THE BLACK WORKER
How black men, coming to America in the
16th,
17th, 18th and 19th centuries,
became a central thread in the history
of the United States,
at once a challenge to its democracy and
always an important part
of its economic history and social
development
Easily the most dramatic episode in
American history
was the sudden move to free four million
black slaves in an effort to stop a
great
civil war, to end forty years of bitter
controversy,
and to appease the moral sense of
civilization. 
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of
slavery
plagued a nation which asserted the
equality of all men, 
and sought to derive powers of
government from the consent
of the governed. Within sound of the
voices of those who
said this lived more than a half
million black slaves, forming nearly
one-fifth of the population
of a new nation.
The black population at the time of the
first census had risen to three-quarters
of a million, 
and there were over a million at the
beginning of the 19th century. 
Before 1830, the blacks had passed the 2
million mark,
helped by the increased importations
just before
1808, and the illicit smuggling up
until 1820.
By their own reproduction,  the Negroes
reached
3,638,808
in 1850,
and before the Civil War stood at four
million
four hundred forty one thousand eight
hundred thirty.
They were ten percent of the whole
population of the nation
in 1700, 22 percent
in 1750, 18.9 percent
in 1800 and 11.6%
in 1900. These workers were not all
black and not all Africans and not all
slaves.
In 1860, at least 90 percent were born in
the United States,
13% were visibly of white as well as
Negro descent
and actually more than one-fourth were
probably of white,
Indian and Negro blood. In 1860, 
11% of these dark folk were free
workers. In origin,
the slaves represented everything
African, although most of them originated
on or near the West Coast.
Yet among them appeared the great Bantu
tribes from Sierra Leone to South Africa;
the Sudanese straight across the center
of the continent,
from the Atlantic to the Valley of the
Nile;
the Nilotic Negroes and the black and
the brown
Hamites allied with Egypt;
the tribes of the great lakes; the
Pygmies and the Hottentots;
and in addition to these, distinct traces
of both
Berber and Arab blood.
There is no doubt of the presence of all
these various
elements in the mass 10 million
or more Negroes transported from Africa
to various
Americas from the 15th
to the 19th centuries. Most of them that
came to the continent went through West
Indian tutelage,
and thus finally appeared in the United
States.
They brought with them their religion
and rhythmic song, 
and some traces of their art and tribal
customs.
And after a lapse of two and one-half
centuries,
the Negroes became a settled working
population, speaking English or French
professing Christianity, and used
principally
in agricultural toil. Moreover,
they so mingled their blood with white
and red America
that today less than 25 percent of the
Negro Americans
are of unmixed African descent.
So long as slavery was a matter of race
and color,
it made the conscience of the nation
uneasy and continually affronted its
ideals.
The men who wrote the Constitution
sought by
every evasion, and almost by subterfuge,
to keep recognition of slavery out of
the basic form of the new government.
They founded their hopes on the
prohibition of the slave trade,
being sure that without continual
additions from abroad,
this tropical people would not long
survive, and thus the problem of slavery
would disappear in death.
They miscalculated, or did not foresee
the changing economic world.
It might be more profitable in
the West Indies to kill the slaves by
overwork
and import cheap Africans; but in America
without a slave trade, it paid
to conserve the slave and let him
multiply.
When, therefore, manifestly the Negroes
were not
dying out ,there came quite
naturally new excuses and explanations.
It was a matter of social condition.
Gradually these people would be free;
but freedom could only come to the bulk
as the freed were transplanted
to their own land and country, since
living together of black and white in
America
was unthinkable. So again the nation
waited,
and its conscience sank to sleep.
But in a rich and eager land, wealth and
work multiplied.
They twisted new and intricate patterns
around the earth.
Slowly but mightily these black workers
were integrated into modern
industry. On free and fertile land
Americans raised, not simply sugar as
cheap
sweetening, rice for food and tobacco
as a new and tickling luxury; but they
began to grow a fiber that clothed
the masses of a ragged world. Cotton grew
so swiftly
that the 9,000 bales of cotton
which the new nation
scarcely noticed in 1791
became 79,000 in 1800;
and with this increase, walked economic
revolution
in a dozen different lines.
The cotton crop reached one half million
bales in 1822,
a million bales in 1831,
2 million in 1840, 3 million
in 1852 and in the year of the secession,
stood at the then enormous total
of 5 million bales. Such facts
and others, coupled with the increase of
the slaves to which they were related as
both cause and effect,
meant a new world; and all the more so
because with increase in American cotton
and Negro slaves,
came both by chance and ingenuity new
miracles for manufacturing
and particularly for the spinning and
weaving
of cloth.
The giant forces of water and of steam
were harnessed
to do the world's work, and the black
workers of America bent at the bottom of
a growing pyramid of commerce and
industry;
and they not only could not be spared,
if this new economic organization was to
expand,
but rather they became the cause of new
political demands and alignments,
and of new dreams of power and visions
of empire. First of all, their work
called for widening stretches of new,
rich, black soil --
in Florida, in Louisiana, in Mexico;
even in Kansas. This land,
added to cheap labor, and labor easily
regulated and distributed, made profits
so high that a whole system of culture
arose in the South,
with a new leisure and social philosophy.
Black labor became the foundation stone
not only of Southern social structure,
but of Northern manufacture and commerce,
of the English factory system, of
European commerce,
of buying and selling on a world-wide
scale; 
new cities were built on the results of
black labor,
and a new labor problem, involving all
white labor,
arose both in Europe and America.
Thus, the old difficulties and paradoxes
appeared
in new dress. Tt became
easy to say and easier to prove that
these black men
were not men in the sense that white men
were, and could never be,
in the same sense, free.
Their slavery was a matter of both race
and social condition,
but the condition was limited and
determined by race.
They were congenital wards and children,
to be well-treated and cared for,
but far happier and safer than in their
own land.
as the Richmond, Virginia, Examiner put it
in 1854:
"Let us not bother our brains about what
Providence
intends to do with our Negroes in the
distant future,
but glory in and profit to the utmost
by what He has done for them and
transplanting them here,
and setting them to work on our
plantations ....
True philanthropy to the Negro, begins,
like charity,
at home; and if Southern men
would act as if the canopy of heaven
were inscribed with a covenant,
in letters of fire, that the Negro is
here,
and here forever; is our property,
and ours forever; ... they would accomplish
more good for the race in five years
than they boast
the institution itself to have
accomplished
in two centuries...."  On the other hand,
the growing exploitation of white labor
in Europe,
the rise of the factory system, the
increased
monopoly of land, and the problem of the
distribution of political
power, began to send wave after wave of
immigrants to America, looking for
new freedom, new opportunity and
new democracy.
The opportunity for real and new
democracy in America
was broad. Political power at first was,
as usual, confined to property holders
and an aristocracy of birth and learning.
But it was never securely based on land.
Land was free and both land and property
were possible to nearly every thrifty
worker.
Schools began early to multiply and open
their doors
even to the poor laborer. Birth began to
count for less
and less and America became to the world
a land of economic opportunity.
So the world came to America,
even before the Revolution, and
afterwards during the 19th century,
19 million immigrants entered the United
States. When we compare these figures
with a cotton crop and the increase of
black workers,
we see how the economic problem
increased in intricacy.
This intricacy is shown by the persons
in the drama
and their differing and opposing
interests.
There were the native-born Americans,
largely of English descent,
who were the property holders and
employers; and even so
they were poor, they looked forward to the
time
when they would accumulate capital and
become, as they put it, 
economically "independent."
