than ten acres; in 1870 there were 616, and 749 farms between ten and twenty acres. This splitting of the old plantations into farms went on with equal rapidity all over the South, and was hailed with lively expressions of satisfaction. A population pinned down to the soil on which it lived, made conservative and prudent by land-ownership, forced to abandon the lavish method of the old time as it had nothing to spare, and to cultivate closely and intelligently as it had no acres to waste, living on cost as it had no credit, and raising its own supplies as it could not afford to buy—this the South boasted it had in 1873, and this many believe it has to-day. The small farmer—who was to retrieve the disasters of the South, and wipe out the last vestige of the planting aristocracy, between which and the people there was always a lack of sympathy, by keeping his own acres under his own supervision, and using hired labor only as a supplement to his own—is still held to be the typical cotton-raiser.
But the observer who cares to look beneath the surface will detect signs of a reverse current. He will discover that there is beyond question a sure though gradual rebunching of the small farms into large estates, and a tendency toward the re-establishment of a land-holding oligarchy. Here and there through all the Cotton States, and almost in every county, are reappearing the planter princes of the old time, still lords of acres, though not of slaves. There is in Mississippi one planter who raises annually 12,000 bales of cotton on twelve consolidated plantations, aggregating perhaps 50,000 acres. The Capeheart estate on Albemarle Sound, originally of several thousand acres, had $52,000 worth of land added last year. In the Mississippi Valley, where, more than anywhere else, is preserved the distinctive cotton plantation, this re-absorbing of separate farms into one ownership is going on rapidly. Mr. F. C. Morehead, an authority on these lands, says that not one-third of them are owned by the men who held them at the close of the war, and that they are passing, one after the other, into the hands of the commission merchants. It is doubtful if there is a neighborhood in all the South in which casual inquiry will not bring to the front from ten to a dozen men who have added farm after farm to their possessions for the past several years, and now own from six to twenty places. It must not be supposed that these farms are bunched together and run after the old plantation style. On the contrary, they are cut into even smaller farms, and rented to small croppers. The question involved is not whether or not the old plantation methods shall be revived. It is the much more serious problem as to whether the lands divided forever into small farms shall be owned by the many or by the few, whether we shall have in the South a peasantry like that of France, or a tenantry like that of Ireland.
By getting at the cause of this threatened re-absorption of the small farmer into the system from which he so eagerly and bravely sought release, we shall best understand the movement. It is primarily credit—a false credit based on usury and oppression, strained to a point where it breeds distrust and provokes a percentage to compensate for risk, and strained, not for the purchase of land, which is a security as long as the debt is unpaid, but for provisions and fertilizers, which are valueless to either secure the lender or assist the borrower to pay. With the failure of the large planters and their withdrawal from business, banks, trust companies, and capitalists withdraw their money from agricultural loans. The new breed of farmers held too little land and were too small dealers to command credit or justify investigation. And yet they were obliged to have money with which to start their work. Commission merchants therefore borrowed the money from the banks, and loaned it to village brokers or store-keepers, who in turn loaned it to farmers in their neighborhood, usually in the form of advancing supplies. It thus came to the farmer after it had been through three principals, each of whom demanded a heavy percentage for the risk he assumed. In every case the farmer gave a lien or mortgage upon his crop of land. In this lien he waived exemptions and defense, and it amounted in effect to a deed. Having once given such a paper to his merchant, his credit was of course gone, and he had to depend upon the man who held the mortgage for his supplies. To that man he must carry his crop when it was gathered, pay him commission for handling it, and accept the settlement that he offered. To give an idea of the oppressiveness of this system it is only necessary to quote the Commissioner of Agriculture of Georgia, who by patient investigation discovered that the Georgia farmers paid prices for supplies that averaged fifty-four per cent. interest on all they bought. For instance, corn that sold for eighty-nine cents a bushel cash was sold on time secured by a lien at a dollar and twelve cents. In Mississippi the percentage is even more terrible, as the crop lien laws are in force there, and the crop goes into the hands of the merchant, who charges commission on the estimated number of bales, whether a half crop or a full one is raised. Even this maladjustment of credits would not impoverish the farmer if he did not yield to the infatuation for cotton-planting, and fail to plant anything but cotton.
Those who have the nerve to give up part of their land and labor to the raising of their own supplies and stock have but little need of credit, and consequently seldom get into the hands of the usurers. But cotton is the money crop, and offers such flattering inducements that everything yields to that. It is not unusual to see farmers come to the cities to buy butter, melons, meal, and vegetables. They rely almost entirely upon their merchants for meat and bread, hay, forage, and stock. In one county in Georgia last year, from the small dépôts, $80,000 worth of meat and bread was shipped to farmers. The official estimate of the National Cotton Planters’ Association, at its session of 1881, was that the Cotton States lacked 42,252,244 bushels of wheat, 166,684,279 bushels of corn, 77,762,108 bushels of oats, or 286,698,632 bushels of grain, of raising what it consumed. When to this is added 4,011,150 tons of hay at thirty dollars a ton, and $32,000,000 paid for fertilizers, we find that the value of the cotton crop is very largely consumed in paying for the material with which it was made. On this enormous amount the cotton farmer has to pay the usurous percentage charged by his merchant broker, which is never less than thirty per cent., and frequently runs up to seventy per cent. We can appreciate, when we consider this, the statement of the man who said, “The commission merchants of the South are gradually becoming farmers, and the farmers, having learned the trick, will become merchants.”
The remedy for this deplorable tendency is first the establishment of a proper system of credit. The great West was in much worse condition than the South some years ago. The farms were mortgaged, and were being sold under mortgages, under a system not half so oppressive as that under which the Southern farmer labors. Boston capital, seeking lucrative investment, soon began to pour toward the West, in charge of loan companies, and was put out at eight per cent., and the redemption of that section was speedily worked out. A similar movement is now started in the South. An English company, with headquarters at New Orleans, loaned over $600,000 its first year at eight per cent., with perfect security. The farmers who borrowed this money were of course immensely relieved, and the testimony is that they are rapidly working out. In Atlanta, Georgia, a company is established with $2,000,000 of Boston and New York capital, which it is loaning on farm lands at seven per cent. In the first three months of its work it loaned $120,000, and it has now appointed local agents in thirty counties in the State, and advertises that it wishes to lend $50,000 in each county. The managers say that they can command practically unlimited capital for safe risks at seven per cent. Companies working on the same plan have been established elsewhere in the South, and it is said that there will be no lack of capital for safe risks on rural lands in a few years.
The first reform, however, that must be made is in the system of farming. The South must prepare to raise her own provisions, compost her fertilizers, cure her own hay, and breed her own stock. Leaving credit and usury out of the question, no man can pay seventy-five cents a bushel for corn, thirty dollars a ton for hay, twenty dollars a barrel for pork, sixty cents for oats, and raise cotton for eight cents a pound. The farmers who prosper at the South are the “corn-raisers,” i.e., the men who raise their own supplies, and make cotton their surplus crop. A gentleman who recorded 320 mortgages last year testified that not one was placed on the farm of a man who raised his own bread and meat. The shrewd farmers who always have a bit of money on hand with which to buy any good place that is to be sold under mortgage are the “corn-raisers,” and the moment they get possession they rule out the all-cotton plan, and plant corn and the grasses. That the plan of farming only needs revision to make the South rich beyond measure is proven by constant example. A corn-raiser bought a place of 370 acres for $1700. He at once put six tenants on it, and limited their cotton acreage to one-third of what they had under cultivation. Each one of the six made more clear money than the former owner had made, and the rents for the first year were $1126. The man who bought this farm lives in Oglethorpe, Georgia, and has fifteen farms all run on the same plan.
The details of the management of what may be the typical planting neighborhood of the South in the future are furnished me by the manager of the Capeheart estate in North Carolina. This estate is divided into farms of fifty acres each, and rented to tenants. These tenants are bound to plant fifteen acres in cotton, twelve in corn, eight in small crops, and let fifteen lie in grass. They pay one-third of the crop as rent, or one-half if the proprietor furnishes horses and mules. They have comfortable quarters, and are entitled to the use of surplus herring and the dressings of the herring caught in the fisheries annexed to the place. In the center of the estate is a general store managed by the proprietor, at which the tenants have such a line of credit as they are entitled to, of course paying a pretty percentage of profit on the goods they buy. They are universally prosperous, and in some cases, where by skill and industry they have secured 100 acres, are laying up money. The profits to Dr. Capeheart are large, and show the margin there is in buying land that is loosely farmed, and putting it under intelligent supervision. Of the $52,000 worth of land added to his estates last year, at a valuation of twenty-five dollars per acre, he will realize in rental nine dollars per acre for every acre cultivated, and calculates that in five years at the most the rentals of the land will have paid back what he gave for it.
Amid all this transition from land-owner to tenant there is, besides the corn-raiser, one other steadfast figure, undisturbed by change of relation or condition, holding tenaciously to what it has, though little inclined to push for more. This is Cuffee, the darky farmer. There is no more interesting study in our agriculture than this same dusky, good-natured fellow—humble, patient, shrewd—as he drives into town with his mixed team and his one bag of cotton, on which, drawn by a sympathetic sense of ownership, his whole family is clustered. Living simply and frugally, supplementing his humble meal with a ’possum caught in the night hunt, or a rabbit shot with the old army musket that he captured from some deserted battle-field, and allowing no idlers in the family save the youngsters who “tend de free school,” he defies alike the usurer and the land-shark. In the State of Georgia he owns 680,000 acres of land, cut up into farms that barely average ten acres each, and in the Cotton States he owns 2,680,800 acres, similarly divided. From this possession it is impossible to drive him, and to this possession he adds gradually as the seasons go by. He is not ambitious, however, to own large tracts of land, preferring the few acres that he has constantly under his eye, and to every foot of which he feels a rude attachment.
The relations of the negro to cotton are peculiar. Although he spends the most of his life in the cotton field, and this staple is the main crop with which he is concerned, it does not enter into his social life, catch his sentiment, or furnish the occasion for any of his pleasures. None of his homely festivals hinge upon the culture or handling of the great staple. He has his corn-shuckings, his log-rollings, his quilting bees, his threshing jousts, and indeed every special work about the farm is made to yield its element of frolic, except the making of cotton. None of those tuneful melodies with which he beguiles his work or gladdens his play-time acknowledge cotton as a subject or an incident. None of the folklore with which the moonlight nights are whiled away or the fire-lit cabins sanctified, and which finds its home in the corn patch or the meadows, has aught to do with the cotton field. I have never heard a negro song in which the cotton field is made the incidental theme or the subject of allusion, except in a broken perversion of that incomparable ballad, “The Mocking-Bird,” in which the name of the heroine, the tender sentiment, and the tune, which is a favorite one with the negroes, are preserved. This song, with the flower of Southern girlhood that points the regretful tenderness changed into a dusky maiden idealized by early death, with the “mocking-bird singing o’er her grave,” and sung in snatches almost without words or coherence, is popular with the field hands in many parts of the South.
But when we have discussed the questions involved in the planting and culture of the cotton crop, as serious as they are, we have had to do with the least important phase of our subject. The crop of 7,000,000 bales, when ready for the market, is worth in round numbers $300,000,000. The same crop when manufactured is worth over $900,000,000. Will the South be content to see the whole of this added value realized by outsiders? If not, how much of the work necessary to create this value will she do within her own borders? She has abundant water-powers, that are never locked a day by ice or lowered by drought, that may be had for a mere song; cheap labor, cheap lands, an unequaled climate, cheap fuel, and the conditions of cheap living. Can these be utilized to any general extent?
It may be premised that there are questions of the utmost importance to the South outside of the manufacture of the lint, which is usually held to cover the whole question of cotton manufacture. There is no particle of the cotton plant that may not be handled to advantage. Mr. Edward Atkinson is authority for the statement that if a plant similar to cotton, but having no lint, could be grown in the North, it would be one of the most profitable of crops. And yet it is true that up to a late date the seed of the cotton has been wholly wasted, and even now the stalk is thrown away as useless. A crop of 7,000,000 bales will yield 3,500,000 tons of cotton seed. Every ounce of this seed is valuable, and in the past few years it has been so handled as to add very heavily to the value of the crop. The first value of the seed is as a fertilizer. It has been discovered of late that the seed that had been formerly allowed to accumulate about the gin-houses in vast piles and rot as waste material, when put upon the fields would add twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. to the crop, and was equal to many of the fertilizers that sell in the market for $25 per ton. In 1869 a mill was established in New Orleans for the purpose of pressing the oil from the cotton seed, and manufacturing the bulk into stock food. Its success was so pronounced that there are now fifty-nine seed-oil mills in the South, costing over $6,000,000, and working up $5,500,000 worth of seed annually. The product of the seed used sells for $9,600,000, so that the mills create a value of $4,500,000 annually. They used only one-seventh of the seed produced in the South. A ton of seed which can be worked for $5.50 a ton, and cost originally $8 to $10, making an average cost when worked of $15, is estimated to produce thirty-five gallons of oil worth $11.50, seed-cake worth $5.50, and lint worth $1.50—a total of $18.50, or profit of $3.50, per ton. The oil is of excellent quality, and is used in the making of soaps, stearine, white oils, and when highly refined is a table oil of such flavor and appearance as will deceive the best judges. A quality has been lately discovered in it that makes it valuable as a dye-stuff. It is shipped largely to Europe, 130,000 barrels having been exported last year, chiefly to Antwerp. It is put up carefully, and re-shipped to this country as olive-oil to such an extent that prohibitory duties have been put on it by the Italian government, and it is ruled out of that country. Before it is placed in the oil mill the cotton seed is hulled. The hulls are valuable, and may be used for tanning, made into pulp for paper stock, or used as fuel, and the ashes sold to the soap-makers for the potash they contain. The mass of kernels left after the hulls have been removed and the oil pressed out is made into seed-cake, a most desirable food for stock, which is exported largely to Europe. It is also worked into a fertilizer that yields under analysis $37.50 in value per ton, and can be sold for $22 a ton. It is a notable fact that the ton of seed-cake is even more valuable as a stock food after the $11.50 worth of oil has been taken from it than before, and quite as valuable as a fertilizer. In the four hundred pounds of lint in a bale of cotton there are but four pounds of chemical elements taken from the soil; in the oil there is little more; but in the seed-cake and hulls there are forty pounds of potash and phosphate of lime. But admirable as is the disposition of the cotton seed for manufacture, ample as is the margin of profit, and rapid as has been the growth in the industry, there exists the same disorganization that is noticeable in the handling of the whole cotton question. Although less than one-seventh of the seed raised is needed by the mills, they are unable to get enough to keep them running. The cotton is ginned in such awkward distribution, and in such small quantity at any one locality, that it cannot be gathered promptly or cheaply enough for the oil mills. Of the 3,500,000 tons of seed, 500,000 tons only are worked up, and perhaps as much more used for seed. This leaves 2,500,000 tons not worked, and in which is lost nearly $30,000,000 worth of oil. For whether this two and a half million tons is used as a fertilizer or fed to the stock, it would lose none of its value for either purpose if the thirty-five gallons of oil, worth $11.50, were extracted from each ton of it.
Even when the South has passed beyond the proper handling of cotton seed, she has very important ground to cover before she arrives at what is generally known as cotton manufacturing. “The manufacture of this staple,” says a very eminent authority, “is a unit, beginning at the field where the cotton is picked, and ending at the factory from which the cloth is sent to the merchant.” How little this essential truth has been appreciated is apparent from the fact that, until the last census, ginning, pressing, and baling have been classed with the “production” of cotton, and its manufacture held to consist solely of spinning and weaving. Yet there is not a process to which the lint is submitted after it is thrown from the negro’s “pocket” that does not act directly on the quality of the cloth that is finally produced, and on the cheapness and efficiency with which the cloth is made. The separation of the fibre from the seed, the disposition made of the fluffy lint before it is compressed, the compression itself, and the baling of the compressed cotton—these are all delicate operations, involving the integrity of the fibre, the cost of getting it ready for the spindle, and the ease with which it may be spun. Indeed, Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, a most accomplished writer, contends that the gin-house is the pivotal point around which the whole manufacture of cotton revolves. There is no question that with one-tenth of the money invested in improved gins, cleaners, and pressers that would be required for factories, and with incomparably less risk, the South could make one-half the profit, pound for pound, that is made in the mills of New England. Mr. F. C. Morehead, already alluded to in this article, says: “A farmer who produces 500 bales of cotton—200,000 pounds—can, by the expenditure of $1500 on improved gins and cleaners, add one cent per pound to the value of his crop, or $2000. If he added only one-half of one cent, he would get in the first year over fifty per cent. return of his outlay.” Mr. Edward Atkinson—to close this list of authorities—says that the cotton crop is deteriorated ten per cent. at least by being improperly handled from the field to the factory. It is, of course, equally true that a reform in this department of the manufacture of cotton would add ten per cent. to the value of the crop—say $30,000,000—and that, too, without cost to the consumer. Much of the work now done in the mills of New England is occasioned by the errors committed in ginning and packing. Not only would the great part of the dust, sand, and grit that get into cotton from careless handling about the gin-house be kept out if it were properly protected, but that which is in the fibre naturally could be cleaned out more efficiently and with one-third the labor and cost, if it were taken before it has been compressed and baled. Beyond this, the excessive beating and tearing of the fibre necessary to clean it after the sand has been packed in, weaken and impair it, and the sand injures the costly and delicate machinery of the mills.
