write, put a Negro on the bench of their highest court, and paraded through the State something like 80,000 Negro militia, armed with money stolen from the State, to insult and menace the people, while the whole South looked coolly on and declared that this treatment was just; then might there be a partial but not a complete parallel to what some of the States of the South endured under Negro rule. [Pg 46] [Pg 47] [Pg 47] It is little wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and carpet-bagger though he was, should have declared as he did in writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[23] The South does not hold that the Negro race was primarily responsible for this travesty of government. Few reasonable men now charge the Negroes at large with more than ignorance and an invincible faculty for being worked on. But the consequences were none the less disastrous. The injury to the whites was not the only injury caused by the reconstruction system. To the Negroes, the objects of its bounty, it was no less a calamity. However high the motive may have been, no greater error could have been committed; nothing could have been more disastrous to the Negro’s future than the teaching he thus received. He was taught that the white man was his enemy when he should have been taught to cultivate his friendship. He was told he was the[Pg 48] equal of the white when he was not the equal; he was given to understand that he was the ward of the nation when he should have been trained in self-reliance; he was led to believe that the Government would sustain him when he could not be sustained. In legislation, he was taught thieving; in politics, he was taught not to think for himself, but to follow slavishly his leaders (and such leaders!); in private life, he was taught insolence. A laborer, dependent on his labor, no greater misfortune could have befallen him than estrangement from the Southern whites. To instil into his mind the belief that the Southern white was his enemy; that his interest was necessarily opposed to that of the white, and that he must thwart the white man to the utmost of his power, was to deprive him of his best friend and to array against him his strongest enemy. [Pg 48] To the teachings which led the Negro to feel that he was “the
Prev.
Back
Top