SPEECH OF HON. BENJAMIN R. TILLMAN, OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

In the Senate of the United States, Monday, February 23, 1903.

Mr. TILLMAN. Mr. President, on the 24th of January the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Spooner) in a very calm, dispassionate, very earnest and eloquent speech represented some views in regard to the Indianola post-office matter. I wanted to get in and have some little colloquy or debate with my friend that afternoon, but we had a special order for pensions, which came on at 5 o'clock; and the Senator left the city that night; and I was unwilling while he was away to speak on the subject, which would be largely to controvert the position he had taken; so I deferred my remarks until his return.

When he got back, the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. McLaurin), who is interested in this matter, had a call to go home, and requested me to wait until his return, and since they both got back into the Senate Chamber we have been in a Headlock over the statehood bill, the Panama Canal treaty, and other matters, with two engines facing each other the same track and no siding there or somewhere else for them to go into, or the engineers unwilling to back off, so that I have had my speech ripening and, I hope, mellowing for nearly a month. I propose on this occasion to surprise my friends and to astonish and disappoint my enemies, if I have any in this body, by being very mild and temperate.

This subject is one which appeals very deeply to me and very deeply to many millions of American people--I will say to all of them--because, while they view it from different standpoints, I feel willing to say that in both ends of this great country the last majority--I might well say all of our people--want to settle the status and the future of the African, or the negro, upon broad, patriotic, and humanitarian grounds.

I should not presume to discuss the Indianola post-office matter if it were not a striking illustration of a condition. We have been dealing with theories in the South and at the North in regard to the race question for many, many years, even before I was born, but we are now face to face with conditions which call forth, or should call forth, the highest patriotism and the best statesmanship that this country can afford.

The Indianola post-office is, you might say, the match which has touched off an electrical line of thought reaching to the remotest bounds of this country. From my standpoint, it involves the most complex, the most difficult, the most dangerous of all the questions which confront this Republic. If it were merely a local issue, dealing only with the status of that little village and its mail facilities, I would leave it where the distinguished Senator from Mississippi (Mr McLaurin) has left it.

At this time the condition there is not at all acute, and there may be no real reason why the subject should be discussed; but when you recall the fact that the action of the National Government in regard to this office was taken calmly and advisedly, without any passion, so far as I know, but in pursuance of a fixed policy; when the President felt called on to make announcement, through his private secretary, as to what motives controlled and influenced his action; when, following on the heels of that, we had introduced here by a distinguished Republican Senator, the chairman of the national Republican committee, a bill dealing with the race question, providing for pensions for the ex-slaves; when the Secretary of War in his speech in New York deemed it 00033necessary to make public his view as to the situation--and I shall not repeat what he said, because all of you read it--when a distinguished prelate of the Catholic Church, Archbishop Ireland, in a similar address in Chicago, I believe it was, felt it be his duty to announce certain ideas and purposes or sentiments; when I know personal experience throughout the North, from one end of it to the other, in college and high schools the question is being discussed and debated by the younger generation--I say this for the reason that I have had in the last twelve months at least a hundred letters from school boys and college boys in the Northern States calling me to give them some information or furnish them documents or speeches relating it--when throughout the South at this time, as I well know the feelings of that people are aroused and the agitation in the minds of the Southern people is more generate and universal in regard to this one question than any other, I think it is time that some man here who does know something about the subject and who has given some study and thought should give the country the benefit of some plain, straight forward, honest, manly, patriotic utterances. If I am claiming too much as to what my purpose is, then I can only say that I shall fail of my intention if my language and my speaking on this subject does not rise to that attitude and command such praise.

If we had known, fellow-countrymen, before the civil war as much about each other as we know now, there would have been no war. A distinguished Southern bishop has declared that the Northern and Southern people have been very unfortunate in discovering all that was bad about each other, and have been woefully lacking in success in discovering what was good about each other, or a great deal that was good about each other. Therefore, as it is a condition and not a theory which confronts us, I say again it behooves the best thought and best statesmanship of this country calmly and deliberately to face this problem and set about something that will alleviate and ameliorate the condition and so doing, prevent a conflagration in the future either of a war of races in the South, black against white, something involving a national warfare or like catastrophe.

Before I enter upon a discussion of the race question proper, as a general philosophical topic affecting our common country. I want to deal specifically with the Indianola post-office matter, because, as I have said, it is a button which has touched an electric wire that is tingling all over this country.

In order to refresh the minds of Senators as to the genesis or origin of what is known as the Indianola post-office case, I will read an extract from the announcement or letter, or whatever it may be termed, which was sent out from the White House by Mr. Cortelyou, the President's private secretary.

The postmaster recently forwarded her resignation, to take effect on January 1, but the report of inspectors and information received from various reputable white citizens of the town and neighborhood show that the resignation was forced by a brutal and lawless element, purely upon ground of her color, and was obtained under terror of threats of physical violence.

The mayor of the town and the sheriff of the country both told the post-office inspector that she refused to resign they could not be answerable for her safety.Jumping a little, Mr. Cortelyou says:In the view of the President the relief of the business interests, which are being injured so by the action of the lawless element of the town is wholly secondary to the preservation of and order and the assertion of the fundamental principle that this Government will not count at or tolerate wrong and outrage of such flagrant character.

Here we have the point of view of our Chief Executive and his justification of the action.

Now I come, in order to open this case fairly and with absolute impartiality, to the statement made in the speech of the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Spooner). Take the view of the inspector that a "brutal and lawless element" in Indianola had threats of violence forced the postmaster to resign, the Senator from Wisconsin, with the evidence before him--he was obliged to admit it, and he did it very gladly and carefully --said:

But it would be a rare thing, I think, North or South, to find a [?] two thousand people in which there is not a lawless and [?]

The President was informed by the papers that a[?] Senator describes them to be--.

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Alluding to the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. McLaurin)-- [?] that they were opposed to the proceedings which forced--I say forced--the resignation of this postmistress.

Repeating it, as though to emphasize it, the Senator from Wisconsin said:

I said there is the highest possible authority in the papers which were before the President, establishing the fact, which could not be gain said, that the large majority of the people of that community are such as the Senator described--peaceable and law-abiding people, who deprecate the action of the minority which forced this resignation, but who did not prevent it.

Mr. President, the first thing which occurs to me here is to ask-- I want Senators calmly to consider the justice of the proposition--why it was that in the action taken by the Executive the large majority of the good, peaceable, law-abiding citizens are furnished because there are, in his estimation, a "lawless and brutal element," small in number, who had taken the action which necessitated the resignation of the postmaster? Why, in any community in this country where law and order are the rule, and if they are not the rule can be made the rule, shall the innocent be punished because there are some who are guilty? Is that not contrary to the fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon jurispudence, wherein it is declared that it is better that 100 guilty shall escape than that one innocent shall suffer?

The Senator from Wisconsin, in his strong and eloquent plea for the end at which he was aiming, goes on to argue the case out, and he uses this language:

She had as much right under the Constitution and laws of the united States--a Federal instrumentality, discharging Federal functions within the limits of a State--to hold her office without duress without obstruction, moral or physical, as we have, anyone of us, to sit in this Chamber and to discharge here without intimidation of any kind our duties.

Then, in order to bring out the point he was endeavoring to use as a lever or reason for the conclusion at which he arrived, he declared that it was duress, that there was force, moral or otherwise, and that the threats of force were of such cogency and power that this woman, dreading the result, tendered her resignation, and that therefore she was forced to resign. He speaks of it in this way:

If it was not duress, what was it? It was the power of the community originating in this meeting, represented by petition, circuiated in an organized way to bring pressure, for it constituted pressure, upon this agent of the Federal Government to quit her post of duty, not when she chose, that when the Federal Government chose, not when the President chose, but when this mass meeting chose.

The Senator from Wisconsin and the Senator from Mississippi had some disagreement about the mass meeting. I do not pretend to determine which of them has the better part of the law in this matter. I suppose our Constitution guarantees the right to the people to assemble peaceably and petition for redress of grievances. The question might arise, and I have no doubt it would arise in the mind of a lawyer, whether that meant a petition to somebody who was a local or to a central authority, the President or the Congress, or to some one having power to redress grievances. I will leave [?] that question. I do not pretend to discuss the question as to the legitimacy the illegitimacy, the wrong or the right of the petition which was not sent to the postmaster, but which was being prepared to be sent to her, asking for her resignation.

The Senator from Wisconsin, going on to deal with this question from the one standpoint of national authority, says:

This is vital, and if the Government is not dependent upon the consent States to the exercise of governmental functions, how much less is it dependent upon the consent of the people of towns, villages, and cities?

Is it to be admitted for a moment that the people of a village or city may close a post-office established and offered under the Constitution and laws of the United States by forcing the agent of the Government to quit because they do not like that agent? Is the product of a post-office by the General Government to be made to depend upon the approval by the patrons of the agent chosen by the Government?

If it will do the Senator any good, I will say it here and now, of course not that is not in the dream of the wildest ass with a white skin on who roams over the Southern States that the Federal Government is not supreme throughout these [?]. But there are some fundamental principles involved in connection with [?] of the United States, to which I shall direct your attend [?] we are no longer a confederacy but a nation, [?] Executive and Congress, is supreme--I do 00055deny it and nobody down my way does deny it--I want to ask you if there are not some cognate propositions going along with that doctrine which have been ignored in this case?

I read here some words used by our forefathers when they met in convention to frame a Constitution for the government of the colonies or the States. I read from the preamble:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those are the objects sought to be attained, and I want to say here and now that when those objects are ignored in maintaining the authority of the National Government and asserting its right to have its agents respected and peaceably allowed to perform their functions, we are face to face again with a condition and not a theory.

While it may be vital and is vital to the maintenance of the national authority and the respect for the flag and for the Government that its agents, appointed in due course of law and according to the Constitution, shall be protected, if necessary, by the Army, I want to ask you whether you are ready to maintain the proposition that a post office is ordained and created merely for the officer and not for the people who patronize it and who cause it to exist. Would there have been any post-office at Indianola if there had not been mail directed to the citizens of that community?

Would not the post-office cease to exist if by some cataclysm of nature the citizen of that community who have been receiving mail there should all die or be swept away But with the people there, the postage being collected on whatever mail they may receive the facilities which the Government provides under law for every citizen similarly situated have been denied to the people of Indianola. The office is closed, the post master is gone, and the innocent people, who had a right to expect the Government to protect them in the inalienable right of receiving the mail where they paid for with the postage stamp at their doors and where a post-office had existed, find the right has been annulled and abrogated and that "Justice"--the "general welfare" and the "blessings of liberty" have disappeared.

I maintain, gentlemen, that any policy, from whatever motive, which ignores the rights of the people, and which forgets that the Government was created for the people and not the people for the Government, is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong. Also yet we have the boldest possible illustration of such a thought or feeling or purpose in the Executive when, merely because there are in a community some brutal and lawly men, the rights of the people of that community who are innocent, who have done nothing, to be regarded and treated as other citizens of other counties and cities and States are treated are ignored.

My friend the Senator from Wisconsin says the office is not abolished--he got somewhere; I do not know; I have not taken the trouble to look it up; he is always accurate that I think he knows what he is talking about--that we can not abolish post-office in a country town or court-house. I want him or anyone else to tell me what the meaning of abolishment is. There is no mail going there. All the mail directed Indianola was ordered to be sent to Greenville, 30 miles away. As was proper, and as I would suppose right, a petition was presented to have the mail sent to the near town, Heathman, 4 miles off. But, no; it was ordered sent to Greenville, 30 miles away.

I suppose the name of the postmaster of Indianola is on the roll of the Post-Office Department; that she is drawing her salary, $100 a month, or more, because it is Presidential office. If the office is not abolished, I want somebody to explain what condition it is in. Of course I suppose the name remains on the post-route map. The to is on the railroad, and it can not be rubbed off the United States map; and we are force to face with this condition: That community has had a burden place on it--the good people, these peaceable people, these law-abiding people; three-fourths of the or four-fifths of them or nine-tenths of them--of the additional expense of having send to Heathman because of malice, if there was malice. I do not want to [?] malice.

But whatever motive caused the Department to refuse to have the mail for Indianola change to Heathman, it could not be carried out, for how could you prevent 00066the people of Indianola from directing their newspapers to be sent to Heathman and instructing all their correspondents to mail their letters to Heathman? And unless that office is to be abolished too, this miserable scheme of punishment has been circumvented by the simple action of the Indianola people getting their mail at the nearest point by having it directed to that office.

Was there any cruelty in this? Yes. And who are the sufferers? What is the situation to-day? As usual, whenever any attempt is made by those abroad, who know nothing much of the South, and who deal with it only from a political standpoint, to intermeddle in our affairs, the poor negroes are the greatest sufferers. All the white people of that community have met together and pooled their little money; whatever was necessary. They have hired a man to carry their mail to Heathman and bring it back twice a day.

They have created a little post-office of their own, personal and private, at which the mail thus brought, for white people only, mark you, by a white man for white people, is distributed by a white woman, who receives a salary for it, and while the negroes of Indianola, who are largely in the majority, get very little mail and possibly have not been seriously damaged, still what mail they do get has been ordered to Greenville, and they have to hunt up some means by which some one will either go 30 miles by the railroad or get some one to bring it back on the railroad and deliver it.

The office is closed, though not abolished. There is a private postmistress or postmaster in the employ of the citizens. They are getting their mail; they are fairly well satisfied, I suppose; but do you not know that deep down in their hearts they feel that this thing could not happen in a Northern State? Do you not know it? Do you not?

The Senator form Wisconsin, seeming to desire above all things to let his brethren were and the people of the South especially, and anyone else who is willing to study his question as he has put it in his speech, know made a statement which he repeated and repeated and repeated in varying forms; and I will do him the full justice of reading everything he had to say in regard to that one fundamental, monumental, Pikes Peak doctrine of national supremacy. He said:

What was done? The President refused to have Federal office, held by a competent person, rated against her will and under duress by local pressure, and, as the people there had closed the race to all intents and purposes, he declined to accept the resignation; and in doing that, Mr. President, he acted upon a principle absolutely essential to the virility and strength of the National government.

