The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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At first sight it would seem that slavery completely destroyed every
vestige of spontaneous movement among the Negroes. This is not strictly
true. The vast power of the priest in the African state is well known; his
realm alone--the province of religion and medicine--remained largely
unaffected by the plantation system. The Negro priest, therefore, early
became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the
interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as
the one who expressed, rudely but picturesquely, the longing and
disappointment and resentment of a stolen people. From such beginnings
arose and spread with marvelous rapidity the Negro church, the first
distinctively Negro American social institution. It was not at first by
any means a Christian church, but a mere adaptation of those rites of
fetish which in America is termed obe worship, or "voodooism."[93]
Association and missionary effort soon gave these rites a veneer of
Christianity and gradually, after two centuries, the church became
Christian, with a simple Calvinistic creed, but with many of the old
customs still clinging to the services. It is this historic fact, that the
Negro church of to-day bases itself upon the sole surviving social
institution of the African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary
growth and vitality.

The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt to
reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe. The laborers were
mainly black and were held for life. Above them came the artisans, free
whites with a few blacks, and above them the master class. The feudalism
called for the plantation system, and the plantation system as developed
in America, and particularly in Virginia, was at first a feudal domain. On
these plantations the master was practically supreme. The slave codes in
early days were but moderately harsh, allowing punishment by the master,
but restraining him in extreme cases and providing for care of the slaves
and of the aged. With the power, however, solely in the hands of the
master class, and with the master supreme on his own plantation, his power
over the slave was practically what he wished it to be. In some cases the
cruelty was as great as on the worst West Indian plantations. In other
cases the rule was mild and paternal.

Up through this American feudalism the Negro began to rise. He learned in
the eighteenth century the English language, he began to be identified
with the Christian church, he mingled his blood to a considerable extent
with the master class. The house servants particularly were favored, in
some cases receiving education, and the number of free Negroes gradually
increased.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of
Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle
patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease
and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and
unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The
answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same
shield; they are different shields. They are pictures, on the one hand, of
house service in the great country seats and in the towns, and on the
other hand of the field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and
cotton crops. We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were
really different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different
degrees in the development of the economic system. House service was the
older feudal idea of personal retainership, developed in Virginia and
Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had all the
advantages and disadvantages of such a system; the advantage of the strong
personal tie and disadvantage of unyielding caste distinctions, with the
resultant immoralities. At its worst, however, it was a matter primarily
of human relationships.

Out of this older type of slavery in the northern South there developed,
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the southern South the
type of slavery which corresponds to the modern factory system in its
worst conceivable form. It represented production of a staple product on a
large scale; between the owner and laborer were interposed the overseer
and the drivers. The slaves were whipped and driven to a mechanical task
system. Wide territory was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship
was common. It was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton
kingdom, and the extension of the area of this system southward and
westward marked the aggressive world-conquering visions of the slave
barons. On the other hand it was the milder and far different Virginia
house service and the personal retainership of town life in which most
white children grew up; it was this that impressed their imaginations and
which they have so vividly portrayed. The Negroes, however, knew the other
side, for it was under the harsher, heartless driving of the fields that
fully nine-tenths of them lived.

There early began to be some internal development and growth of
self-consciousness among the Negroes: for instance, in New England towns
Negro "governors" were elected. This was partly an African custom
transplanted and partly an endeavor to put the regulation of the slaves
into their own hands. Negroes voted in those days: for instance, in North
Carolina until 1835 the Constitution extended the franchise to every
freeman, and when Negroes were disfranchised in 1835, several hundred
colored men were deprived of the vote. In fact, as Albert Bushnell Hart
says, "In the colonies freed Negroes, like freed indentured white
servants, acquired property, founded families, and came into the political
community if they had the energy, thrift, and fortune to get the necessary
property."[94]

The humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century was active toward
Negroes, because of the part which they played in the Revolutionary War.
Negro regiments and companies were raised in Connecticut and Rhode Island,
and a large number of Negroes were members of the continental armies
elsewhere. Individual Negroes distinguished themselves. It is estimated
that five thousand Negroes fought in the American armies.

The mass of the Americans considered at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution that Negro slavery was doomed. There soon came a series of
laws emancipating slaves in the North: Vermont began in 1779, followed by
judicial decision in Massachusetts in 1780 and gradual emancipation in
Pennsylvania beginning the same year; emancipation was accomplished in New
Hampshire in 1783, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. The
momentous exclusion of slavery in the Northwest Territory took place in
1787, and gradual emancipation began in New York and New Jersey in 1799
and 1804.

