CHAPTER VII
THE RACE QUESTION[65]
I
TO any calm observer of the present condition of our country painfully apparent must be the difference between the state of what from long usage we are accustomed to term “the two sections.”
We have one blood, one language, one religion, one common end, one government; but the North and the South are still “the two sections,” as they were one hundred years ago, when the bands of the Constitution were hardly cooled from the welding, or as they were in 1860, when they stood, armed to the teeth, facing each other, and the cloud of revolution was hovering above them soon to burst in the dread thunder of civil war.
Should one, hearing the phrase “the two sections,” take the map of the American Union and study its salient features, he would declare that “the two sections” were by natural geographical division the East and the West; should he study the commerce of the country with its vast currents and tides, its fields of agriculture and manufacture, he would be impelled to declare that by all the inexorable laws of interest they were the East and the West. And yet, we who stand amid the incontestable evidences of events know that against all laws, against all reason, against all right, there are two sections of this country, and they are not the East and the West, but the South and the rest of the Union.
It is proposed to show briefly why this unhappy condition exists; and to suggest a few things which, if earnestly considered and patiently advocated, may, in the providence of God, contribute to the solution of the distressing difficulties which confront us.
The divergence of the “two sections” was coeval with the planting of the continent; it preceded the establishment of the nation. It steadily increased until an irrepressible conflict became inevitable; and it was not until after this conflict had spent itself that reconcilement became possible.
The causes of that divergence, with the exception of one, it is not necessary to discuss here. This one has survived even the cauterization of war. Other causes have passed away. The right of secession is no longer an active issue. It has been adjudicated. That it once existed and was utilized on occasion by other States than those which actually exercised it is undeniable; that it passed away with the Confederate armies at Appomattox is equally beyond controversy. The very men who once asserted it and shed their blood to establish it, would now, while still standing by the rightness of their former position, admit that in the light of altered conditions the Union is no longer dissoluble. They are ready if need be to maintain the fact. It is, however, important to make it clear that the right did exist, because on this depends largely the South’s place in history. Without this we were mere insurgents and rebels; with it, we were a great people in revolution for our rights. In 1861 the South stood aligned against the Union and apparently for the perpetuation of slavery. The sentiment of the whole world was against it. We were defeated, overwhelmed. Unless we possess strength sufficient to maintain ourselves even in the face of this, the verdict of posterity will be against us. It is not unlikely that in fifty years the defence of slavery will be deemed the world over to have been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to have been. There is but one way to prevent the impending disaster: by establishing the real fact, that, whatever may have been the immediate and apparent occasion, the true and ultimate cause of the action of the South was her firm and unwavering adherence to the principle of self-government and her jealous devotion to her inalienable rights.
But if the other causes which kept the country divided have passed away as practical issues, one still survives and is, under a changed form, as vital to-day and as pregnant with evil as it was in 1861.
This is the question which ever confronts the South; the question which after twenty-five years of peace and prosperity still keeps the South “one section” and the rest of the nation the other. This is the ever-present, ever-menacing, ever-growing Negro Question.