Читать книгу Your Negro Neighbor - Benjamin Brawley - Страница 2

It was in August, 1619, that a Dutch vessel brought to Jamestown, Va., twenty Negroes, who were sold into servitude. While this event definitely signalized the coming of the Negro for permanent residence within the limits of what is now the United States, it by no means marked his first coming to this country. The records of the Negro extend as far back as the voyages of Columbus. Within a few years after the visits of the great explorer there were several Negroes in the West Indies, and in 1513 thirty assisted Balboa in the building of the first ships made on the Pacific Coast. One of the four survivors of the ill-starred expedition of De Narvaez in 1527 was the Negro Estevanico, to whom belongs the credit of the discovery of the Zuñi Indians and of New Mexico. Nothing from these early years, however, exercised any abiding influence on the history of the Negro in the United States.

The status of the Negro after 1619 was for several decades complicated by the system of indentured labor known as servitude. This applied especially to white servants brought from England; but the first Negroes brought to the country technically fell into the system. According to the New International Encyclopedia, "Servitude became slavery when to such incidents as alienation, disfranchisement, whipping, and limited marriage, were added those of perpetual service and a denial of civil, juridical, marital and property rights as well as the denial of the possession of children." While legislation was enacted earlier in Massachusetts, it was Virginia that in 1661 really led the way for the South in the definite recognition of slavery as a system by saying that Negroes were "incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time." The next year the same colony enacted that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother, which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary; and thus the system definitely gained a foothold in the oldest of the colonies.

It must not be supposed that the institution of slavery was fastened on the colonies without many doubts and fears. As early as 1688 the Germantown Quakers made a formal protest against the barter of human beings, and moral sentiment developed in other places as well as in Pennsylvania. In the far South, especially in the colony of South Carolina, where the slaves eventually outnumbered the white people, the constant fear of insurrections led to the imposition of heavier and heavier fines on those brought into the country; and for one reason or another Virginia before 1772 passed thirty-three acts looking toward the prohibition of the importation of slaves. Nothing, however, was able to stand in the way of the cupidity of Englishmen who were gaining riches by the traffic; economic considerations were as potent two hundred years ago as now. In the course of the eighteenth century slavery grew by leaps and bounds. By the time of the first regular census in 1790 there were 757,208 Negroes in the states, 19.3 per cent. of the total population. Fifty-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven of these were those who in one way or another had become free. It is important to note that the percentage of total population has never been higher than 19.3. It has in fact steadily declined since 1790, the common figure for recent years being 11 per cent.

As a race there was little to be remarked of the Negro in the colonial period. To those in bondage there was little outlook. Occasionally there was an attempt at an insurrection; but nothing of first rate importance materialized. In 1741 there was a very unhappy panic in New York, then a prosperous town of ten thousand inhabitants. Nine fires in rapid succession led to the report that the Negroes were conspiring to burn the city. All of the eight lawyers of the town appeared against the defendants, who had no counsel and who were convicted on most insufficient evidence. Before the fury was over, fourteen of the Negroes were burned, eighteen hanged, and seventy-one deported.

Any evidence of progress in this period would of course have to be found among the free Negroes. The position of these people was a very anomalous one. In the South especially very harsh laws were passed against them; but very frequently these were not enforced. In general the class was regarded as idle and shiftless and a breeder of mischief. More and more, however, individuals made their way in gainful occupations. The free Negro might become skilled at a trade; he might buy land; he might even buy slaves; and he might have one gun with which to protect his home. Liberty, however, genuine liberty, he did not possess. In all the finer things of life, the things that make life worth living, the lot that was his was only less hard than that of the slave.

The general period of the Revolution was one of idealism. Humanitarianism and liberalism were in the air, and both principles were exerting a profound influence on English literature and life. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England, thrilled all English-speaking people by handing down from the Court of King's Bench the decision that as soon as a slave set foot upon the soil of England he became free. The logic of the position of the patriots, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, naturally forced them to defend liberty at all times; and by the time the convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States met in Philadelphia, at least two of the original thirteen states (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) had positively prohibited slavery, while in three others (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) gradual abolition was in progress. Under the influence of commercialism and industrialism, however, great convictions gradually declined; and at least two of the three great compromises that entered into the Constitution were a concession to the slave-holding South. Then across the page of history flashed the brilliant figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Negro race to obtain its first independent colony outside of the continent of Africa. In America the influence of the chieftain became one of the reasons for the cheap selling of Louisiana, and rendered more certain the prohibition of the slave-trade at the end of 1807. A wave of fear swept over the South, and Georgia and the Carolinas at once passed repressive measures designed especially to restrict the importation of Negroes from the West Indies.

