A new generation of men has come upon the stage of action in the South. They know little or nothing of the regulations or the horrors of the slave regime. They know they are freemen; they know they are cruelly and unjustly defrauded; and they question the right of their equals to oppose and defraud them. A large number of these people have enjoyed the advantage of common school education, and not a few of academic and collegiate education, and a large number have "put money in their purse." The entire race has so changed that they are almost a different people from what they were when the exigencies of war made their manumission imperative. Yet there has been but little change in the attitude of the white men towards this people. They still strenuously deny their right to participate in the administration of justice or to share equally in the blessings of that justice.

There must be a change of policy. The progress of the black man demands it; the interest of the white man compels it. The South cannot hope to share in the industrious emigration constantly flowing into our ports as long as it is scattered over the world that mob law and race distractions constantly interrupt the industry of the people, and put life and property in jeopardy of eminent disturbance; and she cannot hope to encourage the investment of large capital in the development of her industries or the extension of her national system. Capital is timid. It will only seek investment where it is sure of being let alone. Again, while the present state continues, no Southern statesman, however capable he may be, can hope to enjoy the confidence of the country or attain to high official position. Thoughtful, sober people will not entrust power to men who sanction mob law, and who rise to high honor by conniving at or participating in assassination and murder. They have too much self-respect to do it.

Only a few weeks since, a narrow-minded senator from the State of Alabama, speaking upon the question of "National Aid to Education," said he would rather vote for an appropriation to place the Southern States in direct communication with the Congo than to vote money to educate the blacks. There is no ingrate more execrable than the one who lifts up his hand or his voice to wrong the man he has betrayed. This senator from Alabama does not represent the majority of the people of his state. Take away the shot gun and mob law and he would be compelled to crawl back into the obscurity out of which he was dragged by his accomplices in roguery.

The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any attempt to put him out. The expatriation of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 people to an alien country needs only to be suggested to create mirth and ridicule. The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the black men will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness. The talk about the black people being brought to this country to prepare themselves to evangelize Africa is so much religious nonsense boiled down to a sycophantic platitude. The Lord, who is eminently just, had no hand in their forcible coming here; it was preeminently the work of the devil. Africa will have to be evangelized from within, not from without. The Colonization society has spent mints of money and tons of human blood in the selfish attempt to plant an Anglo-African colony on the West Coast of Africa. The money has been thrown away and the human lives have been sacrificed in vain. The black people of this country are Americans, not Africans; and any wholesale expatriation of them is altogether out of the question.

The white men of the South should not deceive themselves: the blacks are with them to remain. Whether they like it or not, it is a fact that will not be rubbed out.

If this be true, what should be the policy of the whites towards the blacks? The question should need no answer at my hands. If it were not for the unexampled obtuseness of the editors, preachers and politicians of that section, I should close this chapter here.

The white men and women of the South should get down from the delectable mountain of delusive superiority which they have climbed; and, recognizing that "of one blood God made all the children of men," take hold of the missionary work God has placed under their nose.

Instead of railing at the black man, let them take hold of him in a Christian spirit and assist him in correcting those moral abscesses and that mental enervation which they did so awfully much to infuse into him; they should first take the elephant out of their own eyes before digging at the gnat in their neighbor's eyes. They should encourage him in his efforts at moral and religious improvement, not by standing off and clapping their hands, but by going into his churches and into his pulpits, showing him the "light and the way" not only by precept but example as well. Can't do it, do you say? Then take your religion and cast it to the dogs, for it is a living lie; it comes not from God but from Beelzebub the Prince of Darkness. A religion that divides Christians is unadulterated paganism; a minister that will not preach the Gospel to sinners, be they black or white, is a hypocrite, who "steals the livery of Heaven to serve the Devil in." They should make liberal provision for the schools set apart for the colored people, and they should visit these schools, not only to mark the progress made, and to encourage teacher and pupil, but to show to the young minds blossoming into maturity and usefulness that they are friends and deeply interested in the progress made. In public, they should seek first to inspire the confidence of colored men by just laws and friendly overtures and by encouraging the capable, honest and ambitious few by placing them in position of honor and trust. They should show to colored men that they accept the Constitution as amended, and are earnestly solicitous that they should prosper in the world, and become useful and respected citizens. You can't make a friend and partisan of a man by shooting him; you can't make a sober, industrious, honest man by robbing and outraging him. These tactics will not work to the uplifting of a people. "A soft answer turns away wrath." Even a dog caresses the hand that pats him on the head.

The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources; she must get off the "race line" hobby and pay more attention to the common man; she must wake up to the fact that—

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,

and that it is to her best interest to place all men upon the same footing before the law; mete out the same punishment to the white scamp that is inexorably meted out to the black scamp, for a scamp is a scamp any way you twist it; a social pest that should be put where he will be unable to harm any one. In an honest acceptance of the new conditions and responsibilities God has placed upon them, and in mutual forebearance, toleration and assistance, the South will find that panacea for which she has sought in vain down to this time.



CHAPTER XI

Land and Labor

There is more prose than poetry in the desperate conflict now waging in every part of the civilized world between labor and capital,—between the dog and his tail, again, for, when the question is reduced to a comprehensive statement of fact, it will be readily seen that capital is the offspring of labor, not labor the offspring of capital. Capital can produce nothing. Left to itself, it is as valueless as the countless millions of gold, silver, copper, lead and iron that lie buried in the unexplored womb of Nature. This storied wealth counts for nothing in its crude, undeveloped state. As it is to-day, so it was a thousand years ago. Years may add to the bulk, and, therefore, the richness of its value; but until man, by his labor of muscle and brain, has brought it forth, it has no value whatever. To have value, it must become an object of barter, of circulation, in short, of exchange. As its value depends upon its utility, so when it can no longer be used it again becomes a useless mass of perishable wealth. It is the product of labor, pure and simple. Speaking on "Management of the Banks" (footnote p. 223), in his work on Labor and Capital, Edward Kellogg says:—

All who become rich by speculations in bank, state and other stocks, gain their wealth at the expense of the producing classes; for no increased production is made by the changing market value of these stocks. It is clear, that when the rate of interest is increased, the gains of money-lenders are augmented, and the money gained will buy a greater quantity of property and labor. The increased gains of the lender must be paid by the borrowers, by the productions of their own or of others' labor.

So Adam Smith, speaking of "the Origin and Use of Money" (Wealth of Nations, p. 33), says:

In order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the divisions of labor, must naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry.

Labor is the one paramount force which develops the resources of the world. It produces all the wealth; it pays, in the last analysis, all the taxes—National, State and municipal; it produces the wealth which sustains all the institutions of learning, as well as ministers to the profligate luxuries of the idlers and sharpers who add nothing to the wealth of society, but on the contrary constantly take from it, and who have not inaptly been termed by Dr. Howard Crosby the "dangerous classes;" it makes the wealth which gives a few men millions of dollars as their share, either as rental or usurious interest upon capital invested in the production of wealth; and it creates the vast surplus which lies in the coffers of the Federal and State treasuries of our land.

The producing agency, without which there could be no wealth; without which the landlord could exact no rent and capital could draw no interest, the producing agency alone receives an inadequate proportion of the wealth it produces. The man who conducts any business requiring labor and capital not only exacts an unjust proportion of the laborer's hire, but takes more than he justly should as interest upon his capital and as reward for his own time and labor, often amounting to no trouble or labor, he delegating to other hands, such as foremen or overseers, the absolute control of his investment. Yet, the man who invests capital not only derives, in a majority of cases, a sufficient income to enable him to live in more than comfort but to have a healthy bank account; while the laborer, who alone makes capital draw interest by giving it employment in developing the resources of nature, derives only a bare subsistence, frequently not sufficient to meet the absolute necessaries of his daily life. His wife and children must be content with life simply—bare, cold life—often without any of the conveniences or the commonest luxuries which make existence anything more than the curse it is to a large majority of humankind. This is peculiarly true of the condition of the masses of the Old World, and is fast becoming true in our own young and vigorous country.

In every quarter of the globe the cry of depressed and defrauded labor is heard. The enormous drain upon the producing agents necessary to maintain in idleness and luxury the great capitalists of the world who accumulated their ill-gotten wealth by fraud, perjury and "conquest," so called, grinds the producing agent down to the lowest possible point at which he can live and still produce. The millionaires of the world, so called "aristocracies," and the taxes imposed by sovereign states to liquidate obligations more frequently contracted to enslave than to ameliorate the conditions of mankind, are a constant drain which comes ultimately out of the laboring classes in every case.

