The Souls of Black Folk - Dr. Earl Wright II

W. E. B. Du Boisbut one alternative,—to make those wards their own guardians byarming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practicalpolitician pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if wecannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainlycan with black votes. So justice and force joined hands.The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full andrestricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice betweensuffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed tosweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stoodready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not asingle Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possiblewithout a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; therewas scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regardEmancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. Insuch a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was anecessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,and the only method of compelling the South to accept the resultsof the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning arace feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed inits swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and somefelt and feel only indifference and contempt.Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to governmentguardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment tothe slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a farbetter policy,—a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a nationalsystem of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment andlabor office; a system of impartial protection before the regularcourts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks,land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vastexpenditure of money and brains might have formed a great schoolof prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solvedthe most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in partto certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard itswork as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer toall present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents33