The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ with those who deny that the negro can ever originate a civilization, and who assert that with the best of educations he remains an

       inferior type of man.'

       [Pg ix]"According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed, cannibalism, and superstition of the most sensual and degrading character. Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly rapid."[1]

       In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their most noticeable institutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.

       Institutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions, is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution, and is now[Pg x] about to crown

       its grand work with direct legislation, it is like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864 count as a gold one.

       And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding progress.

       Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair samples of the average negro of the south. Dr.

       3

       Washington and Professor DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon snub

       to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See how this coalblack and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This man, almost white, is to[Pg xi] them a coalblack, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas, Douglass, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood does not do far better?

       I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the bulldog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bulldog was visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the desired trait of the bulldog. Who can say that there is not among the professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a lusus naturae.

       The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is

       hardly involved in the race question.

       The negroes in the south outside of the upper class--the latter not amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently assume that our[Pg xii] weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while. The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same powers are now in

       both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks, of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable in

       marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana. These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close of the century, if this separation has not been made long before, Professor Willcox's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.

       Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the south do him justice and loving[Pg xiii] kindness, by trans-

       planting him into favorable environment.

       2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It mustered, not assassins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged, but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, dis-banded two or three months later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men--bogus Ku Klux, as we, the genuine, called them--did afterwards. The exalted glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan's desert. It becomes dearer in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the bloody pine thicket at First Manassas, where it outfought four times its own number; at Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson's brigade, coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing back Mahone, СКАЧАТЬ