It presented itself to him, as it will present itself to thoughtful men everywhere who are [?] as vital to the Government of the United States that it shall be permitted to transact the government business, to protect the Government property, through such agencies in the States as Government selects in the constitutional way, without consent or interference locally--and I [?] deal with that briefly in a moment. It is that principle, Mr. President, which underlies the [?] of the President and upon which I have justified his action, because, whatever else the Senator may think the President was misinformed about, he was not misinformed upon the proposition that this woman did not wish to resign; that she desired to serve out her term of office, and that would have done that if she had been permitted.Further on he said:May the choice of a postmaster or a marshal or district attorney be taken practically from the President and the Senate and made to depend upon the dictation of the people of a locality? And one postmaster, chosen by the President and Senate, may be forced to quit and a successor [?] why may not one successor after another be forced to resign until one satisfactory to the quality shall have been chosen?

And them who, in fact, will have appointed the official ?

The Federal agent must be appointed by the constitutional methods and obstructions in any ? in the discharge of Federal functions by localities can not be permitted.Going on, my eloquent friend said:Here is a post-office. Under the Constitution Congress establishes post-offices and post-road. The sign of the sovereignty of the Federal Government in Indianola is the post-office. That is the place, Mr. President, where the flag of the United States has a right to float as testimony that as in possession of the United States and subject alone to its jurisdiction; and if the agencies of United States are to be carried on or obstructed in a State at the wish, caprice, whim, or because of hatred or excitement of individuals or masses, what becomes of the Government as a government of power and a government of law? What becomes of the President sworn to support the institution of the United States and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed?

Right here I want to give my earnest support to this doctrine, but I want it carried out in its entirely and by lawful and not tyrannical methods.

I wish to quote to my friend a statute which is still on the statute book, placed 00077there I do not know when, but I suppose during the reconstruction era, when this question was much more burning, though not half so dangerous as it is now: Section 5518 of the Revised Statutes of the United States provides that--

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire to prevent, by force intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof, or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave any State, district, or place where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or no injure him in his person or property on account of his lawful discharge of the duties of his office, or while engaged in the lawful discharge thereof, or to injure his property so as to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties, each of such persons shall be punished by a fine of not less than five hundred nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment, with or without hard labor, not less than six months nor more than six years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

If you yourselves were to-day sitting here as a committee of the whole endeavoring to frame a statute to meet this abuse, if you term it such, this condition at Indianola, by which you should hedge it about with legal provisions and punishment, you could not change those words or strengthen them one iota. Yet with that on the statute book, with the knowledge furnished by the inspectors and by witnesses by the hundred almost, certainly as many as you want, that these people had met at the court-house; that they had organized; that they had some together, which is the essence of conspiracy; that they had set in motion machinery to cause an officer of the United States to quit the official position to which he or she had been assigned, when, if there is nay criminality forbidden in that statute whatever, these men have been criminals, instead of putting the law in orderly motion and in accordance with the Constitution, which has been appealed to, the people are punished by extraordinary and outrageous devices.

The innocent are punished along with the guilty. The "lawless and brutal element" of which we have heard and which the Senate from Mississippi (Mr. McLaurin) denied exists would be left to be determined in the future by any prosecution which might be brought under any indictment, with the witnesses to prove it. But here you had your remedy in a decent and proper and legal way and you did not use it.

The essence of good government is equality, that it shall touch all alike and treat all alike. When the lawmaking, or rather the law-executive, power endeavors to establish a rule which differentiates as between States and sections, which creates flesh of one and fowl of the other, you at once leave the safe path. Here was a law. The Army, if necessary, could have gone to support of the postmaster if the civil machinery had not been sufficient to bring in an indictment and have these men who had conspired arrested. If you had not done anything more than simply attempted to punish them you would have accomplished your purpose. If you had failed of a verdict, if you had been unable to get a jury to convict, you would at least not have punished the innocent along with the guilty.

That is the gravamen of the indictment which we in the South bring. I said this action was taken calmly. This mass meeting was held in November. I will relate further to those who do not know the facts what the postmistress's husband or the postmaster's husband did. It is said that there is a legal word "postmaster," and that there is no such thing as a postmistress. I believe I will go back to the common-sense view and leave the legal alone, and speak about this woman as postmistress, because I get tangled in my own grammar when I do not.

When the husband of Mrs. Cox found that she was obnoxious to that community as postmistress, and that a mass meeting had been held, at which a petition was order to be gotten up and sent around the community asking citizens to sign it to request her to resign, he went to one of the men who was engaged in this matter and said. "My wife does not want this office if you people do not want her to have it. She is willing now, and she requests me to tell you, to give her resignation to the adjourned meeting," which was held a week later.

Then the question arose as to whether they should accept it or not, and of course they agreed to accept it. Now, my friend here grows very eloquent and very wrathy over the idea of a mass meeting accepting the resignation of a Federal appointee, and very justly from his point of view, because it was a very outrageous and insulting and insolent and rebellious action. But I suppose those people were after results rather than after the legal status. They were after obtaining relief from a negro postmaster 00088or postmistress who had grown obnoxious not because of anything she herself had done but for the reason that other things had happened in that community which had fanned the flame of race antagonism and made the people rush to do an unjust and improper thing. They acted thus because of an insulting, infamous proposition and insult from a negro man to a white woman, a poor Jewess who was clerking in the same store.

Mr. McLAURIN of Mississippi. Mr. President--

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Depew in the chair). Does the Senator from South Carolina yield to the Senator from Mississippi?

Mr. TILLMAN. Certainly.

Mr. McLAURIN of Mississippi. I did not exactly catch the language of the Senator from South Carolina as to the people of Indianola doing an unjust and improper thing. As I caught it--

Mr. TILLMAN. I was only using the language of my friend from Wisconsin as to the legal phase. I myself do not think the people of Indianola transcended their right to meet and to consider the best means of removing the obnoxious postmistress.

Mr. McLAURIN of Mississippi. Yes, sir; I merely wanted to say that the people of Indianola, as far as any evidence so far shows, have never done any illegal or improper or unjust act in reference to this post-office.

Mr. TILLMAN. I was simply using the thought and the language of the Senator from Wisconsin in order to trace the point he made, or tried to make, and which I am trying to show was on wrong law and wrong executive action.

The Senator went on and asked, which it would be very natural for him to ask in Wisconsin, why the people of Indianola did not petition the President, the proper man to petition, the proper source of power, the appointing officer, the man whose duty it was to uphold the authority of the National Government, and who alone could take her away lawfully.

Why did they not petition him? Well, I do not want to rake over any embers. If there is any idea farther away from my heart and bead than to get up a sectional debate, I do not know it. No good could come of that. I have not the remotest purpose or desire to drag into this discussion that old, miserable, horrible specter. I have been over the North possibly in the last four or five years more than any Southern man in this Chamber, and I have had occasion of the fact as far as I could judge, and I gave every provocation to let it blaze up if it existed, because I was discussing the race question by request. I know that in the Northern States to-day there is very little left of that old hatred of the South which was so prevalent thirty years ago.

I realize that no man should approach this subject from any standpoint other than that of patriotic Americans who have to deal with the terrible conditions which it will take the best minds and the best hearts of this country to even ameliorate, much less to solve. I know that since the Spanish war, in which the Southern States sent their quotas of volunteers as promptly and as readily to be marshaled under the common flag, which they tried to shoot to pieces in 1861 to 1865, and were ready to do and die for the honor of the American people, the North has had little or no hatred for us. But they do not know what is involved in this issue. They can not understand it because they have not got anything like similar conditions, and therefore it is that I speak.

Petition the President! This leads me briefly to discuss the mode of Federal appointments in Southern States--the method pursued. I do not do it for the purpose of exciting any angry passions. I merely state facts which are familiar to all of you, or which can be proven to be absolutely true if you doubt what I say.

Under the Constitution the appointment to every important office is made by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Let me give a common-sense interpretation of those words. Just putting aside all political bias, and recollecting that we come here as the representatives, two from each State, on an equality without regard to population, wealth, or area, the only possible interpretation of the language is that it was supposed by the framers of the Constitution that the representatives of a given State would know more about the character and qualifications of any person in their respective States, and that their opinion and advice in regard to such individual would be followed by their brethren here from other States.

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In many instances that is the only rule which obtains. Now, as far as the Northern people are concerned, you find here that the Representatives from the Northern States have absolute control of most of the appointments in their Commonwealths, either in this Senate or in conjunction with the other House. The exception is very rare in which the President takes it upon himself to go outside of or contrary to the will and the desire of both Senators and of all the Representatives from a Northern State.

How is it in my part of the country? Who controls the patronage? Who selects the office-holders? Who selects the representatives of the National Government, the men who are to uphold its honor and dignity and to perform its functions? Sometimes the rule varies, but as a general thing we find that to the chairman of the Republican State committee, in conjunction possibly with two or three other leaders, who may be made a board of reference, all appointments to office, however petty, are referred.

Now, in the North, where everybody, Democrats and Republicans, are on a level, where, if they have party differences, you do not know the difference as you walk along the street, where they do not know whether this store belongs to a Republican or a Democrat, or whether that man you meet is a Republican or a Democrat, and where there is personal friendship and business relations the most intimate between men of opposing parties, the question of the appointment to office submitted to the men in affiliation with the Executive in this Chamber and in the other can not bring any great wrong or bother.

The men selected will necessarily be, I suppose, in the condition of degraded politics to which we have reached, the partisan and earnest supporters of that party. It seems that has been the rule ever since somebody discovered away back yonder, seventy-five years ago, that "to the victors belong the spoils," and that, therefore, those who were elected in the general election should have the right to turn out all the opposite party who held high official position. Of late years there has grown up a custom, not a law, allowing in many cases the holder of an official position to serve the term for which his commission is dated.

But in the South we have a condition which is simply a reminder to us perpetually of the fact that thirty-seven years ago our ancestors were conquered. We are reminded, forever and ever, that we are in the Union, but not of it--except to pay taxes.

These Republican boards of reference of which I have spoken are sometimes composed of one man, sometimes of half a dozen. They select all the postmasters for all the Presidential offices and many others. They select men for every other official position that is to be given out by the Republican party.

How many votes do they furnish you except in the national Republican convention? To that they go, and there is the poison in this situation.

Therefore these long, long years the balance of power in the Republican national conventions has been held by the representatives of the machine in the South, and the machine mainly is composed of negroes. These furnish the delegates who go to the national Republican convention; and it is a matter of common talk that when they get there and there is any trouble between Northern men involved in the mastery as to who shall be nominated the Southern representatives of the great Republican party thus chosen by a machine, kept alive by patronage, have always held the balance of power and have determined who shall get the honor and the chance to be elected President of this great country. And it is a notorious scandal that in some instances these delegates have sold their votes, and always they have obtained pledges of offices.

Now, this is a plain fact--a fact of current history. If the people of Indianola had petitioned the President of the United States to remove Mrs. Cox, the petition would have gone into the waste-basket, and everybody knows it. The petition to appoint Mrs. Cox had not come from them. No petition that they could have ever gotten up would have had any consideration at the hands of the Executive or the Postmaster-General.

So you see that this thing has another view, which some of you have not been able to see from your standpoint. Looking alone at the great plea of the necessity of maintaining the national authority and having its agents respected and allowed to remain in office, which no one disputes, you ignore the mode of appointment of those agencies, and you forget the fact that those 17,000,000 white men and women, south of the Potomae and the Ohio are to-day, wherever Democracy is in power, ignored, and 001010that the offices and all the evidences of the power of the Federal Government are parceled out by a small Republican machine, which can not and never will, in my judgment, as long as you continue the present policy, furnish you a solitary electoral vote.

We do not mind petitioning. I do not want to drag in or drag up any specters or ghosts, but I have filed petitions. I have filed protests. I have gone and plead and begged for justice when a negro from an adjoining county had been carried out of his county over onto another county and made postmaster in a town where he did not live and knew nobody. Everything that I did was spurned, and the necessity of rewarding the men who would round up delegates for the national Republican machine down there, who had pledged themselves to support somebody in the national convention, was far superior to any influence that I as a Senator from the State could exert. It ended in a bloody tragedy but it has not wrought a change of policy.

Why should we continue to petition when our petitions are ignored and we are treated with contumely and contempt? We simply have shut our eyes and are going on. We are doing the best we can. We are face to face every day of our lives with this specter, this dread, this horrible nightmare; and when we lose patience sometimes, when we do cruel, bitter, fearful things, fiendish things, savage things, there is a howl from men who know nothing, who never have been south of the Potomae, and who have theorized and who have inherited their prejudices and sentiments.

I will elaborate a little further the point I have just made, or rather the statement of fact. It is not so much a point except in the intelligible discussion of the question. We in that part of the country are face to face, as they were in Indianola, for instance, with a three-to-one negro population, for Sunflower County has 18,000 negroes and only 6,000, or such a matter, of white people in it. We realize what it means to us to allow ever so little trickle of race equality to break through the dam. When in our efforts, lawful or unlawful, constitutional or unconstitutional, to stem this tide of ignorant and debased and debauched men, we do things which we do not want to do, but which we feel it necessary to do, and which our instincts as white men make us do, we do not get any sympathy from those who know nothing about it. We can not take any risks, and we will not allow the idea to get any headway.

We are only told that these people have every right under the Constitution that we have and that it is our business to submit to the law. When we seek to have men of character, men of good reputation, men of integrity, of honestly, and of decency given public positions, we are ignored. We have only left to us the privilege of selecting between those who may be submitted to us by the Executive here, and if he makes a mistake--and he has got such poor material to choose from that very often he does make a mistake--then we are left with Hobson's choice; for we can not find any Republican who is properly fit to hold the position.

We of the South are under the dire alternative of letting those people be confirmed, or possibly do worse. That is our situation. If you, gentlemen, could just take this realizing sense home with you and put yourselves in our places for twenty-four hours, it would be all I or any other Southern man could ask of you.

