: Why Colored People in Philadelphia Are Excluded from the Street Cars by Hunt Benjamin P Benjamin Peter - United States Race relations; Segregation in transportation Pennsylvania Philadelphia; African Americans Pennsylvania Philadelphia

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Aside then from the action of official and conventional bodies, it has been shown that large numbers of the laboring classes are opposed to the unreserved use of the cars by the colored people; and it must be inferred from the foregoing facts that but a small number of any class earnestly and actively advocate it. Between these extremes is the great body of the respectable, intelligent and influential portion of the community, the members of which are generally self-restraining and above violence in speech or act, and who, at first sight, one might suppose to be indifferent on the question, or perhaps torpidly in favor of admission. A little friction, however, brings to the surface unmistakable evidence that this body also is permeated with latent prejudice sufficient to carry it, imperceptibly perhaps and by dead weight only, but still to carry it against the colored people. Many belong to this class who would take offence if told so. It is not hard to find old hereditary abolitionists--Orthodox and other Friends, and members of the late Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, who coldly decline all overtures for co?peration in this work. The abolition of Slavery away in the South was all very well, but here is a matter of personal contact. They are not opposed, themselves, to riding with colored people--certainly not. The colored people may get into the cars if they can; they will not hinder it. But they do wish there were baths furnished at the public expense, for the use of these friends, in order that they might be made thereby less offensive to ladies. And from these ladies, no doubt, comes an opposition--indirect and partially concealed--apparent perhaps only through the manner and tone of the father, husband or brother, but still most obstinate. It is often curious to observe how the discussion of this subject will set in motion two opposing moral currents in the same religious and cultivated female mind; that of conscience, which calls for the admission of the colored people, and that of prejudice, which hopes they will not get it. And thus the moral nature of many men and women, who in general are friendly to equal rights, on this question is divided. The sense of justice not being quickened by sympathy, their movements in respect to it are like those of a man palsied on one side--hindering rather than helpful. And it is this great, respectable and intelligent portion of the community that is really responsible for these wrongs and disturbances.

John Swift, a hard, shrewd man, now gone to his place, but in 1838 Mayor of this city, told a committee of Friends who called on him, on the 17th of May of that year, for protection against men who threatened violence, that "public opinion makes mobs;" and on the same night a mob, so made, after a short, mild speech from the said Mayor, counselling order and stating that the military would not be called out, burnt down Pennsylvania Hall. And every mob that the country has seen, during the last century, has had a similar origin and support, from that of the Paxton Boys against harmless Indians, in 1763, encouraged up to the threshold of murder, and then only opposed, when too late, by the Rev. Mr. Elder and his colleagues, to that of the New York Irish rioters against the negroes and the draft, in 1863, that was addressed as "my friends" by Gov. Seymour, the representative of a great party. And, to bring this subject up to date, may be added the late rebel mob at New Orleans, hissed on, in its wholesale work of murder, by the President of the United States through the telegraph. The brain does not more surely impel or restrain the hand, than do the more educated and influential classes, however imperceptibly, those that are less so, in all cases in which premeditated violence is forseen. And had there really existed any considerable degree of this moral restraining power in our community, these outrages against the people of color would long since have ceased.

We are forced then to the conclusion that this community, as a body, by long indulgence in the wicked habit of wronging and maltreating colored people, has become, like a moral lunatic, utterly powerless, by the exercise of its own will, to resist or control the propensity. And unless it finds an authoritative and sane guardian and controller in the Supreme Court--unless this Court has itself, by chance, escaped this widely spread moral imbecility of vicious type, there seems to be no cure for the disease, nor end to its wickedness. And Philadelphia must still continue to stand, as she now does, alone, among all the cities of the old free States, in the exercise of this most infamous system of class persecution.

When Lear cries out "Let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart," we are made to perceive that his mind was not so wholly absorbed in his wrongs as to prevent it from speculating, in a wild way, on their cause: a touch of nature suggesting that any statement of wrongs which does not enter into the causes and conditions that made their commission possible, is imperfect. And to the question constantly recurring: What is it that has caused the people of Philadelphia thus to stand apart from other northern and western free cities, in the disposition to persecute negroes? the true answer seems to be this: Philadelphia once owned more slaves than any other northern city, with the possible exception of New York; she retains a greater number of colored people now, in proportion to her white population, than any other such city, with the accidental exception of New Bedford, when emancipation took place the process was left incomplete, and of all cities, north or south, she most fears amalgamation.

