The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment. And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college, regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The “highest citizen” may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly higher.
Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where does he come in?
Where the Negro Comes In
Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less literally true that up to the present time the Negro’s real influence in politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an issue, but not an actor in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites. They have talked about the Negro, but they have not let him talk. Even in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.
In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction, practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development, caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.
Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the “Solid South” was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested, to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political status of the Negro by law.
Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have never believed that the Negro has or should have any political rights. The South as a whole does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few Negroes vote everywhere, “but not enough,” as a Southerner said to me, “to do any hurt.”
The South, then, has been placed in the position of providing by law for something that it did not really believe in.