The New York Herald

THE COLORED VOTERS OF THE SOUTH

Pollard's Address to His Negro Fellow Citizens.

Reasons Why They Should Vote with the Conservatives.

Colored Fellow Citizens—I am well aware that some democrats in the North have been saying that not only will they not solicit, but they do not want the negro vote. Now, candidly speaking, the democrats or conservatives of the South cannot afford to affect this mighty indifference, and, in point of fact, they do not affect it. While the vote of the negro is comparatively insignificant in the Northern States, and may, therefore, be despised there by the politicians, in the South it is important, vital, critical, an element not only of politics, but of the general welfare there; and we, speaking for the democratic party, do want it, and have already shown such evidence of our desire for it, that it would be quite useless for us now to affect the contrary, to play at the game of the fox in the fable and declare the grapes sour because we have been unable to reach them.

We, white conservatives of the South, want your votes, my colored fellow citizens; but our mistake, so far, has been that we have wanted it without affording you a reason for our wanting or an inducement for you giving it. That has been just our mistake. We, your "old masters," wanted your vote, and, very foolishly, as we now see, we expected to get it by the mere asking for it; and some are now disposed to be offended, and are sore with disappointment, because you did not give them your votes simply at their command, or on some trivial persuasion. For myself, I believe that the vote of the negro is to be obtained by addressing his intelligence and interest, just as much as those of any other voter; that we must be prepared to compete with the radicals in solid argument and in logical address, and that the first step towards securing your vote for the conservative party is to give you satisfactory reasons for bestowing it there, instead of supposing that a simple word of desire, or the smallest article of clap-trap, at most, are sufficient for the business, sufficient to outweigh the immense and elaborate organization, the imposing display of argument and device that the radical party has brought to bear upon you. I am not one of those Southern conservatives who, because you did not recently vote with us, after the slight and unworthy efforts which we made to obtain your ballots, would say, "Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone," and point the finger to a hope expired and a task abandoned. I, for one, now and repeatedly, wish to speak to your intelligence and interest as I would speak to those of any other political constituents.

I want to have some plain counsel with you. There is no device in the language of the heart. I have lived many years in the South, and from my birth upwards I have been among your people wherever the sun shines from the Potomac to where the Rio Grande, the great river, sets up the boundary of the habitation of your race. Departing from my native State (Virginia), as I shall do soon, with the burden of many mixed recollections, I shall leave here, not among the least I shall regret, people of your race—black men and black women whom I have loved, and who to this poor life of mine have given of pleasure, and of affection's experience, and of honor of God's creatures often more than those who have white faces and on their limbs the fine linen and purple and the garments that the black, weary hands of your slavery wove for them in the past. Some of these colored people are yet tarrying in the shade of the great trees of Oakridge where I played in youth, and where in lonely manhood I have stood in sight of the sweet graves; some in the Christian and kindly home of a beloved brother, some exiles, wanderers from the groves of oaks, and the warm shining fields which were once all that 500 negroes ever knew of any home on earth,

Thank God that in the worst days of slavery I had an affection for the oppressed, and that I could find it in my heart to say of your race that despite its bonds it was one of the most tender and interesting ones on the face of the earth. I never knew what was meant by the thing called "nigger," except that it was some sort of thing between brute and human kind, the name for which was invented by the passion of the slave driver. And here I want you to understand that when I call you negroes I mean no disrespect, and there is no more reflection in this name than that of African or any other proper name of nativity, unless you foolishly consider it your disgrace that you are a native of Africa; that you came out of that ancient house of nations that age and mystery have made at least venerable and interesting. I have always had a strange interest in you; you are yet to become a curious study to the whole world; unequal as you may be to the white man in intellect and cunning and appliance, yet a race of romance, a strange, poetic race, full of humor and tenderness and courage and pastoral simplicity. Be assured that you are going to excite somehow or other a great curiosity in this living world; and if I have thought of you before as a peculiar people, you can now understand how with even greater interest I regard you, since God has plainly called you from the house of bondage and put your feet on the weary and mysterious course of His Providence—the same that led out from the Red Sea and that shifts the sands of the desert and makes all the paths of the world's empire.

