THE NEGRO'S FUTURE.
[FROM ORR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]
Washington, March 25. ALMOST every other day you see amongst the petitions presented to Congress a request from somebody or other begging the House only to leave the negro alone and attend to business. There is something almost pitiable in the painful anxiety that newspapers and politicians and persons in private society express to ignore the ques- tion of the everlasting negro. Abolitionists are unpopular, because they keep thrusting the wrongs of the negro upon unwilling ears. Pro-slavery men are unpopular, because they keep dinning the rights of negro ownership on an unsympathetic public ; and the men who are popular are the prophets who speak pleasant things, and who recommend the people to wait upon Providence (or in the stock phrase, "not to interfere with its manifest interposition") for the ultimate solution of the negro question, Still, the question crops up at every moment. Runaway slaves come constantly into the Federal lines. Large districts are deserted by their owners as the Federal armies advance, and the plantations, which cannot be de- stroyed, and the slaves, who cannot be removed, are left to the charge and embarrassment of the United States Government. "What shall we do with them," is the question that everybody here is asking un- willingly, and to which nobody can find an answer. Meanwhile, it is growing daily clearer, that beyond the slavery question, difficult enough in itself, there lies the negro question, almost more difficult to grapple with. lam no great believer in Providence doing for one what one ought to do oneself; but still in any event, without much decided action on the part of the Government, I think there is a necessary solution to the mere slavery question. Either (and this is the view of the most far-sighted American politicians I have talked to) the insurrec- tion is speedily and hopelessly crushed, or it holds out for some time longer with varying success. In the latter case, there is an end to slavery at once, a rough and a sharp one. The vindictiveness of the North will be roused, revolutionary measures will be required, and the first and chief of these will be enforced emancipation. In the former and more probable event, the decline of slavery will be less rapid, but as certain. Hitherto, slavery has been the badge and cry of the great ruling political faction in the country. Any man who wanted power and office and success in public life was obliged to put on slavery colours. With the election of Lincoln the power of this party was broken, and anti-slavery views became the political creed of the winning side, just as pro-slavery views had been hitherto. As a political party the slave faction had lost its power, and it was the consciousness of this fact which impelled them to secession. Still, if they had abided by constitutional measures, this party would always have possessed strength from the fear that it might secede, and might possibly have recovered the reins of Government. Now, supposing the insurrection to be crushed, they will have played their last card and failed lamentably. There will be no terror for the North now in the cry of Secession. The South will not fight again a battle that has been fought and lost, and the slaveholders will be a small and declining faction in the State. Every politician of ambi- tion, and every place-seeker who wants patronage, will profess anti- slavery views. Since the question of free trade has been decided in England nobody who wants to rise in public life professes himself a Protectionist, and a similar result will happen here. With a free Qovernment like the American the influence of public opinion is overwhelming, and with the tide of public opinion set dead against slavery, state after state will throw off the degradation attached to slavery, and the slave system will fall to pieces by its own inherent weakness.
The objection to this optimist viewin mymind is, that it does not take into account the extraordinary social influence of slavery. As long as there is slavery in a state the pride of race makes the maintenance of slavery popular, even with classes who have no direct connexion with it. Thus in Kentucky—the staunchest of the Union Slave States, and in which within the last ten years the white population has increased in a ratio of more than three to one to the slave—the answer to the President's emancipation message, given by the Legislature, was to pass a resolution "that any person who advocates the doctrine of the abolition or emancipation of slavery in the State of Kentucky, either directly or indirectly, or who sympathizes with the same, shall be disfranchised for • e, and requested to leave the State within ten Ly.
