Edward Winslow Gilliam

“ A body of four million slaves, ignorant, uncivilized, and trained in habits of dependence, suddenly set free, then invested with the ballot, and intoxicated with political power, then checked, and in many instances violently checked, by the necessary and wholesome self-assertion of the white race, that they should have increased as they have done is astonishing, and can be accounted for only by the remarkable fecundity of the African. ”

“ This dark, swelling, muttering mass along the social horizon, gathering strength with education, and ambitious to rise, will grow increasingly restless and sullen under repression, until at length conscious, through numbers, of superior power, it will assert that power destructively, and, bursting forth like an angry, furious cloud, avenge, in tumult and disorder, the social law broken against it. ”

“ Whatever civic capability the blacks may have, it is now in germ; whatever governing aptitude the race may possess, it is at present dormant. In the history of nations it has nowhere, as yet, been exhibited. If this race in the United States is improving, its improvement, as was to have been expected, is slow; and in every political virtue it will still be vastly below the whites, when in voting strength its fecundity will have put it vastly beyond them—so far beyond as to overcome every counter-influence, and give the political reins entirely into its hands. ”

“ Wealth and intelligence gave them the victory, as it ever will, where numbers approach an equality—a victory that does not mean injury to the blacks, but which is the pledge for good government and order—the proof whereof is the present peaceful and prosperous condition of the Southern States, for the blacks no less than for the whites, compared with their state of wretchedness, under negro political rule, in the days following immediately upon the close of the war. ”

“ The status of the black population, as a distinct and alien race, condemns the race to remain, in perpetuum, the laboring class. If its blood can not commingle with that of the whites, social advancement ceases at an early stage; the higher social planes are incapable of attainment; whereby is broken a fundamental social law that allows to the individual full freedom to rise or fall in the social scale, without hindrance from race prejudice or prestige. ”

“ But what will the upshot be, when the black population, advancing on the white, finally outnumbers it? The outlook is most serious. It is a repetition of the Israelites in Egypt, a lower and laboring class gaining in population on the upper, and, as a distinct and alien race, causing apprehensions to the Egyptians. There is a point at which mere numbers must prevail over wealth, intelligence, and prestige combined. Unless relief comes, when that point approaches, woes await the land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They mingle freely with the pure African on terms of perfect equality, have the African instinct, and make a great factor in determining the average progress of the race.
This laboring class, working upward along the social cycle, meets, almost on the threshold of development, an impassable barrier. With growing aspirations incapable of being realized, they are doomed to remain where they have been, and be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Individuals here and there, by force of peculiar talent and fortunate circumstances, break through the opposing obstacle, and attain high positions ”

“ Since the Southern States have been under the rule of its intelligent population, the blacks, as a whole, and in the main, have been free in the exercise of political rights; and, moreover, they have prospered as never before. The underlying cause of the exodus fever, stimulated to some extent by railroad men and other side agencies, is the broken social law obstructing the upward tendency of the laboring class. Naturally they are uneasy and restless at the prospect of being held perpetually in one place, and made the bottom caste under a social status professedly free. ”

“ They are tolerated by reason of their fewness. The mass of the blacks are held back in their state of toil. It is the mandate of American instinct.
We say American instinct—which is, that America is for Americans, not for German, Irish, or African, as such. The German here rises and rules, not as a German; nor the Irishman as an Irishman. When the German gets out his naturalization papers, he theoretically gets out of his German skin. Practically, he gets out of it in a generation or two, through intermarriage and association; mingles freely and equally with the mass of population ”

“ Disappearing in the mass of population, he must lose the African cast, and transform himself, by intermarriage and social association, into an actual American; for he could be no American, however the letter of the law might read, who, after the lapse of a century, should retain the exclusive hue and affinity of a stranger race. But this transformation is impossible, seeing the blacks stand apart from the whites, and make a distinct and alien people. Any advancement of the blacks is an advancement of the African, as such ”

“ Some would fain deem the danger imaginary; and, even when fully realized, the trouble, in its ultimate and worst forms, is comparatively so remote that there is a tendency to forget it, or at least to transfer its consideration to another day and generation. The remoteness of an evil, however, does not carry with it remoteness in applying the remedy. Let American statesmen of the present day be looking in the direction we have indicated. A subject so vast and so momentous it is the part of wisdom to regard before immediate threatenings compel consideration. ”

“ Emancipation found the negro without the master's care (and, as a body, slaveholders, at least from motives of self-interest, were humane) , without the customary oversight and medical attention, dependent, not self-reliant. No wonder that many of the negroes have been worse off than under their former bondage; that the burden of life has been so often excessive; that infanticide has been so often resorted to, to lessen it; and that death from want and exposure has been so exceptionally frequent. ”

“ 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 can not be—a fusion like this between whites and blacks. Account for it as we may, the antipathy is a palpable fact which no one fails to recognize—an antipathy not less strong among the Northern than among the Southern whites. ”

“ The blacks are an improving race, and the throb of aspiration is quickening. Progress with the pure African is, indeed, slow. How could it be otherwise? A long dark night of barbarous ignorance in his native land, succeeded on these shores by nearly a century of servitude, wherein letters were denied him, and improvident, unthrifty habits necessarily engendered, could rapid progress for the race, under these circumstances, be rationally expected? Advancement in mental training and in economic science must needs be slow—but there is advancement. ”

