Shadow and Light / An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century

by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

Then doubt, alternating, would present the immense problems awaiting popular solution. Born in the seething cauldron of civil war, they had been met in the arena of fervid Congressional debate and political conflict. The amendments to the Constitution had been passed, but was their inscription a record of the crystallization of public sentiment? Subsequent events have fully shown that only to the magnanimity and justice of the American people and the fruition of time can they be commended. Not to believe that these problems will be rightfully solved is to doubt not only the efficacy of the basic principles of our Government, but the divinity of truth and justice. To these rounds of hope's ladder, while eager in obtaining wisdom, the Negro should cling with tenacity, with faith "a higher faculty than reason" unconquerable.

Having resolved to locate in some part of the South for the purpose of practicing law, I had while in Victoria read the English Common Law, the basis of our country's jurisprudence, under Mr. Ring, an English barrister. Soon after my arrival in Oberlin, Ohio, where my family, four years before, had preceded me, I entered the law department of an Oberlin business college, and after graduation proceeded South, the first time since emancipation. In an early chapter I described my first contact with and impressions of slavery, when a lad; then the hopelessness of abject servitude and consciousness of unrequited toil had its impress on the brow of the laborer. Now cheerfulness, a spirit of industry, enterprise, and fraternal feeling replaced the stagnant humdrum of slavery. Nor was progress observable only among the freedmen. Many evidences of kindness and sympathy were shown and expressed by former owners for the moral and mental advancement of their former bondsmen, which, to a great degree, unfortunately, was counterbalanced by violence and persecution.

My brother, Jonathan C. Gibbs, was then Secretary of State of Florida, with Governor Hart as executive. He had had the benefit of a collegiate education, having graduated at Dartmouth, New Haven, and had for some years filled the pulpit as a Presbyterian minister. The stress of reconstruction and obvious necessity for ability in secular matters induced him to enter official life. Naturally indomitable, he more than fulfilled the expectations of his friends and supporters by rare ability as a thinker and speaker, with unflinching fidelity to his party principles. I found him at Tallahassee, the capital, in a well-appointed residence, but his sleeping place in the attic contracted, and, as I perceived, considerable of an arsenal. He said that for better vantage it had been his resting place for several months, as his life had been threatened by the "Ku Klux," that band of midnight assassins whose deeds of blood and carnage darken so many pages of our national history, and was the constant terror of white and black adherents to the national Government's policy of enfranchisement. He was hopeful of better conditions in Florida, and introduced me to Governor Hart. Both urged me to locate in the State, promising me their support. I highly appreciated the affection of the one and the proffered friendship of the other. But the feeling paramount was that my brother had "won his spurs" by assiduity and fidelity through the scathing and fiery ordeal of those troublesome times; that it would ill become me to profit or serenely rest beneath the laurels he had won. It was the last interview or sight of my brother. Subsequently after a three hours' speech, he went to his office and suddenly died of apoplexy.

I continued my tour of observation, and, having been appointed a delegate from Ohio to a national convention to be held in Charleston, South Carolina, I attended. It was the first assembly of the kind at which I had been present since emancipation. I had hitherto met many conventions of colored men having for their object the amelioration of oppressive conditions. This gathering was unlike any similar meeting. The deliberations of the convention presented a combination of a strong intellectual grasp of present needs and their solution, with much uninformed groping and strife for prominence, features of procedure I have observed not confined to Negro assemblies.

The majority were unlettered, but earnest in their mental toiling for protection to life and equality before the law. Hitherto the purpose had been to make earnest appeals to the law-making power for such legislation as would abolish slavery and award equal justice—the first supported by the national conscience, but mainly as a military necessity, was a "fait accompli;" the other had been legislatively awarded, but for its realization much more was necessary than its simple identification on the statute books of a nation, when public sentiment is law. More than a third of a century has now passed, enabling a view more dispassionate and accurate of the conditions surrounding the freedmen directly after emancipation and the instrumentalities designed for fitting him for citizenship.

