BLACK AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

THE BLACK BELT.

THE total population of the United States, exclusive of Alaska and of the Indian Territory, was, according to the official returns of the Tenth Census, 50,155,783. This Census was taken as long ago as 1880; but it is, and will for some time continue to be, the latest enumeration concerning which full statistical details are in possession of the world. An Eleventh Census was taken in June, 1890. This, so far as has as yet been ascertained, fixes the population of the great Republic at 62,622,250.* The details of it are, however, still unknown. We are altogether in the dark as to how many of the people are males and how many females, how many white and how many coloured; and months, if not years, may be expected to elapse before the hard-working Census Bureau at Washington shall find itself in a position to enlighten us upon these and other particular points of interest. But there is no reason

*NOTE.-See Appendix.

B

to suppose that the full details of the Eleventh Census will, when they are published, greatly surprise the statistical experts who have made a special study of the increase of American population in the past and of its probable increase in the future; nor are there any signs that the results of the Eleventh Census will, upon one point of special significance, be much more reassuring than were those of the Tenth. That point of special significance is the rate of increase of the coloured people in certain extensive sections of the old slave-holding States of the South. This rate of increase has hitherto been vastly superior to that of the white people in the same districts, and is a thing of no new growth. The four States, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, were numbered for the first time in 1790. Their white and coloured populations in that year and in the year 1880, and the rates of increase per cent. during the ninety intermediate years, are shown in the following tables :

While, therefore, in the ninety years the white population of the four States has grown from 923,385 to only 2,956,111, the coloured population has grown from 549,597 to 2,492,358. In other words, while the whites have increased only 220.1 per cent., the blacks have increased 353-4 per cent., and the latter have been continuing to increase with superior speed in face of the facts that now for more than a generation black immigration has practically ceased, and that the black race is considerably shorter-lived than the white. It is remarkable, too, that in each of the four States the rate of increase has been greater among the blacks than among the whites.

In only the above-mentioned four of the eight old Slave States of the South was there a Census in 1790. The first census of Mississippi was taken in 1800, of Louisiana in 1810, of Alabama in 1820, and of Florida in 1830. The first enumerations of the eight States showed a total white population of 1,066,711; the Census of

1880 showed the white population to be 4,695,253, an increase of 340-2 per cent. On the other hand, the first enumerations of the eight States showed a coloured population of but 654,308, while the Census of 1880 showed a coloured population of no less than 4,353,097, or an increase of 563.7 per cent. Whereas, therefore, at the earliest enumerations the blacks formed only about 38 per cent. of the population, they formed in 1880 about 48 per cent. In short, in these States, and in the period under review, the blacks steadily drew ever nearer and nearer to the attainment of a numerical majority. In 1860 they were still nearly half a million behind the whites. To-day, in the eight old Slave States of the South the whites and the blacks are practically equal in numbers, and in several individual States the blacks have a formidable and growing majority.

It is in these last States most particularly that what is known as the Negro Problem constitutes the most serious and complex social question of the hour. For most of the other States of the Union the problem possesses as yet only a secondary interest. The total number of negroes and coloured people in the whole of the United States in 1880 was 6,580,793. Of these, 4,353,097 lived, as has been seen, in the eight old Slave States of the South, and there formed