Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories

by Caroline E. Merrick

The negro question of the South has become the problem of the nation. This is retributive justice; for the North introduced slavery into the colonial provinces, and sold the slaves to the South when they had ceased to be profitable in Massachusetts. The South found them renumerative and kept them. This branch of the subject may be dismissed with the reflection that it is a disposition common to humanity to use any sort of sophistry to excuse or palliate bias of feeling and departures in conduct from the right way. Everybody—North and South—is equally glad that slavery is now abolished, notwithstanding differences of opinion as to the methods by which it was accomplished.

Judge Tourgee, in his “Fool’s Errand,” said: “The negroes were brought here against their will. They have learned in two hundred years the rudiments of civilization, the alphabet of religion, law, mechanic arts, husbandry. Freed without any great exertion upon their part, enfranchised without any intelligent or independent cooperation—no wonder they deem themselves the special pets of Providence.” Seven years ago when cotton was selling for four cents a pound and starvation was staring in the face alike the planter and the negro tenant, the owner of a large plantation said to one of her old slaves: “Oh, these are dreadful times, Maria! How are we to live through them! I’m distressed for the people on the place. I fear they will suffer this winter!” “Lor, Miss Annie,” Maria replied, “I ain’t ’sturbin’ my mine ’bout it. White folks dun tuk keer me all my life an’ I spec’s they gwine ter keep on ter the eend!” The negro Providence is “white folks.” If they seem a bit slow in doling out to their desire they know how to help themselves, and it is well they do.

The sudden freedom of the black man as a war measure and his enfranchisement as a political necessity of the Republican party was a social earthquake for the South and a sort of moral cataclysm for the North. The one was too stunned by the shock, the other too delirious with success to be able to grasp the portent of such an event in the national life. The North approached it with abolition, fanaticism, and expected the liberated slave to be an ally of freedom of which he had no true conception. The South was an instinctive and hereditary ruler, and the freedman was overrunning its daily life and traditions. It is not wonderful that the negro has suffered in this conflict of antagonistic ideas.

The enfranchisement of the old slave has set back the development of the South for a generation, because it has been compelled to gauge all its movements on the race line. It has hindered the North for an equal time because the political value of the colored brother to the Republican party has seemed to overshadow every other phase of his development. But schooling and training can remodel even the prejudices of intelligent minds and sincere natures. Thirty-five years of mistakes have convinced both North and South that the negro has been long enough sacrificed to political interests.

Those only who have long lived where the negro equals or outnumbers the white population can understand his character, and the grave problem now confronting this nation.

The danger of enfranchising a large class uninstructed in the duties of citizenship and totally ignorant of any principles of government, will prove an experiment not in vain if it enforces on the people of the United States the necessity to restrict suffrage to those who are trained in the knowledge and spirit of American institutions. It should serve to emphasize the unwisdom and injustice of denying the ballot because of sex to one half of its American born citizens who, by education and patriotism, are qualified for the highest citizenship. Our government will never become truly democratic until it lives up to its own principles, “No taxation without representation, no government without the consent of the governed.” Suffrage should be the privilege of those only who have acquired a right to it by educating themselves for its responsibilities. A proper educational qualification for the ballot, without sex or color lines, would actualize our vision of “a government for the people, of the people and by the people,” and would eliminate the ignorant foreigner of all nationalities and colors, as well as the white American who is too indolent or unintelligent to fit himself for the duties of citizenship.

Happily the true friend of the Afro-Americans, North and South, begins to distinguish between their accidental and their permanent well-being. The negro himself is coming to realize that he must make the people with whom he lives his best friends; that the conditions which are for the good of the whites of his community are good for him; that his development must be economic instead of political; that only as he learns to cope with the Anglo-Saxon as a breadwinner will he become truly a freed man.

The African in the South is better off than any laboring class on earth. His industrial conditions have less stress in them. He is seldom out of work unless by his own choice or inefficiency. The climate is in his favor. In the agricultural districts land is cheap for purchase or rent. Gardens, stock, poultry and fruit are easily at his command. For little effort he is well clothed and well fed. Fuel costs him only the gathering. The soil responds freely to his careless cultivation. In the trades no distinctions are made between the white and the colored mechanic as to wages or opportunity. There is no economic prejudice against him; he is freely employed by the whites even as a contractor. But the Southern white will “ride alone”—even in a hearse—rather than ride with the negro socially outside the electric cars. Otherwise his old master is the negro’s best friend. A study of the State Report of Education will convince the most skeptical that the public school fund is divided proportionally with the colored schools, though the whites pay nearly the whole tax. Besides, while Ohio, and perhaps other Northern States, prohibit negro teachers in the public schools, the South, with a view to rewarding as well as stimulating the ambition of the student, gives the preference to colored teachers for their own schools.

Removed from the arena of politics the black man has no real enemy but himself. It will not do to judge the masses by the few who have been able to lift themselves above their fellows. Their religion is emotional, often without moral standards. Some of them are indolent, improvident and shiftless to a degree that largely affects white prosperity. But though they have faults which do not even “lean to virtue’s side,” they are good-natured, teachable, forgiving, loving and lovable.