Then there were the new immigrants, torn
with a certain
violence for their older social and
economic surroundings;
strangers in a new land, with visions of
rising in the social and economic world
by means of labor.
They differed in language and social
status,
varying from the half-starved Irish
peasant
to the educated German and English
artisan.
There were the free Negroes: those from
the North free
in some cases for many generations, and
voters;
and in other cases, fugitives, new
come from the South, with little skill
and small knowledge of life and labor
in their new environment. There were the
free Negroes of the South,
an unstable, harried class, living on
sufferance of the law, and the good will
of white patrons,
and yet rising to be workers and
sometimes owners of property
and even slaves, and cultured citizens.
There was the great mass of poor whites,
disinherited of their economic portion
by competition with the slave system
and land monopoly.
In the earlier history of the South, free
Negroes had the right
to vote. Indeed, so far as the letter of
the law was concerned,
there was not a single Southern colony
in which a black man who owned
the requisite amount of property, and
complied with other conditions,
did not at some period have the legal
right to vote.
Negroes voted in Virginia as late as 1723,
when the assembly enacted
that no free Negro mulatto or Indian
"shall hereafter have any vote at the
elections
or burgesses or any election whatsoever."
In North Carolina by the Act of 1734,
a former discrimination against Negro
voters
was laid aside and not reenacted until
1835.
A complaint in South Carolina in 1701,
said:
"Several free Negroes were received, &
taken for
as good Electors as the best Freeholders
in the Province.
So that we leave it with Your Lordships
to judge whether admitting
Aliens, Strangers, Servants, Negroes, etc,
as good and qualified Voters, can be
thought any ways
agreeable to King Charles' Patent
to Your Lordships, or the English
Constitution of Government."
Again in 1716, Jews and Negroes, who had
been voting,
were expressly excluded.
In Georgia, there was at first no color
discrimination,
although only owners of 50 acres of land
could vote.
in 1761, voting was expressly confined
to white men. In the states carved out of
the Southwest,
they were disenfranchised as soon as the
state came into the Union,
although in Kentucky they voted between
1792
and 1799, and Tennessee allowed free
Negroes to vote in her constitution
in 1796.
In North Carolina, where even
disenfranchisement,
in 1835, did not apply to Negroes who
already had the right to vote,
it was said that the several hundred
Negroes who had been voting before then
usually voted prudently and judiciously.
In Delaware and Maryland they voted in
the latter part of the 18th century.
In Louisiana, Negroes who had had the
right to vote
during territorial status were not
disenfranchised.
To sum up, in colonial times, the free
Negro was excluded from the suffrage
only in Georgia, South Carolina and
Virginia.
In the border States, Delaware
disenfranchised the Negro
in 1792, Maryland in 1783 and 1810.
In the Southeast, Florida disenfranchised
Negroes in 1845; 
and in the Southwest, Louisiana
disenfranchised them
in 1812; Mississippi in 1817;
Georgia in her constitution of 1777
confined voters to white males;
but this was omitted in the
constitutions of 1789
and 1798.
As slavery grew to a system and the
Cotton Kingdom began to expand into
imperial
white domination, a free Negro was a
contradiction,
a threat and a menace.
As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened
society;
but as an educated property holder, a
successful mechanic
or even professional man, he more than
threatened
slavery. He contradicted and undermined
it.
He must not be. He must be suppressed,
enslaved,
colonized. And nothing so bad could be
said about him
that did not easily appear as true to
slaveholders.
In the North, Negroes, for the most part,
received political enfranchisement
with the white laboring classes. In 1778,
the Congress of the Confederation
twice refused to insert the word "white"
in the Articles of Confederation in
asserting that free inhabitants in each
state
should be entitled to all the privileges
and immunities
of free citizens of several states.
In the law of 1783,
free Negroes were recognized as a basis
of taxation,
and in 1784, they were reorganized as
voters in the territories. In the
Northwest
Ordinance of 1787,
"free male inhabitants of full age" were
recognized as voters.
The few Negroes that were in Maine, New
Hampshire
and Vermont could vote if they had the
property qualifications.
In Connecticut they were disfranchised
in 1814;
in 1865 this restriction was retained,
and Negroes did not regain the right
until after the Civil War.
In New Jersey, they were disfranchised
in 1807,
but regained the right in 1820 and lost
it again in 1847.
Negroes voted in New York in the 18th
century, then were disfranchised,
but in 1821 were permitted to vote with
a discriminatory property qualification
of $250. No property qualification was
required of whites.
Attempts were made at various times to
remove this qualification
but it was not removed until 1870. in
Rhode Island they were disfranchised
in the constitution which followed
Dorr's Rebellion, but finally allowed to
vote in 1842.
In Pennsylvania, they were allowed to
vote in 1838
when the "reform" convention restricted
the suffrage
to whites.
The Western States as territories did
not usually
restrict the suffrage, but as they were
admitted to the Union
they disfranchised the Negroes: Ohio
in 1803; Indiana in 1816;
Illinois in 1818; Michigan in 1837;
Iowa in 1846; Wisconsin
in 1848; Minnesota in 1858;
and Kansas in 1861.
The Northwest Ordinance and even the
Louisiana Purchase
had made no color discrimination in
legal and political rights.
But the states admitted from this
territory,
specifically and from the first, denied
free black men the right to vote and
passed codes
of black laws in Ohio, Indiana and
elsewhere,
instigated largely by the attitude and
fears of the immigrant poor whites from
the South.
Thus, at first, in Kansas and the West, the
problem of the black worker was
narrow and specific. Neither the north
nor the West
asked the black labor in the United
States be free
and enfranchised. On the contrary, they
accepted slave labor as
a fact; but they determined that it
should be territorially
restricted, and should not compete with
free
white labor. What was this industrial
system for which the South
fought and risked life, reputation and
wealth
and which a growing element in the North
viewed first with
hesitating tolerance, then with distaste
and finally with economic
fear and moral horror?
What did it mean to be a slave?
It is hard to imagine it today. We think
of oppression beyond all conception:
cruelty, degradation, whipping and
starvation,
and absolute negation of human rights;
or on the contrary, we may think of the
ordinary worker in the world
over today, ,slaving 10
12, or 14 hours a day, with not enough to
eat,
compelled by his physical necessities to
do this and not
to do that, curtailed in his movements
and his possibilities;
and we say, here, too, is a slave called a
"free worker,"
and slavery is merely a matter of name.
But there was in 1863 a real meaning to
slavery different from that we may apply
to the laborer today.
It was in part psychological, the
enforced
personal feeling of inferiority, the
calling of another Master;
the standing with hat in hand. It was the
helplessness.
It was the defenselessness of family
life.
It was the submergence below the
arbitrary will
of any sort of individual. It was without
doubt worse
in these vital respects than that which
exists
today in Europe or America.
its analogue today is the yellow, brown and
black laborer
in China and India, in Africa,
in in the forests of the Amazon;
and it was this slavery that fell in
America.
The slavery of Negroes in the South was
not usually
a deliberately cruel and oppressive
system.
It did not mean systematic starvation or
murder. On the other hand,
it is just as difficult to conceive as
quite true the idyllic picture of
patriarchal
state with cultured and humane masters
under whom slaves were as children,
guided and
trained in work and play, given even such
mental training as was for their good,
and for the well-being
of the surrounding world.
The victims of Southern slavery
were often happy;
had usually adequate food for their
health,
and shelter sufficient for a mild
climate.
The Southerners could say with some
justification
that when the mass of their field hands
were compared to the worst class of
laborers in the slums of New York and
Philadelphia,
and the factory towns of New England,
the black slaves were as well off
and in some particulars better off.
Slaves lived largely in the country
where health conditions were
better;
they worked in the open air,
and their hours were about the current
hours
for peasants throughout Europe.
They received no formal education, and
neither did the Irish
peasant, the English factory-laborer, nor
the German Bauer;
and in contrast with these free white
laborers,
the Negroes were protected by
a certain primitive sort of
old-age pension,
job insurance, and sickness
insurance; that is,
they must be supported in some fashion,
when they were too old to work;
they must have attention in sickness,
for they represented invested capital;
and they could never be among
the unemployed.
On the other hand, it is just as true
that Negro slaves in America represented
the worst and lowest conditions among
modern laborers. One estimate is that the
maintenance of a slave in the South
cost the master about $19 a year,
which means that they were among the
poorest
paid laborers in the modern world.
They represented in a very real sense
the ultimate degradation of
man. Indeed, the system was so reactionary,
so utterly inconsistent with modern
progress,
that we simply cannot grasp it today.
No matter how degraded the factory hand,
he is not
real estate. The tragedy of the black
slave's position
was precisely this; his absolute
subjection to the individual will
of an owner and to "the cruelty
and injustice which are the invariable
consequences of the exercise
of irresponsible power, especially where
authority
must be sometimes delegated by the
planter to
agents of inferior education
and coarser feelings."
The proof of this lies clearly written
in the slave codes.
Slaves were not considered men. They had
no right
or petition. They were "devisible like
any other chattel."  They could own
nothing; they could make no contracts;
they could hold
no property, nor traffic in property;
they could not hire out; they could not
legally marry nor
constitute families; they could not
control
their children; they could not appeal from
their master;
they could be punished at will.
They could not testify in court; they
could be imprisoned by their owners,
and the criminal offense of assault and
battery
could not be committed on the person of
a slave.
The "willful, malicious and deliberate
murder" of a slave was punishable by
death but such a crime was practically
impossible of proof.
The slave owed to his master and all his
family
a respect "without bounds, and an
absolute obedience."
This authority could be transmitted to
others.
A slave could not sue his master; had no
right
of redemption; no right to education
or religion; a promise made to a slave by
his master had no force nor validity.
Children followed the condition of the
slave mother.
The slave could have no access to
judiciary.
A slave might be condemned to death for
striking
any white person. Looking at these
accounts,
"it is safe to say that the law regards a
Negro slave, so far as his civil status
is concerned,
purely and absolutely property,
to be bought and sold and pass and
descend
as a tract of land, a horse,
or an ox." The whole legal system of slavery
was enunciated in the extraordinary
statement of a Chief Justice
of the United States that Negroes had
always been regarded in America "as
having no
rights which a white man was bound to
respect."
It may be said with truth that the law
was often harsher than the practice.
Nevertheless, these laws and decisions
represent the legally permissible
possibilities, and the only curb upon the
power of the master
was his sense of humanity and decency,
on the one hand, and the conserving of
his investment
on the other. Of the humanity
of large numbers of Southern masters
there can be no doubt.
In some cases, they gave their slaves a
fatherly care.
And yet even in such cases the strain
upon their ability to care for
large numbers of people and the
necessity of entrusting the care of
slaves
to other hands than their own, led to
much suffering and cruelty.
The matter of his investment in land and
slaves
greatly curtailed the owner's freedom
of action.
Under the competition of growing
industrial organization,
the slave system was indeed the source
of immense
profits. But for the slave owner
and landlord to keep a large or even
reasonable share of these profits was
increasingly difficult.
The price of the slave produce in the
open market could be hammered down by
merchants and traders
acting with knowledge and collusion.
And the slave owner was, therefore,
continually forced
to find his profit not in the high price
of
cotton and sugar, but in beating even
further down the cost of his slave labor.
This made the slave owners in early days
kill the slave
by overwork and renew their working
stock;
it led to the widely organized
interstate slave trade between the
Border States
and the Cotton Kingdom of the Southern
South;
it led to neglect and the breaking up of
families,
and it could not protect the slave
against the cruelty, lust and neglect
of certain owners.
In this vital respect, the slave laborer
differed
from all others of his day:
he could be sold; he could, it will of a
single individual,
be transferred for life a thousand miles
or more. His family, wife and children
could be legally and absolutely taken
from him.
Free laborers today are compelled to
wander in search of work and food;
their families are deserted for want of
wages;
but in all this there is no such direct
barter
in human flesh. It was a sharp
accentuation of control over men beyond
the modern labor
reserve or the contract coolie system.
Negroes could be sold--actually sold as
we sell
cattle with no reference to calves or
bulls,
or recognition of family. It was a nasty
business.
The white South was properly ashamed of
it and continually belittled and almost
denied it. But it was a stark
and bitter fact. Southern papers of the
Border States
were filled with advertisements:-- "I wish
to purchase
50 Negroes of both sexes from
6 to 30 years of age for which I will
give the highest
cash prices."  "Wanted to purchase--
Negroes of every description, age
and sex." The consequent disruption of
families
is proven beyond doubt:
"Fifty Dollars reward. --Ran away
from the subscriber, a Negro girl, named Maria.
She is of a copper color, between 13 and 14
years of age--
bareheaded and barefooted. 
She is small for her age--very sprightly
and very likely. She stated she was going
to see her mother
in Maysville. Sanford Tomson."
"Committed to jail in Madison County, a
Negro woman, who calls herself
Fanny, and says she belongs to William
Miller, of Mobile.
She formerly belonged to John Givins, of
this county,
who now owns several of her children.
David Shropshire, Jailer."
"Fifty Dollar reward. --Ran away from the
subscriber, his Negro
man Pauladore, commonly called Paul.
I understand Gen. R. Y. Hayne
has purchased his wife and children from
H.L. Pinckney, Esq.,
and has them on his plantation at Goosecreek,
where, no doubt, the fellow is frequently
lurking.
T. Davis." One can see Pauladore
"lurking" about his wife and children.
The system of slavery demanded a special
police force
and such a force was made possible and
usually effective
by the presence of poor whites. This
explains the difference
between the slave revolts in the West
Indies, and the lack of effective revolt
in the Southern United States. In the
West Indies,
the power over the slave was held by the
whites and carried out by them
and such Negroes as they could trust.
In the south, on the other hand, the great
planters formed
proportionately quite as small a class
but they had
singularly enough at their command some
five
million poor whites; that is,
there were actually more white people to
police the slaves
than there were slaves. Considering the
economic
rivalry of the black and white worker in
the North,
it would have seemed natural that the
poor white would have refused to police
the slaves.
But two considerations led him in the
opposite direction.
First of all, it gave him work and some
authority as an overseer,
slave driver, and member of a patrol
system.
But above and beyond this, it fed his
vanity
because it associated him with the
masters.
Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike
of Negro toil of all
sorts. He never regarded himself as a
laborer,
or as part of any labor movement.
If he had any ambition at all it was to
become a planter
and to own "niggers."
To these Negroes he transferred all the
dislike and hatred which he had
for the whole slave system.
The result was the system
was held stable and intact by
the poor white.
Even with the late ruin of Haiti before
their eyes,
the planters, stirred as they were, were
nevertheless
able to stamp out slave revolt.
The dozen revolts of the 18th century
had dwindled to the plot
of Gabriel in 1800,
Vesey in 1822,
of Nat Turner in 1831
and crews of the Amistad and Creole in
1839 and 1841.
