The opening could hardly be improved upon by any special pleader.
Writing in 1909, he declares:
“There is danger today that between the intense feeling of the South and the conciliatory spirit of the North grave injustice will be done the Negro American in the history of Reconstruction. Those who see in Negro suffrage the cause of the main evils of Reconstruction must remember that if there had not been a single freedman left in the South after war the problems of Reconstruction would still have been grave. Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement—a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization. Add to all this the presence of four million freedmen and the situation is further complicated.”[324]
That the training and the treatment of these ex-slaves became a central problem of Reconstruction, he admits; yet claims that three agencies, the Negro church; the Negro school and the Freedmen’s Bureau undertook the solution, without which, he maintains, it would have been far graver. But he absolutely disregards that product of ante-bellum Southern civilization then in the South, 132,819[325] free persons of color, many of whom were morally and mentally well fitted for what the Black Codes designed to give them, the suffrage. This element of the Southern population together with the majority of the House slaves would have probably furnished a base of about ten per cent of the total Negro population on which the new civilization would have been reared, had the South been permitted to test its plan. Having declared that the economic condition of the eleven States at the close of the war was “pitiable, their fear of Negro freedom genuine,” Dr. DuBois maintains, “yet it was reasonable to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction toward slavery.”
Admitting that:
“To some extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the Negro.”[326]—
he promptly contradicts his own admission, with the assertion:
“The Codes spoke for themselves. They have often been reprinted and quoted. No open minded student can read them without being convinced that they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.”[327]
Is this true? Can any student be absolutely open minded? A seer is a receiver and revealer of truths. Such a being can possibly approach the consideration of a subject with an open mind. One may imagine Socrates so approaching a subject; but by what process, by what mental cathartic, does one, who studies, divest his mind of all preconceived ideas of the subject every time he considers a theory concerning that which has interested him sufficiently to lead him to seek to know more of it?
No, the vast mass of us approach those subjects, when we are sincerely desirous of truth in the spirit of that individual who exclaimed to Christ—“Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” When the broken, beaten South attempted to frame the Codes, which no Negro has ever been able to consider judicially, the survivors could not possibly approach the condition they were in with an open mind. The greatest mind that has ever considered our great experiment in government, the French student De Tocqueville and that strong but shallower mind, that for so many years had with its resolutions overshadowed all others in the South, united in the dictum. Abolition means Africanization for the South. But the whites of the South were to a great extent British and Northern Irish in stock. They were eminently conservative. A stock greater in defeat than in victory, as history has shown the British to be.