Why was Mrs. Cox given this place? Was it because of any special superior fitness on her part? There is not any evidence of it. We will say, according to the reports, that she was absolutely competent: that her work was satisfactory so far as any colored women could give satisfaction, and that there is nothing against her reputation in any shape, form, or fashion.

But we have had instances in my State in which local leaders--the precinct or county chairmen--being given the patronage of the local post-offices, have sold them to some man who wanted the job of holding a little $50 or $75 or $100 office; and there was no negro around that would dare to try to hold it in the backwoods, the local Republican leader who was engaged in the business of helping this Republican States committee to round up the delegates to the State convention and help him control the delegation made money in that way.

That is the situation, and our protests have fallen on deaf ears. We get no consideration. When we have undertaken to stop the appointment of a fourth-class postmaster the only redress has been to call for an inspector, to prefer charges, to try to bring the whole case up, and prove beyond peradventure that the man is a scoundrel or a thief or incompetent.

001111

So you see there is another side to this question; that while in this case at Indianola Mrs. Cox or Mrs. Cox's supporters and friends may have just reason to say that an example should have been made; that Indianola should be deprived of its post-office that the citizens should be put to as much trouble and bother as possible, and made pay for it in inconvenience and money both, the question which addresses itself to us, and which we can not help--I do not mention this in any spirit of animosity or with any desire to arouse passion--the question which we naturally, necessarily, and inevitably ask ourselves is, Why it is that those who are responsible for this condition in the South and seem to desire to perpetuate and to continue it indefinitely do not once in a while try it among themselves?

There are 51,000 negro voters in Pennsylvania. When conditions are normal there and the Republican majority 50,000, they have the balance of power, and they are responsible for Republican control there. If you do not accept that State as an illustration, I might name others, where the negro vote is inevitably the controlling factor in maintaining the present party in power, and I might ask you why you do not recognize the negro in those State and give him some of these nice places.

Our mouths would be somewhat shut if you carried out in good faith among yourselves this policy of holding up forever the idea of negro equality, and if you would give some of them some of these places. Why not put one of them in the Cabinet? I would vote to confirm Booker Washington as secretary of anything. (Laughter.) There are 8,000,000 negroes, which is about one-ninth of the people of the country, and there are nine members of the Cabinet.

Why not have a genuine negro, not a mulatto or a hybrid, in the Cabinet? Then let us make them officers in the Army and the Navy; let us give them their pro rata share of all the good jobs wherever they exist, without regard to local conditions. You do not intend to do it: you could not do it; your people would not submit to it; and yet because you look South and see our situation there with this large and in some States preponderating negro vote, you say we are obliged to recognize them; we are obliged to give them office.

Tuesday, February 24, 1903.

Mr. TILLMAN said:Mr. PRESIDENT: When I yielded the floor yesterday I was discussing the political aspect of the race question. I wish to add a few facts and observations to that phase of the subject before I proceed with the broader and more important phases of this complex problem.

Mr. McLAURIN of Mississippi. Will the Senator allow me to interrupt him?

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Does the Senator from South Carolina yield to the Senator from Mississippi?

Mr. TILLMAN. I do.

Mr. McLAURIN of Mississippi. Before the Senator proceeds with the discussion of this matter I desire to call attention to page 2738 of the RECORD, lest by my silence I may be taken as acquiescing in the remark of the Senator from South Carolina yesterday, which is printed in the Record on the page to which I have referred. I could not well catch all that he said, and so I did not notice the statement to which I am about to refer in his speech yesterday. I hope it will not be necessary for me to take the floor again on this question, and for that reason I ask to correct the statement now. This language was used by the Senator from South Carolina in speaking of the Indionola people:

They have created a little post-office of their own, personal and private, at which the mail thus brought, for white people only, mark you.

The portion of this sentence which I desire to correct is that part which states that the mail is to be brought for white people only. While I have no direct testimony on this point--

Mr. TILLMAN. If the Senator will allow me there, I was merely giving my general impression in regard to the status of Indianola from a statement or an interview or something which I saw in the Washington Post. If I am in error I shall be glad to be corrected, for I would not do the good people of that community 001212wrong in one single instance. If they are bringing the mail for all the citizens of Indianola without regard to race, color, or previous condition, I am glad to know it.

Mr. MCLAURIN of Mississippi. As I understand, there has been an arrangement made by the white people of Indianola for the carrying of the mail twice a day a Heathman and for bringing the mail from Heathman to all the people of Indianola and that this carrying and bringing of the mail is for whites and negroes indiscriminately; that any person in Indianola who has any mail to go can send it by this messenger to Heathman and have it posted there; that any mail that comes to Heathman for any person living in Indianola, or who before the abolishment of the post-office received his mail at Indianola, is brought from Heathman by this messenger; that they have a white post-master, a lady who lives in Indianola, and attends to this as if it was a regular post-office, except that it does not have any sign or anything to indicate that it is a United States post-office.

There is another thing, if the Senator from South Carolina will indulge me for a moment, to which I should like to call attention. The Senator from South Carolina seems in this language to take issue with the position I took in my discussion of the legal aspect of this case--Mr. TILLMAN. Mr. President, as I had expressly refrained from undertaking to pass an opinion upon the conflicting and diametrically opposed contentions of my two legal friends, the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Spooner) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. McLaurin), I do not see why I should be charged with endeavoring even by implication to side with either. I merely expressed a general idea. Being no lawyer, I can give only a rather vague and indefinite expression of my view. What little law I know I have absorbed. But I still think that whatever the Constitution guarantees must be a part of it, and when the guaranty was that the right to assemble peaceably and to petition for the redress of grievances should not be abridged, I think that that was practically saying, "They shall have this right forever." But the Senator from Mississippi feels that he must make himself clear, and I think everybody understands his contention. I agree with him entirely that it would be splitting hairs to say that the people of Indianola had committed an unlawful act in coming together as they did and setting in motion machinery to give an expression of opinion by the citizens in regard to the post-office.

It is true I quoted yesterday an act which was placed upon the statute books in the reconstruction era applicable to this very condition, and I judge if any action should be brought in the courts to determine whether that act was constitutional, whether any crime, any conspiracy had been organized at this mass meeting, it could be settled. My main desire was to make known my opinion and belief that the President and the Postmaster-General had transcended their authority and had used tyrannical and unconstitutional and illegal methods in dealing with the Indianola post-office as they did.

Now, I am not going to deal in technicalities here, but as the Senator has brought that matter up, I will return to it for a moment to read some expressions of opinion on the part of leading Northern newspapers, leading republican newspapers, on this subject. First, the New York Tribune, in discussing the general question of negroes holding office said:

The question of negro officeholding in the South is a difficult one. Many leading negroes believe the negroes better off if they avoid polities. The duty of the Government is to get its business transacted properly and to the satisfaction of the public concerned. The Government can not admit that one citizen's rights are inferior to anothers; nevertheless the wisdom of putting a good man where he will not fit, simply to assert the right to put him there, is debatable, and a vote against putting him there does not prove any readiness to reestablish slavery.

Then we have the New York Mail and Express. In discussing this topic it uses this language:

If the country can not afford to see all official opportunity denied to a man because he is colored, can not, on the other hand, in the least afford to see a candidate put forward, excused, and defended merely because he is colored.

Then we have Harper's Weekly:

The question is: "Shall the military power of the United States be used to force a colored official upon a community against the unanimous protest of its white inhabitants?" If this question be answered in the affirmative, we may have to face a renewal of the civil war.

We doubt the expediency of raising such as issue. We regret to add that there is a trace of vindictiyeness and provocation in the course pursued by the Post-Office Department which has 001313compelled the citizens of Indianola to obtain their mail at a post-office 30 miles away instead of at another only 4 miles distant.

Conceding, for the sake argument, that the inhabitants of Indianola had defied Federal authority--which is not clear, since no threat of violence was made, and Mrs. Cox seems to have resigned her office voluntarily--we doubt the constitutionality of the measure taken by Mr. Roosevelt.

He could, unquestionably, have appointed another negro to the post-office at Indianola and upheld him with the judicial and military powers of the Federal Government.

But where does he get the right to deprive an American community of postal facilities, the cost of which it helps to defray? We sincerely hope that the real, though unavowed, motive of the attempt to discipline the citizens of Indianola is not, instead of being a somewhat belated resolve to enforce rigorously the privileges granted to colored persons by the reconstruction amendments of the Constitution, a bid for the colored vote in certain Northern States where it holds the balance of power.

Does Mr. Roosevelt imagine himself to be a truer friend to the colored race than Booker T., Washington, who has repeatedly advised his brethren to forego officeholding or office-seeking in that section of the country which resents even an approach to negro domination?

I have read those extracts from these exponents of Northern opinion for the purpose of showing that there is a saner view, a more patriotic, a more conservative, and a more just view of the difficulties which beset us of the South than has obtained heretofore.

Discussing as I have been doing the question of motives, and I deal with motives here very reluctantly, but following the thought I have just read from Harper's Weekly as to whether or not the purpose of this new-born zeal, this cold-blooded, calculating, advisedly taken action has any such low motive, I hold in my hand the figures of the last census giving for each State of the Union the persons of negro descent, together with the number of male persons of voting age. I shall not read it all, but I shall put it in the Record as a matter of information to those who wish to make calculations and comparisons and deductions. I will merely call off a few of the States which are doubtful, and let the people judge for themselves whether or not the suspicion which is in the mind of the editor of Harper's Weekly has any foundation in fact.

Maryland has 60,000 negroes of voting age; Pennsylvania, 51,000--I am using round figures only--New York, 31,000: Illinois, 20,000; New Jersey, 21,000; Kansas, 14,000; West Virginia, 14,000; Delaware, 8,000.

Mentioning these States for the purpose of directing attention to them specially, I will give the full table:

Persons ofNegroes of State or Territory. negro devotingage,scent, 1900, 1900.Georgia1,034,813223,073 Mississippi907,630197,936 Alabama827,307181,471South Carolina782,307152,860 Virginia660,722146,123 Louisiana650,460147,384North Carolina624,469127,114 Texas620,722136,875 Tennessee480,243112,236 Arkansas366,85687,157 Kentucky284,78674,728 Maryland235,03460,406 Florida 230,73061,417Missouri161,23446,418 Pennsylvania156,84551,668 New York 99,23231,425 Ohio 96,90131,235District of Columbia86,70223,072Illinois 85,07829,762 New Jersey69,84421,474 Indiana57,30518,186 Kansas52,00314,695 West Virginia43,49914,786 Indian Territory36,853 9,146 Massachusetts31,97410,456 Delaware30,697 8,374 Oklahoma18,831 4,827 Michigan15,816 5,193 Connecticut15,226 4,576 Iowa12,693 4,441 California11,045 3,711 Rhode Island 9,092 2,765 Colorado 8,570 3,212 Nebraska 6,296 2,298 Minnesota4,936 2,168 Wisconsin2,542 1,006 Washington 2,514 1,239 Arizona1,848 1,084 New Mexico 1,610775Montana1,523711Maine 1,319445 Oregon1,105560 Wyoming940481 Vermont826289 Utah672358 New Hampshire662230 South Dakota465184 Idaho293130 North Dakota286115 Hawaii23393 Alaska168141 Nevada13470

Let any student of politics take the statistics of the last election, or the last three elections, and place alongside of these figures the majorities which were obtained, and judge for himself. I have not added up the figures, but I stand here to say that it his perfectly clear to my mind that the presence in the border States on both sides of the old Mason and Dixon line, the Ohio and the Potomae, of negroes in the numbers that 001414are shown to exist, proves that there are some six or seven hundred thousand of them, all told, and that it is the influence, the coercion, if I may use the term, of this small fragment or fraction of the race that appears to be behind the President's policy. In other words, 800,000 negroes, if there be so many, are coercing 50.000,000 white people at the North to deal with 17,000,000 white people at the South in the interest of 8,000,000 ignorant negroes down there.

I might comment with some degree of dissatisfaction upon this unpleasant fact; I might ask whether "blood is thicker than water;" but I do not wish to dwell too long upon the political side of this issue. I wish, however, to call attention to this fact: If you should call the roll of every man who wore the gray in the unfortunate civil strife which ended thirty-seven years ago--that gallant band of heroes who went to death for what they believed to be their rights--I am absolutely certain you could not get a response from 200,000 of them. The rest have "crossed over the river" and are resting with Jackson and Lee. This being true, it occurs to me to ask you Senators from the North when the war is to terminate, or is it ended now? This generation of Southern men had nothing to do with the bringing on of that war. The generation which fought the war were not responsible for slavery. Slavery is dead and gone and the Union is restored. I know of no man in the South who would restore slavery if he could. The whites were emancipated from a thralldom of ignorance and debasing conditions, which was as much to their advantage as was the emancipation of the negroes.

But consider, if you please, how many more generations are to come and go, confronted as they are by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, which were put upon the Constitution as the reaping of the fruits of the unfortunate fratricidal strife, and sat whether they are to be forever in the grasp of a political machine which ignores the fact that they are Anglo-Saxons as well as you; that they have that same feeling of caste which you have in a less degree, but that their sentiments and prejudices and inherited feelings of whatever character are ignored, and in several of the States they are constantly face to face with a condition without example in history, where a minority of white men are forever facing a situation in which their liberties and civilization may be jeopardized by the negro vote.

We have had three race problems in the nation's history. By common consent, North and South, we have acted upon the policy that there were no good Indians except dead ones. We have pushed the red man backward, westward, ever, ever westward, until by the overpowering, thronging white population the red men have been practically destroyed and the small remnant of those great tribes which once owned this continent are now corralled upon their reservations. A few thousand mainly mixed bloods without hope and without liberty or equality are being given in the Indian Territory some little recognition of the obligations of this Government in parceling among them in severalty the lands set apart for those who had been transported across the Mississippi. In a few years those lands will also be owned by the palefaces.

Next we had the Chinese coming from the Pacific, swarming over to develop our mines and build our railroads. But as soon as the competition between the Celestials and the Americans became sharp a universal demand arose that the Chinese should be excluded, and notwithstanding the fact that they are superior in every respect to the negroes, they have been kept out.

