Chapter 40. Sorrow And Gladness

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_ CHAPTER XL. Sorrow and Gladness

In the parlor of the sanitarium Earl sat awaiting the coming of Eunice, his face telling of the hopes now alive within his heart.

With an exclamation of joy Eunice ran and threw herself into his arms. During her whole stay in the sanitarium the Negro question had not been broached to her and her mind seemed almost normal. Earl now sought to complete the work by letting her know that things had at last been set right and that the color of a man's skin was to no longer be in his way. Standing over her he whispered:

"Eunice, the American people have decreed that the door of hope shall not be closed to any of their citizens because of the accident of birth."

A strange glow came into Eunice's eyes.

"When will the duly authorized power see to it that the states live according to this decree and apply one test to voters of both races," asked Eunice so quietly, so intelligently, that hopes sprang up in Earl's breast.

Stooping, he kissed his wife, saying:

"I can't say, my darling; but it will surely come in time."

"Time!" shrieked Eunice. "Same old thing! Time! Bah! We shall all die in 'time.' Earl, are you turning against me, coming to me with that old word 'time?' Ah! Earl, are you a Southerner? Time! Earl, can't you persuade the people to let justice do now what they are waiting for 'time' to do?"

Jumping up she whirled round and round until from sheer exhaustion she fell into her weeping husband's arms.

"O thou of little faith, counterpart of my own darker days, Eunice, awake! Awake! The currents are forming that will sweep the caste spirit out of the political life of the nation. Awake, my Eunice! Awake!" plaintively spoke the grief-stricken husband to the unheeding ears of his wife.

While hope thus wrestles with despair, we visit another parlor.

* * * * *

In the parlor of Tiara's home Ensal sat awaiting the coming of the girl that he had loved so long and so ardently, on whom he had now called for the purpose of asking her to link her destiny with his.

Ensal had delivered many speeches in the course of his lifetime, but he could hardly recall one that had given him as much trouble as the short speech which he had sought to prepare for Tiara. Form after form of approach came to him, but they were all rejected as being inadequate to the occasion, so that when the beautiful Tiara appeared in the parlor door Ensal was absolutely and literally speechless.

With love-lit eyes Tiara walked unfalteringly in his direction and, with a smile for which Ensal the great altruist, mark you, fancied he would have been willing to return from a thousand Africas, she extended her hand to him in greeting.

There is a saying among the Negroes to the effect that "If you give a Negro an inch he will take an ell." Whatever may be the meaning of that expression, this we do know, that when Tiara gave Ensal one hand, he deliberately--no, we won't make the offense one of premeditation--he, without deliberating the matter at all, hastily took not only more of the hand than what Tiara offered, but the other one as well.

For the sake of Ensal's reputation for poise, already a little shaken, we fear, we fain would draw the curtain just here; but as we have all along sought to tell the whole truth about matters herein discussed, we will have to allow our hero's reputation to take care of itself the best way it can. Without obtaining any more consent than that which was plainly written in Tiara's eyes, and without any pretense at delivering any one of the many thousand little preliminary speeches framed for the occasion, Ensal bent forward and kissed Tiara!

Now that he has by this act lost favor with you, dear reader, we shall expose him to the utmost!

Dropping one of Tiara's hands, an arm stole around her waist, and Ensal kissed her again and, sad to say, again, and, vexing thought, again. And to cap the climax, the two were joyfully married that night, and on the next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the American Negro, should the demented Eunice prove to be a wiser prophet than the hopeful, irrepressible Earl; should the good people of America, North and South, grow busy, confused or irresolute and fail, to the subversion of their ideals, to firmly entrench the Negro in his political rights, the denial of which, and the blight incident thereto, more than all other factors, cause the Ethiopian in America to feel that his is indeed "The Hindered Hand."

NOTES FOR THE SERIOUS.

1. The author of THE HINDERED HAND was an eyewitness of the driving of "Little Henry" to his death by the officers of the law.

2. The details of the Maulville burning were given the author by an eyewitness of the tragedy, a man of national reputation among the Negroes. Some of the more revolting features of that occurrence have been suppressed for decency's sake. We would have been glad to eliminate all of the details, but they have entered into the thought-life of the Negroes, and their influence must be taken into account.

3. The experiences of Eunice upon being assigned to membership in the Negro race are by no means overdrawn. The refined, cultured and most highly respected young woman whose actual experiences form the groundwork of that part of the story was not only thus accosted and insulted by a white man of the order indicated, but was actually beaten in a most brutal manner and fined fifteen dollars in the police court.

4. The following statement of facts lends interest to the contention of one of the characters of THE HINDERED HAND, to the effect that the repressionist order of things brings forward, by its own force an undesirable type of officials.

During the recent presidential campaign the repression of the Negro was made an issue in the state of Tennessee.

The most representative audience that assembled during the whole campaign in the State was wrought to its highest pitch of enthusiasm by the following outburst of eloquence from the Junior Senator of that state: "The man that does not know the difference between a white man and a 'nigger' is not fit to be President." The kind of a state Legislature begotten by a campaign in which the foregoing remark marked the highest level of the discussion so far as the popular taste was concerned, may be judged from the following comments on that Legislature after it adjourned:

"There were many men in the last Legislature upon whose faces the mark of incompetency or worse was as plain as the noonday sun."--The Nashville American.

