THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN
ITS RELATIONS TO THE NEGRO
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[From the Southern Planter and Fanner, Decemh
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN ITS RELATIONS TO
THE NEGRO.
No. I.
In a series of articles over the signature of " Civis," which ap¬
peared in the Religious Herald last spring and summer, I demon¬
strated that the political principles which are invoked in the sup¬
port of the public school are foreign to free institutions and fatal
to liberty; that the theory upon which the system is based is well
calculated to emasculate the energies of a people, and, to debauch
public and private morality; that the education of children is not
the business of government, but the sacred and imperative duty of
parents; that the assumption by the State, as the system requires,
of the duties, privileges and prerogatives that belong only to the
parental relation, is a wicked and dangerous denial of the recipro¬
cal relations and obligations of parent and child, as proclaimed by
nature and taught with solemn emphasis over and over by God, by
Christ and his Apostles; that the cost of instruction at the public
school is, as to those whose money supports it, greater than that of'
better instruction at the private school, and that the enforced char¬
ity is really an injury to the party receiving it and to the party
robbed and wronged by unjust taxation; that granting, for the
sake of argument, the system to be in itself desirable, Virginia is
forbidden by simple honesty to patronize it, for she can only do it,
as she is doing to-day, with money which is not her own, money
withheld from its rightful owners, the creditors of the Common¬
wealth.
These positions and others of a kindred character, elaborated in
the articles referred to, and fortified and illustrated by the facts of
past and current history, have been assailed in various quarters, in
some instances with marked ability, but in all with conspicuous
and signal lack of success. Having shown that the public school is
utterly indefensible, both as a matter of right and of policy, even if
our population were homogeneous, I purpose in this article and in
others, which may follow, to discuss the system in its relations to
the negro that we may discover what policy is demanded alike by
his interests and our own.
Ideas,—born of a spurious and pernicious philanthropy indige¬
nous to other latitudes, which sees the mote in a brother's eye not
Vthe beam in its own, which substitutes its unsupported dicta for the
doctrines of Revelation, for the teachings of science and for the
Nssons of history and of experience,—are gaining foothold in our
6
The Public School in its
that we are in duty bound to educate the race in compensation of
250 years of labor, my ready and triumphant reply is:
1. That Domestic Slavery brought absolute savages into contact
with civilization and taught them to be skillful laborers in agricul¬
ture,^ household duties, and, to some extent, in the mechanic arts;
that it was to them a School of Association that raised the race to a
higher plane of life than it has ever reached in any other age or in
any other quarter of the globe; that in the opinion of those even
who have most fiercely denounced the institution, it has rendered
them competent to the highest functions of life, the duties of politi¬
cal sovereignty.
2. That compensation for service rendered has been thrice made
by the generous supply of their wants as well in the helpless periods
of infancy and decrepitude as in vigorous and useful life; and by
the tuition which they have received in this School of Association,
resulting so conspicuously in their moral and intellectual improve¬
ment.
The history of this race may be explored in vain for a case in
which these people have risen by inherent energy to a condition of
independent civilized existence; in vain for a single instance even
in which after having been as highly civilized as is possible for
them, and then left to themselves with the arts and appliances of
civilization in their hands, they have succeeded in making progress
or even in holding their own.
The Liberian colony founded under the most favorable auspices
after vast expenditures of treasure, and anxious and protracted
thought by many of our best and wisest men, constantly guarded
by influences and propped up by material support from this country
and England, is yet in a tottering condition and seems unable to
defend itself against the assaults of savage brothers.
In some of the West India Islands—Hayti, for instance—where
by British philanthropy negroes have been made almost the exclu¬
sive owners of the soil, coffee and other intertropical products, once
largely exported, have almost ceased to be articles of export; and
plantations, before magnificent and wonderfully productive, are
rapidly relapsing, under the ownership of the blacks, into original
wilderness. Raising, almost without labor, in their fervid and fer¬
tile soil only a few yams, they rely almost entirely upon the sponta¬
neous productions of the earth to support their lazy and unprofitable
lives. The moulding and controling influence of the white man
being cancelled, they blend the teachings of the Bible with the
baldest superstitions, and are fast reviving the feticism which their
ancestors brought from the Guinea coast.
Were it not too painful to pursue the subject in that direction, I
might find illustrations nearer home and show how corruption runs
riot, and the car of progress turns back, and civilization, late in its
noblest and loftiest type, wilts withers and dies before the hot
breath of these black barbarians.
All the facts of negro history, his moral, intellectual and physical
Relations to the Negro.
7
peculiarities, particularly his facial and cranial configuration, point
to the same conclusion, to wit: that he belongs to an inferior type
of the human family, to a lower grade of organization. No man,
familiar with the facts involved and competent to form a sound opin¬
ion, can believe that the negro is the equal of the Caucasian. The
truth is, the negro is incapable of independent civilized existence.
His God-given instincts, stronger thau the logic and a surer and
safer guide than the teachings of philanthropy, impel him to rely
for support and guidance upon a clearer and a stronger wit than he
can claim. He is, by necessity of intellectual weakness, a parasite.
This explains his extreme docility, which renders him so agreeable
and' happy, and valuable as a menial, so dangerous a tool in the
contests of politics.
These people so impulsive and docile, so reckless of the future
and so oblivious of care, so patient of heat and of labor, incapable
of logical and consecutive thought, unambitious, unenterprising,
unprogressive, we have among us. How shall we treat them ? A
problem in sociology so important has never before demanded a
solution. The development of our material resources, the perpe¬
tuity of our form of government, the conservation of our social
system, and the interests and happiness alike of both races, are in¬
volved in the solution. If calmly and dispassionately we consider
the facts of the case, if we study the history of the negro, his idio-
syncracies and capabilities, it will not be difficult to discover the line
at once of duty and of interest. On the other hand, if we ignore
the differentia of the races, the peculiarities which God has im¬
pressed upon the negro, and proceed to reconstruct him after the
approved pattern of a silly fanaticism, we shall commit one of those
terrible blunders which are worse than crimes.
There is one plan by which, without cost to the State, the highest
happiness and utmost usefulness of which the negro is capable, may
be accomplished; there is another which will effectually destroy
both his usefulness and his happiness, and render him liable, at any
capricious moment, like a blind giant, to seize and tear down the
pillars of our political edifice, involving at the same time an enor¬
mous expenditure of money, which we cannot suffer without the
sacrifice of the good name, the sacred honor of the Commonwealth.
In the next number of the Planter and Farmer I hope to make
application of the foregoing to the subject in hand.
Civis.
[Note by the Editor.—We have two correspondents writing under the nom de plume
of " Civis," both of whom are prominently identified with the educational aud agricultural
interests of the South. The author of this article is favorably known to the public by the
contribution to the Religious Herald last spring and summer of a series of articles on the
" public school" referred to in this communication.]
8
The Public School in its
[From the Southern Planter and Farmer, Jan'y, 1876.]
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN ITS RELATIONS TO
THE NEGRO.
No. II.
So different anatomically and physiologically are the two races
from each other, that we are told on the highest medical authority
that the treatment which is demanded for the recovery of a white
\man in fever and other forms of disease will be fatal to the negro;
that the most successful practitioners educated at the North or in
Europe, when they first come in contact with the negro and proceed
to treat him in sickness on general principles, uniformly fail, and
frequently with disastrous results, until by observation and trial
they learn that special treatment is demanded by congenital pecu¬
liarities, both in organization and functions. "We have already seen
that the negro both in his intellectual and moral attributes is con¬
spicuously inferior to the white man, so that there is a perfect cor¬
relation between his physical peculiarities and his immaterial nature.
Inferiority is stamped plainly and indelibly on the negro alike in
his intellectual, moral and physical being.
This line of demarcation between the races is not accidental or
the result of outward surroundings; it has been fixed by the finger
of God. Since the negro has been known to history, he has always
been as we see him now. In our dealings with him, shall we ignore
or attempt to obliterate this line of separation? It is greatly to be
deplored, says modern philanthropy, that these differences exist.
They constitute a great barrier to the success of its pet schemes of
equality and fraternity. There have always been men, as there are
to-day, wiser than God, and ready at a moment's notice to recon¬
struct the work of the matchless Architect. A distinguished scientist
of our day has told us that the eye is a bungling piece of optical
mechanism; and that, under his direction, the construction of that
organ would have been vastly better. Not long ago, carpers and
critics were fond of attacking the divine cosmogony, because three-
fourths of the earth's surface is covered with water, an arrangement
which restricts, they complained, our race to a small part of the
planet. They, wiser than he who "spake and it was done, who com¬
manded and it stood fast," would at farthest have covered only one-
fourth of the earth with water, an arrangement which, we now per¬
fectly know, would have rendered the land an absolute desert for
lack of sufficient evaporating surface. I do not belong to the fana¬
tical crew that dares to assail the Infinite Wisdom; that would
" Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Rejudge his justice, be the god of God."
Relations to the Negro.
9
As far as I can understand the forms and forces of matter, I see
the most wonderful harmonies, manifold adaptations of material
things to our wants and happiness, and even in many phenomena,
which bring sorrow and suffering, a vindication of the ways of
Ood to man. When and where I cannot understand, I am equally
content to wonder and adore; believing, knowing that when the
unknown becomes the known, as at last it may, it will equally
attest the infinite wisdom and boundless beneficence of the Great
Contriver.
It does not, however, appear to me difficult to explain why the
negro, not by accident but by the act of God, is made inferior to the
Caucasian. It is in perfect harmony with the whole economy of the
world. The law of nature, which is always the law of God, is
inequality, not equality; diversity, not uniformity; and the happi¬
ness of the whole animal kingdom is best subserved by this arrange¬
ment. " One star differeth from another star in glory;" no two
trees in the forest, no two leaves even,are exactly alike; and every
ijian is different from all other men, that live, or have lived, on the
surface of the earth. Civilization requires an infinite variety of
work, which in turn requires for its performance infinite gradations
of intellect. The man who, accepting his destiny as indicated by
his humble capacity, performs the lowest kind of menial labor, does
work just as necessary in the economy of civilization as the profound
astronomer who measures and weighs suspended worlds, and marks
out their circling paths. The truth is that the number of those
required to do the loftiest work of which the human intellect is
capable, is very small; while larger and still larger numbers are
required for lower and still lower work, so that those occupations
are most thronged which least require intellectual strength and
activity. It always has been so; and, dream and speculate as we
will, it always will be so. When Christ said: " The poor ye have
always with you," he stated a general truth, applicable not only to
the age and country of which he spoke, but to all ages and to all
countries. Of necessity it must bo so, it is right that it should be
so. Bootblacks and scavengers, cooks and chamber-maids, farm
hands, and operatives in manufacturing establishments, must con¬
tinue until chaos comes again. These and kindred occupations,
constituting the very foundation of civilized society, require for the
utmost efficiency of the work, little or no scholastic training on the
part of the mere laborers. Nor can it be said that such work
would be better done if the laborers were educated. So far from
this being so, the difficulty of having it done at all would be greatly
increased; and when done, it would be done by no means so well.
For several reasons, this must be so. The fact that a laborer is
educated, or thinks he is educated, beyond his calling, unfits him
for that calling. If a man is engaged in work below his education,
he feels degraded by it, and that sense of degradation compels him
to do inferior work. No laborer can do good work unless he is
proud of his work. I know of no spectacle more pitiable than that
10
The Public School in its
of a man compelled by necessity to engage in menial labor for a
support, whose education, either in fact or in his conception, fits
him for a higher plane of life. He is far less happy, and does less-
work, and that less efficiently, than the simple laborer by his side,
whose thoughts never rise higher than his calling, and whose guile¬
less heart is made happy by a word of praise from his employer.
Again, the more simple a piece of machinery is, the more man¬
ageable it is, and the better it does the work for which it was designed.
When we complicate it so as to render it capable of doing several
things, it will not do any one of these things so well as the simple
machine constructed solely with reference to that thing. A mower
and reaper combined is less efficient as a mower than a simple
mower; is less efficient as a reaper than a simple reaper. And so
that intelligence and culture, and only that, which is required for
one's calling, best fits him for the duties of that calling. The
bootblack is not a better bootblack, but a worse one, the ditcher is
not a better ditcher, but a worse one, if he can also calculate a
solar eclipse or read with a critic's ken the choral odes of the
Greek dramatists.
A higher than human authority hath taught us that we cannot
serve two masters. Faithfully and well to discharge the duties of
one sphere of life positively disqualifies us for those of a lower or
of a higher sphere. Contentment in our allotted place—and a place
is allotted to us all—is at once the plain dictate of reason and the
positive injunction of inspiration. A laborer will never do full and
efficient work unless ,,he finds not only his support but his happi¬
ness in his labor, content to leave to those more gifted than he,
the problems of science and the perplexities of finance. And such
a course is always the laborer's choice; unless the vile spirit of un¬
rest and discontent has been stirred within him by the constant
teachings of a blasphemous philosophy.
The practice of men in the employment of menial labor is in
entire harmony with our doctrine, and at once attests aud demon¬
strates its truth. The farmer always prefers as laborers in his field
those accustomed and competent only to such work; nor will he
employ, except from necessity or as a matter of charity, applicants
whose thoughts have taken a wider and a loftier range. To succeed
in work that is below one's capacity and attainments is just as im¬
possible as to succeed in work that is above one's capacity and attain¬
ments; and this the practical man, who, in all matters relating to
his business and interests, has more sense than all the philanthro¬
pists and reformers in the world put together, well knows, and acts
accordingly. Not long ago, I had a conversation with a prominent
gentleman, a farmer and preacher, who combatted this view; and
yet in the conversation it cropped out that he had just refused em¬
ployment, though greatly needing labor on his farm, to two strong-
young men, fresh from the Normal School at Hampton, on tho
ground, as acknowledged, that persons engaged as they had been
would not suit his work, nor it them. What this man did, every-
Relations to the Negro.
11
body else, under similar circumstances, does. The simple fact that
men uniformly so act, proves that such action is based on the
strongest and most conclusive reasons. The cook, that must read
the daily paper, will spoil your beef and your bread; the sable
pickaninny, that has to do his grammar and arithmetic, will leave
your boots unblacked and your horse uncurried.
Some—and a great many too—are and must be mudsills. Some
are and must be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Such is
the decree, and the language quoted is that of the Almighty. This
doctrine, so unpalatable to our fanatical optimists, has been most
fiercely attacked; but these assaults, hot with wrath, have made no
impression on the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler.
Society, left to the operation of natural causes, will take its pro¬
per order of stratification. Each member, according to his inherent
energy and capacity, will find his proper place in just gradation.
To protect the individual in his rights, not to form society, is the
function of government. As individuals have or lack capacity, they
will rise or sink; and they will rise who ought to rise, and they
will sink who ought to sink. To check, or attempt to check, one
from sinking who ought to sink, is as great a cruelty to him and
as disastrous to society as to prevent or attempt to prevent one
from rising who ought to rise. That father would be cruel in the
extreme and inflict a great damage on the community who should
hold, or attempt to hold, in lowly life, a son competent to the
grandest achievements; but not more cruel nor more injurious to
society than that other father who places his son in a position above
his capacity, and, say, holds him there, a position which requires of
him duties that he cannot discharge, and devolves upon him respon¬
sibilities, that he cannot meet, rendering worthless, and, from a sense
of worthlessness, wretched, one who, in his proper place, would
have been both useful and happy. That every man should promptly
find his proper level is demanded alike by the happiness of the indi¬
vidual and the general interests of the community. An attempt on
the part of the State to place all on a common level, is beyond the
range of its just powers, and is as silly as it is vain. The great
Father of Waters, as he moves to the sea, bears on his turbid bosom
many thousand tons of solid matter, which is accurately assorted
and distributed along his course and at his mouths by the operation
of physical laws too powerful for human agency to contravene; and
so the laws of God's moral government, not less constant nor less
powerful than those that control the physical universe, determine
the stratification of human society. We may endeavor by legisla¬
tion, as weak as it is wicked, to prevent this stratification or to
make it homogeneous and uniform; but so sure as God is stronger
than man, the attempt will end in failure, inflicting, however, un¬
told misery on individuals and crippling, it may be, the industries
of the globe.
We have drifted far from the simplicity of our fathers. They
held that government is instituted for the protection of individual
12
The Public School in its
rights; now the individual is the prey of government, which crushes
him with tyrannous exactions, while the highest aim of statesmanship
consists in the discovery of new subjects of taxation. And now,
when the President of the Republic, (can we call it a Republic?)
"whereof," he sapiently tells us, " one man is as good as another,"
recommends in his last annual message to Congress, compulsory
education by the Federal Government; and, with a logic, of which
I will only say that it is worthy of its source, proposes to tax the
church to support the school, backed in this latter matter, I regret
to add, by the feeble support of the Governor of Virginia, it is
high time that thoughtful men should bestir themselves, demand a
new reckoning, and make the supreme effort, lest the ship of state
drift into worse than Prussian absolutism. The fact that the Presi¬
dent makes such a proposition, and that, too, in the most solemn and
formal way, ought to arouse us from our lethargy and make us open
our eyes to the alarming drift and tendency of the times. It is no¬
thing less than that the Federal Government should stretch out its
Briarean arms from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and lay its cold and heavy hand upon all
the children of "the nation," compelling them to schools supported
by universal taxation, prescribing what they shall learn, and what
they shall not learn, forbidding the reading of the Bible and the bare
mention of the name of Christ, forming their minds and their morals,
taking charge of their health and their habits, constituting itself a
sort of wet nurse to the little urchins, and leaving to parents, upon
whom alone is devolved, as well by instinct and affection as by the
repeated and most solemn injunctions of Inspiration, the education
of their children, little more than the function of reproduction.
Under such a system, the path to despotism is short and plain ; and
we may expect to see, as we most abundantly do see, wherever the
scheme has been long intrenched and so has had time to fructify,
an utter relaxation of parental and filial obligation and manifold
forms of atheism and irreligion. But the Federal Government has
as much right to intervene in this matter as the State Government;
it belongs to neither. The education of children belongs to parents
and to them only; nor can they delegate or surrender it to the civil
• authority, State or Federal, without guilt.
But, it is maintained, that a necessity is laid upon Virginia to
support the public school because of the presence of negroes as
citizens in our midst, whose equality is asserted by the law and
maintained by the power of the Federal Government.
Let us look into this. "When an inferior and a superior race come
into contact with each other, one of these three things will take
place. 1st. The inferior race will disappear; or 2d. The races will
amalgamate; or 3d. The inferior race must submit, under forms
more or less despotic, to- the domination of the superior race.
1. When Europeans landed on this continent, their instincts de¬
manded that so vast and fertile a domain, pregnant with such mighty
and brilliant possibilities, should not be left to the proprietorship of
Relations to the Negro.
13
wild savages, incompetent to cultivate the soil or explore the mine.
They were but curaberers of the ground, and must give way to those
who could utilize the gifts of nature to the general benefit of man¬
kind. On the other hand, the proud spirit of the haughty Indian,
after many a bloody protest, it is true, sulleuly recognized the in¬
evitable logic of this demand, and so he has constantly retired before
the advancing wave of civilization. Taught by instinct, he felt that
he was unable to compete, for the means of living, with a race whose
superior sagacity moulded the forms and bent the forces of nature
to their will. Thus, the mighty tribes that once lorded it over this
continent, following the course of the sun, and vanishing, as they
retired, like April snows, are represented now in our western wilds
by only a few degraded and broken spirited remnants, the miserable
victims of the cruel charity of the Government—for governmental
charity is always cruel, and corrupting too—famishing on fibrous
beef, and poisoned with putrid pork. As the tide of life moves
further westward, the Indian, as heretofore, must abandon his reser¬
vation, and soon his only place will be in history. This is one method
of solution, which we have witnessed with our own eyes, and, so sure
as the laws of nature are constant, we shall witness it again, unless
we change the hideous policy to which we are committed.
2. Under favoring circumstances and conditions, the races will
amalgamate. Nature implants in the superior race antagonisms
and antipathies to the inferior, which except under abnormal cir¬
cumstances, effectually protects the purity of its strain. The greater
the disparity, the stronger these antipathies, and therefore the less
the liability to amalgamation. But howsoever great the disparity,
amalgamation is inevitable under certain conditions, as where the
inferior race vastly outnumbers the superior, or when the two races
are kept together by external force. The amalgamation of the
blacks and whites—a crime against blood and lineage, against man
and God, against which I raise my hands in horror and disgust,
and exonerate my conscience, if I can do no more, by a solemn and
indignant protest—is encouraged and invited by the law, which
recognizes the political equality of the negro, and ties the races
together in the bonds of political partnership.
If the negro, as the law assumes, is equal to the great functions
of citizenship, is a copartner with us in a common government, to
discharge the same duties, meet the same responsibilities, and share
the same destiny, then the races ought to assimilate as thoroughly as
possible, and every bar to their perfect blending ought to be removed.
Mixed schools, which we barely escaped—if, indeed, we have escaped
—only because race instinct, though weakened and blinded by the
hot passions born of strife and blood, was stronger than the logic of
the law, in which the same training and instructions should be given
and antagonisms worn off* by constant contact and association, is the
necessary, the logical demand of the doctrine of equality. Nor let
us deceive ourselves by saying that political equality is one thing
and social equality another. An adjective will not save us. Equality
14
The Public School in its
is equality. If the negro is fit, as the law in question declares he
is, to make laws for the control of our conduct and property; to
give orders as a colonel or general, which we must implicitly obey;
to sit in senatorial robes; to wear the spotless ermine; to occupy
the chair of Washington, he is certainly fit to eat with us at our
tables, to sleep in our beds, to be invited into our parlors, and to
do all acts and things which a white man may do.
