I.
How
THE BLACK WORKER
black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in
the history of the United States, at once a challenge to
racy
and always an important part of
social
Easily the
den move
civil
its
its
democ-
economic history and
development
most dramatic episode in American history was the sud-
to free four million black slaves in
an
effort to stop a great
war, to end forty years of bitter controversy, and to appease the
moral sense of civilization.
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation
which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers
of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of
the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black
slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.
The black population at the time of the first census had risen to
three-quarters of a million,
and there were over
a million at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. Before 1830, the blacks had passed the
two million mark, helped by the increased importations just before
and the illicit smuggling up until 1820. By their own reproduction, the Negroes reached 3,638,808 in 1850, and before the Civil
War, stood at 4,441,830. They were 10% of the whole population of
the nation in 1700, 22% in 1750, 18.9% in 1800 and 1.1.6% in 1900.
These workers were not all black and not all Africans and not all
slaves. In i860, at least 90% were born in the United States, 13% were
visibly of white as well as Negro descent and actually more than onefourth were probably of white, Indian and Negro blood. In i860, 11%
of these dark folk were free workers.
In origin, the slaves represented everything African, although most
of them originated on or near the West Coast. Yet among them appeared the great Bantu tribes from Sierra Leone to South Africa; the
Sudanese, straight across the center of the continent, from the Atlantic
to the Valley of the Nile; the Nilotic Negroes and the black and
brown Hamites, allied with Egypt; the tribes of the great lakes; the
Pygmies and the Hottentots; and in addition to these, distinct traces
of both Berber and Arab blood. There is no doubt of the presence of
all these various elements in the mass of 10,000,000 or more Negroes
1808,
3
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4
transported from Africa to the various Americas, from the fifteenth
to the nineteenth centuries.
went through West Indian
tutelage, and thus finally appeared in the United States. They brought
with them their religion and rhythmic song, and some traces of their
art and tribal customs. And after a lapse of two and one-half centuries,
the Negroes became a settled working population, speaking English
or French, professing Christianity, and used principally in agricultural
toil. Moreover, they so mingled their blood with white and red America that today less than 25% of the Negro Americans are of unmixed
Most
of
them
that
came
to the continent
African descent.
So long as slavery was a matter of race and color, it made the conscience of the nation uneasy and continually affronted its ideals. The
men who wrote the Constitution sought by every evasion, and almost
by subterfuge, to keep recognition of slavery out of the basic form of
the new government. They founded their hopes on the prohibition of
the slave trade, being sure that without continual additions from
abroad, this tropical people would not long survive, and thus the problem of slavery would disappear in death. They miscalculated, or did
not foresee the changing economic world. It might be more profitable
in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap
Africans; but in America without a slave trade, it paid to conserve
the slave and let him multiply. When, therefore, manifestly the Negroes were not dying out, there came quite naturally new excuses and
explanations.
It
was
a matter of social condition. Gradually these peo-
would be free; but freedom could only come to the bulk as the
freed were transplanted to their own land and country, since the living together of black and white in America was unthinkable. So again
the nation waited, and its conscience sank to sleep.
But in a rich and eager land, wealth and work multiplied. They
twisted new and intricate patterns around the earth. Slowly but
mightily these black workers were integrated into modern industry.
On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap
sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new and tickling luxury;
but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged
world. Cotton grew so swiftly that the 9,000 bales of cotton which the
new nation scarcely noticed in 1791 became 79,000 in 1800; and with
this increase, walked economic revolution in a dozen different lines.
ple
The
cotton crop reached one-half million bales in 1822, a million bales
in 1831, two million in 1840, three million in 1852, and in the year of
secession, stood at the then
Such facts and
which they were
enormous
others, coupled
related
as
total of five million bales.
with the increase of the slaves to
both cause and effect, meant a new
THE BLACK WORKER
5
more so because with increase in American cotton
and Negro slaves, came both by chance and ingenuity new miracles
for manufacturing, and particularly for the spinning and weaving of
world; and
all
the
cloth.
The
giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the
world's work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom
of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only
could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand,
but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire.
work
widening stretches of new, rich,
black soil in Florida, in Louisiana, in Mexico; even in Kansas. This
land, added to cheap labor, and labor easily regulated and distributed,
made profits so high that a whole system of culture arose in the South,
with a new leisure and social philosophy. Black labor became the
foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of
Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system,
of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale;
new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor
problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America.
Thus, the old difficulties and paradoxes appeared in new dress. It
became easy to say and easier to prove that these black men were not
men in the sense that white men were, and could never be, in the
same sense, free. Their slavery was a matter of both race and social
condition, but the condition was limited and determined by race. They
were congenital wards and children, to be well-treated and cared for,
but far happier and safer here than in their own land. As the RichFirst of
all,
—
mond,
their
Virginia,
called for
Examiner put
it
in 1854:
"Let us not bother our brains about what Providence intends to do
with our Negroes in the distant future, but glory in and profit to the
utmost by what He has done for them in transplanting them here,
and
setting
them
to
work on our
plantations.
.
.
.
True philanthropy
Negro, begins, like charity, at home; and if Southern men
would act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant,
in letters of fire, that the Negro is here, and here forever; is our property, and ours forever;
they would accomplish more good for the
race in five years than they boast the institution itself to have accomto the
.
plished in
two
centuries.
.
.
.
.
."
On
the other hand, the growing exploitation of white labor in
Europe, the rise of the factory system, the increased monopoly of land,
and the problem of the distribution of political power, began to send
wave
new
after
wave
of immigrants to America, looking for
opportunity and
new
democracy.
new
freedom,
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
6
The
opportunity for real and
Political
an
on
power
at first
new democracy
America was broad.
property holders and
in
was, as usual, confined to
and learning. But it was never securely based
land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to
nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open
their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and
less and America became to the world a land of economic opportunity. So the world came to America, even before the Revolution, and
afterwards during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered the United States.
When we compare these figures with the cotton crop and the increase of black workers, we see how the economic problem increased
in intricacy. This intricacy is shown by the persons in the drama and
their differing and opposing interests. There were the native-born
Americans, largely of English descent, who were the property holders
and employers; and even so far as they were poor, they looked forward to the time when they would accumulate capital and become, as
they put it, economically "independent." Then there were the new
immigrants, torn with a certain violence from their older social and
economic surroundings; strangers in a new land, with visions of rising
in the social and economic world by means of labor. They differed in
language and social status, varying from the half-starved Irish peasant
to the educated German and English artisan. There were the free
Negroes: those of the North free in some cases for many generations,
and voters; and in other cases, fugitives, new come from the South,
with little skill and small knowledge of life and labor in their new
environment. There were the free Negroes of the South, an unstable,
harried class, living on sufferance of the law, and the good will of
white patrons, and yet rising to be workers and sometimes owners of
property and even of slaves, and cultured citizens. There was the great
mass of poor whites, disinherited of their economic portion by competition with the slave system, and land monopoly.
In the earlier history of the South, free Negroes had the right to
vote. Indeed, so far as the letter of the law was concerned, there was
not a single Southern colony in which a black man who owned the
requisite amount of property, and complied with other conditions, did
not at some period have the legal right to vote.
Negroes voted in Virginia as late as 1723, when the assembly
enacted that no free Negro, mulatto or Indian "shall hereafter have
any vote at the elections of burgesses or any election whatsoever." In
North Carolina, by the Act of 1734, a former discrimination against
Negro voters was laid aside and not reenacted until 1835.
A complaint in South Carolina, in 1701, said:
aristocracy of birth
THE BLACK WORKER
7
&
taken for as good Electors as
the best Freeholders in the Province. So that we leave it with Your
Lordships to judge whether admitting Aliens, Strangers, Servants,
Negroes, &c, as good and qualified Voters, can be thought any ways
agreeable to King Charles' Patent to Your Lordships, or the English
Constitution of Government." Again in 1716, Jews and Negroes, who
had been voting, were expressly excluded. In Georgia, there was at
first no color discrimination, although only owners of fifty acres of
1
land could vote. In 1761, voting was expressly confined to white men.
"Several free Negroes were receiv'd,
In the states carved out of the Southwest, they were disfranchised
as soon as the state came into the Union, although in Kentucky they
voted between 1792 and 1799, and Tennessee allowed free Negroes to
vote in her constitution of 1796.
In North Carolina, where even disfranchisement, in 1835, did not
apply to Negroes
who
already had the right to vote,
it
was
said that
hundred Negroes who had been voting before then usually voted prudently and judiciously.
In Delaware and Maryland they voted in the latter part of the
eighteenth century. In Louisiana, Negroes who had had the right to
vote during territorial status were not disfranchised.
To sum up, in colonial times, the free Negro was excluded from the
suffrage only in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. In the Border
States, Delaware disfranchised the Negro in 1792; Maryland in 1783
and 1810.
In the Southeast, Florida disfranchised Negroes in 1845; and in the
the several
Southwest, Louisiana disfranchised them in 1812; Mississippi in 1817;
Alabama in 1819; Missouri, 1821; Arkansas in 1836; Texas, 1845.
Georgia in her constitution of 1777 confined voters to white males;
but this was omitted in the constitutions of 1789 and 1798.
As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to
expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic
or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed,
enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that
did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.
In the North, Negroes, for the most part, received political enfranchisement with the white laboring classes. In 1778, the Congress
of the Confederation twice refused to insert the word "white" in the
Articles of Confederation in asserting that free inhabitants in each
state should be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free
citizens of the several states. In the law of 1783, free Negroes were
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
8
recognized as a basis of taxation, and in 1784, they were recognized as
voters in the territories. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, "free
male inhabitants of full age" were recognized as voters.
The few Negroes that were in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont could vote if they had the property qualifications. In Connecticut they were disfranchised in 1814; in 1865 this restriction was retained, and Negroes did not regain the right until after the Civil War.
In New Jersey, they were disfranchised in 1807, but regained the right
in 1820 and lost it again in 1847. Negroes voted in New York in the
eighteenth century, then were disfranchised, but in 1821 were permitted to vote with a discriminatory property qualification of $250. No
property qualification was required of whites. Attempts were made at
various times to remove this qualification but
until 1870. In
Rhode
it
was not removed
Island they were disfranchised in the constitution
which followed Dorr's Rebellion, but finally allowed to vote in
1842. In Pennsylvania, they were allowed to vote until 1838 when the
"reform" convention restricted the suffrage to whites.
The Western States as territories did not usually restrict the suffrage,
but as they were admitted to the Union they disfranchised the Negroes: Ohio in 1803; Indiana in 1816; Illinois in 1818; Michigan in
1837; Iowa in 1846; Wisconsin in 1848; Minnesota in 1858; and Kansas
in 1861.
The Northwest Ordinance and even the Louisiana Purchase had
made no color discrimination in legal and political rights. But the
admitted from this territory, specifically and from the first, denied free black men the right to vote and passed codes of black laws
in Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere, instigated largely by the attitude and
fears of the immigrant poor whites from the South. Thus, at first, in
Kansas and the West, the problem of the black worker was narrow
and specific. Neither the North nor the West asked that black labor
in the United States be free and enfranchised. On the contrary, they
accepted slave labor as a fact; but they were determined that it should
be territorially restricted, and should not compete with free white
states
labor.
What was
system for which the South fought and
risked life, reputation and wealth and which a growing element in
the North viewed first with hesitating tolerance, then with distaste
and finally with economic fear and moral horror? What did it mean
think of oppression
to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today.
this industrial
We
beyond
all
conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation,
the absolute negation of
human
rights; or
on the contrary, we may
think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten,
twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by
THE BLACK WORKER
his physical necessities to
movements and
do
this
his possibilities;
and not to do
and we say,
9
that, curtailed in his
here, too,
is
a
slave
and slavery is merely a matter of name.
But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that
we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the
called a "free worker,"
enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master;
the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the de-
was the submergence below the arbitrary
will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these
vital respects than that which exists today in Europe or America. Its
analogue today is the yellow, brown and black laborer in China and
India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon; and it was this slavery
fenselessness of family
life. It
that fell in America.
The
cruel
slavery of
Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately
and oppressive system.
murder.
On
the other hand,
It
did not
it is
mean
systematic starvation or
just as difficult to conceive as quite
and humane
masters under whom slaves were as children, guided and trained in
work and play, given even such mental training as was for their good,
and for the well-being of the surrounding world.
The victims of Southern slavery were often happy; had usually adequate food for their health, and shelter sufficient for a mild climate.
The Southerners could say with some justification that when the mass
of their field hands were compared with the worst class of laborers in
the slums of New York and Philadelphia, and the factory towns of
New England, the black slaves were as well off and in some particulars better off. Slaves lived largely in the country where health conditions were better; they worked in the open air, and their hours were
true the idyllic picture of a patriarchal state with cultured
about the current hours for peasants throughout Europe. They received no formal education, and neither did the Irish peasant, the
English factory-laborer, nor the German Bauer; and in contrast with
these free white laborers, the Negroes were protected by a certain
primitive sort of old-age pension, job insurance, and sickness insurance; that is, they must be supported in some fashion, when they were
must have attention in sickness, for they represented invested capital; and they could never be among the unem-
too old to work; they
ployed.
On
the other hand,
it is
just as true that
Negro
slaves in
America
represented the worst and lowest conditions among modern laborers.
One estimate is that the maintenance of a slave in the South cost the
master about $19 a year, which means that they were among the poorest paid laborers in the modern world. They represented in a very real
sense the ultimate degradation of
^e
man. Indeed, the system was
so re-
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
io
modern
actionary, so utterly inconsistent with
we
simply
cannot grasp it today. No matter how degraded the factory hand, he
is not real estate. The tragedy of the black slave's position was preprogress, that
an owner
and to "the cruelty and injustice which are the invariable consequences
of the exercise of irresponsible power, especially where authority must
be sometimes delegated by the planter to agents of inferior education
cisely this; his absolute subjection to the individual will of
and coarser
The
feelings."
proof of this
They
not considered men.
visable like
make no
written in the slave codes. Slaves were
had no right of petition. They were "de-
lies clearly
any other
chattel."
