Читать книгу The Smart Culture - Robert L. Hayman Jr. - Страница 18

In April 1860, the United States Senate took up the question whether public education should be afforded to the District of Columbia’s children, black and white alike. No large sum of money was implicated, nor was the number of prospective students very large; but the principle, such as it was, certainly seemed worth fighting for.

For some, the attempt to educate black children was a waste of time and money; for others, like James A. Bayard of Delaware, the inherent limitations of “the black race” simply meant that “the extent of education ought to be limited, and precise in its character.” Still others had grown tired of these and similar claims: “I have heard long enough,” said Daniel Clark of New Hampshire, “in the Senate and elsewhere that the colored people cannot be elevated. They cannot be elevated because you will not try to elevate them.”

Yet another view was offered by Albert G. Brown, Democrat from Mississippi. “I will not,” Brown insisted, “in this slaveholding community, vote for any proposition which proposes to mingle the negro and the white child in the same school.” Brown was willing, however, to allow the black and white communities to be separately taxed to fund separate schools; “but I will vote for no proposition which looks to put white children on an equal footing with negro children, here or elsewhere.” Brown preferred that his colleagues concentrate their attention on the needs of white children:

these children are dearer to us than the little darkies . . . children of your own blood; of your own complexion; of your own race . . . as the white boy is better than the black boy in the judgment of some of us, as the white girl is more entitled to our kindness than the black girl, let us take the whites first; let us provide for our own people, precisely as any man would do for his own children in preference to the children of his neighbor; precisely as a man would take care of his own kith and kin in preference to strangers. These white children are of our own race.

James Harlan of Iowa was moved to inquire: “If it is cheaper to educate the white child at the public expense than to support him as a pauper, or to punish him after years as a criminal, is it not equally true of colored children?”

One answer came from Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis:

In this District of Columbia you have but to go to the jail and find there, by those who fill it, the result of relieving the negro from that control which keeps him in his own healthy and useful condition. It is idle to assume that it is the want of education; it is the natural inferiority of the race; and the same proof exists wherever that race has been left the master of itself—sinking into barbarism or into the commission of crime. . . . In the law, sometimes, it has been attempted to declare their equality; but in fact, socially, and as a practical question, I say it is done nowhere.

“Do gentlemen need more,” Davis asked:

to convince them of the distinction between the races? Do they hope, offending against all the teachings of history; against the marks of God; in violation of the Constitution; and by trampling upon the feelings of the southern representatives here, to found in the District of Columbia an experimental establishment to disprove the inequality of the races?

Bayard concurred, and thus prompted another inquiry from Harlan: “If the negro population were all as well educated as the white people, would they then be our equals?”

Bayard did not hesitate:

Without entering into the question, which I leave to philologists and ethnologists, as to the unity or diversity of the races, I have no shadow of a doubt, from my own observation of the negro race, of its inferiority. . . . My answer to the honorable Senator is, that, from my reading of the history of the past, from my own personal observation of the character of the race, I believe it would be impossible to carry the civilization of the negro race as a race—I do not speak of individual cases—to equality with the white man with any benefit either to them or the white race.

It was the response Harlan had anticipated. Harlan’s defense of black education was, after all, a pragmatic one: it was better to afford education than to absorb the social costs of ignorance. It was not a defense rooted in equality, at least, not the kind of equality Davis and Bayard seemed to fear:

What do Senators mean by the term equality? Do they mean physical equality? Who has proposed to make the Negro, by law, as beautiful as the Anglo-Saxon; as symmetrical in his proportions; as capable of enduring fatigue, or enduring toil? Who has proposed to make him his equal in intellectual development, or in moral sensibilities? Who has proposed to make him his equal in a social point of view? Nobody. Social equality, I suppose, depends on entirely different laws, and on that subject everybody must be a judge for himself. Will either of those Senators tell me that he will meet on terms of perfect equality every man of his own race, admit every man to his own table, or as a suitable suitor for the hand of his own daughter in matrimony? I apprehend not. Then what kind of equality is referred to? . . . Well, is it political equality that is referred to? Who has proposed to make them the equal of the white race in a political point of view? Nobody.

Henry Wilson of Massachusetts shared Harlan’s views: “This negro equality seems to run through the heads of southern gentlemen. There is great alarm about negro equality. Sir, let us educate, if we can, these poor colored children, and enable them, as far as possible, to improve their condition in life.”

What followed is an early version of a colloquy that would be replayed countless times over the next two decades—and many times more, right up to the present day. It is at once enlightening and bewildering, as befits, perhaps, its subject. At issue was the meaning, theoretically and practically, of that elusive term “equality.”

Davis: The Senator objects to the argument which treats of the proposition of himself and his friends, as the assertion of equality between the negro and white races. Do I understand him as denying the equality, or does he admit the equality?

Wilson: The natural equality of all men I believe in, as far as the rights are concerned. So far as mental or physical equality is concerned, I believe the African race inferior to the white race.

Davis: “Natural equality” would imply that God had created them equal, and had left them equal, down to the present time. Is that what the Senator means?

Wilson: I believe in the equality of rights of all mankind. I do not believe in the equality of the African race with the white race, mentally or physically, and I do not think morally.

Davis: When the Senator says “equality of rights of all men,” does he mean political and social rights—political and social equality?

Wilson: I believe that every human being has the right to his life and to his liberty, and to act in this world so as to secure his own happiness. I believe, in a word, in the Declaration of Independence; but I do not, as I have said, believe in the mental or moral or physical equality of some of the races, as against this white race of ours.

Davis: Then the Senator believes and he does not believe, and he changes his position so rapidly in giving his answers that it is impossible to tell what he does believe.

Harlan: Will the Senator allow me to ask him a question?

Davis: Oh, yes.

Harlan: Do you believe in the political and social equality of all individuals of the white race?

Davis: I will answer you, yes; the exact political equality of all white men who are citizens of the United States. That equality may be lost by the commission of crime; but white men, the descendants of the Adamic race, under our institutions, are born equal; and that is the effect of the Declaration of Independence.

Harlan: If the Senator will allow me, being “born equal” is a phrase that involves the proposition that the Senator from Massachusetts has stated. I inquired as to their social and their political equality.

Davis: Their political equality, I stated, exists, unless it is lost by the commission of crime, or some disqualification which attaches to the individual, not to the race. Their social equality will depend upon a great variety of circumstances, being the result of education and many other contingencies. Those are conventional, not political, rights. They do not belong to the institutions of the country. They may be matters of taste. Every man has a right to select his own associates; and he may assert his superiority, and the person he excludes may regard him as an inferior. All that has nothing to do with anything which we have a right to consider. This is not a debating society. We are not here to deal in general theories and mere speculative philosophy, but to treat subjects as political questions.

Seven months later, the “political question” would start to be answered with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. The slave South seceded from the Union; Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederate States of America. Their rebellion, Davis insisted, was in the name of liberty. In 1863 Union General David Hunter defied military protocol by writing Davis directly to protest the brutal treatment of captured black soldiers; in the process, he shared his thoughts on the slaveholders’ conception of liberty:

You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;—liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;—liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;—liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;—liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty—the liberty to do wrong—which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell.¹⁹

In the end, a different principle prevailed. After four years of war, in which over six hundred thousand soldiers lost their lives, the United States of America was in need of Reconstruction. By 1868, its amended Constitution would contain an explicit guarantee of equality. But precisely what that meant, and how it was to be realized, remained far from certain.