The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

CHAPTER XXV

THE WRONG WAY OUT

Except within the postulates stated in the last chapter, there can be no rational expectation of improvement of race relations in the South. Even within those conditions many suggestions are from time to time made which are out of accord with white and negro character, with the physical conditions, or with the general trend of American life. Before coming to practical remedies, it is necessary to examine and set aside these no-thoroughfares.

First of all, can the Southern race question be solved by any action of the North? The Reconstruction amendments with the clause authorizing Congress to enforce them by “appropriate legislation” seem intended to give the federal government power to protect the Negro against either state legislation or individual action; but the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights decision of 1883 held that the action of Congress under those amendments was confined to meeting positive official action by state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment provides for a special penalty in case of deprivation of political rights, by reducing the representation in Congress of the states which limit their suffrage. Any such legislation must be general in terms and would therefore apply to the Northern states in which there are educational or tax qualifications. Beyond that difficulty is the remembered ill effect of Reconstruction laws, and the conviction in the North that the negro problem is not one simply of race hostility and definition of rights—that the Negroes are in many ways a menace. To take the matter a second time out of the hands of the people on the ground, even though they are not solving their own problems, would mean a storm in Congress, a weight on the administration, possibly a contest with the Supreme Court, which no responsible Northern public man likes to contemplate.

Through the control of Congress over federal elections there is another opportunity to interfere in behalf of the Negro, but the federal laws put on the statute book in Reconstruction times were repealed in 1894; and nobody now proposes to renew them. By the recent experience of the nation in the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Cuba, a lesson has been taught of the difficulty of handling non-European races. The nation begins to doubt the elevating power of self-government. For whatever reason, there is no evidence of any intention in the North to make the Negro the ward of the nation. The writer is one of those who believe that any general federal legislation would revive friction between the sections, would sharpen the race feeling in the South, and in the end could accomplish little for the uplift of the Negro; even federal aid to education could hardly be so managed as to keep up the feeling of white responsibility from which alone proper education of the Negro can be expected.

Is there any likelihood of a private propaganda in behalf of the Negro like that of the abolitionists? A considerable class of Northern people have a warm sense of resentment at what they think the injustice and cruelty of the superior race, especially in the withdrawal of the suffrage by state constitutional amendments; and there is a lively interest in the education of Negroes and in work among the Poor Whites. A propaganda, with societies, public meetings, journals, and a literature is, however, no longer possible—the North has too much on its own hands in curing the political diseases of its cities, in absorbing the foreigners; like Congress, it recognizes that the South is sincere, even if somewhat exaggerated, in its nervousness about the Negroes. The most that can be expected of Northern individuals in the way of bettering Southern conditions is attempts like that of this volume to get into the real nature of the problems and to offer good advice.

Notwithstanding the horror felt toward amalgamation, from time to time in unexpected Southern quarters reappears the suggestion that it is impossible for the two races to live alongside each other separate, and that the logical and unavoidable outcome is fusion; that the relentless force of juxtaposition is too much for law or prejudice or race instinct. Over and over again one is told that nowhere in history is there an example of two races living side by side indefinitely without uniting. This is not historically true; Mohammedans and Hindoos (originally of the same race) have lived separate hundreds of years in India; Boers and Kaffirs have been side by side for near a century; the English colonists and the American Indians were little intermixed. Amalgamation could only be accomplished by a change in white sentiment about as probable as the Mormonization of the Northern Whites; and if it were possible, it would lead to a new and worse race question, the rivalry of a mixed race occupying the whole South against a white race in the rest of the country, which would make all present troubles seem a pleasant interlude. Amalgamation as a remedy welcomed by the Southern Whites is unthinkable; as a remedy against their convictions, brought about by time, it is highly unlikely.

At the other extremity is the idea, now more than a century old, that the way to get rid of the race question is to remove one of the races altogether. This notion of curing the patient by sending him to a hospital for incurables goes back to 1775. Jefferson favored it; the Colonization Society organized it in 1816, and in the forty years from 1820 to 1860 succeeded in sending about ten thousand Negroes to Liberia. Abraham Lincoln favored it. It is often suggested nowadays. This plan, if it could be carried out, would so completely relieve the immediate difficulties that it deserves the most careful consideration.

The first objection at the outset is ten million objections—namely, the Negroes themselves, who have never taken kindly to expatriation, for the simple reason that it is flying to evils that they know not of. The second difficulty is to find a place to receive the exiles. Experiments in the West Indies, in Central America, and in Africa have all been failures. No European country or colonies will welcome people sent away on the ground that they are inimical to white civilization; and the settlements of American Negroes in savage Africa have been entire failures. As has been shown above, Liberia, after nearly ninety years of existence, has no influence on the back country; its trade is scanty, its health is depleted, and its conditions are in every way less favorable to physical and moral well-being than those of the United States.

Then follows the financial difficulty; to be sure a correspondent of a Georgia newspaper suggests: “Let the government appropriate $20,000,000 for five successive years each for deportation, judiciously forcing off first the ages from eighteen to forty-five, as far as can be done without too violent a separation of dependent ages, and five years will substantially settle the exodus. All separations can be reunited in a few years and not a negro’s heart broken.” But a single hundred millions would be only a drop in the bucket. To bring over the ten million foreigners now in the United States, and get them started in a country abounding in work and opportunities, has probably averaged a cost of a hundred dollars a head, or one thousand millions. The thing must be done completely, if at all; for from the point of view of its advocates, to expatriate a part of the race would be like cutting out a portion of a cancer; and where are you going to find, say, a thousand million dollars to carry away ten million people upon the proceeds of whose continued labor in America you must depend for the Southern share of the money?