Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

be alienated, and that it could be regarded only as property as long as 
it was cultivated; and a fool because he designed simply to impose 
upon the credulity and ignorance of his victims. But the justness of 
the “forty acre” donation cannot be controverted. In the fi rst place, 
the slave had earned this miserable stipend from the government by 
two hundred years of unrequited toil, and, secondly, as a free man, 
he was inherently entitled to so much of the soil of his country as 
would suffi
  ce to maintain him in the freedom thrust upon him. To 
tell him he was a free man, and at the same time shut him off  from 
free access to the soil upon which he had been reared, without a 
penny in his pocket, and with an army of children at his coattail—
some of his reputed wife’s children being the illegitimate off spring 
of a former inhuman master—was to add insult to injury, to mix 
syrup and hyssop, to aggravate into curses the pretended conference 
of blessings.
When I think of the absolutely destitute condition of the colored 
people of the South at the close of the Rebellion, when I remember 
the moral and intellectual enervation which slavery had produced 
in them, when I remember that not only were they thus bankrupt 
but that they were absolutely and unconditionally cut off  from the 
soil, with absolutely no right or title in it, I am surprised—not that 
they have already got a respectable slice of landed interests, not that 
they have taken hold eagerly of the advantages of moral and intel-
lectual opportunities of development placed in their reach by the 
charitable philanthropy of good men and women, not that they have 
bought homes and supplied them with articles of convenience and 
comfort, often of luxury—but I am surprised that the race did not 
turn robbers and highwaymen, and in turn terrorize and rob society 
as society had for so long terrorized and robbed them. Th
  e thing is 
strange, marvelous, phenomenal in the extreme. Instead of becom-
ing outlaws, as the critical condition would seem to have indicated, 
the black men of the South went manfully to work to better their 
own condition and the crippled condition of the country which 
had been produced by the ravages of internecine rebellion; while the 
white men of the South, the capitalists, the land-sharks, the poor white 
trash, and the nondescripts, with a thousand years of Christian civiliza-
tion and culture behind them, with “the boast of chivalry, the pomp of 
power,” these white scamps, who had imposed upon the world the idea 
236 thomas 
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that they were paragons of virtue and the heaven-sent vicegerents of 
civil power, organized themselves into a band of outlaws whose concate-
native chain of auxiliaries ran through the entire South, and deliberately 
proceeded to murder innocent men and women for political reasons 
and to systematically rob them of their honest labor, because they were too 
accursedly lazy to labor themselves.
But this highly abnormal, unnatural condition of things is fast 
passing away. Th
  e white man, having asserted his superiority in the 
matters of assassination and robbery, has settled down upon a bar-
rel of dynamite, as he did in the days of slavery, and will await the 
explosion with the same fatuity and self-satisfaction true of him in 
other days. But as convulsions from within are more violent and 
destructive than convulsions from without, being more deep-seated 
and therefore more diffi
  cult to reach, the next explosion will be 
more disastrous, more far-reaching in its havoc than the one which 
metamorphosed social conditions in the South and from the dread-
ful reactions of which we are just now recovering.
As I have said elsewhere, the future struggle in the South will 
be not between white men and black men but between capital and 
labor, landlord and tenant. Already the cohorts are marshalling to 
the fray; already the forces are mustering to the fi eld at the sound 
of the slogan.
Th
  e same battle will be fought upon Southern soil that is in 
preparation in other states, where the conditions are older in devel-
opment, but no more deep-seated, no more pernicious, no more 
blighting upon the industries of the country and the growth of the 
people.
It is not my purpose here to enter into an extended analysis of 
the foundations upon which our land system rests, nor to give 
my views as to how matters might be remedied. I may take up 
the question at some future time. It is suffi
  cient for my purpose 
to have indicated that the social problems in the South, as they 
exfoliate more and more as resultant upon the war, will be found to 
be the same as those found in every other section of our country, 
and to have pointed out that the questions of “race,” “condition,” 
“politics,” etc. will all properly adjust themselves with the advance-
ment of the people in wealth, education, and forgetfulness of the 
unhappy past.
black and white  237

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Th
  e hour is approaching when the laboring classes of our coun-
try, North, East, West and South, will recognize that they have a 
common cause, a common humanity, and a common enemy, and that 
therefore, if they would triumph over wrong and place the laurel 
wreath upon triumphant justice, without distinction of race or of 
previous condition they must unite! And unite they will, for “a fel-
low feeling makes us wond’rous kind.” When the issue is properly 
joined, the rich, be they black or be they white, will be found upon 
the same side, and the poor, be they black or be they white, will be 
found on the same side.
Necessity knows no law and discriminates in favor of no man or 
race.
238 thomas 
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