Says Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, in his very interesting and instructive book, “The Southern South”:
“A systematic effort has been made to settle colored people in Indiana, in order to hold that State in the Republican column; and there are now probably nearly a hundred thousand there, a third of whom settled in Indianapolis, where they furnish a race problem of growing seriousness.”[297]
It is true that the Census for 1910 only disclosed in Indiana 60,280 Negroes; but Mr. Hart’s not unreasonable estimate was probably based upon the preceding Censuses of 1880, 1890 and 1900, alone available in 1910, when he wrote, which did indicate a rising rate of that species of population, from 15% to 27%, while that of 1910 indicated for that State a drop of 4.8%. A similar falling off being recorded in Illionis, where the rate of increase dropped from 49 percent to 28.2 percent, and in Ohio alone of these three great States, the rate increased. There it had risen from 11 to 15 percent. Proceeding East, a decline was also recorded for Pennsylvania from 43 to 23.6; for New Jersey from 47 to 28.5; for New York from 40 to 35.2 percent. The total increase of the Northern States east of the Mississippi from the year 1900 to 1910 being only 142,363 as against 188,347 from 1890 to 1900; but west of the Mississippi from 1900 to 1910 the increase was 107,747, as against 51,194 from 1890 to 1900; a total increase in the whole area outside of the South of about 250,000 against about 240,000 for the previous decade. At the same time in the South for the decade 1900 to 1910 an increase of Negroes of only 757,901 as against 1,079,054 from 1890 to 1900, with an actual decrease in the population of the three States, Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee, amounting to 33,020.
This would seem to indicate a rate of increase in the South of about ten percent and outside of the South, in the rest of the United States about twenty-five percent, up to 1910.
But in connection with the above there is another fact which is of some importance, and that is the increase of the entire Negro population of the United States, in 1900 amounting to 8,849,789, as exhibited by the Census of 1910 was 351,029 less than the increase of the 7,488,788 Negroes in the United States in 1890 to 1900.
What has caused the difference?
The not unnatural but wholly unsatisfactory suggestion of the Census authorities, that the discrepancy is due to the errors of others Censuses, should be received with politeness coming from such efficient workers; but can hardly be taken at its face value. After all the Censuses are our safest guides, and there is not much reason for thinking one so very much better than another.
Again, there is a class of reasoners prone to take to themselves the somewhat comforting conclusion that the Negroes may be moving into the North and West from the South; but that they cannot live there and die out; to clinch the argument, they point to Canada, where it is asserted just about and after the war a great number of Negroes had settled in Ontario, and certain it is that by the official Census of Canada for 1911, the Negro population had decreased from 17,437 in 1901 to 16,877 in 1911.[298] Yet there are other facts and circumstances leading to speculations affording explanation of a part of the loss.
From 1900 to 1920, there passed over into Canada from the United States some 1,318,834 citizens of the latter country, some of whom have been Negroes, how many mulattoes, not designated.
It is true that, as Negroes, not more than 383 so classified entered Canada up to 1911, and only 13 during the fiscal year 1910-1911;[299] but many more under the classification “citizens of the United States;” must have entered in the light of the following newspaper comments: