South Harniss

“ In part, this frame of mind is due to a feeling neatly stated by a Southern banker: “The Southern people are not a bad kind, and a kind word goes a long way with them; they have odd peculiarities; they cannot argue, and as soon as you differ with them, you arouse temper, not on the Negro question especially, but on any.” ”

“ The chief flew back to his camp, Harney in hot pursuit with the infantry.
When Harney was within hailing distance of the camp, he motioned to the Indians to run. They started to do so, and ran directly upon the cavalry. Then the Indians, finding themselves trapped, began a fight for their lives, but they were overwhelmed from the beginning. The battle of Ash Hollow was a cruel massacre of the Brules, but they died bravely. An Indian severely wounded, and supposed to be dead, rose up and shot a soldier. ”

“ In the last twenty-five years great inroads have been made on the Southern forests, and clearing is going on everywhere on a large scale. Nevertheless, a very considerable proportion of the Southern Whites and many Negroes still live in the woods, and have retained some of the habits of the frontier. Population is commonly sparse ”

“ None of the forcible remedies meets the most obvious difficulty in the South—that the present condition of the lower race is not a foundation for great wealth and high prosperity. If the Negro has reached his pitch, if he is to remain at his present average of morals and industry and productivity, the South may well be in despair, for it is far below that of the low Southern White, and farther below that of the Northwestern farmer. The condition of the black is a menace to society—if it must stay at the present level. ”

“ The main reason for this want of touch with the Negroes is an apprehension that any common understanding will assist a social equality which might lead to miscegenation.
The Southern problem, therefore, to state it in a sentence, is how twenty million Whites and ten million Negroes in the Southern states shall make up a community in which one race shall hold most of the property, and all the government, and the other race shall remain content and industrious; in which one gets most of the good things of life and the other does most of the disagreeable work ”

“ I know it has been supposed by certain ill-informed persons, that the south exists only by the countenance and protection of the north. Sir, this is the idlest of all idle and ridiculous fancies that ever entered into the mind of man. In every state of this Union, except one, the free white population actually preponderates; while in the British West India Islands, (where the average white population is less than ten per cent. of the whole,) the slaves are kept in entire subjection: it is preposterous to suppose that the Southern States could ever find the smallest difficulty in this respect. ”

“ In 1907 the Southern press was convinced that a great flow of immigration had set in from the North, but in reality outside of Florida and Texas nearly all colonies of Northerners have been unsuccessful, though there is a slow stream of people, partly from the Northwest, who take up farms in the South and mix with the Southern white population. These people are prone to be dissatisfied with the schools; they are in despair over the wretched domestic service; the women are filled with terror by the lynchings and by the frequent cause of them ”

“ The Southern emigrant to the North finds no door shut to him because he comes from elsewhere; his origin is interesting to the people he meets; and unless very violent in temper and abusive to the section of his adoption, he may criticise his home and set forth the superiority of the Southland without making enemies. ”

“ The North has twenty race problems; the South has but one, which for that very reason is twenty times as serious. In every field of Southern life, social, political, economic, intellectual, the presence of two races divides and weakens. The blacks and the Whites in the South are the two members of a pair of shears, so clumsily put together that they gnash against each other continually. ”

“ Still, on any basis of comparison with the least wealthy states and sections of the North—whether it be made between the total population of equivalent groups or between the white populations only, leaving out of account the productivity of the Negroes, the South is below the national standard of wealth and progress; it grows constantly in accumulations and in productivity, but its yearly additions are less than those of the Northwestern states, and much less than those of the Northeastern states. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are two or three settlements of the same kind in the South, on a smaller scale, as at Goldsboro, Fla., and one in Alabama. Different in type, but a proof of prosperity, are the negro settlements on the Sea Islands; here is no personal leader like Leonard, or Benson, or Montgomery; but on several of the islands is a large group of colored landowners who have been there ever since the Civil War, and whose houses are much superior to the usual negro cabins. While not progressive, they hold on to their land with great tenacity, and are not running into debt. ”

“ Violent, ignorant, and prejudiced discussion of any section of the Union by any other section is, of course, destructive [Pg 79] of national harmony; but the days have gone by when it could be thought unfriendly, hostile, or condemnatory for Northern men to strive to make themselves familiar with the race questions of the South. “We are everyone members of another,” and the whole body politic suffers from the disease of any member. The immigrant in the North is the concern of the Southerner for he is to become part of America. ”

“ These five books are proof not only that there is wide divergence of views, but also that genuine Southern men, strongly loyal to their own section, can set an example of moderation of speech, breadth of view, and willingness to accept and to promote a settlement of the Southern question through the elevation of the people, white and black, who have ultimate power over that question. ”

“ The Indians laughed boisterously. "White man's medicine too strong," they said.
Harney was satisfied that Fort Pierre was too far up river for the best location of a military post, and he set out to find a more suitable one. He spent several months in examining the river and finally decided upon Handys Point, midway between Sioux City and Fort Pierre, where he located and built Fort Randall, which was named for Captain Daniel Randall, former paymaster of the army. Fort Pierre was abandoned, most of the material being floated down the river to be used in the construction of the new fort. ”

“ The Northwestern states have more manufactures than the Southern, but they have more of everything, which indicates industry and prosperity. The obvious reason is that laborers in the South, both white and colored, are inferior in average productive power to Northern laborers; and the obvious remedy is to use every effort to bring up the intelligence, and the value to the community of every element of the population. ”

“ These are cruel and unjust words. It was Ben Hill—the music of whose voice hath not deepened, though now attuned to the symphonies of the skies—who said: “There was a South of secession and slavery—that South is dead; there is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, growing, every hour.”
It was he who named the New South. One of the “upstarts” said in a speech in New York: “In answering the toast to the New South, I accept that name in no disparagement to the Old South. ”

“ Professor Smith’s answer to his own question is: “The South cares nothing, in themselves, for the personal friendships or appreciations of high-placed dignitaries and men of light and leading.” He does not speak for his section; for most intelligent Southern people, however extreme their views, desire to be understood; they want their position to seem humane and logical to their neighbors; they are sure that they are the only people who can be on the right road; but they do not feel that they are approaching a permanent adjustment of race relations. ”

“ No doubt the sense of high breeding, which was common in the South, went beyond mere manners; it played its part in making the struggle of the Southern population, including the "mean whites," in the Civil War one of the most heroic, if one of the most mistaken, in which a whole population has ever been engaged; it went along with integrity and a high average of governing capacity among public men; and it fitted the gentry of the South to contribute, when they should choose, an element of great value to the common life of America. ”

“ Is it prejudice against a low race, or a black race? To say that the white Southerner looks down upon and despises every black Southerner would not be fair, for there is still much personal [Pg 162] liking between members of the two races, and the South is right in claiming that it has a warmer feeling for individual Negroes than Northern people. ”

“ We feel as though we had stood on the outermost edge and caught a glimpse of the wonder-land where nature is working her will in silence and darkness.
Some of the most picturesque and sublime scenery of the South may be found in the regions of Western Virginia, where nature in her wildest mood holds sovereign sway among her everlasting hills, clothed with majestic woods running down to the narrow valleys and winding lands which intersect the mountains. Here in these solitudes, scattered through these lonely regions, live a primitive people, leading a primitive life. ”

“ Listen to the philosophy of Thomas Dixon, Jr., a Christian minister: “If the Negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do North, when the struggle for bread becomes as tragic.... Make the Negro a scientific and successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it will mean a race war.... The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots. ”

“ The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes principally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral. ”

“ He who can give solid, forcible, and declamatory expression to his sentiments and arguments is he who can impress, convince, and win his case.
In Western Australia the name of Mr. Harney seems a synonym for oratorical powers and forensic persuasion. Some competent judges avow that his peer nowhere exists on this island-continent. He has the spontaneity, the fiery eloquence, and the shrewd mother-wit and humour of his native land.
Mr. Harney was born in Dublin in 1865, and passed most of his youth at his father's country seat, Kildteran House, County Waterford. ”

“ This difference of temperament between North and South is not confined to members of the white race. The mental processes of the Southern Negro differ not only from those of the Southern White, but to a considerable degree from those of the Northern Negro; and the African temperament has, in the course of centuries, in some ways reacted upon the minds of the associated white race. ”

“ The agencies of uplift are slow and uncertain and nobody can positively predict that they will do the work. The South, with all its magnificent resources, is far behind the other sections of the Union, both in wealth and productive power. It can only take its proper place in the Union by raising the average character and energy of its people—of all its people—for it cannot be done by improving either race while the other remains stationary. ”

“ No thinking person in the North desires anything but the peaceful removal of the evils which undeniably weigh upon the South. To that end the North might offer something out of its own experience, for it has expert knowledge of race troubles and of ways to solve them. The Indian question ever since the Civil War has been chiefly in the hands of Northern men ”

“ If the thinking people of the South were less willing to share the discussion with the North, it would still be a Northern concern; for the Southern race problem, like the labor unions of the manufacturing North, the distribution of lands in the far West, and the treatment of Mongolians on the Pacific Coast, is nobody’s exclusive property. There must be freedom for the men of every section to discuss every such question ”

“ That Northerners do not all lay claim to such understanding, or hold themselves responsible for race troubles, is admitted by a Southerner of much greater weight, Edgar Gardner Murphy, who has recently said: “Beneath the North’s serious and rightful sense of obligation the South saw only an intolerant ‘interference.’ Beneath the South’s natural suspicion and solicitude the North saw only an indiscriminating enmity to herself and to the negro.” ”

“ Frank laughed.
"It's seldom you speak like this, professor," he said. "You must be in love with the South."
"I am a Northerner, but I think the South very beautiful, and I admire the people of the South more than I can tell. I do not know as they are naturally more gentle and kind-hearted than Northerners, but they are certainly more courteous and chivalrous, despite their quick tempers and more passionate dispositions. Northerners are too brusque. If they ask pardon for rudeness, they do it as if they regretted the breath spent in uttering the words. ”