The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

But Mr. Curtis, clean and lovable man as he was, never could entirely free himself from the feeling that, as an abolitionist, he had felt toward the class which had led the South through the struggle in behalf of slavery. He had great hopes that the elevation of Tillman and the overthrow of the Hampton regime meant a chance for the Negro to come back to some exercise, even if a restricted one, of the suffrage. He expected that there would be a marked difference in the feelings and sentiments of those whom Tillman led and those who had preceded them; and in a letter of Jan. 21, he thus exhibited it:

“I do not know if you have seen a paper by the Rev. A. D. Mayo, who for ten years has been busily engaged in promoting education in the Southern States. He holds that the class which Tillman represents and not the old planting aristocracy is the real hope of the Southern country, and he makes a very strong statement.”[236]

But no class has any monopoly of selfishness and while it was most unfortunate for South Carolina, yet it was in accordance with human nature, that one of the first considerations of the class which had seized the reins of power in South Carolina in 1890, was to benefit its own class, by an attempt to perpetuate those very conditions which for eighty years had done more to injure South Carolina than any one thing in her history, and which her wisest sons had unavailingly opposed, viz., the retention of a mass of ignorant, agricultural laborers, reduced as close to the condition of serfs of the soil as it was possible in each period to accomplish; for this is what the law, enacted in most of the cotton States at that date, did in fact bring about, by taxing out of existence those agencies which might have relieved the State of considerable numbers of Negroes.

The South Carolina Act, passed December 4, 1891, can stand as typical of this legislation, which was based upon the determination of the white agriculturists of the Lower South, constituting as they did about seventy per cent of the white population, to hobble, well within their reach, cheap Negro labor. Coupled as the passage of such legislation was with the fierce declarations against black brutes, with which the perpetrators of such sought to excuse the numerous lynchings of this period, it was apparent that, while the vengeance was swift in overtaking the blacks who violated white women, the pound of cure was preferred to the ounce of prevention; and so, exposing their women to that risk which seemed inevitable with the tremendous Negro population which abounded in the South, the men who made the laws still clung to cheap Negro labor. It is true that as a whole, in the section covered even by South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the white population had gained upon the Negro population and was at this date but slightly inferior in numbers, amounting to 2,917,000 whites, to 2,966,000 Negroes, in this black belt; but just what proportion of whites were absolutely independent of the Negro agricultural laborer it would be difficult to estimate. That there were then and are now a very great number, who would profit to a very great degree by an assisted emigration of Negroes, and that these whites were of the class whose women folk necessarily were most exposed to the risk which a juxtaposition of such an immense mass of Negroes presented, growing race prejudice prevented the perception of, and the members of this class lent their influence to this injurious legislation formulated as follows:

“No person shall carry on the business of emigrant agent in the State without first having obtained a license therefor from the State Treasurer.

Section 2. That the term ‘emigrant agent’, as contemplated in the Act, shall be construed to mean any person engaged in hiring laborers or soliciting emigrants in the State to be employed beyond the limits of the same.

Section 3. That any person shall be entitled to a license, which shall be good for one year, upon payment unto the State Treasurer, for the use of the State, of one thousand dollars in each county in which he operates or solicits emigrants, for each year so engaged.

Section 4. That any person doing the business of an emigrant agent without first having obtained such license shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine not less than five hundred dollars and not more than five thousand or may be imprisoned in the county jail not less than four months or confined in the State prison at hard labor not exceeding two years for each and every offense, within the discretion of the Court.”[237]

It is doubtful if the injury which had been inflicted upon the South by the vicious Federal legislation of 1868, had, in any way, been greater than by its checking the natural diffusion of the Negroes throughout the Union in consequence of their emancipation and the military overthrow of those opposing such.

The effect of the legislation of 1868 had been to direct and stimulate a movement to the South of Northern Negroes and white adventurers which banked up the Negro population there, taught all to consider themselves ladies and gentlemen, a fact which is still apparent in the apparel in which many attempt to perform heavy manual work; and, until they were disbanded in 1890, was most ludicrous, in their military aspirations, as the Kodak by Johnson shows.