Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
This is a very large question, and cannot be discussed in my limits. If
I were to say what my impression is, it would be about this: the South
is quite as much perplexed by the negro problem as the North is, and is
very much disposed to await developments, and to let time solve it. One
thing, however, must be admitted in all this discussion. The Southerners
will not permit such Legislatures as those assembled once in Louisiana
and South Carolina to rule them again. “Will you disfranchise the blacks
by management or by force?”
“Well, what would you do in Ohio or in Connecticut? Would you be ruled
by a lot of ignorant field-hands allied with a gang of plunderers?”
In looking at this question from a Northern point of view we have to
keep in mind two things: first, the Federal Government imposed colored
suffrage without any educational qualification—a hazardous experiment;
in the second place, it has handed over the control of the colored
people in each State to the State, under the Constitution, as completely
in Louisiana as in New York. The responsibility is on Louisiana. The
North cannot relieve her of it, and it cannot interfere, except by ways
provided in the Constitution. In the South, where fear of a legislative
domination has gone, the feeling between the two races is that of amity
and mutual help. This is, I think, especially true in Louisiana. The
Southerners never have forgotten the loyalty of the slaves during the
war, the security with which the white families dwelt in the midst of a
black population while all the white men were absent in the field; they
often refer to this. It touches with tenderness the new relation of the
races. I think there is generally in the South a feeling of good-will
towards the negroes, a desire that they should develop into true manhood
and womanhood. Undeniably there are indifference and neglect and
some remaining suspicion about the schools that Northern charity has
organized for the negroes. As to this neglect of the negro, two things
are to be said: the whole subject of education (as we have understood
it in the North) is comparatively new in the South; and the necessity of
earning a living since the war has distracted attention from it. But
the general development of education is quite as advanced as could be
expected. The thoughtful and the leaders of opinion are fully awake to
the fact that the mass of the people must be educated, and that the
only settlement of the negro problem is in the education of the negro,
intellectually and morally. They go further than this. They say that for
the South to hold its own—since the negro is there and will stay there,
and is the majority of the laboring class—it is necessary that the great
agricultural mass of unskilled labor should be transformed, to a great
extent, into a class of skilled labor, skilled on the farm, in shops, in
factories, and that the South must have a highly diversified industry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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