The Soul of John Brown

by Stephen Graham

AFTER THE WAR: THE VOTE

The march to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war. Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South. It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of all the States.

“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,” says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till the South had been conquered by the United States, and the war was not o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster progeny of revenge.

The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise. Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the same exaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice. Nigger baiting arose, mob violence took the place of the justice of the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it has grown.

The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still progressing to an ever fuller freedom.

In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate possibilities latent in a man. But with freedom every baby became a potential Alexander.

In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the suffrage.

I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage stands to-day.

In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against “Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very widespread among educated colored people. In the first place I should like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger” has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which that word is used in America. Thus we say “working like a nigger,” an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “nigger diploma,” a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in America at a Negro university; the ten little nigger boys, the black boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man, preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.

The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to be government by the domination of a military caste, and mankind generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more harm than good.