The Savannah morning news., 1903-04-10
SPOKE
ON APPOMATTOX DAY
tentuckian Addressed the Hamilton Club at Its
Annual Banquet at Chicago.

measures, mainly repreSsive and
hostile, and its local agents,
generally extreme, too often unclean,
employing the negro vote as a simple
asset in Congress, in Republican ma
tlonal conventions. and in the field of
the Federal patronage. In most of the
Southern states there seemed a delibeF-
ate plan to trim the Republican mi
nority among the whites down to the
point of just about filling the Federal
offices precisely as in the old ante-de-
luvian days of pristine democracy and
under the lead of that past grandmas-
ter of political chicane, Gen, Benjamin
+. Butler, the Democratic party of New
England was trimmed and regulated.
No thought was given the predictions,
the prejudices, the interests of the
great body Of the white population .
Il grew up to regard the institution
of African slavery as a monstrous
evil With gray jacket on my
back l abated no part of my abhor-
renee of it. The war over, fully
realized that the negro could not be
suspended, like Mahomet's coffin, in the
neither air, neither fish, flesh nor fowl;
that he must be made a freeman in
fact, as he was in name; that he must
be habilitated to his new belongings,
and l promptly accepted the three last
amendments to the constitution as the
treaty of peace between the North
and the South, and went to work in
good faith to help carry them out, I
fought to remove the old black laws
from the statute book in Kentucky.
fought the Kuklux Khan from start to
finish. l fought in all possible ways
to give the black man an opportunity
to achieve the hopes which. in COM
mon with many other of his friends,
had formed of him.
After thirty years of observation, ex-
perience and reflection-aIWays direct
ed from sympathetic point of view
l am forced to agree with the Secre-
tary of War that negro suffrage is a
failure. 1t is failure because the
Southern blacks are not equal to it.
1t is a failure because the Southern
whites will not have it.
Gentlemen, 1 appeal to you as Re
publicans, and through you l appeal to
the Republicans of the United States,
to have done with the conceit that,
unless you stand by the black man,
that, unless you continue him as an
issue in partisan politics, injustice will
be done him. In the lettering of his
condition, and in the acquisition of
property, starting with nothing, he has
made wondrous progress the last five
and thirty years; and, relatively, great
er progress at the South than at the
North. He could not have done this
without the sympathy and co-opera-
ton of the Southern whites. He has
made little progress in the arts of self
government either North or South, be-
cause of the agitation which has kept
him in a state of perpetual excitement,
with no healthful public opinion to
moderate it, and has been made the
sport and prey of political eXgency,
always selfish, and with respect to him
more or less visionary and needless.
The negro can never become in any
beneficient, or genuine sense, an integ
raj and recognized part of the body
polite except through the forces of
evolution. which are undoubtedly at
work, but which in the nature of the
case must needs go exceedingly slow.
Where there is one negro fit for citi-
zenship, there are myriads of negroes
wholly unfit. The hot-housa process has
been tried and it has failed. If, In
vested with every right enjoyed by
the whites, the blacks, gaining in all
.things else,7 have brought corruption
into the suffrage and discredit upon
themselves, is it not a kind of mad
ness further to press artificial methods,
from educational look-outs in Michi-
gan, Iowa and Wisconsin, fall help
less to the ground in their practical
application to the semi barbarous toll
ers in the cotton fields and corn lands of
Alabama, Georgia and South Caro-
lima?
Il appeal to you equally in what l
conceive the true interest Of the black
people along with the white people of
the South; nay, and of the North as
well, for all our interests are indis-
soluble, interchangeable, and that can
never be good or bad for one section
which is not good or bad for the other
section. Modern invention, which has
already annihilated time and space,
is surely erasing sectional lines 1t
ought not to leave so much as a
Renaissance of sectional strife. If
that dread spirit should come again
its evil winds will not blow between
the North and the South, but between
the East and the West: the horns of
the dilemma presented by extremism
involving a new irrepressible conflict
between capital and labor. May that
day never come, but in case it does
the conservatism of the North will
need the conservatism of the South.
The law-loving forces of the North
will need the law-breeding instincts
or the South. The Americanism of
the North will need the Americanism
OF the South. Then, indeed, shall both
sections learn what racial homogen-
city means and know for certain that
blood is thicker than water"
A reception in the parlors of the
hotel preceded the banquet.