“ Referring to the figures of the last decade, belonging to the States, it is further seen that, while the gain in all these States, both for white and black, is remarkably high, the gain in several instances—as in the case of Arkansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi (for the blacks) —is too high to be credible, transcending as it does the natural procreative power of the most prolific race. (The reader will remember that from 1870 to 1880 the population of these States received little or no accession from immigration.) ”

“ We take it for a certainty that a distinct and alien race like the blacks will always, in the main, vote together. Why they all are now Republicans is readily seen. But should present political parties break up, and others be formed on new issues, the blacks would still naturally go as a body. The circumstances under which they live here, compelling them to stand together socially, will also morally compel them to stand together politically. ”

“ The republic is so rich and so prosperous, and its future, from some stand-points, so fair, that it seems invidious, perhaps, to mar the picture and reveal a frightful evil slowly developing in its bosom. ”

“ That is the healthiest society which is the freest, which gives the fullest play to individual intelligence and energy; and in such a social state we note a tendency on the part of the rich upper class to sink, and the poor laboring class to rise; we observe therein a social cycle at whose completion the rich and the poor, the upper and the lower orders, are found, as a whole, to have changed places. ”

“ The fusion of races is the resultant from social equality and intermarriage, and the barrier to this here is insurmountable. The human species presents three grand varieties, marked off by color—white, yellow, and black. ”

“ The sons of the rich eat daintily, exercise daintily, keep late hours for resting and rising, are self-indulgent and extravagant. There are, of course, exceptions. Undoubtedly, however, the surroundings of the sons of wealth create tendencies this way, toward effeminacy of body and uneconomical habits of mind. These are downward tendencies, and, pressing through a cycle of years, bring the descendants of the rich, as a class, to the social bottom. ”

“ The poor, on the other hand, are compelled, by their condition of life, to strength-giving exercise, and careful, saving methods in the management of means. Robust bodies and thrifty ways give upward tendencies, which, acting through the social cycle, lift the descendants of these poor to the higher planes. Taking men in the mass, tendencies and results are this way.
Now, as regards the blacks, this fundamental law is broken, and the issue, in a state of society theoretically free, is approaching disorder. ”

“ The gain for the whites in the last decade is very nearly thirty per cent. This is to be docked in the Southern States to the extent of five per cent for the error in the census of 1870. Since, however, this error appertains only to the twelve million Southern whites, and the census in regard to the thirty million Northern whites is accepted as correct, the rate of increase for the total white population is a fraction under twenty-nine per cent. Of this at least nine per cent should be attributed to immigration. ”

“ One at the first, in origin and color, 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, crystallized into permanent characteristics. Social affinity exists among the families of these three groups. The groups themselves stand rigidly apart. The Irish, German, French, etc., who come to these shores, readily intermarry among themselves and with the native population. ”

“ It is estimated that five per cent from the rate of gain for the entire Southern blacks, as by census for 1880, is a fair allowance for this error, making their real gain about thirty per cent. Yet, as an obvious consideration points to the conclusion that the blacks will for the future develop in the South under conditions more and more favorable, it is not unreasonable to think that, in subsequent decades, this five per cent will be regained. ”

“ Notwithstanding the war-engendered bitterness, a large white minority, if not a majority, at the South—partly the remnants of the old-line Whigs who antagonized the political tenets connected with the war's beginning, partly converts to results which force had imposed, partly recruits from moribund Democracy—these were ready, in good faith, to accept the new order of affairs, and act with Republicanism ”

“ The white population, increasing at the rate of twenty per cent in ten years, or two per cent per annum, doubles itself every thirty-five years. The black, increasing at the rate of thirty-five per cent in ten years, or three and a half per cent per annum, doubles itself in twenty years. ”

“ Like food incapable of digestion, and which lies in the stomach only stimulative of disease, he remained in the body politic a foreign element, without opportunity or power of assimilation, and a perpetual source of alarm. ”

“ The advancement of the blacks, therefore, becomes a menace to the whites. No two free races, remaining distinctly apart, can advance side by side, without a struggle for supremacy. The thing is impossible. ”

“ Immigration is now, and for a year or two past has been, largely in excess of this figure, but probably not for the past decade; and the resultant is a gain of twenty per cent for the entire native white population. ”

“ In the case of a laboring woman the child-bearing period is greater by a number of years than in one more delicately reared. Again, in estimating fecundity, the pain and danger attendant upon parturition are factors, and its comparative ease to the laboring woman, contrasted with the profound and long-continued prostration it brings to the lady of tender palms and jeweled fingers, is well known. ”

“ The whites would hold (1) that, while America is a nation governed by majorities, yet by those who framed the Constitution it was never intended that a race brought here as slaves, an inferior race, one kept distinct by this very inferiority, should, merely through a superior fecundity, become politically supreme, and lord it over the land. ”

“ It is seen that over the United States the gain for the whites has been twenty-nine per cent, that for the blacks thirty-four per cent, and that the latter is by much the highest figure reached by the blacks in the several decades. ”

“ We must again ask the question, What, from this standpoint, will the upshot be when the blacks numerically will so far exceed the whites as to overcome the vantage that the superior wealth and intelligence of the latter now give them? ”