Thomas Nelson Page

“ Finally, and as the only sound foundation for the whole system of education, the Negro must be taught the great elementary truths of morality and duty. Until he is so established in these that he claims to be on this ground the equal of the white, he can never be his equal on any other ground. When he is the equal of the white, it will make itself known. Until then, he is fighting not the white race, but a law of nature, universal and inexorable—that races rise or fall according to their character. ”

“ Against those who availed themselves of the opportunities offered them to escape from the bondage of domestic slavery may be put the great body of the Negro race who, whether from inability to grasp the vastness of the boon of liberty held out to them, or from fear of the ills they knew not of, or from sheer content with a life where the toil was not drudgery and the flesh-pots overbalanced the idea of freedom, not only held fast to their masters, but took sides with them with a quickened feeling and a deepened affection. ”

“ Education is now the talisman—the desire and aim of all the vast influx of immigrants who come within our gates. The children of the foreign-born population of the country are, by the last census, less illiterate, even in the North, than those of the native-born. Unless we furnish these people good schools, we can never hope to get a good class of immigrants to come to us. Without good schools, if we get any, it will be only the poorest class. And nothing would help us more in the South than to get in the best class. ”

“ I know well all the arguments against educating the Negroes. I know the struggle that the South made in the days of her poverty to educate that race, even at the expense of her white children; expending upon them, out of taxes levied by the whites on the property of the whites, over $110,000,000, though over a fifth of the whites were left in ignorance. [101] I know the disappointment from which she has suffered. What is charged as to the educated Negro’s being just educated enough to make him worthless as a laborer and leave him useless for anything else has in it often too much truth. ”

“ The North believed that the Negro was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled and compelled to work. ”

“ Lincoln has been so generally declared to be the emancipator of the Negro race that it is probable the facts in all their significance will never be generally received. The abolition of slavery was no doubt his desire; but the preservation of the Union was his passion. And, whatever Mr. Lincoln may have felt on the subject of emancipation, he was too good a lawyer and too sound a statesman to act with the inconsiderate haste that has usually been accredited him. It was rather what he might do than what he actually did that alarmed the South and brought about secession. ”

“ They are lovers of home. They have not the mean traits which grow up somewhere in places where money-making is the chief end of life. They have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition and without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired and without getting diverted, can pursue a great public object, in and out, year after year and generation after generation.
This is the race which the Negro confronts. It is a race which, whatever perils have impended, has always faced them with a steadfast mind. ”

“ And after nearly forty years, in which money, brains, philanthropy, and unceasing effort have been poured out lavishly, the most that we have gotten out of it is the experience that forty years have given, and a sad experience it is. The best-informed, the most clear-sighted and straight-thinking men of the North admit sadly that the experiment of Negro suffrage, entered into with so much enthusiasm and sustained at so frightful a cost, has proved a failure, as those who alone knew the Negro when the experiment was undertaken prophesied it must, in the nature of things, prove. ”

“ One other reason is commonly overlooked. The instinct for command of the white race—at least, of that section to which the whites of this country belong—is a wonderful thing: the serene self-confidence which reckons no opposition, but drives straight for the highest place, is impressive. It made the race in the past; it has preserved it in our time. The Negroes knew the courage and constancy of their masters. They had had abundant proof of them for generations, and their masters were now in arms.
The failure of a servile population to rise against their masters in time of war is no new thing. ”

“ Southerners of every class and calling, without exception, bear witness to the depressing fact that, leaving out the small upper fraction, the Negro race has not advanced at all in morality.
Unhappily, the fountain is tainted at the source. The great body of the race have scarcely any notion of the foundation principles of pure family life. They appear not only to have no idea of morality, but to lack any instinct upon which such an idea can be founded. It is usually charged that slavery was responsible for the absence of morality throughout the race. ”

“ He should be taught that one of the strongest elements in racial development is purity of family life; he should be taught that the duties of citizenship are much more than the ability to cast a ballot, or even to hold an office; that elevation to superiority among the people of his own race is of far greater moment to him at this time than external equality with another race, and that true superiority is founded on character. ”

“ Can any deflection whatsoever, no matter how inexorable the occasion, from the path of absolute rectitude be tolerated without inflicting an injury [Pg 212] on that sense of justice and right, which, allied to unflinching courage, constitutes a nation’s virtue? Who will say that the moral sense of our people now is as lofty as it was in the days of our fathers, when men voted with uplifted faces for the candidate of their choice? ”

