The Negro Exodus From the Gulf States: A Paper Read in Saratoga, New York, on September 12, 1879
THE NEGRO EXODUS FROM THE GULF STATES:
A PAPER READ IN SARATOGA, NEW YORK,
ON 12 SEPTEMBER 1879
Douglass, “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States,” Journal of Social Science, 11: 1-21
(May 1880). Other texts in New York World, 13 September 1879; New York Times, 13
September 1879; Douglass, Life and Times, 473-82; Speech File, reel 15, frames 323-34,
358-61, FD Papers, DLC; Foner, Life and Writings, 4: 324-42; Carter G. Woodson, Negro
Orators and Their Orations (Washington, D.C., 1925), 453-73.
Frustrated by the reinstatement of oppressive Black Codes, imposition of
unfair labor practices, the lack of educational opportunity, and political impo-
tence to correct these problems, black “Exodusters” from throughout the
South but especially Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee had left in
large numbers for Kansas and adjacent areas of the Midwest in the spring of
1879. The migration received encouragement from former abolitionists
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and from many prominent black
leaders, including John H. Rainey, Henry Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth,
John M. Langston, and Richard T. Greener. Although Blanche K. Bruce,
James Milton Turner, and other well-known blacks spoke out against the
freedmen’s migration to the West, supporters of the movement particularly
resented Douglass’s opposition because of his prominence as a race leader.
After first criticizing the Exodus in an address in Baltimore on 4 May 1879,
Douglass endured a summer of what he labeled “base accusations” from
“maligners.” When the American Social Science Association offered Doug-
lass a chance to present a detailed explanation of his position at its annual
general meeting at Saratoga, New York, on 12 September 1879, he accepted
readily. Reports in the press that the session would actually be a debate with
one of his most vociferous critics, Richard T. Greener, the dean of the law
school of Howard University, however, disturbed Douglass who privately
wrote an officer of the Association that he desired to meet “in the Spirit of
Social Science and not in a Spirit of controversy.” Three days before the
scheduled session, Douglass canceled his appearance, pleading the press of
duties as marshal of the District of Columbia. He did send his paper to the
meeting with permission for it to be read and published. The New York
reported that the audience displayed “great disappointment” when it was
announced that Professor Francis Wayland of New Haven, Connecticut,
would present Douglass’s paper. After Wayland finished, Greener delivered a
prepared defense of the Exodus in which he treated Douglass’s arguments
with unexpected courtesy. The press divided sharply on Douglass’s paper with
several black editors accusing him of disservice to his race. When Douglass
reprinted a large portion of the paper in Life and Times, he called it an answer
to “those who accused me of indifference to the welfare of the Negro people
of the South on account of my opposition to the so-called exodus.” Richard T.
Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens from the Southern States,”
Journal of Social Science, 11: 22-35 (May 1880); Douglass to Blanche K.
Bruce, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 366-67, FD Papers,
DDC; Douglass to Frank[lin] B. Sanborn, 4, 9 September 1879, in Joseph A.
Borome, ed., “Some Additional Light on Frederick Douglass,” JNH, 38:
216-24 (April 1953); Washington People’s Advocate, 20, 27 September
1879; Topeka (Kans.) Colored Citizen, 18 October 1879; Holland, Colored
Orator, 343-47; Robert G. Atheam, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration
to Kansas, 1879-80 (Lawrence, Kans., 1978), 233-38; Painter, Exodusters,
3-68, 234-61; Billie D. Higgins, “Negro Thought and the Exodus of 1879,”
Phylon, 32: 39-52 (Spring 1971).
The negro, long deemed to be too indolent and stupid to discover and adopt
any rational measure to secure and defend his rights as a man, may now be
congratulated upon the telling contradiction which he has recently and
strikingly given to this withering disparagement and reproach. He has
discovered and adopted a measure which may assist very materially in the
solution of some of the vital problems involved in his sudden elevation
from slavery to freedom, and from chattelhood to manhood and cit-
izenship. He has shown that Mississippi can originate more than one plan,1Douglass alludes to the tactics employed by southern white Democrats to capture political control of Mississippi in 1875. Heavy social and economic pressures encouraged white solidarity and black defections to the Democrats. A climate of intimidation and carefully timed acts of violence directed against Republican meetings and candidates circumvented erratic efforts by state and federal officials to ensure a fair election. The following year, Redeemers in South Carolina and Louisiana successfully imitated the Mississippi Democrats' “plan.” ESH, 838.
and that there is a possible plan for the oppressed, as well as for the
oppressor. He has not chosen to copy the example of his would-be en-
slavers. It is to his credit that he has steadily refused to resort to those
extreme measures of repression and retaliation to which the cruel wrongs
he has suffered might have tempted a less docile and forgiving race. He has
not imitated the plan of the oppressed tenant, who sneaks in ambush and
shoots his landlord, as in Ireland; nor the example of the Indian, who meets
the invader of his hunting-ground with scalping-knife and tomahawk; he
has not learned his lesson from the freed serfs of Russia, and organized
assassination against tyrant princes and nobles;2Increasingly in the 1870s, secret societies, offshoots of the “populist,” or Narodnik, movement, developed detailed plans for the assassination of government officials by the Russian peasantry. Starting in 1876, in a new “movement to the people," revolutionaries went to live amid the peasants to indoctrinate them to carry out those plans. From that time onward, acts of terrorism increased steadily. The victims of assassination were local political and military leaders, and government retaliation against revolutionary suspects was quick and brutal. Ironically, Douglass's paper predates by two years the assassination of Czar Alexander II by the “People's Will” society. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914 (New York, 1956), 66-73; Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York, 1977), 115-17, 129-47, 248-49, 329-31, 335-56. nor has he copied the
example of his own race in Santo Domingo, who taught their French
oppressors by fire and sword the danger of goading too far the “energy that
slumbers in the black man’s arm."
On the contrary, he has adopted a simple, lawful and peaceable mea-
sure. It is emigration—the quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and
muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable.
Innocent as this remedy is for the manifold ills, which he has thus far borne
with marvellous patience, fortitude, and forbearance, it is none the less
significant and effective. Nothing has occurred since the abolition of slav-
ery, which has excited a deeper interest among thoughtful men in all
sections of the country, than has this Exodus. In the simple fact that a few
thousand freedmen have deliberately laid down the shovel and the hoe,
quitted the sugar and cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana, and sought
homes in Kansas, and that thousands more are seriously meditating upon
following their example, the sober thinking minds of the South have dis-
covered a new and startling peril to the welfare and civilization of that
section of our country. Already apprehension and alarm have led to noisy
and frantic efforts on the part of the South to arrest and put an end to what it
considers a ruinous evil.
