The Southern South - free ebook by Albert Bushnell Hart

THE SOUTHERN SOUTH

THE SOUTHERN SOUTH BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART , Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1910 Copyright, 1910, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published April, 1910 THE SOUTHERN SOUTH...

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INTRODUCTION

The keynote to which intelligent spirits respond most quickly in the United States is Americanism; no nation is more conscious of its own existence and its importance in the universe, more interested in the greatness, the strength, the pride, the influence, and the future of the common country. Nevertheless, any observer passing through all the parts of the United States would discover that the Union is made up not only of many states but of several sections—an East, a Middle West, a Far West, a

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CHAPTER I

MATERIALS For an understanding of the Southern South the materials are abundant but little systematized. In addition to the sources of direct information there is a literature of the Southern question beginning as far back as Samuel Sewall’s pamphlet “Joseph Sold by His Brethren,” published in 1700. Down to the Civil War the greater part of this literature was a controversy over slavery, which has little application to present problems, except as showing the temper of the times and as furnishing

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CHAPTER II

THE SOUTHLAND In what do the Southern States differ as to extent and climate from other parts of the United States? First of all, what does the Southland include? Previous to the Civil War, when people said “the South” they usually meant the fifteen states in which slavery was established. Since 1865 some inroads and additions to that group have been made. Maryland is rather a middle state than a Southern; West Virginia has been cut off from the South, and is now essentially Western, as is Misso

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CHAPTER III

THE POOR WHITE The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900), who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. In the

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CHAPTER IV

IMMIGRATION In every other section of the United States the element of the population descended from English colonists is flanked by, and in some places submerged by, a body of European immigrants; and every state is penetrated by great numbers of people from other states. Considering that the South has contributed to other sections of the Union about two and a half millions of people, the return current from the North has been comparatively small. “Why is it,” asks the Louisville Courier Journa

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CHAPTER V

SOUTHERN LEADERSHIP Immigrants either from the North or from abroad may be ignored as a formative part of the South; but the Poor Whites are only a part of the rank and file. There are many independent farmers, handicraftsmen, skilled laborers, and small laborers, all parts of a great democracy; and one of the causes of uplift is the coming of this democracy to a consciousness of its own power. Nevertheless, in the South as elsewhere in the world, the great affairs are carried on, the great deci

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CHAPTER VI

SOUTHERN TEMPERAMENT The South has not only its own division of special classes, its own methods of influence, it has also its own way of looking at the problems of the universe, and especially that department of the universe south of Mason and Dixon’s line. To discover the temperament of the South is difficult, for upon the face of things the differences of the two sections are slight. Aside from little peculiarities of dialect, probably no more startling than Bostonese English is to the Southe

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CHAPTER VII

ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY The history of the United States is a rope of many strands, each of which was twisted into form before they were united into one cable. Each state marks the sites of its first landings, puts monuments on its battlefields, commemorates its liberty days, and teaches its children to remember the great years of the past. The South has a full share of these memories, which are both local events and foundation stones of the nation’s history. Jamestown, St. Mary’s, Charleston, F

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CHAPTER VIII

NEGRO CHARACTER The social organization of the Anglo-Saxons in the South, their relations with each other, their strife for leadership, takes little account of the other race, though it is diffused throughout the country; it is everywhere with the Whites, but not of them. Although to the Southern mind the community is made up entirely of white people, numerically almost one third of the inhabitants of the former slaveholding states are Negroes, and in the Lower South there are five million black

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CHAPTER IX

NEGRO LIFE The negro problem in the South cannot be solved, nor is much light thrown upon it by the conditions of the race elsewhere. The immediate and pressing issue is the widespread belief that the great numbers of them in the South are an unsatisfactory element of the population. The total Negroes in the United States in 1900, the last available figures, was 8,834,000. They are, however, very unequally distributed throughout the Union; in twenty Northern states and territories there are only

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CHAPTER X

THE NEGRO AT WORK Nobody accepts church or fraternal orders as the measure of the Negro’s place in the community, for the gospel which he hears most often is the gospel of work; and that comes less from the preacher than from the reformer; as DuBois says: “Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics.” The labor system and labor ideal of the South are very different from those of the North.

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CHAPTER XI

IS THE NEGRO RISING? That the Negro is inferior to the Whites among whom he lives is a cause of apprehension to the whole land; that his labor is in steadiness and efficiency much below that of his intelligent white neighbors is a drawback to his section. Yet neither deficiencies of character nor of industry really settle his place in the community. A race may be as high as the Greeks and yet go to nothingness; a race may be as industrious as the Chinese, and have little to show for it. The esse

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CHAPTER XII

RACE ASSOCIATION In the preceding chapters the effort has been made to analyze and describe the white race and the negro race, each as though it lived by itself, and could work out its own destiny without reference to the other. The white race is faced with the necessity of elevating its lower fourth; the negro race should be equally absorbed in advancing its lower three fourths. In both races there is progress and there is hope; if either one were living by itself it might be predicted that in

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CHAPTER XIII

RACE SEPARATION Strong and passionate dislike and apprehension such as is set forth in the last chapter is certain to show itself in custom and law set up by that portion of the community which has the power of legislation. The commonest measures of this kind are discriminations between Whites and Negroes, especially in the use of public conveniences. In some cases the white people shut out Negroes altogether. There are perhaps half a dozen towns in the South in which none but Negroes live; ther

