The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

The negroes of Hayti and San Domingo spurred by their politics into perpetual fighting and bloodshed; the negroes of Jamaica peaceful and ripe for industrial training, which it seems the English have resolved to give them—if Booker Washington had to choose one of the two islands for his future activity, do you not know that he would decide he could do great things in Jamaica and nothing in the other?

The thirteenth amendment emancipated the slaves instantly and not gradually, the fourteenth made them complete citizens of the United States and of the particular State wherein they reside, and the fifteenth practically conferred unlimited suffrage upon them. The Hayti, and not the Jamaica, precedent was followed. The brothers that had conquered were blind from civil fury: and they had been brought by the root-and-branch abolitionists into full persuasion that the southern negroes were ready for and entitled to these high privileges. By the amendments they confidently tried to railroad the African slave in one instant of time up the long steep to the topmost Caucasian who had established liberty and self-government over a continent, and made it perpetual. We pray that they be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. Had the white population of the south been at the time as disproportionate to the black as it was in Hayti in 1794, it would also have been massacred. But the section was full of late confederate soldiers. When the fates had decided against the dear cause for which they had fought for four years they accepted peace in good faith. Now their conquerors turned loose a horde of black plunderers to despoil the little that war had left. When I read Professor Brown’s inability to say whether the work of the Ku-Klux was justifiable or not,[157] I thought of Christ’s asking if it was right to do good on the sabbath day.

The lesson to be learned here is that while it is now too late to make the thirteenth amendment what it ought to have been, and there is perhaps no need to alter the fourteenth, yet there must be abrogation of the fifteenth as to the great mass of southern negroes. In fact this has really come already through the white primary. Booker Washington is a great, a decisive authority on this question. He counsels the negroes to eschew politics. This is wise. It is the solid interest of the negro masses that they accept the inevitable; just as the south gave up slavery when we could hold on to it no longer.

4. The southern negroes have split into what I shall roughly distinguish as an upper and a lower class. The former includes property owners and such as are in higher occupations, trades, and professions. I do not believe that the entire class contains three per cent, but I shall take it to be five per cent of the whole negroes in the section. Exact accuracy here is not important. It needs only to be remembered that the lower class outnumbers the other many times over. They are moving in different directions. The dominant inclination of the upper class is towards incorporation as citizens, exercising all the rights of the white. The dominant inclination of the lower class is towards segregation in their own circles. A true representative of the former would always travel in a white railroad car, while a true representative of the other is perfectly content with the shabbiest Jim Crow, if the whites be kept out of it. Thousands in the south never think of any negroes but those of the lower, thousands in the north never think of any but those in the upper class. The lower class subsists mainly upon agricultural, domestic, and day labor. There is a rural and urban section of each one of the two. The rural section of the upper class has little promise of permanence and growth, but its urban section seems to have securer foothold. For a while this urban section will probably increase and rise in condition—both slowly. This upper class is now steadily sending some of its members from country and town, to settle in the north. As I read the signs its destiny is ultimate dispersion over the entire country and gradual disappearance. The lower class settles downwards steadily. The outlook for it is gloomy in the extreme.

5. Somewhere about 1890—which year we may regard as approximately beginning the manufacturing era of the South—many whites in the section had broken with the old ways and methods and resolved to substitute their own for negro labor as far as possible. These awakened men and women multiply. They are pushing the lower class out of all rural labor, and both classes out of agriculture; and they are also pushing some of the upper class out of the trades and more important occupations in both town and country. Evidently the powers have decreed that the labor class of the south shall be white and homogeneous with that of the north. These powers who delivered the white laborers of the west from the Chinese will also deliver the white laborers of the south from the negroes.

6. There is soon to be a New Industrial South, in which the most advanced machinery and laborers of the very highest skill are to be chief factors. A little later there is to be a still more important New Agricultural South. In this, the empirical restorative methods of the Chinese, which Liebig, in his day, showed to be ahead of the world, must be far surpassed. Economy of the enormous mass of fertile elements now washing into the sea; adequate exploitation of the nitrogen of the air and of all accessible mineral elements needed; scientific dairy industry, stock rearing, fruit culture, and all related branches; farmers of the most efficient training, and laborers whose deft hands are the proper instruments of the strongest brains—all these must combine to give the south that perfect intensive culture which she will add to her blessings of climate and soil in order to supply the fast growing demand of all the world outside for her especial products. Further, as everything now seems to indicate, the southern yield of the more important minerals and metals will lead that of the entire country. Further again, the bulk of transcontinental railroad traffic must be across the south on snow-free routes, and the upbuilding which in time will follow from this is as yet incalculable. And when the inter-ocean canal connects us with the Pacific trade—what new impetus will this give to our development! What needs and opportunities there will then be for skilled labor, for inventive talent, for managerial ability, for every element of a most highly organized community of unwontedly many diversified prospecting interests. The demand will be for a vast population of the very best strain and breed, knowing the best methods of physical, moral, and self-subsisting education of their children, out of whom will come the best of all workers and producers. To attempt to do the required tasks of the new south of the near future and hold our own against the competition of the world—to try to do these with negro laborers, negro farmers, negro producers, negro employers, would be like substituting the ox-wagon for the present railroad freight train. Nay, it would be more like one with a wooden leg, and a millstone around his neck, offering to run against a trained racer. The negro laborer, farmer, manufacturer, and contractor show more clearly every day that they are hopelessly outclassed in the struggle with white competitors. As a body where they now are they are becoming useless and an incubus. They will soon be still more in the way, and a more serious hindrance to southern development. They keep back the immigration which is especially called for. That is the immigration of northern and European farmers, producers, and manufacturers of all kinds to teach us their advanced methods, and the most skilled labor in every department to stimulate with example our native white labor to its highest accomplishment. The northern people would come south very largely if there were no negroes here. Their desire to come increases steadily, and so does our desire to have them come. The whites of both sections naturally co-operate more and more earnestly to effect their joint wishes. The disinclination of the United States supreme court to overturn the recent anti-negro amendments of the constitutions of southern States, and the palpably growing favor showed these amendments at the north are very significant signs that the south is to be made more to the liking of northern settlers.

Since the last sentence was written that court has ruled it to be a crime, punishable severely, to hold one to the performance of a contract to pay his debt by laboring for you.[158] The average negro has no resource but credit on the faith of such a contract. So soon as it becomes generally known that he cannot be lawfully held to its performance, the credit will be denied. As has been suggested to me by an observant and far-seeing man, the decision overturns the main pillar of the negro’s subsistence. It will powerfully favor northern immigration, as well as the substitution of white for black labor—that is, if it is vigorously enforced.

7. I believe that the two races together, in the same community as they are now in the south, are oil and water. Meditate the course and portent of these facts. Immediately upon emancipation the negroes set up their own churches and schools; they manifested approval of the separate passenger car for themselves, politely hinting in season that the whites ought to be kept out of it; and they influenced the planter to remove their cabins out of sight and hearing of the Big House. They showed a great disinclination, the men to do agricultural work by the year for standing wages, the women to hire as house servants. It was some while before the whites really recognized this drift of the negro towards segregation, when many of them—especially the wives and mothers—gave the rein to much unreasonable resentment. Now, if you but know how to look, you will find everywhere the proofs of deepening antagonism. The black driver will not see even a white lady—not to mention a man—on the crossing, but he will always see a negro of either sex. The face of the white inconveniently stepping aside flushes with momentary anger. If your colored servant tells you there is a lady at the door you may know it is a negro woman; he never calls a “white ’oman” a lady. A negro woman is prone to make the most prominent white lady give the street. In Atlanta, a negro man or a white boy cannot safely go at night the former through the factory white settlement, the latter through Summer Hill, a negro residence quarter. I have been informed that where the mill operatives of Anderson, South Carolina, have their cottages, there is conspicuously posted, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you here.” I hear that the same is true of certain places in the Texas Panhandle; also that a negro settlement in the Indian territory displays a similar warning to the white man.[159] Parties of black and white children meeting on unfrequented streets of Atlanta nearly always exchange opprobrious language, often throw stones at one another, and sometimes fight—a proof so significant that, whenever I see it, it always makes me serious. The most decided change from old times that I note is that white society everywhere proscribes mixed sexual intercourse and the procreation of mulattoes with rapidly increasing severity. The advocate of mixed marriages is more and more regarded as a fiend. The white woman seized by a negro man—how gladly would she change place with the victim of the torturing savage or of the tiger that would mangle and eat her alive! This menace is everywhere, and naturally it is magnified by excited imagination. It increases in fact. The trial of negroes for capital offences was given the superior court of Georgia in 1850. From then until the end of the brothers’ war but two cases of rape of white women by negroes are in the supreme court reports;[160] and I never heard of but two other cases occurring in that time. But there have been many since. It steadily becomes more frequent. Women more and more dread to be left alone. And now there is hardly a man in the Black Belt who, when he is to be a night away from wife, daughters, mother, and sisters, without help at call, does not have uncomfortable thoughts of the sooty desecrator. The increasing effect of these multiplying outrages and the increasing horror which they cause is proved by a fact which ought to receive more intelligent recognition from everybody. This fact is that lynching of a negro for rape, and lately for other crimes of violence against whites, whether in the south or in the north, seems to be every time marked with a greater outburst of popular fury. The public grows more decidedly anti-negro. They give as little heed to the appeals of the papers in these matters as they do to the editorials always advocating the projects of the machine and corporations. The mob sweeps aside the military. The military will not load its rifles. If they were loaded it would probably refuse to fire, or would fire into the air. A few exclaim against lawlessness, while it is plain that the great mass of the whites do not really condemn in their hearts.

Let us try to understand the real cause of these things. The plainest parallel that occurs to me is the riots and violence excited by attempts to execute the fugitive slave law. The greatest of our southern statesmen misunderstood. What they thought to be lawlessness was in fact the struggle of nature by which the social organism of the United States expelled all cause of dissolution. These hostile demonstrations of the day against negroes are, as they seem to me, far other than acts of unenlightened and ignorant race prejudice, to which some writers ascribe them. They indicate, I think, another struggle of nature to expel a foreign and death-breeding substance out of the American body politic; they are each the protest of the self-preserving instincts against keeping the negro with us to counteract our progress, to debase our politics, to corrupt our blood, to injure us more than even successful secession could have done. How aptly has Matthew Arnold said, “O man, how true are thine instincts, how overhasty thine interpretation of them!”

8. Plainly the disparity of the negro in the deadly struggle with the white over every resource of subsistence fast becomes greater; plainly does his stay in the south more and more injure both sections; plainly under the effects of hard life, growing idleness and growing crime, increasing ravages of disease, and the naturally engendered feeling of helplessness, the average negro in the lower class gravitates downwards; plainly this negro ought to have, in a sphere of his own, opportunity and stimulus for self-recovery and progress. Plainly whites and negroes ought to be separated. The latter seriously clog the evolution of the desired southern labor class, and the southern whites completely exclude the negroes from public life. The two are really each different communities in juxtaposition, but not united. You may think of them as plants, one of which has a diseased root, and the other has its top kept in the dark and out of the sun. Both these evils result unavoidably from keeping the two races together. So let us give the negro his own State in our union. That will allow the root of the one plant to get well, and it will give the top of the other permanently to the sun.