The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

This confusion of definitions has in the past resulted in untold evil, and it cannot be insisted on too often that it is of the utmost importance that the truth, whatever it is, should be established. When this shall be accomplished, and done so clearly that both sides shall accept it, the chief difficulty in the way of complete understanding between the sections will be removed. So long as the two sections are divided upon it, the question will never be settled. As soon as they unite in one view, it will settle itself on the only sound foundation—that of unimpeachable economic truth.

To this ignorance and opposition of views on the part of the two sections, unhappily, were added at the outset the misunderstandings and passions engendered by war, which prevented reason having any great part in a work which was to affect the whole future of the nation. With a fixed idea that there could be no justice toward the Negroes in any dealings of their former masters, all matters relating to the Negroes were intrusted by the Government to the organization which had recently been started for this very purpose under the name of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was a subject which called for the widest knowledge and the broadest wisdom, and, unhappily, both knowledge and wisdom appeared to have been resolutely banished in the treatment of the subject.

The basis of the institution of the Freedmen’s Bureau was the assumption stated: that the interests of the blacks and of the whites were necessarily opposed to each other, and that the blacks needed protection against the whites in all cases. The densest ignorance of the material on which the organization was to work prevailed, and the personnel of the organization was as unsuited to the work as could well be. With a small infusion of sensible men were mingled a considerable element of enthusiasts who felt themselves called to be the regenerators of the slaves and the scourge of their former masters, and with these, a large element of reckless adventurers who, recognizing a field for the exercise of their peculiar talents, went into the business for what they could make out of it. Measures were adopted which might have been sound enough in themselves if they had been administered with any practical wisdom. But there was no wisdom in the administration. Those who advised moderation and counselled with the whites were set aside. Bred on the idea of slavery presented in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and inflamed by passions engendered by the war, the enthusiasts honestly believed that they were right in always taking the side of the down-trodden Negro; while the adventurers, gauging with an infallible appraisement the feelings at the North, went about their work with businesslike methods to stir up sectional strife and reap all they could from the abundant harvest. And of the two, the one did about as much mischief as the other.

No statement of any Southern white person, however pure in life, lofty in morals, high-minded in principle he might be, was accepted. His experience, his position, his character, counted for nothing. He was assumed to be so designing or so prejudiced that his counsel was valueless.

It is a phase of the case which has not yet wholly disappeared, and even now we have presented to us in a large section of the country the singular spectacle of evidence being weighed rather by a man’s geographical position than by his character and his opportunity for knowledge.

This self-complacent ignorance is one of the factors which prevent a complete understanding of the problem and tend to perpetuate the errors which have cost so much in the past and, unless corrected, may prove yet more expensive in the future.

The conduct of the Freedmen’s Bureau misled the Negroes and caused the first breach between them and their former masters. Ignorance and truculence characterized almost every act of that unhappy time. Nearly every mistake that could be made was made on both sides. Measures that were designed with the best intentions were so administered as to bring these intentions to wreck.

On the emancipation of the slaves, the more enlightened whites of the South saw quite as clearly as any person at the North could have seen the necessity of some substitute for the former direction and training of the Negroes, and schools were started in many places by the old masters for the colored children.[16]

Teachers and money had come from the North for the education of the Negroes, and many schools were opened. But the teachers, at first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated the good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they might have accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust in any case, for no people look with favor on the missionaries who come to instruct them as to matters of which they feel they know much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new missionaries went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern people. They lived with the Negroes, consorting with them, and appearing with them on terms of apparent intimacy, and were believed to teach social equality, a doctrine which was the surest of all to arouse enmity then as now. The result was that hostility to the public-school system sprang up for a time. In some sections violence was resorted to by the rougher element, though it was of short duration, and was always confined to a small territory.[17] Before long, however, this form of opposition disappeared and the public-school system became an established fact.

The next step in the alienation of the races was the formation of the secret order of the Union League. The meetings were held at night, with closed doors, and with pickets guarding the approaches, and were generally under the direction of the most hostile members of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The whites regarded this movement with serious misgivings, as well they might, for, having as its basic principle the consolidation of the Negro race against the white race, it banded the Negroes in an organization which, with the exception of the Confederate Army, was the most complete that has ever been known in the South, and the fruits of which still survive to-day. Without going into the question of the charges that the League taught the most inflammatory doctrines, it may be asserted without fear of question that its teaching was to alienate the Negroes from the whites; to withdraw them wholly from reliance on their former masters, and to drill into their minds the imperative necessity of adherence to their new leaders, and those whom those leaders represented.