The intent and animus of the law, the pressure of the whole ma¬
chinery of the Federal Government, and of the State Government
too, in so far as it recognizes the equality of the negro in its insane
attempts to qualify him by education for the rights and duties of citi¬
zenship, tend to a common point, viz., to wear off race antagonisms
by contact and association, to pave the way consequently to assimi¬
lation and amalgamation, and thus degrade into mulattoes and
molungeons, the noblest type of the noblest race that ever floated
on the tide of time. No thanks to the law if this result does not
promptly and fully ensue. It is as criminal as if miscegenation
were the order of the day; for it plies all its logic and displays all
its seductions to effect that object, from which we are saved, in so
far as we are saved, only by those antagonisms and antipathies of
race, stronger than human legislation, implanted in us by our Ma¬
ker to protect purity of blood and accomplish the 4< survival of the
fittest."
If it be said in reply that this very principle of race antagonism
is an effectual bar to hybridization, I answer:
1. That if such be the tendency of the law, it must produce its
effect; that it is as impossible to annihilate a force in morals as it
is to annihilate a force in physics; that the law makes its fiercest
assaults upon the very principle which is relied upon to combat or
modify its tendencies, and that this principle is liable to be so weak¬
ened and emasculated by the varied appliances operating against it,
as to be unable at last to antagonize the baleful tendencies of the
law. The law, however weak in comparison with the antagonizing
principle, must produce its effects, which will become more manifest
and more disastrous as the law becomes stronger and the opposing
principle weaker. And this is exactly the tendency of things. As
we submit to this legislation, and applaud and adopt it, its power
over us becomes greater and our repugnance less to it and to its
results, so that a time may come when, both from the increasing
strength of the law and the growing weakness of human virtue,
our race may be hopelessly ruined.
2. Beware how you subject human nature to temptation. For
us, as weak as we are sinful, the only safe philosophy is found in
the prayer of our Savior, " Lead us not into temptation." How
dare we support and sanction a law which daily displays before
society and our children a constant temptation to corruption of
blood ? It is a crime against decency and morals, against race and
blood, against God and nature.
If we are not utterly debauched by the temptation, the law is not
Relations to the Negro.
15
the less criminal; for we are saved, so far as we are saved, by a
principle outside of the law, antagonistic to it, the eradication of
which is the supreme object of the law, and of those who conceived
and framed it.
But we have no option, we are told, except submission. I reply
that we can submit without guilt to anything that we cannot pre¬
vent ; but that when we adopt, and applaud and defend this law,
and, with superserviceable weakness, extend its application, we are
as guilty, we are more guilty than its original framers. And this
thing, and nothing else, we are doing, when we go to the exhausted
Exchequer of the Commonwealth, and take from it money—money
that does not belong to the State, but to its creditors—and apply it
to the support of the public school that the asserted doctrine of
negro equality may be made good. In this we cannot offer the plea
of compulsion; no federal law requires it; we do it of our own
volition ; and in doing it, we grant that the negro is competent to
political sovereignty and endeavor to prepare him for it; and thus
we commit ourselves to the dogma of negro equality and become
responsible for all its hideous consequences. This law, born of
blood, is destined to die, as the passions engendered by war sub¬
side, uuless we adopt it and approve it, and so infuse new life into
it, and proceed with supreme guilt and folly to incorporate it into
our State legislation. Shall we do it ? God forbid.
3. A third course has been indicated, the discussion of which is
reserved for another article. Civis.
[From the Southern Planter and Farmer, February, 1876.]
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN ITS RELATIONS TO
THE NEGRO.
No. IH.
If we do not wish the negro to vanish like the Indian from ex¬
istence, nor to amalgamate with the whites, and thus to originate a
population as worthless as the mongrels of Mexico, all that is left us
is simply to let him alone, and leave him to occupy his natural posi¬
tion of subordination. This is the position which the negro in¬
stinctively seeks, nor is he happy or comfortable in any other.
Everything has been done that diabolical wit could suggest to make
the negro assert his equality, and yet he will not; incendiary phi¬
lanthropists have passed through the length and breadth of our
land, and endeavored to scatter firebrands among his race, and still
he is quiescent; the Federal Government has expended millions of
treasure and mobilized mighty armies to infuse into him sufficient
The Public School in its
courage for the maintenance of the mendacious dogma, and yet no
sooner has the tread of armed legions faded from his ears than he
turns to seek his only safety in obscurity. Coming from the hot
crowd, where he has been galvanized by inflammatory rhetoric into
a spasmodic feeling of importance, so soon as he touches the cool
air and comes in contact with a white man, all his injected courage
oozes out, and by his language, his attitude and bearing, he pro¬
claims his inferiority. In all the annals of history I know of noth¬
ing so striking and so conclusive as the humility, the general quiet
behavior, of the negro, though every effort is made and every pos¬
sible suggestion offered to vex and goad him into a contrary course.
They are sometimes, it is true, lashed into local and temporary dis¬
turbances; the wonder of wonders is, that these disturbances are not
general and constant. The negro, true to nature and true to truth,
stoutly denies the heresy of equality. And why should we endea¬
vor to make him belie the instincts of his nature, and seek to force
him into a position in which he knows he is unable to sustain him¬
self? There are no people in the world so kindly and so indulgent
to the negro as the white people of the South—none so bitterly and
implacably hostile to him. When he comes, as he generally does,
humble, docile and obedient—in a word, as an inferior—he receives
the most kindly and generous consideration; but when, as is some¬
times the case, he assumes impudent airs and utters impudent
words, or in any way deports himself as an equal, then he stirs
the blood and fires the pride of race, and he must take the
consequences or wilt at once into submission. The unvarnished
truth must be told, and the sooner we recognize it in our conduct
the better for us all. The whites and the negroes cannot live together as.
equals. Why cannot this be done? our modern reformers ask. I
answer: because God, for wise reasons not difficult to be understood,
has made it impossible. It is forbidden by a law of nature, which ap¬
plies not only to the human race, but to the entire animal kingdom.
If a game cock and a dunghill rooster be placed in the same barn¬
yard, the latter must submit, or he must die. Numberless illustra¬
tions of this principle will occur to the readers of this journal,
accustomed as they are to observe the habits of animals. This race
antagonism becomes stronger as we ascend the scale of animal life,
and is most pronounced in man, for the plain reason that its ob¬
ject—the preservation of purity of strain—is more important than
in the case of the inferior animals ! Inferior and superior races,
whether of man or of the lower orders of animals, cannot live to¬
gether except as inferiors and superiors. If we put them on a
plane of equality and hold them there, the weaker dies. The law
of the Federal Government declares the equality of the negro; but
the declaration of the law does not make the dogma true. It were
as easy to make the James river the equal of the Mississippi, or
the Alleghany mountains as lofty as the Andes, by a presidential
pronunciamento.
The public school system recognizes the doctrine of negro equal-
Relations to the Negro.
17
ity, and professes to prepare him for the highest functions of life,
the duties of political sovereignty. If he is, by congenital inferior¬
ity, not competent to such functions, the attempt to prepare him for
them is a manifest absurdity. If he is competent to such functions,
then inferiority does not belong to his race. Having shown, in
former articles before referred to, that the public school, even with¬
out reference to the question of races, is utterly indefensible, both
as a matter of morals and of policy, I oppose it in its application to
the negro race:—
1. Because it is an assertion, in the most dangerous form, of the
hideous doctrine of negro equality. How this blasphemous heresy
seeks the amalgamation of the races as its culmination, was clearly
shown in our last article. I cannot dwell on this topic; it is too re¬
volting, it is too disgusting for contemplation.
2. I oppose it because its policy is cruelty in the extreme to the
negro himself. It instills into his mind that he is competent to shine
in the higher walks of life, prompts him to despise those menial pur¬
suits to which his race has been doomed, and invites him to enter
into competition with the white man for those tempting prizes that
can be won only by a quicker and profounder sagacity, by a greater
energy and self-denial, and a higher order of administrative talent
than the negro has ever displayed. In such a competition the negro
inevitably goes down. To invite the negro from those pursuits
which require firm muscles aud little intelligence to those callings
which demand less muscle and higher intelligence, is to invite him
to his sure extermination. To require the ponderous Percheron to
equal the fleet Arabian courser,as he sweeps the plain, or the latter
to draw the heavy loads which scarcely tax the muscles or warm the
shoulders of the former, would be the last degree of cruelty to the
animals, and render them at the same time worse than worthless.
More cruel are we, and a vastly greater damage do we inflict upon
society, when, prompted by a silly fanaticism, we seduce the negro
from those occupations in which alone he can be useful and content,
and tempt him to a competition which he cannot accept without his
ruin. It is as pleasing as it is instructive to witness how labor is
allotted here in the South. We find negroes universally preferred
and almost exclusively employed as cooks and chambermaids, as
barbers and bootblacks, as laborers on the farm and in tobacco fac¬
tories. As I write, my head is dull and my eyes are heavy from
los3 of sleep caused by the sickness of an infant child; and yet the
nurse, a negro girl of seventeen }7ears, upon whom the heavy work
has chiefly fallen, and whose sleep has been interrupted several times
every uight—during some nights many times—is as fresh to-day as
when the doctor was summoned two weeks ago. I have known her
to be aroused five or six times a night, and yet not to lose from these
several interruptions combined a half hour's sleep, for in thirty sec¬
onds after relieved of active duty she is soundly asleep again. This
result, I am sure, is due to a low type of cerebral organization, to
her mental inactivity, which really fits her for the duties of her
2
•18
The Public School in its
place, but would be a supreme disqualification for the higher avo¬
cations of life. She is withal tenderly affectionate to her charge,
cheerfully responds to all the calls made upon her, and I prefer her
in her place to any white girl in the commonwealth. Would it be
kind to her, would it be just to society, which must always demand
just such duties as she performs, to tempt her to aspire to a higher
position denied her by Him who made her as she is?
In such pursuits as I have indicated, the negro is preferred from
a thorough conviction, born of observation and self-interest, the safest
guides, that he is more docile and manageable, more efficient and
happy, than whites are when engaged in the same sort of work.
But the negro has no administrative faculty; he cannot forecast and
plan, he cannot arrange and combine. How stupid to teach, or at¬
tempt to teach, a being so organized, that a time will come when he
will be able to determine the parallax of a fixed star, or solving the
problems of political economy, will at last realize the conception of
the poet and " read his history in a nation's eyes! " Let him im¬
bibe the fatal lesson ahd proceed to grapple with the Caucasian as
a competitor for a livelihood, on a plane too lofty for his intellect,
and his doom is sealed. Let him confine himself to menial pur¬
suits, to certain kinds of mechanical labor,' and he will have a wide
berth; he will encounter no opposition, and if he does, can conquer
it, for in such labor he excels. Moreover, in such callings he has
the kindly encouragement, the protecting sympathy, of the superior
race, and thus his comfort, his happiness and his usefulness are best
accomplished. But let him attempt to move out of bis orbit and
seek a higher circle, to wrest from more skilful hands the work for
which he has no aptitude, then he will find every inch of ground
fiercely and stoutly contested; then he will arouse into opposition
the pride of race, which will vindicate its native dignity, and with
unpitying triumph bear him hopelessly down. His strength, his
only strength, is his weakness. How, the theory of the public school
denies all this, and, in endeavoring to qualify the negro as a co¬
partner with the whites in the administration of the government,
asserts in the strongest way his unqualified equality. It were
strange, indeed, if a doctrine so flattering to the vanity of a weak
and credulous race did not find, though opposed to their instincts,
some adherents among them. Hence, we find that in our cities and
villages, where they have been most plied and corrupted by this
doctrine, they are asserting, to an extent greater or less, their im¬
portance with a result that is mournfully told by mortuary statistics.
Awaiting my family physician in his office a few days ago, and
picking up a copy of the Virginia Medical Monthly, I noticed that in
all the cities reported (Richmond, Norfolk, Lynchburg, Petersburg,
Selma, Mobile,) the death rate is notably greater among the blacks
than among the whites. Why this persistent uniformity? The
negroes to-day all over this country are dying more rapidly than
the whites. Once it was not so. They increased with marvellous
rapidity, the supreme proof of physical comfort. Let the negro
Relations to the Negro.
19
imbibe more and still more of this false and poisonous philosophy,
and, led by its malign inspirations, leave those lowly walks in
which alone he can make a living and be happy, then will the swift
-extermination of the race put sin eternal quietus upon all our spec¬
ulations as to his status in politics and in society.*
3. I oppose the public school, because it brings paralysis to our
industrial pursuits. We are poor to the point of derisiou ; yet ex-
haustless wealth lies hidden in our soil. Broad acres of deep allu¬
vium, which would yield to honest toil some sixty and some an
hundred fold, lie untilled, and only serve to poison the atmosphere
with mephitic exhalations. The utilization of our natural resources-
is our only pathway to prosperity. The great need of this Common¬
wealth is labor—labor that can be relied on and controlled. Work,
work, work is our salvation. And yet, instead of encouraging
labor, our legislation puts it as much as possible under ban. The
framers of the patchwork constitution under which we live have
displayed a fertile ingenuity in creating the largest number possible
of public offices, that idlers and incompetents might occupy them
as bomb-proofs from labor. Constables and sheriffs, assessors and
tax gatherers, publicans of one sort or another, swarm through the
Commonwealth and devour our living and eat out our substance. To
tax, tax, tax, is to our Virginia statesman the full conception of his
duty, while the revenues thus wrung from a reluctant people are
applied not to satisfy the supreme demand of honor, but to support
burglars and thieves in comfort and idleness, and foster the mis¬
chievous experiments of quixotic philanthropy. Session after ses¬
sion the Legislature is approached by immigration agencies for
appropriations to enable them to bring laborers from abroad, and
yet we turn and expend annually with suicidal folly, vastly larger
sums of money to render worthless, and worse than worthless, a
vastly better class of laborers in our midst. Can the force of folly
*1 have calculated the ratio of white and black mortality for the cities of Richmond,
Norfolk and Lynchburg, Va.; representing a total white population of 51,952, and a total
colored population of 41,713—total population, white and colored, 93,665. The mortuary
reports for these cities, in my possession, cover a period of twenty-one months (March 1874
to November 1875, inclusive). During these twenty-one months, there was a total white
mortality of 1,900, a total colored mortality of 2,599. In other words, there was one white
death to every twenty-seven of the white population, and one colored death to every sixteen
of the colored population. The reports from Petersburg, Virginia, cover a period of only
three months (September, October, November, 1875). The white population is 8,744; the
colored population 10,185. During the three months, there were fifty-three deaths among
the whites, and one hundred and four among the. colored, or one white death to every one
hundred and sixty five of the white population, one colored death to every ninety-eight of
the colored population.
It may be of further interest to note that regarding the first three named Virginia cities,
during the twenty one months stated, there were four hundred and eighty still-births; of
these the race is not given in thirty-three cases, but one hundred and forty-six white still¬
births are tabulated, and three hundred and one colored—making the total of four hundred
and eighty. Omitting any reference to the thirty-three still births, the races of which are
not given, the ratio of white still births is one to every three hundred and fifty-six white
population, and the ratio of colored still-births, one to every one hundred and thirty eight
of the colored population.
20
The Public School in its
further go? Up to 1860 the exports of the South in the shape of
tobacco, cotton, sugar, &c., were several tiroes greater than the ex¬
ports from equal areas in any other part of the Union, and kept the
balance of trade in our favor—(there lies the secret of our financial
troubles). I have seen the statistics, though I cannot lay my hands
on them now, which demonstrate that our Southern agriculture,
during the period alluded to, gathered from our fertile soil more
wealth than was ever acquired by similar means since the dawn of
authentic history. These grand results were chiefly due to the la¬
bor of negro slaves, who almost fed and clothed the world. The
crude products of their labor were fashioned by superior skill, all
over the civilized globe, into infinite forms of comfort, of elegance,
and of luxury. And in such congenial employment the negro was
comfortable and happy to an extent never realized before by any
other laboring class since time began. His eyes stood out with fat¬
ness, and joy exultant burst from his tuneful throat. With happy
confidence he relied upon a clearer head to direct his steps, and
loved the generous hand that supplied his wants. This race, per¬
fectly adapted, as we have seen, by their moral, intellectual and
physical attributes, to field labor in low latitudes; better for such
work, incomparably better, than Irish or Scandinavians, than
Scotch or English, than Dutch or Swiss—better even than the olive
pigtails of the Flowery Kingdorp—we teach, or attempt to teach, to
despise those lowly walks in which alone they can be useful and
happy, and disregarding the laws of nature, which can never be
violated with impunity, to aspire to the shop and the counter, the
office, the pulpit, the bar, the bench, the hustings, the warrior's
wreath, the statesman's civic crown. Are we in our dotage? De¬
based and corrupt, have we at last become the victims of that su¬
preme infatuation, which forebodes destruction from the gods? The
negro, tutored under the old regime, inoculated therefore with just
conceptions of himself and others, and so protected against the
malignant virus of modern philanthropy, is still the best field laborer
in the world. The negroes who are growing up, or have grown up
in the last decade, are sadly unreliable. But if the}' are idle and
thriftless, the fault is ours, uot theirs. That they should behave as
well and work as well as they generally do, is a great marvel. The
thrusting of the negro into politics, against every dictate of pru¬
dence and common sense, without a precedent in all the annals of
time to sanction it, is what ruins him as a laborer. Is he not a fac¬
tor of the government? Dim visions of ease and idleness flit before
his beclouded mind, and stagger his feeble intellections. The Pres¬
ident of "the nation" invokes his assistance and leans upon him for
support. Flattered by and feeling his importance as a political ele¬
ment, bearing the weight of empire on his shoulders, he is no longer
content to crush the clods, nor proud to guide the shining plough
and turn the stubborn glebe. The lofty duties of citizenship call
him from the swamp and the ditch, from the farmyard and the
field. With simple wants, which—so feeble is his moral sense—he
Relations to the Negro.
21
can supply without labor, and almost without danger, is it strange
that it is unsafe to rely upon him for faithful and steady labor?
And shall we, at the expense of the bleeding honor of the common¬
wealth, endeavor to raise the negro to a class of duties which he
will never comprehend, nor with safety can even attempt to dis¬
charge, and in the process utterly unfit him for that kind of labor
which is the great demand of the day, and in the performance of
which he excels every other people on the earth.
4. If all I have written be destitute of force, still there remains an
objection to the system, which is absolutely conclusive, unless indeed
the sense of honor is dead within us beyond the possibility of resus¬
citation. Simple honesty forbids that we should support a mam¬
moth charity, however worthy, with money which does not belong
to the State, money wrongfully withheld from its rightful owners,
the creditors of the Commonwealth. To support the system, even
granting it to be desirable per se, is, under existing circumstances,
a high crime; a crime of the deepest dye and most malignant type,
which no argument, no necessity can justify.
We owe a debt of more than thirty millions. It was contracted
by our own people through legislatures fairly chosen and represent¬
ing the will of the people. If it had been created by the new element
forcibly injected into our economy, as is the case with the debts of
some of the States south of us, repudiation might perhaps be enter¬
tained. But we created it. Nor was it created for objects which
have been swept away by the convulsions of war. We are to-day
in the enjoyment of the benefits purchased by this debt. We are
not required to pay for a dead horse. A magnificent monument, by
which we propose to perpetuate to coming ages the form and the
features of the Father of his Country, stands on our Capitol Square,
but it is still unpaid for. How dare the State insult the memory of
Washington by an act of grand larceny ! If his spirit could infuse
that inanimate bronze, his indignant soul would shiver the effigy into
atoms! What Virginian does not burn with indignation and blush
with shame, when he sees the Commonwealth, late the synonym of
chivalry and honor, chaffer and higgle with her creditors for abate¬
ment and compromise ! If an honest man be pressed with debt, he
makes all the money he can, reduces expenses to the minimum, and
turns over to his creditors the excess of income over barely neces¬
sary expenses. But if a man, burdened with debt, support a style of
living more costly and luxurious than he indulged in his prosperity,
and plead his poverty as a justification of non-payment, he simply
adds mendacity to theft. Let States be judged by the same rule.
From them is due, in a higher sense, a pure allegiance, an unquali¬
fied obedience to justice. What shall we say to the plea of poverty
put up in behalf of Virginia, when we know that with an area one-
third less and a population a fourth less thau in 1860, the expenses
of the Government are more than two and a half times greater than
when the State was in the plenitude of its wealth. The Governor
in his last message, through many paragraphs of pompous rhetoric,
22
The Public School in its
recommends a ruthless retrenchment in all the departments of the
Government, and to the same end, a remodeling of the Constitution;
but when he sees the inevitable application of his ideas, adds with
bated breath: " This recommendation means no interference with
the public school system." " O, most lame and impotent conclu¬
sion !" This system which abstracts $500,000 per annum from
State funds, and embracing local taxation, costs considerably more
than a million, we are required to support, while the honor of the
State is bleeding at every pore, and its creditors are coolly told to
stand aside until we have concluded a costly experiment in govern¬
mental philanthropy. Shall we have the brazen effrontery to plead
our poverty in justification of our conduct, when we expend annu¬
ally $1,584,000 to meet the expenses of our State Government, not
including interest on the public debt; while from 1850 to 1860, the
-annual average cost of a vastly better Government, embracing a
larger area and a greater population, was only $588,000. How can
"we look our creditors in the face and talk about our poverty, and
propose postponement or reduction of interest, when rioting, it would
seem, in excessive wealth, we appropriate from State funds alone to
the costly luxury of public schools an amount, which, fifteen years
ago was sufficient to defray all the expenses of the Government?
