In discussing the political and industrial problems of the South, I base my conclusions upon a personal knowledge of the condition of classes in the South, as well as upon the ample data furnished by writers who have pursued, in their way, the question before me. That the colored people of the country will yet achieve an honorable status in the national industries of thought and activity, I believe, and try to make plain. In discussion of the land and labor problem I but pursue the theories advo

Return to Table of Contents There is no question to-day in American politics more unsettled than the negro question; nor has there been a time since the adoption of the Federal Constitution when this question has not, in one shape or another, been a disturbing element, a deep-rooted cancer, upon the body of our society, frequently occupying public attention to the exclusion of all other questions. It appears to possess, as no other question, the elements of perennial vitality. The introduction o

Return to Table of Contents It is my purpose in writing this work to show that the American Government has always construed people of African parentage to be aliens, not only when the Constitution was tortured by narrow-minded men to shield the cruel, murderous slave-holder in the possession of his human property, but even now, when the panoply of citizenship is, presumably, all-sufficient to insure to the late slave the enjoyment of full manhood rights as a sovereign citizen. The conflict of la

Return to Table of Contents The war of the Rebellion settled only one question: It forever settled the question of chattel slavery [3] in this country. It forever choked the life out of the infamy of the Constitutional right of one man to rob another, by purchase of his person, or of his honest share of the produce of his own labor. But this was the only question permanently and irrevocably settled. Nor was this the all-absorbing question involved. The right of a State to secede from the so-call

Return to Table of Contents There are those throughout the length and breadth of our great country who make a fair living by traducing better men than themselves; by continually crying out that the black man is incapable of being civilized; that he is born with the elements of barbarity, improvidence and untruthfulness so woven into his very nature that no amount of opportunity, labor, love, or sacrifice can ever lift him out of the condition, the "sphere God designed him to occupy"—as if the gr

Return to Table of Contents At the close of the rebellion there were in the Union (according to the census of 1860) 4,441,830 people of African origin; in 1880 they had increased to 6,580,793. Of this vast multitude in 1860, it is safe to say, not so many as one in every ten thousand could read or write. They had been doomed by the most stringent laws to a long night of mental darkness. It was a crime to teach a black man how to read even the Bible, the sacred repository of the laws that must li

Return to Table of Contents The "Religious Training of the Freedmen" and the "Education of the Freedmen" have raised up an army of people more peculiar in many respects than any other like class in all the history of mankind. They stand off by themselves; they are not to be approached by any counter method of "advocating a cause" or "building up the Kingdom of Christ" in their field. Millions of dollars have been "raised" to root out the illiteracy and immorality of the Freedmen, and to build up

Return to Table of Contents Revolutions are always the outgrowth of deepest wrongs, clearly defined by long and heated agitation, which inflame the mind of the people, and divide them into hostile factions. The field of battle is simply the theater upon which the hostile factions decide by superior prowess, or numbers, or sagacity, the questions at issue. In these conflicts, right usually, but not invariably, triumphs, as it should always do. Revolutions quicken the conscience and intelligence o

Return to Table of Contents The mind sickens in contemplating the mistakes of the "Reconstruction policy;" and the revolting peculation and crime—which went hand in hand from 1867-8 to 1876, bankrupting and terrorizing those unfortunate States—plunging them into all but anarchy, pure and simple. A parallel to the terror which walked abroad in the South from 1866, down to 1876, and which is largely dominant in that section even unto the present hour, must be sought for in other lands than our own

Return to Table of Contents The following chapter is, in the main, a reproduction of an address delivered by me before the Colored Press Association, in the city of Washington, June 27, 1882:— In addressing myself to a consideration of the subject: "The colored man as an Independent Force in our Politics," I come at once to one of the vital principles underlying American citizenship of the colored man in a peculiar manner. Upon this question hang all the conditions of man as a free moral agent,

Return to Table of Contents I have no faith in parties. In monarchical and imperial governments they are always manipulated by royal boobies, who are in turn manipulated by their empty-pated favorites and their women of soporific virtue; while in republics they are always manipulated by demagogues, tricksters, and corruptionists, who figure in the newspapers as "bosses," "heelers" and "sluggers," and in history as statesmen, senators and representatives. These gentlemen, who rule our government

Return to Table of Contents 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 t

Return to Table of Contents 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,

Return to Table of Contents 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 o

Return to Table of Contents 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 re

Return to Table of Contents The ownership of land in the South is the same pernicious thing it has come to be in every civilized country in the world. Instead of being, as it was intended to be, a blessing to the people, it is the crying curse which takes precedence of all other evils that afflict mankind. And the cause is not far to seek. Land is, in its very nature, the common property of the people. Like air and water, it is one of the natural elements which inhere in man as a common right, a

Return to Table of Contents I know it is not fashionable for writers on economic questions to tell the truth, but the truth should be told, though it kill. When the wail of distress encircles the world, the man who is linked by "the touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin" to the common destiny of the race universal; who hates injustice wherever it lifts up its head; who sympathizes with the distressed, the weak, and the friendless in every corner of the globe, such a man is morally bo

Return to Table of Contents I append to this volume a portion of the testimony of Mr. John Caldwell Calhoun because of the uniform fairness with which he treated the race and labor problem in the section of country where he is an extensive landowner and employer of labor. Mr. Calhoun's testimony was given before the Blair Senate Committee on Education and Labor and will be found in the Committee's Report as to The Relations between Labor and Capital . (Vol. II, pp. 157). New York , Thursday, Sep