A Reply to Senator Eustis’s Late Paper on Race Antagonism

A Reply to Senator Eustis’s Late Paper on Race Antagonism is a pamphlet by Atticus Greene Haygood, the American Methodist bishop, college president, and writer on race relations who lived from 1839 to 1896. Haygood was one of the most influential white Southern voices arguing for racial moderation and for the educational and economic advancement of African Americans during the difficult decades after Reconstruction.

The pamphlet responds to a paper by Senator James B Eustis of Louisiana, who had published an article presenting the more typical white Southern view of race relations in the post Reconstruction South. Eustis and other Southern political figures of the period were arguing that the difficulties between white and black Americans were the product of fundamental racial differences that could not be overcome by any policy interventions and that the best approach was simply to accept the existing patterns of segregation and white political dominance as the natural result of those racial differences.

Haygood, writing from a different position within the same white Southern world, took strong exception to Eustis’s argument. He had spent much of his career as president of Emory College and as a leader in Methodist missionary work in the South, and he had developed substantial direct knowledge of African American educational and economic development during the period after emancipation. His own book Our Brother in Black of 1881 had been one of the more important white Southern works arguing for serious investment in African American education and for the gradual integration of African Americans into Southern economic and civic life.

The pamphlet works through the various points of Eustis’s argument and offers Haygood’s alternative reading of the situation. The argument is conducted in the careful theological and moral framework that Haygood characteristically used, with substantial appeal to Christian principles and to the practical evidence of African American advancement that Haygood had personally witnessed.

The pamphlet is mostly of interest now to historians of late nineteenth century American race relations and to those studying the variety of white Southern opinion during the difficult decades after Reconstruction. Haygood represented a minority position within the white South of his period, but his pamphlet documents the existence of that more moderate position and its arguments. It pairs naturally with Haygood’s other writings on race.