The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

CHAPTER IX

NEGRO LIFE

The negro problem in the South cannot be solved, nor is much light thrown upon it by the conditions of the race elsewhere. The immediate and pressing issue is the widespread belief that the great numbers of them in the South are an unsatisfactory element of the population. The total Negroes in the United States in 1900, the last available figures, was 8,834,000. They are, however, very unequally distributed throughout the Union; in twenty Northern states and territories there are only 50,000 altogether; in the states from Pennsylvania northward there are about 400,000; from Ohio westward about 500,000; while in the one state of Georgia there are over a million; 7,898,000 lived in the fifteen former slaveholding states; 7,187,000 in the eleven seceding states; and 5,055,000 in the seven states of the Lower South. At the rate of increase shown during the last forty years there will soon be 10,000,000 in the South alone. These figures have since 1900 been somewhat disturbed by the natural growth of population and by the interstate movement, so that the proportion of blacks in the North is doubtless now a little larger; but the fact remains that the habitat of the black is in the Southern States. Even there, great variations occur from state to state, and from place to place. In Briscoe County, Texas, there are 1,253 Whites and not a single Negro; in Beaufort County, S. C., there are 3,349 Whites and 32,137 Africans; on the island of St. Helena in this last county are 8,700 colored and 125 white people; and on Fenwick’s Island there are something like 100 Negroes and not a white person.

As between country and city, the Negro is a rural man; the only Southern cities containing over 50,000 of them in the Lower South are New Orleans and perhaps Atlanta; in the former slaveholding states out of 8,000,000 Negroes only about 1,000,000 lived in cities of 8,000 people and upwards, which is less in proportion than the Whites. In a very black district like the Delta of the Mississippi they form a majority of the city population. In 72 of the Southern places having a population of 2,500 or more at least half the population is African; but their drift cityward is less marked than that of the white people, eighty-five per cent of all the Negroes live outside of cities and towns. The Negroes have no race tradition of city life in Africa, are no fonder than Whites of moving from country to city, and throw no unendurable strain on the city governments.

A favorite assertion is that the American Negroes are either dying out or nearing the point where the death-rate will exceed the birth-rate. Hoffmann, in his “Race Traits,” has examined this question in a painstaking way, and proves conclusively that both North and South the death-rate of the black race is much higher than that of the Whites. In Philadelphia, for instance, the ratios are 30 to 1,000 against 20 to 1,000. Upon this point there are no trustworthy figures for the whole country; but an eighth of the Negroes live in the so-called “registration area,” which includes most of the large cities; and in that area the death-rate in 1900 is computed at 30 to 1,000 for Negroes and 17 to 1,000 for the Whites. This excess is largely due to the frightful mortality among negro children, which is almost double that among Whites in the same community. In Washington in 1900 one fifth of the white children under a year old died and almost one half of the colored children.

When Hoffmann attempts to show that the negro death-rate is accelerating, he is obliged to depend upon scanty figures from a few Southern cities. In Charleston, for instance, the records show in the forties (a period of yellow fever) a white death-rate of 16 and a colored death-rate of 20, against recent rates of 22 and 44 to the 1,000 respectively; but in New Orleans Mr. Hoffmann’s own figures show a reduction of the colored death-rate from 52 in the fifties to 40 in the nineties. The only possible conclusion from these conflicting results is that the earlier mortality statistics on which he relies are few and unreliable.

Nevertheless, the present conditions of negro mortality are frightful. They appear to be due primarily to ignorance and neglect in the care of children, and secondly, to an increase of dangerous diseases. The frequent statement that consumption was almost unknown among Negroes in slavery times is abundantly disproved by Hoffmann; but the disease is undoubtedly gaining, for much the same reason that it ravages the Indians in Alaska, namely, that the people now live in close houses which become saturated with the virus of the disease. Syphilis is also fearfully prevalent, and the most alarming statements are made by physicians who have practice or hospital service among the Negroes; but the testimony as to the extent of the disease is conflicting, and there are other race elements in the United States which are depleted by venereal disease. The blacks also suffer from the use of liquor, though drunkards are little known among the cotton hands; but drugs, particularly cocaine and morphine, are widely used. In one country store a clerk has been known to make up a hundred and fifty packages of cocaine in a single night.

Notwithstanding the undoubtedly high death-rate, the birth-rate is so much greater that at every census the negro race is shown to be still growing; as Murphy says: “Whenever the Negro has looked down the lane of annihilation he has always had the good sense to go around the other way.” The census of 1870 was so defective that it must be thrown out of account, but the negro population, which was about 4,400,000 in 1860, and 6,600,000 in 1880, had grown to 8,800,000 in 1900. It is true that the rate of increase is falling off both absolutely and in proportion to the white race. In the South Central group of states, which includes most of the Lower South, the population increased about forty-eight per cent from 1860 to 1880 and only thirty-nine per cent in the next double decade; while the white population has in both periods increased at about sixty per cent, with a rising ratio.

The urban Negro has a high death-rate, not only in the South but in Northern cities; in Boston and Indianapolis the birth-rate of the Negroes does not keep pace with the deaths, and they would disappear but for steady accessions from the South. The Southern blacks on the land are doing better and are growing steadily; neither statistics nor observations support the theory that the Negro is dying out in the South; and comparatively slight changes in resort to skilled physicians, in the spread of trained nurses, in infants’ food, may check the child mortality. On the other hand, any increase in thrift and in saving habits will almost certainly affect the size of families and diminish the average birth-rate.

The very words “The Negro” suggest the misleading idea that there is within the Southern states a clearly defined negro race. In fact, physically, intellectually, and morally, it is as much subdivided as the white race. What is supposed to be the pure African type is the Guinea Negro, very black, very uncouth, and hard to civilize. What these people are is easy to find out, for a great part of the inhabitants of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia are of that race and speak what is called the Gullah dialect, which Joel Chandler Harris has preserved in his “Daddy Jack.” Besides these children and grandchildren of imported Negroes there is near Mobile a small group of sturdy people perfectly well known to have been brought into the United States in 1858 in the yacht Wanderer. These may be part of a cargo from which Senator Tillman’s family bought a gang, and he says of them: “These poor wretches, half starved as they have been, were the most miserable lot of human beings—the nearest to the missing link with the monkey I have ever put my eyes on.”