It is not surprising, neither is he blameworthy, if in the incipiency of joy for freedom bestowed he could not properly estimate the factors necessary to form an homogenous citizenship. The ways for two centuries had been divergent paths. The dominant claiming and exercising, as an heirloom, every civil and political right; the subordinate, with knowledge the most meager of their application or limits, by compulsion was made to concede the claim. Neither is it singular that participation in the exercise of these rights by the freedman should have created a determined opposition in a majority of the former, who claimed their fitness to rule as the embodiment of the wealth and intelligence (which are generally the ruling factors world-wide), and would have at an early date derived a just "power from the consent of the governed," did not history record the unnecessary and inhuman means resorted to to extort it, the obliquity of which can be erased only by according him the rights of an American citizen. Mutual hostility, opposition on the one hand to the assumption and exercise of these rights, and consequent distrust by the freedman, often fostered by unscrupulous leaders, have been alike detrimental to both classes, but especially so to the Negro, for his constant need in the Southland is the cordial friendship and helping hand of "his brother in white." He deserves it for his century of unrequited labor in peace and in war for fidelity to the tender ties committed to his care. Anti-revolutionist in his nature, he will continue to merit it and possibly save the industrial life in the South in the coming conflict of capital and labor.

That, as a class, they are in antagonism to the prevailing political sentiment is the legitimate result of the manner of their emancipation and a commendable gratitude and kinship for the party through which they obtained their freedom. But Gibbon, in his "Decline and Fall of Rome," has said that "gratitude is expensive," and so the Negro has found it, and is beginning to echo the sentiment and would gladly hail conditions and opportunity where he could, after thirty-five years of blood and fidelity, be less partisan and more fraternal politically, conscious his united affiliation with his early alliance, and consequent ostracism of the opposition has given him a "hard road to travel." Commendable as has been his devotion, he finds commendation a limited currency and not negotiable for the protection and benefits that should accompany the paladium of citizenship. While his treatment by the Democratic party has made a continuous political relation compulsory, it is unfortunate; for the political affinity of no other class of American citizens is judged by the accident of birth. It is detrimental to the voter whose proclivity is thereby determined. Wherever the Negro vote, in the estimation of any party, is an uncertain quantity, its value as a factor will have increased, consolidated, and in numbers controlling, it has been considered a menace and vigorously eliminated.

This view has to an extent an auxiliary in certain Republican circles, where it is avowed that the party could get in the South a large accession of hitherto Democratic voters, giving it a commanding influence, but for its colored contingent, which is averred to be repellant. There may be difference of opinion as to the merit of such conclusions and the fitness of their rehearsal "to the marines;" but none as to the measure of welcome of those that hold them. However, given that they are correct. Self-respect and a desire to help the old party can go hand in hand, and when possible in a manly way, room should be made for such anticipated accession.

There is another phase of present conditions that deserves, and I have no doubt has claimed, attention. It is the emphatic trend of the national leaders of the party to conciliate the hitherto discordant elements in the South in the interest of national harmony, an object lesson of which was presented by the late President on his Southern tour. But few years have elapsed since no man seeking a renomination on the Republican ticket would have put on and worn a Confederate badge. This President McKinley did, receiving the indiscriminate applause and the concurrence of his own party. Such an act, which is not only allowable, but commendable, would formerly have been political suicide. This being a movement in the house of his political alliance, it is up to the Negro to consider which is his best interest, should the olive branch of political friendship be extended by those from whom he receives his chief support. Under like conditions, his white brother would have no hesitancy.

There is yet another phase which indicates the Negro in jeopardy on industrial lines. A few years hence the South will have ceased to be chiefly agricultural. Mills for cotton, iron, and other factories will have dotted hilltop and valley, and with them will come the Northern operative with his exclusive "unions" and trade prejudice, shutting the doors of mills and foundries against him. To meet this scramble for favor from the wealth and intelligence of the Southland—the ruling factors—he should avail himself of every appliance for fostering harmony and co-operation along all the lines of contact. In slavery and in his subsequent journey in freedom he has suffered much. But what nation or people have escaped that ordeal who have made mark in the world's history? There is now prospective unfriendly legislation in several Southern States; also the lowest of the whites, as they deem occasion may require, go, often undisturbed, on shooting and lynching expeditions.