(1903) The Negro Question
(1903) The Negro Question
(1903) The Negro Question
UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH CAROLINA
AT CHAPEL HILL
ENDOWED BY THE
DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC
SOCIETIES
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL
00023483464
^^
NEGRO QUESTION
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE
Author of "The Silent South"
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1903
THE LIBRARY
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROUNA
AT CHAPEL HILL
CorvRiGHT, 1890, by
CHARLES SCRIDNER'S SONS.
CONTENTS.
PAOB
THE NEGRO QUESTION I
The Question^
I. Have Colored AmericaDS in the South the same
Rights as Americans of Foreign Birth, .... I
The Answer —
I. The Social Basis of Slavery still Exists 24
II. Enfranchisement a Cause of Apprehension, .- . . 33
III, The Freedmen Loyal to Government 39
IV. Distinction Between Civil and Social Equality, .
43
V. Responsibility of Southern White Men 47
VI. Material Development in the South, ...... 51
THE QUESTION.
I.
II.
III.
THE ANSWER.
I.
II.
negro.
Then the winners of the war saw that the
great issue which had jeopardized the Union was
not settled. The Government's foundation prin-
ciple was not and could not be
reestablished,
while millions of the country's population were
without a voice as to who should rule, who
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 35
III.
IV.
V.
Thus we see that, so far from a complete eman-
cipation of the freedman bringing those results
in the Southern States which the white people
there so justly abhor, but so needlessly fear, it is
—
from it it is only the Old South readapting the
old plantation idea to a peasant labor and min-
eral products. Said a mine owner of the far
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 53
is in the South.
Certain public men in both North and South
have of late years made, with the kindest inten-
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 55
6o NATIONAL AID
TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS. 6
TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS. 65
66
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO Dot 6/
* Afler stating that any adult male citizen of the United States
may become a member, it declares its object to be " to foster and
promote, by every lawful use of the pen, the press, the mails, Ihe
laws, and the courts, by public assemblage and petition, and by all
proper stimulation of public sentiment : I. Both the legal and
the conventional recognition, establishment, and protection of all
men in the common rights of humanity and of all citizens of the
United States in the full enjoyment of every civil right, without
distinction on account of birth, race, or private social status. 2.
substance.
Or, for another instance, that the demand for
equal civil, including political, rights, is by no
ever it must.
Keeping your vote alive means, also, that
while to be grateful is right and to be ungrateful
is base, you must nevertheless stop voting for
gratitude. The debts of gratitude are sacred,
but no unwise vote can lighten them. A vote
is not a free-will offering to the past; it. is a
debt to the present
Again, keeping your vote alive means voting
on all questions. What makes great parties if
is one of those
a running, not a self-healing sore ;
——
whole Union, "while" to quote again from the
same earlier paper "the greater part of the
wealth and intelligence of the region directly in-
volved held out sincerely, steadfastly, and des-
perately against it and for the preservation of
unequal public privileges and class domination."
" We thought we saw," says Governor Colquitt,
Ii6
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. U/
—
even looked forward though with more longing
than hope — to some indefinite day, when their
own slaves might somehow enter into freedom.
Beyond dispute, then, as to-day, a vast majority
;
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Another great measure which
progressive
accompanied and accompanies the policy
still
be done.
The day in which this truth becomes a popu-
among our white brethren of the
lar conviction
South and among millions in the North whose
conversion waits only on theirs, will be the
brightest, gladdest, best day that ever dawned
on this continent. I believe that dawn is now'
breaking.
154 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT.
VII.
True, we hear voices through the Southern
press crying new schemes for avoiding the sim-
ple necessities of free government: the establish-
ment of a Negro Territory; a disfranchisement
of over half the Negroes by an educational
.qualification at the polls; their total disfranchise-
ment by the repeal of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment; and in the very Senate a proposition to
deport the Negro to Africa at the national
expense, although at the same time and all over
the South, men in the same party from which
the project comes are stating with new frankness
their old doctrine, that though the country shall
never belong to the Negro, the Negro simply
shall belong to the country. But the very for-
lornness of these absurd projects, built, them-
selves, on open confessions that the past is a
failure and that something different must be done
with all speed, is a final admission that the party
pledged to solve the Negro Question without
consulting the Negro, feels that it must change
its policy or drop from under the nation's mis-
placed hopes.
The press of the nation almost with one voice
rejects the scheme of a Negro territory. We
have more Negro territories now than either
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 55
man's vote.
I hold that to prove the moral wrong of a
thing is to prove just so far its practical worth-
lessness. To disfranchise the illiterate is to make
the most defenceless part of a community more
defenceless still. There is,know, an educa-
I
VIII.
had. One
is a means which no generous mind
plain.
Yet I see to-day only one alternative inter-
vening. Of it I shall speak in a moment. But
for this alternative, it seems to me totally in-
compatible with the dignity and honor of this
nation, that, after twelve years of amiable, hope-
ful waiting, it should let itself be kept indefinitely
waiting still for admission to its own simplest
rights by the plausible and eloquent door-
keepers of a do-nothing policy. A despair that
prompts to action and deliverance is better than
any false hope, and if such a despair moves this
nation, this year or next, to the action it has
borne so much to avoid, it can point to these
door-keepers, whether they be of North or South,
and say, the blame of it and the shame of it be
on you I