Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

by Timothy Thomas Fortune

The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to watch the fire-brand. The "wise men" of the nation had made possible a system of government in which robbery and murder were to contend for the mastery, in which organized ignorance and organized brigandage were to contend for the right to rule and to ruin.

It is not complimentary to the white men of the South that their organized brigandage proved to be more stubborn, more far-sighted than was unorganized ignorance. In a warfare of this disreputable nature very little honor can be accorded to the victorious party, be he brigand or ignoramus. The warfare is absolutely devoid of principle, and, therefore, victory, any way it is twisted, is supremely dishonorable.

The South, therefore, although she rooted out the incubus of carpet-baggism (one of the most noxious plants that ever blossomed in the garden of any nascent society), and stifled the liberties and immunities of a whole people, turning their new-found joy into sadness and mourning—although the South succeeded in accomplishing these results, she lies prostrate to-day, feared by her fellow-citizens, who will not trust her with power, and shunned by the industrious aliens who seek our shores, because they will not become members of a society in which individualism and absolutism are the supreme law—for was it not to escape these parasites that they expatriated themselves from the shores of the Volga, the Danube and the Rhine? Men will not make their homes among people who, spurning the accepted canons of justice and the courts of law, make themselves a community of banditti. Thus, the South lies prostrate, staggering beneath a load of illiteracy sufficient to paralyze the energies of any people; dwelling in the midst of usurpation, where law is suspended and individual license is the standard authority; where criminals and suspected criminals are turned over to the rude mercy of mobs, masked and irresponsible; where caste corrupts every rivulet that issues from the fountain of aspiration or of chastity;[13] where no man is allowed to think or act for himself who does not conform his thoughts and shape his actions to suit the censorious and haughty dictum of the dominant class.

"You must think as we think and act as we act, or you must go!" This is the law of the South.

In each of the late rebellious states the ballotbox has been closed against the black man. To reach it he is compelled to brave the muzzles of a thousand rifles in the hands of silent sentinels who esteem a human life as no more sacred than the serpent that drags his tortuous length among the grasses of the field, and whose head mankind is enjoined to crush.

The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal constitution which grew out of the public sentiment created by thirty long years of agitation of the abolitionists and of the "emancipation proclamation"—issued as a war measure by President Lincoln—are no longer regarded as fundamental by the South. The beneficiaries of those amendments have failed in every instance to enjoy the benefits that were, presumably, intended to be conferred.

These laws—having passed both branches of the Federal legislature, having received the approval and signature of the Chief Executive of the nation, and having been ratified by a majority of the states composing the sisterhood of states—these laws are no longer binding upon the people of the South, who fought long and desperately to prevent the possibility of their enactment; and they no longer benefit, if they ever did, the people in whose interest they were incorporated in the Magna Charta of American liberty; while the Central authority which originated them, has, through the Supreme Court, declared nugatory, null and void all supplementary legislation based upon those laws, as far as the government of the United States is concerned! The whole question has been remanded to the legislatures of the several states! The Federal Union has left to the usurped governments of the South the adjudication of rights which the South fought four years in honorable warfare to make impossible, and which it has since the war exhausted the catalogue of infamy and lawlessness to make of no force or effect. The fate of the lamb has been left to the mercy of the lion and the tiger.

The "party of great moral ideas," having emancipated the slave, and enfranchised disorganized ignorance and poverty, finally finished its mission, relinquished its right to the respect and confidence of mankind when, in 1876, it abandoned all effort to enforce the provisions of the war amendments. That party stands today for organized corruption, while its opponent stands for organized brigandage. The black man, who was betrayed by his party and murdered by the opponents of his party, is absolved from all allegiance which gratitude may have dictated, and is to-day free to make conditions the best possible with any faction which will insure him in his right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The black men of the United States are, today, free to form whatever alliances wisdom dictates, to make sure their position in the social and civil system of which, in the wise providence of a just God, they are a factor, for better or for worse.