It cannot be denied that there is much reason for this apprehension.
This Exodus has revealed to southern men the humiliating fact that the
prosperity and civilization of the South are at the mercy of the despised and
hated negro. That it is for him, more than for any other, to say what shall be
the future of the late Confederate States; that within their ample borders, he
alone can stand between the contending powers of savage and civilized life;
that the giving or withholding of his labor will bless or blast their beautiful
country. Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more
important, and absolutely indispensable to the existence of civilization,
than in the more southern of the United States. Machinery may continue to
do, as it has done, much of the work of the North, but the work of the South
requires bone, sinew and muscle of the strongest and most enduring kind
for its performance. Labor in that section must know no pause. Her soil is
prolific with life and energy. All the forces of nature within her borders are
wonderfully vigorous, persistent and active. Aided by an almost perpetual
summer, abundantly supplied with heat and moisture, her soil readily and
rapidly covers itself with noxious weeds, dense forests and impenetrable
jungles, natural hiding places for devouring wolves and loathsome reptiles.
Only a few years of non-tillage would be required to give the sunny and
fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness. From this
condition, shocking for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that
nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro can save her. For
him, as a southern laborer, there is no competitor or substitute. The thought
of filling his place by any other variety of the human family will be found
utterly impracticable. Neither Chinaman, German, Norwegian nor Swede
can drive him from the sugar and cotton fields of Louisiana and Mississip-
pi. They would certainly perish in the black bottoms of those states if they
could be induced, which they cannot, to try the experiment. Nature itself in
those states comes to the rescue of the negro; fights his battles and enables
him to exact conditions from those who would unfairly treat and oppress
him. Besides being dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor,
the climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive
to the white man. He dreads it, shrinks from it and refuses it. He shuns the
burning sun of the fields, and seeks the shade of the verandas. On the con-
trary the negro walks, labors, or sleeps in the sunlight unharmed. The
standing apology for slavery was based upon a knowledge of this fact. It
was said that the world must have cotton and sugar, and that only the negro
could supply this want, and that he could be induced to do it only under the
“beneficent whip” of some bloodthirsty Legree.3A reference to Simon Legree, the northern-born villain of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The last part of this
argument has been happily disproved by the large crops of these produc-
tions since emancipation; but the first part of it stands firm, unassailed and
unassailable. It served him well years ago, when in the bitterest extremity
of his destitution. But for it he would have perished when he dropped out of
slavery. It saved him then and will save him again.
Emancipation came to him surrounded by exceedingly unfriendly cir-
cumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the people among whom he
lived, but against a death struggle on their part to prevent it. His chains
were broken in the tempest and whirlwind of civil war. Without food,
Without shelter, without land, without money or friends, he, with his
children, his sick, his aged and helpless, was turned loose and naked to the
open sky. The announcement of his freedom was instantly followed by an
order from his old master to quit his old quarters and to seek bread there-
after from the hands of those who had given him his freedom. A desperate
extremity was thus forced upon him at the outset of his freedom, and the
world watched with humane anxiety to see what would become of him. His
peril was imminent; starvation stared him in the face.
Even if climatic, and other natural causes, did not protect the negro
from all competition in the labor market of the South, inevitable social
causes would probably effect the same result. The slave system of that
section left behind it, as in the nature of the case it must, manners, customs
and conditions, to which free white laboring men will not be in haste to
submit themselves and their families. They do not emigrate from the free
North, where labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has
been whipped, chained and degraded for centuries. Naturally enough such
emigration follows the lines of latitude in which they who compose it were
born. Not from South to North, but from East to West “the course of empire
takes its way.”38This frequently appropriated phrase dates back to Bishop George Berkeley’s poem On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (1752), Stanza 6, line 1. A[rthur] A[ston] Luce and T[homas] E[dmund] Jessop, eds., The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 vols. (London, 1948-57), 7: 373. Hence, it is seen that the dependence of the planters,
landowners and old master-class of the South upon the negro, however
galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is nearly complete
and perfect. There is only one mode of escape for them, and that mode they
will certainly not adopt. It is to take off their own coats, cease to whittle
sticks and talk politics at the cross—roads, and go themselves to work in
their broad and sunny fields of cotton and sugar. An invitation to do this is
about as harsh and distasteful to all their inclinations, as would be an
invitation to step down into their graves. With the negro, all this is differ-
ent. Neither natural, artificial nor traditional causes, stand in the way of the
freedman to such labor in the South. Neither heat, nor the fever demon that
lurks in her tangled and oozy swamps affrights him, and he stands today the
admitted author of whatever prosperity, beauty and civilization are now
possessed by the South. He is the arbiter of her destiny.
This, then, is the high vantage ground of the negro; he has labor, the
South wants it, and must have it or perish. Since he is free he can now give
it, or withhold it; use it where he is, or take it elsewhere, as he pleases. His
labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free,
comfortable and independent. It is more to him than either fire, sword,
ballot-boxes, or bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its
pocket.
It will not be soon forgotten, that, at the close of a five hours’ speech by
the late Senator Sumner, in which he advocated, with unequalled learning
and eloquence the enfranchisement of the freedmen, he was met in the
senate with the argument that legislation at that point would be utterly
superfluous; that the negro was rapidly dying out and must inevitably and
speedily disappear.5Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin voiced such an opinion in an exchange with Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on 8 February 1869. Congressional Globe, 40th Cong, 3d sess., 1010-12. Inhuman and shocking as was this consignment of
millions of human beings to extinction, the extremity of the negro, at that
date, did not contradict but favored the prophecy. The policy of the old
master-class, dictated by passion, pride and revenge, was then to make the
freedom of the negro a greater calamity to him, if possible, than had been
his slavery. But happily, both for the old master-class, and the recently
emancipated, there came, as there will come now, the sober, second
thought. The old master-class then found that it had made a great mistake.
It had driven away the means of its own support. It had destroyed the hands
and left the mouths. It had starved the negro and starved itself. Not even to
gratify its own anger and resentment could it afford to allow its fields to go
uncultivated, and its tables to go unsupplied with food. Hence the freed-
man, less from humanity than cupidity, less from choice, than necessity,
was speedily called back to labor and life. But now, after fourteen years of
service, and fourteen years of separation from visible presence of slavery,
during which he has shown both disposition and ability to supply the labor
market of the South, and that he could do so far better as a freeman than he
ever did as a slave; that more cotton and sugar can be raised by the same
hands under the inspiration of liberty and hope than can be raised under the
influence of bondage and the whip,—he is again, alas! in the deepest
trouble—without a home; again out under the open sky, with his wife and
his little ones. He lines the sunny banks of the Mississippi, fluttering in
rags and wretchedness; he stands mournfully imploring hard-hearted
steamboat captains to take him on board; while the friends of the emigra-
tion movement are diligently soliciting funds all over the North to help him
away from his old home to the modern Canaan of Kansas.
THE CAUSE OF IT.
Several causes have been assigned for this truly desperate and pitiable
spectacle. Many of these are, upon their face, superficial, insufficient and
ridiculous. Adepts in political trickery and duplicity, who will never go
straight to a point, when they can go crooked, explain the Exodus as a
cunning scheme to force a certain nomination upon the Republican party in
1880. It does not appear how such an effect is to follow such a cause. For, if
the negroes are to leave the South, as the advocates of the Exodus tell us,
and settle in the North, where all their rights are protected, the country need
not trouble itself about securing a President whose chief recommendation
is supposed to be his will and power to protect the negro in the South; and
the nomination is thus rendered unnecessary by the success of the measure
which made it necessary. Again, we are told that greedy speculators in
Kansas have adopted this plan to sell and increase the value of their land.
This cannot be,—men of this class are usually shrewd. They do not seek to
sell land to those who have no money,—and they are too sharp to believe
that they can increase the value of their property by inviting to its neigh-
borhood a class of people against whom there is an intense and bitter
popular prejudice. Malignant emissaries from the North, it is said, have
been circulating among the freedmen, talking to them and deluding them
with promises of the great things which will be done for them if they will
only go to Kansas. Plainly enough this theory fails for the want of even the
show of probable motive. The North can have no motive to cripple industry
at the South, or elsewhere, in this country. If she were malignant enough,
which she is not, she is not blind enough to her own interest to do any such
thing. She sees and feels that an injury to any part of this country is an
injury to the whole of it.
Again, it is said, that this Exodus is all the work of the defeated and
disappointed demagogues, white and black, who have been hurled from
place and power by the men of property and intelligence in the South.
There may be some truth in this theory. Human nature is capable of resent-
ment. It would not be strange if people who have been degraded and driven
from place and power by brute force and by fraud, were to resent the
outrage in any way they safely could.
But it is still further said that the Exodus is peculiarly the work of
Senator Windom. His resolution and speech in the Senate, last winter, are
said to have set this black ball in motion, and much wrath has been poured
out upon that humane Senator for his part in the movement.6William Windom (1827-91) was born to a Quaker farming family in Belmont County, Ohio. After a few years of practicing law in Ohio, Windom migrated to Minnesota where he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives (1859-69). Appointed to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate in 1870, he was elected to that office in 1871 and held it until March 1883, except for an eight-month interval in 1881 when he served as James A. Garfield’s secretary of the treasury. Defeated for reelection in 1883, Windom moved to New York City and practiced law there until Benjamin Harrison returned him to the leadership of the Treasury Department in 1889. Reacting against the collapse of Reconstruction in the South, Windom had introduced a resolution into the Senate on 16 January 1879, asking Congress to assist black migration from the South to states and territories where the freedmen’s rights would be protected. Congressional Record, 45th Cong., 3d sess., 483; Memorial Tribute to the Character and Public Services of William Windom Together with His Last Address (Cambridge, Mass., 1891), 1-9; Painter, Exodusters, 175-79, 230, 257; DAB, 20: 383-84. It need not be
denied that there is truth in this allegation. Senator Windom’s speech and
resolution certainly did serve as a powerful stimulus to this emigration.
Until he spoke there was no general stampede from the cotton and sugar
plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana. There can be no doubt, either,
that the freedmen received erroneous notions from some quarter what the
Government was likely to do for them in the new country to which they are
now going. They may have been told the story of “forty acres and a
mule,”7This phrase probably originated with the proposal made late during the Civil War by Thaddeus Stevens and a few other Radical Republicans that farm land be confiscated from pro-Confederate planters and distributed to freed slaves in forty-acre plots. ESH, 481-82. and some of them may have believed and acted upon it. But it is
manifest that the real cause of this extraordinary Exodus lies deeper down
than any point touched by any of the causes thus far alleged. Political
tricksters, land speculators, defeated office seekers, Northern malignants,
speeches and resolutions in the Senate, unaided by other causes, could not,
of themselves, have set such a multitudinous Exodus in motion. The col-
ored race is a remarkably home-loving race. It has done little in the way of
voluntary colonization. It shrinks from the untried and unknown. It thinks
its own locality the best in the world. Of all the galling conditions to which
the negro was subjected in the days of his bondage, the worst was the
liability of separation from home and friends. His love of home and his
dread of change made him even partially content in slavery. He could
endure the smart of the lash, worked to the utmost of his power, and be
content till the thought of being sent away from the scenes of his childhood
and youth was thrust upon his heart.
But argument is less needed upon this point than testimony. We have
the story of the emigrants themselves, and if any can reveal the true cause
of this Exodus they can. They have spoken, and their story is before the
country. It is a sad story, disgraceful and scandalous to our age and country.
Much of their testimony has been given under the solemnity of an oath.
They tell us with great unanimity that they are very badly treated at the
South. The land owners, planters, and the old master-class generally, deal
unfairly with them, having had their labor for nothing when they were
slaves. These men, now they are free, endeavor by various devices to get it
for next to nothing; work as hard, faithfully and constantly as they may, live
as plainly and as sparingly as they may, they are no better off at the end of
the year than at the beginning. They say that they are the dupes and victims
of cunning and fraud in signing contracts which they cannot read and
cannot fully understand; that they are compelled to trade at stores owned in
whole or in part by their employers, and that they are paid with orders and
not with money. They say that they have to pay double the value of nearly
everything they buy; that they are compelled to pay a rental of ten dollars a
year for an acre of ground that will not bring thirty dollars under the
hammer; that land owners are in league to prevent land-owning by negroes;
that when they work the land on shares they barely make a living; that
outside the towns and cities no provision is made for education, and,
ground down as they are, they cannot themselves employ teachers to
instruct their children; that they are not only the victims of fraud and
cunning, but of violence and intimidation; that from their very poverty the
temples of justice are not open to them; that the jury box is virtually closed;
that the murder of a black man by a white man is followed by no conviction
or punishment. They say further, that a crime for which a white man goes
free a black man is severely punished; that impunity and encouragement
are given by the wealthy and respectable classes to men of the baser sort
who delight in midnight raids upon the defenceless; that their ignorance of
letters has put them at the mercy of men bent upon making their freedom a
greater evil to them than was their slavery; that the law is the refuge of
crime rather than of innocence; that even the old slave driver’s whip has
reappeared, and the inhuman and disgusting spectacle of the chain-gang is
beginning to be seen; that the government of every Southern State is now in
the hands of the old slave oligarchy, and that both departments of the
National Government soon will be in the same hands. They believe that
when the Government, State and National, shall be in the control of the old
masters of the South, they will find means for reducing the freedmen to a
condition analogous to slavery. They despair of any change for the better,
declaring that everything is waxing worse for the negro, and that his only
means of safety is to leave the South.