The negro alone of the three races other than the white with which we have had to deal as a people has excited a sympathy born of sentiment and his condition of slavery and has produced a conflagration the recollection and the magnitude of which will be a memory to be regretted by this people during the balance of their history, and history has no record of so grand and great a struggle in all its annals.

What has this race question, this negro questions, cost us a people? Speaking in general language, I want to remind you that from the very best sources of information I can get the cost in men--brave, gallant, heroic, patriotic men, the very flower of our country on both sides--was a half million or more. In money and property the east estimate is five billion dollars. Of the blood and the tears and the misery, the horrors of civil strife, I shall make no mention. But when we recall the facts which I have just repeated to you as to what this race problem has already cost us, and shall dwell as I shall do later on upon the conditions now confronting us, I ask you to meet me upon the same plane of patriotism, of race pride, and of civilization, and not to fall into the dirty cesspool of partisan polities. Ignorance and fanaticism are responsible for 001515the civil war. Have we statesmanship enough to avoid the more direful struggle which threatens?

Returning to the thread of my story, because I want to get all the evidence in, for I am going to try this case just as impartially as if I myself was before the bar of God, I want to read you an extract from a letter published by the President of the United States on the 27th of last November. It was written in answer to two letters which he had received from some gentlemen in Charleston discussing a Federal appointment. Mr. Roosevelt in this communication uses the following language:

The great majority of my appointments in every State have been of white men. North and South alike it has been my sedulous endeavor to appoint only men of high character and good capacity, whether white or black. But it is and should be my consistent policy in every State, where their numbers warranted it, to recognize colored men of good repute and standing in making appointments to office. These appointments of colored men have in no State made more than a small proportion of the total number of appointments. I am unable to see how I can legitimately be asked to make an exception for South Carolina. In South Carolina, to the four most important positions in the State. I have appointed three men and continued in office a fourth, all of them white men--three of them originally Gold Democrats--two of them, as I am informed, the sons of Confederate soldiers. I have been informed by the citizens of Charleston whom I have met that those four men represent a high grade of public service.

I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feeling of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope--the door of opportunity--is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong. If, as you hold, the great bulk of the colored people are not yet fit in point of character and influence to hold such positions, it seems to me that it is worth while putting a premium upon the effort among them to achieve the character and standing which will fit them.

The question of "negro domination" does not enter into the matter at all. It might as well be asserted that when I was governor of New York I sought to bring about negro domination in that State because I appointed two colored men of good character and standing to responsible positions--one of them to a position paying a salary twice as large as that paid in the office now under consideration; one of them as a director of the Buffalo exposition. The question raised by you and Mr.--in the statements to which I refer is simply whether it is to be declared that under no circumstances shall any man of color, no matter how upright and honest, no matter how good a citizen, no matter how fair in his dealings with all his fellows, be permitted to hold any office under our Government. I certainly can not assume such an attitude, and you must permit me to say that in my view it is an attitude no man should assume, whether he looks at it from the standpoint of the true interest of the white man of the South of the colored man of the South-not to speak of any other section of the Union. It seems to me that it is a good thing from every standpoint to let the colored man know that if he shows in a marked degree the qualities of good citizenship--the qualities which in a white man we feel are entitled to reward-then he will not be cut off from all hope of similar reward.

Without any regard as to what my decision may be on the merits of this particular applicant for this particular place, I feel that I ought to let you know clearly my attitude on the far broader question raised to you and Mr.--, an attitude from which I have not varied during my term of office.

I have read this letter, Mr. President, for the purpose of giving to you that broad and high view which the President maintains. I want to be entirely just and fair to him. I have no purpose by implication or indirection to attack his motives, but I want to show how superficial is the view, how little and small and infinitesimal is the knowledge behind such a view.

First opening up the evidence, I want to say here and now that the facts I can bring to bear are overwhelming which go to prove that the masses of the Northern people have no more use for the colored man at close quarters than we have. If you occupy this attitude by reason of caste, the fact that you have not been brought in contact with negroes and you know nothing about them, still let that number be ever so small, wheresoever there are any of them this race prejudice or caste feeling exists.

I have here a letter which appeared in the Washington Post a few days ago from a South Carolinian, a colored man by the name of Samuel II. Blythewood, describing his treatment and the environment to which he is subjected in the city of Philadelphia:

Sir: I am a colored man, a mechanic by trade. There is nothing in the line of a house in wood that I can not make. I can build all the stairs, windows, make the sashes, blinds, and doors, draw the plans, make blue Prints, make the specifications, and give estimates. Yet I am debarred from employment on account of my color. The prejudice in this city is strong against me, much stronger than in the place I came from. No one wants me because I am a colored man. Why is this? I am 37 years old. I drew the plans of the colored church on Tasker street, above Twentieth. my name is on the corner-stone. I built the State Colored College of Orangeburg, S.C., and I have built cottages in Orangeburg and for the mayor of Beaufort, S.C., but still I am debarred from employment in Philadelphia.SAMUEL H. BYTHEWOOD.

I have here a copy of the Hartford Daily Courant of March 38, 1902. It relates the pitiful condition of a well-to-do colored man by the name of Edwards, who owned a 001616home immediately adjoining a school. The school board wanted his land to enlarge the playground or something. They bought it, and then he tried to go somewhere and buy another home. Here, in brief, is his experience:MR. EDWARDS'S HOME-HAVING SOLD IT, HE HAS TROUBLE GETTING ANOTHER-HARD LUCK OF A RESPECTABLE COLORED MAN IN TRYING TO BUY OR RENT A HOME FOR HIS FAMILY.

William B. Edwards is one of the best known colored man in Hartford, a modest, retiring man, intelligent and self-respecting. He is employed by the Hartford Fire Insurance Company as messenger and janitor, and is well known to nearly everyone in the city as the janitor of the Center Church. Just now he is looking for a home for himself and family, and has hard luck in buying or renting.

Mr. Edwards is at present living at No. 44 Wadsworth street, where he has made his home for the past twenty years, but having sold the house to the South School district, whose property it adjoins, he has been asked by the district committee to vacate as soon as possible; and this he is trying to do, but without signal success. To begin with, Mr. Edwards does not think he has been used quite fairly by the district in the purchase of the house. It seems that some years ago Mr. Baker, then chairman of the district committee, approached him with the statement that the district would probably want his house some time. Nothing happened under Mr. Baker's administration in the way of getting the property, however, and not until Gen. H.C. Dwight was chairman did negotiations for the house begin. Mr. Edwards was asked what he considered his property worth, and after consultation with Gen. William H. Bulkeley as to the probability of the district's ever buying it, he fixed the figure at $6,500.

Another property directly in the rear of Mr. Edwards's lot is owned by Alonzo Edwards, who is a white man. This lot faces on Hudson street, and adjoins the school property very much as Mr. Edwards's property does. Mr. Edwards says he considered that his property was worth more than the Alonzo Edwards property, as it has a frontage of 90 feet and a depth of 153 feet, while the Hudson street property has a frontage of only 60 feet. At a meeting of the district held two years ago General Dwight reported that the Edwardses, both the colored and the white Edwards, wanted exorbitant prices for their property, and that the district ought not to buy at the figures. The proposed purchase was dropped, and just before the June meeting of the district in 1901 Mr. Edwards was again approached, this time by Mr. Hansling, of the committee, as to what he would sell his property for. This time Mr. Edwards referred the matter to ex-Governor Bulkeley, but there was no satisfactory action taken by the meeting.

Mr. Edwards says that late in fall of 1901 a real estate agent approached him on the matter and worried him a great deal about it. Finally he went to General Dwight and said that he wished to sell directly to the district and not through an agent. He was asked his lowest figure and said it was $5,500. The reason the figure was placed so low was that he was nervous and worried and had family afflictions and he agreed to let it go. At the same time he expected that he would be used as well as his white namesake. A meeting of the district was called and it was voted to buy both lots. No papers had been passed before he ascertained, as he says, that the district was going to pay Alonzo Edwards $7,000 for the Hudson street lot. He was worked up over this and consulted friends, saying that he did not think the district was using him right, and suggesting that he withdraw from the bargain. His friends advised him to stick to it and the house was sold to the district at the figure named. The house, which Mr. Edwards had brought of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company twenty year ago, had passed from his hands. To his surprise he read in a few days that the Alonzo Edwards property had been bought by the district for $8,000. "Then I kicked," he says. But it was too late.

But this is the beginning of the story. Mr. Edwards immediately set himself about getting another home. Consulting Fred. M. Lincoln, real estate agent, he got track of a new house down on Adelaide street and made a bargain to buy it for $3,250, the trading being done by the agent. The sum of $250 was paid to bind the bargain, and when the deed was prepared Mr. Edwards inspected it, and the owner of the property, a Mr. Kerns, came into the office of Francis Chambers to sign the document. Mr. Edwards was not in evidence, and left the office, supposing that the matter was adjusted. In the evening of last Thursday, however, some one met him on the street and told him that Kerns would not sign because the proposed purchasers were colored. He went to Mr. Chambers's office at once and Mr. Kearns was there, and the conversation between Mr. Chambers and Mr. Kerns was something like this:"Did you not agree to sell this property through Mr. Lincoln to any respectable person?"Yes.""You did not tell the agent not to sell to a Chinaman?""No.""Nor to a Japanese?""No.""You didn't tell Mr. Lincoln to sell to a Yankee and to no one else?""No.""You didn't tell him not sell to a negro?""No; I told him to sell to a respectable person; that's all.""Well." said Mr. Chambers, "I have known Mr. Edwards many years and he is as respectable as any man of my acquaintance."

Just then Mr. Edwards stepped inside the office and Mr. Kerns "scooted out," to use Mr. Edwards's language, and Edwards has not seen him since. Mr. Lincoln returned the bargain money of $250 to Mr. Edwards and that transaction was closed, unfortunately for Mr. Edwards.

Another phase of the story was yet to develop. Mr. Edwards saw an advertisement in one of the evening papers to the effect that three tenements were to rent at No. 35 Summer street, with the further information "to colored people only. Large families no objection." He thought the name of the street sounded rather large, but he investigated and found it to be the house of A. Goodman. He said to Mr. Goodman that if he really meant to have colored people live in his house he would like to rent it, but cautioned him that it would be to the disadvantage of property for him to do so, owing to the prejudice against color. Mr. Goodman replied that the neighbors had found fault with his children and insulted them, and that he was going to let them live beside colored people and see how they would like that. Mr. Edwards assured him that his family was respectable, and that the only difficulty was their skin was black,

001717

He thought the rent was secured, and was congratulating himself on getting it, when on Monday Mr. Goodman appeared in distress, saying that the bank was going to call in its loan on the property. Mr. Edwards said that under those conditions he would not take the rent. Mr. Goodman assured him that if he could arrange the matter the rent was still his. Mr. Edwards told him the mistake he made was putting such an advertisement in the papers. It had set the neighbors wild, and they had made a move against him. He did not suppose there would have been any objection to his living there, but "colored families only with large families" was something the people would resent. There the matter rests, and Mr. Edwards is still hunting for a comfortable rent for a respectable family of color.

Next I have a copy of the Boston Globe of June 2, 1902. I will read headlines and merely print and insert, with the permission of the Senate, two articles. The first is as follows:FEELING IS VERY BITTER--HOWARD AND MARSHALL GET SCANT COURTESY--COLORED BOYS AT EXETER ARE TREATED BY STUDENTS WITH CONTUMELY--RESENTMENT SHOWN OVER THEIR WITHDRAWAL FROM THE ATHLETIC TEAM.

Exeter, N.H., June 1, 1902.

It is the general belief in town that if Howard and Marshall, the colored boys until recently in the squad, were good enough to represent the school at the meet they were good enough to eat at the training table, and their resentment of insults by leaving the team is generally commended.

In student circles, however, feeling against them is very bitter, and in the march of the school from the campus after the meet they were treated with contumely.

This was in direct variance with the Exeter spirit. Twice has a colored man been elected class-day orator, and colored men, notably Jones, the star tackle, Lawton, Syphax, and Marshall, now a Boston lawyer, have repeatedly represented Exeter on elevens, nines, and track teams, eating at training tables.

It is almost a certainty that Howard would have won the mile in yesterday's meet, and that Marshall would have taken third place in the shot put. He was a substitute on last fall's eleven and was given an "E," being the single man who did not play in the Andover game to gain the distinction.

An unintentional omission was made in yesterday's report of the meet. McGovern and Marshall, of Andover, who tied for second place in the high jump at 5 feet 7 1/2 inches, should have been credited with breaking a dual meet record, 5 feet 6 inches, established in the 1909 meet by Connor, of Exeter, and Botchford, of Andover.The same Boston paper contains the following:

WOMAN ATTACKED--PLUCKY GIRL ESCAPE FROM NEGRO--MISS MARY R. GREEN DEFENDED HERSELF BRAVELY--WAS IN HER UNCLE'S GROUNDS AT WORCESTER--BURLY RUFFIAN TRIED TO DO HER VIOLENCE--FLED, BUT WAS CAPTURED A FEW HOURS AFTERWARDS.

Worcester, June 1, 1902.

Mary R. Green, 28 years old, a niece of Andrew H. Green, of New York, was attacked by a burly negro on the grounds of her uncle, Martin Green, of Green Hill farm, this afternoon, and escaped from his clutches only after a most terrible struggle.

The man was drunk at the time, and to his condition as well as to the plucky fight put up in defense is due the escape of the young woman. She fought her assailant for five minutes, and then, frightened by her calls for help, the negro fled to the woods. He was captured three hours later.

The news of the assault did not spread, and few knew of it outside of the police, to whom it was reported at once, but this evening, when the news was circulated, there was great excitement.

Miss Green is a daughter of the late Dr. Samuel F. Green, for many years a missionary to India. She lived with her uncle, Martin Green, on his summer estate. She went to the Sabbath school of the Central church and was returning soon after 1 o'clock when she was attacked.

Green Hill is situated on the east side of Lincoln street, in the north part of the city, and the Green estate embraces many acres. The entrance gate is at the end of Green lane, which extends from Lincoln street, and Miss Green had entered the grounds to walk up to the house.

She had not gone far when she saw the man walking down the avenue from the house, but she paid no attention to him, as it is not uncommon for strangers to stroll through the grounds.

She was about to pass him when he rushed upon her and violently threw her to the ground. The young woman struggled and called for help, but this seemed only to exasperate the miscreant, who tore her clothing and held her to the ground.

When he became alarmed he started to run and was soon lost in the woods, but it was known that he had gone toward Lake Quinsigamond, and in that direction pursuit was taken. The bicycle squad and all the day force of the police department were ordered to search for the negro.

Sergeant Hill and Patrolmen Power, Thayer, Jackson, Knight, and Streeter were sent through the woods in the vicinity. Power and Thayer got a clew which led them in the direction of Bloomingdale, and there near the engine house, they came upon him. He submitted quietly to arrest.

He had the appearance of just getting over a spree. One of the officers says he denied having committed any assault, but admitted having met a woman somewhere and taking hold of her. Even this much he would not admit later, but maintained that he had not committed any assault.

Miss Green and her uncle called at the police station, and the young woman positively identified her assailant.

The prisoner gave his name as William Johnson, and said he was 40 years old. He said he was born in Maryland and later moved to Harrisburg, and from there came to this city last fall. He was a laborer, and said he worked for a contractor named Bernard, whose other name he could not give.

Johnson is known to a few people in that vicinity of Hanover street. He roomed in a house on that street, near Arch street, and his quarters were frequently the scene of carousals, so his neighbors say.

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The condition of Miss Green is not alarming. It was feared at first that she would suffer from shock, but her uncle thinks she will be able to appear against her assailant in court to-morrow morning.

These may be isolated cases: they may not reflect the general feeling and sentiment of the Northern people or conditions there; but there are every day facts coming out going to show my contention to be true that the more the Northern people find out about the negro the less use they have for him. To use the expression which I have used once before, they love him according to the square of the distance. He is, they think, an admirable voter in the South, and in the border States, where his vote counts for so much. Under the Constitution he is entitled to all the rights and privileges of other citizens, and many millions of unthinking Americans are drifting along that road absolutely ignorant and oblivious of where it is going to lead.

I will not spend more time to prove that there is prejudice and caste feeling among the Northern people in regard to the negro. If anyone wants to dispute it, let him produce his evidence and then I will be ready with some more facts to back up my position.

Right here, I think it very well to remind Senators that in this district we have the most striking example of the calm, considerate judgment of the leaders of the Republican party that the negro's ballot is a menace to good government. We had in this District in 1807 an enactment which gave the citizens, white and black, some control over local affairs and the levying of taxes and their expenditure. After five years the experiment had proven so absolute a failure that Congress, to save itself or save the city of Washington, felt constrained to repeal the act, and to institute the form of government we now have, which is as autocratic as that of Russia or China, or any other absolute government.

Why was it right or necessary to take the ballot from the negro here, and to take along with it the ballot of the white man, and yet it is right and proper to continue the partisan cry that there must be a free vote and fair count in the South, and that every negro man should cast his ballot and have it counted, without regard to intelligence, or character, or anything else?

I leave those who are ready to defend this policy now, if there be any left, to specify. We have reached a period in the evolution of this question in which Northern sentiment has come to concede and to acknowledge that there was a blunder and a crime, or a mistake bordering on crime, when the negroes were enfranchised in the manner they were.

We have seen Southern State after Southern State exercise every possible ingenuity under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to reduce the number of negro voters and to minimize the danger from that source, and without protest almost from the North. Therefore I feel that we are approaching a period when this sane and patriotic view will obtain throughout the country, when the best thought North and South will come together and consider what can be possibly done for this colored brother, this man in black, and at the same time not jeopardize and destroy the white people who live where the negroes are thickest.

I shall approach that subject from the viewpoint of a man living in a State where there are 235,000 more negroes than there are white people, and some 40,000 more negroes of voting age than there are white people. There is one other State similarly situated-Mississippi, while throughout the South the proportion of negroes to whites varies. There are over a million negroes in Georgia, and a majority of white voters of 30,000 or 40,000, and so on throughout the long catalogue. The table which I have prepared and which I have inserted will facilitate the examination by any person interested in it.

Now, the most striking phrase in the President's letter, the one which appeals strongest to the sentiment of everybody North and South, is that he is unwilling to "shut the door of hope and of opportunity in the face of a worthy and competent colored man." On the first blush there is not a man alive who is a man, who has any of the elements of breadth and depth and liberality and Christianity and humanity, who would no agree with that sentiment.

Did it ever occur to those of you whose feelings are enlisted in that contention that in opening the door of hope and opportunity to this colored man you might be shutting it in the face of his white brother? We in my State for long years lived with the door of hope closed on us and the lock fastened by bayonets, keyed together by a bayonet, while 001919rapine and murder and misgovernment and anarchy and every other thing which ought not to have been ran riot, with a travesty on government, an abomination in the sight of God and man presiding over the destinies of the Palmetto State.

We had the door shut, and it seemed to have closed for all time. We pried it open by force because we had to pry it open or suffocate. Even now the sunshine which comes to us from God's blue sky has up there the shadow of a negro with a ballot in his hand. We have exercised, as I said, our ingenuity and all the ability as lawyers and statesmen which we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to minimize and reduce the evil and to push it away from us. But it remains.

As chairman of the committee on suffrage in the constitutional convention, which I had struggled for for four years as governor to have called for the express purpose of dealing with this question; as a man born on a slave plantation where there were one hundred of them belonging to my family; with experience some little insight into the horrors of the war, and with a full knowledge of what happened during the reconstruction era when the carpetbag vampires and their negro dupes were running riot in South Carolina, I approached it with all the solemnity of a man resolved by every possible scheme that we could devise to take the ballot from every negro alive, if that had been allowed. But we could not do it, because the fifteenth amendment barred the way.

The fifteenth amendment prohibits any discrimination on account of race, color, or previous condition. Therefore we had the simple and only alternative to provide for an educational qualification, with an elastic provision which enabled the illiterate whites to be registered, because we were unwilling to take the ballot from those of our own blood, some of them the best men we have, who had lost the opportunity to get an education in their youth because they were fighting.

We found after we had completed our work that there were some 15,000 negroes who were then ready to register. I suppose that the number has increased since by education to 25,000, while the number of whites who were able to register is something like a hundred thousand. So that for the time we have a breathing spell. We are at ease for the moment. But the relief is only temporary.

Along with the instrument which deprived the negroes of the right to vote because they could not read and write we placed in the constitution a provision which levied a 3-mill tax for public schools, and so again there was no discrimination on account of race, color, or previous condition. Therefore, the history of education in South Carolina for the last twenty-five years before the new constitution and since has been that there are more negro children in our public schools than there are white.

While we have opened the door of hope for a while to the whites, and shallow thinkers are ready to suppose that a solution of the race problem in the South has been reached, every man who can look beyond his nose can see that with the negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who can read and write among the colored race, with such preponderance of numbers as they have, will in time encroach upon and reach and overbalance our white men. And then what will happen? Will the door of hope be closed again on us by submitting to negro domination? Take it home and sleep on it, and then give me your answer.

Why can we not afford it? This brings a long train of witnesses to show the difference between the Caucasian and the colored race, and to demonstrate to the satisfaction of every student of ethnology and history that the Southern white men can not, without absolute destruction to their civilization, submit to it.

I will begin in Washington. This city has been the very hotbed, the hothouse, where the effort to elevate the African and educate him and humanize him and civilize him and Christianize him has had its best development, or, rather, the effort has had unlimited money and encouragement. It has been right here under the aegis of the American eagle, in sight of the Dome of the Capitol, and what are the results?

I have here one of the most interesting, instructive and valuable compilations that I suppose has ever been written by anyone. I did not know it was in existence until I began the investigation of this subject. I should like for Congress to have it printed as a document if the consent of the owner of the copyright could be obtained, and let every student of our political and sociological and ethnological conditions get hold of it. It is termed "The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro." a publication by the American Economic Association, volume 11, printed in 1896 by Macmillan & Co., New York. It is written by Frederick L. Hoffman, statistician to the Prudential Insurance Company of America; and in order that the astounding facts which this gentleman 002020marshaled, purely as a scientific investigator, may receive such due credence as they appear to me to be entitled to. I will read briefly and extract from his preface. I want to introduce Mr. Hoffman to the Senate. I never knew of him until a few days ago myself.

At the commencement of my investigation, especially in regard to longevity and physiological peculiarities among the colored population. I was confronted with the absence of any extensive collection of data free from the taint of prejudice or sentimentality. Being of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from a personal bias which might have made an impartial treatment of the subject difficult. By making exclusive use of the statistical method and giving in every instance a concise tabular statement of the facts, I believe that I have made it entirely possible for my readers to arrive at there own conclusions, irrespective of the deductions that I have made.

During the course of my inquiry it became more and more apparent that there lie at the root of all social difficulties or problems racial traits and tendencies which make for good or ill in the fate of nations as well as of individuals. It became more apparent as the work progressed that, in the great attempts at world bettering, at the amelioration of the condition of the lower races by those of higher degree of culture and economic well-being, racial traits and tendencies have been almost entirely ignored. Hence a vast sum of evil consequence is met as the natural results of misapplied energy and misdirected human effort.

He speaks here in regard to the city of Washington as follows:

In Washington the colored race has had exceptional educational, religious, and social opportunities. Even in an economic sense the race is probably better off there than anywhere else. According to the census there were in Washington, in 1890, 77 churches for colored people, valued at $1,182,650, with 22,965 communicants. There were 250 colored teachers in charge of 13,332 colored pupils; but there were also during the year 483 young mothers whom neither education nor religion had restrained from open violation of the moral law.

I shall quote further presently, but before I give statistic I wish to bring as a witness the voluntary statement of one of our ex-District Commissioners. I have here a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, consisting of Messrs. Grout, Bingham, McCleary, Allen, and Benton, in charge of the District of Columbia appropriation bill for 1901. Major Sylvester and Mr. Wright, the then Commissioner, having charge of the police department of the city government, were asking for more policemen. Here is what took place:

Mr. BENTON. I would like to ask you if it is not a fact that there is not another city in this country of equal population to this as well patrolled as this. Is there another one?

Major SYLVESTER. Yes: there are better patrolled cities.

Mr. BENTON. There may be a good many more policemen: but is not the criminal class as successfully taken care of in Washington as in any other city of its size in the country?

Major SYLVESTER. I believe so: but when I answer that statement I want to invite your attention to what I stated to you as to the hours of labor these men have.

Mr. BENTON. I recollect what you have said on that subject. You effect it, but you have to work your men more than you ought to.

Here is the Commissioner's statement:

Mr. WIGHT. Perhaps I had better answer that, because it might be a little embarrassing to Major Sylvester. I think it is remarkably to the credit of the police department, with the small amount of men and the large amount of criminal classes--

Mr. BENTON. I did not knew that there was a very great amount. I know there is not a great deal of crime here, comparatively.

The CHAIRMAN. They are not the worst criminals.

Mr. WIGHT. I say it with all kindness, but I state it as a fact, that the 90,000 colored people here are equal to the criminal conditions in any city. They regard life as of no value whatever.

Here is lifelong Republican, charged with the solemn duty of governing this city, and that is what he said. What corroborative evidence have I in regard to the conditions in Washington to sustain this terrible revelation, as it was to me? I will read first from Mr. Hoffman, because I can not be too long about this, and I am only citing gentlemen who wish to investigate, to this book which affords a fund of information about the colored race throughout the country, North and South East and West. He gives here a table furnished from the report of the health officer of the District of Columbia for 1894, in which we have the illegitimacy in Washington for the years from 1879 to 1894. I wish to print it in my remarks, but I shall simply call attention to the facts that the average for the white race in 1894 was 2.92 per cent while the average for the colored race was 22.49 per cent. That was the total of illegitimate births; and the saddest part of all this is that in 1879 there were only 17.60 per cent, of colored, while in 1893 there were 27 per cent, and in 1894 26.46 per cent, and for the four preceding years there had been more than 25 per cent, of births of illegitimate colored children in the city of Washington.

The explanation is made, or, rather, the bald fact is stated, that immorality of that kind, which lies at the very root of civilization and civilizing influences is abroad; that it goes on in spite of religious teachings and educational opportunities. That is the appalling thing for us to consider.

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The table referred to is as follows:Illegitimacy in Washington, D.C., 1879-1894.(Percentage of illegitimate in total number of births.)White.Colored. White.Colored. 1879...2.32 17.6018912.90 25.12 18802.43 19.0218922.53 26.40 18812.33 19.4218932.82 27 18822.09 19.7318942.56 26.46 18833.14 20.9518843.60 19.02Average1885322.881979-1894 2.92 22.49 18863.28 21.86SUMMARY 1879-1894.18873.34 21.2718883.39 22.18Total births,1879-189484,80327,211 18893.59 23.45Illegitimatebirths, 1879-1894 1,032 6,186 18903.34 26.50Percentageillegitimate births 2.92 22.49

Mr. TILLMAN. Now I will quote something from Mr. Hoffman. He says:

I have given the statistics of the general progress of the race in religion and education for the country at large, and have shown that in church and school the number of attending members or pupils is constantly increasing; but in the statistics of crime and the data of illegitimacy the proof is furnished that neither religion nor education has influenced to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. Whatever benefit the individual colored man may have gained from the extension of religious worship and educational processes, the race as a whole has gone backward rather than forward.

Next he says:

It was a favorite argument of the opponents of slavery that freedom, education, and citizenship would elevate the negro to the level of the white in a generation or two. One writer, in a report to the Anti-Slavery Society, which was widely circulated, made use of the following language in regard to the effects of the emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies: "The abolition of slavery gave the death below to open vice. Immediate emancipation, instead of opening the flood gates, was the only power strong enough to shut them down. Those great controllers of moral action, self-respect, attachment to law, and veneration of God, which slavery destroyed, freedom has resuscitated."

That is a quotation. Mr. Hoffman goes on and marshals some facts which utterly annihilated the contention. He says:

The West India slaves were completely emancipated in 1838. About thirty years later the American Missionary, in commenting upon the people of Jamaica, used the following language: "A man may be a drunkard, a liar, a Sabbath breaker, a profane man, a fornicator, an adulterer, and such like, and be known to be such, and go to chapel and hold up his head there, and feel no disgrace from those things, because they are so common as to create a public sentiment in his favor.'

About twenty-five years later James Anthony Froude, the great English historian, wrote of the negro in the West Indies in the following severe terms:

Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they can not be said to sin, because they have no knowledge of the law and therefore can not commit a breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They are married, as they call it, but not parsoned. The woman prefers a looser tie that she may be able to leave the man if he treat her unkindly. A missionary told me that a marriage connection rarely turned out well which begins with legal marriage. The system is strange, but it answers. There is evil, but there is not the demoralizing effect of evil. They sin, but they sin only as animals sin, without shame, because there is no sense of wrongdoing; they eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the difference between good and evil--in fact, these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the fall, and must come of another stock, after all.

Mr. Hoffman resumes:

The statements of the various writers, on the social condition of the West India negro are supported by reliable statistical evidence. The table below, compiled from the annual reports of the registrar-general of Jamaica, bears mute testimony on this point:

Illegitimacy and illiteracy in Jamaica.Percentage of illegitimate births.Percentage of femalessigning marriageregister with mark. 1880-8157.7 66.8 1881-8258.2 67.7 1882-8358.0968.6 1883-8458.9 68.8 1884-8559.9 67.7 1885-8659.6 641886-8759.8 64.8 1887-8860.6 64.8 1988-8960.5 65.5 1889-9061.7 64.9 1890-9160.7 63.7 1891-9260.6 61.6 1892-9360.1 601893-9460.6 59.4 1894-9560.8 57.1

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Indicating the increase in education. Mr. Hoffman sadly comments there. He says:

After fifty years of educational and religious influence under conditions of freedom, sixty out of every hundred births are acknowledged to be illegitimate.

Further on Mr. Hoffman says:this country, during which the most elaborate efforts have been made to improve the moral and social condition of the race, we find that its physical and moral tendency is downward.

After nearly sixty years of freedom in the West Indies and after thirty years of freedom in

One other quotation and I have done with this book for the present. Giving the percentage of criminals, he quotes from the official record of convicts in the Pennsylvania penitentiaries:Convicts in the Pennsylvania penitentiaries, 1886 and 1984. Males.Females.Total Colored. PercentageTotal Colored. of colored. percentage ofcolored. 18861.73024414.10 411434.15 18942.31238416.61 521834.61

Males. Females. Percentage of colored in total population over 15 yearsof age in 18002.232.09

The table shows that in Pennsylvania, in 1894, 16.61 per cent, of the male inmates and 34.61 per cent, of the females were colored; yet in the whole population of the State over 15 years of age only 2.23 per cent, of the males and 2.09 per cent, of the females were persons of African descent, showing an excessively high proportion of colored convicts.

It is rather strange that nearly all, or a large number, of the colored people who have gravitated North from our part of the world must be the bad negroes; and yet, coming in contact with this constantly increasing class of criminals, we find people up there who say that the stock from which they sprang is good enough to govern South Carolina. I will remark in passing that the conditions in our state are even worse. That is the astounding and the inexplicable situation to me. I have here a witness who speaks about Illinois. Benjamin C. Whitehead, of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, writing from Chicago, says:

A THREATENING CLOUD.

The more serious condition growing out of the negro problem is yet to come, criminologists and officers fear. The negro youth is the threatening cloud obscuring all hope of something better. As the first generation after slavery deteriorated in character and moral worth, the negro children of to-day tend toward vice and crime. In the John Worthy School at Chicago, an institution founded upon benevolent ideas and calculated to teach the mistaught boys at the true path to upright citizenship, a most sickening scandal was brought to light from inquiry into the habits and practices of negro boys, and the investigation afforded a very good index to the inclination of even the very young negro children. The details of the scandal are too vile for publication, but the reader who is familiar with negro conduct may have some idea of the character of the testimony if not of the extent of the offenders misconduct.

The negroes form 2 per cent of the population of Illinois.

Very nearly the same proportion that exists in Pennsylvania.At the Illinois Home for Female Juvenile Offenders at Geneva 13 per cent, of the inmates are negroes. At the boys' prison at Pontiac 18 per cent, of those incarcerated are negroes. The negro lists in the juvenile prisons are constantly increasing. In the Chester penitentiary no statistics are furnished regarding the relative number of negroes and whites, but in the Joliet prison Warden Murphy affords the information that more than 16 per cent, of the prisoners are negroes. In connection with this it may be stated that of the female prisoners there 27 are white and 38 are negroes.

It may appear in the eyes of some that I am bringing out all this for the sinister purpose of belittling the negro race--of deoming them to obloquy and mistreatment. I want to say to you--and I say it with all the sincerity of my nature--that I do not hate the 002323negro. I was nursed by a black mammy. I have on my farm in South Carolina to-day a negro man of about my own age, Joe Gibson, who has been with me thirty years. He has charge of my keys and of everything I possess there in the way of a house, furniture, horses and carriages, and everything for a farm of 200 acres, worth some twelve of fifteen thousand Dollars. I trust him implicitly. He can not read and write. He has got a wife who is as trustworthy as he is.

All negroes are not bad; a very small percentage of them are bad; but the bad ones are leading all the rest, and they are patted on the back by the politicians at the North. Every farmer throughout the South who is familiar with the locality in which he lives knows that there are on many of those plantations--in fact, on nearly all of them where any considerable number of negroes live--a large number of good, quiet, peaceable, orderly, and more or less industrious colored people, who are endeavoring to make a living with the least labor possible, and getting along pleasantly and peacefully with their white friends. But the younger generation is worthless--wholly unreliable--and in every community there are young vagabonds most of whom have a smattering of education who are doing all the devilment of which we read every day.

The condition which the President has precipitated by his revival of a worn-out policy, the discussion of the status of this man throughout the country and of his future, will not down. It is like Banquo's ghost, and the sooner we take hold of the question in a calm, statesmanlike way and endeavor to set in motion instrumentalities which will do something to stop the agitation and to help these people, if they can be helped, the better it will be for all concerned.

I am ready to lend any information I possess and to give the best thought I have because I have given thought to this subject for the last thirty years, mainly from the point of view I have occupied up to now, that it was my duty to my own people and to my own State to stand forever opposed to any idea of political or social equality on that part of the negro with the whites of South Carolina. You have just had facts collected by a man whose statements with regard to himself would gain credit anywhere as to being an impartial observer and student of this great question. Opposed to that we have a vast amount of nebulous contention and assertion of claims; and I want to read here the latest that I have come across from the very highest negro authority, a man withstands highest in the estimation of white men North and South of any man of his race-Booker T. Washington.

In an address in New York on Washington's Birthday. Booker T. Washington, at a memorial meeting held in the Academy of Arts and Sciences. devoted his remarks to the consideration of the race problem. He said in part:

Unlike the Indian, the original Mexican, or the Hawaiian, the negro, so far from dying out when in contact with a stronger and different race, has continued to increase in numbers to such an extent that whereas the race entered bondage 20 in number, there are now more than 9,000,000. So I went to emphasize the truth that whether we are of Northern or of Southern birth, whether we are black or white, we must face frankly the hard, stubborn fact that in bondage and in freedom the negro, in spite of all predictions to the contrary, has continued year by year to increase in numbers until he now forms about one-seventh of the entire population, and that there are no signs that the same ratio of increase will not hold good in the future. Further than this, despite of all the changing uncertain conditions through which the race has passed and is passing in this country, whether in bondage or in freedom, he has made a steady gain in acquiring property, skill, habits of industry, education, and Christian character.

To deal directly with the affairs of my own race, I believe that both the teaching of history, as well as the results of everyday observation, should convince us that we shall make our most enduring progress by laying the foundations carefully, patiently, in the ownership of the soil, the exercise of habits of economy the saving of money, the securing of the most complete education of hand and head, and the cultivation of Christian virtues.

I can not believe, I will not believe that the country which invites into its midst every type of European, from the highest to the very dregs of the earth, and gives these comers shelter, protection, and the highest encouragement, will refuse to accord the same protection and encouragement to her black citizens. The negro seeks no special privileges. All that he asks is opportunity--that the same law which is made by the white man and applied to the one race be applied with equal certainty and exactness to the other.

Here we have the apostle of technical and industrial education, a man who has warned his people against the folly of political office, showing in spite of his wisdom that he has the same dream.

I quote again:

All that he asks is opportunity--that the same law which is made by the white man and applied to the one race be applied with equal certainty and exactness to the other.

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I do not wish to comment on his utterances except to show that his hopes and aspirations are natural and even pathetic. But while he gives advice to his people that is wise, afar off he sees a vision of equality, and I say that his dream can never come to pass. His claims about the negro race are largely guesswork and can not stand against the facts as set out by Hoffman.

Mr. President, I do not want to tire the Senate, but I have here the work of a student of ethnology, of sociology and of philosophy, one of the greatest minds of the last century, Max Muller, the famous Sanskirt scholar, who has delved deeper into the mine of Indian lore and East Indian traditions and religion than any other man, living or dead. In his Essay on Caste, he deals directly with the question which confronts us, and it is my desire, if you will be patient with me, to give you some quotations from this scholar, this man whose sole purpose and desire was to give to his countrymen the truth and the facts, as his long years of laborious research had enabled him to arrive at them. And it is in regard to the question of caste--that inherent, irrepressible, indelible feeling which exists in the mind of every human being under certain conditions and circumstances, for which we are not responsible because it grows with our growth in childhood and becomes part and parcel of every fiber of flesh and bone of which our bodies are composed. In explanation of the conditions which he found in India, Muller says:

As soon as we trace the complicated system of caste such as we find it in India at the present day back to its first beginnings we find that it flows from the least three different sources, and that accordingly we must distinguish between ethnological political and professional caste.

Ethnological caste arises whenever different races are brought in contact. There is and always has been a mutual antipathy between the white and the black man and when the two are brought together, either by conquest or migration the white man has invariably asserted his superiority, and established certain social barriers between himself and his dark skinned brother.

The Areas and Sudras seem to have felt this mutual antipathy. The difference of blood and color was heightened in ancient times by difference of religion and language; but in modern times also, and in countries where the negro has learned to speak the same language and to worship the same God as his master, the white man can never completely overcome the old feeling that seems to lurk in his very blood and makes him recoil from the embrace of his darker neighbor. And even where there is no distinction of color, an analogons feeling, the feeling of race asserts its influence as if inherent in human nature. Between the Jew and the Gentile, the Greek and the barbarian, the Saxon and the Celt, the Englishman and the there is something--whether we call it hatred or antipathy or mistrust or mere coldness--which in a primitive state of society would necessarily lead to a system of castes, and which, even in more civilized countries, will never be completely eradicated.

In tracing the condition in India as far back as he could get any authentic information, Muller tells us that caste existed there from the first settlement of that peninsula and he goes on to describe the various strata of society and of population in the two hundred and odd millions of the inhabitants of Hindostan, and he winds up by saying that the word "casts" itself, in its primary significance, simply means color. He gives some very funny and ridiculous descriptions as to what the law of caste has forced those people to do and to believe and to feel. Here for instance, is one:

Low as the Sudra stood in the system of Manu, he stood higher than most of the mixed castes, the Varnasankaras. The son of a Sudra by a Sudra woman is purer than the son of a Sudra by a woman of the highest caste (Manu X, 30) Manu calls the Kandala one of the lowest outcasts, because he is the son of a Sudra father and a Brahmanle mother. He evidently considered the misalliance of a woman more degrading than of a man.

Just as we do.

For the son of a Brahman father and a Sudra mother may in the seventh generation raise his family to the highest caste (Manu X, G1)--

In South Carolina we recognized ocloroons as white people--while the son of a Sudra father and a Brahaman mother belongs forever to the Kandalas. The abode of the Kanadalas must be out of the town, and no respectable man is to hold intercourse with them. By day they must walk about distinguished by badges; by night they are driven out of the city.

He goes on the philosophize on this subject one race antagonism and association and contact, and of the laws of the society even in and, and I will give a quotation without reading it all. He gives a remarkable illustration on the sense of indignation of one of the old-time English aristocracy, saying:

Even in England the public service has but very lately been thrown open to all classes, and we heard it stated by one of the most eminent men that the Indian civil service would no longer 002525be fit for the sons of gentlemen. Why? Because one of the elected candidates was the son of the missionary.

As illustrative of the intense cruelty. I may say, which this law in India has brought about, you all recollect the immolation of the child widows who had married in the infancy, and if the husband to whom they had been married died, they were forbidden to marry anyone else. You all recall the Juggernaut car, with the idolators, so as to speak rushing in front and throwing themselves down to be crushed. You all remember the ceremony of burning after maturity, a woman whose husband had died after marriage and all that kind of thing. Muller states here:

In former times a Pariah was obliged to carry a beil--the very name of Pariah is derived from that bell--in order to give warning to the Brahmans, who might be polluted by the shadow of outcast. In Malabar a Nayadi defiles a Braham at a distance of 74 paces--

If he gets within 74 paces the Brahman is polluted.and a Nayer, though himself a Sudra, would shoot one of these degraded races if he approach too near.

Here is what I want you gentlemen to consider:

Those who know the Hindus best are the least anxious to see them without caste. Colonel Sleeman remarks:

"What chiefly prevents the spread of Chrstianity is the dead of exclusion from caste and its privileges, and the utter hopelessness of their ever finding any respectable circle of society the adopted religion, which converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity now everywhere feel.