What are millionaires, any way, but the most dangerous enemies of society, always eating away its entrails, like the cultures that preyed upon the chained Prometheus? Take our own breed of these parasites; note how they grind down the stipend they are compelled to bestow upon the human tools they must use to still further swell their ungodly gains! Note how they take advantage of the public; how they extort, with Shylock avarice, every penny they possibly can from those who are compelled to use the appliances which wealth enables them to contrive for the public convenience and comfort; how they corrupt legislatures and dictate to the unscrupulous minions of the law. The Athenians were wise who enacted into law the principle that when a citizen became too powerful or rich to be controlled within proper bounds, the safety of society demanded that he should be exiled—sent where his power or riches could not be used to the detriment of his fellow-citizens. Should such a rule be applied to-day, society in every land could disgorge with much advantage the men who ride the people as the Old Man of the Sea rode Sindbad the luckless sailor. But our civilization is built upon a higher conception of individual right and immunity; there is now no limit to the right of one man to rob another of the produce of his labor or his natural and conferred rights. Not only may individuals rob and plunder their fellows with absolute impunity, but our laws have put breath into that soulless thing which has become notoriously infamous as a "corporation." Around this thing, this engine of extortion and oppression, our laws have placed bulwarks which the defrauded laborer, the widow and orphan, and even the sovereign public, cannot overleap. Here is where Monopoly first shows its cormorant head.

If millionaires are enemies of society, and I assume that they are—not because they have property, but because, as a rule, they have acquired it by unjust processes and use it tyrannically—what excuse have we for aristocracies, an idle class, a privileged class, who toil not, nor spin? What is a recognized aristocracy, such as England maintains? From what perennial fountain did it draw its nobility and wealth? Came they not through Norman conquest and robbery? Who pay the heavy taxes levied upon the people to support the privileged classes of England? The royal revenues and princely preserves, are they not supported out of the sweat of the poorer classes, upon whom all the burdens of society fall at last? And why should there be royal revenues and princely preserves? Do they add anything to the wealth of a nation or the happiness of a people? Let us see.

Brassey (Sir Thomas), in his book on Work and Wages, p. 71, says:

The Irish Poor Law Commissioners stated that the average produce of the soil in Ireland was not much above one half the average produce in England, whilst the number of laborers employed in agriculture was, in proportion to the quantity of land under cultivation more than double, viz.: as five to two. Thus ten laborers in Ireland raised only the same quantity of produce that four laborers raised in England, and this produce was generally of an inferior quality.

Why is it that ten men in Ireland produce no more than four men produce in England?

Henry George says (Social Problems, p. 150):

A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from which these government-aided emigrants come. What surprises an American at first, even in Connaught, is the apparent sparseness of population, and he wonders if this can indeed be that over-populated Ireland of which he has heard so much. There is plenty of good land, but on it are only fat beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you at first think that they must be washed and combed every morning. Once, this soil was tilled and was populous, but now you will find only traces of ruined hamlets, and here and there the miserable hut of a herd, who lives in a way that no Terra del Fuegan could envy. For the 'owners' of this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them having never seen their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so the men have been driven off. It is only when you reach the bog and the rocks in the mountains and by the sea shore, that you find a dense population. Here they are crowded together on land on which nature never intended men to live. It is too poor for grazing, so the people who have been driven from the better lands are allowed to live upon it—as long as they pay their rent. If it were not too pathetic, the patches they called fields would make you laugh. Originally the surface of the ground must have been about as susceptible of cultivation as the surface of Broadway. But at the cost of enormous labor the small stones have been picked off and piled up, though the great boulders remain, so that it is impossible to use a plow; and the surface of the bog has been cut away and manured by seaweed, brought in from the shore on the backs of men and women, till it can be made to grow something.

Sir Thomas Brassey writes from a capitalist's standpoint, while Mr. George writes from the standpoint of a philosopher who not only sees gross social wrongs but boldly applies the remedy. But let us see if the same fester which irritates the body of Irish society has not also a parasitical existence in our own land, where society is yet in its infancy, where the people are supposed to enjoy all the advantages of the competitive system, and where all are, measurably, free to take and to use the opportunities offered the pioneers, or him who gets first his grip upon the three natural elements absolutely essential to man's existence, viz.: air, water, and land.

Wm. Goodwin Moody says (Land and Labor in the United States, p. 77):

Instead of being able to boast, as could our fathers, that every man who tilled the soil was lord of the manor he occupied, owning no master, the last census report made a return of 1,024,701 tenant farms in our country in 1880.

A comparison of this showing with the land-holdings of Great Britain and Ireland will help to a better understanding of what these things import. The very latest statistics give the total number of holdings in England and Wales at 414,804; in Ireland, at 574,222; in Scotland, at 80,101; total, 1,069,127. Showing that in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, counting all the holdings as tenant occupations, which they are not, there are 200,000 less tenant farms than in the United States.

Again:

Among the owners of the tenant farms in our country are English, French, and German capitalists, non-residents, who have bought immense tracts of the railroad lands, and seized upon the alternate government sections lying within their railroad purchases, and on those tracts have commenced their bonanza operations, or planted their tenants on the American system.

When it is remembered that the entire network of railroads in the United States is practically under the absolute control of five or six men who, having derived their valuable franchises and more than princely land grants from the people, show the utmost disregard of the comfort, convenience or rights of the donors; when it is remembered that one family in the city of New York controls enough land with enough tenants to constitute an overgrown village; and that what they do not claim as their own is held by one-fourth of the rest of the population; when it is remembered that nearly every article which has become a household necessity has been seized upon and can be obtained only through some corporation, in the manufacture of which the government has virtually granted a monopoly, as Charles granted to the Duke of Buckingham a monopoly in the sale of gold lace; when it is remembered that, even in this new country, three-fourths of the population rent their homes and cannot buy them[14]; when these things are remembered, as they should be, it will be readily seen that the condition of our work-people is fast becoming no better than that of the people of Europe, where a thousand years of false social adjustments, of usurpation and of tyranny, have reduced the proletariat class to the verge of starvation and desperation.

True, the immigrant laborers from Europe in the North, and the colored people at the South tend to crowd into the cities, where their labor is least needed and the conditions of life for them must be at the hardest; true, in America if a man has it in him the way is open for him to mount to the topmost round of the social ladder; true, too, the operatives in manufactures and the agricultural laborers here live on a far higher plane than in Europe; but the elements of degradation as well as of elevation are present in our land, and "easy in the descent" to the infernal regions. Let us be warned in time.



CHAPTER XII

Civilization Degrades the Masses

There are men in all parts of the world, whose names have become synonyms of learning and genius, who proclaim it from the housetops that civilization is in a constant state of evolution to a higher, purer, nobler, happier condition of the people, the great mass of mankind, who properly make up society, and who have been styled, in derision, the "mudsills of society." So they are, society rests upon them; society must build upon them; without them society cannot be, because they are, in the broadest sense, society itself,—not only the "mudsills" but the superstructure as well. They not only constitute the great producing class but the great consuming class as well. They are the bone and sinew of society.

It is therefore of the utmost importance to know the condition of the people; it is not only important to know exactly what that condition is, but it is of the very first importance to the well-being of society that there should be absolutely nothing in that condition to arouse the apprehension of the sharks who live upon the carcass of the people, or of the people who permit the sharks to so live. There is nothing more absolutely certain than that the people—who submit to be robbed through the intricate and multifarious processes devised by the cupidity of individuals and of governments—when aroused to a full sense of the wrongs inflicted upon them, will strike down their oppressors in a rage of desperation born of despair.

Modern tyrannies are far more insidious than the military despotisms of the past. These modern engines which crush society destroy the energy and vitality of the people by the slow process of starvation, sanctioned by the law, and in a majority of instances, are patiently borne by the victims. It is only when human nature can endure no more that protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy. Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne without excruciating pain and without earnest protest.

If in their desperate conflict with the serpent that has coiled its slimy length about the body of the people the latter resort to dynamite, and seek by savage warfare to right their wrongs, they are to be condemned and controlled, for they confound the innocent with the guilty and work ruin rather than reform. Yet there is another side to be considered, for when injustice wraps itself in the robes of virtue and of law, and calls in the assistance of armies and all the destructive machinery of modern warfare to enforce its right to enslave and starve mankind, what counter warfare can be too savage, too destructive in its operations, to compel attention to the wrong? The difficulty is that vengeance should discriminate, but that is a refinement which blind rage can hardly compass.

I believe in law and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent, that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice; if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written injustice, men are not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. There is no law, on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly upon the people, which should be permitted to stand one hour. It is through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is by the prostitution of the rights of the masses, by men who pretend to be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and death fill the largest space in the news channels of every land.

In New York City—where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth and the christianized humanity of the New World are supposed to have their highest exemplification—men, women and children die by the thousands, starved and frozen out of the world! Thousands die yearly in the city of New York from the effects of exposure and insufficient nutriment. The world, into which they had come unbidden, and the fruits of which a just God had declared they should enjoy as reward of the sweat of their brows, had refused them even a bare subsistance; and, this, when millions of food rot in the storehouses without purchasers! The harpies of trade prefer that their substance should resolve itself into the dirt and weed from which it sprung, rather than the poor and needy should eat of it and live.

I have walked through the tenement wards of New York, and I have seen enough want and crime and blasted virtue to condemn the civilization which produced them and which fosters them in its bosom.

I have looked upon the vast army of police which New York City maintains to protect life and so-called "vested rights," and I have concluded that there is something wrong in the social system which can only be kept intact by the expenditure of so much productive force, for this vast army, which stands on the street corners and lurks in the alley ways, "spotting," suspicious persons, "keeping an eye" on strangers who look "smart," this vast army contributes nothing to the production of wealth. It is, essentially, a parasite. And yet, without this army of idlers, life would be in constant danger and property would fall prey not only to the vicious and the desperate, but to the hungry men and women who have neither a place to shelter them from the storms of heaven, nor food to sustain nature's cravings from finding an eternal resting place in the Potter's Field. And, even after every precaution which selfishness can devise, courts of law and police officers are powerless to stay the hand of the pariahs whom society has outlawed—the men and women who are doomed to starve to death and be buried at the expense of society. The streets of every city in the Union are full of people who have been made desperate by social adjustments which prophets laud to the skies and which philosophers commend as "ideal," as far as they go.

One-half the producing power of the United States is to-day absolutely dependent upon the cold charity of the world; one fourth does not make sufficient to live beyond the day, while the other one-fourth only manages to live comfortably at the expense of the most parsimonious economy.

It is becoming a mooted question whether labor-saving machinery has not supplanted muscle-power in the production of every article to such a marvelous extent as to make thoughtful men tremble for the future of those who can only hope to live upon the produce of their labors. The machine has taken the place, largely, of man in the production of articles of consumption, of wear and of ornamentation; but no machine has, as yet, been invented to take the place of human wants. The markets of the world are actually glutted with articles produced by machine labor, but there are no purchasers with the means to buy, to consume the additional production caused by machinery and the consequent cheapening of processes of producing the articles of consumption, ornamentation, etc. When men have work they have money; and when men have money they spend it. Hence, when the toilers of a land have steady employment trade is brisk; when business stagnation forces them into idleness vice and crime afflict the country.

What avail the tireless labor of the machine and the mountains of material it places upon the market, if there are no purchasers? One man at a machine will do as much work in a factory to-day as required the work of fifty men fifty years ago; but the enhanced volume of production can have only one purchaser now where there was once fifty, hence the fitful existence of the one and the desperate struggle for existence of the forty-nine.[15] As iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in the volume of production, so iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in consumption. And, without consumption, what does production amount to? What does it avail us that our stores and granaries are overstocked, if the people are unable to buy? The thing is reduced to a cruel mockery when stores and granaries are over-gorged, while people clamor in vain for clothing and food, and drop dead within reach of these prime elements of warmth and sustentation.

What does it avail us if the balance of trade be in our favor by one, or two, or three hundred millions of dollars, if this result be obtained by the degradation and death of our own people? More; not only at the expense of the well being of our own people, but of the people of those countries in whose markets we are enabled to undersell them, by reason of the more systematic pauperization of our own producing classes.

Competition, it is declared, is the life of trade; if this be true, it is truer that it is the death of labor, of the poorer classes. For Great Britain has established herself in the markets of the world at the expense of her laboring classes. While the capitalists of that country hold up their heads among the proudest people of the world, her laboring classes are absolutely ground to powder. Because of the inhuman competition which her manufacturers have been led to adopt, and the introduction of improved labor-saving machinery, her balance of trade runs far into the millions of pounds, and political economists place their hands upon their hearts and declare that Great Britain is the most happy and prosperous country on the face of the globe. But the declaration is illusory in the extreme. No country can be happy and prosperous whose "mudsills" live in squalor, want, misery, vice and death. If Great Britain is happy and prosperous, how shall we account for the constant strikes of labor organizations for higher pay or as a protest against further reduction of wages below which man cannot live and produce? The balance of trade desire is the curse of the people of the world. It can be obtained only by underbidding other people in their own markets; and this can be done only by the maximum of production at the minimum of cost—by forcing as much labor out of the man or the machine as possible at the least possible expense.

There is death in the theory; death to our own people and death to the people with whom we compete. When a people no longer produce those articles which are absolutely necessary to sustain life the days of such people may be easily calculated.

Men talk daily of "over production," of "glutted markets," and the like; but such is not a true statement of the case. There can be no over production of anything as long as there are hungry mouths to be fed. It does not matter if the possessors of these hungry mouths are too poor to buy the bread; if they are hungry, there is no overproduction. With a balance of $150,000,000 of trade; with plethoric granaries and elevators all over the land; with millions of swine, sheep and cattle on a thousand hills; with millions of surplus revenue in the vaults of the National treasury, diverted from the regular channels of trade by an ignorant set of legislators who have not gumption enough to reduce unnecessary and burdensome taxation without upsetting the industries of the country—with all its grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring classes of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still more horrible.

The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord—a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our pretensions to civilization.

Yet, "competition" is the cry of the hour. Millionaires compete with each other in the management of vast railroads and water routes, reducing labor to the verge of subsistence while exacting mints of money as tolls for transportation from the toilers of the soil and the consumers who live by their labor in other industrial enterprises; the manufacturers join in the competition, selling goods at the least possible profit to themselves and the least possible profit to those who labor for them; and, when no market can be found at home, boldly enter foreign markets and successfully compete with manufacturers who employ what our writers are pleased to style "pauper" labor. Every branch of industry is in the field competing, and the competition is ruining every branch of industry. The constant effort to obtain the maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation, caused by the competition, reduces, in every branch of industry, the wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it produces those "hard times" which bear so hardly upon the poor in every walk of life. Even the laboring man has entered the race, and now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child. When things reach this stage, when the man who is working for one dollar and a half per day is underbid by a man who will work for a dollar and a quarter, then the condition of the great wealth producing and consuming class is desperate indeed. And so it is.

Frederick Douglass, the great Negro commoner, speaking at Washington, April 16, 1883, on the "Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia," said:

Events are transpiring all around us that enforce respect of the oppressed classes. In one form or another, by one means or another, the ideas of a common humanity against privileged classes, of common rights against special privileges, are now rocking the world. Explosives are heard that rival the earthquake. They are causing despots to tremble, class rule to quail, thrones to shake and oppressive associated wealth to turn pale. It is for America to be wise in time.

And the black philosopher, who had by manly courage and matchless eloquence braved the mob law of the North and the organized brigandage and robbery of the South in the dark days of the past, days that tried men's souls, standing in the sunlight of rejuvenated manhood, still was the oracle of the oppressed in the sentiments above quoted.

All over the land the voice of the masses is heard. Organizations in their interests are multiplying like sands on the seashore. The fierce, hoarse mutter of the starved and starving gives unmistakable warning that America has entered upon that fierce conflict of money-power and muscle-power which now shake to their very centers the hoary-headed commonwealths of the old world. In John Swintons Paper of a recent date I find the following editorial arraignment of the present state of "Labor and Capital:"

The cries of the people against the oppressions of capital and monopoly are heard all over the land; but the capitalist and monopolist give them no heed, and go on their way more relentlessly than ever. Congress is fully aware of the condition of things; but you cannot get any bill through there for the relief of the people. The coal lords of Pennsylvania know how abject are the tens of thousands of blackamoors of their mines; but they grind them without mercy, and cut their days' wages again whenever they squeal. Jay Gould knows of the wide-spread ruin he has wrought in piling up his hundred millions; but he drives along faster than ever in his routine of plunder. The factory Christians of Fall River see their thousands of poor spinners struggling for the bread of life amid the whirl of machinery: but they order reduction after reduction in the rate of wages, though the veins of the corporations are swollen to congestion. The "Big Four" of Chicago, who corner grain and provisions, and the capitalists here and elsewhere who do the same thing, know well how the farmers suffer and the tables of the poor are ravaged by their operations; but they prosecute their work more extensively and recklessly than ever. The railroad and telegraph corporations know that, in putting on "all that the traffic will bear," they are taking from this country more than the people can stand; yet their only answer is that of the horseleech....