They could own nothing; they could
contracts; they could hold
no property, nor
traffic
in prop-
could not hire out; they could not legally marry nor constitute families; they could not control their children; they could not
appeal from their master; they could be punished at will. They could
not testify in court; they could be imprisoned by their owners, and
erty; they
the criminal offense of assault and battery could not be committed
the person of a slave.
of a slave
The
The
slave
a respect "without bounds,
owed
deliberate
a crime
practically
his family
and an absolute obedience." This author-
could be transmitted to others.
had no
to his
and
was
master and all
was punishable by death, but such
impossible of proof.
ity
"willful, malicious
on
murder"
A
slave could not sue his master;
no right to education or religion; a
promise made to a slave by his master had no force nor validity. Children followed the condition of the slave mother. The slave could have
no access to the judiciary. A slave might be condemned to death for
striking any white person.
Looking at these accounts, "it is safe to say that the law regards a
Negro slave, so far as his civil status is concerned, purely and absolutely property, to be bought and sold and pass and descend as a tract
2
of land, a horse, or an ox."
The whole legal status of slavery was enunciated in the extraordinary statement of a Chief Justice of the United States that Negroes
had always been regarded in America "as having no rights which a
white man was bound to respect."
It may be said with truth that the law was often harsher than the
practice. Nevertheless, these laws and decisions represent the legally
permissible possibilities, and the only curb upon the power of the
master was his sense of humanity and decency, on the one hand,
and the conserving of his investment on the other. Of the humanity
of large numbers of Southern masters there can be no doubt. In some
cases, they gave their slaves a fatherly care. And yet even in such cases
the strain upon their ability to care for large numbers of people and
right of redemption;
THE BLACK WORKER
n
the necessity of entrusting the care of the slaves to other hands than
their own, led to much suffering and cruelty.
The matter
of his investment in land and slaves greatly curtailed
the owner's freedom of action. Under the competition of growing industrial organization, the slave system was indeed the source of im-
owner and landlord to keep a
large or even reasonable share of these profits was increasingly difficult. The price of the slave produce in the open market could be
hammered down by merchants and traders acting with knowledge
and collusion. And the slave owner was, therefore, continually forced
to find his profit not in the high price of cotton and sugar, but in
mense
profits.
But for the
beating even further
down
slave
the cost of his slave labor. This
made
the
owners in early days kill the slave by overwork and renew their
working stock; it led to the widely organized interstate slave trade
between the Border States and the Cotton Kingdom of the Southern
South; it led to neglect and the breaking up of families, and it could
not protect the slave against the cruelty, lust and neglect of certain
slave
owners.
Thus human
and led in two singutoward the deliberate
larly contradictory and paradoxical directions
commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit and toward
the intermingling of black and white blood. The slaveholders shrank
from acknowledging either set of facts but they were clear and unslavery in the South pointed
—
deniable.
In this vital respect, the slave laborer differed from all others of his
day: he could be sold; he could, at the will of a single individual, be
transferred for life a thousand miles or more. His family, wife and
and absolutely taken from him. Free laborers today are compelled to wander in search for work and food; their
families are deserted for want of wages; but in all this there is no such
direct barter in human flesh. It was a sharp accentuation of control
over men beyond the modern labor reserve or the contract coolie sys-
children could be legally
tem.
Negroes could be sold
—actually sold
as
we
sell cattle
with no
refer-
was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually
belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact. Southern papers of the Border States were filled with advertisements: "I
wish to purchase fifty Negroes of both sexes from 6 to 30 years of age
for which I will give the highest cash prices."
"Wanted to purchase Negroes of every description, age and sex."
The consequent disruption of families is proven beyond doubt:
"Fifty Dollars reward. Ran away from the subscriber, a Negro
ence to calves or bulls, or recognition of family.
It
—
—
—
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
12
girl,
named Maria. She
of a copper color, between 13
is
—bareheaded
and
14 years
—
and barefooted. She is small for her age very
sprightly and very likely. She stated she was going to see her mother
at Maysville. Sanford Tomson."
"Committed to jail of Madison County, a Negro woman, who calls
her name Fanny, and says she belongs to William Miller, of Mobile.
She formerly belonged to John Givins, of this county, who now owns
several of her children. David Shropshire, Jailer."
"Fifty Dollar reward. Ran away from the subscriber, his Negro
man Pauladore, commonly called Paul. I understand Gen. R. Y.
Hayne has purchased his wife and children from H. L. Pinckney,
Esq., and has them on his plantation at Goosecreek, where, no doubt,
of age
—
the fellow
is
frequently lurking. T. Davis."
"lurking" about his wife and children.
The system of
force was made
slavery
demanded
One
can see Pauladore
3
a special police force
and unusually
and such a
by the presence of
the poor whites. This explains the difference between the slave revolts
in the West Indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the Southern
United States. In the West Indies, the power over the slave was held
by the whites and carried out by them and such Negroes as they could
trust. In the South, on the other hand, the great planters formed propossible
effective
had singularly enough at
their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were
actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves.
Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in
the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would
have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in
the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But
above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with
portionately quite as small a class but they
the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of
He
Negro
toil
of
never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any
labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a
planter and to own "niggers." To these Negroes he transferred all the
dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.
Even with the late ruin of Haiti before their eyes, the planters, stirred
as they were, were nevertheless able to stamp out slave revolt. The
dozen revolts of the eighteenth century had dwindled to the plot of
Gabriel in 1800, Vesey in 1822, of Nat Turner in 1831 and crews of
the Amistad and Creole in 1839 and 1841. Gradually the whole white
South became an armed and commissioned camp to keep Negroes in
all
sorts.
slavery
and
to kill the black rebel.
—
THE BLACK WORKER
13
But even the poor white, led by the planter, would not have kept
the black slave in nearly so complete control had it not been for what
may be called the Safety Valve of Slavery; and that was the chance
which a vigorous and determined slave had to run away to freedom.
Under the situation as it developed between 1830 and i860 there
were grave losses to the capital invested in black workers. Encouraged
by the idealism of those Northern thinkers who insisted that Negroes
were human, the black worker sought freedom by running away from
slavery. The physical geography of America with its paths north, by
swamp, river and mountain range; the daring of black revolutionists
like Henson and Tubman; and the extra-legal efforts of abolitionists
made this more and more easy.
One cannot know the real facts concerning the number of fugitives,
but despite the fear of advertising the losses, the emphasis put upon
fugitive slaves by the South shows that it was an important economic
from the bitter effort to increase the efficiency of
the fugitive slave law that the losses from runaways were widespread
and continuous; and the increase in the interstate slave trade from
item. It
is
certain
Border States to the deep South, together with the increase in the price
of slaves, showed a growing pressure. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, one bought an average slave for $200; while in i860
the price ranged from $1,400 to $2,000.
