Your Negro Neighbor. Benjamin Brawley
see the consistency of fighting for outraged Belgians or Armenians so long as the rights of citizens at home are violated. In the words of Foraker, "They ask no favors because they are Negroes, but only justice because they are men."
Yours for liberty and democracy,
II
THE NEGRO IN AMERICA: HISTORICAL REVIEW 1
It was in August, 1619, that a Dutch vessel brought to Jamestown, Va., twenty Negroes, who were sold into servitude. While this event definitely signalized the coming of the Negro for permanent residence within the limits of what is now the United States, it by no means marked his first coming to this country. The records of the Negro extend as far back as the voyages of Columbus. Within a few years after the visits of the great explorer there were several Negroes in the West Indies, and in 1513 thirty assisted Balboa in the building of the first ships made on the Pacific Coast. One of the four survivors of the ill-starred expedition of De Narvaez in 1527 was the Negro Estevanico, to whom belongs the credit of the discovery of the Zuñi Indians and of New Mexico. Nothing from these early years, however, exercised any abiding influence on the history of the Negro in the United States.
The status of the Negro after 1619 was for several decades complicated by the system of indentured labor known as servitude. This applied especially to white servants brought from England; but the first Negroes brought to the country technically fell into the system. According to the New International Encyclopedia, "Servitude became slavery when to such incidents as alienation, disfranchisement, whipping, and limited marriage, were added those of perpetual service and a denial of civil, juridical, marital and property rights as well as the denial of the possession of children." While legislation was enacted earlier in Massachusetts, it was Virginia that in 1661 really led the way for the South in the definite recognition of slavery as a system by saying that Negroes were "incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time." The next year the same colony enacted that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother, which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary; and thus the system definitely gained a foothold in the oldest of the colonies.
It must not be supposed that the institution of slavery was fastened on the colonies without many doubts and fears. As early as 1688 the Germantown Quakers made a formal protest against the barter of human beings, and moral sentiment developed in other places as well as in Pennsylvania. In the far South, especially in the colony of South Carolina, where the slaves eventually outnumbered the white people, the constant fear of insurrections led to the imposition of heavier and heavier fines on those brought into the country; and for one reason or another Virginia before 1772 passed thirty-three acts looking toward the prohibition of the importation of slaves. Nothing, however, was able to stand in the way of the cupidity of Englishmen who were gaining riches by the traffic; economic considerations were as potent two hundred years ago as now. In the course of the eighteenth century slavery grew by leaps and bounds. By the time of the first regular census in 1790 there were 757,208 Negroes in the states, 19.3 per cent. of the total population. Fifty-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven of these were those who in one way or another had become free. It is important to note that the percentage of total population has never been higher than 19.3. It has in fact steadily declined since 1790, the common figure for recent years being 11 per cent.
As a race there was little to be remarked of the Negro in the colonial period. To those in bondage there was little outlook. Occasionally there was an attempt at an insurrection; but nothing of first rate importance materialized. In 1741 there was a very unhappy panic in New York, then a prosperous town of ten thousand inhabitants. Nine fires in rapid succession led to the report that the Negroes were conspiring to burn the city. All of the eight lawyers of the town appeared against the defendants, who had no counsel and who were convicted on most insufficient evidence. Before the fury was over, fourteen of the Negroes were burned, eighteen hanged, and seventy-one deported.
Any evidence of progress in this period would of course have to be found among the free Negroes. The position of these people was a very anomalous one. In the South especially very harsh laws were passed against them; but very frequently these were not enforced. In general the class was regarded as idle and shiftless and a breeder of mischief. More and more, however, individuals made their way in gainful occupations. The free Negro might become skilled at a trade; he might buy land; he might even buy slaves; and he might have one gun with which to protect his home. Liberty, however, genuine liberty, he did not possess. In all the finer things of life, the things that make life worth living, the lot that was his was only less hard than that of the slave.
The general period of the Revolution was one of idealism. Humanitarianism and liberalism were in the air, and both principles were exerting a profound influence on English literature and life. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England, thrilled all English-speaking people by handing down from the Court of King's Bench the decision that as soon as a slave set foot upon the soil of England he became free. The logic of the position of the patriots, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, naturally forced them to defend liberty at all times; and by the time the convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States met in Philadelphia, at least two of the original thirteen states (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) had positively prohibited slavery, while in three others (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) gradual abolition was in progress. Under the influence of commercialism and industrialism, however, great convictions gradually declined; and at least two of the three great compromises that entered into the Constitution were a concession to the slave-holding South. Then across the page of history flashed the brilliant figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Negro race to obtain its first independent colony outside of the continent of Africa. In America the influence of the chieftain became one of the reasons for the cheap selling of Louisiana, and rendered more certain the prohibition of the slave-trade at the end of 1807. A wave of fear swept over the South, and Georgia and the Carolinas at once passed repressive measures designed especially to restrict the importation of Negroes from the West Indies.
All-potent, however, proved the cotton-gin. Almost suddenly Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana appeared on the map. By 1830 the exports of what then comprised the Southern states amounted to $32,000,000, and this section had not less than $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves. As a system of labor, however, in spite of seeming advantages, slavery was not slow in revealing its shortcomings. Its ultimate effects on the South were disastrous. As Rhodes says, "It needed no extensive marshaling of statistics to prove that the welfare of the North was greater than that of the South. Two simple facts, everywhere admitted, were of so far-reaching moment that they amounted to irrefragable demonstration. The emigration from the slave states was much larger than the movement in the other direction; and the South repelled the industrious emigrants who came from Europe, while the North attracted them." It was the rich planter rather than the white man of slender means who profited by slavery, wealth being more and more concentrated in the hands of a few; and in 1860, 41 per cent. of the white men who had been born in South Carolina were living in other states. More and more the South realized that she was not keeping pace with the country's development; and one of her own sons, speaking "simply as the voice of the non-slaveholding whites of the South," set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than that of the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and in short that the system was harmful in every way. Helper's book was proscribed in some quarters; nevertheless it succeeded because, in spite of the fact that it did not rest on the broadest principles of humanity, it did attempt to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.
Meanwhile the sections were being arrayed against each other. The first fugitive slave law had been passed in 1793. The period 1820-60 was marked by five great aggressive steps on the part of the slave power: the Missouri Compromise (1820), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854), and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). One after another appeared Lundy and Garrison, Parker and Birney, Whittier and Lovejoy, Phillips and Sumner, Lydia Maria Child and Harriet
This chapter is naturally indebted in some degree to the author's "A Short History of the American Negro" (Macmillan, 1913).