If the expenses of our State Government were one-third what they
are or less, we should have a Government incalculably better; for all
money raised by taxation beyond what is simply necessary is only a
fund for corruption. Our people groan beneath excessive taxation,
not because they are unwilling to bear the just burdens of govern¬
ment ; but because they know that their hard earnings are used, not
to save the plighted faith of the Commonwealth, but to support the
lazy incumbents of unnecessary offices; to provide fuel and lodg¬
ings, food and raiment, for rogues and scoundrels, three-fourths of
whom would be more suitably punished at the whipping-post; to
meet the heavy demands of a bald experiment in universal educa¬
tion, based on false theories of government, false doctrines in morals,
repugnant to the traditions and to the genius of our people. If we
would apply to the State debt the sums annually appropriated to
the support of the public schools, we would be able to pay full in¬
terest and create a sinking fund besides. Thus easy it is to pay our
debt; to throttle the vampire that is sucking our blood; to get re¬
lief from that incubus that paralyzes our industries and keeps capi¬
tal from our borders. Doing this, Virginia will be welcomed, thrice
welcomed, and received with happy plaudits, into the family of
honest commonwealths. Doing this, joy will suffuse her face, and
honor, quickening her pulses into healthful and happy play, will
send the life current in tingling ecstacy through her veins. Doing
this, the dark cloud of repudiation will vanish into thin air, and
Virginia, radiant with her ancient glories, will stand forth, "re¬
deemed, regenerated, and disenthralled." Can we hesitate?
A State that will not pay its honest debts, has lived too long. The
very existence of a State, so dishonored, is a crime, and the prolific
Belations to the Negro.
23;
parent of crime. The State is to its citizens the rule of right, the
very embodiment of inviolable justice. To enforce among its sub¬
jects a just regard for mutual rights, the State imposes fines and for¬
feitures, uses chains and manacles, builds jails and penitentiaries,
constructs the gallows and the guillotine. But when the State be¬
comes itself an evil-doer, commits those acts which it punishes in its
subjects, tramples under foot the eternal justice which it professes
to enforce and to dispense, then it debauches the morals of its sub¬
jects, who have been taught to look to it for inspiration and for
guidance.
There is among us in this latter half of the 19th century, a laxity
about debts, public and private, which would have disgraced the
ethics of pagan Rome. They called a debt aes alienum, another's
money; with us, when a man gets another's money, by borrowing
or otherwise, it is, iu many cases, most effectually his own. Stay
laws and bankrupt acts, at once the evidence and the means of cor¬
ruption, enable him in many ways to bar payment. Nor does he
lose caste by his ill-gotten wealth. Luxurious parlors open to re¬
ceive him, and are honored by his presence; his wife and daugh¬
ters flaunt in silks and flutter in brocade; his splendid equipage
flings mud from its whirring wheels on the obscure pedestrian with
whose money, perchance, it was bought. When, even in the cor¬
rupt days of the Roman commonwealth, Cicero was approached
with a proposition for new tablets—obliteration of debts—the in¬
dignant Consul answered he would give new tablets, but under the
auctioneer's hammer. Nor is it difficult to find the cause of this
woful putridity of morals. The two Governments under which we
live, have, for fifteen years, shown an utter disregard, have affected
on the grand scale, an utter annihilation, of the property rights of
the citizen; have themselves committed, over and over, those
crimes which just governments always punish in their subjects. Is
it strange that the individual should forget the distinction between
mine and thine, should have his sensibilities utterly obtunded, when
the State, to which he has been taught to look as the impersonation
of justice, as his exemplar in morals and iu conduct, abuses the
confidence reposed in its honor, and denies the obligations of its
plighted faith? If the State, upon which rests supremely the obli¬
gation of immutable justice, can plunder and rob on the grand
scale, why not he in feeble imitation on the small?
And so, descending step by step, we have learned to entertain the
idea of repudiation. Calmly we walk to the edge of that awful
chasm and look down into its dismal depths. Shall Virginia take
that fatal plunge ? No sacrifice would be too great to prevent it.
But none is required. It is only necessary to be content to live as
we lived in our purer and happier days. If we do this guilty thing,
it will be the blackest picture in the book of time. The act will
have no extenuation. For one, I say it deliberately, I prefer the
annihilation of her sovereignty, the obliteration of her name from
history, and from the memory of men.
24
The Public School in its
If Virginia is to commit this crowning infamy, I trust it will ap¬
pear that they, who can justly claim the proud heritage of her
glory, were guiltless of the sin; that Virginia, brave in war and
wise in peace, renowned in history and in romance, the lofty idol
of gallant and knightly sons, preserved, so long as she was free,
her honor unsullied; that the noble mother, convulsed with mor¬
tal agony—herself no longer—stooped to this last disgrace only
after she had been bound and manacled, and a baser blood had
been'injected, at a tyrant's bidding, into her indignant veins.
Civis.
[From the Southern Planter and Farmer, Hay, 1876.]
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN ITS RELATIONS TO
THE NEGRO.
No. IV.
The negro, we are told, is a voter, and our own safety and pro¬
tection demand that we should educate him and so prepare him for
the intelligent discharge of the duties of citizenship. To this I
an 8we r :
1. That fully believing that such a result will never be reached, I
am utterly unwilling to expend vast sums of money, wrung from
an impoverished and tax-burdened people, in a silly attempt to ac¬
complish an impossibility.
2. If the negro, or rather his special friends for him, assert his
equality, then let him make good the assertion. That they, who
with hot indignation deny the revolting doctrine, should yet be
heavily taxed to prove it true, is an extreme experiment on human
patience. And yet, if with meek pusillanimity we submit to heavy
taxation in the furtherance of negro education, we thereby put into
the problem an element that renders its solution impossible. Under
such a system, any success or seeming success, which the negro
may accomplish in what our modern reformers- term education,
would leave still unsettled the question at issue. Negro children go
to school, it is true ; but the}' go because the feast is free and the
school-house is a shelter from labor. That yearning for knowledge,
which is the only test that it will be effectually acquired or usefully
employed, is not the motive that takes the negro urchin to school.
Should such a motive possibly exist, the system leaves no room for
its display or development. By money extorted from capital and
labor, negro children are coaxed and petted into the acquisition of
the rudiments of learning, into a certain facility in the mere imita¬
tive processes of education. From such data the conclusion is
reached that the negro is capable of education in the true sense of
Relations to the Negro.
25
the word, and is competent to the loftiest functions of life—the
duties of political sovereignty. Not more absurd would the conclu¬
sion be that oranges may be profitably grown in Virginia as a staple
crop because the seed will germinate in our soil, and the plant, if
protected from the rigor of our winters and forced by artificial heat,
may be made to bear a scanty crop of imperfect fruit.
3. There is one way, and only one, in which it is possible for the
demonstration to be made. Let the negro, in his own way, without
help or hindrance from any quarter, make good his claim that he
may be safely invested with the rights of citizenship, then, and not
till then, will the demonstration be satisfactory and complete. The
negro has his destiny in his own hands; he is in a civilized society,
with all the arts and appliances of civilization at his command. If
he is competent to rise from his present position, and capable of
becoming a useful citizen, an integral part of the body politic, no
help, no stimulation, is necessary to bring about the result. Indeed,
he would rise and make good the demonstration, of his capacity and
consequently of his rights, not only without assistance, but in the
face of hostile legislation. Never had a semi-civilized race so
splendid an opportunity of demonstrating their capabilities. So far
from not learning, they cannot help learning, if only they have the
ability and the desire to learn. To tax our people, already pinched
with extreme poverty, to provide for the blacks the means of free
education, is simply an attempt to bribe and'coax them into learn¬
ing, and is, in itself, a complete confession of defeat. The soil is
so barren that it must be stimulated into temporary and spasmodic
productiveness by copious applications of guano obtained from a
foreign locality. Withhold the artificial stimulus, and the soil
lapses at once into its original infertility.
Now, we tax ourselves to the point of actual suffering, we stretch
the power of taxation to the very verge of confiscation, and attaint
the sacred name of the Commonwealth, to settle a question in so¬
ciology, the solution of which is rendered impossible by the new
element—unnecessary and deceptive—with which we complicate the
problem. That individual negroes may be stimulated by the system
into a mechanical familiarity with the elements of education, so-
called, no more settles the question of the capacity of the race than
the fructification of a tropical plant in a hot house proves that it
can stand the rigors of our climate and may be made to entrench
itself permanently and profitably in our soil. But if the negro,
moved by his own instincts, stimulated by his own aspirations, make
good, in his own way, by his own strength, and at his own expense,
his fitness for citizenship, then the question is put beyond cavil, and
the doctrine of negro equality is settled, affirmatively and forever.
If, under the circumstances indicated, he should fail, however, to
make good his claim, then it would as clearly appear that he is con-
genitally an inferior, and that his proper position is menial and
subordinate. We are guilty,tben, of the supreme folly, of the out¬
rageous Wickedness of expending annually vast sums of money,
3
26
The Public School in its
extorted by unjust taxation from a disheartened and poverty-stricken
people, upon the pretended education of negroes, with the view of
settling the question of their fitness for citizenship, while this very
expenditure in their behalf renders a correct solution of the pro¬
blem an utter impossibility. On the other hand, without the ex¬
penditure of a single dollar, the question would settle itself naturally,
and so settled, would lead us to the only safe and wise conclusions.
Let not the reader imagine that I am arguing for the exclusion
of the negro from the public schools. Having shown in several ar¬
ticles, before alluded to, that appeared in the Religious Herald, that
the system is utterly indefensible, even without reference to the
question of mixed races; that it is in irreconcilable conflict with
the American theory of government and with the Bible doctrine of
parental duty and responsibility; that it debauches public and pri¬
vate morality; that unless arrested, it will be the death of liberty,
if, indeed, it has not already inflicted the fatal blow, I favor the
abandonment Of the scheme altogether.
Are the "children of the State" then, says an objector, to be
allowed to grow up in ignorance, and by their ignorance imperil the
morals, the property and the institutions of the country? To this
I answer:
1. That if the education of children be left where God and nature
has placed it, in the hands of parents, some will be educated and
others will not be. As a general statement, those will be educated
who ought to be educated, and those will fail to be educated, or
rather will remain untaught in letters, whose education would
neither increase their own happiness nor advance the general inter¬
ests of society. Those, or their parents for them, who have an in¬
nate yearning for a loftier and nobler sphere; for the pleasure and
the power of real mental development; for the good it will enable
them to accomplish, and the influence it will enable them to exert,
will not be baulked in the accomplishment of their ambition: They
will reach their goal through years, it may be, of toil, of hardship,
of self-denial; and this very discipline of trial and difficulty will be
the most important element of their education; will make them
stronger, purer, better. In the education of such, society is pro¬
foundly interested; and they will be educated as certainly and far
more effectually without the pestiferous and dangerous intervention
of government.
But they who have no such longings will, in the main, be left out:
and it is better for them and for society that it should be so. Their
instincts do not seek, their modes of life will not require, scholastic
arts. Their attainments in letters accordingly will range from zero
upwards, but never high. . Such people must spend their lives in
physical labor. Is it hard that it should be so? Very hard, in the
estimation of our fanatical optimists, but not so in truth. Such
people would be extremely unhappy, and useless as well, if placed
upon a plane above their instincts and beyond their capacity. Spec¬
ulate as we will, a large part, perhaps the larger part, of the human.
Relations to the Negro.
27
^family is doomed to manual labor. We cannot extricate them
from that condition. In it they are happy and content unless dis-
•quieted by the false teachings of a mischievous fanaticism. The
prime necessities of life, as food and fuel, raiment and shelter, have
always demanded, and always will demand, the mechanical labor of
half the world. Let it not be imagined that steam or electricity
will at length so perform the work of human muscles as to leave
-all men abundant time for intellectual cultivation. Science sug¬
gests no such dreamy vista. The locomotive has but increased the
demand for transportation, the spinning jenny for textile fabrics,
the sewing machine for excessive embroidery and ornamentation.
As the facilities of work are increased, the demands for work will
grow proportionately. The wants of society, artificial or necessary,
will always multiply as fast as the means of supplying them.
Now, the}r who do this work cannot be scholars. A man who
has followed the plough all day .long cannot study when he comes
home at night. All his time of rest is demanded to repair the
muscular and nervous exhaustion of a day's labor. If, in his early
youth, he has made some proficiency in literary arts, they fall into
disuse, as a fact, and from necessity, in his toiling manhood. The
laboring class will also be a reading class when, and only when,
Plato's Utopia is realized. The attempt to lift our whole popula¬
tion, white and black, into a literary atmosphere would be su¬
premely silly, even if we possessed the fabled gift of Midas, whose
touch turned every object into gold. The fantastic enterprise, under
existiug circumstances, when we are unable, or profess to be una¬
ble, to pay the interest on our public debt, and to solve the daily
recurring problem of food and clothing for our families, is an out¬
rage upon simple honesty and common sense.
Nor can it be successfully maintained that the education is pro¬
moted of those even for whose special benefit the public school is
intended. Those whose instincts lead them to seek education will
be better educated, as already shown, without the costly patronage
of the State. But the others, without such instincts, may attend
schools; compulsory laws, as in the Northern States, Prussia, and
elsewhere, may enforce their attendance; the desire to study, the
thirstfor knowledge, however, is lacking, and cannot be supplied by
legislation. Without this essential condition of success, the whole
business is a farce. The feast is spread, but the urchins do not
rolish it; you may force it into their stomachs, but then it is physic,
not food; it cannot be assimilated; it does not strengthen, it weak¬
ens, the intellectual organism. The "Pierian Spring," a little turbid,
perhaps, bubbles before their eyes; but they are not thirsty, and
will not drink. You may f6rce them to. swallow draught after
•draught; but then it is only a disgusting drench, not the living
water of intellectual life.
2. To grow up ignorant of letters is not necessarily to grow up
in ignorance. I have been all along using the term education with
*a sort of silent protest. A man is educated, who can observe intel¬
ligently, compare and reason, and reach just conclusions, with or
28
The Public School in its
without hook-learning. A knowledge of letters is not education
but only a means, and frequently a very imperfect means, of educa¬
tion. That man is educated for his sphere of life, and is happy and
useful in that sphere, who well understands and discharges its duties'.
I daily meet uneducated men, whose knowledge of newspaper and
what is called popular literature, is flippant and voluminous. I daily
meet educated men, good citizens, and good neighbors, some of
whom cannot even read, while others abandon in mature and busy
life the scholastic arts acquired in their boyhood.
My next neighbor is a quiet, kindly man, a valuable citizen, an
industrious and successful tiller of the soil. If you go to his farm
in the busy season, you realize at once, from the steady progress and
thorough character of the work, from the absence of all hurry,
bluster and confusion, that he is indeed a master workman. I have
seen him directing the work of thirty laborers. Some are hauling
up wheat, some are threshing, some are fanning, some are ricking
the straw, some are putting away the chafl', some are measuring the
grain, some are hauling it to market; and all these operations are
so ordered that they go on at equal pace; there is no jar, no loss of
time. Can such a man, averaging from 25 to 30 bushels of wheat
per acre on a large farm, competent to direct this work in such a
systematic and judicious way, be justly called an uneducated man?
And yet this man never reads, and, I am told, is unable to read.
If, indeed, he is uneducated, then I wish we had more of the same
sort.
During the late war, Stonewall Jackson came at nightfall to a
swollen stream. A supreme necessity required that he should cross
it before day. He called his engineers to him and explained the
situation. He also sent for a man, who sustained an anomalous re¬
lation to the army, and whose sterling worth and strong common
sense had frequently attracted the General's notice. "What can
you do for me?" said Jackson. "Let me pick a hundred men, and
I think I can put you over," said our hero. The detail was granted;
and before day he returned to old Stonewall: "Ginral, the bridge
ar built; your army can pass over. Your drawin' men will show
you their picters in the morning." And yet by the modern test
this man, who built the bridge before professional engineers had
completed their plans and specifications, was an ignorant man. If,
indeed, he was, then the familiar line is true in a sense which the
poet never intended:
" When ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."
Consider the ancient Athenians. Such was their critical acumen
that with ease they followed Socrates in his subtlest disquisitions;
such their polished taste that the use of a false quantity by a speaker
forced him from the bema; such their quick intelligence that their
appreciative plaudits were the highest meed of their orators and the
sure passport to fame. And yet these people, innocent, in the main,
Relations to the Negro.
29
of letters, and therefore, according to the modern standard, unedu¬
cated, have fairly illumined the track of history with the brightest
record of public spirit and of patriotism; have left for the con¬
stant study and imitation of succeeding ages the loftiest achiev-
ments in poetry and in eloquence, in philosophy and in art; and
have infused their spirit as an eternal inspiration, solace and guide,
into the language aud literature of every civilized people that have
since figured in the annals of time.
We are indeed a progressive people! Education, which concerns
that incorporeal essence, the mind or soul,-we have learned in our
day to determine with an accuracy fully equal, to that with which a
merchant measures his calico or a butcher weighs his beef. Our
modern reformers turn to the Federal census, and because they find
that the percentage of persons unable to read and write is greater
in Virginia than in Connecticut, reach the conclusion by the applica¬
tion of their simple rule, that Connecticut is exactly four and a
half times better educated than Virginia. The fact that Virginia
has given to the country and to history the purest and ablest pa¬
triots and statesmen, the most brilliant and gifted orators, the
ablest generals, the noblest, displays of generosity and self-abnega¬
tion, while the contribution of Connecticut has been little more
than painted hams and wooden nutmegs, has no relation at all to
the matter of education !
But whether children are to grow up ignorant or not is not a pro¬
per question for government. The fact that it is assumed that gov¬
ernment may take the whole matter of the education of " the chil¬
dren of the State" into its parental hands most painfully shows
how far we have been corrupted from the simplicity of our fathers.
Such an idea never entered the minds of such babes in statesman¬
ship as Mason, Monroe, Marshall, Pendleton, Randolph, and so on,
but was reserved to illustrate, in our day, the luminous patriotism
of Judge Underwood and Doctor Bayne.
According to the American theory, government is not personal
or parental, but is a mere agency which we may alter or abolish at
pleasure when it fails to accomplish the purposes for which it was
instituted. Government is the creature of society, not society the
creature of government. The government belongs to the people,
not the people to the government. It is the proper function of
government to protect the rights of individuals, not to form so¬
ciety.
How, our government, State or Federal, cannot undertake the
education of the people without violating its foundation maxims. If
our government can prescribe when our children shall go to school,
where, and to whom, what they shall learn and what they shall not
learn, it is plain that it can mould to its pleasures the feelings and
sentiments of the rising generation. It forms society. A party in
power can easily perpetuate its existence. In some of the States, the
whole public school machinery has been run avowedly in the inter¬
ests of the Radical party. Under such a system the voters of the
30
The Public School in its
country are fabricated and fashioned by government. The govern¬
ment is not the reflex of public sentiment, but public sentiment the
reflex of government. The opinions of individuals do not form the
government, but government the opinions of individuals. This is
done confessedly in bepraised Prussia and in other absolute govern¬
ments. Under such a system, the people may be called voters'; but
they are tools, pliant tools, ready at a moment's notice to do a ty¬
rant's bidding. No room has been left for the development of in¬
dividual opinion, as necessary to free government as air is to life;
but a generation has been welded by uniform processes into an un¬
thinking mass, not competent to direct, but prompt to obey, the
government, which has infused it with its ideas and moulded it to
its will.
To support the public school is to abandon the American theory
of government. Nor is if calculated to abate our fears when we
observe how responsive the States are to the suggestions of the
central government, which, hot satisfied with pliant servility, is
evidently preparing to clutch the whole system and wield its incal¬
culable power in the furtherance of its projects.
Another view will demonstrate that the public school system and
the American theory of government cannot exist together. We
maintain the perfect separation of Church and State. Absolute re¬
ligious freedom, we proudly claim, is the gift of American thought
to humanity. Here, we assert, Catholics and Protestants, Jews'and
Mahommedans, Infidels, Pagans and Atheists, stand politically on
the same footing. All are free to believe or disbelieve what they
please, and incur by their belief no disqualification of any sort
whatever. A man is responsible only to his Maker for his religious
belief, and government cannot tax for the support of any form
of religion. Such is our boast, such our creed. But this creed is
attacked so soon as the State undertakes to. educate. The vexed
question of Church and State obtrudes itself, and will not down.
Shall religious instruction be given in the public school ? If so,
then that instruction will offend some, who will 'maintain, and, ac¬
cording to our political compact, will justly maintain, that they are
taxed to propagate religious error. Shall religious instruction be
excluded from the public school? If so, then the public school, in
the clear opinion of the great bulk of Protestants, is an institution
in the interests of Atheism and Infidelity. To exclude the precepts
and the doctrines of the Gospel, and its motives and inspirations,
from the hungry, plastic minds of children, is, they tell us, to put
contempt upon religion and to compel their children to receive hos¬
tile, perhaps fatal, impressions.- They are taxed that their children
may learn to trample under foot the lessons of religion and the
blood of the atonement. Whether, therefore, religious instruction
be given or excluded, the great American doctrine of absolute re¬
ligious freedom is violated.
Shall the Bible be read in the public school ? If so, what ver¬
sion ? If the Catholic version, then Protestants are taxed to sup-
Relations to the Negro.
31
port the doctrine of penance. If King James' version, then the
Catholic is taxed to propagate heresy, and the Jew to maintain the
pretensions of an imposter. The State cannot prescribe a religious
creed; it has covenanted to respect the religious faith of all its
citizens alike, and not to inquire into the truth or error of their
tenets.
Let the Bible be a sealed book in the public school, demands the
Atheist or the Infidel, Let its doctrines and teachings never be
announced to furnish motives of conduct to the pupils. Be it so.
Then religionists of every class will complain, and justly, that they
are taxed to destroy religion and to foster infidelity. The minds
of their children are hungry; if truth be excluded, they must feed
on error. Those minds are plastic, and must receive impressions.
If Religion be forbidden to write its lessons on the soft tablets of
their hearts, Vice will brand them with his mark and seal them as
his own.
Nor is it possible to divorce religion from secular instruction.
There is religion in the copy-book and in the primer, in history,
in science, in literature. Every teacher makes impressions for or
against religion.
Under such a system, what chance is there of sound, moral cul¬
ture when a chapter of the Bible can be read only by sufferance;
when the only infallible source of ethics must be positively excluded
or timidly employed. The mere cultivation of the intellectual
powers, without the proper cultivation of the moral faculties, fur¬
nishes no safeguard against vice and crime. It enlarges the de¬
sires, it is true; but this enlargement is not accompanied by cor¬
responding moral restraints to prevent their unlawful gratification.
It only puts into the heart a stronger temptation, and into the
hand a keener instrument for crime.
Such has always been the fruit which this tree has borne. It first
took root and flourished among the ancient Spartans, and soon their
creed was perfidy, and their virtue, theft. In an article in the Re¬
ligious Herald, I proved by the inexorable logic of the census tables
that crime and communism are most rife and rampant exactly in
those communities where the System has been longest entrenched.
The State, in order to prepare our children for the safe and intelli¬
gent discharge of the duties'of citizenship, must inform their minds
and mould their morals! This work, by the voice of Nature and
the law of God, belongs to parents, and to them only; and govern¬
ment has never in a single instance usurped the parental function
without emasculating, debasing and corrupting the character of its
subjects. If this be our reliance for the intelligence and morality
necessary to the perpetuity of free institutions, then we are leaning
upon a broken reed, we are treading upon treacherous ashes, we
are building upon the unstable sand.
But the system, we are'told, is upon us by the conqueror's act,
and submission is at once our necessity and our policy. To this I
answer:
32
The Public School in its
1. That there is no evidence to show that the Federal Govern¬
ment required the incorporation of the free school sj'stem into our
State Constitution as a condition of reconstruction; and if it did
not, the argument is plainly false.
2. But, it is replied, that while the Federal Government did not
expressly make this avowal, it was known that such was its pleasure
and its purpose, and that the State would not have been re-admitted
into the Union unless our Constitution had contained a provision for
the support of free schools. This may be true; it may not be true.
It is a matter of conjecture. But granting it to be true, I have this
to say;. Virgiuia is now a State of this Union. She is as truly a
State as Massachusetts, and as sovereign within the limits of State
action. Provided she does not violate the Federal Constitution, she
is as free as any other State to regulate her internal affairs in her
own way. All that the Federal Government had a right to expect,
all, in fact, that it did expect, was so to start us in our new career
as to make it morally certain that we would move in the path of its
appointment. Fastening upon us negro suffrage and the public
school, it knew that the difficulty of making a change would be ex¬
ceedingly great. But if from inherent energy and virtue we sur¬
mount the difficulty, the Federal Government will only be baulked
in its own game—a game it had no right to play, and certainly will
have no right to complain. If good faith to the Federal Govern¬
ment iudeed demands the eternal integrity of the present Constitu¬
tion of Virginia, by what authority, then, is our present Legisla¬
ture engaged in an attempt to affect important alterations ? If Vir-
ginia'is indeed a State, with all the rights of any other State, then
the payment of her debt supremely touches her honor. But, if, as
is secretly assumed but not roundly asserted, she is not a real State,
but an outlying province; if, by foreign force, a form of organic
law is fixed and fastened upon her that prevents the development of
her resources and renders compliance with her plighted faith im¬
possible, then it were well that the fact should so appear, and cancel
her obligations. If such, indeed, be her condition, then let the
Federal Government tear from her shield the sham sovereignty we
should in very shame refuse to flaunt. Let the full truth be openly
avowed. Sorrow, humiliation and shame have been the fruit, the
bitter fruit, of falsehood, pretense and self-deception.. If such in¬
deed be the condition of Virginia, then she is dead; dead from the
blow, which, with superhuman courage, she vainly essayed to parry.
But proclaim her death, and the circumstances of her death, and so
save her honor. Yes, it were better to annihilate right out her pre¬
tended sovereignty, and so free her fame from the foul stain of vio¬
lated faith, thau that she should live on, but in a moribund state,
while dishonor feeds and fattens on her decaying vitals. So dying,
her pale ghost, as it descends to the shades, pale from sorrow and
from torture, but still pure, will be welcomed to the tender em¬
brace of the bravest of her sons: of him, whose effigy, the gift of
kindred blood, was lately inaugurated amidst the loud roar of artil-
Relations to the Negro.
33
lery and the mournful dirge of martial music; who left, as his last
legacy to the Commonwealth he could not save, the immortal
words, " Death is preferable to dishonor."
No, no; I cannot admit the conclusion of those who say that the
conqueror has left us the form but nothing of the reality of freedom;
that he has imposed upon us the responsibilities of sovereignty but
denied us the liberty of meeting its demands; that he even consents
to the destruction of the government he fought to defend in order
to wreak the more fully his malignant vengeance oh us. No, no ;
we can change the Constitution of our State, if we please ; we can do
this and be guilty of no breach of faith—express, tacit or implied.
3. When the present Constitution of Virginia was adopted, it
was simply impossible to do the wise and proper thing. The con¬
queror, after a hard and doubtful contest, was flushed with victory,
hot with wrath, and thirsting for vengeance. Thus inflamed, he
did things injurious to both sides, which a returning sense of justice
and the mellowing influence of time, lead him to cancel or modify.
On the other hand, Virginia was absolutely paralyzed with despair.
She had made the supreme effort and had failed. Bleeding and
prostrate, she lay at the conqueror's feet. If at such *a time she
accepted ruinous and degrading conditions; if, in the hour of her
mortal weakness, she went farther (as I think she did) in the way
of submission than was required, and, to appease her powerful and
vindictive conqueror, assumed burdens which even he in his hot
exasperation did not seek to impose, is she now, when she is some¬
what recovering from her deadly stupor, and the blood, though slow
and languid, is beginning to creep and tingle through her veins,
still to suffer, and to suffer forever, the crucifixion of those cruel
fetters? Virginia was not even present in the Convention that-
formed this Constitution. A few, indeed, impotent to restrain, stood
by in silent agony and saw their mother mutilated and mangled by
aliens and enemies, when there was neither strength in her arm nor
mercy in her woe. And yet we are told that a Constitution thus
formed, and imposed upon .us, is an eternal contract, and that it is
wrong even to attempt to free the Commonwealth from its hard
and ruinous conditions.
We are trying to inaugurate the " era of good feeling," to
" shake hands across the bloody chasm," and be friends again. God
speed the happy day! But that day will never come so long as un¬
just and injurious terms, the heritage of defeat, are submitted to on
the one hand, or enforced on the other. We can never feel kindly
towards the North so long as we chafe under these cruel exactions;
the North can never respect us or extend to us a sincere and hon¬
orable friendship so long^as with lying lips we profess to love the
chains that gall us. The only condition of solid peace, of honest
friendship, is that the perfect equality of the States should be felt,
asserted and acknowledged. In order to the restoration of fraternal
relations, we must make a full, frank and manly assertion of our
sentiments. To conceal or qualify them is but to confirm the op-
34
The Public School in its
pression which the advocates of such a policy profess, to fear. As
time mellows the temper of the North, and the hot passions, born of
blood, subside, the generous instincts of the victor, stimulated and
strengthened by an ever-growing conviction of identity of interests,
and by the sad spectacle of a brave people writhing under dishon¬
orable terms accepted in the weakness of despair or imposed in the
cruel wantonness of power, will seek to erase the traces of fratrici¬
dal conflict and to blend the late hostile sections into friendly and
honorable union again. But this consummation will never be reached
so long as we profess to-be satisfied with—even to support and de¬
fend—the degrading terms of which the conqueror himself is getting
to be ashamed. By manly conduct and bearing, by language open,
frank, ingenuous, let us maintain our self-respect, and so we wilt
secure respect and consideration from our enemies—enemies
no more, at last friends. I offend a powerful friend. My condition
is such that an adjustment is necessary. He has me in his power,
and imposes'conditions which wound my pride and self-respect, but
I accept them from necessity.. We resume our relations; we main¬
tain the forms of friendship and courtesy; but it is a hollow and;
a treacherous peace. If I should tell him I was easy and content
under the galling terms, he would hold me, and justly, in contempt.
I can never feel kindly towards him; he can .never restore to me
his confidence and respect; we can never be friends again, until by
concurrent action the degrading terma are cancelled. The appli¬
cation is easy.
That there is nothing in our relations to the Federal Government
to prevent our abandonment of free schools, the friends of the
scheme in Virginia have again and again proclaimed. When the
Civil Rights Bill, requiring mixed schools—the logical demand, by
the way, of the system—was under debate in Congress, they con¬
stantly declared that that feature, if retained, would effectually kill
the public schools in this and in all the Southern States. There is
a way, then, to get rid of this system, even according to its sup¬
porters, for the Constitution of Virginia is now exactly what it was
then.
But, says an objector, the theory of public instruction so gener-
erally prevails, and is still making such rapid headway, that it is
idle to resist the current, and that it becomes us to submit as grace¬
fully as possible to the inevitable. I answer as follows:
1. If the system is utterly wrong both in morals and in policy, as
I have shown it to be, it is the duty of good men to oppose it, and
that without reference to the question of the success or failure of
their opposition. In the language of Burke: "When there is abuse
there ought to be clamor; for it is better to have our slumber bro¬
ken by the fire-bell than to perish in bed amidst the flames." It is
better for us, it makes us purer and stronger, to encounter defeat
in a brave contest for the right than to triumph in the wrong. In
fact, a constant contest with evil is the unending duty of humanity.
To submit to it, and hence to be corrupted and debauched by it, is
Relations to the Negro.
35
the soft persuasion of the lax morality of our day. I daily meet
men who say: "I fully accept your views, but the thing is upon us,
and we have only to submit." Of course, the system will prevail],
if those who are opposed to will not oppose it. The devil himself
is upon us; must we, therefore, cease resistance, and passively sub¬
mit to his pleasure?
