This lies at the bottom of the whole difficulty. This refuses to see his good qualities, denies his capacity for improvement, shuts to him the doors of knowledge, cheats him at the polls, wrongs him in the courts, and consigns him perpetually to the position of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, thus enstamping the race distinction broad and permanent, and awakening in his heart either utter discouragement or implacable hatred.
In these three facts—the withholding of the negro’s equal rights, his ignorance and vice, and this caste prejudice—are the elements of a race warfare; they foreshadow another “Impending Crisis”—the next “Irrepressible Conflict.” This becomes the more obvious, because the negro, having been recognized as a man before the law, there is no alternative but to withdraw the recognition or to make it real. There is no middle ground—he must be a slave or a freeman; the equal of his white peers. The “Impending Crisis” is the more imminent from the growth of the blacks in number. In spite of all denials, the time is hastening on when the blacks in the Southern States will outnumber the whites; and when they feel their strength in brawn and muscle—and when especially there arise among them men of education and talent, with ambition aroused and with passion stimulated by a sense of injustice—then will the “Irrepressible Conflict” become as certain as, and, we fear, more implacable than, the last great struggle.
But there is a higher stand-point from which to view this great question—the providential. When the negro ceased to be a slave he became invested with a new significance. Then for the first time began to be seen the meaning of his presence in America—the reason why the black man from Africa—the most degraded part of the world—was selected by Divine Providence as one of the Three Brothers to settle this continent. He was the one by whom God could test the nation and call upon it to exemplify before the world the Brotherhood of Man. The full test could only be made when the highest should recognize the lowest.
The nation cannot shirk this test. Justice to the negro demands it; God, who made of one blood all nations, demands it; Christ, who died for all men, demands it; he cares for the poor and repudiates caste; he was born in poverty and toiled for his living; his mission was announced and attested by miracles of help for the needy and the preaching of the gospel to the poor; he touched the leper when he healed him; he ate with publicans and sinners; in his church there is neither bond nor free, but all are one in him; and in the final judgment his award will depend upon how he himself was treated in the person of one of the least of his brethren. His voice must be heard. To all that call him Lord, and mean to obey his word and follow his example, this whole question must be lifted out of the realm of prejudice into the higher plane of Christian duty, and when placed there, who can doubt the issue? The Brotherhood of Man must be recognized and exemplified.
But the question remains, How shall this next great step in human progress be taken? The question will be settled and the step will be taken in righteousness, for no question is ever settled till it is settled right. As we have seen before, the issue between the American Colonies and the British Government, and that between the North and the South in regard to slavery, might both have been settled peacefully, if righteously; and so the question now before the nation may be settled peacefully, if righteously, by giving the negro his guaranteed rights, lifting him out of his ignorance and vice, and especially by taking him from under the ban of caste prejudice. But it is to be feared that these concessions will not be made, and then the question will be settled by a bloody war of races, involving the North as well as the South.
But this conclusion is too startling to contemplate without instinctively turning to the possibility of a peaceful solution of the problem. Let me suggest:
1. The Northern Brother has a great responsibility in this matter. He, too, enslaved the Black Brother for a time, and gave his consent to the virtual recognition of slavery in the Constitution; and when at length he saw his error and demanded the emancipation of the slave, the South resisted him to the utmost in the terrible war; and when the slave was freed and the North insisted on making him a citizen and on giving him the ballot, the Southern Brother, though he could no longer resist, yet entered his most earnest protest. He said: “I know these negroes; they are not fit for the ballot and will ruin the country if they have it.” But the Northern Brother had the power, and like General Jackson he “took the responsibility.” He cannot now shrink from that responsibility. He cannot, with any better success than Pilate, wash his hands and thus be made guiltless. He brought his innocent Brother into his present trouble and it will be both cowardly and criminal to leave him to his fate. No! if this great problem is ever solved peacefully and righteously, the North must awake fully to its special duty, and perform it at whatever cost of money and self-sacrifice.
2. The Southern Brother has a still deeper interest in this matter. In the first place he owes something to the Black Brother, who always helped and never hindered him, who tilled his land and made his wealth, who, during the war, cared for the plantation and protected the family—though he knew that the master fought to rivet his fetters all the tighter. Then again, the Southern Brother has and must have the Black Brother with him, near him, his immediate neighbor, and whatever discomforts or dangers may arise, he must be the first, and for a time, the only one to suffer. He cannot remand the negro back to slavery, nor even to serfdom—the nineteenth century cannot tolerate the one more than the other—even in Russia, much less in America. Nor can the present anomalous position of the negro long be maintained. It is full of vexations and of dangers; the negro will soon be strong enough to resist it, and the North, as in the contest about slavery, must take sides with the Black man.
Why should the South fight against the inevitable? In a recent number of the Century, a Confederate officer, Col. Alexander, in giving a racy sketch of Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg, incidentally refers, in a humorous way, to one of their chaplains who was accustomed to pray that “Providence would consent at last to come down and take a proper view of the situation.” The Colonel, at one auspicious juncture in the preliminary fight, was inclined to believe that the prayer of the good chaplain was about to be answered. But when all was over and the battle was lost, he dryly admits that “Providence had evidently not yet taken a proper view of the situation.” The same admission was equally pertinent at Appomattox—and has been ever since—indeed, is it not time for the South to see that the trouble is not with Providence but with itself—that it should “consent at last to take a proper view of the situation”? Providence did not take its view during the war to sustain slavery, and will not in the struggle to maintain caste, which is now the great issue, as slavery then was. That issue the South is pushing to the front with new energy. For example, the great churches, Methodist and Presbyterian, that had been rent asunder by the anti-slavery agitation before the war, had seemed for a time since to be happily coming together once more, but recently that fair prospect has become darkened, and mainly by the strong exactions in regard to caste-separation demanded by the South. Then as to schools, the South has always been understood to be opposed to the co-education of the races, but the recent demonstrations in one of the States are almost amusingly violent. We stolid Northern people are tempted to smile at the fear that the white young gentlemen and ladies of the South are so eager to marry negroes that they dare not be trusted in the same school together, and that such stringent measures as fines, imprisonment and the chain-gang are deemed necessary to prevent it! But we are glad to find that these severe measures were planned by over-zealous young politicians, and that “the sober second thought of the people” has substituted less barbarous methods, and that other Southern States do not follow the bad example.