The Pacific Monthly/Volume 9/"The Leopard's Spots" and the Negro Problem

by Horace Sumner Lyman

Questions of the Day

"The Leopard's Spots" and the Negro Problem

By H. S. Lyman

The recent novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr., entitled "The Leopard's Spots," abundantly repays perusal, and even study. To one who has followed the daily news, and magazine literature, and political speeches, it has little, if anything, new in the discussion of the race problem in America; but it is a collection in one place of what one would otherwise find scattered through many detached leaves, or else retain only as a series of mental impressions more or less mixed in memory. As a story, it presents these facts in the light of human feeling and daily relations, thus heightening their effect, or at least compelling the reader to dwell for some hours, or perhaps days, upon circumstances that might otherwise occupy but a moment's attention. This is skillfully done, and it must be allowed that the story carries the sympathies of the reader; although in a literary point of view the work is not above that of Roe or Sheldon.

The value of the information is not in the well known incidents narrated, but as throwing light upon the extreme Southern feeling. It might be called a study in the psychology of the present day Southerner—far as the book is itself from the psychological. The mentality that it reveals is an important element in the American life, and this book shows it to be persistent from generation to generation, and apparently insusceptible of modification. It seems, indeed, to be the boast of this volume that the white Southerner has not changed from the days of Washington, and never will change, but that long after the American of the North has ceased to exist that of the white of the South will remain pure and unpolluted, and with him is bound up the hope of Anglo-Saxon civilization. One cannot but admire this exclusive claim, and also the proud character behind it; though in fact he may see in it only the American form of European aristocracy of blood and birth, or even Pharisaic race-confidence.

To gain anything like a clear or unbiased view of the race problem itself, this book should be read along with two others—A Fool's Errand, by Judge Tourgee, and the Autobiography of Booker T. Washington. With the three a very fair and calm idea of the days and years succeeding the war period in the South may be obtained. The Leopard's Spots has been called the voice of the South—though in fact the books of George W. Cable, especially John March, Southerner, may be as truly so considered as this. It has also been styled the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the South, and the author does not scruple to introduce characters from that masterpiece of the gifted Northern novelist to point his moral or work his revenge; but it is in no respect the antithesis of Mrs. Stowe's book. It does, however, cover the same period and deal with the same problems as the works of Tourgee and Booker T. Washington. The Fool's Errand was by one of the fools, and gives the personal impressions of a Northern man who was at the South and went through the reconstruction period. The autobiographical sketches of the founder and president of the Tuskeegee Industrial Institute is by one of the interdicted race itself, who, although a mulatto, would be reckoned in this work as a negro, since one drop of negro blood makes a negro.

Very early in the pages of The Leopard's Spots, if not in the title itself, we find that the story needs the balance of Other facts and the impressions of other persons, if we would see the truth. It is written in a spirit of tension and with an extreme object in view. Hyperbole is one of the most common figures of speech employed. The following is perhaps the keynote of the political expressions of the book, speaking of the return of the Confederate soldiers: "The spectacle of this terrible army of the Confederacy, the memory of whose battle cry yet thrills the world, transformed in a month into patient and hopeful workers, has never been parailed in history. Who destroyed this scene of peaceful rehabilitation? Hell has no pit dark enough, and no damnation deep enough for these conspirators when once history has fixed their guilt." Not to mention the very apparent parallel of the army of the Union disbanding into the army of peaceful and patient laborers, though victorious and under the temptation of levying long on a defeated enemy, it is evident even at this point that the author's desire is to fix the guilt and consign to a damnation deeper than to be expected in the next world the authors of the second humiliation of the South. An example of exaggeration is also seen in the allusion to the loss to the South of four billions of dollars in slaves. This is precisely four times the estimate of the careful statistician, Jean de Bloch, and would make every slave, children and old men as well as the able-bodied, worth $1,000. This reveals a mode of argument that makes reply mere tedious correction of mistakes.

It can scarcely be said that the plan of reconstruction proposed by Andrew Johnson, or his manner of carrying it out, was that of Lincoln; neither can it be considered that an expression of Lincoln's in 1858, on the relations of the negroes and the whites, would be a complete statement of his views on the subject in 1865. It must be taken with much allowance for personal race bias that what were called the "black laws" of the first state governments erected by the whites of the South after the war were simply to restrain vagrancy, or that they were modeled upon the laws of Northern states, or that their penalties, some of which were mutilation, were usual; or that such laws, even if modeled on those of the North, were wise or justifiable. Neither can it be taken as a colorless statement that the negroes first drew the color line; nor again that it was a little Yankee woman writing a crude book that caused the war—no war certainly having come except as the Southern whites began hostilities, and the claim being like that of Louis Napoleon that Germany began war because King William refused to see Benedetti.

But it is not in items of history or statistics that the interest of the book lies; though it is worthy of notice that what has been called an expression of the wronged and silent South cannot be taken as an argument because its hyperbole and exaggeration leave it indeterminate just what the author means.

A greater interest lies in the characterization of the Northern people who appeared in the reconstruction of the South. The Northern benefactors and statesmen, as they were wont to con- sider themselves, are here permitted to see how they appeared in Southern eyes. Charles Sumner is alluded to as—apparently owing to the cane of Brooks—"a poor, cracked-brain." In the apprehension of the Rev. John Durham, the ideal character of the story, who evidently voices the feelings of the author. Summer, Thad. Stevens and Ben. Butler were "a triumvirate of physical and mental deformity;" the first being a crack-brained theorist and the second a club-footed misanthrope, while the third, Butler, seems to have been beyond description.

It would perhaps be supposed that the Northern schoolma'ams and benefactors who established education of the negroes and even of the poor whites in the South would be given credit for good intentions. On the contrary, they are merged into one personality, that of Miss Susan Walker, who is described as having a sinister pug nose, and for whom the fate is reserved, at the close, of marrying, at the age of sixty, the villain of the story, Allen McLeod. No philanthropy is accorded to her; she had begun her benefactions by endowing an institution for homeless cats, and her efforts at the South for the negroes were simply to add specimens to her menagerie. The preacher rejects her ideas as "maudlin;" he agrees only to establish between his work and hers "a great mutual ignorance." He considers her mission as simply "to teach crack-brained theories of social and political equality to four millions of ignorant negroes, some of whom are but fifty years removed from the African jungles," and separate them by an impossible social order from their only real friends, their former masters. This the labors of General Fiske at Nashville and Armstrong at Hampton are summarized in that of the five times millionairess from Boston. It would be well, at this point, if space permitted, to compare this picture with that of Tour- gee's of the school teacher from the North, or the reminiscences of Booker T. Washington of the Yankee woman in West Virginia, and of the Yankee teacher at Hampton.

For the Freedmen's Bureau he also presents but one character, the Rev. Ezra Perkins. Perkins is described as a former preacher in Michigan, who lost his church on account of unsavory rumors about his character; he then eked out his living as a book agent, and as an insurance agent. As to the bureau itself, the following is said: "If the devil himself had devised an instrument for creating race antagonism and strife, he could not have improved on the bureau in its actual workings. Had clean-handed, competent agents been possible, it might have accomplished good. These agents were, as a rule, the riff-raff and trash of the North. It was the supreme opportunity of army cooks, teamsters, fakirs and broken down preachers who had turned insurance agents." It may be suspected that there was more or less truth in this, but it must be remembered that the able and humane General Howard, who is even now, in his old age, establishing an educational institution for the whites of the Cumberland Gap, was at the head of this bureau. The description as the the bureau appeared to the South can hardly be considered as complete without Howard.

The agents of reconstruction at the South are also painted in very dark colors. One of the leaders of these was Simon Legree, taken alive, so to speak, from the pages of Mrs. Stowe, and converted, only that instead of whipping slaves, he now stripes the whites. He was seconded by Dave Haley, also from Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Tim Shelby, who had run away from the Shelby farm in Kentucky and received a good education in Canada, but returned to plague the South. The carpet-bag governments are described in the same sable colors, their thefts and extravagances unrelieved by one good character or one good act. The leaders ultimately go North, Legree apparently developing at length into J. P. Morgan—Shelby alone being so unfortunate as to fall the first victim of the Ku Klux Klan.

This organization, which appears so vividly as seen by a white man, in the pages of A Fool's Errand, is here represented as a law and order league. Its first operations are spoken of as necessary and justifiable; though later, having fallen into the hands of young men, who afterwards turned Populists, it committed petty crimes, such as whipping negroes and worrying Northern school teachers. It can hardly be considered that this Southern organization, whatever its justification, is adequately described in this work. The writer became personally acquainted with a mulatto, in attendance at the Oberlin Theological Seminary and a graduate of Fiske University, who had only escaped with his life from the Klan, and whose only offense was that he opened a school in the black belt of Mississippi for colored children. The later attempt of the negroes to gain political recognition by an alliance with the farmers and Populists is also detailed, and the chief leader is a sensual young scalawag, a poor white, called Allan McLeod. He proves to be a villain and coward, and the personal rival and enemy of the hero, Charles Gaston. He is the old-fashioned villain, embodying every unmanly vice under a plausible exterior, and incapable of redemption. He is represented as probably having no soul — precisely as the negroes. If he is intended, as would seem, as the author's representation of Marion Butler, the talented Populist leader of the South, his character and fate would seem to require modification.

The stress of the story, however, is not on these Northern adventurers or the Southern scalawags ; they are but the setting for the negro character, which is conceived as antipathetic to the white. The negro is here defined as anyone having one drop of negro blood, and the less that intermixture, the weaker and worse the character. But four such characters are individualized. These are Nelse, the faithful slave who served his master tp the latter's death, and then his mistress until his own death from wounds by the Freedmen ruffians ; Dick, the new uneducated ne- gro ; Tim Shelby, the tool of the carpet- baggers, and George Harris, the mod- em educated negro. To each of these three modern negroes is assigned one overwhelming passion — that of pos- sessing a white woman. Tim Shelby, who had become affluent through his plunders at the capital, and had the means to gratify every passion, reveal- ed this final extravagance of nature by attempting to secure — at the price of position as school teacher, which was in his power to give — a kiss from the daughter of the village doctor. With this arose the Ku Klux, and Shelby was hanged.

Dick, the new plantation negro and vagabond, became the fiend who de- stroyed the life of the last remaining child of Tom Camp, the crippled Con- federate veteran; and also, by that crime, the reason of the old soldier. This description, sorrowful as it is, is the best done of any part of the book. It is sufficiently restrained to meet the requirements of literary excellence ; it is also an account of a calamity so great that anyone with a man's feel- ings is compelled to have sympathy and respect. The execution that fol- lowed, that of burning the negro, seems, on the showing, to be inevitable, if not justifiable. One is inclined to

say that for such brutes no torture is too great. Such a subject can hardly be discussed here, and we cannot but allow that the wrath of a community is an elemental uprising for protection, not unlike that of a herd of cattle that combines to form a circle around their young, and to meet the beast of prey with a wall of horns. Nevertheless, as an argument against the negro, or ne- groid, it is manifestly discredited by facts elsewhere. Similar crimes, and just as atrocious, are committed by whites. Oregon was horrified a few years ago by such a crime, with mur- der, in Clackamas county ; and Califor- nia by a double murder of the same kind in the heart of San Francisco. The theory that the negro, or negroid, is a brute without a soul, who can be only restrained by terror, must also be ex- tended to include the white fiend, or the fiend of any other race. With the disappearance bf the negro or negroid, this character of crime would not cease. It cannot appear as otherwise than a species of race hatred that would burn a colored fiend but leave the equally guilty and loathsome white fiend to legal trial.

In the third character, George Har- ris, who is the little son of Eliza, who crossed the Ohio on the ice, now grown and educated by Miss Walker, and em- ployed by Lowell of Boston, the sup- posed negro infatuation is carried al- most to absurdity. Harris asks his pa- tron's permission to gain the affections of his daughter, but is indignantly re- fused and ordered out of the house — though but an octoroon. He is heart- broken, and contemplates suicide, but has not the courage, and after looking in vain for work, at last makes five hundred dollars in a gambling joint, and with this visits the ash-piles of negroes burned in Ohio, Kansas and Colorado — Northern states. The argu- ment here intended is that the antipa- thy to the negro is racial, not sectional ; and the conclusion, that the South is comparatively justifiable in such pun- ishments. It seems almost a peculiarity of the Southern mind that all these questions are judged by comparison with the North. But what if^e North were wrong? Can not such matters be decided by considerations of justice and wisdom?

One reads along, however, until almost the close before finding any solution of the problem presented. It is asserted again and again that social equality of the two races is impossible, and that political equality, or civil equality, means precisely the same as social equality. The argument is put in the mouth of George Harris, who says to Lowell: '*I deny it (that 'social rights are qne thing and political rights another'). Politics is but a manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit of civilization. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any society is not a member of it."

The argument, however, is evidently that of the white; it is not made by Professor Scarborough or Booker T. Washington, who see a distinction between civil rights and social privileges, and ask only for the former. The argument, however, such as it is, is con- fused by using the word "society" in two senses. Society in the broad sense includes all the relations of men, political as well as friendly. But in the sense of personal standing it means only the narrow limits of association in friendship. That part in civil society which defines men's relations as to nat- ural or political rights, such as to life, liberty, personal security and property, and the legal and civil means to obtain these rights, the negroes claim, and they are constitutionally given them; but the privilege of associating with the whites, calling on them, eating at the same table, dancing with them, or marrying, has not been claimed by any civil enactment, and is universally ad- mitted by them, so far as the writer has seen, to be just like the friendly rela- tions of the whites, to be controlled by mutual respect and affinity.