Now, will you listen to me? You have heard abundantly the radical side of the story of your freedom. It has sunk deep in your hearts; it has constituted the very strongest appeal of that party to you, and in any ordinary conflict of motives or doubts it has come as a supreme guide, an irresistible inspiration, an unanswerable argument, that you should vote with that party which made you free. In this consideration lies the main strength of the radical party with you. The argument is plausible, powerful, and, if the premises are allowed, really unanswerable. But now let us see if there is not a conservative side to this story. Let us see if to this great and hitherto prevailing argument of the radical party we cannot produce an answer somewhat better than is afforded by that miracle of stupidity, the Southern press since the war (for during the war the press of the South was, indeed, a great estate, the power, brilliancy and tact of some of the Richmond journals being complimented even in the courts of Europe); that wretched journalism which slavery has left as the vilest of its dregs, to call assassination chivalry; to abuse every memory of the South for courage or for wisdom, and to display a daily sloughing of reporters' wit about "niggers," as the highest wisdom on those political and social questions which the mind of the world elsewhere meditates so profoundly.

God forbid that I should deny or disparage your rejoicing in your freedom. But, while asking who are the givers of this gift, has it never occurred to you to enquire from whose loss and suffering you have it, whether from the Northern people or the white people of the South? That is the question. From whose suffering has your freedom been purchased; not who claim to have given it to you, but who have suffered and are yet suffering that you might be free, who have paid the loss, and have not yet done paying it; for I tell you that under God it is this last people who are the donors of your liberty, and not those who say, "Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name." Now, this is a new view of the subject, and I want you to lay hold of it. What did the North do for you, and how did it draw the sword against slavery more than it did against anything else representing the property and strength of the South in the late war? It attacked slavery, not out of any benevolence to you, not for any solicitude for you, but that this act might help along the war. What said Abraham Lincoln when some Northern clergymen asked him for a proclamation of emancipation, and that after the war had gone on for nearly two years? I quote for you from that great authority:—

"I view this matter as a practical war measure, to be decided on according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer for the suppression of the rebellion." Again:—"Some additional strength would be added in that way to the war; and then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers." And yet further, speaking to Mr. Greeley:—"If I can save the Union by striking down slavery I will do it; and if I can save the Union without striking down slavery I will do it."

There is the declaration, and no man can go behind it without a lie in his mouth.

Now, see this. You were freed by the North as a war measure, and thus you were freed in no better sense than General Sherman and General Sheridan took away the cattle, the horses and the mules from the white people of the South. You were taken away from your former condition to dispossess the South. It was a mere act of spoliation; as much so as of the cattle that the Northern general drove away to his army. The consequences have been God's; give Him the glory. The deprivation and the loss have been those of the white people of the South; and, therefore, at least, give them the credit of suffering, and suffering cheerfully, that the good providence of God might be accomplished in you. It is the people of the South who have paid the great price of your freedom. I ask you, what sacrifice did the North ever make for it to the extent of one dollar? And now, mark you this—If the North had ever been willing on her part to pay this same price that the South is now paying you would have been free long years ago. Here is the test of the affection of the North for you, plain as the day:—You were worth some two thousand millions of dollars to your old masters; it matters not whether right or wrong, there is the fact: this is the price which the white people of the South are now paying for your freedom; it matters not whether willingly or unwillingly, there is the fact. And now take one more step in the argument, and say if you think the North would ever, out of its own pocket, have paid this price, or a tithe of it, for your freedom? And has it not had the chance for nearly one hundred years thus to set you free, and thus to testify its affection for you?

Observe, it is no question here of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of the North towards you, to take the measure of its slavery; it is merely to test the true disposition or love precisely in that measure in which the people of the South are now being made to pay in acquittance of your freedom. Emancipation the North might have had any time in a hundred years if it had been willing to testify its desire for it in making terms of compensation for it—if it had been willing to make even a part of this very same sacrifice that it has imposed upon the South. There is the fact, and no voice of man can override it. There is no merit where there is no spirit of sacrifice; and though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

Let us look at this matter in another view. There is a large pecuniary loss somewhere; it is two thousand millions of dollars. In the change of your condition that amount of money has gone out somewhere. Now, suppose we represent it as the subscription list of your freedom. Who are the subscribers on that paper—who the contributors who have set down their names to the prices of your freedom? Understand, the man who owned you in the past has really set down on that subscription paper one thousand dollars or one thousand five hundred dollars for your freedom.