Not only was the fugitive slave important because of the actual loss
involved, but for potentialities in the future. These free Negroes were
furnishing a leadership for the mass of the black workers, and espe-
were furnishing a text for the abolition idealists. Fugitive
slaves, like Frederick Douglass and others humbler and less gifted,
increased the number of abolitionists by thousands and spelled the
cially they
doom of slavery.
The true significance
of slavery in the United States to the
whole
development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves
to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in
the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free
were given schools and the right to vote what control could or should
be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the
mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to
all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected?
This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of
the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy.
It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands
and touches all races and nations.
social
—
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
i4
And
human
development, ancient and modern, not the least
singular and significant is the philosophy of life and action which
slavery bred in the souls of black folk. In most respects its expression
was
of
stilted
all
and confused; the
Hebrew prophecy and
but splendid words. The subtle
rolling periods of
legend furnished inaccurate
folk-lore of Africa, with whimsy and parable, veiled wish and wisdom;
and above all fell the anointing chrism of the slave music, the only gift
of pure art in America.
Beneath the Veil lay right and wrong, vengeance and love, and
sometimes throwing aside the veil, a soul of sweet Beauty and Truth
stood revealed. Nothing else of art or religion did the slave South give
biblical
to the world, except the
down
to our day,
remember
it
Negro song and
has added but
little
story.
And
even
to this gift.
after slavery,
One
has but to
symbol of it all, still unspoiled by petty artisans, the
legend of John Henry, the mighty black, who broke his heart working
against the machine, and died "with his Hammer in His Hand."
Up from this slavery gradually climbed the Free Negro with clearer,
modern expression and more definite aim long before the emancipation of 1863. His greatest effort lay in his cooperation with the Abolition movement. He knew he was not free until all Negroes were free.
Individual Negroes became exhibits of the possibilities of the Negro
race, if once it was raised above the status of slavery. Even when, as
so often, the Negro became Court Jester to the ignorant American
mob, he made his plea in his songs and antics.
Thus spoke "the noblest slave that ever God set free," Frederick
Douglass in 1852, in his 4th of July oration at Rochester, voicing the
frank and fearless criticism of the black worker:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day
that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty
and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence;
your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and
hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious
parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
as
—
disgrace a nation of savages.
.
.
.
"You
boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and
your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation
embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged
to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your
countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crown-headed tyrants
(as
—
THE BLACK WORKER
15
and Austria and pride yourselves on your democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your
shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets,
of Russia
greet
them with
ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect
them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives
from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You
glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character
of a nation a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make
the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and
orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her
cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs
—
of the
American
slave,
you would enforce the
strictest
silence,
and
would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those
wrongs the subject of public discourse!" 4
Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate
exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish
nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly exploit
other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance with capital, to share in their
exploitation. To be sure, the black mass, developed again and again,
here and there, capitalistic groups in New Orleans, in Charleston and
in Philadelphia; groups willing to join white capital in exploiting
were driven back into the mass by racial prejudice
before they had reached a permanent foothold; and thus became all
the more bitter against all organization which by means of race prejudice, or the monopoly of wealth, sought to exclude men from maklabor; but they
ing a living.
founding stone of a new economic
system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who
brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite
of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.
That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the
South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America
and in the United States that great majority of mankind, on whose
bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern
industry shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by
race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven,
beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name; spawning the world's
raw material and luxury cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil,
fibers, spices, rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather
how shall we end the list and where? All these are gathered up at
It
was thus the black worker,
—
—
—
as
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
i6
and transported
at fabulous gain; and the resultant wealth is distributed and displayed
and made the basis of world power and universal dominion and
armed arrogance in London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York
and Rio de Janeiro.
Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the
problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile
prices lowest of the low, manufactured, transformed
gestures avail nothing.
Out
of the exploitation of the dark proletariat
comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured
lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of
labor
is
the freeing of that basic majority of workers
brown and
who
are yellow,
black.
Dark, shackled knights of labor, clinging
Amidst a universal wreck of faith
To
still
and foreigners to hate.
These know ye not, these have ye not received,
But these shall speak to you Beatitudes.
Around them surge the tides of all your strife,
Above them rise the august monuments
Of all your outward splendor, but they stand
Unenvious in thought, and bide their time.
Leslie P. Hill
i.
Compare A.
in
cheerfulness,
E. McKinley,
The
Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies
America,
p. 137.
Picture of Slavery Drawn from the Decisions of Southern Courts, p. 5.
3. Compare Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South; Weld, American Slavery as
4. Woodson, Negro Orators and Their Orations, pp. 218-19.
2.
A
It Is.
THE WHITE WORKER
II.
How
America became the
here from
slaves,
all
with
laborer's
Promised Land; and flocking
the world the white workers competed with black
new
floods of foreigners,
and with growing
exploita-
fought slavery to save democracy and then
tion, until they
lost
democracy in a new and vaster slavery
The
opportunity for real and
Political
power was
new democracy
at first as usual
America was broad.
property holders and
in
confined to
an aristocracy of birth and learning. But it was never securely based
on land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to
nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open
their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and
less and America became to the world a land of opportunity. So the
world came to America, even before the Revolution, and afterward
during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered
the United States.
The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor,
used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was
not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent
laboring class and
it
is
in the light of this fact that the labor
move-
ment among white Americans must be studied. The successful, wellpaid American laboring class formed, because of its property and
ideals, a petty bourgeoisie
common
ready always to join capital in exploiting
white and black, foreign and native. The more energetic and thrifty among the immigrants caught the prevalent American idea that here labor could become emancipated from the necessity
of continuous toil and that an increasing proportion could join the
class of exploiters, that is of those who made their income chiefly by
profit derived through the hiring of labor.
Abraham Lincoln expressed this idea frankly at Hartford, in March,
i860.
"I
labor,
He said:
am not ashamed
hired laborer, mauling
to confess that twenty-five years
rails, at
work on
a
flat
boat
—just
ago
I
was a
what might
happen to any poor man's son." Then followed the characteristic philosophy of the time: "I want every man to have his chance and I believe a black man is entitled to it in which he can better his condition when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this
—
—
17
—
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
18
year and the next,
work for himself afterward, and finally to hire
men to work for him. That is the true system."
He was enunciating the widespread American idea of the son rising
economic level than the father; of the chance for the poor
man to accumulate wealth and power, which made the European
doctrine of a working class fighting for the elevation of all workers
seem not only less desirable but even less possible for average workers
than they had formerly considered it.
These workers came to oppose slavery not so much from moral as
from the economic fear of being reduced by competition to the level
of slaves. They wanted a chance to become capitalists; and they found
that chance threatened by the competition of a working class whose
status at the bottom of the economic structure seemed permanent and
inescapable. At first, black slavery jarred upon them, and as early as the
seventeenth century German immigrants to Pennsylvania asked the
Quakers innocently if slavery was in accord with the Golden Rule.
