CHAPTER IX
Emancipation and Enfranchisement
One has but to notice significant dates in the emancipation of Negro slaves and the enfranchisement of white workers to become aware of the close connection between the two series of events. Especially since the French Revolution, the white workers of Europe were striving to better their condition through the achievement of political power. There was in the minds of their leaders no question but that with the right to vote all things economic were possible. Slowly through the reform bills and subsequent legislation in England, through the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in France, and by analogous steps in many other countries, including the revolution in the United States under Andrew Jackson, the great mass of white workers were enfranchised. At the same time in the West Indies and South America the working class was being made legally free and in some cases also achieved the right to vote. In the rest of the world and among the darker peoples, the workers remained for the most part in semi-serfdom.
Meantime the power of capitalism expanded enormously. Capital actually gained that freedom of action and irresponsibility of power which had been dreamed into reality in the eighteenth century as an attribute of the free individual citizen. The power of capital in the state increased much faster than the participation of workers in the direction of the state. Moreover, the power of capital rested upon legal property and property was the thing that was most tenaciously withheld from the democratic power of the new workers.
England stopped the slave trade in order to defeat Napoleon. She was enabled to do this because a moral revolt was sweeping England against the methods of the slave trade; and this revolt was allowed scope because continual slave uprisings and new conditions in Africa were reducing the profits of slavery. Moreover, a new era of capitalism was approaching. It was gradually becoming possible to transfer capital to places where labor was available instead of, as formerly, being compelled to transfer labor to available land and capital.
This increased ease in the transfer of capital came through the establishment of stock exchanges. In 1773 the “Stock Exchange Coffee House” was established in London and business grew so fast that in 1801 the members raised capital and provided a building and opened it in 1802. Thus while particular recipients of profits might be ruined, and were ruined, in the stopping of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, nevertheless the general flow of profits to the masters of capital could be and was enormously increased at the beginning of the nineteenth century by possibilities of investment in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
On the other hand, recalcitrant groups of laborers who revolted against capitalists’ methods, like those in the West Indies Islands, could now be starved into submission. Instead of transporting labor from Africa to the rich lands of America, it was possible to transfer capital to the labor of Africa and Asia and thus control increasing amounts of necessary raw materials. With this new capitalistic era went new methods of controlling democracy through wealth, through investment in colonial labor. The wealth and power of capitalist classes in democratic lands became so large that directly and indirectly they controlled votes and public opinion. The forms of democracy remained but the substance began steadily to decay as colonial imperialism increased.
The main problem of the West Indies is not political, but economic, and the problem of race is only important as it affects economic status. The labor of the islands, ignorant and degraded and exploited for centuries, was freed only in the sense that the importations of Africans ceased. There was some division of lands varying in different islands from the complete peasant proprietorship of Haiti to complete land monopoly under landlords in many other islands.
The taxes direct and indirect on the poor are high; the officials, especially in the British Islands, receive large salaries and perquisites. For instance, in West Indian, Central and South American British colonies, nine governors receive as salaries and allowances $175,000 a year, not to speak of other governmental expenses. Yet the work of these nine men could easily be concentrated into the hands of two or three executives. Such federation, however, would mean increasing power and democratic control among black people, attack on investment returns, with all of the slow and painful training of those folk into self-government. This task Great Britain is not disposed to undertake. The markets in which the island produce can be sold are monopolized and directed by white capital in European centers, and the carrying trade is entirely in their hands. Capital for local enterprise can only be obtained from them and the local labor employed is paid at the lowest competitive price.
Revolt has been controlled by the rise of a small local bourgeoisie composed of whites and reinforced gradually by mulattoes and a few blacks, who are recognized as part of the dominant white community and associate and often intermarry with them. All signs of revolt and leadership are thus persistently taken away from the Negro masses and honors, appointments and recognition by the mother country are so arranged as to keep the status quo.