It must be admitted, if this brief statement of complaints be only half
true, the explanation of the Exodus and the justification of the persons
composing it, are full and ample. The complaints they make against South-
ern society are such as every man of common honesty and humanity must
wish ill founded; unhappily, however, there is nothing in the nature of these
complaints to make them doubtful or surprising. The unjust conduct
charged against the late slaveholders is eminently probable. It is an inheri-
tance from the long exercise of irresponsible power by man over man. It is
not a question of the natural inferiority of the negro, or the color of his skin.
Tyranny is the same proud and selfish thing everywhere, and with all races
and colors. What the negro is now suffering at the hands of his former
master, the white emancipated serfs of Russia are now suffering from the
lords and nobles by whom they were formerly held as slaves. In form and
appearance the emancipation of the latter was upon better terms than in the
case of the negro. The Empire, unlike the Republic, gave the free serfs
three acres of land,—a start in the world. But the selection and bestowment
of this land was unhappily confided to the care of the lords and nobles, their
former masters. Thus the lamb was committed to the care of the wolf;8Douglass paraphrases Isa. 11: 6 or 65: 25.
hence the organized assassination now going on in that country, and it will
be well for our Southern States if they escape a like fate. The world is slow
to learn that no man can wrong his brother without doing a greater wrong to
himself; something may, however, be learned from the lessons of alarm and
consternation which are now written all over Russia.
But in contemplating this Exodus, it should be kept in mind that the
way of an oppressed people from bondage to freedom is never smooth.
There is ever in such transition much to overcome on both sides. Neither
the master nor the emancipated slave can at once shake off the habits and
manners of a long-established past condition. The form may be abolished,
but the spirit survives and lingers about the scenes of its former life. The
slave brings into the new relation much of the dependence and servility of
slavery, and the master brings much of his pride, selfishness and love of
power. The influence of feudalism has not yet disappeared from Europe.
Norman pride is still visible in England, though centuries have passed since
the Saxon was the slave of the Norman; and long years must elapse before
all traces of slavery shall disappear from our country. Suffering and hard-
ships made the Saxon strong,—and suffering and hardships will make the
Anglo-African strong.
THE EXODUS AS A POLICY.
Very evidently there are to be asked and answered many important
questions, before the friends of humanity can be properly called upon to
give their support to this emigration movement. A natural and primary
enquiry is: What does it mean? How much ground is it meant to cover? Is
the total removal of the whole five millions of colored people from the
South contemplated? Or is it proposed to remove only a part? And if only a
part, why a part and not the whole? A vindication of the rights of the many
can not be less important than the same to the few. If the few are to be
removed because of the intolerable oppression which prevails in the South,
why not the many, also? If exodus is good for any, must it not be equally
good for all? Then, if the whole five millions are to leave the South,9Douglass's estimate probably relies on the report by the 1870 U.S. census of a total of 4,880,009 blacks in the United States. The 1880 figure would rise to 6,580,793. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, Part I, ser. A91-104. as a
doomed country,—left as Lot left Sodom,10Gen. 19: 14-26. or driven out as the Moors
were driven out of Spain,11Muslim invaders from North Africa, popularly known as the Moriscos or Moors, seized control of large portions of southern and central Spain in the early eighth century. The Catholic reconquest of the Iberian peninsula was a slow process that did not conclude until the capture of Granada by the Catholic forces of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. In the late 1480s, these Catholic monarchs enacted laws requiring Jews as well as Muslims to convert or leave the country and established the infamous Inquisition tribunals to enforce them. John Fraser Ramsey, Spain: The Rise of the First World Power (University, Ala., 1973), 32-78, 202-07, 212-23, 229-30.—there is next a question of ways and means to
be considered. Has any definite estimate of the cost of this removal been
made? How shall the one or two hundred millions of dollars which such
removal would require be obtained? Shall it be appropriated by Congress,
or voluntarily be contributed by the public? Manifestly, with such a debt
upon the nation as the war for the Union has created, Congress is not likely
to be in a hurry to make any such appropriation. It would much more
willingly and readily enact the necessary legislation to protect the freed-
men where they are, than appropriate $200,000,000 to help them away to
Kansas, or elsewhere in the North. But suppose, as already suggested, the
matter shall not be left at all to Congress, but remitted to the voluntary
contributions from the people. Then a swarm of Conways12Thomas W. Conway's efforts to aid southern black migration to Kansas in 1879 focused primarin on the provision of transportation along the Mississippi River. A Baptist minister from New York, Conway first took notice of the conditions of southern blacks after going to Louisiana as a Union army chaplain. In early 1863, General Nathaniel Banks established the Bureau of Free Labor in Louisiana and appointed Conway its chief administrator. He later served in the Freedmen's Bureau and helped organize the Republican party in Louisiana. Disillusioned by the collapse of Reconstruction,. Conway wholeheartedly supported the proposed black migration to the West in 1879. To assist and coordinate that movement, he and eastern sympathizers organized the National Emigration Aid Society in April 1879. Conway then went to St. Louis to investigate the problems that migrants encountered with uncooperative steamboat companies. Conway proposed that his organization and other eastern friends of the blacks charter armed steamboats to go down the Mississippi River to relieve the trapped migrants. Growing support for Conway's plan forced the steamboat companies to retract their discriminatory policies and there was no need to implement it. Atheam, In Search of Canaan, 135, 144-52; Painter, Exodusters 198-99, 228-29; William Malvin Caskey, Secession and Restoration of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1938), 142, 193, 196; John Cornelius Engelsman, “The Freedmen's Bureau in Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 32: 145-224 (January 1949). and Tandys13When the first black migrants to Kansas reached St. Louis in March 1879, Charlton H. Tandy, a local black, initiated efforts to provide them with minimal support during their stay as well as to ensure their transportation farther west. Tandy immediately petitioned the Mullanphy Emigrant Relief Board, a city-administered organization providing relief to western travelers in need. Frustrated by the limited aid the board provided, Tandy and other local blacks formed their own relief organization. the Colored People‘s Board of Emigration of the City of St. Louis. In order to raise funds, Tandy toured eastern cities. While in Washington, D.C., Tandy approached Douglass for his support. Douglass initially refused even to meet with Tandy but later relented. By that time, however, the national press had begun to circulate articles praising Tandy’s efforts and he now refused to meet with Douglass. Despite his publicized imbroglio with Douglass, Tandy's fund-raising tour proved to be a major success. During the spring and summer, the Colored People's Board of Emigration collected almost twenty thousand dollars for food, clothing, travel fare, garden seed, and farm implements for the approximately twenty thousand black emigrants passing through St. Louis in 1879. Athearn, In Search of Canaan, 11-13, 18-19, 22, 27-29, 33, 114; Painter, Exodusters, 225-28, 232; Thomas C. Cox, Blacks in Topeka, Kansas, 1865-1915: A Social History (Baton Rouge, 1982), 78.
must be employed to circulate over the country, hat in hand, soliciting and
collecting these contributions; representing to the people, everywhere, that
the cause of the negro is lost in the South; that his only hope and deliv-
erance from a condition of things worse than slavery is,—removal to
Kansas, or to some country outside the Southern States. Then, would such
an arrangement, such an apostleship of despair, be beneficial or prejudicial
to the cause of the freedmen?