Our lawmakers know how the people are wronged through legislation in the interest of privilege and plunder; but they add statute to statute in that same interest. They know how advantageous to the producers would be the few measures asked in their name; yet they persistently refuse to adopt them. The great employers of labor, the cormorants of competition, know through what hideous injustice they enrich themselves; but speak to them of fair play, and they flout you from their presence. The wealthy corporations owning these street car lines in New York see that their drivers and conductors are kept on the rack from sixteen to eighteen hours every day of the week, including Sundays; but when a bill is brought into the State Legislature to limit the daily working hours to twelve, they order their hired agents of the lobby to defeat it. These gamblers of Wall street know that their gains are mainly through fraud; yet forever, fast and furious, do they play with loaded dice.

The landlords of these tenement quarters know by the mortality statistics how broad is the swathe that death cuts among their victims; but they add dollar to dollar as coffin after coffin is carried into the street. * * *

These owners of the machinery of industry know how it bears upon the men who keep it flying; but they are regardless of all that, if only it fills their coffers. These owners of palaces look upon the men by whom they are built; but think all the time how to raise the rent of their hovels. These great money-lenders who hold the mortgages on countless farms know of the straits of the mortgage-bound farmers; yet they never cease to plot for higher interest and harder terms. The gilded priests of Mammon and hypocrisy cannot get away from the cries of humankind; but when do you ever hear them denouncing the guilty and responsible criminals in their velvet-cushioned pews? Harder and harder grow the exactions of capital. Harder and harder grows the lot of the millions. Louder and louder grow the cries of the sufferers. Deafer and deafer grow the ears of the millionaires. Yet, if those who cry would but use their power in action, peaceful action, they could right their wrongs, or at least the most grievous of them, before the world completes the solar circuit of this year.

Wm. Goodwin Moody (Land and Labor in the United States, p. 338), reverting to the difficulties which beset the pathway of labor organizations, which have so far been productive of nothing but disaster to the laboring classes, says:

Is it not time that new weapons should be adopted, and new methods introduced? * * * Will not the working men of the country learn anything from the bitter experiences they have passed through, and abandon methods that have been so uniformly followed by the ultimate failure of all their efforts. But the great evils by which we are surrounded, and that are destroying the foundations of society, can be removed by the working-men only. They form the large majority of its members, and in our country they are all-powerful. Still it is only by absolutely united action that the working-men can accomplish any good. By disunion they may achieve any amount of evil. The enemy they have to contend against, though few in number, are strong in position and possession of great capital. Nevertheless, before the united working-men of the country, seeking really national objects and noble ends, by methods that are just and in harmony with the institutions under which we live, the tyranny of capital will end. The working-men will also draw to their support a very large part of the best thought and intelligence of the country, that will be sure to keep even step with the labor of society in its attack upon the enemies of humanity and progress.

There is no fact truer than this, that the accumulated wealth of the land, and the sources of power, are fast becoming concentrated in the hands of a few men, who use that wealth and power to the debasement and enthrallment of the wage workers. Already it is almost impossible to obtain any legislation, in State or Federal legislatures, to ameliorate the condition of the laboring classes. Capital has placed its tyrant grip upon the throat of the Goddess of Liberty. The power of railroad and telegraph corporations, and associated capital invested in monopolies which oppress the many, while ministering to the wealth, the comfort and the luxury of the few, has become omnipotent in halls of legislation, courts of justice, and even in the Executive Chambers of great States, so that the poor, the oppressed and the defrauded appeal in vain for justice.

Such is the deplorable condition of the laboring classes in the west, the north and the east. They are bound to the car of capital, and are being ground to powder as fast as day follows day. They organize in vain; they protest in vain; they appeal in vain. Civilization is doing its work. "To him that hath, more shall be given; to him that hath nothing, even that shall be taken from him."

Let us turn to the South and see if a black skin has anything to do with the tyranny of capital; let us see if the cause of the laboring man is not the same in all sections, in all States, in all governments, in the Union, as it is in all the world. If this can be shown; if I can incontestably demonstrate that the condition of the black and the white laborer is the same, and that consequently their cause is common; that they should unite under the one banner and work upon the same platform of principles for the uplifting of labor, the more equal distribution of the products of labor and capital, I shall not have written this book in vain, and the patient reader will not have read after me without profit to himself and the common cause of a common humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] W.G. Moody: Land and Labor in the United States.

[15] Wm. Goodwin Moody shows this conclusively in his work on Land and Labor in the United States.



CHAPTER XIII

Conditions of Labor in the South

I am not seriously concerned about the frightful political disorders which have disgraced the Southern States since the close of the War of the Rebellion; nor am I seriously concerned about the race-wars in that section about which so much has been justly said, and about which so very little is really known, in spite of the vast mass of testimony that did not more than begin to tell the tale. I know that time and education will give proper adjustment to the politics of the South, and that the best men of all classes, the intelligent and the property-holders will eventually grasp the reins of political or civil power and give, as far as they can, equilibrium to the unbalanced conditions.

The men of natural parts, of superior culture and ambitious spirit usually, in all societies, manage to rise to the top as the natural rulers of the people. You cannot keep them down; you cannot repress them. They rise to the top as naturally as sparks fly upward to the heavens. Demagogues and quacks manage only to impose upon the ignorant and confiding, upon men, conscious of their own inability to rule, who gladly transfer the responsibility to the first loud-mouthed fellow who comes along claiming, as his own, superior capacity and virtue. Intelligent men do not permit ignoramuses and adventurers to rule them; they prefer to rule themselves; and they submit to be ruled by such interlopers only so long as it takes them to thoroughly understand the condition of affairs. It is not, therefore, to be marvelled at that the white men of the South spread death and terror in their pathway to the throne of power in subverting the governments of the Reconstruction policy, based as those governments were, upon disorganized ignorance on the part of the blacks and organized robbery on the part of the white adventurers, who have become infamous under the expressive term "carpet-baggers;" although the genuine Northern immigrants, the "Fools" who came in good faith to cast in their lot with the Southern people supposing themselves to be welcome, should not share in the obloquy of that epithet. But, should the white men of the South continue indefinitely as the rulers of the South, to the absolute exclusion of participation of the black citizens of those states, then would my surprise be turned into profound amazement and horror at what such tyranny would produce as a logical result. Yet I know the temper of the people of the South too well to base any deduction upon a proposition so full of horror and despair. And, then, too, such a proposition would be at variance with all accepted precedents of two peoples living in the same community, governed by the same laws and subject to the same social and material conditions. I submit that I have no fears about the future political status of the whites and blacks of the South. The intelligent, the ambitious and the wealthy men of both races will eventually rule over their less fortunate fellow-citizens without invidious regard to race or previous condition. And the great-grandson of Senator Wade Hampton may yet vote for the great-grandson of Congressman Robert Smalls to be Governor of the chivalric commonwealth of South Carolina. Senator Wade Hampton may grit his teeth at this aspect of the case; but it is strictly in the domain of probability. The grandson of John C. Calhoun, the great orator and statesman of South Carolina, has not as yet voted for a colored Governor, but he has for a colored sheriff and probate judge, as the following testimony he gave before the Blair committee on "Education and Labor," (Vol II, p. 173), in the city of New York, September 13, 1883, will show:

"Q. (the Chairman) What do you think of his [the black man's] intellectual and moral qualities and his capacity for development? A. (Mr. Calhoun, John C.) ... The probate judge of my county is a Negro and one of my tenants, and I am here now in New York attending to important business for my county as an appointee of that man. He has upon him the responsibilities of all estates in the county; he is probate judge.

"Q. Is he a capable man? A. A very capable man, and an excellent, good man, and a very just one."

Again (Ibid p. 137), Mr. Calhoun testified:

The sheriff of my county is from Ohio, and a Negro, and he is a man whom we all support in his office, because he is capable of administering his office.

When the grandson of John C. Calhoun can make such admissions, creditable alike to his head and his heart, may not the great-grandson of Wade Hampton rise up to chase the Bourbonism of his great-grandfather into the tomb of disgruntlement? I have not the least doubt of such probability. Again, I say, I am not seriously concerned about the future political status of the black man of the South. He has talent; he has ambition; he possesses a rare fund of eloquence, of wit and of humor, and these will carry him into the executive chambers of States, the halls of legislation and on to the bench of the judiciary. You can't bar him out; you can't repress him: he will make his way. God has planted in his very nature those elements which constitute the stock-in-trade of the American politician—ready eloquence, rich humor, quick perception—and you may rest assured he will use all of them to the very best advantage.

