The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

Then came the worst enemy that either race had ever had: the post-bellum politician. The problem was already sufficiently complicated when politics were injected into it. Well might General Lee say with a wise knowledge of men: “The real war has just begun.”

No sooner had the Southern armies laid down their guns and the great armies of the North who had saved the Union disbanded, than the vultures, who had been waiting in the secure distance, gathered to the feast. The act of a madman had removed the wisest, most catholic, most conservative, and the ablest leader, one whose last thoughts almost had been to “restore the Union” by restoring the government of the Southern States along constitutional lines; and well the politicians used the unhappy tragedy for their purposes. Those who had been most cowardly in war were bravest in peace, now that peace had come. Even in Mr. Lincoln’s time the radical leaders in Congress had made a strenuous fight to carry out their views, and their hostility to his plan of pacification and reconstruction was expressed with hardly less vindictiveness than they exhibited later toward his successor.[18]

The Southern people, unhappily, acted precisely as this element wished them to act; for they were sore, unquelled, and angry. They met denunciation with defiance.

Knowing the imperative necessities of the time as no Northerner could know them; fearing the effects of turning loose a slave population of several millions, and ignorant of the deep feeling of the Northern people; the Southerners hastily enacted laws regulating labor which were certainly unwise in view of the consequences that followed, and possibly, if enforced, might have proved oppressive, though they never had a trial. Most of these laws were simply reënactments of old vagrant laws on the statute books and some still stand on the statute books; but they were enacted now expressly to control the Negroes; they showed the animus of the great body of the whites, and they aroused a deep feeling of distrust and much resentment among the Northerners. And, finally, they played into the hands of the politicians who were on the lookout for any pretext to fasten their grip on the South.

The struggle just then became intensified between the President and his opponents in Washington, with the Presidency and the control of the Government as the stake, and with the South holding the balance of power; and, unhappily, the Negroes appeared to the politicians an element that could be utilized to advantage by being made the “permanent allies” of what Mr. Stevens, Mr. Wade, and Mr. Sumner used to term “the party of the Union.”

So, the Negro appeared to the politicians a useful instrument, and to the doctrinaires “a man and brother” who was the equal of his former master, and, if he were “armed with the weapon” of the ballot, would be able to protect himself and would inevitably rise to the full stature of the white.

A large part of the people of the North were undoubtedly inspired by a missionary spirit which had a high motive beneath it. But a missionary spirit undirected by knowledge of real conditions is a dangerous guide to follow. And the danger was never better illustrated than in this revolution. Doubtless, some of the politicians were inspired partly by the same idea; but the major portion had but one ruling passion—the securing of power and the down-treading of the Southern whites.[19]

Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were enfranchised.

It is useless to discuss the motives with which this was done. No matter what the motives it was a national blunder; in its way as great a blunder as secession.

It is not uncommonly supposed that Mr. Lincoln was the originator of this idea. The weight of his name is frequently given to it by the uninformed. Mr. Lincoln, however, was too level-headed and clear-sighted a statesman ever to have committed so great a folly. The furthest he ever went was in his letter to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, in which he “suggested” the experiment of intrusting the ballot to “some of the colored people, for instance ... the very intelligent,” and as a reward for those who had fought for the Union.[20]