Precisely and plainly, this is a feature of the emigration movement
which is open to serious objection. Voluntary, spontaneous, self-sustained
emigration on the part of the freedmen, may or may not be commendable.
It is a matter with which they alone have to do. The public is not called upon
to say or do anything for or against it; but when the public is called upon to
take sides, declare its views, organize emigration societies, appoint and
send out agents to make speeches and collect money,—to help the freed-
men from the South,—it may very properly object. The public may not
wish to be responsible for the measure, or for the disheartening doctrines
by which the measure is supported. Objection may properly be made upon
many grounds. It may well enough be said that the negro question is not so
desperate as the advocates of this Exodus would have the public believe;
that there is still hope that the negro will ultimately have his rights as a man,
and be fully protected in the South; that in several of the old slave States his
citizenship and his right to vote are already respected and protected; that
the same, in time, will be secured for the negro in the other States; that the
world was not the work of a day; that even in free New England, all the
evils generated by slavery did not disappear in a century after the abolition
of the system, if, indeed, they have yet entirely disappeared.
Within the last forty years, a dark and shocking picture might be given
of the persecution of the negro and his friends, even in the now preemi-
nently free State of Massachusetts. It is not more than twenty years ago that
Boston supplied a pistol club, if not a rifle club, to break up an abolition
meeting; and that one of her most eminent citizens had to be guarded to and
from his house (Wendell Phillips) to escape the hand of mobocratic as-
sassins, armed in the interest of slavery.14Douglass recalls the disturbances that occurred in Boston in early December 1860 when abolitionists attempted to commemorate the anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Opponents of the abolitionists seized control of a memorial meeting in the morning of 3 December 1860, and after two hours of pandemonium police finally cleared the hall. After a speech at another meeting on the evening of the same day, Wendell Phillips required an escort of a dozen friends to pass through an angry antiabolitionist mob to return home. Boston Post, 4 December 1860; New York Daily Tribune. 4, 7 December 1860; Lib., 7, 14, 28 December 1860; DM, 3: 390 (January 1861). The negro on the Sound boats
between New York and Boston, though a respectable educated gentleman,
was driven forward of the wheels, and must sleep, if he slept at all, upon the
naked deck in the open air. Upon no condition except that of a servant or
slave could he be permitted to go into a cabin. All the handicrafts of New
England were closed to him. The appearance of a black man in any work-
shop or ship yard, as a mechanic, would have scattered the whole gang of
white hands at once. The poor negro was not admitted into the factories to
work, or as an apprentice to any trade. He was barber, waiter, white-
washer and wood-sawer. All of what were called respectable employ-
ments, by a power superior to legal enactments, were denied him. But none
of these things have moved the negro from New England, and it is well for
him that he has remained there. Bad as is the condition of the negro today at
the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably
worse. A few years ago he had nothing; he did not have himself, his labor
and his rights to dispose of as should best suit his own happiness. But he
has now even more. He has a standing in the supreme law of the land, in the
Constitution of the United States, not to be changed or affected by any
conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in the immediate or remote
future. The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen, and the Fifteenth
makes him a voter. With power behind him at work for him, and which
cannot be taken from him, the negro of the South may wisely bide his time.
The situation at this moment is exceptional and transient. The perma-
nent powers of the Government are all on his side. What though for the
moment the hand of violence strikes down the negro’s rights in the South?
Those rights will revive, survive and flourish again. They are not the only
people who have been in a moment of popular passion maltreated and
driven from the polls. The Irish and Dutch have frequently been so treated;
Boston, Baltimore and New York have been the scenes of this lawless
violence; but those scenes have now disappeared.15Although there were numerous earlier episodes of nativist violence, Douglass probably alludes to events in the 1850s. Irish and German Americans in virtually every American city were principal targets for election-day violence on behalf of the American or “Know-Nothing" party, though some of the violence might have been instigated by Democrats. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (1938; Gloucester, Mass, 1963), 180-81, 196-97, 275, 279, 420-21; Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1789-1861 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 191, 204-05. A Hebrew may even
now be rudely repulsed from the door of a hotel; but he will not on that
account get up another exodus, as he did three thousand years ago, but will
quietly “put money in his purse”16Douglass adapts Othello, act 1, sc. 3, lines 347-59. and bide his time, knowing that the
rising tide of civilization will eventually float him, as it floats all other
varieties of the human family, to whom floating in any condition is possi-
ble. Of one thing we may be certain (and it is a thing which is destined to be
made very prominent not long hence), the negro will either be counted at
the polls, or not counted in the basis of representation. The South must let
the negro vote, or surrender its representation in Congress.17Douglass alludes to the requirement of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, mandating the loss of congressional representation to any state denying the right to vote to any category of male citizen, except felons or ex-Confederates, proportional to the number disenfranchised in the total adult male population. The chosen
horn of this dilemma18Douglass adapts the proverbial “horns of a dilemma" that first appeared in literature in the poem “Against Hope" (1647) by Abraham Cowley. Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, 2 vols. (London, 1881), 1: 117. will finally be to let the negro vote, and vote
unmolested. Let us have all the indignant and fiery declamation which the
warm hearts of our youthful orators can pour out against Southern mean-
ness, “White Leagues,” “Bulldozers,” and other “Dark Lantern”
organizations,19An allusion to the names or nicknames of white terrorist groups formed after the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s. The “White Leagues" and the “Bulldozers” originally referred to specific local groups that employed fear and violence to overthrow the Republican Reconstruction-era state governments of the south, but the terms soon became general. The term “Dark Lantern" had earlier been applied to secret Know-Nothing organizations in the 1850s. Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms, 1: 461-62, 2: 1806; ESH, 159. but let us have a little calm, clear reason as well. The latter is a
safer guide than the former. On this great question we want light rather than
heat; thought, rather than feeling; a comprehensive view and appreciation
of what the negro has already on his side, as well as the disadvantages
against which he has thus far been compelled to struggle, and still has to
struggle.