Well, now, what is the practical application of this view? You owe your freedom, under the providence of God, to the loss and deprivation of the white people of the South and to the general willingness of your old masters to submit to the sacrifice. What does this teach you? It is that you, colored people of the South, should more heartily recognize whose loss it is that set you free, and when you see how cheerfully that loss is borne, even more so than other losses of the late war: when you see the white people of the South consenting to your freedom, even though it has put the chill cup of poverty to their lips and made many of them as poor and hopeless as the most unfortunate of yourselves, then, I say, whatever there is of generosity, counting all under the ascription of glory to God; whatever there is of the returns of Christian love, whatever there is of the true spirit of thankfulness, make to your old masters, and not to those who have made God's work in you their boast and their advantage.

This thought is of a piece with all I have to say to you; it will bear the seed of many good reflections. Your liberty has come through the impoverishment of the white men of the South, and the thought should inspire at least a benevolent regard, a grateful reflection, according to the great truth of Christian humanity, that he who suffers is the true liberator, and not he who stands at the foot of the cross and says:—"I am the crucifier, I am the cruel executioner. My bloody and strong hands have done this work, and on the remission of sins cast you me the honor and the glory and the profit."

Now, yet another view. You have heard many times of the indisposition of the North to give you, as from itself, the freedom it claims to have acquired for you; to give you equality among the white people of the North, as it claims and demands and legislates that it shall be given you among the white people of the South. Now, have you ever thought of the significance of this, of the evidence it gives of the want of true affection of the North for you, and of the way it goes to help the proof that your emancipation did not come from the benevolence of the North; that it was a trick and spoil of the war—a calculation to-day of profits to the white people of the North, while it is a sentence of sacrifice and of poverty to the white people of the South? The whites of the North will not willingly give you suffrage in their own States. They will not even give you work there. And while they would set you up as an idol in Virginia and North Carolina, they make you, in Indiana and Ohio, such a contamination and a plague that even the sweat of your labor stinks in their nostrils.

Northern men come down here. They organize what they call Union Leagues. They sit with you there; they consult with you there; they give you their hands and strike vows of friendship and companionship on them, and you are mightily pleased. But in the North there is another league that you are not told of. It is the Labor League: and in that league you are daily condemned. You are useful in that organization in the South, in which Northern men choose to sit and counsel with you; but the trades unions of the North won't admit a colored man of you; and, though they allow the worst white men that Europe spews out in emigrant ships to come in competition with them in the forge and the field, they will not allow you to wage work with them, or even to come in the presence of their organized societies. The contrast between the Union League in the South and the Labor League in the North tells the whole story. The Northern man in the South will strike hands with you at the political council fire, will eat your meal and meat, will pig in your beds; but the Northern man in the North will disdain and scout you, and drive you even from the lowest form of his society—that of the laboring classes—will grudge you even a division on the mud sill of the sweaty bread, that is of the very lowest white man among them. Even the very dregs of their society rise against you.

Look at but two incidents in the experience of the black man in the North as laborer and bread-winner. It has not been long since two colored men were employed as brickmakers in the navy yard at Washington. The white brickmakers drove them out, and in the shadow of that government which has made so many professions for you a protest was sent up to the Secretary of the Navy against the employment of negroes even to make a brick—a task which even the Hebrews were thought worthy to do for the Egyptians. Again, a negro skilled as a printer, the son of Fred Douglass, sought admission into the Typographical Union. The application was, as in disdain, laid on the table—not even treated with the respect of any argument, consideration or explanation.

You know very little of the North but from hearsay. It is to you a far and untravelled land; and remember that you get most of your information of it from men who come from there to deceive you and to profit on your poor, ignorant and romantic affection for a distant and unexplored country. You have their interested word that the North wrestles in love for you and all that talk; but you have the fact that the North never gave you freedom except as a weapon and an advantage in its own hand, that the North does not willingly give you suffrage, that the North does not give you equality, that the North does not even give you labor, the right to make your bread with the white man and to go with him in the market for the price of your living. And now what is the North to you? You are going to live in the South; you have got to make your profit there, you have got to make your friends there, and the great question is how to do to the best advantage—not in an impossible Utopia, not as in a country and a time wherein you do not live, but in that land wherein God has let fall your lines and wherein you are to find your homes and your graves.

