"The Solid South" And the Afro-American Race Problem: Speech of Charles Francis Adams at the Academy of Music, Richmond, Va., Saturday Evening, 24 October, 1908 (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from "The Solid South" And the Afro-American Race Problem: Speech of Charles Francis Adams at the Academy of Music, Richmond, Va., Saturday Evening, 24 October, 1908

IT will now, in less than six months, be forty-four full years since Appomattox day, - that day when, through the action of the greatest of all modern Virginians, the War of Secession was brought to a dramatic close. Forty-four years covers the whole lifetime of one entire generation of men and a third part of that of a second generation. The man of twenty-one in 1865 is, then, a man of sixty-five now, - practically on the retired list; and, if he has during the intervening years been a good citizen he, next month, will have cast his ballot at eleven presidential elections covering the candidates from the first election of Grant to that one who may be his choice on the 3d of November. During the present canvass we have heard almost no reference at all to the War of Secession, the embers of the great strife have not been raked over, nor its passions and enmities stirred up into a fitful blaze. Both statesman and demagogue have left it severely alone. In fact, since 1876 and the inauguration of President Hayes, appeals of that character have ceased to be in vogue vulgarly speaking, the bloody shirt long since passed away as a political emblem on either side, and to the eyes and ears of the vast majority of those who will vote at the election of Tuesday week the phrase has no significance. And yet, in spite of all this, it is a significant and curious, as well as an indisputable fact that the coming election will turn on the still living memories and traditions of the great strife, and the more vital issues which grew out of it. Proverbially, the ground swell following mighty tempests is slow in subsiding.

I have said that this was an indisputable as well as a Significant and curious fact; to prove it so it is merely necessary to call a moment's attention to the attitude in the present canvass of the eleven States which once constituted the Confederacy - now what is known as the Solid South. To a large extent, by no means impossibly as a controlling factor, those States will influence the result. Assuredly, without their votes conceded to him inadvance, one of the two leading candidates would simply drop out of the running; and yet those States have been, and now are, ignored as a factor in the contest. In the eyes and minds of the party managers they are a mere recognized appendage of one political party, a species of bob, so to speak, on the tail of its kite. From the beginning of the canvass this has been apparent. It was notorious at Chicago as at Denver, and before both the nominating Conventions; it has been an accepted fact through out the somewhat languid debate now drawing to its wearisome close. By both Democrats and Republicans the South has been looked upon as a fixed political quantity, to be weighed and treated as such-and, as such, ignored!

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