Race prejudice between the whites and the negroes in this country began with the landing of the first ship-load of slaves in Virginia. In describing the condition of the negroes in the colony of Virginia, George W. Williams says: “It was not a mitigating circumstance that the white servants of the colony who came into natural contact with the Negroes were ‘disorderly persons,’ or convicts sent to Virginia by an order of the King of England. It was fixed by public sentiment and law that there should be no relation between the races. The first prohibition was made September 17, 1630. Hugh Davis, a white servant, was publicly flogged ‘before an assembly of Negroes and others,’ for defiling himself with a Negro. It was also required that he should confess as much on the following Sabbath.... All intercourse was cut off between the races. Intermarrying of whites and blacks was prohibited by severe laws. And the most common civilities and amenities were frowned down when intended for a Negro. The plantation was as religious as the Church, and the Church was as secular as the plantation. The ‘white Christians’ hated the Negro, and the Church bestowed upon him a most bountiful amount of neglect.”[[231]]
The importation of negroes from Africa into this country brought a stream of racial heredity from the torrid zone to mingle with a similar stream which had its origin and development in the north temperate zone. When these two streams met, the chief characteristics of the former were: civilization of a very low level; no letters or art or science, language in the agglutinative state; industries confined to a very elementary agriculture, fishing, a little hunting, and some simple handicrafts; no religion except that which explains all natural phenomena by reference to spirits, mostly ill-disposed towards man; physical and psychic characteristics substantially uniform, only trained observers being able to detect differences here and there. The stream from the north temperate zone, on the contrary, was characterized by an hereditary endowment delicately adjusted to the highest civilization recorded in history. A difference and contrast better adapted to bringing about racial antagonism can scarcely be conceived.[[232]]
On both physical and psychic grounds there is reason for an antagonistic feeling between the white race and the black race. Physically there is great diversity between the racial types of the two races. The color of the negro’s skin, his kinky hair, and his general physiognomy, especially his flat nose and protruding lips with receding (actual or apparent) forehead,—all are widely diverse from the white man’s standard of beauty and symmetry. Measured by the Caucasian ideal the features of the negro are coarse and animal-like. To most white persons, also, the odor arising from an assemblage of negroes is extremely disagreeable, and some negroes say that they find the odor of white persons similarly distasteful.[[233]] With reference to the psychic characteristics of the two races, their intellectual and moral traits, there is even greater diversity. In their religion, and essential manners, customs, and habits of thought, the differences are so great as to constitute almost opposite extremes. There is a total lack of anything like a community of interest between the two races. Members of the white race and of the black race do not find satisfaction in intermarriage and mingling together around the hearthstone. The whites and the blacks never have associated and do not to-day associate together in public and in private as one people.[[234]]
When two races, occupying the same territory and living side by side, differ so widely in their physical features, in their interests and in their attainments, as do the white and colored races in this country, it is most natural and indeed almost inevitable that prejudice should arise between them. The institution of slavery has no doubt created a caste feeling on the part of the master race, and yet this is but the strengthening and deepening of a natural race antipathy, the causes for which are evident. Slavery merely intensified a feeling that was due to other causes. It is an error to say that slavery has been the cause of all the prejudice against the negro.[[235]] It is true that the black race long wore the chain of slavery and was regarded as an inferior race, and this was true in the United States as well as elsewhere; but the reason for the antagonistic feeling lies deeper than that fact.[[236]]
An indication of the existence of racial prejudice during the period of slavery is found in a report adopted at the “Second Annual Convention of the People of Color” which met at Philadelphia in June, 1832. This convention, composed of free negroes, adopted a resolution in which the following passage occurs: “The recent occurrences at the South have swelled the tide of prejudice until it has almost revolutionized public sentiment, which has given birth to severe legislative enactments in some of the States, and almost ruined our interests and prospects in others, in which, in the opinion of your Committee, our situation is more precarious than it has been at any other period since the Declaration of Independence. The events of the past year have been more fruitful in persecution, and have presented more inducements than any other period of the history of our country, for the men of color to fly from the graves of their fathers, and seek new homes in a land where the roaring billows of prejudice are less injurious to their rights and privileges.”[[237]]
