Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/37

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The Race Problem in the South. 29

race, which would work out for man his highest destiny. The con- quering white race, from the first, acknowledged themselves the mere trustees for the highest development of man, when they were driving out the Indian and occupying his lands. They were a pious people, and they gave to their rapacity a nomenclature suited to their creeds. They have remorselessly driven the Indian from territory to territory, from reservation to reservation, until his fading race is compelled to take its last refuge among the inhospitable blizzards of our North- western border, among the mountain ranges that are covered with perpetual snow, in the desert valleys where it never rains, among the lava beds where volcanoes are slumbering.

IT MEANS WHITE SLAVERY.

The fairest portion of this land is now being taken from the white man, and turned over to the enfranchised slave. It is being turned over to the negro race, which has furnished no just claims to it, and given no assurance of its ability to govern it, or even to till the soil. Within the last half century Florida has passed through the hands of the white man from Seminole to Senegambian. Four of the original thirteen States are about to pass from the dominion of the descendants of the founders of this government into the dominion of their ex-slaves. The negro has never been able to confer the blessings of good government on its own race in Africa, or Hayti, or elsewhere. It can hardly be expected to govern the Caucasian race wisely and well.

The domination of the white race by the blacks simply means white slavery. The whites will never submit to it. The Anglo-American race in the South has been familiar with the chains of slavery for two centuries or more, but they have never worn those chains them- selves, and never will. The negro is not a success as a tiller of the soil even. He has ruined it by his ignorant and reckless modes of its cultivation. He has felled the forests to permit underbrush to grow instead. The Indian left forests that were primeval and a soil that was virgin. In the hands of the negro the fields have been permitted to wash into irreclaimable gullies and ravines. Where once the undulating acres stretched away into a landscape of bea^Uy and fertility, may now be found caverns so deep that whole villages, with all their cottages and churches and spires, may be hidden away in them.

THE NEGRO AS A DESTROYER.

The green fields of the olden time have given place to the horrid