Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

It would not have been American, however, not to have maintained some color discrimination, however petty.

Broken limbs, broken heads, the mangling of bodies, all prove that it was a contest between enraged men: on the one side from hatred to a race; and on the other, desire for self-preservation, revenge for past grievances and the inhuman murder of their comrades.

How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!

In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.

All observers spoke of the fact that the slaves were slow and churlish; that they wasted material and malingered at their work. Of course, they did. This was not racial but economic. It was the answer of any group of laborers forced down to the last ditch. They might be made to work continuously but no power could make them work well.

The whites might give suffrage to the Negroes, but if the Negroes gave suffrage to the whites, it would result in the Negro losing it.

Here were grown, sensible men arguing about a written form of government adopted ninety years before, when men did not believe that slavery could outlive their generation in this country, or that civil war could possibly be its result; when no man foresaw the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; and yet now, with incantation and abracadabra, the leaders of the nation tried to peer back into the magic crystal, and out of a bit of paper called the Constitution, find eternal and immutable law laid down for their guidance forever and ever, Amen!

It made little difference what laws were made so long as their interpretation by the courts and administration was dictated by capital.

[F]or 250 years the Negroes had worked on this land, and by every analogy in history, when they were emancipated the land ought to have belonged in large part to the workers.

Take out the accusation of being black, which is still a crime in the United States, and there remains in such tirades as this only a protest against ignorance and poverty presuming to rule intelligence and wealth; and yet, under the circumstances, how else was the necessary economic and social revolution to be effected?

When citizens undertake to claim a right for themselves, they must claim it as a principle, and therefore speak in the name of all who are deprived of the same immunities. As long as they do not consider the question from a high standpoint, as long as they overlook the principle for a mere expediency, they will have no force whatever.

If the Northern fanatics are the means with which God wishes to confer upon us these rights, I will take the rights whether they or the devil brought them to us. I know that we have them.

It may be said, then, that the argument for giving the right to vote to the mass of the poor and ignorant still stands as defensible, without for a moment denying that there should not be such a class in a civilized community; but if the class is there, the fault is the fault of the community and the community must suffer and pay for it.

If the majority did not want Negro rule, or Negro participation in government, the majority was right, and they would not allow themselves to stop and ask how that majority was made.

The freedmen are peaceable and inoffensive; yet if the whites continue to make it all their lives are worth to go through the country, as free people have the right to do, they will goad them to that point at which submission and patience cease to be a virtue.

In a republic, the people precede their government.

The break was begun by the extraordinary corruption, graft and theft that became more and more evident in the country from 1868 on, as a result of the wild idea that industry and progress for the people of the United States were compatible with the selfish sequestration of profit for private individuals and powerful corporations.

No more idiotic program could be laid down than to require a people follow a written rule of government 90 years old, if that rule had been definitely broken in order to preserve the unity of the government and to destroy an economic anachronism. In such a crisis legalists may insist that consistency with precedent is more important than firm and far-sighted rebuilding. But manifestly, it is not. Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain commonsense.

Here then came a plain question of definition: was it a crime, in the judgment of the people of the United States in 1867, for a President to block the overwhelming will of a successful majority of voters during a period of nearly three years?

[N]o history is accurate and no “political science” scientific that starts with the gratuitous assumption that the Negro race has been proven incapable of modern civilization.

During the organization of the convention, it was moved that the word “colored” be added to the name of each Negro delegate. Thereupon, the Reverend James Lynch, a colored man, afterward Secretary of State, moved to amend it so that the color of each delegate’s hair should be added also.

There was here as in South Carolina the same charge against this convention and against succeeding legislatures, that they did not sufficiently represent wealth; they represented poverty; and the majority of the members, white and black, were not taxpayers. They represented labor, and were voting and working as far as they intelligently could to improve their condition and not to increase the profits of the hirers of labor.

The dictatorship of property, as represented by the wild freebooting from the close of the war to the panic, had proven to many minds that free competition in industry was not going to bring proper control and development.

Great corporations, through their control of new capital, began to establish a super-government. On the one hand, they crushed the robber-barons, the thieves and the grafters, and thus appeased those of the old school who demanded the old standards of personal honesty. Secondly, they made treaty with the petty bourgeoisie by guarantying them reasonable and certain income from their investments, while they gradually deprived them of real control in industry. And finally, they made treaty with labor by dealing with it as a powerful, determined unit and dividing it up into skilled union labor, with which the new industry shared profit in the shape of higher wage and other privileges, and a great reservoir of common and foreign labor which it kept at work at low wages with the threat of starvation and with police control.

It was not, then, that the post-bellum South could not produce wealth with free labor; it was the far more fundamental question as to whom this wealth was to belong to and for whose interests laborers were to work.

The charge against the poor, frequent as it always is in democratic movements, is not valid. The first attempt of a democracy which includes the previously disenfranchised poor is to redistribute wealth and income, and this is exactly what the black South attempted. The theory is that the wealth and the current income of the wealthy ruling class does not belong to them entirely, but is the product of the work and striving of the great millions; and that, therefore, these millions ought to have a voice in its more equitable distribution. And if this is true in modern countries, like France and England and Germany, how much more true was it in the South after the war where the poorest class represented the most extreme case of theft of labor that the world can conceive; namely, chattel slavery?
On the other hand, there is not the slightest doubt but that the South had a right to demand of the nation that the whole of the burden of this readjustment of wealth should not fall upon the planters; guilty as they were of supreme exploitation of labor, their guilt was shared by the rest of the nation, just as the rest of the nation had for centuries shared the profits of the slave system. It would have been fair and just for the cost of emancipating the slaves and giving them land to be equitably shared by the whole of the United States.

It may be contended that the presence of a mass of unlettered and inexperienced voters in a state makes bribery and graft easier and more capable of misuse by malign elements. This is true. But the question is, is the situation any better if ignorance and poverty are permanently disenfranchised? The whole answer of modern industrial conditions is—no, it is not. And the only alternative, therefore, is the one continually urged by Sumner, Philips and Stevens: if ignorance is dangerous—instruct it. If poverty is the cause of stealing and crime, increase the income of the masses.

Southerners argued that if the Negro was disenfranchised, normal political life would be possible for the South. They did not realize that a living working class can never lose its political power and that all they did in 1876 was to transfer that political power from the hands of labor to the hands of capital, where it has been concentrated ever since.

Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right.

He was trained to make profits. He used his profits to write history.

We were eight years in power.