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

What the nation had before it then was not the nice academic question as to whether it would be better to have as voters men of intelligence or men of ignorance, whether it would be better to throw into the electorate of a great modern country a mass of slaves or a mass of college graduates—no such question came before the country; it was, as we are fond of saying, a situation and not a theory that confronted the country and that situation was this: here in the South we had attempted to abolish slavery by act of legislature—it was not abolished. The people who hitherto held power did not believe in its real abolishment; a great and growing economic revolution fronted them, cotton was still king. They were about to solve that problem—to meet the Revolution—according to their former labor ideals.

One could not expect any other outcome. One could not in justice ask them voluntarily to accept free black labor; the only possible way to insure the solving of that economic problem with labor really free was to put in the South a political power which should make slavery in fact or inference forever impossible. This truth the great Thaddeus Stephens saw, and with a statesmanship far greater than Lincoln's he forced Negro suffrage on the South.

Although the new voters thus introduced in the South were crude and ignorant, and in many ways ill-fitted to rule, nevertheless in the fundamental postulates of American freedom and democracy they were sane and sound. Some of them were silly, some were ignorant, and some were venal, but they were not as silly as those who had fostered slavery in the South, nor as ignorant as those who were determined to perpetuate it, and the black voters of South Carolina never stole half as much as the white voters of Pennsylvania are stealing to-day.

The eternal monument to these maligned victims of a nation's wrong is the fact that they began the abolition of slavery in fact and not merely attack it in theory, they established free schools, and they passed laws on all subjects under which the white South is still content to live (see Note 8). If these men had been protected in their legal rights by the strong arm of the government, they would have been able to protect themselves in a generation or so. They would have increased in intelligence, responsibility, and power, and this the South was determined to prevent. The North wavered; having put its hand to the plow it looked back, and gradually allowed the black peasantry of the South to be almost completely disfranchised. What happened?

The time had passed for a reëstablishment of slavery, but serfdom and peonage were still possible and probable. When you have the leading classes of a country with the ideal of slavery in their minds and the laboring classes ignorant and without political power, there is but one system that can ensue and that is serfdom, and through serfdom was the second way in which the South strove to meet its great post-bellum economic problem.

Given these premises the economic answer of the South was, from a business standpoint, perfectly sound. The men who, starting poor after a miserable war, went into the development of the South, went in to make money—to use the great American thesis, they were "not in business for their health." They were going to grant to the laborer just as little as they must; the laborer was unused to a system of free labor, he was not a steady workman, he was not a skilled workman, he had been for two or three hundred years driven to his work, he took no pride in his work—how could he take pride in that which hitherto had been the badge of his shame?

Now it was not considered the business of the new Southern business man to develop and train the working man. It was his business, as I have said, from the American point of view, to make money. And the consequence was that he evolved a peculiarly ingenious system of land serfdom, which bears many likenesses to the serfdom that replaced slavery in Europe. The land belonged to the landlord—it was rented out to the serf; the serf was nominally free, but as a matter of fact he was not free at all; he was held to his labor: he rose with the morning work bell of slavery days, he was driven to his labor by mounted riders, he was whipped for delinquencies, he received no stipulated return, but on the contrary the owner of the land made the contract, kept the accounts, and gave him enough once or twice a year to make him not too dissatisfied.

After a time this changed somewhat; instead of the land owner himself undertaking the advancing of supplies, a third party, the merchant with capital, came in. In order to enforce such a system it needed to be backed by a peculiar law system—therefore the business men went into politics in the South with the same result as when business men go into politics in the North. Things were done quickly and quietly; they were done not for the good of people who had no political voice, but for the good of those who wielded the political power, i.e., the business men and land owners. The laws were made to favor the landlord and the merchant and to make it easy to exploit the tenant and laborer.

This system, which still is the rule of agricultural labor in the black belt of the South, is not a system of free labor; it is simply a form of peonage. The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions. Judge and jury are in honor bound to hold him down; if by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob. The power of the individual white patron to protect colored men is still great and is often exercised, but this is but another argument against the system: it is undemocratic and un-American, and stamps on the serf system its most damning criticism.

Moreover, this second attempt to meet the economic revolution of the South is failing, and its failure is shown by the scarcity of farm labor, the migration of Negroes, and the increase of crime and lawlessness. Serfdom like slavery demands ignorance and strict laws. The decade of Negro voting and Northern benevolence had however given the Negro schools and aspiration.