I know of municipalities in the South to-day, where capable colored men are regularly voted into responsible positions by the best white men of their cities. And why not? Do not colored men vote white men into office? And, pray, is the white man less magnanimous than the black man? Perish the thought! No; the politics of the South will readily adjust themselves to the best interest of the people; be very sure of this. And the future rulers of the South will not all be white, nor will they be all black: they will be a happy commingling of the two peoples.

And thus with the so-called "war of races:" it will pass away and leave not a trace behind. It is based upon condition and color-prejudice—two things which cannot perpetuate themselves. When the lowly condition of the black man has passed away; when he becomes a capable president of banks, of railroads and of steamboats; when he becomes a large land-holder, operating bonanza farms which enrich him and pauperize black and white labor; when he is not only a prisoner at the bar but a judge on the bench; when he sits in the halls of legislation the advocate of the people, or (more profit if less honor) the advocate of vast corporations and monopolies; when he has successfully metamorphosed the condition which attaches to him as a badge of slavery and degradation, and made a reputation for himself as a financier, statesman, advocate, land-holder, and money-shark generally, his color will be swallowed up in his reputation, his bank-account and his important money interests.

Is this a fancy picture? Is there no substantial truth seen in this picture of what will, must and shall be, as the logical outgrowth of the Divine affirmation that of one blood he created all men to dwell upon the earth, and of the Declaration of Independence that "we hold these truths to be self-evident:—That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?

Let us see.

A few months ago I sat in the banking office of Mr. William E. Mathews and ex-Congressman Joseph H. Rainey (of South Carolina), in Washington. As I sat there, a stream of patrons came and went. The whites were largely in the majority. They all wanted to negotiate a loan, or to meet a note just matured. Among the men were contractors, merchants, department clerks, etc. They all spoke with the utmost deference to the colored gentleman who had money to loan upon good security and good interest.

A few months ago I dined with ex-Senator B.K. Bruce (of Mississippi), now Register of the United States Treasury. The ex-Senator has a handsome house, and a delightful family. In running my eyes over his card tray, I saw the names of some of the foremost men and women of the nation who had called upon Register and Mrs. Bruce. In passing through the Register's department with the Senator, sight-seeing, I was not surprised at the marks of respect shown to Mr. Bruce by the white ladies and gentlemen in his department. Why? Because Mr. Bruce is a gentleman by instinct, a diplomat by nature, and a scholar who has "burned the midnight oil." Such a person does not have to ask men and women to respect him; they do so instinctively.

I walked down F street and called at the office of Prof. Richard T. Greener, a ripe scholar and a gentleman. The professor not only has a paying law practice, but is president of a new insurance company. He has all that he can do, and his patrons are both black and white.

All this and more came under my observation in the course of an hour's leisure at the capital of the nation. And the black man has not yet aroused himself to a full sense of his responsibilities or of his opportunities.

In Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston we have colored men of large wealth, who conduct extensive business operations and enjoy the confidence and esteem of their fellow citizens without regard to caste.

Speaking upon the progress of the colored race, in the course of an address on the "Civil Rights Law," at Washington, October 20, 1883, the Hon. John Mercer Langston, United States Minister and Consul General to Hayti, and one of the most remarkable, scholarly, and diplomatic men the colored race in America has produced, drew the following pen-picture:

Do you desire to witness moral wonders? Start at Chicago; travel to St. Louis; travel to Louisville; travel to Nashville; travel to Chattanooga; travel on to New Orleans, and in every State and city you will meet vast audiences, immense concourses of men and women with their children, boys and girls, who, degraded and in ignorance because of their slavery formerly, are to-day far advanced in general social improvement.

It would be remarkable now for you to go into the home of one of our families, and find even our daughters incompetent to discourse with you upon any subject of general interest with perfect ease and understanding. Excuse me, if I refer to the fact that some two weeks ago I visited St. Louis for two reasons; first to see my son and daughter, and secondly and mainly to attend the seventy-second anniversary of the birth of perhaps the richest colored man in the State of Missouri. I went to his house, and I was surprised as I entered his doors and looked about his sitting-room and parlors, furnished in the most approved modern style, in the richest manner; but I was more surprised when I saw one hundred guests come into the home of this venerable man, to celebrate the seventy-second anniversary of his birth, all beautifully attired; and when he told me, indirectly, how much money he had made, since the war, and what he was worth on the night of this celebration, I was more surprised than ever. I am surprised at the matchless progress the colored people of this country have made since their emancipation. I have traveled in the West Indies; I have seen the emancipated English, Spanish and French Negro; but I have seen no emancipated Negro anywhere who has made the progress at all comparable with the colored people of the United States of America.

I desire it to be distinctly understood, that I am not at all anxious about the mental and material development of the colored people of the United States. They are naturally shrewd, calculating and agreeable, possessing in a peculiar degree the art of pleasing; and these qualities will give them creditable positions in the business interests of the country in a few years. But they must have time to collect their wits, to sharpen their intelligence, to train their moral sense and the feeling of social responsibility, to fully comprehend all that the change from chattel slavery to absolute freedom implies. Men cannot awaken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber of a hundred years and grasp at once the altered conditions which flash upon them. The awakening is terrific, appalling, staggering.

When a man has been confined for long years in a dark dungeon he has not trouble in discerning objects about him which, when he first entered his dungeon, were indistinct or invisible to him. So when he is brought suddenly to the strong light of the sun the effulgence overmasters him, and he is blind as a bat. But slowly and painfully he becomes accustomed to the transition from absolute darkness to absolute light, and then nature wears to his vision her naturally gay and winsome appearance. So with the slave. His grasp of the conditions of freedom is slow and uncertain. But give him time, lend him a helping hand, and he will completely master the situation.

In one of the most remarkable pamphlets of the time, written by C.K. Marshall, D.D., of Vicksburg, Miss., entitled The Colored Race Weighed in the Balance, being a reply to a most malicious speech by J.L. Tucker, D.D., of Jackson, Miss., I find many truths that the American people should know. Both Dr. Marshall and Dr. Tucker are white ministers of the South, and both should be intimately acquainted with the characteristics, capacity and progress of the colored people. But Dr. Tucker appears to be as ignorant of the colored race as if he had spent his days in the Sandwich Islands instead of the sunny land of the South.

Dr. Marshall says (p. 55):

I think I know nearly all that can be said against a Negro. In one form or another, the complaints have been a thousand times reiterated; but has he not been, and is he not now what the white man and society have made him? He is naturally peace-loving, docile, and imitative. If kindly and justly treated, with due allowance for the peculiar elements that make up his life, he will render back, in kind at least, equally with the brother in white in like surroundings. Everybody knows some reliable, trustworthy Negro man and woman; and John Randolph said that of two of the politest men he ever saw one was a Negro. Gentleness is a wonderful agency in managing a Negro: I know it tells powerfully upon white folks. The psalmist, addressing his Maker, says, "Thy gentleness hath made me great." It is a mighty lever; it moves the world; it moved it before Archimedes; it moves it still; but peevishness, fault-finding, scolding, cursing, premature censure, haughty and assuming ways, sullenness, ill-temper, whether in the field, the kitchen, the nursery, or parlor, will legitimately result in thriftlessness, revolt, departure, and contempt for white people! Many of the young generation have not yet found their places in the new order of things; and their silly parents work themselves nearly to death to keep their sons from the plow and to make ladies of their daughters, just like white folks; but time, gentleness, bread, and neat homes will, with religion and culture, bring great changes. And I say it to the credit of their former owners, and their own instincts and capabilities, that they constitute to-day the best peasantry, holding similar relations to the ruling classes on the face of the earth. Their vices are no greater; their respect for law about the same; and their care for their children little inferior. Besides, they speak the language of their country better, are less cringing and craven, freer from begging; more manly, more polite, less priest-ridden, less obsequious; have a higher estimate of human rights and obligations; understand farming, cooking, house-work, and manual labor, in which they have been trained, better, I insist, than any similarly conditioned race or people. They are less profane—very much less—than white people; less bitter, vindictive, and bloodthirsty; less intemperate, and far, far less revengeful; and less selfish than what they contemptuously snub as "poor white trash." But he is a sinner! I believe the old stale rhyme tells some truth in a modified sense, "In Adam's fall we sinned all;" but I do not believe the serpent's tooth struck a more deadly and depraving virus into the Negro's share of the apple of Eden, dooming him as a sinner to a lower plane of wickedness than others. He commits not all, but many, of the sins, crimes, and misdemeanors, and indulges many of the vices of polished humanity—cultured Caucasian humanity. They have had but moderate experience in the sole management of their own affairs.