The evils of slavery are in proportion to its density. In South Carolina, which is the part of the United States where it was most dense, these evils, especially in their effect on the Whites, were more distinct and apparent than in any other State. The South Carolinians were the most despotic of our slave owners, and they were the first to secede in order to remain such undisturbed. But great as were these evils in our slave States, where the Whites always outnumbered the Blacks, they were infinitely greater in the West Indies, and especially in St. Domingo, where the Blacks, in a much greater degree, outnumbered the Whites. The most comprehensive evidence of this is to be found in the fact that, in the United States there was a natural increase in the slave population, while in the West Indies the reverse was the case, to a remarkable degree. A slave, when landed in the United States, always found here at least two Whites to one Black; for before the introduction of the cotton gin, which was not until after the abolition of the slave trade, the temptation was not great to drive plantation work, or to increase the number of slaves. He came at once into such multiplied contact with Whites that, though he was taught nothing, he learnt much. His African superstitions soon died out, or became greatly diluted; camp meeting exercises took their place; his games and dances were assimilated to those of white people, and his spontaneous songs, unlike those of the St. Domingo negroes, which mostly relate to eating, satire and venery, early became emotional and religious. The first tincture of Christianity which West India slaves received, was communicated to them by slaves from the United States. When Dr. Coke landed in St. Eustatia, in 1788, he found, as his Journal says, that "the Lord had raised up lately a negro slave named Harry, brought here from the continent to prepare our way." The Baptists, now the great sect of Jamaica, owe their origin there to George Lisle, a slave preacher, who was taken thither from Georgia, by his tory master, at the evacuation of Savannah by the British in 1782.

On the Whites, the most curious effect of dense slavery is that of destroying, or greatly impairing the power of moral vision in all matters relating to Blacks. In this respect, the trial for murder of the Hon. Arthur Hodge, planter and member of His Majesty's Council in the island of Tortola, and there hanged, in 1811, is a psychological study. Along through the years including 1805 and 1808, this gentleman, by cart-whipping at "short quarters," by pouring boiling water down the throat, by burning with hot irons and by dipping in coppers of scalding water, murdered eight of his slaves and one freeman. Tortola is twelve miles long by four broad and at the time in question contained about 6000 inhabitants. These murders were well known to the slave population, when committed, and as testimony afterwards proved, to many of the Whites. But Hodge was not brought to trial till 1811, and then formal complaint against him only reached his brother magistrates through a family quarrel about property. John M'Donough declined to serve on the jury because "the case would make the negroes saucy." Stephen M'Keough, a planter and an important witness, who saw some of these cases of flogging which ended in death, described Mr. Hodge as "a good man, but comical, because he had bad slaves." Both the Attorney General and the presiding Judge, apparently functionaries from England, thought it necessary to go into a set argument to show that killing negro slaves was really murder, and the jury, under the charge, brought Hodge in guilty, but recommended him to mercy. Here was moral blindness produced by an atmosphere of slavery which can only find its physical counterpart in the eyeless fishes bred in the dark waters of the Kentucky cave. Probably no case could be found in our Southern States equal to this in enormity of crime and corresponding absence of moral vision in respect to it, though that of Mrs. Abrahams, of Virginia, with her four murders, and the alacrity with which "all the Richmond lawyers" volunteered in her defence may approach it.

In Pennsylvania the slaves were never more than a sprinkling compared to the free population, slavery never appeared in these dark colors, and it was early declared to be prospectively abolished. And yet this old, unmistakable characteristic of the slaveholder--defect of moral vision where the black man is concerned, is to this day a distinct feature of our society. We are still unable to see clearly the wickedness of denying him the vote and expelling him from the cars; and the same spirit of outrage and murder, which now shocks us by the terrible energy with which it moves the late slaveholders against the freedmen, is at this moment acting in a small, feeble, mean way within ourselves against our own colored population. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. Thus, eighty-six years after the passage of the act for the gradual emancipation of the slaves of Pennsylvania, life enough remains in the old institution, long since supposed extinct, still to disturb the peace of society.

