were three thousand five hundred papers in the box. There was not much intimidation, but only cheating. ... As a general result of all that I have been able to learn about the elections in this part of the country, I may say that there does not seem to be the least doubt that they were won by the most wholesale cheating. That is avowed in the most open way. Most people seem to praise the negroes, and to be on very good terms with them; but they all admit that, while the blacks will do almost anything else for them, when it comes to voting they cannot be influenced, and insist on voting with their party. At one place that I visited, where a considerable number of Republican votes were recorded, an old Democratic gentleman jocularly remarked that this had been the only honest poll in the whole district. They say the Republicans made the election law to suit their own purpose of cheating, and had arranged the electoral districts so as to swamp the whites with black votes. Now they are hoist with their own petard, and serve them right. The blacks seem to have accepted their defeat as a foregone conclusion, and therefore it is that they are quite good-natured over it. Perhaps, too, they really have to some degree accepted Wade Hampton and his policy, and are not so anxious to fight as they otherwise might be. Both parties seem to assume as a matter of course that whichever controls the machinery of the elections will win the elections. I am told that Wade Hampton generally appointed two Democrats and one Radical as election commissioners; that the radical was always corrupt and could be bought, and that therefore the Democrats always had it their own way. The Democrats of Charleston have done something to conciliate those blacks who accept the Democratic ticket. In this district seventeen members are sent up to the State Assembly, and of these three are Democratic blacks. The county officers are whites, but there are some blacks in the Charleston municipality. For the State Assembly the Republicans adopted a fusion ticket, including the five best of the Democrats. Hitherto three Congressional districts in the black part of South Carolina have been represented by black men, and I am told that they were all very fair specimens. The representative of the Charleston district was a well-educated negro, from the North. The Georgetown district was represented by an extremely polished black gentleman, who was formerly a very popular barber in Charleston, and is not at all a bad sort of person. I observe that in a great number of the elections for county and local offices in these Southern States the opportunity is taken to provide for the veterans of the Confederate army who are not eligible for pensions. I saw several notices of elections of one-legged and one-armed ex-soldiers to county offices. These offices are profitable—if not paid by salaries they have considerable fees. Looking over the accounts of the elections in other States, of which the papers are full, I observe that Governor Nicholls, of Louisiana, is said to be conciliatory and to have followed the same policy as Wade Hampton; but there the negroes fought more successfully than here; and in some cases the Democrats carried the seats in Congress only by adopting a fusion ticket and giving the blacks a good many county offices. There seems to be more 'bulldozing' in Mississippi than anywhere else. That is called 'the Mississippi plan.' South Carolina seems to be the only State which carried everything solidly Democratic. In all the others there has been more or less success of Republican or independent candidates. Sir George Campbell, White and Black: the Outcome of a Visit to the United States (London, 1879), 321-332 passim. 204. The Indian Problem (1887) BY REVEREND JONATHAN BAXTER HARRISON Harrison is a Unitarian minister who has written several works on economic and social questions connected with the progress of the United States. - Bibliography: Thomas W. Field, An Essay towards an Indian Bibliography; Boston Public Library, Bulletins, IV, 68-70; Providence Public Library, Monthly Reference Lists, III, 5-7. For other articles on the Indians, see Contemporaries, I, Nos. 60, 64, 91, 123, 133, 147; II, ch. xviii; III, No. 139. EVER VERY particular reservation and tribe or company of Indians will have to be examined, studied, and dealt with by itself, at least at first. The Indians cannot be understood, nor successfully managed and controlled in detail from a distance. That is the fatal defect of the present system and methods. . . . Meanwhile. . . the powers of Indian agents should be enlarged, their office made more important, with better pay, so as to make it practicable for men of high character and ability to enter the service on the reservations, and to continue in it while they are successful. I do not think the agency and reservation system should be at once abolished. On the contrary, I think it will be necessary to the very end of our work with the Indians as a separate and special class. The reservation system can be so administered as to prepare the way for its own extinction, by guiding the Indians into conditions in which reservations and agents will no longer be necessary. It is so administered, in many cases, at present, as to provide for and require its own permanent perpetuation. The methods of administration maintain and reproduce the conditions and forces which hold the Indians in an undeveloped and parasitic state of life. . . . What is the Indian problem? Set forth plainly, without confusing rhetoric or sentimentality, it is the question how the Indians shall be brought to a condition of self-support, and of equal rights before the law, in which they will no longer require the special protection and control of the Government. The problem has its alternative. If the Indians are not so instructed, educated and guided that they shall become self-sustaining, industrious and law-abiding citizens, they must inevitably sink to a condition of permanent pauperism, and re-enforce, almost in a body, whatever vicious and disintegrating tendencies already exist in our great Western communities. We have more than 250,000 Indians in our country. They are not scattered or distributed in all parts of it. There are enough of them in various restricted regions and districts to become an intolerable curse to the white communities for all time to come, and a burden which will always cripple and depress their vitality. So far as I can now judge, this appears to be the most probable destiny for most of the Indians, unless the people of the country interpose to prevent it. It will probably be said by and by that nothing better could be done with the Indians or for them. But nobody can know that this is true; for no reasonable or practical system of management adapted to their guidance through their transition to the conditions of civilized life, has ever been tried. The Indians generally have never had, have not now, and, as I think, are not likely ever to have, what would be half a fair chance or just opportunity for any class of people. The popular creed on the subject, which clothes itself with the solemn sanctions and imperial authority of science is, that the Indian is doomed and fated to fade away, by reason of his inherent inferiority to the white Well, let him fade. Nobody need mourn if any race, justly treated, and with reasonable opportunity for self-perpetuation, comes to man. an end because its vitality is exhausted and its puny and vanishing representatives no longer reproduce their kind. When a race perishes thus it is time for it to go. But when people numbering hundreds of thousands are destroyed on their own soil by the richest and strongest nation under the sun, crushed and exterminated by means of falsehood and theft, of mountainous fraud and ferocious murder, I do not call that fading out. It is altogether a different matter. My controversy with a very large proportion of the American people regarding this subject is exactly this: They appear to believe that because we are strong enough to trample upon and destroy the Indians, and there is nobody to call us to account, we may safely do so. I doubt that. I do not believe it. I do not pretend to understand the laws which govern the social world and the course of forces and events in the life of men. But it seems to me that it is by no means plain that we can safely do such deliberate and outrageous wrong. How do people know that it will be safe and profitable, and that there will be no retribution to weary and haunt us by and by? I do not believe they know at all. They are so greedy for the Indian land, poor as most of it is, that they are willing to leave to their children the added burden of a pauper population of a quarter of a million Indians, idle, vicious and criminal, rather than take the trouble to consider the subject, and to institute a policy which would be best and safest for the white people of the country. The Indian problem will never be decided rightly until the business men of the country take it up, and apply business principles and methods to its investigation and solution. There is no need of rhetoric or sentimentality in treating the subject sensibly and practically. It would be just as well to vary the terms of the problem so that it would stand thus: What policy, system and methods of management in the conduct of Indian affairs would be best for the white people of the country? The conclusion would be equally favorable to the Indians, though we should make no distinct claim on their behalf. Of all our people, those of our great and growing Western communities have most at stake in this matter. But we are all one nation, and our business men everywhere should give attention to this pressing and rapidly developing state of things, and should take the matter into their own hands. It will take time and money, but it will save more. J. B. Harrison, The Latest Studies on Indian Reservations (Philadelphia, 1887), 166-173 passim. 205. The Negro Question (1888) BY HENRY WOODFIN GRADY Grady became one of the most prominent of post-bellum journalists in the South. During his short career he exerted, both through the columns of his newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, and by public addresses, his great ability and oratorical power in promoting reconciliation between the sections of his country. His views on the negro problem, as expressed in his speech at Dallas, Texas, are typical of those of the most enlightened thinkers of the "New South." This extract is from that speech. For Grady, see J. C. Harris, Life of Henry W. Grady. — Bibliography as in No. 203 above. THE HE future holds a problem, in solving which the South must stand alone; in dealing with which, she must come closer together than ambition or despair has driven her, and on the outcome of which her very existence depends. This problem is to carry within her body politic two separate races, equal in civil and political rights, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace; for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately; for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice; for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end; for in human probability she will never be quit of either. . . . What of the negro? This of him. . . . . . As no race had ever lived in such unresisting bondage, none was ever hurried with such swiftness through freedom into power. Into hands still trembling from the blow that broke the shackles, was thrust the ballot. In less than twelve months from the day he walked down the furrow a slave, the negro dictated in legislative halls, from which Davis and Calhoun had gone forth, the policy of twelve commonwealths. When his late master protested against his misrule, the federal drum beat rolled around his strongholds, and from a hedge of federal bayonets he grinned in good-natured insolence. From the proven incapacity of that day has he far advanced? Simple, credulous, impulsive easily led, and too often easily bought, is he a safer, more intelligent citizen now than then? Is this mass of votes, loosed from old restraints, inviting alliance or awaiting opportunity, less menacing than when its purpose was plain and its way direct? My countrymen, right here the South must make a decision on which very much depends. Many wise men hold that the white vote of the |