The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

In the next place, would a world which still has tears for the Acadians deported from Nova Scotia in 1755, which is aroused by the banishment of political suspects to Siberia, be impressed with the high civilization of a nation which would send ten million people to their death in a continent where as yet neither Briton, Frenchman, Portuguese, or German has ever been able to establish any considerable colony of European emigrants? If the superior race, with all its resources, prudence, and medical skill cannot live in Africa, what would become of ten million Negroes deported on the plea that they were not capable of participating in the white man’s civilization? Though descended from Africans there is no reason to suppose that they have transmitted immunity from the deadly tropical diseases.

Again, there is not a state, city, or county populous with Negroes in the South which would not resent, and if need be resist, the sudden taking away of its laborers. Whenever the question is brought to an issue, the Southern people admit that, with all the race difficulties, the Negro does raise the cotton and drive the mule; and without him the white man must take the hoe and the reins. As John Sharp Williams puts it: “The white people of the South do not want to hasten the departure of the good negroes; ... whenever you suggest that he leave the Southern darky replies in Scriptural phrase, ‘Ask me not to leave thee.’ They are here, and they are going to remain here so long as there is a cotton field in sight.” The people who preach expatriation, deportation, elimination, or whatever they choose to call it, are not the people who employ the Negro or wish him well, or would be pleased to see him succeed in any hemisphere.

A milder suggestion is that the essential Negro be slowly and quietly replaced by somebody else. What somebody else? Shall it be Northerners? Senator Williams, of Mississippi, says: “I would like to see established a great land company with a capital of about a million dollars, to buy lands in the cotton States and sell them out to home-seeking immigrants on a ten years’ instalment plan.” In 1907 the Southern press was convinced that a great flow of immigration had set in from the North, but in reality outside of Florida and Texas nearly all colonies of Northerners have been unsuccessful, though there is a slow stream of people, partly from the Northwest, who take up farms in the South and mix with the Southern white population. These people are prone to be dissatisfied with the schools; they are in despair over the wretched domestic service; the women are filled with terror by the lynchings and by the frequent cause of them; the newcomers dislike the Negroes more than the Southern-born people dislike them, and cannot be depended upon to remain a permanent part of the population. In any case, they do not replace the negro laborer for wages.

The only hope of a substitute population of plantation hands is in the foreign immigrants, who have been described in a previous chapter, and of whom, up to 1909, the South seems to have expected a brisk influx. The federal government even set out to build immigrant stations in Charleston and Savannah. But in 1907 all the Southern ports (excepting Baltimore) together received only 21,000 out of 1,300,000. To-day the whole scheme is a failure and there is no prospect of importing large numbers of foreigners to work for wages. A member of Congress from Mississippi recently declared from his seat in the House that there was a conspiracy of federal and Italian officials to prevent Italians from coming into his state.

The first reason for the failure of the promising plan is the many undoubted cases, and the more rumored and reported instances, of peonage of white men. In the second place the Italians, who have been chiefly relied upon, have no intention of spending their lives and bringing up their children as plantation laborers; they work so well and are so profitable to both the plantation owners and themselves that after a few years they save money enough to do something that they like better, and that is the end of their service on other people’s land. The experience of South Carolina in 1906, detailed in the chapter on Immigration, seems conclusively to prove that most foreigners prefer the North because they think they are better treated there.

The fundamental difficulty with the whole plan of immigration is that a great many people in the South believe that the average foreigner is an undesirable member of the community. They have no familiarity with that grinding-down process by which even unpromising races are transformed into Americans. They read of the “Black Hand,” which is not very different from some forms of the old Ku Klux Klan; of the Vendetta, which can be paralleled in the Southern mountains; and they show little willingness to receive even the better foreign elements on equal terms. It is a fair question whether if the Italians, for example, should come to have a majority of votes in Louisiana they would ever be permitted to elect and inaugurate a governor out of their own number; whether the phrase “White man’s government” does not apply as much against the “Dago” as against the Negro.

If the Negroes cannot be replaced, is it not possible to segregate them into districts of their own? For forty years a process has been going on by which the black counties grow blacker and the white counties become whiter; Negroes move into the counties where there is most work and therefore the greatest number of laborers, and the Whites gradually move out of the districts in which the Negroes are very numerous. Could not that process be carried still farther? Some people in despair predict that the Whites will eventually find their way into the West and Northwest, leaving the fruitful South to the Negro. Although there is a steady drift of white people out of the Southern states, it is of the same kind as the movement from New England and the Middle states to the West, and the Whites have not the slightest intention of abandoning their section; buildings go up, mills appear, skyscrapers intensify the city, and in every Southern state the Whites grow richer and more powerful.

The desired result might be brought about if the Negroes would move to other parts of the Union, and much is made of the present drift into the Northern cities, but the conditions of life are not favorable to them there, and their number is only kept up by new immigrations. Booker Washington advises the Negro to stay in the South because “The fact that at the North the Negro is confined to almost one line of employment often tends to discourage and demoralize the strongest who go from the South, and to make them an easy prey to temptation.” Many of the keenest observers in the South desire that the Negroes should spread through the country, partly to relieve the pressure in the South, and partly in the conviction that it would furnish an object lesson to the Northern people of the disadvantage of the presence of Negroes. Whatever the number of emigrant Negroes out of the South, the number left there goes on steadily increasing from decade to decade; and whenever they show a disposition to leave in large numbers, the Southerners oppose and resist, because they see no hope of supplying their place with any other than more negro laborers.

Could the two races divide the land into districts? Such a separation is favored both by Bishop Turner, a negro leader, and by John Temple Graves, of Atlanta, a negro hater, and there are a few examples of such separate communities. Many white counties and a few white towns will not admit Negroes; and in perhaps half a dozen colored villages no white man lives. Here is perhaps an opportunity for considerably reducing race friction, for there is no reason to suppose that such separate towns go backward in civilization; and they give opportunities for negro business and professional men, which are important for the encouragement of the best members of the race. The most serious practical objection is, however, that such towns take away laborers, actual or potential, from the white plantations; and the industrial cotton system depends on keeping those Negroes on other people’s land.

A broader proposition is phrased by Reed in the “Brother’s War”—“Let us give the negro his own State in our union.... We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from the town meeting to congress.” Possibly this remedy might have been applied forty years ago, but it is now absolutely unworkable. When Reed suggests that the Negro be allowed to take over some state and carry it on as a negro community, the instant question is, which state? Louisiana will not allow her laborers to go en masse to Texas; and Texas would drive them back with shotguns from the border if they tried to move. The blackest states have the least disposition to become blacker, the lighter states are just as determined to remain light; and since there is no longer any great area of good land not taken up by anybody, colonization of the Negro within the limits of the United States is impossible.