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of the Freedman's Case in Equity. [Under the above heading, the New Orleans Times-Democrat on 2 February 1885 reprinted attacks on Cable's essay from six papers in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. ("Job-printers" is a reference to the way Cable himself demeaned the southern press in his interview with a reporter from The New York Tribune.) Below are excerpts from four of the reprinted articles.]We say, without fear of successful contradiction, that nothing has ever yet been said or written characterized by more unfairness, more transparent bitterness toward Southern people and Southern habits of thought, more radical in its views, or more calculated to excite dissatisfaction on the part of the negro, and lead to the assertion of claims which, if practically asserted, would issue in widening the breach between him and the white man, and probably eventuate in strife and bloodshed, than this article from the pen of Mr. Geo. W. Cable, a Southern man, the son and grandson of Southern men, and a Confederate soldier, as he himself is pleased to inform us. . . . . . . we find that his paper is entirely one-sided -- all for the freedman and nothing for the free man. . . . Mr. Cable denies the existence of race instinct, and seeking the negro's social elevation, would demolish, though he does not say so, all the barriers of social caste. Hence it is, perhaps, that he is eloquently silent as to what would be the consequences in social circles -- if so be any could possibly exist under his levelling process -- of the mingling of the two races in concert halls, in steamboat cabins dining and lodging side by side, in houses of worship, and in the schoolhouse -- the very nursery of social as well as of intellectual manhood and progress. . . . We greatly feared when that brilliant young man, George W. Cable, the Southern novelist, delivered the lecture last summer at Tuskaloosa, Ala., which aroused his audience to such a spirited state of indignation, on account of the sentiment it contained touching the social question -- that the sun of his popularity in the South would soon go down in darkness . . . The white races, in conclusion, have filled the world with their glory and their numbers, as is now the fact before the eyes of all men, and the white man and the white woman are paramount in all the improvements of the earth. They will set their faces like flint against the sentimentalism of our Mr. Cable. . . they will at the same time see to it that the separation of the two races in our theatres, council halls, public schools, churches, etc., shall be enforced in the interest of both whites and blacks. . . . . . . The negro needs no incentive to push himself where he is not wanted, and such fellows as Cable are aiding and encouraging them in this already growing and pernicious direction, which will never result in any good for the colored people. |