The educational solution of the prob- lem is rejected. Gaston, who struggles through and up, until he becomes gov- ernor, is about to make the recommen- dation, in his inaugural, that the ne-

groes must be educated along indus- trial lines. To this the preacher replies: "It's a mistake. If the negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do at the North, when the struggle for bread becomes tragic. . . Make the neg^o a scientific and successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it will mean a race war. . . . The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots. ... If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a negro in marriage. That is the test. When she sinks with her mulatto chil- dren into the black abyss of a negroid life, then ask him! Your scheme of education is a humbug. . . . The more you educate, the more impossible you make his position in a democracy. Education! Can you change the color of his skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lips, the spread of his nose, or the beat of his heart, with a spelling book? The negro is the human don- key. You can train him, but you can- not make of him a horse. Mate him with a horse and you get a larger don- key, called a mule, incapable of pre- serving his species. What is called race prejudice is simply God's first law of nature — the instinct of self-preserva- tion."

When it is considered that any one having even a drop of negro blood is reckoned a negro, the full sweep of this summary may be understood, though it is so harsh and contemptuous as hardly to seem a sober judgment.

The only solution presented by the preacher, the spokesman of the author, is transportation. "The neg^o must ultimately leave this continent." This is the only solution offered in this vol- ume; all others are rejected; a return to slavery is discarded ; any degree of education, and all participation in gfov- ernment, and even independent indus- try, are considered impracticable. How- ever, it is evident that the solution of the race question by transporting the negro, including every one that has a drop of negro blood, is one that cannot be taken seriously. Let alone the legal difficulties in the way of removing mil- lions of native born citizens, convicted of no crime, the industrial difficulties would rise to the point of impossibility. We are warranted in concluding, therefore, that the book presents no conclusion, and is chiefly valuable as an exposition of the feeling of many in the South over their great problem. Narrow as the scope of the book seems, hard and dry as are its sympathies, passionate as is its hatred, and contrary as seems its teaching to that of the Apostles, who declared that God had made of one blood all races of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth, and that in the estimation of Jesus there was no bond or free, Greek, Jew, Sc)rthian, Roman or Barbarian, but all one humanity, we cannot but be touch- ed anew with the pathos and extremity of the Southern people. The situation is such, with its passions and perplexities, as to affect one as when reading descriptions of Russian life, or Siberian exile — ^that the people concerned are hardly sane. Yet we cannot but think the people who express themselves as this author have little comprehension of the power and possibilities of appropriation by all men, of all races, of the mental and spiritual accumulations of the ages. Not only are the descendants of the revolutionary fathers heirs of American ideas.

The autobiographical sketches of Booker T. Washington, to whom the author of The Leopard's Spots makes no direct allusion, should be read in conclusion, to take out the impression of despair and hypochondria. It has all the solidity of a genuine life. It is not fiction. From a literary point of view it is better than either Tourgee's or Dixon's work. It is ever cheerful and hopeful, and sparkles with kindly humor. It shows a perfectly sane and happy life, engrossed in imparting what he believes to be a saving knowledge to his people and his country. It is the story of a heart full of gratitude, busy at every throb with labor, and trusting to a better future. He believes that civil rights and political guaranties will not be denied a people industrially useful. To his people, therefore, he says, Be useful; he teaches them how to raise fat hogs instead of lean ones; make two hundred and fifty bushels of sweet potatoes grow on an acre instead of fifty; be worthy of trust, and wait to be trusted; God is good, and man, on the whole, is just. Such are the teachings of this mulatto who never even knew his father, who struggled through poverty with his mother, and trudged to Hampton and received from Armstrong and his corps of Yankee teachers the training that made him at an early age known around the world. Such seem to be the ideas that he impressed, as the hope of his race, upon the President, at the dinner in the White House which so shocked the South. That there can be such a man among the colored people of the South, shows that there is a hopeful solution of the race problem.

The calm-minded man, who trusts in a happy outcome for all the prob- lems now engrossing the world's thought, will trust more and more to evolution. Not that partial type of evo- lution which simply destroys the weak and unfit, but which fits the weak for the advancing life. Not the destructive, the katabolic, feature of evolution, but the constructive — the anabolic. The evolution that not only destroys the unfavorable variations but so improves the conditions that an ever increasing number of favorable variations are se- cured. In our American society — using the term in the large sense — this evolu- tion will include the better application of the great ideas already, and for long past, at work here; the more complete and universal education, and its practical applications ; a clearer and more humane religion, teaching the unity of God, the solidarity of mankind, and a universal redemption from the ignorance and evils of the past ; and a more perfect democracy, guaranteeing to all alike security in life, liberty, and an industrial opportunity, and to the use and enjoyment and dispensation of the rewards of their own labor.