The overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, did to some degree produce diffusion and by the Census of 1890 it became noticeable even in South Carolina, where the Negro population was densest, that while the numerical increase of the Negroes was still greater there than the whites, the rate of increase of the former had fallen below the latter. Yet in South Carolina the Negro population still exceeded the white by 226,296, a greater excess than appeared even in Mississippi, a State of greater area and with a more numerous white population, where the excess of the Negro population was but 197,698.
Negro National Guardsman—South Carolina, 1890
Product of Congressional Reconstruction
Under such circumstances it was patent that legislation in either State which tended to restrain the egress of the Negroes, even if temporarily of industrial benefit to the land owners and agriculturists, was against the true interest of the State and the people, and, accordingly, in South Carolina, in the columns of “The Cotton Plant”, the organ of the South Carolina agricultural class of that date, the author of this work began an attack upon the law in a series of articles.
Without asserting that it was in response to this agitation, it nevertheless is a fact that closely following upon it, in 1893, the law was amended by the addition of a clause in the nature of a compromise, namely:
“That nothing in this act shall be construed to prevent emigrant agents operating in this State between the 1st day of July and the 31st day of December of any year.”[238]
This amendment, permitting the opportunity for assisted removal of the Negroes during that half of the year when such was least liable to interfere with their contracts for labor, admitted of a gradual removal of numbers of them and was a concession to public opinion and political morality by those who, with their votes and influence, controlled the political situation.
By 1890, it was scarcely to be doubted, that a great change in sentiment was taking place in the world or rather in those three great countries which, from their position, were most able to effect the opinion of the world. In Great Britain, the United States of America and Germany the extravagantly liberal and humanitarian ideas, with regard to the race question, which had marked the twenty-five years preceding 1890, were giving way to something which might be described by the word race-imperialism. In Germany it made its appearance in many forms, but more noticeably in the colonial ventures, which off the coast of East Africa were smeared with a recrudescence of the slave trade.[239] How it grew in that country and to what astounding lengths of caste culture it proceeded, would be beyond the scope of this study, but it might be mentioned that, by Paul Rohrback, without any credit to the author, Calhoun’s black “substratum” theory was openly avowed as the basis of colonial expansion.
Great Britain, with the Jameson raid and its sequellae, gave an illustration of race intolerance that shocked the world, but avoided the use of the black in conquering the white.
In the United States it took shape in the various constitutional conventions in Southern States, aiming to disfranchise the bulk of the Negro vote.