In the years in which it had been maintained in the South Negro supremacy had done more to destroy the belief of the bulk of the Northern public, as to the capacity of the race to assume the full duties of citizenship, than any argument of whites could have achieved. The following extracts from a letter of George W. Curtis at this date is interesting. Referring to conditions in the fifties, he writes:
“I was mobbed in Philadelphia and the halter was made ready for me and I was only protected by the entire police force merely because I spoke against slavery.”[224]
With freedom of discussion assured, he now, in December, 1888, wrote:
“I am very much obliged by your letter of Nov., I do not think the feeling of this part of the country is precisely understood in your part. It is in a word this, that admitting the force of all that is said about Negro supremacy, the colored vote ought not to be suppressed and the advantages based upon it retained. Of course I do not say it should be suppressed. I am assuming that there is great reason in the remark that under the same conditions the people in the Northern States would do likewise, and I ask whether, under that assumption, the people of those States ought to expect to retain what they are not entitled to? It is unreasonable to ask acquiescence in the suppression of legal votes, which makes the white vote in Mississippi count more than the white vote in Massachusetts or New York. An educational test would be of no avail in a community where color is the disqualification according to Mr. Grady and Mr. Watterson. I shall be very glad to hear from you and I should like to know the reply to the statement, that it is not fair to suppress the vote and retain the advantages based upon it.”[225]
The reply of the individual to whom this letter was addressed may well be omitted, in the light of what follows.
In 1889 two publications appeared from Southern sources most powerfully portraying the advantages of freedom of discussion and the inestimable value of that which Mr. Curtis had described as “the fundamental condition of human progress,”—“the right of the individual to express his opinion on any and every subject.” The first publication was the careful, exact and searching analysis of the condition of the mass of the blacks contained in “The Plantation Negro as a Freedman,” by Philip Alexander Bruce of Virginia. The second, the remarkable editorials of Carlyle McKinley, in The News and Courier, of Charleston, S. C., upon the impending movements of the freedmen in the United States.
With a prescience absolutely astounding, when we consider the only available source of information at that date, the Census of 1880, the same from which Judge Tourgee had drawn the figures upon which he based his gloomy prophecy of the speedy Africanization of the South, Mr. Carlyle McKinley wrote:
“The Negro question and all questions growing out of it will be rendered one hundred fold more easy of prompt and right adjustment when the Negroes themselves are more equally distributed throughout the republic.”[226]
Differing in toto with the work of Judge Tourgee, which had unquestionably in some quarters produced a profound impression and one which was not obliterated until the figures of the Census of 1890 were published, in 1889 Carlyle McKinley confidently declared:
“The currents which are moving from nearly every part of the cotton belt towards the Mississippi basin will not stop there. The Southern States have already all the colored population that they want and more than they want. Future movements in the same direction must inevitably extend beyond the cotton and cane fields of the region and being deflected around the northern borders of Texas spread into the vast prairie country beyond or perhaps curve northward into the States bordering the Mississippi and its tributaries.”[227]