Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches

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But what of the other danger? Can we risk that to avoid the first? I am sure we cannot. The very worst thing that could happen to the South is to have her white vote divided into factions, and each faction bidding for the negro who holds the balance of power. What is this negro vote? In every southern State it is considerable, and I fear it is increasing. It is alien, being separated by racial differences that are deep and permanent. It is ignorant—easily deluded or betrayed. It is impulsive—lashed by a word into violence. It is purchasable, having the incentive of poverty and cupidity, and the restraint of neither pride nor conviction. It can never be merged through logical or orderly currents into either of two parties, if two should present themselves. We cannot be rid of it. There it is, a vast mass of impulsive, ignorant and purchasable votes. With no factions between which to swing it has no play or dislocation; but thrown from one faction to another it is the loosed cannon on the storm-tossed ship. There is no community that would deliberately tempt this danger; no social or political fabric that could stand its strain. The Tweed ring, backed by a similar and less irresponsible following than a shrewd clique could rally and control in every southern State, and daring less of plunder and insolence than that following would sanction or support, blotted out party lines in New York, and made its intelligence and integrity as solid as the South ever was. Party lines were promptly recast because New York had to deal with the vicious, who once punished may be trusted to sulk in quiet while their wounds heal. We deal with the ignorant, that scourged from power to-day, may be deluded to-morrow into assaulting the very position from which they have been lashed. Never did robbers find followers more to their mind than the emancipated slaves of reconstruction days. Ignorant and confiding, they could be committed to any excess, led to any outrage. Deep as was the degradation to which these sovereign States were carried, and heavy as is the burden they left on this impoverished people, it was only when the white race, rallying from the graves of its dead and the ashes of its homes, closed its decimated ranks, and fronting federal bayonets, and defying federal power, stood like a stone wall before the uttermost temples of its liberty and credit, and the hideous drama closed, that the miserable assault was checked.

Shall those ranks be broken while the danger still threatens?

Let the whites divide, what happens? Here is this dangerous and alien influence that holds the balance of power. It cannot be won by argument, for it is without information, understanding or traditions—hence without convictions. It must be bought by race privileges granted as such, or by money paid outright. Let us follow this in its twofold aspect. One faction gives the negro certain privileges and wins. The other offers more. The first bids under, and so the sickening work goes on until the barriers that now protect the social integrity and peace of both races are swept away. The negro gains nothing, for he secures these spoils and privileges not by deserving them, or qualifying himself for them, but as the plunder of an irritating struggle in which he loses that largeness of sympathy and tolerance that is at last essential to his well-being and advancement. The other aspect is as bad. One side puts up five thousand dollars for the purchase of the negro vote and wins. The other, declining at first to corrupt the suffrage, but realizing at last that the administration on which his life and property depends is at stake, doubles this, and so the debauching deepens until at last such enormous sums are spent that they must be recouped from the public treasuries. Good men disgusted go to the rear. The shrewd and unscrupulous are put to the front, and the negro, carrying with him the balance of power, falls at last into the grasp of the faction which is most cunning and conscienceless. National parties, finding here their cheapest market and widest field, will pour millions into the South, adding to the corruption funds of municipal and State factions until the ballot-box will be hopelessly debauched, all the approaches thereto corrupt, and all the results therefrom tainted.

I understand perfectly that this is not the largest view of this question to take. The larger interests of this section and of the Union do not rest here. I deplore this fact. I would that the South, fettered by no circumstances and embarrassed by no problem, could take her place by the side of her sister States, making alliance as her interest or patriotism suggested.

Let me say here that I yield to no man in my love for this Union. I was taught from my cradle to love it, and my father, loving it to the last, nevertheless gave his life for Georgia when she asked it at his hands. Loving the Union as he did, yet would I do unto Georgia even as he did. I said once in New York, and I repeat it here, honoring his memory as I do nothing on this earth, I still thank God that the American conflict was adjudged by higher wisdom than his or mine, that the honest purposes of the South were crossed, her brave armies beaten, and the American Union saved from the storm of war. I love this Union because I am an American citizen. I love it because it stands in the light while other nations are groping in the dark. I love it because here, in this republic of a homogeneous people, must be worked out the great problems that perplex the world and established the axioms that must uplift and regenerate humanity. I love it because it is my country, and my State stood by when its flag was once unfurled, and uplifted her stainless sword, and pledged “her life, her property and her sacred honor,” and when the last star glittered from the silken folds, and with her precious blood wrote her loyalty in its crimson bars. I love it, because I know that its flag, fluttering from the misty heights of the future, followed by a devoted people once estranged and thereby closer bound, shall blaze out the way, and make clear the path up which all the nations of the earth shall come in God’s appointed time.

