Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/473



The correspondence of the editor often has an historical value as the following communications will show:

February 13, 1922.

Dear Dr. Woodson:

Your has been so full of good material that I hesitate to call attention to two things in the last (January) number that seem unsuitable.

The first is the leading article on Slave Society on the Southern Society. For more than thirty years I have been combating with all my might the theory of slave-holding sovereignty set forth in that article. It is the essentially Southern view—a magnified view and an unreal view. The article is practically a mild form of the panegyric of the slave plantation which has been the stock in trade of defenders of slavery for a hundred years.

The reasons for slavery given on pages 1 and 2 do not accord with the facts, and if they were true would have minimized the protests against slavery, past and present. It is ridiculous to say that white men endanger their lives by working in the South when you consider how large a part of the cotton crop is raised entirely by white men.

The description of what was said to be the "usual" type of plantation house does not in my opinion apply to more than two hundred or three hundred plantations in the South at the outside. I have traveled very extensively in the South and have never seen more than three or four such mansions. The testimony of Olmsted and other writers is that ordinarily the slaveholder's house was poor and that he lived in a very poor fashion. As for the twelve sons and daughters in the planters' families, and the fifteen to twenty-five children in the negro families, it is perfect gammon. Not one family in a thousand had such numbers. None but a very few of the richest planters lived in the profusion described on page four. As for the enrolment in colleges between 1859 and 1860, and the incomes of the higher institutions, that is all bosh. Francis 419