REVIEWS. The Negro in Maryland: A Study of the Institution of Slavery. By JEFFREY R. BRACKETT, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University Studies. Extra volume VI.) Baltimore, N. Murray, 1889.- Svo, 268 pp. Notes on the Progress of the Colored People of Maryland since the War: A Supplement to The Negro in Maryland. By JEFFREY R. BRACKETT, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University Studies. Eighth Series, VII, VIII, IX.) Baltimore, Publication Agency of the Johns Hopkins University, 1890. — 8vo, 96 pp. The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on his Char- The Negro Question. By GEORGE W. CABLE. New York, In striking contrast with the greater number of books on the negro, Dr. Brackett's volumes are devoted to an examination of actual conditions within a territory small enough to be exhaustively studied; and his aim is to present clearly all the facts rather than to make deductions. In the introduction to The Negro in Maryland, Dr. Brackett refers very briefly to the rise and decline of enslavement for debt or by capture in war and the custom of ransom; to the strange mixture of religion and thrift in the servitude to which the Spaniards reduced the negroes and the Indians in trading in Africa and America; and to the beginning of negro slavery in the western world. From the settlement of Maryland by Lord Baltimore in 1634 until the early part of the next century, Indians captured in war or convicted of crime were often enslaved for years or for life. And white slaves, or "servants," as the laws styled them, were then and long afterwards very numerous; their service being the result of crime or voluntary contract and generally lasting for a fixed term. In the 122 pages of the third chapter are condensed in logical order all the facts touching the origin and growth of negro slavery in Maryland the regulations and legislation that governed it; the changing restrictions upon immigration and emigration of slaves into and out of Maryland; the slave's civil rights; the provisions of state and local law to prevent his escape by flight or servile insurrection; the criminal 66 code with special references to slave offenders; the history of "sale South" and of the general enforcement of the laws affecting slaves and property in them, with all cognate questions. Manumission is treated. with the same thoroughness, from the first act upon this subject, in 1752, to the last in 1864. The final chapter of this interesting study is upon The Free Negro." His lot was in many respects a harder one than the slave's. The laws covered almost every point in his daily life, and were designed to render his residence in Maryland as uncomfortable to him and as vexatious to the general public as possible. The immigration of free negroes was prohibited and their emigration harshly encouraged. Joel Chandler Harris, in Free Joe, vividly portrays the result of the legislation which is here detailed. Not only are all enactments of the legislature upon these subjects set out chronologically and with great fulness of detail, but the journals of the two Houses, the records of the courts and the current newspapers have been searched for evidence and illustration of the actual administration of the laws and the prevailing popular opinion. 66 That Dr. Brackett's work is systematic and exhaustive is a great merit; but these qualities alone do not make a study." The materials are all here, but undigested; in order, but not vitally co-ordinated. A "study," like a true book, is a finished product ready for consumption, and not a collection of the raw materials of intellectual subsistence. Without a succinct and flowing narrative of the salient facts and lucid generalizations from them, the book cannot reach the reading public. With it the volume might be made as interesting and valuable to the general reader as it is now to the student of politics. Happily this criticism does not apply with equal force to Dr. Brackett's Notes. They are delightfully simple and unpretentious, yet concrete and scholarly. To the best of my recollection this is the first, or at least the most satisfactory, effort ever made to gather and arrange the statistics of an entire state on almost every feature of the negro's daily life. Dr. Brackett wisely devotes small space to politics. The political negro can best be studied in the history of states farther south. Yet enough is given in the Notes to show clearly that he has been the spoil of the politician rather than a voter able to demand and command his rights. The clear statements of fact in regard to the Maryland negro's ideas and habits touching the acquisition of property, protective unions for laborers, manual and intellectual schools, newspapers, religious work, literary and benevolent associations, secret societies, social relations, professional life, jury service etc. etc., show the folly of reasoning by mere theory-which is also likely to be by prejudice. Here are the records of what Maryland negroes have done or failed to do. Our author seems to be so conscientious with his facts that no honest reader can fail to draw for himself the conclusion that, so far as Maryland is concerned at least, the heroic remedies of a flood of political power and a deluge of education are worthy only of political quacks and fanatics. Such measures are not, neither can they construct, a stable civilization. The elevation of the negro — which means merely civilizing him — is like the erection of a brick building: there must be a solid foundation, and the materials must be such and in such relations that they will adhere, else they will soon fall into débris. Lacking these requisites, negro civilization in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina became human débris. Dr. Brackett's Notes, without either argument or drawing of conclusions, shows the best way to solve the problem of civilizing the negro. The only safe method of treating a question obscured by prejudice, passion and half-knowledge is the historical one. Mr. Bruce is evidently a native Virginian; his memory does not recall the days of slavery, and his observations refer especially to "that portion of the Old Dominion which lies between the James River and the northern boundary line of North Carolina." He discusses the important subjects of parent and child, husband and wife, master and servant, blacks and whites, the negro and the commonwealth, religion, superstition, mental and moral characteristics, the negro as a laborer and mechanic, and others of a kindred nature. Being of the later generation, he plainly struggles to see and tell the truth in the light of post-bellum events; but born amid the ideas of a former period and never having grouped facts historically and reasoned inductively, the result is to be regretted rather than condemned. Dr. Atticus G. Haygood — probably the bravest and most valuable friend the negro has in this generation-asserted the plain but, to many of his fellow-Southerners, the startling truth: In its essential characteristics the human mind is the same in every race and in every age. When a negro child is taught that two and two are four he learns just what a white child learns when he is taught the same proposition. . . . There is no more in this statement to excite prejudice than if one should affirm that a negro boy ten years old weighs as much as a white boy ten years old, or that he can jump as far. Mr. Bruce reverses this course of reasoning. He believes that because the negro race is inferior to the Caucasian, every negro is and must forever remain inferior to his white neighbor, i.e. that the general traits and immoralities of the negro race are the necessary possession of every negro. The spectres of social equality, political superiority and their kindred horrors all seem to haunt him. How do these delusions work themselves out? Most disastrously to the honest purposes of our author. The whole category of human failings, common the world over to poor and semi-civilized peasants, are charged up as the characteristics of the ex-slave along with his few special or serious weaknesses. What is the conclusion? What can it be from such an outrageous but common premise? Ah, possibly education may be of some assistance in a few instances, but, alas, education seems to turn the negro's head without training his hand; liberty has loosened the restraints and given rein to immorality and idleness; freedom of labor has merely bred a license of debt or shiftlessness. Such is the gist of Mr. Bruce's philosophy. In his two hundred and sixty pages there are not twenty hopeful sentences. He seems to be entirely blind to the prosperity, resources and education of many of the negroes in such cities as Charleston, Washington and Baltimore. Mr. Cable, although a native Southerner and an ex-Confederate, starts with the plain proposition that the negro merits the same civil rights as the white man. Having fortified his position by expelling all fear of social equality, he attempts to put political rights on the same basis. Here his argument begins to grow weak; for in his successful effort to dispel the delusion that because all negroes are not equal to Caucasians, none of them can be, he is led to believe that because some may be, all are. This is a direct departure from the teachings of the negro's history since the war. He sees nothing peculiar about the Reconstruction state governments. The main cause of their fall was "the corruption of the ballot." Can he be the one person who has never heard of eight years of legislative and administrative corruption in South Carolina and almost as many in Mississippi and his native state of Louisiana - before the corruption of the ballot was seriously considered? He sees no difference in political science between "our fathers" and the white knaves and black thieves who looted the state and county treasuries of the states named; for he says: For instance they [our fathers] had to learn state and national banking and general public financiering; and they learned them in a series of gigantic blunders in comparison with whose devastating results those of the Southern Reconstruction governments of 1868-77 sink into insignificance. In other words, they had to learn how to vote wisely; and no people ever learned how to vote except by voting. [p. 121.] There is a strange mixture of sophistry, fanatical enthusiasm and sound, practical reason in this second volume which Mr. Cable has published on the negro question. The effect of these efforts has been so to enrage the South without particularly enlightening the North (except in regard to the convict-lease system), that we doubt if his very sincere and self-sacrificing discussions have really added much to the solution of the problem. For the good of the cause we cannot but regret that Mr. Cable did not devote this labor to a minute exposi tion of the social and political action and progress of the negro in Louisiana during all or a part of the quarter of a century of his freedom. Such a work would have no suggestion of special pleading, nor would it enrage the persons whom it is important to convince. It would have lasting value at every stage of the development of this troublesome question. FREDERIC BANCROFT. The Union-State: A Letter to Our States-Rights Friend. By JOHN C. HURD, LL.D. New York, D. Van Nostrand Co., 1890.135 PP. Dr. Hurd's views on the constitutional law of the United States are not unfamiliar to students of American history. He has ably presented them in his Theory of our National Existence and other works. The occasion for the present pamphlet was a correspondence with an advocate of the right of state secession. As a central point in the discussion of this right appears the historical question as to the actual political status of the thirteen states at the time when the constitution was proposed for ratification by them. A considerable part of the volume is devoted to a presentation of facts from the records of the colonial and continental congresses, illustrating the views which prevailed at the time of the separation from the mother country. The study is an interesting and valuable one. Dr. Hurd is no believer in state sovereignty. By sovereignty he understands "the existence of will and force directed to a certain political end." The will and force which secured independence from Great Britain he conceives to have been manifested not by any single colony for its own people and territory separately, but by a number of states together and for their joint territory and population. Upon the success of the war, sovereignty vested therefore not in any single commonwealth, but in the union of all. A federal state, or as the author prefers to say, a union-state, came into existence. Dr. Hurd considers that the reciprocal action of the Continental Congress and the voting peoples of the various colonies anticipated the Declaration of Independence, and also indicated a consciousness that the exercise of any independent jurisdiction within any colony or province could rest only on a single will and force manifested in the common action of thirteen pre-existing political personalities which had never possessed sovereignty before that time, either for local government or for national existence. Starting from this historical conception of a sovereignty vested by fact in the states united, the author can find no basis for recognizing at any time any sovereign power in any state separately. The express |