Beneficial and insurance societies began to appear among colored people.
Nearly every town of any size in Virginia in the early eighteenth century
had Negro organizations for caring for the sick and burying the dead. As
the number of free Negroes increased, particularly in the North, these
financial societies began to be openly formed. One of the earliest was the
Free African Society of Philadelphia. This eventually became the present
African Methodist Church, which has to-day half a million members and over
eleven million dollars' worth of property.

Negroes began to be received into the white church bodies in separate
congregations, and before 1807 there is the record of the formation of
eight such Negro churches. This brought forth leaders who were usually
preachers in these churches. Richard Allen, the founder of the African
Methodist Church, was one; Lot Carey, one of the founders of Liberia, was
another. In the South there was John Chavis, who passed through a regular
course of studies at what is now Washington and Lee University. He started
a school for young white men in North Carolina and had among his pupils a
United States senator, sons of a chief justice of North Carolina, a
governor of the state, and many others. He was a full-blooded Negro, but a
Southern writer says that "all accounts agree that John Chavis was a
gentleman. He was received socially among the best whites and asked to
table."[95]

In the war of 1812 thirty-three hundred Negroes helped Jackson win the
battle of New Orleans, and numbers fought in New York State and in the
navy under Perry, Channing, and others. Phyllis Wheatley, a Negro girl,
wrote poetry, and the mulatto, Benjamin Banneker, published one of the
first American series of almanacs.

In fine, it seemed in the early years of the nineteenth century that
slavery in the United States would gradually disappear and that the Negro
would have, in time, a man's chance. A change came, however, between 1820
and 1830, and it is directly traceable to the industrial revolution of the
nineteenth century.

Between 1738 and 1830 there had come a remarkable series of inventions
which revolutionized the methods of making cloth. This series included the
invention of the fly shuttle, the carding machine, the steam engine, and
the power loom. The world began to look about for a cheaper and larger
supply of fiber for weaving. It was found in the cotton plant, and the
southern United States was especially adapted to its culture. The
invention of the cotton gin removed the last difficulties. The South now
had a crop which could be attended to by unskilled labor and for which
there was practically unlimited demand. There was land, and rich land, in
plenty. The result was that the cotton crop in the United States increased
from 8,000 bales in 1790 to 650,000 bales in 1820, to 2,500,000 bales in
1850, and to 4,000,000 bales in 1860.

In this growth one sees the economic foundation of the new slavery in the
United States, which rose in the second decade of the nineteenth century.
Manifestly the fatal procrastination in dealing with slavery in the
eighteenth century received in the nineteenth century its terrible reward.
The change in the attitude toward slavery was manifest in various ways.
The South no longer excused slavery, but began to defend it as an economic
system. The enforcement of the slave trade laws became notoriously lax
and there was a tendency to make slave codes harsher.

This led to retaliation on the part of the Negroes. There had not been in
the United States before this many attempts at insurrection. The slaves
were distributed over a wide territory, and before they became intelligent
enough to cooperate the chance of emancipation was held before them.
Several small insurrections are alluded to in South Carolina early in the
eighteenth century, and one by Cato at Stono in 1740 caused widespread
alarm. The Negro plot in New York in 1712 put the city into hysterics.
There was no further plotting on any scale until the Haytian revolt, when
Gabriel in Virginia made an abortive attempt. In 1822 a free Negro,
Denmark Vesey, in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten
years after that, in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and
killed fifty-one persons. The result of this insurrection was to
crystallize tendencies toward harshness which the economic revolution was
making advisable.

A wave of legislation passed over the South, prohibiting the slaves from
learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering
with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared in 1831 that neither
slaves nor free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious
service at night without permission. In North Carolina slaves and free
Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort, or teach "in any prayer meeting
or other association for worship where slaves of different families are
collected together" on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes.
Maryland and Georgia and other states had similar laws.

The real effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not, however,
by fighting, but by running away, usually to the North, which had been
recently freed from slavery. From the beginning of the nineteenth century
slaves began to escape in considerable numbers. Four geographical paths
were chiefly followed: one, leading southward, was the line of swamps
along the coast from Norfolk, Virginia, to the northern border of Florida.
This gave rise to the Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led
to the two Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835. These wars were really slave
raids to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves
domiciled among them. The wars cost the United States ten million dollars
and two thousand lives.

The great Appalachian range, with its abutting mountains, was the safest
path northward. Through Tennessee and Kentucky and the heart of the
Cumberland Mountains, using the limestone caverns, was the third route,
and the valley of the Mississippi was the western tunnel.

These runaways and the freedmen of the North soon began to form a group of
people who sought to consider the problem of slavery and the destiny of
the Negro in America. They passed through many psychological changes of
attitude in the years from 1700 to 1850. At first, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, there was but one thought: revolt and revenge. The
development of the latter half of the century brought an attitude of hope
and adjustment and emphasized the differences between the slave and the
free Negro. The first part of the nineteenth century brought two
movements: among the free Negroes an effort at self-development and
protection through organization; among slaves and recent fugitives a
distinct reversion to the older idea of revolt.