Then, gradually, as succeeding immigrants were thrown in difficult
and exasperating competition with black workers, their attitude
changed. These were the very years when the white worker was beginning to understand the early American doctrine of wealth and property; to escape the liability of imprisonment for debt, and even to gain
the right of universal suffrage. He found pouring into cities like New
York and Philadelphia emancipated Negroes with low standards of
living, competing for the jobs which the lower class of unskilled white
to a higher
laborers wanted.
For the immediate available jobs, the Irish particularly competed
and the employers because of race antipathy and sympathy with the
South did not wish to increase the number of Negro workers, so long
as
the foreigners
worked
just
as
cheaply.
The foreigners in turn
The result was race war;
blamed blacks for the cheap price of labor.
riots took place which were at first simply the flaming hostility of
groups of laborers fighting for bread and butter; then they turned
into race riots. For three days in Cincinnati in 1829, a mob of whites
wounded and killed free Negroes and fugitive slaves and destroyed
property. Most of the black population, numbering over two thousand,
left the city and trekked to Canada. In Philadelphia, 1 828-1 840, a series
of riots took place which thereafter extended until after the Civil War.
The riot of 1834 took the dimensions of a pitched battle and lasted
for three days. Thirty-one houses and two churches were destroyed.
Other riots took place in 1835 and 1838 and a two days' riot in 1842
caused the calling out of the militia with artillery.
In the forties came quite a different class, the English and
workers,
who had
tried
by organization
to fight the
German
machine and
in
THE WHITE WORKER
19
some degree envisaged the Marxian reorganization of
industry through trade unions and class struggle. The attitude of these
people toward the Negro was varied and contradictory. At first they
blurted out their disapprobation of slavery on principle. It was a phase
of all wage slavery. Then they began to see a way out for the worker
in America through the free land of the West. Here was a solution
such as was impossible in Europe plenty of land, rich land, land coming daily nearer its own markets, to which the worker could retreat
and restore the industrial balance ruined in Europe by the expropriation of the worker from the soil. Or in other words, the worker in
America saw a chance to increase his wage and regulate his conditions
of employment much greater than in Europe. The trade unions could
have a material backing that they could not have in Germany, France
the end had to
:
or England. This thought, curiously enough, instead of increasing the
sympathy for the slave turned
The
it
directly into rivalry
and enmity.
wisest of the leaders could not clearly envisage just
how
slave
and competition with free labor tended to reduce
all labor toward slavery. For this reason, the union and labor leaders
gravitated toward the political party which opposed tariff bounties
and welcomed immigrants, quite forgetting that this same Democratic
party had as its backbone the planter oligarchy of the South with its
labor in conjunction
slave labor.
The new immigrants
in their competition with this
group
reflected
not simply the general attitude of America toward colored people, but
which these Negroes foreshadowed. The Negroes worked cheaply, partly from cusparticularly they felt a threat of slave competition
tom, partly as their only defense against competition.
The white
la-
borers realized that Negroes were part of a group of millions of work-
who were
by law, and whose competition kept white labor
out of the work of the South and threatened its wages and stability
in the North. When now the labor question moved West, and became
a part of the land question, the competition of black men became of
increased importance. Foreign laborers saw more clearly than most
Americans the tremendous significance of free land in abundance,
such as America possessed, in open contrast to the land monopoly of
Europe. But here on this free land, they met not only a few free Negro workers, but the threat of a mass of slaves. The attitude of the
West toward Negroes, therefore, became sterner than that of the East.
Here was the possibility of direct competition with slaves, and the
absorption of Western land into the slave system. This must be resisted at all costs, but beyond this, even free Negroes must be discouraged. On this the Southern poor white immigrants insisted.
In the meantime, the problem of the black worker had not ceased
ers
slaves
20
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
and the economic philosophy of America.
That the worker should be a bond slave was fundamentally at variance
with the American doctrine, and the demand for the abolition of
slavery had been continuous since the Revolution. In the North, it had
resulted in freeing gradually all of the Negroes. But the comparatively
small number of those thus freed was being augmented now by
fugitive slaves from the South, and manifestly the ultimate plight
of the black worker depended upon the course of Southern slavery.
There arose, then, in the thirties, and among thinkers and workers,
a demand that slavery in the United States be immediately abolished.
This demand became epitomized in the crusade of William Lloyd
Garrison, himself a poor printer, but a man of education, thought and
indomitable courage. This movement was not primarily a labor movement or a matter of profit and wage. It simply said that under any
condition of life, the reduction of a human being to real estate was a
crime against humanity of such enormity that its existence must be
immediately ended. After emancipation there would come questions
of labor, wage and political power. But now, first, must be demanded
that ordinary human freedom and recognition of essential manhood
which slavery blasphemously denied. This philosophy of freedom was
a logical continuation of the freedom philosophy of the eighteenth
century which insisted that Freedom was not an End but an indispensable means to the beginning of human progress and that democracy could function only after the dropping of feudal privileges,
monopoly and chains.
The propaganda which made the abolition movement terribly real
was the Fugitive Slave the piece of intelligent humanity who could
say: I have been owned like an ox. I stole my own body and now I
am hunted by law and lash to be made an ox again. By no conception
of justice could such logic be answered. Nevertheless, at the same time
white labor, while it attempted no denial but even expressed faint
sympathy, saw in this fugitive slave and in the millions of slaves behind him, willing and eager to work for less than current wage, competition for their own jobs. What they failed to comprehend was that
the black man enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal comto trouble the conscience
—
petitor than the black
man
free.
Here, then, were two labor movements: the movement to give the
minimum
which would enable him to sell
his own labor, and another movement which proposed to increase
the wage and better the condition of the working class in America,
now largely composed of foreign immigrants, and dispute with the
new American capitalism the basis upon which the new wealth was
to be divided. Broad philanthropy and a wide knowledge of the eleblack worker a
legal status
THE WHITE WORKER
21
ments of human progress would have led these two movements to
unite and in their union to become irresistible. It was difficult, almost
impossible, for this to be clear to the white labor leaders of the
thirties. They had their particularistic grievances and one of these
was the competition of free Negro labor. Beyond this they could easily
vision a new and tremendous competition of black workers after all
the slaves became free. What they did not see nor understand was
that this competition was present and would continue and would be
emphasized if the Negro continued as a slave worker. On the other
hand, the Abolitionists did not realize the plight of the white laborer,
especially the semi-skilled and unskilled worker.
While the Evans brothers, who came as labor agitators in 1825, had
among
their twelve
theless,
George was soon convinced that freedom without land was
of
no importance.
demands "the
He
abolition of chattel slavery," never-
wrote to Gerrit Smith,
who was
giving land to
Negroes, and said:
was formerly,
warm
advocate of the
abolition of slavery. This was before I saw that there was white slavery. Since I saw this, I have materially changed my views as to the
"I
means
of abolishing
like yourself,
Negro
sir,
slavery.
I
a very
now
see, clearly, I
think, that
changing masters now possessed by the landless white would hardly be a benefit to him in exchange for his surety of support in sickness and old age, although he
is in a favorable climate. If the Southern form of slavery existed at the
North, I should say the black would be a great loser by such a
to give the landless black the privilege of
change."