Again (p. 66):

The Negro is neither a beggar, nor a pauper, nor a tramp; and if honestly dealt with, he can make his own way. Where they are idle and profligate, execute the law vigorously against them, and they will approve and aid in the work. We can lift them up, or cast them down. For one, I think we owe them a debt of gratitude and impartial justice for their faithful conduct during the war; and when disposed to criticise and reproach them for not coming in all things up to your sentimental notions, just put yourself in their place. Then you will, if your scales are true and your weights just, settle the question with little difficulty. I cannot serve my readers better, perhaps, than by quoting the words of the Rev. Dr. Callaway, lately Professor in Emory College, Oxford, Ga., and new President of Paine Institute, Augusta, Ga., a native of that State, and to the manor born. In a late address, he says: "We have spoken of the Negro as related to the conduct of the war, but it remains to be said that, in his relation to us as a friend during that period, and to our wives and children as guardian, the testimony of his fidelity is on the lips of every surviving soldier. It is easy to conjecture how, with a race less loyal to home and patron, the testimony in the case might have been a narrative of lawlessness and license. What he refrained from, therefore, is to his credit. But in the four years of darkness and demoralization, when, besides those of military age, every boy whose muscles were equal to the support of a musket, and every old man with vigor enough to mark time, was called to the front, the Negro, commanding as a patriarch and reverent as a priest, kept sacred vigil at our homes. Besides this, with a foresight not developed for himself or his family, but evoked by virtue of his office, and the piteous destitution of our loved ones, he provided for their wants. 'They were a-hungered, and he fed them.' What he did is to his honor. What we refrain from in our place of power as the superior race, shall be to our credit; what we do in return shall be in proof of our appreciation. The conduct of the Negro during the war proves him kindly, temperate, trustworthy; his conduct since the war reveals in him considerateness, purpose, capacity, an order of growing good qualities. During the war his inferior courage, it may be assumed, inured to his superior serviceableness, his fears giving counsel to his courtesy and care. So set it down, if you will, though the logic is as lame as the charge is ungrateful."

This testimony upon the character, temper and adaptability of colored people is all the more valuable because Dr. Marshall not only treats the question from a Christian standpoint, but because his intimate acquaintance with the subject adds weight and authority to his opinion.

In the same strain, Dr. Atticus G. Haygood, President of Emory College, in Georgia, a man of the largest culture, Christian intelligence and progressive ideas, says, in his masterful work, Our Brother in Black, His Freedom and His Future (p. 194):

If white people and black people wish to know how to treat each other in all the relations of life, let them study the Bible. Take for example the business relations of life, the old question of capital and labor, of service and wages. For the settlement of all questions that grow out of these relations the laws laid down and the principles taught in the Bible, are worth all the "political economies" in the world. They apply to all races and conditions of men, in all countries and in all times. They are as needful and useful in New England factories as on Southern plantations. Free Negroes are not the only underlings in the world, Negro servants are not the only hirelings. There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night. "For which things' sake," in all lands, "the wrath of God is come upon the children of disobedience." Let us here recall some of these half-forgotten laws; they must do us all good. I know they are needed in the South; I am persuaded that they are needed wherever there are masters and servants.

Having heard a great deal about the condition of the colored people in Louisiana, I decided that it would not be uninteresting to have an authentic statement of that condition by some person fully capable of furnishing the desired information. I therefore addressed a letter to the Hon. Theophile T. Allain, a colored member of the Louisiana Legislature for Sweet Iberville parish, and a large sugar planter. From Mr. Allain's letter I condense the following statement, which will be found to be interesting for many reasons:

"First," says Mr. Allain, "I speak as a man of the South, who pays taxes on thirty-five thousand dollars worth of property, and without owing to any man one dollar. I claim to be well informed as to the condition of the colored people of the South, the people who bear the heat and burden of the day.

"In the cotton section of the South the Negroes are kept in subjugation, and are not permitted to exercise the right of suffrage guaranteed to them by the provisions of the Federal constitution. In the sugar-growing districts of Louisiana the colored and white people live upon terms of friendship and cordiality. In these districts there are thousands of colored men, who before the war were slaves, who now pay taxes upon property, assessed in their own names, ranging in value from five hundred to fifty thousand dollars. They produce principally rice and sugar. It is a self-evident fact that the labor of the colored men produces two-thirds of all the cotton raised in the South, four-fifths of the sugar, and nine-tenths of all the rice.

"In the cotton sections of Louisiana the colored men work mostly on shares, and here and there some of them have accumulated a little money; but, as a rule, they make fortunes for the landlords and die in poverty because of no fault of their own. Rent here, as everywhere else, pulls the laborer down, and keeps him down. What remains to him after the landlord has taken his share, goes to the Jew shopkeepers and other middle men at crossroads, who will not be satisfied with any profit less than one hundred to one hundred and fifty per cent.

"But the sugar districts of Louisiana are like oases in the desert. Vacuum pans, steam cars, fine machinery and smiling faces are to be met on every hand. Colored laborers find employment very readily in the sugar districts from October to February; and during cultivation-time, in many places, the colored laborers receive as high as one dollar and twenty cents per day, and during the grinding season, which is the harvest time, laborers receive from one dollar and twenty-five cents to one dollar and fifty cents per day in the field and seventy-five cents for one half of the night. At this season we run the sugar machinery night and day. I should not omit to state that colored men are, in the majority of cases, employed as engineers at our sugar mills, and receive from two to two and a half dollars per day:

"You will be surprised when I tell you that the most of the bricklaying and plastering work, and the blacksmithing and carpentering work is done in the sugar districts by colored men, who average three dollars per day for their work.

"There are fifty-eight parishes in Louisiana, twenty-four of them being sugar districts. To illustrate the degree of toleration which obtains in the cotton and sugar growing districts, take the following statement: In the Louisiana House of Representatives there are thirteen colored members—all from the sugar districts; in the Senate there are four colored members—all from the sugar districts. This condition of things is readily accounted for by the fact that the colored people in the sugar districts are more generally tax payers than they are in the cotton districts, and, having mutual interests, both white and black are more tolerant and better informed. The Bulldozer and White Liner can find but little room to ply their nefarious work where everybody finds plenty of work that pays well, and where material prosperity is the first and political bickering the secondary consideration. Because of the mutual interests at stake, colored men in the sugar districts are often protected by their bitterest political opponents.

"The State of Louisiana is assessed at $200,000,000, of which her colored population pay taxes upon more than $30,000,000.—Two thirds of this is owned by colored men in the sugar districts."

I could multiply quotations, but they would serve only to confirm my view, that the colored man merely requires time to fully comprehend his freedom and his opportunities, to enjoy the ample immunities of the first and to improve to the utmost the advantages of the second. All over the country the colored man is coming to understand that if he is ever to have and enjoy a status in this country at all commensurate with that of his white fellow-citizens, he must get his grip upon the elements of success which they employ with such effect, and boldly enter the lists, a competitor who must make a way for himself. Dr. Marshall says truly: "The Negro is neither a beggar, nor a pauper, nor a tramp." He is, essentially, a man of the largest wealth, God having given him, under tropical conditions, a powerful physique, with ample muscle and constitution to extract out of the repositories of nature her buried wealth. He only needs intelligence to use the wealth he creates. When he has intelligence, he will no longer labor to enrich men more designing and unscrupulous than he is; he will labor to enrich himself and his children. Indeed, in his powerful muscle and enduring physical constitution, directed by intelligence, the black man of the South, who alone has demonstrated his capacity to labor with success in the rice swamps, the cotton, and the cornfields of the South, will ultimately turn the tables upon the unscrupulous harpies who have robbed him for more than two hundred years; and from having been the slave of these men, he, in turn, will enslave them. From having been the slave, he will become the master; from having labored to enrich others, he will force others to labor to enrich him. The laws of nature are inexorable, and this is one of them. The white men of the South may turn pale with rage at this aspect of the case, but it is written on the wall. Already I have seen in the South the black and white farm laborer, working side by side for a black landlord; already I have seen in the South a black and a white brick-mason (and carpenters as well) working upon a building side by side, under a colored contractor. And we are not yet two decades from the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the manumission of the black slave.