Here and there despite this, revolts arise. One of the most spectacular was the case of Marcus Garvey. He was a leader of the Jamaica peasants and, migrating to the United States, tried from that base to emancipate the Negroes of the world by commercial enterprise. It was of course a dream far beyond his power or ability, but it aroused the Negro world and led to precautionary measures both in the West Indies and in Africa. Recently widespread labor troubles have broken out both in the French and the British West Indies. The only systematic attempt to meet the grievances of this peasantry has been taken in the producers’ and consumers’ co-operative movement, which the English government has subsidized, chiefly to offset the monopoly of the American owned United Fruit Company.
The West Indies still remain remote exploited provinces, cut off from union with the world labor movement or with their racial groups, and distracted by petty internal jealousies and provincialisms. It is the tragedy and paradox of a land where life might be easy, healthy and happy, with a minimum of toil for simple needs, or even luxury with adequate technique, that the investing races of the world have for centuries lived on the toil of this proletariat, raping its land and labor; impoverishing it with taxes and interest; monopolizing its sugar, coffee and fruit; depressing the prices of its products in the world market and saddling it with eternal debt. Today the white world visits the land either to play or to rule; to reap large profit and to throw pennies and guffaws at little, lithe, black, begging swimmers.
The racial problem in these areas is biological, but even more cultural. The people are European in speech and outlook, but largely African in their unconscious memories and survivals; and still so filled with a naive joy and exhilaration from an awful experience in slave trade and slavery that there survives art and laughter and joy of living, sprung today from emancipation, and not embittered as yet by memory of a fall from decent standards of living or lost dreams of wealth.
Human beings are apt to be naive in their plans of righting social wrongs, particularly if it seems possible to execute these plans without loss of income to themselves or others. If the stealing of men instituted slavery, their emancipation meant freedom and happiness. It was a commonplace among abolitionists to prove beyond peradventure that a free laborer could do more work and better work than a slave and create more wealth. It was not, on the other hand, at all clear that while the profit which the slave made went almost exclusively to his master save for the pittance which kept him alive, on the other hand, the profit of the free laborer was divided: an increased proportion went to the laborer himself in the form of wages or of leisure; and he might easily have no direct interest in making the total profit large.
Of course those who had invested in the West Indies knew that under slavery or freedom, under political control or independence, they owned the land, they would handle the crops, they would pay the labor. Unless then the land was confiscated or the crops seriously decreased in amount, or the labor inefficient or intractable, they might still make profit. It happened after West Indian emancipation, that only in one country was the land definitely and entirely taken from the former proprietors.
Sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and rum, and later oil and tropical fruits were the raw materials eventually turned out by the West Indies in increasing amounts. Their value was enhanced at first by the Napoleonic wars and later by the prosperity and increased demand of the industrial development of the nineteenth century.
Labor varied in efficiency and docility. The first impulse of the freed slave was to rest, to realize his freedom in leisure and absence of driven toil. If he had his own land as in Haiti, he worked only irregularly and when his wants compelled him. On the other hand, in Cuba he remained a slave long after legal emancipation, being driven to work by land monopoly and the low wages paid. In Jamaica there was at first widespread ruin among the planters. They were already in debt to English financiers and the demand of the free laborers in wage and leisure was more than they could pay and keep solvent.
On the other hand, the owner and exploiter was not without weapons against the laborer: he could refuse to furnish capital except this was accompanied by at least some political control. Foreign capital could be attracted to these regions of emancipation only by the payment of large interest and the promise of excessive profit. Even when emancipated labor began to get political power and to vote, nevertheless this power could be controlled by limiting its scope to the selection of powerless officials and carefully keeping control of property and industry out of the hands of the voters.
Unfortunately, all the interesting details of this economic development in the West Indies have not been seriously studied by sociologists and economists. Usually the explanation of everything that has taken place there is purely racial: Negroes are lazy and inefficient and consequently poor and turbulent; with a different kind of labor the West Indies would flourish, but their racial fate is upon them.