I know you have got some crosses to bear—that in some respects you are not now fairly getting your rights from the white people of the South. I am free and unreserved, and fearless to confess this. You often do not get justice, you often fail to see crimes committed upon you avenged by the law. I noticed some time ago that a negro was vilely murdered (for he was in flight at the time) within the shadow of one of your county courts in Virginia and the murderers are as yet unarrested, and I do not believe that they were vigorously pursued or sought after with the desire of discovering them. It was an outrage, and the blood of that colored man cries from the ground. But remember that you are not alone in this disappointment of justice—that even many a white man has failed in rotten communities in the South, where white cowards and white bawds make public sentiment, to get justice.

Now, believe me, there are other rights which you want more than political rights. You want the right to have justice done you in the courts; to live, in the severest eye of the law, as every inch free. You should have it. You want something more than this—to be regarded practically not as "niggers," with tickets of leave, not as freemen by courtesy or by any left-handed title, but as freemen in fee simple and in full estate. There is one terrible outrage on your race, of which I must allow you have reason to complain even until your voices strike the sky. I refer to a hideous war upon your race waged in the South under the forms of the law and executed by the instrument of the gallows. I cannot close my eyes to the fact that for years since the war the gallows in the South has reeked with black victims. Within that time how many white criminals have suffered the extreme penalty of the law even for crimes that have made the world doubt whether the boasted courage of the white chivalry of the South, the polite bloodthirstiness of former times has not degenerated since the war into a mania for assassinations. The Southern newspapers are full of accounts of the hanging of negroes, hung by twos and threes at a time, hung on the slightest occasion. The gallows for the black man is a common incident of the county meeting. I lately read that in a single county in Virginia there are shortly to be hung three negroes for participating in an affray which cost the life of one white boy. In another county of this State a negro for stealing a few pieces of bacon was sent to the penitentiary for twenty years, and if the law could have been stretched further I suppose he, too, would have been hung. Let any candid man number the executions of negroes in the South since the war compared with those of white criminals of equal grade and he will be satisfied that a bloodthirstiness has skulked into the robes of justice and has fixed its withering eye upon the unhappy and helpless black man. Against this legal murdering of your race you need protection, and, God knows, it is time that this sickening gallows show was removed from the stage, unless there were occasionally hung up the white murderers—cowardly assassins—the vile ditch water, in whose veins may plead the privilege of a white skin, though that skin was got in harlotry and spewed out of the very sinkholes of iniquity.

You want to be respected in your new condition. You should be so. I know very well how you are daily wounded and insulted by caricatures, how rural-witted newspapers revenge themselves on the "colored cuss," and how everything you say in your conventions and public assemblies is set down in the usual gibberish of the funny orthographers of the "Mozis-Addums" school. Thus a member of the Richmond press has found no happier vocation since the war than going about to agricultural fairs and county meetings, giving burlesque recitations of negro "norations," one apothegm of which en passant might be applied to himself, viz.:—"That oysters have got more sense dan some pussons, 'kase dey know when to keep der mouch shet." These follies and frivolities of the Southern press are to be deprecated; they exasperate the resentments of race wantonly, but after all what do the tin trumpets of Southern newspapers amount to whose clamors may be bought for a sixpence and never get beyond the circle of the mutual admiration society of fools. The dog that barked at the moon may have deserved chastisement, but the course of nature was uninter rupted. All the caricatures of this school, all the misspelling of negro speeches, all the "pigeon-English" forgeries of would-be humorists, and all the faces that the Richmond man can make to the giggling "beauty and fashion" of his audience within the limits of fifty cents a head, have not availed to prevent the exhibition of Senator Revels speaking a purer and better English than nine-tenths of Southern editors; the triumph of the lamented Bland, surpassing all the white orators of Virginia who spoke before the Reconstruction Committee of Congress or the romance which has recently figured in all the newspapers of a despised Virginia slave, escaping from the scourge to Ohio, educating himself in two colleges of the North, going thence to Europe, winning in the Crimean war promotion from the ranks to a colonelcy in the imperial army of France, and now representing the United States at the court of Hayti.

