CHAPTER II

THE HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM

But our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never. They have an indestructible life, both in

and out of our consciousness.-GEORGE ELIOT.

N order fully to comprehend the gravity of the situation and to understand the present condition and prospects of the negro race in this country, a brief examination of the historical aspects of the problem and a review of the salient facts of the connection of the negro with the white population will be necessary. For nearly three centuries the history and development of the negro in this country have been so closely identified with those of the superior race that no thorough understanding of his present circumstances, North and South, can be reached without some comprehension of the beginning and development of the problem.

It forms no part of the plan of this work to present a detailed history of the negro race in the United States. Able pens have given the subject careful attention. To those who desire to pursue this topic in detail both races have supplied historical works to aid the investigation. For a broad-minded, philosophic discussion of the historical aspects of the subject, the reader is referred to the recent work of George S. Merriam, Esq., of Springfield, Massachusetts, entitled, The Negro and the Nation, a History of Slavery and Enfranchisement. This volume leaves little

to be added as a scholarly and sympathetic study of the connection of the two races in our history.

Recurring to the earliest recorded annals of the human race, the negro is found invariably occupied in some menial capacity, always a personal attendant or a burden-bearing slave. We are not called upon here to adopt or refute the scriptural theory of the curse of Noah resting upon Ham and his descendants, condemning them to perpetual slavery. It is enough for our purpose to record this fact of uniform social and political abasement without seeking the cause. Throughout all history, in song and story, in biblical narrative and in the pages of the dramatists, the negro at all times and in all places has been depicted as a being of subordinate capacity, a subject and dependent race. In his own country the centuries have rolled away, finding him always in the same condition of dense ignorance and unalleviated savagery, and there to a large degree he remains to this day, without apparent prospect of amelioration.

I quote from Thomas Dixon, Jr., the following expressive words, which without exaggeration adequately portray the record of this non-progressive race:

The negro has held the continent of Africa since the dawn of history, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed him its light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never built a harness, cart or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. In a land of stone and timber, he never carved a block, sawed a foot of lumber or built a house save of broken sticks and mud, and for four thousand years he gazed upon the sea, yet never dreamed of a sail.

Originally a savage when the white man was well ad

vanced in the path of progress; forcibly abducted from the barbarism of his native jungle and brought to this country by the slave-trader; incapable of speaking the language or understanding the institutions of the land of his captivity; limited in his capacity and yet more limited in his opportunity, the negro's condition in the United States from the beginning to the present has been that of an unfortunate dependent.

In the year 1619 we find the first mention of the negro as an element in our colonial history. At that time there were introduced into Virginia as a profitable in the trading speculation fourteen negro slaves, and with their coming the negro problem may be

The Negro

Colonial

Period.

said to have had its origin. To the ship which transported this unfortunate human freight may well be applied the words of the poet Milton:

That fatal, that perfidious bark,

Built i' the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.

Following this importation the history of the negro population of Virginia is that of a slow but steady numerical growth. Contemned by the spirit of caste and oppressed by the harshest laws, they were held in the vice-like grip of slavery, but as a result of natural increase in numbers and as a consequence of profitable employment, resulting in the importation of thousands of others, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War there were upward of two hundred thousand negroes within the colony of Virginia. While a few were classified as free negroes, the great majority were in a state of abject slavery. The history of the Virginian colony in this respect is typical of that of the other colonies of the South, and to some extent of those of the Northern section of the country.

In New York in the early days of settlement under the

Dutch colonial government negro slaves abounded, and after the acquisition of the province by the English government the slave-trade became very active. By the year 1741, negroes were so numerous in the colony, especially in the City of New York, as to create the gravest apprehension for the safety of the white inhabitants. In that year panicstricken colonists discovered what ignorance and racial animosity magnified into a negro plot by which it was believed that the slaves in the City of New York intended to rise against their masters, slaughter the white population, and to establish for themselves a government dominated by negroes. Hundreds of blacks, poor ignorant wretches, principally servants and others employed in the most menial capacities, unschooled even in the language of the country, and unfamiliar with its institutions, were arrested and cast into prison. As a result of this groundless panic, eighteen negroes were hanged, fourteen burned at the stake, seventyone transported, and many others subjected to minor but cruel punishment.

It would appear that punitive measures to keep the negro in his place were early invoked in this country. The whole story of this alleged plot seems like a monstrous nightmare, and yet it is a forcible illustration of that all-pervading fear which will deprive a community of all common-sense when the apprehension of the domination of an inferior race gains possession of the minds of the people.

At the time of the Revolution there were twenty-six thousand negroes in the colony of New York, a much larger proportion to the white population than exists at the present time.

New England also was subjected to the reproach of negro slavery, negroes being numerous in every one of the four New England colonies then forming that section, while the transportation of human freight from the African west coast

to the Southern colonies for the purpose of slavery furnished a profitable industry for New England ship-owners. Harsh and repressive laws were adopted in all the Eastern colonies, subjecting the unfortunate negroes to severe penalties for the slightest acts of insubordination, and while some few were so fortunate as to acquire their freedom, the great mass were held in the condition of slavery so universal for that race at that time. The census for 1790 shows the presence of seventeen thousand negroes in the New England states, nearly all of them held as slaves, and distributed mainly among the important seacoast cities.

The general facts here stated are indicative of the condition of affairs in the other American colonies. North and South, the negroes in colonial times were subjected to the most rigorous control; they were scarcely regarded as possessed of ordinary human rights, and indeed at that period the view entertained of the hapless negro by members of the dominant race fully justified the statement of Chief Justice Taney in his oft-quoted opinion in the Dred Scott case, that at that period the negro was considered "as a person who had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."

The number of negroes, slave and free, in the United States, as shown by the census of 1790, was 757,208, contrasted with the white population of 3,172,006; the negroes forming approximately nineteen per cent. of the population. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War a marked change of attitude towards the negro in the Northern colonies The Revolu- may be detected. The first patriotic blood to tionary War. moisten the streets of Boston was that of Crispus Attucks, the runaway negro slave, who on March 5, 1770, led the attack of the patriotic rioters upon the English soldiery and with other Massachusetts men went down to deathless fame, the first martyrs of the Revolution.

And this was but the beginning. Throughout the coun