I have no disposition to infuriate any white man of the South, by placing a red flag before him; we simply desire to accustom him to look upon a picture which his grand-children will not, because of the frequency of the occurrence, regard with anything more heart-rending than complacent indifference. The world moves forward; and the white man of the South could not stand still, if he so desired. Like the black man, he must work, or perish; like the black man, he must submit to the sharpest competition, and rise or fall, as the case may be. And so it should be.



CHAPTER XIV

Classes in the South

Since the war the people of the South are, from a Northern standpoint, very poor. There are very few millionaires among them. A man who has a bank account of fifty thousand dollars is regarded as very rich. I am reminded of an incident which shows that the Southern people fall down and worship a golden calf the same as their deluded brothers of the North and West.

A few years ago I was a resident of Jacksonville, the metropolis of Florida. Florida is a great Winter resort. The wealthy people of the country go there for a few months or weeks in the Winter. It is fashionable to do so. A great many wealthy northern men have acquired valuable landed interests in Jacksonville, among them the Astors of New York, who have a knack for pinning their interests in the soil. The people of Jacksonville were very proud to have as a resident and property holder, Mr. Wm. B. Astor. And Mr. Astor appeared to enjoy immensely the worship bestowed upon his money. He built one or two very fine buildings there, which must net him a handsome return for his investment by this time. Mr. Astor had with him a very shrewd "Man Friday," and this Man Friday got it into his head that he would like to be Mayor of Jacksonville, and he sought and obtained the support of his very powerful patron. It leaked out that Mr. Astor favored his Man Friday for Mayor. The "business interests" of the city took the matter "under advisement." After much "consultation" and preliminary skirmishing, it was decided that it would be unwise to antagonize Mr. Astor's Man Friday; and so he was placed in nomination as the "Citizens' Candidate." He was elected by a handsome majority. I believe it is a disputed question to-day, whether Mr. Astor's Man Friday was, or was not, a citizen of the place at the time he was elected Mayor. Be that as it may, it showed beyond question that the people knew how to go down upon their knees to the golden calf.

A condition of slavery or of serfdom produces two grievous evils, around which cluster many others of less importance, viz: the creation of vast landed estates, and the pauperization and debasement of labor. Pliny declared that to the creation of vast latifundia (aggregated estates) Italy owed its downfall. The same is true of the downfall of the South and its pet institution, since they produced a powerful and arrogant class which was not content to lord it on their vast demesnes and over their pauper labor, but must needs carry their high-flown notions into the councils of the nation, flaunting their gentle birth and undulating acres in the faces of horny-handed statesmen like Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wilson, and others.

The operations of the vast landed estates of the South produced all the industrial disjointments which have afflicted the South since the war. The white man was taught to look upon labor as the natural portion of the black slave; and nothing could induce a white man to put his hand to the plow, but the gaunt visage of starvation at his door. He even preferred ignominious starvation to honest work; and, in his desperate struggle to avoid the horror of the one and the disgrace of the other, he would sink himself lower in the scale of moral infamy than the black slave he despised. He would make of himself a monster of cruelty or of abject servility to avoid starvation or honest work. It was from this class of vermin that the planters secured their "Nigger drivers" or overseers, and a more pliable, servile, cruel, heartless set of men never existed. They were commonly known as "poor white trash," or "crackers." They were most heartily and righteously detested by the slave population. As the poor whites of the South were fifty years ago, so they are to-day—a careless, ignorant, lazy, but withal, arrogant set, who add nothing to the productive wealth of the community because they are too lazy to work, and who take nothing from that wealth because they are too poor to purchase. They have graded human wants to a point below which man could not go without starving. They live upon the poorest land in the South, the "piney woods," and raise a few potatoes and corn, and a few pigs, which never grow to be hogs, so sterile is the land upon which they are turned to "root, or die." These characteristic pigs are derisively called "shotes" by those who have seen their lean, lank and hungry development. They are awful counterparts of their pauper owners. It may be taken as an index of the quality of the soil and the condition of the people, to observe the condition of their live stock. Strange as it may appear, the faithful dog is the only animal which appears to thrive on "piney woods" land. The "piney woods" gopher, which may be not inappropriately termed a "highland turtle," is a great desideratum in the food supply of the pauper denizens of these portions of the South. There is nothing enticing about the appearance of the gopher. But his flesh, properly cooked, is passably palatable.

The poor white population of the South who live in the piney woods are sunk in the lowest ignorance, and practice vices too heinous to be breathed. They have no schools, and their mental condition hardly warrants the charitable inference that they would profit much if they were supplied with them. Still, I would like to see the experiment tried. Their horrible poverty, their appalling illiteracy, their deplorable moral enervation, deserve the pity of mankind and the assistance of philanthropic men and a thoughtful government. Though sunk to the lowest moral scale, they are men, and nothing should be omitted to improve their condition and make them more useful members of the communities in which they are now more than an incubus.

It may not be out of place here to state that the Kuklux Klan, the White Liners League, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other lawless gangs which have in the past fifteen years made Southern chivalry a by-word and reproach among the nations of the earth, were largely recruited from this idle, vicious, ignorant class of Southerners. They needed no preparation for the bloody work perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of the organized chivalrous brigands (as they had been of the slave oligarch), whose superior intelligence made them blush at the lawlessness they inspired, and who, therefore, gladly transferred to other hands the execution of those deeds of blood and death which make men shudder even now to think of them. It was long a common saying among the black population of the South that "I'd rudder be a niggah den a po' w'ite man!" and they were wise in their preference.

It is safe to say, that the peasantry of no country claiming to be civilized stands more in need of the labors of the schoolmaster and the preacher, than do the so-called "poor white trash" of the South. On their account, if no other, I am an advocate of a compulsory system of education, a National Board of Education, and a very large National appropriation for common school and industrial education.

I name this class first because it is the very lowest.

Next to this class is the great labor force of the South, the class upon whose ample shoulders have fallen the weight of Southern labor and inhumanity for lo! two hundred years—the black man. Time was, yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of one condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God expended no more time or ingenuity. Up to the close of the Rebellion, of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican government to their center, the great black population were truly the "mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to "dwell in a strange land, among strangers," to endure, like the children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world, the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the selfishness and cupidity of man. And to-day, as in the dark days of the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.

A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State could very well dispense with her black population. That population outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of it—the most valuable part. And the time will come when it will hold its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him best. Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the people this great magnus in the Nation's councils would supersede in their divine rights.

When the war closed, as I said, the great black population of the South was distinctively a laboring class. It owned no lands, houses, banks, stores, or live stock, or other wealth. Not only was it the distinctively laboring class but the distinctively pauper class. It had neither money, intelligence nor morals with which to begin the hard struggle of life. It was absolutely at the bottom of the social ladder. It possessed nothing but health and muscle.

I have frequently contemplated with profound amazement the momentous mass of subjected human force, a force which had been educated by the lash and the bloodhound to despise labor, which was thrown upon itself by the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender of Robert E. Lee. Nothing in the history of mankind is at all comparable, an exact counterpart, in all particulars, to that great event. A slavery of two hundred years had dwarfed the intelligence and morality of this people, and made them to look upon labor as the most baneful of all the curses a just God can inflict upon humankind; and they were turned loose upon the land, without a dollar in their hands, and, like the great Christ and the fowls of the air, without a place to lay their head.

And yet to-day, this people, who, only a few years ago, were bankrupts in morality, in intelligence, and in wealth, have leaped forward in the battle of progress like veterans; have built magnificent churches, with a membership of over two million souls; have preachers, learned and eloquent; have professors in colleges by the hundreds and schoolmasters by the thousands; have accumulated large landed interests in country, town and city; have established banking houses and railroads; manage large coal, grocery and merchant tailoring businesses; conduct with ability and success large and influential newspaper enterprises; in short, have come, and that very rapidly, into sharp competition with white men (who have the prestige of a thousand years of civilization and opportunity) in all the industrial interests which make a people great, respected and feared. The metamorphosis has been rapid, marvelous, astounding. Their home life has been largely transformed into the quality of purity and refinement which should characterize the home; they have now successful farmers, merchants, ministers, lawyers, editors, educators, physicians, legislators—in short, they have entered every avenue of industry and thought. Their efforts yet crude and their grasp uncertain, but they are in the field of competition, and will remain there and acquit themselves manfully.