1
At the convention of the New England anti-slavery society in 1845,
Robert Owen, the great champion of cooperation, said he was opposed
to Negro slavery, but that he had seen worse slavery in England than
among the Negroes. Horace Greeley said the same year: "If I am less
concerning the slavery prevalent in Charleston or New
Orleans, it is because I see so much slavery in New York which
appears to claim my first efforts."
troubled
Thus
despite all influences, reform
and
social uplift veered
away
from the Negro. Brisbane, Channing, Owen and other leaders called
a National Reform Association to meet in New York in May, 1845.
In October, Owen's "World Conference" met. But they hardly mentioned slavery. The Abolitionists did join a National Industrial Congress which met around 1 845-1 846. Other labor leaders were openly
hostile toward the abolitionist movement, while the movement for
free
land increased.
Thus two movements—Labor-Free
fundamental divergence instead of
and Abolition, exhibited
becoming one great party of free
Soil,
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
22
labor
and
free land.
The Free
Soilers stressed the difficulties of even
the free laborer getting hold of the land and getting
work
in the great
congestion which immigration had brought;
and the abolitionists
These two movements might
moral wrong of slavery.
easily have cooperated and differed only in matters of emphasis; but
the trouble was that black and white laborers were competing for
the same jobs just of course as all laborers always are. The immediate
competition became open and visible because of racial lines and racial
philosophy and particularly in Northern states where free Negroes
and fugitive slaves had established themselves as workers, while the
ultimate and overshadowing competition of free and slave labor was
obscured and pushed into the background. This situation, too, made
extraordinary reaction, led by the ignorant mob and fomented by
authority and privilege; abolitionists were attacked and their meeting
places burned; women suffragists were hooted; laws were proposed
making the kidnaping of Negroes easier and disfranchising Negro
stressed the
voters in conventions called for purposes of "reform."
The humanitarian reform movement
reached
its
height in 1847-
amid falling prices, and trade unionism was at a low ebb. The
strikes from 1 849-1 852 won the support of Horace Greeley, and increased the labor organizations. Labor in eastern cities refused to touch
the slavery controversy, and the control which the Democrats had
over the labor vote in New York and elsewhere increased this tendency to ignore the Negro, and increased the division between white
and colored labor. In 1850, a Congress of Trade Unions was held
1849
no
They
reform but said nothing about
slavery and the organization eventually was captured by Tammany
Hall. After 1850 unions composed of skilled laborers began to separate
from common laborers and adopt a policy of closed shops and a minimum wage and excluded farmers and Negroes. Although this movement was killed by the panic of 1857, it eventually became triumphant
in the eighties and culminated in the American Federation of Labor
which today allows any local or national union to exclude Negroes
on any pretext.
Other labor leaders became more explicit and emphasized race
rather than class. John Campbell said in 1851: "Will the white race
with
delegates.
stressed land
ever agree that blacks shall stand beside us
on
election day,
upon the
rostrum, in the ranks of the army, in our places of amusement, in
places of public worship, ride in the same coaches, railway cars, or
steamships? Never! Never! or is it natural, or just, that this kind of
equality should exist? God never intended it; had he so willed it, he
would have made
New
all
one
color."
2
labor leaders arrived in the
fifties.
Hermann Kriege and Wil-
THE WHITE WORKER
23
helm Weitling left their work in Germany, and their friends Marx
and Engels, and came to America, and at the same time came tens
of thousands of revolutionary Germans. The Socialist and Communist papers increased. Trade unions increased in power and numbers and held public meetings. Immediately, the question of slavery
injected itself, and that of abolition.
Kriege began to preach land reform and free soil in 1846, and by
1850 six hundred American papers were supporting his program. But
Kriege went beyond Evans and former leaders and openly repudiated
abolition.
He
"That we
declared in 1846:
see in the slavery question a property question
cannot be settled by
That we should declare ourselves
movement if it were our intention to throw
itself
in favor of the abolitionist
which
alone.
the Republic into a state of anarchy, to extend the competition of
workingmen' beyond all measure, and to depress labor itself
to the last extremity. That we could not improve the lot of our 'black
brothers' by abolition under the conditions prevailing in modern
society, but make infinitely worse the lot of our 'white brothers.' That
'free
we
believe in the peaceable development of society in the United
States
and do
not, therefore, here at least see
our only hope in condi-
That we
feel constrained, there-
tion of the extremest degradation.
fore, to
oppose Abolition with
all
and
tunities of sentimental philistines
of liberty-intoxicated ladies."
much
all
the impor-
despite all the poetical effusions
3
Wilhelm Weitling, who came
started
our might, despite
to
agitation but gave
America the following
little
year, 1847,
attention to slavery.
He
did
not openly side with the slaveholder, as Kriege did; nevertheless, there
was no condemnation of
slavery in his paper. In the first
German
labor conference in Philadelphia, under Weitling in 1850, a series of
resolutions were passed which did not mention slavery. Both Kriege
and Weitling joined the Democratic party and numbers of other immigrant Germans did the same thing, and these workers, therefore,
became practical defenders of slavery. Doubtless, the "Know-Nothing"
movement against the foreign-born forced many workers into the
Democratic party, despite slavery.
The year 1853 saw the formation of the Arbeiterbund, under Joseph
Weydemeyer, a friend of Karl Marx. This organization advocated
Marxian socialism but never got a clear attitude toward slavery. In
1854, it opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill because "Capitalism and
land speculation have again been favored at the expense of the mass
of the people," and "This bill withdraws from or makes unavailable
in a future homestead bill vast tracts of territory," and "authorizes
the further extension of slavery; but we have, do now, and shall con-
"
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
24
tinue to protest most emphatically
against both
white and black
slavery."
Nevertheless,
1857, slavery
April,
1858,
when
the Arbeiterbund
was not mentioned.
it
was reorganized in December,
When
said that the question of
new organ appeared in
the present moment was
its
not the abolition of slavery, but the prevention of its further extension
iand that Negro slavery was firmly rooted in America. One small
division of this organization in 1857 called for abolition of the slave
trade
and colonization of Negroes, but defended the Southern
slave-
holders.
In 1859, however, a conference of the Arbeiterbund condemned all
slavery in whatever form it might appear, and demanded the repeal
of the Fugitive Slave Law. The Democratic and pro-slavery New
York Staats-Zeitung counseled the people to abstain from agitation
against the extension of slavery, but all of the German population did
not agree.
As
the Chartist
movement
was filled
institutions, and the
increased in England, the press
with attacks against the United States and its
Chartists were clear on the matter of slavery. Their chief organ in
1844 said: "That damning stain upon the American escutcheon is one
that has caused the Republicans of Europe to weep for very shame
and mortification; and the people of the United States have much
to answer for at the bar of humanity for this indecent, cruel, revolting
and fiendish violation of
born free and equal.'
The
movement
—that
their boasted principle
'All
men
are
England continued to emphasize the
importance of attacking slavery and the agitation, started by the
work of Frederick Douglass and others, increased in importance and
activity. In 1857, George I. Holyoake sent an anti-slavery address to
America, signed by 1,800 English workingmen, whom Karl Marx
himself was guiding in England, and this made the black American
worker a central text. They pointed out the fact that the black worker
was furnishing the raw material which the English capitalist was exploiting together with the English worker. This same year, the United
States Supreme Court sent down the Dred Scott decision that Negroes
were not citizens.
