The negro: the southerner's problemPage, Thomas Nelson
History
The negro: the southerner's problem
Page, Thomas Nelson
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
The great body of the Northern people, bred on this food, never
having heard any other relation, believes this implicitly, and all
the more dangerously because honestly. If they are wrong and we right
it behooves us to enlighten them.
There are, without doubt, some whom nothing can enlighten; who would
not believe though one rose from the dead. They are not confined
to one latitude. There are, with equal certainty, others who for
place and profit trade in their brother’s blood, and keep open the
wounds which peace, but for them, would long ago have healed; who
for a mess of pottage would sell the birthright of the nation. The
professional Haman can never sleep while Mordecai so much as sits at
the gate; but we can have an abiding faith in the ultimate good sense
and sound principles of the great Anglo-Saxon race wherever it may
dwell; and to this we must address ourselves.
The second thing necessary to the solution of the question is to
enlighten the people of the North. If we can show that the question
is not, as Mr. Cable states and as the North believes, merely whether
the Negro shall or shall not have the right to choose his ruler,
but is a great race question on which depends the future as well as
the present salvation of the nation, we need have no fear as to the
ultimate result; sound sense and right judgment will prevail.
That there exists a race question of some sort must be apparent to
every person who passes through the South. Where six millions of
people of one color and one race live in contact with twelve millions
of another color and race, there must, of necessity, be a race issue.
The Negro has not behaved unnaturally: he has, indeed, in the main
behaved well; but the race issue exists and grows. The feeling has
not yet reached the point of personal hostility—at least on the part
of the Whites; but as the older generation which knew the tie between
master and servant passes away, the race feeling is growing intenser.
The Negro becomes more assertive, the White more firm.
III
There are a multitude of men and women at the North who do not know
that slavery ever really existed at the North. They may accept it
historically in a dim, theoretical sort of way, as we accept the fact
that men and women were once hanged for forgery or for stealing a
shilling; but they do not take it in as a vital fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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