Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase
of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference
of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us
hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of
disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way
for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers
across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most
exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in
Calhoun's speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that
abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been
vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after
the brothers' war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his
two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing
memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of
southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the
other day was Dixon's masterly effort to prove that the real, even if
unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote
fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language
is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the
marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique
greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose
book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as he says, "for the first time we see
the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in
which Aryan society has caged him."
These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the
emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that
divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It
was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell's strong paper opposing
negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in _Collier's_,
and which last month obtained for Dixon's article just mentioned the first
pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. When we get full audience, other
such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom
Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a
thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great
advantage of the whole country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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