He says further:

Caste can not be abolished in India, and to attempt it would be one of the most hazardous operations that was ever performed on a living political body. As a religious institution, caste [?] die; as a social institution, it will live and improve. Let the Sudras, or, as they are called Tamil, the Petta Pittei, the children of the house, grow into free laborers, the Vaisyas into wealth merchants, the Kshatriyas into powerful barons, and let the Brahmans aspire to the position that intellectual aristocracy which is the only true aristocracy in truly civilized countries, and the four castes of the Veda will not be out of date in the nineteenth century, nor out of place in Christian country. But all this must be the work of time. "The teeth," as a native writer [?] "fall off themselves old age, but it is painful to extract them in youth."

Is this the genesis of the Booker Washington idea?

Muller, after devoting a lifetime to the study of the language, literature, and conditions in India, sums up with this declaration. It is worth all the schools and college sermon, and preachments, religious or political, that have ever been uttered on the subject of African regeneration. The mothers must lift the race or its doom is sealed.

AS SOON AS THE FEMALE POPULATION OF INDIA CAN BE RAISED FROM THE PRESENT DEGRADATION; AS SOON AS A BETTER EDUCATION AND A PURER RELIGION HAVE INSPIRED THE WOMEN OF INDIA WITH FEELINGS OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-RESPECT; AS SOON AS THEY HAVE LEARNED--WHAT CHRISTIANITY [?] CAN TEACH--THAT IN THE TRUE LOVE OF A WOMAN THERE IS SOMETHING FAR [A?] THE LAW OF CASTE OR THE CURSES OF PRIESTS, THEIR INFLUENCE WILL BE THE POWERFUL. ON THE ONE SIDE. TO BREAK THROUGH THE THE ARTIFICIAL FORMS OF [C?] AND, ON THE OTHER, TO MAINTAIN IN, INDIA, AS ELSEWHERE, THE TRUE CAST RANK, MANNERS, INTELLECT, AND CHARACTER.

Senators will recollect that the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, with all its horrors, [?] duced by reason of the fact that the English officers the forced the Sepoys simply cartridges with hog grease on them. You will say "That is all no good here; [?] civilized Americans; we are the highest type of men." Bonaparte said. "If you a Russian, you will find a Tartar." If you scratch the white man too deep, you [?] the same savage whose ancestry used to roam wild in Britian when the [?] and best men we have, lose all semblance of Christian human beings in their [?] frenzy when some female of their acquaintance or one of their daughters had [?] and they were as wild and cruel as any tiger of the jungle. You can not [?] over by law. Constitutions do not change human nature.

I come now, after this imperfect portrayal, to another feature. There is [?] terial here, and it covers much ground, in reference to racial antagonism. [?] history of the Danube Valley, with its teeming millions of Slavs and Magyars nians and Servians and Dalmatians, and the Turks and the Macedonians, who [?] 002626putting each other's throats for six centuries, all white people at that, but simply with a racial antagonism.

Look at India, with its two hundred and odd millions, nobody knows how many, governed by 400,000 Englishmen. Where in history can you point to an instance in which white men proper, the best type of white men, or even the lowest type, have been dominated very long by any colored people? It is not in our blood. When you force conditions, when you gentlemen relentlessly and remorselessly stand by your mistakes of the period from 1808 to 1872, when the fifteenth amendment was placed on our backs, and say, "It stands there sacred, and it must stay," you force us to face an alternative which in the future is bound to produce a conflict of races. That dire condition is ahead of us, and, like the sword of Damocles, it hangs by a very slender thread.

We ask you to pause and think. We beg you not to drive us to desperation. You [?] we must keep the door of hope open to the negro. Please consider the shutting of door to the white man. If you could force that policy upon my State and we [?] to it quietly and peaceably, in the next fifty years at the outside we would have majority of negroes in South Carolina who could outvote the whites. Give them a peaceful election, no resistance, absolute equality before the law, and what happens? [?] negroes capture the government. They do not own any of the property, or only a very small percentage. They have none of the intelligence, or so little that it does not [?]. They have none of the character, or so little that it does not count. They have [?] of the of the knowledge of government which is bred in our bones. But let us submit; the negroes take possession; let them have a negro government; let them control taxation; and if we have sunk so low by that time as to forget all traditions of Anglo-Saxons, Caucasians, then what follows?

The governing race in any community, where there is absolute equality before the law, and equality for which the President contends before the law, and equality of opportunity, will in time come to amalgamation with any different race that may be there. The reason why we have not had any amalgamation in any of the racial antagonisms of which I have spoken, except in a limited degree, the reason why the Slavs and the [?] in Hungary have never intermarried to any considerable degree, is because [?] hate each other, and which ever one crosses the line loses caste with his fellows and absorbed into the other race.

What is the fundamental hope, what is the dream of the negro agitators, these men [?] are importuning the President now and are making his life a burden to him in reward to appointments to office of men of their race? I will produce a witness. He may be a good one, but that is my fault. In the Washington Post of January 27 I [?] this statement:

[?] STIRS HIS RACE--VIRGINIA NEGRO LEADER TALKS OF SWORD AND TORCH--WASHINGTON CROWD APPLAUD--JAMES 11. HEINOUS PREDICTS FORCIBLE RESISTANCE TO THE VIRGINA CONSTITUTION AND OTHER ACTS OF DISFRANCHISEMENT PASSED BY SOUTH SOUTHERN LEGISLATURES-TEMPER OF A MASS AT LINCOLN CHURCH.

You all read it, at least most of you did. I will incorporate it in my speech, with the [?] of the Senate.

[?] a mass meeting of colored people at Lincoln Memorial Church at 8 o'clock last night, under spices of the Afro-American Council, prominent negro race made addresses the question of disfranchisement in the Southern States and considerable feeling was man[?].

Cyrus Field Adams, Assistant Register of the Treasury, presided. James H. Hayes, of Richmond, the attorney who has been retained by the colored people of [?] to test the disenfranchisement laws of that State, delivered a speech in which he declared the negro has now reached the limit of endurance, and advocated the sword and torch as a [?] for the negro to maintain his manhood. His remarks were received with great enthusiasm. He referred to the fact that during the years which have elapsed since the war sectional feeling between the North and South has died out to such an extent that Virginia now proposes to place [?] of Lee in Statuary Hall in the National Capitol, but said that all this period has not [?] for the negro to advance one inch beyond the place he held when liberated from [?]

There is nothing in Virginia for the negro," he said, "but degradation unless the negroes firm stand, contend for their rights, and, if necessary, die for them. I am not an anarchist," [?] and I dont mean to kill anybody, but to let somebody else kill you." This [?] provoked loud applause and laughter. "In Virginia," added the speaker, "you [?] Crows,'. You opened the meeting to-night by singing 'My country, 'tis of thee,' but I think the time has come when the negro must fight, not theoretically, not intellectually; but fight [?] hands. The disfranchisement of the children of Israel in Egypt has been followed letter [?] by the disfranchisement of the South."

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He then spoke about Moses being called to lead the Israelities from their bondage and drew attention to the fact that slavery for four hundred years had made them cowards, so that they were obliged to turn back, drawing a parallel to the case of the negro in America.

"A second time," he continued, "the children of God arose. This time they had the leadership of Joshua, and when they went forth from the land of their bondage they did not go meekly, but carried the sword in one hand and the torch in the other. In this country," also he added, "a second generation has grown up in the forty years since the war. The Atlanta Constitution has threatened us with Kuklux if the growth of Federal appointments in the South continues. I make the prediction that when the Southern people start to Kukluxing this time they will not have as the objects of their oppression the same timid people they kukluxed in the sixties.

"Negroes are leaving the State of Virginia because of the treatment they are receiving. What we want to do is to start something, and keep it up until the white people stop something. We don't intend to be oppressed any longer. We don't intend to be crushed. I am afraid we are anarchistic, that we are anarchists, and I give the warning that if this oppression in the South continues the negro must resort to the sword and torch, and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.

"I want to make the assertion right here that we are not going to be disfranchised in Virginia. It is written in the heavens and engraved upon the stars that the Virginia negro does not intend to submit to disfranchisement. We are told, Let the negro obtain education and wealth if he would gain the political equality which he desires," I say that never was a bigger lie uttered. The [?] the negro advances the more will political rights be denied him. It is not the common negro [?] the South who is cut off the registration lists. It is not the ditch digger. It is the educated men the doctor and lawyer and preacher, who are deprived unlawfully of political rights and [?] by the iniquitious constitution of Virginia, which cost half a million dollars to frame. And I [?] to say that by the time we get through punching holes in the constitution it will cost the State Virginia half a million more."

The sting of that speech is in the tail, and I want to read you what this colored orator, who made the members of his race in that tabernacle or church go wild with enthusiasm, as the report states, said:

"It is claimed that the negro industrial schools are the proper lines of effort for the race. Talk about education and wealth, and say that they make votes for the negro. It's a lie. No, they are destroying votes. Every negro who puts on a clean collar and tries to be a man is destroying a vote. I believe God will take care of us. And just one word about the question of the absorption of the races."

The speaker added significantly:

"No two people having the same religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been kept apart. This is well known, and it is one of the reasons why the dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South."

There is your open door and it is easy to see what doom it leads. The purpose [?] and hope of those who indorse this policy and are madly pressing it on us in the South [?] is that we in time shall become a country or State of mulattoes. Wendell Phillips in his Fourth of July speech in 1863 openly advocated amalgamation. Theodore Tilton also advocated it. Thad Stevens practiced it. It was not surprising. It was not to be wondered at that those men who had devoted their lives to the propaganda of abolition should have allowed their sentimentality to get the better of all judgment and race pride. Hayes is of a type of negroes who are growing in number daily. He is [?] more bold and less cunning and cautious than the rest. He repudiates Booker Washington and his teachings, but his race in Washington "go wild" over his ravings.

Look southward, if you please, over the Rio Grande, and tell me what you see no commonwealth, that is self-governing. You see a mongrelized aggregation of Indies and Spaniards and negroes inhabiting that land who make orderly government a byword and a hissing. [?] such doom as that is possible to the Southern States. No such scheme will ever receive the indorsement of the American people, and if it does then god have mercy on the country, for there will be a hundred times more blood shed than ever was shed before. "The stars in their courses fight against sisera. I do not threaten you. I prayerfully [?] you. I know those people. I know your stock as well as mine. You would submit to it. We can not. We dare not. We will not.

I want to touch a moment on the effect of education on men. Under existing [?] we are left absolutely without any barrier in dealing with suffrage other than the ability to read and write. In my State we have enlarged that by permitting that who pays tax on $300 worth of property, whether or not they read or write, to use ballot. But who here is prepared to say that the mere acquirement of enough education, to read and write a good citizen--that it fits a man for the complicated duties of self-government and participation in self-government? Pope declared that "A little learning is a dangerous thing,"and it is the quintessence of folly to suppose that the African can emulate, or [?] imitate even, the Anglo-Saxon in matters of government. The history of [?] 002828in the continent where it originated and still exists by the hundreds of millions is that of barbarism, savagery, cannibalism, and everything which is low and degrading.

This has been the story of all the centuries. It is idle to expect such beings to be transformed in a generation or two into good citizens capable of governing themselves.

My observation teaches me that where is no moral training there is no character. If along with the training of the head--the mere ability to translate letters into word--there be not a training of the moral faculties faculties, the realization of the difference between right and wrong, the instinct to tell the truth, to be virtuous and honest, what good do your three little r's do?

I did not want to say anything about what are the conditions in the South as I know them to be by personal contact and observation all my life. I have preferred to marshall the evidence of an unbiased witness, who has taken official reports and the scientific data, and to tell you what he has to say about this race. But I am willing to say that [?] little smattering of education which negroes are receiving now has absolutely no [?] upon their upbuilding as a people. It does not increase by one-quarter of an [?] their stature in manhood. It is not elevating, but enervating and destructive of the [?] virtues of the negro race, and they have their virtues as well as we have.

I want to direct your attention to a remarkable fact in the history of this country, which can not be too much dwell upon. When the Southern white men, from 16 to 60 years of age, all of them living in the cotton States, except a few in the mountains, had left their homes during the civil war to follow the standards of Lee and Jackson, of Johnston and Forrest, and when there were absolutely no men there except the old men above 60 and 65 and the little schoolboys--and the country then was much less thickly populated than it is now and altogether more agricultural--with over 4,000,000 negroes there were at least 1,000,000 males of adult age, slaves scattered throughout the breadth of the land, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and the wives and daughters of their masters were left to their care and protection.

The negroes knew the war was to settle the question of their future liberty or continued slavery. If there existed in their hearts any cause for hatred and resentment and desire for revenge, such as you gentlemen in your youth were led to believe existed [?] reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel and other sources of information and when [?] poured out its plea for the poor, downtrodden African--if these people had [?] been imbued with one-tenth of the hatred of the whites which exist to-day, if they [?] cause for late, what would have been the consequences upon the helpless white women and children then living among them? The very imagination sickens at the picture of rapine and number and of the cruelties and horrors of which we have read in [?] and San Domingo, and which would have been repeated in the South. Yet they were slaves and had, as you believe, ample cause for revenge and hate.

But what are the facts, Senators? During those four dark years there is not of [?] a solitary case where a negro man wronged a white woman. What is the situation [?] take your morning paper and read it any day in the year, and there is hardly a day in which your sensibilities are not wrought up and passions aroused or our pity [?] by some tale or horror and of woe.

I tell you from my own experience and observation that the old sense of security [?] of love and friendship on the part of the negro for his white master and his mistress [?] the children, which I myself experience in my boyhood, had gone. With the remnant the old negroes who were born in slavery and had some of that training (all of whom [?] now necessity above 40) gone, the last restraining and conservative element among [?] will have disappeared. They have been taught that they are the equals of the [?] During the reconstruction period, when they had the ballot and professed to [?], and levied taxes and marched themselves in the statehouses, constantly squander- and stealing of our substances, they learned their lesson well. They tasted blood. They were innoculated with the virus of equality. "License they mean when they ery Liberty:For who loves that must first be wise and good."among the dusky millions who were held in bondage there were, of course, many [?] been cruelty wronged and suffered injustice, but the overwhelming major [?] had no feeling for their masters and their families except love and veneration looked up to them as superior beings. They felt the obligations of the trusts which 002929had been reposed in them, and many of them were true unto death. The fact which can not be disputed is one to give us pause when we undertake to analyze the present conditions.

