The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at work. One of the most powerful uplifting agencies in all agricultural countries is the desire to own land, and one of the most frequent texts of Booker Washington is that now is the time for the Negro to acquire land, for it will never again be so cheap; but where is the land to be found? Although ownership has almost completely changed since the Civil War, good lands are aggregating more and more into large tracts. The white farmer finds it difficult to hold his own against the capitalist and the syndicate, and even the thrifty black is beset by special difficulties.

In the first place, the rural Negro has, unless by his saving from sawmill and turpentine work, little opportunity to make money with which to buy a farm, except from the farm itself: hence he buys on time, pays a heavy interest charge, and is at every disadvantage. In the second place, few planters are willing to break up their land into small tracts; to do so takes away their livelihood, their only opportunity of making available their knowledge of cotton planting and of dealing with cotton hands. Some of them are absolutely opposed to letting the Negroes have land. Mr. Bell, of Alabama, one of the largest landowners in the South, is credited with saying that he “has no use for a Nigger that pays out.” That is to say, he prefer his hands to be unprogressive and in debt. Perhaps the South fails to realize that the wealth of the Western, Middle, and New England states comes from encouraging people to do the best they know how. The more industrious the people are, the more business there is of every kind and for everybody. The South would be happier and more prosperous if it could accept the Western system of moderate-sized detached farms, on each of which there is an intelligent owner or tenant.

The large number of negro landowners (though many of them perhaps are mortgaged) and the evident prosperity of those communities in which the greatest number of them hold their land, seems to show that landowning is a motive that ought to be strongly set before them. The old notion of Reconstruction times that the federal government ought to furnish “forty acres and a mule” was not so far wrong; it would have been perfectly possible for the nation to acquire land in large tracts, to subdivide it, and give or sell it at nominal rates, so as to offer every thrifty Negro the chance of proprietorship; but that opportunity, if it ever existed, has long gone by, and the Negro must depend upon himself if he wishes to buy land.

The present system is not only industrial; it tends to make a peasant out of the Negro, and peasant is a term of reproach in the United States, though in France, Germany, and Italy there are rich peasants as well as poor ones, peasants who employ labor as well as those who have nothing but their hands. The American objection to a peasant system is its fixity; the peasant is an hereditary laborer on the land, usually the land of another; he leaves it to other people to carry on the state, to elevate the community. Nevertheless, it is simply the truth that under the present system of tenancy employment and day wages, nearly half of the negro race in the South is in effect a peasantry. Perhaps that is their fate. Perhaps the Alabama lawyer’s doctrine, so comfortable for the white man, is to prevail: “It’s a question who will do the dirty work. In this country the white man won’t: the Negro must. There’s got to be a mudsill somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won’t stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented.”

The question of who is to do the crude, disagreeable and dirty work, has solved itself in the North which has had one stratum after another of immigrants who were willing to take it, each shoving his predecessor higher up in the scale of employment; but no foreigners will come into the South in order to relieve the Negro of hewing of wood and drawing of water. It looks as though the majority of the race would be compelled to accept some condition on the land, without a share in the government and without much prospect of getting into other kinds of life. The prospect is discouraging in itself, and it readily shades into restraint, subjection, and peonage—the worst of remedies for a race low in origin, which has just emerged from a debasing servitude, and which needs all the stimulus of ambition and opportunity.

The South has proved its capacity for organizing and directing ignorant labor, but a peasant system has more dangers for the upper than the lower class. The gentlemen of eighteenth-century France, with all their high breeding, did not understand the people under them and were hated of their peasants; the Pashas of Egypt were degraded by their mastery over thousands of fellahin; the Russian boyars have so alienated the peasants that they have almost rent the empire in twain. To accept a peasant system would be a confession that the South must remain in the lower stage of economic progress which goes with such a system. The duty and the privilege of the South is still to seek the way of enlightment; to make the Negro a better laborer instead of crystallizing him into a race of dependents.

Material progress is necessary for the Negro and equally for the Poor White, not simply that he may be better clad and have better health, but because it brings with it other influences which go to elevate mankind. You cannot make good citizens and virtuous people out of a dirty, ill-fed family in a one-room house; the remedy of intellectual and moral uplift is as important as the material side. Thrift works both ways: the man who buys good clothes for his children wants to send them to Sunday school; the poor children in Sunday school beg their fathers to give them good clothes. Such intellectual and moral agencies are at work, though here again some white leaders object to them. For instance, John Temple Graves asks: “Will the negro, with his increasing education and his surely and steadily advancing worth and merit, be content to accept, in peace and humility, anything less than his full and equal share in the government of which he is a part?” Here is one of the stumbling blocks in the way of the progress of the race.

For thrift and saving habits the South has always lacked one of the approved aids; it has few savings banks, few ordinary banks which attract the deposits of Negroes, and few steady investments in small denominations. For this reason the proposed Postal Savings Banks would be a boon to the South, and would help toward the purchase of land and other property. The Negroes’ own fraternal orders and stock companies furnish some opportunities for savings. Regulation of drinking and gambling places will also make saving likelier among the laborers. That difficulties and conflicts of interest would rise between Whites and Negroes was foreseen at the time of Reconstruction, and it was honestly supposed by the thinking people of the North that the ballot would at the same time protect the black against white aggression, and would educate him into the sense of such responsibility that there would not be negro aggression. Giving the negro suffrage, however, while at the same time through the Reconstruction state constitutions disfranchising his former master, brought about a condition of unstable equilibrium, and the strongest, best organized, and most determined race of course prevailed. For some years after the restoration of white supremacy in the Southern states, colored men were still allowed to vote in districts like the Sea Islands of South Carolina, and the Delta of Mississippi, where they were predominant, but since 1885 there has not been any genuine negro suffrage in any state of the South, in the sense that Negroes were assured that their votes could be cast and would be counted even if they made a difference in the result. The last remnant of a successful combination of negro voters with a minority of the Whites was in the North Carolina election of 1896.

By the series of constitutional amendments begun in 1890, and since spread through the South, a property or intelligence qualification has practically been established for Negroes while not applying to poor or illiterate Whites. In the Northern states race difficulties, so far as they take form in politics, are settled by the usual course of elections; in the South it is the unalterable intention of the Whites that the Negroes shall not participate in choosing officials or in making laws either for white men or for themselves.

Furthermore, the South is bitterly opposed to the holding of offices by Negroes except the small local appointments. Though Negroes are one third in number in the South, and more than one half the population in two states, they have not a single state administrative official, member of legislature, or judge. The opposition to negro office holding extends to federal appointments, although a considerable number of places, some of them important, are still held by Negroes. They obtain appointments as railway mail clerks and letter carriers by competitive examination, and a few of them are selected for collectorships of internal revenue and of customs, on the basis that the Negroes are part of the community and entitled to some recognition. To exclude them altogether from the public service, as they have been almost excluded from the suffrage, may somewhat diminish race friction, but it is a mark of inferiority which the whole negro race resents.