As the new industrial slavery, following the rise of the cotton kingdom,
began to press harder, a period of storm and stress ensued in the black
world, and in 1829 came the first full-voiced, almost hysterical protest
of a Negro against slavery and the color line in David Walker's Appeal,
which aroused Southern legislatures to action.

The decade 1830-40 was a severe period of trial. Not only were the chains
of slavery tighter in the South, but in the North the free Negro was
beginning to feel the ostracism and competition of white workingmen,
native and foreign. In Philadelphia, between 1829 and 1849, six mobs of
hoodlums and foreigners murdered and maltreated Negroes. In the Middle
West harsh black laws which had been enacted in earlier days were hauled
from their hiding places and put into effect. No Negro was allowed to
settle in Ohio unless he gave bond within twenty days to the amount of
five thousand dollars to guarantee his good behavior and support.
Harboring or concealing fugitives was heavily fined, and no Negro could
give evidence in any case where a white man was party. These laws began to
be enforced in 1829 and for three days riots went on in Cincinnati and
Negroes were shot and killed. Aroused, the Negroes sent a deputation to
Canada where they were offered asylum. Fully two thousand migrated from
Ohio. Later large numbers from other parts of the United States joined
them.

In 1830-31 the first Negro conventions were called in Philadelphia to
consider the desperate condition of the Negro population, and in 1833 the
convention met again and local societies were formed. The first Negro
paper was issued in New York in 1827, while later emancipation in the
British West Indies brought some cheer in the darkness.

A system of separate Negro schools was established and the little band of
abolitionists led by Garrison and others appeared. In spite of all the
untoward circumstances, therefore, the internal development of the free
Negro in the North went on. The Negro population increased twenty-three
per cent between 1830 and 1840; Philadelphia had, in 1838, one hundred
small beneficial societies, while Ohio Negroes had ten thousand acres of
land. The slave mutiny on the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd
Fellows, and the growth of the Negro churches all indicated advancement.

Between 1830 and 1850 the concerted cooeperation to assist fugitives came
to be known as the Underground Railroad. It was an organization not simply
of white philanthropists, but the cooeperation of Negroes in the most
difficult part of the work made it possible. Hundreds of Negroes visited
the slave states to entice the slaves away, and the list of Underground
Railroad operators given by Siebert contains one hundred and twenty-eight
names of Negroes. In Canada and in the northern United States there was a
secret society, known as the League of Freedom, which especially worked to
help slaves run away. Harriet Tubman was one of the most energetic of
these slave conductors and brought away several thousand slaves. William
Lambert, a colored man, was reputed between 1829 and 1862 to have aided in
the escape of thirty thousand.

The decade 1840-50 was a period of hope and uplift for the Negro group,
with clear evidences of distinct self-assertion and advance. A few
well-trained lawyers and physicians appeared, and colored men took their
place among the abolition orators. The catering business in Philadelphia
and other cities fell largely into their hands, and some small merchants
arose here and there. Above all, Frederick Douglass made his first speech
in 1841 and thereafter became one of the most prominent figures in the
abolition crusade. A new series of national conventions began to assemble
late in the forties, and the delegates were drawn from the artisans and
higher servants, showing a great increase of efficiency in the rank and
file of the free Negroes.

By 1850 the Negroes had increased to three and a half million. Those in
Canada were being organized in settlements and were accumulating property.
The escape of fugitive slaves was systematized and some of the most
representative conventions met. One particularly, in 1854, grappled
frankly with the problem of emigration. It looked as though it was going
to be impossible for Negroes to remain in the United States and be free.
As early as 1788 a Negro union of Newport, Rhode Island, had proposed a
general exodus to Africa. John and Paul Cuffe, after petitioning for the
right to vote in 1780, started in 1815 for Africa, organizing an
expedition at their own expense which cost four thousand dollars. Lot
Carey organized the African Mission Society in 1813, and the first Negro
college graduate went to Liberia in 1829 and became superintendent of
public schools. The Colonization Society encouraged this migration, and
the Negroes themselves had organized the Canadian exodus.

The Rochester Negro convention in 1853 pronounced against migration, but
nevertheless emissaries were sent in various directions to see what
inducements could be offered. One went to the Niger valley, one to Central
America, and one to Hayti. The Haytian trip was successful and about two
thousand black emigrants eventually settled in Hayti.

Delaney, who went to Africa, concluded a treaty with eight kings offering
inducements to Negroes, but nothing came of it. In 1853 Negroes like
Purvis and Barbadoes helped in the formation of the American Anti-slavery
society, and for a while colored men cooeperated with John Brown and
probably would have given him considerable help if they had thoroughly
known his plans. As it was, six or seven of his twenty-two followers were
Negroes.