Of course I speak in general terms of the progress the colored people have made. Individual effort and success are the indicators of the vitality and genius of a people. When individuals rise out of the indistinguishable mass and make their mark, we may rest assured that the mass is rich and capable of unlimited production. The great mass of every government, of every people, while adding to and creating greatness, go down in history unmentioned. But their glory, their genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few great spirits their fortunate condition produced. The governments of antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, or Fulton. And this may be true. There can now be no question that the African race in the United States possess every element of vitality and genius possessed by their fellow citizens of other races, and any calculation of race possibilities in this country which assumes that they will remain indefinitely the "mudsills" only of society will prove more brittle than ropes of sand.

At this time the colored people of the South are largely the industrial class; that is, they are the producing class. They are principally the agriculturists of the South; consequently, being wedded to the soil by life-long association and interest, and being principally the laboring class, they will naturally invest their surplus earnings in the purchase of the soil. Herein lies the great hope of the future. For the man who owns the soil largely owns and dictates to the men who are compelled to live upon it and derive their subsistence from it. The colored people of the South recognize this fact. And if there is any one idiosyncrasy more marked than another among them, it is their mania for buying land. They all live and labor in the cheerful anticipation of some day owning a home, a farm of their own. As the race grows in intelligence this mania for land owning becomes more and more pronounced. At first their impecuniosity will compel them to purchase poor hill-lands, but they will eventually get their grip upon the rich alluvial lands.

The class next to the great black class is the small white farmers. This class is composed of some of the "best families" of the South who were thrown upon their resources of brain and muscle by the results of the war, and of some of the worst families drawn from the more thrifty poor white class. Southern political economists labor hard to make it appear that the vastly increased production of wealth in the South since the war is to be traced largely to the phenomenally increased percentum of small white farmers, but the assumption is too transparent to impose upon any save those most ignorant of the industrial conditions of the South, and the marvelous adaptability to the new conditions shown by colored men. I grant that these small white farmers, who were almost too inconsiderable in numbers to be taken into account before the war, have added largely to the development of the country and the production of wealth; but that the tremendous gains of free labor as against slave labor are to be placed principally to their intelligence and industry is too absurd to be seriously debated. The Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier, a pronounced anti-negro newspaper, recently made such a charge in all seriousness. The struggle for supremacy will largely come between the small white and black farmer; because each recurring year will augment the number of each class of small holders. A condition of freedom and open competition makes the fight equal, in many respects. Which will prove the more successful small holder, the black or the white?

The fourth class is composed of the hereditary land-lords of the South; the gentlemen with flowing locks, gentle blood and irascible tempers, who appeal to the code of honor (in times past) to settle small differences with their equals and shoot down their inferiors without premeditation or compunction, and who drown their sorrows, as well as their joviality in rye or Bourbon whiskey; the gentlemen who claim consanguinity with Europe's titled sharks, and vaunt their chivalry in contrast to the peasant or yeoman blood of all other Americans; the gentlemen who got their broad acres (however they came by their peculiar blood) by robbing black men, women and children of the produce of their toil under the system of slavery, and who maintain themselves in their reduced condition by driving hard bargains with white and black labor either as planters or shop-keepers, often as both, the dual occupations more effectually enabling them to make unreasonable contracts and exactions of those they live to victimize. They are the gentlemen who constantly declare that "this is a white man's government," and that "the Negro must be made to keep his place." They are the gentlemen who have their grip upon the throat of Southern labor; who hold vast areas of land, the product of robbery, for a rise in values; who run the stores and torture the small farmer to death by usurious charges for necessaries; these are the gentlemen who are opposed to the new conditions resultant from the war which their Hotspur impetuosity and Shylock greed made possible. In short, these gentlemen comprise the moneyed class. They are the gentlemen who are hastening the conflict of labor and capital in the South. And, when the black laborer and the white laborer come to their senses, join issues with the common enemy and pitch the tent of battle, then will come the tug of war.

But the large land-owners and tradesmen of the South will not in the future belong exclusively to the class of persons I have described. On the contrary this class of hereditary land-owners will be sensibly diminished and their places be taken by successful recruits from the ranks of small white and black farmers. Indeed, I confess, I strongly incline to the belief that the black man of the South will eventually become the large land-holding class, and, therefore, the future tyrants of labor in that section. All the indications strongly point to such a possibility. It is estimated that, already, the colored people own, in the cotton growing states, 2,680,800 acres, the result of seventeen years of thrift, economy, and judicious management; while in the State of Georgia alone they own, it is reliably estimated, 680,000 acres of land, and pay taxes on $9,000,000 worth of property. Dr. Alexander Crummell, a most learned African, in a very interesting pamphlet drawn out by the malicious misstatements of Dr. Tucker, before referred to by me, makes the following deductions and statements, to wit:

Let me suggest here another estimate of this landed property of the Negro, acquired since emancipation. Taking the old slave States in the general, there has been a large acquisition of land in each and all of them. In the State of Georgia, as we have just seen, it was 680,000 acres. Let us put the figure as low as 400,000 for each State—for the purchase of farm lands has been everywhere a passion with the freedman—this 400,000 acres multiplied into 14, i.e. the number of the chief Southern States, shows an aggregate of 5,600,000 acres of land, the acquisition of the black race in less than twenty years.

But Dr. Tucker will observe a further fact of magnitude in this connection: It is the increased PRODUCTION which has been developed on the part of the freedman since emancipation. I present but one staple, and for the reason that it is almost exclusively the result of $1.

I will take the five years immediately preceding the late civil war and compare them with the five years preceeding the last year's census-taking; and the contrast in the number of cotton-bales produced will show the industry and thrift of the black race as a consequent on the gift of freedom:

Years Bales 1857 2,939,519 1858 3,113,962 1859 3,851,481 1860 4,669,770 1861 3,656,006 ————— Total 18,230,738

Years Bales 1878 4,811,265 1879 5,073,531 1880 5,757,397 1881 6,589,329 1882 5,435,845 —————- The five years' work of freedom 27,667,367 The five years' work of slavery 18,230,738 ————— Balance in favor of freedom 9,436,629

Now this item of production is a positive disproof of Dr. Tucker's statement, "that the average level in material prosperity is but little higher than it was before the war." Here is the fact that the Freedman has produced one-third more in five years than he did in the same time when a slave!

Another view of this matter is still more striking. The excess of yield in cotton in seven years [i.e., from 1875 to 1882] over the seven years [i.e., from 1854 to 1861] is 17,091,000 bales, being $1. If Dr. Tucker will glance at the great increase of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops South, as shown in Agricultural Reports from 1865 to 1882, and reflect that NEGROES have been the producers of these crops, he will understand their indignation at his outrageous charges of "laziness and vagabondage:" and perhaps he will listen to their demand that he shall take back the unjust and injurious imputations which, without knowledge and discrimination, he makes against a whole race of people.

This impulse to thrift on the part of the Freedmen was no tardy and reluctant disposition. It was the immediate offspring of freedom.

It is not possible even to approximate the landed acquisitions of the colored people, but that they have been large purchasers of small holdings will readily be admitted by all candid persons who are acquainted with the intense pastoral nature of the people, their constant thrift, and their deepseated determination to own their own homes. If we assume, with Dr. Crummell, that in the past seventeen years, the hardest, most disadvantageous years they will ever again be compelled to go through, they have come into possession of 5,600,000 acres, the gain in the next seventeen years must be vastly greater. At any rate, we are free to place the holdings in the next fifty years at not less than 35,000,000 acres, and the probability is that it will be vastly more.

In the Popular Science Monthly for October 1881, Mr. J. Stahl Patterson, in an article on the "Movement of the Colored Population," says: "It would seem that in the industrial aspects of the case the white and colored men may be, under certain circumstances, the complement of each other." Again: "There are two distinct classes of colored economists. One is satisfied with dependence on others for employment, the other affects independent homes, and struggles to secure them, however humble. Some even acquire wealth."

In the same monthly for February, 1883, Prof. E.W. Gilliam has a long article on the "African in the United States," in which he does all he can to make wider the breach between the blacks and the whites. He has very little good to say of the black man. But he was forced to make the following admissions, viz:

"The blacks are an improving race, and the throb of aspiration is quickening. * * * Advancement in mental training and in economic science must needs be slow but there is advancement."

The learned professor makes the interesting calculation that the blacks in the Southern States will increase from 6,000,000 in 1880, to 192,000,000, in 1980; while the whites in the South, in 1880, 12,000,000, will number only 96,000,000, in 1980. The learned professor infers that this vast army will be "doomed to remain where they have been, and be hewers of wood and drawers of water," because they form a "distinct alien race." I think, if the professor will wait until 1980, he will find that this "alien race," which profligate white men have done and are doing so much to amalgamate with their own race, will not only increase approximately as he has figured it out, in numbers, but in wealth as well.