The doorways
to this new system of slavery are far more numerous than those
which led into the old. African transportation ships and negro
procreation did not advance the number of slaves half so rapidly
in the two hundred and fifty years of actual servitude as the
courts and the penal processes of the South do the new system.
The sheriff is in league with the white farmer and every negro
hand must sign a contract filled with obstruse legal terms which
the boss himself does not understand, but, are so arranged as
to protect his interests and give him every advantage over his
hired man. This is a regular enlistment system-- the negro must
work a full year, or, if from any cause he quits and goes off
in search of work no one else can hire him, and if he is caught
he goes to jail. This door is always thronged; the colored man
signs his name in January and he is a slave until December, unless
he is discharged, which his employer may do at will.
The lien law
is another doorway to this iniquitous system. Not one half of
one per cent of the colored farmers of the South who run their
own farms or work for themselves pay as they go; the shark gets
the cotton before it is well baled and pockets the money for
the inferior meat he has dealt out to the poor colored farmer
during the year at double the cash price with interest added.
Any breach of this ironclad rule, and such is bound to occur,
lands a negro in jail and in the penitentiary. This phase of
the causes leading to litigation against the negro will be more
horrible when it is remembered that the negro keeps no account--he
must abide by the books at the end of the year and they always
tell of a fabulous consumption of commodities. A poor old man
once kept his account upon a stick which he notched with his
knife in the presence of the storekeeper whenever he procured
an article, and at the end of the year the books were ahead of
him by over a hundred dollars. An ingenious lawyer went into
court in behalf of the old man who was always known to be a good
boy around white men, and by the aid of the notches on the stick
and the testimony of his old master as to his veracity for truthfulness,
secured a verdict against the merchant. If he had peremptorily
refused to pay this trumpt-up account a capias ad satisfacicadum
would have given him a term of years at hard labor in the penitentiary.
Stealing constitutes
a great door to the new system of servitude. If all the stories
told in the South of Negro dishonesty be true then the slave
owners must have instructed in the matter of stealing more thoroughly
than in any thing else which they taught the Negro while he was
in bondage. All that the Negro knows he learned it from his master,
and what he does not know his master would not teach him and
this is the cause. In slavery the master would not teach the
slave to read, and when the emancipation came he was totally
ignorant; in slavery the master kept from the Negro every incentive
to manhood and when the emancipation came he had none: in slavery
the Negro was not allowed to make money and when liberty was
declared he was poor, without a dollar and without a shelter
for his head. Now, by inverting the terms in this process of
reasoning we say, that as the negro knew how well to steal at
the close of the war he must have had some instruction while
he was in slavery. But can it be imagined that all, or even half
of the instances of theft reported and tried in the South, are
genuine? Can it be supposed that a people debarred from every
privilege except that of serving God, for so long a time, could
be so universally dishonest! Could be so naturally given to the
habit of stealing? It does not stand to reason that with two
masters to fear, a heavenly and an earthly master, such a habit
could have become so uncommon and so universal among the colored
people as to make it a maxim that the negro will steal. No conscientious
historian believes it; no man who is acquainted with human nature,
and with the forces which conspire to produce individual, or
national evil could be induced to credit the monstrosities urged
against the Southern negro along the line of dishonesty. A poor
woman was arrested for having picked some cotton from the field
of a white neighbor. The cotton was a product of the Dixon cotton
seed so popular with the Southern farmer. By this point of fact
the cotton was identified and a constable took from the poor
woman's cotton house two hundred and fifty pounds which he said
contained the Dixon seed. In the trial the woman proved that
she planted the Dixon seed and that her cotton house was full
of cotton containing the same seed. She proved by the man who
brought the suit and for whom she had cooked for more than three
years that she was strictly honest. The man, whose name was Singleton,
declared that she had never deceived him in all his acquaintance
with her, and yet he had trusted her with money and other valuables,
but he believed she stole his cotton. On the day of trial a humble
woman appeared in court and took the prisoner's stand. When she
arose to testify the jury could not understand her well on account
of her peculiar accent. She pleaded with out stretched arms for
her release; the court was completely silenced by her pitiable
protestations, and finally the judge ordered the jury to render
a verdict of not guilty from their seats; but when an order was
made to reclaim the cotton which Singleton had taken from her,
the court refused to grant it and thus the woman whom the jury
acquitted was robbed of her earnings to satisfy her white accuser.
Granting that there are colored people who steal as there are
white people who do the same, we submit with assurance that more
than half of the cases of stealing against the colored man in
the South originate as did the case against the old woman referred
to.
Insults to the
chastity of Anglo-Saxon women is another door to this new system
of slavery. There is little here to be said: the negro is held
to be a coward, it is not a wonder that it is true; but how will
it be made to appear that such is the case when in the face of
the lynching that is of almost every day occurrence the colored
man is said to go right on in his attacks: upon innocent Saxon
womanhood. I am in favor of visiting the extreme penalty of the
law upon any man who brutally violates the honor of poorest and
most despised woman in the land. No lover of character, no believer
in the sound dictates of reason and religion can feel otherwise;
but the Anglo Saxons themselves do not credit the enormous record
of negro disregard for honor reported in Southern newspapers.
The last door to be mentioned and the one that is the most painful
to us as a people, is the trouble which arises among the colored
people themselves. A large per cent of the criminal proceedings
against colored persons in the South comes from internal strife
and internal accusation. The negro has learned that the Southern
white man wants him in trouble and therefore when moved by the
spirit and impulse of revenge which is so common among the ignorant
masses, he runs to the courts and the swearing he does is enough
to send a blush to the cheeks of the twelve apostles. The same
spirit which moved the negro to restore the cane with which Brooks
felled to the floor the lamented Sumner, may still be found here
and there; and wherever there is a door opened for the destruction
of a negro some one of the race can easily be found to do the
pushing. Every little plantation broil or domestic squabble must
go to the courts, and the end is a prolific harvest for the new
servitude.
Full text (Library of Congress/Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection)
