heedlessness, inconstancy of purpose, improvidence, and extravagance,"1 forced themselves upon every Northern traveler. Before leaving the study of the negro in his relations to manners, it is necessary to notice that the negro has aided the immigrant in vitiating Northern courtesy. When the victory of the North gave the black man his freedom, and he was free to go and come as he pleased, he naturally drifted to Northern cities to find such employment as he was suited for. At that time and for many years to come the negro was unmoral, lazy, shiftless; his intelligence only rudimentary. Driven to seek sordid and menial occupations, and employed simply because he was strong and satisfied with lower wages than white labor, he was looked upon as only half human. His ways were often repulsive, he was uncouth, sullen, revengeful. In their relations with him the Americans made no pretence of equality and made no effort to teach him manners; and field labor and the conditions under which he had lived in slavery were not conducive to the cultivation of courtesy or those manners which come from imitation and contact with a highly cultivated or intellectual body of masters or employers. The newly emancipated slave soon imbibed the doctrine of equality and showed it by the disrespect with which he treated the whites, who, to assert their superiority, were rough and domineering in their 1 Olmsted: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, vol. 1, p. 163 et seq. intercourse with the "moke." The advancement of the negro was made painfully slow, and in his ascent he helped the immigrant to pull down the manners of the whites. 1 It is curious to note the different meanings given to slang in the two English-speaking countries. In America a negro is a "moke," which is the only meaning the word has there. In England a "moke" is a costermonger's donkey. CHAPTER XVII SLAVERY REFERENCE has already been made to the effect of slavery on the development of the American people, but it is necessary to give the subject further consideration, for slavery was one of the causes to influence American psychology. As we have seen, it was slavery that gave the American of the South a view of life different from that of the American of the North, and brought into being in the Southern states an Englishman, or the descendant of an Englishman, who was unlike the stock from which he sprung. The destructive effects of slavery, moral, physical, and intellectual, were not seen in the early days of the Republic; in fact, slavery appeared to have vindicated itself, and it almost seemed as if the strength of the South was the consequence of that institution. In everything the South was dissimilar to the North. There was no landed leisure class in the North as there was in the South, the North knew no ruling class as the South did. Masters of great estates and many slaves, the men of the South were filled with that pride "which is not wholly private, a pride which makes of them a planning and governing order.”1 There grew up in the South 1 Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, p. 407. a governing class very closely corresponding to that in England, the existence of which was unknown in the North. The South had leaders whose domination rested on birth and social prominence as well as intellectual attainments. "It was this advantage, of always knowing her leaders, and of keeping them always thus in a school of privilege and authority, that had given the South from the first her marked preeminence in affairs." In the first forty-eight years of the Union there were seven Presidents, four of whom were from Virginia, one from Tennessee, and only two from Massachusetts. The genius of Southern men was seen in the Constitution, the advisers of Presidents were Southern men, it was largely their planning and their making that shaped the political trend of the infant nation. In the South statesmanship was one of the serious affairs of life and a duty imposed upon men of wealth and high social station, who did not shirk their responsibilities. In the North statesmanship was largely incidental. In the South there was created a compact, self-perpetuating oligarchy; in the North the democracy that was the very life of the people made an oligarchy impossible. Everything tended to magnify the political importance of the South and to minimize that of the North. A cultivated class, united by blood ties and a common purpose, is, as a rule, better fitted for the business of governing than men drawn from 1 Op. cit. the people. The spread of population from the older established states of the East and the original Southern States to the new territory of the West gave a tremendous impetus to democracy and was the first blow aimed at the Southern oligarchy; for "in a society dependent upon itself for the food it eats, the clothes it wears, and the implements and utensils its civilization demands, there was small chance for the development of sharply marked classes, or for social and political distinctions;"1 Jackson still further weakened Southern dominance when he substituted the Convention for the Congressional Committee. Ambitious politicians, men fluent of speech who possessed the art of tickling the ears of groundlings, demagogues with specious panaceas, agitators who encouraged unrest, reformers with unsubstantial plans for correcting real or imaginary evils, were now to contest with the old leaders for supremacy. But while the power of the South was weakened, it was not destroyed. The influence of a class depends not so much upon its numbers as its cohesiveness and discipline, its pride and traditions, its intellect and courage. The South, that had come to look upon power as its right and to meet little challenge from the North, was now to struggle with the growing forces of democracy to retain its hold. The history of the American people for the first sixty years of the nineteenth century is, in one re 1 Elliott: Biographical Story of the Constitution, p. 154. |