Meantime the slave power was impelled by the high price of slaves and the
exhaustion of cotton land to make increased demands. Slavery was forced
north of Mason and Dixon's line in 1820; a new slave empire with thousands
of slaves was annexed in 1850, and a fugitive slave law was passed which
endangered the liberty of every free Negro; finally a determined attempt
was made to force slavery into the Northwest in competition with free
white labor, and less effective but powerful movements arose to annex more
slave territory to the south and to reopen the African slave trade.

It looked like a triumphal march for the slave barons, but each step cost
more than the last. Missouri gave rise to the early abolitionist movement.
Mexico and the fugitive slave law aroused deep opposition in the North,
and Kansas developed an attack upon the free labor system, not simply of
the North, but of the civilized world. The result was war; but the war was
not against slavery. It was fought to protect free white laborers against
the competition of slaves, and it was thought possible to do this by
segregating slavery.

The first thing that vexed the Northern armies on Southern soil during the
war was the question of the disposition of the fugitive slaves, who
immediately began to arrive in increasing numbers. Butler confiscated
them, Fremont freed them, and Halleck caught and returned them; but their
numbers swelled to such large proportions that the mere economic problem
of their presence overshadowed everything else, especially after the
Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was glad to have them come after once
he realized their strength to the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation was forced, not simply by the necessity of
paralyzing industry in the South, but also by the necessity of employing
Negro soldiers. During the first two years of the war no one wanted Negro
soldiers. It was declared to be a "white man's war." General Hunter tried
to raise a regiment in South Carolina, but the War Department disavowed
the act. In Louisiana the Negroes were anxious to enlist, but were held
off. In the meantime the war did not go as well as the North had hoped,
and on the twenty-sixth of January, 1863, the Secretary of War authorized
the Governor of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of Negro troops.
Frederick Douglass and others began the work with enthusiasm, and in the
end one hundred and eighty-seven thousand Negroes enlisted in the Northern
armies, of whom seventy thousand were killed and wounded. The conduct of
these troops was exemplary. They were indispensable in camp duties and
brave on the field, where they fought in two hundred and thirteen battles.
General Banks wrote, "Their conduct was heroic. No troops could be more
determined or more daring."[96]

The assault on Fort Wagner, led by a thousand black soldiers under the
white Colonel Shaw, is one of the greatest deeds of desperate bravery on
record. On the other hand the treatment of Negro soldiers when captured by
the Confederates was barbarous. At Fort Pillow, after the surrender of the
federal troops, the colored regiment was indiscriminately butchered and
some of them were buried alive.

Abraham Lincoln said, "The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to
any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic
strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it.
There are now in the service of the United States near two hundred
thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and
acquiring Union territory.... Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by
black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them in the
battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon
the war in three weeks."[97] Emancipation thus came as a war measure to
break the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the
sympathy of the civilized world.

However, two hundred and forty-four years of slavery could not be stopped
by edict. There were legal difficulties, the whole slow problem of
economic readjustment, and the subtle and far-reaching questions of future
race relations.

The peculiar circumstances of emancipation forced the legal and political
difficulties to the front, and these were so striking that they have since
obscured the others in the eyes of students. Quite unexpectedly and
without forethought the nation had emancipated four million slaves. Once
the deed was done, the majority of the nation was glad and recognized that
this was, after all, the only result of a fearful four years' war which in
any degree justified it. But how was the result to be secured for all
time? There were three possibilities: (1) to declare the slave free and
leave him at the mercy of his former masters; (2) to establish a careful
government guardianship designed to guide the slave from legal to real
economic freedom; (3) to give the Negro the political power to guard
himself as well as he could during this development. It is very easy to
forget that the United States government tried each one of these in
succession and was literally forced to adopt the third, because the first
had utterly failed and the second was thought too "paternal" and
especially too costly. To leave the Negroes helpless after a paper edict
of emancipation was manifestly impossible. It would have meant that the
war had been fought in vain.

Carl Schurz, who traversed the South just after the war, said, "A
veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South. The Negro
found scant justice in the local courts against the white man. He could
look for protection only to the military forces of the United States still
garrisoning the states lately in rebellion and to the Freedmen's
Bureau."[98] This Freedmen's Bureau was proposed by Charles Sumner. If it
had been presented to-day instead of fifty years ago, it would have been
regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary than the state insurance of
England and Germany. A half century ago, however, and in a country which
gave the _laisser faire_ economics their extremest trial, the Freedmen's
Bureau struck the whole nation as unthinkable, save as a very temporary
expedient and to relieve the more pointed forms of distress following war.
Yet the proposals of the Bureau were both simple and sensible:

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