Despite this oft-repeated belief, it is quite clear that if the West Indian laborers were paid decent wages and given a modern education; if they could control capital and income through a free vote; there might arise there a center of world industry; and more than that, a center of thought and art. But so long as the labor is isolated on these islands, given but limited education, paid a starvation wage, kept largely from the use of the land, and taxed on consumption, some art may emerge and some individuals of note, but on the whole the islands and the adjacent mainland will remain a sort of world slum, illustrating and making clear the exploitation which planted it in the past and prolongs it today.
The future development of this interesting and fundamentally important part of the world may come through the economic emancipation of its preponderantly dark peasantry and the raising of them to higher standards of living. On the other hand it may come by the persistent effort which one sees today to subject them to a bourgeoisie partly risen from their own masses and partly foreign, which will build a prosperity of wealth on the continued subjection of the masses of labor. It is for the promise of this latter purpose, that these groups are held today apart, not only by general economic exploitation but by studiously encouraging provincialism in small and separate islands and groups, with every difficulty of intercourse and contact and in the face of the general neglect of the world.
To illustrate the development of the West Indies, since the emancipation of the slaves, we may take certain typical examples: the drama of the West Indies typified itself in the story of San Domingo. Here was the nadir of labor, a great amorphous mass of black commodity flesh dumped into a little island of heavenly beauty and exploited with every ecstasy of cruelty and blood, from the mass murder of Indians in the fifteenth century to the sugar-cane exploitation of the eighteenth. And then suddenly, in a night, there came the revolution. It came as Marx would have had it, not so much from the educated and rich mulattoes, as from the great black mass of slaves, led by an incredible man; those slaves drove out the imperial Spaniards and the commercial English and ruined Napoleon Bonaparte’s dream of empire in the Valley of the Mississippi; they set up a free and independent state.
The result of the Haitian revolution was not so much the independence of a small island with its half million or more inhabitants, but rather the ideas which it spread among many million black laborers in America, and their exploiters; and even beyond that, the challenge to democracy which it eventually instituted.
The world alternately grew red with laughter and white with fear as this little independent state, born of slavery and revolution, started its tempestuous career. Its real problem was not political, although it had to struggle for political independence against France and the United States. The essential struggle was for economic survival; for feeding and sheltering these slaves and enabling them to barter with the world for a share in world goods. Commercial isolation was not permitted. They must trade and on such terms as white folk willed. They established under the great Christophe, whose monument is still the most marvelous building in America, a replica of the African tribal government with emperor, chieftains, clans and family life, and raised Haiti from the inertia of reaction to organized and fairly efficient beginnings of economic life.
Above all, this regime accomplished the most astonishing thing in the modern world: it divided the land among the peasantry in fee simple, sharply in contrast with the land monopoly of Europe, the current land theft of Africa, the other West Indies and America. Land-holding by foreigners was forbidden and large holdings by natives were neither politically wise nor profitable. The plantation system disappeared.
This was the result not so much of edict as of custom. Toussaint, Christophe and Petion all were compelled to drive the black laborers back to their land; but they gave them holidays to work for themselves and they gave them customary rights of tenure. Gradually it came to be Haitian law that peasants could not be evicted and this law stood until the Americans did what they could to overturn it during their occupation. But, after all, this island of communal effort and peasant proprietorship was in the midst of a sea of private profit organized during the Industrial Revolution and coming, in the early nineteenth century, to its perfect flower.
The kidnapping and death of Toussaint opened the eyes of his followers; Dessalines and Christophe and mulattoes like Petion, who had joined the French, soon saw their mistake. The result was that Rochambeau was literally driven into the sea and had to surrender to the English. After the loss of sixty thousand Frenchmen, Haiti became independent and in 1804 Dessalines tore out the white stripe from the French tricolor and threw it on the ground and put the red and the blue together as the standard of a new state, which he called Haiti, “Land of Mountains.”
He and his successor, Christophe, were curious combinations of primitive African chieftains and shrewd modern men, uneducated and violent but determined and shrewd. Through the Napoleonic wars they maintained the political independence. Political subjugation could not be forced on Haiti, but economic subjugation was almost inevitable. Crops decreased; Haitians were not raising sugar for the world but food for themselves; they were not toiling for the ease of white folk, but for their own enjoyment. The Sugar Empire passed to the slaves of Cuba. The French later insisted on enormous tribute, which Boyer reduced in actual figures, but which still remained more than this poor community could pay and live.
The pressure of American investment began, culminating in demands for strategic coaling stations and finally in attempted subjugation. The result in Haiti was that the people limped forward, wavering between the attempted leadership of presidents analogous to African chieftains, and presidents who represented the French élite of capital.
The élite could establish no exploitation in modern form because they could furnish neither land nor cheap labor to investors, nor did the island have technical skill for industry. The agriculture of Haiti was at the mercy of colonial imperialism throughout the world, with a low value set on raw materials, by those world centers where profit was made and expected, not from the raising of crops, but from their transformation into manufactured goods. Such foreign capital as was offered Haiti was offered only on the severest terms with a demand for more or less political control in the background and with the additional demand, peculiar to colored countries, that white representatives be the local repositories of all expenditure and control.
During these years the fight in Haiti was between an incipient bourgeoisie with a fine tradition of French culture but small wealth, and a black peasantry fanatic in its insistence upon land ownership and freedom from compulsory labor. Civil disturbances, rapid succession of officials and social unrest in Haiti can practically all be explained in these terms.
Finally the United States conceived of Haiti as a way station to the Panama Canal, and President Wilson, at the behest of American investors and commercial freebooters, seized the country. The resistance was not mainly, and could not be, physical. The new engines of war were too terrible; but Haiti put in action a “sit-down” strike, a silent refusal to co-operate; it made use of all of the difficulties of a language which the Americans did not know, and of a law code with which they were not familiar; the inability of the conquerors legally to monopolize land; and above all a determined propaganda among the Negroes of the United States which threatened their allegiance to the Republican party, the party of finance capital, in many critical centers.
There were only two ways out: murder and subjugation, which the Republican party with its Negro supporters did not dare inaugurate; or compromise. That compromise consisted of compelling Haiti to accept a debt which was nothing less than highway robbery, and included every alleged “contract” that it could, under the most disadvantageous terms. Haiti again became “free,” but her existence depended upon a dictatorship which must, on the one hand, keep the peace; and, on the other hand, pay enormous and continuous tribute to the banks of New York. An American fiscal officer sits in Port au Prince with his hands on the treasury, seeing that the profit of foreign investors, made permanent by the debt agreement, is paid before anything can be done for Haitian labor in wage, education, health or social advance.
Under such circumstances no new orientation of object could easily take place. The new voices of industrial democracy were sternly repressed and perhaps had to be if the threat of American subjugation was not to return. Nevertheless, the voices were there and the effort. The voices declared that the true ideal of Haiti is to raise its land-holding peasantry to economic independence and intelligence; and perhaps the most significant prophecy of this thought was when Bellegarde, delegate of Haiti, alone raised his voice against the South African murder of the Bondelswartz, voicing the complaint of a whole world of exploited black folk in the League of Nations.
The Spanish end of the island of San Domingo is known today as the Dominican Republic. It remained separate from Haiti until Toussaint and his revolting slaves united the island. When Haiti was established as an independent republic, the Spanish part of the island reverted to Spain, but became independent in 1821. The Haitians under President Boyer dominated the whole island from 1822 to 1844. Since then the Dominican Republic has been independent, except for the intervention of American business, 1916 to 1924. The greatest leader of the country was the mulatto, Ulisse Heureaux.
Much Negro and less Spanish blood make up the people of the republic, but the Dominicans are anxious to be regarded as white because they want to be treated like white people and preserve the social and cultural bonds which they still have with Spanish-speaking countries. They, therefore, discriminate against Negroes in their immigration laws. On the other hand, their workers form a part of the low paid exploited labor of the West Indies, working under the control of foreign capital.
