Describing the departure of the Negroes from South Carolina in 1916, he states that:
“Hon. H. C. Tillman, son of Senator B. R. Tillman, told me that in the crowd were one or two of the farm hands that had signed contracts to work next year, but that he would not interfere with them.”
Next he describes the tearful, melodramatic appeal of a Georgia divine, entreating the Negroes not to leave the South:
“We have not treated you right; we are going to do better. Let us, white and colored unite to solve the race question on Southern soil. We are in debt to you colored people. First of all we owe you the Gospel; then we owe you protection before the law. There will be no more outrages when we take up this problem, as we should, and solve it by the Gospel.”
Having shown the patriotic unselfishness of Captain Tillman and quoted the wail of the Georgia divine, the colored educator proceeds to state his own view:
“This is the country for the black man; the white people of the South should offer the proper inducements and protection before the law to keep the colored people in the Southland.... It may be as many of our colored people say: ‘God is in this movement.’ But I believe that if the colored people of the South had worked together for the last fifty years for the good of each race and at the same time each race in its place, we would have had better conditions; in the South—no lynchings, no cause for lynchings. If the best people in the South had kept it in the hands of the Gen. Wade Hampton type, this would have been the greatest country on earth.”
Just about fifty years before Carroll’s utterance, people in the South, to some degree answering to Carroll’s description of the Hampton type, framed the Black Codes, as they thought, “for the good of each race, and at the same time each race in its place.” But, after Reconstruction, Wade Hampton thought diffusion of the Negro was the only remedy.
After detailing cases, where he claimed to know that Negro men of property had been ordered out of the State simply because they owned property and were prosperous, Carroll states that when they came to him for advice, he advised them to—
“try to get to some other white men in the county or community, as there are plenty of white men in South Carolina, who would give justice and protection.”[355]
The Black Codes made this obligatory on all masters for their servants. The framers of the codes were raised in the school of politics which Rhett, in 1850, announced the basic principle of, as follows: