Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/357

 Advance from Appomatlox. 349

evidences of what we are and have done I know that we have problems yet to solve, dangers to meet, obstacles to overcome. It is no part of my province to discuss the rights or wrongs, the necessity or the possibility of the avoidance or the voluntary abolition of slavery. But my feeling is that the negro, the corpse of a murdered race, whether justly or unjustly, dangled helpless about the strong limbs of the South; a weight upon her back not a crushing weight, because that sturdy and leonine back cannot-be crushed by any weight that maybe piled upon it but a weight and hindrance. Do not understand me as depreciating or denounc- ing the negro. He has done the best he could with the oppor- tunities he has had, wonderfully well, I think. Generally speaking, and especially when of the older generations, he has done his humble and docile and faithful and patient part in building the South from the earliest times to the most recent. We, too, have done our patient part by him. Since Appomattox the Southern white man has spent, as nearly as I can gather from the figures available, more than $160,000,000 from his own sweat and brain, and at the cost of the education of his own children to be loyal to his undertaking and to educate the negro. So the negro has outgrown the South for the use it has for him as a laborer and the South has outgrown or is outgrowing fast, its dependence on negro labor. We are educating him for the larger opportunities offered him at the North, and he is going there in numbers accelerating every year.

From 1890 to 1900 the negro population of the United States increased 18 per cent. The increase, 'however, in the Eastern and Northern States, including New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, was more than twice the average, or 43 per cent. , against an average increase in the sixteen Southern States of i6 l /2 per cent., and against an increase for the same period in the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan of more than 24 per cent.

We have begun in the South to replace the negro with immigra- tion under ruling by which our ports are thrown open wide to the world of white people whom we can assimilate with whom in a generation or two we can begin to amalagamate, whom we can ac- cept as part of us. This will continue to drive the negro North, and when he is there the American people under the unfailing