The capital available to the farmers of any neighborhood in the South is entirely adequate to make thorough reform in this most important, safest, and most profitable department of the manufacture of cotton. A gin-house constructed on the best plan, supplied with the new roller gins lately invented in England, that guarantee to surpass in quantity of cotton ginned as well as quality of lint our rude and imperfect saw gins, having automatic feeders to pass the picking to the gin, and an apron to receive the lint as it comes from the gin and carry it to the beater, or cleaner, where all the motes and dust can be taken from the freshly ginned fibre and then, instead of rolling this fleecy mass on a dirty floor, where it would catch every particle of dust and grit, to carry it direct to a Dedrick press that would compress forty pounds within a cubic foot, and reduce the little bale of one hundred and twenty pounds to the consistency of elm-wood, and as little liable to soak water or catch dirt—an establishment of this sort would add one cent per pound to every pound of cotton put through it, and would be worth more as an example than a dozen cotton factories. Annexed to this gin-house should be a huller to take the hulls from the seed and to this huller the seed should be taken as it comes from the gins. Once hulled, the hulls should be fed to the stock, restored to the soil, or sold, and the kernels sent to the nearest oil mill, the oil sold, and the meal fed to sheep or stock, or used as a fertilizer. These improvements, costing little, and within the skill of ordinary laborers, would bring as good a profit as could be realized by a factory involving enormous outlay, great risk, and the utmost skill of management. The importance of reform here will be seen when we state that there is half as much capital—say $70,000,000—invested in machinery for baling, pressing, and ginning cotton as there is invested in the United States in machinery for weaving and spinning it. So great has been the progress in invention, and so sluggish the cotton farmer to reform either his methods or his machinery, that experts agree that the ginning, pressing, and baling of the crop could be done with one-half or possibly one-third of the labor and cost of the present, and done so much better that the product would be worth ten per cent. more than it now commands, if the best machinery were bought, and the best methods employed.
The urgency and the magnitude of the reforms needed in the field and about the gin-house have not deterred the South from aspiring to spin and weave at least the bulk of the cotton crop. Indeed, there is nothing that so appeals to Southern pride as to urge the possibility that in time the manufacture of this crop as well as the crop itself shall be a monopoly of the cotton belt. As the South grows richer and the conditions of competition are nearer equal, there will be a tendency to place new machinery intended for the manufacture of cotton near the field in which the staple is growing; but the extent to which this tendency will control, or the time in which it will become controlling, is beyond the scope of this article. We shall rather deal with things as they are, or are likely to be in the very near future. We note, then, that in the past ten years the South has more than doubled the amount of cotton manufactured within her borders. In 1870, there were used 45,032,866 pounds of cotton; in 1880, 101,937,256 pounds. In 1870, there were 11,602 looms and 416,983 spindles running; in 1880, 15,222 looms and 714,078 spindles. This array of figures hardly indicates fairly the progress that the South will make in the next ten years, for the reason that the factories in which these spindles are turned are experiments in most of the localities in which they are placed. It is the invariable rule that when a factory is built in any city or country it is easier to raise the capital for a subsequent enterprise than for the first one. At Augusta, Georgia, for instance, where the manufacture of cloth has been demonstrated a success, the progress is remarkable. In the past two years two new mills, the Enterprise and Sibly, with 30,000 spindles each, have been established; and a third, the King, has been organized, with a capital of $1,000,000 and 30,000 spindles. The capital for these mills was furnished about one-fourth in Augusta, and the balance in the North. With these mills running, Augusta will have 170,000 spindles, and will have added about 70,000 spindles to the last census returns. In South Carolina the same rapid growth is resulting from the establishment of one or two successful mills; and in Columbus, Georgia, the influence of one successful mill, the Eagle and Phœnix, has raised the local consumption of cotton from 1927 bales in 1870 to 19,000 bales in 1880. In Atlanta, Georgia, the first mill had hardly been finished before the second was started; a third is projected; and two companies have secured charters for the building of a forty-mile canal to furnish water-power and factory fronts to capital in and about the city. These things are mentioned simply to show that the growth of cotton manufacture in the South is sympathetic, and that each factory established is an argument for others. There is no investment that has proved so uniformly successful in the South as that put into cotton factories. An Augusta factory just advertises eight per cent. semi-annual dividend; the Eagle and Phœnix, of Columbus, earned twenty-five per cent. last year; the Augusta factory for eleven years made an average of eighteen per cent. per annum. The net earnings of the Langley Mills was $480,000 for its first eight years on a capital of $400,000, or an average of fifteen per cent. a year. The earnings of sixty Southern mills, large and small, selected at random, for three years, averaged fourteen per cent. per annum.
Indeed, an experience varied and extended enough to give it authority teaches that there is absolutely no reason why the South should not profitably quadruple its capacity for the manufacture of cotton every year in the next five years except the lack of capital. The lack of skilled labor has proved to be a chimerical fear, as the mills bring enough of skilled labor to any community in which they are established to speedily educate up a native force. It may be true that for the most delicate work the South will for a while lack the efficient labor of New England that has been trained for generations, but it is equally true that no factory in the South has ever been stopped a week for the lack of suitable labor. The operatives can live cheaper than at the North, and can be had for lower wages. As sensible a man as Mr. Edward Atkinson claimed lately that in the cotton country proper a person could not keep at continuous in-door labor during the summer. The answer to this is that during the present summer, the hottest ever known, not a Southern mill has stopped for one day or hour on account of the heat, and this, too, when scores of establishments through the Western and Northern cities were closed. One of the strongest points of advantage the South has is that for no extreme of climate, acting on the machinery, the operatives, or the water-supply, is any of her mills forced to suspend work at any season. Beyond this, Southern water-powers can be purchased low, and the land adjacent at a song; there are no commissions to pay on the purchase of cotton, no freight on its transportation, and it is submitted to the picker before it has undergone serious compression. Mr. W. H. Young, of Columbus, perhaps the best Southern authority, estimates that the Columbus mills have an advantage of nine-tenths of a cent per pound over their Northern competitors, and this in a mill of 1600 looms will amount to nine per cent. on the entire capital, or $120,099. The Southern mills, without exception, pulled through the years of depression that followed the panic of 1873, paying regular dividends of from six per cent. to fifteen, and, it may be said, have thoroughly won the confidence of investors North and South. The one thing that has retarded the growth of manufacturing in the Cotton States, the lack of capital, is being overcome with astonishing rapidity. Within the past two years considerably over $100,000,000 of Northern capital has been subscribed, in lots of $1,000,000 and upward, for the purchase and development of Southern railroads and mining properties; the total will probably run to $120,000,000. There is now being expended in the building of new railroads from Atlanta, Georgia, as headquarters, $17,800,000, not one dollar of which was subscribed by Georgians or by the State of Georgia. The men who invest these vast amounts in the South are interested in the general development of the section into which they have gone with their enterprise, and they readily double any local subscription for any legitimate local improvement. By the sale of these railroad properties to Northern syndicates at advanced prices the local stockholders have realized heavily in cash, and this surplus is seeking manufacturing investment. The prospect is that the next ten years will witness a growth in this direction beyond what even the most sanguine predict.