All-potent, however, proved the cotton-gin. Almost suddenly Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana appeared on the map. By 1830 the exports of what then comprised the Southern states amounted to $32,000,000, and this section had not less than $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves. As a system of labor, however, in spite of seeming advantages, slavery was not slow in revealing its shortcomings. Its ultimate effects on the South were disastrous. As Rhodes says, "It needed no extensive marshaling of statistics to prove that the welfare of the North was greater than that of the South. Two simple facts, everywhere admitted, were of so far-reaching moment that they amounted to irrefragable demonstration. The emigration from the slave states was much larger than the movement in the other direction; and the South repelled the industrious emigrants who came from Europe, while the North attracted them." It was the rich planter rather than the white man of slender means who profited by slavery, wealth being more and more concentrated in the hands of a few; and in 1860, 41 per cent. of the white men who had been born in South Carolina were living in other states. More and more the South realized that she was not keeping pace with the country's development; and one of her own sons, speaking "simply as the voice of the non-slaveholding whites of the South," set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than that of the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and in short that the system was harmful in every way. Helper's book was proscribed in some quarters; nevertheless it succeeded because, in spite of the fact that it did not rest on the broadest principles of humanity, it did attempt to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.

Meanwhile the sections were being arrayed against each other. The first fugitive slave law had been passed in 1793. The period 1820-60 was marked by five great aggressive steps on the part of the slave power: the Missouri Compromise (1820), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854), and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). One after another appeared Lundy and Garrison, Parker and Birney, Whittier and Lovejoy, Phillips and Sumner, Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the South replied to the Underground Railroad with a virtual reopening of the slave-trade; John Brown made a raid on Harper's Ferry; and then came the appeal to arms.

And what of the Negro himself in all this period of turmoil and tumult? The inner life of the race was one of furious ferment. Already were there sharp cries for vengeance, for economic freedom, and for the immediate granting of the full privileges of citizenship; and on the other hand there were those who tried to look far into the future with an air of conservatism and philosophy. Naturally there was the appeal to force; the only wonder is that there was not more of this. As early as 1687 a conspiracy among the Negroes in the Northern Neck in Virginia was detected just in time to prevent slaughter. In Surry County in 1710 there was a similar plot, betrayed by one of the conspirators. An attempt in New York in 1712 resulted in the execution of many Negroes. In 1740 some slaves on the coast of South Carolina, under the lead of one of their number named Cato, began an indiscriminate slaughter of the white people in which many lives were lost. Somewhat more ambitious was the effort made in Richmond in 1800 and known as Gabriel's Insurrection. In 1822 an unusually intelligent Negro, Denmark Vesey, the deepest thinker of all Negro insurrectionists, conceived a plan that contemplated nothing less than the total annihilation of the people of Charleston. His plot was divulged, and as a result thirty-five men were executed and thirty-seven banished. For the magnitude of its plan, the care with which it was matured, and the faithfulness of the leaders to one another, Vesey's insurrection was never equaled by a similar attempt for freedom in the United States. Nine years later, however, Nat Turner, the type of the emotional insurrectionist, with the assistance of five other men, actually killed fifty-seven white people before he was stopped. The effect of this revolt upon legislation was immediate. Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and other states at once passed harshly repressive measures.

Less direct than open revolt, but more effective sometimes, was escape by running away. In general the slaves directed their way to the North or to the swamps such as those in Virginia and Florida. The Dismal Swamp became a famous hiding-place. Soldiers never ventured into the colony, and bloodhounds sent thither did not return. The first Seminole War was very largely caused by fugitives who had been befriended by the Indians, and the second was even more directly so caused than the first.

In the ordinary social life of the Negro, however, the decade after Nat Turner's insurrection was one of the most trying in the history of the race in America. Repressive measures in the Southern states have just been remarked. In the North the free Negro was beginning to feel the force of economic ostracism. In Ohio no Negro was allowed to settle unless he gave bond for his support. When this law and others of similar import began to be put in force in 1829, serious riots prevailed in Cincinnati for three days, in the course of which several Negroes were killed. Mobs in Philadelphia at various times within the period also murdered Negroes.