So the poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentaries and our jails, lurking around to see if some helpless white woman can be murdered or brutalized. Yet he can read and write. He has a little of the veneer of education and civilization, according to New England ideas.

I do not blame the New England people. They have none, or few, of the negroes. The whole number beyond New York would not equal the negroes in my county. The people up there can afford to theorize and to determine upon the life and death of the civilization of the South from their standpoint of sentimentality, if they are willing, but I do not believe they now willing. I do not believe they want to. I give them credit for more love of humanity and of their kind than to bring on a conflict of that sort. If there were no higher motives. I give them credit for more statesmanship. But, with the constantly increasing hatred between the races, with the older white men, acquainted with the better negroes, dying off, as they are doing rapidly; with the old negroes, the grandfathers of the race, dying off rapidly, as they are doing, in a very short while those who know anything of the relation of the slave and the master in the old days will have disappeared and gone.

And then the younger generation of white men, who are hating these negroes in return, whose animosity and antagonism grow apace with these acute situations and conditions, have got to face this problem. I thank God sometimes that I will not live to see the thing brought to a focus. I am endeavoring in my feeble way to beg you, for God's sake, not to help produce that acute stage of fever and race hatred and carry it through until you bring into people those angry passions which will put the races at each other's throats with the resolve on the part of the whites to die or maintain their supremacy. Every one knows what will be the result.

What effect does it have to appoint a negro to office in a community, many of which I could mention in my State, where there are three or five negroes to one white, just as there are in Indianola three negroes to a white person in that entire community, and in the adjoining county of Washington there are absolutely ten to one, just as in Beaufort, S.C., there are ten to one? What effect does it have for the knowledge to go out all over and among them, at their churches and everywhere else, that the great President of the United States is still their friend; that he does not intend to allow the "door of hope to be shut upon them;" that he wants to offer them an opportunity in life; that [?] is going to recognize them and give them offices to represent the United States Government? Does that tend to peace, tend to good order, tend to produce that feeling of subordination which is their only salvation?

Some people have been ready to believe and to contend that the negro is a white man with a black skin. All history disproves that. Go to Africa. What do you find there? From one hundred and fifty million to two hundred million savages.

I happened in my boyhood, when I was about 12 years old, to see some real Africans fresh from their native jungles. The last cargo of slaves imported into this country were brought here in 1858 on the yacht Wanderer, landed on an island below Savannah, and sneaked by the United States marshal up the Savannah River and landed a little distance below Augusta, and my family bought some thirty of them.

Therefore I had a chance to see just what kind of people these were, and to compare the African as he is to-day in Africa with the African who, after two centuries [?] slavery, was brought side by side to be judged. The difference was as "Hyperion to a satyr."Those poor wretches, half starved as they had been on their voyage across the Atlantic, shut down and battened under the hatches and fed a little rice, several hundred of them, were the most miserable lot of human beings--the nearest to the missing [?] with the monkey--I have ever put my eyes on.

Now, I do not go into the philosophy of it, or undertake to act as God's interpreter because I have no ambition of that sort and I would not presume to even suggest a [?] more than to say that if we consider the destinied of this race from a broad standpoint and compare the condition the African in Africa to-day, the highest and [?] with the condition of the American negroes, such as we now have them, or [?] them in 1865, I do not hesitate to say that among the [?] million 003030slaves who were in the South in 1865 there were more good, Christian men and women and gentlemen and ladies than all African could show then or can show now.

Then if God in His providence ordained slavery and had these people transported over here for the purpose of civilizing enough of them to form a nucleus and to become missionaries back to their native heath, that is a question. I have a letter here from distinguished African bishop who believes it, and I want to read it. But the thing want to call your attention to is that slavery was not an unmitigated evil for the negro, because whatever of progress the colored race has shown itself capable of achieving has come from slavery; and whether among those four million there were not more good men and women than could be found among the nine million now is to my mind question. I would not like to assert it; but I am strongly of that belief from the facts know in regard to the demoralization that has come to those people down there by having liberty thrust upon them in the way it was, and then having the ballot and the burdens of government, and being subjected to the strain of being tempted and misled and duped and used as tools by designing white men who went there among them.

A little while back I received a letter from this man--I never met him--making some comment on something he had seen about my utterances in regard to the negro in some speech or lecture. My newspaper friends have always taken it upon themselves to quote everything that is lurid and hot and vitriolic that I say and then to finish by saying. "The Senator from South Carolina made a characteristic speech," leaving anything that was same and rational and decent and eloquent, if I ever rise to eloquence, out of the whole account. That is unintentional, doubtless. In their pursuit for sensation they have done me the great wrong to misrepresent me throughout this country. I do not fret over it. I know that the truth never has overtaken a lie; and I do not intend to undertake it; and I never will even make a start to run down the thousand and one [?] that have been told on me.

But this man, this bishop, wrote me a letter and called my attention to a dream of his, an inspiration and a hope, and to suggest that I should submit his proposition to the Senate of the United States and lend it support. I wrote back to him the difficulty that lay in the way, the obstruction, the well-nigh impossibility of anything being done along that line to the extent he had dreamed of, and I went on to say something about any idea in regard to the negro, giving a little advice, as we are all so prone and ready to [?] Advice is one of those commodities that nobody ever charges anything for except lawyer. I got this letter in return:

Atlanta, Ga., January 24, 1903. Hon. B.R. Tillman,United States Senator.Sir: Yours of the 19th instant was upon my table when I reached home from Memphis, Tenn.

You say, if I know anything I ought to know that the negro in the South must ever and forever remain subordinate or be destroyed and annihilated. I know that as well as you do, and even after for a white man can not see the virus of this entire nation, from the Supreme Court of the United States down to the ward politician, as the colored man can see it and feel it. But this determination to degrade the negro and prevent his recognition as a man that God made is not only confined to the ruling masses of the South, but to the North as well. Color prejudice--

He seemed to agree with me in the idea I expressed in the beginning of my speech, that caste feeling, prejudice, whatever you call it, is just as strong in the North as it is with us, except that the provocation to exhibit it does not exist there. But let me go with him--

Just to the North as well. Color prejudice is not a Southern institution alone, but of the United States. Hence my desire for my race to leave the nation and return to Africa. When I was a boy, [?] years ago, I thought then as I do now, that God allowed the negro to be brought to this country and civilized to redeem his kindred in Africa. And since I have traveled from one end of Africa to the other, I am stronger in my conviction than ever. And I did hope that, as Jefferson Davis has the negative force in the freedom of the negro, God had raised you up to be the negative force that should establish through governmental aid a highway for millions of our race to return to the land of our ancestors. I have been looking upon you as a creature of Providence--

Now, is not that a high compliment? (Laughter.) As you know--God moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform--still think that your utterances in many instances will serve a purpose not even contemplated yourself. Others of my race may denounce you, as they do in mass meetings and on the lecture form of this country, but I shall praise you and wish you godspeed; for I believe that you are ? a purpose of Providence that but few are aware of, and even yourself do not realize. [?] you [?] the tone of your letter, that I am a politician--

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I told him that if we could get politicians to emigrate, God knows I would subsidize all the vessels Uncle Sam has and ship them to Africa or to heaven. He says [?].

I judge you think, from the tone of your letter, that I am a politician. But be politics far from me. I am no politician. Nor am I any office seeker for my race. I do not care if a negro gets office in this country while the world stands. A little insignificant office in the face of all the laws that are enacted to prevent our rising to manhood is too small to merit my attention. The negro is a fool for wanting office. He is a fool for enlisting in the Army of Navy or in doing anything to protect a flag that gives white men all the stars and leaves nothing but the stripes [?] the negro. Please do not class me among the politicians.

You see this man has got some gray matter in his kinky head.

You say the natural increase of the negro by birth would be a bar to emigration solving the race problem. If I could talk with you I would make you see otherwise. For I know all about it--and acquainted with the statistics of immigration to this country. But I shall not intrude upon your time and patience. No reply to this letter will be expected.Truly,H.M. TURNER.

H.M. Turner is a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His scheme is before you to consider.

Now, Mr. President, a little brief summary, and I am done.I have endeavored in my feeble and humble way to give you such historical light such ethnological light, on this subject as I could come across in the brief time I have had, along with my other duties, to collect. I have relied mainly on the inner light of my own observations and my own feeling and knowledge of conditions.

I do not want to see the African driven to the wall. I do not want to shut the door hope in his face. I am willing to give him every opportunity in life, all that the Declaration of Independence guarantees--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But that [?] not involve, and so help me God I can not consent to have it involve, the dominance that people over my people.

Then what are we to do? We have, as I have told you, a large negro majority South Carolina. Negroes constituted the wealth of that State before the war when the slaves were chattels. They are there, and they do not want to leave, and we do not want them to leave. What I mean by that is that to-day the superficial thought is [?] if they left our fields would go untilled, our lands would become worthless, there [?] be a vacuum in the productions of that State, and if you took them out of the [?] you would create a cataclysm in finance, and would knock down and destroy not the financial prosperity of this nation but of all Europe.

So you can not approach this problem at a double-quick. It has been coming on for two centuries or more. We will have to take the time to study out the best way to go about settling it and then begin. We had better never begin than to begin wrong. We have already begun wrong. The blunders which have been made since 1865 have produced the present unfortunate and, I might say dangerous situation.

Consider for a moment what it means to undertake to deport these people, to encourage them to emigrate. You are face to face with a problem which in its magnity in expense will approximate the national debt at the close of the war. The getting gether even in small quantity of 200,000 a year, or whatever number might equal birth rate, and giving them the aid and the assistance to go across the ocean, or to South America, or to Mexico, or to the Philippines, or to Cuba, or to Africa, or where else, involves transportation by sea, the food necessary to sustain them while [?] are on the way and in the time they are on shipboard, the food to support life; and [?] when you had land them on the other shore you are compelled by humanity to furnish them with the means of support until they can make a start in the world, until they can plan a crop and gather it.

So I think upon a rough estimate you can not possibly hope or expect to accomplish it under $300 per capita at a very low estimate.

How many of them want to go? I do not know, and certainly there is no law make them go and Congress can not pass one. Joe does not want to gummy Joe. I do not know whether I belong to Joe or Joe belongs to me. Anyhow, we have been together for thirty years, and we have agreed to live together until one or both of us die, [?] when I go away, if I go first, I know he will shed as sincere tears as anybody. I [?] die to protect him from injustice or wrong.

Now, what are you going to do about it? Throughout that broad land there are hundreds and thousands of Joes. They do not care anything about voting. They [?] 0032now anything about it. Left alone and in peace as they are now, they do not know anything about the elections. They have forgotten all they did know about them. They have not voted in South Carolina since 1881, long before they were disfranchised according to the constitution and the law of the State. When we took the government away from them in 1876 we made it clear that we intended to keep it that, after one or two spasmodic efforts, they surrendered all desire or contention, and virtually were satisfied to go and pick cotton on the 6th or 7th of November, when the first Tuesday came.

It is only these pestiferous creatures who are organized, as I said, into little Republican machines to furnish delegates to nominate a Republican President who are bothering about it; and it is those fellows who are in these offices who stir up bad blood and create [?] antagonism and create a feeling of opposition in the minds of all those who are willing to be misled.

Then comes this other idea--I had forgotten it. I wish the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Hanna) was in his seat. I have here a bill which I should like to have him explain. I had almost let it slip my mind. It is Senate bill 7254, introduced by Mr. Hanna, "to provide pensions for freedmen," and so forth. "Be it enacted," and so on. The bill carries with it--how much I do not know--forty, or fifty, or sixty million dollars. Oh, Mr. President, did Mr. Hanna mean that, or is it a political dodge He can not answer, for is not here. If he chooses to answer tomorrow, I shall be glad to hear him.

What has been the effect of this? There are passing up and down the South, from one end of it to the other, agents, shrewd, sharp fellows, mostly mulattoes, who have all meanness of the white man, along with some intellectual superiority--many of them; some of them are good people. But these scoundrels are collecting at the negro churches and schools 10 cents, 20 cents, 30 cents, in accordance with ability of the poor dupes contribute to this fund, to hire lawyers to press this bill through Congress.

My God, was there ever a more infamous scheme to bamboozle and deceive since the freedman's Bureau had those people contribute of their substance fifty-odd million dollars and then you allowed a lot of fellows to steal the best part of it?

Is there anybody on the other side willing to help me put this pension bill in one [?]appropriation bills as a rider? I intend to move it--God knows I will--and let you in on it, if I can get a chance. I want you to put yourselves on record whether you [?] these old negroes as well as I do. I am perfectly willing to give Joe and Kitty, one of whom were old slaves and who are ex-slaves, an appropriation of three or four hundred dollars or $10 a month apiece, and I will give them each a piece of land and them stay on it, and when I want my shoes blacked and carriage horses hitched [?] or anything done for which I pay Joe, I will get it just the same without regard to the pension that Mr. Hanna is proposing to give.

Well, Mr. President, I am done [?] treated this subject but imperfectly, but I have spoken from the soul, from [?] eart, to tell you the truth, so help me God.[?] warn you that in proportion as you arouse false hopes in these people's minds as to [?] future, keeping the door of hope open by giving them offices, you are only sowing wind which will flame up into a whirlwind later on. You can not keep that door without shutting it on the whites. The northern millions which have gone down have gone into negro colleges and schools to equip these people to complete with white neighbors.

All of the millions that are being sent there by Northern philanthrophy has been but [?] an antagonism between the poorer classes of our citizens and these people upon those level they are in the labor market. There has been no contribution to elevate the white people of the South, to aid and assist Anglo-Saxon Americans, the men who are descended from the people who fought with Marion and Sumter. They are allowed to struggle from poverty and in ignorance, and to do everything they can to get along, and [?] see Northern people pouring into thousands and thousands to help build up an African [?] nination.

Senators I leave the subject with you. May God give you wisdom and light to "do [?] ou would have others do unto you."