The future is mainly with yourselves. But I would not have you unduly elated, conceited of successes won by a few of your race. I want you to understand the whole situation. You are but at the commencement of what you have to learn in your new condition—at the bottom of the ladder. The civilization of the white man is the work of many centuries; it is the accumulation of hundreds of years of labor and sacrifice. The great storehouses of learning wherein the Anglo-Saxon race has been

garnering from time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary have been building while nations have passed away. This civilization is not so cheap that you can be admitted into it in a day. You can't vote yourself into it. You can't get it by putting wishing caps on your heads or little pieces of paper in your hands. The ballot is no talisman: it has no miraculous power; it is nothing more than a human instrument. You have got to work for your civilization as truly as for your bread. For you, as for every nation and people, there is but one law of progress, one possible lesson—

Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

The colored freeman is only commencing his education, and I have this to say, that to force him into prominence in the political administration of the country—and this is what I mean by "negro rule" in its bad sense—is to destroy the negro as well as to injure the white man. The world is giving you a great notice; it is well disposed towards every effort you put forth to make true progress and to take off the reproach of your race; let this large and beneficent regard encourage you to continue for a time in pupilage, to work steadily on, showing a solid foundation of merit for every increase of that regard, and not to ruin your future and destroy the whole experiment of your race in this country by an eager, childish desire to appropriate suddenly a civilization and influence beyond your true and present capacity. There are just and intelligent white men in the South enough, who will keep equal pace in their acknowledgments with your achievements and who will be constantly interested and sympathetic observers of your progress. Trust them; make them your friends; make them your instructors. They are naturally both.

The good relation of the two races in the South is important to the white man, but to the negro it is vital. The immigration of white laborers into Virginia, which the colored people themselves are directly encouraging by their desertion of their old masters, to give their votes and confidence to strangers, and even by their diversions from the fields of steady labor to political excitements, is already threatening to take the bread from their mouths. I would like to see every colored man understanding and rightly appreciating just one thing. It is that, humanly speaking, his labor is his all. You have no capital; many of you have no homes, not even a bit of shelter, nothing more of wealth or of hope in the future than what is locked up in the horny flesh on your hands. Your labor, as your all, is just the most important of earthly considerations to you, and your whole policy in the South should be to conserve and cherish it, or in other words to cultivate the very best possible relations with the white people, to whom you must look for employment and wages. In this matter you cannot serve two masters. I do not say "Vote with us or starve." That is a foolish and cruel speech, and I do not think anything was ever really gained, even on the lowest grounds of interest, by making a man vote against his convictions; for you don't purchase any amount of real opinion or of good will; you merely buy hypocrisy, which will in the end turn and sting with increased asperity. But I do say that you cannot expect more than average human nature from the white people of the South, and that when you prefer the advice and interest of the Northern carpet-bagger and agitator, when you collect around such men and join with them in denunciation of the native whites of the South as robbers, outcasts, &c., you cannot with a firm and unshamed face turn around and ask these same people you have been thus abusing to do deeds of kindness to you and to stand your friends in the day of adversity. The colored man must, once for all, come out of the delusion that he can set himself to the League and Northern agitators, and yet at the same time curry favor with the white people against whom these are in daily and unremitting enmity.

He must make his choice, and he should understand what that choice is limited to. It is a choice that does not properly affect his rights (and here it is he so often mistakes); it only goes practically to the question whom he will select for friends and counsellors, as between self-seeking and insidious men of the North and those Southern people, who have a common home, a common interest and—as far as laws can make it—a common future with him. I wish to be clearly and completely understood when I say that I would not abate one jot the rights of the colored man accrued under the act of emancipation; and I believe there is a sufficient number of just and enlightened white men in the South agreeing with me in this disposition to make perfectly safe to the freedmen, as long as they exist on the statute book, the guarantees he has obtained from Congress. I do not ask him to part from his rights; I do not ask him to diminish them. In sum and in substance this is all that is asked of the colored people of the South:—That they should set their faces as flint against Northern emissaries, that they should be reconciled with the native whites of the South and that they should take the position of learning from them, following the lead of superior civilization and a friendly interest.

This is all. And believe me, colored friends and fellow citizens, when you have done these things and have occasion thereafter to stand up for your rights, to ask why justice has not been done you in any case, why a right has been withheld or a wrong indicted, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of white men in the South who will stand with you to confirm your voices, to emphasize your demands, to make your cause their cause and to say for you what you are now requested to say for them—"Let justice be done."

EDWARD A. POLLARD.