The International Cotton Exposition, opening October 5, of the present year, in Atlanta, must have a tremendous influence in improving the culture, handling, and manufacture of the great staple of the South. The Southern people do not lack the desire to keep abreast with improvement and invention, but on the contrary have shown precipitate eagerness in reaching out for the best and newest. Before the war, when the Southern planter had a little surplus money he bought a slave. Since the war, he buys a piece of machinery. The trouble has been that he was forced to buy without any guide as to the value of what he bought, or its adaptability to the purposes for which he intended it. The consequence is that the farms are littered with ill-adapted and inferior implements and machines, representing twice the investment that, intelligently placed, would provide an equipment that with half the labor would do better work. It is the purpose of the exposition to bring the farmers face to face with the very best machinery that invention and experience have produced. The buildings themselves will be models each of its kind, and will represent the judgment of experts as to cheapness, durability, safety and general excellence. The past and present will be contrasted in the exhibition. The old loom on which the rude fabrics of our forefathers were woven by hands gentle and loving will be put against the more elaborate looms of to-day. The spinning wheel of the past, that filled all the country-side with its drowsy music, as the dusky spinner advanced and retreated, with not ungraceful courtesy and a swinging sidewise shuffle, will find its sweet voice lost in the hum of modern spindles. The cycle of gins and ginning will be there completed, invention coming back, after a half-century of trial with the brutal saw, to a perfected variation of the patient and gentle roller with which the precious fleece was pulled from the seed years upon years ago. There are the most wonderful machines promised, including a half-dozen that claim to have solved the problem—supposed to be past finding out—of picking cotton by machinery. Large fields flank the buildings, and on these are tested the various kinds of cotton seed, fed by the various kinds of fertilizers, each put in fair competition with the others.
One of the most important special inventions at the exposition will be the Clement attachment—a contrivance for spinning the cotton as it comes from the gin. The invention is simply the marriage of the gin to the spindle. These are joined by two large cards that take the fibre from the gin, straighten it out, and pass it directly to the spinning boards, where it is made into the best of yarns. The announcement of this invention two years ago created very great excitement. If it proved a success, the whole system of cotton manufacture was changed. If the cotton could be spun directly from the gin, all the expense of baling would be eliminated, and four or five expensive steps in the process of cotton from field to cloth would be rendered unnecessary. Better than all, the South argued, the Clement attachment brought the heaviest part of manufacturing to the cotton field, from which it could never be divorced. By the simple joining of the spindles to the gin, the cotton, worth only eight or nine cents as baled lint, in which shape it had been shipped North, became worth sixteen to eighteen cents as yarns. The home value of the crop was thus to be doubled, and by such process as New England could never capture. Several of the attachments were put to work, and were visited by thousands. They produced an excellent quality of yarns, and made a clear profit of two cents per pound on the cotton treated. The investment required was small, and it was held that $5000 would certainly bring a net annual profit of $2200. Many of these little mills are still running, and profitably; but difficulties between the owner and his agents, and a general suspicion raised by his declining to put the machine on its merits before certain agricultural associations, prevented its general adoption. That this attachment, or some machine of similar character for spinning the cotton into yarns near the field where it is grown, will be generally adopted through the South in the near future, I have not a particle of doubt; that the exposition with its particular exhibits on this point will hasten the day, there is every reason to hope. There are many yarn mills already scattered through the South, but none of them promise the results that will be achieved when the spindles are wedded to the gin, and the same motive power drives both, carrying the cotton without delay or compression from seed to thread.
Such, then, in brief and casual review, is King Cotton, his subjects, and his realm. Vast as his concerns and possessions may appear at present, they are but the hint of what the future will develop. The best authority puts the amount of cotton goods manufactured in America at about fourteen pounds per head of population, of which twelve pounds per capita are retained for home consumption, leaving only a small margin for export. On the Continent there is but one country, probably—Switzerland—that manufactures more cotton goods than it consumes; and the Continent demands from Great Britain an amount of cotton cloth that, added to its own supply, exhausts nearly one-half the product of the English mills. It is hardly probable that, under the sharp competition of American mills, the capacity of either England or the Continent for producing ordinary cotton cloths will be greatly increased. But, with the yield of the English and Continental mills at least measurably defined and now rapidly absorbed, there is an enormous demand for machine-made cotton fabrics springing from new and virtually exhaustless sources. The continents of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and the countries lying between the two American continents, contain more than 800,000,000 people, according to general authority. This immense population is clothed in cotton almost exclusively, and almost as exclusively in hand-made fabrics. That the cheap and superior products of the modern factory will displace these hand-made goods as rapidly as they can be delivered upon competing terms, cannot be doubted. To supply China alone with cotton fabrics made by machine, deducting the 35,000,000 people or thereabout already supplied, and estimating the demand of the remainder at five pounds per capita, would require 3,000,000 additional bales of cotton and 30,000,000 additional spindles. The goods needed for this demand will be the lower grades of cottons, for the manufacture of which the South is especially adapted, and in which there is serious reason to believe she has demonstrated she has advantages over New England. The demand from Mexico, Central and South America, will grow into immense proportions as cotton and its products cheapen under increased supply, and improved methods of culture and manufacture. The South will be called upon to furnish the cotton to meet the calls of the peoples enumerated. That she can easily do so has been made plain by previous estimate, but it may be added that hardly three per cent. of the cotton area is now devoted to cotton, and that on one-tenth of a single Cotton State—Texas—double the present crop might be raised. Whether or not she will do this profitably, and without destroying the happiness and prosperity of her former population, and building up a land-holding oligarchy, depends on a reform in her system of credit and her system of planting. The first is being effected by the introduction of capital that recognizes farming lands as a safe risk worthy of a low percentage of interest; the latter must depend on the intelligence of her people, the force of a few bright examples, and the wisdom of her leaders. She will be called upon to supply a large proportion of the manufactured goods for this new and limitless demand. It has already been shown that she has felicitous conditions for this work.
IN PLAIN BLACK AND WHITE.[[2]]
[2]. Reprinted from The Century, April, 1885.
A REPLY TO MR. CABLE.
IT is strange that during the discussion of the negro question, which has been wide and pertinent, no one has stood up to speak the mind of the South. In this discussion there has been much of truth and more of error—something of perverseness, but more of misapprehension—not a little of injustice, but perhaps less of mean intention.
Amid it all, the South has been silent.
There has been, perhaps, good reason for this silence. The problem under debate is a tremendous one. Its right solution means peace, prosperity, and happiness to the South. A mistake, even in the temper in which it is approached or the theory upon which its solution is attempted, would mean detriment, that at best would be serious, and might easily be worse. Hence the South has pondered over this problem, earnestly seeking with all her might the honest and the safe way out of its entanglements, and saying little because there was but little to which she felt safe in committing herself. Indeed, there was another reason why she did not feel called upon to obtrude her opinions. The people of the North, proceeding by the right of victorious arms, had themselves undertaken to settle the negro question. From the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights Bill they hurried with little let or hindrance, holding the negro in the meanwhile under a sort of tutelage, from part in which his former masters were practically excluded. Under this state of things the South had little to do but watch and learn.
We have now passed fifteen years of experiment. Certain broad principles have been established as wise and just.
The South has something to say which she can say with confidence. There is no longer impropriety in her speaking or lack of weight in her words. The people of the United States have, by their suffrages, remitted to the Southern people, temporarily at least, control of the race question. The decision of the Supreme Court on the Civil Rights Bill leaves practically to their adjustment important issues that were, until that decision was rendered, covered by straight and severe enactment. These things deepen the responsibility of the South, increase its concern, and confront it with a problem to which it must address itself promptly and frankly. Where it has been silent, it now should speak. The interest of every American in the honorable and equitable settlement of this question is second only to the interest of those specially—and fortunately, we believe—charged with its adjustment. “What will you do with it?” is a question any man may now ask the South, and to which the South should make frank and full reply.
It is important that this reply shall be plain and straightforward. Above all things it must carry the genuine convictions of the people it represents. On this subject and at this time the South cannot afford to be misunderstood. Upon the clear and general apprehension of her position and of her motives and purpose everything depends. She cannot let pass unchallenged a single utterance that, spoken in her name, misstates her case or her intention. It is to protest against just such injustice that this article is written.
