The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

Indeed, before Mr. Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation he gave one hundred days’ warning to the revolutionary States to lay down their arms, and in the proclamation he places the entire matter forever at rest by declaring in terms, in that unmistakable English of which he was a master, that the measure was adopted “upon military necessity.”

No one can read this record and not admit that slavery was abolished in the providence of God, against the intention of the North and of the South alike, because its purpose had been accomplished, and the time was ripe for its ending.

V

The next step is the discussion of the attitude in which we, the white people of the South, stand to the Negro. This attitude is too striking, if not too anomalous, not to have attracted wide attention. A race with an historic and glorious past, in a high stage of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race, is at least unsympathetic. The two races cannot be termed with exactness hostile—in many respects, not even unfriendly; but they are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; the former slave race has been for over thirty years politically useful to the outsiders by whose sentiment they are sustained, and the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it.

Now what is the question? Is it merely the question, “whether the Negro shall not have the right to choose his own rulers”; or is it a great race issue between the Negro and the White?

If it is a question of mere perverse imposition by the white on the black, by the stronger on the weaker, a refusal to recognize his just rights, then the advocates of that side are right. If, however, it be the other, then the stronger race should be sustained, or else the people of the North are guilty of the fatuity which destroys nations.

The chief complication of the matter has arisen from the possession of the elective franchise by the newly emancipated Negro, and the peculiar circumstances which surround this possession. The very method of the bestowal of this franchise was pregnant with baleful results. It was given him not as a righteous and reasonable act; not because he was considered capable of exercising the highest function of citizenship: the making of laws, and the execution of laws; not with the philosophic deliberation which should characterize an act by which four millions of new citizens of a distinct and inferior race are suddenly added to the nation; but in heat, in a spirit of revenge, and chiefly because the cabal which then controlled the Republic thought that with the Negro as an ally it could dominate the South and perpetuate its own power. The South, just emerging from the furious struggle of war, physically prostrate, but with its dauntless spirit unbroken, confiding in its own integrity of purpose, and vainly believing that as the Constitution was the ægis under which the North had claimed to fight, the constitutional rights for which it had itself contended would be observed and respected, accepted the emancipation of the Negro, but not unnaturally found itself unwilling, indeed unable, to accept all that this emancipation might import. The North, partly in distrust of the sincerity of even the measure of acceptance which the South avowed; partly in the belief in the minds of a considerable portion of its people that the Negro might thus be elevated, and that he would, at least, be enabled to protect himself; but mainly to govern the intrepid and difficult South, at the instance of the partisan leaders who then directed the destinies of the Republic, struck down constitutional government throughout the South, and restored it only when it had placed it in the Negro’s hands.

No such act of fatuity ever emanated from a nation. Justification it can have none; its best excuse must be that it was accomplished under a certain enthusiasm just after a bitter war, and before passion had cooled sufficiently for reason to reassert her sway. It was a people’s insanity. The “Reconstruction of the South” was, on the part of the people of the North at large, simply that which in national life is worse than a crime, a blunder; on the part of the leaders who planned it and carried it through, it was a cool, deliberate, calculated act, violative of the terms on which the South had surrendered and disbanded her broken armies, and perpetrated for the purpose of securing—not peace, not safety, not righteous acknowledgment of lawfully constituted authority, but personal power to the leaders of the party which at that time was dominant, power with all that it implied of gain and revenge. For this they took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigor of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the eyes of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.

Within two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox there was not a Confederate within the limits of the Southern States who had not accepted honestly the status of affairs.

On the 18th of December, 1865, General Grant, who had been sent through the South to inspect and make a report on its condition, in his report to the President said: