Chapter III: The Ex-Slave as He Is (1)

The main outlines of the rights of the negro in the United States are laid down in Amendments XIII., XIV., and XV. to the American Constitution. Says Amendment XIII., “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Says Amendment XIV., “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” And, says Amendment XV., “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or any State, on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.” Such is roughly the American charter of the black and coloured man’s liberties.

The Civil Rights Bill, passed by Congress in 1875, went further, and, as I have said, declared that “All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privilege of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other places of amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and colour, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” But this measure was held by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional; and I only again cite its first section here in order to show, in all completeness, what the negro in America wants and is struggling for, and what his most enthusiastic friends in the North would give him if they had it in their power to give.

It is because he is not given these rights, and because some of the rights which are given to him in law are withheld from him in practice, that the Race Question is to-day one of towering importance in America. If the American white were able to frankly make up his mind to accept the negro as in all respects his political and social equal, the whole question would vanish, and the two races might, in course of time, become one. But the American white, it is absolutely certain, will never adopt this solution of the difficulty. He will not frankly accept the negro as his equal at the polls, in society, in the court of law, or in the school. He holds that the negro is physically and intellectually inferior in the scale of humanity; and he points, with a gesture that forbids argument, to the differences that exist between the Caucasian and the Caucasian’s “brother in black.”

Am I, he asks, to admit my equality with a being who more nearly approaches the quadrumana than does any other member of the human family; with a being whose arms are, on an average, two inches longer than mine? Am I to admit my equality with a being whose facial angle is about 70 deg., while mine is about 82 deg.? Am I to admit my equality with a being the average weight of whose brain is ten ounces less than that of people of my own family? Is it a matter of insignificance that he is black while I am white; that his eyes have a yellowish sclerotic coat; that his nose is short, depressed, and dilated; that he has high and prominent cheek-bones; that his cranium is much thicker than mine; that he has a low instep and a “lark heel”; that his head is covered not with hair but with wool of nearly flat section; that his skin is thicker than mine, and that, it is velvety and emits a characteristic odour; that his frame, owing to structural peculiarities, is not as erect as mine; or that the cranial sutures of the negro close up much earlier than those of the white man?

These points of difference, and many more, are ever before the eye and in the mind of the American white in the South. I am not concerned to say whether or not the white man pays exaggerated attention to them. I can only declare that, influenced, rightly or wrongly, by his observations and his prejudices, the white Southerner has impregnably determined that, in spite of anything that Constitutional Amendments and State legislation may hint to the contrary, the negro on American soil occupies an inferior position, and that he must never be allowed to trespass beyond it.

I have already incidentally mentioned that the illegal repression of the black is openly defended by Americans who, in the ordinary affairs of life, take rank as men of honour. Mr. George William Curtis, writing in _Harper’s Weekly_ in June, 1887, said:—

“What is the Southern question? It is essentially one of the gravest
and most vital that can concern any community, for it is substantially
the question whether where the coloured vote is largely in the
majority, and is cast all together, the community shall be placed
under the government of its most ignorant class, recently emancipated
from a dehumanising slavery, and led by unscrupulous chiefs. The
pitiless cruelty of slavery was not a good school for the exercise of
political supremacy in an otherwise highly civilised community, and
the situation in some parts of the Southern States is one which, could
it be reproduced in the Northern States, would not be tolerated.
Relief would be sought and found under law or over law, and that is
what is done in such communities in the Southern States. There is
plainly a deprivation of rights conferred by law. But would any humane
and intelligent Republican say that the power of the United States
should be employed to compel submission to an endless rule like that
of Moses in South Carolina?”

And the Boston _Herald_, one of the most respectable of Northern newspapers, candidly tells its New England readers that if they lived in the South they would entertain the same views about the negroes as the Southern whites do. It explains very thoroughly the race prejudice, which is prevalent with all white races, and particularly with the Anglo-Saxon, and which has kept the Anglo-Saxon race pure and has preserved its institutions, civilisation, and free government. Says the _Herald_ on this subject:—

“The treatment accorded to coloured races by white men, especially
representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race, has never been of a kind to
call forth commendations, and yet it may be said that this almost
universal display of inhumanity indicates that it is a necessary
feature of race development. Our Western countrymen believe that the
only good Indian is a dead Indian; our Southern countrymen believe
that the negro is a person who cannot be allowed political and social
equality, but must be kept in an inferior condition. We in the North,
who have nothing to fear from Indians and with whom the negro is an
exception, raise our voices in protest at such barbarity. And yet our
forefathers, who were, perhaps, quite as conscientious persons as we
are, did not hesitate to undertake a war of extermination against the
Indians, and they even held views concerning the negro quite different
from those which we entertain.

“In fact, human nature is such that the chances are altogether in
favour of the supposition that, if the people of New England could be
transported to the North-Western States and Territories, and our
fellow-citizens of those districts brought back to New England, we
should soon have those who now entertain philanthropic views
concerning the Indians crying out for their speedy extermination,
while those who now regard them as obstacles to civilisation, to be
brushed out of the way as soon as possible, would come, looking at
them from a perspective of 2,000 miles, to regard them as men and
brothers, deserving of kind and equitable treatment. We dare say that
the removal of the white people of the North to the Southern States
and the transfer of the Southern people to the north of Mason and
Dixon’s line would be attended with the same reversal of opinions
respecting the negro question—that is, the manner in which these race
problems are regarded is largely a matter of geographical location.”

The Atlanta _Constitution_ thus excuses the attitude of the whites. Is there, it asks, a State in the North in which if, as in Mississippi, 181,000 negro voters, of whom 145,000 are unable to read or write, were to-day settled, the white people would be or could be divided under any pretence or by any power? Is there a Northern State in which, although, as in Mississippi, there were only 121,000 white voters to oppose them, this host of black illiterates could capture and maintain the control of affairs under any pretext or by any power? Could this be done in Indiana, or in Ohio, and especially could it be done if, as in Mississippi, the hideous and sickening pages of the carpet-bag era, by showing what these people did do when the whites were united against them, gave appalling suggestions of what they would do if the whites were divided? Iowa has about the voting population of Georgia, say 320,000. If 130,000 of these voters were negroes, of whom 100,000 were illiterate (to say no worse), is there any sane man who believes, or any fair man who will assert, that the white people of Iowa would not so unite as to hold control of their affairs, and remain so united, in all despite? Would any political ambition, or could any external force, so divide the whites as to make it possible for a considerable minority of their number, by deluding the ignorant and bribing the corrupt of the negroes, to hold the reins of government?

Nor can it be denied that, in practice, many of the most negrophil Northerners have as little as possible to do with the black, and, indeed, systematically treat him as an inferior. A Republican Congress twenty years ago forced negro suffrage upon the South, and at the same time established it in the District of Columbia. Six years’ experience of it in Columbia was sufficient, and to get rid of it a Republican Congress obliterated suffrage altogether there, amid the hearty amens of Republican property holders in Washington. There are three Senators now in Congress—Messrs. Edmunds and Morrill, of Vermont, and Mr. Sherman, of Ohio—who twenty years ago assisted might and main to burden the South with negro suffrage. These three are among the foremost in advocating Southern fairness towards the negro. Indeed, Mr. Sherman is the author of a proposition in this direction which for stringency goes far ahead of anything previously suggested. Yet all three of these Senators, who are large property holders in Washington, voted to disestablish negro suffrage in Washington fifteen years ago, and not one of them would for one moment listen to any suggestion to revive it.

The attitude of the Southern white towards the negro is, nevertheless, not exactly an unkind one. It is rather that of a magisterial guardian. Within certain limits, the negro is no longer “kept down.” Far from seeking to condemn him to ignorance and stagnation, the white man contributes, and contributes generously, to the negro’s mental, physical, and moral advancement. He freely provides his ex-slave with facilities for education, with medical care in seasons of sickness, and with opportunities for religious instruction. Indeed, in these directions, he does for the black man a great many good deeds which the black man never dreams of trying to do for himself. But this is, I think, mainly because the white systematically regards the black as a child. And in this the white is certainly justified. No one who has associated much with the negro race can have failed to have remarked that in the natural time of childhood the negro is apparently as vivacious and as intelligent as the white. With the approach of puberty, however, the two races begin to betray marked intellectual divergence. The white steadily progresses in intelligence; the black stops short; so that, a few years afterwards, the latter is by comparison dull, stupid, and indolent, though still frivolous, affectionate, good-natured, and mischievous. I speak, of course, of the average negro, and more especially of the full-blooded one. There are exceptions, but they are few. As a rule the grown negro, even if he have received a better education than the majority of his fellows, is in mind always a child. The uneducated grown negro is invariably of this characteristic nature; and he is often charmingly simple and devoid of evil. But, on the other hand, he is quite as often full of the worst vices and passions. Into this, however, I will not go at present, my immediate purpose being rather to show how the negro is treated by his white fellow-citizens than to indicate the effect that is being produced upon the South by the existence in it of an enormous, and in many localities an overwhelming, negro population.

According to law, the American negro has at the polls exactly the same rights and privileges as the American white man. But the concession was made to the negro without the full and free consent of the Southern white, and in consequence the Southern white has always grudged it, and has very rarely allowed it to be fully exercised. There was a time, as I have endeavoured to show, when the Southern white was prevented by _force majeure_ from greatly interfering with the negro’s action at the ballot-boxes; but since the days of Reconstruction the Southern white man has been supreme in his own States, and his will has ever been that the negro shall not be a significant factor in politics. At first the white enforced his will with the rifle and the revolver. In many places the negro could not approach the ballot-box without risking his life, and so he stayed away. There were “rifle clubs,” and, in Texas and Virginia, there was the Ku-Klux Klan, an organisation of whites of good position who were determined, no matter how much blood it might cost, to make the coloured people “behave themselves.” Then followed the less violent but not less reprehensible recourse to “tissue-ballots.” “Let the negroes vote if they will,” was the word; “we will stultify their action by fraud, which is safer than force.” And so it happened that, as in South Carolina, although the negro majority trooped to the polls and voted Republican to a man, the returning officers found that, almost without exception, the men who were elected were Democrats.

The infamous trick was easily managed. In America the voter is, in most places, required to register, and to produce his registration certificate upon recording his vote. He votes by depositing in the ballot-box a printed ticket, or ballot. This ticket simply bears the names of the favoured candidates for vacant offices, and, although it now has to be of certain prescribed dimensions and colour, its form used to be very much dependent upon the tastes and idiosyncrasies of the party leaders who supplied it to the electors. In the “tissue-ballot” days fraudulent party leaders caused it to be printed upon the very thinnest of tissue-paper, so that the thickness of, say, twenty-five tissue-tickets did not much exceed that of an ordinary piece of writing-paper. These tickets were entrusted to unscrupulous voters of the right political complexion. The ballots, before being deposited, had to be folded, but only lightly folded; and thus, when an expert fraudulent voter folded his twenty-five tissue-tickets together and gave them a gentle flip as he dropped them into the box, the papers flew open and apart, and at once assumed a comparatively innocent appearance. Upon the close of the poll the ballots were counted and their number was compared with that of the registered electors who had voted at that booth. There was found to be a large excess of ballots; whereupon all the papers were returned to the box, and an election manager, in accordance with precedent, undertook the duty of withdrawing sufficient ballots to make the remainder tally with the number of voters who had polled. If, as was generally the case, the manager was fraudulent, he took care to draw out only thick tickets. If, as may have sometimes happened, he was honest, he took the tickets as they came, thick and thin indifferently. But in either event the party that used “tissue-ballots” naturally gained an immense advantage. If the negroes—against whom almost exclusively this device was employed—suspected and protested, revolvers were exhibited by the other side.

Such a revelation as this may appear incredible to British readers, but it by no means exhausts the villainies of American politics as they are displayed at the polls, even at this day; and Americans themselves seem to accept such things as matters of course. Mr. John James Ingalls, one of the United States Senators for Kansas, excited no great surprise or repulsion when he recently declared, “The purification of politics is an iridescent dream; the Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place in a political campaign.” Mr. Ingalls is a Republican. Republicans, however, it is but fair to say, are not monopolists of fraud. A normally respectable Southern newspaper, the Charleston _News and Courier_, during the last campaign, coolly gave to its readers the following conspicuously printed piece of advice:—“Go to the polls to-day. Vote early, vote often, vote straight.” (November 4, 1890.) And I am bound to admit that the counsel was acted upon. But of that anon.

Concurrently with the use of “tissue-ballots,” the practices of “counting in” and “counting out” were resorted to, or, in other words, false returns were made. Again, the registration certificates of the ignorant and often careless coloured voters were frequently stolen or purchased for ridiculous sums by whites. The regular price used to be fifty cents, or a pint of whisky.

Another favourite device was, and still is, deception. The majority of coloured voters cannot read, and since, at most American elections, there are several “tickets” to be voted for—as, for example, a State ticket, a county or municipal ticket, and a Federal ticket—there is generally plenty of opportunity for Sambo to go wrong. With the assistance of a learned friend, he selects such tickets as he may, in his political wisdom, desire to deposit. He also assures himself as to the relative positions of the various ballot-boxes in the booth. Then, with the State ticket between his forefinger and thumb, the county ticket between his forefinger and second finger, and the Federal ticket between his second and third fingers, and in the happy belief that the State box is on the extreme right, the county box in the middle, and the Federal box on the extreme left, he enters the booth to do his civic duty. In the meantime the managers inside have deliberately changed the position of the boxes. They are legally bound to indicate each box if they be asked to do so; but, even if they comply with the letter of the requirement, Sambo inevitably gets his papers confused, and ends by depositing them wrongly, and so spoils his vote. In practice, the managers, as often as not, either do not indicate the boxes or indicate them wrongly. They are all labelled, but when Sambo is illiterate the labels are meaningless to him.

In a speech delivered on July 30th, 1888, Governor John P. Richardson, of South Carolina, openly and frankly defended this practice. Said he:—

“The great problem which God has given us to solve is not yet solved.
We have now the rule of a minority of four hundred thousand over a
majority of six hundred thousand. No army at Austerlitz, Waterloo, or
Gettysburg could ever be wielded like that mass of six hundred
thousand people. The only thing which stands to-day between us and
their rule is a flimsy statute—the _eight-box law_—which depends for
its effectiveness upon the unity of the white people.”

In a speech delivered a few days later Governor Richardson again declared:—

“But there is one thing more which the Democracy has to do, and that
is to solve the problem of how a minority of four hundred thousand
people shall rule for the advancement of the State and the people at
large. There are to-day many people who think that the eight-box law
could be disposed of, but I tell you that on it depends the salvation
of the State. It amounts to an educational qualification for suffrage.
None of us can forget the election trials which took place in this
city, when a native South Carolinian was the prosecutor against his
own people. But if he was the Cicero, we had yet the Demosthenes to
meet him, and the gifted Youmans arose, and we saved our comrades by
the skin of their teeth. Be careful, my friends, of the eight-box law.
Some have said that we could control by simple Anglo-Saxon manhood,
but this is only a beautiful theory, and would be dangerous in
practice. I have an abiding faith in the onward progress of humanity,
and I believe it is the eternal law of God that this land shall be
controlled by the Anglo-Saxon race.”

The _eight-box law_ is the statute which provides a separate box for each ticket, township, county, State, Congressional, Electoral, &c. Every voter must approach these boxes alone, and no one, unless asked, is allowed to tell him where a particular ticket belongs. If he cannot read he cannot, without assistance, distribute his tickets, and, by the law, all that are put into the wrong box are void.

Senator Eustis, of Louisiana, at about the same time publicly asserted that the whites of Louisiana, in spite of the law, would rule by might, and as for the rest of the country it was none of Louisiana’s business.

The vulgar devices of making voters drunk and of temporarily restraining their personal liberty are not wholly neglected; but these are troublesome methods, and the easier ones are found by experience to have all the hoped-for effect. Indeed, in many districts, the negro now seems to recognise that his vote, should he deposit it, will not be allowed to count, and he therefore stays at home. In other districts he votes still; but the whole business is a sad farce. And of this I have some personal knowledge.

On November 4th, 1890, I was present at a voting place at Mount Pleasant in South Carolina. The whites were voting for Tillman, the Farmers’ Alliance candidate, for Governor. A small dissentient body of whites and the whole body of negroes were voting for Haskell, the Democratic-Republican Coalition candidate. The district is a very black one, one of the blackest in the State, and its vote was much counted upon by the Haskell party. Overnight, therefore, the Tillmanites tried, but in vain, to destroy the booth; and on the day of the election they adopted a modification of the old “tissue-ballot” trick, using, however, ordinary instead of tissue-ballots. Two hundred and forty-four persons voted at this particular booth. When one of the boxes was opened it was found to contain a largely excessive number of ballots; the exact number was, if I recollect rightly, 477. The surplus 233 papers were cast out by the managers, some of whom were shrewdly suspected of being parties to the conspiracy, and the result of the poll in that precinct was decided by the verdict of the remainder. Nor was this the only villainy that was perpetrated on that day in the neighbourhood. In an adjoining precinct a Tillman champion named Gaillard seized and destroyed the registration books, thus rendering the polling impossible in default of duplicate books. Ballot-boxes, too, are sometimes destroyed or made away with. Indeed, there is no conceivable scoundrelism that is not, or has not been, practised in the South to neutralise the negro vote.

From what I have written it will be clear that the extension of the suffrage to the coloured race in the Southern States by no means ensures the representation of the black man. The situation is a very disgraceful one for the Southern whites; but even the better class of Southern politicians with whom I have conversed upon the subject tacitly, if not expressly, defend, as with one voice, the iniquitous system. “We cannot,” they say, “be ruled by the negroes; we must protect ourselves. It is very lamentable; but what is the alternative?”

It is hard to suggest a practicable one, for the fatal and irretrievable mistake of bestowing the suffrage upon every male citizen of full age has already been made. That mistake is recognised as such not only by the Democrats, not only by the whites. Senator Ingalls, whom I have already spoken of as a Republican, wrote in the _North American Review_, in April, 1886:—“Had the Republican party been courageous or intelligent enough to have attempted the reconstruction of the South through its brains rather than through its numbers, the most lamentable chapter in our history might have been unwritten.” And Mr. A. M. E. Church, an intelligent coloured clergyman of Vicksburg, wrote, in the same year:—“We will say ... that the mass of negroes would do themselves and their country more good if the ballot were out of their reach.”

Congress has it in its power to limit the suffrage; but at this time of day it will not exercise that power, which, by the way, ought never to have been taken out of the hands of individual States. The situation in Maine, where nearly all the people are white and educated, is not like the situation in Mississippi, where more than half the people are black and ignorant. But Congress forgot that fact, and Amendment XV. took from the States, practically for ever, a wholesome power, which, under sec. 2, Art. 1, of the original Constitution, they had up to that moment been at liberty to exercise. The repeal of Amendment XV., however, would not settle, and would, in my humble opinion, scarcely assist, the solution of the race question. The cause of difficulty lies far deeper; and this, I think, will appear when I shall have considered the Southern negro in his social and general, as well as in his political, position, and when I shall have given some examples of the force of race prejudice in America.

Throughout the South the social position of the man in whose veins negro blood courses is unalterably fixed at birth. The child may grow to be wise, to be wealthy, to be entrusted even with the responsibilities of office, but he always bears with him the visible marks of his origin, and those marks condemn him to remain for ever at the bottom of the social ladder. To incur this condemnation he need not be by any means black. A quarter, an eighth, nay, a sixteenth of African blood, is sufficient to deprive him of all chances of social equality with the white man. For the being with the hated taint there is positively no social mercy. A white man may be ignorant, vicious, and poor. For him, in spite of all, the door is ever kept open. But the black, or coloured man, no matter what his personal merits may be, is ruthlessly shut out. The white absolutely declines to associate with him on equal terms. A line has been drawn; and he who, from either side, crosses that line has to pay the penalty. If it be the negro who dares to cross, cruelty and violence chase him promptly back again, or kill him for his temerity. If it be the white, ostracism is the recognised penalty. And it is not only the uneducated and the easily prejudiced who have drawn the line thus sharply. Speaking in 1858, Abraham Lincoln said:—

“I am not, and never have been, in favour of bringing about, in any
form, the social and political equality of the white and the black
races. There is a physical difference which forbids them from living
together on terms of social and political equality. And, inasmuch as
they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a
position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am
in favour of having the superior position assigned to the whites.”

Mr. Froude, in “The English in the West Indies,” writes:—

“One does not grudge the black man his property, his freedom, his
opportunity of advancing himself; one would wish him as free and
prosperous as the fates and his own exertions can make him, with more
and more means of raising himself to the white man’s level. But left
to himself, and without the white man to lead him, he can never reach
it.... We have a population to deal with the majority of whom are an
inferior race. Inferior, I am obliged to call them, because as yet
they have shown no capacity to rise above the condition of their
ancestors, except under European laws, European education, and
European authority to keep them from war upon one another.... Give
them independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such
civilisation as they have as easily and as willingly as their coats
and trousers.”

And, says Professor E. W. Gilliam, to whose writings on the subject I have already made some allusion:—

“The blacks have been, and must continue to be, a distinct and alien
race; the fusion of races is the resultant from social equality and
intermarriage, and the barrier to this is here insurmountable. The
human species presents three grand varieties, marked off by
colour—white, yellow, and black. One at the first, in origin and
colour, the race multiplied and spread, and separate sections, settled
in different latitudes, took on—under climatic conditions acting with
abnormal force in that early and impressionable period of the race’s
age—took on, we say, different hues, which, as the race grew and
hardened, crystallised into permanent characteristics. Social affinity
exists among the families of these three groups. The groups themselves
stand rigidly apart. The Irish, German, French, &c., who come to these
shores readily intermarry among themselves and with the native
population. Within a generation or two the sharpness of national
feature disappears, and the issue is the American, whose mixed blood
is the country’s foremost hope. It cannot be—a fusion like this
between blacks and whites. Account for it as we may, the antipathy is
a palpable fact which no one fails to recognise—an antipathy not less
strong among the Northern than among the Southern whites. However the
former may, on the score of matters political, profess themselves
special friends to the blacks, the question of intermarriage and
social equality, when brought to practical test, they will not touch
with the end of the little finger. Whether it be that the blacks,
because of their former condition of servitude, are regarded as a
permanently degraded class; whether it be that the whites, from their
historic eminence, are possessed with a consciousness of superiority
which spurns alliance—the fact that fusion is impossible no one in his
senses can deny.”

Professor Gilliam wrote from a Southern standpoint, but, says Judge Albion W. Tourgée: “Looking at the subject from a standpoint diametrically opposed in every respect both to the intellectual bias and to the political inclination of Professor Gilliam, we are compelled to endorse his views in this respect almost without the least modification.” And in another page of his admirable and informing volume, “An Appeal to Cæsar,” Mr. Tourgée remarks, “When the freedman began to establish his own home circle, to build for himself a household about his own hearth, however humble, the distance between the whites and blacks, though in fact very greatly diminished, seemed to have been as greatly increased.”

My own impression, as derived from somewhat wide observation, is that, since the emancipation, the distance has really as well as apparently increased, and that it is still increasing. Whites and blacks have less in common than of yore; there is less chance than there ever was of their working together peacefully for good; and racial antagonism, nourished by both sides, grows daily. There are many signs, too, of this growing antagonism. On the side of the negro there is a desire to be what the white man is, and to do what the white man does—to elevate himself to the same level of privileges, with or without the pre-requisite education and fitness for the elevation. He argues blindly that the legal right confers the needful fitness. The law opens positions to him, and he is a voter. Why then should he not vote himself and his friends into the positions? And education by no means tends to decrease the friction, seeing that the white man is as prejudiced against an educated negro as against an ignorant one. On the contrary, it adds to it. When the uneducated black thinks himself the equal of the white, the educated black cannot be expected to submit resignedly to be regarded as the white’s inferior. Yet he is obliged to affect the resignation which he cannot feel. He must suppress his real sentiments, or he must risk physical maltreatment.

His social position cannot be properly understood without the aid of illustrations. I will therefore give a few, which are taken at hazard from some hundreds of examples that I might cite.

But, as an introduction to this branch of the subject, I must first quote a passage from Mr. George W. Cable’s recent book, “The Silent South,” a volume which is inspired from beginning to end with love—perhaps unwise love—for the negro, and with a desire to do all that lies in the writer’s power to abate the prevalent race friction. Mr. Cable asks:—

“Are the freedman’s liberties suffering any real abridgment? The
answer is easy. The letter of the laws, with a few exceptions,
recognises him as entitled to every right of an American citizen; and
to some it may seem unimportant that there is scarcely one public
relation of life in the South where he is not arbitrarily and
unlawfully compelled to hold toward the white man the attitude of an
alien, a menial, and a probable reprobate, by reason of his race and
colour. One of the marvels of future history will be that it was
counted a small matter by a majority of our nation for six millions of
people within it, made by its own decree a component part of it, to be
subjected to a system of oppression so rank that nothing could make it
seem small except the fact that they had already been ground under it
for a century and a half. Examine it. It proffers to the freedman a
certain security of life and property, and then holds the respect of
the community, that dearest of earthly boons, beyond his attainment.
It gives him certain guarantees against thieves and robbers, and then
holds him under the unearned contumely of the mass of good men and
women. It acknowledges in constitutions and statutes his title to an
American’s freedom and aspirations, and then in daily practice heaps
upon him in every public place the most odious distinctions, without
giving ear to the humblest plea concerning mental or moral character.
It spurns his ambition, tramples upon his languishing self-respect,
and indignantly refuses to let him either buy with money, or earn by
any excellence of inner life or outward behaviour, the most momentary
immunity from these public indignities even for his wife and
daughters.”

In America it is a matter of notoriety that there is no exaggeration here, nor is the race feeling confined solely to the South. To the British reader the following cases in point will, I believe, prove that there is no exaggeration:—

“Supposing the Courts of our Southern States, while changing no laws
requiring the impanelling of jurymen without distinction as to race,
&c., should suddenly begin to draw their thousands of jurymen all
black, and well-nigh everyone of them counting not only himself, but
all his race, better than any white man. Assuming that their average
of intelligence and morals should be not below that of jurymen as now
drawn, would a white man, for all that, choose to be tried in one of
those Courts? Would he suspect nothing? Could one persuade him that
his chances of even justice were all they should be, or all they would
be, were the Court not evading the law in order to sustain an
outrageous distinction against him because of the accident of his
birth? Yet, only read white man for black man, and black man for white
man, and that—I speak as an eye-witness—has been the practice for
years, and is still so to-day; an actual emasculation, in the case of
six million people, both as plaintiff and defendant, of the right of
trial by jury.”—MR. G. W. CABLE.

“The negro children of the city are usually the aggressors when
trouble occurs between them and white children. Both colours are too
ready for a row, but coloured parents are too ready to teach their
youngsters that white people are their natural enemies. We daily see
negro boys trying all their ingenuity to get a fight out of the white
boys when the latter try to avoid a row, and this is peculiarly true
when there are two or three young negroes to one white. Negro girls
are apt to be extremely insolent, not only to whites of their own age,
but to ladies. In the matter of collisions between school-boys, that
may best be left to the police. The negro girls who push white women
and girls off the walks can be cured of that practice by the use of a
horsewhip; and we advise white fathers and husbands to use the whip.
It’s a great corrective.”—Chattanooga _Times_.

This advocacy of the summary horsewhipping of girls is very significant of the brutal attitude of the Southern white towards the negro.

“Between two and three o’clock an excursion train, composed entirely
of coloured people, arrived at Gouldsboro depôt from Bâton Rouge. A
large number of coloured men and women were near the depôt waiting for
the train, which was due at eleven o’clock. As the train neared the
depôt, one of the excursionists attempted to get off and fell to the
ground. Some unknown person made a personal remark, when the negro
drew a pistol and fired four or five shots in rapid succession, one of
which struck a white man named William Miller, brother of one of the
Gretna police, in the nose and lodged itself in the back of his neck.
Then the shooting became general, some four or five hundred shots
being fired in less than fifteen minutes. The stories of the blacks
and whites as to the origin of the trouble differ widely. The negroes
say that a large body of armed white men were awaiting the train’s
arrival, and that about ten minutes after it stopped they opened fire
on the negroes who were going to the street car. The whites say that
only half a dozen white men were concerned in the affair, and that the
negroes, before the train came to a halt, fired two shots at a white
boy named Burmester. Billy Miller was then shot by one of the white
men, and then the fight became general.”—Associated Press Telegram
from New Orleans, September 1st, 1889.

“It is impossible for the negro to get any justice at the hands of
Southern magistrates or juries. A man who resides in Augusta, Ga.—a
Democrat and a hater of the negro—admits that the whites’ maltreatment
of the blacks must one day recoil upon their own heads. ‘Why,’ said he
to me to-day, ‘you can’t convict a white man of the murder of a negro,
nor even of a white friend of the negro. Just before I left home a
negro was found one morning in the street, with his body riddled with
bullets. I was pretty certain that his death was due to a certain gang
of roughs, whose leader is under obligation to me for keeping him out
of the penitentiary. Meeting him I said, “Pat, who killed that
nigger?” “Oh, some of the boys,” said Pat, with a grin. “What did they
do it for?” I asked. “Oh, because he was a nigger,” said Pat. “And,”
he continued, “he was the best nigger in town. Why, he would even take
off his hat to me.”’ I thought he must be a good negro, indeed, who
would take off his hat to that creature, and I walked away pondering
upon what must be the outcome of it all. It is my opinion that several
of the Southern States will have to be abandoned to the negroes if we
would avoid terrible consequences from the wrongs we are heaping on
them.”—Washington correspondence of the Pittsburg _Dispatch_, January
11th, 1890.