THE EXODUS ILL-TIMED.
Without abating one jot of our horror and indignation at the outrages
committed in some parts of the Southern States against the negro, we
cannot but regard the present agitation of an African exodus from the South
as ill-timed, and in some respects hurtful. We stand today at the beginning
of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is a growing recognition of the
duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect and defend
the personal and political rights of all the people of the States; to uphold the
principles upon which rebellion was suppressed, slavery abolished, and the
country saved from dismemberment and ruin. We see and feel today, as we
have not seen and felt before, that the time for conciliation, and trusting to
the honor of the late rebels and slave-holders, has past [passed]. The
President of the United States, himself, while still liberal, just and gener-
ous towards the South, has yet sounded a halt in that direction, and has
bravely, firmly and ably asserted the constitutional authority, to maintain
the public peace in every State in the Union, and upon every day in the year;
and has maintained this ground against all the powers of House and Sen-
ate.20Douglass possibly is referring to President Rutherford B. Hayes’s resistance in 1879 to efforts by the Democratic majorities of both houses of Congress to pass legislation prohibiting federal intervention to protect voting rights. Although congressional Republicans mustered enough votes to sustain the vetoes of such measures, Hayes took few active steps in the last two years of his presidency to protect the freedmen. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 357-62; Davison, Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, 139-41. We stand at the gateway of a marked and decided change in the
statesmanship of our rulers. Every day brings fresh and increasing evi-
dence that we are, and of right ought to be, a nation; that Confederate
notions of the nature and powers of our Government ought to have perished
in the rebellion which they supported; that they are anachronisms and
superstitions, and no longer fit to be above ground. National ideas are
springing up all around us; the oppressor of the negro is seen to be the
enemy of the peace, prosperity and honor of the country. The attempt to
nullify the national election laws; to starve the officer where they could not
destroy the office; to attack the national credit when they could not prevent
successful resumption; to paralyze the Constitution where they could nei-
ther prevent nor set it aside, has all worked against the old slaveholding
element, and in the interest of the negro. They have made it evident that the
sceptre of political power must soon pass from the party of reaction,
revolution, rebellion and slavery, to the party of constitution, liberty and
progress.
At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a
cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South;
unfortunate that men are going over the country begging in the name of the
poor colored man of the South, and telling the people that the Government
has no power to enforce the Constitution and Laws in that section, and that
there is no hope for the poor negro, but to plant him in the new soil of
Kansas and Nebraska. These men do the colored people of the South a real
damage. They give their enemies an advantage in the argument for their
manhood and freedom. They assume the inability of the colored people of
the South to take care of themselves. The country will be told of the
hundreds who go to Kansas, but not of the thousands who stay in Mississip-
pi and Louisiana. They will be told of the destitute who require material
aid, but not of the multitude who are bravely sustaining themselves where
they are. In Georgia the negroes are paying taxes upon six millions of
dollars;21The figure for Georgia can be verified: state records in 1879 listed the aggregate taxed Property of blacks as $5,182,398. Report of the Comptroller General of the State of Georgia from October 1, 1879 to October 1, 1880 (Atlanta, 1880), 153-57. in Louisiana upon forty or fifty millions, and upon unascertained
sums elsewhere in the Southern States. Why should a people who have
made such progress in the course of a few years, now be humiliated and
scandalized by exodus agents, begging money to remove them from their
home; especially at a time when every indication favors the position that the
wrongs and hardships which they suffer are soon to be redressed?
IT SURRENDERS A GREAT PRINCIPLE.
Besides the objections thus stated, it is manifest that the public and
noisy advocacy of a general stampede of the colored people from the South
to the North, is necessarily an abandonment of the great and paramount
principle of protection to person and property in every State of the Union. It
is an evasion of a solemn obligation and duty. The business of this nation is
to protect its citizens where they are, not to transport them where they will
not need protection. The best that can be said of this Exodus in this respect,
is that it is an attempt to climb up some other than the right way; it is an
expedient, a half-way measure, and tends to weaken in the public mind a
sense of the absolute right, power and duty of the Government, inasmuch
as it concedes, by implication at least, that on the soil of the South, the law
of the land cannot command obedience; the ballot box cannot be kept pure;
peaceable elections cannot be held; the Constitution cannot be enforced;
and the lives and liberties of loyal and peaceable citizens cannot be pro-
tected. It is a surrender, a premature, disheartening surrender, since it
would make freedom and free institutions depend upon migration rather
than protection; by flight, rather than by right; by going into a strange land,
rather than by staying in one’s own. It leaves the whole question of equal
rights on the soil of the South open and still to be settled, with the moral
influence of exodus against us; since it is a confession of the utter imprac-
ticability of equal rights and equal protection in any State, where those
rights may be struck down by violence.
It does not appear that the friends of freedom should spend either time
or talent in furtherance of this Exodus as a desirable measure either for the
North or the South; for the blacks of the South or the whites of the North. If
the people of this country cannot be protected in every State of this Union,
the Government of the United States is shorn of its rightful dignity and
power; the late rebellion has triumphed; the sovereignty of the nation is an
empty name, and the power and authority in individual States is greater
than the power and authority of the United States.
BETTER TO STAY THAN TO GO.
While necessity often compels men to migrate; to leave their old homes
and seek new ones; to sever old ties and create new ones; to do this the
necessity should be obvious and imperative. It should be a last resort and
only adopted after carefully considering what is against the measure as well
as what is in favor of it. There are prodigal sons everywhere, who are ready
to demand the portion of goods that would fall to them and betake them—
selves to a strange country.22Douglass alludes to the prodigal son, who took his inheritance and wasted it in a distant land. Luke 15: 12-13. Something is ever lost in the process of
migration, and much is sacrificed at home for what is gained abroad. A
world of wisdom is in the saying of Mr. Emerson, “that those who made
Rome worth going to stayed there.”23A paraphrase of a statement in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “Boston.” Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12: 184-85. Three moves from house to house
are said to be worse than a fire.24Douglass misquotes a maxim in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac for 1858: "Three Removes is as bad as a Fire." Labaree, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 7: 344. That a rolling stone gathers no moss25Publilius Syrus, Maxim 524. has
passed into the world’s wisdom. The colored people of the South, just
beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the foundation of
families, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to the banks of
the Mississippi. The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of
better conditions of existence is by no means a good one. A man should
never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make
his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes. The time and energy
expended in wandering about from place to place, if employed in making
him comfortable where he is, will, in nine cases out of ten, prove the best
investment. No people ever did much for themselves or for the world,
without the sense and inspiration of native land; of a fixed home; of a
familiar neighborhood, and common associations. The fact of being to the
manor [manner] born26Hamlet, act 1, SC. 4, line 15. has an elevating power upon the mind and heart of a
man. It is a more cheerful thing to be able to say, “I was born here and
know all the people,” than to say, “I am a stranger here and know none of
the people.” It cannot be doubted, that in so far as this Exodus tends to
promote restlessness in the colored people of the South, to unsettle their
feeling of home and to sacrifice positive advantages where they are, for
fancied ones in Kansas or elsewhere, it is an evil. Some have sold their little
homes at a sacrifice, their chickens, mules and pigs, to follow the Exodus.
