The Van Buren press., 1875-04-06
The White Man and the Black.
lst. Louis Republican a9th.l


ion-of the u S. judge of Southern cir
cuit against the constitutionality Of th'
civil rights law is received at the Nortl
irrcsistibly suggests that we are not ye
done with the negro, nor he with us HI
is still an,unplaccd and underlined person
he has not been absorbed into our nation
ality, but continues to he disturbing
element outside it. We have Swallowed
and are in process of swallowing all frag
ments and waits of peoples that drift on
our shores-Germans, Irish, Swedes
Frenchmen, Italians and Spaniards-
Saxons, Celts and Latins. Only the Jew
and the negro defy degluttion-the one
| because the God of Abraham and OF
Isaac and Of Jacob is rescrving him ioI
a special purposc-the other for uneX.
! planned reasons that form an important
and still unselved problem in our poll
tics. There was no necessity for Judge
| Emmons' declaration against the civil.
rights law; that statute, only two weeks
old, was not before the court in such a
way as to warrant a review of it; indeed,
it was not before the court at all Judge
Emmons made his charge to the grand
jury an occasion or preteXt for an ex-
haustive review of the statute fresh from
the hands of congress and the approval
of the president, as if for the purpose of
preciptating a judicial condemnation of
it on country only too glad to see it
condemned in any way, regular or irregu-
lar This uncalled-f0r ahd unjudicial
conduct ought to have provoked severe
rebuke from the public. and had the law
covered by the unprovoked and con
demnatory review been any other polit-
ical act enacted by the late congress,
Judge Emmons would now be feeling the
force of Northern Indignation But be
cause the act which he goes out of his
way to strike is one giving the negro the
same status with the white man in hotels,
theatres and sleeping cars, the North,
with almost unanimous voice, hastens to
accept his declaration with all the alacri-
ty Of lively gratitude-outstripp
even the South in its exhibition of relief
at the courts welcome dctum. 1t never
rains but it pours-and along with Judge
Emmons' declaration we have Ben But.
Ter, who passed the civil rights bill, pro-
claiming that the man who. we used to
be told, saved the Union in its extremity,
has still no constitutional right to de.
mand his grog in a public saloon, nor to
be shaved in barber shop. All this ex
poses the enormous hypocrisy of the Re
publican party, but with that We are not
dealing at present; more important
consideration is that it proves by the ex
torted confession ofthe Northern people,
not less than by the violent assertions of
the Southern people, that after all we have
done 10y constitutional amendments, laws
and the sword-after making legislators,
Judges, state officers, members of con-
gress and federal senators of negroes,
and pretending to rejoice over the work
there is still broad line of separation
between the white man, Southern or
Northern, and the black man, which has
not been elIaced. 1t it not necessary to
go to Mississippi to prove this; Massa.
chusetts itself furnishes the evidence in
the determined refusal Of Gov. Andrew
to permit fugitive contrabands from
South Carolina TO be brought into that
state in lS62-a refusal which the people
Of Massachusetts most heartily approved
though it was only six years before
that the sane people insisted that fugitive
negroes should not be carried out of
their state; and the implacablc unfricnd
illness which n solitary black boy meets
with at every turn, at West Point and at
Annapolis, shows that the prejudice, or
whatever We may call it, is stronger than
military discipline.
The fact has wider significance than
at first sight might appear Its effects
and exhibitions are not social merely, but
political and economical. WHY'S it that
all efforts to attract immigration to the
Southern states have been signal failures ?
There are no fairer regions on the cont
nent than Virginia, Kentucky and Ten
ncssee; there is no place in all the North
where an industrious white man can
make more money, with the same amount
of labor, than on the cotton lands of
Mississippi or in the sugar districts of
Louisiana. But, though choice lands in
Mississippi and Louisiana may be had
for 80 to $40 per acre, though farms in
Arkansas, Alabama and South Carolina
may be had for next to nothing. there is
not, and has not been since tle war, any
immigration whatever into the negro
states, with the exception of Missouri
Texas, it is true, is filling up with new
settlers, but they come from other South
ern states, and all the migration that is
seen in the South is either a movement
Of whites to the North, or n transfer Of
whites aud blacks from one Southern
state to another; no influx ofpopulation
from the North or from abroad is Oh
scrvable The conclusion which these
singular facts rresstibly force is that the
inert, immovablc negro population in the
Southern states is an impossible barrier
to immigration. If the $4,000 blacks
now in Virginia could be transferred to
Iowa, the two states would change
places; immigration would pour into the
white state Of Virginia, and avoid the
black state Of Iowa, and the Northern po
sition and character of the latter state
would not avail to change the current
Indeed, the fact that whites from the
North and abroad refuse to go into the
South no less now than before emancipa.
ton, proves that it was not slavery, but
the presence of the black race that has
caused the inferiority Of those states to
their Northern sisters, in wealth and
power. II the blacks in the South were