“They had an election down in Jackson, Miss., yesterday, and it was of
the usual kind. The regular press reports, with charming frankness,
state that everything was progressing quietly so long as the negroes
stayed away from the polls; but should the black men attempt to
exercise the right of suffrage there would be trouble.”—Philadelphia
_Evening Telegram_, January 7th, 1890.

A negro named William Black stole some trifling articles from the
house of a white man, one Jim Bennett, near Robins, South Carolina.
Bennett followed and caught the negro, and, assisted by Dave Ready,
Henry Sweat, and John Walker, tied the prisoner to a tree. Ready then
placed a gun to the negro’s temple and blew out the man’s brains.
Bennett, Walker, and Sweat were arrested as accessories in the first
degree, but were discharged by Justice Dunbar. Ready apparently
escaped.—Summarised from a Barnwell letter of January 11th, 1890, in
the Charleston _Budget_.

Two boys—Williams, a negro, and Robertson, a white—were playing
together near Waynesboro with a gun, which, being accidentally
discharged, killed Robertson. The negro boy was arrested, but was
taken from custody by a mob of white men, who tied him up and shot him
to death.—Summarised from a despatch from Augusta, Georgia, dated
October 24th, 1890, to the Charleston _News and Courier_.

“A Tennessee white man was hanged on Tuesday for the brutal murder of
his wife. The despatches tell us that he objected to going on the
gallows with three coloured men who were to be hanged at the same
time, and that the authorities so far respected his prejudices as to
swing off the negroes first.”—New York _Star_, January 7th, 1890.

“Some years ago a great revival was going on in one of the churches of
my own city. The evangelist was fervidly inviting all kinds of people
to come to the ‘anxious seat.’ Crowds of men, women, and children were
accepting the invitation. Tramps, drunkards, and beggars were among
the number. At last it was announced to the church officials that a
negro upon one of the back seats was ‘under conviction.’ Here was a
problem of serious import. The officials held a hurried and anxious
consultation, and it was finally decided that the negro might receive
the benefit of salvation in an inconspicuous pew. This case might
fairly be termed exceptional if it were not true that one of the
largest and most influential denominations in the land, having been
split in half by the question of slavery, remains in that condition
to-day solely on the question of colour caste.”—Rev. JOHN SNYDER, in
the _Forum_, October, 1889. (The denomination alluded to is the
American Presbyterian Church.)

“While the Republican whoopers at the North are bursting with
indignation at the fact that the negroes on Southern railroads are
provided with separate cars from those occupied by the whites, they
have not a word of protest against the fact that a daughter of a
Southern negro ex-Governor was ‘frozen’ out of the ball-room of the
Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga a few nights ago. The gathering in the
ball-room was not of persons specially invited, but was made up, as
such watering-place balls usually are, of the guests stopping in the
hotel. The young lady in question is beautiful and accomplished, and
above all moral reproach, and so slightly tinted with negro blood that
she would have passed muster among whites almost anywhere in the
matter of colour. In spite, however, of all the facts in her favour,
the single circumstance of race created, in a crowded assemblage in a
Northern State, a sentiment that immediately culminated in outward
expressions which at once convinced the unfortunate lady that she was
an object of most unfriendly observation on the part of the people
gathered there.”—New Orleans _Picayune_, August 30th, 1889.

“The report comes from South Carolina that a coloured man, unarmed and
defenceless, fell into an altercation with a white man of that State
named Gallman. Gallman slit the coloured man’s throat from ear to ear,
and drove to a neighbour’s house, where he procured a shot-gun, and
emptied the contents of one barrel into the wounded man. At a late
hour that night Mr. Gallman’s friends, hearing that the victim had not
died, although he was at death’s door, rode to where he lay, and
carried him to the nearest churchyard, where they riddled his body
with bullets.”—Boston _Advertiser_, June 2nd, 1889.

“A reporter of the New York _World_ on Saturday disguised himself as a
wealthy negro from Cuba, and went around to the various first class
hotels to secure accommodation for himself. That must have been a busy
day with the hotel people, for the clerks smilingly told him that
every room was engaged. Seeing that it would be impossible to secure a
room, he then tried to get something to eat. At most of the
restaurants the waiters would pay no attention to his orders, and the
cashiers with one accord assured him that the proprietor was out and
would not return until late. At the Hoffman House Café he was given
food, but was not served at the bar. At Delmonico’s he was assured
that they had nothing to eat. So it seems that the prejudice against
the negro is not confined entirely to the South.”—New York _World_,
June, 1888.

Last year Mr. Douglass, a mulatto, was appointed United States
Minister to Hayti, and was taken thither on board an American
man-of-war, the _Kearsage_. Another ship, the _Ossipee_, was first
ordered to convey him. It is alleged that her commander, being
unwilling to carry and associate with a coloured man, urged as an
excuse that his vessel was not fit for sea. The officers of the
_Kearsage_ refused to dine with the Minister. “The army officers are
in a state of glee over it, and so are the Navy officers on duty here.
All unite in saying that if any of the _Kearsage_ officers dine with
Douglass on the way to Hayti they will find themselves tabooed by
their brother officers thereafter.”—Summarised from the Washington
correspondence of the St. Louis _Republic_, October, 1889.

“We simply hate, as American citizens, to be told by our equals _de
jure_ ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.’ The blackest hands can
cook the food for prejudiced throats; the blackest, dirtiest arms can
hold the whitest, cleanest baby; the blackest, most illiterate man can
sit on the same seat, even with a lady, as a driver; but the angry
passions rise when a well-dressed, educated, refined negro pays his
own fare and seats himself quietly in a public conveyance.”—Orangeburg
_Plain Speaker_, a negro newspaper, December 4th, 1889.

“Two coloured men, respectable in appearance and well educated, the
one principal of, and the other a teacher in, a public school of the
city, entered a restaurant in Cincinnati the other day. They seated
themselves at a table, but no waiter went near them, and when they
finally asked to be served they were thrown out into the street. The
sole trouble was the fact that they were coloured.”—New York _Evening
Post_, December 31st, 1889.

“Social equality of whites and blacks is unheard of here, even in
‘black’ Republican circles. The whites don’t want it and the blacks
won’t have it. Any white person who advocates it here is quietly
ignored as an irredeemable crank, and the South can afford to keep
cool and follow Northern example regarding this deadest of dead
issues.”—New York _Herald_, November, 1889.

“Wednesday will be long remembered in Georgia as the day on which an
unparalleled number of violent crimes were committed. At Jessop a
bloody riot occurred; at Augusta there was a conflict approaching the
dimensions of a riot, accompanied by bloodshed. At Dainesville a very
worthy coloured man was, it appears, cruelly murdered; at Toombsboro
another negro was killed; and at Greenville a shooting affair
occurred.... The quarrel was in every instance between men of
different colour.”—Macon _Telegraph_, December 28th, 1889.

“A few days ago a negro minister of this city boarded the east-bound
passenger train on the E.T.V. and G. Railway, and took a seat in the
coach occupied by white passengers. Some of the passengers complained
to the conductor and brakemen, and expressed considerable
dissatisfaction that they were forced to ride alongside of a negro.
The railway officials informed the complainants that they were not
authorised to force the coloured passenger into the coach set apart
for the negroes, and they would lay themselves liable should they do
so. The white passengers then took the matter in their own hands, and
ordered the ebony-hued minister to take a seat in the next coach. He
positively refused to obey orders, whereupon the white men gave him a
sound flogging and forced him to a seat among his own colour and
equals. We learned yesterday that the vanquished preacher was unable
to fill his pulpit on account of the severe chastisement inflicted
upon him.”—Selma (Alabama) _Times_, quoted by MR. G. W. CABLE.

“There is terrible excitement here over the co-education of the races.
The Alton Board of Education has provided separate schools for
coloured children, but the negroes want their children to attend the
schools set apart for the whites. They had threatened and threatened
to force their way into the schools and put their children alongside
the whites, and flatly refused to permit their children to attend the
schoolhouses set apart for the negro children. These threats, however,
until to-day, were looked upon as idle and meaningless. This morning
the negroes took action in the matter. Scores of adult negroes,
accompanied by half a hundred black children, went to the high school
and demanded admission. Superintendent Powell is a mild-mannered man,
and offered no obstructions. The black children walked in and took
possession of all the desks they found unoccupied. The white pupils
protested, and began to pick up their books and make preparations to
leave. Some of the coloured boys grinned at the white girls, and as
soon as the negro men left the building the white pupils assaulted the
blacks. There was a hard fight for fifteen minutes, during which
books, inkstands, rulers, slates and hair filled the air. The whites
finally drove the blacks out of the room and chased them out of the
yard, and continued to fight in the street. The white girls urged
their champions on with encouraging shouts, and brought them munitions
of war when possible.”—General Press Telegram from Alton, Illinois,
January 11th, 1890.

“At Decatur, Ill., Wood Bros., purveyors of candles and ice-cream, had
no ice-cream to sell to the Rev. Edward Wilson. He was a negro. He now
arrests the purveyors by virtue of the Civil Rights Law, and ‘the case
will be hotly contested.’ Of course it will. And the jury will
discharge the confectioners. The black man will get no ice-cream. The
people of Decatur love the negro in the South, not in the North. The
Civil Rights Bill was prepared for the South, where a coloured man can
get all the ice-cream he may pay for. To apply Reconstruction to the
North—is not that oppressive? The same Northerner who will endure
arrest before he will sell ice-cream to a black man will tell you
confidently that the determination of the Southerners to prevent black
home rule is the vilest conspiracy of modern times.”—Chicago _Herald_,
September 6th, 1889.