USA > West Virginia > Pendleton County > A history of Pendleton County, West Virginia > Part 41
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The plan of Henry Clay was very similar to that of Dr. Ruffner.
But the fiery tempest of war made an abrupt emancipation inevitable. That so far as the negro is concerned this act was premature is apparent in two ways. Had he become in- dustrially efficient, he would not have remained quiet on the
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plantation while his master was absent in the army. Had he as a class become fitted to assume the responsibility of citi- zenship, he would not have used the ballot ignorantly and corruptly, and as a member of society he would not so often show himself idle, vicious, disorderly, and diseased.
Until toward the very last no one but the fanatic thought of uncompensated emancipation through the national govern- ment. The failure to indemnify the owner would seem un- fortunate. But when in our day we see that the lawlessness of corporate power may compel the partial or entire nation- alization of corporate interests, we find that the arbitrary emancipation was a precedent that makes the coming prob- lem more easy to attack.
The status of the American negro in the years to come is a most serious problem. The experiment of blindly thrusting the ballot upon the negro is universally recognized as a dis- astrous blunder, while the continuance of a large non-voting class is out of harmony with democratic ideals. Left to him- self the black man has never shown himself capable of main- taining more than a semblance of civilization. The problem is the more difficult because of the more than 2, 000, 000 mulattoes, the result of illicit intermixture. Many of these are nearly white, and as a whole the mulatto class furnishes a very dis- proportionate number of the more able and substantial of the colored race.
In slavery the negro was a laborer and nothing more. During the transition period that followed emancipation he still performed a large share of Southern labor, but in an un- satisfactory manner. If this condition were to continue, there would be less doubt as to his future. But the shame once attached to labor has now quite vanished from among the Southern whites. Southern labor tends to become more and more white. In the skilled labor required by the in- dustrial South there is only a limited amount of room for the negro. In the new agricultural South that is now rapidly coming to the front, skill is also necessary and the negro is less in demand than of old.
The anti-negro feeling that undeniably exists, North as well as South, is an instinctive tendency to draw apart from a race which the white man no longer finds necessary as a laboring class. It is even more a desire to live apart from a race with which it cannot associate on terms of social equality, because it has an invincible repugnance to the thought of in- termarriage. In this there is a recognition that two races of unequal capacity cannot intermingle without the superior race being pulled down toward the level of the lower. Under the changed conditions that have arisen since the war the
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presence of the black in large numbers is a menace to the se- curity of the home and it carries with it an immoral trail. The tendency of towns and counties to bar out the negro will doubtless increase. This will tend to restrict the negro to limited areas, somewhat as the Indian was formerly restricted to the reservation. Owing to vice and disease the negro in- creases less rapidly than the white, and over extensive areas of the South the decrease in his numbers is surprising and is not fully accounted for by emigration.
The people of Saxon blood have never shown any inclina- tion to recognize any colored stock as their equals, and the American negro will remain the white man's ward to an in- definite future.
The Disruption of Virginia
When the war of the Revolution closed Virginia covered a fourth of the area of the United States. After its curtail- ments in 1787 and 1790, it was still first in size, and for thirty-five years it remained the most populous. For a while it was the foremost wheat-growing state, and one of its sons developed the first practical reaping machine. It was also for a while the most influential, and it furnished a large share of the earlier statesmen of the republic, even aside from the seven presidents who were natives of the commonwealth. In this highly honorable record each of the 148 counties ex- isting in 1860 may claim a direct interest.
The causes of the final partition of Virginia are older than the Union. They are to be found first of all in the hard facts of physical geography. These same causes led the early settlers of Tennessee to attempt their independence of North Carolina under the name of the state of Franklin. They led Kentucky to insist on its separation from the parent state. Even before the Revolution they led the people in the west of Virginia and Pennsylvania to demand that they be set off into a fourteenth colony under the name of Westsylvania. The war for independence put an end to this movement, and had Virginia advanced industrially with the speed of Penn- sylvania, it is probable that the partition of 1861 would not have taken place.
Between the Virginias the Appalachians are a broad, com- plicated network of ridges and throughout the pioneer period the crossing of them was tedious and difficult. Not until 1870 was this barrier spanned by a railroad, except by way of the Potomac on the northern boundary. The rugged mountain land and the rugged hill country beyond did not much attract the slaveholding, tobacco-growing people of the smooth
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eastern section. When they sought a new home they usually preferred going all the way to Kentucky or into the lowlands of the Gulf states. The colonizing of the Appalachian hills was left to the small non-slaveholding farmers who had oc- cupied the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge, but in a still greater degree to the Scotch-Irish and German immigrants who poured into them through the natural highways leading outward from Pennsylvania. From the very start there was thus a difference between the highland and lowland popula- tions. Consequently, a distinction was made between the "Eastern Waters" and the "Western Waters," between the "Land of the Tuckahoe" and the "Land of the Cohee." Even for administrative purposes an Eastern District and a Western District were recognized, the Blue Ridge being the dividing line. Except as to the Valley of Virginia, and that only to a limited extent, the channels of commerce for the Western District were entirely in the direction of its water courses. What did not go westward to the Ohio river went seaward to Baltimore rather than to Norfolk.