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CHAPTER XIV

CRIME AND ITS PENALTIES Sitting one night in the writing room of a country hotel in South Carolina, a young man opposite, with a face as smooth as a baby’s and as pretty as a girl’s, volunteered to tell where he had just been, a discreditable tale. It soon developed that his business was the sale of goods on instalments, chiefly to Negroes, and that in that little town of Florence he had no less than five hundred and ninety transactions then going on; that his profits were about fifty per cent o

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CHAPTER XV

LYNCHING The defects in the administration of justice in the South are complicated by a recognized system of punishment of criminals and supposed criminals by other persons than officers of the law—a system to which the term Lynch Law is often applied. In part it is an effort to supplement the law of the commonwealths; in part it is a protest against the law’s delay; in greater part a defiance of law and authority and impartial justice. In its mildest form this system of irresponsible jurisprude

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CHAPTER XVI

ACTUAL WEALTH In every discussion of Southern affairs an important thing to reckon with is a fixed belief that the South is the most prosperous part of the country, which fits in with the conviction that it has long surpassed all other parts of the world in civilization, in military ardor, and in the power to rise out of the sufferings of a conquered people. This belief is hard to reconcile with the grim fact that the South under slavery was the poorest section of the country. Visitors just befo

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CHAPTER XVII

COMPARATIVE WEALTH Wealth the South possesses—large wealth, growing wealth, greater wealth than that section has ever before approached. So agreeable is this state of things that Southern writers are inclined not only to set forth their prosperity but to claim that theirs is the most prosperous part of the whole country and is soon to become the richest. As Edmonds puts it in his “Facts about the South”: “Against the poverty, the inexperience, the discredit and doubt at home and abroad of oursel

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CHAPTER XVIII

MAKING COTTON “The South holds a call upon the world’s gold to the extent of $450,000,000 to $500,000,000 for the cotton which it will this year furnish to Europe.... This money, whether paid in actual gold or in other ways, will so strengthen the financial situation, not only of the South, but of New York and the country at large, as to make the South the saving power in American financial interests. No other crop on earth is of such far-reaching importance to any other great country as cotton

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CHAPTER XIX

COTTON HANDS So far cotton cultivation has been considered as though it were a crop which came of itself, like the rubber of the Brazilian forests, but during a whole century the cultivation of cotton has had a direct influence on the labor system and the whole social organization of the South. Such close relations sometimes exist in other commodities; for instance, the election of President McKinley, in 1896, seems to have been determined by a sudden rise in the price of wheat; but cotton is so

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CHAPTER XX

PEONAGE From the earlier chapters on the Negroes and on the Cotton Hands it is plain that the Southern agricultural laborer is unsatisfactory to his employer, and not happy in himself; that the two races, though allied, are yet in disharmony. Of recent years a new or rather a renewed cause of race hostility has been found, because the great demand for labor, chiefly in the cotton fields, gives rise to the startling abuse of a system of forced labor, commonly called peonage, which at the mildest

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CHAPTER XXI

WHITE EDUCATION “The most progressive nations have now definitely come to the conclusion that there is no mode of increasing industrial and commercial efficiency so effective as universal education sufficiently prolonged to effect permanent improvement in the observing and reasoning powers of the children.” So said that primate of American education, President Eliot, in an address at Tuskegee, Ala. Though speaking before an audience chiefly composed of colored people, he was laying down a genera

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CHAPTER XXII

NEGRO EDUCATION However cheering the interest in general public and higher education throughout the South, the Whites get most of the benefit; the lower third of the people, the most ignorant, the poorest, the least ambitious, those whose debasement is the greatest menace to the community, are less in the public eye; and the efforts to educate them arouse antagonism of various kinds. All calculations as to numbers of pupils, school expenditures, and public opinion as to education are subject to

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CHAPTER XXIII

OBJECTIONS TO EDUCATION In the two previous chapters white and negro education have been described as parts of the social and governmental system of the South; there, as in the North, the tacit presumption is that education is desirable, that it is essential for moral and material progress, that both the parents and the community must make great sacrifices to secure it. White education hardly needs defense in the South; most of the people wish to see the opportunities of life open to promising y

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CHAPTER XXIV

POSTULATES OF THE PROBLEM That the South confronts a complexus of problems difficult and almost insoluble is clear to all onlookers, Northern or Southern, candid or prejudiced. So far this book has undertaken to deal rather with conditions than with remedies, to state questions without trying to answer them, to separate so far as may be the real aspirations and progress of the Southern people of both races from conventional beliefs and shop-worn statements which overlie the actualities. Such an

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CHAPTER XXV

THE WRONG WAY OUT Except within the postulates stated in the last chapter, there can be no rational expectation of improvement of race relations in the South. Even within those conditions many suggestions are from time to time made which are out of accord with white and negro character, with the physical conditions, or with the general trend of American life. Before coming to practical remedies, it is necessary to examine and set aside these no-thoroughfares. First of all, can the Southern race

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CHAPTER XXVI

MATERIAL AND POLITICAL REMEDIES The methods of dealing with the race question discussed in the last chapter all go back to the idea that the Negro can be improved only by some process distasteful to him. Race separation he dislikes, expatriation he shudders at, and violence brings on him more evils than it removes, to say nothing of the effect on the Whites. The world has tried many experiments of civilizing people by the police, and they are all failures, from the Russian Empire to the West Sid

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CHAPTER XXVII

MORAL REMEDIES The regeneration of a race, as of mankind, is something that must proceed from within and work outward. Hence the most obvious remedy for race troubles is that both races should come up to a higher plane of living. What has been the progress of the Negro in that direction; what is the likelihood of further advance? The chance of the blacks is less than it would be if the white race had a larger part in it. The Negro is insensibly affected by the spirit of the community in which he

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