Gradually the whole white South became
an armed and commissioned camp
to keep Negroes in slavery and to kill
the black
rebel. But even the poor white,
led by the planter, would not have kept
the black slave in nearly so complete
control
had it not been for what may be called
the Safety Valve of Slavery;
and that was the chance which a vigorous
and determined slave had
to run to freedom.
Under the situation as it developed between
1830
and 1860 there were grave losses to the
capital invested in black workers.
Encouraged by the idealism of those
Northern thinkers
who insisted that Negroes were human, the
black worker sought freedom by running
away from slavery.
The physical geography of America with
its paths north,
by swamp, river and mountain range; the
daring black revolutionists like Henson
and Tubman; and the extra-legal efforts
of abolitionists
made this more and more easy.
One cannot know the real facts
concerning the number of fugitives,
but despite the fear of advertising the
losses,
the emphasis put on fugitive slaves by
the South
shows it was an important economic item.
it is certain from the bitter effort to
increase the efficiency of the fugitive
slave law
that the losses from runaways was
widespread
and continuous; and the increase in the
interstate
slave trade from Border States to the
deep South,
together with the increase in the price
of slaves,
showed a growing pressure. At the
beginning of the 19th century,
one bought an average slave for two
hundred dollars;
while in 1860 the price ranged from
one thousand four hundred to two
thousand dollars.
Not only was the fugitive slave
important because of the actual loss
involved, but for potentialities
in the future. These free Negroes were
furnishing a leadership
for the mass of black workers, and
especially
they were furnishing a text for the
abolition idealists.
Fugitive slaves, like Frederick Douglass
and others
humbler and less gifted, increased the
number of abolitionists
by thousands and spelled the doom
of slavery.
The true significance of slavery in the
United States to the whole social
development of America
lay in the ultimate relation of slaves
to democracy.
What were to be the limits of democratic
control in the United States?
If all labor, black as well as white,
became free--
were given schools and the right to vote--
what control
could or should be set to the power and
action of these laborers?
Was the rule of the mass of Americans to
be unlimited,
and the right to rule extended to all
men regardless of
race and color, or if not,
what power of dictatorship and control;
and how would property and privilege be
protected?
This was the great and primary question
which was in the minds of the men who
wrote the Constitution of the United
States
and continued in the minds of thinkers
down through the slavery controversy.
It still remains with the world as the
problem of democracy expands
and touches all races and nations.
And of all human development, ancient and
modern,
not to the least singular and
significant
is the philosophy of life and action
which
slavery bred in the souls of black folk.
In most respects its expression was
stilted
and confused; the rolling periods of
Hebrew prophecy and biblical legend
furnished inaccurate but splendid
words. The subtle folk-lore of Africa, with
whimsy and parable,
veiled wish and wisdom; and above all
fell
the anointing chrism of the slave music,
the only gift of pure art in America.
Beneath the Veil lay right and wrong,
vengeance and love, and sometimes
throwing aside the veil, a soul of sweet
Beauty and Truth stood revealed.
Nothing else of art or religion did the
slave South give to the world,
except the Negro song and story.
And even after slavery, down to our day,
it has added but little to this gift.
One has but to remember as symbol of it
all,
still unspoiled by petty artisans, the
legend of John
Henry, the mighty black, who broke his
heart
working against the machine, and died "with his Hammer in His Hand."
Up from the slavery gradually
climbed
the Free Negro with clearer, modern
expression
and more definite aim long before the
emancipation of 1863.
his greatest effort lay in his
cooperation with the abolition movement.
He knew he was not free until all
Negroes were free.
Individual Negroes became exhibits of
the
possibilities of the Negro race, if once
it was raised above the status of
slavery.
Even when, as so often, the Negro became
Court Jester to the
ignorant American mob, he made his plea
in songs and antics.
Thus spoke "the noblest slave that ever
God
set free,"  Frederick Douglass
in 1852, in his fourth
of July oration at Rochester,
voicing the frank and fearless criticism
of the black worker:
"What, to the American slave, is your
fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him,
more than all other days in the year, the
gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the
constant
victim. To him your celebration
is a sham; your boasted liberty,
an unholy license; your national
greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing
and empty and heartless; your
denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted
impudence; your shouts of liberty and
equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanksgivings,
with all your religious parade and
solemnity, are, to him
mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy--
a thin veil to cover up crimes which
would disgrace
a nation of savages....
"You boast of your love of liberty,
your superior civilization,  and your pure
Christianity, while the whole political
power of the nation (as embodied in the
two great political parties)
is solemnly pledged to support and
perpetuate
the enslavement of three million of your
countrymen.
You hurl your anathemas at the crown-headed
tyrants of Russia
and Austria and pride yourselves on your
democratic
institutions, while you yourselves
consent to be the mere tools
and bodyguards of the tyrants of
Virginia and Carolina.
You invite to your shores fugitives of
oppression from abroad,
honor them with banquets, greet them with
ovations,
cheer them, toast them, salute them,
protect them,
and pour out your money to them like
water;
but the fugitives from your own land you
advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and
kill. You glory in your refinement
and your universal education;
yet you maintain a system as barbarous
and dreadful as ever stained the
character of a nation--
a system begun in avarice, supported in
pride,
and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed
tears over fallen Hungary,
and make the sad story of her wrongs the
theme of your poets,
statesmen, and orators, till your gallant
sons are ready to fly to the arms
to vindicate her against the oppressor:
but in regard to the 10,000 wrongs of
the American slave,
you would enforce the strictest silence,
and would hail him as an enemy of the
nation who dares to make those wrongs
the subject of public discourse!"
Above all, we must remember the black
worker was the ultimate exploited;
that he formed that mass of labor which had
neither wish
nor power to escape from the labor
status, in order to directly exploit
other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance
with capital,
to share in their exploitation.
To be sure, the black mass, developed
again and again, here and there,
capitalistic groups in New Orleans, in
Charleston
and in Philadelphia; groups willing to
join white capital in exploiting labor;
but they were driven back into the mass
by racial prejudice
before they had reached a permanent
foothold; and thus became all the more
bitter against all organization which by
means of race prejudice, or the monopoly
of wealth,
sought to exclude men from making a
living.
It was thus the black worker, as founding
stone of a new economic system in the
19th century
and for the modern world, who brought
civil war
in America. He was its underlying cause,
in spite of every effort to base the
strife upon union
and national power.
The dark and vast sea of human labor in
China
and India, the South Seas
and all Africa; in the West Indies and
Central America
and in the United States-- that great
majority of mankind,
on whose bent and broken backs rest
today
the founding stones of modern industry--
shares a common destiny;
it is despised and rejected
by race and color; paid a wage below the
level
of decent living; driven,
beaten, prisoned and enslaved in
all but name; spawning the world's raw
material and luxury--
cotton, wool, coffee,
tea, cocoa, palm oil,
fibers, spices, rubber, silks,
lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather--
how shall we end the list and where?
All these are gathered up
at prices lowest of the low,
manufactured, transformed and
transported at fabulous gain;
and the resultant wealth is distributed
and displayed
and made the basis of world power and
universal dominion
in armed arrogance in London
and Paris, Berlin and Rome,
New York and Rio de Janeiro.
Here is the real modern labor problem.
Here is the kernel of the problem of
Religion
and Democracy, of Humanity.
Words and futile gestures
avail nothing. Out of the exploitation
of the dark proletariat comes the
Surplus Value
filched from human beasts which,
in cultured lands, the Machine and
harnessed Power
veil and conceal.