Turning now to Jamaica, we find a development different in many ways. Two hundred fifty-five thousand slaves were set free in 1838 for which the planters were paid nearly thirty million dollars. There ensued a discouraging condition of industry. This was partly due to unwilling and lazy Negro labor, trained by slavery to despise common work; but it was also in part due to English commercial adjustments. The capital invested in the West Indies by Englishmen was more and more concentrated in the carrying trade and that trade even after emancipation remained large and lucrative. The Jamaica crops of sugar and coffee markedly decreased at the time of emancipation, but crops from other islands and new crops more than made up the difference.
The losses fell principally on the plantation owners who had borrowed from the financiers and already paid them handsome profit. Tariff protection on Jamaican sugar in the English market was withdrawn after emancipation and the price of sugar which had been about ten dollars a hundredweight fell to six dollars. The overvalued estates were burdened with mortgages and debts owed largely to English consignees, who had formerly bought the sugar crop. There was a severe financial and banking crisis in England. Nine-tenths of the Jamaican land and estates in Jamaica were owned by absentee landlords and administered by agents. They proceeded to cut the wages of labor from fifty cents to twenty-five cents a day and finally even to sixteen cents a day. And often at that they had no money to pay the wages due.
Thomas Carlyle came forward as the extreme protagonist of the planters with his Discourse on Niggers in 1849: “You are not slaves now; nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again; but decidedly you have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you;… servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal man can doubt they are?) born wiser than you! That, you may depend upon, my obscure black friends! Is and was always the Law of the world for you and all men.”1
The white officials sent out in these days were arbitrary and corrupt. Little was done for the mass of people and there was outrageous over-taxation. Nevertheless the backwardness of the colony was attributed solely to the Negro. Governor Eyre complained in 1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and were filling the jails.
The colored people were aroused and a mulatto, George William Gordon, began agitation for reform. Gordon was the son of a white planter by a Negro slave woman, who taught himself to read and write and eventually bought his own and his mother’s freedom. He became a prosperous storekeeper, and when his white father became insolvent redeemed the home and maintained his father and the white family in it, although they refused to recognize him or let him enter the house. The minister of the Scotch church in Kingston characterized him as “a man of princely generosity and unbounded benevolence.” He married a white woman and by allying himself as a planter with the whites, as so many of the mulattoes did, he might have escaped the difficulties of black folk. But he espoused the cause of the blacks and as a parish official tried to help them in many ways.
Meetings were held, and finally the Negro peasantry began a riot in 1861, in which twenty-two people were killed, only three of whom were white. Thirty-four persons were wounded. The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial three hundred and fifty-four persons, and also killed without trial eighty-five, a total of four hundred and thirty-nine. In addition to this, one hundred and forty-seven were killed after martial law ceased. One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children had their brains dashed out, pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon himself, whose direct connection with the riot was never proved, was tried by court-martial and hanged. In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners admitted, “reckless and positively barbarous.” Eyre was never punished, but the island was made a crown colony in 1866 and twenty years later the voters were given the right to elect a majority of the legislature.
Nevertheless this right to vote was seriously curtailed. It could not touch the returns on old investments made by the English dating back to slavery days. It had but limited control over the land, and its right of taxation was strictly curtailed by the governor and colonial office and could not impede the freedom of capital. The peasantry remains with elementary education, little land, low wages and uncertain employment.
Above the mass has arisen a considerable class of educated, well-to-do Negroes and mulattoes, who achieve on the whole political and social equality with the whites. Good education is available for them and commercial and political preferment. But their ranks could be multiplied tenfold and their horizon infinitely widened in industry, literature and art, if the barriers of slavery did not hold the great flood of ability and genius imprisoned in the black peasantry.
Emancipation wrought no sudden miracle in Cuba. Economic oppression continued after emancipation. The mass of the Negroes were still beasts of burden on the sugar and tobacco plantations and manumission gave them no settled economic status. They were continually uprooted by war, disorganized, politically unstable, and even when enfranchised the victims of demagogues and fuel for further revolution.
It was the Negroes and mulattoes who made Cuba politically independent of Spain and started her on her torturous climb to economic justice. The Ten Years War brought legal emancipation, but when oppression and injustice followed, Antonio Maceo, a handsome mulatto, took the field with numbers of Negro soldiers in 1895. The wealthy Spanish and creole capitalists denounced this war as a race struggle of Negroes against whites. From the beginning it was bitter. For fourteen days Maceo and his companions were hunted over hills and valleys and through forests. Some of his companions were killed, others captured, and he himself was wounded twenty-five times. Finally in December, 1896, he was killed “too soon to witness the final triumph of his cause,” but he lived long enough “to stamp him the greatest military leader in Cuba’s history.” His bronze monument today dominates Havana.
Through the intervention of the United States, Cuba secured her freedom. American Negro regiments played a leading role, among other things rescuing Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders from threatened annihilation. But the American intervention had its price. It was motivated by no desire to see Negroes free and politically independent in Cuba, but rather with the distinct design of dominating the Cuban sugar fields and concentrating in that island the sugar culture which formerly had centered in Haiti and Jamaica. With the rule of American capital and under such officials as Wood, Brookes and Lagoon, labor exploitation was accomplished and helped by racial discrimination which was now emphasized in Cuba to an extent never known before.
Notwithstanding this, the political leaders, whether they were puppets of the Americans or local demagogues, had to be careful of their Negro political support. Estrada Palma, who was the first independent Cuban official and a direct representative of American finance, depended upon Martin Delgado, the black leader, for political backing. He managed, however, in deference to American prejudice, to refuse recognition to Delgado’s wife at social functions.
Palma subjected the government to foreign capital, closed the doors to native development and favored foreign banking. The sugar lands were increasingly monopolized. Whole towns on the sugar estates were subject to American law, with private company railways and private ports. A wave of purely racial resentment swept over Cuba for the first time. Under the leadership of Estenoz, born in the black capital, Santiago de Cuba, a new Independent Colored Party was formed and incorporated in 1907. Within a year it had a membership of over sixty thousand Negro voters. The result was race riots and clashes, in one of which at Oriente, three thousand Negroes were killed.
President Gomez depended again upon Delgado and by his aid an electoral law was introduced forbidding the formation of any political party along racial lines. But the lesson had been learned. Negro officials began to be appointed. They have occupied cabinet and other high positions. Under President Grau, the Havana chief of police was a capable mulatto. A black judge was appointed and the number of Negro Army officers increased. Indeed the present military dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who came to power in 1933, is a mulatto with white, Negro and Indian blood.
The present Negro population of Cuba probably runs to about seventy per cent despite official statistics. The Negroes form naturally the bulk of the poor, ignorant and untrained. The American economic penetration has monopolized the resources of the island and made the Negro’s opportunity worse. There are now Negro and white jobs and open discrimination in pay. As Beals says, if present tendencies persist, “Cuba will be converted into a vast sugar plantation with a population of West Indian Negroes, a cowardly native bureaucracy; a government receiving orders from Wall Street, and a flag—symbol of its independence.”2
Puerto Rico was annexed to the United States after the Spanish American war and in 1917 the inhabitants became American citizens. Education has been provided widely but the poverty and low social status of the people as a result of long history of exploitation and misrule are notable and have led to clashes with the officials, labor controversy and other sorts of unrest.
Turning now to South America, we may center our attention upon Brazil because this country represents a rather different attempt to solve the problem, not only of the worker but of the workers of different races. The submerged peoples here were the Indians and the Negroes. The Indians were only partially enslaved and lived apart in the swamps and forests. Their exploitation as porters and laborers did not reach the concentration of effort characterized by the importation of Negro slaves. It is probable today that white folk form only one-third of the population of Brazil, the other two-thirds being Indians, Negroes, and mixtures of these races and the whites.
Emancipation of Negroes did not come in Brazil until 1888, but before that gradually large numbers had been freed; and also before and after emancipation, Negroes, whites and Indians were amalgamating into a new race. Some of the most intelligent Brazilians have possessed Negro blood. Indians and Negroes made up the lowest class in Brazil, and the white element the highest; but nevertheless race and color have played only a secondary part in social life. Discriminatory laws existed in the past, until the close of the colonial era, those having Negro blood being legally disqualified from becoming priests or holding civil office; yet individuals evidently Negro secured such positions. Even in the eighteenth century there were black clergy and bishops; indeed the Negro clergy seem to have been on a higher moral level than the whites. Negroes rose to high posts even in colonial times. A recognition of the equality of the two darker races with the white one was shown when four persons were decorated and ennobled for services in driving out the Dutch; one was an Indian chief and another a Negro captain of a black regiment. Later patents of nobility were repeatedly conferred upon persons known to have Negro blood.3
A Brazilian writer said at the First Races Congress: “The cooperation of the metis in the advance of Brazil is notorious and far from inconsiderable.4 They played the chief part during many years in Brazil in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. I could quote celebrated names of more than one of these metis who put themselves at the head of the literary movement. They fought with firmness and intrepidity in the press and on the platform. They faced with courage the gravest perils to which they were exposed in their struggle against the powerful slave-owners, who had the protection of a conservative government. It was owing to their support that the republic was erected on the ruins of the empire.”
At other parts of South America we can but glance. Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador, and some parts of Mexico have considerable amounts of Negro blood. Slavery was abolished by Guatemala in 1824 and by Mexico in 1829. Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay ceased to recognize it about 1825. Between 1840 and 1845 it came to an end in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador.
When Bolivar announced his war in Colombia and Venezuela, many Negroes flocked to the standard, and, after his first failure, it was President Petion of Haiti who twice provided him with filibuster forces of black troops to start the war anew, with the proviso that Bolivar would at once free the slaves. Paez, Sucre, and other South American leaders used Negro soldiers in their fight for freedom. In general, in South America, Negroes found the army a short cut to social improvement and were especially used as soldiers in many civil wars and rebellions.
In Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador there are today whole towns predominantly or entirely Negro. All along the coast of Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras there are numbers of Negroes and mixed people of Negro, Spanish, and Indian blood. The Negroes of Nicaragua are mostly on the Pacific side and form a notably handsome group of people; but throughout this country the economic disintegration and social squalor are tremendous. These lands are largely without guiding ideals or encouragement and receive little help from the civilized world, which in turn has not yet reduced them to profitable wage slavery.
Negroes have always exercised an important political role in Venezuela, where most of the leaders of revolts have had Negro and Indian blood. There are perhaps thirty thousand Negroes in Ecuador, where they have led many of the recent revolts. They are interbred widely with Spaniards and Indians, “and today give a distinct flavor to the whole coast culture, ever so separatist, so resentful and mistrustful of highland Quito rule.”5
When the French Panama Canal Company began to dig, they brought large numbers of black laborers from the British and French West Indies and Haiti, and began a trade in transferring labor from island to island and to the coast, which is still carried on by none too honest contractors. It has not very greatly improved the lot of the laborers, but it has begun to get them acquainted with each other and conscious of their common wrongs. When the United States took up the work of digging the Panama Canal they used thousands of these laborers and dumped the surplus across the borders into the new republic of Panama. Thus Panama became a distributing center for labor all along the Central American and South American coast.
In the Canal Zone the United States drew the color line strictly by law and custom, discriminating in wages and particularly in housing. The housing of black laborers in Panama and Colon has been described as horrible. “No more tragic contrast is presented between these people, dumped originally on Panama by the Zone authorities, and the great civilized symbol represented by the remarkable operation of the canal itself.”6
In general, throughout South America, the situation differs from that in the West Indies. First of all, here the migration of Europeans has been large enough to establish a group of local capitalists in most of the countries, who proceeded to exploit the mass of Indian and Negro labor. They were encouraged to borrow large amounts of capital from Europe and the United States and for a time fell into continuous revolutionary squabbles over the division of the profits.
Gradually, however, their ranks were penetrated with Indian and Negro blood, and a new patriotism arose which looks upon these countries as places of development for the mass of their people. Endeavors to break down land monopoly in countries like Mexico and to reorganize the state on less oligarchic lines, as in Brazil, went on and still, with halting and retrogression, are proceeding. On the other hand, in Brazil, the Argentine and elsewhere European capital is playing a menacing role and increasing in power.
The ignorance and inexperience of the masses here are partly compensated for in a certain carefree life in the forest and on the plains, for a people who have developed a love of mere existence even on a low plane. There is a good chance, therefore, that in South America, despite the power of European capital, a democracy in industry and agriculture will eventually arise and that people of mixed Indian, Spanish, Portuguese and Negro blood will form a new amalgam with increasing economic equality and a rich cultural life.
The widespread mixture of races in the West Indies and South America: Indian, Spanish, Dutch, English, and Negro, has given rise to exceptional men and women. Yet systematically their relation to any of these races except the Negro is stressed; and if any West Indian insists that he or his ancestors were not of Negro descent, it is a matter of courtesy to agree with him; and of course documentary proof is nearly always impossible. On the other hand, there were few white women in the West Indies, especially in earlier days, and those few were protected by wealth, law and custom. An illegitimate child, therefore, in the West Indies in the earlier days was almost proof positive of Negro descent. Thus Alexander Hamilton, the great American statesman, and the forebears of Robert Browning were probably of Negro descent; but the facts can naturally never be proven.
Today only one country in the West Indies openly acknowledges and even boasts of its Negro blood, and that is Haiti, although as a matter of fact there are more Negroes in Cuba than in Haiti. Haiti has often been tempted to stress her mulatto element and forget her black peasantry, but the temptation to this lies primarily in the insult and discrimination which she had suffered, even at the hands of the Pan-American Union.
Beyond the physical results of this mixture, come certain cultural developments. In Brazil “at the present moment there is scarcely a lowly or a highly placed federal or provincial official at the head of or within any of the great departments of state that has not more or less Negro or American-Indian blood in his veins.”7
Lord Bryce says, “It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind these two cities, the black population predominates.… The Brazilian middle class intermarries with mulattoes and quadroons. Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory that there is little or no class friction.”
Waldo Frank writes: “The dark folk alone that dwell in Brazil can create an authentic Brazilian culture. This dark folk does not make republics and has not learned yet sufficiently how to direct one. It has not studied the intricacies of international commerce. Its potency is a deeper level. It is already forming the vision, the art, the play of its world. It is the living plasm of Brazil, whence must rise its spirit.”
From the French West Indies many people of mixed blood have arisen to distinction both there and in France. Olivier fought as an officer in the German wars. Chevalier de St. Georges was knighted by Louis XVI. The Dumas family furnished a general under Napoleon and two of the leading literary men of France; and finally Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, granddaughter of a Negro, became first the mistress of a member of the Directory and later wife of Napoleon and first empress of France.
The art influence of the Negro in the West Indies and Latin America has been deep. He is responsible for much of its spiritual heritage. Ruben Dario, a Nicaraguan mulatto, is perhaps the greatest poet of Latin America. In Cuba there was the poet Placido and today there is Guillen. In Peru there are two mulatto poets, Abujar and Yerovi. José de Patroncinio was of Negro descent and not only one of Brazil’s greatest writers but a leading abolitionist. Negro language customs and folklore have been preserved in Guiana, in Cuba, in Jamaica and Haiti. There are few dances in America that have not been influenced by the Negro.
The future of Latin America is with no single race but with a new amalgam which is already setting its pattern. Often the fear is expressed that parts of Central America and the West Indies will grow black and that drink, disease and sexual immorality will degrade the people. But the danger does not lie here. It lies rather in the determination to pauperize any people with black blood and thus deliver it into the arms of disease and crime. For hundreds of years the development of ability among West Indians and the opening of doors, particularly, of economic opportunity, were confined to white people or to those light mulattoes who by courtesy passed as white. The great mass of laborers became a proletariat reduced in the days of the slave trade to the very lowest labor status. There is no sufficient reason to doubt that economic opportunity and social justice will raise, out of this part of the world, people not only capable of supporting present human civilization but of creating new centers for a greater and finer culture.