Footnote
Table of Contents [7] We of the United States take credit for having abolished slavery. Passing the question of how much credit the majority of us are entitled to for the abolition of Negro slavery, it remains true that we have only abolished one form of slavery-and that a primitive form which had been abolished in the greater portion of the country by social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same way in other parts of the country. We have not really abolished slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread form-in the form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, and we made no scruple of setting into it our own children-the citizens of the Republic yet to be. For what else are we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must live, if they are to live at all.-Henry George, Social Problems, p. 209.
[8] Although for the present there is a lull in the conflict of races at the South, it is a lull which comes only from the breathing-spells of a great secular contention, and not from any permanent pacification founded on a resolution of the race problem presented by the Negro question in its present aspects. So long as the existing mass of our crude and unassimilated colored population holds its present place in the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political rights will oscillate between alternate perils-the peril that comes from the white man when he places civilization, or sometimes his travesty of it, higher than the Negro's political rights, and the peril that comes from the black man when his political rights are placed by himself or others higher than civilization-President James C. Willing, on "Race Education" in The North American Review, April, 1883.
[9] By virtue of the power and for the purposes aforesaid, I do ordain and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States, are and henceforth shall be free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.-Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
[10] From Williams's History of the Negro Race in America I construct the following table showing the number of colored troops employed by the Federal Government during the war of the Rebellion:
Colored Troops Furnished 1861-65 Total of New England States 7,916 Total of Middle States 13,922 Total, Western States and Territories 12,711 Total, Border States 45,184 Total, Southern States 63,571 ---- Grand Total States 143,304 At Large 733 Not accounted for 5,083 Officers 7,122 ---- Grand total 156,242
This gives colored troops enlisted in the States in Rebellion; besides this, there were 92,576 colored troops (included with the white soldiers) in the quotas of the several States.
CHAPTER V
Table of Contents Illiteracy-Its Causes
Table of Contents Return to Table of Contents
At the close of the rebellion there were in the Union (according to the census of 1860) 4,441,830 people of African origin; in 1880 they had increased to 6,580,793. Of this vast multitude in 1860, it is safe to say, not so many as one in every ten thousand could read or write. They had been doomed by the most stringent laws to a long night of mental darkness. It was a crime to teach a black man how to read even the Bible, the sacred repository of the laws that must light the pathway of man from death unto life eternal. For to teach a slave was to make a firebrand-to arouse that love of freedom which stops at nothing short of absolute freedom. It is not, therefore, surprising that every southern state should have passed the most odious inhibitary laws, with severe fines and penalties for their infraction, upon the question of informing the stunted intelligence of the slave population. The following table [on page 29] will show the condition of education in the South in 1880:
COMPARATIVE STATISTICS OF EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH
------------------------------------------------------------------------
White Colored
-------------------------- ------------------------
States School Enroll- [A] School Enroll- [A] [B]
population ment population ment
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alabama 217,590 107,483 49 170,413 72,007 42 $375,465
Arkansas [b]181,799 [c]53,229 29 [b]54,332 [c]17,743 33 238,056
Delaware 31,505 25,053 80 3,954 2,770 70 207,281
Florida [b]46,410 [c]18,871 41 [b]42,099 [c]20,444 49 114,895
Georgia [d]236,319 150,134 64 [d]197,125 86,399 45 471,029
Kentucky [e]478,597 [c]241,679 50 [e]66,564 [c]23,902 36 803,490
Louisiana [c]139,661 [d]44,052 32 [c]134,184 [d]34,476 26 480,320
Maryland [f]213,669 134,210 63 [f]63,591 28,221 44 1,544,367
Mississippi 175,251 112,994 64 251,438 123,710 49 850,704
Missouri 681,995 454,218 67 41,489 22,158 53 3,152,178
N.Carolina 291,770 136,481 47 167,554 89,125 53 352,882
S.Carolina [g]83,813 61,219 73 [g]144,315 72,853 50 324,629
Tennessee 403,353 229,290 57 141,509 60,851 43 724,862
Texas [h]171,426 138,912 81 [h]62,015 47,874 77 753,346
Virginia 314,827 152,136 48 240,980 68,600 28 946,109
W.Virginia 202,364 138,799 68 7,749 4,071 53 716,864
District of
Columbia 29,612 16,934 57 13,946 9,505 68 438,567
--------- --------- -- --------- ------- ----------
Total 3,899,961 2,215,674 1,803,257 784,709 12,475,044
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Table Header A: Percentage of the school population enrolled]
[Table Header B: Total Expenditure for both races[a]]
[a] In Delaware the colored public schools have been supported by the school tax collected from colored citizens only; recently, however, they have received an appropriation of $2,400 from the State; in Kentucky the school-tax collected from colored citizens is the only State appropriation for the support of colored schools; in Maryland there is a biennial appropriation by the Legislature; in the District of Columbia one-third of the school moneys is set apart for colored public schools, and in the other States mentioned above the school moneys are divided in proportion to the school population without regard to race.
[b] Several counties failed to make race distinctions.
[c] Estimated.
[d] In 1879.
[e] For whites the school age is 6 to 20, for colored 6 to 16.
[f] Census of 1870.
[g] In 1877.
[h] These numbers include some duplicates; the actual school population is 230,527.
Speaking in the Senate of the United States June 13, 1882, the bill for National "Aid to Common Schools" being under consideration, Senator Henry W. Blair, of New Hampshire, said:
Excluding the states of Maryland and Missouri and the District of Columbia, and the total yearly expenditure for both races is only $7,339,932, while in the whole country the annual expenditure is, from taxation, $70,341,435, and from school funds $6,580,632, or a total of $76,922,067, (see tables 2 and 7,) or one-tenth of the whole, while they contain one-fifth of the school-population. The causes which have produced this state of things in the Southern States are far less important than the facts themselves as they now exist. To find a remedy and apply it is the only duty which devolves upon us. Without universal education, not only will the late war prove to be a failure, but the abolition of slavery be proved to be a tremendous disaster, if not a crime.
The country was held together by the strong and bloody embrace of war, but that which the nation might and did do to retain the integrity of its territory and of its laws by the expenditure of brute force will all be lost if, for the subjection of seven millions of men, by the statutes of the States is to be substituted the thraldom of ignorance and the tyranny of an irresponsible suffrage. Secession, and a confederacy founded upon slavery as its chief cornerstone, would be better than the future of the Southern States-better for both races, too-if the nation is to permit one-third, and that the fairest portion of its domain, to become the spawning ground of ignorance, vice, anarchy, and of every crime. The nation as such abolished slavery as a legal institution; but ignorance is slavery, and no matter what is written in your constitutions and your laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the light of her smile.
Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies, highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities. Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all...