To this view of the matter there is an apparent objection. It would seem that if race prejudice existed during the time of slavery, it should have manifested itself in the form of summary treatment of the negroes more frequently than it did. In general, however, there was no occasion for its manifestation. So long as the blacks were valuable as slaves and accepted their inferior position without protest, no one wanted to get rid of them or put them to death. The fact that slaves were property, and in that capacity were amenable to the laws, made recourse to unlawful procedure against them both unwise and unnecessary. It was only in cases of insurrection among the slaves, or when some especially brutal and barbarous crime was committed by a negro, that summary measures were adopted prior to the Civil War. At such times negroes were killed without mercy, sometimes they were tortured and their bodies mutilated while still alive, and occasionally they were burned to death. But these were extraordinary occasions; ordinarily the law was allowed to take its course.[[238]]
A careful study of the relations which existed between the two races from 1619 to 1860 will reveal the presence of more or less racial antipathy. The institution of slavery, however, acted as a check to the manifestation of this antagonistic feeling as regards the manner of procedure for the punishment of negroes accused of serious offenses. “Slavery was, in its way, a thoroughgoing school; the negro race was educated in the cotton-fields and cabins of the South. In the Old South there was very little negro crime and no negro idleness. The negro worked under direction; he was taught how to work; he cheerfully accepted his work, and he was the soul of fidelity, as the history of the war proved.”[[239]] Restraints were placed around him; he received protection and guardianship; and, above all, he received an industrial training which gave him some degree of control over his own impulses and actions. He was looked upon and governed as a child, and he was punished as a child when he committed a breach of the peace or some serious offense against person or property. The legal procedure for the punishment of negroes, based upon the property right in slaves, was in perfect accord with the order of society that had been established during two hundred years or more of slavery.
When the institution of slavery was attacked in the early thirties and during the years of controversy which followed, and still more when it was finally overthrown in the sixties, race prejudice began to manifest itself in the manner of treatment accorded negro criminals. By the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, under the existing conditions, absolutely no restriction was left upon its manifestation, for the property right in the negro had been swept away and the great mass of the negroes, finding all the old restraints suddenly removed, naturally mistook liberty for license and committed many excesses. Large numbers of negroes ceased to work. “The worst instincts of the negro came to the front; the percentage of criminals among negroes increased to an alarming extent; many were guilty of crimes of violence of the most heinous and repulsive kind.”[[240]] The result of emancipation had not been fully anticipated and no adequate legal provision was made for the control of the freedmen. The foundation had been removed from the old legal system and no new system was established in the place of the old one which to any degree could cope with the condition of affairs.
Further, not only did the emancipation of the slaves leave no restriction upon the manifestation of race prejudice in the form of summary procedure against negro criminals, but the sudden elevation of the negroes to political equality with the whites directly encouraged its display. “Two hundred years or more of slavery educated both the white and the black to a fixed order of society, in which the negro was the servant and the white man the master. In one generation, through as devastating a war as any country ever experienced, slavery was abolished, the vast property interests in the slave destroyed, the structure of society reversed, the master put at the bottom and the slave at the top.”[[241]] In the light of subsequent history a greater mistake could scarcely have been made than that of giving the elective franchise to the newly emancipated slave. He was far from being a fully developed man capable of exercising the duties of citizenship in a democratic government, but in the legal institutions which were established in the South during the period of Reconstruction it was assumed that he was entitled to an equal share in the government with his former master. A legal system was established which had no basis in the order of society then existing. The result was enmity and bitterness between whites and blacks at a time when there should have been sympathy and forbearance, and summary and illegal measures were adopted by the whites to prevent negro domination.
Any one who would deal intelligently with the questions presenting themselves in the South to-day must recognize the existence of a racial prejudice. In some respects it is an unreasoning prejudice, a prejudice in the extreme sense of the word, but there is also a real and substantial basis for such racial antipathy, and it is a feeling which is not likely to disappear for generations to come. It must be taken into account in the consideration of all remedies proposed for existing evils in the South. It is something that cannot be removed by legislative enactments; neither can it be destroyed by constant crying out against it. While it does not justify the lynching of negroes, it does furnish a standpoint from which justification is easy, and it is a fact which makes the prevention of such lynchings extremely difficult, particularly where brutal crimes are committed upon whites by negroes.