“ The Negro was invested with absolute power, and turned loose. He selected his rulers. The entire weight of the government—an immense force—was under the misapprehension, born of the passion which then reigned, thrown blindly in the Negroes’ favor; whatever they asserted was believed; whatever they demanded was done; the ballot was given them, and all the forms established by generations of Caucasian patriots and jurists, and consecrated by centuries of Caucasian blood, were solemnly set up and solemnly followed. The Negro at least then selected his own rulers. ”

“ The best service the Negro’s best friend can render him is to tell him the truth. The direst injury the Negro’s worst enemy can do him is to perpetuate hostility between him and the Southern White. Left to themselves they would settle the question along economic lines, and this it must come to at last.
However one side or the other may dogmatize, it is safe to assume that any final settlement of the problem must be one that will commend itself to the body of the intelligent whites at the South. ”

“ This upper fraction of the race, relieved from the incubus of the great body which they have been forced to carry as it were on their backs, would inevitably secure political representation in the South precisely as they have secured it in the North. They would before long probably have the intelligence to divide upon all economic questions just as any other race divides, and the whites, released from the necessity of maintaining a solidarity, would likewise be free to divide, in which case there would always be an inducement to secure rather than to repress the Negro vote. ”

“ Cable, after negativing the Southern idea of the question, declares: “The problem is whether American citizens shall not enjoy equal rights in the choice of their rulers. It is not a question of the Negro’s right to rule. It is simply a question of their right to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably do so now.” This is quoted with approval by even so liberal and well-informed a thinker as the Rev. Henry M. Field, who certainly bears only good-will to the South, as to the rest of mankind. ”

“ The South, knowing that he is not oppressed, draws therefrom the juster inference that he naturally, wilfully, and inevitably allies himself against the White simply upon a race line and stands, irrespective of reason, in persistent opposition to all measures which the White advocates.
The North sees in the Negro’s attitude only the proper and laudable aspiration of a citizen [Pg 248] and a man; the South detects therein a desire to dominate, a menace to all that the Anglo-American race has effected on this continent, and to the hopes in which that race established this nation. ”

“ Civilization first lit her golden torch upon her borders. The swelling waters of the Nile spread through a lettered and partly enlightened people when the Tiber crept through swamps and wilderness; when the Acropolis was a wild, and the seven hills of the Eternal City a range for wolves, Thebes and Memphis and Heliopolis contained a civilization which in some of its manifestations has never been equalled since. ”

“ In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.
It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of any intellectual development. ”

“ Not the least evil of the solidifying of the Negro race during the period of reconstruction was the destruction of all distinctions between virtue and vice, as a qualification for civic promotion. After thirty years the upright, law-abiding, conservative Negro is bound by that manacle to the thief and the evil-liver, and strangely enough he mainly appears unwilling to help break the shackles which hold him down. ”

“ The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. ”

“ It has long appeared to the writer that the [Pg 159] prime necessity of the Negroes is to learn to distinguish between Negroes and Negroes; between the law-abiding and self-respecting Negro and the lawbreaker and blackguard; between the honest man and the thief; the decent man and the dive-frequenter; the good citizen and the “tough”—in other words, to create for themselves some standard of virtue and right living for both men and women according to which they shall be classified. ”

“ Viewing the matter economically, the Negro race, like every other race, must be of far more value to the country in which it is placed, if the Negro is properly educated, elevated, and trained, than if he is [Pg 297] allowed to remain in ignorance and degradation. He is a greater peril to the community in which he lives if he remains in ignorance and degradation than if he is enlightened. If the South expects ever to compete with the North, she must educate and train her population, and, in my judgment, not merely her white population, but her entire population. ”

“ How would Delaware, which requires no qualification for the suffrage, except that a resident voter shall have paid a registration fee of $1, be discriminated against by the fact that California provides that only those may vote who can read the Constitution in English and can write his name; or, how are the people of Colorado, where women, as well as men vote, injured by the fact that only men vote in Massachusetts and Virginia? ”

“ Lynching does not end ravishing, and that is the prime necessity. Most right-thinking men are agreed as to this. Indeed, lynching, through lacking the supreme principle of law, the deliberateness from which is supposed to come the certainty of identification, fails utterly to meet the necessity of the case even as a deterrent, though it must be admitted that there are a respectable number of thoughtful men who dissent from this view. The growth of a sentiment which, at least, condones lynching as a punishment for assaults on women is a significant and distressing fact. ”

“ After being sued and pursued by every process of law which a New England community could devise, she was finally driven forth into exile in Kansas.
She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous. ”