Others say, in terms of confidential cowardice, that, while they
utterly disapprove the scheme, yet so many who have votes or pat¬
ronage are in favor of it, their interests forbid them even to divulge
their opinions. But they, upon whom the burdens of government
chiefly fall, whose opinions, therefore, are most entitled to consid¬
eration, who have never been candidates for office, and never expect
to be, with but few exceptions, oppose the scheme. It is fastened
upon us by the brute tyranny of numbers, supported by tbe votes
of those who give it no money, and by the money of those who
give it no votes.
2. But I am not at all certain that the system is necessarily upon
us forever. It is not gaining, but it is evidently losing strength,
even in the North. The tree is beginning to bear fruit, and it is
not luscious fruit. The great State of New York is in a ferment
about the matter. So with some of the Northwestern States. Even
in Masachusetts, the machinery has to be continually tinkered and
altered. Everywhere it excites discontent and opposition, and causes
bad blood. Most men cannot reason except from facts; tbey must
learn only in the school of experience. The facts have not been
favorable to the system; the experience has been bitter. The insu¬
perable difficulties that belong to the system, as, for instance, com¬
pulsory attendance and religious instruction, display themselves
under the test of actual experiment, and threaten it with overthrow.
The school fund has in many cases become a fund for corruption,
and has been used notoriously in the furtherance of political schemes.
The educational system, a part of government, and therefore sub¬
ject to all the fluctuations and corruptions of government, has in
some instances been so saturated with the putrid waters of party
politics that parents, unable to reason from principles, instructed at
last by facts, stand aghast at the contamination to which their
children are subjected. The system is not becoming stronger; it
is getting weaker. A reconsideration of the whole matter is the
growing demand and tendency of the times.
3. But so far from accepting the opinion so flippantly proclaimed,
I know that the system, sooner or later, is doomed to utter over¬
throw. Founded on false principles of government, false doctrines
in morals, its cornerstone injustice, like all other false systems, it
will at last tumble down. It is a violation of those eternal princi¬
ples of God's moral government, as steady and as constant in their
action as the laws that control the physical universe. The results of
the violation of those principles are as inevitable, though, perhaps,
not so patent or so prompt, as those which follow a disregard of phy¬
sical laws. "The mills of the gods grind slowly," but they grind;;
36
The Public School in its
and their perfect work will at length be accomplished. We may
obstruct the operation of these principles, as we may obstruct the
action of physical laws, but never in either case safely or perma¬
nently. They will display at last their invincible power by sweep¬
ing away all obstructing causes, and the consequent devastation
will be greater in proportion to the strength of the obstructions.
We may arrest for a time the flow of a river to the sea. As the
waters come, and fret and foam against the embankment, we may
make it higher, broader, stronger; but no obstruction which human
power can build will be able finally to withstand the resistless mo¬
mentum of that ever-swelling flood. And the longer we stay its
course, the greater will be the desolating force of that angry tide
when at last it has forced its way.
False moral systems, once more popular and more prevalent than
the one we have subjected to examination, have in like manner
been swept away, and their wrecks bestrew the path of history.
"Truth is great, and it will prevail."
But shall we weakly wait until this system has borne its full har¬
vest of evil fruit; until, leaving us no fragment of our distinctive
civilization, it has accomplished our social subjugation, without
making the supreme effort for its extirpation? If we cannot destroy
it, we can certainly so modify it as to strip it of some of its most
objectional features. The scheme intended for the benefit of indi¬
viduals, not for the protection of property, should, if we can do no
more, be thrown upon the poll tax solely for support. The most
intelligent and worthy friends of the system themselves favor this
plan ; and with proper effort, the necessary change of the constitu¬
tion could be easily effected. But there is a remedy, an effectual
remedy, if only we have the courage to use it; there is a way out
of the wilderness, which will lead us to relief not only from this
system, but from other evils also, daily becoming more and more
intolerable, the brood of the same hideous parentage.
Universal suffrage, the sum of all political evils, without which
the free-school system could not be sustained in Virginia, must give
way to qualified suffrage; and the best qualification is a property-
qualification. Start not, and say the remedy is impossible; be
patient, let us see.
If indeed it be impossible, then we may fold our hands in de¬
spair; we are a ruined people, utterly ruined. A government that
does not protect property rights, fails to discharge the most obvious
and important function of government, and is a monstrous op¬
pression. Universal suffrage puts property under the control of
those who own none, and to be able to control property by legisla¬
tion is in effect to own it. It is the unvarying testimony of all his¬
tory, and the impregnable conclusion of sound philosophy, that the
ratio of increase of non-property-holders is greater than that of
property-holders, and this becomes more conspicuous as popula¬
tion becomes more crowded. A time comes in the history of every4
State when non-property-holders constitute the majority, the larger
Relations to the Negro.
37
majority as population becomes dense. Under universal suffrage,
the majority, owning no property, control the property in the bands
of the minority. They will tax it so as to make it tributary to their
interests, increasing the tax more and more for their own benefit,
until property yields more revenue to the public than to its nominal
owners, and this is practical confiscation. Or, they may demand
and enforce actual partition and inaugurate downright communism.
The effect, in either case, is the same. When confiscation by either
route is reached, revolution, bloodshed and chaos are the results,
succeeded by the dead calm of absolute despotism. Universal suf¬
frage is, ipso facto, a confiscation of private property. The tend¬
encies of our legislation to such an issue are so painfully patent
that I need not stop to point them out.
This result, sooner or later, would be reached; but now, more
quicklj7 and with circumstances of aggravated horror by virtue of
the alien and baser blood forcibly injected, into our political system.
We must not criminally shut our eyes to the bitter harvest of woe
we are preparing for ourselves and for our children. The discovery
of "manhood suffrage" is the fatal achievement of those commu¬
nities which boast their free schools and superior enlightenment;
and whose educational policy, discredited everywhere by its results,
is commended to our support. The fundamental error that per¬
vades the northern mind, adopted and defended by Dr. Wayland
in his "Elements of Moral Science," and so" to some extent pre¬
vailing in the southern States (the book having once been largely
used as a text in our colleges), is tbe doctrine that rights are unaf¬
fected by condition. In this doctrine "manhood suffrage" had its
origin and finds still its support. But the doctrine is as false as it
is mischievous. Our rights grow out of our condition. Coudition
defines and determines our rights. A minor has rights, but other
and different rights when he gets to be a man. Savages have rights,
but other and different rights when they become civilized. The
poor man has rights, sacred rights; but other and different rights
when he has acquired property, He has the right to protection for
his* life, for his business, and in all lawful means of bettering his
condition and advancing his happiness. But he has no right to
control property that does not belong to him; in other words, he
has no right to suffrage.
A property-qualification for suffrage is recommended by the fol¬
lowing considerations:
1. It is just. Nothing is plainer than that they who own the
property of a country, and must bear well nigh the whole burden
of taxation, should control legislation.
2. It is the only politic and safe plan. .To, acquire property is'a
much better ed ideational test even than the ability to read and write.
Any fool may learn to read and write, but to make a thousand
dollars requires much more intelligence, and is a far better test of
worth. To own property identifies one with the State, and his in¬
telligence is quickened and stimulated by his interests.
■38
The Pullic School in its
But, says the demagogue, must a man be required to fight for a
country in which he cannot vote ? Must he be required to shoulder
the musket and not be allowed to cast a ballot? I answer : fight¬
ing and voting are very different things. The fact that a man
makes a good soldier does not at all touch the question of his fit¬
ness as a voter. Fitness to fight and fitness to vote, are not con¬
vertible terms.
Why does he fight, and what does he fight for, if he cannot vote?
I answer : he fights for the country that protects his life, that pro¬
tects his business, that protects his hopes and his prospects, and
will protect his property when he acquires it. If suffrage be so
dear, I answer further, that he fights for the country that will
give him suffrage in due time when he will be prepared to ex¬
ercise the right, now valuable, for the general good, and for the
undisturbed possession and enjoyment of the fruits of his honest
toil. We have had restricted suffrage in Virginia, and nobody
was oppressed or aggrieved, but all were more content and bet¬
ter protected, because the government was in safer and better
hands.
We, are told, however, that, universal suffrage having been inau¬
gurated, it is now impossible to recall it. But the privilege has
become so worthless and has been attended with such ruinous com
sequences of the certainty of a still more abundant harvest of sor¬
row in the future, th'at thousands are ready to disfranchise them¬
selves if, by so doing, they could restrict suffrage and put it on a
safer basis. Let us not be discouraged by the remark, so common,
that political powers, when once extended, can never be peaceably
revoked. Our condition is utterly exceptional, and history throws
no light upon the problem left to us for solution. The conditions
are new and abnormal, and we may reach an issue as novel in his¬
tory as the case itself.
If it were proposed to amend our State Constitution by engraft¬
ing upon it a property qualification for suffrage, applicable alike to
both races, who would support the amendment ? I answer :
1. All, with the rarest exceptions, possessing the required qualifi¬
cation, the class who are most interested in good government, and
upon whom its burdens chiefly fall
2. Thousands upon thousands, who have little or no property,
but who have energy, intelligence, the hope and the capacity of ac¬
quiring property. They would gladly abandon a polluted and
worthless privilege to acquire in due time a valuable right which
they would exercise in the protection of their property. With
proper effort, the support of almost every voter belonging to this
class could be secured for the suggested amendment.
3. But not these two classes only, who own the property, and rep¬
resent the intelligence, the morality, the energy and enterprise, of
the commonwealth. Their influence is necessarily and j ustly great,
and this influence they would properly exert in securiug the support
or cancelling the opposition of others more or less indifferent.
Opposition to the amendment would come, as a general statement,
Relations to the Negro.
39
almost wholly from that class who are so low that they do not even
hope to rise. Its defeat, if defeat must come, would demonstrate
that the political power of the State is lodged exactly in those hands
least competent to use it. Into this wretched condition has the
grand old Commonwealth already come ? I do not believe it. But
she is approaching that condition with each revolving year. Her
rescue is easier now than it will ever be again. The attempt is
worthy of our noblest effort, demands our utmost energy. Let the
real people boldly demand this change, and bravely attempt to put
it through, and -success is certain. Let them turn away from the
cautious counsels of timid editors, with whom the subscription list
outweighs good government and the triumph of truth. Let petty
politicians, tempted perhaps, for selfish ends, to head the ignoble
opposition, in whose eyes a vote is more important than a principle,
be made to understand that in this hour of supreme peril, they
must stand aside. Hot only life, and property and good govern¬
ment, but our honor and our social status and the very sanctities of
the fireside are imperilled. Let us endeavor, if we despair for our¬
selves, to open a future for our children, and leave to them at least
the heritage of hope.
Oh! my countrymen, my countrymen, will you go on in un¬
thinking apathy, and weakly close your eyes to the thickening
horrors of the future? If we falter now, when every thing is
at stake that makes life dear, then it will appear that we have ex¬
perienced not only political but social subjugation;' that we have
neither "freedom in our love, nor in our souls are free."
Civis.