"It would be better for Tennessee to groan on under present laws and let the Legislature meet no more in ten years if it were possible under the Constitution."--Lebanon Banner.

"Mediocrity was in the saddle, and picayunish partisan politics held the center of the boards."--Franklin Review-Appeal.

"The Legislature has adjourned. Many praises unto the 'Great I Am.'"--Murfreesboro News-Banner.

"Throwing bricks at the Legislature is a favorite pastime, but really a brick is hardly big enough for the purpose.--Franklin County Truth.

"In our opinion the present Legislature will go down in history as the most incompetent body of lawmakers that ever sat in the capitol of Tennessee."--Tullahoma Guardian.

"The Tennessee Legislature has adjourned and perhaps done less to commend itself than any of its predecessors."--Obion Democrat.

"The people elect the legislators and the people are responsible for the character of men they elect and send to Nashville to make and unmake laws. We know the Legislature was bad, even miserable, but the members got their commissions from the people."--Gallatin News.

"The weekly press of the state is almost unanimous in its condemnation of the late Legislature. * * * As we have said before, the general littleness of the body, its petty conduct in many instances, its trades and combinations, the autocratic methods of self-seeking members, the quarrels, the cheap declamations and intemperate and undignified and unwarrantable public denunciations by members who should have shown a better sense of dignity and decency, the dishonesty in juggling with bills, the unreliability of promises--the general record and conduct of the body marked it as unworthy of the state or the approval of the people. What man of established reputation would care to be known as a member of such a Legislature as the one recently adjourned?"--The Nashville American.

These comments are from newspapers of the same political faith as the Legislature.

5. The question might be raised as to whether the conditions set forth in THE HINDERED HAND are true of some special locality or are general in character.

As to how general the conditions complained of are one may infer from the following editorial from a leading Southern newspaper, which never fails in defense of the South where defense is possible.

"In South Carolina, as we have noted, the safest crime is the crime of taking human life. The conditions are the same in almost every Southern State. Murder and violence are the distinguishing marks of our present-day civilization. We do not enforce the law. We say by statute that murder must be punished by death, and murder is rarely punished by death, or rarely punished in any other way in this State, and in any of the Southern States, except where the murderer is colored, or is poor and without influence. Now this state of affairs cannot last forever. We have grown so accustomed to the failure of justice in cases where human life is taken by violence that we excuse one failure and another until it will become a habit and the strong shall prevail over the weak, and the man who slays his brother shall be regarded as the incarnation of power."--The Charleston News and Courier.

6. Since the recent defeat of the ultra radical element in the national campaign, there has been a marked improvement as to the more violent manifestations of race prejudice, emphasizing the fact that actual political power can procure respect.

7. It must never be concluded by those interested in these matters that the mere suppression of mob violence approaches a solution of the race problem. The programme of the Negro race, that must be ever kept in mind as a factor to be dealt with, is the obtaining of all the rights and privileges accorded by the State to other American citizens.

8. Acknowledgment is here made of the generous aid often extended the Negro race in its efforts to rise by the liberal element among the whites of the South. One of the most notable achievements of this element has been the manner in which they have fought off the attacks of the repressionists, directed against the education of the Negroes in the public school systems of the South, so amply provided for by the "Reconstruction" Governments.

9. The overwhelmingly predominant sentiment of the American Negroes is to fight out their battles on these shores. The assigning of the thoughts of the race to the uplift of Africa, as affecting the situation in America, must be taken more as the dream of the author rather than as representing any considerable responsible sentiment within the race, which, as has been stated, seems at present thoroughly and unqualifiedly American, a fact that must never be overlooked by those seeking to deal with this grave question in a practical manner.

THE AUTHOR.

NOTES TO THE THIRD EDITION.

1. The present edition of "The Hindered Hand" differs from previous editions in that a review of Mr. Thomas Dixon's "Leopard Spots" appears in former editions in the form of a conversation between two of the characters of the book, whereas in the present edition the review is more fully given in an article appearing in the rear of this book after the closing of the story.

No attempt is here made to deal with Mr. Dixon's second book bearing on the race problem, it being the hope of the writer to give that matter serious and independent attention.

2. In spite of the solemn assurances of the writer that the incidents depicted in "The Hindered Hand" are based upon actual occurrences, there has appeared here and there a slight air of questioning with regard to some things related. Particularly does it seem hard to believe what is told of the manner of the death of Bud and Foresta Harper. The writer would be only too glad if he could but free his mind of the knowledge that the picture is true to life in the utmost horrible detail, The Nashville American, one of the leading Southern daily papers, at the time of its occurrence, accepted the account as we have given it as correct and made editorial comment upon the same, and no one would dare pronounce that paper hostile to the South.

We stand ready to furnish ample evidence of the absolute correctness of each and every portrayal to be found in "The Hindered Hand."

SUTTON E. GRIGGS,
No. 610 Webster St., Nashville, Tenn.

* * * * *

A HINDERING HAND

SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE HINDERED HAND.

 

A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr.

* * * * *

A HINDERING HAND.