The emancipation of man is the
emancipation of labor
and the emancipation of labor is the
freeing
of that basic majority of workers who
are yellow,
brown and black.
Dark shackled nights of labor,
clinging still
Amidst a universal wreck
of faith To cheerfulness,
and foreigners to hate.
These know ye not, these have ye not
received,
But these shall speak to you Beatitudes.
Around them search the tides of all your
strife,
Above them rise the august monuments Of
all your
outward splendor, but they
stand Unenvious in thought,
and bide their time.
Leslie P. Hill
Chapter Two: The White Worker
 
How America
became the laborer's Promised Land; and
flocking here from all the world the
white workers competed with black slaves,
with new floods of foreigners,
and with growing exploitation, until they
fought slavery to save
democracy and then lost democracy in a
new investor slavery
The opportunity for real and new
democracy in America was broad.
Political power was at first as usual
confined to property holders and
an aristocracy of birth and learning. But
it was never securely based on land.
Land was free and both land and property
were possible to nearly every thrifty
worker.
Schools began early to multiply and open
their doors
even to the poor laborer. Birth began to
count for less and less and America became
to the world a land of opportunity.
So the world came to America, even before
the Revolution, and afterward during the
19th century,
19 million immigrants entered the United
States.
The new labor that came to the United
States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low
standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America,
to regard itself as a permanent laboring class
and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans
must be studied.
The successful, well-paid American
laboring class formed, because of its property and
ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join
capital in exploiting common labor, white and
black, foreign and native. The more energetic
and thrifty among the immigrants caught
the prevalent American idea that
here labor could become emancipated from the necessity of continuous toil
and that an increasing proportion could
join the class of exploiters,
that is of those who made their income
chiefly
by profit derived through the hiring of
labor.
Abraham Lincoln expressed this idea
frankly at Hartford, in March,
1860. He said: "I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired
laborer,
mauling rails, at work on a flat boat--
just what
might happen to any poor man's son." Then
followed the characteristic philosophy of the time: "I want every man to have his
chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—
in which he can better his condition--
when he may look forward and hope to be
a hired laborer this year and
the next,
work for himself afterward, and finally
to hire men to work for him.
That is the true system." He was
enunciating the widespread American
idea of the son
rising to a higher economic level than
the father; of the chance for the poor
man to accumulate wealth
and power, which made the European
doctrine of a working class fighting for
the elevation of all workers
seemed not only less desirable but even
less possible for average workers
than they had formally considered it.
These workers came to oppose slavery not
so much from
moral as from the economic fear of being
reduced by competition to the level of
slaves.
They wanted a chance to become
capitalists; and they found that chance
threatened by the competition of a
working class whose status at the bottom
of the economic structure seemed
permanent
and inescapable. At first,
black slavery jarred upon them, and as
early as the 17th century German
immigrants to Pennsylvania
asked the Quakers innocently if slavery
was in accord with the Golden Rule.
Then, gradually, as succeeding immigrants
were thrown in difficult and
exasperating competition with black
workers,
their attitude changed. These were the
very years when the white worker was
beginning to understand the early
American doctrine of wealth
and property; to escape
the liability of imprisonment for debt,
and even to gain the right of universal
suffrage.
He found pouring into cities like New
York and Philadelphia emancipated
Negroes with low standards of living,
competing for the jobs which the lower
class of unskilled white laborers wanted.
For the immediate available jobs, the
Irish particularly competed
and the employers because of race
antipathy and sympathy with the South
did not wish to increase the number of
Negro workers, so long as the foreigners
worked just as cheaply.
The foreigners in turn blamed blacks for
the cheap price of labor.
The result was race war; riots took place
which were at first simply the
flaming hostility of the group of
laborers fighting for bread and butter;
then they turned into race riots.
For three days in Cincinnati in 1829, a
mob of whites wounded
and killed free Negroes and fugitive
slaves and destroyed property.
Most of the black population, numbering
over 2000 left the city and trekked to
Canada.
In Philadelphia, 1828 to 1840,
a series of riots took place which
thereafter extended until
after the Civil War. The riot of 1834
took the dimensions of a pitched battle
and lasted for three days.
31 houses and two churches were
destroyed. Other riots took place in 1835
and 1838 and a two days' riot in 1842
caused the calling out of the militia
with artillery.
In the 40s came quite a different class,
the English and German workers, who had
tried by
organization to fight the machine and in
the end had to some degree
envisage the Marxian reorganization of
industry through trade unions
and class struggle. The attitude of these
people towards the Negro was varied and
contradictory.
At first they blurted out the
disapprobation
of slavery on principle. It was a phase
of
all wage slavery. Then they began to see
a way out for the worker in America
through the free land of the west.
Here was a solution such as was
impossible in Europe:
plenty of land, rich land, land coming
daily nearer
its own markets, to which the worker
could retreat and restore the industrial
balance ruined
in Europe by the expropriation of the
worker from the soil.
Or in other words, the worker in America
saw a chance to increase his wage and
regulate his conditions of employment
much greater than in Europe. The trade
unions could have a
material backing that they could not
have in Germany, France or England.
This thought, curiously enough,
instead of increasing the sympathy for
the slave
turned it directly into rivalry and
enmity.
The wisest of the leaders could not
clearly envisage just how
slave labor in conjunction and
competition with free labor
tended to reduce all labor towards
slavery. For this reason,
the union and labor leaders gravitated
toward the political party which opposed
tariff bounties and welcomed immigrants,
quite forgetting that
this same Democratic party had as its
backbone the
planter oligarchy of the South with with
its slave labor.
The new immigrants in their competition
with the group reflected not simply the
general attitude of America toward
colored people,
but particularly they felt a threat of
slave competition
which these Negroes foreshadowed. The
Negroes worked cheaply,
partly from custom, partly as their own
defense against competition.
The white laborers realized that Negroes
were part of a group of millions of
workers who had who were slaves by law,
and whose competition kept white labor
out of the work
of the South and threatened its wages
and stability in the North.
When now the labor question moved West,
and became a part of the land question,
the competition of black men became of
increased importance.
Foreign laborers saw more clearly than
most Americans the tremendous
significance of free land
in abundance, such as America possessed,
in open contrast to the land monopoly of
Europe.
But here on this free land, they met not
only a
few free Negro workers, but the threat of
a mass
of slaves. The attitude of the West
toward Negroes, therefore, became sterner
than that of the East.
Here was the possibility of direct
competition with slaves,
and the absorption of Western land into
the slave system.
This must be resisted at all costs, but
beyond this,
even free Negroes must be discouraged.
On this the Southern poor white
immigrants insisted.
In the meantime, the problem of the black
worker had not
ceased to trouble the conscious and
economic philosophy of America.
That the worker should be a bond slave
was fundamentally at variance with the
American doctrine,
and the demand for the abolition of
slavery had been continuous since the
Revolution.
In the North, it had resulted in freeing
gradually all of the Negroes.
But the comparatively small number of
those thus freed was being augmented now
by fugitive slaves from the South,
and manifestly the ultimate plight of
the black worker depended
upon the course of Southern slavery.
There arose, then, in the 30s, and
among thinkers and workers,
a demand that slavery in the United
States be immediately abolished.
This demand became epitomized in the
crusade of William Lloyd Garrison,
himself a poor printer,
but a man of education, thought and indomitable courage.
This movement was not primarily a labor movement or a matter of profit and wage.
It simply said that under any condition of life, the
reduction of a human being to real estate was a crime against
humanity of such enormity that its existence must be immediately
ended.