days." Happily the majority of forty-eight to twenty-nine, by which this resolution was carried, was not sufficient to make it valicl, but the fact shows the strength of the anti-abolition sentiment. Still, in spite of this and many similar indications, I think it probable the view quoted above (which I know to be that of leading American statesmen) is substantially correct, and that, as a system, slavery is doomed, if, as I take for granted, the insurrection is suppressed. But when slavery is abolished what is to become of the uegroes ? The other night, when Wendell Phillips was lecturing at the Smith
sonian Institute, he thanked God "that never till that day had he set foot on slave soil." The sentiment was a creditable one, but I own the lecture would have been more satisfactory to me if the lec- turer had travelled in slave countries, or had told us his own experi- ence about the character of negroes. It is astonishing to me how very little the Northern people I meet (not only the abolitionists, but men of moderate views) know about the South, and how little they have been there; and, more than all, how very little they know about the state of the free coloured people in the North. Here in Washington, where the number of slaves is about 2000, and the free blacks over 10,000, you see coloured faces enough about the streets. But the line between the white and black is marked clearly, as of two distinct races. You rarely see a coloured person in company with a white, unless it is a black nursemaid with a white child in her arms. The majority, I should say, of the household servants are coloured, and they have the merit of being the pleasantest servants in this country. They are always good-tempered and obliging, and never appear to think they are doing you a favour in waiting on you, which is the characteristic trait of native American "help." I have not seen a shop here kept by a coloured tradesman, and the coloured people you meet in the streets are rarely well dressed. In the cars I have seen them occasionally, but in the churches the odious pew system still prevails. Supposing the slaves to be emancipated there are three solutions possible for the negro question. Amalgamation with the white race, emigration or enforced colonization, and settlement in this country as a free population of distinct race. The first of these in the obvious one, at first sight, to a philosopher. Unfortunately, the instincts of race are too strong to be got over. It is hard for a European to quite appreciate the intensity of American feeling about colour, but still, when an American asks you the usual question whether you would like your sister to marry a black man, I own that candour forces one to answer in the negative. A black butler can be tole- rated, but a black brother-in-law is an idea not pleasant to the Anglo- Saxon mind; and if you plead guilty to this weakness in an abstract case it is not difficult to understand the aversion with which a proud hard race like the American looks on the idea of any infusion of black blood in practice. That a black man should ever sit in Con- gress is to the American mind a sort of reduelio ad absurdum, a moral anomaly, from the contemplation of which even the Tribune shrinks reluctantly. Moreover, supposing this aversion to be re- moved, there seem to be physiological. objec- tions to any amalgama- tion of the races. The persons who have studied the subject most agree that the mixed race is not a healthy one. The intellectual power of the mulatto is very great, but the physical power is inferior either to the white or black man, and with each succeeding in- termixture the race becomes feebler, and dies out, as a rule, with scrofulous diseases. Colonization on a large scale presents great practical difficulties. The expense of transporting and pro- viding for four millions of people is a gigantic task, which it must take scores of years before America is able to undertake. More- over, the negroes, like all nations with strong feelings and little energy, have their local attachments, and have absolutely no desire to leave the home of their birth, cruel as that home may have proved to them. There remains, then, only the alternative of settlement in the existing slave states as a free population. The political difficulties, of which the advocates of slavery talk so much, do not seem to me great. There is no reason why the several states should extend the franchise to the coloured population, and, I fear, there is little hope that the blacks would agitate to obtain political rights. With the exception of Massachusetts, Maine, and, I believe, New Hampshire, coloured citizens have no votes in any of the free states, and except as a matter of abstract justice, about which the Ame- ricans do not trouble themselves, they may well remain disfranchised for the present. The difficulty is a social one. In the northern hemisphere the negro is an exotic, and does not flourish except under an artificial system. Now, though nobody is more adverse to slavery than I am, the logic of figures compels me to admit that from the rapid increase of population in the slave states, the slaves must, on the whole, have been kept in physical comfort. An amount of work was abstracted from them, which no inducement but force would urge them to undergo, and in return for this they were, as animals, treated with comfort. Remove the necessity of bondage, and in a northern climate, where his energies are deadened, the negro will not work, as a rule, enough to keep him in more than bare existence. I have my own doubts about the truth of our received English doc- trines as to the dignity of labour, and work being the one essential of human existence. It seems to me possible, that in this world as well as in the next, Lazarus, when the sun shone upon his sores, and the crumbs thrown out to him were plentiful, may have been as well off as Dives with his wealth and cares. Still, as a matter of fact, one cannot doubt that a people to whom work is naturally distasteful, will not stand a chance, on the same ground, with a race which works for the sake of work as well as for gain. Free white labourers will drive the blacks out of the field in the slave states, and under like conditions the blacks in the free states do not prosper. Somehow or other, the free coloured families do not grow ; the population de- clines or stands stationary; and at the present moment there are barely 900,000 blacks in the free states. The probability seems to be, that after emancipation the fate of the American negroes will be like that of the Indians. They will gradually move farther south, die out, and disappear with more or less of suffering. It seems as if by some law of nature the white man and the black cannot live and work together on equal terms on the same soil. Where the white man comes hitherto the black man has disappeared, and I fear that America is not likely to prove an exception to the rule.
The difficulties of the problem are very great, and I own that the abolitionist solution is the simplest, if not the most philosophical. The negro question, they say virtually, is one with which we have nothing as yet to do. When it comes upon us, we must do our best to alleviate the working of natural laws over which we have no con- trol. Meanwhile, the system of slavery is a sin which we have no right to commit for any ulterior considerations. The negro question we must leave to Providence ; but the slavery question is one we can deal with for ourselves. And like all simple solutions this com- mends itself to the popular instinct.
AN ENGLISH TRAVELLER.
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