In a lately printed article, Mr. George W. Cable, writing in the name of the Southern people, confesses judgment on points that they still defend, and commits them to a line of thought from which they must forever dissent. In this article, as in his works, the singular tenderness and beauty of which have justly made him famous, Mr. Cable is sentimental rather than practical. But the reader, enchained by the picturesque style and misled by the engaging candor with which the author admits the shortcomings of “We of the South,” and the kindling enthusiasm with which he tells how “We of the South” must make reparation, is apt to assume that it is really the soul of the South that breathes through Mr. Cable’s repentant sentences. It is not my purpose to discuss Mr. Cable’s relations to the people for whom he claims to speak. Born in the South, of Northern parents, he appears to have had little sympathy with his Southern environment, as in 1882 he wrote, “To be in New England would be enough for me. I was there once,—a year ago,—and it seemed as if I had never been home till then.” It will be suggested that a man so out of harmony with his neighbors as to say, even after he had fought side by side with them on the battle-field, that he never felt at home until he had left them, cannot speak understandingly of their views on so vital a subject as that under discussion. But it is with his statement rather than his personality that we have to deal. Does he truly represent the South? We reply that he does not! There may be here and there in the South a dreaming theorist who subscribes to Mr. Cable’s teachings. We have seen no signs of one. Among the thoughtful men of the South,—the men who felt that all brave men might quit fighting when General Lee surrendered,—who, enshrining in their hearts the heroic memories of the cause they had lost, in good faith accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which they had appealed,—who bestirred themselves cheerfully amid the ruins of their homes, and set about the work of rehabilitation,—who have patched and mended and builded anew, and fashioned out of pitiful resource a larger prosperity than they ever knew before,—who have set their homes on the old red hills, and staked their honor and prosperity and the peace and well-being of the children who shall come after them on the clear and equitable solution of every social, industrial, or political problem that concerns the South,—among these men, who control and will continue to control, I do know, there is general protest against Mr. Cable’s statement of the case, and universal protest against his suggestions for the future. The mind of these men I shall attempt to speak, maintaining my right to speak for them with the pledge that, having exceptional means for knowing their views on this subject, and having spared no pains to keep fully informed thereof, I shall write down nothing in their name on which I have found even a fractional difference of opinion.
A careful reading of Mr. Cable’s article discloses the following argument: The Southern people have deliberately and persistently evaded the laws forced on them for the protection of the freedman; this evasion has been the result of prejudices born of and surviving the institution of slavery, the only way to remove which is to break down every distinction between the races; and now the best thought of the South, alarmed at the withdrawal of the political machinery that forced the passage of the protective laws, which withdrawal tempts further and more intolerable evasions, is moving to forbid all further assortment of the races and insist on their intermingling in all places and in all relations. The first part of this argument is a matter of record, and, from the Southern stand-point, mainly a matter of reputation. It can bide its time. The suggestion held in its conclusion is so impossible, so mischievous, and, in certain aspects, so monstrous, that it must be met at once.
It is hard to think about the negro with exactness. His helplessness, his generations of enslavement, his unique position among the peoples of the earth, his distinctive color, his simple, lovable traits,—all these combine to hasten opinion into conviction where he is the subject of discussion. Three times has this tendency brought about epochal results in his history. First, it abolished slavery. For this all men are thankful, even those who, because of the personal injustice and violence of the means by which it was brought about, opposed its accomplishment. Second, it made him a voter. This, done more in a sense of reparation than in judgment, is as final as the other. The North demanded it; the South expected it; all acquiesced in it, and, wise or unwise, it will stand. Third, it fixed by enactment his social and civil rights. And here for the first time the revolution faltered. Up to this point the way had been plain, the light clear, and the march at quick-step. Here the line halted. The way was lost; there was hesitation, division, and uncertainty. Knowing not which way to turn, and enveloped in doubt, the revolutionists heard the retreat sounded by the Supreme Court with small reluctance, and, to use Mr. Cable’s words, “bewildered by complication, vexed by many a blunder,” retired from the field. See, then, the progress of this work. The first step, right by universal agreement, would stand if the law that made it were withdrawn. The second step, though irrevocable, raises doubts as to its wisdom. The third, wrong in purpose, has failed in execution. It stands denounced as null by the highest court, as inoperative by general confession, and as unwise by popular verdict. Let us take advantage of this halt in the too rapid revolution, and see exactly where we stand and what is best for us to do. The situation is critical. The next moment may formulate the work of the next twenty years. The tremendous forces of the revolution, unspent and still terrible, are but held in arrest. Launch them mistakenly, chaos may come. Wrong-headedness may be as fatal now as wrong-heartedness. Clear views, clear statement, and clear understanding are the demands of the hour. Given these, the common sense and courage of the American people will make the rest easy.
Let it be understood in the beginning, then, that the South will never adopt Mr. Cable’s suggestion of the social intermingling of the races. It can never be driven into accepting it. So far from there being a growing sentiment in the South in favor of the indiscriminate mixing of the races, the intelligence of both races is moving farther from that proposition day by day. It is more impossible (if I may shade a superlative) now than it was ten years ago; it will be less possible ten years hence. Neither race wants it. The interest, as the inclination, of both races is against it. Here the issue with Mr. Cable is made up. He denounces any assortment of the races as unjust, and demands that white and black shall intermingle everywhere. The South replies that the assortment of the races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodation for each race, but separate.
The difference is an essential one. Deplore or defend it as we may, an antagonism is bred between the races when they are forced into mixed assemblages. This sinks out of sight, if not out of existence, when each race moves in its own sphere. Mr. Cable admits this feeling, but doubts that it is instinctive. In my opinion it is instinctive—deeper than prejudice or pride, and bred in the bone and blood. It would make itself felt even in sections where popular prejudice runs counter to its manifestation. If in any town in Wisconsin or Vermont there was equal population of whites and blacks, and schools, churches, hotels, and theaters were in common, this instinct would assuredly develop; the races would separate, and each race would hasten the separation. Let me give an example that touches this supposition closely. Bishop Gilbert Haven, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, many years ago came to the South earnestly, and honestly, we may believe, devoted to breaking up the assortment of the races. He was backed by powerful influences in the North. He was welcomed by resident Northerners in the South (then in control of Southern affairs) as an able and eloquent exponent of their views. His first experiment toward mixing the races was made in the church—surely the most propitious field. Here the fraternal influence of religion emphasized his appeals for the brotherhood of the races. What was the result? After the first month his church was decimated. The Northern whites and the Southern blacks left it in squads. The dividing influences were mutual. The stout bishop contended with prayer and argument and threat against the inevitable, but finally succumbed. Two separate churches were established, and each race worshiped to itself. There had been no collision, no harsh words, no discussion even. Each race simply obeyed its instinct, that spoke above the appeal of the bishop and dominated the divine influences that pulsed from pew to pew. Time and again did the bishop force the experiment. Time and again he failed. At last he was driven to the confession that but one thing could effect what he had tried so hard to bring about, and that was miscegenation. A few years of experiment would force Mr. Cable to the same conclusion.
The same experiment was tried on a larger scale by the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) when it established its churches in the South after the war. It essayed to bring the races together, and in its conferences and its churches there was no color line. Prejudice certainly did not operate to make a division here. On the contrary, the whites and blacks of this church were knit together by prejudice, pride, sentiment, political and even social policy. Underneath all this was a race instinct, obeying which, silently, they drifted swiftly apart. While white Methodists of the church North and of the church South, distant from each other in all but the kinship of race and worship, were struggling to effect once more a union of the churches that had been torn apart by a quarrel over slavery, so that in every white conference and every white church on all this continent white Methodists could stand in restored brotherhood, the Methodist Church (North) agreed, without serious protest, to a separation of its Southern branch into two conferences of whites and of blacks, and into separate congregations where the proportion of either race was considerable. Was it without reason—it certainly was not through prejudice—that this Church, while seeking anew fusion with its late enemies, consented to separate from its new friends?
It was the race instinct that spoke there. It spoke not with prejudice, but against it. It spoke there as it speaks always and everywhere—as it has spoken for two thousand years. And it spoke to the reason of each race. Millaud, in voting in the French Convention for the beheading of Louis XVI., said: “If death did not exist, it would be necessary to-day to invent it.” So of this instinct. It is the pledge of the integrity of each race, and of peace between the races. Without it, there might be a breaking down of all lines of division and a thorough intermingling of whites and blacks. This once accomplished, the lower and the weaker elements of the races would begin to fuse and the process of amalgamation would have begun. This would mean the disorganization of society. An internecine war would be precipitated. The whites, at any cost and at any hazard, would maintain the clear integrity and dominance of the Anglo-Saxon blood. They understand perfectly that the debasement of their own race would not profit the humble and sincere race with which their lot is cast, and that the hybrid would not gain what either race lost. Even if the vigor and the volume of the Anglo-Saxon blood would enable it to absorb the African current, and after many generations recover its own strength and purity, not all the powers of earth could control the unspeakable horrors that would wait upon the slow process of clarification. Easier far it would be to take the population of central New York, intermingle with it an equal percentage of Indians, and force amalgamation between the two. Let us review the argument. If Mr. Cable is correct in assuming that there is no instinct that keeps the two races separate in the South, then there is no reason for doubting that if intermingled they would fuse. Mere prejudice would not long survive perfect equality and social intermingling; and the prejudice once gone, intermarrying would begin. Then, if there is a race instinct in either race that resents intimate association with the other, it would be unwise to force such association when there are easy and just alternatives. If there is no such instinct, the mixing of the races would mean amalgamation, to which the whites will never submit, and to which neither race should submit. So that in either case, whether the race feeling is instinct or prejudice, we come to but one conclusion: The white and black races in the South must walk apart. Concurrent their courses may go—ought to go—will go—but separate. If instinct did not make this plain in a flash, reason would spell it out letter by letter.
Now, let us see. We hold that there is an instinct, ineradicable and positive, that will keep the races apart, that would keep the races apart if the problem were transferred to Illinois or to Maine, and that will resist every effort of appeal, argument, or force to bring them together. We add in perfect frankness, however, that if no such instinct existed, or if the South had reasonable doubt of its existence, it would, by every means in its power, so strengthen the race prejudice that it would do the work and hold the stubbornness and strength of instinct. The question that confronts us at this point is: Admitted this instinct, that gathers each race to itself. Then, do you believe it possible to carry forward on the same soil and under the same laws two races equally free, practically equal in numbers, and yet entirely distinct and separate? This is a momentous question. It involves a problem that, all things considered, is without a precedent or parallel. Can the South carry this problem in honor and in peace to an equitable solution? We reply that for ten years the South has been doing this very thing, and with at least apparent success. No impartial and observant man can say that in the present aspect of things there is cause for alarm, or even for doubt. In the experience of the past few years there is assuredly reason for encouragement. There may be those who discern danger in the distant future. We do not. Beyond the apprehensions which must for a long time attend a matter so serious, we see nothing but cause for congratulation. In the common sense and the sincerity of the negro, no less than in the intelligence and earnestness of the whites, we find the problem simplifying. So far from the future bringing trouble, we feel confident that another decade or so, confirming the experience of the past ten years, will furnish the solution to be accepted of all men.
Let us examine briefly what the South has been doing, and study the attitude of the races toward each other. Let us do this, not so much to vindicate the past as to clear the way for the future. Let us see what the situation teaches. There must be in the experience of fifteen years something definite and suggestive. We begin with the schools and school management, as the basis of the rest.
Every Southern State has a common-school system, and in every State separate schools are provided for the races. Almost every city of more than five thousand inhabitants has a public-school system, and in every city the schools for whites and blacks are separate. There is no exception to this rule that I can find. In many cases the law creating this system requires that separate schools shall be provided for the races. This plan works admirably. There is no friction in the administration of the schools, and no suspicion as to the ultimate tendency of the system. The road to school is clear, and both races walk therein with confidence. The whites, assured that the school will not be made the hot-bed of false and pernicious ideas, or the scene of unwise associations, support the system cordially, and insist on perfect equality in grade and efficiency. The blacks, asking no more than this, fill the schools with alert and eager children. So far from feeling debased by the separate-school system, they insist that the separation shall be carried further, and the few white teachers yet presiding over negro schools supplanted by negro teachers. The appropriations for public schools are increased year after year, and free education grows constantly in strength and popularity. Cities that were afraid to commit themselves to free-schools while mixed schools were a possibility commenced building school-houses as soon as separate schools were assured. In 1870 the late Benjamin H. Hill found his matchless eloquence unable to carry the suggestion of negro education into popular tolerance. Ten years later nearly one million black children attended free-schools, supported by general taxation. Though the whites pay nineteen-twentieths of the tax, they insist that the blacks shall share its advantages equally. The schools for each race are opened on the same day and closed on the same day. Neither is run a single day at the expense of the other. The negroes are satisfied with the situation. I am aware that some of the Northern teachers of negro high-schools and universities will controvert this. Touching their opinion, I have only to say that it can hardly be considered fair or conservative. Under the forcing influence of social ostracism, they have reasoned impatiently and have been helped to conclusions by quick sympathies or resentments. Driven back upon themselves and hedged in by suspicion or hostility, their service has become a sort of martyrdom, which has swiftly stimulated opinion into conviction and conviction into fanaticism. I read in a late issue of Zion’s Herald a letter from one of these teachers, who declined, on the conductor’s request, to leave the car in which she was riding, and which was set apart exclusively for negroes. The conductor, therefore, presumed she was a quadroon, and stated his presumption in answer to the inquiry of a young negro man who was with her. She says of this:
“Truly, a glad thrill went through my heart—a thrill of pride. This great autocrat had pronounced me as not only in sympathy, but also one in blood, with the truest, tenderest, and noblest race that dwells on earth.”
If this quotation, which is now before me, over the writer’s name, suggests that she and those of her colleagues who agree with her have narrowed within their narrowing environment, and acquired artificial enthusiasm under their unnatural conditions, so that they must be unsafe as advisers and unfair as witnesses, the sole purpose for which it is introduced will have been served. This suggestion does not reach all Northern teachers of negro schools. Some have taken broader counsels, awakened wider sympathies, and, as a natural result, hold more moderate views. The influence of the extremer faction is steadily diminishing. Set apart, as small and curious communities are set here and there in populous States, stubborn and stiff for a while, but overwhelmed at last and lost in the mingling currents, these dissenting spots will be ere long blotted out and forgotten. The educational problem, which is their special care, has already been settled, and the settlement accepted with a heartiness that precludes the possibility of its disturbance. From the stand-point of either race the experiment of distinct but equal schools for the white and black children of the South has demonstrated its wisdom, its policy, and its justice, if any experiment ever made plain its wisdom in the hands of finite man.
I quote on this subject Gustavus J. Orr, one of the wisest and best of men, and lately elected, by spontaneous movement, president of the National Educational Association. He says: “The race question in the schools is already settled. We give the negroes equal advantages, but separate schools. This plan meets the reason and satisfies the instinct of both races. Under it we have spent over five million dollars in Georgia, and the system grows in strength constantly.” I asked if the negroes wanted mixed schools. His reply was prompt: “They do not. I have questioned them carefully on this point, and they make but one reply: “They want their children in their own schools and under their own teachers.” I asked what would be the effect of mixed schools. “I could not maintain the Georgia system one year. Both races would protest against it. My record as a public-school man is known. I have devoted my life to the work of education. But I am so sure of the evils that would come from mixed schools that, even if they were possible, I would see the whole educational system swept away before I would see them established. There is an instinct that gathers each race about itself. It is as strong in the blacks as in the whites, though it has not asserted itself so strongly. It is making itself manifest, since the blacks are organizing a social system of their own. It has long controlled them in their churches, and it is now doing so in their schools.”