This English initiative had at first but limited influence in America.
The trade unions were willing to admit that the Negroes ought to
labor
in
;
be free sometime; but
at the present, self-preservation called for their
were a different grade of workers from
blacks. Even when the Marxian ideas arrived, there was a split; the
earlier representatives of the Marxian philosophy in America agreed
with the older Union movement in deprecating any entanglement
slavery;
and
after all, whites
THE WHITE WORKER
25
with the abolition controversy. After all, abolition represented capital.
The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and
not on the demands of the workers, at least of the white workers.
And so the early American Marxists simply gave up the idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth at that time.
To this logic the abolitionists were increasingly opposed. It seemed
to them that the crucial point was the matter of freedom; that a free
laborer in America had an even chance to make his fortune as a worker
or a farmer; but, on the other hand, if the laborer was not free, as
in the case of the Negro, he
degraded white labor.
The
had no opportunity, and he inevitably
abolitionist did not sense the
new
sub-
ordination into which the worker was being forced by organized capi-
while the laborers did not realize that the exclusion of four million
workers from the labor program was a fatal omission. Wendell
Phillips alone suggested a boycott on Southern goods, and said that
the great cause of labor was paramount and included mill operatives
in New England, peasants in Ireland, and laborers in South America
who ought not to be lost sight of in sympathy for the Southern slave.
In the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War
there were twenty-six trades with national organizations, including
the iron and steel workers, machinists, blacksmiths, etc. The employers formed a national league and planned to import more workmen
from foreign countries. The iron molders started a national strike
July 5, 1859, and said: "Wealth is power, and practical experience
teaches us that it is a power but too often used to oppress and degrade
the daily laborer. Year after year the capital of the country becomes
more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, and, in proportion
as the wealth of the country becomes centralized, its power increases,
and the laboring classes are impoverished. It therefore becomes us, as
men who have to battle with the stern realities of life, to look this
matter fair in the face; there is no dodging the question; let every
man give it a fair, full and candid consideration, and then act according to his honest convictions. What position are we, the mechanics of
America, to hold in Society?"
There was not a word in this address about slavery and one would
not dream that the United States was on the verge of the greatest
labor revolution it had seen. Other conferences of the molders, machinists and blacksmiths and others were held in the sixties, and a labor
mass meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1861 said: "The truth is
tal,
that the
workingmen
care
little
the intrigues of office-seekers.
We
and
regard them with the contempt
for the strife of political parties
We
weary of this question of slavery; it is a matter
which does not concern us; and we wish only to attend to our business,
they deserve.
are
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
26
and leave the South to attend
4
ference from the North."
In
all this
consideration,
own
to their
we have
we have done
affairs,
without any inter-
so far ignored the white
workers
because the labor movement
ignored them and the abolitionists ignored them; and above all, they
of the South and
this
were ignored by Northern capitalists and Southern planters. They
were in many respects almost a forgotten mass of men. Cairnes describes the slave South, the period just before the war:
"It resolves itself into three classes, broadly distinguished from each
other, and connected by no common interest the slaves on whom
—
devolves
all
the regular industry, the slaveholders
who
reap
all
its
and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast
plains in a condition little removed from absolute barbarism."
From all that has been written and said about the ante-bellum South,
one almost loses sight of about 5,000,000 white people in i860 who lived
in the South and held no slaves. Even among the two million slaveholders, an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the South, while as an observer said: "For twenty years, I do not recollect ever to have seen or
fruits,
and an
idle
heard these non-slaveholding whites referred to by the Southern gentleman as constituting any part of what they called the South." 5 They
were largely ignorant and degraded; only 25% could read and write.
The condition of the poor whites has been many times described:
"A wretched log hut or two are the only habitations in sight. Here
reside, or rather take shelter, the miserable cultivators of the ground,
or a still more destitute class who make a precarious living by peddling 'lightwood' in the
city.
.
.
.
are dens of filth. The bed if there be a bed is a
"These cabins
layer of something in the corner that defies scenting. If the bed is
nasty, what of the floor ? What of the whole enclosed space ? What of
the creatures themselves? Pough! Water in use as a purifier is unknown. Their faces are bedaubed with the muddy accumulation of
weeks. They just give them a wipe when they see a stranger to take
off the blackest dirt.
The poor wretches seem startled when you
6
address them, and answer your questions cowering like culprits."
Olmsted said: "I saw as much close packing, filth and squalor, in
certain blocks inhabited by laboring whites in Charleston, as I have
witnessed in any Northern town of its size; and greater evidences of
brutality and ruffianly character, than I have ever happened to see,
among an equal population of this class, before." 7
Two classes of poor whites have been differentiated: the mountain
whites and the poor whites of the lowlands. "Below a dirty and illfavored house, down under the bank on the shingle near the river, sits
a family of five people, all ill-clothed and unclean; a blear-eyed old
.
.
.
.
.
.
"
THE WHITE WORKER
27
woman
with a mass of tangled red hair hanging
about her shoulders, indubitably suckling a baby; a little girl with
the same auburn evidence of Scotch ancestry; a boy, and a younger
child all gathered about a fire made among some bricks, surrounding
a couple of iron saucepans, in which is a dirty mixture looking like
mud, but probably warmed-up sorghum syrup, which with a few
woman,
a
younger
pieces of corn pone,
makes
their breakfast.
"Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences
of Negro blood. The so-called 'mountain boomer,' says an observer,
'has little self-respect and no self-reliance. ... So long as his corn
pile lasts the "cracker" lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe
cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked
before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes
him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it.
The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of
But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they
shame.
8
are of an intense religious excitability.'
Above this lowest mass rose a middle class of poor whites in the
making. There were some small farmers who had more than a mere
sustenance and yet were not large planters. There were overseers.
There was a growing class of merchants who traded with the slaves
and free Negroes and became in many cases larger traders, dealing
.
.
.
.
.
.
with the planters for the staple crops. Some poor whites rose to the
professional class, so that the rift between the planters and the mass
of the whites was partially bridged by this smaller intermediate class.
While revolt against the domination of the planters over the poor
whites was voiced by men like Helper, who called for a class struggle
to destroy the planters, this was nullified by deep-rooted antagonism
to the Negro, whether slave or free. If black labor could be expelled
from the United States or eventually exterminated, then the fight
against the planter could take place. But the poor whites and their
leaders could not for a moment contemplate a fight of united white
and black labor against the
exploiters. Indeed, the natural leaders of
the poor whites, the small farmer, the merchant, the professional
the white mechanic and slave overseer, were
and repelled from the
laborers in two ways:
slaves
first,
could ride with planters and
bound
man,
to the planters
and even from the mass of the white
they constituted the police patrol
now and
who
then exercise unlimited force
upon recalcitrant or runaway slaves; and then, too, there was always
a chance that they themselves might also become planters by saving
money, by investment, by the power of good luck; and the only heaven
that attracted them was the life of the great Southern planter.
