The era of good feeling seemed to have been ushered in along with Mr. Phillips' inauguration. The country was prosperous to a degree. Labour was receiving steady employment and a fair wage and uttered no complaint. Capital was adding surplus to per cent., and was content. The Cuban skirmish with Spain and the trial-by-battle with Germany had cemented again in blood the sections divided by the Great War—so closely indeed that nobody, not even Presidents on hand-shaking junkets, thought to mention it. Any sporadic "waver of the bloody shirt" was considered an anachronism and laughed at as a harmless idiot. It was true that the negro question, being present in the flesh and incapable of banishment, was yet a momentous problem: but it was considered in cooler temper as being either a national or a local question—not sectional in any sense.
President Phillips in his first message to Congress, as in his inaugural address, felicitated his countrymen upon the unity of the American people and the American spirit, and on both occasions gave a new rhetorical turn and oratorical flourish to the statement that his father was from Massachusetts and his mother a South Carolinian. In sections of the South where his party was admittedly effete or undoubtedly odorous he hesitated not to appoint to office men of political faith radically differing from his own—and all good citizens applauded. Partisanry was settling itself down for a good long sleep, and strife had ceased. The lion and the lamb were lain down together, and there was none that made afraid in all the holy mountain of American good-will and fair prospect.
Into this sectionally serene and peaceful situation, which Mr. Phillips deemed largely the result of his personal effort as a non-sectional American executive, he deliberately or impulsively pitched an issue which set one-third of his admiring countrymen by the ears.
The good commonwealth of Mississippi was in a state of upheaval. A peaceable revolution was being attempted there which would have changed the essential nature and purpose of the State government. Incited by the wordy eloquence of a provincial governor, with a few scraps of statistics gone mad, good men, honest men, men of intelligence were seriously considering the proposition to so amend the State constitution as to put upon the negro in his ignorance and poverty the whole burden of his own education—by a division of the school fund between the races in proportion to the taxes each paid to the State.
This reactionary and truly astonishing proposition of Governor Wordyfellow was commonly known as the Wordyfellow Idea. It was giving great concern to the sober statesmanship of the entire nation, North and South—indeed greater concern to the thoughtful men of the South who realized its momentous import, its far-reaching effect upon Southern white people, than to the thoughtful outsiders who viewed it philosophically as having a speculative interest but no actual part in its settlement or effects.
The proposition to so divide the school funds indeed found its most violent and active opposition, as it found its strongest advocates, not only among the men of the South but even in the very State of Mississippi itself. The fact soon developed that this was to be the greatest political battle that was to be fought concerning the negro. All prior conflicts had been white man against negro. This was white man against white man, with the negro as an interested onlooker.
The lines were drawn roughly with the church, the schools and the independent press allied against the politicians, the political press and the less intelligent citizenship. Notable individual exceptions there were to this alignment—which all men remember—but the line of cleavage, taking it by and large, was as stated. Though the matter of an actual constitutional revision was presented as yet only to the people of Mississippi, the battle was being waged in serious purpose to a no less actual finish in every State from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.
It was into this situation, fraught with dire possibilities of course, but full of promise to the negro's friends, that the new President projected his impulsive and forceful personality. Anxious as always to be in the fight and leader in the fight, he set about to devise some plan for helping along the black man's cause. That he might do this more intelligently he conferred often with his most trusted advisers.
It was on the occasion of the memorable Home-Coming Week at Cleveland in 191- that he held the famous conference which gave that great civic celebration a fixed place in history. He stood loyally by his home city in its effort to enjoy and advertise itself, for he betook himself and family and several friends, including two members of his cabinet, away from busiest Washington for two days, and opened up his Cleveland home at great expense for that brief stay.
Doctor Woods, a negro of national reputation, also claimed Cleveland as his birthplace, and he had journeyed thither from afar to swell the throng of loyal sons of the city, and had brought with him Doctor Martin, now a bishop of the A.M.E. Zion Church, to add dignity and strength to the negro end of the programme. Meeting officially with these two dignitaries of colour suggested to Mr. Phillips a discussion of the Wordyfellow disturbance, and he called an impromptu consultation.