Note (return) — Chapter XV

Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James Bryce wrote in the North American Review, pointing out that the situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the Atlantic "The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson Page in the North American contended that in spite of the $5,000,000 spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890 the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery." Later in the same year he published The Old South. In the same month Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the Arena, contended that in view of its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.205 Also in April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the Chautauquan, recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion, thinking it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in 1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in the Forum, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.