But another cause which gives Philadelphia a bad eminence in respect to the treatment of colored people, is the comparatively large numbers of them which she possesses over other northern cities, with the one exception above noted; and this cause seems simply to connect with and form part of another--the fear of amalgamation. This fear greatly disturbs a large portion of our white population. In discussing the car question, an opponent of admission at once urges that it will be a stepping stone to amalgamation. The suggestion that seven disabled colored soldiers might safely be allowed equal privileges in a military hospital with 160 white soldiers, is put aside with the remark that such a rule would countenance amalgamation. The matron, with downcast eyes and timid horror, intimates this objection to the reception, into the same Orphan Home, of little white and colored children, mostly between the ages of four and ten. All this sounds very illogical. Hitherto, there has been little amalgamation of the two races at the North, and as the colored people never make advances to the Whites, that little cannot be increased until the Whites make advances to them. When is this to begin? Let each one answer this question individually. This matter, in its negative aspect, rests entirely within the control of the white population.

The broad distinction, so often pointed out, between political and social equality, is still by many of our people persistently confounded, and perhaps it may be necessary to state it once more. Political equality everybody has the present or prospective right to demand--social equality nobody; for the barrier which separates the two is made up of private door-steps. Each of these, its owner has absolutely at his own command, and no man has a right to prescribe, even by implication, whom he shall permit, or forbid, to pass it. It is not an open question.

This proposition is less extravagant than are these insane and wicked fears of impending amalgamation;--wicked, because they are made the excuse, by the race that has the entire preventive control of the matter, for maltreating colored people and denying them rights which are accorded, without dispute, to every other man and woman in the country.

But these people will never come to such an end as this; and if it is true that amalgamation, here, leads towards it, then here, to any considerable extent, it will never take place. They were never made the valuable element of our population, which they are, simply to die out. The greater part of the work which has yet been done on a large portion of this continent has been done by them, and apparently they ever will be, as they ever have been, absolutely essential to its full development.

This statement does not imply that the slave trade and slavery were right or necessary. The sin was not in the bringing of Africans to America, but in the manner of bringing them. God has established His own fixed laws to govern the movements of peoples, but He permits men to carry them out according to their will. Had men willed to be just and humane, they could have induced Africans to come to this continent as free emigrants; but they were selfish and wicked, and therefore forced them to come as slaves. Slavery has been, and is, destroying itself everywhere; and in this country, the great system of free labor and equal rights which prevails, without qualification, in some of the Northern States, is now being offered, and in spite of all opposition will soon be applied, to every State, north and south. It is not probable that it will stop there. It is believed that the same system is destined, in time, to be extended into our tropics. The so-called Anglo-Saxon race in England colonizes; in the United States it expands. Mr. Disraeli lately pronounced England more an Asiatic than a European power; and the day may come when we shall be as much a power of South America as we now are of North America. We have a means to facilitate future extension into the tropics in an element of our home population, suited to them, which England never possessed in hers; and after this has been received into our body politic, and is thus enabled to develop its powers, it is not easy to resist the conclusion that its destiny is to carry our civilization into these latitudes. The feeble and imperfect nationalities lying to the south of us are apparently but provisional. They are waiting a better system than their own, and higher powers than they possess, to apply it. The time is likely to come when their ability to furnish the products peculiar to their soil will fall short of the wants of the civilized world without; and should this be the case, it will stimulate us to carry thither our enterprise, and with it our laws and institutions. This has been the process by which they have been carried into California, by Whites alone--gold being the lure; but to places farther south our people of color, from their special climatic fitness for it, must assist in being their vehicle; and the two races must go towards the tropics, if at all, together. The African will never leave this country, but he may, in the legitimate pursuit of his own interests and happiness, assist in its expansion beyond its present limits; and, soon or late, should the practical assertion of our "Monroe Doctrine" make it necessary for us to carry our arms into tropical latitudes, the late war has shown us where to find soldiers. These are speculations, but it would be hard to show that they are without some groundwork of probable reality in the future. Meantime it is well to feel assured that these people are here for the good, and not the evil of both races, and that interest as well as justice demands that every right and privilege which we possess should be freely and at once extended to them. Let us trust God to do His own justice, not fearing that harm will come of it unless we interpose with our injustice; and let us no longer believe that if we do what is right and humane as a people to-day, we shall be punished for it to-morrow; for this is practical atheism.

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