After the emancipation there would come
questions of labor, wage and political
power. But now,
first, must be demanded that ordinary human freedom and recognition of
essential manhood which slavery blasphemously
denied.
This philosophy of freedom was a logical
continuation of the freedom philosophy
of the 18th century which insisted that
Freedom was not an End but an indispensable means to the beginning
of human progress and that democracy could function only after the dropping
of feudal privileges, monopoly and chains.
The propaganda which
made the abolition movement terribly real was the Fugitive Slave—
the piece of intelligent humanity who could say: I have been owned like an ox.
I stole my own body and now I am hunted by law
and lash to be made an ox again. By no conception of justice could such logic
be answered. Nevertheless, at the same time white
labor, while it attempted no denial but even
expressed faint sympathy, saw in this fugitive slave and in the
millions of slaves behind him, willing and eager to work for less than
current wage, competition for their own jobs.
What they failed to comprehend was that the black man enslaved
was an even more formidable and fatal competitor than the black man free.
Here, then, were two labor movements: the movement to give the black worker a
minimum legal status which would
enable him to sell his own labor, and another movement
which proposed to increase the wage and better the condition of the working
class in America, now largely composed of foreign
immigrants, and dispute with the new American capitalism
the basis upon which the new wealth was to be divided.
Broad philanthropy and a wide knowledge of the elements of human progress would
have led these two movements to unite and in
their union to become irresistible. It was difficult, almost impossible, for
this to be clear to the white labor leaders of the
thirties. They had their particularistic grievances and
one of these was the competition of free Negro labor.
Beyond this they could easily vision a new and tremendous competition of black
workers after all the slaves became free. What
they did not see nor understand was that this competition
was present and would continue and would
be emphasized
if the Negro continued as a slave worker.
On the other hand, the Abolitionists
did not realize the plight of the white laborer, especially the semi-skilled and
unskilled worker.
While the Evans brothers, who came as
labor agitators in 1825, had among their twelve demands "the abolition of chattel
slavery," nevertheless, George was soon convinced
that freedom without land was of no
importance.
He wrote to Gerrit Smith, who was giving land to Negroes, and said:
"I was formerly, like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the
abolition of
slavery. This was before I saw that there was
white slavery. Since I saw this, I have materially changed my views as to the
means of abolishing Negro slavery. I now see, clearly, I think, that to give
the landless black the privilege of changing masters now possessed by the
landless white would hardly be a benefit to him in
exchange for his surety of support in sickness and old age, although he
is in a favorable climate. If the Southern form of slavery existed at the
North, I should say the black would be a great loser by such a change." At the
convention of the New England anti-slavery society in 1845, Robert Owen,
the great champion of cooperation, said
he was opposed to Negro slavery, but
that he had seen worse slavery in England than among the Negroes.
Horace Greeley said the same year: "If I am less troubled concerning the slavery
prevalent in Charleston or New Orleans, it is because
I see so much slavery in New York which appears to claim my first efforts." Thus
despite all influences,
reform and social uplift veered away
from the Negro.
Brisbane, Channing, Owen and other
leaders called a National Reform
Association
to meet in New York in May, 1845. In October, Owen's "World Conference" met.
But they hardly mentioned slavery. The Abolitionists did
join a National Industrial Congress which met around 1845-1846.
Other labor leaders were openly hostile toward the abolitionist movement,
while the movement for free land
increased.
Thus two movements—Labor-Free Soil, and Abolition,
exhibited fundamental divergence instead
of becoming one great party of free
labor and free land. The Free Soilers
stressed the difficulties that even the
free laborer getting hold of the land
and getting work in the great congestion
which
immigration had brought; and the
abolitionists stressed the moral wrong
of slavery.
These two movements might easily have
cooperated and
differed only in matters of emphasis;
but the trouble was that
black and white laborers were competing
for the same jobs
just of course as all laborers always
are.
The immediate competition became open
and visible because of racial lines and
racial philosophy and
particularly in Northern states where
free Negroes and fugitive slaves had
established themselves as workers, while
the ultimate overshadowing competition
of free and slave labor was
obscured and pushed into the background.
This situation, too,
made extraordinary reaction led by the
ignorant mob and formatted by
authority and privilege; abolitionists
were attacked in their meeting places
burned;
women suffragists were hooted; laws were
proposed making the kidnapping of
Negroes easier and
disfranchising Negro voters in
conventions called for
purposes of "reform."  The humanitarian
reform movement reached its height in
1847
to 1849 amid falling prices, and trade
unionism
was at a low ebb. The strikes from 1849
to 1852 won the support of Horace Greeley, and increased the labor organizations.
Labor in eastern cities refused to touch
the slavery controversy, and the
control which the Democrats had over the
labor vote in New York and elsewhere
increased this tendency to ignore the
Negro,
and increased the division between white
and colored labor.
In 1850, a Congress of Trade Unions was
held with 110 delegates.
They stressed land reform but said nothing about slavery and the
organization eventually was captured by Tammany Hall. After 1850
unions composed of skilled laborers
began to separate from common laborers
and adopt a policy of closed shops in a
minimum wage and excluded farmers and
Negroes.
Although this movement was killed by the
panic of 1857, it eventually became
triumphant in the 80s
and culminated in the American Federation of Labor which today
allows any local or national union to
exclude Negroes of any pretext.
Other labor leaders became more explicit
and emphasized race rather than class.
John Campbell said in 1851: "Will the white race
ever agree that blacks shall stand beside us on election
day, upon the rostrum, in the ranks of the army, in our places
of amusement, in places of public worship, ride in the same coaches,
railway cars, or steamships? Never! Never! or is it natural, or just,
that this kind of equality should exist? God never intended
it; had he so willed it, he would have made all
one color."
New labor leaders arrived in the 50s.
Hermann Kriege and Wilhelm Weitling
left their work in Germany, and their friends Marx and Engels, and came to
America, and at the same time came tens of
thousands of revolutionary Germans. The Socialist and Communist papers
increased. Trade unions increased in power and numbers and held public
meetings. Immediately, the question of slavery
injected itself, and that of abolition.
Kriege began to preach land reform and
free soil in 1846, and by 1850 six hundred American papers were supporting his
program. But Kriege went beyond Evans and former leaders and openly
repudiated abolition. He declared in 1846:
"That we see in the slavery question a
property question which cannot be settled by itself alone.
That we should declare ourselves in favor of the abolitionist movement
if it were our intention to throw the Republic into a state of
anarchy, to extend the competition of 'free
workingmen' beyond all measure, and to depress labor itself to the last
extremity. That we could not improve the lot of our
'black brothers' by abolition under the conditions
prevailing in modern society, but make infinitely worse the lot of our
'white brothers.' That we believe in the peaceable development of
society in the United States and do not, therefore, here
at least see our only hope in condition of the extremest degradation.
That we feel constrained, there- fore, to oppose Abolition with all our might,
despite all the importunities of sentimental philistines
and despite all the poetical effusions
of
liberty-intoxicated ladies." Wilhelm Weitling, who came to America the
following year, 1847, started much agitation but gave little
attention to slavery. He did not openly side with the
slaveholder, as Kriege did; nevertheless, there was no condemnation
of slavery in his paper. In the first German labor
conference in Philadelphia, under Weitling in 1850,
a series of resolutions were passed which did not mention slavery.
Both Kriege and Weitling joined the Democratic party and numbers of
other immigrant Germans did the same thing, and these workers, therefore, became
practical defenders of slavery. Doubtless, the "Know-Nothing" movement against the
foreign-born forced many workers into the Democratic
party, despite slavery.
The year 1853 saw the formation of the
Arbeiterbund, under Joseph Weydemeyer, a
friend of Karl Marx. This organization advocated Marxian
socialism but never got a clear attitude toward
slavery. In 1854, it opposed the Kansas-Nebraska
bill because "Capitalism and land speculation have
again been favored at the expense of the mass of the people,"
and "This bill withdraws from or makes unavailable in a future
homestead bill vast tracts of territory," and
"authorizes the further extension of slavery; but we have,
do now, and shall continue to protest most
emphatically against both white and black slavery."
Nevertheless, when the Arbeiterbund was reorganized in December, 1857, slavery
was not mentioned. When its new organ appeared in
April, 1858, it said that the question of the present
moment was not the abolition of slavery, but the prevention of its further
extension and that Negro slavery was firmly rooted
in America. One small division of this organization
in 1857 called for abolition of the slave trade and colonization of Negroes,
but defended the Southern slaveholders.
In 1859, however, a conference of the Arbeiterbund
condemned all
slavery in whatever form it might appear,
and demanded the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. The Democratic and pro-slavery
New York Staats-Zeitung counseled the people to abstain from
agitation against the extension of slavery, but
all of the German population did not agree.
As the Chartist movement increased in England, the press was filled with
attacks against the United States and its institutions, and the
Chartists were clear on the matter of slavery. Their chief organ in
1844 said:
"That damning stain upon the American escutcheon
is one that has caused the Republicans of Europe to weep for very shame
and mortification; and the people of the United States have
much to answer for at the bar of humanity for this indecent, cruel,
revolting and fiendish violation of their
boasted principle—that 'All men are born free
and equal.' "  The labor movement in England continued to emphasize the importance of
attacking slavery; and the agitation, started by the work of
Frederick Douglass and others, increased in importance and activity.
In 1857, George I. Holyoake sent an anti-slavery
address to America, signed by 1,800 English workingmen,
whom Karl Marx himself was guiding in England, and this made the black American
worker a central text. They pointed out the fact that the black
worker was furnishing the raw material which the English capitalist was
exploiting together with the English
worker.
This same year, the United States Supreme Court sent down the Dred Scott decision
that Negroes were not citizens.
This English
initiative had at first but limited influence in America. The trade
unions were willing to admit that the Negroes ought to be free
sometime; but at the present, self-preservation called for their
slavery; and after all, whites were a different
grade of workers from blacks. Even when the Marxian ideas arrived,
there was a split; the earlier representatives of the Marxian
philosophy in America agreed with the older Union
movement in deprecating any entanglement with the abolition
controversy. After all, abolition represented capital.
The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and not on the demands of
the workers, at least of the white workers. And so the
early American Marxists simply gave up the
idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth
at that time.
To this logic the abolitionists were increasingly opposed
It seemed to them that the crucial point was the matter of freedom;
that a free laborer in America had an even chance to make his fortune as
a worker or a farmer; but, on the other hand, if the laborer was not free, as in the
case of the Negro, he had no opportunity, and he inevitably
degraded white labor. The abolitionist did not sense the new
subordination into which the worker was being forced by organized capital,
while the laborers did not realize that the exclusion of four million workers
from the labor program was a fatal omission.
Wendell Phillips alone suggested a boycott on Southern goods, and said that
the great cause of labor was paramount and included mill operatives in New
England, peasants in Ireland, and laborers in
South America who ought not to be lost sight of in sympathy for the
Southern slave.
In the United States shortly before the
outbreak of the Civil War there were twenty-six trades with national organizations,
including the iron and steel workers, machinists, blacksmiths, etc.
The employers formed a national league and planned to import more
workmen from foreign countries. The iron molders started a national strike July 5,
1859, and said: "Wealth is power, and practical experience
teaches us that it is a power but too often used to
oppress and degrade the daily laborer. Year after year
the capital of the country becomes more and more concentrated in the hands
of a few, and, in proportion as the wealth of the
country becomes centralized, its power increases, and the laboring classes are
impoverished. It therefore becomes us, as men who have
to battle with the stern realities of life,
to look this matter fair in the face; there is no dodging the question;
let every man give it a fair, full and candid consideration,
and then act according to his honest convictions.
What position are we, the mechanics of America,
to hold in Society?"  There was not a word in this address about slavery and one
would not dream that the United States was on the verge of the greatest labor
revolution it had seen. Other conferences of the molders, machinists and
blacksmiths and others were held in the sixties, and a labor mass
meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1861 said:
"The truth is that the workingmen care little for the strife of political
parties and the intrigues of office-seekers. We regard
them with the contempt they deserve. We are weary of this question of slavery;
it is a matter which does not concern us; and we wish only to attend
to our business, and leave the South to
attend to their own affairs, without
any interference from the North."
In all this consideration, we have so far
ignored the white workers
of the South and we have done this
because the labor movement ignored them and the abolitionists
ignored them; and above all, they were ignored by Northern capitalists and
Southern planters. They were in many respects
almost a forgotten mass of men. Cairnes describes the slave
South, the period just before the war:
"It resolves itself into three classes,
broadly distinguished from each other, and connected by no common interest—
the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who
reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless
rabble who live dispersed over vast plains in a condition little removed
from absolute barbarism."
From all that has been written and said
about the antbellum South, one almost loses sight of about
5,000,000 white people in 1860 who lived in the South and held no slaves.
Even among the two million slave- holders, an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the
South, while as an ob- server said: "For twenty years, I do
not recollect ever to have seen or heard these non-slaveholding whites
referred to by the Southern gentleman as constituting any part of
what they called the South."
They were largely ignorant and degraded;
only 25 percent could read and write. The condition of the poor whites has
been many times described:
"A wretched log hut or two are the only
habitations in sight. Here reside, or rather take shelter, the
miserable cultivators of the ground, or a still
more destitute class who make a precarious living by
peddling 'lightwood' in the city. . . .
"These cabins . . . are dens of filth.
The bed if there be a bed is a layer of something in the corner that defies
scenting. If the bed is nasty, what of the floor?
What of the whole enclosed space ? What of the creatures themselves?
Pough! Water in use as a purifier is un- known. Their faces are
bedaubed with the muddy accumulation of weeks. They just give them a wipe when
they see a stranger to take off the blackest dirt. . . . The poor wretches seem
startled when you address them, and answer your questions cowering like
culprits." Olmsted said: "I saw as much close
packing, filth and squalor, in certain blocks
inhabited by laboring whites in Charleston, as I have witnessed in any
Northern town of its size; and greater evidences of brutality and
ruffianly character, than I have ever happened to
see, among an equal population of this class, before."
Two classes of poor whites have been differentiated: the mountain whites and
the poor whites of the lowlands. "Below a dirty and ill- favored house, down
under the bank on the shingle near the river, sits a family of
five people, all ill-clothed and unclean; a blear-eyed old
woman, a younger woman with a mass of tangled red hair hanging about her
shoulders, indubitably suckling a baby; a little girl with the
same auburn evidence of Scotch ancestry; a boy, and a
younger child all gathered about a fire made among some bricks, surrounding a couple
of iron saucepans, in which is a dirty
mixture looking like mud, but probably warmed-up sorghum syrup,
which with a few pieces of corn pone, makes their breakfast.
"Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant.
Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of Negro blood.