A few graded wagon roads were finally built across the mountains, but in 1860 Virginia had not gone nearly so far as Pennsylvania in linking the two sections of her domain by easy commercial thoroughfares.
But there was a social as well as a physical barrier. The Eastern District was dominated by slave labor, the Western by free labor. There were eight times as many slaves in the former section as in the latter. Therefore with little travel and less trade between the sections, with differences in the people and resulting differences in their views there was not a full community of interest. The only conspicuous bond be- ing the state government, the chief source of discord came through the policy of this government. The Eastern District being the earlier settled it had framed the laws. It was conservative, proud of its history, and addicted to caste. It had no mind to see its cherished civilization turned upside down by a people it regarded as a rude, semi-illiterate folk living in log cabins and exhibiting industrial and social tend- encies with which it had no hearty sympathy.
So it became the settled policy of lowland Virginia to con- trol the state government in its own interest. The state offi- cials were taken from the East almost exclusively, and the apportionment of delegates to the legislature was made in so ingenious a manner as to enable the East to outvote the West, even beyond the excess of population in the former. The West was being governed almost on the basis of a col- ony, and it is notoriously true that no colony has ever found it easy to get the ear of the home government.
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Yet in all this the East was but following the universal instinct of self-protection. It was taking care of Number One by seeking to stave off a transfer of political control to the other side of the mountains. Had the West gained the upper hand prior to 1860, it is a fair question whether it might not have looked out for Number One by means of legislation distasteful to the East if not also unfair.
The state constitution of 1776 was little more than the colonial charter purged of its phrases relating to monarchy. It remained unpalatable to the pioneer society within and be- yond the mountains. The constitution of 1829 was a very partial and unsatisfactory concession to the democratic breeze blowing across the Alleghanies. That of 1851 was a broader compliance, although the stubborn East coupled it with a proviso that it was not to become fully operative for fourteen years. Had the conflict of 1861 been averted, the persistent pressure of the Westean District would have broken down the remaining discriminations. But the incident of war saved to the parent state a large portion of the Western Dis- trict, inasmuch as it threw the dividing line generally west- ward from the Blue Ridge.
It is interesting to consider what West Virginia would have been in 1861 had it already gained statehood by a peaceable arrangement between the Virginians of the two districts. Though divergent from the East the mountain section had been moulded by the operations of the laws and legal usages of Virginia and was still Virginian in spirit. The new state would still have been a Southern commonwealth. It would have been another Kentucky, which is itself an earlier off- shoot from Virginia.
The discord and quarreling between the two sections had been uninterrupted. That the western counties voted ten to one against the ordinance of secession was in part an expres- sion of their general temper toward the eastern. There was not the same unanimity in favor of the Federal cause. This is seen in the fact that a large area of the new state was actively Confederate, and the ratio of Federal to Confederate soldiers is four to one instead of ten to one. That a South- ern feeling long remained dominant in West Virginia is further shown in the political history of the state. When in 1872 the Democratic party came into power for twenty-two years, it was controlled by that wing which had upheld the Confederate side.
The West Virginians of 1861 were almost solidly in favor of separate statehood, yet the crisis of that year threw them into two groups. The Federal party saw an opportunity to gain the coveted end by allying itself with the North, and it
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thus accomplished the object. The Confederate party was not in sympathy with such a method. It saw no alternative but to lay aside its difference with the Virginians of the East. The line separating the two parties was mainly a com- mercial line. North of this line were counties having almost exclusive trade interests with Pennsylvania and Ohio. Economically they were thus a portion of the North and they espoused its cause with vigor. South of the line were coun- ties remote from those states and having but little commercial or social intercourse with them. Their own trade interests lay toward Baltimore or Richmoud, or else down the Ohio to- ward Kentucky and the Gulf, and as a matter of course their sympathies followed the line of social and political touch. The Federal wing of the statehood party having control of the situation, it set up a boundary line that included counties dominated by the Confederate wing. Such counties thus be- came a part of West Virginia without an opportunity to ex- press their views on the matter. In the interest of common fairness these counties should after the return of peace have been given an opportunity to ratify or reject the transfer. But the irregularity was largely remedied by the political rev- olution of 1872, whereby the Confederate wing came into partnership with its rival.
It might be supposed that the secession of West Virginia from Virginia stood on the same basis as the secession of the South from the Union. But there is an important distinction between the two propositions. In the latter instance there was the question of separate nationality. In the former in- stance there was only the question of fairer and more con- venient local administration. The division of a large state into smaller states of the same union is like the division of an unwieldy county into smaller counties of the same state.
