The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

There are, without doubt, some whom nothing can enlighten; who would not believe though one rose from the dead. They are not confined to one latitude. There are, with equal certainty, others who for place and profit trade in their brother’s blood, and keep open the wounds which peace, but for them, would long ago have healed; who for a mess of pottage would sell the birthright of the nation. The professional Haman can never sleep while Mordecai so much as sits at the gate; but we can have an abiding faith in the ultimate good sense and sound principles of the great Anglo-Saxon race wherever it may dwell; and to this we must address ourselves.

The second thing necessary to the solution of the question is to enlighten the people of the North. If we can show that the question is not, as Mr. Cable states and as the North believes, merely whether the Negro shall or shall not have the right to choose his ruler, but is a great race question on which depends the future as well as the present salvation of the nation, we need have no fear as to the ultimate result; sound sense and right judgment will prevail.

That there exists a race question of some sort must be apparent to every person who passes through the South. Where six millions of people of one color and one race live in contact with twelve millions of another color and race, there must, of necessity, be a race issue. The Negro has not behaved unnaturally: he has, indeed, in the main behaved well; but the race issue exists and grows. The feeling has not yet reached the point of personal hostility—at least on the part of the Whites; but as the older generation which knew the tie between master and servant passes away, the race feeling is growing intenser. The Negro becomes more assertive, the White more firm.

III

There are a multitude of men and women at the North who do not know that slavery ever really existed at the North. They may accept it historically in a dim, theoretical sort of way, as we accept the fact that men and women were once hanged for forgery or for stealing a shilling; but they do not take it in as a vital fact.

It may possibly aid the solution of our problem if it be shown that New England had quite as much to do with the establishment of African slavery on this continent as had the South, though it survived longest in the latter section; that slavery at the North was, while it continued, as rigorous a system as ever it was at the South; that abolition was at the North in the main deemed as illegal, and its advocates encountered as much obloquy there as at the South; that the emancipation of the slaves was effected not by the Northern people at large, but by a limited band of enthusiasts and in the wise providence of God; that the emancipation proclamation was not based on the lofty moral principle of universal freedom, to which it has been the custom to accredit it, but was a war-measure, resorted to only on “necessity of war,” and as a means of restoring the Union. Further, that the investment of the Negro with the elective franchise was not the result of a high moral sentiment founded on the rights of man, but was effected in a spirit of heat if not of revenge, and under a misapprehension of the true bearing of such an act; that the Negro has not used the power vested in him for the advantage of himself or of anyone else, but in a reckless, unreasonable, and dangerous way; that while there have been cases of injustice to him, in the main the restraints thrown around him at the South have been merely such as were rendered necessary to preserve the South from absolute and irretrievable ruin; that the same instincts under which the South has acted prevail at the North; that the Negro has been and is being educated by the South to an extent far beyond his right to claim, or the ability of the white race to contribute to it; that he is as yet incapable, as a race, of self-government. And finally, that unless the white race continues to assert itself and retains control, a large section of the nation will become hopelessly Africanized, and American civilization relapse and possibly perish.

Slavery was until within, historically speaking, a very recent period, as much a Northern institution as it was a Southern one; it existed in full vigor in all of the original thirteen colonies, and while it existed it was quite as rigorous a system at the North as at the South. Every law which formed its code at the South had its counterpart in the North, and with less reason; for while there were at the South not less than 600,000 slaves—Virginia having, by the census of 1790, 293,427—there were at the North, by the census of 1790, less than 42,000.

Regulations not wholly compatible with absolute freedom of will are necessary concomitants of any system of slavery, especially where the slaves are in large numbers; and it should move the hearts of our brethren at the North to greater patience with us that they, too, are not “without sin.”

Massachusetts has the honor of being the first community in America to legalize the slave-trade and slavery by legislative act; the first to send out a slave-ship, and the first to secure a fugitive-slave law.

Slavery having been planted on this continent (not by the South, as has been reiterated until it is the generally received doctrine, but by a Dutch ship, which in 1619 landed a cargo of “twenty negers” in a famished condition at Jamestown), it shortly took general root, and after a time began to flourish. Indeed, it flourished here and elsewhere, so that in 1636, only seventeen years later, a ship, The Desire, was built and fitted out at Marblehead as a slaver, and thus became the first American slave-ship, but by no means the last. In the early period of the institution it was conceived that as it was justified on the ground that the slaves were heathen, conversion to Christianity might operate to emancipate them. In Virginia, the leading Southern colony, it was adjudicated that this did not so operate; but long prior to that, and while it was the accepted theory, Negroes are shown, by the church records, to have been baptized. In Massachusetts, at that time, baptism was expressly prohibited.