The so-called 'mountain boomer,' says an observer,
'has little self-respect and no self-reliance. ... So long as his corn pile
lasts the "cracker" lives in contentment,
feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and
water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest
furnishes him when he
can get up the energy to go out and
shoot or trap it....
The irregularities of their moral lives
cause them no sense of shame... But,
notwithstanding these low
moral conceptions,
they are of an intense religious
excitability.' "
Above this lowest mass rose a middle
class of poor whites in the making.
There were some small farmers who had
more than a mere sustenance and yet were not large planters. There were
overseers. There was a growing class of merchants who
traded with the slaves and free Negroes and became in many cases
larger traders, dealing with the planters for the staple crops. Some
poor whites rose to the professional class, so that the rift
between the planters and the mass of the whites was partially
bridged by this smaller intermediate class.
While revolt against the domination of the planters over the poor whites was
voiced by men like Helper, who called for a class struggle to
destroy the planters, this was nullified by deep-rooted
antagonism to the Negro, whether slave or free. If black labor
could be expelled from the United States or eventually exterminated,
then the fight against the planter could take place. But the poor whites and their
leaders could not for the moment
contemplate a fight
of united white and black labor against
the exploiters.
Indeed, the natural leaders of the poor whites, the small farmer, the merchant, the
professional man, the white mechanic and slave overseer, were bound to the
planters and repelled from the slaves and even from the mass
of the white laborers in two ways: first, they constituted the police patrol
who could ride with planters and now and
then
exercise unlimited force upon
recalcitrant or runaway slaves;
and then, too, there was always a chance that they themselves might also become
planters by saving money, by investment, by the power of good luck;
and the only heaven that attracted them
was the life of the
great Southern planter.
There were a few weak associations of
white mechanics, such as printers and
shipwrights and iron molders,
in 1850 to 1860, but practically no labor
movement in the South.
Charles Nordoff states that he was told
by a wealthy Alabaman, in 1860, that the planters in his region
were determined to discontinue altogether the employment of
free mechanics. "On my own place," he said, "I have slave
carpenters, slave blacksmiths, and slave wheel-wrights, and
thus I am independent of free mechanics." And a certain Alfred E. Mathews remarks:
"I have seen free white mechanics obliged to stand aside
while their families were suffering for the necessaries of life,
when the slave mechanics, owned by rich and influential men, could
get plenty of work; and I have heard these same white mechanics
breathe the most bitter curses against the institution of slavery and the slave
aristocracy."
The resultant revolt of the poor whites, just as the revolt of the
slaves, came through migration. And their migration, instead of being
restricted, was freely encouraged. As a result, the poor whites left
the South in large numbers. In 1860, 399,700 Virginians were living
out of their native state. From Tennessee, 344,765 emigrated;
from North Carolina, 272,606, and from South Carolina,
256,868. The majority of these had come to the Middle West and it is quite
possible that the Southern states sent as many
settlers to the West as the Northeastern states,
and while the Northeast demanded free soil, the Southerners demanded not only
free soil but the exclusion
of Negroes from work and the franchise.
They had a very vivid fear of the Negro
as a competitor in labor, whether
slave or free. It was thus the presence
of the poor white Southerner in the West
that complicated the whole
Free Soil movement in its relation to
the labor movement.
While the Western pioneer was an
advocate of extreme democracy and
equalitarianism in his political and
economic philosophy, his vote
and influence did not go to strengthen
the abolition democracy, before,
during, or even after the war. On the contrary, it was stopped and inhibited by
the doctrine of race, and the West, therefore, long stood against that
democracy in industry which might have emancipated labor in the United States,
because it did not admit to that democracy the American citizen
of Negro descent.
Thus Northern workers were organizing
and fighting industrial integration in order to gain
higher wage and shorter hours, and more and more they saw economic salvation in
the rich land of the West. A Western movement
of white workers and pioneers began and was paralleled
by a Western movement of planters and black workers in the South.
Land and more land became the cry of the Southern political leader,
with finally a growing demand for reopening
of the African slave trade. Land,
more land, became the cry of the peasant
farmer in the North. The two forces met in Kansas, and in
Kansas civil war began.
The South was fighting
for the protection and expansion of its agrarian feudalism. For the sheer
existence of slavery, there must be a continual supply of fertile
land, cheaper slaves, and such political power as would give the slave
status full legal recognition and protection,
and annihilate the free Negro. The Louisiana Purchase had furnished
slaves and land, but most of the land was in the Northwest.
The foray into Mexico had opened an empire, but
the availability of this land was partly spoiled by the loss of California to
free labor. This suggested a proposed expansion of
slavery toward Kansas, where
it involved the South in
competition with white labor: a competition which endangered the slave
status, encouraged slave revolt, and in- creased the possibility of fugitive
slaves.
It was a war to determine how far
industry in the United States should be carried
on under a system where the capitalist
owns
not only the nation's raw material, not
only the land,
but also the laborer himself; or
whether the laborer was going to
maintain his personal freedom, and
enforce it by growing
political and economic independence
based on widespread
ownership of land. This brings us down to
the period
of the Civil War. Up to the time that the war actually broke out,
American labor simply refused, in the main, to
envisage black labor as a part of its problem. Right up to the edge of the war,
it was talking about the emancipation of white labor
and the organization of stronger unions
without seeing a word, or
apparently giving a thought, to 4 million
black slaves.
During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife
between capitalists in which they had no interest
and they showed their resentment in the
peculiarly
human way of beating and murdering the
innocent victims of
it all the free Negroes of New York
and other Northern cities; while in the
South, five million non-slaveholding
poor white farmers and laborers
sent their manhood by the thousands to
fight and die for a system that had
degraded them equally with the black
slave.
Could one imagine anything more
paradoxical than the
this whole situation? America thus
stepped forward in the first blossoming
of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance,
and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision
of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the
intelligent decision of free and
self-sustaining men.
What an idea and what an area for its
realization-- endless land of richest
fertility,
natural resources such as Earth seldom
exhibited before,
a population infinite in variety, of
universal gift, burned in the fires of
poverty and
caste, yearning towards the Unknown God;
and self-reliant pioneers,
unafraid of man or devil. It was the
Supreme Adventure,
in the last Great Battle of the West, for that human freedom which would release
the human spirit from lower lust for mere meat, and set it free to dream and
sing.
And then some unjust God leaned,
laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man
in the midst.
It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman
Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and
oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of
humanity from the vast majority of human beings.
But not without struggle. Not without writhing and
rending of spirit and pitiable wail of
lost souls.
They said: Slavery was wrong but not all
wrong;
slavery must perish and not simply move; God made black men;
God made slavery; the will of God be done; slavery to the glory of God and black
men as his servants and ours; slavery as
a way to freedom—the freedom of blacks, the freedom of whites;
white freedom as the goal of the world and black slavery as the path thereto.
Up with the white world, down with the black!
Then came this battle called Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending
in the presidential election of 1876—twenty awful years. The slave went free;
stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back
again towards slavery.  The whole weight
of America was thrown to color caste.
The colored world went down before England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and
America. A new slavery arose. The upward moving of
white labor was betrayed into wars for profit based on color caste.
Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is
directly traceable to Negro slavery in America,
on which modern commerce and industry was founded,
and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown
in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and
retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor,
and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits
the world over. Thus the majority of the world's laborers, by
the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which
ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World
War and Depression. And this book seeks to
tell that story. Have ye leisure,
comfort, calm, Shelter, food, love's gentle balm? Or what is it
ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?
The seed ye sow,
another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge,
another bears.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
That was chapter two. The White Worker
[singing "Oooo"]
