Yet at the bottom of this foaming cup of joy remain the black dregs. I would not invidiously compare the unfortunate black to the 'dregs of the populace,' since labor in any form must not be lightly spoken of. But it would be the weakest of euphuisms to affect ignorance of the social position which he occupies, and which, not to increase the misery of his position, is indubitably 'at the bottom of the ladder.' But that which is at the bottom of the ladder may seriously affect its position and standing. There is a fearful and thrilling illustration of this, to be found in a popular cut graphically described in these words:
A negro on the top of a high ladder, white-washing, a hog lifting it up from beneath. 'G'way dar,—you'm makin' mischief.'
President Lincoln is understood to favor emigration. This looks well. Carry the blacks away to Liberia. Unfortunately I am informed that eight and a half Great Easterns, each making one trip per month, could only export the annual increase of our Southern slaves. This speaks in thunder tones, even to the welkin, and provokes a scream from the eagle. It is impossible.
But what shall we do with our blacks, since it is really impossible, then, to export the dark, industrial, productive, proletarian, operative, laboring element from our midst?
I suggest as a remedy that they continue in our midst, with this amendment, that they be concentrated in that same 'midst' and the 'midst' be removed a little to one side. In other words, let us centre them all in one State, that State to be South Carolina.
The justice of this arrangement must be apparent to every one. It is evident that if the present occupation by our troops continue much longer, there will be no white men left in South Carolina, neither is it likely that they will ever return. Terror and pride combined must ever keep the native whites from repopulating that region. And, as South Carolina was especially the State which brought about this war, for the express purpose of making the black man the basis of its society, there would be a wonderful and fearful propriety in carrying out that theory, or 'sociology,' even to perfection; making the negro not only the basis of society, but all society there whatever,—top, bottom, and sides.
It is true that this absolute perfection of their theory was never contemplated even by the celebrated Hammond. But truth compels the deduction, and reason admits it. Verus in uno, verus in omnibus.
I trust that the reader will not be startled, nor accuse the writer of these lines of lacking patriotism, when he avows that since the Southern social philosophers have boldly started a tremendous and original theory, he should be very sorry not to see it fairly tested, tried, and worked out. Every great doctrine or idea, be it for good or evil, must and will work itself out, that of mudsill-ism and negro labor among the rest. Only I claim that it should be complete in its elements, eliminated of what the African, with a fine intuition of the truth, ingenuously terms 'de wite trash,'—yes, in the Southern social scheme the whites are trash,—and they only find their place as a sort of useless ornament, non-productive and inoperative, even according to their own ideas. Therefore the 'wite trash' must be eliminated.
There is yet another and a very beautiful argument to be adduced in favor of colonizing South Carolina with 'contrabands.' It must be apparent to the blindest eye that the negro inclines idiosyncratically to Southern institutions far more zealously than even Mr. Jefferson Davis can be presumed to do. He is the most driving of drivers, the severest of overseers, the most aristocratic of aristocrats, the most Southern of Southerners. The planter despises poverty, but what is his contempt of a poor white man compared to that of his slave for such wretchedness? What indeed is the negro but an intensified Creole? His very color reflects that of his swarthy lord. The planter is tanned, but the negro is 'black and tanned,'—tanned always on the face, and not unfrequently on the back!
The black, left to his own instincts in Africa, develops the Southern sociology to a degree which casts entirely into pitiable pettiness the puling despotism of the calaboose and slave market. Witness Dahomey, where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are coördinated in one perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who is de jure divino husband by a sublime fiction of law to every woman on the sacred soil of Africa, and master of the lives of all of both sexes. What to this stupendous and perfect theory is the impotent and imperfect scheme so lamely announced by the sociologists of the C. S. A.?