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
28
There were a few weak associations of white mechanics, such as
printers and shipwrights and iron molders, in 1 850-1 860, but practically
no labor movement in the South.
Charles Nordhoff states that he was told by a wealthy Alabaman,
in i860, that the planters in his region were determined to discontinue
altogether the employment of free mechanics. "On my own place," he
said, "I have slave carpenters, slave blacksmiths, and slave wheelwrights, and thus I am independent of free mechanics." And a certain
Alfred E. Mathews remarks: "I have seen free white mechanics
obliged to stand aside while their families were suffering for the necessaries of life, when the slave mechanics, owned by rich and influential
men, could get plenty of work; and I have heard these same white
mechanics breathe the most bitter curses against the institution of
slavery and the slave aristocracy."
The
resultant revolt of the poor whites, just as the revolt of the
came through migration. And
restricted, was freely encouraged. As
slaves,
their migration, instead of
being
a result, the poor whites left the
were living out
of their native state. From Tennessee, 344,765 emigrated; from North
Carolina, 272,606, and from South Carolina, 256,868. The majority of
these had come to the Middle West and it is quite possible that the
Southern states sent as many settlers to the West as the Northeastern
states, and while the Northeast demanded free soil, the Southerners
demanded not only free soil but the exclusion of Negroes from work
and the franchise. They had a very vivid fear of the Negro as a competitor in labor, whether slave or free.
It was thus the presence of the poor white Southerner in the West
that complicated the whole Free Soil movement in its relation to the
labor movement. While the Western pioneer was an advocate of extreme democracy and equalitarianism in his political and economic
philosophy, his vote and influence did not go to strengthen the abolition-democracy, before, during, or even after the war. On the contrary, it was stopped and inhibited by the doctrine of race, and the
West, therefore, long stood against that democracy in industry which
might have emancipated labor in the United States, because it did not
admit to that democracy the American citizen of Negro descent.
Thus Northern workers were organizing and fighting industrial
integration in order to gain higher wage and shorter hours, and more
and more they saw economic salvation in the rich land of the West.
A Western movement of white workers and pioneers began and was
paralleled by a Western movement of planters and black workers in
the South. Land and more land became the cry of the Southern political leader, with finally a growing demand for reopening of the African
South in large numbers. In
i860, 399,700 Virginians
THE WHITE WORKER
29
Land, more land, became the cry of the peasant farmer in
the North. The two forces met in Kansas, and in Kansas civil war
slave trade.
began.
and expansion of its
agrarian feudalism. For the sheer existence of slavery, there must be a
continual supply of fertile land, cheaper slaves, and such political
power as would give the slave status full legal recognition and protection, and annihilate the free Negro. The Louisiana Purchase had
furnished slaves and land, but most of the land was in the Northwest.
The foray into Mexico had opened an empire, but the availability of
this land was partly spoiled by the loss of California to free labor.
This suggested a proposed expansion of slavery toward Kansas, where
The South was
it
fighting for the protection
involved the South in competition with white labor: a competition
which endangered the
slave status,
encouraged slave
revolt,
and
in-
creased the possibility of fugitive slaves.
It
was
a
war
to determine
how
far industry in the
United States
should be carried on under a system where the capitalist owns not
only the nation's raw material, not only the land, but also the laborer
himself; or whether the laborer was going to maintain his personal
freedom, and enforce it by growing political and economic independence based on widespread ownership of land.
This brings us down to the period of the Civil War. Up to the time
that the
war
actually broke out,
American labor simply
refused, in
problem. Right up
to the edge of the war, it was talking about the emancipation of white
labor and the organization of stronger unions without saying a word,
or apparently giving a thought, to four million black slaves. During
the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a
the main, to envisage black labor as a part of
its
between capitalists in which they had no interest and they
showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and
murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of
New York and other Northern cities; while in the South, five million
non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers sent their manhood by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded
them equally with the black slave. Could one imagine anything more
paradoxical than this whole situation?
America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern
age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to
Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of
democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the
intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men. What an idea
and what an area for its realization endless land of richest fertility,
natural resources such as Earth seldom exhibited before, a population
strife
—
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
3o
burned in the fires of poverty
and caste, yearning toward the Unknown God; and self-reliant pioneers, unafraid of man or devil. It was the Supreme Adventure, in
the last Great Batde of the West, for that human freedom which
would release the human spirit from lower lust for mere meat, and
set it free to dream and sing.
infinite in variety,
of universal gift,
And
then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts
of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst.
It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced
freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the
vast majority of human beings.
But not without struggle. Not without writhing and rending of
spirit and pitiable wail of lost souls. They said: Slavery was wrong
but not all wrong; slavery must perish and not simply move; God
made black men; God made slavery; the will of God be done; slavery
to the glory of God and black men as his servants and ours; slavery
way
—
freedom the freedom of blacks, the freedom of whites;
white freedom as the goal of the world and black slavery as the
path thereto. Up with the white world, down with the black!
Then came this battle called Civil War, beginning in Kansas in
1854, and ending in the presidential election of 1876 twenty awful
years. The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then
moved back again toward slavery. The whole weight of America was
thrown to color caste. The colored world went down before England,
France, Germany, Russia, Italy and America. A new slavery arose.
The upward moving of white labor was betrayed into wars for profit
based on color caste. Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world
today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to
threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The
resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted,
forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world's laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the
basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its
perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to
as a
to
—
tell
that story.
Have
ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love's gentle
balm?
THE WHITE WORKER
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your
fear?
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lincoln, Labor
and
Slavery, p. 66.
1.
Schliiter,
2.
Campbell, Negromania, p. 545.
7.
Labor and Slavery, pp. 72, 73.
Labor and Slavery, p. 135.
Schliiter, Lincoln, Labor and Slavery, p. 86.
Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction,
Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 404.
8.
Hart,
3. Schliiter, Lincoln,
4.
5.
6.
Schliiter, Lincoln,
The Southern South,
pp. 34, 35.
p. 326.
31
GUIDELINES FOR READING REFLECTIONS
Here are some things to consider when approaching your reading reflections and discussion
questions:
1. SURPRISE. Identify something that surprised you or challenged a priori understandings that you
had, something that you would have found hard to believe. In other words, WHY are you
surprised?
2. CURIOUS. Identify or discuss something that you would like to know more about. You might
mention one or more cited sources.
3. HELP. A Term or phrase/concept perhaps a theoretical argument that you find helpful/inspiring.
It helped you to better understand the analysis presented.
4. CONNECT. Something from this reading that relates to another reading, documentary film
and/or discussion.
5. BIAS. Are there any errors, biases or misinterpretations that you think the author has made?
Explain using passages from the text.
6. HOW did this text (alter/change/provoke) you to RETHINK how you conduct your life and/or
how you view the lives of others?
7. WHAT have you taken away from this reading that is UNFORGETTABLE? In other words, ten
years from now what do you think you will member or recall from this analysis (or not)?
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