I know the ideal status is that every State should vote without regard to sectional lines. The reconciliation of the people will never be complete until Iowa and Georgia, Texas and Massachusetts may stand side by side without surprise. I would to God that status could be reached! If any man can define a path on which the whites of the South, though divided, can walk in honor and peace, I shall take that path, though I walk down it alone—for at the end of that path, and nowhere else, lies the full emancipation of my section and the full restoration of this Union.

But it cannot be. When the negro was enfranchised, the South was condemned to solidity as surely as self-preservation is the first law of nature. A State here or there may drift away, but it will come back assuredly—and come through such travail, and bearing such burden, as neither war nor pestilence can bring. This problem is not of our seeking. It was thrust upon us not in the orderly unfolding of a preordained plan, but in hot impulse and passion, against the judgment of the world and the lessons of history, and to the peril of popular government, which rests at last on a pure and unsullied suffrage as a building rests on its cornerstone. If it be urged that it was the inexorable result of our course in 1860, we reply that we took that course in deliberation, maintained it in sincerity, sealed it with the blood of our best and bravest—and we accept without complaint, and abide in dignity, its direct and ultimate results, and shall hold it to be, in spite of defeat, forever honorable and sacred. This much I add. No king that ever sat on a throne, though backed by autocratic power, would have dared to subject his kingdom to the strain, and his people to the burden that the North put on the prostrate, impoverished, and helpless South when it enfranchised the body of our late slaves. We would not undo this if we could. We know that this step, though taken in haste, shall never be retraced. Posterity will judge of the wisdom and patriotism in which it was ordered, and the order and equity in which it was worked out.

To that judgment we appeal with confidence. From that judgment Mr. Blaine has already appealed by shrewdly urging in his written history, that the North did not intend to enfranchise the negro, but was forced to do it by the stubborn attitude of the South. Be that as it may, it is our problem now, and with resolute hands and unfailing hearts we must carry it to the end. It dominates, and will dominate, all other issues with us. Political spoils are not to be considered. The administration of our affairs is secondary, and patronage is less. Economic issues are as naught, and even great moral reforms must wait on the settlement of this question. To quarrel over other issues while this is impending is to imitate the mother quail that thrums the leaves afar from her nest, or recall the finesse of the Spartan boy who smiled in his mother’s face while he hid the fox that was gnawing at his vitals.

What then is the duty of the South? Simply this. To maintain the political as well as the social integrity of her white race, and to appeal to the world for patience and justice. Let us show that it is not sectional prejudice, but a sectional problem that keeps us compacted; that it is not the hope of dominion or power, but an abiding necessity—not spoils or patronage, but plain self-preservation that holds the white race together in the South. Let us make this so plain that a community anywhere, searching its own heart, would say: “The necessity that binds our brothers in the South would bind us as closely were the necessity here.” Let us invite immigrants and meet them with such cordial welcome that they will abide with us in brotherhood, and so enlarge the body of intelligence and integrity, that divided it may carry the burden of ignorance without danger. Let us be loyal to the Union, and not only loyal but loving. Let the republic know that in peace it hath nowhere better citizens, nor in war braver soldiers, than in these States. Though set apart by this problem which God permits to rest upon us, and which therefore is right, let us garner our sheaves gladly into the harvest of the Union, and find joy in our work and progress, because it makes broader the glory and deeper the majesty of this republic that is cemented with our blood. Let us love the flag that waved over Marion and Jasper, that waves over us, and which when we are gathered to our fathers shall be a guarantee of liberty and prosperity to our children, and our children’s children, and know that what we do in honor shall deepen, and what we do in dishonor shall dim, the luster of its fixed and glittering stars.

As for the negro, let us impress upon him what he already knows, that his best friends are the people among whom he lives, whose interests are one with his, and whose prosperity depends on his perfect contentment. Let us give him his uttermost rights, and measure out justice to him in that fullness the strong should always give to the weak. Let us educate him that he may be a better, a broader, and more enlightened man. Let us lead him in steadfast ways of citizenship, that he may not longer be the sport of the thoughtless, and the prey of the unscrupulous. Let us inspire him to follow the example of the worthy and upright of his race, who may be found in every community, and who increase steadily in numbers and influence. Let us strike hands with him as friends—and as in slavery we led him to heights which his race in Africa had never reached, so in freedom let us lead him to a prosperity of which his friends in the North have not dreamed. Let us make him know that he, depending more than any other on the protection and bounty of government, shall find in alliance with the best elements of the whites the pledge of safe and impartial administration. And let us remember this—that whatever wrong we put on him shall return to punish us. Whatever we take from him in violence, that is unworthy and shall not endure. What we steal from him in fraud, that is worse. But what we win from him in sympathy and affection, what we gain in his confiding alliance and confirm in his awakening judgment, that is precious and shall endure—and out of it shall come healing and peace.