“The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting population.”
Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the Negro vote of Cleveland:
“I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in the same walks of life.”
Negro a National Problem
I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional but a national problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human, not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters, confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the South. Nothing short of the patient coöperation of the entire country, North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.
In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.
Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic, Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in it.
The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle. Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.
What Slavery Did
This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery, but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called “poor whites,” whom even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning. If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery and liberated both Negro and poor white men.