In churches, as in schools, the separation is perfect. The negroes, in all denominations in which their membership is an appreciable percentage of the whole, have their own churches, congregations, pastors, conferences, bishops, and their own missionaries. There is not the slightest antagonism between them and the white churches of the same denomination. On the contrary, there is sympathetic interest and the utmost friendliness. The separation is recognized as not only instinctive but wise. There is no disposition to disturb it, and least of all on the part of the negro. The church is with him the center of social life, and there he wants to find his own people and no others. Let me quote just here a few sentences from a speech delivered by a genuine black negro at the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South), in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1880. He is himself a pastor of the African Methodist Church, and came as a fraternal delegate. This extract from a speech, largely extempore, is a fair specimen of negro eloquence, as it is a fair evidence of the feeling of that people toward their white neighbors. He said:
“Mr. Chairman, Bishops, and Brethren in Christ: Let me here state a circumstance which has just now occurred. When in the vestry, there we were consulting your committee, among whom is your illustrious Christian Governor, the Honorable A. H. Colquitt [applause], feeling an unusual thirst, and expecting in a few moments to appear before you, thoughtlessly I asked him if there was water to drink. He, looking about the room, answered, ‘There is none; I will get you some.’ I insisted not; but presently it was brought by a brother minister, and handed me by the Governor. I said: ‘Governor, you must allow me to deny myself this distinguished favor, as it recalls so vividly the episode of the warrior king of Israel, when, with parched lips, he cried from the rocky cave of Adullam, ‘Oh! that one would give me drink of water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate.’ And when three of his valiant captains broke through the host of the enemy, and returned to him with the water for which his soul was longing, regarding it as the water of life, he would not drink it, but poured it out to the Lord.’ [Applause.] So may this transcendent emblem of purity and love, from the hand of your most honored co-laborer and friend of the human race, ever remain as a memorial unto the Lord of the friendship existing between the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the African Methodist Episcopal Church upon this the first exchange of formal fraternal greeting. [Applause.]
“In the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,—and I declare the true sentiments of thousands,—I say, that for your Church and your race we cherish the kindliest feelings that ever found a lodgment in the human breast. [Applause.] Of this you need not be told. Let speak your former missionaries among us, who now hold seats upon this floor, and whose hearts have so often burned within them as they have seen the word sown by them in such humble soil burst forth into abundant prosperity. Ask the hundred thousand of your laymen who still survive the dead, how we conducted ourselves as tillers of the soil, as servants about the dwelling, and as common worshipers in the temple of God! Ask your battle-scarred veterans, who left their all to the mercy of relentless circumstances, and went, in answer to the clarion call of the trumpet, to the gigantic and unnatural strife of the second revolution! Ask them who looked at their interests at home [great cheering]; who raised their earthworks upon the field; who buried the young hero so far away from his home, or returned his ashes to the stricken hearts which hung breathless upon the hour; who protected their wives and little ones from the ravages of wild beasts, and the worse ravages of famine! And the answer is returned from a million heaving bosoms, as a monument of everlasting remembrance to the benevolence of the colored race in America. [Immense applause.] And these are they who greet you to-day, through their chief organization, the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. [Loud and continued applause.]
“And now, though the yoke which bound the master and the slave together in such close and mutual responsibility has been shivered by the rude shock of war, we find ourselves still standing by your side as natural allies against an unfriendly world.” [Applause.]
In their social institutions, as in their churches and schools, the negroes have obeyed their instinct and kept apart from the whites. They have their own social and benevolent societies, their own military companies, their own orders of Masons and Odd Fellows. They rally about these organizations with the greatest enthusiasm and support them with the greatest liberality. If it were proposed to merge them with white organizations of the same character, with equal rights guaranteed in all, the negroes would interpose the stoutest objection. Their tastes, associations, and inclinations—their instincts—lead them to gather their race about social centers of its own. I am tempted into trying to explain here what I have never yet seen a stranger to the South able to understand. The feeling that, by mutual action, separates whites and blacks when they are thrown together in social intercourse is not a repellent influence in the harsh sense of that word. It is centripetal rather than centrifugal. It is attractive about separate centers rather than expulsive from a common center. There is no antagonism, for example, between white and black military companies. On occasions they parade in the same street, and have none of the feeling that exists between Orangemen and Catholics. Of course the good sense of each race and the mutual recognition of the possible dangers of the situation have much to do with maintaining the good-will between the distinct races. The fact that in his own church or society the negro has more freedom, more chance for leadership and for individual development, than he could have in association with the whites, has more to do with it. But beyond all this is the fact that, in the segregation of the races, blacks as well as whites obey a natural instinct, which, always granting that they get equal justice and equal advantages, they obey without the slightest ill-nature or without any sense of disgrace. They meet the white people in all the avenues of business. They work side by side with the white bricklayer or carpenter in perfect accord and friendliness. When the trowel or the hammer is laid aside, the laborers part, each going his own way. Any attempt to carry the comradeship of the day into private life would be sternly resisted by both parties in interest.
We have seen that in churches, schools, and social organizations the whites and blacks are moving along separately but harmoniously, and that the “assortment of the races,” which has been described as shameful and unjust, is in most part made by the instinct of each race, and commands the hearty assent of both. Let us now consider the question of public carriers. On this point the South has been sharply criticised, and not always without reason. It is manifestly wrong to make a negro pay as much for a railroad ticket as a white man pays, and then force him to accept inferior accommodations. It is equally wrong to force a decent negro into an indecent car, when there is room for him or for her elsewhere. Public sentiment in the South has long recognized this, and has persistently demanded that the railroad managers should provide cars for the negroes equal in every respect to those set apart for the whites, and that these cars should be kept clean and orderly. In Georgia a State law requires all public roads or carriers to provide equal accommodation for each race, and failure to do so is made a penal offense. In Tennessee a negro woman lately gained damages by proving that she had been forced to take inferior accommodation on a train. The railroads have, with few exceptions, come up to the requirements of the law. Where they fail, they quickly feel the weight of public opinion, and shock the sense of public justice. This very discussion, I am bound to say, will lessen such failures in the future. On four roads, in my knowledge, even better has been done than the law requires. The car set apart for the negroes is made exclusive. No whites are permitted to occupy it. A white man who strays into this car is politely told that it is reserved for the negroes. He has the information repeated two or three times, smiles, and retreats. This rule works admirably and will win general favor. There are a few roads that make no separate provision for the races, but announce that any passenger can ride on any car. Here the “assortment” of the races is done away with, and here it is that most of the outrages of which we hear occur. On these roads the negro has no place set apart for him. As a rule, he is shy about asserting himself, and he usually finds himself in the meanest corners of the train. If he forces himself into the ladies’ car, he is apt to provoke a collision. It is on just one of these trains where the assortment of the passengers is left to chance that a respectable negro woman is apt to be forced to ride in a car crowded with negro convicts. Such a thing would be impossible where the issue is fairly met, and a car, clean, orderly, and exclusive, is provided for each race. The case could not be met by grading the tickets and the accommodations. Such a plan would bring together in the second or third class car just the element of both races between whom prejudice runs highest, and from whom the least of tact or restraint might be expected. On the railroads, as elsewhere, the solution of the race problem is, equal advantages for the same money,—equal in comfort, safety, and exclusiveness,—but separate.
There remains but one thing further to consider—the negro in the jury-box. It is assumed generally that the negro has no representation in the courts. This is a false assumption. In the United States courts he usually makes more than half the jury. As to the State courts, I can speak particularly as to Georgia. I assume that she does not materially differ from the other States. In Georgia the law requires that commissioners shall prepare the jury-list for each county by selection from the upright, intelligent, and experienced citizens of the county. This provision was put into the Constitution by the negro convention of reconstruction days. Under its terms no reasonable man would have expected to see the list made up of equal percentage of the races. Indeed, the fewest number of negroes were qualified under the law. Consequently, but few appeared on the lists. The number, as was to be expected, is steadily increasing. In Fulton County there are seventy-four negroes whose names are on the lists, and the commissioners, I am informed, have about doubled this number for the present year. These negroes make good jurymen, and are rarely struck by attorneys, no matter what the client or cause may be. About the worst that can be charged against the jury system in Georgia is that the commissioners have made jurors of negroes only when they had qualified themselves to intelligently discharge a juror’s duties. In few quarters of the South, however, is the negro unable to get full and exact justice in the courts, whether the jury be white or black. Immediately after the war, when there was general alarm and irritation, there may have been undue severity in sentences and extreme rigor of prosecution. But the charge that the people of the South have, in their deliberate and later moments prostituted justice to the oppression of this dependent people, is as false as it is infamous. There is abundant belief that the very helplessness of the negro in court has touched the heart and conscience of many a jury, when the facts should have held them impervious. In the city in which this is written, a negro, at midnight, on an unfrequented street, murdered a popular young fellow, over whose grave a monument was placed by popular subscription. The only witnesses of the killing were the friends of the murdered boy. Had the murderer been a white man, it is believed he would have been convicted. He was acquitted by the white jury, and has since been convicted of a murderous assault on a person of his own color. Similarly, a young white man, belonging to one of the leading families of the State, was hanged for the murder of a negro. Insanity was pleaded in his defense, and so plausibly that it is believed he would have escaped had his victim been a white man.