THE POOR WHITE AND THE NEGRO.

From the door of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of the South, prior to his emancipation by the Civil War, looked out upon a world whose honors and emoluments cast no favoring glances in his direction.

Between the poor white and his every earthly hope stood the Negro slave. As his thoughts now and then stole upward toward the higher social circles, he realized that the absence of slave quarters from his home entailed his absence from those upper realms. If in the marts of toil he offered the labor of his hands, he felt his cheeks tingling from the consciousness that others regarded him as being upon a level with slaves; and at the best the market for his labor was very limited, for the fatted slave stood in his way.

So utterly forlorn was the condition of the poor white that the enslaved Negro felt justified in meeting his protruding claim of racial superiority with contemptuous scorn. In the very nature of things the strongest sort of repulsion developed between this class of whites and the Negro slaves. The work, therefore, of overseeing and driving the slaves on the plantations of the more wealthy whites, fitted the habitual mood of the poor white exactly. No form of service was more congenial to him than that of whipping intractable Negroes for their masters.

It thus came to pass that the poor white man registered it as his first duty to wreak vengeance upon this unbowing, scornful Negro standing between him and all that was dear to his heart. This feeling of hostility was handed over from father to son, from generation to generation, until the very social atmosphere was charged with this bitter feeling.

When the Civil War came this neglected and despised class suddenly became important and furnished its quota of soldiers and commanders. Nathan Bedford Forrest hailed from this class, and as a result the American people have on their annals Fort Pillow and its savage-like massacre. When the war was over, the poor white class began to bestir itself in civil life, and from that class the nation derived the Hon. Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina.

And now literature is receiving its contribution from this class of whites, in the work being done by Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., of North Carolina, who does not hail from the more wealthy and more friendly element of Southern whites, but from mingling with the poorer classes, where hatred of the Negro was a part of the legacy handed down from parent to child. For, before Mr. Dixon's marriage he was a poor man and was viewed by the Negroes of Raleigh, N. C., as one belonging to the class of their hereditary enemies. It is with the outpourings of a man who has been steeped in all the traditions of this hostile atmosphere that we are now called upon to deal.

The goal toward which Mr. Dixon is striving is the ejection from America of nearly ten million of his fellow citizens, against the overwhelming majority of whom he can allege no unusual offense save that they are of African descent.

The work of their fathers and of themselves in wresting the fields of the South from the clutch of forest; in crimsoning American soil with their blood in every war that has been fought; in yielding of all of the best of their heart and mind for this country's good is, according to Mr. Dixon, to count for naught.

HARNESSING HATRED.

It is to be conceded that the presence in large numbers of two distinct races in the same territory under a democratic form of government constitutes a grave problem, and profound is the wish of many of both races that a separation might be effected. Mr. Dixon is by no means a pioneer in desiring a separation. The great emancipator desired this result.

But Mr. Dixon is a pioneer in the matter of seeking to attain his end by an attempt to thoroughly discredit the Negroes, to stir up the baser passions of men against them and to send them forth with a load of obloquy and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over, sufficient to appall a nation of angels.

Mark the essentially barbarous character of Mr. Dixon's method of warfare.

There is the good and the bad in all men. The world has learned since the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there is in men.

Mankind has been grouping itself from time immemorial, according to certain physical likenesses, and each race or group has had more or less of prejudice against alien groups. It has been the one struggle of the higher human instincts to enable men, in spite of differences of form, of feature, to find a common bond of sympathy linking mankind together.

Uncle Tom's Cabin grappled in the mire of Southern slavery and lifted a despised and helpless race into living sympathy with the white race at the North. To cut these chords of sympathy and re-establish the old order of repulsion, based upon the primitive feeling of race hatred is the first item on Mr. Dixon's programme.

The adopting of a course so patently barbaric stamps Mr. Dixon as a spiritual reversion to type, violently out of accord with the best tendencies of his times.

The very opposite of Mr. Dixon is Professor Nathaniel F. Shaler, of Harvard, himself a Southerner, who approaches this same grave question of the relation of the races and seeks to prepare the American people for the consideration of the subject free from the distorting influence of prejudice.

A SERIOUS HANDICAP.

The cultivation of race hatreds on the part of Mr. Dixon and others who labor with him, if successful will react on the American people sadly to their detriment. The wonderful activity of American industries call loudly for the world as a market for their goods. The dark races of the world, now backward in the matter of manufacturing, must largely furnish these markets. The cloven foot of America's race prejudice will make itself manifest, and its owner will find it increasingly difficult to secure a ready purchaser for his goods.

We have a hint of what will happen in the awakened darker world in the boycott of American goods by the Chinese, because of the rude treatment by American custom officials, of unoffending Chinese, a treatment born of the spirit of race hatred.

MR. DIXON IS SHREWD.

Let us now take note of the various artifices resorted to by Mr. Dixon to unhorse the Negro in the esteem of the North and bestow his place upon those who would repress him.

In his first Anti-Negro book, Mr. Dixon was shrewd enough not to make a Southerner who was persona non grata to the North the hero of the story. The poor old Ex-Confederate soldier, rank secessionist, the real hero and dominating figure of his times, in this book is tied out in the back yard, while the post of honor is given to a little boy whose father fought most unwillingly against the Union. Mr. Dixon's choosing for a hero this lad, whose father wore a confederate uniform over a union heart, forcibly reminds one of the reply of the whimpering soldier whom the captain was upbraiding for cowardice under fire.

"You act as though you were a baby," angrily shouted the captain to the frightened soldier.

"I wish I was a baby and a gal baby at that," whimpered the soldier, reasoning that "gal babies" were exempt not only from that battle, but from all others.

While Mr. Dixon was in search of a hero that would be far removed from what was regarded as treason in those days he might have made assurance doubly sure by doing further violence to the predominating sentiment of the day by making his hero--not his heroine--a "gal" baby.

MR. DIXON SCOFFS.

One of the brightest pages in the history of this nation will be that which tells the story of those men and women of the North, who, over the protests of loved ones, faced the ostracism of their kind in the South that they might open the Negroes' eyes to the hitherto forbidden glories of modern civilization and take care that the spiritual was not lost sight of in the new maze of world wonders. Withered indeed must be the soul that could scoff at such moral heroism, and yet that is just what Mr. Dixon does. He suggests that the people who produced a Washington and a Jefferson hardly needed missionaries to perform work among the Negroes within their borders.

But it must be borne in mind that as a part of the propaganda in favor of retaining the Negro in slavery, the white people of the South thoroughly committed themselves to the doctrine of the ineffaceable, inherent inferiority of the Negro, and had no largeness of faith in his possibilities along lines of higher culture. It is evident, then, that if salvation was to come at all, it was to come from a source that deemed such an outcome possible.

THE EARLIER CHURCH LIFE OF THE NEGRO.

Mr. Dixon essays to portray Negro worship and makes of it a very grotesque affair.

Over against Mr. Dixon's representation of Negro worship as a heathenish affair, we place the old plantation melodies evolved in those and earlier days. Charged as these melodies are with true religious fervor, they stand as a bulwark against all who would assail these earlier gropings of the race after the unknown God. Equally misplaced are the sneers of Mr. Dixon at the Negro minister. The center of the whole social fabric erected by the Negro race in the South is the Negro church, and to the zeal and power of the untutored Negro pastor and his more favored successor is this success due. Subtract from the assets of the Negro race those things placed there through the instrumentality of the Negro minister and small will be the remnant.

Again, this religion and this minister at whom Mr. Dixon sneers, are really responsible for the pacific character of the Negro population of the South. The Negro race is a great fighting race. The native optimism of the individual soldier causing him to discount his own chances of being killed, coupled with his ability to be lost in his enthusiasms, make the Negro very effective as a soldier.

Africa has been one great battle field and the internecine strife of fighting Africans is in a measure responsible for the plight of the Negro race in the world, as a union of forces could have the better halted alien aggression. But in America the Negro was taught the Gospel of peace. The singing of the American Negro is said to lack the martial strain found in the fatherland. For the peace loving Negro, credit the church and the Negro minister, whom Mr. Dixon would have the world contemn.

MR. DIXON STABS TO KILL.

The late Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, once remarked (we quote from memory), "Our population is composed of various races of mankind, but there are four great things upon which we are all united: Love of home, love of country, love of liberty and love of woman." The glory of the Anglo-Saxon race has come largely of the estimate it has placed on woman.

Mr. Dixon would break the accord of the American Negro with the rest of his fellows by picturing him as the savage enemy of womankind. In order to attain his end he picks up the degenerates within the Negro race and exploits them as the normal type. In one of his books Mr. Dixon makes a Negro school commissioner solicit a kiss from a white girl when she applies to him for a position. The man of this character in the Negro race is known of all men familiar with the Southern Negro to be an exotic, for nowhere in the world does woman get more instinctive deference from men than what Negro men render to the white women of the South. The very fact that degenerates sometimes make them the objects of assaults, invests them with a double measure of sympathy and deference on the part of the great body of Negro men.

WHERE MR. DIXON'S POWER FAILS.

Mr. Dixon displays great power in depicting the emotions of the white people when the news was borne to them that a little white girl had been outraged and slain by a Negro.

Mr. Dixon, there were other hearts throbbing in that neighborhood! Oh, that you had the spirit and the power to give utterance to those heart throbs.

The Negroes, whose absence from the mob you would ascribe to sympathy with the criminal, were in their homes sorrowing over the death of the little one, sorrowing over the disgrace that was so undeservingly brought upon the race, and wondering whether your mob had the right man or was making a mistake that would leave the really guilty free to again bring death and grief and wrath to the white race and grief and shame unspeakable to the Negro race.

AS TO INTERMARRIAGE.

Not content with picturing the Negro race, as a race prolific with the assaulters of women, Mr. Dixon would further have the world believe that the highest ambition of the cultured Negro man is to find for himself a white wife.

Perhaps it may not be out of place just here for the writer to disclose what he considers, from close observation, to be the attitude of the Negroes on the question of the intermarriage of the races. They do not hold with that group of writers who contend that the Negro is inherently inferior to the whites and that a mixture of the blood of the races produces an essentially inferior being. Dumas, holding his own among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English, and Douglass, among the Americans, to their minds belie that assertion. Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.

Accepting the race as it came to them from slavery, during which mulattoism was forced upon it, the Negroes have gone on developing race pride and visiting their supreme disfavor upon all who signify inability to find thorough contentment within the race. The marriage of Frederick Douglass to a white woman created a great gulf between himself and his people, and it is said that so great was the alienation that Mr. Douglass was never afterwards the orator that he had been. The delicate network of wires over which the inner soul conveys itself to the hearts of its hearers was totally disarranged by that marriage.

PRIDE OF RACE.

It was this feeling of race pride which the Negroes have and thoroughly understand, that Mr. Dixon was picturing in that Northern statesman who would not give his daughter in marriage to a Negro suitor who was his political ally. This pride of race Mr. Dixon confounds with the prejudice which he would glorify. How utterly absurd it is to infer that it is inconsistent in a father to apply a totally different test to a man aspiring to be his son-in-law to that applied to a man asking for political rights! The rejection of a man because he lacks generations of approved blood behind him is classed by Mr. Dixon as race discrimination, whereas such rejections are daily made for similar reasons within all civilized races.

BACKWARD AFRICA.

In his eager grasping after anything that would seem to serve his purpose of thoroughly discrediting the Negro, Mr. Dixon holds up the backwardness of Africa as an indication of the inherent inefficiency of the Negro race. The life of the great body of the Negro race has been cast for untold centuries in Africa. This one simple fact has meant and still means so much. The peculiar character of the African coast, lacking as it is in great indentations, the immense falls preventing entrance into its greatest river, the Congo--these things have caused Africans to be more nearly isolated from the rest of humanity than has been the case with any other large body of people. With isolation and lack of contact the Negroes have been compelled to rely upon their own narrow set of ideas, while the progress of other peoples has been the result of the union of what they begot with what strangers brought them.

The soil of Africa fed the Negroes so bountifully that they did not acquire the habit of industry, and with a plenty of time on their hands they warred incessantly. The hot, humid atmosphere made them black and sapped their energies. To save them from yellow fever, nature gave them pigment and lost them friends. Other peoples have hesitated to intermarry with them because of their rather unfavorable showing in personal appearance.

Some hold that a race is great in proportion to the distance it has wandered through intermarriage from the parent stock. The great races of the world, it is held, are the mixed races. When the Africans' environments robbed them of comeliness and attractive qualities, they were thrown off to their own one blood, no one courting alliance with them.

The merest tyro of a sociologist knows that these are the essential facts which account for the backwardness of the African people, and yet Mr. Dixon would fasten upon Negroes the charge of inherent inferiority because of the showing made under circumstances most adverse to the development of civilization.

RECONSTRUCTION DAYS.

The most pathetic page in the history of the Negro race in America is the story of reconstruction days. Kept in ignorance during the days of slavery his one great desire under freedom was for knowledge and self-improvement. Because the white South was spiritually unprepared to deal with the new order of things, and because the North did not desire to make one great military camp of the South, the Negroes en masse were summoned forthwith to the task of establishing governments in the Southern states in harmony with the Constitution of the United States. The men whom the Negroes supported accomplished that task well, but in other respects betrayed their trusts.

When corruption in office, a thing by no means confined to one era of the world's history, became manifest, in many quarters an appeal was made to the Negroes to help overturn the corruptionists. And be it said to the honor of the race, the cry for good government never failed to rally Negro support, even at a great sacrifice. When Wade Hampton was struggling for the dethronement of corrupt governments in South Carolina, six thousand Negroes took part in one of the parades during his canvass for the governorship.

But some states did not have leaders prepared to deal with the Negroes as political equals, leaders who were wise enough to appeal to the good within the race. In such places the unreasoning, undiscriminating, brutal, murderous mobs arose to do by violence what better and wiser men had done elsewhere through moral suasion. Had enlightened methods been employed the sky would not have been as portentous as it is to-day. As it is, we have the sickening record of the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan and the heritage of evil and lawlessness left in its wake.

Over against Mr. Dixon's lurid and grossly misleading pictures of the conduct of the Negroes in reconstruction days, we offer the following tribute to the race, clipped from the columns of the Nashville Banner, perhaps the most widely read daily newspaper in the state of Tennessee, and a paper opposed to the reconstruction policy pursued by the federal government:

"Let us do the negroes justice. There is no spirit of bloodthirsty and incendiary revolt prevailing among them. History and experience have shown that there never existed a more tractable people considering all the trying conditions and circumstances to which they have been subjected. In time of war and in the frightful reconstruction period, when they were urged and tempted by false friends and incentives and had opportunities of evil appalling to contemplate, they were restrained as perhaps no other people would have been restrained and were more sinned against than sinning. And to-day as a people they have no mind except to accept the best that may come to them."

MR. DIXON VS. HON. JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Dixon's hope is evidently in the young North. That the young people may not be wedded to the traditions of their section, he would impress the young North that what their fathers did in the way of bestowing equality of citizenship upon the Negro, was the result of a leadership blind with the spirit of revenge. As a complete rebuttal to this contention on his part, we quote from an article which appeared in the North American Review from the pen of the late Hon. James G. Blaine:

"It must be borne in mind that the Republicans were urged and hastened to measures of amelioration for the Negro by very dangerous developments in the Southern States looking to his re-enslavement in fact, if not in form. The year that followed the accession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency was full of anxiety and warning to all the lovers of justice, to all who hoped for 'a more perfect union' of the States. In nearly every one of the Confederate States the white inhabitants assumed that they were to be restored to the Union with their State governments precisely as they were when they seceded in 1861, and that the organic change created by the Thirteenth Amendment might be practically set aside by State legislation. In this belief they exhibited their policy towards the Negro. Considering all the circumstances, it would be hard to find in history a more causeless and cruel oppression of a whole race than was embodied in the legislation of those revived and reconstructed State governments. Their membership was composed wholly of the 'ruling class,' as they termed it, and, in no small degree, of Confederate officers below the rank of brigadier-general, who sat in the legislature in the very uniforms which had distinguished them as enemies of the Union upon the battlefield. Limited space forbids my transcribing the black code wherewith they loaded their statute books. In Mr. Lamar's State the Negroes were forbidden, under very severe penalties, to keep firearms of any kind; they were apprenticed, if minors, to labor, preference being given by the statute to their 'former owners;' grown men and women were compelled to let their labor by contract, the decision of whose terms was wholly in the hands of the whites; and those who failed to contract were to be seized as 'vagrants,' heavily fined, and their labor sold by the sheriff at public outcry to the highest bidder. The terms 'master' and 'mistress' continually recur in the statutes, and the slavery that was thus instituted was a far more degrading, merciless and mercenary than that which was blotted out by the Thirteenth Amendment.

"South Carolina, whose moderation and justice are so highly prized by Governor Hampton, enacted a code still more cruel than that I have quoted from Mississippi. Firearms were forbidden to the Negro, and any violation of the statute was punished by 'fine equal to twice the value of the weapon so unlawfully kept,' and 'if that be not immediately paid, by corporal punishment.' It was further provided that 'no person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade, or business of an artisan, mechanic, or shopkeeper, or any other trade or employment (besides that of husbandry or that of a servant under contract for labor), until he shall have obtained a license from the judge of the district court, which license shall be good for one year only.' If the license was granted to the Negro to be a shopkeeper or peddler he was compelled to pay $100 per annum for it, and if he pursued the rudest mechanical calling he could do so only by the payment of a license fee of $10 per annum. No such fees were exacted of the whites, and no such fee of free blacks during the era of slavery. The Negro was thus hedged in on all sides; he was down, and he was to be kept down, and the chivalric race that denied him a fair and honest competition in the humblest mechanical pursuit was loud in its assertions of his inferiority and his incompetency.

"But it was reserved for Louisiana to outdo both South Carolina and Mississippi in this horrible legislation. In that State all agricultural laborers were compelled to make labor contracts during the first ten days of January for the next year. The contract was made, the laborer was not to be allowed to leave his place of employment during the year except upon conditions not likely to happen and easily prevented. The master was allowed to make deductions from the servants' wages for injuries done to 'animals and agricultural implements committed to his care,' thus making the Negro responsible for wear and tear. Deductions were to be made for 'bad or negligent work,' the master being the judge. For every act of 'disobedience' a fine of $1 was imposed on the offender, disobedience being a technical term made to include, besides 'neglect of duty' and 'leaving home without permission,' such fearful offenses as 'impudence,' 'swearing,' 'indecent language in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent,' or 'quarreling or fighting with one another.' The master or his agent might assail every ear with profaneness aimed at the Negro man and outrage every sentiment of decency in the foul language addressed to the Negro women; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or restore indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of $1 for every outburst. The 'agent' referred to in the statute is the well-known overseer of the cotton region, and the care with which the lawmaker of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears and sensitive nerves should not be offended with an oath or an indecent word from a Negro will be appreciated by all who have heard the crack of the whip on a southern plantation.

"It is impossible to quote all the hideous provisions of these statutes under whose operation the Negro would have been relapsed gradually and surely into actual and admitted slavery. Kindred legislation was attempted in a large majority of the Confederate States, and it is not uncharitable or illogical to assume that the ultimate re-enslavement of the race was the fixed design of those who framed the law and of those who attempted to enforce them.

"I am not speculating as to what would have been done or might have been done in the Southern States if the National Government had not intervened. I have quoted what actually was done by legislatures under the control of Southern Democrats, and I am only recalling history when I say that those outrages against human nature were upheld by the Democratic party of the country. All Democrats whose articles I am reviewing were in various degrees, active or passive, principal or endorser, parties to this legislation; and the fixed determination of the Republican party to thwart and destroy it called down upon its head all the anathemas of Democratic wrath. But it was just at this point in our history when the Republican party was compelled to decide whether the emancipated slave should be protected by national power or handed over to his late master to be dealt with in the spirit of the enactments I have quoted.

"To restore the Union on a safe foundation, and to re-establish law and promote order, to insure justice and equal rights to all, the Republican party was forced to its reconstruction policy. To hesitate in its adoption was to invite and confirm the statute of wrong and cruelty to which I have referred. The first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving citizenship and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at least its trial.

"But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia, only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it was the legislature assembled under the reconstruction act that gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the unreconstructed legislature, which has his endorsement and sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate, not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with grievous disabilities and passed a criminal code of barbarous severity for his punishment.

"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June 13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867, the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States, composed wholly of men who had been loyal to the Government, or the legislatures of the rebel states, composed wholly of men who had been disloyal to the Government, should determine the basis on which their relation to the Union should be resumed. In such a crisis the Republican party could not hesitate; to halt, indeed, would have been an abandonment of the principles on which the war had been fought; to surrender to the rebel legislatures would have been cowardly desertion of its loyal friends and a base betrayal of the Union cause.

"And thus, in March, 1867, after and because of the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment by Southern legislatures, Congress passed the reconstruction act. This was the origin of Negro suffrage. The southern whites knowingly and willfully brought it upon themselves. The reconstruction act would have never been demanded had the Southern States accepted the Fourteenth Amendment in good faith. But that amendment contained so many provisions demanded by considerations of great national policy that its adoption became an absolute necessity. Those who controlled the Federal Government would have been recreant to their plainest duty had they permitted the power of these States to be wielded by disloyal hands against the measures deemed essential to the security of the Union. To have destroyed the rebellion on the battlefield and then permit it to seize the power of eleven States and put a check on all changes in the organic law necessary to prevent future rebellion would have been a weak and wicked conclusion to the grandest contest ever waged for human rights and for constitutional liberty.

"Negro suffrage being thus made a necessity by the obduracy of those who were in control of the South, it became a subsequent necessity to adopt the Fifteenth Amendment. Nothing could have been more despicable than to use the Negro to secure the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and then to leave them exposed to the hazard of losing suffrage whenever those who had attempted to re-enslave them should regain political power in their State. Hence the Fifteenth Amendment, which never pretended to guarantee universal suffrage, but simply forbade that any man should lose his vote because he had once been a slave, or because his face might be black, or because his remote ancestors came from Africa."

Thus is scattered to the four winds, we feel, Mr. Dixon's claim that the Negro suffrage was born of the spirit of revenge.

MR. DIXON'S WIDE HEARING.

If Mr. Dixon is so wholly false as we have set forth in this paper, the question naturally arises as to how he could have obtained such a hearing as has been accorded him. Of the many factors which perhaps operated to secure this hearing we shall mention a few that commend themselves to us as possible causes.

In the first place, there is that great American spirit of fair play. The Negro through Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Tourgee novels had his day in court, and it was felt to be only just that the South be heard in all fullness.

Another factor in Mr. Dixon's success in obtaining his hearing we believe to be his choice of the hour in the world's history in which to demand a hearing. Queen Victoria, who had reigned so long and honorably, had just summoned by her death all of Anglo-Saxondom to her bier, where in a common sorrow over the departure of a great and good woman they learned anew how that, fundamentally, they were all about alike.

About this time, too, a poet had arisen, with voice to reach, for the time being, at least, the whole English speaking world, furnishing another scrap of evidence that differing forms of government, wide seas and varying problems had not affected their spiritual unity.

Anglo-Saxon lads, peacefully sleeping in the harbor of a Latin nation, had been treacherously blown up, and at the sight of that which was thicker than water in the hold of the Maine, the Anglo-Saxons of the world got still closer together.

In the war that followed, the South had its first opportunity of attesting with its blood its professions of love for the Union flag which it had sought to lower in four years of bloody strife. As a result of that war the Northern and controlling section of the country felt impelled by the logic of the situation to force an unaccepted relation upon an alien race, thereby providing the one outstanding section of the Anglo-Saxon race with some form of a race problem.

These various happenings brought the English speaking people wondrously close together and bridged the chasms made by internecine wars and conflicting ideas of government.

Listen now to the dream of Thomas Carlyle as set forth in his lecture on "The Hero" as a poet. Says he:

"England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English; in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very antipodes, there will be a great Saxondom covering great spaces of the globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together in virtually one nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brother-like intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish this? Acts of parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it; here, I say, is an English king whom no time or chance, parliament or combination of parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does he not shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of parish-constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours, we produced him, and we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.'"

As set forth here the travail of the English heart is toward a unified Saxondom, and, as indicated above, its hour had come. It was in the hour when the world paused in awe to see a fruition of this dream, that Mr. Dixon asked--insisted upon being heard. Anxious to know upon what terms the South would be a contented member of this new accord, Mr. Dixon, essaying to speak for the South, got his hearing.

What a terrible enemy to humanity does Mr. Dixon prove himself to be when, essaying to speak for the South, he would impart to this mighty force, with work before it worthy of the gods, a larger measure of the virus of race prejudice. Rather, may this unified Saxondom, as the agent of that "divinity that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will," choose the opening hours of its era for the purging from its great heart all the lingering vestiges of hatred of men, and with eyes ever on the heights above, begin the final climb of the human race toward the ideal state. May this trumpet call to a greatness of soul in keeping with its greatness of power, supplant the voice of Dixon the hater, summoning men to grovellings in the valleys of a thousand years agone.

MR. DIXON'S BORROWED POWER.

We shall now make mention of a force within Mr. Dixon which, from our point of view, enabled him to seize the passing opportunity and challenge the attention of so great a constituency. There is nothing more patent to an observer of life in the South than the fact that the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are producing in each other modifications of many of their racial characteristics. The erstwhile, abounding humor of the Negro has found its echo in the white race of the South and we find the dignified L. Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, succeeded in his grasp upon public attention by the witty, fun-loving John Sharp Williams, while the great American humorist, Mark Twain is likewise a product of the South.

The unquestioning faith of the Negro in the Bible is largely responsible for the militant orthodoxy of the white Christian ministry of the South, which makes life miserable for any mind retaining and applying to religious matters the old Anglo-Saxon habit of investigating. "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world," even if that hand is a black hand. It is the boast of the Southern white preacher that he was nursed by a black mammy.

Along emotional lines there is appearing a marked difference between the white people of the South and those of the North. It was remarked of the National Democratic Convention, held in the city of St. Louis in 1904, that such an emotional convention could only have been held somewhere in the South. The Negro race is noted for its highly emotional nature, and while contact with the Anglo-Saxon race is toning it down, there is also evidence that the Negro race is affecting the Anglo-Saxon.

Now, Mr. Dixon's publishers, in announcing a second book from his pen, singled out for purposes of parade what they regarded as the most powerful element in his work, namely, his grasp upon the emotions of men, his ability to arouse and sway their feelings. In the long line of men of letters of the Anglo-Saxon race we find no counterpart of Mr. Dixon. So the question is very pertinent as to what influence has given power to this pale-face shout exciter, this expert player upon men's emotions, this literary (we beg a thousand pardons for seeming billingsgate) demagogue and exotic in Anglo-Saxondom. The irony of fate! Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., beyond doubt owes his emotional power to the very race which he has elected to scourge.

Mr. Dixon has not breathed the Negro air of emotionalism without being affected thereby. The Negro minister whom Mr. Dixon derides in his book is beyond all doubt Mr. Dixon's spiritual parent so far as power is concerned. The fact that Mr. Dixon has chosen the discomfiture of the Negro race as the chief end of his existence is not inconsistent with the fact that the predominating element in his power is the gift of that race. It is perhaps this subconscious feeling on the part of Mr. Dixon that he is in the grasp of a power not Anglo-Saxon that causes him to rant and cry for a freedom that his own Southern brethren less affected do not understand.

THE REAL PROBLEM.

Ah, good people of America, here is your real problem! Southern self-interest may be relied upon to keep the Negro here; being here, no human power can prevent him from contributing his quota to the atmosphere of the group in which all the sons of the South must find their environing inheritance. In the contact of the street workman with his boss; in the cook kitchen; in the nursery room; in the concubine chamber; in the street song; in the brothel; in the philosophizings of the minstrel performer; in the literature which he will ere long create, by means of which there can be contact not personal; in myriad ways the Negro will write something upon the soul of the white man. It should be the care of the American people that he write well.

Mr. Dixon trembles at a possible physical amalgamation and would have the races separated. The "nay" which the nation renders to his cause so badly plead makes the spiritual amalgamation a certainty.

That the contribution of the Negro to the coming composite Americanism may be of the highest quality is the nation's problem.

Just now the American people seem much engrossed with the training of the hand of the Negro, confessedly a work of tremendous moment. But be it known unto you, oh Americans, that it is through his mind, his spirit, the exhalations of his soul, his dreams or lack of dreams, that the Negro is to leave his most marked influence on American life. Let the use to which Mr. Dixon is putting his borrowed emotional power recall the nation to the slumbering Negro mind that must ere long awake to power. May the coming, then, of Mr. Dixon, the literary exotic, serve as a reminder to the American people that they give the Negro a healthy place, a helpful atmosphere in which to evolve all that is good within himself and eliminate all the bad. If this be done, even Mr. Dixon will not have lived and frothed in vain.

A FINAL WORD.

A final word with regard to Mr. Dixon. The appearance of such a man with such a spirit might incline one to think that the world is going backward rather than forward. But there is this redeeming thought. Mr. Dixon represents the ultra radical element of Southern whites. The coming of this radical of radicals before the bar of public opinion, clothed in his garb of avowed prejudice of the rankest sort, means that the self-satisfied isolation of the past is over, that even the radicals desire or see the need of sympathetic consideration from other portions of the human family--decidedly a step forward for them. The coming to the light of this type where civilization may work upon it is in this respect one of the most hopeful signs of America's future. Soberly the great world consciousness will deal with this enemy of the human race, and the universal finger of scorn that will surely in the end be pointed toward him will render it certain that no other like unto him shall ever arise.

If, when his services are in demand, the chiseler of the epitaph for Mr. Dixon's tombstone desires to carve words that will be read with patience in the coming better days of the world, let him carve thus:

"This misguided soul ignored all of the good in the aspiring Negro; made every vicious offshoot that he pictured typical of the entire race; presented all mistakes independent of their environments and provocations; ignored or minimized all the evil in the more vicious element of whites; said and did all things which he deemed necessary to leave behind him the greatest heritage of hatred the world has ever known. Humanity claims him not as one of her children."

SUTTON E. GRIGGS.

[THE END]
Sutton E. Griggs's Novel: Hindered Hand

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