The Mission of America
In barbaric society the people rule. The chieftain holds his position only through his ability to lead. Yet this low type of social organization can neither unfold the capacities of the human mind nor discover an efficient key to the great store- house of natural resource.
It is a curious fact that the human race has found no way to rise to civilization without putting itself under the heel of despotic power. In this way the early freedom was lost by the dividing of society into classes. Slavery arose at one end of the social scale and privilege at the other. For the many there were few rights, except the "right" to give compulsory service. For the few there was freedom from drudgery, and thereby an opportunity for mental improvement and cultured
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society. The Many were the privates of the nation. The Few were the officers, and their commander-in-chief was the monarch. They assumed that only they themselves were really the people. Thus in histories of the older pattern we are told much of the privileged class, but little or nothing of the people in general. Furthermore, monarchy and aris- tocracy are commonly spoken of as though distinct. In practice they are one and the same. Aristocracy has to have a head, and therefore it sets up a king. The only well de- fined types of government are the rule of the Few and the rule of the Many.
In the evolution of mankind, privilege, or aristocracy,- and the two terms have the same force, -has played an useful and important part. By giving an open ground to the more forceful element of society, it has demonstrated the capabili- ties of the race. Those who won renown by this means became models whom later individuals sought to follow.
The first aristocrat is always the strong man, and he domi- nates because of his gift for leadership. But power is some- thing to which all men like to cling. Thus the privilege be- stowed by nature seeks to continue itself through a privilege given by birth. In other words there arises an hereditary privilege, which may and may not have the inherent strength of the privilege which is given by nature. To hold its vantage ground the original privilege throws around itself an artificial rampart. It becomes even more proud, exclusive, and tyrannical than before. In a word it becomes fossilized. Progress travels on ideas, and as privilege prefers to see things remain as they are it is never inclined to reform itself.
In another paper we found that the institution of slavery tends to its own undoing. This is because the institution of privilege tends to its own undoing. So long as the many are meek, willing to be beasts of burden, and indifferent to thinking for themselves, privilege has everything its own way. In fact it aims to bring about this very condition and to keep it in full force. But a civilization of this type is only a counterfeit article. A real civilization is never stagnant. It either sinks back toward ruin or steps forward in the direc- tion of progress. Now as a growing civilization unfolds it dif- fuses itself through the whole structure of society. The many become aware that the wall around privilege is not natural but artificial; that in the last analysis the only aristocrat is the man of character and capability, and that such endow- ment does not necessarily reappear in his offspring. When a class begins to bank on something else than its own worth and energy it has outlived its usefulness.
The artificial barrier between privilege and non-privilege
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is swept away through the Many rising to an equality of worthiness with the exclusive Few. Yet privilege does not meekly step down and out. It resists stubbornly, at times with success, yet is all the while engaged in a losing battle.
The merging of the Many with the Few does not put aside the laws of nature. It does not bring a dead level of equality in the social relations of individuals, the compensation of effort, or the exercise of the responsibilities of government. Such a result is not necessary or desirable, nor is it even possible. Society will always have its forceful and its inert members; its leaders and its followers. Freedom for the in- dividual to rise to what he is capable of becoming, and to enjoy what he may thus achieve, is one thing. Freedom in the practical relations between man and man is quite another matter. A forced equality of condition and wealth is un- natural. The only practicable freedom is a distribution of burden, privilege, and opportunity according to the capaci- ties of people.
Nevertheless, civilization is not graded by the brilliant few, but by the commonplace many. It is the man who toils in his shirt sleeves who sets the pace, and he must always con- stitute the vast majority of any nation. In certain directions civilization is capable of much further advance. Yet it can never become the superfine and fantastic article that some persons would have us believe. These lop-sided enthusiasts shut their eyes to the toil which the world cannot avoid if it would, and should not if it could. They see only dress suits, art galleries, and the canals on Mars.
Civilization is well defined by William J. Bryan as "the harmonious development of the human race, physically, men- tally, and morally." It may be measured by two standards, the idealistic and the realistic. Idealism inclines men to take time for thought, to be content with the simpler needs of life, and to measure a question by the rule of right and justice. Realism inclines men to be luxurious in house, home, and garment, and to measure the concerns of life by the yardstick that is labeled expediency on one side and car- ries on the other the phrase, "how much will this proposition pay me?" Idealism extols the life of the open field. Realism builds great cities and would do away with the farm if it could. Idealism is restful, aspiring, and spiritual, and leads to length and enjoyment in national life. Realism is hurried, sordid, and skeptical, and leads to a national career that is swift and showy, yet brief.