I quote on this point Mr. Benjamin H. Hill, who has been prosecuting attorney of the Atlanta, Ga., circuit for twelve years. He says: “In cities and towns the negro gets equal and exact justice before the courts. It is possible that, in remote counties, where the question is one of a fight between a white man and a negro, there may be a lingering prejudice that causes occasional injustice. The judge, however, may be relied on to correct this. As to negro jurors, I have never known a negro to allow his lawyer to accept a negro juror. For the State I have accepted a black juror fifty times, to have him rejected by the opposing lawyer by order of his negro client. This has incurred so invariably that I have accepted it as a rule. Irrespective of that, the negro gets justice in the courts, and the last remaining prejudice against him in the jury-box has passed away. I convicted a white man for voluntary manslaughter under peculiar circumstances. A negro met him on the street and cursed him. The white man ordered him off and started home. The negro followed him to his house and cursed him until he entered the door. When he came out, the negro was still waiting. He renewed the abuse, followed him to his store, and there struck him with his fist. In the struggle that followed, the negro was shot and killed. The jury promptly convicted the slayer.”
So much for the relation between the races in the South, in churches, schools, social organizations, on the railroad, and in theaters. Everything is placed on the basis of equal accommodations, but separate. In the courts the blacks are admitted to the jury-box as they lift themselves into the limit of qualification. Mistakes have been made and injustice has been worked here and there. This was to have been expected, and it has been less than might have been expected. But there can be no mistake about the progress the South is making in the equitable adjustment of the relations between the races. Ten years ago nothing was settled. There were frequent collisions and constant apprehensions. The whites were suspicious and the blacks were restless. So simple a thing as a negro taking an hour’s ride on the cars, or going to see a play, was fraught with possible danger. The larger affairs—school, church, and court—were held in abeyance. Now all this is changed. The era of doubt and mistrust is succeeded by the era of confidence and good-will. The races meet in the exchange of labor in perfect amity and understanding. Together they carry on the concerns of the day, knowing little or nothing of the fierce hostility that divides labor and capital in other sections. When they turn to social life they separate. Each race obeys its instinct and congregates about its own centers. At the theater they sit in opposite sections of the same gallery. On the trains they ride each in his own car. Each worships in his own church, and educates his children in his schools. Each has his place and fills it, and is satisfied. Each gets the same accommodation for the same money. There is no collision. There is no irritation or suspicion. Nowhere on earth is there kindlier feeling, closer sympathy, or less friction between two classes of society than between the whites and blacks of the South to-day. This is due to the fact that in the adjustment of their relations they have been practical and sensible. They have wisely recognized what was essential, and have not sought to change what was unchangeable. They have yielded neither to the fanatic nor demagogue, refusing to be misled by the one or misused by the other. While the world has been clamoring over their differences they have been quietly taking counsel with each other, in the field, the shop, the street and cabin, and settling things for themselves. That the result has not astonished the world in the speediness and the facility with which it has been reached, and the beneficence that has come with it, is due to the fact that the result has not been freely proclaimed. It has been a deplorable condition of our politics that the North has been misinformed as to the true condition of things in the South. Political greed and passion conjured pestilential mists to becloud what the lifting smoke of battle left clear. It has exaggerated where there was a grain of fact, and invented where there was none. It has sought to establish the most casual occurrences as the settled habit of the section, and has sprung endless jeremiades from one single disorder, as Jenkins filled the courts of Christendom with lamentations over his dissevered ear. These misrepresentations will pass away with the occasion that provoked them, and when the truth is known it will come with the force of a revelation to vindicate those who have bespoken for the South a fair trial, and to confound those who have borne false witness against her.
One thing further need be said, in perfect frankness. The South must be allowed to settle the social relations of the races according to her own views of what is right and best. There has never been a moment when she could have submitted to have the social status of her citizens fixed by an outside power. She accepted the emancipation and the enfranchisement of her slaves as the legitimate results of war that had been fought to a conclusion. These once accomplished, nothing more was possible. “Thus far and no farther,” she said to her neighbors, in no spirit of defiance, but with quiet determination. In her weakest moments, when her helpless people were hedged about by the unthinking bayonets of her conquerors, she gathered them for resistance at this point. Here she defended everything that a people should hold dear. There was little proclamation of her purpose. Barely did the whispered word that bespoke her resolution catch the listening ears of her sons; but for all this the victorious armies of the North, had they been rallied again from their homes, could not have enforced and maintained among this disarmed people the policy indicated in the Civil Rights bill. Had she found herself unable to defend her social integrity against the arms that were invincible on the fields where she staked the sovereignty of her States, her people would have abandoned their homes and betaken themselves into exile. Now, as then, the South is determined that, come what may, she must control the social relations of the two races whose lots are cast within her limits. It is right that she should have this control. The problem is hers, whether or not of her seeking, and her very existence depends on its proper solution. Her responsibility is greater, her knowledge of the case more thorough than that of others can be. The question touches her at every point; it presses on her from every side; it commands her constant attention. Every consideration of policy, of honor, of pride, of common sense impels her to the exactest justice and the fullest equity. She lacks the ignorance or misapprehension that might lead others into mistakes; all others lack the appalling alternative that, all else failing, would force her to use her knowledge wisely. For these reasons she has reserved to herself the right to settle the still unsettled element of the race problem, and this right she can never yield.
As a matter of course, this implies the clear and unmistakable domination of the white race in the South. The assertion of that is simply the assertion of the right of character, intelligence and property to rule. It is simply saying that the responsible and steadfast element in the community shall control, rather than the irresponsible and the migratory. It is the reassertion of the moral power that overthrew the scandalous reconstruction governments, even though, to the shame of the Republic be it said, they were supported by the bayonets of the General Government. Even the race issue is lost at this point. If the blacks of the South wore white skins, and were leagued together in the same ignorance and irresponsibility under any other distinctive mark than their color, they would progress not one step farther toward the control of affairs. Or if they were transported as they are to Ohio, and there placed in numerical majority of two to one, they would find the white minority there asserting and maintaining control, with less patience, perhaps, than many a Southern State has shown. Everywhere, with such temporary exceptions as afford demonstration of the rule, intelligence, character, and property will dominate in spite of numerical differences. These qualities are lodged with the white race in the South, and will assuredly remain there for many generations at least; so that the white race will continue to dominate the colored, even if the percentages of race increase deduced from the comparison of a lame census with a perfect one, and the omission of other considerations, should hold good and the present race majority be reversed.
Let no one imagine, from what is here said, that the South is careless of the opinion or regardless of the counsel of the outside world. On the contrary, while maintaining firmly a position she believes to be essential, she appreciates heartily the value of general sympathy and confidence. With an earnestness that is little less than pathetic she bespeaks the patience and the impartial judgment of all concerned. Surely her situation should command this rather than indifference or antagonism. In poverty and defeat,—with her cities destroyed, her fields desolated, her labor disorganized, her homes in ruins, her families scattered, and the ranks of her sons decimated,—in the face of universal prejudice, fanned by the storm of war into hostility and hatred—under the shadow of this sorrow and this disadvantage, she turned bravely to confront a problem that would have taxed to the utmost every resource of a rich and powerful and victorious people. Every inch of her progress has been beset with sore difficulties; and if the way is now clearing, it only reveals more clearly the tremendous import of the work to which her hands are given. It must be understood that she desires to silence no criticism, evade no issue, and lessen no responsibility. She recognizes that the negro is here to stay. She knows that her honor, her dear name, and her fame, no less than her prosperity, will be measured by the fulness of the justice she gives and guarantees to this kindly and dependent race. She knows that every mistake made and every error fallen into, no matter how innocently, endanger her peace and her reputation. In this full knowledge she accepts the issue without fear or evasion. She says, not boldly, but conscious of the honesty and the wisdom of her convictions: “Leave this problem to my working out. I will solve it in calmness and deliberation, without passion or prejudice, and with full regard for the unspeakable equities it holds. Judge me rigidly, but judge me by my works.” And with the South the matter may be left—must be left. There it can be left with the fullest confidence that the honor of the Republic will be maintained, the rights of humanity guarded, and the problem worked out in such exact justice as the finite mind can measure or finite agencies administer.