Let it be understood that you are going, and you advertise the fact that your
mule has lost half his value—for your staying with him makes half his
value. Let the colored people of Georgia offer their six millions worth of
property for sale, with the purpose to leave Georgia, and they will not
realize half its value. Land is not worth much where there are no people to
occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to use it.
A MISTAKE AND A FAILURE.
It may safely be asserted that, whether advocated and commended to
favor on the ground that it will increase the political power of the Republican
party, and thus help to make a solid North against a solid South; or
upon the ground that it will increase the power and influence of the colored
people as a political element, and enable them the better to protect their
rights, and ensure their moral and social elevation, the Exodus will prove a
disappointment, a mistake and a failure; because, as to strengthening the
Republican party, the emigrants will go only to those States where the
Republican party is strong and solid enough already without their votes;
and in respect to the other part of the argument, it will fail, because it takes
colored voters from a section of the country where they are sufficiently
numerous to elect some of their number to places of honor and profit, and
places them in a country where their proportion to other classes will be so
small as not to be recognized as a political element, or entitled to be
represented by one of themselves; and further, because, go where they will,
they must, for a time, inevitably carry with them poverty, ignorance and
other repulsive incidents inherited from their former conditions as slaves; a
circumstance which is about as likely to make votes for Democrats as for
Republicans, and to raise up bitter prejudices against them, as to raise up
friends for them. No people can be much respected in this country, where
all are eligible to office, that cannot point to any one of their class in an
honorable, responsible position. In sending a few men to Congress, the
negroes of the South have done much to dispel prejudice and raise them-
selves in the estimation of the country and the world. By staying where they
are, they may be able to send abler, better and more effective representa-
tives of their race to Congress, than it was possible for them to send at first,
because of their want of education, and their recent liberation from bond-
age. In the South the negro has at least the possibility of power; in the North
he has no such possibility, and it is for him to say how well he can afford to
part with this possible power.
But another argument in favor of this emigration is, that having a
numerical superiority in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina,27Both the 1870 and the 1880 U.S. Census reports revealed large black majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina and a much narrower one in Louisiana. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Tenth Census, 333. and
thereby possessing the ability to choose some of their own number to
represent them in the state and nation, they are necessarily brought into
antagonism with the white race, and invite the very political persecution of
which they complain. So they are told that the best remedy for this persecu-
tion is to surrender the right and advantage given them by the Constitution
and the Government, of electing men of color to office. They are not to
overcome prejudice and persecution where it is, but to go where it is not;
not to stand where they are, and demand the full constitutional protection
which the Government is solemnly bound to give, but to go where the
protection of the Government is not needed. Plainly enough this is an
evasion of a solemn obligation and duty, an attempt to climb up some other
way; a half-way measure, a makeshift, a miserable substitution of expedi-
ency for right. For an egg, it gives the negro a stone. The dissemination of
this doctrine by the agents of emigration cannot but do the cause of equal
rights much harm. It lets the public mind down from the high ground of a
great national duty, to a miserable compromise, in which wrong surrenders
nothing, and right everything. The South is not to repent its crimes, and
submit to the Constitution in common with all other parts of the country,
but such repentance and submission is to be conveniently made unneces-
sary by removing the temptation to commit violations of the Law and the
Constitution. Men may be pardoned for refusing their assent to a measure
supported upon a principle so unsound, subversive and pernicious. The
nation should be held steadily to the high and paramount principle, that
allegiance and protection are inseparable; that this Government is solemnly
bound to protect and defend the lives and liberties of all its citizens, of
whatever race or color, or of whatever political or religious opinion, and to
do this in every State and territory within the American Union. Then,
again, is there to be no stopping-place for the negro? Suppose that by-and-
by some “Sand Lot Orator” shall arise in Kansas, as in California, and take
it into his head to stir up the mob against the negro, as he stirred up the mob
against the Chinese?28An allusion to the anti-Chinese tirades that Irish-born agitator Denis Kearney (1847-1907) delivered at the “sandlots” in San Francisco in the late 1870s. Kearney headed the short-lived Workingmen's party of California, which campaigned against the economic power of banks, railroads, and landlords as well as Chinese immigration. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), 55, 76, 200; Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2: 1455; DAB, 10: 268-69. What then? Must the negro have another exodus?
Does not one exodus invite another, and in advocating one do we not
sustain the demand for another?
Plainly enough, the Exodus is less harmful in itself than are the argu-
ments by which it is supported. The one is the result of a feeling of outrage
and despair; but the other comes of cool, selfish calculation. One is the
result of honest despair, and appeals powerfully to the sympathies of men;
the other is an appeal to our selfishness, which shrinks from doing right
because the way is difficult.
THE SOUTH THE BEST MARKET FOR THE BLACK MAN’S LABOR.
Not only is the South the best locality for the negro on the ground of his
political powers and possibilities, but it is best for him as a field of labor.
He is there, as he is nowhere else, an absolute necessity. He has a monopo-
ly of the labor market. His labor is the only labor which can successfully
offer itself for sale in that market. This, with a little wisdom and firmness,
will enable him to sell his labor there on terms more favorable to himself
than he can elsewhere. As there are no competitors or substitutes, he can
demand living prices with the certainty that the demand will be complied
with. Exodus would deprive him of this advantage. It would take him from
a country where the land owners and planters must have his labor, or allow
their fields to go untilled and their purses unsupplied with cash; to a country
where the land owners are able and proud to do their own work, and do not
need to hire hands except for limited periods at certain seasons of the year.
The effect of this will be to send the negro to the towns and cities to
compete with white labor. With what result, let the past tell. They will be
crowded into lanes and alleys, cellars and garrets, poorly provided with the
necessaries of life, and will gradually die out. The negro, as already
intimated, is preëminently a Southern man. He is so both in constitution
and habits, in body as well as mind. He will not only take with him to the
North, Southern modes of labor, but Southern modes of life. The careless
and improvident habits of the South cannot be set aside in a generation. If
they are adhered to in the North, in the fierce winds and snows of Kansas
and Nebraska, the emigration must be large to keep up their numbers. It
would appear, therefore, that neither the laws of politics, labor nor climate
favor this Exodus. It does not conform to the laws of healthy emigration
which proceeds not from South to North, not from heat to cold, but from
East to West, and in climates to which the emigrants are more or less
adapted and accustomed.
THE NORTH GATE OF THE SOUTH MUST BE KEPT OPEN.
As an assertion of power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt; as
an emphatic and stinging protest against high-handed, greedy and shame—
less injustice to the weak and defenceless; as a means of opening the blind
eyes of oppressors to their folly and peril, the Exodus has done valuable
service. Whether it has accomplished all of which it is capable in this
particular direction for the present, is a question which may well be consid-
ered. With a moderate degree of intelligent leadership among the laboring
class at the South, properly handling the justice of their cause, and wisely
using the Exodus example, they can easily exact better terms for their labor
than ever before. Exodus is medicine, not food; it is for disease, not health;
it is not to be taken from choice, but necessity. In anything like a normal
condition of things the South is the best place for the negro. Nowhere else
is there for him a promise of a happier future. Let him stay there if he can,
and save both the South and himself to civilization. While, however, it may
be the highest wisdom under the circumstances for the freedmen to stay
where they are, no encouragement should be given to any measures of
coercion to keep them there. The American people are bound, if they are or
can be bound to anything, to keep the North gate of the South open to black
and white, and to all the people. The time to assert a right, Webster says, is
when it is called in question.29Douglass perhaps paraphrases Daniel Webster's speech on 14 January 1814 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Writings and Speeches of Webster, 14: 25. If it is attempted by force or fraud to compel
the colored people to stay, then they should by all means go; go quickly, and
die, if need be, in the attempt. Thus far and to this extent any man may be
an emigrationist, and thus far and to this extent I certainly am an emigra-
tionist. In no case must the negro be “bottled up” or “caged up.” He must
be left free, like every other American citizen, to choose his own local
habitation, and to go where he shall like. Though it may not be for his
interest to leave the South, his right and power to leave it may be his best
means of making it possible for him to stay there in peace. Woe to the
oppressed and destitute of all countries and races if the rich and powerful
are to decide when and where they shall go or stay. The deserving hired
man gets his wages increased when he can tell his employer that he can get
better wages elsewhere. And when all hope is gone from the hearts of the
laboring classes of the old world, they can come across the sea to the new. If
they could not do that their crushed hearts would break under increasing
burdens. The right to emigrate is one of the most useful and precious of all
rights. But not only to the oppressed, to the oppressor also, is the free use of
this right necessary. To attempt to keep these freedmen in the South, who
are spirited enough to undertake the risks and hardships of emigration,
would involve great possible danger to all concerned. Ignorant and cow-
ardly as the negro may be, he has been known to fight bravely for his
liberty. He went down to Harper’s Ferry with John Brown, and fought as
bravely and died as nobly as any.30Five blacks were members of John Brown’s party which attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in November 1859. All fought bravely and only one, Osborne P. Anderson, escaped with his life. Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (New York, 1974), 72-82. There have been Nathaniel Turners and
Denmark Veseys31Denmark Vesey (c. 1767-1822), leader of the famous conspiracy of slaves and free blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, spent the early years of his life as the slave of Joseph Vesey, including two years on the West Indies slave ship that his master captained before settling in Charleston in 1783. Upon winning a lottery seven years later, Vesey purchased his freedom and established himself as a carpenter. Vesey began to organize a slave revolt in December 1821, in secret meetings and through individual encounters, instructing coleaders carefully on recruitment to the plot. As many as nine thousand blacks from Charleston and its vicinity might have been enlisted. Vesey's plans envisioned the takeover of the city arsenals and guardhouses, the assassination of the governor, and a general massacre of all whites and those blacks not participating in the revolt. He named Santo Domingo as the ultimate refuge for the rebels. A house slave who had incautiously been apprised of the plot revealed the conspiracy to white authorities. Vesey first tried to change the date of the uprising and then went into hiding. Soon found and arrested, he conducted his own legal defense, arguing that he, a free man, could have no reason to rebel. Found guilty, Vesey and five coconspirators were hanged on 2 June 1822. Subsequently sixty-one men brought to trial were acquitted, thirty-four executed by hanging, and thirty-five sent into exile, most of the last being reenslaved. John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1964), 37, 73, 131-34, 140-42, 156-57, 206-10; DANB, 618-19; ACAB, 6: 283-84; DAB, 19: 258-59. among them in the United States, Joseph Cinques,
Madison Washingtons and Tillmons32William Tillman. on the sea, and Toussaint L’Ouver-
tures on land. Even his enemies, during the late war, had to confess that the
negro is a good fighter, when once in a fight. If he runs, it is only as all men
will run, when they are whipped.
This is no time to trifle with the rights of men. All Europe today is
studded with the material for a wild conflagration. Every day brings us
news of plots and conspiracies against oppressive power. An able writer in
the North American Review for July, himself a Nihilist, in a powerful
article defends the extremest measures of his party, and shows that the
treatment of the emancipated peasants by the government and landed aris-
tocracy of Russia is very similar to that now practiced towards the freed-
men by the landed aristocracy of the South.33Douglass describes the contents of an article entitled “The Revolution in Russia.” Out of fear that the Russian government might arrest its author, the North American Review published the article under the pseudonym “A Russian Nihilist." North American Review, 129: 21-36 (July 1879). Like causes will produce like
effects, the world over. It will not be wise for the Southern slaveholders and
their successors to shape their policy upon the presumption that the negro’s
cowardice or forbearance has no limit. The fever of freedom is already in
the negro’s blood. He is not just what he was fourteen years ago. To
forcibly dam up the stream of emigration would be a measure of extreme
madness as well as oppression. It would be exposing the heart of the
oppressor to the pistol and dagger, and his home to fire and pillage. The cry
of “Land and Liberty,” the watchword of the Nihilistic party in Russia,34Actually “Land and Freedom" is the more correct translation of the name taken by the loose networks of Russian revolutionaries who operated in the period 1861-64 and again in 1876-80. Ulam, In the Name of the People, 110, 129-31, 251-55, 323-25.
has a music in it sweet to the ear of all oppressed peoples, and well it shall
be for the landholders of the South if they shall learn wisdom in time and
adopt such a course of just treatment towards the landless laborers of the
South in the future as shall make this popular watchword uncontagious and
unknown among their laborers, and further stampede to the North wholly
unknown, indescribable and impossible.