Neither of these two types is symmetrical. A marked ex- cess of idealism inclines men to live too much in the air. A marked excess of realism inclines men to live too much in
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the senses. Yet it is idealism which teaches people the true worth of life. Realism in its turn has been of great service through its specialization in applied science. But in spirit and practice it is cold, narrow, and calculating, and does not lead to contentment or happiness. Its only watchword is Prosperity and Business. It makes an idol of its own con- ception of progress. It has no true recognition for any world except the one in which it scrambles for gain. It or- ganizes society into an industrial chariot moving at break- neck speed.
Realism finds no obvious way to compute idealism in terms of coin, and therefore says it has no "practical" value. In fact, realism claims to be the only true brand of civilization, although its spirit is at once barbaric and pagan. The bar- baric chief covers his person with finery in order to impress his people with his pride, his wealth, and his station. The same motive leads the industrial chief to aim at a fortune in a quick, easy, and questionable way, to shut himself within a gaudy mansion, and to buy a titled coxcomb from the so- called nobility of Europe as a husband to his daughter.
There is going to be an effort to find and apply the golden mean between idealism and realism. Until this is done, his- tory will still be teaching its invariable lesson that nations weaken and fall as they yield to the malarial influence of material prosperity.
Every nation has appeared for some definite purpose. Every failure to carry out such purpose has been a danger signal to other nations. It was never intended that America should content itself with being a land of automobiles, sky- scrapers, million-dollar dwelling houses, and mammoth cor- porations.
The nations of the Germanic stock have led the world dur- ing the last hundred years. At heart they are serious, earn- est, and imaginative. Out of these traits has come the ideal of Social Democracy, which, in the words of Franklin, pro- claims "the all of one man to be as dear to him as the all of another." This ideal is also expressed in the opening sen- tence of the Declaration of Independence, which in effect defined civil freedom as fair play to all members of human society. Social Democracy thus restores mankind to the breadth of freedom it had under barbarism, but which it lost while under the rule of privilege. It means the essential brotherhood of the human race, and the right of each indi- vidual to achieve whatever good purpose he is capable of at- taining. But privilege does not permit this free develop- ment. It arranges people in a series of classes and sets up artificial barriers between these classes. Under Social De-
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mocracy, society is like a household of individualized mem- bers working in harmony. Under privilege, it is like a household whose members have as little to do with one an- other as possible. Privilege and true civilization are there- fore at odds.
While the Thirteen Colonies were being settled, privilege in Europe was everywhere in the saddle. It held as a maxim that the only true seat of human authority lay in a close cor- poration of intellectual men; that while this oligarchy might dole out favors to the mass of the people, these favors did not belong to the people by their own right. It is on this very theory that a few years ago the Russian czar authorized a national legislature. The privileged Few always assume that the Many exist primarily for their convenience and ex- ploitation. They are ready to impoverish the Many by ex- tortion, yet take a certain pleasure in distributing alms among them, after the fashion of certain well-known Amer- ican millionaires, who with a flourish of trumpets establish libraries and colleges.
The foundations of democracy lie in the character of the people and in freedom of opportunity. It was the search for a clearer atmosphere in which it might grow that led the founders of the Thirteen Colonies across the Atlantic. It has been the true mission of America to broaden this field and not to narrow it.
American Tendencies
We have elsewhere pointed out that mankind is moved upon by a power higher than itself. We have also pointed out that the present era, which fairly opened in 1848, has been attended by a most extraordinary industrial activity. A third fact remains to be noticed. A domineering lust for pelf has been the besetting sin of the Saxon race, even be- fore the remote days when the hills along the river Rhine were crowned with the robber castles of the German knights, and the waters of the German ocean dotted with the pirate ships of the Northmen.
The first of these facts does not involve any denial of free agency on the part of men. They are not obliged to misuse the good which falls in their way, or to embrace the evil. The second fact does not excuse a feverish haste in rushing upon a suddenly uncovered storehouse of nature. The third fact would indicate the duty of curbing rather than nursing the money-greed which is the ruling passion of all English- speaking nations.
To the heathen Saxon and Northman straight-forward rob-
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bery was commendable. Yet a great deal of the spirit re- mained, and when the Reformation came to Western Europe, the watchword Thrift became so prominent an adjunct to all the Puritan creeds that not without foundation were these words applied to all the colonial immigrants of the Puritan type : "They keep the ten commandments and every other good thing they can lay their hands on." For the old-fash- ioned word thrift, our modern age has substituted the high- sounding term, Material Prosperity. Now thrift, or prosperity is an excellent thing in its way, yet no more a fit object of worship than was the golden calf of the Israelites.
A nation in fact is a collective individual, and is just as liable to wander from the straight and narrow path as the in- dividual himself. It is therefore instructive to take a bird's- eye view of the career of the American people during the sixty years of our modern epoch. We can then form a better opinion as to how truly the United States has been following its national ideal of Social Democracy.
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