The Negro in the South / His Economic Progress in Relation to his Moral and Religious Development

by W. E. B. Du Bois; Booker T. Washington

The very forward forces of industry that fastened slavery on the South were weaving a social system which made the enslavement of laborers impossible and unprofitable. Consequently at the very time when the South ought to have been increasing in intelligence, law and order, the use of machinery, industrial concentration, and the intensive culture of land with the rest of the world, she lost a half century in a development backward toward a dispersing of population, extensive rather than intensive land culture, increased and compulsory ignorance of the laboring class, and the rearing of a complete system of caste and aristocracy (see Note 2).

Evils there were to be sure in the new factory system of Europe and the North, evils which southern leaders did not fail to note and gloat over, but they were evils of another and newer industrial era, which did not stop progress, but gave it added incentive.

The industrial back-set of the South meant of course but one thing: the discovery of the paradox of slavery, the turning from the mistake, and the adoption of remedial measures which should usher into the South the same industrial revolution in methods of work which Europe saw begin a century ago. This is exactly what has happened, and to-day the Industrial Revolution is beginning south of Mason and Dixon's line. The forecast of change was apparent by 1850. Slavery still paid then—was still an economic success, but only under conditions which became more and more impossible of realization because of the factory system and the new industrial conditions in the rest of the world (see Note 3).

It was, in other words, an attempt at an industrial system with the lowest wages, the most oppressive labor laws, and the best natural advantages. Such a system at such a time carried its own sentence of death: fertile land was becoming scarce in the forties, the horrors of the slave trade had shocked even the eighteenth century, and southern labor laws which made knowledge a crime and migration of laborers a capital offense, simply could not be enforced. It was in vain that the solidly united capitalistic classes of the South threw themselves bodily into the fray—raped Mexico, filibustered in Cuba and Central America, encouraged slave-smuggling (see Note 4), and bullied the hesitating North; their economic doom was written even if militant Abolitionism had not appeared.

The economic student could have foretold and did foretell easily in the forties and fifties that slavery in the South was doomed (see Note 5): even if all available territory had been thrown wide to the slave system, slavery could not possibly have stayed in Kansas and Utah, in New Mexico or in Arizona; it could have stayed only temporarily in Missouri and in Texas. It had already reached its territorial limit, it was bound to have evolved something different. It will always be an interesting speculation as to how soon this economic necessity would have been recognized; whether the South would have had the acumen eventually to see the end, and what sort of gradual change could have come about, had it not been for the political crisis precipitated in 1861.

Then came the war—that disgraceful episode of civil strife when, leaving the arguments of men, the nation appealed to the last resort of dogs, murdering and ravishing each other for four long shameful years (see Note 6).

When this nightmare had passed there came, after the resulting period of disorder, a new régime, a new problem of labor, a new industrial order. Not only that, but gradually in the decade 1870-1880 there were added to the South four new economic activities: first, the iron industry; second, the manufacture of cotton cloth; third, the transportation of these goods to, from, and through the South; and fourth, the general exchange of goods in this growing Southern industrial population—in other words, the Industrial Revolution was beginning in the South. So that the South of the 80's was a different South from the South of the 60's, not simply by reason of emancipation but by reason of new economic possibilities.

However, this change could not go on unhindered by the mistakes of the past. With all that was new in the South, there was also much that was old, and of these old things the most important were the Ideals which slavery handed down—ideals of government, of labor, of caste.

Consequently when the South tried to use its new freed labor on its new industrial possibilities, it went to the problem full of the ideals of slavery, and it made four separate attempts. In the first place it was perfectly natural for a land which had said for generations that free Negro labor was an impossibility, and free Negro citizens unthinkable, to cherish a very distinct idea that the way to get along with the emancipated Negro was to make him a slave in fact if not in name. The idea that was back of the first apprentice laws and the various labor codes passed directly after Lee's surrender was that the labor of the blacks belonged to the former white owners by right and could be directed only by force under a nominal wage system. These labor codes therefore attempted to reëstablish slavery without a slave trade (see Note 7).

These ill-advised attempts were frustrated by the Fifteenth Amendment which made the freedmen voters. The Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery—it directed its abolition and the answer to it was the labor codes. The Fourteenth Amendment gave the freedmen civil rights and put a premium on granting them political rights, but the premium was not accepted and the civil rights remained unenforced. The Fifteenth Amendment went to the root of the matter by putting local political power into the hands of the freedmen and their friends and this made slavery and the slave system impossible.