The Emancipation Proclamation was a document far greater in its moral purpose than the Declaration of Independence, for there was in it more humanity and more Christianity. The Colonial fathers declared that all men are created equal—a beautifully wrought truth which meant everything for one part of the population but nothing for another part which was held in a cruel slavery. The historic paper which Lincoln gave to the world nearly a hundred years later abolished that slavery. It has not, however, fulfilled the wishes, the hopes, and the final expectations of those who pleaded so eloquently for the Negro on the rostrum, or those who fought so desperately on the field of battle to make its provisions effective. And our cup is all the more bitter, when the thought comes to us that among those who bled and died that the country might be saved and their kinsmen free were black men, the bravest soldiers that ever wore a uniform.
The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. I can see for the American people no permanent peace, no ease of conscience until the Negro question is settled, and settled right.
At no time since the Civil War has the future of the Negro seemed so dark and so uncertain as today. We are in thick weather and on a stormy sea, and many wise and thoughtful people fear for our safety. But I believe behind the clouds the sun is shining and is bound to bring in God’s final day of light. The older ones among us have seen darker days than these. They have seen husbands sold from wives and children from mothers, yet they hoped on and prayed on until the day of their redemption came. And shall we with forty years of freedom behind us and forty years of opportunity to strengthen and develop us be less courageous than they were? It may be well for us to pause a moment and take a cursory glance at the history of the black man in America and see through what trials and through what difficulties he has so triumphantly come. Such a review may be helpful to us and may make our present seem less gloomy and more hopeful.
In the year [[1]]1620 two ships from foreign shores set sail for America. Both carried passengers destined to play an important part in the history of our country. One came from England and landed her precious burden on the northern shore of Cape Cod. The other sailed from the sunny shores of Africa, touched at Jamestown in Virginia, and left there twenty black men as slaves. Those from England were the forerunners of a people distinguished for thrift, enterprise and ingenuity. To these pilgrims and their descendants the American nation is very largely indebted for its greatness. But that score of black men, unwilling emigrants, torn by force from their native land, were the fathers of a people who produced no such salutary effect upon the civilization with which they came in contact. They proved to be a hindrance to it rather than an advantage. They and their descendants were slaves. The labor which they performed lost its dignity and became degrading in the eyes of the white man in the section where these bondmen lived and toiled. The development of this spirit has been the great misfortune—the bane of the southern states, for nothing is more essential to the prosperity of a community than industry in all its citizens.
[1]. Many writers say that slavery was introduced in the Colonies in 1619.
The germ of slavery that fell upon the soil of Virginia in 1620 took root and grew with marvellous rapidity until it became an evil more destructive than a pestilence. No event in the history of our country has carried with it to its last analysis such terrible consequences. Nor did slavery confine itself to the colony of Virginia, but it spread in all directions and even reared its head among the sons of the Pilgrims and stalked shamelessly over the hills of New England. Two hundred years before proud, aristocratic, Cavalier Virginia had won for herself the distinguished honor of being called “The Mother of Presidents,” she became the Mother of Slavery.
The northern white man and the southern white man alike became responsible for the pernicious system of serfdom introduced in America. Frederick Douglass said there was but one innocent party to the evil and that was the Negro himself. And as he was the innocent party to his slavery, so he has been since his emancipation the innocent and abused party in all controversies relating to his privileges as a freeman and to his rights as a citizen.
There have been stirring issues and far-reaching upheavals crowded into the eventful years, and things have moved fast in this country since its first settlement. A great war came and changed the legal relations of its inhabitants and conferred upon them new rights, discharged old bonds and imposed new duties. A people achieved independence and brought into existence a nation. Questions of great import came to the surface; questions of national policy demanding solution, questions that were disposed of in a wise and statesman-like and patriotic way. But there was one question, the like of which had never before harassed a nation. It was how to maintain a democratic form of government of thirty millions of people, of whom twenty millions existed under one kind of social and industrial system and ten millions under another totally different from it. The twenty millions of one race forming one section of the country, carried out to some extent among themselves that portion of the Declaration of Independence touching the equal creation and inalienable rights of man. The ten millions forming the other section consisted in nearly equal portions of two races—one Anglo-Saxon, the other African; one master, the other slave; one the descendants of voluntary emigrants who came hither seeking happiness and a broader freedom; the other deriving their blood from forced emigrants who came to the shores of America and were sold as chattels.
This condition developed the problem which has harassed the country for more than a hundred years. It raised the question which could be answered only in one way, and that was that such an experiment in government with two such conflicting elements could not succeed. Abraham Lincoln answered it, when he said: “Our country cannot exist half slave and half free.” The thoughtful men of the nation saw the cloud on the horizon, when it was no bigger than a man’s hand. They endeavored to ward off the storm of which it was the precursor, but they were not equal to the task. It grew and grew and became darker and darker, until it finally burst into a tempest, destructive of life and treasure beyond the imagination of man. But this storm was worth all the sacrifice which our country was called upon to suffer, for it carried before it slavery and all its horrors. That glorious storm of shot and shell was sent by the Almighty as a punishment for our country’s greatest crime. It made it possible for us to assemble here tonight as a free people.
Those who associate the movement for the freedom of the Negro only with the northern section of our country forget that in Tennessee the first anti-slavery paper was published, and that in the early years of the nineteenth century it was far safer to deliver a speech against slavery in East Tennessee than in any part of the North. In Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and George Wythe, all Virginians, the cause of freedom found uncompromising advocates. It was through the influence of these men that the first Congress of the colonies in 1774 adopted unanimously a covenant against slavery. Thomas Jefferson wrote that portion of the ordinance before the Continental Congress in 1784 which declared for the freedom of the Negro in all territory to be ceded to the new Union by the original states. Unfortunately this section of the resolution was lost, because a delegate from the state of New Jersey, who was in favor of it, was not in his place in Congress when the vote was taken.