What is the attitude of the North on this issue? Two propositions appear to be universally declared by the Republicans. First, that the negro vote of the South is suppressed by violence, or miscounted by fraud. Second, that it shall be freely cast and fairly counted. While Republicans agree on these declarations, there are those who hold them sincerely, but would be glad to see the first disapproved, and the second thereby wiped out—and those who hold them in malignity, and who will maintain the first that they may justify the storm that lies hid in the second.
Let us send to-day a few words to the fair-minded Republicans of the North. Here is a fundamental assertion—the negroes of the South can never be kept in antagonism with their white neighbors—for the intimacy and friendliness of the relation forbids. This friendliness, the most important factor of the problem—the saving factor now as always—the North has never, and it appears will never, take account of. It explains that otherwise inexplicable thing—the fidelity and loyalty of the negro during the war to the women and children left in his care. Had Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrayed the habit rather than the exception of slavery, the return of the Confederate armies could not have stayed the horrors of arson and murder their departure would have invited. Instead of that, witness the miracle of the slave in loyalty closing the fetters about his own limbs—maintaining the families of those who fought against his freedom—and at night on the far-off battle-field searching among the carnage for his young master, that he might lift the dying head to his humble breast and with rough hands wipe the blood away, and bend his tender ear to catch the last words for the old ones at home, wrestling meanwhile in agony and love, that in vicarious sacrifice he would have laid down his life in his master’s stead. This friendliness, thank God, has survived the lapse of years, the interruption of factions, and the violence of campaigns, in which the bayonet fortified, and the drum-beat inspired. Though unsuspected in slavery, it explains the miracle of ’64—though not yet confessed, it must explain the miracle of 1888.
Can a Northern man dealing with casual servants, querulous, sensitive, and lodged for a day in a sphere they resent, understand the close relations of the races of the South? Can he comprehend the open-hearted, sympathetic negro, contented in his place, full of gossip and comradeship, the companion of the hunt, the frolic, the furrow, and the home, standing in kindly dependence that is the habit of his blood, and lifting not his eyes beyond the narrow horizon that shuts him in with his neighbors? This relation may be interrupted, but permanent estrangement can never come between these two races. It is upon this that the South depends. By fair dealing and by sympathy to deepen this friendship and add thereto the moral effect of the better elements compacted, with the wealth and intelligence and influence lodged therein—it is this upon which the South has relied for years, and upon which she will rest in future.
Against this no outside power can prevail. That there has been violence is admitted. There has also been brutality in the North. But I do not believe there was a negro voter in the South kept away from the polls by fear of violence in the late election. I believe there were fewer votes miscounted in the South than in the North. Even in those localities where violence once occurred, wiser counsels have prevailed, and reliance is placed on those higher and legitimate and inexorable methods by which the superior race always dominates, and by which intelligence and integrity always resist the domination of ignorance and corruption. If the honest Republicans of the North permit a scheme of federal supervision, based on the assumption of intimidated voters and a false count, they will blunder from the start, for, beginning in error, they will end in worse. This whole matter should be left now with the people, with whom it must be left at last—that people most interested in its honorable settlement. External pressure but irritates and delays. The South has voluntarily laid down the certainty of power which dividing her States would bring, that she might solve this problem in the deliberation and the calmness it demands. She turns away from spoils, knowing that to struggle for them would bring irritation to endanger greater things. She postpones reforms and surrenders economic convictions, that unembarrassed she may deal with this great issue. And she pledges her sacred honor—by all that she has won, and all that she has suffered—that she will settle this problem in such full and exact justice as the finite mind can measure, or finite hands administer. On this pledge she asks the patience and waiting judgment of the world, and especially of the people—her brothers and her kindred—that in passion forced this problem into the keeping of her helpless hands.
Shall she have it?
Let us see. Was there a pistol shot through the South on election day? Was there a riot? Was there anything to equal the disturbance and arrests in President Harrison’s own city? If so, diligent search has not found it. Where then was the vote suppressed through violence? In the 12,000 election precincts of the South, where was a ballot-box rifled, or a registry list altered? Thirteen Republican congressmen were elected, many of them by majorities so slender that the vote of a single precinct would have changed the result. In West Virginia, with its wild and lawless districts, the governorship hangs on less than three hundred votes, and this very day the governor of Tennessee and his cabinet are passing on a legal question in the casting of twenty-three votes that elects or defeats a congressman. In West Virginia and in Tennessee the law will be applied as impartially and the official vote held as sacred as in New York or Ohio. Where, then, is the wholesale fraud of which complaint is made?
In the face of this showing, let me quote from an editorial in the Chicago Tribune, one of the most powerful and a usually conservative journal, charging that the negro vote is suppressed and miscounted. It says:
“The trouble is, the blacks will not fight for themselves. White men, or Indians, situated as the negroes, would have made the rivers of the South run red with blood before they would submit to the usurpations and wrongs with which the black passively endure. Oppressed by generations of slavery, the negroes are non-combatants. They will not shoot and burn for their rights.”
Mark the unspeakable infamy of this suggestion. The “trouble” is that the negroes will not rise and shoot and burn. Not the “mercy” is that they do not—but the “mercy” is that they will not massacre and begin the strife that would repeat the horrors of Hayti in the various States of this Republic. Burn and shoot for what? That they may vote in Georgia, where in front of me in the line stood a negro, whose place was as sacred as mine, and whose vote as safely counted? That they may vote in the thirteen districts in which they have elected their congressmen?—in the 320 counties in which they have elected their representatives, and in old Virginia, where they came within 1400 votes of carrying the State?
As the 60,000 Virginia negroes who did vote did so in admitted peace and safety, where was the violence that prevented the needed 1400 from leaving their fields, coming to the ballot-box, and giving the State to the Republicans? And yet slavery itself, in which the selling of a child from its mother’s arms and a wife from her husband was permitted, never brought into reputable print so villainous a suggestion as this, leveled by a knave at a political condition which he views from afar, and which it is proved does not exist. To pass by the man who wrote these words, how shall we judge the temper of a community in which they are applauded? Are these men blood of our blood that they permit such things to go unchallenged? Better that they had refused us parole at Appomattox and had confiscated the ruins of our homes, than twenty years later to bring us under the dominion of such passion as this. Hear another witness, General Sherman, not in hot speech but in cold print: