The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

MATERIALS

For an understanding of the Southern South the materials are abundant but little systematized. In addition to the sources of direct information there is a literature of the Southern question beginning as far back as Samuel Sewall’s pamphlet “Joseph Sold by His Brethren,” published in 1700. Down to the Civil War the greater part of this literature was a controversy over slavery, which has little application to present problems, except as showing the temper of the times and as furnishing evidence to test the validity of certain traditions of the slavery epoch. The publications which are most helpful have appeared since 1880, and by far the greater number since 1900. Besides the formal books there is a shower of pamphlets and fugitive pieces; and newspapers and periodicals have lately given much space to the discussion of these topics.

So multifarious is this literature that clues have become necessary, and there are three or four serviceable bibliographies, some on the negro problem and some on the Southern question as a whole. The earliest of these works is “Bibliography of the Negroes in America” (published in the “Reports” of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1894, vol. i). More searching, and embracing the whole field of the Negro’s life in America, are two bibliographies by W. E. Burghardt DuBois, the first being “A Select Bibliography of the American Negro” (“Atlanta University Publications,” 1901), and “A Select Bibliography of the Negro American” (“Atlanta University Publications,” No. 10, 1905). A. P. C. Griffin has also published through the library of Congress “Select List of References on the Negro Question” (2d ed., 1906) and “List of Discussions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments” (1906). One of the most useful select bibliographies is that of Walter L. Fleming in his “Reconstruction of the Seceded States, 1865-76” (1905). The author of this book, in his volume on “Slavery and Abolition” (“The American Nation,” vol. xvi, 1908), has printed a bibliographical chapter upon the general question of negro servitude in America. The study of the Southern question would be much lightened were there a systematic general bibliography, with a critical discussion of the various works that may be listed.

A part of the problem is the spirit of those who write formal books, and a group of works may be enumerated which take an extreme anti-Negro view and seek to throw upon the African race the responsibility for whatever is wrong in the South. Dr. R. W. Shufeldt (late of the United States army) has published “The Negro a Menace to American Civilization” (1907), of which the theme is sufficiently set forth by the wearisome use of the term “hybrid” for mulatto; he illustrates his book, supposed to be a logical argument on the inferiority of the Negro, with reproductions of photographs showing the torture and death of a Negro in process of lynching by a white mob; and he sums up his judgment of the negro race in the phrase “The Negro in fact has no morals, and it is therefore out of the question for him to be immoral.”

The most misleading of all the Southern writers is Thomas Dixon, Jr., a man who is spending his life in the attempt to persuade his neighbors that the North is passionately hostile to the South; that the black is bent on dishonoring the white race; and that the ultimate remedy is extermination. In his three novels, “The Leopard’s Spots” (1902), “The Clansman” (1905), and “The Traitor” (1907), he paints a lurid picture of Reconstruction, in which the high-toned Southern gentleman tells the white lady who wishes to endow a college for Negroes that he would like—“to box you up in a glass cage, such as are used for rattlesnakes, and ship you back to Boston.” One of these novels, “The Clansman,” has been dramatized, and its production, against the remonstrances of the respectable colored people in a Missouri town, led directly to a lynching. No reasonable being would hold the whole South responsible for such appeals to passion; but unfortunately many well-meaning people accept that responsibility. In Charlotte, N. C., the most refined and respectable white people went to see “The Clansman” played and showed every sign of approval, as appears to have been the case in Providence, R. I., in 1909. A recent writer, John C. Reed, in his “Brothers’ War,” brackets Thomas Dixon, Jr., with John C. Calhoun as exponents of Southern feeling and especially lauds Dixon as the “exalted glorification” of the Ku Klux.

The volume from Dixon’s pen which has had most influence is “The Leopard’s Spots,” the accuracy of which is marked by such assertions as that Congress made a law which gave “to India and Egypt the mastery of the cotton markets of the world”; and that it cost $200,000,000 to pay the United States troops in the South in the year 1867. The book has been traversed with great skill by a negro writer. When Dixon asks: “Can you change the color of the Negro’s skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lip or the beat of his heart with a spelling-book or a machine?” Kelly Miller replies: “You need not be so frantic about the superiority of your race. Whatever superiority it may possess, inherent or acquired, will take care of itself without such rabid support.... Your loud protestations, backed up by such exclamatory outbursts of passion, make upon the reflecting mind the impression that you entertain a sneaking suspicion of their validity.”

Many Southern writers are disposed to put their problems into the form of novels, and there are half a dozen other stories nearly all having for their stock in trade the statutes of Reconstruction, the negro politician who wants to marry a white woman, and the vengeance inflicted on him by the Ku Klux. In the latest of these novels the President of the United States is pictured as dying of a broken heart because his daughter has married a man who is discovered to be a Negro.

A book very widely read and quoted in the South is Frederick L. Hoffman, “Race Traits and Tendencies” (“Am. Economic Association Publications,” xi, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, 1896). “Race Traits” is written by a man of foreign extraction who therefore feels that he is outside the currents of prejudice; it is well studied, scientifically arranged, and rests chiefly on statistical summaries carefully compiled. The thesis of the book is that the Africans in America are a dying race, but many of the generalizations are based upon statistics of too narrow a range to permit safe deductions, or upon the confessedly imperfect data of the Federal censuses.

Quite different in its tone is a book which is said to have been widely sold throughout the South, and which seems to be written for no other purpose but to arouse the hostility of the Whites against the Negroes. The title page reads: “The Negro a Beast or In the Image of God The Reasoner of the Age, the Revelator of the Century! The Bible as it is! The Negro and his Relation to the Human Family! The Negro a beast, but created with articulate speech, and hands, that he may be of service to his master—the White man. The Negro not the Son of Ham, Neither can it be proven by the Bible, and the argument of the theologian who would claim such, melts to mist before the thunderous and convincing arguments of this masterful book.” This savage work quotes with approval an alleged statement of a Northern man that inside the next thirty years the South will be obliged to “Re-enslave, kill or export the bulk of its Negro population.” It insists that the Negro is an ape, notwithstanding the fact that he has not four hands; he has no soul; the mulatto has no soul; the expression “The human race” is a false term invented by Plato “in the atheistic school of evolution.” The serpent in the garden of Eden was a Negro. Cain was also mixed up in the detestable business of miscegenation, for the Bible says, “Sin lieth at thy door, and unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The writer has taken pains to point out that “The mere fact that the inspired writer refers to it in the masculine gender is no evidence that it was not a female.” The mulatto being “doomed by Divine edict to instant death ... neither the mulatto nor his ultimate offspring can acquire the right to live. This being true, it follows that these monstrosities have no rights social, financial, political or religious that man need respect.” Wherever you find the word beast in the Bible it means the Negro!

If such passionate and rancorous books were all that sprang from the South, the problem would end in a race war; but as will be seen throughout this discussion, there are two camps of opinion and utterance among Southern white people. On one side the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force; on the other side there is a body of white writers who go deeper into the subject, who recognize the responsibility of the white race as the dominant element, and who preach and expect peace and uplift. Such a writer is A. H. Shannon in his “Racial Integrity and Other Features of the Negro Problem” (printed in Nashville and Dallas, 1907). In good temper and at much length he argues that the Negro owes to the white man a debt of gratitude for bringing his ancestors out of African barbarism, though the principal evils of the negro question are due to the inferior race.