Meanwhile migration was strongly urged in some quarters as a solution of the problem. Says Dr. DuBois: "As early as 1788 a Negro union of Newport, Rhode Island, had proposed a general exodus to Africa. John and Paul Cuffe, after petitioning for the right to vote in 1780, started in 1815 for Africa, organizing an expedition at their own expense which cost four thousand dollars. Lott Carey organized the African Mission Society in 1813, and the first Negro college graduate went to Liberia in 1829 and became superintendent of public schools… About two thousand black emigrants eventually settled in Hayti."

Even after the Civil War migration efforts were renewed, the Baptists and the Methodists of South Carolina joining hands in 1877 in the formation of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Company. As early as 1833, however, in his pamphlet entitled "Thoughts on African Colonization," Garrison showed the futility of the whole plan as a means of solving the problem of the Negro in the United States, and time has justified his view.

Gradually, in spite of all the discouraging circumstances, hope appeared on the horizon. England emancipated the slaves in her colonies in 1833, and more and more conventions of free Negroes showed an interest in the welfare of the race. A strong foothold began to be gained in certain occupations, such as those of the barber and caterer. Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass appeared on the public platform; the poems of Phillis Wheatley ran through three new editions within four years; Elizabeth Greenfield sang before the royalty of Europe; and the African Methodist Church began to show what it was possible for the Negro to do in organization. By 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Law, when things were looking especially dark, the turning of the tide was much nearer than most people imagined. The South was still triumphant; but each new victory had to be more fiercely fought for than the last, and awakened stronger and stronger elements of opposition.

Into the crucible of war of course fell not only slavery, but every other great question of interest to the American people. Free labor, free speech, woman suffrage, the authority of the Federal Government, were all at stake as well as the cause of the Negro. So far as the Negro himself was concerned, one of the first questions that the Northern generals had to settle was what to do with the fugitive slaves that flocked to their standards. In May, 1861, while in command at Fortress Monroe, Major-General Benjamin F. Butler put such men to work, justifying their retention on the ground that, being of service to the enemy for purposes of war, they were, like guns, powder, etc., "contraband of war," and could not be reclaimed. On August 30th of this year Major-General John C. Frémont, in command in Missouri, placed the state under martial law and declared the slaves there emancipated. The administration was embarrassed, Frémont's order was annulled, and he was relieved of his command. The next May, however, Major-General David Hunter, in charge of the Department of the South, issued his famous order freeing the slaves in his territory, and thus brought to general attention the matter of the employment of Negro soldiers in the Union armies. The Confederate government outlawed Hunter, Lincoln annulled his order, and the grace of the nation was again saved; but in the meantime a new situation had arisen. While Brigadier-General John W. Phelps was taking part in the expedition against New Orleans, a large sugar-planter near the city, disgusted with Federal interference with the affairs of his plantation, drove all the slaves away, telling them to go to their friends, the Yankees. Phelps attempted to organize the Negroes who came into troops. Accordingly he too was outlawed by the Confederates and his act disavowed by the Union, that was not ready to take this step. It was not until a great many men had been killed, and until the Emancipation Proclamation had changed the status of the Negro, that steps were taken by the Union for his employment as a soldier. Opinion in his favor gained force after the Draft Riot in New York, when Negroes in the city were mobbed and beaten by the enemies of conscription. Soon a distinct bureau was established in Washington for the recording of all matters pertaining to Negro troops, a board was organized for the examination of candidates, and recruiting stations were set up in Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. By the end of 1864 nearly 200,000 Negroes had been enrolled in the army. The exploits of these men at Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, and Fort Pillow are a part of the romance of American History.

The Civil War meant more than the emancipation of four million slaves, with all the perplexing problems that that liberation brought with it; it involved the overturning of the whole economic system of the South. To educate the freedmen, to train them in citizenship, and to give them a place in the new labor system, was all a problem calling for the wisest statesmanship and the largest and most unselfish patriotism. Strange contradictions moreover were frequently in evidence to increase the practical difficulties of the situation. Some Negroes, because of personal attachment, refused to leave their former masters; while the South in general, although it laid all its ills at the door of the Negro, violently opposed any considerable effort to have him taken away.