The last thing that I have to say is that the south ought to invite immigrants only of white blood. We want no settlers from whose intermarriage mongrels would spring. All Europeans should receive welcome—the Germans perhaps the warmest. But in my judgment those that will most advantage us are the truckmen, growers of the smaller and larger fruits, grass, grain, and stock farmers, manufacturers, miners, builders, contractors, business men, and skilled laborers, of the north. It looks now as if the cotton mills of England as well as of the north would be profited by coming to us; and it also seems probable that there will be for many years so great a demand for our cotton that the worn-out soil of the older parts of the lower south must be restored to more than virgin richness by the method which Dr. Moore has patented and made a gift of to the nation, or some other intensive culture; and that there must be consequently great multiplication of southern mill-operatives and agricultural workers in the near future. Recall what we have said in the last chapter as to the future promise of the section. Every day the south by disclosing some new opportunity cogently makes new invitation to immigrants. It is the interest as well as the duty of the nation to remove the great clog upon development of the south. That clog is the presence of some millions of unassimilable negroes in the section. It is also the best interest and the highest duty of the nation to segregate these negroes into a territory of their own. As Bishop Holsey says, and what I believe with my whole soul, “The union of the States will never be fully and perfectly recemented with tenacious integrity until black Ham and white Japheth dwell together in separate tents.”[196]
I must add an epilogue to these chapters on the race question as I did to that on Toombs.
Brothers and sisters of the north, you should learn why there is a solid south. There is but one cause. It is the menace to the whites from the political power given the negroes by the fifteenth amendment. There is nothing in your section—in its past or its present—from which I can illustrate to you the gravity of this menace to us. In not one of your States are there ignorant negroes in so great a number that, by combining with the debased whites, they can make for it such a constitution and laws and set up such authorities as they please. We, your brothers and sisters of the south, have lived under the rule of this foulest of coalitions. We know from actual experience how it plunders and preys upon honest workers, producers, and property owners; how it licenses and fosters crime. In my own State, from the first day that a governor, elected by fiat voters and ex-whites, as we called the latter, was inaugurated, until we virtually restored the supremacy of our race by carrying the three days’ election in December, 1870, fifty dollars would get a pardon for the greatest offence, and robberies, burglaries, horse-stealing, and the like each went free for a much smaller sum. Is it forgotten that the negro speaker was voted one thousand dollars by a South Carolina legislature, ostensibly as extra compensation for unusual services, but really of purpose to reimburse him for a bet lost upon a horse race? Why, the foremost of our people in virtue, wisdom, and patriotism were agreed that these sordid tyrannies should be subverted at once and at any cost to ourselves. The emergency justified any practice, device, or stratagem at the polls by which we could defend our homes, families, and subsistence against assassins of the public peace, wholesale robbers of the people, and instigators and protectors of every crime. It justified the shotgun and six-shooter in politics just as legitimate war justifies the musket in the hands of the soldier. It called forth most righteously the Ku-Klux. That spontaneous resistance finds a close parallel in the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, fought before American independence was declared. But the Ku-Klux fought for something still dearer than the dear cause for which our forefathers bled in the two battles just mentioned. Had the latter failed in the war they had thus begun, their children and people would nevertheless have had such good government as England is now giving the defeated Boers; but had the southern whites failed in their defence, their land would have for long years been befouled like Hayti, and those who had not been slaughtered unspeakably degraded. I think that all our countrymen who so rightfully eulogize the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill should also learn to give the greater praise to the southern heroes whose indomitable spirit routed the madmen that, with all the power of the federal government in their hands, tried their best to give the section over to negro rulers. Brothers and sisters, “picture it, think of it,” until you can fully understand that hour of our trial. All my northern acquaintances who have resided in the south for several years—they are many—come to look at the subject just as the natives do. A candid and honest settler from Vermont has told me how he was made to change his mind. Conversing with a southerner, he had reprehended the different ways in which the negro’s ballot had been rendered nugatory. The other replied, “Suppose that there was an incursion of Indians given suffrage into your State in such a mass as to make them seventy-five per cent of all the voters, wouldn’t you whites in some way manage either to outvote or outcount them!” The Vermonter answered in the affirmative. We had to deliver ourselves. We used the only means at our command.
It was not to be thought of that these negro governments be endured, even if tempered by the Ku-Klux, for government is in its nature lasting and permanent while the other was only temporary. They would have gradually gathered strength. Then there would have been rapid enrichment of a few exceptional negroes and rapid expulsion of the whites impoverished by emancipation, from all their little that was left. And then, the leading negroes desiring nothing else so much, there would have come many white men and women, each one willing to climb out of the depths of want by intermarriage with a prosperous negro. Who can predict what would have been the future of mongrelism thus beginning? We of the south are most conscientiously solid against what we know from actual trial to be the worst and most corrupting of all government; and we are still more solid against everything that tends to promote amalgamation. Can you blame us for standing in serried phalanx by white domination and against the misrule exampled in the early years of reconstruction, and for our own uncontaminated white blood and against fusion with the negro? We must be solid in the face of these dangers, and as long as they are threatened by the presence of millions of negroes in our midst. There is no other solidity in the south. In all matters of the locality republicans and democrats count alike. When one offers to vote in the primary, if his name is on the registry list, and he appears on inspection to be white, his vote is accepted; and he generally casts that vote, not for the interest of a political party, but for that of the public. The triumphant election in November, 1904, of independents or democrats, in four northern States which at the same time went for Mr. Roosevelt, indicates solidity for the true local welfare of the people as against the behests of party. So what the white primary has produced in the south, has commenced in the north. And the result in Missouri, voting for Roosevelt, republican, and Folk, democrat, shows that what we may call federal independentism has commenced in the south. This will spread as the people learn it does not hurt them to split their tickets while voting upon national questions, if they but maintain their solidity while voting upon State or municipal.
Now may I be allowed some decided words, most kindly and inoffensively spoken, as to appointing negroes to federal offices in the south. It is no sound argument for it that now and then some negro may have been appointed in a northern community which manifested no opposition. Consider the case of Mr. William H. Lewis, a negro lately made assistant district attorney in Boston by Mr. Roosevelt. He is a Harvard graduate, was captain of the Harvard eleven while in college, had represented Cambridge in the Massachusetts legislature, and the community was not at all averse to his appointment.[197] Therefore when it was made there was no disregard of the wishes and feelings of Boston and the regions adjoining. But when a negro is given office in the south, it is felt by all the community to be an insult. Would President Roosevelt cram the appointment of a white down the throats of a northern community in which all the best citizens protested against it? Would he not confess to himself that the wishes and feelings of these good people ought to be respected, even if he considered them foolish and unreasonable? It seems to me that he would, and that he would find for the place somebody else in his party acceptable to the locality. Why should he not do the like when his southern brothers and sisters who have such convincing reasons against the encouragement of negroes in their politics, protest unanimously against his filling an office in their midst with a negro? Will he snub them because a negro has more sacred right than a white? Is that what he means by keeping open the door of hope and opportunity? Or will he snub them because enough of punishment has not yet been given them, and because the south is still a province or dependency on which he is justified in quartering his partisans and pets without regard to the feelings and wishes of all the better inhabitants?
Brothers and sisters of the north, I cannot believe that any one of you who impartially considers the subject, would ever approve appointing even the most competent and deserving negro to a southern office in the teeth of universal objection by the whites of the community.
My last word is to implore every honest one in the country to lay aside all prejudice and master the southern situation before judging. Whoever does this, whoever will accurately place himself in the shoes of a good southern citizen, will, I most firmly believe, approve the attitude of the south, with his whole heart and soul.