Some hold that a race is great in proportion to the distance it has wandered through intermarriage from the parent stock. The great races of the world, it is held, are the mixed races. When the Africans' environments robbed them of comeliness and attractive qualities, they were thrown off to their own one blood, no one courting alliance with them.
The merest tyro of a sociologist knows that these are the essential facts which account for the backwardness of the African people, and yet Mr. Dixon would fasten upon Negroes the charge of inherent inferiority because of the showing made under circumstances most adverse to the development of civilization.
RECONSTRUCTION DAYS.
The most pathetic page in the history of the Negro race in America is the story of reconstruction days. Kept in ignorance during the days of slavery his one great desire under freedom was for knowledge and self-improvement. Because the white South was spiritually unprepared to deal with the new order of things, and because the North did not desire to make one great military camp of the South, the Negroes en masse were summoned forthwith to the task of establishing governments in the Southern states in harmony with the Constitution of the United States. The men whom the Negroes supported accomplished that task well, but in other respects betrayed their trusts.
When corruption in office, a thing by no means confined to one era of the world's history, became manifest, in many quarters an appeal was made to the Negroes to help overturn the corruptionists. And be it said to the honor of the race, the cry for good government never failed to rally Negro support, even at a great sacrifice. When Wade Hampton was struggling for the dethronement of corrupt governments in South Carolina, six thousand Negroes took part in one of the parades during his canvass for the governorship.
But some states did not have leaders prepared to deal with the Negroes as political equals, leaders who were wise enough to appeal to the good within the race. In such places the unreasoning, undiscriminating, brutal, murderous mobs arose to do by violence what better and wiser men had done elsewhere through moral suasion. Had enlightened methods been employed the sky would not have been as portentous as it is to-day. As it is, we have the sickening record of the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan and the heritage of evil and lawlessness left in its wake.
Over against Mr. Dixon's lurid and grossly misleading pictures of the conduct of the Negroes in reconstruction days, we offer the following tribute to the race, clipped from the columns of the Nashville Banner, perhaps the most widely read daily newspaper in the state of Tennessee, and a paper opposed to the reconstruction policy pursued by the federal government:
"Let us do the negroes justice. There is no spirit of bloodthirsty and incendiary revolt prevailing among them. History and experience have shown that there never existed a more tractable people considering all the trying conditions and circumstances to which they have been subjected. In time of war and in the frightful reconstruction period, when they were urged and tempted by false friends and incentives and had opportunities of evil appalling to contemplate, they were restrained as perhaps no other people would have been restrained and were more sinned against than sinning. And to-day as a people they have no mind except to accept the best that may come to them."
MR. DIXON VS. HON. JAMES G. BLAINE.
Mr. Dixon's hope is evidently in the young North. That the young people may not be wedded to the traditions of their section, he would impress the young North that what their fathers did in the way of bestowing equality of citizenship upon the Negro, was the result of a leadership blind with the spirit of revenge. As a complete rebuttal to this contention on his part, we quote from an article which appeared in the North American Review from the pen of the late Hon. James G. Blaine: