Year: 1879

SOLUTION OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM.


To the Editor of the Advance:


NICKsBURG, Miss, Nov. 24.-I observe
with grief and shame that your journal
| continues to pour out blistering anathemas
upon the people OF the South.


In the number for October 23d the first
page is red with the bloody shirt" What
does this mean? Do Northern Christian
people expect to draw us from our evil ways
and teach us to do right by bitter denunci-
ations and false presentations of our real
condition in the South Is that Christ
| wise? Is 1t common sense, since human
nature is what it is? That political Jour
| mails should abuse us is not altogether a
matter of wonder; but that the pulpit and
| Christian press of a great, intelligent and
| generally humane people, possessed of the
| means of knowing the truth, should not
allow one weekly paper nor one Sabbath
sermon to go by without lampooning the
South is u me the matchless wonder of the
| age


Look at the great official organ Of the
Methodist Episcopal Church in New York
| One would suppose its editor a heartless
| Zulu, writing his ferocious assaults upon
the South with the glittering point of his
poisoned assegal. Nothing is too bitter
| nothing too false. Not that he would, like
/
glory in the crimes and follies of the South
as a license for his savage pen, but he has
an object-purely political-and will use
whatever serves his purpose And so it is
of hundreds of Christian weeklies and
| monthlies all over the North and East
The subject is one full of fearful presage
| Your people see nothing but the poor negro
The poor, the really impoverished white
man, seems never to be considered But
the freedman Is first, middle, last, the Alpha
and Omega of dreams by night and denun-
Citations by day, in his behalf of all the
poor trash of the South. When | read
| these things | often think of the words Of
the Fiftieth Psalm: Thou sittest and
| speakest against thy brother; thou SANDER
est thine own mothers SON"


And this is often literally true, for the
South is made up largely of people from
every State in the Union, and of citizens
from every nation and kingdom on earth.
But | want to refer to the article you
quote on your first page thus:


"a decent respect for the opinions Of
mankind must force the white
citizens of the South to a more equitable
and more honorable behavior toward their
colored fellow citizens" and then follow
| certain menaces if we don't do better.
To all that | simply say nothing better,
"more equitable or honorable" will ever
come. The South has done her hest for the
colored man, and better than she can ever
do again.


Like all agricultural people we have had
hard times. The colored man never feels
them unless he spends his earnings on his
vices. But the South took the negro, either
from New England or Just out of the jun
giles of Africa, and made him the peer of
the greatest Senators in the capital of the
Union. No agricultural peasantry on earth
ever made such progress in 200 years as the
freedman did in Gods own Southern school.
No such peasantry was ever so well clothed,
fed and sheltered on the face of the earth.
Ireland never compared favorably for her
self with him. No peasantry was ever so
highly esteemed, may say loved and honOred
as the slaves of the maligned, abused and
sanderei South. No toiling class ever en-.
joyed so much of life, or better opportuni-
ties of making friends and obtaining the
awards of good conduct. No laboring or
peasant class were ever more cared for
religiously. Hundreds of thousands of them
were raised from heathenism to a goodly
state of Christian exemplariness and real
piety by the several Christian denomina-
tions of Protestants. And when they were
freed they were more intelligent; spoke flu
emily the language of the nation; knew
how to dress with taste and neatness to
cook and wash and wait and work, and
knew and better observed the rules of po-
likeness and the customs of good society
than the poor classes Of England, Ireland,
Italy, Austria, Germany, and were always
more dignified and more at ease in the pres
ence of their superiors than ever were the
peasant classes of any or all of those coun-
tries Fifty years of life among them,
since school-days, with much travel and
observation, fixes these facts as indisputable
in my mind,


The South has treated the negro the best
her condition has permitted. Wenever got
up savings bank TO rob him, nor taught
him that politics were superior to piety,
and the ballot-box more holy than the
sacrament of the Lords Supper. The
enemies of the South have filled his simple
mind with the idea that we may some day
enslave him again, and therefore he is shy
of Us in political matters. At one time lhe
carpet-haggers had organized the entire
South into "loyal leagues" and every col
ored man was solemnly sworn against the
old white race-pulpit and pews-and yet
Northern people wonder why we are so
slow to teach and preach among them. A
great gulf yawns between us and them.


But withal, | admit that great evils at
tended the slave question and yet no
where and by no body was the negro so
wronged and outraged in the South as he
was while held as a slave in the Eastern
States And many of the splended fortunes
of New England are the outgrowth of the
price of Indian and African slaves.


Your quotation speaks of the colored
people being "defrauded in respect to their
civil rights" Well, you never hear any
one speak of his religious rights Are civil
rights first, last everything? Now we may
bulldoze him little at the halot-box, but
he bulldozes your people in the pulpit. He
won't have Northern white trash-preacher.
He has sent them all away.


And then for the matter of many colored
preachers, they are a disgrace to decent So
ciety. The Northern Methodist Church
papers recently published list, some of
whom were as graceless a lot of penitentiary
birds as could be found, and complained of
the South for buldozing and numbering
them. Doubtless in the list were some good
men, and wrong was doubtless done to such ;
but Wesley and his coadjutors were
thousandfold worse treated in England, and
yet all mankind were not invoked to hate
| England because a few scamps maltreated
some clever men.


| We do not for a moment deny the fact
| that violence has heretofore been wickedly
employed, but violence prevails everywhere
! One week of outrages in any one of ten
| Northern cities | can name will overmatch
all the wrongs inflicted on white and black
in a year in my own State; and of the long
list of maltreated negro preachers referred
to, not one hair of mans head was ever
molested because he was preacher. 1t was
| for other causes.


| Now, ! undertake to say, and facts will
sustain me, that not one-tenth-I might say
not one twentieth-of the crimes, folies,
misdemeanors and acts of cruelty charged
upon the South ever took place. They are
sheer fabrications. Gov. St. John, of Kan
sas, is doubtless an honest. honorable and
| fair minded gentleman, but he has been led
I into the gFavest mistakes imaginable. He
deems the colored man the most prosecuted
and outraged of all the inhabitants of the
globe. Why? Because he hears from his
own lips the story of his wrongs. Now,
dare say that he has heard more nonsense OF
that sort than he can tell.


a very clever and intelligent colored man